Editorial, May 2011
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue twelve of Lightspeed!

To quote the esteemed Professor Farnsworth: Good news, everyone! This year’s Hugo Award finalists have been named, and we’re immensely proud to announce that Lightspeed has three nominations!

(1) Best Short Story: “Amaryllis” by Carrie Vaughn

(2) Best Semiprozine: Lightspeed Magazine

(3) Best Editor, Short Form: John Joseph Adams

I’d like to extend a huge thanks to all our readers and fans who have made this possible, and I hope everyone reading this will join us in congratulating Carrie for her achievement—it’s her first major SF award nomination! Thanks as well to all of Lightspeed’s staff, who don’t get named on the ballot but are as every bit as essential as I am—GO TEAM LIGHTSPEED!

It’s a tremendous honor to receive these award nominations, and frankly it’s kind of hard to believe. But we’ll be at Worldcon on the off chance that this is real and not some crazy dream, on hand to accept should we actually win this most coveted of science fiction’s prizes.

And speaking of winning, the results of our first annual reader’s poll are in! And here are the top three finishers:

1st: “Amaryllis” by Carrie Vaughn

2nd: “How to Become a Mars Overlord” by Catherynne M. Valente

3rd (tie): “In-Fall” by Ted Kosmatka

3rd (tie): “Standard Loneliness Package” by Charles Yu

It looks like our readers agree with the Hugo voters, eh? So, another hearty congratulations to Carrie Vaughn. As the winner of the reader’s poll, Carrie will receive a box of Sjaak’s Organic Chocolate Truffle Assortment, courtesy of Cosmo’s Vegan Shoppe. Perhaps not as prestigious as a Hugo or Nebula Award, but much more tasty I’m sure!

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

In “The Harrowers,” author Eric Gregory gives us the story of Ez, who believes far more in bullets than blessings in fighting the dead, but who agrees to take a preacher’s kid outside the safety of the cities anyway—for a price.

Our feature interview this month is brought to us by Genevieve Valentine, who talks with SETI director Jill Tarter about the search for extraterrestrial life and being the inspiration for Jodi Foster’s character in Contact.

Having an exotic, desirable roommate can make any college freshman miserable, but when your roommate is from another planet it makes things even more complicated. Tessa Mellas tells us all about it in “Bibi From Jupiter.”

Dr. Pamela Gay returns to Lightspeed to tell us about Bibi’s homeworld in “The Icy Ecosystem of Europa.”

Nancy Kress brings us a near-future story, “Eliot Wrote.” Eliot’s genius father sees a vision of ineffable truth in a toaster pastry, and refuses to have the memory erased, despite the damage it’s done to them both.

In the related nonfiction, Neurotopia’s Evil Monkey explains the science behind what actually happens when a person sees a deity in an inanimate object.

“Scales” by Alastair Reynolds, master of space opera, takes his first foray into military SF…with stunning results.

Various military forces and governments (both real and fictional) throughout the years have been known to engage in the practice of brainwashing. Laura Waterstripe explores the science of this technique and provides some famous examples.

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

John Joseph Adams is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead (a World Fantasy Award finalist), The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, The Way of the Wizard, Federations, and The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. 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 The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

The Harrowers
Eric Gregory

The kid didn’t have a feed. He glanced over his shoulder and scratched the back of his head, and I saw there was nothing in his neck. You didn’t find many folks without feeds in the city. Right away, I knew he’d brought me a problem. “I’m looking for Ez,” he said, and I said yeah, I was him.

He looked relieved then lowered his voice. “And you’re a guide?”

I wiped grease on the front of my jeans, closed the hood of the 4Runner, and gestured for the kid to follow me. He took the hint, nodding with absurd gratitude, and I led him down past the line of old rigs, all waiting to be stripped. Across the yard, someone cranked up a saw.

“Who gave you my name?” I asked.

“Guy called himself Coroner.”

“You don’t want to talk to him again.”

The kid gave a sad sort of smile. “No. I really don’t.”

He wasn’t the roughneck sort who usually came around looking for a guide. Right age, maybe: Seventeen, eighteen. But the boy had a pressed, conservative look to him. Skinny, clean-shaven, all done up in slacks and suspenders and a white, sweaty shirt. I didn’t know what to make of him, and I didn’t like that I didn’t know.

“You from around here?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No, sir. Lynchburg.”

“Nice town,” I lied. Hive of fanatics. “How long you been here, then?”

“Not quite a day.”

“And you already want to go outside.” I grinned. “Jesus.”

It wasn’t much cooler in the office, but there was beer and shade. The kid settled onto my ratty, floral-print sofa, and I opened two Yanjings, thinking maybe he was used to the fancy stuff. I still couldn’t get a fix on him, but he dressed like a big spender. He folded his arms and crossed his legs at the knee, glancing at the old gas station signs on the wall.

“What do I call you?” I said.

He frowned into his beer. “P.K.”

“All right, P.K. You want to tell me about your deathwish?”

He shook his head.

“No deathwish. I just want to see my old man again.”

My turn to frown. “Your old man.”

“Yessir. He’s outside.”

I slid my bottle across the desk, back and forth from one hand to the other.

“How far outside?”

“Cherokee North. Between here and Johnson City.”

“That’s a lot of forest.”

He shrugged.

Some guides don’t like to get nosy. Take the job, don’t ask questions. Lot of those guides develop a nasty case of dead.

“You want my help,” I said, “you’re going to have to tell me what he was doing there.” If Coroner had sent him, I didn’t have many choices here, but maybe the boy didn’t know that. He nodded, answered without hesitation.

“We were out harrowing.”

Christ, I thought. And then: Of course—P.K.: Preacher’s Kid. Should’ve caught that earlier. I finished off the Yanjing, then opened the cooler and unscrewed a jar of whiskey. I’d heard of harrowers before, but never met one alive.

“You were with him,” I said.

“Yessir.”

“He preaches, you shoot. That how it works?”

The kid looked embarrassed. “I haven’t learned to bless yet.”

“And you got separated?”

He inclined his head. “Pack of wolves surprised us. We were running, and my father—” He paused. “He fell. Over a ledge. I saw him roll, heard him call out, but the slope sharpened and—I didn’t see where he landed. I searched until sundown. I love my father, but—”he pursed his lips—”but I’m not stupid.”

“You did right.” I leaned forward. “But you understand he’s dead.”

The boy was silent.

“I ain’t gonna sell you false hope. Your daddy’s gone. I’ll take your money, I’ll take you out there, and I’ll help you make whatever amends you want to make. But I want us both to understand what’s going on here. I don’t want any confusion between us. You have to show me that you know we’re not going to find him smiling.”

“I have to find him,” he said. “I know the odds.”

I wasn’t sure he did. “I ain’t cheap. And I ain’t stupid either.” I told him the deposit. “I need to see triple the advance in a credit account, and I need the account linked to my feed. In the event of my death, the triple transfers automatically to my family.”

Little joke, there. Family.

“That’s fair,” he said. “And if I die?”

“We link your feed to my account. The deposit transfers back.”

He shook his head. “I don’t have a feed.”

I’d forgotten. Mark of the Devil. I smiled through a stir of jealousy. The little metal nub in my neck let me work in the city, let me spend and collect credit, but mostly it just felt like a warm seed of debt, always itching beneath my skin, waiting for me to die or default, always threatening to grow.

“We can go to my credit agency and set up a timed withdrawal from my account,” I said. “If you’re not around to cancel it in three days, the advance’ll transfer to the account of your choice.”

He nodded. “Works for me.”

“I think we understand one another, P.K.” I took the Colt from my drawer, set it on my desk. The old, faded sticker on the grip said Keep Asheville Weird. “If you got the yuan, I got the yeehaw.”

And just like that, we were in business.

No one ran outside the law in Asheville without owing money to Coroner. He found you when you were down, desperate, earthless. He fed you, paid your rent. If you wanted to be a guide, he made it easy: Set you up as a company mechanic, pulled all the right bureaucratic triggers to assign you to truckers on his payroll, to divert shipping routes. Last Christmas, he’d bought me a suit of skintight armor straight out of Cupertino. Sometimes it was hard to figure out where the companies ended and Coroner began, but it was absolutely clear who owned you.

Coroner had placed me and Xin Sun together so often that I could tell you her granddaddy’s favorite singer (Johnny Cash) and the city where her mama was born (Raleigh). She was short, wiry, somewhere in her forties, with a line of faded hearts tattooed around her wrist. Her rig was a behemoth, a messy cross between a Humvee and an old furniture truck. I sat in the cab, behind the old automatic rifle mounted on the hood. P.K. huddled in the cargo crawlspace with the liquor.

Xin caught my eye as she eased toward the gate. “You’re a bad person, Ez.”

“Yeah?”

“The daddy’s gone,” she said. “Boy don’t need to see that.”

“I told him. He can make up his own mind.”

She shook her head, scratched her neck. “He’s green as shit. The dead on the moon can see it. You ought to know better.”

“He’s shot his share of dead. He don’t need a mama, Xin.”

She stared straight ahead, gripped the wheel.

Asshole, said the silence.

The traffic light changed, and Xin eased forward again. Bluecoats crowded around us with rifles and pads. My feed ran hot, so I could almost feel their fingers in the back of my neck, sifting through my licenses and permissions, my employers and outstanding debts. The bluecoat captain read through our manifest while his grunts looked over the cargo. Xin ignored me, and I tried not to touch my gun or crack my knuckles or otherwise announce that I was scared turdless. I listened to the clang of footsteps in the back and wondered what the kid was thinking, hidden down there with the liquor.

The footsteps in the back receded. The door slammed shut, and the captain waved us on. I tipped an invisible hat and Xin told him to have a good one.

The gate opened, and we drove outside.

There’s something about leaving a city that makes you want to get drunk and scream. You ride out into the emptiness of the frontier and you can feel the weight of gazes falling away with every mile. Debts, shopping centers, manifests—all that headsmoke recedes until it’s just you and the quiet, the clouds wrapped around road-carved mountains. I watched the trees as we rode out: The leaves were only just tinged with orange. Ahead, the Interstate wound through the broad swells of the Blue Ridge, all steep slopes and sharp drops. If you rode fifteen miles outside of Asheville, you could hardly tell that anyone had ever bothered to live on the mountains. Even the billboards were scarce and choked by kudzu.

“Want to let him out?” said Xin.

“Guess I ought to.”

I pulled myself out of the gunner’s seat, grappled my way to the back and ducked past stacked pallets marked in Portuguese, Italian, Chinese. All the world’s shit packed up in crates. You couldn’t see much by the emergency lights, and as often as I’d navigated Xin’s rig, they packed it a little different every time. I pushed a box of canned soup off of the hidden door, rapped three times, waited, rapped again. I heard the door unlatch from his side, and I pulled it open. P.K. stared out from the crawlspace, his arms crossed over his chest like an old-fashioned corpse, mason jars shifting slightly around him. He was red-faced, his hair sweat-wet against his forehead.

“Thank you,” he breathed.

I offered my hand. “Everything all right down there?”

He blinked. “Are we out?”

“Yessir.”

I helped him up, guided him to the front. “Have a sit-down,” I said, waving him into the gunner’s seat. Xin glanced over her shoulder and smiled at the boy.

“Hope you didn’t sample the whiskey,” she said. Gently, teasing. “I don’t want Coroner to come knocking.”

He flushed. “No, ma’am. I don’t drink.”

I tried not to imagine Coroner at my door.

Xin laughed. “That so? You’re either wise or insane. Not sure which.”

“Out here,” P.K. ventured, smiling nervously, “I think it’s for the best.”

“Out here, you may be right.”

On the side of the road, empty signs. Words scraped and weathered away. A lone dead woman, one-armed and skeletal, limped along the side of the road, stumbling now and then into the guardrail, threatening to tumble over and down into a far hollow. Xin and P.K. fell silent, and I watched the sky for birds.

I still couldn’t work out what Coroner was trying to say, sending me this job. When I’d called to line up the ride, I asked about the kid, but the minder only told me that the operation was important to the boss. “Make sure the boy and his daddy come back with you,” he’d said. “Finish the job, you’ll be fine.”

Coroner wasn’t an idiot—he knew the preacher was dead by now. Was he trying to play the kid for money? That didn’t make sense; this was small change for him. He wanted the job done, but I didn’t understand why. I didn’t know the stakes, didn’t understand what I stood to lose.

Xin braked hard, lashing me out of my thoughts.

I barely caught myself from toppling headfirst into the windshield. Ahead, an eighteen-wheeler lay on its side, its head curled into the median and its ass blocking half of the Interstate, splayed out like a sleeping cat. The semi’s rear turret was shredded, the cow-catcher banged up and twisted into bad art. Gathered around the cab was a cluster of red bears—dead, from the look of them—ripping the skin from the rig. In unison, the bears looked up from their work.

Some people call dead eyes dull, but I’ve never understood that. You look the dead in the eyes, you see the judgment.

When guides and truckers get together to drink, you hear talk of road churches that worship the red bears. We’re not a very spiritual lot, but I believe it. Sometimes you got to pray to the thing that scares you. And if you ain’t scared of a twelve-foot, three-thousand-pound monster bred to consume as much flesh as possible, you’re already underground. The companies engineered the red bears to clear the forests of the dead, and on paper, it still sounds like a good idea: Carnivorous cyborg weapons, carrion-eaters with titanium-reinforced skeletons. They were supposed to be uninfectable, a walking immune system for the world outside.

Problem was, they got infected anyway.

I grabbed P.K.’s shoulder, tried to pull him out of the seat, but he shook me off. Four of the animals broke off from the pack, loping toward us. Xin gripped the wheel, shifted the truck into reverse. The approaching dead split into two groups, flanking us; the ones that stayed behind tore open the cab of the downed rig—

Crack.

The nearest bear lurched to the right as blood sprayed from the side of its head. His face blank, P.K. swung the barrel of the rifle toward the next animal, then frowned slightly when he noticed that the first bear was still coming, its jaw hanging loose and swinging side-to-side as it ran. Xin watched the mirror and held the wheel steady, pushing the truck backward as fast as it would go, but the bears moved faster, hardly slowing as P.K. shot them in the chest, in the head. Finally, the one with the loose jaw stumbled and fell forward, as if it was dizzy or out of breath. At first, I thought P.K. had worn it down, but no: Its hind legs had collapsed.

The other three bears were close enough that I could see the meat between their teeth. I leaned into P.K.’s ear, shouted over the gun: “Shoot them in the legs.”

He nodded once and concentrated his fire on the space in front of the animals. There was less flesh around the joints where their forelimbs met their paws; red fur and muscle fell away, and bone-alloy gleamed underneath. P.K. didn’t waste a shot, but we’d have to reload soon. The tallest bear staggered and hit the pavement, scraped away its snout as it fell.

The last hurled itself forward and hit our hood. The rig shook, but Xin kept it steady. The bear slumped and fell away then lay still on the road. Xin slowed, and we watched the rest of the dead in the distance. There were seven or eight bears circled there, maybe more. They’d already pulled apart the cab of the fallen truck, and now were eating.

“I can turn us around,” Xin said quietly. “Get off the last exit, bypass the Interstate for a couple miles.”

I wondered about the folks in the middle of that circle. Other truckers. Other guides, maybe. I wondered if I knew them.

“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s do that.”

“I hope they were Christians,” P.K. said softly.

We talked about our families. Xin’s mother, half out of her mind in a nursing home in Charlotte. She didn’t mention her ex-husband and sons. My daughter, grown and living on a Monsanto farm colony in the Pacific, still writing every couple months for money. Xin had heard the story a dozen times before—often enough that she ought to have pegged it for bullshit—but she still watched me with something between warmth and bitterness.

P.K. told us about his father, Joseph. At first, the kid spoke hesitantly, responding to Xin’s questions with short, one-word answers, but finally he relaxed into his story, seeming to surprise himself with the pleasure of the telling.

Joseph hadn’t always harrowed souls in the wilderness. As a young man of the Lynchburg Watch, he’d walked the walls and killed the dead. Joseph had mumbled his prayers since he was a boy, the town being what it was, but he didn’t find religion until a circuit rider passed through in the summer of his twentieth year. He’d only recently become a father, and the death he’d dealt out weighed on him with new urgency, even if it was only the long-rotted he’d sent to their final repose. The circuit rider preached that the souls of the dead still resided in those wasted bodies, that for all their hunger and decay, they could always receive or reject the love of Christ. He preached that the living death was an opportunity, a flesh limbo, and that it was the duty of all Christians to speak the gospel to lost souls and offer them salvation. Just as Christ had descended to Hell to harrow pagan souls, the faithful were bound to travel the wilderness and minister to the dead.

Joseph found his calling. He rode with the circuit man for three years, preaching in the walled cities and preaching to the dead outside, returning now and then to Lynchburg to give his wife and son the money he’d collected from churches throughout the South. When P.K. was seven, Joseph came home to find his wife lost to pneumonia, his son motherless and afraid. For almost a year, Joseph gave up the circuit and raised the boy, working the wall as he’d done before, now hollering salvation as he delivered bullets into creeping bodies.

It was on the wall that he had his Revelation. As he fired his rifle at a cluster of dead in army camouflage, an angel of the Lord seized his tongue and set it ablaze with the language Enoch knew, the words spoken in the Kingdom of Heaven. The dead paused to hear his ministry, and he saw the light of Christ in their eyes. He killed them all immediately, before they could move or doubt. He was ecstatic.

