Editorial, October 2011
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue seventeen of Lightspeed!

Alas! Lightspeed did not win any Hugo Awards this year (we were 0-3), but it truly was an honor to be nominated. (And hey, we did get some frickin’ sweet rocket pins for being nominees.) Congratulations to Mary Robinette Kowal, Clarkesworld, and Sheila Williams for defeating us in each respective category, and congratulations to all of the other winners as well. And thanks again to everyone who nominated us and voted for us.

In other, better news: While we didn’t win any Hugos, Lightspeed did win a Parsec Award! Presented at Dragoncon over Labor Day weekend, the Parsec Awards—which honor excellence in genre podcasting—presented the award for Best Speculative Fiction Story (Short Form) to “Saying the Names” by Maggie Clark, from the March 2011 issue of Lightspeed. So congratulations to Maggie Clark, to the story’s narrator, Emily Janice Card, to our audio editor Stefan Rudnicki, and to everyone else on the Lightspeed podcasting team.

That’s all the news there is to report this month, but 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!).

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

We welcome back author Adam-Troy Castro, who brings us a story of complicated human relationships, in which the people involved have to question what it is exactly that makes us human in “Her Husband’s Hands.”

In the related nonfiction, Lauren Davis explains the ins-and-outs of organ transplantation in “The Care and Feeding of Your Disembodied Lungs.”

Justina Robson gives the story of a family separated—definitely in space, but also possibly in time—in “The Little Bear.”

Dr. Pamela Gay explains the coincidence of life and quantum mechanics in “The Physics of a Populated Universe.”

In “Against Eternity” author David Farland takes us through a far-future transformation in pursuit of immortality.

Jeff Hecht explores the possibilities and pitfalls of downloading yourself into a computer in his article “Saving Your Brain to a Disk.”

And in the last, but not least of our fiction offerings this month, we have, from Candlewick Press’s new Steampunk! Anthology, Cassandra Clare’s tale of a lonely girl and her clockwork dolls: “Some Fortunate Future Day.”

In our feature interview this month, Gwenda Bond talks with Beth Revis, author of Across the Universe, about writing YA and SF, and cryosleep and genetic-engineering.

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.

Her Husband’s Hands
Adam-Troy Castro

Her husband’s hands came home on a Friday. Rebecca had received word of the attack, which had claimed the lives of seven other soldiers in his unit and reduced three others to similar, minimal fractions of themselves: One man missing above the waist, another missing below, a third neatly halved, like a bisected man on display in an anatomy lab.

The Veteran’s Administration had told her it could have been worse. The notification officer had reminded her of Tatum, the neighbor’s daughter so completely expunged by her own moment under fire that only a strip of skin and muscle remained: A section of her thigh, about the size and shape of a cigarette pack, returned to her parents in a box and now living in their upstairs room, where it made a living proofreading articles on the internet. That’s no life, the notification officer said. But Bob, he pointed out, was a pair of perfect hands, amputated from the body at the wrists but still capable of accomplishing many great things. And there was always the cloning lottery. The chances were a couple of million to one, but it was something to hope for, and stranger things had happened.

Rebecca had asked her parents, and his, and the friends so anxious to see him, to stay away. It was a personal moment and she could not be sure that she would be able to take their solicitous platitudes. She waited at home wanting a cigarette as much as she’d ever wanted anything in her entire life and stared at the door until the knock came and the two smartly uniformed escorts brought what was left of her husband inside in a box with an American flag on it.

They opened the box and showed her Bob’s hands, resting side by side on a white pillow. The left one lay palm-down, the right one palm-up. The one that was palm-up twitched and waggled fingers at Rebecca when it saw her. The new light-sensitive apertures at the fingertips blinked many times in what she could only assume was excitement. The fingernails had been manicured and buffed to a high sheen. Rebecca’s eyes inevitably wandered to the wrists, which ended in thick silver bands, a lot like bracelets except for the flat bottoms where arms should have emerged. They, Rebecca knew, contained not just the life support—without which her husband’s hands would just be graying meat—but also his most recent memory backup, without which everything he had ever been, and everything he had ever done, would now be gone.

She had not supposed that a pair of hands could be personal enough to be recognized, but she did recognize them. There was a crooked angle to one of the pinkies where he had once broken it catching a baseball and it had not healed back precisely right. And there was a scar on one of the knuckles where he had once cut himself, almost to the bone, on broken glass. She knew those hands as the same ones that once could make her shiver, when they were at the end of strong and comforting arms.

The fingers wagged some more, and the escort told her that her husband wanted to talk to her. She said that she did not know what to do. The younger of the two escorts presented her with a flat black pad with slots for fingers, turned it on, and placed it in the box where Bob’s hands could get at it. As the text display came up, Bob’s hands turned around, inserted fingertips into the pad’s control slots and did . . . something, not exactly typing as she knew it from the familiar QWERTY keyboard but something very much like it, with subtle and practiced movements that over the next few seconds forced words and sentences onto the screen.

rebecca please don’t be afraid, her husband’s hands typed. i know this is strange & frightening but it’s still me. i can see you & i’m glad to be home. i love you. please i want you to kiss me

There were few things Rebecca wanted to do less right now, but she knew her husband’s hands would sense any further hesitation, and so she reached down and touched them. They disengaged from the black pad and let her pick them up, one hand in each of her own. They were as warm as she remembered, and heavier than she expected. A sick feeling rose in her throat as, driven by obligation, she gave each one a sweet kiss on the knuckles. Each one turned around in the hand that held it and twined its fingers through hers, a grip as tight and as complete as a hug would have been had fate decided to let him come home as a whole man.

One of the escorts said, “We’ll leave you two alone now.”

Rebecca couldn’t help thinking: What do you mean, you two? His hands are now two separate objects; don’t you mean, you three? Or, since they don’t add up to anything even close to the whole man, shouldn’t you be using fractions? Telling me, we’ll leave you one and a tenth alone now? Or whatever? She thought all this but did not say it, as they donned their caps and told her to call if she needed anything, and left her alone grasping what had once been part, but not all, of the husband who only four years before had struck her eighteen-year-old self, sitting across from him in a college seminar, as the most beautiful man she’d ever seen.

For a long time she sat with him—with them—in silence. Sometimes, as she closed her eyes and waited for the reassuring squeezes that were as close as he could come to conversation without the typepad, she could almost fool herself into thinking those hands were connected to wrists that were connected to arms that joined at shoulders with a chest and a beating heart and lips and eyes and a man who could lie beside her and arouse her passions as well as her pity.

After a while, his left hand gently disengaged from her right and climbed up to her shoulder, squeezing that as well before crab-crawling to her face and finding the tear-tracks on the side of her cheek. It froze at the discovery, and she could not help feeling that she’d failed him, that she’d proven herself shallow, that she’d hurt him or what was left of him at the moment he needed to know that she was still capable of loving him.

Some time later his hands withdrew to the table so they could talk to her about the problems they now faced. The left one turned over on its back so the light-apertures on the fingertips could see her face, and the right one went to the typepad and told her that he knew how she felt, that this wasn’t how he had envisioned their future either, and that if she gave him a chance he would still be the best husband to her that he possibly could. Her hesitation, her struggle to come up with words that would not be a mockery or a lie, spoke volumes, and may have broken whatever he now had for a heart. But after a long time she nodded, and it was a start.

He could not tell her anything about what had happened to him. The last backup before the attack that had destroyed the rest of him was only a week old, sparing him the memories of a hellish ordeal under fire, watching the rest of the unit fall away, one or two at a time, in pieces. He typed that he had at best an academic knowledge of what had been in that backup, as he said there were things even then that he chose not to remember, and had preferred to live the rest of his life arrested at an even earlier set of memories, recorded two months before that, and blessedly free of some experiences that would have crippled him even more than his current condition.

He typed that the war had been so terrible that he would have gotten rid of even more, had that been possible; there were certainly vets who backed up just as they were shipped out and came back as parts or wholes refusing to remember any of what they’d done, or had done to them, over there. Rather than recall a single day in-country they preferred to live a life where being strong and fit and whole and on a troop carrier getting their past coded into a database was followed, without so much as a single moment of transition, by being older and finished with their time and back, reduced to a sentient body part on a plate. But there’d been buddies, people in his unit, who had done things for him in that time during his hitch that he would never allow himself to forget, not even if he also had to remember visions out of hell. He typed that the little he could remember, he would never talk to her about.

After that, there was little to say; she made some lunch for herself and his hands sat on the table watching her eat, the palms held upward so the fingertips could see, giving the accidental but undeniable impression that they were being held upward in supplication.

Later, as the silence of the afternoon grew thick, the hands typed, i still enjoy watching you eat. It was something he had said before, as they’d circled each other performing the rituals that connect early attraction to couplehood; he had appreciated her meticulousness, the way she addressed a plate of food as much like a puzzle to be disassembled as a meal to savored. She did not respond that once upon a time she’d loved watching him eat as well, the sheer joy he’d taken in the foods he loved, the unabashed and unapologetic gusto with which he’d torn into meals that were not good for him. It was, she knew, a gusto he could never show anymore, and that she’d never witness, again: Another of life’s pleasures robbed from them, left on a bloody patch of dirt beneath a foreign sky. She could not help thinking of the all the meals to come, the breakfasts and lunches and dinners that for years unwritten would always be reminders of what had been and would never be again.

Conversation lagged. They watched television, the hands sitting on her lap or beside her on the couch showing pleasure or displeasure in the set’s offerings with mimed commentary that at one point, an angry response to an anchorman’s report on the war, included a silent, but vehement, middle finger. Rebecca answered some concerned phone calls from family and friends who wanted to know how the reunion was going, and told them that no, she and Bob were not ready to receive any visitors just yet. More hours of silence broken by intervals of halting conversation rendered necessarily brief by his limited skill at typing inevitably and to some extent horrifically led to dinner, where the discomfort of lunch was not only repeated but doubled by the awareness that all this was still only starting, that the silence of their meals would soon be a familiar ritual, for as long as the future still stretched.

There was only one sign of real trouble before bedtime. Bob’s wandering right hand encountered a framed photograph of himself in uniform, on an end table next to the sofa. Rebecca happened to be watching as his hand hesitated, tapping the glass with a fingertip as if somehow hoping to be allowed back into the image’s frozen moment of time. It looked like he knocked the photo over deliberately. She was almost a hundred percent sure.

That night she lay on her habitual side of the bed, the ceiling an empty white space offering no counsel. His right hand burrowed under the covers and settled at about waist level, while his left sat on his fresh pillow, preferring the sight of her to any warmth the blanket might have provided. When she turned off the lamp, the pinprick red lights of his left fingertips cast a scarlet glow over everything around them, making that pillowcase look a little like the aftermath of a hemorrhage. The fingers caught Rebecca looking at them and waggled; either a perversely jaunty hello, or a reminder from Bob that he could see her. She forced herself to lean over and kiss his palm, somehow fighting back an instinctive shudder when the fingers curled up to caress her cheeks.

Rebecca called Bob’s hand by his name and told it she loved him.

Under the covers, his right hand crawled toward her left and wrapped its fingers around hers. She had already held that hand for hours, on and off, and would have preferred freedom for her own, now. But what could she say, really, knowing that to reject the touch now, in this most intimate of their shared places, on the very day he’d returned to her, would have amounted to rejecting him? She had to give him something. She had to pretend, if nothing else. So she squeezed him back and whispered a few loving words that sounded like fiction to her own ears and let him hold her with one hand while the other watched with eyes like pinprick wounds.

She slept, and in her dreams, Bob’s hands had still returned to her, but without the nice sanitized bands that allowed them his memories and mind and hid the magnitude of the violence done to him behind polished silver. In her dreams his hands returned to her with the wounds ragged and raw, strips of torn and whitened skin trailing along behind them like tattered streamers. Each had a splintered and blackened wrist bone protruding from the amputation point, like a spear. The fingertips of these Bob remnants were blind and useless instruments, incapable of leading him anywhere except by touch; as they crawled across the polished kitchen floor in search of her, while she fought air as thick as Jell-O to stay just beyond their reach, they left a continuous gout of blood behind, more than mere hands could have possibly bled without becoming drained sacks of flesh. The kitchen became a frieze of twisted blood-trails, which only continued up her bare legs after the chase ended and she found herself standing as paralyzed as any dream-woman with her feet nailed to the floor, while the disembodied hands climbed her.

She might have screamed herself awake, but she couldn’t breathe in the dream, as the air around her was not an atmosphere a woman could breathe, but a thicker substance that refused to pass her lips, no matter how deeply her chest labored or her ears thundered or how desperately she struggled to draw anything capable of sustaining her into her lungs.

Then she woke up and knew it was not a dream. He was strangling her. His hands had tightened around her throat, the two thumbs joining at her windpipe while his coarse and powerful fingers curled around the curve of her neck to meet, as if in terrible summit, at the back. Even as a man with more than hands he had always possessed a strong grip, and the hands that were all that remained of him seemed to add the strength of his arms and back as well, all dedicated to the deadly impossible task of compressing her throat to nothingness.

A woman being strangled by a complete man might have died clawing at his chest or grasping for his face or even going for the hands themselves, which would have possessed the advantage of being anchored to arms and shoulders. Rebecca had nothing to fight but the hands, and they provided a focus for her resistance. She reached for the sharpened pencil she kept beside the book of crossword puzzles that had been her only companion since Bob went to fight that goddamned stupid war, and jabbed at the back of his hands until his skin broke and his grip went soft and the two little pieces of Bob fell away, freeing her to breathe again.

She might have screamed and continued to stab her husband’s hands until there was nothing left of them but torn flesh, but something in the way they now lay on the bed, ten glowing red lights staring up at her, halted her in a way that crazed or uncomprehending eyes might not have.

She flipped on her bedside lamp and regarded Bob’s murderous hands in the glare of harsh light.

All things have faces even when they don’t have faces; the human eye insists on putting faces on them. Even hands have faces, and expressions, that change depending on how the fingers are held in relation to the palm. Hands can look calm or agonized or desperate. They can look gentle and they can look brutish, sometimes while remaining the same hands. For no reason at all that made any sense to her, her husband’s hands looked lost. She didn’t understand, but she could sense that there was something she was failing to see, something she could almost see that was just outside of her field of vision.

Bob’s right hand mimed a typing motion.

She was reluctant to leave them alone long enough to get the typepad. She had read too many stories about people who turned their back on monsters. But they made the motion again, insistently. She went to the other room, returned to see that her husband’s hands remained where they had fallen, and, not trusting them to keep their distance, tossed the pad onto the bed.

He typed.

i am sorry so so sorry i would not hurt u for anything i was having a nightmare i have been having them for a while i didnt know it was you i was hurting pls understand pls forgive me pls

Rebecca was not ready to forgive him. “You could have killed me.”

i know. it was not the man you married but the man who lived through hell over there. when i know where i am im all right. maybe we cant sleep in the same bed for a while. please understand. please

She wanted to die. But after long minutes standing there feeling her fury churn inside her she went to her husband and told him it was all right, that she would set up another place for him in another room, and that they would sleep apart but see each other in the morning. She kissed him on the knuckles and went to make his new bed, a pillow stuffed into an unused drawer of a bureau in another room. He allowed her to carry him there, without argument. And they parted, though the sound of frantic thumping continued in the night and she was reduced to lying sleepless, her eyes fixed on unseen bloody carnage in the darkness.

The VA man said that she should take Bob to the first available support group, and even specified a local chapter that was meeting the next day. They went. It amounted to five sectioned veterans and their spouses, sitting in an approximate circle on folding chairs that must have known happy occasions as well as sad: christenings, religious meetings, political rallies, maybe even amateur theatre productions, all dissipating in the air as soon as the chairs were put away and stacked and returned to the anonymity enjoyed by furniture. The idea that somebody might sit in the very same chair she sat in now, a day or a week from now, and sip fruit punch while discussing plans for the decoration of the school prom, seemed almost incomprehensible to her.

