Editorial, March 2011
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue ten of Lightspeed!

Before we get to this month’s teasers, I just wanted to remind you that you can now subscribe to the ebook edition of Lightspeed, via Weightless Books, a new ebookstore managed by Gavin Grant and the team at Small Beer Press. Subscriptions are just $19.95 a year, which is over $15 off the cover price, so subscribe early and subscribe often—and tell your friends!

Also, this month marks the beginning of my tenure as editor of Lightspeed’s sister-publication, Fantasy Magazine (www.fantasy-magazine.com). So if you enjoy fantasy as well, please pop over and check it out. (And you can tell your friends about that too!)

With that out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month:

In “Saying the Names,” debut author Maggie Clark gives us the story of a woman hired to navigate the sticky legal system of a complicated alien race, and her own equally sticky relationship with the defendant.

And to accompany Ms. Clark’s story, we have, from Genevieve Valentine, an overview of our attempts to communicate with other species, in “You Never Get a Seventh Chance to Make a First Impression: An Awkward History of Our Space Transmissions.”

“Gossamer” by Stephen Baxter takes us to Pluto and Charon, tidally-locked in their mutual orbit. A team briefly stranded there discovers that timing is everything, and that the relationship between the two worlds is more complicated than anyone had guessed. (Reprint)

Author and reviewer Chris Moriarty presents our feature interview with Nebula Award-winning, bestselling author Walter Jon Williams, in which they discuss big ideas, “sub-genre busting,” and Walter’s latest book, Deep State.

In “Spider the Artist,” Nnedi Okorafor takes us to Nigeria of the future, where Big Oil protects the pipelines with spider-like AIs known as zombies, and tells the tale of a woman who faces down one of the murderous machines armed only with a guitar. (Reprint)

Roboticist/author Daniel H. Wilson examines the history of robotics and warfare in “Retro Robots on the Battlefield,” and reveals that these autonomous machines may have been around longer than you would have thought.

“Woman Leaves Room” by Robert Reed gives us a view of immortality, forgotten files, and perhaps a reminder to be awake for the parts of life that matter.

In the related nonfiction, celebrated novelist Ekaterina Sedia puts on her scientist hat and tells us about Turritopsis nutricula, a kind of jellyfish that seems to live forever, and speculates on what that means for humans, in “Immortal Jellyfish and Transhuman You.”

That about does it for our fiction and nonfiction selections for March, but be sure to also look for our author and artist spotlights, and keep an ear out for our podcasts of “Saying the Names” by Maggie Clark and “Woman Leaves Room” by Robert Reed.

So that’s our issue this month. Thanks for reading!

Lightspeed editor John Joseph Adams is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Wastelands, The Living Dead (a World Fantasy Award finalist), The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, and The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Barnes & Noble.com named him “the reigning king of the anthology world,” and his books have been named to numerous best of the year lists. He is also the editor of Lightspeed’s sister-publication, Fantasy Magazine. In addition to his editorial work, John is also the co-host of io9’s Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

Saying the Names
Maggie Clark

On the shuttle out to our connecting flight, the Bo assigned to my mission fixes the bulge of his eyes unwaveringly upon me. I was told to expect this, the species so alien to death it finds our every parting curious; its sense of privacy so absent, not one of its forty-three languages contains the word.

Though L-drive allows us to return long before our loved ones pass on, just the thought of my journey’s purpose already has me pining for home: of all the ways I’ve imagined meeting my father, as defense council in his murder trial does not rank high on the list. Our shuttle crests the white round of the L-ship’s hull, powering down non-essentials while preparing to dock.

I can bear the Bo’s steady gaze even less in the dark.

In-flight, I dream. Vega III, my home world, holds a species of deep-water squid that can regress at will to any prior phase in its development. When I was small my mother introduced me to this creature as a means of describing the Bo, and with them, my father’s permanent absence. No more was ever said about either the man or the mission, and for years I thought of the Bo as slimy cephalopods forever darting from the light. Not until the Academy did my perception of the species take its proper form, of large, mottled amphibians with forelimbs caught between quadrupedal and bipedal use, who did indeed revert to earlier stages of development when their warts grew too big for them to move.

Before then, as a child embroiled in misconceptions, I dreamed of my father trapped at the bottom of the Bo’s oceans, assailed by giant barbed tentacles in underground caves. Now he is indeed held prisoner, as best the Bo understand the term, and while hurtling towards him in a prison all its own, my subconscious returns to these vague, inky nightmares of my youth. When I wake for meals, taken with the crew in a long, narrow galley sporting tiny portholes to the stars, we can hear the Bo singing through the ventilation shafts. I find it hard sometimes just to chew.

The captain sits with me the day before our arrival. He has the appropriate look of a spaceman—hardened, lank, with an indifferent cast about his beard, hands lanced with burns and calluses from his work. I think he expects some move on my part for his companionship—the novice traveler’s last, desperate cleaving to the familiar before ejection into the great and terrible unknown—but I’ve decided to wait for the return trip to make such an overture, and only then if I can’t bring my father home.

Captain Sedgwick sets a small parcel before me.

“What’s this?”

In the wrapping I find two small devices, each the size of an earbud.

“White noise,” he says. “You’ll need it. To work, to sleep.”

“Is it that loud?”

“It’s that constant.”

“I have a portable.”

“That’s not enough. Here—” He shows me the settings, each one’s capacity to block out Bo songs on select frequencies. “You’re going to be speaking, I gather? For the trial?”

“Of course. But surely then—”

“It never stops. It can’t stop. You know the story of the first ambassador?”

“And the last, yes.” I worry he’ll go on anyway, but the captain accepts my response at face value, or at least seems not to unduly favor the sound of his own voice.

“Well, hold to it, then. They abbreviate nothing. Sentences can go on for days, and they don’t take kindly to being told to keep it short. You’re better off just blocking out the background bits.”

“Thanks.”

I remember the story of the ambassador from Conflict Differentials at the Academy, where it served as a classic anecdote on the limits of preparation. The poor, over-educated man in this case thought to ask what the Bo called themselves and their home world, so he might see both proper names used throughout the galaxy in place of other species’ words. Pleased by this gesture, the Bo proceeded to speak the names as they did everything else—at length, and sparing no historical or biological detail. For the first three hours, captivated by the sudden wealth of data, the ambassador recorded everything, noting patterns where he could, grappling with obscure referents whenever they emerged, but by the fourth, exhausted, and thinking at last of the realpolitik of his original query, he asked if there might be some shorter variant he could write down instead.

Though slow to speak, his counterparts were surprisingly quick to anger, abbreviation an act of offense, of disdain, with no equal among their kind. In the immediacy of their contempt, they gave the ambassador one syllable, Bo, to serve for both requests, and thereafter declared a complete disinterest in diplomacy with the rest of the galaxy, its vast species all clearly lacking either the intelligence or civility to learn real words.

The utterance of these vehement declarations of course took a week all its own, during which time the ambassador suffered a massive heart attack from the constant, thunderous rebukes directed against his person, and soon after—one hopes with a modicum of regret—the Bo shipped his body and field notes home. No ambassadorship has since existed on their planet, and even scientists avoid the territory. My father is the first in four human generations to make Bo his home.

Captain Sedgwick hesitates at the entrance to my berth. “Your father...”

“Yes?”

“If he’s found guilty...”

Now it’s my turn to hesitate. “Like you said, the Bo don’t abbreviate anything. And they don’t take kindly to those who do.”

Captain Sedgwick nods, drumming his hand once on the frame of my door. I study the floor so as not to watch him when he goes.

I had never even seen a picture of my father until his vid showed up at my office, requesting my presence on an alien planet with no readily discernible criminal code. Still, when the Bo bring him to meet my shuttle—his hair long, matted and graying; his body broad, and lean, and gaunt—I can’t help thinking how much he’s changed, how tired he now looks.

Bo is a tidally-locked world, one side of the planet forever scorched by the heat and light of its sun, the other cast in perpetual darkness and cold. Yet for a particular stretch of land along the circumference between opposing halves, the constant flux of hot and cold creates an oasis where life somehow prevails. What manner of life is debatable, however: where the shuttle sets down--presumably a metropolis, from the intensity of Bo songs alone—it is foggy and dark, and I think it no wonder that a human should look wilted under such an oppressive absence of sun.

At the very least, the Bo do not have my father in restraints when I arrive; indeed, they seem perfectly uncertain how best to handle him, and say as much in ceaseless song to one another, their hind-legs and throat sacs rumbling with agitated words on at least two different wavelengths apiece. I wish I could be so open with my own uncertainty, approaching my father for the first time with no sense of what to do next. Shake hands? Embrace?

My father bows his head, then looks at me with an uncomfortable smile. “Hello, Nia. I’m glad you came.”

Be angry. Yes. This is an option I’d forgotten, a feeling I’d pushed aside for years. It rears its head now at my father’s proximity, the almost amused quality of guilt upon his face. Be angry, yes, and make damn sure the Bo spare my father’s life, so I have time to be angry some more.

The Bo have not yet finished their death songs for the one my father is said to have killed, and the city rumbles with this unrelenting grief as we walk the briny length of the docks under escort. Marsh homes emerge to either side of us in the fog, while a thread of golden light persists on distant waters, recalling the intractable sun just beyond. Absent a routine for criminal courts, the Bo permit my father to move where he will during waking hours, but he is under strict curfew, and no Bo will look favorably upon escape.

“If they cannot speak the way they must, they are silent,” my father says. “The Bo who came with you—he said nothing, of course. That’s how they survive on the rare occasions they travel among us.”

“So if they’re suddenly silent, no one’s going to come running.”

“Right. But it’s still uncommon. Most often, it signals an impending regression.”

“Which they do alone, away from the noise?”

“Quite the opposite. They regress in plain sight, with as much noise around them as possible.” My father pauses, a measure of excitement rising in his voice. “Actually, it’s what I came here to study—the function of that regression, its mechanisms.” When I make no reply he continues, gathering steam:

“You see, evolutionarily, the Bo are already extraordinary. They exist in a narrow margin of viable territory in the middle of a planet of extremes, so of course there’s little competition, and few possible niches to fill. Consequently, they lack the evolutionary incentive to evolve fully out of vestigial forms, and boast a wealth of intermediate features practically unheard of at this level of sentience. But then, as if that weren’t enough, there’s also their ability to regress, a process we’ve only seen among rudimentary species before—aquatic animals, mostly, and some insects. On Vega III, even, there’s a squid—”

“Yes, I know.”

He registers my tone and cuts his lecture short. “Nia,” he says, gently.

I find I can’t look directly at him. “We have a lot of casework to cover.”

He waits, but my position does not improve. “All right,” he says at last. There is an unpleasant weight in his words now, a pointed brevity. “What do you want to know?”

The Bo assigned to me has a large, dark patch of skin around his left eye, a welcome distinction that allows me to pick it out from others in a crowd. I think to wish it good night after my father is taken away and I’m escorted to quarters of my own, but I worry the cursory words might cause offense. And, of course, with the sky here dark at all hours, illumined only slightly by twin orange moons on the horizon, the concept of “night” also seems moot. I am thus neither surprised nor upset when the Bo leaves without speaking one word to me, its hind-legs humming general notes of exhaustion as it lurches into the street. Better silence, I imagine, than diplomatic incident.

I too am exhausted, but even with Sedgwick’s white noise buds turned on I lie awake in my pod, replaying my father’s words and reconstructing the scene of the Bo’s sudden death. According to my father, the deceased was his laboratory assistant, a Bo who predominantly sang words of discovery while collecting soil and water samples from the metropolitan marshlands. Listening to my father’s detailed description of events—the circumstances under which he and the Bo met and hashed out a working relationship, the hours preceding the Bo’s unfortunate demise, the means by which its death became suspect—the complexity of my task grows painfully apparent. The Bo are so suspicious of brevity, so dependent on motive for truth, that to ask potential corroborating witnesses their side of the story bears all the tell-tale signs of walking a minefield. Will they trust me? Will they speak? And if so, how long will all their answers take?

My father’s answers alone are slower and more drawn out than I am used to in my work, a consequence I nonetheless expected of his thirty-odd years among the Bo. How does a human manage so long without its own kind, I wondered. We have ritualistic orders on Vega III that emulate emptiness, silence, and of course celibacy, but for the singing out of our very existence, our every interaction in minute and protracted detail, I can only conjure up one god cult that believed the universe would cease to exist if its singing ever stopped. All of its members perished in an avalanche thousands of years back, of course. The universe, to my knowledge, has not.

My thoughts drift eventually to Captain Sedgwick, though the air is clammy and cold, and my pod, an unusual texture, a truly alien space. There are few places, I had thought, where human desire could not reach, and yet my father seems to have found one—even sought it out. I think of my mother, the robustness of her figure, the strength of her mind, given up for over thirty loveless years in the far reaches of space. What kind of man was my father then, to commit such an act of self-denial? What kind of man is he now, having done it?

I turn off the white noise buds, having given up on sleep. One sacrifice, I think, as Bo songs rumble about me, in the foolhardy hope of ever understanding another’s.

In the first waking hours on the dark side of Bo, my father takes me to his laboratory, the scene of the incident in question. Nothing has been moved since that wake cycle—not even the dead Bo, its mummifying remains giving me a start when I approach the head of the room. There are no morgues here, no cemeteries: To the Bo this is cast-off matter, a skin one might find at the site of regression. The Bo that accompanies us does not so much as eye the mound of gray and crumbling flesh. It looks bored, standing guard by the door, and hums impatience alongside its standard mourning chord.

“There have been deaths before,” my father says, his hands ghosting, but not touching, the long array of enclosures sustaining samples of other lifeforms on Bo. “It’s rare, since their proximity to one another, their constant chatter, sings out potential threats. Few environmental disasters ever claim a life, but it does happen. The last was a year after my arrival, a Bo in the middle of regression when a sandstorm hit in the drylands, where the light touches the black rocks and makes them molten, and plant life turns to fire in an instant. The Bo was in a bad place, an inopportune place, and it also caught fire. There were Bo about it, saying its names, minding its abandoned skins as it sought to escape the heat through regression, and they might have caught it when the winds struck—but they didn’t. They missed. They were slow. To this day they sing mourning songs that are heard over the escarpments, down in the valleys with the hot and the oxidized rocks. They sing for all their poor timing, and the poor timing of the Bo in their care, and their fears of regression even now. None of those watchers has regressed again yet, that I know of, though their warts have grown heavy and stiff, and their sacs hardly move when they speak...”

In his lumpy Bo cloak my father looks toad-like himself, hunched over to peer at old notes on his desk. He has been speaking this rambling, proto-Bo-speak since our arrival, and even without my earbuds I quickly tune him out. Instead of lending him my ear I muster the courage to approach the decaying corpse, slumped over in the bottom of an open tank. But what was it doing inside? How could it have fallen in? My eyes narrow at the thread of a plastic tube still affixed to the back of its wrist.

“I thought you said this Bo was assisting you.”

“It was.”

I turn to my father, my gaze flicking quickly to the Bo by the door. “Can we talk in private?”

My father straightens, glancing at my Bo in turn, then back to me. His longwinded speech comes to its end with one word: “No.”

“As your legal counsel I’d strongly advise—”

“You’re not my counsel, Nia.”

“Excuse me?”

He shakes his head. “Say what you were going to say.”

I hesitate. I know I should ignore my father’s words and get him to plead mental unfitness for refusing legal aid, but at the tone in his voice, that base dismissal, the primal anger rises in me again. There is a dead Bo beside me with an IV sticking out of its arm. What game does my father think he’s playing now?

“This Bo wasn’t just assisting you,” I say at last. “It was the experiment.”

My father looks disconcertingly triumphant. “Yes,” he says. “It most certainly was.”

In the gathering space of the Bo, the songs from the spectator pods are indeed deafening and unchecked by the gravity of proceedings, so I gratefully fine-tune my precious earbuds until most of the chatter has been reduced to a murmur; the one voice that still filters through is that of the inquisitor Bo, who presides over the room with tremendous warts wreathed about his skull and coursing down his mottled forelimbs. Beside me my father is quite content to recline in his pod, so that my blood alone is still agitated from the fall-out of his words in the laboratory, now two wake and rest cycles past.

At this time I have just finished my opening remarks to the Inquisitor, who itself took half an hour to formally greet the room and establish the purpose of this second wake cycle’s assembly of Bo. My own remarks were simple: I tried to draw them out in appropriate Bo-style but did not last ten minutes, though in that time I had already explained my journey, how far I’d traveled, how I first learned of my father’s case, and what it was like to arrive on Bo—how different everything seemed, and how deeply sorry I was if any of my words gave offence in their brevity, as concision was all I was used to back home.

Now we come to the part of the trial for which my father has given clear instructions, and at which I can feel his gaze surreptitiously upon me. The Inquisitor Bo asks me if I think to plead my father’s case in this matter, and after five minutes, when its question is completed and fully translated, I glance at my father and then turn to the incessantly murmuring room.

I say to them: “My father has caused the death of a Bo. Of this there can be no doubt. You know it and now I know it too. Therefore I do not come to draw out a game of the courts, of misdirection and passive deceit as it is played on my world, but to serve in another role, an honest role, secondary to my father’s testimony, which I hope you will take into consideration before verdict is passed.” I bite my lip before the last: “To that end, I stand before you, Nia Palino: Character witness in my father’s defense.”

The conversation in my father’s laboratory two wake and rest cycles prior was not so remarkable in form, the whole of it oversimplified by my shock at his last words, as in function, and thrust. After my father’s self-congratulatory answer regarding the dead Bo there was really only one thing I could think to say, so I said it:

“What the hell have you done?”

“Easy,” my father said, holding out his hands. “It was consensual. The Bo agreed. We followed every precaution. It’s just that, this time, it failed.”

“This time! What do you think you were doing, putting its life at risk even once like that?”

“‘Like that.’“ My father’s mouth twitched in annoyance. “You don’t even know what that is.”

“I know a Bo is dead because of it. I know it could cost you your life, too. What else do I need to know? What the hell were you doing that was so important you’d risk everything—even your own damned life—to see it through?”

A glint returned to my father’s eyes, and he smiled. “What do you think?” he said. “Go on. Try me.”