His fervor restored, Joseph resolved to return to the wilderness, this time with his son. P.K. was already a fine shot, a junior watchman. The circuit rider had traveled in an armored truck, declaiming over loudspeakers, but Joseph now understood that glass and metal separated him from the souls he meant to save; he bought two horses and taught P.K. to ride.

“Wait,” I said. “You rode horses? Out here?”

P.K. shrugged. “They’re fast.”

“You’re fucking with me now.”

“No, sir.”

I glanced aside at Xin. She focused on the road, negotiating the sharp, mountainside S-curves of Cherokee North. We had to drive at a crawl, but P.K. said we weren’t far from the last place he’d seen Joseph.

“How do you survive something like those bears?”

He smiled tightly. “I got lucky last night. But the dead stand aside for my father. He preaches as he rides.”

They stand aside, I thought. Of course.

“What happened next?” said Xin. “He taught you?”

P.K. seemed reluctant. “That’s all there is to tell. He taught me to ride, and we rode. We visited churches often enough to keep food in our stomachs, but his heart was never much in ministering to the living. We spent more and more time in the wild, released thousands of souls to the Lord. Father’s done his best to teach me the tongue of Heaven, but I lack. . .” He trailed off, stared out the window. “The Revelation,” he finished quietly.

The tires whined as the road wound back around on itself, almost a three-hundred-sixty degree turn. I gritted my teeth, tried not to see the sheer drop to my left or the rock face to my right. P.K. leaned forward, pointed at a graffiti symbol on the rock. “I recognize—”

Something hit the side of the truck. Hard, on the right side.

We screeched toward the side of the road, mangled the guard-rail. “The hell—” Xin shouted. I swung behind P.K.’s seat, pulled on the safety straps and curled into a ball. There was another deep, metal-rending crash, and another, and then the world rolled and blurred. A rank, cloudy explosion as the airbags deployed and then gravity fell out from underneath me, snapped back in brief, vicious cracks against my knees and elbows. I covered my head the best I could, but suddenly it felt hot, and then everything was heavy and dark.

Metal ground against metal, keening.

“Wake,” shouted Xin, “the fuck up.”

Two gunshots. I took a breath like a knife to the chest, opened my eyes. The cab was pillowy and white. Almost heavenly, except for the bent metal and bloodstains. There was a sour stench, piss mixed with sulfur. My feed burned. I moved my fingers, feet, blinked blood out of my eyes. Felt like maybe I’d bruised a rib, but I could sit up, breathe. Limbs intact. Head was wet, but it was a shallow gash.

Xin stood over me, covered in white powder from the airbags. A pleasant, middle-aged phantom with a Desert Eagle. There was a wide hole in the back of the rig. Jeans and soda and high heels, all strewn around like Christmas in the Asheville Mall, not that I’d ever had the yuan or self-loathing to step in there. Three dead men in faded orange jumpsuits peered inside the truck, eager in the instant before Xin shot them down.

“You good?” she asked.

“Golden. P.K.?”

“Up top.” She gestured toward the roof with her head. “Looks like they hit us with rocks.”

I unbuckled the safety straps, stood up shakily. Almost fell, but steadied myself against the driver’s seat.

“Kid have a gun?” I asked, fumbling for my holster.

“He’s got the rifle.”

“So why isn’t he shooting?”

Xin bit her lip. I flicked off the safety on my Colt, and we pressed our way to the back, kicking aside boxes of designer boots, finally stepping outside. It looked like Xin had killed the last of the orange-suited dead: there was nothing but breeze and the glare of afternoon light. The truck was caught between two large trees; we hadn’t rolled all the way to the bottom, maybe hadn’t rolled that far at all, which meant we were still on a sharp slope.

Also, P.K. wasn’t up top.

I ripped the handset from my belt. Prayed it wasn’t broken.

“Where the hell are you?” I hissed.

There was a long silence. I wondered what Coroner would do if I lost the boy. Lost the money. “Down the hill a bit,” P.K. answered at last, his voice crackling on the handset. “To the east. You can probably still see me.”

And there he was, through the trees: A dot.

“I already sent the SOS,” Xin said, leaning into my handset. “Company’s coming. Maybe thirty minutes. We just got to wait here.”

P.K. said, “My old man’s close. I can find him in half an hour.”

“Wait here for the rescue,” Xin said. “We’ll all go out and look for him.”

He gave a sad little laugh. “The company’s not going to send out a search party. You know that. All they care about is their cargo and whatever they can salvage from the truck. My father’s less than meaningless to anyone but me.”

Well, I wanted to say, he is dead. Instead, I started down the hill.

“Slow down,” I said. “I’m coming with you.”

“What?” said Xin.

I took my thumb off the handset.

“Kid can’t die,” I said, wondering how much honesty I could afford.

“You mean you need the money.”

I held on to a low tree limb with my free hand. Moved ahead, grabbed hold of another tree, all the while trying not to slip on leaves or trip on roots.

“Jesus, Ez.” Xin was flushed, agitated. She took a step forward, not following me so much as making sure I could hear her. “We all need the money. But it’s no goddamned good if you’re dead.”

“Not true. Boy owes me a pile if I die.”

“Yeah? What if you both get eaten?”

“That’ll be complicated. May have to hire an accountant.”

“I save your life and you’re going to leave me alone. All those times we rode together, you’re going to leave me alone.”

I forced myself to keep walking, to fix my eyes on the kid. “You know guilt don’t work on me, Xin. Lock yourself in the crawlspace. Pour a few shots, drink to our health, and don’t let the rescue team leave without us.” I stepped over another corpse in an orange jumpsuit, pale and gaunt and forest-scratched, its face little more than a skull beneath skin. These were the desperate dead, the old and ravenous. The fatter, younger, brighter ones favored the night, when the sun wouldn’t rot muscle from their bones.

“Ez,” said Xin. “The boy’s lying.”

I stopped.

“I don’t know what’s truth and what’s lies,” she said. “But I seen him before. Back home, at the New French. Playing cards and throwing back shots.” She lowered her voice, spoke in a high-speed hiss. “That no-ma’am-I-don’t-drink business was horseshit, and I reckon he’s been in Asheville a lot longer than a night. I don’t know what his game is here, but I don’t feel like dying for a lie today. Just stay back. If the kid gets himself killed, well, we lose a little money. We’ll have another job tomorrow.”

Was she telling the truth? Or just trying to keep me from getting myself killed? As long as Coroner was knocking on my door, it didn’t really matter.

“Tomorrow’s too late,” I said.

She shook her head and stepped back. She said, “You stupid asshole.”

I worked my way down.

P.K. waited in a hollow where the ground flattened out. There was a creek nearby, invisible but mumbling. He forced a smile, cradled the M-16. His clothes were sweat-soaked, weighted down with ammunition. The air smelled smogless and new. Like God had just invented it and still thought it was good.

“You ain’t a tourist,” I said.

He shrugged a shoulder, then turned away and raised his rifle toward the trees. Skipped over a rocky outcrop and made toward the sound of the creek. “I told you. I’ve spent every day outside for as long as I can remember. We should keep our mouths shut.”

Ordinarily I’d have welcomed the caution. There was a certain flavor of tourist who hooted his glee every time he pulled a trigger, or almost pulled a trigger, or thought about pulling triggers. But silence seemed ridiculous now, and I didn’t appreciate the boy hushing me. “We’re the only game in town, kid. Every corpse for miles around already knows we’re here.”

He gave another half-shrug.

The creek was low enough that we didn’t bother walking on stones. Tadpoles flitted around our boots. On the other side, we started moving uphill again. The leaves here were shot through with streaks of red, as if we’d stumbled our way deep into autumn.

“You’re a hell of a good son,” I said. “Boy your age usually wants to strangle his daddy.”

He looked back. “Did you strangle yours?”

“Never knew him. But I wanted to.” I paused. “Strangle him, I mean.”

He chewed that over a while. “Where did you grow up?”

“Richmond.”

“Never heard of it.”

“That’s because it ain’t there anymore.”

The flutter of birds overhead. You could depend on birds. They died and stayed dead. Twigs snapped underfoot. The climb sharpened.

“I have to be honest with you,” he said.

“Okay.”

“Sometimes, I think I’m not a good enough person.”

“I know I’m not.”

“I mean to speak the tongue. The angels’ language.”

“Are you an angel?”

“No.”

“There you go.”

P.K. pursed his lips, looked like he wanted to say something. Instead, he pointed up. I followed the line of his finger to the purpling sky ahead and the silhouette of an old fire tower. When clients wanted to hunt, I took them to towers like that. Tall, ancient, sturdy. Dead folks are slow climbers.

“That’s where he’ll be,” said the boy. “I should warn you—”

I raised my hand to cut him off. Listened.

“Do you hear that?” I whispered.

The strongest argument against talking when you’re outside is that your voice masks important warnings. Like the sound of feet against dirt, running.

We sprinted up the hill. P.K. scanned the woods ahead, his rifle following his eyes, and I glanced back over my shoulder. My lungs felt like someone had balled them up, pissed on them, and stapled them into my ribcage, but I pushed on, legs dragging underneath me. My feed was hot with its broadcast of I am alive, I am still alive, I will pay my debts, and a tendril of shame shot through the middle of my fear, because this was the only reason anyone cared that I was alive, to earn and owe money. We made it halfway to the tower before I saw our pursuers, and realized I’d been wrong about the sound.

It wasn’t just feet against the dirt.

There were also paws.

The wolves were ragged, skeletal things, ribs half-exposed beneath gray and white fur. They wove like steel needles through the trees. A man and a woman trailed the wolves, wearing tattered green uniforms. I fired at the closest animal. Missed.

“Behind us,” I rasped.

P.K. twisted around as he ran, took aim, tore the front legs off the wolf I’d missed. I couldn’t tell how many were left—they ducked in and out of sight, gray-green blurs, faces of the forest. One appeared a body’s length from P.K.’s left side; I got it in the head, almost fell over the body as it crumpled. Caught my footing and squeezed off a shot at the man in green.

The dead didn’t breathe, didn’t growl or hiss or groan. They watched and lunged and snapped, silent. Eyes flashed ahead. They flanked us with a kind of brutal grace, closing from every side with each footfall, and I had one of those idiot epiphanies that seem profound when you’re dizzy with adrenaline and about to be eaten: It’s like they’re dancing. Every lunge in concert, every bite. We were going to die because the dead were dancers.

The kid stopped.

I was running too fast, too close behind him. We hit the dirt. Someone shouted, but I didn’t understand the words. I smelled rotted meat. I tried to stand but my legs were tangled; someone was still shouting. My shoulder throbbed. Each breath was a suckerpunch. I gripped the Colt, braced for the bite, and someone was still shouting. I looked up.

The dead all stared at the man in black.

He was tall, pale. He wore a day’s gray-brown stubble and his eyes were hidden by the shadow of his wide-brimmed hat. His voice was hoarse but commanding as hunger—every nonsense syllable he shouted was a slap, a crack, all thunder and hard edges. The dead folks slumped as he spoke, cowed or subdued or enraptured. The wolves pawed the dirt, uncertain, saliva dripping from their mouths, their eyes never leaving the preacher. Joseph took off his hat and stared down at his son, his blue eyes blunt, and then he spoke English instead of the babble of Heaven.

“Go on and shoot ‘em,” he said. “My throat hurts like a bitch.”

When I first came to Asheville, I’d lived for six months with an ex-Pentecostal poet from the mountain collectives south of Blacksburg. Once, after a night of smoke and sweat and Blackjack, she’d given me slurred lessons in glossolalia, giggling as she coached me on tongues. There were, she said, patterns in the babble. Sounds that looped and recurred. Subtle cadences. The language of Heaven was poetry without meaning, empty words taking shapes.

There was an art to it.

Silently, I wrapped my tongue around the syllables of Joseph’s sermon. Nalumasakala, sayamawath, shit like that.Kidsounds, but they’d tamed the dead. The man had reached out with his tongue and controlled them. I tried to memorize his rhythms and words that weren’t words. I wanted to beg him to preach again.

Joseph wasn’t lost. He wasn’t stranded or waiting for saviors. He was at home, at ease.

There was a reinforced steel stable at the base of the tower—a horse grunted inside. After we killed the last of the dead, Joseph lit a cigarette and gestured to a rope ladder. Invited us up for coffee. “I ain’t got much to offer,” he said, “but I can boil you some beans.”

P.K. didn’t move. “You need to come with us,” he said, terse and low. “Rescue’s coming soon, but we have to meet them on the other side of the creek.”

“Already told you. I ain’t going nowhere.”

P.K. gripped his rifle. “Father. You can’t live out here.”

Joseph snorted. “Missed you too, Christopher. How you like the city? You going to introduce me to your friend?”

“He’s a tour guide. He’s here to help. You’re sick. We want to help you.”

Christopher. The kid glanced at me, frowned.

“My name’s Ezekiel,” I said. Held out my hand. He eyed me carefully, then shook it.

“You from around here?” he asked.

“No, sir. Richmond.”

He grimaced, exhaled smoke. “You had people there?”

My joke, my family. “I did.”

“I passed through, once. Few months after Christopher left.” He flicked ash into the dirt. “You see that place, you have a hard time looking the Lord in the eye.”

I didn’t know what to say. I said, “Yes, sir.”

“Father,” Christopher pressed. “You need to come with us now.”

Joseph shook his head. “It’s good to see you, son. I’m happy to drink a cup of coffee with you, and you can tell me what it is you really want. Grace Baptist took up a collection last month—you need money, we can talk. But I ain’t going to live inside of walls for you.” He turned around, started to walk back to his ladder.

And P.K.—Christopher—hit him in the head with the butt of his rifle.

The preacher crumpled.

My instinct was to reach for the Colt, but I balled my fist and stood very still. Christopher kneeled and fumbled in his father’s jacket, withdrew a ring of keys.

“He doesn’t want to leave the wilderness anymore,” he said. “He’s senile. He needs saving. If you want to help him, the best thing you can do is help me get him on the horse.”

You could smell the bullshit in every word. I watched him as he searched through his daddy’s keys, and I remembered Xin’s story about the New French. I remembered that the minder told me to bring back the old man, and a nasty hunch worked itself out in my head. I would have shaken my head in grudging admiration, but no one had told me, and that left me scratching the nub in the back of my neck. Feeling the dim heat of my feed, the constant heat of debt and return. Coroner had sent me into this blind, and now I was stuck, choiceless. Why had he chosen me? Because I was dependable? Or because he thought I was stupid, expendable?

Finish the job and you’ll be fine.

“Okay,” I said slowly. “I’ll get this arm, we’ll hold him up together.”

We pulled his father to his feet, draped his arms over our shoulders and carried him to the stable. Christopher unlocked the steel door, and we hauled Joseph inside. The place was cramped and thick with shit-stink. Bars of light slanted through the grates, and the ground was covered with hay. The horse huffed, stepped back. It was gaunt, its fur as black as Joseph’s coat. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen such a large animal alive. Rodents tended to stay dead, but most mammals bigger than cats were liable to come back. You didn’t see them much in the cities.

The horse was calm; it let us push Joseph onto its back without much fuss. We swung the preacher around by his legs so that he was sitting more or less upright, his head hanging forward. Christopher climbed onto the horse, inclined his head to me. “Thank you,” he said.

Then he shot me in the chest.

The blast knocked me into the dirt. Even with the armor under my coat, it felt like someone had jackhammered the breath out of me, and I fought to suck down air. Christopher’s horse charged into the woods, and for a beautiful, adrenaline-soaked moment, I stopped worrying about money and consequences and Coroner. I raised the Colt, fired.

The first shot missed. The second hit its mark, and the boy toppled from the horse. The animal panicked, reared back, and knocked off the preacher, who fell on his side and rolled.

I winced and climbed to my feet. Staggered outside in time to see the kid duck behind a tree, weaving and heavy-breathing but alive, the M-16 in hand. I pulled the trigger again, splintered bark, took cover behind a fallen trunk.

It looked an awful lot like Coroner had bought the kid Californian armor, too.

“So,” I called, “You want to sell your old man?”

Christopher coughed. It took me a moment to realize he was laughing. “Is that why you’re shooting at me? Because I’m a bad son?” His shot grazed bark, burned moss, whistled over my head. “Or do you want to sell him yourself?”

“Didn’t plan on it,” I said. I slid down the length of the log, listened for footsteps or tells. “I just make a point of shooting folks who shoot me.”

He was silent.

“I want to know if I got this right,” I shouted. I willed him to make a move while I talked, willed him to peer out and try to find me.“You were sick of it, weren’t you? The preaching. The wilderness. You were sick of it, and you were sane, and you wanted to go live with the living, so you ran off to the city and got caught up in cards and whiskey. Do I have it right so far?”

Wind in the leaves. The snap of a reloaded magazine. I focused on the snap, raised the barrel of the Colt over the log.

“You play the tables long enough in the New French, you start owing money around town. Which, in the end, really just means you owe Coroner. I bet it wasn’t long before Coroner came calling, and you started to wonder what you could give him to get him off your back. Then you remembered your daddy, and it all—”

He cut me off with a thundercrack. I fired twice over the log.

The Colt clicked.

Christopher must have heard it. He coughed and fired into the dead tree, tearing through moss and bark and wood as if he were hacking with a machete, moving closer and coughing and ripping apart the air—

And then he stopped.

There was a snap, and the woods fell silent.

I peered over the log.

She held him like a lover. His head hung limp, twisted. Her forearm was mangled, her mouth bloodstained. She was still covered in the powder from the airbag. Three dead rescue workers in camouflage armor staggered through the trees behind her.

