Editorial, August 2013
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue thirty-nine of Lightspeed!

Thanks to everyone who participated in our reader survey that we conducted last month. We got lots of great feedback and data, and we really appreciate you taking the time. (And congrats to the lucky participant who won a free one-year subscription to Lightspeed!)

As I write this, I have just lost the Locus Award for best editor (alas), and the Hugo voting will have concluded by the time this issue comes out (though we won’t know who the winners are until September 1). Soon we’ll learn what this year’s World Fantasy Award nominees are, and then we’ll pretty much be done with awards . . . at least for a few months!

In other news, I recently re-released a new edition of my anthology Seeds of Change, which features nine stories about paradigm shifts—those critical moments when everything you know can change—including work by Tobias S. Buckell, Ted Kosmatka, Nnedi Okorafor, Ken MacLeod, and others.

And, lastly, we’ve again got a special bonus for you this month: In addition to all of the usual Lightspeed goodness, at the end of this issue, we’re presenting a bonus story from the pages of our sister-magazine, Nightmare. So once you’re done reading the issue proper, please also check out the bonus story—and if you enjoy it, please consider subscribing to Nightmare!

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

We have original fantasy by Ken Liu (“The Litigation Master and the Monkey King”) and Cory Skerry (“Breathless in the Deep”), along with fantasy reprints by Marc Laidlaw (“Catamounts”) and Angela Slatter (“Brisneyland by Night”).

Plus, we have original science fiction by Yoon Ha Lee (“The Knight of Chains, the Deuce of Stars”) and Sean Williams (“Face Value”) and SF reprints by Alastair Reynolds (“At Budokan”) and Nancy Kress (“End Game”).

All that, and of course, we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with Alaya Dawn Johnson and bestselling YA author Rick Yancey.

For our ebook readers, we also have the novella “The Gorgon in the Cupboard” by Patricia McKillip and an excerpt from Blood of Tyrants, the penultimate volume in the acclaimed Temeraire series by bestselling author Naomi Novik.

Our issue this month is sponsored by our friends at 47North. This month, look for Kingmaker by Christian Cantrell (from which you can read an excerpt in our ebook edition this month) and The Raven by Jeremy Bishop. You can find more from 47North at www.apub.com.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And remember, there are several ways you can sign up to be notified of new Lightspeed content:

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Before I go, just a reminder that our custom-built ebookstore I told you about recently is now up and running. So if you’d like to purchase an ebook issue, or if you’d like to subscribe directly from us, please visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in both epub and mobi format.

And don’t worry—all of our other purchasing options are still available, of course; this is just one more way you can buy the magazine or subscribe. You can, for instance, still subscribe via Amazon.com or from our friends at Weightless Books. Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe to learn more about all of our subscription options.

Well, that’s all there is to report this month. Thanks for reading!

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of Lightspeed, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Oz Reimagined, Epic: Legends of Fantasy, Other Worlds Than These, Armored, Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, 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. He is a six-time finalist for the Hugo Award and four-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award. He is also the editor of Nightmare Magazine and is the co-host of Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

The Gorgon in the Cupboard
Patricia A. McKillip

Harry could not get the goat to stay still. His model, who was an aspiring actress, offered numerous impractical suggestions as she crouched beside the animal. In fact, she rarely stopped talking. Harry didn’t like the look in the goat’s eye. It wasn’t very big, but it seemed to him arrogant beyond its age, and contemplating mischief.

“Give it something to eat,” Moira suggested. “Goats eat anything, don’t they? That old leather sack, there.”

“That’s my lunch,” Harry said patiently. “And the less we put into the goat, the less will come out of it. If you get my meaning.”

She giggled. She was quite charming, with her triangular elfin face, her large green eyes with lashes so long they seemed to catch air like butterfly wings as they rose and fell. She dealt handily with the goat, who was eyeing Harry’s lunch now. It strained against the rope around its neck, occasionally tightening it so that its yellow eyes verged on the protuberant. A bit like hers, Harry thought.

“Try to remain serious,” he pleaded. “You’re a scapegoat; you’ve been falsely accused and spurned by the world. Your only friend in the world is that goat.”

“I thought you said you were just sketching the outlines today. Putting us in our places. So why do I have to be serious?” The goat, in whose rope her wrists were supposedly entangled, gave an obstinate tug; she loosed one hand and smacked it. “You should have gotten a female. They’re sweet-natured. Not like this ruffian.” She wrinkled her nose. “Stinks, too, he does. Like—”

“This one was all I could borrow. Please.”

They were still for a miraculous moment, both gazing at him. He picked up charcoal, held his breath and drew a line of the goat’s flank onto the canvas, then continued the line with her flank and bent knee. She swatted at a fly; the goat bucked; they both seemed to baa at once. Harry sighed, wiped sweat out of his eyes. They had been there half the morning, and little enough to show for it. The sun was high and dagger-bright; the tavern yard where he had set his poignant scene was full of sniggering critics. Idlers, he reminded himself, resuming doggedly when the pair settled again. They wouldn’t know a brush from a broom straw. Still. He paused to study his efforts. He sighed again. There was something definitely wrong with her foot.

“It’s hot,” she said plaintively, shaking her heavy hair away from her neck, disturbing the perfect, nunlike veil of line across her face.

“Ah, don’t—”

“And I’m starving. Why can’t you paint like Alex McAlister? He lets me sit inside; he dresses me in silks; he lets me talk as much as I want unless he’s doing my face. And I get hung every time, too, a good place on the wall where people can see me, not down in a corner where nobody looks.”

The goat was hunkered on the ground now, trying to break its neck pulling at the rope peg. Harry glanced despairingly at the merciless source of light, looked again at his mutinous scapegoats, then flung his charcoal down.

“All right. All right.”

“You owe me for Thursday, too.”

“All right.”

“When do you want me to come again?”

He closed his eyes briefly, then fished coins out of his pocket. “I’ll send word.”

One of the critics leaning against the wall called, “Best pay the goat, too; it might not come back otherwise.”

“I might have work,” Moira reminded him loftily. Mostly she worked early mornings selling bread in a bakery, and took elocution lessons in afternoons when she wasn’t prowling the theaters, or, Harry suspected, the streets for work.

“That goat won’t get any younger neither,” another idler commented. Harry gritted his teeth, then snapped his fingers for the boy pitching a knife in a corner of the yard. The boy loosened the goat from the peg, got a good grip on its neck-loop to return it to its owner. He held out his other hand for pay.

“Tomorrow then, sir?” he asked indifferently.

“I’ll send word,” Harry repeated.

“Don’t forget your dinner there, sir.”

“You have it. I’m not hungry.”

He dropped the charcoal into his pocket, tucked the canvas under one arm and the folded easel under the other, and walked home dejectedly, scarcely seeing the city around him. He was a fair-haired, sweet-faced young man, nicely built despite his awkward ways, with a habitually patient expression and a heart full of ravaging longings and ambitions. He was not talented enough for them, this morning’s work told him. He would never be good enough. The girl was right. His paintings, if chosen at all to be hung for important exhibits, always ended up too high, or too close to the floor, or in obscure, badly lit corners. He thought of McAlister’s magnificent Diana, with the dogs and the deer in it looking so well-behaved they might have been stuffed. And Haversham’s Watchful Shepherd: the sheep as fat as dandelions and as docile as—as, well, sheep. Why not scapesheep, he wondered despondently, rather than scapegoats? No goat would stand still long enough for mankind to heap their crimes on its head.

Then he saw that which drove every other thought out of his head.

Her.

She was walking with her husband on the other side of the street. He was speaking fervidly, gesturing, as was his wont, probably about something that had seized his imagination. It might have been anything, Harry knew: a poem, the style of an arch, a pattern of embroidery on a woman’s sleeve. She listened, her quiet face angled slightly toward him, her eyes downturned, intent, it seemed, on the man’s brilliance. He swept fingers through his dark, shaggy hair, his thick mustaches dancing, spit flying now and then in his exuberance.

Neither of them saw Harry. Who had stopped midstream in the busy street, willing her to look, terrified that she might raise her dark, brooding eyes and see what was in his face. She only raised her long white fingers, gently clasped her husband’s flying arm and tucked it down between them.

Thus they passed, the great Alex McAlister and his wife Aurora, oblivious to the man turned to stone by the sight of her.

He moved at last, jostled by a pair of boys pursued through the crowd, and then by the irate man at their heels. Harry barely noticed them. Her face hung in his mind, gazing out of canvas at him: McAlister’s Diana, McAlister’s Cleopatra, McAlister’s Venus. That hair, rippling like black fire from skin as white as alabaster, those deep, heavy-lidded eyes that seemed to perceive invisible worlds. That strong, slender column of neck. Those long fingers, impossibly mobile and expressive. That mouth like a bite of sweet fruit. Those full, sultry lips . . .

I would give my soul to paint you, he told her silently. But even if in some marvelous synchronicity of events that were possible, it would still be impossible. With her gazing at him, he could not have painted a stroke. Again and again, she turned him into stone.

Not Aurora, he thought with hopeless longing, but Medusa.

He had tried to speak to her any number of times when he had visited Alex’s studio, or their enchanting cottage in the country. All he managed, under that still, inhuman gaze, were insipid commonplaces. The weather. The wildflowers blooming in the garden. The stunning success of McAlister’s latest painting. He coughed on crumbs, spilled tea on his cuff. Her voice was very low; he bent to hear it and stepped on her hem with his muddy boot sole, so that whatever she had begun to say was overwhelmed by his apologies. Invariably, routed by his own gracelessness, he would turn abruptly away to study a vase that McAlister had glazed himself, or a frame he was making. McAlister never seemed to notice his hopeless passion, the longing of the most insignificant moth for fire. He would clap Harry’s shoulder vigorously, spilling his tea again, and then fix him in an enthusiastic torrent of words, trying to elicit Harry’s opinion of some project or profundity, while the only thought in Harry’s head was of the woman sitting so silently beyond them she might have been in another world entirely.

He walked down a quiet side street shaded by stately elms, opened the gate in front of the comfortable house he had inherited from his parents. Looking despondently upon his nicely blooming hollyhocks, he wondered what to do next.

If only I could create a masterwork, he thought. An idea no one has thought of yet, that would attract the attention of the city, bring me acclaim. Make me one of the circle of the great . . . Now I’m only a novice, a squire, something more than apprentice yet less than master. Harry Waterman, dabbler at the mystery of art. If only I could pass through the closed doors to the inner sanctum. Surely She would notice me then . . .

He went across the garden, up the steps to his door and stopped again, hand on the latch, as he mused over an appropriate subject for a masterpiece.

The goat, while original and artistically challenging, held no dignity; it would not rivet crowds with its power and mystery. At most, viewers might pity it and its ambiguous female counterpart, and then pass on. More likely they would pity the artist, who had stood in a sweltering tavern yard painting a goat.

Aurora’s face passed again through his thoughts; his hand opened and closed convulsively on the door latch. Something worthy of those eyes he must paint. Something that would bring expression into them: wonder, admiration, curiosity . . .

What?

Whatever it was, he would dedicate his masterpiece to Her.

The door pulled abruptly out of his hold. Mrs. Grommet, his placid housekeeper, held a hand to her ample bosom as she stared at him. “Oh, it’s you, Mr. Waterman. I couldn’t imagine who was making that racket with the door latch.” She shifted aside, opened the door wide for him to enter.

“Sorry, Mrs. Grommet,” he murmured. “Throes of creation.”

“Of course, Mr. Waterman. I didn’t expect you back so soon. Have you had your lunch, sir?”

“No. Just bring me tea in my studio, please. I expect to be in the throes for the rest of the afternoon.”

“Yes, sir.”

In the highest floor of the house, he had knocked down walls, enlarged windows to give him space and light, views from a city park on one side, the broad, busy river on the other. Mrs. Grommet came panting up with a great silver tray. He slumped in an easy chair, sipped tea as he flipped through his sketchbooks for inspiration. Faces, dogs, flowers, birds, hills, rocks, pieces of armor, horses, folds of heavy tapestry, drifting silk, hands, feet, eyes . . . Nothing coherent, nothing whole, nothing containing the lightning-bolt of inspiration he craved.

He read some poetry; words did not compel an image. He paced for a while, his mind a blank canvas. He beseeched his Muse. Anybody’s Muse.

Inspiration failed to turn her lovely face, her kindly attention, toward him. He wandered to his cupboards, pulled out old, unfinished canvases, studied the stilted figures, the fuzzy landscapes for something that he might redeem to greatness.

One caught at memory: a head without a mouth. He placed it on the easel, stood studying it. The head, when completed, would have belonged to Persephone at the moment she realized that, having eaten of the fruits of the Underworld, she was doomed to spend half her life in that gloomy place. The young model he had chosen for it had vanished before he could finish it. Harry gazed at her, struck by her beauty, which had inspired his normally clumsy brushwork. The almond-shaped eyes of such pale gray they seemed the color of sun-kissed ice, the white-gold hair, the apricot skin. A true mingling of spring and winter, his Persephone, who had disappeared so completely she might have been carried away into the nether world herself.

He tried to remember her name. May? Jenny? She had gotten herself into trouble, he suspected. Harry had noticed a certain heaviness in her walk, the frigidity of terror in her expression. Moved, he had offered, in his nebulous, hesitant way, to help. But she had fled. Or died, perhaps, he was forced to consider. In childbirth, or trying to get rid of the child, who could know? He had tried to find her so that he could finish the painting. But no one seemed to know anything at all about her.

He wondered if it might be worth finishing. Her eyes, gazing straight out at the viewer, compelled attention. Idly, he traced a mouth with his forefinger, rifling through all the likely mouths he might borrow to finish it. There was Beresford’s cousin Jane. . . But no, even at her young age, her lips were too thin to suggest the hunger that had caused Persephone to eat forbidden fruit . . . Or was that a different tale?

He recognized the invisible mouth his finger had outlined, and swallowed.

Some passing Muse, a mischievous sprite, tempted him to reach for crimson paint. The lips that haunted him burned like fire in memory . . . but darker than fire, darker than rose, darker than blood. He toyed guiltily with all those colors on his palette. Only paint, he told himself. Only memory. The color of wine, they were, deep, shadowy burgundy, with all the silken moistness of the rose petal.

Vaguely he heard Mrs. Grommet knock, inquire about his supper. Vaguely he made some noise. She went away. The room darkened; he lit lamps, candles. Mrs. Grommet did not return; the streets grew even quieter; the river faded into night.

He blinked, coming out of his obsessive trance. That full, provocative splendor of a mouth was startling beneath the gentle, frightened eyes of his Persephone. But the likeness transfixed him. Aurora’s mouth it was; he had succeeded beyond all dreams in shifting it from memory into paint. He could not use it. Of course he could not. Everyone would recognize it, even on some other woman’s face. Which he would need to go out and find, if he wanted to finish this Persephone. Maybe not his masterwork, but far easier to manage than the goat; she would do until inspiration struck.

He lingered, contemplating that silent, untouchable mouth. He could not bring himself to wipe it away yet. He would go down and eat his cold supper, deal more ruthlessly with the mouth after he had found a replacement for it. It did not, after all, belong to him; it belonged to the wife of his dear friend and mentor . . . He tore his eyes from it, lifted the canvas from the easel and positioned it carefully back into the cupboard, where it could dry and be forgotten at the same time.

He closed the door and the lips spoke.

“Harry!” Its voice was sweet and raucous and completely unfamiliar. “You’re not going to leave me here in the dark, are you? After calling me all afternoon? Harry?”

He flung himself against the door, hearing his heart pound like something frantic trying to get out of him, or trying to get in. He tried to speak; his voice wouldn’t come, only silent bleats of air, like an astonished sheep.

“Harry?”

“Who—” he finally managed to gasp. “Who—”

“Open the door.”

“N.”

“You know I’m in here. You can’t just keep me shut up in here.”

“N.”

“Oh, Harry don’t be so unfriendly. I won’t bite. And even if I did—” The voice trilled an uncouth snigger, “you’d like it, from this mouth.”

Harry, galvanized with sudden fury, clutched at the cupboard latch, barely refraining from wrenching it open. “How dare you!” he demanded, feeling as though the contents of his inmost heart had been rifled by vulgar, soiled hands. “Who are you?”

“That’s it,” the voice cooed. “Now lift the latch, open the door. You can do it.”

“If you force me to come in, I’ll—I’ll wipe away your mouth with turpentine.”

“Tut, Harry. How crude. Just when I’m ready to give you what you want most.”

“What I want—”

“Inspiration, Harry. You’ve been wishing for me ever since you gave up on the goat and gave me a chance to get a word in edgewise.”

“You’re a mouth—” He was breathing strangely again, taking in too much air. “How can you possibly know about the goat?”

“You called me.”

“I did not.”

“You invoked me,” the voice insisted. “I am the voice of your despair. Your desire. Why do you think I’m coming out of these lips?”

Harry was silent, suddenly breathless. A flash went through him, not unlike the uncomfortable premonitions of inspiration. He was going to open the door. Pushed against it with all his strength, his hands locked around the latch, he was going to open . . . “Who are you?” he pleaded hoarsely. “Are you some sort of insane Muse?”

“Guess again,” the voice said coolly. “You looked upon your Beloved and thought of me. I want you to paint me. I am your masterwork.”

He swallowed drily. “My masterwork.”

“Paint me, Harry. And all you wish for will be yours.”

“All I wish . . . ”

“Open the door,” the voice repeated patiently. “Don’t be afraid. You have already seen my face.”

His mouth opened; nothing came out. The vision stunned him, turned him into stone: the painting that would rivet the entire art world, reveal at last the depths and heights of his genius. The snake-haired daughter of the gods whose beauty threatened, commanded, whose eyes reflected inexpressible, inhuman visions.

He whispered, “Medusa.”

“Me,” she said. “Open the door.”

He opened it.

Down by the river, Jo huddled with the rest of the refuse, all squeezed under a butcher’s awning trying to get out of the sudden squall. In the country, where she had walked from, the roads turned liquid in the rain; carriages, wagons, horses, herds of sheep and cows churned them into thick, oozing welts and hillocks of mud deep enough to swallow your boots if you weren’t careful.

Here the cobbles, though hard enough, offered some protection. At least she was off her aching feet. At least until the butcher saw what took up space from customers looking in his windows and drove them off. Jo had been walking that day since dawn to finish her journey to the city. It was noon now, she guessed, though hard to tell. The gray sky hadn’t changed its morose expression by so much as a shift of light since sunrise.

Someone new pushed into the little group cowering under the awning. Another drenched body, nearly faceless under the rags wrapped around its head, sat leaning against Jo’s shoulder, worn shoes out in the rain. It wore skirts; other than that it seemed scarcely human, just one more sodden, miserable, breathing thing trying to find some protection from life.

They all sat silently for a bit, listening to the rain pounding on the awning, watching the little figures along the tide’s edge, gray and shapeless as mud in their rags, darting like birds from one poor crumb of treasure the river left behind to the next. Bits of coal they stuffed into their rags to sell, splinters of wood, the odd nail or frayed piece of rope.

The bundle beside Jo murmured, “At least they’re used to being wet, aren’t they? River or rain, it’s all one to them.”

Her voice was unexpectedly young. Jo turned, maneuvering one shoulder out from beneath a sodden back. She saw a freckled girl’s face between wet cloth wrapped down to her eyebrows, up to her lower lip. One eye, as blue as violets, looked resigned, calm. The other eye was swollen shut and ringed by all the colors of the rainbow.

Jo, her own face frozen for so long it hardly remembered how to move, felt something odd stirring in her. Vaguely she remembered it. Pity or some such, for all the good it did.

She said, “Whoever gave you that must love you something fierce.”

“Oh, yes,” the girl said. “He’ll love me to death one of these days. If he finds me again.”

There was a snort from the figure on the other side of Jo. This one sounded older, hoarse and wheezy with illness. Still she cackled, “I’d one like that. I used to collect my teeth in a bag after he knocked them out. I was so sorry to lose them, I couldn’t bear to give them up. I was that young, then. Never smart enough to run away, even when I was young enough to think there might be a place to run to.”

“There’s not,” Jo said shortly. “I ran back home to the country. And now I’m here again.”

“What will you do?” the girl asked.

Jo shrugged. “Whatever I can.”

“What have you done?”

“Mill work in the country. I had to stop doing that when my mother died and there was no one else to—to—”

“Care for the baby?” the old woman guessed shrewdly.

Jo felt her face grow cold again, less expression on it than on a brick. “Yes. Well, it’s dead now, so it doesn’t matter.”

The girl sucked in her breath. “Cruel,” she whispered.

“After that I got work at one of the big houses. Laundry and fires and such. But that didn’t last.”

“Did you get your references, though?”

“No. Turned out without.”

“For what? Stealing?”

“No.” Jo leaned her head back against the wall, watched rain running like a fountain over the edge of the swollen awning. “I wasn’t that smart.”

The old woman gave her crow-cackle again. “Out of the frying pan—”

Jo nodded. “Into the fire. It would have been, if I hadn’t run away. If I’d stayed, I’d have had another mouth to feed when they turned me out. So I came back here.”

Another voice came to life, a man’s this time. “To what?” he asked heavily. “Nothing ever changes. City, country, it’s all the same. You’re in the mill or on the streets from dark to dark, just to get your pittance to survive one more day. And some days you can’t even get that.” He paused; Jo felt his racking cough shudder through them all, piled on top of one another as they were. The old woman patted his arm, whispered something. Then she turned to Jo, when he had quieted.

“He lost his wife, not long ago. Twenty-two years together, and not a voice raised. Some have that.”

“Twenty-two years,” the man echoed. “She had her corner at the foot of the Barrow Bridge. She sang like she didn’t know any better. She made you believe it, too—that you didn’t know anything better than her singing, you’d never know anything better. She stopped boats with her voice; fish jumped out of the water to hear. But then she left me alone with my old fiddle and my old bones, both of us creaking and groaning without her.” He patted the lump under his threadbare cloak as though it were a child. “Especially in this rain.”

“Well, I know what I’m going to do when it quits,” the girl said briskly. “I’m going to get myself arrested. He’ll never get his hands on me in there. And it’s dry and they feed you, at least for a few days before they let you out again.”

“I got in for three months once,” a young voice interposed from the far edge of the awning.

“Three months!” the girl exclaimed, her bruised eye trying to flutter open. “What do you have to do for that?”

“I couldn’t get myself arrested for walking the streets, no matter how I tried, and I was losing my teeth and my looks to a great lout who drank all my money away by day and flung me around at night. I was so sick and tired of my life that one morning when I saw the Lord Mayor of the city in a parade of fine horses and soldiers and dressed-up lords and ladies, I took off my shoe and threw it at his head.” The old woman crowed richly at the thought. “I let them catch me, and for three months I had a bed every night, clean clothes, and food every day. By the time I got out, my lout had moved on to some other girl and I was free.”

“They don’t make jails nowadays the way they used to,” the fiddler said. “They never used to spoil you with food or a bed.”

Jo felt the girl sigh noiselessly. “I’d do three months,” she murmured, “if I knew where to find a Lord Mayor.”

Jo’s eyes slid to her vivid, wistful face. “What will you do,” she asked slowly, “for your few days?”

“I’ve heard they take you off the streets if you break something. A window, or a street lamp. I thought I’d try that.”

Jo was silent, pulling her mother’s tattered shawl around her. Jo had made it for her, years earlier, when her father was alive to tend to his sheep and his cows, make cheese, shear wool for them to spin into thread. When she’d gone back, her mother had given the shawl to her to wrap the baby in. The sheep and cows were long gone to pay debts after her father died. Her mother’s hands had grown huge and red from taking in laundry. Alf, they called the baby, after her father. Alfred Fletcher Byrd. Poor poppit, she thought dispassionately. Not strong enough for any one of those names, let alone three.

The man who was its father showed his face in her thoughts. She shoved him out again, ruthlessly, barred that entry. She’d lost a good place in the city because of him, in a rich, quiet, well-run house. A guest, a friend of the family, who had a family of his own somewhere. He’d found her early one morning making up a fire in the empty library . . . The only time she’d ever seen him, and it was enough to change her life. So she’d run out of the city, all the way back home to her mother. And all she had left now, of any of that time, was an old purple shawl.

That was then, she thought coldly. This is now.

Now, the rain was letting up a little. The young girl shifted, leaning out to test it with her hand. Jo moved, too, felt the coin or two she had left sliding around in her shoe. Enough for a loaf and a bed in some crowded, noisy, dangerous lodging house run by thieves. Might as well spend it there, before they found a way to steal it.

Or she could break a window, if she got desperate enough.

A door banged. There was the butcher, a great florid man with blood on his hands and a voice like a bulldog, growling at them to take their carcasses elsewhere or he’d grind them into sausages.

The girl wrapped her face close again, hiding her telltale eye. The fiddler coughed himself back into the rain, his instrument carefully cradled beneath his cloak. The old woman, wheezing dreadfully, pulled herself up with Jo’s help. Jo picked up her covered basket for her. Flowers, she thought at first, then caught a pungent whiff of it. Whatever it was she sold, it wasn’t violets. The woman winked at her and slid the basket over her arm. She trailed off after the rest of the bedraggled flock scattering into the rain.

Jo saw a lump of masonry, or maybe a broken cobblestone, half the size of her fist near the wall where the old woman had been sitting. She picked it up, slipped it into her pocket in case she needed it later.

You never knew.

Harry stood in the enchanted garden of the McAlister’s cottage in the country. Only a few miles from the city, it might have existed in a different time and world: the realm of poetry, where the fall of light and a rosebud heavy with rain from a passing storm symbolized something else entirely. The rain had stopped in the early afternoon. Bright sun had warmed the garden quickly, filled its humid, sparkling air with the smells of grass and wild thyme, the crushed strawberry scent of the rambling roses climbing up either side of the cottage door. The cottage, an oddly shaped affair with no symmetry whatsoever, had all its scattered, mismatched windows open to the air. There was no garden fence, only a distant, rambling stone wall marking the property. The cottage stood on a grassy knoll; in nearby fields the long grass was lush with wildflowers. Farther away, brindled cows and fluffy clouds of sheep pastured within rambling field walls. Farther yet, in a fold of green, the ancient village, a bucolic garden of stone, grew along the river. On the next knoll over, John Grainger was battling the winds trying to paint the scene. Occasionally, as a puff of exuberant air tried to make off with Grainger’s canvas, Harry could hear his energetic swearing.

Harry had come up for the day to look for a face for his Medusa among McAlister’s visitors. Painters, their wives and families, models, friends who encouraged and bought, and brought friends who bought, wandered around the gardens, chatting, drinking wine and tea, sketching, painting, or watching McAlister paint.

McAlister was painting his wife. Or rather, he was painting her windblown sleeve. She stood patiently against the backdrop of climbing red roses, all of which, Harry noticed, were the exact shade of her mouth. He tried not to think of that. Thinking of her mouth made him think of the monstrous creation in his cupboard. In the sweet light of day, there in the country, he was willing to attribute his Gorgon to the morbid churning of his frustrated romantic urges. But she had inspired him, no doubt about that. Here he was in McAlister’s garden, looking in every passing female, even the young girl from the kitchen who kept the teapot filled, for his Medusa.

McAlister was unusually reticent about his own subject matter. Whatever figure from myth or romance he was portraying, he needed her windblown. He had captured the graceful curves of his wife’s wrist bone, her long, pliant fingers. The flow of her silky sleeve in the contrary wind proved challenging, but he persevered, carrying on three discussions at once with his onlookers as he painted. Aurora, her brooding eyes fixed on some distant horizon, scarcely seemed to breathe; she might have been a piece of garden statuary.

Harry drifted, trying not to watch.

He sat down finally next to John Grainger’s mistress, Nan Stewart. She had modeled many times for John’s drawings and paintings, as well as for other artists who needed her frail, ethereal beauty for their visions. Grainger had discovered her sitting in the cheaper seats of a theater one evening. A well-brought up young girl despite her class, she refused to speak to an artist. Undaunted, he found out who she was and implored her mother’s permission to let her model for him. Her mother, a fussy lump of a bed-mattress as Grainger described her, accompanied Nan a few times, until she realized that the girl could make as much in an hour modeling for artists as she could sewing for a week in a dressmaker’s shop. Eventually Nan came to live with the brilliant, volatile Grainger, which explained, Harry thought, her pallor and her melancholy eyes.

She had fine red-gold hair and arresting green eyes. With marriage in view at one point in their relationship, Grainger had hired someone to teach her to move and speak properly. She smiled at Harry dutifully as he filled the empty chair beside her.

“More tea?” he asked.

A vigorous, incoherent shouting from the knoll beyond made them both glance up. Grainger, hands on his easel, seemed to be wrestling with the wind.

Nan shook her head. She had a bound sketchbook on her lap, as well as a pencil or two. Grainger encouraged her to draw. She had talent, he declared to the world, and he was right, from what Harry had seen. But that day her sketchbook was shut.

“Not inspired?” he ventured.

“Not today.” She turned her attention from the painter on the knoll finally. “How are you, Harry?”

“Flourishing.”

“Are you painting?”

“I have a subject in mind. I’m prowling about for a face.”

“What subject?”

“It’s a secret,” he said lightly. “I’m not sure I can pull it off. I don’t want to embarrass myself among you artists.”

Her smile touched her eyes finally. “You’re a sweet man, Harry. I’m still such a novice myself.”

“John praises your work to the skies. He thinks very highly—”

“I know.” Her face was suddenly angled away. “I know. I only wish he still thought so highly of me.”

“He does!” Harry said, shocked. “He’s loved you for years. You live together, you work together, you are twin souls—”

“Yes.” She looked at him again, her expression a polite mask. “Yes.”

He was silent, wondering what was troubling her. His eyes strayed to the group beside the rose vines. Children ran out of the cottage door; he recognized Andrew Peel’s gray-eyed little beauty, and her baby brother trundling unsteadily after. Nan sighed absently, her eyes on the children. Harry’s own eyes strayed. Across the garden, the statue came to life; the dark, unfathomable eyes seemed to gaze straight at him.

He started, his cup clattering, feeling that regard like a bolt from the blue, striking silently, deeply. He became aware of Nan’s eyes on him, too, in wide, unblinking scrutiny. Then she set her cup down on a table; it too rattled sharply in its saucer.

“She’s pregnant, you know,” Nan said. Harry felt as though he had missed a step, plunged into sudden space. He started again, this time not so noisily. Nan added, “So am I.”

He stared at her. “That’s wonderful,” he exclaimed finally, leaning to put his cup on the grass. He caught her hands. That’s all it was then: her inner turmoil, her natural uncertainties. “Wonderful,” he repeated.

“Is it?”

“Of course! You’ll marry now, won’t you?”

She gave him an incredulous stare. Then she loosed her hands, answered tonelessly, “Yes, quite soon. Next week, perhaps, and then we’ll go away for a bit to the southern coasts to paint.”

“I couldn’t be happier,” Harry told her earnestly. “We’ve all been expecting this for—”

“For years,” she finished. “Yes.” She hesitated; he waited, puzzled without knowing why. Something about the event, he supposed, made women anxious, prone to fear disasters, or imagine things that were not true.

Grainger’s voice, sonorous and vibrant, spilled over the group. He appeared tramping up the knoll, his hat gone, his canvas in one hand, easel in the other, paints in the pockets of his voluminous, stained jacket. He blew a kiss to Nan, leaving a daub of blue on his bushy, autumn-gold mustaches. Then he turned to see how McAlister’s sleeve was coming. Above his broad back, Harry saw the statue’s eyes come alive again; her cheeks had flushed, in the wayward wind, a delicate shade of rose. Ever the consummate professional, she did not move, while Grainger, lingering in the group, expounded with witty astonishment how like a wing that sleeve seemed, straining for its freedom on the wind.

Harry turned back to Nan, breath indrawn for some pleasantry.

Her chair was empty. He looked around bewilderedly. She had flown herself, it seemed, but why and on what wayward wind, he could not imagine.

Jo walked the darkening streets, fingering the broken cobble in her pocket. The day had been drier than the previous day; that was as much as she could say for it. Sun seemed to linger forever as she trudged through the noisy, stinking streets. She asked everyone for work, even the butcher who had driven her out from under his awning, a shapeless, faceless unrecognizable bundle he didn’t remember in the light. But he only laughed and offered the usual, smacking with the flat of his hand the quivering haunch of meat he was slicing into steaks.

“Come back when you get desperate,” he called after her, to the amusement of his customers. “Show me how fine you can grind it.”

She got much the same at inns and alehouses. When she stopped at crossings to rest her feet and beg for a coin or two, she got threats from sweepers’ brooms, screeches from ancient heaps of rags whose territory she invaded, shoves from lean, hollow-cheeked, cat-eyed girls with missing teeth who told her they’d cut off her hair with a rusty knife if they saw her twice on their street.

Toward late afternoon she was too exhausted to feel hungry. She had money for one more night’s lodging, or money for food. Not both. After that—she didn’t think about it. That would be tomorrow, this was not. Now she had her two coppers, her two choices. And she had the stone in her pocket. She drifted, waiting for night.

When the street lamps were lit, she made up her mind. Just in that moment. She was sitting in the dark, finally safe because nobody could see her nursing her blistered, aching soles. Nobody threatened, yelled, or made lewd suggestions; for a few precious moments she might have been invisible.

And then the gas lamps went on, showing the world where she was again. Caught in the light, she didn’t even think. She was on her feet in a breath, hand in her pocket; in the next she had hurled the broken stone furiously at the light. She was startled to hear the satisfying shatter of glass. Someone shouted; the flare, still burning, illumined a couple of uniformed figures to which, she decided with relief, she would yield herself for her transgression.

There was a sudden confusion around her: ragged people rushing into the light, all calling out as they surrounded the uniforms. Jo, pushing against them, couldn’t get past to reveal herself to the law.

“I did it,” a woman shrieked.

“No, it was me broke the lamp,” somebody else shouted. The crowd lurched; voices rose higher. “Give over, you great cow—it was me!”

“I did it!” Jo shouted indignantly. “It wasn’t them at all!”

The crowd heaved against her, picked her off her feet. Then it dropped her a moment later, as it broke apart. She lost her balance, sat on the curb staring as the uniforms escorted the wrong woman entirely out of the light. She went along eagerly enough, Jo noted sourly. She pulled herself up finally, still smarting over the injustice of it all.

Then she realized that her purple shawl was gone.

She felt her throat swell and burn, for the first time in forever. Even when her mother had died she hadn’t cried. Not even when the baby had died. She had taken the shawl off her mother, and then off the baby. It was all she had left of them to remember them by. Now that was gone. And she was blinded, tears swelling behind her eyes, because the tattered shawl had borne the burden, within its braided threads, of her memories.

Now she was left holding them all herself.

She limped to find some private shred of shadow, refusing to let tears fall. All the shadows seemed occupied; snores and mutterings warned her before she could sit. She wandered on and on through the quieting streets, unable to stop the memories swirling in her head. Her innocent young self, cleaning the ashes out of the fireplace in the fine, peaceful library. The handsome stranger with the light, easy voice, asking her name. Asking about her. Listening to her, while he touched her cuff button with his finger. Shifted a loose strand of her hair off her face. Touched her as no one had, ever before. Then gone, nowhere, not to be seen, he might have been a dream. And she, beginning to wake at nights, feeling the panic gnawing at her until she could bear it no longer, and upped and ran.

But there was something else. A street name dredged it up as she walked. Or the night smell of a great tree in a line of them along the street. She had run from someone else. Oh, she remembered. Him. The young painter. He had a gentle voice, too, but he only touched her to turn her head, or put her loose hair where he wanted it. He paid well, too, for the random hour or two she could spare him. It was his money she saved to run with, when she knew she could no longer stay. When her skirts grew tight. When the other girls began to whisper, and the housekeeper’s eyes drew up tight in her head like a snail’s eyes at the sight of Jo.

What was his name?

She walked under the great, dark boughs that shielded her from the street lights. She could sleep under them, she thought. Curl up in their roots like an animal; no one would see her until dawn. The street was very quiet; a sedate carriage or a cab went by now and then, but she heard no voices. He lived on a street like this; she remembered the trees. She’d walk there from the great house, his housekeeper would let her in, and she would climb the stairs to his—his what was it? His studio. He painted her with that strange fruit in her hand, with all the rows of little seeds in it like baby teeth.

He told her stories.

You are in the Underworld, he said. You have been stolen from your loving mother’s house by the King of Hades. You must not eat or drink anything he offers you; if you refuse, he will have no power over you, and he must set you free. But you grow hungry, so hungry, as you wait . . .

“So hungry,” she whispered.

You eat only a few tiny seeds from this fruit, thinking such small things would do no harm. But harm you have done for now he can claim you as his wife and keep you, during the darkest months of the year, in his desolate and lonely realm . . .

What was her name?

Her eyes were closing. Her bones ached; her feet seemed no longer recognizable. Not feet any longer, just pain. Pain she walked on, and dark her only friend . . . She didn’t choose; she simply fell, driven to her knees in the damp ground beneath a tree. She crawled close to it, settled herself among its roots, her head reeling, it felt like, about to bounce off her shoulders and roll away without her.

What was its name?

She closed her eyes and saw it: that bright, glowing fruit, those sweet, innocent seeds . . .

Pomegranate.

Would he want to finish his painting? she wondered.

But there was someone guarding her passage out of the Underworld. Someone stood at the gates she must pass through, protecting the serene upper realms from the likes of her. Someone whose word was law on the border between two worlds . . .

What was her name?

Her eyes. Jo could not remember her eyes, only felt them watching as she fled into the ancient, timeless dark. Only her bun, the light, glossy brown of a well-baked dinner roll, and her chins and the watch pinned to her bosom, at one corner of her apron.

What would her eyes say when she saw Jo?

She remembered as she felt the strong arms seize her, pull her off the earth into the nether realms of sleep.

Mrs. Grommet.

Harry, having returned from the country without his Medusa, avoided his studio. He did not want to open the cupboard door again. He couldn’t decide which might be worse: his painting talking to him or his painting not talking to him. Was expecting a painting to speak to him worse than having it speak to him? Suppose he opened the cupboard door with expectations, and nothing happened? He would be forced to conclusions which, in the cheery light of day, he did not want to think about.

So he left the house at midmorning, and dropped in at a gallery where a new painting by Thomas Buck was hung. The gallery, recently opened, had acquired pieces indiscriminately in its desire to become fashionable. It aimed, it declared affably, to encourage the novice as well as to celebrate the artist. Tommy Buck’s work showed promise. It had been showing promise for years. Harry, studying the new painting called Knight Errant, was gratified to see that Buck still could not draw to save his life. The horse was absurdly proportioned; its wide, oblong back could have been set for a dinner party of six. And the knight’s hands, conveniently hidden within bulky gauntlets, gripped the reins awkwardly, as though he were playing tug-of-war. The young woman tied to a tree, toward whom the knight rode, seemed to be chatting amiably with the dragon who menaced her.

I could do better than that, Harry thought.

He felt the urge, remembered the anomaly in the cupboard, and was relieved when some friends hailed him. They carried him away eventually to dine, and from there to another friend’s studio where they drank wine and watched the painter struggle with his Venus, a comely enough young woman with something oddly bland about her beauty. She bantered well, though, and stayed to entertain them over a cold supper of beef and salad. Harry got home late, pleasantly tipsy, and, inspired, went immediately up to his studio to view his work within the context of his friends’.

The Gorgon spoke when he opened the cupboard, causing him to reel back with a startled cry: He had actually forgotten her.

“Hello, Harry.”

“Hlmph,” he choked.

“Have you found me yet?”

He tugged at his collar, tempted to slam the cupboard shut and go to bed. But he answered, venturing closer, “No. Not yet.”

“Did you even look for me?”

“Of course I did! I looked for you in every female face I passed. I didn’t see you anywhere.” Except, he thought, in McAlister’s garden, where Her eyes had immobilized him once again. “You aren’t easy to find,” he added, speaking now into the shadows. “You’re a very complex matter.”

“Yes, I am, aren’t I,” she murmured complacently. “Harry, why don’t you let me out?”

“I can’t. What if someone sees?”

“Well, I don’t intend to pass the time of day with Mrs. Grommet, if that’s what worries you.”

“No, but—”

“Hang a cloth over my face or something. Pretend I’m a parrot.”

“I don’t think so,” he sighed, sitting down on the floor because he had been standing much of the day. A lamp on the wall above his head spilled some light into the open cupboard; he could see the edge of the canvas, but not the moving mouth. Less afraid now, lulled by wine and company, he asked her curiously, “Where do you think I should look for you?”

“Oh, anywhere. You’ll know me when you see me.”

“But to see you is to be—”

“Yes,” she said, laughing a little. “You’ll recognize your model when she turns you, for just a tiny human moment, into stone.”

“Only One can do that,” he said softly.

“Maybe. You just keep looking.”

“But for what? Are you—Were you, I mean, really that terrible? Or that beautiful? Which should I be searching for?”

“Oh, we were hideous,” she answered cheerfully, “me and my two Gorgon sisters. Stheno and Euryale, they were called. Even in the Underworld, our looks could kill.”

“Stheno?”

“Nobody remembers them, because nothing much ever happened to them. They didn’t even die, being immortal. Do you think anyone would remember me if that obnoxious boy hadn’t figured out a way to chop my head off without looking at me?”

Harry dredged a name out of the mists of youthful education. “Perseus, was it?”

“He had help, you know. He couldn’t have been that clever without divine intervention. Long on brawn, short on brains, you know that type of hero.”

“That’s not what I was taught.”

“He forced our guardian sisters, the gray-haired Graeae, to help him, you must have heard. He stole their only eye and their tooth.”

“They had one eye?” Harry said fuzzily.

“They passed it back and forth. And the tooth. Among the three of them.” She gave an unlovely cackle. “What a sight that was, watching them eat. Or squabble over that eyeball. That’s what they were doing when they didn’t see that brat of a boy coming. He grabbed their goods and forced them to give him magic armor and a mirror to see me in, so he wouldn’t have to meet my eyes. Then he lopped my head off and used me to kill his enemies. Even dead, I had an effect on people.”

“He doesn’t sound so very stupid.”

“He had help,” she repeated with a touch of asperity. “Anyway, it was loathsome, gray-haired old biddies who armed him to fight me. Not some lissome, rosy-fingered maidens. You remember that when you paint me.”

“I will.” He added, brooding over the matter, “If I can find you.”

“Oh, you will,” she said more cheerfully. “Never fret. I do wish you would take me out of here and let me watch, though.”

“No.”

“I could advise you.”

“You’d scare my model.”

“I wouldn’t talk, I promise you! And if I forget, just cover me up. Please, Harry? After all, I have inspired you. You could do me a favor. It’s awfully dark in here.”

“Well.”

“Please? Harry?”

“Well.” He got to his feet again, dusted off his pants, yawning now and forgetting why he had come up. “I’ll think about it. Good night.”

“Good night, Harry.”

He closed the cupboard door and went to bed.

The next morning, his ambition inflamed by what the gallery seemed to think worth hanging, he ate his breakfast hastily and early. He would not come home without his Medusa, he was determined, even if he had to search the ravaged streets and slums for her. No, he told Mrs. Grommet, she should not expect him home before evening. If then. He would go as far as he must to find his inspiration, even as far, he admitted in his inmost heart, as the country, to see if he might find that unexpected face in Aurora’s shadow.

He got as far as the street. He paused to latch the garden gate behind him, and was turned to stone.

A woman appeared out of nowhere, it seemed. She murmured something to him; he hardly knew what. He looked at her and time stopped. The normal street noises of passing carriages, birds, doors opening, voices calling, simply vanished. He heard the faint hum of his own blood in his ears, and recognized it as a constant, unchanging sound out of antiquity. The sound heard when all else is silent; nothing moves.

Her face was all bone and shadow, full of stark paradoxes: young yet ancient with experience, beautiful yet terrifying with knowledge, living yet somehow alive no longer. Whatever those great, wide-set eyes had seen had left a haunting starkness in them that riveted him where he stood. She spoke again. She might have been speaking Etruscan, for all the words made sense to Harry. Her mouth held the same contradictions: It was lovely, its grim line warned of horror, it hungered, it would never eat again.

Sound washed over him again: a delivery wagon, a yowling cat, a young housemaid chasing after it down the street. He heard his stammering voice. “Where—where did you come from?”

She gestured: out of a tree, out of the sky, her hand said. She was very poorly dressed, he realized: her thin, tight jacket torn at both elbows, the hem of her skirt awash with dried mud, her shoes worn down and beginning to split. She spoke again, very slowly, as if to a young child, or a man whose wits had badly strayed.

“I wondered if you had some work for me, sir. If maybe you could use me for your paintings. Anything will do. Any amount of time—”

One of his hands closed convulsively above her elbow; his other hand pulled the gate open.

“Oh, yes,” he said unsteadily. “Oh, yes. Miss. Whoever you—”

“Jo, sir.”

“Jo. Come in.” He swept her down the walk, threw the door wide, and shouted, “Mrs. Grommet! Mrs. Grommet! We need you!”

“You have lice,” Mrs. Grommet said.

Jo, hearing her within a cascade of lukewarm water, thought her voice sounded simply matter-of-fact. The kitchen maid stopped pouring water, began to pass a hard, lumpy bar of soap over Jo’s wet hair. It took time to work up a lather.

“I’m not surprised,” Jo murmured. She knelt in her tattered chemise beside a huge tub, allowing Mrs. Grommet the sight of her cracked, filthy feet. She could only hope that whatever vision had possessed Mr. Waterman to let her in the house would not be washed down the drain. But, she told herself coldly, if that happens then I will be no worse than I was before, and at least I will be clean.

“Go on, girl,” the housekeeper said. “Give it a good scrub. Pretend you’re doing the front steps.”

“There’s such a lot of it,” the maid ventured. Jo closed her eyes, felt the blunt, vigorous fingers work away at her until she imagined herself underwater, floating in some river god’s grip, being flailed back and forth like water weed.

“Rinse now,” Mrs. Grommet ordered, and the water flowed again, copious and mercilessly cold. “There,” the housekeeper said at last with satisfaction. “That should do it.”

Freed, Jo straightened. The maid tossed a towel over her head and began to pummel her again.

“Go and boil some water,” Mrs. Grommet told her. She added to Jo when the girl had gone, “Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t, these new hot water pipes. He didn’t recognize you, did he?”

Jo swallowed. Mrs. Grommet’s eyes, green as unripe tomatoes, said very little beyond her words. She knows, Jo thought. She knows why I ran away. But what Mrs. Grommet felt about that, Jo could only guess. Anyone else in the housekeeper’s position would have made her sentiments about this immoral, unwashed bit of dredge crossing her employer’s threshold very plain, very soon.

“No,” Jo said simply. “He doesn’t. He saw my face and wants to paint it. That’s all. I don’t know if he’ll feel the same when he sees it again. If not, I’ll go.”

Mrs. Grommet did not comment on that. “I’ll see what I can find for you to wear, while you wash.”

“Mrs. Grommet—” Her voice faltered; the housekeeper, hand on the doorknob, waited expressionlessly. “I know my clothes are a disgrace, but they’re all I’ve got, if I go. Please—”

“Don’t worry, girl,” Mrs. Grommet said briskly, “I won’t turn you out naked into the street, whatever becomes of you.”

An hour later, Jo sat at the kitchen fireplace, letting her hair dry while she ate some cold beef and bread. She was dressed in a dark, shapeless gown, which had made its way, some time in the distant past, to Harry’s costume closet. Made to fit tight at wrists and neck and beneath the bosom, it hung on Jo like a sack. The kitchen maid, chopping onions for a pie, could not stop staring at her. Jo, too weary to eat much, didn’t wonder at her staring, until the cook, a great mound of a woman with cheeks the color of raw beef, rolling out pastry, made as though to swat the maid with a floury hand.

“Leave her be, then,” she grunted.

“I’m sorry, miss,” the girl murmured to Jo. “I can’t help it. It’s your hair.”

Jo glanced sideways at it, as it fell around her face. It did look unfamiliar clean, but other than that it was just her hair.

“What’s the matter with it? Have I got the mange, too?”

“No,” the maid whispered, flicking her eyes to it again. “It’s so beautiful, all long and gold and curly.”

Jo blinked, at a loss. Her eyes rose helplessly, sought Mrs. Grommet’s.

The housekeeper, sipping tea at the table and still inscrutable, gave a brief nod. “Oh, yes. He’ll like that.”

Jo, suddenly terrified, stood abruptly, her meal scattering out of her fingers into the fire. “I have to go, then,” she heard herself babble. “I have to go. Where are my shoes? I had a couple of coppers in my shoes—”

Mrs. Grommet gazed at her wordlessly. Her eyes came alive suddenly, as she pushed herself to her feet. “There now, Jo,” she said faintly, rounding the table to Jo’s side. “Mr. Waterman’s not like that. You know that. There’s no need to run away from him again.” She put her hand on Jo’s arm and pointed to a grubby little pile near the hearth. “There’s your shoes and clothes. The coins are in there, just as I found them. If you need them, you’ll have them.”

“Why,” Jo asked her wildly, “are you treating me this way?”

“What way?” Mrs. Grommet asked, astonished.

It took Jo a moment to remember the word. “Kind.” Spoken, it seemed to surprise them both. “Why are you being kind to me? You know—you—”

Mrs. Grommet’s eyes went distant again. But she kept her hand on Jo’s arm, patted it a little. “Stay a bit,” she said finally, eluding the question. “Mr. Waterman will think we drove you away if you leave now. He’ll only go looking for you.”

“But I don’t understand—”

“Well, you might ask him what he has in mind. You might stay long enough to listen to him. Whatever it is, I’m sure it’s nothing more than a painting.”

Jo, still trembling, sat down at the hearth again. She heard whispering; after a moment, the little maid brought her a cup of tea. She sipped it wordlessly, the kitchen silent behind her but for the thump of the rolling pin. When she knew she could stand again, she knew it was time. She rose, set the cup on the table. Mrs. Grommet looked at her.

“I’ll take you up,” she said briefly. Jo nodded gratefully, too lightheaded to speak.

She passed familiar hallways, paintings, patterns of wallpaper, carpets that seemed more real in memory. It was, she thought dazedly, like being in two places at once; she was uncertain, from one step to the next, if she were moving backward or forward in time. They went up the second flight of steeper stairs into the top of the house. There, as Mrs. Grommet opened the door, Jo saw another memory that was real: the long rows of windows overlooking the street, the park across from them, and on the other side of the house, the river. She could see the tree under which she had wakened in the other world at dawn. She smelled oils and pungent turpentine, saw the untidy shelves of books and sketches, the oddments everywhere—peacock feathers, beads, baskets, seashells, tapestries, rich shawls of taffeta, goblets, moth-eaten furs.

She saw Harry. He stood across the room, watching her silently as she entered. She had never seen anyone look at her like that before, as though she were something not quite human, a piece of dream, maybe, that he had to step into to see her properly.

He said absently, “Thank you, Mrs. Grommet.”

“Yes, sir. She lingered. “Will you need—”

“Nothing. Thank you.”

She closed the door behind her. Harry crossed the room, came close to Jo. Still in his dream, she saw, he reached out, touched her hair with one finger. She felt herself stiffen. He drew back hastily. She saw his eyes again, anxious now, tentative, fascinated. Like some mooncalf boy in love for the first time, she realized, and not even sure with what.

“Will you let me paint you?” he asked huskily.

“Of course,” she answered, so amazed she forgot her terrors.

“I see you—I see you as a very ancient power, a goddess, almost, who is herself mortal, but who can kill with a look. To see her is to die. But not to see her is to live without living. I see you, in all her terrible, devastating beauty, as Medusa.”

“Yes, Mr. Waterman,” she said, completely mystified, and thought with wonder: He doesn’t recognize me at all.

Much later that day, almost into the next, Harry sat on the floor beside the open cupboard door, babbling to the Gorgon.

“The lines of her face are stunning. They transfixed me the moment I saw them. They seem shaped—sculpted—by primal forces, like stone, yet very much alive. They are beauty, they are death, they are youth, they are ancient beyond belief. And her eyes. Medusa’s eyes. They gaze at you from another world, the Underworld perhaps; they are portals to that grim world. Of the palest gray, nearly colorless, like the mist between life and death—” He heard a vague noise from within the cupboard, almost as if the Gorgon had sneezed. “I beg your pardon. Did you speak?”

“No,” she said faintly.

“And her hair. I’ve never seen anything like it. White gold, rippling down from her face to her knees. Again that suggestion of youth and antiquity, knowledge gained too early from unearthly places—”

“Harry.”

“Her mouth—there again—”

“Harry.”

“Yes, what is it?”

“I think you should let me see her.”

“Her mouth is like—”

“I promise, by Perseus’s shield that bore my reflection and killed me, that I won’t speak a word in her presence.”

“Again, it contradicts itself—it should be mobile, plump, alluring, the delicate pink of freshwater pearls—”

“You can put me in a dark corner where she won’t notice me.”

“But it has long forgotten how to smile; its line is inflexible and determined—”

“Harry. It’s me you’re painting. I haven’t seen myself in thousands of years. Have a heart. Let me see what humans think of me these days. I’m not used to being associated with beauty.”

Harry was silent. He thought he perceived the faintest undertone in the Gorgon’s plea, as though she were laughing at him. But her words argued otherwise. And it did seem an appropriate request. She had after all inspired him; how could he deny her his vision of herself?

“You’ll forget,” he said guardedly, “and say something impulsive and frighten her away.”

“I won’t. I have sworn.”

“I’ll think about—”

“Harry. Stop thinking about it. Just do it. Or I’ll yell my head off here in the cupboard like one of Bluebeard’s wives.”

Harry blinked. “You could have done that—”

“Today, while she was here. Yes. But I didn’t, did I? I am capable of controlling myself. I won’t say a word in her presence, no matter how—”

“How?”

“No matter what.”

“Do I amuse you?” Harry demanded indignantly.

“No, no,” the Gorgon said soothingly. “No. I’m just incredibly old, Harry, and my sense of humor is warped. I’m very ignorant of the modern world, and it would do me good to see even a tiny corner of it.”

Harry sighed, mollified. “All right. Tomorrow morning, before she comes.”

“Thank you, Harry.”

He got up early to hang the Gorgon above some high bookshelves, among other old sketches and watercolors scattered along the wall. The contradictions in the face startled him anew: the frightened eyes, the pale, anxious brows, the lush, voluptuous, wine-red mouth. His eyes lingered on that mouth as he descended the ladder. He would make a trip to the country soon, he decided. She was down there with Alex, nearly every weekend. The mouth seemed to crook in a faint smile; his foot froze on the bottom rung.

“No,” he said sharply. “You must be absolutely still.”

The mouth composed itself. The eyes gazed unseeingly across the room. He had placed the painting where most often his model would have her back to it. She would only glimpse it as she faced the door to leave. And few people looked that high without reason, Harry had learned to his chagrin when his work had been hung near the ceiling in exhibits. She would never notice the peculiar face with its mismatched features unless she looked for it.

He spent a few days sketching Jo, learning every nuance of her face, experimenting with various positions, draperies. He decided, in the end, simply to paint her face at the instant she saw herself reflected in the young hero’s shield. The Medusa turning her baleful gaze upon herself, and realizing in that instant that she had slain herself. The shield would frame her within the canvas. The pale, rippling beauty of the model’s hair would transform itself easily into gorgeous, dangerous snakes. Jo’s stark-white skin, drained of life-force it seemed, hallowed and shadowed with weariness and strain, hinted of the Medusa’s otherworldly origins. He positioned black silk in graceful folds about her neck to emphasize the shadows. That would be her only costume. That and the snakes in her hair, which might suggest, in their golden brilliance, the final light of the sun upon her dying and deadly face.

So lost he was in the excitement of inspiration that he scarcely remembered to speak to his model. She came in the mornings, murmured, “Good morning, Mr. Waterman,” and sat in her chair beside his easel. He arranged the silk about her throat, giving her a greeting or a pleasantry. Then she became so still she hardly seemed to breathe. He worked, utterly absorbed, until the light began to fade. Then, her pallor deep by then, her humanity began to intrude upon him. She is tired, he would realize. She must be hungry. I am.

He would put his palette down and open the door. “Mrs. Grommet,” he would call down the stairs. Then he would study the day’s work until the housekeeper hove into view, bearing a tea tray and Jo’s wages for the day. Jo would follow her down. Mrs. Grommet would feed her in the kitchen, for Harry was reluctant to glimpse, at this sensitive stage, his Medusa with her cheeks full of mutton.

The Gorgon above their heads watched all this silently, refraining from comment.

She hardly saw Jo, Harry knew, except when she rose to leave. Then the wan, beautiful face would be visible to the painting above her head. Jo never looked that high; she seemed oddly incurious about the studio. Other models had prowled around peering at his canvases, opening books, trying on bits of finery, fingering this and that. But Jo just came and left, as though, Harry thought, she truly vanished into another world and was not much interested in his.

The Gorgon finally asked one evening, after Jo had followed Mrs. Grommet downstairs, “Where does she go?”

“What?” Harry asked through a bite of sandwich.

“Your model. Where does she sleep at night?”

“How should I know?” He was sitting in a well-stuffed chair, weary from standing all day, and devouring sandwiches and cakes, he suspected, like a well-brought-up vulture. He could see the Gorgon’s face from that position if he wanted. Her voice startled him; she hadn’t said much for days.

“Aren’t you pleased with me, Harry?”

“For being so quiet? Oh, yes, I’m very grateful.” He swallowed another mouthful of hot, sweet tea, and looked up at her. “What do you think of her?”

“Oh, a great deal,” the painting answered vaguely, and gave a sudden, crude snort of a laugh. “She’s far too beautiful for the likes of me, of course. But I see your point in her.”

“Do you?”

“Beauty that can kill. But Harry, she’s bone-thin and she’s not much use to you dead. She might sleep in an alley for all you know. Anything could happen to her, and you’d never know what.”

Harry was silent, blinking. He took another scalding sip. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Well, think of it. What would you do if tomorrow she didn’t appear?”

The thought brought him out of his chair to pace a little, suddenly edgy. “Surely I pay her enough for decent lodgings. Don’t I?”

“How much is enough?”

“I don’t—”

“And suppose she has others dependent on her? Who need every coin she brings to them?”

“Well, maybe—” He paused, still tramping across the room; then he dropped into his chair again. “I’ll ask Mrs. Grommet.”

“You could ask your model.”

Harry rolled his head to gaze up at the painting. “How?” he pleaded. “She is my Medusa. She exists only in this little world, only to be painted. I dare not make her real. She might lose all her power, become just another woman in my eyes.”

The Medusa snorted again, this time without amusement. “She’d still be there for you to paint her. Your brush knows how to lie. If she vanishes into the streets out there, where will you go to look for her? You might at least ask her that.”

Harry tried, at least three times, the next morning, before he got a question out. His model, whose name he kept forgetting, sat silently gazing as he requested, at the back of his easel. What she saw, he could not begin to guess. Her wide, eerily pale eyes seemed to glimpse enormities in his peaceful studio. Until now, he had absently confused her expression with the Gorgon seeing herself for the first time and the last. Now he wondered, despite his better judgment, what those eyes had truly seen to make them so stricken.

He cleared his throat yet again. Her eyelids trembled, startled, at the sound of his voice. “Tell me, er—Jo?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Do you have a decent place to stay at night? I mean, I do pay you enough for that, don’t I?”

She kept her face very still, answered simply, “Yes, Mr. Waterman. I go to a lodging house on Carvery Street.”

“Alone?”

Her eyes flicked up, widening; he caught the full force of the Gorgon’s stare. “Sir?”

“I mean—I only meant—Do you have other people to care for? Others dependent on you?”

“Oh.” The fierce gaze lowered once again to the middle distance. “No, sir. They’re dead.”

“Oh,” he said inanely. He painted in silence a while, aware, though he told himself he imagined it, of eyes boring into his head from above the bookshelves. He glanced up finally, was appalled to see the full red lips moving wildly in a grotesque parody of speech.

He cleared his throat again hastily. “Do you get enough to eat? I mean, you’re very thin.”

“I’m eating better now,” she answered.

The question sent a faint, unwelcome patina of color into her white face that at first alarmed him. Then he thought: Why not? Medusa, seeing her own beauty for the first time, may well flush with pleasure and astonishment, before she turns herself into stone.

“Do you know,” he asked aimlessly, trying to make conversation, “the story of Medusa?”

“Something of it,” she said hesitantly. “Some sort of monster who turned people into stone?”

“Yes.”

“Ugly, wasn’t she?”

“Hideous,” he answered, “by all accounts.”

He heard her take a breath or two then, as if to speak. Then she grew still again, so still that he wondered if he had somehow turned her into stone.

He let his model rest a day or two later, and spent a tranquil afternoon in the country, watching others work. Arthur Millidge was there, putting a honeysuckle background to what would be his Nymph Dying for Love of a Shepherd. He kept knocking his easel over swatting at bees. John Grainger was there as well, to Harry’s surprise, back on his windy knoll painting the distant village. McAlister had finished his wife’s windblown sleeve; now he was engrossed in her bare feet and ankles, around which green silk swirled and eddied. Harry, after his first glimpse of those long marble toes and exquisite anklebones, took the first chair he found and tried not to think about them.

Arthur Millidge’s wife Holly handed him a cup of tea and sat down beside him. She was a pretty, good-natured, giddy-headed thing, who could pull out an arrow and hit an astute social bulls-eye just when she seemed at her most frivolous. She was watching her suffering husband with a great deal of amusement.

“Oh, poor Arthur,” she cried, when he batted at a wasp with his brush and actually hit it; it stuck, struggling, to the yellow-daubed bristles. “At least it’s the right color.”

Her husband smiled at her wanly.

“I thought,” Harry said blankly, “that Grainger and Nan would still be at the south coast.”

“Oh, no,” Holly answered briskly. “They only spent a few days there.”

“But they are—they did get married.”

“So it seems. She’s wearing a ring.”

“Is she here?”

“No, poor thing, the traveling exhausted her in her condition, so she let John come alone.”

Harry’s eyes crept back to Aurora. Her condition, as well, he remembered, and could not, for a prolonged moment, stop studying her. The flowing, voluminous silk hid everything. Her face seemed a trifle plumper, but then he had been gazing at his emaciated model for days, he reminded himself. Aurora’s face seemed exquisitely serene, he realized, ivory, full and tranquil, like a midsummer moon.

“The condition suits Aurora,” Holly said, reading Harry’s thoughts in her uncanny way. “I think poor Nan will have a great deal of difficulty with it. She’s frail anyway, and suffers from imagination.”

Harry pulled his eyes away from McAlister’s wife, dipped his hand into a bowl full of cherries. “Which of us doesn’t?” he asked lightly.

“I’m sure I don’t,” Holly laughed, and helped herself to a cherry or two from Harry’s hand. “I heard you’re painting something mysterious, Harry. Tommy Buck said that he and some friends came to visit you, and you refused to let them into your studio.”

“They frightened my model,” Harry said, remembering the shouts, Mrs. Grommet’s flurried protest, the stampede up the stairs. “I thought she might faint, she was trembling so badly.”

