FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial, January 2014
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue forty-four of Lightspeed!

We hope everyone had a great holiday season this year, and best wishes for a great new year to come. We here at Lightspeed didn’t take much time off during the holidays, as we’ve been busy dreaming up a new special issue of the magazine for our upcoming fourth anniversary issue this June.

It could be said that women invented science fiction; after all, Mary Shelley wrote what is considered by many to be the first science fiction novel (Frankenstein). Yet some readers seem to have this funny idea that women don’t—or can’t—write science fiction. Some have even gone so far as to accuse women of destroying science fiction with their girl cooties. So to help prove how silly that notion is, Lightspeed’s June 2014 issue—our fourth anniversary issue—will be a Women Destroy Science Fiction! special issue. And we will also—for the first time in Lightspeed’s history—have a guest editor at the helm.

The original announcement of this special issue generated so much excitement that we wanted to find ways to include even more amazing science fiction by women, so we're going to make it a double issue!

On January 15 we’ll be launching a Kickstarter campaign to help make the Women Destroy Science Fiction! issue the best it can be. Our primary goal will be to raise enough money in order to make the issue double the size of a regular issue, but if the campaign goes well we’ll also have some stretch goals as well. If you’d like to back the project, visit lightspeedmagazine.com/kickstarter.

For more details about the special issue, check out the message from the guest editor immediately following this editorial.

Before we get to our stories, I just wanted to remind you about some of the great ebooks and ebook bundles we currently have available:

1. Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy ebooks: As you probably know, the majority of our interviews are provided by The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy, a podcast I co-produce for Wired.com. You’ve been able to read transcripts of most of the Geek’s Guide interviews here in Lightspeed for quite a while now, but now you can also read transcripts of the panel discussions. If you hop over to geeksguideshow.com and click on Transcripts, you can see which episodes are available. We’ve got the episodes bundled in threes; so if you buy one of the ebooks (for just $2.99), you get three full episode transcripts, which all contain a variety of panel discussions on all things geeky. You’ll also find one of our panel transcripts as bonus content at the end of this month’s ebook edition.

2. Lightspeed ebook bundles: Over in the Lightspeed ebookstore (lightspeedmagazine.com/store), we have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-36). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so.

3. Fantasy Magazine ebooks and bundles: You can now also buy ebook back issues—and ebook back issue bundles—of Lightspeed’s (now dormant) sister magazine, Fantasy. To check those out, just visit fantasy-magazine.com/store. You can buy each Fantasy bundle for $24.99, or you can buy the complete run of Fantasy Magazine—all 57 issues—for just $114.99 (that’s $10 off buying all the bundles individually, and more than $55 off the cover price!).

4. Nightmare ebooks and bundles: Naturally, Lightspeed’s other sister-magazine, Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com), also has ebooks and bundles available, too. For instance, you can get the complete first year (12 issues) of Nightmare for just $24.99; that's savings of $11 off buying the issues individually.

5. Subscriptions: In addition to bundles and ebooks, you can also subscribe to Lightspeed (or Nightmare) directly from our ebookstore. All purchases from the Lightspeed (and Fantasy and Nightmare) store are provided in epub and mobi format, plus now they're also all available in ebook-optimized PDF format as well.

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

We have original science fiction by Jeremiah Tolbert (“In the Dying Light, We Saw a Shape”) and Anaea Lay (“Salamander Patterns”), along with SF reprints by Terry Bisson (“Bears Discover Fire”) and Zhao Haihong (“Exuviation”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Matthew Hughes (“His Elbow Unkissed”—a Kaslo Chronicles tale) and Adam-Troy Castro (“The Thing About Shapes to Come”), and fantasy reprints by Rosamund Hodge (“Apotheosis”) and Ursula K. Le Guin (“Elementals”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with Hyperbole and a Half’s Allie Brosh and bestselling epic fantasy author Scott Lynch.

For our ebook readers, we also have the novella reprint “The Chambered Fruit” by M. Rickert and novel excerpts from Chuck Wendig and James L. Cambias.

Our issue this month is sponsored by our friends at EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing. This month, look for Clockwork Heart by Dru Pagliassotti (of which you can also read an excerpt in our ebook edition this month). You can find more from EDGE at www.edgewebsite.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:

Newsletter: lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

RSS Feed: lightspeedmagazine.com/rss-2

Podcast Feed: lightspeedmagazine.com/itunes-rss

Twitter: @lightspeedmag

Facebook: facebook.com/lightspeedmagazine

Google+: plus.google.com/100415462108153087624

Subscribe: lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe

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 five-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award. He is also the editor of Nightmare Magazine and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

Guest Editorial:
Women Destroy Science Fiction!
Christie Yant

Women aren’t writing “real” science fiction, the fallacy goes. “Real” science fiction is . . . whatever science fiction certain men like. Some days this makes me sad. Some days it makes me angry. Some days it makes me want to quit. And then I get angry again, because no, after all of these years of hard work, they do not get to make me quit.

And some days I find it hilarious and make a quip on Twitter that turns into a special issue of Lightspeed in the space of roughly half an hour.

When we announced the Women Destroy Science Fiction! special issue in September, the response was immediate and overwhelming. All you had was a title and an email address, but your enthusiasm was boundless. My inbox filled with subject lines like:

Helping my sisters destroy science fiction since 1983

I CAN HAZ DESTROY?

If anyone’s going to destroy SFF—

Please sir, may I destroy science fiction?

Why, yes. Yes, you may.

John Joseph Adams founded Lightspeed based on the core idea that all science fiction is real science fiction. The whole point of this magazine, of which I am proud to have been a part since its very first issue, is that science fiction is vast. It is inclusive. Science fiction is about people (roughly 50% of whom are women), just as much as it’s about ideas. Science fiction is about us, our perils and our promise; it’s about our collective future. Lightspeed has been committed to gender parity from the beginning, and we have achieved it consistently for three straight years. But looking around at media at large, it’s clearly just not enough.

So for our June 2014 issue—our fourth anniversary issue—John has handed control over to us, the women of Lightspeed. In fact, we’re giving the guys the month off, and we’ve brought in some extra talent:

An author who has appeared on every major ballot our field has to offer, founding editor of PodCastle, and winner of the 2011 Nebula Award, Rachel Swirsky joins us as guest reprint editor for the issue to showcase the ground-breaking work done by women in the past.

Producing our podcast for the month is Grammy nominee and Audie Award winner Gabrielle de Cuir of Skyboat Media, with guest host Mur Lafferty, former editor of SF audio magazine Escape Pod, and winner of the 2013 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

This issue is about the voices and art of women, and as such my goal is to find ways to include as many women in SF as possible. So for the first time, in addition to our usual original fiction, we will also be accepting up to ten pieces of flash fiction. Lightspeed assistant editor Robyn Lupo will be flash fiction editor for the issue.

Let’s answer some questions:

Who can submit stories for consideration for the special issue? Women.

And what is a woman? A woman is any human being who identifies as one, to whatever degree that they do so.

What can women submit? Science fiction short stories, up to 7500 words. No fantasy this time around.

What is science fiction? At Lightspeed, we think of science fiction as fiction that speculates on our future, where the basis of that speculation is science, not magic. This includes the social sciences, so dystopias are welcome, as are stories set in post-apocalyptic worlds. Steampunk is also welcome, as long as whatever is powering your cool stuff isn’t magic.

When will you open to submissions? Submissions open December 16, 2013, and will close at 11:59:59 p.m. Pacific on February 14, 2014.

So, Women of Science Fiction, don your space suit; set up your lab equipment; fire up your boiler; perform your pre-flight inspection. Spread your girl cooties all over that rocketship, Mars colony, or deadly bacterial slime. Your sisters are beside you.

Now let’s go wreck some shit.

Christie Yant

Guest Editor

Lightspeed Magazine

Women Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue

P.S. Want to learn more? Sign up for our Women Destroy Science Fiction! mailing list, at lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter.

P.P.S. Want to write something for the special issue? Visit our guidelines page for more information, at lightspeedmagazine.com/about/guidelines.

Christie Yant is a science fiction and fantasy writer, and Assistant Editor for Lightspeed Magazine. Her fiction has appeared in anthologies and magazines including Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011 (Horton), Armored, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, io9, Wired.com, and China’s Science Fiction World. Her work has received honorable mentions in Year’s Best Science Fiction (Dozois) and Best Horror of the Year (Datlow), and has been long-listed for StorySouth’s Million Writers Award. She lives on the central coast of California with two writers, an editor, and assorted four-legged nuisances. Follow her on Twitter @christieyant.

SCIENCE FICTION

In the Dying Light, We Saw a Shape
Jeremiah Tolbert

{{Before Us}}

“.@neiltyson calls them “space diatoms,” but I say “space whales.” They’re beaching themselves on our interstellar shores. Question is: why?”

—Tweet by @lilmeyer, January 7, 2021

Thom met Lilian under a Nebraska sky, stars shining through the fabric of space so intensely that he sometimes mistook them for the falling whales, burning brightly. He tended to stargaze; it was the frustrated astronomer in him, deposed by his practical self who had learned that mathematics was crucial to the study of the universe. So why not study something more practical, like business administration? And so Thom was watching the sky instead of the dying space whale when Lilian introduced herself.

She struck up a conversation in the usual way, asking how he had become involved in “all this,” with a sweeping gesture to include the other contactees, ripe with unwashed, road-weary bodies, the dying space whale smelling strangely of gunpowder, and the ephemeral industry that sprang into life around new landing sites. T-shirt hawkers and knickknack vendors shouted ever-lower prices while local news media interviewed the oddest looking contactees they could pry away from the whale’s hulking presence. Diminutive and ancient Hispanic women strolled through it all with the serenity of Buddha, selling homemade burritos and tamales cocooned in aluminum foil out of large coolers on creaking, plastic wheels. On the fringes, half-hidden in the corn, well-bribed deputies and sheriffs stood watch, eyes narrow, lips pursed, ready for signs of trouble, any reason to shut it all down. With state budgets being in such sorry states and the federal government headed into its eighth year of complete deadlock, they took what they could, saw industry and commerce for what it was. But by God, wasn’t it all just too damned weird?

Lilian pulled Thom away from the circus with a smile and a gesture, and in the relative quiet, she spoke of her father’s long, painful illness, of the money he left her when he died, and how that money unmoored her from life, left her drifting on a sea of possibility, unable to settle on one plan. She spoke of her fear, that the world would never be the same, when she read the first reports of the creatures falling from the sky. She worried that it was humanity’s fault, somehow, that we had escalated the wholesale destruction of life on this planet to the life between worlds, without even meaning to. Despite her fears, she sought out contact, and afterward, the fear and uncertainty were gone. She had found a purpose in these “space whales”: A mystery to solve, perhaps the greatest one ever.

“I guess I always enjoyed a good puzzle when I was a girl,” she said with a teasing smile. “What about you?”

Thom admitted that he was partial to puzzles, but it wasn’t what had drawn him to the chase. He related how he had first seen a whale falling from the sky in West Texas; he’d been the first to arrive at the landing site. The beauty of a thing, its crenulations and whorls etched by exotic particles on its silica skin, its enormous bulk, and the strange sadness that enveloped him upon seeing it—a certainty that if it was not dead already, it was certainly dying.

He described how he had somehow known to touch it, despite all instincts to the contrary, simply by instinct, or perhaps fate. The contact experience had left him dizzy for hours. It shared the imagery of some far-off nebula in colors he wasn’t certain could be seen by the human eye. Before contact, he was a failed astronomy student turned business major. After, he was something new, something no word had been invented to describe yet, but later people like him came to be called “chasers,” or, derogatorily “touchers,” and then finally, “Conversationalists.” He described, with hesitation and embarrassment, how he had waited with the whale, feeling like he owed the dying creature something in return for the experiences it had imparted to him. In those early hours, he thought it was something unique and did not know it would become a shared experience with so many. For six days, the touches of others spread gray death over its vast, silica skin, drained it of its glimpses of stars, nebulae, black holes, and stranger interstellar mysteries still.

He departed only after the harvesters and collectors arrived and began sectioning what remained, cutting it into pieces for sale via online markets that hadn’t yet banned such things. In the contacts he has witnessed since—a dozen of the tens of thousands of creatures that fell and continued to fall, much to the consternation of governments around the world—he never stayed at a site long enough to see the scavengers arrive again.

“We call them scavengers, but I think sometimes that we’re all just picking over the carcasses,” he said.

“No,” Lilian said sharply. “We listen and we remember. We honor them, unlike those goddamned butchers.”

He frowned. “Still, we usher in the deaths of once-beautiful creatures from the heavens. I know they’ll die without our stealing caresses, but I wish there was something—anything—else that we could do.”

And then she kissed him, for want of something to say. In the months to follow, he learned that in some strange way his fear and frustration summoned a kind of pitying love from the ocean of complexity that was Lilian. He fell into her kiss eagerly, but he could not shake a disappointment that his frustrations did not evoke something more meaningful.

The kiss led to other things in the moon-cast shadow of corn stalks, far away from the contact site. They lay together under the too-thin Nebraska sky making love, surfacing from one another’s skins to relate their entire lives in a rush, like a whale to a contactee, desperate to share experiences before one of them faded to the gray of lifeless ash.

{{How We Met, By the Numbers}}

Excerpt from Report ID 7389, Experiential Contact Internet Database (ECID).

Location: 40.97938, -96.01639

Date and Time: 5:21 AM, June 11th, 2022

Sensations: intense heat and cold, stinging exotic particles, radio waves that “sound” like a piano being played in slow motion.

Identifying visual landmarks and distances: a red giant, burning like a ruby eye, best guess approximation 2 AU away(?) Drawings attached include constellation shapes as best I could remember them.

Estimated contact experience pod size?: 25-30

Contactee Name: Thom Janssen

Contactee Kerber Sensitivity Rating: 7—high

Organism status at completion of experience: deceased

Site notes: Landing site was a cornfield near a country road. The property owner should be contacted by the ECID with a reparation grant offer. He was pissed, but did not call the authorities when promised a reparations grant by ECID founder Lilian Meyer. (Hi Lilian!)

Attachments: Four color pencil drawings (4 MB file size)

In Lilian, Thom saw a brilliant, strong-willed woman who had the agency to change the things in the world she did not like. They both shared dissatisfaction with how life had turned out. Both shared a longing for more of the adventure that they had found, at least temporarily, in the chase. But Lilian was determined to change things where Thom felt powerless to do so.

“I don’t know that it is really my place to force my will on others, even by a method so subtle as persuasion . . .” he would say during their long conversations on drives between sites, following internet postings and rumors—sometimes arriving too late to make contact, always moving, always talking about things with deep meaning and emphasis on his part. If Thom had died then, his friends and family would have found it tempting to leave, as an epitaph, on his gravestone: “a most serious young man.” And then Lilian would have scrawled rude graffiti on it after everyone had gone.

But Thom lived, and he sold his beater of a Ford Focus and took to riding with Lilian in her handsome, feature-rich SUV only a week after their Nebraska meeting.

“Admit it,” she said jokingly, “you’re with me not because of my company but for the air-conditioned seats.”

Thom’s face reddened, and he sputtered denials. “Absolutely not! You mean more to me than a comfortable ass—”

Lilian only laughed.

What did she see then that drew her to him? Perhaps it was the earnest seriousness—his lack of humor, to her, was not a character flaw. At least at first.

Among their many topics of conversation were also various theories about the space whales. It became their way for Lilian to advance the more ridiculous ideas. “They’re a bioweapon sent to get us high and prepare the planet for colonization!”

In return, he would argue in seriousness the more rational of explanations. “Alien escape pods, launched without passengers. That would explain the hollow interiors—”

“But why the contact effect and why are they alive?” she would counter, giggling.

Later he would want her to know: For all his seriousness, he was rarely ever hurt by her mockery and laughter. Perhaps this is why they worked so well together; he loved her because she could not wound him deeply enough to do serious harm.

She loved him because she liked a challenge.

{{How You Refused to Settle for Easy Answers}}

Confession time: the term “space whale” bothers me now, and I wish I hadn’t coined it. Yes, they have vaguely whale-like shapes, but so do tadpoles, or anything else that is tapered on one end and round on the other. They could be “space footballs.”

(Thank God the media didn’t take up calling them that.)

Okay, sure, they’re the size of a school bus, but they’re not made of blubber and bone; they’re composed of silica—at least, whatever makes it through the atmosphere is. Calling a colony a singular organism isn’t right either, because from what little research has been published so far, they’re actually colonies of single-celled organisms working together in a kind of cooperative agreement. But I think even that comparison will fail as we understand more.

And we will understand more; we must. Honestly, I was drawn at first by the strangeness, the high of contact. I’m not sensitive enough for deeper imagery, but through the ECID, I can help gather imagery, and we can start to paint a picture. I don’t think we have begun to understand them—as evidenced by all the false information you read, half of it coming from the government trying to convince you that your face will melt off if you come into contact with one of them.

I don’t know what else to call them yet. Even Neil deGrasse Tyson isn’t right when he calls them “colossal space diatoms.” They’re not diatoms. They’re not whales. They’re not like anything on this Earth. Because they’re ALIEN. We forget that at our own peril.

—From “A ‘Space Whale’ Primer” by LMeyer171

Their first fight erupted on a sticky-hot summer night in western Missouri, over how long it had taken for Lilian to admit that she was, in fact, that Lilian Meyer, the young philanthropist who created and endowed the ECID—the main contactee website for sharing experiences and theories. Lilian was the high queen of whale contactees, and her encounter with Thom had not been by chance.

He felt a fool for not putting it together, but it was the false pretenses under which she had found him that stirred him to rare anger.

“Okay,” she said, anxiously twisting a lock of blonde hair around a slender finger, “I read every report submitted on the site. Your reports stood out from the beginning. You experience contact deeper than almost anyone, so I had to meet you. I kind of cyber-stalked you.”

He scowled and refused to speak for thirty miles, instead looking out the window at passing cars and wondering how much of their relationship was true, and how much was based on lies convenient to Lilian.

“Come on, Thom. You were a minor celebrity in the Conversation,” Lilian said, joking only some. “I had to meet you. Look, I’m sorry I wasn’t honest with you. Your sensitivity is a gift.”

“Gift?” he said, finally breaking his silence. “I’ve lost friends over my ‘gift.’ I don’t even like other chasers to know anymore. They just get jealous. ‘Why does he get to experience contact so deeply?’ Because it’s like a mild high for them, they think it’s pleasurable for me.”

“It’s not?”

“There’s no euphoria to it,” he said. “That’s subsumed by the recollection of intense experience.”

“It sounds painful.”

“It is, sometimes.”

“Then why keep doing this?”

“Someone has to,” was all he could think to say.

“I’m sorry I lied to you,” she said a moment later.

He sighed. “Do you remember how angry you were when you found out that pair of ‘high-sensitives’ were faking their reports?”

“Those motherfuckers!” She punched the padding ceiling of the SUV for punctuation.

“I wondered, ‘Why me? She could have any of these guys.’ I worried the only thing that makes me different is my sensitivity, and now you’ve admitted as much!”

“No, Thom—” she said, but he continued, his voice raised, face red, tears glinting in his eyes.

“I just wanted this to be real.”

She pulled the car over onto the shoulder sharply, took his face in her hands, and kissed him gently.

“I’m so sorry you would ever think that. You’re real, Thom. You are the realest thing in my life.”

But not the most important, he realized. She hadn’t said that.

{{So Young and Foolish Were We}}

Impossible, you say? Not so! We’ve reached out to SpaceX and they have tentatively agreed to repurpose one of their launch vehicles to attempt this mission, should we succeed in raising the necessary funds.

Yes, we know there’s no guarantee that returning one of these creatures to space will save its life. But we feel it is our duty as sentient, caring beings to attempt it. With your $18 million, we will give it our best shot.

—From the “Save the Beached Space Whales” Kickstarter Campaign, 2022

Others had held hands while making contact before, but not Thom. It was Lilian’s idea, he admitted later, not that it mattered whose idea it was to break taboo.

Some types had been making “group contact” with whales since those two Durango, Colorado teenagers had sex on top of one. “Lovers” were much derided by the more serious Conversationalists, so Thom thought it safer to avoid public displays of affection at a site.

But Lilian had taken his hand before he could think to stop her, and when they touched the whale’s sandpaper surface, they both gasped.

For him, the experience overwhelmed all else. He—

—Sailed in the vast emptiness between stars, propelled forward by the lightest of photons pressing against his fin-sails that extended outward for miles to either side. Every surface of his being recorded every particle of light along every wavelength, storing it the covalent bonds of biomimetic materials, which in turn were protected by rings of heavy metal ions that turned away the most damaging high energy particles—

Before, she experienced mere flashes of visual stimulus, a brief euphoria. Now, she—

—bore witness to a star field, blazing, stars singing across spectrums an aria of existence—so magnificent that her/his human self, deep in the gravity well of Earth, wept openly. It was as if s/he had spent her/his life listening to a radio station tuned between stations, only to have it suddenly become Beethoven. Brilliant arpeggios of frequencies humming through the taut skeins of flesh made for receiving, but no pattern, still no message to draw. Exotic particles without name pass through him/her in waves like shivers of post-coital bliss and—

Thom broke contact after a moment with a deep groan. Lilian, eyes wide, ran from person to person in the makeshift conclave, begging them to join with them. What would happen, she asked, if a dozen of us touched it together?

Thom wanted to say no. Cold particles of fear ran up and down his spine—what would happen to him? But he could not say no to Lilian—not yet. He was the spark, and now she was the fire afterward, spreading. What could a spark say to the blazing wildfire?

Those that participated witnessed the first of the message—just a faint inkling of it, but enough to know that it was there. Signal too low, not enough power . . . it was indecipherable, for now.

The events of Contact Site 14159 changed the Conversation. Before, it had no purpose—only a vague direction imparted by Lilian and her site. Afterward, it was no longer a conversation only among human minds.

The contact was disorienting and draining for all involved, but it was worst for Thom. Whereas before contact had made him dizzy for a few hours afterward, this time, he fell into a coma for three days.

Lilian sat at his bedside with her laptop and made plans; sent out calls, messages, rallying the army she had been unintentionally building the past year.

She claimed later that she would have waited forever for Thom. He never quite believed her, but he didn’t argue either. She had already set things in motion that he knew she would never miss, not even for him.

The wildfire only needs an inciting spark for a brief moment, after all.

{{How They Tried to Stop You and Failed}}

Despite the rapid passing of the act, Senator Lethem (R, Conn) has no illusions about its effectiveness as a deterrent.

“Declaring the creatures to be the property of the U.S. Government is unlikely to put a stop to contact events by the general public, but it lays a legal framework for the government to prosecute individuals who interfere with official collection and protection. It’s one step in a continuing process to get the situation under control.”

When asked about rumors that Congress may be considering designating the contact experience itself a controlled substance, similar on the scale to LSD, the congressman said: “Contact with the creatures has been shown to cause intense hallucinations. And there have been no studies of the long-term health risks—for all we know, the brains of these ‘chaser’ kids will melt in five years. There’s simply too much we don’t know about these things. The government should discourage the public from interacting with them through any means allowed by the Constitution, but also it’s a matter of just good, common sense, which many citizens seem to lack. I’m very disappointed that my amendment to shutdown sites, such as those run by the extremist Lilian Meyer, failed to pass.”

—From “Congress Passes Alien Flora and Fauna Act” —January 3, 2021 Online Edition of the New York Times

The actual planning was carried out by word of mouth, but Lilian kept up appearances online to avoid suspicion, even going so far as to have fake, meaningless phone conversations that were monitored, even with the sequesters and cutbacks. The old military bases with their tanks and helicopters struggled for funding, but network surveillance and drones only grew. Reports circulated more and more that the U.S. had begun using orbital weapons platforms to shoot down the whales before they could even enter the atmosphere. In China, they enforced their contact ban by firing on anyone who approached the whales. Low-res footage circulated on major news networks of small-scale massacres around the globe.

There was an undertone of fear and paranoia in everything they did now. Lilian had long since closed off her site to new members, believing the site to be thoroughly infiltrated by government agents. Thom thought her too paranoid. Then they found the bug in their hotel room in Oklahoma City.

At each site or gathering place for contactees, she laid out her simple plan.

“What would happen if we gathered together as many people as possible, along with as many of the creatures as possible, and we all touched simultaneously?”

Not once did she think to ask Thom if he would agree to participate in her experiment. But then, for weeks, he never objected. As the day grew closer, so too did his dread, until on a cool morning in October, he ended everything.

“No,” Thom said. He filled the tank of Lilian’s SUV at a gas station outside of Wichita while she cleaned the windshield of bugs and other road detritus.

“‘No’ what?”

“I won’t do it,” he said.

She stared at him, face pale. “We’ll have volunteer medical personnel standing by just in case—”

“When we did it with twelve people, I was in a coma for three days, Lilly! Are you crazy? Do you want me to die?”

This tension had been building since Iowa. It broke like a dam, and their love clung to the tatters of their hearts, so desperate to escape being swept away in the flood of his fear and her paranoia.

They shouted, cajoled, and threatened each other until the station attendant announced that she had called the cops. Car doors slammed, tires screeched, and away they went, but the argument didn’t cease. At a stoplight a mile later, Thom climbed out. Lilian sobbed behind him.

“You do this thing, you do it without me,” he said.

“Thom—you’re just scared!”

“That’s right, Lilly. Other people get scared. We’re not all fearless like you. I can’t do this. I won’t.”

He wished she wouldn’t drive away, but he knew she would. And she did.

{{My Shame}}

“I’ve thought about this for a long time. Especially in light of new research showing strong evidence that the whales are genetically engineered, I have decided that I had to act. I love Lilian very much, and I worry for her safety and the safety of those she’s convinced to participate in her reckless experiment. It’s for that reason that I’m speaking with you today. The “Grand Conclave” has to be stopped. We do not know enough to predict the consequences.”

—From a This Is Your World CNN interview with me, March 18, 2022

Thom watched the joint ATF/FBI raid on Lilian’s Grand Conclave fall apart from a hotel room fifteen miles away. Around him, agents hustled, taking urgent phone calls, shouting out information to their superiors, who relayed it into further phones back to Washington. The task force had required a special emergency budget session, but rumors of what Lilian was planning had frightened Congress so much that she had done what everyone else had failed to do; she had broken the partisan gridlock in the government. Money flowed in a last-ditch effort to stop it all.

He sat on the corner of the bed. A man in a dark gray suit from the FBI sat beside him, name already forgotten. He was talking urgently, seeking something to convince Thom he had made the right choice in working with them on this, but Thom had stopped listening.

For a week, contactees had come in vehicles of all shapes and sizes, some towing trailers or campers. Lilian had used the last of her inheritance to purchase a thousand acres of land in South Dakota, and the contactees converged on it en masse, some bringing carefully collected space whales hidden from the poorly funded government search teams.

Rather than set up roadblocks to divert contactee traffic, someone—exactly who became the subject of many Congressional hearings later—had decided a mass arrest would get the government’s point across better. The attack was swift and brutal, but ultimately, a failure. A mole inside the government had tipped off Lilian. Moles could work both directions.

Lilian had initiated her mass experiment four hours earlier. By the time the government moved, they were attacking celebrants. Sixteen people died in the riot, including two law enforcement agents under suspicious circumstances. Some conspiracy theorists believed that the agents’ deaths were a “false flag” operation, intended to provide hard crimes the government could pin on Lilian Meyer.

Thom felt he should blame Lilian for their deaths, but he knew that those deaths were on his shoulders. He was thankful that Lilian was arrested without injury, then guilty for his gratitude.

Many years later, a reporter asked Thom—did he regret that day?

Of course he did, he answered. Lives were lost. He trusted the government to protect people, but instead, they treated them like terrorists. They wanted to touch space; that’s all.

But nobody knew then what would happen; what the consequences of Lilian Meyer’s actions would be. It could have been so much worse.

Lilian was right, but she might not have been.

{{The First Time I Wished I Could Change It All}}

You can ask any one of the thousands of contactees who participated what we saw that day. My voice doesn’t matter anymore; I was only a catalyst. I’m no spokesperson for the movement that has grown out of that event, but this is my trial, and they have asked me to make a statement explaining my actions.

For months, we contactees had sensed an important message lurking within the transmissions from what we now think of as “the messengers”—what the media popularized as “space whales.” I first sensed it in Iowa six months before with Thom Janssen, who I must say I bear no ill will toward. My suspicions finally grew enough that I determined to act on them, and many others agreed. Thom helped me realize that we could amplify the effects with multitudes of receiving nodes and broadcasters. Don’t ask me to explain the science of it, but in some way, our own electrical impulses can serve as amplifiers for them.

The real Conversation began when we connected as one with the messengers that day. What began as a shape in fading light was now brilliantly illuminated.

“We are a test,” they said. “And you have passed it.

“The stars are yours. They are the birthright of every species that has the capacity to look up and be filled with wonderment, combined with the ability to collaborate together to achieve greatness.

“Reaching space is the grandest achievement any species can make. You must join us and the countless others. We are messengers, sent to urge you forward. There will be hardships, but there will be rewards also. Though the distances are vast and deep, you are not alone.

“Come join us.

“Come.”

It wasn’t so much a revelation for us as it was a reminder. Maybe on other worlds, drawn as they are by patterns in radio waves, the messengers would find those who had not yet reached the stars, and would find themselves inspired enough by such a message to take their first steps from their planet into the heavens.

Once, we understood the importance of such an achievement, but we turned away from that because space is cold. Space is pain and death. Space is not easy. What is the value proposition in accomplishing great things? How can we profit from it?

Those are not the right questions, and we’ve let them distract us for too long.

Along with this message came instructions, techniques that each one of us carry now. The problems of space have been anticipated. The universe is not fair. The game favors the house, but our friends on the other side of the abyss have sent us a loaded deck.

You can try me. You can convict me. I regret the loss of life that has occurred, but something so much bigger is happening.

Space is calling us. It would be the ultimate crime not to heed it.

—From the redacted proceedings of the U.S. Government vs. Lilian Meyer trial, 2024

Thom was not called to the stand, but he watched in the courtroom every day. Many later marked Lilian’s statement as a turning point in public opinion. Thom was not convinced of her rightness, but he regretted everything he had said.

After Lilian’s conviction, he wrote a letter. He begged for her forgiveness, circled around it many times, but could not bring himself to admit that she had been right and he had been wrong. People had died. He might have died too.

He burned it in the fireplace.

A decade passed and his life moved on. He married, had children, took up a career in academia, and did his best to ignore the Conversation movement. He took no calls from reporters asking him to comment on the latest developments, or the latest plans for implementing the tools the messengers had brought.

Public opinion shifted steadily further in Lilian’s favor until President Goldberg pardoned her eleven years into her sentence. By then, Thom had softened on the matter. He considered attending the D.C. celebration the Conversationalists were throwing in her honor. He had four years earlier settled into a cozy faculty position at a Baltimore community college, so it wouldn’t be such a great distance to travel. It might be good to see her. To talk. To say the things left unsaid.

But still he wasn’t ready to forgive her. Or was it he who needed her forgiveness? He could hardly remember anymore.

{{When I Knew What Must be Done}}

We saw it in that moment in Iowa, with Thom’s hand in mine. My contacts with the creatures before had been mild highs or sensations like ticklish skin. Nothing so concrete as this, amplified somehow by Thom’s presence. In the dying light, we saw a shape of something else, something reaching across the vastness of space and time, to brush its digits against our palm. Perhaps it had not hands, but tentacles, or pseudopods, but it reached, and we reached, and together, for that moment, we touched.

An overwhelming loneliness I had never articulated lifted in that moment.

In the dying light of hope, we saw the shape of companionship.

It frightened Thom, I think, because he had actually made up his mind before we met that it would be better to be alone.

I frighten him too. I wish I didn’t. I miss him.

Tomorrow, I begin the first of the gene therapies here in Florida. When I was a child, I was terrified of needles because they hurt, and I did not like to experience that pain.

I’m looking forward to the first injection. I’ve already been through the pain. The needle will finally feel like I have succeeded in all of this.

Or at least, I hope it will.

—From “When Everything Changed, And Changes Again,” a blog post by you, 2041.

It is not easy for the old man to gain access to the launching reef, for even now, some would rather stop humanity’s greatest endeavor, some would rather we forever cowered in our gravity well. He calls in many favors accrued over the years in order to make contact with those who can facilitate his plans, carefully created over the past few years as his health has declined.

He is met by the smuggler at the Miami airport. The smuggler is an elderly, sea-hardened man who had once fished for his living, but has found a more lucrative calling late in life.

They take a gondola through the streets to the sea wall, transferring from there to a small boat disguised as a patrol craft. The smuggler slips past the patrol boats and ties them off along the floating fences around the whale paddocks. Heavy titanium mesh protects the dark shapes drifting on the other side from what few predators still survive in open water.

“You’re sure you can bring her to the surface?” the old man asks the smuggler again.

The smuggler nods. “They’re all supposed to be anonymous, but each has an identifying genetic marker and accompanying signal used by the diagnostics team. Cracking that sequence is buying me a nice three-bedroom far inland.”

The smuggler speaks with the authority of someone who has broken the rules before. The Conversationalists may have decided that the volunteers go forth to the heavens carrying only the approved information, but not everyone is in lockstep with the decision. Even the possibility of sending a personal story along—hidden in the stored imagery of the Answer—has proved a lucrative business for smugglers.

The smuggler works for a moment at an old-fashioned computer console. He smiles when underwater speakers on his boat begin to play tones into the depths. The behemoth that rises from the depths looks like every other first-stage messenger in the hundreds of paddocks off the coast. The old man marvels at how little this stage resembles the final stage of the space whales, laden as it is with sacs of launch propellant.

They were so ignorant in the beginning. Understood so little.

“Fairly certain this is her. Not that it matters,” the smuggler says with a shrug. “They scrubbed away everything that was her in the process.”

The old man nods. He knows this, but doesn’t believe it. If he did, he would not have spent all of his savings to buy the methods of breaking and reversing contact protocols, to send data instead of receive, and most importantly, to remove the senescence protocols just this once. It amazes him, what scientists have learned in the last few decades of study. But they do not know as much as they think. Lilian was not someone who could be scrubbed from a mind, even one so transformed. He was testament to that.

“It’s her,” he says. He can feel it with some hidden sense, like a bird knowing magnetic South.

He coats his fingertips with a compound composed of special proteins he has had designed to fit chemical locks in the surface of the star messenger that was once Lilian Meyer. He rests his hand on the slick, cool skin. And he remembers, so that she will remember too.

He sends clips of their life together, that brief period—stories, segments he has told himself over and over until he was sure he would not forget. He has assembled them together in a narrative, stitched them together as best he can. He shares his regrets, his fears, his doubts. All to say:

I was wrong. You were right. Go with peace. Go with my love.

The shape I saw was you.

His fingers ache when it is done. Cheeks wet, the old man forces a smile.

The boat rocks suddenly as the star messenger sinks beneath the surface. A deep rumble passes through the ocean, the hull of the boat, and into the soles of Thom’s bare feet.

A star messenger breaches far out to sea, two thousand tons of fuel and flesh now in the air where it hangs for a moment before a flash, and then the roar of roars as launch fuel ignites and burns. The messenger slowly rises into the air, an improbable sight, but an unmistakable one, accelerating, climbing—

“What did you do?” The smuggler shouts. He throttles up his engine and the boat races back for the sea wall over increasingly choppy waters.

Thom braces himself in the rear of the boat and stares out over the boiling sea as they escape. He has no fear. How long has she waited, he wonders, to show him this?

The messengers launch; first one, then another, then hundreds, and finally, one last creature, recognizable now to him in any shape, rises from the water on a towering plume of light, vapor, and heat.

She ascends, tail burning brightly, into a star-filled sky hanging overhead, like a promise.

© 2014 by Jeremiah Tolbert.

Jeremiah Tolbert has published fiction in Lightspeed, Fantasy Magazine, Interzone, Ideomancer, and Shimmer, as well as in the anthologies The Way of the Wizard, Seeds of Change, Federations,and Polyphony 4. He’s also been featured several times on the Escape Pod and Podcastle podcasts. In addition to being a writer, he is a web designer, photographer, and graphic artist. He lives in Kansas, with his wife and cats.

Bears Discover Fire
Terry Bisson

I was driving with my brother, the preacher, and my nephew, the preacher’s son, on I-65 just north of Bowling Green when we got a flat. It was Sunday night and we had been to visit Mother at the Home. We were in my car. The flat caused what you might call knowing groans since, as the old-fashioned one in my family (so they tell me), I fix my own tires, and my brother is always telling me to get radials and quit buying old tires.

But if you know how to mount and fix tires yourself, you can pick them up for almost nothing.

Since it was a left rear tire, I pulled over to the left, onto the median grass. The way my Caddy stumbled to a stop, I figured the tire was ruined. “I guess there’s no need asking if you have any of that FlatFix in the trunk,” said Wallace.

“Here, son, hold the light,” I said to Wallace Jr. He’s old enough to want to help and not old enough (yet) to think he knows it all. If I’d married and had kids, he’s the kind I’d have wanted.

An old Caddy has a big trunk that tends to fill up like a shed. Mine’s a ’56. Wallace was wearing his Sunday shirt, so he didn’t offer to help while I pulled magazines, fishing tackle, a wooden tool box, some old clothes, a come-along wrapped in a grass sack, and a tobacco sprayer out of the way, looking for my jack. The spare looked a little soft.

The light went out. “Shake it, son,” I said.

It went back on. The bumper jack was long gone, but I carry a little 1/4-ton hydraulic. I found it under Mother’s old Southern Livings, 1978-1986. I had been meaning to drop them at the dump. If Wallace hadn’t been along, I’d have let Wallace Jr. position the jack under the axle, but I got on my knees and did it myself. There’s nothing wrong with a boy learning to change a tire. Even if you’re not going to fix and mount them, you’re still going to have to change a few in this life. The light went off again before I had the wheel off the ground. I was surprised at how dark the night was already. It was late October and beginning to get cool. “Shake it again, son,” I said.

It went back on but it was weak. Flickery.

“With radials you just don’t have flats,” Wallace explained in that voice he uses when he’s talking to a number of people at once; in this case, Wallace Jr. and myself. “And even when you do, you just squirt them with this stuff called FlatFix and you just drive on. $3.95 the can.”

“Uncle Bobby can fix a tire hisself,” said Wallace Jr., out of loyalty I presume.

“Himself,” I said from halfway under the car. If it was up to Wallace, the boy would talk like what Mother used to call “a helot from the gorges of the mountains.” But drive on radials.

“Shake that light again,” I said. It was about gone. I spun the lugs off into the hubcap and pulled the wheel. The tire had blown out along the sidewall. “Won’t be fixing this one,” I said. Not that I cared. I have a pile as tall as a man out by the barn.

The light went out again, then came back better than ever as I was fitting the spare over the lugs. “Much better,” I said. There was a flood of dim orange flickery light. But when I turned to find the lug nuts, I was surprised to see that the flashlight the boy was holding was dead. The light was coming from two bears at the edge of the trees, holding torches. They were big, three hundred pounders, standing about five feet tall. Wallace Jr. and his father had seen them and were standing perfectly still. It’s best not to alarm bears.

I fished the lug nuts out of the hubcap and spun them on. I usually like to put a little oil on them, but this time I let it go. I reached under the car and let the jack down and pulled it out. I was relieved to see that the spare was high enough to drive on. I put the jack and the lug wrench and the flat into the trunk. Instead of replacing the hubcap, I put it in there too. All this time, the bears never made a move. They just held the torches, whether out of curiosity or helpfulness, there was no way of knowing. It looked like there may have been more bears behind them, in the trees.

Opening three doors at once, we got into the car and drove off. Wallace was the first to speak. “Looks like bears have discovered fire,” he said.

When we first took Mother to the Home almost four years (forty-seven months) ago, she told Wallace and me she was ready to die. “Don’t worry about me, boys,” she whispered, pulling us both down so the nurse wouldn’t hear. “I’ve drove a million miles and I’m ready to pass over to the other shore. I won’t have long to linger here.” She drove a consolidated school bus for thirty-nine years. Later, after Wallace left, she told me about her dream. A bunch of doctors were sitting around in a circle discussing her case. One said, “We’ve done all we can for her, boys, let’s let her go.” They all turned their hands up and smiled. When she didn’t die that Fall she seemed disappointed, though as Spring came she forgot about it, as old people will.

In addition to taking Wallace and Wallace Jr. to see Mother on Sunday nights, I go myself on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I usually find her sitting in front of the TV, even though she doesn’t watch it. The nurses keep it on all the time. They say the old folks like the flickering. It soothes them down.

“What’s this I hear about bears discovering fire?” she said on Tuesday. “It’s true,” I told her as I combed her long white hair with the shell comb Wallace had brought her from Florida. Monday there had been a story in the Louisville Courier-Journal, and Tuesday one on NBC or CBS Nightly News. People were seeing bears all over the state, and in Virginia as well. They had quit hibernating, and were apparently planning to spend the winter in the medians of the interstates. There have always been bears in the mountains of Virginia, but not here in western Kentucky, not for almost a hundred years. The last one was killed when Mother was a girl. The theory in the Courier-Journal was that they were following 1-65 down from the forests of Michigan and Canada, but one old man from Allen County (interviewed on nationwide TV) said that there had always been a few bears left back in the hills, and they had come out to join the others now that they had discovered fire.

“They don’t hibernate anymore,” I said. “They make a fire and keep it going all winter.”

“I declare,” Mother said. “What’ll they think of next!”

The nurse came to take her tobacco away, which is the signal for bedtime.

Every October, Wallace Jr. stays with me while his parents go to camp. I realize how backward that sounds, but there it is. My brother is a Minister (House of the Righteous Way, Reformed) but he makes two-thirds of his living in real estate. He and Elizabeth go to a Christian Success Retreat in South Carolina, where people from all over the country practice selling things to one another. I know what it’s like not because they’ve ever bothered to tell me, but because I’ve seen the Revolving Equity Success Plan ads late at night on TV.

The school bus let Wallace Jr. off at my house on Wednesday, the day they left. The boy doesn’t have to pack much of a bag when he stays with me. He has his own room here. As the eldest of our family, I hung onto the old home place near Smiths Grove. It’s getting run down, but Wallace Jr. and I don’t mind. He has his own room in Bowling Green, too, but since Wallace and Elizabeth move to a different house every year (part of the Plan), he keeps his .22 and his comics, the stuff that’s important to a boy his age, in his room here at the home place. It’s the room his dad and I used to share.

Wallace Jr. is twelve. I found him sitting on the back porch that overlooks the interstate when I got home from work. I sell crop insurance.

After I changed clothes I showed him how to break the bead on a tire two ways, with a hammer, and by backing a car over it. Like making sorghum, fixing tires by hand is a dying art. The boy caught on fast, though. “Tomorrow I’ll show you how to mount your tire with the hammer and a tire iron,” I said.

“What I wish is I could see the bears,” he said. He was looking across the field to I-65, where the northbound lanes cut off the corner of our field. From the house at night, sometimes the traffic sounds like a waterfall.

“Can’t see their fire in the daytime,” I said. “But wait till tonight.” That night CBS or NBC (I forget which is which) did a special on the bears, which were becoming a story of nationwide interest. They were seen in Kentucky, West Virginia, Missouri, Illinois (southern), and, of course, Virginia. There have always been bears in Virginia. Some characters there were even talking about hunting them. A scientist said they were heading into the states where there is some snow but not too much, and where there is enough timber in the medians for firewood. He had gone in with a video camera, but his shots were just blurry figures sitting around a fire. Another scientist said the bears were attracted by the berries on a new bush that grew only in the medians of the interstates. He claimed this berry was the first new species in recent history, brought about by the mixing of seeds along the highway. He ate one on TV, making a face, and called it a “newberry.” A climatic ecologist said that the warm winters (there was no snow last winter in Nashville, and only one flurry in Louisville) had changed the bears’ hibernation cycle, and now they were able to remember things from year to year. “Bears may have discovered fire centuries ago,” he said, “but forgot it.” Another theory was that they had discovered (or remembered) fire when Yellowstone burned, several years ago.

The TV showed more guys talking about bears than it showed bears, and Wallace Jr. and I lost interest. After the supper dishes were done I took the boy out behind the house and down to our fence. Across the interstate and through the trees, we could see the light of the bears’ fire. Wallace Jr. wanted to go back to the house and get his .22 and go shoot one, and I explained why that would be wrong. “Besides,” I said, “a .22 wouldn’t do much more to a bear than make it mad.

“Besides,” I added, “it’s illegal to hunt in the medians.”

The only trick to mounting a tire by hand, once you have beaten or pried it onto the rim, is setting the bead. You do this by setting the tire upright, sitting on it, and bouncing it up and down between your legs while the air goes in. When the bead sets on the rim, it makes a satisfying “pop.” On Thursday, I kept Wallace Jr. home from school and showed him how to do this until he got it right. Then we climbed our fence and crossed the field to get a look at the bears.

