TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 130, March 2021

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: March 2021

SCIENCE FICTION

Homecoming
Claire Wrenwood

Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit—Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts
Ken Liu

And Now, A Preview of Coming Attractions
Adam-Troy Castro

The Empty Gun
Yoon Ha Lee

FANTASY

Olivia’s Table
Alyssa Wong

The Bear Prince
P H Lee

A Place for Hiding Precious Things
Amber Sparks

Brightly, Undiminished
Sarah Grey

EXCERPTS

A Desolation Called Peace
Arkady Martine

NONFICTION

Book Review: The Unbroken, by C.L. Clark
LaShawn M. Wanak

Book Review: Escaping Exodus: Symbiosis, by Nicky Drayden
Chris Kluwe

Book Review: Broken Fevers, by Tenea D. Johnson
Arley Sorg

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Claire Wrenwood

P H Lee

Adam-Troy Castro

Sarah Grey

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

© 2021 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Grandfailure / Adobe Stock

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: March 2021

John Joseph Adams | 244 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 130th issue!

Thomas Wolfe’s novel popularized the phrase “You can’t go home again,” and in this month’s first piece of original science fiction, “Homecoming,” Claire Wrenwood sets out to prove he’s still right, even when humanity has moved on to newer and stranger planets. Adam-Troy Castro brings us a fresh new story of alternate lives in his dark tale “And Now A Preview of Coming Attractions.” We also have SF reprints by Ken Liu (“Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit—Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts”) and Yoon Ha Lee (“The Empty Gun”).

We’re happy to announce that P H Lee has a new fairy tale for us! In “The Bear Prince,” Dusty Boots returns with a story of inhumanity and power in the kingdoms of both men . . . and beasts. In our other original fantasy short, “Brightly, Undiminished,” Sarah Grey spins a tale of witchcraft and love that’s sure to warm your heart. We also have fantasy reprints by Alyssa Wong (“Olivia’s Table”) and Amber Sparks (“A Place for Hiding Precious Things”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book review columns. Our ebook readers will also enjoy an excerpt from A Desolation Called Peace, the sequel to Arkady Martine’s Hugo award-winning debut novel.

It’s another terrific issue—we hope you enjoy it as much as we do!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Joseph Adams is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and is the bestselling editor of more than thirty anthologies, including Wastelands and The Living Dead. Recent books include A People’s Future of the United States, Wastelands: The New Apocalypse, and the three volumes of The Dystopia 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 Lightspeed and is the publisher of its sister-magazines, Fantasy and Nightmare. For five years, he ran the John Joseph Adams Books novel imprint for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Find him online at johnjosephadams.com and @johnjosephadams.

Homecoming

Claire Wrenwood | 2685 words

Only when Marlo and her mother have followed the attendants through the faux-marble foyer and into the room filled with diffusers and soft jazz and laid down on the massage tables covered in crisp, clean-smelling sheets; only when someone has placed a cool gel pack over Marlo’s eyes and set something against her skin that starts kneading, a familiar, needling motion that ignites a distant spark of recognition within her; only then does Marlo understand where her mother has taken her. She pushes back her eye mask and sits up, and the thing on her cheek disengages with a slight sucking pop. There in the dimness, she peers at the creature and yes, she recognizes it, from her time on its home planet and from various waystations thereafter.

The alien is the size of a rabbit, with a dozen scaled limbs and a narrow head devoid of features save for a long, thin proboscis that balloons into a mouth. When set against a human face, the creature unfurls this mouth like an umbrella, vibrating the tiny nubs inside to slough away dead skin as its hundreds of needle-like teeth penetrate the skin and produce a potent, opioid-like rush. The aliens may be stupid, but they are adept at this one thing. Out in space, people called them squicks or squeakers for the sound they made when you kicked them. But the display behind the counter said something about a skin soother treatment, and Marlo remembers now that this is what people call them here—soothers, not squicks.

Her mother must have heard Marlo’s rustling. “What’s wrong?” she says.

The squick’s long mouth is probing the air where Marlo’s face was a moment ago. Watching the quivering movement, Marlo remembers a hot, flat planet riddled with deep ravines. She remembers rappelling down those steep cliff walls, the sudden coolness, the giant ferns that towered overhead and filled the air with a distinctive wet musk. A strange, dissociative wave rolls over her: she was there, on another planet, and now she is here, in a dingy strip mall salon outside Indianapolis. She has been back six weeks, having finished her contract with an extraterrestrial prospecting firm and returned to fulfill the bargain she made when she fled home the day after her eighteenth birthday. Ten years of adventure, she had told herself; then home to help run the bakery and look after her mother until one or both of them was dead.

Marlo glances across at her mother, at her dark, inscrutable bulk. She pulls the mask back over her eyes. “I thought you said we were getting facials.”

“This is a facial.”

Marlo lies down, trying not to wince as the squick reattaches to her face. “I thought you meant, like, mud masks.”

“Times have changed,” her mother says. “If you hadn’t been gone so long, you’d know.”

“I was on the team that discovered these things. Remember? I made you a bracelet out of their teeth.” And Marlo sees again the long needles she painstakingly glued to a metal cuff; remembers how she had imagined them circling her mother’s wrist like fence posts, like a barricade against the badness of the world.

The kneading on her cheek hitches.

Marlo raises a hand, thinking to take off her eye mask, but a moment later the rhythm resumes, the endorphins already flooding her system, and she lowers her hand woozily. “I wish you could’ve seen it up there.”

“I’m thinking of adding something new to the menu,” her mother says. “Do people still eat donuts?”

“How come you never ask about what it was like? Aren’t you curious?”

“I could inject them with that alien liquor, what do you call it. The stuff that makes your mouth go numb. There’s a place down in Bloomington doing those now.”

“If you could see it, you’d understand. The call of it. The way it pulls you back.”

“Now why would you say a thing like that, Marlene?”

“Marlo.”

“It makes me think you’ll leave again.”

“On my first expedition,” Marlo says, “we scouted this planet.” Her mother mutters something inaudible, but Marlo pushes on. “And we saw this settlement, right? This big round hill with buildings on it. Well, the law says you have to approach new species on foot, so we landed ten miles away and walked. Everything was flat, covered in water that came up to our knees. Everything except that hill. It rose out of the water like a—like an anthill, you know? And we could see them up there, like little ants, going crazy. I guess they could see us too.” Somewhere in the telling of this story, the squick’s high has kicked in. Time has slowed; Marlo feels each word leave her mouth, float to the ceiling, and hover there like an unpopped balloon. “When we finally made it to the hill, they all burst into flame. All at once. By the time we got to the top, no one was there. Just piles of ash, everywhere you looked.”

She stops, frustrated. The story isn’t coming out right. How to convey the eerie stillness of that moment? The sudden wind that blew the ash away?

“I made donuts for your eighteenth birthday.” Her mother’s voice is slurred. “Remember? And then I woke up the next morning, and you were gone. Nothing but a note on the kitchen table.”

Marlo feels herself drifting toward sleep. She tenses every muscle in her body and pulls herself back. “I just wish you’d ask about it.”

“But I knew you’d come home.”

The words are so faint that, a moment after hearing them, Marlo wonders if her mother said anything at all. She swallows. Her tongue is heavy in her mouth. The darkness around them swells, contracts. She can’t tell if it has been five seconds or five minutes when she says, “I applied for another rotation.”

“Mm.”

“Mom? Did you hear me? I’m going back.”

But her mother has fallen asleep, her breathing heavy and sure. I’ll tell her tomorrow, Marlo thinks. The touch on her cheek is gentle, insistent. No sneaking off this time, she vows, only half-believing the promise even as she makes it. Her thoughts are coming slow and blurred, now. Sleep unmoors her. She gives in.

• • • •

And here it was again: the squicks’ home planet, with its flat, bare surface and low-hanging clouds. Ravines crisscrossed the surface like a sunken highway system, forty feet or more in depth and filled with ferns three times Marlo’s height. Holes dotted the ravine walls, openings that led to the squicks’ tunnels and dens. Some quirk of nature had made the creatures the planet’s dominant species. But testing failed to uncover a level of intelligence that required diplomacy under international space-law, so Marlo and her colleagues were licensed to prospect for worthwhile resources. They collected a lot of samples, dug a lot of holes. When one enterprising scientist discovered that starving squicks ate dead skin, with pleasant results, the strategy changed—they were ordered to capture the squicks and bring them to home base for exporting off-planet.

What Marlo dreams of now is her last night on the planet. The other members of her squad had built a big bonfire in the middle of camp, using the last of their kerosene to induce the perpetually wet fern stalks to burn. But Marlo and Fabi had walked away from camp and built their own small fire, which sputtered and hissed as fat drops from the fronds overhead fell into it. Fabi had brought out her last bottle of aaj—to celebrate, she had said, but it didn’t feel like a celebration. Tomorrow, they would be shipped off to different assignments. They had exchanged home addresses, promised to visit, but both knew what would come of that.

Marlo raised the cap of her thermos, full of aaj, to her mouth. But the remembered boundaries of her body had gone blurry, and the cap overturned before it reached her lips.

Fabi tutted. “That was the last cup.”

Marlo touched her lips; the aaj had made them go numb. “I miss home.”

“You’re drunk,” Fabi said.

“I miss my mom’s muffins.”

Fabi buried her face in the crook of Marlo’s shoulder. “Let’s go back to my tent.”

“Did you know she still uses fresh blueberries?” Marlo said. “Supermarkets can’t even get them anymore but she has some connection, drives fifty miles to some guy’s farm every other Saturday.”

Fabi dropped the arm that had been circling Marlo. She prodded the empty aaj bottle with the toe of her boot, then gave it a kick, so that it skidded outside the meager circumference of firelight, into the darkness. She was almost a decade older than Marlo; this was her second rotation. “You only miss it while you’re gone. Then you get back, and no one gets it, and you’d give anything just to get out again.”

“You’re wrong.” Marlo shook her head, and when she stopped her vision—the entire canyon—swirled for a few seconds before settling into place. “My mom gets it.”

“Then why’d you leave?”

Marlo opened her mouth, then closed it. There was a faint sound coming from the darkness. “You hear that?”

“You’re drunk,” Fabi said again. Her words had an edge to them this time: no longer observation but indictment.

Marlo got to her feet and staggered in the direction of the sound. She could hear it more clearly now, a keening that raised the hair on her arms. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw a small clearing. In it was a pulsing mass that slowly resolved into distinct shapes: a half-dozen or so squicks, arranged around another of their kind that was obviously dead.

Fabi had come up behind her. “They’re eating it.”

“No,” Marlo said. “They’re—” But she stopped, because the word that came to mind was too impossible.

The squicks raised their long mouths into the air, trumpeting that high, thin sound into the night sky.

Mourning, is what Marlo had been about to say.

The keening cut short. As one, the creatures’ heads turned toward them. They weren’t so bad, Marlo thought—like little chihuahuas, or something. She remembered the man who used to come into the bakery every Saturday morning with a bearded dragon named Norma clinging to his shirt. He always bought a chocolate croissant and fed her half. And for a moment Marlo thought she might scoop up one of the creatures, stroke it as that man had, let it nibble at the protein bar in her shirt pocket. She took a step forward.

The ends of the creatures’ mouths rolled back, revealing those clusters of needle-like teeth, which seemed to lengthen and thicken as she watched, gleaming whitely in the darkness. Marlo had to stop herself from stumbling back. She forced a laugh. The sound was reflected back by the high canyon walls, amplified, more like a shout. “You see this shit?”

“Easy, now,” Fabi said.

Marlo grasped for the weighted net at her belt. “I could catch every one of you squeakers if I wanted to.” Her fingers fumbled over nothing; she had left the net in her tent.

“Come on, Marlo,” Fabi said. “Let’s go back.”

Marlo faked a lunge, but the squicks didn’t move.

“Oh yeah?” she said, filled now with a hot, fast anger—toward the squicks, toward Fabi, toward the mother who waited, millions of miles from here, for her daughter to return and restore her to herself.

She stepped forward, and Fabi grabbed her arm. “Marlo—”

“That’s not my name.” Some distant part of Marlo’s brain registered that the squicks’ keening had started up again, but she was too focused on trying to shake off Fabi’s hands to care. “You don’t even know my real name.” And she heard it in her mother’s mouth, the flat way she always said it, lingering on the end—Marlene. And she remembered—not the good memories of home that she had worked so hard to cultivate, but the summers that baked people to death in their trailers, the dust storms that swirled across the desiccated fields, the grind of early morning after early morning at the bakery, using the same recipes her mother had used for thirty years, and her grandmother before that; her mother always at her shoulder, not like that, Marlene, like this, her voice a constant in that hot, cramped kitchen, chiding and gossiping and calling out to customers and never talking about a single real thing; how day by day Marlo had felt her world narrowing, as though there were shutters at the corners of her eyes slowly inching toward center—which was why she had caught a bus at six a.m. one morning, nothing but a note on the kitchen table, because she had felt the weight of this life looping heavy around her neck, had felt sure it would kill her if she stayed. And she knew that Fabi was right about what would happen when she went home, but that she would do it anyway. She had split herself apart such that no one would ever see her in her entirety. Part of her would always be an outsider, observing but not observed, removed and yet unable to pull away completely: orbiting herself for the rest of her life like a lost and lonely moon.

“You watch,” Marlo said, tearing out of Fabi’s grasp and lurching toward the creatures, who had hoisted the body aloft, whose wails (she realized) interwove to form a melody, and she drew back her foot and she—

• • • •

Marlo wakes to pain.

A hot, sharp sensation radiates from her cheek and lances through her bones. She staggers upright, clawing at her face, at the creature that has latched onto her skin and pierced all the way through. Its pale limbs swing this way and that as she shakes her head, trying to dislodge it. Blood floods her mouth, trickling down her throat until she cannot breathe. There is a high, tinny sound playing in her ears and a moment later she realizes it is her mother, screaming. The music has stopped and Marlo is pulling and pulling but the thing on her cheek won’t let go. Dark spots crowd her vision. getitoff getitoff someone is yelling. An attendant runs in with a broom and beats the creature, holding its limbs and whacking its middle until finally, with a great sucking noise, it lets go.

Marlo sinks to the floor, coughing. Her mother rushes to her and presses a wadded-up sheet to her cheek. Someone has switched the light on and Marlo squints in the sudden brightness. Her mother’s face looms over her own, almost unrecognizable in the harsh light, eyes and nose pooled in shadow, skin sun-spotted and slack with age.

“I’m sorry,” Marlo sobs. She jerks away from her mother’s hands, trying to see past her, to the squick. It must know this—how very sorry she is. But the squick is facing away from her, cowering in a pool of blood as the attendant advances upon it.

“Sorry?” her mother says, pressing the sheet against Marlo’s cheek, her nose, her mouth, until she can barely breathe. “There now—hush.”

“No, listen,” Marlo tries to say. But her mouth is filled with blood. The attendant tosses the broom aside, grabbing the squick with both hands. Marlo pulls away from her mother. Hot drops of blood spatter against her neck, her shoulders. “It read my mind, it saw—”

“Shh.” Her mother forces Marlo’s head back down, holding it to her breast. “It’s okay. I have you now.”

The attendant has thrown the squick over her shoulder and is carrying it through the door. It thrusts its long mouth toward Marlo, rolling its lips back to reveal bloody teeth, and although it has no eyes she feels its gaze upon her, knows that it has seen her as she thought only she could see herself.

Isn’t it strange? To feel, at last, understood?

©2021 by Claire Wrenwood.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Claire Wrenwood grew up in Indiana and New Zealand and currently lives on Waiheke Island, NZ. A member of the Clarion class of 2019, she also has work published at Tor.com and Nightmare Magazine. Find her at clairewrenwood.com.

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

Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit—Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts

Ken Liu | 5827 words

Before she became a hermit, Asa-<whale>-<tongue>-π had been a managing director with JP Morgan Credit Suisse on Valentina Station, Venus. She would, of course, find this description small-minded and obtuse. “Call a woman a financial engineer or a man an agricultural systems analyst, and the world thinks they know something about them,” she wrote. “But what does the job a person has been channeled into have to do with who they are?”

Nonetheless, I will tell you that she was responsible for United Planet’s public offering thirty years ago, at the time the biggest single pooling of resources by any individual or corporate entity in history. She was, in large measure, responsible for convincing a wearied humanity scattered across three planets, a moon, and a dozen asteroid habitats to continue to invest in the Grand Task—the terraforming of both Earth and Mars.

Does telling you what she has done explain who she is? I’m not sure. “From cradle to grave, everything we do is motivated by the need to answer one question: Who am I?” she wrote. “But the answer to the question has always been obvious: Stop striving; accept.”

A few days after she became the youngest chief managing director for JPMCS, on Solar Epoch 22385200, she handed in her resignation, divorced her husbands and wives, liquidated all her assets, placed the bulk of the proceeds into trusts for her children, and then departed for the Old Blue on a one-way ticket.

Once she arrived on Earth, she made her way to the port town of Acton in the Federation of Maritime Provinces and States, where she purchased a survival habitat kit, one identical to the millions used by refugee communities all over the planet, and put the pieces together herself using only two common laborer automata, eschewing offers of aid from other inhabitants of the city. Then she set herself afloat like a piece of driftwood, alone on the seven seas, much to the consternation of her family, friends, and colleagues.

“Given how she was dressed, we thought she was here to buy a vacation villa,” said Edgar Baker, the man who sold Asa her habitat. “Plenty of bankers and executives like to come here in winter to dive for treasure and enjoy the sun, but she didn’t want me to show her any of the vacant houses, several of which have excellent private beaches.”

(Despite the rather transparent ploy, I’ve decided to leave in Baker’s little plug. I can attest that Acton is an excellent vacation spot, with several good restaurants in town serving traditional New England fare—though the lobsters are farmed, not wild. Conservationists are uncertain if the extinct wild lobster will ever make a comeback in the waters off New England, as they have never adapted to the warmer seas. The crustaceans that survived global warming were generally smaller in size.)

A consortium of her former spouses sued to have Asa declared mentally incompetent and reverse her financial dispositions. For a while, the case provided juicy gossip that filled the XP-stations, but Asa managed to make the case go away quickly with some undisclosed settlements. “They understand now that I just want to be left alone,” she was quoted as saying after the case was dismissed—that was probably true, but I’m sure it didn’t hurt that she could afford the best lawyers.

“Yesterday I came here to live.” With this first entry in her journal, Asa began her seaborne life over the sunken metropolis of Boston on Solar Epoch 22385302, which, if you’re familiar with the old Gregorian Calendar, was July 5, 2645.

The words were not original, of course. Henry David Thoreau wrote them first exactly eight hundred years earlier in a suburb of Boston.

But unlike Thoreau, who often sounded misanthropic in his declarations, Asa spent as much time alone as she did among crowds.

• • • •

Excerpted from Adrift, by Asa-<whale>-<tongue>-π:

The legendary island of Singapore is no more. But the idea of Singapore lives on.

The floating family habitats connect to each other in tight clan-strands that weave together into a massive raft-city. From above, the city looks like an algal mat composed of metal and plastic, studded with glistening pearls, dewdrops or air bubbles—the transparent domes and solar collectors for the habitats.

The Singapore Refugee Collective is so extensive that it is possible to walk the hundreds of kilometers from the site of sunken Kuala Lumpur to the surviving isles of Sumatra without ever touching water—though you would never want to do such a thing, as the air outside is far too hot for human survival.

When typhoons—a near-constant presence at these latitudes—approach, entire clan-strands detach and sink beneath the waves to ride out the storm. The refugees sometimes speak not of days or nights, but of upside and downside.

The air inside the habitats is redolent with a thousand smells that would overwhelm an inhabitant of the sterile Venus stations and the climate-controlled domes of the upper latitudes. Char kway teow, diesel fumes, bak kut teh, human waste, raja, Katong laksa, mango-flavored perfume, kaya toast, ayam penyet, burnt electric insulation, mee goreng, roti prata, sea-salt-laced reclaimed air, nasi lemak, charsiew—the heady mixture is something the refugees grow up with and outsiders can never get used to.

Life in the Refugee Collective is noisy, cramped, and occasionally violent. Infectious diseases periodically sweep through the population, and life expectancy is short. The fact that the refugees remain stateless, so many generations after the wars that stripped their ancestors of homelands, seems to make it impossible for a solution to be envisioned by anyone from the Developed World—an ancient label whose meaning has evolved over the centuries, but has never been synonymous with moral rectitude. It was the Developed World that had polluted the world the earliest and the most, and yet it was also the Developed World that went to war with India and China for daring to follow in their footsteps.

I was saddened by what I saw. So many people clinging to life tenaciously on the thin interface between water and air. Even in a place like this, unsuitable for human habitation, people hang on, as stubborn as the barnacles on pilings revealed at every low tide. What of the refugees in the deserts of interior Asia, who live like moles in underground warrens? What of the other floating refugee collectives off the coasts of Africa and Central America? They have survived by pure strength of will, a miracle.

Humanity may have taken to the stars, but we have destroyed our home planet. Such has been the lament of the Naturalists for eons.

“But why do you think we’re a problem that needs solving?” asked a child who bartered with me. (I gave him a box of antibiotics, and he served me chicken rice.) “Sunken Singapore was once a part of the Developed World; we’re not. We don’t call ourselves refugees; you do. This is our home. We live here.”

I could not sleep that night.

This is our home. We live here.

• • • •

The prolonged economic depression in much of North America has led to a decline of the region’s once-famous pneumatic tube transportation networks that connected the climate-controlled domed cities, so the easiest way to get to the Sea of Massachusetts these days is by water.

I embarked in balmy Iceland on a cruise ship bound for the coast of the Federation of Maritime Provinces and States—November is an excellent time to visit the region, as the summer months are far too hot—and then, once in Acton, I hired a skiff to bring me out to visit Asa in her floating habitat.

“Have you been to Mars?” asked Jimmy, my guide. He was a man in his twenties, stocky, sunburnt, with gaps in his teeth that showed when he smiled.

“I have,” I said.

“Is it warm?” he asked.

“Not quite warm enough to be outside the domes for long,” I said, thinking about the last time I visited Watney City on Acidalia Planetia.

“I’d like to go when it’s ready,” he said.

“You won’t miss home?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Home is where the jobs are.”

It’s well known that the constant bombardment of the Martian surface with comets pulled from the Oort Cloud and the increased radiation from the deployment of solar sails, both grand engineering efforts begun centuries ago, had managed to raise the temperature of Mars enough to cause sublimation of much of the red planet’s polar dry ice caps and restart the water cycle. The introduction of photosynthesizing plants is slowly turning the atmosphere into something resembling what we could breathe. It’s early days yet, but it isn’t impossible to imagine that a habitable Mars, long a dream of humanity, would be reality within two or three generations. Jimmy might go there only as a tourist, but his children may settle there.

As our skiff approached the hemisphere bobbling over the waves in the distance, I asked Jimmy what he thought of the world’s most well-known hermit, who had recently returned to the Sea of Massachusetts, whence she had started her circumnavigation of the globe.

“She brings the tourists,” he said, in a tone that strove to be neutral.

Asa’s collected writings about her life drifting over the ruins of the world’s ancient sunken cities have been a publishing phenomenon that defies explanation. She eschews the use of XP-capturing or even plain old videography, instead conveying her experiences through impressionistic essays composed in a florid manner that seems at once anachronistic and abiding. Some have called her book bold and original; others said it was affected.

Asa has done little to discourage her critics. It was said by the Zen masters that the best place for hermits to find the peace they seek is in the crowd, she wrote. And you could almost hear the disgusted groans of her detractors at this kind of ornate, elusive mysticism.

Many have accused her of encouraging “refugee-tourism” instead of looking for real solutions, and some claim that she is merely engaging in the timeless practice of intellectuals from privileged societies visiting those less fortunate and purporting to speak for her subjects by “discovering” romanticized pseudo-wisdom attributed to them.

“Asa Whale is simply trying to soothe the neuroses of the Developed World with a cup of panglossian chicken soup for the soul,” declared Emma, the media critic for my own publication. “What would she have us do? Stop all terraforming efforts? Leave the hellish Earth as it stands? The world needs more engineers willing to solve problems and fewer wealthy philosophers who have run out of ways to spend money.”

Be that as it may, the tourist czar of the Federation of Maritime Provinces and States, John –, claimed earlier this year that the number of tourists visiting the Sea of Massachusetts has grown fourfold since the publication of Asa’s book (similar tourism surges in Singapore and Havana are even higher). No doubt the influx of tourist money is welcomed by the locals, however conflicted they may be about Asa’s portrayal of them.

Before I could follow up on the complicated look in his eyes, Jimmy turned his face resolutely away to regard our destination, which was growing bigger by the minute.

Spherical in shape, the floating dwelling was about fifteen meters in diameter, consisting of a thin transparent outer hull to which most of the ship’s navigation surfaces were affixed, plus a thicker metal-alloy inner pressure hull. Most of the sphere floated below the surface, making the transparent bridge-dome appear like the pupil of some sea monster’s eye staring into the sky.

On top of the pupil stood a solitary figure, her back as straight as the gnomon of a sundial.

Jimmy nudged the skiff until it bumped gently against the side of the habitat, and I gingerly stepped from one craft to the other. Asa steadied me as her habitat dipped under my added weight; her hand felt dry, cool, and very strong.

I observed, somewhat inanely, that she looked exactly like her last public scan-gram, when she had proclaimed from the large central forum of Valentina Station that United Planets was not only going to terraform Mars, but had also successfully bought a controlling stake in Blue Cradle, the public-private partnership for restoring Earth to a fully habitable state.

“I don’t get many visitors,” she said, her voice tranquil. “There’s not much point to putting on a new face every day.”

I had been surprised when she replied to my request to stay with her for a few days with a simple “Yes.” She had never so much as granted an interview to anyone since she started her life adrift.

“Why?” I had asked.

“Even a hermit can grow lonely,” she had replied. And then, in another message that immediately followed the first, she added, “Sometimes.”

Jimmy motored away on his skiff. Asa turned and gestured for me to descend through the transparent and open “pupil” into the most influential refugee bubble in the Solar System.

• • • •

The stars are invisible from the metal cocoons floating in the heavy atmosphere of Venus; nor do we pay much attention to them from the pressurized domes on Mars. On Earth, the denizens of the climate-controlled cities in habitable zones are preoccupied with scintillating screens and XP implants, the glow of meandering conversation, brightening reputation accounts, and the fading trails left by falling credit scores. They do not look up.

One night, as I lay in the habitat drifting over the balmy subtropical Pacific, the stars spun over my face in their habitual course, a million diamantine points of crisp, mathematical light. I realized, with a startled understanding reminiscent of the clarity of childhood, that the face of the heavens was a collage.

Some of the photons striking my retinas had emerged from the crease in the rock to which Andromeda is chained when nomadic warriors from the last ice age still roamed Doggerland, which connected Britain to the European mainland; others had left that winking point at the wingtip of Cygnus when bloody Caesar fell at the feet of Pompey’s statue; still more had departed the mouth of Aquarius’s jar when the decades-long genocidal wars swept through Asia, and aerial drones from Japan and Australia strafed and sank the rafts of refugees fleeing their desertified or flooded homelands; yet others had sparked from the distant hoof of Pegasus when the last glaciers of Greenland and Antarctica disappeared, and Moscow and Ottawa launched the first rockets bound for Venus . . .

The seas rise and fall, and the surface of the planet is as inconstant as our faces: lands burst forth from the waters and return beneath them; well-armored lobsters scuttle over seafloors that but a geologic eyeblink ago had been fought over by armies of wooly mammoths; yesterday’s Doggerland may be tomorrow’s Sea of Massachusetts. The only witnesses to constant change are the eternal stars, each a separate stream in the ocean of time.

A picture of the welkin is an album of time, as convoluted and intricate as the shell of the nautilus or the arms of the Milky Way.

• • • •

The interior of the habitat was sparsely furnished. Everything—the molded bunks, the stainless steel table attached to the wall, the boxy navigation console—was functional, plain, stripped of the elaborate “signature” decorations extruded by personal nanites that seem all the rage these days. Though the space inside was cramped with two people, it seemed larger than it was because Asa did not fill it with conversation.

We ate dinner—fish that Asa had caught herself roasted over an open fire, with the canopy open—and went to bed silently. I fell asleep quickly, my body rocked by the gentle motions of the sea and my face caressed by the bright, warm New England stars that she had devoted so many words to.

After a breakfast of instant coffee and dry biscuits, Asa asked me if I wanted to see Boston.

“Of course,” I said. It was an ancient citadel of learning, a legendary metropolis where brave engineers had struggled against the rising sea for two centuries before its massive seawalls finally succumbed, leaving the city inundated overnight in one of the greatest disasters in the history of the Developed World.

While Asa sat in the back of the habitat to steer and to monitor the solar-powered water-jet drive, I knelt on the bottom of the sphere and greedily drank in the sights passing beneath the transparent floor.

As the sun rose, its light gradually revealed a sandy floor studded by massive ruins: monuments erected to long-forgotten victories of the American Empire pointed toward the distant surface like ancient rockets; towers of stone and vitrified concrete that had once housed hundreds of thousands loomed like underwater mountains, their innumerable windows and doors silent, empty caves from which shoals of colorful fish darted like tropical birds; between the buildings, forest of giant kelp swayed in canyons that had once been boulevards and avenues filled with streaming vehicles, the hepatocytes that had once brought life to this metropolis.

And most amazing of all were the rainbow-hued corals that covered every surface of this urban reef: dark crimson, light orange, pearly white, bright neon vermillion . . .

Before the Second Flood Wars, the sages of Europe and America had thought the corals doomed. Rising sea temperature and acidity; booming algae populations; heavy deposits of mercury, arsenic, lead, and other heavy metals; runaway coastal construction as the developed nations built up the machinery of death against waves of refugees from the uninhabitable zones—everything seemed to spell doom for the fragile marine animals and their photosynthesizing symbiotes.

Would the ocean become bleached of color, a black-and-white photograph bearing silent witness to our folly?

But the corals survived and adapted. They migrated to higher latitudes north and south, gained tolerance for stressed environments, and unexpectedly, developed new symbiotic relationships with artificial nanoplate-secreting algae engineered by humans for ocean-mining. I do not think the beauty of the Sea of Massachusetts yields one inch to the fabled Great Barrier Reef or the legends of long-dead Caribbean.

“Such colors . . .” I murmured.

“The most beautiful patch is in Harvard Yard,” Asa said.

We approached the ruins of the famed academy in Cambridge from the south, over a kelp forest that used to be the Charles River. But the looming presence of a cruise ship on the surface blocked our way. Asa stopped the habitat, and I climbed up to gaze out the domed top. Tourists wearing GnuSkin flippers and artificial gills were leaping out of the ship like selkies returning home, their sleek skin temporarily bronzed to endure the scorching November sun.

“Widener Library is a popular spot for cruise ship excursions,” said Asa, by way of explanation.

I climbed down, and Asa drove the habitat to dive under the cruise ship. The craft was able to submerge beneath the waves as a way for the refugees in coastal raft-cities to survive typhoons and hurricanes, as well as to avoid the deadly heat of the tropics.

Slowly, we descended toward the coral reef that had grown around the ruined hulk of what had once been the largest university library in the world. Around us, schools of brightly colored fish wove through shafts of sunlight, and tourists gracefully floated down like mermaids, streams of bubbles trailing behind their artificial gills.

Asa guided the habitat in a gentle circle around the kaleidoscopic sea floor in front of the underwater edifice, pointing out various features. The mound covered by the intricate crimson folds of a coral colony that pleated and swirled like the voluminous dress of classical flamenco dancers had once been a lecture hall named after Thoreau’s mentor, Emerson; the tall, spear-like column whose surface was tiled by sharp, geometric patches of coral in carmine, cerulean, viridian, and saffron had once been the steeple of Harvard’s Memorial Church; the tiny bump in the side of another long reef, a massive brain-shaped coral formation whose gyri and lobes evoked the wisdom of generations of robed scholars who had once strolled through this hallowed temple to knowledge, was in fact the site of the renowned “Statue of Three Lies”—an ancient monument to John Harvard that failed to depict or identify the benefactor with any accuracy.

Next to me, Asa quietly recited,

The maple wears a gayer scarf,
The field a scarlet gown.
Lest I should be old-fashioned,
I’ll put a trinket on.

The classical verses of the Early Republican Era poet Dickinson evoked the vanished beauty of the autumns that had once graced these shores, long before the sea had risen and the winters driven away, seemed oddly appropriate.

“I can’t imagine the foliage of the Republican Era could be any more glorious than this,” I said.

“None of us would know,” Asa said. “Do you know how the corals get their bright colors?”

I shook my head. I knew next to nothing about corals except that they were popular as jewelry on Venus.

“The pigmentation comes from the heavy metals and pollutants that might have once killed their less hardy ancestors,” said Asa. “They’re particularly bright here because this area was touched by the hand of mankind the longest. Beautiful as they are, these corals are incredibly fragile. A global cooling by more than a degree or two would kill them. They survived climate change once by a miracle. Can they do it again?”

I looked back toward the great reef that was Widener Library, and saw that tourists had landed on the wide platform in front of the library’s entrance or against its sides in small groups. Young tour guides in bright crimson—the color of Harvard achieved either by skin pigmentation or costume—led each group in their day-excursion activities.