There were five fragmented veterans along with spouses and other family members at the meeting, some of them arguably better off than Bob, others so much more reduced that it was impossible to know whether to scream in horror at their predicament or giggle uncontrollably at its madness. There was a boy of twenty-two who had been in-country for less than a day before a bombing reduced him to a thin strip of face that included one (blind) eye, two cheeks, a nose, and part of his upper lip, all now mounted on the very same silver plate that kept him alive, which his mother had attached to a plaque suitable for mounting on a wall. Another was just a torso, devoid of limbs, genitalia, or head, and plugged at all the stumps by more silver interfaces. Another was a shapely woman with delicately sculpted nails, a short skirt designed to show off a killer pair of legs and a top designed to accentuate her cleavage: Her every move reeked of sexuality, which may have been the way she carried herself before being drafted or the way she now compensated for losing the front half of her head, which instead of a face or a jaw or a pair of eyes now displayed a plane of mirrored silver before her ears. A fourth had not been salvageable as anything but a mound of shredded internal organs but had been gotten to in time and was now completely enclosed in a silver box about the size of a briefcase, with a screen for communication and a handle for her grim husband’s convenience.

The last was, like Bob, a pair of amputated hands. He was the one who made Rebecca want to run screaming, because his lovely blonde wife had dealt with the problem of maintaining a relationship with him by amputating her own hands and having his attached at the end of her own wrists. The silver memory disks marking the junction points on her arms would have resembled bracelets had his calloused, darker-skinned, hairier, and disproportionately larger paws not resembled cartoon gloves at the ends of her smooth, milk-white arms; and had her husband’s hands not usurped much of the control of those arms, which now gesticulated in a perversely masculine manner as his loving wife described at length how much this measure had saved her marriage. More than once during the meeting, Rebecca caught those hands resting on the other woman’s bare knees and caressing them, the arms stroking them back and forth with a lascivious energy that the other woman clearly recognized and appreciated but otherwise seemed wholly removed from. She could only wonder if that’s what her own husband wanted, if that was something Bob could ever ask of her, and whether she could ever come to want it herself.

The man lugging around the briefcase told all the other spouses at the meeting that he considered them lucky. Their loved ones had returned to them as parts that could be touched, skin that gave off an undeniable if largely artificial warmth, flesh that evoked the memory of what had been even in those cases where it could manage little else. But his wife? He produced a picture of the woman she had been, a plump little chubby-cheeked thing with a premature double-chin, but a smile of genuine warmth and eyes that seemed to express genuine mirth at some hidden personal joke. He said that she could see him through the interface and even communicate with him through the typepad, but words had never been a major part of her, not even when she was whole; she had been more a creature of silent gestures, of accommodating smiles, of kind acts and expressive glances and sudden stormy silences. Now, he said, she was a sack of nonfunctioning organs containing just enough meat to qualify as alive. And though she would occasionally answer direct questions, she more often remained silent, telling him when pressed that she just wanted to be left alone, put on a shelf, and forgotten. It was getting harder and harder for him to argue otherwise. “My wife is dead,” he told the group, and after a moment of shocked silence repeated himself, with something like stunned wonder, “My wife is dead. My wife is dead.” The wife whose arms ended with her husband’s hands just pawed herself.

Gallows humor intruded, as it always does among survivors of extreme loss, when the man who was just a strip of face said that he’d met a guy, back in the hospital, who had turned out to be nothing but an asshole. The wife of the torso said that she’d met one guy who was a real dick. Somebody else said that his lieutenant had always been a little shit and probably still was, and the variations only went downhill from there. There were a few little flights of fancy involving the prospect of sectioned people who had been reduced to nothing but their sexual organs and how their chances of making a living after the service were so much better than anyone else’s, but by then the shocking jokes had started to trail off, replaced by uncomfortable silence.

The meeting broke up with ten minutes of internal business involving when the next one would be held and who was going to get the word out to others who might benefit by attending. Rebecca went to the table where the coffee and the cookies were laid out on a plastic tablecloth and stood there not wanting any of it but needing to do something other than return to a house and a life now dominated by silence, and found herself shaking until the woman with a flat silver mirror for a face came up behind her and, speaking through a voice synthesizer, said, “You’re not alone.” Rebecca broke down and accepted the hug, feeling the warmth of the other woman’s arms but also keenly aware of the how cold the mirror felt against her own cheek. She wanted to tell the other woman, of course I’m alone, and my husband’s alone, and you’re alone, and we’re all alone; the very point of being in hell is that there’s a gulf between us and all our efforts to bridge it for even a moment give us nothing but a respite and the illusion of comfort before those bridges retract and we’re left to face the same problems from our own separate islands. She wanted to say it, but of course she couldn’t, not if it meant embracing despair in defiance of this sectioned woman’s kindness, and so she wept herself blind and took the hug as the gift it was meant to be.

By Saturday night, the answering machine was filling up with calls from family and friends, eager to know how it was going and wanting to know when they could enjoy their own happy reunion. Following her husband’s wishes, Rebecca called them all back to thank them but put them off, saying that there still adjustments to be made, and accommodations to be arranged. Again, many wanted to know if Bob was all right. She wondered how she could possibly be expected to answer that question but said, yes, he was all right. They asked her if she was all right and again she gave the answer they wanted, that yes, she was all right.

The two sat together, watching the latest reports from the war for a while, not reacting to the news that a hundred thousand more had been called up, and how this would not be enough; or, afterward, to the feel-good assurance, delivered by a smiling red-headed anchorwoman, that actual deaths that counted as deaths were at an all-time low. Bob’s hands tapped at his pad, producing a string of lower-case profanities that Rebecca supposed were now his angry equivalent of embittered muttering.

She fingered the bruises on her neck and decided that maybe they shouldn’t be watching this. She turned off the set with the remote and sat with him, feeling and tasting the oppressive silence as if it were the very air, rendered so thick that every moment felt like an eternity spent underwater.

Some time later, her husband’s hands released hers and went to the typepad.

do you want me to leave or do you think there’s any future for us

She didn’t know. She didn’t know but she thought of her husband in better times, that strong man, that smiling man, that occasionally petulant man, the man with the naughty streak who sometimes became the child who treated her as the authority figure who mischief needed to be hidden from. She remembered him pulling one form of foolishness or another, peering at her out of the corners of his eyes to see whether she thought it maddening or funny. She remembered the shape of his head in the middle of the night, when the lights were out and it was too dark to see him as anything but silhouette, when he was awake and looking at her, not knowing that she was awake and looking at him, this shadow of him that was to her every bit as revealing as his features viewed in the full light of day, because she knew him and could fill in the darkness. She remembered what it was like to let him know with a touch that she was awake too, and how sometimes that led to whispers and sometimes to more. She remembered his lips, his teeth, his touch, his gentleness and his passion. She remembered sometimes not letting him know that she was awake, instead just continuing to feign sleep, and thinking that this was her man and her lover and her friend and someday the father of her children. She remembered, once, feeling so proud to have won him that her heart could have burst.

say something

She didn’t know if there was anything to say. That was the thing. She didn’t know but she was proud. She was proud and she didn’t want to be the one to fail. She knew that it didn’t speak well of her that this remained the chief motivating force in her current relationship with what had become of her husband, the stubborn refusal to be the one who failed; to be driven not so much by an instinctive, unquestioning need to support him in what he had become, but the drive to be the better one, the strong one, the one who did the right things and held on when it might have been easier to just be the bitch who gave up. Maybe, she thought, that was the way back; not through love, but a fierce, unyielding pride. Maybe if she could stoke that, the other would return. But how could she, when it was so much more than she could make herself give?

Bob’s hands had gone back to typing.

becks, i lied

She looked at them, and perceived something ineffably tense about the way they sat against the typepad. “About what?”

whatever happens i need you to know that i remember more than i told you. its worse than the news reports say, its dirtier and bloodier and nowhere near as simple. it’s the kind of place that makes you forget that theres any good anywhere in the world. its why so many of us choose to forget. but i backed myself up for the last time only two days before the attack. i remember everything terrible that happened to me over there, everything terrible i did. afterward when they downloaded me they gave me a choice of keeping it all or going back to some earlier recording. i almost threw out the whole damn war. but i decided to keep it all because i had to.

She stared. “Why?”

the only thing worth remembering about any of it was how much of it i spent wanting to return to you

That, at long last, destroyed her. For the first time since his return she gave in to her sense of loss and howled. She buried her face in her hands and didn’t see her husband’s hands disengage from the typepad or return to the couch. But she did feel the weight of them on her shoulders, the strength they still had when they squeezed her there, the gentleness they still showed as the index fingers brushed the tear-tracks from her cheeks.

She found his touch both familiar and alien in some ways, like he had never left; in others, like he was a stranger, returned from a war with nothing but gall and a vague resemblance to seduce the widow with dire lies of being the man who had left. She missed the weight of him, the solidity, the sound of his breath. And she still hated the cold feel of the metal attachments at the ends of his wrists, so much like chains. But for the first time she was able to feel the presence of the boy she had fallen in love with, the man she had married, the husband who had been with her at night. It was him; against all odds, at long last, it was him. And for the first time, irrationally, she wanted him.

She told him she needed a minute, and went to the bathroom, where she ran water over her face, damned her red nose and puffy eyes, and made herself presentable, or at least as presentable she could. She knew that it was not the best time. She was terrified, a wreck. From what he’d typed, he wasn’t much better. But there would never be a best time, not if she just kept waiting for it. In life, there were always thresholds that had to be crossed, whenever they could be, if only because that was the only way to get to whatever awaited on the other side.

When she had done everything that was possible she returned, kissed her husband’s hands, and carried what was left of him to bed. After she undressed and got under the covers, his hands hesitated, with a sudden shyness that was almost possible to find endearing, then slipped under the covers themselves, and crawled through the darkness to her side, one heading north and the other heading south. The sheets rustled, and she allowed herself one last analytical thought: how lucky she was, after all, to have him come back as a pair of hands, and not as some useless strip of flesh in a sealed silver box. How very much they’d been left with.

She closed her eyes, grew warm, and let her husband love her.

Adam-Troy Castro’s seventeen books include Emissaries from the Dead (winner of the Philip K. Dick award), and The Third Claw of God, both of which feature his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator, Andrea Cort. His short fiction has been nominated for five Nebulas, two Hugos, and two Stokers. His next books will be a series of middle-school novels about the adventures of a strange young boy called Gustav Gloom, the first of which will be Gustav Gloom and the People Taker, due out from Grossett and Dunlap in August 2012. Adam-Troy, who describes the odd hyphen between his first and middle names as a typo from his college newspaper that was just annoying enough to embrace with gusto, lives in Miami with his wife Judi and a population of insane cats that includes Uma Furman and Meow Farrow.

Author Spotlight: Adam Troy-Castro
Robyn Lupo

Reading “Her Husband’s Hands” made me think of John Irving’s novel The Fourth Hand, as well as recent strides made in transplants, such as face transplants. Can you tell us about what elements brought this story forward?

I will confess that I had absolutely no medical realities in mind when I conceived this story, just the dark emotions that drive it. The silver interfaces are just there to provide a nod to plausibility, but what’s in them, and how they work, are secondary. I could have just as easily made this a form of zombie story, and focused on the plight of a woman whose husband’s hands return dark and rotting, from the grave; that would have made the scene at the support group difficult, so I got steered to hypothetical trauma medicine.

This story appears to be about survivors and surviving, but the bar for survival has been changed from what we’re typically familiar with. What prompted this? How do you see survival after a traumatic event?

There are already people today who live with less than what Bob and Rebecca are given here: The spouses who must care for loved ones who are unresponsive, who are vegetative, who are nothing but sacks of brain-dead meat that must be cared for and that cannot appreciate being cared for. There are even people with locked-in syndrome who are entirely aware of what’s happening around them, but cannot speak or interact with others except with great difficulty. Medical advances actually make such situations more common, and to those among the families who cannot move on with their lives, more interminable. Reducing the returning soldiers of this story to actual amputated body parts is just a way of particularizing their situation, and illustrating its horror in a manner that might permit jaded readers to feel the wound.

It was interesting to see how Bob and Rebecca reacted differently to the tragedy; Rebecca isolating herself and fighting despair, while Bob was in denial — even being dishonest about how much he remembered. They seemed to find each other again when he confessed. Why did he keep his memories a secret?

There are any number of reasons that would contribute to that, among them the alienation he feels upon returning in such an unnatural condition, shame over whatever he had to do to stay alive in the war, and a misplaced belief that he was protecting his wife from the horrors he endured. None of these are alien motivations to disabled veterans.

What would you like readers to take away from “Her Husband’s Hands”?

Aside from any wishes that they remember it as a really good story? Probably just the reminder that love is a mysterious thing that can survive any number of traumatic wounds.

What’s next for you?

I have a series of middle grade novels coming out, starting in 2012; the adventures of Gustav Gloom, the first of which is Gustav Gloom and the People Taker.

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.

The Care and Feeding of Your Disembodied Lungs
Lauren Davis

Henrietta Lacks, a Virginia tobacco farmer, died in 1951, but her cells are still alive today. Before Lacks succumbed to cervical cancer at age thirty-one, her doctor at Johns Hopkins excised part of her tumor and sent it down the hall to the hospital’s Tissue Culture Laboratory. There, Lacks’s cells were placed in a mixture of human placental blood, beef embryo extract, and fresh chicken plasma in the hopes that they might survive outside the human body.

And survive they did. Henrietta Lacks’s cervical cells proved to be the first immortal human cell line; rather than die off as most cell cultures do, Lacks’s cells thrived and even reproduced in the lab. Today, Lacks’s cells, dubbed HeLa cells, live in laboratories all over the world, nurtured in a variety of growth media and nestled in bioreactors and held at a steady 37°C. It is estimated that some 50 million metric tons of HeLa cells are alive today, derived from a woman who stood just over five feet tall.

Although animal tissue had been successfully cultured before, HeLa was the first human cell line to reproduce successfully and indefinitely in the lab, and its contribution to modern medicine is immeasurable. HeLa cells were key to the development of the polio vaccine. They’ve played an invaluable role in gene mapping and in vitro fertilization. Bits of Henrietta Lacks have even been sent into space. Cultivating that first HeLa culture was also the first step on the path to nurturing human tissue, blood, and eventually entire organs outside the human body.

Keeping Cells Alive Without a Body

So what do you feed your human cell cultures? There are now dozens of human cell lines available for purchase—not to mention stem cell lines—and an entire industry has sprung up around their care. Gone are the days when researchers would place their cells in chicken plasma and hope for the best. Researchers have had decades to tinker with the menu, and each cell line has its favorite mix of foods. Most start out with a base of Eagle’s Minimum Essential Medium, the most popular growth medium on the market, which supplies cells with their daily recommended dose of amino acids, salts, glucose, and B vitamins. That usually gets topped off with a helping of animal-derived serum, often from a fetal calf, which provides essential factors for cellular growth. However, for the vegetarian researcher, serum-free alternatives are available. Add a dash of antibiotics, and you’ve got a recipe for well-fed cells free of bacterial contamination.

But human tissue cannot live on growth medium alone. In addition to food, researchers must also provide their cell and tissue cultures with shelter and plenty of exercise. To that end, bioreactors are the YMCAs of the laboratory. Cell and tissue cultures want to live at the same temperature, humidity, gas levels, and pH that they would find inside the human body, and bioreactors offer all those comforts of home. They also keep cells safely in the dark, away from the deleterious effects of light. But what makes bioreactors more than just souped-up Petri dishes is the mechanical stimulation they provide to their cellular tenants. Regular exercise helps cells form their extracellular matrices, the part of animal tissues that provides support for the cells and platforms for growth and healing. Bioreactors rake and churn cells into stronger, healthier cultures. It’s thanks to these carefully crafted, closely regulated environments that researchers have cultivated living, implantable heart, bone, skin, kidney, liver, cartilage, skeletal muscle, and other types of tissue.

