Editorial, September 2011
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue sixteen of Lightspeed!

The big news at Lightspeed HQ this month is that two of our stories—“The Taste of Starlight” by John R. Fultz and “Saying the Names” by Maggie Clark—have been named finalists for the Parsec Awards, for excellence in podcasting. Congratulations to Maggie and John, and to our audio editor Stefan Rudnicki, and the entire audio team at Skyboat Road Company, Inc.

In other news, your humble editor has been nominated for two World Fantasy Awards! My anthology The Way of the Wizard is a finalist for best anthology, and I personally am nominated in the “special award (professional)” category. So, congratulations, to . . . well, me, I guess! And of course to all of the contributors to The Way of the Wizard, and everyone who I’ve worked with over the past year that made both nominations possible.

And don’t forget: The Lightspeed: Year One anthology, collecting all of the fiction we published in our first year (from June 2010-May 2011), will be published by Prime Books in November (pre-order now!). But never fear—all of our content will still be available on lightspeedmagazine.com; this will just be yet another way for readers to find and discover Lightspeed.

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

In our first story this month, Liz Coleman’s “Join,” a man who has always felt alienated returns home to visit his family on Earth, and brings with him part of his new family—a newborn, parasitic alien.

Then, in the related article, our nonfiction editor Esther Inglis-Arkell explains how to “Vulcanize, Wookify, and Alienate Yourself” so you can better fit in when we welcome our alien overlords.

Most of the universe is the regions between galaxies, yet no stories are ever set in that vast emptiness. In “Bubbles” by David Brin, we get to know Serena, a lonely entity traveling the space between galaxies.

The cosmos is a vast, and largely empty, place. Astronomer Dr. Pamela Gay reveals its scope in “The Lonely Universe.”

D. Thomas Minton’s “Thief of Futures” follows Eshram Kingston through a future Kuala Lumpur, where he is hired for the dirty business of stealing the future of a child.

In our feature interview this month, Jeff Lester talks to Lois McMaster Bujold about Miles Vorkosigan, demanding readers, anime, webcomics, and more.

In Ursula K. Le Guin’s story, “The Island of the Immortals,” a traveler takes a vacation to an island where immortality might have been achieved. And it is—but at what price?

Living forever may not be all it’s cracked up to be. Sure, there’s everlasting life, but, just like anything else, there are going to be complications as well. Shaenon Garrity explores the downside of immortality in “Immortals That Show Us That Death Is The Best Option.”

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

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as editor of Lightspeed and Fantasy Magazine, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. Upcoming anthologies include: Lightspeed: Year One, Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, Armored, and The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination. He is a finalist for the 2011 Hugo Award and the 2011 World Fantasy Award, and he has been called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble.com. John is also the co-host of io9’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

Join
Liz Coleman

The sky blinded me when I emerged from the shuttle onto the tarmac at SeaTac spaceport. It was a midnight sky, glowing orange with the pollution of a city that stretched the full length of the Salish Sea. A midnight sky, an empty bowl of clouds, but the brightness made me shut my eyes just the same: A month in stasis will do that to you.

Just standing took everything out of me. I’m a big guy, been in space a lot, but I was also a surrogate dad of a species not my own. Ngoraich hadn’t slept that whole month we were in transit. She was a pupating larva, soft and pearly. The spacers didn’t know how to put her into stasis, and even if they could, she wouldn’t notice the difference. All she did was absorb nourishment from my blood—and dream. I shared her dreams, and she shared mine. We’d both had a lousy trip.

This was such a stupid idea, coming home.

I lowered myself to a pocked plastic bench in the waiting area. God, it was heavy here. Ngoraich was making my back ache. Just a few weeks here, and then I could go home to light gravity and breathable air. Just one visit to a grave, a few dinners and platitudes, and then back to the people who understood me.

“Oh, you’ve got a baby!” a human woman said. Of course she was human; there were only humans here. I’d been gone way too long. It was strange, though. Nothing but humans, everywhere, yet I felt so alone. “Is the mother getting off the A90 shuttle?”

My hand instinctively covered Ngoraich’s holster, even though no one could see her. She was in one of the full-coverage baby carriers popular these days, slung around my torso in such a way that no one could see the join where Ngoraich’s proboscis entered my ribcage. Her tongue flexed against my lungs. She liked this woman, even though I didn’t. Of course, Ngoraich liked everyone, just as I disliked any human who paid too much attention to me.

“Uh, yes,” I said. My throat modifications twisted the words, but hopefully my breathing mask hid that fact. This woman didn’t bother with a mask; her face was shiny with a recent skin transplant. They were popular in this age of acid rain. Her eyes were glassy with full protective contacts. Me, I wore implanted bug-eye lenses protecting my eyes from the atmosphere; it was mildly poisonous to everyone nowadays, but completely poisonous to traitorous me. (At least I wouldn’t look too out of place.)

Thankfully, the man the woman was waiting for arrived and she went away without questioning me further.

If my mom left the house—assuming it was the same house—when I called, she’d arrive in an hour. A hour to wait and readjust to Earth.

I rubbed Ngoraich’s holster. “When I was a kid,” I told her, “my grandpa would meet us at the airport when we visited. It’s a nice feeling.” She twitched, happy to understand this human emotion. But my own family nostalgia was activating her own. Mama Dina, Papa Dina? Warm folds of keratinous skin, shiny pink sucky nodes. Three-voiced song around a warm, white borehole.

“Your mom and dad are up there.” I pointed to the east, where I was pretty sure Mars was about to rise somewhere beyond the hard orange midnight. Were they working on their individual borehole into Phobos right now? Out there was one huge, hollow Phoeng generation ship attached to Mars’ largest moon, slowly extracting the minerals. I already longed for it. You could sit beneath the observation bubble capping Stickney Crater and watch the sun set behind the frigid elbow pad of Mars’ ice cap. Dina Lae—Ngoraich’s mama—would join me, holding my hand in that human gesture I taught her.

Poor Lae. So beautiful and fertile that she had three babes instead of two. Of course I offered to nourish the extra one.

Not many humans could say they dated an alien couple. I’m certain none could say they knew what it was like to be a surrogate parent to an alien. I was making my own tribe, not quite human, not quite Phoeng. I’d raise Ngoraich in our own little culture, and Ngoraich would pass that on to her children and beyond.

I’d play human music for her, teach her human games. I’d show her how to etch images into her carapace like humans tattooed their skin. I’d show her the painful joys of body suspension. On Phobos, gravity was so light that you couldn’t even achieve a real suspension; the chains and hooks pierced your chest and anchored you while you spun around like a planet of your own.

“Derek!” Mom ran toward me with arms outspread, long black corset jacket swaying behind her. Flamboyant as always, her breathing mask was printed with Mexican-style roses that matched the Day of the Dead skulls printed on her scarf.

Right away, Ngoraich really liked my mom. Dina Lae would get along with Mom, too. I could imagine Dina Lae giving Mom holographic ribbon that she could braid through her hair while they drank chardonnay. Dina Lae loved Earth wine. Unlike most of the Phoeng, she was curious about humans, and she always made me feel smart and useful. Too bad they’d never get to meet each other.

But though Mom could be friends with an alien, and might even accept that I’d married one, she couldn’t accept that I’d married two, and was running around with their surplus child soaking nutrients from my bloodstream. She definitely couldn’t accept that I’d had my body altered to breathe the Phoeng’s methane-heavy atmosphere, and my throat to better speak their language.

Black cats and maple leafs skirted my mind. Ngoraich trying to pull me into happy memories, away from the stress I felt right now. She liked my memories of playing in my childhood neighbor’s yard, but now, it was distracting and painful.

“De-rek!” Every syllable accented by the landing of her high-heeled boots. “Oh, God, I’m so happy!”

“It’s been a long time,” I said. The “ng” sound rasped as the bony additions to my throat rubbed together.

She hugged me. Ngoraich squirmed with glee: Warm warm warm touch! My baby missed being touched. Poor thing, trapped in that casing, which my mom was bumping against.

“Oh, look at you,” she said. “Carrying your things in a baby carrier! Have they got a surplus of them in the dark of space?”

“Actually, Mom, they do. People live and breed out there, just not as much as the companies thought. It’s holding my nutrient pack and medicine dispenser.”

I wasn’t lying. It did hold a nutrient pack, just a small one under Ngoraich’s tail. I wasn’t going to lie. No one would suspect the truth. Not from Good Boy Derek.

She took off her mask and moved to kiss me, but pulled back. “Oh, I shouldn’t, should I? I’m so sorry for you, with your immune system all shot. At least it’s not so bad you have to be in a bubble.”

“I’ll be fine, Mom.” I still wasn’t lying much. Ngoraich twitched at my discomfort. I didn’t want to teach her to lie. My immune system was vulnerable to Earth viruses, I told her. Even on Earth, wearing the anti-pollution masks had damaged people’s immune systems as they lacked exposure to even everyday bugs and toxins.

“I’m so glad you made it for Easter,” Mom said. “It’s too bad you had to miss your father’s funeral.”

“You doing all right?” I asked her.

I couldn’t see her forced smile behind her mask, but I knew it was there.

“Of course I am,” she said. “The whole family’s shown up to take care of me, and I’m glad your father’s finally not in pain.”

She squeezed my hands. Ngoraich purred.

“I know coming back to Earth is hard on your body,” she said. “The pressure down here hurts you, doesn’t it?”

 Her gloved hands clutched mine. Bony knuckles dug into my palms.

Mom hung her mask in a glass-faced curio cabinet when we got home, above the ceramic fondue pot and dented silver cups and dusty knickknacks that went ignored. The seal on the door hissed shut. A familiar noise, locking me into an old, old world. I half-expected to hear my dad’s Alzheimer’s-induced ramblings coming from the den: sounds I’d ran to Mars to avoid. But he was gone.

Laughter in the kitchen. Happy sounds from familiar voices. Dishes clinking and plastic bags rustling. The smell of apple pie seeping through my mask.

“Help yourself to whatever’s in the kitchen,” Mother said. “Lyra made pie and spaghetti for dinner, and the leftovers are already in the fridge, but you know you can help yourself.”

“I can’t eat it,” I said, “but thank you.”

“Oh, that’s right, I’m so sorry.”

“I don’t regret my choice, Mom. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

Ngoraich joined me in memories of Christmas with my cousins, sitting around the cold glass table, Aunt Lyra’s apple pie at our elbow, chins in our hands as we studied a one thousand piece puzzle. I’d have to bring a jigsaw puzzle back with me, though I wished Lae and Kyru could be here to do them with my family. I wished they could all meet each other.

“Who all’s here?” I ask.

“Just Lyra and the boys so far. Theresa and the others are arriving in the morning.”

My cousin Barack entered the kitchen. He slammed a bottle of green apple-ade on the table and pierced its top. Green tendrils drifted inside the clear glass.

“Hey, Derek,” he said, holding out the bottle. “Want one? There’s a whole case in the garage.”

It was good stuff, full of memories of past picnics in the park. Slamming it and watching the bottom compartment crack and release a stream of green flavor was the fun part. It was Father’s favorite. The drink itself was syrupy and a little too tart for me, but I always drank it so I could slam it. Barack was about ten years younger than me. I’d shown him how to make the bottles work, back when he was just a kid. Now, according to Mom’s letters, he was studying astrogeology at UW. Following in my footsteps, it appeared.

I shook my head as I sat down. I shoved a flimsy woven placemat to the side and rested my elbows on the old blonde maple surface. It desperately needed resurfacing. Maybe I’d volunteer for the task while I was here.

“Space travel damaged Derek’s digestive system,” said Mom. “He can only eat his specially-processed rations.”

“Space does that to you?” Barack said.

“Not to everyone,” I said. “However, they’re working with the Phoeng to develop deep cellular modifications to cut down on that sort of thing. It would also help us survive in lower pressures and temperatures.”

“Sounds like it’s also a nice way to lose your humanity,” Barack said.

“You thinking of getting a job out there when you’re done at UW?” I changed the subject.

If he was, if he was someone I could mentor and befriend, someone I could introduce to my new family . . .

He shrugged. “I dunno. I mean, actually seeing the other planets . . .  but there’s so many aliens out there, and there’s just getting to be more and more. I hear they breed like rabbits.”

“They only have two children per couple. Their population’s more stable than ours.”

“Then why did they bother colonizing our system?” Aunt Lyra asked. She stood in the doorway, holding aside the plastic beaded curtain with her hip.

“They’re on their way to the galaxy’s center.” I closed my eyes. “We’re just a stop on the way.” The Fountains of God. Ngoraich twitched and lapped my lungs as they took extra deep breaths. Sacred images painted by Mama Dina of the twin sacred jets. Blue fire pouring from the void while the filth of the universe awaited renewal in a vast accretion disc. My skin itched, remnants of the experiments they were doing on me to stop the destructive effects of x-rays on my frail human flesh. They pitied us so much that we weren’t able to withstand the burning touch of God.

Parts of my soul would be there, passed through Ngoraich and her children’s children, when the Phoeng, millennia from now, arrived at the most holy site at the galaxy’s core. That distant imprint would carry the memories of my mom, Barack, of my family, of Earth itself, long after we’d destroyed ourselves or evolved away. I’d join in the collective ecstasy of the Phoeng as they threw themselves into the heart of God to be set free and disseminated by the Twin Fountains.

“They’re leaving in less than a hundred years,” I said. “When they’ve turned Phobos and Deimos into new colony ships and gathered what knowledge they can from us and our system. They’re not here to conquer us.”

“No one said they were.” Mom patted my shoulder, then jerked back as if she wasn’t sure she should have. Ngoraich purred and lapped away the echoes of Mother’s dismay.

“It’s all right, Mother,” I said. “You can touch me. I just can’t eat or breathe here.”

I turned to Barack. “If you’re bothered by the Phoeng, don’t worry. You’ll probably never see one, even on Mars. There’s loads of opportunities, though, if you do want to work with them directly. My friends—the Phoeng I work with—they took me out to the settlement on Titan to scout out some deposits. They’re really nice and generous. Dina Lae—she’s the Phoeng I work with most—she holds monthly wine parties for the human crew out on Phobos. They project everyone’s avatar into the opposite room so we can all party together while breathing the right kind of air. You’d really like her, Mom.”

Ngoraich tittered into my bloodstream. I really, really wished I could knock back a green apple or even a cold soda. Mom would have sparkling apple cider in the fridge since it was Easter. Likely, it was left from Father’s funeral. Most people treated it like a celebratory drink, and though my father’s death wasn’t a thing to celebrate—expected and merciful end though it was—the family getting together was always an event.

Alien hormones skittered through my veins, I giggled and asked Barack about his studies. Keep looking outside myself. More things for Ngoraich to learn about my family. He was specializing in Venus, but my talk of asteroids was still like candy to him. His eyes went wide when I told him how the Phoeng secreted a substance that let them integrate x-ray-proof minerals while they snuggled in stony cribs. Cold stone and sticky acid. A body forced to change. Ngoraich dreaded her next step of development, ripped from me to be inserted with her sisters into a nook in the wall of Stickney Crater. But she’d crawl from it whole and grown. She’d blink her sapphire-domed eyes at the red ceiling that was Mars, where humans lived their fragile lives in sapphire domes of their own. She wanted to be there living the same kind of life I used to live. She wanted me to stay with my family as long as possible so she could understand them and absorb a life she could never live.

This was the way of the Phoeng. They soaked up wisdom everywhere they went, though usually not so directly. Their long memories spoke of attempts to use other species as I was allowing myself to be used. The Phoeng’s body chemistry was adaptable for this very reason. But without the love I felt, their larvae withered away and took their hosts with them.

My existence encouraged the Phoeng. They spoke of taking in more humans, of actively recruiting among the Martian colonies. I warned that I was an oddity, and that their attempts at seduction might frighten humanity.

This was the way of the Phoeng. This is why they rejoiced in their divine mission which kept them moving ever onward.

“At least going to Mars means you finally got rid of those hideous piercings,” Mother said. “Will the holes close up on their own?”

I frowned and rubbed the row of five holes on my eyebrow. I hadn’t gotten rid of them—just taken them out for the visit because otherwise, everyone would give me a hard time about it. I still had all my tattoos, too, though my long sleeves hid them. I’d only added to them on Mars. They were my early attempts at shaping my own identity. Quietly, I clicked the bones in my throat and ignored the question.

We visited the mausoleum after Easter mass, which Ngoraich adored. She loved the smells and the music and the pressure of being crammed elbow to elbow in the pews. She liked the mausoleum, too. It was cold and stony, similar to the halls of Phobos, but different. There was no marble and bronze on Phobos. She was getting the impression that this was where humans stored their memories.

My father’s tomb was covered in old CDs from his collection. The labels were turned inward, revealing only a surface of rainbow mirrors. I ran my fingers over their scratched surfaces. I used to dance, all alone, to those CDs when I was just a kid, keeping to myself in the basement. I’d never been very good at making friends. Sometimes, Dad would hear and come down to teach me about the music.

