TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 126, November 2020

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: November 2020

SCIENCE FICTION

Schrödinger’s Catastrophe [Part 1]
Gene Doucette

Schrödinger’s Catastrophe [Part 2]
Gene Doucette

Seven Ways to Fall in Love with an Astronaut
Dominica Phetteplace

Three Speeches about Billy Grainger
Jake Kerr

FANTASY

Le Cygne Baiseur
Molly Tanzer

Burn the Ships
Alberto Yáñez

The Lachrymist
Kat Howard

Magnificent Maurice, or the Flowers of Immortality
Rati Mehrotra

EXCERPTS

The Conductors
Nicole Glover

NONFICTION

Book Reviews: November 2020
LaShawn M. Wanak

Media Review: November 2020
Lisa Nohealani Morton

Interview: Usman T. Malik
Christian A. Coleman

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Gene Doucette

Kat Howard

Rati Mehrotra

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 Roman3d / Adobe Stock Image

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: November 2020

John Joseph Adams | 192 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 126th issue!

We’re breaking with our usual schedule to serialize a novelette of quantum trouble: “Schrödinger’s Catastrophe” by Gene Doucette. You won’t want to miss either installment! We also have SF reprints by Dominica Phetteplace (“Seven Ways to Fall in Love with an Astronaut”) and Jake Kerr (“Three Speeches About Billy Granger”).

Our first original fantasy short this month is from Kat Howard (“The Lachrymist”), which explores the meanings of memory and mourning. On a less tearful note, Rati Mehrotra brings us a story straight from the World Tree itself (“Magnificent Maurice, or the Flowers of Immortality”). Much has been spoken about this legendary tree, but this story asks the important question: Who protects the tree from pests? We also have fantasy reprints by Molly Tanzer (“Le Cygne Baiseur”) and Alberto Yáñez (“Burn the Ships”).

Of course our nonfiction team has put together our usual assortment of author spotlights, and book and media review columns. Our feature interview is with Usman T. Malik. Our ebook readers will also enjoy an excerpt from Nicole Glover’s debut fantasy novel, The Conductors.

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.

Schrödinger’s Catastrophe [Part 1]

Gene Doucette | 6789 words

Editor’s Note: Instead of two original science fiction short stories this month, we have for you a single novelette (presented in two parts) by Gene Doucette, which is about twice the length of a regular Lightspeed story. So, although you are getting one original SF story instead of two this month, you’re still getting about the same amount of fiction. We hope you enjoy this minor deviation from our usual offerings, and rest assured we will return to our regularly scheduled programming next month. —eds

Things began to go badly for the crew of the USFS Erwin around the time Dr. Marchere’s coffee mug spontaneously reassembled itself.

Dr. Louis Marchere was not, at that moment, conducting some manner of experiment. Well, he was, only not on entropy and the nature of time. He was running several other tests, of the kind that make perfect sense on a scientific vessel such as the Erwin. About half of them were biological in nature, concerning how small samples of cellular material react to certain deep-space factors. Other tests were more at home in the general field of astrophysics. But—again, as this is important—he was not conducting a test on entropy.

He just dropped his coffee mug. More exactly, he elbowed it from the corner of the table, while he was concentrating on things unrelated to the nature of falling objects. The mug fell onto the hard, ferrous metal of a lab floor, shattered, and sent his coffee—which was already disappointingly lukewarm—everywhere.

Louis Marchere was pretty upset about this. He’d been on dozens of deep-space scientific missions over the years, and this mug—a white mug with a black swan—had made it through all of them. It was a gift from his daughter.

But things break. No use dwelling.

Then, while Marchere was fetching a towel and a broom, the shattered pieces of the mug re-formed, rose up, and settled back on the corner of the table.

The spilled coffee remained where it was, either because it had decided that it wanted no part in whatever nonsense the mug had going on, or so as to verify—for Dr. Marchere’s sake—that what he witnessed had actually happened.

Which, of course, it had not. Shattered mugs don’t simply decide to reassemble themselves. They don’t decide to do anything, because they’re inanimate objects with no agency, subject to the whims of the same laws of physics as everyone and everything else in Louis Marchere’s laboratory, including Louis Marchere.

This was true irrespective of where that laboratory happened to be located. It had to be.

In this particular instance, the lab was in the middle of a ship that was in the middle of deep space, in a previously unexplored quadrant. The part about it being unexplored was unusual, but only a little unusual. The quadrant in question—C17-A387614-X.21, but everyone called it Brenda—was right in the center of a fully explored space grid. There had been many exploratory missions to all the other cubes on that grid, but nobody had bothered to check out Quadrant Brenda.

Probably, this was because Quadrant Brenda looked incredibly boring. There didn’t appear to be anything in Brenda—no stars, planets, or moons. Comets showed no interest in visiting, and asteroids kept their distance. In a universe that could be defined as “enormous patches of nothing, with occasional, albeit incredibly rare, bits of something mixed in here and there,” Quadrant Brenda somehow managed to contain even more nothing. This was probably why nobody had bothered to explore it before. It was definitely why the USFS Erwin was there, as this much nothing might mean something.

So far, two days into the quadrant, Dr. Marchere could confirm that it was just as boring on the inside as it looked from the outside. Three thousand different sensors on and outside the ship confirmed that sometimes a quadrant full of nothing is just a quadrant full of nothing.

And then the second law of thermodynamics—which was both extremely important and incredibly reliable—stopped working.

Dr. Marchere knew that wasn’t what really happened; a dozen better explanations were surely available. He just had to find one of them.

First, he checked on the lab’s artificial gravity, which he did by going to the wall panel and examining the settings, rather than by jumping up and verifying that after having done so, he also fell down.

The control panel confirmed that he had artificial gravity, and that nothing anomalous had transpired recently, either near the coffee mug, or in any other part of the lab.

Louis returned to the table and picked up the coffee mug, half expecting it to fall apart in his hands. It did not; the mug appeared intact, with no indication it had been in seven pieces quite recently.

“How did you manage that?” he asked the mug, which didn’t respond.

Dr. Marchere held the mug over the floor and considered a practical but possibly irreversible test. Would the mug reassemble itself a second time? If so, the anomaly could be pinned down to something peculiar about the black swan mug his daughter gave him some years back. Perhaps it was even a trick of some kind, just waiting for the day he dropped it. She bought this trick mug based on certain assumptions about her father: that he was naturally clumsy, or vindictive about mugs, and would have shattered it before now, revealing the gag.

But that hardly seemed possible. It would require that self-healing mug technology existed, which it did not. And if it had, there was still the problem of the mug also returning to the tabletop.

He decided that this was a scientific problem, while wanting to keep the mug intact was an emotional problem. But he’d already reconciled with having broken the mug his daughter gave him, and felt confident that, if she were there, she’d understand.

He let go. The mug fell, broke into five pieces . . . and remained broken.

Of course it did. How could he have expected otherwise?

He fetched the towel and the broom, cleaned up the mess, and made an appointment with the medical wing. One of the twelve remaining possible explanations to consider, before upturning the second law of thermodynamics, was that he was going mad, and that was information that couldn’t wait.

Dr. Louis Marchere didn’t make it to the medical wing for his checkup.

• • • •

“Final approach,” the computer announced, in a cheerful sing-song.

Corporal Alice Aste was in the rear portion of the shuttle at the time of the announcement, performing some light calisthenics to get the blood moving in preparation for . . . well, something. There was no telling what she was headed into, but there was an excellent chance that it would require her to be limber. This was an old combat-readiness technique that had less applicability now, in peaceful times, but she knew of more than one soldier who didn’t live to become an ex-soldier due to a pulled hamstring.

She climbed back to the front of the cabin to get a look at the side of the vessel through the front windshield. The United Space Federation Science Vessel Erwin was right where Alice expected it to be, free-floating in the middle of Quadrant C17-A387614-X.21-slash-Brenda and doing absolutely nothing.

She opened up the comms.

“USFS Erwin, this is Corporal Aste of the USF Security Force. I’m on approach, and intend to dock. Please respond.”

No answer.

“Again, Erwin, this is USFSF Corporal Alice Aste, on approach, requesting dock. Please open bay doors. Respond, Erwin.”

She waited for a few seconds, in case someone over there felt chatty, then left the line open and went back to the rear of the cabin to get ready.

In any normal circumstance, Alice would be speaking with a hangar tech now, working out the details on how and where she’d be parking her shuttle. These weren’t normal circumstances. What she expected from the Erwin was continued radio silence, just like when Alice sent a transmission from the base ship—the Rosen, parked at the edge of the quadrant—and just like the same radio silence the science vessel had been honoring for a little more than six weeks.

The last official transmission from the Erwin was recorded forty-seven days ago. It was from Captain Hadder, and it read: We aren’t here again today. It was received, as were all of the science vessel communiqués, at the research station relay hub and then forwarded to the main cluster, where it sat for several days before anyone actually looked at it. And then, the only reason they did was that no subsequent communications came through and somebody thought that was notable.

Protocol was for a twice-daily check-in. Granted, the “day” these transmissions were sent and the “day” they were received were hardly ever the same, given the vast distances the signals had to cross, even when using the FTL ports. Still, ships like the Erwin had to transmit on a prearranged schedule, even if that transmission was nothing more than a not much, what’s up with you?

Self-evidently, something was now up with the Erwin.

Once it became clear that the cryptic message had no obvious, direct meaning, it was handed off to a linguistics team, and run through some databases. It received a partial hit on an old Earth song by The Zombies, and an even older poem by Hughes Mearns. Neither made sense in the context of deep-space communications from science vessels.

A message was sent back, asking for clarification, but no clarification arrived. Someone got a linguist involved, who decided that in order to get a proper response from the Erwin, base had to answer in kind. He offered several suggestions, such as: If you are not there, where are you? and Are you here again now?

When that didn’t do the trick either, somebody dug up The Zombies’ song and broadcast that, to see if it triggered a response, and then tried reading back both the annotated and full versions of the Mearns poem.

Still nothing.

By then, one of the network’s orbital satellites got an angle on the ship, and sent back a video feed. The USFS cognoscenti were able to determine that: (1) the Erwin wasn’t moving, (2) it had a heat signature, strongly implying the ship still had power, and (3) there was no evidence of outgassing, so it either still had atmosphere, or all of the atmosphere had escaped already.

All that was left to try was a crewed mission, which was how the USFSF Rosen ended up at the edge of the Brenda quadrant, and how Alice ended up on the shuttle.

The shuttle’s autopilot sounded a gentle alert.

“Bay doors remain closed,” it said.

“Computer, transmit bay door override to the Erwin, on my authority.”

“Transmitting,” it said calmly. Then, “No response. Collision imminent. Course correction strongly recommended.”

Sometime in the past twenty years, the people in charge of these things at the USF standardized the vocal communications from all Space Federation computers, and it was decided the voice they used should be, above all, serene. It worked fine in most situations, but came off as ridiculous to the point of self-parody in high-stress circumstances. Phrases like explosive decompression in five seconds aren’t meant to be heard in a voice meant to soothe unruly children.

“All right, keep your pants dry, computer,” Alice said.

“This computer has no pants.”

“Pull up from the current course and bring us alongside the hull. I’ll go in the side door.”

“Course corrected. Would you like to hear about the explosive charges inventory?”

“That’d be great, thanks.”

The computer navigated the shuttle right up next to the Erwin, about twenty yards from the rear hatch. The hatch’s functional intent was to allow someone from inside to get outside, to make repairs on the hull or to unjam the bay doors, clean a filter, touch up the paint job, or whatever. It wasn’t meant to be used to get in from the outside, and almost never was used that way. Despite that, hatches like this were called pirate doors.

The good thing about pirate doors, and what made them so useful in times like this, was that there was an airlock on the other side, so if she had to blow the door with one of the many explosive charges on inventory she wouldn’t be breaching the entire deck.

After gowning up for the spacewalk, Alice stuffed a few charges in a bag—like her, the bag was a veteran of combat, and came with a steel panel that doubled as a piece of armor in a pinch—added a couple of blasters, and headed across on an umbilical. She expected to have to blow the door, but it opened easily after a few turns of the hatch’s wheel.

Alice unhooked the umbilical, ordered the shuttle to hold position, stepped in and sealed the hatch from the inside. The wall panel indicated the ship had power, so she pressurized the airlock and let herself into the inner door.

Then, theoretically, she was free to take off her helmet.

“Computer, run a check for airborne pathogens,” she said.

The computer—the one built into the suit this time—blinked a silent confirmation on her visor.

“Negative results,” it said, after checking. “Atmosphere breathable.”

Alice was standing at one end of a modest hangar, with two parked shuttles exactly like the one outside and room for two more.

“Then where is everybody?” she asked, as she appeared to be alone.

“Please be more specific,” the computer said. “Whom would you like to locate?”

“Never mind.”

“Never minding.”

Alice took the helmet off.

The air smelled like the standard filtered air she’d been breathing for most of her adult life, and the gravity that held her to the floor of the bay felt like Earth-standard. Both good things. Yet even if the crew of the Erwin wasn’t expecting a visitor, there should have been someone in the shuttle hangar, if only to ask her what the hell she was doing there.

“Hello?” she shouted. She heard her voice echo back, resonating with a slightly metallic hum. No doors opened, and nobody came running.

A quick inspection of the bay confirmed only that there weren’t any bodies lying around.

“Is anybody here?” she shouted.

Nothing.

The Flying Dutchman, she thought, referencing an old Earth maritime ghost story she remembered liking as a child. It wasn’t, of course, but that was what always sprang to mind in situations like this.

Alice had investigated her share of wrecks in her day, but usually the explanation was self-evident, and she was just there on the off-chance someone managed to survive whatever drastic event had killed their ship. Hardly anyone ever did, because spaceships were surrounded by the vacuum of space, which was actively hostile toward human beings.

This time, there was no obvious explanation. The ship seemed to be working fine, albeit on reserve power—she could tell from the feel of the floor that the Erwin’s engines were definitely offline—it was just that everyone was somewhere else for some reason.

So where do I begin?

The USFS Erwin had five decks total. The captain’s bridge was on the top deck at the front of the ship, which was the farthest point from the hangar. Alice felt obligated to start there—if for no other reason than to announce her arrival to the person who was supposed to have already authorized that arrival. At the same time, it was pretty far away; surely, she could find someone closer to her current location, who could fill her in on why the entire vessel was running silent. Or rather, drifting silent.

Alice found the door that led to the rest of the ship, and hesitated.

“Computer,” she said, addressing her suit, “synchronize with the ship’s computer.”

“Synchronizing,” the computer said, in the tone of voice waitresses used when asking children what flavor ice cream they wanted. “Synchronization complete.”

“Computer, report life signs, total. Human only.”

The synchronization allowed Alice to leverage all the ship’s systems for her inquiry. It was supposed to help clear things up. It did not.

“No life signs detected,” the computer said.

This was obviously incorrect. Aside from the fact that the Erwin had a complement of eighty-five, Alice was herself alive. Anything less than one was an error.

“Computer, recheck life signs, human only.”

“Rechecking.”

Alice pressed her face up against the window of the door she was about to go through. The hallway on the other side was well lit, and entirely empty. It ran the length of the lower deck, and—if she recalled the vessel’s specs correctly—was home to about sixty percent of the crew. There should have been somebody around.

“Two hundred and six life signs detected,” the computer said.

“No . . . no, that’s not the right answer either,” Alice said.

“What is the right answer?” the computer asked.

“I don’t understand.”

“What is the right answer?” the computer repeated.

“Computer, I’m asking for an exact life sign count of all the humans on board this ship. I don’t know the answer, but I know it’s a round number that one arrives at by actually counting those life signs.”

“Understood. What is your expectation?”

“I don’t know the right answer, or I wouldn’t have asked, but I would expect it to be anywhere between one and eighty-six.”

“Rechecking,” the computer said. Then, “Seventy-two life signs detected.”

“Is that the real count, computer?”

“As requested, the total is between one and eighty-six. Is this acceptable?”

“If it’s the actual count, yes.”

“The actual count is seventy-two.”

Alice was pretty sure the computer didn’t perform anything like an actual count, which was a minor problem masking a much more serious one. Clearly, something was wrong with the Erwin’s computer; counting things wasn’t a difficult task.

“Computer, run a full internal diagnostic.”

“Running diagnostic.”

“Let me know what you find,” she said. Then she pressed the override code for the door and left the hangar for the crew living quarters corridor.

“Hello?” she shouted. “Is anyone here?”

Nobody responded.

All the doors were closed. Alice’s override code could open any one of them, but—and this was a decidedly odd but undeniable truth—she was afraid to do it.

Alice Aste had been working with the USF Security Force for fifteen years, and before that she’d been a veteran of five interplanetary conflicts. She’d once spent two months adrift and alone in a disabled life raft, rescued by chance some fifteen hours before her oxygen ran out. Before that, she’d suffered a childhood of privation during her waking hours, and nightmares when she slept. She came to grips with her own mortality when she was ten. She did not get afraid, or rather, she wasn’t afraid of the unknown. (Fear of the known, on the other hand, was quite sensible.)

And yet, on an impossibly empty vessel adrift in an unusually empty deep space quadrant, Alice had to admit that she was one loud noise from freaking the hell out.

“Anybody?” she asked. She hesitated at the first door.

Just plug in the code and ask whoever’s on the other side what’s going on here.

She didn’t plug in the code. Her pulse was up, and her breathing was shallow. She wondered if this was what a panic attack felt like.

“Calm down,” she said to herself. “Just go straight for the bridge. You can see the stars from the bridge.”

That was one of the tricks she picked up when she was ten; there is comfort in the vast emptiness of space. At least for her.

“Diagnostic complete,” the computer said. Alice jumped two feet in the air.

“Computer, report results,” she said, once she got her heart started again.

“Results are terrific,” the computer said.

“. . . computer, please repeat.”

“Terrific. Self-diagnostic reports computer is terrific. Perfect score. Computer would report a thumbs-up if computer had thumbs.”

The Erwin’s computer had evidently lost its mind. This was, of course, just as impossible as the constantly adjusting life sign count. Computers had no minds to lose.

“Are you certain, computer?” she asked.

“Computer is certain. Computer has no thumbs.”

Alice wondered if a full reboot of the ship’s computer was in order. She’d have to do that from the bridge, but that was where she was heading anyway. It might take a while, but if there really was nobody on this vessel aside from her, she’d need to interrogate the ship’s logs. For that to work, a sane and rational computer would be important.

She headed down the hall at a normal walking pace that quickly devolved into a jog. A door might open and that, she decided, would be bad.

There’s no such thing as irrational fear, she thought, recalling the wisdom of one of her academy trainers. Your instincts know why they’re afraid; you just gotta catch up.

She made it to the other end of the hall, to the elevator, punched the button for the top deck, and checked the corridor behind her twelve times while waiting for the elevator to arrive.

It did. She jumped in, and the doors swished closed reassuringly. Up she went.

And up, and up. The elevator should have taken less than thirty seconds to reach the bridge. After well over a minute, Alice became concerned that maybe deck one wasn’t where they were headed, except there was no further point to travel to while still remaining on the Erwin.

“Computer, are we going to deck one?”

“Confirmed, deck one.”

“What’s taking so long?”

“Traveling from deck five to deck one takes a non-trivial amount of time,” the computer said, “and time is a construct.”

“That isn’t a helpful answer.”

“Would you like to try a different narration?”

“A what? No, I just want to go to deck one.”

“Deck one, coming up.”

Alice sighed.

“When?” she asked.

“I cannot provide an exact time,” the computer said.

“All right. Computer, if I stopped the elevator right now, where would I be? What deck.”

“Would you like to stop the elevator right now?”

“No, just tell me where I would be if I did.”

“You would be on deck one-and-five-eighths.”

“Computer, this ship has no deck one-and-five-eighths.”

“That is incorrect,” the computer said. “There are multiple fractional decks.”

“How many?”

“Unclear. How many would you like for there to be?”

“Never mind. Is it a finite amount?”

“This computer infers that the amount must be finite, as otherwise, deck one would be unattainable. It is coming up shortly, and is therefore not unattainable.”

Alice had an unkind response for that, but then the elevator came to a stop and the doors opened.

“Arrived, deck one,” the computer said.

Alice stepped out onto the bridge. For a vessel of this type, the bridge was really very small—especially as compared to the military ships to which she was accustomed. It had two seats at the front, a raised seat in the middle for the captain, and two seats in the back, with instrumentation spread throughout.

Captain Matthew Hadder—unshaven, in dirty clothing, looking tired, and shorter than she expected—was in the chair, and an ensign she didn’t know was at the console to her left.

“You’ve shot Ensign Anson,” Hadder said, which was an interesting thing to say given that Alice hadn’t done anything of the kind.

But then the ensign fell over dead, having indeed been shot by a blaster. Still more interesting, it was only then that Alice drew her blaster from its holster and fired it. It struck Ensign Anson directly in the chest two seconds prior to being fired.

“What?” Alice said.

“Ensign Anson has been shot,” Hadder said. “By your blaster, which you used to shoot him with.”

“But I didn’t shoot him.”

“He was shot, and then you did it. Don’t worry, it wasn’t your fault. It was, because if you hadn’t run in with a gun, Ensign Anson would not be shot, but the shot came faster than the blaster off your hip. Don’t worry, it’s been happening all day. He’s dead, but only now. He wasn’t earlier, and may not be later. Who are you and what are you doing on my ship?”

“I’m . . . I don’t understand. How could I fire my blaster before I fired my blaster?”

“It happened before you decided to do it, but if you want to know why you decided before you decided, I can’t provide you with that. He may have been about to shoot, with a gun he both had and did not have. He does not right now have a gun, but may have had one before you decided to shoot.”

“He’s unarmed. I shot an unarmed ensign.”

“I can testify to Ensign Anson being both armed and unarmed at once, if it comes to that. Also, the ship’s cause-and-effect has been acting up all day. But enough about the dead ensign; once more, who are you and what are you doing on my ship?”

“I’m Corporal Alice Aste, USFSF. I’ve been sent here to find out what happened to this ship.”

“Quite a lot! We just lost an ensign, and the rest of my command deck crew have reported nonexistent. But what’s the rush!”

“Your last communication was over six weeks ago, and you’ve been adrift since. I’m here to find out what kind of assistance is needed, and then to get that assistance for you.”

“That’s hardly possible,” he said. “I sent a message just yesterday.”

“None have been received.”

“No, no, no, I would’ve remembered if I had sent silence. I didn’t. I sent a message that went like this: Please stay away.”

“That wasn’t it. What we received was, We aren’t here again today,” Alice said. “Do you remember sending that?”

“Ahhh.” Captain Hadder clapped his hands on the side of his head. “I got it wrong, I meant to say, I wish, I wish you’d stay away.”

Captain Hadder had been going in and out of rhyme for the entire conversation. At first, she thought it was just an accident of word-choice. Now she was thinking he was doing it on purpose, and also that he’d begun to lose his mind, just like his ship’s computer. Unless she was losing her mind. She’d just shot a crew member, but if asked to explain how that happened, the best she could come up with was that the shot was fired before she pulled the trigger.

“Why did you want us to stay away?” Alice asked. “You seem in need of rescue.”

“Rescue! It’s only been a day.”

“Again, it’s been more than six weeks, captain.”

“Computer, how long has it been?”

“It has been a day, captain,” the computer said.

“There, you see?” Hadder said. “If you received that message six weeks ago, that’s hardly my fault. I sent it yesterday; you should be receiving it now.”

“Captain Hadder, you know there’s something wrong with your ship’s computer, don’t you?” Alice asked. “It’s been providing me with inaccurate information since I boarded.”

“Not at all! It’s adjusted quite well. You must have been asking it the wrong questions.”

“Computer,” she said, “how many life signs are there aboard the ship?”

“There are between one and eighty-six,” the computer said, “or zero, or two-hundred-and six.”

“There,” Alice said. “See? That’s an unacceptable response.”

“Why, it’s a ridiculous question!” Hadder said. “The answer is clearly variable from moment to moment. You should expect to have a different answer every time. Now where is Ensign Anson?”

“Isn’t he the one I shot?”

“Yes, yes, but he should be back by now.”

Ensign Anson was still lying dead on the floor, and Captain Hadder was clearly insane. Alice put her hand on her blaster, reflexively. It was probably a bad idea, given she’d only just not-shot-but-also-shot Anson, but instincts existed for a reason.

“Once again, captain, why did you send the stay away message? Did something happen here? An accident maybe?”

“Nothing is the matter,” he said, which was clearly untrue.

“Then why did you send that message?”

“Because nothing is the matter! Ask Anson; he can explain it better.”

“Maybe I should ask someone else from the crew,” Alice said slowly. She’d begun to talk more slowly and deliberately with Captain Hadder, the way one might talk to a person in a bomb vest. “Captain, can you tell me where everyone else is?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But if you didn’t see them on your way to the bridge, they’re probably in their quarters.”

“All right. Don’t you need them in order to work the ship? Maybe you can find your own way out of this quadrant, with a little help. One of the engineers?”

“Ensign Anson and I can handle the bridge ourselves,” he said. “Little to do when you’re adrift.”

“My point is that you don’t need to be adrift. Some members of the crew could be enacting repairs.”

“I see your reasoning, but about the engines, there’s nothing to be done. They work perfectly, or they would; it’s the physics that are wrong.”

“Then someone, should fix . . . the physics?”

He was surely speaking non-literally. Alice remembered a particularly sarcastic first officer who—in the middle of a war—would say things like, “Barring some change in the laws of physics, this next torpedo will be a direct hit; brace for impact.” Captain Hadder’s delivery was wanting, but she felt certain that he was aiming for the same sort of droll wit.

“They’re not broken, they’re wrong,” he said. “I’m amazed you’ve survived on board the ship for this long, corporal.”

“I haven’t . . . Captain. Just tell me where the rest of the crew is, and I’ll go find someone who can help.”

“As I said, they could be in their quarters. Computer, are the crew in their quarters?”

“The crew may or may not be in quarters, captain.”

“There, see?” he said. “They may be there.”

“Then should we go down and check?” she asked. “I passed the quarters on my way.”

“Oh, goodness no, don’t do that. Imagine the consequences.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Corporal, it’s really very simple. I don’t know if they’re alive or not. If I check, I will definitely know. Who wants that on their conscience?”

“They’re either alive or they’re not alive,” Alice said.

“The computer confirmed, they are both. Have you ever seen a person who was both alive and dead?”

“Of course not. Those are binary states.”

“Neither have I. Therefore, if they are currently both alive and dead, and one of us were to go down to see which one it was, and we have never seen a person who was both alive and dead, then by checking, we will ensure that they are either one or the other, and I want no part of that! Neither should you, after what happened to poor Ensign Anson. Already enough blood on your hands.”

About ninety-five percent of Alice thought this was the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard. The five percent that didn’t was the same five percent that was in charge when she ran down the corridor in deck five, in the midst of something like a panic attack. She didn’t want to open those doors either, even before having her intelligence assaulted by Captain Hadder’s nonsense.

“How about if we just open a comm line, right now?” she asked. “We can hail the Rosen.”

“Oh no, that’s impossible. Nothing on the bridge works right now.”

She looked around. The panels were lit, which wasn’t an expectation on a non-working bridge.

“You have power. It all looks like it’s working.”

“It’s not,” he said. “Hasn’t been since yesterday. And even though we clearly do have power, the engine isn’t providing it. Couldn’t tell you what is.”

She pointed to one of the chairs at the front of the deck. “May I?” she asked.

Captain Hadder stepped aside and waved her through.

She sat down at what was—if she remembered the ship design specs accurately—the helmsman’s chair. It had all the navigational instrumentation, and the communications matrix.

All the ships in the USF communicated locally by sending concentrated radioelectric bursts in tight, targeted beams. A similar approach was used for long-range communications, only the local transmission was sent to a relay, which repeated the information through an FTL tunnel.

The Rosen was just at the edge of Quadrant Brenda. In a rational universe, the Erwin would already know the Rosen was there, either because the Rosen pinged it when it was in range—which it did, as part of the ongoing effort to establish communication—or because the mid-range sensors have only one job, which is to detect nearby objects and keep track of them.

Possibly, the Erwin was no longer a participant in a rational universe.

She asked the ship to perform a full sensor sweep, and while there was some good news—it did pick up the Rosen, and her shuttle—according to the survey, there was nothing on the starboard side.

Not just nothing, as in, space is pretty much a lot of nothing anyway nothing. This was a nothingness that far exceeded any previously recorded nothing, on a scale that made it quite a remarkable something. There were no quantum fluctuations popping in virtual particles, or the evidence of gravitational force acting at a distance to warp the fabric of spacetime, or microscopic space debris. There were no solar winds. There was just nothing.

Alice was reminded of the ancient Earth maps: those two-dimensional rectangles meant to approximate a portion of a spherical object. The early ones weren’t large enough to encompass the entire planet, so when one drew a line to the edge of the map, it wasn’t an expectation that the line would pick up again on the opposite side. There was nothing else there because the mapmaker had stopped drawing what came next.

This is the end of the map, she thought. Here be dragons.