The Future of Blood

Blood banking predates HeLa cultures by more than three decades, and has more modest aims. The emphasis has long been on staving off blood cell death rather than nurturing live blood cultures. In fact, when the Red Cross stores blood for transfusion, it separates the platelets from the red blood cells from the plasma, treating each component according to its particular needs. Platelets can be kept at room temperate for just five days, and they must be stored in agitators that provide constant side-to-side motion to help platelets retain their adhesive properties. Red blood cells can be frozen, but because freezing the cells is so costly, they are usually refrigerated at 6°C for up to 42 days. Plasma, on the other hand, can be more readily frozen for up to a year. Some medical facilities will store whole blood, refrigerating the blood after treating it with an anticoagulant solution.

But, in the last few years, we’ve seen major breakthroughs that could lead scientists to culture infusible blood cells in the lab. In 2008, a company called Advanced Cell Technology produced the first functional lab-grown red blood cells. Red blood cells live a mere 120 days even inside the human circulatory system, so any living, growing culture of blood would need a constantly refreshed supply of red blood cells. In the human body, red blood cells grow in bone marrow, and the ACT researchers were able to form red blood cells from embryonic stem cells by growing them on stromal cells from bone marrow. Without those stromal cells, which function as loose connective tissue, lab-grown red blood cells retain their nuclei and risk becoming cancerous. Over the last few years, Arteriocyte, a DARPA contractor, has made progress “pharming” blood using a similar method, taking hematopoietic stem cells, which are harvested from adult bone marrow, and placing them in a growth factor that imitates the conditions of bone marrow. The technology could mean a ready supply of pathogen-free blood, constantly refreshed by new blood cells.

Breathing Life Into Disembodied Organs

The ability to keep blood alive in a lab has far-reaching consequences, but few medical advances are as visually dramatic as a disembodied organ kept alive and pumping in the lab. Transplanting an organ from one body into another has required no small amount of resurrection. Once removed from a donor, organs are packed in cold saline to prevent decay and eventually brought back to life inside the recipient’s body. But while livers, pancreases, and intestines can remain viable outside the body for up to a day, hearts and lungs lose their viability after just four to six hours, making each transplant a race against the clock and each excised organ a quickly decaying lump of flesh.

However, if our organs maintain their normal functions while outside the body—if our hearts still pump blood, if our lungs breathe, if our kidneys filter out waste—their odds for viability improve. Andover, Massachusetts-based TransMedics has developed the Organ Care System, a squat device that vaguely resembles a trash compactor but reproduces many of our body’s own functions. Like the bioreactor, the OCS keeps excised organs in a sterile environment, at a carefully regulated temperature and humidity, while nutrient-rich blood flows through the organ. And just as the bioreactor keeps cells active and moving, the OCS keeps organs pumping. It’s startling to watch a lung breathe—pumping air in and out—underneath plastic, to see a telltale heart beat inside its clear box. This past spring, transplant researchers at Toronto General Hospital revealed that damaged donor lungs can actually heal during their time on a ventilator. At present, organs can spend only a few hours inside these mechanical bodies, but perhaps someday those machines could keep our lonely, bodiless hearts beating indefinitely.

Keeping extremities such as hands and feet alive, however, is a much more difficult proposition. Severed limbs have been reattached to their rightful owners, but only a few hours after their removal. To keep an extremity alive long-term, a scientist would need to maintain the circulation in all those tiny blood vessels, or else the extremity would wither and decay. When a girl in Zhengzhou lost her hand in a tractor accident last year, physicians grafted the severed hand onto her leg to keep it alive until they could reattach it to her arm. There is no machine that could have done it for her.

But we’ve come a long way from cultivating a handful of cancer cells in a lab, and every day scientists learn more about the particular wants and needs of our tissues and organs. It may be just a matter of time before we can walk into a laboratory and see our own hands waving back at us.

Lauren Davis is a freelance writer, blogger, and editor living in the Bay Area. Earlier this year, she edited and published The Comic Book Guide to the Mission, an anthology of comics about San Francisco. In case anyone ever asks, she would be happy to have her cells sent into space.

The Little Bear
Justina Robson

Be it the northern or the southern sky, the constellations on a dark night look as they do from only one point in the universe; from Earth. It’s not like being lost at sea, or in the desert, where knowing their patterns can set you on the right path. Constellations are stories, convenient memory markers existing purely in our minds so we don’t have to experience the truth of our position in a great and indifferent space.

Violette thought this as she looked up into the night, searching against the setting gleam of Venus for the white engine-track of a returning craft. She felt without a shadow of doubt that the expanse of outer space was a bagatelle kind of nothing, compared with the space she’d become aware of as it grew inside her mind: the distance between herself and her husband Guy.

Someone had once told her that she might try to imagine infinity thus: Picture a steel ball the size of the Earth. A fly lands on it once in a million years. When the friction caused by the fly’s feet has worn the steel ball away to nothing, infinity has not even begun.

Space is Time, Time is Space. She had written that as the last line in her thesis. The constellations above her had travelled with her since then, apparently much unchanged by either aspect of the continuum, as far as she was aware. But she was much changed by time. It had grooved her face and bleached her hair and was close to swallowing her whole. As for space . . .

She touched the eternity ring she had bought for herself on finishing her studies—a circle, naturally, because she had hoped, against her logical conclusions, that spacetime was a doughnut shape and, as a sugar-mote on its surface, her life lay safely perpetual there, always to be returned to, always repeated as space progressed along the doughnut’s roundel of time, although she could not experience it that way. The ring had a diamond, a small one, and two flanking stones like tiny gateposts. Her finger counted them as she watched Venus decline in the west. Slowly she let out the breath she’d been holding.

The spinnaker of her small boat billowed with freshening wind and rode the swell with a drunken swagger quickly smoothing into a surf. She released the ring and took hold of the helm again, reassuring herself by the feel of the boat’s lively passage resonating in the wheel. Above her Orion was sinking and his dogs were quick on his heels. Dawn was coming and already the glow of the sun had begun to erase the clarity of the stars in the eastern sky. Soon the single planet would be her only guide.

Time is space wasn’t news even then. Einstein had said it decades ago. But in Violette’s interpretation of the physical laws it had to be re-stated. Time was a space of no volume. Hence one could not go back to a point in it, navigating one’s way by the look of past and future worlds, constellations there of people and actions, of objects in their exact array and bearings tuned by the flavour, smell and zest of a single instant viewed from all directions. Time was a cusp, the wave’s crest, a moment of perpetual immanence. Guy was lost in space, since his mission failed to return all those years ago. But she didn’t believe him dead. She considered him dislocated in time. Although this might make no difference to the facts it made her feel less alone. In one part of the continuum, Guy was still there.

She reached into the inner pocket of her oilskin and removed a laminated photograph. Looking at Guy’s picture—it seemed only an instant ago that he’d gone. How could that be so far away that she could never get there? Of course, if they allowed her to work the machine again, she might try to get there, which is why it was shut off in its bunker, never to be used again. They thought Guy’s mission a sufficient loss, in the wake of all the events after the machine’s first use and no doubt that was the wisest way. Teleportation remained a dream, even though Violette knew first hand that it was not.

A wave recklessly covered the deck and fell to nothing, draining in the sluices and drenching her feet. It splashed the photo and she wiped it clean as she put it away before turning a degree to the south. She’d built the boat—Arrowflight—herself, learning via several false starts and many hard hours as she went along, determined to attempt a full circumnavigation of the world by star and sun before she died. She’d left Les Sables a week ago and hadn’t switched on her radio since. On the third day she’d become aware that direction didn’t matter.

Wherever she went Guy would never be. The trail of a spacecraft that should have come in a long time ago was only in her mind’s eye, a nervous tic of hopeful longing. She reasoned that there had been a miscalculation on board and the moment of return had failed to find Earth where it should have been in space, materialising behind or in front by a critical margin to discover . . . to do nothing in fact, for to miss utterly was to cease to exist in a timely manner, at least in this universe.

Violette did not believe in discontinuity—where objects could dot in and out, not there one minute but there the next, skipping time steps like a child over chalked hopscotch lines. Guy had gone out to test their theories in the only safe place they could think of and he was lost.

Guy took a seat in a café bar near Montmartre. It was the time of evening when his father had liked to light a cigar and ask his mother to provide him with a glass of fino. Guy liked neither but ordered the sherry anyway and when it came, tasted its woodiness and dryness with a hidden grimace. He only had to wait for a few minutes and then Rafaella appeared, slinking like a cat out of the shadows. Her face was contorted with the pressure she was feeling. It spoiled her beauty, made her look older and more disappointed than he’d hoped.

She slumped in her seat and crossed her legs, kicking the loose sole of her cheap flip-flop against her foot. He regarded her with a fondness he felt correct for a father to feel towards his daughter. The lamplight coming from the bar’s interior made her look more like Violette than ever.

Rafaella batted a moth away with a flick of her hand and crossed her legs the other way. A waiter appeared as though summoned by majesty, and she ordered wine without rewarding him with a single glance. She caught Guy’s look of amusement at this naked display of feminine power,

“Don’t look at me like that.”

“You remind me of her.”

“And don’t say that.”

“What? I have to say something. It’s the reason we’re here.”

“I hate anniversaries. It’s pointless nostalgia.” She raked her gaze over the other people on the street and, finding nothing in them to grip her attention, looked up at heaven for patience.

“Then why did you come?”

She snorted, “To humour you, of course. You think she meant to come back.”

“You don’t.”

“If she’d meant to then she would have—cuh!” Rafaella took her wineglass from the offered tray and took a big swallow, bigger than she intended. A line of red ran down her mouth and dripped onto the boho chic-ness of her outfit. She swore and ignored it.

Guy said, “The solicitor thinks it’s time to ask the court to declare her legally dead.”

Rafaella focused her emotion on the distant stars and didn’t look at him. Her flip-flop counted away a minute and she glanced at her watch.

“‘Plane to catch?” He cursed his own sarcasm even as he said it.

“I’m meeting Paul,” she said and then heaved herself around as if it was a Herculean effort. “If we do this, what does it do?”

“It means that her will can be executed,” he replied, the words and their meaning a simple skim on the surface of his mind, not allowed to disturb what lay beneath. “You’ll get some money. I will. The house . . . ”

“Is not going to be sold,” she declared, taking a swallow of wine.

“Be reasonable,” he began, but she cut him off.

“It’s the only place she knows. What if she comes back and we’re not there? What if she goes there and nobody knows who she is? What if it’s all she recognises?”

Guy sighed and watched a young couple walk by, their arms entwined, nothing in the span of their regard except each other. He and Violette had walked like that once. He wanted to believe they would again. Perhaps they were doing so even now, in some other time and space which he could not find. He didn’t know how to explain to Rafaella that her mother might be missing on another Earth. He didn’t want to believe it himself.

The house in question was far away in rural Yorkshire, but he could feel its presence as though a lodestone in the walls pulled at him twenty-four seven. He could feel its emptiness and the chilly transparent dome of its roof, above which the Great Bear pawed the northern sky and pointed helplessly at the single unmoving mote of Polaris, the North Star, with her tail.

Rafaella believed her mother had suffered a stroke causing a kind of amnesia and had simply wandered off. Or that she had had an affair and created a clever story to cover her absence. It had been years, and although she’d left home by then anyway, the idea of Violette’s abandonment of her was too hard. Guy knew that the moment hadn’t been anything so mundane. There was a chance Rafaella was right and that the house and its co-ordinates were the only points in the universe where Violette might return.

“Little Bear,” he said fondly to Rafaella, hardly realising he spoke aloud.

She shot him a cold look but could not sustain it and returned to watching the people pass by.

If universes intersect one another at all, then they must do so at at least one point. However those points are mapped, a moment and a space or both are shared. This could be used as the focus of all maps that serve to describe those separate worlds, no matter how giant or how fleeting.

Why shouldn’t this be a house, or a heart?

The machine towered over them, humming with power—so strange to think that such a small wattage could achieve so much—as Guy and Violette watched the their chosen test object vanish from sight. The telephone rang in the outer office. Violette answered. “Oui?”

There was a breathless pause.

“Vraiment?”

Another beat, another mark that nailed down each moment to its position without ambiguity.

“Guy!” she shouted, the phone raised high like a staff of power. “He has the bottle! Alain has the bottle! In Greece! Right now!”

But at the time they’d never thought on where the bottle might have been when it was neither with them, in Paris, or with Alain, in Athens. Between one second and the next, how much space could there be? And for his part Alain never mentioned, thinking it bad luck, that the old Châteauneuf-du-Pape was foul and corked beyond drinking.

Violette searched the sky again for the one unchanging constant, following the blunted end of Thor’s Hammer. The North Star was faint as she angled the boat away from it. A fresh update on the monitor revealed that none of the satellites heard anything of Guy’s scout mission, and why should they? He was full fifty years lost and the machine in its laboratory was thick with dust, guarded by young soldiers who didn’t even know what it was for and thought maybe it was an old Cold War thing.

Alain had texted her—OK ld grl?

She hadn’t replied yet, she thought, although she fancied that she was replying, had already replied—OK.

After the first few attempts they’d given up trying to calculate how many fresh universes had peeled away from their one original with each repeated use of the machine. Violette had no idea whether or not there were many of her sharing this space right now, others turning about, others reckoning the sky, others at home, far away, watching old movies with Guy and Rafaella in the house below the hill.

In her mind that Violette in the house was the real one. Somehow she had become one of the pale copies instead, her consciousness slipping away from its true course and into this unsatisfactory illusion. She took comfort from the knowledge that it was only a shard in time that separated her from this perfect life, even though crossing back into it might be impossible. Other Violettes may make it. And other Guys may never have left with the astronauts to verify the fracture by viewing it from the outside—travelling into a sister reality.

The wind was as strong in any other world. The boat made a tortured banging sound as it drove into the waves. The bowsprit surfaced to point up at the three Norns and Violette switched on the autopilot, exhausted, and went below.

Rafaella uncorked the bottle of wine and stood on the balcony in the humid night heat, the stone of the terrace barely cool against her feet. She could hear Alain playing Chopin on the piano. Its notes were bell-like in their melancholy patterns, picking out the essence of her emotion without her having to articulate it. How like him to know what to play at an hour like this, she thought, and how like her father to wander off to the bottom of the garden, a white shape in the gloom like a ghost.

In the dining room the legal documents lay crisp below the stare of another wine bottle—this one in a protective glass case. The original Châteauneuf of the first experiment was fragile enough to break these days, without much encouragement from anyone. It was the thinning of its walls that had first suggested danger in the method. Not only had it lost something during its travel to Athens that night, years ago, but with every subsequent use of the machine another integral layer had been peeled from its substance. Its label was unreadable, the printing ink flayed off. The glass itself was, at a microscopic level, pitted with holes until it resembled a peculiar bone, the fossil of an ancient time. Since the wine itself had gone down the sink in Athens, nobody knew what had happened to that.

Rafaella thought of the papers there, awaiting her signature. Guy’s was still drying on the page. He was convinced Violette must be dead or never coming back. Rafaella felt she ought to sign, if only to end the suspension of his life, to allow him to move on, but a more bitter, stubborn piece of her wouldn’t let her. The bottle’s problem was that it had moved unpredictably through space because of its predictability in time. Violette was the opposite. Rafaella was sure she was alive somewhen soon, and they did not, as Guy insisted, live in a Universe which had allowed her to vanish from it absolutely. Matter could not disappear like that from all coordinates of the continuum, ergo her mother was out there somewhere and she was not going to sign away the one point of contact they might have.

When is it?

Rafaella set the corkscrew on the terrace wall, started pouring a libation down the stones, then let all the wine run there, each rivulet of darkness winding its own way over the rough and porous surfaces. Where is the crossing where all these worlds collide?

Guy said it was at Ago, at the first use of the machine. They couldn’t get back there, because they’d already been.