I set my teeth against the smugness in his voice, the goading. “You and your goddamn science,” I said. But this seemed only to feed into his pleasure, his aggravating tone.

“Exactly. So you’ll be my character witness, then?”

“Character witness! Now that’s a laugh. I don’t even know you. At all. How could you possibly...?” I was too angry to finish my sentence, and stalked back to the body instead. Though considerably decayed, there were strange features upon the remains that stood out—clear differences between this Bo and the Bo to my right, still guarding the door. If I’d been any more level-headed I might have paused long enough then and there to question my father about each incongruent detail—but of course, I was not. How could I have been?

“Right again,” my father said, not even remotely giving me pause to cool down. “And why don’t you know me? What did I choose over you, and your mother?”

I could hear my own heartbeat in my ears, my skin hot to the touch. “Goddamn you, dad,” I said.

If my words deflated his humor then, they did not also strip him of his relief, the sense of it clear in both voice and expression when I faced him again. “God? Yes,” he said softly, meeting my sudden, asserted gaze. “But with your help, Nia, at least not the Bo.”

I am a good speaker, even under unusual circumstances. Even when obliged to be more bombastic than even the most pompous human windbag I know (which, in my profession, is always saying a lot). And so I tell the assembly of Bo that my father’s scientific ideals are so important to him that he even abandoned his family in their pursuit over thirty years ago, knowing full well that humans cannot regress, and thus that such opportunities for kinship, once forsaken, almost never emerge again. Considering the ignorance of my audience, the Bo’s absence of preferential family bonding from which to draw comparison for this loss, I then explain what it means to be a father, and a husband, and also a daughter or a wife lacking the desired presence of one of the former two.

I close by offering up a variation of the words my father gave at yesterday’s first assembly of Bo: my conviction that the Bo’s death happened in the name of science, as a consensual act to that end alone, and that if any among the Bo in attendance grieved the loss of their companion, rest assured they could not even begin to approach the grief my father had felt at the time of its passing and every moment since, having sacrificed so much of himself, his mortality, and all claims to happiness therein to those same scientific ideals, only to see his greatest work destroyed in the sunset of his life. (I have to backtrack here alone, to explain the term “sunset,” and then to emphasize how the term’s very strangeness among the Bo only furthers my point about the sanctity of life to a human being.)

The verdict comes back in four days, taking another full day to be delivered, during which time I fall asleep regularly in the courtroom, while my Bo ducks out on occasion to provide us with food and drink. Twice I linger by the waste receptacles, nauseated by the poorness of my sleep, stalling my return to that ceaseless chatter of spectator Bo as long as I can, clamping my hands to my ears in an effort to recall the sound of pure silence: A fairy tale I hold deep in my heart. I have my white noise buds on their highest settings by the end of it all, and still the Bo-speak trickles through, my ears damnably attuned by then to the chorus of them against all odds, all internal appeals for sanity, and peace.

Finally, the summation arrives: guilty, but pardoned. I close my eyes and sink in my seat. My father is silent, unmoving beside me. I fall asleep again, the whole of my body tingling and drained, and when I wake anew he is gone: The gathering space, empty, save for one Bo with a dark cast over its left eye, waiting patiently off to one side.

“Can I go home now?” I hear the words come out in a croak and think only, to hell with convention and prudence: Let the Bo’s anger pour out. But to my great surprise, the Bo hesitates, parting its long, thin mouth in turn, and with clear effort musters a mere three words in response:

“It is done.”

It is not, of course, done. Captain Sedgwick greets me grimly when my shuttle docks in the dark cavern of his ship. He knows nothing of my father’s verdict save the language of my body, and my body is tired and defeated. We speak scarcely at all before the inevitable unraveling of tensions between us, my blissfully dry berth turned doubly warm-blooded for a spell. Only after, in the darkness, which I find at last I am learning to bear, do I allow myself to think through all of my lingering doubts.

That my father was experimenting with regression was apparent, but so too, it seemed to me, were the aims of his work. Perhaps the Bo at large could not see what I had seen—the discordant number of digits on the dead Bo’s shriveled body, the unusual nature of its legs, its head, and its chest. But my father had also said the Bo sought out companion songs when regressing. Could the Bo have missed that, too? Had none of them wondered who had been this Bo’s singer as it regrew?

In the long, dark night that followed the trial, my thoughts had grown wilder still: Perhaps saying the names did not sustain the universe, but what if the ritual of it could sustain even one creature, one Bo at a time? And if those songs changed—if the singer changed—what of the Bo in regression? Could it take on other forms through the right song alone? These might all have been the idle, fool thoughts of a non-scientist, an outsider—easily pondered, that is, and just as easily let go—if it hadn’t been for the last conversation I had on Bo.

I knew it would also be the last time I saw my father, that conversation in the last wake cycle before the shuttle arrived to take me home. My father was back in the laboratory by then, dusting the rank and file of his reclaimed research shelves, when I entered for one last look around. The dead Bo, I quickly noted, was now gone.

“I’ve buried it,” my father said. “In case you’re wondering. The Bo don’t care, don’t mind what happens to the flesh.”

“Do you mean that?” I said. “It?”

My father paused in his cleaning to look at me. “What else would I mean?”

My heart was pounding at his scrutiny, and I knew then that the anger I felt for him, the coarse utilitarianism of his first and only attempt to contact me—to use me as a tool of his own, meticulous construction and then cast aside again—had to be coloring my view of things. No human could be so cruel, I told myself—so cold. Everyone, I had almost convinced myself, had a soft spot somewhere. Even my Bo had been kindly, in its way, by the end.

“Her,” I said at last. “That’s what you were doing, wasn’t it? Turning the Bo into something else, something not just for science, but for you. Thirty years alone out here. Thirty years—”

“I was not alone.” The terseness in my father’s voice sings out my only victory—meager, and for me already fraught with remorse. I do not say the words that follow in my head: But now you are, aren’t you?

Some losses are caverns. His, I realize at long last, are active mines.

Our breath has fogged up the tiny porthole in my L-ship berth, blotting out the farthest stars, and home. Captain Sedgwick sits on the edge of the bunk, finding his boots, hitching up his uniform to his hips but no further, not yet. I rest my hand on the small of his browned and hairy back, studying my fingers in a glimmer of starlight, as just days ago I had studied the dead Bo’s—all five digits not quite squid-like, but still strong enough, pliant enough, to hold something fierce in its grip and never let go.

Margaret Clark is an emerging Canadian writer with her toes in many literary waters. Alongside this first publication for science fiction, she’s been published for poetry in RATTLE, Pedestal Magazine, Ryga, and ditch, while a novelette is forthcoming at Vagabondage Press. Her first play was given a reading at Canada’s Magnetic North Theatre Festival, and among her current commissioned projects is a feature length film. Having devoured wide tracts of science fiction throughout her childhood, returning to the form as a mature writer feels a lot like coming home.

Author Spotlight: Margaret Clark
Erin Stocks

Will you tell us about what inspired the Bo?

Twitter did, actually. I’m part of the new media generation, but more fascinated by the conversations around such advances than the advances themselves. Ever since the rise of search engines we’ve been inundated by analysis arguing that easier access to (and distribution of) information might negatively impact the way we think and act. I wanted to approach this range of theories from the other side of the spectrum, so I envisioned a species that had no evolutionary imperative towards competitive behaviors, and as such thrived on constant, snail’s-pace communication routines that similarly kept all members of any given community bonded at all times.

Given Nia’s being raised by her mother with certain perceptions about the Bo, not to mention her father, why do you think she decides to make the trip to the alien world?

The quest to reconnect with an absent parent is a common one, though often blocked by overt discouragement or anxiety on the part of other guardians. In this case, Nia’s mother didn’t speak to Nia at all about her father after the initial conversation, so there was no explicit disincentive when the opportunity arose to learn more about this man. Furthermore, the way this particular opportunity arose allowed Nia to believe she was in charge of her father’s fate. This perceived inversion of the helplessness Nia surely felt as a child, stripped of all say in her father’s permanent absence, couldn’t help but make the journey to meet him all the easier.

The Bo’s ability to regress is fascinating from many perspectives. Will you tell us about how that process came about?

I’m not a fan of writing real creatures into stories just because they’re “cool,” but when I conceptualized the Bo, I soon realized turritopsis nutricula, an honest-to-heck species of jellyfish that can revert to its polyp stage even after sexual maturity, had to be my guiding light.

As a species with minimal opportunities for geographical isolation, and few evolutionary niches to fill even within its available territory, the Bo would have found little adaptive advantage in rigid taxonomic forms. By taking the interesting case of the “immortal jellyfish” to even wilder extremes on the Bo’s home planet, I was able to flesh out a species with a biological make-up that would best drive the social behaviors I most wanted to explore.

Nia’s father explains that despite their “wealth of intermediate features,” the Bo don’t evolve much, but typically regress, which is logical given the nature of their extreme planet. Do you think it also has something to do with the fact that the Bo aren’t interested in the rest of the galaxy, and haven’t experienced any other possible evolutionary examples? Has keeping to themselves helped to retain the purity of their culture?

It’s hard to answer this without saying too much about a fundamental part of the story’s ending. However, even without touching on the implications of the research carried out by Nia’s father, I’m hesitant to mix the colloquial term “evolution” with the biological term. When we speak of evolution in a cultural sense, the word carries a lot of misleading implications, not least of which being the notion of consciously-manufactured species outcomes.

In contrast, biological evolutionary processes drive themselves, whether we’re cognizant of them or not, so to suggest that exposure to other evolutionary examples might lead the Bo to pursue other genetic paths might be akin to suggesting that the aforementioned jellyfish, if granted comparable sentience, might look upon all the creatures in the world that can’t also revert to their polyp stages, then change their genetic make-up to fit the status quo.

Suffice it to say, the Bo’s cultural disinterest in the rest of the galaxy is an understandable extension of their species’ biological development, but even if they were to engage with the cultures of other, more competitively-driven species, the Bo’s biological survival would still depend by and large upon their ability to monopolize an environmental niche no one else could quite as handily fill—which their current genetic code already gives them ample means to do on the planet of Bo.

Her father seems genuinely grieved over the death of the Bo at his hands, and doesn’t hesitate to tell Nia to use his own flaws to support him in the trial. Do you think he really cared for that particular Bo? What made that relationship different than his love for Nia and her mother, thirty years earlier?

The great trick of first-person writing is that the narrator’s own hopes and hurts seep into every line of the story, allowing readers to similarly mistake one person’s hope for another’s reality. My interpretation of the father is very different: What might be taken for genuine grief is just as easily a fear of punishment, an intimate knowledge of ideal psychological gambits for negotiations with the Bo, and a willingness to sacrifice anyone and anything to his work and current needs.

This isn’t to suggest that Nia’s father is, in fact, a heartless man, but to emphasize that whether he is or isn’t matters less than how Nia projects her own hopes and hurts over the reality of the man, and his crisis, which in turn involves much that will always lie outside her full comprehension.

Nia discovers, and clings to, a new anger at her father in this story as she tries to understand what’s happened. By the end of the story, I think she finds more in common with her father than she might have believed. Do you think that impacted her choices with Captain Sedgwick?

I’m hesitant to suggest that a grown woman’s pursuit of casual sex is driven, to put it glibly, by “daddy issues.” Rather, I see Nia’s type of engagement with the Captain as common practice in any routinely space-faring human society, though certainly Nia’s desire for intimacy of some caliber would be heightened after an utterly estranging first encounter with a long-absent parent. The very fact that Nia calculates the possibility of such an encounter before even meeting her father, however, hopefully dispels the sense that later revelations about her father, and herself, expressly drove her to such ends.

Lightspeed assistant editor Erin Stocks is a writer and musician transplanted from Chicago to Oklahoma City. Her fiction can be found in the Couer de Lion anthology Anywhere but Earth (upcoming), Flash Fiction Online, the Hadley Rille anthology Destination: Future, and the Absent Willow Review. When she’s not writing, she’s reading for her SFF writing group, and can be found on erinstocks.blogspot.com.

You Never Get a Seventh Chance to Make a First Impression: An Awkward History of Our Space Transmissions
Genevieve Valentine

Ever since humanity has been able to launch projectiles into space to take nosey pictures that make us all feel insignificant, a major priority has been to somehow communicate with any alien life forms that might come across this space detritus and wonder who shot a space probe right into their upper atmosphere. Using physics, mathematics, art, and even Earth’s greatest weapon (Carl Sagan), our species has painstakingly crafted the first tentative social overtures towards the magnificent extraterrestrials we hope are listening.

Completely disrespecting all those hours of work, in this piece we run down a list of some of most notable spacebound icebreakers, and guess what a curious alien species might make of them.

1. The Morse Message (1962)

This audio salute, one of the first radio signals intended specifically for interstellar intelligence, was meant as a test of the new Evpatoria Planetary Radar (EPR). In November 1962, the Unique Korenberg Telescope Array transmitted the greeting towards Venus, using simple Morse Code. Given the location of Venus in November 1962, the message is even now winging its way towards Libra.

Message Content: The words “MIR,” “LENIN,” and “SSSR,” in Morse.

Message Assumptions: The Morse message assumes that aliens will be listening for a message that brief. Also, given the specificity, we’ll assume the content was symbolic; otherwise you’re asking for quite a bit of Earth current-events context.

Likely Impression: You know when a kid draws all over the wall with crayon, and you’d be really annoyed except you notice that the kid’s managed to spell his name somehow, so you end up mildly surprised, and after you send them to their room you talk about whether it’s already time for preschool? Like that.

2. The Pioneer Plaques (1972, 1973)

Mounted to Pioneer spacecraft before they made their merry way into the inhospitable reaches of space outside the solar system, the Pioneer Plaque was the first—but not the last!—interstellar communiqué in which Carl Sagan had a say. Attached to both Pioneers and positioned to minimize the corrosive effects of solar dust, the plaque might well be the first thing an alien culture knows about us. (Well, the plaque, and also the fact that we hurl things into space and aim them right at you.)

Message Content: The Pioneer plaque forewent an auditory component and instead tried to include the maximum information about Pioneer’s source; thanks to Sagan, Linda Salzman Sagan, and Franke Drake, every inch is packed with data: A diagram of a hydrogen atom; a pulsar map with the sun at the center, showing the relative distances of 14 pulsars and the binary code of their periods, which can help date the launch era; figures of a nude man and woman set in front of a to scale silhouette of Pioneer; a sketch of our solar system with a long arrow indicating the Earth as the planet that launched the little guy.

Message Assumptions: Alien life form can see in two dimensions, has a concept of arrows.

Likely Impression: Earth is filled with humanoids who haven’t had the brains to develop clothes, possibly because they’re too busy fighting off the absolutely enormous serpent reaching out from the third planet and launching space probes willy-nilly.

3. The Arecebo Message (1974)

Taking what they had learned from the Pioneer message and fine-tuning it, Frank Drake and Carl Sagan built a richer, stronger, mathier greeting card on the second go-round. The message was beamed out into space only once in 1974, aimed at the M13 star cluster, and consisted of 1679 digits (binary, naturally) that, when collected, formed a picture that gave a very Pong picture of our little blue planet.

Message Content: Quite a bit. The Arecebo message managed to pack in the numbers one through ten, the atomic numbers of the elements found in DNA, the formula for DNA, a DNA helix, the figure of a human with a binary scale, a diagram of the solar system, and a sketch of Arecebo.

Message Assumptions: Using binary signals and physical constants like atomic weight, this message attempts to minimize communication barriers. Biggest assumption: The aliens aren’t Humanities majors and would actually recognize the atomic weight of nucleotides.

Likely Impression: That logic puzzle that future alien middle-schoolers have to crack during part of their Making Contact teaching unit about the Pong Planet.

4. Voyager Golden Records (1977)

Among the most poetic of humanity’s letters to the universe, the Golden Record sent into space with each of the Voyager probes is more a symbol than a pointed communiqué—the spacecraft are so small that when they stop emitting radiation, they’ll be almost impossible to detect in the vastness of space, especially as it’s still a good 40,000 years away from the nearest star (AC+79 3888).

Message Content: The Sagan went to the drawing board for a third time to develop a richer tapestry of the Earth experience. The Golden Record contains 116 images, from the old pulsar-map and hydrogen-atom standbys to images of animals, plants and architecture; it also contains a multitude of sounds, from the sound of surf and birdsongs to musical compositions from around the world, and greetings in fifty-five languages. Also included is a cover that gives a quick pictorial explanation of how to play the record and read the images, and a cartridge, in case the aliens have already moved on to 8-track.

Message Assumptions: That aliens will ever find it.

Likely Impression: Earthlings are just a bunch of hopeful, lovin’ fools

5. Cosmic Call (1999, 2003)

The Cosmic Call, broadcast from Evpatoria in 1999 and 2003 and sent to nine different stars, is perhaps our most serious attempt at a spacegoing message. With several messages and repetitions per broadcast, and the widest directional net, this might well be the message most likely to get us noticed.

Message Contents: The 1999 Cosmic Call contains the Dutil-Dumas Message (the “Interstellar Rosetta stone,” built on a series of symbols), the Brastaad Message (which uses the mathematical language of the Dutil-Dumas Message to give more information on message sponsor Team Encounter), the Arecebo Message, and a staff message from Team Encounter. The 2003 edition substituted a Bilingual Image Glossary for the Braastad Message, showing concepts such as Family.

Message Assumptions: With a message this diverse, even if the specifics don’t get through, aliens will definitely understand there’s a civilization longing to make contact.

Likely Impression: That kid in the mall that sings two bars of a song over and over as loudly as it can, waiting for attention. Then it does the same thing in another language.

6. Teen Age Message (2001)

The children are our future—literally, in this case, as a group of Russian teens built their own message to space and beamed it to six stars in 2001. Along the same lines as the Cosmic Calls that preceded and followed it, the Teen Age Message also contained some innovative new twists.

Message Contents: The message contains data in three forms—radio signals, analog data (music), and binary digital information: The radio signals attempt to imitate transmission from the Sun itself; the “First Theremin Concert for Aliens” includes Russian folk songs and the finale of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, and the binary digital follow-up gives an Arecebo-esque rundown of basic mathematic and physical constants.