In northern Virginia, according to Good Morning America, the bears were keeping their fires going all day long. Here in western Kentucky, though, it was still warm for late October and they only stayed around the fires at night. Where they went and what they did in the daytime, I don’t know. Maybe they were watching from the newberry bushes as Wallace Jr. and I climbed the government fence and crossed the northbound lanes. I carried an axe and Wallace Jr. brought his .22, not because he wanted to kill a bear but because a boy likes to carry some kind of a gun. The median was all tangled with brush and vines under the maples, oaks and sycamores. Even though we were only a hundred yards from the house, I had never been there, and neither had anyone else that I knew of. It was like a created country. We found a path in the center and followed it down across a slow, short stream that flowed out of one grate and into another. The tracks in the gray mud were the first bear signs we saw. There was a musty, but not really unpleasant smell. In a clearing under a big hollow beech, where the fire had been, we found nothing but ashes. Logs were drawn up in a rough circle and the smell was stronger. I stirred the ashes and found enough coals to start a new flame, so I banked them back the way they had been left.

I cut a little firewood and stacked it to one side, just to be neighborly.

Maybe the bears were watching us from the bushes even then. There’s no way to know. I tasted one of the newberries and spit it out. It was so sweet it was sour, just the sort of thing you would imagine a bear would like.

That evening after supper I asked Wallace Jr. if he might want to go with me to visit Mother. I wasn’t surprised when he said “yes.” Kids have more consideration than folks give them credit for. We found her sitting on the concrete front porch of the Home, watching the cars go by on I-65. The nurse said she had been agitated all day. I wasn’t surprised by that, either. Every Fall as the leaves change, she gets restless, maybe the word is hopeful, again. I brought her into the dayroom and combed her long white hair. “Nothing but bears on TV anymore,” the nurse complained, flipping the channels. Wallace Jr. picked up the remote after the nurse left, and we watched a CBS or NBC Special Report about some hunters in Virginia who had gotten their houses torched. The TV interviewed a hunter and his wife whose $117,500 Shenandoah Valley home had burned. She blamed the bears. He didn’t blame the bears, but he was suing for compensation from the state since he had a valid hunting license. The state hunting commissioner came on and said that possession of a hunting license didn’t prohibit (enjoin, I think, was the word he used) the hunted from striking back. I thought that was a pretty liberal view for a state commissioner. Of course, he had a vested interest in not paying off. I’m not a hunter myself.

“Don’t bother coming on Sunday,” Mother told Wallace Jr. with a wink. “I’ve drove a million miles and I’ve got one hand on the gate.” I’m used to her saying stuff like that, especially in the Fall, but I was afraid it would upset the boy. In fact, he looked worried after we left and I asked him what was wrong.

“How could she have drove a million miles?” he asked. She had told him forty-eight miles a day for thirty-nine years, and he had worked it out on his calculator to be 336,960 miles.

“Have driven,” I said. “And it’s forty-eight in the morning and forty-eight in the afternoon. Plus there were the football trips. Plus, old folks exaggerate a little.” Mother was the first woman school bus driver in the state. She did it every day and raised a family, too. Dad just farmed.

I usually get off the interstate at Smiths Grove, but that night I drove north all the way to Horse Cave and doubled back so Wallace Jr. and I could see the bears’ fires. There were not as many as you would think from the TV—one every six or seven miles, hidden back in a clump of trees or under a rocky ledge. Probably they look for water as well as wood. Wallace Jr. wanted to stop, but it’s against the law to stop on the interstate and I was afraid the state police would run us off.

There was a card from Wallace in the mailbox. He and Elizabeth were doing fine and having a wonderful time. Not a word about Wallace Jr., but the boy didn’t seem to mind. Like most kids his age, he doesn’t really enjoy going places with his parents.

On Saturday afternoon the Home called my office (Burley Belt Drought & Hail) and left word that Mother was gone. I was on the road. I work Saturdays. It’s the only day a lot of part-time farmers are home. My heart literally missed a beat when I called in and got the message, but only a beat. I had long been prepared. “It’s a blessing,” I said when I got the nurse on the phone.

“You don’t understand,” the nurse said. “Not passed away, gone. Ran away, gone. Your mother has escaped.” Mother had gone through the door at the end of the corridor when no one was looking, wedging the door with her comb and taking a bedspread which belonged to the Home. What about her tobacco? I asked. It was gone. That was a sure sign she was planning to stay away. I was in Franklin, and it took me less than an hour to get to the Home on I-65. The nurse told me that Mother had been acting more and more confused lately. Of course they are going to say that. We looked around the grounds, which is only a half-acre with no trees between the interstate and a soybean field. Then they had me leave a message at the Sheriff’s office. I would have to keep paying for her care until she was officially listed as Missing, which would be Monday.

It was dark by the time I got back to the house, and Wallace Jr. was fixing supper. This just involves opening a few cans, already selected and grouped together with a rubber band. I told him his grandmother had gone, and he nodded, saying, “She told us she would be.” I called South Carolina and left a message. There was nothing more to be done. I sat down and tried to watch TV, but there was nothing on. Then, I looked out the back door, and saw the firelight twinkling through the trees across the northbound lane of I-65, and realized I just might know where to find her.

It was definitely getting colder, so I got my jacket. I told the boy to wait by the phone in case the Sheriff called, but when I looked back, halfway across the field, there he was behind me. He didn’t have a jacket. I let him catch up. He was carrying his .22 and I made him leave it leaning against our fence. It was harder climbing the government fence in the dark, at my age, than it had been in the daylight. I am sixty-one. The highway was busy with cars heading south and trucks heading north.

Crossing the shoulder, I got my pants cuffs wet on the long grass, already wet with dew. It is actually bluegrass.

The first few feet into the trees it was pitch black and the boy grabbed my hand. Then it got lighter. At first I thought it was the moon, but it was the high beams shining like moonlight into the treetops, allowing Wallace Jr. and me to pick our way through the brush. We soon found the path and its familiar bear smell.

I was wary of approaching the bears at night. If we stayed on the path we might run into one in the dark, but if we went through the bushes we might be seen as intruders. I wondered if maybe we shouldn’t have brought the gun.

We stayed on the path. The light seemed to drip down from the canopy of the woods like rain. The going was easy, especially if we didn’t try to look at the path but let our feet find their own way.

Then through the trees I saw their fire.

The fire was mostly of sycamore and beech branches, the kind that puts out very little heat or light and lots of smoke. The bears hadn’t learned the ins and outs of wood yet. They did okay at tending it, though. A large cinnamon brown northern-looking bear was poking the fire with a stick, adding a branch now and then from a pile at his side. The others sat around in a loose circle on the logs. Most were smaller black or honey bears, one was a mother with cubs. Some were eating berries from a hubcap. Not eating, but just watching the fire, my mother sat among them with the bedspread from the Home around her shoulders.

If the bears noticed us, they didn’t let on. Mother patted a spot right next to her on the log and I sat down. A bear moved over to let Wallace Jr. sit on her other side.

The bear smell is rank but not unpleasant, once you get used to it. It’s not like a barn smell, but wilder. I leaned over to whisper something to Mother and she shook her head. It would be rude to whisper around these creatures that don’t possess the power of speech, she let me know without speaking. Wallace Jr. was silent too. Mother shared the bedspread with us and we sat for what seemed hours, looking into the fire.

The big bear tended the fire, breaking up the dry branches by holding one end and stepping on them, like people do. He was good at keeping it going at the same level. Another bear poked the fire from time to time but the others left it alone. It looked like only a few of the bears knew how to use fire and were carrying the others along. But isn’t that how it is with everything? Every once in a while, a smaller bear walked into the circle of firelight with an armload of wood and dropped it onto the pile. Median wood has a silvery cast, like driftwood.

Wallace Jr. isn’t fidgety like a lot of kids. I found it pleasant to sit and stare into the fire. I took a little piece of Mother’s Red Man, though I don’t generally chew. It was no different from visiting her at the Home, only more interesting, because of the bears. There were about eight or ten of them. Inside the fire itself, things weren’t so dull, either: Little dramas were being played out as fiery chambers were created and then destroyed in a crashing of sparks. My imagination ran wild. I looked around the circle at the bears and wondered what they saw. Some had their eyes closed. Though they were gathered together, their spirits still seemed solitary, as if each bear was sitting along in front of its own fire.

The hubcap came around and we all took some newberries. I don’t know about Mother, but I just pretended to eat mine. Wallace Jr. made a face and spit his out. When he went to sleep, I wrapped the bedspread around all three of us. It was getting colder and we were not provided, like the bears, with fur. I was ready to go home, but not Mother. She pointed up toward the canopy of trees, where a light was spreading, and then pointed to herself. Did she think it was angels approaching from on high? It was only the high beams of some southbound truck, but she seemed mighty pleased. Holding her hand, I felt it grow colder and colder in mine.

Wallace Jr. woke me up by tapping on my knee. It was past dawn, and his grandmother had died sitting on the log between us. The fire was banked up and the bears were gone and someone was crashing straight through the woods, ignoring the path. It was Wallace. Two state troopers were right behind him. He was wearing a white shirt, and I realized it was Sunday morning. Underneath his sadness on learning of Mother’s death, he looked peeved.

The troopers were sniffing the air and nodding. The bear smell was still strong. Wallace and I wrapped Mother in the bedspread and started with her body back out to the highway. The troopers stayed behind and scattered the bears’ fire ashes and flung their firewood away into the bushes. It seemed a petty thing to do. They were like bears themselves, each one solitary in his own uniform.

There was Wallace’s Olds 98 on the median, with its radial tires looking squashed on the grass. In front of it there was a police car with a trooper standing beside it, and behind it a funeral home hearse, also an Olds 98.

“First report we’ve had of them bothering old folks,” the trooper said to Wallace. “That’s not hardly what happened at all,” I said, but nobody asked me to explain. They have their own procedures. Two men in suits got out of the hearse and opened the rear door. That to me was the point at which Mother departed this life. After we put her in, I put my arms around the boy. He was shivering even though it wasn’t that cold. Sometimes death will do that, especially at dawn, with the police around and the grass wet, even when it comes as a friend.

We stood for a minute watching the cars and trucks pass. “It’s a blessing,” Wallace said. It’s surprising how much traffic there is at 6:22 a.m.

That afternoon, I went back to the median and cut a little firewood to replace what the troopers had flung away. I could see the fire through the trees that night.

I went back two nights later, after the funeral. The fire was going and it was the same bunch of bears, as far as I could tell. I sat around with them a while but it seemed to make them nervous, so I went home. I had taken a handful of newberries from the hubcap, and on Sunday I went with the boy and arranged them on Mother’s grave. I tried again, but it’s no use, you can’t eat them.

Unless you’re a bear.

© 1990 by Terry Bisson.

Originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Terry Bisson is a science fiction writer who lives in California.

Salamander Patterns
Anaea Lay

I hadn’t meant to become an astronaut, but these things happen. I worked hard, because I liked working hard, and that’s just where I landed. Apparently a chemical engineer with a PhD in molecular physics and a half-dozen Iron Man trophies is overqualified for most other jobs. I’m not complaining. Not meaning to become an astronaut and not wanting to be an astronaut are two entirely different things. Sometimes people don’t understand that when I try to explain, though.

Which makes explaining the salamander even harder.

I stretch out on the bed and stare up at the ceiling. It’s one of those textured ones that was so popular in the ’90s, big lumpy bumps forming random shapes, like constellations in the night sky. They’re all familiar. I spent my childhood staring up at that ceiling.

“What do you see?” I ask the salamander grafted to my neck.

“Are you testing my capacity for human-style imagination?” it asks.

“No,” I say. “I’m testing your ability to impose meaningful patterns on random data.”

There’s a shift in pressure at my throat that makes me swallow. The salamander is looking around, pondering.

The blob-shape on the ceiling I’m fixated on has always presented two possibilities to me. In the first instance, it’s a woman with her hair pulled up in a bun; it’s an old fashioned sort of bun—pulled up, so the hair is big and poofs out from the head before coiling into a spiral that takes up the whole back of her skull. She doesn’t have a mouth, but her nose sticks out in a long point.

If I squint the other way, it’s an ice cream cone.

“You don’t like this room,” the salamander says. “You have strong negative associations with it. Your response to it is one you interpret as claustrophobia.”

“That’s not something you see. That’s something you feel,” I say.

“But I do see it. It’s part of trying to see what you see. You aren’t actually finding patterns anymore, but recalling past associations.”

That’s probably true. “And?”

“It’s an ice cream cone.”

I smile. I’m glad it sees the ice cream cone instead of the mouthless woman. I don’t know why.

There’s a light tap on the door and I hear my Dad’s voice. “Sharon? Dinner.”

“Coming.”

I’m thinking of the ice cream cone and what the salamander said about me, just remembering old patterns I’d found, as I go downstairs and take my seat at the table. I’m sitting in the chair farthest from the kitchen, with my back to the patio doors, just like I always did growing up—and have continued to do on visits home to my parents. I do this even though it puts an empty chair to either side of me, where my siblings, who are not here, used to be.

“Did you have a nice nap, sweetie?” my mother asks.

“I wasn’t napping,” I say. “I still can’t nap.” Thirty-three years old and I’ve never napped.

“Oh,” Mom says. Then she smiles too big and makes her chair squeak horribly as she scoots in.

“How did your appointment with the doctor go?” Dad asks.

It was terrible. The doctor had started off by consoling me about the salamander, then dove right in with possibilities for removing it. “Humanely, of course,” he’d said when he paused long enough to hear my protests. Never mind that what I’d been protesting was the idea that I needed consolation, or that the salamander should be removed. I’d sat there for twenty minutes in the scratchy gown with the confusing ties. Then I told him I’d have to think about what he’d said before I made any decisions. All the while the salamander sat docile on my neck, never saying a word in defense of itself.

“It was fine,” I tell my Dad.

“Any . . . news?” my mother asks.

I blink at her, my fork stopped halfway between my plate and my mouth. She is clearly referencing something—and expects me to know what—but I have no idea. “What kind of news?”

“From the doctor. About Sally.” My mother refers to the salamander as Sally. A doctor on one of mom’s talk shows said that we should try to treat the salamanders the way we would treat humans and develop positive relationships with them. He said it’s better for those “afflicted” with accidental grafting. As if this is something that happens routinely.

Salamanders are not just like humans. They do not conceptualize themselves the way we do, and they find our self-conceptions peculiar and unsettling. Also, Sally is a stupid name.

“I’m not having it removed,” I say.

My mother drops her fork to the table, its tines clattering as they bounce off the edge of the plate. “Don’t you want it removed?”

This argument again. We’ve been having it for as long as I can remember. Not always about removing the salamander—it’s only been a year—but about my failure to do, or be, what they think I should want to do or be. Our relationship was supposed to evolve past this when I moved out, when I became an adult. It didn’t, but at least I’m on comfortable footing again. I know how to have this argument. I stick my fork into the pile of noodles on my plate and twist. “I have a responsibility,” I say as I pull a be-noodled fork clear from the rest of the plate. “I’m going to see it through.”

“Don’t be stupid, Sharon. You’re not like those others. You didn’t ask for this. Nobody can hold you to those obligations.”

“It can,” I say. I shove noodles in my mouth. “And it’s right here, listening.”

My dad cuts in, his tone placating, his fork covered in sauce. “Let’s change the subject.”

None of modern space exploration would be possible without the salamanders. They came to us and taught us how to make it practical, economical, easy. All they asked for in exchange were hosts, humans who would carry them around, sustaining them and letting them study us. A lot of people find this disturbing for some reason, but it’s hardly different from letting Google track your data usage. You go around surfing the web, it learns everything about you. Except all you get from Google is an improved ad experience, whereas the salamanders are giving us the stars.

What I mean is that it doesn’t make sense to be more disturbed by the salamanders than you are by the electronics you use every day.

It’s not that the salamanders need people without emotions like they imply on the news. They’d have you think the salamanders can only graft onto people lacking in real feeling or empathy. But that’s not it at all; they don’t need an absence of emotion, but a distance from it. They get overwhelmed by people who get overwhelmed. They need people who can think through what they’re feeling, who can experience a thing while watching themselves experience a thing. It’s not that they have an antipathy to empathy. They just need a host with a certain amount of detachment so they can maintain their own detachment and watch us.

Can you blame them?

I’m lying on my bed again, staring at the ceiling. A foot away from the mouthless lady/ice cream cone is a lumpy huddle of sheep. They aren’t really sheep—they don’t look like anything—but one night I couldn’t sleep and had counted three hundred imaginary sheep, so I decided to find more tangible ones. That wasn’t a pattern I found, but one I imposed. And I remember it, all these years later.

“Why do you come back here, when you dislike it so much?” the salamander asks me.

“They’re my family,” I say, because it’s the only answer I have. Everybody has problems with their family, but you put up with them because they’re family. There’s no such thing as a functional family. We all know that, even if half of us make ourselves miserable by trying to be the exception.

“Are you dependent on them in some fashion?” the salamander asks.

“They’re the only family I have. I don’t get another one.”

“Why do you need a family?”

This question stumps me. This happens sometimes, when talking to the salamander. They aren’t individuals the way we are, so they’re fascinated and confused by social networks among humans, the ways our individuals form collectives. I find I can’t explain the function of families to the salamander because I’m so fuzzy on the subject myself. I know that family matters and that mine cares for me—people have been assuring me of both points since I was very small—but I am at a loss to articulate why.

“They provide a critical support network, a reliable fallback for resources and assistance should something fail.”

The salamander shifts, pressure moving away from my throat and toward my collarbone. “Like for raising children?”

“Yes,” I say, pleased to have found something to offer as an explanation. “Grandparents are great babysitters.”

“But you have no children. You have no plans to have children. Why come back here when you don’t plan to use the benefits rendered by doing so?”

Because where else was I going to go for my mandatory three-week vacation? The last time I’d had a mandatory break was college. Maybe that’s what I should tell the salamander: We need family so we have somewhere to go when our professional lives start to fall apart. Before I can say that, I hear a gentle tapping on my door. I sigh, but I don’t move. I can already predict the next twenty minutes and nobody is going to be happy at the end of them. “Come in,” I say.

“Sharon, can we talk?” my dad says as he comes in the door, his face wearing that I come in peace to be the voice of reason expression he uses whenever he feels trapped between me and my mother.

I sit up, suppressing the sigh I feel coming on. “Sure.”

“Your mother means well,” he says as he sits down next to me on the bed. “This is very hard for her.”

“This doesn’t have anything to do with her,” I say. “It happened to me. It’s my life. This is my decision.”

“But it reflects on her. On us.”

The salamander shifts on my neck. When it talks, I’m the only one who can hear it, but it still rarely speaks when there are others around. It’s an observer, and tries very hard not to influence things as they are happening.

“You think this makes you look bad?” I say.

“We think we wouldn’t be very good parents if we weren’t worried. You know what those things are. What they need. We want you to be happy. But if you’re a salamander host, how can that happen?”

This conversation hasn’t quite gone where I expected it to. Discomfort with the salamander, I’d expected. Pressure to pretend the accident never happened, or to make a big deal out of it, I’d expected. But this is something . . . subtler. I’m not sure what to do with it. “I would be unhappy if I had the salamander removed.”

My dad sighs, and I wonder whether he loathes these peace-making conversations as much as I do. “I love you, Sharon. Your mother and I both do. And we’ll always support you, whatever you do. But we want what’s best for you. So if you don’t want the salamander removed, will you do something else for me?”

“That depends on what,” I say, always reluctant to commit to anything I don’t understand.

“Talk to somebody. A counselor, or a psychologist, or a priest. Somebody objective. Work through things with them. If you do that, and you still want to keep the salamander, that’s fine.”

He’s certain I’ll change my mind. He also knows that I’d never, voluntarily, “talk to somebody.” This is one of those impossible situations where, in order to avoid looking like a stubborn, unreasonable person in the face of an absurd expectation, I have to give in to another absurd expectation. He thinks he’s being fair, kind. He really does. I think about trying to explain to him why he’s wrong. But it will be one of those cold fights, where we’re both perfectly calm and reasonable, and both walk away hurt and disappointed. My teenage years are a mass of scars from those discussions and attempts. He will not understand and I’ll never know whether it’s because he can’t or he refuses to. But even if nothing else between us has changed since I was a teenager, I have at least learned that much. “I’ll think about it,” I say.

He smiles, pats my shoulder. “That’s all I ask.”

No, what he asked was for me to either cut the salamander out of my neck or to validate their sense that there’s something wrong with me by seeking help for it. But he loves me. He’ll always support me. Him and my mother, both.

The thing is, he’s almost right. He looks at me and sees the sole survivor of a devastating accident, physically maimed by the event, and refusing to deal with the psychological trauma. That person probably does need to deal with it. That person probably should talk to somebody. Standing up to that person to make sure they get the help they need probably is the best way to express love and support.

“They don’t understand you very well,” the salamander says when my father is gone.

The problem is, I’m not scarred, and I wasn’t traumatized.

I never meant to be an astronaut, but not because I didn’t want to be one. Growing up, being an astronaut meant lots of training for the chance to spend a few days in a tin can hovering in the exosphere, eating terrible food and urging middle-schoolers into STEM fields via web-cam. We’d already been to the moon and, when we were being honest, had given up on sending people anywhere else. “Astronaut” just wasn’t a career option a practical person would find attractive.

“Your subconscious wanted it,” the program director told me when they offered me the job. “You couldn’t have a more perfect resume for an astronaut if you’d tried.” This comment irritated me a great deal. He wanted to be an astronaut, and in order to like you, he needed to think that you did too. So he invented a life-long self-delusion for me to make me palatable, and never questioned whether that explanation might make me unqualified for the position.

The director’s well-intentioned, irritating quirks aside, I quite enjoyed working for the program. The salamanders claimed they’d come from Venus and, publicly, we let that stand. In the program, we knew it was a lie—their arrival trajectories made no sense with a Venusian origin point—but they didn’t try to sell the people in the program on it. Wherever they were actually from, whatever they were actually doing, at this point they were a fascinating species giving us technology we craved and access to the universe in exchange for consensual hosting by a very small number of volunteers. Everybody suspected there was another shoe waiting to drop, but there was little we could do until it did. So we kept our eyes open and learned everything we could.

I’d found a niche I enjoyed, got along well with my colleagues, and looked forward to Penelope’s launch. My workload was reasonable, which meant I had time to pursue side interests. That was deliberate. The program wanted us cross-trained as heavily as possible.

To a point.

“You got a minute, Sharon?” the program director asked me one day. He was in his late fifties, too old for a position on Penelope but young and fit enough to fantasize about an exception.

“Sure.”

“It’s about this application you submitted last week. To join the ambassador program.”

“What about it?” I asked.

“You need to withdraw it.”

I turned in my chair to look at him directly. He liked that from the people working under him, especially women. It made him feel like they trusted him enough to be assertive, and he desperately wanted us to trust him. To like him. To petition the higher brass to give him his hoped-for exception. “Why?” I asked. “I passed the psychological exams. I qualify.” That I’d even consented to the psychological exams should have been proof of my interest in the project.

“That’s the problem,” the director said. “We don’t want the public knowing one of our astronauts qualifies as a salamander host.”

This came as a surprise to me. Up to that point I’d only thought of the benefits to the project, the advantages of having an active salamander with the crew to provide advice and guidance if something went wrong. It had seemed to me like the very sort of thing the brass would want. “I don’t understand.”

“There’s a word for the people who qualify as hosts. It’s not one we want associated with our crew.”

I still didn’t understand. “What word?”

“Psychopath.”

More surprise. “You think I’m a psychopath?”

In that moment I could see him remembering our first conversation, reconsidering his assertion that really, deep down, his dream had always been mine, too. I did not like the conclusion he seemed to be drawing. “I think you need to withdraw your application. We won’t allow a salamander host onto the crew.”

I spent four days thinking about it, then withdrew.

Of course, something went wrong. We hadn’t even launched yet and the engines were sending up warnings. We delayed the launch an hour to troubleshoot them. Thirty minutes later they were cycling out of control. The evacuation alarms sounded ten minutes later. We’d drilled for a four-minute evacuation. The explosion came at one minute, thirty seconds.

I’d taken post near the salamander storage facility on the ship since none of my skills were useful for troubleshooting the engines; I could contribute best by staying out of the way and monitoring conditions in areas the rest of the crew weren’t in. That was what saved me from dying in the initial blast. I was still a goner, except that the salamanders had been blown out of their storage, too. One of them crawled toward me, the long, tapered appendage that served as an arm and looked like a tail coiling around it when it reached me. Then it tickled my ear.

“We can save each other,” it said. “Will you host me?”

I didn’t need to think about my answer.

And the merging? Nothing in the universe would convince me to give up that experience.

I miss my crewmates. I’m sorry the mission failed before it ever launched. Six months of recovery from my injuries was intensely unpleasant. But I wasn’t traumatized by the accident.

It gave me the stars in a way success never would have.

I agreed to talk to a counselor. There were another two weeks in my enforced vacation and it was that or leave my parents early. My siblings were coming for the weekend. It would have been awkward, complicated, and needlessly dramatic. My siblings didn’t deserve to walk into that. I did insist on a counselor, not a psychologist. I’m not going near anybody who has the authority to do anything.

Her office is drab and plain. Dr. Geffston. Beige Berber carpeting and faded chairs with worn padding. No fish tank, but several ficus plants. Neutral-warm smile as I sit down across from her.

“How is Sally?” she asks.

“Who? I’m Sharon,” I say.

Dr. Geffston points to her neck. “The salamander.”

“The salamander doesn’t have a name,” I say. “And it doesn’t want to be discussed. It’s an observer. It doesn’t change anything.”

“And you’re sympathetic to that?” the doctor asks.

My patience for this is shorter than I thought it would be. Already I want to be anywhere else, and care less about the consequences than I should. “Since you’ve already spoken to my mother, it shouldn’t be hard for you to realize that the problem is her inability to accept that my choices aren’t about her. Why don’t you have her come in and tell you all about Sally?”

Dr. Geffston doesn’t react. I wonder how many of the people chosen as salamander hosts have training like hers. Is she actually detached, or just faking it to be professional? “I may do that,” she says. “But while you’re here, let’s focus on you. This isn’t the first time you’ve talked to someone like me, right?”

No. “I was an astronaut. We have to talk to lots of people like you to get and keep that job.”

“And before that?”

I was eight. “I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

“Tell me a little bit about what it’s like to host the salamander.”

I’m relieved she changed the subject, and I’m sure she notices. “It’s not like anything. I mean. Nothing’s different.”

“Really?”

“Nothing with me. Other people are different. They treat me differently. For the first six months I wasn’t sure whether it was the accident or the salamander. I think it was both.”

“And now?”

“Now, obviously, it’s the salamander. The accident was a year ago.” I roll my shoulders a bit as the salamander shifts at my neck.

“In what ways do people treat you differently?”

“They worry about me so much I have to come here to calm them down.”

Dr. Geffston has a tablet resting on her lap, but she’s not using it to take notes. I wonder what the point of having it is. “But they have worried about you like this before.”

The sigh escapes before I can stop it. I start to cut it off, then reconsider. It’s like a hiccup mid-sigh. But that’s all I need to reach my decision. “There’s no point to this,” I say. “Thank you for your time.”

“Sharon!” she calls as I reach the door.

I put up with a lot for the program. I was getting the stars in exchange. But this? There’s no reward for this.

I can’t face going home so soon. I go to a food court instead, scarf around my neck to hide the tell-tale lump from the salamander. Milkshake, French fries, and cheesy pop music over hollow loudspeakers. It’s a sort of hell, really. I haven’t been to a food court since high school, but for now it’s better than the alternative. I eat the fried potatoes and wonder whether I ought to regret walking out, whether it was worth the pique of temper. The aftermath of getting angry always leaves me a little afraid.

“Can you take me away from this?” I ask the salamander.

“It is unlikely they will restart the project. And if they do, it is unlikely they’ll allow you to crew it,” the salamander replies.

These are things I know already. The French fries are too salty and I adore it. “What about . . . how it was when we merged?”

“I don’t understand why you came back here,” the salamander says.

It has ignored my question. Salamander tact. “I didn’t have anywhere else to go. And I hadn’t been home since before the project started. I was overdue.”

“You owe them visits?”

“Something like that.”

“And what do they owe you?”

Love. Support. Understanding. “Nothing.”

“Yet you honor the obligation. You are unhappy, but you make no effort to change that.”

I look at the food, the plastic table, the laminate flooring. It ignored my question and I noticed. If I ask again, will I get an answer? I suspect not.

Salamanders don’t go backward.

I remember the first time I saw the mouthless woman on the ceiling. I was six. We’d moved into the house just a few weeks before. I stared up at the ceiling from my bed, watching morning sunlight crawl across it and wondering whether it was late enough for me to get up yet. I’ve never slept much, and even then I knew that trying to keep up with me exhausted my parents. So I held still, looking to the ceiling for my amusement, and there she was. I spent a good while wondering whether I’d ever be able to scoop my hair into a bun like hers. I wondered whether her nose had always been so pointy, or if she’d gotten herself into trouble like Pinocchio.

A few years later I made up a backstory for her. Lying in bed, two weeks after I punched Jimmy Calton for stealing my best friend’s Lisa Frank folder. I was scared because the doctor told me that if I didn’t control my temper he’d take me away from my family, send me to a school for other kids like me. I didn’t know how they’d be like me, just that what I was was horrible, and that the other children would be as well.

So I didn’t think about the doctor, or Jimmy Calton, or my parents whispering furiously when they thought I couldn’t hear. The lady on my ceiling was a mom, a new mom. She loved her little baby too much for words. Bad fairies were jealous and they cursed her, taking away her mouth so she could never even sing her baby a lullaby. But she loved that baby anyway, even if she was cursed. She loved that baby so fiercely that even without a mouth, even with her pointy nose, she’d never let anybody take it away ever.

I never found her baby.

I don’t take off the scarf, and I don’t talk about Dr. Geffston. I go out as much as I can, though I have no friends and no connections in this place. I just have to take it one day at a time, and then it’s over. I’ll wait three more years before coming back, and just stay for a week next time. Maybe things will be better by then. Maybe next time, it’ll go differently.

My siblings arrive late on Friday, spouses and children in tow. The kids take over the living room as their bedroom for the weekend, and my siblings put down air mattresses in their respective childhood rooms. My sister is jetlagged and disappears to bed before long. My brother’s wife does the same, though without the excuse. My brother and I stay up late in the kitchen.

“You need tackier jewelry if you’re going to wear scarves like that,” he says as he pours us a drink. Then he hesitates. “Can you still drink?”

I scowl. “I’m not pregnant. Give it here.”

He teases me, holding the tumbler just out of reach, but I step on his foot and he repents. I’ve missed him, and I can feel the salamander wriggle in response to my sudden awareness of just how much.

“The folks are worried about you,” he said.

I sip my drink. “I know.”

“Should I?”

“No.”

“Didn’t think so.” He downs his drink, pushes his glass aside. “So is this the sort of mandatory three-week vacation where you still have a job at the end?”

I shrug. “Yes, technically. Not sure for how long, though.”

“No funding?”

I take another sip. I know he won’t tell anybody, but still. How much should I share? “No salamanders. They’re leaving.”

“Back to Venus?” my brother asks.

The squirming is somewhat uncomfortable. I take a breath, try to ease the salamander. It’s not normally like this. “The hosted ones will stay, but their ambassadors and the ones who’ve been teaching us are moving on. They don’t have the patience to keep teaching us anymore. Either we figure out what happened on our own, or no stars after all.”

He refreshes our drinks, though I haven’t finished mine yet. “Well, we’ll figure it out. How long do you think it will take?”

“No idea. I’m not that kind of engineer.”

He nudges me, grinning. “You’re just about everything else, though. What’s next for you?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe biology. Well, xenobiology.”

“You want to study the salamanders who stay?”

“Of course,” I say, grinning because I can tell he understands. Not in any way he could articulate. But he gets me. He always has. I don’t have to explain the salamander to him, which makes me want to. “We can’t go to the stars, but a piece of them came to us. I think it would be nice to take a closer look at that.”

“What does Sally think of that?” he asks.

I cringe.

He squeezes my bicep. “Sorry. Our parents are assholes.”

I drink to that.

While they’re grafted to their hosts, the salamanders see and feel everything their host experiences. The relationship is reversed during the grafting. I didn’t just sense what the salamander was sensing right then, its panic over the explosion, its fear of dying alone in the flames, but I got a sense of everything it had seen and experienced, the sum of all that it was.

They’d come from far, far away. Much farther than Venus.

They were all the same creature. They’re like starfish, where the pieces survive when you cut them off. They can wander around on their own for a bit, but they’ll come back eventually. Join again. There is no going home for a salamander, just becoming whole.

I saw the galaxy, the universe, spread whole and fragile and graspable before them. I felt novae burn and explode and knew it was nothing, a mere second of the cosmic whole, while I would stretch long past it.

I found thousands of little species, planet-bound and frightened of their smallness, their confinement. And I reached out my hand to help them, the ones that could be helped.

I learned the pattern and shape of the universe, rode the crests of its waves, sank deep into its troughs. I tore off pieces of myself to study it closely, intimately, to become lost in the ebb of it before coming back into me.

I became small.

I accepted confinement.

And I woke up to burning. My other pieces of self destroyed. Facing a moment where I would never be me again, would lose the knowledge and experience I’d gained from my temporary sundering.

Found the girl, the woman, the dying creature I might save, if only she’d let me save this small part of myself.

I became alien, and I folded the universe within me. I was happy.

And then I was Sharon, and there was a salamander living in my neck.

“They make you different,” the salamander says after my siblings have left. “It helped me understand.”

“Good,” I say. And I am pleased. If the salamander is beginning to understand, maybe I’m getting closer, too. I pause for a moment, a pair of socks clutched in my hands. Then I recall myself to my task, put them in the bag.

“You’re leaving,” it says.

“Spending the next two weeks alone in my apartment won’t be so bad. I think we’ll all be happier.”

“Could we visit another host?” the salamander asks. It is the first time it has ever suggested that I do something. The first time it has asked me for something since I consented to host it.

“I think that would be nice.” I’m standing on my bed, neck bent to look up at the ceiling, sharpie in hand. “Will you be able to merge with the other salamander?”

“No,” it says. “But we can share what we’ve learned.”

It is awkward to draw on the ceiling, my wrist is bent at an uncomfortable angle, but it only takes a few strokes and I am finished.

“It’s not an ice cream cone anymore,” the salamander says.

“No,” I agree, smiling up at my vandalized ceiling. And the woman with the pointy nose and old-fashioned bun looks down at me, smiling back.

© 2014 by Anaea Lay.

Anaea Lay lives in Madison, Wisconsin where she sells real estate under a different name, writes, cooks, plays board games, spoils her cat, and plots to take over the world. The rumors that she never sleeps are not true. She has no comment on the rumors about the disconcerting noises emanating from her basement. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Nightmare, Apex, Strange Horizons, Penumbra, and Shock Totem. Find her online at anaealay.com.

Exuviation
Zhao Haihong

I saw him as soon as I stepped into the room.

He was trembling.

He was moaning softly.

His hands were reaching into the air, as if they wanted to seize hold of something. Thin red lines were crawling over his bare arms.

Suddenly I felt that the room was full of some special aura, some unknown energy.

Every room in the house was too big for me. The designer had used a Mideast palace for reference. Memories of my old life had weighed down on me so much that I wanted desperately to relieve the pressure. “The rooms should be wide, high, and deep, every one of them!” Not until I moved into it did I realize that even if I had escaped from the claustrophobic confines of my old living place, I could not free myself from the past. The palatially high rooms only made matters worse. I saw so many people so often there that the house had gradually turned into a stage setting. Plays premiered and closed and were replaced by other plays, but life itself was still brief and hollow. Nothing really belonged to me underneath this actress’s mask. At this moment, however, I found the room far too small again, as confining as the cloth on his body or the skin on his flesh. The skin which would be cast off when the exuviation began.

He was the center of the room. He was the center of all. The heat he emitted swallowed up every cold abiotic object in the room, making them a part of him. Making me a part of him.

I stepped to the center of that heat. It was the source of life itself. Its allurements filled the air. The air was his breath, and it was the way to transcend his life energy. It was his life that I was breathing and I seemed to be alive then.

Dee . . . Dee . . . Dee . . . I was shocked out of my reverie by my phone.

Abruptly, all that was happening was that I was in my own guestroom, and my guest was going to exuviate. He was not a magician. He had no mystical powers. He was only a caver, who would shed nine times during his lifetime.

We would shed nine times during our lifetimes.

“Hello,” I said, and a holographic image of Mosen appeared in the room.

Holographic communication had always turned me off. Yet when I saw Mosen’s image floating over Tou’s bed, for the first time I realized the sharp contrast between reality and phantasm. Where the caver was struggling, moaning, and striving to use his painful growth to preserve his life, Mosen looked so arrogant and sure of himself. How could I allow someone like that to see Tou’s exuviation?

“I’m going into another room.” I pressed off the communicator before Mosen could object. As I stepped out the door, I glanced back in. Tou had begun to thrash about in the bed. His pitiful moans flooded the room.

“What is it?” I asked, not trying to hide my bad temper.

“Gong, your fans are deeply resentful of your sheltering this caver. What is worse, the studio directors have expressed their dissatisfaction as well.” Mosen was my agent who always wore a perpetually hypocritical gentle expression. Sometimes I wanted to rip that smile off his face. “You’re the most popular actress in the world, sweetie, even if you are only nineteen. A romance like this could have a fatal impact on your career.”

“Romance? You think I’m involved in a love affair? Tou is a caver, my only sibling in the whole upper world. What’s wrong with my helping him?”

“Sibling? Your fans won’t accept him as a sibling, Gong. Don’t you forget that it’s only because you’ve already stopped exuviating that people regard you as a proper human being. Tou insists on exuviating, and that’s why the human world won’t accept him.”

“But that’s all your fault!” I couldn’t control my voice. “Why did you bring us into your world? We were . . . we were . . .”

A sharp light came into Mosen’s permanently smiling eyes. “What kind of life were you living then?” My breathing was unexpectedly labored. Memories of my old life flowed over me irresistibly, nightmares that filled my imagination and left no room for anything else.

The dark world without sunlight, the narrow and damp caves. We curled ourselves up in each cave, like eggs waiting to be incubated. Then came the pain. At first, it was only itching under the skin. Later, when the new skin had formed under the hard incrustation, the newborn muscles and bones were growing out of the old body, like pulp gradually plumping up, struggling to break its outermost shell. The whole body was burned by interior flames. Every cell was screaming thirstily, trembling, twitching, wanting to rupture itself. And sometimes we did not survive.

Such was exuviation, the brilliance of life shining in the dark world. Yet the grievous pain was unbearable indeed to recollect.

“Gong?” Mosen said.

I looked up at him. What right had I to complain or to despise him? The greatest hypocrite here was me. It was I who had willingly abandoned my own life.

“Send him away.”

Send him away? I shivered at his words. No. Never. “Mr. Sun is dead, and I don’t fully trust any other people. I won’t give Tou to them.”

“Then what about your career? I can’t believe that you don’t care about it. Because of the public’s discontent with your affair, the studio is considering offering Sycina the heroine’s role in Holy War—the role that you’ve been longing after for quite some time.”

“Tou is more important than any role,” I heard myself answer without hesitation.

“Why?” His face darkened, but his eyes still twinkled.

“Because he moves me. For such a long time I have been empty to everything, just like the dead. But he has touched me and brought me to life again.”

The sunlight shone through the half-transparent exuviae as thin as cicada wings and lit up his eyes. The sunlight was in his pupils, dancing like two little flames. Tou held up the exuviae he had cast off, stretching it towards the sunshine. He studied it with all his attention, as if he were enjoying a delicate artwork.

It might almost be Yuyi, the mythological cloak that would enable earthbound folk to take flight to the Land of the Immortals. Alas, the truth was never so miraculous. It was only the old self he had just left. It was no more than a layer of cast-off skin.

“You can’t keep this exuviae,” I said. Tou’s expression made me feel I was being cruel. “It should be turned over to the research institute.”

“You—” He finally opened his mouth. After one month living together, he could understand me with effort when I spoke human language. But to speak it himself was more difficult.

I switched to the low and hoarse cave language and said it in a soft tune, “To the research institute, do you understand?”

Tou’s eyes suddenly moistened. He held out his right hand. His fingers were lightly kicking, flicking and rubbing on the back of my left hand. All this was so familiar and yet so distant. In the dark world, cavers met by chance would open their minds to each other through a combination of cave language and the touch of fingers.

But Tou’s sign language indicated nothing but pure gratitude. I looked down on his fingers, smiling. The mucosa-like congestive skin resulting from his recent exuviation had become harder. It was turning light brown. It would grow much prettier and harder with time, until it shone like the glaze of porcelain.

“Gong—” Tou looked into my eyes. “Are yours all finished?” His face was oval at our first meeting, the cheeks a bit plump, the lower eyelids always dropsical, the ridge of his nose a touch too broad. The thick upper lip pouted a little. But now his rectangular face was very pure in outline; the straight, classical nose was like that of Michelangelo’s David; the deep, bright eyes sparkled with sunshine; and the well-formed lips were thin yet not stern. A cleft down the middle of the chin added to his manliness.

“Yes,” I said. “I have molted nine times. My tasks are all finished.”

Is it excusable for me to lie? Every exuviation was a great risk. No one could foretell their physical appearance after an exuviation. All I had in this world was dependent on my artistic career. If I turned out to be a freak of nature after my exuviation, my present life would be totally destroyed.

Staring into my eyes, Tou squeezed out the word from the slit between his teeth. “Liar.”

My teeth were clacking. My whole body trembled slightly and uncontrollably.

The doctor pressed the back of my neck tightly with his left hand. The hypodermic syringe in his right kept pressing in until the needle stuck into my spine. Yes, I felt it. Although the anesthetic had already deadened my nerves to pain, I still felt it, because this was a battle. The hormone injected into my body was fighting my hidden instincts.

The long, drawn-out battle had pained me so much! Seven years had passed since my last exuviation. Nevertheless I still had to fight against my natural desire to exuviate almost every day with all of my will and, what’s more, with drugs.

The doctor was Mr. Sun’s student. He took over my care after Mr. Sun passed away. I owed him the greatest debt of gratitude, for he had immediately informed me when the institute found a second caver.

“Tou is in stable condition.” The needle slid out of spine marrow, and the doctor began to talk about Tou. He was trying to distract me. “His exuviae is so lovely. Yours were lovely too.”

“Never refer to that!”

“It’s your abnormal psychology that makes trouble!” The doctor’s voice rose, but he seemed to regret it almost immediately. He must have remembered that Mr. Sun never yelled at me. He treated the “animal” found by a geological prospecting party in an underground rift valley like the little princess found in the bamboo.

It was Mr. Sun who taught me to speak human language and who made me acceptable to human society. He helped me to survive in an alien world that I didn’t belong to. Mr. Sun had accompanied me through two exuviation periods, watching me change from a caterpillar to a butterfly. And then he had left this world, silently and permanently.

What Mr. Sun had done for me, I must do for Tou.

The trembling grew stronger and became twitching. My vision blurred. Flames flew inside my body, which was ready to burst, to be destroyed, and to gain a new life. I gritted my teeth without uttering a sound. I must restrain my physiological impulse with reason and, if that failed, with drugs.

In the end, when, exhausted, I drowsily lost consciousness, I had only that one thought in my mind: What Mr. Sun had done for me, I must do for Tou.

War flags were flapping in the wind that swept across the grassland. An eagle glided down from the upper air. I raised up a heavy silver spear. Sunlight dazzled on it.

Pressing the horse’s belly with my thighs, I urged it to dive into the valley.

Behind me, thousands upon thousands of horses and soldiers galloped toward the army in the valley.

“Gong?”

I turned off the player. Holographic movies are so compelling because they make the audience feel as though they are personally on the scene. When I turned on the player, the deserted hall would immediately become vast grasslands. Press the key again and the magic ended and everything returned to its original condition.

“I was watching the screener you sent.” I turned to Mosen. “How’re the numbers?”

“The film has pulled more than ninety-five percent attendance in all cinemas for the first weekend. Very successful.”

I sighed with relief. “That’s fine.”

“But—”

“Well? What’s the problem?”

“You are not the most popular role in Hua Mulan.”

“So?” I didn’t want to care, but still I couldn’t pretend to be happy to hear it. “It’s the male lead, then?”

Mosen shook his head. He lowered his body to get very close to my face, watching my eyes. His face slowly expanded into a smile. “It was . . . Tou!”

Naturally, I was surprised. “But he was only in the film for a few minutes.”

“It has nothing to do with the length of time. He has a striking appearance. Combined with his inspired acting, he’s irresistible.”

My reaction was hard to explain. I managed a little smile. “Aren’t you going to urge me to send him away?”

“Oh, that’s old news now. Nobody’s still bothered by your relationship with him. I never imagined that you could teach him so well in only two years.” Mosen’s tone was absolutely sincere. “You are an extraordinary girl.”

