Editorial, April 2011
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue eleven of Lightspeed!

In case you missed it last month, we here at Lightspeed HQ have been buzzing about the exciting news that two of our stories—“I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno” by Vylar Kaftan and “Arvies” by Adam-Troy Castro—have been named finalists for the Nebula Award. We are hugely honored that these two stories have been selected as finalists for one of our field’s most prestigious awards, so we would like to extend our most heartfelt congratulations to Vylar and Adam-Troy. (For the full list of nominees, visit sfwa.org.)

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

In “All That Touches the Air,” author An Owomoyela explores the boundaries of differing moralities, as humanity tries to live alongside an unlikely ally—a parasitic being that believes only in natural law.

While alien parasites are fun to read about, there are plenty of real parasites right here on Earth. And Wendy Wagner will make your skin crawl when she tells you about them in “Parasitic Puppet-Masters.”

In “Maneki Neko” Bruce Sterling takes us to a networked Tokyo, where strangers offer anonymous gifts, and what is needed is freely given without question.

Then, Jeff Lester explores the idea of the “gift-economy” as it exists in the real world and in other fictions in “TANSTAAFL: There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch.”

Tom Crosshill brings us a story of a boy, his dog, a lab, and many universes in “Mama, We are Zhenya, Your Son.”

In this universe, Brad Deutsch takes us on a guided tour of quantum mechanics and the multiple universes in “The Many Worlds Interpretation Theory: Having Your Cake and Eating it Two, and Three, and Four…”

“Velvet Fields,” by Anne McCaffrey, is a tale of a newly-settled world, the consequence of ignorance and the price people of conscience might pay for it.

And in our feature interview this month, Erin Stocks talks with Hugo Award-winner Elizabeth Bear about genre boundaries, generation ships, and how to make ginger beer.

That about does it for our fiction and nonfiction selections for April, but be sure to also look for our author and artist spotlights, and keep an ear out for our podcasts.

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.

All That Touches the Air
An Owomoyela

When I was ten, I saw a man named Menley brought out to the Ocean of Starve. Thirty of us colonials gathered around, sweating in our envirosuits under the cerulean sky, while bailiffs flashed radio signals into the Ocean. Soon enough the silvery Vosth fog swarmed up and we watched the bailiffs take off Menley’s suit, helmet first. They worked down his body until every inch of his skin was exposed.

Every. Last. Inch.

Menley was mad. Colonist’s dementia. Born on Earth, he was one of the unlucky six-point-three percent who set down outside the solar system in strange atmospheres, gravities, rates of orbit and rotation, and just snapped because everything was almost like Earth, but wasn’t quite right. In his dementia, he’d defecated somewhere public; uncouth of him, but it wouldn’t have got him thrown to the Ocean except that the governors were fed up with limited resources and strict colonial bylaws and Earth’s fuck off on your own attitude, and Menley crapping on the communal lawns was the last insult they could take. He was nobody, here on Predonia. He was a madman. No one would miss him.

The fog crawled out of the water and over his body, colonizing his pores, permeating bone and tissue, bleeding off his ability to yell or fight back.

He was on his side in a convulsion before the Vosth parasites took his motor functions and stood his body up. They turned around and staggered into the Ocean of Starve, and it was eight years before I saw Menley again.

Before that, when I was sixteen, I was studying hydroponics and genetic selection. In the heat of the greenhouse, everyone could notice that I wore long clothing, high collars, gloves. I’d just passed the civics tests and become a voting adult, and that meant dressing in another envirosuit and going out to the Ocean again. The auditor sat me down in a comm booth and the Vosth swarmed into its speakers. The voice they synthesized was tinny and inhuman.

We tell our history of this colony, they said. You came past the shell of atmosphere. We were at that time the dominant species. You made your colonies in the open air. We harvested the utility of your bodies, but you proved sentience and sapience and an understanding was formed.

You would keep your colony to lands prescribed for you. You would make shells against our atmosphere. You would accept our law.

All that touches the air belongs to us.

What touches the air is ours.

Endria was a prodigy. She passed her civics tests at thirteen. She was also stupid.

After two years in hydroponics, I graduated to waste reclamation, specialty in chemical-accelerated blackwater decomposition. No one wanted the job, so the compensation was great—and it came with a hazard suit. I used to take a sterile shower in the waste facility and walk to my room in my suit, past the airlock that led to the open air. That’s where I caught Endria.

Emancipated adults weren’t beholden to curfew, so she was out unsupervised. She was also opening the door without an envirosuit on.

I ran up to stop her and pulled her hand from the control panel. “Hey!”

She wrenched her hand away. No thanks there. “What are you doing?”

“What are you doing?” I asked back. “You’re endangering the colony! I should report you.”

“Is it my civic or personal responsibility to leave people out there when they’re trying to get in?”

I looked through the porthole to see what she was talking about. I had no peripheral vision in the suit, so I hadn’t seen anyone in the airlock. But Endria was right: Someone was trying to get in.

Menley was trying to get in.

He looked the same: Silvery skin, dead expression, eyes and muscles moving like the Vosth could work out how each part of his face functioned but couldn’t put it all together. I jumped back. I thought I could feel Vosth crawling inside my envirosuit.

“He’s not allowed in,” I said. “I’m contacting Security Response.”

“Why isn’t he?”

Of all the idiotic questions. “He’s been taken over by the Vosth!”

“And we maintain a civil, reciprocal policy toward them,” Endria said. “We’re allowed in their territory without notification, so they should be allowed in ours.”

Besides the Vosth, there was nothing I hated more than someone who’d just come out of a civics test. “Unless we take them over when they wander in, it’s not reciprocal,” I said. Vosth-Menley put his hand against the porthole; his silver fingers squished against the composite. I stepped back. “You know it all; who gets notified if an infested colonist tries to walk into the habitat?”

Her face screwed up. I guess that wasn’t on her exam.

“I’ll find out,” she said, turning on her heel. “Don’t create an interspecies incident while I’m gone.”

She flounced away.

I turned back to the porthole, where Vosth-Menley had smooshed his nose up against the composite as well. I knocked my helmet against the door.

“Leave,” I told him. Them. It.

He stared, dead eyes unblinking, then slouched away.

I didn’t sleep that night. My brain played old-Earth zombie flicks whenever I closed my eyes, staffed by silver monstrosities instead of rotting corpses. Endria thought I’d create an interspecies incident; I thought about how many people would be trapped without e-suits if a Vosth infestation broke out. How many people would be screaming and convulsing and then just staggering around with dead silver eyes, soft hands pressing into portholes, skin teeming with parasites ready to crawl into anyone they saw.

I talked to the governor on duty the next day, who confirmed that the colony would “strongly prefer” if the Vosth weren’t allowed to walk around in naked fleshsuits inside the habitat. She even sent out a public memo.

Three days later, Endria came to give me crap about it. The way she walked into my lab, she looked like someone took one of the governors, shrunk them, and reworked their face to fit that impish craze back in the ‘20s. She even had a datapad, and a button-up tunic under her hygienic jacket. “I’m not going to enjoy this, am I?” I asked.

“I came to interview you about civil law and the Vosth,” she said. “It’s for a primary certification in government apprenticeship. I’m going to be a governor by the time I’m sixteen.”

I stared at her.

“It’s part of a civics certification, so I can make you answer,” she added.

Wonderful. “After these titrations,” I told her.

Endria went to one of the counters and boosted herself onto it, dropped her datapad beside her, and reached into a pocket to pull out something colorful and probably fragrant and nutrient-scarce. “That’s okay. We can make small talk while you’re working. I know titration isn’t demanding on the linguistic portions of your brain.”

Excepting the Vosth, there was nothing I hated more than people who thought they knew more about my work than I did.

“Sit quietly,” I said. “I’ll be with you shortly.”

To my surprise, she actually sat quietly.

To my annoyance, that lasted through a total of one titration and a half.

“I’m going to interview you about the sentence passed on Ken Menley in colony record zero-zero-zero-three-zero-four,” she said. “According to my research, you were the youngest person there, as well as the only person there to meet Menley again. You have a unique perspective on Vosth-human interactions. After the incident a few nights ago I thought it would be a good idea to focus my paper on them.”

“My perspective,” I started to say, but thought better of calling the Vosth names usually reserved for human excrement. They were shit, they were horrifying, they were waiting out there to crawl inside us, and if Endria was going to be a governor by age sixteen she’d probably have the authority to rehabilitate me by sixteen and a half. I didn’t want her thinking I needed my opinions revised. “I have no perspective. I don’t deal with them.”

Endria rolled the candy around in her mouth. “I don’t think any of my friends are friends with you,” she said. “Isn’t it weird to go past two degrees of separation?”

“Wouldn’t know,” I said. My primary degrees of separation were limited to my supervisor and the quartermaster I requisitioned e-suits from. I wouldn’t call either of them friends.

Endria kicked her heels, tilting her head so far her ear rested on her shoulder. “Everyone thinks you’re a creep because you never take that e-suit off.”

“That’s nice,” I said.

“Are you afraid of the Vosth?” Endria asked. She said it like that was unreasonable.

“I have a healthy skepticism that they’re good neighbors,” I said.

“And that’s why you wear an e-suit?”

“No,” I said, “that’s why I’m active in colonial politics and took the civics track with an emphasis on interspecies diplomacy.” I set down the beaker I was working with. For irony.

Endria sucked on her teeth, then gave me a smile I couldn’t read. “You could go into Vosth research. It’s a promising new area of scientific inquiry.”

I pushed the beaker aside. “What new area? We’ve been here for a generation. Bureaucracy is slow, but it’s not that slow.”

“It’s a hard science, not sociological,” she said. “We couldn’t do that before. I don’t know much about it, but there’s all sorts of government appropriations earmarked for it. Don’t you read the public accounting?”

I turned to look at her. She was kicking her heels against the table.

“You should go into Vosth research, and you should use your experience with Menley to open up a line of inquiry. It’s probably xenobiology or something, but it might be fertile ground for new discoveries. Then you could be the colony’s expert on the Vosth. Interspecies relations are an important part of this colony. That’s why I’m writing a paper on them for my civics certification.”

“I’m not getting this titration done, am I?”

Endria smiled, and said the words most feared by common citizens interacting with civil law. “This will only take a minute.”

It wasn’t against the law to go outside the compound, and some people liked the sunlight. Some people—daredevils and risk-takers—even enjoyed the fresh air. As for me, I passed the front door every time I got off work and always felt like I was walking along the edge of a cliff. I’d tried taking different routes but that made it worse somehow, like if I didn’t keep my eye on it, the airlock would blow out and let these seething waves of silver flow in and I wouldn’t know until I got back to my shower or had to switch out my suit for cleaning. Or I’d be opening my faceplate for dinner and feel something else on my lips, and there would be the Vosth, crawling inside. I had trouble eating if I didn’t walk past the airlock to make sure it was closed.

Yeah, Menley made that worse.

I started staring at the airlock, expecting to see his face squashed up against it. Maybe he was just outside, seconds away from getting some idiot like Endria to let him in. People walked past me, and I could hear them talking in low tones while I watched the airlock, like maybe I’d gone into an absence seizure and they should get someone to haul me away. And then they could have me investigated for colonist’s dementia despite the fact that I’d been born here. And they could take me out to the Ocean of Starve...

After two nights I realized if I didn’t step outside to make sure the Vosth weren’t coming with a swarm, I was heading for a paranoid fugue.

Actually walking out took two more nights because I couldn’t stand to open the airlock myself. I finally saw a couple strolling out as I passed, e-suited hand in e-suited hand, and I fell in behind them.

The airlock and the outside were the only places I could be anonymous in my e-suit. The couple didn’t even cross to the other side of the enclosure as it cycled the air and opened the outer door.

The grass was teal-green. I hear it’s less blue on Earth, and the sky is less green, but I was just glad neither one was silver. The sunlight was strong and golden, the clouds were mercifully white, and there wasn’t a trace of fog to be seen. So that was good. For the moment.

The Ocean of Starve was a good ten-minute hike away, and I didn’t want to get near it. I walked around the habitat instead, eyeing the horizon in the Ocean’s direction. I’d made it about a half-kilometer around the periphery when I caught a flash of silver out of the corner of my eye and jumped, ready for it to be a trick of the light or a metal component on the eggshell exterior of the dome.

No. It was Menley.

I screamed.

The scream instinct isn’t one of evolution’s better moves. Actually, it’s a terrible idea. The instant sound left my mouth Menley turned and dragged himself toward me. I considered running, but I had this image of tripping, and either losing a boot or ripping a hole in my e-suit.

Menley staggered up and stared at me. I took a step back. Menley turned his head like he wasn’t sure which eye got a better view, and I stepped back again.

After about a minute of this, I said “You really want inside the compound, don’t you?”

The Vosth opened Menley’s mouth. His nostrils flared. I guess they were doing something like they did to the speakers in the audience booth—vibrating the equipment. The voice, if you wanted to call it that, was quiet and reedy. We are the Vosth.

“I know that,” I said, and took another step back from them. Him. Vosth-Menley.

You will let us inside? he asked, with an artificial rise to his voice. I guess the Vosth had to telegraph their questions. Maybe they weren’t used to asking.

“No,” I told him.

He shifted his weight forward and ignored my answer. The Vosth are allowed inside your partition shell?

“Look what you do to people,” I said. “No, you’re not allowed inside.”

This is natural, they said, and I had no idea if that was supposed to be an argument or agreement.

“What?”

Take off your suit, Vosth-Menley said.

“Hell no.”

The air creates a pleasurable sensation on human skin.

“And the Vosth create a pleasant infestation?”

We will promise not to take you.

If they had to tell me, I wasn’t trusting them. “Why do you want me to?”

Do you want to? the Vosth asked.

I checked the seal on my suit.

Take off your suit, Vosth-Menley said again.

“I’m going home now,” I answered, and ran for the compound door.

Endria was in the canteen, sitting on a table, watching a slow-wave newsfeed from Earth and nibbling on a finger sandwich, and I was annoyed to run into her there. I was also annoyed that it took me that long to run into her, after trying to run into her in the library, the courthouse auditorium, the promenade and my lab.

Endria just annoyed me.

I dodged a few people on their rest hours and walked up to her table, putting my hands down on it. I hadn’t sterilized them after being outside and was technically breeching a bylaw or two, but that didn’t occur to me. I guess I was lucky Endria didn’t perform a civilian arrest.

“One,” I said, “I don’t want anything to do with the Vosth in a lab, or outside of one, and two, in no more than thirty seconds, explain Vosth legal rights outside the colony compound.”

Endria jumped, kicking over the chair her feet were resting on, and looking agape at me in the middle of a bite of sandwich. Sweet schadenfreude: The first word out of her mouth was the none-too-smart: “Uh.”

Of course, she regrouped quickly.

“First of all, the Vosth don’t believe in civil or social law,” she said. “Just natural law. So the treaty we have isn’t really a treaty, just them explaining what they do so we had the option not to let them. We don’t have legal recourse. It’s like that inside the colony, too—we can adjust the air system to filter them out and kill them, so they know we’re in charge in here and don’t try to come inside. Except for Menley, but that’s weird, and that’s why I’m doing a paper. Did you find anything out?”

I ignored that. “And he doesn’t act like the other—how many other infested colonists are there?”

She shrugged. “A lot. Like, more than forty. A few of them were killed by panicked colonists, though. We don’t know much about them. In the last hundred records, Menley’s the only—”

“Vosth-Menley,” I corrected.

Endria rolled her eyes. “Yeah, that. Whatever. Vosth-Menley is the only one to make contact with us. There’s actually this theory that the rest are off building a civilization now that the Vosth have opposable thumbs. Even if it’s only, like, eighty opposable thumbs.”

The base of my neck itched. Fortunately, years in an envirosuit let me ignore that. “We lost forty colonists to the Vosth?”

“Oh, yeah!” she said. “And more when everyone panicked and there were riots and we thought there was going to be a war. That’s why so many Earth-shipped embryos were matured so fast. In fact, our colony has the highest per-capita percentage of in-vitro citizens. We’ve got sixty-three percent.”

“I’m one of them,” I said.

“I’ve got parents,” Endria responded.

I managed not to strangle her. “So there’s no law?”

“Not really,” Endria said. “But there’s a lot of unwritten stuff and assumed stuff. Like we just assume that if we wear e-suits out they won’t think they own the e-suits even though they touch the air, and we assume that if they did come in the compound they’d be nice.” She shot me a sharp look. “But I don’t think that’s an issue now, since you squealed to the governors.”

“Yeah, thanks.” I did not squeal. Endria just didn’t see what was wrong with having a sentient invasive disease wandering around your colony. “I’m going to go now.”

“I still want to complete our interview!” Endria said. “I think you have opinion data you’re holding back!”

“Later,” I said, gave a little wave, and headed off.

On the way out of the canteen I ran into one of the auxiliary governors, who pulled me aside and gave my envirosuit the usual look of disdain. “Citizen,” she said, “I need a thumbprint verification to confirm that your complaint to the colony council was resolved to your satisfaction. Your complaint about the infested colonist.”

I looked to the hall leading in the direction of the outside doors. “Right now?”

“It will only take a moment.”

I looked to the vents, and then back at Endria.

I hated thumbprint confirmations.

Quickly, I unsealed one glove, pulled my hand out, and pressed my thumb into the datapad sensor. The air drew little fingers along my palm, tested my wrist seal, tickled the back of my hand. “Thank you, citizen,” the auxiliary said, and wandered off.

I tucked my exposed hand under my other arm and hurried back toward my room to sterilize hand and glove and put my suit back together.

I went outside again. I don’t know why. Specialized insanity, maybe.

Actually, no. This was like those people on Mulciber who’d go outside in their hazard suits even though the Mulciber colony was on a patch of stable ground that didn’t extend much beyond the habitat, and they always ran the risk of falling into a magma chamber or having a glob of superheated rock smash their faceplate in. Some people find something terrifying and then just have to go out to stare it in the face. Another one of evolution’s less-than-brilliant moves.