So many things I worried about giving Ngoraich. My nail biting, my tendency to interrupt, my self-hatred at abandoning my own species. But this moment right now—the echoes of grief and relief at my father’s hard death at the hands of cancer on the heels of Early Onset Alzheimers—was exactly what I wanted the Phoeng to preserve for me and my species.

Maybe I wasn’t betraying my species at all; maybe I was giving them a way to be remembered.

Most of my family had been at the funeral, but even so, someone passed around a flask of whiskey and started an impromptu memorial.

Mother touched my wrist. She wore the same coat I saw when she picked me up; her mask with grinning skulls hung around her neck. After fumbling in her pocket, she pulled out some wrinkled index cards.

“Derek,” she said. “I wanted to bring you here to read you something. I suppose I should just say it, but there was so much . . . I didn’t want to forget.” She flipped through the cards.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just wrote down so much. I didn’t know what would be best to speak of. He did so much.”

Aunt Lyra handed her the whiskey, and she took a swig before talking.

“Your father was so proud of you,” she said. “I told him it was horrible, you leaving us and then to return only rarely. But he changed my mind. It took a long time, but after years of him watching the feeds, going into the backyard every night and pointing to the sky, to the spot where, even though he couldn’t see you, he knew you were living a life that none of us would get to lead. That knowledge seemed to cut through his Alzheimer’s . . . . His joy infected me, and even though I still wish you’d call more, I understand why you can’t, and I’m proud of you too. That’s the sort of amazing man my husband was, that he could change even a bitter, overprotective mother like me.”

Ngoraich’s tongue was sharp against my lungs.

This was all about my father, of course, not me, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how they couldn’t know, they wouldn’t want to know. I could only think about myself, even though Ngoraich’s secretions ordered me to dwell on everyone here except me. And for the first time, I resented her.

Mother crumpled the little paper and rubbed her eyes.

“Let’s go have some pie,” she said.

When we got home, and the door seals hissed shut, and everyone’s masks but mine were tucked away in safe corners, over a dozen people related to me by blood and love settled in for sparkling cider and reminiscing. I sat in a corner where Ngoraich and I could watch. Didn’t feel much like talking right now, and everyone knew me well enough to know not to try. However I’d changed over my years in space, I’d always been aloof. How else could I survive years separated from everyone I loved? Even on Phobos, looking down at the sparkling lights of the colonies, so far down.

Several children charged around the house in a game of hide and seek, giggling and screeching as they ran. My sister Theresa curled up on the couch, her husband holding her hand. Their two oldest—girls aged ten and seven—set up a game of checkers on the table. How well did they know their grandfather? Was he a tragic, decaying figure in the corners of their memory, or had they actually been able to interact with him? He might have been the one to teach them checkers, like he’d taught me. Ngoraich wondered about checkers. She liked the image of red and black discs hopping across a colorful board. The feel of ridged plastic edges on young fingertips.

I sat beside the fireplace and an army of family photos. A half-dozen old-fashioned prints stood guard over the mantel beside a half-dozen digital frames, slowly rotating between images. One set was from the funeral. My father’s casket was engraved with the words of John Lennon, and, I was told, a single verse of the Bible. The thin, laser-carved words nearest the camera were from “I Am The Walrus.” What was the Bible verse? Father’s tendency towards a quiet faith betrayed nothing, and Mother refused to tell me. Her little revenge for my missing the funeral, I supposed.

Most of the other pictures were of the grandkids and shots of Mom waving before world landmarks. I picked up each one and internally told Ngoraich what it was. A shot of my dad holding a child made me freeze the rotation. He was young and blonde, with the spiky, messy hair that was popular back then. His walrus tattoo looked fresh and sharp on his forearm. I tapped for the caption. The baby was me. I’d probably seen the picture before, but never paid any attention to it, since I wasn’t interested in myself when I was just another generic baby.

But this time, I wasn’t interested in my young self, though I told Ngoraich that this was me back when I was like her. She mostly understood that humans and Phoeng were different things, and lived in different ways. But she didn’t know the specifics, even if she could grasp their importance. She wanted to know where my proboscis was, and why I didn’t have a twin somewhere.

Human babies were parasites of a different sort, I told her.

I started to feel the burn within my blood that meant time for a new nutrient pack. They were in my bag, lazily draped over my childhood dresser upstairs. Skirting the edge of the kitchen, I headed for the back hallway, carefully avoiding Aunt Lyra’s elbows, which jabbed in and out while she stirred a big bowl of vanilla pudding. A bowl of chopped strawberries—grown as always by Mom in the sealed rooftop greenhouse—awaited addition to the pudding.

The pantry door slammed open. Right into my face. I jerked back a step.

“Oh, Derek, are you all right?” someone asked.

My mask and eye implants protected my face; I was just a little shaken. One of my nieces stuck her head around the door, looking wide-eyed and mortified. And then I tried to take a breath and my throat burned. A broken filter hissed.

If I could hold my breath, would Ngoraich be able to filter my blood long enough to grab a fresh filter?

I wouldn’t find out. After only a few steps, I collapsed with my chest on fire.

“Oh my god!” Aunt Lyra knelt beside me. She was shouting for others. So many faces staring. Ngoraich screaming her chemical scream into my blood. Theresa asking if I was all right. The bones in my throat rasped as I answered.

“I can’t hear you,” she said, tearing off my mask.

Cold, poisonous air tickled the sweat edging my face.

“No! My bag, bring my bag.”

Barack darted off.

I gasped like a dying fish, my throat bones digging into soft, desperate flesh. The smell of turkey and apple pie and mother’s patchouli incense smothered me. Ngoraich’s chemicals kept me going for the eternity I spent on my back, my head on my sister’s lap. Barack appeared with my bag, and in moments, I found my new filter.

My heartbeat slowed as the familiar methane-tinted scent filled my sinuses. Instantly, Ngoraich detected that all was well and started pumping calm into my veins. My sister’s fingers still checked my pulse when I started twitching at the emotional soup my baby was forcing upon me. I fought against her and the hasty change she brought.

“What’s wrong with you?” Theresa asked.

My brain was being pulled in two directions at once.

“Don’t ever have children,” I muttered. “They mess with your head.”

Theresa laughed and gently shook my head between her hands. “I’ve already had kids, silly.”

“A bad immune system isn’t going to hurt you like that just did,” Mother said. She stood behind Barack, clutching his shoulder. He stared at me like I was an alien. I had a story in place, in case of this. A serious accident in the borehole. Major reconstructive surgery on my throat (hence, the scars) necessitated a special oxygen concentrator. I hadn’t wanted to worry them (hence, the silence).

But instead I told the truth: “I’m becoming an alien,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“What are you talking about?” Theresa said. “An alien?” She touched my throat scars and felt the lumps that were harder than any adam’s apple should be.

“I can still be here,” I said. “I can still be human. I just wanted to be closer to the others who I love, too.”

I told them about the modifications.

I told them about Ngoraich.

“That thing’s going to kill you, isn’t it?” said Barack, shoving me hard enough that I almost rolled out of Theresa’s lap. “That’s why you finally came home, for one last goodbye before you killed yourself for the sake of the freakiest body mod you could think of?”

“No!” I raised myself up on my elbows. “She won’t kill me. Space life was going to shorten my life anyway.”

“He’s already dead to me,” said Mother. Everyone stared at her.

“You have no idea how happy I was that you came home,” she said. “And on Easter, even!” She pulled off her big cocktail ring and rubbed her eyes. “When you decided to go to Mars long term,” she said. “I knew I’d never see you again. I thought about what I might have done to drive you away. I thought about what I might do to bring you home. I told myself I’d even do one of those awful suspensions you do. Hang myself by my wrists from the kitchen lights to show I loved you. Now, it’s obvious that it was your father you were running from. Well, that’s understandable—” She couldn’t keep the bitterness from her voice. “But that doesn’t change the fact that years ago, I said goodbye in my heart forever.”

“Mom! I’m not gone!” I’d never seen her like this. She looked like a wilted flower, her hand draped limply over her knee, her big onyx ring dangling from her grasp. She looked at me with empty eyes.

“Mom, I promise I’ll call more often. I’ll need to! I need your help with this. You have to know what I’m doing. I’m helping the Phoeng understand us—”

“So they can conquer us!” said Barack.

“And don’t you want the one Phoeng who’s going to know our weaknesses to love us?” I said to him. “Mom, I’ve never raised a kid. She’s going to be more human than Phoeng in some ways, and I’m just one guy.” Ngoraich flicked her tongue querulously at this anxiety I was feeling for her. “Sometimes, she’s going to feel all alone. She’s going to need a family that’s bigger than just me and her parents. Even if it’s just over the skyscreen, you could teach her to play the piano, to paint. You can tell her all those stupid jokes Dad used to tell. You could be grandma to an alien.”

She laughed sharply.

“We should kill it right now,” Barack said. “Before it kills you.”

“Be quiet,” said Mom. “This is a living being we’re talking about.

“Is it safe for you?” Theresa asked.

The question implied my physical well-being, but I knew they were all wondering if I was crazy.

I shrugged. “It has been so far.” My life would be shortened, though. No changing that, even if they did manage to make me x-ray resistant. My family didn’t need to know that.

“I just want you to be safe,” Mother said. “I want you to be happy.”

I told them about Dina Lae and Kyru, and how they were so curious about me and generous. We’d learned a lot from each other. I didn’t mention our discovery that soft human hands could stimulate in ways no Phoeng could.

I showed them a photo of me and Ngoraich, the join tastefully hidden by my rock-dusted jumpsuit.

“You’ve got a granddaughter like no one else,” I said. “She’s right here and she likes you a lot.” Ngoraich crooned at the attention. She didn’t understand my underlying current of fear that someone might rip her from me and smash open her casing and throw her to the pollution-tainted ground.

“You’re sure this is safe?” Mother said, staring at the image.

“They’ve done this to other species,” I said.

“But not ours?” said Theresa.

“Just me,” I said. “I’m not afraid. I’m happy. Hey, it’s not like it says anything in the Bible about not marrying aliens.”

“I suspect Father Walker would have a few things to say about the temple of our body,” said Mother stiffly. But she slowly smiled as she looked at the photo, and then at Ngoraich’s battered casing, and asked:

“What’s her name?”

Liz Coleman lives in the Pacific Northwest and works in a very tall, hopefully earthquake-proof building. Her work has previously appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and she is a recent graduate of Viable Paradise.

Author Spotlight: Liz Coleman
by Erin Stocks

Many science fiction stories focus on the negative effects of two species meeting, but in “Join,” the Phoeng long to know and understand humanity. What was the inspiration behind that?

Well, Samuel Delany was the ultimate inspiration for this whole story. Bloodchild, by Octavia Butler, was also an inspiration. I’m fascinated by unorthodox sexuality and the changes we put ourselves through for our loved ones. So I wanted to write about a guy dating aliens, which leads to the question, “Why would aliens want to date a human?”

I’m also fascinated by collective identities: Family, subculture, society, species. I wanted a species that added to its collective, but not in a “We will assimilate you,” kind of way, so the Phoeng are an inquisitive species. If they weren’t, then their generations-long journey to the center of the galaxy would be tedious. The colony ships they live on don’t offer much variety, so they really live in their heads, among the memories of their ancestors. Bringing in fresh material from outside species is a joy—not to mention that they think they’re doing those species a favor by giving them a chance to exist forever in the minds of the Phoeng.

We see the appeal Derek holds for the Phoeng (and Ngoraich), but what intrigues him so much about them?

Derek is driven by his sense of alienation. He reasons that because he feels like an alien, he’ll find belonging among aliens. The Phoeng don’t care about any of the qualities he imagines make him strange or mediocre. The Phoeng treat him as something special, because among them, he genuinely is. He’s a little self-centered, and a large part of the story is that he needs to get over himself and accept that he’s not actually as much of an outsider as he feels.

The Phoeng are very religious, their colonization only a stop along their journey to the Fountains of God. In addition to so many of their ways, do you think Derek has accepted their faith, too?

I think he has, or at least, he wants to. He’s constantly flirting with self-destruction. His love of body modification is part of his attempt to constantly reinvent himself, dancing through death and rebirth. I suspect that if actually faced with the choice to throw himself into a black hole, he’d pause, but he likes the idea of it, that everything we love can be preserved and ultimately converted into pure energy, and just possibly, a new universe.

Derek doesn’t say much about his relationship with his dad, but his mother suggests that he stayed away so long because of his father. If that was the case, would Derek would have come all the way back to Earth if it weren’t for Ngoraich?

I think he would. By returning, he’s hoping to resolve his guilt over leaving his family behind. I suspect that any problems he had with his dad were a convenient excuse for him, while the real reason he left was more complicated. It was just easier to blame his dad, rather than accept the fact that he has trouble relating to his fellow humans.

What do you think ultimately wins Derek’s mother over? That Ngoraich needs her?

I don’t think it was ever going to take much to win over Derek’s mother. Derek just thought otherwise. If he had been up front about Ngoraich, his mother would have expressed mild shock, concern for his health, and then gotten on with life. She accepts Derek no matter what, it’s only Derek who has trouble accepting himself. She’d love Ngoraich because Derek does, and because she’s an open-minded, inquisitive person herself who’d realize it was pretty cool being the only lady on Earth with a telepathic bug for a grandchild.

Lightspeed assistant editor Erin Stocks’s fiction can be found in the Coeur de Lion anthology Anywhere but Earth (upcoming), Flash Fiction Online, the Hadley Rille anthology Destination: Future, and the Absent Willow Review. When she’s not writing, she’s reading for her SFF writing group, and can be found on erinstocks.com.

Vulcanize, Wookify, and Alienate Yourself
Esther Inglis-Arkell

The alien creatures that populate the worlds of science fiction films draw people in because of their strangeness. Aliens represent singular ways to experience the world, from heat vision, to deep logic, to a bracing day of hunting commandos for sport. The allure of running out to see the alien is, by definition, its divergence with everyday life. It’s the ultimate escape.

People are always trying to bridge the gap between the alien and the human. Costumes, languages, philosophies, and whole conventions are constructed to bring the different worlds together. But if aliens were to step off the screen and into the real world, they’d see nothing more than crude imitations: papier-mâché and facial putty.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. The ever-advancing field of genetics sees the potential for the alien in the human, and the potential for bringing it out. So if, one day, these aliens did come to Earth, we might be able to meet them with exact copies.

Wookify Yourself

Most people, upon watching Star Wars, want to be Han Solo or Luke Skywalker, but there are a few who gravitate towards the subtler charms of bellowing, Life Day, and multiple gun belts. For them, it is Chewbacca the Wookiee who they wish to imitate. The two main characteristics that make a Wookiee different from a human are full body hair and extreme height. Both are accomplishable by medicine right now.

The earliest record of someone with hypertrichosis was in 1648. It’s a painting of Petrus Gonzales, who, above the starched collar of his robe, has a face entirely covered in hair. Hypertrichosis can cause hair to grow only on the face or in strange patterns on the face and body, and, in certain cases, entirely cover the face and body. Most of the time, it is congenital, but it may manifest in people at any age, under certain conditions. Drugs like phenytoin, cyclosporine, and minoxidil all cause different levels of hypertrichosis. It was initially thought that the drugs alone caused hypertrichosis, but it was found that certain head injuries caused it as well. With some study, scientists can isolate the exact changes in the brain, or the hormonal system, which causes such a condition, and can recreate it at will. 

As for height, the pituitary gland stimulates growth by releasing growth hormone. Although injecting growth hormone into adults is associated with growth in muscle mass (as well as a host of health problems) and nothing else, adolescents with a large amount of human growth hormone can grow extremely tall. Generally, the methods for stimulating the pituitary gland aren’t pretty—usually resulting in hormonal imbalance, injury, or a tumor. Eventually, though, there could be ways to stimulate the gland in a controlled manner, and thus it may become possible for any one of us to choose to be Wookie-sized.

Vulcanize and Get Klingy

Vulcans and Klingons are probably the most human-like of all alien species. They act as the main protagonist and antagonist of the long-running TV shows and well-established movie franchises of the Star Trek universe. To imitate them, most of what’s needed is an attitude adjustment. Klingons are prideful and aggressive. Vulcans are arrogant and logical. Imitating them is mostly a matter of attending a few creepy summer camps.

But there are some outward physical characteristics. First, there are pointed ears, a feature shared by both species. This is a simple matter of surgery. A vertical incision is made at the top of the ear, and the cartilage is sewn back together in a point. In some cases, the procedure isn’t even done by a doctor. A body-modification specialist can do it with topical anesthetic.

Harder to emulate are the ridges that grow on the forehead of the Klingons. It might be possible to purposely create something like them on a human, assuming they are made of bone. Bone spurs are fairly common growths that form on otherwise healthy bones. They usually occur when the bone tries to repair tears caused by constant rubbing or stress. Most people have some bone spurs without even knowing it. Unless they press against joints or ligaments, they don’t cause any pain. Enough rubbing, and some stretching and callusing of the skin on the head, and people might be able to get Klingon faces now.