“You flatter me.” I waited for him to go on. But Mosen merely said that he wanted to discuss the possibility with Tou of signing a contract with Image Productions.

“Then go to him! Why are you still here?”

“Gong, you’re a bit impatient lately. You should watch that.”

“Go away!”

After I’d driven Mosen away, I was overcome by a feeling of frustration. But why? I surely didn’t envy Tou for his success. If he could be accepted by human world, I would be the first one to feel happy for him. It was I who taught him to walk upright. It was I who instructed him in human language. I who taught him how to use knives and forks. I who led him into the world of movies.

But Tou was unhappy.

Just as I used to be.

Which made me, his teacher, begin to doubt the value of all my hard work.

Why? Why shouldn’t we achieve happiness, like ordinary people?

Had I remained in the world of cavers, I would have finished my nine exuviations. I would only have a short period of life left—mating, bearing children—and then death would come. Wasn’t my present life much better than that? Why did neither of us feel happy?

“Tou?” I walked into the garden and found him at the stairs around the fountain.

The moon was gleaming, but the wind blew hard, stirring up the floating clouds and making the moonlight flicker. The marble fountain gushed, streamed, broke into strings of pearls, then fell into the surging pool.

Turning to me, Tou said, “Gong, I am tired.”

Long after, when I recalled this night, I could still see every detail of his face. It was etched on my mind like the lines on a copperplate etching.

His expression was a little dull. The thin lips opened slightly. The eyelids were half-closed, yet sadness streamed from them. “Gong,” he repeated, “I am tired.”

I felt like he’d punched me in the chest.

I found myself holding him.

“Gong, I don’t want to act anymore.”

“No . . . don’t give up.” Softly I held my arms around him, and let his head lean on my chest. My fingers were entwined in his thick, short hair. “You’ll be a star soon. Hua Mulan is doing extremely well. Your character is the most popular, even though it was just a minor role. And your first film as the leading man has just wrapped. You are about to become very popular.”

Tou smiled comfortingly. Nevertheless, I could see that what I had said was totally without significance to him.

The calm, pale moonlight, its sad beauty beaming, touched the plants fast asleep in the garden. A night-blooming cereus near the stairs was in full blossom, every petal straining to its utmost unfold, its white color steeped in the darkness of night thereby transformed into a light green blur.

“Tomorrow I will stop taking my medicine.” Tou sounded as cool as metal to show his resolution. “I don’t want to escape any more. I will molt—for my ninth time.”

“I . . . object.” I loosed my arms, which were holding him, and stepped back. “You are too willful.”

“Willful? Maybe.” His head dropped, hanging heavily on his chest. “But the one who should understand me most is you.”

I didn’t say anything.

“No matter how many plays or films we act in—temporarily hiding in the loves of others, escaping into fictitious lives—when the play is over, we should come back and be ourselves again. But who are we, Gong? What are our real features? Acting is inauthentic. Nothing of us is left afterwards. Gong, what on earth have we done?”

“Of course we have something left. We add our own creations when we act. My true features can be found in my films.”

“No more lying to yourself and others. Even you don’t know your own features. How then could you express them through acting?” Tou was angry in a way I’d never seen. “Afraid of changes, refusing to grow. Is this your reality?”

I couldn’t keep from sneering. “No matter who scolds me, you should never scold me.

“What do you want? Death comes soon after the ninth exuviation. I don’t want to die yet. And I want you to live too. Why can’t you understand?”

“It’s you who can’t understand,” Tou said. “Why are you afraid of natural law? Life is the twin of death. Without death, life would not be so dear.”

“Change, growth . . . these things sound good. But we never know what our physical appearance will be after our next exuviation. It may not be good. The result is unpredictable. Unpredictable!”

“So you are more afraid of change than of death. But what you become is yourself. Why are you afraid of it? It’s more real than you are now. No matter if you are beautiful or ugly, it’s your real appearance after your hard struggle to grow which is of utmost importance, isn’t it?”

“If—” I became a bit hysterical. “If I turn out to be very ugly, then everything I have now would be totally lost. Nothing would be left!”

“You fool! What do you care about that? Tell me what do you have now? What? What could you possibly have if you don’t have yourself? And if you have nothing, then what can you lose?”

I have you. You are my brother, my sibling, and the only kin I have in this world. I don’t want to lose your respect. Should I suffer the pain of exuviation again to regain it?

I hesitated.

Tou sighed slightly. He started to go down the stairs. Then he paused in front of that night-blooming cereus, putting out a finger, softly touching the petals which were unfolding in all directions. “So beautiful,” he murmured. “So true to its own life. Life may be short. But never inauthentic.”

The gossip channels are always well informed. At the press conference for the release of Spring and Autumn Annals, the film in which Tou first took the leading role, exuviation had unexpectedly become a hot topic.

“It’s said that you have already stopped taking juvenile hormones and are preparing for your next exuviation.”

“We’ve heard that your sort can’t mate until you’ve undergone nine periods of exuviation, but that your lives after that will be very short.”

“Will you leave us during your exuviation period?”

“Will you make the whole process of your exuviation known to the public?”

And the fans were not far behind.

“Tou! Don’t molt! You are my idol!”

“Tou, we love you! We support you!”

“Tou, are you going to be more handsome afterwards? I expect so much from you!”

“Tou—!”

“Tou—!”

The situation was out of control. I took my anger out on Mosen. “Who has spread such unreliable rumors?”

“Who do you think?” Mosen smiled wryly. “What a pity. He could have been a superstar. But instead, he went public about exuviation. The studio is quite embarrassed.”

Then, to my shock, I saw Tou in the crowd. He was standing firm and haughty in the center of the seething sea, not even knitting his brows, while waves of clamor rose one after another. Maybe he was aware I was watching, for he turned his head and looked in my direction. Our eyes met. He smiled meaningfully.

“This will be the last exuviation of my life.” He raised his voice. “I want to let you see the whole of it. That is the way of life for our cavers. We are not subhuman animals at all. Our life is pure and filled with intensity.” He gazed directly at me and said: “I glory in being a caver.”

My friend, my brother, my only companion in this world. The boundless crowd of people separated us. My warm body was cooling, from calvaria to arch, until every inch of it was ice-cold.

My palatial grand hall at last was finally being put to good use. It was now the set from which would be broadcasted live the final exuviation of Tou, the brilliant movie star and a caver from the unearthly world.

Holographic video cameras were fixed at all corners so as to catch every change in Tou from all possible angles. I stared up at the camera set on the crystal pendant lamp. At this moment, everybody in the world could see Tou. My heart beat hard, once, at the thought.

Lying silently on a wide green jade bed was a caver whose beautifully formed body flickered with bronze glints. It was a shell of porcelain rather than of human skin.

Over the next ten days, there would be a Tou in every home that was watching. They would see his struggle, his pain, his rebirth.

But only the one beside me was real.

I was filled to bursting with emotions. I sat on the edge of the bed and dabbed at his forehead, softly and slowly.

“Won’t you change your mind, Tou?”

“My only regret is that I can’t return to my own world.” Opening his eyes, he smoothed over my anxious expression with a gentle gaze. “Only exuviation can help me find myself on this alien earth.”

I recalled his last exuviation. I knew what to expect.

First it was the fingertips. Ten fingertips, ten toetips. Slight lines appeared in them. Then, in about two days’ time, the lines had covered the whole body and grown thicker themselves.

On the third day, also from the fingertips and toetips, indistinct chapping began. Cavers have no nails, yet our skin has the same rigidity as human nails. Our joints are interlinked by thick and flexible bast-like skin. The chapping extended from the fingertips to the back of the head. The cura counterparts were the insteps.

On the fourth day, the skin beside the chaps on the fingertips slightly warped and turned over, revealing a red glimpse of new skin. There was a little mucilage between the new skin and the old, as well as some floccule couplings.

At last came the ninth day.

Tou was gasping.

Exuviation is very painful. A caver must depend on his own strength to break loose from the old body, rending his relationship with it little by little, while creating a tender new body to endure the hard trials of the world. The ninth exuviation is extremely tough, for it is the battle in which a caver at last becomes mature. Both the interior body and the exterior skin undergo great changes. Some cavers even die in this last trial.

Tou was struggling and I could only look on.

The incomparable vitality he displayed in the process, the vitality that immediately impressed and overwhelmed me, was now being broadcast through a dozen video cameras and transmitted to every corner of the world.

At last I understood why he wanted to show his painful struggle to the humans. In contrast to the two roles he had taken in the films, this was the true Tou. The caver who suffered so publicly was much more alive than any roles he had ever played. He declared to the world with irresistible vigor:

This is life! This is reality! This is living!

This Tou was a living reproach to my treachery.

I was afraid of growth. I was afraid of change.

I kept hiding in the stories of humans, hoping that I could enter their world through the roles I played, trying to gain some human experience. But did I really understand those roles? They were so far from my own experiences, I could only try to learn from them. I couldn’t bridge the difference in mentality. I had failed to become human, while drifting farther and farther from my true essence.

“Ahhhhh—” Tou was groaning lowly and deeply. His body heaved in waves. His skin, the skin that gradually peeled off from his new body, was translucent with a light golden brown luster.

The groans suddenly escalated into screams.

I rushed to him, catching his hand. “Tou!”

His whole arm was twitching. I saw that the old skin on the palm had already peeled off, which meant that the congestive new skin was only a sensitive mucous membrane. I immediately let go of his hand.

“Tou, try to endure a little longer.” Tears welled up in my eyes.

“Don’t . . . grieve . . . don’t . . . cry.” At that moment the old and new skins on his face separated.

I gently laid my hand on his bare chest. It was the last place to exuviate. There, the two layers of skin hadn’t separated yet. I could feel a wild power flowing from his gasping body. It was ceaselessly surging, ceaselessly releasing, ceaselessly growing.

That night I went to see the night-blooming cereus after leaving Tou. Softly touching the petals that were making every effort to burst, I was stunned by the riot of life and strength in such a delicate and fragile body.

“I . . . don’t . . . regret . . . anything.” Tou squeezed out the words with great difficulty.

My palm was shaken by his chest. The skins were flexible here. The old shell and the new one had separated.

“It’s done! The exuviation is a success!” I couldn’t help exclaiming in rapture.

The lady from the television studio immediately added her commentary: “Dear audience, Tou’s ninth exuviation has been satisfactorily completed. Now—”

The doctor standing by the bed suddenly interrupted. “Ms. Gong,” he said. “He . . .” His expression was serious.

I didn’t understand what he was saying, until suddenly I wondered—why was Tou so silent?

I lowered my head to look at him.

I stared at him with my eyes wide open.

That night, the white flower that bloomed in the moonlight, such a beautiful flower, withered before the dawn. The delicate petals fell in the wind like soft sighs.

I held Tou tight in my arms.

The body in my arms had stopped breathing. The life that had bloomed like a night-blooming cereus had withered and died.

Several days later, the ruptured red corpse in cold storage underwent a miraculous transformation into a delicate work of art.

With the detumescence of the new skin, the body was as smooth and clear as white jade. But unlike a living human being, it had no distinct facial features. The head looked like a white jade egg. There was no hunching bridge of a nose, no expanded auricle, no bulging lips. There were three shallow slots which could only be seen with close examination—I thought they were the eyes and mouth—and there were four tiny holes, probably the earholes and nostrils. Had it been a man, this face would make him totally unacceptable in human society.

But this was only a corpse, a beautiful and marvelous jade statue, the termination of Tou’s growth, the true appearance he had sought at the cost of his life.

I was still overcome with emotion when the doctor asked me, “Do you know what he got for the broadcast?”

“I don’t care.” I shook my head numbly. No matter how much he was paid, it was useless to him now.

“Here it is.” The doctor handed me a tidily packaged box.

After a brief hesitation, I opened it.

There was an exuviae lying inside the box. As flimsy as the wings of a cicada. Shining a pale golden-brown.

I raised my eyebrows in silent question.

“According to the original agreement, all the exuviaes belong to the institute. He couldn’t keep it.”

“Yeah,” I replied with deep regret.

“Tou consulted with me beforehand. He said he would contribute all his income from the live broadcast to the institute in exchange for his last exuviae.”

“Is this it?” I stretched my fingers to touch the beautiful Yuyi in the box. I was trembling. “It’s a good bargain. But still he is—”

“He didn’t want to keep it for himself. He wanted to give it to you.”

“To me? Why?” The marvelous exuviae, his old shell, now belonged to me?

“He said he did it because of your name.” The doctor paused, but could not keep himself from curiosity: “Why? Why because of your name?”

The corners of my mouth pulled it up into a miserable and grieving smile. “In the caver language, ‘Gong’ means exuviaes.”

“So. What does Tou mean, then?”

My mouth hung open for a time. I finally spat out the word: “Life.”

The huge square, which could hold five million people, was entirely filled. In the air were hundreds and thousands of flight vehicles filled with my fans.

At last I appeared in a white gauze dress, standing on a bubble-like vehicle. Gradually, it ascended higher and higher. Like a beautiful fairy, a dreamy sprite, I floated up in the blue night sky, slightly swaying in the evening wind.

Every focus lamp was fixed on me. My skin was heated by the light, yet protected by the machine.

“Gong—!”

“Gong—!”

“Gong—!”

The shouts converged into a tempestuous sea of sound.

But every one of you is singing the praises of a false outward form. What you see is just a shell in which I took refuge from growth and change. Did it deserve such fervid and enthusiastic praise?

I waved toward the distant audience. My gauze sleeves fluttered in the wind.

Behind me, an image fifty times my size was making the same action. The image of the fluttering sleeves was steeped in the dreamy colors of the night sky.

People, the one who was worthy of your respect has already been forgotten.

My friend, my relative, the world in my eyes was only a vast expanse of wasteland when I lost you.

I didn’t belong to this world. At last I understood that they had never accepted me as one of them. I was only a precious and beloved pet.

I was a toy of the human world.

Down upon the cheering crowd, I smiled, smiled, smiled.

The night had darkened. The stars were hidden.

Sitting on the stairs near the fountain, I recited from the new script. The heroine was reciting one of Pablo Neruda’s most beautiful poems:

I could write the very saddest verses tonight.

To think I don’t have you. To feel that I have lost you.

To hear the immense night, even more immense without you.

I was overcome. Wasn’t this the description of my feelings at this very moment?

Solitude rose up from my soul, like stars dropped on the wasteland.

I felt a little twitch deep under my skin, which I recognized as the initial symptom of exuviation.

No, no, I cannot.

For the one-thousand-and-first time, I did my best to depress my thirst for growth and extinguished that slight flame without mercy.

But I could hear a voice crying within.

It was me, crying for my own cowardice.

—With many thanks to Geoffrey Landis, Mary Turzillo, and Michael Swanwick.

© 2010 by Zhao Haihong.

Originally published in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Zhao Haihong graduated from Zhejiang University with a master's degree in English and American Literature. She currently teaches at Zhejiang Gongshang University, and she has started studying Art History at China Academy of Art as a doctoral candidate since 2012. Her writing has won her many prizes in China, such as “Best New Talent” at the sixth Song Qingling Children’s Literature Awards, the sixth National Outstanding Children's Literature Award, and the Chinese Science Fiction Galaxy Awards (six times). She has published the short story collections Shijian de Bifang [The Other Side of Time] and Huashu de Yanjing [The Eyes of the Birch], and a novel Shuijing de Tiankong [Crystal Sky].

FANTASY

Apotheosis
Rosamund Hodge

The people of Ipu needed a god.

Of course they already had one. His name was Kuromasai, and he had ended three droughts, cured seven plagues, and defended them from an army of Heccan raiders. But he was also old, and each morning when he appeared for his offering of praise, he had grown a little bit fainter. Soon he would disappear completely, and what is a city without a god?

So the seven Elders of Ipu met to discuss the matter. It had been over two hundred years since they had needed a new god, and though the scrolls said that the Iputians had once made their own, the method was lost.

“The Nimbagi seek their gods in the desert,” said the Second Eldest.

“Yes, and their gods smite them for the least offense,” said the Fourth Eldest.

“The Sornese gods last millennia,” said the Fifth Eldest.

“But what do they ever do?” asked the Third Eldest. “Sit on a pillar and give them ethical advice. That’s not our kind of god.”

Indeed it was not. Theirs were not the leather tents and warrior ways of the Nimbagi, nor the marble temples of the Sornese and their pursuit of virtue. Ipu was a small city of wood and sandstone, and its people were practical and loving; and they prided themselves that their gods protected and loved them.

The solution was obvious. “We must purchase a god from Tsubarime’s factory,” said the Eldest. “Nothing else will do.”

They consulted the oracle, and she told them to send the three sons of the Seventh Eldest. So the Elders gave them advice and a map, along with a diamond, a bag of gold, and a chicken’s tooth. With the faded blessing of Kuromasai they set out, and they walked all day until at sunset they made camp on the shore of the Commotionless Sea, which lies still across half the world.

The next morning they gazed at the water, dazzled golden by the rising sun, which they would have to cross; for Tsubarime’s factory lay beyond the curved horizon, at the eastern end of the world.

“Stupid oracle,” said the eldest son.

“But just think of how we’ll help our city,” said the youngest.

The eldest son snorted. “By walking halfway across the world!” He turned to the middle son. “Come on, don’t you think this quest is crazy?”

The middle son smiled and shrugged.

“Hell,” muttered the eldest son, wading into the clear water.

The youngest son followed him. “Dulce et decorum est.”

It was easy going, for the Commotionless Sea is never more than knee-deep and its bed is of sand and rounded pebbles. So they walked eastwards all day, until the land was gone and they waded through a circular infinity of blue, until sunset turned the water silver and gold and left it darkest cobalt. And still they kept walking deep into the night, for they could not lie down without drowning.

“Damn water,” said the eldest son.

“It’s nothing to what our people will bear if we don’t bring a god back quickly,” said the youngest son.

“There are fish sniffing my toes,” said the middle son.

Suddenly a mighty wind buffeted them—though the water barely rippled—and a great serpent with three horns and a pearl on its forehead descended from the sky. It circled them three times and then hovered before them, its iridescent scales gleaming in the moonlight.

“I am the great serpent ferryman of the west,” it said. “I bear travelers across the Commotionless Sea. Would you care to avail yourselves of my services?”

“Gladly,” said the eldest son, leaping onto the serpent’s back.

“What of my fee?” asked the serpent.

“Do you take gold?” asked the eldest, raising the bag.

“Certainly,” said the serpent.

“But if you give it the gold, how shall we pay for our god?” demanded the youngest.

“Easy,” said the eldest. “I still have the diamond. Coming?”

Neither of his brothers moved, and after a few moments the serpent said, “In that case, we’ll be off. Good night.” With a flick of its tail, it rose into the air and bore the eldest son to the land of Jorongheer, where it devoured him and took both gold and diamond. Serpents are not the most honest of creatures.

Meanwhile the two remaining sons, left with nothing but each other and the chicken’s tooth, began to walk again. When the eastern edge of the sky had just begun to pale, the youngest son gave a shout and fell forward into the water. His brother hauled him up and asked, “What happened?”

“I tripped,” said the youngest son. “Look.” He pointed down, and there on the sandy bottom of the sea lay a girl clothed all in white, her black hair floating about her.

At once they hauled her up and forced the water out of her, and after a few moments the girl coughed and came to life.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“We are from the city of Ipu,” said the middle son, “and we’re going to buy a god from Tsubarime’s factory.”

“But who are you?” asked the youngest son.

The girl looked at the water. “I don’t know. I am a child of the air; when I was born, my cruel mother stole my name and buried me in the sea.” She grasped the hands of the youngest son with a sudden smile. “Then you saved me! And now my powers are yours. I can bear one of you across the sea in a moment—but only one,” she said. “Sorry.”

The middle son looked at their hands. “You have the chicken’s tooth,” he said to his brother. “You go ahead.”

“We do need our god as soon as possible,” said the youngest son. “Can you catch up?”

“Of course,” said the middle son.

The girl drew the youngest son closer and they vanished, water sloshing in to fill the space where they had stood. The middle son watched the ripples a moment, and then waded onward. Sometimes he saw narrow ships skimming over the water, but only one ever came close to him when he waved, and that one glided through the water with no one on board. It paused a moment before him, its white silk sails flapping in the breeze, but he stepped back, and then it sailed away and was gone. So he walked, and he walked, and he had to sleep sitting up, and was often woken with a splash as he fell in. He had to catch gold-scaled fish in his hands, and eat them raw; and he did not die of thirst only because the water of the Commotionless Sea is sweet. Once he passed through a field of floating white flowers, and then he ate their petals, and for three days and three nights he waded through stingless jellyfish that hung glowing in the water; but he was too afraid to eat any of them.

And every night as he huddled upright in the water, he heard weeping, the soft weeping of a thousand hopeless voices; and he dreamed or saw countless shadowy figures walking towards him and behind him into the west.

Until at last a year later, he walked up out of the sea and collapsed on the beach, where he slept for a day. Then he woke up and saw before him a square building made of polished black glass. It looked glorious enough to birth gods, and sure enough, over the door was a sign that read TSUBARIME’S FACTORY.

“It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be,” he said, and walked into the factory lobby. Tsubarime stood waiting at a desk of green marble. She was tall and slender, and wore a tight little skirt and a buttoned gray jacket. Her lips and nails were painted crimson, her hair was curled short, and instead of eyes she had two black orbs.

“Good morning,” she said pleasantly. “Are you related to the last young man who came in here? He’s standing by the geraniums.” She pointed at a potted plant and the middle son saw his brother standing next to it, turned to a statue.

“What did he do wrong?” asked the middle son, because he had read a lot of stories and he knew these things were tricky.

“Nothing,” said Tsubarime. “He just didn’t want to wait a year, and time flies when you’re stone. Your goddess will be done in a few minutes, and then I’ll wake him up.”

“Did my other brother ever get here?” asked the middle son.

“No,” she said cheerfully. “Pity about him; never trust a serpent, I say. Would you like a tour of the factory?”

“All right,” said the middle son, and then, because he had been brought up correctly, “Thank you, ma’am.”

Tsubarime got up, put on a pair of small spectacles, and led him down a hallway. “I used to do the work by hand,” she said. “Now everything is automated. Look.”

They stood before a window, looking into the body of the factory. Muted through the glass came the whirr and clatter and hum of machinery. It was the hugest room that the middle son had ever seen, and it was filled with light gray machines and dark gray conveyor belts. Riding the belts were little lumps like raisins; the middle son looked closer and saw that they were people, naked and curled in on themselves.

“I didn’t know that gods had bodies,” he said.

“They start out with bodies,” said Tsubarime. “They don’t have them when they’re finished. It’s a long process—seven baths and seven burnings—I have to feed them nectar and anoint them with ambrosia.” She gestured to another window, and the middle son saw the people being fed into a great machine that roared and spat them out as piles of ash.

“But it kills them!” he said.

“Oh, the Seventh Fire? Don’t worry, the Seventh Washing restores them.” She led him to another window, where he saw water spurt out of a nozzle onto the piles of ash, turning each back into a curled body.

“That’s nearly the end,” she said. “Then there’s just the curing process, and they’re ready to come out. Look.”

This window showed the end of the conveyor belt. A mechanical arm lifted up each body, shook it straight, and lowered it into a coffin that was whisked away by another arm.

“We bury them for a thousand years,” she said. “It’s the only way to ensure a quality apotheosis. Luckily I can bend time a little, so it doesn’t take as long on the outside—just a year and a day.”

“But why?” asked the middle son. They were walking through a very long corridor now. “Washings and burnings and feedings I understand, but why must they be buried?”

“Because that’s what gods are made of,” said Tsubarime. “Pain and loss and loved denied. I take people who are alone and I kill them and revive them seven times, and I feed them on nectar and I bury them alive, and it all crinkles up inside them and gives them so much power. And all the time they’re alone, and they only want to love. You understand that in Ipu. A real god loves and protects. That’s all that’s left of them when I’m done, the love and protection they never got, and they give it back so they can stay real.”

At the end of a hallway was a little door of dented metal. Tsubarime fished a key out of her pocket and turned it in the lock three times. The door swung open to reveal utter darkness; Tsubarime strode through, the middle son trailing after. When she snapped her fingers a circle of light appeared around them, but outside it was so dark and the cold air was so still that he couldn’t tell if they were even in a room at all.

“Here we are,” she said, and handed him a shovel. “Don’t look baffled. If your brother could give a chicken tooth, you can dig a little dirt.”

He had barely dug a foot when he hit the coffin, and it only took him a few minutes to uncover the lid and wrest it off. Inside lay the girl that he and his brother had saved from the sea.

Tsubarime clapped her hands and the girl stood up. “Excellent,” she said. “Both of you follow me. You can leave the shovel.”

She opened another door. This one led into a gleaming white room where the girl sat on an operating table while Tsubarime examined her tongue and her teeth.

“Perfect condition,” she said at last. “There’s just one final step.” She plucked out the girl’s eyes and ate them. Then she put jade orbs into the sockets and led them all out into the lobby again.

As soon as they walked through the door, the youngest son woke up and bounded forward to meet them. “Our goddess!” he cried, and knelt before her.

“Guaranteed for at least one hundred seventy-five years, and could make it to three hundred if you’re careful,” said Tsubarime. “Just make sure that you give her a daily offering of praise and devotion from at least twelve people. Twenty is better, but if you can do twelve you’ll be fine.”

“Ipu takes pride in its gods,” said the youngest son. “You can depend on us. Anything else?”

“She’s still a deity in potential.” Tsubarime handed him a blue egg. “When you get back to Ipu, break this egg against her heart. Her body will turn to ether and she’ll be bound to your city for the rest of her life. But be careful—if anyone else breaks it, not only will she never be bound, but the one who broke the egg will die. Oh, and since you brought along your own deity material, I’ll toss in a magic carpet for free. It’ll get you back to Ipu in a week.”

“Brother,” said the middle son, “do you think she looks all right?”

The youngest son gave the new goddess a long look. “Well, actually,” he said, “she came from the sea. Shouldn’t her eyes be blue?”

“Easily fixed,” said Tsubarime, and switched the goddess’s jade eyes for sapphires. “Better?”

“Perfect,” said the youngest son, and gazed deep into the jewels. Then he led the goddess out of the factory, the magic carpet rolled up under his arm. But the middle son lingered.

“Can I ask you some questions?” he asked.

“You can,” said Tsubarime, “but I’ll only answer them if you give me an eye.”

The middle son almost said no, but then he thought about the people on the conveyor belt. “All right,” he said.

Tsubarime reached into his head like it was made of warm butter and pulled out an eye. It didn’t hurt, but it made a nasty squelching sound. She swallowed it in one gulp and said, “I’ll answer three. Fire away.”

“I heard weeping as I came here,” said the middle son. “What was it?”

“The souls in my factory turning into gods,” said Tsubarime.

“I saw a million shades walking west across the sea,” said the middle son. “Who were they?”

“Empty gods,” said Tsubarime. “When their power is all used up, they’re freed from their homes and they wander back to me. I have no use for them, so I tell them to look for the land of the dead. Who knows? They might sneak in.”

“How can I turn our goddess back to a child of the air?” he asked.

She squinted. “That’s a tricky one. It’s never been done. But if you could find her name, that might work.”

There was nothing more to say. Tsubarime put one of the jade orbs into his socket, and the middle son thanked her and started to leave. He was almost out the door when she grabbed him by the elbow.

“I like your pluck,” she said. “And you’re planning to destroy something, which pleases me too. So I’ll give you a freebie: Truth is stronger than magic. Always.”

Then she released him and he went down to the shore, discovering along the way that her nails had left six little white scars on his arm. His younger brother was waiting for him on the magic carpet, one arm around the goddess.

“Hop on,” he said. “We need to get home at once and save our people.”

The middle son got on, and the carpet began to fly across the sea. The goddess smiled at him, her sapphires glinting in the sunlight.

“My name is Siriumana,” she said. “It means ‘She who is beautiful as the dawn.’”

“I don’t think so,” the middle son whispered.

That night the goddess and the youngest son sat up late, talking and holding hands.

“You don’t remember, but I plucked you from the water,” said the youngest son. “I loved you even then.”

“I feel as if I have loved you for a thousand years,” said the goddess.

“When we come to the city, you will give up your life to protect it,” said the youngest son. “Our love is doomed. But I shall love you still all the days of my life, and when I die they will bury me in the temple and you will mourn me for centuries.”

“The mystery of love is bitter,” said the goddess, “and yet deathly sweet.”

The next morning, the middle son asked his brother, “Why did you give her to become a goddess? You could have bought one off the conveyor belt.”

“Our people must have the best,” said the youngest son. “A mass-produced god would not be nearly good enough. She alone was the perfect vessel. Besides, it was fated; I could feel it in my heart.”

They sped across the sea for five days. On the morning of the sixth day, the middle son said, “Have you ever dreamed about ghosts walking across the sea?”

“No,” said the youngest son. “My dreams are of my beloved alone.”

“I thought so,” said the middle son.

They reached land at sunset, and again they camped on the beach. Late at night, when his brother had fallen asleep, the middle son roused the goddess and led her aside.

“To spend my life with your brother, I would carve my heart out of my breast,” she said. “But I have a duty, and a fate.” She sighed in the way that the youngest son had taught her.

“What is your name?” asked the middle son.

“I told you. I am Siriumana.”

“That is what my brother called you. What is your name?”

“I am Etakaia. ‘She who brings blessings.’”

“That is what your name will be if you become our goddess. What is your real name?”

“I am alone,” she whispered.

“That is not your name either,” said the middle son.

The goddess began to tremble. “I have no name,” she said. “Anything that could be named was burnt and washed away, and I am only what they make me when they let me love. If I love them well enough, they will love me back. The darkness said so.”

“The darkness lied.” The middle son gripped her shoulders. “You must remember your name, when you were a child of the air.”

“There is no air in a grave,” she said. “And the darkness is all that I can see, even at noon.”

“Then I will give you one of my eyes,” said the middle son. He plucked out his jade eye and exchanged it for a sapphire.

The goddess was still for a long time. Then she whispered, “I still do not have a name,” and went to lie down beside the youngest son.

The next day, they mounted the carpet again and arrived at Ipu within an hour. At once they were greeted by a great throng of people, wringing their hands and sobbing for joy because they had a new goddess. The Elders shoved their way to the front of the crowd and fell on their knees before her.

“O honored one, awaited one, beloved one,” they cried. “Bless us. Bless us.” Their devotion flushed her cheeks, and she stepped forward.

“Wait,” said the middle son. “Do you want to be a goddess?”

She looked at him, blue and green.

“No,” she said. “But I have no name. There is nothing else for me.”

“You must find it,” said the middle son.

“How can you say such things?” cried the youngest son. “I love her; I want her to live even more than you do. But think of our people!”

“You want me to be free,” said the goddess to the middle son. “I would love you for that. If I were free.” She turned to the youngest. “Give me the egg.”

“I am thinking of our people!” shouted the middle son. “Is it right that we should live on suffering and death and the destruction of souls?”

“Love and protection come only at the price of suffering and death,” said the youngest son. “Everybody knows that.” He took out the egg, and drew the goddess close for a final kiss.

Only the goddess heard him, but the middle son said very quietly, “That is true. And truth is stronger than magic.”

Then he snatched the egg and crushed it.

As he fell, the goddess staggered back, and in her scream was the pain and betrayal of all the world. She dropped to her knees, and light flickered about her; then with another wail she vanished.

“Has she been bound?” asked the Sixth Eldest.

“So it would seem,” said the Eldest. “Her body is turned to ether.”

Then with hymns and praises, they carried the body of the middle son to the temple and laid him before the altar. As the maidens anointed him with frankincense and shrouded him in cloth of gold, the artists painted images of their new goddess on the screens and set new statues in the alcoves. The priests kept vigil all night with incense and chanting, and at dawn they began to sing the traditional praises.

That morning the Elders were met in council when they heard a great wailing arise in the city. They sent out servants to see what was the matter but they did not return, and they were about to go themselves when the doors burst open and the goddess entered the room. She was clothed all in black, and her black hair swirled about her, and in her arms she held the body of the middle son.

“Truth,” she said, “is stronger than magic.”

They saw that she had real eyes now, one green and one blue. Before those eyes they fell to their knees, but she did not let them look away until each one had seen himself reflected.

“I do not think you are ready for gods,” she said. “You do not even know what it means to be a hero.” Then she laid the body down in the center of the room. “He loved this place, so I shall leave him here, and his love will protect it. But I go to free my brothers and sisters at the factory.” She paused in the doorway and said without looking back, “There is no love without freedom. He knew that. And if you want love, you must pay the price yourself. He knew that too.”

There was a great noise of wind. When the trembling Elders dared look up, they saw only the youngest son standing pale-faced in the doorway.

There are many stories about what happened afterwards in Ipu. None of them mention the Last Goddess or Tsubarime and her factory. If ghosts continued marching west or if they ceased, who can say? But one thing is said, as certainly as legends can be: The Seventh Eldest had no heirs, for his one remaining son left the city and began walking east.

© 2011 by Rosamund Hodge.

Originally published in Black Gate.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Rosamund Hodge grew up as a homeschooler in Los Angeles, where she spent her time reading everything she could lay hands on, but especially fantasy and mythology. She got a BA in English from the University of Dallas and an MSt in Medieval English from Oxford, and she now lives in Seattle with seven toy cats and a plush Cthulhu. Her debut novel, Cruel Beauty, is a young adult fantasy novel where Greek mythology meets Beauty and the Beast. For more information, visit her website rosamundhodge.net.

His Elbow, Unkissed: A Kaslo Chronicles Tale
Matthew Hughes

Previously on The Kaslo Chronicles: The far-future civilization of the Ten Thousand Worlds will soon collapse as the universe's fundamental operating principle shifts from rationalism to magic. Only a handful of people on the long-settled world of Novo Bantry know the change is coming, and they are murderously rivaling with each other to be the wizards who will dominate the new order. Hardboiled confidential operative Erm Kaslo has acquired some ancient magical paraphernalia and is experimenting to see if he has what it takes to be a thaumaturge.

Erm Kaslo arranged the materials of the experiment on the scarred and scorched workbench in his new lodgings. He had recently had to relocate to new quarters on the outskirts of Indoberia, after the custodial agent of his former lodgings had complained to the Commune about the noises, smells, and other disruptions arising from Kaslo’s suite of rooms. He had taken this isolated cottage in a clearing of the Forest of Shades, where his nearest neighbor was well out of earshot.

“Integrator,” he said to the device that was his assistant, “we will now repeat the procedure using the second interpretation of bazzizzat.”

“Very well.” A device on the bench produced an extensible arm that ended in a multi-digited grip. The grip closed around a short length of dark wood, cylindrical in cross-section, and moved to place it in a downward-pointing position above a blackened crucible of dense metal.

“Wait!” said Kaslo. He crossed to where a shield of copper alloy, taller and wider than he was, leaned against a wall. Its inner surface featured leather straps and thick, soft padding; its outer surface was dented and smeared with deposits of oily soot. He dragged it to a point two arms’ lengths from the bench, then used a grimy sleeve of his singlesuit to wipe away some of the muck that clouded the hand-sized pane of heavy, clear crystal set at eye height in the metal. He got behind the safety barrier and peered through the narrow window. “Proceed,” he said.

“For the record,” the integrator said, “this attempt assumes that the term bazzizzat means ‘in a counterclockwise motion at moderate speed.’”

The device’s arm descended until the wand of dark wood entered the contents of the crucible. There was a pause while both the man and the integrator waited to see if there was a reaction.

“Nothing,” Kaslo said, after a long moment. “Continue.”

The arm moved and the stick stirred the materials in the container. “Once, twice, three times,” Kaslo said as the revolutions continued. “This could be it.”

At that point, a column of bright light shot straight up from the crucible, pure white energy alternating with vertical striations of brilliant crystalline non-color. The metal arm that held the wand became soft and began to droop, although the dark wood was unaffected by the upward torrent of force. The ceiling, however, instantly developed a hole where the energy had struck it, so that what was now a pillar of light went straight up into the chamber above.

“Remove the wand!” Kaslo said.

The integrator caused the machine on the bench to withdraw its appendage, which now had the appearance of a length of rope. The digits at its end managed to maintain a grip on the wood long enough to lift it from the crucible, whereupon the wand fell to lie on the bench’s battered top. When the wood left the cauldron, the tower of force abruptly winked out, leaving a perfectly round hole in the ceiling. Faint wisps of smoke hung around the edges of the opening for a little while, then dissipated.

Kaslo, experienced now, waited a few moments longer. Then a few moments more. When nothing further happened, he laid the shield on the floor and cautiously approached the bench. Even more circumspectly, he peered into the crucible. The materials he had placed inside were gone, except for the small black sphere called a nouble that had been the key ingredient of the spell he had been trying, for weeks now, to cast.

He reached in and lifted it out, felt again the strange sense that when he held the thing, everything else—including himself—somehow took on an air of insubstantiality; as if the ball of stygian blackness was the only real thing in existence, and he and all the universe mere shadows cast by a dim light on the thinnest of vapors.

The black nouble was neither hot nor cold to the touch, neither weighty nor slight in his hand. As always when he touched it, he had a nagging intimation that he was of no consequence whatsoever. He quickly slipped it into the pouch of supple leather that he had acquired when he had taken the nouble and two others from the dead thaumaturge, Choter Gozon.

He still found it odd to think that such persons actually existed, that spells and cantrips and incantations were not just the trappings of imaginary adventures and fusty old legends, that magic was about to become, once again, the fundamental principle by which the universe went about its business.

But that’s how it is, he told himself, not for the first time, and those of us who want to survive in the new environment had better start adapting now.

The problem was, he was not making much progress at mastering the arcane arts. Indeed, it could not be said that he was making any progress at all.

He had the noubles and the crucible. He had the wand and several other items he had lifted from the premises of the dead Gozon. He had more arcane goods, including some apparently ancient tomes in lost languages, that he had taken from the same place. And he had the collection of magical paraphernalia that used to belong to Gozon’s former partner in thaumaturgical studies, the man who had hired him to help bring the noubles safely here to Indoberia, on the Grand Foundational Domain of Novo Bantry. The client—his name had been Slovan Ballameer—had had no more use for his books and curios. He had winked out of existence when Gozon had pointed the wand at him and uttered a few syllables, which Kaslo, for all the rigorous mental training he had undertaken to become a top-echelon confidential operative, could not keep in his head.

Now he picked up the wand and examined it. As always, no matter what he did with it, or to it, the length of unidentifiable wood was unaffected. He laid it down on the bench, then rested both hands on the hard-used piece of furniture and leaned his weight on them.

He was trying to think, but nothing useful came. He looked up at the hole in the ceiling, then asked his assistant, “What is above that?”

“In sequence,” the device said, “the floor of the chamber above, a carpet, then the wardrobe and its contents, the room’s ceiling, the rafters, then the roof.”

“Damage?”

“The roof will need repair, as will everything below it. And you will not be able to wear your blue formal garment again.”

“Did the beam of force extend far?”

“It did not travel at lightspeed,” the integrator said, “but it covered distance faster than the speed of sound. Fortunately, we discontinued the experiment before the energy reached low orbit.”

“What would it have hit?”

“The Gunter Line’s freight orbital. But casualties would have been moderate. The orbital has excellent safety systems.”

Kaslo sighed and looked down at the bench again. “This is not working.”

“No,” said his assistant. “Random experimentation absent a theoretical base is not an optimum strategy. Besides, the premises of the work are irrational.”

“Never mind that. How do we acquire a theoretical base?”

“Find another thaumaturge?”

The op sighed again. “I suppose there is nothing for it. Contact Diomedo Obron.”

Erm Kaslo’s experience with Diomedo Obron had not been pleasant. The magnate had hired the op to travel to the secondary world Cheddle with a warrant to arrest one Binnie Varshun for defrauding Obron. But the client had not been comprehensively open about the business relationship between himself and the fraudster. It emerged, after Kaslo had been imprisoned in an unofficial forced-labor camp from which he quickly escaped, that Obron and Varshun were actually engaged in some experimental wizardry. Their intent was to create a device that would allow them to reach into other planes and retrieve substances of supernal power. But events had spiraled out of control. Varshun ended up dead at the hands of Captain Maduc and his deputy, two corrupt Cheddle provostmen Varshun had himself hired but who had decided to become free agents. During the operation, Kaslo had been required to kill two men, one of them by means that still disturbed his quiet moments. As soon as the business was completed, he had left Obron to deal with the aftermath and refused further contact with the magnate.

Thus he was not greatly pleased to see Obron’s luxury-model volante ease silently down from the sky to alight before the door of his cottage. The canopy opened and the magnate stepped to the ground with an attempt at a casual air, but Kaslo could read the eagerness in the man’s eyes as his gaze darted here and there.

“The items,” the op said, “are in my work room.”

“I can spare you a few moments,” Obron said, with an affected flourish of one slim, pale hand, “though I doubt the things are of much value.”

He spoke off-handedly, but all the time he was moving toward the open doorway. Kaslo stepped into his path and took hold of the other man’s arm in a grip that was not to be gainsaid.

“Let us first clear away any doubts or misconceptions,” he said, stopping Obron as effectively as a stone wall. “As I said when we spoke earlier, I have acquired the collections of Slovan Ballameer and his associate, Choter Gozon.”

“Who?” said Obron.

But Kaslo was an adept in the art of informed listening. “This business will end right here and right now,” he said, “unless you cease these pathetic attempts at subterfuge.”

The magnate swallowed. His narrow face showed a struggle between greed and fear. After it continued for a few seconds, Kaslo said, “Having dealt with you and Varshun, as well as with Ballameer and Gozon, I understand that treachery is rife among practitioners of sympathetic association. I, however, am a licensed confidential operative. I am sworn to a standard of conduct, and I take the swearing of oaths very seriously.”

Obron’s inner struggle continued. He clearly wished to say something but it seemed he could not find the words.

Kaslo said, “If you are honest with me, I will be honest with you. If you are not honest with me, I will make you wish you had been. And then I will load what remains of you into your aircar and tell it to take you home.” He used his free hand to draw the magnate’s face close to his own. “Is this clear to you?”

Obron swallowed again. “You swear not to gull or cozen me?”

“On my license, I swear it.”

He saw a moment of calculation, then the other man’s fear broke. It was replaced with the look an optimistic child wears upon awakening on a birthday morning. “All right,” Obron said, with one final swallow, “let me see them.”

At first, Obron skipped from one object to another, touching some of them lightly, as if he could not quite believe they were real. Finally, after he had surveyed them all, he stepped clear of the bench and stood, his long face still as he ordered his thoughts. He gestured to the crucible and the measuring and sifting implements. “This is elementary paraphernalia, but of good quality. Seventeenth Aeon, I would say.”

Kaslo was surprised. “That old?”

“They were made to last, by practitioners who counted their lifespans not in years but in centuries.”

The op blinked. It was not a factor that he had considered. “Go on,” he said.

“The books,” Obron said, indicating the five small and one large volumes Kaslo had placed on a shelf above the bench, “range from the commonplace to the deeply arcane. This one”—he touched a fat-spined tome bound in scaly black leather—“may be the only unabridged copy of Hentero’s Compendium to have endured across the ages.”

Obron licked his thin lips, then overcame whatever had caused his brief hesitation. He looked directly at Kaslo. “You should not let it be known you possess it. There are people who would go to extreme lengths to acquire it, if they heard even a rumor of its existence.”

“It’s that valuable?”

“It’s priceless, but that’s not the issue.”

“Then what is?”

The magnate reached out and touched the book’s tattered cover. A shiver went through him. “Power,” he said. “If you can learn to wield it.”

“I see.”

“With all respect,” Obron said, “I’m not sure you do. In the world as it is, wealth brings power, and power is usually employed to gain more wealth. In the world to come, power will be everything, wealth an afterthought.” He shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Why strive for riches when a roomful of precious gems can be whiffled up by any hedge sorcerer who knows one of a half-dozen medium-level spells?”

“Then what will power be used for?” the op said, though he thought he already knew the answer. The magnate confirmed it when he answered, “Power will be used to gain more power, and yet more, and so it will go.”

“To what end?” Kaslo said.

Obron’s face said the question was naïve. “To be on top, when all others are below.”

“And then?”

“To stay there.”

Kaslo understood ambition, the urge for prestige. But the picture Obron painted seemed excessive. “Are you all tyrants waiting to chip your way out of the egg?”

“In past eras when magic ruled,” Obron said, “whenever one thaumaturge rose too high above his competitors, they would combine to bring him down. Or her; it’s an equal-opportunity discipline.”

Kaslo frowned. “Not an attractive world.”

“Except to those who are ravished by its appeal.”

“As you are?”

Obron sighed. “I will admit, it calls to me. I can hardly bear the wait.”

Kaslo tasted a sourness in his mouth. “What else do I have here?”

The other man looked around. “That,” he said, pointing to a skull about the length of his hand but narrower; it was written all over with symbols and characters in faded red ink, “is a nygrave’s skull. Useful in divination.”

“And the wand?”

