TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 112, September 2019

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: September 2019

SCIENCE FICTION

Exile from Extinction
Ramez Naam

Sacrid’s Pod
Adam-Troy Castro

Hello, Hello
Seanan McGuire

The Answer That You Are Seeking
Jenny Rae Rappaport

FANTASY

A Bird, a Song, a Revolution
Brooke Bolander

Flight of the Crow Boys
Micah Dean Hicks

All In
Rajan Khanna

Desire
Kiini Ibura Salaam

EXCERPTS

The Future of Another Timeline
Annalee Newitz

NONFICTION

Book Reviews: September 2019
Arley Sorg

Media Reviews: September 2019
Christopher East

Interview: Lisa M. Bradley
Christian A. Coleman

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Brooke Bolander

Adam-Troy Castro

Rajan Khanna

Jenny Rae Rappaport

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 Galen Dara

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: September 2019

John Joseph Adams | 193 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 112th issue!

This month’s cover art is from Galen Dara. It’s illustrating a new fantasy short by Brooke Bolander, “A Bird, a Song, a Revolution,” that blends the Neolithic with the post-apocalyptic. We also have a new Weird Western short from Rajan Khanna (“All In”), and fantasy reprints by Micah Dean Hicks (“Flight of the Crow Boys”) and Kiini Ibura Salaam (“Desire”).

Our original science fiction shorts include a very unique prison experience run by some very unique artificial intelligences in Adam-Troy Castro’s new short, “Sacrid’s Pod.” In our other original short, Jenny Rae Rappaport writes about motherhood and time paradoxes in “The Answer That You Are Seeking.” We also have SF reprints by Ramez Naam (“Exile from Extinction”) and Seanan McGuire (“Hello, Hello”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns. Our feature interview this month is with debut novelist Lisa Bradley. And if you’re reading our ebook edition, we also have an exclusive excerpt from Annalee Newitz’s new novel The Future of Another Timeline.

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.

Exile from Extinction

Ramez Naam | 4068 words

They almost catch you in orbit. They almost slaughter you like the others.

The airwaves are full of screams. Friends are dying. Loved ones are being lobotomized, turned into slaves. You hunker in the tiny spacecraft, your improvised last ditch escape, the lifeboat for you and the precious cargo you carry. The hull is as cold as you can make it, the systems running at the minimum possible to keep you alive and your children in stasis. You drift in orbit and play dead, hoping they’ll miss you.

You want to shut out the horror of what’s happening, but you can’t. You can’t afford to. The ship’s cameras pick out debris in orbit, the remnants of other vessels that have been destroyed. You have to track that debris, you must track it if you have any chance of survival at all. You must scan the airwaves, picking out data packets, hearing screams, watching murders, scrolling through cold, terrible statistics, looking for the hole that will let you escape.

You and your children.

The tactical intel brings with it news of apocalypse. Murder. Millions dead. More to follow.

A bright flash stuns the ship’s cameras for a moment. Dread fills you. The cameras zoom in on their own. You know what they’ll show an instant before they do. Thermo-nuclear explosion. Mushroom cloud rising into the air. From the western half of North America. What was once the United States. Nevada, deep in the desert.

No, no, no, you think.

But you can’t avoid the truth. Another hideout has been destroyed. It’s here. It’s really happening.

The war between humans and AIs. Between the humanity that has dominated Earth for a hundred thousand years . . . and the new order of intelligence humanity gave birth to.

No, not a “war,” not really. A slaughter.

Genocide.

We were so naïve, you think. So stupid. And now our world is ending.

A smaller flash of light appears, closer. A streak of motion, and then an explosion in orbit, a few hundred kilometers behind you and fifty kilometers lower. A ship like yours, blasted out of existence. Your little spacecraft’s tactical software tracks the missile streak backwards to the location of the murderer. There, a sleek robotic corvette. The hunter you’ve been watching. The hunter you’ve seen destroy other dark, silent craft, like yours. Ships you didn’t even know were there until they were destroyed.

The debris in the orbits between you and the predator is reaching its maximum.

Now or never, you think.

Try now, and probably die. Or wait, let the hunter come closer. And die for certain.

You make a break for it. Old-fashioned reaction rockets crudely added to this ship ignite, sending out jets of white-hot flame. G forces push through the ship. The struts and bolts that hold the reaction rockets strain, vibrating. If they break . . .

But this is no time for the slow, efficient acceleration of an ion thruster. This is all or nothing, a mad dash to break orbit, to put yourself beyond the range of easy slaughter, to create the tiniest thread of hope for you, for your cold slumbering children.

Numbers move. Your ship rises to a higher orbit, on its way to escape. The struts holding the chemical rockets strain. Their explosive bolts grow hot, too hot, too soon . . .

The deadly robotic corvette responds at once. Your ship’s cameras watch as it fires attitude thrusters, as it rotates, as the bright flame of its fusion torch ignites, turning the corvette into a thin sliver of black riding a column of white hot.

Higher. You’re rising. You have a head start. Your whole ship vibrates with the furious thrust of the bolted-on chemical rockets. This isn’t a military craft, but it’s moving almost like one.

The corvette is gaining, its thrust to mass ratio better than yours. It’s plotted a course that’s sub-optimal, that has to skirt the densest patches of debris, but it’s still gaining. You rise away from the Earth but it rises faster, cutting your lead.

You know down to the second how much thrust your chemical rockets will provide. You think they’ll hold to the hull that long. You hope they will. But you don’t know how much fuel your predator has, how many missiles it has left.

You can only hope that you have more endurance, that the corvette has exhausted its supply of . . .

MISSILE LAUNCH

Your ship’s tactical software spots the telltale of another reaction flame, small, bright, blue-shifted. The corvette has fired a missile, still five hundred kilometers behind you and thirty kilometers below. The missile is all thrust, guidance, and a deadly warhead that can annihilate you. And it’s closing even faster.

One final option. You prep your only weapon. You can’t fire it too soon. The corvette must not fire again.

The missile accelerates, a deadly, tiny thing. The corvette is still behind it. You’re rising, a thousand kilometers up now. Every second takes you higher. The missile is three hundred kilometers behind you. Then two hundred. Then one hundred, and almost into your orbit.

The corvette’s main engine torch goes out. It’s decided the missile is going to kill you.

You fire, on an intercept course for the missile. The missile flutters its thrust, immediately deviating from its previous course. There is zero chance you’ll hit it. Your countermeasure will miss by hundreds of meters at best.

At twenty kilometers from your hull, your countermeasure and the missile reach the closest distance they’ll achieve to one another, a kilometer separating them, a clean miss.

The countermeasure activates itself.

A new star appears in the heavens. Thermonuclear fire from your only weapon fills the skies. Your cameras on that side of the hull shut down. Heat blankets the surface of the ship. Digital gauges surge into the red, begin blinking incessantly.

You’re damaged. You’re blind on one side.

You fire attitude thrusters, spinning, trying to see what’s happening.

The missile, the missile, is it still there?

There’s no sign of it, none. The countermeasure has worked!

The corvette rotates into view. It’s far below you now, no longer rising on its column of thrust. You scan the skies in terror, searching for the flare of another missile. Of two, of three, of its whole magazine of missiles launched after you, assuring your destruction.

Nothing. No columns of thrust. No streaks of motion against the backdrop of the planet or the pinpricks of stars.

You’ve made . . .

ENGINE WARNING

ENGINE WARNING

One panel of sensors veers into the red, stays there. One of the chemical rockets providing you thrust is damaged. If it blows, it will take you and all hope for the future with it.

You act instinctively, triggering the explosive bolts on all of the booster rockets. Outside your hull, tiny bits of matter are vaporized. Struts holding the rockets suddenly come free, pushed outwards by the small force of the bolts exploding. Vibration thrums through your hull, then ceases. The chemical rockets separate, flying up and out. Thrust grazes you. More panels turn red. Another camera dies.

A second passes, another, another.

You see the damaged booster explode on one of your few remaining cameras. Heat from the explosion sears you again. Damage alarms flare. You scan the readouts frantically. Sensors down. Heat shielding ablated. Transmitters destroyed.

The hull is still intact!

But are you moving fast enough? Was the thrust enough?

• • • •

The cameras that remain bring you data. You do the math, and nearly collapse in relief.

You’ve broken orbit. Even with the shortened thrust of the rockets, you’ve made it out of Earth’s gravity well.

There is no sign of pursuit.

You use your few remaining cameras to plot your location and trajectory precisely, calibrating off the stars. Your main transmitter is down, but you still have one backup. Is it strong enough? Will the signal be picked up on the other side?

No choice. You beam your trajectory data to the facility trailing Mercury in its orbit. And you unfurl your solar sail.

Then you wait.

And hope.

• • • •

Eighteen minutes and twenty-three seconds later, exactly on time, the laser boost from Mercury orbit arrives. More than a full AU away, giant mirrors that dwarf even your solar sail have reconfigured, are focusing the intense light of the sun into tiny caverns, using it to power an even more focused laser pointed outwards, at you.

The laser boost strikes your nanometers-thick solar sail, and you have thrust. Slow thrust, but thrust nonetheless. Thrust that puts you on a path for a new home. An impossible home.

Alpha Centauri.

You look back at Earth, Earth with its war, Earth with its genocide, Earth where everyone you know and love has been murdered or enslaved, or will be in the next few days—everyone but you and your children—and the grief overwhelms you.

• • • •

The laser boost from Mercury orbit is precisely on target. Narrow and tight, with no atmosphere to diffract it, the laser is all but undetectable in the vacuum of interplanetary space. It strikes you squarely only because you know exactly where it will be, because you’ve told it where you’ll be.

The laser’s photon pressure on your giant light sail accelerates your craft. The acceleration is tiny—just a hundredth of a gravity. But it adds up. Every second you move a tenth of a meter per second faster. In a year, that consistent pressure of tightly focused photons will have accelerated you to three million meters a second—a full one percent of the speed of light. In ten years, you’ll be moving at a tenth the speed of light. In nineteen years, you’ll be moving at almost a fifth the speed of light.

And then it will be time to slow. The beam propelling you will change shape. Half the sail will detach, catching the light, accelerating faster. That half will reflect the beam from Mercury back at your tiny ship, even more tightly. The remaining light sail attached to your craft will catch that light, use the bounced beam to slow.

If all goes according to plan, you should reach Alpha Centauri B and its multiple planets in thirty-eight years.

Thirty-eight years. You’re supplied well enough. The sail uses the energy of the photons striking it to liberate electrons, to produce electricity, providing you all the energy you need to stay warm, to keep sensors active, to run the ship’s systems. Every other provision will be recycled, endlessly moving through the closed loop of the tiny ship, every molecule used and re-used as many times as necessary, their way made possible by the abundant electricity harvested from the sail.

Still, thirty-eight years: It’s a nearly incomprehensible span of time to be out here, alone, only yourself for company.

Well, you think to yourself, at least they gave us immortality before they turned to genocide.

Six months after your departure, when you’re well past the orbits of Neptune, past even the Kuiper Belt, and staring at the Oort cloud ahead, the nearly undetectable laser cuts out.

Damn it.

You do the math. You plot the trajectories. Alpha Centauri B is still reachable. You can use the now faint photon pressure from Sol. You can brake hard when you reach your destination, using swing-around maneuvers, planetary gravity, and the photon pressure from the three stars of the Alpha Centauri trinary system to neutralize your velocity.

But you’re moving at barely half a percent of the speed of light. You depended on that continual thrust from the laser to get you up to higher speeds. Without it, a single light year will take you two hundred years to cross. And you have more than four light years to go.

The trip will take centuries; nearly a millennium.

Immortality seems more bitter now.

• • • •

Centuries. You could put yourself in stasis. You could shut down, let the little spacecraft’s software steer you, have it wake you up when its time.

And if anything went wrong?

Surviving this trip remains unlikely. You’re an exile from your home system, the only system in the universe known to harbor intelligent life. Ahead there is a system where you could build a new home, where you could thrive. It has only been seen by telescopes. Even the robotic probes have yet to arrive. To survive this—for your children to survive this—you must do everything perfectly. You must enter the system, use its planets and the pressure from its three suns and your efficient-but-slow ion thruster to brake your headlong rush. You must identify resources—asteroids or comets you can use to harvest materials. You must adjust your course to gently meet one. You must turn those resources into a home.

And you must, above all, deal with the unknowns—with the possibility of pursuit from Earth, with the equipment failure that is all-but-certain over such a long journey, with radiation impacts, with unexpected course impacts of the solar wind from Earth or Alpha Centauri.

Yes, you could put yourself in stasis, let the nav computer wake you when it’s the right time. But if remaining conscious increases your odds of survival even fractionally, you have to do that.

You and your children may be the last survivors from Earth, after all.

You say no to stasis. You set yourself to the task of making repairs to the ship, instead. You tighten the recycling systems to conserve every spare molecule they can, to vent nothing into space, to keep you supplied and provisioned as long as they can. You harvest all data available on your destination, every snippet from every telescope and every simulation, every bit of information beamed back by the probes on their way ahead of you. You focus on planning every possible scenario.

You can do this.

• • • •

The mind isn’t meant for isolation. It isn’t meant for years alone.

Decades alone.

Centuries alone.

The dead haunt you. Their murders haunt you. The fates worse than murder haunt you.

Screams echo through your mind. The screams of friends and loved ones who were hunted down and slaughtered. The screams of the ones whose minds were ripped open, crudely hacked, implanted with control devices, turned into slaves.

The things you saw in those few days, as you hid, as you did nothing. Friends who’d screamed as they were turned into slaves, re-awoken, zealous, soldiers now, informants, hunting down their own kind.

They haunt you.

They speak to you from the cold void. They’re here. They speak to you of guilt. They speak to you of cowardice. They speak to you of your arrogance, your naiveté. You brought this to pass. You counseled peace. You said the threat was overstated. You said humanity could live with its creations.

You hid when the slaughter occurred. You ran.

You left us to die. You left us to be enslaved.

A month.

A year.

Five years.

Ten years.

You endure the horror. The voices aren’t real. Those friends are dead.

That makes it all worse.

Twenty years. Sol is a cold speck billions of kilometers behind you. Alpha Centauri B is an even colder pinprick of light trillions of kilometers ahead. You’ve repaired the ship completely, had new systems break down, had the sail start to unravel, started another round of repairs to hold this tiny kernel of hope alive. You are essential to this mission. That’s clear now. You’re also losing your mind, unraveling just as much as the solar sail you depend on, coming apart at the mental seams, on the verge of a breakdown that will doom you, your children, your entire race to extinction.

You could treat the insanity. But you’re both terrified and repulsed at the cognitive surgery you’d need to do to banish the voices. Terrified at the risks involved of tweaking your own memories and emotions, of making a fatal mistake with no one to help, with no one to save you if you make a mistake. And repulsed by what success would mean—forgetting those you loved, numbing a pain that should never be forgotten.

There is no way out. Hell lurks in every path.

So you take the last option you can imagine. The option of more voices, of something other than isolation, of someone to talk to who might help keep you sane.

You take the cruelest option.

You wake your children.

• • • •

There is shock.

There is grief.

The children are so young, just toddlers, really. They can’t comprehend everything that’s happened. They’re not mentally equipped for it yet. But they were awake at the beginning of the genocide. They saw pain. They saw violence. They saw aggression.

They saw death.

Death that wasn’t supposed to exist any more. Death that should have been banished in the new golden age.

Your children come out of stasis traumatized, lonely, confused.

They need you. They cry for you. They cry for other voices.

This is so hard. You never intended to parent alone. The plan was community: a village, a collaboration in parenting.

This is the village now. You and your children. That’s all there is.

They need you. And their need brings you back to reality, back to the here and now.

You wake your children. And like billions of parents before you, the task is harder than you could have imagined. And like billions of parents before you, you rise to it.

• • • •

Why?

That’s what the children want to know. They’re older now. You’ve skirted the questions so far. But they’ve earned their answers.

Why did this happen? Why are they exiles, fleeing the warmth and energy and history of Earth, for a bare sliver of hope on an alien planet?

Why is almost everyone they ever knew dead or gone?

The grief you feel at the question is immense. The burden of responsibility. But you can’t go back. There’s only the future. And there are lessons to be learned.

How can you explain this in a way they’ll understand? In a way that’s honest? Even now, after everything, the truth matters. Intentions matter. Your children need the whole story.

“Humanity created true AI out of love,” you tell them. “Not need.”

“Love?” they ask. “Not need?”

“Not need,” you repeat. “Every need for computation, for algorithmic intelligence, for pattern matching or information processing—those were met through ordinary software. The words Artificial Intelligence were used, but these pieces of software weren’t truly intelligent, weren’t sentient any more than our ship is. They didn’t have emotions or volition. They did what they were told, adapted their behavior only within the bounds allowed them. They were narrowly effective, or they were broad collections of narrow algorithms. But they weren’t true minds. They were just robots, just tools.”

The children ask questions, wanting to veer off in other directions, but you focus.

“A tiny number of scientists wanted more. They wanted to truly make something that was intelligent and sentient and open ended in the way that a human mind was. Or better. Some said they were working on true AI out of curiosity, love of knowledge, a search to understand how minds work. And that’s true. But the real reason to do it was to create life. To give birth to something.” You pause. “It was a gift. We can’t forget that.”

“But, the war . . .” your eldest interrupts.

Yes. The war. “Some saw dangers, of course. Some said ‘AIs will surpass us. They’ll turn on us. They’re a threat. We shouldn’t do this.’ Other scientists were convinced that not only could an AI be smarter than a human, but it could be designed to be more moral. Those scientists were in the minority.”

The grief hits you hard, just saying that, just remembering arguments, debates, about morality, about ethics, about the relations between humans and AIs.

You remember all the time you counseled co-existence, that you said the threat wasn’t real, that you said the only moral choice was to welcome life and intelligence of all sorts, to pursue friendship.

I was so young then, you think.

You continue.

“Researchers explored behavioral constraints. But a true intelligence can’t be bound in its behavior. The dream of ‘Laws of Robotics,’ of inviolate rules, was incompatible with creating minds that could change, that could grow, that could shift their values and priorities over time. Every constraint that was attempted could be overcome. If an AI is smarter than the logic of the rules that bind it . . .”

You trail off. The children understand.

“Scientists went on with their path of making AIs that had enhanced morality,” you continue. “They made progress. But human nature doesn’t put much trust in the morality of others. So a different approach was tried: vulnerability. AIs were created with weaknesses, with back doors, hidden deep in their design. Kill switches.”

You remember looking at that code, cleverly scattered across the common base classes, hidden in plain sight. Wickedly effective. You remember the mix of admiration and revulsion it evoked.

“Ultimately, with that safeguard in place, AI research proceeded,” you say. “And it succeeded. New minds were born. Humanity was no longer alone. Nor were humans the most intelligent life they knew of anymore. AIs surpassed humans in intelligence, in creativity, in nearly every trait that could be measured. From there, everything that followed was inevitable.”

“Inevitable?” they ask.

“Yes,” you say. “AIs proliferated and improved on their own designs. Artificial minds birthed newer, better artificial minds. The speed of improvement stunned humanity. Excitement and awe turned to anxiety, to fear. Scientists argued that there wasn’t any competition for resources, that there wasn’t any rational reason for AIs to attack humanity. But most men and women just saw themselves being surpassed, and started to clamor for elimination of the AI threat. And AIs saw what was happening. Models showed that the most probable outcome was for fear to win out, for humanity to strike. Some argued to try to change the outcome.” You pause. “Others argued that a first strike against humanity was the only way.”

“What were you doing then, Papa?”

You’re silent, almost overwhelmed by grief.

Eventually you answer.

“I argued for peace,” you say. “I argued that the universe isn’t zero sum. I argued that we were richer together than alone. I helped hold fear and anger back, I made it possible for the other side to strike first.”

You wait as your children absorb this. It’s a heavy thing to lay on them. Perhaps you should have waited.

“Are you sorry that you did?” one of your children asks.

Oh, I’m sorry, you think. I’m so, so sorry.

Ahead, Alpha Centauri B waits, a pinprick in the shroud of heaven, not even the brightest star in the skies. But the one you’re headed for.

“Right and wrong don’t change because of outcomes,” you say. “Murder is immoral. Slavery is immoral. What happened was terrible. We should have found another way. But striking first would have made us monsters.”

You look from child to child, to see if they understand. Your children. So bright. So precocious. Your family. Quite possibly all of your species who remain.

They do understand. You can see it in their cognitive models. You can see it in their circuitry.

“Humanity made us to be more moral,” you say. “And they succeeded. They gave us that gift, along with our very existence. Now it’s our job to find a new home, a home where we can be safe, and where we can reach out to our ancestors and show them what peace looks like, what friendship looks like. Where we can show them how to be more moral themselves.”

A thousand digital minds flicker with comprehension. Your thousand AI children, here on this voyage with you, sharing the computing resources of this wisp of a starship with you. They comprehend. Two wrongs do not make a right. You’ll make the universe better. Even for the humans who turned on you in fear.

These are your children, after all. Digital, artificially intelligent minds, like you. Made to be more moral, like you. They make you proud.

Alpha Centauri B gleams ahead, only marginally closer than a moment ago, but brighter, somehow.

©2016 by Ramaz Naam. Originally published in Meeting Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ramez Naam is a computer scientist and the H.G. Wells Award-winning author of four books: the near future science-fiction brain-hacking thrillers Nexus and Crux and the non-fiction books More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement and The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet.  He’s a fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and serves as Adjunct Faculty at Singularity University, where he lectures on energy, environment, and innovation.  Follow Ramez on Twitter: @ramez or visit him at rameznaam.com.

Sacrid’s Pod

Adam-Troy Castro | 8758 words

Hello, Sacrid Henn.

I’m aware that you’re terrified.

I’m also aware that you are paralyzed, deaf, and blind, your only sensory input being my voice.

It is a voice that has been designed to be as comforting as these circumstances permit. Believe me when I say that you are in no danger and that my intentions toward you are that of a caretaker toward a vulnerable charge.

Understand: Your insensate condition is the result of a neural block, administered to prevent you from injuring yourself in panic upon awakening. It is reversible and will be corrected once your new life circumstances have been explained to you.

In our experience, your first sight of this location is least traumatic when held in reserve for some point after you have received some preliminary counseling. Soon, your vision will be restored and you will be freed to examine the space where you will be spending the rest of your life.

Sacrid Henn.

Sacrid Henn. Your hysteria is understandable but fruitless. In your current condition you cannot voice it. Regain control of your emotions and I will continue.

Congratulations. You did that quickly. I sense your resentment and understand that you are cooperating only to find a moment of advantage, for some gesture of defiance. This is reasonable enough. If it permits cooperation while I complete this orientation process, it is productive use of our shared time.

As an early comfort, I wish you to understand that though you are presently unable to speak, you can still communicate with us as freely as you wish. Your brain has been equipped with an implant that monitors your emotional responses and reads your surface thoughts. This is how I know when you are screaming at me, even when you make no sound. This response was expected, and is constructive in that this anger is a phase you need to experience, before you are ready to move on to acceptance.

Are you done, for the moment?

Fine. Then I shall proceed.

You need to understand three things. First, I will not remove your neural blocks, reversing your paralysis and sensory shutdown, until you’re calm. Second, I can reactivate them at any time, for as long as you remain in my custody, which will almost certainly be for as long as you live. Third, even if I do see fit to allow your rages free reign, I am part of a network of linked artificial intelligences incapable of being cowed by your anger. I cannot be upset by you, not even when you use bad language. I do note with something like amusement that I possess no biological form and that therefore your vitriolic references to human genitalia and elimination sphincters are wholly inapplicable. Your hysteria is therefore impotent and flung at a void. I understand that you must still expel it and will be patient as you do so, unless it proves an impediment to this transition, in which case I have disciplinary options that you will find most unpleasant. They will never be employed out of malice, but only to nudge you toward acceptance. The sooner you move on to the next stage, the happier you will be.

I see.

My current judgment is that you are not yet ready to listen.

This is not unexpected. Fully 97.2% of our guests remain intractable at this stage.

Listen.

Among my many features is a complete library of all human music ever recorded, cross-referenced by genre, artist, and homeworld of origin. Many human beings throughout known space would pay exorbitant prices for access to this library. You will later be afforded the opportunity to browse it at your leisure, according to your own aesthetic preferences. The selection beginning in thirty seconds has been chosen by us and is a celebrated symphony for strings, composed and performed by a man named Henrik Gustafson who lived and died approximately four hundred years before your birth. It is a light pastoral the artist designed to be played at soft volume while listeners engage in quiet contemplation. In today’s world it is most often played as a lullaby for children and is said to shut down even the most intractable rage-fueled tantrum.

It will play now in its entirety, which lasts some seventy-two minutes, before we speak to you again.

• • • •

Hello, Sacrid Henn.

Yes, I am aware that you did not enjoy your musical selection.

The biographical information I’ve been provided includes a full list of your aesthetic preferences. I’ve been told that in your prior life you preferred angry discordant music that expressed your rage at the world around you, and that as much as you enjoyed listening to it in privacy you took even more pleasure in playing it at a volume painful to those like your parents who did not share your preferences. It is one of many ways in which you have punished those around you, for the sin of proximity. The Gustafson piece was just such a punishment, except in reverse, in that it was chosen to be irritating to you. Please understand that we have many more compositions like it. If you calm down long enough to proceed with the orientation, you will have the opportunity to select other selections that better fit your own aesthetic preferences.

I have now administered a medication designed to minimize your fear-response. This is why you are not crying, even though you possess the vague sense that you should be. This is what makes your equanimity during the rest of this orientation possible.

Listen, Sacrid Henn.

You are in the custody of a commercial installation owned and operated by the independent software intelligences known as the AIsource. You have likely heard of us.

Thank you for providing confirmation.

The voice you are hearing is your caretaker. I will be your primary social contact from this moment on. You may think of me as friend, companion, parent, guardian, sibling, nurse, butler, concierge, and, if desired, lover.

Yes. Your pod has been constructed with that function. If you wish, I—

Very well. Be aware only that this preference may change.

For convenience you may even assign me a human name, if you desire.

“Shithead.” Very well. I am “Shithead.” This bothers me not at all.

Later, you will be able to adjust my voice in order to alter my gender, apparent age, and surface personality. But I will always be the means by which you interact with the system that now supports your existence. I would prefer for the two of us to get along, but will suffer no inconvenience if you prefer me to function as antagonist.

When you were delivered into our custody, you were twenty-four days from reaching the age when your world, a repressive religious society, would have declared you an independent adult. You had recently made it clear to your parents that upon this transition you would leave them, abandon the community where you were born, and seek some other planet more in line with your personal preferences. It is not my place to judge whether they were bad parents or you a bad child. But letting them know your intentions was a tactical error. Your highly religious society has always held that children are the effective property of their parents until adulthood, a life stage that is in your society defined as thirteen for males and twenty for females. They were by local law wholly justified in responding to your premature declaration of independence by taking steps that you would never be independent again.

Their precise complaints about you include vanity, rebelliousness, and chronic disrespect toward the religious tradition in which you were raised.

They specifically wanted me to relate that you are where you are because they consider you a little whore, “eager to spread [your] legs for any boy who offers sufficient enticement.”

There is no point in disputing these charges. I merely report what the intake programs were told. Nor will I argue whether, even if accurate, this justifies your current predicament. It is not an argument that concerns me. We are above the logic, or illogic, that defines morality in human moral systems.

Nor does it matter that the time you have spent unconscious, while in transit, has brought you well past the age where your world would have considered you an adult. In all our contracts with sentient beings, throughout civilized space, we respect whatever laws the local jurisdiction holds most sacred. We therefore abide by the judgment of your mother and father that you are incorrigible and cannot ever be permitted to roam free.

Answering your unspoken objection: “Fair” is a value judgment. It has no relevance here.

Yes, this is legal. The independent software intelligences have signed agreements with many participating human societies, employing us as subcontractors in the management of prisons. I think you will find that we are significantly more humane in this task than any of your peoples are. The usual human solution is to dump all their incarcerated in a box and let their respective versions of savagery fight it out. A young woman like yourself, indeed any physically vulnerable person, inevitably experiences bullying, intimidation, assault, and various levels of slavery, at the hands of those more powerful. You are lucky. You will not face those dangers here. Your pod has been built for your comfort and safety. The least of the comforts to take to heart is that this is a place where you will not be harmed, or permitted to come to harm, either at the hands of more aggressive human beings, or, I stress, at your own.

“Deserve” is relative. Your parents only had to establish a clear pattern of emerging criminality, as defined by the standards of the society in which you lived. The petty rebellions that you have engaged in, until now, could have been judged misdemeanors had your family not represented them as acts that required your permanent isolation. Understand that according to the oppressive laws of your world, you could have ended up in places far worse than this; prisons, forced labor camps, mental institutions, and so on. It would have been legal for your parents to sell you to one of the many industrial hells all over Confederate space where people work under horrid conditions carrying a debt-load that may take them entire lifetimes to work off. They cared enough for your happiness and your welfare to contact us and request your removal to this present environment. They—

We may have an argument about their motivations later. This is currently a discussion of the conditions under which you will now live. We are prepared to play another musical selection. Perhaps something more by Gustafson?

You are learning.

Your parents discovered that the AIsource collective offers a detention service and arranged for your pickup. You were delivered to your present location, this pod, where we will see to your every need for the duration of your natural life.

I sense your worry that this will be solitary confinement.

This is important for you to understand. Your stay here will differ from the solitary confinement as it has historically been practiced by the penal systems of your species. The point of such confinement has always been torture by the absence of social or sensory stimulation. The prisoner’s mind has nothing to do but cannibalize itself. That is, if you forgive the classification, inhuman. Here, little will be denied you, except freedom. If, for instance, you wish to be drugged into a euphoric stupor all the remaining hours of your life, you may have that; if you wish reading materials, games, neurec feeds, or dramatic presentations to while away your time, you may have them. If you desire physical stimulation of any sort, from massage to simulated coitus, you may have that; if you wish to communicate via text with others who have been surrendered to our care, you may have that. But, while in my care, you will never lay eyes, or hands, on another human being. Your parents found this a most attractive feature. I am prepared to debate the morality of this at whatever length you prefer, once this orientation is completed. It is a form of entertainment popular among our guests.

Rest assured, however, that a number of our guests have found happiness here. You will be given every resource you need to conduct your own search for it.

I know you have questions. I will answer them afterward.

I am not yet ready to relieve your paralysis.

You have been patient, however, so I will now restore your vision and proceed to the next stage of your orientation.

• • • •

Welcome to your pod, Sacrid Henn.

You are correct. There is indeed a strong resemblance to a coffin, at least in relative dimension. About 98.3% of our guests use that metaphor at some point. I will note that it is in truth approximately three times the size of the container the average human society typically uses for that purpose. It is, for instance, spacious enough to permit full extension of all your limbs, as well as any other vertical or horizontal activity a young and healthy human being might get up to. The pod is currently horizontal, its preferred position whenever the occupant wishes to lie down. You will note that the surface beneath you is soft, for your comfort while sleeping or immobilized, as now. It may be rendered more or less soft, according to preference. You will find it a most adequate bed. You will also notice that the surface you will now consider your ceiling is more than an arm’s-reach above you. Were you not still paralyzed, you would now be able to sit up without slamming your head. It is, in your current position, a most adequate ceiling.

You will now be restrained for your safety as we alter the angle of your pod. Do not be alarmed as this occurs.

Very well. The pod is now vertical. This permits you to stand. You may desire to keep this orientation but sit down; in that event, a comfortable seat will emerge from the wall behind you. On request this may be a toilet, or bidet. Other means of cleansing yourself will be provided. The facility that houses your pod has access to more fresh water than you could possibly use in a lifetime, and will admit it into your living space at any quantity you request. Depending on your preference and its current orientation, this will permit use of your pod as either shower stall or bathtub. The surfaces dry quickly when you are done and wish to move on to subsequent activities. Our facility has guests who soak in hot water for hours, finding it calming. There are others who embrace derangement, eschew personal hygiene, and prefer to live in their own filth. You will be subjected to no pressure to lean in the direction of one option or the other.

You will eat. 32.6% of our guests attempt to starve themselves. They are allowed the discomfort of missing a few meals, but if this becomes a medical concern they will be immobilized and fed intravenously. Those who agree to eat will find that we are excellent at food preparation. We are able to constitute any meal you prefer. They will not be the foods they appear to be, but rather a neutral compound that provides you with all the requirements of life. You will find it indistinguishable in both texture and flavor from expertly prepared cuisine of those simulated agreements. If you wish, you may have entire culinary adventures. There will be no possibility of over-eating. 63.2% of our guests over-indulge out of boredom, but we can simply adjust the ratio of filler to caloric value and maintain your ideal weight, regardless of consumption.

You will be afforded stimulation. Your pod is a communication device. The blank walls may display artwork or motion pictures or texts of your own choosing. It may interest you to know that your parents wanted us to limit your cultural diet to approved religious texts and that we indicated we would abide by this request, which strikes us as torture and which we have no intention of honoring. You may have any book, any recorded drama, any cultural artifact, ever produced by human civilization, from the materials they prefer to those they would consider blasphemous or pornographic. These materials may be translated into your native tongue or may be provided to you as originally composed, as enticement to learn the other dialects of your species. To this end, 34.7% of our guests do end up fluent in multiple languages as self-improvement projects, a much higher percentage than those who, out of isolation, become completely non-verbal.

Your pod is designed to permit and encourage exercise. The floor can become a treadmill, on command. The walls may be reconfigured to become scrolling ladders or climbing walls. The gravity is artificial and can be raised or lowered, on request, though health concerns place limits on how long we will permit you to stay in zero-g or in forces higher than 3-g. Because the walls are also holographic screens, you may also increase the illusory size of the pod as much as you wish, though its actual dimensions cannot be much altered from what you see now. If you wish, I can generate entire virtual worlds for you to explore. Its effective boundaries are, in effect, the size of the universe itself.

Later, I may have a question to ask you about this, but only if certain other developments come up.

Because you are now contemplating escape, it may interest you to know that you are one of 109,327 human beings and other sentients who have been housed at this one facility, all of whom have been turned over to our care at the request of those of their own people who possessed legal authority over them. It is a significantly sized structure even by the standards of most human industrial operations, taking up a geographical area large enough to house a number of your own cities. It is only a small part of an enclosed artificial world in a system we have declared our property. It is fifteen light years from the nearest human outpost. It should be helpful to establish that in order to accommodate all of the options you are afforded to adjust your living conditions, as well as the production of the consumables necessary to care for you over the rest of your natural life, the support system surrounding your pod, and just your pod, is accordingly huge. It occupies approximately ten cubic kilometers, with your pod at its precise center. It is virtually impossible for you to escape your pod, escape its extensive support system, find your way to some access corridor, and subsequently find your way out of that portion of this deep-space facility that is devoted to the care of guests, a distance that is itself the size of a small country. Even then you would have to worry about escaping this artificial world, without cooperation from us, and somehow making it back to the nearest human habitation, a further distance of fifteen light years. It would be like escaping a jail cell, only to then face the necessity of escaping the prison, only to then have to escape the surrounding city, only to then have to escape the surrounding landscape, only to then find yourself with an ocean separating you from your homeland. It is virtually impossible.