“No, that can’t be right,” she said. “It must be a sensor malfunction.”

“Sensors operating at full capacity,” the computer said, helpfully.

Alice stood up and leaned, to get a look at that side of the ship. If she didn’t know better, she’d have said someone was out there, hanging a gigantic piece of non-reflective fabric over that part of space. Maybe they were.

“Oh no, don’t do that,” Hadder said.

“Do what?”

“Stare at the Void. Never a good idea.”

“You know about this?”

“Of course I do. It’s why the ship isn’t moving.”

“Great, now we’re getting somewhere. Tell me what it is, and then maybe we can work up a strategy to get away from it.”

“It’s nothing. You read the sensors. I don’t know why you’re acting so surprised, I told you what the problem was already.”

“You didn’t mention the giant Void in space,” she said. “I would have remembered that.”

“I said nothing was the matter with the ship. That’s very clear.”

She sighed, and resisted the urge to draw her blaster again.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “I can still see the Rosen. I’ll hail them, set up a tow.”

“Best of luck!”

She opened a channel.

“USFSF Rosen, this is Corporal Aste, on the USFS Erwin. Please respond.”

The transmission came from the radar array at the highest point on the top of the Erwin, with secondary and tertiary arrays on the underbelly in the event of damage from space debris or an act of violence. When Alice sent the transmission, the signal was transmitted by all three.

Alice already knew this was how local communication worked, but this time she got a dramatic demonstration of it, because for some reason the radio signal she sent out became visible for five full seconds, before falling apart.

It was hard to get a total count on the number of things that was wrong with this. Radio waves weren’t supposed to be a part of the visible spectrum, so that was a big problem right there. Also, before the signals dissolved (or whatever that was), those beams of impossible-but-true visible light slowed down.

Alice checked the communications array to confirm that the frequency she chose to send the signal on was a normal, non-visible-spectrum frequency. It was.

“Don’t try the laser,” Hadder said. He meant the high-burst pulse communicator, which was meant for long-range emergency signaling. “Unless you dislike the Rosen.”

“You tried it already?”

“It was like birthing a sun. Very beautiful! Given its speed and direction, I’m afraid that beam may be well on its way to annihilating everyone who lives in the Podolsky System. First Officer Hart worked that out.”

This was the first time Hadder mentioned a member of the bridge crew other than the departed Ensign Anson. She thought that was a significant thing.

“First Officer Regina Hart?” she said. “Where is she now? In her quarters?”

“I’m afraid not. She’s left.”

“L . . . left. Left the bridge? Left the ship?”

“She’s in the Anthropene Principality now. I’ll see her soon, I’m sure.”

“Where is that?” Alice asked. It wasn’t a place she’d ever heard of before. Not that it mattered if she had; it was impossible to walk off a ship in deep space and visit much of anywhere, and there was a full complement of shuttles in the hangar. Wherever it was, First Officer Hart wasn’t actually there.

Hadder laughed, and gestured vaguely at the expanse of space. Oh, you know, the gesture said. Let’s not be silly.

Exasperated, Alice sat back down in the helm chair and rubbed her head. She could feel a headache coming on.

“I wonder,” she said, “If one of you—captain or computer—can tell me what actually happened, or why, or even when?”

Hadder laughed again.

“Why, I’m not sure!” he said. “What an excellent question. I know what we can do. Computer?”

“Yes captain,” the computer said.

“Switch to narrative mode.”

“Narrative mode?” Alice asked. “That’s not even . . .”

The computer began speaking again, only this time in a deeper voice that wasn’t precisely the same as the sing-songy soothing one all the USF ships were stuck with.

“Things began to go badly for the crew of the USFS Erwin around the time Dr. Marchere’s coffee mug spontaneously reassembled itself.

“Dr. Louis Marchere was not, at that moment, conducting some manner of experiment. Well, he was, only not on entropy and the nature of time. He was running several other tests, of the kind that make perfect sense on a scientific vessel such as the Erwin. About half of them were biological in nature, concerning how small samples of cellular material react to certain deep-space factors. Other tests were more at home in the general field of astrophysics. But—again, as this is important—he was not conducting a test on entropy.”

“Computer, stop,” Hadder said. “There, that was helpful, wasn’t it?”

“What the hell was that?” Alice asked. “And why is the computer doing that?”

“Doing what?”

“It said Alice asked, when I was talking, and the same thing when you were talking.”

“It’s narrative mode. Useful! Now we know it all began with Dr. Marchere.”

Alice was deeply confused. She’d never heard of narrative mode before, and was nearly positive Hadder was playing some sort of elaborate joke.

“It’s not a joke!” Hadder said.

“I didn’t say it was!”

“The narrative did.”

“Turn it off,” Alice said. “I KNOW I SAID THAT, YOU DON’T HAVE TO TELL ME I SAID THAT.”

“Computer, end narrative mode.”

“Ending narrative mode,” the computer said.

“Oh, thank God,” she said. “All right, so, Dr. Louis Marchere. Where is he? Or did he go to the . . . whatever-you-said place?”

“No, I believe he’s still aboard,” Hadder said. “We were just speaking. Deck three, in the research lab.”

“Great. Let’s go.”

She headed for the elevator. Hadder remained where he was.

“Well, come on,” she said. “You’re the only survivor I’ve found so far; I think we should stick together, don’t you?”

“It’s . . . um, no. No, I think my place is on the bridge,” he said. “It’s safer.”

“Captain Hadder, I don’t think any part of this ship is safe. Our best option here is to find out what Marchere knows; if he doesn’t have a way to save the Erwin, we need to get to my shuttle.”

“Find out what you can,” he said, in a tone that sounded like an order, “and keep me updated! Much to do up here.”

He sat down in the captain’s chair, as if this settled things.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll, ah, I’ll let you know. Computer, deck three.”

“Deck three,” the computer confirmed.

As the doors closed, Alice could have sworn she saw Ensign Anson standing next to Captain Hadder.

But of course, she didn’t. That would be impossible.

[End of Part 1]

©2020 by Gene Doucette.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gene Doucette is the author of over twenty sci-fi/fantasy titles, including The Spaceship Next Door and The Frequency of Aliens, the Immortal series, the Tandemstar books, and The Apocalypse Seven (2021). Gene lives in Cambridge MA.

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

Schrödinger’s Catastrophe [Part 2]

Gene Doucette | 6057 words

Editor’s Note: Instead of two original science fiction short stories this month, we have for you a single novelette (presented in two parts) by Gene Doucette, which is about twice the length of a regular Lightspeed story. So, although you are getting one original SF story instead of two this month, you’re still getting about the same amount of fiction. We hope you enjoy this minor deviation from our usual offerings, and rest assured we will return to our regularly scheduled programming next month. —eds

It took twice as long to get to the third deck from the first as it did to get to the first deck from the fifth. Alice was quite certain there was no mechanism in existence capable of adding fractional decks to the ship, and so was chalking this up to another aspect of the ongoing computer malfunction. She supposed a way to validate this was to ask that the elevator stop at, say, deck two-and-five-sixteenths, but she also didn’t want to encourage the computer’s departures from reality any more than necessary.

Find the problem, she thought. Find the problem, work the problem, solve the problem.

The reason Corporal Alice Aste was an ideal rescue mission envoy was that, over the course of a fairly extensive career, she’d worked in just about every part of a starship, from engine to helm. She was a problem-solving universal tool, a one-person away team. If a disabled ship was disabled because there was nobody aboard with the expertise to re-enable the vessel, the likelihood was fairly high that Alice had the gap-filling skillset.

But this? Whatever was going on aboard the USFS Erwin, she wasn’t equipped to deal with it. Maybe nobody human was.

“The subjective mind is objectively flawed,” she said aloud. It was one of the philosophical-slash-practical mottos she lived by. She couldn’t recall who said it to her originally—probably one of her academy professors—but she’d found it incredibly useful over the years. There were some things the human mind was simply bad at grasping, observationally or intuitively, which was why flawed humans created machines to objectively interrogate the world for them.

That was what the computer was supposed to be doing. Since it was malfunctioning, Alice had no way to determine how much of what she was experiencing was even real.

And that was terrifying.

“Deck three,” the computer announced, finally.

The door slid open, revealing a corridor with glass-walled rooms on both sides.

Scientific research was the Erwin’s central function, which was why the third deck was its widest and tallest. (Looked at from the front, the Erwin looked like a wide oval or, if you were hungry, like an overstuffed sandwich; deck three was where all the meat was located.) It was also where most of the vessel’s funding went.

There was a dizzying amount of experimentational activity taking place in both of the glassed-in rooms, nearly all of it mechanized. If quizzed, Alice could definitively identify maybe a third of the experiments, and perhaps half of the equipment.

The ship’s supercollider—one of only a half-dozen off-planet supercolliders in existence—was running some kind of test on the far wall on her left, while on her right a laser tube designed to detect gravitational waves was humming along. A little farther along, a hologram of a Moebius strip was rotating slowly beside a bank of computer screens displaying rapidly evolving fractals.

Those were just the most obvious, macroscopic things. There were also cultured cells somewhere, having things done to them, and top-secret genetic splicing research, and plants being taught to grow in zero gravity chambers, and much more, but she couldn’t see any of that.

She kept walking down the corridor, absorbing the maelstrom of activity on both sides, wondering exactly where all the power for this was coming from. The supercollider alone was supposed to take up enough of the energy from the Erwin’s fusion engine that the vessel couldn’t run the FTL drive as long as it was also going. (The energy issue wasn’t the only problem. Nobody was sure what would happen if a supercollider ran while on a ship traveling faster-than-light speed, but the consensus was: nothing good.)

The point was, everything running at once had to be an enormous drain, and yet the captain insisted the ship’s engine wasn’t even running. Either he was wrong—he was crazy, so it was probably that—or the Erwin was surviving on battery power. The batteries on a ship like this supplied just about enough power to keep life support going, plus the communications array, and maybe some impulse power for basic maneuverability, for about thirty days. It couldn’t do all that and also provide a city’s worth of energy to the research deck.

And yet, that appeared to be what was happening. Unless Hadder was wrong.

“Computer,” she said, “give me a read on the ship’s engine output?”

“The engine is not running,” the computer said.

“Not the propulsion. I know we aren’t moving. The base-level output.”

“The engine is not running.”

“Computer, the ship has power, does it not? Otherwise, you and I wouldn’t be talking and I wouldn’t be able to breathe.”

“Confirmed, the ship has power.”

“Then what’s the engine’s baseline output?”

“The engine is not running.”

“Fine,” Alice said. “Computer, what is the source of the ship’s power, if not the engine? Is it the auxiliary batteries, or something else?”

“What is the answer you are expecting?” the computer asked.

“The right answer would be great.”

“The batteries are providing the ship with power.”

“Did you just say that because you thought that was what I wanted to hear?”

“The batteries are providing the ship with power.”

“Sure.”

“Would you like to switch to narrative mode?”

“No. What is it with you and narrative mode?”

“Narrative mode has been proven to reveal information not otherwise available to this computer.”

“No, thank you.”

She stopped short of asking the computer what other modes it had available, both because this was yet another ridiculous conversation she had no time for, and because she could see someone moving in the last part of the lab on the right.

The man had on a lead vest, with goggles and a face shield dangling loosely around his neck. He was also wearing thick leather gloves, brown coveralls of the sort Alice recognized as standard for the engineers, and heavy mag-spiked boots. His hair was pointed in five different directions, and he was holding something that looked like a blowtorch in one hand.

He could have been just about anyone in the crew. Nonetheless, she felt certain that this was Dr. Marchere.

Alice walked up to the nearest door, and when it wouldn’t open, tried her override code. That didn’t work either, so she knocked.

She startled him; he nearly dropped the torch, which would have been very bad had it been lit.

“Dr. Marchere?” she shouted.

He waved, put down the torch, waddled over, and opened the door.

“Very sorry, I’m extremely busy, can you come back later?” he asked.

“I really can’t,” she said. “I’m here to rescue the ship.”

“I . . . see. And you are?”

“Corporal Alice Aste. I’m with the Security Force, and—”

“All right, all right, come in. Rescue! Ha-ha. Yes. That would be something.”

She stepped into the room, which was awash in an atonal cacophony of pings, whirrs, and clangs. He took off his gloves and led her to a table in the center of all of it. On the table was a coffee mug, a cold pot of coffee, and a plate of doughnuts.

“I would offer you something other than doughnuts,” he said, “but the food replicator can only make these, and only if one asks for bicarbonate of soda. I haven’t worked out what one is supposed to request in order to get other foods, so this is what I have. Now, you’ve exactly seventeen minutes, and then I’ll have to get back. I’m running thirty-eight experiments, and as you can see, all of my colleagues have already left.”

“Where did they go?”

“They left, as I said. You’re not from the Erwin, is that right?”

“The Rosen is nearby. If we can’t get the Erwin’s engine running, we’ll have to get the Rosen here for a tow. I can’t hail them for . . . some reason, but I can try calling them from my shuttle. I just need to understand what’s happening here, first. The computer . . . I’m sorry, this will sound insane, but in narrative mode, whatever that is, the computer said that this all began when Dr. Louis Marchere dropped a coffee mug. You are Dr. Louis Marchere, aren’t you?”

“I am! And that is amazing.”

“Which part?”

“All of it! I’m amazed you’ve lasted this long. Have you come across anyone else?”

“The captain and I had a long conversation that made no sense and confused everything much more.”

“Oh excellent, the captain is still here. I was sure I was the last one left.”

“He said he thinks the crew might be in their quarters, but is afraid to check, because he thinks if he does so, they might be dead and it will be his fault.” She laughed then, to see if Marchere was inspired to laugh as well. He was not.

“Yes, that’s eminently reasonable on his part,” he said. “Narrative mode, you say? That’s a new one. I accidentally stumbled upon theatrical mode yesterday, which was odd enough.”

“Switching to theatrical mode,” the computer said.

Marchere: No, I didn’t mean for that. Oh well, here we are. Welcome to theatrical mode.

Alice: Oh, this is very strange.

Marchere: Yes, well, now we’re here. It’s not terrible. I enjoyed it during a soliloquy, but after became quite frustrated.

(Marchere takes a bite of a doughnut.)

Marchere: There, you see, it’s exhausting, having your own actions read back to you. I became obsessed with the question of whether the computer was describing what I was doing, or if I was doing what the computer instructed me to do. Did I just bite this doughnut because that was what the stage business described, or did the stage business capture my actions?

(Alice looks confused.)

Alice: Weird, it’s in present tense. And the computer keeps announcing who’s speaking, like we don’t already know. It was doing that before too, in narrative mode, only not every time.

Marchere: The fact that it’s in present tense is what makes it so confounding. That would argue in favor of it dictating my actions instead of the other way around, which would contravene the concept of free will entirely, and that’s terribly frustrating.

Alice: I shot a man on the bridge before pulling the trigger on my blaster. Captain Hadder said it was because cause-and-effect had been malfunctioning all day. That sounds like a similar problem. Can we . . . turn this off?

Marchere: Computer, end theatrical mode.

“Ending theatrical mode,” the computer said.

“Thank you,” Alice said. “Now can you please explain what’s happened here? Where did everyone go, why are you running all of these experiments, where are you even getting the power to run all of these experiments?”

“Do you want for me to answer all of those at the same time, or is there a particular order you’d like for me to honor?”

“Start with what’s going on. I guess.”

“All right. Do you know what scientific theory states that the laws of physics are the same everywhere?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Good, because there isn’t one. We’ve always just assumed it to be so, because it did us no good to assume otherwise. It was a poor assumption.”

“You’re saying the laws of physics don’t apply to this quadrant?”

“I mean the Void we’re next to, primarily, but as you must have worked out, there have been local alterations. We’re right on the event horizon of a portion of space in which nothing we’ve previously proven to be true is necessarily still true. That’s why I’m running all these experiments. I’m trying to work out what is true in this particular region of space.”

“That sounds ridiculous.”

“Oh, absolutely. It’s magnificently ridiculous. Yesterday, I positively identified a particle’s exact location and velocity. This morning, I tested the wave function collapse of light, but it refused to collapse. Later, I managed to measure the speed of light from a moving object compared to the speed of light from a stationary one, and discovered the one from the moving object was faster. I’ve also discovered electrons a half-quanta apart, and a few hours ago the supercollider detected an element between carbon and nitrogen, and a neutron with a negative charge. And this morning, for five seconds, all the oxygen in the other room—thankfully, I was in this one—gathered in one corner. These are all impossible, ridiculous things.”

“But that can’t be right. It’s only a computer malfunction.”

“The computer on this ship is working perfectly,” he said, “in that it’s describing an objective reality we cannot grasp. My equipment is working perfectly as well. It’s our perception that’s having trouble catching up. Now, I have to get back to my work before it’s too late.”

“Too late for what, doctor?” she asked. “What exactly happened to your coworkers? Where is everyone else?”

“Ah. They don’t exist any longer.”

“You mean, they’re dead?”

“I prefer it the way I said it. Are you familiar with the anthropic principle?”

“I heard something like that. The captain said his bridge crew went to the Anthropene Principality. Is that the same thing?”

“More or less. Hadder’s head’s all jumbled. The anthropic principle is a logical point stemming from the observation that everything in our universe has to be just so, in order to allow for our existence. From Planck’s Constant to the charge of an electron, the weight of atomic particles, and so on and so forth, all of it carries a value which allows, as an aggregate, for a universe to exist which contains intelligent life. None of these values had to be what they were. It’s a little circular, because one could easily argue that the only reason the universe’s aggregation of values exists to allow intelligent life is because this is the only permutation that allowed for intelligent life to develop in order to make that observation. Other universes—assuming multiple universes—evolved differently, and have no intelligent life to note that their universe failed to evolve in such a way to allow for them to exist.”

“All right,” she said. “That does sound odd.”

“I bring it up because the part of the universe we’re standing at the edge of, right now, is a part where the laws do not allow for us to exist. It’s the converse point of the anthropic principle. We’re composed of the laws on which our universe was built. The slightest change in the strong nuclear charge and the atoms that make up your body could fly apart or collapse into themselves. Your brain evolved to communicate via neural electrical charges; a change in the electromagnetic force, and it stops working. These are facile examples, but you understand. If the laws change, we won’t be around to measure them. At least, not for long. We’re still here because neither of us have had the misfortune to happen upon a patch of altered laws that will undo us, and in fact right now we’re alive because I’ve been taking advantage of the alteration. You asked before what’s powering us. The answer is, when the engine failed, I hooked up the auxiliary batteries together. They’re now charging one another and the ship.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Evidently not here! The laws of this patch of universe allow for perpetual motion machines, so we may as well get some use out of it.”

“So . . . you’re saying the rest of the crew has been . . . unmade?”

“I’ve yet to witness this happening to anyone, but yes, I think so. I’m afraid to leave this level. You say you came from the hangar, and visited the bridge; it’s good to know those places still exist.”

“According to the computer there are fractional decks being added all the time,” she said.

He laughed.

“Fascinating,” he said. “I only hope I’m around to find an explanation for that.”

“Now that I’m here with a shuttle, you don’t have to think like that, doctor,” she said. “I can take you—and the captain, if he’s willing to leave the bridge—and whatever research you have. The Erwin is clearly a hostile living environment.”

“An excellent suggestion, but no, I think I had better stay. You have a good point, however, in that I have no way to communicate my findings. My hope was to record as much as I could and jettison it toward the hub, but in truth I came upon that idea when I thought I’d reach the end of my studies. It seems the deeper I dig, the more strangeness I find. But here.”

He placed a memory tab on the table.

“This is everything I’ve measured up to about an hour ago. I hope.”

“You hope?”

“I hope it’s only been an hour. The passage of time has been curious.”

She picked up the tab.

“It has,” she said, “the captain said it had only been a day, but it’s been . . .”

Alice looked up from the table to find she was speaking to an empty room.

“Dr. Marchere?”

He’d been standing two meters away, and now he wasn’t. The experiments in the room were still running, and the doughnut he’d taken a bite from remained bitten from, but he wasn’t there to continue the experiments or finish the doughnut.

“Computer, can you locate Dr. Marchere?”

“There is no Dr. Marchere.”

“Dr. Louis Marchere,” she clarified.

“There is no Dr. Louis Marchere.”

“He was just right here, computer.”

“Would you like to try a different narration?”

“No, I . . . I don’t know what I want.”

He’s in the Anthropene Principality now, she thought.

“I need to get off this ship,” she decided. “Computer, what’s the fastest way to the hangar?”

“The hangar is located on deck five,” the computer said.

“Is there still a deck five?”

“There’s still a deck five, but portions appear missing. Haste is recommended.”

Alice opened the door to the lab and ran to the elevator, as things in both glass-walled rooms began to go somewhat more haywire than before. The holographic Moebius strip had developed a second side, the fractals on the computer screens began flashing random Greek letters for some reason, and it looked like a black hole was forming in the center of the supercollider. An amoeba the size of her head popped into existence on the glass a few feet from her face, and then popped back out of existence again before she had a chance to scream. It began to rain.

She reached the elevator door and pushed the button. Then she opened up her bag and retrieved her helmet. If the atmosphere decided to collect in one corner of the ship again, she’d rather she was breathing her own supply.

The ship started groaning before the elevator even made it to the fourth deck.

“Computer, what made that sound?” Alice asked.

“Unclear.”

Alice remembered visiting the extinct-Earth-animals exhibit as a child, and being transfixed by the elephant in particular. The noises the ship was making sounded like an elephant being squeezed like an exhaust bladder.

Then the elevator shuddered, and stopped.

“Computer, what’s going on?”

“Unclear.”

“Can you tell me where I’ve stopped?”

“You’ve stopped at deck three-and-eleven-sixteenths. Would you like to get out here?”

“That depends. Will the elevator be moving again any time soon?”

“Define soon.”

“Before the ship blows up, implodes, or otherwise ceases to exist?”

“Unable to predict those outcomes at this time.”

Alice wondered if maybe she should have gone up instead, back to the bridge. She could have collected Captain Hadder and gone out the topside hatch, and called the shuttle from there.

Then Alice started floating: the gravity had cut out.

If I can get into the shaft, I can reach the command deck on my own, she thought.

“Computer, can you hail Captain Hadder?” she asked.

“There is no Captain Hadder.”

“Computer, can you hail the bridge?”

“There is no bridge.”

“Deck one, Computer. Open a channel to deck one.”

“There is no deck one.”

Crap.

“Computer, does deck five still exist?”

“Deck five continues to exist.”

“But deck one is missing.”

“The USFS Erwin does not have a deck one.”

“All right, never mind. Open doors, please. Let’s see what deck three-and-eleven-sixteenths looks like.”

The doors slid open on a level that looked weirdly out-of-focus. Alice’s first thought was that some kind of viscous fluid had gotten on her helmet, distorting the view of the universe on the other side. But the helmet was clean.

The walls were partly transparent and partly solid, because deck four’s walls were opaque, while deck three’s floors had glass walls. Deck three-and-eleven-sixteenths was trying to have both at once.

Since the gravity was out, Alice activated the mag-spikes on her boots and attached herself to the floor, then stepped off the elevator onto a blurry level that somehow managed to be solid.

“Computer, where is the nearest maintenance shaft on this deck?” she asked.

If the ship behaved for long enough, she’d be able to access the fifth deck by way of a maintenance shaft.

“Twenty-five meters.”

“In which direction?”

“All directions.”

The computer was not going to help.

Relying on the deck layout of one of the levels that was actually supposed to exist, Alice headed straight down the blurry corridor between the blurry rooms on both sides. In a slightly more ideal circumstance, she’d run, but because the artificial gravity generator had decided it was done (or ceased to exist, or whatever), she had to keep one boot on the ground.

About fifteen steps in, the boots stopped working. Actually, what it felt like was that the magnets holding her in place switched poles spontaneously, and repelled her from the floor. She began drifting to the ceiling.

Then came an explosion, somewhere aboard the ship. Alice felt it tremble through the belly of the vessel, rocking the walls and putting her into a gentle spin.

“Computer, what was that?”

“That was an explosion,” the computer said, not at all helpfully.

“Right, thanks.”

There was another tremble, and a shudder, and then a loud screech that didn’t sound like much of anything Alice had ever heard before: not the noise a machine makes when it’s broken, or a sound approximating that of an extinct elephant getting squeezed, or the cacophony a ship makes when its hull is torn open. It was not, in other words, on the short list of bad noises in her mental catalog of things to be alarmed about. She was nevertheless extremely alarmed, because what it did sound like was a creature that her lizard brain told her to run from. This was even though that portion of her brain also didn’t know what she was hearing.

Then, directly beneath her and along the corridor floor, a thing ran past.

There were a tremendous number of wrong things that were wrong with this thing, the most arresting being that it was somehow in a higher definition than the rest of the deck, including Alice herself. It was a bright shade of blue, and green, almond, and a color of purple she was pretty sure was ultraviolet, which she was also pretty sure she shouldn’t have been able to see. There were other colors she didn’t even have a name for, because they didn’t exist in the universe she was familiar with.

It was perhaps a giant bat, perhaps a snake, and perhaps a horse. It galloped and hissed, shrieked and chortled, and swung its long, clawed fingers through the walls on either side as if they weren’t there. The walls, in turn, acted as if the creature wasn’t there, showing no damage.

Here be dragons, she thought.

With a great flap of its enormous wings, it soared ahead, and vanished at the far end of the corridor.

“All right, I’ve had enough,” Alice said. “Computer what’s the fastest way off this ship? I don’t care how, just as long as it puts me on the other side of the hull.”

“Unable to calculate,” the computer said.

“Why is that?”

“The concept of other side of the hull is too variable to allow for a precise calculation. There are several places where the hull has ceased to exist, but sensors indicate nothing exists on the other side of where the hull no longer is.”

“That’s great.”

The vessel shuddered again. Alice waited for a new nightmare creature to show up, but none did. It was probably just another part of the Erwin getting unwritten from the universe.

“Computer, how close am I to the maintenance shaft now?”

“Twenty-five meters.”

“That’s how far I was when I got off the broken elevator. I must have gotten closer since.”

“Understood. However, the distance remains twenty-five meters.”

She sighed.

“I really need to understand what’s happening to the entire ship right now, computer,” Alice said, “or I’m never getting off of it. I don’t even know what questions to ask you. Can you provide me with an integrity assessment?”

“Not in this mode.”

A hole opened up in the floor, which should have been good news, because that was the direction she wanted to go. But there was nothing on the other side of the hole. Either decks four and five were missing now, or the hole just went to someplace different.

“What the hell,” Alice said. “Computer, switch to narrative mode.”

• • • •

Something quite extraordinary was happening to the USFS Erwin.

It was difficult to tell, from more or less any angle, whether the ship had been drawing closer to the Void on its starboard, or if the Void was moving closer to the ship, but what was definitely the case was that their positions relative to one another had been changing since the Erwin first encountered the strange section of space. Now—after either two days or six weeks—the two things were colliding.

The Void was having a devastating effect on the Erwin. (The same could not be said of the Erwin’s impact on the Void, which appeared to be weathering things just fine.) There were certain expectations regarding how most space-based threats could damage a manmade starship. Incredibly dense objects, like neutron stars or black holes, could tear apart such a ship if it ventured too close, by literally ripping parts of the vessel off of other parts of the vessel, and/or drawing it into an inescapable gravitational well. Highly radioactive objects could bombard the ship with levels of gamma radiation so severe as to overwhelm the shielding and cook whoever was unfortunate enough to be inside. Rogue objects like asteroids could blow through a hull with a direct hit.

And so on.

None of those things were happening to the Erwin. Instead, it looked as if someone had produced a very realistic three-dimensional artistic rendering of the ship and then, deciding they disliked it, began erasing the artwork. Starting on the starboard side, large chunks of solid material were being turned into tiny bits of particulate matter—eraser crumbs, perhaps—after which the tiny bits of particulate matter glistened with internal light and then vanished.

It’s fair to say that however beautiful this might have looked to a neutral (and presumably distant) observer, its impact on the contents of the vessel was very bad indeed. Under optimal circumstances, a hull breach was dealt with by the ship’s integrity shields: short-term force fields that plugged up holes before all of the atmosphere in the breached cell leaked into space. But the integrity shields only worked in circumstances where there was more hull than breach, and anyway they needed power in order to function. Unfortunately, the entirely impossible perpetual motion machine Dr. Marchere assembled had begun to break down.

All of this would be very bad news for anyone still alive aboard the USFS Erwin. It was good news, then—if such a thing deserved to be called good news, that there was nobody left alive on the Erwin. All except for Corporal Alice Aste, desperately shuffling along deck three-and-eleven-sixteenths in a quixotic attempt to get back to her shuttle before she too was unmade.

“Hey!” Alice said. “There’s no need for that.”

The deck floor was mostly gone now, as was the starboard side of the hull, which she could see through the blurry office wall: The Void was on two sides. But the ceiling remained intact, and since there was no such thing as up or down in space—especially without the artificial gravity—she was doing okay with her mag-spiked boots. Shortly, though, she was going to run out of places to move.