But what if it was in the future? What if there was a universe in which the machine never worked? THAT universe couldn’t possibly intersect with this one in the past. In fact there must be an infinity of worlds in which the machine did not exist or had never been used, and an infinity of crossroads from this world in which it did, presenting chances to jump over. But Guy would only laugh at this reasoning of hers.

In the garden her father’s white form walked towards her. He looked up as he came into the terrace lights.

“There’s always another possibility,” he said as the final chord sounded from the piano. “That she might have stepped out of existence only for a certain length of time. In which case, she hasn’t moved in space at all.”

Rafaella stared down at him, brushing a moth away from her hair. “What?”

“But even if she did,” he continued. “The world has moved on. Literally. In space. The planet has moved. The galaxy has moved. Nothing is where it used to be. Even positions that seem to be fixed have altered beyond recognition.”

The moth returned, blundered against her cheek, corrected itself and fled up into the brilliance of the terrace light. Dust from its wings powdered the air. She listened to it battling against the glass, beating itself to death with the force of its determination to reach what it had mistaken for the moon.

Alain checked the set up for the eighth time. In fact there was nothing to check, but he smoothed the tablecloth over the cold marble top one more time and walked around the invisible perimeter of the three beacons, noting their alignment. According to theory the bottle should arrive two millimetres above the cloth. He didn’t know what would happen if it came in any lower, but then again he didn’t know what would happen to the air it displaced on its arrival either. He put his goggles on and moved back to the safe distance of his cane chair.

Beyond the shuttered windows the low growl of traffic persisted, overshot with the bright, sudden notes of the calls of birds, which were gathering to roost in the eaves of his hotel. They weren’t swallows, he knew that, but birds weren’t his thing, navigation was his interest. Migrations from one continent to another over vast distances had intrigued him since his boyhood. Geese had been the first animals he’d studied for his dissertation, and then the wandering albatross. A curious mixture of the Earth’s magnetism, the stars and the sun traced their paths for them. The turning year and the flares of solar agitation or tropical storms could cast them far beyond their routes. The memory of routes also passed on from generation to generation, even when conditions at the destinations altered, became less desirable. How curious he’d been to discover that instinct was so powerful, even when its drive took you in the wrong direction. He wasn’t sure himself if this position he was in was less desirable. He didn’t like the idea of the machine and hoped it would fail.

His watch, in regular contact with an atomic clock, counted the moments to midnight. The church at the end of the street chimed in early, its hand-rung bell marking the hours, the end of the day, the start of something. Bathed in the moment, suspended between past and future, Alain wished for nothing.

There was a sharp bang, like a muted gunshot, and a softer thud.

Wings beat suddenly against the shutters, a flurry, and were still.

A bottle of wine stood on the table, the meniscus just visible beneath the collar label, quivering.

He was surprised it didn’t startle him. He mustered enthusiasm, rang Paris as he moved forwards to inspect it, briefly wondering why they hadn’t bothered to wipe the dust off it before they sent it over. Violette’s delight was so infectious he found himself starting to laugh, to smile. When he rang off he was grinning as he took out his keys from his pocket, undid his corkscrew from the Swiss army knife and opened the bottle.

The cork came out easily and with it a soft, resiny odour quickly turning sour. He poured it and took a sniff. Pure vinegar. The cork in his fingers was slimy. What a bad omen, he thought then, his smile fading. He resolved never to mention it to the others but quickly watched the bottleful splash its way down the plughole. Probably he should have saved it for testing, but the glass would be enough.

He suddenly remembered that in all the excitement he’d forgotten to turn off the recording equipment. It only took a few minutes to roll back the tapes and erase what he’d done.

“He’s not coming back,” Rafaella said, her voice almost drowned out by the cries of the children, fighting over a toy. She sounded weary rather than irritated to Violette, who cradled the receiver against her chin as she guided the boat back to its mooring.

“I know,” she said. “But I like to look.”

“When are you coming home?”

“Soon,” Violette assured her. “The estate agent says the house is sold. I have to pack it up—that will take a while—and then I’ll be coming. I’m selling most of the furniture, unless there’s something you particularly want.”

“No,” Rafaella said, pausing to administer some kind of hasty discipline. Violette heard her saying, “We’ll get another Little Bear, don’t worry about it,” and then Martine’s voice whined, “Don’t want another. Want that one.” She came back on the line, “But if you find anything personal of Dad’s . . . ”

“It’ll all come back with me,” Violette said. “You can look through it yourself. Did you get Alain’s card?”

“He still signs himself off ‘A Friend of Your Father’s’ as if I didn’t know who he was.” Rafaella sighed. “Yes. And a hundred Euros, even though I’m thirty five and earn more than his pension.”

“He feels responsible,” Violette said. “I have to go, the wind is changing.” She hung up and brought the vessel about just in time to make it safely around the harbour buoy. Gulls circled the mast lazily, giving her the once over, not even bothering to call out from their frozen postures in the air.

A week later, kneeling in the attic on the Rue St-Denis, she dragged over a wooden packing case from the very back. It wasn’t the last to be cleared out, but nearly the last and must have been there since the day they moved in, she reckoned—a strip of 1989 Le Monde hung from its slats. She brushed filthy grey dust from it and sneezed, pausing to wipe her face with a tissue and seeing black marks stripe it as she put it away again. In the light of the single weak bulb she wondered if she could be bothered to check it, or whether she should simply leave it here for the new owners to find. Whatever was in it hadn’t interested them for forty years, why should she want it now?

She opened the lid anyway and looked at the unexpected top of a bottle of wine, her heart thudding suddenly loud in her chest. It had been for Guy’s return of course, she thought, to celebrate, and then, unable to throw it away, she’d put it up here. The bottle itself was clean and new-looking but she couldn’t help thinking it must have gone bad after living through so many hot summers up here. She couldn’t bring herself to read the label or hold it in her hands, thinking of the time it ought to have been uncorked and the emotions she’d hoped to feel.

A pigeon, perched on the tiles above her, burbled its ridiculous love-warble. She heard its claws tacking and the sudden muffled clapping of winged escape.

That settled it. She pushed the case back into the darkest shadow and backed up on her hands and knees along the grimy length of carpet until her foot found the top rung of the ladders again.

Alain walked the last mile to Guy’s house in the dale. It took him an hour and many pauses, resting against walls, sitting on his shooting stick, stumbling over the rocks on the back road. He was tired when he got there, but it was worth it. For every mile he’d covered since Paris the weight of the bag had become lighter and now he could hardly feel it in his hand.

Rafaella was there, looking thin and irritable. She let him in. The place was warm but smelled of damp nonetheless. They should have let it go, moved somewhere with a more temperate climate, Alain thought. England had its beauties but he would have traded them for the comfort of the Avignon villa. But it hadn’t been up to him. The girl had never stopped hoping that Violette would come back here and Guy hadn’t had the heart to stifle her hope. It was a pity, because now Rafaella was getting too old for children and too bitter for marriage and Guy was, like himself, simply a relic awaiting destruction.

He said as much as they sat down to a whiskey.

Rafaella was taken aback by his bluntness.

“There’s not much time for games,” Alain shrugged. He pushed at the bag with his foot. “Open it.”

She did so and unwrapped the bottle from a swatch of heavy velvet curtain. Her glance at him was quizzical, “Why now?”

“It’s my fault she got lost,” Alain said. “I never told you that the wine in that bottle was rancid. Something was wrong with the whole thing. I could have said so but it didn’t seem that important at the time. I thought it was a coincidence.”

“You couldn’t have known,” Guy began, trying to brush Alain’s grimness aside.

“No, but I could have guessed. We said before that what’s known in space must be uncertain in time if it leaves the continuum here at all. And if time was certain then space would be the opposite. She was gone for five minutes and in that time we forgot that we would have MOVED, Guy. Moved forty thousand bloody miles . . . and when she came back it’s us who wasn’t there. Nothing was there.”

Rafaella was staring into nothing. She said, into the silence that followed, “I wonder if it’s the same bottle. Is there any way of proving that?”

Her father took his glass from his mouth halfway into a sip and swiped a line of whiskey from his lip. Alain’s face grew even more bleak. She could tell they hadn’t considered this, as she hadn’t, until now. The bottle’s decay had stopped, which they had taken to mean that the universes had ceased to peel away from one another or, if that theory was entirely wrong, that at least whatever dimension had leached its substance away was now stabilised, all reactions come to their natural conclusions. She hadn’t been a part of the science, barely understood any of it, but she said now,

“I mean, was there any way of telling it to be the bottle you sent, dad? Or could it be from a different continuum? Maybe we switched bottles with someone else’s universe and they didn’t get one in return. Maybe this bottle is trying to get back to its own space and time.”

They stared at the offended item and then, with a single, swift movement Rafaella lunged forward and sent it hurtling against the wall. It smashed instantly and the shards of glass scattered, tinkling on the floor with a sound like stars ringing in an empty heaven.

“No more uncertainty,” she said, sitting back, withdrawing her hand carefully as though it were a snake that might strike again. “I can’t stand it any more.”

Guy crossed over to her and put his arm around her shoulders.

Alain looked at the shining splinters. “See,” he said, his voice cracking as he pointed a shaking finger at the patterns they made on the floor. “It’s Andromeda, and Leo.”

A smile moved from one to the other of them beginning with Guy and passing to Rafaella, and then to Alain before it faded away. Alain tried to look at the glass and see no pattern in it but, no matter how hard he tried, he saw more and more familiar shapes as the minutes passed until he had to look away.

“Do you remember her?” Rafaella said. “Because I can’t. Only little things. Her smell. The shape of her chin. The way her eyes looked when she smiled. But not all at once. I can’t see her anymore. I always thought that’s how you lived forever, in people’s minds, but it can’t be true, because we can’t remember like that. If she walked in here now I sometimes think I wouldn’t know her.”

Guy stood up and began to pick up the pieces, gathering them in his hand.

Alain got up to go.

There was a knock at the door.

They glanced at each other, eyes wide, and saw hope in the others’ faces, impossible to extinguish but already beginning to twist with resigned disappointment. Nobody moved to answer it.

© 2005 by Justina Robson.

Originally appeared in Constellations, edited by Peter Crowther.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Justina Robson is the author of several SF and F novels plus a collection of short stories and has been shortlisted for a variety of genre and literary awards. She is published in the UK, USA, and Europe. Her most recent series of books is Quantum Gravity, a wry story of love, the supernatural, and machine transformation. She is presently working on SF again although rather slowly because there are small children at home, school has not quite started yet, and she is in the middle of a glorious binge of reading other people’s work.

Author Spotlight: Justina Robson
Robyn Lupo

Can you tell us some about how this story came about? It’s poignant, and deals with the acceptance of loss with great deftness and care. Was there anything in particular that was difficult in writing this story?

I knew the basics of the story before I started but I didn’t know how it would all work itself together until I was writing it. As I went along I kept a lookout for interesting points and connections and just worked on tying things up until I reached the point where there was no more to say, which was the end. It was fun to figure it all out and one of those times when everything seems to fall in a serendipitous manner. After I finished it I did wonder if it was clear enough to decode for the reader but as I liked it the way it was I didn’t add any further explanation and I’m glad about that.

Constellations as being unfixed or fixed points appear to be a reoccurring motif in this story. So, it seems that perhaps Guy and Violette’s house, or more likely their daughter, might be the “fixed point” in their lives. Would you tell us more about this connection?

Yes, you are right about my attempt to make constellations the metaphor for the relationships each person has with the others in their lives. Originally “constellations” was the theme of the anthology this story first appeared in and as soon as the subject was mentioned and I had the project to do I thought of how the patterns in the stars were manmade things, objects of whimsy, and how humans over the ages must have seen different combinations and connections in the same arrangements. I was also thinking about astrology and how people try to find meaningful relations about their life experience explained by celestial movements—something apparently quite unattached to them, but of lasting magnitude—and then the metaphor appeared quite naturally to me. The other meanings assigned to “stars” in my mind came into play at that point, as well as the illusion of our solar system being a fixed point in space with the sun at the centre—it revolves around in the galactic arm of course and the galaxy itself is also on the move. The aptness of all this in relation to human families and significant others seemed perfectly suited to a story. Finally the use of constellations as navigational tools put the icing on the cake for me and I knew that it would be a story about the journeys of the heart, finding and losing.

There are several worlds in “The Little Bear.” Did you imagine a world where Guy and Violette’s experiment would have worked the way they hoped? If so, why did you decide not to include it?

Because of my preoccupation with the metaphors at work in the story, trying to push them but not slam into them, I didn’t consider the alternate worlds in which other things might have happened, although the characters do think of it. I didn’t want to get into multiple reality theory on top of everything else; it would have been too complex and also, although it might have provided a consolation to the reader, I didn’t want to give that consolation as the focus of the story is the deep, fundamental doubt with which the characters must struggle and come to terms. Their position is what I think of as our human position in life—longing for certainty but unable to find sufficient information to get it.

Rafaella is fierce, loyal, and aptly nicknamed as “Little Bear.” Were there any particular influences that brought her to life?

She’s the embodiment of passionate commitment, love and human devotion pitted against an essentially insentient and unfeeling cosmos—I wanted her to have that role to balance the nebulous and sad aspects of the story. She’s the fixed star, although her being that is an act of faith, not of rational decision-making. She’s there like the astrological bear, to defy chaos, entropy and death, at least for a moment or two.

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.

The Physics of a Populated Universe
Pamela L. Gay

In the universe we know, physical laws eventually reach the point of tautology: They are a certain way, simply because they are that way. Gravity is calculated through this coefficient. Matter is scattered about in that abundance. The universe expanded by x. We assume that that is the only way it could be, but that’s not necessarily true. There could be any number of physical laws in place instead of the ones we know, some of them possibly even more probable than the ones we know. But if other laws existed, we as humans may not. Because of that, we must consider why the laws of physics are the way they are, and what other strange or lifeless universes there might be, or might have been.

The Coincidence of Life

No one can say exactly why life exists, but we can say that life is allowed to exist thanks to a few simple coincidences. In the earliest instants of the universe, the epoch of inflation grew our universe just large enough that it wouldn’t collapse into black holes later on, but not so large that stars could never form. Also, in the instants of beginning, the matter and anti-matter that formed had just enough of an imbalance that when they collided and annihilated each other, there was still some matter left over to form you, me, and the universe we know. All across physics we see these fine tunings reflected in the amount of dark energy that pushes apart the galaxies, and in fine structural constants such as the one that defines how neon “open” signs glow red.

The things that facilitate life and appear to be the way they are “just because,” is an ever-growing list. One of the holy grails of science is a single underlying theory that explains away these coincidences: The amount of dark energy, the length of the inflation epoch, the proportion of matter to anti-matter—all these things and more we hope will fall out of some magic, perfect equation that elegantly sums up everything.

But we can’t find that theory.

Einstein spent his life searching for it. Hawking has looked. Every great cosmologist has asked, “Hmmm, what if?” and they’ve come back with nothing certain.

So for now, scientists find themselves in a universe with much that seems to be just so—just because—and many of us hate not knowing why this is.

The Reasons Behind It All

We could, of course, not really understand the universe. It could be there is some yet undiscovered underlying rule, some beautiful set of equations, that will dictate that all of the impossible coincidences must exist.

Another possibility is that there is a force outside our universe—outside our space and time—that is dictating the constants of our cosmos. Perhaps there is a God, a watchmaker, a greater power tweaking our forces to make life possible. (By definition, this possibility is beyond the testing of science.)

A third possibility is, to some scientists, the ugliest and, to others, the most elegant. This theory says that our universe is just one of many and that our improbable reality is able to occur because every possible combination of constants exists somewhere in the multiverse of universes. This theory may or may not be testable. And this possibility falls out of many different ideas.

There is also the probability argument: In theory, if enough monkeys pound on typewriters for long enough, they’ll end up with Hamlet, and so it makes sense to also say that if enough universes are allowed to exist, eventually life will emerge. But saying that something makes sense just isn’t enough.

Luckily, many scientists find more compelling arguments to suggest multiple universes.