Holly maneuvered a cherry pit daintily from lips to palm and tipped it into the grass. “But who is she? Someone we know?”

“No. I found her in the street.”

“How exciting! And what are you making of her?”

“Oh, I’m experimenting with this and that,” he answered airily. “Nothing much, yet.”

“She must be very pretty.”

“In a wild kind of way. She’s very shy. Not used to company.”

“Everyone,” Holly sighed, “is full of secrets. Alex won’t tell what he’s working on, either. You should bring her here, Harry.”

“I should?” he asked, surprised.

“It might calm her, knowing others like her who model. Besides, if you decide you can’t make anything of her, someone else might, and then she wouldn’t have to go back into the streets.”

“True,” he said absently, flinging a cherry pit at a bee buzzing in the honeysuckle. “Oh, sorry, Arthur. I was aiming for the bee.”

“Don’t try to be helpful, Waterman.”

“I won’t, then.”

“Will you bring her, Harry?”

“I might,” he answered vaguely, and changed the subject. “What do you think McAlister is making out of his wife?”

“Oh, who knows?” Holly said, waving midges away from her face. “Blind Justice? Aphrodite? Maybe even he doesn’t know. The point is to keep her here, don’t you think?”

“Here?” Harry repeated, mystified. Holly turned her head, regarded him blithely a moment, chin on her fist. Abruptly she laughed, and got to her feet.

“Oh, Harry. You are so unbearably sweet. Arthur, come into the shade with us and have something to drink before you melt in all that light. I’m trying to worm secrets out of Harry.”

“Harry has secrets?” John Grainger’s deep, vigorous voice intoned incredulously behind them. “Mirabile dictu!” He dropped into a chair, dipped into the cherries with cerulean blue fingertips and demanded of the hapless Harry, “Tell all.”

Jo sat in Harry’s kitchen, eating her supper after he had returned from the country and began to paint her again. At his request, she had given Mrs. Grommet explicit instructions about where to find her if Harry needed her. Mrs. Grommet dutifully wrote the address down. Then, to Jo’s surprise, she poured herself a cup of tea and pulled out a chair at the end of the table near Jo, where she sat close to the fire.

Mrs. Grommet said, “I know Mrs. Atkins, the woman who owns the lodging house on Carvery Street. She’s a good, honest woman. Or at least she was when we worked together, in a great house over on Bellingham Road.”

Jo’s eyes slid uncertainly to her face. She managed an answer, after a moment, “She seems kind.”

“She married unexpectedly. Lucky for her, her husband had saved a little money. And had a very loving heart. Married they were for thirty years before he died, and never a word passed his lips that their child wasn’t his.”

Jo coughed on a bit of pickled beet. The kitchen maid was on the far side of the kitchen, banging pots noisily in weltering dishwater. The cook was in the pantry counting spoons, which was her way of saying resting her feet and having a nip. Mrs. Grommet’s eyes opened meaningfully upon Jo, then lowered again. She sipped tea, half-turned at a splash from the sink.

“Go easy, girl! You’re washing pots, not the flagstones.”

Jo put two and two together, cleared her throat. Still, words came out with difficulty. “That’s why—” She drew breath, met the housekeeper’s eyes. “That’s why you’re kind to me.”

“Things happen,” Mrs. Grommet said, the corners of her mouth puckering a moment. “They’re not always our fault.”

“No.” She lifted her cup. It trembled badly; she put it down again quickly before she spilled. She folded her hands tightly, said to them, “It takes a special heart to see it that way, though.”

Mrs. Grommet patted her hands. “I saw how you were with Mr. Waterman the first time you came here. So quiet and nicely behaved. Some of his models—well, the less said. Not that he was that way, at least not under his own roof. But I hear the young men talking about the girls they paint, about which would only pose and go, and which might stay around after for their bit of fun.” She became aware of the maid handling the pots as gently as possible, and raised her voice again. “Finish up there, Lizzie, then go and see if cook needs help in the pantry.”

“Yes, Mrs. Grommet.”

Jo said very softly, “You were friends, then, you and Mrs. Atkins, when you worked on Bellingham Road.”

“Mary. Mary Plum she was, then. We started there very young, you see, and during the same summer. We were there together for five years. She—What happened to her seemed so unfair to me. It was one of the young friends of the family—”

“Yes,” Jo whispered.

“Nothing to him, of course. He told her he loved her and would care for her. He couldn’t even remember her name or her face, next time he came. He looked straight at her, she said, when she was serving dinner, and didn’t even see her. She was at the point then when she had to leave. She had no choice. But then Martin—Mr. Atkins—found her weeping under the privet hedge when he went to trim it. He was a gardener there, then, and very well thought of. He’d saved all his money for years for an investment, he said. He asked Mary to be his investment.” She paused, watching Jo’s struggling face. “I’ve never seen you smile before.”

“I’ve nearly forgotten how. Did he really put it like that?”

“She was a pretty thing,” Mrs. Grommet said reminiscently. “He said he’d had his eye on her, but never thought he’d have a chance. Well, chance came, wearing an unexpected face, and he was brave enough to take it. She had a daughter who looked just like her. After some years, he’d worked so hard that—” She stopped abruptly. “Oh, dear.”

The tears came out of nowhere Jo could name, hot, fierce and seemingly unstoppable. She put her hands over her mouth, turned her back quickly to face the fire again. She heard Mrs. Grommet say something sharply to Lizzie; all sounds faded in the kitchen. Jo felt a tea towel pushed into her hand.

She buried her face in it, seeing, feeling, smelling all at once, as though memory, locked so carefully away, had crashed and blundered out of its door. His warm, slight weight in her arms, the smell of milk in his hair, his wide, round eyes catching at hers.

“Poor Alf,” she whispered into the towel. “Oh, poor Alf. Poor little poppit. Oh, Mrs. Grommet, I did love him despite everything—”

“Now, then.”

“He was just too frail to go on.”

“There now.” Mrs. Grommet patted her shoulder.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right; Lizzie’s gone. You have a good cry.”

“I haven’t—I forgot to cry, when—when—” Her voice wailed away from her, incoherent. She shook hair over her face and eyes like a shroud, trying to hide in it while tears came noisily, messily, barely restrained under the wad of tea towel. “Poor mite, he was all my heart. I think we must have gotten buried together, and I have been just a ghost ever since—No wonder Mr. Waterman sees me as that stone-eyed monster—”

“What?”

She drew a raw, ragged breath that was half sob. “Some—Medusa—who turns people into stone with her eyes. That’s what he sees when he looks at me.” Then she felt an odd bubble in her chest; loosed, it sounded strangely like a laugh. “I’d terrify anyone with these eyes now—”

“Let me see,” Mrs. Grommet said faintly. Jo lifted her face from the towel, pulled wet strands of hair from her cheeks. Her throat ached again at the housekeeper’s expression. But it was not grief so much as relief that she could still cry, she could still laugh. Which she found herself doing again amid her tears, in a damp, inelegant snort. “Look what I’ve done to you—You’re stunned—”

“You do look a bit fiery around the eyes,” Mrs. Grommet admitted. “But no wonder Mr. Waterman doesn’t remember you, with all that happened to you since.”

“I was a maid when he began his first painting. Now I’m Medusa.” She sat again, drew a shuddering breath as she mopped her eyes.

“Maybe. But you look all the younger now for those tears.” She refilled their cups. “Not that you’re much more than a girl. But you just seemed—like you’d seen a Medusa, yourself. And lived to tell about it.”

Jo wrapped her fingers around the cup, managed to raise it without spilling. “Mrs. Grommet, you’ve been so good to me,” she said huskily. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

“Well. You reminded me so of Mary, when you disappeared like that. I couldn’t see that you could have found any way to help yourself, except maybe into the river. Mr. Waterman looked for you when you left. He fretted about you. And not only for his painting. He wanted to help.”

“I know.” She got a sip past the sudden burn in her throat. “I was too frightened to think then. And now, I don’t care if he never recognizes that terrified waif. I don’t want him feeling sorry for me. I’m glad he doesn’t know me.”

“I did,” Mrs. Grommet said, “the moment I saw you. I don’t see how he can’t. Being a painter as he is. Faces are his business.”

“He doesn’t see me. He sees the woman he wants to see. And I hope—” She touched her swollen eyes lightly. “I hope she’s still there, in spite of my tears.”

“Now he’s got you thinking that way,” Mrs. Grommet said roundly. “As if you’re not yourself.”

“But I never am, when he paints me. I am always the woman he has in mind. I think that’s why he doesn’t like to talk to me. He only wants to know the woman in his head. The dream he has of me. If I told him too much about—” She swallowed, continued steadily, “—about Alf, about the streets, the mill, about my mother’s hands all cracked from taking in laundry, about the purple shawl—the dream would be gone. All he’d have left is me.”

Harry was gazing at his Medusa, a ham sandwich forgotten in one hand. With the other hand he was pointing out to the Medusa overhead various examples of his brilliance or his clumsiness, which seemed, judging by the Gorgon’s expression, to be running about neck and neck that day.

“Look there. Putting that fleck of pure white just so, I’ve captured perfectly the suggestion of ice in her gray eyes. Do you see it? Of course the delicate line of the inner eye is a bit blurry, there; I’ll have to rework it.” Raptly, he took a bite of sandwich. “And there—” He said with his mouth full, overcome. “You see what I did.”

“Harry. You still don’t know anything about this woman.”

“I told her to give Mrs. Grommet her address. You made a good point about that. Now, her hair. I shall have to go to the zoological gardens, observe some snakes.” He paused, chewing, added regretfully, “I should have brought a few back with me from the country. I didn’t think of it. Perhaps because I don’t see the point of them. They just begin and go on and keep going on the same way they began, and then they end without any reason whatsoever.” He paused again.

“Don’t say it,” the Gorgon pleaded.

Harry glanced at her, took another bite. “All right, I won’t. But it is a bit like life, isn’t it?”

“Harry!”

He smiled. “I’d give a lot to see your snakes, though. What color were they?”

“Ugly.”

“No color is ugly.”

“Maybe,” the Medusa sighed, “but you must remember that I was hideous. I never looked at myself, of course, and my snakes were usually twined around my head. But now and then a loop or a head would lose its direction and slide near my eyes. They were fairly drab: brown, black, gray, without any interesting patterns. Big, they were, though. Thick as your wrists.”

“Really? What did they eat?”

“Air, I suppose. Thoughts. They were my hair, Harry; they weren’t meant to exist like ordinary creatures. Your hair feeds on you.”

“I’ll make hers like treasure,” Harry said, studying the magnificent, haunting eyes again, the dangerous, irresistible mouth. “Gold, white gold, silver, buttercup, lemon. A shining, glittering swarm of light. Tomorrow morning, I’ll go—”

“She’s coming tomorrow.”

“I’ll paint her in the morning then, and visit the snakes in the afternoon.”

“You could,” the Gorgon suggested, “take her with you. You might get a better perspective on the snakes as hair if you see them both together.”

Harry grunted, struck. “Possible . . . ” Then he blinked. “No. What am I saying? I can’t possibly watch this devastatingly powerful creature wandering around looking at snakes in the Zoological Gardens. Something would happen.”

“Like what?”

“She’d step in a puddle, get a paper stuck to her shoe, some such. She’d mispronounce the names of things, she’d want tea and a bun, or peanuts for the bears—”

“I can’t see that frozen-eyed woman tossing peanuts to the bears. But what you’re saying, Harry, is that she would be in danger of turning human.”

“Exactly,” Harry said adamantly. “I don’t want her human, I want her Gorgon—”

“I bet she’d be a charming human.”

Harry opened his mouth. As though one of the Medusa’s snakes had streaked down quick as thought and bit him, he glimpsed the potential charms in those eyes, warming in a smile, that hair, piled carelessly on her head, tendrils about her face playing in a breeze. He clenched his fists, pushed them in front of his eyes. “No,” he said fiercely. “No, no, and no. This is my masterwork, and nothing—” He lowered his hands as suddenly. “What on earth is that hubbub downstairs?”

There seemed to be a good deal of shouting and thumping coming up the stairwell. Mrs. Grommet’s voice joined it and it resolved itself easily then, into any number of friends in every stage of revelry pushing their way upstairs to join Harry.

He threw open the door, heard their chanting as they ascended. “Where is she, Harry? We must see her. We want to see your painting, foul as it may be. We have come to kneel at the feet of your Muse. Harry!”

Harry had just enough time to remove the painting from the easel and slide it carefully into the cupboard. Where, he hoped fervently, it would not also acquire a voice. He opened his study door, stepped into the landing. Half a dozen friends, a couple of them painters, one planning a gallery, others budding poets or philosophers, or whatever was fashionable this week, reeled into one another at the sight of him. Then, they rushed the second flight of stairs. Harry glimpsed Mrs. Grommet below, flinging her hands in the air, turning hastily back to the kitchen.

“Don’t you dare lock your door this time,” the honey-haired, sloe-eyed Tommy Buck called. “We’ll sit on your stairs and hold them hostage until you reveal her. We’ll—”

“She’s not here,” Harry said, with great relief. “She left an hour ago.”

“Then let’s see your painting.”

“No. It’s too dreadful.” He turned adroitly as they reached the landing, and locked the door behind him. “You’ll laugh, and I’ll be forced to become a bricklayer.”

“She’s in there.” Tommy Buck paused to hiccup loudly, then banged upon the door. “You’ve hidden her.”

“I have not. She’s a shy, sensitive woman and you lot would cause her to turn into a deer and flee.”

“Prove it.”

“Prove what?”

“Prove she’s not there.”

“All right, I will. But I don’t want you all rummaging about my studio and tossing my bad paintings out the window. You can look in and see, Tommy. The rest of you go downstairs and wait.”

“No,” said one of the poets, a burly young man who looked like he might have flung bricks around in an earlier life. “Open up, Harry boy. Show us all.”

“No. I shall defend all with my life.”

“What’s that in your hand?” Tommy asked, swaying as he squinted at it.

Harry looked. “My ham sandwich.”

“Ham. He has ham in there,” someone said wistfully. “I’m hungry.”

“Here,” Harry said, tossing him the remains.

“I saw it first,” Tommy said indignantly. “I’m hungrier.” He paused, still swaying lithely, like a reed in a breeze. “I’ve got an idea.”

“He has an idea.”

“I’d rather have a sandwich.”

“Silence! I will speak! My idea is this. We all go out to dinner—Wait—Wait—” He waved his arms, fending off protests. “Listen. If we go out to dinner, and Harry goes out to dinner with us, and then goes wherever we happen to go after that, it will prove that he hasn’t got a model locked up in his studio. Won’t it?”

“He could get the Grommet to unlock her,” someone muttered.

“I won’t speak to her,” Harry promised. “And—” he dangled it. “I have the only key.”

Tommy made a snatch at it. Harry tucked it out of reach. “She really has gone home,” he told them. “And I think Tommy has an excellent idea. Maybe, if we hurry out, we’ll catch a glimpse of her on the street.”

They were quiet, staring at him, faces motionless in the stair lights.

Then, as one, they turned, clattered furiously back down the stairs. Harry followed more slowly, brushing crumbs off his shirt and rolling down his sleeves. He heard the street door fly open, voices flow down the hall and out. Someone called his name, then the sounds faded. He didn’t hear the door close. He wondered if Mrs. Grommet had taken refuge in a closet until the barbarian horde had gone.

He reached the hall and nearly bumped into his Medusa, coming quickly out of the kitchen with Mrs. Grommet at her heels.

“Jo—” he exclaimed, startled.

She pulled up sharply, staring at him, just as surprised.

“Mr. Waterman,” she breathed. “I thought you had left with them.”

He was silent, studying her. Something was awry with her face. It seemed streaked, flushed in odd places; her cold, magnificent eyes looked puffy and reddened, oddly vulnerable. He caught his breath, appalled.

“What have you done?”

“Sorry, Mr. Waterman,” she said tremulously, brushing at her eyes. “It’ll be gone by morning.”

“But—” Something else was happening to her face as he stared. Lines shifted. Memory imposed itself, rearranging a curve here, a hollow there. He swallowed, his throat suddenly dry, feeling as though the world he knew had vanished for an eye blink, and then returned, subtly, irrevocably altered.

“Jo,” he said, feeling his heart beat. “Jo Byrd.”

She said simply, “Yes.”

She returned the next morning as she promised, though not without misgivings. She looked for the same apprehension in the artist’s eyes, searching for his Medusa in her face while he arranged the black silk around her neck, to draw out her pallor as he said. She wasn’t certain about the pallor. The face in the tiny mirror above her washstand had been more colorful than usual. Nor was she at all certain what Mr. Waterman was thinking. He was very quiet, murmuring instructions now and then. She would have described his expression as peculiar, if he had asked. He looked like someone who had swallowed a butterfly, she thought: a mixed blessing, no matter how you turned it.

She said finally, hesitantly, “Mr. Waterman. If you can’t see your Medusa now for seeing me, I’ll understand.”

He gave his head a quick little shake, met her eyes. “As the Gor—as someone pointed out, I tell lies with my brush. Let’s see how well I can do it.”

“But—”

“We’ll give it a try,” he insisted calmly. “Shall we?”

“If you say so, sir.” She subsided, prepared herself to sit as silently as usual.

But, strangely, now he seemed in a mood to talk. “I am,” he said, touching white into the black around the Medusa’s throat, “incredibly embarrassed that I didn’t recognize you.”

“I’ve gotten older.”

“By how much? A year? I’m a painter! I’ve been staring at you daily. Not to mention—” His lips tightened; whatever it was, he didn’t mention it.

“Yes, sir.”

He looked at her again, instead of the silk. “I can’t imagine what you’ve gone through. Or, rather, I can only try to imagine it. The child—It must have died?”

Her voice caught, but she had no tears left for that, it seemed. “Yes. He was never strong.”

“Where did you go, when you vanished in the middle of my painting?”

“I went home to my mother’s, in the country.”

“I looked for you.”

“I know. Mrs. Grommet told me.”

His mouth crooked ruefully. “So she recognized you.”

“The way I see it,” Jo explained, “Mrs. Grommet was protecting your household. She has to know what she opens your door to. You remember what I looked like, then.”

“Yes.”

“She had to make decisions in her own mind about me. You were only seeing your painting. She was seeing a hungry, filthy wreck of a girl, and trying to judge all in a moment whether I would steal the silver, eat with a fork or my fingers, go mad and break all the crockery. She was looking for reasons not to be afraid to let me through the door. You just saw your dream and let me walk right in.”

He ran his hand through his hair, nearly tangling the brush in it. “Makes me sound like a fool.”

She thought about that, shrugged. “I don’t know. How do you like your painting?”

He looked at it, his eyes going depthless, still, like water reflecting an empty sky. They were, she realized suddenly, the exact blue of the dragonflies in the stream behind her parents’ cottage. She’d lie and watch them dart and light, little dancing arrows as blue as larkspur.

Mr. Waterman blinked; so did she. They both drew back a little from what they’d been examining. She recognized that expression on his face; it was how he had been looking at her until now.

“I think—” he said, still gazing at his painting, and stammering a little, “I think—I wasn’t a fool, after all. I think it’s at least better than anything I’ve done so far, Jo.” He turned to her abruptly. “I have such amazing visions of your hair. Are you afraid of snakes?”

“No more or less than anything else that might bite me. But, sir,” she amended warily, “surely you’re not going to put them in my hair? I don’t think I want to wear them.”

“No, no.” His thoughts veered abruptly. “I have to fix that eye before I go on. Look at me. Don’t blink.” He added, after a moment or two, “You can talk.”

“About what?”

“Anything that won’t make you cry.” She felt her eyes flush at the thought; he looked stricken. “I’m sorry, Jo.”

“It’s just—somehow I never got around to crying before.”

“Tell me something—anything you remember—that once made you happy. If there was anything,” he added carefully.

“Well.” The tide retreated; she gazed, dry-eyed, at her past. “When my father was alive, he kept a small flock of sheep for wool. I liked to look at them, all plump and white in their green field, watch the lambs leap for no reason except that they were alive. He’d shear them and we’d spin the wool into yarn to sell. Sometimes we’d look for madder root to dye it purple.”

“We?” he asked, busy at the corner of her eye, from what she could see. “Sister?”

“My mother. I didn’t have sisters. I had a little brother for a few years once, but he died.”

“Oh. But you chose not to stay with your mother? To come back here instead?”

“She died, too.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“Yes,” she said softly, but without tears. “So was I. So I came back here. And you rescued me.”

He looked at her, oddly surprised. “I did?”

“You did,” she said huskily. “I couldn’t find work, I was exhausted, I had two coppers to my name—I found my way to your street just muddling around in the dark, and then I remembered you. I slept under a tree, that night before I came to your door. I didn’t have any hope, but I didn’t have anything left to do. I even—I even tried to get myself arrested for breaking a street lamp, to have a place to sleep.”

He was watching her, brush suspended. “When you do that—”

“What, sir?”

“Even when you only think about smiling, you change the shape of your eye. Medusa does not smile.” He stopped abruptly, cast an odd glance above her head, and amended, “At least we have no recorded evidence that she smiled.”

“You asked me to think about something happy.”

“You didn’t smile, then. It was irony, not happiness, that made you smile.”

She mulled that over. “You mean trying to get into jail for a bed?”

“Yes. What happened? Did you miss the street lamp?”

“No. I hit it dead-on. But a dozen others stepped up on the spot and swore it was them that threw the stone. Someone else got my bed. So I wandered on—”

“And,” he said softly, his brush moving again, “you found me.”

“You found me,” she whispered.

“No tears. Medusa does not cry.”

She composed her face again, summoned the icy, gorgeous monster to look out of her eyes. “She does not cry.”

“But,” he said after a while, “she might perhaps like to come with me this afternoon to look at snakes. No blinking.”

“No blinking.”

“But snakes?”

“Looking at snakes,” she said, suddenly aware of his own fair, tidy hair, on a nicely-rounded head, his young face with its sweet, determined expression, like the little boy she had once known who chased after dragonflies along the stream bank, “would make Medusa happy.”

Harry stood on the ladder in his studio, detaching the Gorgon from her nail. He had gotten in late. After spending a few hours among the reptiles and other assorted creatures, he had walked Jo to her lodging house on Carvery Street. Then he had wandered aimlessly, oddly lightheaded, dropping in at studios here and there to let his friends tease him about his imaginary model, his hopeless daub of a painting so dreadful he was forced to keep it hidden behind locked doors. He laughed with them; his thoughts kept straying back to his studio, sometimes to the reptiles, none of which had done justice to his Medusa’s hair.

But my brush can lie, he told himself. He had insisted on buying Jo peanuts in the zoological garden. But instead of throwing them to the animals, she had simply given them to a wiry, dirty-faced boy who had somehow wriggled his way in and was begging near the lions’ den.

His elbow hit a book on top of the shelves as he maneuvered the painting down and under his arm. The book dropped with a thud that probably woke the house. He breathed a curse, trying to be as quiet as possible. The ladder rungs creaked ominously.

The Gorgon, who had been blessedly silent until then, said sharply, her mouth somewhere under his armpit, “Harry, you’re not putting me back into the cupboard.”

“Sh—”

“Don’t shush me. Just because you don’t need me anymore.”

“What do you mean I don’t need you?”

“I saw the way you looked at her.”

“I was not aware that I looked at her in any particular way.”

“Ha!”

“Shh,” Harry pleaded. “Mrs. Grommet will think I’m up here entertaining lewd company.”

“Thank you,” the Gorgon said frostily. But once started, she could never be silent for long, Harry knew. He felt the floor beneath his foot at last, and her curiosity got the better. “Then what are you going to do with me?”

“I just want to look at you.”

He positioned a wooden chair beside the easel, propped the painting on it. Then he drew the black silk off the new Medusa. Side by side, Jo past and Jo present, he studied them: the young, terrified girl, the haunted, desperate woman. A year in the life . . . “What a life,” he breathed, moved at the thought of it.

The Gorgon spoke, startling him again. “What are you looking for?”

“I wanted to see why it was I didn’t recognize her. I understand a little better now. That hair—I should have known it anywhere. But the expressions are completely different. And the skin tone . . . She was at least being fed when she came to me the first time.” His voice trailed away as he studied them: Persephone who had innocently eaten a few seeds and transformed herself into the doomed Medusa. He asked, suddenly curious himself, “Where do you live? I mean, where were you before you took up residence in my painting?”

“Oh, here and there,” she answered vaguely.

“No, really.”

“Why? Are you thinking of ways to get rid of your noisy, uncouth Gorgon?”

He thought about that, touched the Medusa on the easel. “Who inspired this out of me? No. Stay as long as you like. Stay forever. I’ll introduce you to my friends. None of them have paintings that speak. They’ll all be jealous of me.”

“You invited me,” she reminded him.

“I did.”

“I go where I’m invited. Where I am invoked. When I hear my name in someone’s heart, or in a painting or a poem, I exist there. The young thug Perseus cut my head off. But he didn’t rid the world of me. I’ve stayed alive these thousands of years because I haven’t been forgotten. Every time my name is invoked and my power is remembered anew, then I live again, I am empowered.”

“Yes,” Harry said softly, watching those full, alluring lips move, take their varying shapes on canvas in ways that he could never seem to move them in life. “I understand.”

“You understand what, Harry?” the Gorgon asked so gently that he knew, beneath her raucous ways, she understood a great deal more than he had realized.

“I understand that I must go to the country again soon.”

“Good idea. Take Jo with you.”

“Should I? Really? She might be uncomfortable. And Grainger will try to seduce her away from me. He tries to steal everyone’s models.”

“That will happen sooner or later in any case, unless you are planning to cast her back into the streets once you’ve finished with her.”

“No. I don’t want to do that. I hadn’t really thought ahead. About sharing her. Or painting her as someone else. Until now she was just my inspiration.” He paced a step or two, stopped again in front of the paintings. Jo then. Jo now. “She’s changed again,” he realized. “There’s yet another face. I wonder if that one will inspire another painting.”

“Something,” the Medusa murmured.

“Something,” Harry agreed absently. “But you’re right. I certainly can’t put her back on the streets just so that she stays my secret. If she can get other work, she should. If I decide I don’t—”

“Harry,” the Gorgon interrupted. “One thing at a time. Why don’t you just ask her if she’d like to come to the country with you and be introduced to other painters? She’ll either say yes or she’ll say no. In either case, you can take it from there.”

Harry smiled. “That seems too simple.”

“And find her something nice to wear. She looks like a bedpost in that old dress. Went out of style forty years ago, at least. I may not have a clue about what to do with my hair, but I always did have an eye for fashion. Though, of course, things were incredibly boring in my day, comparatively speaking. Especially the shoes! You wouldn’t believe—”

“Good night,” Harry said, yawning, and draped the black silk over her. “See you in the morning.”

Jo sat in the McAlisters’ garden, sipping tea. She felt very strange, as though she had wandered into a painting of a bright, sunny world strewn with windblown petals, where everyone laughed easily, plump children ran in and out of the ancient cottage, a woman, still as a statue at the other side of the garden, was being painted into yet another painting. Some guests had gathered, Harry among them, to watch Alex McAlister work. Jo heard the harsh, eager voice of the painter, talking about mosaics in some foreign country, while he spun a dark, rippling thundercloud of his wife’s hair with his brush. Aurora McAlister, a windblown Venus, it looked like, her head bowed slightly under long, heavy hair, seemed to be absorbed in her own thoughts; her husband and guests might have been speaking the language of another world.

Someone rustled into the wicker chair next to Jo. She looked up. People had wandered up to her and spoken and wandered off again all afternoon; she was struggling hopelessly with all the names.

“Holly,” this one said helpfully, “Holly Millidge.” She was a pretty, frothy young woman with very shrewd eyes. She waved a plate of little sandwiches under Jo’s nose; Jo took one hesitantly. “They’re all right. Just cucumber, nothing nasty.” She set the plate back on the table. “So you’re Harry’s secret model. We’ve all been wondering.”

“I didn’t know I was a secret,” Jo said, surprised.

“I can see why.”

“Why what?”

“Why he tried to keep you secret. Tommy Buck said he’d been twice to Harry’s studio trying to see you, and Harry locked the door on him.”

Jo remembered the clamoring voices, the thunder up the stairs. “Why,” she asked warily, “did he want to see me that badly?”

“To see if he should paint you, of course.” Holly was silent a little, still smiling, studying Jo. “They’re noisy, that lot. But they’re good-hearted. You don’t have to be afraid of them.”

“I’m used to being afraid,” Jo said helplessly. “I’m not used to this.”

“It’s not entirely what you think,” Holly said obscurely, and laughed at herself. “What am I trying to say? You’re not seeing what you think you see.”

“Painters don’t, do they?”

“Not always, no.” She bit into a strawberry, watching the scene on the other side of the garden. “They’d see how pretty you are and how wonderful and mysterious the expression is in your eyes. But they wouldn’t have any idea how that expression got there. Or the expression, for instance, in Aurora’s eyes.”

Jo looked at the still, dreaming face. “She’s very beautiful.”

“She is.” Holly bit into another strawberry. “Her father worked in the stables at an inn on Crowdy Street. Aurora was cleaning rooms for the establishment when Alex met her. Barefoot, with her hair full of lice—”

A sudden bubble of laughter escaped Jo; she put her hands over her mouth. “Her, too?”

“And whatever her name was then, it was most certainly not Aurora. Most of us have a skewed past. As well as a skewed present.” She gave a sigh, leaned back in her chair. “Except for me; I have no secrets. No interesting ones, at any rate. When they put me in their paintings, I’m the one carrying the heartless bride’s train, or one of the shocked guests who finds the thwarted lover’s body in the fish pond.”

Jo, feeling less estranged from her surroundings, took another glance around the garden. Seen that way, if the goddess had been a chambermaid, then everyone might be anyone, and no telling what anybody knew or didn’t know about life. Except for Harry, she thought. And then she glimpsed the expression on his face, and had to amend even that notion.

Nothing, apparently, was plain as day, not even Harry. While the other guests were laughing and chatting, Alex’s voice running cheerfully over them all, Harry was standing very quietly among them, his eyes on the tall, dark goddess. Jo drew a breath, feeling an odd little hollow where her certainty had been.

“Harry,” she said, hardly realizing she’d spoken aloud.

Holly nodded. “Oh, yes, Harry. And John Grainger, and half the painters in the McAlister constellation, including one or two of the women. Dreamers, all of them, in love with what they think they see instead of what they see.”

“John Grainger. The one with the wild hair and rumbly voice and the black, black eyes?”

“Yes, that’s him.”

“He talked to me earlier.”

“Everyone talked to you earlier,” Holly said lightly. “I was watching. They’re making their plans for you, don’t you fret.”

“I didn’t like him,” Jo said. “He has a way of putting his hand on you as though it’s supposed to mean something to you. It made me uncomfortable.”

Holly laughed. “Then he’ll have to watch his manners with you. He’s a fine painter, though, and very generous; if you let him paint you, you’ll be noticed. Others will find you, if you want.” She lifted her bright face to greet a lovely, red-haired woman with somber green eyes. “Nan! Have you met Harry’s painting yet? Jo Byrd. Nan Grainger.”

“Jo Byrd. Why do I know that name?” Nan eased herself into a chair, gazing at Jo. “Harry must have talked about you. But that was some time ago. Oh.” She gave a little start, her pale skin flushing slightly. “I remember now.”

“I ran away.”

“Yes. In the middle of his Persephone. He was bereft.”

“Yes, well,” Jo said, her mouth quirked, for everyone seemed to know everything anyway. “So was I.”

Nan was silent, gazing at her without smiling. What have I said? Jo wondered, and then saw what lay beneath Nan’s hands clasped gently over her belly.

Holly interrupted Nan’s silence adroitly, with some droll story about her husband. Jo sighed noiselessly, her eyes going back to the group around the goddess. John Grainger stood closest to Aurora, she saw. They did not look at one another. But now and then the trailing green silk around her bare feet, raised by a teasing wind, flowed toward him to touch his shoe. He would glance down at that flickering green touching him, and his laugh would ring across the garden.

Secrets, she thought. If you look at this one way, there’s a group of cheerful people standing together on a sunny afternoon in a garden. That’s one painting. If you look at them with a different eye, there’s the story within the painting . . . She looked at Harry again, wanting the uncomplicated friend she thought she knew, who got excited over the golden snakes in the reptile house, and who made her go shopping with Mrs. Grommet for a dress, he said, that didn’t look as if his grandmother had slept in it.

Unexpectedly, as though he’d felt her thoughts flow his direction, against the wind, he was looking back at her.

“What beautiful hair you have,” Nan said, watching the white-gold ripple over Jo’s shoulders. “I’d love to paint it. Holly, I can’t imagine what you find so amusing.” But her green eyes were gathering warmth, despite the silk fluttering over her husband’s shoe, despite her fears and private sorrows; for a moment she was just a woman smiling in the light. “Jo, have you ever tried to draw? You might try it sometime. I forget myself when I do; it makes me very tranquil.”

I might try it, Jo thought, after I lose this feeling that I’ve just fallen off the moon.

But she didn’t say that, she said something else, and then there was another cup of tea in her hand, and a willowy young man with wayward locks the color of honeycomb kneeling in the grass at her feet, who introduced himself as Tommy Buck . . .

Harry watched Tommy kneel beside Jo’s chair. Their two faces seemed to reflect one another’s wild beauty, and he thought dispassionately: I would like to paint them both together. Then, he felt a sharp flash of annoyance at Tommy, who could barely paint his feet, dreaming of capturing that barely human face of Jo’s with his brush.

His attention drifted. He watched the green silk touch Grainger’s shoe, withdraw, flutter toward him again. Seemingly oblivious, Aurora watched the distant horizon; seemingly oblivious, her husband orated in his hoarse, exuberant crow’s voice about the architectural history of the arch. Harry thought about Aurora’s long, graceful hands, about her mouth. So silent, it looked now; he had gotten used to it speaking. He wondered if he could ever make this mouth speak.

And then she moved; the little group was breaking up around McAlister. “Too sober,” he proclaimed them all. “Much too sober.” Lightly he touched his wife, to draw her with him toward the cottage. As lightly, she slipped from his fingers, stayed behind to find her shoes under the rose vines. Grainger glanced at his wife across the garden, then at Aurora, then at his wife again. In that moment of his indecision, Aurora put her hand out to steady herself on Harry’s arm as she put on her shoes.

“She’s lovely, Harry,” he heard her say through the blood drumming in his ears. “I like her. Where did you find her?”

“In the street,” he stammered. “Both times. She—she has been through hard times.”

“I know.” She straightened, shod, but didn’t drop her hand. Behind her, Grainger drifted away. Her voice, deep and slow and sweet, riveted Harry. “I know those times. I hear them in her speech, I see them in her eyes. I know those streets.”

“Surely not—”

She smiled very faintly. “Harry, I grew up helping my father shovel out the stables until I was old enough to clean up after humans. Didn’t you know that? I thought everybody—”

“But the way you speak,” Harry said bewilderedly. “Your poise and manners—”

“A retired governess. Alex hired her to teach me. Beyond that I have my own good sense and some skills that Alex finds interesting. He likes my company.”

“He adores you.”

“He thinks he does. He adores the woman he paints. Not the Livvie that I am.”

“Livvie?”

Her mouth crooked wryly; he saw her rare, brief smile. “Olive. That’s my real name. Livvie, they called me until I was seventeen and Alex looked at me and saw painting after painting . . . He said I was the dawn of his inspiration. So Olive became Aurora.”

“Why,” he asked her, his voice finally steady, “are you telling me this?”

“Because I’ve often thought I’d like to talk to you. That I might like having you as a friend, to tell things to. But for the longest time you could only see me the way Alex sees me. But then I saw how you looked at Jo today, knowing all you know about her. So I thought maybe, if I explained a thing or two to you, you might look at me as a friend.”

She waited, the dark-eyed goddess who had pitched horse shit out of stables, and whose name was Livvie. Mute with wonder, he could only stare at her. Then his face spoke, breaking into a rueful smile.

“I hope you can forgive my foolishness,” he said softly. “It can’t have been very helpful.”

“I do get lonely,” she confessed, “on my pedestal. Come, let’s have some tea with Jo, and rescue her from Tommy Buck. He’s not good enough for her.”

“Will you come some day and see if I’m good enough to paint her? I would value your opinion very much.”

“Yes, I will,” she promised, and tucked her long sylph’s hand into the crook of his arm, making him reel dizzily for a step. He found his balance somewhere in Jo’s eyes as she watched them come to her.

Much later, he reeled back into his studio, stupefied with impressions. Jo had promised, sometime before he left her at her door, to sit for the unfinished Persephone as well. So he would see her daily until—until he dreamed up something else. Or maybe, he thought, he would do what Odysseus’s Penelope had done to get what she wanted: weave by day, unweave by night. He pulled the black silk off Persephone’s head, saw the lovely, wine-red mouth and smiled, remembering the real one speaking, smiling its faint sphinx’s smile, saying things he never dreamed would come out of it. But he no longer needed to dream, and he did not want Jo to see that mouth on her own face and wonder.

He was wiping it away carefully with cloth and turpentine when he remembered the Gorgon.

Horrified, he dropped the cloth. He had erased her entirely, without even thinking. What she must be trying to say, he could not imagine. And then he realized that the voluble Gorgon, who had talked her way out of his cupboard and into his life, had said not a word, nothing at all, to rescue herself.

Perhaps, he thought, she had nothing left to say. Perhaps she had already gone . . .

He picked up the cloth, gazing at the clean, empty bit of canvas where Persephone’s mouth would finally appear. He heard the Gorgon’s voice in his head, having the last word as usual.

If you need me, Harry, you know how to find me.

He left them side by side, his unfinished faces, and went to bed, where he would have finished them, except that he could not keep Persephone from smiling in his dreams.

© 2004 by Patricia A. McKillip.

Originally published in To Weave a Web of Magic.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Patricia A. McKillip has published many fantasy novels and short stories over the decades. Several years ago she got interested in the lives and the fantasy works of the Pre-Raphaelite artists of Victorian England. Her research into the period inspired “The Gorgon in the Cupboard,” which was first published in the anthology To Weave a Web of Magic, edited by Susan Allison. She lives with her husband, poet David Lunde, on the south coast of Oregon. Her latest novel is The Bards of Bone Plain.

Novel Excerpt: Blood of Tyrants
Naomi Novik

Chapter 1

Water lapping salt at his cheek roused him, a fresh cold trickle finding its way into the hollow of sand where his face rested. It spurred him: With an effort he pushed to hands and knees and then up, to stagger indecorously along the shore and fall again at the foot of several gnarled old pines clinging to the edge of the beach.

His mouth was dry and cracked, his tongue swollen. His hands were clotted with sand. The wind bit sharply through the sodden wool of his coat, stained black with water, and he was barefoot. Slowly, he unfastened the remnants of a leather harness from around his waist: buckles and clasps of good steel, still bright, but heavily waterlogged; he let it fall to the sand. The sword-belt he kept. The blade when he drew it was bright Damascus steel, the hilt wrapped in black ray-skin, the collar the golden head of a dragon. He stared down at it, without recognition.

He rested it across his knees and leaned back against the tree, half-drifting. The empty ocean stood before him: water cold dark blue, the sky a thin grey; dark clouds receded into the east. He might have emerged onto the sand new-born. He felt as empty as the shore: of strength, of history, of name.

Thirst at last drove him onwards, when little else would have served to rouse him. The stand of trees gave onto a road, well maintained and showing the signs of heavy use, recent tracks and disturbed dust. He walked slowly and mechanically until he found a narrow stream that crossed the road, traveling towards the sea, and he stopped and cupped water into his mouth urgently until the taste of salt had gone.

He held himself braced on hands and knees, water dripping from his face into the stream. The bank had a little new grass, though the ground was still cold. There was a smell in the air of pine needles, and the stream ran over the rocks in a steady gurgle, mingling with the more distant sound of the ocean, the scent of salt on the wind. He felt inwardly the sense of something urgent and forgotten, like a weight on his back. But his trembling arms slowly gave way. He lay down on the grass of the riverbank where he had knelt to drink and fell again into a heavy torpor; his head ached dully.

The sun climbed, warmed his coat. Travelers went past on the nearby road. He was distantly aware of the jingle of harness and slap of walking feet, the occasional creak of cart wheels, but none of them stopped to bother him or even halted by the stream. A small party of men went by singing off-key, loudly and cheerfully, not in any tongue he knew. At last a larger company came, accompanied by the familiar creaking of an old-fashioned sedan-chair. Some confused corner of his mind offered the image of an older woman, borne by porters through London streets, but even as it came he knew it wrong.

The creaking stopped abruptly; a voice spoke from the chair: a clear tenor with the directness of authority. Prudence would have driven him to his feet, but he had no reserves of strength. In a moment, someone came to inspect him—a servant of some kind? He had some vague impression of a youth bending down over him, but not so low that the face came clear.

The servant paused, and then withdrew quickly to his master and spoke urgently in a clear young voice. There was another pause, and then the master spoke again in yet another tongue, one which he could not put a name to and nevertheless somehow understood: a rising and falling speech, musical. “I will not evade the will of Heaven. Tell me.”

“He is Dutch,” the servant answered in that same language, reluctance clear in every word.

He might have raised his head to speak—he was not Dutch, and knew that, if very little else; but he was cold, and his limbs heavier with every moment.

“Master, let us go on—”

“Enough,” the tenor voice said, quiet but final.

He heard orders given in the unfamiliar language while darkness stole over his vision; there were hands on him, their warmth welcome. He was lifted from the ground and slung into a sheet or a net for carrying; he could not even open his eyes to see. The company moved on; suspended in mid-air, swinging steadily back and forth as they went on, he felt almost as though he were in a hammock, aboard ship, swaying with the water. The movement lulled him; his pain dulled; he knew nothing more.

“William Laurence,” he said, and woke with his own name, at least, restored to him: out of a tangled dream full of burning sails and a strange weight of despair, a sinking ship. It faded as he struggled up to sit. He had been lain on a thin pad laid upon a floor of woven straw matting, in a room like none he had ever seen before: one solid wooden wall, the rest of translucent white paper set in frames of wood, and no sign of doors or windows. He had been bathed and dressed in a robe of light cotton; his own clothes were gone, and his sword. He missed the latter more.

He felt adrift, robbed of place and time. The chamber might have been a solitary hut or a room in the center of a great house; it might be set upon a mountaintop or the seashore; he might have slept an hour, a day, a week. A shadow abruptly loomed on the other side of the wall furthest from his bed, and the wall slid open along a track to furnish Laurence a glimpse of a corridor and another room across standing half-open, indistinguishable from his own, save for a window which looked out on a slim cherry tree with bare dark branches.

A young man, not very tall but gangly with recent growth, perhaps sixteen, came through the opening and folded himself into the low-roofed chamber while Laurence stared at him blankly: He was Oriental. A long face with a sharp chin, clean-shaven and softened with the last remnants of puppy-fat; his dark hair was drawn back into a tail, and he wore an intricately arranged set of robes, creases as sharp as knife-edges.

He sat down on his heels and contemplated Laurence in turn, with an expression bleak enough to be aimed at a plague-carrier. After a moment he spoke, and Laurence thought he recognized the voice—the youth who had wished him left by the road.

“I have not the least notion what you are saying,” Laurence said, his voice sounding hoarse in his own ears. He cleared his throat: even that much struck his head with fresh pain. “Can you speak English? Or French? Where am I?” He tried those tongues both, and then hesitating repeated the last over in the other language which the men had spoken on the road.

“You are in Chikuzen Province,” the young man said, answering him in kind, “and far from Nagasaki, as you must well know.”

There was a sharp bitterness to his voice, but Laurence seized on the one familiar name. “Nagasaki?” he said, half in relief, but the momentary gratification faded: he was no less bewildered to know himself in Japan, the other side of the world from where he ought have been.

The young man—too old for a page, and he wore a sword; an equerry of some sort, or a squire, Laurence could only guess—made no answer, only with a curt gesture motioned him off the mat.

Laurence shifted himself onto the floor, with some awkwardness and pain: the ceiling was too low to have permitted him to stand unless he had hunched over like a toad, and he ached in every part. Two servants came in at the young man’s call; they tidied the mat away into a cabinet and offered Laurence fresh garments, baffling in their layers. He felt a clumsy child under their valeting, thrust one way and then another as he put his limbs continuously in the wrong places; then they brought him a tray of food: rice and dried fish and pungent broth, with an array of startling pickles. It was by no means the breakfast he would have chosen, his stomach unsettled, but they had no sooner put it before him than animal hunger became his master. He paused only after having devoured nearly half the meal, and stared at the eating-sticks, which he had picked up and used without thinking of it.

He forced himself to go on more slowly than he wished, still queasy and conscious of being under observation, the young man regarding him coldly and steadily the whole of his meal. “Thank you,” Laurence said at last, when he had finished, and the dishes were silently and deftly removed. “I would be grateful if you should give your master my thanks for his hospitality, and tell him I would be glad of an opportunity to repay it.”

The youth only compressed his lips together. “This way,” he said shortly. Laurence supposed he could have not looked anything but a vagabond, when they had found him.

The corridors of the house were not so stooped as the chambers. Laurence followed him to a back-chamber with a low writing desk of some sort set upon the floor: Another man sat behind it, working smoothly with brush and ink. His forehead and pate were clean-shaven, with a queue of his back hair clubbed tight and bound down doubled, over the bare skin; his garments were more ornate than the young man’s, although of the same style. The young man bowed to him from the waist, and spoke briefly in the Japanese tongue, gesturing towards him.

“Junichiro tells me you are recovered, Dutchman,” the man said, laying aside his brush. He looked across the desk at Laurence, wearing an expression of formal reserve, but with none of the dismay the young man—Junichiro?—had aimed at him.

“Sir,” Laurence said, “I must correct you: I am an Englishman, Captain William Laurence of—” He halted. Hanging from the wall behind the man’s head was a large and polished bronze mirror. The face which looked back at him from it was not merely haggard from his recent ordeal but unfamiliar: his hair grown long; a thin white scar running down his cheek, long-healed, which he did not remember; and lines and wear accumulated. He might have aged years since he had seen himself last.

“Perhaps you would be so kind as to explain to me the circumstances of your arrival in this part of the country,” the man said, prompting gently.

Laurence managed to say, reeling, “I am Captain William Laurence, of His Majesty’s Ship Reliant, of the Royal Navy. And I have not the least notion how I have come to be here, except if my ship has suffered some accident, which God forbid.”

Laurence did not much know what else he said afterwards. He supposed they saw his confusion and distress, for the questions stopped, and a servant was called to bring in a tray: a flask and small porcelain cups. His host filled one and gave it to him; Laurence took it and drank blindly, glad for the intensity: strong as brandy though light on the tongue. His cup was refilled promptly, and he drank again; the cup was small enough to be a single swallow. But he put it down afterwards. “I beg your pardon,” he said, feeling acutely that he had lost control of himself, and all the more awkward in the face of their carefully polite failure to notice it. “I beg your pardon,” he said, more strongly. “Sir, to answer your question, I cannot tell you how I came to be here: I must have been swept overboard, is the only possible answer. As for purpose, I have none; I have neither business nor friends in this part of the world.”

He hesitated, yet there was no help for it; he could not help but recognize himself utterly a beggar. Pride should have to be sacrificed. “I am sorry to be so bold as to make any further claims on your generosity,” he said, “when you have already been more than kind, but I would be glad—I would be very glad indeed for your assistance in making my way to Nagasaki, where I may be reunited with my ship, or find another to return me to England.”

But his host was silent. Finally he said, “You are yet too ill for the rigors of a long journey, I think. For now, permit me to invite you to enjoy the hospitality of my house. If there is anything you require for your comfort, Junichiro will see it is done.”

All that was courteous, all that was kind, and yet it was a dismissal. Junichiro silently moved to hover behind Laurence at his elbow, plainly waiting for him to leave. Laurence hesitated, but he could not much argue: There was a low hollow thumping in his head, like the sound of bare heels coming down on a deck overhead, and the liquor already had thrown a further haze over his sight.

He followed Junichiro out and down the hall, back to the small chamber where he had awoken. Junichiro drew open the door and stood waiting; his face remained hard and unfriendly, and he fixed his eyes past Laurence like a grande dame giving the cut direct, though he said with cold hauteur, once Laurence had ducked inside, “Send for me if you should require anything.”

Laurence looked about the chamber: the empty floor covered with straw mats, the bare and featureless walls, the silence of it; both the siren’s promise of immediate rest, and confinement. “My liberty,” he said, grimly, half under his breath.

“Be grateful for your life,” Junichiro said with sudden venom, “which you have only by my master’s benevolence. Perhaps he will think better of it.”

He all but hurled the door shut, the frame rattling on its track, and Laurence could only stare after his shadow disappearing on the other side of the translucent wall.

The green, glassy wave broke against the shoals but flung itself rushing on even as it crumpled. The cold foam washed ferociously up Temeraire’s hindquarters and left a fresh line of seaweed and splinters clinging to his hide as it finally fell back, exhausted. A low groaning came from the Potentate’s hull where she strained against the rocks, pinned and struggling; all around them the ocean stood wide and empty and grey, and the distant curve of land was only a smudge in the distance.

“You may say anything you like,” Temeraire said, flatly, “but I do not care in the least. I will go alone, if I must, whether or not anyone will come and help me.”

“Oh, Lord,” Granby muttered, half under his breath; Captain Berkley, who was clinging to a stanchion to keep his balance on the badly slanted deck, did not bother to keep his own voice low, but bellowed up, “Listen, you mad beast, you don’t suppose any of us like it better than you do?”

“I am quite sure I should like it less than anyone, if Laurence were dead,” Temeraire said, “but he is not: he is certainly not dead. Of course I am going to go and look for him: I think it outside of everything for you to try and persuade me to any other course.”

He did not bother to keep the reproach from his voice, and the anger. “And I do not see why you will all waste time arguing with me, when you had much better be helping me to organize a search: he cannot come to us, as long as we are still fixed out here in this useless position.”

He was himself in an equally unpleasant position: perched awkwardly upon the long line of jagged black rocks, with his hindquarters half in the ocean, and peering over onto the dragondeck at the aviators. The Potentate had grounded during the storm: a terrific crash which had nearly sent all the dragons sliding off the deck into the ocean and tipped the ship up and over her ends.

There had been no time to think of anything but the mad scrambling effort to untangle themselves from the storm-chains in time, Laurence throwing himself up to where little Nitidus was pinned beneath three knots, frantically sawing them open and letting him at last wriggle free, so the rest of them had room enough to burst loose while the chains and tarpaulins slid down over the prow, into the churning ocean.

“When you are loose, take hold the anchor-chains at stern and bow!” Laurence had roared to him, before climbing up. “You must hold her back and off her beam-ends, else this cross-ocean will pound her apart on the shoals,” and as soon as Temeraire had managed to break free he had done it: he and Maximus and Kulingile all working mightily together, straining against the anchor chains and every rope that Nitidus and Dulcia could bring up to them, to keep the ship upright while the wind shrieked and tried to batter her and them against the rocks. And Temeraire had borne the brunt of it, for he could better maneuver than either of them: though it was quite impossible to hover properly in the storm, at least he could keep to his position more or less, without being flung down into the waves.

No-one had said a word to him, all that time—no-one had mentioned that Laurence was nowhere to be seen, and likely carried overboard with the chains—until he had finally been able to land exhausted on the deck, and look about, and Roland had slowly come and told him softly that Laurence was lost.

Temeraire did not mind admitting that it had been a very dreadful moment, and he had indulged himself in imagining consequences as dire as any of them. He had gone and swept frantically over all the neighboring ocean, every moment a torment as he found not the least sign of the tarpaulins or Laurence anywhere. But he had forced himself to stop searching empty waves—it had already been several hours, and Laurence would certainly not have stayed in the water, but would have struck right out for land, sensibly—and had gone back to the ship to consult maps to determine where best to find Laurence, and organize a better rescue.

It had not occurred to him that anyone would be so ridiculous as to throw some business of politics in his way: this nonsense of Japan being closed to foreign shipping, and unreasonably intolerant of visitors. Of course Hammond might be counted on to try offering him objections on such flimsy grounds, but Temeraire would have thought better of Granby and Captain Harcourt to lend themselves to it, or any of the other dragons’ captains.

Temeraire was trying to be just: he did not hold it against anyone, much, that they had not noticed Laurence missing in the great confusion—although he had been trying to save the entire ship, and others had not been in quite so crucial a position; someone else might have looked sooner—“But I do not think it unreasonably selfish of me,” he said, “that now the others should keep on without me, until I have found Laurence. And I will certainly go at once.”

The storm was gone and the winds had died down, and Maximus and Kulingile could take it in turn to keep the ship from being smashed upon the shoals: Kulingile was aloft even now, doing his turn alone, and the ship was perfectly well. It did not signify if a few waves came over the side; sailors had to be prepared to get a little wet, now and again.

“I do not even mean to be gone very long,” Temeraire said. “I am only asking to take perhaps twenty men, or thirty, and fly to the nearest shore and begin a search: Certainly we will find him very soon. Particularly if we should make inquiries amongst the populace.”

“We must do nothing of the sort,” Hammond said, leaning over the rail and mopping his brow with his handkerchief: The weather was pleasantly hot now under the direct sun, which they had not seen for several days. “Nagasaki is the only harbor of Japan even open to any Western trade: The law utterly forbids the entry of any foreigners into the country, and if they should find Captain Laurence thrown up on their shore—” He stopped talking with a choking cough, as Granby stumbled with the swell on the shuddering deck, and knocked him in the side.

“If they do not want any foreigners about, they should be all the happier for us to find Laurence, and depart,” Temeraire said, feeling himself on eminently solid ground. “And after all, we can tell them we do not want to be here, either: We are only on our way to China, and if we had not run into that dreadful squall we should not have troubled them in the least.”

“Perhaps instead you might proceed at once to Nagasaki,” Gong Su said; he did not quail when Temeraire turned a cold glittering eye upon him, although he did add, “I beg your forgiveness for speaking of a course of action which is distasteful to you, but no good can come from failing to follow the proper forms of intercourse. I am sure that an inquiry laid with the harbormaster, with the proper respect, is most likely to yield the fruit which we all desire: the prince’s safe return.”

“Not much chance of that, certain sure,” O’Dea muttered, from where he was sitting not far away, wrapped in an oilskin and huddled up to Iskierka’s side for the warmth, pretending to be worming a rope usefully when really he was only listening. “Cruel, I call it, to keep up his hopes: The ocean keeps what she takes.”

“Thank you, O’Dea, that is enough,” Granby said sharply.

“It is enough,” Temeraire said. “You need not silence him, when he is only saying what you all think. Well, I do not care. I am not going to Nagasaki; I am not going to China; I am not going anywhere without Laurence, and I am certainly not going to only sit here and wait.”

“No, of course you aren’t,” Granby said under his breath.

“Oh, yes, you are!” said Iskierka cracking open an eye, now of all times. She had slept nearly the entire storm away fastened down in the most comfortable place, between Maximus and Kulingile, with Temeraire curled round and Lily, Messoria, and Immortalis all heaped on top; during the crisis, she had done absolutely nothing but huddle on an exposed rock and watch, grumblingly, while the rest of them had worked. And now the ship was more secure, she had slung herself, very inconveniently for everyone else, around the base of the mizzenmast to keep sleeping all the day.

“I am not, in the least!” Temeraire said to her, with strong indignation: if she were to tell him Laurence was dead, he would clout her across the nose. “Laurence is not dead.”

“I don’t see why he should be dead,” Iskierka said, “what has that to do with anything? But you are not going haring off into the countryside when we are stuck here on these rocks, and anything at all might happen to the ship.”

Temeraire thought this ridiculous. The storm was over, and the Potentate had not sunk yet; she would not sink now. “Whyever ought I stay here, when Laurence is lost somewhere in Japan?”

“Because I am going to have the egg tomorrow,” Iskierka said, then paused and tilted her head thoughtfully, “or perhaps today: I want something to eat, and then we shall see.”

“The egg?” Granby said, staring at her. “What egg? What—do you mean to tell me the two of you blighted fiends have been—”

“Well, of course,” Iskierka said. “How else could we have made an egg? Although,” she added to Temeraire, “it has been a great deal more trouble for me, so once it is out, I think it is only fair you should look after it: Anyway you are not going anywhere, until it is quite safe.”

[End Excerpt]

Copyright © 2013 by Naomi Novik.

Excerpted from Blood of Tyrants by Naomi Novik.

Excerpted by permission of Del Rey,

a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.

No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Naomi Novik was born in New York in 1973, a first-generation American, and raised on Polish fairy tales, Baba Yaga, and Tolkien. She studied English Literature at Brown University and did graduate work in Computer Science at Columbia University before leaving to participate in the design and development of the computer game Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide. Her first novel, His Majesty’s Dragon, was published in 2006 along with Throne of Jade and Black Powder War, and has been translated into 23 languages. She has won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel, and the Locus Award for Best First Novel. The fourth volume of the Temeraire series, Empire of Ivory, published in September 2007, was a New York Times bestseller, and was followed by bestsellers Victory of Eagles and Tongues of Serpents. Will Supervillains Be on the Final?, volume one in a new graphic novel series titled Liberty Vocational, came out in 2011. She is one of the founding board members of the Organization for Transformative Works, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the fair-use rights of fan creators, and is herself a fanfic writer and fan vidder. Naomi lives in New York City with her husband and eight computers.

Novel Excerpt: Kingmaker
Christian Cantrell

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.

—Archimedes

Prologue

Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center (KhSC)

Moscow, Russia

October 16, 1997

7:22 a.m.

Grigori Kedrov was not called to the director’s office. He was brought.

The two men who escorted him never produced, revealed, or even hinted at the weapons beneath their coats. There was no need. At the moment of eye contact, there was an instantaneous nonverbal agreement: It was over, and the more Grigori cooperated, the easier it would be. Grigori watched the men for a moment, then placed the coupling he had been examining down on a bench. The two men kept Grigori between them as they walked, and they all ignored the astonished gazes of the other engineers.

As he was led into the dim, mahogany-paneled office, Grigori saw the one thing he hoped he would not: his wife. She was sitting in one of the two chairs in front of the massive, intricately carved oak desk. Her spine was straight and her knuckles were pale as she gripped the chair’s ornate armrests. Grigori thought that she was bound, but when she turned, he could see that her restraints were self-imposed.

The man behind the director’s desk was not the director. His cold, slate-blue eyes were set slightly too close together, which gave him an unsettling and predatory stare. There were four other men in the room—two on each side. Their long dark coats were open and their hands were clasped at their waists.

In the center of the desk was a tiny aluminum microfilm canister.

Grigori and Tetyana had been working at KhSC since December of 1984. By then, most of the engineers from Chernobyl who were still able to work had been relocated to Moscow and assigned to the Zarya project. Zarya was initially designed as a propulsion module for the Mir orbital space station, but it never flew. It was later used as an upper-stage engine for the Polyus spacecraft—a weapons platform designed to use megawatt carbon-dioxide lasers to destroy American Strategic Defense Initiative satellites, which were, in turn, designed to use directed-energy weapons to destroy Soviet ICBMs. After the fall of the Soviet Union—and in a remarkable spectacle of post-Cold War irony—NASA chose Zarya over a similar US-built option to be the very first module of the International Space Station. Although it was of Soviet design and was being built by a Russian company, Zarya was funded by the Americans, and therefore owned by the United States.

The hermetically sealed aluminum microfilm canister in the center of the director’s desk had been discovered behind one of the four earth-orientation instruments. It was not part of Zarya’s design.

When Tetyana saw her husband, she stood, crossed the room, and embraced him. All four men advanced from the sides of the room and began to separate them, but the captain snapped his fingers and waved them off. Let them, he said. He watched the man rock his wife and stroke her long chestnut hair. There is no harm in it, the captain told his men. All the harm that could be done had been done already.

The woman turned and started to speak to the captain, but her husband stopped her. He told her it was best not to say anything. The captain watched her with his cool blue eyes and said he already knew what she was going to ask, and that the answer was yes. Their son would be looked after. He would be cared for and raised by the state. The captain did not smile, but his eyes softened. They needn’t worry about the boy, he told them. He assured the two traitors that he would personally see to Alexei’s well-being, education, and most importantly, to his training.

Part One

The End of the Silk Road

Chapter One

Alexei Kedrov did not have a heart. He was the first agent of the Russian Federal Security Service to have it removed and replaced with two perfectly silent, continuous-flow centrifugal pumps that integrated flawlessly with his autonomic nervous system. The procedure was not done for health reasons—in fact, his heart was so robust that it was preserved in the Kremlin’s presidential tissue bank—but rather as a way to increase stealth; Alexei became invisible to even the most advanced heartbeat sensors employed by security systems, black ops units, and all forms of cardio-acoustic, antipersonnel ballistics.

An additional benefit to not having a pulse was the ability to pass for a corpse. It was rare that such a morbid aptitude proved convenient, but certainly not without precedent. More than once Alexei had gone unnoticed by covering himself with fistfuls of nearby purple glistening entrails and holding his breath while a soldier scanned him with his handheld electric potential sensor, attributed the minimal readings to residual brain activity, and moved on.

Before the procedure, Alexei was known as Lev, or “the Lion”—a testament to his intrepid nature and uninhibited ferocity. Afterwards he was called “Tin Man.”

Relinquishing his heart had saved Alexei’s life on several occasions, and now he was depending on it to help him start a new one. It was not generally difficult to get into the United States anymore since there were far more people making plans to leave than had dreams of immigrating, but getting in without being photographed, scanned, and possibly even microchipped or isotoped (and henceforth monitored by the FBI, CIA, NSA, and/or Immigration and Customs Enforcement) was becoming increasingly problematic. Although there never seemed to be sufficient funding or consensus to pass legislation designed to help feed, clothe, house, or employ Americans, any initiative promising to track them more closely enjoyed lavish financial support and expedited nonpartisan ratification.

Given the current political climate, the state of American civil liberties, and the nature of armed conflict across the globe, it occurred to Alexei that the easiest way to penetrate the United States border without being identified or registered was probably as a dead enemy combatant. Rather than maintaining complex and expensive processing facilities all over the world, it was far cheaper and easier to hire contractors to load the bodies of suspected, accused, condemned, and subsequently executed terrorists into reusable carbon fiber caskets, transfer them onto freight drones, and send them off to labs in northern California, South Carolina, or Texas, where the entire process of unloading, dissecting, analyzing, and finally disposing of remains was entirely automated. Most insurgents entered the facility more or less anonymous, but by the time the carborane acids in which their limbs and organs were dissolved was sent out to be disposed of as hazardous waste, the United States had obtained photographs, measurements, biometrics, a full DNA profile, genealogical data, and several other data points useful in matching casualties to known targets, and more importantly, in helping to identify new ones.