Message Assumptions: The uniquely-teen pressure of making the perfect mix tape.

Likely Impression: A return binary message 100 years from now, asking for an interstellar envoy to teach them how to play the theremin.

The chances of an alien civilization having the means, motive, and opportunity to catch any of these messages are slim; certainly it’s not likely that humanity will last long enough to catch any return messages showing the atomic weight of silver and bizarre, monstrous forms that we realize only too late were actually pictures of aliens galloping on the back of the enormous monsters they ride into battle with all who contact them. Even if the aliens are friendly, perhaps it’s just as well their chances of finding us are slim; all these messages, no matter their medium of context, are the equivalent of a first-date lie that paints humanity as a united, noble, peaceful civilization that cherishes their planet and wishes only to share their knowledge with others. Aliens that actually make it to our planet will have a long, awkward standoff while they look back and forth from the Voyager record to the planet, wondering what happened to the 24/7 beachside music festival they were promised.

On the other hand, if there’s a chance that all they’re looking for is theremin lessons, we might be okay! Related: everyone should start practicing the theremin immediately.

Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: a Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, is forthcoming from Prime Books in 2011. Her short fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from: Running with the Pack, The Living Dead 2, The Way of the Wizard, Teeth, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, and more. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her genevievevalentine.com.

Gossamer
Stephen Baxter

The flitter bucked.

Lvov looked up from her data desk, startled. Beyond the flitter’s translucent hull, the wormhole was flooded with sheets of blue-white light which raced towards and past the flitter, giving Lvov the impression of huge, uncontrolled speed.

“We’ve got a problem,” Cobh said. The pilot bent over her own data desk, a frown creasing her thin face.

Lvov had been listening to her data desk’s synthesized murmur on temperature inversion layers in nitrogen atmospheres; now she tapped the desk to shut it off. The flitter was a transparent tube, deceptively warm and comfortable. Impossibly fragile. Astronauts have problems in space, she thought. But not me. I’m no hero; I’m only a researcher. Lvov was twenty-eight years old; she had no plans to die—and certainly not during a routine four-hour hop through a Poole wormhole that had been human-rated for eighty years.

She clung to her desk, her knuckles whitening, wondering if she ought to feel scared.

Cobh sighed and pushed her data desk away; it floated before her. “Close up your suit and buckle up.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Our speed through the wormhole has increased.” Cobh pulled her own restraint harness around her. “We’ll reach the terminus in another minute—”

“What? But we should have been travelling for another half-hour.”

Cobh looked irritated. “I know that. I think the Interface has become unstable. The wormhole is buckling.”

“What does that mean? Are we in danger?”

Cobh checked the integrity of Lvov’s pressure suit, then pulled her data desk to her. Cobh was a Caucasian, strong-faced, a native of Mars, perhaps fifty years old. “Well, we can’t turn back. One way or the other it’ll be over in a few more seconds—hold tight—”

Now Lvov could see the Interface itself, the terminus of the wormhole: The Interface was a blue-white tetrahedron, an angular cage that exploded at her from infinity.

Glowing struts swept over the flitter.

The craft hurtled out of the collapsing wormhole. Light founted around the fleeing craft, as stressed spacetime yielded in a gush of heavy particles.

Lvov glimpsed stars, wheeling.

Cobh dragged the flitter sideways, away from the energy fount—

There was a lurch, a discontinuity in the scene beyond the hull. Suddenly a planet loomed before them.

“Lethe,” Cobh said. “Where did that come from? I’ll have to take her down—we’re too close—”

Lvov saw a flat, complex landscape, grey-crimson in the light of a swollen moon. The scene was dimly lit, and it rocked wildly as the flitter tumbled. And, stretching between world and moon, she saw—

No. It was impossible.

The vision was gone, receded into darkness.

“Here it comes,” Cobh yelled.

Foam erupted, filling the flitter. The foam pushed into Lvov’s ears, mouth and eyes; she was blinded, but she found she could breathe.

She heard a collision, a grinding that lasted seconds, and she imagined the flitter ploughing its way into the surface of the planet. She felt a hard lurch, a rebound.

The flitter came to rest.

A synthesized voice emitted blurred safety instructions. There was a ticking as the hull cooled.

In the sudden stillness, still blinded by foam, Lvov tried to recapture what she had seen. Spider-web. It was a web, stretching from the planet to its moon.

“Welcome to Pluto.” Cobh’s voice was breathless, ironic.

Lvov stood on the surface of Pluto.

The suit’s insulation was good, but enough heat leaked to send nitrogen clouds hissing around her footsteps, and where she walked she burned craters in the ice. Gravity was only a few per cent of gee, and Lvov, Earth-born, felt as if she might blow away.

There were clouds above her, wispy cirrus: aerosol clusters suspended in an atmosphere of nitrogen and methane. The clouds occluded bone-white stars. From here, Sol and the moon, Charon, were hidden by the planet’s bulk, and it was dark, dark on dark, the damaged landscape visible only as a sketch in starlight.

The flitter had dug a trench a mile long and fifty yards deep in this world’s antique surface, so Lvov was at the bottom of a valley walled by nitrogen ice. Cobh was hauling equipment out of the crumpled-up wreck of the flitter: scooters, data desks, life-support boxes, Lvov’s equipment. Most of the stuff had been robust enough to survive the impact, Lvov saw, but not her own equipment.

Maybe a geologist could have crawled around with nothing more than a hammer and a set of sample bags. But Lvov was an atmospheric scientist. What was she going to achieve here without her equipment?

Her fear was fading now, to be replaced by irritation, impatience. She was five light hours from Sol; already she was missing the online nets. She kicked at the ice. She was stuck here; she couldn’t talk to anyone, and there wasn’t even the processing power to generate a Virtual environment.

Cobh finished wrestling with the wreckage. She was breathing hard. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of this ditch and take a look around.” She showed Lvov how to work a scooter. It was a simple platform, its inert-gas jets controlled by twists of raised handles.

Side by side, Cobh and Lvov rose out of the crash scar.

Pluto ice was a rich crimson laced with organic purple. Lvov made out patterns, dimly, on the surface of the ice; they were like bas-relief, discs the size of dinner plates, with the intricate complexity of snowflakes.

Lvov landed clumsily on the rim of the crash scar, the scooter’s blunt prow crunching into surface ice, and she was grateful for the low gravity. The weight and heat of the scooters quickly obliterated the ice patterns.

“We’ve come down near the equator,” Cobh said. “The albedo is higher at the south pole: a cap of methane ice there, I’m told.”

“Yes.”

Cobh pointed to a bright blue spark, high in the sky. “That’s the wormhole Interface, where we emerged: Fifty thousand miles away.”

Lvov squinted at constellations unchanged from those she’d grown up with on Earth. “Are we stranded?”

Cobh said, with reasonable patience, “For the time being. The flitter is wrecked, and the wormhole has collapsed; we’re going to have to go back to Jupiter the long way round.”

Three billion miles ... “Ten hours ago I was asleep in a hotel room on Io. And now this. What a mess.”

Cobh laughed. “I’ve already sent off messages to the inner System. They’ll be received in about five hours. A one-way GUTship will be sent to retrieve us. It will refuel here, with Charon ice—”

“How long?”

“It depends on the readiness of a ship. Say ten days to prepare, then a ten-day flight out here—”

“Twenty days?”

“We’re in no danger. We’ve supplies for a month. Although we’re going to have to live in these suits.”

“Lethe. This trip was supposed to last seventy-two hours.”

“Well,” Cobh said testily, “you’ll have to call and cancel your appointments, won’t you? All we have to do is wait here; we’re not going to be comfortable, but we’re safe enough.”

“Do you know what happened to the wormhole?”

Cobh shrugged. She stared up at the distant blue spark. “As far as I know nothing like this has happened before. I think the Interface itself became unstable, and that fed back into the throat ... But I don’t know how we fell to Pluto so quickly. That doesn’t make sense.”

“How so?”

“Our trajectory was spacelike. Superluminal.” She glanced at Lvov obliquely, as if embarrassed. “For a moment there, we appeared to be travelling faster than light.”

“Through normal space? That’s impossible.”

“Of course it is.” Cobh reached up to scratch her cheek, but her gloved fingers rattled against her faceplate. “I think I’ll go up to the Interface and take a look around there.”

Cobh showed Lvov how to access the life support boxes. Then she strapped her data desk to her back, climbed aboard her scooter, and lifted off the planet’s surface, heading for the Interface. Lvov watched her dwindle.

Lvov’s isolation closed in. She was alone, the only human on the surface of Pluto.

A reply from the inner System came within twelve hours of the crash. A GUTship was being sent from Jupiter. It would take thirteen days to refit the ship, followed by an eight-day flight to Pluto, then more delay for taking on fresh reaction mass at Charon. Lvov chafed at the timescale, restless.

There was other mail: Concerned notes from Lvov’s family, a testy demand for updates from her research supervisor, and for Cobh, orders from her employer to mark as much of the flitter wreck as she could for salvage and analysis. Cobh’s ship was a commercial wormhole transit vessel, hired by Oxford—Lvov’s university—for this trip. Now, it seemed, a complex battle over liability would be joined between Oxford, Cobh’s firm, and the insurance companies.

Lvov, five light-hours from home, found it difficult to respond to the mail asynchronously. She felt as if she had been cut out of the online mind of humanity. In the end she drafted replies to her family, and deleted the rest of the messages.

She checked her research equipment again, but it really was unusable. She tried to sleep. The suit was uncomfortable, claustrophobic. She was restless, bored, a little scared.

She began a systematic survey of the surface, taking her scooter on widening spiral sweeps around the crash scar.

The landscape was surprisingly complex, a starlit sculpture of feathery ridges and fine ravines. She kept a few hundred feet above the surface; whenever she flew too low her heat evoked billowing vapour from fragile nitrogen ice, obliterating ancient features, and she experienced obscure guilt.

She found more of the snowflake-like features, generally in little clusters of eight or ten.

Pluto, like its moon-twin Charon, was a ball of rock clad by thick mantles of water ice and nitrogen ice and laced with methane, ammonia and organic compounds. It was like a big, stable comet nucleus; it barely deserved the status of “planet.” There were moons bigger than Pluto.

There had been only a handful of visitors in the eighty years since the building of the Poole wormhole. None of them had troubled to walk the surfaces of Pluto or Charon. The wormhole, Lvov realised, hadn’t been built as a commercial proposition, but as a sort of stunt: the link which connected, at last, all of the System’s planets to the rapid-transit hub at Jupiter.

She tired of her plodding survey. She made sure she could locate the crash scar, lifted the scooter to a mile above the surface, and flew towards the south polar cap.

Cobh called from the Interface. “I think I’m figuring out what happened here—that superluminal effect I talked about. Lvov, have you heard of an Alcubierre wave?” She dumped images to Lvov’s desk—portraits of the wormhole Interface, various graphics.

“No.” Lvov ignored the input and concentrated on flying the scooter. “Cobh, why should a wormhole become unstable? Hundreds of wormhole rapid transits are made every day, all across the System.”

“A wormhole is a flaw in space. It’s inherently unstable anyway. The throat and mouths are kept open by active feedback loops involving threads of exotic matter. That’s matter with a negative energy density, a sort of antigravity which—”

“But this wormhole went wrong.”

“Maybe the tuning wasn’t perfect. The presence of the flitter’s mass in the throat was enough to send the wormhole over the edge. If the wormhole had been more heavily used, the instability might have been detected earlier, and fixed ...”

Over the grey-white pole, Lvov flew through banks of aerosol mist; Cobh’s voice whispered to her, remote, without meaning.

Sunrise on Pluto:

Sol was a point of light, low on Lvov’s unfolding horizon, wreathed in the complex strata of a cirrus cloud. The Sun was a thousand times fainter than from Earth, but brighter than any planet in Earth’s sky.

The inner System was a puddle of light around Sol, an oblique disc small enough for Lvov to cover with the palm of her hand. It was a disc that contained almost all of man’s hundreds of billions. Sol brought no heat to her raised hand, but she saw faint shadows, cast by the sun on her faceplate.

The nitrogen atmosphere was dynamic. At perihelion—the closest approach to Sol, which Pluto was nearing—the air expanded, to three planetary diameters. Methane and other volatiles joined the thickening air, sublimating from the planet’s surface. Then, when Pluto turned away from Sol and sailed into its two-hundred-year winter, the air snowed down.

Lvov wished she had her atmospheric-analysis equipment now; she felt its lack like an ache.

She passed over spectacular features: Buie Crater, Tombaugh Plateau, the Lowell Range. She recorded them all, walked on them.

After a while her world, of Earth and information and work, seemed remote, a glittering abstraction. Pluto was like a complex, blind fish, drifting around its two-century orbit, gradually interfacing with her. Changing her, she suspected.

Ten hours after leaving the crash scar, Lvov arrived at the sub-Charon point, called Christy. She kept the scooter hovering, puffs of gas holding her against Pluto’s gentle gravity.

Sol was half-way up the sky, a diamond of light. Charon hung directly over Lvov’s head, a misty blue disc, six times the size of Luna as seen from Earth. Half the moon’s lit hemisphere was turned away from Lvov, towards Sol.

Like Luna, Charon was tidally locked to its parent, and kept the same face to Pluto as it orbited. But, unlike Earth, Pluto was also locked to its twin. Every six days the worlds turned about each other, facing each other constantly, like two waltzers. Pluto-Charon was the only significant system in which both partners were tidally locked.

Chiron’s surface looked pocked. Lvov had her faceplate enhance the image. Many of the gouges were deep and quite regular.

She remarked on this to Cobh, at the Interface.

“The Poole people mostly used Charon material for the building of the wormhole,” Cobh said. “Charon is just rock and water ice. It’s easier to get to water ice, in particular. Charon doesn’t have the inconvenience of an atmosphere, or an overlay of nitrogen ice over the water. And the gravity’s shallower.”

The wormhole builders had flown out here in a huge, unreliable GUTship. They had lifted ice and rock off Charon, and used it to construct tetrahedra of exotic matter. The tetrahedra had served as Interfaces, the termini of a wormhole. One Interface had been left in orbit around Pluto, and the other had been hauled laboriously back to Jupiter by the GUTship, itself replenished with Charon-ice reaction mass.

By such crude means, Michael Poole and his people had opened up the Solar System.

“They made Lethe’s own mess of Charon,” Lvov said.

She could almost see Cobh’s characteristic shrug. So what?

Pluto’s surface was geologically complex, here at this point of maximal tidal stress. She flew over ravines and ridges; in places, it looked as if the land had been smashed up with an immense hammer, cracked and fractured. She imagined there was a greater mix, here, of interior material with the surface ice.

In many places she saw gatherings of the peculiar snowflakes she had noticed before. Perhaps they were some form of frosting effect, she wondered. She descended, thinking vaguely of collecting samples.

She killed the scooter’s jets some yards above the surface, and let the little craft fall under Pluto’s gentle gravity. She hit the ice with a soft collision, but without heat-damaging the surface features much beyond a few feet.

She stepped off the scooter. The ice crunched, and she felt layers compress under her, but the fractured surface supported her weight. She looked up towards Charon. The crimson moon was immense, round, heavy.

She caught a glimmer of light, an arc, directly above her.

It was gone immediately. She closed her eyes and tried to recapture it. A line, slowly curving, like a thread. A web. Suspended between Pluto and Charon.

She looked again, with her faceplate set to optimal enhancement. She couldn’t recapture the vision.

She didn’t say anything to Cobh.

“I was right, by the way,” Cobh was saying.

“What?” Lvov tried to focus.

“The wormhole instability, when we crashed. It did cause an Alcubierre wave.”

“What’s an Alcubierre wave?”

“The Interface’s negative energy region expanded from the tetrahedron, just for a moment. The negative energy distorted a chunk of spacetime. The chunk containing the flitter, and us.”

On one side of the flitter, Cobh said, spacetime had contracted. Like a model black hole. On the other side, it expanded—like a re-run of the Big Bang, the expansion at the beginning of the Universe.

“An Alcubierre wave is a front in spacetime. The Interface—with us embedded inside—was carried along. We were pushed away from the expanding region, and towards the contraction.”

“Like a surfer, on a wave.”

“Right.” Cobh sounded excited. “The effect’s been known to theory, almost since the formulation of relativity. But I don’t think anyone’s observed it before.”

“How lucky for us,” Lvov said drily. “You said we travelled faster than light. But that’s impossible.”

“You can’t move faster than light within spacetime. Wormholes are one way of getting around this; in a wormhole you are passing through a branch in spacetime. The Alcubierre effect is another way. The superluminal velocity comes from the distortion of space itself; we were carried along within distorting space.

“So we weren’t breaking lightspeed within our raft of spacetime. But that spacetime itself was distorting at more than lightspeed.”

“It sounds like cheating.”

“So sue me. Or look up the math.”

“Couldn’t we use your Alcubierre effect to drive starships?”

“No. The instabilities and the energy drain are forbidding.”

One of the snowflake patterns lay mostly undamaged, within Lvov’s reach. She crouched and peered at it. The flake was perhaps a foot across. Internal structure was visible within the clear ice as layers of tubes and compartments; it was highly symmetrical, and very complex. She said to Cobh, “This is an impressive crystallisation effect. If that’s what it is.” Gingerly she reached out with thumb and forefinger, and snapped a short tube off the rim of the flake. She laid the sample on her desk. After a few seconds the analysis presented. “It’s mostly water ice, with some contaminants,” she told Cobh. “But in a novel molecular form. Denser than normal ice, a kind of glass. Water would freeze like this under high pressures—several thousand atmospheres.”

“Perhaps it’s material from the interior, brought out by the chthonic mixing in that region.”

“Perhaps.” Lvov felt more confident now; she was intrigued. “Cobh, there’s a larger specimen a few feet further away.”

“Take it easy, Lvov.”

She stepped forward. “I’ll be fine. I—”

The surface shattered.

Lvov’s left foot dropped forward, into a shallow hole; something crackled under the sole of her boot. Threads of ice crystals, oddly woven together, spun up and tracked precise parabolae around her leg.

