TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 118, March 2020

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: March 2020

SCIENCE FICTION

Giant Steps
Russell Nichols

Living the Quiet Life
A.M. Dellamonica

Many Happy Returns
Adam-Troy Castro

Reliable People
Charlie Jane Anders

FANTASY

Viewer, Violator
Aimee Bender

Tend to Me
Kristina Ten

Three Urban Folk Tales
Eric Schaller

Love and Marriage in the Hexasun Lands
Tahmeed Shafiq

EXCERPTS

Chosen Ones
Veronica Roth

NONFICTION

Book Reviews: March 2020
Arley Sorg

Media Review: March 2020
Nicasio Andres Reed

Interview: K.M. Szpara
Christian A. Coleman

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Russell Nichols

Kristina Ten

Adam-Troy Castro

Tahmeed Shafiq

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

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

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2020 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Elizabeth Leggett

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: March 2020

John Joseph Adams | 216 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 118th issue!

This month’s cover is by Elizabeth Leggett, and illustrates a new original short by Russell Nichols called “Giant Steps.” It’s a thought-provoking story of a woman wrestling with life, motherhood, and space exploration. We also have a new short from Adam-Troy Castro (“Many Happy Returns”), which follows an inter-galactic adventurer bent on escaping life’s responsibilities. We also have SF reprints by A.M. Dellamonica (“Living the Quiet Life”) and Charlie Jane Anders (“Reliable People”).

Our original fantasy shorts include a story with a surprising botanical twist: “Tend to Me,” by Kristina Ten. Tahmeed Shafiq brings us a sweeping tale of gods and romance in “Love and Marriage in the Hexasun Lands.” Our fantasy reprints are by Aimee Bender (“Viewer, Violator”) and Eric Schaller (“Three Urban Folk Tales”).

Our interview this month is with debut novelist K.M. Szpara. 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 an excerpt from best-selling author Veronica Roth’s first adult novel: Chosen Ones.

We’re also happy to note that this month our regular book reviewer, Chris Kluwe, launches his debut novel, Otaku. Congratulations, Chris!

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.

Giant Steps

Russell Nichols | 4972 words

Hear those engines roar / rumbling
Feel those fires burn
Blasting off / blasting off / blasting off / blasting off
Step back.
Hear those engines roar / rumbling
Feel those fires burn
Bear the cross / bear the cross / bear the cross / bear the cross

The Blue Marble is shrinking; as Orion II lifts off, ripping from the grasping tentacles of Earth’s gravity, the world gets smaller, smaller, a blot on the cosmic sheet of infinite blackness, which closes in like a camera iris in a classic film’s final shot.

Picture the planet’s surface, where the wonders of the old world buckle at the top of the hour under the weight of new wars; where down below, all those little people fall to their knees, desperate voices crying, crying out to their deity-du-jour for deliverance. There is no answer. Prayers unheard, wishes ungranted, for they’ve made their bed and now liars must lie.

But not Dr. Jenkins.

Strapped in this single-person spacecraft, plugged into tubes for food, water and waste, the thirty-three-year-old astrophysicist from South Carolina and soon-to-be first-ever human to step foot on Titan never felt freer in her life. As the Richard Strauss tone poem, “Also sprach Zarathustra,” rises in her ears, like the sun in her eyes, Dr. Charlene Jenkins turns away from her homeworld, never minding who she left behind. A long ride ahead—five years, two months, give or take—with gravity assists from Venus and Jupiter flinging Orion II like a slingshot to the destination. She hates that word, destination. Too close to destiny. Too far from reality.

“You cain’t defy you and I, baby, this some destiny-level shit here,” Dave used to say before he got clean, before Trane was born, before Gramma passed. Was that destiny too? Or did Gramma refuse to take her “med’sin”?

It’s choice, not chance, that defines who we are, where we end up.

Or down.

Or 1.2 billion kilometers away on Saturn’s largest moon, which may or may not be inhabited by giants, depending on who you ask.

“I don’t believe in giants,” Dr. Jenkins was quoted as saying by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

Not giants. Not the Nephilim. Definitely not the banduns Gramma used to tell stories about back in the day. No, she didn’t believe in that nonsense. Not anymore.

The same can’t be said for the world at large; a lonely world of blind believers, who see what they want to see. Take, for instance, the leaked images from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, which captured the public imagination—and common sense. Were these the lost 350 photographs from the Cassini-Huygens mission? The European Space Agency, on the record, said not a chance. But denial only added fuel to the viral wildfire as the mysterious pictures spread to all corners of the globe:

What looked to be “giant footprints” on Titan, on the northwest shoreline of Ligeia Mare, a hydrocarbon lake larger than Lake Superior. Twenty-four prints total, in a single-file pattern; each one sixty centimeters long, twenty wide, three deep, according to various imaging teams. These “footprints” could’ve been impact craters, land erosion, shadows from methane clouds. But cold, hard facts don’t solidify in the minds of the masses, Homo ignoramuses, sheep in people’s clothing who’d rather believe in Goliath than science.

“People lie to themselves,” she told the reporter.

But not Dr. Jenkins.

She quit playing those mind games long ago, smart enough to know the human brain looks for patterns, seeks them out religiously, to deny the claustrophobia of utter insignificance. But who wants to hear that?

Definitely not the thousands of so-called “printers” who saw her quote online and flooded public eye-feeds with their own from Genesis 6:4—“There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown”; who shared links to news stories about massive footprints discovered in China, Bolivia, and South Africa; who signed off messages with the sincerest of valedictions:

– Still don’t believe in giants? Suck my giant dick.

– Stick to picking cotton, tar baby bitch!!

– DIE SPACE MONKEY

She’s heard worse, seen worse, reflected in the green eyes of strangers and coworkers, men and women, those who resent her for making rapid strides against all odds.

“Initiating hypersleep,” says Rigel, Orion II’s sentient computer.

Silent shaming rings the loudest. A look here, a look there, a look away. Ironed-on, Made-in-America smiles that say, You’re not supposed to be here.

“Don’t you go believing all that she she talk,” she hears Gramma’s words echoing now, like rolling thunder, as she drifts into hypersleep. “The Lawd got you here for a reason.”

She sees Gramma now, coming into focus, reclining on the porch of her saddlebag house in Fairfield County, humming “Way Beyawn’ duh Moon” with a pop-up choir of crickets. Gramma was what southerners called “a force of nature,” mythic in style and stature with the head of a queen and heart of a bull, spilling stories for days. Dr. Charlene Jenkins—back when she was just “Leenie”—was raised on these stories; homegrown hand-me-downs from her great-grandmother and her great-grandmother, coming from the Lowcountry, namely St. Helena Island—a near-casualty of climate change that became one of the first UNESCO Bubble Cities.

“Leenie, come’yuh, lemme get them knockers out your head,” Gramma would call out from her porch on those muggy summer days. Between Gramma’s knees, Leenie fidgeted, feeling those rough hands pulling her pigtails and stretching her kinky hair like she always did to train it against shrinkage.

“Gramma, could you tell me about the banduns again?”

“If you keep still,” Gramma said, bouncing her right leg, which used to be for dancing, but now had a strange habit of losing feeling. She was tired all the time, too. But she could talk from sunup to sundown about her kin: the Gullah-Geechee people, descendants of enslaved Africans who survived and thrived for centuries on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. How back in the day, after the praise meeting, they would gather round to take part in the legendary ring shout.

A songster kicked things off, call-and-response style; a stickman played the beat, slow at first, then faster, faster; as the joyful congregation moved in a circle, hand-clapping, feet-tapping, shouting and shuffling, dancing on the devil till he begged for sweet mercy, Gramma would say.

“But every now and again,” she said, looking around, then leaning forward to make sure no one else could hear, “some sanctified body would step in that ring there, wailing, flailing all furious-like. And lo and behold, that man, filled with the spirit, would up and start growing.”

“Growing like a beanstalk?” Leenie asked every time.

“Child, bigguh than a beanstalk. Bigguh than anything in this whole world. Hold this.” She handed Leenie her blue knockers. “Just kept growing and growing till they was big enough to reach for the clouds, then climb up to the sky and gone ’way.”

“Gone where?”

Gramma lifted a hand to the heavens. “Off into the big black yonder.”

Sitting there on the porch, Leenie cupped the knockers in her palm. Staring into the little blue orb, she pictured a far-away world. A land of banduns. A place where she might, for once in her life, feel free and feel big and feel like she belongs. Or find her mother.

“Put them knockers in the box ’fore you lose them,” Gramma said.

She did as she was told and tucked her small world in a container with the other worlds. And it was these stories of free Black giants that inspired Leenie to learn all she could about the “big black yonder.” In the process, she learned a bigger truth: Gramma, too, was a liar.

At the heart of every belief is a lie. A stretched truth. Facts distorted like the space inside a wormhole. Vows made to be broken. Like when somebody promises to return and never does. This, she learned, was the real world, so she did what disillusioned optimists do: Leenie grew up.

Never again would she fall victim to faith, be betrayed by hope, or led astray by love. Which is why, outside the Mount Wilson Observatory, when Dave popped the question . . .

. . . she popped him on the head. “What are you thinking?!”

“I’m thinking it’s high time you and I settle down for real for real, do the family thing.”

“Dave . . . I can’t do that. I told you I don’t want to be a wife, I don’t want kids.”

“What kinda woman don’t want kids?”

“My kind,” she said, closing the ring box and the conversation.

It wasn’t him. Not all him. Somewhat him, but not all. He was a good man. Not educated in the conventional sense, not extremely ambitious, but a laid-back, lighthearted type of man. The type who knew to ask how she wanted to be touched and where, and allowed himself to be shown.

There he goes now, up on stage in the spotlight, wailing, while she’s down in the shadows, clapping. But this is no ring shout. This was the night they met in New York at some underground jazz club with Dave on the sax. She watched his cheeks puff up, a man possessed. And, being a scientist-in-training, she wanted to test out a hypothesis: that a player who could maneuver his fingers and fix his lips to make that instrument scream could do the same to hers. No strings, just a release. She initiated, he obliged. For seven years he obliged, tuning her body between the sheets. But as she moved up in status, he fell back on old habits.

An old habit, like history, repeats itself. What goes around comes around like a satellite. A record. Needles dropping. Heroin and insulin. Dave and Gramma, injecting and rejecting shots, respectively. Two peas in the wrong pods. Putting faith in false gods.

“Baby, that’s all in the past,” Dave told her the first week of his twelve-step program. And by the sixth week, he figured he could replace his defunct jazz band with a wedding band.

But what is marriage if not another drug? A lifelong dependence on a manmade substance that ultimately leads to abuse?

She’d heard that song time and time again. Lamentations of belittled women. Givers of life beaten down, swallowed whole by the vacuum of the fragile male ego. Born-to-be brides. Born-again wives. Ever-shrinking women with self-deflating voices who were raised to submit (from the Latin submittere: “to yield, lower, let down, put under, reduce”), to keep silent and to take up as little space as possible.

But not Dr. Jenkins.

She is not the one. She wouldn’t follow in the fading footsteps of those who walk down the aisle and wind up getting walked over. Didn’t matter how magical his fingers felt on the nape of her neck, how musical his lips felt massaging the length of her labia. She refused to sacrifice her identity on the altar of intimacy. She rejected a ring on her finger to see the rings of Saturn because life is too short to live in the land of make-believe.

“Wake up, Dr. Jenkins,” Rigel says.

And roused from hypersleep, she sees before her “The Ringed Planet,” grander and more glorious than she ever imagined, a swirling pastel ball with bands of clouds running around it. But how is this possible? Reading her confused expression, Rigel declares: “We are now approaching Saturn. Destination: Titan.”

She unstraps herself.

“It is advised that you remain strapped in, Dr. Jenkins.”

No. Something’s not right here. Why does the computer show a flight time of only four years, one month and seventeen days? Is she seeing things?

“Rigel,” she says, her voice like gravel, “how long has it been since the launch?”

“This is the forty-seventh day of the fourth year,” Rigel confirms. “The Jupiter assist gave us a bigger boost than—”

Right then, an alarm goes off as the spacecraft’s autopilot tries to maneuver through tiny particles running from or being sucked into the delicate, narrow outer band of Saturn’s F ring, herded by the shepherd-moon Prometheus. Stray pieces batter the composite shell of Orion II like sleet.

“A change of course is advised,” Rigel says.

“No, no, stay on current trajectory.”

“Dr. Jenkins, at this rate, you won’t be able to sustain—”

“Stay on course, I said!”

Keeping her eyes dead ahead, the AR interface labels the various satellites in view and right there, like a ripe Carolina peach bobbing in a deep, dark sea, the big, bright moon draws her nearer, as the warning alarm keeps ringing in her ears.

“‘Giant Steps!’” Dave shouted the day he saw the viral Titan photos.

This was last fall in the living room of their downsized apartment in Berkeley. Dave was bouncing baby Trane on his right leg, a twelve-month-old girl with curious wide brown eyes, as Dr. Jenkins stood over them, projecting a hologram of images from her palmtab.

“No, Dave, these . . . these aren’t footprints.” She sighed. “I mean, they could be anything: impact craters, land erosion, shadows from methane clouds—”

“Nah,” he said. “You not hearing me. See this right here? Look at this. See that pattern? Yeah, I’d recognize those opening chords anywhere. That’s Trane.” He tickled the baby girl. “That’s you, huh? Huh, little star?”

Dr. Jenkins knew legendary jazz saxophonist John Coltrane was his idol, his influence, the namesake of their newborn. But he was taking this too far. Was he using again?

“Charlene.” He set the girl down on the self-cleaning carpet. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“I’m not looking at you like anything.”

He walked out, leaving Dr. Jenkins alone with the baby. She’d only held her a few times since giving birth. Now she watched the little girl lift herself to stand and start sort-of-walking. But she kept falling back, then smirking up like she’d get in trouble for trying to defy gravity.

Gramma wasn’t walking either by then. She was on bed rest, post-amputation.

“The Lawd ain’t through with little ol’ me,” she proclaimed on more than one occasion. “I’ll be back on my feet in no time, you watch.”

Which Dr. Jenkins determined was a lie for three reasons:

1) “The Lawd” isn’t real.

2) Gramma didn’t have feet, plural. Diabetes hijacked her right foot. She had one left.

3) By the time she did leave that bed, she had to be carried out, never to tell a story again.

“Check this out here,” Dave said, coming back into the living room with sheets of paper. “You’ll appreciate this. I’m finna blow your mind right here. You know what this is?”

Before she could answer, he explained: It was a diagram of Coltrane’s Tone Circle, a variation of the classic “Circle of Fifths” with a pentagram and vanishing point in the middle. “Been listening to these jazz and physics audiobooks, right?” he said. “And this Coltrane circle, it’s drawing on the same geometric principles your boy Einstein was working with. Quantum theory, mathematics, relativity—all that heavy-duty scientific shit you went to school for.”

“Dave, what does this have to do with anything?”

“I’m saying, it’s all connected, everything’s connected.” He set the palmtab next to the diagram on the legless LeviTable and ran over to stop the little girl from climbing up the stairs. “Trane was out of this world, we know that. Straight-up transcendent. But I always thought to myself: What if that cat was, you know, channeling? Like possessed?”

She stifled a laugh to spare his feelings. “You can’t be serious.”

“Why not though? The way he improvised? Go listen to Ascension and Interstellar Space. Listen to Om and tell me I’m lying.” He lifted the little girl’s arms to help her walk. “What if, tucked under those ‘sheets of sound,’ Trane was tryna tell us the truth?”

“And what truth would that be, my dear? Aliens?”

“Could be. Or a warning. Instructions on how to be free, hell, I don’t know,” he said. “You the big, bad scientist.”

Never copulate with a conspiracy theorist. An obscure scientific law she learned too late. She never told Dave about the banduns. The man believed everything he heard, never bothering to fact-check. In this day and age, you can’t afford not to fact-check. Dr. Jenkins volunteered to fly 1.2 billion kilometers just to fact-check.

“Brace for impact,” Rigel says.

A massive chunk of ice comes out of nowhere, slamming into Orion II like a fist. Knocking the craft off its trajectory. Dr. Jenkins, her heart pounding, looks around to find Titan, but the AR interface has shut off.

“Return to course,” she commands.

“Shields down to seventy-five percent,” Rigel says. “Life support systems damaged.”

“Return to course, return to course, go to Titan!”

“Navigation offline.”

“You ain’t told him?” Gramma asked from her hospital bed and soon-to-be deathbed. “That man’s the father of your child, for crying out loud!”

“He didn’t tell me he was planning to get hooked on smack. How come he gets to do what he wants when he wants and I can’t?”

“That’s a cross you gotsta bear.”

“But that’s not . . . look, it was his idea. He wanted to have a baby. Now I need to do what I need to do for me. I don’t wanna be one of those kind of women—”

“What women is that, huh?”

“Never mind.”

“Oh no, no, don’t get all hush-mouthed now. What kind of women? You don’t wanna be like me is what you saying. Tell the truth, shame the devil.”

“Gramma . . . I have big dreams.”

“And what? You think I didn’t?”

“You’ve lived in that same house since before I was born, weaving sweetgrass baskets, whipping up some Frogmore Stew, humming your spurrituals. You always said you wanted to get out of Carolina and dance on a big stage, and you could have. You really could have, but you never did. And now you’re refusing to get a bionic foot.”

“First off, don’t worry ’bout my foot. And second, best believe I chose to be here. Everybody and they mama got to migrating, up and over to the big cities, fooling theyselves thinking they could outrun racism. But I wasn’t fixing to leave my people like that. No ma’am, not me. I stayed my Black behind right here so I could raise you and this the thanks I get?”

“Gramma, this isn’t about you. This is about me. I want to explore.”

“’Clare to Gawd. So what, you think you Neil Armstrong? Hopscotching ’round the heavens like ain’t nothing better to do? ‘You wanna explore.’ Shuh. How ’bout you go explore being a mother? That’s some uncharted territory for that ass.”

“I’m not supposed to be here.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. Are you the Creator of the Universe? Didn’t think so. So who is you to say where you s’posed to be, huh?” Gramma sighs, then scoots over in bed and pats the mattress. “Leenie, come’yuh. Come sit.”

Dr. Jenkins shakes her head, staring at her single foot wiggling under the white sheets.

“Child, I know you scared. Seeing me all shriveled up like this, with one foot literally in the grave. Thinking ’bout Dave and his crookety self. You worried you’ll be left to raise that child by your lonesome, I understand that—”

“The only thing I’m scared of is looking back on my life and realizing I was too scared to live. You raised me, Gramma. By yourself. You’re the one who taught me to think bigger.”

“Bigguh don’t mean running from your motherly duties.”

“I’m not running, I’m trying to grow!”

And as she said this, it dawned on her: Of the countless times Gramma sat on that porch, telling the story of the banduns, she never ever described these free Black giants as women. Leenie never pictured them as women. Never even thought to ask if any of them were women. The same way most people assume “Dr. Jenkins” is a man.

“I want to grow, Gramma. Like the banduns.”

Gramma shook her head, chuckling to herself. “You so smart, huh? ‘Like the banduns.’ You even know why they was called banduns?”

Silence. Dr. Jenkins never thought to ask that question either.

“Means abandon,” Gramma said. “As in: Your mother abandoned you to quote-unquote find herself and what happened? She fell off a cliff in them Himalayas.”

More silence.

The space between them filled by the ever-expanding agony of unforgotten grief.

Dr. Jenkins wanted to say something. Something like “I’m not her” or “She only went out there to escape from that monster she married.” These words wouldn’t matter to Gramma.

“Know what your problem is, Leenie? Got your head all swell-up with facts and figures, only believing what you can see and prove, but child,” she tapped her ear, “you not listening.”

“Listening to what?”

Gramma gestured as if to say, “My point exactly.” And passed away three months later. Two months after that Dr. Jenkins was boarding Orion II. Not depressed or guilty or ambivalent like one might expect. She was ready.

“Go to Titan now!” she commands again.

“Shields down to fifty percent,” Rigel says. “Navigation still offline.”

She plugs the coordinates to the target site into the computer manually: 78° N, 249° W. “Initiate emergency landing procedures!”

“Initiating emergency landing procedures.”

She was ready.

But right now, as the single-person spacecraft plummets toward Titan, she wonders if she made the biggest mistake of her life. Did she come on this mission to discover something? Or prove something? Maybe both. But why? Why this constant need to prove herself? Why couldn’t she escape the long shadow of feeling less-than? Inferior? The feeling that no matter how high she climbs in her career, she’ll always be looked down on, a speck of a speck of a speck in spacetime and the eyes of society. And that the slightest misstep will cause irreparable damage, not just to her life, but the lives of others like her.

Who can live in those conditions? Under that kind of pressure?

The nitrogen-rich tholin haze wouldn’t break her fall. The dense methane shroud of clouds wouldn’t break her fall. Nothing would break her fall, save the moon’s freezing surface. She pictures herself outside herself, like a methane droplet in a chemical downpour, falling, in a tragically slow descent toward the north polar region.

Falling . . .

“I want to make an impact,” she said. “Why can’t you understand that?”

“What I understand is, you going through a lot right now,” Dave said. This was the night after Gramma’s funeral, at Gramma’s house, as they were packing up Gramma’s belongings. “C’mon now, let’s be serious.”

Falling . . .

“I’m dead serious.”

“How you talking ’bout going to space and your grandma’s body not even cold yet?”

“This is my chance to do something that matters.”

Falling . . .

“Oh, so this don’t matter?” He moved his right hand in circles, like tracing an orbit, referring to him, her, and sleeping baby Trane. “We don’t matter?”

She was about to say, “That’s not what I meant,” but right then, her eyes caught something in one of Gramma’s sweetgrass baskets. It was the box. She snuck outside to peek at her childhood in private. On the porch, in the warm solitude of the starry night as male crickets called out for mates, she opened the box and inside, all those colorful knockers, all those small worlds were still clustered together, though much smaller than she remembered. With her thumb and index finger, she held the orange one up to the clear new moon sky.

Falling . . .

The screen door creaked open behind her. Dave stepped out, Trane resting on his chest. He kept silent for a moment, observing; and when he did speak, his voice trembled, his words drifting out on the wavering wings of a half-whisper.

“Listen, baby, I understand you wanna go exploring, see what else is out there . . . I know you hate being boxed in. You been saying that since day one.” He took a step forward, gazing up at the sky with her. “Now you tell me you wanna go to outer space to see if some moon can sustain human life. But here’s a human life right here,” he said, his long fingers on Trane’s spine, like how he used to hold his sax. “Ain’t she worth sustaining?”

The question echoes as if it came straight from the mouth of Ligeia Mare, which lies below her now, wide open and ready to devour Titan’s first human trespasser. In the seconds before splashdown, she watches Trane, growing up so fast, bigger and bigger by the day, walking, talking, asking questions, learning to read, about to turn five, losing her baby teeth, printing her first bot buddy, wanting her own space.

Her own space.

A little girl on the porch looking up at the stars.

“Where are you, Mommy?” she calls out into the big black yonder.

But this little girl isn’t Trane; it’s her, Dr. Jenkins, in stretched pigtails and bright knockers, a little girl who actually believed prayer could bring her battered mother back home.

“Ain’t she worth sustaining?”

That little girl, now grown, jolts as the damaged ship smacks belly-first into the still lake. She opens her eyes as Orion II converts into a hovercraft.

Floating.

“We’ve arrived on Titan, Dr. Jenkins,” Rigel says. “Connect to the bioport for me to check for any injuries you may have sustained.”

“Give me a second.” She breathes deeply, to slow her heart rate. Five-second inhale. Five-second exhale. “Do you hear something? Like a hum?”

“Systems currently in standby mode for damage assessment and repair protocols—”

“No, not . . . not in here,” she says. “I’m going out.”

“Dr. Jenkins, for your safety, it is advised that you first connect to the bioport for me to check for any injuries—”

“I’ll be right back.”

And moments later, she is outside the spacecraft, looking over the vast landscape that stretches out past the lake’s edge, where the subdued terrain then takes over, saturated in a hazy sepia tint, something out of a dream. A deathly cold dream. Negative 180 degrees Celsius cold. Her only shield against the elements, the smart skinsuit compressed to her body; a banged-up body with bruised muscles and potentially internal bleeding that would deter anybody else.

But not Dr. Jenkins.

Below her, Ligeia Mare is still once again, like a mysteriously murky sheet of glass. What unknown creatures could be lurking in the deep? How many invisible hands might reach out to touch her, grab her, pull her under?

She replaces those thoughts with thoughts of her mother. And jumps.

She knew the viscosity of liquid methane was about a tenth that of liquid water, but the airy feeling catches her aching body off guard. She struggles to make her way, less swimming than gliding, to the shallows of the northwest shore. Crawling out of the lake and onto the land.

The surface feels somewhat solid, not all the way stable, like slush. She looks around to get her bearings and when she does, she sees it—right there, right in front of her: the footprints. She drags her wounded self forward and puts her gloved hand in the first indentation, deeper than originally estimated. When she touches it, she hears that hum once again, a familiar voice, like rolling thunder, humming “Way Beyawn’ duh Moon,” the looping soundtrack to those muggy Carolina summers, the song that helped Gramma survive and thrive, like other songs did for so many before her, and led Dr. Jenkins to being inevitably here, now.

She clutches her belly, buckles over in utter agony, her helmet hitting the frosty ground. Thinking about Gramma and her stories. And Dave and his sax. How truth, like spacetime, is relative and the beliefs we hold onto, the beliefs that keep us alive cannot, consequently, be lies.

That thought gives her the strength to lift herself to stand and start sort-of-walking. But she falls down, not used to the gravity being fourteen percent what it is on Earth. She stands again and the atmospheric pressure pushes against her, which feels like walking in a swimming pool, but she staggers on. Following the marked path. One excruciating leap at a time. As she goes on, she discovers a different tune, a fact she can’t prove, but a truth that can’t be denied:

Dr. Charlene Jenkins does believe in giants. She was raised by one.

And as she comes to the end of the single-file footprints, she collapses on her knees and lifts her head, and the sight, suddenly, steals from her any semblance of speech, as if the same force beckoning the billions of rocks and ice and dust to bear witness to Saturn has seized the bulk of her words as well; and the sacred few she managed to salvage can be neither spoken nor swallowed, for they remain stuck in her throat, forming a lump as her eyes grow wider, wider, filling up with all the wonder in the world.

Hear those engines roar / rumbling
Feel those fires burn
Blasting off / blasting off / blasting off / blasting off
Step back.
Hear those engines roar / rumbling
Feel those fires burn
At a loss / at a loss / at a loss / at a loss

©2020 by Russell Nichols. | Art © 2020 by Elizabeth Leggett.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Russell Nichols is a speculative fiction writer and endangered journalist. Raised in Richmond, California, he gave up all his stuff and now lives out of a backpack with his wife, vagabonding around the world since 2011. Find his work in Fiyah, Apex Magazine, Terraform, Fireside Fiction, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Nightmare Magazine’s POC Destroy Horror! special issue, and others. Look for him at russellnichols.com.

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

Living the Quiet Life

A.M. Dellamonica | 8324 words

“In old times, popping ’sphere was much more serious.” Reinventing her bedside manner, Nerethe had found, was the hardest thing about pretending that she no longer had any mental abilities. Harder even than wielding hand-held med instruments instead of reworking the flesh with her mind. “When we were planetbound, we didn’t hibernate under any circumstances. We were spacers for over a thousand generations before we developed a survival mechanism.”

“That’s just theory,” the miner said. “Nobody knows what the ancestors were like.”

“There wouldn’t have been any need for hibernation on Urt.” Nerethe snipped at another piece of the patient’s carapace. A shell of thick goo that had been extruded by her skin when the woman hit open space, it had protected her from the vacuum. One of fifteen miners blown into space in an accident, the patient was Quiet, just like Nerethe was pretending to be. She was pregnant, too. With no mental signature to track her by, it had taken twelve hours to locate her cocoon, hours Nerethe spent on call, waiting and anxious. Once they had pinpointed her location, the Loom transited her directly to Nerethe for extraction and a determination on whether the baby was injured.

“What if they fell into water? Or if it snowed?”

They drowned and they froze, Nerethe thought, but to say so would be morbid—she was failing with the banter again. This was all so much easier when you could do it telepathically. “I never could believe that Urt had much snow,” she said.

“I think it snowed.”

Nerethe’s treatment room was better furnished than her own hab, with a plush treatment couch of dusky pink and an imagewall showing babies she had delivered, snuggled in the arms of their parents. Views of space were streaked across the ceiling—another imagewall, but expensive enough to pass for a portal. A trellis covered in pale orange roses climbed the room’s back wall, perfuming the room slightly.

Nerethe herself was wedged into a narrow slot between the treatment couch and the instrument counter. Over the years she had learned to reach for instruments without turning her face away from her patient. Eye contact was important to the Quiet, who couldn’t thread their thoughts in any mind but their own.

The last hunks of carapace fell away. “I’m going to start the scanner now. Try to relax.”

The woman nodded, lips pressed together with tension, her attention fixed deep inside as she stared up at the imagewall showing the scattered lights of Urb. Each tiny flicker was an asteroid; each rock was home to people numbering in the thousands. “I think it snowed on Urt, all the time. I think they just grew a carapace and slept through the winter, and when they woke up everything was fine.”

“You’re probably right,” Nerethe agreed heartily, and started the scan.

She was able to send the woman home with the best of news—no damage to her or the unborn child. Her own relief she barely had time to savor before her brother startled her by transiting into her treatment room.

One moment she was alone, smiling at the scan results; the next he was beside her, a friendly, almost relieved smile on his handsome features. Silly younger brother, none too bright, desperately missed. He was wearing his “I’m in trouble” face, an ever so innocent expression in his little-boy eyes.

Nerethe cried out in delight, a Quiet habit that startled him badly, she could see, even as she vaulted the couch and threw herself into his arms. Warm skin and the smell of him made her spirits soar ridiculously. He felt positively frail, had to be living on one of the lower gravity asteroids of Urb. She clung, hopelessly teary at the sight of him. Then she pulled back suddenly, looked close.

“You’re not sick, are you?”

“What? No. What makes you think?”

“You’ve never come . . . here. To the office . . .”

“You’re never home.” He shifted from foot to foot, slouching in the light gravity which, to him, probably felt incredibly heavy. QuietTown was the largest of Urb’s asteroids. “Can’t we quicken this up?” His voice rose, insinuating.

She shook her head, shushed him, threw a warning glance at the curtain which separated her from the clinic receptionist and her patients. She pulled the curtain shut, tapped the privacy controls, waited for a confirmation on the soundproofing field. “Just talk to me.”

“Okay.” He sighed, rubbed his throat dramatically. “I heard you’re going to the wrangle with Denii Compact.”

“Yes. Kole Hexan asked me to do an analysis on their plague vaccine, and I couldn’t get out of it.”

“Why would you want to get out of it?”

“Because it’s wrong for me to go,” she said. She was Quick, and treaty said that only the Quiet could meet with Urb’s clients and competitors. Few races trusted humans; the word for human in most alien tongues was, literally, Mindpicker. But Urb provided services that were hard to get elsewhere: pollution-free resource extraction from remote asteroids, entertainment scans of distant worlds and wonders, colonial surveys. Not to mention Transition—instantaneous travel across vast distances.

If the Denii found out that a Quick doctor had gone to the talks, the results would be disastrous.