Vosth-Menley was stretching his stolen muscles by the shore of the Starve. I could see the muscles moving under his skin. He laced his fingers together and pulled his hands above his head. He planted his feet and bent at the waist so far that his forehead almost touched the ground. I couldn’t do any of that.

I went through the usual colony-prescribed exercises every morning. The envirosuit pinched and chafed, but like hell I was going to show off my body any longer than I had to. Vosth-Menley didn’t have that problem. The Vosth could walk around naked, for all they cared, if they had a body to be naked.

The Vosth noticed me and Vosth-Menley turned around. He clomped his way over, and I tried not to back away.

The air is temperate at this time, at these coordinates, Vosth-Menley said.

I looked over the turbid water. It caught the turquoise of the sky and reflected slate, underlaid with silver. “Why do you call this the Ocean of Starve?”

Vosth-Menley turned back to the Ocean. His gaze ran over the surface, eyes moving in separate directions, and his mouth slacked open.

Our genetic structure was encoded in a meteorite, he said. We impacted this world long ago and altered the ecosystem. We adapted to rely on the heat of free volcanic activity, which was not this world’s stable state. When the world cooled our rate of starvation exceeded our rate of adaptation. Here, underwater vents provided heat to sustain our adaptation until we could survive.

My stomach turned. “Why do you take people over?”

Your bodies are warm and comfortable.

“Even though we proved sapience to you,” I said.

Vosth-Menley didn’t answer.

“What would you do if I took off my envirosuit?”

You would feel the air, Vosth-Menley said, like I wouldn’t notice that he hadn’t answered the question.

“I know that. What would you do? You, the Vosth?”

You would feel the gentle sun warming your skin.

I backed away. Nothing was stopping him from lunging and tearing off my suit. Not if what Endria said was true: that it was the law of the wild out here. Why didn’t he? “You don’t see anything wrong with that.”

I wished he would blink. Maybe gesture. Tapdance. Anything. You have been reacting to us with fear.

The conversation was an exercise in stating the useless and obvious. “I don’t want to end up like Menley,” I said. “Can’t you understand that? Would you want that to happen to you?”

We are the dominant species, the Vosth said. We would not be taken over.

“Empathy,” I muttered. I wasn’t expecting him to hear it. “Learn it.”

We are not averse to learning, the Vosth said. Do you engage in demonstration?

Demonstration? Empathy? I shook my head. “You don’t get what I’m saying.”

Would we be better if we understood? he asked, and stumbled forward with sudden intensity.

I jumped back, ready to fight him off, ready to run.

We want to understand.

[Can the Vosth change?] was the first thing I wrote to Endria when I sat down at my terminal. I don’t know why I kept asking her things. Maybe despite the fact that she was five years my junior and a pain in the rectum she was still less annoying than the diplomatic auditors. Maybe because she was the only person who didn’t look at me like they might have to call Security Response if I walked up. I didn’t really talk to anyone on my off hours.

She never wrote me back. Instead, she showed up at my door. “You’re going to have to be a little more specific.”

“Hello, Endria,” I said as I let her in. “Nice of you to stop by. You couldn’t have just written that out?”

She huffed. “You have a pretty nice room, you know that? The quarters I can get if I want to move out of our family’s allotment are all little closets.”

“Get a job,” I said. “Look, when you said the Vosth—”

“Don’t you ever take that suit off?” she interrupted. “I mean, we’re inside about five different air filtration systems and an airlock or two.”

I ran a hand around the collar of my envirosuit. “I like having it on.”

“How do you eat?”

“I open it to eat.” And shower, and piss, and I took it off to change into other suits and have the ones I’d been wearing cleaned. I just didn’t enjoy it. “Can you reason with the Vosth?”

Endria shook her head. “More specific.”

“Do they change their behavior?” I asked.

Endria wandered over to my couch and sat down, giving me a disparaging look. “Nice specifics. They adapt, if that’s what you mean. Didn’t you listen at your initiation? They came to this planet and couldn’t survive here so they adapted. Some people think that’s why we can negotiate with them at all.”

I didn’t follow. “What does that have to do with negotiation?”

“Well, it’s all theoretical,” she said, and tried to fish something out of her teeth with her pinky.

“Endria. Negotiation. Adaptation. What?”

“They adapt,” she said. “They fell out of the sky and almost died here and then they adapted and they became the dominant species. Then we landed, which is way better than falling, and we have all this technology they don’t have, and they can’t just read our minds, even if they take us over, so wouldn’t you negotiate for that? To stay the dominant species? I think they want to be more like us.”

Would we be better if we understood, the Vosth had asked. “They said they took over colonists because our bodies were comfortable,” I said.

Endria shrugged. “Maybe being dominant is comfortable for them.”

I ran a hand over my helmet. “Charming.”

“I mean, letting them be dominant sure isn’t comfortable for you.”

I glared. “What, it’s comfortable for you?”

“They’re not that bad,” Endria said. “I mean, they’re not territorial or anything. They just do their thing. When I’m a governor, I want to see if we can work together.”

“Yeah. Us and the body-snatchers.”

Endria tilted her head at me. “You know, I think it would be kinda neat, sharing your body with the Vosth. I mean, if it wasn’t a permanent thing. I bet you’d get all sorts of new perspectives.”

I gaped. I don’t think Endria saw my expression through the helmet, but it was disturbing enough that she didn’t share it. “It is a permanent thing! And you don’t share—you don’t get control. They take you over and you just die. There’s probably nothing left of you. Or if there is, you’re just stuck in your head, screaming.”

“And that’s why you’re asking if the Vosth can change?” Endria asked.

“I’m asking because—” I started, and then couldn’t finish that sentence.

Endria smiled. It was a nasty sort of hah-I-knew-it smile. “See?” she said, hopping off the couch and heading for the door. “You are interested in Vosth research.”

Twenty minutes later someone knocked on my door. I opened it, thinking it was Endria back to irritate me. No. In the corridor outside my room stood a wide-faced, high-collared balding man, with an expression like he’d been eating ascorbic acid and a badge on his lapel reading DIPLOMATIC AUDITOR in big bold letters.

He’d even brought a datapad.

“This is a notice, citizen,” he said. “You’re not authorized to engage in diplomatic action with the Vosth.”

“I’m not engaging in diplomatic action,” I said, shuffling through possible excuses. It’d be easier if I had any idea what I was doing. “I’m... engaging in research.”

He didn’t look convinced.

“Civil research,” I said, picking up a pen from my desk and wagging it at him like he should know better. “Helping Endria with her civics certification. Didn’t she fill out the right forms to make me one of her resources?”

There were no forms, as far as I knew. Still, if there were, I could probably shuffle off the responsibility onto Endria, and if there weren’t, the sourface in front of me would probably go and draft some up to mollify himself. Either way, I was off the hook for a moment.

He marked something down on his datapad. “I’m going to check into this,” he warned.

At which point he’d argue his case against Endria. Poor bastards, both of them.

“Expect further communication from a member of the governing commission,” he warned. Satisfied with that threat, he turned and went away.

For about a day, I decided work was safer. If I kept to the restricted-access parts of the waste reclamation facility I could cut down on Endria sightings, and I could work long hours. Surely the governors wouldn’t work late just to harass me.

It wasn’t a long-term solution. Still, I thought it’d be longer-term than one work shift.

I got back to my room and my terminal was blinking, and when I sat down it triggered an automatic callback and put me on standby for two minutes. Now, in theory automatic callbacks were only for high-priority colony business, which, considering I’d seen my supervisor not ten minutes ago and I wasn’t involved in anything important in governance, I expected to mean that Endria wanted something and they took civics certification courses way more seriously than I’d thought. I went to get a drink while it was trying to connect.

And I came back to a line of text on an encrypted channel, coming from the office of the Prime Governor.

Most of my water ended up on my boots.

[Sorry I’m doing this over text,] she wrote. [I just wanted an official record of our conversation.]

When a governor wants an official record of your conversation, you’re fucked.

[What can I do for you?] I typed back.

[Someone stopped by to talk to you,] she went on, the lines spooling out over the screen in real-time. [About your not being authorized to engage in diplomatic action.]

I had expected that to be defused, not to escalate. Escalating up to the Prime Governor had been right out. [I still believe that I wasn’t engaging in diplomatic—] I started, but she typed right over it.

[How would you like authorization?]

That hadn’t been on the list of possibilities, either.

[I’m sorry?] I typed. What I almost typed, and might have typed if I didn’t value my civil liberties, was I recycle shit for a living. My skillset is not what you’re looking for.

[You may be aware that we’re pioneering a new focus of study into the Vosth,] the Governor typed.

Vosth research. I wondered if Endria had recommended me upward. [Yes, ma’am,] I wrote.

[We now believe that we can reverse the effects of Vosth colonization of a human host.]

I looked at my water. I looked at my boots. After a moment, I typed [Ma’am?] and got up for another glass. I needed it.

I came back to a paragraph explaining [You’ve been in contact with one of the infested colonists. We’d like you to bring him back to the compound for experimentation.]

Okay. So long as I was just being asked to harvest test subjects. [You want to cure Menley?]

[We believe it unlikely that human consciousness would survive anywhere on the order of years,] she typed back, and my stomach twisted like it had talking to Menley. [This would be a proof of concept which could be applied to the more recently infected.]

And Menley wasn’t someone who’d be welcomed back into the colony, I read between the lines. I should’ve asked Endria who had sat on the council that decided Menley’s sentence. Was this particular Prime Governor serving, back then? Why did I never remember these things? Why did I never think to ask?

[So, you would extract the Vosth,] I started, and was going to write leaving a corpse?, maybe hoping that we’d at least get a breathing body. She interrupted me again.

[The Vosth parasite organisms would not be extracted. They would die.]

My mouth was dry, but the idea of drinking water made me nauseous. It was like anyone or anything in Menley’s body was fair game for anyone.

[I want to be clear with you,] she said. Dammit. She could have just lied like they did in every dramatic work I’d ever read. Then, if the truth ever came out, I could be horrified but still secure in the knowledge that there was no way I could have known. No. I just got told to kidnap someone so the scientists could kill him. I wasn’t even saving anyone. Well, maybe in the future, if anyone got infested again.

Anyone the governors felt like curing, anyway.

Then she had to go and make it worse.

[We would not be in violation of any treaties or rules of conduct,] she wrote. [If we can develop a cure for or immunity to Vosth infestation, the de facto arrangement in place between our colony and the Vosth will be rendered null, and the restrictions imposed on our activities on the planet will become obsolete.]

I wished Endria was there. She could interpret this. [Isn’t this an act of war?]

[We’re confident that the Vosth will regard an unwarranted act of aggression as an expression of natural law,] the Governor explained.

That didn’t make me feel better, and I think it translated to yes. [I thought it was understood that things like that wouldn’t happen.]

[It was understood that the dominant species could, at any time, exercise their natural rights,] the Governor explained. [Perhaps it’s time they learned that they aren’t the dominant species any more.]

We believe the ambient temperature to be pleasant for human senses today, Vosth-Menley told me when I got to the Ocean of Starve. I was beginning to wonder whether his reassurances were predation or a mountain of culture skew.

“What is your obsession with me feeling the air?” I asked him. Them. The Vosth.

You would be safe, Vosth-Menley insisted.

I should have asked Endria if the Vosth could lie. I should have kept a running list of things I needed to ask. “Listen,” I said.

We would like to understand, Vosth-Menley said again.

I read a lot of Earth lit. I’d never seen a butterfly, but I knew the metaphor of kids who’d pull off their wings. Looking at Menley, I wondered if the Vosth were like children, oblivious to their own cruelty. “What would you do if someone could take you over?”

Our biology is not comparable to yours, Vosth-Menley said.

Bad hypothetical. “What would you do if someone tried to kill you?”

It is our perception of reality that species attempt to prolong their own existence, he said.

“Yeah.” I was having trouble following my own conversation. “Look, you’re a dominant species, and we’re supposed to have a reciprocal relationship, but you take people over and—look.” I’d gone past talking myself in circles and was talking myself in scatterplots.

The back of my neck itched, and I couldn’t ignore it.

“What if I do want to take off my suit?” I asked, and then scatterplotted, “Do you have any reason to lie to me?”

The Vosth considered. Yes.

Oh. Okay. Great.

Our present actions are concurrent with a different directive, he added. There is reason to establish honesty.

Nothing was stopping him from attacking. He could have torn off my suit or helmet by now. Even if it was a risk, and it was a risk, and even if I had a phobia the size of the meterorite the Vosth had ridden in...

I’d seen how many Vosth had swarmed over Menley’s whole body, and how long it had taken him to stop twitching. If it was just a few of them, I might be able to run back to the compound. Then, if the governors really had a cure, they could cure me. And I’d feel fine about tricking the Vosth into being test subjects if they’d tricked me into being a host. That’s what I told myself. I didn’t feel fine about anything.

I brought my gloves to the catch on my helmet.

Two minutes later I was still standing like that, with the catch still sealed, and Vosth-Menley was still staring.

“You could come back to the compound with me,” I said. “The governors would love to see you.”

We are curious as to the conditions of your constructed habitat, Vosth-Menley said.

Yeah, I thought, but are you coming back as a plague bearer or an experiment?

I squeezed my eyes shut, and pried my helmet off.

I’d lost way too many referents.

The outside air closed around my face with too many smells I couldn’t identify or describe, other than “nothing like sterile air” and “nothing like my room or my shower.” Every nerve on my head and neck screamed for broadcast time, registering the temperature of the air, the little breezes through the hairs on my nape, the warmth of direct sunlight. My heart was racing. I was breathing way too fast and even with my eyes shut I was overloaded on stimuli.

I waded my way through. It took time, but amidst the slog of what I was feeling, I eventually noticed something I wasn’t: Anything identifiable as Vosth infestation.

I opened my eyes.

Vosth-Menley was standing just where he had been, watching just as he had been. And I was breathing, with my skin touching the outside air.

Touching the air. That which touched the air belonged to the Vosth. I wasn’t belonging to the Vosth.

I looked toward the Ocean. Its silver underlayer was still there, calm beneath the surface.

I took a breath. I tasted the outside world, the gas balance, the smell of vegetation working its way from my nostrils to the back of my throat. This was a Vosth world, unless the governors made it a human world, and I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Looking back to Vosth-Menley, I didn’t know how he’d feel about it either.

“You came from beyond the shell of atmosphere,” I said. “Like we did, right?”

Vosth-Menley said, Our genetic predecessors came to this world on an meteorite.

“And you adapted, right?” I almost ran a hand over my helmet, but stopped before I touched my hair. I hadn’t sterilized my gloves. Never mind that my head wasn’t in a sterile environment anymore either. “Do you understand that we adapt?”

It is our perception of reality that living organisms adapt, he said.

That was a yes. Maybe. “Look, we don’t have to fight for dominance, do we?” I spread my hands. “Like, if you go off and re-invent technology now that you have hands to build things with, you don’t need to come back here and threaten us. We can have an equilibrium.”

His eyes were as dead as usual. I had no idea what understanding on a Vosth colonist would look like.

“We’d both be better.”

We are not averse to an equilibrium, Vosth-Menley said.

I swallowed. “Then you’ve gotta go now.” Then, when I thought he didn’t understand, “The governors are adapting a way to cure you. To kill you. Making us the dominant species. Look, I’m... telling you what will happen, and I’m giving you the option not to let us do it.”

Vosth-Menley watched me for a moment. Then he turned, and walked back toward the Ocean of Starve.

Interspecies incident, said a little voice at the corner of my mind. It sounded like Endria. Sterile or not, I sealed my helmet back onto my e-suit and walked back toward the colony at double-time.

That night I filed a report saying that I’d invited Vosth-Menley back, but he’d declined for reasons I couldn’t make sense of. Communications barrier. I thought of telling the Prime Governor that she should have sent a diplomatic auditor, but didn’t.

I didn’t hear anything until the next day when a survey buggy came back in, and its driver hopped down and said that something strange happened at the Ocean of Starve. Far from being its usual murky silver, it was perfectly clear and reflecting the sky. He said it to a governor, but news spread fast. It came to me via Endria as I was walking out of my lab.

“The only thing that would cause that would be a mass migration of the Vosth, but that’s not something we’ve seen in their behavior before now!” She glared at me like I might know something, which, of course, I did.

A diplomatic auditor came by later to take a complete transcript of my last interaction with Vosth-Menley. I left most of it out.

Survey buggies kept going out. People walked down to the Ocean shore. Auditors flashed radio signals out of the communications booth, but no one answered. The Vosth had vanished, and that was all anyone could tell.

I stopped wearing my envirosuit.

The first day, stepping out of my door, I felt lightbodied, lightheaded, not entirely there. I felt like I’d walked out of my shower without getting dressed. I had to force myself to go forward instead of back, back to grab my envirosuit, to make myself decent.

I walked into the hall where every moment was the sensory overload of air on my skin, where my arms and legs felt loose, where everyone could see the expressions on my face. That was as frightening as the Vosth. I’d just left behind the environmental advantage I’d had since I was ten.

But I was adapting.

Variously known as a student of Linguistics, a web application developer, a graduate of the 2008 Clarion West class, a writer of speculative fiction, and a purveyor of medieval armor and fine baked goods, An mostly resides in places contrary to consensus reality but is compelled to list a university town in the American Midwest as home on most official documents. Fiction bearing the mark of this elusive author can be found in an increasing variety of “here”s and “there”s, and more general information can be found at an.owomoyela.net.

Author Spotlight: An Omomoyela
Erin Stocks

While alien life is nothing new to the world of SF, the parasitic possession of the Vosth adds a unique twist. Can you tell us a little about this story’s origins?

Typically, for the stories I come up with, the idea seeds don’t at all resemble the final product. Bear with me for a moment.

See, it started out with sexual politics.