Asa wanted to leave—she found the presence of the tourists bothersome—but I explained that I wanted to see what they were interested in. After a moment of hesitation, she nodded and guided the craft closer.

One group, gathered on what used to be the steps ascending to the entrance of Widener, stood in a circle as they followed a guide, a young woman dressed in a crimson wetsuit, through a series of dance-like movements. They moved slowly, but it was unclear whether they were doing so because the choreography required it or because the water provided too much drag. From time to time, the tourists looked up at the blazing sun far above, blurred and made hazy by a hundred feet of intervening water.

“They think they’re doing taiji,” said Asa.

“It looks nothing like taiji,” I said, unable to connect the languorous, clumsy movements with the quick, staccato motion I was familiar with from sessions in low-gravity gyms.

“It’s believed that taiji once was a slow, measured art, quite different from its modern incarnation. But since so few recordings of the pre-Diaspora years are left, the cruise ships just make up whatever they want for the tourists.”

“Why do taiji here?” I was utterly baffled.

“Harvard was supposed to have hosted a large population of Chinese scholars before the wars. It was said that the children of many of China’s wealthiest and most powerful inhabitants studied here. It didn’t save them from the wars.”

Asa steered the craft a bit farther away from Widener, and I saw more tourists strolling over the coral-carpeted Yard or lounging about, holding what appeared to be paper books—props provided by the cruise company—and taking scans of each other. A few danced without music, dressed in costumes that were a mix of Early and Late Republican fashions, with an academic gown or two thrown in for good measure. In front of Emerson, two guides led two groups of tourists in a mimed version of some debate, with each side presenting their position through ghostly holograms that hovered over their heads like comic thought bubbles. Some tourists saw us but did not pay much attention—probably thinking that the drifting refugee bubble was a prop added by the cruise ship to provide atmosphere. If only they knew they were so close to the celebrity hermit . . .

I gathered that the tourists were re-enacting imagined scenes from the glory days of this university, when it had nurtured the great philosophers who delivered jeremiads against the development-crazed governments of the world as they heated the planet without cease, until the ice caps had collapsed.

“So many of the world’s greatest conservationists and Naturalists walked through this Yard,” I said. In the popular imagination, the Yard is the equal of the Athenian Acropolis or the Roman Forum. I tried to re-envision the particolored reef below me as a grassy lawn covered by bright red and yellow leaves on a cool New England fall day as students and professors debated the fate of the planet.

“Despite my reputation for romanticism,” said Asa, “I’m not so sure the Harvard of yesteryear is better than today. That university and others like it once also nurtured the generals and presidents who would eventually deny that mankind could change the climate and lead a people hungry for demagoguery into war against the poorer states in Asia and Africa.”

Quietly, we continued to drift around the Yard, watching tourists climb in and out of the empty, barnacle-encrusted windows like hermit crabs darting through the sockets of a many-eyed skull. Some were mostly nude, trailing diaphanous fabrics from their bodies in a manner reminiscent of Classical American Early Republic dresses and suits; others wore wetsuits inspired by American Imperial styles, covered by faux body armor plates and gas mask helmets; still others went with refugee-chic, dragging fake survival breathing kits with artfully applied rust stains.

What were they looking for? Did they find it?

Nostalgia is a wound that we refuse time to heal, Asa once wrote.

• • • •

After a few hours, satiated with their excursions, the tourists headed for the surface like panicked fish fleeing some unseen predator, and in a way, they were.

The forecast was for a massive storm. The Sea of Massachusetts was rarely tranquil.

As the sea around us emptied of visitors and the massive cloud-island that was the cruise ship departed, Asa grew noticeably calmer. She assured me that we were safe, and brought the submersible craft to the lee of Memorial Church Reef. Here, below the turbulent surface, we would ride out the storm.

The sun set; the sea darkened; a million lights came to life around us. The coral reef at night was hardly a place of slumber. This was when the luminescent creatures of the night—the jellies, the shrimp, the glow-worms and lantern-fish—came out of hiding to enjoy their time in this underwater metropolis that never slept.

While the wind and the waves raged above us, we hardly felt a thing as we drifted in the briny abyss, innumerable living stars around us.

• • • •

We do not look.

We do not see.

We travel millions of miles to seek out fresh vistas without even once having glimpsed inside our skulls, a landscape surely as alien and as wondrous as anything the universe has to offer. There is more than enough to occupy our curiosity and restless need for novelty if we but turn our gaze to the ten square meters around us: the unique longitudinal patterns in each tile beneath our feet, the chemical symphony animating each bacterium on our skin, the mysteries of how we can contemplate ourselves contemplating ourselves.

The stars above are as distant—and as close—as the glowing coral-worms outside my portholes. We only have to look to see Beauty steeped in every atom.

Only in solitude is it possible to live as self-contained as a star.

I am content to have this. To have now.

• • • •

In the distance, against Widener’s cliff-like bulk, there was an explosion of light, a nova bursting in the void.

The stars around it streaked away, leaving inky darkness behind, but the nova itself, an indistinct cloud of light, continued to twist and churn.

I woke Asa and pointed. Without speaking, she guided the habitat toward it. As we approached, the light resolved itself into a struggling figure. An octopus? No, a person.

“That must be a tourist stranded behind,” said Asa. “If they go up to the surface now, they’ll die in the storm.”

Asa switched on the bright lights in front of the habitat to get the tourist’s attention. The light revealed a disoriented young woman in a wetsuit studded with luminescent patches, shielding her eyes against the sudden glow of the habitat’s harsh lights. Her artificial gill slits opened and closed rapidly, showing her confusion and terror.

“She can’t tell which way is up,” Asa muttered.

Asa waved at her through the porthole, gesturing for her to follow the habitat. There was no airlock in the tiny refuge, and we had to go up to the surface to get her in. The young woman nodded.

Up on the surface, the rain was torrential and the waves so choppy that it was impossible to remain standing. Asa and I clung to the narrow ridge around the entrance dome on our bellies and dragged the young woman onto the craft, which dipped even lower under the added weight. With a great deal of effort and shouting, we managed to get her inside, seal the dome, and dive back underwater.

Twenty minutes later, dry, gills removed, securely wrapped in a warm blanket with a hot mug of tea, Saram – looked back gratefully at us.

“I got lost inside,” she said. “The empty stacks went on and on, and they looked the same in every direction. At first, I followed a candy-cane fish through the floors, thinking that it was going to lead me outside, but it must have been going around in circles.”

“Did you find what you were looking for?” asked Asa.

She was a student at Harvard Station, Saram explained—the institution of higher learning suspended in the upper atmosphere of Venus that had licensed the old name of the university lying in ruins under us. She had come to see this school of legend for herself, harboring romantic notions of trying to search through the stacks of the dead library in the hopes of finding a forgotten tome.

Asa looked outside the porthole at the looming presence of the empty library. “I doubt there’s anything left there now after all these years.”

“Maybe,” Saram said. “But history doesn’t die. The water will recede from here one day. I may live to see when Nature is finally restored to her rightful course.”

Saram was probably a little too optimistic. United Planets’ ion-drive ships had just succeeded in pushing six asteroids into near-Earth orbits earlier in the year, and the construction of the space mirrors had not even begun. Even the most optimistic engineering projections suggest that it will be decades, if not centuries, before the mirrors will reduce the amount of sunlight reaching Earth to begin the process of climate cooling and restoring the planet to its ancient state, a temperate Eden with polar ice caps and glaciers on top of mountain peaks. Mars might be fully terraformed before then.

“Is Doggerland any more natural than the Sea of Massachusetts?” Asa asked.

Saram’s steady gaze did not waver. “An ice age is hardly comparable to what was made by the hand of mankind.”

“Who are we to warm a planet for a dream and to cool it for nostalgia?”

“Mysticism is no balm for the suffering of the refugees enduring the consequences of our ancestors’ errors.”

“It is further error that I’m trying to prevent!” shouted Asa. She forced herself to calm down. “If the water recedes, everything around you will be gone.” She looked outside the porthole, where the reef’s night-time denizens had returned to their luminescent activities. “As will the vibrant communities in Singapore, in Havana, in Inner Mongolia. We call them refugee shantytowns and disturbed habitats, but these places are also homes.”

“I am from Singapore,” said Saram. “I spent my life trying to get away from it and only succeeded by winning one of the coveted migration visas to Birmingham. Do not presume to speak for us or to tell me what it is we should want.”

“But you have left,” said Asa. “You no longer live there.”

I thought of the lovely corals outside, colored by poison. I thought of the refugees around the world underground and afloat—still called that after centuries and generations. I thought of a cooling Earth, of the Developed World racing to reclaim their ancestral lands, of the wars to come and the slaughter hinted at when the deck of power is shuffled and redealt. Who should decide? Who pays the price?

As the three of us sat inside the submerged habitat, refugees enveloped by darting trails of light like meteors streaking across the empyrean, none of us could think of anything more to say.

• • • •

I once regretted that I do not know the face I was born with.

We remake our faces as easily as our ancestors once sculpted clay, changing the features and contours of our shells, this microcosm of the soul, to match the moods and fashions of the macrocosm of society. Still unsatisfied with the limits of the flesh, we supplement the results with jewelry that deflect light and project shadows, smoothing over substance with ethereal holograms.

The Naturalists, in their eternal struggle against modernity, proclaim hypocrisy and demand us to stop, telling us that our lives are inauthentic, and we listen, enraptured, as they flash grainy images of our ancestors before us, their imperfections and fixed appearances a series of mute accusations. And we nod and vow to do better, to foreswear artifice, until we go back to our jobs, shake off the spell, and decide upon the new face to wear for the next customer.

But what would the Naturalists have us do? The faces that we were born with were already constructed—when we were only fertilized eggs, a million cellular scalpels snipped and edited our genes to eliminate diseases, to filter out risky mutations, to build up intelligence and longevity, and before that, millions of years of conquest, of migration, of global cooling and warming, of choices made by our ancestors motivated by beauty or violence or avarice had already shaped us. Our faces at birth were as crafted as the masks worn by the ancient players in Dionysian Athens or Ashikaga’s Kyoto, but also as natural as the glacier-sculpted Alps or sea-inundated Massachusetts.

We do not know who we are. But we dare not stop striving to find out.

©2016 by Ken Liu. Originally published in Drowned Worlds, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an American author of speculative fiction. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, he wrote The Dandelion Dynasty, a silkpunk epic fantasy series (starting with The Grace of Kings), as well as The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and The Hidden Girl and Other Stories. He also authored the Star Wars novel, The Legends of Luke Skywalker.

Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Liu worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. Liu frequently speaks at conferences and universities on a variety of topics, including futurism, cryptocurrency, history of technology, bookmaking, the mathematics of origami, and other subjects of his expertise.

And Now, A Preview of Coming Attractions

Adam-Troy Castro | 9090 words

I have experienced some tastes of my afterlife as a crustacean.

In it, I am one of many, on a beach with purple sand abutting a sea that could be water but might be some other liquid entirely, beneath stars that seem larger and brighter than any I see in the night sky now. The effect is very alien, but I have no idea whether the place really looks that strange, because I am looking at it with the eyes of a creature not human, which may be seeing it in spectra my human self cannot measure. Maybe whatever I am then adds all those colors; maybe what I perceive is an error in translation between the human being I am now and the crustacean I will be then.

Either of these two explanations can also apply to the constant high-pitched hum that never goes away there, which strikes me as the kind of thing that should be maddening but which to my crustacean self is a beloved and necessary part of the environment, a part of the ambience I treasure and need in order to live. It is the constant background music of my life in a shell, and maybe I describe it wrongly. I am a man, and as a crustacean my mind works differently than the mind of a man. It is slower, and harsher, and yet in some ways more elevated and perceptive. It is wise in a way I cannot be, while naïve in others I’m not.

As a crustacean I am low to the ground, and spiny, and I survive by using my powerful claws to crack open the shells that the high tide deposits on my beach, and that always contain soft succulent things I extract with a long, flute-like extremity that is most like, but not quite, a tongue. The stored heat in the sand keeps my body temperature regulated and also sets my stomach acids to breaking down whatever I consume. Dragging myself across that sand is a sensual pleasure that I deeply miss whenever that alien world goes away and I am stuck in the body of a human being again.

When I return to being me, I cannot quite summon the thrill of crustacean life, just as I know that it upon remembering me cannot quite summon the thrill of being a soft layer of upright meat, over internal skeleton, wearing a tie and walking around in shoes. This is at some point in my future, after I am born to that life, after I am raised in it, after I live that way for a while; after I have spent some time processing alien thoughts with alien wiring, after I can no longer summon the memories of being me in any real detail. I do, however, like to imagine that it is able to sense itself being watched by me its past self, and that it sends a message back, through all that distance, that in people-speak reads as, “Do not worry. It will be all right.”

• • • •

I get these previews more often nowadays, because I am dying.

It is an astonishing thought. We all know we will die someday, in no large part because we receive this preview of our future as crustacean or flying thing or swimming thing or rooted thing, but also because we see the disappearances of those we know, the aged relatives and unlucky friends and the celebrated people who strut in notoriety for a decade or so and then perish from misadventure or actuarial chance. The President of the United States disappeared a few years ago, felled by an assassin’s bullet, gone so fast that her body never struck the ground. I should know that if it happened to her, a terrestrial ending of some kind will come to me, but until my doctor told me that my time here was short, I held on to that irrational belief we all have that I was somehow an exception, that I would be here, on this planet, a human being, forever. Then I got the first taste of my future life as crustacean that I’ve gotten since childhood; the first of many, as it turns out. I am there often now, more often today since yesterday and no doubt more often still, by tomorrow. “Flickering,” we call it. I am dying, and so I flicker, like some ghostly comedian in an old-time silent movie; a few more minutes every day.

The cause will be an aneurism. It is deep in the brain where no surgeon can get to it, and it is getting larger, and from time to time I suffer little deaths, a second or two in duration, at least once as long as a minute, and each time, witnesses say, I do what people do on dying and vanish from this world, only to pass back into existence confused and disoriented and still thinking like a crustacean. I had some health problems as a child and experienced it then, but not for a long time until an isolated incident at work about sixteen months ago; a few minutes of crustacean followed by the sight of all my co-workers bent over me, looking concerned and, I think, among those who have grown tired of life, envious. Now it happens at least once a day, sometimes many times, and I can no longer work or drive. I fade out and then I fade back in, on the couch, or in our bed, and Analise shows the relief that this time, at least, I have returned. Sometimes tears fall, because she knows that I go where she cannot follow. It’s been established. After she dies, she’ll be a golden ape.

• • • •

On the day I found out that death was coming, I surrendered my driver’s license, because the flash-forwards would be happening more and more often now and it would not do to disappear from existence when I was in my car, barreling down an expressway at seventy. You hear of that happening all the time; one car wanders into the wrong lane and takes out another, and when the authorities get around to pulling out survivors there is no one behind the steering wheel of the car that lost control.

So I gave up my driver’s license as the law required, leaving my car in a parking lot for someone to retrieve later and because I was not yet ready to face Analise with the news, called up the father I hadn’t seen for four years or spoken to at all in two. He was still living out on the island, cashing his retirement checks and posting angry screeds on the political blogs. To my surprise he agreed to see me, and I took an Uber out to the island, passing a familiar neighborhood of attached houses and another of tenements to another where little clapboard homes with front porches sat side by side with lot lines so narrow that the spaces between them were, though planted with resentful strips of grass, less lawns than alleys. That was where we’d lived and where he still hung on. As the Uber dropped me off, I saw that he had come out on the porch to wait for me, his oxygen tank at his left and the table bearing his ashtray and empty beer cans on his right. He nodded at me, but didn’t wave, and I didn’t blame him, because a wave might have testified to a closeness we’d never known. I got out and made my way along the cracked walk to the three stairs leading up to the porch and said, “Hello, Dad,” and he nodded and got straight to the point of the matter, “Hey, Alan, who died?” I told him it was nobody yet and my voice cracked just enough that he figured it out and said, “Aw, hell. Want a beer?”

Alcohol was one of the things I’d been warned against, but there are traditions that must be respected, and so I said yes. He handed me a can and I peeled the top and took a sip and tried not to wince. Even if I was a beer guy, and I never have been, my father is the kind of beer guy who buys the cheapest, most generic brand, disdaining all issues of taste in favor of the ability to create a daily wall of dead soldiers without breaking the bank or muddying the issue with questions like flavor. He patted the folding chair beside him, inviting me to sit and watch the birds. I had no interest in birds and so I repositioned the chair so that it faced him and then sat.

We studied each other for a little bit: him with his fresh jowls and yellow-parchment complexion, myself with sunken cheeks and the complexion of a whiter shade of paper. He smiled and showed flattened teeth and said, “Cancer?”

“No, Dad.”

“Shame,” he said. “You could have had the crab and then been one. Not that I wish cancer on you; I’m just saying. What is it?”

I told him and for a bit I endured his questions about the nature of my ailment and its ensuing prognosis, something he didn’t quite get, but was willing to take an interest in. He ran out of questions at about the time my bladder ran out of space. He told me that the door was open and I went in, hitting what amounted to a solid wall of haze and rotten food stink. He had gotten worse about airing out the house since the last time I saw him. But I persevered, made my way to the downstairs bathroom and, gagging again because he hadn’t flushed this morning, found relief. On my way out, I got the bagged food garbage from the can in the kitchen and brought it out to the can at the curb before returning to him. He didn’t thank me for taking out the trash, just asked if I wanted another beer. But the wariness had entered his eyes, really, that and the alcoholic math pitting the obligations of hospitality against the finite nature of supply. I said I was okay, handed him a couple of hundreds and used the app on my phone to order another car. At which point he said something he’d been saying since my childhood close call with a speeding car gave me the first glimpse of my afterlife, something he’d found quite funny when I was a kid and that had developed a certain pathetic flavor, since.

“I’m gonna be a maggot.”

• • • •

Death is, I tell myself, nothing to be afraid of. This is why the good Lord makes sure we all get these previews, at moments when death seems imminent; why my mother first learned she was going to be some kind of carnivorous alien sunflower at age seventeen, or why my brother Dan spent half his time in the war, blinking in and out of existence to experience flashes of his future incarnation as sentient virus.

The theological argument has always been that God provides these previews to prove his love, to assure us that our souls are eternal and that we only change state, like water turning to ice or vapor. It isn’t much of a comfort to a guy like Dan who understood that he would live out his next life causing peritonitis in some alien bovine’s large intestine. By the time he pulled the pin on himself, he was saying that it could only be an improvement on this goddamned planet. He was a drinker like Dad by then, vacillating between random bursts of drunken hilarity and random bursts of inebriated misery with little in the way of transition, sometimes swinging from one extreme to the other multiple times a minute, the absurdity of his destination manifesting with his own favorite joke, that he was going to move to a condo up a cow’s ass. When he finally disappeared, nobody was watching, but the sheer amount of booze around the place suggested that he’d drunk himself right into his new and even more septic existence. But at least we know where that was, and it’s been so long since then that maybe he’s died again, once or more than once, and now lives as a species he could be proud of.

Mom, wasted in bed without the capacity to sit up, used to choke that she wanted to be that sunflower already, wanted to feel the rich nutrients in the soil rising up through her stalk, to fuel another day’s growth while the golden light from above made every inch of her tingle like fire; and over the last few weeks she spent more and more of her time living that life, sometimes gone for so long that even the doctors gazing down at her empty bed wondered if she had already passed through the veil. Then she would reappear and say, “Oh, not here again,” with something like despair, and though I knew that it was the pain talking, she would also always be upset at herself for expressing such resentment in front of me, her dutiful son, both happy and appalled that her existence as human being still had some hold on her, even when all it could offer was torment. But her alien sunflower life gave us much to talk about. As a human, she didn’t have the vocabulary to fully explain what an alien sunflower thinks, what being one feels like and what politics rule its traffic with others of its kind, but she tried, and there were times when she seemed about to come up with a perfect metaphor before she turned transparent, the wrinkles on her pillow clearly visible through her pale features, and I knew that the sunflower life was pulling at her again, more real to her at that moment than I was.

• • • •

Nobody ever remembers their past lives, though some claim to; that’s just nonsense. We may get little dream-images, impressions of flying or of burrowing underground or otherwise behaving in ways alien to our lives now. They may be memories. But who knows? There is no way to tell for sure.

But I tell Analise that wherever I was when that version of myself who was an alien mouse or hippogriff or slime mold in the life before this one first tasted the proximity of death and caught a glimpse of its future existence as myself, it must have been excited to see that its future included a creature as gorgeous as herself.

She smiles. She’s good at smiling; she lights up the room when she does. She has a laugh like music, and when we make love, she frequently bursts into laughter, as if what we do together is the funniest thing that ever happened on this Earth. When I ask why she says, “Because it is funny. Don’t you know that?” She says that the golden apes, whose ways she knows well, laugh uproariously through the act, and that her own human hilarity during the act can mean that they have extended their influence into the life she lives now, or it might be a peculiarity of her nature that may have influenced where she will end up after this life.

Analise teaches natural science and in particular she teaches exobiology, a profoundly speculative body of knowledge that has only congealed into a science because of the fragmentary reports we compile from the reported lives to come. Some witnesses, she tells her fifth-graders, must surely be lying. People who say that one day they’ll be some noble jungle cat, lord of all the lesser creatures around them, might be concocting that to avoid admitting that instead they’ll be some form of sentient alien moss, giving off clouds of toxic vapor while adhering to a wall in a cave. If people lie on their résumés, they’ll lie about the lives to come. Rare indeed are the grim, honest reports like my father’s, the future as alien larva subsisting on carrion. Surely, some people must glamorize.

But some forms show up more than once, and therefore have the ring of confirmation: the swimmers and the fliers and the predators and the wispy philosophers and the things that we cannot quite understand because the people whose reports we got could only describe them in the most fragmentary ways. It is from her that I know that my crustacean future seems to be unprecedented, and therefore still subject to many uncertainties. I may be the first human being whose trajectory intersects that particular world. Who knows?

Either way, future golden apes, like Analise, are fairly common. Maybe one percent of the human population. It is like a common blood type, really. And among those who don’t know, it’s a desired destination. Who wouldn’t want to be a glorious golden ape?

Analise knows that she will be a golden ape because of childhood sleep apnea that put her at strong risk for sudden death; an ailment that my in-laws say once made her flicker in her crib like an old-time movie or like a light in danger of going out, which of course she was. The first time she completely went away for more than a second or so, leaving only the indentation in the comforter to prove that she’d ever been there, my mother-in-law went a little crazy with fear that her darling baby would never come back and would instead stay in whatever alien land she’d gone to, living her new life as alien analogue to worm or mushroom or eagle forever with only this slightest brief taste of life as human child to sometimes disturb her dreams. Then Analise came back, coughing but gurgling in evident delight, testifying that her destination had been perceived by her infant self as a good place, and giving cause for hope throughout every subsequent attack until, in time, she obtained language and was able to explain that she had another life as a “blonde monkey.”

In time, she confirmed that she meant “golden ape,” the apnea went away, and she experienced no further tastes of that future until one day in her twenties when she choked on a fragment of chicken bone and disappeared in the middle of a crowded restaurant, and then found herself in the upper branches of a mile-high tree beneath looming scarlet clouds. That lasted all of three minutes before she popped back into terrestrial existence, gasping heavily. She knew a golden ape lover in that three minutes, and she still speaks of the experience with dreamy eyes, because no one who has ever had a taste of that future can ever describe it in terms that don’t make it sound like paradise.

• • • •

Early in our dating life, she said, “I had long furry arms like an orangutan’s, but it was really nothing like that. I wasn’t built like an orangutan, for one thing. I had six limbs, not four, and they all came together in a torso that didn’t have much to it; not so much a trunk as an intersection. I think I may have been more like a spider. But there were others around me, talking, and I knew what they were saying, and it was beautiful. We were philosophers. We lived so high up that tree that the forest floor was a rumor, and still so far below the canopy that sunlight struck us only as little needles of light as slight as pinky fingers, and there were these constant mists that swirled around us, perfumed by all the flowers, and what I remember most about it was that it made me horny; it’s making me horny now, just describing it, but it’s not me the human woman feeling that way, it’s me remembering myself as that ape, and being more at home there than I ever was as a person. Do you feel that way, as your crab?”

She had a bad habit of calling my crustacean self a crab, when in fact I had told her that it was really its own thing and as hard to categorize as a crab as her next life was categorized as an ape. We all do that, with our merely human tongues. After our flash-forwards, we say that we became a sunflower like my mom and say that it was not really a sunflower. We say that we became a dolphin or a fish or a horse and then we hasten to add, “only not really like that,” because of course it’s not like that; what we’re headed for is something that never evolved on Earth, that cannot be categorized in the terms of terrestrial evolution. But the comparisons we apologize for still exist. So she says “golden ape,” laughing that even there, she’s still blonde; and I say “crustacean,” and add that I always did like the beach. And these days, like Mom, I spend increasing time in that future place, aware with every even brief visit that I am fast approaching the moment when I go there and do not come back; when I vanish in place and do not reappear, any more than Mom or Dan reappeared.

“Yes,” I said simply. “I feel that way, as a crab.”

Though I do not think the crustacean I will become thinks of sex, much. There is certainly a reproductive impulse, but I don’t think the sex/pleasure connection works on that species the way it does for human beings, or for golden apes. The pleasure I derive from my tastes of life as that species is more connected to the specific sensual impulse of warm sand, heating up my insides and making the food in my stomach break down the way it must. As a crustacean, it is the sand that turns me on; the sand that gives me the crustacean equivalent of orgasm. But I did not say so, when we discussed this, because I was focused on the prospect of getting her into bed for the first time and thought it better to accentuate the drives we shared in this incarnation than those that would be present in the next. And so we had kinky spider-ape snapping crustacean sex, laughing about it, her saying ook-ook when it seemed appropriate and me saying some witless thing about getting my claws on her, but there were just two human beings there, really; two who got to know that which was also present, even though it wouldn’t always be. And then we did it again, and again a couple of nights after that, and again on multiple occasions after that, and for a time neither of us had any close calls immediate enough to manifest our futures again; and for a time, we were just people; a process I now, without volition, abandon multiple times a day. I am a man becoming less and less a human being and more and more a scuttler on sand.

• • • •

One day when she is out shopping and I am stuck at home watching a classic movies channel, the world goes away with a hard snap and, I, during the black transition, think that this is it. It is so sudden it could only be true death, and so she must be coming home to an empty house, my presence marked only by the indentation I leave on the couch. I find myself on that alien beach, surrounded by the others of my kind, and it is so vivid that it puts all my memories as human being in the shadow, and I also find out that life as this crustacean thing is more complicated than all my past previews suggested, because my kind is at war. The alien software driving whatever my new crustacean species uses to house its mind is not talented at counting, but there must be thousands of us crowding those sands, and we are marching, or as close to marching as we are built for, and we are advancing on creatures not quite like us, who I have the innate knowledge of as ancient enemies who are a direct threat to our existence, and who must be repelled in this, their perennial effort to claim our perfect feeding ground for themselves. They are, I think, white lobster-things, though again the differences between the human taxonomic vocabulary and the vocabulary of this creature I am make the precise classification impossible. They are without number. They are perceived by me as terrifyingly evil, but I know that they have been defeated before, and that they can be defeated again, as bad as it looks now. They must be. When we close with them, our claws clatter against theirs, and both sides snip and tear, and the beach turns the color of blood—a specific shade I have no human analogue for—as carapaces are punctured and internal meat is ripped out and as twitching limbs continue to thrash like things that still have input into their own fates. The scent of carnage is overpowering, and as we all fight for our lives, the stench draws the birds, which are, much like we’re not really crustaceans but something that reminds human beings of crustaceans, not birds but things that are easiest to explain as an analogue to sea gulls. They swoop down in great numbers, the sky turning to night, and they land on anything at all disabled and tear at us with their beaks, claiming whatever food they can. I see a companion impaled through the midsection, screeching in the precise way we do when death comes for us, and for one heartbeat of profound disconnection I think of all this in the way that a human being might, wondering if any of these damned birds were ever once people, and if any one of them is experiencing this moment from the point of view of some piece of shit having a near-death experience on Earth, and thinking of this assault upon our innocent kind as something to look forward to, something that will render his or her current life as librarian or taxi driver or brain surgeon a pale afterthought, once it has reached this moment. Ignoring the white-lobster enemy I launch myself at the gull-thing instead, and as it pecks at me, I wrap my powerful claws around its feathered throat.

Then there is that moment of disconnect again and I find myself looking up at Analise, who is weeping, who is saying that she thought I was gone for sure this time, and no woman on Earth has ever looked more beautiful, and no woman ever married to a man who loved her has ever looked more alien. I cannot make sense of her features. What are those glossy, wet objects set in hollows, beneath that hanging brow? What is that pale protruding triangle? That gaping abyss beneath, lined in glossy red coloring, what is that, and what is that worm I thought I saw inhabiting it? She is alien terror on a Lovecraftian scale, and then in a flash, it is just my wife, resolving in the way any incomprehensible sight does once it returns to making sense. She lowers her forehead to mine, and for a time we weep together, happy that this part of our respective eternal stories is not over.

But I am also thinking that I have been robbed of my revenge on that gull.

• • • •

Dr. Patel sees me every few weeks to check on the progress of my deterioration. He says that I am doing as well as he had any right to expect. That is the way he frames it, as a prospect measured by his own degree of hope, and I do not know whether to feel my condition honored or the object of condescension. I have gotten over-sensitive, I suppose, in these the past few months of my life, and it takes an active act of charity to resolve it with the rationalization that it shows how much he cares.

He also says that these regular measurements are academic, because aside from some palliative care, there is little he can do. The end is coming. Every day I live damages me; every moment I vanish and spend another few minutes as crustacean brings me closer to my permanent transition. I have, as a dying man, already undergone a permanent metamorphosis, in a way. I have already stopped being the guy who showers and gets dressed and eats breakfast and only then wakes up the wife whose shift starts an hour after mine. I have stopped being the guy who goes to work and sees himself as a useful person. I am now the man who drifts off early in the evening, sleeps an additional three hours and still wakes up tired, who has little energy to spend on the activities that take up the rest of the day. The metamorphosis will continue and I will someday soon stop being the guy who walks upright and breathes oxygen. I will instead become something else, something I have made no secret about longing to become; and that might happen later today or it might happen six months from now, and my discussions with Patel have become more about amelioration, about palliative treatments, about therapies to help me put aside what I am and come to terms with what I will be.

Still, he does what he always does to measure my ailment’s progress. He shines a light in my eyes, noting the dilation intervals of both pupils. He tests my reflexes. He asks me if there’s any pain, not that he expects any pain; the brain doesn’t feel it, he says. He asks if I’m keeping my spirits up. I say I am, and he says that’s good.

He does this and as the examination continues, I watch him more and more closely, and increasingly confirm something that I first perceived on the day when he told me I was terminal; that it is all rote, all professionalism unpolluted by passion, all the behavior of a man who, though good at his job, feels absolutely none of it. I am more and more certain that he actually envies me, that his emotional investment is actually more in the life to come than in the life he’s currently stranded in.

I ask him if he has learned the form of his own next incarnation.

Something strange comes into his eyes, and he says, “An elephant.”

Only, he now corrects himself, not an elephant. The creature he will be reborn as has two trunks, a plate of bone protecting the back of the neck, and a pair of additional eyes at the base of the spine, forever searching for predators who might be approaching from behind. And the plants, he says, the plants. They look nothing like anything to be found on the African savannah. But oh, the way they taste . . . and then he seems to remember where he is, and who he’s speaking to, and that professional façade slides back into position, and we are once again doctor and patient, with nothing but the facts of the case between us.

Then I say, “Has anybody ever succeeded in changing it?”

He frowns. “What do you mean, changing it?”

“The destination species.”

“I thought you were looking forward to being a crustacean.”

“I am. From the tastes I’ve gotten, it’s quite enjoyable.”

“And?”

“I’ve had another glimpse and learned more. They have wars. Very bloody wars. I was on one of their battlefields and it was . . . well, total, absolute carnage. Savagery, really. What if that’s not what I want in a life? What if I want to be a golden ape and live with Analise? Is there any way I can change my destination? Has anybody ever done that?”

I recognize the look on his learned face. It’s the physician’s default compassionate look, the same one he wore when he pronounced my condition inoperable. He places his hand on my shoulder and he tells me that people have tried; that they’ve gone to hypnotists and they’ve practiced intense meditation and they’ve spent all their time picturing the destination they want over the destination they’ve learned, and in some cases it has eaten up all their energies in what time they had left.

I ask if it’s ever worked, even once, and the default compassionate look intensifies and he says that when he was a child there was a common belief that if you die in a dream you die in real life, and it was bandied about as a fact, until somebody finally asked the logical question: Even if that was true, how would we even know, when nobody’s ever returned from permanent death to report it?