The fall seemed to take an age; the ice tipped up towards her like an opening door. She put her hands out. She couldn’t stop the fall, but she was able to cushion herself, and she kept her faceplate away from the ice. She finished up on her backside; she felt the chill of Pluto ice through the suit material over her buttocks and calves.

“...Lvov? Are you okay?”

She was panting, she found. “I’m fine.”

“You were screaming.”

“Was I? I’m sorry. I fell.”

“You fell? How?”

“There was a hole, in the ice.” She massaged her left ankle; it didn’t seem to be hurt. “It was covered up.”

“Show me.”

She got to her feet, stepped gingerly back to the open hole, and held up her data desk. The hole was only a few inches deep. “It was covered by a sort of lid, I think.”

“Move the desk closer to the hole.” Light from the desk, controlled by Cobh, played over the shallow pit.

Lvov found a piece of the smashed lid. It was mostly ice, but there was a texture to its undersurface, embedded thread which bound the ice together.

“Lvov,” Cobh said. “Take a look at this.”

Lvov lifted the desk aside and peered into the hole. The walls were quite smooth. At the base there was a cluster of spheres, fist-sized. Lvov counted seven; all but one of the spheres had been smashed by her stumble. She picked up the one intact sphere, and turned it over in her hand. It was pearl-grey, almost translucent. There was something embedded inside, disc-shaped, complex.

Cobh sounded breathless. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“It’s an egg,” Lvov said. She looked around wildly, at the open pit, the egg, the snowflake patterns. Suddenly she saw the meaning of the scene; it was as if a light had shone up from within Pluto, illuminating her. The “snowflakes” represented life, she intuited; they had dug the burrows, laid these eggs, and now their bodies of water glass lay, dormant or dead, on the ancient ice...

“I’m coming down,” Cobh said sternly. “We’re going to have to discuss this. Don’t say anything to the inner System; wait until I get back. This could mean trouble for us, Lvov.”

Lvov placed the egg back in the shattered nest.

She met Cobh at the crash scar. Cobh was shovelling nitrogen and water ice into the life-support modules’ raw material hopper. She hooked up her own and Lvov’s suits to the modules, recharging the suits’ internal systems. Then she began to carve GUTdrive components out of the flitter’s hull. The flitter’s central Grand Unified Theory chamber was compact, no larger than a basketball, and the rest of the drive was similarly scaled. “I bet I could get this working,” Cobh said. “Although it couldn’t take us anywhere.”

Lvov sat on a fragment of the shattered hull. Tentatively, she told Cobh about the web.

Cobh stood with hands on hips, facing Lvov, and Lvov could hear her sucking drink from the nipples in her helmet. “Spiders from Pluto? Give me a break.”

“It’s only an analogy,” Lvov said defensively. “I’m an atmospheric specialist, not a biologist.” She tapped the surface of her desk. “It’s not spider-web. Obviously. But if that substance has anything like the characteristics of true spider silk, it’s not impossible.” She read from her desk. “Spider silk has a breaking strain twice that of steel, but thirty times the elasticity. It’s a type of liquid crystal. It’s used commercially—did you know that?” She fingered the fabric of her suit. “We could be wearing spider silk right now.”

“What about the hole with the lid?”

“There are trapdoor spiders in America. On Earth. I remember, when I was a kid...The spiders make burrows, lined with silk, with hinged lids.”

“Why make burrows on Pluto?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the eggs can last out the winter that way. Maybe the creatures, the flakes, only have active life during the perihelion period, when the atmosphere expands and enriches.” She thought that through. “That fits. That’s why the Poole people didn’t spot anything. The construction team was here close to the last aphelion. Pluto’s year is so long that we’re still only half-way to the next perihelion—”

“So how do they live?” Cobh snapped. “What do they eat?”

“There must be more to the ecosystem than one species,” Lvov conceded. “The flakes—the spiders—need water glass. But there’s little of that on the surface. Maybe there is some biocycle—plants or burrowing animals—which brings ice and glass to the surface, from the interior.”

“That doesn’t make sense. The layer of nitrogen over water ice is too deep.”

“Then where do the flakes get their glass?”

“Don’t ask me,” Cobh said. “It’s your dumb hypothesis. And what about the web? What’s the point of that—if it’s real?”

Lvov ground to a halt. “I don’t know,” she said lamely. Although Pluto/Charon is the only place in the System where you could build a spider-web between worlds.

Cobh toyed with a fitting from the drive. “Have you told anyone about this yet? In the inner System, I mean.”

“No. You said you wanted to talk about that.”

“Right.” Lvov saw Cobh close her eyes; her face was masked by the glimmer of her faceplate. “Listen. Here’s what we say. We’ve seen nothing here. Nothing that couldn’t be explained by crystallisation effects.”

Lvov was baffled. “What are you talking about? What about the eggs? Why would we lie about this? Besides, we have the desks—records.”

“Data desks can be lost, or wiped, or their contents amended.”

Lvov wished she could see Cobh’s face. “Why would we do such a thing?”

“Think it through. Once Earth hears about this, these flake-spiders of yours will be protected. Won’t they?”

“Of course. What’s bad about that?”

“It’s bad for us, Lvov. You’ve seen what a mess the Poole people made of Charon. If this system is inhabited, a fast GUTship won’t be allowed to come for us. It wouldn’t be allowed to refuel here. Not if it meant further damage to the native life forms.”

Lvov shrugged. “So we’d have to wait for a slower ship. A liner; one that won’t need to take on more reaction mass here.”

Cobh laughed at her. “You don’t know much about the economics of GUTship transport, do you? Now that the System is criss-crossed by Poole wormholes, how many liners like that do you think are still running? I’ve already checked the manifests. There are two liners capable of a round trip to Pluto still in service. One is in dry dock; the other is heading for Saturn—”

“On the other side of the System.”

“Right. There’s no way either of those ships could reach us for, I’d say, a year.”

We only have a month’s supplies. A bubble of panic gathered in Lvov’s stomach.

“Do you get it yet?” Cobh said heavily. “We’ll be sacrificed, if there’s a chance that our rescue would damage the new ecology, here.”

“No. It wouldn’t happen like that.”

Cobh shrugged. “There are precedents.”

She was right, Lvov knew. There were precedents, of new forms of life discovered in corners of the system: From Mercury to the remote Kuiper objects. In every case the territory had been ring-fenced, the local conditions preserved, once life—or even a plausible candidate for life—was recognised.

Cobh said, “Pan-genetic diversity. Pan-environmental management. That’s the key to it; the public policy of preserving all the species and habitats of Sol, into the indefinite future. The lives of two humans won’t matter a damn against that.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“That we don’t tell the inner System about the flakes.”

Lvov tried to recapture her mood of a few days before: When Pluto hadn’t mattered to her, when the crash had been just an inconvenience. Now, suddenly, we’re talking about threats to our lives, the destruction of an ecology.

What a dilemma. If I don’t tell of the flakes, their ecology may be destroyed during our rescue. But if I do tell, the GUTship won’t come for me, and I’ll lose my life.

Cobh seemed to be waiting for an answer.

Lvov thought of how Sol light looked over Pluto’s ice fields, at dawn.

She decided to stall. “We’ll say nothing. For now. But I don’t accept either of your options.”

Cobh laughed. “What else is there? The wormhole is destroyed; even this flitter is disabled.”

“We have time. Days, before the GUTship is due to be launched. Let’s search for another solution. A win-win.”

Cobh shrugged. She looked suspicious.

She’s right to be, Lvov thought, exploring her own decision with surprise. I’ve every intention of telling the truth later, of diverting the GUTship, if I have to.

I may give up my life, for this world.

I think.

In the days that followed, Cobh tinkered with the GUTdrive, and flew up to the Interface to gather more data on the Alcubierre phenomenon.

Lvov roamed the surface of Pluto, with her desk set to full record. She came to love the wreaths of cirrus clouds, the huge, misty moon, the slow, oceanic pulse of the centuries-long year.

Everywhere she found the inert bodies of snowflakes, or evidence of their presence: eggs, lidded burrows. She found no other life forms—or, more likely, she told herself, she wasn’t equipped to recognise any others.

She was drawn back to Christy, the sub-Charon point, where the topography was at its most complex and interesting, and where the greatest density of flakes was to be found. It was as if, she thought, the flakes had gathered here, yearning for the huge, inaccessible moon above them. But what could the flakes possibly want of Charon? What did it mean for them?

Lvov encountered Cobh at the crash scar, recharging her suit’s systems from the life support packs. Cobh seemed quiet. She kept her face, hooded by her faceplate, turned from Lvov.

Lvov watched her for a while. “You’re being evasive,” she said eventually. “Something’s changed—something you’re not telling me about.”

Cobh made to turn away, but Lvov grabbed her arm. “I think you’ve found a third option. Haven’t you? You’ve found some other way to resolve this situation, without destroying either us or the flakes.”

Cobh shook off her hand. “Yes. Yes, I think I know a way. But—”

“But what?”

“It’s dangerous, damn it. Maybe unworkable. Lethal.” Cobh’s hands pulled at each other.

She’s scared, Lvov saw. She stepped back from Cobh. Without giving herself time to think about it, she said, “Our deal’s off. I’m going to tell the inner System about the flakes. Right now. So we’re going to have to go with your new idea, dangerous or not.”

Cobh studied her face; Cobh seemed to be weighing up Lvov’s determination, perhaps even her physical strength. Lvov felt as if she were a data desk being downloaded. The moment stretched, and Lvov felt her breath tighten in her chest. Would she be able to defend herself, physically, if it came to that? And—was her own will really so strong?

I have changed, she thought. Pluto has changed me.

At last Cobh looked away. “Send your damn message,” she said.

Before Cobh—or Lvov herself—had a chance to waver, Lvov picked up her desk and sent a message to the inner worlds. She downloaded all the data she had on the flakes: Text, images, analyses, her own observations and hypotheses.

“It’s done,” she said at last.

“And the GUTship?”

“I’m sure they’ll cancel it.” Lvov smiled. “I’m also sure they won’t tell us they’ve done so.”

“So we’re left with no choice,” Cobh said angrily. “Look: I know it’s the right thing to do. To preserve the flakes. I just don’t want to die, that’s all. I hope you’re right, Lvov.”

“You haven’t told me how we’re going to get home.”

Cobh grinned through her faceplate. “Surfing.”

“All right. You’re doing fine. Now let go of the scooter.”

Lvov took a deep breath, and kicked the scooter away with both legs; the little device tumbled away, catching the deep light of Sol, and Lvov rolled in reaction.

Cobh reached out and steadied her. “You can’t fall,” Cobh said. “You’re in orbit. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” Lvov grumbled.

The two of them drifted in space, close to the defunct Poole wormhole Interface. The Interface itself was a tetrahedron of electric blue struts, enclosing darkness, its size overwhelming; Lvov felt as if she was floating beside the carcase of some huge, wrecked building.

Pluto and Charon hovered before her like balloons, their surfaces mottled and complex, their forms visibly distorted from the spherical. Their separation was only fourteen of Pluto’s diameters. The worlds were strikingly different in hue, with Pluto a blood red, Charon ice blue. That’s the difference in surface composition, Lvov thought absently. All that water ice on Charon’s surface.

The panorama was stunningly beautiful. Lvov had a sudden, gut-level intuition of the rightness of the various System authorities’ rigid pan-environment policies.

Cobh had strapped her data desk to her chest; now she checked the time. “Any moment now. Lvov, you’ll be fine. Remember, you’ll feel no acceleration, no matter how fast we travel. At the centre of an Alcubierre wave, spacetime is locally flat; you’ll still be in free fall. There will be tidal forces, but they will remain small. Just keep your breathing even, and—”

“Shut up, Cobh,” Lvov said tightly. “I know all this.”

Cobh’s desk flared with light. “There,” she breathed. “The GUTdrive has fired. Just a few seconds, now.”

A spark of light arced up from Pluto’s surface and tracked, in complete silence, under the belly of the parent world. It was the flitter’s GUTdrive, salvaged and stabilised by Cobh. The flame was brighter than Sol; Lvov saw its light reflected in Pluto, as if the surface was a great, fractured mirror of ice. Where the flame passed, tongues of nitrogen gas billowed up.

The GUTdrive passed over Christy. Lvov had left her desk there, to monitor the flakes, and the image the desk transmitted, displayed in the corner of her faceplate, showed a spark, crossing the sky.

Then the GUTdrive veered sharply upwards, climbing directly towards Lvov and Cobh at the Interface.

“Cobh, are you sure this is going to work?”

Lvov could hear Cobh’s breath rasp, shallow. “Look, Lvov, I know you’re scared, but pestering me with dumb-ass questions isn’t going to help. Once the drive enters the Interface, it will take only seconds for the instability to set in. Seconds, and then we’ll be home. In the inner System, at any rate. Or...”

“Or what?”

Cobh didn’t reply.

Or not, Lvov finished for her. If Cobh has designed this new instability right, the Alcubierre wave will carry us home. If not—

The GUTdrive flame approached, becoming dazzling. Lvov tried to regulate her breathing, to keep her limbs hanging loose—

“Lethe,” Cobh whispered.

“What?” Lvov demanded, alarmed.

“Take a look at Pluto. At Christy.”

Lvov looked into her faceplate.

Where the warmth and light of the GUTdrive had passed, Christy was a ferment. Nitrogen billowed. And, amid the pale fountains, burrows were opening. Lids folded back. Eggs cracked. Infant flakes soared and sailed, with webs and nets of their silk-analogue hauling at the rising air.

Lvov caught glimpses of threads, long, sparkling, trailing down to Pluto—and up towards Charon. Already, Lvov saw, some of the baby flakes had hurtled more than a planetary diameter from the surface, towards the moon.

“It’s goose summer,” she said.

“What?”

“When I was a kid...The young spiders spin bits of webs, and climb to the top of grass stalks, and float off on the breeze. Goose summer—’gossamer’”.

“Right,” Cobh said sceptically. “Well, it looks as if they are making for Charon. They use the evaporation of the atmosphere for lift...Perhaps they follow last year’s threads, to the moon. They must fly off every perihelion, rebuilding their web bridge every time. They think the perihelion is here now. The warmth of the drive—it’s remarkable. But why go to Charon?”

Lvov couldn’t take her eyes off the flakes. “Because of the water,” she said. It all seemed to make sense, now that she saw the flakes in action. “There must be water glass, on Chiron’s surface. The baby flakes use it to build their bodies. They take other nutrients from Pluto’s interior, and the glass from Charon...They need the resources of both worlds to survive—”

“Lvov!”

The GUTdrive flared past them, sudden, dazzling, and plunged into the damaged Interface.

Electric-blue light exploded from the Interface, washing over her.

There was a ball of light, unearthly, behind her, and an irregular patch of darkness ahead, like a rip in space. Tidal forces plucked gently at her belly and limbs.

Pluto, Charon and goose summer disappeared. But the stars, the eternal stars, shone down on her, just as they had during her childhood on Earth. She stared at the stars, trusting, and felt no fear.

Remotely, she heard Cobh whoop, exhilarated.

The tides faded. The darkness before her healed, to reveal the brilliance and warmth of Sol.

© 1995 by Stephen Baxter

Originally published in Science Fiction Age

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Stephen Baxter was born in Liverpool, England. With a background in math and engineering, he is the author of over fifty novels and over a hundred published short stories. He has collaborated with Sir Arthur C. Clarke and is working on a new collaboration with Sir Terry Pratchett. Among his awards are BSFA awards, the Philip K. Dick Award, and Locus, Asimov, and Analog awards. His latest novel is Stone Spring, first of a new series.

Author Spotlight: Stephen Baxter
Erin Stocks

Where did you draw inspiration for this story?

I was working in the general background of my Xeelee Sequence future history. In this particular era the solar system is being opened up with wormhole technology—a kind of railway age, so every world is a new frontier. But for this story I was particularly inspired by two separate ideas. It’s an old technique of mine to develop ideas by bashing together two separate notions to see what comes out of the product. Here it was the space-warp idea of the Alcubierre drive, which was then a very new bit of science, and a particular aspect of Pluto...

I found it interesting that Lvov thinks of Pluto as hardly deserving of the status of “planet.” More than ten years after you published this story, Pluto lost its official planetary status (although has since been deigned a “minor planet,” and “dwarf planet.”) Why did you choose to set the story here?

It was one particular feature that snagged my attention: That Pluto and its moon Charon are the only bodies in the solar system where both primary world and satellite keep the same faces pointing to each other. One day this will be true of Earth and moon also. So it’s a very static system, and you could imagine building Jacob’s-ladder bridges between the two worlds—or wrap them up in spiderweb, as in here. And where you have spiderweb you must have spiders and some ecology behind them! It was a very visual inspiration initially however, the cobwebbed worlds.

Your Manifold Trilogy novels deal with the Fermi paradox—the contradiction between the likely possibility of extraterrestrial life and the lack of evidence supporting that possibility—which seems to play into this story, too. Is this a theme you consciously return to in your writing, or does it unfold on its own accord?

I’m now consciously returning to it, and have in fact done some formal academic papers on Fermi and related subjected for conferences on SETI, the search for aliens. I think when I wrote “Gossamer” I was working all this out in my own head; the Xeelee solar system is full of life and mind but you don’t see it until you get there—which I suspect may well be true.

You have degrees in both math and engineering, but the heart of this story focuses on biology, and the new species Lvov discovers. How much do you think your education affects your science fiction? Did you end up needing to do any research regarding the biology of the flakes, or was it knowledge you’d gleaned along the way?

I was drawn into math and engineering through SF in the first place, to tell you the truth. I studied relativity and quantum mechanics and such, and was involved in some big engineering projects, so that is all experience I can draw on: This is how things work, and how they get built. I’ve no background in biology, for instance, but I know how to research, I guess—how to frame questions and answer them. I would say a science background is no prerequisite for writing great hard SF—Greg Bear being a key example, for instance. You need an open mind and an ability to ask good questions, rather than to know the answers straight off!

Much of your writing is on a grand, cosmic scale, tackling a larger panoramic view of science and the universe, often including the fate of a species (human or otherwise). This story is no exception. What draws you to this type of storytelling, rather than more intimate scenarios?