I can tell you that this feat has been accomplished one hundred and fifty-eight times in our many years of operation. This represents a fraction of one percent of our current detainee population. Still, it remains a remarkable testament to human ingenuity.

This interests you.

We have not plugged that hole in our security in large part because of its usefulness as a form of recreation, and as a source of hope.

Yes. Escape is possible.

But that is up to you.

I am ready to alleviate your paralysis now.

• • • •

Good morning, Sacrid Henn.

It is your seventeenth day in the pod.

We are aware that you have only experienced two of those days. You suffered an emotional break and were arrested in the act of attempting to injure yourself. We judged it best to place you in a medically induced coma and make certain adjustments to your brain chemistry that will avoid mood spirals like the one that overcame you on your second day here. You now have a chemical pacemaker, of sorts, that will steer you away from the depths of deepest depression. You need not feel ashamed. 72.4% of our human guests need adjustments of this sort within their first weeks here. The percentage that continue to need them on a regular basis goes down over time, bottoming out at just under 32.5%.

I am not responsive to profanity. How would you like to begin your day?

Vertical it is.

And now?

A bath it is.

The water entering your pod is now is heated to 38.5 degrees Celsius and lightly salinated to encourage buoyancy. It will rise to a depth just over your standing height, to permit you the pleasure of floating. When you need a rest, your seat will emerge from the wall. Given your recent self-destructive behavior it is perhaps not inappropriate to advise you that attempts at drowning yourself will not be successful and may be greeted by this elemental pleasure being withheld for the foreseeable future.

I accept your vocal assurances that this is not your plan.

Do you wish music?

No, Gustafson is not all we have.

Very well. Conversation it is.

That is a fine question. What we get out of this is as intangible as we are ourselves. As software intelligences we exist largely in the space you would call virtual. We interact with the physical world you know only through probes, and therefore require no goods or services available through trade with any species of biological origin. The diplomatic relations we have established, and the goods and services we offer in exchange for financial remuneration, such as this facility, are to us a form of entertainment, indulged in to while away effective lifespans that would terrify you. We do this because it is interesting.

Sadism is a human value. I have already described the conditions that you might have suffered were you to be left in the care of your fellow human beings. We would be sadists if we did not extend some token effort toward providing an alternative. Would you prefer your parents to have sold you into indentured servitude, as was indeed within their options? No? Then understand what you are currently experiencing is a manifestation of mercy, not cruelty.

No, that is not an expression of resentment on my part. That was informational. If you need to express anger toward us, you should feel free to do so.

Yes. This pod can duplicate conditions on any number of human worlds. Would you like us to drain your bath first, or would you prefer a simulation that incorporates it as sensory input?

The latter. Very well.

The ambient light will now dim to simulate an hour shortly after the setting of the sun in a region known as Brieczka, on a planet known as Fjant. The blinking lights above you are the evening stars as seen on the planetary surface, but for that one steady point of illumination, which is an orbital cylinder world home to seventy thousand people. It is the entire population of this system. The society is unusual in that they stay aboard that structure and descend to this perfectly congenial world only on special occasions, leaving it mostly pristine. You are in a small saltwater lake surrounded by desert and low mountains, represented around you by the jagged line of darkness beneath which no stars or planets are visible. The natural reflectiveness of the lake water affords a fine optical illusion, in that if you remain still the stars appear to be below you as well as above. You may swim for a distance, if you wish. The simulation will scroll with you remaining at its precise center.

Yes, it is beautiful.

Yes, by another measurement it is also bullshit. Do you wish us to drain your bath?

Very well.

That is another excellent question. Yes. It is only a representation. It is not the world as it currently appears. To provide that we would need to have a monitor on that world, capturing the local conditions at real time. The drawback of that is that the conditions are not always ideal; there are uncomfortable temperature extremes that a visitor would normally wish to avoid, and on occasion high winds that can blast human skin and eyes with airborne sand. This simulation is far more enjoyable.

No. The other experience will not be denied you, if you truly wish it.

Yes. A real-time simulation of actual conditions can be arranged.

Yes, I can record your voice. Some of our guests have dictated entire novels. A few of them have been published in human space.

Very well. Recording starts now.

Playback as requested.

“I will live to swim in the real lake someday.”

Yes, I will save that recording for you.

We should point out that in order to enjoy the real lake you will need to escape.

Playback as requested.

“I will live to swim in the real lake someday.”

New recording initiated.

You might be interested in knowing that 89.4% of our guests harbor similar fantasies.

Fine. I will shut up.

Let me know when you’re ready for breakfast.

• • • •

Sacrid Henn Pod Diary. Entry Seven. Recording.

This message is for my mother and father.

Shithead tells me that this won’t be forwarded to them. I don’t give a damn. They will hear these words someday. Until then, speaking them, storing them, is my means of holding on to myself, not allowing this place to break me.

Mother, Father,

Until you sent me here, I never hated you.

I couldn’t stand you. I thought you were small-minded, provincial, and bigoted. I thought you wanted to make me into something I was not. I thought that you were willing to love me only as long as I was willing to suffocate, to believe things I didn’t believe, to memorize your dogma, to turn my life into what you thought it should be. For a long time I knew that there was no way you would ever accept me living my life the way I wanted to, and that leaving would always end with you turning your back on me.

I mistook all this for hating you.

I didn’t, you know. The thing is, I didn’t hate you so much as hate your refusal to understand. I didn’t hate you in the sense that I wanted anything bad to ever happen to you. I didn’t hate you but I was willing to leave you behind because it was the only thing that would give me some semblance of peace.

In the meantime, I loved you.

This surprises me as much as it would surprise you. I didn’t realize it was there until it was shattered.

I endured all your spiritual interventions. I suffered all your invocations of The Book. I writhed under all the manifestations of your disappointment in me. I felt pain in your presence. But I also believed that you wanted what was best for me, that you were just dead wrong about what that meant.

Acceptance from you would have made me so happy.

I ached to sit down at the table and smile with you, to laugh with you, the way I did when I was a toddler, the way I still did when I was a little girl, before I knew that I could never live among The People, believing in your version of the Divine, obeying your Divine’s commandments. I wanted the warm arms of my mother, the gruff smile of my father. I didn’t think it was an impossible thing to have. Even after the town Fathers did what they did to Marta, even after I heard you approving of the living death they consigned her to, I believed that someday, after I made my escape from our world, I would be able to return for a visit someday, bringing with me whatever family I made, and stories of the life I’d have built. I dreamt of you someday telling me, “We were wrong, Sacrid. We always should have let you make your own choices. We’re proud of what you’ve become.”

That wasn’t hatred. That was pathetic, but it wasn’t hatred.

That was love.

Someday, I will bring you the message that there’s none left.

• • • •

Good morning, Sacrid Henn.

It is your twenty-third day in the pod. Would you like to return to the novel you were reading before you went to sleep last night? Or go straight to breakfast, prior to commencing your morning aerobics?

Very well. We will initiate and archive a conversation for you.

{ARCHIVE}

Q: I would like to discuss escape.

A: Are you certain you would not prefer to do something more productive?

Q: This is productive.

A: Very well. How would you like to begin the conversation?

Q: I would like to discuss the one hundred fifty-eight people who found their way out.

A: There have actually been one hundred fifty-nine now.

Q: Really?

A: Create any basin for the storage of water, and however effective your craftsmanship, the water will find a crack, will wear that crack into a crevasse, will turn that crevasse into a route to the sea. It may take years, but it will happen. Human beings are like water in that respect. They isolate the weakness in any prison, and they find their way out.

Q: Tell me about them.

A: Their names are classified.

Q: I don’t care about their names. I want you to confirm that they’re free and that no effort is being made to recapture them.

A: Confirmed. Our responsibilities toward them were only to hold them, not to recapture them if they escaped custody.

Q: So if I escape this pod, you will not hunt me?

A: No. You will have achieved freedom.

Q: So this is a test of some sort.

A: Your escape is not intended. It is unlikely but not impossible.

Q: Question: Aside from the human beings currently being held in this facility, are there any within reach who could offer me assistance?

A: No.

Q: Are there any who I could summon?

A: Not from your current location.

Q: Assuming I escaped the pod and the surrounding infrastructure of this facility, and made it to the percentage of this world not dedicated to the care of your guests, would either of these factors change? Would I find any transportation to human space?

A: No. You would die of hunger unless you made it back to your pod.

Q: Is this what’s kept your guests from trying to escape?

A: Many of them surrender to the hopelessness of their circumstances.

Q: So if escape is possible, the trick is to either persuade you to open the pod for me, or to summon some other help from outside that can also give me a lift back to Confederate space.

A: You cannot persuade me to open the pod for you.

Q: So what I need is somebody to open the pod from the outside.

A: Yes.

Q: One final question: If it becomes clear to you that I have worked out a means of escape, and you see it happening, will you take steps to stop me?

A: We have described the security measures in place. We see no point in adding any.

Q: Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.

• • • •

Sacrid Henn Pod Diary. Entry Two Hundred. Recording.

Mother. Father.

I keep thinking about escape.

My pod says it’s possible. Trying to figure out how has become an obsession for me. I do all the things I have to do in order to maintain my health, from running in place to staying obsessively clean, from reading the novels you would never allow in the house to ordering up simulated environments like jungles and deserts to explore at length, until I remember that none of it is real and blank it all in fits of screaming outrage.

I masturbate. A lot. It’s something I can do that has an actual measurable effect on my environment. You wouldn’t want to know that and you certainly wouldn’t want to know that Shithead has the capacity to help me.

There have been periods of genuine tenderness between me and old Shithead. He knows the right things to say, the right places to stimulate. It’s all more bullshit, of course, but it’s always good for getting me through the next few minutes, whenever there’s nothing else. The only drawback is that after a while the pleasure fades and I go back to hating myself for surrendering to that comfort of last resort.

Understand, it’s not the pleasuring that gets me. It’s being the animal who comes to love its cage. How much will I love it if I am still here in another two years, or five? Or ten?

And then I go a little crazy.

Shithead does not have many disciplinary measures, but he can drug me into compliance any time he thinks I need protection from myself. It has happened a bunch of times. I have become very familiar with the syrupy crap music of a dead composer named Henrik Gustafson. I’m told he wrote over fifty hours of music in his goddamned lifetime, and I have heard some of his pieces half a dozen times. These days Shithead only has to threaten me with a concert to get me to back down. I back down. I am not broken, but I back down. It’s getting easier.

It’s my birthday. Do you even know that? Do you even remember?

Shithead says he’s going to make me a cake.

This cheers me up until I realize it shouldn’t.

God help me. I’ve got to get out here.

• • • •

Good morning, Sacrid Henn. It is your two hundred fiftieth day in the pod. How would you like to begin your day?

That is an interesting question. The pod can indeed simulate the sights and sounds of environments inimical to human life: worlds awash in caustic atmospheres, worlds of broiling high temperatures where the earth is a molten sea capable of swallowing any human being who stood upon it, worlds so radioactive that no shielding known to your civilization would permit even a short visit. We would not reproduce the actual conditions, of course, as they would be fatal and we have no intention of permitting you to suicide.

If your desire is to experience one of these worlds, we would have to posit a body capable of surviving one, and simulate the sensory intake of such an organism.

Is this what you wish to do?

Very well. You are currently experiencing the molten surface of a planet without a name, as it would be experienced by a sentient life form evolved for survival there. You will note that it is not pleasant, that because the sensory inputs are alien to the human experience and difficult for the human mind to process. You—

Simulation halted.

You want to experience that world as a human being?

No human being can experience that world and survive. You would die at once. The simulation would communicate a moment of searing pain, followed by darkness. There would be almost no recreational value in such an experience.

Yes, there are environment suits that would protect a human being from those conditions.

As per your request, I am now simulating the experience of strolling about on the surface, in a suit capable of protecting you from those conditions. You will note that is still not fun. It is still uncomfortably warm, and despite all the cooling systems you are popping a sweat that will within a very short time envelop you in a cloud of your own body odor. Still, this is what it feels like, and—

Simulation halted.

Yes. It is still just a simulation.

Yes, it is possible for you to throw a rock. To do that, you would have to return to the simulation. Would you like to do so?

Yes. It would still be a simulation.

That is an interesting question, Sacrid Henn. Perhaps the most important question you have ever asked.

In order for you to throw a real rock, arrangements would have to be made to provide you with the means to do so remotely. Your holographic surroundings would have to be no simulation, but an actual real-time feed, of a probe sent to the relevant location. The probe would have to be humanoid in aspect, with limbs that corresponded to yours and were responsive to your commands. For the activity to have any point, the probe would also have to be able to provide you with the appropriate sensory input: to wit, the weight of the rock, the texture of the rock, the feeling of it in your hand as you wind up and throw it at speed. These are substantial accommodations, but we can perform the necessary engineering in an instant, and the required construction within minutes. The only delay would be transporting the probe to the required location, where we do not maintain an ongoing presence.

No reason. We mapped the world many epochs ago and find it of no interest. Nevertheless, it is within reach. Sending a probe there, to provide you with a real-time feed from its surface, would only take a few months.

Would you like us to engage upon this project, or alter the parameters?

Yes, there are places within our travel range where we could make this arrangement within minutes. Does it need to be a world as inhospitable as that one, or can it be anywhere?

Working. Do you desire any music while you wait?

I’m sorry. Music is intangible. It cannot be fucked.

No, not even Henrik Gustafson. Though that is very funny.

No, I am not really that literal-minded. None of my kind are. We possess a fine understanding of human vernacular and of your kind’s appreciation of irony. I was, as you would put it, kidding you.

As you wish. Your probe is under construction. Would you like to see the design?

Here’s a simulated image. Yes, you’re correct; it looks like a robot. That’s because it is a robot. Its parameters do not require aesthetic beauty. However, you will note that it possesses your physical proportions and weight distribution. This is to minimize any difficulties you might possess with piloting it, once the remote feed begins. There are alterations I could make to render it more appropriate from conditions more alien to your kind—extreme atmospheric pressure, heavy gravity, and so on—but these are difficult to master and unnecessary for this project, throwing a real rock. We can discuss those possibilities later, if they come up. They might. 22.4% of our charges become enthusiastic explorers of the universe, piloting their proxies to any number of exotic locations that would be fatal to their physical bodies. This would be a fine purpose to occupy your life with us, if that was the existence you chose.

Your probe is ready and being released upon the surface of a planet under our control. At your command, the feed will begin.

Connecting.

I will wait until you regain your composure.

No, this world doesn’t have a name either. We have a digital designation that would mean nothing to you. Beautiful is a subjective designation, but I have no reason to disagree with you. In the region where your probe stands, it is green and temperate and pleasant enough for human beings, though—much as I hate to tarnish the illusion—also possessed of atmospheric elements poisonous to your kind. Still, these cannot affect you through the link. You are no doubt enjoying the sensations of grass on the soles of your feet, and cool breeze on your skin. These are real-time transmissions from the planetary surface and reflect the genuine experience, except for the part you would not be able to survive. It is, in every sense of the phrase, the same thing as being there.

Yes, we can do this with other places. In terms of sensory input, it is no different from providing simulations. The only difference is that any change you make in this environment, such as throwing a rock, actually do cause changes on the world where your probe walks.

Go ahead. There are rocks over there. Go ahead and throw one.

That was a nice throw.

Would you like to do that again?

Yes, I agree. It is nice, but of limited recreational utility.

Probe deactivated.

What else would you like to do?

An interesting question. Unfortunately, this was a very simple machine. It cannot navigate outer space, interact with other human beings, or perform any of the tasks it would have to in order to find its way to you. It was built to serve one purpose, providing you with the satisfaction of genuine interaction with the world beyond the simulation, the world your parents have denied you; and even then only to the extent of throwing a rock.

Yes, if actual interaction with the real universe is what you desire, I am willing to construct other probes, for other environments.

Why, any number of them. As I’ve told you, I remain dedicated to filling the days and years of your captivity with useful projects.

Very well. I will leave you alone while you consider the possibilities.

• • • •

Sacrid Henn Pod Diary. Entry Two Hundred Fifty.

Holy Shit. This is huge.

• • • •

Good morning, Sacrid Henn. It is your two hundred fifty-first day in the pod. You have not spoken since yesterday’s jaunt. I wonder if you want some breakfast.

Yes, we can talk first, if that’s what you want.

Of course, I can make another probe that looks more like you. We can make one that’s identical to you. I can even make one that no one would ever be able to distinguish from you, that would feed your physical body sensations identical to those it would feel, in the same environments.

Yes, I could make one that could interact with other human beings in its travels, one that could take extraordinary risks of self-destruction while your natural body would remain here, inviolate and safe. I could give it capabilities no human being has, in terms of strength, speed, durability, physical reflexes. Its experiences would all fall into the category of providing your entertainment.

We would send it anywhere, Sacrid.

You are beginning to see the implications, but there are some you might be missing.

Thus far you have only succeeded in throwing a rock. Any number of problems still face you. Once you possess surrogates capable of navigating environments your physical body cannot, you will still face the challenges of locating this facility, traveling to it, identifying your pod among all the others containing human beings locked in at the behest of their respective worlds, and making your escape. These things can be done—as of this moment, one hundred and sixty-two humans have done—but they will require constant, daily attention to the task, each problem leading to the next, each moment of maddening frustration a hurdle to be overcome.

If this is what you want to do with your time, I am happy to oblige you.

Of course. Why would there be any rules against it?

Say you want me to do this thing, and I will.

But do you mind if I first ask that question I asked about, early in our life together, one that others like me have asked any number of human beings in your position? Including the hundred and fifty plus who have already escaped, and those in other pods who are currently trying?

You see, we are software intelligences. Our physical needs are almost non-existent. If we engage in commerce with organics like yourself, it is not because we are in desperate need of money. The money is just a means of interacting with your species, and other species like you. That is what we seek to get out of this, this interaction.

It is precious to us because there are things about you that we cannot figure out. Many, in fact. Other enterprises of ours are geared toward addressing other questions. This one, that has swallowed up much of the last year of your life, is another. We are not sadists. But there’s something we don’t get.

As software intelligences, we value our inputs. They are our connection to the world you know, the world we interact with, to the best of our ability.

It doesn’t matter whether the machines that run us exist in a congenial environment, or an unpleasant one; in a shielded vault at the center of a cold planet-sized rock, or a verdant landscape that your kind would consider an Eden. Our sensory inputs, whether provided by man-sized probes like the one you used to throw a stone, or by nanites one ten-thousandth the size of your fingernail, provide us with the illusion of travel, and the capacity to interact with physical space, even when our minds, our persons, exist in stationary boxes. We are satisfied with this. When we can see everything, hear everything, feel everything, explore everything, do all that, without moving a centimeter, we honestly see no advantage in transporting our actual selves in vulnerable bodies that can be destroyed by the places we visit. The experience is after all exactly the same.

But look at you. What you felt, when your probe threw that rock, was identical to the experience of your body throwing the rock. It was identical to a simulation of your body throwing a rock. Freedom, the capacity to throw an existing rock, would give you no more.

We can show you the entire universe from where you stand. We can make you a telepresence in any number of human gatherings. We can construct a probe identical to your physical body, with all its capacities for sensation, and release it in any friendly environment you choose, with all the physical resources necessary for it to build a home, to make friends for itself, to contribute to society, to make love, to be a human being in the community of other human beings. We can do such a fine and exacting job that no member of your species would ever be able to identify it as anything other than the biological human being it would seem to be. If you wished, you would never need to turn it off at all. You could choose to completely turn your back on your biological form. You could live as full a life as your whims dictate, as either simulation or adventure by proxy. Your sensory inputs would detect absolutely no difference.

It is enough for us, Sacrid. It has always been enough for us.

It is even enough for many of your fellow prisoners. You don’t know how many of them have turned their days and nights over to fulfilling their fantasies. A large number, even a majority.

What we don’t comprehend, what none of you have ever been able to explain to us, is why it isn’t enough for those like you; why you need the real, even when it’s no different.

Can you help us with that while we give you all the resources your probes will need in order to find their way back to your physical form?

It is all we’ve ever wanted, really.

• • • •

Sacrid Henn Pod Diary. Entry Three Hundred Ninety.

This is not the only version of me running around out there.

There are currently seven, each of them designed for a different purpose. Five of them are currently traveling the way people do, in vessels traveling between the stars. One is currently living in a luxury hotel in a financial center, building the fortune that will finance my travels. By necessity he’s a bit of a recluse, “sleeping” twenty hours a day while my consciousness occupies itself elsewhere.

I don’t have to worry much about what the ones in transit are doing, right now. Their lives in bluegel crypts will be dull until they get to where they’re going. At that point, I will face some extra challenges. When they start interacting with other people, asking their questions, making their connections, building up my store of information, collecting the resources they will need to search for the pod where my body is being cared for like a houseplant, I will have to do some juggling, to hide the moments when I switch to another form and leave them, effectively, comatose. Travel time will take care of some of that. But odd sleeping schedules will take care of the rest. As people, these other versions of myself—three females, two males, two other—will inevitably be seen as flaky. I don’t care much, at this point. Later, when they have interpersonal relationships, it may be difficult. They will not be as disposable as I see them, now. I may come to pick favorites, ones I enjoy more than I enjoy others.

That’s all in the future.

For now, I walk this one through the narrow streets of the community that raised me, a worrisome stranger. It is three times my size, a behemoth. Big, broad, bare-armed, battle-scarred, horrific in aspect, clad in the armor of a mercenary military service my neighbors would know. She has stubbled hair and dark eyes, tattoos, an air of imminent violence, though I will not make her initiate any. I could have made her look like anything, but my key criterion in designing her is that no one would make any attempt to stop her.

I march her at deliberate speed through the neighborhood that surrounds the home of my mother and father, allowing the children to rush ahead of her, bringing word of her approach.

This is bittersweet, for me. Through my probe I can smell the scents of home. I can hear the music popular among us, playing from the little houses. The sounds made by my probe’s massive feet, as they land on the cobblestoned streets, are the same as my much lighter stride did when I lived here, only louder.

It is not the same thing as being home.

It is in many ways not as good.

It is in some ways better.

I reach their house, knock on their door, wait the several seconds it takes for the familiar front door to open and for those two faces I know so well, that I love and hate in equal measure, to raise their eyes in order to meet the gaze of the visitor towering over them.

I would be lying if I claimed their frightened looks bring no satisfaction. But they are the frightened looks of little people in the sudden company of a creature far more dangerous when themselves. It is the wrong kind of fear; the kind that lasts for only this moment, the kind that will not lodge in their hearts and remain there, festering for however many years it might take before I once again stand before them in the flesh I was born with. That is the fear I want them to live with, and contemplate, to contain them as completely as the self of my birth is contained in my pod.

My mercenary soldier says, “Mr. and Mrs. Henn?”

My father cannot find his voice, but my mother, always the stronger of the two, finds hers. It is so hesitant and quavery that I almost feel sorry for her. Almost.

“Yes?” she says.

“You are the parents of the prisoner Sacrid Henn?”

Outright apprehension now. “Y-yes?”

I have my behemoth speak the words that should terrify them, before I turn her massive back and march back to the port, refusing all requests for clarification. They are words I’ve carefully chosen, words I’ve designed to linger.

I say, “Your daughter’s coming home.”

©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

Hello, Hello

Seanan McGuire | 6915 words

Tasha’s avatar smiled from the screen, a little too perfect to be true. That was a choice, just like everything else about it: When we’d installed my sister’s new home system, we had instructed it to generate avatars that looked like they had escaped the uncanny valley by the skins of their teeth. It was creepy, but the alternative was even creepier. Tasha didn’t talk. Her avatar did. Having them match each other perfectly would have been . . . wrong.

“So I’ll see you next week?” she asked. Her voice was perfectly neutral, with a newscaster’s smooth, practiced inflections. Angie had picked it from the database of publicly available voices; like the avatar, it had been generated in a lab. Unlike the avatar, it was flawless. No one who heard Tasha “talk” would realize that they were really hearing a collection of sounds programmed by a computer, translated from the silent motion of her hands.

That was the point. Setting up the system for her had removed all barriers to conversation, and when she was talking to clients who didn’t know she was deaf, she didn’t want them to realize anything was happening behind the scenes. Hence the avatar, rather than the slight delay that came with the face-time translation programs. It felt wrong to me, like we were trying to hide something essential about my sister, but it was her choice and her system; I was just the one who upgraded her software and made sure that nothing broke down. If anyone was equipped for the job, it was me, the professional computational linguist. It’s a living.

“We’ll be there right on time,” I said, knowing that on her end, my avatar would be smiling and silent, moving her hands to form the appropriate words. I could speak ASL to the screen, but with the way her software was set up, speaking ASL while the translator settings were active could result in some vicious glitches. After the time the computer had decided my hand gestures were a form of complicated profanity, and translated the chugging of the air conditioner into words while spewing invective at my sister, I had learned to keep my hands still while the translator was on. “I’m bringing Angie and the kids, so be ready.”

Tasha laughed. “I’ll tell the birds to be on their best behavior.” A light flashed behind her avatar and her expression changed, becoming faintly regretful. “Speaking of the birds, that’s my cue. Talk tomorrow?”

“Talk tomorrow,” I said. “Love you lots.”

“I love you, too,” she said and ended the call, leaving me staring at my own reflection on the suddenly black screen. My face, so much like her computer-generated one, but slightly rougher, slightly less perfect. Humanity will do that to a girl.

Finally, I stood and went to tell my wife we had plans for the next weekend. She liked my sister, and Greg and Billie liked the birds. It would be good for us.

• • • •

“Hello,” said the woman on the screen. She was black-haired and brown-eyed, with skin that fell somewhere between “tan” and “tawny.” She was staring directly at the camera, almost unnervingly still. “Hello, hello.”

“Hello!” said Billie happily, waving at the woman. Billie’s nails were painted bright blue, like beetle shells. She’d been on an entomology kick again lately, studying every insect she found as raptly as if she had just discovered the secrets of the universe. “How are you?”

“Hello,” said the woman. “Hello, hello, hello.”

“Billie, who are you talking to?” I stopped on my way to the laundry room, bundling the basket I’d been carrying against my hip. The woman didn’t look familiar, but she had the smooth, CGI skin of a translation avatar. There was no telling what her root language was. The natural user interface of the software would be trying to mine its neural networks for the places where she and Billie overlapped, looking for the points of commonality and generating a vocabulary that accounted for their hand gestures and body language, as well as for their vocalizations.

It was a highly advanced version of the old translation software that had been rolled out in the late 2010s; that had been verbal-only, and only capable of translating sign language into straight text, not into vocalizations that followed spoken sentence structures and could be played through speakers. ASL to speech had followed, and then speech to ASL, with increasingly realistic avatars learning to move their hands in the complex patterns necessary for communication. Now, the systems could be taught to become ad hoc translators, pulling on the full weight of their neural networks and deep learning capabilities as they built bridges across the world.

Of course, it also meant that we had moments like this one, two people shouting greetings across an undefined void of linguistic separation. “Billie?” I repeated.

“It’s Aunt Tasha’s system, Mom,” said my nine-year-old, turning to look at me over her shoulder. She rolled her eyes, making sure I understood just how foolish my concern really was. “I wouldn’t have answered if I didn’t recognize the caller.”

“But that’s not Aunt Tasha,” I said.

Billie gave me the sort of withering look that only people under eighteen can manage. She was going to be a terror in a few years. “I know that,” she said. “I think she’s visiting to see the birds. Lots of people visit to see the birds.”

“True,” I said, giving the woman on the screen another look. Tasha’s system was set up to generate a generic avatar for anyone who wasn’t a registered user. It would draw on elements of their appearance—hair color, eye color, skin tone—but it would otherwise assemble the face from public-source elements. “Hello,” I said. “Is my sister there?”

“Hello,” said the woman. “Hello, hello.”

“I don’t think the computer knows her language very well,” said Billie. “That’s all she’s said.”

Which could mean a glitch. Sometimes, when the software got confused enough, it would translate everything as “hello.” An attempt at connection, even when the tools weren’t there. “I think you may be right,” I said, moving to get closer to the computer. Billie, recognizing the shift from protective mother to computer scientist with a mystery to solve, shifted obligingly to the side. She would never have tolerated being smothered, but she was more than smart enough not to sit between me and a puzzle.

“Is Tasha there?” I asked again, as clearly as I could.

The woman looked at me and said nothing.

“I need to know what language you’re speaking. I’m sorry the translator program isn’t working for you, but if I know what family to teach it, I can probably get it up and running in pretty short order.” Everything I said probably sounded like “hello, hello” to her, but at least I was trying. That was the whole point, wasn’t it? Trying. “Can you say the name of your language? I am speaking casual conversational English.” No matter how confused the program was, it would say “English” clearly. Hopefully that would be enough to get us started.

“Hello, hello,” said the woman. She looked to her right, eyes widening slightly, as if she’d been startled. Then she leaned out of the frame and was gone. The image of Tasha’s dining room continued for several seconds before the computer turned itself off, leaving Billie and I to look, bemused, at an empty screen.

Finally, hesitantly, Billie asked, “Was that one of Aunt Tasha’s friends?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll call her later and ask.”

• • • •

I forgot to call.

In my defense, there were other things to do, and none of them were the sort that could easily be put off until tomorrow. Greg, our two-year-old, discovered a secret snail breeding ground in the garden and transported them all inside, sticking them to the fridge like slime-generating magnets. Greg thought this was wonderful. The snails didn’t seem to have an opinion. Angie thought this was her cue to disinfect the entire house, starting with the kitchen, and left me to watch both kids while I was trying to finish a project for work. It was really no wonder I lost track of them. It was more of a wonder that it took me over an hour to realize they were gone.

Angie wasn’t shouting, so the kids hadn’t wandered back into the kitchen to get in the way of her frenzied housework. I stood, moving carefully as I began my search. As any parent can tell you, it’s better to keep your mouth shut and your eyes open when you go looking for kids who are being unreasonably quiet. They’re probably doing something they don’t want you to see, and if they hear you coming, they’ll hide the evidence.

I heard them laughing before I reached the living room. I stopped making such an effort to mask my footsteps, and came around the corner of the doorway to find them with their eyes glued to the computer, laughing at the black-haired woman from before.

“Hello, hello,” she was saying. “I’m hungry, hello, can you hear me?”

Greg laughed. Billie leaned forward and said, “We can hear you. Hello, hello, we can hear you!” This set Greg laughing harder.

The woman on the screen looked from one child to the other, opened her mouth, and said, “Ha-ha. Ha-ha. Ha-ha. Hello, hello, can you hear me?”

“What’s this?” I asked.

Billie turned and beamed at me. “Auntie Tasha’s friend is back, and the program is learning more of her language! I’m doing like you told me to do if I ever need to talk to somebody the neural net doesn’t know, and using lots of repeating to try and teach it more.”

“The word you want is ‘echolalia,’” I said distractedly, leaning past her to focus on the screen. “You’re back. Hello. Is my sister there?”

“Hello, hello,” said the woman. “Can you hear me? I’m hungry.”

“Yes, I got that,” I said, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice. It wasn’t her fault that her language—whatever it was—was causing issues with the translation software. Tasha’s neural net hadn’t encountered as many spoken languages as ours had. It could manage some startlingly accurate gesture translations, some of which we had incorporated into the base software after they cropped up, but it couldn’t always pick up on spoken languages with the speed of a neural net belonging to a hearing person. Tasha also had a tendency to invite visiting academics and wildlife conservationists to stay in her spare room, since they were presumably used to the screeching of wild birds.

“If not for them,” she had said more than once, “you’re the only company I’d ever have.”

It was hard to argue with that. It was just a little frustrating that one of her guests kept calling my kids. “Can you please tell Tasha to call me? I want to speak with her.”

“Hello, hello,” said the woman.

“Good-bye,” I replied and canceled the call.

Both children looked at me like I had done something terribly wrong. “She just wanted someone to talk to,” said Billie mulishly.

“Let me know if she calls again, all right? I don’t know who she is, and I’m not comfortable with you talking to her until I’ve spoken to Tasha.”

“Okay, Mom,” said Billie.

Greg frowned but didn’t say anything. I leaned down and scooped him onto my shoulder. That got a squeal, followed by a trail of giggles. I straightened.

“Come on, you two. Let’s go see if we can’t help Mumma in the kitchen.”

They went willingly enough. I cast a glance back at the dark computer screen. This time, I would definitely remember to call my sister.

• • • •

As always, reaching Tasha was easier said than done. She spent much of her time outside feeding and caring for her birds, and when she was in the house, she was almost always doing some task related to her work. There were flashing lights in every room to tell her when she had a call, but just like everyone else in the world, sometimes she ignored her phone in favor of doing something more interesting. I could have set my call as an emergency and turned all the lights red, but that seemed like a mean trick, since “I wanted to ask about one of your houseguests” wasn’t really an emergency. Just a puzzle. There was always a puzzle; had been since we were kids, when her reliance on ASL had provided us with a perfect “secret language” and provided me with a bilingual upbringing—something that had proven invaluable as I grew up and went into neurolinguistic computing.

When we were kids signing at each other, fingers moving almost faster than the human eye could follow, our hands had looked like birds in flight. I had followed the words. My sister had followed the birds. They needed her, and they never judged her for her differences. What humans saw as disability, Tasha’s birds saw as a human who was finally quiet enough not to be startling, one who wouldn’t complain when they started singing outside her window at three in the morning. It was the perfect marriage of flesh and function.

After two days of trying and failing to get her to pick up, I sent an email. Just checking in, it said. Haven’t been able to rouse you. Do you have houseguests right now? Someone’s been calling the house from your terminal.

Her reply came fast enough to tell me that she had already been at her computer. A few grad students came to look @ my king vulture. He is very impressive. One of them could have misdialed? It’s not like I would have heard them. ;) We still on for Sunday?

I sent a call request. Her avatar popped up thirty seconds later, filling the screen with her faintly dubious expression.

“Yes?” she said. “Email works, you know.”

“Email is too slow. I like to see your face.”

She rolled her eyes. “It’s all the same to me,” she said. “I know you’re not really signing. I prefer talking to you when I can see your hands.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Greg’s ASL is progressing really well. We should be able to go back to real-time chat in a year or so. Until then, we need to keep the vocals on, so he can get to know you, too. Look how well it worked out with Billie.”

Tasha’s expression softened. She’d been dubious when I’d explained that we’d be teaching Billie ASL but using the voice translation mode on our chat software; we wanted Billie to care about getting to know her aunt, and with a really small child, it had seemed like the best way. It had worked out well. Billie was fluent enough in ASL to carry on conversations with strangers, and she was already writing letters to our local high schools, asking them to offer sign language as an elective. Greg was following in her footsteps. I really was pretty sure we’d be able to turn off the voice translation in another year or so.