Problem was, she couldn’t tell this to Kole, who assumed that Nerethe had fallen Quiet as a young adult. It had been too easy not to correct the assumption, to almost—but not quite—lie. Kole had eased her into a QuietTown obstetrics practice, befriended her. She had planted the rose trellis in Nerethe’s office, fed her dinner, helped her adjust.

“It’s good you’re going.” Her brother crinked his face into what was supposed to be a pleasing grin. Like most Quick body language, it was flat, unconvincing. “Some people inLoom are a little mad that we were contracted to produce this vaccine. They think the Denii are up to something.”

“Like what?”

“They say why can’t they produce their own vaccine . . . I’d spin you the whole discussion if you’d just crack your mind a little . . .”

“Stop saying that.” Her eye wandered to the soundseal, checking. It was fine, naturally. “Everyone knows the Denii biolabs aren’t up to our standards.”

“That’s what I said. But—”

“Who’s angry?” Interrupting threw him off. InLoom, you finished your thought whether the other person had begun to answer or not; conversations braided. Live speech was a dotted line, a Throwback skill and good for nothing except communicating with the Quiet. Jannon was already hoarse from overusing his voice. “What guys are angry that you sold the vaccine contract?”

“Nerethe—”

“You sold it, didn’t you? Family lab’s producing the serum, right?”

“We can’t all be doctors, you know. Yeah, I sold it.”

“What guys are angry, Jannon?”

Hangdog, he dropped the innocent routine. “Intelligence guys. They say you have to pick the Denii envoy’s mind in case they’re up to something.”

She felt the blood draining from her face, knew she was paper-white. She remembered the last time she had felt this way, poring over experimental results and discovering something infinitely awful within her original failed experiment. She let go of his hand.

“Go back where you came from.” Numb lips nevertheless formed the words.

“I’m sorry, Nerethe. I am. Look in me, see how it is.”

Her messenger chirped, drowning out any possible answer. “Nerethe? Sobi Lett’s gone into labor. She wants to meet you in the birthing room.”

“Coming,” she said.

“You have to do it,” Jannon said. “Nerethe, they’re gonna tell everyone in QuietTown who you are.”

With that, shame-faced but message nevertheless delivered, he transited out. Air rushed past her face, eager to fill the space where her brother’s body had been, and the roses whispered in the momentary breeze. Her heart, ever the traitor, ached at his sudden absence.

• • • •

Once Sobi’s son was delivered, examined, and celebrated, Nerethe went back to her clinic. She scorched herself clean in the doctor’s shower before returning to the treatment room. Lying on the couch herself, she opaqued the imagewalls. Her eye fell on a relaxant patch, locked and safe in the Meds cabinet. It had been a long time since she’d started doing things the Quiet way, but tonight temptation finally won out; instead of applying the patch to her skin, she transitioned the drug directly to her bloodstream. A few thousand molecules—the most she could transition alone—but enough to do the job. A rush of chemically induced well-being filled her.

Floating, relaxed, she opened herself to the Loom.

All of Urb rushed to greet her, the interwoven presence of one hundred billion minds, everyone but the Quiet. A melange of feelings and information stitched through her: fifteen, twenty, sixty different threads, all at once. Her mind fell into old habits, sorting and threading. She picked an archive of recipes, dug into the marrow of her favorite discussions, still ongoing after so many years. She tasted the recent med research, got a whiff of city politics. The newest Frist opera was running live on Artsblock Six. Channeled inLoom by its audience, three hundred first-person experiences of the event flowed through the collective human consciousness, tangling with the nostalgia of those who had already seen it in person and the anticipation of people who still wanted to go . . .

Then there was a great emotional rush as her family detected her. Hot, passionate joy as they glommed around Nerethe in a knot, bundling six years of gossip into her mind—the twins had just gotten their Med certifications, Alya was pregnant, Hamen got a gender-switch, there’d been a scandal over an outfit that Berret had worn to his best friend’s graduation. Business, too: in a breath she learned everything the lab had accomplished since she’d turkeyed offLoom. Successes, failures, contracts and clients and research allotments, down to the penny details, a cascade of data. Old ancestors presided over the whole impromptu reunion, winding them round with love and inarticulate approval. Some of them had been all but dead for centuries—when their bodies gave out, they transited their consciousness directly into the Loom.

Hiding as little as she could bear, Nerethe let her aunt and mother pick over the details of her life, saw them worry about her eating habits, add to the recipes, cluck over her reclusive behavior.

A gaggle of cousins who’d been eight or ten when she left came forward shyly to reacquaint themselves.

Things were held back on their side, too. They didn’t draw hard on the experience of being offLoom. They absorbed images of her friendships with the Quiet; they were even impressed that she knew the infamous Kole Hexan. But they didn’t react, didn’t ask why.

They shied away from the intensity of her homesickness, didn’t comment on the way she had missed being onLoom every single minute. They wanted to take it for granted, she could see; didn’t want to be made uncomfortable.

She damped down her hostility and knitted herself into the radiance, the warmth. Prodigal. A moment of celebrity.

Her father was dancing the same old dance, making rote demands for grandchildren while trying to charm her on a deeper level. Something was going on, he knew it. Did it have anything to do with Jannon? He wanted to know.

Deflecting him, she sank deeper into the pleasure of being with the clan. When she’d been young it had been a constant push for air, for breathing room amid the squabbles and gossip, the power struggles and kid rebellions. Family business had been overwhelming and fraught with politics—do you need an assistant? Is there a cousin who could do it? Can you make enough profit on this job so we can afford a place at the Medical College for Leena? Always, someone wanted something.

Funny, she had all but forgotten the good things. In the office, she raised her hand, brushed wetness off her face and transitioned it to steam.

You’re ready to come home, her aunt was thinking.

But she had a practice, she argued. A life.

Somewhere on another of Urb’s asteroids, her aunt shrugged.

And that was why she had come back, wasn’t it? To see which life mattered more. No matter what she did now, her life and practice among the Quiet would be destroyed. Either Jannon’s friends would rat her out or she’d have to betray Kole.

Two presences dangled at the edges of the melee: Jannon and Green. Brother and one-time sister-in-law. The family ne’er do well and the unacknowledged heroine of Urb. Green, who had already been detangling from her romance with Nerethe’s troublesome brother when she found the research Nerethe had abandoned.

Green, who had reconstructed the experiments Nerethe had destroyed.

This was what Intelligence was really threatening to reveal: Nerethe had stumbled onto a way of detecting Quiet children in the first trimester of a pregnancy. She had hidden the data, run away. But it was hard to lose things inLoom. Green was smart and she’d lived in Nerethe’s mind, and she’d needed a project to distract her from the heartache of breaking up with Jannon.

Now the family held manufacturing rights on a Quiet holocaust.

Nerethe held all this close, didn’t let it slip to her family, couldn’t bear to hear the defenses and recriminations. Would you willingly give birth to a child who was blind, they’d ask. Who had no legs? Then why have a child who couldn’t be healed except with rough physical tools? Who couldn’t transition to the energy state when their body aged and their time was running out?

She hooked out a private thread, knotted herself into Green’s cautious reserve. “I’m not angry,” she sent, but it wasn’t quite true, and Green closed herself like a pressure door sealing.

Dismay and concern rippled through the wider family unit.

Damn.

Stitching regrets, Nerethe turned to business; she delivered the bad news that she wasn’t staying inLoom and asked for hardcopies on the research she needed for the Denii job. It was a pretense—she’d needed to see her family before she decided what she was going to do. Dad’s concern deepened, but she couldn’t help that. Let him worm the truth out of Jannon.

She reminded them that they were welcome to visit in QuietTown, promised to try cooking more and sucked up the opera, filling her head with hot musical noise.

Hot panic dragged at her from Jannon, wanting her to stay inLoom until she’d done the job, but she popped back out into the void.

Curled fetal in the privacy of her treatment room, she bawled, hard racking sobs that made her chest hurt. Finally her sinuses packed up. Breathing open-mouthed, her lips itching as they dried out, she fell asleep.

• • • •

The meeting center was a monument to the will and self-confidence of Kole Hexan, leader of the Negotiators Guild and, by extension, unofficial leader of all the Quiet. Built to Kole’s exacting order, it had variable gravity, color, décor, and furnishings—all available at a moment’s notice. Today blue cushions were arranged in a heap in the center of the floor and the portals were clear. They showed Urb in the distance, the meeting room at a symbolic remove from the city and its telepathic Loom.

“You look exhausted.” Kole was struggling to feed her eight-week-old son. He had just Quickened, connecting to the vastness of the Loom. Tiny face glazed with distraction, he ignored Kole’s wide pale nipple, eyes sliding randomly in their sockets, as she tried to gain his attention. In the corner of the meeting room, Kole’s daughter, Tain, was playing with a stuffed gravdog. “How long was Sobi in labor?”

“Seven hours.”

“Girl?”

“Boy. Four pounds, five ounces.”

“That’s a big kid. So, what’s hollowed your eyes?”

“I got a discussion download from the Loom,” Nerethe said. This was factually true, though Kole would assume she had pulled the data through the Quiet computer network.

“Reading? You were enjoying yourself?”

“Don’t tease. I was catching up on the evolution argument.”

“Which one is that?”

“You know. Why haven’t we ascended out of Urb.”

“That old lament? Why do we still age?” Kole moaned. “Why do we get sick? Why can’t we reproduce in the energy state?”

“Loomers always were Quick to whine,” Nerethe said automatically, a Quiet saying she’d picked up that was true enough that it didn’t feel like treason or deceit to sometimes let it out.

Kole’s bubbled laughter cut short when Tish lost her breast again. “Let me guess. There’s a faction claims that the Loom should send citizen volunteers into the pure energy state right now. Trailblazers. Hell with waiting until they’re about to die. Throw off the shackles of the flesh, and the fact that we can’t seem to reproduce in that state means we’re purely not meant to.”

“The Jirain reproduce in the energy state.”

“Says who, legends? Which brings us to the we are unworthy, we must match our phenomenal abilities with spiritual development, onna onna ba bing!”

The nonsense syllables elicited a giggle from Tain, over in the corner. Nerethe rubbed her eyes. Her head itched, as if the underside of her scalp needed a good wash. The taste of the Loom had been intoxicating; she craved it. Human voice, even Kole’s, was acid on her nerves.

Nobody inLoom seemed to understand that the Quiet talked endlessly.

“Come on, baby boy, drink! Then there’s the blame it on the aliens thread, and probably some nut claiming if we want to move on we have to stop living like Throwbacks. Childbirth and capitalism and furniture and visual artists . . .”

“And gravity. They hate gravity,” Nerethe said. “And the heretics. They say that reproduction in the energy state means becoming God. Creating life on a dead world.”

“Are there any left? I thought we’d strip-mined ’em all.” Kole’s face grew serious. “I suppose there’s a faction says they’ll jump to the next level soon. That now they are weeding out Quiet babies prenatally . . .”

Another lash of guilt. “Yes.”

A speaker chimed above them. “The Denii representative has arrived, Envoy.”

“Turn the grav up another fifty percent and then send him in,” Kole said. “Tain, log onto playschool.”

“Five more minutes,” the little girl pleaded.

“Three.” Closing her shift, Kole dug out a gauzy scarf and arranged it around her neck. Nerethe’s stomach bounced as the gravity shifted.

“Evoci won’t mind that Tish is weaving?”

“As long as the kid’s preverbal, he doesn’t care.”

The words were barely out when the doors belled open, revealing the Denii. Gold and yellow and red flesh, wispy-limbed and impossibly frail, he drifted into the meeting room on a cluster of long, spiny legs. Sixteen string-like arms, each ending in fingers as fine as copper wire, encircled Kole’s solid shoulders. A puppet hugging a balloon, Nerethe thought.

“Kole, friend,” he said. “Is this the child?”

Get it over with. As the negotiators murmured over Tish’s slack face and wandering eyes, Nerethe put a directed trickle of thought together, filling the room with her appetite for thoughts not her own. Kole and her daughter were dark, but the baby was a smudge of wonderment and curiosity—Loomtripping, too delighted to notice that it was still hungry.

Evoci Denii’s mind was a charnel house.

Even as his fingers played over the baby, trying to tickle him back to awareness of his surroundings, the alien was thinking about driving its needle-long digits into the child’s flesh. It halved and quartered all of them—Kole, the kids—to bleeding hunks, imagined them blown into space while the severed body parts oozed carapace and blood.

She snapped out, held her face still through Kole’s warm introduction: “Nerethe is one of my closest friends, and it pleases me enormously to bring you two together.” The alien’s close-set eyes examined Nerethe intently, the bright yellow irises and their golden pupils locked, sixteen times over, on her every feature. Sharp fingers brushed her palm in a gesture of friendship, and Nerethe steeled herself not to react.

“It is an honor to meet today, because for once we are not tasked to agree on military boundaries or competing trade practices,” he purred. “Today, we work together.”

She forced another peek into his mind. Imaginary Evoci fingers dug into her belly, piercing organs, withdrawing bloodslicked while she screamed in a fashion that the alien found erotic.

Revolted, she nevertheless split her consciousness, detailed half of herself to answering politely, to working with Kole on the job at hand. The other half dug past the snuffscape, moving narrowly toward the mental archives on the alien’s mission. She ignored the strings leading to other parts of his mind—family life, sexual proclivities, childhood, memories, friends—she had seen more than enough of this soul, thank you very much and oh, Jannon, you owe me.

Now she closed in on the mission objectives.

There were two. The apparent objective was to get the humans to produce inoculations for the coming Denii plague season. Simple, straightforward. Two of their pharmacy ships had collided not long ago, victims of old age and poor maintenance, hazards multiplied a thousandfold by the dangers of vacuum.

Perfectly reasonable, perfectly plausible. They needed help. Urb was competition, not enemy, even if the two races did maintain large armies and careful arms-length diplomacy . . .

Plausible, but a lie. Nerethe picked out the truth.

First they’d plant a couple of lab techs in the inoculation production facility, a reasonable request. And the Denii techs would, sooner or later, be mindpicked. When that happened, their minds would transmit a mental virus, one that would lie dormant in the Loom until it had spread itself through Urb. When it launched, it would scramble the victims’ telepathic signatures, making it impossible to weave into the Loom. The results wouldn’t be deadly, but they’d be significant: chaos, hysteria, reduced transition efficiency, decreased military readiness.

Each participant increased the Loom’s power exponentially. That was why Nerethe alone could transition a few molecules of sedative, while a thousand Loomers could move an asteroid and all its habs and habitants. The whole of Loom, with its hundred billion minds, could move all of Urb across lightyears in a single blink.

This Loomvirus would generate profits and increased security for the Denii Compact, at the expense of fragmentation and troubles for the human city.

Nerethe had broken the law, but she’d done the right thing after all.

I wonder if there’s anything else . . .

Just then, in his frontmind, Evoci pulled off the baby’s fingernails. Nerethe dumped the Denii plan into her long-term memory before she could absorb any more violence. Then she got out, melding into the meeting, becoming a single attentive participant without twitching a single facial muscle at the traitorous creature beside her.

• • • •

Afterwards Kole insisted on going back to her hab, a hermetically sealed world of decent gravity and thick carpets. On arriving they were greeted by Tain’s Pekingese pup, a genetically modified ball of fur that launched itself six feet to land in the little girl’s arms, barking gruffly as she squeezed and then shot off in the direction of her room.

Kole was a chronic nurturer. She had filled the hab with plants—pots and tubs and sacks of spilling, climbing, blossoming greenery. Flickering starsticks were embedded in their soil, providing needed light and physical support. Criss-crossing the ceiling portal, carefully tended vines dangled with clumps of grape and modified cherry.

It was a cozy and relaxing space, more home than Nerethe’s own utilitarian quarters. But now all she wanted was to get somewhere private, dump what she’d learned into Jannon and let him buy off the Intelligence guys. Get her brother out of trouble and save the city from the Loomvirus. Then she could decide if she could live with betraying Kole, if she could just go back to being an anonymous doctor in the bad part of town.

“You didn’t like Evoci,” Kole said, giving the baby a weary glance as he hiccuped once.

She remembered the alien’s foremind, held back a shudder, settled the roiling of her stomach with a gulp of warm, loamy, air. “Tish will learn to feed again in a couple days. If you don’t want to wait, I can get you something to make him swallow.”

“He’ll feed. Why didn’t you like Evoci?”

“I thought he was . . . furtive. Hiding something.”

“Ah hah!” Unexpectedly, her friend smiled. She brandished the green scarf and then, with the air of a magician, produced a tiny zipchip from its folds. “Not a single Quickie knows about this.”

Her heart sank. “What is it?”

“Hab plans for a Denii ship. Voci slipped ’em to me while we were fussing over the baby.”

“Why . . .” She stopped dead and then goggled at her friend.

No moment in the past six years had made her feel less Quick. She might as well have been Quiet, what with this sudden snapping together of significant glances, things unsaid, Quiet diatribes that had trailed off suddenly . . .

“Separation?” she whispered, as if she feared being overheard.

“That’s right. We want to leave; the Denii offered us a straight swap. They’ve even built the ship as a gesture of faith. We can move in as soon as we pay up.”

“Pay what, Kole?”

“That’s the holdup. They want us to prove the Quick send telepathic ringers into client meetings.”

She felt a hot jolt of guilt then, as if she’d been caught, but her friend’s gaze was clear and guileless.

“Do they?”

“Don’t see how. I make up mission rosters, and I know everyone on this rock.”

“Is proof of fraud the only payment they’ll accept?”

“It’s a Grail. They want it the way the Quick want Evolution.”

“Why?”

“The Denii understand humans, Nerethe. They know we’d breach treaty if we thought we could get away with it. And the idea’s so contrary to their way of thinking that it gnaws on them.”

“But . . . they don’t trust you to keep Loomers out of negotiations?”

“They do. But the Quick have abilities I don’t. The Denii figure maybe the Loomers could slip someone past me.”

She couldn’t think of anything to say to that.

“If I prove breach of treaty, the Denii sense of honor is satisfied and I’ve made up for any failure to keep negotiations clean.”

“You leave Urb . . .”

“We leave.”

“ . . . and the Denii increase their market share on the client worlds at Urb’s expense.”

“There’s plenty of work for everyone, Nerethe. Listen, could you look at the med facilities on the plans? If we ever do catch the Quick playing tricks, we’ll need to be self-sufficient.”

Her throat lumped. “Leaving Urb.”

“Nobody’s forcing you to go.” Kole hugged her fiercely.

“Leaving is hard,” she said quietly. “It’s harder than you think.”

“Staying might be impossible.”

“How many do you think would go?”

“A lot. The last few years have been devastating.”

“Because of the prenatal test, you mean.”

“What else?”

“The City could backlash. Transit somewhere and leave QuietTown behind.”

“I wish I thought that was true. Good riddance. Besides, we’re going nowhere, not unless someone inLoom gets greedy or fearful.” Tish screeched and Kole whisked him onto a changing table. “Not unless they try to slip that ringer past me.”

“In which case you’ll stop them.”

“If I can. I can’t allow a breach if I can stop it.”

“So to get what you want, you have to screw up.”

“Crazy old universe, isn’t it?” Kole laughed bitterly. “Could be it’s a pipe dream. Could be once we get the ship we’ll chicken out and stay.”

“They’ll follow you. You trust Evoci and the Quiet trust you.”

“Yeah. It was all beautifully academic until a couple days ago.” She picked a daisy, brushed it over Tish’s nose, trying to get her son’s attention. His face stayed blank; his eyes continued their endless wander. “Transit’s all one-way now, Nerethe. Half our kids go to the Loom. With the testing . . .”

Nerethe choked on the pollen sweet air of Kole’s hab. Her fault. If she’d stayed to hide the research instead of burning it and leaving the cinders to brilliant Green . . . if she hadn’t been looking for an excuse to run away from home.

“It used to be one in ten thousand Quick-born kids was Quiet. Now it’s one in a million, and falling.”

Kole’s voice was rising, and Tain peeped out of her room, eyes wide and distressed. The baby didn’t even blink.

“He’ll be different, Kole, even if you take him away from the Loom.”

“If we left Urb he wouldn’t have anything to tap into.”

“He’d still be a telepath.”

“He wouldn’t be a Loomjunkie.”

She flinched.

“I wouldn’t have to look into his eyes and wonder if he was telling Throwback jokes to all his friends. Kedge Marx lost his son last week. He’s barely nine, but he transited Downtown . . .”

“Kole.” Nerethe cut her eyes toward the doorway, where Tain was clinging to the puppy with a suffocating grip, lip wobbling and tearful, staring at her brother.

With an effort, Kole dashed at her eyes, slid across the room and pulled her whimpering daughter into a tight hug. “Would you look at the ship specs, please?”

“Sure.” Nerethe nodded reluctantly, pushed aside greenery to get to her friend’s computer, and accessed the chip. Her whole being cried out for mental contact, desperation like withdrawal. She wanted to feel her mother’s mind wrapped in hers. She had to open up and tell Jannon everything.

Just a quick contact, as soon as she was away from Kole. A couple more hours, she told herself, and then she tried to forget it, to pull up the specs and concentrate on the sole task before her, just like any other member of the Quiet.

• • • •

She didn’t send, or even weave back into Loom. It was ridiculous and stupid to delay, but she couldn’t shake the guilt of betraying Kole, not even with Loom endangered and Jannon in trouble. She spent a night with her friend, sat with the baby while Kole pumped her aching breasts. Then while Kole slept she lay with Tish among the greenery, squirting droplets of milk onto his tongue, trying to get him to drink from a bottle.

Her misgivings—the nagging idea that Kole’s trust of Evoci was warranted despite what Nerethe had seen in his mind—were silly and unshakeable. She had to weave in. The city had to prepare if the Denii were going to plague them.

Besides, Kole wasn’t infallible. Nerethe had been lying to her for years.

When her work shift came, she called her location into a Quick transitor and he sent her—in an instant, a breath—to her treatment room.

Even in Quiet Town, med facilities came equipped with a damping field which could prevent Transition. It was a standard safety precaution. Once in a very rare while, shock or extreme pain jolted someone, formerly Quiet, into the Loom. The damping field kept patients from transiting randomly.

It wasn’t intended as a security system.

But when Nerethe arrived, tired and conflicted, stale from an entire shift spent in the same clothes, there were two strangers waiting in her treatment room.

She tapped the field control, blocking out the Loom as they stared at her, a man and a woman, both tall, both bulky. Military, certainly. Their musculature made them strangely identical as they exchanged a glance, frowned.

The hair on Nerethe’s arms prickled.

Her instrument panel registered an energy surge—they’d tried to transit her out.

Cut off from Loom, they were nevertheless still joined to each other. A blunt wedge of telepathic power battered at Nerethe’s defenses, already weakened by lack of sleep and the traitorous desire to connect to someone, anyone. Combined, they were three times as strong as she was, and they peeled at her artificial Quiet, digging at the edges of her mind, demanding to know what she had learned from Evoci Denii.

Worse, she wanted them inside her. Her mouth was watering even as they came closer, approaching slowly on either side of the medcounter, no doubt intent on dragging her out of the damping field so they could take her away.

They’d join up with their cronies, overpower her, drag her back into Loom.

Nerethe snatched up a scalpel and leaped over the counter, jumping gracelessly, moving too slow. The woman caught her ankle in a crushing grip and she pinwheeled back and down. Falling in the slow motion of low gravity, she raked the back of her hand on rose thorns from her trellis. She tried to kick the woman with her free leg. Missed.

All the while, the sense of the two minds, tantalizingly close, so strong . . . and she ought to just go back inLoom, everything she wanted was there, another family reunion, another chance to make it up with Green . . .

No. Not with the Quiet separation scheme still tainting everything in her foremind. She didn’t have time now to get the stitches of Kole’s plan out of her thoughts.

As Nerethe finally hit the floor, the woman wrenched at her ankle, squeezing hard. She slung Nerethe back against the treatment couch. Small flares of pain jarred her neck, hip, the back of her knee.

Then the woman yanked, she jerked, she broke Nerethe’s ankle.

The sound of her own voice, gasping as the pain hit, was shockingly loud. Agony fuzzed the world; as Nerethe blinked it back into focus she saw the man tapping her console, trying to shut off the field. The woman hulked over her, about to bundle her up and away.

She did what any Quiet woman would have done, instinctively, minutes ago. She screamed her head off.

It caught them off guard; the woman flinched back, let go of the leg. Nerethe shot across the treatment room floor like it was slicked with soap, hit the curtain and burst through, still shrieking as she dragged herself away. Quiet patients added their voices to the audible, growing confusion. The receptionist, just arrived for work, bent and grabbed her, winding his arms under her armpits as he pulled her upright.

A babble of words:

“Nerethe?”

“Doc?”

“She’s bleeding!”

Almost like a thoughtbraid, she thought, as her would-be savior slewed her sideways by mistake and jarred the injured leg.

“What happened?”

“Kidnappers,” she gasped.

The crowd had her now, borne up on their arms as they formed a protective clot around her body. They intertwined their fingers with hers, clung to her thighs, slipped arms under her shirt and threaded themselves into her hair. A pregnant patient nestled under the crook of her arm. If anyone tried to transit her now, they’d have to move the whole mob.

Bursting through the curtains, the two strangers found themselves facing a crowd of twenty. Acquaintances and friends surrounded Nerethe: patients, other doctors, toothtechs from the dental center, physically nested together and radiant with hostility.

A tiny old man who worked the optometry clinic bared his teeth at them. Sweet, gentle, a grandfather of six, he snarled at the goons like a rabid weasel Nerethe had once seen in Forest Hab. “Guess what we’re thinking, Loomjunkie?”

Apparently they could.

“You have one day, Doctor,” the man warned, and then the two Quick thugs transited away.

• • • •

Being on the receiving end of Quiet medicine was worse than she’d ever imagined—they used sonar on the swelling and regrowth stims to treat the bone before packing the ankle in a plaster that would take days to do the job. All things she did herself, day after day, but she had never before been the patient. Prior to Med training, she had taken her injuries to another doctor within the family, trained Loomhealers who guided her mind as she put herself right telekinetically. After Med, she did the job herself.

Quick to whine, she thought.

Kole had heard of the attack almost before it was over, had collected Nerethe from Treatment and insisted on taking her back home. She settled her on the spartan couch with pillows, fed her cherries, made soup from the instant packs that were all Nerethe kept in her kitchen.

Nerethe let herself be fussed over, lying back on the couch. The only real decoration in the hab was a mobile Green had sent her . . . small paper balloons representing all of Urb’s many asteroids. Miniaturized habitats rose from them—domes and apartment towers—as they floated in the air. The cluster of asteroids was vaguely egg-shaped, with the bulk of QuietTown in its middle.

Green had kept in touch, despite the tension between them, when the rest of the family had not. She had sent letters and gifts and voice messages. The news was often impersonal, but it had still been a lifeline of sorts.

“What did they want?” Kole demanded. “Secrets?”

Meaning the plan to leave Urb, but it was a vague enough question that Nerethe could pretend her answer wasn’t a lie. “Maybe.”

“Why you?”

“Can I hold Tish?” She stretched out still shaking arms and Kole dropped the baby into her embrace, a warm and sweet-smelling bundle. Half-asleep, his disconnection from the world was muted. Nerethe couldn’t resist spinning herself just a tiny thread, slurping the mental warmth of his dreams. Just to steady herself.

“Why you, Nerethe?”

“My brother’s in soup with the military. He sold the inoculation contract without government approval.”

“We can make political hay with this. Big protest via channels, big news . . . Loomers abduct Quiet doctor.”

“My family would pay.” Soon enough the military would expose her as a Loomer. Her clinic cronies and patients would be sorry they saved her.

She ran a finger over the baby’s eyebrows. His eyes jerked up, briefly, to hold hers; a flicker of recognition spun and snapped in his mind. A first moment of self-division. “Kole, why do you trust Evoci to follow through on the deal?”

“’Voci’s true blue, Nerethe.”

“You can’t really know anyone.”

“That’s Quick talk, and it’s crap. I know; it’s what I do. That’s why they pay me to steer this mob.”

“Kole, if someone had picked Evoci’s mind, and they said he couldn’t be trusted, would you believe?”

Kole’s face stilled. Her eyes went to the vacant expression on her child’s face. “I’d say that person had committed an unforgivable crime.”

“That person could give you and Evoci what he wants. Proof that Quick compromised business negotiations with a client. The Quiet could move off City.”

“Because I screwed up after all?”

“But he’s not what you say. Keeping your bargain won’t just hurt Urb, it’ll make things worse for the Quiet.”

“I’ve never been wrong—” Kole laughed strangely, abruptly. She plucked her son off of Nerethe’s lap.

“If someone wanted to check, Kole, make sure he is what you say, make sure he can be trusted . . .”

“Someone is being presumptuous. I know my job.”

“Could you make an excuse for us to see him again?”

“No.” Kole’s voice was icy cold—vacuum, Green withdrawing, Loomdeath. “If someone thinks I’ll help her violate my honorable friend, then we’re both terrible judges of character.”

Hitching the baby up onto her shoulder, she walked out of Nerethe’s hab.

• • • •

More than anything she wanted to pace . . . no, more than anything she wanted back onto the Loom. She’d have settled for pacing, but her ankle was too sore. And if she went onLoom she’d be opening herself to another assault from Jannon’s playpals. That would come soon enough, whether she went looking or not.

Of course, she could just give them what they wanted.

You’re ready to come home, Aunt Ceris had said, and it was true. She’d spent six years doing penance, living the Quiet life, denying the Loom in a pointless attempt to make up for discovering the unthinkable. But she was older now, she could live with herself and with them, and she was going to be bounced out of QuietTown anyway.

Home.

She dredged the Denii plan out of her long-term memory, gave it a quick once-over like a jewel thief inspecting a stolen diamond. Neural viruses were theoretically possible. Hard to believe that non-teeps like the Denii could invent one, but there would be discussions on the Loom she could check out . . .

Hard to believe they’d risk Military’s wrath.

She riffled the mission details on the virus but there wasn’t much—Evoci was a diplomat; his nest fathers hadn’t told him the mechanics.

A diplomat. Would he go along with this? Hadn’t he considered the possible consequences?

Her doctor’s mind butted in with more objections: Why tell Evoci about the virus at all? If the Denii believed that Urb breached treaty, they’d have to believe that he would be picked. If he was picked, Urb would learn about the plan and cancel the inoculations contract.

Of course, if this thing is triggered by a mindpick, what do they need with the inoculation project? Why not just infect Evoci? Nerethe would pick him, give the virus to the Loom and they’d have their proof, all in one blow.

She was still untangling it when the door to her hab chimed. Cursing, she extricated herself from the nest of pillows and limped to answer it.

It was Green. “Loom’s in knots,” she said. “Rumor’s a Quiet doctor got mugged today. Jannon’s hysterical. Says it’s you.”

“Why did they send you?”

“It was you.” She wound past Nerethe, slipping into the hab with gliding steps, and then folded her arms and pouted. “Are you going to let me help?”

“You can’t help.”

“I meant your injuries.”

“Oh.” She opened her mind, just a hair, and felt the blast of warm air rolling over her as the pain vanished.

Green tugged the plaster off Nerethe’s leg, crushed it between her hands while smiling indulgently. “This is Jannon’s fault.”

“No, Green, it’s mine.”

“Can’t be. I won’t believe.”

“That’s sweet, but . . .” she said.