“Computer, if you could just stop being so long-winded and give me something I can use, that would be great,” she said.

“The nature and pace of the narrative isn’t under the computer’s control,” the computer said, annoyingly.

Alice grumbled an insult under her breath and kept going. Very shortly, none of this would matter. The port side hull was weakening already, not so much from direct contact with the Void as a consequence of having its structural integrity challenged thanks to half of it no longer existing. The hull’s metal shell was wrinkling . . .

“Hang on, go back,” Alice said. “Repeat that last part.”

Alice grumbled an insult . . .

“After that.”

Already, the port side hull was weakening . . .

• • • •

“Computer, end narrative mode.”

“Ending narrative mode.”

Alice put her hand on the blurry med lab wall on the port side. It felt firm, because it was a wall, but at the same time it also didn’t feel that firm. She pushed . . . and her hand went through it.

“Okay, that probably shouldn’t have worked,” she said.

She kicked her leg through, and then her other arm, and soon she’d gotten her whole body on the other side. Now in a room that was trying very hard to be both Marchere’s supercollider lab and a medical examination room, she mag-walked across the ceiling to the outer hull.

The pushing-her-hand-through-something-that-was-supposed-to-be-solid trick didn’t work a second time; the hull was firm, although she could hear it starting to fail. Waiting for that to happen seemed like a bad bet, and she didn’t have to; not as long as she was carrying explosive charges.

She pulled one out, set the digital timer to thirty seconds, said a quiet prayer that she was in a part of the ship where chemical explosives and digital clocks still worked like they were supposed to, and then disengaged the mag-clips from the ceiling and pushed herself to the far end of the room.

The charge went off, exposing all of deck three-and-eleven-sixteenths to outer space. The atmosphere blew out of the hole, and sucked Alice out with it. In seconds, she was drifting on a free trajectory a significant distance from the Erwin.

“Now unsynchronized with USFS Erwin’s computer,” her suit’s computer announced, which Alice thought was great news.

“Call the shuttle to my position,” Alice said.

“Unable to locate shuttle,” the computer said.

Alice twisted around until she was facing the wreckage of the Erwin. She could see the shuttle all right, but it was now embedded in the side of the larger ship. It looked like the Erwin was giving birth to it, only in reverse.

“That’s great,” she said.

The Void was just about done with the Erwin. Like the narrative said, it was hard to tell whether the ship had been drifting into the Void or whether the Void was expanding to consume the ship. Either way, she couldn’t afford to drift into it herself, nor could she ask the Rosen to get that close to it just to pick her up.

But, she wasn’t out of options. There were two more charges in her bag, and the bag had armor shielding.

She pulled it off her back and got out the two remaining charges.

“Computer, locate the Rosen,” she said. Then she held her breath. If the computer said unable to locate or worse, the USF Rosen does not exist, Alice was out of luck. It said neither.

“Rosen located.”

“Target on helmet view.”

The computer pinpointed the ship for her.

Now’s the fun part, she thought. She set the timer for both charges at thirty seconds, put them back in the bag, and then tried to crouch until her whole body—feet-first so her legs would absorb the worst of it—was behind the steel plate in the bag. Then she tried to maneuver herself so that she was between the impending explosion and the USF Rosen.

“Computer, activate emergency beacon,” she said.

“Emergency beacon activated.”

“Thanks. Sure hope this works.”

The charges blew. She felt her right leg shatter, and then she blacked out.

• • • •

She woke up in the Rosen’s med-lab, with a doctor she didn’t know standing over her.

“There you are,” he said. “Welcome back.”

“Thanks,” she said. Her mouth was dry and her vision blurry.

How long have I been out? she wondered.

She tried to sit up, but it felt like the Rosen’s gravity was set at a much higher force level than it was supposed to be.

“Here, let me help,” the doctor said, pushing a button that got her bed into an upright position. “I’m Dr. Maxwell, and you are lucky to be alive.”

“You wouldn’t be the first doctor to tell me that,” she said, trying out a smile. “What’s the damage?”

“Broken right leg, shattered left kneecap, broken left elbow, torn muscles in your right shoulder, and your oxygen ran out three minutes before we got to you, so you’re probably missing a few brain cells. There were a couple of other things, but that’s the worst of it.”

“I need to speak to the captain,” she said.

“I’m sure. I’ll let him know you’re awake; he’ll want to speak to you too. They’ve been going over the information you retrieved from the Erwin; I guess there are a lot of questions that need answering.”

“How long . . .?”

“How long have you been out?” he asked. “Depends on where you’d like to start counting. We believe you were adrift for a couple of days, but you’d been on board the Erwin for more than a week. Your trip computer recorded only a few hours, though. I think this is one of the questions the captain has. You do need some rest first, so if you’d like for me to delay him, I can certainly do so.”

“No,” she said. “It’s okay. The sooner the better.”

“Good,” he said with a paternal smile. “I’ll let him know. Meanwhile, if you’re thirsty, there’s a glass of water on your right. I’ll be right back.”

He left. Alice sat still for a few minutes, trying to compose her thoughts. It was going to be impossible to explain everything without sounding insane, but she didn’t really care about coming off as sane any more. What happened, happened. They’d have to take the data from Dr. Marchere, and her accounting, and figure out what to do with it. Hopefully, one of the things they would decide to do would be to bar all travel through Quadrant Brenda.

After a few minutes with her thoughts, Alice realized she was fantastically thirsty. She turned and reached for the glass, not entirely anticipating how weak her right arm was. What began as a straightforward reach for a nearby object became an awkward flail that resulted in her knocking the glass off the edge of the counter.

She heard it shatter on the floor.

“Great,” she said. “You gave me an actual glass. Very smart, Dr. Maxwell.”

Alice was deciding whether to call a nurse to clean up the glass or to try to do it herself—despite the cast on her leg—when the drinking glass reassembled itself and returned to the counter.

She blinked a couple of times, thinking it would be best if she pretended that hadn’t just happened, while knowing that pretending this wouldn’t make a difference.

“Computer,” she said.

“Yes, Corporal Aste,” the Rosen’s computer said.

“This is going to sound crazy, but do you have a narrative mode?”

©2020 by Gene Doucette.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gene Doucette is the author of over twenty sci-fi/fantasy titles, including The Spaceship Next Door and The Frequency of Aliens, the Immortal series, the Tandemstar books, and The Apocalypse Seven (2021). Gene lives in Cambridge MA.

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

Seven Ways to Fall in Love with an Astronaut

Dominica Phetteplace | 2331 words

1. We met on Mars.

You had been there for two years already; I was fresh out of rehabilitation. We already knew about each other, had read each other’s files. You were an expert in highly optimized tolerance. I had seen your picture, but I had never realized you were handsome until I saw you in person.

You weren’t clean-shaven, but neither did you have a beard. This is supposed to be the mark of a man who makes a good boyfriend but a bad husband.

Perfect, I told myself, because this is not love. It can’t be love. And yet I avoided you. I left rooms that you entered, and since you were robotics and I was botanical microbiology, we never had any shifts together except under the North Dome, where we tried to make things grow.

Seeds would sprout, but they would not take root. If a flower bloomed, it would die the next day. We both suspected it was the soil. But it could have been the air or the artificial light or the microbiome. There were supposed to be crops years ago; instead we had a field under a glass bubble where plants went to die. It was a shiny brown patch on red Mars. It was a failure visible from space.

In my lab, I could make anything grow. My lab was the only place on the whole base that smelled alive. It could smell like a forest or field or a swamp. I had a humidifier for the orchids and the carnivorous plants. The rest of the base smelled like chemicals. Once, you came to my lab. You wanted a cactus; you were willing to trade me a robot.

I gave you a miniature specimen from the Pilosocereus genus. It grew in a solitary, spiky stalk. You gave me a miniature dragonfly drone to fly around the room. It had iridescent wings. You said it would make my plants feel more at home to have a pollinator around. I pointed out that dragonflies weren’t pollinators, and so the next week you brought me a mechanical moth.

Your wife was not an astronaut. Astronauts never seem to marry each other. We marry civilians even though they could never know what it is like. We marry them even though that means being apart for years at a time. Astronauts get divorced a lot.

• • • •

2. In stasis, we slept together. And by together, I mean next to each other. For eight months. Other astronauts claimed not to dream at all in stasis, but I always did.

I did and didn’t want to dream of you. I dreamt of us in a forest under the dome. I dreamt of your lips on my collarbone and neck. I dreamt of us waking up again and again. Of our pods opening, of sitting up, standing up, looking at each other, finding each other.

I had dreams within dreams. Dreams I would wake up from, but not all the way. At one instant, I would dream deeply of your hand on my hip, at the next, I would dream less deeply of the tubes connected to my body, of the fluid that suspended me. I would dream of darkness, then I would direct my thoughts to a huge tree, trunk like a lighthouse, blue-green leaves.

I would imagine myself sitting under this giant tree. It was like the tree I had wanted to grow on Mars, specially engineered for the lower gravity, as giant as my ambitions.

The plan was to start small, with unicellular organisms. Then mosses, ferns, flowering plants. Then trees. Then one really big tree.

But nothing survived. And so I went home.

• • • •

3. When the pods opened, we did not sit up and look deeply into each other’s eyes. We were too weak and atrophied.

In physical therapy, we learned to walk again. You were strong, first to your feet. But you were also tall, high center of gravity, long limbs to balance. So you would wobble and then will yourself steady. I loved that about you.

I wanted to impress you with my recovery, but I was too slow. By the time I was walking, you were running. When I was running, you were doing handstands. You always beat me at ping-pong, but I was the better dancer.

• • • •

4. Post-recovery, you went back to your wife, to your research. I didn’t have a family to go back to, and I needed a break from my research.

So I summited mountains, I went to Antarctica. I dove in reefs and hiked in deserts. My guides were young men aged by the weather. Vagabonds, adrenaline junkies, and completely inappropriate for me while being the only people on Earth who seemed to understand me.

When I was ready to continue my research, I kept traveling. I studied the soil microbes in extreme environments, the tiny inhabitants of harsh ecosystems. I felt like a creature on a speck of dust studying a smaller creature on a smaller speck of dust. My companions on these expeditions were scientists, my peers. They were not prone to existential musings, but they understood my curiosity. Occasionally I liked one well enough to invite into my tent, my lab, but never into my bed. I wanted men who could reach past my exterior, past my fears, and find the very essence of me. If this happened, it happened for only a second. A second is better than not at all.

I still thought of you even though I had given up on you. I wondered about you. I worried about you.

You were back on Mars. Your wife had divorced you, but I wasn’t sure what to do about that.

• • • •

5. I wrote a series of papers that got some attention, about Azotobacter. It had been found on Mars. Mysteriously, several members of the genus had found a way to survive there. They had mutated, become a new thing. And then returned somehow. I found a colony of the organism we were calling Azotobacter martii 4 at the bottom of an Uruguayan salt marsh. They were astronauts, too.

A nitrogen-fixing bacteria had colonized a planet with almost no nitrogen in the atmosphere. Then it had survived the journey through space. It seemed impossible.

I would leave it to others to figure out how it happened. I wanted to know how this new creature could be of use to the larger goal of terraforming Mars.

My exposure to A. martii 4 warranted a three-week quarantine. The boredom and isolation were good for my writing. I wrote my most cited papers while locked in a plastic bubble.

When I was allowed back into my lab, I began to culture a soil sample based on the contaminated Martian regolith. I made things grow in my lab. I requested samples and analysis from the Rover labs, which meant exchanging the occasional transmission with you.

We mainly discussed technical matters, putting asides about life and art at the margins of our interactions. One transmission went:

WE NEVER SPOKE MUCH WHEN YOU WERE UP HERE AND THAT MEANT WHEN YOU DID TALK, I MADE SURE TO LISTEN. YOU ONCE SAID THAT THE HARDEST PART WOULD BE THE ENTRY POINT. THAT IF WE COULD GET ONE THING TO GROW IN THIS DIRT THAN WE COULD GET MANY THINGS. I THINK WE ARE CLOSE.

To which I responded:

I HAVE SINCE CHANGED MY MIND. THE CREATURES THAT MAKE UP THE A. MARTII 4 ECOSYSTEM ON MARS ARE MANY. IT IS NOT ABOUT GETTING JUST ONE THING TO SURVIVE, IT IS ABOUT GETTING LOTS OF DIFFERENT THINGS TO CULTURE AT THE SAME TIME. BUT YES, I AGREE, WE ARE CLOSE NOW. IT WILL HAPPEN SOON.

To which you responded:

YOU SHOULD COME BACK.

• • • •

6 and 7. I did go back. I wanted to try again.

In stasis, I dreamed of flowering vines crawling over my suspended form. I dreamed of moss completely enveloping me. Their life, my decay. I made a bargain with the plants that were strangling me. I would stay if they would grow. That’s how I knew I wasn’t ever going back to Earth, even if I survived the return to Mars.

I know it sounds like a nightmare, and it was scary but not terrifying. Nature is supposed to devour us. That’s how I knew there would be life on Mars eventually.

I never saw you during those dreams, but I felt your presence hovering. Like you were watching me, like you were in my peripheral vision, but right in my blind spot to prevent me from seeing you. You seemed concerned. I felt like it would disappoint you if I died in stasis, but some things can’t be helped.

I did not to expect to survive the journey to Mars given the content of my dreams. But I must have, because my pod opened. Civilians think we wake like Sleeping Beauties, but extraction is nothing like being kissed by your prince.

It does not feel at all like a rescue. It feels like an assault. In stasis, my body was comfortable, even if my mind was troubled. Everything was well regulated before in sleep, but now that gravity and consciousness had returned, I felt that all my organs were the wrong size, all of them enlarged and more spherical than they should be. My heart was like Mars, round and red, but also warm and alive. I could feel it in my chest, pushing and beating against desperate, too-round lungs that had forgotten how to breathe on their own. I coughed up something, then I vomited something else. I couldn’t see what or who rescued me. My eyesight wasn’t working. Neither was my hearing. Words were being spoken to me, and while I couldn’t hear what was said, I could feel the perturbances they were causing in the air around me. That’s how sensitive my newly exposed skin was.

You visited me in sick bay, something you did not do at my last arrival.

Lying in bed, I felt embarrassed at my weakness. All I ever wanted to do was impress you.

“It gets worse each time,” you said.

“I’m never doing that again,” I said.

“Me either.” You gave me a look that I didn’t understand. It suggested worry or acceptance. Sadness or relief. Joy or understanding. Perhaps all of those things plus others I don’t have names for.

That look confirmed my suspicions. Something had shifted between us. I was aware of my power despite my enervated body.

You avoided me after that. You waited until I was well enough to walk to visit me again. I impressed you with my handstand.

You helped me set up my lab. Together we unpacked boxes. I set up the lights, tested my dirt. I planted the seeds, and you watched. Green shoots pushed through. Corn, chamomile, and sugar cane. Apple, peach, and olive trees. You came to check on them every day. Their progress fascinated you. I gave you a dwarf fern to keep in your room. You came back the next day to tell me it was still alive. And the days after that. Still alive, still alive, still alive.

The day before the first transplanting, we walked out to the brown field under the dome. I told you what I wanted things to look like, where I wanted things to go. Crops first, then a forest. I wanted grasses and a pond. I wanted a wetland, I wanted birds. I’ve always been greedy.

You took my hand in yours and faced me so that you really looked at me. I looked away. This feeling felt like a promising thing, and promising things tended to wither after you brought them out to the dome.

That night, I regretted my hesitance, as one does. I could not sleep, so I messaged you. But you did not respond. I did not expect to see you at the planting the next morning, it was not your shift, but there you were.

“Good luck,” you said.

“I’ll need it.”

“I think it will be different this time.”

I didn’t say anything because I wasn’t sure.

“Is your fern still alive?” I asked.

“Yes,” you said. “I mean, I think so. I hope so. It might not be. You should come check on it.”

I took this as a sign to message you again that night, but earlier, before insomnia could strike. You responded to my message by appearing at my door. I invited you in. And finally, in defiance of Zeno, the distance between us shrank to nothing.

I want to know how it happened. What changed, and how did it manage to survive until the next day?

We are scientists, there must be reasons. There exist reasons behind reasons. The reasons extend down to our atoms and out to the Universe.

You told me things don’t need to make sense, they just need to work. Typical engineer.

You came to my room the next night and the night after. The transplants eventually died, but still you visited.

“They lasted longer this time, didn’t they?” you asked, one night as you lay in my bed.

“Yes, it was a slightly slower death, a slightly longer life.”

“It takes a while to get your bearings. Your plants will like it on Mars, eventually, they just don’t know it yet. Each transplant will last a little a longer than the last. And the longer they live, the more they will have to live for.”

I pulled you close and wondered: How did it happen? What changed? What can still change?

I wanted some of your certainty, so I kissed you on the mouth and willed myself to stop thinking and start believing: We will grow things on Mars. We will die on Mars. And then Nature will devour us.

©2014 by Dominica Phetteplace. Originally published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dominica Phetteplace writes fiction and poetry. Her work has appeared in Zyzzyva, Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, Clarkesworld, Copper Nickel, Ecotone, Wigleaf, The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, and Best Microfiction 2019. Her honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Rona Jaffe Award, a Barbara Deming Award and fellowships from I-Park, Marble House Project and the MacDowell Colony. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley and the Clarion West Writers Workshop.

Three Speeches about Billy Grainger

Jake Kerr | 4138 words

Billy Grainger, posthumous induction into the Humor Hall of Fame
Induction speech by Eugene “Mean Gene” Crawford

Thank you.

Now shut the fuck up.

I know you’re comedians, but we’re here to honor our own, so I swear to God if I hear one more tinkling glass I’ll shove it so far up your ass you’ll be able to toast after you finish your drink.

That’s better. Now where was I? Oh yeah, we’re a classy fucking group, and this is our distinguished fucking hall.

So, what can I say about Billy Grainger? Not a whole lot. He’s a fucking chemist. Ted called me and was like, “We’d like you to give an induction speech at the Hall of Fame ceremony, but it’s a posthumous award. You good with that?”

My first thought was, “It’s about fucking time.” My second thought was, “Sure, stick Mean Gene with the dead guy.” But the more I thought about it, the more excited I got. Maybe I’d be the one to finally induct Jeff Cargo or some dude from a hundred years ago who was overlooked. I’d be inducting some icon. Better yet, they’d be dead long enough that I could steal some of their material and you dumb fucks would think of it as an homage if I got caught. So it sounded like a good deal.

But, no, I didn’t get someone like that. I didn’t even get a pity induction for Carrot Top or Gallagher. So who do I get to induct? Billy Grainger. Billy fucking Grainger. A goddamn chemistry nerd.

The Centenary Prize from the Royal Society of Chemistry,
posthumously awarded to Billy Grainger
Speech by Doctor Mary Evans, Cambridge University

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen of the Society and our honored guests. I am humbled and excited to present this award to the late Billy Grainger for his extraordinary work using chemistry for social change. I recognize that this was both an inspired and controversial choice, but it was a necessary and important one.

For the many new guests we have in attendance, I should note that the Centenary Prize was established ninety-five years ago with the goal of highlighting exceptional communicators from overseas. Its specific purpose was to bring these communicators to the United Kingdom to share their deep and nuanced knowledge of chemistry by way of their skills as speakers and teachers. Yet here we are awarding the prize to someone who not only can’t share his knowledge with us, but whose knowledge was distinctly practical.

So, some of you ask: Why present Billy Grainger with the Centenary Prize?

Well, before we honor today’s recipient, let me answer the critics seated in this room. No, Mister Grainger was not a theoretical chemist. He provided no new knowledge or understanding to our field. Nor was he an experimental chemist, who blazed trails of new study. Nor was Mister Grainger a scholar, who used his broad knowledge of our field to further the understanding of chemistry or to provide context to assist current theory. Mister Grainger was none of those things. Mister Grainger—Billy Grainger—was that most simple and yet practical of us—an applied chemist. He took our current knowledge and applied it to a problem.

And, with all due respect, the problem he solved and the methods he used are the absolute definition of what this prize honors. I ask you all: Who in the entire history of this esteemed Society used chemistry and communication to change the world as much as Billy Grainger?

Heroes of the Resistance: Billy Grainger statue unveiling
Speech by Professor Terrence Jefferson, University of Pennsylvania

I’m a historian, and I’m proud of that fact. I don’t hide from the sins of our past. I’m not afraid to applaud the progress we have made. I shine the light of truth on the past, so that we can learn from it. So I cannot discuss the vital role that Billy Grainger played in reversing the Quiet Revolution without first providing you with the proper historical context—the truth.

So friends and fellow citizens, let me start with a simple proverb, condensed to a single sentence.

For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost.

This proverb tells us that small events can have great consequences. Nothing describes Billy Grainger better than this single line. He was not a great general. He did not give inspiring speeches or write revolutionary blog posts. He wasn’t a spy, a journalist, or a warrior. He did one thing. One small thing. One small, extraordinary, amazing thing to bring down a tyrant—he used humor.

Humor Hall of Fame speech, continued

You’re booing me for calling him a chemistry nerd? I can’t believe this. You’re fucking booing me.

The dude’s corpse is cold, and you’re telling me this is too soon? We’re fucking comedians. It’s never too soon, you cowardly fucks. Do you think Grainger was a coward? He was shot on live TV for doing what we do—making people laugh.

Oh, you got me going now. See this? This was my really funny and somewhat inappropriate speech. This is me ripping it up. You now get the really inappropriate speech.

So let me tell you about Billy.

He was a fucking chemistry nerd. Sure, he was more than a chemist, but it was his chemical paint that defined him, so if we’re going to celebrate how funny and important his humor was, we still need to mock him for being a chemistry nerd. It’s what he would have done, and if you don’t get that, you’re idiots.

Am I pissing you off? Well, Grainger had this amazing talent for pissing people off so badly that they did stupid things. Sound familiar? Yeah, it’s not an accident that Ted asked me to give this fucking speech, you dickwads.

Do you remember his first piece? Of course you do. It pissed off everyone. He spray-painted Kellen doing Andrews doggy-style on the side of the Washington Monument. I mean, you have this fucking phallic symbol centered between the White House and the Capitol, and Grainger paints the President literally fucking Congress on it.

That’s pretty damn funny.

Centenary Prize speech, continued

We are all familiar with how Mister Grainger communicated his messages—graffiti. The messages were powerful in that they stabbed into the heart of the tyranny in America. Yet I daresay that it wasn’t the message that was important, but the chemistry.

There can be no doubt that Mister Grainger was a genius. He took nanotechnology and applied it broadly to both organic and inorganic compounds to create what we all now take for granted—nanopaint. Could someone else have done this? Certainly. Was there a market for a paint that binds with the underlying structures so strongly that it is effectively permanent? Maybe. All progress seems obvious in hindsight, but someone must take that first, critical step. That someone was Billy Grainger.

Today we know that others had the same idea, but they abandoned it due to the many perceived problems. Truly permanent paint was deemed too dangerous and impractical. Something as minor as a spill would be impossible to clean. Paint on clothing or your skin would never come out. And, yet, where others saw nothing but problems, Mister Grainger saw a unique opportunity to create change.

This is the essence of applied chemistry and something this honored society has overlooked for far too many years. It took Mister Grainger’s sacrifice and the societal change in America for us to recognize it. Many claim that it was Grainger’s words and images that sparked the resistance, but us chemists know better—it started with Mister Grainger’s understanding of both nanotechnology and chemistry. Without that understanding of binding two unrelated chemicals together, we wouldn’t have permanent paints and dyes. And without permanent paint, America wouldn’t have its freedom.

Heroes of the Resistance speech, continued

History is constantly being re-examined. Historians in the nineteenth century saw the enslavement of my ancestors in financial terms. Today we view slavery differently. This is healthy and part of getting to the truth—understanding how things were and how they change.

It is clear today that the United States was founded not by ideologues but by practical men. They knew that rule by popularity was a different kind of tyranny, but one nonetheless. They saw the tyranny of the masses and built systems in place to protect the minority—empowering states, creating a senate not based on population but territory, and many other things that held the potential power of the masses in check.

That structure helped my people and many other minorities as we battled for our rights. So this was a good thing.

Yet history has taught us again and again that a small and rabid group of people can tyrannize a splintered larger group. And that’s what we all failed to see until we looked back as historians—that a small group of citizens had twisted the practical and good intentions of this country’s founders into the Quiet Revolution. One moment we were dumbfounded over the election of President Kellen, and the next we were watching as he systematically dismantled our freedom for his own purposes.

Which brings me to Billy Grainger. Billy saw something that none of us could see—the fragility of a tyrant fueling the flames of anger in that minority. He saw that when you rule from a position of weakness, nothing is worse than being mocked. Yet Grainger wasn’t just a pamphleteer or an editorial cartoonist or an artist. Grainger was a chemist.

And thanks to his application of chemistry, he did one thing that none of us could have predicted. One small thing that made all the difference in the world—his nanopaint gave his mockery permanence.

Humor Hall of Fame speech, continued

It’s really convenient to forget today, but that move pissed off everyone. He fucking defaced a national monument. Even people who hated Kellen and Andrews were pissed off at Grainger. Let me tell you, that takes talent.

It takes talent because for attack comedians like Grainger and myself, it’s not about the joke; it’s about the response. That’s right, I’m calling him a comedian. Did he ever do stand-up? No. Can I mock him for being a chemistry nerd and honor him for being a comedian? Yes. I’m fat. I contain multitudes.

So what do I mean by the response? Well, we’ve all crossed the line and said something that made others uncomfortable on stage. Hell, I’ve built a career around it. When it works, the response of that uncomfortable person is itself so over-the-top and funny that your bit of cruelty is overshadowed by the ridiculousness of your target. You provoke, and the response is the punchline.

Is it nice? No. Is it cruel? Maybe. Is it funny? Fuck yeah.

So while I thought Grainger’s graffiti was funny, Kellen’s response by tearing down the entire Washington Monument was absolutely hilarious. Who the fuck does that? Some insane fascist dictator, that’s who. And you know who knew how to destabilize the fragile ego of a dictator better than anyone?

Billy fucking Grainger and his nano fucking paint.

Centenary Prize speech, continued

This award is about communication, and it is about chemistry. Before I talk about Mister Grainger’s talent for communication, let us discuss his chemistry. Science and technology have progressed so fast that it’s easy to forget that nanobot-assisted chemical reactions were new when Mister Grainger was in graduate school. Like many men before him, he dropped out of school not because he was bored with his studies, but because he was excited by this technology. He didn’t want to study it—he wanted to use it.

At the time, many people were doing the same in important disciplines—medicine and pharmacology, industrial engineering, transportation. Some of them have been lauded on this stage. Yet while many scientists followed the money flowing into businesses embracing this new technology, Mister Grainger did not. He took a used 3D printer, a credit card, and lots and lots of time, and focused on one simple thing—paint.

Here is the moment where I shall wax philosophical as I speak proudly of chemistry’s contribution to art. Simply put, chemists have changed art throughout the ages in fundamental ways. Dyes, oils, acrylics—this was not the first time that we had created a new paint for our artist brothers and sisters. Even new colors were brought to life thanks to chemistry.

So Mister Grainger is the latest in a long and honored lineage of chemists who have fundamentally changed art. And that is one of the reasons we honor him today. When the world saw dollar signs, he saw chemistry at its most fundamental level—a creative expression.

Heroes of the Resistance speech, continued

It is an iconic moment, one that my fellow historians point to as the moment that galvanized the resistance—when President Kellen ordered the Washington Monument torn down. It shocked the nation. Many blamed Grainger for defacing the monument, but few could understand why it needed to be torn down. Sure, Kellen restricted access. He covered Grainger’s political statement with tarp. He tried to use chisels and jackhammers to remove the statement, but in the end we are told that he felt everything was taking too long.

Kellen’s impatience and his ego led to his biggest mistake—tearing down a monument to one of the country’s most revered founders. He had his propaganda machines explain it the best they could, but in the end a flawed monument that defined the nation was still a monument, a symbol of everything that Kellen claimed to be. It is easy to forget, but at that moment in time he could have recovered. The country was teetering between sentiments that Kellen did what he had to do and that he had betrayed our country’s founders.

At that exact moment of uncertainty, of a nation poised between abandoning the symbols of our past or turning on the Kellen regime, Billy Grainger spray painted the following on the statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial: You made me Kellen’s Bitch.

Crass. Offensive. Shocking. It was all those things, but it was Kellen’s irrational response that made the headlines.

Humor Hall of Fame speech, continued

Billy was that evil combination of class clown and science nerd. He was a chemist with a vengeance, man. If you idiots learned anything from fifth grade, it was don’t pick on the class clown. But you especially don’t pick on the class clown with access to chemicals. Kellen fucked with the wrong man.

The Lincoln Memorial thing will always be my favorite. You made me Kellan’s Bitch. Holy shit. That’s genius. Honest Abe calling out the fascist fuck ruining his country. How pissed off and insane do you need to be to bulldoze the Lincoln fucking Memorial just so people won’t know what was written? Why didn’t Kellen just permanently close the memorial for repairs or something? I don’t fucking know, but the idiot did it anyway.