The most abundant producers of enemy combatant corpses bound for the US were probably the “narco-cratic” nations of Mexico and Columbia, whose only remaining political parties were recent evolutionary offshoots of the Los Zetas, Sinaloa, and Norte del Valle drug cartels. Unfortunately, while constant paramilitary operations were certain to provide Alexei with ample opportunity, there were far too many ways between Russia and just about anywhere in Latin America to register on the ubiquitous and omniscient radar nets cast by any number of three-letter American agencies. Therefore the safest, most reliable, and most convenient option was Iran.

Alexei bought a Range Rover in Volgograd from a balding man in a lustrous, electric blue track suit who proved willing to trade cash for an unofficial and hassle-free transaction (which Alexei knew would later be reported as a theft in order to justify the lack of documentation, and to yield a supplemental payment from the insurance company). The dealer even threw in a complimentary roof rack, several spare hydrogen fuel cells, and after the second time Alexei stood up to walk out, micro-weave floor mats apparently impregnated with stain-dissolving enzymes. Alexei drove the two thousand kilometers south to Tehran in a single day, where he traded the Range Rover for a used BMW R 1400 GS Adventure motorcycle with massive titanium panniers and a computerized traction control system designed specifically for riding through sand. The dealer tried to sell him a helmet and several other types of ballistic protection (including a full-body, one-piece suit capable of inflating from neck to ankle in less than ten milliseconds should the built-in accelerometer suddenly report values consistent with an accident), but Alexei already had his own custom-engineered gear. With the cash left over from the deal, he bought two weeks’ worth of supplies, then discovered it was far easier to find prostitutes in an Islamic republic than a single liter of even mediocre vodka. His persistence eventually paid off, however, and he spent one more night at the Tehran Milad Tower before leaving the next morning for Dasht-e Kavir, or the Great Salt Desert.

He used his handset to monitor communications between military contractor outposts, the constellation of geosynchronous satellites overhead, and hundreds of both aerial and terrestrial drones in the region. It was programmed to look for a very specific set of criteria. Since he needed relatively well-intact corpses to blend in among, the most important thing was that the attack on the insurgents be conducted using some form of chemical agent or discreet directed-energy weapon rather than conventional or tactical nuclear ordnance likely to incinerate every solid object within a radius of five hundred meters. He also had to be able to reach the target in the brief window of time between when the last of the UAVs left the area and the body harvesting crew arrived.

Alexei smoked a particular brand of pure black filterless cigarette, which he had stocked up on before leaving Moscow. He’d been rationing them at an increasing rate during his time in the desert, and was now down to his last one. As soon as he lit it with a miniature plasma torch, he saw his handset come alive on the seat of his bike. He picked it up to verify the criteria, then took a long, wistful drag, flicked the unsmoked remains off into the sand, and hastily began striking his meager camp. Assuming he hadn’t made any gross miscalculations, Alexei knew that within twelve hours, he would very likely be on his way to the US to start not just a new mission, but an entirely new life.

The attack would be outside of Kashmar, which was several hundred kilometers away from Alexei’s current position. It had been long enough since it rained last that the BMW’s microwave density sensors assured him that he could ride directly over the great crusts of salt without fear of falling through into the black saline marshes below. He stood up on his foot pegs until the ridges of minerals flattened out into dirt, and then into paths, and finally into the closest thing to a road Alexei had seen in weeks.

The handset was clipped in among the bike’s instrument cluster, and he checked it as he rode. He was close enough when the attack occurred that had the target been destroyed, he would have probably heard it. Since no acrid black plumes rose above the horizon ahead, he knew that the site contained bodies and/or equipment that the United States considered vital and therefore fully intended to recover.

The reds and browns and blacks of salt and sand were behind Alexei now, and it was almost ten degrees cooler as he began to pass through the shade of occasional trees. He was still several kilometers outside of Kashmar when the dirt road turned to gravel, and he approached a cluster of warehouses. The windows were boarded and the old chipped brick was covered in the dripping twists and swirls and dots of Farsi graffiti, which the transparent LCD inside Alexei’s visor translated into “God is great” and “Death to Israel” and “Behead all infidel pig-fuckers.” Weeds pushed up through the gravel out front, where several Iranian sedans were parked at various angles. The trees around the buildings looked too straight—even for products of genetic engineering—and as Alexei got off his bike, he realized that they were artificial. The silicon foliage concealed antennas, transmitters, and clear plastic parabolic satellite dishes watching several different regions of the sky at once. He left the keys in the ignition and did not remove his helmet.

The first warehouse Alexei checked explained the American’s interest. There were no bodies, but dozens of drones were arranged throughout the space, each a dramatically unique model. In the natural light permitted by the transparent thermoplastic panels in the ceiling, Alexei could see everything from an old stealth Sentinel reconnaissance UAV—the Beast of Kandahar, as it was once known—to multicopter gunships to racks of Hummingbird- and Dragonfly-class micro aerial vehicles. Nestled in below the wings and rotors of the larger aircraft were several models of continuous-track and 6x6 UGVs, or Unmanned Ground Vehicles, and even a few quadrupedal and bipedal transport, antipersonnel, and antiaircraft assets commonly referred to as “mechs.” Several of the machines were partially disassembled—clearly in the process of being reverse-engineered—and the air inside the hangar was thick with the fumes of kerosene-based jet fuel and the metallic tinge of old battery acid. Although there were various components tagged and laid out on steel, multitiered machine tables, there was no wreckage, and none of the vehicles appeared to have sustained any damage. It looked as though everything in the warehouse had been captured fully intact.

The next structure was exactly what Alexei was expecting. Even through his one-piece, composite-weave suit he felt the frigid air wash over him as he slid the door open. The space was divided between racks of servers and rows of workstations, all connected by cables dropping down from a low ceiling of metal latticework panels. Alexei had infiltrated facilities like this before and he knew that some of the cabling was for data and some of the lines carried water—likely condensed from the vapor byproduct of hydrogen fuel cells—which was used to draw thermal energy away from the synthetic diamond heat sinks clamped down over what probably totaled tens of thousands of parallel processor cores.

Alexei was inside a modern Iranian war room.

All of the technicians were dead. They lay in pools of bodily fluids, their white microfiber thermal-insulated suits absorbing the blood from their gums and eyes and ears, and the greenish-brown bile heaved up from their stomachs with their very last breaths. The attack had obviously been radiological, conducted by one or more quadrotor drones focusing beams of ionizing radiation—probably gamma rays—at levels of at least one hundred thousand roentgens. Unconsciousness would have been almost instantaneous and death from internal hemorrhaging not far behind.

The building would probably not be safe until it was fully decontaminated, so Alexei backed out and closed the door. He felt the ring beneath his glove vibrate, and he took his handset out of his thigh pocket and checked the map. The Americans were less than a kilometer away and approaching rapidly. He picked a spot between the nearest building and his bike, took a few casual steps, relaxed his arms and legs, and collapsed.

He couldn’t tell exactly how many vehicles there were, but from the number of doors he heard open and slam, he guessed at least three. There were the sounds of ammo magazines being slapped into place, rounds being chambered, and safeties being released, but he could tell the men were not advancing in any kind of formation. Their boots kicked lackadaisically at the gravel as they gathered.

“Check him out. Dude almost got away.”

“What the hell’s a bike like that doing way the fuck out here?”

“I don’t know, but the poor thing’s all alone without anyone in the world to take care of it.”

“To the victor go the spoils.”

“How the hell are you going to get that thing back?”

“It’s a motorcycle, you fucking retard. How do you think?”

“Man, if I were you, I wouldn’t go near that thing.”

“Why not?”

“It’s either booby-trapped and you’re going to get your balls blown off right away, or you’re going to hit an IED on the way back and get your balls blown off. Either way, no motorcycle’s worth getting your balls blown off.”

“Why not? Ain’t like he’s using them.”

“All right, everyone. Listen up. We got four buildings to cover. Scarberry, Hash, I want you to take the western structure. Carbone and O’Leary, you take the one behind it. Me and Collins will start with this guy, then do the main building. Whoever finishes last gets the fourth building while everyone else gets to drink what’s in that cooler we brought. Got it?”

There was a chorus of acknowledgments, followed by the crunch of boots dispersing. Alexei heard the top of a Zippo flick open, a plasma torch ignite, and then a metallic snap. The stiff weave of his suit lifted it above his torso, leaving a shallow cavity into which his chest slowly rose and fell as he took measured, invisible breaths.

“You scan this guy yet?”

Alexei could hear a handheld electric potential sensor being triggered. “He’s cooked. Man, that’s a nice fucking helmet he’s got on.”

Alexei heard a boot next to his head, then felt his visor get shoved up.

“Holy shit, this ain’t no hajji!”

“It most certainly is not.”

“Fucking mercenaries.”

“What do you mean fucking mercenaries? What do you think you are?”

“I’m a military contractor. There’s a difference.”

“And what difference is that?”

“The difference is he’s dead and I ain’t, which means I get to make the rules.”

“You can make all the rules you want; just do it while you’re helping me move this guy.”

“Hold on. He ain’t even bleeding. Let me get his helmet first.”

Alexei felt fingers working at the strap under his chin.

“Leave the helmet where it is, Collins.”

“Come on, man. That’s a nice fucking helmet. Ain’t like he needs it anymore.”

“I said leave it. Take the bike if you want it, but we’re here to collect these bodies, not rob them.”

“How can you rob someone who’s dead? That’s just plain ignorant.”

“By taking shit that doesn’t belong to you, that’s how. Now I’m done fucking around, Collins. I said no.”

A moment passed and then Alexei’s visor got slapped back down.

“Fine. Fuck it. Helmets are for pussies, anyways.”

“Relax. It’s not like you got much to protect. Come on. Let’s get this done.”

Alexei felt himself being lifted from the ankles and armpits, carried a short distance, and then lowered.

“Gently now.”

“Man, how come you’re always sticking up for these ragheads?”

“He isn’t a raghead. You saw him. He’s about as white as O’Leary’s ass.”

“Whatever. Anyone who comes out here and takes up arms against the United States is a raghead in my book, and you’re the only one I know who gives a fuck about what happens to every one of these camel-humping sons-a-bitches. That what they teach you in officer school? You too brainwashed to break the rules every now and then?”

“It’s not because I’m an officer, and it’s not because I’m afraid to break the rules.”

“Then what is it? What’s wrong with grabbing a helmet, or a gold tooth, or a little jewelry every now and then? Ain’t like they’re going to miss any of it.”

“It’s called respect, Collins. Not that you’d know anything about that.”

“Respect? Wait a second. You do know that we’re sending these bodies out for DECOP, right? You do know what Deceased Enemy Combatant Processing is, don’t you? I’m pretty sure that’s about the farthest thing from respect there is.”

“Maybe, but that’s not my call. What is my call is how they get treated before they get sent out. It may not be much, but it’s something.”

“Yeah, it’s something, all right.”

“Let me ask you something, Collins. You think you’re always going to be on the winning side of this fight?”

“I damn sure intend to be.”

“You might intend to be, but what we want and what we get are two very different things, aren’t they? When your number’s up, you want someone pulling your teeth out of your skull with some rusty old pair of pliers, or cutting off your ear and wearing it on a necklace as a souvenir, or dragging your bare-ass body through the streets while everyone spits and pisses on your corpse?”

“They’ll do all that shit anyway. It don’t matter what we do.”

“Maybe, but that’s not the point. It isn’t about who they are—it’s about who we are. They might be our enemy, but that doesn’t mean we have to hate them. We all got our fights to fight in this world.”

“That’s why we should be out here getting what we can, when we can. If you ask me, we’re passing up a damn good opportunity here.”

“That’s the thing,” the man said. “I’m not asking.”

Alexei felt the space around him condense and then he heard the click of several latches. When he opened his eyes again, it was black.

The time glowing in the corner of his visor told Alexei that it was a little less than three hours before he was loaded onto a freight drone, and then another ten hours before he landed. Environmental scrubbers kept carbon dioxide levels in the casket down to 394 parts per million by absorbing the poisonous molecules into the padding of his helmet, and he sipped cool, compressed oxygen from the vent over his nose and mouth. The freighter was refrigerated, and when the sensors around Alexei’s torso detected that he was nearly hypothermic, current from the batteries in his boots was forced through the resistant steel fibers woven into his suit’s composite material until his core was back up to ninety-eight degrees. He spent a few hours drifting in and out of sleep, and he dreamed that he had the opportunity to kill a man whom he hated intensely for reasons he could not recall, but the trigger of his pistol was soft and the bullets just slid down the barrel with a metallic rasp and dropped to the floor at his feet where they bounced and rolled and accumulated into a maddening pile of impotence.

He felt himself being unloaded, and then the casket vibrated as it moved along a track. There were industrial sounds ahead of him: the banging of heavy objects being moved and stacked; the hiss and groan of pneumatics; the robotic whine of servos and actuators; the accumulative cacophony of products either being assembled or destroyed. When the noise entirely surrounded him, Alexei placed his palms against the top of the casket and pushed. The material warped, then reformed to its original shape as soon as he lowered his hands. He made a fist and punched feebly in the small space, but the carbon fiber shell deflected his blows. The casket jerked to a stop and then the top was gone, and Alexei was suddenly looking up at the underside of a massive metallic insect. Jointed appendages clattered above him wielding high-speed, diamond-tipped saw blades and drill bits, scalpels, retractors, needles, suction tubes, and fiber-optic scopes. There wasn’t enough room to vault up and out, so he threw his weight against the side of the casket, but it was locked securely into its track. An array of steel grippers began to descend—mechanisms designed to pin him at multiple points and keep him immobile during the initial cutting—but they paused just above the casket. The noise immediately around him wound down as the machinery’s residual power faded. The casket was yanked farther along the track, and the surgical cluster was replaced by a chubby face with saggy eyes and a black beard shaped along an ample jawline. The man smiled.

“Good morning, Tin Man!” he announced enthusiastically through a thick Russian accent. “I am Bogdan! Welcome to America!”

Alexei sat up and pulled off his helmet. The queue he was in was stopped, but the lines parallel to him were still operating. The steel appendages made minute adjustments on multiple axes as they applied their implements in perfect coordination. Various organs and entrails were carefully detached or gathered and spooled from wet red abdominal, chest, and cranial cavities, then placed in molded dishes, which were conveyed along separate paths. The robotic instrument cluster to his right was being sterilized in a simmering vat as a fresh corpse was brought into position. There was a total of at least twenty working lines with caskets identical to his placed about two meters apart, and although he couldn’t see what was beyond this room, he assumed the remains were bound for more discrete tissue, chemical, and genetic analysis. The air smelled of acidic and caustic vapor.

He climbed down and stood unsteadily on the concrete floor as the circulation returned to his legs. The man before him was short and heavy and seemed to be trying to augment his stature with a thick black bouffant. He had a bag hanging from one shoulder and a smug grin on his plump lips.

“A few more seconds and the Americans would have possessed the famous heart of the Lion.”

“Where are we?”

“South Carolina. Folly Beach. Home of the biggest insurgent processing plant in the country.”

“How did you stop the line?” Alexei asked him.

The fat man gestured behind him. “It was no problem. The kill switch is right on the wall.”

“How long do we have before someone notices?”

“I am told each line has fifteen minutes to repair itself before a technician is sent in.”

“Does anyone know you’re here?”

The fat man’s laugh rebounded off the high ceiling. “Not even my wife, Tin Man. She thinks I’m spending a week at the beach with some whores. Maybe there will still be time, no?”

“Did you bring water?”

“I have everything you requested,” Bogdan said, and then his smile faltered. “As long as you have the money.”

Alexei unzipped the top portion of his suit and removed a thick envelope. The fat man took it and thumbed through the notes.

“A private jet would have been a lot cheaper,” he said. “And a lot more comfortable.”

He took a brushed-steel canister from the bag and handed it to Alexei. Alexei unhinged the top and tipped it back twice, pausing to breathe in-between.

“Give me the protein.”

Bogdan handed Alexei a single white tube. Alexei ripped off the top and squeezed the paste into his mouth. When he’d swallowed it all, he finished the canister of water.

“Show me the rest.”

The fat man widened the top of the bag and began presenting its contents. “A twenty-five centimeter tungsten carbide tactical combat knife with serrated blade. A Gryazev-Shipunov 10mm pistol with four twenty-round magazines. Two packs of Sobranie black blend unfiltered cigarettes. (Very good, by the way.) And, of course, a passport. Congratulations, Tin Man. You are an American now!”

Alexei took the passport and opened it. “Alexei Drovosek? Not very subtle.”

“You are the Woodcutter now, no?”

Alexei motioned for the bag, and Bogdan passed it to him. He began verifying the contents for himself.

“With all due respect, Tin Man,” Bogdan said, “I think you are wasting your time and your talents here.”

Alexei did not look up. “What makes you say that?”

“Everything there is to own in America is already owned by someone. This is not the land of opportunity it once was. Do you know the Thirty-first Amendment?”

“What about it?”

“Every year it gets more and more support. Eventually it will be ratified, and all the votes will go from the citizens to their employers. Once that happens, this place will be as bad as Russia. Maybe worse.”

“You’re thinking small, comrade,” Alexei said. “You’ve been away from the motherland too long. You think I came all this way to open a grocery store?”

Bogdan smiled. “Tell me. What did the great Tin Man come here to do?”

Alexei looked up from the bag. “No matter how much a man has, there are two things he can never get enough of: pleasure and protection. Just like in Russia, the wealthy here need weapons, drugs, and girls. Or boys, depending on the individual. Whoever can provide them safely, discreetly, and reliably can get access to the most powerful men in the country.”

The fat man’s smile broadened. “I like the way you think, Tin Man,” he said. “But you know what you are going to need?”

“Enlighten me.”

“A partner. Someone who knows people. Someone with connections.” He pointed at the bag in Alexei’s hands. “Someone who can get you what you need.”

Alexei slipped the passport back in the bag, but he didn’t remove his hand.

“You’re right,” he said. “I do need all those things, and more. But you know what I need right now?”

“Tell me, my friend.”

“I need a body to fill that casket.”

Alexei took a step forward and the knife went into the fat man’s gut. He had planned to slide the blade up under the rib cage and into the man’s heart and wait for it to stop twitching as the muscle went into spasm, but he was suddenly concerned about the amount of blood it would leave on the floor. He withdrew the knife, and Bogdan groaned as Alexei hoisted him up into the casket. The fat man’s fingers looked like raw bloody sausages as they pressed down over the wound. Alexei retrieved the bloody envelope from the man’s coat pocket and slipped it into the shoulder bag.

The fat man rolled back and forth in the casket. He tried to sit up but his movements were arrested by the pain in his gut. Despite the weight, the casket slid easily on its rails, and Alexei heard the man pleading in Russian as he was positioned under the belly of the bristling steel beast. On his way out, the Tin Man punched the green button on the wall, and the disassembly line came back to life.

[End Excerpt]

Copyright © 2013 by Christian Cantrell.

Excerpted from Kingmaker by Christian Cantrell.

Excerpted by permission of 47North.

All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Christian Cantrell is a software developer from Northern Virginia. He writes the technology blog LivingDigitally.net and takes photographs for microkosmic.com. Cantrell is the author of several self-published short stories, including “Brainbox” and “Farmer One.” His first novel, Containment, was published in 2010. Kingmaker is his second novel.

Interview: Alaya Dawn Johnson
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Alaya Dawn Johnson is the author of The Spirit Binder series and the Zephyr Hollis series. Her latest novel, The Summer Prince, is set in Brazil, 400 years in the future, in a pyramid city where young men vie for the honor of being elected king for a year, after which they are ritualistically sacrificed. She attended Columbia University and lives in New York City. Visit her online at www.alayadawnjohnson.com.

This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the hosts discuss various geeky topics.

Your new book is called The Summer Prince. What’s that about?

It is a novel that takes place in what is now Brazil, on the coast of the state that is now Bahia, but 400 years in the future, in the aftermath of a global apocalypse. And it’s in a matriarchal society that’s a utopian experiment, run by women of color, and women have power, but every five years they elect a king, and it’s a Summer King, and he rules and is the ultimate rock star, sex god, political figurehead for a year. And then, at the end of the year, he is ritually killed. It’s basically a year in the life of the Summer King. It’s told from the point of view of a girl, June, who is a young artist in that society, and they end up collaborating on spectacular, public, political art projects together.

And it takes place in Brazil, as you said, and you said that some of your sister Lauren’s tales helped inspire it.

Yes.

What kind of crazy tales of Brazil did she have?

Oh, she has so many. She studied abroad in the north of Brazil, in the state of Pará, her junior year of college. My sister and my cousin and I ended up going her senior year of college, to help my sister study for her research for her senior year thesis there. When my sister, my cousin, and I went, we went to the south of Brazil, to Sāo Paulo and to Rio. So part of it was my experiences with the two of them in Rio and Sāo Paulo, but also my sister’s stories, because just, for example, part of her trip was involved in going on a riverboat down the Amazon, and she would describe how, in order to wash her hair, she had to jump in the river, climb up, soap up her hair, jump in the river again, climb back up, put the conditioner on her hair, jump in the river again: this is how they bathed. She went hiking in the woods, in the rainforest, and didn’t wear closed shoes, which was a big mistake because she actually has this incredible photograph of this monstrous centipede, or millipede, that somehow found its way into her Teva and bit her foot. And it swelled up like crazy and then she was okay, but my gosh, how terrifying. The kind of first spark of my novel that came from her experience was when, as part of her study abroad research, she would take bags of food and go into villages and say, “In exchange for groceries for a week, will someone let me string up my hammock and talk to you?” And apparently this is something that researchers, anthropologists in Brazil will do a lot. So she went to this little town called Palmares Dos, which was named after Palmares, the famous Quilombo escaped-slave town. And it was of African-diasporic people living in this town, and they named it after this famous Quilombo, and I remember she told me about that. So then, years later, when I was thinking about the city, I wanted it to be with African-diasporic people, and I wanted it to evoke the history of that. I realized that I could call it an homage to that small town my sister stayed in, Palmares Tres.

In the book it says that the culture of Palmares Tres comes from the legend of Palmares you just mentioned, Catholicism, and Candomblé, if I’m saying that right?

Yeah.

Could you talk about what Candomblé is and how it played a role in the story?

Candomblé is the traditional African religion that slaves practiced and African descendants in Brazil practiced. Candomblé in the book is related to Candomblé now, but it’s not the same thing at all. But I wanted to have it so that the people of that society had a connection with their past, had a connection with the Amanja and Ushala, and the gods of their people.

Yeah, the people in Palmares Tres, they worship the Orisas, you said.

Yes.

Actually, there are a lot of words that I think most readers will find unfamiliar in the book: You have “walkas” and the “verde” and all this stuff. Which of those did you make up and which of them came from real places?

Well, to some extent I made all of them up. Like the “verde,” just means green. I just used it because of the physical way the bottom tier of the pyramid, which is what “verde” is referring to, the bottom tier where the poorest people live, is green because they have these giant algae vats. So I was just trying to come up with slang that felt real but is really specific to the fictional place I was making up. The same thing with “walkas.” “Walkas” is an interesting one though because its basis isn’t Portuguese, it’s Japanese, because part of the other thing I was attempting to do with this was to create a culture where you could see different immigrant strains. Because Brazil right now has one of the largest populations of diasporic Japanese people in the world, I think it might actually be the largest population. That was what my sister was studying in Sāo Paulo when she was there, because both of us speak Japanese and she, obviously, speaks Portuguese. I was really fascinated by how much the Japanese-Brazilians pulled on both of those cultures, and how many Japanese people there were in Brazil, which had never really occurred to me. In this book I had it so that, because the cities of Sāo Paulo and Rio had kind of been destroyed in this long-ago apocalypse, a lot of the immigration moved to this part of Eastern Brazil. Basically, the terms like “walka,” terms like “kiri,” are from Japanese, and so it’s all kind of integrated, and it feels to the young characters sort of like the same thing, but they come from different places.

I noticed there’s an audio book of this. Did they get all those names right? Did they consult with you at all? How did that work?

I was consulted a lot on the audio book, which is great. I think almost always audio books, especially if there’s a lot of words that the actors might not know, they’ll send a giant word list to the writer. So they sent to me this, like, ten-page document of all the words in the book. I was like, ‘Oh my goodness.’ So I just tried to really sound them out phonetically to help out, but they also made a point of hiring actors who are familiar with Brazilian-Portuguese and so could speak that more easily than somebody with no familiarity at all.

You said that Palmares Tres is this pyramid city, and I saw you give a presentation of this book at a bookstore called Books of Wonder. You mentioned that there’s a real plan for these pyramid cities, and they just need to invent a couple more building materials, and they’ll be good to go. Could you talk about that?

Basically, of course, my ideas come from all these different places, and so part of the random chunk that met the other chunk of the social politics of the society was me watching a documentary on the Discovery Channel a while back. It was all about extreme building materials. It’s one of those Discovery Channel shows, but this one was really fascinating to me because it was talking about vertical cities, and it was in the context of ecological cities, cities that can be sustainable. And this Japanese design company or architecture firm had come up with a plan for a giant pyramid city, miles in diameter, that is constructed of a bunch of mini-pyramids, and each of the tubes that connect them are transport tubes, and skyscrapers would hang from the joints, and just every single thing about this sounded amazingly cool. And it was also self-sustaining. In the case of the design by the Japanese firm, it was self-sustaining because it was supposed to be in Tokyo Bay and the waves coming through the bottom of the pyramid would provide power for the city, which is a really interesting idea, but not one that I ended up going with. The funny thing about it was that this whole city looked amazing, but they said, “We can’t actually build it because we need a certain kind of nanotechnology that is sure to be invented soon, but we don’t actually have it. So until then we aren’t going to have wonderful pyramid cities.” I thought it was a short leap for me to imagine that, somehow, someone had come up with this wonderful pyramid nanotechnology, and so the women, the original founding mothers of Palmares Tres, could have built their city with it.

A pyramidal structure really nicely reflects the social stratification as well.

Yes.

In the book, the lower levels we said is “the verde,” where the workers grow these giant algae tanks. How does the city run, what does the algae do, and how does that all work?

The idea was that the algae basically breaks down chemicals to produce pure hydrogen gas to power fuel cells. The thing about fuel cells, which I found interesting, is if you get hydrogen, they’re an incredibly efficient and clean way of getting energy. The trouble is that, even though hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, it’s almost always bound with other stuff, so getting pure hydrogen gas is really difficult, and right now the current processes we have for getting it make it more wasteful than just using fossil fuels. I had this leap that right now there’s microbes that break down all sorts of chemicals, and they have different waste products, and I think there’s some people doing some research on this. But I really did just make this leap, because it’s science fiction and I can—that someone had engineered some special microbes that would break down water or something else and release hydrogen as their byproduct of whatever their other process is. And you could market this as hydrogen, but the trouble is they they’re still stinking algae. They smell really, really bad, so you put them at the bottom of the pyramid, where they catch all the light, they look really beautiful, but they smell, and so because of that, and also because you can’t help it if you’re building a pyramid city, it seems almost natural to have the tier system work to mirror the social stratification. The poorest people live on the bottom of the pyramid where everything smells. So that is mirrored throughout the society.

At the top of the pyramid you have what are called the Antes, the sort of matriarchal ruling class. What was it about the matriarchy that interested you and made you want to write about it?

I’ve always wanted to write, and I love science fiction for the possibilities it explores. I love the idea of trying to construct a society that is better than ours, or just different, or that explores and gets at problems with our own society. I also felt that, honestly, I’d read a whole lot of science fictional matriarchies that are really evil, or its women get control, and it’s not as if there aren’t social problems in this world. The whole book is about June discovering the ugly underbelly of her supposedly perfect city. But, despite all that, I think that Palmares Tres is probably a better place to live than modern America. I wanted it to have a matriarchy that, while reflecting actual reality and not just being some utopia, wasn’t also a horrible place to live, that reflected certain understandings of the world that other societies might not have come across. Part of that was me deliberately wanting to have a society that was less hung-up about sex and sexuality, and I felt—now maybe I’m wrong, obviously you can argue with me about this—but I felt that a matriarchal society would have much less interest than a patriarchy in enforcing social and gender norms in the same way.

Let’s talk about that, because at the center of the story is a love triangle, like in a lot of YA books, but in this case it’s a female best friend and a male best friend who both fall in love with the same boy, essentially, the new Summer King. Could you just talk about the dynamics of that kind of relationship?

The other thing that I like a lot are love triangles, which is weird because, honestly, most of the love triangles that I read these days make me crazy. It turns out that they make me crazy because, for some reason, I am very fascinated by the dynamic of three people having a very intense relationship with each other. I think part of the reason why I don’t like a lot of love triangles is that you only see, usually, two guys and then there’s a girl, and the guys, if they have any relationship with each other at all, just hate each other. And the girl is like, “Oh, should I have one or should I have the other?” To me that’s a boring way of doing it. It seems to me that if you’re really going to have a genuine connection with two people, those other two people would also have an interesting relationship with each other, and that jealousy, while a real and important emotion, isn’t the only one. It seems to me that I wish that it would be subordinated a little bit more, just to explore the other things that could happen between three people in that kind of situation.

In the case of my book it’s a little different because, of course, Enki, the Summer King, isn’t going to live more than a year. It’s the refrain throughout the book, everyone knows that the Summer Kings screw like mayflies, he’s not even pretending to be monogamous or choosing between one or the other, this is not, in his idea, a relationship, and it’s not June or Gil’s idea of a relationship. His promiscuity turns that on its head because it makes it even more difficult for them to be jealous of each other, despite the fact that that also exists anyway. So I guess the real reason that I liked it is because it could get so complicated, and hopefully complicated in a way that feels more real to people. I think I got to make it so that the gender identity of each of those characters mattered less than all of the other stuff between them. I thought that was interesting and maybe an important thing to do, especially in young adult literature.

What sort of response have you gotten to that from readers and parents and stuff like that?

What’s weird is that I have not, really. Maybe the parents haven’t found me yet or something. Sometimes when I describe this book to people, they say, “Wow, this is sort of interesting,” and they look sort of amused. But I never had anybody really challenge me. I had a bunch of teenage boys, actually, who told me how much they love this book, which—color me surprised. I have never been more pleased with a demographic that I had not expected to capture. I remember I said it talking at a school recently, and this teenaged boy was asking me, “When did you get the idea for Gil, to make him gay and to love Enki?” That was an interesting question, because when he asked me that, I realized that right until the moment of starting to write this book, I had vaguely intended for June’s best friend to be a girl. And then, as I was typing it, just sort of turned Gil into Gil, and that launched the whole book for me. But it was very strange because it made me realize that I had not been really planning what ended up being a really central element of the book until the moment of writing it.

Why did you expect that boys maybe wouldn’t be into it as much, and what do you think the boys you’ve talked to see in it that you weren’t expecting?

I think part of it is just my own—it’s just a silly prejudice I had, which, clearly, I shouldn’t have had—it’s that, a lot of times, a lot of adult readers and writers and educators will really bemoan the lack of books for boys now. Boys aren’t reading because all of these women write YA, and their main characters are all girls, and so boys aren’t really as into that, and they just need books for them, and what about the boys, and we’re losing the boys. This is a common refrain. I felt intellectually like that was a silly refrain because, for heaven’s sake, girls read books starring boys all the time. So why can’t boys read books starring girls? I don’t think that it’s healthy for anyone to encourage these hypothetical male readers in thinking that it’s okay to just shun reading about half the population on Earth. But, I realized that, when I was talking to these teen boys, that actually a lot of them don’t have that assumption. What I was thinking was that, because this book is so much about a girl and it’s so much about the relationships between her and the two guys that are an important aspect of things—though not in the regular way, it’s not like she’s choosing between Gil and Enki, but they’re still really important to the book—I had this silly idea that, “Well that means that boys aren’t going to be as interested and, really, I’m just going to have female readers.” Which was fine with me, but it made me really excited to realize that a lot of times the stuff keeping young male readers from reading books might not be their own preferences, it might be this sort of cultural weight on them by adults who have much more rigid ideas of what they should be reading. I feel great about that, and I feel like, maybe, the answer for how to get boys to read is to stop trying to single them out so much and worrying so much about their precious masculinity if they read girl books.

You just said on Twitter recently that you got a fan letter that made you cry. Could you talk about that?

I’ve been getting these amazing fan letters. Not like a deluge or anything, but some really special things from people who have read my books, and this one in particular was from a young writer, she’s a young black woman and she’s just basically said that her idol, L.A. Banks, Leslie Banks, the famous vampire fantasy novelist who died last year, was her idol, and she never got to tell her how much she loved her. And she was despairing of finding other black female writers who appealed to her and really spoke to her, and wrote books that were fantastical but also were well written and smart and had black characters in them. And then she found me, and I made her feel rejuvenated and like she can actually write again. Nothing can make a writer feel better than to hear from people who had felt the kind of despair against which I was doing something, like writing The Summer Prince. I’m fully aware of how little young adult, and fiction in general, that’s fantastical features characters of color. To have been inspired by that and to want to write her own fiction was to me just so amazing and something that is pretty much all I could ask for. Especially because I was feeling sort of all tossed around. Writing is a difficult business, lots of ups and downs, and it just came at a really good time.

You said in this book, or in the afterword, that you went through a difficult period of time while writing this book. I don’t know if that’s something you don’t want to talk about, but I was just curious. What was going on?

I broke up with my boyfriend of seven years, so it was just hard. It was just a really hard time. I was moving around a whole bunch of different places, and I didn’t sleep in the same bed for longer than a month for months. It shook me up creatively, and I ended up with The Summer Prince, which is sort of strange, because a lot of times I felt like for writing I need to have stability and calm and quiet. But there was no stability at all, and that was where this book came out of.

And I guess that was right in the middle of the process, right? Because you said you started this in Vancouver, and then finished it in New York and—

Right. What happened was, I broke up with him, and then I was thinking of this book and I was like, “I’ve got to ditch everything, I can’t deal with my life, I’m going to get on a train.” So I got on a train, it was a very silly idea, but I had some free Amtrak points, so I could get a free train ride across the country, so I did that. In coach for three days. It was really great, but I don’t know if I’d do it again. I discovered that it turns out you really do need to take a shower every once in a while. But the most amazing people ride on trains. And they love talking. Just the stories I heard from people and the people I sat next to and people’s life stories, these funny and tragic stories, just amazing stuff, all across the country, and I was writing this story. It was a really magical experience, and it really did just come because I had to get out. And that was when it started. I came back, obviously because I had this silly notion that, “I’ll just get it all out, I’ll just speed-write a whole novel in three weeks, and then I’ll go back to the book that I’m supposed to be writing.” But, of course, it took me a year to write this book, so…

You also mention in the afterword that this went through many drafts and a lot of different people helped you. Could you talk about how the shape of the book changed through those revisions?

The interesting thing is that the major plot points were basically in place from the beginning. The stuff that changed was more the connective tissue between them, making stuff make sense. A lot of times, and this is true of pretty much every revision I’ve ever done of any book, I like being subtle, but I like being subtle so much that I practically don’t put it on the page, and so I always have to have readers tell me, “This makes no sense at all.” And I’ll be like, “But how could you not get all of that from this one sentence in chapter three?” Obviously you might need more than one sentence to connect two halves of your book. So, for example, in this book, the political system is sort of complex, and the first draft I wrote, I didn’t explain a thing. Not a single word of explanation of this political system. I figured you could piece it together, but I realized in hindsight that you can only piece it together if you were reading it like you were an anthropologist or an archeologist, going line by line through my work and writing down all of the dates I provided, and then working out the clues on a scratch sheet. That was the only method you could have used to figure out the system because I didn’t explain anything at all. I realized that I had a problem, which almost all science fiction and fantasy eventually runs up against, which is that someone in a society isn’t going to explain their society the same way that someone outside of it is going to explain it. But unfortunately you have to find some method of explaining it to people who are outside of your society because your society is fictional, and so the people outside of it are all of your readers. And some writers just throw you in and do not care, and that’s what I’d like to do, but the trouble is that that really makes it almost impossible to read, especially when, in this case, the political system is not incidental, it’s really central to the plot. So a lot of my drafts are me wrangling with my pre-readers going, “Okay, now does it makes sense, now does it make sense?” Then finally I made it make sense, and then my editor bought it, and his first comment on the draft was, “Boy, you over explain everything.” I was like, “Are you joking?” I had done so much, I mean, it was hilarious, but he was right, I had gone so crazy trying to figure out how to explain everything to everybody that he, who was more on my side of the scale of not wanting things explained to him, just said, “Cut out this scene, cut out this paragraph, and then it will be okay.” I went from one extreme to the other and then kind of back to the middle again. I know that there are people who read it now and are still a little baffled by the political system, but I figure it’s almost impossible to write a book that everyone will understand and grasp in the same way, so at some point you just have to make compromises.

The political system is basically that the Summer Kings are chosen every five years, I think.

Right.

And then they pick the next queen, and then they have to kill themselves.

Or they’re killed.

Or they’re sacrificed. They cooperate in their own sacrifice, right?

Right. Yeah.

What was it about that idea that made you want to base a novel around it?

The Summer King idea was probably the moment where I really perked up and went, “Yes. This is definitely what I want to write.” There’s all sorts of weird things that went into it. The book that I was supposed to be writing was a sequel to my Moonshine, which was a 1920s historical vampire novel, completely different from this book in practically every way. But there’s a weird connection between them, which is that I was thinking about vampires, and specifically I was thinking about what makes vampires a romantic trope, like what people like about, not just vampires in general, but sort of supernaturally long-lived creatures in general. I think that shows up in probably fifty to sixty percent of paranormal romances.

What exactly makes that attractive? For some reason I decided to invert it. Could you create a romantic trope, could you create someone whose power was not in their incredible longevity but in the brief intense spark of their life? How would that work differently? That leap for some reason was the leap that made me start thinking about Summer Kings, which is not something that I invented. It’s a tradition, a kind of social thing that will happen in a lot of different societies around the world. There’s Celtic Oak Kings; in Aztec Mexico there was the annual sacrifice of the Avatar of Tezcatlipoca; it was exactly the same concept. He would live for a year, he would walk around the city with attendants, and people would want him to bless them, and he was the most beautiful of all of the captured slaves that had been brought in from neighboring polities, and for that one year the God Avatar was actually a god, but a god that you could actually touch and feel. At the end of that year he went willingly to his own sacrifice. All of those ideas and the fact that it has popped up so often in different societies arguably is a trope that even has resonance in modern American society, if you look at the kind of ways that people will really almost fetishize and worship characters or people like James Dean, people who have lived brightly and died young.

I kind of took all of that and realized that it would be very interesting for a matriarchal society to also see the power of that idea and to harness it, because you can’t, of course, exclude half of the population from your political system. Even the most patriarchal societies couldn’t manage that, and the most matriarchal society isn’t going to be able to manage it either. And so what they came up with instead is a way for them [the men] to have, arguably, the most power in their system, but it’s a limited and different power from the ones that the women have. But it makes Enki a very strange character, because, of course, you have to imagine, who is the sort of person who is going to choose that life, who had had all of this before him but is going to choose to die young for the sake of just being awesome for a year, or, in the case of Enki, for making a political statement for a year?

Do you sympathize with, or do you personally feel any of that, the allure of that, “Live crazy and then die,” or are you more of a June kind of person where you’re like, “No, what, are you crazy?’”

For me, I am totally like June. I’m also like June in the sense that I feel the magnetizing pull of that, too. You wonder how they can live so fiercely and not be unafraid of death exactly, but it matters less than everything else that they care about. To me it’s just something that I’m endlessly drawn to; I’m drawn to it in characters in books; I’m drawn to it in real life. I’m so interested in that mindset and the kind of passion and purity of passion behind that. June was definitely speaking for me in a lot of her interactions with Enki, that’s for sure.

June is an artist, and art plays a really big role in the book. She does these graffiti-type public performance art pieces. Do you have any experience with public art or do you know people who have? Where did you draw that material from?

I can’t say I’ve ever participated in public art, mostly because I’m not an artist. Visual art is something that I admire but I find extremely difficult. I’ve gone to some big public art festivals in New York, for sure, but mostly I was thinking about it because I love the idea of art and I also love the idea of expanding the definition as far as you can possibly take it. It was in that spirit that I wanted June to always be pushing the envelope with Enki. I ended up exploring, just because I was thinking about a lot of people who do that right now, and so, there’s the whole concept of flash mobs. There’s a list, The Gemini and Scorpio List, which is a great thing, with every weekend, the sort of artsy, fun, burlesque and all sorts of other art things that you can do in New York every weekend. A lot of them are, “Come and participate on the annual No Pants Subway Ride.” Which is exactly what it sounds like. You all get on a train, you pretend you don’t know each other, and then, at a certain time, you casually divest yourself of your pants and just sit down, and everybody’s staring at you, and you’re like, “What are you talking about?”

I love the idea of this sort of art, the idea that the art is interactive performance, art is flash mob, art is just something really odd. And then there’s other things. People who go to silent dances where they all have different music and your earbuds, and you’re just dancing together but it looks, on the outside, like some really freaky thing. There’s so much more of that now, I think, because of the internet, it makes it easier to coordinate this stuff. That was a big inspiration for what June wants to do and what June does end up doing. But public art, installation art, if you live in a city, it exists everywhere. So part of it was just me looking around and seeing how much street art there was and how much performance art there was. How many people are busking, how many people are painting things, how many people are drawing things for you as you pass by, and trying to turn all of that around and create some kind of political thing that June and Enki could do for the course of the novel.

You mention dancing, and dancing is a big part of this book, too. You mentioned that one of the inspirations was your father’s love of bossa nova music. Could you talk about the way that music influenced the book?

I think that music was my first introduction to Brazil, and it remains one of the big inspirations in my life in general. My dad started listening to bossa nova, and then I branched out and started listening to all sorts of stuff. MPB, Entropicalia, more modern Brazilian rock music, Brazilian psychedelia, like Os Mutantes, and a lot of different, strange—I mean, the richness of Brazilian music is just really overwhelming to me, and just wonderful, and was exciting for me to try to portray in the book. It’s impossible for me to get at the richness, especially because I had a difficulty of working at a four-hundred-year remove, where it seemed like either I was going to have to talk too much about music or I was going to have to do it with a light touch that unfortunately might not convey all of the richness of modern Brazilian music. But I still wanted it to be a really integral part of their lives and dancing as well. Dancing and music is a hugely integral part of my life, and I feel like it’s one of the things that links African-disaporic cultures. This is no less true for African-American culture than it is for Afro-Brazilian culture, and I did want to bring that out in the book. So it wasn’t so much the dances in particular that they’re doing, but the fact that it’s always there, and the fact that you relate things to music and the bands you’ve seen and all of that was—I wanted it to run through their lives, because June isn’t a musician, she’s an artist, but it’s still just as much part of her life as it is for anybody.

It’s funny you mention this problem of having something set really far in the future, but the people are still obsessed with our pop culture. You see that in Futurama, right? Where it’s like a thousand years in the future, and everyone still knows all of our talk shows and stuff like that. But if people are curious about some of this music, do you have some suggestions for a couple songs or a couple artists they should check out?

The song that she uses for her big art installation at the end of the section “Summer” is Chico Buarque’s “Roda Viva,” which is R-O-D-A V-I-V-A. I just love, love, love this song. It’s a—I think you’d call it MPB—and it’s this really beautiful song about the wheel of life, but “roda viva” also means “hustle bustle,” sort of, and so it’s a bit of a double entendre, so it’s a really great metaphor for the book and in the song, too. So that is one song that I would recommend; just listen to Chico Buarque, he’s so wonderful. João Gilberto was a huge influence; I just love João Gilberto so much, I couldn’t help myself. I felt like I could get away with some of this because I was saying it’s classical music. He’s such a giant of Brazilian music, and so is Chico Buarque. They actually mention a couple of American songs, there’s a really oblique reference to a Sondheim song in there, just because I wanted to show that it’s because of the way that this part of Brazil has become a kind of cultural mecca after a lot of other parts of the Western Hemisphere have been decimated. So a lot of that musical influence ended up coming down there.

You mention that this is, in a way, a post-apocalyptic novel, that there’s been this massive disaster involving nuclear bombs falling and something called the Y Virus, which, for a time, wiped out most men on the planet, which is what precipitated this rearrangement of the social structure. Is that actually possible, a Y Virus? Should I be worried?

I think so. I have to say that this is one of those ones where I was like, “La-la-la, get away from my hands,” because it’s in the background of the story. There are certainly diseases that affect men and don’t affect women because of the XY, XX. But I’m not sure if it’s possible for a communicable virus to only affect men. I figure that anything is possible with enough weird evolution, so . . .

I really like how on the back of this book you have a blurb from Justine Larbalestier, and she says, “This coruscating, molten vision of a futuristic Brazil is storytelling at its most compulsively readable.” Obviously the story is both coruscating and molten, but I was wondering is it more molten that coruscating, or would you say it’s more coruscating than molten?

It’s definitely more molten. I’d say all that hot implied sex there, you know you don’t want that coruscating you.

All right, great! So let’s talk about some of the other stuff you’ve been up to. I was reading your Twitter feed, and I saw an awful lot of mentions of Veronica Mars.

Oh god.

I think you said—did I read this right?—that one of your favorite pieces that you’ve ever written was a piece of Veronica Mars fanfic.

Yes. Yes, you have found me out. I had a job briefly after college, and, probably, like, “Oh, this is for the birds,” and it was very hard for me because I started writing my first novels in high school and college. There was a lot of work to do, but there was also a lot of downtime, and I found that segmenting my day into brief intense chunks and then downtime was much easier to write in than a nine-to-five job, to the point where I really spent two years, and I wrote sort of three-quarters of one book, and that was it. Usually my output is much more than that, and I found that a lot of my creative energies ended up getting diverted into fan fiction for Veronica Mars, which I had discovered right around that time, thanks to a coworker who hooked me on it, and I was so in love with that show. I just thought the writing was amazing, and the characters and the interaction between the characters were just so spot-on. The dialogue made me just, I wanted to write dialogue that good. In fact, half the reason I wrote fanfic was just to figure out how that dialogue got so good. It was really fun. I don’t regret it at all. There was a time I realized that I definitely needed to stop, because otherwise I was not going to write my own fiction.

So do you think that will ever be public, or do you think if there are any Veronica Mars producers who are listening to this maybe they’ll be interested in it?

Yeah, Rob Thomas, hey! Um, no. I, listen, it is technically possible to find it, I never took it down. I am not going to tell you how to find it, but if you try hard enough and you’re good at Google, I promise you, you can find my fanfic in all of its sad glory.

You mentioned Moonshine, right? What are some of your other books that are out, that people should check out?

Yes, so there’s Moonshine, the 1920s urban fantasy vampire novel. They’re not sexy vampires, I always have to tell people. They’re sort of sad; they’re people with a blood problem, is essentially how I would describe them. It’s sort of like social justice in the ’20s, but it’s much more tongue-in-cheek and light-hearted, and it’s adult fiction. And then the other books that I have are The Spirit Binders trilogy, except there’s only two of them—that’s Racing the Dark and The Burning City—and I think they are more thematically close to what I’m doing in The Summer Prince. They’re high fantasy, completely secondary world, in an island culture that’s vaguely Polynesian, with some hints of Japan because I started writing it when I was studying abroad in Japan. They’re playing with ideas that humans can manipulate the environment, except using magic instead of technology to do it, and there are a lot of questions of love and the nature of love. In the second book, there is a love triangle that has some affinities with the love triangle in The Summer Prince. It’s interesting because I started Racing the Dark a decade ago and I don’t know if, a decade from now, I’m going to look at The Summer Prince and go, “Oh, I can’t even read it!” But I do feel like that now. There are people who love those books, and I can see things that I did in them that I think are cool, but hopefully as a writer you’re going to always improve and get better. I do think that, because of that, there is sadly a point at which you just want to rewrite everything that you read or everything that you read that you did before, so that is sadly the point I’m at now with Racing the Dark.

How about short stories? Actually, if people like podcasts, which I assume they do if they’re listening to this one, you had a story come out within the past few years on PodCastle called “Their Changing Bodies.”

Mm-hmm.

And people say that there are no new ideas out there, but I’m pretty sure that this is a vampire story unlike any you’ve ever read.

Oh man, that story! My writer’s group, when I gave this to them, you should have seen their expressions! Oh my gosh. I don’t know, should I give away the twist?

The thing about it was that I wanted to write a funny story, and I wanted to write about vampires. I don’t know what it is about vampires. You’ve heard me talk about them a lot in this podcast, and I don’t know why. Because if you had asked me five years ago, do I even like vampires, I would have told you I don’t. But there’s something about it that keeps pinging interest buttons. I was just thinking about male-female relations, and, again, that cool thing where the vampires almost always tend to be guys. Like, what does that mean? And blood, what does that mean, and all that stuff combined to make—the funny thing was that the first draft did not have that thing with the period blood, and the, and I was—

The ookie cookie, you might say?

The first draft had the ookie cookie, but it didn’t have the period blood.

Yeah, okay.

I was thinking to myself, “There’s something wrong with the story,” and I had just started dating this guy, who I’m dating now, we’re still together. I’d just started dating him, and I was lying around trying to figure out what was wrong with this story, and suddenly I pop up and I go to him and I say, “Listen, I figured it out! It just can’t be the ookie cookie, it also has to be period blood!” And he stared at me—you know that blank expression, the one that presages all my best ideas. So the first person I sent that to sort of backed away very slowly. The second person I sent it to stared at me a lot, but they said, “Okay, I guess I’ll publish it.”

How about other short stories? You had a story in that Zombies vs. Unicorns anthology, right?

Yeah.

Welcome to Bordertown, you had a story in there.

My three YA stories are the Welcome to Bordertown short story, and Zombies Vs. Unicorns, and the ookie—the “Their Changing Bodies”—two of which are really strange.

What’s the other really strange one?

Well, the zombie one is. My friends either call it “The Mac and Cheese Story” or “The Gay Zombie Love Story.” It’s me playing with raunchiness and deliberately gross language in service of what I hope is a higher goal. But it has definitely made a lot of readers go, “Whaa!” It’s also, probably more than anything except maybe The Summer Prince, gotten more emails and more people who are just excited about it. Which is cool for a short story. I never expect to get that kind of reaction from people, but that’s really fun.

What are you working on now? Or what do you have coming up in the future?

Well, I just finished this monstrous novella that who knows what I’m going to do with it, because no one was soliciting this novella. I just decided to drop two months and write it. I have a YA novel that I finished a draft of, and I’m about to dig into the revision, so I’m very excited about it, and it’s actually, again, a totally different thing from The Summer Prince. It’s modern times in Washington, D.C., in the D.C. private school scene, which is more autobiographical than anything I’ve ever done. Which is not to say that this book is, at all, autobiographical, but I did grow up in D.C. and did attend that strange social scene of the D.C. private schools. It’s about class dynamics and the kind of differences between culturally black D.C. and white political D.C. and the ways that those intersect in this hothouse atmosphere of the prep school, except there’s a global flu pandemic happening. It’s sort of Love in the Time of Cholera.

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is hosted by:

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of Lightspeed, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Oz Reimagined, Epic, Other Worlds Than These, Armored, Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, 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. He is a six-time finalist for the Hugo Award and a four-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Forthcoming anthologies include Wastelands 2, Dead Man’s Hand, and Robot Uprisings. He is also the co-host of Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

David Barr Kirtley has published fiction in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, Lightspeed, Intergalactic Medicine Show, On Spec, and Cicada, and in anthologies such as New Voices in Science Fiction, Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and The Dragon Done It. Recently he’s contributed stories to several of John Joseph Adams’s anthologies, including The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, and The Way of the Wizard. He’s attended numerous writing workshops, including Clarion, Odyssey, Viable Paradise, James Gunn’s Center for the Study of Science Fiction, and Orson Scott Card’s Writers Bootcamp, and he holds an MFA in screenwriting and fiction from the University of Southern California. He also teaches regularly at Alpha, a Pittsburgh-area science fiction workshop for young writers. He lives in New York.

Interview: Rick Yancey
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Rick Yancey is the author of popular young adult novels such as the Alfred Kropp series and the Monstrumologist series. His latest book, The 5th Wave, is the story of a teenage girl searching for her brother in the wake of a devastating alien attack. The book’s publisher, Penguin, is betting big that The 5th Wave has what it takes to become the next Hunger Games, and is giving the book a massive $750,000 marketing push. The 5th Wave has also been optioned for film by Sony Pictures with Tobey Maguire reportedly attached to the project.

This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the hosts discuss various geeky topics.

First of all, tell us about your new book The 5th Wave. What’s it about?

The 5th Wave is a story that takes the alien invasion genre and leaps from the premise that Hollywood has gotten it completely wrong. That if they’re out there, we better hope that they never find us. It centers around four survivors of an alien apocalypse that comes about in waves. Instead of one single attack, it’s a coordinated, multiple assault on the planet Earth. The first wave knocks out all electronics, all power, the entire grid goes down. The second wave is designed to take advantage of the fact that the Earth has an unstable surface, and that forty percent of the world’s population lives within sixty miles of a coastline. The third wave is a plague delivered by birds, and the fourth wave is . . . Well, I’ll leave the fourth and fifth waves out there. I don’t want to do any spoilers. It’s a species-threatening event, which is what really sparked my imagination with this book. I had run across an interview with the physicist Stephen Hawking, and in the interview they had brought up what they always love to ask astrophysicists, “Do you think life is out there in the universe?” And he said, “Of course.” And the interviewer asked, “Well, do you think that it could have intelligent life that could somehow bridge the enormous gulf between star systems?” And he said, “Sure. Of course it’s conceivable that they’re out there, and if they’ve advanced to that point then they could.” Of course, the next logical question was, “Well, what do you think would happen if they found us?” He said, “I’m not sure, but I hope they don’t, because if they do it probably won’t work out very well for us. It’ll probably be more like when Christopher Columbus came to the Americas, and we all know how that worked out for the Native Americans.”

Your wife said something that inspired it too, right?

She did. It was one of those three a.m. conversations where your mind starts going, and I asked her, on the spur of the moment, “What is your greatest fear?” She said, without hesitation, “Alien abduction.” Which was the last thing I thought she might say. I thought she was going to say something about the kids, or her own health, and I said “An alien abduction? I think the odds of that are probably pretty slim. Why is that so scary?” She said, “Well, not only would it be horrifying to be abducted by aliens, but no one would believe me afterwards.” That sense of terrible isolation that that would create, that you’d just be considered crazy. The novel kind of takes that feeling. It opens with the lead narrator, Cassie, who’s a 16-year-old girl, utterly alone in the wilderness, after having witnessed this terrible devastation brought about by these beings that no one has even seen, which I think adds to the fear of the book. You don’t even know what these things even look like.

You mentioned that this was a reaction to Hollywood movies.

Well, we’ve all seen it, from War of the Worlds to Independence Day: They come, they wreak some havoc, and we all band together, we take them on. I think, in that sense, that’s how Hollywood has gotten it wrong. It depends on your definition of wrong, obviously—the movies don’t celebrate how tough and bad the aliens are, they’re celebrating how tough and bad humans are. But screenwriters are almost painting themselves into a corner; you want those thrills of us taking on those big, bad aliens, but you’ve got to figure out some way that we somehow defeat them. That’s the challenge, because no movie audience wants to go and watch two hours of the human race being obliterated.

How did you come up with your alien attack plan? How did you decide on those specific waves, and were there any other ones that you considered but didn’t use?

It was basically trying to think like an alien, and considering the fact that if they are out there, they probably wouldn’t attack without getting to know us very, very well. They would learn how we think, they would learn about what do humans do in times of crisis, and they would turn that to their own advantage. So, when I was working through how the attacks might work, I realized first that it couldn’t just be one attack—the world’s too big—you’d have to do it in stages, or waves.

The first wave would be to cut everybody off, to take down the grid, or to take away our technology, which would isolate people and play to our primal fears of the dark and of being isolated and alone and would kind of drive us together.

The second wave takes advantage of the Earth’s actual structure, the fact that the surface of the Earth is made up of tectonic plates that meet each other, and rub against each other and create friction, and that’s where we get earthquakes and tsunamis. It wouldn’t take advanced alien technology to take advantage of this structural flaw in the planet. So, these massive earthquakes, huge tsunamis, and you have forty percent of the world’s population living within sixty miles of a coastline—after an attack like that the survivors would probably flee inland; they would have no choice if they wanted to survive. They’d cluster even tighter, and that’s when it occurred to me that once you have all that human population in basically one spot, you can unleash something biological, which would [kill the indigenous population but] preserve the planet [for the invaders]; you wouldn’t have the ray guns, the land-walkers, and the flying saucers swooping out of the sky—you wouldn’t need to. Just find a way to deliver a virus that has an extremely high kill rate, which you could have plenty of time to genetically engineer in the safety of your mothership.

The fourth and fifth waves play off the idea of what would these beings actually look like? Does it matter what they look like? They’ve had plenty of time to decide how they’re going to take care of any of the remnants that are left after they’ve knocked off ninety-nine-plus-some-change percent of the Earth.

You mentioned that you’re kind of reluctant to talk about what the fourth and fifth waves actually are, and I’ve even seen some synopses that are kind of spoilerish given that the book is so based around mysteries. How do you even go about doing publicity for it?

It’s difficult, you do kind of have to dance around it. There are major spoilers, if you will, that if you go on too long about the basic plot, you’re going to give stuff away that’s going to, I think, take some enjoyment away from the reader.

Let’s talk a bit about the characters. You mentioned that the main protagonist is a teenage girl named Cassie. Why don’t you tell us about her?

Cassie is the first female [protagonist] I’ve ever attempted, and I was a little nervous tackling her character because I’m not a 16-year-old girl, and I never have been. I have three boys, so I didn’t raise a 16-year-old girl. I was a little [apprehensive], but I knew once I was just a few pages in that I had it pretty close, so it was exciting to kind of see the world through the eyes of someone very different than what I was. The heart of the book, really, is not an alien invasion, but its effect upon us. Any sort of species-threatening—or apocalyptic—event, how it affects human beings, and the idea of when everything else has been stripped away, what is it that’s fundamental that remains? To explore that is why I introduced her little brother Sam, who is five years old at the beginning of the story, and who is separated from her, and it becomes Cassie’s sole mission in life to find him and to keep a promise that she made to him that she would come back for him and they would be reunited, and that is the driving force of the story. More than “Are the aliens going to ultimately win?” or “Are we ultimately going to defeat them?” It’s really a very human story about what is left after everything else is gone.

You said in the afterword that your son Jake helped out with writing from a teenage perspective; can you think of any specific pointers that he gave you?

Oh, yes. I tried to be pretty conservative when it comes to slang, particularly teenage slang, because it changes almost on a weekly basis, so you don’t want to pepper your story with a bunch of teenage slang because five years from now teenagers won’t even know what’s going on. I tried to be conservative about it and very choosy about it, but there was one moment when I was writing, and I shouted up the stairs to Jake, my 16-year-old, and I said, “I need some term that means someone is really good at something, that they’re just excellent.” And he said, “Boss, they’re boss!” And I said, “Oh, that’s perfect!” So that made it to the book.

One thing I thought was really interesting is one of the characters in the book proposes knocking out the alien mothership using Fermi’s steam cannon. Where did you come across that?

I don’t remember. I do a lot of research, and I probably saw it some place online. I did a little dipping into Fermi because he’s the father of the Fermi paradox.

Basically, the Fermi paradox is: There are certainly enough stars in the part of the universe that we can see that could sustain planets, and on these planets intelligent life could arise, and the universe is definitely old enough to have a civilization that’s far in advance of ours, and if that is the case, then why haven’t we ever seen any evidence of any kind of that, anywhere? That’s Fermi’s paradox. If they are out there, then why haven’t we seen them? We should be able to see them because there’d be so many, there’d be so much of it out there, but we don’t see anything out there.

Well, maybe they all got killed with Fermi’s steam cannon.

[Laughter] Exactly. So, that whole thing with the steam cannon, I stumbled across while I was looking into Fermi’s paradox.

Do you want to just describe the idea of the steam cannon?

Basically, you dig a big hole, you put a nuclear device in the bottom of it, and then you seal it off with steel, or concrete, or maybe both, and it’s submerged in water. When the device goes off, of course you’re talking about millions of degrees Celsius, which would blow off the lid you’ve constructed of metal and concrete, and it would literally blow it into orbit, it would be that much force.

Another thing I really liked was a reference: “the sole atheist in Camp Ashpit’s foxhole, a college professor named Dawkins.”

[Laughter] You caught that.

Presumably that’s not Richard Dawkins. Could you just talk about why you decided to name the character that?

This is an action-adventure novel that’s set in sort of a sci-fi paradigm, and I was never pretending I was writing some great study of good and evil, and that kind of thing, but I did realize, putting myself in the position of these characters, like in any existential crisis, there is this question that arises, “What about God?” This kind of comes up—it’s not heavy-handed, it doesn’t come up over and over in the novel, but every character wonders about this because I think everyone would wonder about this, “What about God?” I didn’t try to play it up too much, but, obviously, just like people divide into camps over all kinds of things, I think there would be people who are so entrenched in their own beliefs, whether it be atheistic or monotheistic, they would cling even harder, they would dig the trench even deeper. I like it as a reader, especially when you’re reading YA, when you know the author has put things in that probably will go over the young person’s head, but a savvy reader is going to hook on it and get maybe a chuckle. I thought, well, if I want some guy who’s an atheist, why not use a name that might ring a bell.

I understand that this book is the first in a trilogy.

Yes, that’s right. The second book is coming out in May of next year.

You said essentially the premise of the book is that any aliens that could fly here from another star are so advanced that we would have no chance against them.

It would be like using sticks and stones against a tank.

It seems that makes it kind of a challenge to make it a series. Is there anything you can say about your approach to that that’s not giving too much away?

My approach is maybe it’s not so much about watching the mothership crash to Earth, like in Independence Day, maybe it’s more like what Faulkner called “enduring.”That that is the most human, if you will, most inspiring thing about our species, is that somehow we endure. I’m not sure there will be an ultimate triumph—I’m not saying that—but there could be. I don’t want to close every door, but there will be affirmation.

Which previous alien invasion stories do you think have done the best job of presenting a realistic picture of it? I’ll say that the books that this made me think of was the Tripods series by John Christopher.

I’m glad you brought that up. I remember being pretty young [when I read those], and I was blown away by those books. They were so creepy and yet so almost dreamlike. It was so well done. I don’t know how well those books ever did, but I sure remember them.

Did you do any research for any of the military training or weapons?

A lot of research, because I am not in the military, nor do I have a living family member that served in the military. My father served, but he’s passed away, so I couldn’t rely on him as a resource. The best, most fun thing I did, that gave me the most insight, was looking at message boards and forums that are populated by former and current military personnel, and reading their stories, and the jokes they exchange, and how boot camp was because my book does deal with military training. Former grunts were talking about the drill sergeants that they had, exchanging stories, anecdotes, and things that the drill sergeants would scream at them, and how they were treated, that sort of thing. I actually got a lot of information from the official site of the United States Marine Corp. In fact, there was a page on there that talked about the typical day of boot camp. I guess it was to let prospective recruits know what to look forward to when they got to camp. That was very helpful.