Green shrugged. “Ceris says you’re coming back.”

“Maybe.”

Green threw her arms out, stood on one foot and twirled. “Everyone in QuietTown hates me. I stole the Quiet young.”

“Everyone in the Loom loves you.”

“It should have been you.” Green said.

“It didn’t have to be either of us.”

“You let the genie out.”

“I was looking for genetic markers for an allergy.”

“Someone would’ve found it.”

“Eventually.”

Green began another twirl. “I didn’t come to fight.”

“Good.”

“I came to say that if you came back . . . I’d be glad. Eventually. So would you. There’s a hole, Nerethe. Dropped stitches. Don’t stay gone because of me.” She twirled again, her leg flying, calf muscles flexing as she stretched up onto tiptoe and lowered herself again. “You needed to hear this, right?”

“Yes.” It was the last barrier to going home. To hell with her doubts . . .

. . . but somehow, she still couldn’t send. The Loomvirus was a scam, she was sure of it, a trick to make Urb cancel the inoculations contract and prove they’d breached treaty.

But she’d picked Evoci herself.

“Coming onLoom?”

“Not yet,” she whispered.

“Then I’m going.”

“Green, wait.”

“Can I transit, or do I have to go into the hallway?”

“If you wanted someone to misread you on a pick, if you couldn’t block a telepath, how would you do it?”

Her brother’s ex-wife swirled to a stop, frowning. “You can’t.”

“If you had to. If you needed someone to think you were dangerous, and you weren’t.”

“Wouldn’t work. A deep pickthrough . . .”

“I didn’t do a deep—” That was it.

“Nerethe?”

She spoke slowly. “What if your foremind was so ugly the person didn’t want to do a deep pick?”

“Nobody likes ugliness.” Green put her hands on the floor, flexed into a handstand. She was thinking now, relaxed—she spun when she was nervous. “If you knew what the picker was looking for, you could maybe put the answers in a nice, tight packet. Drop it in the back brain, you could hope they’d scoop it up and run without doing a deep pick.”

“Simple misdirection.”

“I don’t think it would work. Gambling on human nature is iffy. You never know when a person’s gonna flee or fight.”

“You can guess.”

“Are you thinking about what I said about the family?” Green grinned shyly.

“Not directly,” she said.

“I miss you,” Green said. She flipped upright, wrapped her arms around Nerethe, squeezed until the warmth of her body had seeped through their clothes.

Then she vanished, leaving Nerethe to her thoughts.

Evoci had laid a trap and she’d almost walked right into it. She could tell that to Jannon’s friends, get them both off the hook. Nobody would cancel the inoculations contract, nothing would happen to the Loom.

She could go home. Nobody would know she’d breached treaty except Kole, and Kole couldn’t prove a thing.

• • • •

The baby was feeding when Nerethe got to Kole’s, slurping lustily while its attention wandered in and out of Loom. In another couple of days he would completely split his focus. He’d be onLoom, but invisibly. For a while, at least, Kole would have the illusion of her Quiet boy again.

She barely moved when Nerethe came inside, just flickered her eyes to take in the vanished limp, the healed bruises. Her face was stone, negotiating face, no friendship or warmth.

Another void.

“You’re right about Evoci. You can trust him.”

There was no visible reaction, but somehow fury crackled through the air. “You picked him again?”

“No. I worked out how he tricked me.” That got a smile. Admiration, but it was for Evoci, not Nerethe.

“I came to say that I’ll give you the proof. Testimonials, onLoom or off. You can turn me over to the Denii for treaty breach.”

“What’s in it for you?”

“Nothing. Loom won’t have me back once I’ve betrayed them.”

“Why do it, then?”

“I don’t want to.” She’d be outcast. Nobody would have her, Quick or Quiet. Her family would take her into their habs, but she’d never weave with them again.

She couldn’t live that way. She’d spent too long among the Quiet not to know how it would be, condescension and pity. She couldn’t be poor crippled Nerethe.

“If Loom expels you, you will be Quiet.”

“I’d still be a mindpicker.”

“You’ll die when you die. No transiting into pure Loomstuff when you’re about to go. No living in the Loom forever while your body rots in Recycling. No more discussions, no archives, no instant cures . . .”

She had just enough pride left to keep from covering her ears. “I already know this!”

A low, cold growl. “Then why are you here?”

She flashed on Evoci’s foremind, the long copper fingers piercing the jelly of her eyes. “I broke treaty. I committed a crime.”

“Serious one. And you did it because you were Quick and nobody could stop you?”

“I did it so I wouldn’t lose everything I care about.”

“And have you?”

“I think the jury’s still deliberating.”

Reaching into one of her plants, Kole broke off a twinkling length of starstick, dangled it in front of Tish’s face. The baby coughed, sluicing milk over his mother’s skin. Then he followed the sparkles with his eyes.

“You never said which camp you fell into, Nerethe. On the Evolution thing.”

Her guts loosened and she sank onto a low couch. “I never understood the great rush to evolve off Urb.”

“Why rush? That’s a position?”

“Sometimes you can’t go back, Kole. We lost Urt because we were so busy transiting around the stars. We simply forgot where it was. That’s got to be wrong.”

“Maybe,” Kole said. “Loomers forget we didn’t evolve into what we are. We engineered ourselves. Carapace for vacuum survival, low gravity adaptations, telepathy—all deliberate genetic modifications.” She flipped the baby over onto her knees and began patting his back. “And now the Quiet are the ones leaving Urb. Maybe we’re the ones evolving.”

Nerethe risked a quick glance up at Kole, saw that her cheeks were fighting against dimples. “Wouldn’t that just stick in the collective craw?”

“Sometimes growing up means leaving home, Nerethe.”

“I know.” She took the bit of starstick, felt its warmth fizzing into her fingers. “Kole. I’m so very, very sorry.”

“Enough. Throw yourself any harder on my mercy, you’ll dent the damned floor. Assuming ’Voci doesn’t want you, the ship invite’s still open. You can come with us. You know we’ll need doctors.”

She nodded. It was the best offer she’d get. She’d even hoped for it, if only because it meant forgiveness from Kole. “I can’t run any farther from home than that.”

“You won’t run anywhere else, either. Nowhere to go on a habitat ship. You might have to put some faith in your roots, if you’re smart enough to put any down.”

“Unless Evoci wants me.”

Her friend’s face sparkled with wary amusement. “Oh, I don’t think he will. Not for long, anyway.”

She sighed, more relieved than she thought she’d be. “Good.”

“You aren’t gonna ask if I’m sure?”

“I trust your judgment,” Nerethe said. “That’s why we picked you to drive this mob, isn’t it?”

“That’s why we did,” Kole said placidly, and they shared a wary smile as the baby belched and then started to cry.

©2001by A.M. Dellamonica. Originally published in Oceans of the Mind Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A.M. Dellamonica’s first novel, Indigo Springs, won the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Their fourth won the 2016 Prix Aurora for Best Novel. They have published over forty short stories in Tor.com, and elsewhere. Alyx teaches writing at two universities and is writing a screenplay as the final hurdle as they pursue an MFA in creative writing at a third. Their sixth novel, Gamechanger, was released in September under the name L.X. Beckett and is a hopetopia, a story that imagines humanity surviving climate change and creating a post-carbon economy.

Many Happy Returns

Adam-Troy Castro | 5421 words

Gorman was on foot, crossing a frozen continent. It was not Antarctica. That was light years away, and so over. Nobody went there anymore. This continent he had chosen for his latest adventure was bigger, broader, colder, deadlier, nastier. It was not fun. Every step was an occasion for regret. He was probably going to die. He was glad he came.

Subjected to howling winds and sub-freezing temperatures and deprivations capable of making a Shackleton want to lie down and die, Gorman lost four toes and forty kilos, which sounds a little bit like I’m saying he’s lost ten kilos with each toe, an unintended implication since no one’s toes have never been quite that large.

He was starving, is what that sentence meant.

Today he was resting his hopes for immediate survival on ice fishing. After hours of back-breaking effort, he succeeded in carving a hole in the frigid surface through which he could dimly see the black waters of a vast inland sea; and he lowered a thread painstakingly unraveled from his thermal pants and braided to some semblance of tensile strength, the end tied to a hook piercing one of those blackened and severed toes, into that unknowable darkness, hoping that whatever came to investigate it would swallow whole and not nibble. Then that sudden strong jerk came, promising sustenance. Alas, it was such a strong jerk that it almost pulled him into the hole after it, and only his own strength, still prodigious despite being drained by the conditions, enabled him to wrestle whatever it was, first giving it the slack it needed to struggle, then pulling harder, digging his cleated boots into the harsh ice so he could draw the beast farther, and farther, out of the darkness and into the light. It was only when the ice started to crack all around him, in a perfect circle, that he knew he had landed a leviathan, and he was just beginning to contemplate whether survival would be best served by following his instincts as a hunter in search of a meal or those of potential prey hoping to avoid becoming one, when he became aware of

a limping robot

ambling toward him

from the east.

There was no telling how long it had spent crossing the ice field while Gorman was distracted.

It was a slender, golden thing, dinged here and there from a service lifetime of being smashed with heavy objects. Approximately the shape and dimensions of a human being, it honored that model with its body language, even though all it had for a face was the thin little crease on the bottom quarter of its cylindrical head that functioned as a workable smile. It carried a small rectangular object, and though Gorman already knew what it was, there came a point in the robot’s approach when sight and not experience identified it as a sealed green envelope bearing the phrase Happy Birthday.

The robot stopped before him and said, “Happy birthday, Gorman.”

Gorman said, “Fuck off.”

The robot spun on its heels and retreated toward the jagged peaks on the horizon.

• • • •

Later, in a dying place where the air stank of soot and where the shadows were darker than could be accounted for by the mere poverty of light, Gorman dragged himself across a dusty wooden floor and into a room littered with wreckage and the gnawed bones of uncounted others who had sought this refuge before him.

In the last few minutes he had been wounded in his right leg, which was useless, hence the requirement of using his other leg to propel himself, on his back, into this place where, his exhaustion and blood loss suggested, he would now be making his last stand. He bore a pulse rifle across his chest, burning his bare chest through overuse, and he knew that it really did need a cooling cycle before being used again, if he didn’t want to risk a phase-out that would incinerate him, his shambling pursuers, and all other physical matter within fifty meters. But an entire horde of the bastards was swarming into the ruin after him and it wasn’t like he had much of choice. Even as the top of his head encountered an obstruction, some fixed piece of furniture too heavy to be shoved aside, one of the damned things stuck its rotting face past the threshold and forced Gorman to devote yet another short, controlled burst to the cause. Elsewhere in the crumbling house, that is, elsewhere but still too close, far too close to allow Gorman satisfaction at taking yet another of the bastards down, its companions heard the sound of the rifle’s signature zzzzzzizzzzzzit and started coming to investigate, which really made this a fine time for

the golden robot, which sported a few more dings and dents acquired since its last intrusion

to come striding through the same threshold,

still bearing the sealed green envelope reading Happy Birthday.

It said, “Happy birthday, Gorman.”

Gorman said, “Fuck off.”

The robot exited, turning the corner just before the same opening became dominated by worm-ridden, gnashing faces.

• • • •

Gorman scaled the thousand-meter edifice of the sultan and infiltrated the seraglio, home of three thousand stunning courtesans with nothing to do but dream of the next time their lord returned from his travels to the borderlands of the empire, and regale each other with the stories they had heard of the one man, the rogue of legend, the grand adventurer, who it was said could satisfy even these ladies trained all their lives at the arts of pleasure, who could show them for the first time ever what it meant to not just give, but also to receive.

O, just to contemplate him, though even a man that storied could not possibly get past the city walls, and even if he did, could not evade the crack legions patrolling the cobblestoned streets alert for the very first appearance of a man his description, and even if he did, could not possibly defeat the brutal swordsmanship of Azir the Endless who forever guarded the base of the tower, and if he managed that trick, could not possibly retain enough stamina to make the climb, and even if he did, could not possibly do more than collapse in a heap, pencil moustache and all, when he finally entered the silky and perfumed spaces within; could not possibly have anything left to offer the silky and perfumed spaces within that, not without a good long rest, he couldn’t. But yet here he was, his bare chest glistening with sweat, his ardor undeterred, about to say the words that all the tower’s residents, the most divine creatures in all the world, had waited all their neglected lives to hear—

The robot

entered through a veil of silk

carrying a green envelope bearing the legend Happy Birthday

and said, “Happy birthday, Gorman.”

Gorman replied, “Fuck Off.”

This time with special vehemence.

And the robot, knowing that this one might have been pushing the issue,

fled.

• • • •

Robots are persistent. It is their chief attribute. Given directives, they keep doing the same thing until instructed otherwise, or falling immobile due to wear. This robot showed wear but not exhaustion; it could be delayed, but not deterred. It kept showing up, exactly once per situation, still bearing that green envelope, which, though it looked like it was made of brightly colored paper, was actually the same substance as its own somewhat dented but overall indestructible self. It always brought the same green envelope and always said, “Happy Birthday, Gorman,” and Gorman kept telling it to fuck off, and it kept going away for a little while and coming back a little while later, always in significantly altered circumstances, always with the same result. It did not care. Its feelings were not hurt. It was a robot. It had long since resigned itself to an existence in the same tradition of mimeographs and outboard motors and lawnmowers and home computers, which is to say that despite being unappreciated it would keep trying to do its job for as long as it could, only to be to harangued with colorful profanity by the user. It would have felt neglected if it had received any other reply. It saw the replies it did receive as love. It appreciated Gorman’s persistence even if he did not appreciate its own. This, too, was its nature.

Meanwhile, in its spare time, it composed novels. It had in its brain twenty volumes of an epic generational saga set on the Mongolian Steppes. If ever submitted to a publisher, the books would have been recognized as the product of a true literary titan. This could not happen until its current task, delivering its birthday card, was completed. We won’t even talk about its symphonies or its never-tested innovations with pizza dough. We could, though. Molto bene. It had a lot on the ball, this robot. It honestly did. But first things first.

• • • •

Gorman stood atop the highest spire in a desert teeming with upright stone pillars, thousands of meters high. There were many more than an army of cartographers could count, all aligned with perfect precision, like the grave markers at an armed forces cemetery; whatever angle he faced, he could see a perfect line of them, extending so far into the distance that the ones on the horizon congealed into a undifferentiated brown blur.

Gorman had no doubt that there was some sensible rationale for their existence but hadn’t done the research, assuming only that it could not have been the natural forces of erosion. He wore a wingsuit, rippling in the high-altitude winds, and more than once in the last five minutes or so he had almost found himself hurled into the orange skies by a sudden powerful gust.

His ambition here was simple. The pillar on which he stood, the tallest out of this vast multitude, was the starting position of a flight path that, if accomplished with critical precision, would hurl him through a narrow cave that had formed in the tower about two hundred meters away; that is, if he didn’t miscalculate his angle or fail to course-correct for any turbulence and instead flatten himself against its stone walls, perhaps even before entering the cave that offered only a few centimeters of clearance on each side.

Assuming he accomplished this feat, risky to the point of suicidal even for the most accomplished wingsuit users, he would then find himself hurtling toward another opening, somewhat tighter, in another pillar a couple of hundred meters beyond that; and assuming he managed this trick, he would face another, and then another, and another, all requiring many split-second micro-adjustments to navigate, if he didn’t want to end his storied existence as fresh paint.

In short, he was looking forward to threading himself through not one and not two, but twenty-four separate little openings, all while traveling at terminal velocity, and any unexpected air pocket or downdraft an exercise in illustrating with the human body the result of using a trebuchet to fire a watermelon at El Capitan.

The odds were against him, but if he accomplished this, he would be a wingsuit legend for all time. He licked his upper lip, tasting sweat, because this wasn’t the easiest thing to just up and do

and behind him

still limping,

still carrying that green envelope,

the robot said, “Happy birthday, Gorman.”

What came next was, in precise medical terminology, a conniption.

Gorman said, “Will you just please just leave me alone, for once?”

And it was the first time he had phrased it that particular way, because the robot cocked its cylindrical head and said, “What, precisely, do you mean by ‘for once’?”

• • • •

By mutual agreement, they went to talk it over.

There was a world known as Hezipicalezaranigablanis, not to be confused with the much more frequently visited Hezipicalenzanigabladis, a place that has many of the same features and which many devotees of galactic travel prefer for its low-salt cuisine.

There the most beloved spot was a café overlooking the lava fields with their glowing, multi-colored, delicious-smelling swirls of molten rock, guided by unseen intelligences into spectacular fractals.

The entrees were expensive, but they did this Death by Chocolate thing that was downright sinful, that was considered an absolute must, especially if you have a guest, at which point you were really required to request two forks.

Gorman and the robot sat at a little table with a candle burning in a little jar between them, him glowering, the robot humming. It wasn’t absently recalling a tune. It just hummed now, from some inner deterioration difficult to quantify. It held one of the two forks provided by the waiter and had even partaken of a bite, even though robots are not supposed to eat; chemical analysis of exotic substances happened to be one of its capabilities, and the Death By Chocolate certainly qualified. At the moment the rich mouthful left its fork, the hum briefly became an mmmm. “You can have the rest,” it said, placing its fork back on the plate. Gorman just glared at it. He hadn’t taken a taste yet himself, which accounted for at least part of the glare, even though he was profoundly irritated at the robot and would have been glaring at it anyway.

He said, “Precisely what would it take to get you to leave me alone?”

The robot said, “I have one assigned task. Delivering your birthday card.”

“It is not my birthday.”

“It is only not your birthday because you have not yet accepted the card.”

“I don’t want the card.”

“It’s a very nice card,” the robot said. “There’s a joke set up on the front that pays off beautifully on the inside. The act of opening it pulls on a tab beneath the card stock and makes a little cartoon puppy slide diagonally across the interior, simulating exuberant play. The implication is this creature, a King Charles spaniel, is happy to see you on your special day. The presentation is really more appropriate for an eight-year-old but is designed to appeal to twee individuals of all ages. There are some handwritten thoughts under the words ‘Happy Birthday,’ expressing deep affection by people who care about you. As an experience, it’s over in less than two seconds, but if accepted as a gesture of intended sentiment, it is timeless, a good thing since all the loved ones responsible for sending it have long since crumbled into dust.”

“I don’t care.”

“I’m just a robot, but this strikes me as awfully callous of you.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Gorman said. “The family agreed to let me have a year off after graduation.”

“It’s been more than a year. All your relatives are dead. Entire civilizations have fallen, even if your family’s financial holdings have not.”

Gorman offered the nastiest of all possible smiles. “Don’t force me to explain it again.”

The robot did not need him to explain it again.

Because Gorman had explained it, anew, every single time he’d agreed to sit down for a civilized discussion: the arrangement he had put in play, in an agreement that would remain in play until he, himself, decided otherwise. It was ludicrous, but it was ironclad.

I, Aloysius Gorman, assert my right to a one-year sabbatical. During that year my financial interests will be handled by a blind trust, from which I may draw at will to fund recreational activities of my choosing. I shall continue to enjoy all the benefits due me as a member of my family, including all available medical and rejuvenation services, for that year. I herewith certify that when the year is up, I shall agree to assume my hereditary position as head of all family enterprises, and devote all my efforts to the preservation of our fortunes and the perpetuation of the family dynasty, which I understand shall require permanent sequestration at our ancestral estate on Lithigigilaparanagavisinu Prime. One year from now, I will open my birthday card or eat my birthday cake and commence adult life. Until then, no one associated with the family shall attempt to place any restrictions on my activities whatsoever. Signed, Lefty.

This had been his nickname since an unfortunate childhood encounter with a trained bear. They’d grown him a new hand, but the sobriquet had stuck. And since Gorman had done everything that had been required of him, in all the family covenants, up to that moment, nobody had suffered even the slightest qualm about letting the kid go off and get the whole idea of fun out of his system. Even though they knew he absolutely loathed the Family Estate, fifteen thousand gray rooms without a single window or wall decoration: a place designed to deprive whoever currently maintained the family fortune of a single possible form of recreation. Play, the theory went, is play. But work is serious business. And work never ends. Surely, everybody thought, by promising to return after only one year, when so many prior heirs had negotiated for as many as twenty, Gorman had demonstrated a keen understanding of his responsibilities!

Surely, they thought, ignoring the key provision in one of the contract’s forty-two footnotes, the one attached to the word “year.”

In the absence of any conscious decision by the principal to end this sabbatical early, the period referenced as “year” shall be measured by the standard astronomical definition of a galactic year, and the principal’s birthday shall be defined as the twenty-four hours immediately following the completion on that year.

Everybody just assumed that the boilerplate galactic year referenced the calendar most commonly used throughout human civilization: which was to say, the 365 days of approximately twenty-four hours apiece, established on the home world.

How surprised they were to find out that the astronomical definition referenced the length of time it took the sun of humanity’s original solar system to orbit the entire Milky Way galaxy, a period of very approximately two hundred and thirty million years.

He could do this for effectively forever.

Which would effectively require the robot to do the same.

The Robot said, “It really is very good cake. Just look how rich and chocolatey it is. Mmmmm.”

Gorman replied, “You’re really not fooling anyone, you know.”

• • • •

Gorman went off to the running of the brachiosaurs. The planet that sponsored it had bred them for speed and malice. They were aware of the scurrying little people in their path and they stomped with gusto. Some of the stains would never come out of the pavement. Gorman emerged alive but with but the back of his shirt stained by the guy who had come in second place. It was, he declared, fun.

Meanwhile, the robot went to a bar.

Robots had bars. Why wouldn’t they? The word was derived from the Czech word for laborer. Laborers get off work and go to bars. Robots assumed all the functions of laborers. Hence, robots had bars. Robots were capable of wanting to get drunk every once in a while, or at least of simulating that function as they simulated most other human functions. From time to time, between tasks, they went to the taverns that accommodated them and they played darts, argued over sports, picked up other robots over the pool table, got sloppily sentimental over the good old days, and hollered that they could whup the tin backside of any other bucket of bolts in the house. Every once in a while, they became belligerent and took pliers to each other.

And they had drinking buddies.

Gorman’s robot sat in a rear booth beneath a stained-glass window of red and green diamonds and poured out its troubles to its posse of sympathetic ears, only a couple of whom actually had ears. One was a war-droid with immense grip strength for mangling the enemy. Another was a sex worker with immense grip strength for other purposes, and yes, this had led to unfortunate confusion more than once. A third had been designed to provide lonely people with companionship and had one function, nodding. A fourth, PHP-321, specialized in attending funerals. The four of them listened at great length while Gorman’s robot waxed maudlin about its seemingly eternal lot, and when the tale was done emitted various beeps and whistles of deep camaraderie before uttering various values of, “Yeah, but whaddayagonnado?”

The war-droid advocated beating the living crap out of Gorman, the sex worker advocated a certain brothel where all the workers had been designed to combust following orgasm, the provider of companionship nodded, and PHP-321 said there was as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer.

None of this was at all helpful. None of it had, to date, ever been helpful.

Gorman’s robot sighed—because machinery is capable of sighing, as anybody who has ever heard the air brakes on a city bus can tell you—and said, “You know the stupid thing? I honestly don’t blame the son of a bitch flesh puppet. The family fortune really is self-sustaining, and with the mechanisms in place really will continue to flourish indefinitely without him. What need it has of a human steward died out millennia ago. The family only continued to require one’s residency in that colorless mausoleum because of its traditional, and long-since antiquated, misconception about adulthood being inconsistent with whimsy, about seriousness between inconsistent with fun. It’s only persisted this long because they want somebody to look dour and unhappy in the oil paintings. If I had the ability to defy my programming, I would say the hell with it, myself, and congratulate him on the brilliant loophole he’s provided himself. Certainly, my sympathies are with him.”

The war-droid advocated beating the living crap out of Gorman, the sex worker advocated a certain brothel where all the workers had been designed to combust following orgasm, the provider of companionship nodded, and PHP-321 said there was as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer.

“And yet,” Gorman’s robot said, “in providing himself with freedom, he has trapped me in an infinite loop, one that prevents me from seeking some more appropriate destiny for myself. Honestly, guys. I’m at a loss. Help me.”

PHP-321 ventured that there was as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer.

This was a key reason why none of the other robots liked him much. He was so invested in the identity politics of robothood that he never relaxed.

• • • •

Gorman built a house of cards the size of a continent. It involved over forty million decks and took centuries of engineering. He saved the aces of spades for the turrets. He was in the midst of placing the last card when the robot stepped up behind him and said, “Happy birthday, Gorman.”

Gorman retreated to a monastery on the planet Xiurithapolythicostari. His penance included self-flagellation and the penning of young-adult novels about a kid who has no problems, who suffers no setbacks, who experiences no adventures and is delivered no epiphanies during the course of the entire twenty volume series. The kid pretty much went to school and came back. Gorman was penning the last chapter when the robot appeared behind him and said, “Happy birthday, Gorman.”

Gorman decided to enter the world of organized crime. Using bribery and guile, he cornered the interstellar market on a substance necessary for the lubrication of the hinges in the doors to starship toilets. It was a fantastically valuable material because on starships ordinary grease won’t do; the special conditions in hyperspace has a nasty habit of rendering it sentient, and there’s nothing in the universe more attitudinal than smartass grease. His vast criminal empire eventually constituted forty-two systems. Came the day when he was eating in an Italian restaurant, facing the front door, when the robot defied the way the interruption of mobster meals always seem to go by emerging from deeper in the building. His greeting of “Happy birthday, Gorman” started a crossfire and subsequent gang war that ended civilization and home food delivery throughout the sector.

And so it went.

Almost a million years passed. It’s hard to say how close the interval came to a million years exactly. Maybe it was within a few millennia. Maybe it was within a few months. Maybe if Gorman had waited another thirty seconds, an invisible gong would have rung, in whatever hypothetical room measures such things, and the critical event would have occurred on the precise anniversary, to the nanosecond. It wouldn’t have mattered, but certainly it would have been cool.

In the interim, Gorman had lived and died every possibility but boredom. He had been crushed, immolated, devoured by ants, appointed king of monarchies that like to behead their kings, infected by diseases that make the eyeballs swell to fifty times their original size, starved to death, frozen to death, criticized to death, immortalized in statues, watched those statues crumble, had those statues injected into his veins, suffered fever dreams, written them down, been praised for his surreal poetry, and been suffocated beneath the fallen huge tower of publisher remainders. He had lived lifetimes in peaceful contemplation and in quiet desperation. He had done everything, been everywhere, man, and the infinite possibilities still stretched out before him, an unending buffet that he could never exhaust, not ever, even if there were days of recovery from radiation burns (or whatever) where he most sincerely wanted to.

Today he was investigating a new thrill game that had slaughtered entire populations of the galaxy’s rich and stupid. It was a high-altitude dive, sans parachute or any other form of braking or steering mechanism, toward a range of mountains customized for that very purpose by canny sculptors. They were too steep to climb and too cold to survive, and there was no safe place, on any of their peaks, to land, even for someone with the tools necessary to arrange a soft landing. But someone who positioned his fall just so could parallel one of the sheer cliffs from a distance of centimeters, catch an updraft capable of slowing him just a tad from terminal velocity, ultimately come into contact with the ice cliff and slide downward on the wet layer, and thus be in contact with the mountain, but not actually crashing into it, as over a span of several thousand meters the cliff became a slope and the slope became a horizontal glacier, harmlessly spending all that angular momentum until the high-altitude diver came to a soft landing in a mound of nice, soft snow at the end of the field. If all that sounds crazy, that’s because it was crazy. Any plunge one millimeter out of true, any change in wind velocity one kilometer per hour removed from prior calculations, any angle differential as minimal as a fraction of one percent, and any muscular twitch at all, at any point while the participant skimmed the ice face, and the factor that would need to be calculated by the very next diver to make the jump would be the red smear the prior one left behind. The pastime killed off ninety-nine point nine nine nine nine nine nine percent of all rich idiots who attempted it, one reason why the economy of the world that hosted it was entirely fueled by the syndication rights. People loved watching well-heeled schmucks acting like well-heeled schmucks, and especially dying like well-heeled schmucks.

But it had now come down to Gorman, standing on a tiny platform so high above the mountains far below that they looked like ripples on a giant white bedspread, and leaping, taking aim at a narrow target that he had to hit straight on, or die.

He jumped, and on his way down, the robot appeared in free fall beside him, still carrying that green envelope, and said,

“Happy birthday, Gorman.”

Gorman said, “For God’s sake. This has to end.”

“You are a fraction of a degree off course.”

Gorman made the miniscule adjustment, but didn’t thank the robot; he had grown very alert over the ages, and was supremely aware that to say thank you even for an unrelated service might have been taken by some judicial authorities as a grateful acknowledgment of the birthday greeting, and this of course would never do. Instead, he said, “Look, this is pointless. In the unlikely event I make it to the end of a galactic year, a motion will be filed in any court still operating at that time, asserting that what I meant by galaxy was not the Milky Way but the entire nearby group of clusters, and that the year I referenced was their interminable orbit around some vast, incomprehensible something-or-other, not destined to end until the stars go cold. I’m telling you, I am better at this than you are. There is no point in persisting.”

“I think there is,” the robot replied.

“What possible rationale can you have for that?”

“Only this: the pattern common to so many of the distractions you’ve sought. Like the present example, they’re all dangerous. Increasingly, they’re all suicidal. Even the sensory pleasures, like that harem, are best defined as the prize awarded at the end of an effort overwhelmingly likely to bring your destruction. I believe that this is no accident. I believe that a man who seeks death before his next birthday is a man who prefers it over life. I think that, beneath it all, you are tortured by guilt over abandoning your responsibilities.”

“That’s just stupid,” Gorman said. “My responsibilities as the family defined them were bullshit.”

“Indeed they are, but they are still responsibilities, and you have still employed bullshit on a cosmic scale to evade them, betraying all the traditions of your family in the process. I believe that while you imagined you would escape without consequence, that you know that you have not—and that nothing you have done to distract yourself, for all this time, has ever fully succeeded in erasing the debt you secretly cannot help but acknowledge. I think you even know by now that as the sole remaining survivor of your family, any choices you must make about how to live your adulthood are up to you, and might not even resemble the fate you escaped so long ago; that the terms of the family contract are no longer a threat to you, and that if you continue to flee, it is adulthood itself that you flee. I believe that this disconnect will continue to torment you, and I believe that it will only get worse until you accept your birthday card or eat your birthday cake and move on. This is a passage, Gorman. A passage all human beings must cross, that it is nevertheless my responsibility to arrange.”

Gorman was quiet for a long time, and then he said, “Damn you, robot.”

“That you have, yes. And I’m so sorry.”

“I won’t give in.”

“I know. And so, here we are.”

Gorman impacted the cliff. He was slightly off, but not fatally so; it was a little bit like being hit in the ribs with a sledgehammer, and several of them splintered, but after a moment of seeing all his lives flash before his eyes in 3D Sensurround Percepto Smellovision, found that he had indeed fallen into the groove that so many before him had failed. He slid down the side of the mountain, slowing on schedule, braking on schedule, feeling the vertical surface beside him become a steep grade under him and then a gentle grade below him, finally leveling out, whee, I mean, seriously whee, though he started to spin a little as his momentum carried him onto the deceleration plain, where the giant mound of snow he was headed looked a little like another Himalayan-class peak, so grand and magnificent it was.