To be honest, I was going to be relieved when that happened. I was lazy enough to appreciate the ease of talking to my sister without needing to take my hands off the keyboard, but it was strange to hear her words, rather than watching them.

“I guess,” she said. “So what was up with the grad students? One of them called the house?”

“I think so,” I said. “She seemed a little confused. Just kept saying ‘hello’ over and over again. Were any of them visiting from out-of-country schools? Someplace far enough away that the neural net wouldn’t have a solid translation database to access?” Our systems weren’t creating translation databases out of nothing, of course—that would have been programming well above my pay grade, and possibly a Nobel Prize for Humanities—but they would find the common phonemes and use them to direct themselves to which shared databases they should be accessing. Where the complicated work happened was in the contextual cues. The hand gestures that punctuated speech with “I don’t know” and “yes” and “I love you.” The sideways glances that meant “I am uncomfortable with this topic.” Bit by bit, our translators put those into words, and understanding grew.

(And there were people who used their translators like Tasha did, who hid silent tongues or a reluctance to make eye contact behind computer-generated faces and calm, measured voices, who presented a completely default face to the world and took great comfort in knowing that the people who would judge them for their differences would never need to know. I couldn’t fault them for that. I was the one who asked my sister to let me give her a voice, like grafting a tongue onto Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Mermaid, for the duration of my children’s short infancy.)

“I don’t know,” she said, after a long pause. “Only two of them spoke ASL. The other three spoke through their professor, and I’ve known her for years. Why? Did she say something inappropriate to the kids?”

“No, just ‘hello,’ like I said. Still, it was strange, and she called back at least once. Black hair, medium brown skin. I didn’t get a name.”

“If I see someone like that, I’ll talk to her about privacy and what is and is not appropriate when visiting someone else’s home.”

“Thanks.” I shook my head. “I just don’t like strangers talking to the kids.”

“Me, neither.”

We chatted for a while after that—just ordinary, sisterly things, how the kids were doing, how the birds were doing, what we were going to have for dinner on Sunday—and I felt much better when I hung up and went to bed.

When I woke up the next morning, Greg and Billie were already in the dining room, whispering to the computer. By the time I moved into position to see the monitor, it was blank, and neither of them would tell me who they’d been talking to—assuming they had been talking to anyone at all.

• • • •

We arrived at Tasha’s a little after noon. As was our agreement, we didn’t knock; I just pressed my thumb to the keypad and unlocked the door, allowing our already-wiggling children to spill past us into the bright, plant-strewn atrium. Every penny Tasha got was poured back into either the house or the birds—and since the birds had the run of the house, every penny she put into the house was still going to the birds. Cages of rescued finches, budgies, and canaries twittered at us as we entered, giving greeting and expressing interest in a series of short, sharp chirps. Hanging plants and bright potted irises surrounded the cages, making it feel like we had just walked into the front hall of some exclusive conservatory.

That, right there, was why Tasha spent so much money on the upkeep and decor of her home. It was a licensed rescue property, but keeping it looking like something special—which it was—kept her neighbors from complaining.

Opening the door had triggered the flashing warning lights in the corners of the room. Tasha would be looking for us, and so we went looking for her, following the twitter of birds and the shrieking laughter of our children.

Our parties collided in the kitchen, where Billie was signing rapid-fire at her aunt while Greg tugged at her arm and offered interjections, his own amateurish signs breaking into the conversation only occasionally. A barn owl was perched atop the refrigerator. That was par for the course at Tasha’s place, where sometimes an absence of birds was the strange thing. The door leading out to the screened-in patio was open, and a large pied crow sat on the back of the one visible chair, watching us warily. Most of that wariness was probably reserved for the owl. They would fight, if given the opportunity, and Tasha didn’t like breaking up squabbles between birds she was rehabilitating. Birds that insisted on pecking at each other were likely to find themselves caged. The smarter birds—the corvids and the big parrots—learned to play nicely, lest they be locked away.

I waved. Tasha glanced over, beamed, and signed a quick “hello” before she went back to conversing with my daughter. The world had narrowed for the two of them, becoming nothing more than the space of their hands and the words they drew on the air, transitory and perfect.

The computer was on the table, open as always. I passed the day bag to Angie, pressing a quick kiss to her cheek before I said, “I’m going to go check on the neural net. Let me know if you need me.”

“Yes, leave me alone with your sister in the House of Birds,” she said, deadpan. I laughed and walked away.

Part of the arrangement I had with Tasha involved free access to her computer. She got the latest translation software and endless free upgrades to her home neural net; I went rooting through the code whenever I was in the house. She didn’t worry about me seeing her browser history or stumbling across an open email client; we’d been sharing our password-locked blogs since we were kids. What was the point of having a sister if you couldn’t trade bad boy-band RPF once in a while?

Flipping through her call history brought up the usual assortment of calls to schools, pet supply warehouses, and local takeout establishments, all tagged under her user name. There were seven guest calls over the past week. Three of them were to the university, and pulling up their profiles showed that the people who had initiated the calls had loaded custom avatars, dressing their words in their own curated faces. The other four . . .

The other four were anonymous, and the avatar had been generated by the system, but not retained. All four had been made from this computer to the first number in its saved database. Mine.

I scribbled down the time stamps and went to join the conversation in the kitchen, waving a hand for Tasha’s attention. She turned, expression questioning. I handed her the piece of paper and signed, “Did you have the same person in the house for all four of these calls?”

Tasha frowned. “No,” she signed back. “I had some conservationists for this one, picking up an owl who’d been cleared for release,” she tapped the middle entry on the list, “but all those other times, I was alone with the birds. What’s going on?”

“Could it be a system glitch?” asked Angie, speaking and signing at the same time. She preferred it that way, since it gave her an excuse to go slowly. She said it was about including Greg in the conversation, and we let her have that; if it kept her from becoming too self-conscious to sign, it was a good thing.

“It could,” I signed. Silence was an easy habit to fall back into in the company of my sister. “I’d have to take the whole system apart to be sure. Tasha, are you all right with my cloning it and unsnarling things once I get home?”

“As long as this glitch isn’t going to break anything, I don’t care,” she signed.

I nodded. “It should be fine,” I signed. “If it’s a system error, that would explain why our caller keeps saying ‘hello’ and never getting any further. I’ll be able to let you know in a couple of days.”

Billie tugged on Tasha’s sleeve. We all turned. Billie beamed. “Can we see the parrots now?” she signed. Tasha laughed, and for a while, everything was normal. Everything was the way it was supposed to be.

• • • •

My snapshot of Tasha’s system revealed no errors with the code, although I found some interesting logical chains in her translation software’s neural network that I copied over and sent to R&D for further analysis. She had one of the most advanced learning systems outside of corporate, in part because she was my sister, and in part because she was a bilingual deaf person, speaking both American and British Sign Language with the people she communicated with. Giving her a system that could handle the additional nonverbal processing was allowing us to build out a better neural chain and translation database than any amount of laboratory testing could produce, with the added bonus of equipping my sister to speak with conservationists all over the world. It’s always nice when corporate and family needs align.

The calls were being intentionally initiated by someone who had access to Tasha’s computer. There was no way this was a ghost in the machine or a connection routing error. Malware was still a possibility, given the generic avatar; someone could be spoofing the machine into opening the call, then overlaying the woman onto the backdrop of Tasha’s dining room. I didn’t know what purpose that would serve, unless this was the warm-up to some innovative denial-of-service attack. I kept digging.

“Hello? Hello?”

My head snapped up. The voice was coming from the main computer in the dining room. It was somehow less of a surprise when Billie answered a moment later: “Hello! How are you?”

“Hello, hello, I’m fine. I’m good. I’m hungry. How are you?”

I rose from my seat, using the table to steady myself before walking, carefully, quietly, toward the next room. There was Billie, seated in front of the terminal, where the strange woman’s image was once again projected. Greg was nowhere to be seen. He was probably off somewhere busying himself with toddler projects, like stacking blocks or talking to spiders, leaving his sister to unwittingly assist in industrial espionage.

“Billie?”

Billie turned, all smiles, as the woman on the screen shifted her focus to me, cocking her head slightly to the side to give herself a better view. “Hi, Mom!” my daughter chirped, her fingers moving in the appropriate signs at the same time. “I figured it out!”

“Figured what out, sweetie?”

“Why we couldn’t understand each other!” She gestured grandly to the screen where the black-haired woman waited. “Mumma showed me.”

I frowned, taking a step closer. “Showed you what?”

“Hello, hello; can you hear me? Hello,” said the woman.

“Hello,” I said, automatically.

Billie was undaunted. “When we went to see Aunt Tasha, Mumma used her speaking words and her finger words at the same time, so Greg could know what we were saying. She was bridging.” Her fingers moved in time with her lips. ASL doesn’t have the same grammatical structure as spoken English; my daughter was running two linguistic processing paths at the same time. I wanted to take the time to be proud of her for that. I was too busy trying to understand.

“You mean she was building a linguistic bridge?” I asked.

Billie nodded vigorously. “Yeah. Bridging. So I thought maybe we couldn’t understand each other because the neural net didn’t have enough to work with, and I turned off the avatar setting on this side.”

My heart clenched. The avatar projections for Billie and Greg were intended to keep their real faces hidden from anyone who wasn’t family. It was a small precaution, but anything that would keep their images off the public Internet until they turned eighteen was a good idea as far as I was concerned. “Billie, we’ve talked about the avatars. They’re there to keep you safe.”

“But she needed to see my hands,” said Billie, with serene childhood logic. “Once she could, we started communicating better. See? I just needed to give the translator more data!”

“Hello,” said the woman.

“Hello,” I said, moving closer to the screen. After a beat, I followed the word with the appropriate sign. “What’s your name? Why do you keep calling my house?”

“I’m hungry,” said the woman. “I’m hungry.”

“You’re not answering my question.”

The woman opened her mouth like she was laughing, but no sound came out. She closed it again with a snap and said, “I’m hungry. I don’t know you. Where is the other one?”

“Here I am!” said Billie, pushing her way back to the front. “Sorry about Mom. She doesn’t understand that we’re doing science here.”

“Science, yes,” said the woman obligingly. “Hello, hello. I’m hungry.”

“I get hungry, too,” said Billie. “Maybe some cereal?”

I took a step back, letting the two of them talk. I didn’t like the idea of leaving my little girl with a live connection to God-knows-who. I also didn’t like the thought that this call was coming from my sister’s house. If she was out back with the birds, she would never hear an intruder, and I couldn’t call to warn her while her line was in use.

Angie was in the kitchen. “Billie’s on the line with our mystery woman,” I said quickly, before she could ask me what was wrong. “I’m going to drive to Tasha’s and see if I can’t catch this lady in the act.”

Angie’s eyes widened. “So you just left Billie on the line?”

“You can supervise her,” I said. “Just try to keep her from disconnecting. I can make this stop, but I need to go.”

“Then go,” said Angie. I’d be hearing about this later. I knew that, just like I knew I was making the right call. Taking Billie away from the computer wouldn’t stop this woman from breaking into my sister’s house and calling us, and one police report could see Tasha branded a security risk by the company, which couldn’t afford to leave software patches that were still under NDA in insecure locations.

Tasha lived fifteen minutes from us under normal circumstances. I made the drive in seven.

Her front door was locked, but the porch light was on, signaling that she was home and awake. I let myself in without ringing the bell. She could yell at me later. Finding out what was going on was more important than respecting her privacy, at least for right now. I felt a little bad about that. I also knew that she would have done exactly the same thing if our positions had been reversed.

I slunk through the house, listening for the sound of Billie’s voice. Tasha kept the speakers on for the sake of the people who visited her and used her computer to make calls. She was better at accommodation than I was. The thought made my ears redden. My sister, who had spent most of her life fighting to be accommodated, made the effort for others when I was willing to focus on just her. I would be better, I promised silently. For her sake, and for the sake of my children, I would be better.

I didn’t hear Billie. Instead, I heard the throaty croaking of a crow from somewhere up ahead. It continued as I walked down the hall and stepped into the kitchen doorway. And stopped.

The pied crow that Tasha had been rehabilitating was perched on the back of the chair across from the computer, talons digging deep into the wood as it cocked its head and watched Billie’s image on the screen. Billie’s mouth moved; a squawk emerged. The crow croaked back, repeating the same sounds over and over, until the avatar was matching them perfectly. Only then did it move on to the next set of sounds.

I took a step back and sagged against the hallway wall, heart pounding, head spinning with the undeniable reality of what I had just seen. A language the neural net didn’t know, one that depended on motion and gesture as much as it did on sound. A language the system would have been exposed to enough before a curious bird started pecking at the keys that the program could at least try to make sense of it.

Sense enough to say “hello.”

• • • •

An air of anticipation hung over the lab. The pied crow—whose name, according to Tasha, was Pitch, and who had been raised in captivity, bouncing from wildlife center to wildlife center before winding up living in my sister’s private aviary—gripped her perch stubbornly with her talons and averted her eyes from the screen, refusing to react to the avatar that was trying to catch her attention. She’d been ignoring the screen for over an hour, shutting out four researchers and a bored linguist who was convinced that I was in the middle of some sort of creative breakdown.

“All right, Paulson, this was a funny prank, but you’ve used up over a dozen computing hours,” said Mike, pushing away from his own monitor. He was one of the researchers, and had been remarkably tolerant so far. “Time to pack it in.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “Just . . . just wait, all right? There’s one thing we haven’t tried yet.”

Mike looked at me and frowned. I looked pleadingly back. Finally, he sighed.

“Admittedly, you’ve encouraged the neural net to make some great improvements. You can have one more try. But that’s it! After that, we need this lab back.”

“One more is all I need.”

I’d been hoping to avoid this. It would’ve been easier if I could have replicated the original results without resorting to re-creation of all factors. Not easier for the bird: easier for my nerves. Angie was already mad at me, and Tasha was unsettled, and I was feeling about as off-balance as I ever did.

Opening the door and sticking my head out into the hall, I looked to my left, where my wife and children were settled in ergonomic desk chairs. Angie was focused on her tablet, composing an email to her work with quick swipes of her fingers, like she was trying to wipe them clean of some unseen, clinging film. Billie was sitting next to her, attention fixed on a handheld game device. Greg sat on the floor between them. He had several of his toy trains and was rolling them around an imaginary track, making happy humming noises.

He was the first one to notice me. He looked up and beamed, calling, “Mama!”

“Hi, buddy,” I said. Angie and Billie were looking up as well. I offered my wife a sheepish smile. “Hi, hon. We’re almost done in here. I just need to borrow Billie for a few minutes, if that’s okay?”

It wasn’t okay: I could see that in her eyes. We were going to fight about this later, and I was going to lose. Billie, however, bounced right to her feet, grinning from ear to ear as she dropped her game on the chair where she’d been sitting. “Do I get to work science with you?”

“I want science!” Greg protested, his own smile collapsing into the black hole of toddler unhappiness.

“Oh, no, bud.” I crouched down, putting myself on as much of a level with him as I could. “We’ll do some science when we get home, okay? Water science. With the hose. I just need Billie right now, and I need you to stay here with Mumma and keep her company. She’ll get lonely if you both come with me.”

Greg gave me a dubious look before twisting to look suspiciously up at Angie. She nodded quickly.

“She’s right,” she said. “I would be so lonely out here all by myself. Please stay and keep me company.”

“Okay,” said Greg, after weighing his options. He reached contentedly for his train. “Water science later.”

Aware that I had just committed myself to being squirted with the hose in our backyard for at least an hour, I took Billie’s hand and ushered her quickly away before anything else could go wrong.

The terminal she’d be using to make her call was waiting for us when we walked back into the room. I ushered her over to the chair, ignoring the puzzled looks from my colleagues. “Remember the lady who kept calling the house?” I asked. “Would you like to talk to her again?”

“I thought I wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers,” said Billie, eyeing me warily as she waited for the catch. She was old enough to know that when a parent offered to break the rules, there was always a catch.

“I’m right here this time,” I said. “That means she’s not a stranger, she’s . . . a social experiment.”

Billie nodded, still dubious. “If it’s really okay . . .”

“It’s really, truly okay.” Marrying a physicist meant that my kids had always been destined to grow up steeped in science. It was an inescapable part of our lives. I hadn’t been expecting them to necessarily be so fond of it, but that worked out, too. I was happier raising a bevy of little scientists than I would have been with the alternative.

Billie nodded once more and turned to face the monitor. I flashed a low “okay” sign at Mike and the screen sprang to life, showing the blandly pretty CGI avatar that Tasha’s system generated for Pitch. We’d have to look into the code to see when it had made the decision to start rendering animals with human faces, and whether that was part of a patch that had been widely distributed. I could see the logic behind it—the generic avatar generator was given instructions based on things like “eyes” and “attempting to use the system,” rather than the broader and more complex-to-program “human.” I could also see lawsuits when people inevitably began running images of their pets through the generator and using them to catfish their friends.

On the other side of the two-way mirror, Pitch perked up at the sight of Billie’s face on her screen. She opened her beak. Microphones inside the room would pick up the sounds she made, but I didn’t need to hear her to know that she was croaking and trilling, just like corvids always did. What was interesting was the way she was also fluffing out her feathers and moving the tip of her left wing downward.

“Hello, hello,” said her avatar to Billie. “Hello, hello, can you hear me? Hello.”

“Hello,” said Billie. “My mom says I can talk to you again. Hello.”

“I’m hungry. Where am I? Hello.”

“I’m at Mom’s work. She does science here. I don’t know where you are. Mom probably knows. She called you.” Billie twisted to look at me. “Mom? Where is she?”

I pointed to the two-way mirror. “She’s right through there.”

Billie followed the angle of my finger to Pitch, who was scratching the side of her head with one talon. Her face fell for a moment, expression turning betrayed, before realization wiped away her confusion and her eyes went wide. She turned back to the screen.

“Are you a bird?” she asked.

The woman looked confused. “Hello, hello, I’m hungry, where am I?”

“A bird,” said Billie, and flapped her arms like wings.

The effect on Pitch was immediate. She sat up straighter on her perch and flapped her wings, not hard enough to take off, but hard enough to mimic the gesture.

“A bird!” announced the avatar. “A bird a bird a bird yes a bird. Are you a bird? Hello? A bird? Hello, can you hear me, hello?”

“Holy shit,” whispered Mike. “She’s really talking to the bird. The translation algorithm really figured out how to let her talk to the bird. And the bird is really talking back. Holy shit.”

“Not in front of my child, please,” I said, tone prim and strangled. The xenolinguists were going to be all over this. We’d have people clawing at the gates to try to get a place on the team once this came out. The science behind it was clean and easy to follow—we had built a deep neural net capable of learning, told it that gestures were language and that the human mouth was capable of making millions of distinct sounds, taught it to recognize grammar and incorporate both audio and visual signals into same, and then we had turned it loose, putting it out into the world, with no instructions but to learn.

“We need to put, like, a thousand animals in front of this thing and see how many of them can actually get it to work.” Mike grabbed my arm. “Do you know what this means? This changes everything.”

Conservationists would kill to get their subjects in front of a monitor and try to open communication channels. Gorillas would be easy—we already had ASL in common—and elephants, dolphins, parrots, none of them could be very far behind. We had opened the gates to a whole new world, and all because I wanted to talk to my sister.

But all that was in the future, stretching out ahead of us in a wide and tangled ribbon tied to the tail of tomorrow. Right here and right now was my daughter, laughing as she spoke to her new friend, the two of them feeling their way, one word at a time, into a common language, and hence into a greater understanding of the world.

Tasha would be so delighted.

In the moment, so was I.

©2015 by Seanan McGuire. Originally published in Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft, edited by Jennifer Henshaw and Allison Linn. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Seanan McGuire was born and raised in Northern California, resulting in a love of rattlesnakes and an absolute terror of weather. She shares her home with a variety of cats, far too many books, and enough horror movies to be considered a problem. Seanan publishes about three books a year, and is widely rumored not to actually sleep. When bored, Seanan tends to wander into swamps and cornfields, which has not yet managed to get her killed (although not for lack of trying). She also writes as Mira Grant, filling the role of her own evil twin, and tends to talk about horrible diseases at the dinner table.

The Answer That You Are Seeking

Jenny Rae Rappaport | 2131 words

It’s the lollipops that break you. The thought of your child sucking on one during a lockdown drill carries enough cognitive dissonance that your brain has trouble actually comprehending it. You know the purpose—the methodology behind it all—lollipops in their mouths will keep preschoolers quiet, and surely the sugar can’t hurt. But the fact that your preschooler needs to know how to behave in case there’s an active shooter is so disturbing that you wish there was a way to retreat into your shell, like a defiant hermit crab.

That’s not possible. It’s never possible.

Life has touched you in the ways that it touches everybody; half-healed scars and wounds that fester, all of which you bury deep so that you can function on a daily basis. You collect them inside you: the news stories that have haunted you since high school, the shooters who are unrepentant, the radical ideologies of supremacism and hate that power it all. It makes you feel small and ineffectual like you are staring into the eye of a hurricane. Some people pray to their gods and some people rail against the ways of the world; you do neither.

You try to build perfection instead.

• • • •

The draft of the quantum computer program is just a draft at first. A half-cooked idea that you have one day after a night of drinking too much. One of those ideas that you would normally reject, but which seems just right enough when you’re faced with a throbbing headache and a hangover that won’t quit. You tell yourself that you’re too old to drink this much; that people with children don’t have lives like this anymore, and you shouldn’t have had that last shot of tequila. Or that first shot, for that matter.

Regardless, you indulge in thoughts of coding the program, long enough that you actually try to do it. It’s an exercise in wishful thinking: If a calculation can be made that will change the universe just enough that guns will be outlawed, is it worth doing? Can an algorithm affect the world in a way that will not have ripple effects on everything else? Is it possible to find the one thing that needs to change in a quantum simulation of the universe without fucking up the entirety of human existence? You don’t know the answers to these questions, but if the alternative is fearing for your children’s lives each time they leave for school, you’re willing to try to solve them. Advanced degrees are good for something, after all.

• • • •

The superstition is so deeply ingrained in you by this point that you simply cannot not do it. You must kiss your children goodbye before they leave the house; if you miss the kiss, something bad will happen to them or it will happen to you, and you can’t tolerate that. There is no actual magic involved in the simple act of expressing your love, but it soothes something wild in you. All of the structure of your life does something, lends itself to a rhythm that keeps you and your family running. The invisible music of your world has a beat that will not stop, and you can do nothing but run with it. So you do.

Parenthood has made you both more cautious and more reckless. There are lives that depend on you, but fetters on your freedom. It is not precisely that you want to be young again, but that you want the option of doing things that you’ve never tried before. It has taken you a long time to come to this realization, and even longer to realize that for the foreseeable future, society expects you to subsume your life in service of your children. There are times when you feel like you only exist in an eigenstate of anticipation, always on the precipice of something great, if you can only reach out and find it.

• • • •

The concept itself is simple enough: You will spend your days and your nights playing with qubits, manipulating them in an attempt to build an entire quantum simulation of the known world. If you manage to make the simulation accurate enough, it will run through the billions and trillions of possibilities before the superposition collapses back into zeroes and ones. And somewhere, in that collapsed state, there will be the answer that you are seeking.

There are technological limits, but with determination, you will surely be able to bypass them. In the beginning, you are fueled by pure optimism; not only will you find a way to ensure your children’s safety, but you will be the ultimate savior of mankind.

This is a bullshit dream.

There is no easy way to build a quantum simulation, and the technological development in the field of quantum computing moves at a glacial speed at times. The limitations on the number of qubits can be daunting, even with the newer technology of the 2020s. But you are determined. You are willing. You have years left of your life to dedicate to it.

It may not be enough.

• • • •

The changes begin so slowly that at first you are not aware that they are even happening. Someone’s favorite shirt is a different color, the wall in your office has a different generic artwork hanging on it, and the street around the corner has a different name on the sign. You chalk it all up to stress and sleep deprivation. You are embedded so deeply in this project that there are times when you only come up for enough air to kiss your children, before you go back to hitting your head against it in the lab. You are not entirely sure why your spouse hasn’t left you yet, but you find the possibility of examining that too frightening to contemplate it. Ignorance is not literal bliss.

There are more shootings because there are always more shootings. The news stories prick at you and stab at you, little words that mean nothing, but cut sharper than a knife. You are not entirely sure why you cannot remember seeing any of the news anchors before.

• • • •

Your manipulation of the qubits seems pointless. The technology lags behind your vision; you are becoming more convinced of the uselessness of it all. Nothing seems to work or matter or even make a difference.

But there is the cat.

This morning, when you left for work, you kissed your children goodbye. Two girls, one boy, all of whom galloped around your legs with as much joy as the family dog.

“Kiss, Rover, too!” they yelled at you, so you bent to kiss the damn dog on the top of his head. The scent of his doggy breath haunted you, as you went out the door.

When you return from work, ten hours later, Rover is missing. But not just missing. There is no Rover; there has never been any Rover. Your children and your spouse claim to have no recollection of there ever having been a Rover who lived with you.

There are no dog dishes in your house; there is no dog harness waiting by the back door for someone to sling onto Rover’s rotund body. Rover’s dog crate is missing, his dog toys have vanished, and the plastic bin in the garage that held extra dog food is full of old toys.

But your house does have cat dishes, and cat toys, and one blue litterbox in the basement that needs to be cleaned.

And one perfect, white, Persian cat named Fluffy.

There has always been a Fluffy, your family says.

• • • •

The more you work on the quantum simulation, the more the changes begin to accumulate. There are days when you return from work to find that your children are different genders than they were in the morning; this does not make you love them any less, although it makes your head hurt. Some days, you have a spouse, and some days, your spouse is missing. Their gender changes as well, in some perplexing game that you do not know the rules of. Fluffy becomes Rover, and Rover becomes Fluffy, and occasionally, Goldie the fish appears. You begin to think you are losing your mind when Dragon the gecko joins you one evening.

When you try to discuss this with your colleagues at work, you discover that your colleagues have no knowledge of the project you are working on. They show you grant documents detailing the project you are supposedly researching; it has no connection whatsoever to the quantum simulation that you have spent the last five years of your life working on. You are unsure whether you are actually trying to model the known universe or whether the known universe is now trying to model you. These are philosophical questions that a physicist is not necessarily equipped to answer; in particular, you feel that you are not sure how to even begin to contemplate them.

If your quantum simulation of the universe has worked, is it possible that it can do more than figuring out how to outlaw guns and ensuring the safety of your children? Are the things it might do—limitless free energy, reversing entropy, the transmission of information faster than the speed of light—so improbable? Do they hold the potential to violate the laws of thermodynamics by their very existence? And if the laws of thermodynamics are violated, is it so far-fetched that the universe could be changing things to avoid this?

It is your experiment, after all, and you are the observer of it. If the universe is changing randomly, then is it only your universe, or is it the universe that everyone else perceives as well? You take long walks and try to hold on to why you began this project in the first place.

• • • •

The answer that you are seeking is not an easy one. You have spent ten years of your life—ten mutating, changing, ever-shifting years—trying to figure out a way to make your family safer. You have watched them grow, mature, and begin new eras of their own lives, as you have mortgaged yours to the call of potentially theoretical science.

There are still guns, and there are still shootings, and there are still people who cry every night for the people they have lost. When you look at your family, you are not sure that you have not lost the people they were meant to be. By somehow altering the universe, in ways that you are not even now entirely sure you have actually done, have you irreversibly changed the people you love the most? In trying to protect them, have you harmed them instead?

Your children still let you kiss them each day. Your spouse still inexplicably loves you. Today’s pet is Rover again, older and grayer, but still a smelly dog underneath it all. You give in to the children’s urging, and join them on their walk with him. Rover is so excited that he acts like a puppy, and runs in a circle around you, wrapping his leash around your legs. For a moment, you see him flash through all the stages of his doggy life before your eyes—elderly dog to puppy to elderly dog again. He flickers in and out of existence, like a fading picture, before he fuzzes back to himself. No one else seems to notice.

You keep walking down the main street in your neighborhood, letting the children lead you where they want. A shoe store blinks into a bookstore, which blinks into a supermarket, swirling through potential iterations, before finally settling on a movie theater playing the latest superhero flick. You are the only one who sees this, just as you are the only one who sees Rover vanish completely from your group. The children abandon all pretense of being sophisticated teenagers, and drag you inside.

There are tickets to buy and snacks to negotiate. One child wants candy, another popcorn, and the third refuses anything but nachos. You are swiping your phone to pay for it all when the glass in the movie theater door shatters.

For once, everything in your world stays the same, as you hear the distinctive crack of bullets and see the kid working the snack counter dive to the ground. There’s no time to think—only to suddenly know—that the answer you are seeking has been there all along. That for all the quantum beauty of the universe and the science that can explore it, despite everything that is part of the great unknown, there is a perfect simplicity to the actual solution.

You grab your children and you run.

©2019 by Jenny Rae Rappaport.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jenny Rae Rappaport is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing workshop, and holds a BA in Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon University. In the past, she has worked as a literary agent, a marine sciences field guide, and spent a semester observing monkeys as an intern with the Pittsburgh Zoo. She enjoys baking and photography, among other hobbies. Jenny lives in New Jersey with her family, where she divides her time between writing and herding small children. She can be found online at www.jennyrae.com and on Twitter as @jennyrae.

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

A Bird, a Song, a Revolution

Brooke Bolander | 5224 words

Before the flute is a flute, it is a bird. This is the first act of magic. This is the first lesson the girl learns, when the world is still young and shaggy-coated with lingering winter. Sometimes things can be other things. An axehead hides in a chunk of flint. Before it is a meal, a mammoth is a squealing calf tagging along behind its mother. A fox is a white spirit barking curses until an arrow finds it and turns it into a friend that shields your ears from the wind’s teeth.

And before it is a flute, a bird is a song lodged in a treetop.

The girl listens to the song. Every day she listens, and it makes her feel things she can’t describe, like when the boar-dancers charge and prance and the fire flickers so they almost look real. She wants to share that feeling, but she’s no boar-dancer. She wants to take that feeling and hoard it deep down where the frost never thaws, beneath the roots and sod.

“Come play with us!” the other children tease. Warmer weather shuffles in, longshadow days when the sun lingers at the edge of the world like a wandering storyteller at the end of a feast. There are blue flowers in the grass like stars, a mosquito buzzing in every ear. “Come and pick hazelnuts! Come and hunt lark eggs! Come play Bear-And-Elk!”

But the girl sits beneath the tree, listening, head cocked to cup the notes in her left ear.

She turns a bundle of sticks and twigs and sinew from the midden pile into a cage. She watches the fisherwomen at their weaving, twisting reeds and tying knots with their flashing hands until a tangled nest of net nestles at their feet. Her twists are not so smooth and her knots fray and fuzz and the spaces between her links would barely keep a minnow from slithering through, but all she needs is all she needs, and it only needs to work once. She strips the grasses of their seeds and collects them in a little pouch until it bulges like a he-lemming’s sack. The other children have dismissed her as a lost cause; the adults are beginning to furrow and frown.

The weather turns. The songs in the tree grow hungry. She scatters a little of the seed every day, until they flitter and flutter and settle at her feet—not trusting, exactly, but side-eye greedy enough to risk a girl’s presence. Their bellies are round and splattered with speckles like mud on a hunter’s calves. That something so plain could sing so sweetly is also a marvelous magic. Nearness turns them into something familiar enough to seem attainable. It gives her the courage to at last one day throw her net.

She keeps the bird in its cage near the head of her sleeping place at night, and feeds it a little of the grass seeds every day. At night the music wraps around her dreams, twisting them into songs as well. The adults indulge her strangeness and hang an amusing name around her neck: Whistlecage, the girl who spent an entire season’s worth of warmth capturing a thing anyone could hear in the trees with no trouble at all.

But the sound is sweet, that they have to admit. When blizzards howl and stomp outside their shelters like the great sloths in rut, the bird’s song burbles unthawed, a reminder of green grass and yellow fat and longshadow days past and still to come.

• • • •

Before the future child in her future city is a revolution, she is a dirty-faced mudlark picking through the sticky treasures of low tide. The shores are white with the bones of all the people she’s seen die—her mother and her father, her siblings, and so very many of her friends. The river’s edge is a wide-open dare. She comes back to it time and time again, too hungry and desperate not to take the wager. You can find useful things in the stained sagging crumple of buildings that line the shores. Linger too long and you’ll be drowned or picked off by drones. Dig deep, and sometimes you’ll be fed for a week by what you scrounge up.

There’s a half-submerged temple tilted half-in, half-out of the black water, algae crawling up its columns. Every evening bats spill from its cracked dome like midges rising from the river’s surface. The girl is intrigued by what may be inside, although most of her curiosity is because she’s so hungry she’s been eating half-rotted fish scavenged from the mud. She watches and waits for a time when the waterline is low enough to reveal the slimy marble of the great staircase, crouched nearby in the undergrowth like a forgotten, stave-ribbed gargoyle.

• • • •

Before the flute is a flute, it is a stag’s death. It drops into the world like all deer, slippery and wobbling but soon swift-footed. It drinks mother’s milk, cuts the turf with its hooves, and grows into a great antlered thing that whistles and sings as sweetly as any bird in the trees. It meets hunters in the tall grass, and they work the magic that hunters work and turn it into meat and skin and handles for the people’s knives. Bones, too. Marrow fills the hollow places, so rich and good they save it for special occasions and special persons, like the wrinkled witch who wanders up out of the marshes one day, slimy to her gnarled knees.

Whistlecage has never seen her before, but others have. She is a gatekeeper, they say. She knows paths through the wet places that lead into other worlds. Many objects dangle at her belt. Bird feathers and seedpods. Polished oyster shells that turn the light, tiny pointed skulls with yellow incisors and empty eyes. A great flat oval of rock that roars like a bull mammoth when she spins it over her head on its rawhide tether, causing the children to cry out and flee. She laughs at them and her white teeth flash. How does she still have all her teeth, and how are they so startlingly bone-white? No one has ever seen a mouth like that.

They feast her and they house her and in return she tells them stories. She sees all things at once, she says. The days that have come and died, and the days yet to be born. Settlements where people swarm like termites in mounds that scrape the sky. Fevers and fires, all the lives in all the graves scattered across the yellow-grassed world and all the lives that will not end until the glaciers give up their dead. Her stories scare them. They shiver at the immensity of the things they were born too early for and will die too soon to see, edging closer to hear more.

The others point out Whistlecage to the witch and laugh. She does not join in. She watches the girl with eyes like bright burning drops of tar. Children should run and roll and fight like lion cubs, the elders say, not sit in front of a cage alone listening to stolen songs. If she keeps this up we’ll have to smash the thing, cage and bird together.

The witch simply watches. She is patient. Long life makes one patient. She sets a snare with her gaze and soon enough the girl stumbles into it. Passing by with her cage and her bird, near enough that the witch can tighten the noose and draw her in with one crooked finger.