The 5th Wave has been optioned for film by Sony Pictures. What’s the current status of that?

I was informed by my agent yesterday that I’m contractually obligated not to talk about the specifics of things. I do know that I can tell you that the last I heard is that they’re lining up a screenwriter for the project.

Wait, your agent only yesterday told you that you’re not supposed to talk about it?

[Laughter] Yeah, not because he knew I was going to talk to you or anything. There was a review that Entertainment Weekly published online that’s going to be in their print edition tomorrow, but the review has a sidebar that talks about it being optioned by Graham King and Tobey Maguire. After he saw that article, my agent contacted me and said, “I don’t know if you told Entertainment Weekly this, but you’re contractually obligated not to talk too much about the details of this deal.” I said, “I didn’t tell anybody. I particularly don’t talk to reviewers. Why would I do that?”

The galley that we got mentions that this book is getting a $750,000 marketing campaign.

Can you believe that? It’s unbelievable.

When they’re spending that kind of money, what does that marketing campaign consist of? What are some of the biggest publicity items that have been going on?

They have done four book trailers, each one dealing with the first four waves of the attacks, and then premiered them on pretty heavily trafficked sites, like MTV, USA Today, io9, and then subsequently put them on YouTube. A lot of extra poster and banner advertising. The trailers themselves are going to be shown in movie theaters. I did see that they will be showing the book trailer for showings of Man of Steel. That’s one of the venues. Of course, money for touring, a lot of advertising in print and other media, and there will be a full-page spread in The New York Times on publication day.

So, there’s not going to be a gold-plated elephant parade or anything?

[Laughter] No, but there should be! I think that’s a great idea.

I’m just saying, if I were spending $750,000, I would want a gold-plated elephant parade.

You know how some propaganda drops out of planes? Just drop leaflets, that sort of thing. I’ve worked with half a dozen publishers, and I have never had this experience with one where everyone from the publisher himself down to the editorial assistant are so excited about a book. It’s very exciting, and it’s also very humbling because as the person who wrote it, I know all its flaws. It’s kind of like being a parent—you know all your kid’s flaws, and you’re very proud of them, but if you’re an honest parent, you don’t look at them with rose-colored glasses. I know all the flaws of the book, and I know that there will be some very conscientious reviewers and critics who are going to see those very flaws and probably won’t be able to resist in pointing them out, but you just have to be prepared for that. It’s just something that happens.

At one point in the book, Cassie ends up on the farm of a teenage boy named Evan Walker, and I read that you actually grew up on a farm yourself, so was it similar to the one in the book?

No, actually, I worked at a cattle ranch, which is different from a farm. My vision of what Evan’s farm is—first of all, it’s in the Ohio Valley, and my ranch that I worked at was in the heart of central Florida in an area called the Green Swamp, so you can take it from there what that was like. Ranch work is a lot different than farm work. I do know what it’s like to put in a day of back-breaking labor and that sort of thing and working with livestock.

But you didn’t grow up on that ranch?

No, my father was a lawyer, but he got to thinking of himself as a gentleman rancher, so as soon as we had a little bit of money, he bought this cattle ranch out in the middle of nowhere in a swamp, cleared the land, and then trucked in some cattle, and then called himself a rancher.

I saw that you wrote your first book at the age of fourteen.

Yes, it was terrible. The experience wasn’t terrible, and that’s probably why I’m still writing, but the actual book, I wouldn’t want it to see the light of day. I was really a geek. I was really into science fiction and fantasy, so it turned out to be an intergalactic story between elves and dwarves, which was a weird mash-up.

Your mom said it was a waste of paper, and your dad wanted you to be a lawyer, right? Your parents were not interested in you becoming an author.

No, my father had that kind of outlook on the arts that, yes, they were necessary, but that would be a horrible way to try to make a living and support a family because until you reach a certain level, it’s not exactly a stable thing to do. He’d been through the Depression, and he was a firm believer in not taking unnecessary risks. I’m not saying that he wasn’t entirely supportive, but I think he would have been perfectly happy with me becoming a lawyer.

You ended up actually going to work for the IRS, right?

Yes, I did, for twelve years, it was one of those things where I picked up the newspaper one day, and I was looking for a job, and I saw this ad, and the paper didn’t even identify that it was for the IRS, it just said federal government work. All you have to have is a college degree and be breathing, and come on in for this open house and find out what it’s all about. I showed up for the open house, and realized at that point I was in the bowels of the IRS. I was writing at the time, and I thought, “Well, I need something to pay the bills, and I’ll just hang on to this until my writing takes off, or I actually get off my butt and get a master’s degree in English and maybe teach somewhere.” Then twelve years later, I was still there.

But you wrote a book about it called Confessions of a Tax Collector, so you must have had some sort of interesting experiences, right?

Oh yes, in fact, I was just talking to my wife about it a couple of days ago. I would not be the person that I am, and I’m not even sure that I would have the willpower, or wherewithal, or whatever you want to call it—this is something that is regardless of talent, by the way—to actually have the discipline to finish a novel, because that’s one of the things the IRS gave me. It awakened my will to succeed, I guess you would say. To finish whatever it is, no matter how unpleasant it might become. There are still moments when I’m writing a book when I just want to take my computer, throw it out the window, and go get a job selling insurance or something, and I tell myself, “It has to be easier than this.” That’s one of the gifts that the IRS gave me, plus the fact that I met my wife there, so it all works out in the end.

Can you think of any specific interesting stories from your time there?

I could, but the IRS would shoot me if I told you. On a daily basis you were exposed to the farcical, the tragic, the hilarious, and the surreal. I specialized in a particular kind of collection with the IRS, and that was for people who had basically decided, for whatever underlying motivation, that they were never going to pay taxes again. Sometimes it was based on a rationalization or a fantasy that they could somehow opt out of the tax system, or it didn’t apply to them for some reason or another, and they were at times sneaky, at times kind of dangerous types, and that was kind of what was addictive about what I was doing because it was like a [game of] cat and mouse, it was like a constant chase. I remember one case, a guy was a pretty hardcore—we called them “tax protestors,” that was the official term for them (we had other terms within the office). [He] would thumb his nose, and was actually dumb enough to park his collectible ’69, cherry red Corvette in a public parking space. I found the car after some work, and called in the tow trucks. He saw me, came barreling out of his office, and he did end up spitting on me, and shoving me, but that always came with the territory. I was very excited about that car—I was going to sell it, that’s what the IRS does with seized assets, and I was very excited about my sale because it was the coolest thing I’d ever seized.

Roger Zelazny is my favorite author. Before he became a full-time writer, he worked for the Social Security Administration. I was just rereading one of his books, and I noticed there’s this line in there where someone seems to have an awful lot of information about the protagonist, and she says that she knows all this stuff about him because she’s been reading government reports on him, and he says, “I’d be really curious to meet the person who’s writing these reports, there may be some great artistic talent going to waste in a government office.” I’ve always thought that was a little in-joke about his time working in the government.

That’s what I tell people. It wasn’t like I was an IRS person that turned to writing. I was always a writer that was working at the IRS trying to figure out a way out.

What was your way out? How did you turn to writing?

I’d published my first novel with Simon & Schuster, and realized very quickly on that first novels, unless you’re incredibly lucky, won’t let you quit your job. I wanted to continue writing—getting that first novel published had kind of swept away my initial reluctance, or whatever you want to call it, about becoming a full-time, professional writer. I had proved to myself that it was something that I was actually capable of doing, completing a manuscript and seeing it through publication with a major publisher. I happened to have read a book not long after that was published called Monster by John Gregory Dunne. He was the spouse of Joan Didion, and he worked in Hollywood, and he had written a book about a movie that he worked on, and the inner workings of how the Hollywood studio system worked at the time. [After reading it,] I thought, “You know what, no one has ever written a book about what it’s like to work within the most hated agency on the planet.” I realized the moment I started thinking about that idea, of actually writing a memoir based on my experiences, that I couldn’t stay at that job. The IRS wouldn’t look kindly upon an employee writing some tell-all book about how things really were behind the frosted glass doors. So, I knew that once I had done the proposal for the book, that what that meant was that it was a career-ending decision, and also a career-beginning decision, but this was ten years ago, after that it was kind of just a leap.

How did you then get into doing YA books?

That was accidental. Totally accidental. I had written a novel starring a 30-something-year-old detective, a private eye, who is kind of a klutz and a ne’er-do-well, and his mom dies and leaves him some money, so he decides to fulfill his lifelong dream of being a detective, without having any clue about how to be one. So he sets up his shingle, and his first client pays him a bunch of money to take something that the client claims was his, that was stolen from him actually, and he just wants this detective to get it back for him. It turns out it’s a very special kind of item, priceless in its way, and it also happens to be magical. It’s King Arthur’s sword Excalibur. The rest of the book is the detective discovering that his client was actually the bad guy, and the bad guy has designs to use the sword Excalibur for his own nefarious purposes, and the last third of the book is getting it back. The CIA gets involved, and there’s a lot of shootouts. Publishers really liked that manuscript. There’s a half a dozen or more that really liked that book. They thought it was so different and out of the box, but that was also its downfall because everything spins off of marketing. They had concerns that they didn’t know what genre it fit in because it literally didn’t fit into a genre. It wasn’t detective because of the magical sword. It wasn’t fantasy because it’s set in the 20th century. The CIA gets involved, but it’s not really a spy thriller because the first part of the book is detective fiction, then it becomes something, then it becomes something else. It’s just a big mash-up. They said our marketing department would kill us because they wouldn’t be able to tell the bookseller where to put it on the shelf. Then my agent, who really believed in the manuscript, and believed in the story, came to me and said, “You know what, there’s one area of fiction that the rules don’t apply. It’s young adult, because kids aren’t so set in their ways yet. They don’t care as long as you give them a good story.” And I said, “Well, beyond the fantasy element, what is there about my story that’s YA? My protagonist is 30-something-years-old.” He said, “Just take your protagonist and halve his age, make him 15, make him a kid because that’s really the hub of what makes young adult young adult, is having a young protagonist.” At first I resisted, but then I decided to give it a try, and that resulted in my first YA novel. I did change it and rewrote the story from a 15-year-old’s point of view, and the book sold right away.

What’s it called?

It’s called The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp.

I actually heard you tell a funny story about coming up with the name Alfred Kropp. Could you talk about that?

[Laughter] Sure. I didn’t have a name for him. I didn’t want to use the same name I used for my detective character because to an author, names are extremely important; it’s almost like naming your kid, and then if you have to change their name when your kid reaches 30 years old, that’d be weird. So, I decided to have a whole new name. I decided on the first name Alfred because it was close to Arthur, and it’s an Arthurian sort of story, but I couldn’t figure out the last name. What had actually happened was, my coffee machine broke, and I went to Wal-Mart, and I was walking down the coffee aisle, and I saw Krups coffee, and I thought, “That sounds so cool,” and it’s almost perfect for my character to describe him because he’s this big, goofy guy. I wanted kind of a goofy name, but I decided to change it because I didn’t want to get sued by Krups, so I made it, long story short, Alfred Kropp.

I’m interested in the long story though because—

[Laughter] Yes, you are! I made his name Alfred Krupp, I just took off the ‘s’ off of Krups, and added a ‘p’ and made it Krupp. We were very close to publication, I forget exactly how the timing was working, but it was extremely close to publication when my editor called me, and she was all in a panic, and she was like, “Don’t you Google names before you write a book?” I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And she said, “It’s his name. It’s Alfred’s name. We’re going to have to change it. We’ve got to change it quickly because we’re right at the wire here, and we’re going to go to press.” And I said, “Well, why?” And she said, “Because Alfred Krupp is a real person.” And I was totally shocked. I said, “Well, I had no idea, who would be named after Krupp?” Actually, there are real Krupps walking around, but that wasn’t the Alfred Krupp she was referring too. She said, “Well, Alfred Krupp was a real person who lived in Germany.” He was the owner of Krupp manufacturing, which was instrumental in producing a lot of Hitler’s war machine. She said, “I don’t want to publish a YA book whose hero is named after a Nazi, so you better come up with something quick.” Which I ended up doing, we just took out the “u” and put in an “o” and Alfred was born.

Names are a big problem for me because often I’ll have a name that I thought I just made up and then later on I realize it’s just something I’d heard somewhere.

From then on, I always check. [Laughter] It’s okay, there are only so many names in the world, and there’s a lot of people, and everybody has a name, and it could happen that you come up with a name for a character that several people have that name. Just make sure they’re not a famous person or something like that.

You have another series called The Monstrumologist. Could you say briefly what the premise of that is?

It springs from a couple things: my love of 19th century literature, and my great fear of things that go bump in the dark that dates back to my childhood. The basic premise is that back in the 19th century, there’s actually an emerging branch of science that studied, and sometimes hunted, creatures that we normally would subscribe to folklore, creatures of myth. Not creatures like vampires or werewolves or something like that, but things that could actually exist in our physical universe. Creatures that were written about quite seriously, and extensively, dating back to the time of the ancient Greeks. The first creature that is wreaking havoc in the first book is called the Anthropophagi, which is actually a creature that has been written about by Herodotus, and Pliny the Elder, and even William Shakespeare makes a mention of them a couple of times. A race of beings with no heads, and eyes and brain and mouth located at different parts of the anatomy. They actually believed in these things. The last book of that series, the fourth book, will be published this fall by Simon & Schuster.

I was reading an interview, and I came across this reference where they said that the series nearly met a premature end back in 2011, but was saved by an extraordinary response from fans. What’s the story behind that?

My contract was done. I had a three-book contract. I had always had it in my mind, though, that the story arc, if you will, could not be told in its entirety in just three books. So, I had my fingers crossed that the series would have gained enough of a following and enough sales that Simon & Schuster would be delighted to extend my contract for one more book. I wrote the third book in the series—the final book, according to the contract—with that hope and thought in mind because the first two books in the series had gotten a lot of critical attention, as well as some pretty big-time awards. The first one received the Michael Printz Honor from The American Library Association, and the second book, The Curse of the Wendigo, was a finalist for the L.A. Times book prize, so I was cautiously optimistic that once I got the third book done that we’d be able to negotiate a contract for a final book. The other reason I was thinking that is because the way the story was structured, the whole setup is, I, the writer, Rick Yancey, discover these thirteen leather-bound, hand-written notebooks, and that’s the form that the books take, the form of a diary of a very old man looking back on his youth and his adventures with this scientist who studies monsters. By the time I reached the end of the third book, I still had three of these hypothetical notebooks left to edit and to publish, and that’s how I presented the third book to my publisher. My publisher said, “Look, Rick, we’re very sorry, we had high hopes for the series, as we’re sure you did, but the sales don’t really justify us moving forward with one last book.” The Monstrumologistis one of those series, like some books, they don’t become hugely popular, but the people who do like it, love it, and it becomes almost cult-like, and that was sort of what was churning underneath the surface by the time I had turned the third book in. There were some very fierce, very loyal readers for these books, who had just fallen in love with the characters, and they would have been perfectly happy with there being 45 books in the series, let alone just one more. Because I constantly got asked questions about a possible fourth book, I just put on my Facebook fan page, “I just heard from the publisher. They are going to stop the series now with the publication of the third book.” That’s all I said, and the blogosphere and the internet exploded. There was a particular blogger who posted a long entry on her site and said, “Oh, and by the way, here’s how you contact Simon & Schuster, and this is the form you use. Here’s the link, please everyone needs to let them know that we are not happy that there will not be a fourth book.” And apparently Simon & Schuster got enough feedback from readers to convince them, you know what, let’s bring this story to a close, and let’s do a fourth book.

Wow, that’s great. The last thing I want to ask you about is that you have a short story called “When First We Were Gods” that will be appearing in an anthology called Rags and Bones, edited by Melissa Marr and Tim Pratt.

That was a great opportunity. Melissa just contacted me out of the blue and she said, “Hey, Tim and I are putting together this anthology. Gaiman’s going to be in it, Carrie Ryan’s going to be in it, Margaret Stohl and Kami Garcia, and this is our idea. Neil had mentioned to us about the things we read as kids, these fairy tales and folklores that our elders pass down to us, how did that affect our writing, and does it consciously affect us?” She was familiar with my Monstrumologist books, and she said, “I know you’re a lover of 19th century literature, and this is the kind of thing we’re thinking of. Would you be interested in taking one of your favorite stories from that era and kind of updating it? Putting a new twist on it? That’s the whole concept behind this book.”

I said, “Yeah, that would be cool. That would be great.” I didn’t want to use something that had been overdone, and I remembered something from Hawthorne that at the time I’d read it when I was pretty young—I think I was a teenager—I thought, “Gosh, this sounds so familiar.” The reason it did was Hawthorne had written it about twenty years after Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, and it’s kind of a Frankenstein-like story called “The Birth-Mark.” The 19th century writers were really unnerved by science—it kind of scared them. [The protagonist] falls in love with this woman who is absolutely beautiful, and she has a birthmark on her cheek, and it just starts to bug the guy—she’s so perfect, except she has this one tiny (in his mind) flaw: She has a birthmark. So, he decides to use all his scientific knowledge and acumen to try to remove this birthmark and make her perfect. I won’t give away the ending, but you probably can figure, being Hawthorne, and being the 19th century, it doesn’t end out very well. It’s over the top in the melodramatics, it’s a little too much on the nose, it hits you over the head with its point, like a lot of writing from that era, but that’s part of its charm to me.

When I decided to do as Melissa suggested and give it that new, fresh twist, I kept stepping back from the story, away from the particulars, like a mad scientist stereotype guy, and his weird, grotesque sort of assistant, and the poor damsel who gets victimized by the guy’s love. I just kept stepping backward until finally I was in the future, and I was taking the themes of the story and placing them in maybe the not-so-distant future where humankind has figured out a way to defeat death, which sprang from an article I read, I think it might have been in The New York Times Magazine, there’s some scientist type, he’s a theoretical guy, but a lot of it’s based on current technology, this idea that we can achieve a virtual immortality by downloading what makes us into a program where consciousness does not have to end when our body ends. You can take the next step and say, well, if you can upload yourself, why couldn’t you download yourself? Why couldn’t you grow bodies, and when your body gets too old and feeble, you can download yourself into a new, fresh body?

In the story, you have the wealthy people who are essentially immortal, and it’s about a marriage between a guy—and this is his 45th marriage or something—and a woman who has put off getting married fourteen times.

He falls in love with a “mortal,” someone who is not in the class that he is, and therefore has a mortal life, like yours and mine. It takes the idea of “The Birth-Mark,” that it’s actually human death that mars the human face, at least from this guy’s perspective, so he’s going to remove that terrible flaw of death from his lover by making her immortal like him, but it has some pretty terrible consequences when he tries. Part of what makes life precious is the fact that time is precious, and that’s pointed out in the story by one of the characters where she says, “We’ve taken time, once the most precious thing on Earth, and we’ve made it the most useless, the most valueless thing. What is time to us anymore? Why do we celebrate birthdays or anniversaries? No wonder we can’t stay married and we can’t stay in love, because we’ve taken away the finiteness of life and filled the infinite with just emptiness.”

How long do you think a life has to be before you get to that point of it all coming to seem pointless? Say you could live to be 200 or 300 years old, would that be too long?

I guess it depends on what you’re up to. I would hope that if you had some kind of gift like that that you would make the most of it and not spend your time watching The Price Is Right. I’m certain that if you ask me this question again when I’m 80 years old, you may get a completely different answer. Sometimes I have a feeling or sensation that I’ve been around forever, and I’m kind of tired, and then I have a sensation that I just got here. My life’s just starting, and how could it be that I’m this age, and that I’m on the back-end of the time I have allotted. How could something like that happen?

I saw that the story was optioned for film by Lionsgate. Is there anything you can say about that?

[It’s with] a writer/director duo that Lionsgate is very [high] on. They like them a lot—one’s a screenwriter and one’s a director who’s gotten some notice; they certainly have placed it with a team that they believe in, and I don’t think it was someone just getting thrown a bone to keep them around, but they do really love this story.

We’ll keep an eye out for news about that. That does it for the questions; is there anything else before we wrap things up? Any other projects you want to mention, or anything else you just wanted to throw out there?

No, you were thorough! That was fun.

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is hosted by:

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of Lightspeed, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Oz Reimagined, Epic, Other Worlds Than These, Armored, Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, 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. He is a six-time finalist for the Hugo Award and a four-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Forthcoming anthologies include Wastelands 2, Dead Man’s Hand, and Robot Uprisings. He is also the co-host of Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

David Barr Kirtley has published fiction in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, Lightspeed, Intergalactic Medicine Show, On Spec, and Cicada, and in anthologies such as New Voices in Science Fiction, Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and The Dragon Done It. Recently he’s contributed stories to several of John Joseph Adams’s anthologies, including The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, and The Way of the Wizard. He’s attended numerous writing workshops, including Clarion, Odyssey, Viable Paradise, James Gunn’s Center for the Study of Science Fiction, and Orson Scott Card’s Writers Bootcamp, and he holds an MFA in screenwriting and fiction from the University of Southern California. He also teaches regularly at Alpha, a Pittsburgh-area science fiction workshop for young writers. He lives in New York.

Artist Gallery: Edvige Faini

Artist Spotlight: Edvige Faini
Galen Dara

Edvige Faini is an Italian concept artist who works internationally for the entertainment industry. Her job is to create concepts, environment, and key frames for films, video games, and commercials. In collaboration with such design studios as New Fuel Studios and The Aaron Sims Company, her work is attached to some of Hollywood’s biggest productions of 2013-14, such as: 300: Rise of an Empire, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Hansel & Gretel, Maleficent, G.I. Joe, and Kull The Conqueror. Edvige Faini is currently employed at Ubisoft Singapore as a Concept Artist for the video game Assassin’s Creed. Her website is www.edvigefaini.com

Your painting Lost World is our cover art this month: two young explorers looking over a surreal alien landscape full of lush flora and fauna, complete with a tentacled airship floating serenely along. What is the story behind this piece? What were the ideas you were working on when you painted this?

Since I was little, painting was always an exigency. I think that choosing drawing as a means to communicate my emotions was an instinctive act and became the vehicle that carried me everywhere I wanted to be, to live, to adventure in, using art to explore worlds in a reality I could never find. (Sometimes, though, it is reality that seems to be unreal.) In other words, every drawing, every concept became for me a chance to escape from reality, from the boredom of life.

To guide me, it is often not ideas but emotions that I would like to feel and that I’d like the observer of my painting to feel. Every painting starts with an emotional thrill that is encoded in the image. In the case of Lost World, it was the sense of wonder and amazement generated by a vast and pristine space clearly situated in a world different from ours, inhabited by organic/robotic creatures.

I love the hard science fiction aspect to your work: an amazing vision of futuristic mechs and structures of enormous scope. Did you ever do any dabbling in engineering or architecture? What inspired your artistic direction? When did your fascination with science fiction and fantasy first start? Is there a movie or game or book from your childhood that first caught your imagination and inspired you?

Architecture and design have always fascinated me a lot. I had the opportunity to study the history of architecture and design and explore these disciplines throughout my school career, but always from a theoretical prospective. Concept art finally gave me the chance to shape all my visions and the knowledge I had absorbed and return it to what I’m painting.

I’m firmly convinced that every single element in my paintings come from the big suitcase of knowledge, notions, memories, and experiences accumulated in a lifetime. Books, travels, people I have known, the music I listened to, movies I saw, all helped in the formation of my imagination. I was so lucky to be raised by a couple of really open-minded parents, and they always encouraged me to be curious about things, to explore interests and passions, and to experience life.

Passion for movies was one of the things they shared with me and my brother since we were really young. My mother especially is a big science fiction lover, so that may explain things. I remember that we were allowed to stay up late at night to watch SF movies or series, while the other children in school could not, but only if was a cult movie or a cult director like Carpenter, Kubrick, Lucas, Spielberg, etc. And if I had to pick one movie that had the biggest impact in my childhood, as most of the children born at the turn of the ’70s/’80s, obviously it is the Star Wars saga, above all.

Quite a few big Hollywood movies owe their look to concept art you’ve created. You’ve worked on such movies as 300: Rise of an Empire, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Hansel & Gretel, Maleficent, G.I. Joe, Kull The Conqueror. And in the gaming industry you are currently doing concept art for Assassin’s Creed. When did you realize you were going to be a creator in the speculative fiction industry? Are there any events or individuals who helped to shape your direction and where you are now?

I still can’t believe I’m creating pieces for the entertainment industry; just two years ago that was just an unlikely dream. I feel like I’m still dreaming and I don’t want to wake up. I was working as an art director in the advertising field when I had the crazy idea to change my career and go study concept art. I remember that, within a few months, I had left my country, my family, and my friends to study at the Gnomon School in Los Angeles. I had barely enough money in my pocket to pay for school, but I had all my passion and all my desire to succeed. I worked so hard and learned so many things from the teachers and all the talented artists I met. It was totally an immersive experience.

At that time I was hungry to know and learn everything possible about concept art. I spent all my time drawing and studying to improve my skills and then, suddenly, a great opportunity presented itself: the chance to join the team of the Aaron Sims Company, one of the greatest production design studios in Hollywood. I can still remember how happy I was!

Learning directly from Aaron Sims and his great team of talented artists was a real honor for me and gave me the chance to become a professional concept designer. Truly one of the great experiences of my professional life. I learned how to be professional, how to deal with the industry pipeline, and I discovered just how much I love this job. If there was one person to thank for what I’ve become, it’s Aaron Sims, who at that time decided to believe in me and in my art.

For education, you graduated from Gnomon School of Visual Effects and received a degree in communication arts and illustration from the European Institute of Design. I noticed you have also studied fine art and photographic techniques; how do those last two fit into your creative arsenal? What other things do you do to further your education and skill set?

I got my degree in visual communication when I was just 21/22 years old, but I was still hungry to keep learning and studying. That hunger didn’t abandon me even after years and years. So I attended courses in fine art, photography, and also philosophy, which is one of my big passions. As I said before, I am convinced that all these ideas and experiences, even if they come from different fields of knowledge, influence my work.

Studying photography, for example, gave me a good understanding of composition and lightning. It taught me how to combine elements in a single frame to narrate a story.

I learned how to use a camera to catch atmospheres, details, and landscape, and all the pictures I take become material I use in my paintings. I’ve created a personal digital image bank that is an important part of my art. Also I believe that curiosity for ﬁne art, literature, philosophy, and architecture are the natural consequence of being born in a place like Italy, a country with a glorious history of art and culture, where art is literally everywhere! It is impossible not to be charmed and attracted by it.

Out of curiosity, is there any difference for you when you are working on a project that is science fiction vs. something more fantasy-based? Any shifts you have to make as an artist when painting scenes/characters from one to the other?

Honestly, there is no difference for me, or any shift I have to make. I mean, for me drawing is an instinctive act, something that happens naturally immediately after an idea or a description I received. The only principle to which I try to keep attached is: No matter if you have to draw a landscape, a character, or a creature, what is important is that it needs to breathe life to be believable. What that means is you need to be able to use your mind and your feelings to be in that place, with that creature, before and during the process of drawing it.

Who are some of your influences and inspirations? If you ever get stuck on a painting, what’s your preferred method for problem solving? What does a typical day look like for you?

Whoo, I have a big list of artists, books, movies, and more that influence me! Most of my influences come (obviously) from the fine art, concept art, and illustration world. Basically, what strikes me is the ability to give perfectly, through mastery of the technique, a perfect vision of something that has never been imagined. It can be an environment, a creature, or a starship. It can be anything. I used to consult lots of portfolios every day, and I did not make a distinction between traditional artists, 3D artists, matte painters, creature designers, environmental designers, or comic book artists, because I think that the more differentiated your sources of inspirations are, the better your imagination becomes. And if I happen to get stuck on a painting I usually take a break from the piece to get relaxed, consulting some art book from my library. Many times inspiration can come from a very small detail noticed in an image or picture.

Concerning a typical day in my life: Currently I’m working full time at Ubisoft Singapore, so most of my time is dedicated to my job, which consists of providing high quality concept pieces. I consider myself a lucky person for the simple fact that my job coincides with my passion, so even if I have to work 8-9 hours every day it doesn’t really feel like “work.” It’s more like a child playing with a favorite toy. And it’s my intent to preserve in my work that same passion and seriousness with which that child plays with their toy.

Galen Dara likes to sit in the dark with her sketchbook, but sometimes she emerges to illustrate for books and magazines, dabble in comics, and hatch wild collaborations with friends and associates. Galen has done art for Edge Publishing, Dagan Books, Apex, Scapezine, Tales to Terrify, Peculiar Pages, Sunstone, and the LovecraftZine. She is on the staff of BookLifeNow, blogs for the Inkpunks, and writes the Art Nerd column at the Functional Nerds. When Galen is not online you can find her on the edge of the Sonoran Desert, climbing mountains or hanging out with a loving assortment of human and animal companions. Follow her on Twitter @galendara.

The Knight of Chains, the Deuce of Stars
Yoon Ha Lee

The tower is a black spire upon a world whose only sun is a million starships wrecked into a mass grave. Light the color of fossils burns from the ships, and at certain hours, the sun casts shadows that mutter the names of vanquished cities and vanished civilizations. It is said that when the tower’s sun finally darkens, the universe’s clocks will stop.

But the sun, however strange, is not why people make the labyrinthine journey to the tower. The tower guards the world’s hollow depths, in which may be found the universe’s games. Every game played among the universe’s peoples was once trapped in the world’s terrible underground passages, and every one was mined and bargained for by some traveler. It is for such a game that the exile Niristez comes here now, in a ship of ice and iron and armageddon engines.

This is the hand Niristez played long ago: The Ten of Theorems; the Knight of Hounds; the Nine of Chains, the bad-luck symbol she uses as a calling card; and she kept two cards hidden, but lost the round anyway.

Niristez carries the last two cards with her. They come from a deck made of coalescent paper, which will reveal the cards drawn when she chooses and not before. Today, the backs show the tower in abbreviated brushstrokes, like a needle of dark iron plunging into an eye. Coalescent cards are not known for their subtlety.

She may have lost that match, but it’s not the only game she’s playing, and this time she means to win.

The tower has a warden, or perhaps the warden has a tower. The warden’s name is Daechong. He is usually polite. It was one of the first lessons he learned.

Most people don’t first notice the warden when they meet him, or the rooms crowded with agate-eyed figurines, flowers of glass, cryptochips sliced into mosaics. They first notice the warden’s gun. It is made of living bone and barbed wire and smoke-silver axioms. It would have a stock of mother-of-pearl, if pearls were born from gangrenous stars. It has a long, lustrous barrel forged in a bomb’s hellheart. And along the barrel is an inscription in whatever language your heart answers to: I never miss.

When he is human-shaped, Daechong is modestly tall, with a narrow face and dark hair cut short. His hands move too quickly to be reassuring, even if he always keeps them in sight. He wears gray, although sometimes his definition of “gray” has more in common with the black static that you find on the other side of your eyelids.

Daechong has been chained to the tower since the tower came into existence. He remembers his first visitors. It took him very little time to understand that he couldn’t leave, and so he murdered them. After that, for a long time, he was alone. When more visitors started to arrive, he was very careful with them, having learned that silence is wearisome company.

Anyone who desires to descend into the world with its unmined games must persuade him to let them pass. Daechong is not recalcitrant, precisely, but he likes to challenge his visitors to games himself. It is possible, although not easy, to defeat him. Sometimes defeat carries a small penalty, sometimes a great one, according to his mood.

It is inadvisable to threaten him, and especially inadvisable to attempt to separate him from his gun. The gun admits no bullets and speaks no words of fire or fission. It gives forth no smoke, no sparks, no suppurating oil.

Yet the gun always hits what Daechong intends to shoot. Killing is one of the few pleasures available to him, and he indulges either as part of a wager or in self-defense. It doesn’t matter whether the target is in front of him, or behind him, or in another galaxy, behind the ash-shroud of stars that failed to be born. Sometimes, when he fires, a quantum sentience shudders apart into spin-states pinned to forever zeros. Sometimes a city inverts itself, plunging its arches and cobweb skyroads into the earth, leaving its citizens to suffocate. The story goes that the sun-of-starships was Daechong’s response to some reckless admiral bent on conquering the tower, although Daechong refuses to say anything definite on the matter.

It has been a long time since Daechong feared anyone. When he learns that Niristez of the Nine of Chains has asked for an audience, fear is not what he feels. But after all this time, he is still capable of curiosity; he will not turn her away.

There is an old story you already know, and a variant on it that you have already guessed.

Take a chessboard, eight squares by eight squares, sixty-four in total. Play begins with the first square being paid for with a single death. On the second day, fill in the next square with two deaths. On the third day, four; on the fourth day, eight. The sequence continues in this manner. The question is when both parties will find the toll of deaths such that they can no longer stomach the price of play.

We use chess—with its pieces intimating knights and kings and castles, sword-crash wars of old—for convenience, although it could be anything else. And we restrict ourselves to powers of two for convenience as well, although the mathematics of escalation knows no such boundary.

Daechong waits for Niristez in one of the highest rooms of the tower. He doesn’t know what she looks like, and he declines to watch her enter by the door that will admit her but which will not allow him to leave. Besides, he can hear her footsteps wherever she is in the tower, or on the world. She has a militant reputation: he can tell that by the percussion of her boots.

This room contains musical instruments. He doesn’t know how to play any of them, but he can tune and maintain them. His current favorite is a flute made of pipe scavenged from some extinguished city’s scrap heap. There’s a great curving harp, a lithophone, two bells. On occasion, one of his visitors breaks an instrument, and then he burns up the fragments; that’s all.

The footsteps slow. She’s reached the room. The lights in the tower will have told her where to go. On occasion, some visitor strays, and then he has to fetch them out of the confusion of hallways and shadows. It is sometimes tempting to let them wander, but by now the habits of courtesy are strong.

Niristez knocks once, twice. Waits.

“The door is unlocked,” Daechong says.

He regards her thoughtfully as she enters the room. She is taller than he is, and her hair is like a banner. In the intolerable aeons of her exile, she has gone by many names, but Niristez is the one she prefers. It means I promise. The name is a lie, although most people know better than to mention it to her face. Once she had a reputation for always keeping her promises. Once she swore to win an unwinnable war. Then she fled her people, and the war has not, to this day, been won.

Her most notable feature, aside from her reputation, is not her height, or the gloves made from skinned fractals, or even the sword-of-treatises knotted at her side. It is her eyes, whose color cannot be discerned in any light but corpselight. In her eyes you can see a map forever drawing and redrawing itself, a map that knows where your flaws may be found, a map that knows how your desires may be drowned. Long ago, she was a strategist for the High Fleet of the Knifebird, and while no one now refers to her by her old rank, people remember what her eyes mean. Daechong isn’t concerned by them, terrible though they are. She will already have charted his greatest weakness, and she doesn’t need her unique form of vision to do so.

Niristez isn’t looking at his gun, which is easily within his reach. That isn’t saying much. No matter where it lies, the gun is always within his reach. But its presence is like a splinter of black dreaming, inescapable.

Niristez is, however, bearing a bottle of amber-green glass, with a cork whose eye stares unblinking at Daechong. “I thought,” she says dryly, “it would be ungracious if I didn’t bring a gift, considering that I am here to bargain for a favor.”

“It’s very considerate of you,” Daechong says. “Shall I open it here?”

Niristez shrugs. “It’s yours now, so you may as well suit yourself.”

He keeps glasses in a red-stained cabinet. She’s not the first person to bring him liquor. He picks out two spiraling flutes, with gold wire patterns reminiscent of inside-out automata and melting gears. It’s tempting to shoot the bottle open, but that would be showing off, so he picks the cork out with his fingers. He’s killed people by digging out their eyes; this isn’t so different.

The liquor effervesces and leaves querulous sparks in the air, spelling out hectic inequalities and the occasional exclamatory couplet. Daechong looks at it longingly. “Would you be offended if I burn it up?” he says. Anything for a taste of the world outside. “I can’t actually drink.”

“I can’t claim to be difficult to offend,” Niristez says, “but as I said, it’s yours now.” She takes a sip herself. The inequalities flare up and die down into first-order contradictions as they pass her lips.

Daechong taps the rim of the glass. For a moment, nothing happens. Then the entire glassful goes up in smoke the color of lamentations, sweet and thick, and he inhales deeply. “You must find my tastes predictable,” he says.

Niristez smiles, and shadows deepen in her eyes. “Let’s say it’s something we have in common.”

“You mentioned that you wished to bargain,” he says. “Might I ask what you’re looking for?” Ordinarily he would not be so direct, but Niristez has a reputation for impatience.

“I want what everyone wants who comes here,” Niristez says. “I want a game. But it’s not just a game.” It never is. “You know my reputation, I trust.”

“It would be hard to escape it, even living where I do,” Daechong says.

“On this world is the stratagem that will enable me to keep my promise.” Niristez’s eyes are very dark now, and her smile darker still. “I wish to buy the game that contains it from you. I’ve spent a great deal of time determining that this game must exist. It will win me the war of wars; it will let me redeem my name.”

Daechong taps the glass again. This time it chimes softly, like a bell of bullets. Some of the musical instruments reverberate in response. “I’m afraid that you are already losing my interest,” he says. “Games that admit an obvious dominant strategy tend not to be very interesting from the players’ point of view.” It’s difficult to be a warden of games and not feel responsible for the quality of the ones that he permits to escape into the outside world. “I could let you root around for it, but I assume you’re after a certain amount of guidance.”

Although he is not infallible, Daechong has an instinct for the passages. He knows where the richest strata are, where the games sought are likeliest to be found. When people bargain with him, it’s not simply access that they seek. Anyone can wander through the twisty passages, growing intoxicated by the combinatoric vapors. It’s another matter to have a decent chance of finding what they want.

“That’s correct,” Niristez says. “I have spent long enough gnawing at the universe’s laws and spitting out dead ends. I don’t intend to waste any more time now that I know what I’m after.” She leans forward. “I am sure that you will hear me out. Because what I offer you is your freedom.”

Daechong tilts his head. “It’s not the first time someone has made that claim, so forgive me for being skeptical.”

He cannot remember ever setting foot outside the tower; it has a number of windows almost beyond reckoning, which open and close at his desire, and which reveal visions terrible and troubling. Poetry-of-malice written into the accretion disks of black holes. Moons covered with sculptures of violet-green fungus grown in the hollowed-out bodies of prisoners of war. Planets with their seas boiled dry and the fossils bleached upon alkaline shores. These and other things he can see just by turning his head and wishing it so.

Yet he thinks, sometimes, of what it would be like to walk up stairs that lead to a plaza ringed by pillars of rough-hewn stone, or perhaps gnarled trees, and not the tower’s highest floor with its indiscriminate collection of paintings, tapestries, and curious statuettes that croak untrue prophecies. (More gifts. He wouldn’t dream of getting rid of them.) What it would be like to travel to a gas giant with its dustweave rings, or to a fortress of neutronium whispers, or to a spot far between stars that is empty except for the froth of quantum bubbling and the microwave hiss. What it would be like to walk outside and look up at the sky, any sky. There isn’t a sky in the universe whose winds would scour him, whose rains would poison him, whose stars would pierce his eyes. But his immunity does him no good here.

“Call my bluff, then,” she says, her smile growing knife-sweet. “You like a challenge, don’t you? You won’t see me here again if you turn me down. If nothing else, it’s a moment’s diversion. Let’s play a game, you and I. If I win, you will tell me where to find my stratagem. If I lose, I will tell you how you can unshackle yourself from this tower—and you can set me whatever penalty you see fit.”

“I don’t remember the very beginning of my existence,” Daechong says softly. “But I was made of pittances of mercy and atrocities sweeter than honey. I was made of carrion calculations and unpolished negations. They say your shadow is shaped like massacres, Niristez. You haven’t killed a fraction of the people that I have. Are you sure you want to offer this? I am not accustomed to losing, especially when the stakes matter to me.”

He doesn’t speak of the penalties he extracts when people lie to him. For all the dreadful things he’s done, he has always respected honesty.

“I am sure,” she says.

“The High Fleet of the Knifebird is still fighting the war you promised to win. It would not be difficult for me to shoot the key players into cinders.”

The lines of her face become sharper, keener. “I know,” she says. “But I made my promise. This is the only way to keep it. I will attempt the gamble. I always keep my promises.”

Niristez has been saying this for a long time, and people have been tactful when she does so for a long time. Daechong, too, is tactful. It does him no harm. “If you are certain,” he says, “then let us play.”

At this point, it is worth describing the war that the High Fleet of the Knifebird has been fighting for so long, against an opponent that is everywhere distributed and which has no name but the name that particles mutter as they decay. The High Fleet has not yet raised the redshift banner that indicates defeat, but the fact that they have been fighting all this time without much in the way of lasting gains is hardly a point of pride.

High Fleet doctrine says that they are finite warriors fighting an infinite war, and the stakes are nothing less than control of the universe’s laws. Each small war in the continuum is itself a gamepiece in the war of wars, placed or extinguished according to local conditions. The value of each piece is contextual both in time and in space. A duel between two spindleships at the edge of an obscure asteroid belt may, at times, weigh more heavily than a genocidal war between a dozen star empires.

In the game of Go, it is possible for players to play such that alternating captures of single stones would cause repeating positions. In principle, these moves could be played forever, and the game would never end. However, the rule called ko prevents such repetition from happening immediately.

There exists a type of ko situation, the ten thousand year ko, which is often left unresolved—sometimes until the game’s conclusion—because the player who enters the battle first does so at a disadvantage. The war of wars is widely held to have run afoul of something similar.

You may speculate as to the application to the ex-strategist Niristez’s situation, although most people believe that she is not capable of such subtlety. Indeed, it’s not clear why she would be interested in prolonging the war of wars, unless she intended it as revenge for her loss of status. Even if she meant only to force the universe into an asymptotic cooldown rather than a condensed annihilation, this would hardly be an unambiguous victory for her or her former allies. But then, if she were skilled enough to carry out this gambit anyway, surely she wouldn’t have fallen in the first place.

Daechong allows Niristez the choice of game, since she is the petitioner. The choice itself might tell him something about her, although he doubts it will be anything he couldn’t already have figured out. He is surprised, then thoughtful, when she requests a linguistic game played upon competing lattices. Its name means something like “the calculus of verses.” He would not have suspected her of a fondness for poetry, even the poetry of eradication. It is likely that the game has real-world manifestations, not that he has any way of checking.

The game has a deployment phase, in which they breed pensive sememes and seed rival phonologies, braid the syntactical structures that they will be pitting against each other. “Do you have the opportunity to read much?” Niristez asks him, no doubt thinking of varieties of literature to wield against him.

“On occasion people bring me books,” he says. Sometimes they are tattooed on wafers of silicon. Sometimes they come bound in metal beaten thin from the corpses of deprecated clocks. Occasionally they have pages of irradiated paper. He is especially fond of the neutron variety. “I don’t often read them, however.” He reads fastest by—surprise—burning up the books, and while he did that a few times by accident in the early days, he saves that now for special occasions.

“Well,” Niristez says, “the universe is infested with words of all kinds. I can’t blame you for being choosy.” She does something exceedingly clever with the placement of a cultural singularity to urge her budding language to better readiness for the engagement.

Daechong’s deployments are conservative. In his experience, people who focus too much on the setup phase of the game tangle themselves up during the match proper. “I am fluent in very many languages,” he says, which is an understatement. He has always assumed that the knack is a requirement, or perhaps a gift, of his position. “But I enjoy talking to people more.”

“Yes,” she says, “I imagine you would.”

They are quiet through the rest of the deployment phase, although Daechong pours Niristez another glass of the wine she brought him, since she appears to be thirsty. She sips at it little by little, without any sign of enjoyment. He considers having another glass himself, but the smoke is still pleasantly strong in the air; no need yet.

When the game begins in earnest, the lattices light up in the colors of drifting constellations and burning sodium and firefly sonatas. Niristez’s first move gives her entire language an imperialistic focus. His response is to nurture a slang of resistance.

“I am not familiar with the High Fleet’s customs,” Daechong says while she considers a typological imperative. “Will it be difficult to secure your reinstatement?”

This is not, strictly speaking, a courteous thing to bring up; but they are playing now. She will expect him to try to unsettle her.

Her laugh is so brief he wonders if he imagined it. “That’s an open question. Tell me, Warden, if you get free of this place, where will you go?”

A predictable riposte. “I don’t know,” he says, although people have asked him before. His answer always changes. “The universe is a very large place. I expect that wherever I start, I can find something new to see. At the moment, I wouldn’t mind visiting a binary star system. Something simple and ordinary.”

That’s not it at all. He likes the thought of stars that have companions, even though he knows better than to think that such things matter to stars.

Niristez seeds the plebeian chants with prestige terms from her own language, denaturing his slang. “What if you find that you were happier here?”

“There’s always that risk, yes.”

“The possibility doesn’t bother you?”

She’s asking questions she knows the answers to, which is also part of the game. “Of course it bothers me,” Daechong says, “but if I never leave, I will never find out.” He initiates a memetic protest. Unstable, although it has the advantage of propagating swiftly.

“I have seen a great deal of the world outside,” Niristez remarks. For a moment, he can almost see what color her eyes are. “There are people who wall themselves away deliberately, you know. Ascetics and philosophers and solitude artists. Some of them would give a great deal to take your place.”

“As far as anyone knows,” Daechong says, “I have been here since the first stars winked open. My time here has hardly been infinite, but it’s still a long time, as finite numbers go. I have no reason to believe any successor of mine would spend less time here.”

She studies his move’s ramifications with a slight frown, then glances around as though seeing the instruments for the first time. Nevertheless, it doesn’t escape his attention that she singles out the flute for scrutiny. “Your imprisonment has given you unprecedented access to the games of the universe,” she says. “Or do you take no pleasure in the things you guard?”

He considers his answer while she puts together a propaganda campaign. Blunt, but perhaps that’s to be expected of someone with a military background. Still, he can’t let down his guard. She may be covering for a more devious ploy. “I can’t claim that the position hasn’t been without its privileges,” he says mildly.

Daechong has played games on involute boards, games of sacrifice and skullduggery and smiling assurances, games where you keep score with burning worlds. He has played games with rules that mutate turn by turn, and games where you bet with the currency of senescent ambition, and games that handicap the stronger player with cognitive manacles. Most of the time, he wins, and he never throws a match, even when he’s tempted to just to see what would happen.

After a few moments, he counters the propaganda campaign with a furtive renaissance of the musical forms that he put in place during deployment. It’s early to do this, but he’d rather respond now than give Niristez’s tactic a chance to play out fully. People are sometimes startled by his comfort with music, for all that he plays no instrument. Music has its own associations with games and sports: battle hymns, marches, aggressive rhythms beaten upon the space-time membrane.

They test each other with more such exchanges. Niristez’s fingers tap the side of the table before she manages to still them. Daechong doesn’t take that lapse at face value, either. “In the old days, it was held that my vision meant I could not be defeated,” she says abruptly, “although that has never been the case. Seeing a no-win situation opening its jaws in your direction isn’t necessarily helpful.”

“Have there been many of those in your career?”

“You only need one,” she says, not without humor. “And even then, I’ve orchestrated my share of dreadful battles. Gravitational tides and neutron cannons and the slaughters you get when you use a thermodynamic vise on someone’s sputtering sun. Doomships that intone stagnancy-curses into the ecosystems of entire planets. Civilizations’ worth of skeletons knit together with ligatures-of-damnation and made to fight unsheathed in the crackling cold void. Dead people everywhere, no matter how you count the cost.”

She’s either trying to warn him or distract him. They might be the same thing. “You wouldn’t have been at personal risk?” he asks. Although he’s spoken with soldiers of all sorts, the staggering variety of military conventions means that he is cautious about making assumptions. In any case, he’s met very few Knifebird officers.

“Not as such,” she says, “although there’s always the risk of an assassination attempt. A few have tried.” She doesn’t bother telling him what happened to them. In this matter, anyway, they are similar.

Niristez’s attacks are starting to give way before Daechong’s tradition of stories handed down mouth to mouth, myths to succor insurrection. A myth doesn’t have to roar like dragons or fight like tigers. A myth can murmur possibilities with fox words. A myth can be subtle.

He doesn’t point this out, but he doesn’t have to. The rueful cast of her mouth tells him she is thinking it.

Niristez redoubles her efforts, but her early-game deployment has locked her into rigid, not to say tyrannical, stratagems. Unless she comes up with something extraordinary, they are nearing the point where the game is effectively over, even if a few of the lattices’ regions can still be contested.

At last Niristez picks up a hollowed-out demagogue node and tips it over: surrender. “There’s no sense in dragging this out any further,” she says.

Daechong is starting to become alarmed: Niristez should be afraid, or resigned, or angry; anything but this calculating alertness. It does occur to him that, by choosing her strategy so early, she dictated his. But that was only part of the game, and in the meantime, they have their agreement.

He doesn’t reach for the gun—not yet.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Niristez says. The side of her mouth tips up, and there are fissures like needles in her irises. “We both win.”

He doesn’t understand.

“I never needed to go into the passages,” she says, and her voice is very steady. “I’m looking at what I seek already. Because the game the tower plays is you, Warden.”

A myth can be subtle, and some regard Daechong as one himself; but he isn’t the only myth in the room.

“Explain yourself,” Daechong says, quiet and cutting.

“Everyone has been mining the planet for its games,” Niristez says, “but no one has been looking at what’s been right in front of them all this time. In a way, you are a game, are you not? You are a challenge to be met. You have rules, give rewards, incur penalties.

“I don’t know who mined you out of the dark depths. It was probably long ago. You must have been one of the first games after the universe’s very machinery of equations. And when they realized just what they had let loose into the world, when they realized your name, they locked you up in the tower. Of course, it was too late.”

Niristez doesn’t tell him what his name has to be. He is figuring that out for himself. The gun’s presence presses against his awareness like an attar of carnage.

“You promised me my freedom,” Daechong says after a long, brittle silence. “Or is that a trick, too?”

“Only if you think of it as one,” she says. “You could have left at any time if you’d only known, Warden. You’re only trapped here so long as you are a prisoner of your own nature. As the warden, you alone can determine this. If you choose to be a game no longer, you can walk out at any time.”

Now she looks at the gun. At the dull bone, at the spiky wires, at the inscription: I never miss. “Destroy the gun,” she says, “and walk free. It’s up to you.”

“If you had won,” Daechong says, “you would have demanded that I come with you.”

He rises. She tilts her head back to meet his gaze, unflinching. Of all things, her eyes are—not kind, precisely, but sympathetic. “Yes,” she said. “But this way you have a choice.”

“You’re implying that, when I leave, all the wars end. That the game of war ceases to exist.”

“Yes,” she says.

All wars over. Everywhere. All at once.

“I can only assume that at this point in time, such a suspension of hostilities would leave the High Fleet of the Knifebird in a winning position,” Daechong says.

Her eyes darken in color. “Warden,” she says, “if I have learned one thing in my years of exile, it is that there are victors in war, but no one wins.”

“I could wait for a position unfavorable to your cause,” he says. “Thwart you.” They’re playing for higher stakes now.

“You could try,” she says, “but I know what passes outside this tower, and you don’t.” The map in her eyes is fractal-deep, and encompasses the universe’s many conflagrations.

“You played well,” Daechong says. He isn’t merely being polite, and he doesn’t say this to many people. “I should have been better prepared.”

“The difference between us is this,” she says. “You are a tactician, and you fought the battle; but I am a strategist, and I fought the war. I keep my promises.”

“I don’t concern myself with ethics,” Daechong says, “but I am surprised that you would think of something as far-reaching and devastating as war to be nothing more than a game.”

“It’s all in how you define the set,” she murmurs.

The gun is in his hand. He points it at the wall, not at Niristez, and not at himself. (This is habit. In reality, this doesn’t make Niristez any safer.) It is beautiful in the way of annihilated stars, beautiful in the way of violated postulates. And she is telling him that he would have to extinguish it forever.

“It comes down to this,” Niristez says. The smile is gone from her mouth, but it kindles in her eyes. “Is thwarting my promise in the war of wars more important to you than the freedom you have desired for so long?”

In the game of Go, groups of stones are said to be alive or dead depending on whether or not the opponent can kill them. But sometimes the opponents have two groups that live together: Neither can attack the other without killing itself. This situation is called seki, or mutual life.

The tower is a black spire upon a world whose only sun is a million starships wrecked into a mass grave. There is no light in the starships, and as time goes by, fewer and fewer people remember when the sun-of-starships gave forth any radiance at all. The shadows still mutter the names of vanquished cities and vanished civilizations, but of course the world is nothing but shadow now, and the few inhabitants remaining find it impossible to hear anything else.

Now and again people make the labyrinthine journey to the tower, which plunges into the world’s hollow depths. But the tower no longer has any doors or any windows, or a warden to greet visitors, and the games that might have been dug out of the dark passages are trapped there.

Two cards of coalescent paper can, however, be found before the tower. Even the wind dares not move them from where they rest. One of them displays the Knight of Chains reversed: shattered fetters, unsmiling eyes, an ornate border that speaks to a preference for courtesy. The other card is the Deuce of Stars. It is the only source of light on the planet.

Even with the two cards revealed, Niristez would have lost the round; but that wasn’t the game she was playing anyway. In the meantime, she likes to think of the former warden looking up at a chilly sky filled with enough stars to sate the longest nights alone, his hands forever empty.

© 2013 by Yoon Ha Lee.

Yoon Ha Lee’s work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, Ideomancer, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Farrago’s Wainscot, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Electric Velocipede, and Sybil’s Garage. She’s also appeared in the anthologies Twenty Epics, Japanese Dreams, In Lands That Never Were, The Way of the Wizard, Year’s Best Fantasy #6, and Science Fiction: The Best of 2002. Her poetry has appeared in such venues as Jabberwocky, Strange Horizons, Star*Line, Mythic Delirium, and Goblin Fruit. Learn more at pegasus.cityofveils.com.

At Budokan
Alastair Reynolds

I’m somewhere over the Sea of Okhotsk when the nightmare hits again. It’s five years ago, and I’m on the run after the machines went berserk. Only this time they’re not just enacting wanton, random mayhem, following the scrambled choreography of a corrupted performance program. This time they’re coming after me, all four of them, stomping their way down an ever-narrowing back alley as I try to get away, the machines too big to fit in that alley, but in the malleable logic of dreams somehow not too big, swinging axes and sticks rather than demolition balls, massive, indestructible guitars and drumsticks. I reach the end of the alley and start climbing up a metal ladder, a ladder that morphs into a steep metal staircase, but my limbs feel like they’re moving through sludge. Then one of them has me, plucking me off the staircase with steel fingers big enough to bend girders, and I’m lifted through the air and turned around, crushed but somehow not crushed, until I’m face to face with James Hetfield out of Metallica.

“You let us down, Fox,” James says, his voice a vast seismic rumble, animatronic face wide enough to headbutt a skyscraper into rubble. “You let us down, you let the fans down, and most of all you let yourself down. Hope you feel ashamed of yourself, buddy.”

“I didn’t mean . . . ” I plead, pityingly, because I don’t want to be crushed to death by a massive robot version of James Hetfield.

“Buddy.” He starts shaking me, holding me in his metal fist like a limp rag doll.

“I’m sorry, man. This wasn’t how it was meant . . . ”

“Buddy.”

But it’s not James Hetfield shaking me to death. It’s Jake, my partner in Morbid Management. He’s standing over my seat, JD bottle in one hand, shaking me awake with the other. Looking down at the pathetic, whimpering spectacle before him.

“Having it again, right?”

“You figured.”

“Buddy, it’s time to let go. You fucked up big time. But no one died and no one wants to kill you about it now. Here.” And he passes me the bottle, letting me take a swig of JD to settle my nerves. Doesn’t help that I don’t like flying much. The flashbacks usually happen in the Antonov, when there’s nowhere else to run.

“Where are we?” I ask groggily.

“About three hours out.”

I perk up. “From landing?”

“From departure. Got another eight, nine in the air, depending on head-winds.”

I hand him back the bottle. “And you woke me up for that?”

“Couldn’t stand to see you suffering like that. Who was it this time? Lars?”

“James.”

Jake gives this a moment’s consideration. “Figures. James is probably not the one you want to piss off. Even now.”

“Thanks.”

“You need to chill. I was talking to them last week.” Jake gave me a friendly punch on the shoulder. “They’re cool with you, buddy. Bygones be bygones. They were even talking about getting some comp seats for the next stateside show, provided we can arrange wheelchair access. Guys are keen to meet Derek. But then who isn’t?”

I think back to the previous evening’s show. The last night of a month-long residency at Tokyo’s Budokan. Rock history. And we pulled it off. Derek and the band packed every seat in the venue, for four straight weeks. We could have stayed on another month if we didn’t have bookings lined up in Europe and America.

“I guess it’s working out after all,” I say.

“You sound surprised.”

“I had my doubts. From a musical standpoint? You had me convinced from the moment I met Derek. But turning this into a show? The logistics, the sponsorship, the legal angles? Keeping the rights activists off our back? Actually making this thing turn a profit? That I wasn’t so certain about.”

“Reason I had to have you on board again, buddy. You’re the numbers man, the guy with the eye for detail. And you came through.”

“I guess.” I stir in my seat, feeling the need to stretch my legs. “You—um—checked on Derek since the show?”

Jake shoots me a too-quick nod. “Derek’s fine. Hit all his marks tonight.”

Something’s off, and I’m not sure what. It’s been like this since we boarded the Antonov. As if something’s bugging Jake and he won’t come out with whatever it was.

“Killer show, by all accounts,” I say.

“Best of all the whole residency. Everything went like clockwork. The lights, the back projection . . . ”

“Not just the technical side. One of the roadies reckoned ‘Extinction Event’ was amazing.”

Jake nods enthusiastically. “As amazing as it ever is.”

“No, he meant exceptionally amazing. As in, above and beyond the performance at any previous show.”

Jake’s face tightens at the corners. “I heard it too, buddy. It was fine. On the nail. The way we like it.”

“I got the impression it was something more than . . . ” But I trail off, and I’m not sure why. “You sure there’s nothing we need to talk about?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Fine.” I give an easy smile, but there’s still something unresolved, something in the air between us. “Then I guess I’ll go see how the big guy’s doing.”

“You do that, buddy.”

I unbuckle from the seat and walk along the drumming, droning length of the Antonov’s fuselage. It’s an AN-225, the largest plane ever made, built fifty years ago for the Soviet space program. There are only two of them in the world, and Morbid Management and Gladius Biomech have joint ownership of both. Putting Derek’s show together is so logistically complex that we need to be assembling one stage set when the other’s still in use. The Antonovs leapfrog the globe, crammed to the gills with scaffolding, lighting rigs, speaker stacks, instruments, screens, the whole five hundred tonne spectacle of a modern rock show. Even Derek’s cage is only a tiny part of the whole cargo.

I make my way past two guitar techs and a roadie deep into a card game, negotiate a long passage between two shipping containers, and pass the fold-down desk where Jake has his laptop set up, reviewing the concert footage, and just beyond the desk lies the cage. It’s lashed down against turbulence, scuffed and scratched from where it was loaded aboard. We touch up the yellow paint before each show so it all looks gleaming and new. I brush a hand against the tubular steel framing.

Strange to think how alarmed and impressed I was the first time, when Jake threw the switch. It’s not the same now. I know Derek a lot better than I did then, and I realise that a lot of his act is, well, just that. Act. He’s a pussycat, really. A born showman. He knows more about image and timing than almost any rock star I’ve ever worked with.

Derek’s finishing off his dinner. Always has a good appetite after a show, and at least it’s not lines of coke and underage hookers he has a taste for.

He registers my presence and fixes me with those vicious yellow eyes.

Rumbles a query, as if to say, Can I help you?

“Just stopping by, friend. I heard you went down a storm tonight. Melted some faces with ‘Extinction Event.’ Bitching ‘Rise of the Mammals,’ too. We’ll be shifting so many downloads we may even have to start charging to cover our overheads.”

Derek offers a ruminative gurgle, as if this is an angle he’s never considered before.

“Just felt I ought to,” and I rap a knuckle against the cage. “You know, give credit. Where it’s due.”

Derek looks at me for a few more seconds, then goes back to his dinner.

You can’t say I don’t try.

I’d been flying when Jake got back in touch. It was five years ago, just after the real-life events of my dream. I was grogged out from departure lounge vodka slammers, hoping to stay unconscious until the scramjet was wheels down, and I was at least one continent away from the chaos in LA. Wasn’t to be, though. The in-flight attendant insisted on waking me up and forcing me to make a choice between two meal serving options: chicken that tasted like mammoth, or mammoth that tasted like chicken.

What was it going to be?

“Give me the furry elephant,” I told him. “And another vodka.”

“Ice and water with that, sir?”

“Just the vodka.”

The mammoth really wasn’t that bad—certainly no worse than the chicken would have been—and I was doing my best to enjoy it when the incoming call icon popped into my upper right visual field. For a moment I considered ignoring it completely. What could it be about, other than the mess I’d left behind after the robots went berserk? But I guess it was my fatal weakness that I’d never been able to not take a call. I put down the cutlery and pressed a finger against the hinge of my jaw. I kept my voice low, subvocalising. Had to be my lawyer. Assuming I still had a lawyer.

“Okay, lay it on me. Who’s trying to sue me, how much are we looking at, and what am I going to have to do to get them off my case?”

“Fox?”

“Who else. You found me on this flight, didn’t you?”

“It’s Jake, man. I learned about your recent difficulties.”

For a moment the vodka took the edge off my surprise. “You and the rest of the world.”

Jake sounded pained. “At least make an effort to sound like you’re glad to hear from me, buddy. It’s been a while.”

“Sorry, Jake. It’s just not been the best few days of my life, you understand?”

“Rock and roll, my friend. Gotta roll with it, take the rough with the smooth. Isn’t that what we always said?”

“I don’t know. Did we?” Irritation boiled up inside me. “I mean, from where I’m sitting, it’s not like we ever had much in common.”

“Cutting, buddy. Cutting. And here I am calling you out of the blue with a business proposition. A proposition that might just dig you out of the hole you now find yourself in.”

“What kind of proposition?”

“It’s time to reactivate Morbid Management.”

I let that sink in before responding, my mind scouting ahead through the possibilities. Morbid Management was defunct, and for good reason. We’d exhausted the possibilities of working together. Worse than that, our parting had left me with a very sour opinion of Jake Addison. Jake had always been the tail wagging that particular dog, and I’d always been prepared to go along with his notions. But he hadn’t been prepared to put his faith in me when I had the one brilliant idea of my career.

We’d started off signing conventional rock acts. Mostly they were manufactured, put together with an eye on image and merchandising. But the problem with conventional rock acts is that they start having ideas of their own. Thinking they know best. Get ideas in their head about creative independence, artistic credibility, solo careers. One by one we’d watched our money-spinners fly apart in a whirlwind of ego and ambition. We figured there had to be something better.