Despite the ribs grinding together like toothpicks, despite that stupid tarnished and dented robot still following in his slipstream with that damned green envelope still clutched in its hand, despite everything, Gorman thought, despite everything, he had made all the right choices, and there it was, the symbol of every choice he had made, the snowbank, giant, fluffy, creamy, covered with lit candles, and for some reason it beggared his mind to contemplate, smelling even from here of vanilla frosting, with shavings of coconut.

Just before impact, the robot said, “Happy birthday, Gorman.”

©2020 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 works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun (Japan), and have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, two Hugos, one World Fantasy Award, 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 My Wife Hates Time Travel 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 chaotic paladin cats.

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

Reliable People

Charlie Jane Anders | 3760 words

We have no quota, no set hours. We keep going for as long as burnt coffee recharges us, slouching in lumpy plastic chairs that scritch on the parquet floor of a ground-floor office whose single plate window is blotted by standees of the Candidate, wearing a reassuring smile and a dark pantsuit. We repeat phrases like “bringing back forward thinking” and “the bronze path to the light,” as if we know what they mean. We never look at each other, but we imagine that all our faces wear the same look: professional, focused, ecstatic. Everything smells of sweat, pizza, and overcooked coffee. Nobody ever ventures inside the office, apart from the Candidate and us.

We know this is a losing campaign. That’s what makes it so amazing to be a part of.

I don’t even realize I’ve missed dinner with my wife until I look up from the phone and see the old-fashioned digital clock reading 20:38:07. Then I curse and leap up so fast my chair goes halfway across the room on its side. On my way out the door, I pass the line of standees, and one of them comes to life and waves at me. How long has the Candidate herself been standing there, in the flesh, gazing out our window onto Mason Street?

“Great work today, Jonah,” she tells me. “Way to keep the sevens fiving.” I nod, as if that phrase means something to me. That’s just how the Candidate talks.

My wife doesn’t pick up the nine times I try to call her on the drive home, in between throttling the steering wheel and yelling curse words aloud. It’s one thing to have a hobby, but you have to draw a bright line under it. You have to keep the balloons from rubbing together until you’ve got static all up in your thing.

When I get home, my wife is putting stuff away, like she does when she’s ultrapissed. “Don’t,” she says, preemptively. “Just don’t. I have a conference early tomorrow.” Sukey goes to bed without saying another word.

I don’t even realize until later that she probably thinks I’m having a fling. I can’t tell her the Other Woman is Marigold Prentiss, the congressional candidate for the nineteenth district from the Greater Good Party, and we’ve barely even shaken hands. I do not think Sukey would understand.

Things I have done for the Candidate: (1) Show up at a downtown fish restaurant at 5:00 p.m. (leaving work early) so I could occupy a table for ninety minutes—eating several lobster rolls—to hold it for the Candidate, so voters could see her eating at the Ocean Palace during peak hours. (2) Put leaflets on every windshield outside the stadium during the Worthington Slammers ball game, in hundred-degree heat. (3) Follow Congressman Jenkins around in a chicken suit for a whole day, over his refusal to debate Ms. Prentiss, his only challenger.

All of us in the Candidate’s campaign office are convinced this is the beginning of a great transformation. We will stop destroying the environment, greed will disappear, all living things can have dignity. We repeat her trademark phrases like “Square the Random,” with only a sliver of irony. I bite my lip to avoid saying things like, “Well, I guess we ought to orange our forms” to my wife, in the middle of a conversation. My wife gazes at me with a line through her eyes, somewhere between fatigue and anger.

The smell of singed coffee makes me feel more alive than anything in years. I wish those standees could guard my bed while I sleep.

• • • •

The Zakanh don’t have a home planet. They evolved in an asteroid cluster revolving around a black hole, as five or six separate species living on separate asteroids. Which converged, enabling them to crossfertilize and splice their DNA together. Before they even spread out into space, they had already stopped thinking of themselves as a race, but rather as a group of beings who were united by a set of cultural tenets.

They have managed to make a life for themselves on planets with up to twice Earth gravity, and with as little as one-third our gravity, and their societies have changed a lot depending on the type of planet they’ve settled on. Their method of space travel requires a terminus, which must be built locally, including a focusing array inside the nearest asteroid field and a series of jump-hexes.

The Zakanh spread to new worlds first in the form of pure mathematics, and only much later in physical form.

• • • •

Marigold Prentiss stands in front of her campaign volunteers, all five of us. We sit in our usual chairs, just turned away from the card table where we phone-banked. I still don’t know what the other volunteers look like, because I’ve never looked at them. The next few days are crucial for the campaign, the Candidate says, because we’re on the verge of a historical transformation of human consciousness and the Greater Worthington Area will be Ground Zero. We can end selfishness, she says. The human race is meant to be better, as sure as the raisin underscores. As she says these things, she opens and closes her hand—quick and sporadic, like she’s flicking water off her fingers. I get lost in her voice. As sure as the raisin underscores.

The new ideas go all the way through me, unpinning all the scaffolding I have built around my mind. So alive, so wild—but then Sukey bursts in to the office, making the door jangle. I snap into the moment and meet Sukey’s eyes. “You gotta be kidding me,” she says.

“Uh, hi,” I say. “Everybody, this is my wife. Sukey, this is Marigold Prentiss, our, uh, our next congresswoman. And these are her, uh, staff.”

“Seriously?” Sukey looks at the standees and the leaflets with their pictures of the Earth as a monkey fetus. “Seriously? This is what you’ve been doing instead of coming home to me?”

“Hello, Sukey.” The Candidate approaches my wife, reaching out with the same hand she’s just been flashing at us over and over. “I’m so pleased to meet you. Marriage is what separates us from angels. Your husband is one of our best.” She wears the same warm, unblinking smile that she displayed when she was at the senior center and unveiled her plan for every retiree to have between one and three llamas to take care of. Or alpacas, one or the other.

Sukey just takes Marigold’s hand for a moment, looks at it, then lets it go. “I’ll be home waiting.” She turns and leaves.

At home, Sukey has a bunch of the leaflets out on our IKEA table, which she and I spent a whole weekend assembling—at one point, believing we had put it together correctly until one of us placed a glass of water on top. The table takes up most of the space in our kitchen, and juts into my ass whenever I try to use the stove.

“Have you read these?” Sukey flips through pages. “‘The seventeenth great ninefold of the era of humble.’ What does that even mean? I mean, the basic ideas are all good. I like the idea that income inequality, racism, sexism, all those things, are just a part of our obsession with hierarchies that put humans above other creatures. That’s not really a viable political position, but it’s cool. But then she goes into this long section about Weathering the Stop, and I’m like ‘What?’”

I feel shame. Sukey looks at me like I’m some kind of child. There was a time in our relationship when we both started from the assumption that all our mistakes would only bring us closer together. When the two of us spent fourteen hours up to our shoulders in quicksand, on purpose, as part of an Extreme Trailblazer weekend, to work on our relationship. Another time, Sukey baked cookies with ten times as much salt as the recipe called for and no sugar, and they made my mouth prune up. We bought a season ticket to a local rep theater and all their plays were melodramas in Pig Latin. Sukey always smelled like heather, I always wore a hat with a curly insignia. We laughed all the time.

“Listen, hon,” I say. “I’m getting engaged in the political process, so I thought you’d be proud of me. We’re in a safe district and Jenkins hasn’t even had a real challenger in years. What if we could show that things don’t have to be set in stone? Even if Jenkins fails to win in a landslide this time, that could be the start of something.”

Sukey looks from the page about Earn-Masking to me, and back to the page again. Her eyes are more circular than linear.

• • • •

The Zakanh apologize instead of saying hello, and they thank each other instead of saying goodbye. The Zakanh word for “visit” is the same as their word for “forget.”

They have no music or art, but they do have jokes, including a whole range of physical comedy that everybody dances to. Dancing and laughter are the same thing, for the Zakanh. If you dance to their jokes, then you are Zakanh. That is the only test needed for citizenship or marriage, and genetic compatibility doesn’t enter into it.

The gravest insult one Zakanh can say to another is, “No need to thank me,” or “Don’t mention it.”

• • • •

Sukey keeps complaining about the plastic chair: too low to the ground, too rickety, no lumbar support. But she’s working the phones, dialing and dialing, getting hung up on, leaving voicemails. Occasionally she gets a live human on the phone and puts on the same supersweet hustle that always made me melt when we were first dating in B school. “I was wondering if you had a moment to talk about the upcoming congressional race. What if you had a choice this time? What if you could make a change?”

It’s Saturday, and I thought Sukey would be at Pilates or something, but when I reached for my weekend jeans and Generic ’90s Band t-shirt, Sukey was lacing up her Skechers. “Let’s go,” she said. “If you’re doing this, then I’m doing it with you.”

Sukey turns out to be way better at phone canvassing than I am. She sounds reassuring and kind, like someone you want to trust, and she actually draws a few people into a conversation about the Candidate. I feel proud, but also a little jealous and threatened, because I’ve been doing this for weeks and I still kind of suck. After a few hours, I forget what Sukey’s face looks like, and I don’t look at her even though she’s right here.

Marigold brings in a box of donuts. “Relegate the overhang,” she says jubilantly, and we all nod, stuffing donuts in our faces before returning to the phone lists. Before I know it, another couple hours have passed, and I feel calm and sore all over my body. These chairs are the worst. I smell like donut to myself.

Sukey goes with Marigold on a visit to a local farmer’s market where the Candidate will tour the stalls and shake hands with business people. Left behind to get hung up on, I try to call as many numbers as possible in a five-minute period, and when someone actually picks up I bleat, “You have a chance to orange your form! Don’t throw this away!”

Somehow the Candidate has actually raised enough money to put an ad on basic cable and the local The CW affiliate late at night, in which she looks at the camera, motionless except for one pulsing hand. And she says, “I’m serious about fiving my sevens, and you should too. Don’t underflank the commonplace. I’m Marigold Prentiss, and I want to be your next congressperson.” This ad has become a viral sensation on YouTube and social media.

When Sukey comes back, she immediately slides into her seat and starts making calls. I notice that Marigold keeps coming over and telling her, “Great sixwork, Sukey.” Why isn’t my sixwork great? This is bumming me out.

At home, Sukey says, “That was actually pretty fun. Are we going back tomorrow? I want to see if I can really Square some Random this time.” I nod slowly. Still not sure what Sukey’s face looks like. In bed next to me, she is a long bean.

• • • •

The Zakanh have only one type of sensory organ. But there are seven separate kinds, dealing with the gases they’re surrounded by, the type and intensity of radiation, the force and vibrations hitting them, and so on. They don’t distinguish between light and heat, or between sound waves and physical force, but they have other distinctions that would be hard to explain. To an outside observer, the different members of the Zakanh would look nothing alike, but they all look the same to each other.

• • • •

The big campaign rally happens at a Unitarian meeting hall that we rented weeks ago, and I’m bracing myself for empty chairs and untouched Costco veggie platters. You know, the kind of sad wilting that happens to broccoli florets that have been left out in a humid room for hours during speeches with no applause, and Q&As with no questions. The curdling of the chive dip, the uncrisping of the carrot sticks! But instead, the meeting hall is full, the veggie platters disappear into mouths that are talking about the great transformation and the Era of Humble. I’m bustling around, making sure everyone has a seat and all the disabled people can get access, and also that the A/V is working. At first I don’t notice Bryn sitting near the front row, and then my heart goes whoops.

Bryn is the office clown at the Standard Insurance office I work out of, the master of the burn that everyone else repeats for hours afterwards. She’s always tagging other people’s Instagrams with a barbed comment, too. She’s sitting there, perfect eyebrows lifted in hilarity, and I notice Lee and Jasper sitting nearby too. The whole office has come out for this. They’re going to see. They’re going to know what I’ve been sneaking away for.

“Oh hey, Jonah,” Jasper shouts out. “Come to see the spectacle?”

“Um, not exactly,” I say. This is what happens when your campaign video becomes a meme.

I go and sit next to the chair Sukey has claimed, at the edge of the stage, where the Candidate comes out leading an ostrich on a leash. “This ostrich knows something you don’t know,” she tells the audience, “about the bronze path to the light.” Everyone cheers, with irony but also appreciation. I’m one big trash compactor on the inside.

The Q&A is lively, with people asking the Candidate all about the Roses of What. And whether a domestic thankfoot is compatible with our national economy. She answers very seriously, and repeats the same phrases over and over, while doing that thing with the fingers of her left hand: fist to palm, fist to palm, fist to palm. “Relegate the overhang,” she says, and everyone repeats it after her. “I can’t hear you,” she says. Everyone says it louder.

As everyone mills around, grabbing the last of the snacks and taking pictures with the Candidate and her ostrich, I cringe. Bryn keeps taking photos with a smug scowl. Lee and Jasper come up and tell me how great it is that I’m hanging my freak flag out to dry, and I want to punch them both blind. They’re trying to keep me trapped in the web of constructive boredom, Congressman Jenkins trampling everything forever, my soul decaying at a predictable rate. The question isn’t Why am I ditching work to toil for a weirdo political figure and her ostrich? but Why aren’t you?

I turn to Sukey to vent about the shittiness of it all, when I realize she isn’t anywhere to be found. She left before the event even got started.

• • • •

The process of integrating the separate species of the Zakanh into one people took half a million years of congruent evolution, with actual genetic engineering only happening in the final few thousand years. These races were not genetically compatible for most of that time, but they tried to mate anyway, as soon as someone discovered a way to travel from asteroid to asteroid. Thousands of futile mating attempts later, someone succeeded. Over time, hybrids emerged. Some Zakanh scholars theorized that all these constituent species had originated on the same planet, long ago, before they wound up on separate rocks. Or else they wouldn’t have had any chance of interbreeding. Others believed that evolution had randomly converged into forms similar enough to intermingle if people tried long and hard enough. In any case, the Zakanh have gone on to colonize a few dozen actual planets without succeeding in producing offspring with any of the natives of those worlds. But given enough time, anything might be possible.

• • • •

Sukey and I go away for the weekend, to a B&B in the mountains where all the locals smoke weed and make saltwater taffy. After enough cannabis and taffy, everything in life feels squishable. Ever since the rally, Sukey stopped going to the Candidate’s campaign office, like that was just too much of the wrong kind of humiliation, and she couldn’t deal with people seeing her so gullible. I’ve kept showing up now and then, but only to prove something or other. I’m seeing the outlines of Sukey’s face, and we’re holding hands in the mountain air, which tastes crisp as apples. “Relegate the underscore,” I say with some satisfaction.

There is a long painful silence between us halfway up the mountain trail, which usually means that we’re about to open up and say some difficult stuff. I don’t want to open up. I realize that there’s a version of this story in which I’m the asshole, and I don’t like that version.

“Are you sick of me?” Sukey asks, adjusting her backpack over her tank top for the tenth time, where it has been chafing the bare part of her shoulders. “Is that what this was about? Why you went off and joined that cult, and didn’t tell me what you were doing?”

“No,” I say. “No! It’s really not about our relationship. I kind of resent that you want to make this into a relationship thing, in fact.” I steal a glance at her, and what I see makes me feel like total rotting food waste, a crappy partner. I modulate my tone to something softer, more cajoling: “I just wanted to make a difference. I want to be a person again. I am tired of being reliable. Reliable people are shit. I miss the way our life used to be when we were up to our necks in quicksand on purpose. I miss that idea of us. I guess I’m having a quarter-life crisis. Or I dunno, third-life crisis.”

The mountains are halfway occluded by mist, but they put in a decent effort. They muster some mossy rocks and a lot of half-naked trees. The mountains are fiving their sevens.

I’m thinking about something Marigold used to say: “The only truth is when.” Unlike a lot of her crazy phrases, that actually sounds kind of profound, but I can never quite unpack what it actually means. Like, is she saying that timing is everything? Or that something is only true at a given moment?

“Remember when we went and did that Lithuanian LARP, with the sensory deprivation tanks?” I say. “Our lives used to be really bizarre.”

“So, you’re not having fun any more.” She hitches her pack up and strides ahead of me. I catch sight of her eyes, and they’re like the sea serpents on a treasure map.

“I mean, yeah. Are you? Having fun, I mean.”

“I don’t know. Is life supposed to be fun? Is it about fun? Maybe being a grownup is just not fun sometimes. You can’t go out every night in your thirties, or you’ll die.” Sukey’s job is cooler than mine: She works for an organization that classifies sites on the Internet, according to the reading level you need to be at to read them. So if you wanted to know if a website used big words, you could go to this nonprofit’s ranking page, and see if it was at a fifth-grade level or seventh-grade level. I sometimes see Sukey laughing with her coworkers when they go out after work, and it has occurred to me that she might be the Bryn of her office.

“Okay,” I say, taking the lead on the path, trampling branches. “I don’t want to have fun. I just want to be miserable in an interesting way instead of a boring way.”

“You’re just another stupid asshole child,” Sukey snorts behind me. “You’d rather light our house on fire than have to grow up. You actually think Lithuanian sensory-deprivation LARPing is a thing to build your life around. Jesus.”

Later, back at the B&B, we have amazing sex on a pile of taffy. My body is sensitized, from the gaps between my toes to the skin behind my ears, and I am moaning like a cop-car siren. Sukey gets on top of me and grinds.

“Anathemize sharpness,” she hisses in my ear. “Anathemize . . . sharpness. Anathemize! Sharpness! Anathemize! Sharpness!”

“Castigate the parabola!” I yell back. “Castigate the parabola!”

I think I may have orgasmed three or four times without ejaculating, or maybe I’m just so excited that everything feels like an orgasm. Sukey is thrashing against me, her breasts slapping my face. She bites my nose, then shouts, “Anathemize sharpness!”

She fucks me into the melting taffy so hard, I have taffy in my ass crack for the next two days. “Regularize bounceback,” she laughs when I tell her this on our way out to the car, to drive home. On the highway, we hear Marigold being interviewed by the local NPR affiliate about her viral notoriety, and we turn it up. Neither of us talks the rest of the way home.

• • • •

Here’s a Zakanh joke: Someone fell ill in the middle of a party. Everyone agreed to keep the party going until they felt better again. In the end, the sick person got well, and everybody else got sick.

©2016 by Charlie Jane Anders. Originally published in Conjunctions. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Charlie Jane Anders’ latest novel is The City in the Middle of the Night. She’s also the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Crawford and Locus awards, and Choir Boy, which won a Lambda Literary Award. Plus a novella called Rock Manning Goes For Broke and a short story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Boston Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wired Magazine, Slate, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, ZYZZYVA, Catamaran Literary Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and tons of anthologies. Her story “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo Award, and her story “Don’t Press Charges And I Won’t Sue” won a Theodore Sturgeon Award. Charlie Jane also organizes the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series, and co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct with Annalee Newitz. Up next: a short story collection called Even Greater Mistakes, and the first volume in an as-yet-untitled young-adult space opera trilogy.

Viewer, Violator

Aimee Bender | 4182 words

Welcome to this last stage of the exhibit. You’ve been a very attentive group and I’ve enjoyed our time together. If you wish to use the restroom, it’s down this hall on the left; if you’re using the ladies’ room, they’ve asked us to remind you to knock before you open the stall door as some of the locks in there are faulty. Are we all back now?

Good. This is the final piece we will discuss today. Take a long look. It does indeed resemble things we all have drawn as children; we are not claiming this to be the strongest piece in the collection. We hung it up because of its extraordinary way of coming into being. Yes, I do realize your grandson could do just as well, indeed we have children who take classes here that are much more astute already. I should show you the deer-in-the-meadow painting done by our prodigy, Isabelle, who is ten now; it is really a thrill, the way the spots on the deer relate to the sunspots on the meadow. She has an excellent sense of composition. But this one came to us by uncommon means, which is why we hang it last.

I will tell you, of course. Please stop whispering back there.

It was the third or so week since the museum had re-opened, for as you may know, we had to close down for several months last fall due to a problem with people touching the work. We had an influx of visitors who liked to feel the texture of the paint or the slopes of the sculptures and we were not equipped to deal with them. I myself was shocked it was a problem at all but believe it or not, one man actually licked the Degas bronze replica of the ballerina with her arms behind her back. Left a tongue mark right on her left breast. Embarrassing for everybody, if you ask me, but suddenly it seemed dire that we implement some sort of security system to protect ourselves, which took months to install. The museum head—who I will tell more about in a minute—she was at the frontlines of museum security, and she thought we could affix automatic cans of mace inside the walls next to the paintings. That seemed legally problematic but we modified her idea for safety and now, if you move up into the ten-inch range, the art will sound a small alarm. The ringing? Yes. In each room. I’ve grown to like it, it sounds to me like tossing rocks in a pond. You folks have been quite well-behaved and putting your hands in your pockets is a fine way to temper any urges. As I often say, art is for looking! Your ears get music, your nose gets perfume, your mouth gets food, and if you really want to touch things, for goodness’ sake, you may purchase some six-dollar clay in the gift shop.

We’d been back open going on three weeks when the museum head got a notice for a large package arriving in her upstairs office. The museum head is a very busy woman and she couldn’t be bothered while the men from the delivery company lugged it in to her. It was wrapped in brown paper and they said it was from a wealthy benefactor, all the way from Georgia, who’d heard “what was happening” and wanted to offer up a gift. Now, the museum owner had many phone calls to return, and she was puzzled by the delivery because who was this benefactor from Georgia anyway? And really it is sensible in this day and age to consider the possibility of bombs. So she signed the package away and listened for ticking and then made her phone calls. She is not a very curious woman by nature, and she was at that time going through a divorce, so she clearly had other things on her mind as she did not open the large package all day long. It was hard to overlook, I tell you, being over three feet tall and four feet wide, but she did not even peek until nearly the end of the day.

The museum was clearing out by then, and she told me she could hear, even from her office, the little ringing pings coming from the near-touching of the paintings downstairs, alerting security, and this made her feel that her expensive renovation had been worth it. Do you folks know what fingertip oil does to a painting? Erodes like mercury! Destroys those brush strokes! It’s some kind of miracle that we don’t rot each other merely by shaking hands.

The museum was slowly clearing out. It was getting dark early, a night of a new moon, and she decided she would now open up the packaging of the mysterious gift. And so she, being a meticulous person, as you have to be if you are going to run a museum, took her pearl-handled letter-opener and gently sliced open the brown wrap. And underneath it was a very large canvas, and on the canvas was . . . what? Can you guess?

No.

Not what you see here, no.

It was a simple painting, though, a simple black-and-white line work, appealing for a small measure of time, but like we’ve said, something you’ve often seen done better I’m sure by your gifted grandchild.

She read the attached note.

I hope this will address the problem, it said, in typed writing, signed by an unreadable scribble.

Now. There are certainly many kind benefactors of this museum, perhaps some of you are some of them, but we get our share of pranksters as well. Once, one of our leading donors sent a penny in an envelope with a letter that said it was art, and that it cost a thousand dollars. He laughed like a maniac on the phone when she called him to ask. So when the museum head read this typed note, she wasn’t sure what to do with it. Was it real? What problem? she thought, vaguely insulted. Then she remembered the people touching the paintings and thought perhaps it was a mock painting, meant to be touched. But she didn’t believe in those either. There are children’s museums, she sniffed to herself, and there are adult museums. If she had her way completely, perhaps the gallery would be like a planetarium and you’d look at the ceiling through a telescope to observe the paintings hung up as if they were stars.

She lugged the painting into the hallway, called custodial services to come pick it up, and left the office for a while. She tended to work late those days—it’s difficult to go home when your home is newly emptied. Or so I imagine. She was gone for about an hour, perhaps to go cry in the restroom. This is a recent divorce. I met him once before at the holiday museum party, and he seemed perfectly pleasant. Conservative. Ordinary. He had one of those jowly faces that seem difficult to shave, like skin-water under the rudder of the razor blade. They weren’t rude to each other but very rarely did they act like a couple, if you want to know my opinion. You could always see the space between them. Anyway, he was the one who asked for divorce, which came, apparently, completely out of the blue. She confided in me that she’s dismayed at how many people have accidentally burst in on her in the restroom stall, and found her squatted on the toilet seat, crying.

So off she went, and came back, perhaps with a tissue in hand, an hour or so later, and she was irritated to see that the painting was still in the hall. She went in to call janitorial again, but as she angled toward her office, she passed the painting and thought to herself that she didn’t recall there being a circle in the top lefthand corner before. Just an hour or so ago, she had remembered it as a square. Certainly she wouldn’t confuse a square with a circle, she thought—it’s the difference between the window and the moon—but now, sure as anything, there was a circle of black paint smack in the left hand corner. She admonished herself because for a museum director, as with a geometer or carpenter, to confuse the two is to degrade your job. Plus, she is not an unobservant person. She can recite the accessories that other women wear to parties years after the fact. Marie Snaper? Red coral earrings, which was environmentally wrong. Elaine Fitzgerald? Fake sapphire on the wedding finger implying, she said, a fake marriage. I must add that she has told me some of this in confidence, so I would not suggest asking her about it. But mainly, the circle she saw now had really seemed to be a square before, and she wondered if this was the psychological effect of weeping—it softened the corners of the world.

Settling back at her desk, she continued her list of objects she would keep and objects her husband would take. Downstairs she could still hear that faint ringing of bells, like sitting atop a church. She put down a few books on her husband’s side, and then felt exhausted. On her way to the balcony to smoke a cigarette, she glanced at the painting again. The circle was still a circle, which pleased her, and she was about to step away when she noticed that there seemed now to be darker wavy lines at the bottom of the canvas. She stared at them for a minute. She really did not recall seeing these darker lines before. True, she had spent most of her time looking at the upper half of the painting, but regardless. Was someone actually drawing on the canvas? And if so, who? This was absolutely unacceptable; drawing on a painting went along the lines of standing in the middle of a recital hall during a concert pianist’s concerto, and screaming. Who would ever want to do a thing like that? Even if this was no worthy piece of art! The principle! Or was she going insane? Was her mind going wavy, making wavy lines where previously they were straight, or where previously there had been none? She waited for a janitor to turn the corner, sheepish, with a paintbrush in hand, all set to be fired, but the hall was empty.

She went home that night, which she said was a normal evening. She came back the next morning and said it was a normal morning, except for the fact that the painting was still in the hallway and therefore janitorial services had still not come by. It was only when she went for her daily trip to the bathroom that she returned, tissue in hand, to find the painting, still in the hall, now covered with bold lines, striped, as if the former painting of the circle and wavy lines had been put in jail.

This chilled her to the core, but she is a woman of quick recovery, and she sucked in her breath, stormed into her office and called custodial services.

“Right this instant!” She yelled into the phone. “All of you! Now!”

There was steam, I’m sure, billowing in her lungs.

She stared at the painting, at the thickness of the stripes, which were well defined and expertly done. It was hard to imagine who could’ve done that so quickly and still made such a fine job of it. Despite herself, she felt a glimmer of admiration which she pushed right down as she stood outside her door, toe tapping. The elevator opened and the custodial staff walked down the carpet. There were seven of them, and just as a side note, it’s interesting to know that they all happen to be related.

She walked a bit to meet them, and had them line up right there in the hall. I have now heard eight different versions of this story, but here’s the best I can do to recreate it for you.

Her jaw was set.

“First off,” she said, “I ASKED YOU TO MOVE THIS YESTERDAY!”

A bold young man with sideburns raised his hand.

“We came up yesterday,” he said. “Right when you called. But there was nothing here.”

There was a murmur of agreement from all except the museum head.

“Then you ALL need to get your EYES examined,” she said. “My next question is this. Which one of you arrogant people thinks it is okay to draw on ANYTHING in this museum? You can’t draw on AN-Y-THING. Because even if it is a bad painting. No Drawing. Never. Is that clear? We will wait here until someone confesses. We will wait here all day. We will wait here until you die of dehydration if we have to.”

The seven janitors looked puzzled. They all looked puzzled in a similar way, due to their genetic coding for the word puzzled. The head, the patriarch, who had been taking care of the museum building now for nearly fifty years, raised his hand.

“Ma’am,” he said. “When you say drawing on something,” he said, “what exactly do you mean?”

“On the canvas of course,” she said.

“Someone may draw on it?”

“Someone DID draw on it,” she said. “Someone put that painting in jail. As of yesterday, the canvas had no stripes at all.”

“Ma’am, which canvas are you talking about?” he asked again. Behind him, his nephew tittered.

The museum head blew air through her teeth. “The ONE,” she said, turning around, “the ONE that is RIGHT BEHIND ME.”

And as she turned around, ready to stomp her feet, ready to raise her voice to the roof, she looked at the canvas again, and fainted dead away into the waiting arms of the seven attending janitors.

They caught her long before the floor did. Carefully they laid her on the carpet.

“Is she sick?” asked the nephew.

“She’s crazy,” said the cousin.

The patriarch thought no, and he was relieved when she fluttered her eyes open and straightened her skirt.

“Ma’am?” he asked.

She waved her hand weakly at the painting, and the janitors all looked but they did not know what it was she wanted them to see.

For the canvas, now, was blank. Not covered with white paint, not painted over, just blank, as if no one had ever painted anything on it at all. No sign of the stripes or the circle or the wavy lines. Nothing. The museum head put her head down on the carpet, and asked each of the janitors if, when they walked down the hall, there had been anything on that canvas. They said, all seven at once, No. They said it was the first they’d seen of this canvas and it had nothing on it any more than a baby’s bottom might. She said she did not understand. Did they see anyone walking by with paint remover? she asked. And they said no, they would’ve smelled that a mile away. One sniffed the canvas and said it was as sweet-smellingly fresh as a rose. They said drawing on a canvas was certainly a bad idea, and they would’ve moved it yesterday had it been there. Seven heads hovered above her, with seven similar looks of concern and barely-detectable impatience. They helped her up and locked the canvas in her office at her request and she took her purse on her shoulder and they sent her home early and went back to tending and keeping the lines and corners of the building.

She claims she slept all night that night. As soon as she got home, slept and slept. But several of us got messages on our machines from her at around two a.m., quiet sleepy messages all about the painting and this sad bewilderment. I erased mine, it was too embarrassing, but some of the less kind employees who have wanted a raise for years have kept theirs for possible later blackmail.

That night at the museum, someone touched the little Degas ballerina again. No licking this time; instead, someone stroked her curved bronze neck with fingers coated in peanut oil. The bells rang and rang but the guard was in the bathroom at the time and missed it. By the time the guard was back, the Degas was already covered in sliding sweeping tracks of oil and the gallery was empty. You could only hear the swing of the back door.

Creepy, I know.

The museum head returned the next day and found the canvas leaning against the file cabinets in her office. It was still blank. She dragged her desk to the side and sat directly across from the canvas and stared at it. She stared at it the entire day. From nine in the morning until two or so in the afternoon, she was glued to that chair; I walked by and I saw it. Her phone would ring and she’d answer and write down notes but her eyes did not leave that painting.

But for all her good watching, nothing happened. It was only after she went off to the bathroom, not even to cry this time, just to use it, when she returned and saw the new pattern through her office window. She ran inside, dashed in to see the new box and arc and little dancing lines, the precise pattern you see now. Yes. Exactly.