“A general-purpose instrument used for focusing the fluxions of several different kinds of spells.”

Kaslo remembered seeing a ball of blackness appear at the wand’s tip when Gozon spoke the cantrip that vanished Ballameer. He nodded. “What else?”

“These three cubes are dice made from the bones of a fourth-plane creature—that realm’s equivalent of a chicken. To those who know how to read them, they tell the futures.”

“Futures?” Kaslo said. “As in, plural?”

“To a well-versed thaumaturge, any moment may be a point of departure in several directions. They are—soon I hope to say we are—exempt from the strictures that confine ordinary lives.”

The op made a noise in his throat. The sourness had grown worse and had to be cleared. Obron took the message and quickly said what he could about the gold plate and the small doll with tufts of coarse hair, and the small black tube with an ivory eyepiece at one end.

“Of course,” he said, “the scryer is only useful if you charge it with the right spell. But I believe there are two such in the Hentero. You should be able to peer into any room that is not defended by the correct counterspell, anywhere.”

“You mean anywhere on Novo Bantry?”

“No, I mean anywhere on this plane. When the change comes, the laws of physics will no longer apply. The power of will, focused and aptly applied, will be the only law that matters.”

It was a lot for Kaslo to take in all at once. The other man was showing him a bleak future ruled by ruthless wielders of unusual powers restrained only by their equally ruthless competitors. His years as a confidential op had shown him all too clearly that will was as often concentrated in the worst of humanity as in the best.

Meanwhile, Diomedo Obron was looking around the room, as if fresh wonders might be found. He noticed the hole in the ceiling over the workbench. “You’ve been experimenting?” he said.

Kaslo came back to the needs of the present. “I have.”

“And it hasn’t gone so well?” Obron’s smile verged on the smug. “Unless you thought the room needed more ventilation.”

“The last thaumaturge I dealt with was Choter Gozon,” Kaslo said. “When I left him, he lacked a head.”

The magnate had seen Kaslo in action. He now showed the op a pair of pale palms raised in a combination of apology and surrender. He looked up again at the ceiling and said, “You were trying something out of one of the books?”

Kaslo nodded. “It seemed to be one of the simpler spells. It should have resulted in a bubble appearing in the air above the crucible, its surface lit with scenes from antique times.”

He moved his hands in a way that expressed frustration. “But the book is written in a long-forgotten language and script. My integrator was able to translate it only partially. Some of the words have no linguistic descendants, so meaning must be inferred from context. Bazzizzat, for example, appears to have something to do with how one stirs a cauldron.”

Again, Obron fought off a condescending smile. “You are thinking like an inhabitant of a universe based on physical laws. Bazzizzat refers to . . .”—he sought for the words—“let us say the ‘attitude’ of the spellcaster as he stirs the mix.” He thought again, then said, “Or perhaps the frame of mind.”

“Then it takes more than will to be a wizard,” Kaslo said. The future now looked even bleaker.

“Well, yes,” said the other man. “Think of it as the need for strength to be focused by coordination. The will must be shaped, and that requires both aptitude and training.” He looked again at the hole above their heads. “It is just as well. If you’d succeeded with the spell, you would have drawn attention. And this place is completely undefended.”

“How do I know if I have aptitude?”

“I will test you,” Obron said.

He posed a series of questions, none of which made sense to Kaslo. One of them was to imagine himself as a four-dimensional object, then describe how he could touch his tongue to his elbow. Kaslo found the exercise annoying.

“Well, there it is,” said Obron. “You require me to be honest. I will tell you bluntly that you do not have the wherewithal to be a thaumaturge. You are what the old-time mages called a ‘mutton-thumper.’ If you persist in trying, you will achieve one of two ends: Either you will do yourself a painful, perhaps fatal, mischief; or you will come to the notice of someone against whom you have no defenses.”

“Someone ruthless,” Kaslo said.

“We are all ruthless,” Obron told him, “but some of us are simply cruel. And a few are complexly cruel, which is worse.”

Kaslo surveyed the objects he had acquired. “I suppose you are going to suggest that I sell these items to you. You clearly covet them.”

He had expected an immediate answer. Instead, the magnate’s face took on a thoughtful cast. “That was my intent when you told me what you had collected,” he said. “But now I am leaning toward another arrangement.”

“Say it.”

“We spoke of honesty,” the magnate said. “In all candor, these materials are not only useless to you, but pose a lethal danger. I can use them as they should be used, though it will take me years to master some of the intricacies.”

“You have the aptitude?”

For answer, Obron spoke three syllables and made a sharp gesture with one hand. Then he applied his tongue to his elbow. Kaslo found the spectacle disconcerting, but honesty impelled him to say, “You do.”

“If you wish, I will buy these from you,” Obron said. “Name your price. But I would prefer it if you gave them to me freely. In return, I will engage you as my full-time security agent, at a handsome salary.”

“How handsome?” When Obron named a number, Kaslo said, “Handsome indeed. How long will the engagement last?”

“It will be permanent,” the magnate said. “It would have to be.”

“I value my independence. I have built a career.”

“Here comes honesty again,” Obron said. “When the universe shifts to sympathetic association, your career ends. The framework of society will collapse. This location”—he gestured to the room and the forest without—“will not be safe.”

“I am capable of looking after myself.”

The magnate glanced at the hole in the ceiling. “No, you are not.”

The dismal prospect again presented itself to Kaslo’s inner vision; he saw vistas of desolation, the Grand Foundational Domain of Novo Bantry reduced to barbarism and want, the glittering cities the haunts of feral gangs, the once-fragrant boulevards strewn with stinking dead.

He sighed. “How will we proceed?”

“I am readying my estate for the transition and after. My current majordomo is not equipped for the task.”

The op thought about it. “Once the change comes, what will the salary buy?”

“Nothing. The economy will shift to a different mode. All my accounts, all my fiduciary arrangements, will melt into the air. But the powers here”—Obron touched one of the books on the shelf—“will see us through the years of transition.”

“May I think about it?”

The magnate spread his hands. “I would not advise too long a meditation. Some of us have probably noticed already that Choter Gozon and Slovan Ballameer are no longer registering on their horizons. They will wonder why that is. At first they will think in terms of a threat to themselves; when they cannot find one, they will want to know how their absence might accrue to their benefit. Once they begin to look in earnest . . .” He brought his hands together and the clap they made was considerably louder than it should have been.

“I see,” said Kaslo. It took him only a moment to weigh the situation, then he said, “You may remove the goods to your volante. I will pack a valise and prepare my integrator to travel.”

“Good,” said Obron. He extended a hand. After a moment, the op took it.

The magnate turned and picked up Hentero’s Compendium, handling it carefully. His eyes on the book, he said, “Along with your other packing, you should include some weapons.” He looked up and noticed the stained shield leaning against the corner, and gestured with his chin. “What’s that?”

“From my days with the Constabulary, a riot shield.”

“Better bring that, too.”

The volante rose silently, its gravity obviators perfectly tuned. The upholstery was luxurious, but Kaslo could not settle. After he lowered the canopy, Obron drew from his upper garment a pad of soft material that unfolded into a map of paper-thin leather. It was marked with lines of several colors that sometimes ran straight, sometimes curved, occasionally crossed each other. He studied the pattern, then gave directions to the aircar’s integrator. They flew south and a little east.

“Ley lines,” he said, when he noted Kaslo’s interest. “Conduits of the force that bind reality together, at least on this plane. They have lain dormant for millennia; now some are regaining their strength. It is one of the signs of impending change.”

“What do they mean to us, up here?” the op said.

“Probably nothing. But if we carry your goods—now my goods—across the wrong one, and if someone is paying heed in one of several ways, we will become at the very least an object of unwelcome curiosity.”

“Nothing happened when I carried them here from Gozon’s and Ballameer’s.”

“And probably nothing will happen now,” Obron said, tracing a finger along a red line that was faded to pink, then looking out to find a landmark. He told the aircar to alter course slightly. Then he drew Kaslo’s attention to a line that ran north and south, broader than most and drawn in faint mauve ink. “There is no way to avoid crossing this one. However, there are as yet no practitioners of the purple school of magic—or, at least, I certainly hope no one has come that far—so I’m hoping we’ll just zip across unnoticed.”

Kaslo looked at the sky around them and down to the ground sweeping past below. For a moment he had a flash of memory, from when he had been a fresh-skinned recruit at the Commune of Indoberia’s Constabular Academy. “If there is a threat,” he said to Obron, “what form will it take, and where will it come from?”

“Watch for something that does not fit,” the magnate said. “And perhaps for the hair on your neck and arms to rise.”

The op drew a self-aiming energy weapon out of the carryall he had packed before locking up the cottage. “Let me know when we are nearing the purple line,” he said.

They flew on, angling upwards to increase their height. Obron said greater altitude might lessen the “twang” as they crossed the invisible line. Kaslo routinely checked the weapon, although he always maintained it in full readiness. Its power magazine was full, its sensors operational. The moment he activated it, its percepts synchronized with those of the aircar’s integrator.

They were well out of the forested zone now, passing south of Indoberia’s green suburbs, the crystalline spires of the Old City glistening far off in the afternoon sun, throwing the convoluted patterns of shadows and reflections for which the place was renowned throughout the Ten Thousand Worlds.

Kaslo imagined the place wrecked and burning, mobs surging through the streets beneath the towers, innocents drowned in blood and brutality. Did he want to live in the world that would follow? Might it not be better to go off to some quiet place—he remembered how at peace he had felt angling for brimtails in the shallow waters of Grand Shoals—and end with dignity?

He contemplated such a scene for a long moment, then the inner image shattered. He would not do that. He might not be able to kiss his elbow, but he was as full of will as a man could be. He would not let the world put him under, however grim and horrid it became, not until it had fought him to the last gore-filled ditch. And even then, he would take as many with him as he could reach.

“Here it comes,” said Obron.

Kaslo turned his attention outward again. They were flying over open pastureland, the ground sloping up here toward a bare tor that rose abruptly out of the green.

“That would make an interesting spot to build on,” the magnate said. “It’s marked on the map as some kind of node.” He told the aircar to steer away from the prominence, then held up an expectant finger. “Three, two, one, now,” he said, then blinked twice and looked at Kaslo. “Did you feel that?”

Kaslo signaled a negative. He had felt nothing.

“I experienced a definite frisson,” Obron said. “Let us hope no one else did. Or, if they did, they’re tardy about looking into it.”

He directed the volante to drop down to ground-skimming height and to increase speed. From here on, they would make straight for his estate and its defenses. Kaslo nodded. He cradled the weapon and watched the sky, the ground, the distant row of trees that separated this pasture from another. He saw nothing out of the ordinary.

The volante sped on. Although the canopy shut out the flow of air, Kaslo felt a chill run down the back of his neck. He glanced at Obron and saw the other man’s eyes meet his with a flicker of alarm.

Kaslo looked up and down and all around. To the energy weapon, he said, “That bird, high and to the left. What do you make of it?”

“There is no bird,” said the weapon.

“What is it, then?”

“There is nothing there.”

“Check your percepts.”

“They concur with the aircar’s.”

Kaslo watched the dark shape above them. It matched their velocity and course. “Go to manual operation,” he said.

“Done,” said the weapon.

Obron had glanced up once at the birdlike shape, then began to sort through the container in which he had packed the books and paraphernalia. He drew out Hentero’s Compendium and began to leaf through its pages.

Kaslo tapped a spot on the canopy and said, “Tell the aircar to open this section.”

Obron did so, then returned to the book. Kaslo poked the snout of the weapon through the gap and used the imaging sight. But when he squinted through it, the target seemed no larger nor clearer than to the naked eye. And, strangely for a speeding bird, its wings made no motion at all.

“It won’t work,” Obron said, without looking away from the page.

“Don’t distract me,” the op said. His thumb touched the activating stud.

“That’s a reciprocating weapon, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” That meant that its systems had to establish a connection with the target. Once made, the connection could not be broken until the weapon had discharged a molecular disruptive surge.

“You won’t get a connection.”

After a futile effort, Kaslo had to admit that the magnate was right. The weapon could not establish a linkage. He set it down and drew a plain energy pistol, aimed it over open sights, and squeezed the activator. A thin line of force arrowed up into the air, and the op saw that his aim was true. He also saw that it didn’t matter; the narrow beam passed through the seeing bird and continued up into the sky.

He released the activator and holstered the pistol. “What is it?”

“There’s a technical term,” Obron said, still flipping through the book, “but it won’t mean anything to you. In practical terms, it’s an extension of someone’s vision, routed through another plane. Something like flying a spaceship through a whimsy, except that all that is being passed is a perception.”

“What can we do about it?”

“Nothing, except congratulate ourselves on the watcher’s arrogance, leaving that thing up there so long.” He stabbed a finger at a page. “Here it is.” He quickly scanned the text, then touched fingers to his eyelids and ear openings and read a string of syllables from the Hentero. An image appeared in the air above the open tome—of a moon-faced man with a head that was bald except for a fringe of white hair; he sat staring into a shallow saucer that seemed to be filled with a clear oil. In the oil could be seen a magnified image of the volante’s cabin, with a clear view of Kaslo, Obron, and the picture of the watcher staring at his pool.

Suddenly the man started and looked up. One hand made a sharp motion and he spoke a word. The image Obron had conjured up suddenly disappeared. When Kaslo looked up, the bird shape was gone as well.

The magnate laughed. “I might have known,” he said.

“Who was that?”

“Phalloon is his name,” Obron said, “to which he appends the sobriquet, ‘The Illimitable,’ though no one else does. He thinks of himself as outstanding in the field. The last time we spoke, I told him that he was more like some dolt out standing in a field—and the wrong field at that.”

“He found us, though,” Kaslo said.

“And didn’t have sense enough to take a quick look then close the connection. Instead, he gave me all the time I needed to consult Hentero and learn how to reverse the spell. You saw how that shook him. I’ll bet he’s changing his small clothes right now.”

Kaslo was acquiring experience of thaumaturges. Clearly, overweening pride was a common trait. “Be that as it may,” he said, “he now knows that you have a box full of interesting items, including the Compendium. And he knows that you have me. What do we know about him?”

His tone somewhat sobered the other man. The op saw him engage with the question. “Good point,” he said. “When we get home, I’ll recall the image and study it.”

Kaslo had visited Obron’s estate once before, when the magnate and Binnie Varshun had made what they called a speculon, a mirror-like device that was actually a portal into higher planes. The exercise had been interrupted by the arrival of Maduc and his thug, who had come to seize the speculon and any other magical paraphernalia they could scoop up. But one of them had ended up dead—and if the other wasn’t, he was probably wishing he were.

Before they expired, the hirelings had let slip the information that they were working for someone else—someone who had been using them to keep tabs on Obron’s and Varshun’s doings. It was unfortunate, Kaslo thought, that he had not tried to find out who their paymaster was before incinerating Maduc’s head.

While Obron and his servants unloaded the aircar, the op took the opportunity to assess the estate’s defensibility. The place consisted of a large house, strongly built of impermeables, intended to keep thieves and burglars out and valuables safe within. The house was surrounded by sweeping stretches of lawn, except at the rear and front where there were wide aprons paved in flagstones. A group of utilitarian outbuildings stood at some distance. There were copses of mature shade trees, a geometrically laid-out ornamental garden, a long, narrow lake, and a substantial wall surrounding the whole. The wall was topped by spikes and pierced by two substantial gates. The house integrator’s percepts, both the noticeable ones and the clandestine, were well distributed.

It would keep out the common run of criminal, Kaslo concluded. Those who made their way past the passive outer defenses would have open ground to cover, giving the estate’s active systems plenty of opportunity to engage them. He examined the roof of the main house with an expert eye and saw ison cannons and heavy-duty disorganizers disguised as decorative sculptures, sited so as to offer overlapping fields of fire.

No one would drop in here uninvited, unless they came in an armored atmospheric cruiser. But suppose they came on a flying carpet? Kaslo asked himself, recalling how his self-aiming weapon and his energy pistol had been of no use against Phalloon’s false bird. He would have to confer with his client.

He found Obron in the basement room where he and Varshun had made the speculon. That item was not in evidence, but the scorch mark was still on the sideboard where a scoop of “soil” extracted from the Sixth Plane had briefly rested. The strong wooden door that Maduc had blown in with explosives had been replaced by an even stronger-looking metal barrier.

The budding thaumaturge was putting away his new possessions in several multi-shelved cupboards bolted to an inner wall. Books went in one, the crucible and its accoutrements in another, and the other items were distributed among three others. Obron was humming happily as he worked.

Kaslo spoke over the music. “What is the likelihood that it was Phalloon who sent Captain Maduc to steal the speculon?”

The magnate paused to think about it, then went back to work, saying, “Strong, I should say. He considers me his chief rival.”

“How much do you think he knows of”—the op gestured to take in the room and its contents—”all this?”

“Not as much as he’d like to. No one can scry into this room. There are . . . barriers to distant perception.” He held up the black tube with the ivory eyepiece. “Even if he had this, all he would see is a gray blank.”

“Yet he knew this was the room to send his men to.”

Obron paused in the act of putting the tub away. His brow wrinkled. “That’s true.”

“And he knew what you were up to in here.”

“I suppose he did.”

“And he knew to wait until the moment when you had succeeded.”

“What are you saying?”

“That there are other ways, besides magic, of finding out what you want to know.” He closed the door behind him. “I am now your security chief, am I not?”

“You are.”

“Then I will start earning my stipend. Please tell your majordomo that I will interview each member of the staff.”

His employer’s brows rose. “You think Phalloon has a spy amongst us?”

“Either that or a highly-trained mouse.” When Obron’s gaze went worriedly to the floor, Kaslo said, “It was a joke.”

“Do you often make jokes?”

“No.”

“Good.” Obron instructed the house integrator to tell the majordomo that all staff were to make themselves immediately available to the new chief of security. There was an office next to the magnate’s study that would now be Kaslo’s. The interviews would be conducted there.

When the op arrived at the office, he found a small crowd of cooks, maids, footmen, gardeners, and the like gathered there. He saw worried looks on the junior servants, and received indignant glances from the senior staff. The majordomo, who introduced himself as Wals, was a plump, smooth-skinned man past his middle years, with thinning hair and soft hands.

There was a brief exchange of words in which the op settled the question of whether or not his position fell under Wals’s authority. The outcome of that discussion was clearly not to the majordomo’s taste. He said, “Our people have an estate to look after; I trust you will not keep them too long from their duties.”

Kaslo told him that the process would take as long as it took. But he had envisioned a shortcut. He asked Wals if any of the staff had not responded to the summons. The man looked around, showed irritation, then said, “Integrator, where is Upper Footman Broyce?”

“He has left the estate,” said a mellow and modulated voice from the air.

Wals’s face lost much of its smoothness. “What? When? How?”

“Just after he was told to report to Ser Kaslo,” said the integrator. “He departed on a skimmer that he kept in the hut where masque lamps are stored.”

A bright flush spread from Wals’s neck up into his cheeks. He seemed to be having trouble finding words, so Kaslo asked the integrator, “In what direction did he travel?”

“A little north of west.”

“And in what direction does the dwelling of a man named Phalloon lie?”

“Approximately the same.”

“Good,” said Kaslo, opening the door to his new office. “I will interview the staff now. Wals,”—he deliberately did not include an honorific—“you may send them in, one at a time, in order of those whose work is least dispensable to the proper running of the estate.”

He did not wait for a reply but went in and sat down. Two hours later, as the boy who fed the fish in the lake departed, he stood and stretched. Then he went next door to Obron’s study, where he had heard his employer moving around, and said, “Phalloon had a spy in your service: Broyce, who has fled. The rest of them I judge to be blameless. Wals is incompetent.”

“Broyce?” the magnate said. “But he’s been with me for years.”

“Such make the best spies.” He told Obron that he wanted to connect his own integrator to the house’s device, in case Broyce had installed any attributes that the estate’s integrator might not be aware of. The idea obviously came as a novel concept to his employer, but he agreed. Kaslo made the necessary connections and, as he had expected, found several interferences that the in-house integrator had been cozened into ignoring. He left them in place, but arranged to have his own integrator—a sophisticated system he had designed and built himself—“take charge” of the intrusive elements. Now they could be used to feed false information to whomever—probably Phalloon—they reported to.

He also had his own integrator check the integrity of the self-aiming weapons on the roof—and was not surprised to find that they, too, had been skillfully touched and tickled.

“It is in the calibration function,” his device told him. “The weapons will treat as non-actionable any motion incoming from a certain direction.”

“And that direction is?”

“A few points north of west.”

“When Captain Maduc and his helper attempted their raid on your employer, was that the direction they came from?”

The integrator checked the weapons’ memories. “Yes.”

“And who was on duty when they arrived?”

His integrator consulted with the house. “Upper Footman Broyce,” it reported.

“Well, there you have it,” he told Obron. “Probably.”

The op’s integrator had long-established relationships with other such artificial entities throughout Indoberia and in many places across Novo Bantry. It circulated an image and other information about the missing footman and made inquiries about his recent movements. Less than a second later, it told Kaslo, “He is in a rented room in the Solonj district. He is pacing and appears to be talking to himself.”

“What is he saying?”

A man’s voice spoke from the air, desperate, pleading. “You promised you would look after me. I did everything—” He broke off as if interrupted. “But—” Again the caesura.

“To whom is he speaking?” Kaslo said.

“To himself,” said his assistant. “There is no one with him and he has accessed no communications channel.”

“Assume some other channel.”

“What, like a magic seashell?”

Kaslo knew that integrators could resent nonsensical orders. “Well, yes. That sort of thing.”

“Why don’t I assume that he speaks into a cup of alabaster linked by a gossamer to the High King of Hummeldance?”

“As you like,” said the op, “but can you tell me anything about who is on the other end of the conversation?”

“There is no other end. The man is plainly delusional.”

It added a few more words. Kaslo told it to keep its opinions of his sanity to itself. Then he asked to hear the rest of the conversation.

“There is no more,” the integrator said. “He said, ‘Very well,’ then, ‘I will.’ Now he has stopped talking. And pacing. The chair in the room made the little sounds it makes when fitting itself to someone’s form.”

“He sits and waits for something,” Kaslo said.

“That is the rational conclusion.”

The op ignored the implied comment and said, “Summon one of Obron’s less opulent vehicles.”

Solonj was on the outskirts of the Commune, not far from Obron’s estate—but not in the direction that Broyce had originally fled. He wanted to ask the spy about that, as well as several more questions that were ranged in his mind when his assistant caused the hostelry’s integrator to open the door of Broyce’s room.

Kaslo burst in, an energy pistol in his hand, but found the room rank with smoke and his quarry in no condition to answer.

“Analysis,” he told his assistant.

“He appears to have spontaneously combusted.”

“Isn’t that impossible?”

“Nevertheless, he has burned from the inside out.”

When Kaslo returned to Obron’s estate, he found the magnate sitting alone in his basement workroom. He had discharged all the servants, giving each an honorarium in the form of precious metals and jewels. “I wished them luck, but I no longer need them,” he said, the Compendium open on his lap. “Once I have mastered this,”—he tapped a page—“I can bind Fourth-Plane entities. Very capable.”

“You may not have time. The most likely scenario is that Phalloon has attacked you once and that he intends to do it again.”

“There is an unlikely scenario?” Obron said.

Kaslo scratched his chin. “Possibly, someone has contrived to make Phalloon seem the villain. But that would take a thaumaturge of, shall we say—and I mean no disrespect—a wider intellectual scope than I have yet seen.”

Obron started to say something but cleared his throat instead. After a moment’s consideration, he said, “But whoever he is, he is now thwarted, is he not?”

“No. He just knows that he has to try harder.”

The magnate closed the book with trembling hands. “What will we do?”

Kaslo shrugged. “No one ever won a war by defending.”

© 2014 by Matthew Hughes.

Matthew Hughes writes science-fantasy. His SF novels are: Fools Errant and Fool Me Twice, Black Brillion, Majestrum, The Commons, The Spiral Labyrinth, Template, Hespira, The Damned Busters, The Other, Costume Not Included, and Hell to Pay. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Postscripts, Storyteller, Interzone and a number of “Year’s Best” anthologies. Night Shade Books published his short story collection, The Gist Hunter and Other Stories, in 2005. Formerly a journalist, he spent more than twenty-five years as a freelance speechwriter for Canadian corporate executives and political leaders. His works have been short-listed for the Aurora, Nebula, and Philip K Dick Awards. His web page is at matthewhughes.org.

Elementals
Ursula K. Le Guin

i. Airlings

No one knows how many airlings there are, most likely not a great many, whatever a great many means. They inhabit the atmosphere, generally between a hundred and ten or twelve thousand feet above the ground, seldom clearly visible to human eyes, and leaving almost no trace of their presence. They swim in air as we do in water, but with far more ease, air being their native element. Slight motions of the whole body and the arms and legs move them gracefully through their three dimensions.

We breathe air, but a very different element, the earth, gives us support. This might explain the apparent duality of human nature. Airlings, like fish or fetuses, are supported by what they breathe, and so to them flesh and spirit may be more nearly, more simply one.

Airlings live off the warmth of the sun: They calorisynthesize, as plants photosynthesize. They eat heat. The highest, faintest stratocirrus clouds are believed to be their waste matter, their ethereal sewage, drifting upward to evaporate.

The airlings’ small, slight, cool bodies are almost transparent. Only with old age do they begin to turn cloudy, verging on translucency. Infants are as clear as glass.

If they ever did, the airlings no longer frequent the air near centers of human habitation. As we swarm thicker and thicker on the earth, the airlings have scattered ever higher into the atmosphere above the oceans, the largest deserts, tundras, and high mountain ranges. Many of them go south for the summer, to Antarctica, where in the endless sunlight above the blizzards they can fly as freely as they used to do.

Our ever-increasing air traffic is evidently a problem or danger to them, but they avoid the routes and altitudes commonly used by airplanes; and they do not register on cameras or radar.

Their voices are extremely soft, but their hearing is acute, and if the wind is not strong a pair of airlings can carry on a long conversation while flying a half-mile apart. Several human studies of their language or languages exist, and even some partial glossaries, but all of them are based on the most fragmentary evidence and, like the nineteenth-century treatises demonstrating that the languages of the North American Indians were derived from Welsh, consist mostly of wishful thinking.

Airlings have no gender, or share a single gender, as you please. Young adults pair off on brief, warm, summer nights in the higher latitudes above the sea; the couples play in the air together, meeting, at the end of intricate and rapid configurations of flight, for a long, close kiss. Down in the tropics some seven months later, each one of the couple, attended closely by friends and relatives, may bear a child in mid-air.

Careful and affectionate parents, the airlings carry their newborns out of every passing cloud or cloud-shadow to bathe and be nourished by the flooding heat of the sun. The babies can fly within a day or two. They sleep in the parent’s arms for a year or so. Even when it has learned to sleep on the wing, the child stays close to its parent for two or three years more. Then the little airling begins to make exploratory flights on its own, and before long the parent will guide it near a school, and soon will see it plunge into the throng without a backward look.

In the school—dozens or hundreds of youngsters flying together—the children live, learn, and play together for ten years or more, till, nearing maturity, one by one they leave the group, going off on their own on world-encircling voyages, each alone in the vast ocean of the air.

They meet and meet again, maintaining long-lasting relationships of consanguinity, friendship, and love, and carrying on their soft, far-ranging conversations; but airlings never stay together permanently, nor, once out of school, do they ever gather in large groups.

Death comes to the airling as a sensation of ever-increasing warmth and lightness, as if they were afire, and gravity were letting go its hold. They begin to fly higher than they have ever flown before, seeking cold, rising into ever thinner air. One day, somewhere alone, almost in the stratosphere, the airling will suddenly combust and vanish in one slight, bright, all-consuming flare.

Nothing of an airling ever falls to the ground.

Airlings pay little heed to other creatures, but have been reported to tease hummingbirds, and sometimes they follow skylarks upward, imitating their song. In early spring and late autumn they often join the great migration routes, spending the long, dark, hungry nights nestled on the back of a wild goose or Arctic tern or sandhill crane, half asleep in the feathers between the powerful, slow-beating wings. The bird pays no attention to its almost invisible, almost weightless passenger.

ii. Booklets

There is a movement to declare booklets an endangered species. I believe this is unnecessary; their adaptability will save them, as it did through the cataclysmic changes from clay to papyrus to vellum to paper in the West, and from scroll to bound book in both the Orient and Occident. The Romans, after all, knew them as volumenuli—scrollets. Perhaps the Babylonians had a word for them—cuneideformers?

Of course many people would applaud the extinction of the whole species. They regard booklets as mere noxious pests, ignoring the indisputable evidence of intelligent, though obscure, purpose in their behavior, and an arguable degree of literacy. “Cockroaches are damn clever too,” one man said to me. I unwisely retorted, “Roaches can’t read,” and his perfectly rational reply was, “Thank God!”

Actually, we can’t say with certainty that booklets read. All we know is that they respond to written or printed words, as words, in some way. Their most persistent and annoying behavior, interference with the order of letters and words, seldom seems meaningful, to us. I know a poet who leaves his notebook on shelves he believes to be particularly booklet-infested, hoping to find they have made wonderful or inspiring changes in his words, but I think him foolish. For one thing, they clearly prefer print to handwriting. Now that the only natural enemy of the booklet, the proof-reader, is a genuinely endangered species, the poet should simply print his poems and confidently expect to find typos, whether enlightening or not.

There is no doubt that booklets multiplied in proportion as print replaced manuscript. Medieval copyists complained, of course, of the membranae pediculi (vellum lice) that transposed letters, altered words, and made nonsense out of whole passages in their work (particularly when the light was poor and they were sleepy). But only countless millions of booklets working, as they seem to do, in mysterious harmony of purpose, can account for the ever-increasing number of typos, transpositions, misspellings, and random garble we see in print these days. The absence of proof-readers can only explain part of it.

Is booklet activity mere mischief, malice, as some believe? Do booklets so despise or envy us, or our books, to the point that they try to destroy them? Are they possibly trying to correct us—to point out, subtly, by making some of it meaningless, the inherent meaninglessness, the existential error, in all we write? Or are they quite indifferent to us and what we write except in using our symbols to transmit an entirely different order of meaning, opaque to us? Jopper’s Codex of Common Typos is a massive but unconvincing attempt to “translate” this supposed code or cipher.

Whatever their purposes, I think it very likely that booklets are in fact quite indifferent to our purposes. Do they perceive us at all? To us they are invisible and imperceptible, except to people experiencing certain types of migraine aura.

These witnesses universally report them as being about the size of a comma, the color of the page, and intensely active. In 1923, Mrs. Dora Brown wrote a vivid description for her ophthalmologist: “A quivering, scuttling busy-ness. All over the page—every page. They’re in constant motion, almost vibrating—mostly gathered around the lines of print, pulling and pushing at letters. A lot of them will do it all at once, so that a whole word shivers, or moves, or jumps a little. And the letters seem to blur. The words aren’t quite solid and definite any more, as printed words ought to be. They’ve been un-stabilised (is that a word?).”

To me, this description brings to mind a phenomenon Mrs. Brown had never seen: a page of text on an early computer screen. The technology has improved, so that the text that I am typing right now into my computer, and that you may be reading on another computer, looks substantial, steady, clear, and stable. But it isn’t. The whole thing could vanish in a moment, or I could change every word in it again and again and leave no trace of what was there to begin with; if you don’t have a locked copy, so can you. I think the computer—which many thought would save us from the annoying tricks of booklets and render the species obsolete—is turning out to be their ideal ecological niche.

We know they are adaptable. Probably they breed very frequently, like fruit flies. They must have undergone great change in the past twenty years in order to operate electronically as they did corporeally—for a booklet to become an ebooklet. But perhaps those changes lay in the direction their nature had always tended: just as, when he was needed, a kind of human being appeared who had never existed, because his capacity, his nature had never before been called upon, the computer nerd.

Ebooklets, which many people carelessly refer to as “bugs,” totally avoid copiers, but they infested scanners at once and copiously. What the future may hold for them in the reproduction and dissemination of computer texts, who can say? Arbitrary alteration, omission and elimination, reversals and misplacement, introduced elements, and garbling—all these devices and strategies are infinitely easier to execute in electronic text. The instability for which Mrs. Brown sought the word in 1923 has been achieved. The pirating of incomplete and corrupted texts, the practice of “mashing” disparate and unrelated texts, the indifference to error, are good evidence of the essential instability of the electronic word. My guess is that ebooklets are eagerly abetting and feasting upon the activities of e-pirates, corporations dealing in information, paranoid governments, and human lazy-mindedness, towards the creation of a Universal Library in which information, misinformation, and disinformation are indistinguishable, a literature in which all texts are corrupt and there is no unaltered original by which to discover the nature and extent of the corruption.

I wonder what ebooklets get out of this? Perhaps they were seeking, even as volumenulae, to destabilise the written word, returning it to the fleeting lability of unrecorded speech. Maybe the changelessness of writing, the lifeblood of historical cultures, is death to them, and they live and thrive on continual change toward disorder, entropic activity, the faster the better.

If so, it appears that our increasing dependence on the computer has some drawbacks. Anybody who wants their grandchildren to know what Plato or Lao Tzu or Yeats or Saramago wrote had better keep a copy on paper, in Greek or Chinese or English or Portuguese, in a box treated with eucalyptus oil to discourage booklets and vetiver oil to discourage silverfish, with a plea to posterity to treat it as a valued inheritance, unique, irreplaceable, precious. Which of course it always was.

iii. Chthons and Draks

Descriptions of the appearance and behavior of chthons are supported by legend, tradition, speculation, and passionate argument, but by little or no actual observation. We know very little about them. We know they are earth-dwellers, but do not even know how much the body of a chthon differs from the earth in which it lives. Is a chthon in fact just dirt, a little more active than dirt in general?

Of course, in the larger sense this is true of ourselves, or any living thing. We are of the earth and its substance is our substance. Here the earthworm provides a useful paradigm. The worm lives in the dirt, moves through it, eats it, excretes it, is utterly and totally a citizen and creature of it, and yet isn’t it. The organization of the insentient minerals and organic refuse that compose dirt and their interaction in the living creature place the worm on a plane of being in which sensation and purposive activity are unmistakably more present than they are in dirt.

Earthworms are not only sentient, they can learn and remember. They probably don’t think about a great many things, but they do think. And it is generally assumed that chthons, however earthy their substance, being by all reports very much larger and possibly more complex than earthworms and showing what many see as evidence of premeditated action, lead an existence on a higher plane of sensitivity and intelligence than worms—perhaps very much higher.

But our favored metaphor of height to signify size, complexity, importance, etc., is out of place when used of creatures to whom depth may mean all that height means to us. It might well be more appropriate to speak, with awed respect, of how low a plane they inhabit.

Certainly they are able to live deep down. How deep, we don’t know. The giant squid was known for a long, long time only through rumors and strange wounds on a whale’s side and improbable decaying fragments of an enormous corpse; and like giant squids, chthons live deep, stay down, and don’t come up. We’ve invaded the depths of the sea and photographed the giant squid, it isn’t just an old sailor’s tale, it’s a celebrity now like everybody else—it’s real, see? that’s a real picture, so the giant squid is real, the way it wasn’t until we took the picture. But there are no photographs of a chthon. Well, there are some. There are photographs of Nessie in Loch Ness, too. You can photograph anything you believe in.

Our deepest mines barely enter the chthonic realm. Our deepest geoprobes may, but it is a very, very large realm, the underworld. There’s little hope of any physical object we could send down there meeting by chance with an inhabitant and recognising that it had met one. The camera of course is useless. A lens in the dark sees dark. In rock it sees rock. In magma it sees magma—very briefly, before it rejoins the magma.

It is in fact much easier for us to send machines, cameras, telescopes, recording devices of all kinds, even people, ten million miles out into space than it is to send anything, let alone anyone, ten miles under foot. Going out is always easy, you just set off and go. Going in is never so easy, and going deep is quite another matter.

The deepest hole we’ve made in the earth so far is only about a third to a fifth of the way through the outer crust. And at that depth, the heat is getting towards three times the boiling point of water, and the pressure crushes a steel beam like a wad of aluminum foil.

Even if a seeing eye could exist in their dark realm, the great elementals of the underground may be assumed to be as elusive to normal human vision and perception as most other elementals. There may, however, have been sightings.

Descriptions, vivid though incomplete and mythologized, of chthons, or of a chthon, exist in several parts of the world, including Japan and Indian California. There is a great earth snake, they said, that lives deep in the earth. When the snake moves, the earth moves beneath our feet. The Japanese and the Californians, being particularly familiar with earthquakes, might know what they were talking about.

Most biogeologists now agree that the San Andreas Fault is a surface feature owing its existence to a creature about eight hundred miles long that resides several miles underneath it: a great earth snake, or chthon. It moves almost constantly. Its movements are occasionally abrupt and jerky, as if in pain or effort, and these attract human attention, sometimes to the point of panic. Most of the time the San Andreas chthon is busy smoothly and almost imperceptibly rearranging the relative positions of the Pacific and North American tectonic plates. It is pushing the area west of it towards the northwest at the rate of about an inch and a half a year, so that eventually Los Angeles will slide past San Francisco on its way to Alaska.

Biogeologists certainly don’t consider this interesting phenomenon to be the goal of the rearrangement, but they can only speculate why the chthon wants to move the south coast of California out of California. Perhaps it is tired of the swarm of lesser chthons, its siblings or descendants, that crowd the depths almost everywhere in California in incredible numbers. Chthonic overpopulation gives rise to territorial rivalries and quarrels that cause endless faulting and instability, which is perhaps why the greatest chthon of them all has been driven to seek a quieter zone out under the northern Pacific Ocean.

The great earth snake of the depths beneath the Japan Trench may be restless for the same reason. Or conversely, the three tectonic plates that are converging on those unsteady islands may be pushed by three different chthons intent upon meeting. To mate? To fight? To dance? Whatever their deep purpose, its achievement is likely to upset the tiny beings that run about on the skin of the planet far above them and consider themselves the crown of earthly existence.

Whether chthons are or are not related to draks, the better-known inhabitants of volcanoes, is an open question. Some think draks are an entirely different species of elemental, citing the immense difference in their appearance and behavior. Others believe they are ancestrally the same. The original unifying theory held that both are born originally of magma. In this picture, the chthons, born deep inside the planet, migrate very slowly towards the outside, cooling, darkening, lithifying, and becoming more porous. As they near the surface, they die, their huge bodies returning to earth in earth. The draks, coming up much faster, take only a very labile form and retain the volatile and spectacular properties of superheated matter under pressure. They burst forth from Etna or Eyjafjallajökull and die in fiery explosions.

A new unifying theory posits that chthons are born from fertile dust on the surface of the planet. Microscopically tiny, the wormlets begin at once to eat their way straight down. They devour their way steadily through dirt and rock, growing all the time. They never cease that downward, inward motion till they are miles under the surface. There in the underworld, particularly around the edges of tectonic plates, they move about easily and freely in the substance of the earth as earthworms do in dirt.

At the next stage in their long lives, chthons head down deeper and ever deeper, boring toward the center without rest, tolerating the increasing heat and unimaginable pressure, till they come to the Great Discontinuity. There, transformed, they plunge straight down toward the molten iron core of Earth. And there they are reshaped, as the pupa is in the cocoon.

They come forth as draks—slender, clawed, winged, with bodies of fire. They make their way upward rapidly, first through liquid rock, then through vents and fissures, seeking the magma chambers of the volcanoes. In them they may live for centuries, dancing endlessly with their kind in those incandescent halls. From them at last they will burst upward to the air, taking wing in a brief, terrible, and splendid mating flight. They are destroyed in that final, ecstatic escape from their body of earth, but from the dust of fertility that falls back to the ground from these great eruptions, the next generation is born.

All this must remain, for now, speculation. The chthons are not invisible, but they live blind in utter darkness, and it is not certain that anybody has ever seen one. The draks are visible, but they live in white-hot lava, and only momentarily, blindingly, are they ever seen.

© 2012 by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Originally published in Tin House.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

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

The Thing About Shapes to Come
Adam-Troy Castro

Monica’s new baby was like a lot of new babies these days in that she was born a cube. She had no external or internal sexual organs, or for that matter organs of any kind, being just a warm solid filled with protoplasm. But she was, genetically at least, a girl, and one who resembled her mother as much as any cube possibly could. That wasn’t much in that she had no eyes, no nose, no mouth, no chin, no hair, nothing that could be charitably called a face or bodily features, not even any orifices larger than pores. But she had inherited Monica’s healthy appetite. Placed in a dish in a puddle of Monica’s breast milk, she throbbed in deep appreciation and absorbed it all in a matter of minutes, becoming as plump and as satiated as a sponge. As far as anybody could tell, she was a happy and healthy cube.

It had been a difficult birth, given all the corners involved. Labor had been the biological equivalent of trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. But there was no reason, they said, to worry about her health; her constitution was strong, and there was no reason to believe she couldn’t live a long, comfortable, and healthy life, devoid of any serious problems unrelated to the general inconvenience of going through life shaped like a cube. The presence of nerve impulses even confirmed that the child could think, while providing little in the way of speculation over what she could possibly have to think about. Look at her the right way and it was even possible to consider her beautiful, in that she was smooth on all her planes, sharply defined on her edges and corners, not off by so much as a millimeter, in any of her vital measurements. This wasn’t the kind of beauty Monica had envisioned when she’d hoped for a beautiful child, but there was a starkness to her daughter’s lines, a mathematical purity to her, that made it impossible to want to use terms like disfigured or deformed.

Monica had hoped for an old-fashioned baby, of the kind that had been common when she was a child, the kind with the rounded features and drooly toothless smile and the foreshortened arms and legs and even—yes, she’d looked forward to this as well—the end that would need to be wiped clean and powdered on a regular basis. She had wanted a child who would someday delight her by calling her “Mama,” and one day rise on uncertain feet to toddle off and force her to give chase. That would have been the ideal. But she had also known that these days the odds of ending up with a baby that looked like that were about one in a hundred thousand, and dropping. More and more women were giving birth to cylinders and pyramids and crosses and rhombuses, with the vast majority of the newest generation emerging as playful spheres. Of all the young mothers Monica knew, only one had been blessed with a baby shaped like a baby; and that mother seemed genuinely haunted as she pushed the infant around in its pram, aware that the world was watching, feeling surrounded on all sides by legions of frustrated kidnappers and pederasts. The mothers of children-shaped children had to take care to shield their progeny from such predators, because the number of predators remained constant even as the number of possible targets for their vile intentions now described an asymptotic curve that approached but never quite reached zero. Most of the young parents Monica knew were lucky enough to have been blessed with spheres that could roll around and bounce into one another and even learn to descend household stairs, though rarely to ascend them. A sphere, Monica thought, would have been a fine alternative to a traditional baby. A sphere she could have taken to the park and played with. But complaining about that was like spitting in the face of God. Certainly, a cube must have other talents, other good points to love.

Of course, Monica’s mom and dad were upset, not just because their teenaged daughter had given birth to a cube but also, unspoken, because that cube’s mocha-brown coloring suggested that, since Monica was white, the unknown father must have been black. Dad wore an unmistakable scowl as he held the new arrival in his hands, his rheumy eyes a million miles away as he bid a mental farewell to any future birthdays involving tricycles and baseball gloves, or even dollhouses or drum batons. He weighed the cube in his hands, wondering aloud whether he was holding her upside down or right side up, or if there was any way he could tell that she even knew she was being held. He said, Maybe we could put a label on it, to let us know which way is up. Monica’s mom was even less subtle, complaining: She’s square. A doctor corrected her at once, saying, No, Mrs. Hufready, she’s not a square, a square would be flat. She’s a cube. Mom was slow to absorb the correction and demanded, What the hell is my daughter going to do with a square kid? It was impossible to hear Mom’s tone of voice and not know that she would always fail to get it, that even if she came around to loving her granddaughter for the beautiful, geometrical solid she was, she would still be slow to pick up the etymological differences, using the offensive s-slur for years to come without ever quite understanding why it was wrong.

As for herself, Monica felt the tug of maternal love the second her child was placed in her hands, and rotated so she could see that her baby was indeed the same on all sides. She was a member of the younger generation, the one that had grown up in the age of such births, the one who had been prepared to gestate and nurture a darling shape of her own. She saw in her daughter’s being, her substance, the oneness of her, a divine spark that all of her dreams of a more conventional child could not deny. She felt the pit of bottomless responsibility open wide before her and, with no reservations, leaped in. Asked for a name to put on the birth certificate, she told the doctors, “Her name’s Di.”

Di was a well-behaved child, who lay in her crib and regarded the world around her with a calm acceptance that never crossed the line into brattiness or fussing for the sake of fussing. She didn’t cry, but from time to time she hummed. This was always a sign that it was time to feed her. She was an angel whenever food was provided, sitting in the center of any puddle laid out for her and plumping visibly as she absorbed it. She also thrummed in the presence of her mother, though rarely so in the presence of her grandparents, whose generational instincts had somehow failed to kick in, and who most often referred to the baby as “that thing.” Monica did whatever she could to jump start their hearts, but that seemed a losing battle, and she spent more and more time retreating from them, taking Di into her own bedroom and doing all the maternal things she was required to do in private, where they would not be a source of constant irritation.