So we’d created it. Ghoul Group was the world’s first all-dead rock act. Of course you’ve heard of them: Who hasn’t? You’ve probably even heard that we dug up the bodies at night, that we sucked the brains out of a failing mid-level pop act, or that they were zombies controlled by Haitian voodoo. Completely untrue, needless to say. It was all legal, all signed off and boilerplated. We kept the bodies alive using simple brain-stem implants, and we used the same technology to operate Ghoul Group on stage. Admittedly there was something Frankensteinesque about the boys and girls on stage—the dead look in their eyes, the scars and surgical stitches added for effect, the lifeless, parodic shuffle that passed for walking—but that was sort of the point.

Kids couldn’t get enough of them. Merchandising went through the roof, and turned Morbid Management into a billion dollar enterprise.

Only trouble was it couldn’t last. Rock promotion sucked money away as fast as it brought it in, and the only way to stay ahead of the curve was to keep manufacturing new acts. The fatal weakness of Ghoul Group was that the concept was easily imitated: Anyone with access to a morgue and a good lawyer could get in on the act. We realised we had to move on.

That was when we got into robotics.

Jake and I had both been in metal acts before turning to management, and we were friendly with Metallica. The band was still successful, still touring, but they weren’t getting any younger. Meanwhile a whole raft of tribute acts fed off the desire for the fans to see younger versions of the band, the way they’d been twenty or thirty years before. Yet no matter how good they were, the tribute acts were never quite realistic enough to be completely convincing. What was needed—what might fill a niche that no one yet perceived—were tribute acts that were completely indistinguishable from their models, and which could replicate them at any point in their careers. And—most importantly—never get tired doing it, or start demanding a raise.

So we made them. Got in hock with the best Japanese robotics specialists and tooled up a slew of different incarnations of Metallica. Each robot was a life-size, hyper-realistic replica of a given member of the band at a specific point in their career. After processing thousands of hours of concert footage, motion capture software enabled these robots to behave with staggering realism. They moved like people. They sounded like people. They sweated and exhaled. Unless you got close enough to look right into their eyes, there was no way at all to tell that you were not looking at the real thing.

We commissioned enough robots to cover every market on the planet, and sent them out on tour. They were insanely successful. The real Metallica did well out of it and within months we were licensing the concept to other touring acts. The money was pumping in faster than we could account it. But at the same time, mindful of what had happened with Ghoul Group, we were thinking ahead. To the next big thing.

That was when I’d had my one original idea.

I’d been on another flight, bored out of my mind, watching some news item about robots being used to dismantle some Russian nuclear plant that had gone meltdown last century. These robots were Godzilla-sized machines, but the thing that struck me was that they were more or less humanoid in shape. They were being worked by specialist engineers from half way round the world, engineers who would zip into telepresence rigs and actually feel like they were wearing the robots; actually feel as if the reactor they were taking apart was the size of a doll’s house.

It wasn’t the reactor I cared about, of course. It was the robots. I’d had a flash, a mental image. We were already doing Robot Metallica. What was to stop us doing Giant Robot Metallica?

By the time I’d landed, I’d tracked down the company that made the demolition machines. By the time I’d checked in to my hotel and ordered room service, I’d established that they could, in principle, build them to order and incorporate the kind of animatronic realism we were already using with the life-size robots. There was, essentially, no engineering barrier to us creating a twenty metre or thirty metre high James Hetfield or Lars Ulrich. We had the technology.

Next morning, shivering with excitement, I put the idea to Jake. I figured it for an easy sell. He’d see the essential genius in it. He’d recognise the need to move beyond our existing business model.

But Jake wasn’t buying.

I’ve often wondered why he didn’t go for it. Was it not enough of a swerve for him, too much a case of simply scaling up what we were already doing? Was he shrewd enough to see the potential for disaster, should our robots malfunction and go berserk? Was it simply that it was my idea, not his?

I don’t know. Even now, after everything else that’s happened—Derek and all the rest—I can’t figure it out. All I can be sure of is that I knew then that it was curtains for Morbid Management. If Jake wasn’t going to back me the one time I’d had an idea of my own, I couldn’t keep on working with him.

So I’d split. Set up my own company. Continued negotiations with the giant demolition robot manufacturers and—somewhat sneakily, I admit—secured the rights from Metallica to all larger-than-life robotic reenactment activities.

Okay, so it hadn’t ended well. But the idea’d been sound. And stadiums can always be rebuilt.

“You still there, buddy?”

“Yeah, I’m still here.” I’d given Jake enough time to think I’d hung up on him. Let the bastard sweat a little, why not. Over the roar of the scramjet’s ballistic re-entry profile I said: “We’re gonna lose comms in a few moments. Why don’t you tell me what this is all about.”

“Not over the phone. But here’s the deal.” And he gave me an address, an industrial unit on the edge of Helsinki. “You’re flying into Copenhagen, buddy. Take the ’lev, you can be in Helsinki by evening.”

“You have to give me more than that.”

“Like you to meet the future of rock and roll, Fox. Little friend of mine by the name of Derek. You’re going to like each other.”

The bastard had me, of course.

It was winter in Helsinki, so evening came down cold and early. From the maglev I took a car straight out into the industrial sticks, a dismal warren of slab-sided warehouses and low-rise office units. Security lights blazed over fenced-off loading areas and nearly empty car parks, the asphalt still slick and reflective from afternoon rain. Beyond the immediate line of warehouses, walking cranes stomped around the docks, picking up and discarding shipping containers like they were coloured building blocks. Giant robots. I didn’t need to be reminded about giant fucking robots, not when I was expecting an Interpol arrest warrant to be declared in my name at any moment. But at least they wouldn’t come looking here too quickly, I thought. On the edge of Helsinki, with even the car now departed on some other errand, I felt like the last man alive, wandering the airless boulevards of some huge abandoned moonbase.

The unit Jake had told me to go to was locked from the road, with a heavy-duty barrier slid across the entrance. Through the fence, it looked semi-abandoned: weeds licking at its base, no lights on in the few visible windows, some of the security lights around it broken or switched off. Maybe I’d been set up. It wouldn’t be like Jake, but time had passed and I still wasn’t ready to place absolute, unconditional trust in my old partner. All the same, if Jake did want to get back at me for something, stranding me in a bleak industrial development was a very elaborate way of going about it.

I pressed the intercom buzzer in the panel next to the barrier. I was half expecting no one to answer it and, if they did, I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to explain my presence. But the voice that crackled through the grille was familiar and unfazed.

“Glad you could make it, buddy. Stroll on inside and take a seat. I’ll be down in a minute. I can’t wait to show Derek off to you.”

“I hope Derek’s worth the journey.”

The barrier slid back. I walked across the damp concrete of the loading area to the service entrance. Now that I paid proper attention, the place wasn’t as derelict as I’d assumed. Cameras tracked me, moving stealthily under their rain hoods. I ascended a step, pushed against a door—which opened easily—and found myself entering some kind of lobby or waiting room. Beyond a fire door, a dimly illuminated corridor led away into the depths of the building. No lights on in the annex, save for the red eye of a coffee machine burbling away next to a small table and a set of chairs. I poured a cup, spooned in creamer, and sat down. As my vision adjusted to the gloom, I made out some of the glossy brochures lying on the table. Most of them were for Gladius Biomech. I’d heard of the firm and recognised their swordfish logo. Most of what they did creeped me out. Once you started messing with genetics, the world was your walking, talking, tap-dancing oyster. I stroked one of the moving images and watched a cat sitting on a high chair and eating its dinner with a knife and fork, holding the cutlery in little furry human-like hands, while the family dined around it. Now your pet can share in your mealtimes—hygienically!

The fire door swung open. I put down the brochure hastily, as ashamed as if I’d been caught leafing through hardcore porn. Jake stood silhouetted in the dim lights of the corridor, knee-length leather jacket, hair still down to his collar.

I put on my best laconic, deadpan voice. “So I guess we’re going into the pet business.”

“Not quite,” Jake answered. “Although there may be merchandising options in that direction at some point. For now, though, it’s still rock and roll all the way.” He gestured back at the door he’d come through. “You want to meet Derek?”

I tipped the coffee dregs into the waste bin. “Guess we don’t want to keep him waiting.”

“Don’t worry about him. He’s not going anywhere.”

I followed Jake into the corridor. He had changed a bit in the two years since we’d split the firm, but not by much. The hair was a little grayer, maybe not as thick as it used to be. Jake still had the soul patch under his lip and the carefully tended stubble on his cheeks. Still wore snakeskin cowboy boots without any measurable irony.

“So what’s this all about?”

“What I said. A new business opportunity. Time to put Morbid Management back on the road. Question is, are we ready to take things to the next level?”

I smiled. “We. Like it’s a done deal already.”

“It will be when you see Derek.”

We’d reached a side door: sheet metal with no window in it. Jake pressed his hand against a reader, submitted to an iris scan, then pushed open the door. Hard light spilled through the widening gap.

“You keep this locked, but I’m able to walk in through the front door? Who are you worried about breaking in?”

“It’s not about anyone breaking in,” Jake said.

We were in a room large enough to hold a dozen semi-trucks. Strip lights ran the length of the low, white-tiled ceiling. There were no windows, and most of the wall space was taken up with grey metal cabinets and what appeared to be industrial-size freezer units. There were many freestanding cabinets and cupboards, with benches laid out in long rows. The benches held computers and glassware and neat, toy-like robotic things. Centrifuges whirred, ovens and chromatographs clicked and beeped. I watched a mechanical arm dip a pipette into a rack of test tubes, sampling or dosing each in quick sequence. The swordfish logo on the side of the robot was for Gladius Biomech.

“Either you’re richer than I think,” I said, “or there’s some kind of deal going on here.”

“Gladius fronts the equipment and expertise,” Jake said. “It’s a risk for them, obviously. But they’re banking on a high capital return.”

“You’re running a biotech lab on your own?”

“Buddy, I can barely work out a bar tip. You were always the one with the head for figures. Every few days, someone from Gladius stops by to make sure it’s all running to plan. But it doesn’t take much tinkering. Stuff’s mostly automated. Which is cool, because the fewer people know about this, the better.”

“Guess I’m one of them now. Want to show me what this is actually all about, or am I meant to figure it out on my own?”

“Over here,” Jake said, strolling over to one of the freestanding cabinets. It was a white cube about the size of a domestic washing machine, and had a similar looking control panel on the front. But it wasn’t a washing machine, obviously. Jake entered a keypad code then slid back the lid. “Go on,” he said, inviting me closer. “Take a look.”

I peered into the cabinet, figuring it was some kind of incubator. Blue, UV-tinged lights ran around the inside of the rim. I could feel the warmth coming off it. Straw and dirt were packed around the floor, and there was a clutch of eggs in the middle. They were big eggs, almost football sized, and one of them was quivering gently.

“Looks like we’ve got a hatcher coming through,” Jake said. “Reason I had to be here, actually. System alerts me when one of those babies gets ready to pop. They need to be hand-reared for a few days, until they can stand on their feet and forage for themselves.”

“Until what can stand on their feet and forage for themselves?”

“Baby dinosaurs, buddy. What else?” Jake slid the cover back on the incubator, then locked it with a touch on the keypad. “T-Rexes, actually. You ever eaten Rex?”

“Kind of out of my price range.”

“Well, take it from me, you’re not missing much. Pretty much everything tastes the same once you’ve added steak sauce, anyway.”

“So we’re diversifying into dinosaur foodstuffs. Is that what you dragged me out here to see?”

“Not exactly.” Jake moved to the next cabinet along—it was the same kind of white incubator—and keyed open the lid. He unhooked a floral-patterned oven glove from the side of the cabinet and slipped it on his right hand, then dipped into the blue-lit interior. I heard a squeak and a scuffling sound and watched as Jake came out with a baby dinosaur in his hand, clutched gently in the oven glove. It was about the size of a plastic bath toy, the same kind of day-glo green, but it was very definitely alive. It squirmed in the glove, trying to escape. The tail whipped back and forth. The huge hind legs thrashed at air. The little forelimbs scrabbled uselessly against the oven glove’s thumb. The head, with its tiny pin-sized teeth already budding through, tried to bite into the glove. The eyes were wide and white-rimmed and charmingly belligerent.

“Already got some fight in it, as you can see,” Jake said, using his ungloved hand to stroke the top of the Rex’s head. “And those teeth’ll give you a nasty cut even now. Couple of weeks, they’ll have your finger off.”

“Nice. But I’m still sort of missing the point here. And why is that thing so green?”

“Tweaked the pigmentation a bit, that’s all. Made it luminous, too. Real things are kind of drab. Not so hot for merchandising.”

“Merchandising what?”

“Jesus, Fox. Take a look at the forelimbs. Maybe it’ll clue you in.”

I took a look at the forelimbs and felt a shiver of I wasn’t exactly sure what. Not quite revulsion, not quite awe. Something that came in at right angles to both.

“I’m no expert on dinosaurs,” I said slowly. “Even less on Rexes. But are those things meant to have four fingers and a thumb?”

“Not the way nature intended. But then, nature wasn’t thinking ahead.” Jake stroked the dinosaur’s head again. It seemed to be calming gradually. “Gladius tells me it’s pretty simple stuff. There are these things called Hoxgenes, which show up in pretty much everything, from fruit flies to monkeys. They’re like a big bank of switches that control limb development, right out to the number of digits on the end. We just flipped a few of those switches, and got us dinosaurs with human hands.”

The hands were like exquisite little plastic extrudings, moulded in the same biohazard green as the rest of the T-Rex. They even had tiny little fingernails.

“Okay, that’s a pretty neat trick,” I said. “If a little on the creepy side. But I’m still not quite seeing the point.”

“The point, buddy, is that without little fingers and thumbs it’s kind of difficult to play rock guitar.”

“You’re shitting me. You bred this thing to make music?”

“He’s got a way to go, obviously. And it doesn’t stop with the fingers. You ever seen a motor homunculus, Fox? Map of human brain function, according to how much volume’s given over to a specific task. Looks like a little man with huge fucking hands. Just operating a pair of hands takes up way more cells than you’d think. Well, there’s no point giving a dinosaur four fingers and an opposable thumb if you don’t give him the mental wiring to go along with it. So we’re in there right from the start, manipulating brain development all the way, messing with the architecture when everything’s nice and plastic. This baby’s two weeks old and he already has thirty per cent more neural volume than a normal Rex. Starting to see some real hierarchical layering of brain modules, too. Your average lizard has a brain like a peanut, but this one’s already got something like a mammalian limbic system. Hell, I’d be scared if it wasn’t me doing this.”

“And for such a noble purpose.”

“Don’t get all moral on me, buddy.” Jake lowered the T-Rex back into the incubator. “We eat these things. We pay to go out into a big park and shoot them with anti-tank guns. I’m giving them the chance to rock. Is that so very wrong?”

“I guess it depends on how much choice the dinosaur has in the matter.”

“When you force a five-year-old kid to take piano lessons, does the kid have a choice?”

“That’s different.”

“Yeah, because it’s cruel and unusual to force someone to play the piano. I agree. But electric guitar? That’s liberation, my friend. That’s like handing someone the keys to the cosmos.”

“It’s a goddamned reptile, Jake.”

“Right. And how is that different than making corpses or giant robots play music?”

He had me there, and from the look of quiet self-satisfaction on his face, he knew it.

“Okay. I accept that you have a baby dinosaur that could, theoretically, play the guitar, if anyone made a guitar that small. But that’s not the same thing as actually playing it. What are you going to do, just sit around and wait?”

“We train it,” Jake said. “Just like training a dog to do tricks. Slowly, one element at a time. Little rewards. Building up the repertoire a part at a time. It doesn’t need to understand music. It just needs to make a sequence of noises. You think we can’t do this?”

“I’d need persuasion.”

“You’ll get it. Dinosaurs live for meat. It doesn’t have to understand what it’s doing, it just has to associate the one with the other. And this is heavy metal we’re talking about here, not Rachmaninov. Not a big ask, even for a reptile.”

“You’ve thought it all through.”

“You think Gladius was going to get on board if there wasn’t a business plan? This is going to work, Fox. It’s going to work, and you’re going to be a part of it. All the way down the line. We’re going to promote a rock tour with an actual carnivorous theropod dinosaur on lead guitar and vocal.”

I couldn’t deny that Jake’s enthusiasm was infectious. Always had been. But when I’d needed him—when I’d taken a big idea to him—he hadn’t been there for me. Even now the pain of that betrayal still stung, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to get over it that quickly.

“Maybe some other time,” I said, shaking my head with a regretful smile. “After all, you’ve got a ways to go yet. I don’t know how fast these things grow, but no one’s going to be blown away by a knee-high rock star, even if they are carnivorous. Maybe when Derek’s a bit older, and he can actually play something”

Jake gave me an odd glance. “Dude, we need to clear something up. You haven’t met Derek yet.”

I looked into his eyes. “Then who—what—was that?”

“Part of the next wave. Same with the eggs. Aren’t enough venues in the world for all the people who’ll want to see Derek. So we make more Dereks. Until we hit market saturation.”

“And you think Derek’ll be cool with that?”

“It’s not like Derek’s ever going to have an opinion on the matter.” Jake looked me up and down, maybe trying to judge exactly how much I could be trusted. “So: You ready to meet the big guy?”

I gave a noncommittal shrug. “Guess I’ve come this far.”

Jake stopped at another white cabinet—this one turned out to be a fridge—and came out with a thigh-sized haunch of freezer-wrapped meat. “Carry this for me, buddy,” he said.

I took the meat, cradling it in both arms. We went out of the laboratory by a different door, then walked down a short corridor until a second door opened out into a dark, echoey space, like the inside of an aircraft hangar.

“Wait here,’ Jake said, and his footsteps veered off to one side. I heard a clunk, as of some huge trip-switch being thrown and, one by one, huge banks of suspended ceiling lights came on. Even as I had to squint against the glare, I mentally applauded the way Jake was managing the presentation. He’d known I was coming, so he could easily have left those lights on until now. But the impresario in him wouldn’t be denied. These weren’t simple spotlights, either. They were computer controlled, steerable, variable-colour stage lights. Jake had a whole routine programmed in. The lights gimballed and gyred, throwing shifting patterns across the walls, floor and ceiling of the vast space. Yet, until the last moment, they studiously avoided illuminating the thing in the middle. When they fell on it, I could almost imagine the crowd going apeshit.

This was how the show would open. This was how the show had to open.

I was looking at Derek.

Derek was in a bright yellow cage, about the size of four shipping containers arranged into a block. I was glad about the cage; glad too that it appeared to have been engineered to generous tolerances. Electrical cables snaked into it, thick as pythons. Orange strobe beacons had just come on, rotating on the top of the cage, for no obvious reason other than that it looked cool. And there was Derek, standing up in the middle.

I’d had a toy T-Rex as a kid, handed down from my dad, and some part of me still expected them to look the way that toy did: standing with the body more or less vertical, forming a tripod with two legs and the tail taking the creature’s weight. That wasn’t how they worked, though. Derek—like every resurrected Rex that ever lived—stood with his body arranged in a horizontal line, with the tail counterbalancing the weight of his forebody and skull. Somehow that just never looked right to me. And the two little arms looked even more pathetic and useless in this posture.

Derek wasn’t the same luminous green as the baby dinosaur; he was a more plausible dark muddy brown. I guess at some point Jake had decided that colouration wasn’t spectacular enough for the second batch. In fact, apart from the human hands on the ends of his forearms, he didn’t look in any way remarkable. Just another meat-eating dinosaur.

Derek was awake, too. He was looking at us and I could hear the rasp of his breathing, like an industrial bellows being worked very slowly. In proportion to his body, his eyes were much smaller than the baby’s. Not so cute now. This was an instinctive predator, big enough to swallow me whole.

“He’s pretty big.”

“Actually he’s pretty small,” Jake said. “Rex development isn’t a straight line thing. They grow fast from babies then stick at two tonnes until they’re about fourteen. Then they get another growth spurt, which can take them anywhere up to six tonnes. Of course with the newer Dereks we should be able to dial things up a bit.” Then he took the haunch off me and whispered: “Watch the neural display. We’ve had implants in him since he hatched—we’re gonna work the imaging into the live show.” He raised his voice. “Hey! Meat-brain! Look what I got for you!”

Derek was visibly interested in the haunch. His head tracked it as Jake walked up to the cage, the little yellow-tinged eyes moving with the smooth vigilance of surveillance cameras. Saliva dribbled between his teeth. The forearms made a futile grabbing gesture, as if Derek somehow didn’t fully comprehend that there was a cage and a quite a lot of air between the haunch and him.

I watched a pink blotch form on the neural display. “Hunter-killer mode kicking in,” Jake said, grinning. “He’s like a heat-seeking missile now. Nothing getting between him and his dinner except maybe another Rex.”

“Maybe you should feed him more often.”

“There’s no such thing as a sated Rex. And I do feed him. How else do you think I get him to work for me?” He raised his voice again. “You know the deal, ain’t no free lunches around here.” He put the haunch down on the ground, then reached for something that I hadn’t seen until then: a remote control unit hanging down from above. It was a grubby yellow box with a set of mushroom-sized buttons on it. Jake depressed one of the buttons and an overhead gantry clanked and whined into view, sliding along rails suspended from the ceiling. The gantry positioned itself over the cage, then began to lower its cargo. It was a flame red Gibson Flying V guitar, bolted to a telescopic frame from the rear of the body. The guitar came down from a gap in the top of the cage (too small for Derek to have escaped through), lowered until it was in front of him, then telescoped back until the guitar was suspended within reach of his arms. At the same time, a microphone had come down to just in front of Derek’s mouth.

Jake released the remote control unit, then picked up the haunch again. “Okay, buddy, you know what you need to do.” Then he pressed one of the other buttons and fast, riffing heavy metal blasted out of speakers somewhere in the room. It wasn’t stadium-level wattage—that, presumably, would have drawn too much attention—but it was still loud enough to impress, to give me some idea of how the show would work in reality.

And then Derek started playing. His hands were on that guitar, and they were making—well, you couldn’t call it music, in the absolutely strict sense of the word. It was noise, basically. Squealing, agonising bursts of sheet-metal sound, none of which bore any kind of harmonic relationship to what had gone before. But the one thing I couldn’t deny was that it worked. With the backing tape, and the light show, and the fact that this was an actual dinosaur playing a Gibson Flying V guitar, it was possible to make certain allowances.

Hell, I didn’t even have to try. I was smitten. And that was before Derek opened his mouth and started singing. Actually it would be best described as a sustained, blood-curdling roar—but that was exactly what it needed to be, and it counterpointed the guitar perfectly. Different parts of his brain were lighting up now; the hunter-killer region was much less bright than it had been before he started playing.

And there was, now that I paid attention to it, more than just migraine-inducing squeals of guitar and monstrous interludes of guttural roaring. Derek might not be playing specific notes and chords, and his vocalisations were no more structured or musical, but they were timed to fit in around the rest of the music, the bass runs and drum fills and second guitar solos. It wasn’t completely random. Derek was playing along, judging his contributions, letting the rest of the band share the limelight.

As a front man, I’d seen a lot worse.

“Okay, that’ll do,” Jake said, killing the music, pressing another button to retract the guitar and mike. “Way to go, Derek. Way to fucking go.”

“He’s good.”

“Does that constitute your seal of approval?”

“He can rock. I’ll give him that.”

“He doesn’t just rock,” Jake said. “He is rock.” Then he turned around and smiled. “So. Buddy. We back in business, or what?”

Yeah, I thought to myself. I guess we’re back in business.

I'm making my way back down the Antonov, thinking of the long hours of subsonic cruising ahead. I pass Jake’s desk again, and this time something on the ancient, battered, desert-sand camouflaged ex-military surplus laptop catches my eye.

The laptop’s running some generic movie editing software, and in one of the windows is a freezeframe from tonight’s show. Beneath the freezeframe is a timeline and soundtrack. I click the cursor and slide it back along to the left, watching Derek run in reverse on the window, hands whipping around the guitar in manic thrash overdrive. The set list is the same from night to night, so I know exactly when “Extinction Event” would have kicked in. I don’t feel guilty about missing it—someone had to take care of the Budokan accounts—but now that we’re airborne and there’s time to kill, I’m at least semi-curious about hearing it properly. What exactly was so great about it tonight, compared to the previous show, and the one before that?

Why was it that Jake didn’t want to hear that “Extinction Event” was even more awesome than usual?

I need earphones to hear anything over the six-engine drone of the Antonov. I’m reaching for them when Jake looms behind me.

“Thought you were checking on the big guy.”

I look around. He’s still got the bottle of JD with him.

“I was. Told him I heard he’d done a good job. Now I’m just checking it out for myself. If I can just find the point where . . . ”

He reaches over and takes my hand off the laptop. “You don’t need to. Got it all cued up already.”

He hands me the JD, punches a few keys—they’re so worn the numbers and letters are barely visible now—and up pops Derek again. From the purple-red tinge of the lighting, and the back-projection footage of crashing asteroids and erupting volcanoes, I know we’ve hit the start of “Extinction Event.”

“So what’s the big deal?” I ask.

“Put the phones on.”

I put the phones on. Jake spools through the track until we hit the bridge between the second and third verse. He lets the movie play on at normal speed. Drums pounding like jackhammers, bass so heavy it could shatter bone, and then Derek lets rip on the Flying V, unleashing a squall of demented sound, arching his neck back as he plays, eyes narrowing to venomous slits, and then belching out a humungous, larynx-shredding roar of pure theropod rage.

We go into the third verse. Jake hits pause.

“So you see,” he says.

I pull out the phones. “I’m not sure I do.”

“Then you need to go back and listen to the previous performance. And the one before that. And every goddamned rendition of that song he’s ever done before tonight.”

“I do?”

“Yes. Because then you’d understand.” And Jake looks at me with an expression of the utmost gravity on his face, as if he’s about to disclose one of the darkest, most mystical secrets of the universe. “It was different tonight. He came in early. Jumped his usual cue. And when he did come in it was for longer than usual and he added that vocal flourish.”

I nod, but I’m still not seeing the big picture. “Okay. He screwed up. Shit happens. Gotta roll with it, remember? It was still a good show. Everyone said so.”

But he shakes his head. “You’re not getting it, buddy. That wasn’t a mistake. That was something much worse. That was an improvement. That was him improvising.”

“You can’t be sure.”

“I can be sure.” He punches another key and a slice of Derek’s neural activity pops up. “Extracted this from the performance,” he says. “Right around the time he started going off-script.” His finger traces three bright blotches. “You see these hotspots? They’ve come on in ones and twos before. But they’ve never once lit up at the same time.”

“And this means something?”

He taps his finger against the blotches in turn. “Dorsal premotor cortex. That’s associated with the brain planning a sequence of body movements. You slip on ice, that’s the part that gets you flapping your arms so you don’t you fall over.” Next blotch. “Anterior cingulate. That’s your basic complex resolution, decision-making module, right. Do I chase after that meal, or go after that one?” He moves his finger again. “Interior frontal gyrus/ventral premotor cortex. We’re deep into mammal brain structure here—a normal Rex wouldn’t have anything you could even stick a label on here. You know when this area lights up, in you and me?”

“I’m not, strangely enough, a neuroscientist.”

“Nor was I until I got involved with Derek. This is the sweet spot, buddy. This is what lights up when you hear language or music. And all three of these areas going off at once? That’s a pretty unique signature. It doesn’t just mean he’s playing music. It means he’s making shit up as he goes along.”

For a moment I don’t know what to say. There’s no doubt in my mind that he’s right. He knows the show—and Derek’s brain—inside out. He knows every cue Derek’s meant to hit. Derek missing his mark—or coming in early—just isn’t meant to happen. And Derek somehow finding a way to deviate from the program and make the song sound better is, well . . . not exactly the way Jake likes things to happen.

“I don’t like improvisation,” he says. “It’s a sign of creative restlessness. Before you know it . . . ”

“It’s solo recording deals, expensive riders, and private tour buses.”

“I thought we got away from this shit,” Jake says mournfully. “I mean, dead bodies, man. Then robots. Then dinosaurs. And still it’s coming back to bite us. Talent always thinks it knows best.”

“Maybe it does.”

“A T-Rex?”

“You gave him just enough of a mind to rock. Unfortunately, that’s already more than enough to not want to take orders.” I take a sip from the JD. “But look on the bright side. What’s the worst that could happen?”

“He escapes and eats us.”

“Apart from that.”

“I don’t know. If he starts showing signs of . . . creativity . . . then we’re fucked six ways from Tuesday. We’ll have animal rights activists pulling the plug on every show.”

“Unless we just . . . roll with it. Let him decide what he does. I mean, it’s not like he doesn’t want to perform, is it? You’ve seen him out there. This is what he was born for. Hell, why stop there? This is what he was evolved for.”

“I wish I had your optimism.”

I look back at the cage. Derek’s watching us, following the conversation. I wonder how much of it he’s capable of understanding. Maybe more than we realise.

“Maybe we keep control of him, maybe we don’t. Either way, we’ve done something beautiful.” I hand him the bottle. “You, mainly. It was your idea, not mine.”

“Took the two of us to make it fly,” Jake says, before taking a gulp. “And hell, maybe you’re right. That’s the glorious thing about rock and roll. It’s alchemy. Holy fire. The moment you control it, it ain’t rock and roll no more. So maybe the thing we should be doing here is celebrating.”

“All the way.” And I snatch back the JD and take my own swig. Then I raise the bottle and toast Derek, who’s still watching us. Hard to tell what’s going on behind those eyes, but one thing I’m sure of is that it’s not nothing. And for a brief, marvellous instant, I’m glad not only to be alive, but to be alive in a universe that has room in it for beautiful monsters.

And heavy metal, of course.

© 2010 by Alastair Reynolds.

Originally published in Shine, edited by Jetse De Vries.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

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

End Game
Nancy Kress

Allen Dodson was sitting in seventh-grade math class, staring at the back of Peggy Corcoran’s head, when he had the insight that changed the world. First his own world and then, eventually, like dominos toppling in predestined rhythm, everybody else’s, until nothing could ever be the same again. Although we didn’t, of course, know that back then.

The source of the insight was Peggy Corcoran. Allen had sat behind her since third grade (Anderson, Blake, Corcoran, Dodson, DuQuesne . . .) and never thought her remarkable. Nor was she. It was 1982 and Peggy wore a David Bowie t-shirt and straggly brown braids. But now, staring at the back of her mousy hair, Allen suddenly realized that Peggy’s head must be a sloppy mess of skittering thoughts and contradictory feelings and half-buried longings—just as his was. Nobody was what they seemed to be!

The realization actually made his stomach roil. In books and movies, characters had one thought at a time: “Elementary, my dear Watson.” “An offer he couldn’t refuse.” “Beam me up, Scotty!” But Allen’s own mind, when he tried to watch it, was different. Ten more minutes of class I’m hungry gotta pee the answer is x+6 you moron what would it be like to kiss Linda Wilson M*A*S*H on tonight really gotta pee locker stuck today Linda eight more minutes do the first sixteen problems baseball after school—

No. Not even close. He would have to include his mind watching those thoughts and then his thoughts about the watching thoughts and then—

And Peggy Corcoran was doing all that, too.

And Linda Wilson.

And Jeff Gallagher.

And Mr. Henderson, standing at the front of math class.

And everyone in the world, all with thoughts zooming through their heads fast as electricity, thoughts bumping into each other and fighting each other and blotting each other out, a mess inside every mind on the whole Earth, nothing sensible or orderly or predictable . . . Why, right this minute Mr. Henderson could be thinking terrible things even as he assigned the first sixteen problems on page 145, terrible things about Allen even, or Mr. Henderson could be thinking about his lunch or hating teaching or planning a murder . . . You could never know. No one was settled or simple, nothing could be counted on . . .

Allen had to be carried, screaming, from math class.

I didn’t learn any of this until decades later, of course. Allen and I weren’t friends, even though we sat across the aisle from each other (Edwards, Farr, Fitzgerald, Gallagher . . .). And after the screaming fit, I thought he was just as weird as everyone else thought. I never taunted Allen like some of the boys, or laughed at him like the girls, and a part of me was actually interested in the strange things he sometimes said in class, always looking as if he had no idea how peculiar he sounded. But I wasn’t strong enough to go against the herd and make friends with such a loser.

The summer before Allen went off to Harvard, we did become—if not friends—then chess companions. “You play rotten, Jeff,” Allen said to me with his characteristic, oblivious candor, “but nobody else plays at all.” So two or three times a week we sat on his parents’ screened porch and battled it out on the chessboard. I never won. Time after time I slammed out of the house in frustration and shame, vowing not to return. After all, unlike wimpy Allen, I had better things to do with my time: girls, cars, James Bond movies. But I always went back.

Allen’s parents were, I thought even back then, a little frightened by their son’s intensity. Mild, hard-working people fond of golf, they pretty much left Allen alone from his fifteenth birthday on. As we moved rooks and knights around the chessboard in the gathering darkness of the porch, Allen’s mother would timidly offer a pitcher of lemonade and a plate of cookies. She treated both of us with an uneasy respect that, in turn, made me uneasy. That wasn’t how parents were supposed to behave.

Harvard was a close thing for Allen, despite his astronomical SATs. His grades were spotty because he only did the work in courses he was interested in, and his medical history was even spottier: bouts of depression when he didn’t attend school, two brief hospitalizations in a psychiatric ward. Allen would get absorbed by something—chess, quantum physics, Buddhism—to the point where he couldn’t stop, until all at once his interest vanished as if it had never existed. Harvard had, I thought in my eighteen-year-old wisdom, every reason to be wary. But Allen was a National Merit Scholar, and when he won the Westinghouse science competition for his work on cranial structures in voles, Harvard took him.

The night before he left, we had our last chess match. Allen opened with the conservative Italian game, which told me he was slightly distracted. Twelve moves in, he suddenly said, “Jeff, what if you could tidy up your thoughts, the way you tidy up your room every night?”

“Do what?” My mother “tidied up” my room, and what kind of weirdo used words like that, anyway?

He ignored me. “It’s sort of like static, isn’t it? All those stray thoughts in a mind, interfering with a clear broadcast. Yeah, that’s the right analogy. Without the static, we could all think clearer. Cleaner. We could see farther before the signal gets lost in uncontrolled noise.”

In the gloom of the porch, I could barely see his pale, broad-cheeked face. But I had a sudden insight, rare for me that summer. “Allen—is that what happened to you that time in seventh grade? Too much . . . static?”

“Yeah.” He didn’t seem embarrassed, unlike anybody normal. It was as if embarrassment was too insignificant for this subject. “That was the first time I saw it. For a long time I thought if I could learn to meditate—you know, like Buddhist monks—I could get rid of the static. But meditation doesn’t go far enough. The static is still there, you’re just not paying attention to it anymore. But it’s still there.” He moved his bishop.

“What exactly happened in the seventh grade?” I found myself intensely curious, which I covered by staring at the board and making a move.

He told me, still unembarrassed, in exhaustive detail. Then he added, “It should be possible to adjust brain chemicals to eliminate the static. To unclutter the mind. It should!”

“Well,” I said, dropping from insight to my more usual sarcasm, “maybe you’ll do it at Harvard, if you don’t get sidetracked by some weird shit like ballet or model railroads.”

“Checkmate,” Allen said.

I lost track of him after that summer, except for the lengthy Bakersville High School Alumni Notes faithfully mailed out every single year by Linda Wilson, who must have had some obsessive/compulsiveness of her own. Allen went on to Harvard Medical School. After graduation he was hired by a prestigious pharmaceutical company and published a lot of scientific articles about topics I couldn’t pronounce. He married, divorced, married again, divorced again. Peggy Corcoran, who married my cousin Joe and who knew Allen’s second wife, told me at my father’s funeral that both ex-wives said the same thing about Allen: He was never emotionally present.

I saw him for myself at our twentieth-fifth reunion. He looked surprisingly the same: thin, broad-faced, pale. He stood alone in a corner, looking so pathetic that I dragged Karen over to him. “Hey, Allen. Jeff Gallagher.”

“I know.”

“This is my wife, Karen.”

He smiled at her but said nothing. Karen, both outgoing and compassionate, started a flow of small talk, but Allen shut her off in mid-sentence. “Jeff, you still play chess?”

“Neither Karen nor I play now,” I said pointedly.

“Oh. There’s someone I want you to see, Jeff. Can you come to the lab tomorrow?”

The “lab” was sixty miles away, in the city, and I had to work the next day. But something about the situation had captured my wife’s eclectic and sharply intelligent interest. She said, “What is it, Allen, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“I don’t mind. It’s a chess player. I think she might change the world.”

“You mean the big important chess world?” I said. Near Allen, all my teenage sarcasm had returned.

“No. The whole world. Please come, Jeff.”

“What time?” Karen said.

“Karen—I have a job.”

“Your hours are flexible,” she said, which was true. I was a real estate agent, working from home. She smiled at me with all her wicked sparkle. “I’m sure it will be fascinating.”

Lucy Hartwick, twenty-five years old, was tall, slender, and very pretty. I saw Karen, who was unfortunately inclined to jealousy, glance at me. But I wasn’t attracted to Lucy. There was something cold about her beauty. She barely glanced up at us from a computer in Allen’s lab, and her gaze was indifferent. The screen displayed a chess game.

“Lucy’s rating, as measured by computer games anyway, is 2670,” Allen said.

“So?” 2670 was extremely high; only twenty or so players in the world held ratings above 2700. But I was still in sarcastic mode, even as I castigated myself for childishness.

Allen said, “Six months ago her rating was 1400.”

“So six months ago she first learned to play, right?” We were talking about Lucy, bent motionless above the chessboard, as if she weren’t even present.

“No, she had played twice a week for five years.”

That kind of ratings jump for someone with mediocre talent who hadn’t studied chess several hours a day for years—it just didn’t happen. Karen said, “Good for you, Lucy!” Lucy glanced up blankly, then returned to her board.

I said, “And so just how is this supposed to change the world?”

“Come look at this,” Allen said. Without looking back, he strode toward the door.

I was getting tired of his games, but Karen followed him, so I followed her. Eccentricity has always intrigued Karen, perhaps because she’s so balanced, so sane, herself. It was one reason I fell in love with her.

Allen held out a mass of graphs, charts, and medical scans as if he expected me to read them. “See, Jeff, these are all Lucy, taken when she’s playing chess. The caudate nucleus, which aids the mind in switching gears from one thought to another, shows low activity. So does the thalamus, which processes sensory input. And here, in the—”

“I’m a realtor, Allen,” I said, more harshly than I intended. “What does all this garbage mean?”

Allen looked at me and said simply, “She’s done it. Lucy has. She’s learned to eliminate the static.”

“What static?” I said, even though I remembered perfectly our conversation of twenty-five years ago.

“You mean,” said Karen, always a quick study, “that Lucy can concentrate on one thing at a time without getting distracted?”

“I just said so, didn’t I?” Allen said. “Lucy Hartwick has control of her own mind. When she plays chess, that’s all she’s doing. As a result, she’s now equal to the top echelons of the chess world.”

“But she hasn’t actually played any of those top players, has she?” I argued. “This is just your estimate based on her play against some computer.”

“Same thing,” Allen said.

“It is not!”

Karen peered in surprise at my outrage. “Jeff—”

Allen said, “Yes, Jeff, listen to Carol. Don’t—”

“‘Karen’!”

“—you understand? Lucy’s somehow achieved total concentration. That lets her just . . . just soar ahead in understanding of the thing she chooses to focus on. Don’t you understand what this could mean for medical research? For . . . for any field at all? We could solve global warming and cancer and toxic waste and . . . and everything!”

As far as I knew, Allen had never been interested in global warming, and a sarcastic reply rose to my lips. But either Allen’s face or Karen’s hand on my arm stopped me. She said gently, “That could be wonderful, Allen.”

“It will be!” he said with all the fervor of his seventh-grade fit. “It will be!”

“What was that all about?” Karen said in the car on our way home.

“Oh, that was just Allen being—”

“Not Allen. You.”

“Me?” I said, but even I knew my innocence didn’t ring true.

“I’ve never seen you like that. You positively sneered at him, and for what might actually be an enormous break-through in brain chemistry.”

“It’s just a theory, Karen! Ninety percent of theories collapse as soon as anyone runs controlled experiments.”

“But you, Jeff . . . you want this one to collapse.”

I twisted in the driver’s seat to look at her face. Karen stared straight ahead, her pretty lips set as concrete. My first instinct was to bluster . . . but not with Karen.

“I don’t know,” I said quietly. “Allen has always brought out the worst in me, for some reason. Maybe . . . maybe I’m jealous.”

A long pause, while I concentrated as hard as I could on the road ahead. Yellow divider, do not pass, 35 MPH, pothole ahead . . .

Then Karen’s hand rested lightly on my shoulder, and the world was all right again.

After that I kept in sporadic touch with Allen. Two or three times a year I’d phone and we’d talk for fifteen minutes. Or, rather, Allen would talk and I’d listen, struggling with irritability. He never asked about me or Karen. He talked exclusively about his research into various aspects of Lucy Hartwick: her spinal and cranial fluid, her neural firing patterns, her blood and tissue cultures. He spoke of her as if she were no more than a collection of biological puzzles he was determined to solve, and I couldn’t imagine what their day-to-day interactions were like. For some reason I didn’t understand, I didn’t tell Karen about these conversations.

That was the first year. The following June, things changed. Allen’s reports—because that’s what they were, reports and not conversations—became non-stop complaints.

“The FDA is taking forever to pass my IND application. Forever!”

I figured out that “IND” meant “initial new drug,” and that it must be a green light for his Lucy research.

“And Lucy has become impossible. She’s hardly ever available when I need her, trotting off to chess tournaments around the world. As if chess mattered as much as my work on her!”

I remembered the long-ago summer when chess mattered to Allen himself more than anything else in the world.

“I’m just frustrated by the selfishness and the bureaucracy and the politics.”

“Yes,” I said.

“And doesn’t Lucy understand how important this could be? The incredible potential for improving the world?”

“Evidently not,” I said, with mean satisfaction that I disliked myself for. To compensate I said, “Allen, why don’t you take a break and come out here for dinner some night. Doesn’t a break help with scientific thinking? Lead sometimes to real insights?”

I could feel, even over the phone line, that he’d been on the point of refusal, but my last two sentences stopped him. After a moment he said, “Oh, all right, if you want me to,” so ungraciously that it seemed he was granting me an inconvenient favor. Right then, I knew that the dinner was going to be a disaster.

And it was, but not as much as it would have been without Karen. She didn’t take offense when Allen refused to tour her beloved garden. She said nothing when he tasted things and put them down on the tablecloth, dropped bits of food as he chewed, slobbered on the rim of his glass. She listened patiently to Allen’s two-hour monologue, nodding and making encouraging little noises. Towards the end her eyes did glaze a bit, but she never lost her poise and wouldn’t let me lose mine, either.

“It’s a disgrace,” Allen ranted, “the FDA is hobbling all productive research with excessive caution for—do you know what would happen if Jenner had needed FDA approval for his vaccines? We’d all still have smallpox, that’s what! If Louis Pasteur—”

“Why don’t you play chess with Jeff?” Karen said when the meal finally finished. “While I clear away here.”

I exhaled in relief. Chess was played in silence. Moreover, Karen would be stuck with cleaning up after Allen’s appalling table manners.

“I’m not interested in chess anymore,” Allen said. “Anyway, I have to get back to the lab. Not that Lucy kept her appointment for tests on . . . she’s wasting my time in Turkistan or someplace. Bye. Thanks for dinner.”

“Don’t invite him again, Jeff,” Karen said to me after Allen left. “Please.”

“I won’t. You were great, sweetheart.”

Later, in bed, I did that thing she likes and I don’t, by way of saying thank you. Halfway through, however, Karen pushed me away. “I only like it when you’re really here,” she said. “Tonight you’re just not focusing on us at all.”

After she went to sleep, I crept out of bed and turned on the computer in my study. The heavy fragrance of Karen’s roses drifted through the window screen. Lucy Hartwick was in Turkmenistan, playing in the Chess Olympiad in Ashgabat. Various websites detailed her rocketing rise to the top of the chess world. Articles about her all mentioned that she never socialized with her own or any other team, preferred to eat all her meals alone in her hotel room, and never smiled. I studied the accompanying pictures, trying to see what had happened to Lucy’s beauty.

She was still slender and long-legged. The lovely features were still there, although obscured by her habitual pose while studying a chessboard: hunched over from the neck like a turtle, with two fingers in her slightly open mouth. I had seen that pose somewhere before, but I couldn’t remember where. It wasn’t appealing, but the loss of Lucy’s good looks came from something else. Even for a chess player, the concentration on her face was formidable. It wiped out any hint of any other emotion whatsoever. Good poker players do that, too, but not in quite this way. Lucy looked not quite human.

Or maybe I just thought that because of my complicated feelings about Allen.

At 2:00 a.m. I sneaked back into bed, glad that Karen hadn’t woken while I was gone.

“She’s gone!” Allen cried over the phone, a year later. “She’s just gone!”

“Who?” I said, although of course I knew. “Allen, I can’t talk now, I have a client coming into the office two minutes from now.”

“You have to come down here!”

“Why?” I had ducked all of Allen’s calls ever since that awful dinner, changing my home phone to an unlisted number and letting my secretary turn him away at work. I’d only answered now because I was expecting a call from Karen about the time for our next marriage counseling session. Things weren’t as good as they used to be. Not really bad, just clouds blocking what used to be steady marital sunshine. I wanted to dispel those clouds before they turned into major thunderstorms.

“You have to come,” Allen repeated, and he started to sob.

Embarrassed, I held the phone away from my ear. Grown men didn’t cry like that, not to other men. All at once I realized why Allen wanted me to come to the lab: because he had no other human contact at all.

“Please, Jeff,” Allen whispered, and I snapped, “Okay!”

“Mr. Gallagher, your clients are here,” Brittany said at the doorway, and I tried to compose a smile and a good lie.

And after all that, Lucy Hartwick wasn’t even gone. She sat in Allen’s lab, hunched over a chessboard with two fingers in her mouth, just as I had seen her a year ago on the Web.

“What the hell—Allen, you said—”

Unpredictable as ever, he had calmed down since calling me. Now he handed me a sheaf of print-outs and medical photos. I flashed back suddenly to the first time I’d come to this lab, when Allen had also thrust on me documents I couldn’t read. He just didn’t learn.

“Her white matter has shrunk another seventy-five percent since I saw her last,” Allen said, as though that were supposed to convey something to me.

“You said Lucy was gone!”

“She is.”

“She’s sitting right there!”

Allen looked at me. I had the impression that the simple act required enormous effort on his part, like a man trying to drag himself free of a concrete block to which he was chained. He said, “I was always jealous of you, you know.”

It staggered me. My mouth opened, but Allen had already moved back to the concrete block. “Just look at these brain scans, seventy-five percent less white matter in six months! And these neurotransmitter levels, they—”

“Allen,” I said. Sudden cold had seized my heart. “Stop.” But he babbled on about the caudate nucleus and antibodies attacking the basal ganglia and bi-directional rerouting.

I walked over to Lucy and lifted her chessboard off the table.

Immediately she rose and continued playing variations on the board in my arms. I took several steps backward; she followed me, still playing. I hurled the board into the hall, slammed the door, and stood with my back to it. I was six-one and 190 pounds; Lucy wasn’t even half that. In fact, she appeared to have lost weight, so that her slimness had turned gaunt.

She didn’t try to fight me. Instead she returned to her table, sat down, and stuck two fingers in her mouth.

“She’s playing in her head, isn’t she,” I said to Allen.

“Yes.”

“What does ‘white matter’ do?”

“It contains axons which connect neurons in the cerebral cortex to neurons in other parts of the brain, thereby facilitating intercranial communication.” Allen sounded like a textbook.

“You mean, it lets some parts of the brain talk to other parts?”

“Well, that’s only a crude analogy, but—”

“It lets different thoughts from different parts of the brain reach each other,” I said, still staring at Lucy. “It makes you aware of more than one thought at a time.”

Static.

Allen began a long technical explanation, but I wasn’t listening. I remembered now where I’d seen that pose of Lucy’s, head pushed forward and two fingers in her mouth, drooling. It had been in an artist’s rendering of Queen Elizabeth I in her final days, immobile and unreachable, her mind already gone in advance of her dying body.

“Lucy’s gone,” Allen had said. He knew.

“Allen, what baseball team did Babe Ruth play for?”

He babbled on about neurotransmitters.

“What was Bobby Fisher’s favorite opening move?” Silently I begged him, Say e4, damn it.

He talked about the brain waves of concentrated meditation.

“Did you know that a tsunami will hit Manhattan tomorrow?”

He urged overhaul of FDA clinical-trial design.

I said, as quietly as I could manage, “You have it, too, don’t you. You injected yourself with whatever concoction the FDA wouldn’t approve, or you took it as a pill, or something. You wanted Lucy’s static-free state, like some fucking dryer sheet, and so you gave this to yourself from her. And now neither one of you can switch focus at all.” The call to me had been Allen’s last, desperate foray out of his perfect concentration on this project. No—that hadn’t been the last.

I took him firmly by the shoulders. “Allen, what did you mean when you said ‘I was always jealous of you’?”

He blathered on about MRI results.

“Allen—please tell me what you meant!”

But he couldn’t. And now I would never know.

I called the front desk of the research building. I called 911. Then I called Karen, needing to hear her voice, needing to connect with her. But she didn’t answer her cell, and the office said she’d left her desk to go home early.

Both Allen and Lucy were hospitalized briefly, then released. I never heard the diagnosis, although I suspect it involved an “inability to perceive and relate to social interactions” or some such psychobabble. Doesn’t play well with others. Runs with scissors. Lucy and Allen demonstrated they could physically care for themselves by doing it, so the hospital let them go. Business professionals, I hear, mind their money for them, order their physical lives. Allen has just published another brilliant paper, and Lucy Hartwick is the first female World Chess Champion.

Karen said, “They’re happy, in their own way. If their single-minded focus on their passions makes them oblivious to anything else—well, so what. Maybe that’s the price for genius.”

“Maybe,” I said, glad that she was talking to me at all. There hadn’t been much conversation lately. Karen had refused any more marriage counseling and had turned silent, escaping me by working in the garden. Our roses are the envy of the neighborhood. We have Tuscan Sun, Ruffled Cloud, Mister Lincoln, Crown Princess, Golden Zest. English roses, hybrid teas, floribunda, groundcover roses, climbers, shrubs. They glow scarlet, pink, antique apricot, deep gold, delicate coral. Their combined scent nauseates me.

I remember the exact moment that happened. We were in the garden, Karen kneeling beside a flower bed, a wide hat shading her face from the sun so that I couldn’t see her eyes.

“Karen,” I said, trying to mask my desperation, “Do you still love me?”

“Hand me that trowel, will you, Jeff?”

“Karen! Please! Can talk about what’s happening to us?”

“The Tahitian Sunsets are going to be glorious this year.”

I stared at her, at the beads of sweat on her upper lip, the graceful arc of her neck, her happy smile.

Karen clearing away Allen’s dinner dishes, picking up his sloppily dropped food. Lucy with two fingers in her mouth, studying her chessboard and then touching the pieces.

No. Not possible.

Karen reached for the trowel herself, as if she’d forgotten I was there.

Lucy Hartwick lost her championship to a Russian named Dmitri Chertov. A geneticist at Stamford made a breakthrough in cancer research so important that it grabbed all headlines for nearly a week. By a coincidence that amused the media, his young daughter won the Scripps Spelling Bee. I looked up the geneticist on the Internet; a year ago he’d attended a scientific conference with Allen. A woman in Oregon, some New Age type, developed the ability to completely control her brain waves through profound meditation. Her husband is a chess grandmaster.

I walk a lot now, when I’m not cleaning or cooking or shopping. Karen quit her job; she barely leaves the garden even to sleep. I kept my job, although I take fewer clients. As I walk, I think about the ones I do have, mulling over various houses they might like. I watch the August trees begin to tinge with early yellow, ponder overheard snatches of conversation, talk to dogs. My walks get longer and longer, and I notice that I’ve started to time my speed, to become interested in running shoes, to investigate transcontinental walking routes.

But I try not to think about walking too much. I observe children at frenetic play during the last of their summer vacation, recall movies I once liked, wonder at the intricacies of quantum physics, anticipate what I’ll cook for lunch. Sometimes I sing. I recite the few snatches of poetry I learned as a child, relive great football games, chat with old ladies on their porches, add up how many calories I had for breakfast. Sometimes I even mentally rehearse basic chess openings: the Vienna Game or the Petroff Defense. I let whatever thoughts come that will, accepting them all.

Listening to the static, because I don’t know how much longer I’ve got.

© 2007 by Nancy Kress.

Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

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

Face Value
Sean Williams

News of the disappearance of inventor Felix Frey spread through the Air with electric ease. It was exactly the kind of distraction I needed. There are only so many quaint old thefts and counterfeit scams I can pluck from policing archives while my girlfriend Billie works in her studio, adjusting facial nerves, muscles, and skin cells to fit her clients’ desires. I seized the unfolding news thread and followed the distraction it promised back to the source.

Frey tinkered on the fringe of many fields, laboring until recently in abject obscurity. Two days earlier, he had announced a breakthrough that threatened to overturn society as radically as the matter transmitter had two generations ago. Or rather, he had announced the announcement of a breakthrough: In forty-eight hours, he said, he intended to provide a proof of concept demonstration live to the Air, so all could see the wonder he had wrought. His hyperbole had gained little traction at first, but now, with his disappearance just hours before the planned demonstration, everything he had said took on a whole new significance.

Even in the midst of a crisis, Frey was a flamboyant self-promoter. His last missive before vanishing off the face of the Earth was, “They have come for me, as I knew they would.”

Then a bump came for me from the Inspector. I honestly can’t say that I expected it, but hope springs eternal in my peacekeeper breast.

“Does the name Felix Frey mean anything to you, PK Sargent?” he asked.

“I’m following the story now. They’re saying he’s been kidnapped.”

“In a manner of speaking. I arrested him this morning.”

That was unexpected. “What did he do?”

“I don’t honestly know, yet.”

“Ah.” This was going to be an interesting one. “I’ll be there in two shakes, Inspector.”

“You really mustn’t call me that.”

“Tell me what I should call you, then. Peacekeepers keep the peace: they don’t arrest people before they’ve done anything wrong.”

He had no reply to that, or if he did he chose not to share it with me. I left Billie a quick message to apologize for leaving, hurried to the booth nearest her studio, and was in Cambridge two minutes later.

I never understood the benefit of Peacekeeper HQ finding a new home every week. Wherever, it looked the same, and it was full of the same people, too, thanks to d-mat. Only the air changed. In Cambridge, the air smelled of the Wash and sounded like gulls. I had a sudden hunger for fish fingers but resisted the urge to order some from a fabber on the way.

Felix Frey was in Suite 5, sitting opposite the Inspector. He was much smaller than he appeared in the Air and older with it, sporting an old-fashioned suit and bushy moustache, and hair that was thinning at the crown. Lines radiated like cracks from the corner of his eyes. He projected a restless, fidgety energy, from the tips of his tapping fingers to the shuffling dance of his shoes. Like a stage magician, he didn’t benefit from close examination.

Frey glanced up as I entered the suite, and kept on looking up, right up to my face.

“Who is this, now?” he asked. “Do you plan to beat the secret out of me?”

“On the contrary,” said the Inspector. “PK Sargent is an admirer of yours. She’s come to witness your demonstration.”

I didn’t know anything of the sort. Working out what the Inspector wanted me for was half the fun.

“I told you,” Frey said, “I cannot show you anything here—”

“I understand perfectly. We will relocate to your laboratories. Just the three of us.”

Frey froze in the act of standing, as though sensing a trap. Or perhaps the exact opposite, an opportunity. For an instant he was completely still.

“My announcement—”

“I will record what transpires for posterity. You may release it afterward, if you wish.”

“Don’t think to do me any favors, PK Forest. The future will not be kind to you.”

The Inspector betrayed not the slightest uncertainty. That would have been impossible, even if he felt any. His face was literally a mask, frozen from birth by Möbius Syndrome. Only with conscious effort could he display any emotion at all.

“Let’s worry about the future when it’s closer to being the past,” he deadpanned, indicating that I should go first and the inventor walk between us. I did as I was told, feeling as though I was intruding on a long and bitter conversation.

The home of the mysterious invention was in Brunei, where dusk cast everything in muted tones. Felix Frey owned a private booth, so we stepped directly from the bright-mirrored interior into a space that looked less like a laboratory than a disorganized, open-plan living room. Couches and tabletops heavily laden with paper notebooks and curious artifacts stood in higgledy-piggledy fashion under a high, raftered ceiling. The walls were louvered on three sides, allowing what breeze there was to mingle with the air within. Mosquitoes wandered freely. I dialed up my antihistamine levels and fought the urge to slap.

From outside came a much more insistent buzzing sound: drones—the eyes of the Air—seeking a closer view.

“What are we doing here?” I bumped the Inspector as Frey practically danced across the room, scattering and clattering in his haste to prove how clever he was.

“I received an anonymous tip-off that Frey is planning to destabilize the OneEarth government.”

“Seriously? So how will letting him do this help? Showing us is the same as showing the world, in the end.”

“It makes a difference that we are here,” he sent back. “We represent the status quo, upon which war has been declared. To battle honorably, one must look one’s enemy in the eye.”

A loud crash cut off our surreptitious conversation. Frey had knocked over a heavily loaded stool while bearing a large, boxy fabber in both arms toward us.

“Clear that table,” he instructed, pointing with his chin.

I complied, taking more care than I possibly needed to. Frey’s scribblings were illegible both to my eyes and to my lenses, and the artifacts looked like nothing so much as burned tree roots. Failed experiments, perhaps.

“The fundamental reality of our economy, thanks to d-mat,” the inventor lectured us as he plugged the fabber into a power outlet and warmed it up, “is that any material thing except for people can be copied into the Air and recreated at will, ad infinitum. Some would have it that we are thus liberated from wage slavery and scarcity, but I believe that we remain as trapped as ever—trapped by rampant consumption fueled by limitless supply.”

The machine beeped in readiness. Frey opened it and invited us to look inside.

“This is a standard fabricator,” he said, using the old fashioned term that my great-aunt preferred. “Please observe that the operational seals are intact and that it is disconnected from any form of data transmission. Yes?”

I assured him that this did certainly seem to be the case.

He scampered off again, bent low into a wooden chest, and returned with a narrow ingot of silvery metal in the palms of his outstretched hands.

“Take this,” he said to me.

The metal was cool to the touch and, when I hefted it, surprisingly light.

“Do you recognize it?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “If I’d known there was going to be a quiz, I would’ve brushed up on my chemistry.”

“You have already passed.” Frey beamed at me. “This element is entirely novel. I am the first to isolate it and hence to comprehend its peculiar nature.”

“Which is . . . ?”

My prompting foreshortened any further boasting.

“Place it into the fabricator,” he said, ushering me forward. “Thus and so. Please now close the door and instruct the machine to scan its contents.”

I pushed the necessary buttons, then stepped back to watch.

The fabber whirred to itself for a moment. Then it beeped and the door opened. Frey gestured for me to look inside.

The fabber was empty.

“Where did it go?” I asked.

Frey winked, but didn’t answer the question. “Now, ask the fabricator to make you a copy of the ingot it just scanned.”

Puzzled, I shut the door and did as I was told. After another minute’s wait, the machine beeped once more.

Inside, nothing but the merest wisp of vapor.

Frey watched me with his hands folded in front of him, radiating an air of deliberate understatement. Like a conjurer announcing his coup de grace, he said, “I have discovered a material that cannot be scanned or copied.”

I wasn’t going to supply the applause because I genuinely didn’t see what the fuss was about.

“What’s the point of that? Something that can’t be d-matted is about is about as useful as . . . as . . . ”

I struggled to find a suitable simile. Coals to Newcastle? An icebox in Antarctica? Bandages on a mummy?

“Useful as money,” supplied the Inspector, only he wasn’t agreeing with me.

“Exactly,” said Frey with a gracious inclination of his head. “I have re-invented money.”

“What?” I said. “Why?”

I felt as shocked as if someone had announced the return of internal combustion engines or AIDS.

“Think about it, PK Sargent.” Frey’s lecturing tone resumed. “Humans are by nature creators and traders. Language, society, economy, laws—all exist because of our evolved capacity to pool invention. We drive to better the world around us and in the process better ourselves.

“But some inventions are more dangerous than others, and the fabber is the most dangerous of them all. It gives us everything we desire, allowing the infinite replication of anything we want. It should unfetter our innate creativity, making inventors of us all. But how do we really use it?”

He placed both hands atop the boxy machine, as though speaking from a lectern.

“We endlessly propagate the familiar. Why make something better when something good enough already exists? There is no incentive to innovate, because nothing—including novelty—has any value anymore. Newness is steadily drowning under sameness. Abundance has eroded our sense of value until all things are equally worthless.”

“Uh, and money fits in where, exactly?” I prompted him again.

“That which cannot be reproduced in a fabber is by definition a scarce resource,” he said with saintly patience. “Scarcity begets value. Value provokes desire. Desire motivates creation. Creation undoes stagnation.”

“Just like that?”

“You think me naïve.” His attitude only grew more self-assured. “The irony pleases me. I have named my discovery jejunium, after the Latin for hunger. Like paper notes or electronic data in the past, it will be a symbolic representation of what we truly value.”

I glanced at the Inspector, wanting him to put the crazy man straight. The world wasn’t drowning in crap just because we could make anything we wanted. If anything, there was less crap, since what a fabber made, it could also recycle. Archeologists would be sifting through the rubbish heaps of the twentieth century for centuries to come. Did Frey really want us to go down that path again?

“Tell me more about the material,” the Inspector said.

“Jejunium.”

“Yes. You called it an element, not a compound or an alloy, but I thought there were no elements left to discover."

“It took physicists one hundred and fifty years,” Frey said, “to advance from Rutherford’s confirmation of the nucleus to the invention of the fabricator. What have we achieved since then? Mere cataloguing! The element I have discovered is indeed new to science, and the details of its creation must remain secret, or else its value will be eroded.”

“So you alone intend to control the means of production,” said the Inspector, strolling among the scattered tables and chairs. He always walked when he thought. “Have you anticipated global demand? Can you make enough to meet it?”

“I have secured a reliable means of manufacture.”

“Restrained, of course. One wouldn’t want to flood the market.”

“Indeed not.”

“May I see another sample?”

Frey left his podium and rummaged in the chest.

“You seem unconcerned by security,” the Inspector said as he took possession of a second ingot, identical to the first. The box was presumably full of them. “Do you have provisions in mind for when this material is revealed to the world?”

When? I scowled. Surely the Inspector wasn’t taking Frey seriously.

“Naturally I have,” the inventor said, looking pleased. “I have also devised a system of denominations and exchanges for when the first transactions occur, and I will ask the public for designs to ensure the coins have cachet beyond their material value. I intended to announce these measures after the initial unveiling—which I hope to proceed with now. You have seen my demonstration and heard my argument. Do you have any objections?”

The Inspector considered the ingot impassively for a moment, moving not a muscle, not a hair. Then he raised his gaze to look at me.

“What do you think, PK Sargent?”