Quantum Multiverses

According to quantum mechanics, the outcome of a quantum event doesn’t exist until it’s observed. This is the premise behind the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment.

The experiment goes something like this: You lock a cat in a sealed container. In the container with the cat is a Geiger counter and a small bit of radioactive material.

At any given moment, each atom in the radioactive material has a certain probability of decaying. If, for instance, it’s a bit of 210 Polonium, the half-life is 138 days. This means that statistically, if you have a bunch of atoms of Polonium, half of them will decay within 138 days. The thing is, statistics doesn’t require that half of the atoms must decay. It could be that more decay or less decay; it’s just a probability. Now if my bunch of Polonium happens to add up to 138 atoms, statistics say that on any given day, I have a 50/50 probability of one atom decaying.

So, imagine I have a cat in a box with 138 atoms of Polonium, and I have a Geiger counter to detect if any atoms actually decay. Just to make things interesting, I attach a vial of poison to the Geiger counter, such that if some atom decays, the Geiger counter will trigger and burst the poison, killing the cat.

According to quantum mechanics, the atoms each exist at every moment in both a decayed and a not-decayed state. Only at that philosophically painful moment when the atoms are observed does the wave function collapse, and the atoms become absolutely decayed or absolutely not decayed. This means, until they are observed those atoms hover in the decayed / not-decayed state and the cat hovers in both a state of life and death.

In reality, the cat is a perfectly good observer of its own death. But still, the atom could be decayed and not-decayed until the Geiger counter or something else comes along to interact with its wave function and observe the outcome.

Radioactive decay isn’t the only weirdly probabilistic thing we observe. For instance, if I have the world’s most pathetic laser and it gives off just one photon at a time, and I point my pathetic laser at a series of slits, the photons will go through and scatter out onto a screen on the far side of the slit. If I keep watching where the photons have landed for a period of time, they will build up a pattern that just happens to be identical to the interference pattern that you get if a bunch of photons from a very bright source all going through the slits at once. Thus, for several odd quantum mechanics reasons, photons have some weird probabilistic way going through slits as waves and interacting in probabilistic ways. While no one can predict where any one photon will land, using quantum mechanics we can predict the pattern that lots of photons will build up.

But why should any one photon do one thing, when in the exact same situation another photon does something totally different? According to what is called the Oxford Interpretation or the Many Worlds Interpretation, each photon actually takes every single different option, but each option occurs in a different, parallel, branching universe. Every time a choice is made, the universe branches. In this way, every possibility that could happen, does happen, just not necessarily in the universe we know as the one we live in. Everything that could happen, does happen, somewhere, in some universe.

In this way, every possible value for every possible factor in our universe is played out in some parallel universe.

The Test of the Untestable

The question is, how do you test this quantum-based multi-universe theory?

Unfortunately, the only way that has been defined really only tests the theory for the poor person running the test. Imagine the person who places a radioactive decay-triggered gun at their head and steps into a box and waits to see if the world ends. With each moment the gun doesn’t fire, the world splits into a world in which the scientist dies, and a world in which she lives. If she continues to live beyond what statistics say is reasonable, than probability weakly claims that there should be other universes where the scientist has died. It’s a weak argument. It’s an immoral experiment, but it’s the one test we have the technology to do, even if no one will—I hope—ever do it.

The Many Bubbling Multiverses

But quantum mechanics isn’t the only way to get at multiverses. According to Andrei Linde (of Stanford University) and many others, it is possible that the field that drove the early period of inflation didn’t act the same way in all places. What if in some places expansion continued, with fluctuations in the inflation leading to bubble universes expanding one from another, extending on forever?

This “What if?” is layered on top of detailed theories that match our observed universe, and elegantly explain how inflation could have occurred. The multiverse falls naturally out of theories that drive the period of inflation with a (scalar) field that reacts to its environment. The early universe was filled with bubbling quantum fluctuations that acted like waves. As the universe expanded, the waves froze. The largest fluctuations froze first, and as the universe expanded, stretching the small waves with its growth, they eventually reached sizes where they also froze.

In these spikes of chaotic inflation, new bubble universes could form, each growing out of a bit of the universe before it, each branch growing bubbles with its own physical characteristics. These universes can sprout out of one another nearly forever.

But, while this theory conforms to observations and explains what we experience, we currently have no way of knowing if it is true. Again, we have left the realm of testable science.

It seems that with today’s technology and physics knowledge we must, at a certain level, label the first moments of the universe with the warning, as ancient mapmakers did, “Here be dragons.” We don’t know what sets our universe in place, and we don’t know why we are in a universe so precisely tuned to allow life to exist. We have ideas, but ideas aren’t answers.

Scientists look at untestable theories and must conclude that they really can’t be proven to be any more valid than works of fiction like Stephen King’s parallel universe series, The Dark Tower, in which there is one true universe and infinite child universes, with alternate, not real pasts and futures. In that series, one of the characters, at the moment of his death, says, “Go, then. There are other worlds than these.” In these words he propels the main character, the gunslinger, to other truths, other possibilities, and other places in time and space. We don’t know if there are other multi-verses, parallel to this one, but we do know that our reality is not uniquely dictated by physics as we know it today. Our life in our universe is frighteningly improbable, and yet nonetheless real.

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 IceHunters.org.

Against Eternity
David Farland

In some surprisingly distant tomorrow, you will grow weary of Earth.

The wan gray of polluted skies will weigh on your soul, and you will recall bluer days, and wish for your childhood, when the grass seemed taller and would rub your inner thighs as you rambled through the fields. You will remember the calls of warblers and meadowlarks, and wonder: Where have all the birds have gone?

You will grow older than any person should. When your friends and family are have all passed, you’ll keep doddering on, a relic from a forgotten age.

Is it the life-extension drugs that keep me going? you will ask yourself. Maybe I should stop taking my Attaroxin. Why would I want to keep on living when everyone I care about is dead?

Secretly, though, you’ll know the truth. You’re fueled by hope.

Every day will bring new wrinkles to your body, and sharp new pains that mask dull aches. Every day you will shuffle more slowly than you did the day before, until it is a labor to get to the toilet.

As your hormones wane, you’ll lie awake at night, unable to sleep. Not like a young person does, with loins afire, lusting.

You’ll feel empty, purposeless.

A salesman will call. He’ll be a bright young man with a smiling face and a neat haircut. All regimes make use of such boys. He’ll be a tool of the state.

“We need you,” he’ll tell you, his teeth a perfect white. “You’ll be of tremendous service to your country. You’ll be a hero! Just put on a battle suit.”

Oh, you’ve spoken to recruiters before, when you were young. You know the dangers.

You’ve seen the victims of war: Drooling wrecks, with their brains half blown out. You see it on the news every day—people crazed by addiction to battle drugs going postal on the mean streets of Los Angeles and New York.

What does it matter that the wars are now fought on Mars, amid red raging sandstorms, where a cymech in battle armor can run a hundred miles per hour? What does it matter that warriors now have the neurons in their brains wedded to crystalline interfaces, and are considered only the “biological component” to a much more sophisticated organism?

War is war, and the fallout is always sickening.

“What the hell?” you will ask yourself. “It has been ages since anyone needed me.”

You’ll take the med-tests, sign the contract.

You’ll study your options carefully, make your decision. “I’ll go for the Aspire-Class ship.”

It looks like a good ship—heavily armed and armored. Sleek, fast and small. A ship for scouting, or for dropping military personnel into the hot zones on Mars, or on the moons Europa, or Io.

They won’t need much of you, of course: Only five pounds of brain matter. It will be cut away from the rest of your body, and your husk will be discarded—the sagging flesh, the brittle bones, that bladder that no longer functions well anyway.

You’ll be granted a new body—one with artificial blood that never needs to be cleaned, all circulated efficiently by self-repairing nanobots. Your energy needs will be minor, and your new body will harvest gamma rays in space for fuel. The gamma rays are everywhere, as common as trash in the ocean. You’ll never run out of energy.

It sounds like an adventure, right? You’ll worry about the war, of course, and about wars that might yet come in the distant future, when all life on Earth is gone, when men have seeded colonies around ten thousand stars.

But you’ll know that you cannot worry about such things. Was it Jesus who said, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof?”

So you will go under the knife. The medics will wheel you into the operating room. You’ll be so cold, feeling almost naked, under a thin blanket. You’ll shiver as if you’re already dying, and you’ll wonder: Can I survive the surgery?

The operating room won’t be an old-fashioned affair with nurses and doctors. People are too contaminated, too full of germs.

Instead it will contain a machine—a sleek surgical droid fitted with laser scalpels to cut through your flesh, and gentle mechanical appendages to prize out your brain.

“Don’t be afraid,” a surgical droid will tell you from a speaker. “I’m Doctor Cohen. I was once human, like you. You’re going to love this. You’re going to a far better place.” The words will be comforting in tone, but you’ll worry anyway.

Your pulse will race, and your stomach will grow queasy. Monitors in the room will thunder as they echo the beating of your heart.

The surgical droid will squirt an invisible mist into the air, just near your mouth. You will sniff, wondering what it is, and the anesthesia will hit you. A numb cold will fill your sinuses and steal into your brain.

All sights and sounds will fade.

When you waken, it will be glorious. You’ll regain consciousness in the space station docks, in the fifth Lagrange orbit. Through a multitude of sensors, you’ll find yourself floating among the stars—brilliant fires above and below and to every side.

You aren’t in a cyborg’s body on the ship. You are the ship.

You’ll see the lights in the heaven more clearly than man has ever seen them. You’ll see them by the billions. Your remote sensors will distinguish whole new colors among the crab nebula—the near infrareds and the far ultra-violets. You’ll spot unnamed comets whisking past Neptune, discover strange new galaxies whirling in the distance.

It will leave you shocked and breathless. Ah, the noise of it all—the hissing of solar winds, the radio traffic bombarding you from Earth, the blipping of pulsars. You will discover that you are born into a strange new universe, one that you have never imagined, bustling with sound, like a noisy city street.

Earth, wheeling below you, will be glorious—with actinic whites at the caps of the poles, the blush of rose where the sunlight strikes clouds along the terminus, the vast seas that still look as blue from this height as you remember from your youth.

Ah, and the city lights! You can see all of humanity spread out before you in numbers that you’d never imagined. The pictures from space never showed it in such detail. Paris and London will be ablaze. Every little farmhouse in Ethiopa will light up like a flare. Every car headlight will spill like milk down the lonely dirt roads in Siberia.

You’ll be able to spot the tiny figures on crowded streets, people by the billions. And on the Serengeti, by infrared you’ll see a lifeless elephant, circled by fiery jackals, its corpse fading like a dying ember.

Just for a moment, you’ll wonder if you can really go through with your plan.

Can anything stop me? you will wonder.

In that instant, your first assignment will be sent via data-burst. You’ll be ordered to escort a freighter carrying a rare-minerals shipment to a manufacturing facility on the edge of the solar system.

An easy assignment, so long as the enemy doesn’t spot you.

In that moment, you’ll decide. You can risk death every moment, or you can take one last chance . . .

You’ll send back your response. “Assignment understood and accepted. Firing thrusters immediately.”

You’ll blast off from the station, wrecking the grappling gear that holds you down.

You’ll go into stealth mode, put up your ion shields and block all transmission from your masters, lest they try to override your systems. You’ll blast into space at twelve gs of constant acceleration—headed out beyond the galactic rim.

For a moment, everyone will wonder what has gone wrong. Did you get a faulty order from the enemy? Is this some kind of technical glitch?

They’ll be frozen into inaction, and that will be to your advantage. They’ll hesitate as you blur past the orbital military posts. You hope they’ll never catch you.

You’re a bright new Aspire-Class ship, after all—the fastest in the fleet.

You’ll head to the stars, fleeing the dying Earth. What does is matter if the military is armed with neutron cannons, or pulse rockets, or magnetic launchers that can slam 2000 rounds per second into your armor?

An EMP burst will knock out their targeting sensors. And you can eject a cloud of microscopic “mirror” chips to dampen their laser blasts.

Glancing back, you will see the frantic firing of white-hot energy beams at your shadow, the explosions of rockets as smart torpedoes blast from the battleships. The fireworks will be dazzling.

In a heartbeat, you’ll be out of enemy range, free to explore the stars.

You will live forever, for you will not just be armored against the weapons of man, but against eternity.

David Farland is an award-winning, New York Times bestselling author with nearly fifty science fiction and fantasy novels to his credit. He has won the Writers of the Future International Gold Award for best short story of the year, the Philip K. Dick Memorial Special Award for Best Novel in the English Language, the Whitney Award for Best Novel of the Year, and others.

He has worked with some of the largest franchises in the world—writing novels for Star Wars and The Mummy.

Dave worked for many years as the judge for one of the world’s largest writing contests, as an educator teaching creative writing at Brigham Young University, and thus has trained dozens of other New York Times bestsellers, including Brandon Sanderson, Brandon Mull, and Stephenie Meyer.

Dave currently lives in Saint George, Utah, with his wife, children, two cats and a Cocker Spaniel.

Author Spotlight: David Farland
Erin Stocks

This story takes the notion of future technology consuming a person and twists it around with unexpected optimism. What inspired this idea?

Over twenty years ago, when I was writing my first novel, On My Way to Paradise, I had a dream that my brain was trapped in the body of a giant tank-like spaceship, and that I was fighting a war on an alien moon—trying to hide in a crater as enemy ships hunted me. In the dream, an ally ship came and fought beside me, and though my companion ship was destroyed, I made it out alive, and decided to just abandon the war. So that became the inspiration. What can I say, I get those kinds of dreams when I eat too much pepperoni pizza.

Why did you decide to write this in second person?

A few months ago I was teaching a writing workshop, and we talked about the comparative advantages of writing in first or third person. At the time, I pointed out that there was nothing wrong with writing in second person, or even writing in future tense, and gave an example of what you might do. It occurred to me then that I should write some second-person future-tense stories just to show people what was possible. I can see how this could work extremely well for horror stories, for example, or thrillers, or even romance.

Battle drugs “going postal” on the streets is a bleak thought. It’s easy to imagine plenty of people willing to give up most of their bodies for an opportunity at something different, like “becoming a ship.” There’s also a parallel between those addicted to the drugs and the character who becomes an Aspire-Class; they’re each looking for something else. Was that parallel drawn intentionally?

Absolutely. We often trade our lives for other opportunities. Think about it. A person who goes to work from nine-to-five trades time with his wife and family, time that might be better spent in other pursuits, for a little security. A teen who goes into the military in order to get a college education is betting his life that the trade might be worth it. So we all do this from time to time.

In this particular case, I’m envisioning a world where the possibility of becoming virtually immortal exists, but the price is so high, few people are willing or capable of paying it.

You write both science fiction and fantasy. What does writing science fiction offer you more than other genres?

Actually, I like to read science fiction, fantasy, and thrillers, but also read a few other genres. I recently won the Whitney Award for Best Novel of the Year by writing a historical fiction piece, and I have a thriller that I hope to complete soon. So I like a lot of genres.

Do you prefer one over the other?

To tell the truth, I’ve enjoyed writing for the middle-grades and teens the best, I think, and I tend to favor fantasy just a bit more than science fiction. I’m not sure if I’ll write any more historicals, and when I tried writing thrillers, I discovered that I kept wanting to do something that was a bit more imaginative.

What’s coming up next for you?

I recently completed the screenplay The Runelords, based upon the first novel in my series. I’ve had a lot of very strong interest in it, and I suspect that we’ll get the movie into production this fall.

I also just completed Nightingale, a young adult contemporary piece that plays with some science fiction tropes that used to intrigue me as a kid—questions like, “I wonder if there could be any near-human species still alive on Earth, coexisting with us, the way that the Neanderthals once lived with our ancestors?” or “What would the next step of evolution be for brain development?”

Right now, I’m back trying to finish the ninth and last book in the Runelords series. It’s called A Tale of Tales, and I plan on getting it done in the next couple of months. It should be released next year.