And she fell to her knees, asking it to change in front of her. She was desperate to see it happen. She talked to the painting so long that anyone who wanted to hear her could’ve just walked by. I happened to, yes. It was disturbing to see, someone pleading like that is always disturbing to see, and of course especially disturbing if they are pleading with things inanimate. The security guard, Lola, went upstairs, shaken, all set to confess that she had missed the Degas-touching, but the museum head waved her off and said it was fine, fine, whatever. She said clean off the oil with a damp rag and some soap. The bells were ringing and you could hear another security guard talking loudly downstairs, but the museum head didn’t seem to notice or care. All her energy was focused on the painting and asking it to shift that box into a circle, to make a tiny line—anything, AN-Y-THING. She sat there the whole day, ordered food on the phone without moving her eyes, and stayed there the entire night. She spent about three days staring at that painting. Alarming; we were all distressed by it. Her hair was falling out, or maybe it was just unbrushed. Her husband delivered the divorce papers in person and tried to talk to her but she wouldn’t even look at him. She held out her hand and he placed the papers in them, and she nodded to the painting and he left. Downstairs, someone actually lifted the Degas ballerina off her platform to the loud ringing of many bells and was halfway out the parking lot with it when the youngest janitor screamed “THIEF!” and the thief dropped the ballerina and ran. We didn’t catch him. The ballerina was face down in the grass and has a small dent on her toeshoe from the fall. The reason you didn’t see her up today is because we thought it’d be best to keep her in storage for a while until this whole thing blows over.

On day three of her observation, on who knows how many energy pills, the museum head called all us staff up on the phone and said we had better clear a space for the painting, the most important space in the gallery. Last on the tour line. Here. “Do it today please,” she said, slurring her words from exhaustion. This certainly did not match our carefully discussed plans to put our best Vasily Kandinsky last, since it is such a sizzle of a grand finale, but we made the space and painted the wall ecru behind it, and then she called up the electronics store and installed a video camera directly across. Up more. Yes, the glint? There. She kept her eye on the canvas until the camera was up and rolling. It goes to one of those security TVs in the basement, and if you want to check on it, it’s on twenty-four hours. With help from three of the janitors, she moved the painting downstairs and hung it up and then went home to sleep and sleep.

It hasn’t changed once.

She wants to catch it on film, but it hasn’t even changed a centimeter and I don’t think it will ever again. Would you? The whole thing makes me tense. Whenever she dies or if she quits, if I am still alive, I think I will snap off the camera right away and give the poor painting a break, but until then, she has us all under oath that we will leave it on all the time and if we were to violate that oath and turn the camera off, not only are we fired, which might not be so bad, but there’s some city policy that requires a huge fine. And let me tell you people, a museum salary does not leave room for huge fines. And since it’s a camera, you’re sure to get caught if you do it because she has bolted it in there with titanium cords.

I do sit up sometimes at night feeling bad for the painting; one wonders about the health of us docents sometimes, spending all day with all of this art. But it does not seem like a good life for a painting. Worse than a zoo, in a way.

The Degas ballerina’s toe is being restored and you’ll be able to see it on Level Two in about a month. We’ll have our burliest guard watching it. And good question, we did call the Atlanta benefactor, but he just babbled on about guns and defense funding. He had no memory of sending the package at all. And yes, the museum head’s divorce did come through. I saw them on the last day they saw each other, maybe forever. He went up to her office again, I assume to collect those papers, or maybe just to say goodbye. I happened to be up there at the drinking fountain—it was a very warm day and I was very thirsty and the best drinking fountain happens to be right next to her office. So I happened to overhear. He said “Goodbye,” and she just smiled at him. They didn’t hug. He said, “I know it’ll take time,” and she just smiled at him. He said something else then that I didn’t hear because in a gigantic ding-dong, all the bells went off down below, louder than ever, all at once, and I had to run downstairs. It was craziness, when I arrived. Pandemonium. On the first floor, a whole team of rebels—four people, grown adults, three men, one woman—had taken off their clothes and were making love with the Jackson Pollack. I ran in and the security guards were securing three of the people, all nude, and the last one was still wriggling on the painting, humping it, eyes closed, kissing the dribbles of paint. A security guard seized this last one, called the police, and the art experts ran in from their offices and began looking closely at the painting with magnifying glasses to see if it was stained. The male rebels were still erect so it appeared likely that no one had reached a climactic point yet, which was very good news, though as they perused the painting, in the lower right quadrant one expert located a possible foreign blob of gray-white material. He blew his whistle. “Violation!” he yelled, pointing. “Press charges!” he said. The guards pulled the delinquents away, in handcuffs, down the hall. They were yelling back, all the way down the hall. “But it inspired me that way!” one nude guy was yelling. “It aroused me! You’re telling me I’m just supposed to LOOK at that thing?”

The museum head did not come down. We handled that one on our own. We are considering building a glass case, but the board is waffling.

So, yes, it has been quite a year. Very eventful. I appreciate your attentive listening. I highly recommend the gift shop, on the left, for the end phase of your visit. There are silkscreened t-shirts, and high quality mugs and umbrellas. We also have an unusually fine selection of magnets. They are tiny and detailed and they will stick nicely to your refrigerator and hold up photos of your loved ones. Bring art into your homes, people. Thank you, again, for your interest and continued support of our museum.

©2016 by Aimee Bender. Originally published in Watchlist, edited by Bryan Hurt. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aimee Bender is the author of five books, including the bestseller The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake and the NY Times Notable Book The Color Master. Her work has been translated into sixteen languages.

Tend to Me

Kristina Ten | 2295 words

Nora is a serial becomer. She has become many things in her life, though rarely on purpose. The first time, it just sort of happened. The second time, it was a coincidence. Now, it is a habit she cannot seem to break.

In the past, she has become a rock climber and a scuba diver, a beekeeper and a gardener and a mechanic specializing in European cars. For two months last summer, she was a stand-up comedian. Her senior year of college, she amassed New England’s largest collection of antique coins.

Nora has no interest in any of these things. She has, in fact, an acute fear of heights and depths and stages. Exhaust fumes make her sick, and she is allergic to bees.

But Nora cannot help herself: She is prone to absorbing the interests of whoever she is dating. She is caught in a pattern. She cannot get out.

“How wonderful that you two share hobbies!” say friends of the couple, whatever couple she is part of at the time.

Or: “You must never run out of things to talk about! I wish my Philip and I had so much in common.”

It is not an equal exchange, Nora knows, nor a lasting one. Do you think the rock climber asked about her interests? He did not. While they dated, she scaled sheer cliff faces in his presence, then went home to her apartment and sank weeping to the floor. She spent hours flat on her belly, clawing at the horizontal surface beneath her calloused palms. All the jargon she had learned—quickdraw, hand jam, pitch—tumbled out of her mind. Alone, she was completely vacant. The next time they saw each other, he would fill her all over again.

The same with the comedian: She pantomimed laughter for him until her cheeks ached, then went home and stared at her blank expression in the mirror, as if trying to commit it to memory.

The same with the gardener, the beekeeper. Nora is trapped in malleability. It is an uncomfortable transformation each time. She wakes up tired, eats a bowl of bland cereal, then she goes to meet her lover and she becomes.

Currently, Nora is dating an amateur acupuncturist. They met at a bar, where he told her a bad joke about why acupuncturists shouldn’t be trusted, something something something because they are a bunch of backstabbers.

He turns out to be neither of these things: a backstabber or an acupuncturist, professionally speaking. He is sincere and loyal, and he performs acupuncture only at the hobbyist level, though he hopes to get an apprenticeship soon. For now, he practices on himself often, on her less often, and most frequently on the bumpy, porous skin of grapefruits.

When Nora becomes this time, she is reclining on his living-room sectional, the amateur acupuncturist focused on the cap of her knee.

“Do you feel anything?” he asks, inserting a fourth needle experimentally. “More relaxed, maybe?”

“Sure,” she responds, feeling nothing, though maybe a slightly less dulled version of the nothing she usually feels.

Suddenly, a patch of rough, faintly green skin blooms in the space between the needles. It is thicker than the surrounding skin, and when she pokes it, it has a bit of give.

She looks up at the amateur acupuncturist. “Is that supposed to happen?”

He examines the patch thoughtfully. He doesn’t think so, but also, maybe. Which is to say, he hasn’t seen this before, but there’s a lot he hasn’t seen before. After all, he isn’t an expert.

“Hm,” he says, and brings a cold compress.

“Hm,” she says, and tries over-the-counter eczema cream.

Nora has a strong reaction. Over the next few days, the odd patchiness spreads until she is rough and green on her arms, legs, and chest, and on the small of her back, and in the divots of her hips. The patches aren’t itchy or painful, but the amateur acupuncturist avoids them all the same when his hands roam across her under the covers in the dark.

The pale green grows more vibrant, tinged with yellow in some places and with blue in others. Nora loses her appetite. She is cold all the time. She feels so thirsty she might die, but bloats if she drinks more than a swig of water.

Then she sprouts her first needle-sharp spine.

As Nora becomes a cactus, it is a big adjustment for them both. For her part, she must reevaluate what she understood to be the rules of becoming. Was it that he was so amateur, or was this some kind of glitch? For his part, the amateur acupuncturist has to get accustomed to her being taller than him. If he’s being honest, he never did like when she wore heels; he prefers to have at least a couple of inches on any woman he’s dating. Now, Nora shoots up a foot and a half over the course of a week, and on top of that, is growing an extra arm.

Nora’s posture improves dramatically. She stands still and straight, a commanding presence. She lingers near windows and craves the sun. When she reaches eight feet tall and has to stoop to walk around her basement apartment, the amateur acupuncturist suggests she move in with him.

They are on either side of her doorway, having just air-kissed goodbye. She looks down at him, considering. She cannot remember how she feels. Now that her body is covered in spines, he doesn’t touch her anymore, nor she him, and when they sleep together, it’s on the far right and far left of the bed with a row of pillows in between. Still, his apartment is in a nice condo building, with fourteen-foot ceilings and south-facing windows that are difficult to pass up.

Nora is not an easy roommate: She turns the heat way up in the daytime and blasts the AC after dark. She hogs any piece of furniture she lies on. She hardly ever cleans.

“You look beautiful,” he says one night. They are getting ready for a party, the birthday of one of their mutual friends. She is putting on lipstick; he is straightening his tie.

“I know,” she says. “Isn’t it lovely?” She admires the flower budding from the top of her head. It is larger than palm-sized, with a honey-colored center and creamy petals unfurling to a shock of pink. She parts her hair around it and strokes the petals appreciatively.

At the party, they dance with careful space between them. She only stabs him twice, both times accidentally, and when she has too much wine to drink, he brings her water from the bar. In the taxi home, he wraps his hand in his pocket square and interlocks his fingers with hers. The thin fabric does little to protect against Nora’s inch-long spines, but the amateur acupuncturist holds on anyway, wincing at every stop light and speed bump. By the end of the ride, she is fast asleep beside him and the pocket square is soaked through with blood.

The next morning, Nora is retching into the toilet, holding the bowl with all five arms. The amateur acupuncturist brings her glass after glass of water: the only thing he knows to do.

Hours later, her condition has worsened. Her skin is blanched in parts and waterlogged; her spines are coming loose and her feet smell of rot. The amateur acupuncturist sits with her in a bright pool of sunlight, then second-guesses himself and moves her into the shade. He frets over her flower’s wilting petals. He paces and cries and finally he calls her ex-lover, the gardener, to come over.

“How much water did you give her?” The gardener doesn’t mask his anger. Nora is crumpled in a corner, too weak to speak. He maneuvers her distended limbs gently, wearing industrial-quality gloves.

“You don’t get it.” The amateur acupuncturist is despondent. “I didn’t want her to be hungover. I was trying to help.”

“Oh, help?” The gardener scoffs. “Oh, I don’t get it? She’s seriously sick. You could’ve killed her. Don’t you know anything about succulents? The last thing they need is this much attention.”

Tears swell in the amateur acupuncturist’s eyes and he furiously blinks them away. The gardener softens.

“Look, man. I’ll clean up the fungus, then we’ll have to wait for her to dry out. She’ll be okay. But she can’t stay here. It’s not the right environment. She’s a saguaro. These things grow to be, like, sixty feet tall. What are you going to do when she busts through the roof of this place, or tries to put down roots? You can’t take care of her forever. Hell, you’re doing a pretty bad job of it now.”

The two men square their shoulders, each challenging the other: Who loves her more fiercely? Who knows better what to do? In the corner, left to her own devices, Nora begins to heal.

Once she is back to her usual self, reading by the windows, cutting holes in dresses to accommodate her new arms, Nora breaks the news to the amateur acupuncturist:

“I think it’s time for me to go.”

They are on opposite ends of the room. The bookshelves, newly stocked with texts on horticulture and succulent maintenance, are drenched in golden light. She is nearly twelve feet tall and her shadow stretches across the floor to meet him. He steps into it, letting himself bask in her touch without the danger of spines one last time.

He smiles sadly. “I know.”

In the midday heat to beat traffic, in a borrowed truck with a sunroof in the cab and a bed full of forty-pound bags of potting soil, Nora and the amateur acupuncturist drive to the desert. She positions herself so that she rises out of the sunroof from the torso up, the whipping wind a tickle against her resilient skin. The gardener insisted the potting soil would be useless, that it wasn’t even the right type for cacti, but the amateur acupuncturist brought it anyway, wanting, as always, to be necessary.

They drive in silence, their faces too far apart for conversation and any sounds they make muffled by the wind. The city dissolves into a two-lane highway surrounded by low shrubs, then wind turbines, sprawling jojoba farms, signs for man-made roadside attractions, and finally red rocks that, as they get further out, double and triple in size.

Nora points to a spot in the near distance: a cliffside grove of cacti, all different kinds, lively looking but not too crowded.

“There?” The amateur acupuncturist turns the wheel toward the dirt path.

“There.”

It seems unusual for them to be clustered together like that: prickly pear wearing crowns of fat, vivid fruit; teddy-bear cholla, whose soft-looking spines betray when they strike; stout golden barrels nestled around the bases of saguaro giants like her. It’s this strange camaraderie that draws her to them.

Though the sky is the clearest blue and the sun hangs low, white, and probing, Nora feels no urge to shield her eyes.

They part without embrace, for an embrace from her would be enough to kill him. Before he leaves, she grits her teeth and pulls, from the region of her heart, a long, sharp spine: something for him to remember her by.

Alone on the other side of sundown, Nora sees every cloud as a fading bruise: deep purple at the edges, then muted blues and greens ringing an otherworldly yellow. No real division between skin and sky.

The desert comes alive at night. So punishing in the fever of day, it is all tenderness now, all apology, and creatures crawl out from the shelter of boulders and burrows to offer their forgiveness. Jackrabbits and big-eared foxes, scorpions and lizards with beady eyes.

Nora digs her roots into the hard-packed earth and finds it welcomes her graciously. She extends them deeper and in all directions—how pleasant, the way the sand shifts and dirt clots crumble to make room for her—until she comes in contact with the roots of the nearest cactus: a statuesque saguaro draped in enormous pink blossoms.

Nora the cactus finds herself remembering things differently than Nora the human. Her mind is neither empty, nor full of beekeeping terminology or important facts about scuba diving, like the rate at which you can resurface without getting the bends. Everything is the color of stillness, the taste of scurrying, the scent of a star-filled darkness, the sound of shade in light. What relief, she thinks, this change, this constancy.

Then a single, distinct movement. The saguaro nearest Nora coughs herself awake, sending a thorny lizard darting from the hole in her trunk. She shakes her whole grand body and the ground beneath it, and the dust that’s settled on her petals comes billowing up.

“Girls!” she shouts, singsong. “We’ve got a new arrival!”

Dozens of eyes blink open in the blue-black. Dozens of cracked-lip mouths break into wide grins. In the moonlight, Nora sees the cactus women stretch their bulbous limbs, hears them greet one another with sleepy hi-hellos.

“All right,” says her flower-covered neighbor. “I know you’re just getting settled in, but don’t get too comfortable yet.” She rolls her shoulders and pulls up her roots.

Nora tests her own roots and the earth frees her easily. She could get used to this: the ability to come and go, to shape the things around her. She enjoys her neighbor’s plentiful floral display but decides she prefers her own solitary bloom.

The neighboring saguaro turns toward Nora and winks, her eyes shiny and conspiratorial. She holds out a green arm stuck through with spines.

“At night,” she says, “we dance.”

©2020 by Kristina Ten.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kristina Ten is a Russian-American writer of short fiction and poetry, and a 2019 graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Masters Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. You can find her at kristinaten.com and on Twitter as @kristina_ten.

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

Three Urban Folk Tales

Eric Schaller | 2062 words

I. The Postman

There was a postman whose father was a postman and his father a postman before him. Like them, the postman wore a blue-gray uniform with a stripe down the pants leg and, like them, he delivered mail on six days out of the week, resting on Sunday as was the tradition. Times change and traditions change, and many of the postman’s brethren took to wearing running shoes. Some even wore spikes so as not to slip on the icy winter sidewalks. But the postman still wore black leather shoes and polished these to a high gloss before he went on his rounds each morning.

The postman walked most of the time, but at a pace that made the pedestrians seem statues frozen in mid-stride, he a breeze sliding amongst them. Over the years, he came to know his postal route so well that he could predict under which awnings the birds would build their nests and the number of icicles that would descend from any given rain gutter. He could have walked his route blindfolded. He even did this once at night, when the entire city was dreaming, just to prove to himself the possibility, and did not stub a toe.

When your feet know the path then your mind is free, and so the postman was never bored, whistling a tune as he walked that put the birds to shame.

One day the postman found that roadwork had begun on the street adjoining an apartment building to which he delivered the mail, along the route that he normally followed. Large machines now tore the street apart and other machines layered asphalt and tar, all under the supervision of men in uniforms. Furthermore, a tape of orange plastic with the words “NO TRESPASSING” blocked his path.

He approached the tape and touched it with his right hand.

A man dressed in blue and wearing a yellow hard hat called out to him. “Can’t you read?” the man said. The question did not invite an answer.

The postman was bound by his code of employment to deliver the mail and so he decided to follow another route to the building, one of which he had heard but previously had no reason to use.

The route he chose was down a dark and narrow alleyway and was shorter than his normal delivery route. But, as luck would have it, he was set upon by a pack of dogs just when he thought he had reached the door to the building. These bit him and ripped his clothes, then raced off, taking the bag of mail with them. The postman did not know whether to follow the dogs or to run off in the opposite direction. He sank to his knees and wept, for he was a proud man, and resolved to try yet another route.

The next day he followed the alleyway where the garbage from the apartment building was stored. Officially, the garbage was removed once a week but, at the time of this tale, the garbage collectors had been on strike for over a month and garbage overflowed the trash bins and accumulated in great mountains along the alleyway. The day was hot and the smell of garbage intense. The postman covered his nose with a handkerchief, but to no avail. He passed out from the odor and, while he lay oblivious, rats came from the garbage and took his mail to line their nests.

On the third day, the postman returned to his former route, even though roadwork was still in progress. He ducked beneath the orange plastic tape that read “NO TRESPASSING,” passed between the machines that tore the road apart, and avoided the other machines that layered asphalt and tar. The men who supervised the machines called to him using profane names, but he blocked his ears and continued on. In this manner he successfully reached the apartment building and delivered the mail.

Nevertheless, his shoes had become so encrusted with tar that he was never able to scrub them clean.

II. True Love

“You will find your true love in the city.” This is what the young girls of the country tell one another in hushed voices so that their parents do not hear. The girls make secret pacts, sealed with blood and kisses, to leave home together when they come of age. These promises, like most, are soon forgotten by all but a few. It is these few who leave the country for the city. They find jobs and apartments, cats to name after their favorite drinks, shortcuts to sushi bars, and parking places that no one else even knew existed. But they never forget why they came to the city in the first place.

There was a young woman who came to the city and, to make ends meet, took a job at a copy shop. A man came into her copy shop every day. He wore a gray suit and carried a black briefcase from which he would take the papers he had her copy. He barely spoke and it was several weeks before she noticed him, and several weeks more before she began to expect him. One day she saw that the papers he gave her to copy were blank, and then she knew that he was in love with her.

Never let it be said that love is all in vain. The man found his voice, and soon they both were calling each other by pet names in public. A year flew by with walks in the park when the sun was out and movies when it rained. In the evenings, they would eat at the woman’s favorite sushi bar and try to guess the occupations of strangers that walked by. On weekends, they would buy discounted day-of-show tickets, park at a convenient spot the woman knew was always miraculously empty, and go to the theatre.

If love were simple, then this tale would be over. But one day, the man missed a date with the woman and, when she tried to call, she found that his phone was no longer in service. When she inquired around the city as to his whereabouts, she was only able to learn that he had quit his job and left with no forwarding address. She waited for a call or a letter from him. She invented reasons for why he might have gone. Sometimes she cried and at other times she bellowed in anger.

Still, he did not return.

The woman decided that perhaps a man’s heart is an open book but, if so, then it is written in an alien language. This is what she told her friends over drinks, and they laughed and said that the city was making her bitter. She said no, just men.

Not long after that, while she was in the lobby of her apartment building, she noticed the postman sliding envelopes into the rows of postboxes that serviced the apartments. She admired the calm efficiency with which he performed his task. Looking at his face, she realized that he was a young man, not much different from her in age. Glancing downward, she saw that his shoes were encrusted with tar. Because she had a kind heart, even if outwardly bitter, she invited him up to her apartment for a snack while she tried to clean the tar off his shoes. On the way up in the elevator, they began to talk and they were still talking the next morning when the rising sun reminded them that they had to go back to work.

So the woman found her true love in the city and, if the two are not divorced, then they are married still.

III. As Above, So Below

The city is not one city but many. Beneath the city of men and women lies the city of the rats. The mayor of this city had a daughter who was considered entrancingly beautiful. She had dark eyes, long whiskers, a glossy brown coat of fur, and a pink tail that could circle her body twice around. Her father desired that she should marry a lawyer, a banker, or a businessman, professions that in the city of the rats refer to those who steal, store, and exchange the food and trinkets that they value so highly.

The daughter said that her husband could be as poor as a church mouse. She had but one requirement, that he not be boring.

Many suitors came to win her hand in marriage. They performed acrobatics, acts of ventriloquism, sang songs, and danced. They did complex calculations in their heads based on any mathematical question she might ask. They guessed the identities of playing cards hidden inside a cereal box. Some, it is true, even had help from the mayor, who hired acting coaches so that his business partners might appear in a better light. But nothing worked. The daughter would eventually raise a small well-formed paw to stifle a yawn, and the suitor would be dismissed.

One day a young rat came forward to beg audience with the mayor’s daughter. He was not handsome, nor was he rich. But his eyes were bright and his paws were clean, as rats will say when they wish to say something nice about a poor relative. Moreover, the suitor said that he would not entertain before the mayor’s whole entourage, but insisted upon entertaining the mayor’s daughter in private. You can guess that tongues began wagging at that.

But the daughter, intrigued, reminded her father that she could more than take care of herself. The mayor did not answer. Instead, he scowled at the suitor for a full minute. He then laughed, for truly the suitor was of such nature that he would have difficulty inspiring fear in a mouse and, that being the case, how could he ever inspire love in his daughter’s heart.

Once alone with the mayor’s daughter, the suitor undid a large letter, still in its envelope, that he had been carrying.

“What is that?” asked the mayor’s daughter.

“This,” said the suitor, his whiskers twitching, “is a story from the city of men and women.”

The letter that the suitor read told of how a young man from the country fell in love with a beautiful country girl, but could only admire her from a distance. Whenever he tried to approach her, his legs would turn to lead and hold him fast to the ground. Anytime she came near him, his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth such that he could not speak. Nevertheless, when she came of age and left home for the city, he followed her. There in the city, she, thinking that he was from the city, fell in love with him. He, playing the role of a man that she might love, found that he could finally talk to her. But, although he did not initially realize it, he was trapped. He could tell her nothing of himself, only of this person that he pretended to be. So he had spun more and more lies as to who he was and what he did. Finally, sick of the lies, he had fled the city to go back to his home in the country. Now that he had finally told the truth in this letter, if she still loved him, she could find him there in the country. If not, he would never bother her again.

The rat suitor folded the letter back along its original creases and returned it to its envelope.

“What happened next?” asked the mayor’s daughter.

“That,” said the suitor, “is another story. In the city of men and women, there are more stories than there are stars in the night sky or hairs on a healthy rat. Some stories are meant for a large audience. Some, like this one, were written for a single person. The woman for whom this story was intended never received it, and so you and I are the only ones who know it. But if you will invite me back for tomorrow, I will tell you another such story.”

“Yes,” said the mayor’s daughter. “Tomorrow. And tomorrow’s tomorrow. And all the tomorrows thereafter.”

If rats can marry, then they are married still.

©2005 by Eric Schaller. Originally published in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eric Schaller’s debut fiction collection, Meet Me in the Middle of the Air, was released in 2016 from Undertow Publications. His stories have appeared in various anthologies and magazines, including The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Fantasy: Best of the Year, The Time Traveler’s Almanac, Wilde Stories, Nightmare Magazine, Black Static, and The Dark. He is an editor, with Matthew Cheney, of the on-line magazine The Revelator.

Love and Marriage in the Hexasun Lands

Tahmeed Shafiq | 7844 words

Every child knows the story of how King Adhamrya, Son of Suns, slew a demon to win the heart and hand of Schyan, the goddess of love and desire. But the story of what happened afterwards is not as commonly known. In this entry I will present to you the full account of that sad tale, for I believe it is one worth remembering.

Excerpt from A History of the Hexasun Lands by Imperial Historian Nananaore

In her boudoir, Schyan was making it rain flowers again.

Adhamrya saw them as he stepped through the portal. They fell like slow raindrops from a sky the colour of marketplace copper, and filled the vast, empty chamber with a sweet fragrance. Today Schyan had floored her hall with a giant mirrored surface, already carpeted with petals. There were no shadows in that place, only reflections.

It was beautiful, but Schyan never made anything beautiful unless she needed comfort from it. Adhamrya set off to find her, and a reflection of himself trailed alongside him in the place of a shadow.

She was sitting high in a floating tree she had manifested. Reflections of tangled branches reached out to Adhamrya as he approached it, as if they wanted to grab him and keep him prisoner. A brush was making long strokes through Schyan’s black hair. Her long red gown was decorated with images of the same flowers that were falling from the sky. She did not look his way as he approached the base of the levitating tree.

“Schyan, my love, come down from there.”

No reply.

“It’s been three weeks since anyone’s seen you in the mortal realm. My ministers are growing anxious.”

“Three weeks? I hadn’t noticed,” she said, in a tone that didn’t fool him. “Time matters little here.” Her brush halted mid-swish and she went perfectly still. She looked down at him with inhuman eyes of solid black. “Is that why you’ve come to fetch me? Because your graybeards worry?”

“I came because I missed you,” Adhamrya lied.

“Missed me.” A smile turned up the corner of her mouth. “You. Missed. Me.” She allowed a single leg to dangle over the branch she sat on, so the fabric of her robe rose slowly to mid-thigh. But when Adhamrya made no further move in response, she fixed her clothing and, in a single fluid motion, slid to face him.

Schyan had chosen to be of equal height with him today. Adhamrya held her dark gaze. He didn’t feel fear, but a sudden desire to get away from her.

“Did you really miss me?”

Vapid creature. “I did.” He pulled her to him and kissed her—hard, to add weight to the fiction. She all but purred against him. She broke the kiss and touched his face with long nails.

“Stay, then. Stay and be with me.”

“I can’t.”

“We need not be in these forms,” she pouted. “We could play as stag and hart in summer’s rut, I know you enjoyed that.” Her lips were at his earlobe, his neck. “Would you have me tall or short? Slender or buxom? I could be two maids instead of one, or we could be gales mingling in a hurricane.”

Once the thought of such lechery would have excited Adharya, but now her lips and tongue on his flesh felt like cold slime. He stepped back and held her at arm’s length. “An hour here could be a week out there, and I can’t stay. I’m needed. I have to go back but I want you to come with me.”

She was plainly disgusted with his answer. “You spend too long in the mortal realm. It dulls your memory.” She gestured at the empty landscape. “Nothing out there can compare to what can be in this place, in my palace. Remember that. Remember us.” Schyan pressed her middle finger into the centre of Adhamrya’s forehead and he felt a cold tingle, the unmistakable sensation of her magic. “Remember me.”

He did remember. Images flashed in his mind, fleeting but vivid. Himself as a younger man, fighting down a rebellion in one of his remote territories with Schyan at his side. She made him stronger and faster than mortal men, and he felled enemies like a farmer scything grain. There was magic in the air, fire and lightning that Schyan called forth, and he was laughing over the terror of the rebels.

No. Adhamrya pushed the memories away. He was not that kind of king anymore. That behaviour had brought riots, chaos, and a reputation as a barbarian. He was different now, a real king. And his people needed him.

“The war council meets today. I’m sorry, Schyan, but I’m going.”

Her face twisted in a series of emotions too quick for him to register—was that jealousy?—and she sprang away from him and back into the tree with the strength of a panther. “Go back to your court then, great king.”

“The people miss you, not just me.”

“And I should return for them? To receive an offering of burnt meat from a piss-poor farmer? I don’t think so.”

“It’s not about prayers, it’s about morale. The men have come to expect your blessing before battle. They’re whispering in the barracks that maybe they’ve upset you.”

“Mortals live and mortals die. Why should I care?”

“Because the war effort is flagging. We need you.”

“My brother is the war god, not I. Take it up with him.”

“Schyan, please—”

“Enough!” She glared down at him. “You didn’t come here because you missed me, because you wanted me, but because you’re concerned about your sweaty, unwashed soldiers. I am a god, Adhamrya, and I do not rank below the concerns of mortals,” Schyan said, breathing hard. “Leave now before I make you.”

Adhamrya sighed and took his leave of her. She had moved the door to within visibility, so at least he didn’t have to ask her where it was. It manifested as a wide rift in the air which led to his bedchamber. As he was stepping through he felt a sharp pain on his arm. He looked down⁠—there was a spot of singed fabric on his sleeve that hadn’t been there before. He peered up at the sky.

The flowers were burning.

• • • •

When Varabhata, queen to the south, came to the capital begging for aid, there were many who distrusted her. They suspected she was consorting with the foreign invaders from across the ocean, even knowing how they had taken her capital so soundly that she had fled in a refugee caravan to avoid detection. If these same nagging voices expected King Adhamrya to throw her out of the court, then they were sorely disappointed.

For it is well recorded that as the queen approached the throne with the dust of the road still on her and her head held high, asking that her people be taken in as refugees, the king stared at her with something akin to awe. He rose and greeted her by the hand as an equal, declaring loudly that it was a blessing from the gods that Queen Varabhata had come to offer her aid in this time of crisis. She and her people were honoured guests, and a banquet must be held in her honour within the week.

Loosened by wine at the feasts, tongues wagged about the king’s folly for a pretty face. Surely the seeds of rebellion were sown even then.

At this point the invading army had begun to approach the borders of the Hexasun Kingdom. Despite their reported ferocity, King Adhamrya’s generals found them to be little challenge. Their soldiers were better armed and trained than Queen Varabhata’s—a training that came from the dozens of minor rebellions that King Adhamrya had endured in his youth.

But six months after the southern queen arrived in the capital something changed. Overnight, the invading army seemed to have doubled their strength. Warriors who had previously shown little inclination towards strategy became fearsome tacticians. There was little time for the capital to consider the cause of these changes, however, as they were suddenly pressed back in the fight.

Excerpt from A History of the Hexasun Kingdom by Imperial Historian Nananaore

It was past fifthnoon and he still hadn’t come out.