“I think he’s crazy,” I said without hesitation.

“You believe his claims lack substance?”

“No. I just don’t think we need money. Or banks, or taxes, or loan sharks, or inflation, or any of the other nonsense that goes with it.”

“Is that your only objection?”

“Well, yes. It's a pretty big one.”

“But our friend here is not actually breaking the law, since making one’s own currency is no longer a criminal offence.” He stopped and tapped his chin with the index finger of his right hand. “I am wondering now if I made a mistake. The tip-off I received was unmistakably a warning, but perhaps not to me. Perhaps I should have taken Mister Frey into protective custody rather than placed him under arrest.”

“Perhaps you should have,” said Frey. “For some time I have anticipated an attack like this. I have many competitors, not to mention enemies in the OneEarth administration.”

“I can see why,” the Inspector said, waving the ingot in one hand. “Very well. I see no reason to prevent you from announcing your discovery to the world at large. I will release the recording and allow you to broadcast live from now on.”

The inventor fairly capered with delight, while I could only glare at the Inspector even harder. First opening himself up to criticism, then practically admitting that he was wrong. What next—retirement to pursue a life of chartered accounting in Frey’s Brave New Old World?

But while I was eyeballing the Inspector, something very strange happened: His face changed. It was a subtle thing, little more than a tilt of the head, so his left eye came forward slightly, and a slight widening of both his eyes, all while staring unblinkingly back at me.

I raised my eyebrows questioningly, and he did it again, turning slightly so it wouldn’t be so obvious to Frey, who was fussing about with his fabber.

It was a nod, with emphasis. An encouragement.

Go on, he was telling me. Go on.

Go on what, I wanted to say. But didn’t.

When the man with the frozen face makes an expression like that, it’s up to me to work out what it means.

Now, I may not be the brightest spark in the campfire, but I am very tall. I spend all of my time looking down at short people looking up at me. I don’t think of it as a strength. You could even say it’s a disability, sometimes. It’s certainly something that I have had to find ways to accommodate, physically and psychologically.

I imagine it’s the same as if you lost your legs, say. You’d spend every waking moment thinking about how to cope, while watching people who still have legs go about their business so easily. Because you’d be bitter—at least I would be—and you’d be imagining what life would be like were circumstances otherwise.

Which leads me to the Inspector. Born with a face that doesn’t work, he’s been at a disadvantage his entire life, at least until he met Billie, my face-sculpting girlfriend. Having to strain to hold his own in non-verbal exchanges explains why he’s so good at Inspecting. He has to work so hard to open the book of his own face that he can understand ours more easily than we can.

When it came to Frey . . . well, the Inspector knew I thought the man was full of nonsense. I had said as much, with vocal chords and everything. What I hadn’t said to the Inspector was how disappointed I was in him. You don’t arrest someone without a reason, not normally, and even if you do, you don’t cave in and admit it so easily. You trust your instincts and pursue the case as far as you possibly can. You certainly don’t admit your mistakes in public. That’s just tedious for everyone.

All this was going through my mind at that moment, and it was written on my face in ways that the Inspector could read perfectly well.

Go on. Tell me. That’s what his expression was telling me.

Go ahead and say it.

All right, I thought, if you really want me to . . .

“This is pointless.”

My voice echoed harshly in the cluttered room.

“Pardon?” the Inspector said.

You heard me, I wanted to say, but he gave me the nod again, so I repeated what I had said, adding a little more into the bargain, since he wanted it so badly.

“This is completely pointless. I don’t understand why we’re here.”

“Well,” he said, “the successful reintroduction of money would fundamentally destabilize society . . . ”

“You don’t really think anyone’s actually going to use it, do you? Everything we want will still come out of a fabber. It’ll still be free.”

“But what about original ideas?” asked Frey. “What about things that cannot come from a fabricator because they don’t exist yet?”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Like your fancy metal. And who paid you to make that? No one. You did it because you wanted to do it.”

The Inspector tapped his teeth with the tip of his right index finger. “PK Sargent has an interesting point,” he said. “What motivated you to make the attempt in the first place, since there exists no guarantee that any invention will find an eager reception? I believe you are familiar with how it feels to have your work rejected.”

Frey flushed a deep crimson. “The world’s appetite for novelty has been stunted by a diet of homogeneity—”

“Whether that is so or not, the question remains. What drives anyone to invent in a culture that can create in a moment’s notice everything it thinks it desires? If not money, then . . . ?”

Frey knew the answer, but he wasn’t ready to admit it. Old people like him often aren’t.

“Fame,” I said.

“Yes,” said the Inspector, snapping his fingers as though I had just given him a profound revelation. “Yes, indeed. Fame, popularity, notoriety—call it what you will. Being noticed is something you can’t make in a fabber. When someone is watching a football game, they can’t be watching you, Mister Frey. Could this be why we’re really here, why those drones are buzzing around outside? Could this jejunium of yours be less about shaking up the world than making you a more prominent part of it as it is?”

“What you’re suggesting is preposterous,” Frey spluttered with high indignation.

“Is it?” I said, joining in the game. I liked where this was going. “I bet it was you who placed that anonymous warning. Getting yourself arrested by the PKs is a sure way to make people pay attention. Well, it worked. We noticed, Mister Frey, only we’re not idiots. It's not our job to make you look better.”

“But the metal,” he said in growing desperation. “How do you explain that?”

“There you must have shown true ingenuity,” the Inspector allowed him. “Some substances by law cannot be fabricated: poisons, for instance, or radioactive materials. Perhaps you used one of these, suspended in a lightweight, transparent material of novel design, to make it seem completely solid. An aerogel, say, that reacts on contact with the air. When each ingot is scanned, the fabber omits the offensive material, leaving the aerogel behind. The aerogel decrepitates into smoke on contact with the air. We saw it in the second instance—the merest puff, but enough to give the game away.” He waggled the ingot Frey had given him like a scolding finger. “Clever, and likely to survive a cursory examination. Hardly revolutionary, though.”

“Radioactive, you say?” I stared worriedly at my hands where they had touched the ingot.

“Or poisonous.” The Inspector tossed it with a metallic thunk onto the nearest table. “Perhaps I was right to arrest you after all, Mister Frey. Endangering the life of a peacekeeper is a serious crime.”

That broke him.

“It’s not dangerous, I swear,” he said, physically sagging. Even his moustache drooped. “The metal is a stable isotope of element 142, which is normally highly unstable. That I discovered. The aerogel I found in an old materials archive.”

The Inspector nodded. “You’re not so venal as to poison anyone to achieve your ends, then. That will serve you in good stead when your case comes before the Consensus Court.”

Frey looked startled. “You’re still arresting me? What for? You said yourself that creating money isn’t illegal.”

“It’s not about the money. You attempted to perpetrate a fraud on the scientific community.” The Inspector’s expression became very stern. “And besides, fame isn’t the only resource we can’t fabricate. There’s one other. We may spend it freely every moment of every day, but once it’s gone we can never get it back.”

“Time,” I guessed.

“Exactly, PK Sargent. Mister Frey, you invested a lot of your own in devising this scheme, and now you have wasted entirely too much of mine . . . ”

The Inspector took the inventor’s arm and guided him firmly back to the d-mat booth. I followed, thinking hard about everything I had just witnessed, everything that was even now spreading out into the Air. The booth’s door slid shut, surrounding us with an infinitude of reflections. In all of them, I was visibly biting my tongue.

The booth’s lights flashed. Justice had been served, I thought, on every front but one.

“You lied to me,” I accused the Inspector as we left the now-infamous Frey in the hands of the Court. Here there were no drones, and the Inspector had stopped recording.

“What do you mean?” he asked with an innocence I had learned to distrust.

“You know exactly what I mean. You called to tell me that you’d arrested Frey without knowing what he’d done yet. It was either then, or when you gave that little speech about defrauding the scientific community. That face you pulled was for everyone else’s benefit, not yours. So which was it? Did you know what Frey was up to before we arrived, or did you only work it out after?”

He spared us both the indignity of prevarication.

“After.”

“And that business about this being a war, how our enemy has to be faced without delay? Frey is a media-hungry kook who’s no enemy of anyone, except himself. You can’t have been talking about him.”

“Precisely. I was talking about the person out there who is, at this very moment, working on the real thing.”

“By which you don’t mean money.”

“No.”

“So why didn’t you tell me?”

“I knew you would correctly apprehend the severity of the situation.”

That was his way of saying I was right, but that he wasn’t necessarily wrong, either.

I had worked out some of it on the way back to HQ. The rest of it fell quickly into place. Reinventing money is the least of our worries where a material that can’t be fabricated is concerned. An assassin might use a jejunium gun as a murder weapon, safe in the knowledge that it will vanish during her escape. Giving someone an artificial heart made of unfabbable material would guarantee that the recipient could never travel by d-mat again. Industrial prototypes could be sabotaged by adding a small amount of the material that would render the copying process incomplete, putting buildings and even satellites at risk . . .

The possibilities are terrifying to imagine, and far too sensitive to preserve in the recording of what happened in Frey’s laboratory, hence the Inspector’s odd charade and meaningful glances.

“I am a peacekeeper like you,” he explained. “I invited you to join me today as the voice of the status quo. You performed that role perfectly. Frey turned out to be guilty of dignifying a dangerous idea, for which he will be mildly punished. The world is better off thinking that any material like jejunium is the province of dreamers and madmen.”

“It is, right?” I asked him. “Not possible, I mean.”

He glanced at me sideways, but said nothing. Keeping me on my toes, I guess. And fair enough, too. I felt slightly foolish for trying so hard to spot Frey’s sleight of hand that I’d nearly missed the trick the real illusionist in the room was pulling.

We stopped at a line of d-mat booths. I checked the time and realized that barely an hour had passed. If I hurried, I might get home before Billie even realized I had gone.

“Well, okay,” I said. “It’s been illuminating, as always. But next time you want an assistant for one of your little performances, at least give me notice so I can get out my spangly tights.”

He made a sound that might have been a cough. “You own such things?”

“I do, from when I took ballet classes as a kid. I was three feet shorter then, so take that as a warning.”

He coughed again, and I realized that he was laughing. His face simply hadn't caught up yet.

I left him and hurried off to Billie, wondering if we were the only people in the world to catch a glimpse of what lay behind the Inspector’s mask.

© 2013 by Sean Williams.

Sean Williams is a #1 New York Times-bestselling author with forty novels and eighty short stories under his belt, not to mention the odd poem. He writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror for adults, young adults, and children, and enjoys the occasional franchise too, such as Star Wars and Doctor Who. Born in the dry, flat lands of South Australia, where he still lives with his wife and family, he is currently working on the Troubletwisters series with Garth Nix and a PhD exploring the trope of the matter transmitter. He is also the Overseas Regional Director of SFWA. This story is set in the world of Twinmaker, his first original SF novel in four years. Twinmaker will be available from HarperCollins November 2013.

Catamounts
Marc Laidlaw

“I have my limits,” said Gorlen Vizenfirthe, hooking a full mug of cheap brew toward him with one of the petrified fingers of his stony right hand. A coarse black strand of beard-hair poked up from the foamy head like a sick fern’s frond. “And you, sir, are quickly approaching several of them at the same time.”

“The question is, how bad do you need the money?” The man whose beard had gone a long way toward sopping up Gorlen’s drink possessed but one eye in a scarred socket; the rest of his face was no prettier. “Two hundred fifty auricles for a day’s walk.” He lifted his beard to his lips and sucked noisily. “More than enough to buy seafare out of Nagahast without engaging in your illegal profession.”

Gorlen absently began a thoughtful pinxing of his eduldamer, which sat unwrapped on the tavern bench beside him. One-eye’s hand landed warningly on his wrist, silencing him, but not before numerous heads had turned fearfully in his direction. To strum more than a few notes in succession was to risk a steep fine under the Nagahast Nuisance-Noise Ordinances. Considering that he was down to his last few pents, he would more likely end up working off the fine in the sewers. Nagahast was a curse to a traveling bard; the sooner he abandoned it, the better. But he could hardly swim the Snool, and he hadn’t enough to pay a traveler’s fare. One-eye must have overheard him asking some sailors about crewman’s work. They had laughed him off: A man with one stone hand was worse than useless among ropes. But two hundred and fifty auris would take him across ten inland seas like the Snool, in luxurious first-class cabins.

“Aren’t you drinking this?” the man asked, eyeing the mug that Gorlen had pushed aside.

“Be my guest.” He looked away from the toothless mouth, but could not so easily avoid the loud slurping. It was a relief when he heard the mug slammed down again on the wooden table.

“Ah . . . for that, my friend, I thank you. And in return I extend the offer of easy money.” One-eye scratched an eczematous patch beneath his beard.

“If it’s so easy, why don’t you earn it yourself?”

“Well, now, for me it would be dangerous. But it’d be a childish task for you. Simply deliver a sealed parcel to old Dog, the wizard in the mountains. Run up, hand over the goods, hop back down. There you have it.”

“And who would pay me for this task?”

“Why, Dog himself. It’s half on delivery, you see.”

“What of the other half?”

“I already spent that. Oh, but I earned it, getting what he needed. I’ve already done the hard work. Now old Dog wants his wants in the worst way, but I daren’t go up to deliver them.”

“That’s the part that interests me,” Gorlen said. “Why ever not?”

“Because I’d be recognized. You, you’re a stranger. They won’t bother you, I’m sure of it.”

“They?” Gorlen said.

So much for easy money.

The plains rose gently toward the peaks above Nagahast, green giving way to rocky brown and then to solid grey heights. He looked back at the Snool, fog adrift over the bays and peninsulas, veiling the distant shores. Tomorrow he would sail into that mist, but for now he had a long climb ahead of him, among gigantic sharpnesses of rock. He moved up a grating trail, rock rattling and sliding constantly underfoot. The walls looked blacker pace by pace, while the whiteness of clouds that cross the gap intensified. Even this late in the morning, the granite gave off a chill more suited to midnight.

He hiked until his legs and his lungs did more than merely protest, then he sagged onto a flat slab of stone near a dripping spring. Swallowing a mouthful of dried fruit, he filled his cup from a rivulet tasting of ice, moss, and iron. As he sat contemplating the trail ahead, a warm body brushed against his ankles.

Gorlen jumped at the touch, recoiling onto the stone. A large grey cat with jade green eyes leapt up beside him. “Prrt,” it said.

Chuckling, Gorlen stroked the cat’s head. It was sleek-furred, strong, plump from a diet of mice and marmots; it seemed glad enough for human company to have been a housecat. Wondering if he had a spare bit of jerky, he started to unknot his travelsack. Suddenly the cat began to hiss at the other sack—the one he’d been hired to carry. It stood with arched back, hackles high, one paw poised defensively with claws extended.

“Now, kitty,” he said amiably. “That’s naught to do with you.”

He reached to stroke the cat again, but this time it rounded on him, spitting and yowling. One wicked claw tore into his sleeve; he gave thanks he’d worn a padded jacket for the climb. Leaping from the slab, he snatched the bag and held it out in case the cat decided to leap. But the beast shrank back growling, ears lowered, head pressed to the rock, staring up at him venomously.

“I was going to feed you,” Gorlen said reprovingly. The cat took another swipe at him. He let out a shout, feigning an attack, and the cat sprang from the far side of the rock. He heard no further sound.

Time to move on.

Now that was a changeable beast, he thought as he walked. Of course, many cats are fey that way. One moment they’re in purring ecstasy as you pet them—the next instant, you’ve got fangs sunk deep in the meat of your hand.

The jolt of adrenaline refreshed him marvelously, and he settled into a pace he imagined would carry him to Dog’s house well before sunset. He had not reckoned on the ascent’s increasing steepness. He came to crude stairs hewn from the rock; although he gained altitude quickly, the climbing was hard on his knees. By the time he sighted a landing above, he was once more in dire need of rest.

Then he saw the second cat.

It was a beautiful beast, thickly furred with spotless white, suited for hunting in the mountain snows. One eye was gold, the other green; both gleamed like stars. It seemed no more fearful of him than the first had been, but Gorlen was wary now, remembering the mercurial nature of most cats.

His wariness changed to pity as he climbed close enough to see that the poor cat was missing a limb, and sat propped unevenly on a single forepaw. He expected it either to flee or to greet him with a growl, but it betrayed nothing and sat immobile. He paused several steps below the landing. There was no way to skirt around the beast.

“Hello, puss,” he said.

The white cat lowered its lids. He mounted a step closer.

“Poor pus,” he said. “Little hoppy. How’d you lose your leg?”

The cat watched him intently, ears cocked. Their eyes were now at a level.

“Caught under a boulder, in a rock slide?” he said. “Nice kitty?”

Gorlen put out his right hand, the gargoyle-kissed limb of solid black stone. The cat merely sniffed. “Friends?” he said. It arched its back to rub against him. “Good kitty.”

As he leaned to pet the cat, his bags swung forward from his shoulder. The cat reared back and struck at his stone fingers, screeching. Gorlen lashed out, clubbing the beast in the head. The cat lost its uneven footing and toppled off the landing. Gorlen hurried up the trail as the cat tumbled some distance down the steps. He looked back to see it sitting up dazed, shaking its head. Then he turned a sharp angle and all was hidden.

Gorlen kept his pace for perhaps an hour, even past the point where the stairs finally came to an end. It was not hunger that finally made him stop and throw down his bags. There was something in the sorcerous sack that frightened, angered, or repelled the cats. Anti-feline amulets, for instance. If the wizard Dog ever wished to come down this trail, he must have needed such items to repulse this couple of ferocious cats.

Gorlen looked at the light, lumpy sack for some time. The mouth of the bag was intricately knotted, and the knots were sealed with brittle wax. It was none of his business what he carried, and he couldn’t consider jeopardizing his pay in order to satisfy a niggling curiosity. Nonetheless, he wished he could have access to the magic if it would ease his journey.

Stones rattled on the trail above. A dwarfish figure advanced slowly, with a peculiar and uncomfortable gait. Its growl was loud enough to echo in the confining chasm. Gorlen wished—not for the first time since taking his bardic oath—that he had not foresworn the carrying of weapons. He should have at least taken the time to select a sturdy walking stick that morning.

He sagged when he saw that the gnomelike creature was an orange tabby with orange eyes, its pupils gleaming like cut black jewels. He noted with more shock than pity that this aggressive beast lacked both forelegs. Having no other option, it walked on its hind feet, like a monkey or a man. Lacking arms, it also lacked an aura of real menace. Gorlen chuckled, his sense of bizarre irony overriding his instinctive distaste.

As the cat approached, Gorlen slung the magic sack over his shoulder. He did not find the cat particularly threatening, but he had learned discretion.

No sooner had he lifted the sack than the walking cat let out a wail and charged him. Gorlen screamed like a cat himself when the tabby sank its fangs into his calf. He threw it off at once, but it landed on its feet and came after him, hissing and howling.

Flight, and not discretion, now seemed the wisest course.

The cat gave a spirited chase, but they soon reached a place where the gorge widened slightly and the trail was heaped with broken boulders. It was hard enough for Gorlen to hop from stone to stone; but the pursuing cat immediately lost its footing and vanished into a chink.

After that, loose rock was everywhere, an unnerving symptom of frequent avalanches. Old snow lay between the rocks and dirty ice crusted the walls. Gorlen stooped with his cup to catch meltwater and drank it without breaking his erratic stride. He dug into his sack for nuts, fuelling himself without pausing. Inevitably, his pace slowed. He thought about the cats he’d passed, contemplating the progression of their mutilations, and it was thus with very little surprise that he spotted cat number four up ahead. His suspicions were confirmed when he saw that this once-handsome calico retained but a single limb—her left hind leg.

He wondered how long she had been watching him with her calm, meditative blue eyes. Perched at the edge of a rock-strewn ledge, her single leg stretched out behind her in a rare spot of sunlight, she licked her chops, presiding over a heap of small cracked bones.

“Now you,” he said, mainly to himself, “don’t frighten me at all.”

She gave him a look as if to say, Oh, really?

Stretching languorously, she extended her hind leg until her toe pads brushed an enormous granite boulder that teetered on the ledge. It was the lightest of touches, but the boulder began perceptibly to shift.

“Now, now,” Gorlen said. “Nice kitty.”

The cat yawned, ribcage stretching under the fur, hind leg reaching still further. The enormous rock grated, tipping. Gorlen skipped a few steps up the trail, nervously shooing at the cat. The calico rolled onto her back, a kitten’s playful move, and gave the boulder an unimpaired rabbit-kick.

Gorlen darted sideways, though there was nowhere really to dart. He found himself on the wall of the ravine, trying desperately to climb, like a spider trapped in a basin. The huge stone crashed from the ledge. Looking up at the oncoming rock, now seemingly afloat on a clattering tide of lesser fragments, he knew he could never climb high enough. Resting his weight on his stone hand, he threw his body higher. The boulder crunched over his arm and went on, carrying the storm of thunder, dust and gravel away down the gorge.

Gorlen looked down at his unscathed black stone hand, which knew nothing of pain. He had never been so grateful for the gargoyle affliction.

On her ledge, the cat no longer looked so haughty. As Gorlen strode angrily through settling rock dust, she slunk back as best she could. The thought scarcely penetrated his anger that it might be unwise to confront a pussycat that had only just now, ever so casually, kicked off an avalanche in his honor. He leapt onto the ledge, prepared to deliver a powerful block to the cripple’s frail-looking ribs.

But the cat looked so pathetic . . . One-legged, she regarded him with a bitter hatred that for a moment he could almost understand. Anger vanished.

He kept an eye on her as he climbed past, but she made no further move.

It occurred to him to wonder how the sorry cats had lost their limbs. Did they owe the losses to some improbable chain of natural events—rock falls, fights with vicious predators . . . or even with each other. But the wounds were cleanly healed, as if sewn and tended; the fur grew thick with no sign of scarring. And there was something ritualistic about the injuries. The cumulative amputations suggested a human agent. No wonder then they hated men, and lay in wait for any who might mount this path.

The sky grew purple, the clouds showed orange edges. Now came occasional promising glimpses of peaks above, which suggested that he was near the end of his climb. He would be out of here by nightfall, if his luck held.

He had become gradually aware, as the ravine darkened further, of soft rattling sounds somewhere near him on the trail. He could not be sure if the noises were above or behind him—signs of pursuit or of ambush. He softened his own steps, although he could be only so quiet on the loose rock.

It occurred to him that he was waiting for cat number five.

The very thought of such a creature filled him with horror, though he could not imagine how it might possibly harm him. Still, he had underestimated cat number four, to his peril.

It was a relief when his view of the evening sky continued to expand. He could feel wind now, blowing down from snowy peaks that became clearly visible above. But he felt no less vulnerable on the open slopes, where in the dusky light every twisted bit of blown, weathered wood looked like a snaky figure lying in wait. Due to fatigue and eyestrain, each of these shapes seemed to writhe and wriggle toward him in the gray light, moving sinuously, furtively through the stones.

Shortly after sunset, the slope leveled out in a forest of ancient dwarf pines. The trail continued into the clutching trees. I’m safe, Gorlen thought, for he had come to associate danger exclusively with the rocky defile and its denizens.

Yet, several minutes’ fast walk into the bleak woods, he recognized his relief as premature. It was far darker here than on the slopes; a scant few miserly stars blinked through the black needles. His eyes swarmed with weird lights and shapes, symptoms of hunger and exhaustion. Worst of all, the sounds he’d heard on the last part of the climb seemed still with him, though altered in character to suit the changed terrain, muffled now by mulch and moss.

It’s weariness, he told himself, but all the same he grabbed a shattered branch—and not for use as a walking stick. He was crossing an icy creek where darkness gathered like cold air when he heard a slithering crash behind him. He leapt to the far bank and spun back with a cry, brandishing the stick.

There was nothing behind him but the fading trail, and a sense of unseen danger drawing near. He searched the stunted trees, flinching from a dark ropy shape until he realized it was a beard of hanging moss. Shaking off his nervousness, he devoted himself to the trail.

Finally, as the last trace of light leached from the air, he saw a house ahead of him. Flames were kindling in the thick, bubbled windows; a thin drift of smoke uncoiled from the chimney. Gorlen raced himself to the door, and hammered till he heard an answer.

The fellow who opened the door was naked, but patched all over with so much hair that at first Gorlen thought he wore a moldering hide. The wizard Dog, who looked part dog himself, peered at Gorlen, then one furry finger darted out and snatched the sack from his shoulder.

“This—” Gorlen started.

“Yes, yes!”

The gruff Dog danced gleefully toward the fire, hugging his sack without a backward glance. Gorlen stepped in and shut the door behind him. The sorcerer continued to ignore him as he laid the bag on a table spread with stuffed birds, crushed powders, and less identifiable oddments.

“Took long enough,” he mumbled. “How many months has it been sine I sent you out?”

“That wasn’t me,” Gorlen said.

Dog craned around to peer at him. “I thought you looked too good to have weathered all the spells I’ve been slinging to draw you back here.”

“Yes, I still retain both my eyes.”

“Well, I’ve got my wands, and that’s what matters.” He busied himself examining the seals; satisfied with their virginity, he snapped them to bits and began to unknot the ties.

Gorlen cleared his throat loudly. “There is one more thing that matters,” he said. “My payment. Two hundred and fifty auricles.”

The magician rounded on him. “Payment? After all this time? After you delayed my work for how long? I wouldn’t give you half a green pentacle! You’ll be lucky if I don’t extract payment from you! I’ll find uses for your parts if you persist in pestering me!”

Gorlen was rarely dumbstruck, except in matters of money.

“No answer to that, eh? Wise fellow. Now leave the way you came, make no fuss, and I just might let you go unharmed. Off with you now, off-off, before I send something to snap at your heels!”

Gorlen did not move, but Dog must have thought that an order from him was congruent with the deed. He upended the sack, sending its contents tumbling over the table. Gorlen’s shock at being swindled gave way to a graver dismay when he learned what he had carried up the pass.

Ten furry wands lay scattered on the scarred, charred tabletop like jointed jackstraws. Chuckling, still oblivious to Gorlen, Dog arranged the wands in an obvious order: first the white one, then the pair of striped gold, followed by three of dappled calico, and the final four of purest shiny black.

Angry disgust swept through him like a fever. He nearly leapt on Dog’s repulsive back, but it was scabbed and matted from louse and flea infestations, and he couldn’t quite bring himself to touch the mage.

At that moment he heard soft scratching at the door.

“About that payment,” Gorlen said.

Dog remained bent over his workbench, doting on his treasure. “Are you still here?”

“I’ll consider the debt paid when some others have collected what they’re owed.”

“This is my last word on the matter: Be gone!”

“Gladly,” Gorlen said, and opened the door.

The grey cat sat on the stoop, blinking up at him. Gorlen stepped outside and pushed the door wide, bowing low. The cat gave a soft meow of recognition, then stepped quietly—as only a cat can step—into the cottage. Behind it came the white cat, pointedly ignoring him as it limped up the steps and went in. “I do apologize,” Gorlen whispered. Next came the orange tabby, skipping eagerly forward on its hind legs, rushing through the door. And then the potent calico, thrusting herself along with her sole limb, leaping more agilely than he might have suspected in a kind of pouncing pogo motion.

There was a moment when Gorlen thought the fifth cat would never appear; then he realized that he was looking at it, so black that it appeared of a piece with the darkness. It slithered snakelike up the trail, its sad shoulder blades digging rapidly into the earth like blunt little spades under the folds of furry skin. Its whiskers were frayed and twisted; its bony frame and dusty black coat suggested an unimaginably hard life. The kinked tail had been severed midway and crushed at several points along its remaining length. Even so, the cat impressed Gorlen with reserves of unguessable strength. He received the distinct impression that it had been waiting for this moment.

The cat, in sliding up the steps, suddenly swerved toward Gorlen. He leapt back fearfully, but there was nowhere to go. It darted toward his feet, and he nearly shrieked when it touched him.

But all the poor beast did was twine betwixt his ankles, emitting one loud purr, like a contented puss on its way to a full saucer.

Once all were inside, Gorlen eased the door shut. The last thing he saw was the five cats advancing slowly, each in its own unique fashion, toward the preoccupied Dog. Their utter silence inspired his own retreat.

© 1996 by Marc Laidlaw.

Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Marc Laidlaw is best known as one of the creators and lead writer on the Half-Life videogame series, but he initially got that gig on the strength of his short stories and novels of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. His novel The 37th Mandala won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Novel. A writer at Valve since 1997 (currently working on for the online game Dota 2), his short stories continue to appear in various magazines and online venues.

The Litigation Master and the Monkey King
Ken Liu

The tiny cottage at the edge of Sanli Village—away from the villagers’ noisy houses and busy clan shrines and next to the cool pond filled with lily pads, pink lotus flowers, and playful carp—would have made an ideal romantic summer hideaway for some dissolute poet and his silk-robed mistress from nearby bustling Yangzhou.

Indeed, having such a country lodge was the fashion among the literati in the lower Yangtze region in this second decade of the glorious reign of the Qianlong Emperor. Everyone agreed—as they visited each other in their vacation homes and sipped tea—that he was the best Emperor of the Qing Dynasty: so wise, so vigorous, and so solicitous of his subjects! And as the Qing Dynasty, founded by Manchu sages, was without a doubt the best dynasty ever to rule China, the scholars competed to compose poems that best showed their gratitude for having the luck to bear witness to this golden age, gift of the greatest Emperor who ever lived.

Alas, any scholar interested in this cottage must be disappointed for it was decrepit. The bamboo grove around it was wild and unkempt; the wooden walls crooked, rotting, and full of holes; the thatching over the roof uneven, with older layers peeking out through holes in the newer layers—

—not unlike the owner and sole inhabitant of the cottage, actually. Tian Haoli was in his fifties but looked ten years older. He was gaunt, sallow, his queue as thin as a pig’s tail, and his breath often smelled of the cheapest rice wine and even cheaper tea. An accident in youth had lamed his right leg, but he preferred to shuffle slowly rather than using a cane. His robe was patched all over, though his under-robe still showed through innumerable holes.

Unlike most in the village, Tian knew how to read and write, but as far as anyone knew, he never passed any level of the Imperial Examinations. From time to time, he would write a letter for some family or read an official notice in the teahouse in exchange for half a chicken or a bowl of dumplings.

But that was not how he really made his living.

The morning began like any other. As the sun rose lazily, the fog hanging over the pond dissipated like dissolving ink. Bit by bit, the pink lotus blossoms, the jade-green bamboo stalks, and the golden-yellow cottage roof emerged from the fog.

Knock, knock.

Tian stirred but did not wake up. The Monkey King was hosting a banquet, and Tian was going to eat his fill.

Ever since Tian was a little boy, he has been obsessed with the exploits of the Monkey King, the trickster demon who had seventy-two transformations and defeated hundreds of monsters, who had shaken the throne of the Jade Emperor with a troop of monkeys.

And Monkey liked good food and loved good wine, a must in a good host.

Knock, knock.

Tian ignored the knocking. He was about to bite into a piece of drunken chicken dipped in four different exquisite sauces—

You going to answer that? Monkey said.

As Tian grew older, Monkey would visit him in his dreams, or, if he was awake, speak to him in his head. While others prayed to the Goddess of Mercy or the Buddha, Tian enjoyed conversing with Monkey, who he felt was a demon after his own heart.

Whatever it is, it can wait, said Tian.

I think you have a client, said Monkey.

Knock-knock-knock—

The insistent knocking whisked away Tian’s chicken and abruptly ended his dream. His stomach growled, and he cursed as he rubbed his eyes.

“Just a moment!” Tian fumbled out of bed and struggled to put on his robe, muttering to himself all the while. “Why can’t they wait till I’ve woken up properly and pissed and eaten? These unlettered fools are getting more and more unreasonable . . . I must demand a whole chicken this time . . . It was such a nice dream . . . ”

I’ll save some plum wine for you, said Monkey.

You better.

Tian opened the door. Li Xiaoyi, a woman so timid that she apologized even when some rambunctious child ran into her, stood there in a dark green dress, her hair pinned up in the manner prescribed for widows. Her fist was lifted and almost smashed into Tian’s nose.

“Aiya!” Tian said. “You owe me the best drunk chicken in Yangzhou!” But Li’s expression, a combination of desperation and fright, altered his tone. “Come on in.”

He closed the door behind the woman and poured a cup of tea for her.

Men and women came to Tian as a last resort, for he helped them when they had nowhere else to turn, when they ran into trouble with the law.

The Qianlong Emperor might be all-wise and all-seeing, but he still needed the thousands of yamen courts to actually govern. Presided over by a magistrate, a judge-administrator who held the power of life and death over the local citizens in his charge, a yamen court was a mysterious, opaque place full of terror for the average man and woman.

Who knew the secrets of the Great Qing Code? Who understood how to plead and prove and defend and argue? When the magistrate spent his evenings at parties hosted by the local gentry, who could predict how a case brought by the poor against the rich would fare? Who could intuit the right clerk to bribe to avoid torture? Who could fathom the correct excuse to give to procure a prison visit?

No, one did not go near the yamen courts unless one had no other choice. When you sought justice, you gambled everything.

And you needed the help of a man like Tian Haoli.

Calmed by the warmth of the tea, Li Xiaoyi told Tian her story in halting sentences.

She had been struggling to feed herself and her two daughters on the produce from a tiny plot of land. To survive a bad harvest, she had mortgaged her land to Jie, a wealthy, distant cousin of her dead husband, who promised that she could redeem her land at any time, interest free. As Li could not read, she had gratefully inked her thumbprint to the contract her cousin handed her.

“He said it was just to make it official for the tax collector,” Li said.

Ah, a familiar story, said the Monkey King.

Tian sighed and nodded.

“I paid him back at the beginning of this year, but yesterday, Jie came to my door with two bailiffs from the yamen. He said that my daughters and I had to leave our house immediately because we had not been making the payments on the loan. I was shocked, but he took out the contract and said that I had promised to pay him back double the amount loaned in one year or else the land would become his forever. ‘It’s all here in black characters on white paper,’ he said, and waved the contract in my face. The bailiffs said that if I don’t leave by tomorrow, they’ll arrest me and sell me and my daughters to a blue house to satisfy the debt.” She clenched her fists. “I don’t know what to do!”

Tian refilled her teacup and said, “We’ll have to go to court and defeat him.”

You sure about this? said the Monkey King. You haven’t even seen the contract.

You worry about the banquets, and I’ll worry about the law.

“How?” Li asked. “Maybe the contract does say what he said.”

“I’m sure it does. But don’t worry, I’ll think of something.”

To those who came to Tian for help, he was a songshi, a litigation master. But to the yamen magistrate and the local gentry, to the men who wielded money and power, Tian was a songgun, a “litigating hooligan.”

The scholars who sipped tea and the merchants who caressed their silver taels despised Tian for daring to help the illiterate peasants draft complaints, devise legal strategies, and prepare for testimony and interrogation. After all, according to Confucius, neighbors should not sue neighbors. A conflict was nothing more than a misunderstanding that needed to be harmonized by a learned Confucian gentleman. But men like Tian Haoli dared to make the crafty peasants think that they could haul their superiors into court, and could violate the proper hierarchies of respect! The Great Qing Code made it clear that champerty, maintenance, barratry, pettifoggery—whatever name you used to describe what Tian did—were crimes.

But Tian understood the yamen courts were parts of a complex machine. Like the watermills that dotted the Yangtze River, complicated machines had patterns, gears, and levers. They could be nudged and pushed to do things, provided you were clever. As much as the scholars and merchants hated Tian, sometimes they also sought his help, and paid him handsomely for it, too.

“I can’t pay you much.”

Tian chuckled. “The rich pay my fee when they use my services but hate me for it. In your case, it’s payment enough to see this moneyed cousin of yours foiled.”

Tian accompanied Li to the yamen court. Along the way, they passed the town square, where a few soldiers were putting up posters of wanted men.

Li glanced at the posters and slowed down. “Wait, I think I may know—”

“Shush!” Tian pulled her along. “Are you crazy? Those aren’t the magistrate’s bailiffs, but real Imperial soldiers. How can you possibly recognize a man wanted by the Emperor?”

“But—”

“I’m sure you’re mistaken. If one of them hears you, even the greatest litigation master in China won’t be able to help you. You have trouble enough. When it comes to politics, it’s best to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”

That’s a philosophy a lot of my monkeys used to share, said the Monkey King. But I disagree with it.

You would, you perpetual rebel, thought Tian Haoli. But you can grow a new head when it’s cut off, a luxury most of us don’t share.

Outside the yamen court, Tian picked up the drumstick and began to beat the Drum of Justice, petitioning the court to hear his complaint.

Half an hour later, an angry Magistrate Yi stared at the two people kneeling on the paved-stone floor below the dais: the widow trembling in fear, and that troublemaker, Tian, his back straight with a false look of respect on his face. Magistrate Yi had hoped to take the day off to enjoy the company of a pretty girl at one of the blue houses, but here he was, forced to work. He had a good mind to order both of them flogged right away, but he had to at least keep up the appearance of being a caring magistrate lest one of his disloyal underlings make a report to the judicial inspector.

“What is your complaint, guileful peasant?” asked the magistrate, gritting his teeth.

Tian shuffled forward on his knees and kowtowed. “Oh, Most Honored Magistrate,” he began—Magistrate Yi wondered how Tian managed to make the phrase sound almost like an insult—”Widow Li cries out for justice, justice, justice!”

“And why are you here?”

“I’m Li Xiaoyi’s cousin, here to help her speak, for she is distraught over how she’s been treated.”

Magistrate Yi fumed. This Tian Haoli always claimed to be related to the litigant to justify his presence in court and avoid the charge of being a litigating hooligan. He slammed his hardwood ruler, the symbol of his authority, against the table. “You lie! How many cousins can you possibly have?”

“I lie not.”

“I warn you, if you can’t prove this relation in the records of the Li clan shrine, I’ll have you given forty strokes of the cane.” Magistrate Yi was pleased with himself, thinking that he had finally come up with a way to best the crafty litigation master. He gave a meaningful look to the bailiffs standing to the sides of the court, and they pounded their staffs against the ground rhythmically, emphasizing the threat.

But Tian seemed not worried at all. “Most Sagacious Magistrate, it was Confucius who said that ‘Within the Four Seas, all men are brothers.’ If all men were brothers at the time of Confucius, then it stands to reason that being descended from them, Li Xiaoyi and I are related. With all due respect, surely, Your Honor isn’t suggesting that the genealogical records of the Li family are more authoritative than the words of the Great Sage?”

Magistrate Yi’s face turned red, but he could not think of an answer. Oh, how he wished he could find some excuse to punish this sharp-tongued songgun, who always seemed to turn black into white and right into wrong. The Emperor needed better laws to deal with men like him.

“Let’s move on.” The magistrate took a deep breath to calm himself. “What is this injustice she claims? Her cousin Jie read me the contract. It’s perfectly clear what happened.”

“I’m afraid there’s been a mistake,” Tian said. “I ask that the contract be brought so it can be examined again.”

Magistrate Yi sent one of the bailiffs to bring back the wealthy cousin with the contract. Everyone in court, including Widow Li, looked at Tian in puzzlement, unsure what he planned. But Tian simply stroked his beard, appearing to be without a care in the world.

You do have a plan, yes? said the Monkey King.

Not really. I’m just playing for time.

Well, said Monkey, I always like to turn my enemies’ weapons against them. Did I tell you about the time I burned Nezha with his own fire-wheels?

Tian dipped his hand inside his robe, where he kept his writing kit.

The bailiff brought back a confused, sweating Jie, who had been interrupted during a luxurious meal of swallow-nest soup. His face was still greasy, as he hadn’t even gotten a chance to wipe himself. Jie knelt before the magistrate next to Tian and Li and lifted the contract above his head for the bailiff.

“Show it to Tian,” the magistrate ordered.

Tian accepted the contract and began to read it. He nodded his head from time to time, as though the contract was the most fascinating poetry.

Though the legalese was long and intricate, the key phrase was only eight characters long:

The mortgage was structured as a sale with a right of redemption, and this part provided that the widow sold her cousin “the crops above, and the field below.”

“Interesting, most interesting,” said Tian as he held the contract and continued to move his head about rhythmically.

Magistrate Yi knew he was being baited, yet he couldn’t help but ask, “What is so interesting?”

“Oh Great, Glorious Magistrate, you who reflect the truth like a perfect mirror, you must read the contract yourself.”

Confused, Magistrate Yi had the bailiff bring him the contract. After a few moments, his eyes bulged out. Right there, in clear black characters, was the key phrase describing the sale:

“The crops above, but not the field,” muttered the magistrate.

Well, the case was clear. The contract did not say what Jie claimed. All that Jie had a right to were the crops, but not the field itself. Magistrate Yi had no idea how this could have happened, but his embarrassed fury needed an outlet. The sweaty, greasy-faced Jie was the first thing he laid his eyes on.

“How dare you lie to me?” Yi shouted, slamming his ruler down on the table. “Are you trying to make me look like a fool?”

It was now Jie’s turn to shake like a leaf in the wind, unable to speak.

“Oh, now you have nothing to say? You’re convicted of obstruction of justice, lying to an Imperial official, and attempting to defraud another of her property. I sentence you to a hundred and twenty strokes of the cane and confiscation of half of your property.”

“Mercy, mercy! I don’t know what happened—” The piteous cries of Jie faded as the bailiffs dragged him out of the yamen to jail.

Litigation Master Tian’s face was impassive, but inside he smiled and thanked Monkey. Discreetly, he rubbed the tip of his finger against his robe to eliminate the evidence of his trick.

A week later, Tian Haoli was awakened from another banquet-dream with the Monkey King by persistent knocking. He opened the door to find Li Xiaoyi standing there, her pale face drained of blood.

“What’s the matter? Is your cousin again—”

“Master Tian, I need your help.” Her voice was barely more than a whisper. “It’s my brother.”

“Is it a gambling debt? A fight with a rich man? Did he make a bad deal? Was he—”

“Please! You have to come with me!”

Tian Haoli was going to say no because a clever songshi never got involved in cases he didn’t understand—a quick way to end a career. But the look on Li’s face softened his resolve. “All right. Lead the way.”

Tian made sure that there was no one watching before he slipped inside Li Xiaoyi’s hut. Though he didn’t have much of a reputation to worry about, Xiaoyi didn’t need the village gossips wagging their tongues.

Inside, a long, crimson streak could be seen across the packed-earth floor, leading from the doorway to the bed against the far wall. A man lay asleep on the bed, bloody bandages around his legs and left shoulder. Xiaoyi’s two children, both girls, huddled in a shadowy corner of the hut, their mistrustful eyes peeking out at Tian.

One glance at the man’s face told Tian all he needed to know: It was the same face on those posters the soldiers were putting up.

Tian Haoli sighed. “Xiaoyi, what kind of trouble have you brought me now?”

Gently, Xiaoyi shook her brother, Xiaojing, awake. He became alert almost immediately, a man used to light sleep and danger on the road.

“Xiaoyi tells me that you can help me,” the man said, gazing at Tian intently.

Tian rubbed his chin as he appraised Xiaojing. “I don’t know.”

“I can pay.” Xiaojing struggled to turn on the bed and lifted a corner of a cloth bundle. Tian could see the glint of silver underneath.

“I make no promises. Not every disease has a cure, and not every fugitive can find a loophole. It depends on who’s after you and why.” Tian walked closer and bent down to examine the promised payment, but the tattoos on Xiaojing’s scarred face, signs that he was a convicted criminal, caught his attention. “You were sentenced to exile.”

“Yes, ten years ago, right after Xiaoyi’s marriage.”

“If you have enough money, there are doctors that can do something about those tattoos, though you won’t look very handsome afterwards.”

“I’m not very worried about looks right now.”

“What was it for?”

Xiaojing laughed and nodded at the table next to the window, upon which a thin book lay open. The wind fluttered its pages. “If you’re as good as my sister says, you can probably figure it out.”

Tian glanced at the book and then turned back to Xiaojing.

“You were exiled to the border near Vietnam,” Tian said to himself as he deciphered the tattoos. “Eleven years ago . . . the breeze fluttering the pages . . . ah, you must have been a servant of Xu Jun, the Hanlin Academy scholar.”

Eleven years ago, during the reign of the Yongzheng Emperor, someone had whispered in the Emperor’s ear that the great scholar Xu Jun was plotting rebellion against the Manchu rulers. But when the Imperial guards seized Xu’s house and ransacked it, they could find nothing incriminating.

However, the Emperor could never be wrong, and so his legal advisors had to devise a way to convict Xu. Their solution was to point at one of Xu’s seemingly innocuous lyric poems:

Breeze, you know not how to read,

So why do you mess with my book?

The first character in the word for “breeze,” qing, was the same as the name of the dynasty. The clever legalists serving the Emperor—and Tian did have a begrudging professional admiration for their skill—construed it as a treasonous composition mocking the Manchu rulers as uncultured and illiterate. Xu and his family were sentenced to death, his servants exiled.

“Xu’s crime was great, but it has been more than ten years.” Tian paced beside the bed. “If you simply broke the terms of your exile, it might not be too difficult to bribe the right officials and commanders to look the other way.”

“The men after me cannot be bribed.”

“Oh?” Tian looked at the bandaged wounds covering the man’s body. “You mean . . . the Blood Drops.”

Xiaojing nodded.

The Blood Drops were the Emperor’s eyes and talons. They moved through the dark alleys of cities like ghosts and melted into the streaming caravans on roads and canals, hunting for signs of treason. They were the reason that teahouses posted signs for patrons to avoid talk of politics and neighbors looked around and whispered when they complained about taxes. They listened, watched, and sometimes came to people’s doors in the middle of the night, and those they visited were never seen again.

Tian waved his arms impatiently. “You and Xiaoyi are wasting my time. If the Blood Drops are after you, I can do nothing. Not if I want to keep my head attached to my neck.” Tian headed for the door of the hut.

“I’m not asking you to save me,” said Xiaojing.

Tian paused.

“Eleven years ago, when they came to arrest Master Xu, he gave me a book and told me it was more important than his life, than his family. I kept the book hidden and took it into exile with me.

“A month ago, two men came to my house, asking me to turn over everything I had from my dead master. Their accents told me they were from Beijing, and I saw in their eyes the cold stare of the Emperor’s falcons. I let them in and told them to look around, but while they were distracted with my chests and drawers, I escaped with the book.

“I’ve been on the run ever since, and a few times they almost caught me, leaving me with these wounds. The book they’re after is over there on the table. That’s what I want you to save.”

Tian hesitated by the door. He was used to bribing yamen clerks and prison guards and debating Magistrate Yi. He liked playing games with words and drinking cheap wine and bitter tea. What business did a lowly songgun have with the Emperor and the intrigue of the Court?

I was once happy on Fruit-and-Flower Mountain, spending all day in play with my fellow monkeys, said the Monkey King. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t been so curious about what lay in the wider world.

But Tian was curious, and he walked over to the table and picked up the book. An Account of Ten Days at Yangzhou, it said, by Wang Xiuchu.

A hundred years earlier, in 1645, after claiming the Ming Chinese capital of Beijing, the Manchu Army was intent on completing its conquest of China.

Prince Dodo and his forces came to Yangzhou, a wealthy city of salt merchants and painted pavilions, at the meeting point of the Yangtze River and the Grand Canal. The Chinese commander, Grand Secretary Shi Kefa, vowed to resist to the utmost. He rallied the city’s residents to reinforce the walls and tried to unite the remaining Ming warlords and militias.

His efforts came to naught on May 20, 1645, when the Manchu forces broke through the city walls after a seven-day siege. Shi Kefa was executed after refusing to surrender. To punish the residents of Yangzhou and to teach the rest of China a lesson about the price of resisting the Manchu Army, Prince Dodo gave the order to slaughter the entire population of the city.

One of the residents, Wang Xiuchu, survived by moving from hiding place to hiding place and bribing the soldiers with whatever he had. He also recorded what he saw:

One Manchu soldier with a sword was in the lead, another with a lance was in the back, and a third roamed in the middle to prevent the captives from escaping. The three of them herded dozens of captives like dogs and sheep. If any captive walked too slow, they would beat him immediately, or else kill him on the spot.

The women were strung together with ropes, like a strand of pearls. They stumbled as they walked through the mud, and filth covered their bodies and clothes. Babies were everywhere on the ground, and as horses and people trampled over them, their brains and organs mixed into the earth, and the howling of the dying filled the air.

Every gutter or pond we passed was filled with corpses, their arms and legs entangled. The blood mixing with the green water turned into a painter’s palette. So many bodies filled the canal that it turned into flat ground.

The mass massacre, raping, pillaging, and burning of the city lasted six days.

On the second day of the lunar month, the new government ordered all the temples to cremate the bodies. The temples had sheltered many women, though many had also died from hunger and fright. The final records of the cremations included hundreds of thousands of bodies, though this figure does not include all those who had committed suicide by jumping into wells or canals or through self-immolation and hanging to avoid a worse fate. . . .

On the fourth day of the lunar month, the weather finally turned sunny. The bodies piled by the roadside, having soaked in rainwater, had inflated and the skin on them was a bluish black and stretched taut like the surface of a drum. The flesh inside rotted and the stench was overwhelming. As the sun baked the bodies, the smell grew worse. Everywhere in Yangzhou, the survivors were cremating bodies. The smoke permeated inside all the houses and formed a miasma. The smell of rotting bodies could be detected a hundred li away.

Tian’s hands trembled as he turned over the last page.

“Now you see why the Blood Drops are after me,” said Xiaojing, his voice weary. “The Manchus have insisted that the Yangzhou Massacre is a myth, and anyone speaking of it is guilty of treason. But here is an eyewitness account that will reveal their throne was built on a foundation of blood and skulls.”

Tian closed his eyes and thought about Yangzhou, with its teahouses full of indolent scholars arguing with singing girls about rhyme schemes, with its palatial mansions full of richly-robed merchants celebrating another good trading season, with its hundreds of thousands of inhabitants happily praying for the Manchu Emperor’s health. Did they know that each day, as they went to the markets and laughed and sang and praised this golden age they lived in, they were treading on the bones of the dead, they were mocking the dying cries of the departed, they were denying the memories of ghosts? He himself had not even believed the stories whispered in his childhood about Yangzhou’s past, and he was quite sure that most young men in Yangzhou now have never even heard of them.

Now that he knew the truth, could he allow the ghosts to continue to be silenced?

But then he also thought about the special prisons the Blood Drops maintained, the devious tortures designed to prolong the journey from life to death, the ways that the Manchu Emperors always got what they wanted in the end. The Emperor’s noble Banners had succeeded in forcing all the Chinese to shave their heads and wear queues to show submission to the Manchus, and to abandon their hanfu for Manchu clothing on pain of death. They had cut the Chinese off from their past, made them a people adrift without the anchor of their memories. They were more powerful than the Jade Emperor and ten thousand heavenly soldiers.

It would be so easy for them to erase this book, to erase him, a lowly songgun, from the world, like a momentary ripple across a placid pond.

Let others have their fill of daring deeds; he was a survivor.

“I’m sorry,” Tian said to Xiaojing, his voice low and hoarse. “I can’t help you.”

Tian Haoli sat down at his table to eat a bowl of noodles. He had flavored it with fresh lotus seeds and bamboo shoots, and the fragrance was usually refreshing, perfect for a late lunch.

The Monkey King appeared in the seat opposite him: fierce eyes, wide mouth, a purple cape that declared him to be the Sage Equal to Heaven, rebel against the Jade Emperor.

This didn’t happen often. Usually Monkey spoke to Tian only in his mind.

“You think you’re not a hero,” the Monkey King said.

“That’s right,” replied Tian. He tried to keep the defensiveness out of his voice. “I’m just an ordinary man making a living by scrounging for crumbs in the cracks of the law, happy to have enough to eat and a few coppers left for drink. I just want to live.”

“I’m not a hero either,” the Monkey King said. “I just did my job when needed.”

“Ha!” said Tian. “I know what you’re trying to do, but it’s not going to work. Your job was to protect the holiest monk on a perilous journey, and your qualifications consisted of peerless strength and boundless magic. You could call on the aid of the Buddha and Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, whenever you needed to. Don’t you compare yourself to me.”

“Fine. Do you know of any heroes?”

Tian slurped some noodles and pondered the question. What he had read that morning was fresh in his mind. “I guess Grand Secretary Shi Kefa was a hero.”

“How? He promised the people of Yangzhou that as long as he lived, he would not let harm come to them, and yet when the city fell, he tried to escape on his own. He seems to me more a coward than a hero.”

Tian put down his bowl. “That’s not fair. He held the city when he had no reinforcements or aid. He pacified the warlords harassing the people in Yangzhou and rallied them to their defense. In the end, despite a moment of weakness, he willingly gave his life for the city, and you can’t ask for more than that.”

The Monkey King snorted contemptuously. “Of course you can. He should have seen that fighting was futile. If he hadn’t resisted the Manchu invaders and instead surrendered the city, maybe not so many would have died. If he hadn’t refused to bow down to the Manchus, maybe he wouldn’t have been killed.” The Monkey King smirked. “Maybe he wasn’t very smart and didn’t know how to survive.”

Blood rushed to Tian’s face. He stood up and pointed a finger at the Monkey King. “Don’t you talk about him that way. Who’s to say that had he surrendered, the Manchus wouldn’t have slaughtered the city anyway? You think lying down before a conquering army bent on rape and pillage is the right thing to do? To turn your argument around, the heavy resistance in Yangzhou slowed the Manchu Army and might have allowed many people to escape to safety in the south, and the city’s defiance might have made the Manchus willing to give better terms to those who did surrender later. Grand Secretary Shi was a real hero!”

The Monkey King laughed. “Listen to you, arguing like you are in Magistrate Yi’s yamen. You’re awfully worked up about a man dead for a hundred years.”

“I won’t let you denigrate his memory that way, even if you’re the Sage Equal to Heaven.”

The Monkey King’s face turned serious. “You speak of memory. What do you think about Wang Xiuchu, who wrote the book you read?”

“He was just an ordinary man like me, surviving by bribes and hiding from danger.”

“Yet he recorded what he saw, so that a hundred years later the men and women who died in those ten days can be remembered. Writing that book was a brave thing to do—look at how the Manchus are hunting down someone today just for reading it. I think he was a hero, too.”

After a moment, Tian nodded. “I hadn’t thought about it that way, but you’re right.”

“There are no heroes, Tian Haoli. Grand Secretary Shi was both courageous and cowardly, capable and foolish. Wang Xiuchu was both an opportunistic survivor and a man of greatness of spirit. I’m mostly selfish and vain, but sometimes even I surprise myself. We’re all just ordinary men—well, I’m an ordinary demon—faced with extraordinary choices. In those moments, sometimes heroic ideals demand that we become their avatars.”

Tian sat down and closed his eyes. “I’m just an old and frightened man, Monkey. I don’t know what to do.”

“Sure you do. You just have to accept it.”

“Why me? What if I don’t want to?”

The Monkey King’s face turned somber, and his voice grew faint. “Those men and women of Yangzhou died a hundred years ago, Tian Haoli, and nothing can be done to change that. But the past lives on in the form of memories, and those in power are always going to want to erase and silence the past, to bury the ghosts. Now that you know about that past, you’re no longer an innocent bystander. If you do not act, you’re complicit with the Emperor and his Blood Drops in this new act of violence, this deed of erasure. Like Wang Xiuchu, you’re now a witness. Like him, you must choose what to do. You must decide if, on the day you die, you will regret your choice.”

The figure of the Monkey King faded away, and Tian was left alone in his hut, remembering.

“I have written a letter to an old friend in Ningbo,” said Tian. “Bring it with you to the address on the envelope. He’s a good surgeon and will erase these tattoos from your face as a favor to me.”

“Thank you,” said Li Xiaojing. “I will destroy the letter as soon as I can, knowing how much danger this brings you. Please accept this as payment.” He turned to his bundle and retrieved five taels of silver.

Tian held up a hand. “No, you’ll need all the money you can get.” He handed over a small bundle. “It’s not much, but it’s all I have saved.”

Li Xiaojing and Li Xiaoyi both looked at the litigation master, not understanding.

Tian continued. “Xiaoyi and the children can’t stay here in Sanli because someone will surely report that she harbored a fugitive when the Blood Drops start asking questions. No, all of you must leave immediately and go to Ningbo, where you will hire a ship to take you to Japan. Since the Manchus have sealed the coast, you will need to pay a great deal to a smuggler.”

“To Japan!?”

“So long as that book is with you, there is nowhere in China where you’ll be safe. Of all the states around, only Japan would dare to defy the Manchu Emperor. Only there will you and the book be safe.”

Xiaojing and Xiaoyi nodded. “You will come with us, then?”

Tian gestured at his lame leg and laughed. “Having me along will only slow you down. No, I’ll stay here and take my chances.”

“The Blood Drops will not let you go if they suspect you helped us.”

Tian smiled. “I’ll come up with something. I always do.”

A few days later, when Tian Haoli was just about to sit down and have his lunch, soldiers from the town garrison came to his door. They arrested him without explanation and brought him to the yamen.

Tian saw that Magistrate Yi wasn’t the only one sitting behind the judging table on the dais this time. With him was another official, whose hat indicated that he came directly from Beijing. His cold eyes and lean build reminded Tian of a falcon.

May my wits defend me again, Tian whispered to the Monkey King in his mind.

Magistrate Yi slammed his ruler on the table. “Deceitful Tian Haoli, you’re hereby accused of aiding the escape of dangerous fugitives and of plotting acts of treason against the Great Qing. Confess your crimes immediately so that you may die quickly.”

Tian nodded as the magistrate finished his speech. “Most Merciful and Far-Sighted Magistrate, I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You presumptuous fool! Your usual tricks will not work this time. I have iron-clad proof that you gave comfort and aid to the traitor Li Xiaojing and read a forbidden, treasonous, false text.”

“I have indeed read a book recently, but there was nothing treasonous in it.”

“What?”

“It was a book about sheep herding and pearl stringing. Plus, some discussions about filling ponds and starting fires.”

The other man behind the table narrowed his eyes, but Tian went on as if he had nothing to hide. “It was very technical and very boring.”

“You lie!” The veins on Magistrate Yi’s neck seemed about to burst.

“Most Brilliant and Perspicacious Magistrate, how can you say that I lie? Can you tell me the contents of this forbidden book, so that I may verify if I have read it?”

“You . . . you . . . ” The magistrate’s mouth opened and closed like the lips of a fish.

Of course Magistrate Yi wouldn’t have been told what was in the book—that was the point of it being forbidden—but Tian was also counting on the fact that the man from the Blood Drops wouldn’t be able to say anything either. To accuse Tian of lying about the contents of the book was to admit that the accuser had read the book, and Tian knew that no member of the Blood Drops would admit such a crime to the suspicious Manchu Emperor.

“There has been a misunderstanding,” said Tian. “The book I read contained nothing that was false, which means that it can’t possibly be the book that has been banned. Certainly Your Honor can see the plain and simple logic.” He smiled. Surely he had found the loophole that would allow him to escape.

“Enough of this charade,” the man from the Blood Drops spoke for the first time. “There’s no need to bother with the law with traitors like you. On the Emperor’s authority, I hereby declare you guilty without appeal and sentence you to death. If you do not wish to suffer much longer, immediately confess the whereabouts of the book and the fugitives.”

Tian felt his legs go rubbery and, for a moment, he saw only darkness and heard only an echo of the Blood Drop’s pronouncement: sentence you to death.

I guess I’ve finally run out of tricks, he thought.

You’ve already made your choice, said the Monkey King. Now you just have to accept it.

Besides being great spies and assassins, the Blood Drops were experts at the art of torture.

Tian screamed as they doused his limbs in boiling water.

Tell me a story, said Tian to the Monkey King. Distract me so I don’t give in.

Let me tell you about the time they cooked me in the alchemical furnace of the Jade Emperor, said the Monkey King. I survived by hiding among smoke and ashes.

And Tian told his torturers a tale about how he had helped Li Xiaojing burn his useless book and saw it turn into smoke and ashes. But he had forgotten where the fire was set. Perhaps the Blood Drops could search the nearby hills thoroughly?

They burnt him with iron pokers heated until they glowed white.

Tell me a story, Tian screamed as he breathed in the smell of charred flesh.

Let me tell you about the time I fought the Iron Fan Princess in the Fire Mountains, said the Monkey King. I tricked her by pretending to run away in fear.

And Tian told his torturers a tale about how he had told Li Xiaojing to escape to Suzhou, famed for its many alleys and canals, as well as refined lacquer fans.

They cut his fingers off one by one.

Tell me a story, Tian croaked. He was weak from loss of blood.

Let me tell you about the time they put that magical headband on me, said the Monkey King. I almost passed out from the pain but still I wouldn’t stop cursing.

And Tian spat in the faces of his torturers.

Tian woke up in the dim cell. It smelled of mildew and shit and piss. Rats squeaked in the corners.

He was finally going to be put to death tomorrow, as his torturers had given up. It would be death by a thousand cuts. A skilled executioner could make the victim suffer for hours before taking his final breath.

I didn’t give in, did I? he asked the Monkey King. I can’t remember everything I told them.

You told them many tales, none true.

Tian thought he should be content. Death would be a release. But he worried that he hadn’t done enough. What if Li Xiaojing didn’t make it to Japan? What if the book was destroyed at sea? If only there were some way to save the book so that it could not be lost.

Have I told you about the time I fought Lord Erlang and confused him by transforming my shape? I turned into a sparrow, a fish, a snake, and finally a temple. My mouth was the door, my eyes the windows, my tongue the statue of the Buddha, and my tail a flagpole. Ha, that was fun. None of Lord Erlang’s demons could see through my disguises.

I am clever with words, thought Tian. I am, after all, a songgun.

The voices of children singing outside the jail cell came to him faintly. He struggled and crawled to the wall with the tiny barred window at the top and called out, “Hey, can you hear me?”

The singing stopped abruptly. After a while, a timid voice said, “We’re not supposed to talk to condemned criminals. My mother says that you’re dangerous and crazy.”

Tian laughed. “I am crazy. But I know some good songs. Would you like to learn them? They’re about sheep and pearls and all sorts of other fun things.”

The children conferred among themselves, and one of them said, “Why not? A crazy man must have some good songs.”

Tian Haoli mustered up every last bit of his strength and concentration. He thought about the words from the book:

The three of them herded dozens of captives like dogs and sheep. If any captive walked too slow, they would beat him immediately, or else kill him on the spot. The women were strung together with ropes, like a strand of pearls.

He thought about disguises. He thought about the way the tones differed between Mandarin and the local topolect, the way he could make puns and approximations and rhymes and shift the words and transform them until they were no longer recognizable. And he began to sing:

The Tree of Dem herded dozens of Cap Tea

Like dogs and sheep.

If any Cap Tea walked too slow, the Wood Beet

Hmm’d immediately.

Or else a quill, slim on the dot.

The Why-Men were strong to gather wits & loupes

Like a strand of pearls.

And the children, delighted by the nonsense, picked up the songs quickly.

They tied him to the pole on the execution platform and stripped him naked.