Last of all, I’ve been asked to work with a German company to create a massively multi-user online role-playing game. I’ll be helping to create the world, the races, monsters, character classes, and so on, with the idea of making this a property that will also work for novels. I’ll then be writing a series of books based in the world. So this will be an interesting project because it will let me begin developing a world in conjunction with another company, creating an intellectual property that is primed to move into a couple of mediums at once. This should be a big challenge.

Beyond that, I’ve go so many novels that I want to write, I don’t know where to start next!

Lightspeed Assistant Editor Erin Stocks is a writer, musician, and graduate of the 2011 Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Her fiction is upcoming in the Coeur de Lion anthology Anywhere but Earth, Flash Fiction Online, the Hadley Rille anthology Destination: Future, and the Absent Willow Review. She can be found on erinstocks.com or Twitter.

Saving Your Brain to a Disk
Jeff Hecht

Mind swaps have been a standard science-fictional prop for decades. Just wire up the brain in a tired old body to something new, turn on the magical mind-transfer machine, and your mind gets downloaded into a new body, a computer, or a spaceship. Today, we can do computer mind swaps routinely; a few weeks back, I downloaded the memories of an aging PowerMac G5 into a sparkling-new MacMini through a Firewire cable. It worked like a charm. So why can’t we download our memories from our aging bodies into a shiny new computer?

What Happens in the Brain?

The short answer is that we don’t know how. The longer answer is that although we can observe brain activity, and have a general idea of how memory works, we don’t know how to read the format the brain uses to store memory. Imagine you were a computer operator back in 1955, when circuits were made of vacuum tubes, data was stored on punched cards, and it took a room of electronics to do the job of a pocket calculator. How would you feel if a time-traveler handed you a 100-gigabyte flash drive? You might understand it was a chunk of semiconductor that contained tiny transistors, but you wouldn’t have a clue of how to read the stored data. So you’d probably be better prepared than a scientist trying to read memories from a brain today, particularly because that makes the rather brash assumption that the “mind” can be transformed into digital bits at all.

We do have all sorts of ways to observe activity in the brain. Magnetic resonance imaging can show blood flow, positron emission tomography can map neurotransmitter activity, and electroencephalograms can record electrical activity. Scientists can tell what parts of the brain are active, and how active they are. That’s enough to tell what parts of the body are stimulated, sexually and otherwise.

But nobody knows how to read those images well enough to read your memories, or tell your thoughts beyond that a person of your favored gender is hot. (So much for the mind-reading dreams of all spy agencies since the darkest days of the cold war.) The brain’s code remains unintelligible, and we’re not even sure if we’re looking in the right place for the signals.

Record-Keeping Instead of Downloading

So if true mind reading is out, how can we record our thoughts? One option is an old-fashioned thing called an autobiography, which dates back over 1600 years to the Confessions of Saint Augustine. Writing an autobiography tells the story you want to tell, but it doesn’t re-create your memories.

Technology can help. Famed computer engineer G. Gordon Bell is taking the quest for memory by using computers to store not only his memories, but also things he sees and hears. “I believe this is the quest for what a personal computer really is,” Bell told Computerworld. “It’s to capture one’s entire life. A personal computer wouldn’t be a machine that just sits on my desk. It’s a repository. I think of the system as a personal memory. I feel immensely free by having all the information there.”

Bell calls his project “My Life Bits.” He has written about it in books called Total Recall and Your Life, Uploaded. He also blogs about it, describing gadgets that help him record his life, like a Bluetooth video camera called Looksie, which records everything you see, and stores it for ten hours. If you see something interesting, you can push a button to save 30 seconds of video posterity. If you’re bored, you just let that time scroll out of the camera’s memory into digital oblivion.

Inevitably, it all builds up. Bell suggests making digital copies of artifacts you want to pass along to your heirs, so everyone can get copies of everything. Perhaps that would prevent a few family fights, but it doesn’t explain who would get the original objects, especially the expensive fine china from your great-grandmother.

It’s a fascinating idea. On one hand, you have to wonder if the digital files will just accumulate on servers somewhere, the electronic counterpart of the mountains of old family photos stashed on closet shelves, storing memories that nobody takes time to look at. Yet on the other, could we use that treasure trove of data to recreate a person by simulating them on a computer?

Weaving Together a “Person” From Data

It might be possible. The trick is to program a computer to sift through the accumulated life data to look for patterns of speech or behavior. The computer would not have to be programmed to look for anything in particular. Instead, it would look for speech or behavior that distinguished that person from others.

That futuristic-sounding software already plays a role in our daily lives. Spam filters use it to identify electronic junk mail, but comparing messages you identify as spam with those you consider legitimate (called “ham” in computer jargon). You may never have heard from Mrs. James in Lagos before, and her letter may be original, but a good spam filter knows that “million,” “business partner,” “next of kin,” and “transfer” are clear fingerprints of Nigerian spam.

Google takes the idea further by using similar software to look for patterns that distinguish well-written and authoritative web pages from computer-generated junk laden with keywords linked to hot topics such as celebrity scandals. Search engines use such software tools to rank pages by their quality without having people laboriously read everything on the web. The more data, the better the technique works, so Google scans everything on a site and analyzes how words are used. Computers can even identify writing traits of individual authors. Scan enough writing of a prolific author, and someday a computer might be able to imitate the author’s style—although it would be much easier to match a pulp-fiction hack than a subtle literary stylist.

Spoken words might be used in the same way. It would take a lot of recordings, but Richard Nixon recorded some 3700 hours of conversation while he was President. Transcribe those tapes, leaving in the original expletives, and a powerful enough computer might be able to simulate Nixon. The computer couldn’t solve mysteries like what happened to the missing eighteen minutes of erased tape, but it could give insight into how Nixon thought, and might be able to simulate how he talked with other people.

Can We Make a Transfer, Instead of a Copy?

Transferring knowledge is a different matter, but engineers have already developed software for that, called expert systems. They codify specific knowledge accumulated by experts in the field, and assemble into an organized form that non-experts can use. For example, the expert system could collect techniques that retiring machinists used to fabricate hard-to-make components. When new workers face similar problems, they can query the system to learn details such as what lubricant to use while cutting a certain alloy.

Similarly, someday veteran space pilots could tell the tricks of their trade to a future expert system, which could codify their knowledge for the next generation of pilots. Of course, such an expert system would not preserve either your personality or your sense of being, so it couldn’t transfer your “self” from a worn-out body into a spaceship where it could survive indefinitely. We have less idea of how to do that than we do of how to record your thoughts or how to translate them into words. But that might not be a bad thing. Would you want to spend eternity as an expert flying a slow freighter to Neptune? That’s the sort of boring place where Gordon Bell would turn his life recorder off.

Jeff Hecht is a science-fact writer who contributes regularly to New Scientist magazine and Laser Focus World. His specialties range from lasers and fiber optics to paleontology. His books include Understanding Lasers, Beam: The Race to Make the Laser, Understanding Fiber Optics, and Beam Weapons: The Next Arms Race. He has had short fiction published in venues ranging from Analog and Asimov’s to Nature. More at his web site: http://www.jeffhecht.com.

Some Fortunate Future Day
Cassandra Clare

When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defac’d

The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age;

When sometime lofty towers I see down-raz’d,

And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;

When I have seen . . . the kingdom of the shore,

And the firm soil win of the watery main,

Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;

When I have seen such interchange of state,

Or state itself confounded to decay;

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate—

That Time will come and take my love away . . .

—William Shakespeare, Sonnet LXIV

Time is many things, her father told her. Time is a circle, and time is a great turning gear that cannot be stopped, and time is a river that carries away what you love.

When he said that, he looked at Rose’s mother’s portrait, hanging over their fireplace mantel. He had invented his time device only a few short months after she had died. It had always been one of his greatest regrets in life, though Rose sometimes wondered whether he could have invented it at all without the all-consuming power of grief to drive him. Most of his other inventions did not work nearly as well. The garden robot often digs up flowers instead of weeds. The mechanical cook can make only one kind of soup. And the talking dolls never tell Rose what she wants to hear.

“Do you think he’s ever coming back?” says Ellen. She means Rose’s father. She is the dark-haired talking doll, the saucy one. She likes to dance around the room, showing her ankles. She arranges the sugar cubes in the tea service to form rude words. “Perhaps he has taken to drink. I hear that is common among soldiers.”

“Shush,” says Cordelia. Cordelia is the gentle doll, redheaded and quiet. “Ladies should not speak of such things.” She turns to Rose.

“Would you like more tea?”

Rose accepts more tea, though it is now more like hot water flavored with a few leaves from the garden than real tea. She ran out of real tea months ago. There had been a time when food and tea and household goods were regularly delivered by the grocer’s boy from the nearby town. It was weeks after he stopped coming that Rose got up the nerve to put on her bonnet, pick a few coins from the box on the mantel, and walk alone into town.

It was then that she realized why the grocer’s boy had stopped coming.

The town was flattened. Great zigzagging cracks ran through the streets, steam still pouring out of them. Great sinkholes had opened in the ground, houses half tipped to the side.

She wondered how she hadn’t heard the destruction, though her house is more than a mile away. But then, airships flew overhead almost every night, dropping incendiaries into the nearby forest, hoping to flush out spies and deserters. Perhaps she was simply used to it.

She reached the edge of one great pit and stared down into it. She could see the top of the church spire sticking up, nearly reaching the top of the sinkhole. All around was the smell of decay. She wondered if the townsfolk had taken refuge in the church when the Wyrms came—she’d seen pictures of Wyrm fighters before, enormous, riveted copper tubes covered with incendiary bombs. She decided that her father was right. Towns were dangerous places for young ladies on their own.

“We’re very happy here, aren’t we?” says Cordelia in her tinny doll’s voice.

“Oh, yes,” says Rose, sloshing the tinted water in her cup. “Very happy.”

When Rose was eight, her father bought her a white bunny rabbit as a pet. At first she took good care of it, stroking its long silky ears with her fingers, feeding it lettuce from her hands. One day while she held it in her arms like a baby, letting it nibble a carrot from her fingertips, it sank its teeth into her skin, not knowing where the carrot ended and Rose began. She screamed and dashed it to the floor.

She was immediately sorry, but it was no use: The bunny was dead, and Rose was inconsolable.

That was when her father showed her the time device.

It has been almost six months since her father left and went to the war. Though she hasn’t been marking the calendar, Rose can tell that she is outgrowing her dresses. They are too tight in the bosom now and too short. Not that it matters, when there is no one to see her.

She goes out to the garden in the morning to gather ingredients for the cook. The cook used to make all sorts of things, but now it is broken and it makes only soup—whatever you put in it comes out in a sort of thick gruel. The garden robot follows her—in fact, it does most of the work. It digs long, even furrows and plants the seeds; it crushes bugs and other pests. It uses its calipers to measure the vegetables and fruit for ripeness. Sometimes, out in the garden, she sees smoke in the distance and hears zeppelins overhead. She finds other unusual things, marks of the war in the sky. Once she found a metal leg, torn off, lying among the carrots and vegetable marrows. She told the garden robot to get rid of it, and it dragged it away to the compost heap, leaving a trail of dark oil behind. Sometimes she finds dropped pamphlets, showing pictures of starving children or great metal hands crushing innocent families, but the words are in a language she doesn’t understand.

This time she finds a man. The garden robot notices him first, whistling in surprise like a teakettle. She nearly screams herself, it’s been so long since she saw another living creature. He looks odd to her as she draws closer. He is collapsed among the rosebushes, one shoulder of his blue uniform—so he is on her side, not an enemy soldier—dark with blood. He is moaning, so she knows he isn’t dead. The roses’ thorns have scratched and torn at him, and his blood is the brightest, reddest thing she’s seen in six months, much brighter than the roses.

“Bring him into the house,” she says to the garden robot. It clicks and whirs around him busily, but its calipers are sharp, and when it tries to close them around the soldier’s wrist, he bleeds distressingly. He cries out, without opening his eyes. His face is very young and smooth, the skin almost translucent, his hair white-blond and fair. He is wearing an airship crewman’s goggles around his neck, and she wonders what battle in the sky he fell from and how far he had to fall.

Eventually she shoos the garden robot away and approaches the soldier carefully. He has an energy rifle strapped to his belt; she undoes it and gives it to the robot to dispose of. Then she sets about the task of freeing the soldier from the tangled briars. His skin is hot when she touches him, much hotter than she remembers human skin being. But maybe it’s just been so long that she doesn’t really recall.

She half drags, half carries the soldier up the stairs and into her father’s bedroom. She hasn’t been in there since he left, and despite the ministrations of the cleaning robots, the room has a dank, fusty smell. The heavy wooden furniture seems to loom over her, as if she had suddenly become very small, like Alice in the children’s book. She gets him into the bed somehow and under the covers, using scissors to cut away the bloody parts of his uniform, baring his shoulder. He fights her weakly, like a kitten, as she does it, and she murmurs hush, and that it is for his own good.

There is a wound through the upper part of his shoulder. It is red and swollen and smells of infection. Dark-red lines radiate out from the puckered edges. Rose knows those lines mean death. She goes into her father’s study and pulls down one of the boxes from the mantel. It is slippery, polished wood, and from the inside she can hear a chittering noise, as of birds.

Back upstairs the soldier is tossing in her father’s bed, crying out unintelligible words. Rose wishes there were someone else with her, someone to hold him down as she opens the box and lets the mechanical leeches run over his body. The soldier screams and thrashes at them, but they cling tenaciously. They fasten on to the wound and the skin around it, their half-translucent coppery bodies swelling and darkening as one by one they fill with blood and fall to the side. When they are done, he is whimpering and clawing at himself. Rose sits down beside him on the bed and strokes his hair. “There, there,” she says. “There, there.”

Slowly, he calms. His eyes flutter open and then close. They are a very pale shade of blue. He is wearing copper dog tags around his neck. She lifts them and examines them carefully. His name is Jonah Lawrence, and he is a second lieutenant on the airship Skywitch. “Jonah,” she whispers, but his eyes don’t open again.

“He is going to fall in love with me,” she tells Ellen and Cordelia over tea, after the soldier has fallen asleep. “I am going to nurse him back to health, and then he will love me. That is always how it happens in books.”

“That is wonderful news,” says Cordelia. “What does it mean?”

“Love, stupid,” says Rose, annoyed. “You know what love is, don’t you?”

“She doesn’t know anything,” says Ellen, rattling her teacup with amusement. After a pause, she says, “Neither do I. What do you mean?”

Rose sighs. “Love means someone wants to be with you all the time. All they want is to make you happy and give you things. And if you go away from them, they will be miserable forever and ever.”

“That sounds terrible,” says Cordelia. “I hope it doesn’t happen.”

“Don’t say that,” says Rose. “Or I will slap you.”

“Do you love us?” Ellen asks.

The question hangs in the air, and Rose is not sure how to answer it. Finally she says, “Cordelia, you’re good with your needle. Come with me. I need you to help me sew up his wound, or it won’t heal.”

Rose sits and watches while Cordelia’s tiny hands sew up the wound in Jonah’s shoulder. The sleeping potion she had given him earlier is keeping him quiet, though Ellen sits on his elbow anyway, just in case he might wake and begin to thrash about. He shows no signs of it, though. Rose begins to worry that perhaps she has given him too much and killed him. The idea is very dramatic—what a tragedy it would be, like Romeo and Juliet.

When he finally wakes, it is just them alone in the room. It is nearly dawn, and watery light drips through the windowpanes. His eyes flutter open, and Rose leans forward in her chair beside the bed, her book and lap rug sliding to the floor. “Are you awake?” she says.

He blinks at her with his clear light eyes. “Who are you?”

“I am Rose,” she tells him. “I found you in my back garden. You must have fallen from your airship.”

“I was shot—” He puts his hand to his shoulder and feels the stitches. He stares at her. “You did all this,” he says. “You healed me?”

She nods modestly. No need to mention Ellen’s and Cordelia’s contributions. They are not real people, anyway.