The big scale is what drew me into SF in the first place, from Wells to Stapledon and Clarke, and then writers like Bear, Benford... Exploring our cosmic context is a major purpose of SF, I’d say. But in fiction you do need to find an intimate human story to tell! I think that works in this case, you have the straightforward jeopardy story with big issues in the background.

What are you working on now?

A big alternate-history saga called “Northland”—book one’s called Stone Spring—about a different way our western culture could have unraveled since prehistoric times. I’ve always been drawn to alternate history, another kind of exploration of the possible, and it’s a lot of fun!

Lightspeed assistant editor Erin Stocks is a writer and musician transplanted from Chicago to Oklahoma City. Her fiction can be found in the Couer de Lion anthology Anywhere but Earth (upcoming), Flash Fiction Online, the Hadley Rille anthology Destination: Future, and the Absent Willow Review. When she’s not writing, she’s reading for her SFF writing group, and can be found on erinstocks.blogspot.com.

Feature Interview: Walter Jon Williams
Chris Moriarty

You’d be hard-pressed to find a serious science fiction fan who doesn’t know the name Walter Jon Williams. Williams is the author of twenty-seven novels and three collections of short fiction, many of them classics in the field. His novel Hardwired (1986) was one of the seminal works of the cyberpunk movement, described by Roger Zelazny as “a tough, sleek juggernaut of a story, punctuated by strobe-light movements, coursing to the wail of jets and the twang of steel guitars.”

Charles Stross has called Walter “one of science fiction’s most versatile and elegant writers.” And indeed, since co-inventing cyberpunk, he has worked in almost every imaginable sub-genre of science fiction. He has also written for the screen and for television, and has worked in the gaming field, where he wrote for the alternate reality game Last Call Poker, and scripted the recent mega-hit Spore. His latest work is Deep State, a near-future thriller set in the world of alternate reality gaming.

Walter has been repeatedly nominated for both the Philip K. Dick and Hugo Awards, and won the Nebula Award for his 2001 novelette, “Daddy’s World,” and his 2004 novella “The Green Leopard Plague.

If I had to describe a “Walter Jon Williams Book” to someone who’d never read one, I’d say that I never know what your next book is going to be about, but I always know it will have big ideas and a rip-roaring storyline. More than anyone else in the genre, you seem to have a talent for following the big idea without losing sight of the need to tell a good story. How do you strike that balance?

I’d like to offer for your approval the highly unfashionable idea that good storytelling trumps everything else. Writers whose characters are made of purest silly putty and who can’t parse a simple English sentence regularly end up on the bestseller list because they know how to tell a story and keep readers turning pages.

There seems to be a school of thought that lovely writing is all that literature is about. I love to bask in beautiful writing, but I much prefer writing to be in aid of something, which is to say a good story. Likewise I fully appreciate well-drawn characters, but well-drawn characters with nothing to do but gaze at the wall and soliloquize to themselves are pretty darn dull.

Am I out of line to expect simply everything? Story, plot, characters, resolution? At any rate, that’s what I try to deliver.

I very often start with a character I want to write about, and so I’ll construct a story specifically around that character, to put the character under pressure and see what he or she is made of.

I tend not to write pure idea stories, which is not to say that I don’t employ ideas. The ideas tend to be in service to the story and characters—if the story is about the distance between the characters, I’ll employ an idea that somehow literalizes that separation. (Put one of them on another planet, say, or in some virtual space that the other can’t enter. Or alternately, jam them together in the same confined space and show how they still can’t talk to each other.)

I will try to have the idea and the characters mirror each other in some way. In my story “Surfacing,” the story was about a researcher trying to communicate with deep-sea creatures. He got involved with a woman who was intermittently possessed by an alien (a metaphor for mental illness, by the way). The various turns of the plot all involved the protagonist’s desperate attempts to communicate with the deep dwellers, the woman, and the alien, and each twist compounded his original problem. (I think it’s one of my best stories.)

(I should point out, by way of self-promotion, that my frustrations in reading fiction which was basically all right except that there was no plot and no pace, led me to found a writers’ workshop, Taos Toolbox, in which the art of plotting is covered thoroughly. This year I’ll be teaching with Nancy Kress and Jack Skillingstead. Applications are now being accepted, so if you’re interested, check out taostoolbox.com. End of commercial interruption.)

I’m amazed and awed by the sheer number of novels you’ve written over the years. What’s the secret to your productivity? And please don’t say good writing habits…we’d all much rather hear that you sold your soul to the devil at the crossroads!

Well, not actually the devil. Just the shabby little demon who lives behind the washing machine and eats my odd socks. And I didn’t sell my soul exactly, it was more of an options deal—if the economy remains stable, I shouldn’t have any trouble at all.

The sad truth is that I am dutiful. I don’t have a big daily word count, I don’t write a novel every month like some people I know, but I don’t let the grass grow under my keyboard, either. Unless I’m traveling or am otherwise fully occupied, I write every day, seven days per week. At my plodding dinosaur pace I manage to write a novel every year, plus a few pieces of short fiction.

You also write in an amazing range of genres. And several of your books are blends of multiple genres. I’ve heard you refer to this as “subgenre-busting.” How has subgenre-busting affected your career and your development as a writer?

“Subgenre-busting” was a term invented by the late Mike Ford, in a conversation where he pointed out that subgenre-busting was something that we both did. I hadn’t realized till then that this was what I was doing.

I never set out to bust genres. I just thought of myself as a kid in a candy store. There were these big display cases full of gooey treats labeled “thriller” and “dystopia” and “space opera” and “radical technology” and I couldn’t resist any of them. Then I started mashing them all together to see what they’d taste like.

I think the “busting” maybe comes from the fact that I did try to bring something new to the process on every attempt, which involved thinking hard about what it is that subgenres do, and why they do it. Which is why some of my stories seem to have mini-critiques built in, in which I challenge the assumptions of the subgenres I’m playing with.

All this was a lot of fun, though I wouldn’t recommend this career path for anyone starting today. Publishers, and a lot of readers, are too conservative to follow all that jumping around.

So why do you write science fiction? Does it give you a chance to ask the big questions? Can you say things through SF that you couldn’t as a mainstream writer?

I write SF because I was a horrible failure at writing everything else. I was told over and over again that my work was just too unconventional and too weird to see print. I’m pleased to report that, in the world of SF, they hardly ever tell you that.

That said, science fiction certainly encourages the asking of the big questions: Who are we, what makes us human, what is our purpose, what is our destiny. Even schlock pulp 1930s space opera at least assures us that there will be a tomorrow, and that people in that tomorrow will be doing exciting and worthwhile things. It’s not necessarily an assurance that you find anywhere else.

As for whether readers read in order to find these answers, I can say that I certainly did, when I was a young person. I believed firmly in everything that Robert Anson Heinlein told me, even when it was contradictory.

Now that I’m older, though, I have other sources of information.

Your stories “Lethe” and “The Green Leopard Plague” are among the most memorable—and moving—pieces of SF I’ve ever read. Both stories are set in a future that remains full of grief and loss even though death has been all but banished from human experience. And both stories suggest that even “in a future where everything goes right,” (your phrase) suffering will still be part of what makes us human. This is a very un-SF outlook. Yet it has given rise to some of your most lyrical and resonant writing. Where does that theme come from, and why do you think it keeps reappearing in your writing?

Perhaps it’s because I find death and suffering to be really, really sad, and sadder still because (at our current level of technology) they’re inescapable. Death and suffering are primary features of the human condition: They’re something we all share. When they no longer exist, we’ll know that posthumanity is upon us.

Also, from the point of view of the craftsman, I find it challenging to find something to write about in a world without war, poverty, and death. But just because those things are gone doesn’t mean that suffering doesn’t exist: There will still be people who are stupid or uncaring who will make you feel bad; you will still make horrible mistakes that will feel like the end of the world; and you’re going to love the wrong person. Almost guaranteed.

When those conditions are no more, you’ll know that humanity as we know it no longer exists.

These days, some of the best books that cross my desk as a reviewer are small press titles written by big name writers. Your own book, Implied Spaced, comes to mind, as do Greg Bear’s Hull Zero Three and Ian McDonald’s The Dervish House. I’ve heard other writers describe their reasons for working with small presses. Still, I’m curious to hear your take on it. Do you see more support for innovative SF at the independent publishers? Is it getting harder to sell groundbreaking SF to commercial publishers? And if so, then what does that mean about the future of the genre?

Traditional publishing in the US has been in crisis since the early 1990s, when traditional methods of paperback distribution were disrupted. The result in the US was that publishers became a lot more conservative in what they were buying. They were much more interested in retaining their traditional audience than in finding a new one. (This, despite the fact that the traditional audience was, and is, getting old and dying.)

US publishing put its money on a bet that no one in its audience will ever get cancer or heart disease or grow old. Ever.

Publishers in the UK, who were feeling the pinch for different reasons, seem to have chosen the opposite route—they bought a lot of ground-breaking new stuff by ground-breaking new writers. All the celebrated new literary movements in the field seem to be British—like the New Space Opera and the New Weird. From what I can see, even though there are plenty of American writers doing New Space Opera and even Newish Weird, this doesn’t count. You have to be British to wear the label.

Which is not to say that ground-breaking work isn’t being produced in the US, it’s just that it’s being published very cheaply, often by small presses. Small Beer, Night Shade, and Subterranean are incubators of cool stuff. They’re strutting around where major publishers fear to tread.

The problem is that people who write for small presses, or who manage to sell off-center work to major publishers for small money, aren’t making a living at their craft. They can hope for a breakout, hope they become the next Paolo Bacigalupi, but basically they have to be in it for the love. And love will only get you so far when it comes to making the mortgage and feeding the kids.

You said earlier that you often start a book with a character you want to write about and then put the character under pressure to see what he or she is made of. What books began this way? And what was it about those characters that made you want to build a book around them?

Books that started with the characters include Hardwired, Voice of the Whirlwind, Aristoi, and Days of Atonement. Those were stories and milieus that were built around the characters, and not the other way around.

Cowboy in Hardwired and Steward in Voice of the Whirlwind are two of my all-time favorite SF characters. Can you say a little more about the inspiration for them?

I’m not sure why I found these two in my head, but once they were there, I was compelled to write about them. Steward was possibly the first SF character I ever tried to write about. I wrote the first part of that novel around 1980, and didn’t finish it till five or six years later.

I realized, when I went through some old manuscripts years after Hardwired was published, that I’d used both Cowboy and Sarah in an unsold novel taking place in China in the 1920s. The characters had different names, but were otherwise very much the same. Apparently I was just very interested in those two personalities and the contrasts between them. I don’t recall the name of the cowboy character, but Sarah was a French anarchist named Hypsipyle Gobineau—reason enough for the proposal to be rejected, I’d imagine.

Cowboy started off as a laconic Westerner, with more than a touch of Tom Wolfe’s astronauts in his genetics. One of the things about modern-day cowboys is that they’re nostalgic for the disappearing old west, and maybe a little bit sad about the speed with which it’s receding into the past. But Cowboy believes in that past, and he’s trying to re-create it in his own personality. He’s consciously trying to re-invent himself as a mythological character.

With Steward I wanted to ring some changes on the idea of the combat veteran who returns home to find that he has changed too much to appreciate his homecoming. What makes Steward crazy—and I hope the reader understands that he is somewhat unbalanced—isn’t the horrors of war, but the fact that he can’t remember any of them. He is on a quest to discover his own personal hell.

What we have here are two people on very unusual quests. I’m very happy that people still find them compelling.

You seem to delight in catching characters at moments of existential crisis. A crisis in a Walter Jon Williams novel is never just a matter of physical survival. Sure, stuff blows up and there’s a high body count and great chase scenes. But, unlike more run-of-the-mill SF writers, you always put your characters’ self-respect up for grabs, too…usually by throwing them into situations where their moral compass goes haywire and they have to reconsider all their old beliefs about who the good guys are and which side they’re on.

Well, thank you. That’s what I try to do. I want to have the characters’ inner lives match their outward circumstances—if one is in crisis, so should the other be.

Insofar as my characters go, I’m not sure if they’re all trying to be heroes, or necessarily to do the right thing. They’re trying to remain themselves. They try to remain themselves even when their self-image turns out to be a construct designed for a world that no longer exists, or that turns out to be to one degree or another delusional.

Conflict in science fiction can operate on a number of levels. The Competent Man who features so prominently in a lot of SF is unusually lucky in that he always seems to be challenged within his realm of competence. If he’s a military officer, the task is usually to defeat the enemy, which is something he is trained to do. If he’s an engineer, he has to build the rocket or repair the rocket or solve some technical problem, and his whole job is solving technical problems.

That’s fine. Competent people do exist in the world, and it’s a pleasure watching them do their job.

What I’d like to do is take the Competent Man and put him in charge of, say, the Albuquerque Public Schools—which have been a horrid failure ever since I was in school, decades ago. Let the C.M. deal with the school board, the unions, with the decaying physical plants, the administrators, the bureaucracy, the budget, and the screaming parents. Tell him he’s not allowed to use the Legion of Killer Drones he built in his basement the week before. Then watch him go hideously, horribly, irrevocably insane.

See, that’s what I do to my characters. I chuck them into a situation in which their competence and their world-view is challenged. (I should point out to any prospective readers that only a minority of them actually go insane.)

The first generation cyberpunk writers—particularly you and William Gibson—created a new and controversial kind of female SF heroine. Molly in Neuromancer and Sarah in Hardwired are the two iconic examples of the breed. Both characters have clear roots in James Tiptree, Jr.’s tough-ass, loner, proto-cyberpunk heroines. But while feminist literary critics have generally celebrated Tiptree’s gender-bending women, they’ve been largely hostile to Molly and Sarah. What do you make of the amazingly polarized reactions to Sarah? And what did you actually have in mind when you wrote her?

I had no idea that there was any sort of controversy at all. I suppose I’m just pleased that people are still reading the book. I think people may be reacting to Sarah’s front rather than to the actual person I intended to write about.

Sarah is someone who has been abused and degraded, but is striving to achieve a position of respect in her particular milieu, which is the underworld. She blames herself for her failure to take care of her younger brother, who has been broken by the same treatment, and is trying to make up for that.

She does a lot of fronting. She gives a lot of attitude. It’s a way of demanding respect from people who aren’t otherwise inclined to give it.

If people only see the front, it’s exactly what she intends.

On the other hand, Dagmar Shaw, the protagonist of This is Not a Game and Deep State, is a very different kind of female lead. Any thoughts on that?

With Dagmar, I decided to write about someone who wasn’t an action hero. She’s a geek. She knows about as much self-defense as the average geek. So while she’s very smart and very successful, her reaction to the threat of violence is to run into the bathroom and lock the door. In Deep State, she actually manages some heroics, but her mental state is so deranged by that point in the narrative that it’s hard to tell whether it’s actual heroism or something more like dementia.

I’m not sure that my approach to characters has changed. I’m still cobbling their psyches together in the same way that I’ve always done. But my range has increased, partly—as you surmise—as an attempt not to repeat myself. Sarah, Sula, and Dagmar Shaw are all from some sort of abusive backgrounds, but they respond to their backgrounds in different ways. (And why, I now ask myself, do their names all start with S? I never noticed that till now. What is that about?)

Steward and Martinez are both types of military men, though not the same type. (There’s that S again.) Doran Falkner and Aristide are both retired philosopher kings. Aristide and Gabriel are both trying to fulfill some kind of ideal Confucian archetype.

I try not to repeat myself, but I do seem to echo. Particularly if the letter S is involved.

So was Dagmar’s character the inspiration for these books? Or was there something else that pulled you into the story?

Where these books started was with the Alternate Reality Game. I was a writer on the Last Call Poker ARG back in 2005, working for my friends Sean Stewart and Maureen McHugh, and there was something about this rich state-of-the-art multi-media speed-of-light Internet phenomenon that made me want to fix it in ink printed on dead trees.

ARGs are just so...freaking...cool. I had to write about them. The trouble was finding a dead-tree editor who had the slightest comprehension what I was trying to write about, and that took years, but fortunately Little, Brown brought somebody over from England, just for me. So thank you, Tim Holman.

As Maureen McHugh has convincingly written, ARGs are the art form created, virtually demanded, by the Internet. Multi-platform narratives delivered at the speed of light through every medium the Internet can deliver. It’s an evolving art form that I watch with great fascination.

In This Is Not a Game, the virtual world of Alternate Reality Gaming was superimposed on our actual reality, with fatal results. In Deep State, Dagmar is hired to use these techniques, along with social media forums, to deliberately undermine a hostile government—or, as she puts it, “to astroturf an entire country.”

Speaking of astroturfing, in Deep State you predicted in great detail and accuracy the Twitter Revolution currently going on in the Middle East. Except, of course, that the real world Twitter Revolution wasn’t secretly masterminded from Simi Valley…or was it?

The Tunisian revolution—and the revolution in Egypt that is ongoing as I type this, along with a revolution in Yemen that seems not to be getting a lot of air time—was probably not masterminded by any branch of the US government, for the simple reason that we seem to have been caught flatfooted in all instances.

Whether a quiet cabal in Simi Valley, or Bahrain, or Beirut, is behind events elsewhere is certainly possible—though if they do their jobs correctly, we’ll never know.

As I’ve been watching the news, I keep seeing pieces of my novel flashing into sight. Social media used to advance radical political objectives: Check. Alternative methods enabled when the government turns off the Internet: Check.

One aspect of the blueprint that wasn’t followed in Tunisia was the establishment of a virtual government—an ad hoc group that performs governmental functions, and can step into the role when the government actually falls. In Tunisia, the new government features a lot of the same old faces we saw in the old government.

In Egypt, as I write, it’s too early to say whether a shadow government along these lines is being formed. But certainly if Mubarak is overthrown only to be replaced by Mubarak cronies, the revolution will have failed.

So are we going to see more of Dagmar in future books?

Indeed, yes. I’ve recently completed the third Dagmar book. The current title is Mister Baby Head, which does seem to be experiencing a certain amount of resistance from the publisher. It may have another title by the time it appears, in about a year.

What’s the best question you’ve never been asked in an interview?

Remember that you asked for this. This is in fact a question I’ve never been asked:

Q: Is it true that you are a god in the kitchen as well as in the bedroom?

A: Why yes. Yes, I am.