Specifically, it started when I got to thinking about the politics of exposure: Life in a society where women especially are encouraged to present themselves as sexually attractive, and then told that by complying with that social meme, they have only themselves to blame for any untoward advances. To see a lot of cultural dialogue, it seems like the act of exposing skin makes a person into a kind of public property; that runs the gamut from rapes being excused because the victim “dressed provocatively” to the kind of explosive harassment you see in cases like Hope Witsell, where a private erotic act became virulently public. At some point the thought “It’s like anything allowed to touch air belongs to anyone who can see it” crossed my mind, and I liked the phrase so much that I started playing with the implications and wondering how a world like that would work. Eventually, I came up with something that could colonize anything it touched, literally taking ownership of it. And I kept working with the idea because I find correlating exposure to offering really creepy, and I love working with ideas that creep me out.

This is actually how a lot of my story ideas progress: I’ll start off thinking about Betelgeuse and wind up in metaphorical Novgorod.

I don’t really expect anyone to read ”All That Touches the Air” as a parable for sexual politics—not without reading this first, anyway. But I tend to listen to what my stories want to do, and if straying from the topic lets them grow up into viable tales, that’s the way things are. I’m intrigued by sexual and gender politics and I’ll certainly write more on the topic anyway, so I don’t feel that this straying is any big loss.

Why do you think Endria encourages the narrator so much to turn towards specifically studying the Vosth?

Endria was a homage to Connie Willis—specifically to characters like Maisie in Passage, and Molly and Bets from Spice Pogrom. Kids who know exactly what they want out of life and are still young enough to assume that not only are they right, and not only have they found the One True Most Important Thing In the Universe, but that everyone else should be totally on board with their interests, and if they’re not, it’s just because they haven’t cottoned on yet. At least, that’s how they come across to me.

I have to admit, I’ve been that kid at points in my life.

The fact that Endria wants to become a governor helps, too. Even in the early stages of worldbuilding I got the impression that the governors on this world think everyone in the colony is there to be a resource for them and their work. So all of Endria’s role models are these imperialistic folk who say “Jump!” and you jump, and she knows she can get something out of the narrator. Poor bastard.

Our narrator goes from fear of Vosth-Menley to a worried intrigue, and subconsciously seeking him out. Then he tries to reason with Vosth-Menley. Is Endria’s urging getting through to him, or do you think it’s his own fearful fascination that’s changing?

I think it’s a combination of factors. There’s the fact that the narrator’s way of life is really pretty miserable, there’s the fact that Endria and the governors and apparently Vosth-Menley are all out to dismantle the constructed comfort zone this miserable way of life provides, and then there’s the fact that the tension over the Vosth has been lingering for years, and sooner or later you have to act to break tension or you’ll wind up in a nervous breakdown.

The narrator has no idea what to do, but clearly something has to change, because the old way isn’t working any more. And the more information comes to light about how the Vosth behave and why, the less makes sense, and the more questions there are demanding to be answered. And it’s hard to resist the call of an unanswered question, especially when you’re ensnared in the topic.

Because of their environment, the Vosth are going extinct. It’s hard not to feel some sympathy for them, especially considering the fact that they were on this planet first. Did you intend this from the beginning—a complicated, killer species to elicit mixed reactions in the reader?

I love shades of grey and questions with non-binary moral values, so, yes, it was intended. One of the things I strive for is a touch of the xenofiction, of creating really alien aliens, who have their own rules which make sense in their own environment. The Vosth are creepy and threaten the human colonists with initially little or no concern for their lives or their rights, but there are reasons for that, and understanding those reasons would ultimately be more valuable than just writing them off as evil or predatory.

We never do get to the point of understanding those reasons in the story, and I feel like it would be difficult to do justice in a short-story format, but I think there’s some fuzzy understanding that is reached, which does allow for that basic negotiation to take place. And I think that while understanding is a good thing to strive for, it might not always be possible.

Is the governor’s request what inspires the narrator to relinquish his fears and take his helmet off?

The governor’s request made it impossible for the narrator not to make a choice. Going back to the habitat without the Vosth and without a good excuse would put the people who control the colony in a bad mood, and Menley himself got thrown to the Vosth for, basically, annoying the Powers That Be too much. But to bring Menley back would be to become an active participant in conquest, war, or even genocide, and the narrator wasn’t prepared to take that step. Taking off the helmet was a way of looking for a third option or forcing another choice: If the Vosth had taken advantage of the exposure, self-preservation would have dictated the next logical action.

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.

Parasitic Puppet-Masters
Wendy Wagner

Parasites are masters of chemical warfare. To bypass their hosts’ many defense mechanisms, they have developed an amazing array of chemicals that can change and influence all kinds of body parts: Even brains. That’s right—the hub of a creature’s behavior, that biochemical miracle called the brain, can become a parasite’s ticket to life on easy street. From zombification to bad driving, here’s a look at microscopic mind-control at its ugliest.

Zombification

George Romero might take credit for the Hollywood zombie, but parasitic jewel wasps have perfected the art of creating zombie cockroaches. The female wasp shoots venom directly into its cockroach victim’s brain, blocking a chemical called octopamine. In cockroaches and many other insects, octopamine stimulates energetic behavior like walking, flying, and paying attention to its surroundings. Without it, the cockroach is barely animate.

Dragging her zombie roach back to her lair, the jewel wasp lays an egg in the cockroach’s abdomen. It will live for seven or eight days...long enough for the egg to hatch and the wasp larvae to eat the still-passive cockroach from the inside out. In a world without refrigeration, a zombified dinner is one method for guaranteed good eats.

Strepsipterans are another insect with the ability to make zombies. The female strepsipteran is a parasite with no eyes and no legs that makes a home inside the body of other insects. Only its head will show, a faceless bulge sticking out of a convenient opening in the host’s exoskeleton. When it is time to mate, the strepsipteran releases pheromones that summon the (mobile and not parasitic) male of the species. The female strepsipteran waits patiently, emitting chemicals that force its host to stay motionless until the male arrives and the happy couple has completed their mating ritual. After witnessing this parasitic booty call, the poor host probably wishes the strepsipteran’s mind control came with a side dish of amnesia.

Super-Nanny Syndrome

Finding good child-care takes money and hard-work—unless you’re a parasite willing to take control of your nanny’s brain. The ichneumonid wasp has found a way to make sure her baby stays safe and healthy by taking advantage of orb-weaving spiders. The wasp knocks out the spider with a sting, and during the few minutes the spider is paralyzed, the wasp glues an egg to the spider’s belly. The spider recovers and returns to normal spider life for a week or two, while the wasp egg hatches and the larval wasp grows strong drinking the spider’s body fluids.

After the baby wasp is old enough, it injects a psychotropical chemical into the spider that takes control of its brain. That night, the spider is compelled to weave a web, but the chemical disrupts it normal web-building patterns. Instead, the spider builds a strange, flat platform out of strong, unsticky silk. Before dawn, the larva molts, eats the exhausted spider, and uses the web platform as a base for building a cocoon where it can pupate into its adult wasp phase.

Another arachnid-turned-babysitter is the crab. A larval female sacculina barnacle abandons its free-swimming life to inject itself inside a crab’s exoskeleton. The sacculina spreads root-like fleshy tendrils throughout the crab’s body and creates chemicals that first sterilize the crab and then influence the crab’s secondary sex characteristics—any males infected with a sacculina parasite will begin to look like a female crab. As the sacculina matures, it grows a knob on the crab’s belly, in the same spot a normal female crab would develop a brood pouch.

The crab will carefully groom and clean the barnacle’s knob just as it would its own brood sac. And when the sacculina is ready to release her eggs (after punching a hole in the crab’s shell and sneaking in a mate), the crab will eject the barnacle’s eggs into the sea just like crab babies. The crab’s instincts, stimulated by the sacculina’s mind control, will tenderly stir the seawater to disperse the barnacle eggs around her, giving them the best start on their parasitic little lives.

These aren’t the only self-sacrificing nannies created by parasitic mind control. There are wasps whose larvae infect caterpillars. The larva then controls the mostly-dead caterpillar’s body as a bodyguard puppet. And, there’s a fungus which infects ants and forces them to latch onto plants until the fungus sends forth a fruiting body and disperses its spores. Fossilized leaves reveal the agonized bitemarks of infected ants going back at least forty-five million years. That’s a long legacy of stiffed babysitters.

Suicidal Tendencies

It’s one thing to make your host act funny to score room and board or free childcare. But some parasites’ life-styles demand their hosts pay the ultimate price: Self-sacrifice. That can involve some pretty tricky biochemical puppeteering. The lancet fluke is a great example of a tiny puppet-master with remarkable control over its host.

Adult lancet flukes live inside the livers of grazing animals, and their eggs are distributed in animal feces. Most animals aren’t really excited about eating their own poop, so the lancet fluke depends on two other creatures to propel their babies into the next ungulate host. Snails, not the fussiest of eaters, will eat manure, gobbling up fluke eggs in their meal. The hatching eggs irritate the snails’ intestines, creating slimy cysts around a dozens of juvenile fluke. The snail vomits up the cyst, which somehow looks delicious to an ant. The flukes spread throughout the ant’s body, some moving into the primitive ant-brain, where they take control.

Ants cannot stay in direct sunlight because they will dry out and die, but a hidden ant is worthless to the lancet flukes. They drive the ant on, evening after evening, forcing it up stalks of grass and other tall plants. The ant will grip onto the grass and stay still all night, waiting around as long as it takes to be eaten by a grazing sheep or cow...whose liver, after all, is a lancet fluke’s dream home.

While the lancet fluke is good at its job, the hairworm is the master of murderous mind manipulation. Larval hairworms grow inside insects like grasshoppers and crickets. They begin as extremely tiny lifeforms, but by the time they’re ready to mate, their long hair-like bodies will fill a host’s entire body cavity. The hairworm creates proteins that stimulate the host to seek out water and jump in. As the host begins to drown, the hairworm shoots out the host’s rear end and begins looking for hairworm love.

If these self-destructive behaviors seem limited to the realm of lower creatures, don’t feel too comfortable. The tiny parasite Toxoplasma gondii reproduces only in the gut of cats, but it will live in all mammals. And toxoplasma creates chemicals with some interesting neurological effects. In rats, toxoplasma encourages more aggressive behavior, delayed reaction times, and an affinity for the smell of cat urine. All of these behaviors up the odds that infected rats will be eaten by cats, completing the toxoplasma’s life cycle.

But Toxoplasma gondii will live quite happily in humans. In fact, an estimated thirty to sixty percent of the world’s population is infected. The parasite will give most of its hosts something like a mild flu before settling into dormant cysts in nerve and muscle tissue. But toxoplasma’s biochemicals wreak some exciting havoc on their human hosts: Women with toxoplasma antibodies are almost twice as likely to have male children as women who are not exposed to the parasite. Behavioral changes are linked with infection as well--from low-level neuroses to aggressive behavior to full-blown schizophrenia. Strangest of all, people who are infected with toxoplasma are almost three times more likely to be involved in traffic accidents than uninfected drivers. The human brain, with all its complexity, has proven itself just as susceptible to microscopic mind control as any other creature’s.

As scientists learn more about parasitic life forms, their wide variety of powers and effects prove astonishing. With vampirism and zombie mind control a matter of course, these microscopic monsters are scarier than anything dreamed up by science fiction writers. After all, who knows how much of human history resulted from our free will... and how much came from the tiny puppet-masters steering our brains?

Wendy Wagner comes from a long line of cat-loving bad drivers—and finds that a little scary. Her short fiction has appeared in The Way of the Wizard, Rigor Amortis, and Crossed Genres magazine; her interviews and poetry have run in Lightspeed, Fantasy Magazine, Horror-web.com, and Abyss and Apex. She is the Assistant Editor of Fantasy Magazine, and lives in Portland, Oregon with her very understanding family.

Maneki Neko
Bruce Sterling

“I can’t go on,” his brother said.

Tsuyoshi Shimizu looked thoughtfully into the screen of his pasokon. His older brother’s face was shiny with sweat from a late-night drinking bout.

“It’s only a career,” said Tsuyoshi, sitting up on his futon and adjusting his pajamas. “You worry too much.”

“All that overtime!” his brother whined. He was making the call from a bar somewhere in Shibuya. In the background, a middle-aged office lady was singing karaoke, badly. “And the examination hells. The manager training programs. The proficiency tests. I never have time to live!”

Tsuyoshi grunted sympathetically. He didn’t like these late-night videophone calls, but he felt obliged to listen. His big brother had always been a decent sort, before he had gone through the elite courses at Waseda University, joined a big corporation, and gotten professionally ambitious.

“My back hurts,” his brother groused. “I have an ulcer. My hair is going gray. And I know they’ll fire me. No matter how loyal you are to the big companies, they have no loyalty to their employees anymore. It’s no wonder that I drink.”

“You should get married,” Tsuyoshi offered.

“I can’t find the right girl. Women never understand me.” He shuddered. “Tsuyoshi, I’m truly desperate. The market pressures are crushing me. I can’t breathe. My life has got to change. I’m thinking of taking the vows. I’m serious! I want to renounce this whole modern world.”

Tsuyoshi was alarmed. “You’re very drunk, right?”

His brother leaned closer to the screen. “Life in a monastery sounds truly good to me. It’s so quiet there. You recite the sutras. You consider your existence. There are rules to follow, and rewards that make sense. It’s just the way that Japanese business used to be, back in the good old days.”

Tsuyoshi grunted skeptically.

“Last week I went out to a special place in the mountains...Mount Aso,” his brother confided. “The monks there, they know about people in trouble, people who are burned out by modern life. The monks protect you from the world. No computers, no phones, no faxes, no e-mail, no overtime, no commuting, nothing at all. It’s beautiful, and it’s peaceful, and nothing ever happens there. Really, it’s like paradise.”

“Listen, older brother,” Tsuyoshi said, “you’re not a religious man by nature. You’re a section chief for a big import-export company.”

“Well...maybe religion won’t work for me. I did think of running away to America. Nothing much ever happens there, either.”

Tsuyoshi smiled. “That sounds much better! America is a good vacation spot. A long vacation is just what you need! Besides, the Americans are real friendly since they gave up their handguns.”

“But I can’t go through with it,” his brother wailed. “I just don’t dare. I can’t just wander away from everything that I know, and trust to the kindness of strangers.”

“That always works for me,” Tsuyoshi said. “Maybe you should try it.”

Tsuyoshi’s wife stirred uneasily on the futon. Tsuyoshi lowered his voice. “Sorry, but I have to hang up now. Call me before you do anything rash.”

“Don’t tell Dad,” Tsuyoshi’s brother said. “He worries so.”

“I won’t tell Dad.” Tsuyoshi cut the connection and the screen went dark.

Tsuyoshi’s wife rolled over, heavily. She was seven months pregnant. She stared at the ceiling puffing for breath. “Was that another call from your brother?” she said.

“Yeah. The company just gave him another promotion. More responsibilities. He’s celebrating.”

“That sounds nice,” his wife said tactfully.

Next morning, Tsuyoshi slept late. He was self-employed, so he kept his own hours. Tsuyoshi was a video format upgrader by trade. He transferred old videos from obsolete formats into the new high-grade storage media. Doing this properly took a craftsman’s eye. Word of Tsuyoshi’s skills had gotten out on the network, so he had as much work as he could handle.

At ten A.M., the mailman arrived. Tsuyoshi abandoned his breakfast of raw egg and miso soup, and signed for a shipment of flaking, twentieth-century analog television tapes. The mail also brought a fresh overnight shipment of strawberries, and a homemade jar of pickles.

“Pickles!” his wife enthused. “People are so nice to you when you’re pregnant.”

“Any idea who sent us that?”

“Just someone on the network.”

“Great.”

Tsuyoshi booted his mediator, cleaned his superconducting heads and examined the old tapes. Home videos from the 1980s. Someone’s grandmother as a child, presumably. There had been a lot of flaking and loss of polarity in the old recording medium.

Tsuyoshi got to work with his desktop fractal detail generator, the image stabilizer, and the interlace algorithms. When he was done, Tsuyoshi’s new digital copies would look much sharper, cleaner, and better composed than the original primitive videotape.

Tsuyoshi enjoyed his work. Quite often he came across bits and pieces of videotape that were of archival interest. He would pass the images on to the net. The really big network databases, with their armies of search engines, indexers, and catalogues, had some very arcane interests. The net machines would never pay for data, because the global information networks were noncommercial. But the net machines were very polite, and had excellent net etiquette. They returned a favor for a favor, and since they were machines with excellent, enormous memories, they never forgot a good deed.

Tsuyoshi and his wife had a lunch of ramen with naruto, and she left to go shopping. A shipment arrived by overseas package service. Cute baby clothes from Darwin, Australia. They were in his wife’s favorite color, sunshine yellow.

Tsuyoshi finished transferring the first tape to a new crystal disk. Time for a break. He left his apartment, took the elevator and went out to the comer coffeeshop. He ordered a double iced mocha cappuccino and paid with a chargecard.

His pokkecon rang. Tsuyoshi took it from his belt and answered it. “Get one to go,” the machine told him.

“Okay,” said Tsuyoshi, and hung up. He bought a second coffee, put a lid on it and left the shop.

A man in a business suit was sitting on a park bench near the entrance of Tsuyoshi’s building. The man’s suit was good, but it looked as if he’d slept in it. He was holding his head in his hands and rocking gently back and forth. He was unshaven and his eyes were red-rimmed.

The pokkecon rang again. “The coffee’s for him?” Tsuyoshi said.

“Yes,” said the pokkecon. “He needs it.”

Tsuyoshi walked up to the lost businessman. The man looked up, flinching warily, as if he were about to be kicked. “What is it?” he said.

“Here,” Tsuyoshi said, handing him the cup. “Double iced mocha cappuccino.”

The man opened the cup, and smelled it. He looked up in disbelief. “This is my favorite kind of coffee...Who are you?”

Tsuyoshi lifted his arm and offered a hand signal, his fingers clenched like a cat’s paw. The man showed no recognition of the gesture.

Tsuyoshi shrugged, and smiled. “It doesn’t matter. Sometimes a man really needs a coffee. Now you have a coffee. That’s all.”

“Well...” The man cautiously sipped his cup, and suddenly smiled. “It’s really great. Thanks!”

“You’re welcome.” Tsuyoshi went home.