I gave up, then.

Those armor suits, so bulky and futile. Xin Sun with blood in her mouth. Everyone was dead. No one was coming for me. And even if I found my way home, Coroner would be waiting.

Xin pressed her lips against the dead boy’s throat. At first, it looked like a kiss. And then it didn’t. She opened the artery, ripped away muscle. Her eyes flicked to the side and met mine; she seemed torn between finishing her meal and moving on to me. The boy’s blood ran down the front of her shirt. The rescue crew’s legs were all bent into painful angles—maybe they’d wrecked—but they still hitched toward us, inch by inch.

“You were right,” I said softly. “I’m a stupid asshole.”

She watched me, shifted her weight. You look the dead in the eyes, you see the judgment.

“I can’t go back to the city. Don’t know why I’d go back, anyway. I ain’t got no family, no daughter in California. All I got is a landlord and some funerals I ain’t paid for.”

The rescuers were close now. I opened my fingers, dropped the Colt.

“I don’t want to be owned,” I said. “I don’t want to owe nobody no more. I been stuck a long time.”

She was silent. I tried to relax. Tried not to feel the blood drum in my neck, my chest. The air tasted good—I was glad to die outside. It was the best I could hope for, going out where I could see the birds. There was a kind of relief in it, a lightness. This is how it’s going to be. Feet scuffed the dirt, one step and then another.

“Go on, Xin,” I said.

She jerked backward with a thwip.

Xin and Christopher fell, tangled together. Before they hit the dirt, the rescue workers’ heads shattered in a spray of bone and blood. I spun around, followed the sound of silenced shots. The preacher stood at the base of his tower with a pistol in each hand, his guns raised toward me and the dead, his face empty as an abandoned city.

We burned the bodies in silence. Joseph stood too close to Christopher’s pyre, head bowed and lips moving wordlessly. The sun was almost down. I held one of his pistols and watched the woods. Far as I could tell, the preacher didn’t know what his son had planned to do. I wasn’t going to tell him. I didn’t have anything more to say to Xin, and I felt guilty for it. Still, I stood by her pyre, clinging quietly to my only friend at a lonely party.

When the preacher finished his prayers, we climbed the tower and watched the fires burn down. He made bitter coffee, and we drank it slowly as the stars came out, denser and brighter than I’d seen in years. When Joseph spoke, his voice was hoarse and flat.

“You still want to try to take me back to your city?”

I reckoned I could do it. Carry him to Coroner. My debt might not be paid, but the boss would be off my back for another day. He’d have something priceless, something that no thuglord or company—not even the few who could fly over oceans—could buy: Words that could hold the dead at bay. Joseph might not cooperate, but Coroner knew how to make a man talk. He’d learn the loops and rhythms, put poets on his payroll, try to vivisect the tongue of Heaven. He’d try to figure out what other things those words could make the dead do.

I swallowed my coffee. “No, sir.”

The old man nodded, then unsheathed his knife.

“You were blessing her,” he said.

I watched the knife’s tip, tried to work out the right answer. He took my silence for confusion.

“The woman. You were blessing her.”

The pyrecoals glowed below, a constellation of deaths.

“Her name was Xin Sun,” I said. “She was the nearest thing to family that I had.” I looked up from the knife and met his eyes, willing him to believe me. “I don’t know how to save a soul, but I would have liked to have saved hers.”

There was nothing about Xin’s soul that needed saving. I hoped she would have forgiven the lie. Joseph leaned on the rail and toyed with his knife, moonlight glinting on the blade. My palms were sweaty, my throat tight with unasked questions. I wasn’t used to wanting something like this. Wanting to walk in the wilderness, outside of walls. Wanting to ride the roads and forests, far from companies and criminals, free from Coroner and the machinery of obligation. I’d never believed that kind of life was possible, and now I was drunk on the fantasy.

“If you want me to teach you,” Joseph said at last, “I’m gonna have to cut out your feed.”

I touched the warm nub on my neck and bit back a smile.

Mark of the Devil.

Already, I could feel it. The sting of alcohol. Metal on skin, the knife’s edge like nightbreeze. Blood. One drop, and then a trickle. The cut, the last hum of the feed running my numbers.

And then a release, when it tells the world that I’m a dead man.

Eric Gregory lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he is working toward his MFA at North Carolina State University. His stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Interzone, Futurismic, Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction, and other publications. Find more at ericmg.com.

Author Spotlight: Eric Gregory
Erin Stocks

You grew up in the mountains of Virginia. Is that where this post-apocalyptic story is set?

Ez and Xin start out in Asheville, North Carolina (one of my very favorite places, so it kind of stung to plunge it into dystopia), and the action of the latter half of the story is set around a particular stretch of road in Cherokee National Forest, right along the border between northeast Tennessee and southwest Virginia. That road is the exact last place I’d ever want to run into hungry dead things, so of course I had to stick my characters there.

What’s your take on how the world ended up this way, with alloyed bears and southern-shotgun-preacher-zombie-madness?

I figured if the zombie plague broke out, the financial industry might be one of the few institutions vicious enough to survive it. So this is a world where the infrastructure that made it out the other side of the apocalypse looks a lot like an unfettered creditocracy. You’ve got these sort of interconnected city-states built around the biggest companies, which maintain private armies and construct the occasional cyborg bear. And then you’ve got people like Joseph, whose religious (and wilderness) impulse is partly a reaction against the world inside the walls.

Ez spends his days working for Coroner, guiding people outside the city for pay. Why does he live this way, knowing how dangerous a job it is?

Consciously, I don’t think he sees himself as having a lot of choice. He owes Coroner, he’s doing what he has to do. Unconsciously, going outside feels like a tiny step toward freedom, even if it’s a deadly freedom that seems totally unsustainable.

Joseph, in a nice contrast to Ez’s choices, refuses to return with his son, preferring instead to stay away from the city and out with the dead. What do you think the dead offer him that living people can’t?

The dead are a captive audience. And an apparently receptive one. They don’t doubt you, they don’t debate you, and they’re a lot less complicated than the living. You know exactly what they want. From Joseph’s standpoint, the important thing is that the dead represent an opportunity for him to save souls with some certainty, to do good in a world where doing good is rarely an option.

What do the feeds connect with? The government we can’t see, or maybe people like Coroner who hold all the cards?

The feed’s basically a physical, constantly-refreshing credit report. It both locks you biologically to your debt (or credit), and keeps the bank in contact with your body, ensuring that when you die, your death will be reported and your debt transferred.

Do you think there could have been something between Ez and Xin Sun if she had lived? Perhaps if he had acknowledged his loneliness earlier, and been truly honest with himself?

It’s possible. To my mind, they had more of a family dynamic than a romantic one, but it’s sort of nice to imagine them together in the cheerier alternate universe a few doors down.

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.

Interview with Jill Tarter, Director of SETI
Genevieve Valentine

Dr. Jill Tarter is the face of humanity.

As the Director of the Center for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research, Dr. Tarter has devoted her career to the search for extraterrestrial life. It’s a search that has already yielded invaluable results about the nature of the universe, and is expanding exponentially thanks to the development of ever-more-powerful telescope arrays—and if some beacon from a far-off world ever calls us, Dr. Tarter will be the one picking up the phone.

Here, she sits down with Lightspeed to discuss her work past and present, the importance of international cooperation, and how being a scientist makes it tough to go to the movies.

For lit nerds, let’s start with the fact that you are the inspiration for Ellie Arroway, the heroine in Carl Sagan’s Contact, who suffers several rounds of professional slings and arrows in an attempt to be taken seriously, both as a woman in her field and as someone dedicated to the idea that in a vast universe, humanity is not alone. Can you speak a little about your experiences with SETI within the scientific community? How has scientific (or public) perception changed?

When I first started—people’s reaction was “what’s a nice girl like you doing in a field like this?” We’ve worked hard to demonstrate the scientific credibility of what we do. SETI has been recommended in multiple decadal reviews by the astronomy and astrophysics community—that’s the seal of approval from the National Research Council as well as our peers. However, that didn’t stop Senator Bryan from Nevada from terminating the funds for NASA’s SETI program in 1993, and we’ve had to rely on raising funds privately since then. Now that Kepler has announced 1235 exoplanet candidates (with many more to come), I think SETI is beginning to seem more reasonable and relevant to people. However, I’m afraid that most folks would still see this as an avocation rather than a full-time vocation. It isn’t! There’s an enormous amount of innovative and challenging work to be done. We partnered with UC Berkeley Radio Astronomy Lab to build the first radio telescope array from a large number of small dishes and we’re demonstrating just how capable that concept is for surveying the sky. We’re about to launch a citizen science project that will allow the crowd to work along side us, in real time, to help find signals that might otherwise be missed. Who knows what will come next.

In the 1990s, you co-created the HabCat Catalog of Nearby Habitable Systems with Margaret Turnbull. What was the process like? Were there any surprises? (Are there any of which you’re particularly fond?)

I’m fondest of those stars that Kepler and radial velocity studies tell us are orbited by exoplanets. Maggie Turnbull built this catalog as part of her PhD thesis and it’s been refined (and pruned down considerably) to serve as the start of a finding list for future space missions to attempt to image terrestrial planets around nearby stars. Maggie did the work on this—I think she did a great job. As we learn more about stars—particularly when the Gaia spacecraft begins to return results a few years from now—we can increase the number of stars in the catalog and improve our characterization of some of the stars that are already in there. In particular, we’re sure that we’ve mistaken some distant giants for nearby main sequence stars because we didn’t have a good measurement of their distances.

Based largely on your work, the list has expanded vastly from its original incarnation—you’re up to more than 17,000. What are the criteria involved in choosing candidates?

Actually, if you include the stars from the Tycho-2 catalog, our target list for SETI observations has slightly over a quarter of a million stars. We chose stars that didn’t seem to have any companions at an awkward distance that might disrupt planetary orbits. We wanted the stars to be over three billion years old, so that technologies might have had a chance to evolve; for that reason, you won’t find any early-type, massive stars in the list; they use up their hydrogen too fast. We excluded stars that were not variable and seemed to be in the stable phase of their main sequence lifetime. We wanted stars to have sufficient metallicity to be able to form rocky planets. In general, the more like the Sun, the more likely the star was to be included in HabCat.

In November of 2010, SETI launched The Dorothy Project, a massive observational campaign covering eighty-five Kepler planets. Can you speak a little more about the project, and any side-goals that might be achieved besides the obvious jackpot discovery?

It was Shin-ya Narusawa of the Nishi-Harima Astronomical Observatory in Japan that launched project Dorothy. He’s managed to get optical and radio observatories where SETI observations have never been done before to participate. It makes the point that SETI is an intrinsically international endeavor. As an unintended side benefit, Dorothy has created a network that allows us to check up on our colleagues in Japan following the devastation there from Friday’s earthquake.

What about your work surprises you?

I’m always surprised when people confuse what I do with the pseudo-science of alien abductions and UFOs. How and why can humans continue to be so lacking in critical thinking skills? Those are incredible claims—where’s the incredible evidence? I haven’t been shown any evidence that has stood up to scrutiny.

What are the greatest challenges in your work?

Our greatest challenge continues to be funding. Technology is allowing us to improve our searches exponentially, but buying that technology or getting it donated and paying scientists and staff to conduct the searches requires funding—continuously. This endeavor may take many generations, and we haven’t solved the problem of how to continue to pay for it.

What about your work do you most enjoy?

Two things. Going to the Allen Telescope Array observatory whenever I can—computers do the searching, so I’m not needed anymore. I still love the solitude and beauty of Hat Creek and the opportunity to think and dream about how to make the search even better. The other thing I like is talking to young people. I encourage them to have a more cosmic perspective, to think of themselves as humans, as Earthlings, as all the same when compared to other intelligent creatures that might share our universe. The only way to preserve our species is to embrace our commonalities and stop fighting over our perceived differences. Molecular biology has shown us exactly how identical we all are, but we haven’t internalized that into our world views.

Are there any alien-contact science fiction movies that drive you up the wall?

Almost all of them!

If SETI ever does detect a suspiciously awesome signal from the reaches of space, what are the verification processes involved in naming it a civilization-made signal? What is the chain of notification once the signal is confirmed?

Independent verification with hardware we didn’t build and software we didn’t write—we worry a lot about deliberate hoaxes. A number of observational tests that show the signal is really coming from a long distance away—probably interstellar, but perhaps a probe might be interplanetary. This will take time, so if the signal doesn’t persist, then we are going to be left with an unexplainable transient. There’s a different kind of fly’s eye telescope that would be good for detecting transients, but we don’t have the compute power to search the whole sky that way yet—in the future we will.

As far as announcing our discovery, we intend to tell the world, after we’ve quietly told our major donors as a way of saying thank you. We’ll use the IAU telegram system to alert all observatories, we’ll send off a discovery paper (but probably will not be able to keep the news under wraps long enough for the review process to complete), and we’ll hold a press conference. And of course, since it will be an incredible claim, we’ll make all our data available for scrutiny.

What are your hopes for SETI in the next ten years?

I’d like to find ways to search a million stars for engineered signals at radio, optical, and infrared wavelengths during the next decade—beyond that, it will depend on what scientific discoveries and technology developments have taken place. We reserve the right to continue to make our searches better.

What are some notable night skies you’ve seen?

It’s very dark at the Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico—I always felt incredibly inspired at night when I’d walk from the visitors’ quarters to the control room to start my shift at midnight—Orion was right overhead, like an old friend. Undoubtedly the best skies I’ve ever seen were at another observatory—Parkes in the outback of New South Wales. The site is dark and the view from the south is much better than from the north, and it’s flat in all directions so the sky comes down to the horizon and appears even bigger. On one visit to Parkes I had the privilege to see comet McNaught arching across the whole sky—wow!

When you’re off-duty, do you find yourself still looking at the stars?

I always look at the stars—they inspire and humble me.

SETI’s mission addresses one of the fundamental questions of humanity (are we alone?), and as Dr. Tarter mentions, SETI is a privately-funded affair. If the idea of first contact sparks your imagination (and it should), or if you find yourself routinely gazing at the night sky and getting dreamy, consider getting involved: go to www.seti.org for more information on how the Kepler search is progressing, and how you can help spread the word about an institute devoted to the idea that, if we listen hard enough, we might someday hear someone calling for us.

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

Bibi from Jupiter
Tessa Mellas

When I marked on my roommate survey sheet that I’d be interested in living with an international student, I was thinking she’d take me to Switzerland for Christmas break or to Puerto Rico for a month in the summer. I wasn’t thinking about a romp around the red eye of Jupiter, which is exactly what I’d have gotten had I followed my roommate home. Apparently, American school systems have gotten popular all over. Universities shepherd the foreigners in. Anything to be able to write on the brochures, “Our student body hails from thirty-three countries and the far reaches of the solar system.”

You’d think there’d have been an uproar over the matter. I mean, here we have student-funding going down the toilet and everyone staging protests to show they’re pissed. And she gets a full ride, all the amenities paid for. She comes in like a Cuban refugee, minus the boat, sweeps up all the scholarships. And why shouldn’t she? She probably qualifies as fifteen different types of minority. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have anything against her. We were friends. I just didn’t expect her to be so popular. I figured I’d have to protect her from riots and reporters. But as it turns out, she was really well liked.

The first time I met her I nearly peed my pants. It’s the end of August and I’ve got all my stuff shoved in the family van, a bit too unorganized for my father’s taste, but we only live an hour away. I’m hoping to get there first to pick the best side of the room, the one with the most sunlight and the least damaged furniture. I get up early—just to beat her there. But I don’t.

She’s sitting at her desk already, reading the student handbook. I double-check the room number. 317. I’ve got the right place. This is my roommate.

At first, I think she’s an inmate. She’s wearing this light-blue jumpsuit. And she’s got pale-green skin that looks sickly. Gangrene, I think, not quite knowing what that is. It just sounds like a disease that would turn you green. She’s not an all-out green. Tinted rather, like she got a sunless tanner that didn’t work out. Her ears are inset like a whale’s, and she doesn’t have eyelids. She’s this tiny creature, not even five feet tall, completely flat, no breasts. It doesn’t even look like she has nipples.

My parents are right behind me. My mother’s carrying my lava lamp like some offering. My father’s got my futon extended over his head, trying to be all macho in case my roommate’s a babe. They drop my stuff on the side of the room with a broken closet door and turn to this green, earless girl. They’re all excited, want to make friends with the new roommate. So they start asking questions: “How was your drive? Do you like the campus? Have your parents left?”

Not even acknowledging the obvious. That she’s green. Maybe they didn’t notice. Like I said, it was a pale green, a tint really, but it was pretty obvious to me, and she had weird eyes too, beady black pinhead eyes like a hamster’s.

So finally I ask, “Where are you from?”

And she says, “Jupiter.”

“Jupiter, New York?” my parents ask.

Not that they know there is a Jupiter, New York. It just makes more sense than the other possibility.

“No,” she says. “Jupiter, Jupiter. The planet.”

“Oh,” they say. “I didn’t realize we’d found life on other planets yet. How interesting.”

She says, “You didn’t. We found you,” and goes back to her reading.

That shuts my parents up fast. They have no response. They do an about-face and head back to the car.

“Jupiter,” my father’s saying. “You believe that, Cath?”

My mother’s shaking her head, saying “Jupiter” over and over. First, like it’s a word she’s never heard, a word she’s trying to get used to. Then like a question. “Jupiter?” Not quite sure whether or not to believe it. She says it several more times, looks at my father, then me.