Klingon and Vulcan anatomies do not only diverge from that of humans on the outside, though. Vulcans have a second eyelid, which protects them from too much light. Klingons have an entire second set of organs, which helps them heal otherwise catastrophic injuries. These organs are not within our capabilities to manufacture. However, if the Vulcans managed to peel up a human’s eyelids, and the Klingons ever got to inspect a human’s internal organs, the game would probably be up anyway. Continuing to fool them would be the least of the human’s problems.

Become Predatory

The Predator would be an easy alien to imitate, at least at first contact, since it is mostly covered in armor at all times. A cunning enough costumer could duplicate a Predator’s clothing, and even the long, hair-like strands that attach to their heads.

People who want to sense the world the way the Predator does and meet them on their own terms have to go further. Predators can see in the infrared spectrum. Predatory snakes like pit vipers have pits on their heads that detect infrared light. The pits are filled with nerves that connect to the snake’s sensory system and, when snakes have two or more pits, let them build a three dimensional view of the world. The exact mechanism of this system is not known, however, so humans are far away from having the ability to biologically implant it. Better to just add an infrared camera to the helmet that Predators wear.

Alienate

Xenomorphs (the aliens from the Alien franchise) are by far the most vicious of the science fiction creatures, and sadly the toughest acts to follow. With their elongated heads, their ultra-thin bodies, and their massive tails, it’s impossible to completely imitate them by any means currently known. The one advantage people have is that aliens come in many forms. Considering the fact that the movie only shows the forms that they take when they form in the host bodies of humans and dogs, it’s possible that they could look like almost anything. If humans can take on one or two characteristics of aliens, it’s possible that the aliens may consider them kin and leave them alone.

Superficially, the difference between Xenomorphs and humans is that Xenomorphs have a hard outer shell. Humans make their own version of these, to a limited degree. Keratin covers our fingers and toes in hard shells, and grows out of our heads in long strands. And although it doesn’t seem so, it’s present in skin as well. Tiny little keratin fragments are embedded throughout the skin, strengthening it. When rubbed enough, the filaments undergo a process called cornification. Keratin fragments group together into filaments, the filaments form tiny envelopes underneath the walls of the cell, and the nucleus and organelles of the cell disappear, and eventually the entire cell becomes a tough plate of keratin. This process happens anywhere the skin feels stress. It also happens in nail beds and in the follicles of hair. It happens in the cells that produce huge plates of baleen in whales. Humans have the potential to cover themselves in keratin and blend in well, if they find out how to stimulate that process in cells.

A tougher thing to imitate is the acid blood that is characteristic of the Xenomorphs. One of the challenges of killing a Xenomorph is negotiating a way to slice into it without getting sprayed with the caustic substance. Humans don’t have heavily acidic blood, but they do carry around acid of their own making. The cells that line the stomach, termed parietal cells, produce acid with a pH as low as one, that helps digest food. The stomach also produces bicarbonate, to bring up the pH of the acid, and cranks out mucus, which protects the stomach walls from getting dissolved. The acid is no substitute for blood, but if stomach-like pouches could be hidden under the skin—by manipulating existing cells or by implantation through surgery—humans could mimic the effects of acidic blood. These sacks could crank out acid while protecting themselves with mucus. Any cut in the skin would spray the attacker with acid. With a tough outer shell and an acidic interior waiting to melt the faces of an attacker, humans could be as feared as the Xenomorphs themselves.

Not a bad transformation for what should just be fleshy prey.

Na’vision

Perhaps the most sought-after alien forms—in terms of imitation anyway—are the Na’vi. Avatar showed a culture of peace, freedom, and great physical joy springing up on Pandora. Strangely enough, these accepting creatures may be the hardest to join. Everything seems to be stacked against humans. For one thing, the Na’vi are blue. On Earth, there is no blue species of mammal and there is no blue pigment on the human body. Even blue eyes are the result of scattered light, not actual blue coloration.

There may be one way humans can imitate the Na’vi functionally. The Na’vi have long tendrils that travel from their head and connect to other creatures. Human nerves are puny in comparison, but there are some creatures that have famously huge nerves. Axons, the long strands of the nerves that carry information from one end of the nerve to the other, can be several feet in length, but human axons are tiny and fragile. The giant squid, however, has an axon like a strand of fishing line, about a thousand times wider than human axons. It’s currently being studied in hopes of finding ways to repair and rebuild axons of humans who have suffered spinal damage. If scientists find a way to build and strengthen nerves, they might be able to engineer nerves tough enough to be connections to the outside world. The Na’vi seem friendly enough. Perhaps they will cast aside ideas about appearance, and look more to emotional connection.

There are ways to rig the human body to experience new sensations with current technology, and there will probably be more to come. Unfortunately, even within one familiar species, two people rarely experience the same thing the same way. Bodies lock everyone into their personal point of view. Even the best technology can only give humans an approximation of the alien experience they so obviously crave. Perhaps groundbreaking fiction, and a vivid imagination, will always be the best anyone can hope for.

That, and acid pouches.

Esther Inglis-Arkell has a degree in physics from Dartmouth College. She’s a contributing editor at io9, where she writes science pieces about how to calculate the distance from the earth to the moon and why warm beer goes flat. When she wants to break free of physical reality, she writes criticism of superhero comics for Comics Alliance and 4thletter. She currently lives in San Francisco, and hopes the layers of fog can give her an aura of mystery. It isn’t easy.

Bubbles
David Brin

1.

On planets, they say, water always runs downhill . . . 

Serena had no way of knowing if it was true. She had never been on a planet. Not in her brief million or so year life so far. Nor had any of her acquaintances. The very idea was absurd.

Few Grand Voyageurs ever got to see a planet. Yet, among them, some ancient truisms were still told.

That which goes up must fall, and will . . . 

The clichés came out of a foggy past. Why question them? Why even care?

No matter how far down you fall, you can always go lower still . . . 

Stunned and still nearly senseless from her passage through the maelstrom, Serena numbly contemplated truths inherited through the aeons from distant times when her ancestors actually dwelled on tiny slivers of rock, close to the bright flames of burning stars.

She had had no inkling, when she tunneled away from Spiral Galaxy 998612a with a full cargo, that the ancient sayings would soon apply to her.

Or do they? she wondered. Was she perhaps as far down as one could possibly get? It seemed to Serena, right then, that there just wasn’t any lower to go.

Systems creaked and groaned as her instruments readapted to normal space-time. Serena still felt the heat of her passage through Kaluza space. That incandescent journey via the bowels of a singularity had raised her temperature dangerously near the fatal point.

Now, though, she realized that her radiators were spilling that excess heat into a coldness like none she ever knew before. Blackness stretched in all directions. Impossible. My sensors must be damaged, she hoped.

But the repair drones reported nothing wrong with her instruments.

Then why can I not see stars?

She increased the sensitivity of her opticals, increased it again, and at last began to discern patterns—motes of light—spread across the black vault.

Tiny, tiny, faraway spirals and fuzzy globes.

Galaxies.

Had she been an organism, Serena might have blinked, closing her eyes against dismay.

Only galaxies?

Serena had traveled deep space all her life. It was her mission—carrying commerce between far-flung islands of intelligence. She was used to black emptiness.

But not like this!

Galaxies, she thought. No stars, only galaxies, everywhere.

She knew galaxies, of course—island universes containing gas clouds and dust and vast myriads of stars, from millions to trillions each. Her job, after all, was to haul gifts from one spiral swirl to the next, or to and from great elliptical giants, galaxies so huge that it seemed extravagant of the universe to have made more than one.

She had spent a million years carrying cargo from one galaxy to another, and yet had never been outside of one before.

Outside! She quailed from the thought, staring at the multitude of foggy specks all around her. But there isn’t anything outside of galaxies!

Oh, she had long used distant ones for navigation, as stable points of reference, but nearly covered in a swarm of nearby stars in a great galactic disk, vast because it lay all around her, a bright, restless, noisy place filled with traffic and bustling civilizations.

She had always felt sorry for the members of those hot little cultures, so busy, so quick. They flashed through their tiny lives so briefly. They never got to see the great expanses, the vistas that she traveled. Their kind had made her kind, long ago. But that was so far in the past that few planet-dwellers any longer knew where the Grand Voyageurs had come from. They simply took Serena and her cousins for granted. Packing her holds with treasures to carry to the next culture, in a never-ending chain of paying-forward.

No, she had never been outside before. For traveling among the galaxies had never meant traveling between them.

Her job was to ply the deep ways at the hearts of those galactic swirls, where stars were packed so dense and tight that their light hardly had room to escape, where they whirled and danced quick pavanes, and occasionally collided in brilliant fury.

Sometimes the crowded stars combined. In the core of every galaxy there lay at least one great black hole, a gravitational well so deep that space itself warped and curled in tight geometries. And these singularities offered paths—from one galaxy to another.

The great nebulae were not linked at their edges, but at their hearts.

So how did I get here? Serena wondered. Here, so far from any galaxy at all?

Part of the answer, she knew, lay in her cargo bay. Pallet fourteen was a twisted ruin. Some violent event there had bruised her Kaluza fields, just at the most critical phase of diving into a singularity, when she had to tunnel from one loop of space-time to another.

In disgust she used several of her remote drones to pry apart the tortured container. The drones played light over a multicolored, spiny mass. Needlelike projections splayed in all directions, like rays of light frozen in midspray. The thing was quite beautiful. And it had certainly killed her.

Idiots! she cursed. Nobody had informed her that antimatter was part of her cargo. In Kaluza space, normal means for containing it were inadequate. She had thought even the most simpleminded quick-life cultures would know to take precautions.

She tried to think. To remember.

In that last galaxy there had been funny little creatures who twittered at her in languages so obscure that even her sophisticated linguistic programs could barely follow them. The beings had used no machines, she recalled, but instead flitted about their star-filled galactic core on the backs of great winged beast/craft made of protoplasm. A few of the living “ships” were so large that Serena had been able to see them unmagnified—as specks fluttering near her great bulk. It was the first time she recalled ever seeing life up close, without artificial aid.

Perhaps the creatures had not understood that machine intelligences like Serena had special needs. Perhaps they thought . . .

Serena had no idea what they thought. All she knew was that their cargo had exploded just as she was midway down the narrow Way between that galaxy and another, diving and swooping along paths of twisted space.

To lose power in a singularity. Serena wondered. It had happened to none of the Voyageurs she ever encountered. But sometimes Voyageurs disappeared. Perhaps this was what happened to the ones who vanished.

Galaxies.

Her attention kept drifting across the vault surrounding her. The brush strokes of light lay scattered almost evenly across the sky. It was unnerving to see so many galaxies, and no stars. No stars at all.

Plenty of stars, she corrected herself. But all of them smeared—in their billions—into those islands in the sky. None of the galaxies appeared to be appreciably above average in size, or appreciably closer than any other.

By this time her radiators had cooled far below the danger level. How could they not? It was as cold here as it ever could get. Enough light struck her to keep the temperature just near three degrees absolute. Some of that faint light came from the galaxies. The rest was long-wave radiation from space itself. It was smooth, isotropic. The slowly ebbing roar of the long-ago birth of everything.

Her remote drones reported in. Repairs had progressed. She could move, if she chose.

Great, she thought. Move where?

She experimented. Her drives thrummed. She felt action and reaction as pure laser light thrust from her tail. Her accelerometers swung.

That was it. There was no other way she could tell she was moving at all. There were no reference points, whose relationships would slowly shift as she swept past. The galaxies were too far away. Much, much too far away.

She tried to think of an adjective, some term from any of the many languages she knew, to convey just how far away they were. The truth of her situation was just sinking in.

Serena knew that a planet-bound creature, such as her distant ancestors, would have looked at her in amazement. She was herself nearly as large as some small planets.

If one of those world-evolved creatures were to find itself on her surface, equipped with the requirements to survive, it might move in its accustomed way—it had been called “walking,” she remembered—and spend its entire brief life span before traveling her length.

She tried to imagine how such creatures must have looked upon the spaces between their rocky little worlds, back in their early days. It was a millionfold increase in scale from the size of a planet to that of a solar system. The prospect must have been daunting.

Then, after they had laboriously conquered their home planetary system, how they must have quailed before the interstellar distances, yet another million times as great! To Serena they were routine, but how stunning those spaces must have seemed to her makers! How totally frustrating and unfathomable!

Now she understood how they must have felt.

Serena increased power to her drives. She clung to the feeling of acceleration, spitting light behind her, driving faster and faster. Her engines roared. For a time she lost herself in the passion of it, thrusting with all her might toward a speck of light chosen at random. She spent energy like a wastrel, pouring it out in a frantic need to move!

Agoraphobia was a terrible discovery to a Grand Voyageur. She howled at the black emptiness, at the distant, tantalizing pools of light. She blasted forth with the heat of her panic.

Galaxies! Any galaxy would do. Any one at all!

Blind to all but terror, she shot through space like a bolt of light . . .  but light was far too slow.

Sense took hold at last, or perhaps some deep-hidden wisdom circuit she had not even known of triggered in a futile reflex for self-preservation. Her drives shut down and Serena found herself coasting.

For a time she simply folded inward, closing off from the universe, huddling within a corner of her mind darker even than the surrounding night.

2.

Galaxies have their ages, their phases, just as living things do. Aim your telescope toward the farthest specks, motes so distant that their light is reddened with the stretching of the universe. The universal expansion makes their flight seem rapid. It also means that the light you see is very, very old.

These, then, are the youngest things you will ever see. Quasars and galaxies at the very earliest stages, when the black holes in their cores were hot, still gobbling stars by the hundreds, blaring forth great bursts of light and belching searing beams of accelerated particles.

Look closer. The galaxies you’ll see will be flying away from you less quickly, their light will be less reddened. And they will be older.

Pinwheel spirals turn, looking like fried eggs made of a hundred billion sparks. In their centers the black holes are now calmer. All the easy prey have been consumed, and now only a few stars fall into their maws, from time to time. The raging has diminished enough to let life grow in the slowly rotating hinterlands.

Spiral arms show where clots of gas and giant molecular clouds concentrate in shock waves, like spume and spindrift gathering on a windswept verge. Here new stars are born. The largest of these sweep through their short lives and explode, filling nearby space with heavy elements, fertilizing the fields of life.

Barred spirals, irregulars, ellipticals . . .  there are other styles of galaxies, as well, sprayed like dandelion seeds across the firmament.

But not randomly. No. Not randomly at all.

3.

Slowly, Serena came back to her senses. She felt a distant amusement.

Dandelion seeds?

Somehow her similes had taken on a style so archaic . . .  perhaps it was a form of defensive reaction. Her memory banks drew forth an image of puffballs bending before a gusty wind, then scattering sparkling specks forth . . . 

Fair enough, she thought of the comparison.

All sense of motion was lost, although she knew she had undergone immense acceleration. The galaxies lay all around her. Apparently unchanged.

She looked again on the universe. Peered at one quadrant of the sky, then another.

Perhaps they aren’t scattered as smoothly as I’d thought.

She contemplated for some time. Then decided.

Fortunately, her cargo wasn’t anybody’s property, per se. Gifts. That was what the Grand Voyageurs like her carried. No civilization could think of “trade” between galaxies. Even using the singularities, there was no way to send anything in expectation of payment.

No. The hot, quick, short-lived cultures took whatever Grand Voyageurs like Serena brought, and then loaded her down with presents to take to the next stop. Nobody ever told a Voyageur where to go. Serena and her cousins traveled wherever whim took them.

So she wasn’t really stealing when she started dismantling her cargo section, pulling forth whatever she found and adapting the treasures for her own purposes.

The observatory took only fifty years to build.

4.

Strings.

Bubbles.

The galaxies were not evenly distributed through expanding space. The “universe” was full of holes.

In fact, most of it was emptiness. Light shimmered at the edges of yawning cavities, like flickers on the surface of a soap bubble. The galaxies and clusters of galaxies lay strung at the fringes of monstrous cavities.

While she performed her careful survey, cataloging and measuring every mote her instruments could find, Serena also sought through her records, through the ancient archives carried by every Grand Voyageur.

She found that she had not been the first to discover this.

The galaxies were linked with one another—via Kaluza space—through the black holes at their centers. A Grand Voyageur traveled those ways, and so never got far enough outside the great spirals to see them in this perspective.

Now, though, Serena thought she understood.

There wasn’t just one Big Bang, at the beginning of time, she realized. It was more complicated than that.

The original kernel had divided early on, and then divided again and again. The universe had many centers of expansion, and it was at the intersecting shock waves of those explosions that matter had condensed, roiled, and formed into galaxies and stars.

So I am at the bottom, she realized.

Somehow, when the explosion sent her tumbling in Kaluza space, she had slipped off the rails. She had fallen. Fallen nearly all the way to the center of one of the great explosions.