Tian watched the crowd. In the eyes of some, he saw pity, in others, he saw fear, and in still others, like Li Xiaoyi’s cousin Jie, he saw delight at seeing the hooligan songgun meet this fate. But most were expectant. This execution, this horror, was entertainment.

“One last chance,” the Blood Drop said. “If you confess the truth now, we will slit your throat cleanly. Otherwise, you can enjoy the next few hours.”

Whispers passed through the crowd. Some tittered. Tian gazed at the bloodlust in some of the men. You have become a slavish people, he thought. You have forgotten the past and become docile captives of the Emperor. You have learned to take delight in his barbarity, to believe that you live in a golden age, never bothering to look beneath the gilded surface of the Empire at its rotten, bloody foundation. You desecrate the very memory of those who died to keep you free.

His heart was filled with despair. Have I endured all this and thrown away my life for nothing?

Some children in the crowd began to sing:

The Tree of Dem herded dozens of Cap Tea

Like dogs and sheep.

If any Cap Tea walked too slow, the Wood Beet

Hmm’d immediately.

Or else a quill, slim on the dot.

The Why-Men were strong to gather wits & loupes

Like a strand of pearls.

The Blood Drop’s expression did not change. He heard nothing but the nonsense of children. True, this way, the children would not be endangered by knowing the song. But Tian also wondered if anyone would ever see through the nonsense. Had he hidden the truth too deep?

“Stubborn till the last, eh?” The Blood Drop turned to the executioner, who was sharpening his knives on the grindstone. “Make it last as long as possible.”

What have I done? thought Tian. They’re laughing at the way I’m dying, the way I’ve been a fool. I’ve accomplished nothing except fighting for a hopeless cause.

Not at all, said the Monkey King. Li Xiaojing is safe in Japan, and the children’s songs will be passed on until the whole county, the whole province, the whole country fills with their voices. Someday, perhaps not now, perhaps not in another hundred years, but someday the book will come back from Japan, or a clever scholar will finally see through the disguise in your songs as Lord Erlang finally saw through mine. And then the spark of truth will set this country aflame, and this people will awaken from their torpor. You have preserved the memories of the men and women of Yangzhou.

The executioner began with a long, slow cut across Tian’s thighs, removing chunks of flesh. Tian’s scream was like that of an animal’s, raw, pitiful, incoherent.

Not much of a hero, am I? thought Tian. I wish I were truly brave.

You’re an ordinary man who was given an extraordinary choice, said the Monkey King. Do you regret your choice?

No, thought Tian. And as the pain made him delirious and reason began to desert him, he shook his head firmly. Not at all.

You can’t ask for more than that, said the Monkey King. And he bowed before Tian Haoli, not the way you kowtowed to an Emperor, but the way you would bow to a great hero.

Author’s Note: For more about the historical profession of songshi (or songgun), please contact the author for an unpublished paper. Some of Tian Haoli’s exploits are based on folktales about the great Litigation Master Xie Fangzun collected by the anthologist Ping Heng in Zhongguo da zhuangshi (“Great Plaintmasters of China”), published in 1922.

For more than 250 years, An Account of Ten Days at Yangzhou was suppressed in China by the Manchu emperors, and the Yangzhou Massacre, along with numerous other atrocities during the Manchu Conquest, was forgotten. It was only until the decade before the Revolution of 1911 that copies of the book were brought back from Japan and republished in China. The text played a small, but important, role in the fall of the Qing and the end of Imperial rule in China. I translated the excerpts used in this story.

Due to the long suppression, which continues to some degree to this day, the true number of victims who died in Yangzhou may never be known. This story is dedicated to their memory.

© 2013 by Ken Liu.

Ken Liu is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in magazines such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Nature, Apex, Daily SF, Fireside, TRSF, andStrange Horizons, and has been reprinted in the prestigious Year’s Best SF and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year anthology series. He has won the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

Breathless in the Deep
Cory Skerry

When Jantz spotted a black skeleton jutting up above the water, at first she thought it was just a tide-battered tree, but before long she could make out the shredded ropes and scraps of sail. The wooden bones were the charred yardarms of a sunken ship.

“Wreck to larboard bow,” Jantz called from her perch on the prow.

“It’s bad luck to say that word,” muttered Pigeon.

“What, ‘larboard’?”

Her scrawny friend ignored her and returned his attention to gently guiding Sandina farther seaward. After he’d lost his right arm in a diving accident, their boss, Sakre, didn’t often let him at the helm. In calm weather like this, however, it wasn’t much of a risk. The eerie witchlight barely swayed where it hung from the sloop’s prow, and the sails hung in tired folds.

Sakre’s voice drifted down from above. “You two be ready to fill your bags.”

Jantz glanced over her shoulder in time to see Sakre swing down from the shrouds and drop lightly to the deck. Years of rum and sailing had whittled him down to necessities, left his skin plastered over his lean muscles like wet canvas draped over ropes. He wore the same threadbare captain’s jacket as he’d worn the day she’d met him, even though he could have afforded a replacement.

Sakre spat once over the side. Pigeon winced at the insult to the sea, but if the Wavekeeper himself had surfaced then to demand retribution, their boss would have haggled over the price of his own head.

“These are the ripest beds on the Grey Coast,” Sakre went on. “Once, one of my divers brought back a pearl the size of a cat’s skull.”

“Then why haven’t we come before?” Jantz asked.

“It takes a long time to grow pearls this big. No use taking ’em while they’re olives if they can be apples. Besides, more often we come out, the more likely someone’ll follow us and pick ’em clean.”

Jantz had never seen another diver in the three years since Sakre had bought her from the orphanage, but she shrugged and helped Pigeon tack into the shelter of the bluffs. She wasn’t going to argue with Sakre, not while he still owned her debt, and especially not when she was so close to paying it off.

“You remember how much I owe?” she asked.

Sakre pulled his saggy-brimmed hat off and smeared away the sweat with the fine hairs on the back of his arm. “Two pearls, same as the last two times you asked. Be sorry to lose you―you’re the best diver I’ve trained. Search extra-hard tonight, since if you bring back more’n two, I’ll owe you in cold coin.”

It was hard to believe she would be diving for herself soon. She didn’t begrudge her debt to Sakre—for teaching her to dive, for fronting the money for her tattoo—but to emerge from a dive with a sackful of her own wares, to afford her own flat and maybe her own boat, maybe even someday her own orphaned divers . . . She swallowed a lump in her throat, remembering the day he’d rescued her.

Sakre had asked her if she wanted to become a diver, and since she’d been told to say yes to anything he asked, she nodded. He’d taken Pigeon and her for a meal at a pub, with meat and a whole slice of pie for each of them. Afterward, they’d gone straight to the inkhouse.

The tattooist had injected tiny dots of fishy-smelling kraken’s ink into Jantz’s flesh. The ink flowed into runes that formed a poem of Sakre’s personal design, an incantation to turn water to air. The runes trailed down her sternum and spread out over her growing breasts. Getting a tattoo didn’t feel good, but she’d been hurt worse before, and she was proud that she didn’t cry like Pigeon had.

“Will it glow?” Jantz had asked, thinking of the witchlights that were fueled by droplets of kraken’s blood.

“Yes,” the tattooist had answered. “But not until you’re wet.”

The tattooed runes had soon puffed up and felt hot to the touch, and her brown skin turned a brick red around the edges of the poem. The runes neither lit up in the bath nor when it rained, and she began to suspect the pretty poem was broken.

When the scabs had hardened and had begun to itch, Sakre caught her scratching at them, peeling up the edges with her thumbnails to see if the ink glowed underneath. He’d slapped her across the face so hard that she’d tumbled to the ground. She curled in a ball while he bellowed.

“Blood of the Five! If you dive with a ruined tattoo, you’ll just drown, you foolish girl. And when your body floats to the surface, I’ll cut that expensive fucking ink out of you and poke it back into someone else’s skin, someone who respects magic. Do you understand?”

It was the only time he’d ever struck her, but she still sensed that violence in him, a glass-toothed eel waiting between rocks, always angry, never closing its eyes.

Yes, she owed Sakre, but she couldn’t wait to be free. After her first dive, she began making tally marks inside the lid of her trunk to mark the winnowing balance on her debt.

Jantz avoided looking at Pigeon as she outfitted herself for what would probably be her last dive. Her tools were so familiar they felt like clothing: an empty sack to fill with pearls; a flask of cider to warm her guts; a bundle of propsticks to prop open the maws of the giant striped oysters; and a sash sewn with gravel ballast, which she slung over her shoulder so she would sink. Last of all, she hung a thumb-sized witchlight around her neck, so she could see where she trod on the seafloor.

These days Pigeon didn’t come back with much. He wore all the same equipment as Jantz, but he also wore a cloak of fear that hunched his back and cramped his fingers into a fist. He placed his hand over his forehead to hide himself from the five death gods, mouthed a prayer to the Wavekeeper, and jumped.

Jantz, like Sakre, wasn’t superstitious. She left her forehead free for the gods to mark as they might, since she doubted they would. But as always, she did hold her breath before she splashed into the water.

As the sea swallowed her in its cold mouth, the runes on her chest flared into hot green life, glowing through her sleeveless shirt. The poetry on her chest seemed to know the sea, and it awakened at the touch of salt water the way barnacles hissed to the approaching tide.

A flock of bubbles tickled the length of her body, rolling off of her chin and up toward the moon where it splattered on the surface. The splash of waves against the hull became the dull swush of her limbs through water, and her muscles went stiff at the sudden cold.

She peered down past her feet as she sank, aiming for the solid rocks revealed by the witchlight. The combined weight of not just the water above her, but the entire ocean smothered her tiny home of bones and meat. It was still less pressure than living on Sakre’s ship, eating food he provided, sleeping in the berths he’d built long ago for other protégés, saying only that which she thought he would approve.

Her chest grew tight, but she pressed her lips together. Not yet.

Crabs and small fish nibbled at the carcass of a seal just ten steps due north of Sandina. The ribcage looked human, but she could see its dog-like skull wedged in between the rocks. If there had been sharks feeding here, they’d fled at Jantz’s approach―inexplicably, even the largest were spooked by witchlights.

Her lungs burned. No matter how many times she dived, she couldn’t trust her tattoo, couldn’t trust that something as powerful as the ocean could be held back by a few scrawled words hovering over her weak little lungs.

She concentrated on searching for oysters. Sakre’s claims of abundance didn’t match this barren vista. There were plenty of the regular edible variety, barely the length of her hand. Each time she spotted the stripe-shelled breed she sought, it was just half of an empty shell, cracked and seaworn.

Fifty or so steps from the ship, the rising panic in her lungs finally reached a crisis. She clenched her fists as her mouth opened and she inhaled.

The water in front of her face heated immediately, as warm as if she’d pissed where she stood. Air flowed into her lungs, chill in comparison. She exhaled, and a stream of bubbles swirled toward the surface, heading for the fever-shaky shape of the moon above.

Jantz struck out across the sloping seafloor toward deeper water. The witchlight around her neck didn’t illuminate anything farther than its own perfect sphere, so she could only examine the ground for threats a step ahead of where she stood. Sometimes, she spotted decisive schools of finger-sized fish, but mostly nothing wanted to swim into the sphere.

Finally, she found an oyster, a real oyster, large enough to enclose a whole seagull, its jagged edges like a cat’s teeth. It was cracked open a handsbreadth, and in daylight, she would have been staring into darkness. At night, however, with the witchlight around her neck, Jantz could make out the glint of blue-green opalescence inside. Before she risked her arm, it was good to know there was a prize.

Jantz worked a t-shaped propstick out of her quiver and eyed the oyster for a moment, to gauge her trajectory, so the stick remained stout instead of splintering. Every time, she wondered if Pigeon had made a mistake, or if his stick had been defective, as he claimed. She pinched herself for judging the living. Even the gods wouldn’t be so cruel.

She popped the pronged end into the oyster’s jaws. It snapped down, fanning cold water toward her belly, but the stick held it open just far enough to fit her arm. The oyster’s furious body was slimy under her fingers as she groped for the fist-sized pearl cradled in its guts.

As she drew out her prize, she saw that it was a fist, five knuckles smooth with pink-white nacre. Two opalescent bones stretched out from the petrified wrist, jagged at the ends where the oyster had severed them. It was a common enough fate among divers, but Pigeon had been lucky to live. This was probably a dead person’s arm.

Jantz considered cracking open the fist and pulling out the original pearl, but after a moment, she tucked the whole arm in her belt. If she could find two regular pearls for Sakre, she might sell the arm for herself. The fortune-witches on Salt Street might pay her well for something both precious and macabre.

She kicked the propstick out of the oyster’s mouth so it could close again, then looked up to orient herself by the moon. In her peripheral vision, however, she saw the telltale witchlight of another diver. Had Pigeon already passed her?

No. A glance proved he was still behind, lurking directly beneath the ship where he could swim to the surface and get quick help if injured.

This other diver’s witchlight hovered motionless near the wreck.

If this was one of Sakre’s ex-workers, Jantz wanted to have a word, see why she never ran into them elsewhere. And if it was a competitor, she had an entirely different set of questions. She’d need to know how she could compete with Sakre’s ship and crew once she was independent and selling the pearls herself. She and Pigeon weren’t allowed ashore unchaperoned, so she’d never had the chance to gather information about the pearl business.

She climbed over rocks, brushed away eelgrass as it licked at her legs. Near the surface, in the liquid light of the moon, she could see the silhouettes of cracked yardarms―just a little sloop, not much different than the Sandina, aboard which Sakre was probably getting impatient.

When she crested a small rise, she found herself close enough to touch the light she’d seen.

It wasn’t another diver’s witchlight; it was a searing green eye, with a star-shaped pupil blacker than the water beyond.

She sucked in a breath, and warm water lapped against her cheeks and chin even as the chill air froze her tongue and throat.

The creature’s skin was nubbly and a deep orange-red. Long, suckered arms curled around a destroyed oyster. A kraken, barely the size of a horse, not the ship-wrecking behemoth she would have expected.

One warty arm rippled, shedding shell fragments like snow. It swiped at her; not violence, but an exploration, the tip of its arm aimed toward her witchlight.

No wonder sharks were afraid of the witchlights―they associated the glowing orbs with kraken’s eyes. So, apparently, did baby kraken.

The empty oyster shells, the dead seal no sharks dared go near . . . Jantz didn’t have time to berate herself, though, because she had seen smaller multi-armed fish hunting in the shoals, and she knew what was coming. She wasn’t about to let it compare her to a tasty snail.

She flicked her knife out and with one hand, grabbed the suckered appendage, and with the other, she slashed at its rubbery skin. Its squeal reverberated through the water, humming through her bones like a bad deed long remembered.

The kraken’s eight arms stretched out, a jagged flower stained green by the witchlight, and suddenly they flapped at once. The current spun Jantz end over end. She thrust her arms over her head, afraid that she would slam against a rock and lose consciousness. She couldn’t drown, but she could die of cold.

The witchlight around her neck went out, and a moment after that, the tattoo glow under her shirt went dark as well. She stuffed the severed kraken’s arm into her belt, alongside the empearled bones, and used her free hands to grope for the witchlight around her neck, to see if it was broken. For a moment, as she rubbed her thumb over it, she saw a flicker of green.

Her lungs burned. The spell had malfunctioned. No matter how hard she gasped, neither air nor water passed through her lips. She’d never missed the reek of burnt salt before, had even cursed it for flavoring her breath for hours afterward.

She rubbed her fingers in the water; it was like touching snot. A black, viscous substance had killed the light of her tattoos, and the spell couldn’t turn it breathable, because it wasn’t water.

Kraken ink.

Precious seconds leaked away as she fumbled for her flask, pried out the cork, and dumped the lukewarm cider into the ocean. Yes, she needed air, but she knew she could hold her breath longer―would have to―because kraken ink was one of the most precious substances in the ocean.

It felt like her lungs were being pressed between the palms of an angry god, but she couldn’t stop, not until she filled the flask with ink. She pinched the leather sides and pulled them apart like a bellows, until the flask was heavy with ink. She recorked it and kicked toward the surface, oily strands clinging to her skin like a tattered cloak as she flailed toward the moon. After a few strokes, she made it into clear water, and her witchlight and tattoos glowed again.

Chill air flooded her lungs just as she was beginning to see red. She paused before she broke the surface and frogged with her legs, thinking hard.

There was one thing that could fetch a better price than pearls, and she had enough for twenty tattoos―forty, maybe a hundred. If Jantz surfaced with the ink now, Sakre would take it. Anything hauled from the sea onto his sloop was his property until her debt was paid.

Two pearls, that’s all she needed. If she had to give up the one in her belt, so be it. The kraken couldn’t have eaten every oyster in Hangwitch Cove.

She only needed one more pearl.

A scheme scuttled in from the dark parts of her mind, quick and shifty. Even if she didn’t find pearls, she could keep the ink. She let herself sink a little farther and stroked toward the wreck.

The witchlight illuminated the spars as she reached them. Barnacles and anemones crusted the old wood. Jantz tucked one of her matted locks back into her ponytail and scuttled face-first down the mast, pulling herself along by rope tangles and clumps of thumb-sized mussels. Once, she caught a glimpse of white bioluminescence floating just outside the witchlight’s influence, but she didn’t have time to marvel at egg sacs or jellyfish. Sakre may have finished his bottle already.

Jantz just needed to find a place she could stash the flask of ink. It wouldn’t hold forever, but at this depth, a regular storm wouldn’t tear everything loose. She could leave it here until she’d settled her account with Sakre, then come back and sell it.

She could buy Pigeon’s debt, too. She smiled as she imagined his face when she told him he was free.

As she kicked toward the bow, hoping to find the fo’c’sle hatch unobstructed, she caught sight of another wisp of jellyfish drifting below the witchlight. Below that, there was a jagged hole in the rotted hull, revealing a luminescent garden of sea-cups, anemones, and coral that grew in animal patterns: spider’s webs, dunecat spots, and concentric rings like a meatbeetle’s shell. They glowed fiery violet and intoxicating orange, so beautiful she wanted to touch them, and so brightly that she knew better.

A pale diver drifted through the glowing jungle, reaching out unnaturally long fingers to caress the sea-cups.

Fingers as white and dead as the pearl fist that Jantz had tucked in her belt.

“Blood of the Five,” she swore, the sound no more than the fluttering of a moth against glass.

The ghost turned its head at an angle that would have snapped a living neck; it had a translucent gourd of a skull on a long, gelatinous body. Above its tiny pink eyes, there was a radiant pink glyph carved into its forehead. Jantz couldn’t read much, but everyone knew and feared the word for Breathless, the mark of the five death gods when they took you for their own.

A clutch of tentacles dangled where the ghost should have had feet, and they rippled as it drifted up toward the hole in the deck, toward Jantz.

She whipped off the weighted sash and kicked her way up to the surface. She changed her mind about leaving the kraken ink, because she was not coming back. The wet sound of her heart in her chest matched the sound of water gurgling against the spell as she panted.

Luminous white shapes drifted toward her, lit not by the witchlight, but something else―maybe the glyph on their foreheads, maybe what was left of their souls. At least they were slow.

Jantz made the mistake of looking down.

There were three below her, reaching for her feet. Their dark mouths opened, and far down their black gullets, she saw the faint glow of more pink magic. Whatever bright energy leaked out of the glyphs on their skulls also lurked in their bellies.

Panicking, she kicked without looking up and slammed her head into a broken spar. In the moment when she floated, stunned, one of the ghosts wrapped its cold fingers around her ankle and pulled down.

Jantz reached for her knife just as a second ghost clamped onto her other leg with its toothless cavern of a mouth. Cold, colder than the water around them, so cold it burned. The edges of its lips wriggled over her skin, and she stabbed it, but the ghost’s flesh sealed behind the blade as if it had never been stabbed at all. It continued to suck the warmth out of her body.

Winter crept through her veins, streaking out from their mouths and freezing her thighs, her labia, her navel and hips. Sakre would be angry at the loss of her expensive tattoo, and there was grim satisfaction in that, at least.

Her tattoo . . . A thought flitted by, too horrible to contemplate, an affront to the gods. If it failed, it would only end her sooner; if it worked, she had best not submerge herself where the gods could see her blasphemy.

Jantz uncapped the flask and smeared kraken’s ink over her forehead. It clung as it had minutes ago, oily and thick. She slashed at her forehead with the tip of her knife. Left to right, a loop, downward zig-zag. The pain was still a fleabite compared to the lifeless agony consuming her legs.

The gods marked the dead with the glyph for Breathless; the only magic Jantz knew how to work was the breathing tattoo on her chest. If she counterfeited the Breathless glyph with the magic of the kraken’s ink, perhaps she would die, but perhaps she would merely pass for dead.

She raked her fingers over her wounds, smearing the sheen of ink into the crevices in her flesh. The enamel on her teeth ground off in flakes until it felt like sand on her tongue.

The ghosts let go.

Jantz glanced down and almost let go as well, almost succumbed to the symphony of light throbbing in the wreck below. What she’d seen before had been nothing compared to this borrowed brilliance. The ghosts were ferociously white, like the sun burning through an overcast sky. They caressed the luminescent flora and fauna, drinking magic through their too-long fingertips, their bodies pulsing in time to the currents.

The ship had burnt, she could see that now. There were too many ghosts to have crewed a sloop this size, however—too many to fit on the ship at once—so there must have been more than one tragedy in Hangwitch Cove. A one-armed ghost poured through a hatch and wandered aft. It was a common enough injury for divers, but she still wondered if she carried its lost limb in her belt.

“Why are y—we all here?” Jantz asked. The words came out in bubbles, garbled by the weight of the sea.

The ghosts who had been chewing on her feet had dropped back to the deck, and they ignored her. The closest ghost faced away from her, apparently tangled in the rigging. But when she spoke, its head sunk through its own chest and appeared again between bony shoulder blades. The ghost regarded her with two pink jewels lodged in an upside-down face.

Its voice was wet and rough, as if it spoke with a rotting canvas tongue. "Why would we go anywhere else?"

Jantz considered this for a moment. “Were you a diver?” she asked.

The ghost’s fingers stroked barnacle plumes the way Pigeon stroked their mangy old cat. “Of course,” the ghost replied. “Oysters and pearls, pearls. If I find more than three, he’ll owe me in cold coin.”

A chill wriggled down her spine only to die in her gut.

For long minutes, Jantz prowled the ship, asking each ghost how it had come to be here. Some didn’t answer, but those that did recited stories of murder and arson, cut throats and bashed skulls, robbery and betrayal.

She propelled herself to the surface.

Dawn had spilled in the east, and though the sun wouldn’t rise for another hour or more, the sky was red and swollen like freshly tattooed skin. She swam for Sandina.

Jantz carefully combed her hair down over her forehead. If the gods saw her counterfeit glyph, so be it, but no one on board that ship needed to know of her blasphemy.

She climbed the rope ladder topside to find Sakre leaning on the rail, his silhouette black and jagged against the witchlight and the coming dawn.

“What the hell took you so long?” he demanded. “Pigeon found one, like usual. He got tired of waiting for you and went to bed.”

Jantz doubted that she would ever see Pigeon again.

“That’s too bad,” she said. “But let him sleep. We can sail without him, to the wreck. I found too many pearls to carry, so I hung them in an old sail, like a hammock.”

“What?” Sakre asked. He hunched over like a bird considering a bug, ready to lunge.

“A kraken has been eating the oysters and spitting out the pearls. I scooped up armfuls,” Jantz said. She plucked the sucker-studded tip of the kraken’s arm from her belt and tossed it to Sakre.

He caught it against his belly with one hand, still holding his bottle in the other.

“Good work,” he said.

When the sloop neared the spars of the wreck, Sakre dropped anchor. He watched Jantz, waiting for her to jump in the water.

“Well?”

“There’s so many, you’ll have to help,” she said.

“You’re not paid off yet,” he said sharply. “You work. I’ll wait.”

“There aren’t any pearls,” Jantz said. Her smile hurt her cheeks like someone was pinching them into place, but she couldn’t stop.

Sakre’s face cramped, and he was silent. She’d never seen someone calculate her death before, and a few hours ago, it might have scared her.

“Will you wait for me to turn around, like Zekre, and hit me with the handle of a chisel?” Jantz asked. “Or do you think you can take this knife from me, the way you took Makarn’s knife from her?”

Even in the sick green glow of the witchlight, Sakre lost color.

“I know why you don’t dive anymore. You have a question that no one’s been able to answer,” Jantz said.

“Shut your—”

“The answer is yes.” Jantz laughed. “They are waiting for you.” She lifted her knife, darting forward fast and low. She would shove the blade into his gut like a propstick into an oyster’s maw.

As Sakre backed up, his eyes tracked the motion of her arms. Jantz was tired from a long night; Sakre was only a little drunk. His fingers pinched onto her wrist, and he squeezed so tightly she dropped the knife.

She shoved off the deck with both legs, and they tumbled into the water together. Jantz blew out her breath immediately, kicked with all her strength, driving them deeper even while Sakre struggled to wriggle free.

The past divers drifted closer, drawn by the thrashing and cursing. White like leaving a temple at noon, with too-long fingers and gawping mouths, they reached for the man who had bought them new lives and then taken them away. Shrieking, streaming bubbles, Sakre tried to swim away, but his victims were many.

Jantz climbed topsides for the final time that night and went in search of Pigeon. He lay on his bunk. While she could find no wounds, he also had no pulse. Poison, perhaps, or a broken neck. She pulled his blanket up over his already-cold flesh, covering the expensive poem that now wouldn’t give him even one more breath.

Her grief seemed too quiet, almost drowsy, but perhaps it was only fatigue and the sloop’s familiar motion. Perhaps it would hurt later.

Jantz lay down in the aft cabin’s big bunk. She thought of dead men, with her head on a dead man’s pillow, still clutching a dead man’s nacre-covered fist.

Her heart still beat with the suppressed thunder of waves thrashing against rocks, as heard from beneath the sea.

© 2013 by Cory Skerry.

Cory Skerry lives in the Northwest U.S. in a spooky old house that he doesn't like to admit is haunted. When he's not peddling (or meddling with) art supplies, he's writing, reading submissions, or off exploring with his sweet, goofy pit bulls. For more stories, visit plunderpuss.net.

Brisneyland by Night
Angela Slatter

“How many kids now?” I asked.

“Twenty-five we can identify for sure. But that’s out of a couple of hundred a week. Not all those are ours.”

“Don’t say ours, Bela. They’re nothing to do with me.” I looked out the window. My reflection stared back. Beyond that I watched the night speed past. I should have been at my next-door neighbour’s eighth birthday party, pretending I didn’t like children; I shouldn’t have been here.

It was a gypsy cab in every sense of the word: battered and beaten, any white surface reduced to grey, the vinyl of the seat a little sticky. The rubber mats on the floor were so thin as to be almost transparent. I imagined they were the only thing stopping me from seeing Wynnum Road’s bitumen beneath us. Instead of an air freshener, a gris-gris hung from the rearview mirror. It wasn’t minty fresh, but then again it didn’t smell bad; cinnamon-y if anything. Scratched along the inside of the doors were protective symbols and sigils even I couldn’t read. I did the dumb thing and looked a bit closer. Some of them were actually fingernail marks. I didn’t want to think about that too much. Bernard Fanning howled out of the speakers behind my head, wanting to wish everyone well yet wondering why someone gave up on him too soon.

There weren’t too many cabs like this in Brisbane, although as the population grew, so did the demand. The general clientele covered Weyrd, wandering Goth, and too-drunk-to-notice Normal. Most times even the drunks thought twice about getting into this kind of vehicle, snapped out of their stupor by the strangeness it exuded.

The eye in the back of the driver’s head examined me through thin ginger hair, while the two on his face dealt with the night-time traffic. Ziggi and I knew each other, kind of; nodding acquaintances. He and Bela had taken me to hospital a few months back. He’d help save my life and I guessed I should be a bit more gracious. The pain in my leg didn’t make me feel gracious. It made me feel grumpy that I couldn’t drive myself anywhere anymore; at least not for a long while.

So I was a regular victim of public transport. Buses and trains might have been environmentally friendly, but sometimes my fellow commuters were creepier than the Weyrd drivers. Instead of being independent, I was now a chauffeured invalid with a foul temper. Some might argue that my temper wasn’t so sweet beforehand.

I wanted to think this wasn’t my usual kind of job; Bela assured me it was, really. There was a time, not so long ago, when I swore I wouldn’t work for him again, but then again once upon a time I didn’t ache inside and walk with a limp. I didn’t wake up sweating, thinking something was at my window, and I didn’t dream of claws reaching through the gaps in the stairs of that house and tearing so much flesh from my leg that I looked like I’d been ringbarked.

I needed money. Not for rent or anything, because the house, at least, was mine, but I still needed to eat and pay for the electricity and phone. Maybe Bela felt guilty, although it wasn’t an emotion I associated with him. It was just another job to him. But I wouldn’t have been there if he hadn’t asked me to be—I kept wondering when the “ex” part of ex-boyfriend would kick in.

Bernard changed tack, wishing for buttons to push.

“I should be eating ice cream cake,” I announced to no one in particular. “I should be watching Lizzie open her presents. I really should.”

“What did you get her?” asked Ziggi, which elicited an annoyed noise from Bela.

“A book of fairy tales. The proper ones.”

“Good choice.”

“Verity, if it’s—” interrupted Bela.

“It’s not,” I said shortly.

“If it is, then maybe it’s like your dad.”

He waited for me to speak, to defend myself. I rewarded him with silence, so he went on. “If it’s a kinderfresser like your father, then we need to get him quickly. He won’t stop by himself. I can’t keep this out of the papers for too long, even if they’re only street kids going missing.”

“Do you really think I don’t know that?”

My glare was enough to make him look away.

He cleared his throat. “Where are you going to start?”

“I’ve got some ideas,” I said, refusing to give him anything more. I could feel his gaze, even though I was looking out the window again. I thought he might be staring at my neck, at the pale curve, at the spot where the vein beat blue close to the surface. I thought he might be remembering what I tasted like.

“Ziggi,” he said abruptly, “keep an eye on her.”

And he was gone, just like that. I turned and the seat beside me was empty, smelling vaguely of his expensive aftershave. Things were quiet, except for Bernard’s strumming, for a few beats.

“I hate it when he does that. Freaks me out,” said Ziggi.

Bela made even other Weyrd uncomfortable. I felt kind of proud.

“It is a bit creepy,” I admitted. “He used to do that in the kitchen all the time. I dropped a lot of dishes.”

I bit down on my lip. Hadn’t meant that to slip out. Ziggi was polite enough to ignore it.

“So, where to? You said you got some ideas.”

“I may have exaggerated. I have one idea. Let’s start with Little Venice.”

“Probably should have told me that three seconds ago when I could have taken the turnoff,” he said mildly. He cut off a dully gleaming four-wheel drive to change lanes. As we drove onto the Story Bridge I glanced out. The lights of the city, down and to the left, and those of New Farm, down and to the right, swam in the blackness.

“It’s okay. We got nothing but time,” I lied and hunched into the upholstery.

West End’s filled with Weyrd. Everyone thinks it’s just students, drunks, artists, writers, a few yuppies waiting for an upgrade, junkies, and the Saturday markets for cheap fruit and veggies. There’s also a metric buttload of Weyrd, who do their best to blend in, generally successfully. They fit in fine in suburbs that already have a pretty bizarre human population—places where it’s difficult to distinguish the wondrous-strange from the nut jobs. The old guy who yells at the trees on the corner of Boundary St and Montague Rd? Weyrd. The kid who keeps peeing on the front steps of the Gun Shoppe? Weyrd. The woman who asks people in the street if they can spare some dirty washing? You get the picture. The smart ones use glamours to hide what they are. There are a few spots, though, where they can go and just be themselves. Little Venice is one of them.

The place looks ordinary enough. It’s cute: dingy little entryway lapping the street, long thin corridor that’s dim and cool leading into four big rooms filled with shadows and incense. Out the back is a walled, stone-paved courtyard that’s generally not used during the daylight hours except by stray Normals. Above is a tightly-twined roof of leaves and vines, enough to keep the sun and rain out, but not quite enough to hide the snakes that lurk there. I could see through the wide archway: The space was packed in the bruised evening. A man with a sitar was accompanied by another playing a theremin and the seated crowd swayed along contentedly. Two emo-Weyrd waitresses sloped between tables delivering drinks and finger food.

Little Venice does good coffee and amazing cakes (fat moist chocolate, rich bitter citrus, and a caramel marshmallow log that will stop your heart). The three sisters who own the place, the Misses Norn, take turns reading palms, cards, and tea leaves—each has her preferred method and each tells a different thing: One genuinely lays out your choices, one will make your future with her words, and the third simply lies. Problem is this: You can’t really tell which does which. They’re not malicious; just Weyrd. It’s what they do.

Aspasia was working the counter in the main room, which wasn’t too full, but the low hum coming from the other rooms told me they might be a different matter. Behind her was a mirror that looked like lace made of snowflakes. She gave me a smile as I limped in. Ziggi was driving around and around—it’s easier to find a good park in Hell. This sister was all dark serpentine curls, obsidian eyes, and red, red smile. When her lips opened I could see how sharp her teeth were.

“Verity, my sweet. Come to hear your future?” Her smile widened, and I re-thought my malice assessment. She gave a shimmy and gracefully extended her hand. “Cross my palm with silver, girly.”

I shook my head. “My answer’s the same as it’s been for the past ten years. But I will take a long black, some information, and a slice of that caramel marshmallow log. And a latte and a piece of mud cake to go. Make the latte super-sweet.”

She raised her eyebrows. “You got a new boyfriend?”

“Hardly.” I shook my head at the idea of Ziggi-as-boyfriend and sat carefully on one of the tall stools, rested my elbows on the fossilised countertop, and smiled. It’s a good smile, nice and bright, disarming. “Kids are going missing.”

“So sad.” She wasn’t fooled, and began to make the coffee, caressing the machine into doing her bidding. There was the bubble and spit of it all, a comforting buzz that made me salivate like one of Pavlov’s dogs. Efficiently she sliced away a chunk of the deadly dessert and plated it in front of me. I took a glutton’s bite then had to wash it down with the coffee. So much sugar my heart did a little jig. She started making Ziggi’s takeaway, slower this time.

“Street kids thus far, so under the radar pretty much. Still,” I said, “it’s only a matter of time before some little Normal goes astray and people in high places start looking at our kind. Well,” I paused, “your kind.”

“Half-breed,” she hissed before she could stop herself. I watch the hair on her head curl and twist, vipers forming there and writhing until she got herself under control.

I gave a cold smile around another mouthful of caramel mush. “All I’m saying, Aspasia, is if you know anything now would be the time to share. And I would be the person to share it with. You know me: I’ll do things quietly. Do you really want Brisneyland’s Keystone Cops traipsing through your place? If word of this gets out, not even your connections will stop them from coming down here. Then where will all the Weyrd go?”

Her shoulders shook with the effort of not hitting me. She didn’t like being threatened and truth be told, I didn’t like threatening—it was cheap and easy. But I didn’t stop. “Although I’m sure Shaky Jakes would pick up the slack, were Little Venice no longer able to guarantee its clients refuge from the ordinary.”

“It’s not about flesh. We haven’t seen a kinderfresser since . . . ” she said, which was what I’d figured. “But I’ve been offered—wine.”

That sat me back on my arse. Wine? My confusion must have shown because she leaned forward. I did the same and felt one of the hair-snakes brush my left ear, soft as a kiss. It was kind of nice.

Aspasia spoke low. “Kids cry, right? I mean, they’re kids, there’s always something to cry over. But enough to fill two, three, four wine bottles? Like, wouldn’t that be a lifetime of tears?”

I stared at her.

“I was offered a case. A case, Fassbinder. That’s a lot of kids, a lot of tears. You take that . . . ”

You take their tears and you rob them of all the tears they might ever cry. You steal their ability to feel joy, compassion, pain. You remove what makes them human. You take their lives. Not a kinderfresser, no, but something somehow worse.

“Who?” I asked. “Who’s been offering?”

She jerked her head towards a table in the corner. I didn’t turn around but watched in the mirror. A thin young girl sat there, badly made-up, her pale floss hair twisted back in a clip, her limbs so sharp they looked like they might make a break for it, given half a chance. She wore a grey singlet top with an irregular pattern on the front—whatever the design had been was gone along with the sequins. Beneath the table I could see stick legs and a far-too-short denim skirt.

“Why is she here?”

“She pays,” said Aspasia flatly.

“When did she offer you the case?”

“Two, maybe three weeks ago.” She shrugged.

“You didn’t think to tell anyone about this?” How many lives lost in that time?

“You think a couple of the Weyrd Council haven’t taken her up on the offer?”

“The Council hired me.”

“No, princess, Tepes hired you. He’s only one of them.”

Again, I sat back, digested that. The problem was bigger than we thought. I wouldn’t be reporting back too soon. I needed to finish this off-radar, and it needed to be fast; then the Council could get purged, weeded, whatever Bela thought appropriate. I flicked my eyes to the girl in the corner; she was looking at me. We stared at each other for maybe five seconds, but that’s all it took. She was up and out of her chair and haring down the long corridor before I could so much as turn around. There was no way I was running after her; no way I’d even bother to try.

“What’s her name and where do I find her?” I asked Aspasia who was casually putting the lid on Ziggi’s takeaway latte and snapping the chunk of cake into a polystyrene coffin. She pushed them towards me, and I handed over a twenty. I had the feeling she didn’t want to tell me any more and just as her hand retracted clutching the cash I grabbed at her and held on tight. I felt her wrist bones grind against each other beneath my grip. I may look Normal, I may be a half-breed, but it doesn’t mean I’ve got nothing of the Weyrd about me. I thought about wrapping the other hand around her throat and risking a few nips from the snakes, but decided she might find it hard to talk.

“Sally Crown. Lives on the streets. Sometimes she sleeps behind the West End Library. Sometimes in the derelict flats on Hardgrave Road. Now let me go and get the fuck out.”

“You need to work on your customer service skills, Aspasia. Keep the change.”

The whole way down the corridor I could feel her eyes boring into the back of my neck. Verity Fassbinder in action: winning friends and influencing people.

“I’ll see you tonight.”

Ziggi waved a hand in my general direction as he drove off; it was probably a “yes.” Those drivers play hard to get. Dawn had crept over the horizon about an hour ago and we’d given up watching the West End Library for any sign of Sally Crown. Admittedly, in the first place we tried—Hardgrave Road—I’d nearly been spitted on the umbrella of an especially grumpy old lady whose wings unfurled in shock when she found me in the flat she was using as a squat.

I made my way up the cracked path to my ramshackle cottage. The jasmine was thick on the front fence, lushly green with white-star flowers like icing. The scent was heady. I felt for my keys in the pockets of my jeans.

“Verity? Verity! Can you get my ball?” High and fluting, the voice came over the side fence. Between the palings was a small face, sharp-chinned, snub-nosed, wide-eyed, with a shock of mousey hair even messier than mine. A little hand pushed through the gap and pointed to a soccer ball lying under my front steps. Lizzie wasn’t allowed out of her yard without a parent in tow. She hated it, but I thought it a good idea and told her so at every opportunity—those were the days she decided not to talk to me.

I limped over and picked up the ball. It was really, really new. “Birthday present? Sorry I couldn’t come.”

“Uh huh. I like the book best.” She smiled and the edges of the crescent went so high that the break in the fence wasn’t wide enough to display them. The book of real fairy tales, the ones with little girls who were eaten by wolves and bears with no rescue; boys who got lost in the forest and weren’t found again ever; where your brother is a danger to you and your sister cannot be trusted; children whose greatest enemies were their own parents. Lizzie’s mother had frowned, but I told her that forewarned was forearmed. Lizzie loved the books in my house, so I knew I was on a winner.

I reached up and dropped the ball over.

“Thanks, Verity. Can I come and read later?”

“Not today, my friend. I’ve had a very long night. Maybe on the weekend?”

“Mmmmm-huh.” The tone told me she wasn’t impressed.

“Have a good day, sweetheart,” I said and headed to the door.

Inside, the hot air was smothering, so I opened all the windows and the double doors onto the back verandah. The breeze did its thing and soon the place was bearable. I carried a glass of cold water and a collection of painkillers out and sat in one of the faded green deckchairs.

I stretched my leg out and rested it on the top of the table. The pain eased. In the gigantic jacaranda tree that took up most of the back yard an extremely fat kookaburra perched. I gave him a nod; he stared, unmoved.

I needed a nap. I needed to do some research. But most of all, I needed the nap. Just a few hours.

I had to dig up the past; exhume my father. I didn’t want to, I really didn’t, but I had no choice. I closed my eyes, dropped my head back until there was a satisfying crack and things sat a little more comfortably.

My father. His murders.

My mother was Normal and gone before I knew her. The everyday things of my childhood were salt in the corners of a room to soak up the curses that might come our way; to keep away the worst of the shades, blood was baked into the bread and left as an offering once a week; dust was swept from the footpath towards the house, as we chanted “for all the wealth of the city to come home to us.” Took me a long time to work out there were two cultures and I could walk between them. That I could fool the Normals. And I could step into the Weyrd—they’d talk to me, but were wary.

Truth was, with one foot in each world, I didn’t belong anywhere.

Twenty years ago my father was jailed as a paedophile and child killer, but that didn’t even begin to touch the skin of what he was.

Most folk, Normal or Weyrd, are law-abiding. But there’s a market for everything, and the law of supply and demand, and some tables demanded the most tender of flesh. Small groups, private parties—it was a particular taste indulged in by the very few, a leftover from the past, when stealing children was an accepted practice; a hobby and a habit. Someone had to source and butcher that flesh.

My father. Kinderfresser. Child eater. Butcher to the Weyrd.

He never touched me—that needs to be clear—and he got caught like so many of them do. He got sloppy. He got lazy. He didn’t take the hunt far enough away from his home. All those fairy tales and my father was the monster.

Grigor lasted precisely how long you’d think a child killer would last in prison. He was a big man, but no match for the six prisoners who held him down. With him gone, my maternal grandparents brought me up; I learned “normal” from them. They loved me, cared for me, left me the house. Some days, though, I’d catch them looking at me as if I were something awful and fascinating, a cuckoo in the nest. It hurt at first, but in the end I accepted it. I let my father fade from my memory as much as I could.

The people Grigor had been supplying just faded into the background—that part never came out, that he was a kinderfresser and that his employers had disappeared without a trace, although the flow of child disappearances seemed to stop for a long, long time—at least, those connected to Brisneyland’s Weyrd. The Normal justice system isn’t really designed to cope with stuff like that. Hell, it can’t cope with its own mundane crimes.

Now, though, something had changed. Something new was on the market.

The State Library was cold, the air-conditioning set to arctic breeze. The microfiche reader made a slight buzz and gave off a lot of heat. I was tempted to rub my hands in front of it and maybe try to toast a marshmallow or two.

There was surprisingly little about Grigor’s murders; Weyrd influence in the corridors of power, I supposed, keeping things on the lowdown. But there were pictures of him being taken to and from the Supreme Court: a large handsome man in a bad suit, with hangdog eyes and a loose-lipped grin that showed off sharp teeth.

I hadn’t looked at these things before; hadn’t wanted to, had chosen not to, as if none of it had happened. But I think some days, when my thoughts turn that way, that everything I’ve done as an adult has been a kind of penance for what my father did. I try to be an atonement for him.

Where Grigor went wrong was to take a cared-for child, one from a happy home, a rich neighbourhood; a child loved and for whom someone would look. Had he stuck to the guttersnipes, the unwanted children, who knows how long he might have continued undetected?

I kept scrolling through the black and white projections of words and pictures: glamorous women smiled out from the social pages, their shoulder pads taking up much of the space; school kids celebrated for dux of their school; public outcry over the knocking down of yet another historic building; rubber duck races on the river of brown; writers and film festivals. Other crimes just as awful but not linked to me. Ah, Brisneyland.

When my fingers went numb, I gave up. Nothing there, a wasted afternoon. The need for more sleep buzzed in my head like a determined fly. And I was meeting Ziggi at my place at six. Sure, he could have picked me up from the library, but I was independent and didn’t plan to rely on anyone. My leg told me I was an idiot. I had to agree as I hobbled out the sliding doors and into the last of the stinking summer heat.

Lizzie’s mother stood on the patio of my house, pale and shaking in the late afternoon, knocking hard on the door.

“Hey, Mel.”

She turned and looked at me with desperate hope. I just knew I was going to disappoint her.

“Is Lizzie here? She said she was coming over to read with you.”

Little bugger.

“No, Mel, she’s not. When did she leave?” My heart thumped. No! I told myself, wrong neighbourhood. A cared-for child. Another part of my brain chimed in with Grigor did it.

“Have you checked the tree?” Lizzie liked to hide in the hollow of the jacaranda tree in my backyard. She had comic books in sealed plastic bags, a blanket, and a couple of dolls. Her mother and I pretended we didn’t know about it—every kid needs a secret spot.

She shook her head. “Not there—it was the first place I looked.”

“Okay, playing with friends in the street? You’ve called school friends?” She nodded, trying not to cry. “Okay, don’t mess around. Call the cops.”

“I don’t want to overreact . . . ” she said, but I knew that’s exactly what she wanted to do, like any mother. She wanted to scream until her baby came back. She wanted to kill the person who’d caused her this tearing fear. I pushed her gently away from my door.

“Go. Call. Better to be safe than sorry. I’ve got to go out,” I said, eyeing the gypsy cab as it pulled up. “But you’ve got my mobile number if you find anything, if you need anything, okay? I can’t avoid this appointment, but I will be back later this evening, I promise.”

She nodded again and the movement was enough to spill the tears over. I hugged her hard and gave her a nudge in the right direction. I stumbled as I headed towards Ziggi and his chariot. Bernard was keeping him company again and at volume, worrying about paper cuts or something. How many times was he going to play that CD? I’m a big Bernard fan, but everyone has their limit.

If it had been me, I wouldn’t have gone back to my usual haunts, at least not that soon. I’d have waited maybe a week for interested parties to give up. Maybe I’m smarter than most people.

But Sally Crown—now Sally Crown was young and dumb.

Ziggi killed the engine and we rolled to a stop outside the West End Library. Out the front was a community noticeboard covered with flyers for self-help groups, book clubs, writers groups, sewing circles, and one enlargement of a newspaper article. A perfectly coiffed matron’s smiling face gleamed out from a photocopied feature about her handing over a substantial cheque to some charity or other. Someone had drawn a moustache across her top lip.

“You okay on your own?” Ziggi asked around a mouthful of day-old chocolate cake.

“Yep.”

“Only Bela said . . . ”

“Fuck Bela.”

“He’s not my type.”

“If I yell then you come running, okay? Otherwise, finish your cake—it was expensive and I may not be able to go back there again for some time. And I cannot believe you still have some left.”

I got out and made my way around the back, surprisingly quietly, all things considered. I was tired enough to cry tears of self-pity, and my leg ached so much it felt like the wounds might have opened again, even though they were well-scarred over. There she was, tucked up like a dirty angel on a clapped-out sofa, a grubby old chequered picnic blanket pulled up to her chin. Mozzies buzzed enthusiastically, but wisely left me alone.

I gently lowered myself to sit beside her and cooed her name. She came awake with a start and slashed at me. Luckily, I was ready for that, suspicious type that I am.

“Okay, unfriendly and counterproductive,” I told her, snatching away the blade and tossing it over the fence. “So, Sally, tell me everything you know.”

“Fuck you, bitch.”

“You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

She let loose with a few more choice profanities and in the end I lost patience, grabbing at her face and squeezing the corners of her jaw so she whimpered.

“Now, you will notice that I am freakishly strong, Sally. I can and will pop your head if you don’t tell me what I want to know.”

She tried to say something. It sounded like half-breed, so I squeezed a little tighter. Tears trickled down her cheeks. I felt bad and let her go. I stroked her hair and that made her flinch.

“Okay, let’s try again. Sally, I’m looking for a friend of mine. She’s young and she’s innocent, and if anything happens to her I swear I’ll be back for you, and you will not enjoy our reunion. Now, I suspect you’ve been leading children astray. No, don’t say anything—if I only suspect things, you’re safe.” I waved a finger at her. “If I know for certain then I will not be able to turn a blind eye. I will tell Tepes.” The fear in her eyes told me she knew about Bela. “But I am willing to ignore all the other things you’ve done if you tell me where I can find my friend.”

“She’ll kill me,” the child whined.

Beneath the rat-like demeanour I could see a little girl who’d been ill-used; who did what she could to survive; whose humanity had been stripped away until she thought of no one but herself. I felt sorry for her, but it didn’t stop me from saying, “And if you don’t tell me, I’ll kill you.”

She whimpered.

“Sally, tell me and I will stop her. She won’t hurt anyone again. She won’t be a danger to you. I promise.”

She seemed to weigh the odds and the scales dropped in my favour. “House at Ascot.”

She reeled off the address and I stood up, anxious. I pulled whatever notes I had in my pocket out and gave them to her, thinking they might keep her from doing anything awful for a night or two at least. “If you’ve lied to me . . . ”

She nodded I know, I know.

And then I had a thought. “Did you take her?” Lizzie wouldn’t have gone to an adult. She would have gone to another child, though, she would have wanted to play.

The hesitation was enough. I felt sick but I turned and walked away.

“Aw, Ziggi. How did we not know about this place?”

The house in Ascot was a big, old architectural layer cake. I didn’t remember seeing it before and looked askance at my sidekick. I mean, I like old houses, I spend a lot of time in them, and I know Brisneyland pretty damned well.

He shrugged. “Glamoured.”

He was right—it was kind of hard to look at. My eyes kept sliding to the side and I had to concentrate for the first few minutes we sat and watched. It got easier after a while, but still the building seemed, well, slippery. I leaned against the body of the cab while Ziggi hung out the window. “Right. Big trees, too.”

The block of land was huge (even for this area) and the house was set far back from the road, in the middle of an overgrown garden. Camphor laurels led up the driveway and grew so tall and close that they formed a canopy above the gravel path on which the taxi was parked. Flying foxes squeaked overhead, heading off for an evening of stripping people’s fruit trees and crapping on their laundry. They were darker patches against the moonlit sky, like shadow puppets.

“Aw, Ziggi,” I repeated. “Shit.”

“What? You don’t think it looks right?”

“I think it looks too damned right.” I pushed myself away from the grimy duco. “You’re not going anywhere?”

“I ain’t going nowhere,” he said, then added hopefully, “Hey, if anyone comes, you got a secret signal you want me to give?”

“Fuck no. I want you to make a really big noise so I hear you. Who knows, maybe you’ll scare them away. And I want you to listen out in case I start yelling for help. Help would be good. You know, cavalry, etcetera.”

“I got it. Big fucken noise.”

I gave him a thumbs-up and walked down the drive.

This would have made sense in West End, but this . . . this was Ascot. Home to the important people; property prices so high they could give you a nosebleed. If the car in the drive wasn’t a Jag or a Merc, then you knew it belonged to the cleaning woman. And here was this house, gigantic, glamoured, and seemingly empty.

The wood creaked under my feet as I went up the five steps to the verandah. A swing-chair sat beside the double front doors. There was a doorbell. I pushed it, hard, swung on it for a long while. What if Sally lied? Hell, what if Sally had told the truth? If anyone answered, I’d ask if they were interested in a pyramid selling scheme. That ruse had gotten me out of trouble more than once. People tended to back away, like you had a spare eye or a secondary nose. Of course, it had also gotten me into trouble once or twice.

No one came. I tried the handle—no joy. I peered in through the windows. They were clean, as was the upholstery on the swing-chair. So. Not deserted, and someone was concerned enough to keep the place spick and span.

I tapped my foot. Maybe Sally had lied and this was just a normal house. Then, why the glamour? I might have given up but that was the kicker; that and the sick feeling in my gut. Something was off. Where do you hide a whole bunch of kids? How do you make them disappear without a trace? Take them somewhere no one would look. Hide them away.

I couldn’t see too much further inside: dark, tidy rooms, some expensive pieces of furniture, a chandelier catching stray streaks of moonlight, thick curtains on most of the other windows. I listened hard for the sound of someone moving about inside. Nothing.

I broke a panel of the frosted glass in the front door, then reached through and let myself in. Ziggi studiously ignored my break and enter. I wasn’t too worried about making noise. The cops I could deal with. Dead kids, I couldn’t.

The long hallway had a thin Persian carpet running its length and that muffled my footsteps. I didn’t know what I was looking for, not exactly, but something like a door to a basement would be a good start. Eventually, I found it in the kitchen; in the pantry to be exact, right next to a shelf stacked with salt, sugar, and water crackers. Plain as day. I guess when you’ve got a glamour around your house and you live in Ascot you think you’re bulletproof.

The door wasn’t locked and the stairway that led down was brightly lit. My sneakers were soft on the steps, but not quite silent because the ache in my leg meant I brought one foot down harder than the other.

At the bottom of the stairs I found a large white room, the floor dark grey polished concrete. The house was old, and the basement must have been dug at the same time as the foundations were laid, but it wasn’t some dingy old cellar; it was pristine, industrial. One wall was lined with wine racks, half of them full. There was a row of steel tables, a large furnace in the back corner, a round vat with a screw-down lid and pipes running into and out of it like a moonshine still. Stark against the floor next to the furnace was a tumbling stack of small shoes and the air ached with a faint smell of cooked flesh.

In the middle of this stood a woman.

For all intents and purposes, she looked like an Ascot matron; in fact, she was the Ascot matron who’d smiled out at me from the community noticeboard. She didn’t look much different. Maybe in her sixties, but her true age was concealed by a combination of expensive cosmetics, a little glamour and a lot of Botox. Not overly tall, but with a good figure; a little thick around the waist. Her pale blue dress was impeccable, and her hair an elegant mix of grey and blonde. The ensemble was completed by an expensive gold watch, pearl earrings, and knuckle-duster rings probably worth more than my house.

“Yes?” she said. Didn’t say, What are you doing in my house, peasant? I’m calling the police. She was holding a pair of thick black gloves maybe made out of that same stuff they’re using to make muffin trays nowadays. They were at odds with the rest of her outfit.

I must have looked dumbly at her when I said, “You’re not eating them.”

“Oh, no. If you take their tears,” she told me quite tenderly, “you can’t use the meat afterwards. It’s too dry, tough. Really, it’s either wine or veal.” She smiled. “You’re Grigor’s daughter, aren’t you?”

I swallowed and peered around, noticing at last that on one of the tables lay a child. She was still dressed; her chest rose and fell. The woman nodded toward her. “Isn’t she lovely? I was very happy with Sally for this one—it’s much nicer when they’re clean and content.” She smiled. “She smells a little like you, you know—my, what a vintage you would have made, my girl, when you were young! What grief, what unadulterated heartache! Oh, what wouldn’t I have done to take the tears from you? The wine tastes so much sweeter when it’s born of sorrow.”

“Lizzie,” I said. She didn’t stir. Louder: “Lizzie!”

“She can’t hear you, dear. I keep them under, just a little sleeping spell, right up until I’m ready to put them in the press. You don’t want too much panic; that sours things. It’s the grief you want, the pain. Best taken fresh; giving them time to worry just makes things, well, stale.”

“Wake her up,” I said. “Wake her up and give her to me and we walk out of here. I tell no one about you. Just give her to me.” I wondered how many deals like this I’d try to make.

“I knew your father. Wonderful butcher. Reliable business partner. Talented kinderfresser, but sometimes so stupid, so rash.” She shook her head.

“Bela Tepes knows I’m here,” I lied. “You mess with me, you mess with him. You mess with him, you mess with the Weyrd Council.”

“I can handle them. Two of my best customers are on the board, lovey,” she confided.

On the table, Lizzie moved. The woman tut-tutted. “Oh, look you’ve broken my concentration. She’s waking up.”

And she came at me so quickly I didn’t have time to think. In my head, she was still the sort of woman who was only dangerous if you took the last friand at her favourite coffee shop. But she was older than that, infinitely stranger, and stronger. She punched me in the chest with both fists. I felt her rings rip the thin cotton of my overwashed t-shirt and pierce my skin, into the flesh. I fell straight backward. She cackled like a fairy tale witch. I hit my head on the concrete and black welled across my eyes.

Next thing I knew I could feel myself being dragged along the smooth cold floor. She had hold of my ankles, the agony of her pulling on my bad leg having woken me; that and the pain in my lacerated chest and my aching skull. She reached the furnace and let go—that hurt too—and I lay there trying to get my brain in order, trying to make my body work, trying to get to my damned feet and fight. I turned my head and looked into Lizzie’s open, terrified eyes.

I heard the door of the furnace clank open and felt the heat whoosh out. I raised my gaze and saw the old woman had finally put her gloves on, and yes, they did indeed clash with her outfit.

“Now,” she said, tilting her head to consider me, “you’re quite tall. How am I going to fit you in? Might be a bit of a squeeze.”

She leaned down to grab my hands so she could pull me forward. She was hideously strong; she was Baba Yaga, the witch in the forest, the stepmother with a poisoned apple in her hand. She hauled my top half up and for a moment our faces almost touched. She smiled and laughed and her breath was like rotten meat. I got my hand around her throat and she laughed again, kept laughing until she felt my grip tighten.

Then she was gasping and taking me seriously. I felt her nails against my back as they burst through the heatproof gloves and tore into me. I screamed and kept squeezing, watching her face turn purple. Her nails slid further in, closer to organs that would not react well to puncturing.

And then she was gone; the talons tore bigger holes in me as she was pushed aside and I fell to my knees.

Lizzie and my attacker fell back against the open maw of the furnace. I heaved myself up and pushed Lizzie out of the way. The old woman, smoke already rising from behind her head, started to scream. I punched at her torso just as she had done to me and she overbalanced, silver-grey hair becoming red and gold with flame. I grabbed at her ankles and lifted—the top half of her disappeared into the furnace and Lizzie and I jammed the rest of her in after. We pushed the door shut and locked it.

Welcome to the Gingerbread House.

The cab rolled across the Story Bridge in the soft darkness. I felt every bump and dip in the road, a regular rolling rhythm of thud thud thud. My t-shirt was sticky with blood; my wounds ached and itched. I wanted to get Lizzie home to her mother before I went to hospital. Sleep called, but I fought it. Ziggi looked at me, the back eye intent and the two at the front flicking to my image in the rear view mirror. I gave him a weak grin and a wave.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I’m a human pincushion.”

“When are you gonna tell Bela?”

“When I stop bleeding.”

“Kid okay?”

I looked down at Lizzie. Her little body was curled on the seat beside me, and her head was in my lap. She sucked her thumb. My hand was on her shoulder, and I could feel the occasional tremor running through her, like a dog that dreamed it was chasing a rabbit.

“Yeah,” I said, thinking of all the kids who weren’t. “She’s okay.”

Ziggi pushed a CD into the player. Softly, Bernard sang about being washed clean. The sun came up.

© 2010 by Angela Slatter.

Originally published in Sprawl, edited by Alisa Krasnostein.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Angela Slatter writes dark fantasy and horror. She is the author of the Aurealis Award-winning The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, the WFA-shortlisted Sourdough and Other Stories, and the new collection/mosaic novel (with Lisa L Hannett), Midnight and Moonshine. She has a British Fantasy Award for “The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter” (ABook of Horrors, Stephen Jones ed.), a PhD in Creative Writing, and blogs at angelaslatter.com.

Author Spotlight: Patricia McKillip
Moshe Siegel

Your novella, “The Gorgon in the Cupboard,” explores two very different lives—that of a dilettante artist and that of an indigent—yet each holds its own kind of pain and loneliness: Penniless Jo suffers great personal loss and succumbs to life as a transient, while Harry, for all his comfortable wealth, turns to unruly goats and fantasies about his mentor’s wife for fulfillment (which neither is able to provide). Did you set out to write the tale of these two characters with the common theme of isolation in mind, or did it develop naturally in the process?

I did a lot of research on the Pre-Raphaelite painters, their works and their lives, simply because I was interested in the tension between their romantic philosophy of art and the actual difficulties of the mid-Victorian times. This story grew out of the research. Edward Burne-Jones wrote: “I mean by a picture a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be, in light better than any light that ever shone, in a land no one can define or remember, only desire.” That’s the state of mind I tried to instill in Harry. If that’s also your notion of love, you are bound to have a difficult time of it. I also read parts of Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, which became the initial landscape of Jo’s return to London. The characters grew out of my efforts to describe the states of mind of both the Pre-Raphaelites and of London’s poor.

Greek mythology is central to this novella, but was it the source of your inspiration? Is this a supposal of Medusa’s tale, or Persephone’s tragedy—or did you first come up with Jo and Harry’s tale and found mythology the best lens through which to tell it?

As I recall, the Medusa was a bit of a surprise. The tale very much belongs to Harry and Jo, even at the very beginning; they came out of my research. But actually what Harry would paint that would become his great work, I wasn’t sure about any more than he was, until I realized that the object of his passion, his friend’s wife, rendered him totally inept with just a glance. In effect, she turned him into stone. At that point, if I remember correctly, he saw his Medusa, his beautiful and deadly inspiration, at the same time I did.

Jo is only able to rediscover her humanity (and acknowledge the pain she has suffered) by viewing herself, through Harry’s eyes, as a monster—and is then afraid that Harry will have no more use for his humanized muse. Aurora, as well, obscures a vulnerable past to sustain her reputation and career as a lofty goddess. Why do you think it is so important to artists like Harry and McAlister that their human models be anything but? What about “real life” defied or jeopardized their artistic sense?

Actually, the Pre-Raphaelites often found their models in some pretty down-to-earth places. Both Jane Burden, who became William Morris’s wife, and Lizzie Siddal, who married Dante Gabriel Rossetti, were working-class women when the two painters asked them to model. The British class system was extremely hard on women then, and my character Jo, a young woman in service who became an unwed mother with no chance of marriage, would have been regarded as a sort of monster by many well-bred women. The painters might have seen the “beautiful romantic dream” of their paintings in the faces of these women, but for the most part the models had no need to hide their pasts; the painters found them where they lived.

I expected trouble from Medusa when she first addressed Harry from within the cupboard, but found instead a sympathetic voice, haunted by her own insecurities. Medusa gives Harry some (rather human) advice about how to treat his model, Jo—thoughtful guidance, unexpected from a murderous Gorgon. Did your Medusa, who was once, like Jo, “shown” herself, discover empathy through that same vision? Has death softened Medusa?

I suspect that hanging around the world for a couple of millennia made the Medusa a bit more understanding about people. As I described her, she was still alive because people kept remembering her. In all that time, becoming aware of so many different people who said or thought her name, she could very well have developed both a keen awareness of the difficulties of society as well as a sense of humor.

You seem to have a handle on the creativity and politics of bohemian art culture. Do you paint or illustrate, as well as write? Or, as the Gorgon might suggest, do you just tell convincing lies with your word processor?

I tell convincing lies with my Pilot G-2 gel pen.

Do you have any projects upcoming or in the works you would like to share with us?

I am under contract for a novel. It is driving me bonkers. I will spare you the details.