I say I don’t know, and he says,

“Well, then, the same is true about changing your destination. There are posited treatments, offered by therapists and drug companies and religious leaders, and they all claim to work, but they all have the same thing in common: Nobody’s ever come back from their new life as an alien lemur to say they got to be that instead of an alien pilot fish. Nobody’s ever said that they’ve arranged to be human for the second time in a row, told us that they when they come back they’ll give us the secret password to confirm it, then twenty years later, having been reborn and progressed to adulthood, walked back into the laboratory to say, it’s me, Phil, and as I told you before, the crow flies at midnight. It’s never happened. Not even once. My personal belief is that it cannot. We are stuck being what we are and we are stuck being whatever we’ll soon become, until that cycle ends and we start another random existence, somewhere else. It’s just the way things are. Stop worrying about it.”

I can’t help asking, “But what if it’s terrible?”

• • • •

Once trapped at home again, I start reading up and find among the reams of inevitable know-nothing bullshit an interesting philosophical experiment, by a thinker who I’ve never encountered before. Imagine, she said, that all the afterlives we’ve documented over the centuries were reduced to an irreducible binary, one good and one bad. Posit that everyone who lives ultimately goes to one or the other, based on some factor that could be measured and even influenced: with virtue, for instance. Imagine further that the price we paid for this simplicity, this promise that the best of us will get to enjoy joyous reunions with their loved ones, was the absence of certainty; that we honestly had no way of knowing whether this was a true promise or just something that somebody made up.

This would be terrible, she said. Our whole lives as human beings would be spent bargaining. What would be the point of that? If I’m going to be some scaled flying squirrel and if I know that from the very first time I experience uncertainty about my immediate survival, don’t I then lose what would otherwise be an overwhelming fear of death? Am I not blessed by knowing?

And what if it’s not good? I ask, silently. What if your flying squirrels use their gliding capacity to invade the branches of other squirrels, and slaughter them in the places where they nest? What if this is a daily part of the life you are destined to be born to and there’s nothing to be done about it? Wouldn’t the uncertainty be preferable?

The tract offers no answer. Nor does the one I read next, or the one after that. I fall into a depression, and for the first time since my ailment was diagnosed, I go four full days without a flash-forward. It is like I erased my future as crustacean and replaced it with nothing at all, or something so terrible that I cannot be allowed the advance preview, as it would destroy me. And I know that the philosopher is right. The uncertainty is worse.

• • • •

My father dies.

We assume he dies. You can’t know for sure that somebody’s died unless you see them vanish and then confirm that they don’t come back. Many are the people who have been assumed dead for years, until the belated discovery that they simply left town without warning, moved to some distant corner of the Earth, and not let anybody know where they were. They are just absences, really; and my father, who has been an absence in my life for more years than I care to count, is an even greater absence, in that he doesn’t even leave behind a hole. He is just a different shade of gone.

His death is still a fairly safe assumption, given his age and lifestyle and his poor state of health. On my last visit he’d coughed more than I’d ever seen him cough before, and in our infrequent encounters in years past he’d already coughed so much that you wondered why his lungs hadn’t already resigned in protest. His departure, if death, is less a shock than a consummation long-promised, only unexpected in the sense that when it arrives, it is not something I had spent much time thinking about.

We only know he’s gone because of a service I’d signed him up for, back when we were making more of an effort to stay in touch. Its sole activity was to call his phone daily just to confirm that he was still capable of answering. He had pronounced this a royal pain in the ass but agreed to it, primarily because I begged him. The calls had to be mid to late afternoon to guarantee an answer. Noon would have been too early, because it took him a couple of hours of dragging himself around before he was able to face even the limited challenges of his life; the early evening too late because he was a sleepy drunk and so completely anaesthetized himself by dinnertime that he could not be trusted to respond to even the most insistent callers. Once we established the effective window, he answered the call without fail until he didn’t, and even then, the monitoring service tried two more times before sending the police. They found no sign of him and remained on the premises for three hours just to make sure he would not pop back in. Only after a week or so of further attempts was he presumed gone for good. It was possible, I supposed, that he wasn’t. It was not unheard of, in the old days, for him to take a quick impulsive flight to some resort where he could lose a couple of thousand at cards. But there’s a feeling you get when you’re sure, and I was sure that gone he was. Transitioned into the thing that he had always learned he’d someday become: a maggot.

He had never offered any other details of that life to come, so I cannot say any more about it.

I strongly doubt that there is anything of value to retrieve, but Analise insists that I seek closure, and so we go to his house together, sweeping aside the empties on the front porch and gagging anew once making it inside. The foul air is so thick that I imagine it retaining its shape with the walls gone, a ghost-house of gray vapor to mark the place where once an embittered, alcoholic old man padded about, working on a life that had become an exercise in retaining a constant buzz. Analise opens windows to the east and west to create a cross-breeze, and sets the fans to going to disturb the murk; and over the next four hours we empty overflowing ashtrays, boxed porn magazines, and toss out most of the family photos. The refrigerator contains milk so ancient that it has partially solidified, cheese that has taken on the consistency of cardboard, and a Chinese take-out carton with half a serving of something so far beyond its sell-by date that it may have been what sent him to his future life as maggot; may have even been, judging by some of the bad meat in a barely functional freezer, an actual conscious attempt to evoke that future existence, with a similar diet. I don’t know. I find one personal item I keep, a picture of Mom, though when I get home I will have to spray it with deodorizer to lessen its tobacco reek enough to bear having it around. I see another item I tell Analise to throw out, a picture of Dan that I stare at for a while, not with grief or nostalgia, but with the horrific whimsy of Dan’s virus self infecting something and my father’s maggot self infesting the corpse. And then, the thought comes, the remains make their way to the sea, and nourishes the life that your crustacean self feeds on. I have to go outside and be ill.

Analise comes out while I am still throwing up. “Do you want to leave?”

For one lunatic moment, I do not know whether she was referencing this house or this planet.

I could say yes, I’m dizzy, I need to go. But closure doesn’t come that simply. I say that it’s just the stink in there and that I’ll be okay in a minute. She goes back inside to get some water from the tap, and until she returns I wish that I could disappear right now, even if only for a few seconds, even if only to see my future crustacean self safely recovered from its war and back in a dream of peace.

• • • •

Later, thinking in bed while Analise sleeps gently snoring beside me, I try to tell myself that I shouldn’t worry about that battle on the beach, not too much. After all, can you imagine just how widely variant the brief random tastes of life as a human being must be, to those who come before us? Experiencing them from some prior life as an alien mole, you could find this strange alien thing known as a person dancing, or scrubbing floors; making love, or puking his guts out; enjoying the best meal of his life, or having the shit kicked out of him in an alley. Imagine as your sole preview of human existence some adventurer hang-gliding, thousands of feet above a checkerboard landscape, feeling that delicious mixture of elation and fear and guiding himself toward a landing field he will not even reach for another five minutes? To the mole, it is hard to fathom that for the creature he barely understands, the pictured experience is not typical, even if it’s regularly repeated. Now imagine that mole getting the same human being, only this time he’s waiting on some line at the post office, early December, and experiencing only the overpowering need to pee and the hope that this interminable vigil doesn’t last another hour. These are two snapshots from the life of one person, and so are snapshots of myself kissing Analise as we both lean on the deck of a ship, and me holding Analise as she shudders through the aftermath of the discovery that she can never have children. So are me laughing with adolescent hilarity on a roller coaster and me sitting under a bridge less than a year later, knowing that my shitty father will beat me if he’s still awake when I get home.

My crustacean exults in the warmth of the sand beneath it, and also wars with natural enemies across a beach wracked with carnage? That’s a minor discrepancy by comparison, compared with the one that separates my ebullience upon finding out that Analise loved me, and my later brief burning hatred for her, when I found out from her tearful confession that she’d spent the past year of our married lives making secret rendezvouses with a succession of men.

Explain that to the mole. She couldn’t even explain it to me.

She just said that she’d gone a little crazy after her dreams of motherhood died, that she’d come to think that this life was just the purgatory she had to endure, while awaiting her genuine life as golden ape; and she had remembered in particular her sense that the apes loved each other with a passion that dwarfed anything felt like human beings. The vignette of herself and some male of her species going at it high above the forest floor had been simple and it had been pure. It had been everything. And she had found herself longing for it as alternative to our own complicated, sweaty, fumbling act, that act not without pleasure that was nevertheless the best human beings could manage. And so she had found herself a website catering to the one percent of people who reported that species in their future, and started meeting up with some of the men, and it had been a series of anonymous acts in motel rooms, and though the ghost of those future golden ape memories had been behind them, they had somehow never lived up to her visions of her post-human future, or even to what we had. “It was a compulsion,” she said, and I hated her, and I hated her for almost two years, and can you imagine the mole trying to understand that? Of course, the mole could not, any more than this future crustacean can.

We can only say that this is part of a life we do not live ourselves, temporarily bleeding back through time to infect the pleasures of this one. And there’s nothing that can be done about it, not that or a brother who committed a fast suicide and a father who committed a slow one.

I only wish for another near-brush with death, so I can place that future life back in context, and I want it to be only a brush, so I can do the same with this one.

• • • •

Weeks pass. I suffer no further slippages. I am overcome with the painful visitation of hope. I begin to believe that my aneurism healed itself. At my next visit, I ask Dr. Patel if this is possible and he orders various scans, and when they are done he says what he had of course already suspected: that my condition does continue to progress, even if it has by sheer chance become asymptomatic of late. He even tells me, “You’re probably just entering the last peaceful interval before the end. It happens, for some lucky ones.”

“What should I do?”

“Enjoy life. It’s life. It’s the last bit you’ll get of this one, before you go crustacean.”

I think on this, and when Analise picks me up in the lobby, I suggest something that I haven’t for a while: that we book a weekend somewhere. Not sometime next month, not later this month, but now. Leaving this afternoon.

She agrees and we run home to pack, one small valise apiece. We get in the car and we drive, hitting the road before we even decide on a destination. When we finally pick one, navigation requires a U-Turn. We think the U-Turn is silly and we laugh like idiots as the map updates. How silly we are! How much like golden apes! And that doesn’t even make me sour, the way references to golden apes sometimes do, now. With so little time to play with, I have come around to the philosophy that my wife just had a lot of love in her and that I was never shorted in it, not even once; and certainly not now. She is, I realize, just an alien, operating from an alien set of rules, as she would be even if she did not have memories of a golden ape future to motivate her; I am a different alien, and so I operate under yet another, and this is normal, and it would be foolish to pollute what little time I have left with grudges that we have settled long ago. I am content. And we are headed for a bed and breakfast where we have stayed twice before, once before we were married and once afterward; a cozy little place with only ten guest rooms and a great view of the water. It is a place we should go again, when I will soon be gone; a place I will miss, for however long I live, as human being and crustacean.

• • • •

It is later. We have checked into our quaint little room, changed our clothes to something nice and strolled up to a narrow two-lane road to a little, strangely isolated little restaurant where I had salmon en croute and she had lobster tails with drawn lemon-butter. It briefly occurs to me to make a joke about her ordering something crustacean, but it’s darkness I don’t want to bring to the table. For the moment, there is no death here, just a man and a woman, enjoying a conversation of no substance, smiling at one another over wine and candlelight.

She excuses herself once, and while she’s gone I flicker for a moment, returning to a world where my fellow diners are averting their eyes. I smile to let everybody know it’s no big deal, and pick up my spoon; but inside, I am wondering. The glimpse I just received had nothing to do with being any kind of crustacean. It barely had anything to do with geometry as I understand it. Things . . . overlapped, though that’s not the right word . . . with other things. I got what I got not out of any variety of sight or sound, but from other senses entirely; things that still buzz in my head, afterward. Whatever I experienced was the viewpoint of something so different, so alien, so removed from both the crustacean life I’d expected and the human life that still has a hold on me that I cannot provide even a single word of referent. I only know that I liked it. I don’t know whether I’ve changed destinations or have simply gotten a glimpse of another destination, further on, and on musing about it for a second or two, decide that it doesn’t matter. It will happen, sooner or later. I can worry about it when it comes.

So we dine and we have some sweet wine and afterward we return down that same two-lane road to the bed and breakfast. We intend to make love, something we haven’t done for a while because of my fragile condition, but we are not ready for that yet because we are stuffed and she is the slightest bit tipsy. So we bypass our lodgings entirely in favor of a walk on the beach. We are not the only couple that has had this idea. There are two or three others, widely scattered, smoking or cuddling or adding to their own states of inebriation. It is dark and the stars are out, uncounted thousands of them, some of which may bear planets that are now home to people I’ve known, some of which Analise and I might travel to someday, perhaps even some of them where, by literally astronomical chance, we might meet again. At this moment, anything seems possible.

The two of us kick off our shoes and stand where the ripples wash over our toes, so we can knead the wet sand, and neither one of us says anything until she squeezes my hand and I tell her something she already knows, that I love her. She says that she loves me too and suggests that she return to the room for a bath towel, so we can sit on the sand for a while. I say that’s a good idea, and let her go, promising to be here when she gets back, a promise that is silly, that has always been silly, because it is the kind of thing that nobody can ever guarantee, even in the prime of health. But I will do my best.

And then she is gone and I am left standing on the boundary between two worlds, the ocean and the land, thinking about nothing but that, until I spot something at the corner of my eye, scuttling across the sand.

Of course it’s a crab, about half the size of my fist, that has somehow decided that my visit to its domain is hostile. It is not anything like the future self I imagine to be massive, though I have no real way of determining its scale, any more than Analise can determine scale for her golden apes, who for all we on Earth know might be microscopic. Its physiognomy is nothing like the creature I know I will someday be, or might for that matter be only five seconds from now; if I collapse to the sand, disappear, and leave Analise with no way of knowing whether I died here without warning, or instead gave in to suicidal impulse and marched into the water. (But then there are people in sight, also enjoying the cool night air, and they would see me go, either way, and tell her.) This crab possesses some of my future self’s spirit, and though I outweigh it by a factor of one hundred, nevertheless seems to believe it could win a battle with me. Who knows? If the winner is the one who draws blood, maybe it could. And if it is anything like the future crustacean self whose life I have previewed, maybe it hears that hum that has so fascinated me: its music, which can mean anything.

As I gaze down at it, it raises its pincers in warning, and I have absolutely no doubt that it could cause me pain, another thing it happens to have in common with the crustacean self whose appearance in my future is now in doubt. Still, I regard the little creature benevolently. It is not my enemy, and I am not its, not even as an occasional consumer of seafood. Right now, and maybe for all time, we are brothers.

I gaze down in love and say, “Enjoy your trip.”

©2021 by Adam-Troy Castro.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam-Troy Castro made his first non-fiction sale to Spy magazine in 1987. His twenty-six books to date include four Spider-Man novels, three novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and six middle-grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of young Gustav Gloom. Adam’s works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun (Japan), and have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, two Hugos, one World Fantasy Award, and, internationally, the Ignotus (Spain), the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and the Kurd-Laßwitz Preis (Germany). His latest release was the audio collection My Wife Hates Time Travel And Other Stories (Skyboat Media), which features thirteen hours of his fiction, including the new stories “The Hour In Between” and “Big Stupe and the Buried Big Glowing Booger.” Adam lives in Florida with his wife Judi and a trio of chaotic paladin cats.

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

The Empty Gun

Yoon Ha Lee | 7229 words

The bazaar on the moon that wandered Transitional Space did not meet Kestre sa Elaya’s exacting requirements for a safe transaction. In years past, as the duelist prime of House Elaya, she would have journeyed with an honor guard to the much-feted Gray Manse. Her meeting would have involved liquors imported from the Flower Worlds and delectable canapés and candies, some of which she would pocket to give to her nieces when she returned home.

If circumstances had been less dire, she would have scorned a meeting with the arms dealer entirely. The dealer refused to leave the moon, for reasons lost in antiquity. That rankled; Kestre was used to people coming to her, not the other way around.

But House Elaya had died in blood and ash two months ago. Kestre herself had been left for dead by the assassins of House Tovraz. She was determined to make them pay for their mistake.

To do so, she needed a weapon. Not just any weapon, but one outside the Houses’ Registry. Weapons like the ones the arms dealer sold.

Kestre didn’t like Transitional Space. Like most House aristocrats, she was superstitious, and she’d always wondered if the immense aliens who had once lurked in Transitional Space, which humanity had driven off in the wars of old, still clung to existence. But she wouldn’t admit to fear, either, and in any case the moon hadn’t suffered any alien attacks since it was colonized.

“Three cutpurses behind you,” her neural assistant said. “Knives only. They shouldn’t cause you any trouble.”

“Thank you,” she said in a harsh whisper, and whipped around, dropping into a fighter’s crouch. She saluted the cutpurses as though she faced them in a duel. The knife rested easily in her hand, and one by one she pointed at each, angling the blade precisely to reflect the streetlights into their eyes.

The cutpurses recognized the challenge for what it was, and slunk away.

“That was overkill,” the assistant said mildly.

“I don’t have time for petty thieves,” Kestre returned, and continued on her way beneath the city dome with its featureless black sky. The hungry sky, the locals called it, those nights in Transitional Space, as the moon traveled through a warp-world sideways of ordinary space. She wondered if anyone else would hunt her tonight, but no one else troubled her.

The arms dealer lived in a surprisingly ordinary apartment overlooking a zero-gee playground. Kestre’s doubts increased as she contemplated the dismayingly domestic wreath of cloud-bloom and brachial wires on the door. Then she knocked.

The door opened. The arms dealer was tall and broad, very dark, like Kestre herself, but with a strangely indistinct face. Even her eyes resembled pits of shadow.

The interior wasn’t much better. Row upon row of weapons rested in plain sight, everything from finger-length knapped flint knives to crew-served artillery and even, in the back, the gleam of a missile whose length receded into an unlikely distance. Kestre assessed the offerings with an expert eye and shook her head in disappointment. “If this is all,” she said, “I had best be on my way.”

“Wait,” the arms dealer said. “For the last survivor of House Elaya, I have something special.”

“On with it, then,” Kestre said, unease coiling in her belly.

“I don’t have a good feeling about this,” the assistant said. “We should look elsewhere.”

“We don’t have many options,” Kestre subvocalized. “We’ll have to chance it.”

The arms dealer led Kestre into her home, stopping in a room where there was a single case. “This is what you want,” she said.

Kestre’s eyebrows rose. All she saw was a handgun of peculiar proportion, too large to wield comfortably, and dull green in color. “Unregistered?” she asked.

“Unregistered,” the arms dealer confirmed. “The only one of its kind.”

“Ammunition?”

“It’s an amicable gun. It handles its own ammunition.”

In her past life, Kestre would have walked away at this point. She’d heard of amicable artifacts, although she’d never handled one. They turned up on certain dead worlds, forever voyaging through Transitional Space, relics of the long-ago aliens that humanity had fought off during its first travels to the stars. The artifacts had a reputation both for extreme efficacy and for bringing bad luck to their owners.

Kestre was desperate, and her luck couldn’t get any worse. Her House had perished. All she had left was her life, and the point of that life was revenge.

The arms dealer smiled knowingly at Kestre, who scowled and lifted the gun from the case. Still awkward, but it fit her hand better than she’d expected from its appearance. This might be workable after all.

“What do you want for it?” Kestre said after a grudging pause. “Whatever is in my power to give is yours.”

The assistant began to protest Kestre’s bargaining skills, but it was too late.

“The honor of House Elaya is still alive, I see,” the arms dealer said. “Give me your House name, then, since you value it so.”

Kestre shuddered and squeezed her eyes shut. The last thing she had of real value—but without a House, and she thought of the last time she’d tucked in her youngest cousins, the name meant nothing. The House could not go unavenged. If this was the price she must pay, then so be it. “Yes.”

The arms dealer laid two precise fingers on Kestre’s brow. A sensation like ice spiked through Kestre’s heart and settled in her bones. “Say it,” the arms dealer said, imperious. “Say your name. So you know.”

Kestre opened her mouth. “Kestre—” Her own breath choked her. She coughed, tried again. “Kestre—” No use. She could not complete the name, even though the words sa Elaya beat in her chest.

“It’s done,” the arms dealer said. “Good hunting, Kestre of the Empty Gun.”

Kestre would have asked what she meant by that, but the arms dealer was already ushering her out of her home. The racks of weapons leered at her as though they were gossiping about her.

Outside, pinpricks of light and the roseate whorls of local nebulae were emerging in the everywhere sky. The moon wasn’t supposed to have exited Transitional Space for another four days. Had she lost that much time?

It didn’t matter. She had a hunt to take up, name or no name.

• • • •

Kestre left the moon out of paranoia and traveled to a sparsely populated world to run her first tests, specifically in the Pillared Plains, with their double-edged shadows and glass-bright rocks, the dust of fallen stars. Few of the nearby city’s inhabitants ventured here. There was no profit to be had, and explorers had a habit of turning up dead at the city limits. That made it perfect for her purpose.

She wasn’t so stupid that she was going to take an unfamiliar weapon to an assassination. Here she encountered her first disappointment. The gun did not fire.

Despite the arms dealer’s assurances, she had procured rounds of rare polymorphic ammo, the kind that shaped itself to best suit weapon or world. It had taken the rest of her resources: fitting for someone who didn’t belong to a House anymore. Fitting, but worrisome.

The gun misfired once, twice, and more times beyond that. Kestre had dealt with recalcitrant firearms since her childhood, under the severe eye of House Elaya’s armsmaster. The fault was not in her ability, but the gun’s own peculiarities. She added the arms dealer to the list of people she needed to kill, and turned to head back toward the city, causing the crossbow bolt to miss her by a centimeter.

Even in the dim and chancy light that ghosted through the Pillared Plains, Kestre recognized an assassin’s bolt. Her neural assistant confirmed it. The bolt was yellow and green, the colors of House Tovraz. Despite her efforts to conceal her movements, someone had determined that she survived—and was set to finish the massacre.

A horrible laugh bubbled up in her chest. House Elaya was dead. She’d surrendered her name, after all. But the assassin didn’t know and wouldn’t care, and she was damned if she’d be easy meat.

Kestre dove for cover, a second bolt glancing off her armor as it hit at the wrong angle. There would be another, somewhere. The Tovraz liked to work in threes.

She thanked House Elaya’s smiths for her suit. Her thanks didn’t last long. The assassins had shared target lock with their third squadmate. The next bolt came from above, in what would have been an admirable parabola if Kestre had been in a mood for admiring, and punctured her air supply. The ones that followed cracked her two spares.

These must be professionals. They didn’t care about the pretty formalities of the duels Kestre had grown up fighting, and in whose terms she still tended to think. They wanted her dead, and they wanted her to know that she was dead.

“They’re leaving,” the assistant said in the carefully neutral voice it used when it wanted to inform her that we’re fucked.

Of course they were leaving. Her heart thumped in panic at the serpent hiss of air escaping even as she reached for sealant. She couldn’t save enough of the precious oxygen; the gauges told her that. Without air, she wouldn’t survive the journey back to the city, even on the scooter she’d rented. The assistant, for all its pessimism, had done the pragmatic thing and backtracked the bolts’ trajectories to give her targeting information. Useless as the information was with a gun that didn’t work.

At this point, Kestre gave in to frustration. She was going to die in a lawless corner of the universe without having taken out a single person on her list. She’d sacrificed her most valuable possession, her House name, without achieving one iota of her revenge.

The gun had none of the useless polymorphic ammunition loaded. It was time to test the arms dealer’s claim that the gun took care of matters itself, incredible as it sounded. Better that than giving up.

She lifted the gun and pulled the trigger three times in rapid succession, aiming in the general direction of the first target, the second target, the third.

It was a laughable gesture. In any other universe, it would have availed her nothing, and she would have died a slow, agonizing death of asphyxiation only to be dragged by the corpse-collectors to the city limits when they found her. Or perhaps she would have hastened the process out of spite by opening her helmet to vacuum.

But this was the universe in which her weapon was the empty gun, bought in Transitional Space for the price of a House name, and the gun fired once, twice, thrice. The recoil surprised her, because the gun was empty and there should have been nothing to cause recoil. She actually dropped the gun after that third shot, something she hadn’t done since childhood.

“They’re not leaving anymore,” the assistant said. This time its tone meant we are either more fucked than before or miraculously unfucked, and it’s your job, as the human half, to figure out which.

Kestre was stunned into a non-sarcastic response. “What the hell happened?”

“They’re not leaving anymore.” Now it meant I don’t know either, and you’re still in charge, what’s a poor AI supposed to do?

She was not so reckless as to believe the danger had passed. But she needed air, so she hastened to the first assassin’s location. What she found when she reached them disquieted her.

The assassin’s helmet was cracked, the faceplate mazed like a flawed opal. There was a hole in the center of their forehead, and a corresponding exit wound in the back of their head, and in the back of their helmet as well. Perfect headshot, instant death.

“Definitely dead,” the assistant said in wonderment. “Well done, ma’am.”

Kestre was vain about her skills as a marksman, but not so vain that she didn’t recognize that the headshot was highly improbable. Still, she accepted her luck, such as it was. The mysterious bullet—wherever it had gone—had missed the assassin’s own air supply. She liberated it and replaced her tank with a quiet sigh of relief: salvation.

The sigh of relief faded when she examined the second and third assassins. They’d died the same way, both of them. This went from highly improbable to downright hallucinatory.

“Much as I’d love to stay and gawk,” the assistant said, “there may be more on the way.”

May meant it hadn’t yet detected anyone. Kestre didn’t believe in taking chances. At least she needn’t add the aggravating arms dealer to her list after all.

She retrieved her scooter, then headed back to the city. Now that the adrenaline was ebbing, nausea filled her—not because she’d come close to death, but because the Tovraz had decided she was a footnote, unworthy of a proper duelist. They’d sent common assassins after her.

• • • •

After that, Kestre’s vendetta began in earnest. She learned to rely on her gun, which always killed living targets and was effective against inanimate objects as well. It kicked her hand with that familiar recoil even though taking it apart and putting it together again, multiple times, assured her that it was as empty as its name. Likewise, the gun hated her polymorphic ammunition and wouldn’t discharge if she loaded it. After a while, she simply gave up trying.

Kestre started with the outlying scions of House Tovraz, the ones sent to safeguard Tovraz’s trade concerns amid the Wandering Moons. She felled eight of them before the warning bulletin went out and they increased their security. The AI’s squeamishness convinced her not to take their ears as trophies, although she thought it would have been a fine jest to mail them to the Tovraz citadel. Her sense of humor had darkened lately.

For a time, all went well. When Kestre needed money to sustain her operations, she went bounty-hunting. Sometimes a small voice whispered that the duelist prime of House Elaya should be above random killing, especially for something as mundane as money. But then she remembered that she had sold her name, so why not sell her scruples too?

This lasted through seventeen kills.

The eighteenth—the eighteenth was when the nature of the empty gun began to manifest.

• • • •

Kestre was in the middle of killing the eighteenth person on the list, in the Labyrinth of Blinded Skulls, when she got the news.

“Ma’am,” the assistant said, its very politeness a warning, “when you get a moment—”

“Not now, sorry,” Kestre said through her teeth as she fired the empty gun. The eighteenth person got off one last shot at her, by some miracle of timing: the closest call she’d had since the beginning. Then they slumped dead.

Kestre assessed her surroundings against the assistant’s kinesthetic map of the Labyrinth’s corridors. She’d learned during an earlier engagement that she couldn’t trust her own maps, thanks to House Tovraz’s countermeasures. Even if she’d disabled the map scramblers earlier, there was always a chance some clever hacker had undone her hard work.

Her maps remained in alignment. The Labyrinth’s halls rose above her with their improbable pointed arches, its walls festooned with the blindfolded portraits of Tovraz ancestors. (Why blindfolded, she didn’t know; some stupid Tovraz quirk.) Even so, Kestre remained vigilant. She had a scar across her side that ached in bad weather because she’d gotten careless with the ninth person on her list.

“Do you have time now?” the assistant asked with a hint of impatience.

Kestre approached the eighteenth kill. No pulse. That same perfect headshot. “Go ahead, thanks.”

“The ancestral head of House Tovraz has returned to life,” it said.

She froze. “What?” That first patriarch had been gunned down several centuries ago. She knew his name and face from her tutors’ history lessons. Was this the gun’s bad luck finally catching up to her?

“Check the newsfeeds for yourself,” the assistant said.

Kestre didn’t waste any time leaving the Labyrinth. Later, she would remember the escape in splintered dreams from which she woke sweating: passages in which gravity inverted and reverted to a schedule like the heartbeat of a restless giant; robots emblazoned with the green and yellow of House Tovraz, and armed with lasers that she escaped only by virtue of her armorsuit’s automatic reflection mode; a perilous climb up a series of maintenance shafts that led to her getaway flyer.

After escaping the Labyrinth, she holed up in one of the pricier hotels for privacy and used the assistant’s connections to verify its information. Sure enough, the ancestral head of House Tovraz had hatched out of his burial urn and demanded to resume leadership of the Tovraz. If it was a prank, it was a hellaciously entertaining one.

“One more Tovraz to remove from the world,” Kestre subvocalized to the assistant.

“Eighteen down, one up isn’t so bad a ratio,” it replied.

She smiled wanly. “You really think it’s the old man and not some sick joke?”

The gun’s weight pulled at her belt. She knew it was true, despite her words. The impossible had happened, and she was somehow responsible.

“Maybe we should reconsider what we’re doing,” the assistant said.

Kestre shook her head. “No,” she said reluctantly. “We’ve come this far. There’s nothing to do but add the patriarch to our list.”

• • • •

Hunger wracked Kestre during her next twenty-six kills. Not physical hunger, which she could have endured, although she didn’t neglect the needs of the body. The gun itself demanded more bloodshed.

She kept this gnawing knowledge from the neural assistant. It would have advised her to surrender the gun to some collector (not the authorities) and leave House Elaya unavenged. After all, it had been impressed with the imperative of preserving her specifically—loyalty to her above all and the House a distant second. As far as the AI was concerned, a dead House’s honor mattered not a whit. But she was not her assistant, and it still mattered to her. She would not concede that she had surrendered her House name for nothing.

Kestre started cataloging the kills as if they were rare specimens that she had to document for some museum of atrocities. After all, the manner of death never changed. Always the same tidy headshot. The only difference was, sometimes, the size of the wound, as if the caliber of the bullet was chosen at random.

There were kills that took place during high-speed chases upon skimmers over dust seas made from the ground-down fossils of ancient behemoths, and kills that took place at nosebleed heights across decaying struts and balconies, so high that even the birds wheeled below. Some kills happened in the deep-down swamps of worlds poorly terraformed and abandoned to breed disease, cauldrons fit only for the habitation of dolorous machines; others happened in the unsweet caress of sheer vacuum, far from stars or planets or anything but the radiation of the universe’s first exhalation.

During these kills, she avoided the news, and asked the neural assistant not to talk about it either.

The next kill after that was another matter. Her squeamishness in learning about her effect on the world bit her in the ass. Even in the more lawless corners of civilization, you couldn’t murder people like this and go unnoticed. Kestre’s House officially no longer existed; she couldn’t claim that she was legally pursuing blood feud.

Kestre had just completed a grueling climb out of the maze of inner apartments where her latest target had holed up and emerged into a surfeit of light: white lights, red lights, the muzzles of guns all aimed at her. The neural assistant sputtered out of silence to tell her how many people she was facing. She heard the number without processing it: too many to escape was all that mattered.

Primed by her experiences, she did the illogical thing. She was already dangling from a window; that left one hand free. And she had superb reflexes, which had served her well as duelist prime. She drew and fired in the general direction of the authorities who had come to arrest her. If her vengeance ended here, fine; but it wouldn’t end without her taking someone on the way out.

Her vengeance didn’t end. It took her a full minute to appreciate what had happened. The sound of scores of people dropping in unison, like a percussion ensemble’s last hammer-blow. The silence afterward.

“All those people,” the assistant said, at a loss for words.

Kestre, dangling, stared down at the blood, and the blood, and the blood.

“You should go before anyone else shows up,” it added softly. Meaning before you kill more bystanders.

“What the hell is going on?” Kestre demanded. But she was already moving. She scrambled down the rest of the way, hands steady only because the alternative was falling to her death on the street below, amid the not-a-tessellation of corpses.

The empty gun hadn’t kicked against her hand any more than usual. It had felt like an ordinary single shot. The one difference—besides the damage—was an obscene satiation radiating throughout her body. She suspected that once it ebbed, she would be left hungrier and more hollow than ever.

Once Kestre made it to her getaway flyer, she keyed it up and headed for the starport. She hadn’t completed her quota of kills on this world—saints of Elaya, if not for the assistant, she would be starting to lose track—but it was clear that she’d have to return later.

Unfortunately, the authorities had noticed the sudden demise of their police forces. They were even more determined to apprehend her now.

The assistant spoke again. “They know where we’re going,” it said. “Maybe it’d be better for us to lie low for a while.”

“That won’t work,” Kestre said. “We might be stuck here for ages. We have to get off-planet, even if it means stealing a ship.” It wouldn’t be the first time.

“We have a police fleet converging on our position.”

The city sped by beneath them, a blur of lights and bridges and spindle figures. Kestre saw the police in their combat flyers. Her flyer didn’t have a tactical system, but the assistant did. It connected to the flyer’s sensor suite and calculated that she only had two minutes and nine seconds before the leading missiles reached her.

Missiles, Kestre thought with savage humor. I’m moving up in the world.