“I was worried about Angela living with city kids,” she says. “This is a bit different.” She unlocks the car, grabs a handful of pillows, and adds, “Is Jupiter the one with the rings?”

“I thought Jupiter was made of gas,” my father says. “How can she live on a gaseous planet?”

“Let’s just drop it,” I say. “She could be from the moon, for all I care.”

As it turned out, she was from the moon. Well, one of them. Apparently Jupiter’s got a few dozen. The one she’s from is called Europa—by Americans at least. But she tells everyone she’s from Jupiter, says it’s easier to explain. Her name is Bibi. No last name. Just Bibi. I looked it up. It means “lady” in Arabic. Ironic, as her kind doesn’t have genders, just one type, like flowers, self-germinating and everything. But she looks more like a girl than a guy, so that’s how we treat her while she’s here, even though her body parts serve both functions.

She tells me most of this the first night in the dorm. I’m unpacking my toiletries and makeup, and she’s still reading. I say, “Your parents were cool with you coming to America? Mine wouldn’t even let me go out of state.”

“I don’t have parents,” Bibi says.

“Oh Christ!” I say. “I’m sorry. That sucks.” What can you say in a situation like that? I’d never met an orphan.

“It’s fine,” she says. “Nobody has parents. I grew up like this, sort of in a dorm.”

“How can nobody on Jupiter have parents?” I ask. I know I’m being nosy, but you’ve got to admit it’s a bit strange.

“It’s complicated,” she says. “I don’t feel like getting into it.”

I’m about to insist when there’s a knock at the door. Bibi jumps to get it and these men wheel in a full-size fridge. It’s brand-new, a Frigidaire, one of those side-by-side freezer-and-fridge jobs complete with icemaker. They prop it against the window, plug it in, and leave.

“What the hell is that?” I ask, knowing damn well it’s a fridge, not quite sure what it’s doing in our room. My parents bought us one of those mini units, just enough space for a Brita filter, pudding snacks, and string cheese. The university had exact specifications on which ones were allowed. This Frigidaire wasn’t on the list. Bibi explains how she got special permission to have it in the room, says she has a medical condition.

“What kind of condition?” I ask. “Are you contagious?”

“It’s not a viral condition,” she says. “I need a daily supply of ice.”

“Ice,” I say. “For what?”

“Don’t they teach you this stuff in school?” she asks. “The basics of the solar system?”

“Of course,” I say. “Third grade. We memorized the planets. There was a song.”

Apparently she doesn’t believe me. She goes to my dresser and starts grabbing stuff. She throws my nightie in a lump in the middle of the floor and says, “That’s the sun.” She places a red thong beside it and calls that Mercury. Venus is a pair of toe socks. Earth a blue bra. Mars a pair of leggings. And Jupiter and all its moons are my best sparkly panties. She lines them up, stands to the side, says, “See?”

“Yeah, I get your point,” I say, though I don’t really. I’m too pissed that my underwear are on the floor. Matching bras and panties aren’t cheap. “I appreciate the astronomy lesson,” I say, but she cuts me off.

She points at my bra. “You’re here,” she says. “We’re there. See how far we are from the sun? It’s cold. We don’t have sweat glands. Your planet is hot, so I need ice. Capisce?”

Capisce? Who the hell does she think she is? A Jupitarian girl trying to intimidate me with Italian. Barging in with her refrigerator. Taking the best side of the room and making my thong a planet. I snatch her solar system off the floor and stuff it back in my drawer, say, “I don’t know much about Jupiter, but here, shit like that just isn’t cool.”

There’s another knock at the door. I’m about to say, “That better not be a fucking stove,” when these guys from down the hall walk in. They want Bibi to join them for a game of pool.

“I’m Angela,” I say, extending my hand.

“You can come too if you want,” they say. But it’s clear they’re just interested in Bibi.

I shrug. “I got stuff to do. Maybe next time.”

And Bibi takes off. No apology. No,“I’m not going without my roommate.” No nothing. She just leaves me there with her big fucking fridge while she goes to shoot pool with these boys she’s never even seen. I’m not sure what they see in her. She isn’t at all pretty. I mean, I don’t think so. We have rigid aesthetics here, right? How can you count a green earless girl without eyelids as pretty?

I watch them head down the stairs. The dorm is quiet, empty. I thought people were supposed to congregate on their floor the first night, praise each other’s bedspreads and posters and shit. The door across the hall opens and a guy wearing pink pants and a polo shirt steps out.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey,” he replies.

He’s wearing his collar propped up like he’s Snow White. His hair is gelled back and all goopy. I want to tell him that went out of style with the Fonz, but instead say, “I’m Angela,” even though it’s written on the construction paper sign on my door.

“Call me Skippy,” he says, even though his sign says John Ward III.

“Where’d the nickname come from?” I ask.

“I made it up. People say you can reinvent yourself in college.”

“Huh,” I say. “Good choice.”

“So that green girl’s your roommate?” he asks.

“Yeah. Afraid so.”

“Do you know when she’s getting back?” he asks. “I heard she’s from Jupiter. You think you could introduce me? Lloyd in Space is my favorite cartoon.”

The first week wasn’t at all what I expected from freshman year. Bibi followed me all over the place, dragging her leaky ice packs along. Didn’t quite understand we had different schedules. She’s taking all these science and math courses. And I have this good mix. Swahili. Ballet. Psychology. Statistics. My adviser made me take that last one, said I needed a math credit. But besides statistics, I’m thinking classes will be fun.

Then in psych lab, I turn around and there she is sitting behind me. She’s even got the books. I figure she must have bought them for both our schedules. How’s a girl from Jupiter to know better?

Everyone wants to be her lab partner. They crowd around her desk and ask stupid questions like, “Are you going to be a psychologist? Will you go back to Jupiter and counsel manic-depressives?”

“No,” she says. “I’m a neurobiology major. Stem cell research. I’m going to learn to grow pancreases and livers on rats, then take them back to Jupiter and implant them in bodies.”

“Right,” I say. “You’re not even supposed to be here. Don’t you have chemistry?”

She doesn’t answer, just prepares her rat for the maze.

Of course, hers finishes first. Mine gets stuck in a corner and goes into shock.

But what does it matter that her rat’s the smartest? The girl doesn’t have any common sense. She forgets her shoes all the time, puts the toothpaste in her mouth instead of on the brush, and doesn’t close the stall door behind her when she goes to the bathroom. No one wants to see how Jupitarians pee. Actually, everyone was interested, but once they saw it, they didn’t want to see it again.

Around the third week I finally get a look at her schedule. It’s in one of those ugly-ass Trapper Keeper things. As it turns out, Bibi is enrolled in my classes. Hers too. She’s taking nine at once. I didn’t think that was allowed. Bet they make exceptions for Jupitarians, figuring anyone from another planet is more intelligent than us. Bibi is pretty smart actually, gets perfect scores on the tests even though she says absolutely nothing in class.

And to top it all off, even the boys are into her. That guy Skippy won’t stop hanging around. He’s a complete dork, a grade-A loser. He stands outside our door like he’s the king’s guard. At night he brings Bibi ice cream and Popsicles. He follows her to dinner and leaves flowers outside our door, nasty weedy ones with ants. Bibi hangs them from the ceiling and the flowers die because there’s absolutely no light in the room. She won’t let me open the blinds, not even a crack, on account of her condition. So now we’ve got all these ants crawling across our ceiling between brown crusty root systems. And Skippy’s become this stalker. I find him in my closet behind my shoe rack and Dustbuster.

“Just playing hide-and-seek,” he says, and winks.

“Hide-and-seek, my ass,” I yell. “She doesn’t even have a vagina!”

I call my mother and tell her about Skippy and the icepacks and the ants. My mother tells me to be patient. She reminds me about Martin Luther King Jr. I tell her she shouldn’t send Bibi presents anymore. She puts something in all my care packages for Bibi. Cookies. Statuettes from the dollar store. Soup-for-the-Soul books. I tell her, “Bibi doesn’t need presents. You should see this girl’s checks. The government gives her plenty of money.”

My mother says presents are different. Bibi doesn’t have parents. She tells me to be mindful of that. I tell my mother no one on Jupiter has parents. She says that doesn’t sound right, and I agree. I mean a whole planet full of orphans. That just seems too sad to be true. She’s probably lying. Going for the sympathy vote. I could press the issue, but I don’t. I think about Martin Luther King Jr., and when Bibi comes back, I give the roommate chitchat thing another try.

“So who do you have the hots for?” I ask.

And she says, “Nobody really.”

I’m not quite sure how it works for Jupitarians, since they can self-germinate. She seems asexual, never mentions boys.

I say, “What about Skippy? He wants you bad.”

“Oh, him,” she says, as though she hadn’t noticed. She gets her shower caddy and heads down the hall. I stare at the door after she’s gone.

Maybe she’s bisexual. Maybe she’s gay. I wonder if she masturbates when I’m out of the room. It seems like genderless people don’t care about anyone but themselves. They might, but Bibi could give two shits about me.

By the time Thanksgiving rolls around, I’m getting pretty sick of my roommate. I mean how many times do you have to tell a person, “Put on your shoes,” before she gets it right? There’s snow on the ground, and she’s prancing in it like some leprechaun. She walks around in her bare feet, leaving these monster frog prints. Did I mention Jupitarians only have three toes? It’s like she needed to show them off. You’d think she at least would have tried to fit in. I think she liked being different. Everyone was always stopping by our room to see what the space alien was up to. I was happy to have a week at home without her.

But there was no place for her to go, and my mother offered our house, insisted, really, said, “Angela, if we were dead, I would hope someone would be nice enough to take you in for the holidays.”

I guess she was right. Bibi couldn’t very well go back to the moon. The least I could do was share my goddamn turkey with the girl. My turkey. My gravy. My family.

Bibi stayed in the guest room, and wouldn’t you know it, she got along great with my mom. Better than me. The two of them bonded like bears.

My mother showed her how to cook cranberry sauce and corn bread from scratch and, of course, how to pull the guts out of a turkey. Bibi was fascinated, watched my mother tear the bird’s insides out of its ass, leaving this hollow pink part in the middle. Bibi couldn’t stop staring at it, until finally I said, “It’s only a turkey. Gobble, gobble.”

Bibi didn’t answer, just looked at me like I’d threatened to cut off her head.

And my mother said, “Angela, why don’t you help your father clean the garage?”

Things went on like this for days, my mother acting like Bibi’s her new adopted daughter and treating me like chopped meat.

Then Thanksgiving Day, we sit down for dinner and, of course, my mother makes us hold hands. We do this every year, even though we’re a family that doesn’t go to church. Even though we’re a family that doesn’t pray. My mother insists we still believe in God.

She starts out as usual with, “Thank you, Lord, for the food before us.” Then she goes off on this new part, says, “Thank you for bringing this space child into our lives. May our civilizations be as peaceful as those of the Pilgrims and Indians.”

I want to say, “God, Mom, does everything have to be about Bibi?” Instead, I grab the nicest piece of turkey and dump gravy all over, a little extra in case Bibi helps herself to more than her fair share. But she doesn’t. She takes some potatoes and squash, a little cranberry sauce and corn bread, really small portions. My father tries to pass her the turkey.

“Don’t you like meat?” he asks.

My mother says, “Bill, maybe she’s a vegetarian.”

“No,” Bibi says. “It’s just that the turkey reminds me of my mother.”

I want to ask Bibi what the hell she meant at dinner, but she goes to bed early and shuts the door. The next day my mother takes us to the mall. I’m thinking she feels bad about the turkey thing because she tells us to buy any outfit we want. But Bibi doesn’t want clothes. She goes to the cooking store and buys a turkey baster. And now I’m really confused.

We go to the food court for lunch. We get Sbarro’s, chow mein, and Arby’s. My mom’s sucking a slushie. She gives Bibi a sip, says, “Tell me about your mother.”

Bibi says, “I never had a mother. No one does. She died before I was born.”

It’s been three months and this chick still hasn’t explained the “no parents” situation. So I say, “What’s the deal? No parents. No fathers. How exactly do you make babies?”

My mother gives me this look like I’m being rude.

“What?” I say. “You started it.”

Bibi swallows the rest of her egg roll, asks, “You wanna see?”

“What? Here?” my mother says.

She lifts her shirt, and there’s this hole where her belly button should be. It’s the size of a nickel, but it scoops in and up like the inside of a funnel. She does this right in the middle of the food court. People turn and stare. My mother tells her to pull down her shirt.

“So it’s like a vagina,” I say.

“Except you put your own pollen up there, push it in deep instead of flushing it.”

“What a relief,” my mother says. “I thought you couldn’t have children.”

“I can,” Bibi says. “But I won’t. Anyone who has a baby ends up dead.”

“Childbirth used to be risky here,” my mother says. “Thank God for modern medicine.”

“No,” Bibi says. “Procreation is suicide. Babies can’t come out the bottom. There’s no hole. To get out, they gnaw through your stomach. They eat the other organs on their way out.”

I sit there, shocked, my fries turning to mush on my tongue. “My God,” I say. “Why would anyone want to get pregnant?”

“They say it’s wonderful. Like being on heroin for nine months. The best euphoria there is.”

“Christ Almighty,” I say, “that’s some mad kind of population control.” I ask her if she’s heard of the one-child law in China, but she doesn’t answer.

“You’re in good hands now,” my mother says and gives her a hug, rocks her back and forth in her arms. Right there in the middle of the food court like she’s five years old. I just sit and stare at my food. As though I could eat after that.

My mother drops us off at school on Sunday, tells Bibi if she needs anything to call. We carry our laundry upstairs. Under our folded clothes, we find notes from my mother on matching stationery taped to bags of Hershey’s kisses. Mine says, “Loved having you home. So nice to spend time with you and Bibi.”

“Your mom’s really cool,” Bibi says. She props her turkey baster and note up on her dresser.

“Yeah,” I say. “I guess.”

Now that she likes my mom, she wants to be friends with me. Go figure.

I curl up on my futon with a piece of leftover corn bread. “So did you ever think of doing it?” I ask. “Just to see what pregnancy’s like? Don’t you think you will eventually?”

“Why would I do that?” she says.

“Don’t you think you’re missing out? You said it’s like drugs. I’d try that.”

“I don’t want to die,” Bibi says. “That’s why I’m here.”

“How does your planet feel about stem cell research?” I ask.

“They don’t understand why things should change.”

“Yeah, it’s kind of the same in America,” I say. “Stem cell research is a sin. Better watch out. They might throw you out of the country.”

She empties her chocolate kisses into the porcelain bowl my mother gave her.

“I think you’ll do it,” I say. “That’s what the turkey baster’s for, right? To stick the pollen all the way up?”

She just stares at me with her black eyes bugging out, and for a second I think she’s going to throw the bowl at my head. Either that or she’s going to cry. But she just turns and walks out of the room.

She didn’t come back that night. I wasn’t sure where she went. And frankly, I didn’t care.

Bibi didn’t speak to me for weeks. We gave each other the silent treatment and slammed the door a lot. I called my mother and told her I wanted to switch rooms. She said, “Angela, that’s not how we deal with our problems.”

I went to the RA and asked how long it would take to get a new room. She said I could file a complaint, but room changes were rarely approved.

It looked like Bibi and I were stuck with each other, at least for six more months. I started thinking I should muster up some sort of reconciliation. I thought about apologizing. Maybe she’d apologize for being such a bitch. I had a plan, was going to do it after my last class the Monday before finals. I swear I was going to.

But then I get back to my room, and Bibi’s in bed with Skippy. He’s straddling her stomach. His schlong’s way up in her belly, shoved up there real good. He’s riding her like a madman, and Bibi’s arching up so her belly keeps hitting his balls.

I slammed the door behind me and slept in the lounge.

Who did she think she was having sex with a human boy, and one from our floor? It’s not that I liked him. He was too pimply for me. But she’d been lying to me all semester, pretending she didn’t understand my crushes, and now this. She loses her virginity to Skippy. She loses her virginity before me. I couldn’t believe a Jupitarian had beaten me to it.

Still, I figured I’d be the bigger person. I figured we should talk. The next day, I get back from ballet, and she’s sitting at her desk reading chemistry, taking pages of notes, pretending like nothing happened. So I sit on my futon and sigh this huge sigh, hoping she’ll get the gist we need to talk. And when that doesn’t work, I say, “If you’re going to be one of those kinds of girls, we need a system.”

She says, “Skippy told me to put a bra on the door. I don’t have any. Is that what you mean?”

“Yeah, that’s what I mean,” I say. And then, “So what’s the big idea? I thought you were genderless. Were you lying about the self-germination?”

“I can’t get pregnant the human way. It’s got to be my own pollen. You’re not even the right species.”

“A girl who can’t get pregnant,” I say. “The boys are going to love that.”

She shrugs. She doesn’t even care that she just lost her cherry. It doesn’t even faze her.

“So did you orgasm all over good ole Skippy?” I ask. “Was he good? Can Jupitarians even get off?”

“You’re so stupid,” she says. “Would a species survive if they couldn’t orgasm?”

“Screw you,” I say. I grab my towel and shower caddy and slam the door behind me. Emily, our next-door neighbor, is just leaving for class.

“God,” I say, “that Bibi is such a whore. I wish she’d warn me before she fucks guys in the room.”

Emily says, “Really? Bibi? I didn’t know she could. We were wondering about that.”

“Yeah,” I say. “She’s a little bitch.”

“Didn’t she go to your house?” Emily says. “I thought you were friends.”

“Not anymore.”