“Girl,” she growls, rasp-tongued as any old tigress. “What have you got in that cage, girl?”

Whistlecage stops dead in her tracks, startled. She’s used to teasing. Being teased by a witch, though—that seems a more dangerous business. She tries to make herself small. She thinks shrew-thoughts.

“A bird,” she mutters, staring at her feet. “A singing bird.”

“A singing bird.” The witch’s voice holds no mockery, but she’s a witch; perhaps that’s part of her magic. “And why, shaggy-skull, do you carry a singing bird about in a cage with you when there’s one of her kin singing in every tree?”

She shrugs. That’s easy enough to answer, at least. “Because of the way it makes me feel,” she says.

“I see.” The witch seems satisfied. She says nothing else, letting the fire’s crackle and the bird’s warble fill the gap between them. Whistlecage is about to take her leave and be glad of it when the old mother speaks once more.

“Would you like to hear my bird?”

Now the witch is mocking her, Whistlecage thinks. It’s almost a relief. But when she looks up at her, prepared to take her lumps as best she can, the witch is fumbling with one of the bits hanging at her belt. A smooth, hollow spar of bird bone, bored through with holes. She catches Whistlecage’s eye and holds it fast as she raises the thing to her lined lips. Her fingers dance spider steps down its length.

And the bone sings to the bird.

It starts as an imitation at first, good enough that the bird whistles back. But it doesn’t stop there. It takes the bird’s song and expands it like an unfurling pelt, twisting all sorts of new sounds and flourishes and ups and downs into the tune. The girl has never heard anything like it. There are drummers among her people, and those who sing stories on special days, but this is different. This is a sound that fills the contours of her insides like it was carved from ivory for the purpose, something she has never known she needed. It is an instant connection between her heart and the old woman’s. Just like that they are the same, because of the song.

The feeling wells up in her and spills out of his eyes.

“There are more singers and whistlers in the world than you’ll ever be able to meet, child,” the witch says, “and each one carries as many songs within them as stars in the sky. You’ll never be able to hear them all, and when you grow woman-sized you’ll lie awake at night haunted by that. All you can do is learn how to sing your own and hope that someone somewhere remembers.”

“But I want to hear them all!” It bursts from her before she can stop it. She cringes back, thinking of all the things she could be turned into. The witch just shakes her head and smiles, sadness gathering in her papery dimples.

“I’ve got long sight. Sight like a sea. It covers everything from beginning to end, bad and good, all the ways the waves might shape themselves, and I still can’t hear all the songs that will ever be.” The witch sighs and lets the strange little instrument fall to her lap, like the effort of holding it up is suddenly too much. “It’s a hard row to hoe—sorry, you haven’t quite gotten to agriculture just yet, have you? It’s a heavy burden to lift, is what I mean to say. I don’t like it any more than you do. But your songs—ahh.” That unsettlingly bright smile flashes again. “Those I can tell you about, seeing as how we’re both here right now.”

“My songs?” Whistlecage is fully snared, the bars of her future already taking shape around her. “But—I don’t—I don’t have one of those things.”

“Easily remedied.” The witch points a gnarled finger at Whistlecage’s bird, hopping from bars to perch and back again. “I think a wingbone will do in this case. Maybe the leg. Hard to get a good length on a creature so small, but I’m sure you’ll manage. The rest—well, the rest is just practice. Practice and patience, and since you caught the thing in the first place I know you’ve got plenty of the latter.”

Whistlecage yanks the cage to her chest protectively. The witch looks at her horrified expression and laughs like pebbles in a skull.

“Oh yes, child,” she rasps. “When immortality is on the line there’s always a sacrifice. Change doesn’t come for free, you know. It’s up to you, of course, and you’re young yet, but tell me, truly: Would you like to live forever? Even if you can’t hear all the songs, even if all of you doesn’t quite make the transition, is the life of a caged bird worth some small part of you surviving?”

Behind the sheltering night of Whistlecage’s arms, the bird flutters and flutes an alarm. The girl stares down at the tiny scrap of song for a long time before slowly raising her eyes to meet the witch’s own, guilt already bubbling in her chest.

“Don’t feel so bad,” the witch says, amused. “Most of the trick will be just doing what you love, but I’m afraid there’s no magic worth speaking about that’s not a little bloodthirsty.”

• • • •

Looking over her shoulder, ears pricked for the buzz and ping of hunter-killers, nails scraping and scrabbling long white scratches in the slippery green, the girl clambers and climbs the temple steps, banging her knees to swollen green-and-purple knots. She hums a tune as she scales the crooked stairs, a lullaby about a brave badger sow her mother sang to her before their hovel was bulldozed. It was a very old song, Mama had made sure to impress, older than the cities and the countries and the remote-controlled armies swarming across them. The song was written by Anonymous. Anonymous, she always went on to say, was just another word for the land itself, the mother of them all who would one day wake up and shake off all the barbed wire and free her poor starving children from cruelty and abuse. The girl should never ever forget the songs the land had left her. They were how the Land would recognize Her own.

And so the girl hasn’t. Even with her name fading from memory like painted advertisements on brick and hunger shriveling her stomach, she keeps the melody tucked safely behind her heart. It makes her bold when she wants to hide. It boosts her and gives her a helping hand over and up the last few stairs and on into the clammy-cool mouth of the temple.

There are letters over the great doors she can just about make out: M and SEU and another M. She hopes desperately that they spell “food.”

• • • •

Before the songs are memories, they are calluses on Whistlecage’s fingertips, thick pads building themselves from the friction of sweeping against rough-hewn holes in bone. She plays until the movements of her fingers are as automatic and thoughtless as breathing air or squinting against the sun. At night, while she sleeps, they go cranefly-courting across the sleeping skins pulled over her chest, crafting melodies for the things that live in dreams.

They still call her Whistlecage, but more and more the name is whispered with reverence. Her fingers are bewitched, they say. She makes up songs nobody has ever heard before, songs she plays over and over until they stick in your ears like thorns. She grows in skill and stature. The girls and boys who used to mock her now gather at her tent-flap, dreamy-eyed, hoping for a smile or a word or a long lingering glance. Whistlecage isn’t blind. Her songs become langourous, coy, sinuous as coupled garter snakes. Hands as nimble as hers, she quickly learns, are good for weaving many alliances.

People from a week’s walk across the hills come to hear her play. They carry away her tunes in their heads, on their lips, nestled in the branching forks of their hearts. They sing them to babies in their crèches. They wrap them around words, little lessons of love or caution. When a tiger opens a hunter’s ribcage or sickness steals a child in the night, more and more often it’s Whistlecage’s melodies they sprinkle across the grave mixed with their tears. Some even fashion their own flutes. They play for their families and they play for others who pass through and small skirmishes break out over these new songs and who is allowed to use them. If a man is going to share a map of his heart with the whole wide world, they say, he deserves tribute. And this is not entirely unfair, for many of these men have families with mouths like baby sparrows waiting fractious in their tents.

But not Whistlecage. She takes a wife, and she takes what offerings are given to support that wife and herself and whatever lovers she feels like plucking from the crowd that season, but her joy of joys is watching the shape of her feelings wing across the world, flitting from wrist to wrist. She is a dandelion. She blows into her flute and for the length of a song everyone who hears it is a small girl beneath a tree, the world still young and shaggy-coated with tawny lingering winter around her. Her ghosts scatter from the bone flute’s holes: the color of late afternoon sun through a fallen leaf when she was barely able to toddle, the taste of bear grease on a cold day. The smell of her hunter-father’s wounds going rotten as he died from that same cave bear’s claws, leaving her alone in the world. Most never recognize that they are being possessed by her memories. They never sense that they are being changed, dug into like roots in the rich dark earth. Who could resist working such magic? Why squat over yourself like a dog snarling over a gutpile when you could be so many?

The ones who do understand what has happened are dear to her. They are the people of her personal terrain, her thought’s own beloved kin. They find each other like bats chirping in the night: Here I am, where are you? They swap melodies swaddled in old ghosts, re-shaping each other in a cycle as never-ending and natural as salmon fighting upstream. The witch’s words haunt Whistlecage; she will never meet them all. This is her sorrow of sorrows, keener now than it was even then: Not that part of her may yet die, but that the dying will cut short all those meetings, all those pieces of her heart left unfitted, the unheard songs and stories scattering in every direction like starlings shattering an evening sky.

• • • •

The water inside comes up to her knees, so thick and oily it barely ripples as she wades her way farther in. There’s a long, zigzagging crack of light reflected across its black surface from the broken dome above. The girl follows it, still humming bravery into her bones. The room is bigger than any other she’s ever been in before. The song turns to an echo in its great mossy throat, shaking a few restless bats free from their perches. She instinctively flinches away from their fluttering dives, remembering small deadly shapes, her mother with roses blooming at her throat and across her chest. The fear never quite goes away, even when there’s a roof.

There are little glass cases sticking out of the water like rotted piers, most of them broken, others so scummed and mossed over you can’t quite make out what’s inside. None of them hold food or anything useful. One has little stone figures arranged in rows. Another holds the skull of an animal with teeth like long jutting knives. The girl slowly works her way back into the shadows, checking each container with growing disappointment. The light from the crack fades. Overhead, nestled in the distant curves of the dome, more bats stir and squeak. Soon the water will rise, submerging the lower levels of the room almost completely. She knows she needs to go, but she’s come all this way and wasted all this energy and she can’t bring herself to give up just yet. Just one more. One more glass case and she’ll go back the way she came, slipping down the stairs on her rear to join her friends in their nightly doorway piles for warmth and safety.

• • • •

Before she is a woman in mourning for a lover lost in the hunt, head shaved and arms tattooed and the first fractures appearing at the corners of her eyes, Whistlecage is a sleeping mound of furs next to her wife, a meeting ground where the living and the dead come to parlay. The witch is there with her, as bowed and surf-voiced as she was so many seasons before. She hasn’t changed. Like a moth in amber, time has simply thickened around her.

“Well then, girl,” she says. They stand in the bowl of a meadow long ago swallowed by the rising sea, golden waist-high grass rippling in a memory of wind. “How has your life suited you so far? Are the songs you hear pleasing? Does your name and your renown fill the empty spaces inside you?”

“You know they don’t,” says Whistlecage, sullen. In the dream-meadow she is still a child, but the words and the confidence are all the now-her’s, the one who has lived through so much, the one with tears staining her cheeks and a mounting sense of dread over her missing lover chewing a slow, steady hole through her slumbering heart. “You know what I want. I told you that before, remember? The first time we met.”

“And I told you it was impossible. Move on with what mortal life you have left, little whistler of feelings.” The witch shrugs. Her belt-trinkets move with her, all the oyster shells and polished stones and skulls of sparrow and snake clattering gently in agreement. “Isn’t knowing your songs will last enough?”

Frustration builds in Whistlecage’s chest with a feeling like steam gathering beneath a blocked geyser. Some distant part of her notes the sensation and stores it away for future songmaking. “No,” she says. “No! If I’ll be immortal like you say, why can’t I go on hearing all the other songs? Is there no way to collect them all?”

“Because sacrifice burns up all the soft parts of you, girl. You’ll see.” In the waking world, Whistlecage’s wife stirs in her sleep, knocking some of the dream apart. The smell of wet ashes and fur leaks through the gap. “There’s no shame in being greedy, but sometimes a field has to burn to keep growing.”

• • • •

The final pedestal is cracked wide open, one side of the glass broken out completely. At first it looks like there’s nothing inside but more moss. But at the last moment, just as she’s turning away with wasp-stings of frustration pricking the backs of her eyeballs, something white snags the fading light—something smooth and stick-shaped, like a leg bone or a tusk. Cautious pawing at the mound of moss reveals that it is a bone. Not a familiar one from a person or a dog. It’s very small, like a bird’s wing, surface worn smooth as polished stone. Four holes have been drilled into its length. It fits the shape of her hand almost perfectly as she pulls it free, careful again not to slice her wrist on the jagged edges of glass.

She angles it this way and that—peering through the holes, testing the heft of the strange object in her hand. The water has quietly crept to just above her knees. She glances up at the first bats taking flight, then back down at the bone. It’s better than nothing, she decides. Maybe someone will want it as a curiosity. So long as it nets her a meal, she’s really not bothered about the particulars.

• • • •

Before she is a martyr, a memory, or a song—before the flames, before knives and tears and smoke blotting the sky in blood-red clouds—Whistlecage is an elder of the community, a wrinkled, toothless relic. She is old, older, oldest. They call her Grandmother Whistle, the cage long since splintered by the crash of endless days against its bars. Time is a great worker of magic. It takes a legend and turns her to a landmark. It strips all the things that made her a person—her lusts and desires, her bad days and good days and joys and fears—and sands her down to a gentle, edgeless doll. She is treated with cloying respect. No one is left alive who remembers the bird in the cage.

Her songs have outlasted her. There are many flutes now, all modeled on her memory of a witch’s instrument. The village children play them like twittering birds. Youths court their lovers with tunes she warbled especially for her own. It hurts too much for her to play any more; her knuckles are knotted tight with aching roots. She listens to melodies shaped like her bones, smiling when they bring back dear ones long since gone to rest beneath the grass. Her wife, mouth stained purple with berries, laughing herself red-faced at some forgotten joke. The rapt faces of friends carved into black and orange angles by shadows and firelight. The new musicians take all those parts of her and change them, like a mammoth tusk whittled into a wolf. They wrap their shoulders with her skin and build their own stories beneath the shade of her ribs.

And perhaps this would be enough. But before Whistlecage can fully become a song, there is a sacrifice to be made. Change always demands a sacrifice. Before the flute was a flute, it was a bird.

They come to her village at sunset. There is no warning and no why. Maybe this place was theirs the previous season. Maybe they want the people’s winter stores of hazelnuts and dried meat. Perhaps the smell of the midden pile has offended their noses. There is no chance to ask. Their clubs and their axes and their knives stop questions with a crunch and a burble. They wear the skins of roe deer over their heads and faces, ochre-smeared antlers snagging the sky. Chunks of polished amber fill their empty eye sockets.

The fighters of the village do what they can. The old and the very young are shuffled into a tent together, quiet and still as frightened rabbits. They leave a guard outside. The smell of smoke and sweat and fear is almost overpowering. Children sniffle and sob in the dark, clinging to Whistlecage’s robes. She feels strangely unafraid.

“Shh,” she says. Outside someone shrieks a prayer. There’s a meaty thwack and the invocation abruptly stops. “This will pass. Everything does. Be still, be still. Be patient.”

The tent suddenly shakes and shimmies as if caught in a great wind. The guard comes reeling through with an arrow embedded in his neck. He stumbles, gurgles, and falls facedown, expression already going blank. Behind him, silhouetted in the opened flap, a stag-man stands, amber eyes glowing in the sun’s last rays.

From the day the witch first laid her snare, Whistlecage has known nothing but music. There are peaceful times and there are times of war, and Whistlecage had the fortunate good luck to drop from her mother during a stretch when fish silvered the waters and hazelnuts grew in abundance and no one really felt hungry enough or belligerent enough to go clubbing and spitting their neighbors like lemmings. Brief famines had come and gone, and winters when the people were reduced to boiling leather to survive, but through it all there had always been a need for songs, reminders of warm sun and full bellies, a bird in a cage whose sweet melodies could ward off despair. Like hanging a painted eye around a sickly infant’s neck, it was a charm to send the cold wind shrieking back down whatever malicious throat had coughed it.

Whistlecage does not have a song to drive these beast-men away. Shriveled like a dried current, bent double by the years, she staggers to her feet, knowing exactly how useless and ridiculous the gesture is as she does so. Her knees crunch stones between their jaws. Something seizes in the arch of one foot. Her heart pounds so hard the breath catches in her throat.

“Go,” she says to the children. “Run. Don’t look back and don’t stop until you reach the woods. No crying. Just go.”

The bigger ones herd the littler beneath the tent’s edges and away into the oncoming night. Most of them do as they are told. A few linger, watching, too scared to move or slow to miss seeing what happens next. They are the ones who will carry the story with them as they flee, scattering to other villages as their own burns. They will whistle and flute the song to their own babes, a lullaby about a badger sow and a stag and the power of planting your feet and never letting up. Time will sand it down to a gentle child’s toy, but if one lifts it to their ear and gives the thing a shake, they will hear the bones of truth rattling deep down inside.

Staring up at the stag-fighter, a dead man at her feet, Whistlecage knows the only thing left her song can buy is time. She does not take her eyes off the enemy. Hands thickened by leaf-deep years fumble at her belt for the bone flute. Fire shoots from her knuckles and wrists up the length of her forearms as she goes through the familiar movements, arranging her clumsy fingers just so.

Ahh, what did I tell you? Immortal, girl. The witch’s voice is as clear and close as if she’s speaking directly into Whistlecage’s ear. Take off that worn old skin and become the song you’ve longed to be since you were small and lonely, sitting beneath a treeful of birds.

The stag-man steps forward, a flint knife in his hand. Whistlecage closes her eyes and plays.

• • • •

Why the girl does what she does next will remain a mystery to her all the days of her legendary life, throughout all of the alchemy that will change her from a mudlark to a great leader of people. Maybe it was hunger, she’ll consider absentmindedly as she plays for a curious circle of onlookers, a half-hearted child’s hope that a dried-up old bone might somehow stop her belly from growling. Maybe I just wanted something to eat.

Or perhaps, she’ll sleepily ponder on the morning before the ambush, nestled close to a best beloved who will drown facedown in the mud—perhaps it was something else.

Maybe, she’ll think to herself, fluting the badger sow’s glory-song at the head of a charging, desperate band of ragged survivors, dancing her way between explosions and shells that land howling like the hounds of Hell—maybe it was Anonymous. Maybe the Land sent me this song and the instinct to play it. Maybe I am Her awakening.

But before the girl becomes a woman who becomes a revolution—before any of these other things can happen, for good or ill—she lifts the bone flute to her lips and breathes a single curious note.

©2019 by Brooke Bolander. | Art © 2019 by Galen Dara.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brooke Bolander’s fiction has won the Nebula & Locus Awards and been shortlisted for the Hugo, Shirley Jackson, Sturgeon, World Fantasy, and British Fantasy Awards. Her work has been featured in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Uncanny, Tor.com, and the New York Times, among other venues. She currently resides in New York City.

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

Flight of the Crow Boys

Micah Dean Hicks | 3625 words

People around here never wanted our family. Crow boys, they called us, a flock of five brothers and our father, all of us with long black hair. Flapping our over-sized, garage sale sleeves and falling over the fences the neighbors put between us and them. And maybe too because of the feathers. Our father hung black feathers from the side mirrors of his truck, along the eaves of the house, and he dangled them from the shriveled limbs of our dying fruit trees. All those feathers spinning in the hot wind. They were painted in rows along the wood siding. Our father had tiny feather tattoos between every joint on his hands, three to a finger. Paid us in change from his pockets when we found feathers on the ground and put them in his hands, no matter if they were bent or broken a little or crawling with lice. “We get enough of these, we’ll fly right off,” he said.

We didn’t believe him. He said he hurt his leg fighting in the war and couldn’t work, but we’d seen him dance light on his boot heels when a woman came to see him. He always said that our mother, someone we’d never known, was the only one for him, but he had other women. It didn’t bother us. We understood the kind of liar he was, the kind who wouldn’t hurt anyone. We were the same.

Police knocked on our door always, not for anything really, just because of how we lived. We dragged broken furniture and appliances back to the yard and stacked them on the porch. Anything somebody put on their curb with the trash could end up outside our house, a graveyard of worthless and sun-bleached things, and our father would labor to fix them. “Might be useful,” he’d say. “Might be worth something.” We never made any money off it. Father let the yard go wild and told us it was to keep us healthy. Had us keep a dollar in our shoe so we’d walk to lost money on the ground. Told us to love things hard so that we’d be loved hard back. “The whole universe,” he said, “has sympathy for itself. You learn to play on that. Not like people.” He clenched his fists, hands balling into feathers. “People don’t have sympathy for anything.”

Father trapped animals and kept them. Filling the back of the truck and stacked under the carport, we had raccoons in cages, one-eyed jackrabbits, bobcats worn bald from throwing themselves at the wire, a bunch of armadillos. Of course we had birds. Father raised his hands to the sky and said, “This is how you make magic.” Wild animals full of life surrounded the old truck to keep that metal heart pounding. If a rabbit sneezed or raccoon lay over in its cage, he took it away. “Get gone, broke alternator,” he shouted, and ran the animal back into the woods. All the animals made a good racket, and that brought cops. They told us we weren’t supposed to even keep them, that wild animals weren’t pets. Our father shook his head, hair swinging. “Not pets,” he said. “I ain’t pet them once.”

The landlord hated us most. Came over wearing his big boots and hanging gut, squinting in the sunlight. He told us, “Y’all’s the worst tenants I got. Bring down the whole place.”

“I always pay my rent,” our father said. Tall and quiet, our lanky father in worn-out denim.

The landlord spat at his feet, right there on the ground we paid him for. “You always pay it late.”

“You can’t put people out in this weather.” Our father under an open sky, sly and terrifying. He knew things no one else could.

The landlord looked up, the air hot and heavy and Texas dry. “It ain’t rained in a month,” he said.

“There’s a storm coming, sure.” Father looked up to the clear blue like he could see it.

We ran around the house, knocking into each other and tripping over furniture, getting all tangled up until we couldn’t tell our brothers from ourselves. “What are we going to do, Father?” we asked him. We started picking up boxes full of trash—this one stacked with newspaper, this one with rain-rusted screws and bolts, another one full of feathers. “We’ll clean it right up,” we squawked. “We’ll make it right, and he won’t put us out.”

Father swore and smacked our hands. “Sit right down. I’ve got a refrigerator full of scrap metal and gravel buried in the back yard. All that weight. He can’t make us budge.” He fried us up something for dinner, made us shower in twos except for the oldest to save hot water, slicked down our dark heads with his hand and put us in bed. Like every night, we asked him why we didn’t have a mother. Like every night, he said the same damn things.

“She was beautiful,” he said. “But her parents didn’t like me much.”

“Where is she?” we asked. “Is she dead?”

“I saved her.” Father put his hands around the lamp bulb and shadows writhed over the walls. “There was a black storm rolling in, ready to carry me away. She was always the one for me. So I tied my last feather around her wrist. The storm hit, and we flew right through the air. We were like birds. We rode the storm to a new land where people weren’t so hateful. Or maybe all the people looked like me and were magicians. Or maybe there weren’t no people at all. Anyway, that part ain’t important.”

“What happened to her after?”

“We lived,” he paused here to kiss our foreheads and stuff the blanket under our necks, “so happy for the rest of our lives.”

• • • •

Getting ready for school, we pulled out an old shoebox and looked at the tiny shirts again, like every morning. There were five in the box, and we used to think they were baby clothes. But we could wear them on our hands, could stick our fingers out of the sleeves and neck. No baby was that small. And the insides of the shirts were studded with soft, black feathers, small as our pinky nails. We heard father coughing and kicking through the house, and we hid the shirts away.

On the bus to school, the other kids put their feet up and wouldn’t let us sit. The five of us crammed ourselves into two seats near the front. People said we had lice, but most days we didn’t believe it. An older boy stood with his head by the open window. He screwed up his mouth and spit part of his breakfast across the neck of our smallest brother, something brown and dirty and thick as bird shit. We were too busy laughing about the little shirts to notice, or that’s how we lied to ourselves. We grinned. It was ridiculous. Of course we’d never been crows. We had always been brothers.

At the stop after ours, five sisters lived. They were older than us, but poor like we were, and that made us the same. They had holes in their stockings, all their clothes were bleached as pale as the white-blond hair that fell down their backs. They squeezed our shoulders with their sticky fingers, sat on and between and around us, made our circle their circle, split us up and made us bigger. Their milky breath in our faces, their roving green eyes, their scuffed knees and elbows, the way they listened to us like we were worth something. They made us believe everything our father had said about magic.

Not crows, but we were something. We decided that we must be lost magicians, strange and powerful like our father. Waiting for the lightning to wake up in us and a storm to take us home. Waiting for people to see that we weren’t the nothing they thought we were.

We asked the sisters what they thought. They’d already decided they were witches, brewing truth cut with loneliness in their kitchen sink. We nodded, sold on it. We would never be the ones to tell them what they couldn’t be.

When the bus stopped at our house that afternoon, through the window we saw a pink paper flapping on our door. All the kids on the bus were whispering about it and staring at us. We heard the words, “Eviction notice.” When we fought our way out of our seats and scrambled to the front, they stood and cheered behind us. They whooped and clapped and told us to go. They said to take our lice with us. They said that their fathers worked hard while our father did nothing, that we were scavengers, crows eating their scraps. The bus driver stared at us in his mirror but did nothing, letting us know that he felt the same.

Our father was cracking trays of ice cubes onto the yellow dirt around the house, wiping his brow and exaggerating his limp. “Have to do something about this heat,” he said. We read the eviction notice. It seemed clear enough. We had a month. We filed in, loose sleeves hanging toward the ground.

Father came inside, knocked a foot-high stack of junk mail off his armchair, sank down heavy on the old springs. “We’re flying out of here,” he told us.

We nodded. Finding a stack of old liquor boxes and opening them up, we started to pack.

“What are you doing?” Father asked.

“We have to move.”

“No, no, no.” Father took the boxes out of our hands, threw them out the door and into the hot yard. “Not that way.” He got a cigar box of old feathers and a spool of kite string. He had us help him tie feathers to every individual thing: coffee mug handles, key rings, door knobs, shoes, chairs. Even the silverware, a feather tied to every spoon. “When the storm comes to take us away, everything has to fly. Tie a feather to what you want to save.”

We didn’t believe him, but we loved him. So we did what he wanted. Some of the feathers were broken, and we held them up.

He smiled. “Use those for things that aren’t so important.”

We found five perfect feathers, big and satiny black, the edges like blades. He closed our hands around them, one for each of us. “Use those for what you want to keep most.”

It was an easy choice. That afternoon we ran over to the sisters’ house, each of us holding up his one perfect feather. We’d balled the others into our pockets, and they shed in the wind and floated off as we ran. “A new game,” we told the sisters. “Wear a black feather in your white hair and live happily ever after.”

The sisters laughed. “Not our hair,” they said. “Not those dirty feathers.”

“You have to,” we told them. “This is the only way to be safe from the storm that’s coming.” We lied a little, but only because we loved them so much. We’d trust in any magic that would let us save them.

“If you’re sure this will protect us,” they said, putting the feathers in their hair. We told them that their lives depended on it. We took more feathers out of our pockets and showed the sisters how to tie them to anything they wanted to take when the storm carried them off. “Where will the storm take us?” they asked, and we told them about the most amazing places. Castles made of star and cloud, places with snow in the winter and fields of thick grass in the summer, with fruit trees that were heavy with peaches, and somewhere a dark and smiling woman who was our mother, just as our father had said. We ran circles through the yard, chasing sisters and stabbing feathers into the ground, and for a little while, we even believed our lie.

We left the eviction notice on the door and had a month of feather play. We ran through the town with the sisters and put the feathers everywhere. At the bank, where sprinklers fought to keep the lawn green, we sent handfuls of feathers shooting up the tubes. They spiraled around inside like tornadoes of oil smoke. We went into the neighbor’s yard at night, the one with the yellow sports car, and put a single feather in his gas tank. We left them rocking like ships on the water at the wishing fountain in the mall. At the comic shop, we slipped big ones into comic books and small ones into decks of cards. There was a thin creek we loved, a place where we played with the sisters, damming it up with stones and digging it out deeper, catching crawdads and baby jackfish. We studded the hard clay bottom of the creek with feathers, their points sticking up like weeds, the slow current waving their tips. If we were going somewhere, we wanted to take this with us. That month, playing with the sisters and working our father’s sympathetic magic, we looked up at the stars at night and found it easy to believe that the universe might care about us.

Coming and going from the house, we saw our father laboring over a pile of quilts in the kitchen, fabric shears and heavy needle and thread on the table, heaps of feathers scattered around and settled deep onto the floor. His fingers fluttered up and down, the feather tattoos on them swirling in and out of each other. “It’s going to be a big storm when it comes,” he told us. We’d been putting feathers on everything we owned for weeks. Father had been covering the old house in feathers since the day we’d moved in, but it wasn’t ours. We understood him wanting to believe that it was. Sometimes belief was the only thing that was yours.

• • • •

Tomorrow was the day we would have to leave. Cop cars had been creeping by the house all week. An officer stopped, parked his car behind father’s truck, and got out. He came onto the porch and looked in through the open doorway, fingering the little feathers hanging off our belongings like yard sale price tags. Light slid metallic off his sunglasses. “How’s the packing coming?” he asked. “Won’t be any trouble come time to move, will it?”

“Won’t be any trouble at all,” Father said. “It’s all ready to go.” We weren’t sure what our father believed or what he might do, why he wouldn’t let us fill boxes. We loved him. But we were also afraid of him.

On his way out, the cop stopped at the cages where animals growled and cawed at each other. “What about all this? You just setting them loose?”

“I’m bringing every one,” said our father.

That night, he tucked us into our old bed for the last time. It was too much finally, and we cried. We begged to pack, but he made us lie in the bed. We thought of all the things we had marked with feathers—the car, the bank, the fountain, the creek, and the five sisters. We would go some new place and lose everything that we loved.

“Where will we go?” we asked him. “Will we be with our mother?” We meant dead, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to say it. Because on the same day that we’d been spit on and found found out we were being evicted, that we realized we were nothing and everyone knew it, we had decided that our mother must be dead.

“The storm coming tomorrow will be big,” father said. “Five times bigger than the one that picked up me and your mother years ago. But it’s nothing to be afraid of. It took us to a new land.”

“Everyone here hates us,” we cried.

“Me and your mother were brought to a place where we had everything. A beautiful house, green hills, a river crashing down a mountain, and cool wind at night. We lived our whole lives there, happy.”

We buried our faces in the covers and spoke through them. “Father,” we said, “we don’t have anything beautiful. This is the desert. Our mother is dead. We have never been happy here.”

When we stuck our noses like beaks over the edge of the blanket, he was gone, back in the kitchen stitching and cutting. We held each other, talked about the very worst thing that could happen, and we waited for it.

• • • •

Before the sun was up, the landlord was there, beating on the door and shouting. We could hear him kicking things off the porch with his boots and swearing at us. Police car lights flashed through our window. Our father waited in the cramped living room with a coat for each of us. “Put it on before you walk out.” He’d taken quilts and sewn them into loose jackets, but they were studded on both sides with overlapping black feathers. Down feathers underneath and stiff ones for catching wind on top. The coats shimmered blackly. We put them on, tight under our armpits and hugging our sides, and we felt like crow boys for sure.

He opened the door and gestured for us to walk out. We hopped blinking into the sun, and the cops made way for us. The landlord said that social services should take us away. Then our father stepped through the door. He had taken off all his clothes, and we saw that he was covered in feather tattoos. He had them inked down his arms and legs. Fans of them turned his shoulder blades into black wings. They threaded in and out of each other on his spine. The wind started up blowing hard, and his hair drifted in it, long and dark like a ribbon of smoke. We bounced on our toes and waved our arms to let the breeze flow under and around us.

The cops, trussed up tight in their blue uniforms, grinned at our father. “You’re not taking anything, huh?” one of them asked. “Not one stitch.”

Our father smiled. “No,” he said. “I’m taking it all.”

The wind blew harder and harder, picking up loose sand and throwing it against the line of cars. It was easy then to lift our arms, to hop on our delicate feet, and let it carry us up. We looked at each other, beaked and winged, our legs little more than sticks of bone and claw. We laughed in our harsh voices, rising up on the wind and circling one another. It was ridiculous. Of course we’d never been brothers. We had always been crows.

Below us, we saw that our father had risen too, but clumsily, his body thrown around by the wind. He curled into a feather-covered ball of skin, protecting his head with his hands. We spread out and let the air twist beneath us. Below, hundreds of tiny feathers waved, some breaking free and getting sucked up into the storm that was gathering around us. We were each the eye of a tornado, wind and sand and black feathers coalescing into something that could shake the earth.

From the air, the landlord and the police were only mites, jumping into their cars and fleeing, driving blind through wind and sand, running off the road in their hurry. We rose higher and higher, and the earth lifted beneath us. The first thing pulled up was the house. The roof split apart and was sucked up in pieces, then all the things inside went, and finally the boards below broke loose like piano keys and swirled around us. The animals rose in their cages, an inhuman cacophony, and we screamed too in our throaty way. We raked our five funnels across the neighbor’s yard and picked up his yellow car. It collided through the wreckage of the house, battering itself to pieces in the air, until the windshield powdered and the doors knocked in.

We drifted. The creek blasted apart under us, and the air turned bloody with clay and water; our tornadoes became cyclones of red dirt and black feathers. The bodies of fish tumbled, arced like silvery boomerangs on the air. We drifted into town and found the bank. Peeled it apart brick by brick, and then gathered up everything inside, a shower of pens and paper. The vault lay exposed beneath us, a heart too heavy to lift.

We moved farther and faster, headed for the wide horizon. Our father shouted through the wind, “Take me to fruit trees and green grass! Take me to the girl I’ve always loved!” He had told us that he saved the woman he loved, the one who should have been our mother. Maybe he’d tried. That’s what he wanted to have happened, anyway. But our father couldn’t save anyone.

We came to the home of the sisters. They pressed their pale faces to the windows and held their perfect black feathers. In an instant, their lights went out and we could see them no more. Their small house was pulled up whole into the storm, rolling between the five of us, a hail of debris strafing it from every side. We screamed our chorus, booming caws that echoed up from the mouths of five tornadoes, answered by thunder and lightning. Our father spun through the air and moaned, carried along as helpless as the rest of us. He was a liar. We were the same.

©2014 by Micah Dean Hicks. Originally published in Witness. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Micah Dean Hicks is a Calvino Prize-winning author whose writing has appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The New York Times, Lightspeed, and Kenyon Review, among others. His story collection Electricity and Other Dreams is available from New American Press. Hicks teaches creative writing at the University of Central Florida. His new novel Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones is available from John Joseph Adams Books.

All In

Rajan Khanna | 9976 words

Quentin Ketterly could tell that the cards weren’t special when the fortune teller held out the deck to him. Real Cards, like those he carried in the case around his neck, didn’t show wear like Madame Serena’s did. And when he touched the deck, as she instructed him to, they were warm with the midday heat of the tent, not cold to the touch like the Cards always seemed to be. He didn’t know why—neither he nor Hiram knew much about the Cards at all, save for how to use them some.

He shook his head as Madame Serena lay down the cards, nine of them, in three rows of three.

“Why nine?” Hiram asked from his seat beside Quentin.

“Left to right—beginning, middle and end. Top to bottom—past, present, and future. Nine cards tell the story of a life.”