“Tell me,” Kestre said aloud to the gun, “just how many people can you take out with a single pull of the trigger?” She was shocked, although she shouldn’t have been, by the raw edge to her voice.

The one who answered was her assistant. “I don’t think this is such a—”

“We need a way out,” Kestre said, “and this is our only option. We can’t go back to the way things used to be. If we’re going to take out the rest of the list, we have to live. And right now, living means killing them.”

The assistant lapsed into miserable silence.

“Well, can you?” Kestre asked. She was addressing the gun again.

One minute remaining. Kestre still had no desire to die in the air. She wondered what would happen if she pushed the gun to its limits. Assuming it had any.

She twisted in her seat, pointed the gun toward the rear of the craft, and set her finger on the trigger.

“Is this what we’ve come to?” the assistant asked. Kestre was aware that she had tried it sorely. “If you choose suicide, it’s my duty to go down with—”

Kestre pulled the trigger.

That’s it, she thought philosophically when the rear of the craft remained intact, despite a satiation so intense it made her queasy. Whatever alien sorcery powers this weapon, I’ve used it up. She rechecked the cabin’s pressure gauges: no change.

Kestre started to laugh. There was nothing else to do. She was going to die. After all the miracles that had saved her, she’d finally pushed her luck too far. It was only just.

“It worked, Kestre,” the assistant said. It rarely used her name. There was no inflection in its voice.

“Don’t be absurd,” Kestre snapped, then regretted it. The assistant was the only friend she had left. Never mind that it had no choice in its loyalty; it did its best by her. A little reciprocity was the least she owed it.

Besides, she could verify its words for herself. It projected a tactical grid over her field of vision, a map, a snapshot of the massacre. The entire police fleet had gone up in flames. The missiles and flyers had plummeted to the ground below, devastating shops and streets and apartments.

“But how?” Kestre wondered. Even if the empty gun had destroyed the entire crew complement of every flyer in pursuit, the vehicles, even the missiles themselves, would have AIs heuristic-sworn to continue their masters’ mission. The city police’s central command could, however awkwardly, puppeteer the vehicles—if they had survived.

They had another six minutes before they reached the starport. An unaccustomed pang struck Kestre’s heart. She was not used to grieving for strangers.

A cold trickle of regret wormed its way into her stomach. She couldn’t see the dead, both the police, and the people who’d been below their flyers and the missiles. But she would always remember the click of the trigger, the kick against her hand, the utter roaring sense of emptiness. She’d always preferred her existence as a duelist because everything was personal.

The kills before today had been personal. She might not have gotten close enough for anyone to see her eyes, as in the dueling halls of yesteryear, but they’d known she was coming for them. The Tovraz had known that she lived, and that while she lived, she had only one purpose: their extinction. There had been a strange, pure honesty in the hunt.

That honesty had shattered with the massacre she’d left behind her. The police weren’t supposed to have gotten involved. But she’d failed to extricate them from the tangled skein of her vengeance. And she was going to carry their shades like shackles until she died.

“We’re under interdict,” the assistant said in a subdued voice. “Security is out in force at the starport.”

And Kestre knew what she had to do.

The assistant provided Kestre a map of the starport and of the massacre site. She spent a precious few moments determining the extent of the empty gun’s reach. As far as she could tell, there was no geometric logic to its targets. It did not fire like a laser, where she pointed it. It did not obey the laws of ballistics; its projectiles were indifferent to the hand of gravity and ignored the quixotic pull of the wind. It felled what it wished to fell. That was all.

“You can’t,” the assistant said. “Kestre, this is too much.”

“We have to get off this world,” Kestre said. Repeating it like a chant, because she couldn’t think of any other way to restore order to her universe. Her House name was gone. If she lost her mission as well, what did that make her? Loss of purpose terrified her more than annihilation.

Her flyer wasn’t authorized to approach the starport. Kestre heard, as from a distance over thundering seas and across indescribable crevasses, the bleating of the starport authority commanding her to turn back; to surrender herself to the patrols that even now were on intercept. The authority’s words presented themselves to her like the buzzing of stinging insects. They had no relevance to her.

She spun the gun in her hand, a showman’s trick; chose a direction. The direction was down. They weren’t over the starport yet. She pulled the trigger anyway.

For the rest of her life, she would associate that kick against her hand with the drumfall deaths of innocents. The tactical display informed her that nothing impeded their safe landing in the starport. The flyer touched down without incident.

A storm wracked the city and the wind whipped about Kestre as she disembarked. Shrapnel crunched beneath her shoes and blew against her armorsuit. Without its protection, she would have been bloodied. Not that a little more blood mattered, for the starport was painted in gore and liberally decorated with fallen bodies. While the corpses themselves, where intact, displayed the headshot wounds she knew so well, the gun hadn’t stopped there. In demolishing the starport’s defenses, it had caused any number of explosions. Walking through the fire-splashed halls and toward the arrayed starships was like touring a combat zone as depicted by an enthusiast of the butcher’s art.

Kestre remained dry-eyed as she passed the corpses of students in their uniforms and children clutching snacks. She didn’t dare give in to sentiment. Yet, when she emerged on the upper levels where the starships’ silhouettes knifed the sky, she wept at the prospect of escape, and hated herself for it.

“Which one?” she asked the assistant, paralyzed not by her own monstrousness but by the kaleidoscope variety of ships available, a harvest won by the gun’s profligacy and her own willingness to go along.

“The best ship,” the assistant said, its voice strained, “is this one—” It indicated a deepship upon the map.

The grotesque satiation should have dulled Kestre’s senses. Instead, she shivered as she strode toward the deepship, like a harp tuned too tight and stirred by the charnel wind. Despite her suit’s filters, she gagged at the imagined stink of the roasted dead, and this despite the fact that she was no stranger to such smells.

The deepship welcomed her although its AI should have barred her way. When she reached its bridge, a one-woman procession leaving footprints of blood and ash and viscera, she looked around and wondered if she was to fly a ship with no brain. But the assistant assured her that enough of the ship’s programming remained for their purpose.

The bridge displays lit. Kestre couldn’t focus on any of them. “Take us to our enemy,” she said hoarsely. “Take us to the Citadel of House Tovraz so I can finish this.”

• • • •

“Kestre,” the assistant said. “Kestre.”

Kestre had slept fitfully, dreaming of House Elaya and its fantastic gardens, its mazy walkways, its children. She’d had none of her own, but she’d been an excellent aunt up until the point where she failed to save the children from the slaughter. At first, mired in dreams, she mistook the assistant’s voice for that of the armsmaster.

“Kestre,” the assistant said a third time, and she woke.

She had fallen asleep in the captain’s chair without making any effort to clear the other dead. There were too many of them. Ghoulish as it was, she wanted the reminder of the gun’s efficacy, so that she could stop taking it for granted.

“There’s pursuit,” the assistant said now that it had her attention.

“There must be a tactical display,” Kestre said. She’d never before set foot on a ship-of-war.

“It’s set up,” the assistant said, directing her to the appropriate holo.

“Pursuit” was an understatement. Another holo was playing an unencrypted news bulletin. The world they’d escaped had taken the destruction of its starport seriously. The system’s patrols were coming after the terrorist—her.

“Why didn’t you wake me earlier?” Kestre said, trying to keep the waspish note out of her voice and failing. “I could have taken some stims, instead of leaving you alone with this.”

“Because we have help.”

“. . . help?” Kestre said, not certain she’d heard correctly. Who would help her after what she’d done?

“If the enemy of your enemy—”

“Oh, that kind of help,” Kestre said, paradoxically relieved that she didn’t have to factor in the whims of some heretofore undeclared ally. “Then what’s the issue?”

“You want a viewport. Of which there are none on the bridge.”

The bridge of this particular ship was a well-fortified nerve center, rather than being anywhere close to the ship’s exterior. “Do we have time?”

“Trust me,” the assistant said.

Her heart clenched tight, and she acceded.

Kestre took a lift to the nearest viewport. It was something of a relic, in a guest cabin, presumably to impress visitors of high status—give them something to look at if the holos didn’t provide sufficient entertainment. The cabin had once been occupied. Kestre averted her eyes from the finely dressed person, the book that had tumbled from their hand. The title nagged at her: The Red Sign. Later, she would forget the corpse’s face and staring eyes, but not the antiquated book.

She stared out the viewport. “I don’t see anything.”

Then she understood the assistant’s concern. The black outside was not the black of ordinary space, but Transitional Space. That wasn’t the surprising part. Even the fact that a fleet of ships pursued them wasn’t surprising.

Rather, the darkness swarmed with the undulating shapes of alien leviathans. They were devouring the enemy ships, unfazed by railgun fire, by missiles, by mines. She had thought the aliens to be extinct.

The fleet was receding in the unspeakable distance. They couldn’t chase her and fend off the aliens at the same time. A desperate hope candled in Kestre’s heart. They might reach House Tovraz’s citadel after all.

Kestre returned to the bridge. They exited Transitional Space, and she beheld a holo of the citadel. House Tovraz’s headquarters occupied geosynchronous orbit over one of its garden worlds, a space station so encrusted in defenses that it resembled a lofty crustacean monarch. And here Kestre’s ambitions were frustrated, for she was too late.

Behemoth ships, vaster even than the leviathans, were even now firing on Station Tovraz and the world below. The deepship’s sensors told her that only stray wisps of atmosphere remained on the station and that it had been thoroughly sieved. Whatever its population had been—and it would have been immense—it was now zero.

As for the world below—

“Show me,” Kestre said.

“It will only hurt you,” the assistant said.

“Show me.”

The assistant interpreted the data for her in excruciating detail. The world’s oceans boiled. All that remained was a hellstorm of smoke and steam and fire. She had not known that weapons of such world-killing potency existed. She was tempted to dismiss the assistant’s false-color portrayal as hyperbole. It was prone to no such thing.

“Where did they come from?” she whispered. And why weren’t they firing on her as well?

Kestre was no military expert. Still, the tutors of House Elaya had taught her to recognize the warships of the major human powers. She could identify them just as handily as she could a parry. And these were no warships that any human civilization, in its yearning after the stars, had ever built or conceived.

The assistant had no answer for her.

“Then we must ask them,” Kestre said. “Hail them.” She didn’t know that it would work, but she didn’t know that it wouldn’t work either.

There was a chime: the alien ships were answering her call.

She almost said, I am Kestre sa Elaya, but that was gone. It stuck in her throat like thistles. She started over. “I am Kestre of the Empty Gun. I desire parley.”

For a tense moment, she wasn’t sure they had understood her. She repeated herself in all the languages she knew, despite despair that even a House education could not prepare her to speak a tongue heretofore unknown.

Then the aliens responded. “Kestre of the Empty Gun,” said a voice. It was a voice a hammer forging armageddon might have.

“You have robbed me of my revenge,” she cried. “Who are you?”

“Kestre of the Empty Gun,” it said, “did it never occur to you to ask where your ammunition came from?”

The question stumped her. She hadn’t cared, after a point, that the gun fired, impossibly, from an empty chamber. It had only mattered that anyone, and anything, she aimed at met its end.

But it was clear that the alien knew her and her history; knew what wretched path had driven her here.

“Did it never occur to you,” it went on, relentless, “that even alien artifacts, however old, obey some of the universe’s laws?”

She choked back a laugh. “You call this obeying the universe’s laws?”

“Your gun fires bullets, and worse,” it said. “This ammunition is not manufactured from the void. It comes from somewhere—out of the past. For a small death, an inconsequential one, it comes out of the recent past. For a greater death, for a massacre to feast upon, it draws from the distant past. We have you to thank, Kestre of the Empty Gun, for stealing the bullets that dealt our death-blows in the ancient war between your people and ours, and returning us to life.”

“No,” Kestre whispered. “No no no no no.” How many more worlds would fall like this one?

Revenge had sustained her this far. She had no more stomach for it. She’d envisioned something cleaner, neater; something that resembled the pageantry of a duel. Just as she’d had the ability to pull the trigger, to her eternal damnation, she had the ability not to. The choice lay entirely in her hands.

The voice had no pity. “We have feasted well and will feast better yet.”

Wildly, Kestre presented the gun. Even now her hands did not shake. She would have preferred it if they had.

“Go ahead,” it said. “Pull the trigger. You can stop us, but you will need ever-escalating firepower. Imagine who you’ll summon next out of the universe’s maggot history.”

“Fuck you,” Kestre said. She tasted blood, realized she’d bitten through her lip in her distress. Apparently, there were limits to vendetta, after all.

Out of nowhere, she remembered not the dead children in the starport, but the book; the honored guest on this very deepship, splayed across the floor, whose leisurely reading she had so untimely interrupted.

If only she’d stopped when the patriarch of House Tovraz, assassinated by someone like her, had walked out of his urn. If only she’d stopped after that first conflagration of death. If only, if only.

She was done. If only she’d stopped earlier—but failing that, she could stop now. It wouldn’t save the people she’d already murdered, but it would, perhaps, limit the damage going forward.

To the assistant, she said, “Help me destroy this thing.”

She was grateful that it didn’t question her volte-face or tell her I told you so. “Engine room,” it said.

Kestre didn’t believe, in her heart of hearts, that a mere antimatter drive would suffice. Still, it beat quitting. She let the assistant shut down the communications link while she sprinted toward the engine room.

The Kestre who had begun this journey would have demanded that the assistant shut out reminders of the world outside; would have told it not to distract her with irrelevancies. Now she knew better. Even if the threat of the empty gun held the aliens at bay for the moment, she couldn’t afford to forget that they could check her in turn by threatening other worlds. It would surely be easy for them to move on to others and destroy them as well.

Kestre almost skidded into a corner, almost crashed into walls, almost broke her ankle tripping over corpses that had turned the whole deepship into a grisly obstacle course. But she remained in excellent shape—even better shape than she’d been in as duelist prime. Vendetta made for an excellent training regimen. And she’d taken vendetta beyond anything the Houses had seen before.

The tactical display exploded in an inferno of incoming missiles.

“They know what we’re doing,” the assistant said. Despite the calm of its voice, Kestre heard a faint note of approval. “I’ve initiated evasive maneuvers, but we don’t have the antimissile defenses to survive this. Besides,” and it paused minutely, “you’re going to have to turn off the antimatter containment if you’re going to throw the gun in there. At which point ‘throwing’ is no longer a concern.”

“I earned this,” Kestre said to the assistant. “But you—what of you?”

“You can’t do this without me,” it said, “and I wouldn’t leave you even if I could. I’ll help you turn off the containment.”

Under other circumstances, they might have been able to rejigger the fuel injection system and throw the gun into the engine that way. But they didn’t have time. It was this or nothing.

“Thank you,” Kestre said inadequately. “You deserve better.”

Together, they shut off the containment field. Perhaps even an alien gun that fired projectiles from the past couldn’t survive an onslaught of antimatter. Any thought beyond that dissolved in a rush of light beyond light.

• • • •

Kestre came to in a familiar bazaar, the one in Transitional Space where she’d obtained the empty gun. Not just in the bazaar: in the home of the arms dealer, with weapons resplendent on every side.

“So you figured it out,” said a voice she had heard an eternity ago. The arms dealer came forward. The face that had once struck her as so indistinct, so empty of character, now reminded her of her own with its scars and effaced tattoos.

“You received fair price,” Kestre said, “but I have one more bargain to make.”

“Speak.”

“Take it back,” Kestre said in a rush. “Take it all back, from the moment I made the agreement with you. If your gun can reach through time, surely—surely there’s a way.”

“Of course there is,” the arms dealer said. “But there’s a price, always.” And the smile she smiled at Kestre was Kestre’s own, made grotesque with triumph. “You have one name left. Give it to me, and let me leave this place, and live your life. I can make better use of it than you ever have.”

A shadow passed over her heart. But it was a small price to pay after everything she had done.

Then the assistant spoke. “No,” it said. “Take my name instead.”

The arms dealer heard it too. “You?” she demanded.

“I am of House Elaya,” the assistant said. “I was just as responsible as Kestre for the massacres of the empty gun, even if it no longer exists. Take my name and be satisfied.”

“Well-played,” the arms dealer said. “Say your name, so that I may devour it.”

“Sa Elaya,” the assistant said, and for a moment its voice dwindled into static.

Once Kestre would have added the arms dealer back to her list; would have attacked her for her temerity. Now she said, “Thank you. You will not see me again.”

Once outside the arms dealer’s home, under the utterly dark sky of Transitional Space, Kestre said to the assistant, “Our House is well and truly dead.”

“It may be dead,” it replied, “but we endure.”

“So we do,” she said.

And together they walked out of the history of the Houses and into a history of their own.

©2019 by Yoon Ha Lee. Originally published in Mission Critical, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Yoon Ha Lee’s debut novel, Ninefox Gambit, won the Locus Award for best first novel and was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke Awards. Its two sequels, Raven Stratagem and Revenant Gun, were also Hugo finalists.  Lee’s middle grade space opera, Dragon Pearl, was a New York Times bestseller, and his steampunk fantasy Phoenix Extravagant came out from Solaris in October 2020.  His short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Lightspeed Magazine, Clarkesworld Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and other venues.  Lee lives in Louisiana with his family and an extremely lazy cat, and has not yet been eaten by gators.

Olivia’s Table

Alyssa Wong | 6976 words

Olivia blew into town with the storm and headed straight for the Grand Silver Hotel. Pots and containers of sauces and marinades clattered in the trunk of her Toyota, packed in with the rest of the groceries she’d brought from Phoenix. The evening sky hung heavy with dark clouds, but the shrinking Arizona sun still burned her arms through the car windows.

Bisden was one of those mining towns that had sprung up in the eighteen hundreds, flourished for a while, and then all but died once the silver ran out. Now, the town made its money from the tourists who trickled in, hoping to see two things: a real Wild West ghost town and one of the most haunted historical sites in the southwest.

After a childhood of making the trip down from Phoenix, Olivia barely needed her GPS to guide her. She drove past the sparse palo verdes lining the old shop fronts. Outside, the wind whipped up sharp clouds of dust and stone shards, sending them sweeping down the barren, red-dirt road that ran through Bisden’s town square. The air carried a light brown tint, and Olivia squinted to see through it.

In front of a clapboard saloon, two reenactment actors in full period dress were toughing out the approaching dust storm, fingering the pistols hanging at their hips. Most of the town’s tourists had migrated inside; a few hung back to watch them, shading their eyes or filming on their phones.

And then there were the ghosts, dozens of them, clustered around the tourists and swaying in the wind like feather grass. A few were dressed in fine clothes—long skirts and blouses buttoned to the throat, cravats tucked into tight waistcoats—but most were dressed in working clothes. Wide-brimmed hats, sturdy trousers, loose shirts. Only some of them were white folks. All bore signs of trauma; gunshots punched a cluster of holes through one gentleman’s torso, and a cluster of women hanging back by the saloon had burned, blackened bodies, the remains of their dresses drifting around them in ashes.

Olivia sighed. They were right in front of the Grand Silver Hotel, too. Figured.

She slung her backpack over her shoulder and pocketed her phone. Her braid was coming loose, but she ignored it. After locking her car, Olivia pulled out the long envelope of paper talismans that her grandma had written years ago. She slapped one over each of the car windows, and the coppery scent of magic sparked in the air. The sky rumbled overhead as she retrieved a pack of Saran Wrap and taped sheets of plastic over the talismans. If this worked, the talismans would keep ghosts away from the car, and the Saran Wrap would keep the rain away from the talismans.

It would work, she thought firmly. It’d worked for her mom all the times they’d made the trip together. And even though she wasn’t here now, Olivia had watched her ward her car like this for years.

No time for doubts. She headed for the hotel, past the reenactment actors and tourists. She had to push her way through the ghosts. Their bodies felt more solid than they did the rest of the year, and fabric brushed her hands as she edged through the crowd. “Excuse me,” she muttered. A pair of Hopi women glanced down at her from beneath the brims of their hats, turning to make room for her to squeeze by. A cluster of Chinese miners, their bodies broken and smashed—A cave-in, she thought, an accident—watched her, unmoving, from a distance. None of the tourists seemed to see the ghosts, staring through them at the girl weaving her way through empty air.

The Grand Silver Hotel rose three stories, clinging to its last shreds of grandeur. Inside, new lightbulbs shone in old fixtures, and the tatty carpet crunched under Olivia’s sneakers. Like every other establishment in town, the Grand Silver kept its head above water by advertising its very own ghost. An oil painting of the Wailing Lady hung on the wall above the reception desk, and a rotating rack of postcards, most of them reproductions of the painting, spun lazily by the elevator door. The older woman behind the desk smiled as Olivia approached. Her name tag read Renee. “Welcome to the Grand Silver Hotel. How may we help you today?”

“I’m here for the Ghost Festival,” said Olivia. Her voice sounded too loud in the nearly empty lobby. She hated listening to herself speak; talking, period, wasn’t easy for her. “I need a room for tonight and tomorrow night, and some help getting things out of my car.”

Renee brightened. “Of course. The Ghost Festival is tomorrow night, and it’s one of Bisden’s big attractions. Now, there are a few other groups of tourists who made the trip here to see it, so you won’t be alone. It’s perfectly safe, but we do ask that everyone stay inside and keep a healthy distance from the ghosts—”

“I’m not a tourist,” Olivia said. “I’m here to cook the banquet for the festival.” She reached for her driver’s license, and her student ID slipped out first. She caught it before it hit the ground. “You’ve worked with my mom before. Amory Chang.”

The receptionist squinted. “You’re Exorcist Chang’s daughter, are you? You do look a bit like her.” It’s nice of her to lie, thought Olivia. “She helped us out for years. Every summer, on the night when the ghosts come out to walk among the living. And her cooking, of course, was sublime.”

Thank you, Olivia wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come. Renee didn’t seem to notice.

“We’re looking forward to having you for the Ghost Festival. Exorcist Chang was always a wonder to watch. Excellent showmanship, and her work kept the town safe for years.” As Olivia checked into her room, Renee paused. “By the way. Our Wailing Lady is getting . . . unruly. Could you look into fixing that up, or finding a replacement? It’s been almost ten years since your mother tended to our ghost.”

The Wailing Lady’s painting hung serenely on the wall. It depicted an ample young woman wearing a wedding dress and a veil that obscured her face. A jilted, suicidal bride, whose weeping could still sometimes be heard late at night. Not very original. “I’ll look in to it,” said Olivia.

Renee and the two folks working at the hotel—a maid and a young man who was probably her son—helped lug Olivia’s vats of soy sauce and marinade from her car and into the hotel kitchen. Rice, cooking utensils, and paper bag after paper bag of different kinds of meat followed. Pickings at the Bisden supermarket were slim, so she’d brought everything she could fit into the Toyota’s back seat and trunk. As they carried the groceries inside, Olivia caught sight of the ghosts out front. The reenactment actors were gone, and now the ghosts stared, as one, at Olivia and the hotel employees.

The air smelled like approaching rain. She walked faster.

After sussing out the kitchen—on the small side, though all of the kitchens at the old Bisden hotels were—Olivia checked her phone. No signal, no internet, though there were a couple of password-locked hotspots from the shops nearby. The Grand Silver had its own router, and Renee gave Olivia the password along with a long, old-fashioned metal key. “You’ll be in room three-oh-nine,” she said.

Olivia spent the next couple of hours in that kitchen, cutting, testing, prepping. It was night by the time she finished. When she made it upstairs to her room, she crouched on the floor by the bed and set out packet after packet of incense and joss paper. She hoped she’d brought enough. Enough incense, enough food—

No, it would be enough. She unpacked a small ceramic bowl and emptied a handful of dried orange peel into it, and then she lit a match over it. Once, her mom had taught her that the smoke from burning orange peel would keep the ghosts away. It had never failed her.

Olivia hesitated. The flame licked down the match, chasing her fingers. After a second, she shook it out.

Wind rattled the windows as she settled into bed. The sounds of faint footsteps upstairs and a woman sobbing through the floorboards chased her into her dreams.

It had rained during every Ghost Festival that Olivia could remember. On the seventh month on her mom’s calendar and the eighth month on her dad’s, Mom would pack the minivan with food and head down south for a couple of days, leaving Olivia in Dad and Grandma’s care. It was monsoon season, and torrential rain flooded the roads and the stony washes out behind the houses. But when the skies cleared, Mom would return with an empty trunk and a check for more money than she made in half a year.

For a time, she didn’t tell Olivia where she went or what she did. But the year Olivia turned eight, Mom loaded her into the back seat next to the paper bags of groceries and drove her to Bisden for the first time.

Come with Mama, she said. Back then, her short black hair was only faintly laced with silver, and she still looked healthy. I need you to help me with the Ghost Festival this year.

The drive was several hours long, and by the time they reached the tiny town, sunset was approaching. So was a storm, a desert monsoon that crawled inexorably across the horizon. That night, they checked into the Grand Silver, although in the coming years, they would rotate from hotel to hotel, collecting paychecks from many grateful proprietors. Every hotel in town wanted the chance to host the festival and attract the bulk of that year’s tourists. Mom told Olivia that when her own mom, and the long line of Chang women before her, had cooked for the Ghost Festival, in this country and in their countries before that, they’d rarely stayed in a place for more than a year.

Different ghosts are tied to different spaces, Olivia, Mom said as they got ready for bed. The lamp cast a warm glow across her face. Sometimes they form attachments to specific places, and sometimes other people bind them there and they can’t leave. Moving the banquet means bringing food to folks who missed their chance to eat the year before. Good service is all about being considerate of others.

Mom spent the entire night and then the next day prepping and cooking, and she had Olivia help her as much as possible. Olivia stood on a little metal stool and cut vegetables. Her knife cuts were careful and even under her mom’s strict tutelage. Occasionally, she peered out the windows, watching the tourists run through the rain, their eyes growing huge and round, even from this distance, whenever they glimpsed one of the ghosts.

“They’re scared of them,” Mom told her as she set out a pair of bamboo steamers. “Right now they can see them.”

“Can’t they see the ghosts all the time?” she asked.

“Not like you and I can. The festival is when ghosts are most themselves instead of what the living want them to be. Not everyone will like what they see tonight.”

When Olivia’s arms grew tired, Mom sent her out of the kitchen to take breaks. The long banquet table that Mom had requested from the hotel was set up on the front porch. She crawled under it and watched the rain slosh down the road in growing streams, swirling with red-brown dirt, until the daylight faded and the electric lights came on.

Her Game Boy. She’d forgotten it in the car. Olivia didn’t have an umbrella, but she ran out into the rain anyway, letting it beat at her through her clothes. It only rained for about two weeks each year, and the cool droplets hitting her face filled her with giddy energy. She sprinted down the street toward her mom’s car, splashing deliberately in the biggest pools of water she could find.

Halfway down the darkening street, a voice stopped her: “You’re not from here.”

Olivia turned sharply. A ghost stood under the awning of the Bisden General Store, leaning against a post. She wore a cotton shirt and trousers, like many of the other folks who’d worked on the railroad when they were alive. There weren’t many women among the Chinese ghosts. But this one was a girl, with deep brown hair like Olivia’s, and a small mouth and dark eyes like Olivia’s. She looked a little older than Olivia, but not nearly as old as Olivia’s mom.

“Did someone lose you?” said the ghost.

“Nobody lost me,” said Olivia. “I came to get my Game Boy.” She came a little closer, under the awning, and the ghost didn’t shrink back. When Olivia reached out to touch her sleeve, her hand passed through. “What’s your name?”

“Mei Ling,” said the ghost. She sounded amused. From this distance, Olivia could see that her legs were mangled, the way a number of other Chinese ghosts who’d died in construction accidents were. “My ma calls me Sadie, though.”

“I’m Olivia,” said Olivia. “My grandma gave me a Chinese name, too, but my dad doesn’t like me using it.” She’d overheard her dad talking with her grandma one night, when she was very little. What will she do when the other kids tease her at school? he’d said. Olivia didn’t tell him that the other kids teased her anyway, name or no name.

“I don’t know what a Game Boy is,” said the ghost. “But why don’t I walk with you while you get it?”

An alarm bell in Olivia’s head began to ring. Don’t talk to strangers, Mom had said, over and over. And don’t trust the ghosts, especially not during the Ghost Festival. “No,” she said. “I’m okay. It’s just over there.”

But the ghost followed her. Olivia began to run faster, and the creak of the ghost’s ruined ankles grew louder and louder as the night got darker. The rain pounded down around them. The water rushed across the ground in rising torrents with no gutters to guide it away from the street.

Where was the car? It was dark, and the electric lights seemed so dim, and the ghost was behind her, lurching forward, moving too fast—

Olivia’s foot slipped out from under her and she fell backward into the water. Her head cracked hard against a stone, and the flash flood pulled her, rolling and gasping, down the street and onto her face. She inhaled a lungful of water. Olivia choked and tried to push herself up, but her palms slid on the loose gravel and her hands slipped out from under her.

She was drowning. Two weeks of rain a year, and this was how she’d die. When she came back as a ghost, would her lungs be full of water forever?

Olivia reached out blindly, and someone grabbed her arm. The ghost hauled her out of the water. When she rubbed Olivia’s back as Olivia coughed, her hand was solid and warm, all the way down to her broken fingers. Her cotton work-clothing was soaked through.

Olivia’s head was bright with pain.

Mei Ling lifted her and held her close to her chest. The ghost had no heartbeat. And then they were running, splashing through the rising water, headed back to the town square. The last thing Olivia saw were the stuccoed walls of the Grand Silver and the hordes of ghosts descending upon her mother’s banquet table, their swarming, newly substantial bodies rippling in the moonlight.

Olivia woke too early, her heart pounding loud in her ears. The roof rattled like someone was upending stones on it. The muted roar of torrential rain surrounded her, and when she pushed back the curtains, she saw that the street was full of rushing water, just as it had been all those years ago. No living people were out and about, not even the actors from yesterday. But ghosts—so many of them, almost too many to count—huddled under porch roofs and awnings, their bodies all clumped together, away from the rain.

Overhead, the sobbing had stopped. Last night, through the haze of half-swallowed dreams, the woman’s voice had sounded familiar. Olivia listened carefully, but she could hear nothing but the storm.

She checked her phone for missed calls and found that there were none. No phone service. Right. But there was internet, so she emailed her dad: I made it to Bisden safely. Cooking all today. I’ll be home soon. Love you. Don’t forget to eat.

Too late, she remembered that her mom used to sign off all her texts and emails the same way. But she’d already hit Send. She bit her lip, then turned away to pull on her jeans.

Despite the early hour and pouring rain, the ghosts on the street were already out in full force. She walked past them, and their heads followed her on skinny, starved necks, rotating like owls’. The full moon was a brief imprint in the sky, barely visible through a gap in the darkened clouds. As Olivia headed for her car, the boy who’d helped her move her supplies into the kitchen ran after her. “Hey,” he said breathlessly. “Mom asked me to help you if you needed anything.”

Olivia looked at him. He looked about her age, maybe seventeen at most. She couldn’t remember his name. “I’m just going grocery shopping,” she said.

“I’ll help you carry things if you want. I don’t mind.” He grinned. “I’m Carlos.”

He did look strong, Olivia conceded. His arms and back were well muscled. When he smiled, he had cute dimples. If she had been interested in men, she might have found him attractive. “I’m Olivia,” she said. “I’m going to buy a lot of stuff, though.”

“I figured. I didn’t think ghosts would eat a lot, but apparently they do.” He didn’t seem bothered by the rain or by the ghosts who watched them from the awnings. But then, he didn’t seem to see the ghosts at all.

The best thing about the Bisden supermarket, Olivia decided, was that it was cheap. She headed straight for the back counter and bought two dozen fresh fish. These were dead—not as fresh as the live ones swimming in tanks at the Chinese market back home—but they would do. She loaded her cart up with fresh produce: green onions, carrots, garlic, herbs. Four crates of oranges. It was too bad that Bisden didn’t have a Costco.

Carlos talked a lot, but he did hold up his end of the bargain. He carried all her groceries and helped load them into her car. He told her all about his schooling (he was a junior, one year younger than her), his aspirations (to go to Arizona State and study mechanical engineering), and his boyfriend (Sean, beautiful and geeky, also an aspiring engineer). “What about you?” he said as they drove through the pouring rain. “Do you have someone you like?”

“I did,” said Olivia. “But we broke up a while ago.” It had been a year and a half ago, in the spring. Priya was a year ahead of Olivia in school, and when she found out she was going to an East Coast college, she was ecstatic.

Olivia hadn’t wanted to keep Priya tied down. With Priya going east and Olivia staying in Arizona, it made sense to break things off. But Priya hadn’t agreed, and when she’d cried and Olivia didn’t, she’d accused Olivia of not caring enough to be there for her.

But you’re going out of state, Olivia had said. I can’t just move to Boston for you.

Priya had blown her wavy black hair away from her face and stared her down. You know that’s not what I’m talking about. Even when we’re together, having dinner, watching movies or whatever, you’re always so detached. It feels like you’re somewhere else, not with me. Her mouth tightened. Is there someone else?

There was the memory of a girl in dark cotton trousers, her hair hanging down her shoulders, pulling her from the water. There was also Mom, lying alone in the hospital, watching dramas until she fell asleep. She’d never told Priya about either, because they felt too private to talk about. No, said Olivia.