I pound down the hall as hard as I can, though flip-flops don’t make much noise. I slam the bathroom door to let the whole floor know Bibi’s a skank. I let the hot water wash over my back. “Slut,” I say under my breath. And then a little louder, “At least I’m not a slut like you are.” I say it as though I’m talking to someone in the opposite shower stall. “You’re such a slut,” I say again and imagine Bibi across from me. I say it once more, almost shout it, “You’re the biggest slut in the galaxy, and I wish you’d go back to the moon!”

I’m not sure if it was Skippy who spread the word or Emily. It might even have been me, proclaiming loudly from the shower stall that day. Whoever it was, my bra ended up on the door an awful lot the next month. I left a note on her desk that said, “Stay the hell away from my underwear drawer.”

Bibi did a different guy nearly every day. I saw one of those little black books on her desk. She had all the boys on the hall penciled in. There were even some names I didn’t know. She really had turned into a whore. I wondered if they paid her or if she did it for free. I missed the old Bibi. The Bibi who forgot her shoes. The Bibi who studied all night. The Bibi who didn’t know jack shit about boys.

We didn’t talk anymore. We just came and went as though we didn’t know each other. I moved my futon into Emily’s room and slept there most of the time. I wondered what would become of Bibi. I figured her grades would plummet, and she’d get kicked out of school. But when I got back from Christmas break, her marks were posted to the wall, nine A’s. She’d completed a whole year of college in four months.

I’m not sure how she kept it up, the sex and the studies. Her second semester she upped her course load to ten. They even let her into a graduate class. Like I said, if you’re not from America, they let you get away with that shit.

Then around February she starts looking greener. I wonder if she has that seasonal depression thing. Then one day, I get back to my room, and Bibi’s jumping all over her bed. She’s got the music cranked as high as it goes, some god-awful Broadway crap, and she’s singing, “I feel pretty. Oh so pretty.” And she’s wearing this outfit that’s half her clothes and half mine with my sparkly panties around her head.

“What the hell’s going on?” I say. “I thought I told you not to touch my stuff.”

She jumps off her bed and dances this little jig. She looks so goddamn ridiculous I have to laugh.

“Did you find some solution to Jupiter’s baby problem?” I ask. “Is your research going well?”

“No,” she says. “I’m pregnant.”

“You’re not,” I say. “I thought you couldn’t.”

“Well, it’s not like I had proof it was impossible,” she says. “I guess it is. I’m pregnant with a half-human baby.” At this, she bursts out laughing. Pollen puffs out her ears in yellow clouds.

“Who?” I say. “Whose baby is it?”

“A boy’s,” she says. “A human boy’s.” And then she’s surrounded by pollen again. She swirls it around with her hands. “Can you believe that?”

“Are you going to keep it?” I say. “If you give birth, it’ll kill you, right?”

“I’m giving birth to the first half-human, half-Jupitarian baby ever!” she screams. She rips the panties off her head and twirls them in the air.

“Can’t you get an abortion? Those are common here. They’ll get rid of it. You’ll be fine.”

“I don’t want an abortion,” she says. “I want to be eaten alive.”

I didn’t know what to say. She’d turned ten types of crazy. It must have been that euphoria she told me about. I began to wish I had a normal human roommate I could take to the abortion clinic so things would be better. I’d never had a friend with a life-threatening illness. Only grandfathers and uncles. And they died. There was nothing I could do. Bibi had lost it. Her condition was terminal, and she didn’t even care.

In the weeks that followed, Bibi stopped seeing the boys. I moved my futon back into our room, and we started talking again. I became Bibi’s bodyguard, shielding her from all the male scum on the floor. Boys would stop by and say, “I’m here for some alien sex.”

I’d say, “Fuck off, asshole.” And they’d go away.

By March, Bibi had given up her studies. No more stem cell research. Instead, she starts holing herself up in our room making sculptures out of dining hall silverware. She hangs them from the ceiling where the ants used to be and opens the windows to watch the dead flowers blow in the breeze.

We start having parties in our room every weekend. Everyone brings beer and fills up our fridge. The RA doesn’t give a damn because Bibi got her through chemistry first semester, and she hopes she’ll get her through physics next fall.

I call my mother and tell her we’re getting along great. I tell her Bibi is the best. My mother’s glad we’re back to being friends, says she knew we’d work it out. I don’t mention that Bibi is pregnant. My mother would be disappointed. She wouldn’t understand.

Finally, Bibi and I do everything together like roommates should. We order pizza at midnight, rate the guys on the hall, redecorate the room. We move the beds against one wall and scatter huge pillows on the floor. Bibi finds these red Christmas lights on sale at the hardware store and hangs them up. She turns them on and lies under her swaying spoons, pretends she’s watching hot liquid hydrogen swirl around Jupiter from the moon. She says, “Angela, come lie with me. We can watch Jupiter together. Better enjoy me while you can. Pretty soon, this baby will eat its way out.”

“Don’t talk like that,” I say.

“Like what?” She dangles her three-toed feet in the air, says, “It’s okay. It’s only death.”

By April she’s really showing. She’s got this great green hump of a belly, draws faces on it with finger paint and calls it Skippy Junior. Every day she plans something different. She says, “Let’s take Skippy Junior to the zoo. Let’s take Skippy Junior ice skating. Let’s take Skippy Junior for parachute lessons.”

I say, “Bibi, I’ve got classes.”

She says, “I’m going to be dead in a few months. You can study then.”

So we go ice skating and snorkeling and rent lots of porno and drink slushies. Bibi does this thing with her turkey baster, fills it up with slushie and lets it volcano into her mouth. Half goes in. Half gets all over, which makes the ants come back. But this is kind of great, just like before when we hated each other and Skippy was a stalker. Back when Bibi studied all the time and didn’t care about parties or drinking or boys.

The new Bibi is completely different. She dances all over the room, begs me to go with her to clubs, says, “You gotta teach me that booty bounce thing.” She puts on a sparkly shirt and lipstick, a short skirt and heels. She tapes a paper bow tie to her stomach and says, “Skippy Junior’s ready.”

So that’s what we do. We go to the only dance club in town, Freaky Willy’s. And I teach her to dance the American way. I show her how to grind like a skanky ho.

We run into Skippy at the club. He’s there with some guys. His acne looks a bit better. He buys us both drinks, Coronas all around. You’ve got to give him credit. At least he got us good beer. Then he wants to dance with Bibi. He seems genuine enough. Anyhow, there’s no way he can get sex with her funnel closed up. One of those really bouncy songs comes on with the flashing lights, and Bibi drags Skippy to the dance floor and rocks it out.

I sit at the bar and watch. She’s picked up the booty bounce, no problem. She looks kind of sexy gyrating her tiny hips, her shoulders bopping with the music. In this light, she doesn’t even look green. Skippy puts his hand on her back and tries to shake his pelvis too. But you can tell he’s not the dancing type.

Later, he walks us home, and Bibi invites him in. I go to Emily’s room until he leaves.

When he’s gone, I ask, “So does he want you back? Is it his baby?”

“It’s nobody’s baby,” she says. “On Jupiter, no one belongs to anyone else.”

That was the last time I saw Bibi. When I woke up, she was gone. There was a note on my desk that said, “Thanks for teaching me to dance. Thanks for sharing your family.” Most of her stuff was still there. I assume she went back to Jupiter, but who’s to be sure. I don’t like to think of other possibilities.

After that, there were lots of policemen and school officials who wanted to know where Bibi went. I told them I didn’t know. Word got out to the papers. Skippy came by our room and put a bouquet of weedy flowers by the door.

He said, “I really loved her. I don’t know why she had sex with all those other guys.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m sure it was your baby.”

I invited him in. We sat on Bibi’s bed real close, and it felt better, that warmth, being next to someone who understood. We stayed like that for hours, shoulder to shoulder, not even talking. When it got dark, we slid under the covers. I was wearing those sparkly panties, the ones Bibi tossed on the floor that first night, the ones that were Jupiter. Skippy slid his hand down the front, brushed his fingers against what I imagined to be Bibi’s moon. I didn’t even mind when he aimed his boner at my belly button. I guided it lower, and he found the right hole.

“What if she comes back?” he asked.

“She’s gone,” I said, and kissed him hard.

He moved his hips back and forth and buried his head in my neck. My eyes locked on the turkey baster on Bibi’s dresser, and I tried to imagine that she had never been here. That she had never existed. That I had gotten here on my own.

© 2007 by Tessa Mellas.

Originally appeared in StoryQuarterly.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Tessa Mellas is currently a PhD student at the University of Cincinnati. She is an editorial assistant for The Cincinnati Review. Her fiction has been published in StoryQuarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Gulf Coast, Fugue, and New Orleans Review. She has been a vegetarian for over two decades, was formerly a competitive synchronized figure skater, grew up on the St. Lawrence River, where each June shadflies rose out of the water in great gray clouds, and is an aficionado of snow.

Author Spotlight: Tessa Mellas
Stacey Friedberg

Even though Bibi is an alien, so much of what she and Angela experience are more or less typical roommate dilemmas. How much of “Bibi From Jupiter” is inspired by your own college experiences?

The seed of this story actually had more to do with my experiences as a teacher than as a college student. Of course, my knowledge of college culture is mined directly from my undergraduate experience. There was even a self-named Skippy on the floor of my freshman dorm. But what first inspired this story was the voice of my students. I taught high school for two years at a boarding school and was teaching freshman composition at a university while writing this story as an MFA student. Angela’s voice is an amalgamation of voices, none of which I could even identify individually. The whininess in her voice, her impatience, her unfamiliarity with and intolerance for difference, her desperation for popularity and bafflement at not being the center of attention, her sense of entitlement combined with a general desire not to work terribly hard for the rewards that Bibi is endowed with, all seemed very familiar to me.

I am not trying to imply that this voice is characteristic of all American students or even the majority of them. I think it is an exaggerated voice, but there is a lot of truth in it. The qualities reflected in Angela’s voice seem to me to be a sign of our cultural confusion of belonging to a society that values educational degrees but not learning, that touts the importance of multiculturalism but maintains segregation to a degree that young people don’t know how to cope with cultural difference. It’s a voice from a culture that proudly labels itself a “melting pot” and clings to patriotism and symbols like the Statue of Liberty, but also wants to erect huge walls on the border to keep immigrants out, labels our president a Muslim foreigner, and expresses bitterness that immigrants are employed in menial jobs that most Americans feel are below them. In that way, Bibi is certainly a metaphor for the kind of culture shock that many students go through in college and how that shock is negotiated and hopefully overcome.

In the story, Europans can’t procreate without sacrificing themselves in the process. Europa is, in Angela’s words, “a whole planet full of orphans.” Yet, once pregnant, Bibi seems ecstatic about dying. Where did you come up with the idea for this sort of alien procreation, and for Bibi’s race in general?

This was one of the easiest stories I’ve ever written. I feel guilty admitting that. But the voice really carried me through the story and made it fun to write. The voice felt bold and ridiculous, and I think the absurdity of Bibi’s anatomy and of the Jupiterian dilemma regarding procreation spun out of that voice. I also needed there to be a reason why Bibi had come to an American university; she needed a problem that Jupiterians couldn’t solve on their own. Tying the problem to sex and birth and tragedy also allowed me to explore really complex issues that women deal with: The pressure to have sex, the violence of sex, the violence of childbirth, the fact that the status of young women is both improved and demeaned by their being sexually active. I also imagine that a college student contemplating childbirth—if this should cross her mind—would be so disgusted by the prospect of it that she would imagine the baby eating through the mother to get out, in essence destroying the mother in order to enter the world as its own person. And perhaps this fear isn’t unwarranted. Pregnancy seems like such an amazing and surreal thing to have happen to a person’s body.

Angela is jealous of all the attention that Bibi gets—from her family, from boys, and even from the school. She seems to blame Bibi for all of her own shortcomings. Yet, we can’t help but empathize with her, despite how cruel she can be. How did you come up with her character? And why make her the narrator of this story?

I think I answered this question prematurely. Angela’s character did spin out of a voice I had in my head. And while this voice is unattractive in so many ways, I am glad that she is an empathetic character. I think the ugly aspects of her personality do stem from feelings of invisibility and muteness, and we can sympathize with that. Angela also feels generic. She can’t compete with Bibi’s exoticism in a culture that pits girls against one another. Also, I think readers understand that Angela has inherited her prejudices from her culture, that her cruelty is more a coping mechanism than a true reflection of her personality, and that her cruelty ultimately comes out of a place of pain.

Angela seems to be the only one who really cares that Bibi is an alien. Except for the boys who want to have sex with Bibi, everyone else seems to ignore the fact that Bibi is from space and treats her normally. Why is Angela so hung up on Bibi’s race?

I think because she sees her race as the thing that attracts other people to Bibi. People seem intrigued by the fact that Bibi is an alien, and that she is different, exotic, freakish, even. Associating with Bibi and having intercourse with her seem like attempts to have her uniqueness rub off on them and to endow them with their own specialness. Angela can’t be different in the way Bibi is and therefore sees no way to attract her peers; she can’t or won’t connect with Bibi sexually the way the boys do since that doesn’t fit into her worldview. Since Bibi isn’t profitable for Angela, she sees her as an obstacle to all the things she wants and thinks she deserves. Her fixation on Bibi’s race reflects her sense that this is the source of her problems.

In your mind, what happens to Bibi at the end of the story? Where does she go?

I think I’d like readers to be able to imagine Bibi’s ultimate destiny any way they want or in a multitude of ways. I wonder, though, if Bibi’s disappearance could even be figurative. I think differences that often seem so prominent at first sometimes melt away on their own.

Do you have any upcoming projects you’d like us to know about?

I am working on a short story collection that includes “Bibi from Jupiter.” The collection explores Western notions of femininity through magical realism, the surrealism of each premise showing how the female condition is one of both beauty and grotesqueness. In my most recent stories, I have been experimenting more with language, writing in lyrical modes, sometimes in fragmented prose. I hope to finish a draft of the collection by the end of the summer.

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 Icy Ecosystem of Europa
Dr. Pamela L. Gay

If, like me, you’re a child of the 1980s, the words “There are those who believe that life here, began out there, far across the universe” may be permanently engraved on your mind. Whenever the topic of alien life comes up, it is this silly opener to a some-say-silly single season science fiction show that springs into my cerebellum. The thing is, while life may have begun out there “beyond the heavens,” it could just as easily have originated elsewhere in our solar system. From the once wet surface of Mars, to the organic rich deltas of Saturn’s Titan, to the under-surface oceans of Saturn’s Enceladus and Jupiter’s Europa, our Solar System offers a myriad of possible places for life to have originated. To modern scientists and science fiction writers, the most intriguing of all these possible ecosystems is the moon Europa.

This icy world, at first glance, is just another moon. It is about 90% the size of our Earth’s moon and shines a nondescript grey white against the background stars. Galileo Galilei first discovered it in 1610. He watched as Europa and its companions—Io, Ganymede, and Callisto—raced around their gaseous home planet. Under Galileo’s watchful gaze, it took Europa just 3.6 days to complete an orbit, as it played a game of orbital tag with its closest companion moons. The three inner Galilean moons are bound up in what is called an orbital resonance. The inner most moon Io races the fastest, orbiting in only 1.8 days. Outer moon Ganymede makes it way a bit slower, getting around giant Jupiter in 7.2 days. These numbers form a pattern—1.8*2 = 3.6, 3.6*2 = 7.2—and they define orbits that bring the moons rhythmically into alignment.

Imagine seeing all these moons lined up beside Jupiter, like a string of mythical mistresses chasing down the cheating Zeus.

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Very quickly, in just 1.8 days, the middle moon Europa gets ahead of the crowds, but an even quicker Io has already cycled back to where it stated, while Ganymede finds itself neither ahead nor behind.

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And they keep moving, keep rotating, keep resonating; for every complete orbit of Europa the alignments alter. After one complete orbit, Io and Europa return to the chasing position, while Ganymede races ahead of the pack.

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And an orbit later, a trip back and forth of inner Io later,

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they are all chasing after their lover once again.

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This constant pattern of motion causes Europa to go from being gravitationally tugged on only one side, to being tugged at from all direction at varying levels. This constant change of forces causes the planet to get stretched and released, and stretched and released, over and over with every orbit. This has been known since people started thinking through the consequences of gravity. Stretch and release; that’s what happens when moons orbit in resonance, beating gravitationally against one another.

The results of this stretching and releasing didn’t become apparent until 1979 when the Voyager probes made their fly-bys of the Jovian system. All pictures of Europa up until that point had shown her as nothing more than a fuzzy blur. When the Voyager images of Europa where downloaded, they revealed a surface almost devoid of large craters and instead covered in giant cracks and strange chaotic surfaces that looked almost like the surface of a frozen and re-frozen glacial lake. The lack of craters more than anything else caused planetary scientists to gasp, and ask “how?”

Here on Earth, we don’t generally see craters. If you happen to be on just the right flight from Texas to California, you may find yourself looking down on Arizona’s meteor crater. If you hunt hard enough through Google maps, you may find a handful of craters dotting Canada, Africa, and South America. Craters here are rare because our weather erases them over time. They become lakes or get filled with sand or otherwise wear away from the landscape. On other worlds, lava may sometimes fill in craters, but in general, these holes in the ground are given a chance to stay. In the images of Europa it was clear volcanoes were not erasing craters (that was happening on Io). It was clear that weather didn’t play a role (that was happening on Saturn’s Titan). It was clear this was something new.