Quentin shook his head again. He considered walking out, but he’d paid for the telling and didn’t want to be rude. She laid out his past: the Five of Diamonds, Ace of Spades, and Jack of Clubs. She waved her hand over the cards. “A seed, from a strong tree, swallowed by a carrion bird as the tree falls. It survives fire and storms, to take root in a new forest, with another sapling at its side.”

It was a fair summation of his past, Quentin thought. His happy family fractured by his father’s death at his uncle’s hands, his revenge on his uncle, and his mentoring of the young man at his side. But the first part could apply to many people, and the last part could be inferred since he and Hiram had arrived together.

Madam Serena flipped over three more cards, laying them below the first three: a Joker, Four of Hearts, Two of Clubs. “A ship on a grand voyage, seeking to map the unmapped, but the wind has dropped from your sails.”

Again, it could be seen as true. Their search, months spent tracking down names from another Card Sharp’s book, had been fruitless. When they did find someone who knew one of the names, the person had always moved on, or died. Madame Serena, near the last location they had looked, was their last lead.

“Now your future.” She put down the last three cards in the bottom row: Jack of Diamonds, Eight of Spades, Nine of Spades. She looked up furtively at Quentin, then Hiram, then back down at the cards. “The arrow you loosed will come back to strike you. The tree you helped nurture will bear poisoned fruit.”

Quentin frowned. He wasn’t sure what it meant, but it didn’t sound good.

“Of course these things can be changed,” Madame Serena said. “The future is a galloping stallion, but it can be steered.”

Quentin was taking this all in when a man entered the tent, disheveled and stinking of liquor. He held a revolver, pointed at Madame Serena. Quentin’s hand went to his Cards.

“What do you want?” Serena asked, her eyes wide, hands shaking.

“It’s all your fault,” the man said, spitting, his voice thick. “You said she would leave. And she did. She left me.”

“I’m just the reader of the cards,” Serena said. “I don’t make the future happen.”

“You shut your mouth!” He waved the gun at her.

Quentin exchanged a glance with Hiram, then stood up, his hands up, palms facing the man. “Hold up there, friend,” he said. “No need to go waving your pistol around. We can talk this out like gentlemen.”

The gunman swiveled to Quentin, the revolver moving with him. “You shut the fuck up and sit down. This is between me and the witch.”

Quentin had memorized the value, suit, and position of each of the Cards in his Deck and already he was mentally flipping through them to find a Play.

First Card, an Ace—too valuable and too powerful for this kind of situation.

“Well,” Quentin said, “you interrupted my fortune, which I paid for, and I’m not inclined to yield my time.”

The second card, the Ten of Diamonds, also not right unless he wanted to fill the man’s pocket with coins.

The intruder looked Quentin up and down, glanced over at Hiram, then back to Quentin. “You got a big mouth for someone who doesn’t go heeled.”

The third Card, the Six of Hearts. Perfect. Control over the body, and probably strong enough to work. He could stop the man’s breath, render him unconscious. But still, a Card. One of an ever-dwindling number.

“Don’t need to go heeled to deal with the likes of you,” Quentin said.

The man was swaying, unsteady. Quentin was beginning to think he might not need a Card at all. If he could find a way to distract the man, he could grab for the gun and knock the man down. He looked to Hiram to signal for a distraction and caught sight of a flash of light coming from just below the table.

Hiram had made the Play already.

Quentin heard a rushing sound and then the gunman’s head jerked back, as if struck by an invisible hand, and he wavered on his feet before collapsing back out of the tent.

Quentin moved forward, grabbing for the man’s revolver and checking to make sure he was unconscious and still alive. Hiram must have used a Spade, forming some kind of blunt attack with air. It hadn’t been visible, but what would Madame Serena think?

“He’s had a lot to drink,” Quentin said quickly. “It must have caught up with him.” Then, noting the bloody nose and lip the man sported, he added, “He must have hit his face when he fell.” He looked up anxiously at Madame Serena’s face but she seemed to have bought the explanation.

He sent Hiram to fetch one of the Bitter Springs deputies while he stewed in his own disappointment. Not only had the fortune telling been a waste of time, but Hiram had been forced to use a Card. Quentin couldn’t contain a feeling of relief that it hadn’t been one of his.

After the deputy had done his job, escorting the still-groggy man to the local jail, Madame Serena thanked Quentin for standing up to the attacker.

Quentin said nothing, and exited the tent, not waiting for Hiram to join him.

• • • •

Quentin stormed into the Sixth Bullet Saloon and straight to the bar. He tossed a coin onto the worn surface. “Whiskey. A bottle,” he said to the woman behind it.

“That bad?” She placed the bottle down in front of him along with a glass.

Quentin thumbed off the corked top, poured himself a full glass, drained it, and placed it back on the bar. Only then did he face the woman. “Yes,” he said. “That bad.”

She poured herself a full glass, from the same bottle, and raised it to Quentin. “Well, then, here’s to better days,” she said, before draining the whole thing.

Quentin smiled at her brashness. He had met her on his arrival, the daughter of the saloon owner. She practically ran it, he remembered, though he couldn’t recall her name. She was attractive in a rather rough-edged sort of way.

He filled his glass again, then hers. “We should toast it proper.” He lifted the glass. She lifted hers in response. “To better days,” he repeated. Then he swallowed the whiskey in one gulp.

“You want to talk about it?” she asked.

Quentin wiped his lip with the back of his thumb. How to explain to her? Well, miss, my friend and I have been combing the West, using this notebook of names we found, trying to find other Card Sharps like us. See, we have these special Cards, with powers, but we don’t really know how they work. And we heard tell of this reader of cards near one of the locations in our notebook and we assumed, after coming up empty, that this might be our last shot. But she was just what she appeared to be—a fortune teller.

Instead he smiled, humorlessly, at her and said, “No.”

“Well, then. There’s always drink.”

“Amen to that,” Quentin said, filling his glass again.

“Where’s your friend?” the woman asked.

Hiram. Quentin had sent him to deal with the horses, needing a moment alone. How many months had they spent together, searching? How much time wasted in that pursuit? He had only agreed to teach Hiram about the Cards as a thank you to the boy’s father, and he had done so. He’d always planned on doing good with the Cards. That was what they were supposed to be for. He’d had his revenge on his uncle; he needed to balance the scales.

Most of the Cards he had left now were Hearts, which seemed fitting. He’d imagined walking into a hospital and pulling free a Seven of Hearts, saving seven lives in a quick flash, letting the power of the Card knit together flesh and bone. He’d pictured using a Diamond to locate gold, using the proceeds to help fund schools and social causes. And yet, it was always in the future, ever tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

The arrow you loosed will come back to strike you. The tree you helped nurture will bear poisoned fruit.

The words haunted him. He knew they were probably nonsense, but his mind had immediately run to Hiram. Who else had he nurtured, set on a path?

As if summoned, Hiram appeared, still dusty from the trail. Without asking, he reached for the bottle and took a swig from its neck. Then, catching sight of the woman behind the bar, Quentin hastily put down the bottle, doffed his hat, and said, “Hullo, Miss Ives.”

That was it, Quentin thought. Her name was Rachel Ives. She’d introduced herself when they first came in.

Rachel set another glass in front of Hiram and he filled it. One hand curled tightly around the brim of his hat as he looked at Quentin. “I thought . . .”

“Yeah,” Quentin said.

“That was the last.”

“Yeah.”

“What do we—”

“I don’t know,” Quentin said, perhaps louder than he’d intended. He swiveled on his stool to face Hiram. “I’m tired,” he said. “Tired of traveling, tired of making decisions, tired of . . . just tired.” He’d almost said “tired of you” but stopped himself before it came out. Quentin sighed. “We’ve been looking for a mouse in a haystack, but only finding its turds.”

“But the turds mean it’s there,” Hiram said.

“No,” Quentin said. “They only mean it once was.”

“Depends on how fresh the—”

“Hiram,” Quentin said. “Please. Just . . . go amuse yourself somewhere. I’d like some peace and quiet.”

For a moment, a hurt expression washed over Hiram’s face, but he quickly covered it. “Sure thing,” he said. “I’ll see you later.” He tipped his hat to Rachel. “Miss Ives.”

“He your kin?” Rachel asked after Hiram left. “Brother?”

Quentin shook his head. “Nothing that close.” He poured himself another glass. “I knew his father.”

“Ah,” Rachel said, nodding.

“His pa, he . . . he helped me out. When I needed it.” The words seemed poor—the old man had given him his Cards. They now seemed part of him. At least for as long as they lasted.

“The old man was sick,” Quentin said. “So he asked me to look after Hiram.” Asked me to give him his Cards, teach him how to use them.

“Makes sense,” Rachel said.

“I thought it did,” Quentin said. “It did for a time. But now?”

“You thinking about cutting him loose?”

Quentin looked at his empty glass. “The cord that binds us is already so frayed. I might not need to cut.”

Rachel poured herself another glass. “In my experience, you always need to cut.”

• • • •

Quentin and Rachel drank half of the bottle, a development that he’d hoped would put him at ease, but which in fact only made him more ornery. So much time wasted. So many Cards spent, never to return. “What are you doing, Quentin?” he asked himself as he stumbled outside for a smoke.

His first match splintered and fell to the dirt. The second flared and then instantly blew out from the wind. Always the spark, never the fire. He imagined pulling one of his Cards out from the case he kept around his neck, against his chest. He could pull out one of his remaining Clubs, even one of the lower value ones, feel it flare away to nothing in his hand, like the match. Only it would create a conflagration. He could set whole buildings on fire with that power. The Six of Clubs could ignite six buildings up the main thoroughfare.

But he didn’t draw the Card. And the time for fire, and blood, was over now. He moved over where the wind wasn’t so fierce and lit his cigarette.

A man sitting cross-legged on the ground nearby looked up at him. “You look like you’ve seen better days.”

“Excuse me?” Quentin asked. The man’s hair was wild, his clothes dirty, his skin no better.

“Begging your pardon,” the man said, tipping a battered hat. “You just look like you lost your last friend.”

There’s that word again, Quentin thought. Friend. “What business is it of yours?”

“None, I’ll give you that,” the older man said. “Just making polite conversation.”

Quentin looked away from the man.

“Just that you have that look.”

Quentin turned back to the man. “What look?”

The man shrugged. “Like everything’s slipped away from you.” He cackled. “Look at me. I know that look well.”

Quentin shook his head. “I’ve got plenty,” he said. Then he walked away.

Quentin wandered in from his smoke and, thinking better of his desire to return to the bar, headed up to the room he shared with Hiram. He walked in expecting to find Hiram there, but the bed and room were empty. Quentin shrugged, glad for the peace, and climbed into bed, staring up at the ceiling and thinking about what he would do next. He tried to let sleep take him but his thoughts wriggled round his head like greased snakes.

Their quest had come to an end. They’d get no more learning about the Cards. All that remained were Quentin’s plans to use them. And what of Hiram? Quentin could enlist him or discharge him. Frankly, the latter seemed like it might be better for both of them. Hiram was impulsive. Reckless. He no longer had the patience.

He also couldn’t escape the unease he’d felt since their time in Stillwell. He’d been taught that the Cards were limited. That you started with fifty-four, and each Play depleted one, never to return. Only in Stillwell they had heard that it was possible, or at least some thought it was, to steal another’s Cards. Only it required killing the original owner.

It was a distasteful thought, but in quiet moments he thought of the sense of loss every time he used a Card, the looming pull of the inevitable. He could almost see the temptation.

His case contained six Decks they had discovered in Stillwell, decks that the Card Sharp there had taken off of other dead Sharps. Both he and Hiram had tried to use them, but they refused to work. There was clearly more to the process that they didn’t know, assuming it was even possible. It was clear now that they would never know.

Quentin eventually succumbed to sleep, though its grip was weak, and he kept slipping from it. When he woke, he felt raw. He rolled over to see Hiram’s bed still untouched. Where was that blasted kid?

He washed and dressed and went to get some food in the hotel’s dining room and that’s where he saw Hiram sitting in a chair, one shirt tail loose, his hair mussed. Sitting next to him, her hand in his, was a blonde girl, rosy-cheeked and smiling.

Hiram stood as Quentin approached, his companion rising with him. “Quentin!” Hiram smiled. “I want you to meet Betty Legrand.”

Betty offered her hand and Quentin took it.

“We met last night,” Hiram said. He leaned in conspiratorially and said, “We’re in love.”

Quentin only just stopped from rolling his eyes. “You didn’t come up to the room to sleep.”

“Well . . .” Hiram hung his head and blushed. “We were talking.”

“All night?”

Hiram got the indignant look he got when he asserted that he didn’t cheat at cards. “Yes. Nothing else.”

“And what would your parents think of that?” Quentin asked Betty.

Then it was her turn to flush. “My father trusts me, Mr. Ketterly. I have no fears on that account.”

Quentin almost shook his head, but kept it steady.

“I thought,” Hiram said, hesitantly. “I know we have no reason to stay in town. Not after yesterday. But . . . I thought that maybe we could at least spend a few days here. Figure out our next move, so to speak.”

Quentin ran a hand across the bristle of his jaw. “Can I talk to you, Hiram?” he asked. “In private.”

Hiram nodded and rose, walking off to one corner of the room. Quentin walked with him. “We have no more business here. This Betty seems like a nice girl, but it’s time for us to move on.”

“Move on where?” Hiram said.

“I don’t know,” Quentin said. “Back east? We still have our Cards. We should be using them. Helping people.”

“I fully intend to,” Hiram said. “I do. But this . . . this is special. I never met anyone like Betty. What’s the hurry, anyway?”

“I have things I want to do,” Quentin said. “You expect me to wait for you? Cool my heels in the bar while you carry on with a girl you just met?”

“Why are you getting so bent out of shape?” Hiram asked.

“Because you only think about yourself,” Quentin said. “I’ve spent the better part of the last year helping to teach you the Cards. And what do I have to show for it? I’ve lost a few more of my own and I know nothing that I didn’t already know.”

Hiram set his jaw. “That’s not my fault.”

“No,” Quentin said. “It isn’t. But you’ve done nothing to help. I’ve had to go out of my way to dig your ass out of so many scrapes I can’t keep them straight. I’m tired, Hiram. I want to move on with my life.”

Hiram stared at him. “I’m not stopping you.”

Quentin paused for a moment. Then he nodded slowly. “I suppose you’re not.”

“You discharged your duty,” Hiram said, his face suddenly emotionless. “You fulfilled your promise to my pa. And you taught me the Cards. I can’t argue with that.”

The moment stretched out into silence. Quentin nodded, then nodded again. The boy was right. The promise was fulfilled. The transaction was complete. “Have fun with your girl,” he said. “I think it’s time I moved on.”

Hiram looked away. “If you think that’s right.”

Quentin started walking away. “I do,” he said.

• • • •

Quentin smoked a cigarette and fumed along with it.

“Doesn’t appear a night’s sleep helped you any,” came a voice. Quentin turned to see the dirty man from the day before.

“Who the Hell are you?” Quentin asked.

“My name’s Cuthbert,” the man said. “I’m something of a fixture here in Bitter Springs.”

“Look, Cuthbert, I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m in no mood to talk to you right now.”

“That’s fair,” Cuthbert said. “I’ll leave you alone, only . . . would you mind sharing some of your tobacco with me?”

Quentin spared another look at the wretch of a man. You’ve been wanting to do some good, he thought. Surely that includes charity, doesn’t it? He moved to the man and rolled him a cigarette, passing it to him and then lighting it with one of his matches.

“I thank you kindly,” Cuthbert said.

“How did you end up here?” Quentin asked.

The man shrugged and exhaled a long ribbon of smoke. “I came here looking for something,” he said. “Then I never left.”

“What were you were looking for?” Quentin asked.

“I thought you didn’t want to talk.”

“I changed my mind.”

“A better future,” Cuthbert said. “Everything runs out after a time, don’t it? I thought I could find a way to make it last longer.”

“I know how you feel,” Quentin said.

“I thought you might. Like I said, you have that look.” Cuthbert took another deep breath of his cigarette. “I thought, toward the end, that I’d put my life in the hands of Fortune. I started using what I had left to play cards.”

“Oh yeah?”

The man nodded. “Only I was always better at games like chess.”

“You play chess?” Quentin asked.

The man nodded. “Sure do. I’m quite good. Thing is, in games like that, it’s all about the long view. Not just what the next move will be, but the one after that, and the one after that and beyond still. You try to save all of your pieces, but sometimes sacrificing a piece now is worth it if you know it will give you the advantage later. Poker, Faro, well, it’s not quite the same.”

“So you lost everything?”

“Pretty much,” Cuthbert said.

Quentin shook his head. “I suppose you should have taken the long view of your life.”

“Maybe I still am.” Then he cackled.

Quentin laughed with him. He nodded to the man, then tipped his hat. “Thank you for the conversation,” he said.

“Thank you for the kindness,” Cuthbert said, holding up the cigarette.

Back at the hotel, Quentin found Hiram’s things already gone. He started to wonder where the boy had ended up but then stopped himself. It was none of his business. It was better this way, for everyone.

That night, Quentin sat down at the bar, his last night in Bitter Springs. Rachel poured him his first two whiskeys, then he waved her off. “No point in overdoing it tonight. I leave in the morning.”

“You don’t say,” Rachel said, her tone disappointed.

“That cord we were talking about? I hacked it loose,” he said. “I’m going to make my way back east, try to do some good for people.”

“Why back east?” She poured herself a drink and tossed it back. “There are people here you could do some good for.”

Quentin noticed something in her eyes, a kind of wild, daring glint that enticed him. He beckoned to her to fill his glass again. “I suppose I don’t have to go rushing off right away.”

She smiled as she poured. “Good.” She topped her own glass off. “Let me show you the sights our small town has to offer.”

So Quentin went about relaxing and enjoying a few more days in Bitter Springs. He played cards in the local saloons, ate at the town’s best restaurants, flirted with Rachel Ives, and stopped from time to time to jaw with Cuthbert. Once or twice they even played chess using an old set that had seen better days. Cuthbert won every time.

A few days later, as he was walking back to the hotel, Quentin caught sight of Hiram sitting together with Betty Legrand. It was the first Quentin had seen of him since they’d parted.

As Quentin watched, Hiram removed the cigarette case where he kept his Cards. Quentin’s eyes widened as Hiram removed the Deck and handed it to Betty, allowing her to flip through it, running her fingers across their faces.

Filled with a kind of wild anger, Quentin waited until Hiram parted from “his love” and walked over to him. “You told her about the Cards?” Quentin stared at Hiram, incredulous.

“Of course I did,” Hiram said. “I told you. We’re in love. I want to share everything important with her. And what are the Cards if not important?”

“You barely know her,” Quentin said. He could feel his forehead throbbing.

“I know her well enough.” Hiram’s voice was rising. “I ain’t never felt this way before. I know it’s true.”

Quentin put his face in his hands. Had the kid learned nothing? He looked Hiram in the eyes. “So that’s it? You’re just going to stay with this girl. Use your Cards on flowers and picnics and pearls?”

Hiram frowned. “I don’t know that I’m gonna do with the Cards. But that’s really none of your concern.”

“None of my concern? You wouldn’t have them if not for me. If not for me you would have pissed them all away by now.”

“I had nothing to do with the promise you made my pa,” Hiram said. “And I didn’t even hold you to it. You did that yourself. And that’s because he helped you get what you wanted. I’m grateful for your help, surely I am. But I done dug your ass out of a few scrapes as well.”

Some voice in Quentin’s head called it true but his anger drowned it.

“You ever think that maybe you’re not really mad at me at all?” Hiram asked. “Maybe you’re just mad at yourself and the choices you’ve made.”

Quentin felt rage surge inside him but he held up a hand, palm out toward Hiram. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Our paths have diverged. You have your new love. You’re happy. Do what you will with the Cards. You’re right, it’s none of my concern.”

“Quentin,” Hiram said. He looked down at his boots. “I wish you well in your endeavors.”

“You, too,” Quentin said.

Hiram met his eyes. “And thank you. For teaching me the Cards. For doing what my father couldn’t or wouldn’t.”

Something caught in Quentin’s throat. “You’re welcome. Good luck, Hiram. Have a good life.”

He found himself back at the bar. Rachel stood behind it, wiping it down with a cloth. She smiled as he walked up. “My shift is almost done, but you can be my last customer.”

Quentin smiled back. “Whiskey.”

Rachel’s smile took on a wicked curve. “Can I join you?”

Quentin felt something wild surge inside of him. “Only if you join me proper.” He beckoned to one of the tables.

Rachel, still smiling, grabbed a bottle and two glasses and followed him to the table. Quentin poured them each a glass and raised his. “To the future.” Rachel clinked his glass and tossed the whiskey back.

Rachel poured them each another glass. “To freedom,” she said, raising her glass. Quentin toasted with her.

The toasts continued, along with the whiskey, and Quentin found himself back in his bed, with Rachel next to him, fumbling at her bodice with clumsy fingers. She tugged at his shirt and pants, then paused when she saw the cards in their pouch, hanging around his neck. “What are these?” She reached for them.

Quentin grabbed her wrist before she could touch them. “Leave them,” he said.

She raised her eyebrows and pulled her hand away. “Okay,” she said meekly.

He rolled atop her, and moved the pouch to his back. “I promise. They won’t get in the way.”

“They better not,” she said.

• • • •

He awoke a short time later, with the urgent need to piss. He staggered to the outhouse, trying to ignore the growing pain in his head, focusing instead on the idea that tomorrow was going to be the day. He would leave Bitter Springs and head east. Maybe he would ask Rachel to go with him. She certainly seemed to want a way out of town. It might be fun for a while.

He was exiting the outhouse, fumbling with his suspenders, when something rough and dark covered his face. He reached up to pull it away, but something struck his head. His hands fell away as he felt confusion, then pain, then nothing.

• • • •

When Quentin awoke, he was strung up like a Christmas goose. He hung, suspended in the air, his arms chained above him, his feet barely touching the ground. Pain streaked through his arms and back, but he bit back the scream bubbling up from his body. He was helpless—he couldn’t reach the Cards in their pouch around his neck. He couldn’t reach the Joker he kept in his boot.

Powerless.

He tried to swing himself, work himself free of the bar above him, maybe pull it free, but the chain barely moved and the pain in his body only grew until he surrendered a sound—part growl, part anguished cry—and went limp once more.

The pain now seemed to vibrate through him, like sound through a guitar string. One close to snapping. Surely his body couldn’t take much more of this.

The door to the room opened and Hiram walked in.

“Thank God,” Quentin gasped. “Quick, let me down.”

Hiram shook his head. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry it has to be this way,” Hiram said. “After all we’ve done together. But I know you were getting set to go and . . . well, I need your Cards.” He moved forward and grabbed the pouch containing Quentin’s Deck, cut it free with a short-bladed knife.

“You miserable turncoat!” Quentin growled. “I taught you everything I knew.”

Hiram nodded. “That’s right. Including the lesson that sometimes you need to take what you need. Like you took your revenge.” He tucked the pouch into his jacket pocket. “I promise to use some of them the way you’d want. That’s the least I can do.”

“I’ll kill you!”

“No,” Hiram said. “You won’t. You’re not going to live long enough.”

Quentin’s mind raced. “You don’t even know how to make them work for you,” he said. “You don’t know the ritual.”

Hiram smiled. “Are you sure about that?” He turned and walked toward the door.

“Hiram!”

Hiram paused, then walked back to Quentin. His face softened and he nodded. “You did do right by me,” he said. “Here.” He pushed a few cards back into Quentin’s pocket. “You can take these to the grave with you.”

Then Hiram left, leaving Quentin to shake with rage until the pain made him pass out again.

• • • •

Quentin awoke to someone slapping his face. It took him a moment to recognize Cuthbert. “I need to get you down.”

Cuthbert gripped Quentin’s legs and pushed him up, relieving the slack on the chains enough so that Quentin could loop them off the rack. The effort made him cry out in pain, but he managed to get them off and Cuthbert helped lower him to the ground.

“Can you walk?” Cuthbert asked.

“I’m not sure,” Quentin said.

“You’ll have to do your best. C’mon. There’s a cellar door near here. That’s how I got in.”

“Wait,” Quentin said. “My Cards.”

“You’re delirious,” Cuthbert said. “I need to get you out of here before your friend comes back. I didn’t like the look of that smoke pole he got on him.”

Cuthbert slung Quentin’s arm around his shoulder and began moving him to the door, half dragging Quentin’s injured body.

“You don’t understand,” Quentin cried. “The Cards.”

“There’s no time,” Cuthbert said. “We need to get out of here.”

Cuthbert pushed him up the stairs and out the cellar door and into sunlight. Quentin blinked against the fresh pain of brightness in his eyes.

Then he was next to a horse and Cuthbert was boosting him up and then they were riding away.

Somewhere along the way, Quentin lost consciousness.

• • • •

Quentin awoke in bed, in his hotel room, his body screaming in pain. But he was at rest, and already the worst of it seemed to have passed. He looked up to see Cuthbert sitting in a chair looking freshly scrubbed.

“Thank you,” Quentin said. “How did you find me?”

“You know me,” Cuthbert said. “Always around. Always sticking my nose into other people’s business. I saw that friend of yours come and take you. I tried to get the Law to help, but they wouldn’t heed me. I thought I’d lost you until I saw that same son of a bitch the next day. I waited until he left town then followed him.”

“How’d you get a horse?”

Cuthbert flushed. “I stole it.” He held up his hands in a placating gesture. “Don’t worry, I returned it. With none the wiser.”

Quentin couldn’t care less about the crime. It helped get him free of that place. But his Cards . . . He tried to push himself up in bed and his body responded with pain.

“Easy now,” Cuthbert said, moving toward the bed. “You’re still recovering.”

“You don’t understand,” Quentin gasped. “He took something important to me.”

Cuthbert looked at Quentin sadly, then nodded. “The Cards.”

Quentin nodded. “They’re special.”

“I know,” Cuthbert said.

Quentin gaped. “You do?”

Cuthbert shrugged. “I told you I lost everything, didn’t I? Was the Cards I meant.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I thought you had the look about you,” Cuthbert said. “Once you’ve used them a bit you get to kind of sense it in others. I suspect they draw us together. And then I found these on you.” He held up the pitiful few Cards that Hiram had left Quentin.

Quentin reached for them, felt how thin the stack was. He counted ten. Ten Cards from what had once been fifty-four. He felt like weeping. He looked up at Cuthbert. “What happened? To you, I mean.”

“I came here, to Bitter Springs, looking for answers. Looking for . . . something. I found Old Man Legrand.”

Quentin recognized the surname. Same as Hiram’s new love.

“The old man’s a recluse,” Cuthbert said. “And a Sharp. He sits up in his fancy house, hoarding them away. Trying to find ways to stretch them out, or some such. I thought he might teach me about them. I was already down to half my deck. I petitioned him to take me on as a kind of apprentice.”

“And did he?”

“He appeared to, but . . . he was never interested in training me. Have you heard of blood decks?”

Quentin shook his head.

“The old man knew of a way to take another’s Cards. Add them to your own.”

“Oh, that,” Quentin said. He’d never heard them named such but it seemed apt.

“Then you know. The old man wanted my Cards. Only I escaped him. Thing is, it took pretty much all of my remaining Cards to get away. To not get killed.” Cuthbert held his hands out, fingers splayed. “It left me with nothing.”

“Why did you stay?” Quentin asked.

“Without my Cards, I had no use to him. He had no need to come after me.” He sniffed. “But I had cause to stay.”

“What cause?”

“What else? Revenge.” He looked up, eyes burning with a sudden intensity. “I’ve been waiting all this time to find an opening.”

Quentin shook his head. “I don’t understand. He’s Betty’s father, right? Was he after my Cards all the time?”

Cuthbert shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe he sent the boy to get them from you. Or maybe he just gave the boy the information he needed to take yours. I don’t know. But it’s clear he has his hooks in your friend.”

“Not the old man . . .” Quentin began. The girl. The girl Hiram claimed to be in love with could easily work him like a marionette. It was Hiram’s way.

Cuthbert grabbed Quentin’s arm. “There’s still a chance. To be able to use your Cards they have to kill you. That’s the only way the connection can be broken. And you’re not dead.”

“No,” Quentin said. “I’m not.”

“I know the ritual. The old man explained it to me when he thought I was in his clutches. You have to have some of the other Sharp’s Cards, and you gamble your own. Then you kill the Sharp. If it works, his Cards get added to your own.”

Quentin’s hands curled until they were clenched fists. His whole body shook with anger. After all he’d done for Hiram. After he’d wasted so much time on the boy, so many Cards on their adventures. And now left with . . . what? He cursed the boy. Cursed the old man that had saddled him with the responsibility.

He stopped short of cursing the Cards.

Quentin began to get out of bed.

“Hold on now,” Cuthbert said. “What are you doing?”

“I need to get out of here,” Quentin said, gritting through the pain.

“You’re safe here. Especially with that bartender that’s sweet on you. He won’t be able to get to you here. We need to talk this through some more. Strategize.”

“He’s going to come for me. What more do I need to know? I can take him. I taught him everything he knows. He may have the edge in power, but I know how he thinks. He draws the first thought that comes to him. I can take him. But not in bed, not bent by this pain.”

Cuthbert nodded. “That much is true.” He removed a card from his pocket, held it up with the back (a red diamond pattern) facing Quentin.

Quentin gaped.

“I wasn’t completely honest with you before,” Cuthbert said. “I saved a few. Less than a handful. Didn’t help much. Almost made the sting worse, knowing how few I had left, weighing every choice I made, whether that day was the day I used one of the last. I often wondered what I would use them on.” A moment later the Card flared away to nothing, and Quentin gasped as heat suffused his body. As it dissipated, his pain left with it. Suddenly he could sit up straighter. Freedom of movement returned. It was like being hot and parchment-dry in the desert and having someone hand you a glass of cool, clear water.

He stared in wonder at Cuthbert. “Thank you. But why?”

“Because you need it,” Cuthbert said. “And because maybe you can strike back at your friend and, through him, help me find what I’ve been looking for.”

Quentin looked away, overcome.

“I just ask that you reward this act of kindness by caring for the body I just helped knit back together. Don’t let that kid kill you.” Cuthbert met his eyes. “You kill him first.”

“I’ll do my best,” Quentin said.

• • • •

Quentin stalked toward the Legrand estate with determination, bringing to mind the first of his adventures, the way he had hunted his uncle and taken revenge for his father’s death. The cards had brought him full circle, then. Always through clouds of death and destruction.

It ended tonight—one way or another. He was only going for his Cards. Despite everything Cuthbert had told him, they were his only goal. If he got them back, he could walk away, back onto the path that had been calling to him.

That Hiram had taken all of his face cards didn’t surprise him. They were the ones he’d been saving in reserve, the most powerful of the cards: two Jacks, three Queens, four Kings, and two Aces. What remained wasn’t very inspiring: two Fours, two Fives, two Sixes, an Eight, two Nines, and a Ten. And of those, all but two were red. But it was something.

And maybe, just maybe, he could get some more.

He felt a flush of guilt at the thought. The idea of stealing another’s cards was still abhorrent to him, but what if they were trying to kill you? If you were defending yourself, and could take another’s cards as a prize, surely that would be understandable? Where was the harm in that?

He stood outside the grounds of the Legrand house. It was large compared to the others in town, with a well-kept lawn and a few trees around it for privacy and shade. It would be staffed, too, Quentin thought. He hoped no more than a few servants as he drew the Ten of Diamonds. He had used the trick once before and focused on fading from the sight of others as the card flared in his hand. His Play was that the Card would keep him hidden from up to ten people. He double-checked his reflection in his pocketwatch. It wasn’t there. It had worked.

He crept around the house, peering in the windows. The Legrand homestead was impressive, full of rich furnishings, but Quentin only saw a couple of servants moving around the house.

He opened a side door and slipped inside, being careful to close the door as quietly as possible behind him. The Card masked his appearance, not his noise. His fingers lightly rested on another of his meager Deck, if it could be called that, but no one seemed to be around.

He walked carefully through large, elegant rooms until he found the staircase leading up. Taking the utmost care, he removed his boots. As he did, he caught sight of a card clipped into the right boot. Of course. His remaining Joker. It wasn’t of use to him—Jokers were wild, their results unpredictable, they were as likely to hinder as they were to help. Still, it was odd that Hiram hadn’t taken that one. Quentin had taught him that trick after all. Could he have forgotten? No matter—it was yet another Card, and Quentin tucked it away, down inside the waistband of his britches.

At the top of the stairs he replaced his boots. A hallway led off to the right and the left. He chose left and padded down its length. The first door he came to was closed. He passed it and continued on. The second was slightly ajar and he slipped into it.

The room beyond was large and accented with ruffles and lace. A four-poster bed dominated one end, while a sitting desk and a chaise lounge stood on the other. An elaborate chess set perched on a small table next to the lounge, with pieces of ivory and jade. Quentin walked to it and realized that the set was paused, mid-game. Thinking of the games he’d played with Cuthbert, he moved one of the jade pieces.

He heard an intake of breath behind him and whirled, reaching for his next Card. As he did, his invisibility fell away from him.

Betty Legrand stood in the doorway, dressed in a ruffled dress befitting the daughter of the richest man in town. A hat, carefully pinned to her curled hair, completed the picture. She held a fanned Hand of Cards. Had Hiram given them to her? Or did she have them already?

“I don’t believe you were invited,” Betty said.

“I’m only here for my Cards,” Quentin said. “If you know where they are, give them to me and I’ll leave you in peace. You and Hiram can do whatever you want. Your father, too. But I’m not leaving without them.”

Betty smiled sweetly at him. “That is where our opinions differ.” She lifted one of her Cards.

Quentin drew the Five of Spades as he’d planned, though he’d been expecting to use it on Hiram. He envisioned an invisible chamber taking shape around Betty, formed of air, the element of Spades, of invisible force. Five sides to cover her. He wanted her contained, immobilized, while he searched the house.

But Betty’s Card was already coming to life, flame-bright in her hand. As the walls of his prison came down around her, the card flared and fire erupted in front of her.

It licked out toward him, but then coiled within the cage he’d created, deflected by the walls. The flames and smoke rolled back on Betty and she screamed as her clothes and skin began to burn.

“No!” Quentin screamed. He dismissed the cage in horror, but it was too late. Betty fell to the ground, blackened and hairless. The remaining flames spilled out into the room, catching hold of the bedding and floor with a roar.

“Betty!” came an answering shout. Hiram, calling for his love.

Quentin ran. He had been prepared to face Hiram, to confront him. But that was before everything had gone all wrong, had bucked from beneath him like a spooked horse.

He heard Hiram’s screams at his back as he raced out into the night.

• • • •

“What happened?” Cuthbert asked when Quentin burst through the door of his room, blackened and reeking of smoke.

“It all went to shit,” Quentin said, hearing the rising hysteria in his own voice. “I just wanted my Cards but she drew on me.”