Aside from that, there was no shame. Monica felt no compunction about taking Di out to the park, where there were only a couple of lonely “normal” children who looked furtive and uncomfortable in the playgrounds littered with mostly immobile shapes other parents had brought and placed about the rusting swing sets and jungle gyms, in the hopes that the environment would provide the kinetic opportunities that the limited motive ability their own offspring lacked. The most popular item of equipment among the parents seemed to be the sandbox, where the pyramids, cubes, and rhombuses, arranged in rows and left to interact in any way they could, resembled the half-buried buildings of some desert city, assaulted by the aftermath of a sandstorm. A couple of times Monica placed Di there, among the other edifices in the miniature boulevard, until she noticed that when playtime was over the parents didn’t always leave with the same kids they’d come with, and excused away any accidents of identification with the excuse that they were just too hard to tell apart.

Some conscientious parents made more of an effort to personalize—as in, “render a person”—their shape-children. Sometimes, Monica sat beside one determined young woman who dressed her pyramidal boy, Roger, in jean overalls that buttoned midway up his converging slopes, held in place by suspenders that hooked around his single vertex. The outfit came complete with plush-toy, fake legs dangling from his base. The effect wasn’t very convincing, not even with the cartoonish smiley-face drawn on one of Roger’s three risers, a representation of two dot eyes and bubblegum pink cheeks curving into a happy mouth that, on Roger, resembled disrespectful graffiti more than an actual personification of a child. Even when Monica forced herself to entertain the premise, she couldn’t help noticing that the simulated head came to a point, which to her mind made Roger look feeble-minded. To be sure, Roger’s mother had tried to ameliorate that point with a scruffy little wig and baseball cap, but how much more noble, she thought, was his actual shape, shorn of pretense? It was primal; it was classical. It was the shape of monuments, of constructs that lived forever. The pyramid-in-boy-suit was, by comparison, just a transparent ploy, a stab at imagined normalcy that emerged as grubby and pathetic by comparison. Monica could only glance at her own Di, who embodied self-contained perfection so well that she looked the same from every angle, and tried in vain to summon the mindset that would have led her to subject the darling to indignities of the same sort that Roger’s mother subjected on him. It seemed deluded, anti-maternal, and likely hurtful.

Other times Monica wandered over to the fenced-in area where the spheres played. It had been a basketball court, though the poles and hoops had been taken down, and the game being played by about two dozen spheres of different sizes resembled nothing that had ever been played between teams. Unlike cubes, which were stable once placed in any given position and could be trusted to remain where they were put until somebody came by to move them, spheres were pure chaos, harder to stop than to start, an explosion of play potential that manifested as a collection of runaway ids. They rolled about at high speeds, some describing predictable orbits and others changing their course according to the whim of each passing moment. They collided. They bounced. They slowed, pretended to rest, and then accelerated like streaks of light, as if fired by invisible cannons. It was impossible to tell if they were actually playing with one another, or, as it seemed to Monica, at one another. Perhaps they perceived their fellow spheres as annoying obstructions and not as fellow inhabitants of the universe. But there was an energy to their play, a potential that reminded Monica of atoms colliding with one another, searching for others with which they could combine and form strange new substances, with none of the properties of the original contributors. But when Monica put Di down in the center of all that splendid chaos, just to see what would happen, the answer was nothing; her child just sat in the center of it all, unstirred, a closed system.

When Di was two, the world experienced a slight upswing in instances of what were by then called traditional pregnancies. It wasn’t much. It didn’t amount to more than about five thousand more than the population had been told to expect. But the furor over this development vastly exceeded its statistical significance. The news media questioned: Is the “plague” over? Had mankind been saved from this strange mutation?

In a few short months further numbers would come in, and the answer to both questions would turn out to be no. This was nothing more than a statistical fluke, the kind of phenomenon that only happens because the numbers come up that way; no more significant that the occasional odd family that, in the old days, would produce ten boys in a row without a single female face among them, without much affecting the fifty/fifty ratio in the general population. When things evened out, the vast majority of young mothers continued to pump out spheres and cubes and pyramids and rhombuses, and the line on the graph that reflected the percentage of pregnancies that resulted in baby-shaped babies continued to descend, inexorably, toward zero.

But while the illusion lasted, many people seized on the premature intimations of hope to initiate debates over what to do with what they considered a lost generation. Shape-children were abandoned, thrown out, offered up for adoption. Many mothers were pressured by loved ones to admit that the things they’d carried in their bodies, expelled, and cared for, were, not people, but things unworthy of their love that could now be discarded.

Monica’s parents were among the people who took this position. They pointed out that she had not held down a job, or done anything else with her life, since Di’s birth. They said that all she did was feed “it” and care for “it” and talk to “it” as if “it” could hear her. They told her that she showed even more devotion than a “regular” mother, but that it was a devotion poured down a black hole that swallowed far more than it could ever return. It’s a parasite, they told her. She argued that it had always been possible to see babies as parasites feeding off the generation that birthed them; for a while, at least, they contributed nothing but smiles and coos while demanding food, attention, and energy. How, she wanted to know, was Di different? This somehow never closed the argument but rather brought it back to the beginning, to the declaration that Di had done nothing in her short life but increase in size and in her need for nutrients. You don’t like the word “parasite”? her parents asked her, Try “vegetable.” The point was that Di still showed no sign of ever being able to interact with others in any meaningful way. There was no reason Monica had to continue paying the price of being devoted to her, not when there were “places” that could take care of Di just as well as she could.

This was not just a single conversation. Or perhaps it was, if you can say that a series of conversations, continued over days and weeks with only short interruptions for sleep and the necessary business of being alive, was a conversation. There was no halt to it. Monica took it with calm, and then with anger, then with long bitter silences, and then with weakness: Yes, she said, Of course, I’m not saying I agree, but I’ll look at one of those places, already.

And so they went to a facility for abandoned cubes. It wasn’t called that. It was called a juvenile home. But it was only open to cubes, specializing in that particular shape and no other, to the point of specifying in its charter that any children whose parents submitted applications would be carefully measured before acceptance, to ensure that none of them had sides that differed in proportion by even a stray millimeter. As Di thrummed contentedly in Monica’s lap, the administrator, a woman who seemed inordinately configured out of ninety-degree angles herself, explained that “fitting in” here was not a social concern but a physical one. The children were stored on shelves in stacks of three, and any whose dimensions were at all disproportionate caused dangerous instability among those stacked on top of them. But—she smiled—there was no reason to believe that this would be a problem with Di, who was just lovely. In her case the examination would be, doubtlessly, no more than a formality.

Monica and her parents took the grand tour, and by now were not surprised that the place was, very much literally, a place for warehousing unwanted children. The shelves stretched twelve feet above a cold concrete floor and the length of a football field into gloom, each stacked five high with cubes of sizes ranging from newborn to adolescent, the latter being so large they could have contained old-fashioned console televisions. A sprinkler hose moved down one of the aisles on a track, spraying them with a liquid that, the administrator advised Monica, had been formulated to fit all of their nutritional needs. Another spraying light mist washed them off. Stereo speakers played gentle instrumentals while the cubes thrummed, staying in tune. Dust motes danced in the cold, dim light. Monica’s father asked the administrator if they had a system in place for knowing which child was which, and she pointed out a placard at the end of each row, which detailed the number range of those stored on each shelf (as in “1200- 1503”). The names, she said, were backed up weekly and stored off-site, for convenience, but they didn’t really matter all that much, as these were not children who would ever come when called.

The silence and seeming acquiescence of Monica and her parents encouraged the administrator to ramble. She told them about the most memorable mishap the facility had ever suffered, a case where none of the attendants had noticed that the cube on top of the stack had experienced a growth spurt faster than those of the cubes it rested on, and a cascade occurred that had toppled first that stack and then the other stacks next to it, resulting in a pile of thrumming objects who may have been unhurt but who presented a challenge that didn’t often come up when dealing with other children, in that they were faceless and identical. It had taken a flurry of DNA tests, undertaken at great expense, to determine which child was which, not that anyone at the facility felt it especially mattered.

Monica asked permission to place Di on one of the shelves, just as an experiment. The administrator beamed and told her to go right ahead. She placed Di on an empty spot, murmured that there was no need to worry because Mommy would be right back, and backed away, stopping only when she was ten feet away, and then again when she was twenty, and finally again at fifty. Di was hard to pick out among all the other cubes. She was indistinguishable from the others her size. But Monica thought of all the times she had been in public places like busy streets or stadiums and auditoriums, looking out upon crowds of hundreds or even thousands—the way all of those faces, as unique as they may have been as Joe, or Sue, or Brad, or Laura, had been reduced by the sheer number to shifting pixels, making up a grand mural whose only identity was that of the mob. It wasn’t easy to pick out any one person in that place either, because they were all alike, becoming something different from all the others only when they were approached and examined for the cues that made them individuals. She wondered if anybody working at this warehouse ever picked up one of the cubes and felt its warmth against their own. But mostly, she wondered how many of them were screaming.

The spheres rebelled the year Di turned fifteen. By that time it had been years since Monica had been able to hold her only child in her lap, or cradle her in her arms. Now Di was the size of a dishwasher and could no longer be moved except with a hand truck; at the speed she was growing, it would soon be impossible to move her from Monica’s little studio apartment except by knocking down one of the walls. She was by far the most prominent item of de facto furniture in a place that otherwise knew little more than a kitchenette, a convertible couch, and a second-hand television.

Monica, who since cutting off all contact with her parents had worked two jobs to maintain the place, remained as attentive a mother as she could be under the circumstances. She made a point of eating breakfast with Di every morning; Di absorbing the contents of a sponge saturated in shape chow, Monica using Di’s ceiling-oriented face as the dining table she otherwise didn’t have room for. Di was, if nothing else, a considerate person to eat a meal on. She absorbed spills, and to Monica’s maternal eyes seemed to be particularly fond of coffee.

Monica still spoke to Di all the time, telling her that she was special, assuring her that she was loved. There was no way for Monica to know that her child heard or appreciated any of it, and though she held on to her faith with a ferocity that her few friends considered heroic if not deluded, those doubts sometimes overwhelmed her, leading to sleepless nights and a sense of all her life’s energy being poured down a black hole.

The little studio became a fortress when the spheres rebelled, many millions of them at once, a revolution declared at the same moment in a hundred major cities around the world, though it was hard to say what grievances they thought they had, or what cause they might have championed, other than anarchy. Thousands, of all ages, from newborns to near-adults, rolled down the Spanish steps in Rome, thousands more down the zigzag planes of Lombard Street in San Francisco, uncounted numbers rebounding at high altitudes from glass skyscraper to glass skyscraper in Tokyo in what amounted to the most horrifying Pachinko game ever played. Cities with steep hills were the most vulnerable, of course, but they were not above tailoring their acts of terror to the local possibilities: Witness what they did in Saint Louis, where hundreds of them herded shrieking innocents through the Gateway Arch and back, scoring goals.

In the city where Monica lived, they just broke things, smashing through automobile windshields, overturned trucks, and made it their solemn duty to pay a visit to every single china shop in the greater metropolitan area. She spent that long night huddled in her studio, assuring Di that everything would be all right as the sounds of fear and destruction rattled her windows. She lost herself in bleak thoughts of the price that would need to be paid for all this, the price that would no doubt be levied against innocents like Di, who could not wage war against anybody. Spheres, she thought savagely, were troublemakers by design. They could spin; therefore, they were revolutionary. It was not just their privilege but their nature to take the path of least resistance, no matter what lay ahead of them. It was just the way they rolled. But cubes, like Di? They were solid, dependable, and uncomplaining. They received love and asked for nothing more. How terrible it was, that they would now be lumped into the same category as such delinquents.

But in the morning, the sounds of destruction gave way to an eerie silence that persisted until the sun reached its height in the sky. Monica ventured downstairs alone and discovered what those who had already left their homes already knew: that whatever had driven the spheres to their destructive madness the night before seemed to have exhausted, not just their rage, but their will to live. Wherever she looked, in every direction, the spheres remained in the places they had come to rest, moving only when some of the people they had terrorized kicked them against walls or beat them with golf clubs and bats. Some, damaged by their fury of the night before, had lost so much of their bounce that they responded to any fall from a height not with an exuberant spring but rather with a sullen and indifferent thud. As she walked the city, she saw workers clearing their unresisting forms from the streets and loading them into trucks; and she knew that, all over the world, all those not claimed by loyal parents would be taken somewhere far from sight where they could be stacked in pyramids or plowed into canyons or otherwise forgotten about. For the first time in a life spent taking it as matter of faith that her cube had a soul, she found herself doubting that all shape-children did, and wondering if they would even care about being discarded in this manner. But what was the alternative? Tolerating what they’d done? Leaving them where they’d landed and trusting that they’d never run roughshod over the landscape again? It was not that she had no answer. It was that every answer she had made her feel dirty. It was a warm day but she hugged herself, shivering from a cold that originated somewhere deep in her marrow.

Before she returned to her apartment to check on Di, she stopped by the riverfront, where some of the smaller spheres had landed. Hundreds, ranging in size from golf ball to weather balloon, had landed in the water and were floating downstream toward the sea, where she supposed their next adventure would be serving as the playthings of dolphins. She supposed it as fitting a fate as any.

After a while Monica picked up one of the tiny ones that had landed on the shore, which, judging by its size, could not have been more than six months old. She spoke to it, asking if it could say anything to her that would help her to help them, or at the very least, explain just what, in any of their short lives, had embittered them so much that they had to turn to violence. Naturally it didn’t answer. She asked if there was anything it could tell her that could help her understand her own daughter, who was so close to being too large to live at home. Again, it didn’t answer. Tears sprung to her eyes and she cried, At least you could move! At least you could have an adventure! But no reply was forthcoming and in a fit of rage and resentment she tossed the infant into the river, somehow unsurprised when it didn’t land with a single splash but instead skipped over the waves, landing here and there but between those moments of impact remaining in flight, like something defiant and free.

Nine months later, the very last shape-child—a random squiggle, like a strip of twisted macaroni—was born in Jakarta. Baby-shaped babies filled the Earth again. It’s worth noting that nobody ever came up with any reasonable scientific or theological explanation for the nearly two decades that saw such a drastic change in Mankind’s reproductive output; nor did it seem all that important, as long as it never happened again. Explanations are perhaps best left to the philosophers, who persist in seeking meaning even for those of life’s mysteries that remain random, or pointless, or so subtle in their inner workings that examining them is as destructive to the wonder itself as scattering the components of a pocket watch.

For all of us, meaning arrives in installments. It might be actual and it might be wishful thinking. We can only report the facts and hope that they provide closure.

To wit:

Many years later, a rented car drives across the desert, taking a unmarked exit off the paved road to a dirt trail that carries its lone driver past some low hills to a hidden valley on the other side. Trailing a cloud of dust like a comet trail, it passes a little-used gate and descends into a vast caldera that, from a distance, looks like a recent settlement constructed in haste, with prefabricated buildings. It is in fact one of many around the world. Sprinklers water the immobile cubes, spheres, and squiggles, making rainbows in the air that, left to its own design, would be dusty and arid.

The car parks in a place that has been marked off for that purpose and out of it emerges a silver-haired, but still energetic, woman, squinting at the harsh desert sun. She looks out upon the survivors of a generation, the biggest of which are now three times her own height but which remain as voiceless and without affect as they ever were. Donning a pair of mirrored sunglasses, she sighs and makes her way down to the orderly paths past a very small number of other visitors, finally reaching a certain cube among many, that she has visited so many times she could probably find it in her sleep. No one other than her could see anything about this particular shape, which now towers over her like a monument, that could possibly distinguish it from all the others in its row or the rows that bracket it. But she smiles sadly when she sees it. To her, the shape before her has an individual character different from all the others. It is a person.

To be sure, Di also shows some of the ravages of time. The side facing east shows some sun-damage, and a swath of the side facing north shows some bad discoloration left over from the last time she needed to be sand-blasted for graffiti. But she thrums as always in the presence of her mother, who places a single wrinkled hand against her side and speaks words very much like those she’s uttered on any number of other visits. We do not need to know exactly what the silver-haired woman says. We can likely already imagine it, and reconstruct its meaning if not the actual words. What she says is not clever and it is not significant, and it will never appear in any book. But it fulfills its purpose, breaking the silence and ameliorating the harshness of the desert air.

Eventually, though, it’s time for the visit to end. The silver-haired woman whispers a few final words, lets her right hand brush the side of the vast shape before her, and turns to leave. Always, before, she never turned back. But today something—perhaps maternal instinct, or perhaps a voice that only she can hear—makes her turn before she has traversed twenty paces. And this time she sees something in her strange daughter that she has never witnessed before: an alteration in the nearest of her previously, featureless faces. It’s a rectangular opening, seven feet tall and three feet wide, extending upward from the patch of dirt that has become Di’s permanent home.

The silver-haired woman returns to what she has no trouble recognizing as a doorway, and runs her fingers up and down the jamb, filled with wonder at its sudden appearance. She turns away from it and peers up and down the path between the other children of her daughter’s generation, to make certain that nobody is watching. As it happens, nobody is. Di has chosen the perfect moment. This gesture is only meant for one.

The silver-haired woman cannot see anything past the opening but darkness, not even when she removes her sunglasses and shades her eyes from the glare. The precise nature of the answers to be found inside are not available to her, not out here. But she senses no threat: just the welcome the young are supposed to extend to the old, when the most inexorable of life’s many passages transfers the responsibility from one to the other.

With another glance up and down the row, just to be sure that she remains unobserved, the silver-haired woman murmurs the first words she has been ever been able to speak in response to an act Di has committed out of personal volition. “All right,” she says. “Good girl.”

Then she takes the first step, and her daughter lets her in.

© 2014 by Adam-Troy Castro.

Adam-Troy Castro is best known in science fiction circles for his Philip K. Dick Award winning novel, Emissaries From the Dead, which stars his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort. His short fiction has been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stoker Awards, and two Hugos. The first volume of a middle-grade fantasy series, Gustav Gloom and the People Taker, was published by Grosset and Dunlap in August 2012; the second and third volumes, Gustav Gloom and the Nightmare Vault and Gustav Gloom and the Four Terrors, were published in 2013. Adam lives in Florida with his wife Judi and a rotating collection of insane cats that includes Uma Furman, Meow Farrow, and Harley Quinn.

NOVELLA

The Chambered Fruit
M. Rickert

Stones. Roots. Chips like bones. The moldering scent of dry leaves and dirt, the odd aroma of mint. What grew here before it fell to neglect and misuse? I remember this past spring’s tulips and daffodils, sprouted amongst the weeds, picked and discarded without discrimination. I was so distracted by my dead daughter that I rarely noticed the living. I take a deep breath. Mint thyme. It should have survived the neglect, perhaps did, but now has fallen victim to my passionate weeding, as so much of more significance has fallen victim before it. I pick up a small, brown bulb and set it, point up, in the hole, cover it with dirt. Geese fly overhead. I shade my eyes to watch them pass, and then cannot avoid surveying the property.

Near the old barn are piles of wood and brick meant to further its renovation. Leaves and broken branches litter the stacks. The wood looks slightly warped, weathered by the seasons it’s gone untended. The yard is bristly with dried weeds and leaves. The house has suffered the worst. Surely, instead of planting bulbs I should be calling a contractor. It can’t be good, the way it looks like it’s begun to sink into the earth or how the roof litters shingles that spear into the ground around it. But who should I call? How far do I have to search to find someone who doesn’t know our story?

I think of it like the nursery rhyme. Inside the old farmhouse with the sagging porch, through the large, sunny kitchen, past the living room with the wood-burning stove, up the creaking stairs and down the hall lined with braided rugs, past the bathroom with the round window and claw-footed tub, past the yellow and white bedroom we called the guest room, past her room (where the door is shut) to our bedroom—my bedroom now—there is, on the bedside table, a picture of the three of us. It’s from her last birthday. Twelve candles on the cake. She is bent to blow them out, her face in pretty profile. Her dark hair brushes against the smooth skin of her puffed cheek; her eye, bright with happiness, dark-lashed beneath its perfectly arched brow. Jack and I stand behind her. Both of us are blurry, the result of Jack having set up the camera for automatic timer, his running to be in the shot, me moving to make room for him. He looks like her, only handsome, and I look like, well, someone passing by who got in the picture by mistake, a blur of long, untidy hair, an oversized shirt, baggy slacks. The camera captures and holds their smiles forever, locked in innocence and joy, and my smile, strained, my focus somewhere past the borders of the picture, as if I see, in the shadows, what is coming.

When I think of everything that happened, from the beginning, I look for clues. In a way, there are so many it baffles strangers that we couldn’t see them. But to understand this, and really, I’m beyond expecting anyone else to understand this, but for my own understanding, I have to remember that to be human is a dangerous state. That said, Jack’s nature is not profoundly careless, and I am not, really, in spite of everything you might have read or concluded, criminally naïve. Though of course I accept, even as I rebel against its horrible truth, that a great deal of the fault was ours. Sometimes I think more ours than his. When I look for clues to the dangerous parents we’d become I have to accept the combustible combination that occurred, just once, when Jack was careless and I was naïve and that’s all it took. We lost her.

You may be familiar with my old work. Folk scenes, sort of like Grandma Moses except, frankly, hers are better. Maybe the difference is that hers were created from real memories and mine were made from longing. No one I know has ever ridden in a horse-drawn sleigh, with or without bells. We did not hang Christmas wreaths on all the doors and from the street lamps lit with candles. We did not send the children to skate at the neighborhood pond (which didn’t exist, the closest thing being the town dump) or burn leaves and grow pumpkins (well, the Hadleys grew pumpkins but their farmhouse was an old trailer so it didn’t really fit the picture). We did garden, but our gardens did not all blossom into perfect flower at the same moment on the same day, the women standing in aprons, talking over the fence. The sun shone, but it didn’t shine the way I painted it, a great ball of light with spears of brightness around it.

These are the paintings I made. Little folk scenes that were actually quite popular, not in town, of course, but in other places where people imagined the world I painted existed. I made a decent living at it. Even now, when all I paint are dark and frightening scenes of abduction and despair that I show no one (who would come anyway, even old friends keep their distance now), I live off the royalties. My paintings are on calendars, Christmas cards, coasters, T-shirts. In the first days of horror, when the news coverage was so heavy, I thought someone would certainly point out that I (the neglectful mother of the dead girl) was also the painter, C. R. Rite, but as far as I know the connection was never made and my income has not suffered for my neglect.

Jack still represents my work, which also makes it strange that no one ever made the connection. Maybe people assumed we were actually farmers, though the locals certainly knew that wasn’t true. Maybe the media was just too busy telling the grisly details of our story to focus any attention on the boring issue of our finances. Certainly that matter isn’t very titillating. What people seemed to want to hear was how our daughter died, an endless nightmare from which I can’t ever wake, that strangers actually watch and read as some form of entertainment.

I accept my fault in this, and I know it’s huge. I live every day with the Greek proportions of our story. In the classic nature, I had a fault, a small area, like Achilles’s heel, that left me vulnerable.

But not evil. As Jack likes to point out, we didn’t do that to her and we would have stopped it from happening if we knew how.

The unforgivable thing, everyone agrees, is that we didn’t see it. How evil do you have to be? We did not keep our daughter safe and she’s dead because of that. Isn’t that evil enough?

When we moved here, Steff was eight. She didn’t know that we were really country people, having lived her whole life in the city. At first she spent all her time in her room with her books and her dolls but eventually, during that giddy, first hot summer when I walked about in my slip (when the construction crew wasn’t working on the barn) eating raspberries off the bushes and planting sunflower seeds, and hollyhocks (though it was too late and they wouldn’t bloom), she joined me, staying close, afraid of all the space, the strangeness of sky. Eventually, she came to love it, too, and brought blankets into the yard for picnics, both real and imagined, and paper to color, which, in true Buddha-child fashion, she left to blow about the yard when she was finished. When one of these pictures blew across my path, a scene of a girl picking flowers, a shimmering angel behind her, I memorized it and then let it blow away, thinking it would be a gift for somebody unlucky enough not to have a child who drew pictures of that other world which children are so close to.

In the city, Steffie had attended a small private school with a philosophy that sheltered children from the things in our world that make them grow up so fast. The influence of media was discouraged and, contrary to national trend, computer use was considered neither necessary nor particularly beneficial to children. At eight, Steffie still played with dolls, and believed in, if not magic, at least a magicalness to the world; a condition that caused strangers to look at her askance and try to measure her IQ but for which I took great pride. In her school they learned the mythic stories, needlework, and dance. Friends of mine with children in public or other private schools talked of the homework stress and the busyness of their lives, transporting kids from practice to practice. When I visited these friends, their children did not play the piano, or happily kick soccer balls in the yard. In spite of all those lessons, or, I suspected, because of them, these children sat listless and bleary-eyed in front of the television or wandered about the house, restless and bored, often resorting to eating, while Steffie played with dolls or spoons, whatever was available. I feel that our society has forgotten the importance of play, the simple beginnings of a creative mind. The value of that. Not that anyone is interested in parental guidance from me now.

At any rate, Steffie got off the bus, that first day, in tears. Several of the children would not sit with her because, they said, we were a bunch of hippies who ran around the yard in our underthings. When Steffie told me this, I cried right along with her. I’d made a life out of forgetting the world. I found its reminders sharp and disturbing.

Eventually, she adjusted and I did, too. I wore clothes in the yard, though I was baffled how anyone knew I’d ever done differently. Steff put away her dolls and proudly carried her heavy backpack filled with books and maps and serious questions about the real world, completely neglecting anything about the spiritual. Incredibly (to me), she liked it. A lot. She loved the candy they were rewarded with, the movies they watched. “I like it because it’s normal,” she said, and I realized that she knew we were not.

The years passed. I had the barn converted to an art studio and planned to further the renovation so that I could turn it into a sort of community art center for teenagers. I imagined Saturday mornings teaching painting, others teaching things like weaving, or, when Steffie began to take an interest in it, even dance. I think part of the motivation for this plan was the idea of filling the place with teenagers and helping Steffie’s social life, which still seemed, though she never complained, strangely quiet for a child her age.

So, when Jack bought the computer, I thought it was a good idea. He said he needed it for the business and Steffie had been complaining for some time that she “needed” one, too. He brought home the computer and I didn’t argue. After all, he and Steff were the ones dealing with the notorious “real” world and I was the one who got to spend all morning painting happy pictures and the rest of the day gardening, or baking cookies, or reading a good book. Who in the world lived a life like mine?

When the computer was set up and ready to use in his office, Jack called me to come look. I looked into the brightly colored screen and felt numbed by it. Steff, however, was thrilled. Soon the two of them were talking a strange language I didn’t understand. I drifted off into private thoughts, mentally working on paintings, scenes from a time before the world was enchanted by screens.

About three months before (oh, God, I still cannot write these words without trembling) her last birthday, Jack began campaigning that we get Steff her own computer. I didn’t like the idea but I couldn’t say why, though I held my ground until one Saturday when I drove into town to the post office and saw a group of girls who looked to be Steffie’s age, and who I thought I recognized from classroom functions, sitting at the picnic table outside the ice cream place. A few of the girls caught me staring, and they began whispering behind open hands. I turned away. Had I done this to her? Was it my strangeness that made her unpopular? I went home and told Jack to go ahead and buy the thing. We gave it to her for her twelfth birthday, that’s when we took the picture, the one I still have on the bedside table.

Steff was thrilled. She hugged us both and gave us kisses and thanked us so much that I began to believe we had done the right thing. I was baffled how this silent box was going to make her life better, but after seeing those girls together, I was ready to try anything.

They set up the computer in her room. At night, after dinner, they each went off for hours, clicking and staring at their separate screens. I lit candles and sat, with the cat in my lap, reading. I guess I had some vague ideas about homework, and I’d heard that there were ways to view great paintings from distant museums on the computer. I assumed she was doing things like that. I thought she should be doing more interacting with the world. I thought this as I sat reading, with the cat on my lap, and tried to believe that one solitude is the same as any other.

As though she’d been given the magic elixir for a social life, she began talking about various friends. Eventually one name came up more and more frequently. Celia read the same books Steffie did and liked to draw and dance. When Celia asked Steff to sleep over I was thrilled until I found out Stephanie had never actually met the girl but only “talked” to her on the computer.

Of course, I said this would not happen. She could be anyone; why, Celia might not even be a girl, I said. No, she could not sleep over at this stranger’s house, who, coincidentally lived only twenty-four miles away.

Steff burst into tears at the dinner table, threw her napkin on the plate. “You don’t want me to be normal,” she said, “you want me to be just like you and I’m not!” Then she ran out of the kitchen, up the stairs to her bedroom where she actually slammed the door, all of this perhaps not unusual behavior for an almost teenager but completely new for Steff.

Jack looked at me accusingly.

“You can’t expect me to let her go off to some stranger’s house. We don’t even know the family.”

“Whose family do we know?”

I understood his point. I had sheltered us, all of us, with my sheltered ways.

“When it comes down to it, if she went anywhere in town, we wouldn’t know those people either.”

“It’s not the same thing. People have reputations.” As soon as I saw the look on Jack’s face, I realized that our reputation was probably more extensive than I knew. If not for me, they would be having a normal life. I was the odd one. It was all my fault.

“What if I speak to the girl’s parents, would that make you more comfortable?”

For a moment, I considered that we invite the girl’s family over, we could have a barbecue, but the thought of having to spend a whole evening entertaining anyone horrified me. When it comes right down to it, my daughter died because of my reluctance to entertain. How ridiculous and horrifying. Instead, I agreed that she could go if Jack talked to Celia’s parents first.

We went up to her room together. We knocked and entered. I expected to find her lying across the bed, my posture of teenage despair, but instead, she was sitting at the desk, staring into the computer.

“We’ve decided you can go, but we want to speak to her parents first.”

She turned and grinned, bathed in computer glow, all the color gone from her pretty face and replaced with green.

“Is that Celia now?” Jack asked.

She nodded.

“Ask her for her number.”

She began typing. I turned and walked away. What was I so creeped out about? This was the new world. My daughter and my husband were a part of it, as was I, even if with reluctance.

Jack spoke to Celia’s father that night. It turned out they had a lot in common, too. He was an insurance salesman. His wife, however, was very different from me, a lawyer out of town until Friday night. Jack covered the mouthpiece. “He wants to pick Steff up around 4:30 on Friday. He’s going to be passing through town. They’ll pick Celia up at her dance class, and Sarah will get home from D.C. about 5:30. He’s spoken to her and she’s happy to have Stephanie over. What do you think?”

“How does he sound?”

“He sounds a lot like me.”

Steff was standing in the kitchen doorway watching. I wasn’t used to her squinty-eyed appraisal, as if suddenly there was something suspicious about me.

“Okay,” I said.

Steff grinned. Jack took his hands off the mouthpiece. “That’ll work out fine,” he said in a boisterous voice. They really both looked so thrilled. Had I done this to them? Kept them so sheltered that Stephanie’s sleepover at a friend’s house on a Friday night, an absolutely normal occurrence for any girl her age, was such an enormous event?

Was this all my fault?

He was right on time. It was a beautiful spring day, unseasonably warm. I found him immediately affable, friendly, grinning dimples. I thought he looked younger than Jack or me, though in reality he was a year older. I guess people without consciences don’t wrinkle like the rest of us. I opened the door and we shook hands. He had a firm handshake, a bit sweaty, but it was a warm day. Jack came out and the two of them got to talking immediately. I slipped away to get Steff. I went to her bedroom. Her backpack was packed, the sleeping bag rolled next to it, but she was not in the room. I walked over to the window and saw her in the garden, picking flowers. I opened the window. She looked up and waved, the flowers in her hand arcing the sky. I waved, pointed to his car. She nodded and ran toward the house. I brought the ridiculously heavy backpack and sleeping bag downstairs. When I got to the kitchen, she was standing there, her cheeks flushed, holding the bouquet of daffodils and tulips while Jack and Celia’s father talked. I helped her wrap the stems in a wet paper towel and aluminum foil. “This is a very nice idea,” I whispered to her at the sink.

She smiled and shrugged. “Celia said her mom likes flowers, too.”

What was it about that that set off a little warning buzzer in my head? All these coincidences. I shook it back; after all, isn’t that how friendships are made, by common interests? We turned and the fathers stopped talking. Celia’s father grinned at Steff. Once more the alarm sounded but he bent down, picked up the pack, and said something like, What do kids put in these things, Celia’s is always so heavy, too. They walked to the door. I wanted to hug Stephanie but it seemed silly and probably would be embarrassing to her, and, after all, hadn’t I already embarrassed her enough? The screen door banged shut. I stood in the kitchen and listened to the cheerful voices, the car doors slam, the engine, the sound of the gravel as they drove away. Too late, I ran out to wave goodbye. I have no idea if Steffie saw me or not.

Jack wrapped his arms around my waist, nuzzled my neck. “The garden? Kitchen? Name your place, baby.”

“I should have told her to call when she gets there.”

“Honey, she’ll be back tomorrow.”

“Let’s call her, just to make sure she’s comfortable.”

“Chloe—”

“After we call her, the garden.”

There was a sudden change in the weather. The temperature dropped thirty degrees. We closed windows and doors and put on sweaters and jeans. It began to rain about 5:30 and it just kept raining. We called at six, seven, eight. No one answered. It began to hail.

“Something’s wrong,” I said.

“They probably just went to a movie.”

We called at nine. It rang and rang.

“I’m going there.”

“What? Are you kidding? Do you have any idea how embarrassing that would be for her?”

“Well, where are they Jack?”

“They went to a movie, or the mall, or out for pizza. Not everyone lives like us.”

Ten. Still no answer.

I put on my coat.

“Where are you going?”

“Give me the directions.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Where are the directions?”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“Jack!”

“I don’t have any directions.”

“What do you mean? How are we supposed to pick her up?”

“Turns out he’s coming back this way tomorrow. He’s going to drop her off.”

Lightning split the sky and thunder shook the house. “Do you even have an address?”

“I’m sure everything’s all right,” he said, but he said it softly and I could hear the fear in his voice.

We called at 10:20, 10:30, 10:41, 10:50, 10:54. At last, at 10:59, a man’s voice.

“Hello, this is Steffie’s mother, is this—” I don’t even know his name “—is this Celia’s father?”

“I just picked up the phone, lady, ain’t no one here.”

“What do you mean? Who are you? Where is everyone?”

“This is just a phone booth, okay?”

I drop the phone. I run to the bathroom. In the distance I hear Jack’s voice, he says the number and then he says, “Oh my God,” and I don’t hear the rest, over the sound of my retching.

Police sirens blood red. Blue uniforms and serious faces. Lights blaze. Pencils scratch across white pads. Jack wipes his hand through his hair, over and over again. Dry taste in my mouth. The smell of vomit. The questions. The descriptions. Fingerprint powder. I take them to her bedroom. Strange hands paw her things. Her diary. Someone turns her computer on. “Do you know her password?” I shake my head. “Well,” says the man reading her diary, “it appears she really believed there was a Celia.” What? Of course she did, can I see that? “Sorry, ma’am, it’s evidence.” Downstairs. More uniforms and raincoats. Police banter about the weather. Blazing lights. The telephone rings. Sudden silence. I run to answer it. “Hello.” It’s Mrs. Bialo, my neighbor; she says, is everything all right? No, it’s not. I hang up the phone. The activity resumes. Suddenly I see a light like the tiny flicker of a hundred fireflies hovering close to me and I hear her voice, Mom? I fall to my knees sobbing. Jack rushes over and holds me like I’m breakable. There is a temporary and slight change in the activity around us but then it continues as before and goes on like this for hours. In early morning there is a freak snowfall. We start getting calls from newspapers and magazines. A TV truck parks at the end of our drive. My neighbor, Mrs. Bialo, shows up with banana bread and starts making coffee. I stand on the porch and watch the snow salting down. The red tulips droop wounded against the icy white. The daffodils bow their silent bells. I listen to the sound of falling snow. I haven’t told anyone what I know. What would be the point? Who would believe me? But I know. She’s dead. She’s dead. She’s gone.

Let’s go quickly over the details. The body. Oh, her body. Found. The tests confirm. Raped and strangled. My little darling.

Then, incredibly, he is found, too. Trying to do the same thing again but this time to a more savvy family. He even used the name Celia. The sergeant tells me this with glee. “They always think they’re so clever, but they’re not. They make mistakes.” How excited everybody is. They found him. He can’t do it again. This is good. But I don’t feel happiness, which disappoints everyone.

Jack agrees to go on a talk show. They convince him he will be helping other families and other little girls but really he’s there so everyone can feel superior. One lady stands up. She is wearing a sensible dress and shoes. She is a sensible mother, anyone can see that, and she says, “I just don’t understand, in this day and age, how you could let your daughter go off with a stranger like that?” She says it like she really cares, but she beams when the audience claps because really, she just wants to make her point.

Jack tries to say the stuff about how really everyone takes chances when they send their children off to other homes. I mean, we’re all really strangers, he says. But they aren’t buying it, this clever audience. The sensible lady stands up again and says, “I’m really sorry about what happened to your daughter, but you gotta accept that it’s at least partly your fault.” There is scattered applause. The host tries to take it back. “I’m sure no one here means to imply this is your fault,” he says, “we only want to learn from your mistakes.” The audience applauds at that as well. Everyone gets applause except Jack.

After the taping he calls me in tears. I’m not much help as I am also feeling superior since I would never be so stupid as to fall for the “You’re helping others” line the talk show people keep trying. He says it was terrible but on the day it airs, he insists we watch. It is terrible.

We move through the house and our lives. I think I will never eat again and then, one day, I do. I think we will never make love again and then, one night, something like that happens, but it is so different, there is such a cold desperation to it, that I think it will never happen again, and it doesn’t.

Six months later there is a trial. We are both witnesses for the prosecution so we can’t attend. The defense attorney does a mean job on us but the prosecutor says, “He’s just trying to distract the jury. It’s not going to work. In fact, it’ll probably backfire, generating more sympathy.”

Fuck their sympathy, I say.

Jack looks as if I’ve just confirmed the worst rumors he’s heard about me. The attorney maintains his placid expression, but his tone of voice is mildly scolding when he says, “The jury is your best hope now.”

I think of her picking flowers in the garden that afternoon, the way she waved them in an arc across the sky.

When the verdict is read, I stare at the back of his head. I think how, surely, if I had really studied him that day, instead of being so distracted by self-doubt, I never would have let him take her. The shape of his ears at the wrong height, the tilt of his head, something about his shoulders, all of it adds up. It’s so obvious now.

“Guilty,” the foreman says.

The courtroom is strangely quiet. Somehow, it is not enough.

When Jack and I get home, he goes into his office. I wander about, until finally I settle on a plan. I take the fireside poker and walk up the stairs to her room. where I smash the computer. When I’m done, Jack is standing there, watching. “That’s a very expensive machine,” he says.

“Fuck you,” I say.

It doesn’t get any better. At the end of the month, he moves out.

Fat, white flakes fall all day. The pine trees are supplicant with snow. I sit in my rocking chair like an old woman, the blue throw across my lap. I thought about starting a fire with the well-seasoned wood left over from last winter, but when I opened the stove and saw those ashes I didn’t have the energy to clean them out. I rock and watch the snow fall. The house creaks with emptiness. The phone rings. I don’t answer it. I fall asleep in the chair and when I wake it’s dark. I walk to the kitchen, turn on the outside light. It’s still snowing. I turn off the light and go to bed, not bothering to change out of my sweats and turtleneck. The phone rings and I grumble into the blankets but I don’t answer it. I sleep what has become my usual restless sleep. In the morning, it’s still snowing.

Day after day it snows. Finally, the power goes out. The phone lines are down. I don’t mind this at all. Oddly, I am invigorated by it. I shovel the wood-burning stove’s ashes into an old paint can, find the wood carrier, and bring in stacks of wood and kindling. I build a fire and once I’m sure it’s really started good, go upstairs and get my book, some blankets and pillows. I find the flashlights in the kitchen, both with working batteries, search through the linen closet and then the kitchen cupboards until I remember and find the portable radio on the top shelf in the basement. I stoke the fire, wrap myself in a blanket. How efficient we were, how well organized, how prepared for this sort of emergency, how completely useless, even culpable, when she needed us most. I turn on the radio. It will snow and snow, they say. We are having a blizzard. There are widespread reports of power outages. The Red Cross is setting up in the high school, which, actually, is also currently out of power so residents are advised to stay home for now. I click off the radio.

The phone is ringing.

“Hello?”

“Mom, where are you?”

“Steff? Steff?”

But there is no response. I stand there, holding the phone while the kitchen shadows lengthen around me. Still I stand there. I say her name over and over again. I don’t know how long I stand there before I hang up, but when I do, I’m a changed woman. If I can’t keep her alive, and it’s been all too obvious that I can’t, I’ll take her dead. Yes, I want this ghost.

The person you most love has died and is now trying to contact you. You are happy.

You do whatever you can to help. You go out in the middle of the worst blizzard on record since there has been a record and drive to town. A trip that usually takes ten minutes today takes an hour and a half and you are happy. You go to the local drugstore and walk right past the aisles stripped of batteries and Sterno cans and candles to the toy section where you select a Ouija board and tarot cards and you don’t care when the clerk looks at you funny because you already have a strange reputation and who even cares about reputation when your dead daughter is trying to talk to you. You are not scared. You are excited. You know you probably should change your expression and look bored or disinterested as the clerk tallies up your purchases on a notepad because the cash register doesn’t work due to the power outage and you probably should say something about buying this for your teenage niece but instead you stand there grinning with excitement. You sense the clerk, who looks to be a teenager herself, only a few years older than your dead daughter, watching you leave the store and walk through the storm to your truck, the only vehicle in the parking lot.

It takes even longer to get home and by the time you do the fire has gone out and the house is cold. You are too excited to stop everything to build another fire. Instead you set up the Ouija board on the kitchen table. The cat comes over to smell it. You light a candle. The cat rubs against your leg. You sit at the table. You rest your fingers lightly on the pointer. You remember this from when you were young. “Steff,” you say, and the sound of it is both silly and wonderful in the silent house. As if, maybe, she’s just in another room or something. “Steff, are you here?” You wait for the pointer to move. It does not. “Steff?” Suddenly the house is wild with light and sound. The kitchen blazes brightly, the refrigerator hums, the heater turns on. The phone rings. You push back the chair, stand, and bang your thigh against the table. The phone rings and rings. “Hello?”

“Mom?”

“Steff, Steff, is that you?”

The dial tone buzzes.

You slam the phone down. The cat races out of the room with her tail puffed up.

You turn to the Ouija board. The pointer rests over the word. Yes. You try to remember if you left it there but you don’t think you did or maybe it got knocked there when you hit your leg but why are you trying to explain it when there is only one explanation for your dead daughter’s voice on the phone? Slowly you turn and look at the silent phone. You pick up the receiver and listen to the dial tone.

You don’t know whether to laugh or cry and suddenly your body is convulsing in some new emotion that seems to be a combination of both. You sink to the kitchen floor. The cat comes back into the room and lies down beside you. The dead can’t make phone calls but the living can lose their minds. You decide you won’t do that. You get up.

You try to believe it didn’t happen.

But just in case, every time the phone rings, I answer it. I speak to an endless assortment of telemarketers wanting to sell me newspapers, a different phone service, offering me exciting opportunities to win trips to Florida or the Bahamas. Jack calls about once a week and we generally have the same conversation. (I’m fine. He can’t come back. I haven’t forgiven him. I haven’t forgiven myself. I don’t expect to. Ever.) Once there is a call where no one speaks at all and I’m terrified to hang up the phone so I stand there saying hello, hello, and finally I say, Steff? and there’s a click and then the dial tone. Once, an old friend of mine from the city calls and I tell her all lies. How I’ve begun painting scenes of idyllic life again, how I’ve begun the healing process. I tell her the things people want me to say and by the end of the conversation she’s happy she called and for a few minutes I feel happy, too, as though everything I said was true.

I start receiving Christmas cards in the mail, strange greetings of Peace on Earth with scrawled condolences or blessings about this first Christmas without her. Jack calls in tears and tells me how much he misses her and us. I know, I know, I say gently, but you still can’t come back. There is a long silence, then he hangs up.

I go into town only for groceries. I lose track of the days so completely that I end up in the supermarket on Christmas Eve. Happy shoppers load carts with turkeys and gift wrap and bottles of wine, bags of shrimp, crackers and cheese. I pick through the limp lettuce, the winter tomatoes. While I’m choosing apples I feel someone watching me and turn to see a teenage girl of maybe sixteen or seventeen standing by the bananas. There is something strange about the girl’s penetrating stare beneath her homemade knit cap, though it is not unusual to catch people staring at me; after all, I’m the mother of a dead girl. I grab a bag of apples. I wonder if she knew Steff. I turn to look over by the bananas but she’s not there.