In the years since those images first made it to Earth, scientists have been working hard to try and define ways to resurface Europa without any of the normal physics: Without weather, without volcanoes, without even an alien Zamboni driver making his way over and over across the icy moon.

While it may seem silly to imagine some little alien Zamboni driver, the science behind this crazy cartoon notion isn’t too far off the truth. The first epiphany the scientists had was the presence of a hidden liquid ocean—think of this as the Zamboni’s tank of liquid. The orbital resonance between Io, Europa, and Ganymede has the effect of significantly heating the interiors of Europa and Io. The volcanoes of Io dramatically illustrate this point as they fling lava in arcs dozens of kilometers long. While Europa doesn’t have any features this flamboyant, it occurred to scientists that the icy surface of Europa might be caused by liquid seeping out onto the surface and recoating it like the liquid sprayed from a Zamboni machine recoats the pitted ice of a hockey rink.

The idea of a liquid ocean led quickly to the simple questions: How large, and how deep? And it led to the more fundamental question; can life exist in that under-ice sea? Here on Earth we find life clinging to deep-sea volcanic vents. This life needs no light to thrive and it demonstrates to scientists that life could, and quite possibly does, exist around deep-sea vents on Europa as well.

Today, many scientists and engineers are trying to figure out how to get through the ice on Europa to explore what lies beneath. The biggest remaining question is where to try and break through. The newest models of Europa’s structure describe a hot core, with hot vents, surrounded by a salty sea. The majority of this ocean is covered in ice perhaps tens of kilometers thick, although in certain spots, the rising hot water thins out pockets, creating places perhaps the size of Lake Superior where the water rises to within a couple kilometers of the surface. Marked by a specific type of chaotic ice pattern, these are the places to burrow down with sterile robots and cameras, and to descend into the deep to look for life that didn’t begin here on Earth, but did begin far across the solar system.

If life is found on Europa . . . There is really no way to scientifically finish that sentence. The discovery of life on another world will mean something different to every individual. Scientifically, it will simply put constraints on the probability of life originating under different conditions. At this moment we can make no real guess of how advanced life might be. Many scientists’ diagrams show (only half-jokingly) sea sponges and other undersea foliage on the floor of cartoon drawings of Europa. It is generally believed that any life is likely to be unintelligent and likely not at all advanced, but these are simply guesses.

At this time, none of the world’s space agencies have concrete (and funded) plans to send a mission to Europa. Various proof of concept robots are being tested in hopes that we’ll able to automatically explore in the not too distant future, but in the US at least, that future is at least fifteen years away if not longer.

For now, we scientists pour over modern detailed images of this icy moon, and try and write computer models that will allow us to reproduce the cracks and crevices and resurfacing we see. We study and we model and we dream of what awaits in the sea. Life here, most likely, did begin here, but there is nothing to say that it didn’t also begin there, where it waits for tomorrows’ robots to make first contact.

Dr. Pamela L. Gay is an astronomer, writer, and podcaster focused on using new media technologies to engage people in science and technology. You can learn more about astronomy each week through AstronomyCast.com. Want to do science? Help Pamela and other scientists through MoonZoo.org or GalaxyZoo.org.

Eliot Wrote
Nancy Kress

“Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”—J.B.S. Haldane

Eliot wrote: Picture your brain as a room. The major functions are like furniture. Each in its own place, and you can move from sofa to chair to ottoman, or even lie across more than one piece of furniture at the same time. Memory is like air in the room, dispersed everywhere. Musical ability is a specific accessory, like a vase on the mantle. Anger is a Doberman pinscher halfway out of the door from the kitchen. Algebra just fell down the heat duct. Love of your sibling is a water spill that evaporated three weeks ago.

Well, maybe not accurate, Eliot thought, and hit DELETE. Or maybe too accurate for his asshole English class. What kind of writing assignment was “Explain something important using an extended metaphor?”

He closed his school tablet and paced around the room. Cold, cheerless, bereft—or was that his own fault? Partly his own fault, he admitted; Eliot prided himself on self-honesty. He could turn up the heat, pick up the pizza boxes, open the curtains to the May sunshine. He did none of these things. Cold and cheerless matched bereft, and there was nothing to do about bereft. Well, one thing. He went to the fireplace (cold ashes, months old) and from the mantel plucked the ceramic pig and threw it as hard as he could onto the stone hearth. It shattered into pink shards.

Then he left the apartment and caught the bus to the hospital.

Eliot’s father had been entered into Ononeida Psychiatric Hospital ten days ago, for a religious conversion in which he saw the clear image of Zeus on a strawberry toaster pastry.

Ononeida, named for an Indian tribe that had once occupied Marthorn City, was accustomed to religious visions, and Carl Tremling was a mathematician, a group known for being eccentric. Ordinarily the hospital would not have admitted him at all. But Dr. Tremling had reacted to the toaster pastry with some violence, flinging furniture out of the apartment window and sobbing that there was dice being played with the universe after all, and that the center would not hold. A flung end-table, imitation Queen Anne, had hit the mailman, who was not seriously injured but was considerably perturbed. Carl Tremling was deemed a danger to others and possibly himself.

A brain scan had failed to find temporal lobe epilepsy, the usual cause of religious visions. Dr. Tremling had continued to sob and to fling whatever furniture the orderlies were not quick enough to defend. Also, the psychiatrist on intake duty, who had recognized both the Einstein and Yeats quotes, was puzzled over the choice of Zeus as the toaster-pastry image. The usual thing was either Christ or the Virgin Mary.

The commitment papers had been signed by Dr. Tremling’s sister, a sweet, dim, easily frightened woman who had never been comfortable with her brilliant brother but who was fond of Eliot. She was leaving the hospital as her nephew arrived.

“Eliot! Are you alone?”

“Yes, Aunt Sue.” In Susan Tremling Fisher’s mind, Eliot was perpetually nine instead of sixteen, and should not be riding buses alone. “How is he?”

“The same.” She sighed. “Only they want to—he wants to—Eliot, are you eating enough? You look thinner.”

“I’m fine.”

“You shouldn’t stay in that apartment alone. Anything could happen! Please come and stay with Uncle Ned and me, you know we’d love to have you and I hate to think of you alone in that big apartment without—”

If Eliot didn’t stop her, she would start her Poor Motherless Lamb speech. “What does Dad want to do?”

“What?”

“You said ‘They want to—he wants to’—so what do the doctors want to do?”

She sighed again. “I wish I had your memory, Eliot. You get it from poor Carl. That doctor with the mustache, he wants to try some new procedure on Carl.”

“What new procedure?”

“I can’t recall the name . . . ” She fumbled in her purse as if the name might be among the tissues and supermarket coupons.

“Was it Selective Memory Obliteration Neural Re-Routing?”

“Yes! The very words! Your memory, Eliot, I swear, your mother would have been so proud of—”

Eliot grabbed her arm. “Are you going to let them operate? Are you?”

“Why, Eliot! You’re hurting me!”

He let go. “I’m sorry. But—you are going to let them operate, aren’t you?”

Aunt Sue looked at him. She had small eyes of no particular color, and a little mouth that was pursing and unpursing in distress. But she was a Tremling. Into those small eyes came stubbornness, an unthinking but resolute stubbornness and yet somehow murky, like a muddy pool over bedrock. She said gently, “I couldn’t do that.”

“Aunt Sue—”

“Carl will come to himself eventually, Eliot. He’s had spells before, you know—why, just consider that time he shut himself up in my spare room for six days and wouldn’t even come out to eat! I had to bring him meals on a tray!”

“He was working on his big breakthrough on the topography of knots!”

“Not only would he not eat, he wouldn’t even wash. I had to air that room out for two days afterward, and in February. But Carl came out of that spell and he’ll come out of this one, too. You just wait and see.”

“It’s not the same! Don’t you understand, his whole mental construct has been turned upside down!”

“That’s exactly what he said when he came out of my spare room with those knot numbers,” she said triumphantly. “Knots! But even as a boy Carl took fits, why I remember when he was just eight years old and he found out that somebody named Girdle proved there were things you couldn’t prove, why that doesn’t even make common sense to—”

“Aunt Sue! You have to sign the papers allowing this operation!”

“No. I won’t. Eliot, you listen to me. I went online last night and read about this Memory Obligation Whatever. It’s new and it’s dangerous because the doctors don’t really know what they’re doing yet. In one case, after the operation a woman didn’t even remember who she was, or recognize her own children, or anything! In another case, a man could no longer read and—get this!—he couldn’t relearn how to do it, either! Something had just gone missing in his brain as a result of the operation. Imagine Carl unable to read! We can’t risk—”

Eliot was no longer listening. He’d known Aunt Sue all his life; she wasn’t going to budge. He barreled down the hall and rattled the door to the ward, which was of course locked. An orderly wielding a mop peered at him through the reinforced glass and pantomimed pressing the call button.

“Yes?” said the disembodied voice of a nurse. Eliot recognized it.

“Mary, I want to see Dr. Tallman!”

“Oh, Eliot, I’m glad you came just now, your father is quiet and—”

“I don’t want to see my father! I want to see Dr. Tallman!”

“He’s not here, dear. I’ll just buzz you in.”

Mary came out of the nurse’s station to meet him. Middle-aged, kind, motherly, she radiated the kind of brisk competence that Eliot admired, and had seen so little of in his own disordered household. Or at least he would have admired it if it weren’t for the motherliness. She saw him not as the intellectual he knew himself to be, but rather as the skinny, short, floppy-haired kid he seemed to be. He was smarter than Mary, smarter than Aunt Sue, smarter than most of the world, so why the hell couldn’t the world notice that?

“I want to see Dr. Tallman!”

“He’s not on the ward, dear.”

“Call him!”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that. Eliot, you seem upset.”

“I am upset! Isn’t my father going to have SMON-R? Because my aunt wouldn’t sign the papers?”

Motherliness gave way to professionalism. “You know I can’t discuss this with you.”

No one would discuss anything with Eliot. He didn’t count. The rational world didn’t count, not in here. Eliot glared at Mary, who gazed calmly back. He said, “I’ll sign them! I will!”

“You’re underage, Eliot. And your father is non compos mentis. Did you come to visit? He’s in the day room. But if you’re going to upset him, it might be better if you chose another time to visit.”

Eliot bolted past her and ran into the day room.

His father was not flinging furniture. He slumped inert in a chair, staring at the TV, which showed a rerun of Jeopardy. Eliot groaned. His father had published papers in scientific journals, developed algorithms for high-resolution space imagery, had a promising lead on actually solving the Riemann Hypothesis. He did not watch Jeopardy. This was the anti-psychotic drugs, not the real Carl Tremling. Everything the hospital was doing was just making the situation worse.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Hey, Eliot.”

Alex Trebek said, “The tendency of an object in motion to remain in motion, or an object at rest to remain at rest, unless acted upon by an outside force.”

“How are you doing?”

“Just fine.” But he frowned. “Only I can’t quite . . . there was something…”

Something. There were a lot of somethings. There was rational thought, and logical progressions, and the need to restore a man’s proper intellect.

Someone on the TV said, “What is ‘inertia’?”

“Zeus,” Dr. Tremling brought out triumphantly. “Who would have believed—” All at once his face sagged from underneath, like a pie crust cooling. “Who would have believed . . . ” His face crumpled and he clutched Eliot’s sleeve. “It’s real, Eliot! It’s loose in the world and nothing that I thought was true—”

“It was a toaster pastry, Dad!”

Three patients slowly swiveled their heads at Eliot’s raised voice. He lowered it. “Listen to me. Please listen to me. The doctors want to do a procedure on you called Selective Memory Obliteration Neural Re-Routing. It will remove the memory of the . . . the incident from your mind. Only Aunt Sue—”

“Where’s the pig?” Dr. Tremling said.

Eliot rocked back and forth with frustration. “Even if Aunt Sue won’t sign the papers, if you can seem reasonably lucid—in compos mentis—then—”

“I asked you to bring the pig!”

“It’s broken!”

Dr. Tremling stared at Eliot. Then he threw back his head and howled at the ceiling. Two orderlies, a nurse, and four patients sprang to attention. Dr. Tremling rose, overcoming the inertia of his drugs, and picked up his chair. His face was a mask of grief. “It isn’t true. Nothing I believed is true! The universe—Zeus—dice—”

Eliot shouted, “It was just a fucking toaster pastry!”

“I needed that pig!” He flung the chair at the wall. Orderlies rushed forward.

Nurse Mary grabbed Eliot and hustled him out of the room. “I told you not to upset him!”

“I didn’t upset him, you did, by not giving him what he needs! Do you know how finely balanced a mathematician’s brain is, how prone to obsessions already, and it needs to be clear to—you’re refusing to remove a tumor from his brain!”

“Your father does not have a brain tumor, and you need to leave now,” Mary said, hustling him down the hallway.

A male voice said, “I’ll take scientific terms for 400, Alex.”

“It’s his brain!” Eliot shouted. He meant: My brain, and he knew it, and the knowledge made him even angrier.

Mary got him to the door of the ward, keyed in a code to unlock it, and waved him through. As he stalked off, she called after him, “Eliot? Dear? Do you have enough money for the bus home?”

Eliot’s parents had met at college, where both studied mathematics. Even though Eliot’s mother was not beautiful, there were few girls in the graduate math program, and she was sought after by every mathematician with enough social skills to approach her, including two of the professors. Her own social skills lacked coherence, but something in Carl Tremling appealed to her. She emailed her bewildered mother, “There is a boy here I think I like. He’s interested in nothing but algorithms and pigs.” Carl, who had grown up in farm country, had a theory that pigs were much smarter than other animals and deserved respect.

Fuming on the bus, Eliot wondered why his father had wanted the ceramic pig. Did he have a premonition that in its artificial pink wrinkles he might see Hermes, god of mathematics? Aphrodite? His dead wife? How could his mind have so betrayed Carl Tremling? Eliot wanted his father back, and in his own mind.

Eliot’s mind was so much like his father’s. Everybody said so.

“Fuck,” he said aloud, which caused a man to glare at him across the bus aisle and a woman to change her seat. Embarrassed, Eliot pulled out his school tablet.

Memory, he wrote, is a bridge between what you are today and what you were for all the days before that. All your life you go back and forth across that bridge, extending and reinforcing it. You add a new strut. You hang flower pots on the railing. You lay down kitty litter during icy weather. You chase away the kids who are smoking pot on top of the pilings and under the roadway. Then one day, a section of the bridge gives way. When that happens, it is criminal to not repair it. An unrepaired bridge is like a deep pothole on a dark road and—

Two metaphors. This was not working. And it was due Tuesday.

The man across the aisle was still watching him. Probably thought that Eliot was some sort of gang-affiliated punk. Well, no, not that, not with his build and clothing. A crazy, then. The man thought Eliot might be a gun-toting, cheerleader-loathing shooter who would court death to kill everybody on the bus, perhaps because school shooting was now such a risk, what with all the metal detectors and guards and lock-down protocols.

I am not a shooter, Eliot silently told the man. He was a rationalist and an intellectual, and he just wanted his father back, whole, the way he had been before.

He got off the bus at his Aunt Sue’s building.

The building was depressing because it was so smug. It looked as if nothing bad could ever happen here as long as the stoop was swept clean and the curtains were a bright color and the flower boxes were watered. Nothing bad! Wanna bet? Inside, his aunt’s apartment was even worse. Her decorating style was country-mystic, with wreaths of dried flowers and tapestries of unicorns and small ceramic plaques that said things like “LET A SMILE BE YOUR UMBRELLA.”

“Aunt Sue, I have to tell you things I didn’t get a chance to say at the hospital. Please listen to me.”

“Of course, Eliot. Don’t I always?”

Almost never. But he composed himself and arranged his arguments. “I was online last night, too. Those two cases you mentioned, the man who couldn’t read again and the woman who didn’t recognize her kids, were anomalies. Selective Memory Obliteration Neural Re-Routing is new, yes, but it passed clinical trials and FDA approval and it has an eighty-nine percent success rate, with a one percent confidence level. Of the remaining eleven percent, two-thirds were neither better nor worse after the operation. That leaves only three-point-eight percent and when you take into account those with only minor—”

“No.”

“You’re not listening!”

“I am listening. Nobody is going to cut into Carl’s brain.”

“But he believes he saw a defunct Greek god in a toaster pastry!”

“Eliot, is that so bad?”

“It’s not true!”

“Well, it’s true that Carl saw it, anyway, or he wouldn’t be so upset. He’ll come out of whatever spell he’s having about it, he always does. And anyway, I don’t understand Carl’s reaction. Would it be so bad to believe this Zeus-god is around?”

“That’s the part that’s not true!”

She shrugged. “Are you so sure you know what’s true?”

“Yes!” Eliot shouted. “Mathematics is true! Physics is true! Memory can play us false, there’s a ton of research on that, nobody can be sure if their memories are accurate—” He stopped, no longer sure what he was saying.

Aunt Sue said calmly, “Well, if memory is playing Carl false, then he’s all the more likely to get over it, isn’t he?”

“No! It isn’t—I didn’t mean—”

“Wouldn’t you like some walnut cake, Eliot? I baked it fresh this morning.”

Hopeless. They came from two different planets. And she—this kind, stupid woman who inexplicably shared one-quarter of his genes—held the power. In a truly rational world, that couldn’t have been true.

“Cream-cheese icing,” she said brightly, and caressed his cheek.

Eliot wrote: Memory is like a corn stalk. Corn blight can wreck any entire economy, starve an entire nation, but it responds to science. Find the bad gene, cut it out, replace it with a genetically engineered Bt gene that fights blight because it allows the use of strong pesticides and voila! Memory functions again! Science triumphs!