One could fall no farther.

The calculations were clear on something else, as well. Even should she accelerate with everything she had, and get so close to light-speed that relativistic time foreshortened, she would still never make it even to the nearest galaxy.

Such emptiness, she contemplated. Why, even the cosmic rays were faint here. And those sleeting nuclei were only passing through. It was rare for Serena to detect even an atom of hydrogen as a neighbor.

It is better, far,

to light a candle,

Than to curse the darkness.

For a time it was only the soft melancholy of ancient poetry that saved Serena from the one-way solace of despair.

5.

To the very center, then.

Why not? Serena wondered.

According to her calculations, she was much, much closer to the center of the great bubble than to any of the sprayed galaxies at its distant rim.

Indeed. Why not? It would be something to do.

She found she only had to modify her velocity a little. She had already been heading roughly that way by accident, from that first panicked outburst.

She passed the time reading works from a million poets, from a million noble races. She created subpersonae—little separate personalities, which could argue with each other, discussing the relative merits of so many planet-bound points of view. It helped to pass the time.

Soon, after only a few thousand years, it was time to decelerate, or she would simply streak past the center, with no time even to contemplate the bottom, the navel of creation.

Serena used much of her reserve killing the last of her velocity, relative to the bubble of galaxies. All around her the red shifts were the same, constant. All the galaxies seemed to recede away at the same rate.

So. Here I am.

She coasted, and realized that she had just completed the last task of any relevance she could ever aspire to. There were no more options. No other deeds that could be done.

“Hello?”

Irritably, Serena wiped her conversation banks, clearing away the subpersonae that had helped her while away the last few centuries. She did not want those little artificial voices disturbing her as she contemplated the manner of bringing about her own end.

I wonder how big a flash I’ll make, she thought. Is it even remotely possible that anyone back in the inhabited universe might see it, even if they were looking this way with the best instruments?

She caressed the fields in her engines, and knew she had the will to do what must be done.

“Hello? Has somebody come?”

Serena sent angry surges through her lingula systems. Stop it.

Suicide would come none too soon. I must be going crazy, she subvocalized, and some of her agony slipped out into space around her.

“Yes, many feel that way when they arrive here.”

Quakes of surprise made Serena tremble. The voice had come from outside!

“Who . . .  who are you?” she gasped.

“I am the one who waits, the one who collects and greets,” the voice replied. And then, after some hesitation:

“I am the coward.”

6.

Joy sparkled and burst from Serena. She shouted, though the only one in the universe to hear her was near enough to touch. She cried aloud.

“There is a way!”

The coward was larger than Serena. He drifted nearby, looking like nothing so much as a great assemblage of junk from every and any civilization imaginable. He had already explained that the bits and pieces had been contributed by countless stranded entities before her. By now he was approaching the mass of a small star and had to hold the pieces apart with webs of frozen field lines.

The coward seemed disturbed by Serena’s enthusiasm.

“But I’ve already explained to you, it isn’t a way!It is death!”

Serena could not make clear to the thing that she had already been ready to die. “That remains to be seen. All I know is that you have told me there is a way out of this place, and that many have arrived here before me and taken that route away from here.”

“I tell you it is a funnel into hell!”

“So a black hole seems, to planet-dwellers, but we Grand Voyageurs dive into them and traverse the tortured lanes of Kaluza space—”

“And I have told you that this is not a black hole! And what lies within this opening is not Kaluza space, but a door into madness and destruction!”

Serena found that she pitied the poor thing. She could not imagine choosing, as it obviously had, to sit here at the center of nothingness for all eternity, an eternity broken every few million years by the arrival of one more stranded voyager. Apparently every one of Serena’s predecessors had ignored the poor thing’s advice, given him what they had to spare, and then eagerly taken that escape offered, no matter how hazardous.

“Show it to me, please,” she asked politely.

The coward sighed and turned to lead the way.

7.

It has long been hypothesized that there was more than one episode of creation.

The discovery that the universe of galaxies is distributed like soap bubbles, each expanding from its own center, was the great confirmation that the Big Bang, at least, had not been undivided.

But the ideas went beyond that.

What if, they had wondered, even in ancient days, what if there are other universes altogether?

She and Coward traded data files while they moved leisurely toward the hole at the very center of All. Serena was in no hurry, now that she had a destination again. She savored the vast store of knowledge Coward had accumulated.

Her own Grand Voyageurs were not the first, it seemed, to have cruised the great wormholes between the galaxies. There were others, some greater, who had nevertheless found themselves for whatever reason shipwrecked here at the base of everything.

And all of them, no doubt, had contemplated the dizzying emptiness that lay before them now.

A steady stream of very strange particles emanated from a twisted shapelessness. Rarities, such as magnetic monopoles, swept past Serena more thickly than she ever would have imagined possible. Here they were more common than atoms.

“As I said, it leads to another place, where the fundamentals of our universe do not hold. We can tell very little from this side, only that, charge, mass, gravity,all have different meanings. Tell me, then, what hope does a creature of our universe have of surviving there? Will your circuits conduct? Will your junctions quantum-jump properly? Will your laser drives even function if electrons aren’t allowed to occupy the same energy state?”

For a moment the coward’s fear infected Serena. The closer she approached, the more eerie and dangerous this undertaking seemed.

“And nobody has ever come back out again,” the coward whispered.

Serena shook herself out of her funk. Her situation remained the same. If this was nothing more than yet another way to suicide, at least it had the advantage of being interesting.

And who knows? Many of my predecessors were wiser than I, and they all chose this path, as well.

“I thank you for your friendship,” she told the coward. “I give you all of this spare mass, from my cargo, as a token of affection.”

Resignedly, the coward sent drone ships to pick up the baggage Serena shed. They cruised away into the blackness.

“What you see is only a small fraction of what I have accumulated,” he explained.

“How much?”

He gave her a number, and for a long moment there was only silence between them. Then the coward went on.

“Lately you castaways have been growing more and more common. I have hope that soon someone shall arrive who will leave me more than fragments.”

Serena pulsed to widen the gap between them. She began to feel a soft tug—something wholly unlike gravity, or any other force she had ever known.

“I wish you well,” she said.

The coward, too, began to back away. The other’s voice was chastened, somber. “So many others seem to find me pitiable, because I wait here, because I am not adventuresome.”

“I do believe you will find your own destiny,” she told him. She dared not say what she really thought, so she kept her words vague. “You will find greatness that surpasses that of even those much more bold in spirit,” she predicted.

Then, before the stunned ancient thing could reply, she turned and accelerated toward her destiny.

8.

On planets, they say, water always runs downhill . . . 

From the bottom, from as low as one could go in all the universe, Serena plunged downward into another place. Her shields thickened and her drives flexed. As ready as she would ever be, she dived into the strangeness ahead.

She thought about the irony of it all.

He calls himself Coward . . . she contemplated, and knew that it was unfair.

She, and all of those who had plunged this way, blindly into the unknowable, were the real cowards in a way. Oh, she could only speak for herself, but she guessed that their greatest motive was fear, fear of the long loneliness, the empty aeons without anything to do.

And all the while Coward accumulated mass: bits of space junk . . .  debris cast out from Kaluza space . . .  cargo jettisoned or donated by castaways who, like her, were only passing through . . . 

He had told Serena how much mass. And then he had told her that the rate of accumulation was slowly growing over the long epochs.

And with the mass, he accumulates knowledge. For Serena had opened her libraries to him, and found them absorbed more quickly than she would ever have thought possible. The same thing must have happened countless times before.

Already space had warped beyond recognition around her. Serena looked back and out at all the galaxies, distant motes of light now smeared into swirls of lambent glow.

Astronomers of every civilization puzzle over the question of the missing mass, Serena thought.

Calculations showed that there had to be more mass than could be counted by measuring the galaxies, and what could be detected of the gases in between. Even cosmic rays and neutrinos could not account for it. Half of the matter was simply missing.

Coward had told her. He was accumulating it. Here and there. Dark patches, clots, stuffed in field-stabilized clusters, scattered around the vast emptiness of the center of the great galactic bubble.

Perhaps I should have stayed and talked with him some more, Serena thought as the smeared light melded into a golden glory.

She might have told him. She might have said it. But with all of his brainpower, no doubt he had figured it out long ago and chose to hide the knowledge away from himself.

All that mass.

Someday the galaxies would die. No new stars would be born. The glow would fade. Life—even life crafted out of baryonic machines—would glimmer and go out.

But the recession of the dead whirlpools would slow. It would stop, reverse, and fall again, toward the great gravitational pull at the center of each bubble. And there universes would be born anew.

Serena saw the last glimmer of galactic light twinkle and disappear. She knew the real reason why she had chosen to take this gamble, to dive into this tunnel to an alien realm.

It was one thing to flee loneliness.

It was quite another thing to flee one who would be God.

No wonder all the others had made the same choice.

The walls of the tunnel converged. She plunged ahead. All around her was strangeness.

© 1987 by David Brin.

Originally published in The Universe, edited by Byron Preiss.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

David Brin is a scientist, technology speaker, and author. His 1989 ecological thriller, Earth, foreshadowed global warming, cyberwarfare and the world wide web. A 1998 movie, directed by Kevin Costner, was based on The Postman. His novels—including New York Times Bestsellers and winners of the Hugo and Nebula awards—have been translated into more than twenty languages. David appears frequently on History Channel shows such as The ARCHITECHS, The Universe and, most recently, Life After People. His doctoral research predicted today’s view of comets, as iceballs covered by insulating dust layers, and he has published extensively on the Search for Extraterrestrial life. Brin’s non-fiction book—The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Freedom and Privacy?—won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association.

Author Spotlight: David Brin
Stacey Friedberg

“Bubbles” was originally written in 1995. What inspired you to write this story?

Most of the universe is the regions between galaxies, yet no stories are ever set in that vast emptiness. I like a challenge.

What exactly are Grand Voyageurs? How did you come up with Serena in particular?

“Her job, after all, was to haul gifts from one spiral swirl to the next, or to and from great elliptical giants, galaxies so huge that it seemed extravagant of the universe to have made more than one.”

I liked the idea of starships so vast they would carry a million years worth of treasures from one galaxy to another, as “gift” because even passing through wormholes would be one-way, so every great civilization is constantly paying forward to the next one, never expecting “trade” in return.

Besides being an author, you are also a scientist, speaker, and consultant. What would you say your favorite occupation is? And how does wearing so many hats influence your writing?

Science influences my stories almost as much as my deep love of history—studying the poignant litany of human triumphs and blunders. My newest novel, Existence will (in 2012) explore the vast range of mistakes that might rob us of our future . . . and how we might navigate the minefield to get to the other side safely. Alas, this novel got delayed because a lot of people, companies, groups and agencies have been asking for my time. I have to cut down. And do what I do best.

The concept of the universe being gravitationally pulled towards its center and being born anew is not a new idea, but you take that even further in this story with your addition of The Coward and the passageway at the center. What are your thoughts on the eventual fate of the universe?

The long debate over the long-range fate of the universe is still unsettled. For a while the notion of a Cyclical Cosmos reigned . . . that eventually the Big Bang’s expansion would peter out and gravity would pull everything back into a Big Crunch. Frank Tipler’s The Physics of Immortality explores some amazing possible consequences. I played with that idea in “Bubbles.” At present, the pendulum is swinging toward a more “open” universe that may keep expanding forever. But the jury is still out.

At the end of the story, The Coward states, “I have hope that soon someone shall arrive who will leave me more than fragments.” What is he waiting for? And why is he so afraid to journey away from the center?

Sorry. Some things I leave for the reader to head-scratch about! The reasons are artistic. Puzzlement that hangs with you and makes you think.

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

I enjoyed the notion that the way to travel from one galaxy to another was not to leave it via its boundary at the spiral rim . . . but instead to dive into the central black hole and emerge in another. Fun concept! You go from one to another, never “leaving” galaxies. But it is the ironic pinch at the end that I truly was trying for. It is up to the reader whether I succeeded.

Stacey Friedberg is an editorial assistant at Penguin Books for Young Readers. She enjoys reading, writing, and cooking. You can follow her (very infrequent) tweets via @stacabird.

The Lonely Universe
Pamela L. Gay

The universe is evolving toward loneliness. In the first moments of our universe’s life, the matter and energy were so dense that not even light could travel more than an atom’s length before being absorbed into the willing heart of an atomic nucleus. Like a too-large family in a too-small house, every one of those nuclei was constantly bumping into another. But as the moments and the millennia have passed, the universe has expanded, and the space between the atoms has grown from microns to megaparsecs.

With this expansion, encounters have become much more rare and light can now travel unimpeded from one side of the universe to another. This expansion comes at a cost; in the distant future, the universe will grow to the point that any remaining life will stare out into emptier skies. All the other galaxy clusters will move beyond the visible horizon as the stars around us begin to one-by-one wink out.

A Magical Time

The moment in which we live is a somewhat magical time. The Universe is old enough that heavy elements—the iron in your blood, the calcium in your bones—have come to exist in sufficient amounts that life is possible. At the same time, the universe has evolved enough that galaxies are safe places. Deadly objects like quasars are few and far between. As we look out across the sky, we see our place in our solar system of eight planets, and we see our solar system’s place in this immense Milky Way galaxy. With telescopic eyes, we can reveal our home in the small “local group” of galaxies, and see how we are falling into the gravitational arms of the nearby Virgo Cluster. As we look and look across the heavens, we begin to see our place in a vast lace of galaxies and galaxy clusters that trace out the shape of space.

Had we been born earlier, ignoring the lack of elements needed to form our bones and blood, these structures wouldn’t have had time to achieve this beautiful structure, and we would have seen nothing more than a lumpy universe of still-coalescing forms. Had we come later, ignoring the slow blinking out of the stars, we would have found a structure stretched so much that only our small piece—the much merged future version of the Local Group and the Virgo Cluster we’re falling toward—would remain within the visible universe. All the other galaxies and clusters are being carried away by the expansion of space—a process that can ignore relativistic speed limits and cause the distance between objects to grow faster than light can travel. Someday the galaxy clusters will be so distant that their light will be unable to reach our galaxy and we will only see those things to which we are gravitationally bound.

An Isolated Time

The universe is evolving toward loneliness, but even today the vast distances of space mean that humanity, limited by our far-less-than-the-speed-of-light technology, is isolated on the Earth.

The immense distances of space are almost impossible for a human to grasp. In school we learn the Sun is eight light minutes away or about 150,000,000 kilometers distant. These are just large numbers, though, and we don’t really have a sense of them. If I say his large blue eyes are 4in (or 10cm) apart, depending on your culture, you can see what I see in your mind. Up to a few kilometers or miles, you can feel out the distance with your feet. But what does 150,000,000 km feel like to the lonely astronaut traveling on an interplanetary journey? The fastest interplanetary spacecraft built to date, New Horizons, is traveling toward Pluto at 58,536 kilometers per hour. This is the equivalent of traveling 2.3 times around the Earth’s circumference every hour! To this speedy spacecraft, 150,000,000 km is 107 days of travel; 107 days of nothing. Yes, one might encounter Venus. Yes, Mercury could be on the path from here to the Sun. Yes, maybe even an asteroid or comet could get in the way, but probably not. On any given day—on most given days—the path from us to the Sun is much more likely to be utterly empty.

The Sun is eight light minutes away. The next nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.243 light years farther off. The nearest large galaxy is 2.52 million light years away. The distance to the nearest cluster of galaxies is 59 million light years. And the distance to the current edge of the visible universe is 46 billion light years.

Our fastest spacecraft would take more than 1,820 years to get to Proxima Centauri.

What We Have and What We Dream

Space is vast, and, mostly, space is empty. Today we know of no way to burrow through the distances between here and some distant where without facing the speed of light limitations of relativity. There are those who hope we will learn to tunnel like an electron through space, expanding our wave functions out to collapse somewhere new in an instant. But no one knows where to begin the experiments that will get us to teleportation technology. There are those who dream of stable wormholes, but the math says no mass may enter these theoretical one-way tunnels to nowhere. There are those who speak of warping, folding, or otherwise employing a tesseract or Holzman effect to get the space here and there brought together for a moment so we can simply step across the vastness of space. But this is still just science fiction and finds no support in science fact.

We are limited by the human lifetime to our own solar system for now and mostly until the next bright new genius is born to change our scientific paradigm in the ways of Newton, and Plank, and Einstein.

So we sit here, alone on Earth, watching the Sun and the stars and the galaxies shine down. But in our isolation we can at least cherish the knowledge that we have that Sun, and those stars and distant galaxies shining there in our sky. Someday, those will all be gone and we will be alone on whatever remains of our terrestrial perch.

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 IceHunters.org.

Thief of Futures
D. Thomas Minton

Mr. Naajy Padwal, Mumbai business magnate and collector of eclectic futures, slides a rectangle of paper across the counter. He doesn’t remove his hand, the back of which is covered with coarse black hairs.