“I don’t know if you remember me or not.”

The girl stands at my elbow. The brown knit cap is pulled low over her brow with wisps of brown hair sticking out. She has dark brown eyes, lashed with black. She might be pretty.

“I waited on you during the first storm at Walker’s drugstore.”

I nod, at a loss at what to say to this strange, staring girl.

She leans close to me. I smell bubblegum, peppermint, and something faintly sour. “I can help,” she whispers.

“Excuse me?”

She looks around, in a dramatic way, as if we are sharing state secrets, licks her chapped lips and leans close again. “I know how to talk to dead people. You know, like in that movie. I’m like that kid.” She leans back and looks at me with those dark, sad eyes and then scans the room as if frightened of the living. “My name is Maggie Dwinder. I’m in the book.” She nods abruptly and walks away. I watch her in her old wool coat, a brown knit scarf trailing down her back like a snake.

“Oh, how are you doing, dear?”

This face sends me back to that day. Snow on tulips. My daughter’s death. “Mrs. Bialo, I never thanked you for coming over that morning.”

She pats my arm. One of her fingernails is black, the others are lined with dirt. “Don’t mention it, dear. I should’ve made an effort long before. I wouldn’t bother you now, except I noticed you was talking to the Dwinder girl.”

I nod.

“There’s something wrong with that child, her parents are all so upset about it, her father being a reverend and all. Anyhow, I hope she didn’t upset you none.”

“Oh no,” I lie, “we were just talking about apple pie.”

My neighbor studies me closely and I can imagine her reporting her findings to the ladies at the checkout, how I am so strange. I’m glad I lied to the old snoop, and feel unreasonably proud that in this small way I may have protected the girl. It doesn’t take a Jungian analyst to figure it out. It felt good to protect the girl.

It’s the coldest, snowiest winter on record and Christmas morning is no different. The wind chill factor is ten below and it’s snowing. I stack wood into the carrier, the icy snow stinging my face. My wood supply is rapidly dwindling but I dread trying to buy more wood now, during the coldest winter anyone can remember. I can just imagine the bantering, “Lady, you want wood? Seasoned wood?” Or the pity, “Is this, are you, I’m so sorry, we’re out of wood to sell, but wait, we’ll bring you ours.” Or the insult, “What? You want me to bring it where? Not after what you did to that girl, they should have put you in jail for child neglect, letting her leave like that with a stranger.” Head bent against the bitter chill, both real and imagined, I carry the wood inside.

There is nothing like that feeling of coming into a warm house from the cold. I turn on the classical music station, make a fire, fill the teakettle, and put it on the kitchen stove. The radio is playing Handel’s Messiah, the teakettle rattles softly on the burner, the cat curls up on the braided rug. I wrap my arms around myself and watch the snow swirl outside the window. Inexplicably, it stops as suddenly as if turned off by a switch. The sun comes out, the yard sparkles, and I realize I’m happy. The teakettle whistles. I turn to take it off the burner, search through the cupboard for the box of green tea. I wrap the teabag string around the teapot handle, pour the hot water. If we never got that stupid computer, if we never (stupidly) let her go with him, how different this morning would be, scented by pine and punctuated with laughter, the tear of wrapping paper and litter of ribbons and bows. I turn, teapot in hand, to the kitchen table and see that the storm has returned to its full vigor, the crystallized scene obliterated. As it should be. In my grief, this stormy winter has been perfect.

I find my strange Christmas perfect, too. I make a vegetable soup and leave it to simmer on the stove. The radio station plays beautiful music. All day the weather volleys between winter wonderland and wild storm. I bring out the old photo albums and page through the imperfect memories, her smile but not her laughter, her face but not her breath, her skin but not her touch. I rock and weep. Outside, the storm rages. This is how I spend the first Christmas without her, crying, napping, in fits of peace and rage.

I go to bed early and, for the first time since she died, sleep through the night. In the morning, a bright winter sun is reflected a thousand times in the thick ice that coats the branches outside my bedroom window and hangs from the eaves like daggers. The phone rings.

“Hello?”

“Mom?”

“Steff, talk to me, what do you want?”

“Maggie Dwinder.”

“What?”

But there is no answer, only a dial tone.

I tear up half the house looking for the local phone book, searching through drawers and cupboards, until at last I find it in Jack’s old office on the middle of the otherwise empty desk. Jack used to sit here in a chaos of papers and folders, a pencil tucked behind his ear, the computer screen undulating with a swirl of colored tubes that broke apart and reassembled over and over again. I bring the phone book to the kitchen where I page through to the Ds and find, Dwinder, Reverend John, and Nancy. My hand is shaking when I dial.

“Hello,” a cheerful voice answers on the first ring.

“Hello, is Maggie there?”

“Speaking.”

“Maggie, I spoke to you on Christmas Eve, at the grocery store.”

“Uh-huh?”

“You said you could help me.”

“I’m not sure I, oh.” The voice drops to a serious tone. “I’ve been expecting you to call. She really has something important to tell you.” While I absorb this, she adds, “I’m really sorry about what happened.” Her voice changes to a cheerful tone, “Really? All of it? That’s great!”

“I’m sorry I—”

“No way! Everything?”

“Maggie, are you afraid of being overheard?”

“That’s the truth.”

“Maybe you should come over here.”

“Okay, when?”

“Can you come now?”

“Yeah, I have to do the dishes and then I can come over.”

“Do you know where I live?”

“Doesn’t everybody?”

“Can you get here or should I . . .”

“No. I’ll be over as soon as I can.”

She took so long to arrive that I started watching for her at the window. In the midst of more bad weather, I saw the dark figure walking up the road. At first, even though I knew she was coming, I had the ridiculous notion that it was Steffie’s ghost, but as she got closer, I recognized the old wool coat, the brown knit hat and scarf crusted with snow. She walked carefully, her head bent with the wind, her hands thrust in her pockets, her narrow shoulders hunched against the chill, her snow-crusted jeans tucked into old boots, the kind with buckles. I asked myself how this rag doll was going to help me, then opened the door for her. For a moment she stood there, as if considering turning back, then she nodded and stepped inside.

“You must be freezing. Please, take off your coat.”

She whipped off the knit hat and revealed straight, brown hair that fell to her shoulders as she unwrapped the long, wet scarf, unbuttoned her coat (still wearing her gloves, one blue, the other black). She sat to unbuckle her boots, while I hung her things in the hall closet. When I returned, she sat at the kitchen table, hunched over in a white sweatshirt. It occurred to me that she might fit into one of Steffie’s baggier sweaters, but I offered her one of mine instead. She shook her head and said (as she shivered), “No thanks, I’m warm enough.”

“Do you want some tea?” She shrugged, then shook her head. “Hot chocolate?”

She looked up and smiled. “Yes, please.” I opened the refrigerator, took out the milk. “I like your house. It’s not at all like I heard.”

I pour the milk into the pan. “What did you hear?”

“Oh, different stuff.”

I set the pan on the burner and start opening cupboards, looking for the chocolate bars from last winter.

“Some people say you’re a witch.”

This is a new one and I’m so startled by it that I bang my head on the shelf. I touch the sore spot and turn to look at her.

“Of course I don’t believe it,” she says. “I think of you more as a Mother Nature type.”

I find the bars and, after only a short search, the sharp knife we used for cutting the dark chocolate, which I drop in with the milk, and stir.

“I never saw anyone make it like this before. We always just add water.”

“We used to make real whipped cream for it, too.”

“Of course I wouldn’t care if you was, ’cause, you know, I sort of am.”

“Excuse me?”

“Well, you know, like, I told you, dead people talk to me.”

I’m glad I have an excuse to not look at her as I stir and stir, waiting for the chocolate to melt. When it has, I pour in the rest of the milk, whisking it to just below a boil, then pour two mugs full. There is a temporary break in the weather. Sun streams across the kitchen table. I hand the little witch her mug. She holds it with both hands, sniffs it, and smiles.

“You don’t look like a witch.”

She shrugs. “Well, who knows?”

I sit across from her with my own mug of hot chocolate. Yes. Who knows? All I know is that Steffie told me she wanted Maggie Dwinder. So here she is, sipping hot chocolate in my kitchen, and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with her.

As if sensing my inquiry, she stops sipping and looks at me over the rim of the cup. “She wants to come back.”

“Come back?”

“She misses you, and she misses it here.” She slowly lowers the cup, sets it on the table. “But there’s a problem. A couple problems, actually. She can’t stay, of course. She can only be here for a little while and then she has to go back.”

“No she doesn’t.”

“She’s been gone a long time.”

“You don’t have to tell me that.”

She bites her chapped lips.

“I’m sorry. This isn’t easy for me.”

“Yeah. Anyway, she can’t stay. I’m sorry, too, but that’s the way it is. Those are the rules and, also . . .”

“Yes?”

“I don’t think you’re going to like this part.”

“Please tell me.”

She looks up at me and then down at the table. “The thing is, she doesn’t want to stay here anyway, she sort of likes it where she is.”

“Being dead?”

Maggie shrugs and attempts a feeble smile. “Well, you could say that’s her life now.”

I push back from the table, my chair scraping across the floor. “Is that supposed to be funny?” Maggie shrinks at my voice. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” she says, softly. “Maybe she figures she sort of belongs there now.”

“When?”

“What?”

“When does she want to come?”

“That’s why she talked to me. ’Cause she said you’ve been really upset and all, but she wonders if you can wait until spring?”

“Spring?”

“Yeah. She wants to come in the spring. If it’s okay with you.” Maggie watches me closely as I consider this imperfect offer, my daughter returned but only borrowed from the dead. What rational response can there be? Life is composed of large faiths, in the series of beliefs that sustain us, we little humans whose very existence is a borrowing from the dead. I look into Maggie’s brown eyes, I fall into them and feel as if I’m being pulled into the earth. All this, as we sit at the kitchen table, a world done and undone, a life given and taken. “Yes,” I say. “Tell her spring will be fine.”

We are like one of my paintings. Small, in a vast landscape. The snow glistens outside. We are not cold, or hungry, or anything but this, two figures through a lit window, waiting.

Maggie and I became friends of sorts. She liked to sit in the kitchen and chat over hot chocolate about her school day. (Most of her classmates, and all her teachers, were “boring.”) The cat liked to sit in her lap.

There were no more phone calls from Stephanie. “Don’t worry about that,” Maggie reassured me, “she’ll be here soon enough and you can really talk.”

It was the worst winter on record. Maggie said that the students were really “pissed” because they would have to make up days in June.

I grew to look forward to her visits. Eventually we got to talking about painting and she showed me some of her sketches, the ones assigned by the art teacher: boxes, shoes, books, and the ones she drew from her imagination: vampires and shadowed, winged figures, pictures that might have warned me were I not spending my days painting girls picking flowers, with dark figures descending on them. I thought Maggie was wise. She understood and accepted the way the world is, full of death and sorrow. This did not seem to affect her happiness. On the contrary, she seemed to be blossoming, losing the tired, haggard look she had when I first met her. I mentioned this to her one day over hot chocolate and she opened her mouth, then bit her lip and nodded.

“What were you going to say?”

“I don’t know if I should.”

“No, go ahead.”

“It was your daughter.”

“What was my daughter?”

“She was wearing me out. I know she wasn’t meaning to, but it’s like she was haunting me ever since she, I mean, she wouldn’t leave me alone.”

“That doesn’t sound like Steffie.”

“Yeah, well, I guess people change when they’re, you know, dead.”

I nod.

“Anyway, it stopped once I talked to you. I guess she just wanted to make sure you got the message.”

I remember that time as being almost joyful. What a relief it was to think of our separation as temporary, that she would return to me as she had been before she left, carrying flowers, her cheeks flushed, her eyes bright with happiness.

I got the phone call on a Tuesday afternoon. I remember this so clearly because I marked it with a big, black X on the calendar, and also, that day, though it was already April, there was another storm, so sudden that six motorists were killed in a four-car pileup, one of them a teenage boy. But that was later, after Maggie’s parents left.

Maggie’s mother calls in the morning, introduces herself, and says that she and her husband want to talk to me, could they stop by for a visit.

How can I refuse them? They are Maggie’s parents and I’m sure concerned and curious about this adult she is spending so much time with. Nancy, Maggie’s mother, sounds nice enough on the phone. When they arrive an hour later, I think I could like her and, to my surprise, the reverend, too.

She has a wide, pleasant face, lightly freckled, red hair the color of certain autumn leaves, and hazel eyes that measure me with a cool but kind mother-to-mother look. She wears a long, dark wool skirt, boots, and a red sweater.

Her husband has a firm handshake and kind, brown eyes. His hair is dark and curly, a little long about the ears. He has a neatly trimmed beard and mustache. I am immediately disturbed and surprised to find myself somewhat attracted to him. He wears blue jeans, and a green sweater that looks homemade and often worn.

They sit side by side on the couch. I sit in the rocker. A pot of tea cools on the table between us, three cups and saucers on the tray beside it. “Would you like some tea?”

Nancy glances at her husband and he nods. “Thank you,” he says, “allow me.” He reaches over and pours tea for the three of us. I find this simple gesture comforting. How long it has been since anyone has done anything for me.

“I have to thank you,” I say, “you’ve been so kind about allowing Maggie to visit and her company has been much appreciated.”

They nod in unison. Then both begin to speak. With a nod from his wife, the reverend continues.

“I feel I owe you an apology. I should have visited you much sooner and then, perhaps, none of this would have happened.” He laughs one of those rueful laughs I was always reading about. “What I mean to say is, I should have offered you my services when you were suffering, but I thought that you probably had more spiritual assistance than you knew what to do with.” He looks at me hopefully.

But I cannot offer him that redemption. Oddly, there had been no one. Oh, many letters offering prayers, and accusations, and a couple Bibles mailed to the house, but no one stood and held my hand, so to speak, spiritually. There was something distasteful about my involvement in Steffie’s horrible death; no one wanted any part of it.

He looks into his teacup and sighs.

“We’re sorry,” Nancy says in a clear, steady voice. “We’ve been involved with our own problems and because of that it seems we haven’t always made the right choices. It’s affected our judgment.”

“Please, don’t worry about it. You’re kind to come now.”

The reverend sets his cup on the table. “We’re here about Maggie.”

“She’s a lovely girl.”

Nancy sets her cup and saucer on the table, licks her lips. I smile at the gesture, so reminiscent of her daughter. “We thought, well, we want you to understand, we hope you understand, that we thought you, being an artist, and Maggie, being so creative . . .”

The reverend continues. “We prayed and pondered, and thought maybe you two would be good for each other.”

“We made the choice to let her be with you for both your sakes.”

“Certainly we had no idea.”

“Oh, no idea at all.”

Suddenly I feel so cold. I sit in the rocking chair and look at the two of them with their earnest faces. I want them to leave. I don’t understand yet what they’ve come to say, but I know I don’t want to hear it.

The reverend looks at me with those beautiful eyes and shakes his head. “We’re sorry.”

Nancy leans forward and reaches as though to pat me on the knee but the reach is short and she brushes air instead. “It’s not her fault. It’s just the way she is. We only hope you can find it in your heart to forgive her.”

The reverend nods. “We know what we’re asking here, a woman like you, who has so much to forgive already.”

My hands are shaking when I set my teacup down. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The reverend just looks at me with sorrowful eyes. Nancy nods, bites her lower lip, and says, “We know what she’s been telling you,” she says. “We found her diary.”

I open my mouth. She raises her hand. “I know, I would have thought the same thing. It’s horrible to read your child’s diary, but I did, and I don’t regret it.” She glances at her husband who does not return the look. “How else can a mother know? They’re so secretive at this age. And I was right. After all, look what she’s been doing.”

I look from her to the reverend. “We know, we can guess how tempting it’s been for you to believe her,” he says.

“She’s ill, really ill.”

“We knew this even before—”

“I read her diary.”

“But we never thought she—”

“How could we? We hope you understand, she’s mentally ill. She didn’t mean to cause you pain.”

The cold moves through me. Why are they here with their petty family squabbles? So she read her daughter’s diary, while I, imperfect mother, never even looked for Steffie’s, or had any idea what her email address was. Why are they here apologizing for their living daughter? Why do I care? “I’m not sure I—”

“There’s also a scrapbook. If I would have known, if we would have known—”

“A scrapbook?”

The reverend clears his throat. “She was obsessed with your daughter’s death. I try to understand it, but God help me, I don’t. She saved every article—”

“Every picture.”

I imagine Maggie cutting up newspapers, gluing the stories into a red scrapbook, the kind I had as a girl. “It’s all right,” I say, though I’m not sure that it is. “A lot of people were fascinated by it.” I imagine myself on an iceberg, drifting into the deep, cold blue.

The reverend opens his mouth but Nancy speaks, like a shout from the unwanted shore. “You don’t understand. We know what she’s been telling you, about your daughter coming back, and of course, we hope you realize it’s all made up.”

There. The words spoken. I close my eyes. The ice in my blood crashes like glass. The reverend’s voice whispers from the distance. “We’re sorry. It must have been tempting to believe her—”

“She called me. I spoke to her.”

He shakes his head. “It was Maggie.”

“A mother knows her daughter’s voice.”

“But you were so upset, right? And she never said much, did she? And in your state—”

“Nancy,” the reverend says gently.

The room is filled with sad silence. I can’t look at either of them. How stupid I have been, how unbearably stupid. I see the reverend’s legs, and then his wife’s, unbending.

The world is ending, I think, all darkness and ice, like the poem.

“We should leave,” says the reverend.

I watch the legs cross the room. Listen to the closet door, the rattle of hangars. Whispering. “We’re sorry,” says Nancy. Footsteps in the kitchen. Door opened. “Snow!” Closed.

All darkness and despair. The greatest loneliness. A shattering. Ice. Who knows how long until at last I throw the cups across the room, the teapot, still full. Brown tea bleeds down the wall. I scream and weep into darkness. Now I know what waits at world’s end. Rage is what fills the emptiness. Rage, and it is cold.

How we suffer, we humans. Pain and joy, but always pain again. How do we do this? Why? Some small part of me still waits for spring. Just to be sure. I know it is absurd, but the rational knowing does not change the irrational hope.

I figured Maggie’s parents had told her that they talked to me. I couldn’t imagine she would want to face my wrath, though she couldn’t know that I didn’t even have the energy for anger anymore. Instead I felt a tired sorrow, a weariness with life. She did come, in the midst of a downpour, knocking on my door after school, wearing a yellow slicker. I finally opened the door just a crack and peered out at her, drenched like a stray dog, her hair hanging dark in her face, her lashes beaded with water.

“Go home, Maggie.”

“Please. You have to talk to me.”

She is crying and snot drips from her nose toward her mouth. She wipes it with the back of her hand, sniffing loudly.

I simply do not know what to say. I close the door.

“You were the only one who ever believed me!” she shouts.

Later, when I look out the window, she is gone, as if I imagined her, made her up out of all my pain.

I decide to sell the house, though I don’t do anything about it. I sleep day and night. One day I realize I haven’t seen the cat for a long while. I walk around whistling and calling her name, but she doesn’t appear. I sit at the kitchen table and stare out the window until gradually I realize I’m looking at spring. Green grass, leaves, tulip and daffodil blooms thrust through the wreck of the garden. Spring. I open windows and doors. Birds twitter in branches. Squirrels scurry across the lawn. Almost a year since we lost her. Gone. My little darling.

Then I see someone, is it, no, in the garden, picking daffodils, her long, dark hair tied with a weedy-looking thing, wearing the dress she had on last year, tattered and torn, my daughter, my ghost.

“Stephanie!” I call.

She turns and looks at me. Yes. It is her face but changed, with a sharpness to it I had not foreseen. She smiles, raises her arm and sweeps the sky with flowers and I am running down the steps and she is running through the garden calling, “Mom, Mom, Mom!” I think when I touch her she will disappear but she doesn’t, though she flinches and squirms from the hug. “You can’t hold me so close anymore,” she says.

So I hold her gently, like the fragile thing she is, and I’m weeping and she’s laughing and somehow, with nimble fingers she braids the bouquet into a crown, which she sets on my head. She covers my face with kisses, so soft I’m sure I’m imagining all of it but I don’t care anyway. I never want to wake up or snap out of it. I want to be with her always. “Steffie, Steffie, Steffie, I’ve missed you so much.”

She has bags under her eyes and her skin is pale and cold. She stares at me, unsmiling, then reaches up, takes the crown from my head and places it on her own. “You’ve changed a lot.” She turns and looks at the yard. “Everything has.”

“It’s been a hard year,” I say to her narrow back and bony elbows. She looks like such a little orphan, so motherless standing there in that dirty dress. I’ll make her something new, something pretty. She turns and looks at me with an expression like none I’d ever seen on her in her lifetime, a hate-filled face, angry and sharp. “Steff, honey, what is it?”

“Don’t. Tell. Me. How hard. This year. Has been.”

“Oh sweetie,” I reach for her but she pulls back.

“I told you. Don’t touch me.”

“At all?”

“I’m the queen,” she says. “Don’t touch me unless I touch you first.”

I don’t argue or disagree. The queen, my daughter, even in death maintains that imagination I so highly prize. When I ask her if she is hungry she says, “I only ate one thing the whole time I was gone.” I feel this surge of anger. What kind of place is this death? She doesn’t want to come inside while I make the sandwiches and I’m afraid she’ll be gone when I come out with the tray, but she isn’t. We have a picnic under the apple tree, which is in white bloom and buzzing with flies, then she falls asleep on the blanket beside me and, to my surprise, I fall asleep, too.

I wake, cold and shivering, already mourning the passing dream. I reach to wrap the picnic blanket around me and my hand touches her. Real. Here. My daughter, sleeping.

“I told you not to touch me.”

“I’m sorry. Honey, are you cold?”

She rolls over and looks up at me. “You do realize I’m dead?”

“Yes.”

She sets the wilted crown back on her head and surveys the yard. “You really let everything go to shit around here, didn’t you?”

“Stephanie!”

“What?”

Really, what? How to be the mother of a dead girl? We sit on the blanket and stare at each other. What she is thinking, I don’t know. I’m surprised, in the midst of this momentous happiness, to feel a sadness, a certain grief for the girl I knew who, I guess, was lost somewhere at the border of death. Then she sighs, a great old sigh.

“Mom?” she says, in her little girl voice.

“Yes, honey?”

“It’s good to be back.”

“It’s good to have you here.”

“But I can’t stay.”

“How long?”

She shrugs.

“Is it horrible there?”

She looks at me, her face going through some imperceptible change that brings more harshness to it. “Don’t ask the dead.”

“What?”

“Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to.”

“Just stay. Don’t go back.”

She stands up. “It doesn’t work like that.”

“We could—”

“No, don’t act like you know anything about it. You don’t.”

I roll up the blanket, pick up the tray. We walk to the house together beneath the purple-tinged sky. When we get to the door she hesitates. “What’s wrong?” She looks at me with wide, frightened eyes. “Steff, what is it?” Wordlessly, she steps inside. I flick on the kitchen light. “Are you hungry?”

She nods.

The refrigerator is nearly empty so I rummage through cupboards and find some spaghetti and a jar of sauce. I fill a pan with water and set it on the stove.

“Is Dad coming back?”

“Would you like to see him?”

She shakes her head vigorously, no.

“Steff, don’t be mad at him, he didn’t know—”

“Well, he really fucked up.”

I bite my lip, check the water. Where is my little girl? I turn and look at her. She is walking around the kitchen, lightly brushing her hand against the wall, a strange, unlovely creature, her hair still knotted with a weed, crowned with wilted daffodils.

“Do you want to talk about it, what happened to you?”

She stops, the tips of her fingers light against the wall, then continues walking around the room, humming softly.

I take this to be a no. I make spaghetti for six and she eats all of it, my ravenous ghost child. What is this feeling? Here is my dead daughter, cold and unkind and difficult and so different from the girl she used to be that only now do I finally accept that Stephanie is gone forever, even as she sits before me, slurping spaghetti, the red sauce blooding her lips.

The dead move in secrets, more wingless than the living, bound by some weight; the memory of life, the impossible things? Dead bones grow, and hair and fingernails, too. Everything grows, but it grows with death. The dead laugh and cry and plant flowers that they pick too soon. The dead do not care about keeping gardens in blossom.

Dead daughters don’t wear socks or shoes and they won’t go into old bedrooms unless you beg and coax and then you see immediately how they were right all along. Dead daughters have little in common with the living ones. They are more like sisters than the same girl and you realize, just as you miss the daughter you’ve lost, so does the dead girl miss, really miss, the one she was.

The dead pick up paintbrushes and suddenly their hands move like rag dolls and they splatter paint, not like Jackson Pollack, or even a kindergartner. All the paint turns brown on the paintbrush and drips across the canvas or floor or wall, until they, helpless, throw it to the ground.

All the dead can do is wander. You walk for hours with your dead daughter pacing the yard she will not (cannot?) leave. She picks all the flowers and drops them in her step. She sleeps suddenly for hours, and then does not sleep for days. She exhausts you. The days and nights whirl. The last time you felt like this was when she was an infant.

One day, as you sit at the kitchen table, watching her tearing flowers from the garden in the new dress you made that already hangs raglike and dirty around her, you think of Maggie Dwinder and you realize you miss her. You put your face in your hands. What have you done?

“What’s wrong with you?”

You would like to believe that she asks because she cares, but you don’t think that’s true. Something vital in her was lost forever. Was this what happened at death or was it because of how she died? You accept you’ll never know. She refuses to talk about it, and really, what would be the point? You look at her, weedy, dirty, wearing that brittle crown. “Maggie Dwinder,” you say.

“As good as dead.”

“What?”

She rolls her eyes.

“Don’t you roll your eyes at me, young lady.”

“Mother, you don’t know anything about it.”

“She’s your friend, and mine. She told me you would come. She suffered for it.”

“Oh, big deal, mommy and daddy watch her very closely. She has to go see the psychiatrist. She doesn’t have any friends. Big fucking deal. What a hard life!”

“Steff.”

“Don’t tell me about suffering. I know about suffering.”

“Steff, honey—”

“Everyone said it was a mistake for me to come back here. They said you wouldn’t like me anymore.”

“Honey, that’s not true. I love you.”

“You love who I used to be, not who I am now.”

“Well, you’re dead.”

“Like it’s my fault.”

The dead are jealous, jealous, jealous and they will do anything to keep you from the living, the lucky living. They will argue with you, and distract you, and if that doesn’t work, they will even let you hug them, and dance for you, and kiss you, and laugh, anything to keep you. The dead are selfish. Jealous. Lonely. Desperate. Hungry.

It isn’t until she brings you a flower, dead for weeks, and hands it to you with that poor smile, that you again remember the living. “I have to call Maggie.”

“Forget about her.”

“No, I have to tell her.”

“Look at me, Mommy.”

“Sweetheart.”

“Look what you did.”

“It wasn’t me.”

She walks away.

“It wasn’t.”

She keeps walking.

You follow. Of course, you follow.

The phone rings. Such a startling noise. I roll into my blankets. Simultaneously I realize the night was cool enough for blankets and that the phone didn’t ring all summer. I reach for it, fumbling across the bedside table, and knock off the photograph from Steff’s last birthday.

“Hello?”

“See you next spring.”

“Steff? Where are you?”

There is only a dial tone. I hang up the phone. Throw off the covers. “Steff!” I call. “Steff!” I look in her bedroom but she’s not there. I run down the stairs and through the house, calling her name. The blue throw is bunched up on the couch, as if she’d sat there for a while, wrapped up in it, but she’s not there now. I run outside, the grass cold against my feet. “Steff! Steff!” She is not in the garden, or the studio. She is not in the yard. A bird cries and I look up through the apple tree branches. One misshapen apple drops while I stand there, shivering in my nightgown. Everything is tinged with brown, except the leaves of the old oak, which are a brilliant red.

A squirrel scurries past. There is a gentle breeze and one red leaf falls. I wrap my arms around myself and walk into the house, fill the teakettle, set it on the burner to boil. I sit at the kitchen table and stare at the garden. I should plant some bulbs. Order firewood. Arrange to have the driveway plowed when it snows. The teakettle whistles. I walk across the cool floor, pour the water into the pot. I leave it to steep and go to the living room where she left the blue throw all balled up. I pick it up and wrap it around myself. It smells like her, musty, sour.

It smells like Maggie, too, last Christmas Eve when she spoke to me in the supermarket. What a risk that was for her. Who knows, I might have been like Mrs. Bialo, or her parents; I might have laughed at her. Instead, I became her friend and then cast her aside at the first sign of trouble.

How many chances do we get? With love? How many times do we wreck it before it’s gone?

I don’t even drink the tea but dress in a rush. All my clothes are too big on me and I see in the mirror how tired I look, how much new gray is in my hair. Yet, there’s something else, a sort of glow, a happiness. I miss her, the one who died, and her ghost is my responsibility, a relationship based on who we lost, while Maggie is a friend, a relationship based on what we found.

All summer I only left for groceries. Stephanie would stand at the top of the driveway, watching me with those cold, narrow eyes as if suspicious I wouldn’t come back. Out of habit I look in the rearview mirror, but all I see is a patch of brown grass, the edge of the house.

It’s easy to find the Dwinder residence. They live right next to the church in a brick house with red geraniums dropping teardrop-shaped petals onto the porch. I ring the bell. Nancy answers, in a pink terry cloth robe.

“I’m sorry, I forgot how early it is.”

She brushes a hand through her red hair. “That’s all right. We were getting ready for church.”

“There’s something I have to tell Maggie. Is she home?”

“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”

“Honey, who is it?” The reverend comes to the door in plaid flannel pants and a T-shirt, his dark hair tousled, his face wrinkled with sleep. “Oh. Chloe, how are you?”

“I’m sorry to disturb you, it’s just—”

“She wants to talk to Maggie.”

“I’ll tell her you’re here.” The reverend turns back into the house.

Nancy continues to stare at me, then, just as I hear Maggie saying, What does she want? she blurts, “She’s been better since she’s stopped seeing you.” I’m not sure if this is meant as an accusation or an apology and before I can find out, Maggie comes to the door dressed in torn jeans and a violet T-shirt, her hair in braids. She meets my gaze with those dark eyes.

“Coffee’s ready!” the reverend calls and Nancy turns away, her pink-robed figure receding slowly down the hall.

“Yeah?”

“I was hoping, if you can forgive me, I was hoping we could be friends again.”

“I can’t be her replacement, you know.”

“I know.”

“You hurt me a lot.”

“I know. I’m sorry. Can you ever forgive me?”

She frowns, squints, then tilts her head slightly, and looks up at me. “I guess.”

“Please. Stop by. Any time. Like you used to.”

She nods and shuts the door gently in my face.

On a sunny but cold day, as the last crimson leaves flutter to earth, and apples turn to cider on the ground, I shovel last winter’s ash onto the garden. A flock of geese flies overhead. I shade my eyes to watch them pass and when I look down again, she is standing there in baggy jeans and an old blue pea coat, unbuttoned in the sun.

It’s as though I’ve been living in one of those glass domes and it’s been shaking for a long time, but in this moment, has stopped, and after all that flurry and unsettling, there is a kind of peace. “Maggie.”

For a moment we only look at each other, then she puts her hand on her hip, rolls her eyes, and says, “You wouldn’t believe what they’re making us do in gym, square dancing!”

All life is death. You don’t fool yourself about this anymore. You slash at the perfect canvas with strokes of paint and replace the perfect picture of your imagination with the reality of what you are capable of. From death, and sorrow, and compromise, you create. This is what it means, you finally realize, to be alive.

You try to explain this to Maggie. You hear yourself talking about bitter seeds, and sweet fruit. She nods and doesn’t interrupt but you know you have not successfully communicated it. This is all right. The grief is so large you’re not sure you want her, or anyone, to understand it, though you wish you could describe this other emotion.

You stand in the ash of your garden. All this time you didn’t realize what you’d been deciding. Now you are crying, because with the realization of the question comes the answer. It is snowing and white flakes fall onto the garden, sticking to the brown stems and broken flowers, melting into the ash. You look up to the sunless white sky. Cold snow tips your face and neck. You close your eyes, and think, yes. Oh, life. Yes.

© 2003 by M. Rickert.

Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

M. Rickert’s stories have been appearing regularly in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction for several years, starting in 1999 with her first publication, “The Girl Who Ate Butterflies.” Her work has also appeared in SCI FICTION and the anthologies Wastelands, Poe, and Feeling Very Strange. A new collection of her short fiction, Holiday, came out in November. Her first collection, Map of Dreams, won the World Fantasy Award and the William L. Crawford Award for best first book-length work of fantasy, and her story “Journey to the Kingdom” won her another World Fantasy Award and was a finalist for the Nebula Award. This story was a finalist for the Stoker, British SF, and Shirley Jackson awards. Learn more at www.mrickert.net.

NOVEL EXCERPTS

NOVEL EXCERPT:
The Cormorant
Chuck Wendig

13. TORCH KEY

The Fiero drives under power lines. She follows the road that turns off toward the gulf side of Middle Torch Key and winds its way through a salt marsh of scrub and stunted palm. The air conditioning in the Fiero suddenly grumbles, vibrating like a paint-shaker, before giving off a cough and a burning smell.

She curses under her breath. Fiddles with the knobs. Slams the vents with the heel of her hand before finally rolling the windows down.

The humid air crawls in. A few cool breeze streamers come with it.

Bats dip and dart overhead. Shadows blacker than the night, flitting after mosquitoes.

Another bridge from Middle Torch Key to Big Torch Key.

Along the way she passes a shirtless man on a rickety bike. His skin glistens in the yellow of her headlights—red flesh like he’s a kielbasa left too long on the grill. He turns toward her, toothless and drunk, and gives a sloppy wave that almost causes him to ditch the bike in a pothole.

She keeps driving.

Big Torch Key.

Nothing out here. She’s beginning to think this is some kind of joke. Even in the damp, slithering heat she can feel the skin on the back of her neck and arms prick up, the hairs standing at full attention. Worry tickles at her like a rat licking its paws. Out here it’s just road and scrub and mangrove, and it’s then she thinks, This is some kind of game. I drove all the way to Florida to fall prey to some sicko’s amusement.

Of course it’s a ruse. Five grand? Off of Craigslist? Shit. Shit! She thinks, I have to get the fuck out of here—fast, too, before she goes too far and drives over a spike-strip and blows her tires and ends up part of some twisted cannibal game out here in the subtropical nowhere—

But then she sees. Ahead, the flickering of actual torchlight.

Glinting off the metal of a driveway gate.

She sees a mailbox—a faded blue dolphin holding a mailbox, actually, some kind of roadside statue. Ridiculous and tacky, sure.

But also a sign of life.

She eases the car forward.

The number on the mailbox matches the number on her directions.

She’s here.

It’s real.

Well. OK, then.

As if on cue, the gate opens. Mechanized.

It shudders and squeals as it swings wide.

She eases the Fiero into the driveway. White gravel grinds beneath her tires. Ahead, past the half-circle drive, sits a plantation-style house. Bent palms stand on both sides of the house like hands sheltering it. Or perhaps propping it up.

Warm orange light from within. Tiki torches lining the drive, flame licking the air, little vines of white smoke climbing.

The front door opens. A man comes out. Older. Late forties. Early fifties. Hair the color of sand swept down over his ears: long, shaggy, wind-frizzled. His arms are out wide, welcoming. Big smile. White teeth.

He beckons for her to park by the side.

She kills the engine. She gets out, takes the sunglasses off the top of her head, tosses them on the dash.

The man’s already on her. Coming toward her fast, arms up and out—

She’s already ready for it.

Her wrist flicks and the black four-inch lock-blade from her back pocket opens.

She points it, thrusts it at the open air. Swish, swish.

“Whoa, whoa, darling, what the—” He laughs, nervous, taking a couple clumsy steps backward. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

“Then maybe don’t come up on a girl so fast.”

“It’s not like that—”

“I don’t know what it’s like. You invite me out here. Middle of the night. Middle of nowhere. Promise me five grand. Then come up on me like a hungry dog sniffing for treats? That’s a good way to get shanked, Jimmy Buffett.”

He laughs. Still nervous. “Well. I sure don’t want to get shanked.”

“Then take five more steps backward.”

He does.

“What’s your name?” she asks.

“Steve.”

“Steve what?”

“Steve Max.”

“That’s two first names.”

“I guess it is, yeah.”

She keeps the knife pointed at him. A stabby accuser. “My name’s Miriam Black.”

“Hi, Miriam. I’m glad you came down to meet me.”

“Go,” she says. “Go inside. I’ll follow you.”

“Are you going to rob me?” he asks.

“Are you going to rape me and kill me?” she asks him. “Or kill me and rape my dead body?”

“That wasn’t my plan.”

“And robbing you wasn’t mine. Like I said, go. I’ll follow.”

He smiles. Nervous. Then does as she asks.

Her gaze flits through the scrub and the trees. Looking for shadows. Nothing. Still, something here feels wrong. Paranoia crawls over her like a colony of ants.

With a deep breath, knife in hand, Miriam goes inside.

14. HEMINGWAY’S SPIRIT

The inside of the house is full of dark timber and tan bamboo. Palm fronds. Tiki mugs on shelves. A big-screen TV on the far wall—big enough you could turn it on its back and use the thing as a dining room table for six people. A ceiling fan of thatched wood turns lazily overhead.

Steve precedes her, and once he’s inside, it’s like he stops worrying about the crazy road-weary chick with the knife in her hand. Like he just lets go of all his cares, letting them float to the heavens on the wings of pretty-pretty butterflies. He saunters over to a one-person bar in the corner, steps behind it, his shirt open, his hand scratching the salty wire-brush hairs growing up out of his bare chest. He’s so tan Miriam thinks someone should skin him and use his pelt to make a nice set of luggage.

He reaches down under the bar and she barks—“Hey, hey, hey!”—and he quickly jerks back up again, hands up like he’s a bank teller about to get robbed. He laughs, nervous.

“Ho now, what’s the problem?”

“What’s behind the bar?” She waggles the knife at him.

“Rum.”

“Rum?”

“I was gonna make us a couple of daiquiris.” He pats a stumpy bar-top blender. “Kind of a welcome to the Keys drink. Hemingway’s favorite cocktail.”

“Hemingway was a diabetic. His favorite drink was a dry martini.”

“Oh. No shit? I didn’t know that. You read a lot?”

“When I can.” Homeless girls love libraries, she thinks but does not say.

“I have some vodka and vermouth here.”

“That’s not a martini.”

“Why, sure it is.”

“Jesus, dude, I don’t want to get into a cocktail pissing match with you, but a martini is gin. Always gin. Putting vodka in a martini is like—”

“Whiskey in a margarita?”

“It’s like spitting in my mouth and calling it champagne.”

His mouth seems frozen in a rigor mortis smile. “I don’t have gin.”

“Then I don’t want whatever it is you would call a martini.”

“Back to daiquiris, then.”

“Are you going to poison me?”

He crosses his arms and leans forward on the bar. Ringlets of beach-blond hair frame his face. “Miriam, I understand your apprehension, I do, but this isn’t anything . . . weird. I’m cool. We’re cool. Here’s how we’re gonna fix this, OK? Over there on the side table by the patio door, there’s a canvas bag, and in that canvas bag is twenty-five hundred bucks. Half of what I said I’d pay you for the vision. You go over there. You take that money. You can leave if you want to. But if you stay, I got a grill out on the patio and a table out on the dock and we can sit out there and eat some shrimp and mahi I got cooking up—little lime, little cilantro, little mango salsa—and then we can get down to business. By which I mean you tell me how I’m going to die and you get the other half of your money and then you can go on your way with a full belly and a fat sack of cash.”

“Why?”

“What?”

“Why do you want to know how you’re going to die?”

His easygoing smile falls away like dead leaves off an autumn tree. He searches for words. It’s like he doesn’t even know the answer to that question, which is eventually exactly what he says. “I don’t know. I’ve always been a little obsessed with it. Living life to the . . . well, to the max. It is my last name and all, so I figure I better live up to it.” Here an awkward laugh like he’s knows it’s super-douchey and not very funny but it’s out there and now they have to deal with it. “I just want to know how much time I got left. I’m on the wrong side of middle age and you’ll see—one day you’ll get older and realize that the ride starts to speed up when you think it should be slowing down.”

She lets the knife fall to her side and hang there in her hand.

Miriam goes to the white canvas bag. Hooks a finger around a strap. Lifts. Separates. Sees wads of cash piled haphazardly atop one another, held together with little rubber bands.

“You can count it,” he says.

“I’m good. It’s good.”

“You wanna eat?”

She closes the knife and pockets it.

“I could eat,” she says, then walks past him out onto the patio.

15. DISEASEBURGER IN PARADISE

Outside: the heady, narcotic smell of shrimp and planked fish on a small charcoal grill. Steve goes on a hunt for plates, doesn’t seem to know where he keeps them. He tells her he has a new maid—“Cuban girl, skin like café con leche, just pretty as the sunset, but she always rearranges my stuff and it’s like a scavenger hunt trying to figure out where.”

Miriam sits at the patio table. A dock extends out over the bay water like a red carpet to the deep blue oblivion.

The moon hangs fat in the sky like it might give birth to a litter of baby moons, and maybe some stars, and a swirl of galaxies, too.

Something bites her arm. A mosquito, she assumes, though she can’t see it in the torchlight.

She swats at it as Steve puts a plate in front of her. Alongside a drink. A pink drink. She scowls at it. “Strawberry daiquiri,” he says, obviously obsessed with the damn things, and she sniffs at it and pushes it away—too cloying, too strawberry, too pink. She’s thinking of just asking for the bottle of rum when something bites her arm again. Twice. Then a third time.

“Ow, sonofab—” Swat swat swat. She pulls her hand back and expects to see little greasy skeeter-stains, but no such luck.

“No-see-ums.”

“No-who-nows?”

“Little gnats. Fast little stinkers. Zip in, take a bite, then they take off again with your blood still in their mouths. Here.” He takes a long-neck lighter and lights a citronella candle. The chemical citrus stink fills the air. Whatever appetite she had is suddenly gone—her guts are already cinched up in stubborn knots and she’s not sure why.

She pushes the plate away.

“Not hungry?” he asks.

“I’m fine.”

He pokes at a shrimp, then pushes his own plate away.

“Pretty night.”

“I’m not sleeping with you.”

“Didn’t say you were. Didn’t we already cover—”

“What is this, anyway? Dinner and drinks on a moonlight patio overlooking the water? Maybe this is a real panty-dropper for the girls you hang with, but I don’t know you and I’m starting to think it’s creepy.”

Now he’s looking a little irritated. “I just figured you drove a helluva long way and you could use a meal. I had to eat. No reason not to fix two plates. Jeez, you’re an edgy broad.”

“Maybe it’s that you’re calling me broad.”

“It’s just a—” He sighs. “It’s just an expression, an old word. Damn, I’m sorry I hurt your feelings. You’re wound too tight. Like a— a— well, like a thing that’s wound too tight.”

“Nice metaphor, Hemingway.”

“Cripes, you’re meaner than my mama.”

She scowls. Narrows her eyes. “Yeah. I’m sorry.”

“You know, living down here it’s like . . . you gotta learn to let things go. Set ’em down on the water and give them to the wind to take out to sea. We’re all about the good times here in the Keys. Take some of the money from tonight and do a little snorkeling. Fish off a bridge. Or just lie around not doing a damn thing except reading books and smoking cigarettes.”

“I’m not the ‘chillax’ type of girl.”

A wind comes off the water. The torch-fire ripples and whispers.

“What type of girl are you?”

“The type with regrets.”

“We all have regrets.”

She smirks. “Not like me, dude.”

She finally grabs at the daiquiri, figuring, well, if it’s poisoned or roofied or he pissed in it then that’s just a thing she’s going to have to deal with. She bangs it back. It’s sweet. Too sweet. Berry and sugar and citrus. Underneath all the diabetes, though, waits a swift horse-kick of rum. Boom. It runs through her like a ripple of blue flame across a puddle of gasoline.

Her teeth crush ice. Crunch crunch crunch.

She sets the empty glass down.

“You can really put ’em away,” he says.

“It’s a skill. I’m a champ.” She puts her hand down on the table, palm up. “Let’s do this. Get it over with. You didn’t hire me to drink your booze and threaten you with knives and snark at you like a snarky snark who snarks, so place your hand in mine and let’s take a hop in the Grim Reaper’s hell-powered stagecoach and see where that bony motherfucker takes us.”

He stares down at her hand. “You wanna take bets?”

“Bets on what?”

“On how I die.”

“That’s morose.”

“You seem like the type of girl who likes morose.”

“I do.” She thinks about it. “Fine. I’ll play along. You’re, what, fifty?”

“Close. Forty-nine.”

“Married?”

“Never once.”

“So, no heart attack.” She winks. “You eat a lot of seafood?”

He waves his arms, inviting her to behold the majesty of the world around him. “I live out here. Of course I eat a lot of seafood.”

“And you got a bit of a poochy belly but no worse than most men your age and, frankly, a little bit better.”