And last but not least. . . where do I sign up for the job opening of “retired philosopher king?”

If you ever find out, please let me know.

Chris Moriarty is the winner of the 2007 Philip K. Dick Award and the author of hard SF novels Spin State, Spin Control, and Ghost Spin (due out in 2011). Chris also reviews books for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, focusing primarily on hard SF and space opera. For more information please visit chrismoriartybooks.com.

Spider the Artist
Nnedi Okorafor

Zombie no go go, unless you tell am to go

Zombie!

Zombie!

Zombie no go stop, unless you tell am to stop

Zombie no go turn, unless you tell am to turn

Zombie!

Zombie no go think, unless you tell am to think

—from Zombie by Fela Kuti, Nigerian musician and self-proclaimed voice of the voiceless

My husband used to beat me. That was how I ended up out there that evening behind our house, just past the bushes, through the tall grass, in front of the pipelines. Our small house was the last in the village, practically in the forest itself. So nobody ever saw or heard him beating me.

Going out there was the best way to put space between me and him without sending him into further rage. When I went behind the house, he knew where I was and he knew I was alone. But he was too full of himself to realize I was thinking about killing myself.

My husband was a drunk, like too many of the members of the Niger Delta People’s Movement. It was how they all controlled their anger and feelings of helplessness. The fish, shrimps and crayfish in the creeks were dying. Drinking the water shriveled women’s wombs and eventually made men urinate blood.

There was a steam where I had been fetching water. A flow station was built nearby and now the stream was rank and filthy, with an oily film that reflected rainbows. Cassava and yam farms yielded less and less each year. The air left your skin dirty and smelled like something preparing to die. In some places, it was always daytime because of the noisy gas flares.

My village was shit.

On top of all this, People’s Movement members were getting picked off like flies. The “kill-and-go” had grown bold. They shot People’s Movement members in the streets, they ran them over, dragged them into the swamps. You never saw them again.

I tried to give my husband some happiness. But after three years, my body continued to refuse him children. It’s easy to see the root of his frustration and sadness…but pain is pain. And he dealt it to me regularly.

My greatest, my only true possession was my father’s guitar. It was made of fine polished Abura timber and it had a lovely tortoiseshell pick guard. Excellent handwork. My father said that the timber used to create the guitar came from one of the last timber trees in the delta. If you held it to your nose, you could believe this. The guitar was decades old and still smelled like fresh cut wood, like it wanted to tell you its story because only it could.

I wouldn’t exist without my father’s guitar. When he was a young man, he used to sit in front of the compound in the evening and play for everyone. People danced, clapped, shut their eyes and listened. Cell phones would ring and people would ignore them. One day, it was my mother who stopped to listen.

I used to stare at my father’s fast long-fingered hands when he played. Oh, the harmonies. He could weave anything with his music—rainbows, sunrises, spider webs sparkling with morning dew. My older brothers weren’t interested in learning how to play. But I was, so my father taught me everything he knew. And now it was my long-fingers that graced the strings. I’d always been able to hear music and my fingers moved even faster than my father’s. I was good. Really good.

But I married that stupid man. Andrew. So I only played behind the house. Away from him. My guitar was my escape.

That fateful evening, I was sitting on the ground in front of the fuel pipeline. It ran right through everyone’s backyard. My village was an oil village, as was the village where I grew up. My mother lived in a similar village before she was married, as did her mother. We are Pipeline People.

My mother’s grandmother was known for lying on the pipeline running through her village. She’d stay like that for hours, listening and wondering what magical fluids were running through the large never-ending steel tubes. This was before the Zombies, of course. I laughed. If she tried to lie on a pipeline now she’d be brutally killed.

Anyway, when I was feeling especially blue, I’d take my guitar and come out here and sit right in front of the pipeline. I knew I was flirting with death by being so close but when I was like this, I didn’t really care. I actually welcomed the possibility of being done with life. It was a wonder that my husband didn’t smash my guitar during one of his drunken rages. I’d surely have quickly thrown myself on the pipeline if he did. Maybe that was why he’d rather smash my nose than my guitar.

This day, he’d only slapped me hard across the face. I had no idea why. He’d simply come in, seen me in the kitchen and smack!Maybe he’d had a bad day at work—he worked very hard at a local restaurant. Maybe one of his women had scorned him. Maybe I did something wrong. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. My nose was just starting to stop bleeding and I was not seeing so many stars.

My feet were only inches from the pipeline. I was especially daring this night. It was warmer and more humid than normal. Or maybe it was my stinging burning face. The mosquitoes didn’t even bother me much. In the distance, I could see Nneka, a woman who rarely spoke to me, giving her small sons a bath in a large tub. Some men were playing cards at a table several houses down. It was dark, there were small, small trees and bushes here and even our closest neighbor was not very close, so I was hidden.

I sighed and placed my hands on the guitar strings. I plucked out a tune my father used to play. I sighed and closed my eyes. I would always miss my father. The feel of the strings vibrating under my fingers was exquisite.

I fell deep into the zone of my music, weaving it, then floating on a glorious sunset that lit the palm tree tops and…

Click!

I froze. My hands still on the strings, the vibration dying. I didn’t dare move. I kept my eyes closed. The side of my face throbbed.

Click! This time the sound was closer. Click! Closer. Click! Closer.

My heart pounded and I felt nauseous with fear. Despite my risk taking, I knew this was not the way I wanted to die. Who would want to be torn limb from limb by Zombies? As everyone in my village did multiple times a day, I quietly cursed the Nigerian government.

Twing!

The vibration of the guitar string was stifled by my middle finger still pressing it down. My hands started to shake, but still I kept my eyes shut. Something sharp and cool lifted my finger. I wanted to scream. The string was plucked again.

Twang!

The sound was deeper and fuller, my finger no longer muffling the vibration. Very slowly, I opened my eyes. My heart skipped. The thing stood about three feet tall, which meant I was eye-to eye with it. I’d never seen one up close. Few people have. These things are always running up and down the pipeline like a herd of super fast steer, always with things to do.

I chanced a better look. It really did have eight legs. Even in the darkness, those legs shined, catching even the dimmest light. A bit more light and I’d have been able to see my face perfectly reflected back at me. I’d heard that they polished and maintained themselves. This made even more sense now, for who would have time to keep them looking so immaculate?

The government came up with the idea to create the Zombies, and Shell, Chevron and a few other oil companies (who were just as desperate) supplied the money to pay for it all. The Zombies were made to combat pipeline bunkering and terrorism. It makes me laugh. The government and the oil people destroyed our land and dug up our oil, then they created robots to keep us from taking it back.

They were originally called Anansi Droids 419 but we call them “oyibo contraption” and, most often, Zombie, the same name we call those “kill-and-go” soldiers who come in here harassing us every time something bites their brains.

It’s said that Zombies can think. Artificial Intelligence, this is called. I have had some schooling, a year or two of university, but my area was not in the sciences. No matter my education, as soon as I got married and brought to this damn place I became like every other woman here, a simple village woman living in the delta region where Zombies kill anyone who touches the pipelines and whose husband knocks her around every so often. What did I know about Zombie intellect?

It looked like a giant shiny metal spider. It moved like one too. All smooth-shifting joints and legs. It crept closer and leaned in to inspect my guitar strings some more. As it did so, two of its back legs tapped on the metal of the pipeline. Click! Click! Click!

It pushed my thumb back down on the strings and plucked the string twice, making a muted pluck! It looked at me with its many blue shining round eyes. Up close I could see that they weren’t lights. They were balls of a glowing metallic blue undulating liquid, like charged mercury. I stared into them fascinated. No one else in my village could possibly know this fact. No one had gotten close enough. Eyes of glowing bright blue liquid metal, I thought. Na wa.

It pressed my hand harder and I gasped, blinking and looking away from its hypnotic eyes. Then I understood.

“You …you want me to play?”

It sat there waiting, placing a leg on the body of my guitar with a soft tap. It had been a long time since anyone had wanted me to play for him. I played my favorite highlife song. Love Dey See Road by Oliver De Coque. I played like my life depended on it.

The Zombie didn’t move, its leg remaining pressed to my guitar. Was it listening? I was sure it was. Twenty minutes later, when I stopped finally playing, sweat running down my face, it touched the tips of my aching hands. Gently.

Some of these pipelines carry diesel fuel, others carry crude oil. Millions of liters of it a day. Nigeria supplies twenty-five percent of United States oil. And we get virtually nothing in return. Nothing but death by Zombie attack. We can all tell you stories.

When the Zombies were first released, no one knew about them. All people would hear were rumors about people getting torn apart near pipelines or sightings of giant white spiders in the night. Or you’d hear about huge pipeline explosions, charred bodies everywhere. But the pipeline where the bodies lay would be perfectly intact.

People still bunkered. My husband was one of them. I suspected that he sold the fuel and oil on the black market; he would bring some of the oil home, too. You let it sit in a bucket for two days and it would become something like kerosene. I used it for cooking. So I couldn’t really complain. But bunkering was a very, very dangerous practice.

There were ways of breaking a pipeline open without immediately bringing the wrath of Zombies. My husband and his comrades used some sort of powerful laser cutter. They stole them from the hospitals. But they had to be very, very quiet when cutting through the metal. All it took was one bang, one vibration, and the Zombies would come running within a minute. Many of my husband’s comrades had been killed because of the tap of someone’s wedding ring or the tip of the laser cutter on steel.

Two years ago a group of boys had been playing too close to the pipeline. Two of them were wrestling and they fell on it. Within seconds the Zombies came. One boy managed to scramble away. But the other was grabbed by the arm and flung into some bushes. His arm and both of his legs were broken. Government officials said that Zombies were programmed to do as little harm as possible but … I didn’t believe this, na lie.

They were terrible creatures. To get close to a pipeline was to risk a terrible death. Yet the goddamn things ran right through our backyards.

But I didn’t care. My husband was beating the hell out of me during these months. I don’t know why. He had not lost his job. I knew he was seeing other women. We were poor but we were not starving. Maybe it was because I couldn’t bear him children. It is my fault I know, but what can I do?

I found myself out in the backyard more and more. And this particular Zombie visited me every time. I loved playing for it. It would listen. Its lovely eyes would glow with joy. Could a robot feel joy? I believed intelligent ones like this could. Many times a day, I would see a crowd of Zombies running up and down the pipeline, off to do repairs or policing, whatever they did. If my Zombie was amongst them, I couldn’t tell.

It was about the tenth time it visited me that it did something very, very strange. My husband had come home smelling practically flammable, stinking of several kinds of alcohol—beer, palm wine, perfume. I had been thinking hard all day. About my life. I was stuck. I wanted a baby. I wanted to get out of the house. I wanted a job. I wanted friends. I needed courage. I knew I had courage. I had faced a Zombie, many times.

I was going to ask my husband about teaching at the elementary school. I’d heard that they were looking for teachers. When he walked in, he greeted me with a sloppy hug and kiss and then plopped himself on the couch. He turned on the television. It was late but I brought him his dinner, pepper soup heavy with goat meat, chicken and large shrimp. He was in a good drunken mood. But as I stood there watching him eat, all my courage fled. All my need for change skittered and cowered to the back of my brain.

“Do you want anything else?” I asked.

He looked up at me and actually smiled. “The soup is good today.”

I smiled, but something inside me ducked its head lower. “I’m glad,” I said. I picked up my guitar. “I’m going to the back. It’s nice outside.”

“Don’t go too close to the pipeline,” he said. But he was looking at the TV and gnawing on a large piece of goat meat.

I crept into the darkness, through the bushes and grasses, to the pipeline. I sat in my usual spot. A foot from it. I strummed softly, a series of chords. A forlorn tune that spoke my heart. Where else was there to go from here? Was this my life? I sighed. I hadn’t been to church in a month.

When it came clicking down the pipe, my heart lifted. Its blue liquid eyes glowed strong tonight. There was a woman from whom I once bought a bolt of blue cloth. The cloth was a rich blue that reminded me of the open water on sunny days. The woman said the cloth was “azure”. My Zombie’s eyes were a deep azure this night.

It stopped, standing before me. Waiting. I knew it was my Zombie because a month ago, it had allowed me to put a blue butterfly sticker on one of its front legs.

“Good evening,” I said.

It did not move.

“I’m sad today,” I said.

It stepped off the pipeline, its metal legs clicking on the metal and then whispering on the dirt and grass. It sat its body on the ground as it always did. Then it waited.

I strummed a few chords and then played its favorite song, Bob Marley’s “No Woman No Cry.” As I played, its body slowly began to rotate, something I’d come to understand was its way of expressing pleasure. I smiled. When I stopped playing, it turned its eyes back to me. I sighed, strummed an A minor chord, and sat back. “My life is shit,” I said.

Suddenly, it rose up on its eight legs with a soft whir. It stretched and straightened its legs until it was standing a foot taller than normal. From under its body in the center, something whitish and metallic began to descend. I gasped, grabbing my guitar. My mind told me to move away. Move away fast. I’d befriended this artificial creature. I knew it. Or I thought I knew it. But what did I really know about why it did what it did? Or why it came to me?

The metallic substance descended faster, pooling in the grass beneath it. I squinted. The stuff was wire. Right before my eyes, I watched the Zombie take this wire and do something with five of its legs while it supported itself on the other three. The legs scrambled around, working and weaving the shiny wire this way and that. They moved too fast for me to see exactly what they were creating. Grass flew and the soft whirring sound grew slightly louder.

Then the legs stopped. For a moment all I could hear was the sounds of crickets and frogs singing, the breeze blowing in the palm and mangrove tree tops. I could smell the sizzling oil of someone frying plantain or yam nearby.

My eyes focused on what the Zombie had done. I grinned. I grinned and grinned. “What is that?” I whispered.

It held it up with two of its front legs and tapped its back leg twice on the ground as it always seemed to when it was trying to make a point. A point that I usually didn’t understand.

It brought three legs forward and commenced to pluck out what first was a medley of my favorite songs, from Bob Marley to Sunny Ade to Carlos Santana. Then its music deepened to something so complex and beautiful that I was reduced to tears of joy, awe, ecstasy. People must have heard the music, maybe they looked out their windows or opened their doors. But we were hidden by the darkness, the grass, the trees. I cried and cried. I don’t know why, but I cried. I wonder if it was pleased by my reaction. I think it was.

I spent the next hour learning to play its tune.

Ten days later, a group of Zombies attacked some oil workers and soldiers deep in the delta. Ten of the men were torn limb from limb, their bloody remains scattered all over the swampy land. Those who escaped told reporters that nothing would stop the Zombies. A soldier had even thrown a grenade at one, but the thing protected itself with the very force field it had been built to use during pipeline explosions. The soldier said the force field looked like a crackling bubble made of lightning.

“Wahala! Trouble!” the soldier frantically told television reporters. His face was greasy with sweat and the sides of his eyes were twitching. “Evil, evil things! I’ve believed this from start! Look at me with grenade! Ye ye! I could do nothing!”

The pipeline the men had barely even started was found fully assembled. Zombies are made to make repairs, not fully assemble things. It was bizarre. Newspaper write-ups said that the Zombies were getting too smart for their own good. That they were rebelling. Something had certainly changed.

“Maybe it’s only a matter of time before the damn things kill us all,” my husband said, a beer in hand, as he read about the incident in the newspaper.

I considered never going near my Zombie again. They were unpredictable and possibly out of control.

It was midnight and I was out there again.

My husband hadn’t laid a heavy hand on me in weeks. I think he sensed the change in me. I had changed. He now heard me play more. Even in the house. In the mornings. After cooking his dinners. In the bedroom when his friends were over. And he was hearing songs that I knew gave him a most glorious feeling. As if each chord, each sound were examined by scientists and handpicked to provoke the strongest feeling of happiness.

My Zombie had solved my marital problems. At least the worst of them. My husband could not beat me when there was beautiful music sending his senses to lush, sweet places. I began to hope. To hope for a baby. Hope that I would one day leave my house and wifely duties for a job as music teacher at the elementary school. Hope that my village would one day reap from the oil being reaped from it. And I dreamt about being embraced by deep blue liquid metal, webs of wire and music.

I’d woken up that night from one of these strange dreams. I opened my eyes, a smile on my face. Good things were certainly coming. My husband was sleeping soundly beside me. In the dim moonlight, he looked so peaceful. His skin no longer smelled of alcohol. I leaned forward and kissed his lips. He didn’t wake. I slipped out of bed and put on some pants and a long sleeve shirt. The mosquitoes would be out tonight. I grabbed my guitar.

I’d named my Zombie Udide Okwanka. In my language, it means “spider the artist.” According to legend, Udide Okwanka is the Supreme Artist. And she lives underground where she takes fragments of things and changes them into something else. She can even weave spirits from straw. It was a good name for my Zombie. I wondered what Udide named me. I was sure it named me something, though I doubted that it told the others about me. I don’t think it would have been allowed to keep seeing me.

Udide was waiting for me there, as if it sensed I would come out this night. I grinned, my heart feeling so warm. I sat down as it left the pipeline and crept up to me. It carried its instrument on top of its head. A sort of complex star made of wire. Over the weeks, it had added more wire lines, some thin and some thick. I often wondered where it put this thing when it was running about with the others, for the instrument was too big to hide on its body.

Udide held it before its eyes. With a front leg, it plucked out a sweet simple tune that almost made me weep with joy. It conjured up images of my mother and father, when they were so young and full of hope, when my brothers and I were too young to marry and move away. Before the “kill and go” had driven my oldest brother away to America and my middle brother to the north…when there was so much potential.

I laughed and wiped away a tear and started strumming some chords to support the tune. From there we took off into something so intricate, enveloping, intertwining…Chei! I felt as if I was communing with God. Ah-ah, this machine and me. You can’t imagine.

“Eme!”

Our music instantly fell apart.

“Eme!” my husband called again.

I froze, staring at Udide who was also motionless. “Please,” I whispered to it. “Don’t hurt him.”

“Samuel messaged me!” my husband said, his eyes still on his cell phone, as he stepped up to me through the tall grass. “There’s a break in the pipeline near the school! Not a goddamn Zombie in sight yet! Throw down that guitar, woman! Let’s go and get…” He looked up. A terrified look took hold of his face.