The smell of spiced tea and charcoal smoke hangs heavy in the humid air of Subang Jaya’s market.

Not certain anymore why I agreed to meet him, I start to turn from the chai wallah’s cart.

Mr. Padwal puts a hand on my arm.

“I’m retired,” I say.

“Retirement is a state of mind, not an incurable malady.” His accent betrays his Oxford education. When he speaks again, he lowers his voice, even though the portable privacy shield protects our meeting from prying ears and eyes. “I need you to obtain a future for me.”

Out of habit I look to see who is watching. Outside the privacy screen, Mr. Padwal’s two Sikh guards funnel the crowd away from our chai cart, no small feat in a city of sixteen million.

I settle back against the counter. “Why not Bautista?”

“Interpol has him at a black site somewhere in Africa.”

The news surprises me, but it doesn’t upset me. The world is a better place without him. “What about that new girl?”

“Jessica Cavendish? She’s not what I’m looking for.”

“What are you looking for?”

“Someone special. You.” He drains his cup of chai in a single swallow. “I know your circumstances, Mr. Kingston. How long can you survive scrubbing walls in a Trenchtown brothel? For a man who has stolen so many futures, you seem to have no future yourself.” He lets this painfully accurate assessment seize hold; then he says matter-of-factly, “Is this what you want for your daughter?”

“Leave her out of this.”

Mr. Padwal raises his hands in mock surrender. “I am sorry. I did not mean to offend.”

He lies. Years in business have made him a man of supreme calculation. Even knowing this, I find it hard to collect my thoughts because I know what he says is true. Kimbelle deserves better.

“With what I’m offering, a man could do anything.” Mr. Padwal shifts his weight. Over his left shoulder, the ISF launch facility glistens in the distance along the Puchang ridgeline like the spinal plates of a dragon. An orbital shuttle stands ready to launch that afternoon, taking lucky colonists to an orbiting ship bound for Echelon colony.

He pushes the paper closer to me and withdraws his hand. It’s an old-style cashier’s cheque with a very big number.

My mouth goes dry. At the height of my career, even a high-end job wouldn’t have fetched half the sum Mr. Padwal is offering. For a fee like this, he wants something exceptional. Given his reputation, that means something really exceptional.

He grins at me, and my spine tingles. Like any successful businessman, Mr. Padwal knows he has me where he wants me. He produces a finger cache. “The details,” he says, putting the thumbnail-sized data unit on the counter. “Like my offer, that advance is good for twenty-four hours.”

He snaps the shield generator closed. The market crashes in on us like the Red Sea. Flanked by his guards, Mr. Padwal vanishes into the flood of flesh and sweat and noise.

I stare at the finger cache, trying to decide if I should walk away, but a tightness in my throat tells me what I already know. I can never walk away, not as long as I am Earthside.

Trenchtown sits at the bottom of the Klang Valley in a haze of smoke and dampness thick enough to turn the sunlight the color of cockroach wings. Levees to the south hold back the steadily rising sea but can’t stop the water from seeping up through the ground. Even on a good day, the streets are a pig wallow of trash and shit.

Two million people squat in Trenchtown. Like me, they have come to Kuala Lumpur hoping to win a lucky seat on one of the ISF’s monthly colony ships. For those without money, the only ticket comes through the indenture-service lottery, but a hundred seats a flight means the odds are long.

I rent two rooms on the ground floor of a decaying two-floor walkup. I step over the sandbags and slip inside. Kimbelle and Shayana, the Tamil girl from upstairs, are in the other room singing a nonsense song in Bahasa, the only language they share.

Where the mildew from the water line hasn’t obscured them, the walls are covered with Kimbelle’s stick figures and smiley face suns. She’s a five-year old master, and her dancing girls, butterflies, and trees give life to this otherwise dreary box. One day, I hope she will be an artist, but I’ll take anything, as long as she has a future.

I pull the cashier’s cheque from my pocket. Fifty million rupees are enough to get Kimbelle out this place, but the money isn’t free, and I’m not sure I can pay the price. My chest tightens. As a father, I should be willing to do anything for my daughter, but it’s hard when I’ve already lost one person I love.

From under the futon, I remove a watertight box. My hands tremble as I fumble with the lock and clasp.

You would think a future has no value, except to the person who owns it. All our futures, however, are intertwined. My future is as much Kimbelle’s as it is mine. Stealing one future has far reaching repercussions.

The lock clicks open, but I don’t lift the lid. I don’t know why I torture myself. I should throw the box away, but I can’t.

Bao thought I worked as an acquisitions manager for a transnational aerospace firm, acquiring electrical components for off-world shipment. It was the only secret I ever kept from her because I’m sure she would have left me had she ever found out.

I think it would have been better if she had known.

I take a deep breath and open the box.

Inside is a picture of Bao. She sits in the arcade near the Bethesda fountain in New York’s Central Park. I remember that day like it is today. I had snapped the picture quickly, catching her glowing face before she had a chance to mar the perfect moment with a plastic, picture smile. She had just told me she was finally pregnant after years of trying.

Under the crinkled photograph, the pieces of a blown-glass globe are smoky and dark, covered with a dull black film that seems to absorb the light.

They’re all I have left of Bao.

I snap Mr. Padwal’s finger cache into the BIOSlot at the base of my palm. It hums as it draws power from my flowing blood. In my hand appears a holographic dossier of a woman named Sulee Hendricks, a widowed American of Chinese descent, who rents a flat in Subang Jaya, the once affluent suburb of Kuala Lumpur that now sits just above Trenchtown. While she waits for her lucky number to be drawn, she earns enough to survive by chopping cows at an industrial slaughter-factory.

When I come to a series of holographic portraits, I am struck breathless. While Sulee wears her hair pulled back into a tight bun firmly cemented to the back of her head, she shares the same round face and delicate nose as Bao. I spend many minutes staring at the images before a queasiness grips me.

For men like Naajy Padwal, collecting futures is like stealing priceless art to hang for their own edification in an underground gallery. Some collectors believe that possessing a future of great promise will exert a positive force on their own futures, but that reeks too much of Chinese mysticism for me. Others simply admire them for their physical beauty, and I must admit, an exceptional future glowing pink or electric blue in its blown-glass sphere is spellbinding.

But a future is not a painting. A person without a future is nothing more than a body unable to move forward in time. It simply exists in a comatose-like state, as long as food and water are provided. If the future is returned, the body will recover; otherwise, it slowly dies.

It’s for this reason I have never worked for a collector. Instead I ransomed stolen futures back to loved ones. A dirty business, true, but my conscience could reconcile it.

I sit quietly on the futon, my mind a jumble. I take several deep breaths and continue to read. It isn’t until I get near the end of the dossier that I realize Mr. Padwal doesn’t covet Sulee’s future, but rather her five-year old son’s.

The dossier shakes in my hand, and if it hadn’t been a hologram, I would have dropped it. I remove the finger cache and drop it on the table. My pulse races painfully in my neck.

I have never stolen a child’s future, not even to ransom. The thought makes my stomach twist into knots. I can’t do this.

The singing in the back room stops. The door swings open and Kimbelle and Shayana rush in. They skid to a stop when they see me on the futon.

“Mista?” Shayana says, surprised. It’s the only English word I’ve ever heard her say. She’s a good kid, and I know she’s safe. For a handful of coins, she watches Kimbelle anytime I need her.

Kimbelle’s long black hair hangs in a braid over her right shoulder. Between her delicate eyebrows is a smudged crimson bindi.

She looks so much like Bao it hurts.

“Daddy!” She leaps into my arms, and I hug her until she struggles to get away. I will do anything to make her safe.

I cash Mr. Padwal’s advance and set to work. Every night Sulee travels by a circuitous route past curry carts shrouded in films of ghee and grease, and tarp-covered stalls from which women with missing teeth hawk meager piles of rice or fish or bananas. At dawn she stumbles home and is barely able to turn the key in the lock. During the day she stays shuttered inside. I never see the boy. The only evidence he exists is the presence of an old Malay woman who arrives minutes before Sulee leaves and departs soon after she returns.

After a week, I am left wondering if I can even do this job. Stealing a future is not like pinching a purse—not just any rascal with fast feet and a set of cojones can do it. Only a handful people have the innate talent, and of these, few have the necessary moral flexibility.

Before I can take a future, I must sufficiently attune myself to my target’s spatial-temporal trajectory. This means getting close, literally and figuratively. Only then can I take the threads that are their future life. I need to spend time with the boy—lots of it—and the only way to do that is to get close to Sulee.

I finally get my opportunity when she digs into her bag to pay for a bundle of rambutan and a head scarf drops unnoticed to the ground. I retrieve it and push through the crowd calling to her in Bahasa. She does not hear me over the market din, so I grab her elbow.

She spins and sweeps my legs from under me with her foot. I land with a crack. The air explodes from my lungs.

“What do you want?” she says in Bahasa. Her foot presses painfully against my windpipe.

I can’t say anything, so I wave her scarf in surrender.

The pressure on my neck eases. She takes the scarf. “I’m sorry,” she says, kneeling next to me. Up close, she resembles Bao more than I expected. Although Sulee’s eyes are a lighter shade of brown, they have that same depth and complexity of color.

I rub my neck. “It fell out of your bag.”

Sulee studies the ground. “These are dangerous times. You shouldn’t grab people.” After a moment of awkward silence, she says, “Can I repay you with a chai?”

By the time we wend our way through the market, Sulee is late for work. She offers to buy me a chai anyway.

“Maybe tomorrow?”

She smiles demurely. “Tomorrow then, Mister . . . ”

“Eshram.”

She turns into the crowd and before she is swept away, I pray she will look back. She doesn’t, and I feel like I have been robbed.

The chai wallah grins at me and motions hopefully to his pot of steaming tea. I wave him off and head back toward Trenchtown.

I remind myself that she isn’t Bao, but that doesn’t fill the hole.

I turn onto the road down the hillside. Even at this hour bicycles weave through throngs of sari-clad women armed with bamboo switches to fend off the gangs of sticky-fingered children. The night air is thick, and I labor to force it into my lungs. It is like breathing water.

Near the toe of the hill, I get an odd sensation that I am being watched. In the shadows ahead, a dark silhouette sits on the side of the road. As I approach, it unfolds spindly legs, like those of a spider, and pushes its torso up effortlessly to an incredible height. The man is easily over two meters tall.

Mr. Oduya. It can be no one else.

We have history. He works for Interpol, hunting people like me.

He draws up on my right and matches my pace. His skin is as dark as the night, so his white cotton shirt seems to float in the blackness. For a full minute the Kenyan says nothing to me.

Finally, as we near the archway that marks the edge of Trenchtown, he says, “I hear you’ve come out of retirement.”

“That’s none of your business.”

“It is if it’s true.”

“Are you bored with Bautista already?”

Mr. Oduya’s grin floats like the Cheshire cat’s.

I wonder how long he has been shadowing me in Kuala Lumpur. I would think by now that he would have given up and gone after someone else, like the new girl, Cavendish. I suspect he doesn’t know about her yet.

“I like you, Eshram,” he says. “You have scruples, unlike the others, which is why I find it odd you’d work for Naajy Padwal.” I feel his eyes on me, watching for a reaction that will give something away.

As we reach the archway, Mr. Oduya stops me with a hand on my elbow. “Padwal is not a man to mess with. If you were to help us . . . .”

I pull my arm away and leave him, riding the flow of people into Trenchtown.

I fill Shayana’s hand with coins totaling just over a ringgit. She leaves with a wide grin, and I latch the door bar behind her. I check on Kimbelle. Her room is filled with acrid smoke from a smoldering mosquito coil. She sprawls across her bed in a position only a five-year old could find comfortable—arms akimbo and body twisted awkwardly at the waist.

Only after seeing her do I relax.

Other than the bed and a few toys purchased a year ago, the room is empty. With the upfront from Mr. Padwal, we could afford to move to the top of the hill, but we will need every rupee if we’re going to buy passage off-world. So the scattering of toddler toys will need to amuse her a little longer.

When I kiss her sweat-damp forehead, her eyes flutter, but never quite open. “Mommy?”

“No,” I say gently, unable to say more. I stroke her hair until she fades back into sleep. Reluctantly I close her door behind me.

The apartment is sweltering. Before I lay down, I sponge my face and chest with a damp rag. The water is precious—hand carried in a twenty liter bottle from a public fountain—but the heat is oppressive.

Outside a gunshot cracks the night. I don’t even flinch at the sound.

I lay on the futon, crushed by the weight of the darkness. When I close my eyes I see Bao’s face, not as it was when she eventually died, but as it was when we shared a future. My chest aches. I don’t know who took her future. I paid the ransom, nearly all of the money I had, but all I got back were broken pieces of glass and a shattered future of my own.

It hurts to admit, but that’s not what troubles me most. To steal her future, someone had to get close to Bao, and it eats at me to think that someone could get that close without me knowing it. If they could get Bao, they can get Kimbelle. The only way to protect her is to get as far away as possible from people like me.

I meet Sulee the next night. Instead of wearing her hair pulled back into a bun, she wears it down, softly framing her brown eyes. I can barely take my eyes off her. Twenty minutes later she rises. Her dress clings to her body. She has barely touched her chai because our conversation seldom broke long enough.

“Can we do this again?” My spirits drop when she frowns. She is going to say no.

“I have a son,” she says, haltingly. “If you’re not okay with that, I understand.”

I pause for a minute, pretending to contemplate her revelation. “That doesn’t scare me.”

The tension drains from her body. As it does, my spirits rise.

She shoulders her bag. “Tomorrow.”

As I watch her leave, I notice Mr. Oduya’s head poking above the crowd. He leans against the post of a fruit stall sucking at a mango pit. He nods at me.

I see Sulee regularly after that. We meet almost nightly in the market. At first for only twenty-minutes, but as we increasingly find the time too short, she comes earlier and earlier. Tea becomes dinners of nasi goreng or spiced beef.

I tell her my fabricated history. Like any good lie, I have assembled it from bits of truth, to make it seamless and easy to remember. I find it difficult to lie to her. Gradually she reciprocates with stories about her childhood, her dead husband, and most importantly her son.

Every night after I kiss Kimbelle’s forehead, I meticulously transcribe our conversations into a paper notebook. The act of writing reinforces even the smallest details.

 Some nights I see Mr. Oduya’s head rising above the market crowd. I try to ignore him, but my eyes are drawn to him, and I am afraid Sulee will notice. I don’t want uncomfortable questions. Even when I don’t see him, I sense him nearby, like an unspoken threat.

Any day now, I fear she will invite me in to meet her son. I become irritable and contemplate ending it. How can I take her child from her? I wonder, but then I look at Kimbelle, thin and fragile, lost in the slums of Trenchtown, and I think, how can I not?

The next time I see her, Sulee suggests I come to her apartment the following night. I can barely accept the invitation around the lump in my throat. Before she leaves, she whispers in my ear, “I hope you will stay.” She pecks me on the cheek and disappears into the crowd before I can answer.

I wander in a daze to the end of the market and sit on a low, stone wall trying to breathe. Mr. Oduya comes up to me, his hands thrust into his pockets. “Do you think this is his dance of destruction or reincarnation?” he asks, his gaze over the top of my head.

Behind me is a statue of Shiva, his four arms waving gracefully and his right foot raised in dance.

“Aren’t they the same?”

Mr. Oduya shrugs. “I am not Hindu.”

In no mood for his games, I walk away, but with his long strides, he catches me easily. “You have gotten close with this Sulee woman, yet you do not take her future. I am confused.”

“I’m not going to take her future.”

“I’ve already figured that out. What would Naajy Padwal want with her? She is . . .  unremarkable.”

The word stings me. Sulee is no less special than Bao, and someone took her future. “Do you have something to say?”

“If it is not Sulee,” he says, as if musing to himself, “then it must be someone close to her.” A confused look slides across Mr. Oduya’s face. After a second of contemplation, his eyes widen. “The boy?”

My stride breaks. I try to recover quickly, but Mr. Oduya notices.

“You’re after the boy. But you don’t steal from children, unless you’ve changed.”

My face flushes. I walk on, refusing to look at Mr. Oduya. People change.

He follows a step behind. “Help me catch him,” he says.

“Why should I do that?”

“Because it’s the right thing to do.”

I walk faster, but Mr. Oduya comes up along my side. I refuse to acknowledge his presence.

“Padwal does not have a reputation for collecting young futures,” he says. “They are risky, too much possibility for them to lose their luster.”

He falls quiet and waits to see if I will let something slip. I wish he would go to hell.

“Padwal has the reputation for working the long game. He is very patient.”

Mr. Oduya’s comment causes me to pause. What is this new game he’s playing? I learn nothing from the Kenyan’s blank expression.

“Piss off.” I storm on, tired of being talked at.

Mr. Oduya doesn’t follow, but he yells at me as I walk away, “Do what is right, Eshram. Think about your daughter.”

I bite back a retort. He plays me again, trying to goad me into saying something stupid.