He chuckles. “That’s the sweetest thing you’ve said all night.”

“Can it, Hemingway. Hmm. Let’s see. I vote fishing accident. Boat crash. Shark attack. Fishhook to the jugular. Something like that.”

“I do like fishing.”

“Well, there you go.” She bites at a thumbnail. “So, what’s your bet?”

He pops his lips, drums his fingers. “Cancer.”

“How boring.”

“I’m playing the odds.”

“Smart move. Cancer seems to get us all in the end.”

“Fuck cancer,” he says, and raises his glass.

“So. Is this a real bet? We putting money on the table?”

He cocks his head. “I think the money on the table is already enough. I don’t know that I can do better than five grand. But I like making this a real bet just the same. What do you want if you win?”

“I want to take that bottle of rum behind the bar home with me.”

“Deal.”

“And you?”

His lips spread into a shark’s toothy grin. “I want you to spend the night with me.”

“Aaaaand there it is.”

“You gotta admit, you’re starting to like me.”

She is starting to like him. A little. Maybe. She doesn’t admit it, though. Not yet.

“And you don’t think I’m the ugliest duck in the pond.”

“You’re old,” she says.

“I’m not old. I’m seasoned.”

“A little too salt-and-pepper.”

He leans forward. “I still have a little cayenne pepper going on.”

“I’m not sure if you’re being gross, or sexy, or just plain oblique.”

“I don’t know what oblique means.”

She laughs. “I don’t either.”

Way the firelight plays off him, way the rum is oiling all her gears, she thinks, Well, hell, why not?

“I understand if you don’t want to. Probably a bad idea.”

“Good news for you, I’m very good at bad ideas. I’m in.”

“Shall we shake on it?”

She puts her hand back on the table and he reaches out and—

16. HELLO, MIRIAM

In one year’s time, one year to the day —

It’s night, and Steve Max is bleeding.

He lies across the patio table of the plantation home, his arms splayed out. His legs, too. They are bound by nylon cord.

His face is swollen from a beating. One eye shut by a rising hillock of puffy, bruised brow-flesh. The other eye wide with a small cut beneath it on the cheek (not a fresh cut, this, but a scar, pale pink against the tan skin). His lips are split. His teeth are broken or gone. His tongue looks like a diseased fish poking its head out of the ruined coral grotto that is his mouth.

The torches all around are dark.

Someone is there with him.

Someone in a dark jacket. Hood pulled tight.

Standing there. Holding two things. First, a small pocket knife. Second, a sheet of white copier paper.

The shadowed figure takes the knife and sticks it in the side of Steve Max’s neck—not a deep plunge of the blade, just a quick in-and-out, like he’s just trying to tap a barrel. It strikes the jugular. Makes a small hole.

Blood starts to pump like water from a drinking fountain.

Steve Max screams.

The person takes the piece of paper and plants it hard against the beaten man’s bare chest.

He pins it there with a hard stab of the knife.

The blade crunches down through breastbone.

This is not a quick in-and-out. The little knife buries to the hilt. It’s a death blow. Steve’s scream is cut short. His body starts to shudder.

His life starts to fade.

The blade looks familiar. The blade belongs to Miriam Black. It’s her knife. The lock-knife.

As Steve Max starts to die, the shadowed figure takes two gloved fingers—first and middle finger—and dips them in the blood still pumping from the neck.

The wet fingers begin to write on the piece of paper.

HELLO

Dip, dip, dip.

MIRIAM.

Then the index finger alone returns to the pooling blood—now spilling over the edge of the patio table like a sticky red waterfall—and draws one last little comma between the two words. A curious, crimson curl.

HELLO, MIRIAM.

Steve Max belches up a bubble of his own heart’s blood.

And then he is dead.

17. IT’S NIGHT, AND STEVE MAX IS BLEEDING

Miriam comes out of the vision like a meteor punching a hole through the atmosphere—a dark rock in the deep cold that suddenly glows orange, red, white, that catches fire as it falls like a heavenly fist toward Earth.

Her thoughts move a mile a minute, branching, breaking, worming through the maze of Just What The Fuck Is Happening Here—and there Steve Max sits across from her, smiling, eager, genuinely curious. Next thing she knows, her body has made its choice with almost no help from her mind: she’s up on top of the patio table, feet knocking her plate onto the slate-stone patio (crash), and she’s like a wild animal—a mother puma cresting a rock to get at the gazelle, or maybe to tell another cat to get the hell out of her territory. The knife flicks. The blade is out.

She leaps.

She knocks Steve Max and his chair over. Lands on his chest like a gargoyle on a ledge.

Miriam takes the knife and lets its punishing tip hover a half-inch above his wide-open eye.

“I do not like being fucked with,” she says, snarling.

“Whuh-whuh-whuh—” He can’t even say the word.

She can see in his eyes: he doesn’t know what’s happening.

Of course he doesn’t, she thinks, her brain still playing catch-up. He doesn’t know he’s going to be ritually slain on his own patio.

In one year. To the day.

But he knows something.

He has to. This isn’t just fate. Someone wanted her here. Someone wanted her to see that.

“Who hired you?” she seethes.

“What? No—nobody—I don’t—”

She takes the knife and slices a quick inch-long cut across the cheek—not a fresh cut, this, but a scar, pale pink against the tan skin—and he flinches and cries out and tries to grab at her and pull her off, but again she returns the tip of the knife to just above his eye and she hisses a warning.

“Lie still or I’ll take the eye, Steve.”

His arms flop like dead fish.

His lips purse. Teeth chattering from the fear.

“Someone hired you to mess with me,” she says. “Someone asked you to bring me here. They wanted me to see how you die.”

Her head is doing loop-de-loops. A message written in a murder committed in a year’s time. That’s dedication. The killer is bound to fate with lash-rope and tight-knot. But how? How would the killer be able to plan so far ahead? Why a message for her?

And using her knife to do the deed?

“I . . .” He takes a deep breath. Tries to calm himself. “I don’t know who he is. We only spoke over the ph-phone.”

“And what did he say?”

“He . . . he . . . told me to bring you here, to this address. He made it clear that I was not to . . . spook you, because he said you would be easily spooked but that I needed to calm you down and—” Here he needs to calm himself down, breathing faster and faster. With her knifeless hand she grabs his chin and holds it firm. “I needed to get you to touch me.”

A new thought occurs to her. “This isn’t even your house.”

“What? N-no. Just a r-rental from VRBO—”

The plates. He didn’t know where the plates were.

She’s kicking herself now. She should have known this was some kind of trap. Just not the kind she thought.

Whoever’s running these head games is even more committed than she realized: renting the house, looping in this dope, but then renting the house again a year later so it can be used to murder the same dope.

All in order to send her a message.

A little wave from the future. A greeting in wet blood.

Cut with her own knife, or one just like it.

“Who was it?” she asks.

“I dunno, I dunno.”

“Who was it?”

His deep Springsteen-Diamond voice goes higher-pitched than she would have figured it could. “I swear I dunno! He, he, he spoke through one of those voice . . . things, voice boxes, changers—”

“Modulators.”

“Voice modulator, yeah, yeah.”

She sneers. “What were you getting out of this?”

“Money. Money. He was paying me the s-same thing he was paying you. Five grand.”

Ten grand for this ruse. So whoever he is, he’s got cash to spare.

Miriam leans down. Gets her face as close to his as possible. The knife is now her partner in this, the tip of her nose parallel with the tip of the blade.

“I could rob him of this plunder,” she says. “I could kill you right now. I could steal your death for myself and send him a message up through the pipes and tubes of time so a year later he has no message to draw in your blood. And don’t mistake me, Steve. I’m a killer and a thief and this is what comes naturally to a girl like me.”

She echoes the statement in her own mind: I’m a killer. I’m a thief. I’ll kill you dead, steal your soul, and gank your wallet to spend on cigarettes, which I then use to kill myself.

But a smaller voice says, Is that what you really are?

Is it all a mask?

A magic trick you’ve performed on yourself?

She suddenly stands up. She backs away from Steve, who sits up and crawls into the chair after setting it upright.

“You were going to sleep with me,” she says.

“I . . .” He rubs his face. “Yeah.”

“Part of the plan?”

“No. No.” He pauses. “He said I could, though. If I wanted.”

If I wanted. She makes a frustrated animal sound. “That assumes a lot about me. Don’t you think, Steve?” His name, dripping with as much septic juice as she can squeeze from it. “Is that even your real name? Steve?”

“It’s . . . Peter. Peter Lake.”

“Well, Pete. Here’s the news: in one year’s time, the person who hired you to mess with my head is going to find you. He’s going to tie you to this very patio table and stick a knife in your neck and then your chest and he’s going to write a message to me in your blood as you lie dying. And now you’re in a peculiar position because there’s only one way to stop that from happening: I find who kills you and I kill him first. Them’s the laws, Pete. That’s how the universe works, Pete. Fate has fixed us all to its collector’s corkboard with sharp little pins, and the only way we wriggle free is by lubricating the pin with someone else’s blood.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll do anything to help you find him, I swear it.”

“You’re not going to do shit. Because you don’t know shit. You’re not even a pawn in this game—you’re just a bug crawling across the chessboard. So sit back. Chillax, bro. Do a little snorkeling. Fish off a bridge. Read a book and smoke a cigarette. Let the adults do the heavy lifting.”

She heads back inside. Grabs her keys. Grabs the canvas bag. He follows her inside, staggering like a zombie, like a man who’s already dead. She waves her knife at him. “The rest of my money?”

“What?”

“The other half, asshole! I want the other twenty-five hundred.”

“Oh. Right.” He goes to the bar and comes back up with another bag—this one just a Ziploc gallon freezer bag. Then he fishes for two more just like it and sets them on the bar.

He eases the cap off a bottle of rum. But before he can pull the bottle to his lips she snatches it out of his hands.

“Mine,” she says.

She snatches up the cash baggies, too.

“Did he pay you yet?” she asks. It’s like he’s thinking about what the right answer is, but she helps him decide by giving the mini-bar a swift kick. “Tell me the truth now, Pete. Or this could get more complicated.”

He nods. “Yeah. He paid me.”

“Five grand?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Good. I want it. Go fetch, rover.” She watches as he slinks into the living room, opens a chest that looks like a replica of sunken treasure. As he does, she enters the room, kicks over a few couch cushions, tilts a few lamps. Not sure what she’s looking for: a bug? A camera? A little man hiding in the couch with a boom mic?

Ste . . . er, Pete, holds up a dirty army duffel.

“Five grand. Well. Four grand. I already spent a grand.”

“You’re an asshole,” she says, but swipes the bag anyway. Then she reaches into the bag and pulls another cluster of money and throws it at him. It thuds against his chest and drops to the ground. “There, that’s for you, mop-top. Go nuts. You did your work. Besides, you’ve only got a year left on your lease so take a drive and enjoy the ride.” She sighs and shakes her head. “I can’t believe I actually considered sleeping with you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry’s just a word. Have a nice life.”

And then she’s back outside. White gravel. Dark night. Into the Fiero and back through the scrub and mangrove. Money in the passenger seat. Rum in her hands. Burned sugar on her lips. Fire in her belly.

Foot on the accelerator. The road beneath the wheels. The night in her teeth and a sign in her eyes: Key West, 25 mi.

[End Excerpt]

Copyright © 2013 by Chuck Wendig.

Excerpted from The Cormorant by Chuck Wendig.

Published by permission of the author and Angry Robot.

All rights reserved.

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

Chuck Wendig is a novelist, screenwriter, and game designer. He is the author of the novels Blackbirds, Mockingbird, The Blue Blazes, and Under the Empyrean Sky. He is an alumnus of the Sundance Screenwriter’s Lab and is the co-author of the Emmy-nominated digital narrative Collapsus. He lives in Pennsyltucky with wife, son, and two dopey dogs. You can find him on Twitter @ChuckWendig and at his website, terribleminds.com, where he frequently dispenses dubious and very-NSFW advice on writing, publishing, and life in general.

NOVEL EXCERPT:
A Darkling Sea
James L. Cambias

CHAPTER 1

By the end of his second month at Hitode Station, Rob Freeman had already come up with 85 ways to murder Henri Kerlerec. That put him third in the station’s rankings—Josef Palashnik was first with 143, followed by Nadia Kyle with 97. In general, the number and sheer viciousness of the suggested methods was in proportion to the amount of time each one spent with Henri.

Josef, as the primary submarine pilot, had to spend hours and hours each week in close quarters with Henri, so his list concentrated on swift and brutal techniques suitable for a small cockpit. Nadia shared lab space with Henri—which in practice meant she did her dissections in the kitchen or on the floor of her bedroom—and her techniques were mostly obscure poisons and subtle deathtraps.

Rob’s specialty was underwater photography and drone operation. All through training he had been led to expect he would be filming the exotic life forms of Ilmatar, exploring the unique environment of the remote icy world, and helping the science team understand the alien biology and ecology. Within a week of arrival he found himself somehow locked into the role of Henri Kerlerec’s personal cameraman, gofer, and captive audience. His list of murder methods began with “strangling HK with that stupid ankh necklace” and progressed through cutting the air hose on Henri’s drysuit, jamming him into a thermal vent, abandoning him in mid-ocean with no inertial compass, and feeding him to an Aenocampus. Some of the others on the station who routinely read the hidden “Death To HK” board had protested that last one as being too cruel to the Aenocampus.

Rob’s first exposure to killing Henri came at a party given by Nadia and her husband Pierre Adler in their room, just after the support vehicle left orbit for the six-month gimelspace voyage back to Earth. With four guests there was barely enough room, and to avoid overloading the ventilators they had to leave the door open. For refreshment they had melons from the hydroponic garden filled with some of Palashnik’s home-brew potato vodka. One drank melon-flavored vodka until the hollow interior was empty, then cut vodka-flavored melon slices.

“I’ve got a new one,” said Nadia after her third melon slice. “Put a piece of paper next to Le Nuke for a few months until it’s radioactive, then write him a fan letter and slip it under his door. He’d keep the letter for his collection and die of gradual exposure.”

“Too long,” said Josef. “Even if he kept it in his pocket it would take years to kill him.”

“But you’d have the fun of watching him lose his hair,” said Nadia.

“I would rather just lock him in the reactor shed and leave him there,” said Josef.

“Who are they talking about?” Rob asked.

“Henri Kerlerec,” whispered Alicia Neogri, who was squeezed onto the bed next to him and half drunk on melon.

“Irradiate his hair gel,” said Pierre. “That way he’d put more on every day and it would be right next to his brain.”

“Ha! That part has been dead for years!”

“Replace the argon in his breathing unit with chlorine,” said someone Rob couldn’t see, and then the room went quiet.

Henri was standing in the doorway. As usual, he was grinning. “Planning to murder somebody? Our esteemed station director, I hope.” He glanced behind him to make sure Dr. Sen wasn’t in earshot. “I have thought of an infallible technique: I would strike him over the head with a large ham or gigot or something of that kind, and then when the police come, I would serve it to them to destroy the evidence. They would never suspect!”

“Roald Dahl,” murmured Nadia. “And it was a frozen leg of lamb.”

Henri didn’t hear her. “You see the beauty of it? The police eat the murder weapon. Perhaps I shall write a detective novel about it when I get back to Earth. Well, goodnight everyone!” He gave a little wave and went off toward Hab Three.

This particular morning Rob was trying to think of an especially sadistic fate for Henri. Kerlerec had awakened him at 0500—three hours early!—and summoned him to the dive room with a great show of secrecy.

The dive room occupied the bottom of Hab One. It was a big circular room with suits and breathing gear stowed on the walls, benches for getting into one’s gear, and a moon pool in the center where the Terran explorers could pass into Ilmatar’s dark ocean. It was the coldest room in the entire station, chilled by the subzero seawater so that condensation on the walls froze in elaborate geometrical patterns.

Henri was there, waiting at the base of the access ladder. As soon as Rob climbed down he slammed the hatch shut. “Now we can talk privately together. I have an important job for you.”

“What?”

“Tonight at 0100 we are going out on a dive. Tell nobody. Do not write anything in the dive log.”

“What? Why tonight? And why did you have to get me up at five in the goddamned morning to have this conversation?”

“It must be kept absolutely secret.”

“Henri, I’m not doing anything until you tell me exactly what is going on. Enough cloak and dagger stuff.”

“Come and see.” Henri led him to the hatch into Hab Three, opened it a crack to peek through, then gestured for Rob to follow as he led the way to the lab space he shared with Nadia Kyle. It was a little room about twice the size of a sleeping cabin, littered with native artifacts, unlabeled disks, and tanks holding live specimens. Standing in the middle was a large gray plastic container as tall as a man. It had stenciled markings in Cyrillic and a sky blue UNICA shipping label.

Henri touched his thumb to a lock pad and the door swung open to reveal a bulky diving suit. It was entirely black, even the faceplate, and had a sleek, seamless look.

“Nice suit. What’s so secret about it?”

“This is not a common sort of diving suit,” said Henri. “I arranged specially for it to be sent to me. Nobody else has anything like it. It is a Russian Navy stealth suit, for deactivating underwater smart mines or sonar pods. The surface is completely anechoic. Invisible to any kind of sonar imaging. Even the fins are low-noise.”

“How does it work?” Rob’s inner geek prompted him to ask.

Henri gave a shrug. “That is for technical people to worry about. All I care is that it does work. It must—it cost me six million euros to get it here.”

“Okay, so you’ve got the coolest diving suit on Ilmatar. Why are you keeping it locked up? I’m sure the bio people would love to be able to get close to native life without being heard.”

“Pah. When I am done they can watch all the shrimps and worms they wish to. But first, I am going to use this suit to observe the Ilmatarans up close. Imagine it, Robert! I can swim among their houses, perhaps even go right inside! Stand close enough to touch them! They will never notice I am there!”

“What about the contact rules?”

“Contact? What contact? Didn’t you hear—the Ilmatarans will not notice me! I will stand among them, filming at close range, but with this suit I will be invisible to them!”

“Doctor Sen’s going to shit a brick when he finds out.”

“By the time he finds out it will be done. What can he do to me? Send me home? I will go back to Earth on the next ship in triumph!”

“The space agencies aren’t going to like it either.”

“Robert, before I left Earth I did some checking. Do you know how many people regularly access space agency sites or subscribe to their news feeds? About fifty million people, worldwide. Do you know how many people watched the video from my Titan expedition? Ninety-six million! I have twice as many viewers, and that makes me twice as important. The agencies all love me.”

Rob suspected Henri’s numbers were made up on the spur of the moment, the way most of his numbers were, but it was probably true enough that Henri Kerlerec, the famous scientist-explorer and shameless media whore, got more eyeballs than the rest of the entire interstellar program.

He could feel himself being sucked into the mighty whirlpool of Henri’s ego, and tried to struggle against it. “I don’t want to get in any trouble.”

“You have nothing to worry about. Now, listen: here is what we will do. You come down here quietly at about 0030 and get everything ready. Bring the cameras, and a couple of the quiet impeller units. Also a drone or two. I will get this suit on myself in here, and then at 0100 we go out. With the impellers we can get as far as the Maury 3 vent. There is a little Ilmataran settlement there.”

“That’s a long way to go by impeller. Maury 3’s what, sixty kilometers from here?”

“Three hours out, three hours back, and perhaps two hours at the site. We will get back at about 0900, while the others are still eating breakfast. They may not even notice we have gone.”

“And if they do?”

“Then we just say we have been doing some filming around the habitat outside.” Henri began locking up the stealth suit’s container. “I tell you, they will never suspect a thing. Leave all the talking to me. Now: not another word! We have too much to do! I am going to sleep this afternoon to be fresh for our dive tonight. You must do the same. And do not speak of this to anyone!”

Broadtail is nervous. He cannot pay attention to the speaker, and constantly checks the reel holding his text. He is to speak next, his first address to the Bitterwater Company of Scholars. It is an audition of sorts—Broadtail hopes the members find his work interesting enough to invite him to join them.

Smoothshell 24 Midden finishes her address on high-altitude creatures and takes a few questions from the audience. They aren’t easy questions, either, and Broadtail worries about making a fool of himself before all these respected scholars. When she finishes, Longpincer 16 Bitterwater clacks his pincers for quiet.

“Welcome now to Broadtail 38 Sandyslope, who comes to us from a great distance to speak about ancient languages. Broadtail?”

Broadtail nearly drops his reel, but catches it in time and scuttles to the end of the room. It is a wonderful chamber for speaking, with a sloped floor so that everyone can hear directly, and walls of quiet pumice-stone. He finds the end of his reel and begins, running it carefully between his feeding-tendrils as he speaks aloud. His tendrils feel the knots in the string as it passes by them. The patterns of knots indicate numbers, and the numbers match words. He remembers being careful to space his knots and tie them tightly, as this copy is for the Bitterwater library. The reel is a single unbroken cord, expensive to buy and horribly complicated to work with—very different from the original draft, a tangle of short notes tied together all anyhow.

Once he begins, Broadtail’s fear dissipates. His own fascination with his topic asserts itself, and he feels himself speeding up as his excitement grows. When he pauses, he can hear his audience rustling and scrabbling, and he supposes that is a good sign. At least they aren’t all going torpid.

The anchor of his speech is the description of the echo-carvings from the ruined city near his home vent of Continuous Abundance. By correlating the images of the echo-carvings with the number markings below them, Broadtail believes he can create a lexicon for the ancient city builders. He reads the Company some of his translations of other markings in the ruins.

Upon finishing, he faces a torrent of questions. Huge old Roundhead 19 Downcurrent has several tough ones—he is generally recognized as the expert on ancient cities and their builders, and he means to make sure some provincial upstart doesn’t encroach on his territory.

Roundhead and some others quickly home in on some of the weak parts of Broadtail’s argument. A couple of them make reference to the writings of the dead scholar Thickfeelers 19 Swiftcurrent, and Broadtail feels a pang of jealousy because he can’t afford to buy copies of such rare works. As the questions continue, Broadtail feels himself getting angry in defense of his work, and struggles to retain his temper. The presentation may be a disaster, but he must remain polite.

At last it is over, and he rolls up his reel and heads for a seat at the rear of the room. He’d like to just keep going, slink outside and swim for home, but it would be rude.

A scholar Broadtail doesn’t recognize scuttles to the lectern and begins struggling with a tangled reel. Longpincer sits next to Broadtail and speaks privately by means of shell-taps. “That was very well done. I think you describe some extremely important discoveries.”

“You do? I was just thinking of using the reel to mend nets.”

“Because of all the questions? Don’t worry. That’s a good sign. If the hearers ask questions it means they’re thinking, and that’s the whole purpose of this Company. I don’t hear any reason not to make you a member. I’m sure the others agree.”

All kinds of emotions flood through Broadtail—relief, excitement, and sheer happiness. He can barely keep from speaking aloud. His shell-taps are rapid. “I’m very grateful. I plan to revise the reel to address some of Roundhead’s questions.”

“Of course. I imagine some of the others want copies, too. Ah, he’s starting.”

The scholar at the lectern begins to read a reel about a new system for measuring the heat of springs, but Broadtail is too happy to really pay attention.

At midnight, Rob was lying on his bunk trying to come up with some excuse not to go with Henri. Say he was sick, maybe? The trouble was that he was a rotten liar. He tried to make himself feel sick—maybe an upset stomach from ingesting seawater? His body unhelpfully continued to feel okay.

Maybe he just wouldn’t go. Stay in bed and lock the door. Henri could hardly complain to Dr. Sen about him not going on an unauthorized dive. But Henri could and undoubtedly would make his life miserable with nagging and blustering until he finally gave in.

And of course the truth was that Rob did want to go. He really wanted to be the one in the stealth suit, getting within arm’s reach of the Ilmatarans and filming them close up, instead of getting a few murky long-distance drone pictures. Probably everyone else at Hitode Station felt the same way. Putting them here, actually on the sea bottom of Ilmatar, yet forbidding them to get close to the natives, was like telling a pack of horny teenagers they could get naked in bed together, but not touch.

He checked his watch. It was 0020. He got up and slung his camera bag over his shoulder. Damn Henri anyway.

Rob made it to the dive room without encountering anyone. The station wasn’t like a space vehicle with round-the-clock shifts. Everyone slept from about 2400 to 0800, and only one poor soul had to stay in the control room in case of emergency. Tonight it was Dickie Graves on duty, and Rob suspected that Henri had managed to square him somehow so that the exterior hydrophones wouldn’t pick up their little jaunt.

He took one of the drones off the rack and ran a quick check. It was a flexible robot fish about a meter long, more Navy surplus—American, this time. It wasn’t especially stealthy, but instead was designed to mimic a mackerel’s sonar signature. Presumably the Ilmatarans would figure it was some native organism and ignore it. His computer linked up with the drone brain by laser. All powered up and ready to go. He told it to hold position and await further instructions, then dropped it into the water. Just to be on the safe side, Rob fired up a second drone and tossed it into the moon pool.

Next the impellers. They were simple enough—a motor, a battery, and a pair of counter-rotating propellers. You controlled your speed with a thumb switch on the handle. They were supposedly quiet, though in Rob’s experience they weren’t any more stealthy than the ones you could rent at any dive shop back on Earth. Some contractor in Japan had made a bundle on them. Rob found two with full batteries and hooked them on the edge of the pool for easy access.

Now for the hard part: suiting up without any help. Rob took off his frayed and slightly smelly insulated jumpsuit and stripped to the skin. First the diaper—he and Henri were going to be out for eight hours, and getting the inside of his suit wet would invite death from hypothermia. Then a set of thick fleece longjohns, like a child’s pajamas. The water outside was well below freezing; only the pressure and salinity kept it liquid. He’d need all the insulation he could get.

Then the drysuit, double-layered and also insulated. In the chilly air of the changing room he was getting red-faced and hot with all this protection on. The hood was next, a snug fleece balaclava with built-in earphones. Then the helmet, a plastic fishbowl more like a space helmet than most diving gear, which zipped onto the suit to make a watertight seal. The back of the helmet was packed with electronics—biomonitors, microphones, sonar unit, and an elaborate heads-up display which could project text and data on the inside of the faceplate. There was also a freshwater tube, which he sipped before going on to the next stage.

Panting with the exertion, Rob struggled into the heavy APOS backpack, carefully started it up before attaching the hoses to his helmet, and took a few breaths to make sure it was really working. The APOS gear made the whole Ilmatar expedition possible. It made oxygen out of seawater by electrolysis, supplying it at ambient pressure. Little sensors and a pretty sophisticated computer adjusted the supply to the wearer’s demand. The oxygen mixed with a closed-loop argon supply; at the colossal pressures of Ilmatar’s ocean bottom, the proper air mix was about 1,000 parts argon to 1 part oxygen. Hitode Station and the subs each had bigger versions, which was how humans could live under six kilometers of water and ice.

The price, of course, was that it took six days to go up to the surface. The pressure difference between the 300 atmospheres at the bottom of the sea and the half standard at the surface station meant a human wouldn’t just get the bends if he went up quickly—he’d literally burst. There were other dangers, too. All the crew at Hitode took a regimen of drugs to ward off the scary side effects of high pressure.

With his APOS running (though for now its little computer was sensible enough to simply feed him air from the room outside), Rob pulled on his three layers of gloves, buckled on his fins, put on his weight belt, switched on his shoulder lamp, and then crouched on the edge of the moonpool to let himself tumble backwards into the water. It felt pleasantly cool, rather than lethally cold, and he bled a little extra gas into his suit to keep him afloat until Henri could join him.

He gave the drones instructions to follow at a distance of four meters, and created a little window on his faceplate to let him watch through their eyes. He checked over the camera clamped to his shoulder to make sure it was working. Everything nominal. It was 0120 now. Where was Henri?

Kerlerec lumbered into view ten minutes later. In the bulky stealth suit he looked like a big black toad. The foam cover of his faceplate was hanging down over his chest, and Rob could see that he was red and sweating. Henri waddled to the edge of the pool and fell back into the water with an enormous splash. After a moment he bobbed up next to Rob.

“God, it is hot in this thing. You would not believe how hot it is. For once I am glad to be in the water. Do you have everything?”

“Yep. So how are you going to use the camera in that thing? Won’t it spoil the whole stealth effect?”

“I will not use the big camera. That is for you to take pictures of me at long range. I have a couple of little cameras inside my helmet. One points forward to see what I see, the other is for my face. Link up.”

They got the laser link established and Rob opened two new windows at the bottom of his faceplate. One showed him as Henri saw him—a pale, stubbly face inside a bubble helmet—and the other showed Henri in extreme close-up. The huge green-lit face beaded with sweat looked a bit like the Great and Powerful Oz after a three-day drunk.

“Now we will get away from the station and try out your sonar on my suit. You will not be able to detect me at all.”

Personally Rob doubted it. Some Russian had probably made a few million Swiss francs selling Henri and his sponsors at ScienceMonde a failed prototype or just a fake.

The two of them sank down until they were underneath Hab One, only a couple of meters above the seafloor. The light shining down from the moonpool made a pale cone in the silty water, with solid blackness beyond.

Henri led the way away from the station, swimming with his headlamp and his safety strobe on until they were a few hundred meters out. “This is good,” he said. “Start recording.”

Rob got the camera locked in on Henri’s image. “You’re on.”

Henri’s voice instantly became the calm, friendly but all-knowing voice of Henri Kerlerec, scientific media star. “I am here in the dark ocean of Ilmatar, preparing to test the high-tech stealth diving suit which will enable me to get close to the Ilmatarans without being detected. I am covering up the faceplate with the special stealth coating now. My cameraman will try to locate me by sonar. Because the Ilmatarans live in a completely dark environment, they are entirely blind to visible light, so I will leave my safety strobe and headlamp on.”

Rob opened up a window to display sonar images and began recording. First on passive—his computer could build up a vague image of the surroundings just from ambient noise and interference patterns. No sign of Henri, even though Rob could see his bobbing headlamp as he swam back and forth ten meters away.

Not bad, Rob had to admit. Those Russians know a few things about sonar baffling. He tried the active sonar and sent out a couple of pings. The seabottom and the rocks flickered into clear relief, an eerie false-color landscape where green meant soft and yellow meant hard surfaces. The ocean itself was completely black on active. Henri was a green-black shadow against a black background. Even with the computer synthesizing both the active and passive signals, he was almost impossible to see.

“Wonderful!” said Henri when Rob sent him the images. “I told you: completely invisible! We will edit this part down, of course—just the sonar images with me explaining it in voiceover. Now come along. We have a long trip ahead of us.”

The Bitterwater Company are waking up. Longpincer’s servants scuttle along the halls of his house, listening carefully at the entrance to each guest chamber and informing the ones already awake that a meal is ready in the main hall.

Broadtail savors the elegance of having someone to come wake him when the food is ready. At his own house, all would starve if he waited for his apprentices to prepare the meals. He wonders briefly how they are getting along without him. The three of them are reasonably competent, and can certainly tend his pipes and crops without him. Broadtail does worry about how well they can handle an emergency—what if a pipe breaks or one of his nets is snagged? He imagines returning home to find chaos and ruin.

But it is so very nice here at Longpincer’s house. Mansion, really. The Bitterwater vent isn’t nearly as large as Continuous Abundance or the other town vents, but Longpincer controls the entire flow. Everything for ten cables in any direction belongs to him. He has a staff of servants and hired workers. Even his apprentices scarcely need to lift a pincer themselves.

Broadtail doesn’t want to miss the meal. Longpincer’s larder is as opulent as everything else at Bitterwater. As he crawls to the main hall he marvels again at the thick growths on the walls and floor. Some of his own farm pipes don’t support this much life. Is it just that Longpincer’s large household generate enough waste to support lush indoor growth? Or is he rich enough to pipe some excess vent water through the house itself? Either way it’s far more than Broadtail’s chilly property and tepid flow rights can achieve.

As he approaches the main hall Broadtail can taste a tremendous and varied feast laid out. It sounds as if half a dozen of the Company are already there; it says much for Longpincer’s kitchen that the only sounds Broadtail can hear are those of eating.

He finds a place between Smoothshell and a quiet individual whose name Broadtail can’t recall. He runs his feelers over the food before him and feels more admiration mixed with jealousy for Longpincer. There are cakes of pressed sourleaf, whole towfin eggs, fresh jellyfronds, and some little bottom-crawling creatures Broadtail isn’t familiar with, neatly impaled on thorns and still wiggling.

Broadtail can’t recall having a feast like this since he inherited the Sandyslope property and gave the funeral banquet for old Flatbody. He is just reaching for a third jellyfrond when Longpincer clicks loudly for attention from the end of the hall.

“I suggest a small excursion for the Company,” he says. “About ten cables beyond my boundary stones upcurrent is a small vent, too tepid and bitter to be worth piping. I forbid my workers to drag nets there, and I recall finding several interesting creatures feeding at the vent. I propose swimming there to look for specimens.”

“May I suggest applying Sharpfrill’s technique for temperature measurement to those waters?” says Smoothshell.

“Excellent idea!” cries Longpincer. Sharpfrill mutters something about not having his proper equipment, but the others bring him around. They all finish eating (Broadtail notices several of the company stowing delicacies in pouches, and grabs the last towfin egg to fill his own), and set out for the edge of Longpincer’s property.

Swimming is quicker than walking, so the party of scholars cruise at just above net height. At that level Broadtail can only get a general impression of the land below, but it all seems neat and orderly—a well-planned network of stone pipes radiating out from the main vent, carrying the hot, nutrient-rich water to nourish thousands of plants and bacteria colonies. Leaks from the pipes and the waste from the crops and Longpincer’s household feeds clouds of tiny swimmers, which in turn attract larger creatures from the cold waters around. Broadtail notes with approval the placement of Longpincer’s nets, in staggered rows along the prevailing current. With a little envy he estimates that Longpincer’s nets probably produce as much wealth as his own entire property.

Beyond the boundary stones the scholars instinctively gather into a more compact group. There is less conversation and more careful listening and pinging. Longpincer assures them that he allows no bandits or scavengers around his vent, but even he pings behind them once or twice, just to make sure. But all anyone can hear are a few wild children, who flee quickly at the approach of adults.

Henri and Rob didn’t talk much on the way to the vent community. Both of them were paying close attention to the navigation displays inside their helmets. Getting around on Ilmatar was deceptively easy: take a bearing by inertial compass, point the impeller in the right direction, and off you go. But occasionally Rob found himself thinking about just how hard it would be to navigate without electronic help. The stars were hidden by a kilometer of ice overhead, and Ilmatar had no magnetic field worth speaking of. It was barely possible to tell up from down—if you had your searchlights on and could see the bottom and weren’t enveloped in a cloud of silt—but maintaining a constant depth depended entirely on watching the sonar display and the pressure gauge. A human without navigation equipment on Ilmatar would be blind, deaf, and completely lost.

At 0500 they were nearing the site. “Passive sonar only,” said Henri. “And we must be as quiet as possible. Can you film from a hundred meters away?”

“It’ll need enhancement and cleaning up afterward, but yes.”

“Good. You take up a position there—” Henri gestured vaguely into the darkness.

“Where?”

“That big clump of rocks at, let me see, bearing one hundred degrees, about fifty meters out.”

“Okay.”

“Stay there and do not make any noise. I will go on ahead toward the vent. Keep one of the drones with me.”

“Right. What are you going to do?”

“I will walk right into the settlement.”

Shaking his head, Rob found a relatively comfortable spot among the stones. While he waited for the silt to settle, he noticed that this wasn’t a natural outcrop—these were cut stones, the remains of a structure of some kind. Some of the surfaces were even carved into patterns of lines. He made sure to take pictures of everything. The other xeno people back at Hitode would kill him if he didn’t.

Henri went marching past in a cloud of silt. The big camera was going to be useless with him churning up the bottom like that, so Rob relied entirely on the drones. One followed Henri about ten meters back, the second was above him looking down. The laser link through the water was a little noisy from suspended particulates, but he didn’t need a whole lot of detail. The drone cameras could store everything internally, so Rob was satisfied with just enough sight to steer them. Since he was comfortably seated and could use his hands, he called up a virtual joystick instead of relying on voice commands or the really irritating eye-tracking menu device.

“Look at that!” Henri called suddenly.

“What? Where?”

Henri’s forward camera swung up to show eight Ilmatarans swimming along in formation, about ten meters up. They were all adults, wearing belts and harnesses stuffed with gear. A couple carried spears. Ever since the first drone pictures of Ilmatarans, they had been described as looking like giant lobsters, but watching them swim overhead, Rob had to disagree. They were more like beluga whales in armor, with their big flukes and blunt heads. Adults ranged from three to four meters long. Each had a dozen limbs folded neatly against the undersides of their shells: walking legs in back, four manipulators amidships, and the big praying-mantis pincers on the front pair. They also had raspy feeding tendrils and long sensory feelers under the head. The head itself was a smooth featureless dome, flaring out over the neck like a coal-scuttle helmet—the origin of the Ilmatarans’ scientific name Salletocephalus structor. Henri’s passive microphones picked up the clicks and pops of the Ilmatarans’ sonar, with an occasional loud ping like a harpsichord note.

The two humans watched as the group soared over Henri’s head. “What do you think they’re doing?” asked Rob when they had passed.

“I am not sure. Perhaps a hunting party. I will follow them.”

Rob wanted to argue, but knew it was pointless. “Don’t go too far.”

Henri kicked up from the bottom and began to follow the Ilmatarans. It was hard for a human to keep up with them, even when wearing fins. Henri was sweaty and breathing hard after just a couple of minutes, but he struggled along. “They are stopping,” he said after ten minutes, sounding relieved.

The Ilmatarans were dropping down to a small vent formation, which Rob’s computer identified as Maury 3b. Through the drone cameras Rob watched as Henri crept closer to the Ilmatarans. At first he moved with clumsy stealth, then abandoned all pretense and simply waded in among them. Rob waited for a reaction, but the Ilmatarans seemed intent on their own business.

A rock is missing. Broadtail remembers a big chunk of old shells welded together by ventwater minerals and mud, just five armspans away across-current. But now it’s gone. Is his memory faulty? He pings again. There it is, just where it should be. Odd. He goes back to gathering shells.

“—you hear me? Broadtail!” It is Longpincer. He appears out of nowhere just in front of Broadtail, sounding alarmed.

“I’m here. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” says Longpincer. “My own mistake.”

“Wait. Tell me.”

“It’s very odd. I remember hearing you clattering over the rocks, then silence. I recall pinging and sensing nothing.”

“I remember a similar experience—a rock seeming to disappear and then appear again.”

Smoothshell comes up. “What’s the problem?” After they explain she asks “Could there be a reflective layer here? Cold water meeting hot does that.”

“I don’t feel any change in the water temperature,” says Longpincer. “The current here is strong enough to keep everything mixed.”

“Let’s listen,” says Broadtail. The three of them stand silently, tails together, heads outward. Broadtail relaxes, letting the sounds and interference patterns of his surroundings create a model in his mind. The vent is there, rumbling and hissing. Someone is scrabbling up the side—probably Sharpfrill with his jars of temperature-sensitive plants. Roundhead and the quiet person are talking together half a cable away, or rather Roundhead is talking and his companion is making occasional polite clicks. Two others are swishing nets through the water upcurrent.

But there is something else. Something is moving nearby. He can’t quite hear it, but it blocks other sounds and changes the interference patterns. He reaches over to Smoothshell and taps on her leg. “There is a strange effect in the water in front of me, moving slowly from left to right.”

She turns and listens that way while Broadtail taps the same message on Longpincer’s shell. “I think I hear what you mean,” Smoothshell says. “It’s like a big lump of very soft mud, or pumice stone.”

“Yes,” Broadtail agrees. “Except that it’s moving. I’m going to ping it now.” He tenses his resonator muscle and pings as hard as he can, loud enough to stun a few small swimmers near his head. All the other Company members about the vent stop what they are doing.

He hears the entire landscape in front of him—quiet mud, sharp echoes from rocks, muffled and chaotic patterns from patches of plants. And right in the center, only a few armspans in front of him, is a hole in the water. It’s big, whatever it is: almost the size of a young adult, standing upright like a boundary marker.

Henri was completely gonzo. He was rattling off narration for the audience completely off the top of his head. Occasionally he would forget to use his media star voice and give way to an outburst of pure cackling glee. Rob was pretty excited, too, watching through the cameras as Henri got within arm’s reach of the Ilmatarans.

“Here we see a group of Ilmatarans gathering food around one of the seabottom vents. Some are using hand-made nets to catch fish, while these three close to me appear to be scraping algae off the rocks.”

“Henri, you’re using Earth life names again. Those aren’t fish, or algae either.”

“Never mind that now. I will dub in the proper words later if I must. The audience will understand better if I use words they understand. This is wonderful, don’t you think? I can pat them on the backs if I want to!”

“Remember, no contact.”

“Yes, yes.” Back into his narrator voice. “The exact nature of Ilmataran social organization is still not well understood. We know they live in communities of up to a hundred individuals, sharing the work of food production, craft work, and defense. The harvest these bring back to their community will be divided among all.”

“Henri, you can’t just make stuff up like that. Some of the audience are going to want links to more info about Ilmataran society. We don’t know how they allocate resources.”

“Then there is nothing to say that this is untrue. Robert, people do not want to hear that aliens are just like us. They want wise angels and noble savages. Besides, I am certain I am right. The Ilmatarans behave exactly like early human societies. Remember I am an archaeologist by training. I recognize the signs.” He shifted back into media mode. “Life is difficult in these icy seas. The Ilmatarans must make use of every available source of food to ward off starvation. I am going to get closer to these individuals so that we can watch them at their work.”

“Don’t get too close. They might be able to smell you or something.”

“I am being careful. How is the picture quality?”

“Well, the water’s pretty cloudy. I’ve got the drone providing an overhead view of you, but the helmet camera’s the only thing giving us any detail.”

“I will bend down to get a better view, then. How is that?”

“Better. This is great stuff.” Rob checked the drone image. “Uh, Henri, why are they all facing toward you?”

“We must capture it,” says Longpincer. “I don’t remember reading about anything like this.”

“How to capture something we can barely make out?” asks Broadtail.

“Surround it,” suggests Smoothshell. She calls to the others. “Here, quickly! Form a circle!”

With a lot of clicking questions the other members of the Bitterwater Company gather around—except for Sharpfrill, who is far too absorbed in placing his little colonies of temperature indicators on the vent.

“Keep pinging steadily,” says Longpincer. “As hard as you can. Who has a net?”

“Here!” says Raggedclaw.

“Good. Can you make it out? Get the net on it!”

The thing starts to swim upward clumsily, churning up lots of sediment and making a faint but audible swishing noise with its tails. Under Longpincer’s direction the Company form a box around it, like soldiers escorting a convoy. Raggedclaw gets above it with the net. There is a moment of struggling as the thing tries to dodge aside, then the scientists close in around it.

It cuts at the net with a sharp claw, and kicks with its limbs. Broadtail feels the claw grate along his shell. Longpincer and Roundhead move in with ropes, and soon the thing’s limbs are pinned. It sinks to the bottom.

“I suggest we take it to my laboratory,” says Longpincer. “I am sure we all wish to study this remarkable creature.”

It continues to struggle, but the netting and ropes are strong enough to hold it. Whatever it is, it’s too heavy to carry swimming, so the group must walk along the bottom with their catch while Longpincer swims ahead to fetch servants with a litter to help. They all ping about them constantly, fearful that more of the strange silent creatures are lurking about.

“Robert! In the name of God, help me!” The laser link was full of static and skips, what with all the interference from nets, Ilmatarans, and sediment. The video image of Henri degenerated into a series of still shots illustrating panic, terror, and desperation.

“Don’t worry!” he called back, although he had no idea what to do. How could he rescue Henri without revealing himself and blowing all the contact protocols to hell? For that matter, even if he did reveal himself, how could he overcome half a dozen full-grown Ilmatarans?

“Ah, bon Dieu!” Henri started what sounded like praying in French. Rob muted the audio to give himself a chance to think, and because it didn’t seem right to listen in.

He tried to list his options. Call for help? Too far from the station, and it would take an hour or more for a sub to arrive. Go charging in to the rescue? Rob really didn’t want to do that, and not just because it was against the contact regs. On the other hand he didn’t like to think of himself as a coward, either. Skip that one and come back to it.

Create a distraction? That might work. He could fire up the hydrophone and make a lot of noise, maybe use the drones as decoys. The Ilmatarans might drop Henri to go investigate, or run away in terror. Worth a shot, anyway.

He sent the two drones in at top speed, and searched through his computer’s sound library for something suitable to broadcast. “Ride of the Valkyries?” Tarzan yells? “O Fortuna?” No time to be clever; he selected the first item in the playlist and started blasting Billie Holiday as loud as the drone speakers could go. Rob left his camera gear with Henri’s impeller, and used his own to get a little closer to the group of Ilmatarans carrying Henri.

Broadtail hears the weird sounds first, and alerts the others. The noise is coming from a pair of swimming creatures he doesn’t recognize, approaching fast from the left. The sounds are unlike anything he remembers—a mix of low tones, whistles, rattles, and buzzes. There is an underlying rhythm, and Broadtail is sure this is some kind of animal call, not just noise.