Possibly the worst writing he had ever done. He hit DELETE.

His father’s liquor cabinet still held three inches of Scotch. Eliot poured himself two fingers’ worth, so he could sleep.

The next morning, just as he was leaving to catch the bus for school, the hospital called.

“The answer,” his father said, “is obvious.”

It wasn’t obvious to Eliot. His father sat in the day room, out of his bathrobe and dressed in his ordinary baggy khakis and badly-pilled sweater. Dr. Tremling had shaved. He looked just as he once did, and Eliot would have felt hopeful if he hadn’t felt so bewildered, or if the new twitch at the corner of his father’s left eye wasn’t beating madly and irregularly as a malfunctioning metronome.

“I did see what I thought I saw,” his father said carefully. “I know so, in a way that, although it defies explanation, is so incontrovertible that—”

“Dad,” Eliot said, equally carefully—if only that twitch would stop! “You can’t actually ‘know’ that for certain. Surely you’re aware that all our minds can play tricks on us that—”

“Not this time,” Dr. Tremling said simply. “I saw it. And I know it was true, not just an aberration of pastry. I know, too, that mathematics, the whole rational underpinning of the universe, is also true. The dichotomy was . . . upsetting me.”

Upsetting him. Eliot glanced around at the mental hospital, the orderlies watchful in the corners of the room, the barred window. His father had always had a gift for understatement, which was in part what had made this whole thing so . . . so upsetting.

“What I failed to see,” Dr. Tremling said, “was that this is a gift. I have just been handed my life’s work.”

“I thought the topography of knots was your life’s work?”

“It was, yes. But now my life’s work is to find the rational and mathematical underpinnings for this new phenomenon.”

“For Zeus? In a toaster pastry?”

The twitch beat faster, even more irregularly. “I concede that it is a big job.”

“Dad—”

“There must be a larger consciousness, Eliot. If so, it is a physical entity, made up of energy and matter, must be a physical entity. And a physical entity can be described mathematically, possibly through a system that does not yet exist, possibly based on non-local quantum physics.”

Eliot managed to say, “You aren’t a quantum physicist.”

“I can learn.” Twitch twitch TWITCH. “Do you remember what Werner Heisenberg said about belief systems? ‘What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.’ I need a new method of questioning to lead toward a new mathematics.”

“Well, that’s a—”

“They’re letting me have my laptop back, with controlled wifi access, until I go home.”

“Have they said when that might be?”

“Possibly in a few more weeks.”

Dr. Tremling beamed, twitching. Eliot tried to beam, too. He was getting what he’d wanted—his father back home, working on mathematics. Only—”a new mathematics”? His father was not Godel or Einstein or Heisenberg. He wasn’t even an endowed chair.

Eliot burst out, before he knew he was going to say anything, “There’s no evidence for any larger consciousness! It’s mystical wish-fulfillment, a non-rational delusion! There’s just no evidence!”

“I’m the evidence. Son, I don’t think I actually told you what I experienced.” He leaned closer; involuntarily Eliot leaned back. “It was Zeus, but it was also Odin, was Christ, was . . . oh, let me think . . . was Isis and Sedna and Bumba and Quetzalcoatl. It was all of them and none of them because the images were in my mind. Of course they were, where else could they possibly be? But here’s the thing—the images are unimportant. They’re just metaphors, and not very good ones—arrows pointing to something that has neither image nor words, but just is. That thing is—how can I explain this?—the world behind the world. Didn’t you ever feel in childhood that all at once you sort of glimpsed a flash of a great mystery underlying everything, a bright meaning to it all? I know you did because everybody does. Then we grow up and lose that. But it’s still there, bright and shining as solid as . . . as an end table, or a pig. I saw it and now I know it exists in a way that goes beyond any need to question its existence—the way I know, for instance, that prime numbers are infinite. It’s the world beyond the world, the space filled with shining light, the mystery. Do you see?”

“No!”

“Well, that’s because you didn’t experience it. But if I can find the right mathematics, that’s a better arrow than verbal metaphors can ever be.”

Eliot saw in his father’s eyes the gleam of fanaticism. “Dad!” he cried, in pure anguish, but Dr. Tremling only put his hand on Eliot’s knee, a startlingly rare gesture of affection, and said, “Wait, son. Just wait.”

Eliot couldn’t wait. His English assignment was due by third period, which began, with the logic of high school scheduling, at 10:34 a.m. No late assignments were accepted. His tablet on his knees on the crowded bus, Eliot wrote: Memory is not a room or a bridge or a corn stalk with blight. Memory is not a metaphor because nothing is a metaphor. Metaphors are constructions of a fanciful imagination, not reality. In reality everything is what it is, and that is—or certainly should be!—enough for anybody!

The little boy sitting next to him said, “Hey, man, you hit that thing so hard, you gonna break it.”

“Shut up,” Eliot said.

“Get fucked,” the kid answered.

But Eliot already was.

Dr. Tremling came home three weeks later. He was required to see a therapist three times a week. Aunt Sue bustled over, cooked for two days straight, and stocked the freezer with meals. When Eliot and his father sat down to eat, Dr. Tremling’s eye twitched convulsively. Meals were the only time they met. His father chewed absently and spoke little, but then, that had always been true. The rest of the time he stayed in his study, working. Eliot did not ask on what. He didn’t want to know.

Everything felt suspended. Eliot went to school, took his AP classes, expressed scorn for the jocks and goths who teased him, felt superior to his teachers, read obsessively—all normal. And yet not. One day, when his father was at a therapy session, Eliot slid into Dr. Tremling’s study and looked at his notebooks and, to the extent he could find them amid such sloppy electronic housekeeping, his computer files. There didn’t seem to be much notation, and what there was, Eliot couldn’t follow. He wasn’t a mathematician, after all. And his father appeared to have invented a new symbol for something, a sort of Olympic thunderbolt that seemed to have left- and right-handed versions. Eliot groaned and closed the file.

Only once did Eliot ask, “So how’s it going, Dad?”

“It’s difficult,” Dr. Tremling said.

No shit. “Have you had any more . . . uh . . . incidents?”

“That’s irrelevant, son. I only needed one.” But his face twitched harder than ever.

Three weeks after he came home, Dr. Tremling gave up. He hadn’t slept for a few nights and his face sagged like a bloodhound’s. But he was calm when he said to Eliot, “I’m going to have the operation.”

“You are?” Eliot’s heart leapt and then, inexplicably, sank. “Why? When?”

His father answered with something of his old precision. “Because there is no mathematics of a larger conscious entity. On Tuesday at eight in the morning. Dr. Tallman certified me able to sign my own papers.”

“Oh.” For a long terrible moment Eliot thought he had nothing more to say. But then he managed, “I’m sorry about the pig.”

“It’s not important,” Dr. Tremling said, which should have been the first clue.

On Tuesday Eliot rose at 5:00 a.m., and took a cab to the hospital. He sat with his father in Pre-Op, in a vibrantly and mistakenly orange waiting room during the operation, and beside his father’s bed in Post-Op. Dr. Tremling recovered well and came home a week later. He was quiet, subdued. When the new term started, he resumed teaching at the university. He read the professional journals, weeded the garden, fended off his sister. Nobody mentioned the incident, and Dr. Tremling never did, either, since hospital tests had verified that it was gone from his memory. Everything back to normal.

But not really. Something had gone missing, Eliot thought—some part of his father that, though inarticulate, had made his eyes shine at a breakthough in mathematics. That had made him love pigs. That had led him, in passion, to fling bad student problem sets and blockhead professional papers across the room, as later he would fling furniture. Something was definitely missing.

“Isn’t it wonderful that Carl is exactly the way he used to be?” enthused Aunt Sue. “Modern medicine is just amazing!”

Eliot didn’t answer her. On the way home from school, he got off the bus one stop early. He ducked into the Safeway as if planning to rob it, carrying out his purchase more secretively than he’d ever carried out the Trojans he never got to use. In his room, he locked the door, opened the grocery boxes, and spread out their contents on the bed.

On the dresser.

On the desk, beside his calculus homework.

On the computer keyboard.

When there were no other surfaces left, on the not-very-clean carpet.

Then, hoping, he stared at the toaster pastries until his head ached and his eyes crossed from strain.

Eliot wrote, “Metaphor is all we have.” But the assignment had been due weeks ago, and his teacher refused to alter his grade.

Nancy Kress is the author of twenty-six books: three fantasy novels, twelve SF novels, three thrillers, four collections of short stories, one YA novel, and three books on writing fiction. She is perhaps best known for the Sleepless trilogy that began with Beggars in Spain, which was based on the Nebula- and Hugo-winning novella of the same name. She won her second Hugo in 2009 in Montreal, for the novella “The Erdmann Nexus.” Kress has also won three additional Nebulas, a Sturgeon, and the 2003 John W. Campbell Award (for her novel Probability Space). Her most recent books are a collection of short stories, Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories; a bio-thriller, Dogs; and an SF novel, Steal Across the Sky. Kress’s fiction, much of which concerns genetic engineering, has been translated into twenty languages. She often teaches writing at various venues around the country and blogs at nancykress.blogspot.com.

Author Spotlight: Nancy Kress
Stacey Friedberg

Memory, and metaphors for memory, are a running theme throughout this story. What would you say your favorite metaphor for memory is?

I’m inclined to think of computer files as a metaphor for memory, because our minds “file” concepts by category and because files can be cross-indexed, as can memory. However, I didn’t use that in the story because it’s too much of a cliché. Also, Eliot is given to more imaginative metaphors than I am—even though I created him. Fiction is odd in that way.

How did you come up with the idea for Selective Memory Obliteration Neural Re-Routing?

It’s an old idea in SF. Philip K. Dick used it, the movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” used it, as have many other works. The point in fiction is sometimes to give a fresh spin to an old idea. It would be impossible to come up with a brand-new, fresh-out-if-the-box idea for every single story.

Eliot is obsessed with reality and refuses to believe in his father’s vision. Why does he hold such a strong attachment to what he deems to be real?

Because we all do. And the super-rationalists, of which Eliot is one at the beginning of the story, refuse to entertain any idea that smacks of mysticism. I know many such people. I’m related to a whole bunch of them.

What did Carl Tremling actually see? How did you decide on Dr. Tremling’s vision and subsequent outburst?

He “saw” what he said he saw: Zeus in a toaster pastry. Rather, that’s what he perceived, since sight is a combination of what photons strike our retinas and how we interpret the resulting signals to the brain. As to deciding on Carl’s vision: Like so much of what I write, it just came to me and seemed right.

Eliot shares a unique relationship with his father as well as his aunt. In both cases he feels that his decisions should hold more weight than theirs, even though he is a child. Where did you find the inspiration for these relationships? Did you often feel helpless as a child?

All children feel relatively helpless, because they are. Adults make the important decisions. I was glad to grow up, and even though I had a happy and stable childhood, I prefer adulthood. I get to make my own decisions now. I don’t really understand people who say they would love to return to the “innocence” of childhood.

Although Eliot doesn’t deem his father’s operation successful, it’s apparent that the procedure may not be to blame, as he loses his love of pigs beforehand. What actually happened to Carl Tremling to make him lose his personality?

His world was shaken to its foundations. Everything he thought was true turned out not to be. That’s enough to shake any sensitive and intelligent person a little. It shook him a lot because, as I say in my story, truly gifted mathematicians often have an unstable hold on social reality anyway. It’s a psychological phenomenon often written about. Example: John Nash.

Why strawberry toaster pastries?

I like to eat them.

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.

When the Brain Sees God on a Toaster Pastry
The Evil Monkey

What actually happens when a person sees a deity in an inanimate object, specifically not associated with a concomitant religious experience? We’re not talking a full-blown VISION FROM ABOVE here, but the perception of an image that is supposedly accessible to others. We have often seen the social consequences. Other True BelieversTM will then flock for miles, if not from other continents, to catch a glimpse of the Virgin Mary on a tortilla shell. Or at least convince one another that they were there and saw it, like when you stare at the crazy dot picture in the mall and swear you saw the damn boat. But what happens in the mind of the first person who saw it? What happens to the person sitting at the kitchen table, staring down at their peanut butter sandwich, and suddenly seeing an important religious figure?

That depends on what you believe. People who agree with the person will believe that they saw a miracle, no matter how implausible it may sound. Those who don’t believe will look for a neurological explanation. What they will often seize on is the “binding problem.”

The binding problem is well-known in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Specifically, it’s the question of how we take different features—say, an arrangement of black and red blocks in a regular alternating pattern—and know to call it “checkerboard?” How do we know that four wheels and doors on a particular object makes it a “car,” and not a “truck” or “wagon?” When you look at your dad and his brothers, who all have the same basic facial features—the same color moustache, the same receding hairline, same eye color, even the same glasses—how do you tell them apart?

The scientific literature is replete with examples of individuals that have damage to various parts of their temporal lobes resulting from injury, congenital defect, stroke, tumor, or other ailment. These people are often unable to properly “bind features” into a cognitive whole. For example, a patient may be able to navigate their environment just fine, but place a pencil on the table and ask him or her to describe it and you’ll get “well, it’s a cylindrical object about eight inches long with a point, its yellow, and there’s a rubber thing on the end.” Ask the patient to pick it up and they’ll say “oh, it’s a pencil!” The areas that recognize an object via vision may be compromised, but other sensory modalities like touch can supply the missing information.

A similar deficit is known as prosopagnosia, or the inability to recognize faces. An area of the temporal lobe known as the fusiform gyrus contains what is known as the fusiform face area (FFA). People with FFA lesions, or degeneration due to Alzheimer’s, will have difficulty identifying another person’s face on sight. They have to come up with other strategies to identify people, such as by waiting for them to talk and thus recognizing them by voice, or possibly by recognizing the person’s gait as they navigate the room.

So we know that the temporal lobe is important for binding features into larger cognitive constructs. It allows us to “recognize.” Feature Integration Theory is often cited to explain this phenomenon. FIT includes two basic precepts: Feature search and conjunction search. Feature search can occur quickly and without conscious effort, where color, orientation, and other primitive features are brought to attention. At this level a person can often remember whether particular features were present, but not where they were located. Conjunction search is slower, and requires conscious effort to search for conjunctions of primitive features. So thinking back to the checkerboard, feature search brings to your attention the fact that red and black are present, and that there is a repeating pattern of alternating squares. Conjunction search helps you recognize and attach the label of “checkerboard”.

Perhaps the experience of seeing the Virgin Mary in a tortilla is mediated by an “overly ambitious” temporal lobe. If primitive features are combined into easily recognizable archetypes, especially of a religious nature that have significant emotional and cultural importance to the viewer, and are then made accessible to conjunction search, it seems plausible that we can explain these particular types of experiences by studying the brain. Interestingly, cultural expectations seem to play into the perceived religious experience, solidifying the importance of combining primitive features so they can be easily picked out by using a minimal amount of conjunction search brain power. Those not of Judeo-Christian upbringing, for example, may be less inclined to see a tortilla with the Virgin Mary in it, but more inclined to recognize Vishnu on a papadam or Buddha in the petals of a lotus blossom.

The icons of faith permeate nearly every society, and yet they’re seen as removed from daily life. Many religious orders offer ways to integrate the spiritual and the everyday. Perhaps the brain has its own way of doing that.

The Evil Monkey has a Ph.D. in the neurosciences and used to study memory in primates for a living. He now resides in the Midwest and spends his professional time teaching at the local state university and community college. When not teaching, he is often engaged in an endless cycle of home repair or playing with his stepkids or writing his irreverent neuroscience blog Neurotopia.

Scales
Alastair Reynolds

The enemy must die.

Nico stands and waits in the long line, sweating under the electric-yellow dome of the municipal force field.

They must die.

Near the recruiting station, one of the captives has been wheeled out in a cage. The reptile is splayed in a harness, stretched like a frog on the dissection table. A steady stream of soldiers-in-waiting leaves the line, jabbing an electro-prod through the bars of the cage to a chorus of jeers. It’s about the size of a man, and surprisingly androform except for its crested lizard head, its stubby tail and the brilliant green shimmer of its scales. Already they’re flaking off, black and charred, where the prod touches. The reptile was squealing to start with, but it’s slumped and unresponsive now.

Nico turns his head away. He just wants the line to move ahead so he can sign up, obtain his citzenship credits and get out of here.

The enemy must die.

They came in from interstellar darkness, unprovoked, unleashing systematic destruction on unsuspecting human assets. They wiped mankind off Mars and blasted Earth’s lunar settlements into radioactive craters. They pushed the human explorers back into a huddle of defenses around Earth. Now they’ve brought the war to cities and towns, to the civilian masses. Now force shields blister Earth’s surface, sustained by fusion plants sunk deep into the crust. Nico’s almost forgotten what it’s like to look up at the stars.

But the tide is turning. Beneath the domes, factories assemble the ships and weapons to take the war back to the reptiles. Chinks are opening in the enemy’s armour. All that’s needed now are men and women to do Earth’s bidding.

One of the recruiting sergeants walks the line, handing out iced water and candies. He stops and chats to the soldiers-to-be, shaking them by the hand, patting them on the back. He’s a thirty-mission veteran; been twice as far out as the orbit of the moon. He lost an arm, but the new one’s growing back nicely, budding out from the stump like a baby’s trying to punch its way out of him. They’ll look after you too, he says, holding out a bottle of water.

“What’s the catch?” Nico asks.