The dude seventy percent of the country knew was insane was suddenly acting insane to the other thirty percent. He was literally razing our national monuments to cover his fragile ego, and it was all due to Billy Grainger. Billy fucking Grainger the chemist nerd.

Centenary Prize speech, continued

As an applied chemist, I hope you all will agree that Mister Grainger is a worthy recipient of this award, but we cannot forget that the foundation of this award is communication. Mister Grainger’s ability to take ideas and communicate them in a way that had a powerful impact is undeniable. Were his words and images offensive? Certainly. But we must remember that he was living in an offensive fascist dictatorship, and those words and images exposed the rotten core eating away at America.

Chemistry. Communication.

Billy Grainger represents both of those things, and those two things represent this award. Mister Grainger doesn’t only deserve this award, he typifies it.

Heroes of the Resistance speech, continued

It is difficult to comprehend why a leader would act irrationally, but it happens all too often. Perhaps at the root of it is the assumption that they do it because they feel like they can get away with it. Perhaps that is why Kellen responded so irrationally. Something about Grainger’s biting comments and profane images bothered him so much that he felt he had to remove them, and not only that—he had the power to remove them without consequence. So he bulldozed the Lincoln Memorial. He blew up the Arlington Memorial Bridge. When Grainger moved to New York, Kellen closed the Brooklyn Bridge, spending millions of dollars to swap out metal girders where Grainger’s paint had fused with the underlying metal.

There are other examples, and each one led to a response so absurd that you could practically see President Kellen’s face turn red in rage. It was hard to explain. It was utterly unexpected. It was crazy. And it fueled the revolution.

Humor Hall of Fame speech, continued

I was watching Billy’s statue unveiling at the Monument to the Resistance and this stuffed shirt is giving a speech about Billy. He was like, We don’t know why Kellen acted the way he did and Why would he implode over graffiti and shit like that. Let me tell you, us comedians know. Nothing destroys a person like humiliation.

Billy Grainger, the class clown with access to chemicals, fucking humiliated Kellen, but even more than that—he humiliated those who followed him. So many of these left-wing idiots tried to fight Kellen and his Nazi followers using logic and rational arguments. Are you kidding me? That shit never works. What the country needed was someone who would make fun of them for the idiotic, small dick, insecure, evil fucks that they were.

Thank God Billy Grainger came along. He didn’t argue state’s rights or human rights or any of that shit. He pointed at Kellen and fucking laughed. And he made us laugh. Then he pointed at Kellen’s followers and laughed at them. And he made us laugh at them, too. And, let me tell you, those fuckers didn’t like it.

The dumb-fuck fascist enablers in this country could deal with being criticized for being racists, homophobes, misogynists, being ignorant as a brick, and even being called Nazis. But, let me tell you, they could not in any way deal with being laughed at.

Centenary Speech, concluded

Before I close, I want to step outside my role as academic and add an additional word that describes Billy Grainger: courage.

It is perhaps easy to ignore Billy’s great personal courage as we judge him through the cold eye of science, but it is impossible to ignore as we judge him as a human. After he was arrested while painting Resist! on the Golden Gate Bridge, society had already turned against the Kellen regime. We know of the military losses and the erosion of support for Kellen. For Billy, after he was caught, it would have been easy for him to apologize for his crimes and to seek mercy. It is entirely possible he would have been paraded around as a propaganda tool and then imprisoned, with some opportunity to be set free after Kellen was overthrown. We all watched from here in the UK, and it was clear even to us.

Yet Billy did what he meant to do from the start. He spat in the face of a tyrant that couldn’t imagine being spat at. He imagined a message of resistance. He found an inspired canvas for that message. And he communicated it with his art. And, in the end, he was courageous and died delivering that message.

Ladies and gentleman, I am honored to posthumously award William Grainger the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Centenary Prize.

Heroes of the Resistance speech, concluded

Plenty of heroes are honored in this memorial. Heroes who lost friends, family, and loves, who sacrificed their own lives to overthrow a fascist and evil regime. We rightfully honor all of them, as without them we would not enjoy the freedom we have today. Billy Grainger is undeniably one of these heroes. It is worth a reminder that after he was captured by nationalist forces, he had every opportunity to save his own life. He could have reasonably ascertained that the cause he fought for was secure, but for whatever reason, he felt the need to make one last statement.

Today, like with so many decisions of the Kellen regime, we have a hard time understanding how it could happen, but the execution of Grainger, shown live on TV, was the final nail in the regime’s coffin. By then he was a folk hero to everyone but Kellen’s most hardened supporters. Websites provided real-time updates as they waited for the next Grainger piece and wondered just how explicit it would be or what insult Grainger would use next. The machinery of public sentiment that Kellen leveraged so well to gain power was entirely turned against him.

We can only guess that Kellen felt the only way to put the Grainger problem to rest was to intimidate us all by showing what was in store for those who resisted. Kellen called him a bully, a traitor, and a vandal. But labels like that are immaterial when the man you plan to execute walks out with a huge smile as he faces his death.

Billy Grainger’s final act is as well known now as any historical event in history. It spread across the globe in seconds. The image ended up on posters, painted on buildings, and shared across every social network known to man. Grainger, the hero that he was, somehow knew that it wasn’t his permanent graffiti that would shut the door on Kellen’s power, it was his own personal message.

In hindsight, Kellan’s biggest mistake, his final mistake, was glaring and obvious—he locked Grainger in a cell and gave him a pen. Of course, he was delighted when Grainger wrote a lengthy confession the morning of his execution, but for that small and insignificant document, he handed his greatest enemy his greatest weapon.

I tell that well-worn story for one reason: to address the controversial statue created by Ruth Teixeira. She chose the highly personal and yet epic moment of his death to honor Grainger, and none of us on the board of directors could disagree with her decision. Yet it offended many. All I can say as a historian is that you can’t study history without knowing the context that surrounds it. It is the only way to get to the truth. And in the context of Billy Grainger, hero of the resistance, I present you his memorial statue . . . and the truth.

Humor Hall of Fame speech, concluded

Fuck, thinking of that crazy statue made me realize something—there is no way we can honor Billy as well as the goddam Resistance Memorial did. I about shit myself when they unveiled the statue. I kept thinking, Holy shit. They did it. They really did it.

So let me conclude by saying that the fucking nerd chemist class clown pulled off the greatest bit of humor in history when he was shot. I smile every time I think of it. Not Billy getting shot, you assholes, how when the Attorney General fuckhead said, “Reveal his traitorous heart” and they ripped open his shirt and there, drawn on his chest in the same black permanent ink they gave him to write his confession hours before was a drawing of his middle finger with that transcendent caption . . . “Fuck you, asshole.”

Do you get it? He knew this was a historically epic moment. He knew that everyone was watching. He knew that he was on the largest fucking stage any comedian ever had, and he just owned it. He flipped off all those fascist fucks with a smirk on his face. And to make it even better, now there’s this fucking statue of him surrounded by statues of stern-faced heroes and forlorn children, and it’s him smirking with a fuck you written on his chest.

I mean, have you ever walked through the memorial? There’s this awed hush and quiet solemnity, and then you turn the corner and fucking Billy’s chest is giving you the finger. That, ladies and gentleman, is the pinnacle of comedy. This fucking guy. He’s memorialized giving the finger in the fucking Memorial to the Resistance.

Hell, let’s shut this whole fucking Hall of Fame down. Ain’t no one going to top that.

©2018 by Jake Kerr. Originally published in Resist: Tales From a Future Worth Fighting Against, edited by Gary Whitta, Christie Yant, and Hugh Howey. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jake Kerr began writing short fiction in 2010 after fifteen years as a music and radio industry columnist and journalist. His first published story, “The Old Equations,” appeared in Lightspeed and went on to be named a finalist for the Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. He has subsequently been published in Fireside Magazine, Escape Pod, and the Unidentified Funny Objects anthology of humorous SF. A graduate of Kenyon College with degrees in English and Psychology, Kerr studied under writer-in-residence Ursula K. Le Guin and Peruvian playwright Alonso Alegria. He lives in Dallas, Texas, with his wife and three daughters.

Le Cygne Baiseur

Molly Tanzer | 4061 words

The women have gathered around Mr. Hubert, their eyes shining in the candlelight, their expressions eager. The hoops of their skirts bump and crinolines rustle as they jockey for position; looks containing entire conversations are exchanged. In spite of the lateness of the hour, the parlor is very hot. Sweat beads at the edges of their elaborate hairdos and trickles down more than one white-powdered cheek.

Mr. Hubert, the celebrated toymaker, is just as turned out as the women who surround him. Lace drips from his cuffs, and his waistcoat is embroidered with a garden’s worth of fruits, flowers, and vines. He is enjoying their attention; it’s obvious from his stance, his slight smile. By speaking in a low voice, he makes them lean in, exposing the plump tops of their corset-flattened bosoms, and tells them to come closer, even though they are crushed together already.

The women fall silent as he puts his hand on an object about the size of a sleeping St. Bernard, lumpy and obscure under a cloth. He asks them if they would like to see what lies beneath. They do; oh, they do—and once they have evinced an appropriate amount of eagerness, he reveals it with a showman’s flourish.

The mechanical swan is a rococo wonder. The details are marvelous, from the painted feathers to the modeling of the sculptural components. It appears to sleep, eyes closed, metal beak tucked under wooden wing, long neck draped in a zigzag over its body.

The ladies stare at Mr. Hubert’s creation as they ooh and ahh, but Mr. Hubert’s eyes do not leave the women. He watches them watching it. At the ideal moment, just before their interest wavers, he produces an enameled key from his waistcoat pocket, also wrought in the shape of a swan. He jams it rather lewdly into the bird’s backside, and turns it a few times as the women titter.

The swan stirs. It lifts its head, honks twice, and beats its great wings a few times, just like a real bird. Its movements are a bit jerky, clearly clockwork, but the illusion is remarkable. It even waggles its tail before lurching to its feet.

“What is it doing?” shrieks one of the women, as the swan wanders over to poke its bill beneath her skirts.

“Here.” Mr. Hubert produces a handful of corn kernels and hands them to the woman. She frees herself from the swan and then leans down, hand extended. The mechanical bird is immediately interested. It even lifts its head to swallow after nibbling delicately, then defecates on the floor.

“Clockwork my swan may be, but it has its . . . appetites,” says Mr. Hubert.

The polite applause fades away instantly. These women have been waiting for this moment; it’s obvious they have some knowledge of Mr. Hubert’s swan, and what it can do.

He smiles serenely. “I will need a volunteer.”

No one speaks up until the lady of the house, Mrs. Suzman, says, “Mrs. Fraser.”

Eyes swivel in their sockets to an older, dark-haired woman. She goes pale under her powder.

“Pamela,” hisses Mrs. Suzman. “Yours was the short straw.”

Mrs. Fraser, resigned, stands up a bit straighter. “I would love to assist Mr. Hubert,” she says evenly.

“Excellent.” He does not seem bothered by her trepidation. Instead, he offers her his hand and leads her to a gilded chaise lounge. She sits down, trembling, her dark eyes wide.

Mr. Hubert kneels beside where the mechanical swan has gone still and once again thrusts the key up its rear end. He turns it in a different pattern this time. The swan shudders and walks jerkily over to Mrs. Fraser. It bows to her, wings spread. Mrs. Fraser stares at it.

“You may find it a bit easier if you lie back and lift your skirts.” Mr. Hubert’s tranquil mood is just as terrifying as the swan, which has awkwardly leaped up beside her.

Mrs. Fraser hikes up her dress, exposing her clocked stockings and pale thighs. The swan cants its head to the right, inspecting what she has revealed, and then a large human-like phallus unfolds from its underbelly.

It is difficult to tell if Mrs. Fraser is aroused or frightened by the sight of the instrument. Curved and obscene, wreathed with veins, its purple head is bright against the whiteness of the shaft. But when the swan climbs atop her and penetrates her, her moans are pure pleasure. She writhes and bucks against the swan, eventually wrapping her ankles around its body to draw it deeper, as the mechanical bird’s webbed feet scrabble at the couch, tearing the velvet. It twines its neck around her at their mutual crisis, biting her shoulder. After it withdraws, its instrument folds back into its belly.

• • • •

Emily turns up the museum theatre’s lights as the screen goes dark. Like Mr. Hubert in the film, she gazes serenely at the audience. They all seem a bit dazed, flushed, though it’s difficult for her to tell if it’s from arousal, anger, or some emotion she could not perceive. She’s seen just about every reaction to that scene from Le Cygne Baiseur over the past few months, including a first week freak-out from a woman that was so severe the museum had new programs printed with a stern warning right on the front.

The thing was, that was the least offensive sex scene in Le Cygne Baiseur and its context the easiest to explain.

“As we’ve seen, what man invents, he re-invents to be about sex,” she says to her audience. They perk up a bit as they return to the twenty-first century and to the Erotic Parodies exhibit they’ve paid an extra fee and signed a waiver to view. “Le Cygne Baiseur is based on a short story of the same name. Attributed to Voltaire, ‘The Amorous Swan’ is about a toymaker who invents a mechanical swan that ‘makes a Leda’ out of a woman at a fancy party. He wrote it after the sensation made by Jacques de Vaucanson’s ‘Canard Digérateur,’ or Digesting Duck, in 1739. Vaucanson’s celebrated mechanical bird appeared to eat, drink, and defecate, though later it was discovered that the bird actually excreted pre-made bread pellets.

“There was no digestion scene in Voltaire’s original story; that was an addition by British director Ben Blackwell, most famous for his controversial film What She Revealed, When He Departed, and Why They Lied. After reading an account of Vaucanson’s life, Blackwell became obsessed with automata and other clockwork creatures, and wanted to insert a tribute to the original inventor in his film. He also oversaw and even participated in the construction of his own personal, working ‘cygne baiseur,’ which he used as a prop. Yes, that’s right . . . the footage you just saw is all quite real.”

Emily’s heart begins to beat a little faster every time she reaches this part of the tour, leading them to the pièce de résistance of her exhibit. On loan from Prague’s Sex Machines Museum, the swan Blackwell made is truly spectacular. The grainy 1982 film, shot entirely by candlelight during the night scenes, doesn’t really do it justice.

Though not in working order anymore, the enormous mechanical swan can still be adjusted, so of course they have posed it in its most iconic position: wings spread, cock erect. It has never once failed to elicit gasps from the audience, and today is no different. Emily smiles to herself; she really is just like Mr. Hubert, given how much pleasure she takes in watching people beholding the bird. A voyeur’s voyeur.

The swan’s roost is a low pedestal so that it can be viewed in the round. She lets her audience gaze for a few moments more, noting where they look, and where they don’t, before clearing her throat.

“The footage you just watched was from the British Film Institute’s re-release of Le Cygne Baiseur, available on DVD and Blu-ray in the museum gift shop. Which, if you will follow me . . .”

Thus ends another tour. Emily is pleased with herself. It went well. They usually do—she’s proud of this exhibit and enjoys talking about it. Just the same, she’s eager for them to get going. It’s the end of the day; she’s ready to get home, take her shoes off, and veg out with a bottle of wine. Netflix and some genuine chilling.

“That was a really great tour.”

Emily startles. One of the group has lagged behind. She noticed his floppy hair and sardonic smile earlier—a Paul Rudd-type who looked like he really ought to be wearing a flannel rather than a suit jacket over his vintage-looking t-shirt for some craft brewery.

“Thanks,” says Emily. “Glad you enjoyed.”

“I did. Everything was really interesting. Those Japanese woodblock prints of the little Bean-man were great,” he says, “but that film . . . that was something else.”

“It’s an amazing work,” says Emily. She’s happy to talk to him. He seems nice, and isn’t setting off her creep alarm, like a few randos here and there since the show opened. “You should see the entire film sometime.”

“I’d like to,” he says.

An awkward silence descends. He coughs affectedly into his hand to break it, like he’s in a movie, and then extends it. “I’m Paul.”

Huh. “Emily,” she says. “Nice to meet you.”

“Yeah.” He smiles, then chuckles, blushing. Another silence, then he says, “Well, I guess I better . . .” and nods to the door.

Finally, Emily gets it. “What are you doing now? The museum shuts down in a bit, but after, if you wanted to watch it—the whole film, I mean—I could get us back inside. I have a key.”

“Back inside the museum?”

“Yeah. I was thinking we could watch it on the big screen. I love our little theatre; it’s a great opportunity to see movies as they’re meant to be seen. I just don’t want us to be interrupted by the cleaning crew while we’re watching, you know?”

“Sure!” he says, and she’s grateful he doesn’t seem disappointed she hadn’t proposed outright that they go back to her place. “I’d love to.”

They go to a casual Italian joint, one close to the museum as it’s quite cold out. She gets the butternut squash ravioli; he gets the carbonara. They talk about common things, like jobs and hobbies—he’s in tech, but his real passion is climbing—and less common ones, like the exhibit.

“I was especially pleased to get Murakami’s My Lonesome Cowboy on loan,” she says. “I know a lot of people have seen pictures of it, but in person . . .”

“It’s hilarious and shocking,” he agrees. “That semen lasso is just so . . . huge.”

“So, what brought you in?” she asks. “To the show, I mean.”

“That write-up they did in the local paper. But I have to say, when they mentioned you were screening a segment of a,” he makes air quotes, “pornographic film, I wasn’t expecting . . .”

“No. I mean, there’s a reason no under-eighteens are allowed in, but calling it a porno felt like they were trying to make the show sound edgier than it really is. Though some of the later scenes . . .”

“Yeah?” He leans forward, all attention. Emily wonders if they will have sex later. She isn’t averse to the idea. Watching Le Cygne Baiseur always puts her in the mood. There’s just something that turns her crank about the lavish costumes, the period lighting, the unfathomable expressions and disconnected utterances of the actors, the lush Michael Nyman soundtrack based on grounds from William Croft, the curious movements of the swan.

“Yeah,” she says, leaning in and lowering her voice. “For the theatrical release, one scene had to be cut substantially to avoid an X rating, but the version we have at the museum is the restored, remastered, re-everythinged edition. I was so thrilled to see it for the first time, especially given the legend about it . . .”

“What legend?”

“Do you mind spoilers?” He shakes his head, floppy hair flopping around. “So, after the scene we watched, the party breaks up and Mr. Hubert presses his advantage with Mrs. Suzman, the lady of the house. Her husband is out of town, and she agrees to go to bed with him. But while they’re fucking in her bedroom, her daughter sneaks downstairs and has a tryst with the swan.”

“Oh my,” he says.

“Yeah. Without the Toymaker’s key up its bum, the swan comes alive for her. It’s uncanny to watch on two levels. Within the film, the swan is an automaton, and therefore it ought to behave the same way each time it does the same things . . . but it doesn’t. It’s much more, uh, enthusiastic with the daughter. And sure, it’s just a film, but the swan is also a prop, right? Pre-CGI. It’s a practical effect, and should be constrained by similar rules . . . but it doesn’t move like clockwork in that scene. That’s probably why the legend got started, that the swan really did come to life that night while they were filming. It’s said it surprised everyone, as you might imagine, but they kept the cameras rolling. It’s true, the young actress seems genuinely frightened and bewildered, but it could just be acting. And . . .”

“And?” This urban myth is thrilling him.

“Well, the earlier scene is just movie magic. It doesn’t really penetrate that woman. But it’s said the actress playing the daughter got into an interesting condition from the encounter.” Paul looks baffled until Emily spells it out. “Pregnant.”

“Pregnant? In the movie?”

“In the movie, the daughter gets pregnant that night, but not the mother . . . shit gets real weird after that, as you might imagine,” says Emily. “So earlier, when they toymaker makes the thing, he declares it ‘beautiful enough to house Jove himself.’ So the film becomes about whether the girl has gotten knocked up by a god, or whether something else happened that night. But the story is that it all really happened. In real life, to the actress.” She shrugs.

“Enough people believe a mechanical swan came to life and impregnated an actress that it’s become an urban legend?” He sighs. “I guess post-Pizzagate I shouldn’t be surprised.”

“I’m sure that part of it is that the actress only did this one film. It was her breakout role and she disappeared afterwards. Fell right off the map.”

“I guess people could still do that back in the ’80s.”

“I know, right? Plus, there’s this blurry old photo of a young woman who looks very like her. Someone who thought they recognized her snapped it in Greece, a few years after the film. She had a toddler with her, but as to whether it’s actually the same actress . . . anyway.” Emily realizes she’s been talking for a while about this and gives him a look. “Want to see it for yourself?”

He does. They pick their way over the snow and ice back to the museum, stopping only to grab two bottles of wine, a brie, and some crackers at a fancy little shop.

She likes him. He hadn’t seemed bored when she nerded out about her favorite film and hadn’t droned on too long about his passion, either. In fact, his offer to take her indoor climbing sometime, while an intimidating prospect, seems fun and fresh.

The museum is silent and dark; a little spooky, actually. They giggle as they sneak through the hallways, though of course, it’s all mock-sneaking. She’s allowed to be here, it’s just fun to pretend they’re up to something taboo. The mood settles once they get into the theatre, pop in the Blu-ray, unscrew the wine, and the United Artists logo pops up.

“Thanks,” she whispers, leaning in so that her lips almost brush that floppy hair of his. “I haven’t watched this all the way through in a long time.” He shivers, and his eyes flicker toward her and then back to the screen as the film starts.

Le Cygne Baiseur is undeniably slow, and absolutely bizarre, and yet there’s something hypnotic about it. The performances captivate, even though most of the actors were only ever known for bit parts in old BBC adaptations of Dickens and Austen, or the lesser-known Hammer films. Every conversation feels freighted; every moment a clue that, if studied closely enough, might reveal the central puzzle of act three: whether or not Miss Suzman’s pregnancy is truly divine in origin. The characters take various positions on the issue—the daughter believes yes; her father, not so much—but it’s never made wholly clear what the “right” answer is.

Emily and Paul don’t make it that far, however. They break into the second bottle of wine and the oozy brie just before the scene he’s already seen, but Emily barely drinks any of it. She’s too excited for what comes next. She loves the conversation between Mr. Hubert and Mrs. Suzman, so calculated on his part, so wanton on hers; loves the look on the daughter’s face as she hides in the shadows, watching the verbal seduction in the parlor. Then comes the daughter’s woozy stagger back to the swan, which shivers and comes alive as she strokes it.

When the swan begins to tear at the daughter’s clothes with its metal bill, Emily can feel Paul’s growing discomfort. It’s true, after the swan pins her to the carpet with its weight, the girl’s cries are indeterminably of pleasure or pain. It’s hard to watch.

Paul stands, knocking over his half-full glass of wine when the girl screams genuinely as the swan thrusts inside her with more than mechanical urgency.

“I’m done with this,” he says over the clacking of wooden wings and immediately heads for the door of the theatre. Emily, dismayed by both his exit and the wine soaking into the carpet, follows him.

“Wait,” she says, as they reach the door. “Paul—”

“That’s real,” he says. He’s very upset—his face, flickering blue and white from the action on the screen, is furious and frowning. “It’s not a legend. That thing is real, and what it’s doing to her is real.”

The girl’s cries have turned rapturous as the swan fucks her eagerly. She is now quite obviously enjoying herself, though her pleasure is ecstatic and disturbing in its intensity. She cracks a nail digging her fingers into the bird’s unyielding back, grinds against it wildly when it enters the short thrusts. The images of this monstrous machine ravishing the daughter are intercut with eerily similar footage of its creator finishing inside her mother. During an earlier viewing, Emily noticed at various points the sounds are reversed, the honking and the grinding of gears momentarily imposed over animal thrusting; lustful manly grunts accompanying volucrine struggling. They both get caught up in it for a moment, until Paul flees into the darkness of the museum proper.

Emily says, “It’s just a—”

“It’s just nothing. I’m . . . look, thanks for the wine, sorry about the carpet. I think it’s time I got home.” He gives her a scornful, disgusted look as she lets him out. “Enjoy the rest of your film.”

She sees him calling a Lyft on his phone through the glass doors, and though the night is cold, she locks them behind him. A car will likely come quickly, and anyway, she has wine to scrub out of a carpet.

Emily hears the film echoing through the museum like ghosts muttering about her date gone wrong. She’s upset; his disgust has hurt her feelings. She didn’t make the film, or start the urban legend. She only showed it to him at his request, what right does he have to condemn her for doing so? But as she stomps back to the theatre, she passes by the swan that caused so much trouble, and pauses.

It’s been well taken care of, over the decades. The swan’s paint and enamel are still so white that it seems almost luminous under the security lights. It really is such a beautiful object. She wonders how many hours Ben Blackwell and his team spent crafting it—she wonders, too, why he sold it to a museum. She would have kept it.

She knows the security cameras will catch her in the act, but Emily can’t resist. She approaches the mechanical bird, and just like the daughter in Le Cygne Baiseur, she strokes its chin, lightly, so as not to set off the pressure sensors.

The bird shivers. Emily steps back, alarmed and a little annoyed. It will be difficult to explain if she’s engaged some ancient mechanism that causes the stupid thing to shift in some noticeable way. Her heart starts to pound as she hears the dusty squealing of unoiled gears and she steps back with a wince when the bird lowers its wings and steps off of its perch, peering at her.

No alarms sound.

“No way,” says Emily. She takes another step back, but the swan pursues her, waddling on awkward metal legs, and then beats its wings a few times. It mutters at her gently, not really honking. She feels like it is calling to her, but of course, that’s impossible.

Her eyes stray to its phallus. It depends from the bird’s belly, curved like a saber. In the dim light of the dark museum it looks more alive than it ought to—the whole swan does, actually. It ripples with natural motion, artificial feathers puffing and settling, its breast heaving. It cocks its head; mutters at her again, appealing to her.

She hears the film’s theme play faintly in the other room, reedy woodwinds and pulsing strings—it must be to the credits by now—and she is reminded how eager she’d been for a little action that night. The swan’s invitation is unusual, yes, but she’s never minded the atypical in bed. Honestly, it is the chance of a lifetime—to make it with the notorious, eponymous Cygne Baiseur.

“All right,” she says, and she thinks the swan’s next utterance sounds pleased as she peels off her pantyhose and thong in one semi-awkward motion. It comes closer as she kneels, close enough that she kisses its enameled cheek before it dips its head under her skirt to tug eagerly at her pubic hair with its bill. She bats the swan away playfully. Undeterred, it climbs atop her. She runs her hand up and down the length of its shaft a few times to get it wet with whatever viscous fluid has emerged from the tip. She wonders only briefly where that reservoir might reside in its mechanical body—how it’s stayed liquid for so many decades—before spreading herself open to receive it.

She lets the bird have its weird way with her in a flurry of honking and clanking. It is just as enthusiastic with her as it was with that actress, and she comes hard, twice, before it finishes loudly and with a gush of something surprisingly warm, given how cool its body is to the touch.

It withdraws itself slowly, with all the consideration of a human lover, and nibbles her earlobe affectionately before returning to its roost and resuming its former pose. She glances at it briefly as she cleans herself up. It’s as if it never moved.

By the time Emily has her clothes back on and is more or less put together, she wonders if the whole encounter actually happened. By the time she gets the worst of the wine out of the carpet, she’s certain it didn’t. It couldn’t have.

Two weeks later, she’s surprised when her phone app alerts her that she’s late for her period. She’s usually so regular. But it doesn’t come. What does is a feeling of restlessness. For the first time, she’s unhappy with her job; her life. She wishes she were elsewhere. Somewhere warm.

She starts looking for tickets. It’s been a while since her last vacation.

Greece ought to be lovely this time of year.

©2018 by Molly Tanzer. Originally published in Mechanical Animals, edited by Selena Chambers and Jason Heller. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Molly Tanzer is the author of the Diabolist’s Library trilogy: Creatures of Will and Temper, the Locus Award-nominated Creatures of Want and Ruin, and Creatures of Charm and Hunger. She is also the author of the weird western Vermilion, an io9 and NPR “Best Book” of 2015, and the British Fantasy Award-nominated collection, A Pretty Mouth, as well as many critically acclaimed short stories. Follow her adventures at @molly_tanzer on Instagram or @wickedmilkhotel on Twitter. She lives outside of Boulder, CO with her cat, Toad.

Burn the Ships

Alberto Yáñez | 7733 words

There are no obsidian blades in the camp. The Dawncomer guards have learned enough to make sure that no ritual knives get smuggled in. Without obsidian, Quineltoc can’t spill blood properly—he can’t keep the law, can’t observe the rites of the Living Lord as a man of God must. The ghost-colored invaders who came from beyond the rising sun trust in their vigilance and in their cold technology to protect them. It does.

The People make do. They’ve had to, for over a decade now—ever since the Dawncomers laid aside any pretense of friendliness and openly usurped the Emperor’s power. But there is always the Lord.

Quineltoc keeps faith.

It’ll be enough.

Surely.

But tonight, need drives him, as relentless as a snakedriver’s whip. He sneaks into a tight corner between the latrines, hidden from the sight of the guards. The stench of watery shit and piss is thick despite the cold, dry winter night. It’s long after curfew and he’ll be shot on sight, but Quineltoc is alone for the first time in months. In an overcrowded hell, solitude itself is almost worth the risk.