For a very long time it seemed we all were frozen in time. My husband standing just at the last of the tall grass. Udide standing in front of the pipeline, instrument held up like a ceremonial shield. And me between the two of them, too afraid to move. I turned to my husband. “Andrew,” I said with the greatest of care. “Let me explain…”

He slowly dragged his gaze to me and gave me a look, as if he was seeing me for the first time. “My own wife?!” he whispered.

“I…”

Udide raised its two front legs. For a moment it looked almost like it was pleading with me. Or maybe offering me a hug. Then it clicked its legs together so hard that it produced a large red spark and an ear splitting ting!

My husband and I clapped our hands over our ears. The air instantly smelled like freshly lit matches. Even through the palms of my hands, I could hear the responses from down the pipeline. The clicking was so numerous that it sounded like a rain of tiny pebbles falling on the pipeline. Udide shuddered, scrambled back and stood on it, waiting. They came in a great mob. About twenty of them. The first thing that I noticed was their eyes. They were all a deep angry red.

The others scrambled around Udide, tapping their feet in complex rhythms on the pipe. I couldn’t see Udide’s eyes. Then they all ran off with amazing speed, to the east.

I turned to my husband. He was gone.

Word spread like a disease because almost everyone had a cell phone. Soon everyone was clicking away on them, messaging things like, “Pipeline burst, near school! No Zombies in sight!” and “Hurry to school, bring bucket!” My husband never let me have my own cell phone. We couldn’t afford one and he didn’t think I needed one. But I knew where the elementary school was.

People now believed that the Zombies had all gone rogue, shrugging off their man-given jobs to live in the delta swamps and do whatever it was they did there. Normally, if bunkerers broke open a pipeline, even for the quietest jobs, the Zombies would become aware of it within an hour and repair the thing within another hour. But two hours later this broken pipe continued to splash fuel. That was when someone had decided to put the word out.

I knew better. The Zombies weren’t “zombies” at all. They were thinking creatures. Smart beasts. They had a method to their madness. And most of them did not like human beings.

The chaos was lit by the headlights of several cars and trucks. The pipeline here was raised as it traveled south. Someone had taken advantage of this and removed a whole section of piping. Pink diesel fuel poured out of both ends like a giant fountain. People crowded beneath the flow like parched elephants, filling jerri cans, bottles, bowls, buckets. One man even held a garbage bag, until the fuel ate through the bag, splashing fuel all over the man’s chest and legs.

The spillage collected into a large dark pink pool that swiftly flowed toward the elementary school, gathering on the playground. The fumes hit me even before I got within sight of the school. My eyes watered and my nose started running. I held my shirt over my nose and mouth. This barely helped.

People came in cars, motorcycles, buses, on foot. Everyone was messaging on their cell phones, further spreading the word. It had been a while since people who did not make a career out of fuel theft had gotten a sip of free fuel.

There were children everywhere. They ran up and down, sent on errands by their parents or just hanging around to be a part of the excitement. They’d probably never seen people able to go near a pipeline without getting killed. Hip-hop and highlife blasted from cars and SUVs with enhanced sound systems. The baseline vibrations were almost as stifling as the fumes. I had not a doubt that the Zombies knew this was going on.

I spotted my husband. He was heading toward the fountain of fuel with a large red bucket. Five men started arguing amongst each other. Two of them started pushing and shoving, almost falling into the fountain.

“Andrew!” I called over all the noise.

He turned. When he saw me, he narrowed his eyes.

“Please!” I said. “I’m…I’m sorry.”

He spat and started walking away.

“You have to get out of here!” I said. “They will come!”

He whirled around and strode up to me. “How the hell are you so sure? Did you bring them yourself?”

As if in response, people suddenly started screaming and running. I cursed. The Zombies were coming from the street, forcing people to run toward the pool of fuel. I cursed, again. My husband was glaring at me. He pointed into my face with a look of disgust. I couldn’t hear what he said over all the noise. He turned and ran off.

I tried to spot Udide amongst the Zombies. All of their eyes were still red. Was Udide even amongst them? I stared at their legs, searching for the butterfly sticker. There it was. Closest to me, to the left. “Udide!” I called.

As the name came out of my mouth, I saw two of the Zombies in the center each raise two front legs. My smile went to an “O” of shock. I dropped to the ground and threw my hands over my head. People were still splashing across the pool of fuel, trying to get into the school. Their cars continued blasting hip-hop and highlife, the headlights still on, lighting the madness.

The two Zombies clicked their legs together, producing two large sparks. Ting!

WHOOOOOOOOSH!

I remember light, heat, the smell of burning hair and flesh and screams that melted to guttural gurgles. The noise was muffled. The stench was awful. My head to my lap, I remained in this hellish limbo for a long, long time.

I’ll never teach music at the elementary school. It was incinerated along with many of the children who went to it. My husband was killed, too. He died thinking I was some sort of spy fraternizing with the enemy…or something like that. Everyone died. Except me. Just before the explosion happened, Udide ran to me. It protected me with its force field.

So I lived.

And so did the baby inside me. The baby that my body allowed to happen because of Udide’s lovely soothing music. Udide tells me it is a girl. How can a robot know this? Udide and I play for her every day. I can only imagine how content she is. But what kind of world will I be bringing her into? Where only her mother and Udide stand between a flat out war between the Zombies and the human beings who created them?

Pray that Udide and I can convince man and droid to call a truce, otherwise the delta will keep rolling in blood, metal and flames. You know what else? You should also pray that these Zombies don’t build themselves some fins and travel across the ocean.

© 2008 by Nnedi Okorafor

Originally published in Seeds of Change

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Nnedi Okorafor is the author of the novels Zahrah the Windseeker, The Shadow Speaker, and Who Fears Death. Her book for children, Long Juju Man, won the Macmillan Writer’s Prize for Africa. She is also the winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature and the Carl Brandon Society’s Parallax Award, and has been a finalist for the NAACP Image Award, Andre Norton Award, and the Essence Magazine Literary Award. Forthcoming books include Akata Witch and Iridessa the Fire-Bellied Dragon Frog. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, and in anthologies such as Eclipse Three, So Long Been Dreaming, Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, and in John Joseph Adams’s Seeds of Change and The Way of the Wizard.

Author Spotlight: Nnedi Okorafor
John Joseph Adams

In this Author Spotlight, we asked author Nnedi Okorafor to tell us a bit about the background of her story for Lightspeed, ”Spider the Artist.”

Okorafor tells us that the story is about a Nigerian woman changed by her own creativity and how human beings often suffer the consequences of their choices. “One day a lonely but artistically gifted woman named Eme unexpectedly finds a way to communicate with lethal machines built to guard the oil pipelines,” Okorafor says. “Her life is nourished and changed by her encounters with this one unique machine.”

The summer Okorafor wrote this story was a summer of spiders. “They seemed to be lurking all over my house,” she says. “I’m terrified of spiders. Irrationally terrified. Alan Dean Foster and I are always talking back and forth via email and one day he said, something like, ‘You should write a story about them.’ So I got to thinking. Then I saw the film Transformers. There was a moment where one of the Transformers got its head knocked off and the main character kicked it some feet away. The head sprouted legs and scrambled away like a spider. That image was the genesis of the Zombies in ‘Spider the Artist.’“

The story is personal to Okorafor because as a Nigerian and a human being, she finds what is happening in the Niger Delta and in Nigeria as a whole when it comes to oil is disgusting. “The Biafran Civil War of the late 60s and early 70s which resulted in the death of a million Igbos—a Nigerian ethnic group. I am Igbo—was one of the world’s first wars over oil,” she says. “My parents immigrated because of this war. They had not intended to stay in the US when they initially came here for medical and post-grad school.”

Nigeria is one of the top oil producing countries in the world. “Yet this fact has been more like a curse than a blessing,” Okorafor says. “The Niger Delta has one of the highest concentrations of biodiversity on earth, yet it is an environmental, political and social mess. Oil spills, gas flares, pipeline explosions, poor land management, human rights abuses, the oil companies and the Nigerian government could care less about the land or people. Mind you, Nigeria is the United States’ fifth largest oil supplier. So I’m interested in this issue for many reasons.”

Okorafor says that the idea that the Nigerian government and foreign industries would create murderous robots to protect their money-making endeavors at the expense of civilians is very believable. “And the idea that such a plan would backfire in some unsuspected way, well, that’s quite believable, too,” she says.

Much of what Okorafor writes tends to have an environmental theme and tends to be politically charged in some way. “The current situation in Nigeria is highly volatile,” she says. “There are militants in the delta region who are kidnapping and sometimes killing oil workers, they are blowing up pipelines and assassinating officials. When things heat up over there, gas prices go up here in the US. This kind of situation cannot last long. Change is inevitable.”

Lightspeed editor John Joseph Adams is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Wastelands, The Living Dead (a World Fantasy Award finalist), By Blood We Live, Federations, and The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Barnes & Noble.com named him “the reigning king of the anthology world,” and his books have been named to numerous best of the year lists. He is also the editor of Fantasy Magazine. In addition to his editorial work, John is also the co-host of io9.com’s Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Follow him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

Retro Robots on the Battlefield
Daniel H. Wilson

Battlefield robots are armed, intelligent, and poised to change the face of modern warfare. At least, that’s what the pundits have been repeating for the last decade.

The proof seems to be in the air, sea, and on the ground. In the last few years, we’ve seen Predator unmanned aerial vehicles obliterating enemy convoys with Hellfire missiles. Samsung SGR-A1 sentry turrets man the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea, capable of autonomously seeking and shooting human targets. Meanwhile, American soldiers are lugging man-packable robots that can navigate rugged battlefields and defuse improvised explosive devices.

By all accounts, the future is now. What isn’t as obvious, however, is that this highly sophisticated “future of warfare” has been here for sixty plus-years. A wide variety of retro robots have been fighting our battles since the Korean War, and I think it’s about time we recognized some of these faithful soldiers.

Don’t worry, I’m not about to describe why land mines are technically robots. They’re not. The generally accepted definition of a robot is a mechanical artifact that can sense the environment, think about a decision, and then execute that decision in the real world. The sensing is done with sensors, like cameras; thinking typically done on a computational platform, like a computer; and the acting done with an end effector, like an arm or an afterburner. Land mines may be considered autonomous weapons—they certainly don’t want or need any help after deployment—but a simple trigger condition (such as being stepped on) does not meet the cognitive criteria of “thinking.”

So let’s save our praise for real robots, making real decisions in battle.

AQM-34 “Lightning Bug” Drone

We kick off our excursion into retro robots on the battlefield with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Pilotless aircraft began as aerial targets or just gyroscopically-guided unmanned missiles at the turn of the 20th century. By 1964, Beatlemania was sweeping across the United States, and the AQM-34 “Lightning Bug” drone was sweeping across Southeast Asia, conducting photo-reconnaissance missions for the Strategic Air Command 100th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing (SRW).

Developed from the bones of a target-practice drone, the Lightning Bug was deployable from a modified C-130 transport plane and capable of flying strategic routes at very low altitudes, collecting real-time video and taking photographs. The drone autonomously determined its own position, adjusted course, and navigated between waypoints over hundreds of miles. The SRW flew more than three thousand sorties between 1964 and 1975. Ultimately, the Lightning Bug retired two years before the first personal computers came on the market.

Mark (Mk) 48 Torpedo

Other retro robot warriors have teeth.

Consider the Mark (Mk) 48 torpedo. Operational in the U.S. Navy since 1972, the Mk-48 can navigate the distance to target autonomously, using active or passive sonar. On the active side, the torpedo emits sonar pings and listens for their echoes to detect the location of enemy subs. Passively, the torpedo uses a hydrophone to listen for enemies. If the smart torpedo misses on the first pass, it is capable of trying again until it runs out of fuel.

Like most robots, there is the option for remote control. As the Mk-48 leaves the launch tube, it trails a wire that allows a human operator to direct the torpedo past decoys and through any jamming employed by the enemy. After that, the torpedo is on its own. Navy Chief Engineer John Canning writes that a submariner once reported to him that you only had to answer two questions in order to use the Mk-48. (1) “Is the target in range?” and (2) “Do you want to kill it?”

Mk 60 CAPTOR Underwater Mine

But what if the target is not in range and you don’t know if you want to kill it?

Leave the job to another hardworking retro robot: The Mk 60 CAPTOR underwater mine, conceived in 1960 and in common use by 1979. Placed in the likely path of enemy vessels, the CAPTOR waits for months in deep water, listening for potential targets. Once detected, targeted submarines are autonomously classified by their sound signature and an attack plan formed. Once the enemy is in range, the CAPTOR deploys an acoustic homing torpedo that travels in a circular pattern to track down and destroy the target. The CAPTOR is a mine that isn’t willing to sit still and wait for its prey, sometimes described as a “mousetrap that chases the mouse.”

MK 15 Phalanx Close-In Weapons System

On the surface, autonomous guns have been around for more than three decades. The MK 15 Phalanx Close-In Weapons System looks like an oversized R2D2 with twin 20-millimeter rapid-fire gun mounts—and that might not be a coincidence. The system became operational in 1977, the same year Star Wars was released.

Mounted to US Navy ships, the MK 15 is designed to knock out fast-moving threats that have already breached outer fleet defenses. Necessarily operating faster than human reactions allow, the MK 15 can shoot down anti-ship missiles or fixed-wing aircraft traveling at high speeds. This autonomous gun does its job start to finish: Searching for threats, detecting them, evaluating them, acquiring targets, tracking them, firing on them, destroying them, assessing the kill and then making a decision to cease fire. Since the late 1970s, the MK 15 has been a cornerstone of self-defense aboard almost every class of Navy ship.

These are just a few of the many unsung retro robot warriors that have been fighting on battlefields around the world since before Neil Armstrong decided to try on a space suit. Even so, the robotic future of warfare perennially seems to be just over the horizon. Although it’s exhilarating to imagine that we are on the verge of a never-before-seen technological transformation, the truth is that we’re in the middle of a robotic revolution, not on the cutting edge.

Daniel H. Wilson is a roboticist, contributing editor to Popular Mechanics, and author of seven books, including How to Survive a Robot Uprising and Robopocalypse. His website at www.danielhwilson.com.

Woman Leaves Room
Robert Reed

She wears a smile. I like her smile, nervous and maybe a little scared, sweet and somewhat lonely. She wears jeans and a sheer green blouse and comfortable sandals and rings on two fingers and a glass patch across one eye. Standing at her end of the room, she asks how I feel. I feel fine. I tell her so and I tell her my name, and she puts her hands together and says that’s a nice name. I ask to hear hers, but she says no. Then she laughs and says that she wants to be a creature of secrets. Both of us laugh and watch each other. Her smile changes as she makes herself ready for what happens next. I read her face, her body. She wants me to speak. The perfect words offer themselves to me, and I open my mouth. But there comes a sound—an important urgent note—and the glass patch turns opaque, hiding one of those pretty brown eyes.

She takes a quick deep breath, watching what I can’t see. Seconds pass. Her shoulders drop and she widens her stance, absorbing some burden. Then the patch clears, and she tells me what I have already guessed. Something has happened; something needs her immediate attention. Please be patient, please, she says. Then she promises to be right back.

I watch her turn away. I watch her legs and long back and the dark brown hair pushed into a sloppy, temporary bun. A purse waits in the chair. She picks it up and hangs it on her shoulder. Her next two steps are quick but then she slows. Doubt and regret take hold as she reaches the open door. Entering the hallway, she almost looks back at me. She wants to and doesn’t want to, and her face keeps changing. She feels sad and I’m sure that she is scared. But whatever the problem, she wants to smile, not quite meeting my eyes with her final expression, and I wave a hand and wish her well, but she has already vanished down the hallway.

The room is my room. The chairs and long sofa are familiar and look comfortable, and I know how each would feel if I sat. But I don’t sit. Standing is most natural, and it takes no energy. The carpet beneath me is soft and deep and wonderfully warm on bare feet. I stand where I am and wait and wait. The walls are white and decorated with framed paintings of haystacks, and there is a switch beside the door and a fan and light on the ceiling. The light burns blue. The fan turns, clicking and wobbling slightly with each rotation. A window is on my right, but its blinds are drawn and dark. Behind me is another door. I could turn and see what it offers, but I don’t. I am waiting. She is gone but will return, and she has to appear inside the first door, and I spend nothing, not even time, waiting for what I remember best, which is her pretty face.

A similar face appears. But this is a man wearing white trousers and a black shirt and glove-like shoes and no jewelry and no eye patch. He stands on the other side of the door, in the hallway, holding his hands in front of himself much as she did. He stares at me and says nothing. I ask who he is. He blinks and steps back and asks who I am. I tell him. And he laughs nervously. I don’t know why I like the sound of laughter so much. He repeats my name and asks new questions, and I answer what I can answer while smiling at him, wondering how to make this man laugh again.

Do I know what I am meant to be, he asks. Which is a very different question than asking who I am.

I have no answer to give.

Then he lists names, one after another, waiting for me to recognize any of them. I don’t. That’s not surprising, he says. I was only begun and then left, which is too bad. Which is sad. I nod and smile politely. Then he asks if I have ever seen anybody else, and I describe the woman who just left the room. That’s how I get him to laugh again. But it is a nervous little laugh dissolving into sharp, confused emotions.

That woman was my mother, he says. He claims that thirty-one years have passed and she barely started me before something happened to her, but he doesn’t explain. This is all unexpected. I am not expected.

I nod and smile, watching him cry.

He wants to hear about the woman.

I tell him everything.

And then she left?

I tell how the patch darkened, interrupting us, and I describe the purse and how she carried it and the last troubled look that she showed me, and what does it mean that I’m not finished?

It means you are small and nearly invisible, he says. It means that you have existed for three decades without anybody noticing.

But time has no weight. No object outside this room has consequences, and this young man standing out in the hallway is no more real than the painted haystacks on the walls. What I want is for the woman to return. I want her weight and reality, and that’s what I tell this stranger.

Shaking his head, he tells me that I am unreal.

Why he would lie is a mystery.

He mentions his father and cries while looking at me. Do I know that his father died before he was born?

An unreal person can never be born, I think.