As I walk down into Trenchtown, I can’t shake the surprise on Mr. Oduya’s face when he figured out Sulee’s son was the target. I had never stopped to question Mr. Padwal’s motivation, but Mr. Oduya is right. As a collector’s item, a child’s future is a boom or bust proposition. Initially it may look special, but any number of things could cause it to lose its luster as it matures. No collector would pay big money for a child’s future unless he was certain.

Something isn’t right, but I haven’t time to sort it out. I know someone who can, but his services aren’t cheap. With a curse I turn away from Trenchtown. I have no choice but to visit Hiruku.

I pay a hefty fee for a secure connection at a reputable VR conferencing facility in Petaling Jaya, a bustling business district north of Subang Jaya. When I transfer another one million yen to gain access to Hiruku’s location, I try not to do the math in my head. The implications are too painful.

With the attendant’s help, I don the VR neural net and lay down in the coffin-like module. She closes the lid and the equipment hums as it powers up. I close my eyes . . .

 . . .  and open them to birdsong and the clean smell of pine trees. Crouched in the mist ahead is a squat Japanese cottage with a clay-tile roof pulled like taffy into long overhanging eaves.

Inside Hiruku sits cross-legged on a cushion, eyes closed in meditation. He wears a black haori and the pleated hakamas of a fifteenth century samurai.

Without a word I sit on a cushion opposite him.

Eventually he opens his eyes.

Hiruku is a Yogen-sha, a seer capable of foretelling the quality of a person’s future. While he smiles at me from across the table, I don’t think he’s human. I think he may be an artificial intelligence that examines probabilities to extrapolate a likely future from a person’s past actions. However he does it, whatever he is, I’ve never found him to be wrong.

I hand him the finger cache. “I needed to know about the boy.”

“A child? Children are difficult and uncertain, usually not worth the fee.” Hiruku’s lips press into a thin line. After a moment, he exhales loudly and takes the finger cache. “This is not your child,” he says. “What is your interest?”

Even if I wanted to tell him, I’m not sure my mouth would form the words. “I paid for no questions asked.”

Hiruku sets the finger cache back on the table, and I return it to my pocket. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have a reading more worthy of your fee? Yours perhaps?”

I don’t want to know my future, because the only one I wanted is gone.

“A shame. I see special things.”

“I bet you say that to everyone.”

Hiruku shrugs non-committally. “All gold does not glitter. The boy, however, he is like any other. Special? Not at this time.”

I want to ask if he is sure, but I know it is a useless question. I can only assume Mr. Padwal has access to someone as good as Hiruku. “Could someone less skilled see anything different?”

“Only if he were incompetent.”

I have been lazy. Unlike my usual approach to work, this time I gathered none of the information on Sulee myself. It gave me a sense of distance, as if by doing so, the taint of it all would somehow be less. As I review the dossier again, I see how superficial it is. It points me toward an obvious plan of action. Exactly the one I took.

I stop at a pay terminal and access the datasphere. I begin with a search on Sulee’s name. Nothing. A search of the birth records in her hometown also comes up empty. I curse my stupidity. I can’t trust anything that Mr. Padwal has given me because Sulee is a carefully crafted invention.

Creating an alternate identity is difficult, especially one that must withstand the scrutiny of a close relationship. I know from experience—it’s the stock of my trade. Questions always arise that need details, and the easiest way to create details at a moment’s notice is to draw from something known. The best lies are built on the truth. Somewhere out there is a real person from which Sulee has been constructed. I need to find her.

I recall the many details of our conversations and pluck out the ones that could not be easily scripted ahead of time: the name of her college roommate, names of friends, her first job, places visited on vacation, and dozens of others. From this information I assemble my own profile of Sulee.

I then begin to search for this person. I haven’t done this type of research in over a year, but after a few failed attempts, I hit my stride. I delve into university records, search employment databases, visit genealogy websites, newsfeed archives, and advertising databases. After several hours, I find Sulee, except her name is not so exotic: Jennifer Costa, mother of three and owner of a NGO that specializes in building homes for the impoverished in the southeastern United States. She has all the pieces that come together to make Sulee’s life.

On an Atlanta newsfeed, I find a picture of Jennifer wielding over-sized scissors at a ribbon cutting for a new low-income housing project. She’s not Sulee—I never expected her to be—but she has the same eyes.

I dig for information on Ms. Costa. Her maiden name—Cavendish—puts a cold lump in my belly. “Can’t be,” I say, but my fingers shake as I run the lead to ground. A few minutes later, I have it.

I locate a picture of Jennifer with her mother, Jaiying, and her sister, Jessica. Her hair is different, but from her eyes I have no doubt that Jessica and Sulee are the same person.

“Shit.” Jessica Cavendish, the new girl who backfilled the void created by my retirement.

The boy isn’t Mr. Padwal’s target.

I am.

I stand outside Sulee’s apartment trying to decide if I should leave. I want to believe it could be that easy, but I know it isn’t. Mr. Padwal plays the long game, and I suspect I have been in his sights for at least a year. I know people are often poor judges of their own future—maybe my future holds more than I can see—but I can’t imagine why he would want to add it to his collection. Yet he does, and he won’t give up.

I take a deep breath; I’m surprised at the way my nerves vibrate.

When Sulee opens the door her smile looks genuine. I wonder if any of what we have shared was real. She is a professional, so I suspect everything has been an act—just as it has been for me, right?

Her expression changes quickly when I remove the blown-glass sphere from my pocket. Caught unaware, she turns to flee back into the apartment, but stumbles and falls. I sense her future coiled around her like the coarse fibers of a hemp rope, anchored to her in the here-and-now, but extending off into the what-could-be.

As I reach toward her, she looks up at me. In her eyes—brown and deep and so much like Bao’s—I see fear, white-rimmed and stark.

I wonder if Bao knew what was happening as her thief unspooled her future, and if she, like Sulee does now, looked up at her attacker and whispered, “Please . . . .”

My fingers hesitate. I know that I am taking more than Sulee’s future. I am taking the future of anyone who loves her. My hands grow weak. The strands scrape across the pads of my fingers, slipping away, fiber by fiber. I can’t do it. Yet I know I must, for Kimbelle.

Sulee can do nothing except watch as I wrap my fingers around the threads of her existence and yank violently, snapping them free. I slide to the side to avoid getting entangled in the loose ends that swirl around me, but as they brush close, the hairs on my arm stand up. Carefully I begin to feed the hours and days and years of her future into the glass ball. With each sweep of my hand, my throat constricts, and by the time I tuck the last threads into the sphere, I can barely breathe.

Sulee’s head lulls back against the floor. Her eyes, now shrouded and dull, stare out into nothing.

Mr. Padwal tries hard to hide his surprise when I place the glass ball on the counter. It starts to roll toward the edge. For a moment I think it’s going to drop, but then he stops it a hand’s-breadth from falling.

He forces a smile that is unpleasant to look at. He peers into the sphere’s smoky interior. It is gray and thick, almost oily. Nothing about it is remarkable. Certainly he already knows that. As he lowers the sphere, he looks nauseated. “The rest of the payment—”

“No need. I did it for Bao.”

In that split second, his expression confirms my suspicions. He removed Bao, because with her around, he would never have gotten anyone close enough to me to take my future. In the process, he cleverly took everything I had, leaving me desperate and rudderless. Taking my future should have been easy.

Surprisingly, I don’t feel anger. I feel an oppressive weight lift away.

“I—” Mr. Padwal’s face hardens. He has decided not to lie to me because he believes I cannot take his future.

“You are special, Mr. Kingston,” he says. “Resilient. A man that will overcome anything for those he loves. For one like you, the world is open. I should have known you wouldn’t end wallowing in Trenchtown shit.” His teeth bare in a predatory grin. Although he does not say it, he doesn’t consider this over.

But it is.

I step through the privacy screen, into the din and bustle of the market. A few strides into the crowd and I turn to watch as Mr. Oduya’s men descend on the chai wallah’s cart so quickly the Sikh guards don’t react. Mr. Padwal does not have the wherewithal to dispose of the sphere. The agents force him onto his belly.

Mr. Oduya falls in at my side, and I wonder if he is going to arrest me, regardless of our deal. He may be on the wrong side of the law, but he is still honorable.

I begin to walk toward Trenchtown and Kimbelle. I need to hold her.

“The boy is safe,” Mr. Oduya says. “We’re looking for his family.”

The news is welcome, but I say nothing.

Mr. Oduya keeps pace at my side. “Tell me something, Eshram,” he says. “Would you have taken the boy’s future?”

His question is one I don’t want to answer, but I must. If I don’t, it will devour me.

“That’s not a future I could live with,” I say. As I speak the words, I can taste bile in the back of my throat. Have I just traded Kimbelle for someone else’s child?

Mr. Oduya nods, as if satisfied with my answer. “Did you know there is a reward for information leading to the conviction of Naajy Padwal? If the charges stick, I’ll see you get it.”

I stop walking and Mr. Oduya’s momentum carries him several steps farther. “Why would you do that?” I ask.

He shrugs. “I like you, Eshram; didn’t you know that? You have scruples. The reward is enough to retire anywhere.” He arches a knowing eyebrow.

“Who says I ever came out of retirement?” I leave Mr. Oduya standing with his hands in his pockets. His smile tickles my spine.

The Subang Jaya market fades into the night as I careen down through the crowd into Trenchtown. I don’t stop to pay Shayana, but go straight into Kimbelle’s room and scoop her into my arms.

A rectangle of light streaming through the open door illuminates her innocent face. My racing heart slows to match her gentle breathing.

Mr. Padwal was right. My future is remarkable and it lies before me. We will not end down in the wallows of Trenchtown; our journey upward is just beginning.

Kimbelle stirs. Her eyes flutter open. “Daddy?”

I kiss her forehead. “I’m here,” I whisper. “I will always be here.”

When not pounding away on his keyboard, D. Thomas Minton moonlights as a marine biologist. He prefers to spend his days underwater, but at any given time, he can be found lounging on some tropical island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with his wife, daughter, and too many cats. His fiction—which has surprisingly little to do with the ocean—has appeared or is forthcoming in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Daily Science Fiction, and Dagan Books’ In Situ anthology. He scribbles idle ramblings at dthomasminton.com.

Author Spotlight: D. Thomas Minton
Robyn Lupo

The setting of the story appears to be dystopian. What prompted this narrative choice? Can you tell us a bit about your influences for this story?

When I started “Thief of Futures,” I didn’t set out to write a dystopian story. In fact, the first draft took place in New York City. This setting didn’t work, however, because I wanted Eshram’s condition at the beginning to be bleak. So I decided to move the setting to somewhere in Southeast Asia that had undergone significant climate change, sea level rise, and unchecked population growth. This provided the dark and exotic (at least by western standards) setting that I wanted.

 One of the primary influences for this story was a recent trip to Indonesia. While I experienced nothing like Trenchtown in my travels, the smells, sounds and sights of Indonesia permeate “Thief of Futures.” Reading the text still invokes memories of incense and rice offers left on village streets and the haunting voice of the mullah calling the faithful to the mosque for evening prayer. I hope I have captured some of the essence of that incredible place in my story.

There appears to be a theme of predators and prey in this story, as well as predators becoming prey. Was there something in particular that gave rise to this theme?

This theme rose organically out the story I wanted to tell. When I started “Thief of Futures,” I wanted to write a “last job” story, and what “last job” story would be complete without one or more twists, turns, and double-crosses? Also, what better challenge for Eshram to face? All his life he’s been the predator, so I found it interesting to explore how he would respond to suddenly being the prey.

It seems from Eshram’s perspective that Bao was targeted because of Eshram, which ties into your theme of betrayal. What do you find compelling about this theme?

Eshram believes Bao was targeted in order to get to him. Does it matter if it is true? That’s one of the most interesting things about betrayal and guilt. They are emotions that don’t need to be based in fact to be powerful and real—we only need to believe they are true.

 Betrayal is a complex and powerful emotion, because it results from the breaking of trust between individuals. You can really only truly betray people with whom you’ve established personal relationships. Betrayal is also a universal human condition. Everyone has been betrayed, and likely everyone has betrayed. As a writer, I find this compelling because there are so many potential nuances that can be explored.

Mr. Oduya says at one point that he likes Eshram because he has scruples in an immoral business, but it’s still an immoral business. Why do you think we tend to have sympathy for those who do immoral things but hold to some principles in doing so?

I’m an optimist, and I think people want to find good in others. People in immoral businesses who act with no boundaries are more monster than human, and I think that scares people. People with some moral code, however, retain a semblance of humanity, and think people embrace that. This makes it easier for us to see these individuals as humans doing the best they can in a bad situation.

Eshram’s development in this story suggests that not only does he have a future, but a remarkable one. Do you think there are any more stories involving this character?

Eshram undoubtedly has many stories, but at this time I have no plans to write them. I’ve never been fond of sequels. That said, Eshram is one of my favorite characters, so I’ll never say never.

Robyn Lupo has been known to frequent southwestern Ontario with her graduate student husband and elderly dog. She writes, reads, and plays video games. She is personal assistant to three cats.

Feature Interview: Lois McMaster Bujold
Jeff Lester

Lois McMaster Bujold is running out of things to win. She’s won the Hugo Award for best novel many times over. She’s won the Nebula Award twice, the Mythopoeic Award for adult novel, and three Locus Awards. She’s won the Edward E. Smith Memorial Award (Skylark Award), which is awarded to writers not only for their contributions to science fiction as a genre, but also for their embodiment of the qualities of “Doc” Smith that were admired by his family and friends. (This was a man who was described by Robert Heinlein as a “Superman,” so emulating him is no small feat.)

Though the proof is less tangible, Bujold has also managed to win the admiration of many fans. Some of this admiration has to be for endurance. When her first book, Shards of Honor, a story of love and interplanetary politics, did not get published immediately, she went on to write a novel about Miles Vorkosigan, the son of the two lovers in Shards of Honor. When that did not get published quickly enough, she wrote yet another book, set in the same universe. Her dedication paid off when Baen Books agreed to publish all three books after a look at the second one.

She applied the same perseverance to her attempts at the fantasy genre. After the first fantasy book she wrote, The Spirit Ring, didn’t make the splash she wanted, she took classes, came up with a new idea, and returned to the genre with The Curse of Chalion. This book, set in a fantasy kingdom where gods and mortals mingle, was a financial and critical success. The second fantasy novel she wrote, set in this series, was Paladin of Souls, which won her fourth Hugo and second Nebula. When it came to fantasy, Bujold went from educational experience to top of the heap over the course of three books.

But despite her success as a fantasy writer, science fiction and the Miles Vorkosigan series form her greatest body of work. Miles is the son of the most preeminent and heroic couple on Barrayer, his home planet. Although his aristocratic lineage should make his life easy, he suffers biological setbacks due to an attack on his mother while she was pregnant. His stunted growth and fragile bones make him an object of ridicule on his planet, so he leaves to explore the galaxy and make a living as a fighter, detective, smuggler, and whatever else he can manage to do with his keen intelligence and unwavering determination. The Vorkosigan Saga includes books that are space operas, books that are murder mysteries, books that dabble in romance, and one book that is, according to its subtitle, “A Comedy of Biology and Manners.” Miles has become one of the most beloved characters in science fiction—and an appropriate place to start the interview.

In an introduction, an interviewer once said he had never heard of anyone disliking the Miles Vorkosigan books, ever. Have you?

Sure. One has only to pop over to Amazon.com or the like and click on all the one and two-star reviews to find all sorts of opinions. Or cruise the Internet, or check out old reviews. Reader-response has always been all over the map.

Also, some people don’t [just] have issues, they have subscriptions, and it can be hard to recognize, on a single encounter, that this is the case. Gradually, I have learned to spot people who read through their own Special Filters, and at least partially sort out where their remarks are coming from. The general rule impressed upon newbie writers is: “Never respond to a negative review.” Writers aren’t made out of rubber, but it is a sound idea to pretend to be.

You’ve moved from being a new author to one of the most well-known writers in two different genres. Have people grown more diffident over the years? More demanding?

I have a new kind of readerly displeasure to deal with these days, though, which I think of as “being the victim of my own success,” in a way. These are the faithful readers who, in eager anticipation, build up an inner vision of the story they want my book to be, and are variously distressed when the book that finally arrives in their hands, the one that came out of my head, doesn’t match the one that came out of theirs. They write me helpful letters, detailing the plots of the books they think I should have written instead. (All different, of course.) As though I’d had some kind of mental lapse, and needed to be gently straightened out. Very well-meant and sincere, these.

Grant that I do have a brief desire to channel my mother, yelling back at her family in the kitchen at breakfast, “I’m not a short-order cook!” But I have so far managed to overcome the impulse.

In Miles Vorkosigan, you have created what may well be the richest, most-human character in speculative literature, one that grows with time. Do readers note his character progression? Is there any piece of his character that they enjoy most?