The wind picks up and moves the clouds across the blue-black sky, revealing stars glinting like frozen tears on the bruised face of night. The waning quarter moon gives little light, and Quineltoc shivers as he contemplates the dark between the stars. His copper brown skin, sallow from poor rations and exhaustion, tightens and prickles as he shivers. The Tzitzimimeh dwell in the vast emptiness.

He doesn’t precisely fear the dark goddesses, orthodox man that he is. God’s sisters made willing sacrifices, he reminds himself. The Bone Women gave their lives for the Living Lord, for His law. The law itself keeps the People safe, and he keeps the law.

Their blood, their flesh, to nourish Him.

The gray hair on the back of his neck stands up. He tells himself it’s the biting wind that makes him feel small and naked under the pitiless stars.

Quineltoc steels his faith and straightens his back, ignores the cold, and starts to softly chant the bloodletting prayers. He takes a shard of bone out of the pocket of his thin gray pants. Carefully, he doesn’t think from who that bone came, and focuses on the prayers he uttered as he honed the shard’s point, whetted on hope and dismay. He shivers again, harder—shudders—and pulls the sleeve of his dirty smock back, slicing the flesh of his left forearm. The red blood is black in the shadowed starlight.

He should call out, proud, happy at an offering given, voice ringing like a bronze temple bell to proclaim his bloodletting, but the guards would hear him. After a long moment trembling in the cold, Quineltoc is able to focus. The year’s count is ending soon, and with the power of time turning behind his prayers, Quineltoc hopes that the Lord will listen despite the lack of incense and obsidian.

Maybe provide a different answer.

The wind dies down and Quineltoc hears nothing beyond himself and the blood surf, deafening, in his ears. The pounding of each heartbeat one more note in a space where experience and grace have taught him to expect to hear the voice of God.

Ba-dum.

Ba-dum.

Silence.

Ba-dum.

Even with no incense to carry his pleas surely God will hear him? Answer! he thinks deep inside himself, and then stifles the demand.

Ever since he was newly a man and became the youngest lawspeaker of the People of the Starry Codex, the voice of God has answered him at prayers. More than forty years. Now, with the scent of misery the only incense, Quineltoc dreads the reply.

Silence.

Ba-dum.

Exhorting the Lord is difficult, but hopelessness is harder. Quineltoc prays, silent words shaping his cracked lips in curves of agony and devotion.

Ba-dum.

He lets out a mangled cry, barely remembering to muffle his despair with his dirty, chapped hands. A dog barks on the other side of the camp.

The lawspeaker, who had been called to walk before the Living Lord, falls to his knees in the icy muck. In fragmented silence between heartbeats, Quineltoc hears a small, still voice, giving him the answer he has heard before:

Guide the People to Me, Quineltoc. Help them be willing. I am so hungry. Nourish Me.

Ba-dum.

Ba-dum.

• • • •

“No.”

Citlal has heard that word from her husband more times in the last week of arguments than in the nearly forty years spent together before it. She can tell that the argument feels ancient, endless, to the both of them.

“What other choice do we have?” Citlal demands. Her voice is thick with stowed rage writhing like a fire axolotl in her guts, with the tears that she’s refused to shed since she watched a Dawncomer guard shoot their daughter Shochi four months ago. Her dark eyes are dry in her prematurely lined brown face. Three decades since the massive invasion fleet turned their world inside out on a fine spring dawn. The new sun had been huge and red, staining the sky, the Sunrise Gate opening from an old, strange world.

The Empire of the Land Between the Waters had grown accustomed to the almost random trickle of small refugee boats over the previous century, their half-drowned sailors bedraggled like mangy golden rats fleeing chaos from an unfathomable somewhere behind the sunrise. The Dawncomers had just been pale, yellow-haired jetsam on the eastern shores, easily welcomed curiosities. But then they came in great blazing ships teeming with their survivors, unwelcome arrivals with guns and plague and their foreign god, slowly taking over everything.

Citlal has lost almost everyone she’s cared for in a long and fortunate life except her husband, her godly man who refuses to understand what must be done. They are in one of the warehouses the Dawncomers use to keep up the pretense that these are work camps. The other captives ignore their whispered argument out of respect and familiarity. The scent of old boots and cloaks stripped off at gunpoint makes the chilly air musty as the stolen goods move down the conveyer belt with typical Dawncomer efficiency. The usurpers brought cold mechanical technology with them, and it was impervious to the living magics the People use. Their casual illnesses had killed multitudes throughout the Empire, hitting magebloods the worst, eviscerating the effectiveness of the People’s priests and magicians. Centuries of order toppled, the Emperor’s power turned into empty ceremony and yea-saying.

“So we just wait for God to save us?” Citlal is so beyond frustration with her husband that it’s hard work to remember anything but her anger. “How long do we cling to prayer? Do we just wait for God to kill the Dawncomers? We could act—”

“And if we were to do it . . . if we commit that sin, what will we be?”

“Alive.”

Quineltoc closes his eyes. Citlal’s point is sharp, like all of the cactus spine reasoning of her arguments across their lives. As sharp and relentless as her anger is, she knows that he argues reasons—truths—that he devoutly hopes she’ll accept. She fights the urge to count them off on her fingers as he repeats himself, his tone a perfectly logical hammer to knap away the flint of her resolve. “The face of the Living Lord would turn from us! The Sunset Gate would be closed shut to everyone we would ‘save.’ No reunion with our people in the next world beyond the west! The Tzitzimimeh will eat our souls!”

“And probably make dresses out of our bones, too!” she retorts, childhood story truths made glib and fierce by the effort not to yell. Quineltoc stops sorting dead women’s shoes for a moment, breathing hard at her. As a wisewife of the People, Citlal knows the laws that bind magic since the Living Lord rose. She understands the way order limits chaos, like the stars fixing the dark sky. She knows, bone true, the reasons for the laws that forbid the action she urges. Invoking the Dead Sisters is dangerous, especially with the Temple Major—the place where the divine presence of utter night could safely touch mortal earth—now rubble under Dawncomer boots.

Quineltoc sighs and enunciates clearly at her, as if to a foreigner: “Every one of us lost.”

“What good is salvation if the spirit of the People is dead, Quineltoc?” she counters. She sorts a feathered green hat out of the hodgepodge, twiggy fingers nimble but aching in the cold. “They captured every single mageblood on orders from their Hierophant.”

“The Lord saved us before. We need to trust and obey.” His earnestness is painful. It reminds her of the kind young man who won her heart with marigolds and poetry during the first years of their marriage.

“Quineltoc, it isn’t half-dead refugees begging for sanctuary!” She repeats her own list of inarguable facts. “All of the Dawncomers remaining have come now, and they’re tired of us living in their new home. They burned all their ships. They can’t go back through the Sunrise Gate. And there’s only room for themselves in their vision of the world,” Citlal spits the words out like cactus gall. “And God doesn’t care.”

“Of course He does, but it’s not for us to decide how He shows it! We made a pact: He gave men magic, and we swore that we were His! If the Lord chooses that we die here . . . we’ll sing hymns to His light as we do it.”

Citlal knows that her husband’s faith is straight and true. He’s heard the voice of God. He knows what certainty is.

Doubt is new, and grown bitterly familiar.

It’s ash, she thinks. Black ash falling from the sky on the days when the People’s corpses are burnt, ash on her tongue that God says nothing to her husband now.

“We can only do it during the Dead Days, Quineltoc. End-Year comes in two days, and we won’t last another year. If you help, all the People will rise up!” She takes a breath and then she whispers, “Please.” He purses his lips together so tightly that they almost disappear and looks away, pretending absorption in sorting stolen shoes.

Citlal counts to five, and five again, and exhales. Her anger settles, like a pot of chocolate moved off—but still near—the flame. She continues, admitting to heretical magic, “I used women’s blood and the night wind to speak to the wisewives in the other camps and reservations.” There are so few of us left. She continues. “The Dawncomers are planning another purge in three days, through all of the camps. They won’t burn the bodies for at least a few days after that. They dole out our misery to feed their own god, damn them. I think they’re offering us as a sacrifice, but we can appeal to the Tzitz—”

He shakes his head no, gray hair a scraggly storm about his head. “Citlal, no. The other lawspeakers in the camp agree with me.”

She snorts, and throws a fine turquoise spidersilk shawl into a sorting bin. “You mean none of them dare disagree with the great lawspeaker Quineltoc! We will all die.” She pauses, deliberate. “They killed Shochi. And if they are feeding us to their god, do any of our souls even make it past the Sunset Gate to the next world?”

He throws out his hands, negating the possibility. “Shochi is in God’s keeping,” he says, almost reasonable. Then his voice hardens. “And I refuse to be the one to keep us apart for eternity.”

Citlal’s shoulders slump and her head dips, lank black hair streaked with silver-white obscuring her face. She knows that tone in her husband’s voice. He won’t countenance the magic that could save them, not if it embraces the dark between the stars.

She reminds herself that he’s a good man, a godly man. The Living Lord has spoken with him. The People use his name as another word for rectitude, for devotion, for wisdom.

She reminds herself.

A good man who only sees God.

She will not be so blind.

• • • •

There are five Dead Days between End-Year on the night of the Festival of Gates and the start of the new year. Five days when the doors between the worlds of the living and the dead are open and the skeletal Dead Sisters of the Living Lord stride unhindered across the living world. Then, with the sunrise start of the Day of New Fire, God sets the divine glyph on the lists of the living and the dead after making the year’s bargain with His sisters, and shuts the gates.

One of the prayers the People sing to guard them in the dark tells of the grim and beautiful bat-winged Obsidian Butterfly, the Lady of the Knife, eldest of His sisters. She is set to mark down all the living and list, as God so decides and the Tzitzimimeh agree, the deaths in the coming year: who by fire, who by water, who by old age . . .

They are the Living Lord’s People, praying and keeping God’s laws with the magebloods to guide them. Who by falling, who by plague . . . Citlal has never liked that prayer. She doesn’t find comfort in its cosmic certainty.

The People have kept the laws as best they can, watching the Dawncomers abandon slyness and rise to real power over the past decade. They’re the strangers now, forbidden to rebuild the great pyramid Temple Major in the heart of the old capital. Still, the People have adapted.

Who by strangulation, who by thirst, who by willing sacrifice . . .

Quineltoc hid his face when the guard shot their daughter Shochi, and murmured the prayer recited upon receiving news of a death in the stillness after the gunshot: Blessed be the Living Lord, the keeper of life.

The guards tossed their daughter’s body on a pile with others: grandmothers, the gold stolen from their teeth to make wire for machines; children, stomachs distended and arms stick-like with hunger; lame men, who could not work fast enough, bludgeoned to death with rifle butts . . . A daughter, beloved.

Who by gunshot . . . she whispers, adding a new death to the ancient litany.

She will never forgive Quineltoc for looking away.

• • • •

End-year gathers itself in the rising dusk, the prayers of the magebloods exhaling softly into the night. Across the Empire, the rest of the People—less devout and free enough, if burdened and afraid—accommodate the usurpers’ orders for no public ceremonies. But in every camp and reservation where they have been packed into across the Land, the magebloods of the People of the Starry Codex observe the rites as best they can, makeshift and brave.

It’s a ragged chant. Voices falter as physical weakness from short rations and exhaustion robs their breath, yet the chant is kept. The guards don’t bother to forbid them song with so many voices unable to ring out.

East-facing, the barracks’ door is in direct sight of the guards, so Citlal crawls out under the women’s barracks on the west side of the camp.

A few of the other women have guessed at Citlal’s plan. Some of the mothers and elderly nanas even approve. One, an old kitchen witch from a fishing village on the sunset coast, gave her a blue silk purse smuggled out of the sorting line so that Citlal could gather the earth and ashes she needs.

Citlal clings to the shadows and makes her cautious way to the women’s barracks on the north side of the camp, carrying the full purse next to her heart. The remaining wisewives in the camp have berths in the northern barracks. In the other camps across the Empire, every wisewife left gathers as well. They hope to accomplish the task, together.

Borrowing a sliver of the rising power of the first night of the Dead Days and retracing the initial steps of the Tzitzimimeh’s dance, Citlal says a word and cloaks herself in a bit of darkness and misdirection. The guards don’t look her way; their dogs whine, but don’t bark. She passes through the northern barracks’ door and it doesn’t creak. As thin as she’s become, she doesn’t have to open it very far.

The cutting night wind blows her along. Ce-Mishtlin and Yoal, the other two wisewives still alive in their camp, are waiting just inside the door. Ce-Mishtlin is short, dark brown, pretty, an aquiline-nosed young woman from one of the southern tribes of the People. Her spectacles are wire-rimmed, and the right lens has a small asterisk crack flaring in from the outer edge. The cheekbone underneath is bruised and inflamed. Citlal recognizes the marks left by a heavy fist and is careful to kiss a greeting on Ce-Mishtlin’s other cheek.

Yoal is several years older than Citlal, with the pale fawn skin and plaited black hair of the northern tribes, and her skin sags, missing pounds. She had once been tall, beautiful and fat, but now Yoal is deflated and slack from six months in the camp. Citlal meets Yoal’s agate-dark eyes and takes her hand, nodding her respect. Determination glints like starshine in Yoal’s eyes.

The wisewives head to a dark corner of the barracks, passing crowded bunks full of women chanting softly. As they walk by, the women fall silent and then resume praying after they pass, an exhalation that carries them aloft like a murmuration. Citlal is glad that they haven’t reached the portion of the rites where they’ll sing of the Obsidian Butterfly.

Once the three women reach the vacant bit of floor against the western wall that Ce-Mishtlin and Yoal have claimed as workspace, they sit down in a triangle, propped on knees bent, legs underneath them. They are as alone as they can be in the stuffed barracks; the women berthed in the near bunks have all moved away to the other side of the building to give them respectful privacy, or out of fear of their power.

Ce-Mishtlin pulls a sheet of soft brown codex bark-paper out from underneath her gray smock and places it between them. The camp sub-commander had drafted her to be his secretary and bedwarmer. Unwelcomed but useful, the positions give Ce-Mishtlin access to some supplies and news from outside the camp, which is how they learned that the purge was coming.

Yoal lays three steel pins next to the sheet of paper. They’re mismatched hatpins stolen from the sorting lines. One has a brass butterfly for a head, another a coral bead, and the third has a cloisonné sun in blue-green, a turquoise solar disc worked against a black background. A symbol of the People’s faith, it must have belonged to a pious woman. Citlal opens the blue silk purse and sets it down next to the other items, careful that the earth and ashes don’t spill.

They prepare the sheet of the bark-pulp paper first, taking turns with a small, sharp letter opener that Ce-Mishtlin stole to create a lacy cutout frame a couple of finger’s breadth from the edge of the sheet. Then, they join hands and wills to charge the sheet with potential and promise, and link it to the other items. It’s the simplest part of the magic, linking an object to another so that they entwine fates. It’s legitimate, even sanctifying, as when the lawspeakers write out the marriage contracts for a new couple. The paper will bind whatever contract is written upon it with the other items.

The pins are next. Ce-Mishtlin takes up the red-beaded one, Yoal the butterfly. Citlal’s lips compress briefly in hollow black humor at picking up the devout woman’s hatpin. Her grandmother, who was pious and god-fearing, had an obsidian pendant marked in the same way. Citlal accepts her own apostasy.

The women murmur words of binding, followed by a kitchen prayer of blessing, and each pricks her wrist with her pin, a minor bloodletting so the red blood beads up and coats the steel stem. A moment later, the pins gleam bright again, the blood absorbed into their metal hearts. Each pin is now an instrument of the will of the wisewife who fed it her blood. This magic is ambivalent in the eyes of the lawspeakers . . . and as such, forbidden.

Moving quickly to slay doubt or fear, Citlal commits to the next, darker working, and stabs her still-bleeding wrist with her pin to make the blood flow freely. She grits her teeth against the pain and places her wrist above the purse to let the blood stream into the thirsty earth and ashes. Yoal and Ce-Mishtlin do the same. This willing sacrifice of blood and life force is deeply profane and terribly unwise outside of the safe and sanctified bounds of the destroyed Temple Major. They keep their wrists there until the blood stops flowing. When they remove their wrists, their skins are whole and clean; each bears only a faint scar.

Inside the silk purse, the earth and ash and blood are liquid, a black ink that smells incongruously of hearth smoke and mortuary incense as it slowly churns with the power the women channel from the death of the year and the dark between the stars and their beating hearts. What’s writ in this ink will be inscribed upon the world. The stories the wisewives teach one another say that this knowledge was shared by the Tzitzimimeh when they danced out of the void. It happened long ago, before the Bone Women gave up their lives so that their stillborn younger brother could become the Living Lord. The magic is grim, and all the more so for the ashes of those who were once their kin.

Citlal chants the first line of the wise-work, and Ce-Mishtlin repeats it as Citlal starts the second, and Yoal joins the round as Citlal reaches the third line.

Each chants the song three times through, and as Yoal’s voice finishes ringing out on the last phrase, the three jab their pins into the night’s blood. There’s a small glimmer like faint starlight and slowly the inky stuff is absorbed by the pins in the same way as their blood was. The hatpins can write in the language of the world now, each stylus an instrument of dark and needful magic. Outside, the night wind howls, in fury or approval, and then shushes as if silenced.

Citlal looks at her sister-magicians and sees the exhaustion she feels mirrored in their faces. Yoal’s face droops, wrinkled more deeply than before. Ce-Mishtlin is grayish, the dark brown of her complexion sallow and drained, the bruise on her cheekbone a vivid purple.

There’s one more major part to the wise-work that’s left, which will have to wait until after the purge.

It’s that portion of the wise-work, Citlal knows, that will damn them.

Ce-Mishtlin and Yoal accept it, and so does she.

• • • •

The purge is quick.

The Dawncomers are nothing if not efficient. In the late morning sun, old men, howling women, the remaining small children, girls who don’t look at the guards, boys who glare, men who aren’t broken quite enough—they all are chosen and pushed forward into ranks. In every camp, the Dawncomers form a line, raise their rifles, and shoot. Most of the soldiers aim for the head or heart, but a few enjoy taking gut shots.

The prisoners don’t run—where would they hide, what darkness would cover them?

Some of the People are defiant, looking straight into their murderers’ eyes. Others wail in despair. A few sing, the ancient doxology their last words:

Hear the Living Lord: the Living Lord is God. The Living Lord lives!

Thousands die.

It cuts Quineltoc to watch, but he does it. He looked away once, and he can’t do so again. It’s part of his duty to bear witness, to acknowledge the beauty of the People’s faith and the Living Lord’s plans, even as it hurts his soul. Most of the People never speak directly with God, never hear His terrible reply, but every child of the People grows up believing that God will always hear that prayer.

Hear the Living Lord: the Living Lord is God. The Living Lord lives!

Quineltoc wills himself not to question, and repeats his prayer.

• • • •

As the retorts of the rifles sound across the camp, Citlal and Yoal and Ce-Mishtlin are mostly alone in Citlal’s barracks. Facing each other with hands linked one to one to one, the blank contract and the charged hatpin styluses in the middle, the three women raise their arms and sing out, capturing the power of the deaths of their murdered people and adding it to their joined will.

In other camps, other wisewives do the same.

None have any pretense that this is anything other than necromantic abomination, perhaps even an invitation to the skeletal Dead Sisters to come and claim them all. But it must be done if any of the magebloods—the sacred heart of the People—are to survive and make the People whole again.

The Emperor has abandoned them, and the Living Lord has abandoned them, and the lawspeakers would rather the magebloods die unprofaned than take this step. But the women all spoke together through the night wind and the power of their own blood, and although a few wisewives dissented or abstained from condoning the plan, they concur: If God will not understand, what good is God?

The power streams like silent black lightning, rising above them in a column of energy holding up the stars. Their faces are skull-like in that light, the littlest dead sisters. With a final unison shriek, they bring their arms down, and the power slashes down, too, concentrating on the paper and the pins.

Written in a hand not any of theirs, the glyph for night appears on the sheet of codex paper. It’s the glyph of the Tzitzimimeh.

Nodding in grim satisfaction, Citlal kneels to pick up her pin and wields it to write a word on the signed contract. It’s the glyph for fire. It means life. The dry hatpin stylus leaves rich black ink behind, fathomless in its depth.

The other wisewives write out the same glyph, Ce-Mishtlin in careful block marks as neat as a printed sign, Yoal in spidery, old-fashioned scribe’s hand.

They based their wise-work on the story of Lotli, the lawspeaker who centuries ago defended the People in the outland jungle city of Braj against the persecution of a mad king. The People were wanderers then, having not yet reached the Land Between the Waters. Lotli animated a man of clay and wood to fight the king’s soldiers.

Braj was a small city, the quarter assigned to the People easily defended by one protector. There were trees and plenty of clay on the shores of the river that ran through the city’s heart.

The bare prison camps are each much larger than Braj, and have no clay.

But the wisewives have other material at hand.

• • • •

It’s women’s work to prepare the dead amongst the Dawncomers, just as it is amongst the People. No one notices that Citlal, Ce-Mishtlin, and Yoal are late to join the other women, and no one comments as they mark the bodies with their styluses. The black ink is just another stain, one more splatter, before it sinks past the skin and into the bones of the dead.

The men keep laboring in the warehouses. A few are ordered to help the women drag the bodies into stacks. As thin as the corpses are, they pile comfortably, like cordwood.

The dead lie there.

One of the men, a young dropout from a kalmekak, the traditional schools of the law and magic, does notice Yoal marking the body of a half-blood musician who used to play trumpet in the capital symphony. He objects: “What are you doing? That’s—” but a look and a whispered word from Yoal render him mute. He may never talk again.

The power the wisewives now carry is awful, equal parts terror and glory. Each might destroy a battalion with a gesture and four words, but she would die doing it. That could leave the Tzitzimimeh dancing free across the flesh of the land, limitless, and the magebloods would stay in the camps until the Dawncomers killed them all. And there are no guarantees: The Dawncomers integrate their tiny mechanisms into their bodies, their technology leaving them mostly spell-proof.

Citlal knows that they are all a little drunk with the power. It’s headier than agave liquor after a fast. She could make the Dawncomers pay a steep blood price right now, but she knows that the power will grow if they wait. Each day that draws nearer to the Last Night before the Day of New Fire will increase their strength. Each night, unseen by human eyes, the Bone Women dance with greater frenzy. Pinpoint blooms of light burst and die in the wisewives’ dark eyes, and even the fiercest old women in the camps, who long for blood and vengeance, avoid meeting their gaze.

Meanwhile, the dead lie there.

• • • •

The days pass quickly, the weather turning colder. The thin barracks walls whistle when the wind blows. The chill keeps the stacked bodies from bloating, although watchful eyes would note that there has been no decay.

Listening ears might hear a susurrus coming from the piles of the dead.

The sound is a prayer.

Any of the People could tell them it’s the song of the Obsidian Butterfly, but none of the Dawncomers notice it.

• • • •

“It’s done, Quineltoc,” Citlal tells him. Her voice is a little hoarse with strain.

He’s not looking at his wife. He’s trying to take in the quality of the light. The sunlight is golden in the hour before sunset. Standing in the open gravel lot in the middle of the camp that the Dawncomers use for ranking up the prisoners, the light is beautiful. It’s the exact color of the dress Quineltoc’s daughter was wearing when they were herded onto the train cars, and it lends the dirty pall of the killing ground an unexpected dignity. Seen in a reflection of Shochi’s beauty, even this place is momentarily transformed for him.

Then he understands Citlal’s words.

A hole in the world opens under him, the shape of his faith, of his heart, of his daughter. He could feel the power moving on End-Year night, enormous, but he couldn’t read it. He recognized it as wisewife magic, beyond the bounds of orthodox knowledge.

The power raised from the executions of their people had gone unnoticed in his own grief. Necromancy was so foreign to lawspeaker magic that he couldn’t have discerned its shape against the glare of souls departing.

There is no way for him to stop it. The power Citlal has used is outside the scope of the law. The pact between the Living Lord and the People of the Starry Codex is broken. It must be.

He blinks back tears—the light is still golden and is in his eyes—and says, “Thank you for telling me, Citlal.” Then he walks away back to the men’s barracks on the east side of the camp.

The light remains golden until he reaches the barracks.

• • • •

Last Night falls; the Day of New Fire will begin with sunrise. The Living Lord will affix His divine glyph on the lists of the living and the dead after haggling with the Tzitzimimeh. The Dead Days will be over. Once, the new year’s first holy fires would have been kindled atop the Temple Major with crystal lenses under the noon sun.

Citlal huddles for warmth with Ce-Mishtlin and Yoal in the twilight. They exchange tired hugs, then walk down the path to where the bodies of the murdered remain stacked. Ce-Mishtlin read orders that tomorrow the Dawncomers will make the prisoners take the corpses to the mechanical pyres. For so many reasons, tonight is the time to act.

Ce-Mishtlin has had proud, sleepy word from the man whose bed she’s been forced to warm that the Hierophant himself is touring the camps and the reservations. The wisewives will be glad to receive him.

• • • •

Quineltoc the lawspeaker stands in the entrance to his barracks, the wood-framed building creaking loudly in the sudden wind. He recognizes that the wind isn’t natural, that it’s the movement of numinous power reflected in the physical world. The Dawncomers claim that their cold technology prevents such things, but there is power and then there is power.

Nothing in the course of the bitter years between their peoples would have prepared the Dawncomers for what is about to happen. They do not know the Tzitzimimeh.

He hears the high sound of a single sustained note from across the camp. It shouldn’t carry that far, but it does. It’s the trained voice of a wisewife in full exercise of her magic. It’s Citlal, singing in a high, clear soprano. Quineltoc hears another voice join in, an alto harmonizing; Ce-Mishtlin, he thinks. Then, the crystalline clarity of Yoal’s voice, slightly deeper than Citlal.

Wordless, the voices braid power between them. Quineltoc can’t see the energy the way he can see the glow of the lawspeaker script he uses to write his own magic, but it would be impossible for a trained magician not to register some sense of this. He crosses the threshold and walks toward the singing.

He thinks he knows what to expect, but there’s no being ready for the sight of the corpses of their people rising and moving as if with their own volition. Each one, he can see, has been giving a bit of life, marked with the glyph for fire. He thought that Citlal had hoped to get him to animate protectors from whatever materials they could find or steal, but this . . .

Quineltoc spies Citlal and her companions standing together, a sheet of codex bark-paper glowing to his lawspeaker’s vision. Even at a distance, he can read “fire,” life, inscribed upon it in three different hands. He stumbles when he sees the glyph for night. He recognizes the contract, and understands how the wisewives have been able to animate so many. The part of him that’s a scholar admires his wife’s genius. The part of him that insists he trust the Living Lord is afraid and wants to beg forgiveness for Citlal’s transgression.

Dawncomer soldiers arrive in confused clumps, and don’t notice the three women in the midst of the chaos. When they realize that the milling crowd is made up of the murdered, they close ranks and ready their guns.

The women’s song changes and shifts into the wordless melody of the song of the Obsidian Butterfly—the litany of deaths. It sounds like the music of skeletons dancing.

The animated People begin to walk toward the Dawncomers, their dead eyes shining with a cold starry light. The faces of the dead are grim: there is no burning revenge in their expressions, no glint of justice. There’s only enough life in them to make clear the certainty of death for the Dawncomers before them. Somewhere in the silence between heartbeats, a teasing ribbon of skeletal laughter is heard by everyone in the camp.

Quineltoc wants to clamp his hands over his ears, but he knows that won’t stop the sound. He hears a frightened soldier call out to his foreign god and another cry out for his mother. Another starts to shoot at the closing crowd, releasing them all to do the same. They yell obscenities as they fire.

The bullets do not stop the dead.

One of the guards, a tall red-bearded man whom Quineltoc recognizes as a mostly decent man, for a killer, shakes his head in denial at what’s happening. The guard shoots the animated corpse of a woman marching toward him, but the bullets don’t stop her, nor does his wildly hammering rifle butt once he runs out of bullets. When she closes with the red man, she grasps him by the shoulder with one hand and throws him down. Rising up on his knees, the man keens in fear, but with a hooked strike, the woman rips his jaw away and his cries are lost in blood. A revivified child aids her with little hands that rip clothes, skin, intestines. Quineltoc wants to look away as his murdered folk begin tearing the soldiers apart, but he doesn’t. Eyes open, he focuses on his wife singing, audible to him over the soldiers’ screams.

Lifetimes later, once the sounds of tearing flesh stop and the screaming ends, the raised dead move on, swifter now perhaps that they’ve tasted blood. They head toward the stream of Dawncomers attempting to get away. The usurpers don’t get far before the dead catch them.

It goes on like that for hours.

• • • •

In the morning light, the carnage is incredible. Limbs and heads and feet are strewn about like the aftermath of an explosion in an abattoir. The stench of blood and spilled bowels is a foul blanket, heavy even with the wind that has not stopped since last night. Quineltoc stood witness the entire time, watching the soldiers trying to evade the righteous dead. They all failed.