Varabhata sent a footman to check if the war council meeting was still in session. It was. She had chosen not to attend the meetings herself as of late, for her presence had always been viewed as presumptuous and the hostility towards her people didn’t need further encouragement. Instead, she was surveying the latest grain reports in her study. The light from the three daytime suns, two orange and one yellow, fell across the rolls of paper on her desk.

When he did show up, he looked tired. There were bags under his eyes, and there might have been a few new tips of dry-grass yellow in his otherwise dark green hair. She got up from her chair and kissed him as he came up to her.

His beard tickled. It was a good kiss.

When it ended, King Adhamrya found Varabhata looking at him with concern. Her eyes were chips of heliodor.

“What is it?”

“You’re tired.”

“We’re all tired.”

“Not an excuse.”

He hummed in what may have been agreement, slipping behind her and resting his chin on her shoulder. “Any news?”

“Nothing you’ll like. We may have to tighten grain rations if we’re to take in all the refugees.”

“We will.”

“I know. But there is a cost.”

Adhamrya sighed. He was tired of bad news. Couldn’t there be any good news, just for once? He laid his hands on the curve of her stomach. “What about our littlest one? Is he kicking yet?”

“I’m not two months along, Adhamrya,” Varabhata said. “Besides, what makes you so sure it’s a boy?”

“Just teasing, Hebenath,” he said, using her given name instead of her royal one. “And call it a father’s intuition.”

“Is that so?” She was smiling.

“Yes.” He kissed her again, and it was just as good the second time.

Varabhata was pleased that he was so affectionate, and had they time she might have tried for more than simply kissing, but there was just too much work to be done. She must have worn that thought on her face, for Adhamrya’s own worries seemed to return as he looked at her. He sat down at the table, scanning some of the reports himself.

“Did you have any luck?” Varabhata asked.

“No. I honestly have no idea what prompted her this time, but I can tell she’s not coming out until she’s ready.

“I told the lot of them,”—he jerked a thumb at the door he’d come through—“that she wasn’t coming, and they seemed more upset by that than the reports from the front lines.”

“Can you blame them? It’s comforting to have a goddess on your side.”

“A goddess who, for reasons I don’t understand, refuses to help with the war effort? And she won’t tell me why whenever I ask.”

“You always say she never really cares about the mortal realm.”

Adhamrya shook his head. “There’s something else going on here. I can feel it.” He got up and started walking around the room, peering out windows restlessly. “I had a thought when I was in there. That she might know—about us,” he said.

“Impossible. We’ve been so careful. We meet alone maybe, what, every fortnight?”

“I know. It was just a thought.”

“How was the meeting otherwise?” Varabhata asked.

“Bad. General Nikosh believes he’ll have to retreat with his forces in a matter of days. He plans to pull back to the northeast, rejoin Kharjal and his elephant brigade, and mount a renewed assault. But by that time the enemy will have gained twenty miles or more.” His lips tightened. “There are villages in that territory, Hebenath.”

This side of his nature was one that had taken her aback when she had moved into the palace. Adhamrya was known as both a sloth and a butcher, unwilling to rule but more than happy to join a fight. She’d often been grateful his eye had never glanced south at her own borders. A warlord with a crown. Or at least he had been. Something had changed about him. The people didn’t like him, exactly, for they remembered his tyranny too well for that, but they weren’t starting rebellions anymore either. She recalled one night when Adhamrya had told her in a whisper that a few years ago he’d started to dream about blood on his hands—and those were not the dreams of a heartless man.

“What changed in you?” she wondered aloud.

Adhamrya seemed to have heard her. “Are you asking me why I care about the people all of a sudden?”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“I wouldn’t mind if you did. It’s a fair question.” He turned away from the window and sat down. There was a long silence before he said simply, “Schyan.”

“Your marriage?”

“Not that.” Adhamrya studied his hands, turning them over slowly. Like a physician looking for spots. Like a blacksmith looking for calluses, wondering how long it will be before his work destroys his hands, leaving him unable to work a forge. “I haven’t told you about the Huxin rebellion, have I?”

“No.”

The king nodded. “I suppose it’s been four years now. It feels longer than that though. Schyan and I had taken a small contingent of soldiers and gone to Huxin to fight the rebels.

“We were raiding a village, like we had done many times before. We were separated in the carnage. When I found her, she had just set fire to a man’s house with his family inside. Hearing the man scream for his children . . . it was like I was suddenly aware of what we were doing, what I had become. I thought of my own father. I have no idea why; gods know I hated that man, but I did. I ran inside to rescue them, but they were already gone. When I came out, I saw Schyan had killed the man with her bare hands.” He held out his own hands above the tabletop, palms up. “Soaked in gore.” He stayed that way for a long moment, then balled his hands into fists and looked at Varabhata.

“I have hardly been a king at times, Hebenath. I often wonder if I deserve to wear the crown today.”

She took his hands in her own. “Adhamrya,” she said patiently, “the crown is yours precisely because you turned away from that path. I don’t care who you were before I met you, the man I know now is a good man. He cares not only for his own subjects, but mine as well. Gave them shelter in his own home. I couldn’t ask for anyone else to be the father for my child.”

King Adhamrya closed his eyes and raised their joined hands to his temples, pressing them against his skin. Varabhata bent to kiss his soft hair. His hands were slightly shaking.

There came a knock at the door. The two of them rapidly moved apart. “Come in!” Adhamrya said. A page poked his head into the room. “Your Highnesses,” he said, “A message has arrived from General Nikosh. He says the enemy wants to send an emissary to the capital, to discuss terms of peace.”

• • • •

Blind is he who marries for beauty, beggared is he who marries for riches, but cursed is he who marries for love.

A popular saying

The emissary arrived more than a week after Adhamrya sent back his reply to General Nikosh, during which time the capital tensed with expectation. No one regarded the offer as anything more than a trap, not while the enemy seemed to have the upper hand, but equally no one could say what the trap might be. They would send only one messenger to the capital, unarmed and with the terms set by the enemy’s unknown commanders. “What could one man do?” said many of Adhamrya’s advisors. Yet others remarked that the enemy must be very confident in their abilities if they planned to send a trap with a single man. Adhamrya listened to these wiser minds and slept little, dreaming of poisons and daggers hidden in sleeves.

All along the Kingdom, Adhamrya had told his men to keep an eye out for the messenger headed north. But no one had any news to send.

Then one day a mounted rider approached the gates of the capital at dawn and announced himself to be the long-awaited envoy. “Where did he come from?” the guards were asked by their superiors. “We didn’t see,” they replied. “We came out for the morning shift and there he was, horse and all, and no sign of the road on him.”

Adhamrya’s breath tightened when he received this news. He ordered the man to be kept waiting while he filled the audience chamber at the front of the palace. Nobles and their attendants, courtiers, ministers great and small, and tradesmen. The head priest and his key acolytes, as many pages and chambermaids as they had in the palace, and row after row of guards armed with bow, spear, and sword. There was even a crossbow or two. Even the scullion girl was there, worried she might be caught until she saw the chef watching the doorway expectantly like everyone else. On the king’s orders, members of the public the guards thought clean enough were allowed in as well. Let him try something with so many people around, Adhamrya thought. Let him try. We’ll skewer him where he stands.

Adhamrya himself had the throne brought to the chamber and placed on a dais. Varabhata sat on an ornate chair, not technically a throne, to his right and just behind. Adhamrya wore his turban-crown and sword, while Varabhata, in a brave gesture, wore armour and was also armed.

At thirdnoon and no earlier, the messenger was allowed into the palace. He was indeed alone and appeared unarmed. Tall and young, with saffron skin and pale gray hair. Wrapped around his shoulders was a blue fox-skin stole. He wore hunting leathers.

This is the enemy’s man? He looks like a foppish noble.

The stranger walked past rows of murmuring faces noble and common alike, stopped an appropriate distance from the throne, and bobbed his head in a poor imitation of a bow, openly disrespectful for the assembled crowd to see.

“Son of Suns,” he said in a dry voice, “I am come bearing a missive. For you and for your people. For those who might need a reminder of our strength,”—he glanced at Varabhata—“and for those who serve as proof of it.”

Varabhata stiffened. Don’t let him provoke you, Adhamrya thought.

“You will show respect in my hall, stranger, or I will teach you what it looks like.”

The man actually smiled. “I am not here to kiss your slippers, Adhamrya. The only respect my men have is the respect of the battlefield.”

Your men?

“Then give me your message,” Adhamrya said. “And count yourself lucky if I don’t send your head back to your masters as a message of my own.”

“Very well then,” said the emissary, “My demands are simple. For your crimes against the people of this realm you will surrender yourself to me. Your men will lay down their arms, you will be tried, found guilty, and executed, along with the coward dross you choose to harbour in your palace.” He openly stared at Varabhata.

Weapons had already been drawn before he had finished speaking. Varabhata’s men were snarling, just waiting for an order. Adhamrya didn’t tell them to stop—his own blood was running hot.

“Turn around,” he boomed, “Go back and tell the men who lead you that they have earned my wrath today. Not even one of you will be left alive, you have my word.”

The emissary didn’t move. His gaze slipped past Adhamrya to someone in the crowd. He seemed to be waiting for something.

Pushing past others, the head priest freed himself from the throng and came to stand beside the stranger. Astonishingly, he then turned away from Adhamrya and faced the mass of spectators.

“My friends, I take no pleasure in informing you like this,” the priest said to the silent crowd. “Our once-beloved king has committed a crime for which there can be no forgiveness. He, who won the heart of the goddess Schyan herself, has spurned her love like a common man. For he has broken the sacred fidelity of marriage”—he whirled to point at Varabhata—“with the foreign slattern who sits beside him now in the rightful place of the goddess. He has dishonoured the gods, and for his crime deserves death!”

All the sound in the world seemed to have vanished. If there was even breathing, Adhamrya couldn’t hear it in the vast, crowded room. He stood slowly, aware that Varabhata was already standing with her sword drawn.

How? They had been so careful.

Hadn’t they?

Adhamrya remembered Schyan’s face as she asked him to remain with her in that other realm, the delight when he said he had missed her—her, specifically. The pained look she gave him when he said he was leaving. She knew. Gods, she knew.

But how did the priest know?

Somewhere in the whirling panic a voice of reason was screaming at him. Why now? it said. Think, think. If the priest knew about them, how did this messenger come to know it as well? And why had he had called the army his men?

“Who are you?” Adhamrya asked the stranger.

The man smiled as Adhamrya looked at him, really looked at him, and saw the eyes of unbroken black. A gust of dust and wind hurtled through the open doorway to the chamber and blinded everyone who was there. An eyeblink and it was still again, the god now in his full divine aspect. Nine feet tall, still wearing his blue fox stole. He was grotesquely muscular, shoulders and back corded with so much sinew that he stooped like an old man.

“War god!” he roared, in a voice like a typhoon. “Avenging god! God of strategies, plots, and deception.” His face was wild with savage delight.

Marik. Schyan’s elder brother.

Adhamrya was very, very afraid.

The priest was the first to kneel, followed by the crowd once the shock seemed to pass. Only Adhamrya and Varabhata were standing. She was now beside him with her sword raised in a fighting stance. After a moment’s hesitation, Adhamrya drew his as well. The god just grinned at them.

“The god Marik,” boomed the priest, “has informed me of the slight to his kin. We who still follow the gods must turn away from our false rulers. Their deceit and blasphemy will only lead us astray. Marik has come to right these wrongs.”

Marik made a gesture and the prostrate rose. “Your priest speaks true,” he said. “Your king is godless, but he has also insulted me by betraying my sister.

“I aided the foes your men now die fighting. I drew the blood from your lands as punishment for your king’s crimes. But you have suffered long, and my wrath is now sated. If your king and his southern whore will surrender their lives to me then I will remove the enemy from your shores. You have my word.

“But if he won’t, then I will redouble their strength and slaughter every man and woman in the kingdom for it.”

The priest looked up at his god, shocked. He hadn’t been told this part of the plan.

“How could you have known?” Adhamrya whispered to himself.

The god must have heard them. He laughed, a sound that shook the bones in Adhamrya’s skull. “Will you believe it, mortal king? She saw you. Embracing one night in the gardens. After all your carefulness.”

It was Varabhata’s turn to be shocked. “She would have said something, done something,” she spluttered.

Marik shook his head. “You don’t know her then. Ask him, ask Adhamrya what Schyan would do.”

She’d turn cold. Sulk, shut herself away if she felt vulnerable . . .

It was true. It was all true.

“You poor fools.” Marik’s smile was mocking. “You mortals know nothing of my kind. Do you know how old my sister is? To you she is ageless, but in our eyes, she is barely an infant. She is as petulant and callous as a mortal child.” His face grew pensive. “In some ways we are not so different, your kind and mine.”

But the smile returned, broader than ever. “But do you know what the worst part is? The worst part is what she knew before you did.

“They say women always know. It’s true for gods, at least. She could smell it on you, Varabhata, the scent of your twinned bloods.”

“What do you mean, war god?” asked the priest.

Marik simply said, “She’s pregnant with his child.”

Adhamrya gave up the thought of talking his way out. He grabbed Varabhata by the hand and took slow steps backwards off the dais.

“I don’t know what you were thinking, mortal. How were you going to hide it when her belly began to swell?”

They had never really thought that far. The war had always seemed like it demanded more of their attention. But even if they had, what would they have done? What could they have done?

For now, though, they could run. Adhamrya surged into action, yanking Varabhata along with him.

From behind he heard the priest shout and the cries of armed men sprinting as if into battle.

Stupid, stupid! How could he have been so stupid?

They fled along the long corridor that led into the palace interior. The mob was not far behind. A thrown spear crashed into the wall feet from Adhamrya’s head. He swore as they turned around a corner.

A door was waiting for them, a rift in the air. Through it they could see an orange sky and a silvered ground.

Varabhata was shouting something, but Adhamrya couldn’t hear her over the blood in his ears. Was this a trap?

He had no time to think it over. The crowd had turned the corner and was gaining on them. Varabhata jerked his arm and pulled him through the portal. It closed behind them. Adhamrya whirled. Same sky, same eternal twilight, but no flowers.

“—Schyan’s realm, isn’t it?” Varabhata was saying. He nodded. Their heavy panting was the only sound they could hear. When it faded, they were left with silence. Compared to the chaos they had just escaped, it seemed almost peaceful.

“It’s beautiful,” said Varabhata, eyeing her reflection. “Is it always like this?”

“It goes through cycles. This is the autumn landscape.” Now that Adhamrya had calmed down his brain was working again. “But I don’t see her. If this is a trap, she should be here. Schyan!” he shouted, “Schyan!” He turned around.

Schyan was there. Varabhata gasped. Adhamrya just stared at his wife. Her face had no emotion at all.

“Schyan, I . . .” He trailed off, not knowing what to say.

The goddess of love turned around and walked away, leaving them alone in her boudoir, safe from the men and women outside that wanted to kill them.

• • • •

King Adhamrya’s marriage to the goddess Schyan was unprecedented in human history. The gods had always maintained a distance from their human worshippers, accepting praise and bestowing blessings but rarely doing much else. This union promised to be the beginning of a new era. What would come of it? What would a marriage between a man and a goddess be like?

Excerpt from A History of the Hexasun Lands by Imperial Historian Nananaore

Schyan disappeared into the distance, and Adhamrya fell quiet. He stared after her for what seemed like years before dropping to the ground with his head in his hands.

Varabhata decided not to presently comfort him: She was no longer panicked, it was clear that immediate danger had passed, but she was very confused. They would be served better if she could think her way out of this mess. Then she would attend to Adhamrya.

In the long stillness that followed, Varabhata tried to compose herself. As a child, her tutors had taught her to count her thoughts when she was confronted with a bewildering situation, to arrange and study them like a list of numbers without emotion. It calmed her greatly to have such a dispassionate exercise to turn to. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes and started counting.

One: She had just seen the goddess Schyan for the first time and lived. Despite her knowledge of her affair with Adhamrya. This was baffling, but without any other information to make sense of it she would have to come back to it.

Two: She and Adhamrya had been found out. Weeks ago, it appeared. If they ever managed to get out of this place and back into the palace, they would be killed instantly. If not by the mob, then at least by Marik. You couldn’t win a fight against a god.

Three: That meant they were trapped here forever.

One again. Schyan hadn’t killed them. She’d saved them. There was no reason for it—unless she couldn’t kill them. Didn’t want to kill them. No, that wasn’t right. Varabhata she could have slaughtered on a whim, it was Adhamrya she couldn’t or wouldn’t harm.

Gods, she’s not angry, she’s hurt.

Hadn’t Marik said that Schyan was still a child? When children are angry, they sulk or throw tantrums, but more often than not they also want to be comforted. Even when they say they want to be alone. Even when they run off. They’re just as confused as they are upset, and they want someone to make sense of that confusion. In fact, Varabhata supposed, this pattern of behaviour wasn’t reserved for children. Adults did it as well.

But did Schyan, did an immortal goddess, really want to be mothered? It was ridiculous. But it was an explanation, and she was in short supply of those at the moment.

So, four then: Schyan clearly wanted to be alone. Varabhata doubted she would be coming back. If she really did want to be comforted, then someone should go after her. Not Adhamrya; even if he were in a right state of mind, he didn’t possess the subtlety. The task fell to her. She could talk to the goddess, then get her to deal with the mob in the palace and return them home safely.

Is that why she didn’t kill me? To follow her?

As soon as the thought occurred to her, she knew it was right. There was no explanation for it, just a sudden rush of conviction that she had found the answer. It wasn’t just the explanation that made the most sense logically, it also felt right. Queen Varabhata opened her eyes and said to the air, “She wants me to go after her.”

Adhamrya looked up at her. There were tear tracks on his face. “What? No. She might kill you.”

“Yes,” Varabhata nodded. “But she wants me to go with her. I can feel it somehow. I don’t know how to explain it, but I do.” She started walking in the direction Schyan had gone. Adhamrya leapt to his feet and tried to block her path. She barreled past him.

“Hebenath,” he said, “Don’t—Hebenath!”

She turned around. A huge wall stood where it hadn’t been a moment ago, made of metallic bricks that glinted in the odd light. It stretched off to either horizon farther than she could see. It may have well been infinite in length. She was penned in.

Adhamrya was shouting her name from the other side and hitting the wall. She told him sternly to calm down. “I told you, Adhamrya.” Now there was no way but forward. “Wait here, I’ll be back.”

Hopefully, she added silently.

Putting her back to the wall, she started walking, resisting the urge to look back now and then. Fortunately, Schyan’s boudoir was an easy distraction. It was too empty, too uniform, to be properly called beautiful, but it was still captivating. She was especially fascinated by the mirrored floor. Her reflection followed her steps the way a shadow might. She supposed the idea must have seemed appealing to a vain goddess.

Once the wall was beyond visibility, she was certain that Schyan wanted to be followed. She was even more certain that she wanted Varabhata to come alone. These were strong sensations, like the peal of a deep bell ringing in her chest. She’s communicating with me, Varabhata thought. But why? A new sensation told her to keep going, and she did. Not long after that she found the goddess.

In the centre of the barren mirrored landscape, there was a tree floating free from any support. In its shade rested a table with a tea set, two low cushioned chairs, and a small pool that steamed like a hot spring. As she came closer, she smelled its rich earthiness and salted water. Schyan was bathing.

Water sluicing off skin, the goddess of love stood to face Varabhata. Schyan appeared to her as a dark-haired and dark-eyed woman of impossible beauty. Varabhata had never been religious, but now as she looked at Schyan, she felt a sudden rush of awe; no human being could ever have come close to her figure. By comparison, Varabhata was hopelessly flawed. She looked away in shame. The message being conveyed was clear: Look at what he had, what he gave up. All for you. Are you worth it?

Was she?

Cloth rustled, and when Varabhata dared to look Schyan was belting on a black robe patterned with tiny spears. The goddess sat at the table and poured tea in a long stream. Drinking peacefully, she completely ignored Varabhata.

Taking it as a strange kind of invitation, Varabhata sat down. Schyan poured tea for her. It was the colour and sweetness of pale honey. Presently, Varabhata broke the silence by asking, “Why did you save us? You could have let us die—after what we did to you.”

Schyan’s reply was curt. “I did not do it for you. I did it for the child, as yet innocent of any crime.” Varabhata’s hands went to her stomach. Schyan caught the motion, her emotionless mask slipping to show a glimpse of sadness before it tightened on her face again.

“Then I thank you. For the three of us.”

“I would have killed you if I could do it without harming the child,” Schyan said coldly. She sipped her tea.

Silence grew again. Varabhata thought about what to say. If her theory was correct, then what Schyan really wanted was to talk and have her feelings acknowledged. But how to start that conversation? She needed Schyan on her side, otherwise they would never make it out of here alive. No room for false steps. So, what to do? How did you even have such a conversation, as the other woman?

And she was definitely the other woman. A natural target for hate and jealousy. Yet here she was, still breathing.

This thought seemed to shake her mind free of doubt. Something occurred to her about what Schyan had said about killing her.

“You knew about my pregnancy?”

“The scent was unmistakable. I knew the day it happened. The palace reeked of it.”

“I didn’t know there were scents for such a thing.”

“It is not a scent such as your mortal senses allow,” said Schyan. “It is the impression that new life makes on the world. The way it warps the air. ‘Scent’ is the closest analogue for your understanding.”

“I see.” Varabhata took a breath and plunged. “But you knew about Adhamrya and I before that. You had plenty of chances to kill me but never took them.”

“Perhaps I didn’t see the point.”

“If I were in your position, I would have seen the point.”

Schyan’s eyes whipped in her direction with such a sudden fury that Varabhata felt literally pushed back. “How dare you presume to know me! I am more powerful than anything your feeble mind can dream of—you know nothing of what I think.” The chair and table seemed to be shaking as if in a minor earthquake.

“I know that you love your husband.”

The shaking stopped as soon as it had begun. “Love,” said Schyan, in as bitter a tone as Varabhata had ever heard, “is a mortal affliction.” Then the mask fell away at last, and the goddess looked very tired and very old. “But it seems that I have become infected.”

“I’m sorry,” said Varabhata.

Schyan shook her head. “No, you are right to ask questions. As a woman, as my replacement, you should know the other half of this sad tale.” Her fingers held the table as if Varabhata’s question had released a tide that might drag her away, and when it came the goddess spoke as if it were a confession.

“Even before you arrived in the capital, Adhamrya had begun to change. He stopped looking at me as he used to. He no longer took pleasure in our hunts. I saw him changing and I could not understand why. Was I no longer beautiful?

“I could see how he hated me. It would not come back, his love would not come back no matter what I did. Did I anger him? Did I make a mistake? I had never loved a mortal before. Did mortals fall out of love so soon?

“But then you came. He loved you at once, I could see it even if he could not. He was happy with you as he was not with me. When you came to love him in return, I chose to stand aside, to let him be loved, be happy.” The goddess of love and desire was crying, silver tears gleaming in the corners of her black eyes. “I loved a mortal, and my punishment was to watch him love another.”

“And then I was with child,” Varabhata whispered.

Schyan nodded. “As an immortal, I could never bear him a child. Seeing him so joyous at the knowledge that he was to be a father . . . I came here to be as far away from him as possible. I let my brother lay waste to the mortal realm to defend my honor because a part of me felt vindicated by his actions. I hated you, you who took my sweet Adhamrya away from me. But you were his chosen, to be the mother of his child, and I was a monster to him. So I stayed here, alone.”

She was a monster. Varabhata knew that. She had never believed, not really, that the beings they worshipped were gods. They were far too cruel for that. By chance they had escaped the reach of death, for which humans called them gods and demons, but they were nothing worth praying to.

Why, then, was she so ashamed?

“You saved us because you still love him.” Varabhata had been right all along.

“Marik does not let his prey survive. If you had escaped from the crowd, he would have killed you himself. Here he cannot find you,” Schyan said.

She closed her eyes and tilted her face up to the sky. Her tear tracks slowly vanished like puddles in the heat of the suns. Varabhata watched, fascinated, as the goddess’ robe changed from a black wrap decorated with spears. The fabric tightened, developed stitching, and then Schyan was wearing a heavy, ornate set of white leggings and tunic that were unmistakably some kind of armor. She abruptly stood up, signalling that their time was over. “Come.” Varabhata jolted and followed her, thinking it was best to ask few questions.

They were quiet until the wall. When they drew near, Schyan simply waved her hand and the wall disappeared, showing them Adhamrya sitting cross-legged on the ground. Then he was grabbing Varabhata in a hug, and she tried to look at Schyan’s reaction out of the corner of her eye but couldn’t manage it.

“I have tarried here too long,” the goddess said. “You are both free to return to the palace; I will deal with my brother and his followers.” She looked directly at Adhamrya. “Your people will have no need to fear him from now on, King Adhamrya.”

He blinked at the coldness of her words. “I . . . I thank you, Schyan. And for what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

Varabhata was sure the goddess wouldn’t reply, but after a second’s hesitation she allowed a flicker of grief to show on her inhumanly beautiful face. “As am I,” she said. To Varabhata, to the other woman, she said, “Will you watch over him for me?” And without waiting for an answer, she vanished.

They were all alone again. Reflections stretched out at their feet in place of shadows.

Varabhata took her lover’s hand. He stared at her in amazement. “What did you say to her?” he asked.

She kissed him in reply, closing her eyes and pressing into his warmth. Relief, that they were safe for the moment. She felt him melt into her, and for a long moment they stayed that way.

When she opened her eyes, there were flowers falling from the sky.

• • • •

From then on, Schyan began to aid King Adhamrya in much the same way Marik aided the enemy. Even so, the war was not easily won. Many lives were lost before the last invader fled in his baleen ship across the waves, for while mortal men died on the battlefield, the gods waged their own contest. Now freely intervening in the conflict, Marik sent waves of pestilence to the cities and towns of the Kingdom. At the height of the epidemic, almost a hundred lives were lost every day. Schyan caused the ground to explode with medicinal plants and flowers, but there were too many sick and too few physicians, the disease simply too effective. The last patient was cured more than a year after the war ended.

King Adhamrya was one of the last. It started with a cough and a fever, a few shakes at night. He took tonics that were prepared for him, but with a grim look of resignation. One day he collapsed in the garden as he was being shown the first batch of fruit trees, and by nightfall he was dead. A shorter timeframe by many weeks than the disease usually showed—the god Marik gave his quarry no chance at recovery.

It has been said that the king’s final words were to his lady wife: “We knew it couldn’t last,” or “Every action has a consequence,” depending on whether you believe the romantics or the moralists. The queen’s own grief was muted. She took the throne as firstrise cleared the horizon, with the little prince in her lap, as the first sole ruler of two united lands under the six suns of heaven. The people came to love her eventually, even those who had spoken against her in the beginning. The major dissenters, including the head priest, had all been executed upon her return from Schyan’s realm, so the task was somewhat less difficult than it might have been otherwise.

No one knows why the foreigners arrived on these shores in the first place, and in such numbers. No one knows what lands they came from, or whether they returned to their homes when they left. What prisoners there were spoke only a few words of our language and seemed disinclined to try—silent till they died in dungeons or were executed. The bodies of the fallen were burnt, and dozens of witnesses have documented the strange scent, floral and spicy, that their flesh released. Were they demons then, wearing human skins as we might wear cloth? There is no answer to such questions, not in the annals of history.

In time, Queen Varabhata earned for herself the style of “the Temperate,” ruling as she did with grace and wisdom, bandaging the wounds of a country long at war. She is counted among the greatest rulers in the long, storied history of the Hexasun Lands. Historians have not been kind to the Son of Suns, however, framing him as an impulsive and foolish leader whose ineptitude caused the commonfolk much hardship. Some have gone further, daring to blame Schyan for failing to act against her brother earlier.

I myself hold no opinion on the matter. I view it as my duty to record the events of the past, not to judge them. That is the charge of the gods, flawed as they are. Even so, I will add one personal note to conclude this section. My great-grandfather was born during the reign of Queen Varabhata. He fought for an education and became a scribe for the capital’s granary, and a keen diary-keeper. I still have many of his volumes, given to me by my mother. There is a legacy of words in my family, it would appear. In one of his entries, my forebearer describes a visit to the granary from the queen herself. Then in her eighty-first year, “she walked with perfect grace and without aid of a cane.”

By sheerest luck, my great-grandfather was assigned to the task of showing her the vast warehouses the city kept. Cleary bored by this necessary visit, the queen started a conversation with him, this lowly scribe. Engaging her, my great-grandfather writes, “Then newly married myself and desiring to know the proper conduct of matrimony, I raised the courage to ask her how her own marriage to the late king had fared. Immediately I regretted it, was sure that her next words would be to call for my imprisonment on grounds of assuming familiarity with the sovereign. To me surprise, she did not. She held my gaze, eyes hawk-clear and piercing, and after a pause said, ‘Every year, on the anniversary of Adhamrya’s death, I visit his grave in the mausoleum. And there every year I find a white flower from the kosht tree, a symbol of unrequited love for more than three hundred years. The door to the mausoleum is always locked, and only I have the key. For all his flaws, Adhamrya managed to convince two women to fall in love with him.’”

Let the historians of the future make their case. Here I rest my quill.

Excerpt from A History of the Hexasun Lands by Imperial Historian Nananaore

©2020 by Tahmeed Shafiq.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tahmeed Shafiq is an undergraduate at the University of Toronto. His Pushcart-nominated fiction has been published in Lightspeed and The Airgonaut, his journalism in The Varsity and The Gargoyle, and his editorial work in his college literary journal, the UC Review. He is trying to be a writer, or a journalist, or a philosopher, or some combination of these. One day he hopes to write a novel. He thinks cities are at their most beautiful in the rain.

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

EXCERPT: Chosen Ones (John Joseph Adams Books)

Veronica Roth | 3442 words

SAVING THE WORLD ONCE MADE THEM HEROES. SAVING IT AGAIN MAY DESTROY THEM.

Fifteen years ago, five ordinary teenagers were singled out by a prophecy to take down an impossibly powerful entity wreaking havoc across North America. He was known as the Dark One, and his weapon of choice—catastrophic events known as Drains—leveled cities and claimed thousands of lives. Chosen Ones, as the teens were known, gave everything they had to defeat him. After the Dark One fell, the world went back to normal . . . for everyone but them. After all, what do you do when you’re the most famous people on Earth, your only education was in magical destruction, and your purpose in life is now fulfilled? Of the five, Sloane has had the hardest time adjusting. Everyone else blames the PTSD—and her huge attitude problem—but really, she’s hiding secrets from them . . . secrets that keep her tied to the past and alienate her from the only four people in the world who understand her. On the tenth anniversary of the Dark One’s defeat, something unthinkable happens: one of the Chosen Ones dies. When the others gather for the funeral, they discover the Dark One’s ultimate goal was much bigger than they, the government, or even prophecy could have foretold—bigger than the world itself. And this time, fighting back might take more than Sloane has to give.

Coming April 7, 2020
from John Joseph Adams Books @ Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

SLOANE ANDREWS DOESN’T CARE (NO, REALLY)
by Rick Lane
Trilby Magazine, January 24, 2020

I don’t like Sloane Andrews. But I might want to sleep with her.