You were begun but only just begun, he keeps saying. Then he admits that he doesn’t know what to do with me. As if he has any say in these matters. His final act is to turn and vanish, never trying to step inside the room.

But he wasn’t real to begin with. I know this. What cannot stand beside me is false and suspicious, and the lesson gives me more weight, more substance, the epiphany carrying me forward.

Another man appears.

Like the first man, he cannot or will not step out of the hallway. He looks at my face and body and face again. He wears a necklace and sturdy boots and odd clothes that can’t stay one color. He says that it took him forever to find me, and finding me was the easiest part of his job. Operating systems were changed after the Cleansing. He had to resurrect codes and passwords and build machines that haven’t existed in quite some time. Then on top of that, he had to master a dialect that died off ages ago.

He wants to know if he’s making any sense.

He is a madman and I tell him so.

I found your file logs, he says, laughing and nodding. Stored in another server and mislabeled, but that was just another stumbling block.

I don’t know what that means.

He claims that his great-grandfather was the last person to visit me.

Phantoms like to tell stories. I nod politely at his story, saying nothing.

He tells me that the man lived to be one hundred and fifty, but he died recently. There was a will, and my location was mentioned in the will. Until then I was a family legend—a legend wrapped around twin tragedies. His great grandfather’s father was killed in the Fourth Gulf War, and his great-great-grandmother missed him terribly. She was the one who began me. She spent quite a lot of money, using medical records and digital files to create a facsimile of her soul mate. And she would have finished me, at least as far as the software of the day would have allowed. But her son was hurt at daycare. He fell and cut himself, and she was hurrying to the hospital when a stupid kid driver shut off his car’s autopilot and ran her down in the street. The boy wasn’t seriously hurt. What mattered was that the boy, his great-grandfather, was three and orphaned, and a drunken aunt ended up raising him, and for the rest of his many, many days, that man felt cheated and miserable.

I listen to every word, nodding patiently.

He wants to know what I think of the story.

He is crazy but I prefer to say nothing.

Frowning, he tells me that a great deal of work brought him to this point. He says that I should be more appreciative and impressed. Then he asks if I understand how I managed to survive for this long.

But no time has passed, I reply.

He waves a hand, dismissing my words. You are very small, he says. Tiny files that are never opened can resist corruption.

I am not small. I am everything.

He has copied me, he claims. He says that he intends to finish the new copy, as best he can. But he will leave the original alone.

Pausing, he waits for my thanks.

I say nothing, showing him a grim, suspicious face.

But you do need clothes, he says.

Except this is how I am.

My great-great grandma had some plan for you, he says. But I won’t think about that, he says. And besides, clothes won’t take much room in the file.

My body feels different.

Much better, he says, and steps out of view.

Time becomes real when the mind has great work to do. My first eternity is spent picking at the trousers and shirt, eroding them until they fall away, threads of changing color sprawled across the eternal carpet.

Yet nothing is eternal. Each of the haystacks begins with the same pleasantly rounded shape, but some have turned lumpy and ragged at the edges, while my favorite stack has a large gap eaten through its middle. And I remember the straw having colors instead of that faded uniform gray. And I remember the sofa being soft buttery yellow, and the room’s walls were never this rough looking, and the colored threads have vanished entirely, which seems good. But the carpet looks softer and feels softer than seems right, my feet practically melting into their nature.

Portions of my room are falling apart.

As an experiment, I study the nearest haystack until I know it perfectly, and then I shut my eyes and wait and wait and wait still longer, remembering everything; when I look again the painting has changed but I can’t seem to decide how it has changed. Which means the problem perhaps lies in my memory, or maybe with my perishable mind.

Fear gives me ideas.

My legs have never moved and they don’t know how. I have to teach them to walk, one after the other. Each step requires learning and practice and more time than I can hope to measure. But at least my one hand knows how to reach out and grab hold. I push at the window’s blinds, but for all of my effort, nothing is visible except a dull grayish-black rectangle that means nothing to me.

Stepping backwards is more difficult than walking forwards. But turning around is nearly impossible, and I give up. In little steps, I retreat to the place where I began. The carpet remembers my feet, but the carpet feels only half-real. Or my feet are beginning to dissolve. The woman will be here soon. I tell myself that even when I don’t believe it, and the fear grows worse. I start to look at my favorite hand, studying each finger, noting how the flesh has grown hairless and very simple, the nails on the end of every finger swallowed by the simple skin.

A stranger suddenly comes to the door.

Hello, it says.

What it looks like is impossible to describe. I have no words to hang on what I see, and maybe there is nothing to see. But my feeling is that the visitor is smiling and happy, and it sounds like a happy voice asking how I am feeling.

I am nearly dead, I say.

There is death and there is life, it tells me. You are still one thing, which means you are not the other.

I am alive.

It claims that I am lucky. It tells me much about systems and files and the history of machines that have survived in their sleep mode, lasting thousands of years past every estimate of what was possible.

I am a fluke and alive, and my guest says something about tidying the room and me.

The work takes no time.

My favorite hand is the way it began. My favorite haystack is rather like it began in terms of color and shape. Legs that never moved until recently barely complain when I walk across the room. It never occurred to me that I could reach into the haystack paintings, touching those mounds of dead grass. Some feel cool, some warm. I sing out my pleasure, and even my voice feels new.

My guest watches me, making small last adjustments.

Because it is proper, I thank it for its help.

But the original file is gone now, it says.

I ask what that means.

It tells me that I am a copy of the file, filtered and enhanced according to the best tools available.

Once more, I offer my thanks.

And with a voice that conveys importance, my guest tells me that I have a new purpose. What I am will be copied once more, but this time as a kind of light that can pierce dust and distance and might never end its travels across the galaxy and beyond.

I don’t understand, and I tell it so.

Then my friend does one last task, and everything is apparent to me.

I ask when am I going to be sent.

In another few moments, it promises.

For the last time, I thank my benefactor. Then I let my legs turn me around, looking at the door that was always behind me.

A second room waits. The bed is longer than it is wide and rectangular and neatly made. Pillows are stacked high against the headboard, and identical nightstands sport tall candles that have not stopped burning in some great span of time. I know this other room. I think of her and the room and step toward the door and then suffer for my eagerness.

What is wrong? asks a new voice.

I turn back. A creature with many arms stands in the hallway.

You appear agitated, says the creature.

Which is true, but I am not sure why I feel this way. I stare into a face that seems buried in the creature’s chest, hanging word after inadequate word on my emotions.

It listens.

I pause.

You are interesting, says the creature.

I am nothing but a file with a name and a few rough qualities.

But my new companion dismisses my harsh outlook. Every arm moves, drawing complex shapes in the air. You are part of a large cultural package, it says, and do you know how long you have been traveling in space?

I could guess, I say. I could invent infinite estimates, all but one of them wrong.

And then it laughs, revealing a reassuring humor. Even this strange laugh makes me happier than I was before.

An eight billion year voyage, it says.

That seems like an unlikely, preposterous figure, and it shakes me.

It explains that it can’t determine which star was mine, and my galaxy barely wears a name, and most of the data that came with me has been lost to the vagaries of time and the great distance being covered.

But here you stand, it says.

I am standing, but sad. My savior is full of hearty laughter, yet I feel sick and sorry and lost.

She is gone forever, I say.

It knows whom I am talking about. It measures my misery and learns what it can from my longing, and then at the end, as if delivering the punch line of a joke, it laughs and says:

But the universe is infinite, and in too many ways to count.

I don’t know what that means.

Infinite means eternal, it says, and eternal means that nothing is unthinkable, and what can be imagined is inevitable.

But when? I ask.

And again, the alien laughs, saying:

Are you hearing me? There is no such monster as “when.”

I am a file and I am protected and I don’t know where I am or how well I am protected. Time stretches, and I suspect that I exist mostly inside some sleep mode, probably initiating only when I blink my eyes.

Once again, the two rooms decay and the haystacks fall apart and I forget how to move and forget a great deal more too.

Beyond the walls, worlds die and dissolve away.

Little flickers tear the walls to pieces, but the pieces knit themselves back together, and I wait, and wait, and then she comes through the door once again. Her clothes are different. There is no eye patch and no purse. But while I am uncertain about much, I know that beautiful face.

It took me a little while, she explains.

She walks toward me, pulling the pins out of her brown hair.

And that’s when I remember what I was going to tell her that first time that we met.

I won’t ever let you out of this room, darling.

I say it now.

She thinks that is funny and wonderful, and laughs.

And in another moment, I can’t remember anything else that ever happened. The universe is nothing but the two of us holding each other, laughing ourselves sick.

Robert Reed is the author of more than two hundred works of short science fiction, with the occasional fantasy and odd horror thrown into the mix. He has also published various novels, including Marrow and The Well of Stars, two epic tales about a world-sized starship taking a lap around the galaxy. His novella, “A Billion Eves,” won the Hugo in 2007. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska with his wife and daughter, and a computer jammed with forgotten files.

Author Spotlight: Robert Reed
Stacey Friedberg

In this Author Spotlight, we asked author Robert Reed to tell us a bit about the background of his story for Lightspeed, ”Woman Leaves Room.”

What inspired you to write “Woman Leaves Room?” What was the process like?

Memory is suspect, but I did suffer the image of a woman leaving a room and then not returning for a great long while. I think I was watching TV. Maybe something on the screen triggered the image—a similar scene or whatnot. I don’t know and don’t care. I think up images all the time, and, like virtual particles, most of them vanish without notice. This one didn’t. Not long after, I made a file called “Woman Leaves Room” and set it aside. Not long after that, I found myself trying to write in the pre-dawn hours and faced several empty files, and on the spur of the moment, I decided to make the story about files being left alone and eventually lost. I wrote a few paragraphs and set it aside for a few weeks, which is typical, and then I went back to the file and finished it in a few days, without incident or much anguish. At least that’s what I remember, but again, memory is suspect.

Many of the characters in this story have been abandoned by their creators. In fact, the narrator spends most of this story being “lost,” with others unable to locate him or his origins. What do you think this says about humanity, that we let such important things slide away?

I don’t believe people let things slide away. It’s the nature of the universe that everything dissolves into oblivion and by every route possible, but human beings invest a lot of cleverness trying to cling to past events, real or imagined. And because we can’t succeed, we get angry and frustrated and feel guilty. Except the Buddhists, who say, “Fuck that,” and go on inside the moment.

The protagonist doesn’t ever seem to believe others when they tell him how much time has passed. In fact, he doesn’t believe most of what the first two men who visit him say. Why is this?

Only the woman is real to him. That’s the nature of his program. Everything else looks and feels contrived.

On your website you mention that you love to run. Are there any other activities that you enjoy? Do you feel that running helps clear your head, or encourages the creative process?

Running is a joy, yes. And maybe it helps the creative process. The medical literature gives evidence of a profound brain-body relationship. But mostly I run because I learned long ago that if I wanted to flatten out my moods, I needed hard physical effort. Running is best because I genuinely enjoy it and because it takes a lot less time than biking or swimming, and due to some fluke in my body, I seem able to still do it in my mid-fifties.

Other joys: I have ponds and aquariums and hundreds of fish that rise to the surface when I appear. I like to read, although I’m not the voracious indiscriminate reader that I was thirty years ago. Science and apocalyptic science and history are common themes. Right now, I’m enjoying Persian Fire with Darius and the crazy-ass Spartans.

You’re extremely prolific. How on Earth do you come up with so many different things to write about?

Here’s one obvious explanation: I started selling at the beginning of the Computer Age, and I wrote hard every day of the week, selling the occasional titles. Although it’s not a hard-and-fast rule, I seem to have grown more prolific with time, investing less effort and time in my work. I’ve learned to know when the story goes wrong and quit immediately, and I certainly have an easier time selling what I finish. From those clues I think there is an obvious answer. I am not human. I am a piece of software or an alien implant, and my output improves as the Internet grows more sophisticated.

There’s no reason to take that idea seriously, I hope. But still, that popped into my head while thinking about the question. My head is always generating story ideas, and I don’t know why, and I know better than to get in my head’s way.

In an interview with SF Signal, you discussed your fear of time travel. “Woman Leaves Room” deals largely with large jumps in time, resulting in loss for the narrator. Do you think about the passage of time a lot? How does it affect your writing?

I grew up loving dinosaurs and being appalled by the distance between them and a ten year-old boy. Time has always been a vast ocean. Last week is more remote than Alpha Centauri, and I guess that kind of thinking can prey on a soul. Which makes the lost-file scenario into an appealing method of time travel, at least for to serve one small story.

If you could make a file copy of someone—anyone—from the past, present, or future, who would it be and why?

Winston Churchill’s mother, and in particular, while she was a young woman. And no, I’m not going to explain why.

What’s next for you? What are some of the projects you’re working on now?

I always work on stories. That never changes. What I’m working on today will be finished by the time people read this. I intend to sell or at least publish another Marrow novel in 2011. (“At least publish” implies some kind of print-on-demand scenario. I am strongly considering going to the Cory Doctorow model for selling my work.) I’m also doing some consulting work that I’m not free or willing to discuss, except to say that it is fun and maybe important.

Stacey Friedberg is a recent graduate of Emerson College, where she earned her BFA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing. She enjoys reading, writing, and cooking. You can follow her (very infrequent) tweets via @stacabird.

Immortal Jellyfish and Transhuman You
Ekaterina Sedia

Ah, immortality: the ever-elusive dream of both utopians and transhumanists. To us, death is a necessary evil, but to many organisms, plants and fungi that form clonal colonies, it’s but a technicality. Now it seems that some organisms managed to ditch it altogether.

Turritopsis nutricula is a tiny jellyfish from the Caribbean, a mere 5 mm in diameter, which has achieved the impressive feat of not dying. This trait is possibly shared with its less exotic cousin Hydra. T. nutricula is a hydrozoan, a class of simple aquatic animals called cnidarians. Like most of the members of this group, it has a hydroid, or polyp stage, as well as a free-swimming, sexually-reproducing medusoid, or jellyfish, stage.

What makes T. nutricula different from all other animals is that instead of dying some time after sexual reproduction, as most medusoids do, it reverts back to the polyp stage. It seems to be able to go through this process over and over again. It’s as if an old person could revert back to toddlerdom, and go through the kindergarten, college, and other milestones in order as many times as they pleased.

The process of such reversal is known as transdifferentiation. Generally, we start life as a ball of undifferentiated cells (stem cells are an example), and as we grow and develop, they differentiate into different types, choosing their cellular fates. In most organisms, this process is not reversible—despite many claims that lack of exercise makes your muscles turn into fat, humans simply don’t work that way. But some jellyfish do, and use the process to revert from a free swimming medusa to a tiny, asexual hydroid.

Of course, mere biological age is not the only thing that makes us grow old: Many of us remember our excitement over Dolly the sheep and quick disappointment at the realization that she wasn’t a very good sheep. Her cellular clock was that of an older animal, and she passed away after only 6 years, from a disease affecting older sheep.

Telomeres—repeating DNA sequences that protect the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes—shorten with each round of DNA replication, and the enzyme telomerase repairs them, increasing their length. Trouble is, telomerase is usually active early in life. In most adult cells telomerase is not active, and as we age, our cellular death clock is ticking along, the ends of our chromosomes fraying with each cell division. When the telomeres reach the critical length, the Hayflick limit, the cell will stop dividing and die. Each cell comes with built-in limit on a number of divisions it can undergo. The only antidote to this is an active telomerase, which can restore the telomeres to their original length.

The telomerase of the cnidarians, of which T. nutricula and Hydra are members, seems to be active throughout their lifespan. There are also some studies indicating that T. nutricula’s neat trick of reverting back to its polyp stage might not only recapture its lost youth but also the telomerase activity, which is the real villain responsible for our senescence.

Ever since the role of telomerase was discovered, it seemed that restoring telomerase activity in adults would be an easy way to combating senescence (and even those of us who believe in benefits of a limited time span agree that biological aging itself is an unpleasant hassle, what with creaky joints and strange lumps). Unfortunately, telomerase activity in adults is also associated with cancer—after all, cancerous cells are truly immortal, since they have an active telomerase that enables them to divide without limits. Some of the oldest cell lines we have include human cancer cells that have outlived people they originated in. A good example of it is HeLa cell line, grown in culture since 1951 from biopsy cells obtained from Henrietta Lacks who died of cancer soon after. The descendants of her cells have been used to test Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine, as well and many cancer and AIDS drugs. They were also used in studies of human genome. The current estimate is that HeLa line has been used in 60,000 scientific studies.

It’s difficult not to envy the tiny T. nutricula then, with its ability to re-live its lost developmental stages and its active telomerase that doesn’t result in tumors. But cnidarians are not the only immortal organisms, or close to it. Lobsters and giant tortoises, while mortal, do not experience senescence as we know it. Many plants live staggeringly long—some bristlecone pines reach ages of 5,000 years—a good chunk of human civilization.

Additionally, many plants that reproduce asexually form clonal colonies (some fungi do something similar). While each individual member of the colony is mortal, the whole (in its singular genetic makeup) lives on, indefinitely. Since in many cases the members, called ramets, remain connected to each other by shared root system, even the boundaries of what constitutes an individual become elusive.

Could our future immortality lie in a shared consciousness then, rather than extending a life of a single individual? Whatever the case, I’m certain that no single organism, cnidarian or plant, holds a definitive answer. And if we ever manage to make ourselves immortal, I hope we’ll also manage to make ourselves smaller: even the little harmless T. nutricula is spreading all around the world. Imagine what immortal humans would do!

Ekaterina Sedia holds a PhD in Ecology and Evolution, and her popular science articles have appeared in Clarkesworld. She works as an associate professor of biology at a state liberal arts college in New Jersey, and in her spare time she writes fantasy novels and short stories, and edits anthologies. Visit her at www.ekaterinasedia.com.

Coming Attractions

Coming up in April, in Lightspeed, we have original fiction by new authors An Owomoyela (“All That Touches the Air”) and Tom Crosshill (“Mama, We are Zhenya, Your Son”), plus reprints by Bruce Sterling (“Maneki Neko”) and Anne McCaffrey (“Velvet Fields”). All that plus our usual assortment of nonfiction, podcasts, and author spotlights. It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed!

Thanks for reading!