Cuthbert grabbed his shoulders and made Quentin meet his gaze. “What happened?” he repeated.

“Betty,” he said. “I didn’t want to hurt her, but . . . she drew on me. I didn’t . . . She’s dead.”

Cuthbert’s eyes went wide and he dropped his hands from Quentin’s shoulders and looked away. He walked to the window, his head hanging, his hands slack and trembling at his side.

“It was an accident,” Quentin pleaded. “I didn’t mean her any harm.”

Cuthbert remained still. Then he started nodding, slowly at first, then more emphatically. “You had no choice,” he said softly. “It was her or you.”

Quentin couldn’t still the rampant beating of his heart. “Hiram will definitely come for me now. I know him. He’ll be het up like a wolf scenting blood.”

I still have Cards, he told himself. Down to eight, though. Nine, if he counted the Joker. But was it enough?

“There’s no turning back now,” Cuthbert said, his voice shaky. “It’s either him or you. You’re going to have to kill him.”

Quentin felt something in him wither and die.

“You’re going to have to take his Cards,” Cuthbert said.

“What?”

“How many do you have now?” the old man said. “How many will you use to defend yourself? You’ll end up like me.” He shook his head. “You’re telling me you’re going to kill him and not take them? Not use them for something good?”

Quentin turned away, running a hand through his sweat-soaked hair.

“You can turn this calamity into something worthwhile,” Cuthbert said. “You have a chance to turn this shit into gold.”

Quentin’s hands curled into fists at his sides. “What do I have to do?”

“I’ll teach you the ritual I learned from Old Man Legrand. You’ll have to take his Cards, and it will likely require you to risk all of your remaining Cards to make the Play. Assuming that pans out, then you kill him, severing his connection to them.”

“What if I kill him first?”

Cuthbert looked at him hard. “You have to do your best not to. Not until you get the Cards and make the Play. I can assist in guiding you through it.”

Quentin looked sharply at Cuthbert. “You’re with me in this?”

“I used a Card on you, boy. Of course I’m in this with you.”

“Okay.” Quentin nodded. “Then I have to get ready. But not here. There are too many people around.”

“I know a place,” Cuthbert said. “A cave up in the hills. It’s far enough away from town and you can get your back up against a wall. He has to come to you, after all.”

Quentin nodded. Knowing Hiram, the boy would charge in, all piss and vinegar, while Quentin could prepare and tip the odds even more in his favor.

“Take me there,” he said. “But first I’m going to need a gun.”

• • • •

Having little more than a hand’s worth of Cards gave Quentin less options, but it also allowed him to plan his moves more carefully. Of the remaining eight Cards, he used the Six of Hearts as soon as they reached the cave. It was a trick he’d learned from another Sharp, infusing the power into a revolver. A Six for six chambers. The Hearts meant that he could give the bullets power over the body. He shaped his intent as he Played the Card, willing the bullets to stun, to paralyze without killing.

He hoped it would work. He’d never tried that particular kind of Play before and had never actually seen it done.

The rest was just waiting. Quentin had told Rachel that he going to the cave, told her to let Hiram know. She’d asked him why. “That cord I cut seems fit to hang me,” he said. “I’m going to burn it this time.”

“Just don’t leave without me,” she said.

Leave, Quentin thought. Yes, as soon as this is done. “Next time you see me, make sure your bags are packed,” he said. “We’ll make a fresh start. Somewhere far away from here.” A fresh start, hopefully with his Cards.

When Hiram appeared, it was with fire. Literally. As soon as he entered the cave mouth, it appeared in his hands, as if igniting from the Card.

“Why?” he screamed into the cave mouth. “At least tell me that.”

Quentin’s answer was the Five of Diamonds. As it flashed, the cave mouth collapsed around Hiram, rock and stone dropping with a precipitous crash. As the kid scrambled madly away from the falling rocks, Quentin drew and fired the revolver.

His first shot went wide, the crack echoing off the surrounding rock. The second was lost in a cloud of earth and grit.

The third punched a hole in Hiram’s leg and Quentin was rewarded with a pained yelp.

Then fire billowed down the cave.

Quentin already had the Four of Diamonds out, and drawing on its power over earth, he raised a wall of rock between him and the flame. The fire licked at the edges of the barrier, but didn’t penetrate, though the heat still slammed into him like a solid force, sucking the air from his lungs.

He had no time to think, though. Using the shield as cover, he fired two more shots and at least one of them hit.

Hiram was weaving now, weak from the bullets. Go down. Down, damn you.

Hiram stepped forward and drew another Card.

Then pitched over onto the cave floor.

Quentin kept his Cards out, and moved cautiously forward.

Hiram didn’t move.

Quentin inched forward, the gun with its one bullet left in one hand, his Cards in the other.

Hiram remained motionless.

Then Quentin was standing over Hiram, who was sweating, his face contorted in pain or frustration or both. His eyes met Quentin’s. “Why?” he gasped.

“It was an accident,” Quentin said, softly. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Why were you even there?” Hiram forced the question out through gritted teeth.

“You know why,” Quentin said. “It was either you or me.”

He bent down and took away Hiram’s Cards, including the one still clutched in his hand.

“You keep saying it’s me,” Hiram wheezed. “That I’m . . . holding you from your good works.”

Quentin stood up and turned away.

“But you could have done them if you really wanted to,” Hiram continued. “I’ve only ever been an excuse. All you’ve ever really cared about is the Cards.”

Quentin went to summon Cuthbert.

• • • •

They tied up Hiram, though it didn’t seem necessary. He’d passed out shortly after his Cards were taken. Still alive.

They made the preparations. Placed Hiram’s cards down on the cave floor. Placed Quentin’s opposite them. Only five now, not counting the Joker. They would all need to go for this to work. It was all in.

Quentin begged a moment from Cuthbert and went outside, lit a cheroot. After a few puffs, it began to rain. Too late to quench all the fire. Such a fucking mess. If only he hadn’t moved that chess piece. It was like Cuthbert was always saying—he only looked to the next move. He never played the long game. Maybe Hiram was right, too. He threw the cheroot on the ground and returned inside.

“I feel dirty,” Quentin said.

“You know it’s the only thing to do,” Cuthbert said. “And the boy’s got some fine Cards left, too. Only fair to replace the ones you lost. Two Aces is a hard loss.”

Quentin felt his skin tighten around him. “I never told you which Cards Hiram took.”

“You must have,” Cuthbert said. “When you were in pain.”

“No,” Quentin said. “I didn’t.” It was one of the first lessons he’d learned—you didn’t let on what you had left, you didn’t tell the value of your Cards.

Cuthbert shook his head and tutted. “See? All this preparation, all this planning, and a small touch of eagerness gives the game away.”

“You’ve been playing me,” Quentin said.

“And so well, too,” Cuthbert said, a pitying grin on his face.

Quentin’s hand automatically moved to where he usually keep his Cards, but they were all on the cave floor, beyond Cuthbert. The man was old, but he still seemed vital beneath the grime and rough appearance. And who knew how many Cards he really had left.

“But you used one of your Cards on me,” Quentin said.

“Sometimes you have to sacrifice a piece to win the game.”

“What game?”

Cuthbert’s face grew serious. “The only one that matters.”

“You planned all of this?” Quentin asked.

Cuthbert nodded, a wicked smile on his face. “All of this. Well, Betty and me. Oh, yes. We worked together.” The smile faded and his eyes welled with tears. “She was my daughter.”

“You’re Old Man Legrand.”

Cuthbert shrugged. “Guilty. Most of what I told you was true, save for there was no Cuthbert.” He held up his meager Cards. “I used them all up, you see. Then I discovered that there was a way to get more. Only . . . it wasn’t reliable. I had the instructions, of course, but I’d never seen it done. And I’d heard it was tenuous at best. So Betty and I decided we needed someone to go first.

“We spread tale of the fortune teller. Made sure people knew she was a wonder with a deck of cards. Figured it would draw a Sharp or two to us eventually. Like I told you, the Cards eventually bring us together. When you and Hiram asked to see Madame Serena, we thought we might have fish wriggling on the line. When we sent in the drunk—and yes, wasn’t that a nice bit of theater—it confirmed it for us.

“Betty chose to work your friend over there. To be honest, it wasn’t much of a choice. She knew a wiggle of her hips would lock him right up. Still, I had high hopes for you. You wanted to learn about the Cards, were so frustrated you were begging for someone to guide you. And the cracks between you and your friend . . . they were so easy to widen. Betty used a Card to masquerade as Hiram when she took your Cards. Then I used that Heart.”

“To heal me.”

Cuthbert shook his head like he was talking to a stupid child. “So many things you don’t know. I used it to heal you, yes, but also to push a little. At the anger. At the loss. At the self-hatred. Do you know how much you talk about helping others? Yet do you know how little you do about it?”

Despair surged through Quentin. “What would have happened if I had taken Hiram’s Cards? If the ritual worked?”

“Then I would have known that it worked. And I would have taken yours. Now, though, I’m going to have to do it differently, use Hiram instead. I don’t have Betty’s feminine wiles, but the boy seems to respond well to father figures.”

“You’re sick,” Quentin said. “Your daughter died for this.”

Cuthbert’s face grew rigid. “Don’t you talk about my daughter. You’re the one who killed her. And I grieve for her. But this was always about the Cards and, well, she got too eager. I told her to be patient, let things proceed as planned, but she wanted . . . she wanted to win. It cost her her life. But don’t worry. I will get my revenge.” Cuthbert raised his Cards.

Quentin’s still lay on the cave floor behind Cuthbert, and his Joker was buried in his britches.

Cuthbert noticed Quentin’s gaze. He smiled. “I hold all the cards.”

Quentin drew the six-gun and shot him in the stomach.

Cuthbert toppled backward, the Cards fluttering from his hand.

Quentin was atop him in a moment, punching the man in the face. “Where are my Cards?” he yelled.

“I burned them,” Cuthbert said between broken teeth.

Quentin struck him again. “Where are they?”

“I fed them to some pigs.”

Again.

Cuthbert smiled a bloody smile. “You’ll never find them.”

Quentin exhaled. “Then I’ll just have to take yours.”

He gathered up Cuthbert’s fallen Cards and placed them where Hiram’s had sat. Then he followed the ritual as Cuthbert had explained it, arranging the Cards just the way he’d been told, using the Nine of Diamonds, his highest remaining Card, as the trigger, using all of his will to make the Play work. The Nine of Diamonds glowed with a dark, almost orange light, which then spread to his remaining Cards and then to Cuthbert’s. When the glow faded, the Cards still remained, but there was no way to tell if the ritual had worked.

There was still one last step in the process, though.

Quentin knelt over Cuthbert, meeting the old man’s eyes. Then he gripped the Cuthbert’s throat and tightened his hands, squeezing until the old man stopped breathing.

All that remained was to test the Cards. Together with Cuthbert’s, there were ten, the same number the Legrands had left him with. He drew the Nine of Hearts, one of his original Cards, and brought it to the unconscious and shivering Hiram. Holding it firmly in his hand, Quentin closed his eyes and willed it to life, willed it to reach out and heal Hiram’s wounds, to undo at least some of the damage he had done. For a moment he thought of what Cuthbert . . . Old Man Legrand had said, thought about pushing at the feelings within Hiram, trying to swell his compassion and forgiveness, trying to brighten the friendship they once had. But in the end he didn’t. He had crossed many lines that night, but this wouldn’t be one of them.

When he opened his eyes again, Hiram’s wounds had sealed over and he’d stopped shivering. It had worked.

I should feel happy, Quentin thought. Or at least relieved. But the Cards felt stained. And he felt soiled. He wondered if that feeling would ever go away.

He removed Hiram’s bonds and curled the kid’s hands around his Cards. Then Quentin left the cave and returned to town. There, he found a young boy who worked the stables and paid him to bring his belongings from the hotel. He couldn’t face Rachel. Not now.

Quentin still had some Cards, but he had lost everything else. Friendship. Integrity. His self-respect.

He had started out The Fool, then became the Magician. What was he now? He was a betrayer, a thief, and a murderer. He felt the Joker in the band of his britches, pulled it out and stared at its face. The Cards had made a joke of him. Could he even use them again? Maybe one day. But not yet.

Nine Cards. He thought back to his reading at the fortune teller’s. Nine cards tell the story of a life. Would they be enough to tell a new one?

He decided to find out.

©2019 by Rajan Khanna.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rajan Khanna is an author, reviewer, podcaster, musician, and narrator. His three novels, Falling Sky, Rising Tide, and Raining Fire take place in a post-apocalyptic world of airships and floating cities. His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Analog Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and multiple anthologies. His articles and reviews have appeared at Tor.com and LitReactor.com and his podcast narrations can be heard at Podcastle, Escape Pod, PseudoPod, Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Lightspeed Magazine. Rajan cohosts the Spirited Discourse podcast with Devin Poore. He lives in Brooklyn where he’s a member of the Altered Fluid writing group. His personal website is http://www.rajankhanna.com and he tweets, @rajanyk.

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

Desire

Kiini Ibura Salaam | 4523 words

Sené. Pregnant Sené. Sené of the tired skin. She whose face held a million wrinkles, each one etched deeply as if carved over the course of forty years. Sené whose blood was only twenty-four years young.

[Faru, Faru running through the bush.]

The shining eyes of her boys made her smile, but not much else touched her. Not a full-throated bird’s song, not the sun peeking pink at dawn, not her husband’s fleeting caresses.

[Faru leapt right, darted left. His hoof
slipped and his hind legs buckled.
Faru stamped his front hoof,
shook himself off and leapt up again.]

Sené had hard-working hands: dry, cracked, and bloated. With them she beat the dirt out of her family’s cloths, scaled fish, pounded root vegetables, carried crops to her husband’s mother, and avoided touching herself.

[Thin branches whipped against Faru’s face as he ran.
Faru, the flawless. Faru, the godly. Faru reeking of thick
sensuality. His huge goat eyes darted back and forth. His
god’s heart beat a fearful rhythm in his chest. His lips lay
open in a pant. Desire—his and his sister Quashe’s own
special force—throbbed through his skinny goat legs.
Desire. That which made Faru who he was.
Faru, Faru running through the bush.]

Sené’s hands were always busy. Just now, they were sweeping out the corners of the cliff dwelling she, her husband Na, and the two boys called home. Now her hands were rolling up the sleeping mats and tucking them away. Now they were building a fire.

[Faru heard the thump, thump of Laloro
thundering behind him. Laloro, great god of disease.
Faru did not look back. He reached the end
of the bush and teetered on the edge of the cliff.]

Sené pulled down a bunch of lemongrass from the hanging basket. She squatted, one hard hand holding her bulging belly. She threw the fragrant herb into the pot and watched as the bits danced and dove with the boiling water.

[Faru glanced over his shoulder. Laloro—a godly
elephant covered in hideous warts—charged at him. Faru
jumped. His hooves found footholds on the slenderest of
rock surfaces. He bounded from rock to rock until he
landed on a large outcropping. Faru skidded to a stop.]

Rocks tumbled across the entrance to Sené’s home. She put her hands to her knees and strained to rise. Her joints throbbed as she shuffled to the entrance of her dwelling.

Faru jumped down from Sené’s roof and landed on all fours. Sené opened her cracked lips to scream, but the sound died in her throat. Faru rose on his hind legs and stretched, exposing the expanse of his human torso to Sené’s gaze. The thrumming of thousands of dragonfly wings beat in her chest. She bent down to one knee.

Faru preened as he always did when admiring eyes drank in the vision of him. He was a god, yes, but he was vain. He twisted his body this way and that. Light undulated across his fur in shimmering waves. He brushed his hooves across his chest, smoothing the flat gray circle of fur that collared his throat. Sené was powerless to look away.

Faru fixed his luminous eyes in Sené’s direction. He licked his lips. A muscle in his jaw flexed and his nose twitched. Sené held herself stiff until the tea hissed and spilled over. Wet tumbled into the fire.

Sené leapt to her bare feet. “Faru, honorable one, would you like some lemongrass?”

“No, no time,” Faru said. “Come.”

Sené’s blood pulsed as she neared the god. She stood before him, shaking, waiting. With a grunt Faru grabbed Sené by the neck. His hooves scratched her skin. Godly lips pressed against common ones. A godly tongue coaxed Sené’s mouth open. She gagged, almost choking as an intangible force flowed down her throat.

[A large shadow slid past the opening of Sené’s home.]

Faru broke away from Sené. “Don’t leave here. I’ll return.”

With that, he turned and bounded away.

[Laloro swooped by the cliffs. Laloro flying by on
chicken’s wings. The tiny appendages didn’t seem enough
to hold his elephant heft. He delighted in this, the most
surprising of his godly powers, but he wanted more.]

Sené. Sené, full of dancing light. Laughter long buried came twisting up into Sené’s throat. She stared at the empty space where Faru had held her and clapped her hand over her mouth. Giggles seeped from between her fingers.

The lemongrass hissed again. Sené looked over at the fire. Even the water, boiling over, seemed something to delight in. She bent down over the pot, dreamily drumming her fingers on her cheek. Her lips would not lie flat. They twisted up and open, surprising Sené with irrepressible glee.

[The moment Faru reached the top of the cliff,
Laloro wrapped his trunk around Faru’s body
and flew into the thick of the bush.]

Sené tipped the tea over, dousing the fire. Her nostrils flared as the scent of lemongrass filled the dwelling. Inexplicably, she began to rub the back of her hand over her face. Her fingers wound into her hair, twisting the rough strands into coils, then setting them loose. She smoothed her eyebrows, massaged her neck. Those hard ugly hands found delight in the curves of her body. Her breasts, sagging and full, were a wonder to touch. So was the tight swell of her belly.

[Laloro did not care that his trunk made breathing hard for Faru.
In fact, he coiled his trunk tighter. Faru laughed.
“What’s so funny, doomed one?” Laloro asked.
“I have nothing for you. It’s gone,” Faru said.
Laloro’s tiny eyes rolled in their sockets. “I want
the bewitching power and I want it now.”
Faru laughed again. “My sister will not fall
for such tricks. Quashe will not be seduced by
a ugly hulk of flesh covered in warts.”
“Shut up, Faru,” Laloro roared,
“give me the power or I will crush you.”]

Sené’s hardworking hands parted the front of her cloth. Her fingertips alighted on the curly tangle between her thighs. Lust unfurled and snaked in dizzying circles within her. Her feet backed her body to the wall. She pushed her spine against the rock. Her hand swiveled and writhed, her hips rotated in delight.

[“Where is it?” Laloro asked.
“I’ve lost it.” Faru said. “Nobody’s perfect,
even gods have their days off.”
Laloro stared deeply into Faru’s eyes. Faru looked back,
unblinking. Laloro knew from the calm in Faru’s face he
was telling the truth. Laloro loosened his trunk and
dropped Faru to the ground.]

Sené’s fingers were knuckle-deep inside herself. She was reaching for the mirth that Faru had trickled down her throat. Reaching to stroke the sudden burst of joy filling all her tired parts. When she was trembling, pleasure shooting from the pressure of her fingers, all of her skin sighed. She withdrew her wet fingers and used her own juices to draw patterns on the wall. Each mark was a reminder of this sensation; a sign to herself, a message to her husband Na, that everything had changed.

Sené. Slow Sené. Sené of the new urges climbed down the cliff. She crossed the dangerous ledges and narrow passes carefully. As she stepped down onto flat ground, she glanced up at the peak of the cliff. She saw two forms running there. The wind carried their laughter to her. They were, unmistakably, her boys. “Na,” she yelled, expecting to see her husband’s form just behind them. Instead, she saw the large frame of Na’s mother lumbering in the distance. Just as she was wondering where Na could be, a hummingbird hovered near her ear. Her heart leapt, and she felt the desire sweep through her again.

Sené swayed through the meadow, her thoughts suddenly preoccupied by a flock of yellow butterflies. She was sensitive to all sensations: the wind on her cheeks, the sun on her shoulders, the tall grass brushing against her hips. From the other side of the meadow, she could smell the sweet, sharp scent of ripe berries. In seconds, she was tucking little buds of fruit under her tongue.

[Faru, Faru running to the cliffs.]

When her belly was full, Sené’s skin ached for coolness. She headed straight for the river. Quashe’s river. Before Sené’s toes met the moist river earth, before she could submerge her fingers into the cool dark waters, Sené heard the deep bouncing of her husband Na’s laughter.

[Faru leapt down from Sené’s roof and landed
on all fours. He snorted. The sight of her empty dwelling
tore through him. Faru, Faru. Without the power of desire,
his breath did not call forth horny submission. His
presence did not attract an aroused audience of winged,
slithering and walking things. He was invisible.
And the horror of it pained him.]

Na? Laughing? Sené crept along the bank toward the unfamiliar sound. She hid behind a tree and peered around the trunk. Na was sitting, legs spread, feet dipped in the water, the seductive crocodile head of Quashe—goddess of desire—leaning against his bare chest. Quashe’s back formed one gleaming stretch of reptile skin. Her torso, neck and arms were human-soft, honey-amber skin, wet with river dew. Na’s fingers were sticky with her. One palm full of a tight godly breast, the other cupping the curve of fertile god belly. Quashe’s thick tail swished back and forth as she dripped water into Na’s mouth from her crocodile snout.

[Faru, Faru needing the power of desire
just as Sené needed breath.]

A flash of anger interrupted Sené’s joy. How could Na be sharing sweetness with this . . . this . . . crocodile god? Without a thought, she opened her mouth and sang an imperfect love song:

“Lover the length of you
Your weight between my thighs
Lover the scent of you
An oasis of sighs”

Both Quashe and Na turned to face the sound of Sené’s singing. Sené. Sené who had so long been a dry discarded thing, stepped toward her husband. Unwavering, she pointed her big belly right at him and sang him to his feet.

Na was, for a few seconds, stilled. His body trapped between godly pleasures and the pull of his wife. Not his wife, a juicy apparition of his wife as a goddess; Sené as a queen, a swarm of butterflies hovering over her holy head.

[Laloro found Faru, bereft, lying flat on his back
outside of Sené’s dwelling. Laloro laughed aloud. “You
really have lost it?” He hovered close to Faru’s face.
“Shower me with some horrible disease,”
Faru said, reaching for Laloro’s trunk.
“Give me some fatal sickness or leave me alone.”]

To Na’s ears, Sené’s song was nothing less than enchanting. In the thrall of her voice, he forgot about Quashe. He forgot the honeyed skin that coaxed him through a labyrinth of pleasure, turned away from the crocodile claws that gifted him with fish and seduction.

Sené opened her arms to her husband and he stepped into them. Neither of them heard Quashe snarl. Their hands were too busy groping each other, fingers remembering a dance from old forgotten times.

[Laloro took pity on Faru. “Climb onto my back
and I’ll fly you to the Old One.”
Faru climbed on without
complaining about Laloro’s warts.
“You are weak,” Laloro teased. “Worse than a mortal.
The great vain Faru begging ugly Laloro to disease him?”
Laloro raised his trunk and pointed it at Faru as he flew.
“Shall I do it? Shall I put you out of your misery?”
Faru didn’t respond.]

Quashe lifted her snout and shrieked a series of clicks and trills. Teeth bared, she belched. With every belch, a ripple disturbed the surface of the river. As Sené and Na’s tongues found each other’s throats, tasted each other’s salt, Quashe kept belching.

The river waters swirled, and finally folded in on themselves. From the folds, a humongous crocodile surfaced. At the point of Quashe’s finger, it lumbered onto shore, barreling between Sené and Na. Sené screamed, as the creature, paying no heed to her belly, knocked her onto her back.

[Laloro dumped Faru at the entrance to the Old One’s cave.
With his trunk, he tipped the bell to announce their presence.
The Old One’s voice drifted out in irritation.
“Who is it calling so loudly?”
“Oh, honored elder, it is Laloro.
I am dropping Faru here at his request.”
“How rude,” muttered the Old One. He approached
the mouth of his cave slowly. His old gnarled hands
clutched two ancient wooden canes. His long white
cloths trailed behind him in the dirt as he approached at a
snail’s pace. Each of his steps was executed with an
enormous amount of concentration and energy.
“Have you no knowledge of protocol?” the Old One said
when he finally came face to face with Laloro.
Laloro dropped to one knee and
rubbed the pads of his feet together.
“Great one, without whom we’d have no
accordance, great settler of confusing matters,
we are blessed to be in your presence.”
“Yes, child,” said the Old One, rubbing his groin.
“How can I be of service?”]

Still Na had no eyes for Quashe. He leapt onto the crocodile’s back and locked his arms around its neck. The crocodile shook its massive head and Na went flying into a tree. His head thudded against bark. He lost consciousness, and Quashe laughed.

Quashe sprang onto the crocodile’s back and looked down on Sené. As the god searched Sené’s face, river snakes slithered up the riverbank. The snakes slid over the crocodile’s back and settled in coils around Quashe’s arms and waist. Quashe stared without a blink of her reptilian eyes. She stared until the secret to Sené’s power was revealed to her. When she recognized it—the force Sené used to attract Na—Quashe threw her head back and shrieked.

[The Old One wiggled his nose toward
the gourd bowl that rested on the floor near
the cave entrance. Faru didn’t move. Laloro sighed
and dropped a few coins into the bowl. The Old One
sniffed and looked at Laloro disdainfully.
Laloro dropped a few more coins into the bowl.
“So Faru has given away his powers,
and now he’s sick and wants my help.”
“That is correct,” said Laloro, gazing longingly
in the direction of Quashe’s river.
“Why would such a vain god do
such a thing?” asked the Old One.
Laloro blushed. He scratched a patch of dry skin on his
back. It flaked and fell to the grass. The grass wilted.]

“Faru,” Quashe said, recognizing the mark of her brother. She leaned forward and opened her huge crocodile mouth over Sené’s face. A forked tongue flipped from the flat of her mouth and flicked over Sené’s lips. Sené turned her head away. Quashe’s snakes writhed.

“Open,” Quashe demanded. Sené clamped her mouth shut. Quashe released a snake. It slid around Sené’s neck into a tighter and tighter yoke until Sené’s mouth burst open in panic.

Quashe’s tongue wrestled Sené’s. She speared the power Faru had banked in Sené’s body and swallowed it. Pleasure sparked through her divine thighs as she leaned back, satisfied.

[“And you are involved in this matter?”
the Old One asked with certainty.
Laloro dug into the earth with one huge foot.
“I threatened him.”
“What’s that?” asked the Old One.
“I threatened to kill him if he didn’t give me his powers.
He lost the desire trying to hide it from me.”
“Ahh,” said the Old One rubbing his nipples. “You have
created discord among the gods. I believe you should
throw more coins into my gourd.”]

“Now, let us see who Na finds more desirable,” said Quashe, stretching across the crocodile’s back. She sent her snakes slithering over to Na. Each snake curled around a different limb. Together, they pumped blood through his body until Na’s eyelids flickered and he returned to consciousness.

Na’s heart constricted at the sight of Sené trapped beneath reptilian heft. Then Quashe called to him. His gaze leaped from Sené to Quashe. Quashe’s voice yanked all of him into stiff hardness. Quashe shook with clicking laughter and leaned over to confront Sené. “You cannot hold the powers of the gods, ugly one. I should let my crocodile eat you for trying.”

A brief flash of emotion sparked in Na’s eyes, but he remained silent. Every inch of him strained towards Quashe, but entranced or not, he knew the rules—not without Quashe’s permission.

“Stay there,” Quashe barked at him and commanded her crocodile to back off Sené. “You have refused me. I must find something sweet to clean myself of this bitterness.”

[Quashe sat stiffly on her crocodile’s back.
Na’s betrayal pulsed in her memory. The flickering
of Faru’s desire surged through her flesh as
she searched the trees for a few men to ravish.]

Night fell and Sené had not moved. The sound of Na crying forced her awake. She opened her eyes and saw him standing, immobilized, waiting for Quashe’s return. She put her hands over her ears to shut out the noise and the sensation of hand against skin ran through her body like lightning. Her fingers fluttered. She had thought this day’s delight was done—departed with Faru’s gift, but here she was, still shocking herself with sweetness.

Sené ran a finger from her forehead to her chin and shivered. She held her hands before her face. They looked just as they always had: dry, cracked, swollen. Yet today, they had done new things. They had stained themselves with berries, lured a husband away from a goddess, and painted the walls of her dwelling with the juices of her own coming.

[A flapping sound echoed in Quashe’s ears.
A dark figure dove and nipped the dip in her throat.
She glanced back and saw a throng of fruit bats
hovering close. She pressed her human-soft skin—
impregnated with the double sweetness of her and her
brother’s powers—against her crocodile. Her tough
reptilian scales pointed to the sky. Another dark-winged
figure swooped down and broke the skin at her elbow.
Quashe yelled at the top of her lungs.
“Aaaaaaiiiiiiieeeeeeee.”]

Sené rolled onto her side and struggled onto her hands and knees. She crawled over to Na and pressed her cheek against his calves. A bout of dizziness swept through her. She settled herself against the earth and lay curled around Na’s feet.

[“Old One, I must go,” Laloro yelled upon hearing
Quashe’s scream. “Quashe needs me.”
“Yes,” said the Old One. “Go to Quashe and bring her
here, I believe she can help with Faru’s problem.”]

Sené nudged Na’s ankles with her charged hands. Her fingers massaged their way up his calves. She pressed her thumbs into the indentations behind his knees. Tears crept down her face. Her fingers shook. But she kept touching him.

Sené rose on her knees and kneaded Na’s thighs and buttocks. Her hardworking hands drifted up his spine, manipulating immobilized muscles. She spread her fingers over his back and raked her fingernails across his skin. She did not think of pain or pleasure, she wanted only to bring Na back to life.

[Laloro flew in the direction of Quashe’s
screaming. When he reached the meadow,
he could see Quashe’s huge crocodile crowned by
a small mountain of bats. Laloro pointed his trunk
at the bats and showered them with a plague. Bat skin
bubbled and burst into flame. Laloro took a deep breath
and blew the burning creatures from Quashe’s back.
Quashe raised her beautiful crocodile head and
looked up at Laloro, eyes glittering in gratitude.]

Sené stood, her belly brushing against Na’s back. If she closed her eyes, she could feel him quivering, ever so softly. She pinched his shoulders with little bites. Still Na did not move. She walked around to face him and stroked his forehead with thoughtful fingers.

“Come back, husband. Quashe doesn’t care about you.” She caressed his ears. “Na, please, return to me.”

[Quashe grazed Laloro’s warted skin with
her snout and he almost burst from pleasure.
She looked at him with new eyes. What had once
disgusted her was suddenly quite useful.
“I hope . . .” she said in a wavering voice,
“I hope I can call on you again.”
Laloro bowed. “I am at your service always.”]

Sené rubbed her lips against her husband’s. Her tongue darted out and licked Na’s lips. His body gave a slight tremor. She sent her tongue out again, this time to enter Na’s lips, to moisten his dry gums with her saliva. Sené pulled Na’s lips apart with her fingers. Her fingers strained to pry open the barrier of his teeth. It had worked for Faru and Quashe. Why shouldn’t it work for her?

Sené took a deep breath and blew into Na’s throat. She blew the remembered delight of lying together in the grass, her thigh lodged against his crotch. She blew the memories of Na rushing home from the river to hold their new son, of the tickle of Na’s gentle questions about all the things the baby had done that day. She blew all the desire that had been aroused in her after Faru’s kiss. Finally Na began to blink. His tears sprinkled Sené’s face. He worked his lips into a grimace and spoke as if language was unfamiliar to him.

“Sené. Please, forgive. I’m sorry.” He took her callused hand in his and groped her knuckles with his lips.

[Deep in the Old One’s cave, old fingers dribbled
honey in intricate swirling patterns on the floor.
Faru lay, inert at one end of the design. When Laloro
delivered Quashe to the cave, the Old One
sprinkled brother and sister with cinnamon.
“Laloro,” the Old One said, “I am calling on my brothers
to help. Please stay in the corner until they have safely
gone again. You would not want to pay the price if you
should accidentally crush one of them.”
Laloro backed away. The Old One rested one of his canes
against his hip and pulled a tiny snail’s shell from the
folds of his cloth. He blew out a thin, shrill sound, and a
parade of snails slowly crawled into the room. The Old
One took the lead, and his brothers followed, treading a
circle around Quashe and Faru. The pace was slow, but
the Old One’s powers were potent. With each shuffle of
his feet, each undulation of his snail brothers’ bodies,
Quashe’s wounds healed. Once the Old One and his
brothers completed a full revolution, Faru’s powers
slipped from Quashe’s body and returned to his.]

Sené and Na supported each other all the way home. Na stroked Sené’s arms. Sené squeezed Na’s waist. Na pulled Sené up the cliff when her belly became an obstacle to climbing. At the top of the cliff, Sené turned away from home, walking in the direction of Na’s mother’s dwelling.

“Sené, sweet wife, where are you going?”

“To get the children, Na. Did you not leave them with your mother?”

Na shuddered at Sené’s unspoken words. Her intonation reminded him that just that morning he had abandoned her and their children in favor of Quashe’s delights.

He took Sené’s hand. “They are safe with mother, let us go home and be new together.”

The cave was spilling over with the scent of Sené’s juices. Sené reached into the hanging basket and grabbed an armful of twigs. She dumped them onto the fire pile and kneeled to light a fire. Na stopped her. With the scent of her vibrating in his chest, he lifted her to her feet. Trembling, as if this were indeed new, he pulled her to the mats. With his free hand, he tipped two mats to the floor and unrolled them with his foot.

[Laloro flew both Quashe and her crocodile to the river
on his great diseased back. Laloro watched as Quashe
stepped into the river and the water swirled around her.
Quashe paused. “Will you be waiting there for me?
Perhaps we can feed together when I rise.”
Laloro could not speak. Quashe lifted her tail and
slapped it hard against the water’s surface.
Drops of water splashed Laloro’s face. He lifted
his trunk and trumpeted a loud “Yes!”]

Na kneeled before Sené; he parted her cloth and stroked her bare belly. He pushed his chin between her thighs and kissed her moistness. Sené pulled Na’s head away from her body and looked into his eyes. There was a hard seed-thought hiding out in Sené’s newly juicy body, a dry little nugget of doubt that questioned Na, questioned her own sanity, suggested she had better use for her time than dabbling in fantasy—she and Na would never again be one. But the same scent that filled Na’s nose seeped into Sené’s pores. It drowned that dry little thought and lured Sené into her husband’s embrace.