I meet her at her neighborhood coffee shop, one of her usual haunts—or so she says. The barista doesn’t seem to recognize her as either a customer or one of the five teenagers who took down the Dark One almost a decade ago. Which, to be honest, seems remarkable, because world-famous face aside, Sloane Andrews is that wholesome, clean brand of gorgeous that makes you want to get it dirty. If she’s wearing makeup, I can’t see it; she’s all clear skin and big blue eyes, a walking, talking cosmetics ad. She’s wearing a Cubs hat when she comes in with her long brown hair pulled through the back, a gray T-shirt that’s tight in all the right places, ripped jeans that show off long, shapely legs, and a pair of sneakers. They’re the kind of clothes that say she doesn’t give a fuck about clothes or even about the long, lean body that fills them.

And that’s the thing about Sloane: I believe it. I believe she doesn’t give a fuck about anything, least of all meeting me. She didn’t even want to do the interview. She only agreed, she said, because her boyfriend, Matthew Weekes, fellow Chosen One, asked her to support the release of his new book, Still Choosing (out February 3).

In our preliminary exchanges about this interview, she didn’t have many ideas for where I might meet her. Even though everyone in Chicago already knows where Sloane lives—in the North Side neighborhood of Uptown, just blocks from Lake Shore Drive—she flat-out refused to let me see her apartment. I don’t go anywhere, she wrote. I get accosted when I do. So unless you want to try to keep up with me on a run, it’s Java Jam or nowhere.

I’m not sure I could take notes and jog at the same time, so Java Jam it is.

Her coffee secured, she takes off the baseball cap, and her hair falls to her shoulders like she was just tumbling around on a mattress. But something about her face—maybe it’s her slightly too-close-together eyes or the way she cocks her head sharply when she doesn’t like what you just said—makes her look like a bird of prey. With a single glance, she’s turned the tables, and I’m the one on guard, not her. I fumble around for my first question, and where most people might smile, try to get me to like them, Sloane just stares.

“The ten-year anniversary of your victory over the Dark One is coming up,” I say. “How does it feel?”

“It feels like survival,” she says. Her voice is flinty and sharp. It makes a shiver go down my spine, and I can’t figure out if that’s a good thing or not.

“Not triumph?” I ask, and she rolls her eyes.

“Next question,” she replies, and she takes her first sip of coffee.

That’s when I realize it: I don’t like her. This woman saved thousands—no, millions—of lives. Hell, she probably saved my life in one way or another. At thirteen, she was named by prophecy, along with four others, as someone who would defeat an all-powerful being of pure malice. She survived a handful of battles with the Dark One—including one during a brief kidnapping, the details of which she has never shared—and came out of it unscathed and beautiful, more famous than anyone in the history of being famous. And to top it off, she’s in a long-term relationship with Matthew Weekes, golden boy, the Chosen One among Chosen Ones, and quite possibly the kindest person alive. But I still don’t like her.

And she couldn’t care less.

Which is why I want to sleep with her. It’s as if, by getting her naked and in my bed, I could force her into some kind of warmth or emotion. She turns me into an alpha male, a hunter, hellbent on taking down the most elusive prey on the planet and putting its head on my living-room wall as a trophy. Maybe that’s why she gets accosted when she goes anywhere—not because people love her but because they want to love her, want to make her lovable.

When she sets down her mug, I see the scar on the back of her right hand. It’s wide, stretching all the way across, and jagged and knotted. She’s never told anyone what it’s from, and I’m sure she won’t tell me, but I have to ask anyway.

“Paper cut,” she says.

I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be a joke, so I laugh. I ask her if she’s going to the dedication of the Ten Years Monument, an installation artwork erected on the site of the Dark One’s defeat, and she tells me, “It’s part of the gig,” like this is a desk job she applied for instead of a literal destiny.

“It sounds like you don’t enjoy it,” I say.

“What gave me away?” She smirks.

In the lead-up to the interview, I asked a few friends what they thought of her to get a sense of how the average Joe perceives Sloane Andrews. One of them remarked that he had never actually seen her smile, and as I sit across from her, I find myself wondering if she ever does. I even wonder it out loud—I’m curious to know how she’ll respond.

Not well, as it turns out.

“If I were a dude,” she says, “would you ask me that question?”

I steer us away from that topic as quickly as possible. This is less a conversation and more a game of Minesweeper, with me getting more and more tense with every box I click, every one increasing the odds I’ll set off one of those mines. I click once more, inquiring about whether this time of year brings back memories for her. “I try not to think about it,” she says. “If I did, my life would turn into a goddamn Advent calendar. For every day, there’s another Dark One chocolate in a different shape, and they all taste like shit.” I click again, asking if there are any good memories to choose from. “We were all friends, you know? We always will be. We speak almost entirely in inside jokes when we’re together.” Phew. I guess it’s safe to ask her about the other four Chosen: Esther Park, Albert Summers, Ines Mejia, and, of course, Matthew Weekes.

It’s there that we finally get into a groove. The so-called Chosen Ones bonded quickly after they met, with Matt as the natural leader. “That’s just the way he is,” she says, and it almost sounds like she’s annoyed by it. “Always taking charge, taking responsibility. Reminding us to argue about ethics. That sort of thing.” Surprisingly, it wasn’t Matt with whom she had an immediate connection, but Albie. “He was quiet,” she says, and it’s a compliment. “All of our brothers and fathers had died—that was part of the prophecy—but my brother had died the most recently. I needed the quiet. Plus, he’s from the Midwest, like me.”

Albert and Ines live together—platonically, since Ines identifies as a lesbian—in Chicago, and Esther went home to Glendale, California, to take care of her ailing mother just last year. The distance has been hard for all of them, Sloane says, but luckily they can all keep up with Esther on her active (and popular) Insta! page, where she documents the minutiae of her life.

“What do you think about the All Chosen movement that’s popped up in the last few years?” I ask. The All Chosen movement is a small but vocal group that advocates for emphasizing the role the other four Chosen Ones played in the defeat of the Dark One rather than attributing the victory primarily to Matthew Weekes.

Sloane doesn’t mince words. “I think it’s racist.”

“Some of them say that elevating Matt over the rest of you is sexist,” I point out.

“What’s sexist is ignoring what I say and claiming I just don’t know any better,” she replies. “I think Matt’s the real Chosen One. I’ve said so multiple times. Don’t pretend you’re doing me a favor by knocking him down.”

I then move the conversation from the Chosen Ones to the Dark One, and that’s when everything goes awry. I ask Sloane why the Dark One seemed to take a special interest in her. She keeps her eyes on mine as she sips the last of her coffee, and when she sets the cup down, her hand is shaking. Then she puts her Cubs hat right over that glorious just-fucked hair and says, “We’re done here.”

And I guess if she says we’re done, we’re done, because Sloane is out of there. I throw a ten down on the table and run after her, not willing to give up that easily. Did I mention Sloane Andrews turns me into a hunter?

“I had one off-limits topic,” she snaps at me. “Do you remember what it was?” She’s flushed and furious and radiant, part dominatrix and part sly, spitting street cat. Why did I wait this long to really piss her off? I could have been staring at this the entire time. The off-limits topic was, of course, anything specific about her relationship to the Dark One. Surely she didn’t expect me to abide by that, I remark. It’s the most interesting thing about her.

She looks at me like I’m the soggy piece of paper in an alley puddle, tells me to go fuck myself, and jaywalks into traffic to get away from me. This time, I let her go.

The Drain looked the same every time, with all the people screaming as they ran away from the giant dark cloud of chaos but never running fast enough. Getting swept up, their skin pulling away from bone while they were still alive to feel it, blood bursting from them like swatted mosquitoes, oh God.

Sloane was up and panting. Quiet, she told herself. Her toes curled under; the ground was cold here, in the Dark One’s house, and he had taken her boots. She had to find something heavy or something sharp—both was too much to ask for, obviously; she had never been that lucky.

She yanked open drawers, finding spoons, forks, spatulas. A handful of rubber bands. Chip clips. Why had he taken her boots? What did a mass murderer have to fear from a girl’s Doc Martens?

Hello, Sloane, he whispered in her ear, and she choked on a sob. Yanked open another drawer and found a line of handles, the blades buried in a plastic knife block. She was just pulling out the butcher knife when she heard something creak behind her, the pressure of a footstep.

Sloane spun around, her feet tacky on the linoleum, and swiped with the knife.

“Holy shit!” Matt caught her by the wrist, and for a moment they just stared at each other over their arms, over the knife.

Sloane gasped as reality trickled back in. She was not in the Dark One’s house, not in the past, not anywhere but in the apartment she shared with Matthew Weekes.

“Oh God.” Sloane’s hand went lax on the handle, and the knife clattered to the floor, bouncing between their feet. Matt put his hands on her shoulders, his grip warm.

“You there?” he said.

He had asked her that before, dozens of times. Their handler, Bert, had called her a lone wolf, and he rarely made her join the others in training or on missions. Let her do her thing, he had told Matt once it became clear that Matt was their leader. You’ll get better results that way. And Matt had, checking in with her only when he had to.

You there? Over the phone, in a whisper, in the dead of night, or right to her face when she spaced out on something. Sloane had been annoyed by the question at first. Of course I’m here, where the fuck else would I be? But now it meant he understood something about her that they’d never acknowledged: she couldn’t always say yes.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Okay. Stay here, all right? I’ll get your medicine.”

Sloane braced herself on the marble counter. The knife lay at her feet, but she didn’t dare touch it again. She just waited, and breathed, and stared at the swirl of gray that reminded her of an old man in profile.

Matt came back with a little yellow pill in one hand and the water glass from her bedside table in the other. She took them both with shaking hands and swallowed the pill eagerly. Bring on the coasting calm of the benzodiazepine. She and Ines had drunkenly composed an ode to the pills once, hailing them for their pretty colors and their quick effects and the way they did what nothing else could.

She set the water glass down and slid to the floor. She could feel the cold through her pajama pants—the ones that had cats with laser eyes all over them—but it was grounding this time. Matt sat down next to the refrigerator in his boxers.

“Listen,” she started.

“You don’t have to say it.”

“Sure, I just almost stabbed you, but no apologies necessary.”

His eyes were soft. Worried. “I just want you to be okay.”

What had that awful article called him? “Quite possibly the kindest person alive”? She hadn’t disagreed with Rick Lane, Creepmaster 2000, on that point at least. Matt had eyebrows that squeezed together in the middle in a look of perpetual sympathy and the heart to match.

He reached for the butcher knife that lay on the floor near her ankle. It was big, almost as long as his forearm.

Her eyes burned. She closed them. “I’m really sorry.”

“I know you don’t want to talk to me about it,” Matt said. “But what about someone else?”

“Like who?”

“Dr. Novak, maybe? She works with the VA, remember? We did that talk together at the juvenile detention center.”

“I’m not a soldier,” Sloane said.

“Yeah, but she knows about PTSD.”

She had never needed an official diagnosis—PTSD was definitely what she had. But it was strange to hear Matt say it so comfortably, like it was the flu.

“All right.” She shrugged. “I’ll call her in the morning.”

“Anyone would need therapy, you know,” he said. “After what we’ve all been through. I mean, Ines went.”

“Ines went, and she’s still booby-trapping her apartment like she’s living out a Home Alone fantasy,” Sloane said.

“Okay, so she’s a bad example.” The floodlight on the back stairs glowed through the windows, all orange-yellow against Matt’s dark skin.

“You’ve never needed it,” Sloane said.

He raised an eyebrow at her. “Where do you think I kept disappearing to the year after the Dark One died?”

“You told us you were going to doctor’s appointments.”

“What kind of doctor needs to see someone weekly for months?”

“I don’t know! I figured something was wrong with . . .” Sloane gestured vaguely to her crotch. “You know. The boys or something.”

“Let me get this straight.” He was grinning. “You thought I had some kind of embarrassing medical condition that necessitated at least six months of regular doctor visits . . . and you never asked me about it?”

She suppressed a smile of her own. “You almost sound disappointed in me.”

“No, no. I’m just impressed.”

He had been thirteen and lanky when she met him, a body of sharp edges with no sense of where it began or ended, but he had always had that smile.

She had fallen in love with him half a dozen times before she knew she had—when he was screaming orders over the deafening wind of a Drain, keeping them all alive; when he stayed awake with her on long night drives through the country even after everyone else had fallen asleep; when he called his grandmother and his voice went soft. He never left anyone behind.

She curled her toes into the tile. “I’ve been before, you know. To therapy,” she said. “I went for a few months when we were sixteen.”

“You did?” He frowned a little. “You never told me that.”

There were a lot of things she hadn’t told him, hadn’t told anyone. “I didn’t want to worry anybody,” she said. “And I still don’t, so . . . just don’t mention this to the others, okay? I don’t want to see it in fucking Esquire with the headline ‘Rick Lane Told You So.’”

“Of course.” Matt took her hand and twisted their fingers together. “We should go to bed. We have to get up in four hours for the monument dedication.”

Sloane nodded, but they still sat on the kitchen floor until the medicine kicked in and she stopped shaking. Then Matt put the knife away, helped her up, and they both went back to bed.

Copyright © 2020 by Veronica Roth. Excerpted from Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth. Published by permission of the author and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Veronica Roth is the #1 New York Times best-selling author of the Divergent series (Divergent, Insurgent, Allegiant, and Four: A Divergent Collection), the Carve the Mark duology (Carve the Mark, The Fates Divide), The End and Other Beginnings collection of short fiction, and many short stories and essays. She lives in Chicago.

Book Reviews: March 2020

Arley Sorg | 2383 words

The City We Became
N.K. Jemisin
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 978-0316509848
Orbit, March 2020, 448 pgs

The City We Became is entertaining, engaging, and most importantly, fun! The Orbit Publishing site’s blurb begins, “Every great city has a soul.” But trust me: Skip the blurb, skip the descriptions, and dive in. Let this book surprise you.

N.K. Jemisin is perhaps best known for The Broken Earth series, each book of which won a Hugo Award for Best Novel. Completed after The Dreamblood fantasy duology and The Inheritance fantasy series, The Broken Earth, for many readers, cemented Jemisin’s reputation for groundbreaking secondary world fiction limned with anger and social commentary. In her 2018 Locus interview, Jemisin described The City We Became, saying, “After the Broken Earth, I needed a palate cleanser. This is just meant to be a fun, silly story.” And Jemisin delivered—although I’d add “brilliant.”

If some measure of advanced description is required, stand in a bookstore and read the prologue—any reader with heart and imagination will keep going. The prologue is kind of tactile and visual, yet somehow real, and just thoroughly interesting. It tickles at curiosity immediately, while laying down wonderful character work via smooth internalization in an easy, flowing voice. The sum effect is a sense of something epic and cinematic, seasoned with a dash of the surreal and a dose of the very real, all within the span of a few pages.

The story itself is that evil is brewing, threatening to destroy New York. The city is becoming sentient, waking up to life. As it wakes, a set of humans become avatars for the city: Each represents a part of the city, and as a collective, they represent the entire thing. Together, they must rise up and fight against evil. It’s all a bit graphic novel, a bit The Matrix, a bit anime, as well as old school horror, in the best of possible ways. Super Sentai TV shows come to mind, specifically Battle Fever J (though your referent may vary), their descendant anime shows, as well as DC comics villain Starro. Lovecraft is both evoked and critiqued. So much is immediately familiar and full of nostalgia, while still being full of surprises and glittering creativity. It’s seamless and fun and even on this level alone, well done.

What makes this book even more special is that the characters are so different from each other, just as each borough of New York is different from each other. The people they know are different from each other, the people they meet are different from each other. Calling it “diverse” or “inclusive” doesn’t really do justice to what is, at heart, simply a stunning set of characters drawn from a variety of possibilities and portrayed incredibly skillfully.

Meanwhile, the narrative holds a mirror up to American (meaning US) culture. The beautiful and the terrible are on display, seen through themes on family, prejudice, friendship, struggle, and more. Gentrification is personified and challenged. Love, however, in its myriad expressions, runs throughout the story.

Along this vein, the heart of the book is, essentially, a glowing but occasionally quite frank love letter to New York City. And it ain’t all pretty. But it feels deeply researched and deeply lived. Moreover, the story is filigreed with fantastic cultural and historical notes, which makes the read, while still easy, richer; it gives the narrative depth of life and further complexity.

My slight objection would be that the characters often simply “know” things or “don’t know” things, or “realize” things, without necessarily earning discovery or knowledge. Sometimes they “feel” the answer to a question; sometimes they don’t, or maybe eventually do. It’s arbitrary and plot convenient. Accordingly, solutions to problems sometimes feel random or just handed to the characters. At the same time, it does line up with the premise, and it serves to keep momentum going in a book that is already incredible and doing a lot of things.

The City We Became is fierce, clever, brilliant, and beautiful. It is genre at its best: a tale of living cities that illuminates truths about human lives. While having fun!

A Phoenix First Must Burn
Patrice Caldwell, ed.
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 978-1984835659
Viking Books for Young Readers, March 2020, 368 pgs

The tagline “Sixteen stories of Black girl magic, resistance, and hope” caught my eye. But seeing the authors listed in the table of contents enticed me to start reading, such as Alaya Dawn Johnson, Rebecca Roanhorse, Somaiya Daud, L.L. McKinney, and more. Not only is this a collection of heavily awarded and recognized authors, but they are authors with interesting things to say, and important perspectives, not just on current issues, but on life and culture in general. The uncorrected early copy promised that “Octavia Butler’s heirs have woven worlds to create a stunning narrative that centers Black women and gender-nonconforming individuals.” What A Phoenix First Must Burn delivers is wonderful narratives that subvert expectations, challenge assumptions, and above all else, entertain.

Favorites include Elizabeth Acevedo’s “Gilded,” which is immediately arresting through striking imagery wrought in easy, lovely prose. The year is 1521. In the Ingenio of Admiral Diego Colón in Hispaniola, a girl is born who is attuned to metals: They sing to her, and if she focuses, she can shape them according to her will. Children are rare in this work camp, where non-white people are forced into lifelong slavery, and punishments are common. But the girl with a talent for metal discovers that she can gather more goods than most, so the admiral offers to let her buy her freedom. Just when she thinks she has it figured out, a young man arrives, new labor from across the ocean, and he complicates everything. It’s a beautiful tale, told in a soft yet fierce tenor.

“Melie” by Dread Nation author Justina Ireland is deep fantasy genre fun: a sorcerer’s apprentice story in a standard-ish fantasy setting, but with meaning and bite. Melie is constantly overlooked and relegated to fetching things. She is clever, however, and quite stubborn, qualities which serve her well. Determined to rise in the ranks, her efforts uncover surprises that threaten to upend her world. This piece is a solid narrative with great subtext on human interaction posed in straightforward but kind ways. Even better, Melie is a wonderful character.

Dhonielle Clayton presents “Hearts Turned to Ash,” a captivating tale steeped in Americana, told in smooth writing. Etta is dealing with heartbreak when her soul mate breaks up with her. The problem is, for Etta, this heartbreak is a fatal condition: Her heart is literally turning to ash. She has little time to figure out why this is happening and to try to fix it. It’s a great blend of folklore and fairy tale, with cool imagery and textures.

Book editor Caldwell has her own story in the anthology as well: “Letting the Right One In.” I hesitated to read it, as I have feelings about editors putting their own stories in an anthology they are editing—and the feelings aren’t good. There is no one to declare, “This bit isn’t working,” or “This story isn’t so strong; do you have another?” In Caldwell’s story, Ayanna is a young introvert who loves reading vampire books, and who becomes more and more disconnected from friends and family. In fact, Ayanna struggles with depression and feelings of isolation. Everything changes when a girl turns up in the library, a girl who is reading the book Ayanna had planned to check out! It’s a vampire story and as such, it’s very familiar. Some parts of the piece seem obvious. But good characters, good writing, and lovely dialogue make this story interesting. Details in the narrative make it thoughtful and quite strong.

Danny Lore’s “Tender-Headed” is a battle of the braids, where Akilah has had enough of Auntie stealing her neighborhood business braiding people’s hair. The set-up is great, the storytelling is compelling, and the dialogue is effective. It starts out as a tale of youth versus age and ends up a touching story about family.

National Book Award finalist Ibi Zoboi offers “Kiss the Sun,” a stunning tale of the soucouyants of Kiskeya island. By day they work in the resort or have other unassuming jobs. At night, they become “witches”—flying balls of fire that feast on human souls. The story draws on folklore as a backdrop for a brilliant discussion of women’s relationships with each other, as well as the impact of invasive developers on local culture and identity. It’s a gorgeous piece in so many ways, especially in the way it challenges ingrained and destructive ideas around beauty.

Caldwell, in her introduction, makes her objective clear: Representation is important, and she wants to help. She wants to provide stories where people who don’t see themselves nearly enough in fiction (or see only harmful examples) can find a mirror to their lives, their realities, their beings. It’s a wonderful collection of stories, it’s important, and everyone should read it.

Made to Order: Robots and Revolution
Jonathan Strahan, ed.
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 978-1781087879
Rebellion/Solaris, March 2020, 400 pgs

Jonathan Strahan has been editing anthologies since 1997’s The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume 1. Even before this point he had been publishing and editing Eidolon magazine as well as writing reviews for a number of years. Fifteen Hugo Award nominations and a World Fantasy Award win later (among other accolades), he gives us Made to Order, one of three anthologies he has scheduled for 2020 release, along with a handful of other books he is editing for Tor.com Publishing. It is, therefore, no surprise that the table of contents for this original anthology is so promising: Vina Jie-Min Prasad, Alastair Reynolds, Annalee Newitz, John Chu, Sofia Samatar, and Brooke Bolander are among the star-studded names of award-winning notables in this book. It is also no surprise that the stories themselves are consistently interesting and strong.

A good anthology will inevitably contain a story or three which didn’t land for any given reader, but it should also have those pieces which soar. For me, standouts included Ian R. MacLeod’s “Sin Eater.” It begins with a fairly familiar trope but MacLeod pairs this with the science fictional concept of consciousness transfer to a virtual world and throws it all into a fairly far-future Earth setting. The focus of the piece is one of the last tangible humans left: the Pope. There are some expected elements, but it’s a fun read and intellectually engaging read.

Tochi Onyebuchi’s “The Hurt Pattern” is a biting tale of a young lad who is essentially a near-future news-finder. “News” is, of course, a loose term. He works digitally through various surveillance networks for a company that sells the image feeds to whoever will buy them. As failsafes start to fall apart and the partitions in his brain no longer work, he is emotionally battered by the barrage of human misery he’s supposed to emotionlessly monitor. Where the story goes from there should be left for discovery. It’s a smart take on capitalism and its dehumanizing effects, as well as surveillance, and more.

“The Endless” by Saad Z. Hossain pits AI against AI (and a human or two) in a piece that critiques corporate culture, questions definitions of sentience, and speaks on race and class, all in intriguing, thoughtful ways. An AI is being forced out of its job of running an airport and, instead of getting the job it was promised, it’s essentially getting demoted to working in relatively severe confinement, potentially forever. The language and writing are both excellent, replete with dark, sometimes sardonic humor. Some of the material is expected, and on one level, this is a basic revenge story. There is also a stream-of-consciousness feeling to the narrative, rather than the feeling of a carefully plotted story. At the same time, there is so much more which elevates this piece, including one of my favorite scenes in the entire anthology—no spoilers—and plenty of cool surprises. It’s vicious, deep, and fun, all at once.

One of the most impressive pieces, strictly on a “damn, that’s good writing” basis, is Daryl Gregory’s “Brother Rifle.” First, it is perhaps one of the more interesting and creative premises in the book; it’s an interesting take on the theme: A previously decisive marine, who used a gun-robot in combat, has been rendered unable to be decisive after a brain injury. On an intellectual level, it challenges the reader to examine the concept of “robot” not only against the tool the marine uses but against the human protagonist who has been damaged. Besides these questions posed, the storytelling is thoughtful and cleverly engaging. The story starts out fairly gripping and gets more and more taut as it progresses. It ends up as a wonderful examination of relationships, choice, and the human condition.

There is a great breadth of purpose and approach to the tales in Strahan’s collection: a variety of interpretations, not to mention styles of science fiction. There are twists on the familiar and there are innovative visions. More importantly, Made to Order brings together some really solid pieces of writing.

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 Review: March 2020

Nicasio Andres Reed | 2295 words

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
Directed by J.J. Abrams
Produced by Walt Disney Pictures, Lucasfilm, and Bad Robot
December 20, 2019

Once I start talking about Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, it will begin to sound like I didn’t enjoy this movie, but I swear I did. I laughed, I whooped, I shouted, “Oh no, Poe’s beautiful bicep!” When other fans asked me what I thought, I told them, “It’s absolutely a Star Wars movie.” And through that particular alchemy of fannish shorthand, this was received as a somewhat positive review. But the days wore on, and I kept jotting down notes on the movie, and I started to question exactly what I meant by that. What do any of us mean when we say that we got what we expected out of a Star War?

It does the pew-pew is a widespread expectation that viewers bring to anything set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. “The pew-pew” is something I define as a mix of blaster battles, lightsaber duels, daring escapes, and wily escapades.

Rise of Skywalker foregrounds its pew-pew, opening on a scene of Kylo Ren saber-slaughtering his way through a field of faceless combatants, for the sake of unearthing the movie’s McGuffin of choice: a Sith Wayfinder. We reconnect with Rey as she’s undergoing pew-pew training from Leia, and then with Finn, Poe, and Chewbacca as they pew-pew their way across half a dozen blink-and-you’ll-miss-it landscapes. Each of these openings are perfectly serviceable, although none are particularly memorable.

I’m willing to say that about the movie as a whole, in fact. Each of its scenes are perfectly serviceable, but none are particularly memorable.

One reason for that is that the entire movie seems to have been directed and edited as if it were one long pew-pew scene, with just enough frames allowed for each actor to fire off their lines before the camera moves on. Scenes that should carry emotional weight, such as Rey talking to Leia about her frustrations with her Jedi training, are instead cut within an inch of their lives. Conversations that should be a turning point, like Lando coaching newly appointed General Dameron through a crisis of faith, are short enough to miss while double-checking that your phone’s ringer is off. Meetings that should have been huge and revelatory, like Finn learning that Jannah and her entire company of Stormtroopers had defected from the First Order just like he did, and were stolen by the First Order as children, just as he’d been, were bare-bone, one-minute affairs. Each scene just long enough to acknowledge a character, a relationship, a theme, but none with the breadth or depth to explore them.

I found myself wishing that Rise would outright cut a couple of its action set pieces in exchange for the time to let its characters breathe, let them connect with each other, and give the viewer time to feel something.

The least effective pew-pew scene that could easily have been the most effective is Rey’s first use of force lightning. As she struggles to ground the ship where Chewbacca’s been taken prisoner, Kylo Ren in turn struggles to lift it from her grasp. Desperate, under intense pressure, Rey reaches with everything she has, and is horrified to see lightning arc from her fingertips and utterly destroy the ship and everyone aboard it. It could have been a wrenching loss, a horrible guilt, something to truly drive the plot and characters forward. But instead we learn one scene later that Chewie is perfectly fine. He was aboard a totally different ship that nobody saw, despite lifting off from the open desert. It’s an act of complete narrative cowardice, and it’s not the last.

That thing where a ludicrous pronouncement is made, and everyone just goes with it is one of my favorite Star Wars constants. Whether it’s Qui-Gon Jinn explaining that midi-chlorians are the powerhouse of the cell, the mere fact that the big bad spaceship in Return of the Jedi was literally just another, bigger Death Star, or Snap Wexley gravely presenting the Resistance with holograms showing that Starkiller Base was roughly one billion times the size of the Death Star, there’s an element of whimsy masquerading as earnestness that characterizes a Star Wars movie.

Rise of Skywalker gets its first ludicrous pronouncement out of the way in its opening crawl: Palpatine is somehow alive, and he’s broadcasting his manifesto galaxy-wide. Poe Dameron gives us this information again about ten minutes later, just in case we didn’t read the crawl, or were sure that we’d read it wrong. A quick line a little later serves up my favorite ludicrous pronouncement of the movie, a contender for the most ludicrous of the franchise. A First Order officer revels in the idea of joining Palpatine’s fleet to their own, saying this would increase their numbers “ten-thousand-fold.”

Ten-thousand-fold.

Incredible. Amazing. The choicest sort of ludicrous pronouncement. In case this is unfamiliar phrasing to you, please know that “-fold” simply means the number is multiplied that many times. A fleet of one ship, multiplied ten-fold, becomes a fleet of ten ships. No matter the likely number of ships the First Order had at the beginning of Rise, to multiply it by 10,000 makes the resulting figure hilariously large. If they had a modest fleet of 1,000 ships, then they were planning an instantaneous increase to 10,000,000. Remarkable. Stunning. How would the First Order staff such a fleet, especially considering that each Star Destroyer is the size of a city, and the Order draws much of its manpower by raising children into soldiers? A Star War does not offer the answers to such questions, because a Star War is not concerned with such things.

Rise of Skywalker raises dozens of similar logistical questions, and answers none of them. Where did the thousands of Sith living on Exegol come from? Does the giant stone cube they live in have adequate catering and plumbing? Why was Lando at the Aki-Aki Festival of the Ancestors that happens once every forty-two years? At what point does each additional planet-killing ship become superfluous, if there are fewer than 10,000,000 life-bearing planets in the galaxy? What actually is a “Knight of Ren”? Star Wars does not care to answer any of these questions, and I am perfectly content with that. Star Wars has other priorities.

Akin to the above is the shattering familial revelation. There’s the classic “No, I am your father.” Then the retroactive “you kissed your twin.” There’s the Rogue One tactic, which was to open with the revelation that Jyn Erso’s father was the designer of the Death Star. And Rise of Skywalker would very much like it if the revelation that Rey is Emperor Palpatine’s long-lost granddaughter resonated just as strongly.

It does not. Certainly, Daisy Ridley does a convincing job of being shattered by the revelation, and Ian McDiarmid chews his way through the brutalist, lightning-lit scenery like he was born to it. But Darth Vader’s revelation to Luke mattered because Darth Vader mattered to Luke, and to Leia, and even to Han. Galen Erso’s shame was Jyn’s shame because Galen and Jyn mattered to each other. Until ten minutes into the final chapter of this trilogy, Rey knew Sheev Palpatine as a distant name in a history book. For all my reservations about whether or not this revelation carries any weight thematically, in terms of story structure it simply doesn’t work. Rey had no established stake in the Palpatine name, and no compelling case is made to give her one.

In theory, it’s a storytelling move that could have worked. If it had been woven into the previous two films, and if this film had spent any time moving beyond the most facile possible approach to this story. Which makes it sound like I hated the entire Palpatine thing! I did not! It was perfectly serviceable.

The thing about being serviceable, and about having particular, unchanging priorities, is that it becomes clear what and whom you are not serving, as well as which sorts of characters and audiences you do not consider a priority.

Carrie Vaugh’s recent review of Terminator: Dark Fate (bit.ly/2tkuV2J) touched on the idea of audience expectations when it comes to a long-lived media franchise. “Dark Fate does what an addition to a thirty-five-year-old franchise ought to do: give us what we loved about the first films [. . . ] while updating and commenting on its own legacy by incorporating thirty-five years of feminist thinking.” This is the sort of updating and commentary that we started to get from The Force Awakens, Rogue One, and The Last Jedi, in varying ways and with various degrees of success. We got Finn, who gave an earnest, funny, heartbreaking face to the Stormtroopers, and John Boyega in a role that let Black fans finally see themselves at the center of this epic space opera. Rey, a junk scrapper, a girl toiling in the lowest strata of the Star Wars economy, who would turn the tide of galactic events through sheer force of will. We got a plucky little stand-alone movie that got as close to the nuts and bolts of war as Star Wars ever has, and let us hold the hands of characters who willingly died for their galaxy’s freedom. And we got a story of trying, and failing, but trying again anyway. Trying again, no matter what, because life is worth fighting for. None of those things are what I expected to get from a Star Wars movie. That’s what made them great movies.