He catches at her wrist. “Thank you,” he says. His voice is hoarse and sweet. “Thank you for saving my life.”

Rose is pleased. He is beginning to fall in love with her already.

After the rabbit died, Rose sobbed for hours in her room. Her father came in at last. She remembers his shadow falling across her bed as he said, “Sit up, little Rose. There’s something I want to show you.”

Her father was a big man, with big, capable hands, like a gardener or plowman. In one of them he was holding an object that looked like a telescope—or no, she thought as he sat down beside her, it was a watch, for it had a face, with dials, at the far end. “When your mother died,” he said, “I built this. I thought I could go back. Tell her not to go out riding that day. But I have never been able to make it take me back more than a week, and by then she had been dead for years.” He handed it to her. “You can go back if you like,” he said gruffly. “If you turn the dials like so—and so—you can return to the time when your rabbit was still alive.”

Rose was delighted. She took the device from him and turned the dials, as he had shown her, to return her to that morning. Then she snapped the device shut. For a terrifying moment it was like falling down a well, everything hurtling upward and away from her. Then she was in her room again, the white rabbit in its cage, and she was no longer holding the time device. Delighted, she ran to the cage and opened it, lifting her rabbit out and cradling it closely against her, squeezing tighter until it went still in her arms. She loosened her grip in disbelief, but the creature was as limp as a rag. She began to sob again, but this time when her father came to see what was wrong, she didn’t tell him. He didn’t remember having shown her the time device and she was too ashamed to ask for it again.

Jonah is shocked to learn that Rose is alone in the house, aside from the servant robots. He asks her endless questions: Who is her father (he’s never seen him, but he thinks he’s heard his name before), how long ago did he leave her, when was the town destroyed, how does she eat, live, survive? She brings him soup on trays and sits with him, answering his questions, sometimes bewildered at his surprise. It is, after all, the only life she’s known. In exchange, he tells her about himself. He’s only eighteen, the youngest second lieutenant in the army. He lives in the Capital, which she has always imagined as a place with beautiful soaring towers, like a castle on a hill. He tells her it’s much more like everyone rushing everywhere very fast. He tells her about the library, where the shelves of books rise high into the sky, and you can reach them on floating steam-powered platforms. He tells her about the magnetized train that runs around the top level of the city, from which the clouds can be seen. He tells her about the dressmaking automatons that can sew a silk dress for a lady in less than a day and deliver it by pneumatic post. Rose tugs at the too-tight bodice of her own plain cotton childish dress, then blushes.

“I would love to go there,” she says, looking at him with enormous eyes. “To the Capital.”

“It’s amazing what you’ve managed to do here, with the little you have,” he says. “How lucky I was to fall from the airship so close to your doors.”

“I am the lucky one,” she says, but so softly that maybe he doesn’t hear.

“I wish you could meet my sisters,” he says. “They would be much moved by your heroism.”

Rose can barely contain herself. He wants her to meet his family! His love for her must be serious indeed. She looks up so he cannot see the delight in her eyes, and she catches a glimpse of glittering eyes watching from a panel in the corner of the room. Cordelia, she thinks, or Ellen. She will have to reprimand them about their spying ways.

“You mustn’t spy on Jonah,” she says to Ellen. They are having soup in tiny bone teacups. “You must respect his privacy the way you respected Father’s.”

“But where will he live when your father comes back?” asks Cordelia. “He will have to be put in a different room.”

“When we are married, we will live in the same room,” Rose says grandly. “That is what married people do.”

“So he will move into your room?” Ellen’s face is all squashed with disbelief: she is probably thinking of Rose’s tiny bed, barely big enough for one.

“Not at all,” says Rose. “We won’t be staying here once we’re married. We shall go to the Capital and live there.”

There is an appalled silence. Finally, Cordelia says, “I do not think we will like the Capital very much, Rose.”

“Then you can stay here,” says Rose. “Grown-up ladies don’t play with dolls, anyway. And someone must watch the house until Father returns.”

She means the last to cushion the blow, but the dolls don’t seem comforted. Cordelia sets up a wail that pierces Rose’s ears. She hears running steps in the hallway, and the door flies open: it is Jonah, dressed in her father’s clothes. “Dear God,” he says, “is someone being murdered in here?”

“It’s just Cordelia,” says Rose, and turns to both the dolls, her face white with rage. “Stop it. Stop it.”

They are both silent, staring at Jonah. Rose is staring, too. She hadn’t realized how tall he was until now. He is so handsome, even in her father’s old clothes, that it hurts her eyes. “What are those things?” he demands, pointing at Cordelia and Ellen.

“Nothing,” she says hastily, standing up, thinking how childish he must think her, having tea with dolls. “Just toys my father made me.”

The look on his face does not change. “Will you come walk with me in the garden, Rose?” he asks. “I think I could do with some fresh air.”

She hurries to his side, not looking behind her to see if the dolls are watching.

They walk among the carefully planted flower beds, and Rose tries to explain. “It isn’t their fault—they tend to get upset over the littlest things,” she says.

“I’ve never seen anything like them,” says Jonah, catching up a stone and skipping it across the surface of the pond. “Automatons with real reactions—real feelings.”

“They were prototypes,” said Rose. “But my father thought giving them personalities was more trouble than it was worth, so he never sold the design.”

“Your father,” says Jonah, shaking his head, “must be some sort of genius, Rose. What else did he invent?”

She tells him about the garden robot and the cook. He does say he had wondered why there never seemed to be anything to eat but soup. She considers telling him about the time device, but she cannot bear to tell the story of her rabbit. He would think her cruel. All the while that she talks, he nods his head, considering, amazed.

“They won’t be able to believe this in the Capital,” he says, and her heart soars. She had been almost sure he was planning to take her back with him when he went—now she is completely.

“And when do you think you’ll be well enough to make the journey back?” she asks, eyes cast modestly to the ground.

“Tomorrow,” he says. A blue jay is calling from the treetops, and he raises his head to follow the noise.

“Then I must prepare a special dinner tonight. To celebrate that you’re well.” She takes his hand, and he looks startled.

“That sounds very pleasant, Rose,” he says, and turns so that they are walking back toward the house again. His hand slides out of hers. It doesn’t seem intentional, and Rose tells herself that it means nothing. They are going away together, tomorrow. That is what matters.

When Rose returns from the walk, she finds Ellen in her room, sitting on her bed. Cordelia is on the windowsill, singing a tuneless little song. When Rose comes in, dragging an empty trunk from the attic, Ellen scrambles to sit on it, kicking her little heels against the sides. “You can’t go away and leave us,” she says as Rose determinedly pushes her aside and begins to pile in her clothes.

“Yes, I can,” says Rose.

“No one will take care of us,” says Cordelia desolately from the windowsill. “Father will come back and take care of you.”

“He isn’t ever coming back,” says Ellen. “He went away and died in the war, and now you’re going away, too.” She can’t cry—she was never designed for it—but her voice sounds like weeping.

Rose snaps the trunk shut with a final sound. “Leave me alone,” she says, “or I’ll turn you both off. Forever.”

They are silent after that.

Rose dresses with care, in one of her mother’s old gowns. Lace drips from the cuffs and the hem. She goes down into the cellar and finds the last of the preserved peaches and a single bottle of wine. There is dried meat as well, and some flour and old bread. There is no use in saving these things anymore, now that she is going, so she fries vegetables from the garden with the dried meat and puts them out on the table with the fine china, the wine, and the preserves.

Jonah laughs when he comes downstairs and sees what she’s done. “Well, you did the best you could,” he says. “It reminds me of midnight feasts I used to have with my sisters, when we would raid the pantry at night.”

Rose smiles back at him, but she is aware of the eyes watching from the shadows—small shapes that dart and flicker when she looks at them. Cordelia and Ellen. She mentally damns them both to the pit of hell and goes back to smiling at Jonah. He is all pleasantry, filling her wineglass, and then his own, and proposing a toast to their winning the war. Rose has forgotten what the war is about or who they are fighting, but she drinks the wine nonetheless: It tastes dark and bitter, like cellar dust, but she pretends to like it. She drains her glass and he fills it again, with another toast: this one, he says, is for women like her; the war would be won already if all damsels were as valiant as she. Rose discovers that even though the wine tastes bad, it fills her with a pleasant glow when she drinks it.

On the third round of toasting, with the bottle nearly empty, he stands up. “And last,” he says, “a toast to some fortunate future day when, perhaps, once this war is over, we might see each other again.”

Rose freezes, the glass halfway to her lips. “What did you say?”

He repeats the toast. His eyes are bright, his cheeks flushed. He looks like a recruitment poster for airship pilots: Seeking young men, hardy, handy, and brave . . .

“But I thought I was coming with you to the Capital,” she says. “I thought you were going to bring me with you.”

He looks startled. “But, Rose, the way back to the Capital is through enemy territory. It’s much too dangerous—”

“You can’t leave me here,” she says.

“No, of course not. I had planned to alert the authorities when I returned, and they would send someone for you. I’m not callous, Rose. I understand what you did for me, but it’s too dangerous —”

“Nothing is too dangerous if we’re together,” says Rose. She thinks she may have heard someone say this in a novel once.

“That’s not true at all.” Jonah seems agitated by her refusal to understand. “It will be much easier for me to maneuver without worrying about you, Rose. And you aren’t trained for anything like this. It just isn’t possible.”

“I thought you loved me,” says Rose. “I thought we were going to the Capital so we could get married.”

There’s a horrified silence. Then Jonah stammers out, “But, Rose, I’m already engaged. My fiancée, her name is Lily—I can show you a chromolithograph—” His hand strays to his throat, where a locket hangs on a chain. But Rose has no interest in this girl, this fiancée with a flower name like her own. She stumbles to her feet and away from him, even as he moves toward her. “I think of you as if you were my own little sister, Rose—”

She runs past him, runs up the stairs and into her father’s study, slamming the door behind her. She can hear him calling out for her, but after a while, he stops calling, and there is silence. The sun has begun to set outside, and the room is filled with reddish light. She slips to the floor, her head in her hands, and begins to weep. Sobs rack her body. She is aware of the touch of hands on her hair and someone stroking her back. Ellen and Cordelia surround her, petting her as if she were a crying child. She sobs for hours, but they don’t tire; it is Rose, finally, who wearies first. Her tears slow and stop, and she stares at the wall, vacantly, gazing into nothingness.

“He was supposed to fall in love with me,” she says aloud. “I must have done something wrong.”

“Everyone makes mistakes,” says Ellen.

“It’s all for the best,” says Cordelia.

“I never liked him, anyway,” says Ellen.

“If only I could do it again,” Rose says. “I’d be different this time. More charming. I’d make him fall in love with me and forget everything else.”

“It doesn’t matter,” says Cordelia.

Dawn is lightening the room. Rose gets to her feet and goes over to her father’s desk. She rummages through the drawers until she finds what she is looking for, then returns to the window. Looking down, from here she can see the front door, the garden, the meadow, and the forest in the distance.

The dolls clamor around her legs like children, but she ignores them. She waits. She has nothing but time. The sun is high in the sky when the front door opens and Jonah steps out. He is wearing his uniform, patched at the shoulder where she cut it away from him. He is carrying nothing in his hands, taking nothing from her house as he goes. Nothing but her heart, she thinks. He sets off down the path that leads from the front door toward the meadow and to the wider road beyond.

He stops once, a few steps from the house, and looks back and up, squinting into the sun. He raises his hand in a halfhearted wave, but Rose does not respond. This Jonah, this version of him, no longer matters. It doesn’t matter where he thinks he’s going. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t love her. She is going to change all that.

He drops his hand and turns away, and Rose looks down at the time device. She spins the dial back. One day. Two days. Three. She hears Cordelia call out to her, but she snaps the device shut, and the doll’s voice is lost in the whirlwind that picks her up and spins her round and carries her backward through time. In moments, it is over, and she is breathless, sitting once again on the windowsill. The dolls are gone, the time device no longer in her hands.

She anxiously looks out the window. Has she guessed the time right? Did she miscalculate? But no—her heart leaps up with happiness as she sees the man staggering out of the forest and dropping to his knees in the meadow. Leaving a trail of blood behind him, he begins the long and painful crawl toward her garden, where she will find him again.

© 2011 Cassandra Clare.

Originally published in Steampunk! edited by Gavin Grant & Kelly Link.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Cassandra Clare is the New York Times, LA Times, and USA Today bestselling author of The Mortal Instruments and Infernal Devices trilogies of young adult fantasy novels. Her first book, City of Bones, was a 2007 Locus Award finalist for Best First Novel. Her books have been translated into 32 languages. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two cats.

Author Spotlight: Cassandra Clare
Erin Stocks

You seem to have an affinity for steampunk, given this story and your YA steampunk trilogy “The Infernal Devices.” What draws you to this sub-genre? Why did you choose it for this particular story?

I’ve always been drawn to the Victorian era, specifically the “scientific romances” of Jules Verne and HG Wells. I love the idea of this time period where to them technology was indistinguishable from magic and it served the same function in a lot of ways in their literature that magic does in ours. Steampunk is retro-futurism—it’s the Victorians’ idea of what was coming in their future. There is something magically compelling about the technological idealism of A Future That Never Was. It is also I think to us a wonderfully innocent view of technology, before World War One came along and people realized that what technology was really good for was killing a lot of people fast.

Many of the protagonists in your novels grow and learn through the conflicts they face. But in “Some Fortunate Future Day,” Rose was resisting change before Jonah even arrived, remaining in her home day after day while the world crumbled around her. What inspired her character?

I had had this idea for years, about this character who is trapped in an endlessly repeating loop of bad choices. I think with Rose, she has been overprotected and kept ignorant of the world around her by her father because she’s a girl, and when he disappears, she just doesn’t have enough information to navigate the world she’s in.

Do you think Rose would have fallen in love with Jonah so quickly had she not been alone for so long?

I think that one of the themes of the story is about what makes a person—Rose is surrounded by these automatons who have feelings and personalities (something that really shocks Jonah). I don’t think to her Jonah is any more real than one of her dolls, and so he should respond like a doll—giving her obediently what she wants, which in this case is love. Or what Rose thinks of as love. I think it’s clear she doesn’t understand love any more than the dolls do.

Cordelia and Ellen act as Rose’s voice of reason. Why did you decide to give the dolls personalities?

I think Cordelia and Ellen (named after Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman, always voices of reason) function to keep the story from becoming too claustrophobic; they give Rose some way to express her feelings and to hear an alternate viewpoint. I do think they also foreshadow how bad Rose is at hearing anything she doesn’t want to hear and how selfish she is—she’s perfectly willing to abandon them to go with Jonah even though she knows they have no one else and were in fact built to be her companions.

The real tragedy here could be that Rose has the opportunity to grow up. Jonah says he’ll send someone back for her, to take her to the Capital just like she wants, but she refuses to listen—all she wants is to marry him. Do you think she’s incapable of change?

I don’t think she’s incapable of change so much as resistant to it. I think the story is about second chances, or the dream of them. Everyone wants the ability to have a “do-over” of some mistake they made. Rose has that ability, but because of it, she doesn’t need to change. It also means she never learns from her mistakes, because she doesn’t have to. I don’t think anyone will finish the story thinking that Rose really is going to make Jonah love her the second, third or fifth time she uses the time device.

I found it an interesting turn of events that at the beginning of the story, Rose’s father had said that “time is a river that carries away what you love.” Yet Rose uses time to bring Jonah, and her chance at love, back to her. Do you think she’ll be trapped in this cycle forever, or will she eventually find her way out?

I think leaving readers with that question is the core of the story. Of course one wants to know the answer—I want to know the answer—but I don’t think I could answer it because the story is about positing that question. If we could live our lives again, could we “do it right”? Are the mistakes we make really flukes or do they grow out of our nature? Is there fate (Rose uses her time device to bring back her rabbit, but it just dies again, differently) or do we have free will? Could we really make someone love us if we just said the right thing at the right time (“Groundhog Day” style) or is love a more mysterious force than that, alchemical, grounded in who we are?