His wife arrived from shopping. She had bought new shoes. The pregnancy was making her feet swell. She sat carefully on the couch and sighed.

“Orthopedic shoes are expensive,” she said, looking at the yellow pumps. “I hope you don’t think they look ugly.”

“On you, they look really cute,” Tsuyoshi said wisely. He had first met his wife at a video store. She had just used her credit card to buy a disk of primitive black-and-white American anime of the 1950s. The pokkecon had urged him to go up and speak to her on the subject of Felix the Cat. Felix was an early television cartoon star and one of Tsuyoshi’s personal favorites.

Tsuyoshi would have been too shy to approach an attractive woman on his own, but no one was a stranger to the net. This fact gave him the confidence to speak to her. Tsuyoshi had soon discovered that the girl was delighted to discuss her deep fondness for cute, antique, animated cats. They’d had lunch together. They’d had a date the next week. They had spent Christmas Eve together in a love hotel. They had a lot in common.

She had come into his life through a little act of grace, a little gift from Felix the Cat’s magic bag of tricks. Tsuyoshi had never gotten over feeling grateful for this. Now that he was married and becoming a father, Tsuyoshi Shimizu could feel himself becoming solidly fixed in life. He had a man’s role to play now. He knew who he was, and he knew where he stood. Life was good to him.

“You need a haircut, dear,” his wife told him.

“Sure.”

His wife pulled a gift box out of her shopping bag. “Can you go to the Hotel Daruma, and get your hair cut, and deliver this box for me?”

“What is it?” Tsuyoshi said.

Tsuyoshi’s wife opened the little wooden gift box. A maneki neko was nestled inside white foam padding. The smiling ceramic cat held one paw upraised, beckoning for good fortune.

“Don’t you have enough of those yet?” he said. “You even have maneki neko underwear.”

“It’s not for my collection. It’s a gift for someone at the Hotel Daruma.”

“Oh.”

“Some foreign woman gave me this box at the shoestore. She looked American. She couldn’t speak Japanese. She had really nice shoes, though...”

“If the network gave you that little cat, then you’re the one who should take care of that obligation, dear.”

“But dear,” she sighed, “my feet hurt so much, and you could do with a haircut anyway, and I have to cook supper, and besides, it’s not really a nice maneki neko, it’s just cheap tourist souvenir junk. Can’t you do it?”

“Oh, all right,” Tsuyoshi told her. “Just forward your pokkecon prompts onto my machine, and I’ll see what I can do for us.”

She smiled. “I knew you would do it. You’re really so good to me.”

Tsuyoshi left with the little box. He wasn’t unhappy to do the errand, as it wasn’t always easy to manage his pregnant wife’s volatile moods in their small six-tatami apartment. The local neighborhood was good, but he was hoping to find bigger accommodations before the child was born. Maybe a place with a little studio, where he could expand the scope of his work. It was very hard to find decent housing in Tokyo, but word was out on the net. Friends he didn’t even know were working every day to help him. If he kept up with the net’s obligations, he had every confidence that some day something nice would turn up.

Tsuyoshi went into the local pachinko parlor, where he won half a liter of beer and a train chargecard. He drank the beer, took the new train card and wedged himself into the train. He got out at the Ebisu station, and turned on his pokkecon Tokyo street map to guide his steps. He walked past places called Chocolate Soup, and Freshness Physique, and The Aladdin Mai-Tai Panico Trattoria.

He entered the Hotel Daruma and went to the hotel barber shop, which was called the Daruma Planet Look. “May I help you?” said the receptionist.

“I’m thinking, a shave and a trim,” Tsuyoshi said.

“Do you have an appointment with us?”

“Sorry, no.” Tsuyoshi offered a hand gesture.

The woman gestured back, a jerky series of cryptic finger movements. Tsuyoshi didn’t recognize any of the gestures. She wasn’t from his part of the network.

“Oh well, never mind,” the receptionist said kindly. “I’ll get Nahoko to look after you.”

Nahoko was carefully shaving the fine hair from Tsuyoshi’s forehead when the pokkecon rang. Tsuyoshi answered it.

“Go to the ladies’ room on the fourth floor,” the pokkecon told him.

“Sorry, I can’t do that. This is Tsuyoshi Shimizu, not Ai Shimizu. Besides, I’m having my hair cut right now.”

“Oh, I see,” said the machine. “Recalibrating.” It hung up.

Nahoko finished his hair. She had done a good job. He looked much better. A man who worked at home had to take special trouble to keep up appearances. The pokkecon rang again.

“Yes?” said Tsuyoshi.

“Buy bay rum aftershave. Take it outside.”

“Right.” He hung up. “Nahoko, do you have bay rum?”

“Odd you should ask that,” said Nahoko. “Hardly anyone asks for bay rum anymore, but our shop happens to keep it in stock.”

Tsuyoshi bought the aftershave, then stepped outside the barbershop. Nothing happened, so he bought a manga comic and waited. Finally a hairy, blond stranger in shorts, a tropical shirt, and sandals approached him. The foreigner was carrying a camera bag and an old-fashioned pokkecon. He looked about sixty years old, and he was very tall.

The man spoke to his pokkecon in English. “Excuse me,” said the pokkecon, translating the man’s speech into Japanese. “Do you have a bottle of bay rum aftershave?”

“Yes I do.” Tsuyoshi handed the bottle over. “Here.”

“Thank goodness!” said the man, his words relayed through his machine. “I’ve asked everyone else in the lobby. Sorry I was late.”

“No problem,” said Tsuyoshi. “That’s a nice pokkecon you have there.”

“Well,” the man said, “I know it’s old and out of style. But I plan to buy a new pokkecon here in Tokyo. I’m told that they sell pokkecons by the basketful in Akihabara electronics market.”

“That’s right. What kind of translator program are you running? Your translator talks like someone from Osaka.”

“Does it sound funny?” the tourist asked anxiously.

“Well, I don’t want to complain, but...” Tsuyoshi smiled. “Here, let’s trade meishi. I can give you a copy of a brand-new freeware translator.”

“That would be wonderful.” They pressed buttons and squirted copies of their business cards across the network link.

Tsuyoshi examined his copy of the man’s electronic card and saw that his name was Zimmerman. Mr. Zimmerman was from New Zealand. Tsuyoshi activated a transfer program. His modern pokkecon began transferring a new translator onto Zimmerman’s machine.

A large American man in a padded suit entered the lobby of the Daruma. The man wore sunglasses, and was sweating visibly in the summer heat. The American looked huge, as if he lifted a lot of weights. Then a Japanese woman followed him. The woman was sharply dressed, with a dark blue dress suit, hat, sunglasses, and an attache case. She had a haunted look.

Her escort turned and carefully watched the bellhops, who were bringing in a series of bags. The woman walked crisply to the reception desk and began making anxious demands of the clerk.

“I’m a great believer in machine translation,” Tsuyoshi said to the tall man from New Zealand. “I really believe that computers help human beings to relate in a much more human way.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” said Mr. Zimmerman, through his machine. “I can remember the first time I came to your country, many years ago. I had no portable translator. In fact, I had nothing but a printed phrasebook. I happened to go into a bar, and...”

Zimmerman stopped and gazed alertly at his pokkecon. “Oh dear, I’m getting a screen prompt. I have to go up to my room right away.”

“Then I’ll come along with you till this software transfer is done,” Tsuyoshi said.

“That’s very kind of you.” They got into the elevator together. Zimmerman punched for the fourth floor. “Anyway, as I was saying, I went into this bar in Roppongi late at night, because I was jetlagged and hoping for something to eat...”

“Yes?”

“And this woman...well, let’s just say this woman was hanging out in a foreigner’s bar in Roppongi late at night, and she wasn’t wearing a whole lot of clothes, and she didn’t look like she was any better than she ought to be...”

“Yes, I think I understand you.”

“Anyway, this menu they gave me was full of kanji, or katakana, or romanji, or whatever they call those, so I had my phrasebook out, and I was trying very hard to puzzle out these pesky ideograms...” The elevator opened and they stepped into the carpeted hall of the hotel’s fourth floor. “So I opened the menu and I pointed to an entree, and I told this girl...” Zimmerman stopped suddenly, and stared at his screen. “Oh dear, something’s happening. Just a moment.”

Zimmerman carefully studied the instructions on his pokkecon. Then he pulled the bottle of bay rum from the baggy pocket of his shorts, and unscrewed the cap. He stood on tiptoe, stretching to his full height, and carefully poured the contents of the bottle through the iron louvers of a ventilation grate, set high in the top of the wall.

Zimmerman screwed the cap back on neatly, and slipped the empty bottle back in his pocket. Then he examined his pokkecon again. He frowned, and shook it. The screen had frozen. Apparently Tsuyoshi’s new translation program had overloaded Zimmerman’s old-fashioned operating system. His pokkecon had crashed.

Zimmerman spoke a few defeated sentences in English. Then he smiled, and spread his hands apologetically. He bowed, and went into his room, and shut the door.

The Japanese woman and her burly American escort entered the hall. The man gave Tsuyoshi a hard stare. The woman opened the door with a passcard. Her hands were shaking.

Tsuyoshi’s pokkecon rang. “Leave the hall,” it told him. “Go downstairs. Get into the elevator with the bellboy.”

Tsuyoshi followed instructions.

The bellboy was just entering the elevator with a cart full of the woman’s baggage. Tsuyoshi got into the elevator, stepping carefully behind the wheeled metal cart. “What floor, sir?” said the bellboy.

“Eight,” Tsuyoshi said, ad-libbing. The bellboy turned and pushed the buttons. He faced forward attentively, his gloved hands folded.

The pokkecon flashed a silent line of text to the screen. “Put the gift box inside her flight bag,” it read.

Tsuyoshi located the zippered blue bag at the back of the cart. It was a matter of instants to zip it open, put in the box with the maneki neko, and zip the bag shut again. The bellboy noticed nothing. He left, tugging his cart.

Tsuyoshi got out on the eighth floor, feeling slightly foolish. He wandered down the hall, found a quiet nook by an ice machine and called his wife. “What’s going on?” he said.

“Oh, nothing.” She smiled. “Your haircut looks nice! Show me the back of your head.”

Tsuyoshi held the pokkecon screen behind the nape of his neck.

“They do good work,” his wife said with satisfaction. “I hope it didn’t cost too much. Are you coming home now?”

“Things are getting a little odd here at the hotel,” Tsuyoshi told her. “I may be some time.”

His wife frowned. “Well, don’t miss supper. We’re having bonito.”

Tsuyoshi took the elevator back down. It stopped at the fourth floor. The woman’s American companion stepped onto the elevator. His nose was running and his eyes were streaming with tears.

“Are you all right?” Tsuyoshi said.

“I don’t understand Japanese,” the man growled. The elevator doors shut.

The man’s cellular phone crackled into life. It emitted a scream of anguish and a burst of agitated female English. The man swore and slammed his hairy fist against the elevator’s emergency button. The elevator stopped with a lurch. An alarm bell began ringing.

The man pried the doors open with his large hairy fingers and clambered out into the fourth floor. He then ran headlong down the hall.

The elevator began buzzing in protest, its doors shuddering as if broken. Tsuyoshi climbed hastily from the damaged elevator, and stood there in the hallway. He hesitated a moment. Then he produced his pokkecon and loaded his Japanese-to-English translator. He walked cautiously after the American man.

The door to their suite was open. Tsuyoshi spoke aloud into his pokkecon. “Hello?” he said experimentally. “May I be of help?”

The woman was sitting on the bed. She had just discovered the maneki neko box in her flight bag. She was staring at the little cat in horror.

“Who are you?” she said, in bad Japanese.

Tsuyoshi realized suddenly that she was a Japanese American. Tsuyoshi had met a few Japanese Americans before. They always troubled him. They looked fairly normal from the outside, but their behavior was always bizarre. “I’m just a passing friend,” he said. “Something I can do?”

“Grab him, Mitch!” said the woman in English. The American man rushed into the hall and grabbed Tsuyoshi by the arm. His hands were like steel bands.

Tsuyoshi pressed the distress button on his pokkecon.

“Take that computer away from him,” the woman ordered in English. Mitch quickly took Tsuyoshi’s pokkecon away, and threw it on the bed. He deftly patted Tsuyoshi’s clothing, searching for weapons. Then he shoved Tsuyoshi into a chair.

The woman switched back to Japanese. “Sit right there, you. Don’t you dare move.” She began examining the contents of Tsuyoshi’s wallet.

“I beg your pardon?” Tsuyoshi said. His pokkecon was lying on the bed. Lines of red text scrolled up its little screen as it silently issued a series of emergency net alerts.

The woman spoke to her companion in English. Tsuyoshi’s pokkecon was still translating faithfully. “Mitch, go call the local police.”

Mitch sneezed uncontrollably. Tsuyoshi noticed that the room smelled strongly of bay rum. “I can’t talk to the local cops. I can’t speak Japanese.” Mitch sneezed again.

“Okay, then I’ll call the cops. You handcuff this guy. Then go down to the infirmary and get yourself some antihistamines, for Christ’s sake.”

Mitch pulled a length of plastic whipcord cuff from his coat pocket, and attached Tsuyoshi’s right wrist to the head of the bed. He mopped his streaming eyes with a tissue. “I’d better stay with you. If there’s a cat in your luggage, then the criminal network already knows we’re in Japan. You’re in danger.”

“Mitch, you may be my bodyguard, but you’re breaking out in hives.”

“This just isn’t supposed to happen,” Mitch complained, scratching his neck. “My allergies never interfered with my job before.”

“Just leave me here and lock the door,” the woman told him. “I’ll put a chair against the knob. I’ll be all right. You need to look after yourself.”

Mitch left the room.

The woman barricaded the door with a chair. Then she called the front desk on the hotel’s bedside pasokon. “This is Louise Hashimoto in room 434. I have a gangster in my room. He’s an information criminal. Would you call the Tokyo police, please? Tell them to send the organized crime unit. Yes, that’s right. Do it. And you should put your hotel security people on full alert. There may be big trouble here. You’d better hurry.” She hung up.

Tsuyoshi stared at her in astonishment. “Why are you doing this? What’s all this about?”

“So you call yourself Tsuyoshi Shimizu,” said the woman, examining his credit cards. She sat on the foot of the bed and stared at him. “You’re yakuza of some kind, right?”

“I think you’ve made a big mistake,” Tsuyoshi said.

Louise scowled. “Look, Mr. Shimizu, you’re not dealing with some Yankee tourist here. My name is Louise Hashimoto and I’m an assistant federal prosecutor from Providence, Rhode Island, USA.” She showed him a magnetic ID card with a gold official seal.

“It’s nice to meet someone from the American government,” said Tsuyoshi, bowing a bit in his chair. “I’d shake your hand, but it’s tied to the bed.”

“You can stop with the innocent act right now. I spotted you out in the hall earlier, and in the lobby, too, casing the hotel. How did you know my bodyguard is violently allergic to bay rum? You must have read his medical records.”

“Who, me? Never!”

“Ever since I discovered you network people, it’s been one big pattern,” said Louise. “It’s the biggest criminal conspiracy I ever saw. I busted this software pirate in Providence. He had a massive network server and a whole bunch of AI freeware search engines. We took him in custody, we bagged all his search engines, and catalogs, and indexers...Later that very same day, these cats start showing up.”

“Cats?”

Louise lifted the maneki neko, handling it as if it were a live eel. “These little Japanese voodoo cats. Maneki neko, right? They started showing up everywhere I went. There’s a china cat in my handbag. There’s three china cats at the office. Suddenly they’re on display in the windows of every antique store in Providence. My car radio starts making meowing noises at me.”

“You broke part of the network?” Tsuyoshi said, scandalized. “You took someone’s machines away? That’s terrible! How could you do such an inhuman thing?”

“You’ve got a real nerve complaining about that. What about my machinery?” Louise held up her fat, eerie-looking American pokkecon. “As soon as I stepped off the airplane at Narita, my PDA was attacked. Thousands and thousands of e-mail messages. All of them pictures of cats. A denial-of-service attack! I can’t even communicate with the home office! My PDA’s useless!”

“What’s a PDA?”

“It’s a PDA, my Personal Digital Assistant! Manufactured in Silicon Valley!”

“Well, with a goofy name like that, no wonder our pokkecons won’t talk to it.”

Louise frowned grimly. “That’s right, wise guy. Make jokes about it. You’re involved in a malicious software attack on a legal officer of the United States Government. You’ll see.” She paused, looking him over. “You know, Shimizu, you don’t look much like the Italian mafia gangsters I have to deal with, back in Providence.”

“I’m not a gangster at all. I never do anyone any harm.”

“Oh no?” Louise glowered at him. “Listen, pal, I know a lot more about your set-up, and your kind of people, than you think I do. I’ve been studying your outfit for a long time now. We computer cops have names for your kind of people. Digital panarchies. Segmented, polycephalous, integrated influence networks. What about all these free goods and services you’re getting all this time?”

She pointed a finger at him. “Ha! Do you ever pay taxes on those? Do you ever declare that income and those benefits? All the free shipments from other countries! The little homemade cookies, and the free pens and pencils and bumper stickers, and the used bicycles, and the helpful news about fire sales...You’re a tax evader! You’re living through kickbacks! And bribes! And influence peddling! And all kinds of corrupt off-the-books transactions?

Tsuyoshi blinked. “Look, I don’t know anything about all that. I’m just living my life.”

“Well, your network gift economy is undermining the lawful, government approved, regulated economy!”

“Well,” Tsuyoshi said gently, “maybe my economy is better than your economy.”

“Says who?” she scoffed. “Why would anyone think that?”

“It’s better because we’re happier than you are. What’s wrong with acts of kindness? Everyone likes gifts. Midsummer gifts. New Years Day gifts. Year-end presents. Wedding presents. Everybody likes those.”

“Not the way you Japanese like them. You’re totally crazy for gifts.”

“What kind of society has no gifts? It’s barbaric to have no regard for common human feelings.”

Louise bristled. “You’re saying I’m barbaric?”

“I don’t mean to complain,” Tsuyoshi said politely, “but you do have me tied up to your bed.”