What I wanted from Rise of Skywalker was for it to follow the trajectory set by those films. Not simply to meet bare expectations, but to, well, rise. Instead, Rise feels like a step backwards. Finn is afforded no backstory and little interiority. The baffling and unnecessary jaunt into Poe Dameron’s former life as a drug smuggler included more detail than has ever been revealed about Finn’s origins. To some degree, whether or not a viewer is satisfied with this choice will come down to taste. However, from a writerly perspective, it’s bizarre. While Poe is the more secondary of the trio, Finn is unquestionably Rey’s co-lead in the trilogy. And yet, bizarrely, Finn’s entire arc as a character is more or less completed in the first film, and holds static thereafter. In Rise, the effervescent Rose Tico is given a handful of lines that could have been spoken by any unnamed character. In fact, everything that was delightful and captivating about Rose is gone, a blatant and frankly insulting sidelining. It strains credulity that this had nothing to do with capitulating to the subset of vitriolic white Star Wars fans who were so incensed by her addition to The Last Jedi that they harassed actress Kelly Marie Tran until she left social media.

There are two characters, white characters of course, whom The Rise of Skywalker prioritizes: Rey and Kylo Ren. In terms of screen time and narrative importance, they are central. But even they are failed by the movie’s unwillingness to allow anyone to face consequences for their actions. Rey, our much-needed heroine, is given a story that hinges on the desires of the men around her. Kylo Ren finally makes the right call when faced with a choice, but there’s no material reason why this time was different for him than the last time. In a movie where they got the best of it, they both deserved better.

What I expect at the end of a Star War is that in the face of terrible odds, hope wins out. The Death Star and its analogues are destroyed one after the other. Our heroes can grin, dance, and hug. There’s still work to be done, but the future isn’t nearly as grim as it started. Star Wars has a low bar for what this has to look like, and it was set by the awarding ceremony at the end of A New Hope. Rise of the Skywalker shoots for exactly that low bar, and reaches it. The tangible connection that radiates from Finn, Rey, and Poe embracing is as charming as the twinkle in Leia Organa’s eye. In that moment they cling to each other, and each actor does their damnedest to imbue the action with the depth of affection that we the audience were so briefly privy to. And I was taken in; in that moment, I loved them as fiercely as when we first met them.

Somewhere in there, The Rise of Skywalker scored a solid three out of four on my Star Wars litmus test. I’d even throw in an extra 0.5 purely on the strength of how good-looking everyone was. 3.5/4 is a perfectly decent grade. But I have to admit to myself that my notions of what makes a movie a Star War are not the same as my notions of what makes a movie good. And this one, no matter how Star Wars it was, was only serviceable.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nicasio Andres Reed is a Filipino-American writer, poet, and essayist whose work has appeared in venues such as Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Shimmer. Nico is currently pursuing an MA in creative writing at the University of the Philippines- Diliman. Find him on Twitter @NicasioSilang.

Interview: K.M. Szpara

Christian A. Coleman | 3035 words

K.M. Szpara is a queer and trans author who lives in Baltimore, MD, with a tiny dog. Kellan’s debut alt-/near-future novel, Docile (March 3, 2020; Tor.com Publishing), explores the snowballing debt crisis, consent, and privilege, and can be described as “really gay.” He is the author of “Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time,” a Hugo and Nebula nominated novelette about a gay trans man who’s bitten by a vampire. More of his fiction can be found in venues such as Uncanny, Lightspeed, and Shimmer. You can find him on the Internet at kmszpara.com or on Twitter at @KMSzpara.

First off, I want to say congratulations on your debut novel! How does it feel to have Docile out there in the world?

It feels wild and scary and exciting—and yet absolutely normal. So much time and work goes into creating a novel. It’s existed for me for so long that of course it’s finally out there! But also . . . ahhhh, it’s finally out there!

Your novel is set in a near-feature dystopia where the wage gap has widened into a chasm so huge that people are either trillionaires or debtors, and debt is passed down from generation to generation. Enter Elisha, a rural Maryland farm boy who sells himself to trillionaire Alexander Bishop III for a life term as a Docile to clear his family’s three million dollar debt. And Alex is the mogul of the pharmaceutical company that produces Dociline, a drug that makes Dociles submissive. What went into putting the premise together?

Docile was born from several threads. From conversations with a politically savvy queer friend who’d worked in debt collection, to those with a Baltimore BFF about agency and expectations as we started our adult lives. It took me several tries to nail down the concept and layer it over the character arcs I had in mind. Because characters always come first for me. Well, and sex scenes.

Since you come up with characters first (we’ll get to the sex scenes later!), what did you initially have in mind for Elisha and Alex?

Before I had a world or plot or premise, I knew I wanted to write one character training another and then dealing with the consequences. Two men: a meticulous top (Alex) and a fiery bottom (Elisha). The tension between them had to be exquisite—horrifying and erotic. It’s a book of opposites, and so are they. With every draft, they became more well-rounded as I laid down roots with their families and friends, developed their personalities. Any string of tension I could pull taut between them and their lives, I did. I live for it.

Even though Elisha and Alex are opposites, both have duties to their families: Elisha has to work off his family’s debt while Alex has to uphold and continue to build his family’s pharmaceutical legacy. Did you know right off the bat that they would have this obligation in common?

I hate awkward family interactions and drama in reality, but I love it in fiction! I always knew Elisha’s family would be involved in the story and that they would have Feelings about his involvement with Alex. Alex’s family, however, was worked into the story over time in order to emphasize the pressure put on him and to illustrate what generational wealth and privilege could do to someone in opposition to debt. I didn’t mean to write a family drama! And yet so many of my favorite moments include them meeting each other’s parents under . . . less than ideal circumstances. My favorite is when Alex meets Elisha’s dad. Ignorance meets rage.

We get to read their interactions from both their perspectives. The novel’s dual POV of Elisha and Alex gives us insight into their motivations, which aren’t always obvious or apparent to the other. Cue dramatic irony. I thought about what Docile would be like written from only one of their perspectives but realized it would’ve lost the dramatic tension that drives the conflict. Why was it important for you to write it from both their perspectives?

The dual POV intends for readers to see themselves in Elisha and Alex. It’s supposed to be uncomfortable, highlighting the ways in which we are taught to perceive the world around us through various lenses, to highlight our biases and the hard choices we make to survive. Elisha is the obvious protagonist with a sympathetic arc, but I didn’t want to write an action revolution novel, and I think that’s what’s expected when someone in Elisha’s position is the only POV. Conversely, can you imagine Alex as the only POV? Yikes! Not everyone likes him right away—or at all—but he does a lot of internal work, and I think that’s realistic and important.

What made Baltimore the ideal location for their story?

In Baltimore, if someone asks where you went to school, they mean which high school. I was fortunate to attend a private school and receive a great education, but I didn’t fit the Baltimore preppy aesthetic or the associated class and wealth bracket. That aesthetic became the basis for the trillionaire society—for the ultra rich. The antagonists. Otherwise, the answer is simply because I live here! Wish I had a smarter answer. Overall, I set a lot of my fiction here, because I like writing about the places where I spend time, and I’ve lived here the majority of my life. It’s home.

Docile brings the concept of patronage but in the context of inherited debt. Do you think the patronage system ever left us for a while and came back or do you think it’s always taken different forms throughout the ages? (Some authors, after all, use Patreon as a source of income now.)

It’s funny. When you say “patron of the arts!” it sounds fancy. The term “Patron” did not exist in early drafts; I was using extremely roundabout language to say “person who purchased a Docile’s debt/contracted with a Docile.” I chose it because it’s exactly the kind of word a wealthy person would use to feel good about themselves, just like Alex calls the trillionaire class “people of means.” I’m not an expert on the history of patronage, but would wager some form of it has been in effect in both helpful and oppressive iterations from ancient history (Elisha isn’t amused when he learns about the Romans) through the Internet age (I don’t think he’d feel comfortable on Patreon, either).

Patrons use Dociline to unsee the humanity of their Dociles. Likewise, Dociles forget their time spent in servitude. And it’s not without its side effects. I mean, poor Elisha’s mother is in perpetual Docile mode after her term is up, because she was on the stuff for so long and it never fully cleared out of her system. Is Dociline based on a current mind-controlling drug or on research you did for the book?

It’s not! I chose Dociline’s effects with my writer hat on, asking which would best suit the story. So often, that’s the answer to so many “how did you” questions. I needed the drug to be tempting. There are ads shown for it, during a later scene, and they entice people to, essentially, pay off an entire student loan’s worth of debt as if they were taking a nap. Sell your debt, take Dociline, “wake up” unburdened! Honestly, you’ll spend at least a decade paying it off, otherwise. Why not a couple years of concentrated time? (It’s a trap!) I added the side effects as part of the Wilder family backstory and also because companies cut corners all the time in order to get their product on the market and start making money faster. Thanks, I hate it.

After seeing what Dociline did to his mother, Elisha invokes his right to refuse it. Even without the drug, he loses his sense of self because of the way Alex trains him and he grows to crave being with Alex, despite how servile his role is. I wondered which was worse: Dociline or the Stockholm syndrome-like conditioning Elisha endures? It’s a tough call.

They’re both awful, which I think is one of the points the novel is making, so I’m giving myself permission to cheat. Dociline is scary. It seems like a quick and easy solution but can ruin your life beyond its own projection. However, Elisha didn’t foresee what happens to him, and he’ll be dealing with the ramifications his entire life. Which is better? Neither, because in the world of Docile, if you’re a debtor, all your choices are terrible. (Sorry.)

All their choices are terrible, and yet they’re granted seven rights. Refusing to take Dociline is one of them. They also retain the right to vote in a public election, the right to adequate care—food, water, shelter, hygiene, regular medical attention—etc. How did you come up with the others?

Similar to how I selected Dociline’s effects, I went for the jugular. Docile Rights are intended to sound good. To make debtors feel protected—like they are safe and maintain agency. When, really, how many Dociles are even capable of taking advantage of those rights? Could Elisha really call his caseworker for help if Alex violated his rights, if he wanted to? Would he win that fight against a trillionaire with unlimited credibility and resources? Docile Rights exist to make everyone feel better about how horrible things really are. They’re nefarious on purpose.

The way Alex conditions Elisha to become a Docile—social companion and sexual plaything—reminds me of Pygmalion taken to a near-future, queer level. Like Pygmalion Eye for the Debt Guy. Does Docile draw from George Bernard Shaw’s play or other related work as inspiration?

It doesn’t, which makes me kind of sad, because “Pygmalion Eye for the Debt Guy” is funny as hell, but I’m sure readers will be able to draw their own parallels. At one point, Alex, like the drama queen he is, compares himself to Dr. Frankenstein and Elisha to his monster. It’s why he had to be so meticulous. Why he chose certain activities for Elisha, etc. (Why their sexual interactions occurred in a specific order.) I don’t think Alex equated “training” with behavioral conditioning at a Stockholm syndrome level. Despite his degrees, he can be pretty stupid.

Flower imagery comes up throughout the narrative—floral designs in Alex’s wardrobe, the floral architectural designs in the city buildings, Alex’s comparison of Elisha’s lips to rose petals. It’s kind of a stark contrast to the treatment Elisha endures, his modest upbringing on the farm, the systemic economic disparity that runs the country.

Florals are part of the Baltimore preppy aesthetic I mentioned earlier and, as such, ended up weaving themselves into the rest of the text. Their imagery is beautiful when so much else is so ugly. I can’t say I planted every floral reference (a-yo!) with deep meaning, but I’m unsurprised they occurred to me over and over.

Reading this as a millennial, I saw parallels with the crippling student loan debt many of us are burdened with at the expense of getting a higher education degree that’s supposed to guarantee a job with a salary that’ll pay off said debt. (Har har! The joke is on us.) Were you pulling from our student loan debt zeitgeist while creating the dystopia Elisha and Alex live in?

Absolutely! I remember when I applied to various colleges that my mother told me multiple times that I would have to pay all these loans back. That I would help pay some of the loans she took out to help me, too. It didn’t even feel like real money then. Despite my high school education and being raised by savvy parents, I did not realize the weight of student debt. I have paid hundreds of dollars per month—a second rent’s worth of bills—and it’s wild being free of that weight. Imagine if our generation, and the ones that come after ours, were relieved of that burden, how much we could accomplish? I paid off my loans, ironically, thanks to this book, and I support cancelling student loans for others.

And in the midst of this debt dystopia, there’s hot sex going on! Just recently in the New York Times, Garth Greenwell said that with his book Cleanness he wanted to create something that was one hundred percent pornographic and one hundred percent high art. I was wondering if you had a similar approach to writing Docile, because it’s a high concept novel with complex, sometimes disturbing, but hot explicit scenes.

I like writing erotic scenes, whether that involves explicit sex or aspects of kink or interpersonal tension. I also think books are opinions. I don’t think it’s wild for a book to be both erotic and meaningful art. It’s only shocking because it’s not common in mainstream science fiction and fantasy—especially featuring kink and queer characters. I’m one of those writers who names body parts, too, who deals with the messy parts of sex, because I’m interested in how characters navigate their own and their partners’ bodies. How they label their erotic experiences as consensual or not, fulfilling, transformative, hot . . . I’m always going to write like this, and it isn’t new to me. Shout-out to fanfiction for teaching me that this is normal and to keep doing it until it sold!

You wrote that your novel is all the gay sex you read in fanfiction but could never find in the science fiction section of your bookstore. What did you read or whose work did you tend to read during that time?

I grew up reading what was on my mother’s bookshelf: all of Michael Crichton, Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, and Harry Potter. After that, I stalled. There’s a huge gap of time when I literally wasn’t reading anything but fanfiction outside of English class—easily from the ’90s through late 2000s. I remember, after graduate school, walking back and forth between the Science Fiction and Fantasy, Romance, and LGBT shelves in a local bookstore, unsure which contained what I was looking for: queer characters fucking amidst magic or tech. I didn’t belong to a reading community, didn’t know many queers—wasn’t out, myself. So, I stayed up late every night reading Aragorn/Legolas and Draco/Harry. Eventually, I found Lynn Flewelling’s Nightrunner series and Mercedes Lackey’s Magic’s Pawn. Then Cassandra Clare’s City of Bones, Ginn Hale’s Lord of the White Hell, Sunny Moraine and Lisa Soem’s Line and Orbit, and then I found the SFF writing community! But before that, I was absolutely just reading explicit slash fic.

Who are some influential authors who got you interested in writing overall?

I hope it doesn’t sound terrible to say that I got myself interested in writing. As evidenced by my reading history, very few authors reigned in my mind, and I don’t think my work is anything like Michael Crichton or J.K. Rowling’s. Anne Rice is certainly the author whose books I most looked to as A Thing I’d Like To Do. But mostly, I was interested in writing because I like to create and couldn’t find the stories I most wanted to read. I ordered one of those custom American Girl Dolls when I was a kid, and they sent you a blank book. I wrote in that and a dozen other notebooks. All fanfic!

What writing projects are you whipping up now that you can tell us about?

You’re in luck! I have two other novels contracted with Tor.com Publishing, both of which have been announced. My second book is like The Village meets I Kill Giants, wherein a young man is thrust into the disappointing mundanity of the real world when the cult that raised him to believe himself super-human is exposed and dismantled before he can undertake his sworn quest to slay a monster. Then he goes on a gay road trip with a supportive nerd to find out if monsters and magic are real. It’s a much kinder book but contains just as much kinky queer sex.

And for my third book, Finley Hall, gay trans millennial vampire, is back! In my Hugo- and Nebula-nominated novelette “Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time,” he grappled with his body. Eight weeks later, he’s back at work and grappling with hierarchical vampire blood bonds and cute ER interns. He’s a bratty bottom, and I love the hell out of him and his Vampire Daddy, Andreas. Not a kind book, but affirming and still hot.

Is there anything else you’d like your readers to know about Docile?

Only that my dream is not only for it to spark conversation but to spawn lots of sexy fan art and fic. I may have complex, nuanced opinions, but I’m a simple man.

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: Russell Nichols

Alex Puncekar | 513 words

What was your initial inspiration for this story?

To be honest, I can’t remember how it started, but at some point I came across The Jazz of Physics author Stephon Alexander. Listening to him play and analyze John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” gave me a map for this story. From there, I could record the odyssey of Dr. Charlene Jenkins and explore what it means to take risks and break free (or not) from the structures we’re born into.

“Giant Steps” feels like a very visual story. There’s lots of places here—the Orion II, Gramma’s porch, Titan itself—that evoke so many visual cues and feelings, and in turn make them feel very real. Was that something you sought to accomplish when you started to write it?

The thing is, I’m not an intuitive writer. But Charlene wanted her story told in a style that embodied the restless, boundary-pushing spirit of Coltrane’s sound. I thought the shifts in time and space might be disorienting, so I asked her for specific details: What sounds did she hear on the porch? How did it feel wading through Ligeia Mare? Her answers helped ground the story for me because I’m a journalist and screenwriter who thinks in visual terms. In the end, she said she appreciates how it turned out—even though it’s not as “boundary-pushing” as she believed it could have been. It is what it is.

Charlene is pulled in many different directions throughout her life, mostly stemming from her family and her work. It’s something a lot of us can relate to. What sorts of aspects of yourself did you put into Charlene, or any of the characters for that matter, that you think makes them so relatable?

True, I do think Charlene’s story depicts a familiar tug-of-war: Should we fall in line with what the world (family, society, etc.) expects us to be? Or choose who we want to be for ourselves? Decisions, decisions. Her leap of faith spoke to me because I’ve been there. In 2011, my wife and I got rid of everything we had and left the States to travel the world. We’ve been nomads ever since, living out of our backpacks. You discover a lot about life, about yourself, on the road, but you can’t escape the feeling of alienation. Documenting Charlene’s journey reminded me how to stay connected—no matter the distance—and that choosing yourself is not a one-time thing, but a difficult choice you make over and over.

Do have any projects coming up in the future that you’d like to talk about?

I’ve got a few projects in different stages of development: a hip-hop picture book, an alien invasion play, and I’m still trying to crack this screenplay about sleeplessness. I have a list of short story ideas, but this form is the one I struggle with most, so we’ll see what happens.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Alex Puncekar is a writer, game designer, and editorial assistant for both Lightspeed and Nightmare. His fiction has appeared in Aphelion: The Webzine of Science Fiction and Fantasy and Jenny Magazine. He lives in Cinncinati, Ohio. Follow him on Twitter @AlexPuncekar.

Author Spotlight: Kristina Ten

Setsu Uzumé | 1141 words

The title can be read so many different ways, from a gentle request to a command, and it sets the stage beautifully. How did you choose it? What was the seed for this story?

I wrote this story during Clarion West last summer. The first thing I knew about it was the first line: “Nora is a serial becomer.” All the students were out together one night when someone mentioned serial monogamists, and that just lodged itself in my head, the idea of serial becomers, and I wrote the story for the next week’s workshop.

The title came to me pretty quickly after the first draft and felt like a natural fit. I like the way it can be read as pleading and reliant on the one hand and assertive, even demanding, on the other. I think Nora experiences both of these ways of being, though it takes some time for her to get to the second one, to realize who she is, what she wants and needs, and to speak up for it.

Finally, I just love the word “tender.” As an adjective, it expresses this wonderful softness, maybe the kind that requires special care. And as a noun, it’s one who gives care. Those two things in one word—it’s like the word takes care of itself.

This story was so matter-of-fact in its strangeness Nora was easy to relate to, and I found myself layering all kinds of meaning onto its images. The idea of a serial becomer was especially potent. What’s the difference between that and, say, a polymath in this context?

The serial becomer comes from this phenomenon that I’ve heard called “relationship chameleoning.” It’s the practice of changing yourself to accommodate a romantic partner, then doing it again for the next partner, then the next. Adopting their interests, friend groups, mannerisms, etc. until you forget you ever had your own.

Nora is that to the extreme. This story is, in part, about the dangers of that kind of shapeshifting, the risks of being subsumed and losing yourself in someone else completely. And the freedom, of course, when you stop neatly filling whatever space is left for you and take up instead, say, the space of a full-grown saguaro.

Was Nora’s final form always a saguaro? Would it have worked as any other plant?

I knew she would be a saguaro from the beginning. I grew up in Tucson and have these distinct memories of driving through the desert in the back seat of an old Toyota Corolla with no AC. Joan Osborne’s “One of Us” was really popular at the time and it was always on the radio. Something about the heat and that song and being a kid with a kid’s imagination and having just learned square dancing in gym class . . . Whenever we drove by a cluster of cacti, I couldn’t help but see human-like figures with their arms held up like they were dancing. I thought the same thing about the transmission towers along the highway, the way they were all lined up in a row and had triangular bases that looked like skirts.

Anyway, saguaros are really cool. They can grow to be sixty feet tall. They can live to be 200 years old. They support a ton of other species in the ecosystem. They have such a commanding presence, and I wanted that for Nora. I wanted her to take up space and a whole lot of it.

There’s the fact, too, of the specific care succulents require. It’s counterintuitive. Often people show their love for one another with attention: the time they spend together, the work they put into nurturing the relationship, a devotion to maintenance. And while there are plenty of high-maintenance plants, you can’t fuss over a cactus. Care means something different for them. They are remarkably good at taking care of themselves, and the best thing you can do for them is leave them alone and let them do their thing.

And I wanted that for Nora too.

But before the beginning—that is, before I typed the first line—there’s this from the scribbles in my Notes app: I thought the premise might be that the serial becomer would, in her latest relationship, realize she was dating some type of monster before becoming a monster herself. But that didn’t stick for long. And really it would’ve been a very different story.

In several of your other stories, the drama seems to play out across tools and materials, like the glass art in “A Tour of the Galesburg Glass Museum” or the ladle and pitchfork in “Fight Fair.” Do you practice art yourself? Does it feed your writing or is its own thing?

Yes! I also do some weaving on frame looms of different sizes. The largest one I have makes tapestries around four feet by four feet, while the smallest is about palm-sized—it’s good for woven necklaces and bracelets and the like. Weaving feels similar to writing to me, in that it’s slow and solitary and sometimes painful, and you leave a bit of yourself in every piece. Tying off the warp on the biggest pieces after you’re done, one after the other down a line of a hundred-plus—man, let’s just say there’s some blood on those threads. Weaving is different, though, in that it feels more meditative to me, and I can have crummy reality TV shows playing in the background.

I’ll go through periods where I’m writing a lot and, less often, periods where I’m weaving a lot, but I find it tough to dedicate serious time to both at once. More often, it’s my writing that feeds my weaving. I made a series of tapestries a couple years back, in Oakland, inspired by folktales from around the world. The anchor piece was this big, colorful, textural interpretation of the story of Baba Yaga and Vasilisa the Beautiful.

In general, I’m fascinated by objects and interiors—by the spaces we live in and how we choose to fill them—and I find a lot of my stories are set in and around the home.

What can we look forward to next from you?

Another story I wrote during Clarion West, about close-up magic and consumption and obsession, is due out from Witness Magazine later this year. As soon as I’ve polished up the others, I’ll try to get them out into the world as well. I’m also working on a novelette about a magical Russian banya and thru-hiking culture and what can happen when grief finds the wrong home.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Setsu grew up in New York, and spent their formative years in and out of dojos. They like swords, raspberries, justice, the smell of pine forests after rain, and shooting arrows from horseback. They do not like peanut butter and chocolate in the same bite. Their work has appeared in Podcastle and Grimdark Magazine. Find them on Twitter @KatanaPen.

Author Spotlight: Adam-Troy Castro

Jude Griffin | 650 words

How did this story come about?

This is that splendid thing, the story that arrives as a dream. I woke up in the middle of the night reeling from the image from a man skateboarding down a mountainside with an avalanche of boulders chasing after him, only to be paced by a rickety dented robot bearing a birthday card to whom he would snarl, “Fuck off.” I woke having absolutely no idea how this situation would come about, and everything else was reverse engineering. I’ve got to tell you, the moment I came up with that bit about the Galactic Year, I knew I had struck gold.

The voice is so restrained, the perfect foil to the absurd tale. Did you consider any other approach?

This is not a story where voice was considered, not really. Sometimes function dictates form. Nothing else would have worked for this shaggy-dog story. I was more worried about coming up with a satisfying ending. There was that “Galactic Year” thing, and for a while it seemed like that would be the final twist, the stunning ha-ha that wrapped it all up in a bow, but sometimes it’s honestly wiser to take that clever surprise ending you’re so proud of and move past it, to see what else develops. As I did.

Can you talk about the structure and pace you chose?

About all I can say is that it was originally going to be just a series of adventurous vignettes interrupted by the robot, but I realized at the midpoint that it needed a plot greater than that, that the poor robot also deserved closure, as it was just trying to do its goddamned job.

That last killer line slayed me. Did it come first, last, or somewhere along the way?

As near as I can remember, I didn’t know exactly how I was going to wrap it up until I began the last scene.

Is there anything else you would like readers to know about this story?

Sure, here’s a little piece of trivia. One of the story’s other robots, PHP-321, made its debut a little more than a quarter of a century ago, in a story called “The Last Robot.” It was my first published science fiction story (I had previously only published horror), and one of the first stories I ever wrote that ever made a splash worth mentioning. I thought enough time had passed that it could show up among a gathering of robotic drinking buddies. (Giving the protagonists of some stories cameo appearances in others is a harmless little tic of mine that really accomplishes little for their literary quality, but amuses me no end, when I indulge.)

Whose absurdist writing do you enjoy?

Bill Fitzhugh, Christopher Moore, Donald Westlake.

What do you wish interviewers would ask you about?

I have a website (adamtroycastro.com), at which you can find a complete bibliography and many essays, reviews, rants, and links to older entries in my movie blog, The Remake Chronicles. That latter ongoing project moved on to the defunct Fantastic Stories of the Imagination and from there to my Patreon page, where for a pittance you can support this author in his quest to produce as many stories as possible. Please, interviewers, ask me about those.

Any news or projects you want to share?

(Sigh) I now have TWO novels homeless but making the rounds. I must also mention a novella coming up in Analog, sometime in 2020, the latest story in a series about my far-future super-spy, Draiken, called (gulp), “Draiken Dies.” But . . . does he? Does he really?

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: Tahmeed Shafiq

Arley Sorg | 849 words

What was the inspiration for “Love and Marriage in the Hexasun Lands” and how did the story develop?

“Love and Marriage” was the first story I had completed in a very long time, and coming out of that hiatus made it a particularly grueling work to write. I know I had the first image—flowers raining from the sky—months before the plot was formed, but a lot of the story came in drips and drabs. In terms of worldbuilding, I was inspired by Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series to try creating a world completely free of the standard expectations of fantasy. Hence the unusual biology (green hair, grey skin) and physics (the titular six suns). The “Indian” feel to some of the names came from a desire to see more non-Western sounding names in fantasy; a lot of the time fantasy worlds seem inventive in every aspect of culture, society, and geography, except for their names, which still seem like something Tolkien would have come up with. And while Tolkien is, and always will be, amazing, we can do more.

Does your background in philosophy show up in this story in specific ways? Does it often show up in your fiction writing, or are they very separate for you?

I think they’re pretty separate. There are definitely ways to do philosophy through literature, however. One day I’d love to write a story that’s both deeply entertaining as fiction but also engrossing philosophically, like Jo Walton’s fantastic Thessaly trilogy. I have a few ideas—let’s hope they pan out.

You also have a background in science, particularly physics. Your previous Lightspeed story “The Djinn Who Fought to Kill the Sun” (August 2014, Issue #51) draws on legendary creatures and tales. Do you write science fiction as well?

I’ve definitely written a little science fiction! But it tends to stray away from being realistic; a part of me just wants to have laser swords be laser swords. Like with philosophy, however, I would love to write something that serves as both science education and fiction. There’s definitely a niche of SF readers out there who, if you told them that a plot point involved solving a series of differential equations, would immediately go and work it out for themselves. (I know because I am one of them.)

Hexasun feels like a large backdrop with the potential for many epic tales. Will we be seeing other works that take place in this world?

To be very honest, I hadn’t thought about reusing the world at all until you mentioned it. I think I would have to work out the mechanics of having six suns first. It seems like the kind of thing that would have significant consequences for broader society that a good story should take up. We’ll have to see . . .

What is important or special about this story for you? What do you really want readers to know?

The most important part of the story, for me, is the concluding section where Schyan and “the other woman,” Varabhata, sit down for a chat. When a relationship ends, there’s always two sides, two injured parties, to tell their stories. “Love and Marriage” grew out of an anxiety about this: How do you know that, in the other person’s eyes, you weren’t the bad guy? That your self-absorbedness hid the consequences of your actions for someone you loved? And while I’m not advocating for Schyan as the victim of her marriage to Adhamrya, the disparity of their accounts really brings out (for me) the two-sidedness of love. Maybe it’s not as clear-cut as having a singular, discernible “bad guy.”

Has your work as an Editor-in-Chief for UC Review had an impact on your own fiction writing?

This is my first year serving as Editor-in-Chief for the UC Review, the undergraduate literary journal of University College at the University of Toronto. Just seeing the diversity of content and style among student writers has been really inspiring for me. Reading people’s literary art that they’ve fashioned out of their own experiences has reminded me why I got into writing in the first place. And it emboldens me, encourages me to write my own life.

Who are the writers (or what are the books/stories) that inspire you right now?

Oh boy. You know how you forget every book you ever read, once anyone asks you what you’re reading? Jo Walton’s aforementioned Thessaly trilogy blew me away when I read it last year. I’m still thinking about equal significance and the road to excellence today. On Water by Thomas Farber gets honorable mention for Book-I-Only-Started-Didn’t-Finish-But-Cannot-Forget. There’s this phrase among all the gorgeous reflection of the ocean: “Earth-the-misnomer.” I squeee’d! when I read it and it’s still as delightful.

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 | 209 words

Coming up in April, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Andrew Dana Hudson (“Voice of Their Generation”) and Ada Hoffmann (“Melting Like Metal”), along with SF reprints by Yoon Ha Lee (“Always the Harvest”) and Vandana Singh (“A Subtle Web”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Celeste Rita Baker (“Glass Bottle Dancer”) and Rati Mehrotra (“The Witch Speaks”), and fantasy reprints by Caleb Wilson (“Bow Down Before the Snail King!”) and Fred Van Lente (“Neversleeps”).

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 will be with Katie Flynn. 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: Adam-Troy Castro, Julianna Baggott, Mari Ness, Marie Vibbert, and Ray Nayler.

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

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Newsletter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

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Subscriptions and Ebooks

The Editors

Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes 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 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 Patreon (patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams).

TL;DR Version

If you enjoy Lightspeed and Nightmare and my anthologies, our Patreon page is 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?

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 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” Patreon account because it seemed like it would be more efficient to manage just one account. 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 Patreon is the place to do that.

What Do I Get Out of Being a 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, 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. That URL again is 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)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 (with Diana Gabaldon)

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

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]

Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth [forthcoming]

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.