What are you working on now?

Clockwork Princess, the last in the Infernal Devices series.

Lightspeed Assistant Editor Erin Stocks is a writer, musician, and graduate of the 2011 Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Her fiction is upcoming in the Coeur de Lion anthology Anywhere but Earth, Flash Fiction Online, the Hadley Rille anthology Destination: Future, and the Absent Willow Review. She can be found on erinstocks.com or Twitter.

Feature Interview: Beth Revis
Gwenda Bond

Beth Revis is the most common kind of overnight success in publishing—the kind where the author actually worked long and hard for years. Revis, who hails from rural North Carolina, netted a big deal with Penguin’s Razorbill imprint for her science fiction trilogy, which began with Across the Universe, released in January 2011. The story follows Amy, a teenage girl who is put in cryosleep to travel with her parents to a new planet, and Elder, a boy who has grown up on the ship Godspeed and will one day be the leader of its extremely dysfunctional society. The novel blends elements of mystery, romance, and dystopia into its science fictional premise, and received plenty of advance buzz, including a starred review from Kirkus. It will be released in paperback in November.

When the book hit The New York Times Best Seller list at #7 in its first week out, it was an instant beacon of hope for everyone who wants to see a wider variety of science fiction—read: more than just dystopian novels—being published in the Young Adult (YA) field. But the reception isn’t so surprising, given that the generation ship conceit is perfect to explore the ways in which teenagers often feel confined by their surroundings, trapped by limited choices. Revis’s own background, growing up in a rural area and also being a former teacher, surely helped her fully evoke that sense of entrapment.

Despite this wildly successful debut, Revis’s path to publication was a hard-fought one, and she has the ten manuscripts before Across the Universe to prove it. When I caught up with her for this interview, she was hard at work on the trilogy’s second novel, A Million Suns, due out in 2012.

Your debut novel is a big science fiction book—dystopian elements, sure, but also with a generation ship and cryosleep and genetic engineering, which are core science fiction trappings. For years, the conventional wisdom has been that it’s impossible to make spaceships work in Young Adult, and no one will buy books about them. Did you worry about that at all while you were writing Across the Universe?

I didn’t worry one bit while I was writing it—I was honestly just writing a story that I enjoyed. I loved the world, and I loved playing with it. It’s weird to say because it’s science fiction, but the entire story was a very organic process—the ship really grew with the story.

That said, after I finished and started trying to find an agent for the work, I became very worried, very fast. I received three rejections that specifically stated that they didn’t think a space SF novel would sell for the YA market. I had several agents who specifically ask for SF on their listings, but who rejected mine because it was a space SF—they wanted an on-world dystopian like The Hunger Games, not real SF.

Luckily, I found a wonderful, brilliant agent who was very eager for the book, and she placed me with the exact right publisher. It’s been a dream since. And I love proving wrong all those people who told me SF would never sell.

In my experience, SF writers usually tend to work from either theme/idea or from character. Where did the germ of Across the Universe start?

The original story came from an idea for a mystery. I don’t want to ruin anything for those who haven’t read the story yet, but I’ll just say that the end of the novel was always that end. I built the entire book so I could have those last twenty or so pages of the novel.

Beyond that, everything started with the characters. I didn’t think about accessibility when I was writing it, but after I finished, I realized that by having one point-of-view narrator be from Earth and one be born on the spaceship, I was giving my readers access to both the native and alien point-of-view.

But definitely the story came from the characters. The themes—such as honesty, nature versus nurture, and free will—came about because the characters were in situations where they needed to think about those things.

Did you always think of the book as a larger story you’d tell over multiple books?

Actually—and this surprises most people—the story was going to only be one book for a long time. I thought that maybe, if people liked it, I might write a companion novel taking place several generations later from the events in the book. But I was talking to my agent just before we started shopping the book—did I mention she’s brilliant?—and something she said sparked an idea, a way for me to expand the book into a trilogy using the same characters.

That said, the end of the novel didn’t change. Actually, nothing changed to “set up” a trilogy—I just originally intended to end the book on a bit of an ambiguous note. Now that ambiguity will be answered, at least partially, in the two successive books. I think most people will be happier to see what happens.

One of the things that sets YA science fiction apart from much adult SF is how accessible it is—generally speaking, it makes entering its world easy for the reader. Do you agree? Was that something you thought about while you were writing?

It wasn’t something that I thought about writing, but it is something that I think exists and sets the genre apart. There’s a big difference between most adult SF and YA SF. In some ways, it’s like the difference between Star Trek and Star Wars. I always preferred the space opera style—I wanted the story and the characters, not the setting and the science. I wrote the kind of story that I liked—and my biggest influences were movies and television, more so than books. Firefly is my all-time favorite show. They don’t explain a lot of things on Firefly. You know Serenity is a spaceship, and you even see the engine—and in one episode, the workings of the engine are crucial to the plot—but it’s not like there’s really any hard engineering or science revealed in the story.

That’s not to say there’s no science in Firefly—or in Across the Universe for that matter. There is. I gave the ship in my novel an engine that could, potentially, be used for generation ships in the future, and while I don’t explain what the cryo liquid the people from Earth are frozen with, I do explain that it prevents cell walls from bursting, the primary obstacle we currently face in cryogenic freezing.

There are two kinds of science fiction—those that focus on the science and those that focus on the fiction. I focus on the fiction.

That said—I do know my science. Very observant readers—I’ve had maybe a dozen contact me—have noticed that there’s actually a pretty big scientific “error” in the book. It’s actually not an error; it’s a clue for the sequel.

In the novel, Elder and Amy’s romance is quite nontraditional, especially in terms of Elder’s characterization. I almost read him as a subtle critique of the “love at first sight”-obsessed hero type, and I saw you mention somewhere how flawed Shakespeare’s Romeo is. Would you elaborate a bit on that? (I’m assuming this issue won’t be going away in the sequels.)

Absolutely Elder is the “love at first sight” character, and Amy is much more reserved. I based Elder in part on the character of the Emperor in the manga Fushigi Yûgi by Yu Watase. You have this character who just sees an image of someone—just a visual, an idea of the person—and he falls in love with her. But, of course, we are much more than our outer appearances. I don’t really believe in love at first sight. Perhaps attraction at first sight, but not love. So part of what I wanted to do with Amy and Elder on a romantic level was to show that you might think you love someone at first sight, but you can’t really love someone without getting to know that person.

I’ve always had problems with Romeo and Juliet, and, more recently, some other YA novels that have come out. Certainly there’s a market for them, and some people love them, and that’s one hundred percent fine. But it was very important for me to show that real love requires time—and that sometimes love can be one-sided. I don’t want anyone to get too comfortable with the idea that Amy and Elder’s relationship is sealed in stone.

But I think my biggest point is merely this: Real love requires sacrifice. I would believe in the story of Romeo and Juliet if there was no suicide involved. They took the easy way out. Real love is sometimes a burden and sometimes painful and sometimes requires you to keep moving forward, even if that means leaving the one you love behind.

Did keeping the world’s science consistent ever prevent you from going a certain place in the story, or did it drive and enhance the narrative development? Did you have to change anything in later drafts that it made you crazy to lose, to preserve the world-building?

Actually, for Across the Universe, everything flowed very organically. I do not ever plan my novels before I write them—I had this vague idea of the final scene of the book, but I had no idea how to get there until I actually wrote it out. So the world grew with the story, and I really didn’t have to change or lose anything in that way.

However, for A Million Suns, the sequel, there have been a few things that I’ve had to cut and change. I’ve rewritten the story several times—I’m so glad I’m working with such a dedicated editor. We all have a grand vision for the sequel, and we’re all working towards it. But there have been a few things in particular that just didn’t work for the story or the world and they had to go.

You wrote something like ten books before this one. Were any of those science fiction, or were they all over the spectrum?

I did write ten full-length completed manuscripts before Across the Universe, and I tried to get nearly all of them published, as well, but obviously didn’t. They were all fantasy novels, and they were all YA (with one middle grade exception). They were sometimes high fantasy and sometimes contemporary, but science fiction was a big departure for me. I’m glad I took the risk—and Across the Universe was a risk for me for several reasons: SF—since I’d only written fantasy—told from two points of view, with a boy narrator for half the book, and all in first-person present tense—none of which I’d done before.

On a related note, do you have anything to say about the value of perseverance? How did you keep going?

I kept going simply because I enjoy writing. Some people enjoy video games (like my husband) or watching TV (like my father) or reading (like my mother). In my spare time, I enjoy writing. So I kept writing.

I did want to give up at times, though. Writing is fun—but publication is a soul-crushing, dream-eating monster. And while I did enjoy writing, I always had the goal of publication in front of me, and it really killed me inside to know that the odds were against me and that there was a chance nothing I ever wrote would get published.

I’m glad I kept writing—but it’s easy for me to say that, now, with the book published and more on the way. And now I look back on those ten novels that weren’t published with pride—they are symbols of perseverance and dedication to the craft, etc. But not too long ago, they were objects of shame and signs of failure. It’s just about perspective. So, if you are a writer and you have novels that haven’t been published and you’re ashamed of them—that’s okay. Keep writing until you realize that they’re badges of honor.

Where do you see your work going after this trilogy concludes? Do you think you’ll stick with science fiction or branch out into something else?

I know for sure I’ll still be writing YA. I will probably only write YA. But I’m playing around with a steampunk idea, and maybe a fantasy one from one of my trunk novels. I also wouldn’t mind writing a SF novel that has a great ensemble cast, too. Short answer: I don’t know!

I’m always fascinated by how everyone’s personal reading history affects their work. What were your formative influences, as a child and into adulthood? What books or authors are your big beacons, the ones that loom large?

C.S. Lewis changed the way that I thought about books. I was always a big reader, and when I was a kid, my mom would take me to the library. There was a great set of stairs that hid a wonderful reading nook, and I’d pull books off the shelf and read them under the stairs. I was the kind of kid that just devoured books; I’d plow through them, toss them aside, and grab the next. But while reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, I remember thinking that maybe the characters and story were something more, that maybe Aslan was more than a lion. As a kid, this felt like a huge discovery to me. It’s easy to read those books now that I’m an adult and go “Yeah, obviously there’s a bit of an allegory here,” but as a kid, it felt like I was a sleuth fitting together complex puzzle pieces. The idea that a book could be more than words changed my entire outlook on life—I studied literature in college, became a literature teacher, and wrote with this idea that words were magic.

Did you read books for teens growing up, or did you mostly jump from kids’ books to adult books?

It seems so strange to me now, because YA is such a huge genre, but only ten years ago . . . it wasn’t. The classics in YA are classic in part because there were just so few YA books out there. So I read all the classics—Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper, The Enchanted Forest by Patricia Wrede, The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley. And yeah, Sweet Valley and The Baby-Sitters Club.

I didn’t read based on labels. I read the books that looked cool. I read the books where cool stuff happened. When I got to college, that was when there seemed to be more of an emphasis on labels. Harry Potter had just come out and I remember thinking, “That looks neat, but I can’t read it, it’s for kids.” I never thought that way until the YA and MG labels started cropping up so strongly.

Then my college roommate and I were at a bookstore browsing, and of course I went to the adult section because, you know, I thought I was an adult by then. And my roommate looked at me, as if she were about to do something bad, and she said, “I wish I could read the books over there, they look more fun.” And I thought, they are more fun. So I crossed the aisle and I bought the books I wanted to read. I go straight to the YA section now without a bit of remorse—and fortunately, since the success of the big blockbusters, more and more people are thinking the exact same things. They want the books that are fun.

Many people talk about the sense of freedom YA authors have, because YA is not usually subdivided into genres in bookstores in the same way that adult books are. There is also a real sense of supportiveness from the larger YA community. Were those reasons part of what drew you to YA as a writer? What do you think makes YA special?

YA is special because it breaks the label. YA stands for Young Adult, but I think it’s pretty obvious that the books aren’t for young people—or, they’re not just for young people. Ignore the label. What you need to know about YA is that YA is about a style more than anything else. In YA, you can almost guarantee that the books are fast-paced, the characters are interesting, and the plot is exciting. In short: Stuff happens. Or, actually: Cool stuff happens. In YA, you’ll get the book with kissing and explosions and a ticking time bomb and death and tragedy and hilarity and comedy. All in one book. And it can be on a spaceship or in a fantasy world or in Paris or in the Midwest, and the characters can be black, white, Asian, Hispanic, or aliens—any of that and more can happen in YA. It’s not about a setting or a trope—it’s about a style.

What’s your writing process like? Do you do a lot of drafts? What’s the hardest part for you?

I don’t outline, and I write everything in order. I can’t write page two until page one is done. When I wrote Across the Universe, I knew those last twenty pages . . . but I didn’t write them until I got to them.

This is because my favorite part of writing is discovering the story. I love the adventure, the danger, in not knowing where a story is going. When you turn the page of a book, you don’t know what’s going to happen to the characters next. When I write my books, I don’t know what’s going to happen until the words are on the page, and that’s exciting for me.

Of course, that also means that sometimes—often—I write my characters into a corner or I add something that’s not needed or I mess stuff up. So while I love drafting and it’s just a joy to discover the world, the real work begins as soon as I write “the end.” That’s when I have to break everything I just created and glue it all back together in a way that makes sense.

Also: I’m part German and all stubborn. So, sometimes, something doesn’t work in the novel . . . and it’ll take me three or four drafts before I can admit it and change it. So that part’s not hard—it’s excruciating.

Has there been anything that truly surprised you about the publication process and the reaction to the book?

The success of the book has been phenomenal, and so far above and beyond my dreams that I’m more in shock than surprised!

Another thing that I really didn’t expect—the community. And really—it is a community. Online, there’s a whole core of book bloggers and writers who blog YA, and it’s just a friendly, giving community based on books. It’s amazing. I sort of expected writers to be these hugely competitive, back-stabbing, snobby people, and it’s just not true. I have yet to meet someone like that. Instead, I just keep meeting these wonderful people who are passionate about books—not just their books, all books.

Are there things you really rely on for recharging your creative batteries or for inspiration?

Joss Whedon is simply amazing—he’s the best writer of my generation, in my opinion. A Firefly marathon will inspire me more than almost anything else (and I gave credit to that fact by naming one of my side characters after his Kaylee, and basing Eldest on the Operative in Serenity).

On a personal level, if I get really, really stuck, the first thing I do is switch mediums. I do all my writing on a computer, so if I get stuck, I move to pen and paper and brainstorm or even write whole chapters in ink. If that doesn’t work, I get in my car and drive. Before I got the book deal, I worked as a teacher in a very rural town that required a forty-five minute commute each way. In those long drives, I’d think about my story and solved a lot of my plot problems that way. Even now, if I get too stuck, I’ll get in my car, crank the radio, and just drive and drive.

Wild card last question: Would you ever want to travel in space, assuming it became more common?

Absolutely! But not like Amy. I don’t want to give up Earth—I want a vacation home on the moon.

Gwenda Bond writes young adult fantasy. She is also a contributing writer for Publishers Weekly, and regularly reviews for Subterranean Online and Locus. Her work has also appeared in the Journal of Mythic Arts, The Washington Post, Kirkus, and at Strange Horizons, and she has been a guest on NPR’s Weekend Edition. She holds an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts’ program in writing for children and young adults. Readers of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet may know her as everyone’s “Dear Aunt Gwenda.” She lives in a hundred-year-old house in Lexington, Kentucky, with her husband, author Christopher Rowe, and their menagerie. She can be found at her blog or on Twitter.

Coming Attractions

Coming up in November, in Lightspeed, we have original fiction by new writers Lisa Nohealani Morton (“How Maartje and Uppinder Terraformed Mars”) and Mark Pantoja (“Houses”), plus reprints by Maureen F. McHugh (“The Kingdom of the Blind”) and John Crowley (“Snow”). 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 Magazine!

Thanks for reading!