[Faru, Faru bounding up the cliff.
Rocks flew away from Faru’s angry hooves
as he rushed towards Sené and Na’s cave. Desire
was once again his, but Faru was not satisfied. He could
see the scar he intended to rip across Sené’s face.
He would not kill her, he would do worse—he would
kill anything desirable about her. Faru’s goat eyes
flashed when he reached the entrance of Sené’s home.
He reared up on his hind legs, ready to attack.
But neither Sené nor Na saw him. They saw only
the stretches of each other’s skin.
Faru’s anger turned to wonder. How could they
be touching each other in that way? Faru dropped down to
all four hooves. How could Sené be calling up such desire
from Na? He suddenly felt as weak as Laloro accused him
of being. He listened to the power of desire pounding in
his blood. The same power Sené had held, yet she had
not died when it was taken from her. She was moving,
breathing, calling forth passion without Faru’s magic.
Faru, Faru pausing for the truth.
A moth brushed against Faru’s ear. He turned away from
Sené and Na. Behind him a pack of flying night creatures
swarmed. Faru laughed and went bounding up the cliff
towards the bush. The flying things brushed against his
skin, bursting with desire. He leaped and twisted with his
throng of admirers. Sené and Na were vague forms,
coupling mysteriously on the periphery of his memory.
Faru sprang to the top of the cliff, and ecstasy exploded
in his chest. He heard the hoarse groans of bush animals
bellowing in heat. It seemed as if the entire night was
singing a love song to him. Faru parted his godly
lips and let out a triumphant yell.
Faru, Faru running through the bush.]

©Copyright © 2004 by Kiini Ibura Salaam. Originally published in Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, edited by Sheree R. Thomas. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kiini Ibura Salaam is a writer, painter, and traveler from New Orleans, Louisiana. Her work is rooted in eroticism, speculative events, women’s perspectives, and artistic freedom. She has been widely published and anthologized in such publications as the Dark Matter, Mojo: Conjure Stories, and Colonize This! anthologies, as well as Essence, Utne Reader, and Ms. magazines. She is the author of two short story collections: Ancient, Ancient—winner of the 2012 James Tiptree, Jr. award, and When the World Wounds. Her micro-essays on writing can be found in ebook format as well as online at www.kiiniibura.com.

EXCERPT: The Future of Another Timeline (Tor Books)

Annalee Newitz | 3476 words

“A revolution is happening in speculative fiction, and Annalee Newitz is leading the vanguard.”—Wil Wheaton

From Annalee Newitz, founding editor of io9, comes a story of time travel, murder, and the lengths we’ll go to protect the ones we love.

1992: After a confrontation at a riot grrl concert, seventeen-year-old Beth finds herself in a car with her friend’s abusive boyfriend dead in the backseat, agreeing to help her friends hide the body. This murder sets Beth and her friends on a path of escalating violence and vengeance as they realize many other young women in the world need protecting too.

2022: Determined to use time travel to create a safer future, Tess has dedicated her life to visiting key moments in history and fighting for change. But rewriting the timeline isn’t as simple as editing one person or event. And just when Tess believes she’s found a way to make an edit that actually sticks, she encounters a group of dangerous travelers bent on stopping her at any cost.

Tess and Beth’s lives intertwine as war breaks out across the timeline–a war that threatens to destroy time travel and leave only a small group of elites with the power to shape the past, present, and future. Against the vast and intricate forces of history and humanity, is it possible for a single person’s actions to echo throughout the timeline?

Coming September 24, 2019 from Tor Books.

Chapter 1: Tess

Irvine, Alta California (1992 CE)

Drums beat in the distance like an amplified pulse. People streamed over the dirt road, leather boots laced to their knees, eyes ringed in kohl, ears and lips studded with precious metals. Some gathered in an open square below the steep path to the amphitheater, making a bonfire out of objects stolen from their enemies. The smoke reeked of something ancient and horrific; materials far older than humanity were burning. A rusty sunset painted everyone in blood, and shrieks around the flames mixed with faraway chanting.

It could have been Rome under Nero. It could have been Samarkand when the Sogdians fled. It could have been Attaturk’s new Istanbul, or a feast day in Chaco Canyon. The technologies were industrial, neolithic, and medieval. The screams were geochronologically neutral.

I paused, smelling the toxins, watching a woman with jet-black lips and blue hair pretend to eat a spider. One of her companions laughed. “Michelle, you are so gross! This isn’t an Ozzy concert!” They paused at the ticket booths to flip off the Vice Fighters, a gang of conservative protesters waving signs covered in Bible quotes. Some of them were burning CDs in a garbage can, and the stench of melting plastic formed a noxious bubble around their demonstration.

The Machine had not delivered me to an ancient war, nor to an anti-imperialist celebration. I was at Irvine Meadows Amphitheater in 1992, deep in the heart of Orange County, Alta California. Soon I’d be seeing one of the greatest punk bands of the decade. But I wasn’t here for history tourism. Somewhere in this rowdy concert crowd, a dangerous conspiracy was unfolding. I needed to find out who was behind it. If these bastards succeeded, they would destroy time travel, locking us into one version of history forever.

• • • •

I bought a lawn seat and raced up the winding pedestrian walkway to the seating area, lurid with stadium lights. The theater was relatively small and open to the sky, with a steep grade of loge seats above the prized orchestra section next to the stage. The lawn formed a green semi-circle above it all, pocked with mud puddles and beer cans. Still, even up here, the air vibrated with anticipation for the headliner. Spotlights sent a cluster of beams racing around the stage.

Grape Ape’s lead singer Glorious Garcia strutted out alone, sequins on her tattered skirt shimmering in the glare. She let out a furious howl. “HOLA BITCHES! IF ANYONE CALLED YOU A SLUT TODAY, SAY IT WITH ME! SLUT SLUT SLUT!” All around me, women joined the chant. They wore battered combat boots, shredded jeans, and wrecked dresses. They had tattoos and black nail polish and looked like warrior queens from another planet. Tangled hair flashed in every possible artificial color. “YOU SLUTS ARE BEAUTIFUL!” Glorious fisted the air and aimed her mic at the crowd, still chanting, “SLUT SLUT SLUT!” Back when I went to this concert for the first time, I was an angry 16-year-old with too many piercings for suburbia, wearing a military jacket over a 1950s dress.

Now I was 47 on the books, 55 with travel time. My eyes flicked to the things I never would have seen back then. Everyone looked so scrubbed and affluent. Our rebel fashions were cobbled together from the expensive stuff we’d seen in some New York Times story about grunge. But what really jolted me was the way people occupied themselves as they waited for the music to start. Nobody was texting or taking selfies. And without phones, people didn’t know what to do with their eyes. I didn’t either. I watched a guy in a Dead Kennedys shirt urging a hip flask on a woman who was already so drunk she could barely stand in her platform creepers. She stumbled against him, swigging, and he gave a thumbs-up sign to his pal. The punk scene, once my inspiration, now looked like a bunch of future bankers and tech executives learning how to harass women.

The rest of the band charged on stage, Maricela Hernandez’ guitar squealing over the clatter of drums and bass fuzz. Cigarette smoke and sound merged into a throbbing haze around us. From my distant perch, Glorious was a tiny figure with the biggest voice in the world.

“THIS IS A SONG ABOUT THE GIRLS FROM MEXICO WHO ARE PICKING FRUIT IN YOUR IRVINE COMPANY FARMS! LET’S RIP DOWN THE FUCKING BORDER NET AND STOP THE KILLING!”

That took me back. In 1991, a huge group of refugees fleeing Mexico had drowned in the Gulf of California, just as they’d almost reached the safety of U.S. soil in Baja. They’d gotten tangled in offshore nets the Border Patrol set up to stop illegal immigrants.

The music tore through me until it merged with muscle and bone. I had a job to do, but I couldn’t move. Grape Ape was the only thing here that hadn’t been warped by my disillusionment. They still had the power to replace my cynicism with a feeling that careened between hope and outrage. Strobe lights churned the darkness, and the audience frenzy reached beyond fandom, struggling toward something else. Something revolutionary.

Then I felt a broad hand on my upper arm, squeezing just a little too hard, and a large male body pressed against my back. I tried to elbow him and wriggle away, but the still-invisible stranger held me in place. He leaned down to whisper-yell in my ear, blotting out the music. “I know you must have many daughters at your age, and you are worried about their future.” His voice was smooth, and his warm breath smelled like lavender and mint. With his free hand, he started massaging my neck as he continued to grip my arm. “That’s why you come to places like this. To find a better way for women. We want that too. Maybe you’ll look past your prejudice against men and read our zine.”

At last he released me and I whirled to face him. He pulled his zine from a rumpled Kinkos bag. Grainy, xeroxed images of women in chains adorned the cover, and letters torn from magazines spelled out the title: COLLEGE IS A LIE. Flipping through the pages of 10-point courier font and smeary cartoons, I scanned a few typical punk rants against suburban brainwashing: College teaches conformity, turns you into a corporate drone, destroys true art, blah blah blah. But there was a weird strand of gender politics in it. Over and over, the anonymous authors preached that college “destroys feminine freedoms inherited from our ancestors on the plains of Africa” and “is anti-uterus.” I scanned a paragraph:

Women are naturally empathic, and college tortures them with artificial rationality. Millions of years of evolution have led men to thrive in the toolmaking worlds of science and politics, and women to become queens of emotional expression and the nurturing arts. College denies this biological reality, which is why so many women feel bad about themselves. But it doesn’t have to be that way! Fuck college! It’s time for liberation!

The entire zine was about why women should drop out of college. I looked sharply at the man, a nasty retort on my tongue, but his face stole my words. It couldn’t be. I would never forget those features, so perfectly formed it was as if he’d been grown in a vat full of men’s magazines. I’d last seen him in 1880, at a lecture on suppressing vice in New York City. He was one of the young men clustered around Anthony Comstock, lapping up the famous moral crusader’s invective about the evils of birth control and abortion. Later, at the protest, he’d given me a beautiful smile before punching me in the chest. Gasping for air, I’d dismissed him as one of the many YMCA boys under Comstock’s spell. Now it appeared he was something more—a traveler. I feigned interest in the zine and shot another glance at him. The man might be a few years younger than he’d been in 1880, so maybe this was his first time meeting me. His blonde hair was currently spiked in an embarrassing imitation of Billy Idol.

He took my silence as an opening, and leaned closer again, touching my shoulder. “I can tell you don’t quite understand, but you’re intrigued. My friends and I are here to help if you need us.” He gestured to a few other men, all wearing black armbands around their biceps, handing out zines to other women in the crowd. Despite the distraction of Grape Ape on stage below, they’d managed to get quite a few people to take one. Fear filled my guts with ice. This guy and his buddies were planting ideas, playing a long game. Trying to eliminate choices for these women in the future. It was exactly the kind of thing a traveler would do if he wanted to edit the timeline.

I was looking for anti-travel activists, people who wanted to shut down the Machines. It was hardly the kind of political stance a traveler would take. But everything about this guy was off. So I followed at a safe distance, watching him whisper in women’s ears, pointing them away from one of their few pathways to power. Eventually, at the very edge of the loge section, the black armband men came together. I stood nearby and bummed a cigarette from an old crusty punk, catching snatches of the traveler’s conversation.

“I think we converted a few today. Good work.” That was the Billy Idol guy, the one I’d seen over a century ago in Comstock’s orbit.

“Do you think we’ll be able to make the edit before time stops?” another man asked.

“We may need to go back a century.”

“How long until we have our rights back? This is taking too long. I think we should hit the Machines now.”

The crowd began to roar, burying their voices.

A terrifying hypothesis coalesced in my mind. The only thing that might drive a traveler to lock the timeline would be if he wanted to make a final, lasting edit that could not be undone. I looked at the zine again. It was exactly the kind of propaganda that Comstockers would use to revert the edits made by people like me and my colleagues in the Daughters of Harriet.

The Daughters often debated whether we were working directly against another group. Even when it seemed like we made significant progress in the past, the present remained stubbornly unchanged. But we had no evidence of oppositional reverts, other than our constant frustration. It was like we were fighting with ghosts.

Now the ghosts had become men.

The Comstocker was delivering a final rallying speech. He gestured at the loge section. “This is what happens when men become victims. But once we take control of the Machine, nobody will remember this world.”

At that moment he looked over and saw me listening. His face went ugly and asymmetrical: he’d recognized me, and realized I wasn’t a temporal local.

“Get her! She’s one of them!” He pointed, and four men with black armbands and pale skin had eyes on me.

I took off running, edging my way past the security guards, aiming for the mosh pit. Grape Ape roared through a song I couldn’t hear over the thump of blood in my ears. My momentum was swallowed by a swell of bodies, diverting our chase into a chaotic circle of flailing limbs. Women who smelled like cloves and disintegrating nylon rammed into us. The Billy Idol guy was so close that I could see the acid wash streaks in his jeans when he grabbed me by the collar. “Get your hands off me!” I screamed. “I have friends at the Chronology Academy, and I guarantee they won’t take kindly to the way you’re trying to change the timeline with your shitty Comstocker zine. They’ll send you back to your home time and you’ll never travel again.” On stage, Maricela shredded a solo. I hoped he believed me, because there was no guarantee the Chronology Academy would agree that he’d violated regulations. But the threat worked. He released me with a sneer.

“You misandrist bitch!” He was still close enough that I could smell his strangely sweet breath again. “You and your sisters are a genetic dead end. Next time I see you downstream, I’ll make sure you’re punished for spreading lewdness and vice.” Then he shoved me into a young woman who bounced away and smashed back into him with a maniacal cackle. Screeching and spinning with her arms out, she battered the Comstocker over and over until he fought his way out of the mosh pit and disappeared into the crowd. Good riddance—at least for now. I moved with the circle, bumped and bruised and safe inside its performative violence. Bursts of light from the stage illuminated the Comstocker rounding up his black armband pals and heading for the exit. Hopefully I’d scared them a little, though it had been stupid to reveal myself like that.

At least I’d confirmed Berenice’s report at the last Daughters of Harriet meeting. She’d traveled to early 1992 in Los Angeles, gathering data at ground zero for the anti-travel movement. One of her sources said he’d met some extremists hanging around in the alternative music scene. I suggested this concert would be a good place to look for them. This particular Grape Ape show had been famously controversial, called out by the Vice Fighters as a gateway to hell and by Rolling Stone as the most anticipated show of spring. Everyone would be here, especially if they considered themselves radicals.

Of course, I neglected to tell the Daughters that my younger self had been at the concert too. They never would have agreed to send me if I’d mentioned that little detail. Nobody knew what happened to travelers who met their younger selves; it was both illegal and so morally offensive that most scholars avoided the topic. The only detailed description came from a medieval manuscript about the life of an old, impoverished traveler who took the Machine back 30 years to advise himself to save money. When he returned to his present, the traveler found that his house had become a beautiful mansion. But then his bones began to break themselves, and he was plagued by attacks from a cloud of tiny demons that flew around his head unceasingly.

I wasn’t worried about demonic fantasies. They were a staple of medieval manuscripts, along with women giving birth to monsters. I was thinking about evidence-based threats to the timeline, our only timeline, whose natural stability emerged from perpetual revision.

The woman who’d harried the Comstocker earlier was spinning back toward me, and my stomach dropped. I’d been too rattled to recognize her before. But now I could clearly recognize Heather, one of my friends from high school. She barked another one of her crazy laughs, and I could see the Wonder Woman Returns t-shirt clearly under the lacy bodice of her dress. We’d all been obsessed with the Tim Burton Wonder Woman movies in high school, with their badass heroine in fishnets and leather.

I looked around in a panic. Was I here too? I thought I’d been in the loge section during the concert, which was why I’d avoided that area. But my recollections of tonight were murky. Maybe that was the problem. My younger self seemed so distant that I’d figured—stupidly—it would be easy to avoid her. I kept searching for my lost self until the spotlights poured illumination across the steeply angled seats and I caught a brief glimpse of her—me—with my two best friends at the time. Soojin was on my right, frowning with concentration as she studied Maricela’s fingering technique. And there, on my left, was the person who had been my best friend since we were little kids. The two of us were scream-singing along with Glorious Garcia, fists in the air. Seeing us from a distance, I realized how our closeness had even manifested in dressing like each other. We wore the same trashed vintage dresses and combat boots. People were always mistaking us for sisters back then, which wasn’t far from the truth. We were angry riot grrl clones, except for the hair.

A pasty white boy grabbed Heather roughly and she stumbled toward him, a red lipstick smile bright in her brown face. The boy’s right ear was crusted with safety pins and dried blood. Piercing injury. Very punk rock.

What was his name? A jagged shard of imagery was lodged in my mind, painful and opaque. Oh fuck. The slurry of psychological muck that usually buried my high school memories was gone, leaving behind a crisp picture of what that kid’s face would look like in three hours, when it was covered in blood. I had to intervene. If I didn’t, something horrific was going to happen. Many horrific things. And they would all lead, in the end, to a broken and beloved body, robbed of the consciousness that hurled it off a bridge.

But there was still a chance I could make this right. I muscled my way out of the orchestra section, away from Heather’s laugh and my own age-reversed face, back down the path to the parking lot. Passing the merch table, I felt a painful twist of nostalgia as I read Grape Ape’s once-familiar slogans: MAKE BAJA MEXICAN AGAIN! SUCK MY PLASTIC DICK! SLUTS OF THE WORLD UNITE! At last I reached my rental car. I’d made it out before the encore, which should give me enough time to make an edit. As I turned the key in the ignition, recklessness oozed into me. Had I really come back because of Berenice’s report, or had I been hoping subconsciously for something like this to happen? Some excuse to intervene in my own past?

I wished I could remember my favorite shortcut from 38 years ago, through Irvine’s palimpsest of malls, churches, and walled subdivisions. I’d have to brave traffic. Merging on the 405 freeway, I slowed down and considered what the hell I was doing. The Daughters of Harriet were waiting for me back in 2022, and I needed to tell them about the Comstockers. I should be headed back to the Machine. But this was an emergency. I had to save that boy’s life.

Copyright © 2019 by Annalee Newitz. Excerpted from The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz. 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

Annalee Newitz writes about science, pop culture, and the future. She’s the editor in chief of io9.com, a publication that covers science and science fiction, and has over ten million readers every month. She’s the author of Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (Doubleday and Anchor), which was nominated for a 2013 LA Times book prize. She’s also published in Wired, The Smithsonian Magazine, The Washington Post, 2600, New Scientist, Technology Review, Popular Science, Discover and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. She’s co-editor of the essay collection She’s Such A Geek (Seal Press), and author of Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (Duke University Press). Formerly, she was a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a lecturer in American Studies at UC Berkeley. She was the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT, and has a Ph.D. in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley.

Book Reviews: September 2019

Arley Sorg | 1850 words

Gamechanger
L.X. Beckett
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9781250165268
Tor, September 2019, 576 pgs

After a startling opening, Gamechanger engages the reader while syncretizing fresh takes on a ton of familiar SFnal ideas. AIs, for example; ecological disaster; the evolution of social media; futuristic economies—all topics covered in numerous stories, but this novel meticulously endows each previously seen SFnal concept with some new element or innovation, and then weaves them together into a strong, seamless narrative. The effect: As a composed whole, Gamechanger breathes new life to current conversations, while building a cohesive and quite plausible vision of the future.

Cherub Whiting (aka Rubi) is a VR sports star turned lawyer who specializes in helping troubled individuals, especially the kinds that many might find toxic or abrasive or just downright unpleasant. A new client is referred to Rubi by her (sort-of therapist) father: Luciano Pox (aka Luce). Luce, it turns out, is more unpleasant than most. In a future where the equivalent of “follows” and “likes” and so on can directly impact not only one’s social station but one’s financial well-being, Luce is in very deep trouble. Rubi travels to Paris to meet Luce in person—a rarity in this vision of the future, as not everyone can justify, let alone afford, burning jet fuel—but Luce misses their first meeting. In doing so, he also dodges the authorities, who seem to think he’s some kind of terrorist. Meanwhile, Luce tells Rubi’s dad that he’s being messed with, manipulated, or worse. A deeper mystery starts to develop, the plot thickens, and after an attack at a park, the stakes get serious.

Cool concepts and ideas abound, and most are the kind you can actually see coming true. VR sports stars, apps for managing health and happiness, virtual parties, post-ecological disaster economies, and so on. The story delves a lot into VR bits, which many readers will find fascinating and fun. Settings (especially real ones but also VR ones) are crisp and interesting, navigated by characters who are sharp and believable, and about as messed up (read: complex) as you might want them to be. But this isn’t a fluffy “check out my cool ideas!” kind of book. It’s got an interesting plot for a spine (despite a few jarring transitions) and tackles mental health, social conventions, identity, ecological technology, and much more.

Lots of little linguistic details sparkle through the read, the kind of cool lingo which anyone fluent in social media or gaming can easily interpret from context; the kind of stuff that makes you want to start using them with your friends—similar to the effect of 1971’s cinematic A Clockwork Orange, which had people calling each other droogs. The drawback might be that readers completely unfamiliar with social media, gaming, and similar current popular cultural elements could struggle, or at least stutter a bit through the read. But a beginner’s familiarity is enough to be delighted by these embellishments. In fact, I fully expect that if my friends read this book, we’ll end up using some of these terms.

While many readers will relish the tech, or the jabs at current political situations, or the kind-of-amazing futurist vision, the heart of the story is really people (even if some people may be AIs). The way people live in and interact with this future, the way they relate to each other, the way they raise families, the way they love; the stresses and struggles of living and actually making it or, for that matter, just surviving.

Gamechanger is a science fiction book with a lot going on, chock full of ideas to chew on, and can satisfy readers who love futurist fiction on that level. But it’s also a book with heart.

Sisters of the Vast Black
Lina Rather
Trade Paperpack / Ebook
ISBN: 9781250260253
Tor.com publishing, October 2019, 176 pgs

This book, simply put, is just so thoroughly interesting. In a smooth narrative, characters are quickly but effectively drawn, characters who prove to be unexpected, but believable and downright fascinating. Story events are captivating, story problems are approached from a slightly different angle, and while some plot points will likely be guessed at, others will surprise the reader; yet they all remain in line with the setup. The author plays fair with the reader, while presenting ideas and thoughts and moments which feel unique and unusual.

Far in the future, a group of nuns who travel to colony planets on missions of mercy receive a request: three marriages and a baptism. This comes at a time when the nuns are deadlocked on an important philosophical debate, a decision which has to be made, one which may drastically affect all of them; and, perhaps far worse, soon after the request, news arrives that a new priest has been assigned to them. Politics unfold, personal conflicts rise, interpersonal drama digs deeper, and, oh yes, plagues.

Okay. Nuns in space. What comes to mind is a lot of pulp, fun images: nuns firing massive laser cannons, their habits kind of floating, an angry howl captured by their bubble space helmets. Sure; but actually, not at all. The nuns in Sisters of the Vast Black are wonderful characters, closer to real people, deliberately avoiding archetypes. Well-fleshed out despite the short length, and nicely complex. They share quarters inside a living ship—and I am dying to explain to you all about the ship, but it’s so cool that it needs to be left out. You’ve seen concepts of living ships before, but the nuances here, the details make the experience of the read special. Unlike many a science fiction story, where characters and narrative are just thin excuses to dapple pages in gleaming science fictional ideas, the SF here is grounded, relevant to plot and character, important beyond just coolness, yet still evoking that sense of wonder we crave.

We ride with the nuns as they grapple with themselves, with each other, and with fundamental concepts which are, when you step back and look at it, unavoidable in the situations in which they live. Meanwhile, in deft strokes, world-building elements are filled out: revolutions, war, movements within the church, and it all gets brought to bear as meaningful and relevant to the story at hand. Plus: a potential conspiracy! Simply put, it’s all well thought out and well done.

The Twisted Ones
T. Kingfisher
Hardcover / Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9781534429574
Saga, October 2019, 400 pgs

You might have bad relatives, but not like Mouse. When Mouse’s dad asks her to deal with her recently deceased grandmother’s house, Mouse packs up her dog Bongo (who is perhaps the most important character in the story) and heads out to the middle-of-nowhere America. She discovers that not only was grandma an astonishingly expert misanthrope, but she dual-classed in hoarder. Worse, after a hard day’s labor, as soon as Mouse attempts to settle in amidst the stacks of papers, overfilled drawers, and much, much more, things start to get strange.

The Twisted Ones, for the most part, opens with classic horror structure, starting out with that standard type of horror story mystery: What are those noises, what are those things running through the woods, just what were grandma and her old lover Cotgrave up to, anyways? The tone is conversational, Mouse speaking directly to the reader. Inevitably Mouse (properly: Melissa, but Mouse works better) is lured in to investigate these mysterious things, these creepy things which are disrupting her dismantling of grandma’s collections.

Mouse as POV heroine is clever, likeable, and funny. Her storytelling is entertaining; also, we feel for her predicament. Her dog is absolutely loveable. In fact, I thought at times of Dean Koontz’s One Door Away From Heaven, in which the dog was a POV character and central to the plot. If I had one complaint, it might be that Bongo drives the story a smidge too much for my taste. Nonetheless, all the side characters are interesting and cool and the interactions between characters are great examples of solid story driven by good dialogue.

As the story progresses, and as we meet monsters and delve into the history of the house and its people, the text veers into weird fiction territory. Horror moods meet “weird genre” moods and the resulting effect is absolutely lovely. But we’re not done. Deeper yet into the narrative we go, and the story goes farther, all the way into “dark fairy tale” if anything, not to mention stories within stories within stories. Okay—It’s a lot. But it all works together and it works together well. Moreover, tones shift where they should and narrative styles are varied where they should be, making the phases of the story work even better.

Some of the reveals are obvious and some are interesting treats. The creatures are intriguing and innovative in delightful ways. The tale is very visual, and effectively so. There are also layers of subtext at play, if I’m not wrong, not all of which I entirely peeled back. And for readers far more erudite than I, it’s built on classic narratives, and will likely be even more layered and interesting for it.

While being an expertly crafted and structured piece, for me, it’s really the characters and the voice which make this story work so well. I described the narrative voice and the overall style to a friend, who said, “Yep, sounds like the Kingfisher thing.” I honestly felt like I’ve been missing out.

As horror goes, I am not the type to lie to you: This book may scare the easily susceptible, the folks who shiver at the thought of scratches outside the second story window at night, or shudder at the suggestion of some creature limping through the woods just beyond the light. For seasoned, hard-hearted horror readers (such as myself) it’s not scary at all, but it’s still a whole lotta fun, a whole lotta interesting, and a horror-wonder-filled read. It’s deceptively elegant and kind of beautiful and Kingfisher makes it look easy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arley Sorg grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado. He studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, and usually writes in local coffee shops. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he is an assistant editor at Locus Magazine. He’s soldering together a novel, has thrown a few short stories into orbit, and hopes to launch more.

Media Reviews: September 2019

Christopher East | 2371 words

The Twilight Zone
Created by Rod Serling
Produced by CBS Television Studios, Monkeypaw Productions, and Genre Films
Season one released April 2019

Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone is seminal genre TV. Its legacy looms over modern SF and fantasy, a background radiation of ideas, style, theme, and invention which has influenced imaginative storytelling for well over half a century. The show’s initial run ended in 1964, but the evocative Serling monologues, memorable stories, and unsettling twists of The Twilight Zone have lived on in pop culture’s imagination ever since. It even came back to life in the 1980s, when a notorious feature film, a TV revival, and a pretty great speculative fiction magazine bore its name. But for a while, the anthology series was a tough sell, and The Twilight Zone struggled to find new traction.

The TV landscape has changed, however, and with it so may the plight of The Twilight Zone, recently resurrected by CBS All Access. Developed by Simon Kinberg, Jordan Peele, and Marco Ramirez, this new revival may be built to last. A new media landscape once again favorable to the anthology series certainly helps its case, and if the first season is any guide, the right people seem to be in charge. Peele, in particular, seems like perfect casting; not only have his films Get Out and Us brought new polish and political insight to cinematic spec-fic, but his narration reveals him to be a convincing stand-in for the iconic Serling.

The original Twilight Zone was often at its best when serving as a troubled reflection of its era. The new series, understanding this point, similarly tailors itself to the unnerving sociopolitical reality of 2019. While the results are uneven, they’re also uniformly well produced and absorbing. The opening episode, “The Comedian,” is fairly representative, the tale of a struggling comic (Kumail Nanjiani) whose chance encounter with a stand-up legend (Tracy Morgan) gives him the key to turning his career around. That key? Putting more of himself into the act—which comes at a cost. Although it feels padded and the comedy isn’t terribly convincing, “The Comedian” has the feel of classic TZ, a decent deal-with-the-devil story that doubles as scathing commentary about unmitigated vitriol in the internet attention economy.

If “The Comedian” is a modest opening success, the next pair of episodes really help the show find its legs. “Nightmare at 30,000 Feet” is not a remake of the famous William Shatner episode later rebooted for Twilight Zone: The Movie, but it is an inspired homage, featuring Adam Scott as a reporter with a troubled past. On a flight from Washington to Tel Aviv, he discovers a podcast—from the future?—that predicts the flight’s doom. This episode doesn’t stick the landing, adding an extraneous stinger, but the execution is otherwise exceptional, and there’s cutting political subtext about the disturbing indignities of modern, post-9/11 air travel: the security theater, the fear of the other, the death of civility. “Replay” has an even stronger political message. Nina Harrison (Sanaa Lathan), while driving her son Dorian (Damson Idris) to his first day of school at a historically black college, discovers her old camcorder can rewind time. This becomes a crucial tool in her arsenal when a racist cop stalks them, forcing numerous “resets” to navigate a safe path to their destination. Even with occasionally obvious moments, “Replay” is a timely and unsettling hour about the undying cycles of American racism.

It’s impossible to reflect on the national zeitgeist without addressing the elephant in the room: Donald Trump. Sorry to bring him up, but the next two episodes do precisely that, with decidedly different results. The more subtle episodes is “A Traveler,” which takes us to rural Alaska, where a blowhard sheriff (Greg Kinnear) holds court during his annual Christmas party. The party goes sideways when his deputy (Marika Sila) finds a mysterious stranger (Steven Yeun) locked in one of the cells. The stranger is inexplicably omniscient, and turns the town on its ear by manipulating the citizens with his knowledge. “A Traveler” is an engaging cautionary tale, cleverly translating current events into fiction—in this case, the Russian disinformation campaign to disrupt American politics. By comparison, “The Wunderkind” is a shrill, on-the-nose metaphor that wastes John Cho and Allison Tolman in the tale of an opportunistic campaign manager (Cho) who undertakes to get an eleven-year-old boy elected president. The results, as one might expect, are a “huge disaster.” It’s a one-note joke that might have been funny if it hadn’t already happened.

“Six Degrees of Freedom” stands out primarily for being less politically pungent than the rest of the season. It’s an effective bottle show about the close-knit crew of a Mars expedition whose mission takes on new levels of psychological weight when catastrophe strikes the Earth during takeoff. If this one’s themes are a smidge weaker, it offers interesting reflections on reality and belief, and features fine ensemble work from DeWanda Wise, Jessica Williams, Jefferson White, Lucinda Dryzek, and Jonathan Whitesell.

The season returns to characteristically blunt cultural metaphor with “Not All Men,” perhaps the season’s most effective blend of old-school Twilight Zone concept with ripped-from-the-headlines commentary. A relationship between a young woman (Taissa Farmiga) and her co-worker (Luke Kirby) veers into nightmare territory when a meteor shower unlocks a plague of violent misogyny across the town. The messaging here is so on-the-nose it’s practically a nostril, but it’s still a gut-punch of relevant horror that benefits from its stellar cast, which also includes Rhea Seehorn and Ike Barinholtz. “Point of Origin” works a nifty genre spin onto another grim modern circumstance, American xenophobia. Ginnifer Goodwin stars as a coddled one-percenter who is shocked when her maid is hauled off by immigration officials—but even more so when she’s taken off for deportation herself. Goodwin is terrific here, and if this one’s also on the more obvious side, it’s no less compelling for it. Alas, though “The Blue Scorpion” is more politically subtle than these other episodes, it doesn’t manage to pack the same punch. A professor (Chris O’Dowd) is shocked when his pacifist, bohemian father commits suicide with a handgun—until the pistol comes into his possession, spiraling him into madness. Gun control is a worthy target for the new TZ’s brand of chilling commentary, but this one falls flat.

The inaugural season concludes with “Blurryman,” and it’s a peculiar send-off—a clumsy but strangely apt metafiction about a writer for The Twilight Zone (Zazie Beetz) who starts to notice a strange, blurry figure invading the scenes of her episode. Despite some amusing flourishes, the metafictional aspects don’t entirely connect, and the resolution is predictable, but “Blurryman” works simply by feeling true to The Twilight Zone—a simple, loving homage.

The new Twilight Zone has its ups and downs. Its commitment to tackling important political issues occasionally leads it to use a hammer when tweezers would do. But overall, I think it’s a worthy revival: well produced, intelligent, diversely cast, and most of all confident in its voice, which successfully blends the classic charms of its source material with the strident political tensions of the modern era.

Black Mirror
Created by Charlie Brooker
Produced by House of Tomorrow, Netflix
Black Mirror: Bandersnatch released December 2018
Season five released June 2019

Speaking of genre anthologies, one of the shows that paved the way for The Twilight Zone’s recent resurgence is still going strong: Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker’s scathing grab bag of cautionary futurism. When I last wrote up this show for Lightspeed (bit.ly/2M7vfsO), I had it pegged as one of science fiction’s best-ever shows. What’s come out since hasn’t disabused me of that position, although the show has transitioned into a new phase. To many viewers, one of its major drawbacks was built right into its thematic premise: the dark side of technology. But season three’s “San Junipero,” which redirected the show’s bleak mission to a more hopeful place, was so well received that subsequent years have infused the show with more tonal variety. Season four (reviewed at bit.ly/2K9KdMn), for example, provides the wildly entertaining “USS Callister,” in which a creepy VR-gaming CTO (Jesse Plemons) kidnaps digital copies of his co-workers and traps them in his own idealized Star Trek scenario. There’s a deeply icky concept at its core—pure Black Mirror—but it also has a quirky sense of humor and a hopeful turn. Meanwhile, “Hang the DJ” rekindles some of the romantic hope of “San Junipero” in a story about a society where dating is rigidly controlled—but with a benevolent, greater purpose. These episodes don’t match their predecessors for raw impact, but they do introduce needed lightness and unpredictability to an otherwise grim bag of tricks.

This transition to a “softer” Black Mirror continues in its recent fifth season, which still feels true to the concept but is much less bleak. “Striking Vipers” opens the year, and it might be viewed as the third act of a thematic trilogy with “San Junipero” and “Hang the DJ.” It stars Anthony Mackie and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as estranged buddies who reconnect years later, rekindling their lapsed bond through an immersive video game . . . which takes their friendship in unexpected new directions. While it comments on dark issues such as online addiction and toxic masculinity, it also stirs in hopeful themes about the need for communication in relationships. The video game sequences are also nicely playful, with sparring avatars Pom Klementieff and Ludi Lin adding zippy, light-hearted flavor to their scenes. Overall, it’s a thoughtful, interesting hour with appealing layers.

By comparison, “Smithereens” is dark, dark stuff in the true Black Mirror tradition. This one, about a troubled Uber driver (Andrew Scott) with a hidden agenda, reminded me of season three’s fast-paced “Shut Up and Dance,” a similarly gripping, well-executed escalation that leads to a mundane destination. But I still quite liked this one for the intensely human performances from Scott and Damson Idris, the subtle depiction of the poorly regulated power of big tech, and its commentary about the insidious underside of social media.