Moshe Siegel interviews for Lightspeed, freelance edits hither and yon, and is in hot pursuit of an MS in Publishing at Pace University. His overladen bookshelf and smug e-reader glare at each other across his home office in upstate New York, and he isn’t quite sure what to think about it all. Follow tweets of varying relevance @moshesiegel.

Author Spotlight: Yoon Ha Lee
Earnie Sotirokos

“The Knight of Chains, the Deuce of Stars” seems to pit the unstoppable force against the unmovable object. Where did the idea for this story come from?

You are going to laugh, but it came from a line in the TV sitcom Big Bang Theory, episode 6.4, “The Re-Entry Minimization.” (I am fond of this show because, well, I’m married to a Caltech astrophysicist.) Sheldon says to Penny, “All games are made up. They’re not found in nature. You don’t just dig in the ground, come across a rich vein of Rock’em Sock’em Robots.”

I am argumentative by nature, and I bounced up and down and said to myself, “But what if you could just mine games?” Then I decided that war was a game made incarnate, and there was a woman strategist who was out to completely outsmart him. It grew from there.

Daechong preferred his liquor and books to be incinerated before he enjoyed them. How do you decide what quirks to give your characters?

Honestly, I just pick something that seems suitable. In Daechong’s case, I thought it should be something destructive, and yet a little sad. He would probably like to drink and read the normal way just once, like his visitors do.

Weaving the game of Go into your prose was very effective. Was Go on your mind when you started creating this world?

To some extent, yes. It used to be when I put game imagery into a story, I’d automatically reach for chess because it’s very commonly done. I thought for a story featuring a character with a Korean-derived name, I should reach for an Eastern game instead. Go is very popular in South Korea (called baduk there) and there’s a Go channel, or maybe more than one. I remember my dad used to watch it, and to read the go column in the newspaper.

I’m curious about the rest of the games in the tower. Did you come up with any others in addition to the linguistics game?

There was one other game that had been freed, which involved mecha, but I ended up cutting it because beta readers suggested that it muddied the scenario. I didn’t come up with anything beyond that, although if I ever think of something, it would be tempting to give it a try. I am not a game designer, but I find game design intensely fascinating, and I like to read about game design theory.

What can we expect from you in the future?

I’m currently shopping around a space opera novel that pits a disgraced captain against the undead tactician assigned her as an advisor. Probably more space opera if that one doesn’t pan out. It’s good to have an excuse to blow things up!

Earnie Sotirokos grew up in a household where Star Trek: The Next Generation marathons were only interrupted for baseball and football games. When he’s not writing copy for radio or reading slush, he enjoys penning fiction based on those influences. Follow him on Twitter @sotirokos.

Author Spotlight: Alastair Reynolds
Patrick J Stephens

What started “At Budokan”—the dinosaurs, heavy metal, or was it something else?

I don’t keep a notebook of ideas, but I am in the habit of opening files on my computer and entering notes or story fragments into them. Sometimes they are just stories that didn’t work out but which I may return to. In the case of “At Budokan,” I’d opened a file called “Monsters of Rock” quite a few years ago, which contained the germ of “At Budokan,” but all I had was the conceit: I had not worked out how to tell the story. When I heard about the Shine anthology, which was supposed to about optimistic SF stories set on Earth and in the next 50 years, I wondered if I could get something out of those story fragments. So I dived back in and wrote “At Budokan” fairly quickly.

The narrative adopts an aspect of shaded optimism filtered through Fox. Was this intentional for “At Budokan,” or did you feel this method allowed you to explore the world in a more visceral way?

The original problem for the story was that I didn’t know how to tell it, but once I had the idea of focusing on the PR/management team, I found a way into it. Fox’s world-weary cynicism seemed to fit the character, and of course, there’s a hint of wry optimism there at the end. I think it is quite an upbeat piece, in that it presumes a future in which there is still enough of a global economy to support stadium rock acts, which is by no means a given.

The path you’ve created to the future of the music industry with Morbid Management and the introduction of dinosaur-based cover bands is satirically hilarious and captivating. What was the approach you took to envisioning this type of future? What cover band would you like to see, and in what format?

I had quite a bit of fun with imagining the backstory of Morbid Management—the idea being that a dinosaur-based rock act would only be the latest in a string of epically tasteless ideas that have all gone wrong in one way or another. Oddly, though, once I started thinking about robot cover bands, I wondered why someone hadn’t already done it in real life. And then (long after the story) I found out about Compressorhead, the all-robot Motorhead cover act! They sound like fun.

That said, I’m not all that bothered about cover acts myself—you either see the real deal, or live with the fact that you can’t, in my view. I’m off to see Bruce Springsteen for the sixth time shortly, but I couldn’t imagine getting excited about a Bruce cover act.

How do you approach the aspects of science fiction that are harder to grasp, like worldbuilding and technological progression? Does the character come first, waiting to use the technology—or does the device sit around waiting to be used?

I take a very organic, iterative approach to writing, so I might begin with the character one day, or an idea the next, or both at the same time on the third. But the process of writing the story is always to creep my way to a finished piece with a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, going back into the narrative and ramping up or dialing down this or that as the needs of the piece evolve in my head. I very rarely see the shape of the story in clear, diagrammatic terms at the outset—just a vague sense of which direction I need to be headed in. I think people imagine that, because of my science background, I must have a very logical, formulaic approach to fiction, but it couldn’t be farther from the truth. I’m massively intuitive and a lot of it—why it works and why it doesn’t—is still a total mystery to me.

Through your Twitter account (@AquilaRift), you recently expressed an interest in producing more short fiction than in recent years. How is this developing? Is there anything you would like your readers to know?

I do like to keep the short fiction output up, since it helps keep my profile out there and also (I’d hope) gives me the scope to try out some fresh approaches and strike off in new directions. There’s no hard and fast rule, but in a good year I might get out four or five new pieces, whereas in a lean year I might only manage one or two. I didn’t feel that 2012 was a particularly productive year, but on the other hand I wrote two novels, so perhaps it’s only to be expected—it’s not as if I wasn’t writing. That said, I did crank out a few short stories too. But in 2013 I’d like perhaps to produce a couple of fairly long, substantial pieces, and I’m into one of those at the moment, which should end up being a 25- or 30,000 word novella. We’ll see how it goes. I’ve got quite a few things simmering gently on the backburner, which is nice.

Patrick J Stephens recently graduated from the University of Edinburgh and, after spending the entire year writing speculative fiction, came back with a Master’s in Social Science. His first collection (Aurichrome and Other Stories) can be found on Kindle and Nook.

Author Spotlight: Nancy Kress
Amber Barkley

“End Game” is the story of a man trying to set aside the static in his own brain. What drew you to write about that topic? Why is that static so important?

Have you ever tried to meditate? The whole point of meditation is to clear your mind of its constant, stray chattering at itself—and that is very hard to do. My own brain is constantly filled with the static of a hundred irrelevant thoughts: “What should I make for dinner? Who was that actress in that one movie? My nose itches—why does my nose itch? Did I call my father this week? Look at that pretty dress on that woman . . . ” On and on. I got to wondering what total concentration, free of static, would feel like, and what results it might have. In that sense, “End Game” is a what-if story.

One idea that readers might take away from “End Game” is to embrace varied hobbies and interests. How does this tie in to real life and society today?

I think the whole secret of happiness, in this or in any other society, is to be deeply and genuinely interested. In anything: politics, your children, your job, soccer, quilting, collecting beer steins—it doesn’t matter. “Hobbies” is an inadequate word for what I’m talking about. The point is that when you are sincerely engaged with something, you have a reason to get out of bed in the morning with some degree of pleasure.

Why did you choose chess as Lucy’s focus as she becomes better at eliminating the static in her brain, and why walking for Jeff?

I like chess. I play a lot of chess, not very well. But it is one of the things I am deeply engaged with, and so was a natural topic for Lucy. (If I were a gardener, she’d have become obsessed with roses.) For Jeff, walking is good because he’s trying desperately to NOT have his concentration narrowed (a fight he will lose) and walking allows him to see many other things that might keep him from falling into narrow obsession (they won’t).

The story’s narrator is Jeff, but it focuses mainly on Allen and his discoveries/obsessions. Why did you choose to use Jeff’s point of view?

Allen’s POV would be too hard for me to write, and too hard for readers to identify with. For this sort of story, you want someone who can observe the horror, not be the horror.

Jeff is suspicious of Allen from the start, though he attributes it to jealousy. Why is Jeff able to see—consciously or unconsciously—that potential for danger in Allen’s theory, while Karen remains blind to it?

Jeff doesn’t see it as a danger, not at first. He is jealous—of Allen’s intellect, his ability to focus. These kinds of often irrational envies date from their teenage years together. His suspicion is just one manifestation of teenage insecurity, which later turns to irritation at Allen’s weirdness, and only much later to fear. A justified fear, when seeing Lucy creeps him out. I might wish for total concentration on chess (and I would undoubtedly play better if I had it), but what else would I have to give up to get that laser-like single focus? I’ll never know—and maybe that’s a good thing.

Amber Barkley is a recent graduate of Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She was born in Idaho and grew up in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Her favorite animals are cats and horses, and she considers it a great injustice that she is allergic to both—though that doesn’t stop her from being around them whenever she has the chance. Amber writes high fantasy with a dark twist, and is currently working on her first novel.

Author Spotlight: Sean Williams
Jude Griffin

Can you talk about how this story came about and how it ties into your Twinmaker series?

Twinmaker is set in a world where matter transmitters are taken for granted by most people, at least by the youngest members of society, who have entirely grown up with them. This technology, d-mat, doesn’t use a wormhole or anything like that: It analyses a thing, destroying it in the process, and then creates an identical copy somewhere else. As with all technological innovations, there are unintended consequences for individuals and society. Even a three-book series isn’t sufficient to explore all of these consequences, so I’ve been looking for other means of exploring them. The Forrest and Sargent stories are one. My starting premise is always “what’s something interesting about matter transmission that (to my knowledge) hasn’t been tried out before and how can I play it out in the form of a criminal investigation?” The latter part because I grew up reading Asimov’s mysteries and think that’s a fine, well-established vehicle for exploring complex ideas without getting too bogged down in other details. Also, Forest and Sargent will appear in the second book of my series, Crashland, and exploring them is fun too.

Which came first: imagining the Inspector or learning about Möbius Syndrome?

In my first conception of him, the Inspector was very much a Bogart figure, damaged face and all, but that felt both obvious and gratuitous. I wanted something that was interesting as an idea and as a mirror of the character, so I went digging on the internet and found the very real and tragic Möbius Syndrome, an extremely rare congenital disorder that renders people unable to move their eyes or form facial expressions. That seemed just perfect, and the fact that it had an evocative name helped too. Everything unfolded from there, Forest, Sargent and her girlfriend, Billie, and their relationships with each other. The way Billie helps Forest function as a person in the everyday, by “sculpting” the expressions he employs, makes her an offstage collaborator that I’m keen to bring onstage one day.

What inspired the core conceit about re-inventing money?

The Forest and Sargent stories are mysteries, but they’re also about exploring the society of Twinmaker and the values of the people who live in that society. Sometimes the mystery part comes first, as it did in “The Missing Metatarsals,” but in this case it was an idea that’s been around for a very long time. While researching matter-transmitter stories for my PhD on the subject, I found one from 1945 called “Pandora’s Millions” by George O. Smith, in which an economic collapse caused by the invention of a matter duplicator is staved off by a second invention: identium, an element that can’t be duplicated. The idea seemed worth revisiting. After every technological revolution there are always people who long for the good old days (of horse and buggy, of writing letters, of reading paper books, whatever)—why not someone who missed the rock-hard bedrock sense of value that money gives to any system of exchange? As a science fiction writer (one who dropped out of an economics degree to boot) I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what life might be like in a post-scarcity environment. It was fun to turn the situation on its head and take a look at us from the other side.

I liked your line about what Sargent’s great-aunt called the fabbers. Can you talk a little about the balance of, and your approaches to, introducing new terms when worldbuilding?

Part of it’s driven by my gut. You need a certain number of neologisms or retooled familiar terms to give each story a desired SF flavour, but at the same time you want the language to draw the reader into the world rather than completely alienate them from it. I find this tug-of-war creatively stimulating in part because it’s so challenging. I know what feels right to me, but will it work for anyone else? I took weeks to settle on “the Air” as the future of cloud computing, for instance—it was in fact suggested by my wife, who’s not a reader of SF at all (I took that as a good sign). With “fabricator” vs “fabber,” the former felt old-fashioned even to me, like something from an old story, so I decided to use that as a signifier of out-datedness in the world of “Face Value,” since that’s another very important function of jargon: to give us information about the people who use it.

The layers of meaning in the title, “Face Value,” took a while to sink in. Did the title influence the story or was it a felicitous capstone after the story was complete?

The working title was “The Counter-Counterfeiter,” which never sat well with me, so while writing the story I was definitely on the lookout for something else, something with layers. “Face Value” didn’t leap out at me at first, but it certainly had the layers. These are puzzle stories, not just driven by something weird to do with d-mat and what constitutes a crime in this society, but also with our expectation of who the characters are and how they should behave. For instance, it would be easy to define Inspector Forest as an ABC man with a disability, but who is he really? What is his true face? Each story (I hope) unpacks in interesting ways, and over several stories we’ll see the characters unpack a bit more too.

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She cannot parallel park, lies about how far she runs in the morning, and is a Kelly Link fangirl.

Author Spotlight: Marc Laidlaw
Jude Griffin

What inspired “Catamounts”?

This was originally created as a chapter of an episodic novel following this character Gorlen, which I wrote in my teens and later threw away. When I started writing new Gorlen stories years later, I thought one or two of the sequences in that lost novel could stand on their own, so I recreated the story from memory.

“Catamounts” was the second short story I wrote concerning Gorlen Vizenfirthe. But even before I wrote the first, “Dankden,” I knew quite a lot about the gargoyle-handed bard. In my teens, I wrote an entire novel about him, titled Mistress of Shadows. It told the story of how he came to have his hand (initially his finger) replaced with a gargoyle version of the digit—one that grew to consume more and more of his body whenever he faltered in pursuing the quest he’d be given at the start of the story. The book was written heavily under the influence of Jack Vance, and it was highly episodic. Between the setting of his quest and its resolution, Gorlen wandered around and got into unrelated adventures. Sometime in my twenties, I tried rewriting the novel, but was so unhappy with the results that I destroyed all the versions. But Gorlen never left my thoughts, and as the years went by, I have revisited him from time to time to see how he was getting on. I thought it was interesting to write sequels to a novel that nobody has (or will) ever read. He saved the world in that novel . . . but he’s still an anonymous figure, concerned mainly with saving his own skin.

“Catamounts” reads much like a fable, save for the lack of a moral at the end. Was it consciously written that way? If so, did you have a moral in mind?

I think the repetitive quality of the story is similar to certain fables or folk stories, which often feature an element that repeats and gets worse every time. Think of the increasingly huge dogs in “The Tinderbox.” That was probably the biggest influence on this story. But no, I didn’t have a moral in mind. I just wanted a satisfying ending.

In “Catamounts,” the evil are physically repulsive, the victimized and avenging cats have striking or beautiful features, but Gorlen himself is a physical cipher. Can you talk about how you adapted the Inside Matches The Outside trope to fit your vision for the story?

“Catamounts” was initially an episode from that long-lost novel, reconstructed long after the fact. It always had a fable-like symmetry that allowed it to stand on its own. It doesn’t connect to anything else in the series, and Gorlen is at his most generic in this tale. His stone hand plays a very small role. His sense of morality takes care of the rest.

Why does One-Eye so fear the return trip to Dog that he suffers the horrors of Dog’s spells rather than return? Gorlen, in contrast, has a relatively easy time of it.

He knows what’s in the bag.

Is “Catamounts” set in a world you intend to revisit? If so, any idea of where you’ll go with it?

I have written eight Gorlen stories so far, set in this world I recently named Ique. “Catamounts” was the second I wrote, and “Bellweather” (in an upcoming issue of Lightspeed) is the eighth.

The appearance of the fifth cat, the description of its movement, was so lovely in its unsettling creepiness. Was it fun to work on such evocative details or did you find yourself feeling a little too empathetic with the poor creature?

It is fun to feel that as one writes—both the creepiness and the empathy. If it’s not obvious, I am a cat person.

“Evil gets its comeuppance” often makes for an emotionally satisfying ending. Did you consider other ways to end the story?

Nope, I always knew the cats would get some payback.

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She cannot parallel park, lies about how far she runs in the morning, and is a Kelly Link fangirl.

Author Spotlight: Ken Liu
Kevin McNeil

Great to see another story from you in Lightspeed. I read a tweet that “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King” began as a law school paper ten years ago. Can you elaborate on the origins of this story?

Thank you! I’m glad to be back in Lightspeed!

In law school, I took a comparative law elective on the legal history of China. “Litigation masters” were discussed briefly, but I found them so fascinating that I decided to do my class paper on them.

Late Imperial China never developed an independent legal profession as we understand the term in the West. But the complex social and economic life during the Qing Dynasty created demand for individuals with litigation expertise. And so the songshi (“litigation masters”) were born.

For various cultural and historical reasons, litigation was (and to some extent, still is) frowned upon in Chinese society, and aiding others to pursue litigation was viewed as stirring up trouble and profiting from the misery. To the magistrates, these individuals were bothersome songgun (“litigating hooligans”) who turned black to white and fooled the ignorant into clogging the courts. Officially, what the litigation masters did was a crime.

Very little is written about the litigation masters in the official histories. So, for my paper, I also turned to fictionalized accounts in popular culture. The portrayal of these shadowy figures in folk operas and folktales was very different from the official version. They were crafty, alert, nimble, and cunning; they used their intelligence to game the system so as to humble the powerful and uplift the powerless (and often made the magistrates look foolish); they had a habit of defending widows and orphans. Deemed amoral agents whose talent could be hired by anyone, good or evil, they employed strategies and tactics that were of questionable legality. Yet, in these stories, they were often engaged in the pursuit of a moral end that the audience sympathized with. In a corrupt society, they attacked poison with poison.

The kind of intelligence that the litigation masters displayed was that of the trickster hero. Melissa Ann Macauley, in Social Power and Legal Culture: Litigation Masters in Late Imperial China, enumerated aspects of the litigation master’s personality: deception, forethought, opportunism, deviousness, practicality, and intrepid adaptability and flexibility in the face of looming, unexpected threats. It reminded me of my favorite trickster hero from Chinese folk traditions: The Monkey King, who dared to rebel against the Jade Emperor and always had a clever plan in the face of overwhelming odds.

For years and years, the ideas in the paper circulated in my head until I figured out how to make a story out of it. I love it when I can make use of my academic work in fiction.

This is an important story of sacrificing for the greater good. I found reading about the suffering of the people of Yangzhou, as well as the torture of Tian Haoli incredibly difficult. Did you feel that this story was a particularly challenging one to write? If so, how?

Writing this story reminded me, to a lesser extent, of writing my novella, The Man Who Ended History, another story about memories of historical atrocities. In both cases, I wanted to engage with the notion of the importance of remembrance, of preserving the past, of speaking up against the effort to silence historical ghosts and to subjugate the past to serve the purposes of the present.

Reading An Account of Ten Days at Yangzhou was emotionally very difficult. Chinese is the language of my childhood, and reading about the massacre committed at Yangzhou by the Manchu invaders in Classical Chinese had an emotional impact on me that cannot be expressed in English. I had to pause many times during the reading to get my emotions under control. It was a draining, searing experience.

This story is based on historical events, and Tian Haoli is based on folktales about the Litigation Master Xie Fangzun. I’ve read that researching is your favorite thing about writing. What draws you to research? What kind of research was required in order to do this story justice?

I treat the need for research as opportunities to learn, and who doesn’t like learning?

Luckily, I did most of the background research for this story back in law school, so getting my research file out and reading over my notes was relatively easy. (Not being at the law school any more, I don’t have access to the wonderful resources at the Yenching Library at Harvard—writers who are in school, please take advantage of the wealth of information at your disposal before you graduate!)

I also had to read up on the Yangzhou Massacre, which, as I explained, proved to be a very difficult process. I’m glad I went through it, but I would not want to go through it again. Reading about such atrocities has a tendency to make one despair at human nature.

You’ve been incredibly prolific over the past few years, which is a little intimidating for an aspiring writer. What’s the secret? What’s a day in your writing life like?

Ha! I’m afraid I don’t have a secret. What I do can be summarized in two words: write more. The more I write, the more ideas I have. I don’t think this is necessary for everyone because some writers seem to write very little, but everything they write turns out incredible. But for me, I have to do my thinking while writing.

Because of my job and the fact that my wife and I have two very young children, my writing time tends to be pretty unpredictable. I try to squeeze some writing in during my commute on the train, and again after the kids are asleep, but I can’t say I’m successful every day. I always wish I were more disciplined.

Congratulations on your recent string of awards, from the World Fantasy to the Hugo to the Nebula and more. What do the nominations and awards mean to you?

Thank you very much. I’m grateful to the other writers and readers of the speculative fiction community who have nominated my works and voted for them. Their recognition is humbling to me, and I’m just overwhelmed by the response.

Truth be told, I don’t think about the awards much. What matters is writing a better story next, not dwelling on ones you’ve already written.

Is there anything else you’d like to share about “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King”? What’s next for you?

One of the most gratifying comments I received about this story came from a beta reader who’s also a lawyer. He said that the story made him feel good about our profession. I felt that way, too, when I wrote it.

As for what’s next, I’ve put short fiction on hold for a while as I work on my novel and complete a translation of The Waste Tide, Chen Qiufan’s debut novel. I’m excited about both projects and hope readers like them when they’re complete!

Thank you for chatting with me.

Kevin McNeil reads slush for Lightspeed Magazine and is an editorial assistant for Nightmare Magazine. He is a physical therapist, sports fanatic, and volunteer coach for the Special Olympics. He graduated from the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2012 and The Center for the Study of Science Fiction’s Intensive Novel Workshop, led by Kij Johnson, in 2011. Kevin is a New Englander currently living in California. Find him on Twitter @kevinmcneil.

Author Spotlight: Cory Skerry
Earnie Sotirokos

Where did the idea for “Breathless in the Deep” come from?

The short answer is I started with the title and the premises of written magic and a sunken, haunted ship.

The longer answer is that while I was at Clarion West, one of my classmates, Henry Lien, submitted a story for critique with art attached. I really enjoyed seeing the visual inspirations he’d compiled for himself, so I thought I’d collect some images that reflected either the subject or atmosphere of what I wanted to write. The first was a fantastical portrait of Cheng I Sao done by Ross Campbell, who is one of my favorite artists. Working with him in a professional capacity is on my bucket list! The other inspiration was a screenshot from a HOPA game called Nightmares from the Deep: The Cursed Heart. Artifex Mundi, the company that developed the game, has phenomenal digital artists working for them.

Magic systems can be tricky. Why did you choose to use tattoos in this story?

I used to work at a tattoo shop, and I even have some ink myself (nope, not telling you where). I’m a big believer in taking a pickaxe to memories of jobs that didn’t pay enough and mining them for useful story material. I didn’t end up using much technical tattooing knowledge, because the story just went somewhere else, but I hope to work more in this world, so maybe next time.

Two words: Baby Kraken! What other adolescent mythological creatures would be fun to run into?

I’m skeptical that any of them would be very fun. It seems like most of them would just try to kill me. The real question is, would any of the others taste as good as giant magical calamari?

You’ve had several pieces of short fiction published. Do you have anything you’d like to share with authors still trying to make their first sale?

Write stories that only you can write. Several people told me this over the years, and at first I didn’t understand what they meant, but I think at least I can explain what it has come to mean to me. Write stories that draw on your own experience (like working at a tattoo shop or finding out you can’t trust a family member). There’s something powerful in your memories that can be transmuted into equally powerful stories; don’t waste that.

What can we expect from you in the future?

If you want romance and revenge set in a Victorian-era boarding school haunted by ghosts, where kids do parkour and oil paint graffiti, you could check out Where Thy Dark Eye Glances from Lethe Press (July 2013). Apex Book Company is releasing Glitter and Mayhem, which contains a story of mine about a thief who can make doors open where he likes—but as most of us know, some doors should never be opened (August 2013). And my gender-bending take on Beauty & the Beast is included in Once Upon A Time, an anthology of original fairy tales from Prime Books (September 2013).

Earnie Sotirokos grew up in a household where Star Trek: The Next Generation marathons were only interrupted for baseball and football games. When he’s not writing copy for radio or reading slush, he enjoys penning fiction based on those influences. Follow him on Twitter @sotirokos.

Author Spotlight: Angela Slatter
Amber Barkley

The culture in “Brisneyland by Night” seems to be a mix of gypsy customs and original fairy tales. What other elements influenced the culture of the story, and what drew you to write in that particular setting?

My passion is fairy tales and how they adapt across cultures and time, so I was sort of fascinated by how I could work them into an urban, very non-European, very modern Australian setting. I picked the locations in Brisbane that already are a kind of shorthand for residents and played that up so a reader not from Brisbane would still (hopefully) come away feeling as though they knew the city—or a version of it. As I wrote, I pulled creatures and motifs from my own store of knowledge from all the study I’ve done (a Master of Arts and a PhD, both in creative writing with a focus on fairy tales) and used them where I could. So the culture is kind of a patchwork of real-life Brisbane as I see and experience it and European fairy tale elements. I don’t use any Indigenous mythology or tales because those are not my stories to tell.

In the beginning of the story, Verity thinks that she should be at Lizzie’s birthday party, pretending that she doesn’t like children. Why does she need to pretend? What is she afraid people would think if she admitted to liking children?

It’s kind of a tongue-in-cheek comment—Verity’s a tough sort of a character, as evidenced by the fact that she gets called in on cases where monsters try to chew her leg off. So the idea that this tough girl actually wants to go to the birthday party and have cake amused me. I like that it speaks to the fact that, as a character, she’s got a soft core—a bit like a marshmallow hedgehog, prickly on the outside, but gooey and sweet on the inside. Well, not entirely gooey and sweet, but you get the idea. I like that she’s this kind of unwilling gumshoe who complains about getting pulled into this, but she still takes part in solving the mystery—in the novel she observes, “I’m the kind of person who compulsively pulls threads on sweaters until they unravel.”

Verity has spent her adult life trying to atone for her father’s crimes. How else has he influenced her life and her feeling of being an outsider?

I think firstly it’s in knowing she’s different—when she was a kid, she knew they weren’t like other families, but her father pitched it to her not as a bad thing, but as a special secret. Kids love secrets. It wasn’t until his crimes came to light and she started to see exactly how different her family was that she realised how much she was “other.” Going to live with her grandparents made the contrast even more striking because they went to great pains to make sure she grew up “Normal”—before she didn’t really have much to compare to and things don’t strike you as weird until you see them in opposition to other things.

Quite apart from that, she knew that her strength set her apart and something like that can’t be changed—it’s an indelible part of your make-up and you can’t ignore it. So she’s always aware of being different, even if the Normal community doesn’t know it.

Bernard Fanning provides a soundtrack to the story via the CD in the gypsy cab. Why did you choose that particular artist? What is it about his music that fits the story so well?

When I originally wrote “Brisneyland,” I had stumbled across Mr. Fanning’s solo album Tea and Sympathy and was listening to it a lot. Powderfinger, his main band, is one of Brisbane’s best known, most iconic bands of recent years so I wanted something that kind of acted as an appropriate soundtrack to a Brisbane story. Tea and Sympathy’s about the breakdown of relationships and loss and things you can’t control, and it seemed to fit with Verity’s situation at the time of the story.

There are different kinds of Weyrd. Verity’s father is a kinderfresser, but her mother was Normal—what does that make her? What other specific Weyrd do we see in the story, and what makes them all distinct from each other?

One of the things I’ve said in the novel I’m currently finishing—which is based on this short story—is that the Weyrd blood is wild, so you don’t know what abilities a pure Weyrd will get, but they will get something. When Weyrd and Normal blend, the offspring might get no power at all, or some kind of diluted power from the parent—for instance, Verity got her father’s inhuman strength, but she can’t shape-shift like he could to make himself bigger and stronger and more lethal in a fight.

As far as the Weyrd population is concerned, in some instances I used cool fairy tale monsters—for example, a kinderfresser is a child-eater from old German tales. There’s also an element of the fairy tale witch in the story and the gingerbread house; the character of Sally Crown is, to me, like an imp, and Ziggi’s just . . . Weyrd. Bela isn’t a traditional vampire, but he’s a leech of sorts, existing on energy from those around him—not feasting on it, but just from his daily interactions with humans, a bit like a plant pulls carbon dioxide from the air.

I’ve worked out the boundaries of what constitutes Weyrd a bit more in writing the novel, but I think essentially it can all fit under the banner of “things that go bump in the night.” The Weyrd are a bit like Clive Barker’s Tribes of the Moon in Cabal/Nightbreed, but on the whole the Weyrd are far more capable of blending into a society because of their abilities with glamour magic to hide what they are. I’ve tried to use things that will resonate with what readers might know from their own fairy tale reading—wings, tails, eyes in the backs of heads, shape-shifting, that sort of thing.

Amber Barkley is a recent graduate of Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She was born in Idaho and grew up in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Her favorite animals are cats and horses, and she considers it a great injustice that she is allergic to both—though that doesn’t stop her from being around them whenever she has the chance. Amber writes high fantasy with a dark twist, and is currently working on her first novel.

Coming Attractions

Coming up in September, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by D. Thomas Minton (“The Schrödinger War”) and Will McIntosh (“Dry Bite”), along with SF reprints by Lisa Tuttle (“Ragged Claws”) and Nina Allan (“Angelus”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Seanan McGuire (“Homecoming”) and a new Gorlen story by Marc Laidlaw (“Bellweather”) and fantasy reprints by Gene Wolfe (“Suzanne Delage”) and the first Erm Kaslo tale by Matthew Hughes (“And Then Some”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with io9’s Annalee Newitz and author of The Shining Girls, Lauren Beukes.

For our ebook readers, we also have the novella “The Secret Sharer” by Robert Silverberg and a pair of novel excerpts, which as of press time are still TBD.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got a veritable plethora of stories forthcoming. Check out the slate of original stories we’ve got coming up over the next couple of issues: Ken Liu (“Ghost Days”), Dylan Otto Krider (“The Five Deaths of Marvin Dimitri”), Charlie Jane Anders (“Small Dead Creatures”), Sean Williams (“Death and the Hobbyist”), Kelly Barnhill (“The Insect and the Astronomer”), Beth Revis (“The Turing Test”), Siobhan Carroll (“The Correspondence Between the Governess and the Attic”), Hao Jingfang (“Invisible Planets,” translated by Ken Liu), Anaea Lay (“Salamander Patterns”), Adam-Troy Castro (“The Thing About Shapes to Come”), Gregory Benford (“Leaving Night”), Sunny Moraine (“So Sharp That Blood Must Flow”), and James Patrick Kelly (“Stinger, Straight Up”). Plus, we’ve got three all-new Erm Kaslo tales by Matthew Hughes in the queue, which take place in the author’s popular Archonate milieu.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that SFnal goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed. Thanks for reading!

If you enjoyed this issue, you might also enjoy Nightmare Magazine (www.nightmare-magazine.com), also edited by Lightspeed editor John Joseph Adams. Herewith you will find the complete text of one of the stories from the current issue of Nightmare. Enjoy with our compliments—and, if you do, please consider subscribing!

Bonus Story from Nightmare Magazine

If you enjoyed this issue, you might also enjoy Nightmare Magazine (www.nightmare-magazine.com), also edited by Lightspeed editor John Joseph Adams. Herewith you will find the complete text of one of the stories from the current issue of Nightmare. Enjoy with our compliments—and, if you do, please consider subscribing!

How Far to Englishman’s Bay
Matthew Cheney

Max had made the decision that April morning to close up the bookshop and go away for once and for all, but he hadn’t told anyone yet, and he needed somebody to take the cat, so it was a good thing Jeffrey showed up an hour before closing.

“I think Carmilla wants to go home with you,” Max said, watching Jeffrey roam, as always, through the military books. Jeffrey didn’t reply. He took a tattered Shooter’s Bible off the top shelf and held it up.

“Do you really think this is worth ten bucks?”

“Yes,” Max said. “But you can have it for free. And the cat.”

“The cat?”

“Carmilla.”

“For free?”

“Book and cat. Hell, take anything else you want, too.”

“Are you feeling okay?”

“Just fine.”

“I hate cats.”

“It would do you good to have something to care for, something to be responsible for. And she needs a home.”

“But she lives here.”

“Well . . . ” Max sighed. If he had to tell somebody, it might as well be crazy old Jeffrey. They’d known each other since high school—thirty-five years now. Off and on, of course, as their lives took them in different directions, until they both ended up back here in the center of New Hampshire, the middle of nowhere, back where it all began. In school, Jeffrey had been an avowed socialist, class valedictorian, and a pretty good football player, but a knee injury his first year at Duke had ended everything. He left school and wandered through the Midwest for a while, doing occasional work so he’d have enough money for pot, and then somehow or other he ended up back in New Hampshire, landing a job at a machine shop in Rochester, a job he still had. He’d stopped smoking pot a long time ago, and for twenty years now he’d spent every spare cent he had on guns, ammunition, knives, and body armor. Once Max opened the bookstore, he kept his eyes out for books Jeffrey might like, just to make sure he’d come by now and then, just to make sure he’d have someone to talk to.

“I’m going away,” Max said.

“A vacation?” Jeffrey strolled an index finger across some bindings.

“No. Permanent.”

Now Jeffrey was listening.

Max said, “I need somebody to take the cat. I can’t take her with me.”

“What do you mean permanent?”

“Today’s my birthday,” Max said.

“Happy birthday. But—”

“I’m fifty years old.”

“No.”

“I am.”

“No, I mean, you can’t. Happy fucking birthday, buddy, but you’re not going to do it.”

“I am,” Max said. “I don’t honestly feel like I have any choice. It’s hard to explain. I feel awful leaving you behind, though. I do.”

“No.”

“Please take the cat.”

Jeffrey threw the Shooter’s Bible to the ground and ran out the front door.

Max’s apartment sat above the bookstore, a rambling series of small rooms that had been built sometime around the end of the nineteenth century. He’d bought the whole building with the inheritance he got after his parents died on Christmas Eve twenty-two years ago, when a drunk drove a pickup truck straight into their little Volkswagen Golf on their way home from church.

“They’re in a better place now,” the priest told Max at the funeral.

Max somehow resisted the overwhelming urge to punch the sanctimonious ass in the face. He clenched his fists, but didn’t raise them; instead, he replied, “They’re not anywhere. They’re dead,” then turned and walked into the cold night and never set foot in a church again.

When he first bought the building, he’d been excited to work on it, to repair the fixtures and paint the walls and design the bookstore, which he named The Dusty Cover because he thought any used bookstore worth visiting ought not to set people’s expectations of cleanliness too high. He took great care with the few rare and valuable books that came through, but they didn’t interest him as much as the ordinary volumes did, the stray paperbacks and battered Book Club Edition hardcovers—the books that had truly been used. Loved, even. Within a few years, the store and his apartment both had a sagging, lived-in feel to them, and he had never quite finished painting or retrofitting very much of it. Now the ceilings were cracked and in some places crumbling; the walls looked like a coffee stain; the floors were scratched and soiled; and the air itself seemed to hail from another era. It was all he could have hoped for: a temple of entropy, a bell jar, a tomb.

The fluorescent light in the kitchen ceiling had long ago lost its globe. When he turned it on, the light buzzed and flickered. Max opened the refrigerator: a bottle of ketchup, a jar of Dijon mustard, two different bottles of salad dressing, a few slices of turkey, a gallon of milk, a lemon. He closed the fridge door and opened a cupboard: a box of Ritz crackers, a bag of chocolate chip cookies, a granola bar. He put them all on the counter, found a plastic bag from a stash under the sink, and packed the crackers, cookies, and granola bar into the bag. A few cans of Coke sat on top of the refrigerator, and he grabbed those, too. He liked Coke warm. It hurt his teeth less.

Much as he wanted to leave right away, he hated driving at night, so it would be best to wait till morning. In the square little living room, he turned on the TV and sat on the couch. The cushions were thin and desperately needed to be reupholstered, or—better yet—sent to the dump. The couch had been in the house he grew up in. It was one of the few things he’d salvaged from there. It had been a good, solid piece of furniture. He’d gotten a cover for it at Wal-Mart a couple years ago because he finally couldn’t stand to look at its pattern of brown and yellow lines. It was better with the drab gray cover.

On the TV, the President was giving a speech. Max turned it off. From the battered coffee table, he picked up an issue of The New Yorker. His subscription had run out months ago, but he was so far behind in reading them that it didn’t matter.

The phone rang. He walked to the kitchen and looked at the caller ID.

He answered: “Hello, Jeffrey.”

“You can’t go. I won’t let you.”

“You’ll be fine,” Max said. “I’ll leave the front door of the shop open. Do whatever you want with the place. There’s a little bit of money in the cash register. And please look after the cat. I really can’t take her with me.”

“This is the stupidest fucking thing you’ve ever done.”

“That may be true. But I’m still going.”

“Bring me with you.”

“I can’t do that.”

“What’ve I got here?”

“You’ve got your job. You’ve got . . . your guns. What about all the things you’ve wanted to do?”

“But I don’t. I don’t want anything. I just want it all to stay the same.”

“No, I don’t believe that.” Max hesitated, but then said what he’d long been thinking: “You want somebody to break into your apartment and you want to shoot them. This is what you dream about, isn’t it? Or maybe that’s not what you dream about—”

“It’s not—you fuck—I don’t dream about—”

“Maybe what you dream about is being somewhere in public and somebody, some criminal, starts threatening people, and you whip out that pistol you always have on your belt, and you blow them away and save everybody’s life. That’s what you dream about, don’t you? Being big and strong, saving the day? The hero of violence and power?”

“Fuck you.”

“No shame in it,” Max said. “We all want to be a hero. Somehow.”

“Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you!”

“Good night, Jeffrey.” Max hung up. He picked up The New Yorker, but none of the words made any sense, so he tossed it back on the coffee table. He stared at the TV and thought about turning it on. No point in that.

He got up and opened the door to a walk-in closet where he kept boxes of LPs. He flipped through a bunch he didn’t care much about, albums that had seemed interesting when he was young but which he hadn’t listened to for ages and would never listen to again. (Had he really once spent money on an Air Supply record?) A few guitar chords had been haunting him all day, and he’d only just remembered what they were from. There it was—one of the first albums he ever bought: Pink Floyd’s Animals. He hadn’t listened to it for a long time, but he’d played it so many times in the last years of high school and beginning of college that it was permanently seared in his memory. He’d bought it because he liked the cover, the picture of a pig floating between smokestacks. When he first listened to it, he didn’t know what to make of it. The sounds were like nothing he’d heard before, and his ears didn’t know how to shape sense from them, but he knew there was something there, and as he kept listening it drew him back and back until certain strains wrapped around the world, and late at night, alone in his room, headphones on, he would fall asleep thinking he was somewhere, anywhere other than in his bed in his parents’ house in the middle of nowhere.

He put the record on the turntable, then lay down on the couch. He closed his eyes. The cat startled him when she jumped up on his chest. He hadn’t heard her come upstairs. He should probably feed her. Later.

Carmilla’s whining yowls pierced his sleep. For the first time in months, he didn’t remember a dream of ocean waves falling against a rocky shore. He didn’t remember dreaming of anything.

Max’s back, shoulders, and neck ached from spending the night on the couch. “I can’t feed you or you’ll puke in the car,” he said to the cat as he walked to the bathroom.

Later, after a shower and a change of clothes, he let Carmilla lap the milk left in the bowl from his Cheerios. While she was distracted, he grabbed the cat carrier from the storage room at the far end of the apartment. He closed the door in the living room so she wouldn’t be able to run off and disappear, scooped her up, and dropped her down into the plastic box. She moaned deeply as he carried her downstairs and out to his car, a ten-year-old Subaru parked in the narrow driveway next to the building. She yowled during the entire three-mile drive to Jeffrey’s apartment.

As he carried the cat up the front steps, Max noticed the police officer standing in the entranceway.

“Do you live here, sir?” the police officer asked when Max stepped inside.

“I’m bringing a cat to a friend who lives here. Why?”

“The building’s closed except to residents right now.”

“What happened? I need to bring the cat in.”

“Who are you visiting, sir?”

“Why? What’s happened?”

“Which apartment did you want to go to?”

“Apartment four. Jeffrey James. Can’t I just drop the cat—”

“How do you know Mr. James, sir?”

“We’re friends. What’s happened? Can I please just—”

“I’m sorry, sir. There’s been an incident.”

“Incident? What do you mean incident?” But he knew. Visions filled Max’s mind: Jeffrey with his Sig Sauer and his AK-47. Jeffrey with his shooter’s vest packed with ammo and extra magazines, hundreds and hundreds of rounds, enough for a war—enough for an apocalypse. Going from apartment to apartment, kicking in doors as if he were a Ranger in Iraq, firing at any movement. Bang, bang, bang. You’re dead.

“Jeffrey James, sir. I’m afraid it looks like suicide.”

“Oh,” Max said, setting the cat carrier down on the floor. Carmilla had stopped moaning, apparently reconciled to her current reality. “How many other people? Did he . . . ?”

“Himself only. I’m afraid I can’t say anymore. Can I have your phone number, sir, so we can contact you? We’re still sorting things out.”

“What time did he . . . ?”

“Last night. A neighbor heard the gunshot and called it in.”

“Yesterday was my birthday.”

“I’m truly sorry, sir. If I could have your name and phone number . . . ”

“Of course,” he said, and spoke the words and numbers automatically, numbers that would ring a phone in the bookstore, a phone Max would never answer again. He thanked the officer, picked up Carmilla in her carrier, and walked back to his car.

After nearly two hours of driving, his mind blank, Carmilla silent in the carrier on the passenger seat, Max realized he’d forgotten his snacks and his Coke at home. He needed gas anyway, so he stopped at a gas station and convenience store just over the Maine border, filled up, and bought some oatmeal raisin cookies, a Snickers bar, a couple of twelve-ounce bottles of Coke, a gallon of water, a bag of cat food, and a package of red plastic bowls. In the car, he let Carmilla out of the carrier and poured water into one bowl and food into another. He was sure he could find somebody who liked cats along the way. He wasn’t on any timetable. He just needed to get to the farthest shore and let whatever peace was there wash over him.

He opened a bottle of Coke for himself and quickly ate two cookies. Cookies, Karen had said, would be the death of him. In childhood and even up through his mid-twenties he’d been trim and almost scrawny, but now he had the figure of a person who’d been pregnant for a while. He’d tried to stay healthy when he’d been with Karen, but even she had said more than once that he was getting a good gut. That was a long time ago. After she left, he stopped caring.

He’d last been to the doctor eight or nine years ago, and the doctor had told him he should exercise and pay attention to his blood pressure and his cholesterol. Max nodded and did his best to look like he took it all seriously, much as he did during those last months and weeks with Karen, when she said that she worried about him, when she cried and screamed and pounded his chest and said nobody could not care about losing a child, when she told him she’d been sleeping with one of the waiters at the Thai restaurant on the corner of Main Street, when she said she was leaving, finally, for real this time.

It didn’t matter.

Carmilla, content, curled up on the back seat. When Max started the car, she perked her head up, but she seemed to have grown used to the movement, and now she let herself fall asleep as Max drove them toward the edge of the world.

Most of the winter snow had melted, trees and lawns were beginning to green, the last vestiges of mud season giving way to spring. Maine seemed somehow more alive than New Hampshire had been, more vibrant in its shedding of the cold months, its skies more blue than gray. Perhaps this was just a particularly sunny afternoon, Max thought.

He hadn’t ever driven a lot in Maine, just some trips to estate auctions and big library sales, and he always lost his way. But there was no great pressure of time right now, so it didn’t matter if he meandered off of Route 1, a road he hated purely because he’d gotten trapped in summer traffic a few times. There wasn’t much traffic today, but nonetheless, he didn’t want to drive Route 1, and so he sought out the smaller roads, ones bumpy with cracks and potholes after the frost heaves had retreated.

He stopped at some woods near Sebago Lake and let the cat out so she could relieve herself. He demonstrated for her by peeing on a tree. She was mostly terrified of this new place and its strange sounds and scents, but eventually she did what she needed to do. Max half hoped she’d dash away and he would then have a reason to be rid of her, but she didn’t stray far from him. After half an hour or so, they got back in the car and headed off, traveling back roads until, by late afternoon, Max saw signs to Brunswick and turned in that direction, hoping to find a place where he might get a good sandwich. There were open parking spaces in front of a little diner in town, so he parked the car, told Carmilla he’d only be a little while, and went inside.

He found a booth and squeezed himself into it. A waitress, probably of high school age, with black hair and radiant blue eyes, handed him a menu, said her name was Melissa, and asked him if he’d like something to drink.

“Coffee,” he said. When she brought it, he ordered a club sandwich with turkey, not toasted because, though he very much liked toasted club sandwiches, inevitably they cut his gums all to hell. She brought the sandwich quickly. It was divine.

He handed Melissa a twenty dollar bill and told her to keep the change. She smiled, apparently at a loss for words, not at all used to a 100% tip. He asked if she liked cats.

“Sure,” she said. “But I don’t have one.”

“I have a cat in my car that needs a home. She’s eight years old and very friendly, used to being around people in the bookstore that I once owned. If you’d like to take her, she’s yours.”

Melissa followed him to the car and peered through the window at Carmilla. “Are you sure?” Melissa asked.

“I can’t take her where I’m going,” Max said. He opened the door, careful not to let Carmilla slip away. He took her in his hands, but she hissed and scratched and howled. He’d never seen her so enraged, even at the vet’s office. She fought with her claws and teeth as he forced her into the carrier. “She hates the box,” Max said, meekly, as he brought it out and handed it to Melissa.

“I’m sure she’ll be fine,” Melissa said.

“Once she gets settled,” Max said. “She’s a good cat.”

“Thank you,” Melissa said, “for everything.”

“My pleasure.” Max went to the driver’s side, opened the door, and climbed in.

“Just keep going north,” Melissa said as Max closed the door. He couldn’t quite hear what she said next, but it sounded like, “Go to Englishman’s Bay.” He rolled down the passenger’s side window to ask her what she was talking about, but she was gone.

The woods grew deeper, darker, wilder as Max drove on and twilight fell. He put a CD into the player, a recent Bonnie Raitt album, to try to keep himself from thinking about Jeffrey, but it didn’t work for long. He stopped hearing the music, his mind straying to speculations about where in the little apartment Jeffrey had killed himself, Had he slumped on the futon in the main room? Had he sat on the twin bed in the tiny bedroom? Had he stood in the kitchen area or the bathroom? Which gun had he used? One of the pistols? The utterly illegal sawed-off pump-action shotgun he was so proud of having made? Probably that, yes. Max then thought of all the mess, the blood and brains scattered everywhere. Who would clean it up? The police? Probably not. The landlord would have to call in some sort of cleaners. He’d have to bring in painters and even perhaps carpenters, people to fix whatever the shot had ruined. It would take time. People would have to wonder what this Jeffrey James had been like, what had driven him to this point, this decision. Who had loved him? Who had cared?

Max shook his head and gritted his teeth. Beyond the car’s headlights, the world was dark now. The trees loomed among shadows. Soon, though, he found his way to the shore road where the trees were few, and the smell of the ocean filled the car. Now and then the sound of a particularly large wave crashing against the rocks made its way in between the music and the noise of the engine.

Fifty years old. What a meaningless concept, he thought. He didn’t feel any different today than he had a week ago. A pointless number, fifty. Not even old, really, not these days, when plenty of people lived to be ninety or 100. He didn’t feel any better about it, though. He feared nothing so much as age. Or, rather, he didn’t fear it; it disgusted him. The slow failures of the body. The creeping feebleness and dementia. He remembered his grandparents, their homes and bodies giving off a thick scent he forever afterward associated with growing old—a scent redolent of rotting fruit. In the store, he struggled to remain civil with elderly customers. Their eyes and minds were failing, what did they want with books? How could they possibly get any enjoyment from them? In his last year with Karen, some weeks after Melody died after only one day of life, Karen’s parents came to visit and help with things. Max got blind drunk on Jim Beam. He cursed her parents for their age, for their doddering around his house, for their oh-so-loving concern that seemed, he said, to be nothing more than senility, and swore he wouldn’t pay for them when they ended up in a nursing home, shitting their beds, mewling and puking. Karen’s parents left, and implored her to come with them, to escape Max, but she stayed a while longer.

“I didn’t mean it,” Max said in the morning, once he remembered a bit of what he’d said. Karen nodded. She believed him.

“You never really mean anything, do you?” she said. He shrugged. It was often true, but not that time.

Gas stations had become rare this far north, so Max stopped at the first one he saw when he was down to a quarter tank. He went inside the store, used the bathroom, bought a bottle of Coke, a bottle of iced tea, a bag of chocolate chip cookies, and a Snickers. A blonde young man stood behind the counter.

“How far to Englishman’s Bay?” Max asked, after getting his change.

“Another hour or so. Stay on Route 1 toward Machias, then head down to Roque Bluffs. Someone will find you there.”

“Someone will what?”

“Someone will find you there.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t worry about it, old man.”

“Hey,” Max said, “who do you think—”

“You should go. It’s very dark tonight, and you could have trouble finding your way.”

Max stared at the boy’s cold blue eyes and decided not to press the point. He’d always thought people in Maine were strange, and the farther north you went, the stranger they got. They were isolated, suspicious, stubborn—as if their lives were carved from rock.

The boy was right, though. It was very dark tonight.

Max stayed on Route 1 until somewhere near Machias, but must have missed a turn, because the road became narrower, bumpier, and then turned to dirt for a while. He didn’t think he was anywhere near what might be a town. He had always had a pretty good sense of direction, though, and his hunch that he was driving toward the ocean paid off soon enough when he reached the shore road again. He followed it down until it ended at a spot of rough grass and gravel, the driveway of a stone cabin with a few small, square windows, a roof of wooden beams, and a hand-painted sign above the door: La Maison Ravissante.

The heavy wooden front door was open, and Max stepped into a warm, softly-lit room that smelled of wood smoke and baked apples. A small girl, maybe ten years old, with auburn hair and bright blue eyes, stood with her back to a fireplace at the opposite end of the room.

“Excuse me,” Max said. “Are your parents here?”

“No,” the girl said, smiling to reveal a missing front tooth.

“I mean the people who own this place.”

From behind him, a soft voice said, “Hello.” Max turned to see a tall, rugged young man, black-haired and bearded, dressed in jeans and a gray flannel shirt.

“I’m just trying to find Roque Bluffs. Am I anywhere near there?”

“Near enough.”

“Well, that’s a relief. If I go back to the road, where do I need to turn?”

“The night is dark.”

“Yes, I know, believe me. But I need to get to Roque Bluffs.”

“No you don’t,” the young man said. “Come in. Sit down. Warm up by the fire. You’re where you need to be.”

The little girl pulled a leather easy chair up near the fireplace and gestured for Max to sit down.

“I think I’m supposed to go to Roque Bluffs.”

“No,” the young man said, placing his strong hand on Max’s shoulder. “Tonight, you need to be with us.” Gently, the young man pushed Max toward the chair. “We’ll take care of you. Let me bring you some dinner. You must be starving.”

Max wanted to say something, wanted to ask them who they were and what this place was, wanted to say that no, he wasn’t hungry, he wasn’t thirsty, he wasn’t cold—but he was very tired, and he didn’t have the stamina to say any of that. He found his way to the chair and sat down, and the warm fire was, indeed, comforting. Suddenly he was quite hungry and ravishingly thirsty. The man brought him a tray with a large glass of water and a wooden bowl filled with thick beef stew. Max ate. It was the most flavorful stew he’d ever tasted. The meat was so tender it seemed to melt on his tongue.

“My name’s Melanie,” the little girl said.

“Hello,” Max said between slurping bites of stew.

“You’re old,” Melanie said.

“Older than you, yes,” Max said. He gulped water.

“You smell old,” Melanie said.

Just as Max thought of something to say to that, he forgot what it was. The little girl laughed at him, then ran around a corner and disappeared. Max lifted the glass of water, but it fell out of his hands and spilled all over him. He reached for the bowl of stew, pulling it closer, but it slipped in his fingers and poured across his chest.

“Come along,” the young man said from behind Max. “I’ll clean you up and put you to bed.”

The man lifted Max in his arms like a firefighter come to rescue him. He carried Max upstairs to a pool of warm water and soap, then to a bed in a dark room.

When Max woke in the middle of the night, a bright moon shining onto his face through a window above the bed, he vaguely remembered his arms and legs fitting into manacles on iron chains. He laughed at the strange memory, then turned onto his side.

The chains reached from his wrists and ankles to heavy bolts in the floor.

He screamed through the night, until his voice was dust, but he couldn’t help falling back to sleep again.

He woke to music. Bright morning sunlight stung his eyes. Somewhere outside, a chorus sang. The voices were high, ethereal.

Max sat up. He was naked, with no sheet or blanket on the bed. He was not cold, though—indeed, the room’s heat was almost choking. He lifted one arm. His flesh was bruised and red where the chains bound him. The chain on his left leg was not quite long enough for him to swing himself into a sitting position on the bed.

“Hello . . . ?” he called, his voice rasping.

Some moments later, the door opened and Melanie, dressed all in white, walked in.

“Good morning,” she said.

“What are they doing to me?” Max said.

“Cleaning you up,” she said. She hopped from foot to foot and chanted, “You’re a mess, you’re a mess, you’re a mess.” She giggled.

“Please help me,” Max said.

Melanie ran to him and planted a kiss on his lips. “Help me help me help me help me help!” she screamed, then fell down on the floor laughing.

A figure appeared outside the door. “Melanie, leave the old man alone.”

Melanie walked out of the room. A woman—perhaps twenty years old—stepped inside and closed the door behind herself. Her hair was long and a very light brown, almost blonde. Her breasts were large, the nipples vaguely visible through the soft white fabric of her dress. She knelt down beside Max. Her hand rubbed his stomach, then her fingers slowly, gently moved lower.

Without even knowing what he was doing, Max swung his arm and hit her across the face, the iron manacle on his wrist slicing her lip open. The force knocked her to the floor. She held a hand to her mouth.

“I’m sorry,” Max said. “But—you can’t—I don’t know why I’m here and you—”

The woman stood up. Blood had fallen onto her dress. She opened the door and walked outside.

A few minutes later, the bearded young man came into the room. His clothes were made of fur and the skins of animals.

“Why did you hurt Merissa?” he said. “She wanted to give you pleasure. She pities you.”

“What are you doing to me?” Max said.

“You came to us.”

“But why are these chains—why am I—what am I doing here?”

“It sometimes happens.”

“I had dreams of the ocean. I knew I had to get away. I knew I was . . . ”

“Yes?”

What were the words? He couldn’t remember. Other words came to him: “Getting old.”

“Yes.”

“Is that why I’m here?”

“Perhaps,” the man said. “It sometimes happens.” He walked out of the room and closed the door behind.

Later, a pale young man with sharp, uneven features and matted, yellow hair brought a bowl of fish chowder to Max and fed him with a wooden spoon. Max didn’t speak, merely let the young man feed him, and said nothing when the young man’s lips touched his, the tongue wiping away some last bits of chowder. For the first time in many years, and against whatever remained of his will, Max found himself aroused. There was, in his nakedness, no hiding it. The young man seemed not to notice. He set a large porcelain chamber pot under Max and waited until he could take away the wastes.

Days passed, and every few hours (judging by the sun), the young man came in and fed Max the most delicious food he had ever eaten—stews and chowders and soups at first, then hardboiled eggs and cheese, then larger and larger pieces of beef and pork. Now and then Melanie peeked in the door and giggled, but no one else visited him. The young man washed him with hot water, soap, and a plump, yellow sponge. He provided a porcelain chamber pot and waited while Max shat and pissed. The young man was attentive, always ready for Max to release his wastes, always careful to clean every bit of his body.

And then, on what seemed to Max to be perhaps the eighth or ninth morning, Melanie woke him by running into the room and jumping up onto the bed while screaming, “It’s the big day! It’s the big day!”

The tall, young man who wore the furs and animal skins quickly entered, swept Melanie into his arms as she bounced, and stole her out of the room. The silent young man with matted, yellow hair then came in, carrying a wooden pail from which he fed Max a particularly large meal of pork, ham, mashed potato, carrots, turnips, and rice. “Please stop,” Max said as the young man pushed more food into Max’s mouth with the wooden spoon, but the boy did not seem to hear him, or did not care, and the feeding went on and on until Max was certain he would vomit. From a stone pitcher, the young man poured thick buttermilk into Max’s mouth. Max coughed and nearly choked on it. The buttermilk splashed all over his face, even into his eyes. The young man carried the pail and pitcher out, then returned a few minutes later with a bucket of hot water, soap, cloths, and a sponge. He spent even more time than usual cleaning Max, wiping away the remnants of the meal with the cloths, and then, with the sponge, attending to every inch of his skin. The cleaning was slow and sensuous, once again arousing Max, and this time the young man noticed, letting his hand and the sponge provide pleasure, forcing Max to close his eyes, to try to think of something else, but the food had relaxed him, and the washing had calmed him, and he could not distract himself from the gentle, rhythmic pleasure. Afterward, the boy continued to clean him, then, finally satisfied with his work, he kissed Max gently on the lips and departed.

The tall young man came in and unlocked the manacles around Max’s wrists and ankles. “Try standing up,” the man said. “Use me for support.”

Max slung his arm around the man’s shoulders and together they tried to heave him up. His muscles were weak, making his legs feel like liquid. His stomach was larger than ever before, and as he tried to stand he realized he didn’t quite know what to do with such a belly—its weight was unfamiliar to him, skewing his perception of his own center of gravity. If the young man hadn’t been holding him, Max would have fallen forward onto his face. He chuckled as the image entered his mind: himself, tipping over, rolling onto the now-massive cushion of his front.

“Hans!” the young man called, and the pale boy—He has a name, Max thought—entered. “Take the other side,” the man said.

Together, they helped Max out into the hall, where Merissa waited with a white sheet that she carefully wrapped Max in. He felt some shame in his nudity, his immense stomach, his weakness, but more shame when he saw Merissa’s bruised face and thick, slit lip. He had done that. “I’m sorry,” he whispered as she wrapped him in the sheet. She did not look into his eyes.

Everyone, even Melanie, helped get him down the stairs, with a few people below and few people behind, shuttling him like a large piece of furniture. He tried to distract himself from the pain in his hands and feet, tried to remember a song or two, something, anything to get his mind off of where he was now. (How had his stomach grown so immense and his muscles so useless in such a short time? It had only been eleven or twelve, maybe thirteen days, he was certain.) He couldn’t remember any songs. He couldn’t remember even quite how he’d gotten here, or where exactly here was.

At the bottom of the stairs, they helped him back onto his feet, and he did his best to balance and to walk. The front door of La Maison Ravissante opened, revealing a warm and sunny world. He squeezed through the door.

A few feet from the front of the building stood a large chair, a rustic throne made from heavy, dark, knotted wood. Hands jostled Max, spinning him around until he was placed just right, then pushed him down into the chair. Someone put a crown of evergreen branches on his head. It shed needles onto his forehead and down the back of his neck.

People had gathered around him—new people, all young, mostly blonde, mostly blue-eyed, dressed either in the simple white clothes he’d seen so often or some sort of animal skins. They took hold of the bottom of the chair and hoisted him above their shoulders. They carried him around to a staircase leading down to the sea.

“Where are we going?” Max said, his voice sounding odd to him, small and willowy. “What’s going on?” Melanie skipped along beside. He called out to her. “What is going to happen?”

She giggled and bounced and stuck her tongue out at him.

More people waited down on the rocky beach. Men and women, all, it seemed to Max, in their early twenties or so, all wearing animal skins and carrying tools of some sort: knives, gaffs, axes.

Little fires set in cairns dotted the beach.

The chair lowered to the ground. Water tickled Max’s toes. Ocean spray scratched his eyes. Sand and salt flared his wounds.

“The old man has arrived!” someone said.

“He’s better than the last one,” someone said. “This one was all bloody when he got here.”

“We cleaned him up, though.”

“He needs to be here.”

“We need him,” someone said.

A knife flashed, cutting below Max’s eye. Instinctively, he raised his hand to defend himself. Another knife sliced his palm.

“What are you doing to me!” he screamed, but his voice was little more than a whisper, a flash of air in the wind.

Laughter all around. Hans stepped forward, pulled down his white pants, and sprayed a stream of warm piss into Max’s face. Melanie bounced around behind everyone, singing out, “The old man is here, the old man is here, the old, old, old, old man is here!”

Merissa pressed herself against Max’s left side. She unbuttoned her shirt, bared a breast, pressed the nipple to his lips. The crowd cheered her on, voices calling out: “Is that what you want, old man?” and “Is that what you miss?”

He closed his eyes. He could not feel the fingers in his injured hand.

His brain exploded in light. Someone had hit him in the back of the head with something hard, a piece of wood or stone. He tried to turn to see, but his skull didn’t want to do what his mind commanded.

Everyone stood back. Clouds writhed across the sky. Larger and larger waves smashed onto the beach.

Melanie waded forward and climbed onto the chair with Max. She wrapped her arms around his neck, then whispered in his ear: “Remember, forever and ever and ever. You are our savior. We love you. I love you.”

Her tongue tickled his ear. Her teeth tore at the lobe. He tried to raise his arms to get her off of himself, but he didn’t have the strength. She bit deeper. The pain was hot. Her breath in his ear turned to a splash, then a high-pitched ringing that spread misery across his forehead and through his eyes and throat and heart.

Melanie knelt in the water beside him and smiled, half his ear displayed between her teeth.

The other people ran in, their tools raised high, their laughter and screams louder than the growing noise of the waves. For a moment, Max feared Melanie might be trampled, but she easily got out of the way, bounding back toward the stairs leading up to the house. His skin was slashed, his bones battered. Hans took a carving knife to Max’s genitals. It was all pain and all nothing. The world turned red and then black when they thumbed out his eyes. They left him his tongue, a fact that, somewhere in the far recess of his consciousness, provoked surprise.

He could not see the care they took when cutting open his stomach, the reverence with which they held his viscera, the gentleness with which they placed these parts of him in each flaming cairn along the shore.

He did not know that a wave knocked him from his chair and splayed him on the beach. He did not hear the people leave him, nor feel the tongues of the cats that licked his wounds. He did not know where he was, did not perceive the cold or night. For longer than anyone expected, nearly into morning, the wind carried the sound of his singing.

© 2013 by Matthew Cheney.

Matthew Cheney's work has been published by Weird Tales, One Story, Strange Horizons, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Failbetter, Interfictions, Rain Taxi, Locus, and SF Site, among other places. He is the former series editor for the Best American Fantasy anthologies, and co-editor of the occasional online magazine The Revelator (revelatormagazine.com). He currently lives in New Hampshire.