Louise crossed her arms. “You might as well stop complaining. You’ll be in much worse trouble when the local police arrive.”

“Then we’ll probably be waiting here for quite a while,” Tsuyoshi said. “The police move rather slowly, here in Japan. I’m sorry, but we don’t have as much crime as you Americans, so our police are not very alert.”

The pasokon rang at the side of the bed. Louise answered it. It was Tsuyoshi’s wife.

“Could I speak to Tsuyoshi Shimizu please?”

“I’m over here, dear,” Tsuyoshi called quickly. “She’s kidnapped me! She tied me to the bed!”

“Tied to her bed?” His wife’s eyes grew wide. “That does it! I’m calling the police!”

Louise quickly hung up the pasokon. “I haven’t kidnapped you! I’m only detaining you here until the local authorities can come and arrest you.”

“Arrest me for what, exactly?”

Louise thought quickly. “Well, for poisoning my bodyguard by pouring bay rum into the ventilator.”

“But I never did that. Anyway, that’s not illegal, is it?”

The pasokon rang again. A shining white cat appeared on the screen. It had large, staring, unearthly eyes.

“Let him go,” the cat commanded in English.

Louise shrieked and yanked the pasokon’s plug from the wall.

Suddenly the lights went out. “Infrastructure attack!” Louise squawled. She rolled quickly under the bed.

The room went gloomy and quiet. The air conditioner had shut off. “I think you can come out,” Tsuyoshi said at last, his voice loud in the still room. “It’s just a power failure.”

“No it isn’t,” Louise said. She crawled slowly from beneath the bed, and sat on the mattress. Somehow, the darkness had made them more intimate. “I know very well what this is. I’m under attack. I haven’t had a moment’s peace since I broke that network. Stuff just happens to me now. Bad stuff. Swarms of it. It’s never anything you can touch, though. Nothing you can prove in a court of law.”

She sighed. “I sit in chairs, and somebody’s left a piece of gum there. I get free pizzas, but they’re not the kind of pizzas I like. Little kids spit on my sidewalk. Old women in walkers get in front of me whenever I need to hurry.”

The shower came on, all by itself. Louise shuddered, but said nothing. Slowly, the darkened, stuffy room began to fill with hot steam.

“My toilets don’t flush,” Louise said. “My letters get lost in the mail. When I walk by cars, their theft alarms go off. And strangers stare at me. It’s always little things. Lots of little tiny things, but they never, ever stop. I’m up against something that is very, very big, and very, very patient. And it knows all about me. And it’s got a million arms and legs. And all those arms and legs are people.”

There was the noise of scuffling in the hall. Distant voices, confused shouting.

Suddenly the chair broke under the doorknob. The door burst open violently. Mitch tumbled through, the sunglasses flying from his head. Two hotel security guards were trying to grab him. Shouting incoherently in English, Mitch fell headlong to the floor, kicking and thrashing. The guards lost their hats in the struggle. One tackled Mitch’s legs with both his arms, and the other whacked and jabbed him with a baton.

Puffing and grunting with effort, they hauled Mitch out of the room. The darkened room was so full of steam that the harried guards hadn’t even noticed Tsuyoshi and Louise.

Louise stared at the broken door. “Why did they do that to him?”

Tsuyoshi scratched his head in embarrassment. “Probably a failure of communication.”

“Poor Mitch! They took his gun away at the airport. He had all kinds of technical problems with his passport... Poor guy, he’s never had any luck since he met me.”

There was a loud tapping at the window. Louise shrank back in fear. Finally she gathered her courage, and opened the curtains. Daylight flooded the room.

A window-washing rig had been lowered from the roof of the hotel, on cables and pulleys. There were two window-washers in crisp gray uniforms. They waved cheerfully, making little catpaw gestures.

There was a third man with them. It was Tsuyoshi’s brother.

One of the washers opened the window with a utility key. Tsuyoshi’s brother squirmed into the room. He stood up and carefully adjusted his coat and tie.

“This is my brother,” Tsuyoshi explained.

“What are you doing here?” Louise said.

“They always bring in the relatives when there’s a hostage situation,” Tsuyoshi’s brother said. “The police just flew me in by helicopter and landed me on the roof.” He looked Louise up and down. “Miss Hashimoto, you just have time to escape.”

“What?” she said.

“Look down at the streets,” he told her. “See that? You hear them? Crowds are pouring in from all over the city. All kinds of people, everyone with wheels. Street noodle salesmen. Bicycle messengers. Skateboard kids. Takeout delivery guys.”

Louise gazed out the window into the streets, and shrieked aloud. “Oh no! A giant swarming mob! They’re surrounding me! I’m doomed!”

“You are not doomed,” Tsuyoshi’s brother told her intently. “Come out the window. Get onto the platform with us. You’ve got one chance, Louise. It’s a place I know, a sacred place in the mountains. No computers there, no phones, nothing.” He paused. “It’s a sanctuary for people like us. And I know the way.”

She gripped his suited arm. “Can I trust you?”

“Look in my eyes,” he told her. “Don’t you see? Yes, of course you can trust me. We have everything in common.”

Louise stepped out the window. She clutched his arm, the wind whipping at her hair. The platform creaked rapidly up and out of sight.

Tsuyoshi stood up from the chair. When he stretched out, tugging at his handcuffed wrist, he was just able to reach his pokkecon with his fingertips. He drew it in, and clutched it to his chest. Then he sat down again, and waited patiently for someone to come and give him freedom.

© 1998 Bruce Sterling.

Originally published in Hayakawa’s Science Fiction Magazine (Japanese language)

Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (English language)

Reprinted by permission of the author

Bruce Sterling is the author of many novels, including Islands in the Net, Heavy Weather, Distraction, Holy Fire, The Zenith Angle, The Caryatids, and, with William Gibson, The Difference Engine. He is the winner of three Locus Awards, two Hugos, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. He is also the editor of the seminal cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades. Much of his short fiction, which has appeared in magazines such as F&SF and Omni, was recently collected in Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling.

Author Spotlight: Bruce Sterling
Erin Stocks

This is the first truly cyberpunk story we’ve had up on Lightspeed. Will you tell us a little about the origins of it?

Well, since I’m a cyberpunk writer, and that story’s got rather a lot of cyber going on in it, I guess it is indeed “truly cyberpunk.” I wasn’t sitting there looking and acting all truly-cyberpunk while I was typing it, however.

You chose to write this story from the point of view of a Japanese man. Was there a reason for choosing that particular nationality?

Yeah. This story was originally written for Hayakawa’s SF Magazine in Tokyo, and its original appearance was in the Japanese language. Hayakawa’s was reprinting rather a lot of my stuff at the time, and I thought I’d amuse the readers of the mag by writing the kind of story Bruce Sterling would have written if he was a Japanese SF writer.

“Maneki Neko” may be the first story I’ve ever read when a dominant network turns out to be a good thing, rather than a bad (at least in Tsuyoshi’s opinion). It’s original even for 2011. Back when you wrote this, was it a unique idea as well? Were people afraid that they’d end up a victim of conspiracy (like Louise)?

I frankly didn’t care if it was a unique idea. Unique ideas are overrated. The idea that the Internet has a “gift economy”aspect is an obvious idea. It’s a truism, and even a cliche’.

The story is unique because it asks a question like “What would an Internet gift economy look like if it had some strongly Japanese cultural characteristics?” That’s how a story like “Maneki Neko” emerges. It’s not a moral sermon about how some situation is a “good thing rather than a bad thing,” but a detailed speculation on how it might look and feel.

It has turned out to be a rather popular story, but mostly among Internet gift-economy enthusiasts instead of Japanese science fiction readers. I wrote a second piece for Hayakawa’s called “Edo no Hana,” and while steampunks kind of like that story, the Japanese were like: “What gives with that?”

People are always paranoid about being victimized by dominant networks and conspiracies. These guys are just projecting their own anxieties. If you take the trouble to go hang out with the conspirators who are in the dominant networks, you’ll find they’re just some bunch of goons and goofballs, pretty much like everybody else.

It’s especially interesting to go find people who think that YOU are a conspirator in a dominant network. If you’re a white American guy who travels the world, that’ll happen all the time.

You’re known as one of the “founders” of the cyberpunk movement. What appeals to you the most about this sub-genre, and why should we all read it more?

I used to carry on rather a lot about the many good reasons to read cyberpunk, and people actually DID read it more. Nowadays the bookstores are closing, and people read Google searches and Facebook pages. If you’d read some cyberpunk back in 1985, you might have been a bit more up-to-speed with this development.

What are you working on now?

I’m about to go out to a squat in Rome to talk about “design fiction” and “augmented reality” to student radicals and European leftists. My wife, the former-Yugoslav feminist revolutionary dissident, is coming along.

It’s pretty much always like this for me, nowadays. I don’t know if that is “work” or more just some kind of “activism,”but I sure do a lot of it. A lot of my friends say that, nowadays, I live in a Bruce Sterling novel.

Lightspeed assistant editor Erin Stocks is a writer and musician transplanted from Chicago to Oklahoma City. Her fiction can be found in the Coeur de Lion anthology Anywhere but Earth (upcoming), Flash Fiction Online, the Hadley Rille anthology Destination: Future, and the Absent Willow Review. In her free time, she looks for new books to read (zombies in space! fantastical horror!), and can be found on erinstocks.blogspot.com.

TANSTAAFL!
(There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch)
Jeff Lester

In Bruce Sterling’s “Maneki Neko,” a Tokyo resident running errands for his wife ends up embroiled in a potentially dangerous clash of cultures. Although the story features desktop fractal detail generators and highly advanced smartphone-style “pokkecons,” the truly fantastic element of the story is the way protagonist Tsuyoshi Shimizu makes a living—he participates in a gift economy organized and tracked by an AI network.

Although gift economies have existed in various non-Western cultures for many years, academic scrutiny of the process began comparatively recently, when Marcel Mauss published “Essai sur le don” in 1924. Drawing from the field reports of early 20th Century ethnographers and his own considerable knowledge base (Mauss was not only a talented linguist but a Sanskrit scholar), he created such an enduring portrait of the gift economy that, as Lewis Hyde notes in The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, “almost every anthropologist who has addressed himself to questions of exchange in the last half century has taken Mauss’s essay as his point of departure.”

Key among Mauss’s observations is that gift economies tend to be marked by three interrelated obligations: The obligation to give, the obligation to accept, and the obligation to reciprocate. Or, in the words of Robert A. Heinlein: “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” A participant in the classically defined gift economy gives in order to gain honor within the community, accepts to avoid being seen as rejecting the values of the community, and reciprocates—either to the gift-giver or to other members within the same economy—from a complex mash of the motives behind the other two obligations. Finally, to turn a gift into one’s own capital (the example used by Hyde in The Gift is of a tribesman who receives two goats and breeds them to create a flock, rather than making them the cornerstone of a feast to which everyone is invited) is to invite shame upon the recipient of the gift.

In order for shame and honor to work as carrots and sticks upon participants in a gift economy, the cultures they participate in are always small, interconnected communities that constantly track each participant’s social standing–the weight of obligation between giver and recipient to socialize and bond over the gift, the need for both to update their own internal ledgers with corresponding entries of honor and shame. As Hyde puts it, “there are times when we want to be aliens and strangers.”

In Cory Doctorow’s Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom, reputation (or “Whuffie”) becomes the main incentive for members of a post-scarcity society to be productive and useful. For example, although most manual labor no longer exists, “what remained—tending bar, mopping toilets—commanded Whuffie aplenty and a life of leisure in your off-hours.” And yet, participation in Whuffie-culture means what is popular always prevails, and to lose a conflict in a Whuffie-based society can make you worse than an alien or a stranger—you become a non-person, such that when ‘you press the callbutton for the elevator […] it gives you an angry buzz in return.”

Similarly, as Alex Golub, an anthropologist who spent time in Papua, New Guinea, observed in an excellent post at the anthropology blog Savage Minds (http://www.savageminds.org):

“[P]eople who grew up in gift economies don’t mind getting out of them all that much. It can actually be tremendously rewarding to buy a honkin’ big piece of meat from someone who you will never meet again, take it back to your hotel room, and eat the entire thing by yourself, completely alone.”

By contrast, in Maneki Neko, Tsuyoshi Shimizu doesn’t have to worry about his reputation: He can give gifts to people he does not know, confident the pokkecon will track his good deeds and reward them at some later juncture. This is a huge change from the desire to improve social standing that compels participants in the Kula rings of Papua New Guinea to travel hundreds of miles for the exchange of necklaces, or to prove one’s wealth in a potlatch (thrown by one of the North Coast’s Salish Native American tribes) by giving away the most resources—the only obligation Tsuyoshi feels compelled to honor is to the system itself.

While much would have to change in our culture to make it an automated gift economy, the Internet has already helped shaped items, ideas, and movements in ways similar to the engines fueling gift economies. Warez are cracked and distributed by individuals and groups for the honor of bragging rights; open-source software is created and developed by participants who exchange their time, energy, and creativity for prestige; and anyone who’s attended Burning Man, the annual festival held in the Black Rock Desert, knows how participants of theme camps will expend tremendous labor and resources to create works of ephemeral beauty and generosity for the pleasure and appreciation of others. In fact, when Larry Harvey and the other official organizers of Burning Man decided to allow cafes and ice to be sold for money, they were met with resistance by those who’d previously taken pride in the event being a “pure” gift economy. To such detractors, Harvey replied:

“Some people have said that these seeming contradictions in a non-commercial ethos are evidence of deep naïveté or demonstrate hypocrisy. I believe that this is due to a confusion of words and their meanings. When people assert that something is too commercial or has been commercialized, they do not mean to say that commerce is necessarily bad. Instead, they are expressing the feeling that something essential—something that should not be bought or sold—has been commodified. […] Our annual event in the desert is meant to demonstrate what can happen when human interactions cease to be mediated and limited by market transactions and are governed, instead, by the unconditional passage of gifts.”

In moving beyond simple anarchist cant, Harvey and the other administrators of Burning Man proposed that selling ice and coffee to not only assisted the underprepared, but increased the official organization’s fiscal self-sufficiency.

Such arguments may have found favor with Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin, sometimes referred to as “The Anarchist Prince.” (Although he renounced the title at age 12, Kropotkin’s royal lineage was well-established and traced back several centuries.)

In 1902, Kropotkin published Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, in which he argued that the practice of mutual aid among animals and people in feudal and pre-feudal societies allowed the individuals in those societies to prosper. Kropotkin’s aim in doing so was to counterbalance the current social trend to tie Darwin’s theories (especially the concept of the survival of the fittest) to free market capitalism and competition. In his own experiences (especially journeys in his youth made to Eastern Siberia and Northern Manchuria), Kropotkin had “failed to find—although I was eagerly looking for it—that bitter struggle for the means of existence, among animals belonging to the same species, which was considered by most Darwinists (though not always by Darwin himself) as the dominant characteristic of struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution.”

In the colonies of rodents and the migration of birds and fallow-deer, Kropotkin instead discovered examples of mutual aid that allowed the species to survive in such harsh conditions. Kropotkin’s later study of primitive tribes, similarly revealed not “the war of all against all,” but instead a state of cooperation and mutual aid. Although Kropotkin’s studies carried within them both bias and a tendency to romanticize the primitive society (as Hyde points out in The Gift, “a fully shaded view of tribal life had to wait for the emergence of ethnography as an empirical science”), they were still studies done from the field and carried with them more observed truth than the dour Hobbesian pronouncements made by Social Darwinists from the safety of their drawing room chairs.

At the end of “Maneki Neko,” Tsuyoshi encounters Louise Hashimoto, an assistant federal prosecutor from Providence, Rhode Island, who believes (possibly correctly) that Tsuyoshi’s gift economy is also “the biggest criminal conspiracy I ever saw.” An American, Louise still participates in our system of commodity exchange, telling Tsuyoshi, “Your network gift economy is undermining the lawful, government approved, regulated economy!” To which Tsuyoshi gently replies, “Maybe my economy is better than your economy.”

When different economies collide, cultural misunderstandings and frustrations run high. Indeed, Puritans in Massachusetts were initially delighted by the welcoming generosity of Native Americans who offered them an abundance of gifts. But neither group truly understood their vast cultural differences: The Englishmen took the items to consume or to keep and did not reciprocate, ignorant of their obligations under the American Indians’ gift economy. And when the natives tried to correct the situation, the Puritans were both amused and appalled. The pejorative term for someone who either gives a gift and later decides they want it back, or gives a gift to get one in return—an “Indian giver”—is the resulting creation, a painful scrap of linguistic shrapnel, from the clash of two very different economies.

Jeff Lester has written for io9, Newsarama, and Comix Experience’s Savage Critic website, as well as for Telltale Games’ Sam & Max and CSI series of video games. With Graeme McMillan, he co-hosts Wait, What?, a podcast reviewing comics, graphic novels, and the latest developments in the comics industry. He currently divides his time between San Francisco and the amorphous internal landscape of his own head.

Mama, We are Zhenya, Your Son
Tom Crosshill

Mama,

This is Zhenya, your son. I’m in a castle with gnomes! When you said Dr. Olga would pay many rubles for a boy to help her, I was afraid but I didn’t tell you. I didn’t want to be selfish because with rubles you can pay for the hospital so you can be strong again. Now I’m happy that I came.

Dr. Olga says I must write what happens in a letter so you can read it and not worry. We can’t send pictures because the gnomes have no cameras (silly gnomes) so I will describe everything.

I fell asleep in Dr. Olga’s big room, in the red university building by the Botanical Garden. I had a helmet on my head stuffed with wires. There were lots of lights and noises like in that game which Dima’s Papa bought him and you said we couldn’t buy because we don’t have a Papa or rubles. Then the lights went away and I was in a castle.

It’s not like Moscow at all except maybe on the Red Square. There are stone corridors and pretty towers with mushroom tops, and a big hall with a glass roof so you can see the stars when it’s dark.