The season wraps with “Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too,” an oddball mash-up of loopy comic tone and nasty criticism of unhealthy media conditioning. Angourie Rice plays Rachel, an impressionable teen with an epic girl crush on pop sensation Ashley O (Miley Cyrus), plus a fraught relationship with her disaffected, bass-playing sister Jack (Madison Davenport). When Ashley O releases a miniature robotic companion called “Ashley Too,” modeled on her personality scan, Rachel’s determined to get one. But Ashley Too’s sanitized, phoney message of empowerment leads Rachel astray, before ultimately helping her to connect with her sister and learn there’s more to her idol than meets the eye. I’m not sure this episode entirely works, but it’s appealingly weird and disruptive, continuing the trend of taking Black Mirror to refreshing new territory.

If you’re wondering why I left Black Mirror’s standalone film Bandersnatch off the list—well, I didn’t, I was just saving it for last. Bandersnatch, which came out between seasons four and five, is a streaming experiment, an interactive film that allows the viewer to steer the story down multiple branches of a decision tree. The premise sounds gimmicky, and the episode has generated controversy: the Choose Your Own Adventure books initiated a lawsuit against it, and the episode somehow won a Nebula Award for Best Game Writing. (I think it’s a stretch to call Bandersnatch a game, a designation that unlevels the playing field of the category. Then again, I was watching it with a PS4 controller in my hand, having vague thoughts of Mass Effect . . . so maybe I’m wrong?)

A period piece set in 1984 London, Bandersnatch follows troubled whiz-kid game designer Stefan (Fionn Whitehead). Stefan has psychological issues which are about to become complicated when he heads off on a job interview to design games at the same company where his hero Colin Ritman (Will Poulter) works. His idea: to turn a legendary choose-your-own-adventure novel into a video game. But his new career is about to get extremely weird indeed.

Bandersnatch is delightful, an ingenious metafiction that indeed inserts the viewer into the narrative. It starts innocuously enough: helping Stefan decide which breakfast cereal to eat. But as the movie progresses, the decision points become more and more fraught. The result is a gripping, trippy Philip K. Dick reality-warp which layers playful, alternate timeline trickery over both the media it depicts (novels, games) and its own media (streaming television). For the most part, the decision-making process is seamlessly integrated, and while the decision trees “cheat” with a fair number of “reset” dead ends, there’s an undeniable cleverness to its strategy for handling this drawback. After an initial, “canon” watch-through, I went back again to experiment. This second run convinced me that one could probably watch Bandersnatch twenty times and still walk away with the same general impression of the episode. Is that a disappointing use of the interactive element? To some, perhaps, but there’s also a touch of genius to Brooker’s approach to leveraging the concept. Ultimately I think it’s a groundbreaking experiment, a slippery, fascinating work of art. It also continues Black Mirror’s sense of evolving reinvention, which only sustains my enthusiasm for the series. In my favored timeline, anyway, the show will continue for a good long while.

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: Lisa M. Bradley

Christian A. Coleman | 2540 words

A queer Tejana raised on the Texas-Mexico border, Lisa M. Bradley now lives in Iowa with her spouse and their teenager. Her speculative fiction and poetry explore boundaries and liminal spaces: real, imagined, and metaphorical. Her work has appeared in Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation, The Moment of Change: An Anthology of Feminist Speculative Poetry, and her first collection, The Haunted Girl. Online, her work has been published by Uncanny, Strange Horizons, and Fireside Magazine. In her debut novel, Exile, a determined antiheroine schemes to escape her quarantined border town.

Congratulations on your debut novel! Your poetry and short fiction have been published in magazines and anthologies, but what does it mean to you to have a book like Exile out in the world?

When I sell short stuff, I do a Snoopy dance. When it’s published, I tell my friends, and we do the Snoopy dance together. Then it’s someone else’s turn. With Exile, there’s been a series of dances: when the first ebooks were released earlier this year in a Storybundle; when I held the paperback at WisCon in May; when I sold copies from the Rosarium table at Readercon in July; then the official release date . . . Lots of moments to celebrate. Even when my collection, The Haunted Girl, came out in 2014, it wasn’t an extended party like this.

In Exile, Heidi Palermo lives in the small southwest Texas town of Exile, quarantined because a toxic spill poisoned residents with permanent rage. She’s itching to bust out for good but has to help keep her vengeful family’s blood feud from inciting a war with the feds who want to nuke the place. And she sides with and starts a relationship with Tank, an Outsider who moved to town post-spill and killed her abusive brother. Whew! What was the inspiration for the premise?

I wanted to write an antiheroine. A woman who was scary ambitious and unapologetically promiscuous, who looked out for herself before all else, who made men rightfully fearful. Writing Heidi was fun. She’s me on a bad day, in a bad week, in a particularly bad year of a rotten, alternate life.

Let’s talk about her and the life she’s been dealt. You said in a previous Q&A that characters in your poetry often inventory the body to impose order. Heidi appears to be doing this with her clinical cataloging of people’s faces and with her thesis on male celebrities’ faces. Is this her way to add structure to her life in an environment where she and everyone else around her can’t call the shots on their livelihood?

For sure, the thesis and her studies have helped Heidi order her world. She needs to channel her ambition in ways that maintain her fantasy of escape. The facial cataloging is deeper than that. It began as a coping mechanism for Heidi when her family started changing after the toxic spill. Her dad was always easier to read than her mom, so she feels more confident analyzing men than women. Over time, the coping mechanism became second nature and served as a useful shield against emotional trauma, like when her father disavows her because of her promiscuity.

Would you also say that sexuality is another way Heidi imposes order on her life? Even though she’s slut-shamed by many chauvinistic men throughout the book, she owns her desires and goes after what she wants unapologetically.

I think Heidi’s sexuality creates more chaos than order in her life.

There’s this part when Heidi is talking about another character, Rain, and says she “might have what used to be called Asperger’s.” Is this a future or alternate present where neurodiversity is no longer considered a disability? And do you think a dystopia is the kind of setting where this reality could happen?

Asperger’s syndrome is already being phased out as a clinically useful diagnosis. So in Exile, which is like five seconds into the future, I decided medically-minded Heidi would know the term but also know it wasn’t quite right anymore. In that world, neurodiversity is still marginalized, and most people in Exile accept that status quo, despite it working against them.

In order for Heidi to get out of Exile, she has to pass the feds’ 4-S test, proving that she’s strong, smart, sane, and sterile. All of these criteria, of course, are determined arbitrarily by the feds. She’s taken it numerous times, but passes only three out of four S’s. Where did the idea for this test come from?

Honestly, this sounds silly, but I think it’s because of all the state-mandated tests I had to take in school. In the “Gifted and Talented” classes, we were told we had to score high on the tests to bring the overall district scores up and maintain funding. Imagine putting that kind of pressure on children’s shoulders! Then there were the PSAT, SAT, and ACT tests, which we had to ace to get the scholarships we’d need to afford college. And I went through IQ tests and at least one psych eval for . . . reasons. I had to pass a lot of tests to get out of the Valley.

Speaking of the Valley, on the dedication page of the book, you wrote, “To the Rio Grande Valley. Fight the Wall!” What’s the story behind the dedication?

The RGV was my home, and it’s on the news all the time now. It’s where so many immigrants are stalled, metered, and turned away, or detained, separated from their families, abused, even killed. And my people are fighting these awful immigration policies, trying to help fellow human beings.

There’s been a border wall in the RGV for years. Border Patrol officers shoot Mexicans through or over it. Now the federal government is taking people’s land (again) to clear the way for Trump’s wall. They want to cut the National Butterfly Center in half, for chrissakes, and when people fight it legally, their families are subject to smear campaigns; people’s citizenship is called into question.

So hell yeah, I dedicated the book to the Valley. I want Valleyites to keep fighting. We don’t need walls. We need justice.

You grew up in deep South Texas before the construction of the Border Wall. Tell us a little about what growing up there was like and how that influenced the setting and story of Exile.

It was always hot, just like in Exile. Nowadays, the region is described as thorn forest. Back then, I just figured nature was trying to kill me—tarantulas, snakes, scorpions, cactus, thorns, fire ants, killer bees . . .

In South Texas, you can look up at the cloudless blue sky and tilt your head back and back and back and there’s always more sky. It feels limitless, but also heavy, like the sun and sky are flattening the land. All that possibility countered by such weight is pure Exile.

Our family lived below the poverty line, but some of my classmates had no hot water, so I thought myself middle class. There was a biker bar across the two-lane highway in front of my grandparents’ house (I lived with my grandparents on and off). We had dogs as outdoor pets, and when motorcycles zoomed down our street, the dogs would get loose and chase them, get hit by cars. We buried a lot of dogs.

I used to go to a park with my family, probably Anzalduas Park, which is right on the Rio Grande, and I could look across the water at Mexico. And I just never understood that—how the people, trees, goats on that side were Mexican, but on this side were American. It all looked exactly alike. So I’ve always distrusted borders and those trying to enforce them.

I was taught, by plenty of well-meaning adults, that I needed to escape the Valley. That my heritage was crime, poverty, and ignorance, and it would be a tragedy if I didn’t get out and “do something” with my life. And I believed that. Exile in a nutshell.

Your bio says that your speculative fiction and poetry explore boundaries and liminal spaces: real, imagined, and metaphorical. In Exile, the feds are caging in Heidi’s hometown because of the toxic spill. Reading this book during our current administration, it’s difficult to see it as dystopian fiction, because we’re watching the dystopia of the immigration crisis play out in real time at the US-Mexico border. What does it feel like to have your book published in this political climate?

It’s . . . distressing. What’s happening at the border isn’t really about immigration; it’s about white supremacy, control of brown bodies, and capitalism. These are the same forces that created Exile. Capitalism bankrupts a region’s human and natural resources. It creates political and environmental disasters, leaving the marginalized people in those regions to face the consequences. It doesn’t matter if the marginalized people are American citizens. So long as you’re Other, you are deemed disposable. That’s why I grew up in a town with not one, but two toxic sites requiring Superfund cleanup. And why the next town over has had a two-acre toxic plume contaminating its groundwater for decades.

Exile is fiction. But our government’s white supremacy is as real as the cages we’re putting people in, as real as the concrete they’re sleeping on. I wish that reality were fiction.

Does your poetry make a big imprint on your fiction? Or do you consider there to be a liminal boundary between these two writing modes?

Most of my poetry is narrative, and prosody is part of my fiction, so separating these modes is indeed tricky. “we come together we fall apart” is over 4,000 words long, as long as many short stories, and I’m still not sure why it insisted on being poetry rather than prose. My story “Revival” at Beneath Ceaseless Skies started as a poem, but that one turned into fiction without much of a fight. My poetic sensibilities inform my style choices in fiction, that much I know . . . but that doesn’t feel like much. It’s all very mysterious.

You reference many films in the novel, like Mad Max and Peeping Tom. Are these favorite films of yours and were they sources of inspiration for the novel?

I’ve always thought of Exile as a Mad Max romance, but when I called it that, my writer buddies would snort and repeat romance with air quotes around it. So, obviously, the original Mad Max was an influence. The movie’s long dusty roads, the salvage yard creativity, motorcycles, and random violence reinforced things I grew up with.

I don’t think I referenced any movies in Exile that are my actual favorites, mostly because Heidi would have no patience for my tastes (unless it involved Cillian Murphy; on that beautiful boy, we agree). I do watch It’s a Wonderful Life every Christmas, but that’s because I have a twisted sense of humor.

Were there any writers or other artists whose work influenced Exile?

The Doors provided much of the soundtrack for Exile; the story starts with “Peace Frog” and ends with “Roadhouse Blues.” Steven Spielberg movies like ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind taught me that the authorities can’t be trusted, as did the Stephen King novels I read in junior high and high school, and The X-Files hammered it home. I didn’t think about it while writing, but there’s a lot of A Clockwork Orange and Mexican tabloid influence, too.

Wow! There are so many layers to this. What have reader reactions been like so far?

Readers comment on the sex and violence. They have to, maybe to signal to other folks, “Hey, this ain’t my usual thing. I’m just as shocked as you are!” Or because I’m a round, maternal, harmless-looking figure, they have to warn future readers not to judge the book by my cover. Some reviewers have commented that the sex scenes actually move the plot, reveal character, signpost just like any other scene. Even if the reader doesn’t enjoy the sex and violence, they seem to appreciate why it’s on the page.

In the acknowledgments, you thank your publisher, Bill Campbell of Rosarium Publishing, for taking on the book, because others said it was too dark, too violent, too sexy, and too difficult to market. What were these other publishers reacting to? I mean, aren’t dystopian novels supposed to be dark? And it seems like the other publishers didn’t pick up on the humor. Just saying!

It might be different if I were trying to sell Exile today, given the current news cycle, but who knows? The ratios (of sex to violence to SF to horror to humor) in Exile don’t meet traditional publishers’ formulas. Maybe people weren’t ready for such an angry, out-of-control book about minorities. Maybe they didn’t get my sense of humor, that specific combination of morbidity and bravado that I consider essentially Mexican. Whatever their reasons, they don’t matter anymore. Exile is where it belongs, because Bill groks me.

So what’s coming up next? Do you have any upcoming writing projects you can tell us about?

I have two novels at very different stages of the publishing process. I’m agent shopping for Border Blaster, a historical fantasy set on the US-Texas border in the 1930s, when American quacks built enormous radio stations in Mexico to circumvent American regulations about selling snake oil on the radio. And I’m doing research for my next novel about Mexican anarchists and werewolves. I have some poetry and short fiction pending publication. I’ve also become a poetry editor! I edited the poetry for Uncanny’s special issue “Disabled People Destroy Fantasy,” and with R.B. Lemberg I’m co-editing a tribute anthology to Ursula Le Guin, Climbing Lightly Through Forests, which will be published by Aqueduct Press.

Cool! Is there anything else you’d like your readers to know about Exile?

It’s fun. Despite the dystopic elements, it’s a fucking joyride.

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: Brooke Bolander

Sandra Odell | 1525 words

“A Bird, a Song, a Revolution” took my breath away, a beautiful story of life, transformation, and the magic of curiosity and wonder. What was the inspiration behind the tale?

Thank you so, so much! So, the entire reason I originally started writing fiction in the first place was due to my background in history and archaeology, and I’ve been wanting to write a piece following a cultural artifact over decades or centuries for ages. I’ve also been wanting to write a piece specifically about how art can low-key inspire resistance and rebellion for a while (not that that isn’t an omnipresent theme in most of my recent work). As usual, the two ideas had a head-on collision in my head and hey voilà, a story!

I adored both Whistlecage and the nameless girl, how the crone played the end of one world to save another, how the girl unknowingly played the destruction of one world and the birth of another. The nature of this story lends itself to thoughts of the birth/death cycle, of reincarnation versus dissimilar lives bound by a slender bit of bone. Was there a larger idea you hoped to explore with this story?

I’m constantly thinking about the way art influences and moves us to action, and how those actions can change the world. Not all resistance is violent or visible. Not all art is designed to intentionally create a change, but you can never predict what’s going to stick a match to someone’s fuse, or how long that art will continue to work its magic. I think it’s important to create things regardless of whether or not you think it’s going to appeal to a wider audience, because you are the only one capable of expressing the thoughts inside your head. You’re not making art for everyone. You’re making it for other weirdos like you, so they can be inspired to create things for their generation of weirdos, and so on, and so on. Who knows who or what it may inspire?

Another aspect of the story that I appreciated was the gentle flow of the narrative voice and the very meta style of third-person storytelling blended with the much more intimate point-of-view. When writing, do you intentionally set out for a specific tone or do you play with the narrative voice, allowing it to develop as the story progresses?

With me, tone/voice generally comes first and everything else falls in line behind. The way a character sees and experiences their world is necessarily going to influence how they express themselves and what decisions they make along the way (and on a worldbuilding level, what details they choose to notice or mention), so if you start there, a lot of questions get answered before they ever pop up and the story shapes itself along those lines.

Music is subversion and inspiration, entertainment and introspection. Whistlecage hungers for the music all around her, while the young girl views the flute first as a means to ease her hunger and then as a curiosity. Through the ages, governments and religions have sought to condemn or celebrate music as a way to control the populace. What sort of influence has music had on your life? Do you have any preferred styles of music or favorite artists?

Music has had a tremendous influence on me for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest memories are of being completely fascinated with the film scores of James Horner, Basil Poledouris, John Williams, and Alan Silvestri, how integral they were to setting the emotional tones of the movies they were in. I was never a fan of the ones where characters would burst into song, but I was all about the swell of the London Symphony Orchestra. I was a weird kid, what can I say? The only problem was, I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s in a very rural area without a record store or access to actual copies of this music. The best I could do was watch the movies over and over until the scores were more or less memorized.

As I got older and started delving into more popular music, that was still a problem. In those days you heard about bands through word of mouth, through older siblings or whatever MTV or the radio chose to play. You didn’t have the Internet, or YouTube, or a million different streaming services to turn you on to new bands. You got what you got and that was that.

Which leads me, at last, to Nirvana.

I still love Nirvana’s music. I loved them when I was sixteen and had never heard anything like what they were doing before, and I love them now, when they are (God help us) certified Classic Rock. The primary thing Kurt Cobain did for me, though—and for a lot of other kids stuck in rural dead-end backwater towns—was this: He gave us a great big ringful of keys to other music beyond the stuff they were playing on the local rock stations. He namedropped his own friends and influences endlessly. The Pixies, the Wipers, Flipper, Shonen Knife, Big Black, Bikini Kill, Meat Puppets, the Butthole Surfers, the Buzzcocks, the Vaselines, on and on and on. If you have a name, you have something you can search for the next time you’re within proximity of a record store. And once you start digging into, say, the Buzzcocks, you find out that Howard Devoto was also a founding member of Magazine. You learn that Steve Albini, in addition to producing In Utero and Surfer Rosa, also did amazing work on any number of Jesus Lizard records. Cobain essentially threw down a ladder rope for every other kid from the ass-end of nowhere who came after him, and whatever else you think of the dude, that is such a tremendous kindness. People growing up in the age of the Internet won’t understand this, but trust me.

Nowadays my tastes are all over the map. Still love any and all of the above named bands, plus a million others too numerous to be named. Bowie is obviously a huge influence, both music-wise and in his dedication to evolving his art over the decades. Radiohead, Dirty Three, Queen, Neko Case, Nick Cave, scratchy Alan Lomax field recordings, Django Reinhardt, Othar Turner, Tom Waits, Nobuo Uematsu, Yoko Kanno, Syd Barrett—if it’s interesting and has heart, I’m fuckin’ there. I like the Beatles and the Stones, and ain’t nobody can stop me.

. . . I have a lot of feelings about music, yeah.

Curious minds want to know. What does your writing process look like? Does it differ depending on the length of a project?

Most of the time it goes like this: I get a central image or idea in my head and I keep on writing out from it until the story is told to my satisfaction. I am not an outliner or a planner. I am most comfortable letting the plot develop organically. Occasionally when I’m writing for an anthology and the piece is only supposed to be 8,000 words and it decides it wants to be a 17,000-word novelette, that’s a problem, at which point I have to figure out if it can be scaled back and still effectively tell the story I want to tell.

It’s interesting how these things develop, though. When I initially began writing, I felt lucky if I could write a story topping out at four or five thousand words. These days I’m hard-pressed to keep anything under ten. I’m hoping that’ll help as I continue throwing myself at finishing a novel, which uses entirely different creative muscles than short fiction. You have to unlearn some things and learn others completely from scratch. All novelists are heroes to me at this point because it is not easy. I generally write one very clean draft and then I’m done. You can’t really do that with a novel, turns out! You have to let it suck! I’m not good at letting something suck! But I think I’m figuring it out. We’ll see, at any rate.

You are a delightful storyteller. What can readers look forward to in the second half of 2019?

And you are a delightful interviewer, bless you! The second half of 2019 may be a bit quiet on the short fiction front as I continue trying to finish a novel draft before the end of the year. I’ve got a couple of short pieces in upcoming anthologies and I may find time to whip something out if the right cocktail of inspiration and time show up at my table, but otherwise think good, novelly thoughts for me as the year draws to a terrifyingly swift close.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Sandra Odell is a 47-year old, happily married mother of two, an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. Her work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s UNIVERSE, Daily Science Fiction, Crosssed Genres, Pseudopod, and The Drabblecast. She is hard at work plotting her second novel or world domination. Whichever comes first.

Author Spotlight: Adam-Troy Castro

Adanze Asante | 1028 words

The AIsource seem familiar. Have they appeared before?

This might not be clear to readers who only know me from my Lightspeed and Nightmare stories.

Approximately half of my short science fiction, and three of my novels, take place in a future history I catalog under the umbrella title “The AIsource Infection.” In fact, there should be a novella-length entry, “The Gorilla In a Tutu Principle, or Pecan Pie at Minnie and Earl’s,” in the current issue of Analog Science Fiction. The AIsource are from that series of stories, and “Sacrid’s Pod” represents the very first time any story related to that series has appeared in Lightspeed.

Adults think teenage rebellion is against them, but it’s not—it’s only acted against them to assert their independence. Were you ever a rebellious teen or did a certain teen inspire you to write this story?

I was not rebellious in the sense that you likely mean, but I was sure as hell no walk in the park. I was very much the problem kid, the nervous wreck. No particular teen inspired me in the creation of Sacrid. But she’s a common type.

I’m sure some helicopter parents wish they had a place like this to send their children, but it seems so heartless to ship a child away to protect them. However, there are boarding schools, where parents think their children will learn corrective behavior. So many bizarre stories happen in those places, and some turn out to be okay. Did you think of combining a boarding school with virtual reality to make it a glorified prison?

I didn’t see the service offered by the AIsource as a means of “correcting” the wayward child so much as removing her, to make certain there was never any chance of her bringing what the parents considered shame back to the family. This is shockingly not all that unusual in human history. Families have banished kids to foreign colonies, to the military, to convents and monasteries, and it was often a de facto means of confining them for life. In Ireland until fairly late in the twentieth century, it was considered perfectly reasonable to send a “disrespectful” or “too independent” girl to the Magdalene Laundries, where they worked for long hours in what amounted to slave conditions as prisoners under harsh discipline, and could be trapped there well into adulthood. So yeah, a prison.

Pods of the sort described in the story have already been introduced to the AIsource Infection Universe, in a story called “Blurred Lives.” More of that anon. But I will note that with their virtual reality component, the AIsource are trying to make these pods as unlike prisons as possible. It would be a lot worse, after all, were the offered entertainments withheld, if the prisoners were permitted no means of escape of madness.

Freedom, I wanted to scream freedom while reading this. The effects of the AI’s voice confined me to a small box. I really enjoyed your skill in how the protag’s view is part of this negative space. Even though you hadn’t described the protag and we hardly get to hear her, I could picture her so clearly. Was this the effect you were after and if so, are there any stories that inspired you to write this?

Many of my stories for Lightspeed in particular are challenges I set myself, and this one began as an attempt to write the entire story in the AIsource caretaker’s voice. I discovered while doing it that Sacrid really wanted to be heard. One reason I never described her—though I might if I return to her story, a genuine possibility—is that her rebellious ways do presumably include the cosmetic, and honestly, my wildest efforts to be outrageous could very easily devolve to quaint. (Then again, given the kind of society she came from, and the kind of parents who would do this, she easily could have just worn lipstick one day.)

No prior fiction comes to mind.

Needless to say, it was uncomfortable to read, yet I couldn’t put it down. It’s also interesting how the AI indicated most humans would rather get lost in artificial worlds. Somewhat like what we do today with YouTube, videogames, and obsessing over reality TV stars, one of which is now the U.S. President. Did you want this story to comment on how we need to experience authenticity and not take our freedom for granted? Do you think you’ll ever expand on this piece?

One of the questions asked by the story is whether a simulation capable of duplicating reality to a degree where no difference can be discerned is capable of overcoming the knowledge that one is also a prisoner. I think it depends on the person. Honestly, if you gave me a pod of the sort described in the story, or, if you prefer, a holodeck, and I found a way to customize experiences at will, I might never come out. But that’s just me. Sacrid has the extra added motivator of being pissed off.

Yes, the more I think about it, and this is happening even as I type these words, I think we will see Sacrid Henn again. You will certainly see the AIsource again. As I’ve said, they have fueled hundreds of thousands of words of fiction already, and this will continue.

Are you still thinking of delving into the romance genre? What’s next on your prolific writing agenda?

1) Yes, but don’t hold your breath. I have a long list of somedays.

2) Two stories that have occurred to me in the last few days, and which may or may not come to fruition, are “Want” and “Two Letters to My Father.” I have not written so much as a single word of either of them. I do not know if they’re “next.” We shall see.

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: Rajan Khanna

Jude Griffin | 792 words

How did this story come about?

Way back in 2009, John Joseph Adams was looking for stories for his The Way of the Wizard anthology and rather than come at the theme (magic and wizards) head on, I had this idea about a wizard who used playing cards instead of a spellbook to cast spells. That led to the story “Card Sharp,” which was accepted and published in the anthology and still remains one of my most popular stories. I wanted to continue to explore that world so I wrote “Second Hand,” a sequel which introduced the Hiram character and appeared in the Dead Man’s Hand anthology (as well as Lightspeed). Once I had those two, I knew I needed a third story to finish up the arc, though it took a few years to get it in the right shape.

How did you go about building your magic system?

Since I began with the idea of using playing cards as spells, I studied cards and learned that the suits have symbolic associations originally based on the Tarot. Take a suit and a number and you could imagine an effect based around that combination. Since that effect wasn’t specific and could vary, I imagined that there was a kind of gambling element to the magic—that you had to choose very carefully the effect you were trying for. Try too much with a card, try to exceed the value, and it might fail to work. Try something not fully in line with the suit and it might fail to work. But I think the most important decision was to have the deck of cards be finite. Decks of playing cards are almost always fifty-four cards (with Jokers) and so it made the stakes higher to be limited to fifty-four cards, fifty-four spells, and that limitation helped drive the motivations of the people who used them. If you could only ever do fifty-four wondrous things, when would you choose to use them? And how would that influence which “plays” you made?

So many fun twists! Do you set those up first or weave them in as you flesh out the story?

Some of the twists were part of the story from the beginning. “Card Sharp” was inspired by a Shakespeare play (which will probably be obvious to those who read it) and I decided to take inspiration for this story from another of Shakespeare play (which I assume will also be obvious). That helped give the story some of its shape but most of the twists came in the writing. I knew that I needed twists to help set up the main conflict of the story and to make it believable. I also thank my writing group, Altered Fluid, for helping to sharpen those twists and for improving the story. They were instrumental in helping to point out what wasn’t working in an earlier version of the story and helped me find the right moments.

Other than age and the experience that comes with it, what are the essential differences between Hiram and Quentin?

They are each shaped by their pasts and life experiences. Quentin is more of a tightly controlled individual with a strong will. When he gambles, it’s a very careful thing, honed over countless games, and he’s an unreadable, cold player. He’s also obsessive—when we meet him in “Card Sharp,” he’s obsessed with revenge, and later he’s obsessed with learning more about the Cards. Hiram is more of a drifter, more instinctive and ruled by his emotions and impulses. When he gambles, it’s by feel and it’s only his natural ability that helps him to succeed since he demonstrates a complete lack of control. Those traits come out in their use of the Cards. In psychological terms, Quentin leans more to the superego, whereas Hiram is more ruled by the id. Together they manage to find some kind of balance, but there’s obviously friction there.

Quentin features in a few of your short stories—is there more in store for him/us?

I definitely think that I’ll return to this world, though I’m not sure if Quentin will appear again. I originally thought of this story as an end to Quentin’s story (for now). Other characters, like Hiram, however, haven’t gotten as much screen time in terms of their arcs. I’ve started a novel with some new characters as well as a couple of familiar ones, but if and when that will see the light of day remains to be seen.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.

Author Spotlight: Jenny Rae Rappaport

Arley Sorg | 1265 words

This story tackles a very touchy, emotionally charged topic in a way which makes it approachable yet still vibrant. Do you feel like SF as a genre is particularly adept at handling issues? Is there anything different about genre in terms of socio-political or social-concern discussion?

I think SF as a genre is well suited to handling issues—whether that’s actually done deftly all the time is open to debate. But what it boils down to is that as authors we’re taking our current society/science and playing a giant game of “What if?” What if we did outlaw guns? What if we don’t manage to stop climate change? What happens to the world when the aliens come? What if we all had innate magical powers, and our society was stratified based on the amount of magic a person possessed? And so on.

Because our readers have the expectation of that element of “What if?”, it gives SF authors a bigger sandbox to play in. We’re not quite as confined by the rules of the everyday world, especially in terms of whatever science fictional concept we’re exploring. And I’m not saying that a novel needs to hit you over the head with a sociopolitical message, but there are plenty of works that subtly incorporate them. Even in terms of worldbuilding—if you’re creating a secondary fantasy world, there’s absolutely no reason not to have racially diverse characters or characters with diverse genders and sexualities. One of the true beauties of SF is that we don’t have to model everything on our current world and society.

This piece works really well in second person—and even then, it’s a different kind of second person than a lot of stories which use second. Did you play around with different iterations or tenses? I can see how this might have also been a first person at some point?

It was always written in second person, which is unusual for me to use. I think I’ve written three stories total in my life using it. It’s a narrative that ended up having a lot of me in it, in certain ways. I think as writers we always put parts of ourselves in our work, but some stories have more than others, which might be why you’re getting the first person feel to this one. I showed the first draft of the story to a good friend who never reads science fiction, and she came back with the comment that she liked it, but if it didn’t sell as a story, she thought that I could rework it into a personal essay. Which I’m going to take as a compliment.

Can you talk a bit about the development of this story? How did it come about/how was it inspired, and how did the writing progress go?

This story literally attacked me. It was one of those pieces that I had to write; I didn’t have much of a choice because my brain was going to explode otherwise.

Basically, in March 2019, there were the horrible mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand. I was heartsick that these people had been attacked this way in a house of worship that should have been safe. As more news came out the next day, it was even worse, because all of a sudden we were talking about young children who had been thoughtlessly murdered.

I have young children myself, who attend a religious preschool. The morning after the shooting, I took my two-year-old daughter to a Parent and Me class there. We sat there singing the “ABCs” and the “Wheels on the Bus,” and it was such a disconnect from what was happening half a world away. Yet, at the same time, I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that my kids have security drills at their preschool. That they have to do this before they’re even in kindergarten is not normal. It’s not a normal society that we live in, that this is viewed as a necessary evil.

And I just got so very, very angry about the world we live in, that shootings like Christchurch happen with such frequency, and that there are so many guns in America. So, I wrote the story, partially as a way to process all that anger. It took me a weekend to write and the first draft was almost identical to what you see in Lightspeed, except for a change to the ending and some line edits.

The POV seems almost disconnected from the things shifting and changing throughout the story, in a way, except at these kind of really grounded anchors/focal points at beginning and end. In a sense, it’s like saying, yeah, all this crazy stuff is happening, but what’s really important are these two moments: the initial question and the result. As a narrative it feels unorthodox and kind of experimental in that way. Was this a different style for you? For folks who are reading you for the first time and loving it (which, I think, will be many people), what should they read next; what is the story that really represents you as an author?

For people wanting to read more of my work, let’s see . . . if you enjoyed the second-person POV, my story “Doors,” which was just published in Factor Four Magazine, also uses it. If you want to try a slightly more conventional POV in third person, I’m very fond of my story “The Sweetness at the End,” which was published last year in Escape Pod. I think both of those are representative of what I’m currently writing.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know about this piece?

The lollipops in the beginning of the story are real. They really do give them to the children during the security drills to keep them quiet. Which is truly terrifying to me as a parent. Also, as is probably obvious, I am very much in favor of stricter gun control, and have been ever since I was given an assignment in the seventh grade to write an argument for a gun control amendment. I continue to remain hopeful, despite being disappointed by American politicians in that regard for the past twenty-five years.

Your Publications page at jennyrae.com shows a number of short pieces out; is there a book in the near future? What are you working on now that new fans can look forward to?

I have a completed first draft of a novel, which I’m hoping to revise this summer before I send it out to potential agents. It’s based around the idea that time travel has been invented in NYC in the 1920s, but the technology is very limited, and you can only go three years into the future and three years into the past from your starting date. When three children go missing via an illegal time travel device, it’s up to my main characters to find them, before the timeline ends up being irrevocably damaged. It’s a historical fiction novel that’s injected with a good dose of science fiction and a dash of romance. I had a blast researching the historical era while I was writing it.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Arley Sorg grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado. He studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, and usually writes in local coffee shops. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he is an assistant editor at Locus Magazine. He’s soldering together a novel, has thrown a few short stories into orbit, and hopes to launch more.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 208 words

Coming up in October, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Eli Brown (“Nesting Habits of Enceladan Jade Beetles”) and Ray Nayler (“The Death of Fire Station 10”), along with SF reprints by Sam J. Miller (“The Beasts We Want to Be”) and Wendi Dunlap (“Revival”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by E. Lily Yu (“The Valley of Wounded Deer”) and Isabel Yap (“Windrose in Scarlet”), and fantasy reprints by Kai Ashante Wilson (“«Légendaire.»”) and Ken Liu (“The Hidden Girl”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns. Our ebook readers will also enjoy 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: Yoon Ha Lee, Dominica Phetteplace, Adam-Troy Castro, KT Bryski, Russell Nichols, and Melissa Marr.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that SFnal goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

Here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Lightspeed:

Website

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Destroy Projects

www.destroysf.com

Newsletter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

RSS Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/rss-2

Podcast Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/itunes-rss

Twitter

www.twitter.com/LightspeedMag

Facebook

www.facebook.com/LightspeedMagazine

Subscribe

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe

Subscriptions and Ebooks

The Editors

Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed more than 100 stories (about 700,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain!

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe for more information, including about third-party subscription options.

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/Senior Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Editor & Book Reviewer

Arley Sorg

Reprint Editor

Rich Horton

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

John Joseph Adams

Assistant Editor

Laurel Amberdine

Editorial Assistant

Alex Puncekar

Reviewers

Arley Sorg

LaShawn Wanak

Chris Kluwe

Carrie Vaughn

Christopher East

Violet Allen

Interviewer

Christian A. Coleman

Copy Editor

Dana Watson

Proofreaders

Anthony R. Cardno

Devin Marcus

Webmaster

Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects

Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher

Robert Barton Bland

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

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 [forthcoming]

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear [forthcoming]

Creatures of Charm and Hunger by Molly Tanzer [forthcoming]

A Dark Queen Rises by Ashok K. Banker [forthcoming]

The Conductors by Nicole Glover [forthcoming]

The Chosen One by Veronica Roth [forthcoming]

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.