Inside the camp administration building, other former prisoners are using the wireless radio to contact the other camps. The wisewives’ plan worked in all of them, but there were many casualties. Quineltoc mourns all the lives lost, even the Dawncomers’, but does it quietly. Privately, and with weightier grief, he mourns the aching silence: the absent small, still voice. He doesn’t have the heart to explain to his people that while they might be alive, they are damned.

Even illusory joy is a blessing after the horror they’ve endured. It’ll be soon enough that he’ll need to tell them that they are no longer the Living Lord’s own and will never see their loved ones who have already passed through the Sunset Gate into the next world beyond the west.

Quineltoc takes a deep breath and goes to search for his wife. He finds her outside the soldiers’ mess, sitting on the wide green fender on the back of a Dawncomer armored car.

Citlal looks proud and defiant and strong to him, sitting there in her dirty gray prison smock. He thinks about the first time he’d met her, eighteen years old on the day before their wedding—their parents had been old-fashioned and arranged it all—and how beautiful she’d been, golden brown and flush-cheeked, clear brown eyes dancing. He’d thought himself very lucky, a student of the law to whom God had already spoken, about to marry a beautiful girl with power and learning of her own. He has loved her for almost forty years. But the words come of their own accord, the impulse deeper than reason: “Quineltoc-ne amo-namictili Citlal-te.”

They’re in the Nawa, the holy tongue, the one the People use for blessings, rites, and spells.

“I, Quineltoc, divorce you, Citlal.”

He’s a lawspeaker. His words are enough to make—unmake—a blessing, a curse, a rite, a marriage.

It’s simple enough.

He’s shocked himself, but Citlal just laughs. It’s a deep, appreciative laugh, the kind only long-time lovers or intimate friends who know each other’s every secret can laugh. It’s the laugh of delight that comes when someone does exactly what you know they’ll do, and you love them for it.

It’s a wife’s laugh at the folly of her husband, and that’s when Quineltoc knows that he can accept the silence of God if he can but hear Citlal laugh like that for the rest of his life.

• • • •

After spending an hour with Quineltoc not really saying much aloud, Citlal goes to the communications room in the camp headquarters. Yoal and Ce-Mishtlin are sitting there talking quietly at a small table. Ce-Mishtlin holds the contract in her hand, unwilling to let it out of her grasp, her magicked stylus serving as a hairpin to keep her tight black curls in a semblance of order. Yoal drinks a cup of black coffee she liberated from the Dawncomer officers’ mess, her pin holding a thin blue wool blanket around her shoulders like a shawl.

“Did they get the Hierophant?” Citlal asks.

“Yes,” Ce-Mishtlin replies smiling, tears glimmering in her warm black eyes.

“He was visiting Mazaán,” Yoal explains with quiet viciousness. Mazaán was the largest of the reservations, where the People were kept before being shipped to one of the work camps. “Ometzin and Chinueh died, but they got the bastard.”

Citlal closes her eyes briefly, mourning two of the five wisewives who were imprisoned at Mazaán.

“There’s more: The Emperor has sent word that none of the magebloods of the People will be imprisoned by the Dawncomers any longer,” Yoal continues. “It seems that the Miktlán dead”—the Miktlán camp was small, but it was just north of the capital—“paid a visit to the Imperial Palace in Zochimílc. He’s sending away his Dawncomer ‘advisors’ and calling for rebuilding the Temple Major.”

“Nice to see that His Majesty has a spine after all, no?” Ce-Mishtlin grins, hope and hurt in equal measure in her eyes.

Citlal laughs and joins them at the table. She knows that the People won’t ever be free of the Dawncomers—there are too many of them, and a growing number of mixed-blood children—but the scales are no longer so unbalanced now that the usurpers know that the People can retaliate in ways that cannot be evaded even with their cold technology and guns.

“Thankfully, they don’t understand the bounds of the wise-work. Typical Dawncomer ignorance, but I’m grateful for it this time,” Ce-Mishtlin says.

Smiling, Ce-Mishtlin holds up the contract for Yoal and Citlal to see. Then the southerner dips her head in farewell, takes a deep breath and uses her stylus to add a line to the fire glyph, changing the word’s reading to cold: death. Ce-Mishtlin exhales and stills forever, cold, cold. The air freezes around her, wintry steam rising from her like the memories of benedictions. All of the righteous dead she had marked are now just corpses again.

Yoal sighs, and tears come to her eyes as she murmurs something that might be the prayer for the dead under her breath. She pulls her stylus out of her improvised shawl and changes her fire glyph with it and says to Citlal, to the empty husk that once was Ce-Mishtlin, to the morning light, and to the memory of the skeletal dancers in the dark, “Thank you.” Then Yoal, too, dies.

Dry-eyed, Citlal nods her deepest respect to the bodies of her sister-magicians and pushes herself away from the table. She takes their contract, and walks out of the building, needing a moment alone under the winter sky.

She continues past the Dawncomer officers’ housing to a small green garden, planted with roses and lilies forced to grow out of season by Dawncomer technology. It had been where the camp commandant liked to take his afternoon tea.

It’s deserted now.

Citlal sits down on the grass, the new year’s cold sun an indifferent blessing. Alone and safe for the first time since Shochi was murdered, she cries. They aren’t easy tears. Each sob pulls a barbed thorn of pain from her heart. The absence of Shochi is a void she knows will not be filled. Citlal will not cross through the Sunset Gate to find her daughter beyond the west, if Shochi has made it to the next world. But perhaps the People will find a new home, now that they’ll have the chance.

After a while the tears calm, and she is quiet. The wind has died down, and she is perfectly at rest. She takes a deep breath and stands.

It’s then that she hears the voice of the Living Lord. It is not a small, still voice: it’s the roar of a hurricane, the tumult of a mountainside falling. The sound knocks her to her knees. Even through the din, it’s everything that the Starry Codex and the stories and Quineltoc said it is. It’s bliss and grace and fulfillment and balm, sweet balm on Citlal’s battered heart.

Daughter, blessed are you. You are truly the mother of your people. I grant you life for proving it.

It’s warmth and light, a bonfire lit and blazing. It’s the peal of conch trumpets heralding joy. The sound is like receiving judgment and being found worthy.

Through you, the People will live on to nourish Me. Feed Me, daughter.

Her anger is incandescent. It leaves no room for shadows, for doubt: Whatever test she’s passed, whatever plan she’s fulfilled, whatever blessing this might be, it isn’t right and it’s not enough. They all are owed more than this. The countless dead, Quineltoc, her sister-magicians, Shochi, are all owed more than this.

Citlal shouts, a piercing scream that assaults the vaults of heaven. The sound of skeletal women, dancing, fills the cold winter sky and the void beyond. “No,” she says. “Better the anxious night than a certain path down your monstrous gullet. Better that we live and die by our own choices than at your whim. Better the night and all the cold stars than your hunger.”

The warmth and light retract, surprised, afraid.

Citlal takes the contract and her stylus and carefully adds a line to the remaining glyph: life becomes death. Elsewhere in the camp, the last of the righteous dead lie down, all animation fled. She tries to let go of her anger, of her injured sense of justice, with her last breath, but doesn’t quite. The sense of responsibility for the People remains, but she knew that it would. Her body falls to the ground.

Visible only in the dark between the stars, the newest Bone Woman gets up and walks off. The fulfilled pact between the wisewives and the Dead Sisters blows away in the cold wind that howls. Bones rattling, the Tzitzimimeh continue to dance.

©2019 by Alberto Yáñez. Originally published in New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, edited by Nisi Shawl. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alberto Yáñez is a writer, nurse, photographer, and social critic whose work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Toasted Cake, The WisCon Chronicles, Heiresses of Russ, PodCastle, and in the award-winning anthology New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color. A graduate of Clarion West and Viable Paradise, he lives in Portland, where he was awarded a 2018 Oregon Literary Fellowship. Californian by birth and inclination, Alberto went to Portland to become a registered nurse, and has since learned more about people, bodily fluids, and himself than originally anticipated. He loves the magic of Pacific Northwest rain and Portland summers, but he misses easy sunshine, San Francisco, Chinese delivery, and other Mexicans. You can find him at albertoyanez.com and @freelance_max.

The Lachrymist

Kat Howard | 1413 words

It is not the dust that brings her tears.

The Lachrymist’s house is dusty, fragments of time and memory fallen everywhere, a living blanket that drapes itself over tables and chairs and things even stranger. But time and memory are to be expected anywhere the dead gather, and even in this abundance, they do not drive her to weeping.

Neither is her weeping caused by the voices, calling to each other from shadowy ceiling corners, memories still embodied, repeating phrases into the cold air. She likes the voices, has grown used to the syllables echoing about. The voices feel almost like old friends.

Nor does she weep over the lack of doors that open into the outside world, although it is true that the Lachrymist cannot leave her home. She knew the bounds of her role when she accepted it, and tears do not change facts no matter what quantity they fall in.

No, the tears fall because the Lachrymist is a creature made for weeping.

• • • •

The Lachrymist is not the only one who weeps, of course. It would be impossible to for anyone to live without mourning. But she is the only one whose tears fall with such focused attention. She is the only one whose tears fall with such weight.

Things die every day: people, languages, worlds. Trying to mark those losses, even simply the ones that touch directly on their own lives, would render most people unable to function. Yet the refusal to acknowledge so many disappearances on such a scale is not possible, either. Such a refusal would turn the losses into gaping maws, toothed and insatiable, consuming everything around them. And so that what is lost may be given its due, and the world still continue about its turning, the Lachrymist weeps.

She crafts each tear deliberately: water, salt, and memory, in perfect proportions to honor what is gone. She saves each tear that falls.

The Lachrymist has shelves upon shelves of bottles, her tears held in them. Colored glass and plain, faceted and smooth, sun-darkened and ice-clear.

She stores them to preserve the memories. She stores them against need.

• • • •

These are truths the Lachrymist has always known: The dead will arrive at her house so that she can mourn them. Her mourning preserves their memories. Those outside of her house who wish to remember those losses may travel to her at any time and ask for those memories.

All of these things are true, and yet no one living has ever come to the Lachrymist’s house. Hers is the only hand that has touched all of her jars of tears, so carefully collected, so diligently stored.

• • • •

The Lachrymist’s house haunts her. It generates new rooms at its own need, and subtracts others whose use has fallen away. She is constantly moving though strange hallways like some inverse of a ghost. Hers, the only heartbeat among what were once so many.

Yet such a strange and ever-shifting existence is necessary, for it is a condition of her mourning that the Lachrymist maintain proximity with what is lost. There must be a connection of some sort. There must be a reason for the Lachrymist to mourn. And so they come here, all of them, the lost and the dead and the disappeared, the shades and memories and fading voices. They come here, and they stay.

The Lachrymist doesn’t mind these presences. They allow her to pretend that she is not alone.

And most of the residents of the Lachrymist’s house adjust quite well to their change in circumstances. Things are not ideal, it is true, but they are mourned, and in the mourning, they are remembered. For most, this is enough.

• • • •

The dead are still almost fully formed when they arrive at the Lachrymist’s house. Dead languages whisper poetry in long hallways where dead poets stop to linger. Viewed slantwise, the scene is near lifelike.

But even in the Lachrymist’s house, nothing lasts forever. The dead fade, more and more, the longer they stay. Not into nothing—what is remembered is never gone—but they lose bits and pieces of themselves. A poem becomes a verse becomes a broken line, a poet becomes a shadow with no heart left to beat in iambs.

They dissolve into fragments, into dust, and into the memories held in a bottle of tears.

• • • •

The poet comes to her one day when the Lachrymist is collecting her tears. “I would rather,” he says, “be forgot.”

The Lachrymist places a stopper in an amber glass apothecary jar. These particular tears were shed for a delicate loss, a fragile memory, and she takes care that harsh lights will not fade them. She sets the jar on a shelf, near other, similar tears. “That is not up to me.”

A shadow separates itself from a wall and moves closer. “Isn’t it? You are the one who causes us to be remembered.”

“I am only who I am,” the Lachrymist says. “I cannot be other than my nature.” She turns away from the distraction to continue walking her house.

“I wonder,” the poet says. He does not follow.

• • • •

Days pass and the Lachrymist still thinks of that shadowed voice. She finds it strange, to be so haunted by a memory. She carries so many that she usually lives them as a blur, not as specifics. The Lachrymist wishes that this particular memory was not so uncomfortable for her, that it would quiet itself.

She considers what it would mean, to forget one of the residents of her house. She does not bring them here: they arrive. She weeps, yes, and she gathers her tears, but those are merely the tangible symbols of her purpose. The memory is there, as is the mourning. She can undo neither.

She would not even know how.

• • • •

Dust falls softly, coating everything but the jars of the Lachrymist’s tears. They remain pristine, as if she has just now sealed them and placed them on the shelf. Time is not allowed to touch them as it is the other things in the Lachrymist’s house. They are meant to be separate, unblurred by the passing hours. The Lachrymist’s memories are meant to remain as they were at the moment her tears were shed.

The Lachrymist’s footsteps leave marks in the dust, brief ones that begin filling and smoothing over as soon as her feet leave the ground. She does not always weep. Now, in this cool, grey hour, she walks, and she watches.

There are worlds gathered in her house, and words that are spoken nowhere else. She has wept for all those who lived in those worlds and spoke those words. But she can no longer find those people in her hallways and corridors. They fade, smoothed over by the dust of time, until their shapes are unrecognizable, until they no longer remember themselves.

But they are here. They do not leave.

She remembers them.

• • • •

The Lachrymist’s hands flutter over jars of tears like pale birds. The poet’s memory is here, stored. Perhaps if she finds it, she will understand. The entire purpose of this place—of her—is memorial. What can it mean to wish to undo that?

She finds the bottle. The glass is thick, frosted. A pleasing weight in her hand. She unstoppers the jar, and breaths in the memory.

No tears fall from the Lachrymist’s eyes.

His is a loss that is striking only in its ordinariness. There is nothing so terrible about it as to make clear why he would wish to be forgotten. She weeps over worse every day.

“But it is mine.” His voice more faded this time, a whisper now louder than the rustle of dust falling. “Memory holds us here, keeps us prisoner. I would go.”

The Lachrymist considers. “You know this cannot be undone.”

“But I already have been.”

His shadow is no longer substantial enough to bear even the weight of tears, and so the Lachrymist pours the bottle out herself. By the time it empties, he is gone.

• • • •

One day the Lachrymist will weep for herself. She will gather her tears in a jar, close the lid, and set it on a shelf where the dust of time will never touch it. One day, that jar of tears will be all of her that remains.

She does not know whether it will be enough.

But she will weep anyway.

©2020 by Kat Howard.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kat Howard is the author of the novels Roses and Rot and the Alex Award-winning An Unkindness of Magicians. Her most recent book is her short fiction collection, A Cathedral of Myth and Bone. Her novella, The End of the Sentence, co-written with Maria Dahvana Headley, was an NPR Best Book of the Year in 2014, and she was the writer for 18 issues of The Books of Magic for DC Comics. She teaches in the genre writing MFA program at Western Colorado University, and currently lives in New Hampshire, where she is working on her next projects.

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

Magnificent Maurice, or the Flowers of Immortality

Rati Mehrotra | 4540 words

The tree has many names, in many languages: Yggdrasil, Kalpavriksha, Jian-Mu, Ashvattha. It stands at the nexus of worlds, dark matter coiling around its roots, the rim of the universe held aloft by its ever-expanding crown. Its branches bend spacetime, its cordate leaves uphold the laws of physics, and its tiny white flowers grant immortality.

Let us be more specific. One flower grants immortality, two flowers cause a prolonged and painful death, three flowers the obliteration of an entire species. It does not pay to be greedy.

But this is not a story about the tree, per se. Neither is it the story of the witch who dwells in a cottage between its twisting roots—although the witch is a caretaker of the tree and an important character. Witches always are.

No, it is Maurice we are concerned with, Maurice who is currently sprawled on the roof of the cottage, soaking in the light of the yellow star that hangs on one of the branches above. Let us call it the sun for the sake of simplicity. The sun was not essential, but the witch is wise to the ways of cats and brought one anyway. If Maurice could feel gratitude, he would be grateful to the witch, but all cats are the same, even the godlike ones. Especially the godlike ones.

This was many years ago, as the universe counts such things, but who’s counting? Time flows differently here. Maurice is not immortal, and neither is the witch. They are also not as young as they used to be. There are other cats now, milling about the cottage, meowing for the witch’s attention. One day, one of them will take his place.

But not yet. Oh, not yet. Maurice raises his head and casts a yellow-eyed glare at the tortoiseshell that has just landed on the edge of the roof. To his astonishment, she does not retreat. He allows his fur to stand up, his lips to curl away from his sharp white teeth.

“Good morning, Maurice,” she says smoothly. “Surely the roof is big enough for both of us?”

Maurice’s astonishment turns to rage. A mere kitten, challenging his territory! The roof is his. The tree is also his. He will die defending it. The witch knows this, knows how good he is at his job, and yet she has allowed these . . . these . . . children to invade his home!

He rises in all his torn-eared, ragged-furred glory and arches his back, hissing like a storm of bees.

The tortoiseshell regards him, unfazed, out of bright green eyes. “There’s chopped sardines for snack. In case you want to join us.” She turns to leave. “My name is Butterscotch,” she tosses over her shoulder. She leaps down, as silently as she came.

Maurice settles back on the roof, seething. Butterscotch. What kind of name is that for a tortoiseshell? He will try his best to forget it. (In this, he will fail.)

The sun is still blazing, but it has lost all warmth for him. His limbs ache with the ghosts of ancient injuries, battles fought balanced on the edge of the abyss, in the maw of black holes, in the heart of dying stars. There will always be monsters. But there will not always be Maurice.

He washes his paws and thinks, glumly, about sardines.

• • • •

A leaf veined with age and fatigue lets go its tenuous hold on life, and falls. Somewhere, far distant, an earthquake cleaves a world.

In the time it takes a new leaf to grow, a race of Cetaceans leave their ocean world to become spacefarers. Humans establish their first colony on Mars. A star in the Milky Way goes supernova, dimming every other star in the galaxy.

Humans and Cetaceans will not meet. The two species will pass each other by, missing by a mere million kilometers. You might think this is sad, but it is actually a deliberate move on the part of the Cetaceans, who know potential extinction when it stares them in the face.

• • • •

In the cottage between the roots of the tree, the witch requests Maurice to recount his first battle for the edification of the six—SIX!—cats gathered around the fire. The fire, like the sun, is not necessary. But the cats gravitate to it like bees to lavender.

The witch sits on her rocking chair, knitting scarves for the tree. The scarves are also not really necessary, but the tree appreciates them. Bright red, yellow, and blue patterns speckle various branches and bits of gnarly trunk, healing unseen hurts, keeping the worms of entropy at bay.

Maurice glares at the cats clustered before him. He does not wish to recount his first battle. He does not remember his first battle. But he has never refused the witch anything, not when she has asked politely.

She has always asked politely.

Like the time she said, O Valiant Maurice, I ask your leave to adopt these star kittens. The poor things are friendless and homeless. They will die if we do not take them in.

What was he supposed to do, say no, let them die? Or no, find another universe for them?

He almost did. He feels surly and ill-used.

But the witch is waiting, and Butterscotch holds him with her cool green gaze, and the fire crackles with expectation.

Maurice begins, addressing himself to the fire, for that is preferable to addressing the puny felines who have come between him and his witch.

They listen with attention, mostly. Once, when a tiny ball of white fur opens his pink mouth to yawn, Butterscotch swats him with her paw.

And if Maurice gets a few battles jumbled up and embellishes some details, well, no one’s to know that, are they? The story is what’s important.

• • • •

“Many years ago, when I was young and handsomer than any cat has ever been, I faced the greatest challenge any cat has ever faced in the entire whole history of time. I won, of course. I have always won and I will always win, because I am Magnificent.” He directs a scowl at Butterscotch.

When it is clear that she will not lower her disturbingly attentive gaze, Maurice resumes. “I had just finished my training under the great Grimalkin, and he had left on his sky pilgrimage. I was alone, patrolling the tree, when I heard a terrible sawing noise from its base. I leaped down and beheld a dreadful sight.”

The cats hold their breath, and the witch hides a smile.

“It was the tree borers of the Cyrambidae System in Andromeda.” He pauses, allowing the full horror of it to sink into his listeners. “I did not know this until later. I only knew what I saw: giant, hideous beetles with gleaming black carapaces and curved scimitar teeth, boring holes into my tree with saws attached to their limbs.” His whiskers bristle at the memory. “They planned to lay their eggs in the holes so the larvae could feed on the entire universe.”

Maurice begins to pace, his tail swishing. “A cat has three main weapons,” he says, assuming a didactic tone that does not escape the witch. “Voice, teeth, and claws. Voice is best for killing demons, teeth and claws for most natural life forms, and a combination of all three for machines. I leaped on the nearest beetle with a shriek of rage that would have deafened a demon, elongating my teeth and claws so that even an armored dinosaur could not have withstood them.

“But I did not leave even a dent on the carapace of the beetle. I was shocked! I was dismayed! How was this possible?” Maurice stops pacing and rakes his audience with ferocious eyes as if they were responsible for his near defeat.

A small black cat raises a paw.

“What?” says Maurice, irritated at the interruption.

“It is possible they were possessed by demons,” says the black cat.

“Did I ask you to tell the story?” Maurice demands. “Was it you that fought against the tree borers and achieved a glorious victory? No? Then do not utter another word!”

The black cat hides behind the witch’s skirts. Maurice resumes pacing, his fur standing on end. The witch makes a small, soothing sound, and his fur settles somewhat.

“I guessed at once they were possessed by demons,” he says, as if the black cat had not spoken. “Protected by the beetles, the demons were unaffected by my voice. Protected by the demons, the beetles were strong enough to resist my teeth and claws. It was an alliance made by the devil himself! Fortunately, I remembered that I had a fourth weapon.”

(Actually, there is a fifth weapon, but it’s not for neophyte ears, and Maurice wouldn’t dream of bringing it up, not even to boast.)

Butterscotch opens her mouth to speak, then thinks better of it.

Maurice gives a fierce grin. “I had my lives.”

The cats ooh and aah. It is an oddly satisfying sound.

“We only have nine to give,” says Maurice, resuming his lecturing tone, “so it must be an Emergency. This was an Emergency. I cut my life out with my teeth. The pain was unbearable! But did I falter? Did I hesitate? No. I ripped it screaming and groaning from my heart, until it stood in front of me, a replica of my handsome self, although not quite as solid. It bit all its fur off and hurled it at the beetles. Each hair elongated into a whip of lightning that snapped around a beetle, crushing its carapace. In minutes, every beetle had been pulverized by the whips. The demons emerged from the broken beetle bodies, ghastly and screeching. I joined my voice to my replica’s, and together we sang a song to drown them out. It was glorious! The demons clapped their hands over their ears and begged for mercy. We sang even louder! And the demons evaporated to nightmares and nasty smells that blew away on the wind. When the last demon was gone, my replica bowed to me and faded into mist. And that is how I lost my first life.”

There is a respectful silence. Then the black cat, who has emerged from behind the witch’s skirts, raises her paw again.

“What?” says Maurice, trying to control his temper.

“How many lives do you have left?” asks the black cat.

Maurice swells until he thinks he will burst. The witch suddenly finds tasks for all of them to do. Butterscotch takes the little black cat into the corner for a good talking-to.

Maurice crawls into his nest between the roof and the ceiling—a space he has made cozy with blankets and toys—and broods.

He has, of course, only one life left. One last, splendid battle, and it will be curtains for Magnificent Maurice.

• • • •

Time passes. A god arrives, determined to pluck a rare fruit from the tree. Maurice sends him on his way without too much trouble. The fruit will be a new galaxy one day, but do gods care about such things? No, they do not. In this respect, they are no different from demons.

To his annoyance, Maurice now knows the names of all the cats that infest his cottage. The little ball of white fur is Snowflake, and he has the sharpest teeth Maurice has seen in any cat, except himself. The overly curious black cat is Midnight, and she could argue a sphinx to death. Trumpet, Paws, and Destiny are the remaining three. Trumpet has a powerful yowl, Paws can cause tree-quakes, and Destiny can knit almost as well as the witch.

Butterscotch makes them take turns visiting him on the roof, bearing tiny morsels of fish or chicken, begging for stories of his battles. Mostly, he scarfs the treats and snarls at them until they leave. But sometimes—rarely—he will give them what they ask for, and tell a story. They gather round and listen, quiet as mice, until he is done. They do not ask questions, although Midnight has to hold one paw down with another to stop herself.

The witch is relieved. It is time, she thinks, for Maurice to retire. But she will never say so herself.

It is, perhaps, not too long before the witch herself must retire. This she will not allow herself to think, for caretaker witches are even rarer than star kittens. Until a new one comes along, she must continue, though her bones turn to dust within her skin.

• • • •

Another leaf falls. Far away, a world inhabited by machines is swallowed by its star. The machines predicted this catastrophic event and could have left their solar system had they wished to. But there appeared to be no point. The people who made them were long gone, and it seems a fitting end to a once-great civilization.

They leave their story encoded in a quantum riddle, beamed out in the pulses of their dying planet.

It will be thousands of years before it reaches another inhabited world, and when it does, the tree-dwelling primates who are the sole form of semi-intelligent life there will be quite oblivious of it.

• • • •

Maurice patrols the tree every day. The more hints the witch drops his way, the more grumpy and stubborn he becomes. No, he does not need to rest. No, he does not need company. No, his muscles do not ache. Not even a little bit. He can climb just as well as a kitten, thankyouverymuch.

This is a lie. Maurice groans softly when he is high enough up the tree that even Butterscotch, the cat with the sharpest ears, cannot hear him.

He will not accede to any of the witch’s requests. It’s a slippery slope to retirement, and Maurice has no intention of retiring. He will die on the job, as Magnificent as ever. The witch had best accept this. He loves her, in his own gruff way, but she’s not the boss of him. Maurice stamps on a branch and yowls defiance at the distant heavens. The branch shakes beneath him, and he leaps prudently down to another.

But this branch quivers as well, and he realizes, belatedly, that he is not alone. He puffs up his fur, looks fierce, and peers down the tree.

A helmeted human is climbing up, harnessed to a rope slung over a branch that is scarcely a few metres below Maurice.

Maurice is stunned and ashamed. How has the human climbed so high without him noticing? Most of all, Maurice is outraged. Humans are the most troublesome of all living creatures, and that is saying something. Monsters almost always follow in their wake. He leaps down to the branch over which the rope is slung and slashes it with one swipe of his claws.

The rope falls. The human utters a small scream and tumbles.

Maurice settles down to wash his paws with righteous self-satisfaction, waiting for the small, sad splat the human’s body will make when it hits the metaphorical ground.

It does not come. Instead, there is the sound of rope whipping through air. Maurice observes, to his chagrin, that the human has been saved by one of the innumerable branches that adorn the tree. She has thrown a rope over the next branch and is adjusting her harness. Even from this distance, he can sense her determination.

Maurice grins. This will be fun. He will keep slashing the rope, and the human will keep falling. Eventually, the human will hit the ground, and her atoms will disperse into the universe from whence they came.

He leaps down and raises his paw to slash the rope again.

Pow! Maurice blinks and coughs. Something heavy and sharp falls on him. When the smoke clears, he sees that he is trapped under a metallic net. He tries to move, and the net tightens, digging through his fur into his skin. He can sense the spells on it, designed to blunt his teeth and claws.

“I thought I might meet someone like you,” says the human, tucking a cylindrical tube back into her belt. “I came prepared.”

She hauls herself up with dismaying speed and squats on the branch opposite the fuming Maurice. She smells of sweat and honey, of fear and desperation. She has black hair and brown skin, and eyes that have looked into the abyss before jumping in. For some reason, she reminds Maurice of his witch.

“My name is Uhura,” she says. “I mean no harm. I want just one flower. My beloved lies at the door of death, and this is the only thing that can save her.”

Maurice has heard some version of this story countless times over his long and illustrious career. The flowers of immortality are the oldest myth in all the inhabited worlds. If he could, he’d stamp out every dark and tempting tale there is about them. Then perhaps foolish lovers would stop risking the fabric of spacetime to come here.

“Not yours to take,” he growls. “The flowers belong to the tree. And you can see there aren’t any today.”

The leaves flutter, revealing the tiny flowers hidden beneath them.

Why, Tree? thinks Maurice dismally. I’m trying to protect you.

Uhura gasps. “There are so many! And all I need is one.”

“Each one is a baby star,” Maurice tells her. “To save one human, you would destroy an entire star?”

She presses her lips together. “I would. And you cannot stop me.” Her hands reach for the nearest cluster of leaves, and they part obligingly to uncover the flower in their midst.

Why is the tree helping her? Maurice does not know, and so he does what he has never done before: he uses his fifth weapon. He cleaves spacetime to see the best possible action to achieve maximum glory with minimum effort. It’s a dangerous thing to do; after all, spacetime, once divided, gets ideas of its own. But this is an Emergency, and he only has one life left.