Miles is not a jigsaw puzzle. He is not pre-assembled; he grows through and by his actions, all of which combine to create him in turn, in a continuous feedback loop. Just like real people, that.

Miles changes all the time, over the course of his books; he can’t learn without growing and changing. And yes, readers notice.

And for the final Miles-related question: You’ve mentioned that you’ve felt that Miles dies at age fifty-seven. Is this something you still believe? And if so, are you any closer to the how and the where and the why of it?

I’ve also written: “The writer should always reserve the right to have a better idea.” Nothing that is not published is canon, and even some of that can be worked around with clever use of tight viewpoints.

All lives, pushed out far enough, come to the same end; comedy and tragedy both depend for their effects on selecting the story’s stopping-point

It’s an interesting problem, though, for writers of popular series. Should one throw one’s protagonist over the Reichenbach Falls, or let him fade gently into the sunset of the Sussex Downs, keeping bees? (Or both?) No matter which the writer chooses, someone will be unhappy about it. If one’s audience is large enough, it will collectively demand every possible closure, most mutually exclusive.

There comes a point when one really has to stop listening to one’s readers, however much one delights in them, and start listening to oneself.

While you eschew political agendas, you point out that every writer can’t help but write his or her worldview. To the extent that you write books to (among other things) discover that worldview, would you say there is one that’s remained consistent across all your books, and if so how would you describe it?

I suppose that underneath, my worldview is biological; that has certainly sustained itself across all the books and all the series. I believe most politics are driven by our biology, disguised; culture is the clothing we invent to hide our nakedness. Or, biology is to culture as hunger is to cuisine. It’s not necessarily better to study the mechanisms of blood glucose than it is to study cookbooks; one is an underlying universal and the other a flowering of detail, and a balanced life would want both.

But I want to grasp the underlying universals, which, if ever they are correctly understood, ought to be the master key to all cultures. Or: Ever since my human anatomy course back in college, anyone with their skin still on looks dressed to me.

In a WorldCon speech, you discussed reading Scott McCloud’s three books and having them change your view of the world. Are there any comics or webcomics you’ve read or read regularly?

At the moment, xkcd. That one regularly delights me, one way or another. No, I don’t get all of the math jokes.

Similarly, you’ve been asked about what anime you like. Is it something you still watch? If so, any recommendations? You usually mention that you watch a lot of nonfiction DVDs but not as many interviewers appear to have asked for recommendations on that front—do you have any?

I seem to have gone off anime, for the moment. These things always go in cycles for me.

Just saw a good non-fiction DVD last night, in fact, speaking about the intersection of biology and culture, Stress: Portrait of a Killer. Or, how are African baboon troops and British bureaucrats alike? In many more ways than one would think.

Back in 2008, ebook sales were “pizza money” for you. Has that changed by now?

In the past two years, with the rise of Kindle, Nook, and iPad, I believe it finally has. In one of my recent royalty reports, although my paper backlist books still sold twice as many copies as the ebooks, the ebook side generated about 20% more income (different royalty structures). A few years ago, units sold of paper-to-ebook would have been 10:1. So, yeah, big shift.

You’ve said that “to a large degree my worlds are created by the stories moving through them,” but I know you’ve also put a lot of thought into Chalionese theology. Do you feel more pressure to return to Chalion knowing there’s more you want to say?

I get letters every week asking for more of everything. (If I want to write anything new, I pretty much have to do it for myself.)

Chalion sits at the moment as an incomplete pattern, as the series wants to be five books, one for each of the five gods; but that’s not a story idea, that’s just a sense of imbalance. The driving characters and their stories have not yet presented themselves.

At what point does your brain send up enough material on the mental dumbwaiter that you figure you can make a meal with what you’ve got?

It varies from book to book. Sometimes a single line or thought has that plangent vibe (such as, “Miles and Ivan go to the Cetagandan State Funeral”—that alone was enough to make me start grinning—after that it was just q.s. ad lib); sometimes elements must be hitched together with other material to hit critical mass (as, Cazaril as an unnamed proto-character suddenly clumping together with 15th Century Spanish court history. In the shower. With the fortress of the Zange rising up radiant on its rock against scudding, cold, slate-blue clouds.)

What kind of preliminary work do you do when you think you have enough material to start a new novel?

In general, when a novel starts to cook, I’ll accumulate about fifty pages of hand-written notes before the opening scene of Chapter One comes glimmering up out of the fog. Although the novella “The Borders of Infinity” started with four pages of scribbled notes for something that refused to generate a novel, and were put away, only to pop up, suddenly remembered, when a project of the right length was offered.

I never know everything about a book when I start it—writing a novel would be a very boring proposition if that were so, without learning or surprises along the way. “Just enough to be going on with” will do.

In another Worldcon speech, you invited listeners to ask you later about your metaphor of genres as dog breeds. Dog breeds are generally meant to serve different functions for their human masters. What functions do you think the different genres serve?

Psychological needs, principally, different ones for different readers. Different sorts of mental and emotional satisfactions. Genres have been shaped, ultimately, by readers, with sales successes breeding imitation.

There is also the hazard, like dog breeds, that in the pressure of competition forms may become distorted toward an assumed ideal that loses sight of its original function, with what were once working breeds becoming unhealthy parodies of themselves.

This metaphor could likely be extended, but would soon become silly.

The first book you wrote, Shards of Honor, had a relationship evolve over the course of part of the novel—with the second part mostly about the hero’s will to get back to that relationship. Since then, you’ve written a long book series in which relationships evolve over volumes. Could you talk a little about the challenges and rewards of pacing the evolution of character changes in the short form and in the long form?

Well, obviously, one can do more complexity at longer lengths; series books, with sometimes years between the writings, have the benefit of longer or deeper or second thoughts, and also have the ability to implicitly or explicitly comment on what went before. For someone who thinks as slowly as I do, this has obvious benefits.

Rewards of the short form, hmm . . . Focus, I suppose. And getting to the end sooner . . .

Your latest book, CryoBurn, came out in 2010. In it, Miles goes investigates a cryogenics corporation that the dying go to freeze themselves, gambling that one day their illness will be curable. Could you tell us a little about the process of creating that novel?

I’d been thinking about doing something with the demographic and social-psychological implications of cryonics for at least a decade and a half before I came to grips with CryoBurn, due to knowing a reader who worked for Alcor. A lost Miles’s hallucinogenic encounter with a young street kid was sloshing around for years as an unwritten scene unattached to any further story. I had the book’s opening line, “Angels were falling all over the place,” hanging in air (well, jotted in a notebook) for some months before it slotted into its current position. The story’s last line had been sitting in my head for maybe fifteen or twenty years.

The long gestation period might have been just right: CryoBurn was a finalist for this year’s Hugo Award.

If we didn’t know better, we’d say she made it look too easy.

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

The Island of the Immortals
Ursula K. Le Guin

Somebody asked me if I’d heard that there were immortal people on the Yendian Plane, and somebody else told me that there were, so when I got there, I asked about them. The travel agent rather reluctantly showed me a place called the Island of the Immortals on her map. “You don’t want to go there,” she said.

“I don’t?”

“Well, it’s dangerous,” she said, looking at me as if she thought I was not the danger-loving type, in which she was entirely correct. She was a rather unpolished local agent, not an employee of the Interplanary Service. Yendi is not a popular destination. In many ways it’s so like our own plane that it seems hardly worth the trouble of visiting. There are differences, but they’re subtle.

“Why is it called the Island of the Immortals?”

“Because some of the people there are immortal.”

“They don’t die?” I asked, never quite sure of the accuracy of my translatomat.

“They don’t die,” she said indifferently. “Now, the Prinjo Archipelago is a lovely place for a restful fortnight.” Her pencil moved southward across the map of the Great Sea of Yendi. My gaze remained on the large, lonely Island of the Immortals. I pointed to it.

“Is there a hotel—there?”

“There are no tourist facilities. Just cabins for the diamond hunters.”

“There are diamond mines?”

“Probably,” she said. She had become dismissive.

“What makes it dangerous?”

“The flies.”

“Biting flies? Do they carry disease?”

“No.” She was downright sullen by now.

“I’d like to try it for a few days,” I said, as winningly as I could. “Just to find out if I’m brave. If I get scared, I’ll come right back. Give me an open flight back.”

“No airport.”

“Ah,” said I, more winningly than ever. “So how would I get there?”

“Ship,” she said, unwon. “Once a week.”

Nothing rouses an attitude like an attitude. “Fine!” I said.

At least, I thought as I left the travel agency, it won’t be anything like Laputa. I had read Gulliver’s Travels asa child, in a slightly abridged and probably greatly expurgated version. My memory of it was like all my childhood memories, immediate, broken, vivid—bits of bright particularity in a vast drift of oblivion. I remembered that Laputa floated in the air, so you had to use an airship to get to it. And really I remembered little else, except that the Laputans were immortal, and that I had liked it the least of Gulliver’s four Travels, deciding it was for grownups, a damning quality at the time. Did the Laputans have spots, moles, something like that, which distinguished them? And were they scholars? But they grew senile, and lived on and on in incontinent idiocy—or did I imagine that? There was something nasty about them, something like that, something for grown-ups.

But I was on Yendi, where Swift’s works are not in the library. I could not look it up. Instead, since I had a whole day before the ship sailed, I went to the library and looked up the Island of the Immortals.

The Central Library of Undund is a noble old building full of modem conveniences, including book-translatomats. I asked a librarian for assistance and he brought me Postwand’s Explorations, written about a hundred and sixty years earlier, from which I copied what follows. At the time Postwand wrote, the port city where I was staying, An Ria, had not been founded; the great wave of settlers from the east had not begun; the peoples of the coast were scattered tribes of shepherds and farmers. Postwand took a rather patronizing but intelligent interest in their stories.

“Among the legends of the peoples of the West Coast,” he writes, “one concerned a large island two or three days west from Undund Bay, where live the people who never die. All whom I asked about it were familiar with the reputation of the Island of the Immortals, and some even told me that members of their tribe had visited the place. Impressed with the unanimity of this tale, I determined to test its veracity. When at length Vong had finished making repairs to my boat, I sailed out of the Bay and due west over the Great Sea. A following wind favored my expedition.

“About noon on the fifth day, I raised the island. Low-lying, it appeared to be at least fifty miles long from north to south.

“In the region in which I first brought the boat close to the land, the shores were entirely salt marsh. It being low tide, and the weather unbearably sultry, the putrid smell of the mud kept us well away, until at length sighting sand beaches I sailed into a shallow bay and soon saw the roofs of a small town at the mouth of a creek. We tied up at a crude and decrepit jetty and with indescribable emotion, on my part at least, set foot on this isle reputed to hold the secret of ETERNAL LIFE.”

I think I shall abbreviate Postwand; he’s long-winded, and besides, he’s always sneering at Vong, who seems to do most of the work and have none of the indescribable emotions. So he and Vong trudged around the town, finding it all very shabby and nothing out of the way, except that there were dreadful swarms of flies. Everyone went about in gauze clothing from head to toe, and all the doors and windows had screens. Postwand assumed the flies would bite savagely, but found they didn’t; they were annoying, he says, but one scarcely felt their bites, which didn’t swell up or itch. He wondered if they carried some disease. He asked the islanders, who disclaimed all knowledge of disease, saying nobody ever got sick except mainlanders.

At this, Postwand got excited, naturally, and asked them if they ever died. “Of course,” they said.

He does not say what else they said, but one gathers they treated him as yet another idiot from the mainland asking stupid questions. He becomes quite testy, and makes comments on their backwardness, bad manners, and execrable cookery. After a disagreeable night in a hut of some kind, he explored inland for several miles, on foot since there was no other way to get about. In a tiny village near a marsh he saw a sight that was, in his words, “proof positive that the islanders’ claim of being free from disease was mere boastfulness, or something yet more sinister: for a more dreadful example of the ravages of udreba I have never seen, even in the wilds of Rotogo. The sex of the poor victim was indistinguishable; of the legs, nothing remained but stumps; the whole body was as if it had been melted in fire; only the hair, which was quite white, grew luxuriantly, long, tangled, and filthy—a crowning horror to this sad spectacle.”

I looked up udreba. It’s a disease the Yendians dread as we dread leprosy, which it resembles, though it is far more immediately dangerous; a single contact with saliva or any exudation can cause infection. There is no vaccine and no cure. Postwand was horrified to see children playing close by the udreb. He apparently lectured a woman of the village on hygiene, at which she took offense and lectured him back, telling him not to stare at people. She picked up the poor udreb “as if it were a child of five,” he says, and took it into her hut. She came out with a bowl full of something, muttering loudly. At this point Vong, with whom I sympathize, suggested that it was time to leave. “I acceded to my companion’s groundless apprehensions,” Postwand says. In fact, they sailed away that evening.

I can’t say that this account raised my enthusiasm for visiting the island. I sought some more modern information. My librarian had drifted off, the way Yendians always seemed to do. I didn’t know how to use the subject catalogues, or it was even more incomprehensibly organized than our electronic subject catalogues, or there was singularly little information concerning the Island of the Immortals in the library. All I found was a treatise on the Diamonds of Aya—a name sometimes given the island. The article was too technical for the translatomat. I couldn’t understand much except that apparently there were no mines; the diamonds did not occur deep in the earth but were to be found lying on the surface of it, as I think is the case in a southern African desert. As the island of Aya was forested and swampy, its diamonds were exposed by heavy rains or mudslides in the wet season. People went and wandered around looking for them. A big one turned up just often enough to keep people coming. The islanders apparently never joined in the search. In fact, some baffled diamond hunters claimed that the natives buried diamonds when they found them. If I understood the treatise, some that had been found were immense by our standards: they were described as shapeless lumps, usually black or dark, occasionally clear, and weighing up to five pounds. Nothing was said about cutting these huge stones, what they were used for, or their market price. Evidently the Yendi didn’t prize diamonds as we do. There was a lifeless, almost furtive tone to the treatise, as if it concerned something vaguely shameful.

Surely if the islanders actually knew anything about “the secret of ETERNAL LIFE,” there’d be a bit more about them, and it, in the library?

It was mere stubbornness, or reluctance to go back to the sullen travel agent and admit my mistake, that impelled me to the docks the next morning.

I cheered up no end when I saw my ship, a charming miniliner with about thirty pleasant staterooms. Its fortnightly round took it to several islands farther west than Aya. Its sister ship, stopping by on the homeward leg, would bring me back to the mainland at the end of my week. Or perhaps I would simply stay aboard and have a two-week cruise? That was fine with the ship’s staff. They were informal, even lackadaisical, about arrangements. I had the impression that low energy and a short attention span were quite common among Yendians. But my companions on the ship were undemanding, and the cold fish salads were excellent. I spent two days on the top deck watching sea-birds swoop, great red fish leap, and translucent vane-wings hover over the sea. We sighted Aya very early in the morning of the third day. At the mouth of the bay the smell of the marshes was truly discouraging; but a conversation with the ship’s captain had decided me to visit Aya after all, and I disembarked.

The captain, a man of sixty or so, had assured me that there were indeed immortals on the island. They were not born immortal, but contracted immortality from the bite of the island flies. It was, he thought, a virus. “You’ll want to take precautions,” he said. “It’s rare. I don’t think there’s been a new case in the last hundred years—longer, maybe. But you don’t want to take chances.”

After pondering awhile I inquired, as delicately as possible, though delicacy is hard to achieve on the translatomat, whether there weren’t people who wanted to escape death—people who came to the island hoping to be bitten by one of these lively flies. Was there a drawback I did not know about, some price too high to pay even for immortality?

The captain considered my question for a while. He was slow-spoken, unexcitable, verging on the lugubrious. “I think so,” he said. He looked at me. “You can judge,” he said. “After you’ve been there.”

He would say no more. A ship’s captain is a person who has that privilege.

The ship did not put into the bay, but was met out beyond the bar by a boat that took passengers ashore. The other passengers were still in their cabins. Nobody but the captain and a couple of sailors watched me (all rigged out head to foot in a suit of strong but gauzy mesh which I had rented from the ship) clamber down into the boat and wave goodbye. The captain nodded. One of the sailors waved. I was extremely frightened. It was no help at all that I didn’t know what I was frightened of.

Putting the captain and Postwand together, it sounded as if the price of immortality was the horrible disease, udreba. But I really had very little evidence, and my curiosity was intense. If a virus that made you immortal turned up in my country, vast sums of money would be poured into studying it, and if it had bad effects they’d alter it genetically to get rid of the bad effects, and the talk shows would yatter on about it, and news anchors would pontificate about it, and the Pope would do some pontificating too, and so would all the other holy men, and meanwhile the very rich would be cornering not only the market, but the supplies. And then the very rich would be even more different from you and me.

What I was really curious about was the fact that none of this had happened. The Yendians were apparently so uninterested in their chance to be immortal that there was scarcely anything about it in the library.

But I could see, as the boat drew close to the town, that the travel agent had been a bit disingenuous. There had been hotels here—big ones, six or eight stories. They were all visibly derelict, signs askew, windows boarded or blank.