By the time Priya left for college, they had fallen apart.

Olivia and Carlos drove the rest of the way back in silence. As they were unloading the car, Carlos stopped in his tracks. Olivia glanced at him. “What is it?”

“I thought—” he broke off, frowning. He looked pale. “I thought I saw something. Over there, to your left. But it’s gone now.”

Olivia looked. The ghost of an old man, his body wracked with disease, looked back at her. His sunken eyes glittered. “I don’t see anything,” she said.

“Let’s get the rest of these inside,” said Carlos, hurrying past her.

Olivia cast one last look at the ghost and followed. If Carlos was starting to see them, she’d have to cook fast. The moon was rising; the Ghost Festival was coming. Her palms began to sweat. She wiped them on her jeans and strode inside, past the tourists beginning to mill about in the lobby with pamphlets about the Ghost Festival.

Olivia sorted her ingredients on the counters, arranging them by dish. Duck, pork, shrimp, fish. Winter melon, out of season, but bought from one of the Chinese markets back home. Spices, marinades. Red beans, sesame oil, sugar, salt. Bok choy, green beans, lotus root, sauces that she’d spent the past two days making.

Carlos hung back by the door. “Don’t you have work to do?” she said to him, and then winced. Too blunt. The words are wrong. Always wrong, when they came out of her.

“I do,” he said. He seemed unfazed, and the tight knot in Olivia’s chest loosened. “But I want to help if I can. You need someone to help you chop and prep, right? I cook meals in this kitchen all the time.”

A surge of relief flooded through her. “Thank you,” she said quietly. She indicated the vegetables lying in their neat rows. “I need these chopped. Garlic minced, green onions left long, but not longer than a finger. Carrots thinly sliced. Winter melon cubed.”

“Do you have a recipe?”

“Only in my head,” she said. That was how Mom had done it, too.

Carlos sighed and picked up a knife. “All right. Let’s get to work.”

They worked for hours, and soon they began to learn each other’s rhythm. The clock over the sink ticked, and sunlight passed across the windows and grew dark. Olivia didn’t have to look outside to know that people were locking themselves in their houses, pulling the curtains shut. Only the curious tourists kept watch, peering through the large glass windows of every hotel lining the street. All the hotels would have bolted their front doors shut except for the Grand Silver. Not the Grand Silver, because Olivia still had to hurry in and out with her food. Its thresholds were already lined with paper talismans to ward off any ghosts bent on mischief, or worse.

Time flew by, and Olivia sweated and braised and fried and steamed. Her muscles ached, but adrenaline and fear kept her body and mind singing. The rising spirit energy from outside grew to a tight, intense buzz in her head. She could hear the ghosts through the walls—whispering, waiting—and by the expression that Carlos wore, so could he. And then there was a wet, whining sound coming from inside the hotel, and the drag of broken feet in high heels in the ceiling above, somewhere in the air vents.

The moon rose, and Olivia began to plate.

After Olivia’s mom got sick, she became too weak to move around much. She was supposed to stay still, to conserve her energy. Moving made her nauseated. But the one place that Olivia’s dad couldn’t chase her out of was the kitchen. Even when she had trouble standing, she still insisted on cooking dinner for the family. Olivia helped her into a chair by the stove, and she sat there for hours, making sure all of the meal’s components were cooking properly. Olivia did what she could to ease the burden, measuring liquids, cooking the rice, making sure all the ingredients were chopped so that her mom didn’t have to worry about it.

One afternoon, her mother smiled up at her. “You’re getting so good at this. I’m glad. You’ll have to do this when I’m gone.”

A lump rose in Olivia’s throat. “That’s not going to happen.” I can’t fill your shoes, she thought. “You’re going to get better.”

“Don’t let the sesame seeds burn,” said Mom, and Olivia swooped in automatically, rescuing the frying pan of toasted seeds. “Good, good. Let them cool somewhere safe.”

Olivia set them aside in a small bowl. Her hands were trembling. “I can’t lose you. Dad can’t lose you. You’re going to get better. I know it.”

Mom reached out. Her fingers felt so delicate, so thin. “If you honor everything I’ve taught you, then I promise that I will never leave you.” She held Olivia’s hand and squeezed it. “I love you, Xi Yi.”

Olivia hadn’t heard that name in years, not since her grandma had passed away. Tears welled up in her eyes. “Mom—”

The kitchen timer went off. Her mom moved to take the ging do pai gwut off the heat and transferred it into a waiting ceramic dish. “Remember,” she said to Olivia. “Now take this to the table.”

The banquet table waited on the Grand Silver’s porch, safe from the rainstorm and the rushing water below. An outline of talismans marked a boundary around it, leading to the hotel doors. All along its edges, ghosts clustered and crowded, whispering among themselves. They were substantial, all flesh and bone, just for this one night. Just to feast until the sun came up. Above, in a gap in the heavy clouds, the full moon hovered like a malevolent eye.

Olivia came out with a cart laden with giant pots and stacked with metal dishes, clattering past the tourists gathered in the lobby, ignoring their questions. She refused to let Carlos follow her out onto the porch, and she felt his eyes on her back as she crossed the Grand Silver’s threshold. She laid platter after platter of Peking duck in the center of the table, forming a line of meat and soft, pale, steamed buns. She removed the lids of the pots and the scent of winter-melon soup rose through the thick air. As quickly as she could, she began to fill bowls.

The ghosts whispered and pushed their hands up against the barrier, hissing when copper-scented magic sparked against their skin. Cold sweat rose on Olivia’s back. But her hands were steady as she continued to ladle soup into bowls. Finally, there was no more room on the tabletop. Olivia stepped back, laying down another line of talismans so that there was a narrow, unobstructed passage from the door to the table.

She raised her voice. “Welcome, honored guests. My name is Olivia Chang, and I have prepared you a banquet, so that you may take and eat and find peace in your souls.” Her mom had given this speech many times, and Olivia did not stumble. “Please come. You are welcome at this table.”

With that, she broke the talisman barrier around the table. The ghosts fell upon the food. They shoved at each other, grabbing bowls, seizing chopsticks. Some used their hands and pushed food into their mouths as fast as they could. Many of them barely looked human in their hunger. They tore into the meat with ferocity, pushed their faces into the bowls of soup and snarled at their neighbors to get at the dishes they wanted. The food seemed to evaporate as the ghosts fought and bit and ate, ate, ate.

I didn’t make enough, Olivia thought wildly. Dread built in her stomach. All these people came to my table, and I can’t serve them all.

Breathe.

She breathed. Grabbing the cart, she doubled back for more food. Shrimp in clear, sweet sauce; crab with ginger and scallions. Fish after fish, all steamed, with sharp, salty sauce. Tender, marinated beef, still sizzling on metal plates. Bak cheet gai, with all of the sauces; hot-pepper pork chops. Her mother’s ging do pai gwut, sweet and glazed in bright red sauce, sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds. (Olivia’s heart ached.) And then, finally, platter after platter of sliced oranges and bowls of sweet red-bean soup. They vanished almost as soon as she put it out, but Olivia kept up her pace, her legs burning, her hands steady.

The night wore on, and more spirits flocked to the table, replacing those who had filled their bellies and wandered away. The moon drifted. In the lulls between waves, Olivia kept watch, burning incense and joss paper over a small fire. Embers wafted up into the air like wishes, and one by one, they winked out. The rain poured down relentlessly.

Mei Ling did not appear. Olivia watched the table, chewing on her lip so hard that it began to taste raw. Ghosts came, some eating quietly, some ravenously. The wildness in their eyes, their grief, their fear and rage, all ebbed as they ate. Take and eat, she’d said. The Chinese-American ghosts were the ones who wept the most, laughing and reveling in familiar foods. “Thank you,” they told her, one after another. “I never thought I would taste this again.” And one after another, they vanished, fading away to rest at last.

This was why she was here, as Exorcist Chang. It was only an exorcism in the loosest sense. Her work wasn’t an act of expulsion; her role was to soothe lonely souls, offering them freedom.

Olivia thought about the footsteps overhead, the sobbing at night. She sent up her piece of joss paper and headed back inside, through the clump of tourists in the lobby. They tried to speak to her, but she didn’t hear them. She stopped by the reception desk, staring up at the portrait of the Wailing Lady.

Yesterday, Renee had leaned over the counter and smiled at her. Our Wailing Lady is getting . . . unruly. Could you look into fixing that up, or finding a replacement?

The longer a ghost stayed in one place without release, the more restless it became. Bisden lived and died on its haunted attraction tourism. And when a ghost acted up, it lent legitimacy to the stories. But ghosts that were trapped for too long began to go mad, and that was when people got hurt.

Olivia stared at the painting, at the white veil covering the Wailing Lady’s face. In the ten years of Ghost Festivals since that first one at the Grand Silver, Olivia hadn’t seen Mei Ling once.

Beneath that veil, the Wailing Lady could be anyone.

She turned and ran for the kitchen. There was still some rice, just enough for one bowl. Everything else was gone, presented and eaten on the table outside. Olivia hoped the rice would do. She took the stairs up to the third floor and headed back to her room. As she ascended, the familiar sound of sobbing drifted down toward her, and she climbed faster. When Olivia opened the door, she saw a woman standing inside by the window, gazing out at the feast below. She wore a white wedding gown, stained with dirt at the hem, and a long white veil. She turned to face Olivia.

Olivia peeled the talisman necklace from her neck and laid it on the floor beside her. Slowly, she approached, holding out the rice. “I brought you something to eat,” she said. This time, her voice didn’t sound too loud in her ears. “It’s not much. But you seem hungry. Please, honored guest, take and eat.”

The Wailing Lady didn’t move, but she let Olivia approach. Steam wafted gently from the rice into the air. Rain battered down outside, beating at the window, demanding to be let in. Olivia reached out, offering up the bowl.

The ghost reached back, taking it. The hands around hers were warm and solid.

Gently, Olivia pushed back the veil.

When Olivia’s mom had died, she didn’t come back as a ghost. Olivia half expected her to. But she didn’t materialize in the hospital room when Dad chose to take her off life support, or on any of the nights when Olivia heard her dad crying alone in his bedroom. At the funeral, there had only been the silent Mom-shaped body nestled in her casket.

People became ghosts when they were restless, or had unfinished business, or held too much regret to pass on. They became ghosts when the ones they loved forgot them or didn’t pay them respects. Olivia burned incense despite the fire warnings on especially dry days, and some days, she set aside a small dish of whatever she was cooking to put on Mom’s altar later. But she kept the small shrine in her room, away from Dad. Whenever he saw it, his mouth would crumple and he’d leave abruptly, his grief chasing him somewhere else.

Olivia started staying late at school, just to be somewhere else. She withdrew from her friends, hiding in the library. Her grades suffered and improved. Slowly, it dawned on her that her mom was gone. Not just dead-and-a-ghost gone, but gone-gone.

People only became ghosts when they had something tying them to this place. Olivia’s mom, it seemed, had nothing to keep her here.

Olivia didn’t apply to college. Every time she reached the Family section on the applications—Parents’ Names? Level of Education? Relationship? Living? Deceased?—her head filled with static. The essay questions were inane: “What did you do last summer and how did it impact you?” just made her think of the ugly, ultraclean stink of the hospital and how she would never forget it, as much as she wanted to. Besides, someone had to take care of Dad. She couldn’t leave him, too.

Her relationship with Priya crumbled, and Olivia let it.

Her friends packed and left for college, and Olivia cooked, and paid bills, and cooked. She made sure all of her mom’s emails were forwarded to her own email address, and that the small dish in front of her altar was never empty. When she opened the email from the Grand Silver asking Exorcist Chang to prepare her banquet for the Ghost Festival that year, Olivia’s heartbeat jumped.

The one night when spirits walk among us.

She’d helped prepare the banquet every year, but she’d never done it alone. And she hadn’t been back to the Grand Silver since that first summer in Bisden.

“Dad,” she said that evening, twisting her napkin into tight rings under the table, “I’m going to Bisden in August.”

He looked up with a sad smile. He’d gotten so much older in the past months, she realized. “I know,” he said.

Olivia found herself looking into the face of a stranger. A hard face, weathered with age and hunger.

It wasn’t Mei Ling. It wasn’t Mom. It wasn’t anyone she knew.

“Who are you?” Olivia whispered, and the ghost stared silently back at her. The old Chinese woman’s gaze was vacant, and she shifted back and forth, her ill-fitting wedding dress whispering around her. Olivia wondered if she was a bride at all, or if someone had bound her to the Grand Silver Hotel against her will to serve as their ghost. This woman didn’t look like the young, pretty, white girl that the hotel’s brochures advertised as the Wailing Lady. Maybe that hadn’t mattered to the person who had trapped her here.

But if there was a night for truth, it was tonight. Mom had said so: during the festival, ghosts were most themselves. Not what the living wanted. Not what Olivia wanted.

The night of the festival was a chance for freedom.

Olivia bit back her disappointment and smiled at the woman. She held out a pair of chopsticks, and the woman took them and began to eat. The rice wasn’t much, something small and humble. But with every bite, the woman’s gaze grew sharper and more aware, and her movements became more coordinated. Soon, the rice was gone. Olivia opened her mouth to apologize, but the stranger spoke first.

“Thank you,” she said. Her voice was raspy, and Olivia wondered if it was because of all her crying. “Will you walk me to the door, child?”

Olivia took her arm and led her to the elevator. The woman gazed at her reflection in the elevator’s brass walls as they rode down to the first floor. They walked together past the tourists, who gawked but kept a healthy distance. Olivia thought she saw Renee moving toward them, but the crowd of tourists had closed in tight against one another, blocking her way with their bodies.

As they crossed the threshold, the woman raised her arms and her white wedding dress and veil crumbled into dust. Somewhere behind them, Renee shouted. Beneath the dress, the woman wore hardy cotton traveling clothes and a loose coat. There was a hat in her hands that she placed on her head, tugging the brim. The strong, determined set of her shoulders reminded Olivia of her grandma.

“Thank you for the food, child,” said the woman. She patted Olivia’s arm. “After being alone for so long, I forgot what it felt like to have family cook for you. And that is what your offering felt like.” She began to fade, but before she was fully gone, she gave Olivia’s arm a squeeze. “Go feed your guests.”

Olivia looked up. The sky was beginning to lighten, and most of the ghosts had vanished. But there were still a few at the table, picking at the remains of the food. One of them stood out: a girl wearing trousers, with deep brown hair and a small mouth. Her clothing and hair were soaked, and when she caught sight of Olivia, the corners of her mouth curved upward.

“The Game Boy girl,” said Mei Ling. “You grew up.”

Warm, welcome heat spread through Olivia’s chest. Mei Ling hadn’t changed at all since she’d first seen her. “I did,” she said. “Thanks to you.”

Mei Ling looked at the table and sighed. “It’s almost all gone. It looked so good, too.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, scanning the remnants of the banquet. “I almost made it to the table the last time your mom cooked at the Grand Silver, but I didn’t get there in time.”

Olivia’s stomach dropped. She remembered Mei Ling carrying her, bearing her toward the Grand Silver. Had she slowed her down and caused her to miss her chance to cross over?

“I know what you’re thinking,” said Mei Ling. She reached out to ruffle Olivia’s hair. When she pulled away, her crooked fingers brushed against Olivia’s forehead. “Don’t. I don’t regret it. I saw a little kid in trouble, and I did my best to save her. I wish someone had been there to do that for me.”

The most important part of service was being considerate of others, Mom had said. Olivia bit her lip and scanned the table. All the plates had been picked over; even the fish skins and eyes were gone. “I’m going to find you something to eat,” she said. “I’m going to feed you so you can find your way home.”

Mei Ling shook her head. “The sun’s rising, kid. The banquet’s over.”

Olivia picked through the plates with her fingers, pushing aside gnawed-on bones. There was no gristle, and most of the sauce had been licked off of the plates. Mei Ling was right; there was no food left on the table.

Her gaze flicked to the serving cart resting by the Grand Silver’s door. She crouched beside it, peering between the shelves. There, she thought. Splashes of sauce and little bits of food had spilled out of their dishes and onto the metal as she’d pushed the cart through the hotel. Taking her wooden paddle, Olivia carefully scraped them into her palm. Her heart ached. “Welcome, honored guest,” she said, holding her hand out to Mei Ling. “Take and eat, and let your soul be uplifted.”

Mei Ling opened her mouth, closed it. Startled tears welled up in her eyes. She reached for Olivia’s hand, cradling it in her left hand and scooping up the food with her right. As she ate, her mangled fingers straightened and became whole, and her bones twisted themselves back into shape with a series of ugly cracking sounds. Her wounds closed, one by one.

Stay with me, Olivia wanted to say. Don’t eat my food. Don’t go. She swallowed her words and held her hand still.

By the time Mei Ling swallowed the last grain of rice, her face was streaked with tears. She wiped them away. “Thank you,” she said. Her voice was hoarse but clear.

Olivia took her hand, lacing their fingers. It was warm, so warm.

Behind her, the clouds were thinning into fine strands with the returning heat. The moon had waned, and the rain dropped off. With a sigh, the last ghost at her table evaporated into the morning air.

©2018 by Alyssa Wong. Originally published in A Thousand Beginnings and Endings, edited by Elsie Chapman and Ellen Oh. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alyssa Wong writes fiction, comics, and games. Her stories have won the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Locus Award. She was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her fiction has been shortlisted for the Hugo, Bram Stoker, and Shirley Jackson Awards. Her comics credits include Marvel, DC, Star Wars, and Adventure Time. She has also written for Overwatch.

The Bear Prince

P H Lee | 8163 words

I have heard it on the rumors that when the tale-spinner’s guild gathers in their secret places a full half of them are sworn to never tell the truth, and the other half to never tell a lie, even if it means their life. Being one of that trade myself, I can tell you that that’s more or less the shape of it, and I tell you so you’ll know that this tale I tell you is true, just as it happened and just as it was told to me, for I am one of the ones sworn to the truth.

The name I’m called is Dusty Boots, I come from the valley of Erwhile, and I am in love with a girl that I can never have. The tale I tell you now comes from the lands beside the Great Sweet Sea, where once upon a time there was a king who had eight daughters and no sons.

He had called doctors, he had called sorcerers, he had called priests, he even had every man in his kingdom do penance, but regardless of all his efforts his queen would bear him nothing but daughter after daughter. Over time, he grew resentful of her, then angry. Finally, he decreed it a crime—punishable by death—for the queen to bear another daughter.

When the queen next became pregnant, she was terrified. She called out to every wise woman and every old woman and even a few women who were neither old nor wise. She did everything that the women told her to: bathed in five cold rivers, hid herself from the moon, swallowed red iron, slept with a dagger by her heart. But, in the end, it did not matter. When at last her time came, and she saw that she had given birth to a golden-haired daughter, she began to rage and spit and cry.

“Please,” she begged her midwife, who was both old and wise, “please take this cursed girl-child from me. Please, please, take it and tell my King that it was a stillborn son.”

“Your Majesty,” said the midwife, “stay here in seclusion and do not speak a word to your husband. I will say that your health is tender, and you are not to be disturbed. As for the child, leave her in my hands and you need never speak of her again.”

Perhaps, if she had been a little less wise, the midwife might have thought to abandon the child, or drown her, or send her out with a huntsman to cut out her heart. And perhaps, if the midwife had been a little less old, she would not have known where to take her. But this midwife was both old and wise, and a friend to the bears besides, and so she took the girl out into the woods, past all the places where the hunters and trappers dared go, to a family of bears that she had midwifed to the month before.

“Friend bears,” she said, as she approached their cave, “it is I, the midwife who just a month ago came and even in the depths of your winter-sleep drew out your son for you.”

Even though the bears were still muzzy with their winter-sleep, they knew better than to disrespect a midwife, or any woman who is both old and wise. First the father emerged, then the mother, and then at last their son, still tottering on new uneven legs, to see the midwife standing there, wrapped in shrouds and scarves, carrying the newborn princess.

“I have brought your son into this world,” said the midwife, “and what’s more I have brought you, and your husband, and all the children of all the bears in this generation and generations before. In all this time, I have not sought honor nor price for I know that the bears do not account as men do, with gold or silver, but instead with your much older reckonings.”

The bears sat peacefully, and did not respond.

“But now,” continued the midwife, “I have come with a price at last. For I am a woman, the daughter of a man, and in the end I must take my price as men do.

“This, then, is my price: I will take your son. I do not take him for fur, or meat, or any other cruel fate: I take him to be raised as a prince in the manner of men. I take him and I promise you that no harm shall come to him from the hands of men.”

The bears did not reply, but the mother shooed her son behind her and bared her teeth protectively.

“And I do not take him without recompense. In his place, I give you this girl, a princess, born this very hour in a royal court. Eat her, or leave her, or raise her as your own. Do with her what you will.” She held out the baby princess for the bears’ inspection.

The father bear sniffed at the child, while the mother began to growl a threat at the midwife.

“Do you dare to threaten me?” remonstrated the midwife. “I, who pulled you from your mother’s womb and pulled your son from yours? I, who alone knows your bear-names that you will not even breathe to each other in the darkness of your winter-sleep? You are a mother and I know your mother’s pain, but there will be other winters and other sons for you, and at my hand no less.”

The mother set her ears back and whimpered, but kept her son behind her.

“Fine, then,” said the midwife, “see if you have the courage to maul me.” She stepped gingerly behind the mother bear and exchanged the princess for the cub. The mother bear growled and snarled, but she knew better than to harm a woman who is both old and wise.

The midwife made her way out of the forest, carefully wrapping the bear cub in her shawl, shutting her ears to the mourning yowls of the mother she had vilomahed and the princess she had left crying in the snow. As for the cub, good as her word she took him to the palace. As for the princess she left behind, our story now leaves her behind as well, although we may in due course learn her fate.

• • • •

When the midwife, having swaddled up the bear cub just like a human babe, presented the king with his son, he laughed and wept in equal measure. “What a beautiful boy!” the king exclaimed, tossing the cub into the air. “Look how he is already so strong and hairy! Surely he will be a man amongst all men!” The midwife looked at the happy father and smiled to herself, her ruse complete, while the king’s advisors, who knew very well what a bear cub looked like, shot each other anxious glances even as they outdid each other in praise of the young prince.

Likewise, when the prince’s wet nurses began to complain of his sharp and nipping teeth, the king dismissed their complaints. “He’s just being spirited,” the king would say, “showing a little fire as befits a royal prince.”

“Quite so, your majesty,” the king’s advisors would echo. By now, of course, they had entirely convinced themselves that their prince was a perfectly normal child and would never have admitted that they had ever thought otherwise.

What could be done? Bear or not, the prince was a prince. The wet nurses had no choice but to recant and suffer through it.

It was much the same when, years later, the young prince mauled his tutor. “Our prince,” explained the king, “is a true man, not at all like you fuddling scholars. Like all true men, he has a natural contempt for study, which it is your business to overcome. In fact, if you had not been so boring, I’m sure you would even now be whole and healthy.”

“Quite so!” said the king’s advisors. “Such a man is our prince.”

The scholar, of course, did not respond. Even if he had been able—and, with his chest rent open by the prince’s claws, he was far from able—what could he have said in his defense? Bear or not, the prince was a prince. Tutor after tutor had no choice but to submit and die. With no one to rein in his impulses, he wandered the halls and passages and secret places of the palace as well, leaving behind a wake of claw marks rent into the walls and servants. He even found secret passages between the palace and the town around it, where the peasants and freemen were shocked to find a finely-appointed bear rummaging through their stores and houses.

Finally, though, the education of the young prince was turned over to the royal huntsman, who would take the prince out fishing in the woods and whose company the prince peaceably enjoyed, and the whole of the royal court found at least a measure of relief.

And so the young prince grew up, as much bear as prince, but in time the life of the court taught him its own lessons. As the years changed, he changed with them. He even began to dress himself as a man, to speak as one, and even to, in some manners, act the part of a prince, if indeed a wild one.

• • • •

By the time the prince had reached his twelfth year, with another year beside, his mother the queen had died and his father the king had remarried, to a fine-haired daughter from over the Loed. This was, to our prince, a matter of no particular consequence. Rather, it was in the next year, as the weather became more rain than snow, when the young queen gave birth to a son, that the prince’s entire life began, unbeknownst to him, to change.

When, this time, the king held his new son in his arms, he marveled at the child. “What a curious child!” he exclaimed. “Look! He has no hair on him at all. And his nails are thin and tiny! But in frame he is so large and heavy that I can barely toss him into the air.”

While the king’s advisors, who had spent these many years remarking on what a fine specimen was their older prince, rushed over themselves to agree with the king, the new queen found it altogether odd. She was young, and newly-married still, and did not yet know her husband’s temper, so she did not hesitate to contradict him.

“My darling husband,” she said, “whatever do you mean? This is a simply a child like every other child. His hair and teeth shall grow in time, but is it not our human lot to be born into this world hairless and crying?”

The king was taken aback, and his advisors likewise. “But my other son,” said the king, “was born most unlike this dear child.”

“Is that so?” asked the young queen, who knew very well what a bear looked like, then let the matter drop.

The young queen’s contradiction, though, did not so easily leave the king’s mind. Indeed, it tormented him until he could not sleep nor eat for the fear of it. “What is my son?” he asked himself at night and all alone, “if he was not at all a baby?”

He thought of calling the prince to an audience and an account, but what would be revealed? There were secrets he could not bear unveiling, and secrets that the crown could not bear either.

Finally, he called his woodsman, who was by then the prince’s caretaker and confidant, to a secret audience.

“Woodsman,” he addressed his servant, “you of all my court are best beloved of our prince and heir.”

The woodsman, unused to being in the royal presence, knelt and did not contradict him.

“Knowing our prince as well as you do, have you perhaps noticed anything odd about him? About his body and his behavior?”

“Oh no, your majesty,” replied the woodsman, who knew full well that the prince was a bear and had always assumed that the king had intended it that way. “Other than a spot of the mange a while back, he’s as healthy as can be.”

The king breathed out, relieved at least halfway. Still, he pressed on. “And there’s nothing particular about him. Nothing that would give you pause to have him as the heir to the throne.”

“Oh no, your majesty,” replied the woodsman. “He’s as good and healthy a bear as I have ever known.”

• • • •

When the king heard his woodsman say out loud that his son, the prince and heir, was a bear, he fell into a dead faint, and when he awoke he was not much better, tossing this way and that, murmuring to himself. His doctors set him to bed rest and a diet of thin broths, but even then it took until the third day for him to be well enough to understand the whole of his situation. Once he had, he called his most trusted advisors to wait on him in bed.

“Gentlemen,” he said when they had all arrived. “It seems that we have been these many years deceived. My eldest son, the crown prince and heir to all my lands, since his fortunate birth the apple of my eye, is not in the end my son, or any kind of prince at all. He is, rather, a bear.

“I see now clearly,” continued the king. “It must have been my old queen who, afeared to present me with another daughter, arranged for that old midwife to switch the child with a newborn cub. I have heard before that the old midwife was sly, and I have it known that she was long a bear-friend.”

“Oh no, your majesty,” began his advisors’ long-accustomed protests, but even as they began he waved them aside.

“It is not my intention to have you convince me to the contrary. Rather, my question is, knowing what we now know, how we must proceed? Some of you are wise men, and some of you are old men, and some of you may even be both wise and old. Surely, gentlemen, among ourselves, we may find a way out of this predicament without bringing due shame upon ourselves or upon our crown.”

At once, the king’s advisors agreed that there was nothing for it but to arrest and execute that wicked midwife, who was almost certainly a witch, because everyone knew she was both old and wise and a friend to bears besides, and what sort of woman is old and wise and a friend to bears and yet somehow not a witch? So confident were they in their judgment and the king’s consent that they announced the order immediately, calling for the guards to drag her from her home in broad daylight while proclaiming her crimes against the crown, until one of the guards—a young man named Ewen who was a friend to her family and had known her since she’d pulled him from his mother’s womb—had to quietly tell them that she had died in her sleep, peacefully and innocent, almost five years ago.

Denied their blame-goat, the king’s advisors immediately began to argue amongst themselves, and in short order two factions emerged: one that said that for the good of the royal line the prince must be denounced and executed, with the other saying that the entire thing must be kept quiet, that the prince must be sent away to study, and secretly never allowed to return, lest the king, the crown, and the whole of the royal house be brought to disrepute.

The king listened to them argue for a while, until at last he held up his hand for silence. “You,” he said, indicating a man in the back who had not yet said much of anything, “you’ve been nothing but quiet. What have you to say?”

“Well,” said the man, who was new to the king’s advisors, a man of some sense but no real accomplishment, old enough to be a little wise and yet still young enough to be a little foolish, “it seems to me that this circumstance need only be a catastrophe if we in our haste make it into one.”

At once, both factions of the king’s advisors united in their haste to disdain the man, his birth, his bearing, and most especially his advice, until at last the king grew tired and called again for silence.

“What do you mean by that?” he asked.

“This land has been inhabited since time immemorial by both men and bears,” continued the advisor. “And in all that time men have had kings and have had tribes and have even had for some misguided moments their own republics, but in all that time there has never been amongst the bears a king or a bishop or even a squire or a count.”

“As well we all know, that is because of the bears’ nature. What of it?” asked the king, who was losing his patience.

“It seems to me that we have not a crisis, but instead a moment of opportunity. We have in our own court, raised as your own son, a bear that was all these twelve-and-one years educated and taught and treated as a prince. Why not send him out, your majesty, not as an exile or as a shameful secluse, but as the prince he is, to be king over his own people? In this way, all will benefit. Your royal line shall hold not one kingdom, but two, each one raised as your own son, and the bears will at last have gained a king to rule over them with will and law and honor.”

When he heard this, the king began to laugh in great bellowing shouts. “Ahahah,” he laughed, “ohohoh.” His advisors were stunned, for they could not tell whether his laughter was in agreement or in disbelief. Finally, at last, the king stopped laughing. “It’s brilliant,” he said. “And we shall carry it out forthwith.”

• • • •

In the king’s court there was all manner of activity and preparation. The king’s scholars drafted up proper laws, while the goldsmiths set the prince a crown and scepter, and the advisors set about determining all the proper legal bases for the prince’s claim. The king—who had before been happy to leave his son in the company of the woodsman—even began to take the prince aside and offer him advice on kingly conduct.

Neither the king nor any of his advisors, though, were willing to risk the prince’s wrath, so in the end it fell to the old woodsman—the prince’s one friend at the court—to take the prince out to the forest to be a prince among the bears. He woke the prince early in the morning, and waited while the prince’s surviving nurse dressed and combed him and kissed his cheeks and told him to be a good king. After she was done, the woodsman led the prince out of the palace, past the moat and the castle-town, into the forest, across the now-frozen streams where they had fished away many days together, out into the country of the bears in the dark heart of the woods where no man goes.

When the prince and the woodsman had arrived in the dark heart of the forest, the woodsman stopped them in the shadow of a ragged old pine.

The woodsman looked this way and that—unwelcome here and knowing his unwelcome—and then finally to the prince, confused and no small part afraid. The woodsman fumbled inside his satchel. His hand first came to rest upon his knife, which he held for a moment before he tossed it on the ground.

“It might be kinder,” he said to himself as he pulled out the scrolls of law, the silver scepter, and finally the golden crown inscribed for Rex Omnium Ursorum. The woodsman looked at the royal relics, which had in the court seemed so regal and important, and here in the forest seemed thin trinkets. “It might be kinder to simply cut his heart than leave him here and with only a crown.” But he did not reach again for his knife.

Instead, he lifted up the crown—all gold salmon and arrayed with rubies made like berries and silver made like trees—and set it on the prince’s head, and said the words that he had at court been made to memorize, and crowned him in his father’s name as king of the forest and of all the bears.

Afterwards, the woodsman knelt before the new king, and then embraced him and rubbed his ears and told him to be a just king, but presently the winter sun began to twilight and he so afeared his unwelcome in that place and hurried back through the forest, back towards the castle and the town, leaving the bear in his new country, a king alone in winter.

• • • •

The new king wandered this way and that, looking for something to eat and finding little, until at last he chanced upon a well-appointed cave. “Hello?” he said into the cave. “Is anyone there? It is no less than ourselves, your king of all bears, come to receive your love and your obeisance.”

But it was now the dead of the winter, and all the bears were in their winter-sleep. No one responded, or no one would have, except that as it happened there was a golden-haired girl amongst this family, who had lived there all her life and had never known another home. So arearred amidst the bears, she had long since learned their language and so could understand the new king perfectly. A girl-among-bears, but still a girl, she had never accustomed to their winter-sleep, and so had stayed awake, tending the hearth and home while the rest of her family slept at peace.

“Who are you?” asked the golden-haired girl. “And why are you still awake?”

“We just told you,” said the king, “We are your king, the King of the Bears, come to impart my law and justice on all the bears of this forest.” He looked at her uneasily, then added, “And all other creatures of this forest beside.”

“Well, I’ve lived my whole life in this forest,” said that golden-haired girl, “and I’ve never heard anything about any kings, most especially any Kings of any Bears. Kings sound like a thing-of-men, with no home in this or any forest. But it’s the deep of winter, and you a bear alone with no way to make in the world besides. It wouldn’t be right to turn you out of the cave. So you can stay here as long as you need, until the winter-sleep take you, as long as you don’t make yourself any sort of trouble.” She looked at him, and seeing him not nearly fat enough for winter, added “You can even eat something if you like.”