The gnomes live in the cellar. They’re short and green and wear big fluffy hats with their names on them, like GUI 1, GUI 2, GUI 3, which they said means gnome user innerface. I asked them for food but they didn’t understand me real good, only jumped around and sang songs. I think Sulyik is smarter.

Oh, yes, Sulyik is here! Dr. Olga put a helmet on his head too. At first he was afraid of the gnomes but now he barks at them very loud. We found a run place for him with grass and water. I told Dr. Olga about the linden tree behind our building where he likes to bury bones and she put a linden tree in the run place too. He likes that.

Dr. Olga can’t come here but she talks to us sometimes. Her face is in the wall like the stone is soft and moving. She hasn’t told me what work I have to do yet but I promise I’ll work the hardest I can, Mama!!!!!

Zhenya (your son)

Mama,

This is Zhenya, your son.

We are hungry. It’s not so bad for me, but Sulyik whines and drags his belly on the floor.

Dr. Olga says there is a food place and it’s our job to find it, but we can’t because the path between places keeps changing. We go all around the castle and we should be where we started and we’re not. Start in sleep place, end in run place. Start in run place, end in the big hall. It’s like that time I got lost in Izmaylovsky Park and you said I was a stupid boy because anyone could just follow the signs but there are no signs here.

Dr. Olga doesn’t help. She says if I train my mind to get from sleep place to food place and food place to sleep place, then I can find the treasure place. I ask her what treasure place but she doesn’t tell me. I hope she doesn’t think I’m stupid too. But maybe I am. Maybe Sulyik is hungry because I’m not smart enough.

Zhenya (your son)

Mama,

This is Zhenya, your son.

Sulyik found the food place! We were in the big hall and he ran away from me like at the carnival with the mirrors, many Sulyiks in every direction. Then he barked and ran back and pulled at my pants, just one Sulyik. When I tried to go with him there were many Sulyiks again, and I didn’t know which one to follow. Then he brought me a banana and I got excited because I remembered the time I got to eat one for my birthday, but the gnomes took it from me before I could have it. I ran after them but the gnomes are very fast.

I told Dr. Olga, and she says I should be more flexible. After all I am only eight and my pathways are fresh and it’s really not hard if Sulyik can do it.

Dr. Olga doesn’t know Sulyik. He’s a very smart dog. I can’t win hide and seek with him even with my eyes open. When I watch him run away there are many Sulyiks everywhere so that doesn’t help. But when I see him somewhere and go catch him, I can’t guess which way he’s running and how fast.

The gnomes watch and laugh and chant, hai-zen-berg! hai-zen-berg! hai-zen-berg! I don’t get angry at them, though. My Sulyik is smarter than me!

I’m still hungry.

Zhenya (your son)

P.S. Did you go to the hospital, Mama? Are you all right?

Mama,

This is Zhenya, your son.

I’m afraid, Mama. The gnomes make me play a game, and they hit me when I lose. It hurts very much! Sulyik tries to stop them but they hit him too. And Dr. Olga doesn’t come when I call.

It’s a hard game. The gnomes have a big gold box with two rooms and a paper wall and no door in the wall. They put me in one room by the wall and they leave me. There’s a dragon painted on the wall, all red and black. The gnomes say I must get to the other room or the dragon will eat me.

But the dragon doesn’t come. The gnomes come back later and ask me, why are you still in this room? And then they hit me and make me do it again.

One time I broke the paper wall and went to the other room, and they got very angry and hit me many times and said I shouldn’t do that. Tunnel, they say, use a tunnel, but the floor is hard and I don’t even have a shovel.

What can I do, Mama? I know I must try hard for you, but it hurts!

Zhenya (your son, waiting for your letter)

Mama, the dragon came. She came and I was so scared, I went through the wall and it didn’t break. Only she came again on the other side and I couldn’t run away. She burned me! She burned me real bad, Mama.

I’m sorry, Mama. I’m sure I did something very bad but I don’t know what. Please, can I leave now? I know we need rubles but I’m scared. Please, Mama?

Mama,

I think this is Zhenya, your son. I’m not sure.

Nothing is sure. I understand that now. Everything is, and is not. The dragon helped me understand. A wall is no wall if I’m everywhere.

I can find the food place now, if every one of me goes looking. Every me doesn’t find every food place, but one of me finds a food place.

I don’t know why I was all in one place before. I think all the little parts of me, they could be many different places but they disagreed. They pulled in different directions like in that story about the wagon and the horses so they stayed in place. Now every little piece of me agrees, and I am everywhere I want to be.

Oh, yes, Dr. Olga came back. I was angry about the dragon but she said it’s okay because I can go home soon. You always said I should keep my mouth shut around aunts and uncles, Mama. I try very hard with Dr. Olga but I don’t like her so much anymore.

She says my pathways changed. A miracle of tabyula raza, she says. A young mind can learn to think qantumikally in a simulated qantumikal environment. I think she wanted to talk very much because she said many more things about how she proved the brain of somebody called Penroz is real, which is silly because how could a brain not be real. Then she looked very strange and cried. I asked her why, and she said many important aunts and uncles would be very happy and put her name in books, which I guess is important like when you get a Giness record for how big a cake you can bake.

I don’t care about any of that, Mama. I just want to come home.

Zhenya (probably your son)

Mama,

We are Zhenya, your son.

All of I found the Dr. Olga says I have to write clearly because you can’t understand. Is that why you don’t send me letters, Mama? I’m sorry. I want you to write very much.

I found the treasure place. It’s on the roof, with the stars right above. The treasure’s a groaning metal thing as big as a house. I knew what it was as soon as I saw it because gnomes were standing in a circle, holding their hats and singing, “Treasure, treasure, treasure!”

I’m not sure it’s a very good treasure if gnomes have to tell you that’s what it is. And Sulyik doesn’t like it. I called him over but he just barked and wouldn’t come near.

Anyway, I thought the treasure was interesting. There are so many handles you can pull, it’s like a big yellow hedgehog, with twisting knobbly gears which are never in the same place when you look. Dr. Olga said she couldn’t understand the treasure because it’s a qantumikal motor and it needs a qantumikal brain but I should understand it because I’ve got one.

She’s right. When I’m everywhere at once, I get all tangled up with the treasure and the handles become my arms like I’m conducting an orchestra, and I understand everything. But it’s scary when that happens, Mama. The castle becomes squishy like plasticine in my hands, and I can shape it.

I was very bad at shaping at first so I broke the food place. There were sparks everywhere, and Dr. Olga said the hash had overflowed though I don’t know why because I never saw potatoes in the food place. Then I learned to stretch the castle so for every thin part there is a thick part and it doesn’t break. I stretched and stretched until I could see through to other castles.

Mama, there are many castles just like this one except each a little different. Some are a lot different. And when I stretch more with the handles, I can make openings to those other castles and reach through and be in all castles at once!

Dr. Olga said I should grab rooms and light from the other castles and bring them back so we have more energy. I did it but I think there is another Zhenya and another Sulyik in each of the other castles and they didn’t like it, because there was a loud noise and the castle moved very much, and some of the gnomes screamed and fell to the ground. Now there is green blood on their hats and they don’t move anymore.

Dr. Olga said not to worry, it’s a soft wear glitch and they’re not important anyway. I don’t like the gnomes but I think that’s not very nice of her. The treasure hurt them and it’s all because of her.

I’m scared, Mama.

Zhenya (your son, we are)

Mama,

Today Dr. Olga told me to use the treasure to look out of the castle and at the big room where Sulyik and I went to sleep. I moved the handles to stretch the air and I saw us sleeping on a long table, Sulyik and me. Aunts and uncles worked all around, and in the middle of the room there was a big metal box. It hummed and flashed lights when I moved the handles of the treasure.

I think the metal box is like the treasure except it’s in Moscow and it doesn’t move. When I used the treasure and the box started to make noises, all the aunts and uncles looked very excited and not afraid. I thought that was dumb because I was very afraid.

Dr. Olga told me to use the treasure to open other Moscows, like I’d opened other castles. But when I stretched the big room thin, I saw bad little fast things come out of the metal box. They were hitting Dr. Olga and all the aunts and uncles so I stopped.

The aunts and uncles and Dr. Olga didn’t believe me because they couldn’t see the bad little fast things. Dr. Olga said they had Gaigar counters and eye-on chambers and there was nothing there. She said I had to use the treasure to get energy from other Moscows because only I had a qantumikal brain and the whole world was waiting and anyway Sulyik wanted me to.

I said no. I don’t think Sulyik wants me to do a bad thing. I asked him and he licked me which is not very bad. He just wants to sleep with me under the linden tree in the sun.

When I told Dr. Olga that, she said she can’t give me rubles if I don’t help with the treasure.

I think maybe that is important but some of I are not sure anymore. In some Moscow, always, she gives me rubles. In some Moscow, always, she does not give me rubles. Both happen always. You’re sick and you’re fine always, Mama. Some of you, in some Moscow.

If that is so always, why should I help? All is, always, somewhere. But the bad little fast things are bad everywhere.

Zhenya (your son, we are)

Mama,

Okay, I will help Dr. Olga with the treasure tomorrow. Okay, okay, I will help.

All of I loves Sulyik. When Dr. Olga said she will hurt Sulyik, I thought many Sulyiks everywhere, can’t hurt all Sulyiks, we will be okay. But she took Sulyik away from the castle and when I used the treasure I saw him standing alone by the table with my body, outside in Moscow. He looked very sad with his head all shaved. Dr. Olga came and took him away, and now I can’t see him at all but he barks very loud like he hurts, and it’s hard to remember there are other Sulyiks in other Moscows.

I don’t think Dr. Olga is nice. I think maybe she was never nice. I think maybe when she promised us rubles she didn’t really mean it.

Please, ask her to give me Sulyik back. I’ll be good, I promise. I’ll do anything she wants.

Zhenya

Mama,

Zhenya, son.

I put this letter your table. Don’t afraid. Don’t scream.

Yes hide under bed. Under bed safe. Don’t open windows. Don’t go outside. Moscow not safe. Hungry smoke bad.

I protect you.

Sorry write little. Only have fingers if think hard.

Zhenya

Mama,

Zhenya again. Got more time now so I can write better.

Please, come out from under the bed. Don’t stare like that. Aren’t you happy that I’m back? I know I look scary but at least I’m strong enough for eyes and fingers. I can’t talk but I can write you letters.

I saw you got all the old letters I wrote for you. You must have been very busy at the hospital if you couldn’t answer. That’s okay. I’m glad Dr. Olga gave you rubles after all. You look stronger.

Soon I’ll be stronger too, Mama. I’ll have arms, many, many arms, and I’ll hold you, and we’ll be together. Won’t that be lovely, Mama? You always took care of me even when I was stupid and bad, and now I’ll take care of you and won’t ever, ever, ever let you go. Won’t that be great?

But we won’t have Sulyik. He died, Mama. When I started the treasure, the metal box in Dr. Olga’s room growled, and Sulyik ran out of a closet barking. Then the air stretched and broke, and out came all the bad little fast things. They flowed together and became the hungry smoke and came flying buzz buzz buzz, like many black bees.

I stopped the treasure but it was too late. The hungry smoke buzzed and wrapped around Sulyik, and he barked and barked, and then the hungry smoke ate his head and I couldn’t do anything.

I thought maybe it’s okay because there are other Sulyiks in other Moscows but it didn’t feel okay. It didn’t feel okay at all, Mama.

Then the smoke barked like Sulyik, loud and sad. It barked lots while it ate all the aunts and uncles, and Dr. Olga too. Dr. Olga screamed very long and I thought maybe she wanted another Giness record but she stopped and the smoke ate her head too.

After that the smoke gave up barking and whispered things, real soft like Dr. Olga. “Take, take, take from us! Steal from us! No, boy, no. No, no, no!” It ate my head last, because I was on the table and couldn’t run. When I heard it coming—”Boy! Boy! Boy!”—I ran to the castle but the castle got dark so I came back. I got real scared and I twisted the treasure very much and the metal box roared, and I ripped open the air between the castle and Moscow, and I came through all the way, all of me everywhere.

I tried using my body again but it didn’t work. The hungry smoke ate my head after all. It didn’t even hurt because I was everywhere at once.

Don’t worry about me, Mama. It’s okay.

Sorry about Moscow. I couldn’t help all the aunts and uncles and boys and girls and grandmas and grandpas. Sorry about the blood and the screaming. It makes me want to cry but I don’t have any tears. I don’t think crying would help anyway.

I couldn’t protect everyone but at least I protected you. The smoke won’t get into the apartment, don’t you worry, Mama. I think it’s real angry cause we tried to steal from its Moscow, and it gets smarter when it eats heads like when I read books, but you’ve got me and I’m smart too, and I’m everywhere.

I have to catch the hungry smoke now. I hope I can use Dr. Olga’s metal treasure-box and stretch the air, and send it all home. Then I’ll come for you. You just hold on.

Zhenya

Mama,

I caught much hungry smoke and sent it home. I promised we wouldn’t steal from other Moscows again but it just yelled, “Slide the curve! Blast the boy! Twisted metric!” It sounded like Uncles and Aunts and Grandpas and Grandmas and little kids too, happy and sad and angry and calm. I think maybe eating all those heads wasn’t so good for it. I think maybe it got confused.

I’m home, Mama. I sit next to you right now, here on the couch. Do you feel my fingers on your back? See the curtains move? It’s me, Mama.

Smile, Mama. Please, why won’t you smile? Once I catch the last of the smoke, we’ll be together for good. We can even go to Paris like you always wanted. I don’t think the smoke got to Paris.

But before that, can you help me? Look outside the door. I left Sulyik there. His fur is sticky and his head is gone. Can you wash him Mama? Can you bury him in the garden under the linden tree?

When everyone died I thought I was sad but I wasn’t sure. There are many Moscows and this is only one Moscow, so why is it important anyway?

But then I remembered Sulyik. There was only one Sulyik who mattered, in the end. That means there will always be only one Sulyik. I will remember him, all of I, for sure.

Sulyik taught me that. Even being qantumikal I can still know things for sure.

Zhenya (your son, all of I, for sure)

Tom Crosshill’s fiction has appeared in magazines such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Sybil’s Garage and Flash Fiction Online. In 2009, he won the Writers of the Future contest. Originally from Latvia, he writes in English and lives in New York, where he’s a member of the writers’ group Altered Fluid. In the past, he has operated a nuclear reactor, translated books and worked in a zinc mine, among other things. He’s currently working on a post-Singularity YA novel featuring superpowers and giant robots. Visit him at www.tomcrosshill.com.

Author Spotlight: Tom Crosshill
Stacey Friedberg

You studied physics at Reed College. How did this influence your writing of “Mama, We Are Zhenya, Your Son?” Is any of the science of the story based on actual physics?

“Mama, We are Zhenya, Your Son” is definitely an idea piece and it’s very much motivated by actual physics.

I’ve had the central idea for a while. Some years ago Roger Penrose proposed the idea that the human brain relies on quantum properties for computation, using this to explain away self-awareness and intelligence (he was not the first or only person to express similar ideas, but he’s the best known). The idea is not very highly regarded in the scientific community, but it occurred to me that there might be an actual way to prove (or at least strongly imply) it correct. Namely this:

What if you took a very young human brain and placed it in a complex simulated quantum-like environment? Might it learn to adapt to this environment and predict its behavior in real time as accurately as we predict the behavior of the real world (for a quantum-mechanical, probabilistic meaning of “predict”)? If it did, that would be a very strong indication that the human brain does indeed rely on quantum phenomena to make sense of the world (it seems unlikely, though I haven’t spent much time on this, that a non-quantum brain would be capable of such a feat).

All that said, there are limits to how rigorous the physics of such a story can be from scene to scene. The implementation of the experiment and the simulated quantum environment of the story are more suggestions of directions that might be explored than an actual roadmap and no doubt have many holes. The quantum phenomena that come through in the story—the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and quantum tunneling among others—are depicted evocatively for the reader’s sake. The actual reality of such an experiment would undoubtedly be a lot more complicated, a lot harder to understand and hopefully a lot less exciting.

How did you come up with the character of Zhenya? Why choose to let him speak only through letters?

For the science fictional conceit of the story, I needed a protagonist with a mind fresh enough to be extremely malleable. For the sake of the narrative, I needed someone with some emotional range and life experiences to draw on. Zhenya was the result—a boy with an ailing, twisted mother. Young enough to adapt, scarred enough to provide a canvas for my story (though he doesn’t realize it).

As to the epistolary format of the story, the principal reason is that I wanted Zhenya to have certain powerful relationships—with his mother, with Sulyik, with Olga—but it didn’t make sense for all of them to manifest in the VR environment. I thought in particular that I could build the relationship with his mother most effectively this way. By showing Zhenya’s thoughts and letting the audience read between the lines I aimed to draw his relationships without devoting much actual screen time to other characters.

Also, as many readers will have probably noticed, on a structural (as opposed to conceptual) level this story can be read as a dialogue with Daniel Keyes’s famous “Flowers for Algernon.” This was a deliberate choice from the outset. I loved how Keyes uses the letter format to show the evolution (and devolution) of Charlie, his protagonist. I thought the scientists in the story got off rather easy, though—they were lucky Charlie didn’t turn all Hannibal Lecter on them while at his peak. And I was a bit frustrated by the traditional circular story arc, whereby the story ends much as it started, with the protagonist having undergone a journey.

I decided to use a similar epistolary framework to illustrate this twisted science-fictional concept I’d had for years. Instead of Keyes’s circular story structure, though, I chose something more open-ended—I wanted to really push how far I could take my protagonist over the course of the story. I didn’t want a happy fairy tale ending, but I did want real long-term consequences for everyone involved. (I also wanted to include a tribute to Algernon, everyone’s favorite lab mouse—that was part of the motivation for introducing Sulyik).

Dr. Olga prods and then forces Zhenya to do her bidding. He is afraid, but seems to know when to stop, even when she tortures him. What is she so desperate for him to do? What does she expect will happen?

Her expectation is essentially that she’ll be able to siphon energy from parallel universes. Here I’m making up the science, although along familiar lines. Essentially I’m postulating a new kind of energy conservation law—that energy need not be conserved in any one given universe, but must be conserved across all parallel universes.