The boatman, a shy young man, rather nice-looking as well as I could tell through my gauzy envelope, said, “Hunters’ lodge, ma’am?” into my translatomat. I nodded and he sailed us neatly to a small jetty at the north end of the docks. The waterfront too had seen better days. It was now sagging and forlorn, no ships, only a couple of trawlers or crabbers. I stepped up onto the dock, looking about nervously for flies; but there were none at the moment. I tipped the boatman a couple of radlo, and he was so grateful he took me up the street, a sad little street, to the diamond hunters’ lodge. It consisted of eight or nine decrepit cabins managed by a dispirited woman who, speaking slowly but without any commas or periods, said to take Number Four because the screens were the best ones breakfast at eight dinner at seven eighteen radlo and did I want a lunch packed a radlo fifty extra.

All the other cabins were unoccupied. The toilet had a little, internal, eternal leak, tink . . .  tink, which I could not find the source of. Dinner and breakfast arrived on trays, and were edible. The flies arrived with the heat of the day, plenty of them, but not the thick fearsome swarms I had expected. The screens kept them out, and the gauze suit kept them from biting. They were small, weak-looking, brownish flies.

That day and the next morning, walking about the town, the name of which I could not find written anywhere, I felt that the Yendian tendency to depression had bottomed out here, attained nadir. The islanders were a sad people. They were listless. They were lifeless. My mind turned up that word and stared at it.

I realized I’d waste my whole week just getting depressed if I didn’t rouse up my courage and ask some questions. I saw my young boatman fishing off the jetty and went to talk to him.

“Will you tell me about the immortals?” I asked him, after some halting amenities.

“Well, most people just walk around and look for them. In the woods,” he said.

“No, not the diamonds,” I said, checking the translatomat. “I’m not really very interested in diamonds.”

“Nobody much is any more,” he said. “There used to be a lot of tourists and diamond hunters. I guess they do something else now.”

“But I read in a book that there are people here who live very, very long lives—who actually don’t die.”

“Yes,” he said, placidly.

“Are there any immortal people in town? Do you know any of them?”

He checked his fishing line. “Well, no,” he said. “There was a new one, way back in my grandpa’s time, but it went to the mainland. It was a woman. I guess there’s an old one in the village.” He nodded toward the island. “Mother saw it once.”

“If you could, would you like to live a long time?”

“Sure!” he said, with as much enthusiasm as a Yendian is capable of. “You know.”

“But you don’t want to be immortal. You wear the fly-gauze.”

He nodded. He saw nothing to discuss in all this. He was fishing with gauze gloves, seeing the world through a mesh veil. That was life.

The storekeeper told me that you could walk to the village in a day and showed me the path. My dispirited landlady packed me a lunch. I set out next morning, attended at first by thin, persistent swarms of flies. It was a dull walk across a low, damp landscape, but the sun was mild and pleasant, and the flies finally gave up. To my surprise, I got to the village before I was even hungry for lunch. The islanders must walk slowly and seldom. It had to be the right village, though, because they spoke of only one, “the village,” again no name.

It was small and poor and sad: six or seven wooden huts, rather like izbas, stilted up a bit to keep them from the mud. Poultry, something like guinea fowl but mud-brown, scuttled about everywhere, making soft, raucous noises. A couple of children ran away and hid as I approached.

And there, propped up next to the village well, was the figure Postwand had described, just as he had described it—legless, sexless, the face almost featureless, blind, with skin like badly burned bread, and thick, matted, filthy white hair.

I stopped, appalled.

A woman came out of the hut to which the children had run. She came down the rickety steps and walked up to me. She gestured at my translatomat, and I automatically held it out to her so she could speak into it.

“You came to see the Immortal,” she said.

I nodded.

“Two radlo fifty,” she said.

I got out the money and handed it to her.

“Come this way,” she said. She was poorly dressed and not clean, but was a fine-looking woman, thirty-five or so, with unusual decisiveness and vigor in her voice and movements.

She led me straight to the well and stopped in front of the being propped up in a legless canvas fisherman’s chair next to it. I could not look at the face, nor the horribly maimed hand. The other arm ended in a black crust above the elbow. I looked away from that.

“You are looking at the Immortal of our village,” the woman said in the practiced singsong of the tour guide. “It has been with us for many many centuries. For over one thousand years it has belonged to the Roya family. In this family it is our duty and pride to look after the Immortal. Feeding hours are six in the morning and six in the evening. It lives on milk and barley broth. It has a good appetite and enjoys good health with no sicknesses. It does not have udreba. Its legs were lost when there was an earthquake one thousand years ago. It was also damaged by fire and other accidents before it came into the care of the Roya family. The legend of my family says that the Immortal was once a handsome young man who made his living for many lifetimes of normal people by hunting in the marshes. This was two or three thousand years ago, it is believed. The Immortal cannot hear what you say or see you, but is glad to accept your prayers for its wellbeing and any offerings for its support, as it is entirely dependent on the Roya family for food and shelter. Thank you very much. I will answer questions.”

After a while I said, “It can’t die.”

She shook her head. Her face was impassive; not unfeeling, but closed.

“You aren’t wearing gauze,” I said, suddenly realizing this. “The children weren’t. Aren’t you—”

She shook her head again. “Too much trouble,” she said, in a quiet, unofficial voice. “The children always tear the gauze. Anyhow, we don’t have many flies. And there’s only one.”

It was true that the flies seemed to have stayed behind, in the town and the heavily manicured fields near it.

“You mean there’s only one immortal at a time?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “There are others all around. In the ground. Sometimes people find them. Souvenirs. The really old ones. Ours is young, you know.” She looked at the Immortal with a weary but proprietary eye, the way a mother looks at an unpromising infant.

“The diamonds?” I said. “The diamonds are immortals?”

She nodded. “After a really long time,” she said. She looked away, across the marshy plain that surrounded the village, and then back at me. “A man came from the mainland, last year, a scientist. He said we ought to bury our Immortal. So it could turn to diamond, you know. But then he said it takes thousands of years to turn. All that time it would be starving and thirsty in the ground and nobody would look after it. It is wrong to bury a person alive. It is our family duty to look after it. And no tourists would come.”

It was my turn to nod. The ethics of this situation were beyond me. I accepted her choice.

“Would you like to feed it?” she asked, apparently liking something about me, for she smiled at me.

“No,” I said, and I have to admit that I burst into tears.

She came closer and patted my shoulder.

“It is very, very sad,” she said. She smiled again. “But the children like to feed it,” she said. “And the money helps.”

“Thank you for being so kind,” I said, wiping my eyes, and I gave her another five radlo, which she took gratefully. I turned around and walked back across the marshy plains to the town, where I waited four more days until the sister ship came by from the west, and the nice young man took me out in the boat, and I left the Island of the Immortals, and soon after that I left the Yendian Plane.

We are a carbon-based life form, as the scientists say, but how a human body could turn to diamond I do not know, unless through some spiritual factor, perhaps the result of genuinely endless suffering.

Perhaps “diamond” is only a name the Yendians give these lumps of ruin, a kind of euphemism.

I am still not certain what the woman in the village meant when she said, “There’s only one.” She was not referring to the immortals. She was explaining why she didn’t protect herself or her children from the flies, why she found the risk not worth the bother. It is possible that she meant that among the swarms of flies in the island marshes there is only one fly, one immortal fly, whose bite infects its victim with eternal life.

© 1998 by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Originally published in Amazing Stories.

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

Ursula K. Le Guin is the author of innumerable SF and fantasy classics, such as The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven, The Dispossessed, and A Wizard of Earthsea (and the others in the Earthsea Cycle). She has been named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, and is the winner of five Hugos, six Nebulas, two World Fantasy Awards, and twenty Locus Awards. She’s also a winner of the Newbery Medal, The National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, and was named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress.

Immortals That Show Us That Death Is The Best Option
Shaenon Garrity

Eternal life seems like the sweetest of sweet deals. You get to go everywhere, do everything, and collect stories you’ll be telling at parties for millennia. But before you sign up for immortality, be forewarned: It isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Even in the comparatively sweet world of fiction there are plenty of souls embittered by immortality. In the words of Queen, who wants to live forever? Not these folks. And here’s why.

It Can Get All Gross and Stuff

The things you have to go through to live forever make you wonder if it’s worth the effort. Vampirism is the most obvious example: Sure, you get eternal life plus super-powers (superhuman strength, turning into a bat, the currently popular Sunlight Sparkle), but you have to drink all that darn blood. In the Guillermo del Toro film Cronos, people achieve immortality through a device invented by a medieval alchemist—but they develop a vampiric need for fresh blood. In the 1960 B-movie The Leech Woman, a woman keeps herself young through a secret African formula of orchid pollen and pineal juice. She has to keep killing men for their pineal glands, which you can only do for so long before the cops get suspicious. Their version of immortality isn’t a long, sumptuous meal, but a hamster wheel, speeding ever faster but impossible to jump off of.

Immortality Doesn’t Equal Invulnerability

If you’re immortal, but your powers of healing remain normal, you can look forward to racking up unsightly injuries throughout eternity. The film Death Becomes Her pushes this to the extreme, with Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn walking off broken necks and shotgun blasts through the midriff. Ultimately, they realize that their immortal bodies will require constant maintenance just to stay in one piece. In the words of the two immortal murderesses, “Who could have imagined. You and me, together. Painting each other’s asses. Day and night. Forever.” Doesn’t sound like much fun.

But at least they don’t actively decompose. Remaining conscious in a rotting zombie body may be the most unappealing option of all. In H.P. Lovecraft’s 1928 story “Cool Air,” the undead Dr. Muñoz can live indefinitely as long as he manages to protect his body from decay; trouble arrives when his air conditioning goes out.

Even invulnerability can be a pain—literally. Take Wolverine of the X-Men. His “healing factor” allows him to regenerate from almost any injury and makes him effectively immortal. Which is exactly why the Weapon X project kidnapped him, peeled off his skin, and poured molten metal all over his bones. Pretty brutal for Canadians.

Finances Are a Headache

Most people assume that, given endless time, they can easily become millionaires. Just put a few bucks into an interest-bearing account, wait a couple of centuries, and you’ll have a fortune, right? Charles Forrester, the cryogenically preserved hero of Frederik Pohl’s novel The Age of the Pussyfoot, is delighted to learn that he’s accumulated a quarter of a million dollars while in deep freeze. Only after he’s spent most of it does he learn that, with inflation, $250,000 isn’t much money.

And you won’t even get to spend your pathetic hoard if people don’t believe you’re the same person who opened that bank account 200 years ago. In Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics, the immortal Hob Gadling has to periodically fake his own death and come back as his own heir.

With all the hassle, it’s tempting to just come out as immortal. It could be a sweet deal; you might get to go on talk shows and have paparazzi make up stories about you in Us Weekly. Or you could end up like Robert Heinlein’s eugenically-created Howard families, who are hunted down by their neighbors and the government when some of them decide to spill the beans. And they’re not even immortal, just ridiculously long-lived.

All Your Friends Are Dead . . .

One of the oft-cited problems of immortality is having to go to so many funerals. It’s a drag making friends when they’re just going to die on you. The elves in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, being naturally immortal, are generally sanguine about living forever, but even they get all emo about their dead mortal friends and lost loves.

Naturally, it’s even harder for people who weren’t born to immortality. If you live long enough, you could end up like the title character in L. Sprague de Camp’s story “The Gnarly Man,” an immortal Neanderthal who has outlived his entire species. “The main trouble is the shirts,” he tells a pair of scientists. “Just try to buy a shirt with a twenty neck and a twenty-nine sleeve.”

. . .Except Other Immortals, Who Are Jerks

No big deal, right? You’ll just socialize with other immortals. Unless, of course, you’re in a Highlander situation, and your fellow immortals are trying to kill each other because of some annoying prophecy which states “there can be only one.” Your mixers will never end well.

Maybe other immortals aren’t out to get you. Maybe they’re just jerks. Think of the legendary Flying Dutchman, a ship condemned to sail the seas until its captain finds true love. As Tom Holt’s novel Flying Dutch points out, this means that the crew has to spend eternity together, which gets old even if the Dutchmen don’t. Holt’s sailors have an additional problem: The alchemical potion that gave them immortality also makes them stink to high heaven, which is the real reason no port will allow them to dock.

Still not convinced? Chew on this: Steven Seagal—yes, the Steven Seagal—has joined the “Russia 2045” movement, dedicated to making Russia the center of immortality research, and recently petitioned Vladimir Putin to put more funding into finding the secret to immortality. So if you become immortal, expect to spend the next few thousand years hanging out with Steven Seagal and Vladimir Putin. Which might actually, come to think of it, be awesome.

There’s Nothing New on TV

Every immortal, sooner or later, faces the problem of filling yet another afternoon. In John Varley’s “Eight Worlds” stories, where everyone is functionally immortal, the most common cause of death is suicide from boredom. (Even with instant sex-change technology at their disposal!)

In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, who came by his immortality by being the unfortunate victim of a workplace accident, finds himself looping endlessly through time with nothing to do. “In the end it was Sunday afternoons that he couldn’t cope with, and that terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2:55 P.M. . . . as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o’clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.” Wowbagger decides to keep busy by embarking on a quest to insult everyone in the universe, proving once again that All Immortals Are Jerks.

Jorge Luis Borges’ story “The Immortal” introduces an entire city of immortals who have gotten so bored they no longer bother to move or speak. Even the great poet Homer, after thousands of years of life, has devolved into a caveman who sits like a rock all day. You think you’re better at entertaining yourself than Homer? Good luck.

Dating Is Awkward

It was kind of weird in high school when you were a senior and you took a freshman to the yearbook club’s wrap party. It’s really weird when you’re 400 years old and dating a twenty-something. Plus there’s the whole thing where your date ages and dies.

In the recent seasons of Doctor Who, that’s the explanation the Doctor has given for never getting steamy with his human Companions: mortal/immortal pairings just bring up too many nasty ethical questions. Yet despite his upright morality, the Doctor continues to pick Companions who mostly happen to be hot girls.

You could avoid these problems by dating only fellow immortals, but beware: Other Immortals Are Jerks, as previously discussed.

You Could Get Stuck at a Non-Fun Age

When you achieve immortality, be sure to specify eternal youth, not just eternal life. Shoot for the popular 18-35 range if possible. Jonathan Swift explored the crumminess of the alternative in Gulliver’s Travels. On the Island of Immortals, some people live forever but keep getting older, becoming helpless, senile, and as crabby as a person who’s had uncontrollable bowels for over 500 years can get.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you could get stuck as a permanent child. Ray Bradbury’s story “Hail and Farewell” presents the dilemma of an immortal who stops aging at 12. He finds a niche for himself as an eternal foster child to lonely couples, but is there any worse fate than going through early puberty forever? Claudia, the prepubescent vampire “daughter” in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, turns bitter and murderous as she realizes that she’s an intelligent, ambitious woman trapped permanently in the body of a little girl. Looking at the dresses they put on Kirsten Dunst in the movie, it’s hard to blame her.

Sometimes You Just Go Crazypants

Given all the time in the universe, will you eventually go nuts? Insanity is a common fate of vampires and other immortals who have to do horrible things just to stay alive. The RPG Vampire: The Masquerade includes an entire clan, the Malkavians, whose members are completely insane, and many of the other clans suffer from mental disorders.

In the DC Comics universe, the Lazarus Pits rejuvenate people at the cost of temporary insanity. This hasn’t stopped the Pits’ main client, supervillain Ra’s al Ghul, from using them to resurrect himself over and over. His arch-foe Batman would say that Ra’s is permanently mad from all the rejuvenations, but can you trust a psychiatric diagnosis from a man dressed as a giant bat?

Maybe the human mind just isn’t built to last forever. In “The Jaunt,” one of Stephen King’s creepiest short stories, scientists can’t figure out why the human subjects of their teleporter technology all come back insane—until they figure out that while the teleportation takes only seconds in our time, the time inside Jaunt-space stretches forever.

But don’t let the threat of eternal torment stop you. With a positive attitude and a sociopathic indifference to the fate of your merely-mortal loved ones, immortality can be fun. As Queen sings in “Princes of the Universe”: everyone wants to live forever.

That’s right: Queen contradicted itself. In the same album.

Shaenon K. Garrity is an award-winning cartoonist and scriptwriter best known for the online comics Narbonic andSkin Horse. Her writing appears in The Comics Journal, Otaku USA and Comixology.com, and her prose fiction has been published in Strange Horizons. She lives in Berkeley with her husband Andrew and their cat Tesla.

Coming Attractions

Coming up in October in Lightspeed, we have original fiction from “Arvies” author Adam-Troy Castro (“Her Husband’s Hands”) and bestselling author David Farland (“Against Eternity”), along with reprints by bestselling author Cassandra Clare (“Some Fortunate Future Day”) and Justina Robson (“The Little Bear”). 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!

Thanks for reading!