Choice one: He sacrifices his last life, bursts magnificently out of this shameful cage, and claws the human’s face so she topples from the tree. She dies, he dies, Butterscotch takes over his job, and they sing of his brave deeds every night for a year.

One. Single. Miserable. Year. That’s all? Why, Maurice still sings of Grimalkin in his more solitary moments! No, no, this will not do.

Choice two: He lets her take the flower. This is not without precedent. She does not want it for herself, and it will not harm her. But as for her beloved, immortality will ruin her forever. And forever is a long, long time. Centuries after Uhura is dead, her beloved will haunt the Earth, becoming less and less human, more and more like a demon, until she returns to the tree to take revenge on the universe. Okay, not an option at all.

Choice three: Distract her with a game and call for help. This goes against everything a cat stands for, but so far it is the best choice. All he has to do is stall her with a few riddles. Seekers after the flower of immortality love riddles. They seem to think that if they answer correctly, they will somehow deserve the flower and avoid any negative karma from killing an entire star. Maurice can easily summon Butterscotch with a single howl that will also temporarily deafen Uhura. Butterscotch will dispatch the interloper, and the witch will know how to remove the net. An ignominious outcome for him, but also the only one in which he gets to (a) live and (b) save a baby star.

Maurice goes with the fourth choice—the one whose path is too uncertain to see. He draws the seams of spacetime together and purrs, in his most seductive tone, “How would you like a job?”

Her hand stops. She looks at him with a frown knitting her dark, heavy brows. “Are you trying to trick me, Cat?”

“My name is Maurice,” he tells her, “and I have defended this tree for more years than you have hairs on your head. But my witch is growing old. She needs an apprentice. Someone young and strong and clever, who can learn her ways before it is too late.”

She tilts her head, surprised. “But I must return to my beloved,” she says. “I must save her life.”

“Listen to me,” says Maurice, his words dripping with sincerity. This, too, is a weapon—of a kind. “Immortality is a curse. She will never forgive you for it. It will drive her mad. Many years after you are gone, her sanity will crumble like the shore before a raging sea. Is this what you wish?”

“I cannot let her die.” A tiny wobble of uncertainty enters Uhura’s voice. She is young, perhaps no more than seventeen years. All the more impressive, how far she’s come.

“Of course you cannot,” says Maurice warmly. “She should have a chance to recover and live a normal life span. My witch can help you. She knows many secret healing potions. Trust me, you need medicine. Not the flower of immortality.”

Uhura withdraws her hand from the cluster of leaves and leans against the trunk, exhaustion and suspicion warring on her face. “I do not trust you, Cat. We are on opposite sides, you and I.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way.” Maurice is about to say more, when a branch beneath them quivers, rustling the leaves. He tries to look down without moving his limbs. “What followed you from your world?”

“Nothing. I came alone.” Uhura leans over and chokes out, “Oh no.”

“What? What is it?” Maurice stamps a paw in impatience, and the net tightens. Sharp metal digs into his throat, nearly throttling him.

A noxious smell creeps into the air, and a pale, rotting hand grasps the branch they are standing on. The wood creaks in alarm. Uhura jerks back, looking as horrified as Maurice feels.

The intruder raises the rest of its ghastly self up: a black-suited human corpse with flesh peeling away from its face, blank white eyes, and gaping holes for nose and mouth.

“Free me,” yells Maurice. “Quick!”

Uhura throws herself forward and flicks a switch. The net springs away from Maurice and back into the tube, taking a clump of his fur with it. She points it at the corpse and fires. The net lands on the creature, trapping it. It topples off the branch, limbs flailing.

“Good job,” says Maurice, recovering his voice.

Another decaying hand grasps the branch. Maurice doesn’t wait to see who it belongs to. He leaps forward and slashes the hand to ribbons. The corpse falls, its dark mouth open in a permanent grin.

Four pairs of hands clutch the branch.

“Why are there so many?” shouts Uhura, backing away. She raises her metal tube and whacks the head of the nearest corpse.

“Vampire corpse-animation,” snaps Maurice. “Something unique to your world. Thanks a lot for bringing them here.”

“I didn’t!”

“You did. You opened a gateway, and they followed you through it.” Maurice extends his claws and attacks the corpses trying to climb past him. If even one of them manages to pop a flower into its gaping mouth, the entire lot will come to vindictive vampiric life. They will sink their fangs into the tree and suck the sap of the universe into their bottomless souls.

He glances over the edge of the branch. An army of the climbing dead is making its zombie-like way up the tree. Even if Maurice gives up his last life, he won’t be able to ensure the safety of the tree he is sworn to protect. He has already used the fifth weapon once. There is only one thing left to do. Maurice takes a deep breath and pushes aside his pride.

“Butterscotch!” he screams. “Help!”

Cats streak up the tree trunk as if they have been waiting for his signal. Butterscotch takes the lead, a snarling mass of teeth and fur, chomping corpses and tossing them away like confetti. Close behind her are Snowflake, Trumpet, and Paws. She meows a quick order, and Paws slams his body into the trunk.

The tree shakes like a leaf in the wind. It is all Maurice and Uhura can do to cling on. Corpses drop like flies. When the shaking stops, Snowflake and Trumpet take over, picking off the remaining corpses with a speed and ferocity that bely their age and size.

“Your team is pretty impressive,” says Uhura, thwacking another corpse over the head before kicking it away. “You must be proud of them.”

Looking down at them, Maurice realizes, to his astonishment, that he is.

• • • •

When the last corpse has been dispatched, Maurice escorts Uhura down the tree. Butterscotch goes ahead to warn the witch of their surprise visitor. Snowflake, Trumpet, and Paws remain to patrol the tree.

They climb down slowly, Uhura because she is tired, and Maurice because his limbs are cramped and achy, but he pretends he is matching her pace out of consideration.

“If I should return one day,” says Uhura, “there will be a job waiting for me?”

“Do not be too long,” warns Maurice. “If you are going to return, then do so while you are still young, still strong. Witchery is hard business.”

“But important,” she says.

“The most important job in the universe,” he assures her. “Just make sure nothing follows you next time. Learn how to close a gate before opening another one.”

Inside the cottage, the witch has taken the shape of a little old human woman, clad in faded black robes and a pointy hat. She greets Uhura as if visitors show up every week, not once in a hundred years. Uhura introduces herself and explains her problem while Destiny makes tea and Midnight asks intelligent questions.

Maurice crawls up to the sunny roof to doze. He has done his job, with the help of Team Butterscotch. The rest is up to the witch and up to Uhura. She will make a fine apprentice some day. If she returns. If the witch can hang on that long.

“Maurice?” says Butterscotch. “Sardines?”

Maurice jerks awake with a scowl. Butterscotch stands with one paw on the roof and one paw holding up a bowl of his favorite treat.

“Don’t mind if I do,” he mutters, suppressing a yawn.

She pushes the bowl toward him and leaps delicately up on the roof. “You know, I was thinking,” she begins, but we do not hear what she is thinking, for Maurice is not ready to hear it.

He raises himself to his full height and puffs up his fur, wheezing with effort. “Be silent, prideful one, and begone from my roof,” he thunders.

“Seriously, Maurice?” Butterscotch rolls her eyes, but she leaves him in peace. He settles back on the sun-warmed tiles, reaching for the sardines.

One day—quite soon—Butterscotch will take his place.

But not yet. Oh, not yet.

©2020 by Rati Mehrotra.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born and raised in India, Rati Mehrotra now lives and writes in lovely Toronto. She is the author of the Asiana duology: Markswoman published in January 2018, and the sequel Mahimata in March 2019. Her short stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Apex, IGMS, Podcastle, Cast of Wonders, AE–The Canadian Science Fiction Review, and many more. The only thing missing from her life is a cat. Find out more about her at ratiwrites.com or follow her on Twitter @Rati_Mehrotra.

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

The Conductors

Nicole Glover | 3045 words

From a bold new voice in speculative fiction comes a vibrant historical fantasy of magic and murder set in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Hetty Rhodes and her husband, Benjy, were Conductors on the Underground Railroad, ferrying dozens of slaves to freedom with daring, cunning, and magic that draws its power from the stars. With the war over, those skills find new purpose as they solve mysteries and murders in their community that white authorities would otherwise ignore.

In the heart of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward, everyone knows that when there’s a strange death or magical curses causing trouble, Hetty and Benjy are the only ones that can solve the case. But when an old friend is murdered their investigation stirs up a wasp nest of intrigue, lies, and long-buried secrets—and a mystery unlike anything they’ve handled before. A clever, cold-blooded killer is on the prowl, and as death draws near, testing their magic and placing their lives at risk, Hetty and Benjy will discover how little they really know about their neighbors . . . and themselves.

Coming March 2021 from John Joseph Adams Books.

Reward for Two Female Negro Runaways

A pair of sisters fled the 18th night of November 1858.

ESTHER aged 14, fine looking with chestnut coloring and a birthmark on her right cheek. Bring back untouched and alive for $50.

The other, HENRIETTA, aged 15, with chestnut coloring. If examined will find raw ringed scars wrapped around the neck, three fingers wide. Approach with caution and bring shock collar to subdue any magical attack. Reward is $20 dead or alive.

Wanted!

Five Negro males fled the Lea Farm in Pond County with false passes. HARRIS, 42, missing right eye. JON, 20, mulatto with collar scars. LUKE, 22, also mulatto, tall and stout. OBIE, 35, with an R branded on left check. BEN, 16, and able to read and write.

$125 reward for all five, $20 per head.

Posted: December 24, 1858

Wanted, $1000 Dead or Alive for Stealing Slaves!

A Negro man and woman were spotted by the subscriber on the 15th of January in the company of persons belonging to Mrs. Edna Reynolds. The criminals are BENJAMIN, dark coloring with a muscular build. Speaks well and can read. Last seen posing as a blacksmith. With him is HENRIETTA, dark coloring, fine looking despite scars around her neck. Dangerous magic practitioner.

$500 for returned property, $1000 for either criminal dead or alive.

Posted: January 16, 1861

Article XIII

Amendment of 1866

To define the rights of Negroes in regards to spellcasting.

SECTION 1. All persons heretofore known as slaves and free persons of color shall have the right to perform acts of magic and other permitted forms of spellcasting.

SECTION 2. These acts of magic are permitted as long as they are performed within the constraints defined by local authorities.

SECTION 3. It is unlawful for any former slave or free person of color to possess or use a wand. Any person or persons so offending shall face imprisonment no less than one day or more than ten days in the discretion of the Court or jury before whom the trial is had.

—Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

Chapter One
May 1871
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

When the wagon rolled into view, Hetty took another small step along the tree branch. Lookout was not a role she would have chosen, but Benjy had argued a trap was useless if it wasn’t sprung in the right moment. Someone needed to watch the road, or trouble would be the only thing they caught.

If the stars were so willing, Elle could have made a proper lookout. But at the sight of the wagon, the girl clutched her branch so tightly that it was a challenge to find where girl ended and tree started.

The younger girl was one of the dozen or so people who had gone missing over the course of two days, and so far was the only one to have escaped. Hetty and Benjy just thought the missing girl’s trail had gone cold when Elle stumbled out of the woods, frantic for help. Not realizing they had been looking for her, Elle told them everything without hesitation, confirming what they already knew. She had been approached by a kind face, led out of safety, and trapped before she even knew a trick was in play. But the only thing they didn’t know was carried in her breathless words. Details that changed their approach entirely.

After years of ferrying people to safety from white slave catchers, they assumed these kidnappers were cut from the same cloth.

They were wrong.

The men driving the wagon could have been one of their neighbors, someone they’d seen as they went on their business throughout town. Although Hetty did not know these particular men, not even their names, learning this detail stung like a friend smiling as they told your secrets to your worst enemy.

Below her, the bushes rustled as Benjy hurried to finish the last of his spells. Hetty silently urged him on as the wagon drew nearer.

If they had been working in tandem, the spells would be primed and ready.

But the trap was only the first part of the plan, and the least important one.

The driver’s head had just passed under her feet when Hetty let a crow’s caw escape her throat.

She projected her voice as if before her she had a crowd eagerly listening as she spun her tales. Trees some distance away stirred with confused crows, but farther along the road, the bushes stopped moving.

Benjy stepped to the side and slammed his hammer onto the sigil scratched into the dirt.

Light flashed from the strike and dust flew into the air. The trees across from Hetty’s hiding spot swayed until three of them dropped like dogs onto a bone.

Wheels squealed and the horse cried out in alarm. The wagon veered to the side, and the driver swore as he did his best to avoid the pile of trees.

The moment it shuddered to a stop, two men jumped out of the back of the wagon to yell at the driver.

As the dust settled, Benjy tucked the hammer away. But before he approached the trio, he reached up and tugged his left ear.

Hetty rolled her eyes.

Clearly he still remembered the last time they pulled a stunt like this. But she would have lingered on her perch a bit longer even without his warning.

Their plan had not accounted for three men being on the wagon. Nor did it consider the guns the men held in their hands.

The swearing stopped when Benjy drew near. One of the guns turned his way, but Benjy grinned and greeted the trio with a rolling drawl he brought out for these occasions. For some reason, it seemed to put people at ease. Hetty’s husband was imposing even when he tried not to be. He wore his past labors on broad shoulders and held his head high with full confidence as he made his way in the world.

“You fellas look to be in a spot of bad luck,” Benji said. “Need some help getting those trees out the way? Can’t move them, but my pappy taught me a good chopping spell to turn them into firewood.”

While Benjy held the trio’s attention with a rambling story Hetty had invented, she launched into the next stage of the plan. Hetty swung off the branch, soundlessly dropping from the tree to the ground.

The wagon’s doors were partially open when she reached it.

With care, Hetty nudged them a bit wider so she could slip inside. Beams of dying sunlight caught the eyes of the dozen men and women seated around a log. Like a fat spider in the middle of its web, ropes sprouted from the log to bind each person’s hands together so that not even the smallest of fingers could twitch.

This was not as terrible as she expected, but it came mighty close.

Hetty took another step into the wagon. Her appearance sent a shiver through the group.

When the man closest to her made to speak, Hetty raised one finger to her lips.

The only noise she heard was Benjy’s rambling, so she drew the Crow star sigil into the air.

A simple square with a short line extending from one corner, the sigil shimmered in the air for only a moment before Hetty gave life to the constellation. Suddenly, instead of lines and vertices, a crow hovered in the air, silently flapping its wings. Unlike a true crow, this one did not have ink-black feathers. The star sigil was a deep midnight blue from its beak to its tail feathers, speckled with starlight that twinkled even when it stood still.

The star sigil looped circles inside the wagon, slicing through bindings and unraveling the web of ropes.

As the crow did its work, Hetty held out a coin with the Dipper emblazoned on one side. Gesturing toward the open door, she pointed at the road back to town. Most blinked back at her, but an older woman stood up and took the coin from her. She gave Hetty a hearty wink and then held the coin toward the sky. The coin flashed at once.

Ursa Minor took form in front of the woman before shifting into a shower of pale purple light. At the sight, the reluctance in the group melted away. They might not have seen Hetty before, but they had heard the stories of people like her. They knew they were not the first people Hetty had freed.

The older woman held her hand toward the man closest to her. After Hetty urged him with a look, he took it. Others followed, grabbing each other’s hands. One by one, the magic of the coin vanished them from sight—like a veil of invisibility had been tossed over them.

When the last person disappeared into the woods, Hetty directed the crow upward. With a swish of her hand, she imploded the spell, letting loose the magic in a blazing light.

The men outside swore. There was a thump, and then a gunshot split the air.

The horse started at the sound, and its neighs added to the sudden chaos. But it was the second flash of light that got Hetty moving.

She ducked around the wagon, holding out a sharp hairpin.

A bullet struck tree bark inches from Benjy’s head. He ignored it and flicked his fingers into a series of star sigils, forming them so quickly that Hetty got only a faint impression of their shape. The spells shot from his hands and struck the man in front of him. Another man was already on the ground, moaning as he clutched a hand more in pieces than whole.

And the third . . .

The third man was frantically cramming bullets into a pistol.

Hetty jammed the hairpin into his arm. The man yelped, falling to his knees. Hetty jumped back. She ran a finger along the cotton band at her neck, calling on the Taurus star sigil she had sewn into the stitches.

Wrenching out the pin, the man stared at it and then at her. His mouth was still twisted over some crude word when Hetty’s spell sent him flying into a tree.

The man slipped to the ground, out like a snuffed candle.

“Too bad you can’t do that spell from a distance,” Benjy said, tossing the knocked-out men to join the third. The pair hit the tree trunk with a thud. None woke up.

“If I could do anything from a distance,” Hetty reminded him, “I would have pinned them with a sleeping spell from the start and we could have avoided all this trouble.”

Her husband snorted. “Certainly would have made things easier.”

A star-speckled wolf loped over, carrying in its mouth the binding ropes from the wagon. It stopped near the three men and shook itself briefly before vanishing. The ropes fell on the men and then knotted together, binding wrists and ankles with a precision as sure as if done by hand.

“Plan still worked,” Hetty said.

“We’ve done this before,” Benjy said, shrugging, “and this time we didn’t need to be as careful.” He cast a glance around the clearing. “Everyone on their way?”

Hetty pointed upward.

“Except for one.”

Up in the tree, Elle had a death grip on the branch, but a new wariness entered her eyes as Hetty approached.

“Who are you people?” Elle stammered. “You summon birds, walk into gunfire with little pause, and make people vanish into the air. I thought when I ran into you it was luck—”

“Hardly luck,” Benjy scoffed. “We were looking for you!”

The girl emitted a small squeak and pressed her face back into the tree bark.

“A friend of ours sent us looking for you,” Hetty called up to Elle. “Miss Penelope.”

The name did the trick.

Elle’s eyes opened and her grip relaxed so she merely held the tree instead of squeezing life from it.

“Who are you?” she repeated. Curiosity bloomed in her eyes, overshadowing the fear.

Hetty held out a hand to the girl, much as she’d done many times before, and said, “Someone here to help.”

• • • •

When they brought the girl back home, Elle’s mother’s face shone wet with tears. Elle barely stepped through the door before her mother drew her into a crushing embrace.

Hetty stood aside watching the reunion as envy prickled her with each word and gesture.

“Thank you for bringing back my girl,” Elle’s mother said when she finally released her daughter. “Come inside—can’t have you out there after all you done.”

The room was tiny, surprisingly so, given how grand the boardinghouse appeared on the outside. This room must have been partitioned to create more rooms for renters. Hetty’s eyes fell to the paneled wood to her left. It was a shade lighter than the rest and allowed muffled noises to slip through from the next room. But these were small things. The family had a small window to let in the light, a hooked rug spread across the floor, and wilted flowers in a vase on a round table. It wasn’t much, but it was well cared for and filled with love.

“It was no trouble.” Hetty took a few token steps inside. “We were lucky. She escaped them on her own. I don’t think they expected her to have a talent in magic.”

“You taught her, didn’t you?” Benjy asked.

The mother nodded, pride filling the soft curves of her face. “First thing I did once freedom came. Didn’t dare teach any of my children back when we were slaves, but now times are different. Now they’ll have all the tools they can get.”

“She learned well.”

“Not well enough.” Giving Elle a stern look, she said to her daughter, “You should have known better.”

“Those men, they said they knew where Daniel was, said they’d bring him here if I brought the money. I thought . . . I thought it wouldn’t hurt to try. It’s my fault he got sold and I just wanted to see my brother again!”

“We will,” her mother said, “but these things take time.”

“Sometimes too long,” Hetty murmured.

“How did you even know about this at all?” Elle’s mother asked. “I barely told anyone, and none that would know you.”

“Penelope Jones is a friend of mine,” Hetty explained. “She saw a few things that concerned her and got word to me.”

“The choir teacher? I’ll be sure to thank her. I’m in her debt. All your debts.”

Elle’s mother thanked Hetty again and as they were attempting to leave, offered up payment in the form of an inky black candle. Reeking of herbs more mundane than magical, it was a candle of protection, although Hetty suspected the only protection it offered was from the darkness.

Not very much of that, either, Hetty thought as she turned it over in her hands. But they didn’t take up this work expecting payment.

Their first case, if you could call it that, started when they fished a body out of the Schuylkill River, neck slit, and with a fat billfold still in his pocket. It was disturbing, it was strange, and, above all, it was curious. But only to them. The police—who patrolled the streets looking for trouble to stir up—wasn’t interested in the dead man. When Hetty and Benjy pressed too hard, suspicions fell on them. So instead of the police, they directed their questions to people who might actually come to their aid.

That dead man wasn’t the first to be murdered in this city, but he was the first that drew their attention. Hetty and Benjy realized similar deaths would keep occurring and no one would do anything about it.

It became their job. And it still was after five very interesting years.

Whether it was bodies found chopped up in a trunk, missing cauldrons, or cursed teakettles, they poked and prodded until they made sense of the senseless. They found nightmarish things tucked away in the quietest of homes. Revealed culprits and caught thieves. And they found lost loved ones.

The day spent looking for Elle was no different, except this one had a happy ending. Most of their cases ended in death, especially ones like this. Being able to bring that girl home, alive and only slightly shaken, was a delight in every fashion.

Copyright © 2021 by Nicole Glover. Excerpted from The Conductors by Nicole Glover. Published by permission of the author and John Joseph Adams Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nicole Glover works as a UX researcher. A bike commuter and running enthusiast, she enjoys baking and figuring out what book to read next. The Conductors is her debut novel.

Book Reviews: November 2020

LaShawn M. Wanak | 1810 words

By the time you read this review, it will be November. With all the worry over the US election and its outcome, diving into fiction can be seen as escapist. However, we have always sought to explain and define truth, and one of the best ways of doing so is through our fiction, especially SFF. Books can inspire and encourage, predict, and commiserate.

I hope the books reviewed here will bring a measure of comfort.

When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain
Nghi Vo
Paper / Ebook
ISBN: 9781250786135
Tor.com, December 2020, 128 pages

I have not yet read Nghi Vo’s The Empress of Salt and Fortune, which was published back in March 2020. So when I found out her next novella was coming out this year, I immediately snatched it up. I am happy to report that you do not need to have read the previous book. This is a standalone you can sink into.

We pick up with Cleric Chih, a non-binary Collector of Stories using they/them pronouns, as they travel with Si-yu, a mammoth rider who has agreed to escort Chih through a mountain pass. On their journey, they are ambushed by a pack of hungry tigers and take refuge in an outpost. The tigers shapeshift to the human forms of Ho Sinh Loan and her sisters to taunt Chih and Si-yu.

To stall the tigers as they wait for help, Chih tells them the story of Dieu and Ho Thi Thao, a romance between a scholar and a tiger . . . depending on who’s telling the story. This is similar to One Thousand and One Arabian Nights: Chih is telling a story to prevent the tigers from eating them and their companion. What’s lovely about this story is that Chih is not the only one telling it. The tigers interrupt constantly, giving their own version of events and in some cases repeating the same scene, but from Ho Thi Thao’s point of view. In this, a different picture of the tigers emerges. They are dangerous creatures, true, but they are also capable of love and humility.

Vo shows the importance of giving a voice to those impacted by a story. Over the long night, Chih and the tigers dialogue, correct, listen, and argue on the differences in how Dieu and Ho Thi Thao are portrayed. For instance, Chih tells how Dieu is ambushed by a family of ghosts who attempt to betroth Chiu to their oldest son. In the tiger’s version, Ho Thi Thao comes to save her, not from ghosts, but from illusion-spinning foxes. They provide clarity on Ho Thi Thao’s flirtation and wooing, much of which is misconstrued by Scholar Dieu, or is omitted in Chih’s oration. There’s a humorous moment when the tigers bicker among themselves on whether Ho Thi Thao reciting poetry is better in Chih’s version than their own. The tigers know themselves best and ultimately help Chih in making the story a fuller, more complete version of itself. You’d almost forget that they plan to eat Chih and Si-yu when the story is finished.

I enjoyed this story. It encapsulates the line from Hamilton: “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” I enjoyed the exquisiteness of Vo’s language where dangerous tigers recite poetry and act awkward to show love. And it whets my appetite to learn what other tales Chih plans to gather.

Nucleation
Kimberly Unger
Paperback
ISBN: 9781616963385
Tachyon Publications, November 2020, 288 pages

I picked up Nucleation expecting a standard space opera. What I got was a thriller that kept me occupied for days.

Helen Vectorovich is a Far Reaches operator, meaning she can control a robot in space from the comfort of a box that allows her to immerse fully into her work. Her current mission is to check on the Golf Ball, a small spacecraft delivering a payload for building an interstellar gate on a far-off star. However, when Helen logs into the robot onboard the Golf Ball, she finds crucial parts of the ship missing, and a strange dust covering everything. As she and her navigator Ted try to investigate what happened, an unexplained feedback signal knocks Helen from her access to the robot. When she awakes, she learns that the signal killed Ted.

Yanked from the mission, Helen and her team learn that the destruction came from the Scale, an unknown entity that has reprogrammed the nanobots on the Golf Ball for an unknown purpose that may interfere with the mission. Did the nanobots evolve into this new form? Is it interstellar sabotage? Or has a new lifeform taken over the ship?

Helen’s attempt to finds answers is thwarted when she is pulled off the mission and “promoted” to a desk job. Kept in the dark by her team, Helen has to defend her actions to the Far Reaches stakeholders while dealing with the loss of her navigator and enduring physical training to get back in the Golf Ball before another operator steals her spot. And that’s when someone attempts to take her life.

Unger does a terrific job of keeping you guessing at what Helen is up against. We ride along with Helen as she grows frustrated by her lack of progress, questions herself, and endures panic attacks. Helen is a checklist person who goes by protocols, but she is thrown into situations that require flexibility and quick thinking. She also has to deal with outside forces influencing her actions: rival mining companies eager to snatch the Interstellar Gate Mission for themselves, and, closer to home, competitive co-workers who have an eye out for her position.

I also appreciated how Unger’s characters were relatable and didn’t fall into stereotypes much. Even the leader of the mission, Dr. Ivester, wasn’t so much an evil power-hungry mongrel, but more of a Steve Jobs character who would push his team beyond their limits, but could also withstand getting chewed out by said team when he goes too far.

There is a large amount of technobabble, and the book ended on an anticlimactic note. Still, this is a good thriller that will hold you captive until you turn the last page.

The Fires of Vengeance
Evan Winter
Hardcover / Audio / Ebook
ISBN: 9780316489805
Orbit, November 2019, 528 pages

I reviewed Evan Winter’s Rage of Dragons back in August 2019 (bit.ly/2ZOXiD7), about a young man bent on getting revenge for the death of his father. Now Winter is back with his sequel, The Fires of Vengeance, where we get to see that vengeance only begets more vengeance.

The book picks up with Tau, a fighter who just has been dubbed the Queen’s Champion. He and his group of fighters will now aid Queen Tsiora in her effort to keep the throne from being wrenched away by her sister, Esi, who is aided by her own Champion, Odili. Tau is bent on killing Odili, his father’s killer, but those plans will have to be put on hold.

Queen Tsiora has her own problems. Many of the Nobles are upset that Tau, part of the Lesser Common caste, was appointed the Queen’s Champion. She must unite them back under her rule, fighting off coups and attempts on her life, while at the same time fighting against the invasion of the Xidda, the indigenous people trying to take back their land. In order to do so, she needs Tau to do some dangerous tasks. Before the story is over, there will be more killing. And Tau learns that Tsiora harbors a secret that will change how she will rule the Omehi people.

Winter really amped up the action, with most of it centered on Queen Tsiora. She’s smart and has an eye for the future, but she is not a Disney princess. The commands she gives have consequences. She will do what she needs to do for the good of her country and the will of her Goddess, whether it means ordering an execution for a pair of nobles starting a coup against her, or ordering Tau to kill a Xidda commander. Winter does an excellent job of showing many different sides of Tsiora: regal, strong, merciless, vulnerable, and questionable. Is she in the right? Is she truly doing what’s good for the country? Or are the nobles justified in rebelling against her?

We don’t know for sure, and that’s exactly what Winter is aiming for. Violence turns people into caricatures. Tau can only see his opposition as one-note killers. When he sees hints of their fuller selves—a fighter carrying a charcoal picture of her daughters, for instance—he experiences dissonance and questions himself. In a sense, The Fires of Vengeance mirrors When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain . . . with more violence.

In the last story, Tau and his fighters fought demons in the spirit world Isihogo. In this story, Isihogo is starting to bleed into the real world, to the point that Tau starts having trouble telling real people from demons. Perhaps it’s a spiritual battle, as Tau commits atrocity after atrocity in the name of his queen, hoping he could quench his thirst for vengeance. But vengeance isn’t healing; in his push to serve his queen, Tau loses much.

What struck me the most was the weariness that the Queen and most of the cast hold as tragedy after tragedy happen to them, relentless. Having endured 2020 so far, I find myself deeply relating to that. And yet, there’s a strong will in all the characters to push on, despite the horrors they’ve seen, such as the Queen’s vizier, Nyah, who may be bracing and difficult, but who also deeply cares for her Queen.