What Dr. Olga didn’t reckon with was that the folks in the other universes might want to keep their energy—and that someone else had probably tried this before.

What made you decide to set this story in the Russian Federation?

Russia has had an incredibly strong military-scientific complex from Soviet times, but the rule of law is lax. Experimenting on children might be a stretch, but it would be easier to get away with it there than in the States.

Also, being from Eastern Europe myself, I find I’m drawn to that part of the world in many of my stories.

It takes Zhenya some time before he can find the food place. It is only after he meets the dragon that his pathways change and he can think “qantumikally.” Why does this happen to Sulyik before it happens to Zhenya?

Sulyik is less distracted by conscious thought and analysis, and can make the transition intuitively. That’s why the system really puts Zhenya through the wringer to get him to learn—the changes he has to make don’t occur on the level of conscious thought.

Why gnomes?

Ha. This question seems to come up over and over again. I meant the castle and the gnomes to illustrate Dr. Olga’s half-hearted, slapdash efforts at making Zhenya at home in the VR environment. No doubt she’s using stock art assets and cardboard NPCs, but she does want the experiment to seem like a fairytale to Zhenya. No matter that it comes across like the Brothers Grimm on a particularly mean-spirited day—at least she’s trying.

But why gnomes in particular? I like gnomes. And their fluffy hats.

Is there anything else you’d like us to know about the story?

Despite my extensive answers above, I tend to think a story should be in the text. If I’ve done my job right, close readings of the story should be rewarded with an idea or two not immediately apparent.

Your website says that you’re working on a novel. Can you talk to us a little about that?

I’m writing a very dark young adult novel tentatively called Shard. It’s a growing-up tale set in a post-Singularity world where humans are no longer the top predator. I describe it as a cross of The Hunger Games and X-Men, with giant robots.

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.

The Many Worlds Interpretation Theory: Having Your Cake and Eating it Two, and Three, and Four...
Brad Deutsch

Maybe your parents told you to never talk politics or religion in polite company. It’s good advice which you should follow if you ever sit down with the Queen, the Pope, or your boss. It’s good advice in scientific circles, too, but with one addition: Never bring up interpretations of quantum mechanics. If you can imagine an assortment of cultists struggling to convert each other while playing Star Wars Trivial Pursuit, you’ll have a rough idea of the academic ambiance surrounding the topic.

Quantum mechanics tells us that atoms—and everything else on an atomic scale—behave differently than the larger objects we interact with in everyday life. And while quantum mechanics can also help predict events which happen on a tiny scale, they don’t tell us why nature behaves that way.

Recently one theory, which goes by the name of the “Many Worlds Interpretation,” has been gaining ground, moving from amusing obscurity to dark-horse frontrunner. Details vary among specific versions, but the overarching concept is that the universe splits constantly into multiple universes that are slightly different from one another, and between which all communication is cut off. Sound improbable? Maybe. Nevertheless, it’s one of the best guesses we have right now about Life, the Universe, and Everything.

The road to the Many Worlds Interpretation began in the early 20th century, when a serious problem was emerging in science. Massive amounts of evidence showed nature behaving strangely in very small scales. This didn’t make sense. Everything up to that point indicated that matter was matter, and should behave the same whether it was a planet, a tennis ball, or an atom. Why did the laws of motion simply break down at small scales?

One extreme example of the disconnect between macro and micro was the discovery of “superpositions” of states. As a conceptual example, everyday experience tells us that a coin flip can have two results: The coin can end up in the “Heads” state or “Tails” state. At a small enough scale, however, the coin would be in both states at the same time. The problem is, we can’t see the quantum superposition directly, because every time we look at the coin, it’s either “Heads” or “Tails.” It sounds a little fishy, like someone claiming to be invisible as long as no one’s watching, but without the concept of superposition, our predictions about reality come out hopelessly wrong.

The classic real-life demonstration of superposition involves photons—which are particles of light—sent flying one by one at a screen that has two holes for them to pass through. A charge-coupled device (CCD) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge-coupled_device) digital camera is placed on the other side of the screen, and over time, the CCD camera collects enough photons to make an image. Cover the right hole and the image is a bright spot on the left, meaning that photons only made it through the left hole. We say that these photons were in the “Left” state. Cover the left, and the image is a bright spot on the right, so the photons were in the “Right” state. If we uncover both holes we might expect to see two spots—the right photons plus the left—but we don’t. Instead, we see rippling circles, like the surface of a pond after two stones are dropped in. The pattern comes from interference, which is what we would expect if each and every photon had gone through both holes at once. So, a possible conclusion is that instead of being in the “Right” or “Left” state, each photon was in a superposition of both states. A Many Worlds Interpretation.

Disturbingly, measuring a superposition is unpredictable. Not just in the sense that lottery drawings are unpredictable; if we knew everything about every lottery ball, and the exact way the air whirls around in the randomizing machine, the winning numbers could be predicted. But nothing in quantum mechanics or any other physical theory tells us how to predict which state we’ll see when we look at a superposition. So far, it appears that there is simply no rule that determines it.

Quantum mechanics consists of a set of rules that predict how nature works at these small scales. It does the job phenomenally well, and is unanimously agreed upon as the most powerful and accurate physical theory available. Still, it doesn’t always sit well with the scientific community. It predicts behavior accurately, but that behavior is, at a macro scale, impossible. Many scientists insist that there must be some explanation. After all, billiard balls act like billiard balls, even if atoms don’t, and we do a damn good job at predicting billiard balls using nothing but Isaac Newton’s handiwork. Somewhere between the world of particles and the world of humans, there must be a boundary where everything starts to behave normally.

Through time and debate, factions have developed to explain how this boundary works. Some say that quantum mechanics is incomplete, and that we’re ignoring some important piece of information that would let us make exact predictions. Some say it doesn’t matter how it works as long as we can build working rocket ships and computer chips (cynically referred to as the “shut up and calculate” interpretation).

The big winner for decades has been the Copenhagen Interpretation, named after the home base of Neils Bohr, who advocated the position that everything behaves quantum mechanically until it’s observed. That doesn’t have to mean human observation; it just means that the system interacts with something in the rest of the universe: A human, a frog, a water molecule or a ray of sunshine. Once a quantum system is observed, the one true reality “collapses” out of all possible ones. This isn’t entirely satisfactory, since the collapse has to be irreversible and non-deterministic, and also, travel faster than light, which are all pretty big problems for physicists. Still, it’s been the canonical understanding since the 1920’s, and it’s the one that budding young physicists learn in college.

In 1957, a PhD student named Hugh Everett came up with what seems in retrospect to be a pretty obvious idea: What if there is no boundary between the human and quantum worlds? That is, what happens if we apply quantum mechanics at every level of the calculation? When he put in the equations and turned the crank, it worked out perfectly. Everything we observe is predicted exactly, except for one small problem: Every time a quantum mechanical system interacts with anything else, the universe breaks. Sometimes it splits into two, sometimes more. In each universe our quantum mechanical coin flip has a different result. That tiny change might have big consequences for the universe...or it might not. But by now there should be trillions, or trillions of trillions, or even infinitely many universes, if the Many Worlds Interpretation theory is true. How do we as humans fit into this? From the viewpoint of Many Worlds, humans are just a pile of atoms that obey known physics, not unlike a stalk of broccoli or a fence post (no offense). So we split, too, all the time, with the rest of observed reality. We don’t notice because once a world splits off, it can’t interact with “ours” any more. This would explain why we can’t predict quantum measurements. If you flip that quantum coin, you actually get both results. Or rather, one of you gets heads and one of you gets tails. The question of which result you’ll see doesn’t make any sense if you see both. This splitting continues, probably millions of times per second, and a cascading waterfall of realities is formed. Some are similar and some are very different. They might contain human beings, or not. In some universes, maybe this article is about nano-robots instead of quantum mechanics. But you’ll never read that article, because once the split occurs, the universes lose contact. Communicating between them might not turn out to be fundamentally impossible (the jury is still out), but it would at least be akin to making a window spontaneously un-break, or a bonfire un-burn, except on a universal scale.

Hugh Everett, by the way, was roundly ignored by some of the biggest names in physics when he presented his idea, and went on to make a comfortable living solving optimization problems for the Pentagon. His work was rediscovered and popularized by a handful of loyal physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists in the following decades, and by some accounts, Many Worlds is now the most supported interpretation of quantum mechanics among physicists.

The battle rages on, however. As in most emotional discussions, there is a great deal of misunderstanding among different quantum interpretation schools, and many initiates don’t fully understand their own viewpoints. There are also some legitimate concerns that have been only partially addressed by the Many Worlds Interpretation. If you want to get an idea of the terms of the debate, check out Wikipedia’s talk pages for any quantum mechanics article, or do a search for “interpretations of quantum mechanics.” A warning: I don’t know about other universes, but in this one, it’s not pretty.

Further reading:

For an excellent (but long) discussion on quantum mechanics and Many Worlds, check out the Quantum Physics Sequence by Eliezer Yudkowsky at lesswrong.com.

Brad Deutsch is a PhD student in Rochester, NY. His writing has mostly appeared in scientific journals, and usually involves excruciating descriptions of nano-optical experiments. He likes poker, road biking, and cupcakes.

Velvet Fields
Anne McCaffrey

Of course we moved into the cities of the planet we now know we must call Zobranoirundisi when Worlds Federated finally permitted a colony there. Although Survey had kept a watch on the planet for more than thirty years standard and the cities were obviously on a standby directive, the owners remained conspicuous by their absence. Since Resources and Supplies had agitated in council for another breadbasket planet in that sector of the galaxy and Zobranoirundisi was unoccupied, we were sent in, chartered to be self-sufficient in one sidereal year and to produce a surplus in two.

It would, therefore, have been a great misdirection of effort not to have inhabited the cities—we only moved into four—so patently suitable for humanoid life-forms. The murals that decorated a conspicuous wall in every dwelling unit gave only a vague idea of the physiology of our landlords, always depicted in an attitude of reverent obeisance toward a dominating Tree symbol so that only the backs, the rounded fuzz-covered craniums, and the suggestions of arms extended in front of the bodies were visible.

I suppose if we had not been so concerned with establishing the herds, generally breaking our necks to meet the colony charter requirements, we might have discovered sooner that there had been a gross error. The clues were there. For example, although we inhabited the cities, they could not be made fully “operational” despite all the efforts of Dunlapil, the metropolitan engineer. Then, too, we could find no single example of the Tree anywhere on the lush planet. But, with R&S on our backs to produce, produce, produce, we didn’t take time to delve into the perplexing anomalies.

Dunlapil, with his usual urbane contempt for the botanical, quipped to Martin Chavez, our ecologist, that the Tree was the Tree of Life and therefore mythical.

“Carry the analogy further,” he would tease Martin, “and it explains why the Tree worshipers”—that’s what we called them before we knew—“aren’t around anymore. Some dissident plucked the Apple and got ’em all kicked out of the Garden of Eden.”

Eden might well have been modeled on this planet, with its velvet fields, parklike forests, and rolling plains. Amid these sat lovely little cities constructed of pressed fibrous blocks tinted in pleasant colors during a manufacturing process whose nature frustrated Dunlapil as much as the absence of Trees perplexed Chavez.

So, suppressing our pervasive sense of trespassing, we moved into the abandoned dwellings, careful not to make any irreparable changes to accommodate our equipment. In fact, the only sophisticated nonindigenous equipment that I, as colony commissioner, permitted within any city was the plastisteel Comtower. I ordered the spaceport constructed beyond a low range of foothills on the rather scrubby plain at some distance from my headquarters city. An old riverbed proved an acceptable road for moving cargo to and from the port, and no one really objected to the distance. It would be far better not to offend our landlords with the dirt and chaos of outer-space commerce close to their pretty city.

We pastured the cattle in neatly separated velvet fields. Martin Chavez worried when close inspection disclosed that each velvet field was underpinned by its own ten-meter-thick foundation of ancient, rock-hard clay. Those same foundations housed what seemed to be a deep irrigation system.

I did ask Martin Chavez to investigate the curious absence of herbivores from a planet so perfectly suited to them. He had catalogued several types of omnivores, a wide variety of fowl, and a plethora of fishes. He did discover some fossil remains of herbivores, but nothing more recent than traces comparable to those of our Pleistocene epoch.

He therefore was forced to conclude—and submitted in a voluminous report with numerous comparisons to nearby galactic examples—that some catastrophes, perhaps the same that had wiped out the humanoids, had eliminated herbivores at an earlier stage.

Whatever the disaster had been—bacterial, viral, or something more esoteric—it did not recur to plague us. We thrived on the planet. The first children, conceived under the bluish alien sun, were born just after we had shipped our first year’s surplus offworld. Life settled into a pleasant seasonal routine: The beef, sheep, horses, kine, even the windoers of Grace’s World imported on an experimental basis, multiplied on the velvet fields. The centenarian crops from half a dozen worlds gave us abundant yields. We had some failures, of course, with inedible or grotesque ergotic mutations, but not enough to be worth more than a minor Chavezian thesis in the record and the shrug of the pioneering farmer. If a colonist is eating well, living comfortably, with leisure time for his kids and time off with his wife on the languid southern seas, he puts up with minor failures and irritations. Even with the omnipresent guilt of trespassing.

I was not the only one who never felt entirely at ease in the pretty cities. But, as I rationalized the intermittent twinges of conscience, it would have been ridiculous to build facilities when empty accommodations were already available, despite their obstinate refusal to work no matter how Dunlapil tried to energize them. Still, we managed fine and gradually came to ignore the anomalies we had never fully explored, settling down to make our gardens and our families grow.

The tenth year was just beginning, with surprising warmth, when Martin Chavez called a meeting with me and Dunlapil. Chavez had even convened it on a Restday, which was annoying as well as unusual.

“Just in case we have to call a meeting of the colony,” he told me when I protested. That statement, on top of his insistence on a meeting, was enough to make me feel apprehensive. Although Martin was a worrier he was no fool; he did not force his problems on anyone unnecessarily, nor was he one for calling useless meetings.

“I’ve an unusual report to make on a new plant growth discernible on the velvet fields, commissioner Sarubbi,” he announced, addressing me formally. “Such a manifestation is not generally associated with simple monocotyledonous plants. I’ve cross-checked both used and unused pastures, and the distortions of the growth in the used fields are distressing.”

“You mean, we’ve imported a virus that’s mutating the indigenous grasses?” I asked. “Or has the old virus that killed off the herbivorous life revived?”

“Nothing like this mutation has ever been classified and no, I don’t think it’s a return of a previous calamity.” Chavez frowned with worry.

“Ah, champion, Martin,” Dunlapil said with some disgust. “Don’t go calling for a planetary quarantine just when we’re showing a nice credit balance.”

Chavez drew himself up indignantly.

“He hasn’t suggested anything of the sort, Dun,” I said, wondering if the urban engineer was annoyed because Chavez might be closer to solving the enigma of the Tree than Dunlapil was the mechanics of the cities. “Please explain, Specialist Chavez.”

“I’ve just recently become aware of a weird evolution from the family Graminaceae, which these plants have resembled until now.” He snapped on the handviewer and projected a slide onto the only wall in my office bare of the ubiquitous murals. “The nodular extrusions now developing in the velvet fields show none of the characteristics of herbaceous plants. No joined stems or slender sheathing leaves.” He looked around to see if we had seen enough before he flashed on a slide of magnified cellular material. “This cross section suggests genus Helianthus, an improbable mutation.” Chavez shrugged his helplessness in presenting such contradictory material. “However, something new is under every sun and we have not yet determined how the usual blue light of this primary will affect growth after prolonged exposure. We might get a Bragae Two effect.”

“The next thing you’ll be telling us, Martin,” Dunlapil said as if to forestall a discourse on galactic comparisons, “is that these plants are the aliens who built these cities.” He shot me a grin.

“That ought to be obvious,” Chavez said with such a lack of rancor that the disbelief I had been entertaining disappeared. “Commissioner”—Chavez’s grave eyes met mine—”can you give me another reason why every city has similarly fenced lots, all placed to catch full daily sun? Why the velvet fields with that central dominant Tree symbol appear to be the reverent focus of the aliens—excuse me—the indigenous species?”

“But they’re humanoid,” Dunlapil said in protest.

“Their culture is agrarian. And there are no grazers. Not a single example of that blasted Tree anywhere on the planet—yet!”

That was when I truly began to be afraid.

“There are no grazing beasts,” Chavez went on inexorably, “because they have been eliminated to protect the velvet fields and whatever is growing in them now.”

“You mean, when those fields bloom with whatever it is they bloom with, the aliens will return?” Dunlapil asked.

Chavez nodded. “If we haven’t irreparably altered the growth cycle.”

“But that’s fantastic! An entire civilization can’t be dependent on a crazy who-knows-how-long cycle of plant life.” Dunlapil was sputtering with indignation.

“Nothing is impossible,” replied Chavez at his most didactic.

“Your research has been sufficiently comprehensive?” I asked him, although I was sick with the sense of impending disaster.

“As comprehensive as my limited equipment and xenobotanical experience allow. I would welcome a chance to submit my findings to a board of specialists with greater experience in esoteric plant-life forms. And I respectfully request that you have Colonial Central send us a team at once. I’m afraid that we’ve already done incalculable damage to the—” He paused and, with a grim smile, corrected himself. “—indigenous organism seeded in those fields.”

The semantic nicety jarred me. If Chavez was even remotely correct, we would require not only xenobotanists and xenobiologists but an entire investigation team from Worlds Federated to examine our intrusion into a domain that had not, after all, been abandoned by its occupants like a Marie Celeste but had simply been lying fallow—with the indigenous natives quiescently in residence.

As Chavez, Dunlapil, and I walked from my office toward the Comtower, I remember now that I felt a little foolish and very scared, like a child reluctant to report an accident to his parents but dutifully conscientious about admitting his misdemeanor. The plastisteel tower had never looked so out of place, so alien, so sacrilegious as it did now.

“Hey, wait a minute, you two,” Dulapil protested. “You know what an investigation team means...”