“There isn’t one,” the sergeant says. “We give you citizenship and enough toys to take apart a planet. Then you go out there and kill as many of those scaly green bastards as you can.”

“Sounds good to me,” Nico says.

Up in the fortified holdfast of Sentinel Station, something’s different. The tech isn’t like the equipment Nico saw at the recruiting station, or in basic training back on Earth. It’s heavier, nastier, capable of doing more damage. Which would be reassuring, if it wasn’t for one troubling fact.

Earth has better ships, guns and armour than anyone down there has heard about—but then so do the reptiles.

Turns out they’re not exactly reptiles either. Not that Nico cares much. Cold-blooded or not, they still attacked without provocation.

The six months of in-orbit training at Sentinel Station are tough. Half the kids fall by the wayside. Nico’s come through, maybe not top of his class, but somewhere near it. He can handle the power-armour, the tactical weapons. He’s ready to be shown to his ship.

It’s not quite what he was expecting.

It’s a long, sleek, skull-grey shark of a machine that goes faster-than-light.

“Top secret, of course,” says the instructor. “We’ve been using it for interstellar intelligence gathering and resource-acquistion.”

“How long have we had this?”

The instructor grins. “Before you were born.”

“I thought we never had any ambitions beyond Mars,” says Nico.

“What about it?”

“But the reptiles came in unprovoked, they said. If we were already out there…”

They haul him out after a couple of days in the coolbox. Any more of that kind of questioning and he’ll be sent back home with most of his memories scrubbed.

So Nico decides it’s not his problem. He’s got his gun, he’s got his armour and now he’s got his ride. Who cares who started the damned thing?

The FTL transport snaps back into normal space around some other star, heading for a blue gas giant and an outpost that used to be a moon. The place bristles with long-range sensors and the belligerent spines of anti-ship railguns. Chokepoint will be Nico’s home for the next year.

“Forget your armour certification, your weapons rating,” says the new instructor, a human head sticking out of an upright black life-support cylinder. “Now it’s time to get real.”

A wall slides back to reveal a hall of headless corpses, rank on rank of them suspended in green preservative.

“You don’t need bodies where you’re going, you just need brains.” she says. “You can collect your bodies on the way back home, when you’ve completed your tour. We’ll look after them.”

So they strip Nico down to little more than a head and a nervous system, and plug what’s left into a tiny, hyper-agile fighter. The battle lines are being drawn far beyond conventional FTL now. The war against the reptiles will be won and lost in the N-dimensional tangle of interconnected wormhole pathways.

Wired into the fighter, Nico feels like a god with armageddon at his fingertips—not that he’s really got fingertips. He doesn’t feel much like Nico any more. He cracks a wry smile at Chokepoint’s new arrivals, gawping at the bodies in the tanks. His old memories are still in there somewhere, but they’re buried under a luminous welter of tactical programming.

Frankly, he doesn’t miss them.

They’re not fighting the reptiles any more. Turns out they were just the organic puppets of an implacable, machine-based intelligence. The puppetmasters are faster and smarter and their strategic ambitions aren’t clear. But it doesn’t concern thing-that-was-once-Nico.

After all, it’s not like machines can’t die.

Strategic Command sends him deeper. He’s forwarded to an artificial construct actually embedded in the tangle, floating on a semi-stable node like a dark thrombosis. Nico’s past caring where the station lies in relation to real space.

No one fully human can get this far—the station is staffed by bottled brains and brooding artificial intelligences. With a jolt, thing-that-was-once-Nico realises that he doesn’t mind their company. At least they’ve got their priorities right.

At the station, thing-that-was-once-Nico learns that a new offensive has opened up against the puppetmasters, even further into the tangle. It’s harder to reach, so again he must be remade. His living mind is swamped by tiny machines, who build a shining scaffold around the vulnerable architecture of his meat brain. The silvery spikes and struts mesh into a fighter no larger than a drum of oil.

He doesn’t think much about his old body, back at Chokepoint, not any more.

The puppetmasters are just a decoy. Tactical analysis reveals them to be an intrusion into the wormhole tangle from what can only be described as an adjunct dimension. The focus of the military effort shifts again.

Now the organic matter at the core of thing-that-was-once-Nico’s cybernetic mind is totally obsolete. He can’t place the exact moment when he stopped thinking with meat and started thinking with machinery, and he’s not even sure it matters now. As an organism, he was pinned like a squashed moth between two pages in the book of existence. As a machine, he can be endlessly abstracted, simulated unto the seventh simulation, encoded and pulsed across the reality-gap, ready to kill.

This he—or rather it—does.

And for a little while there is death and glory.

Up through the reality stack, level by level. By now it’s not just machines versus machines. It’s machines mapped into byzantine N-dimensional spaces, machines as ghosts of machines. The terms of engagement have become so abstract—so, frankly, higher-mathematical—that the conflict is more like a philosophical dialogue, a debate between protagonists who agree on almost everything except the most trifling, hair-splitting details.

And yet it must still be to the death—the proliferation of one self-replicating, pan-dimensional class of entities is still at the expense of the other.

When did it begin? Where did it begin? Why?

Such questions simply aren’t relevant or even answerable anymore.

All that matters is that there is an adversary, and the adversary must be destroyed.

Eventually—although even the notion of time’s passing is now distinctly moot—the war turns orthogonal. The reality stack is itself but one compacted laminate of something larger, so the warring entities traverse mind-wrenching chasms of meta-dimensional structure, their minds in constant, self-evolving flux as the bedrock of reality shifts and squirms beneath them.

And at last the shape of the enemy becomes clear.

The enemy is vast. The enemy is inexorably slow. As its peripheries are mapped, it gradually emerges that the enemy is a class of intellect that the machines barely have the tools to recognise, let alone understand.

It’s organic.

It is multi-form and multi-variant. It hasn’t been engineered or designed. It’s messy and contingent, originating from the surface of a structure, a higher-mathematical object. It’s but one of several drifting on geodesic trajectories through what might loosely be termed “space.” Arcane fluids slosh around on the surface of this object, and the whole thing is gloved in a kind of gas. The enemy requires technology, not just to sustain itself, but to propagate its warlike ambitions.

Triumph over the organic is a cosmic destiny the machines have been pursuing now through countless instantiations. But to kill the enemy now, without probing deeper into its nature, would be both inefficient and unsubtle. It would waste machines that could be spared if the enemy’s weaknesses were better understood. And what better way to probe those weaknesses than to create another kind of living thing, an army of puppet organisms, and send that army into battle? The puppets may not win, but they will force the adversary to stretch itself, to expose aspects of itself now hidden.

And so they are sent. Volunteers, technically—although the concept of “volunteer” implies a straightforward altruism difficult to correlate with the workings of the machines’ multi-dimensional decision-making matrices. The flesh is grown in huge hangars full of glowing green vats, then shaped into organisms similar but not identical to the enemy. Into those vast, mindless bodies are decanted the thin, gruel-like remains of compactified machine intellects. It’s not really anything the machines would recognise as intelligence, but it gets the job done.

Memories kindle briefly back to life as compactification processes shuffle through ancient data, untouched for subjective millenia, searching for anything that might offer a strategic advantage. Among the fleeting sensations, the flickering visions, one of the machines recalls standing in line under an electric-yellow sky, waiting for something. It hears the crackle of an electro-prod, smells the black char of burning tissue.

The machine hesitates for a moment, then deletes the memory. Its new green-scaled puppet body is ready, it has work to do.

The enemy must die.

© 2009 by Alastair Reynolds.

Originally appeared as a podcast for The Guardian.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Alastair Reynolds was born in Barry in 1966. He spent his early years in Cornwall, then returned to Wales for his primary and secondary school education. He completed a degree in astronomy at Newcastle, then a PhD in the same subject at St Andrews in Scotland. He left the UK in 1991 and spent the next sixteen years working in the Netherlands, mostly for the European Space Agency, although he also did a stint as a postdoctoral worker in Utrecht. He had been writing and selling science fiction since 1989, and published his first novel, Revelation Space, in 2000. He has recently completed his tenth novel and has continued to publish short fiction. His novel Chasm City won the British Science Fiction Award, and he has been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke award three times. In 2004 he left scientific research to write full time. He married in 2005 and returned to Wales in 2008, where he lives in Rhondda Cynon Taff.

Author Spotlight: Alastair Reynolds
Erin Stocks

This story was your first foray into military science fiction. Will you tell us about its origins?

Back in 2009 there was a bit of publicity surrounding my new ten book deal with Orion. As part of that, the Guardian newspaper asked me to write a short story that could be narrated (by me) and made available as a podcast. “Scales” is that story. It was written to a very tight brief, both in terms of the word count and the time I had to deliver it, but sometimes that can be a very refreshing way to work. Rather than faff around on something for months, get it done by Wednesday . . .

As to the theme, at the back of my mind I’d had an idea about how contact with the alien would lead to us becoming progressively more alien ourselves. All I did was bolt that notion onto a simple war story and “Scales” was born.

The Earth depicted here is one some of us may be able to comprehend: Morally ambiguous at times, and capable of both humane action and cruelty. Aside from the technology, not much has changed, which aids in the believability of this story, and can be argued for as a theme in several of your stories and books. Was this an intentional choice?

I had to keep to a very tight wordcount so there really isn’t a sentence in that story that wasn’t essential to the story. Obviously, not a lot of room for going off on tangents about the development of society in the future. I don’t really believe in this particular future, mind—I think it’s highly unlikely that we’ll ever become engaged in an interstellar war with an implacable alien foe.

You spent sixteen years working for the European Space Agency. Did those years have any influence on this story?

Pretty close to zero influence, I’d suspect. It’s not at all a hard SF story (not that I particular self-identify as a hard SF writer to begin with) but something more along the lines of a Philip K Dick short, in which the wacky concept is the thing and the issue of whether or not it makes scientific sense is rather less germane . . .

In a 2003 interview with Locus, you pose the following questions: “Are we going to go out into the universe, and if so will that change us? Can we go out there and still stay human, or is it necessary for us to become something else just to survive in the universe?” This story is definitely one way of answering these questions. Do you still wonder this today?

Oh yes, very much so—in fact, it’s about all I’ve been thinking about for the last couple of years, while I burrow deeply into the start of my new trilogy, which is all about the spacefaring impulse. But, it’s done with an eye to keeping the science plausible, in stark contrast to “Scales.”

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.

Whose Thoughts Are You Thinking?
Laura Waterstripe

Brainwashing has been presented in many science fiction films, usually as a way to get the main character to go berserk and attack their own friends. Although it’s sensationalized, brainwashing has backing in fact. Over the years, plenty of techniques have been tried. While many have failed, and some have succeeded to a certain degree, all are bizarrely, and sometimes horrifically, compelling.

The idea of brainwashing in popular culture usually includes repetition. Ideas are ground into a person and repeated monotonously, until he or she can’t think of anything else. While repetition of stimuli is a key part of brainwashing, if that were the only component in shaping one’s behavior, no one would ever exceed the speed limit and everyone would spend their income on penis enhancements. The difference between repetition and attempts at brainwashing is that in the latter, the subject loses the ability to resist and eventually comes to believe what he is told, either by loving Big Brother or conceding that there are five lights when his eyes show him four.

Brainwashing usually contains some element of punishment and reward to go along with the repetition. Confinement to an uncomfortable environment, mental alteration via sleep deprivation, and chemical alteration through diet or drugs are all tools that weaken people’s resolve and make them more susceptible to suggestion. It sounds simple, but punishment for resistance and rewards for compliance mold the behavior of everyone from lab rats to Nobel Prize winners. Everyone is susceptible, and piling up the disorienting factors leads to brainwashing.

Most pop-culture references to brainwashing spring from military situations. There’s a reason for this. Almost every military, throughout history, has used a mild form of brainwashing to build a cohesive and effective unit. The nearly mythical boot camp and training experience with shouting drill sergeants and endless physical exercise as punishment fulfills the requirements of the definition. Recruits lose their civilian sense of identity and gain a sense of themselves as part of a larger whole.

In most boot camp situations, soldiers do not lose their sense of individual identity or morality, as that kind of thought modification takes a more concentrated and extended indoctrination. To write or rewrite someone’s identity, the state needs to start young, and keep up the pressure. In movies or novels brainwashing appears to take weeks, but many societies made it a lifelong endeavor. Ancient Spartans got their reputation for single-minded military combat, as well as imperialistic tyranny, by taking their children out of home and putting them into military training as young as seven. The children were kept in barracks, and were taught that physical strength, discipline, and military prowess were the highest virtues in life. They were also taught that those who had these virtues were better than anyone else. No wonder Sparta kept the countries it had overtaken nearby enslaved for centuries.

A more modern and sinister example was the Hitler Youth. Some of those children-turned-soldiers began their training at age ten in 1933, and so by the time Germany invaded Poland, they were old enough to offer substantial support to the troops. The Hitler Youth organization was mandatory and focused on teaching children to accept the National Socialist doctrines with quasi-religious overtones regarding Hitler. The physical aspects of the training often left them exhausted. As children aged and the war went on, more training took place in encampments away from cities, with education that focused on making them good soldiers rather than intelligent citizens, and they were removed from homes and schools where they might have heard opposing points of view. As a result, many of the Hitler Youth became fanatical soldiers, fighting desperately with weaker weapons than the Allies’.

While this practice is an ancient one, the word “brainwashing” comes from more modern roots. It was coined by the CIA to explain why American prisoners of war might express sentiments that sympathized with their captors while they were detained in Korea. American soldiers taken prisoner in the Korean War were isolated, emotionally and physically abused, and threatened until they were willing to make statements saying that they had embraced communism. The attacks on their sense of self often involved telling them that they were not who they thought they were, and that the identities they claimed—man, soldier, American—were worthless. Their captors played on feelings of guilt for the things that soldiers might have done in the war and gave them the chance to “confess” their actions. Some confessed to germ warfare that they had not committed, either out of a belief that they had done it, or to avoid further retribution from their captors. The efficacy of the techniques was low in the long term, though, for when the soldiers had the chance to go home, only one in one thousand chose to stay.

One of the most highly publicized political brainwashing was the case of Patty Hearst, who at the age of nineteen was kidnapped by a left-wing militant group. She claimed that she was locked in a closet, threatened, and sexually assaulted, and given drugs. As a result of her treatment, she claimed that she sympathized with her captors and helped them rob a bank. This case of brainwashing also came with a break from the victim’s old identity. Patty Hearst famously changed her name to ‘Tania’ when she joined with her captures, signaling her new sense of self. When she was captured and tried, her lawyers argued that the isolation and abuses may have led her to believe the things she said and willingly commit crimes, but that the extensive, intentional brainwashing that she received negated any responsibility for her crimes. Due to inconsistencies in the story of her brainwashing, the court held her accountable for her actions in the bank, discounting the influence of the earlier treatment. Later, however, her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter. Hearst renounced her actions after a short period away from her captors, and exactly what happened to her and how it affected her responsibility for the acts she committed remains a subject of debate to this day.

Although the idea of being brainwashed is frightening, some people voluntarily undergo brainwashing-type activities. Followers of Lyndon LaRouche, a political activist, underwent a process he called “ego-stripping” that involved emotional abuse. LaRouche wanted to make his subjects feel like there was nowhere safe for them except in his movement. People administering ego-stripping insulted and belittled their colleagues, friends, and partners on every topic they could think of. LaRouche believed, at one point, that a member of his movement had been implanted with the idea to assassinate him. He recorded his ego-stripping session with the man. The recordings of the sessions indicate that the subjects were deprived of food and receiving electric shocks, adding physical pain to the sense of isolation and worthlessness. Not only did the man confess, but large segments of Larouche’s followers claimed that they had been brainwashed by the CIA or the East German secret police and programmed to kill. None of those claims were substantiated by psychologists.

Although the thought of the CIA brainwashing members of LaRouche’s party to kill him sounds preposterous, it’s not entirely baseless. The confessions took place in the 1970s. During that period it was brought to light that the CIA was conducting extensive mind-control experiments, especially by administering drugs. Subjects were dosed with LSD, alternating doses of barbiturates and amphetamines, or pretty much anything else the CIA could get its hands on. Some of the subjects of these experiments were treated without informed consent, or often chosen to participate while engaging in illegal or embarrassing activity (like soliciting prostitution) so they weren’t likely to complain. Other experiments involved dosing subjects into a paralytic coma for months at a time. While many people sustained long-term physical and mental damage from the treatments, none of the documents yet released show any indication that a psychologically healthy individual could have his motivations rewritten by LSD or other therapies. Of all the ways there are to re-write the human brain, the track taken by the most high-tech spy agency have so far proven the least effective.

Science fiction paints a portrait of brainwashing techniques focusing on breaking down one’s mind, primarily using sudden changes of mental ability due to dramatic and brutal techniques that look good on a page or onscreen. In fact, the most effective brainwashing techniques are a daily grind done over a long period of time. In a way, that’s more terrifying than any fiction could portray.

Laura Waterstripe lives in upstate New York where she enjoys writing science fiction, Morris dancing, and singing.

Coming Attractions

Coming up in June, in Lightspeed, we have original fiction by new authors K. C. Ball (“Snapshots I Brought Back From the Black Hole”) and Grady Hendrix (“Transcript of Interaction Between Astronaut Mike Scudderman and the OnStar Hands-Free AI Crash Advisor”), plus reprints by Carolyn Ives Gilman (“Frost Painting”) and Ian McDonald (“Recording Angel”). All that plus our usual assortment of nonfiction 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!

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