The Fires of Vengeance is a hard read that ends on a bleaker note than its predecessor, but there’s one more book to go. We’ll see just how high a cost Tau and his Queen will pay to bring about peace.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LaShawn M. Wanak has been writing speculative fiction stories professionally since 2006. Her works have appeared in the 2018 Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy Anthology, Fireside Magazine, FIYAH, and many others. She is the editor of GigaNotoSaurus and reviews books for Lightspeed Magazine. Writing stories keeps her sane. Also, pie. Visit her blog at tbonecafe.wordpress.com.

Media Review: November 2020

Lisa Nohealani Morton | 981 words

Vagrant Queen
Created by Jem Garrard.
Produced by Blue Ice Pictures.
Released March 27, 2020.

Science fiction is a genre that is constantly in conversation with itself. The call-back, the reaction story, and the homage are all familiar riffs in the song of SF. Vagrant Queen, created by Jem Garrard and airing on SyFy, is a smart, funny, neon-soaked space opera that uses all those tools to alternately embrace and interrogate SFF’s deeply-rooted tropes through the lens of an endearing, addictive show.

Though the show owes a lot of its aesthetic to classic camp, with a scenery-chewing, over-the-top villain (Lazaro, played by Paul du Toit) and an entire episode devoted to a retelling of the movie Clue in space, it features vibrant, well-developed characters, a refreshingly healthy approach to their complex relationships, and a cast headed by a queer woman of color and centering a will-they-or-won’t-they f/f relationship as its primary romance. Vagrant Queen doesn’t just refuse to apologize for its queerness; it refuses to acknowledge that queerness as worthy of remark. Elida and Amae’s relationship is portrayed as exactly the sort of unresolved-sexual-tension-filled clichéfest that the het romance normally featured in this kind of show would get, and gives us a future where queer love doesn’t need a narrative justification or a balancing tragedy to be centered.

Vagrant Queen is based on the comic book series of the same name, written by Magdalene Visaggio. The star of our show is the scrappy, self-reliant Elida (played by Adriyan Rae): a scavenger (“scav”) who scrapes out a meager living by salvaging (or stealing) ancient artifacts and technology for wealthy patrons and crime bosses. But Elida’s no ordinary scav: As we find out in the pilot, she’s also the long-missing—but unwilling—Queen of Arriopa. She quickly gathers friends to support her—her old frenemy Isaac (Tim Rozon), and a genius mechanic-slash-love-interest named Amae (Alex McGregor). They set forth on Isaac’s spaceship to save the galaxy, or sell it for a profit, or possibly just to stay alive and keep scavving.

When the Committee for Public Safety-like Republic who deposed Elida comes looking for her, though, they’re drawn into a war to save the people of Arriopa from Lazaro’s totalitarian, mindslaving rule. Elida and her friends are thrust into the position of fighting against a Republic they can’t let stand and aren’t willing to replace. The standard space fantasy trope would have Elida restoring the status quo by way of retaking her bloodright, but the show rules that out in the very first episode in favor of a much more interesting idea: What if the destined hereditary hero and her friends were reasonably well-adjusted human beings? Many episodes start out as a straightforward rendition of SFnal tropes, only to be taken in a new direction by the emotional beats of the story when the characters refuse to limit themselves to the emotional range and intelligence of their clichés.

Nodding to genre, as the show never fails to do, Elida initially refuses the call to save Arriopa from Lazaro and the Republic. She doesn’t want to be Queen; she just wants to move on with her life. When the Arriopan monarchists try to guilt-trip her into being their savior, Amae sits her down and tells her, “You are not responsible for the actions of your oppressors.” To a monologuing Arriopan mentor telling Elida why he lied to her about her mother being alive, Amae shouts, “This dramatic speech right here? It’s nothing but a ruse to hide the fact that you’re an asshole!” Having delivered this direct refutation of an overdone trope, she physically prevents him from following Elida. Later, upon realizing that she’s wronged Elida, Amae demonstrates a perfect apology, recognizing the impact of her actions as more important than her intent and acknowledging that Elida has no obligation to forgive her. It’s as though the writers sorted through their list of plot elements and discarded all the ones that require the main characters to be terrible at relationships.

The show ups the stakes as the season goes on, of course—adding a Galaxy-endangering McGuffin and a hereditary immunity possessed only by Elida herself—and at the same time we learn through flashbacks that Elida never believed she had a right to rule based only on her birth, unlike your typical deposed-and-hidden monarch in fantasy epics. Grappling with this dilemma—and the novel idea that she might not be the only person in the universe she can depend on—is Elida’s central character arc for the season. The show plays with this expertly, with twists and countertwists keeping Elida from finding secure footing until she’s spinning out of control, unable to trust even her closest friends and more convinced than ever that she’s better off all alone.

Despite the unexpected nuances in its characters and relationships, Vagrant Queen is also funny, fast-paced, campy as all Hell, and such a sheer joy to watch that I spent entire episodes grinning wildly. It’s littered with nods to classic SF media both well-known and obscure to the point that a second layer of joy can be found in the show through playing spot-the-reference. And it’s so deeply embedded in the fabric of its genre that SF fans ought to find it feels like a current and active participant in SF’s eternally ongoing conversation, rather than a reference-dropping imposter.

Sadly, Vagrant Queen was canceled by SyFy after the end of the first season, although Magdalene Visaggio indicated on Twitter that the show is seeking a streaming home. The existing season is still a joy and a delight, however, and is worth the time invested in it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born and raised in Honolulu, Lisa Nohealani Morton lives in Washington, DC. Her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Lightspeed, Fireside, and Daily Science Fiction. Writing as Ellen Cooper, she published the interactive novel Congresswolf through Choice of Games in 2016. She can be found on Twitter as @lnmorton.

Interview: Usman T. Malik

Christian A. Coleman | 2929 words

Usman T. Malik is a Pakistani-American writer and doctor. His fiction has been reprinted in several years’ best anthologies, including the Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy series, and has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, the Million Writers Award, and twice for the Nebula. He has won the Bram Stoker and the British Fantasy Awards. He is a co-founder of the Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction, which seeks to nurture science fiction writers of Pakistani origin.

Usman’s debut collection, Midnight Doorways: Fables from Pakistan, has garnered praise from writers such as Aamer Hussein, Brian Evenson, Joe Hill, Paul Tremblay, and Man Booker finalist Karen Joy Fowler. The book will be out in early 2021. You can find Usman on Twitter at @usmantm.

You’ve won the Bram Stoker and British Fantasy Awards. What’s it feel like to have your debut short story collection, Midnight Doorways: Fables from Pakistan, on the brink of making its grand entrance?

When I began writing seriously in 2012, I thought I’d have a book ready for prime time in a year. I’d write the Great Pakistani-American novel, sell a million copies, and settle into a life of literary splendor with coffee and croissants in the morning and speaking engagements and movie deals at night. That fanciful bubble burst pretty quickly, and I busied myself with trying to actually learn how to write. I’m lucky that my readers have accompanied this journeyman writer since that time and am grateful that I finally have something they can put on their shelf.

Nine Pakistani artists and designers were commissioned to illustrate your collection. Tell us a little about why you wanted to have each story illustrated.

When I was a child, some of my favorite books were illustrated editions of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. Sketch art and color plates by Arthur Rackham, Harry Clarke, Edward Gorey, and Gustave Doré would send my imagination soaring. This was much before I realized I was a colonial experiment—a middle-class mule with dreams and riches dangled before him as he trots along with a hundred million others. The mule’s been trained to dream a certain way, to crave the carrot and thrill at the whiplash until he thinks those are things he wants. Perhaps—or sometimes—we grow up and realize we want subversion but on our terms, not on the terms of masters past or present.

I wanted those stories illustrated my way. I wanted the Old and New Worlds to meet but at a crossroads of my choosing, at the terms of my people. That is also one reason I opted to bring out my debut collection in Pakistan rather than elsewhere.

How did you go about finding the artists? What was your process like?

I put out a call on social media and was flooded by the most dazzling portfolios in the world. The sheer quality of Pakistani speculative art is breathtaking. The artists were variegated and visionary. A few approached me by email, and friends referred others. Two of my favorite pieces in the book are by folks who aren’t well known, but whose work grabbed my attention immediately; I even knew which stories they’d be most suited for. In each case, I wanted the artist to work freely and ferociously. And they really did. I will also add that if you throw in cover art and book design, we have a total of nine visual and design artists who’ve worked on the book, and eight of those nine are women.

The subtitle of your collection is Fables from Pakistan. Tell us why you call these short stories fables.

The short story as a literary form is a modern construct. We had myths, legends, parables, folktales, allegories, and fables first. The characters in my stories and the author of those characters have been struggling under the burden of a past so vast and mysterious that the term short story didn’t seem true to me, especially since the modern Pakistani or Pakistani diaspora short story has mostly been rooted in the “real.” The single most important writer of the modern Urdu story, Naiyer Masud, works a crystalline prose that has the paradoxical effect of accentuating the impenetrability of his uncanny stories. If fables are lies that narrate useful truths, no writer has crafted better subcontinental fables than Masud. I hope some of my fables will aspire to a similar level.

Fables, by definition, dramatize a moral lesson. Though I prefer how you put it: fables being lies that narrate useful truths. What are your thoughts on horror and weird fiction as genres for conveying moral lessons?

Reducing art (or the world) to questions of morality will often render it worthless. For me, a fable quintessentially is about capturing and sharpening the edges of truth. Horror and weird fiction bend the rays of human conscious and subconscious like gravity bends light: they warp the human condition till it is rendered simultaneously less as well as more recognizable. How tolerable the result may be depends on the observer.

How did you decide on which stories to put in the collection? You mentioned that you had an idea of which ones you wanted specific artists to illustrate.

I wanted to put in stories spanning the extent of my decidedly minor literary career. They couldn’t just be sequential; they should show the range of what I like to do as a writer. Therefore, you have a couple science fiction stories bookended by ghost and cosmic horror tales. And yes, I wanted certain illustrators for certain pieces. I knew before I’d even talked to him that Omar Gilani would be a great choice for “The Wandering City;” same with the choice of Emil Hasnain as the artist for “In the Ruins of Mohenjo-Daro.”

You’ve talked previously about childhood as one of the recurring themes in most of these stories. It looks like metamorphosis is another one you’ve explored. I’m thinking of the ending of “The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family;” the serpentine menace in “Dead Lovers on Each Blade, Hung;” Daoud bringing the dead to life in “Resurrection Points.” Would you say that metamorphosis is a way for you to comment on or address the fears and social anxieties present in these stories, like political unrest and the threat of suicide bombers?

I hate change. I always have. I’m afraid of it. It is very likely I have an attachment disorder in the Buddhist sense: my attachment to things and perceived safety is pathologic. This may be why, during the creative act, transformation, often irrevocable, moors my stories. Perhaps I enact the transformative act in the fictive space precisely because it sustains my illusion of safety. If so, the metamorphoses in these stories address my personal demons more than societal demons. Perhaps, in the end, there is no difference.

While we’re on the topic of societal demons, here’s one thing I noticed about the end of “Vaporization Enthalpy.” The dedication reads: “For the 145 innocents of the 16/12 Peshawar terrorist attack and countless known and unknown before.” What’s the story behind the dedication?

On the 16th of December 2014, six terrorists entered a school in Peshawar, Pakistan, and gunned down nearly 150 people; 132 were middle-school children. I was visiting Pakistan at that time, and the televised sight of those little coffins being lifted was so dreadful that I wept for days. “Vaporization Enthalpy” was originally written in protest against drone killings conducted by American forces in Pakistan and Afghanistan; after the 16/12 massacre, I changed my dedication. “Vaporization Enthalpy” is a violent story against violence, a eulogy to innocence and love. It is unashamedly sentimental, and I’m proud of it for doing what it does.

“The Wandering City” is the newest story, published this year in Us in Flux. This one’s about a full-sized Enchanted City that lands mysteriously in Lahore, unleashing a variety of reactions from a collective cast of characters rather than a central protagonist. How did the premise come together for you?

As a child, I loved fairy tales, perhaps more than I loved horror (although I recall that as time went on, my favorite issues of the Pakistani kid mags, Bachon ki Dunya, Bachon ka Bagh, Jugnoon, etc., would recurrently be the “special horror number” issues). Yet I wasn’t drawn to fairy tale retellings until I went to Sycamore Hill and engaged with Karen Joy Fowler and Kelly Link on the subject of fairy tale and fairy tale-adjacent stories; they both did such perfect retellings that my jaw dropped. I realized I’d moved away from my childhood more decisively than I intended. As a writer, I like stories that consistently manage to evoke a sense of awe—whether that was marvel at a writer’s use of language or literary advice or astonishment at their reimagining of symbols. Fairy tales tend to do all that. Thus began my return to fairy tales, and where better to start than with the Alif Laila Wa Lail, also known as A Thousand and One Nights?

“The Wandering City” was born in that context: What would happen, I wondered, if the mythical City of Brass appeared a block from where I lived? How would Lahore react to it? Would our wonder or our bravery win? Like the reduced homo sapiens of J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned Giant, would we sell the magic to the highest bidder? Thus a story about a culture and a society I knew quite well came into being.

In one scene, a call to prayer from the Enchanted City’s mosque triggers a character’s atrial fibrillation. How much do you pull directly from your experiences and insight as a healthcare professional for the details in these stories? In other examples, there are characters living with illness, like Ammi who has cancer and Parveen who has polio in “Ishq.” Hakim Shafi is a doctor who uses medicinal snake venom to cure the narrator of his heroin addiction in “Dead Lovers.” Even metaphorical language and imagery in “In the Ruins of Mohenjo-Daro” is flavored with medical references.

I don’t know if I consciously pull from my experiences as a health professional. When I write, a different part of my brain seems to be at work. Yet, knowing the jargon of medicine, the vocabulary of pathos and pathology, does help when I’m creating the language of the story. It’s like borrowing from a second, secret language that only you have access to. It can be helpful; it can also be frightening. Samuel R. Delany told me his favorite contemporary writer at one time was the American doctor Ethan Canin, and perhaps Canin’s Emperor of the Air was so good because he could only write in very short periods of time due to his then-day job as a physician. I don’t know if medicine fuels my creative side as much as it seems to have fueled Ethan Canin’s, but it must do something, or else I might have quit it altogether.

Reading your stories, I detected an alternate sense of rhythm and flow to plot, anticipation, etc. I especially felt it in “The Fortune of Sparrows,” “Dead Lovers,” and “Vaporization Enthalpy” and got a real kick out of it. What are some of the structural or storytelling devices you use? How do you experiment with Western fiction conventions?

I have always wanted to be a writer who works in different modes. I get certain ideas, and to fully execute those ideas, I need particular tools. Sometimes the tool comes from Robert Aickman, and sometimes Thomas Ligotti. Sometimes it’s the musicality of the Punjabi mystic verse that does the trick; the aery quality of a Kelly Link story; or the flourish and fall and rise of Philip Roth that helps create a particular effect. I trust my instincts when I’m writing that first draft, and while they have misled me at times, often I’m guided clearly and lovingly. At the end of the day, every story wants its own voice and impetus, and my job, really, is to figure that out and then let the story flow.

Cosmic horror is one such mode you work in. Your novelette “In the Ruins of Mohenjo-Daro” appeared first in The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction, edited by Paula Guran. “Dead Lovers” flirts with cosmic horror, too. H.P. Lovecraft’s xenophobia and racism need no discussion or introduction here, but I’m curious about how you, as a Pakistani-American and Muslim writer, feel about making the genre yours with your aesthetic and sensibilities.

Cosmic horror didn’t begin with HPL, you know; he himself took a lot from Lord Dunsany and Arthur Machen. While I devoured pretty much all of Lovecraft in my late teens and early twenties, I’m not much of a Lovecraftian mythos reader anymore. Instead, I tend to get my fix from writers who do feverish work from original sources and new fears and don’t worry about HPL’s monsters and monstrous geographies, several of which were taken from religious or mystical texts to begin with. I don’t find most Lovecraftian anthologies intriguing: the stories become pastiches quite quickly. This is why when Paula Guran asked me to consider linking “In the Ruins” with Shub-Niggurath, HPL’s Goat of a Thousand Young, I declined. This was my cosmic horror story with mythos from my part of the world; Lovecraft had naught to do with it.

Having said that, I encourage young horror writers to cut their teeth on HPL, Kipling, Poe, and other problematic figures. Take freely from their toolboxes and become your own iconoclast. Smash their clay feet with the hammers of your vision and subversion.

I hope young horror writers take your advice, because as you’ve observed, horror lags behind the rest of the speculative field with regard to representation and diversity of characters. It doesn’t have the same sort of representation that science fiction does. But when you cross into dark fantasy, where there’s a lot of overlap, you can find the diverse representation there. Why would you say that is?

Science fiction, by dint of its very nature, flourishes on curiosity and sense of wonder as nutrients. Horror, especially western mainstream (read: suburban or white man horror), tends to be conservative and eschews new forms and people. I could write an essay on why I think horror has lagged behind but I believe that is changing, and the change is very welcome. I’ll leave it at that.

I see your fiction as part of the change that’s happening. Your collection is coming out at a time when horror and dark fantasy with socially relevant themes and socio-historical awareness are getting a lot of attention and coming to the fore. In recent years, we’ve seen Victor LaValle comment on police brutality and anti-Black racism in The Ballad of Black Tom. Stephen Graham Jones comments on the legacy of settler colonialism in The Only Good Indians. And of course, there’s Lovecraft Country and HBO’s TV adaptation of it. Do you see your fiction as part of this moment and do you see it bringing an international scope?

I don’t think of my collection as a horror or dark fantasy collection, although several of my stories have elements of both. Instead, as I said earlier, I tend to see these stories as fables that tell the truth of my childhood, my life, my financial, migratory, spiritual, and physical struggles. I see these stories as the narrative thrust of a country that for too long has existed identity-less and on the margins. But also, I am not a Pakistani anymore. I am a Pakistani-American, and that brings with it more layers of distress, displacement, and disillusionment. My fiction is, of necessity, fractured, and I hope those jagged edges render it all the more dangerous.

And we want more of it! What upcoming and dangerous writing projects do you have coming up that you can tell us about?

I am supposed to be writing a few stories: an SF story and two horror ones. They are for anthologies. I’m most excited about trying my hand at a Raj story in the M. R. James mode and seeing what I can do with it. I also have a novel idea I’ve been meaning to return to. Soon, I hope.

Anything else you’d like your readers to know about Midnight Doorways?

It is the culmination of a decade of quiet and passionate work. I hope it reaches an avid young reader somewhere in Pakistan (or anywhere, really) and shows them flashes of familiarity that they had longed for but didn’t quite know they needed. I hope it makes a difference.

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: Gene Doucette

Jude Griffin | 736 words

How did this story come about?

This all started with the title itself. I was trying to come up with a title with a little more whimsy for my upcoming novel The Apocalypse Seven, when I thought of “Schrödinger’s Catastrophe.” It was entirely too whimsical, but I thought it was clever enough to mention it to my editor (John Joseph Adams). He agreed that it wasn’t right for TA7 but then threw me a curve by suggesting it would work really as the title of a short story.

My first reaction was, cool idea but I don’t write short stories. A day later, I had the entire plot in my head. This was mildly annoying because I was in the middle of writing a different novel, which I immediately had to stop working on in order to get “Schrödinger’s Catastrophe” out of my head.

I had it finished and submitted about ten days later.

I was sure there would be a cat. I almost missed it.

Before you started reading the story, there both was and was not a cat in it. It was only after you read it and found there was no cat that the cat ceased to be a part of the story. The difficult question is, by reading it and discovering no cat, did you in effect make it impossible for any other reader to ever find a cat in the story? Or will other readers still discover a cat? If so, does that mean a second reality—in which the cat does exist in the story—has been created by the both-ness of the cat?

. . . or

Dammit, I should have put a cat in the story.

I’m positive I am missing other science references/in-jokes in the story. Will you enlighten me?

I’m pretty sure if you presented me with your list of all the science references and in-jokes you found, at least one or two of them would surprise me. So instead of answering that directly, I’ll give you this: I elected to use the word “chortled” for a very specific reason.

I was bummed your author visit to my local Worcester bookshop was cancelled. What’s the pandemic rollercoaster like for a writer?

Actually? It’s been going pretty well. If you’d told me a year ago I would have to stay inside every day, work my day job from home, and spend the nights and weekends with nothing to do but eat, drink and write, I would have said, “But that’s all I ever wanted to do anyway.” Since this began, I’ve finished two novels and two short stories, and it’s only been six months.

Any news or projects you want to tell us about?

I’ve mentioned one already: The Apocalypse Seven will be released on May 25, 2021. It’s being published by JJAB/HMH. It’s cool and awesome and I can’t wait. But what’s maybe more interesting is what I’ve been doing with the time in-between.

I finished TA7 back in 2019. Knowing the lead time for HMH before publication was going to be a while (compared to self-publishing, which is the rhythm I’m accustomed to) I tried to set up a two-year schedule to get out as much as possible while I could.

After finishing a long-running fantasy series (the Immortal books) I started an entirely new science fiction line called Tandemstar. With a foundation of world-building I’ve been doing at my Patreon site, I finished the first book of The Outcast Cycle (the first series set in the Tandemstar universe) in May. It’s called Two Suns at Sunset, and it was released on September 8, 2020. I just finished the first draft of the second book, The Madness of Kings, and it will be coming out December 29, 2020.

If I’m very, very lucky, I’ll have the third book written and ready to go by the end of March, 2021. If not, it will have to wait until July or August, so that my release schedule doesn’t interfere with The Apocalypse Seven.

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: Kat Howard

Setsu Uzumé | 563 words

In this story, “The Lachrymist,” the link between death, memory, and water suggests a Mnemosyne-like figure. Did you draw from other myths as well? What were some of the seeds for this story?

It’s so interesting to me that you see that link to Mnemosyne in the story, and I love that you do. I often draw on myth in my work, but this time, I didn’t—at least not consciously. My conscious inspiration was the word “lachrymist” itself. It crossed my path on Twitter as an entry on unusual words (I love words and I follow multiple dictionaries). I was so taken with the definition that I decided to see if I could write a story about a lachrymist. She was there from the beginning. The poet was a surprise.

This is your eleventh story in Lightspeed, correct? How has your writing process changed since you wrote “Sweet Sixteen”? What do you take more seriously, and where do you cut yourself more slack?

I wrote “Sweet Sixteen” to see if I could write science fiction. Editor John Joseph Adams said he would like to see something from me if I did, and so I gave it a try. In some ways, my process for short fiction is still very much connected to that—here is a thing I would like to do, let’s see if I can do it.

I’m not sure if I take anything more seriously at this point. One of my goals as a writer has always been to challenge myself, to take my work seriously, and to always try to push and improve. I hope to always to that. I do cut myself more slack on the idea that all I need to do is get words on the page, and then I can fix things in revisions. And I’m definitely better about taking care of my mental health.

What are you reading these days? What do you remember most about a given work once you’ve put it back on the shelf?

I just finished Kathleen Jennings’ gorgeous and haunting novella, Flyaway. It’s Australian gothic, full of fairy tales, and has incredibly lush prose. I’m currently on the third book of Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, having finally given in to peer pressure to read the series, and I’m finding them incredibly enjoyable. And I am so looking forward to Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi.

Do you have a secret dream project? If you had to choose something purely for your own joy, what would it be? Any medium, any IP.

 I did recently get to work on a dream project. I was the writer for eighteen issues of Books of Magic, for DC Comics, which was part of the Sandman Universe. I worked with a great creative team, and felt incredibly lucky to be able to get to write characters that I had loved for years.

What can we look forward to next from you?

I am deep in my next novel, A Sleight of Shadows, which is the sequel to An Unkindness of Magicians. And then I have a few ideas about what might come next after that.

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: Rati Mehrotra

Alex Puncekar | 830 words

What was the inspiration for this piece? Where did Maurice come from?

Discworld fans who have read The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by the late Sir Terry Pratchett will recognize the reference to the scheming cat who stars in that book. The Discworld books were some of the first fantasy novels that I read, and Terry Pratchett remains one of my favorite writers. Maurice is my tribute to him.

There is also a reference to Star Trek! When I was a kid, the entire family used to watch Star Trek (the original series) every Sunday. Lieutenant Uhura was the first WOC that I saw depicted in a major western show. She was smart, capable, and talented. I’ve always wanted to name one of my characters after her.

Lastly, the story is inspired by the mythology and folk tales I grew up reading.

This story takes on an almost fairy tale-like quality. Do you feel that fairy tales influence your writing? What about them makes them so accessible and relevant, sometimes centuries after they’ve been told?

I love fairy tales and folk tales. I particularly love seeing how they intersect. Go back far enough, and you begin to see how multiple versions of a story spread over time, like tributaries flowing out of a single source. Some fairy tales are thousands of years old. We tell and re-tell them. Languages split from their roots and evolve. Wolves become bears become tigers. The monkey wife becomes a dog bride becomes a mouse maiden. Stories don’t stay the same, and they don’t just entertain and instruct. They are a mirror to who we are as people, as a society. They reflect our fears, desires, and beliefs back at us. Sometimes dark, often violent, they reward courage and cleverness, punish greed and stupidity, and just as often are completely amoral. For all these reasons and more, readers will continue to be fascinated by them.

I read in a previous interview that you are deeply influenced by Indian mythology, and some of that influence is evident in this story. Could you talk a little bit about how it was applied here?

The idea for this story originated in the mythology of the world tree, which is present in multiple cultures across the world. Kalpavriksha, for instance, is a divine wish-fulfilling tree in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. It is the tree of life, the Milky Way, and also the birthplace of stars. One myth says it resides in Indra’s Paradise. On Earth, the species varies—an ancient mulberry tree in the Himalayas, coconut trees in coastal areas, a sacred baobab in North India, or even the mighty banyan. Whatever the species, trees provide both physical and spiritual nourishment. It’s not hard to see why they are considered sacred by so many people, and why so many stories have grown up around them.

Why cats? What about them makes them interesting characters to read about?

I adore cats. Sadly, I cannot adopt one, for health reasons. I take great vicarious pleasure in other people’s cat pictures and videos. Cat fairy tales are some of my favorite stories.

The relationship between cat and human goes back nearly ten thousand years when they apparently domesticated themselves out of sheer self-interest. Ancient Egyptians mummified their cats just as they mummified people. Multiple cultures regarded cats as sacred at one time or another. Over the centuries, the furry felines have established themselves quite firmly in the hearts and homes of humans.

There is something about a cat that is mysterious, beautiful, regal, and elegant. They don’t wear their hearts on their sleeves, like dogs do. I always think, looking at a cat, if only they could speak. It’s just one step further to imagine what they would say and do. And honestly, the idea of a universe-protecting cat is much less terrifying than a universe-destroying one. It could go both ways . . .

This story expertly handles adventure, heart, and a little bit of comedy in one small package. What other sorts of themes do you like to tackle (knowingly or unknowingly) in your writing?

I think family and relationships often make their way into my writing. Even in this story, the cats form a kind of family together with their witch. Oh, and food nearly always makes an appearance. I love both cooking and eating, and I think food is an important part of worldbuilding.

What’s next for you? Are there any projects in the works that you can talk about?

I just finished writing a fantasy novel set in medieval India which is full of monsters and mayhem! Hopefully, I get to share it one day. I’m also working on short stories inspired by the Indian epics and Puranas.

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.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 219 words

Coming up in December, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by writing duo Andrew Dana Hudson and C.Y. Ballard (“Your Mind Is the Superfund Site”) and Ben H. Winters (“Party Time!”), along with SF reprints by Jennifer Marie Brisset (“The Executioner”) and S.L. Huang (“The Woman Who Destroyed Us”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Kali Wallace (“The Salt Warrior”) and P H Lee (“Ann-of-Rags”), and fantasy reprints by Maurice Broaddus (“Ah Been Buked”) and Sofia Samatar (“An Account of the Land of Witches”).

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 is with E. Lily Yu. 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: Ashok K. Banker, Claire Wrenwood, Alexander Weinstein, and A.T. Greenblatt.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that speculative goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

Here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Lightspeed:

Website

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

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Newsletter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

RSS Feed

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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 (recently revived, other) 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

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 Fantasy, Nightmare, and/or Lightspeed, 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 our magazines, so they 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 Fantasy, Nightmare, and Lightspeed 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.

Basically, we wanted to create a crowdfunding page where, if you enjoy the work Adamant Press puts out, 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 our 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 and Christie Yant)

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: Burn the Ashes (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: Or Else the Light (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

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

Wool by Hugh Howey

Shift by Hugh Howey

Dust by Hugh Howey

The Silo Saga Omnibus 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

Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth

Creatures of Charm and Hunger by Molly Tanzer

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear [forthcoming]

A Dark Queen Rises by Ashok K. Banker [forthcoming]

The Conductors by Nicole Glover [forthcoming]

The Apocalypse Seven by Gene Doucette [forthcoming]

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.