“Well now,” began the king. He was, of course, offended at the suggestion that a commoner such as this cave-dwelling girl might have any hospitality to offer him, the king of all bears. But then he thought for a moment.

“Perhaps it is better,” he told himself, “that I should start my reign out on the right foot, to accept this in the spirit of submissive tribute that is clearly intended. Yes,” he concluded, “for any just king must also be a kind king. This is the way.”

“We accept your offer of tribute in the loyal spirit it was intended,” said the king, taking on a most regal pose.

The golden-haired girl, who had already turned her attention back to her winter pottage, startled in response. “All’s right, then,” she said when she had at last recovered her wits. “Here you go.” And she set before the king some dried berries, preserved fish, and honey crystals that she had saved lest any of the other bears go hungry and, in the deep of the winter, awaken starveling and mad.

The king sniffed at her offerings, then reared up, offended. “How dare you offer us, your lord and sovereign, the king of this forest and all the bears within it, such a meager meal? This is nothing more than some dried-out fruit and side of rotten fish, with honey unmeaded and left for waste!”

When she heard the king’s tirade, the golden-haired girl was quite taken aback. In all her life, having known only bears, she had never heard such a tirade about food of any kind. Among the bears, among her people, particularly in the depths of winter, they would eat anything they found before them. Nonetheless, she swept up the preserves back to her stores.

“Well, then,” she said, “if that doesn’t suit you—”

“If that doesn’t suit Your Majesty,” corrected the king.

“If that doesn’t suit your majesty, you’re welcome to have some of my simple pottage. It’s no more than roots and grasses stewed to the death of them, but there is enough to share and I would share it with another bear even if there weren’t.” With that, she served up some of her soft pottage into her only bowl and set it before the king.

The king sniffed at the bowl, wrinkled his nose, then tentatively reached out his tongue. But as soon as he touched the tip of his tongue, he leapt back and cried out. “Oh! My tongue is burnt! Are you trying to murder me? This is far too hot. Surely if I ate it I would die.”

“Suit yourself,” said the golden-haired girl, and sat down to eat the bowl of pottage on her own. “Suits me fine against the winter’s chill.” She had taken two bites before she remembered to add, “your majesty.”

“Well now,” said the king, after he had stuck out his tongue and waved it around in the cold air. He paused for a while after this, but when the girl said nothing to fill the silence, he added, “Have you nothing else suitable to eat?”

“What would be suitable for you to eat?” asked the golden-haired girl. “Your majesty.”

“A civet of smoked hare,” said the king, “or perhaps a loin of veal all studded with silvered almonds? Would it be too much to ask for a pie of whole roe deer? One would suffice, surely. Failing that, perhaps a simple stew of plums and rose-water, with some of that southern cheese that’s gooey on the inside.” At the thought of proper food, he began to smack his lips and taste the air in front of him.

“Well, we’ve none of that here in the forest,” said the golden-haired girl, “or if we have I’ve never tasted it. Your majesty.”

“Ah well,” said the king.

“If there’s no food here for that suits you,” continued the golden-haired girl, “perhaps you might take a rest? Even if the winter-sleep is not your custom, since you are a bear, you may as well make use of this cave’s warmth.”

“Well,” said the king, “I suppose there’s no harm in it. And I am after all today quite tired.” He began to think back at all that had already happened today, but then stopped. It did not bear thinking about.

“Come here, then,” said the golden-haired girl, and led him deeper into the cave. “Your majesty.” The king was beginning to suspect that her obeisance was not entirely sincere, but set the thought aside.

In time they reached the dark heart of the cave, where the golden-haired girl’s bear family slept in the deepness of their winter-sleep in a great warm bearish pile. “Here you go,” said the girl. “Comfortable for you to join them for tonight, or all winter long, if it suits you.”

The king looked at the great furry pile of bears, all breathing thin in their winter-sleep, then back at the golden-haired girl, then back to the pile. “Do you truly expect us, the true and regal King of all Bears, to lie down in a pile of wild animals, covered in all manner of fleas and parasites? I have born your insults up until now, but this is truly beyon—”

“Your majesty,” she interrupted him, trying to keep her voice low so as to not wake the bears. “Please forgive my impertinence. Let me offer you instead of my own bed of moss and straw. Perhaps you will find it more to your liking.” She gestured towards her own bed—not really a bed at all, more of a disorganized pile—in the corner of the cave.

The king regarded the rough pile of moss and straw with disgust. “Oh, and now you invite us into your bed?! Do you expect ourselves, a king and sovereign in our own right, to fall for the wiles of some common harlot?”

“Please,” said the golden-haired girl, “keep your voice down. You’ll wake the other bears.”

“And why should we care if some common peasants can sleep or not?” roared the king. “You should wake them! Wake them now so that they may bow before us, their new king, and swear to us their eternal loyalty.”

“I really don’t think that’s a good idea—” protested the golden-haired girl.

“Did we ask for your opinion, you presumptuous peasant?” snapped the king and walked over to the pile of still sleeping bears. Angry, he began to cuff and chastise them. “Wake up! Wake now! Wake now and pay fealty to your liege!”

“Please,” said the golden-haired girl, “stop! You don’t know what you’re doing.”

But the king did not listen. He kept hitting the bears. “Wake up! Wake up! Your king demands your attention!”

Slowly, gradually, from the depths of her winter-sleep, the mother bear opened one eye, and then another. “Ragwr . . .” she roared gently, and then again, louder. When the king’s paw came down to strike her again she brushed it aside with such force it knocked him off his feet, sending the crown clattering away.

She growled again, this time in warning and alarm, and then she had the father woke, and then their child. Half-starved from winter-sleep, they fell on the king, and even emaciated they had no difficulty in pinning him to the ground.

I have heard it said, and I know it to be true, that bears will not hunt their meat. But, out of the depths of the winter-sleep, when their hunger is at its apex, there is very little a bear will not do to feed itself. And so, with hungry jaws, they fell upon the king, preparing to devour him whole.

“Stop!” cried the golden-haired girl and then, when they did not listen, threw herself on the king to protect him. “It is true that he is rude, and that he is foolish, and that he knows nothing of being a bear. But he is a bear nonetheless, or may at least some day become one. Sister, did you not come up with me together, learning as I did the paths and patterns of the living forest? And father, was it not you who taught me to grab the salmon from the stream at the dawn of winter-time? And mother, did you not wake every hour to nurse me, even as an infant, before I had learned on my own to wait out your winter-sleep? If you spare him, I promise you, I will teach him all the ways and manners of the bears, and he will soon be like your own family, just as I was.”

I do not know why the golden-haired girl, on that day, showed such mercy, throwing her own life for a bear she had only just met and did not particularly like. I wonder if she even knew why, in that moment, she acted as she did. Perhaps one of you will know the answer? Or perhaps it shall remain a mystery to us all.

Regardless of her motives, the bears even in the depths of their hunger and their rage recognized their own daughter and recognized her desperation. One by one, they slowly backed away, stopping to nuzzle and kiss her, before returning in their great pile to sleep away the darkness.

• • • •

The golden-haired girl was good as her word. All that winter, then through the spring and summer, then year after year, she went out with the king into the forest and taught him all the ways and manners of the bears: every rock and every stream and every tree and how to eat from each one, and which animals lived in which territories, where the wolves left their carrion and where the bees hid their nests. Over time, and with practice, the king learned so well to be a bear that you would never have thought that he was once a prince in a castle, with tutors and nurses and servants. You would not imagine that he had ever been anything except a simple bear.

One morning, years later, as the king and the golden-haired girl set out together in the early dawn to peel themselves the underskins of trees, they spied a young man, a huntsman, making his way through the forest, looking at pawprints, testing the earth, smelling the scats that the animals had left behind. Sensibly, they did not approach him. They hid themselves behind a wide tree and watched him as he began to set great iron jaws on the ground and cover them with leaves and needles.

“I know those,” said the bear king. “Those are bear traps!”

The golden-haired girl gasped. “We must tell the others. We must travel further into the wood, away from men and their traps and hunters.”

“Why would they be setting bear traps? Don’t they know that this is our forest, our country of the bears?”

The golden-haired girl struggled to contain a laugh. “Our forest? When have men ever respected what’s ours and what’s theirs? No, when men arrive, there is no use fighting them. There is nothing for it but to flee further into the wood.”

“You think that way, because you have always lived here, amongst the bears. But I was raised among men. I know that they can be reasoned with. Men put a great deal of stock in laws and customs. We cannot so easily abandon our home! Let me go and speak with him.”

“Suit yourself,” said the girl, who clearly did not think much of his chances.

As the king approached the trapper, he stood up on his hind legs, so that he might present himself as a man among men. “Hail, fellow,” he cried out, and the trapper looked up.

“A bear!” he shouted.

“Yes, I am a bear, and this—” began the king, but the trapper interrupted him.

“Don’t think you scare me, bear!” he shouted. “Other men may cower and run at the sound of your grumblings or at the sight of your claws, but my hatred gives me a courage beyond fear. I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!” He was so angry that he spat.

“What could have—” began to ask the king, before he was once more interrupted.

“I was only a child,” continued the hunter, “when my father was tasked with the care of the king’s pet bear, that he raised and pampered as a prince, while our family was fed like dogs with scraps from the table. All day and all night my father cared for that bear, and never a word or a moment for me! And then, just as capricious, the king tired of his pet. He bade my father take that bear out to this wood, and leave him there to whatever fate might bring. I do not know what the bear did to him, out here in the deep forest where no man goes, but afterwards he was never the same. He wouldn’t eat and would barely sleep, and he would not speak but for to cry. He mourned and he mourned and he wept himself to death. Over what? A bear! So no, I am not afraid of you, bear. I set my traps for the king who has late a taste for bear paw, and I hope his taste lasts and lasts until every one of you is dead.”

The king, shocked by such a display, fell onto his feet and opened his mouth in shock, but in the end, he had nothing to say. He turned and made his way back to the tree where the girl was hiding.

“You were right,” he said. “There is no reasoning with him. He wants nothing more than our death.”

“Men are all alike,” agreed the girl.

“He is dangerous,” said the king. “We should fall on him and tear him apart with our teeth and claws. Then the men will fear us, and fear will keep them from our forest.”

“More fool you,” said the girl. “For if we kill one man, it will do nothing. That will only bring more of them, to avenge him, and then yet more, to contain our threat. There is nothing to be done and there is no time to waste. We must flee further into the forest.”

“But what if, one day, there is no deeper forest to flee to?”

The girl lost patience. “What if! What if! That’s tomorrow’s problem. Let’s go tell the rest of them.”

The bear king, though, was not easily cowed. Even as they ran to tell the other bears about the traps, he thought and thought, turning the problem over in his mind. “What do men do,” he asked himself, “when their lands are trespassed?” He began to think thoughts that he had not thought for a long time, thoughts about war and borders, law and loyalty, men-at-arms and oaths and the nature of the crown.

• • • •

That night, as they lay in the cave and waited for sleep, the king turned to the golden-haired girl and spoke. “When men’s lands are trespassed, they do not as we do and flee into the night.”

“Men are men,” she replied with a shrug, “and bears are bears.”

“But some men do flee,” he said, “and some men fight. The difference is that those who fight have among them a king who will rally them and call them to arms and country, to defend and keep their lands and customs.”

“But we are bears,” said the golden-haired girl.

“But if we had a king,” continued the king, “a true king, a king of all the bears, then maybe we could raise ourselves into an army. We would have no need of steeds and smiths. We have all the arms we need at the ends of our paws. And if we were an army, we would not need to flee deeper into the wood. We could stand here; we could fight here. We could counterattack the kingdoms of men and destroy them so that no hunters and no traps would ever trouble us again.”

“Go to sleep,” she said, and he did. But the golden-haired girl did not. Once she heard what the king had said, she tossed and turned and moaned and muttered. She could not stop thinking.

Finally, near the middle of the night, she got up and stood for a while outside the cave in the pale light of most of the moon. She walked down to the nearby creek, cupped the water in her hands, and stared at it as it stilled, at her face reflected with the moonlight, a bear’s face and yet so unlike a bear. She stared and stared until she felt her hands begin to tingle with the cold. She half-laughed at her own thoughts, splashed her face, then leaned down into the creek. She drank deeply and well.

She walked back into the cave and watched the king sleep for a while, but did not join him. Instead, she made her way deeper into the cave, to the place where once, many winters ago, her mother and father and sister had slept and she had promised her life for another.

When the golden-haired girl woke the bear king, well before dawn, she was holding the old but untarnished crown that had been long left where it had fallen, on the floor and deep within the cave.

“We do have a king,” she said. “We have you.”

• • • •

It was not easy for them to explain to the other bears even what a king was, let alone that they had a king and why that mattered. The bears of the forest were not particularly impressed with the king, or with the crown, although one of them mistook one of the rubies for a berry and tried to eat it. At the end of the first day, they had not even convinced their own bear family. But the bears of the forest knew the girl, and while the bear king was a new arrival, he was no longer a stranger to them. At the end of a week, they had a handful of followers. By the end of the moon, they had dozens. And by the end of the season—when they met in the clear meadow by the banks of the salmon stream, when she bathed him and set the crown upon his head, when she proclaimed “Rex Omnium Ursorum” as he had taught her—every bear in the forest was in attendance.

That winter, the bears of the forest retreated into their caves and burrows. But they did not sleep. They trained.

“Listen,” said the golden-haired girl, deep under the earth, with all the bears of the forest standing at attention before her. “When you live as beast, you eat what you can, and when you are done eating, you rest, you sleep, you play. But when you are a soldier, you cannot rest when your day’s eating is done. You must march, you must fight, you must never allow yourself to stop until the foe is defeated. Surprise and discipline are our greatest treasures, and if we devour the reserves of the first farmstead we take, and return to our forests replete, we will have squandered them both.”

The bears listened to her, and they learned that and many things besides.

“Listen,” said the King of All Bears, with his subjects arrayed and alert around him. “We bears do not fight together as men do, nor as wolves do, for we are bears, the greatest creatures in the forest without care or fear. But it is because of this that men may divide us, may surround us, may entrap us with their shields and skewer us with their spears. We are stronger than men, and greater, but if we are to defeat them we must be able fight together, we must fight as one, we must hold the line. Do you know what that means? It means that even if you are hurt, even if you are afraid, you must not fall back, you must not give men a space to breech. Even if it means your own death, at least let it not mean your fellows’.”

The bears listened to him, and practiced, and drilled, and learned that and many other things besides.

That spring, the bears attacked.

The king had long supplied forts along his border, to protect from the incursions of his rivals to the south. He had even a set of patrols and alerts along the sea-coast, for protection from any foreign men a-viking. But he had never deployed any forts or armies against the forest, the deep forest, for none lived in the forest but the bears, and what army could ever cross it?

So bears tore across the land. They ripped open houses, tore apart cows, and sent waves of refugees fleeing to the protection of the capital. If they had been less disciplined, they might have stopped to devour the larders and the cellars as spoils of their conquest, and perhaps then the king’s knights might have had time to rally against them as they slept in contented sleep. But instead they marched together, as one, with the golden-haired girl next to them shouting, “Do not stop and do not eat! Let our first feast be on the entrails of the king!”

The people retreating from the bears’ advance took with them horrible stories of an army of bears, and at their head a bear crowned in gold, with a golden-haired woman at his side. “Queen of the Bears,” they called her, but none of them recognized in her the image of the old queen. The old midwife might have told them the truth of it, but she had died long since.

By the time they reached the capital, the king had managed to rally a defense, withdrawing himself and his court into the keep, with the walls all set with spearmen and archers. But the bear king, who had spent his whole youth wandering the halls and tunnels of the castle, knew well every secret way, and he and the girl and their family with them snuck under cover of darkness deep into the castle, into the keep, into the royal chambers where the king huddled with his personal guard, all easily dispatched.

“Please!” the king begged, as if he had not just last week been feasting on bear paw, “I have no enmity with you! Bears are bears and men are men. Let us set aside our quarrel. Return to your forest, leave us this land, and we will never trouble you again.”

“Surrender now,” said the bear king but the other king, panicked and blubbering, did not understand him.

“Men are liars,” said the golden-haired girl. “Don’t believe. We must end this now.”

“It is not noble—” began the king, but then his gaze fixed upon the golden-haired girl. “Wait!” he said, as he recognized in her the visage of his former queen. “It’s you! You are my lost daughter, stolen away by that wicked witch of a midwife. How you must have suffered, abandoned to these creatures, how you must have yearned for the love of your true father! Oh, my poor girl. Come and embrace me, turn against these monsters.”

The golden-haired girl looked at him, but did not speak.

“Daughter!” cried the king. “Why do you not embrace me, your father?”

“I am not the child you should cry out for,” the golden-haired girl responded. “Do you not recognize your own son, who you raised for twelve-and-one years, who you loved and named your heir, who you sent out into the deep forest with nothing but a golden crown to protect him? He is the one that needed you! He is the one that was abandoned!”

The king turned to stare at the bear king. He did not recognize the bear, but when he recognized the crown, he began to choke.

“I already have a father,” continued the golden-haired girl, and her bear-father came to stand beside her, “and a mother and brothers and sisters besides.” As she spoke, the other bears of her family stood around her, hungrily eyeing the prone king.

“Daughter!” cried the king, but it was no use. The bears—mother and father and daughters and even their adopted bear king—fell upon the old king and ate him, guts and all.

I have heard that, after they finished with the old king, the bear king and the golden-haired girl sat together on the thrones in the great hall, and declared themselves by right of birth and conquest the queen and king over all the forest and all the lands. I have heard it said, and I believe it to be true, that they declared that from that day forth, no men would be welcome in their kingdom, and that the whole of it would be turned over to the bears and their salmon, the deer and their runs, and all the other creatures of the forest. I have heard it, but I have never seen it with my own eyes, for from that generation, and for all the time since, no man has again set foot in that kingdom, on the shores of the Great Sweet Sea. It the bears’ country now, and what stories they keep in it are theirs alone.

That is the story, the whole and the heart of it, just as it happened and just as it was told to me. If any man call me a liar, he has only himself to blame.

—Thanks to Fae Garet for her help with Latin translation.

©2021 by P H Lee.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

P H Lee lives on top of an old walnut tree, past a thicket of roses, down a dead end street at the edge of town. Their work has appeared in many venues including Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Uncanny Magazine. From time to time, they microwave and eat a frozen burrito at two in the morning, for no reason other than that they want to.

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

A Place for Hiding Precious Things

Amber Sparks | 3732 words

Once upon a time, in another part of now, there was a girl.

She was graceful and talented and pretty as dawn—though no more than she ought to be—and she was lucky enough to be the daughter of a very minor king, rich but provincial, with few real responsibilities. She was delighted with life, and with her own way of living in it. She loved stories, and music, and most especially, painting. She loved to create small strange worlds on paper and had set up a gallery in several rooms of her home for her art: the royal version of the family refrigerator. And she had a fairy godmother, because magic in this part of the world was stronger than it is in ours, and it lived out in the open and fed on the fat ripe sun and the clotted cream of moonlight.

Her mother, in the way of most fairy tale mothers: dead.

Her father, in the way of most fairy tale fathers: dreadfully flawed.

The girl herself: naïve; or, charmingly innocent, if you prefer. The girl herself, in the way of most humans: unready for unhappiness.

This fairy tale, in the way of most fairy tales: a warning disguised as a wish.

• • • •

When the king’s daughter was young, he cared little for her, for her drawings or her songs or her stories or her good heart, or for anything at all beyond the alliances her marriage could bring him. Indeed, he was almost a stranger to her. But the girl was not sad; since she’d never known any parent’s affection, she didn’t miss it, and she was raised by nursemaids and governesses and loved by her fairy godmother. She had three cats and two dogs and four turtles, six fish and two ponies, and an enormous library full of books and blue velvet drapery. She had royal playmates and a private lake. She had expensive paints and pretty dresses and riding lessons and music lessons and was probably happier than we’d like to admit a motherless child could be.

But one day, her father happened to look out the window, and he saw his only child riding her bicycle back from the village. He saw her long legs, pedaling gracefully. He saw her long arms, balancing a basket of bread and wine between the handlebars. He saw her long neck, so like her mother’s, and he decided (because of course) he must marry her at once. We are to assume, maybe, that he was senseless with grief? Perhaps this is true. Or perhaps the father felt himself entitled to all the world’s beautiful women, even his blood relations. This too is not uncommon, in fairy tales or otherwise.

In any case, the girl was properly horrified. She cried until her fairy godmother arrived in her sudden way and hugged the girl tight till her breath was flown. (Fairy godmothers aren’t all lacewings and dew, like everyone supposes. They are quite substantial, sturdy as stout trees and deep as rich dark earth, and their love is as good for you as vitamins and vegetables.) The girl’s godmother told her not to worry, that she must ask her father for the impossible before she agreed to marry him. But what could be impossible for a king? The fairy godmother—magical but not inventive—deferred to the girl and her artistic imagination.

A dress, said the girl.

Hmm, said the fairy godmother.

But not just any dress.

Hmm, said the fairy godmother.

A dress the exact color of blood, said the girl.

Ah, said the fairy godmother, and smiled. That’s very good.

• • • •

Because this is a fairy tale, the dress is made, and made perfectly. The dress is the exact color of blood, is a bright, saturated wound; it is a monstrous heart made of tulle and lace.

So the fairy godmother suggests a second challenge. The girl goes to her father, who is now impatient as well as incestuous, and demands a dress the color of bone. If the father had not already lost his mind, he would surely have expressed concern at such morbid selections. But he is already lost, and so he demands the sleeping seamstresses awaken at once and begin sewing the bone dress. The girl begins to pack her trunk, her faith in the fairy godmother diminishing just a little.

• • • •

As she’s dreaded, the dress is the color of bone, a dingy yellow-white shot through with streaks of pink. She models it for the king-her-father, and he closes his eyes in pain. I can’t think, he says, why you would want such a thing; it’s as though you’ve turned yourself inside out.

She thinks she could say much the same of him, but she doesn’t. She curtseys and waits to be dismissed with a wedding date. Then she runs to her rooms to finish packing.

Where will you go? asks her fairy godmother. And how will you get there? With his horses? His carriages?

I don’t know, says the girl, and she sighs. She understands that she has been ill prepared for life in the wide world, and she regrets that now. But what else can she do? She won’t sleep with her own father, no matter how lost he is. It’s escape or death. She doesn’t mean to sound so tragic, she says, but it’s true just the same.

Okay, says the fairy godmother, and she puts her wide arms round the girl. Her shawl smells of cinnamon and sourdough. (Imagine Cary Grant’s housekeeper in To Catch a Thief—the one who strangled Nazis with her bare hands—and you have something of the idea.) Okay, she says, here is what we’ll do. We’ll ask him for a dress the color of death. How could he possibly achieve that? Death is so subjective that no matter what he has made, we’ll simply disagree with it. Yes?

Yes, says the girl. And she asks for a dress the color of death to wear at her wedding. I may as well be dead, she says to the king, if I have to marry you.

Most suitors would be somewhat or very put off by that, but not our father/suitor. He simply shrugs, and agrees, and somewhat ominously adds: This is the last such request I will honor.

When the dress is presented, she screams and sticks her hands up over her eyes. It is indescribable, but nearest to a deep black pooled with scarlet and vermillion and mustard and loam—it is the color of rot, the color of flesh in the earth, the color of dust to dust. It is the color of the last bit of tallow before the candle is snuffed. She cannot disagree that this is death; the seamstresses have done such masterful work. She cannot disagree at all. I will be married in this dress, she thinks, and then I will throw myself from the castle turrets. It will be a fitting shroud.

Oh, come, says the fairy godmother, who is lounging on the girl’s lace and lilac bed, prosaically eating a leg of lamb. (And who, by the way, decided fairies were dainty? Spenser, perhaps? It takes a sizeable constitution to carry all that magic around, after all.) Wasn’t your original plan escape? Let’s pack that trunk, then, and get moving, she says, mouth still half-full. Your father will want to be devouring you (and she has the good grace to shudder here) by nightfall.

• • • •

The girl stuffs her trunk in a hurry. Pack light, says the godmother. Bring a little gold, your paints, the three dresses, a toothbrush and some extra underwear. And we need to disguise you, since your father will have his men out looking for you.

Disguise me how?

The fairy crosses her arms and frowns. She is formidable, even deep in thought. When you run from your father, she finally says, come straight to the stables first. I’ll be there waiting. Then the fairy gives a sharp slap to the trunk and it vanishes, WHOOM.

My trunk, wails the girl. What about my toothbrush? My paints? My underwear?

Not to worry, her godmother tells her. This will help you travel light, live in studio apartments, take trains and busses and things. When you want your things, you just snap your fingers in the air and say, Trunk, show up! And obviously, wait until you’re alone. When you want it to disappear, give it a good whack.

When the girl arrives at the stables, her fairy godmother is standing over a slain donkey, silver knife in hand. Jesus, says the girl.

Had nothing to do with this, says the fairy godmother grimly. Like most fairies, she respects organized religion, but finds it too tame for her purposes. This is old, wild magic, she says, and the girl finds herself wrapped in the donkey’s hide, stinking and bloody and covered with flies and fat globs. The girl is horrified. Clean it with your magic or something, she demands.

But the fairy godmother shakes her head. I can’t hide you from your father without masking the scent trail, she says. He’ll have the bloodhounds out after you. They walk to the wood, the girl trying to keep from fainting. She can close her nose to smells, a trick she learned years ago, but she can still taste the metallic tang of blood, still feel the flies biting at her face and hands.

This sucks, she says.

The fairy godmother nods, and stops. With her strong arms, she pulls at the front of an enormous black oak tree, pulls and pushes until it swings open cleanly, reveals an inside thick and dark as night air. It’s an abditory, explains the godmother. A place for hiding precious things. Ash is, of course, the traditional choice of shut-away women and spirits, but there isn’t any ash around here.

You’re going to shut me in a tree? I’d rather die! The girl tries to run but the donkey’s head falls over her face, oozing and fly-ridden, and she stumbles over a stump and falls. She didn’t think she could weep anymore, and here she is weeping again. This is rotten magic, she says. Just let me die like I wanted to.

Oh, buck up, melodrama, says the fairy, and she pulls the girl to her feet. I’m not shutting you in a tree—what kind of shitty godmother would I be? I’m sending you on a journey, that’s all. It’s this first part that’s hardest. Then step into the tree, step into a new life. I’ll warn you, it’s harder for me to cross over into that country. Far less magic there—it’s all gone underground. I’ll do what I can to help.

The girl hesitates. Her fairy godmother wouldn’t trick her, would she? Well, anyway, better than having her father forced onto her. She supposes she would rather live in a tree. One could tell oneself stories, make friends with the woodland creatures. One could be alone.

Oh, says the fairy. One thing you should know. The donkey skin—burn it. But not until you find true love. You’ll lose your chance at love forever if you shed your skin too soon.

The girl stares. Though she is hardly a girl now, she corrects herself—the creature stares, glimmers of girl visible in shining dark eye, in small sleek foot. She puts that foot out now, bare and bleeding a little. She steps into the black mouth of the oak tree. She wonders what true love will look like.

• • • •

When she first takes life drawing classes, she thinks, for some reason, about that donkey. She draws the lines over the calves, the human hips, the belly—but she is all the while thinking of the chocolate-colored hide, of her godmother’s golden hair come down with the knife, the blood splashed over the straw like ketchup. The sadness and the new freedom of that hide.

She is still living with him now, and it will be a few years yet before she leaves him. He is making them chicken salad sandwiches during a break between classes. She is wearing the bone-colored dress, his favorite, with big black boots, thick-soled and tall. She is still in love with him, in this moment, in this part of the story, and so she put her arms around his skinny back and squeezes. They are both laughing. They are both laughing in her tiny kitchen, they are making love under the soft heat of the skylight, they are making sandwiches, they are making time, space; they are making room for someone or no one else already.

They are making a bonfire at his parents’ cabin and they are burning the donkey skin. It is something she will never regret, despite her godmother’s warnings.

• • • •

The butcher is the first person she meets, on stepping out of the tree. She finds herself in Central Park, though she doesn’t know it’s Central Park, and the butcher thinks she might be one of the Shakespeare in the Park actors. He’s tattooed from neck to toes, and taking a short break from running his hip-and-featured-on-a-cable-travel-show butcher shop. He’s a sweet, funny man, handsome and a little older than her father, gentle even with the dead flesh of his animals. Perhaps it’s having lived in the donkey skin for a moment, but she feels drawn to him. He likes her to wear the skin when they have sex. (He cleans and tans it first.) He tells her important things about this new world.

The stars, he says, are just salt. The grass is fuel for the animals that feed us. The city is our audience, a million hungry bellies and eyes.

And an animal, he says, is always a dragon that will devour her if she doesn’t respect it. He takes her to the country some weekends, teaches her how to hunt with a bow, to kill with a knife. He teaches her to skin, to flay. He teaches her to preserve a hide.

She uses the butcher’s beast blood to make new paintings; she paints startling, painful creatures with thousands of tongues and no heads. The butcher doesn’t mind—but he lives alone in a room above his shop, and he doesn’t have the room to keep her there. So she eventually packs up her things back into her magical trunk—Trunk, show up!—and she agrees as a last favor to deliver a hog to a roast for a recent art school graduate.

You’ll meet some people like you, the butcher says. Kids who paint, the kind of weird shit you love to paint. Your people.

She doesn’t tell the butcher that her people are busy ruling over sleepy seaports, busy discussing casino taxes and port tariffs. She doesn’t tell him the only art she ever saw there was hung in the hotel lobbies she toured as a princess. It was her job to bless their grand opening with champagne and a serene smile for the photographers. She wore her best watered silk and knew the paintings were no good.

• • • •

The art student was the second person she met. He wore a ridiculous hat and she was, of course, wrapped in the eponymous donkey skin, her protection among strangers. He thought she was a performance artist like him. He made corporate logos out of clay, fired them, then smashed them with a hammer while his friends filmed him. You’re an idiot, she told him. I’m escaping my father. He wants to marry me.

Just like Oedipus, he said, and she never bothered to correct him. It grated on her, years later, and she felt sure she should have done. Perhaps they could have stayed together then, if he had only known his Greek tragedy. Maybe then he would have understood her better, understood how suffering steals the aptitude for happiness from you. Maybe he would have been okay with her melancholy then.

He took her to his tiny place and asked if she needed clothes as well as a place to crash. She said no and yes and snapped her fingers in his tiny bathroom. The trunk came crashing down on the sink. What was that, he said, are you okay in there, I mean, what the fuck?

Yeah, she shouted, throwing on the blood-colored dress. She snapped again to dismiss the trunk and walked out nervously, hoping he would let her stay. His place wasn’t much bigger than the butcher’s. Her fairy godmother was hovering somewhere over the stove, giving her a thumbs up and looking a bit cramped by the ceiling. She rarely used her wings.

He’s got a trust fund, said the fairy godmother. Good catch!

Okay, said the girl. What is that?

What’s what, said the boy. Holy shit, said the boy. That dress is incredible. It’s exactly the color of blood.

I’m a painter, said the girl. I want to go to art school. Can I stay here? She almost said, can I take advantage, but she stopped herself in plenty of time. A life at court had adequately prepared her for every form of falsity, if not much else.

You are so goth, said the boy. He was in awe. He was in love. Yes, you can stay.

She told him his hat made it difficult to tell if he was being serious. Maybe I don’t want to be taken seriously, he said, and grinned, and just like she was his, they were they, they were on the floor, on the couch, on the counter, on the balcony in warm weather and much to the neighbors’ annoyance. (Don’t judge her too much—he really was very nice, and very handsome, and an artist at that, and she’d only met older men in her father’s castle. And he really did have that trust fund.)

Happily ever after, yes? True love, yes? And suspiciously easy, she sometimes thought. Her godmother stopped showing up after she burned the dress, and she had to follow the days on her own just like any other young American woman (albeit with a magic trunk.) Except that after the endless grinning and the explosion and the joy and the music and the all-night painting sessions and the great sex—after all that comes the okay sex and the bad sex, the fights and fallout and the nights spent alone or wishing they were alone. And finally comes the rain, and the last night, always tinged with such poignancy that it feels, just a little, like the page after the last page of the tale, the grin and the hat and the door closed on his face and then nothing. A tape played forward then backward past the beginning.

It was a ring in a cake that finally did it. She was baking a cake for them both, celebrating her first show. They had friends over, crowded into the tiny flat, and she was wearing the dress the color of blood over a pair of black jeans. Everyone was laughing too loudly, and there was music, too much bass and she never could get used to their music here, so bold and brutal, and his jacket was in her way on the counter she was clearing. She picked it up and a ring fell out. It was intricate and silver, and inscribed—and not to her. Something switched off inside her. She put her hands down on the cool countertop, felt the warmth of loss flood her fingertips. She calmly put the ring in her mixing bowl. She watched the yellow swirls of batter slowly snare the silver.