“Anything and everything must be done to mitigate our offense as soon as possible,” Chavez said, interrupting nervously.

“Dammit!” Dunlapil stopped in his tracks. “We’ve done nothing wrong.”

“Indeed we have. We may have crippled an entire generation.” Chavez spoke with an expression of ineffable sorrow.

“There are plenty of fields we never touched. The aliens—natives—can use them for food.”

Chavez’s sad smile deepened and he gently removed Dunlapil’s hand from his arm. “‘From dust ye came, to dust ye shall return, and from dust shall ye spring again.’“

It was then that Dunlapil understood the enormity of our crime.

“You mean, the plants are the people?”

“What else have I been saying? They are born from the Trees.”

We did what we could even as we waited for the specialists and investigation team to arrive.

First we cleared the animals and crops from every one of the velvet fields. We removed every sign of our colonial occupation from the cities. The team, composed of five nonhuman and three humanoid species, arrived with menacing expedition well before the initial flood of xenospecialists. The team members did not comment on our preliminary efforts to repair our error, nor did they protest their quarters in the hastily erected dwellings on the bare, dusty plain and the subsequent roaring activity of the spaceport close by. All they did was observe with portentous intensity.

Of course, except for vacating the cities—and occupying them was apparently the least of our cumulative crimes—everything we did to remedy our trespass proved horribly inept in the final analysis. We would have been less destructive had we kept the cattle on the velvet fields and not slaughtered them for food. We ought to have let the crops ripen, die, and return to the special soils that had nourished them. For the fields we stripped produced the worst horrors. But how were we to know?

Now, of course, we know all too fully. We are burdened to this very day with guilt and remorse for the wholesale dismemberment and dispersal of those irretrievable beings; eaten, digested, defecated upon by grazers. And again, eaten, digested, and eliminated by those who partook of the grazers’ flesh. Of the countless disintegrated natives removed from their home soil by unwitting carriers, none can bear fruit on foreign soil. And on their own soil, to repeat, the fields we had stripped produced the worst horrors…

I remember when the last report had been turned in to the eight judges composing the investigation team. Its members wasted no further time in formulating their decree. I was called to their conference room to hear the verdict. As I entered, I saw the judges seated on a raised platform, several feet above my head. That in itself was warning that we had lost all status in Worlds Federated.

A flick of the wrist attracted my attention to one of three humans on the team. Humbly I craned my head back, but he refused to glance down at me.

“The investigation is complete,” he said in an emotionless tone. “You have committed the worst act of genocide yet to be recorded in all galactic history.”

“Sir…” My protest was cut off by a second, peremptory gesture.

“Xenobiologists report that the growths in the velvet fields have reached the third stage in their evolution. The parallel between this life-form in its second stage and that of the cellulose fauna of Brandon Two is inescapable.” Chavez had already told me of that parallel. “Now the plants resemble the exorhizomorphs of Planariae Five and it is inevitable that this third stage will give way to the sentient life pictured in the murals of their cities.

“You came here as agrarians and agrarians you shall be, in the fields of those you have mutilated. What final reparations will be levied against you, one and all, cannot be known until the victims of your crimes pronounce the penance whereby you may redeem your species in the eyes of the Worlds Federated.”

He stopped speaking and waved me away. I withdrew to announce the verdict to my dazed fellow colonists. I would far rather that we had been summarily executed then and there, instead of being worn and torn apart by bits and pieces. But that was not the way of judgment for those who trespass in modern enlightened times.

We could not even make an appeal on the grounds that the planet had been released to us, for the colony in its charter took on all responsibility for its subsequent actions, having reaped benefits now so dearly to be paid for.

So we worked from that day until Budding Time late that heinous fall. We watched anxiously as the seedling exorhizomorphs grew at a phenomenal rate until they were ten, then twenty, finally twenty-five feet high, thick-trunked, branching out, lush with green triangular foliage. By midsummer we knew why it was that during our time on the planet we had never been able to find any examples of the Tree: Such Trees grew once every hundred years. For they were the Trees of Life and bore the Fruit of Zobranoirundisi in the cellular wombs, two to a branch, three to eleven branches per Tree. In the good fields—that is, the unviolated fields.

In the others…

The galaxy knows we tried to atone for our crime. Every man, woman, and child was devoted to tending the twisted, stunted, deformed, half-branched Trees that grew so piteously in those desecrated fields. Every one of us watched with growing apprehension and horror as each new day showed further evidence of the extent of our sacrilege. Oh, the hideous difference between those straight, tall, fine Zobranoirundisi and—the Others. We were ready for any sacrifice as penance.

Then, the morning after the first good frost, when the cold had shriveled the stems, the first Zobranoirundisi tore through his vegetable placenta. He shook his tall willowy body, turned and made obeisance to his natal Tree of Life, ate of the soil at its roots, of its triangular foliage…and knew.

I can never retell the agony of that day, when all those Zobranoirundisi faced us, their maimers, and announced the form our expiation would take. We bowed our heads to the inevitable, for we knew the sentence to be just and of Hammurabian simplicity.

We had to give back to the soil what we had taken from it. The handless Zobranoirundisi, recognizing his missing member from the cells now incorporated into the fingers of a young colony child nurtured on milk from cattle fed in the velvet fields, had every right to reclaim what was undeniably his own flesh. The legless Zobranoirundisi could not be condemned to a crippled existence when the Terran child had used the same cells to run freely for seven years on land where previously only Zobranoirundisi had trod.

We rendered, all of us, unto the Zobranoirundisi that which was truly theirs—seed and soil of the velvet fields, part and particle of the originally fertilizing dust that would have been reconstituted during the cycle we had so impiously interrupted.

Nor were we permitted to evade the least segment of required reparation, for the galaxy watched. I will say this of us proudly, though I no longer have a tongue: Mankind will be able to live with its conscience. Not one of us, when required, failed to give his flesh to the Zobranoirundisi in atonement.

© 1973, 2001 by Anne McCaffrey.

First appeared in Worlds of If, from The Girl Who Heard Dragons

Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, The Virginia Kidd Agency

Anne McCaffrey is a winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Award, a SFWA Grand Master, and an inductee into the SF Hall of Fame. Her work is beloved by generations of readers. She is best known for authoring the Dragonriders of Pern series, but she has also written dozens of other novels. She was born in Cambridge, Mass. in 1926 and currently makes her home in Ireland, in a home named Dragonhold-Underhill.

Feature Interview: Elizabeth Bear
Erin Stocks

Elizabeth Bear should be a familiar name for anyone who even dabbles in science fiction and fantasy. Not only did she catapult into the scene by winning the Campbell Award for Best New Author in 2005, she never lost momentum. She followed that with a Locus Award for Best First Novel in 2006, multiple Hugo awards for her short fiction, and currently has over fifteen books in print, including several written with Sarah Monette. Bear is also extremely active in the science fiction and fantasy (SFF) community, appearing at genre conventions, readings, teaching engagements, and writing workshops, and she reviews books and shows for a number of venues, including Ideomancer, Realms of Fantasy, Tor.com, and her own blog.

One of the most fascinating things about Bear’s work is the impossibility of confining it to a single genre. She’s written Shakespearian England into the middle of a faerie war in her Promethean Age novels, and mixed science fiction and Norse mythology into a post-apocalyptic world in her Edda of Burdens series. Even her short stories run the gamut of creativity: “Tideline,” which won a Hugo, is from the point of view of a war machine who creates funeral necklaces from salvaged stone. “Orm the Beautiful” tells of a singing dragon and the woman who listens to his song. And in “Shoggoths in Bloom,” which also won a Hugo, Bear takes the H.P. Lovecraft-inspired shapeless, protoplasmic beings and sets them in Maine in the 1930s, as war looms on the horizon.

She puts the reader to work, giving nothing away easily. She excels at threading clues throughout the plot, all the while weaving a fascinating dance of intrigue and color which all comes together in a thrilling ride. She doesn’t shy away from controversial subjects, which spawn a flurry of approving reviews and newly loyal readers, as well as disapproving comments. Her series are occasionally written out of order, and while they can work as standalones, the reading order can influence the reading experience, making Bear’s books even more unusual.

And as a bonus Bear is personable to her readers, sharing a glimpse at the way she thinks, writes, and lives. A good amount of her short fiction is available online. A little searching can unearth her monthly posts at Storytellers Unplugged and other indications of her web presence, e.g., her opinions on fan fiction at Subterranean Magazine, which frequently publishes her work. But the real treasure is her blog, which provides a glimpse into the life of this author who opens the doors to other worlds through her writing, even while she appeals to logic with her presumptuous cat, discusses how much experience a writer needs to be legit, and regularly checks in on her writing progress, almost as if she needs her readers to keep her accountable.

But really, the SFF world needs her.

You seem to follow up every science fiction book with a fantasy book, and vice versa. If you had to choose between the genres, which would it be? Or is that an impossible question?

I think it’s an invalid question, not an impossible one. People like to set up lots of arbitrary categories and have subgenre slapfights about which species of speculative fiction is morally superior to which other species of SFF. I think the arguments over which are better (or, cod help us, more “moral”) are very much rooted in insecurity.  I don’t think they’re different genres. There’s a reason they share shelf space in the bookstore. I don’t approach science fiction and fantasy any differently, except in the limits I put on my worldbuilding. In fantasy, they’re derived from myth and logic; in science fiction, they’re derived from physics and logic. Plenty of (probably) fantastical tropes are grandfathered in as science fiction—psionics, time travel, faster-than-light travel.

So given these familiar tropes of science fiction and the relationship of science fiction to fantasy, where do you see SFF fiction going in the next few years?

I keep saying I’m not a futurist, I’m a social commentator. To be a social commentator, I also have to be a trendspotter. I see the next ten years of SF/F as moving away from singularity stories and into bioengineering. Steampunk is not so much a subgenre as a design aesthetic: I imagine it’s got a few more years to run as a hot trend. Zombies and vampires continue to duke it out for supremacy. And romance will never die.

You have tremendous productivity. What’s your secret, and when it comes down to it, is it the deadlines that drive you or the stories?

It’s butt in chair. It takes me six to fourteen hours to turn out what some of my friends can produce in an hour, but I put in those six or fourteen hours more days than not. If I can produce fifteen-hundred words a day, it adds up, if I do it every day ... I think it’s the stories that drive me—although if they weren’t going to be read, they wouldn’t drive me as hard.

You often put your characters through some serious black moments, and force them to make a decision to either buck up or ship out, in a manner of speaking. I’ve read interviews where other authors find themselves seriously affected when they do this to the characters they’ve been living with day in and day out...does this affect you, too?

Oh, yeah. I think to write it honestly, I have to pull it around myself like a shroud. It’s a kind of method writing—often I’ll find my musical taste, my taste in food, whatever, strongly affected by my characters—and I know I’m doing it right with regards to a book when I make myself cry.

While we’re on honesty, you frequently share in your blog what you’re working on in your writing at any particular time, whether its obsessing over detail, thickening out your secondary characters, or revealing the birth (and alterations) of a single paragraph. What would you say your biggest challenge in your writing is now?

Oh good. Right now, I’m trying to find ways to make my work more accessible without losing depth. Adding a layer on top, basically, rather than subtracting layers. I’ve been working on this for a long time. Also, I’m working on making my sentences more linear. I have a tendency to try to get everything into the page at the same time, and it winds up like ten guys going through a door at once. If they just took turns, it’d be no big deal, but...

You’re known for taking famous (and infamous) myths or characters, spinning them around a bit, and weaving them into something brand new. What appeals to you about reworking something old into something new?

I love myths and archetypes. I always have: I’m a little bit of a mythology addict. But I’m much more interested in using those ideas as the foundation for exploration than I am writing straight interpretations. It’s the Folk Process—it’s the way the development of narrative works. Look at the development on the Matter of Britain over the last fifteen-hundred years—Arthur used to have a sister, and Lancelot is a relatively late addition to the canon. Or look at something like the versions of “Tam Lin” or “Stagger Lee” or “John Henry.” Everybody tweaks a little bit, and some people reinvent totally. I think it’s better to go back to the source material, anyway, and bring out your own version, than produce yet another watered-down imitation of Tolkien or Heinlein.

Besides the mythology, if someone gathered up all your books and short stories and analyzed the most frequently appearing themes, they could probably create a lovely flowchart of gender, equality, interracial relationships, dysfunctional families, and many more (potentially) controversial subjects. Do you write about these issues intentionally, or do they just slip into your stories on their own?

You know, I write the world I know. I grew up with divorced parents, in a same-sex household with a Middle Eastern step-parent, who happened to be abusive. I’m a child abuse survivor. I was raised pagan. I’m bisexual and divorced. My grandfather was an immigrant. I’ve got a family tree speckled with addicts and abuse survivors. My godsons’ mother is first-generation Indian and Scottish. Her husband is from a Yankee family that came over on the Mayflower. I can’t write a world where everybody is white, straight, and Christian. It’d be a lie.... I’d probably sell better if I could get rid of all the queer people in my books. But what are you gonna do, lie?

Let’s talk about some of your science fiction. Hammered, in the Jenny Casey series, which also includes Scardown and Worldwired, won the Locus award for Best First Novel in 2006. Why is it you’ve never returned to this world, or, at least, this kind of urban/modern storytelling in books?

I have written a short story since then, about how she met Razorface. Otherwise, Jenny’s story was done. She’d reached a closure point, and if I wanted to tell more stories about her, I would have had to destroy her life again. I have a hard time repeating myself—I tend to do a thing, and then do a different thing. This is a source of great despair to marketing departments, I suspect!

Grail, the third book in the Jacob’s Ladder trilogy, was just released. For our readers who haven’t read any of the previous books yet, what’s a good reason for them to get out and pick up Dust (the first in the trilogy) today?

I like Dust because it was my first real attempt to write a straightforward adventure story. I’m not usually a very linear narrator, but Dust kind of just rolls along. It’s secretly a Gothic novel under its SF veils, for values of Gothic novel that include “a love story between a girl and an evil house.” But the evil house is a generation ship...

You’ve written A Companion to Wolves with Sarah Monette, a book in which the lines between human and animal within a Norse/Germanic culture in wartime are blurred. The sequel The Tempering of Men, comes out in August, and you’re currently writing the third, An Apprentice to Elves. Those books are more fantasy than science fiction, but you’ve also collaborated on several short stories together. How do you and Monette make this writing partnership so efficient and successful?

I write until I get stuck or bored, and then I send it to her, and she edits what I wrote and then writes new text until she gets stuck or bored. She sends it back to me, and I edit what she wrote and then write until I get stuck or bored. Lather, rinse, repeat....

We tend to cover each other’s weak points: she forces me to be concrete and specific when I want to wander off trying to nail down and articulate complicated and nuanced philosophical obscurities; I go after her adjectives and secondary characters with a hatchet; she makes me linear; I provide plot; and she makes me explain myself more.

You’re currently on Season 3 of Shadow Unit, where you write episodes alongside Emma Bull, Holly Black, Amanda Downum, Sarah Monette, Leah Bobet, Will Shetterly, and Chelsea Polk. Written in installments exclusively online (although plans are in the work to extend that to print), Shadow Unit features a police force that deals with the fantastic and unbelievable, in a serial format. What has working on Shadow Unit been like for you?

I love Shadow Unit. It’s all the fun of a role playing game, and I get to be the GM and play all the characters. Also, it’s just a nifty fun world, full of nifty fun things written by nifty fun writers. And the fan community is awesome!

You’re going to be at Clarion—a science fiction and fantasy workshop—this summer. What do you like the most about it? The least?

Well, I’ve taught Clarion West before. This is my first time teaching the Mothership, however.... I love teaching. I figure if I do nothing else in this life, handing out as much of what I’ve learned about my craft to as many people as possible will at least justify my carbon footprint somewhat. I love the fact that I learn other things while teaching. I do hate the travel and the time off work, though.

You have a link to an essay you wrote on your website, called “Join me or Die.” What inspired that?

Well, I wrote that a long time ago back in the mid 1990s but if I recall correctly, I was attempting to express why it is that we find characters like Vader so compelling—and I think it’s because we see in them something we need. We have a tendency to deny the unpretty sides of ourselves, even while we are living them. I think if we accept that darkness exists in everything we do, then we master it, rather than being at its mercy. It’s a part of everything—and everyone—being connected. Not in a fuzzy new age sort of way, but in a very real web of interreliance and cooperation. I can’t do my job without farmers in Illinois and engineers in China. “Nothing human can be alien to me.”

Your current work in progress, Rez, is what you call on your blog a “high-concept optimistic SF novella.” Can you tell us anything more about it?

It’s sitting open on my desktop as I type this response. It’s not sold to anybody yet, or finished, so I have no idea when it will be readable. Actually, I’m kind of avoiding it by answering these questions—I need it to gel, and right now I have a huge pile of Cool Stuff and Nifty Ideas and no actual narrative to tie them together. So I stare into space and practice guitar and do research...

I think we all want to know how to make your ginger beer.

Hah! I just started a batch today. Get an old clean soda bottle and put a lot of fresh-grated ginger in it—like half a cup, LOTS. Juice of one lemon, half cup sugar, half cup honey, one teaspoon yeast, fill with cold water. Cap and set in a corner of the kitchen until the bottle gets hard. Then stick it in the fridge to drink at your leisure. Yum! (Beware exploding bottles.)

Lightspeed assistant editor Erin Stocks is a writer and musician transplanted from Chicago to Oklahoma City. Her fiction can be found in the Coeur de Lion anthology Anywhere but Earth (upcoming), Flash Fiction Online, the Hadley Rille anthology Destination: Future, and the Absent Willow Review. In her free time, she looks for new books to read (zombies in space! fantastical horror!), and can be found on erinstocks.blogspot.com.

Coming Attractions

Coming up in May, in Lightspeed, we have original fiction by new author Eric Gregory (“The Harrowers”) and science fiction icon Nancy Kress (“Eliot Wrote”), plus reprints by Tessa Mellas (“Bibi From Jupiter”) and Alastair Reynolds (“Scales”). 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!