She remembers it now, though she can no longer remember his face or even his hat. She remembers the impossible clang of his teeth, biting down on the solid metal. She remembers the yell, the slow recognition, the way he screamed, You could have fucking killed me. She remembers the friend with the green hair and the Ramones tee, so red-faced she knew it must be her. She remembers the feeling, finally, of that door closing on everyone. The feeling, not bad, of being alone again. She almost wishes for a love affair again, sometimes, just to be able to end it. Just to feel that door close once more. Would that be true love? The relief of loneliness, replayed forever and ever?

• • • •

The third person she met was herself. Welcome, she said to herself, and she smiled. She put on a little weight, enough to feel comfortable and soft in her own skin. She got a job in a coffee shop and rented a tiny studio in the building next door. She baked a cake for herself every morning, and every night she walked through the nearby park, just her and the ghouls and the owls. She made paintings that made the art world shudder, and cut off her long dark hair. She watched movies on Netflix with her friend the butcher, and she told him she’d given up on love. I’m done with that for good.

And you so young, he laughed. It won’t be forever. Someone will snap you up. But they won’t, she thought, and she was so alarmed at the thought that she couldn’t shake it, all through her midnight walk.

The next night, she asked to borrow one of his biggest knives. And the next night, she and her dresses (and her underwear and toothbrush and that useless gold) disappeared, though she left behind her unfinished paintings. And though art museums will occasionally run retrospectives, and a publication or blog might speculate on what happened to that promising young painter, no one has seen her again.

But on moonless nights, in deep woods miles outside the city, some souls say they’ve glimpsed—just briefly—someone draped in what looked like an animal skin, huge head and furry ears fallen back over an elegant neck and throat. The shape always flees before it can be clearly seen.

Other people just possess you, she’d told her friend, the butcher.

Is that so bad, he’d asked? To be possessed?

It’s the worst fate of all, she’d say. The donkey skin, she thought, was everything else in the world; it was solitude, anonymous, beautiful, and bloody.

©2019 by Amber Sparks. Originally published in Fairy Tale Review vol. 15. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amber Sparks is the author of several short story collections, including The Unfinished World and Other Stories, and I Do Not Forgive You (Liveright). Her essays and fiction can be found widely in print and online, in places like The Paris Review, NYMag, Granta, and Tin House.

Brightly, Undiminished

Sarah Grey | 2299 words

Witchcraft is a gift.

Imelda would wave her steel spoon at Mercer and insist on this as he measured ingredients for her, whether she was boiling potions or a pot of farfalle pasta. Watch the salt, a teaspoon only, never pour too much. Don’t overheat the sauce. Bottle the hawks’ gizzards separate from the basilisks’.

Never half-ass a gift, Mercy. Her perpetual imperative.

Mercer is alone now. His hands are unsteady—they’ve shaken like a drunkard’s since they held Imelda as she passed—and he is no witch. Never was. But the candlewick must be rolled in beeswax, and the bees must be fed on narcissus blooms from a single Persian meadow that can only be visited when the moon is waning and the weather storming, and even then only by crawling hands-and-bony-knees through the portal Imelda keeps locked in the cabinet beneath the master bedroom sink.

Kept.

Mercer is careful to lock the cabinet behind him. As Imelda would.

The candle must be wide as a child’s finger—no more or less. Mercer guesses; they never had children, though now he wonders, if they had, would their fingers be spidery like his or thick and rosy, like Imelda’s?

A lock of hair from the loved one lost—seventy-two strands exactly—must be wound around the candle’s shaft until it cuts into the wax, but never so deep that the candle breaks.

He cut Imelda’s braid loose with her red kitchen shears an hour after she’d gone.

He almost forgot to do it. It was her face that reminded him. He touched her closed eyes, and in that tear-swollen technicolor instant he could imagine her reaction, her sweet, exquisite exasperation, if he had neglected such an essential element of a spell. The hair, Mercy! She would have shut her eyes tight, shaken her head, scowled—and then pressed her plump hands together and adopted an air of utter peace and tolerance. Oh Mercy, my love, she would have said. How could you have forgotten my hair?

But in that first unending hour without her, he’d hardly remembered how to breathe.

• • • •

Once lit, the candle must burn, undiminished, all night.

Mercer stays awake. It’s easier these days. Age had already drained away their languid pillow hours, the mornings spent with his hand on her cheek, with her leg tangled over his, the two of them enveloped in whatever shimmer of ecstasy Imelda had concocted from glitter and newt snouts. From magic.

When Imelda fell sick, sleep left him almost entirely and pooled instead in her. He’d gather shreds of rest and she’d pick at her scraps of sliced bread and packaged cheese, nibble away the corners and crusts, before the afternoons wore her thin. They spent her waking time in a concerted act of remembering—a fifth of whiskey shared in a faery den, a waltz on the roof of the Taj Mahal. Making love, sweat-slick from the Roman summer, on a Caesar’s bed. It felt like months, those dwindling weeks, drifting through better days. Together they’d slowed the stealing hand of time, for a while.

Or maybe Imelda had slowed it herself. A secret spell. A final gift.

No. Magic has limits.

So Imelda said. Mercer refuses to believe it. The things they’d done, the places she’d shown him! He could feel it, with her. The infinite ripple of possibility.

Outside, cars slide into neighbors’ driveways. The sun idles into the hills. Children gather their bats and balls and answer calls to come inside. Crows—my queenly Corvidae, Imelda called them—settle into their midnight roosts.

And the candle, set in the center of Imelda’s best Moroccan tea plate, steadily melts into a pool of wax.

Diminished, as with the last four attempts, to nothing.

If Mercer had any strength left, he would cry.

• • • •

Mercer knows nothing of witchcraft. Imelda reminded him of this often. Witchcraft is a birthright—but not in the insidious, entitled sense that pervades aristocracies. A birthmark, rather; a randomness set loose in certain lines. Magic wriggled under your skin, fattened your cells. Or it didn’t. You were born a witch, or you weren’t.

In which case, you just had to fall in love with one. That was Mercer’s best reply, the one that made Imelda grin, made her shut her eyes and wrinkle her nose and flush like a ripening berry.

If she’d seen him unlocking her cabinets, prying open her ironbound crates. If she’d seen him, hauling her books from her moonlit attic down to his desk-lamped study like an old pack mule, struggling to spread them gently on the acrylic rug but fumbling, dropping them instead, letting the burn of suburban daylight fall on their smoke-scented pages.

But she was sleeping so much by then. One night he dropped a globe of water they’d stolen, tipsy and giggling, from an Olympian fountain and whimpered, helpless, as it drained out on the kitchen tiles. And Imelda hadn’t even opened an eye.

He’d found what he needed, though, while she slept, in a hidebound book on the highest shelf.

A spell to call back the dead.

• • • •

Imelda’s hair had gone white young—an unfortunate side effect of witchcraft, she’d said, it scares the color out of every strand—but it had stayed always long, in thick, feral ringlets she restrained with a twist of cinnabar fabric.

He’d asked her once what the fabric was—a scrap of blanket from the saddle of a Mongolian warlord? A muse’s chiton? Gryphon pelt?

She’d doubled over laughing. No, she’d choked through tears, it was cotton. Red cotton and elastic.

Mercer keeps the braid wrapped in a white silk scarf. He secured the rough-cut end of the braid with a rubber band but left the hairband untouched, in its place, bundling the tapering ends of her curls. The scarf, too, is Imelda’s. He unwrapped it, gently, from a deck of cards, each hand-painted with a tangle of erotic nudes. The cards are not tarot or oracles or even the simplest sort of magic; they are playing cards. A gift, long decades given. He’d haggled them off a street artist in the city, a block from the building where he’d worked the job that had bought them this house, this view of the winter-bare crows’ trees, this polished oak table where Mercer sits alone, winding Imelda’s hair around a candle. Again.

His hands ache from molding beeswax, his knees are bruised from crawling through a bathroom-cabinet portal cut wide enough for Imelda’s once-generous hips, but somehow too small, by far, for him.

He sleeps little and poorly and only in the morning hours, after the candle has melted away. An hour at most, or two. After the candle’s diminished. After he’s certain he’s failed yet again.

Worse, Imelda’s braid is thinning with every failure. He squints as he picks out each white strand and curses himself for wrapping it all in a scarf the very same color, and just as soft. He pulls the strands free tenderly, as if he is handling Imelda herself, but still the strands squirm into curls and bounce free of the red hairband and tangle until they are inseparable, uncountable, and then fall together to the floor. Sometimes he finds them again, under the table. Sometimes they’re lost.

And always, his hands shake. Precision, he hears her say. Magic is precise.

The sun lifts above the hilltops. Mercer watches the crows rise in a marled gray curtain, like the static of the black-and-white TV in their first apartment, if the antenna wasn’t set just right.

Early in the night, he had let himself believe he was closer, that this time, the candle held its form longer, the flame dazzled brighter. But these were lies, and short-lived. As always, the candle—one of hundreds, the latest casualty of his months of effort—died out in a lumpy pool of wax.

And another seventy-two strands of hair burned away for good.

Mercer lets his head fall into his hands. He is an old man, and empty. There is no magic bubbling under his frail, papery skin.

Cars pull out of driveways. Two men in white jumpsuits and plastic helmets bright as wildfire carve branches from a leafless tree. A school bus plods around the block, then turns off toward the city.

Imelda is still gone. And Mercer, still alone, still awake and too weak for tears, is lost without her.

• • • •

He is dozing at last when the doorbell rings. He is warm under a blanket—this one, he knows, is magic, spun from siren song gathered by a sailor’s widow and sold on the moors at an unnamed festival held only on moonless nights.

In this meager cache of unconsciousness, he dreams of Imelda. It is the only dream he’s had since she died, a relentlessly repeating vision, but heartbreakingly brief, a splinter of her presence just sharp enough to make him bleed. She works a spell at her broad plank altar. Her thick hands occasionally grasp for a bottle or a book, and her braid swings as she moves, her silver stoneless wedding band glinting in dim candlelight.

But her back is turned. No matter what he says, how he cries out or reaches for her, she never acknowledges him. She never speaks.

The doorbell rings again.

Mercer rises. The ache in his knees is worse now—a deep, purpling species of pain. The stiffness that comes with a break, or bruised bone. The sort of injury Imelda could heal in hours with a cup of boiled water, a fistful of off-colored herbs, and a gentle murmur about his inattention, his clumsiness.

He peeks out the curtains—not magic, although their looping white lace always reminded him of the moonspider silk Imelda farmed in the attic for a number of years, before he begged her to stop. There is no delivery truck. No one is departing the porch or pacing down the concrete path past Imelda’s canvas-shrouded Miata.

Mercer opens the door, certain some neighborhood child has skipped school to amuse herself with a day of pranking the elderly. He is prepared to live up to all the child’s worst fears. He will shout. He will order her off his lawn.

On the porch are seven crows and a narrow, plain wood box, long as his forearm.

Mercer watches the crows. They hop back for him, give him space. They do not leave. Their heads turn. Their beaks twitch. They examine him first with one eye, then the other.

They all look at once toward the box, then one by one, back at him.

Queenly Corvidae, he thinks.

Mercer steps onto the porch. The doorway is lined with empty pots that once held Imelda’s herbs—thyme and tarragon and stalks of red-bloomed aglaophotis—before the winter killed them off. He was never good with plants to begin with, never good with pets or children. No wonder magic kept its distance.

The crows step back.

He picks up the box. The wood is unfinished, rough-cut, nailed shut. There’s a letter burned in the lid. A swirling, italicized, soot-black M.

One of the crows—the smallest—cries out, and all at once they lift off, across the porch, over the house. Away to where Mercer can’t follow.

• • • •

He lays the box on the dining room table. He traces the letter on the lid once, with his forefinger. Then he pries the nails out with a pocketknife from the kitchen junk drawer.

Inside is one spider-thin black candle, wrapped in strands of cloud-white hair and swaddled in red cotton.

There’s also single sheet of blue-lined notepaper, half-sized, folded in thirds. It’s the kind of paper Mercer keeps in pads on his desk, for taking notes during phone calls.

The ink, though. It is the brown of tall August grass and deep soil, of blood long centuries dried. It smells of bergamot and faerysong and familiar skin in sunlight, and it shimmers like laughter.

And the handwriting—oh, the handwriting. Mercer knows at once who it’s from.

Mercy,

If you’re reading this, thank the crows for me.

Magic is a gift. So is rest.

Love forever,

Imelda

P.S. Please put my books back where you found them.

Mercer goes back outside. He sits on the bench beside Imelda’s barren terracotta pots and her Grecian bronze watering can and the sculptures of toadstools she made herself, out of clay from the river Lethe.

The cars and children wind their way back from the city, to the tidy rows of driveways and houses.

The crows follow, not long after. There are more of them this evening, clusters of ruffled black nestled together on the now-trimmed branches of trees.

Mercer gives them a smile and a single, heartfelt nod.

As soon as the sun fades, the wind picks up cold. Mercer goes inside. He lights the candle. The flame is a brisk blue, like a perfect sky breaking through a storm. The shadows it casts are vast as a lifetime; they engulf the kitchen, twirl down the hall and up the unfolded attic stairs, twist through cracked doorways and nuzzle into every carpeted corner of the house.

He can almost make out their edges, their shapes. If he squints, he can see a bouncing curl, a swing of wide-set hips. If he closes his eyes, he hears whispers.

And all at once, he is tired.

Mercer wanders to the couch. He sits. He pulls the siren-song blanket around his shoulders and watches the moths dance against the windowpane, bright as the fires below the Taj Mahal. He waits.

Without even thinking, he sleeps. In an effortless shimmer of magic, he dreams.

And the black candle, impossibly bright, burns on through the night, undiminished.

©2021 by Sarah Grey.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sarah Grey’s stories have appeared in a number of publications, including Lightspeed, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Daily Science Fiction, and Flash Fiction Online, and have twice received an Honorable Mention in The Year’s Best Science Fiction. Her poetry can be found in Fantasy Magazine, Liminality, Eye to the Telescope, Dreams & Nightmares, and elsewhere. She lives with her family near Sacramento, California, where she practices law and accumulates cats. She can be found online at www.sarahgrey.net and on Twitter at @catsprobably.

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

EXCERPT: A Desolation Called Peace (Tor Books)

Arkady Martine | 4756 words

A Desolation Called Peace is the spectacular space opera sequel to Arkady Martine’s genre-reinventing, Hugo Award-winning debut, A Memory Called Empire. An alien armada lurks on the edges of Teixcalaanli space. No one can communicate with it, no one can destroy it, and Fleet Captain Nine Hibiscus is running out of options. In a desperate attempt at diplomacy with the mysterious invaders, the fleet captain has sent for a diplomatic envoy. Now Mahit Dzmare and Three Seagrass—still reeling from the recent upheaval in the Empire—face the impossible task of trying to communicate with a hostile entity. Their failure will guarantee millions of deaths in an endless war. Their success might prevent Teixcalaan’s destruction—and allow the empire to continue its rapacious expansion. Or it might create something far stranger . . .

Available March 2, 2021 from Tor Books.

Chapter Two

[ . . . ] and of course your reputation precedes you, like an earthquake precedes a city-drowning wave; the tremors of your arrival are already setting the Ministry to vibration as if we were all made of tlini-strings and you were the bow. Of course we regret the absence of former Minister Nine Propulsion—her guidance was a warm silk glove that has been taken off the Palms now that she has retired (and so abruptly!)—but I, for one, look forward to having meetings with a person who was the first successful Governor of Nakhar System. We have work to do. I remain, in anticipation [ . . . ]

—letter from Third Undersecretary Eleven Laurel of the Ministry of War to the incoming Minister of War, Three Azimuth, dated to the 21st day, 1st year, in the 1st indiction of the Emperor of All Teixcalaan Nineteen Adze

• • • •

Letters to the dead are poor practice; I’d do myself a service if I merely kept a journal like half the Emperors who have slept in this bed before me. But since when have you known me to do service to myself? And at least you are dead—or it is simplest to think of you so now—I have all the stars in my hands, Yskandr, and it is terribly easy to let them slip through a finger-width gap. Especially when some of them are going dark, eaten up by your successor’s so-convenient alien threat. You slept here more often than I did—more often than I do, if we count sleeping and not nights. How often did you wish for the convenience of narrative to bow to your whims? More or less often than our Emperor, awake beside you?

—the private notes of Her Brilliance the Emperor Nineteen Adze, undated, locked, and encrypted

• • • •

Knifepoint’s captain, Thirty Wax-Seal, clutched his cup of coffee like it was the only thing keeping his hands from shaking. He was a nasty shade of grey all through: Nine Hibiscus thought of oatmeal congealed in the bottom of a pan, that leftover scrim of mealy grey-white that needed to be scraped off.

“It’s not language,” he said, for the second time; that had been his opening statement to her, when she’d gotten him retrieved safely from his ship and had him brought to her smaller conference room to be debriefed. “I had Fourteen Spike with me, she speaks five languages—that’s why I took her, in case we got to overhear something—and it was nothing like a language to her. It’s not got—parsable phonemes, she said. That was before the enemy ship came out of nowhere and started chasing us. She didn’t get much farther than we can’t make noises like that.”

I am not equipped to run a first-contact scenario, Nine Hibiscus thought, especially when the things being contacted spit ship-dissolving fluids at my people and don’t make understandable noises. She was a soldier. A strategically minded one, with the vast punch of Teixcalaanli power behind her, but a soldier nonetheless. First contact was for diplomats and people who got into epic poems.

“If it’s not language,” she said, sipping at her coffee—Thirty Wax-Seal drank a bit of his, mirroring, and she was glad of it—“how did you know it was communication at all?”

“Because it didn’t start until we showed up. And it was responsive, yaotlek—I mean, when I took Knifepoint in closer, the transmission shifted, it sounded different, and when I backed us away, it changed again, and when I tried to slide around the far side of that dwarf sun and get eyes on what happened to our colony on Peloa-2, it shrieked at us and then that ring-ship was right there—”

The edge of hysteria in Thirty Wax-Seal’s voice was unsettling. It wasn’t like him; he wouldn’t be a scout-gunner captain if he was prone to the horrors. The ring-ship had been awful, and its spit had been worse, but still. It wouldn’t do.

“You got back, Captain,” Nine Hibiscus said, even, reassuring. “You came home to us and you brought us an intercepted communiqué and we know approximately eight new things about these people than we did before today.” She was using Twenty Cicada’s language, but this captain didn’t know that. Didn’t know how rattled she was, and never would, if she was careful. “You did very well. You can stand down awaiting further orders, unless there’s anything else I should know.”

“No, sir. The recording is with Chief Communications Officer Two Foam, if you want to listen to it. But there’s nothing else specific. We didn’t get close enough to Peloa-2 for actionable intelligence.”

Nine Hibiscus wanted to listen to the recording very badly, and the idea made her skin crawl at the same time. But she had another hour and three-quarters before Sixteen Moonrise was scheduled to come aboard and discuss strategy—discuss strategy, such thin cover for a meeting meant to provide Nine Hibiscus with some leverage against Sixteen Moonrise’s extremely untimely episode of Fleet intrigue—and she would like all the information she could get. Whether it was language or not.

• • • •

Beneath the imperial palace there was a network of passages, secret and small. There was a poem for them, a good one with a walking rhythm to it. It went, as many roots in the ground as blooms into the sky / daylight servants of the empire gather palace flowers / justice, science, information, war / but the roots that feed us are invisible and strong. Eight Antidote liked two parts of that poem best: how his feet hit the tunnel tilework floor right along with the pulse of roots in the ground and blooms in the sky—and also how he wasn’t a daylight servant at all. Daylight servants got palace flowers. Alone in the tunnels, Eight Antidote, sole heir to Teixcalaan entire (just recently sole heir, which meant something, probably, something about how he needed to think about himself), didn’t need flowers. He was down in the dirt, where silent things grew strong.

He’d been in the tunnels tens of times, even before the Emperor—not the current Emperor, but his ancestor-the-Emperor, it was important also to clarify these things in his mind—had whisked him into them during the insurrection right before he died. He’d been in the tunnels enough to be beginning to know them, their secret ways, their listening-posts and open spy-eyes. His ancestor-the-Emperor had shown him, and had let him . . . go into them.

It was one of the only things Six Direction had let him do, like it was a prize, a passcode between the two of them, an indulgence. Eight Antidote wondered a lot about why. He’d wondered that even before his ancestor had killed himself in a sun temple for the glory of Teixcalaan.

Here the tunnel narrowed, dipped left—it smelled of petrichor, rain and the underneath parts of flowers. Eight Antidote trailed his fingers against the wall where it was damp with condensation, and imagined a small Six Direction, just his own eleven-years-old size, walking around under the palace, exactly like this. He wouldn’t have needed to duck through the narrow parts either, not when he was eleven. If there were physical differences between Eight Antidote and his ancestor, he didn’t know about them yet. Ninety percent was a lot of clone to be, physically. Also he’d seen holos.

But Six Direction hadn’t grown up in the palace, had he. All those holos came from some planet with grass on it, a kid with his own face a hundred years ago, green-grey plants up to his narrow chest. Six Direction’d never been down here at all, until later.

After the narrow part there were some stairs, a long climb in the dim. He knew the way now, even lightless; in the past few weeks he’d come up these stairs seven times. Today was eight. He was too old to believe in numerical luck anymore, but eights felt right even so: eight times for luck particular to him. (Particular to him and to everyone else who shared the glyph he used for the number-sign in his name, so also lucky for the Minister of the Judiciary, who was technically his legal parent since she’d adopted him, and also tens of thousands of other kids, and this was why he didn’t believe in numerical luck anymore, not since he’d thought about it properly.) There was a door in the ceiling, at the end of these stairs. Eight Antidote knocked on it, and it opened up for him, and then he was in the basement of the Ministry of War.

Eleven Laurel was waiting for him there. He was tall, and the carved planes of his face were very dark, with deep wrinkles around the eyes and the mouth. He was wearing a Ministry of War uniform, which wasn’t the same thing as a legionary uniform, but almost was: not a suit like every other ministry, but breeches and a gunmetal-grey jacket that came down to the middle of his thighs and buttoned double-breasted with small flat gold buttons. He never seemed to mind sitting in the Ministry basement dust, waiting for Eight Antidote to show up. He just stood, brushed the dust off his pants unceremoniously, and said, “And how are you this afternoon, Cure?”

There were a couple of things Eight Antidote had learned from his ancestor-the-Emperor, and a couple more from Nineteen Adze, who was Emperor now and had promised to take care of him even if it killed her. The biggest one was probably don’t trust anyone who makes you feel good without knowing why they want you to feel that way.

But Eleven Laurel, who in addition to waiting for him in basements once a week, and teaching him how to run a cartograph strategy table and shoot an energy-pulse pistol, was the Undersecretary of the Third Palm, one of six undersecretaries who only answered to the Minister of War—Eleven Laurel called him Cure, not Your Excellency or Imperial Associate Eight Antidote or anything else, and Eight Antidote really truly loved it. At least, he thought, he knew he loved it. Which had to help. He loved it, Eleven Laurel definitely wanted him to, and this might be a bad thing. But right now, right now it wasn’t. Right now he widened his eyes in a grin, and scrambled out of the hole in the floor, and said, “I solved it, you know. Last week’s exercise. The one about Kauraan System.”

“Did you,” Eleven Laurel said. “All right. Show me what you think the Fleet Captain at Kauraan did to win that battle, and what it tells you about her. We can go to the cartograph straight off.”

It bothered Eight Antidote, a faint kind of upset like a hum off in one corner of his mind, that Eleven Laurel, a man who had served in twenty campaigns and seen more blood- and star-drenched planets than he could easily imagine, spent an afternoon once a week entertaining an eleven-year-old kid who had snuck in through the basement. There were extenuating circumstances, of course: the obvious one being that Eight Antidote was likely to be Emperor of all Teixcalaan at some point, much more likely to be so than before Six Direction had sacrificed himself and named a sole successor in the process. The Third Undersecretary to the Minister of War, who might see himself Minister in that hypothetical future, would have a lot of reasons to amuse that kid.

Also it wasn’t like where they were was a secret. On the way to the cartograph room—one of a whole lot of them, the Ministry of War was a tactician’s garden, Nineteen Adze had said that to him and it stuck in his head—Eight Antidote and Eleven Laurel passed in full view of at least ten soldiers, four administrative staff, one floor cleaner, and five City-eye cameras that Eight Antidote could spot. (That probably meant there were five more he hadn’t spotted on this route.) He wasn’t escaping. He wasn’t doing anything secret, and neither was Eleven Laurel.

Nineteen Adze—Her Brilliance, the Emperor—had said the Ministry of War is a tactician’s garden right after Eight Antidote had come back from his first trip through the tunnels. She’d come into his rooms, alone, and showed him the holograph-recording the City had made of him, moving through the Ministry like a bright bird in a net of eyes. He’d asked her if she’d prefer he not go, and she had said that line about tacticians and gardens and told him to do precisely what he liked, and left again.

Sometimes Eight Antidote wondered if anyone would ever trust him enough to not show him that they were watching him all the time.

The cartograph room made him happy anyway, happy enough to shove the whole mess of why away for a little while: Eleven Laurel called up Kauraan System with a few sweeps of his hands, last week’s exercise displayed in slow-rotating lights hung in the middle of the air. Every ship in the Fleet had one of these tables, for solving problems before they happened. The problem here: How did the Fleet Captain at Kauraan use only one ship to quell an uprising before it could spread past the southern tip of one continent? And the constraints: Less than five thousand Kauraani casualties, less than two hundred Teixcalaanli ones; she didn’t call for help; she had no unusual weaponry not in the standard manifest for a ship of that size; she was outnumbered forty-to-one; and the Kauraani rebels had seized the spaceport and were using Teixcalaanli ships against her. Solve it.

Eight Antidote loved the constraints best of all. Delimiters. This happened, so it must be possible. Solve it.

“Go on,” said Eleven Laurel. “Show me what Fleet Captain Nine Hibiscus of the Tenth did here.”

Eight Antidote came up to the table. He called it to his attention with small movements of his eye behind his cloudhook, and carefully allowed the simulation to run forward without making any changes to what was, now, functionally his Fleet: he stood in for Nine Hibiscus. And like he was almost, almost sure she had done, he didn’t send any of her Shards down toward Kauraan, not even when the Kauraani rebels came floating up off the planet in their stolen Teixcalaanli ships. He paused it right as the stolen fleet entered firing range—between all of them, they could have destroyed Nine Hibiscus’s Weight for the Wheel, even though it was an Eternal-class flagship.

“There’s only one solution I can find,” he said, not looking at Eleven Laurel—imagining, instead, that he was a War Minister or a Fleet Captain himself, talking to his people, his troops. “Nobody fired at all.”

“How would that have happened?” asked Eleven Laurel, which wasn’t no, you’re wrong. Eight Antidote didn’t smile, but he felt very bright, very focused—like flying would feel, like being a Shard pilot, tumbling on a vector of his own choosing.

“On Kauraan,” he went on, “the rebellion was small. Just one faction of one ethnic group. But they were smart enough to know that we keep a garrison on that southern continent. A lot of ships. Enough to kill an Eternal if they had to. The rebels were very smart when they captured the port first instead of going after the provincial governor’s offices. But there really weren’t a whole lot of them, I think. Not enough to not—take allies where they could get them.”

“Not implausible thinking.” Eleven Laurel was paying out the rope, Eight Antidote thought, giving him just enough space to get in trouble, but he wasn’t going to get in trouble, because he was right.

“So the Fleet Captain, Nine Hibiscus. She’s got this reputation—her soldiers would do anything for her. And it’s not just the every-captain’s-soldiers-love-them thing, it’s not just poetry. I looked up her prior campaigns, and her people will do a lot of, um. Dumb shit, in my opinion, Undersecretary. If she asked them to.”

Eleven Laurel made a noise that might have been laughter a few decades back. “You did look her up. I’d say dumb shit is a fair description, yes. Go on. What sort of dumb shit did she get her soldiers to do at Kauraan?”

“If she’d sent some of them down to infiltrate the rebels,” said Eight Antidote, “and she trusted that they’d succeeded—then I think she let the rebels take the stolen ships up into space, this close to her ship, and asked her own people to trust that they wouldn’t fire while the coup went down and the rebels got killed on the same ships they’d stolen. Nobody fired at all. They didn’t need to. She’d already won.”

The cartograph went blank. Eight Antidote blinked, afterimages of Weight for the Wheel and Kauraan’s sun bright across the inside of his eyelids.

“That’s very close to right,” said Eleven Laurel. “Well done.”

“What did I miss?” Eight Antidote asked, because he couldn’t help it. Very close wasn’t good enough. Not when he’d come up with they never fired in the middle of the night like a sunburst explosion of I know it, I see it. Woken up with it on his tongue like a bursting fruit.

“Infiltration is part of Fleet counterinsurgency protocols, yes,” Eleven Laurel said. “But who should be in charge of it? Who makes that call, Cure, to send our people to lie for us?”

“Not a Fleet Captain?”

“The Minister of War, or the Undersecretary of the Third Palm.”

“You?” The Third Palm—for the East direction, for—he struggled, reached for it. Palace-East was where Nineteen Adze had lived before she was Emperor, where ambassadors stayed, where the Information Ministry was. But the Information Ministry was civilians.

Eleven Laurel was waiting for him.

Eight Antidote hated that; it made him feel like he was being indulged. He said, “You. Third Palm, because the Third Palm is what’s left of the military part of Information.”

“Quite. Me, and the rump end of the separation of our spies from our soldiers. The Third of Six Outreaching Palms: intelligence, counterintelligence, and Fleet internal affairs. Now, Cure—did our Nine Hibiscus receive this authorization from me, or from Minister Three Azimuth—ah, no, it was still Minister Nine Propulsion then, but even so?”

“. . . No,” Eight Antidote said. “She didn’t have authorization to give that order. And her people did it anyway.”

“You’re going to make a hell of a tactician when you’re the rest of the way grown,” Eleven Laurel said, and Eight Antidote felt warm all through. He ducked his head, not wanting to blush. “That’s right. She didn’t get permission, she just decided, and none of her people asked a single question about it.”

The blankness of the cartograph table felt abruptly heavy, threatening. “Where is she now?” Eight Antidote asked. “What happened to her after Kauraan?”

“Oh, we made her yaotlek,” Eleven Laurel said, as if this was something that happened every day, “and sent her out to die bravely for Teixcalaan and Her Brilliance the Emperor as quickly as possible.”

• • • •

It took a particularly vicious sort of self-recrimination for Mahit to wish herself alone inside her own mind: alone like she’d been as a child, imagoless and longing, instead of replete with memories that were only beginning to belong to her, and were doubled and distorted and full of Teixcalaan anyhow. A particularly vicious sort of self-recrimination that also involved lying on the bed in her egg-shaped residence pod and staring at the comforting off-white curve of the ceiling as blankly as possible while not thinking about how completely fucked she was. Having whole hours to contemplate her degree of fuckedness was a luxury. Back in the City she’d never had time to sit with the dawning horror of revelation: she’d kept moving. She’d had to. The ceiling was very nice and very Lsel, and no one could look at her in here; she’d set all her tell-lights on the outside of the pod to privacy, emergency only.

[You’re going to have to come out of the pod eventually,] said Yskandr, and Mahit felt nothing so much as that she was being reprimanded by a parent or a crèche-carer: You’ll have to go to bed eventually, Mahit.

“I could wait a week,” she said, quite out loud. No one could hear her in here; no one could notice how she wasn’t one integrated person but a suspect, secret, virulent merge of three. “And then steal a shuttle and try to make the Anhamemat Gate before the Councilor noticed I missed my appointment and yes this is a stupid idea and no I won’t do it and if I was going to betray Lsel’s interests for your sake, Yskandr, I would have done it back in the Empire.”

[How about for yours? What do you think Amnardbat is going to do to us when she finds out what we are?]

That depends, Mahit thought at him. Did she sabotage us the first time, and if so, why did she? You knew her, Yskandr, you have more—time, more years than I do.

[In her office you were sure she’d done the sabotage.]

In her office I was scared. There was a waiting sort of silence, an abeyance that wasn’t acknowledgment as much as it was frustration, and Mahit was so tired of not thinking half of her own thoughts. Are you happy now, Yskandr? I was frightened, and you were spilling trauma reaction all over my endocrine system, of course I was sure Amnardbat had sabotaged us right then. And now I’m alone and I can think, and I can’t just work with I was scared, I have to—

[Mahit,] Yskandr said, very gentle in her mind. [We were scared together. It’s all right. Breathe.]

She took a breath; it came short, and she realized she’d been breathing in little fast useless inhalations for at least a minute and hadn’t really noticed when she’d started. She took another, and it was still so hard, to breathe like her lungs weren’t going to seize up, like she wasn’t trapped—she was trapped, even in the safety of her private pod, she was absolutely trapped, the Councilor for Heritage wanted to carve her open and she still—months later, and she still didn’t understand why Amnardbat would have tried to sabotage her, or how, or anything, and—

She breathed, deep, a circular breath through the nostrils and the mouth; it wasn’t her choice, but she knew (or Yskandr knew) the pattern of it, the calming way of breathing. He took over their body entirely so rarely. Only when he needed to. The last time—the last real time—he’d run them through a riot unscathed, with all of the City in conflagration around them.

[There,] Yskandr said, and then, [Really, oxygen is helpful for clarity of thought,] a snatch of that bright rag of a man, the remains of her first imago, the sabotaged-Yskandr who never remembered his own dying, who only remembered decades of anticipated life in Teixcalaan to come, and a vast ambition, and a cleverness Mahit wanted to own, to inhabit, to allow into herself.

Thank you.

Warmth—all the little hairs on her arms and legs standing up and lying down again in a shivery wave, like her own neurology was touching her gently. This, too, was in none of the imago-training, none of the expectations for what would happen after a person received a live memory and a line of experience to be part of. Nothing in Mahit’s education had told her about the strange kindnesses of living in a body with a—friend.

[Sentimentality is not helpful for clarity of thought,] said Yskandr.

An intensely annoying friend.

Electric laughter, and that vicious spike of ulnar-nerve pain; it wasn’t always a shimmer now. Sometimes it just hurt.

[So. We’re scared and we’re trapped and since you’re not planning on abandoning station like the hero of some graphic story like the one you bought—what are we going to do, Mahit?]

She sat up. Pressed her spine against the comforting inward curve of her pod. What we should have done when we first got back, Yskandr. I think we should tell Dekakel Onchu that her messages for you didn’t go unread entirely.

Again she felt alive—awake in a way she hadn’t seemed to be ever since she’d come back to Lsel. Awake was close to frightened, and exhilarating. There were remarkable similarities between how her aptitudes and Yskandr’s had spelled for risk-seeking; she’d always assumed that had been a necessary precondition for the sort of xenophilia that made a person fall in love with a culture that was slowly eating her own, but perhaps it was something simpler, something gut-deep: I can’t leave anything well enough alone.

[Ah, so you’ve decided to be political after all,] said Yskandr, so close in tone to her own thoughts that there was hardly any space between imago and inheritor, an intimation of future blur—one of her own memories being echoed, Twelve Azalea in her ambassadorial apartment back in the City, before anything had begun to go truly wrong, before she’d gotten him killed. Saying to her, So you’ve decided to be political after all.

Petal, she thought, with fond grief—not what she’d called him, that had been Three Seagrass’s pet name for a man named for a pink extravagance of a flower. Yes, I guess I have.

Copyright © 2021 by Arkady Martine. Excerpted from A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine. Published by permission of the author and Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arkady Martine is a speculative fiction writer and, as Dr. AnnaLinden Weller, a historian of the Byzantine Empire and a city planner. Under both names, she writes about border politics, rhetoric, propaganda, and the edges of the world. Arkady grew up in New York City and, after some time in Turkey, Canada, and Sweden, lives in Baltimore with her wife, the author Vivian Shaw. A Memory Called Empire is her debut novel.

Book Review: The Unbroken, by C.L. Clark

LaShawn M. Wanak | 744 words

The Unbroken
C.L. Clark
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9780316542753
Orbit, March 2021, 464 pages

It feels to me as of late that there’s been a good number of fantasy works coming out that explore the nature of colonization from the oppressed minority’s point of view. The latest of these is The Unbroken by C.L. Clark.

Touraine is a Qazāli soldier who had been conscripted as a child for the Balladaire empire. Now her unit is escorting the Balladairan princess, Luca Ancier, back to El-Wast, the capital city of Qazāl’ and Touraine’s home city, which she has no memory of, thanks to the brutal upbring she endured that strove to erase her ethnicity, her culture, and even her language. Before the unit ventures far, a group of Qazāli rebels attempt to kidnap the princess. Touraine foils their plans, but as they are being executed, one of them calls her by her old name. Stunned, Touraine realizes that while she doesn’t remember El-Wast, there are people here who definitely remember her.

Meanwhile, Princess Luca is torn. She is well aware that the Qazāli are badly treated and wishes to give them a better life under her rule. But many Balladairans in power view the Qazāli as “Sands,” uncivilized, childlike and requiring harsh discipline—particularly her uncle, whom Luca is trying to dethrone. When Touraine finds herself in a situation that threatens her life, Luca rescues Touraine and recruits her to be her go-between to the Qazāli rebels to negotiate for peace. She also instructs Touraine to spy on their activities, something that becomes harder for Touraine when she learns that she shares a personal connection with one of the rebel leaders.

The Unbroken is a wonderful fantasy looking at colonialism and racism through the lens of two women caught in its crosshairs. Touraine is stuck between two worlds that will not accept her: The Qazāli see her as a Balladairan-wannabe, policing her own people, while the Balladairans look down on her. She deals with humiliations daily, from her fellow Balladairan officer constantly undermining her to her captain demanding absolute perfection and loyalty to the Balladaire empire. To rebel, or even show sympathy to her own people, invites death. So she has to swallow her pride and walk the line between the condescending Balladairans, who see her as less than themselves, and the distrustful Qazāli, who are willing to kill her for being on the wrong side. As she recovers more of her lost heritage and witnesses the injustices against her people, it becomes harder for her to walk that line.

To further complicate matters, Clark introduces a queer element to all this. Touraine has an intimate relationship with one of her soldiers, Pruett; has complicated feelings for Cantic; and, once she becomes Luca’s assistant, begins to have romantic feelings for her as well. This brings out an interesting dynamic in power roles. Luca, as Touraine’s superior, wants to help Touraine and her people, but how much of that is attraction due to Luca’s loneliness? How does benevolence play in the matter? There was something a bit squicky about Luca teaching Touraine her own language, a language that had been beaten out of Touraine as a child by Balladairan soldiers. Another thing to consider: Luca is disabled with a lame leg. Luca presses Touraine to bring her information about Qazāli magic, which includes healing properties. However, the Balladaire empire banned magic and religious faith. What crosses the line between Luca’s genuine attraction towards Touraine and her push to make Touraine dig up forbidden secrets that would be a death warrant to her own people?

Somehow, Clark managed to turn something squirm-inducing into a complex romance that kept me engaged in seeing how everything turns out. I liked that Clark didn’t rely on simple tropes about who was good or evil, but showed how everyone would do anything for their own interests and goals. And Clark does not shy away from showing how attraction works best when both partners can treat each other as equals; otherwise, it could easily break down into bitterness, betrayal, and hate.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LaShawn M. Wanak has been writing speculative fiction stories professionally since 2006. Her works have appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018, 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.

Book Review: Escaping Exodus: Symbiosis, by Nicky Drayden

Chris Kluwe | 856 words

Escaping Exodus: Symbiosis
Nicky Drayden
Trade Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9780062867759
Harper Voyager, February 2021, 336 pages

Greetings, readers! For this month’s review, I’d like to talk about an author whose work I’ve grown to greatly admire, and it is the wonderful Nicky Drayden. I’ve covered several of her other books in previous issues, Temper and Escaping Exodus, and I’m pleased to be able to talk about her new novel, Escaping Exodus: Symbiosis, which is the sequel to Escaping Exodus.

For those who haven’t read Escaping Exodus (go read it, it’s pretty darn good), the setting of Escaping Exodus: Symbiosis continues Drayden’s story about a group of human spacefarers who have made their home in the guts and internal structures of a giant space creature called a Zenzee (which isn’t exactly a spacewhale, but in my head it’s totally a spacewhale) and have to navigate various societal and environmental problems created by their not-quite-parasitic not-quite-symbiotic relationship with their host. Like most sequels, you’ll probably want to read the first book before diving into this one—while Drayden does a good job of providing a recap of previous events in her initial chapter, the cast of characters has a richly compelling backstory and set of relationships with each other that you don’t want to miss out on.

One thing that really stood out to me with Escaping Exodus was how vividly imagined and alive its peculiar world felt, and I’m happy to say that Drayden has continued that same penchant for mind-bending imagery in Symbiosis. Every page has something weirdly new (in a good way) for your brain to mull over, including characters literally walking around inside a massive brain, and Drayden does excellent work in making the alien host simultaneously feel like something familiar, yet also profoundly and unsettlingly different.

However, it’s the characters in Symbiosis where Drayden’s writing skills really shine, and for as alien as the world they find themselves living in is, their relationships are very recognizably human, encompassing all the messy, beautiful, unpleasant, and awkward ways in which we interact with each other. Every character in the book has flaws and strengths, joys and regrets, and the overarching theme of having to live with your past while finding a way to not let it destroy your present and future is reflected in all facets of the book and is a message well worth heeding.

Symbiosis also has a strong theme of environmentalism running through it, similar to Escaping Exodus, which I greatly appreciated. The characters being utterly reliant on their Zenzee in order to survive is a not so subtle microcosm of our own journey through space, only we’re on the skin of a rock and they’re in the flesh of a creature. In either case, we both need our greater host to remain healthy if we want our own survival to endure, but just as in real life, in Symbiosis there are plenty who believe otherwise because it fits their own personal goals of enrichment.

My only minor quibble with Symbiosis, and it’s the same one I had with Temper, is that I wish Drayden had spent a bit more time in the final parts of the story expanding on some of the ideas presented there. Don’t get me wrong, the story didn’t feel rushed or anything, and the conclusion was entirely satisfactory, but I wanted to know more about some very cool concepts that she introduced, and I wouldn’t have minded reading another hundred pages in which they were explored further. On the whole, though, having so many interesting ideas that you don’t have space to fit them all in without writing a thousand-page epic is probably a pretty good problem to have, and is indicative of Drayden’s ability to constantly innovate and surprise the reader.

Overall, if I had to find a way to distill Symbiosis down into just a few sentences, it would be that this is a book bursting at the seams with physical and emotional life and all its gloriously messy contradictions. We can, and do, hurt the ones we love, and sometimes we forgive, and sometimes we can’t, but our relationships are always changed by our actions, and the past never changes. All we can do is find a way to live with the world we’re in as best we’re able, and hopefully not cause any more damage than is necessary. You should read it.

Read if: you enjoy descriptions of the native flora and fauna of alien digestive systems; you’ve experienced imperfect people trying their best; you’re somewhat curious about spacewhale hentai.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Kluwe grew up in Southern California among a colony of wild chinchillas and didn’t learn how to communicate outside of barking and howling until he was fourteen years old. He has played football in the NFL, once wrestled a bear for a pot of gold, and lies occasionally. He is also the eternal disappointment of his mother, who just can’t understand why he hasn’t cured cancer yet. Do you know why these bio things are in third person? I have no idea. Please tell me if you figure it out.

Book Review: Broken Fevers, by Tenea D. Johnson

Arley Sorg | 865 words

Broken Fevers
Tenea D. Johnson
Trade Paperback
ISBN: 9781732638853
Rosarium Publishing, March 2021, 136 pgs

Reading a few stories in this collection, followed by a cursory search through a few respected SFF sites, would lead any rational person to a singular conclusion: The SFF community has a talent for overlooking seriously skilled storytellers. For whatever mix of reasons, Tenea D. Johnson’s work hasn’t found its way into the pro mags, nor into any of the long-standing, better known semi-pros such as Kaleidotrope or Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Reviewers have almost entirely failed to notice her. Even those dedicated individuals who track genre careers have let her down.

Let’s set the record straight: Johnson’s work went public in 2002, with four poems posted to the Reading Between A&B site. In 2003, she had short story “Deep Night” in Necrologue, edited by Helen Sandler. In other words, she’s been in the writing game quite a while. After looking through Broken Fevers, which offers an assortment of previously published work and original fiction for a total fourteen stories, I can’t help but feel that recognition is overdue.

First story “Bare” immediately pulls the reader in with good (but not overworked) turns of phrase and an interesting situation. A young girl is out of her comfort zone, as her first-ever girlfriend has invited her to see her at work—in a strip club. But Johnson overturns expectations, offering both surprise and important commentary in the compact space of a flash piece. In one swift move, she excises the male gaze and invokes a wonderful horror sensibility.

Johnson flexes her science fiction chops with pieces like “Foundling.” Petal is one of the best in the world at her job: She works in a center which teleports victims out of harm’s way during disasters. As driven as she is, her perfect record is smeared when her attempt to rescue a child from a collapsing building fails. But Petal knows something is off: She’s checked the vectors, the variables, the Boolean calculus. When she starts her own investigation, she lands in deeper trouble. What’s great about this story is not just the cool application of a familiar trope, but the intense layers infused into the piece, which uses science fiction to explore a complex web of cultural inequities.

As strong as “Foundling” is—and, make no mistake, Johnson is a versatile, intelligent author; there are many strong stories in this book—my favorites are Johnson’s forays into mythic/folkloric narratives. “Lopsided World” is a great, very short story wherein a brother and sister hold up the sky on poles. One day, the brother, Songo, drops his end, leaving Libanja to hold up the sky on her own. Myth meets modern and together they form a vibrant metaphor, delivered with just the right amount of emotional resonance. Ultimately this story accomplishes, in just over a page, the kinds of things many writers struggle to do with thousands of words to spend.

“Sugar Hill” is a definite standout. Ts’ai-Ho is an immortal on the hunt for her missing fairy friend, Doren. Said friend left an ominous message on Ts’ai-Ho’s answering machine, and the immortal has to find him before he harms himself. But the two have been estranged for a while, and she isn’t entirely sure how to find him anymore. This is the kind of modern-meets-myth story I have seen so many people try to write but flounder: filled with awesome ideas, moments of wonder, and sprinkled with just the right amount of bold humor. But because the author is Tenea D. Johnson, it’s also much more than that. The writing is unflinching, it takes risks, and the glittery ideas are part of a deeper story. This piece is a beautiful meditation on friendship, using the truths we share and the things we hide as a focal point. It’s also a thought-provoking treatment of conflicts of cultural identity, especially in terms of reconciling cultural pasts with the not-always-pleasant present. All told, it’s really breathtaking work.

As a community, we should be grateful to editors such as Brandon Massey, who published Johnson in Whispers in the Night; the editorial team of Kinitra Brooks, Linda D. Addison, and Susana Morris who published her in Sycorax’s Daughters; and Bill Campbell, who, working with Nisi Shawl, published her in Stories for Chip. As readers, we should wonder what other wonderful work we might be missing, and if the visionaries who saw the merit in Johnson’s writing might also see merit in other authors equally worthy of reading. More important to this review, Campbell has published Johnson’s work again, and together they offer us the concentrated dose we need, the medicine we didn’t even realize we were missing, wrapped up in a book called Broken Fevers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arley Sorg is co-Editor-in-Chief of Fantasy Magazine, senior editor at Locus Magazine, and associate editor at both Lightspeed and Nightmare. He reviews books for Locus, Lightspeed, and Cascadia Subduction Zone and is an interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine. Arley grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado, and studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, and, in non-pandemic times, usually writes in local coffee shops. He is a 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate.

Author Spotlight: Claire Wrenwood

Audrey T. Williams | 639 words

I was shook by this story! There are so many potentially heavy themes addressed, power, privilege, oppression, family obligation, to name a few. Your skill at your craft ensures “Homecoming” comes across thoughtfully, like a classic, refined (yet dark) fairy tale. As a spa-goer who has always shied away from the “guppy-sized-fish”-aided exfoliation pedicures, I have to ask what inspired the spa concept in this story?

Thank you so much!

Well, you hit upon one of the initial inspirations for this story. I have always found the dynamics in nail salons and spas to be as fascinating as they are uncomfortable: There is this strange intimacy, this literal erasure of distance, that contrasts so sharply with the transactional nature of the service being performed, and with the socioeconomic gap that often exists between customer and worker. When I first heard about fish pedicures, I thought they were weird and funny but essentially harmless. Then I read an article about how the Garra rufa fish don’t naturally eat dead skin; they are induced to do so through starvation. The image of those starving, nibbling fish stayed with me because it seemed to so vividly encapsulate the wider exploitation in the beauty industry. I wanted to use this intimate setting—intimacy which can, of course, tip so easily into claustrophobia—to explore distance between mother and daughter, as well as Marlo’s own implication in the military-industrial complex, in the form of the alien who has been put to work servicing her.

The astrobiological implications are swirling around in my mind. How did you decide what the squicks look like, their physiology, and their skill set?

The squicks’ physiology sprang from the fact that I wanted to pair their skin-eating ability with the lurking threat of violence (their needle-like teeth). They needed to be small and nonthreatening. I knew that we would probably assume that these creatures, whose intelligence we hadn’t bothered to fully ascertain, would only use their teeth to produce a drug-like effect, and not to defend themselves or fight. (As a side note, when I was trying to find the original article about the starvation of Garra rufa fish, I came across multiple news stories about people who had gotten nasty infections and even lost toes as a result of fish pedicures . . . so maybe the fish are getting their revenge after all!)

I love a good ritual. A reminder to have respect for rituals outside of one’s own is one of the things I’m carrying away from your story. Did any particular rituals (real or fictional) influence the description of the squicks’ mourning process?

That’s an interesting question. I love science fiction or fantasy that hints at some aspect of culture but allows my imagination to fill in the gaps. In this story, I wanted to do something similar: presenting a glimpse of a much larger landscape of ritual and culture that these intelligent creatures have created (and that Marlo and her comrades have destroyed), and letting the reader fill in the rest.

After reading the story several times, the remorse Marlo feels at the end leaves me with a different interpretation each time. Was this your intention, or is there something specific you’d like the reader to know about Marlo by the end?

I think it’s great when readers come away with different interpretations! I love stories that resist an easy ending, and I wanted to do the same here. I have my own thoughts about oppressive structures and their dehumanizing effects on those who are bound up in them, but ultimately I wanted to avoid any simple answers. As in life, there are times when none of us escape, when no one is absolved.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Audrey spent her childhood on North Carolina beaches playing in the breakers at Emerald Isle and fishing on Bogue Inlet pier. She now roams Northern California beaches, rivers, and woods seeking sea glass, foraging chanterelles, and hunting rocks and gems. Her work can be found in Space and Time Magazine. She works in San Francisco as a Copy Supervisor at a healthcare advertising agency. Find her on Twitter @Virgule2020.

Author Spotlight: P H Lee

Setsu Uzumé | 1433 words

The Bear Prince’s tale is upon us! This is your third release for Tales from the Great Sweet Sea, a series of fairy tales from a secondary fantasy world. In an earlier interview, you described this as your minority report on fairy tale morals, and I’d like to ask about how you build out each story and make it your own. Does it begin with the lesson? The trope? Something else?

For most of these stories, I wrote the core of them long-ago enough that it’s hard for me to remember how it started. But luckily “The Bear Prince” was a recent story, so I can actually walk you step-by-step through it.

A while back, I was talking with some friends about this fairy tale series and how I have never really been able to “crack open” Goldilocks as a story. By “crack open” I mean find that secret message/moral core that I can find in most other fairy tales.

A woman I was talking to, who has studied a ton of different folkloric traditions, said, “Oh! That’s because the story changed recently. It used to be called ‘Silverlocks’ and the protagonist was an old woman, and the story is about how, at that time, old women were allowed to do whatever they wanted and no one could stop them. But as that social custom died away, the story changed into a little girl and the moral was different.”

So that absolutely cracked the story wide open for me. It is, basically, a story about privilege and comeuppance. Goldilocks thinks that she can get away with all these things, but in the end she cannot, because the people that she’s messing with are bears and don’t care much for social convention. (Goldilocks is also about a lot of other things, of course. I’m not trying to say that this is the sole meaning.)

Anyway, once I got the idea that this was a story about privilege, much of the rest of the story clicked together. How to make that theme clear? Reverse it: Give a bear the life of a privileged human and show the consequences of the humans around him. This blended in my mind with the image of the secret princess raised by bears, which is an image that recurs throughout Germanic folklore, most notably for me in the beginning Naomi Mitchison’s absolutely phenomenal book Travel Light, where a nursemaid takes her charge to be raised by the bears in order to protect her from her father. So why not have a “switched at birth” story about both of them?

From there, the rest of the story falls out as reasonable consequences from the initial set-up. We have these two characters in untenable situations (a bear living as a prince and a princess living as a bear) and we see how these untenable situations collapse, and what they manage to build for themselves out of the contradictions that they’re living in. The ending—where the family of bears eats the cruel and capricious king—is just pure wish fulfillment on my part, albeit one that is mirrored in the original story. But it’s a fairy tale and so I’m allowed to have a wish-fulfillment ending.

Did you have a say in how the stories were curated or arranged? Do any of the tales reflect or contrast each other by virtue of their place in the lineup?

The stories are not in any particular order, and John [Joseph Adams] is the one who decides what order they are printed in. There are obvious connections between all of them, but they aren’t order-dependent.

I have it in my head that once I have enough of them (twelve perhaps? with one extra for luck), I might put together a collection or a fix-up novel. If I do, I’ll try to make sure that they’re in a complementary order. But right now they’re mostly just in the order which I submitted them to Lightspeed, which is absolutely not the order that I wrote them in or an order I’ve chosen to present them in, just the order where they felt ready to submit.

There is one novella-in-progress with the working title “The Queen Beneath the Earth.” That one might have to be the final Dusty Boots story. I’m not yet sure whether this means I’ll refrain from submitting it until the rest are done or I’ll just re-order them in a later collection, though.

At the risk of posing a Pop-Tarts-are-a-ravioli question, are there any stories or pieces of media that read as fairy tales to you when no one else seemed to agree?

I’m more likely to err the other way—seeing some stories as “not fairy tales” when other people do. We have this idea as a culture that fairy tales are tales for children, and that tales for children ought to be nice, and because of that we keep rewriting fairy tales to be “nicer” in a way that makes them lose a lot of their important emotional qualities. The world of fairy tales is violent and cruel and full of betrayals and injustice, because the point of fairy tales is to teach us about how the world works, and the world is violent and cruel and full of betrayals and injustice. Even when injustices are rectified, which sometimes they are not, they are often rectified with an intense violence.

(There is probably a long tangent here about the idea of a “fairy-tale ending” and a “fairy-tale wedding” in our culture. I’m pretty sure most people aren’t looking to be eaten by bears at their wedding, or have their stepsisters cut off their own feet! But that’s straying pretty far from the question.)

So, anyway, a lot of versions of fairy tales end up ringing hollow for me because they’re rewritten to remove the injustice and violence. This is true of both “nicer” versions and “dark” versions.

Regarding the core storyteller, Dusty Boots, what are three things we should know about them before approaching?

“I am one of the ones sworn to the truth,” might not mean what it seems to mean.

That’s three things.

What are three things about Dusty Boots we will never know?

It’s hard for me to say “never” because I don’t what I’ll want to write in the future, and I’m firmly committed to writing whatever I want to write, especially if that means changing my mind. But, as of this particular moment, it is my intention to never write direct narration for this setting; every story from the world of the Great Sweet Sea and the Icicle Coast and so on will be written as a story told to you, the reader, by a particular character with a particular set of interests. I do have a couple of other narrators waiting in the wings, but just like Dusty Boots, they have their own concerns and their own relationships to both stories and the truth.

Because of that restriction, we’re unlikely to ever hear about Dusty Boots outside of his own direct narration. Which means we’ll likely never know any direct personal information about him because, like most storytellers, he tells stories in order to reveal his true opinions and experiences while also disguising them. Perhaps he’ll tell you the story of the girl he’s in love with and can never have, but how could you tell it from any other story of unrequited love? Perhaps he’ll tell you the story of how he became a tale-spinner, but it will be hidden at the heart of a very different story.

Dusty Boots is a storyteller, so he puts a part of his life and heart into the stories that he tells. And, like many of us, he prefers to keep those connections hidden.

What can we look forward to next from you?

I don’t know! After “The Bear Prince,” I have no more stories awaiting publication. I’m working on more, of course (including more stories in the Tales of the Great Sweet Sea series), but will editors want to buy them? I can’t say. Short fiction is such a volatile and tricky business. Hopefully this won’t be the last story that I sell.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Setsu writes and occasionally narrates dark fantasy. Their work has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Grimdark Magazine, and Magic: The Gathering. Find them on Twitter @scribblesassin.

Author Spotlight: Adam-Troy Castro

Jude Griffin | 891 words

How did this story come about?

At the risk of snottiness, I aver that it came about the same way most stories come about: out of my personal interest in spending some time in its given universe, wandering about and finding the story. This was a case of pantsing, not outlining, and I made the various discoveries, including the main character’s rocky relationship with his father, in the process of my explorations, sometimes not finding out stuff until I was almost upon it.

Your characters are so rich in telling detail, I imagine you as a close observer of the humans around you, making notes on possible character details to use one day. How do you build your characters? Does the stereotype about “Florida Man” give you an infinite trove of character details to use?

I don’t think I’m a particularly close observer; I am sometimes thoroughly blind, to the point where I am surprised by explosions that end with me protesting, “I didn’t know you were upset. I’m not telepathic.” I never take notes, but some of what I do retain is internalized, and winds up on the page. Here, it was a case of realizing, “This man and wife cannot exist in a vacuum and it already feels like they do, so I better give them a hint of a larger existence; here, I’ll have the protagonist visit his father, and whoops, that means I have to create a little bit about his father. And hey, I’ll throw in a brother, but to keep him out of the narrative I’ll establish that he’s dead,” and from there I find a way to connect them to the premise. But it’s an adjustment to an adjustment, a way of doing the things that must be done and then re-connecting them to the premise.

As for “Florida Man,” a description that technically speaking does apply to me, I have found as explanation that we are no weirder or more nuts than anyone else. You will find just as many examples of the kind, per capita, in Connecticut, or in Arizona, or for that matter in Sri Lanka. We are just better at reporting them to the police, and publishing them, so they can receive national attention, than most other localities.

Why did you choose the ending you did? I was sure it would end with Analise returning to footsteps in the sand and the little crab waving its claws.

See, this is where the “exploration” part comes in. I had more or less planned precisely that ending, by default, but as I drew closer realized it was facile, obvious, and an unsatisfying conclusion to the story’s contemplations on mortality, belief, and the life at hand as something that needed to be paid attention to, above and beyond the life to come. As I approached the ending, I realized that the last thing I wanted to do was accompany our protagonist on his mortal journey; I certainly didn’t want to show him blinking, falling, and experiencing his transition to a crustacean afterlife. So I provided a paragraph or two that provided a model of that ending, and then moved past it, to absolute peace, to the benediction he provides the angry crab at his feet. That, I realized, is a conclusion that both wraps everything up and provides the readership with the opportunity to decide the next page for themselves. Does the narrator drop dead in the very next heartbeat? Maybe. Fully possible, even likely. But alternatively, he might survive the night, make passionate love to his wife, return home and live for another year with no further symptoms of his degenerative illness. I don’t know, and what’s further, I don’t care. I am satisfied with the ending I found by exploration.

Alan spends his time thinking about the details of his next life, next lives in general, but not about whether the whole thing could be something else, just a type of hallucination, rather than a preview of the future. Is that lack of curiosity his own character or true of his people/population or true of how humans may shy away from the possibility of harder truths?

In this story, people know exactly what afterlife awaits them. They may seek to bargain for another, but I am cagey about whether that has any efficacy. I don’t think there’s much room for theological debate in this world, as nobody doubts their “previews,” but I note that our protagonist does come up with the Heaven vs. Hell model at one point in his contemplations and shudders at the world that would have resulted if people believed in such a silly thing. Certainly, he finds out in the course of the story that his future as a crab has its darker elements, but it is the world he will be stuck with, as we are stuck in ours.

What’s the best story you’ve read recently?

Most recently, as within the last two weeks, the novella “The Dark Ride,” by John Kessel, from the Jan/Feb 2021 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

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: Sarah Grey

Xander Odell | 1047 words

Perhaps my greatest joy in reading “Brightly, Undiminished” is the sheer sensual beauty of the prose, the way you encapsulate plot and emotion in every tiny detail. Imelda’s hair, the tangle of legs beneath the blankets, the indulgence of shadows. Were there any particular challenges in painting these words onto the page?

I also read and write poetry, so vivid prose is my happy place and comes naturally to me. The challenge, though, is keeping the story moving forward. Rich imagery can enhance emotional flavor, but too rich and you’ll give the reader a stomachache. Part of my routine second-draft edits for this and other stories is to ask whether the timing of a particular image or a prose flourish deepens the impact of a scene. Often, I have to eliminate whole sentences I love because they’re just too stylized, and slow the action. Maintaining that balance can be difficult.

But for the most emotional scenes, I let myself unleash all the language and imagery. That’s my favorite part.

What inspired this tale of magic and love?

My father passed away in 2019. My parents had been a couple since they were thirteen. I met my partner when I was eighteen, so I spent a lot of time thinking about the devastation of losing a long-time love.

Just before the one-year anniversary of my father’s death, the pandemic hit. I was seeing so much loss and pain, just an overwhelming quantity of people enduring that level of pain at once. I think, ultimately, it was too much to process, and I needed an outlet.

At the same time, I also lost touch with a very close friend who works in healthcare, and was just too busy with Covid-19 to engage anymore. I had a recurring, intense dream about that person—and that dream was the seed for this story, and is reflected in Mercer’s dream of Imelda at her altar with her back turned, spinning spells.

I was both intrigued and enamored of your description of magic: “You were born a witch, or your weren’t.” Inherited magic is not common in contemporary fantasies and here you cement it in the setting with both the idea that magic has limits and that it exists side by side with the more mundane world. Did you envision magic in the story as a known presence, something as obvious as electricity or cars, or was it a fleeting shadow seen out of the corner of your eye and quickly forgotten?

I definitely envisioned it as somewhat secretive, a hidden and inherited talent shared either with others who possess it, or with close loved ones.

I conceptualized it as similar to empathy, in some respects. Unlike magic in this story, most people are capable of feeling deep empathy. (Whether they choose to indulge it or not is a very different question). Some people, however, inherit a much more intense capacity for feeling empathy toward others—which can make relationships much more enduring and satisfying and joyful, and can absolutely saturate the world in emotional color.

That’s what we see in Mercer’s feelings for Imelda: She and her magic have brightened his life so completely that he’s convinced he can’t live without her.

But at the same, that level of empathy can become a vulnerability, and can be exploited or manipulated, or make a person the target of intentional cruelty. Like witchcraft, it can get you burned at the stake. And so Imelda’s witchcraft is both an inheritance and a private gift, one she shares completely with a person she loves.

In that same vein, if you could be a witch in this world, what is one spell you would want to cast?

I would sprinkle everyone in a pinch of empathy-dust. I expect that would solve many of the world’s problems.

You began running marathons in 2019, and kudos to you for that level of dedication. What set your feet, literally, on that road? Do you find any similarities between writing and running?

I was never an athlete, and never conceived of myself as remotely athletic until I was almost thirty years old.

But I have two children, and my older child has spina bifida and is severely disabled. He’s nonambulatory and depends on a home ventilator, among many other medical complications. His birth and early childhood called into question my very definition of “athletic.” I can walk; I can run; I can breathe even when I feel like another quarter mile will literally kill me.

That was a profound realization. I don’t need to be a champion. No one needs to be a champion. My body moves the way it does, and I’m blessed to have the ability to simply put one foot in front of the other. That’s huge. Just being alive and moving and breathing is huge.

And I would be lying if I said distance running is easy. It’s not—there’s generally a moment of despair toward the end of every long run.

So I bribe myself with pizza.

Which is very much like writing fiction, I think. Some mornings, I just don’t wanna. There’s a lot of self-bribery involved.

Tell us a bit about what’s next for Sarah Grey. What can readers look forward to in 2021?

In a word: more!

Like most people, I have high hopes for this year. I’ve adopted a more sustained schedule of short fiction production, with a focus on more hopeful, upbeat content. I’ve also written quite a bit of poetry lately; I love speculative poetry and I hope to continue publishing it regularly.

I’m also planning to start a novel this year. I have several ideas circulating, and the most promising developed out of one of my previous Lightspeed stories.

A novel is truly a marathon, though, so there will be a mountain of pizza-bribes when I cross that finish line. I hope readers will be there to celebrate with me.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Xander Odell is a 47-year old, happily married mother of two, an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. Their work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s UNIVERSE, Daily Science Fiction, Crosssed Genres, Pseudopod, and The Drabblecast. They are hard at work plotting their second novel or world domination. Whichever comes first.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 219 words

Coming up in April, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by An Owomoyela (“The Equations of the Dead”) and Rich Larson (“Complete Exhaustion of the Organism”), along with SF reprints by Seanan McGuire (“Swear Not by the Moon”) and Ray Nayler (“The Ocean Between the Leaves”).

Plus, we’re serializing an original fantasy novelette by Ashok K. Banker! Online readers can look forward to reading “The Giving One” in two parts spread across two weeks. We also have fantasy reprints by Ann Leckie (“The Justified”) and Genevieve Valentine (“Blood, Ash, Braids”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with book reviews from our terrific review team. 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: Lizz Huerta, Gene Doucette, Andrew Dana Hudson, Nicole D. Sconiers, and Adam-Troy Castro.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that SFnal goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

Here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Lightspeed:

Website

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Destroy Projects

www.destroysf.com

Newsletter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

RSS Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/rss-2

Podcast Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/itunes-rss

Twitter

www.twitter.com/LightspeedMag

Facebook

www.facebook.com/LightspeedMagazine

Subscribe

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe

Subscriptions and Ebooks

The Editors

Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed 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 three 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

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 our Adamant Press magazines, you might also enjoy these works edited by our publisher 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.