The swimmers swoop past low overhead, then, amazingly, circle around together for another pass, like trained performing animals. “Do those creatures belong to Longpincer?” Broadtail asks the others.

“I don’t think so,” says Smoothshell. “I don’t remember noticing them in his house.”

“Does anyone have a net?”

“Don’t be greedy,” says Roundhead. “This is a valuable specimen. We shouldn’t risk it to chase after others.”

Broadtail starts to object, but he realizes Roundhead is right. This thing is obviously more important. Still—“I suggest we return here to search for them after sleeping.”

“Agreed.”

The swimmers continue diving at them and making noise until Longpincer’s servants show up to help carry the specimen.

Rob had hoped the Ilmatarans would scatter in terror when he sent in the drones, but they barely even noticed them even with the speaker volume maxed out. He couldn’t tell if they were too dumb to pay attention, or smart enough to focus on one thing at a time.

He gunned the impeller, closing in on the little group. Enough subtlety. He could see the lights on Henri’s suit about fifty meters away, bobbing and wiggling as the Ilmatarans carried him. Rob slowed to a stop about ten meters from the Ilmatarans. The two big floodlights on the impeller showed them clearly.

Enough subtlety and sneaking around. He turned on his suit hydrophone. “Hey!” He had his dive knife in his right hand in case of trouble.

Broadtail is relieved to be rid of the strange beast. He is getting tired and hungry, and wants nothing more than to be back at Longpincer’s house snacking on threadfin paste and heat-cured eggs.

Then he hears a new noise. A whine, accompanied by the burble of turbulent water. Off to the left about three lengths there is some large swimmer. It gives a loud call. The captive creature struggles harder.

Broadtail pings the new arrival. It is very odd indeed. It has a hard cylindrical body like a riftcruiser, but at the back it branches out into a bunch of jointed limbs covered with soft skin. The thing gives another cry and waves a couple of limbs.

Broadtail moves toward it, trying to figure out what it is. Two creatures, maybe? And what is it doing? Is this a territorial challenge? He keeps his own pincers folded so as not to alarm it.

“Be careful, Broadtail,” Longpincer calls.

“Don’t worry.” He doesn’t approach any closer, but evidently he’s already too close. The thing cries out one more time, then charges him. Broadtail doesn’t want the other Bitterwater scholars to see him flee, so he splays his legs and braces himself, ready to grapple with this unknown monster.

But just before it hits him, the thing veers off and disappears into the silent distance. Listening carefully lest it return, Broadtail backs toward the rest of the group and they resume their journey to Longpincer’s house.

Everyone agrees that this expedition is stranger than anything any of them remember. Longpincer seems pleased.

Rob stopped his impeller and let the drones catch up. He couldn’t think of anything else to do. The Ilmatarans wouldn’t be scared off, and there was no way Rob could attack them. Whatever happened to Henri, Rob did not want to be the first human to harm an alien.

The link with Henri was still open. The video showed him looking quite calm, almost serene.

“Henri?” he said. “I tried everything I could think of. I can’t get you out. There are too many of them.”

“It is all right, Robert,” said Henri, sounding surprisingly cheerful. “I do not think they will harm me. Otherwise why go to all the trouble to capture me alive? Listen: I think they have realized I am an intelligent being like themselves. This is our first contact with the Ilmatarans. I will be humanity’s ambassador.”

“You think so?” For once Rob found himself hoping Henri was right.

“I am certain of it. Keep the link open. The video will show history being made.”

Rob sent in one drone to act as a relay as the Ilmatarans carried Henri into a large rambling building near the Maury 3a vent. As he disappeared inside, Henri managed a grin for the camera.

Longpincer approaches the strange creature, laid out on the floor of his study. The others are all gathered around to help and watch. Broadtail has a fresh reel of cord and is making a record of the proceeding. Longpincer begins. “The hide is thick, but flexible, and is a nearly perfect sound absorber. The loudest of pings barely produce any image at all. There are four limbs. The forward pair appear to be for feeding, while the rear limbs apparently function as both walking legs and what one might call a double tail for swimming. Roundhead, do you know of any such creature recorded elsewhere?”

“I certainly do not recall reading of such a thing. It seems absolutely unique.”

“Please note as much, Broadtail. My first incision is along the underside. Cutting the hide releases a great many bubbles. The hide peels away very easily; there is no connective tissue at all. I feel what seems to be another layer underneath. The creature’s interior is remarkably warm.”

“The poor thing,” says Raggedclaw. “I do hate causing it pain.”

“As do we all, I’m sure,” says Longpincer. “I am cutting through the under-layer. It is extremely tough and fibrous. I hear more bubbles. The warmth is extraordinary—like pipe-water a cable or so from the vent.”

“How can it survive such heat?” asks Roundhead.

“Can you taste any blood, Longpincer?” adds Sharpfrill.

“No blood that I can taste. Some odd flavors in the water, but I judge that to be from the tissues and space between. I am peeling back the under-layer now. Amazing! Yet another layer beneath it. This one has a very different texture—fleshy rather than fibrous. It is very warm. I can feel a trembling sensation and spasmodic movements.”

“Does anyone remember hearing sounds like that before?” says Smoothshell. “It sounds like no creature I know of.”

“I recall that other thing making similar sounds,” says Broadtail.

“I now cut through this layer. Ah—now we come to viscera. The blood tastes very odd. Come, everyone, and feel how hot this thing is. And feel this! Some kind of rigid structures within the flesh.”

“It is not moving,” says Roundhead.

“Now let us examine the head. Someone help me pull off the shell here. Just pull. Good. Thank you, Raggedclaw. What a lot of bubbles! I wonder what this structure is?”

CHAPTER 2

The trip back was awful. Rob couldn’t keep from replaying Henri’s death in his mind. He got back to the station hours late, exhausted and half out of his mind. As a small mercy Rob didn’t have to tell anyone what had happened—they could watch the video.

There were consequences, of course. But because the next supply vehicle wasn’t due for another twenty months, it all happened in slow motion. Rob knew he’d be going back to Earth, and guessed that he’d never make another interstellar trip again.

Nobody blamed him, at least not exactly. At the end of his debriefing, Dr. Sen did look at Rob over his little Gandhi glasses and say “I do think it was rather irresponsible of you both to go off like that. But I am sure you know that already.”

Sen also deleted the “Death to HK” list from the station’s network, but someone must have saved a copy. The next day it was anonymously relayed to Rob’s computer with a final method added: “Let a group of Ilmatarans catch him and slice him up.”

Rob didn’t think it was funny at all.

He stayed in bed for about a week after Henri died. At first he was really just exhausted, and then he was depressed, and for the last couple of days he was afraid of what people would say to him. Nobody had liked Henri, but somehow Rob didn’t think they’d want to congratulate him. So he kept to his room, slipping out during night shift to stockpile food and prowl the station.

Dr. Sen and Elena Sarfatti, the medical officer, did insist on visiting him for a few minutes each day. Sen was still writing up a report on the incident and wanted Rob to explain pretty much every single minute of the time between when Henri showed him the stealth suit and his return to the station alone. That was actually more boring than painful, because the worst parts were on video and Sen didn’t need to ask about them.

Dr. Sarfatti was worse, really, because she wanted him to talk about how he felt.

“Can’t I just have the damned antidepressants?”

“Not until we explore why you feel you need them.”

“I need them because I listened to a guy get cut up by aliens!”

It usually took about half an hour of circling around the subject before she’d relent and hand over the pills. Some days it was antidepressants, some days tranquilizers, and once she bullied him into taking a memory enhancer. That was a mistake. For sixteen hours afterward every time he thought about Henri (and there wasn’t much else for him to think about, holed up in his room), he got a complete, highly-detailed instant replay of the whole incident inside his head.

After a week he finally started working again, motivated chiefly by sheer boredom. He did rearrange his schedule (with Sen’s implicit consent) to minimize his contact with others. He took to working during night shift, sleeping during the day, and staying in his room until everyone else went to bed. They started leaving meals for him in the galley, ready to heat up. It was just like being in grad school.

Broadtail is tired when he gets back to Continuous Abundance. The village is much as he remembers it: a tall mound about two cables across with the main vent at the highest point. A stone dome covers the vent, and each property owner’s pipe leads off to feed a network of smaller channels. The diameter of the pipe is set by law, and interfering with flow rights is a crime and a sin.

The various properties are marked with boundary stones on the lower slopes of the mound and the flat plain beyond. All of them are covered with branching conduits, with different crops growing in different places depending on what temperature and flow speed they prefer.

His own Sandyslope property is intact, on the broad side of the mound where the cold current from the wilderness brings silt. On his own property, Broadtail’s pipes are not like the others at Continuous Abundance. He recalls using mathematical models based on the proportions of blood vessels in large animals to adjust the diameter of the branches. His crop yields are bigger than anything anyone remembers Flatbody producing by nearly an eighth part.

The house is in the middle of the property, three long halls with vaulted stone roofs for protection. Pipes feed into the house, and downstream the waste-laden water supports a bloom of hardy fronds. Broadtail crosses his boundary, pinging for attention. He reaches the door and sets down his reels and supply bags, then calls again loudly for his apprentices. There is no reply.

Typical. Doubtless they are off idling with other apprentices and tenants, instead of working. Broadtail crawls out of his house again and listens. There is a clamor of many voices coming from the commonhouse in the center of the village, just next to the dome over the vent itself. A meeting? Broadtail doesn’t want to go to a meeting now. But he is a landowner. It would not be proper to stay home.

The commonhouse is packed, people jammed in shell to shell. Talk and sonar clicks make it almost too noisy to move about. Broadtail squeezes into the back, working his way to his favorite spot over in the corner, where a slab of porous stone cuts down on some of the echoes. If only that lout Thicklegs 34 Sandybottom just in front of him would stop grinding his palps, Broadtail would be able to hear what the speaker is saying.

Ridgeback 58 Hardshelf is on the lectern, gripping it with all eight legs as if he’s afraid the audience imagine trying to drag him out. They might actually try it if he keeps ranting on. Everyone is hungry and bored—the hecklers at the back have started pinging in unison, trying to set up a standing wave and drown him out.

“Openwater is commonground! All precedents agree! Everything above the height of a person’s outstretched claws is common to all. The catch in tall nets should not belong to the landowner but to the public jars.”

“Nets don’t put themselves on poles!” someone shouts. “If the tall netcatch goes to the public jars there is no reason for us to waste time building tall nets!”

“Then let the town buy some dragnets and put some children to work towing them! The catch can be shared out among all, landowners and tenants.”

That gets a loud response. About half the people in the commonhouse are tenants—netmakers, stonecutters, openwater fishers. The craftworkers love the idea of getting catch for free, so they support Ridgeback loudly. The fishers want the right to drag nets over private lands themselves, so they’re a bit more muted. The landowners hate the whole idea, and say so. The apprentices are just making noise for the sake of noise, hoping a fight breaks out.

Broadtail hates the idea more than most. His Sandyslope property is off at the upstream end of town, exposed to the cold currents, and his pipeflow is cold and thin. His channels produce only slow-growing plants like ropevine and springbranch, and those can’t back many beads. Almost half his food is netcatch, and he has three expensive new tall nets on his land. He waits for the noise to die down and then jumps in before Ridgeback can continue. “How about letting the landowners pay a rent for the right to put up nets? Maybe an eighth of the catch?”

Some of the landowners like that, but most of them just want to be able to put up whatever they want on their own land and eat whatever they catch. The fishers don’t like the rent idea at all, because it sounds too much like the idea of charging a toll on openwater. They fight that notion at almost every meeting.

Ridgeback doesn’t like it either. “Give landowners the right to rent common water and it’s not common anymore! They can trade the rights back and forth, and buy and sell and sub-lease them. The waters become the property of the richest landowners instead of everyone. I imagine the waters full of nets, blocking navigation.”

That really gets the fishers going. They don’t like anything which might snag a dragnet or tangle a line. And none of the tenants like the idea of the landowners being any wealthier than they already are. Broadtail is momentarily deafened by some angry pings directed at him. When he gets his hearing back, Ridgeback is calling for a vote.

It’s a close one. The tenants are all for the proposal, of course. Most of them vote for anything Ridgeback proposes anyway. Even the fishers are grudgingly in favor—Broadtail’s warning has only convinced them that the choice is between public dragnets and a tangle of private ones, and this way they at least get a portion.

Then the landowners vote. Each gets one vote as a citizen and then another based on flow rights. Broadtail himself gets only half an extra vote because his flow share is so small, but big owners like Flatfront 6 Ventside have six. As a group, the owners have the bulk of the voting power, and can usually pass anything they wish, but this time they are divided. Big rich owners don’t care much about netcatch, and like the idea of feeding tenants and apprentices at no expense to themselves. Some of them want to reassure the fishers and craft workers that they aren’t trying to monopolize the waters. The small owners are solidly opposed to Ridgeback’s plan, but they just don’t have enough votes. In the end, the motion squeaks by.

The next speaker with a motion is Sevenlegs 26 Archrock, who wants to reapportion flow rights based on pressure instead of pipe size. She brings it up whenever a meeting is called, but her explanation is so complicated nobody can even tell if it’s a good idea or not. Broadtail’s too mad to stay and listen, so he crawls to the doorway, angrily pinging any adults in his way, and shoving apprentices aside.

Outside the quiet is almost shocking, as if he’s gone deaf. Some children are curled up in the pathway asleep, and Broadtail kicks them out of the way with unnecessary force.

He’s tired and hungry, and he needs some stingers to stay awake long enough to get things in order at home. Widehead 34 Foodhouse sells stingers and doesn’t ask any annoying questions. Her shop is just across the public road from the commonhouse, set on a tiny plot with no flow rights at all. The front part of the shop is actually on public land, and only the kitchen and Widehead’s own quarters are behind her boundary stones.

Broadtail goes inside and taps at the shell by the door for service. Widehead comes out promptly and pings the room. “Broadtail? Is the meeting over?”

“The important part is. Ridgeback’s foolish plan to abolish tall nets passed. I need some stingers.”

Widehead brings him a pair of stingers and Broadtail taps the sharp end of the first one with his feeding tendrils. There’s a mild pain, and then a nice tingly numbness as the neurotoxin spreads through his system. It relaxes his muscles but makes him feel much more alert and alive. He taps the second and savors the sensation, then calls for another pair.

After half a dozen stingers Broadtail finds the sound of his own pulse almost deafening. He gropes clumsily in his pouch with one foot and eventually gets out three of his beads for Widehead. He goes homeward, trying to move as quietly as he can but of course his half-limp legs betray him with every step. Outside it sounds as if the meeting in the commonhouse is breaking up. Broadtail doesn’t linger; he’s tired and hungry and he wants to get home without talking to anyone.

He almost makes it. Nobody stops him until he’s on his own property, going to his own door. He hears a loud ping which makes his shell feel as if it’s shattering. It’s Ridgeback, standing in the public pathway beyond the marker stones. “Broadtail! Come here!”

“What?”

“I am disappointed. You usually vote with me in meetings.”

“You usually have good ideas. This one is terrible. I need my tall nets.”

“But you get your share of the public catch! You can devote your time to other things and still get food!”

“I would get more from my own nets. Schoolchildren pulling a dragnet don’t catch much. They slip away, or eat the catch themselves.”

“We can put someone in charge of them.”

“All too costly for my taste.”

“Broadtail, you are too miserly.”

“I am miserly because I have a cold barren plot and can’t afford to waste my time and wealth winning the friendship of a lot of tenants and apprentices!”

“They are useful friends. They balance the power of the big landowners.”

“And small owners like myself are ground up in between.”

“Because you have nobody to protect you. If you were my friend I would help guard your interests. And so would my other friends.”

“By banning my nets? Go away. I need to eat and rest.”

Ridgeback moves closer to Broadtail and lowers his voice. “I am preparing a motion for the next meeting which makes great changes. If you support it you can gain wealth, perhaps even more flow.”

“I do not wish for gain, only to be allowed to use what I have and be left in peace.”

“You are foolish, Broadtail. You spend all your time digging up old stones and trying to read carvings. A landowner should concern himself with practical matters like politics.”

“Get off my property,” Broadtail pings loudly. He’s sick of Ridgeback’s big promises and schemes, and wants to go inside and run his feelers over a good book before sleeping.

“You should not speak that way to me.”

“Go!”

Ridgeback steps forward past the boundary stone and raises a pincer, and in Broadtail’s tired and stinger-addled brain an ancient instinct kicks in. Invader on my territory! He lunges toward Ridgeback and gives him a shove. Ridgeback folds his pincers and shoves back. For a moment the two of them strain and push, their feet scrabbling for purchase on the path.

Then one of Broadtail’s feelers gets caught in Ridgeback’s pincer, and a couple of segments at the tip get snipped off. The pain makes him even madder, and he raises one of his pincers and jabs it down behind Ridgeback’s head. Ridgeback isn’t expecting this, and there’s a gap between his head shield and his back carapace. The tip of the claw neatly pierces the soft skin and plunges deep into the flesh beneath.

The two of them stand frozen for a moment. Broadtail’s shocked by what he has done. Ridgeback wiggles his feelers, but the rest of his body is paralyzed. Then Broadtail pulls out his claw and Ridgeback collapses.

“Ridgeback!” Broadtail pings him and tries to pick him up, but the wound behind his head is spewing fluids like a vent and he’s not moving.

Broadtail steps back and bumps against something. It’s one of his marker stones. He listens for a moment to get his bearings and gets another shock. During the fight he must have shoved Ridgeback into the pathway. The corpse is in common territory. Killing on private property is a personal matter, but this is murder.

Broadtail doesn’t know what to do. His body does, though. It’s been far too long since Broadtail last ate or slept, and the fight used up any reserve he might have had. He staggers past the marker stone onto his land and passes out.

By an unspoken arrangement, Rob took over as maintenance tech on the drones and sensor gear, communicating with Sergei via notes in grease pencil on the door of the workshop. Since Henri had monopolized Rob’s services before dying, everybody was already used to doing their own photography and image processing anyway.

Four days after he returned to work, Rob started finding little people.

The first one was on the bench in the workshop, a little figure made of swabs and tape with one cotton-tipped arm raised in a cheery wave. Rob figured it was something Sergei had put together in an idle moment, and left it on the shelf when he finished work.

The next day he found two more figures. One was a little dough girl sitting atop the microwave in the galley, and the second was a wire dancer poised in the middle of his regular table.

Rob spent half an hour that night exploring the station to see if the little sculptures were maybe just a kind of fad. Maybe everyone was making them, just to pass the time and decorate the station. He didn’t find any others, though. In his room during the work shift he lay awake for a couple of hours, reverting mentally to age fourteen and wondering if the little figures were somehow part of a plot by everyone else to make fun of him.

On the third night there were half a dozen of them. One, cut from a strip of scrap plastic, on the sink in the bathroom nearest his room in Hab Two. The second, folded from a sheet of nori, in the galley. The third, molded from caulking compound, on the back of the chair in the workshop. Another origami figure made of foil inside the tool cabinet. And a wire angel posed above the hatch into Hab Two where he’d be sure to see it on the way back to his room.

The sixth figure was sitting on his pillow. It was a girl made of swabs and foil, with her cotton hair colored black and a tiny smile on her little cotton face. She was holding a folded note.

“BREAKFAST TOMORROW AT 2200?”

Rob wasn’t any good at sculpting, but he was a decent freehand artist. He sacrificed a page from his personal journal and drew a little cartoon of himself surrounded by tiny figures. The caption read “SURE.” He stuck it on his door and went to bed.

The station used a 24-hour clock, and for simplicity the day began at the start of the first “day” shift. So 2200 was an hour before even the early risers would be up and about. Rob finished rebuilding the flex linkage on one of the drones at 2130, and spent the next half hour fretting about what to do. Should he go meet the mystery person? Should he shower and change?

At 2145 he decided to go ahead and meet whoever it was. If this was some elaborate plan to give him crap about Henri’s death, then whoever was doing it was an asshole and Rob could tell him that face to face.

He wound up sitting in the galley at 2150, wondering if this was all some kind of joke. But at 2200 exactly, Alicia Neogri came in and flipped on the lights.

“Why are you sitting in the dark?”

“Oh, I—”

“Lying in ambush to see who would come?” She put a little figure made of plastic tubing on the table. “What shall we have for breakfast?”

Figuring out what to cook at Hitode was always difficult. For a team of scientists who had grown up in a world of agricultural oversupply, with even the most obscure ingredients available at any market, being limited to what the hydroponic farm could produce was almost intolerable. Everyone brought along personal supplies, and hoarding and bartering were a way of life.

Rob, being an American, had used most of his 10-kilo personal food allotment for sugar and caffeine. But one of the few vivid food memories he had from childhood was eating scrambled eggs on a camping trip with his cousins, so on a whim he had packed a hundred grams of egg powder.

“I’ve still got some powdered eggs left. We could have scrambled eggs.”

“What about an omelette? I have cheese and there are some fresh mushrooms.” When Rob looked uncertain, she laughed. “I’ll do the cooking.”

So Rob grated cheese and sliced mushrooms while Alicia put some synthetic oil in the pan and got it hot.

Cooks on Ilmatar had to follow an entirely different set of rules. The tremendous pressure at the bottom of the ocean affected everything. Water didn’t boil, bread didn’t rise, and foods like rice and pasta practically cooked themselves at room temperature. Added to that were the limits on what was available. The hydroponic garden produced plenty of greens, tomatoes, potatoes, and soybeans, but no grains. They had shrimp and a few catfish but no meat. Dairy products and eggs existed only in powdered form.

For bulk, the staff could always fall back on the pure glucose and synthetic lipids produced by the food assembler. You could have them separately, or combined in a kind of greasy syrup which sounded utterly nasty until you came in from a day in freezing water and wanted nothing but calories in their purest form. Without the hydroponic farm morale would suffer; without the assembler the crew of Hitode would starve.

Alicia was a good cook, at least on Ilmatar. Rob watched admiringly as she flipped the omelette out onto a plate one-handed. It was by far the best thing he’d eaten since leaving Earth.

“So what’s up?” he asked after getting a few mouthfuls into himself. “Why the little statues?”

She looked a little embarassed. “I thought they might cheer you up,” she said. “But I didn’t want to disturb you.”

Rob tried to make sense of the situation. They weren’t friends—at least, he didn’t know her any better than anyone else at Hitode. Why was she being nice to him?

“Thanks,” he said. “It was really nice of you.”

They met again for breakfast the next day, and as they finished their toasted bean cakes, Rob cleared his throat and tried to sound casual. “You know, you don’t have to get up early. We could meet at 0100 tomorrow if that’s better for you.”

“Everyone else will be up.”

“I know.”

“It’s hard to flirt when there’s an audience,” she pointed out.

“We’re flirting?” he asked, startled. She laughed, and he joined in, trying to pass it off as a joke.

They agreed to keep having breakfast together early, but that evening at 1500, when most of the staff were relaxing after dinner, Rob sat with Alicia in the lounge playing cards. There were half a dozen others in the room, and aside from a few furtive glances, nobody reacted to Rob’s presence.

Encouraged, he started joining Alicia earlier and earlier in the evening, until they were dining together with the “second seating” in the galley at 1300. Rob realized he looked forward to spending time with her, and rearranged his work schedule to let him see more of her. In the process, he wound up spending more of his time out of his room when others were about, and he found he didn’t mind it so much after all. A week passed, and then another; Rob hardly noticed.

He was just starting to wonder if she would sleep with him when the aliens arrived.

The braking burn was brutal. Tizhos lay strapped to her bed, which for the occasion had extruded itself from what was normally the aft wall of her cabin. The fusion motors roared, and the force mashed Tizhos down into the cushions. She tried to estimate how hard—twice Shalina-normal gravity? Three times as much? How much could the ship stand before it broke apart?

The entire voyage had a distressingly thrown-together feel to it. Just to get out of orbit they’d used half a dozen strap-on boosters, and there were drop tanks attached to the drive section to allow faster transit in Otherspace. The expense of getting all that lofted into orbit on short notice was simply staggering—this one mission seemed likely to cost more than a year of interstellar probes.

Instead of popping out on a long, cleverly-plotted minimum-fuel rendezvous orbit, they’d drained the drop tanks for a high-speed pass dangerously close to Ilmatar’s sun, and now were using half the ship’s internal fuel for this punishing deceleration.

She watched the display projected in the center of the cabin. At the moment the ship was passing low over the cloud tops of the giant planet the humans had named Ukko. It would swing out again, matching orbits with the moon Ilmatar, and do a final burn to start circling the moon. All these extravagant maneuvers would leave the ship with just enough fuel to get back to Shalina on a four-month low-energy trajectory through Otherspace.

The motors shut down, and Tizhos unstrapped herself. She rather liked zero gravity. She called up a forward view, and watched the red and yellow swirls of Ukko’s atmosphere beneath the dark sky. Ilmatar was already visible as a little white crescent, rising steadily above the giant planet’s cloud tops.

According to the display Tizhos had about two hours before she needed to strap in again. The perfect time to work on her little personal project.

She had joined the Space Working Group in order to learn about alien life. But until now she had never left Shalina. The Ilmatar voyage was a wonderful opportunity to study two different alien species—humans and the natives of Ilmatar. The visit would be short, so Tizhos wanted to be able to gather as much information as she could in the time available. After a little thought she had come up with a clever plan.

The humans spent a lot of time studying the Ilmatarans, so if Tizhos could spend time with one of the human researchers and examine the raw data, she could effectively study both species at once. It seemed like a very efficient way to do things.

Strongpincer and the others crouch hidden beneath an overhanging rock, listening carefully. The rock sits in a barren part of the seafloor, but it is in a good place to wait for travelers. Traders and messengers going from the Deepest Rift communities to the Three Domes hotspot pass nearby, but here it is hundreds of cables to safety in either direction. Robbers can pounce on the unwary and there is no one to help.

The gang has eight members now, all fierce fighters. Strongpincer remembers chasing away a gang of twelve, with only three others to help him. The larger gang consisting mostly of half-grown children is something Strongpincer tries to forget.

He listens again, hoping to hear prey, and feels a surge of joy. It sounds like a whole train—three or four towfins and probably half a dozen adults. As they come closer he hears the adults clicking away to one another, not caring if the whole ocean knows where they are. This train is too big for a band of children or half-starved outcasts to attack; evidently they don’t know this is Strongpincer’s territory.

To his left, Shellcrusher starts to move, but Strongpincer halts her and says very quietly. “The last one. Pass it on.” The others are silently getting into position for a fast climb and some quick, brutal fighting.

Overhead the first towfin passes. From the churning of its fins, it sounds like it’s hauling something big. Two of the chatty adults are trailing behind the towfin. The next one sounds smaller and lightly loaded—Strongpincer suspects a young towfin ready to be sold. Then another, with what sounds like three or four adults hanging on its line.

Strongpincer tenses. The last one is passing now. It sounds like an old towfin with ragged fins, laboring a bit to keep up with the others. Silently, Strongpincer rises from the seafloor and then begins swimming up toward the towfin using powerful strokes of his tail. When he’s half a cable away he starts pinging, to get a better idea of what he’s up against. There is one adult riding on the towfin’s back, and two nets of jars trailing behind it. The adult hears Strongpincer’s pings and calls those ahead for help.

Headcracker and Tailcutter are going for the cargo bundles; even if the merchants get away, Strongpincer and his gang get the loot. Shellcrusher and Thicklegs are in formation with Strongpincer, gaining on the towfin and the panicky adult. Halftail is lagging behind, of course. Ahead he can hear the other towfins coming about, but they are clumsy and can’t turn fast. Where are Onefeeler and Hardshell?

He hears them ping up ahead and imagines them walking on the bottom before rising up to attack. Clever—surely Onefeeler’s idea. Sometimes Strongpincer wonders if maybe Onefeeler isn’t too clever.

The panicking adult abandons his towfin. Fool. Strongpincer gives a couple of powerful strokes with his tail and catches the wretch. A town-bred adult, that’s for sure, with his shell all covered with weed and parasites. Big, though. Strongpincer grabs him from behind and tries to get a grip on his pincers, but the coward tries to curl up, folding his legs and pincers against his belly. Strongpincer doesn’t have the time to waste prying this one open, so he works a pincer point between a couple of the fellow’s back segments and forces it in until he can feel the soft membranes give way.

He looks up and pings. Onefeeler and Hardshell are fighting tail to tail against three angry adults behind the third towfin. Shellcrusher and Thicklegs are going to help. Tailcutter’s down on the bottom trying to cut open the cargo nets from the fourth towfin. Greedy fool; he could be helping get more stuff. The young towfin is bolting, dragging its rider helplessly on the towrope, and the two adults on the first ’fin decide to run for it as well, prodding their beast until it breaks into a ponderous sprint.

When they notice Shellcrusher and Thicklegs, the other three adults scatter, trying to catch up with their fleeing buddies. Shellcrusher overtakes one of them and gets her massive pincers around the poor fool’s body right where the tail joins. There’s a burst of panicked clicking and then a crack, and Shellcrusher lets the leaking body tumble down to the seafloor.

The haul is good. The two cargo nets from the last ’fin hold jars of iceshaver roe and skin bags full of smokeweed pith. The other beast has only a small net full of personal baggage and some food for the merchants. Still, the beasts themselves are certainly valuable. Only one of the gang is hurt—Hardshell lost a feeler, but they grow back, and it won’t affect his fighting ability. Strongpincer imagines recruiting some more fighters, maybe even buying some fierce children from a school. For a big gang, there are so many possibilities. Strongpincer dives down to get some roe before Tailcutter eats the whole jar by himself.

Tizhos joined Gishora at the lander hatch as soon as the ship had established orbit about Ilmatar. Gishora was leader on this voyage, which meant that he had to do a lot of nuzzling and stroking Tizhos as part of the normal bonding. Neither of them particularly enjoyed it. Gishora was naturally somewhat shy and solitary, almost as reserved as the humans. He was in charge of this voyage only because of his unmatched knowledge of human social rules and languages.

Consequently their contact up to now had been perfunctory and brief, enough to satisfy the formalities without really establishing a hormonal leader-follower bond.

The two of them suited up and climbed into the lander after the pilot. There was a delay of some twenty minutes before launch, and Gishora took that opportunity to have a talk with his subordinate.

“Tizhos. I have set up a private channel so we may speak frankly. Tell me if you have finished all your preparations.”

“I believe so. I made estimates of how contact could affect the Ilmatarans. My notes may lack precision—I had very little information other than the bulletin from Earth.”

“I understand. You can refine them as we learn more below. Remember that we come here to learn and understand, and to correct what may have gone wrong, not to judge.”

“Some on board seem to think otherwise,” said Tizhos.

“I thought it best to bring Irona on the mission so that the Interventionists would not feel themselves excluded. But I think even he would agree that he can do little to help in the gathering of facts. So I have a perfectly valid reason to leave him in orbit where he can do no harm.”

“I do admit to curiosity, Gishora: did you bring him in order to have something to threaten the humans with? If they do not cooperate with you, they will have to face Irona?”

Gishora sounded pained. “Tizhos, we have not come here to make threats or demands! Such behavior resembles what we wish to avoid. We only wish to learn all the facts of what happened and prevent future mistakes.”

“If the humans refuse to accept our help, what then?”

“In that case, you and I must do our work anyway. And, yes, I do take comfort from knowing I can call upon Irona if force seems necessary.”

For a moment, Gishora seemed dominant indeed, and Tizhos felt the warm sexual rush of agreement with a leader.

The pilot called back from the flight station. “Thrusters fire in one dozen seconds.”

“Good,” Gishora replied. “We wait prepared.”

A moment later they heard the hissing sound of the thrusters behind them, and a feeble gravity pushed them into their seats. Then they floated again. “All done,” said the pilot. “We begin braking in three dozen minutes.”

Gishora made the hull next to their seats transparent, and the two of them became absorbed in the view as the vast landscape of Ilmatar pivoted beneath them. The surface below was a smooth plain of white ice, crisscrossed by lines and mottled with occasional spots and splotches of dark material. In a few places mountains of rock pierced the ice layer to rise barren and gray, casting long shadows. The moon was virtually airless, with no clouds or haze to block their view.

There! Just at the terminator line, at the intersection of two chasms in the ice, Tizhos saw a tiny flashing light. From this height she could not see the Terran base itself, but the landing strobe showed up clearly. If she peered hard, Tizhos could almost make out a faint smudge around the blinking light, where the humans had disturbed the pristine surface.

[End Excerpt]

Copyright © 2014 by James L. Cambias.

Excerpted from A Darkling Sea by James L. Cambias.

Published by permission of the author and Tor Books.

All rights reserved.

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

James L. Cambias writes science fiction and designs games. Originally from New Orleans, he lives in western Massachusetts and burns a lot of wood when it’s cold. He worked in publishing and journalism before turning to freelance writing full time. During the 1990s he wrote roleplaying games and began selling science fiction in 2000. His stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Shimmer, Nature, and several original anthologies. A Darkling Sea is his first novel. Mr. Cambias has written game books for GURPS, Hero Games, and other roleplaying systems, and is a partner in Zygote Games. He is a member of the notorious Cambridge SF Workshop. Mr. Cambias knows more than most people do about alchemy and Zeppelins, dines well, smells of tweed and bay rum, and wields a mighty axe. Read his blog at www.jamescambias.com.

NOVEL EXCERPT:
Clockwork Heart
Dru Pagliassotti

Chapter One

Taya cupped and fanned her wings, slowing as the iron struts of a wireferry tower loomed before her. The massive construction blocked the gusting winds, and she sighed with relief as her thick boot soles hit the girder. Bending her knees to absorb the impact, she crouched and folded her arms, ducking into the safe harbor.

The wind in the wires sent vibrations thrumming through the metal under her feet, and the tower swayed. She locked her armature into tight-rest, tail feathers snapped up and wings tucked in. With a wriggle, she pulled her arms out of their struts and straps and looped a safety line from her harness around one of the narrow girders.

“Oh, that’s better,” she groaned, rubbing her shoulders. She pulled off her flight goggles and wiped them against her sleeve. The glass was smeared with dead bugs and the inevitable greasy soot that collected whenever she flew past the city’s refineries.

Usually, the trip up from Tertius was easy. Thermals from the smelting factories provided plenty of lift, but today the late autumn gusts of the diispira—the winds that blew over the Yeovil Range every year right before winter—made flight risky. For a few minutes, when one of the winds had stolen her thermal and sent her into a stall, Taya had flapped like a foundering duck. Her shoulder muscles were still twitching, and the sweat from her efforts was drying beneath her flight leathers.

How much longer until she was off-duty, anyway?

She slipped her goggles back on to protect her eyes from the wind and surveyed the mountainside beneath her. Terrace upon terrace of closely placed buildings descended into the dark haze of factory soot that perpetually mantled the lowest sector of the mountain. That was Tertius, the sector where the famulate caste labored in the manufactories to provide the metals and goods that maintained Ondinium. Tertius—where she’d been born and her sister was about to get married.

Thick stone walls ringed Ondinium Mountain, dividing the major sectors from each other: Primus, for the exalteds; Secundus, for the cardinals; and Tertius, for the plebeians. Gates pierced the walls at regular intervals, but each portal was guarded by stern-faced lictors whose job was to prevent the indiscriminate mixing of castes.

Only icarii like Taya and the occasional authorities who rode the suspended wireferries could pass freely from sector to sector. And even wireferry passengers were checked at waystations whenever they changed cars, especially at Primus.

Taya searched the soot-blackened towers that rose at regular intervals along the sector walls, looking for a clock.

Spotting one, she smiled. Another hour and she could go home and prepare for the wedding. With a little luck she could deliver the report from the College of Mathematics and linger long enough at Oporphyr Tower to avoid picking up another job. As long as the decatur didn’t give her another message to carry, she’d get to the party in plenty of time.

The metal beneath her feet jolted and shuddered. Taya grabbed the strut next to her with one heavily gloved hand. Usually she loved flying, but today’s winds were the worst she’d—

The girder jolted again, and the high-pitched shriek of straining metal cut across the whistling wind and humming cables. Taya jerked her head up, looking for the source of the noise.

There. One of the wireferry girders, suspended in midair several yards away from her, was bending under the weight of an approaching car. Gears ground and spun as the heavy wire cables slipped and the girder started to buckle.

Taya leaped to her feet, banging her head against a low strut. She winced, looking around. Didn’t anyone else see the danger?

Yes—wireferry workers were racing up the tower ladders from a nearby station, but they were too far away to do the people in the car any good.

“Oh, Lady,” she groaned, unsnapping her safety hook and tucking the strap back into her harness. Even though the rational part of her mind was screaming warnings about the danger of flying next to a collapsing girder, of maneuvering around wires that could snap at any moment, she was already dredging up memories of old aerial rescue drills, calculating wind direction and target height, her best angle of attack and the load-bearing capacity of her ondium armature.

Heart pounding, Taya slid her arms back into her wings and crouched.

It had to be done. Her armature tugged her upward, its buoyant ondium straining against the weight of her compact body. Shifting to put her head into the wind, Taya threw herself into the air, her boots smacking the beam for extra thrust.

Metal girders shot past as she plunged through their deadly network. As soon as she was clear of the support structure, she threw her arms wide, snapping her metal wings to full extension.

Broad ondium feathers closed as she swept her arms downward, propelling herself toward the endangered ferry car. She kicked her tailset down and slid her ankles behind its bar. A gust of air tugged her and she rode it aloft, then swept her wings again as the gust veered off, broken by an obstruction current from the girders around her.

Metal shrieked again. Wires snapped and twanged.

Time was running out. Taya strained forward, flying up and over the ferry car to get a clearer grasp of the situation.

Two passengers clutched the car’s leather-covered seats—an adult and a child. The adult was wearing robes and a mask. An exalted.

“Scrap!” Taya wheeled, searching for assistance. Engineers were scrambling over the breaking girder, but they still weren’t in any position to help. A small group was stringing another support wire through the struts to keep the straining girder from crashing hundreds of feet to the street below, but that wouldn’t save the passengers if the car cable snapped.

One person at a time, she counseled herself. The wind was suddenly icy on her face as sweat trickled down from her hairline. Just concentrate on rescuing one person at a time.

She circled back to the ferry and began to brake, her tailset down and her wings cupped. She kicked her feet free.

Momentum and uneven winds sent her crashing into the side of the car. Taya’s knees buckled against her chest and she gasped, twisting one hand out of its wingstruts to grab the service handle on the side of the car.

An arm reached through the window and caught the harness straps along her shoulder. Taya looked up. The exalted stared at her, her dark eyes wide but her ring-covered hand gripping the leather harness like iron.

Taya breathlessly nodded her thanks, taking a tighter grip on the door handles. The woman released her and Taya yanked the ferry door open, grabbing the sides of the doorframe. Her ondium wings scraped against the sides of the ferry car and she flinched.

“Take Ariq,” the lady said, her voice shaking. She swept up the child at her side. “Save him.”

Ariq screamed, staring at Taya’s goggle-masked face, and tried to kick away. He couldn’t have been any older than four, his round face still free of castemarks.

“I’ve got him.” Taya braced the edges of her feet against the doorframe to steady herself as she took the boy from his mother. Ignoring the child’s shrieks, she pressed him against her stomach and snapped safety cords between his legs and under his arms. She’d done it before in practice drills, but a squirming child was harder to strap in than a stuffed dummy. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

The exalted nodded. Her castemarks, sweeping blue waves tattooed across each cheek, stood out sharply against her pallor. She’d let her ivory mask fall to the floor, and she’d stripped off her jeweled public robe to free her arms.

Taya finished securing the terrified boy to her harness and slid her arm back into its wing.

The car jolted again, dropping a few more feet as the girder bent and the cables slipped. The woman gasped and Taya threw herself backward, free of the doorway.

For one nauseating moment she was in free fall, and then she twisted around, spreading her wings. They checked her descent with a violent jolt, ondium and air currents fighting gravity. The boy screamed, one long howl of terror.

The engineers at Cardinal Station Six were the closest. Taya flapped without any regard for her dignity, concerned only with maximizing speed and lift as she compensated for the unfamiliar and frantically shifting weight against her midsection. The stubby metalwork dock several yards beneath the breaking girder was her target.

Several workers saw her coming and stretched out their hands. She swooped down, braked, and let them grab her by her legs and harness to haul her in. Holding her wings over her head, she stood as motionless as possible as the workers steadied her with brusque efficiency. Ariq howled again as they stripped away the straps and buckles that held him, roughly tucking them back into her harness.

“There’s another one up there!” a man shouted, as the tower shuddered. Everyone looked up fearfully, but the gears and girder were still holding. Barely.

“I know.” Taya waited just long enough to make sure Ariq was in safe hands, then turned and kicked off from the work dock as engineers and repairmen ducked beneath her sweeping wings.

Another icarus had spotted the danger and was circling the threatened car, seeking a safe approach. Taya swept up, foundered under an unexpected crosswind, then caught herself. The other flier saw her and rocked his wings left and right.

Relieved to have backup, Taya angled toward the ferry.

The exalted was standing in the doorframe, staring up at the bending girder with her hands clamped over her mouth. Taya swept her wings backward and slammed into the car.

“Grab me!” she shouted as the car lurched. The woman reached out—and then, with a horrifying screech, the tower buckled and the ferry plummeted.

Taya’s foot slipped from the car’s doorframe and she tumbled backward, feeling the exalted’s arms tighten around her neck as they dropped. Both of them screamed. Taya instinctively spread her wings to catch as much air as possible, but the edge of the falling car clipped her flight primaries and sent her into a spin.

Wires! Taya thought with alarm, beating both wings in a desperate attempt to get lift. If a loose wire hit them, it would slice them in half. If a girder hit them, it would smash them to a pulp.

Her sister would never forgive her if she died hours before the wedding.

But the plummet continued. Her armature hadn’t been built to carry another adult. Taya had hoped to have enough time to go into a controlled glide, but—

Her wings caught an updraft and their descent slowed, almost imperceptibly. The woman clutching her shoulders moaned, the only sound she’d made since that first scream.

Taya wanted to tilt, but the woman’s excess weight was dragging her down vertically, and all she could do was try to control their fall by flapping as hard as she could. The exalted’s fingers dug between her shoulder straps and her flight suit. Her legs were wrapped around Taya’s waist, and her face was pressed against Taya’s neck.

Somewhere metal crashed against metal, and people shouted, but Taya couldn’t look up to see what had happened. She felt a drag on her wing—clipping the side of the car must have damaged one of her feathers.

“Taya!” The shout was barely audible over the wind in her ears. The other icarus swept past, wings locked. A locked glide was a dangerous maneuver at the best of times, especially so close to the wireferry girders, but it was the only way he could free an arm to yank loose one of his safety lines. “Grab on!”

“Exalted! Listen!” Taya shouted into the woman’s ear. “There’s a safety line dropping toward us. You have to hook it to my harness!”

The woman’s arms tightened around her, and Taya could feel the exalted’s heart hammering. But then, with the same desperate courage she’d shown in the ferry car, the lady looked up.

“I can’t!”

Taya swept her arms down again, straining to keep them from entering free fall.

“Grab the line or we’re both dead!”

The line swung past. The exalted took a halfhearted pass at it, but the line slipped through her fingers. Taya shuddered as she nearly missed a beat.

The icarus above them made a tight circle. The line swung past again. This time the exalted caught it, then clutched Taya’s shoulders. Taya felt the safety line’s clasp slide through the rings in her back harness.

“It’s done,” the woman gasped.

Their fall slowed as the icarus above them shared their weight. They were safe.

A crowd had gathered on the street to watch the drama unfolding hundreds of feet above their heads. Arms reached up to grab her and her passenger, and Taya had to shout at them to back off so she’d have enough space to land. For a second she hovered, backbeating. The exalted slid off and collapsed to the ground, shaking.

Then Taya’s boots hit the street and she staggered, taking a few steps forward. She barely remembered to yank her arms free and unfasten the safety line before she, too, sank into a crouch, wrapping her arms around her shoulders and trembling with relief. Strangers surrounded her, touching her floating wings for luck and saying things to her that sounded like an incoherent rumble.

Lictors appeared, barking orders. Taya drew in a deep breath and pulled her goggles down around her neck. She turned and knelt next to the woman she’d saved.

“Are you all right, Exalted?”

The woman rolled over, her gold hair ornaments clinking against the cobblestones, and opened her eyes.

“Is Ariq safe?”

“I left him at the tower station.” Taya jerked her head upward. “He’s all right. Just a little scared.”

“Thank you.” The woman closed her eyes again.

“Excuse me. Exalted.” A lictor stepped forward, his eyes averted, and held out a rough scarf. Taya took it from him.

“Your face, Exalted,” she said, draping the scarf over the woman’s head. “It’s bare.”

“Oh, Lady save us,” the woman snapped with disgust, then sat up, holding the scarf in place. Her hands were unsteady, but she wrapped the scarf around her face, leaving only her eyes visible.

“Tell me your name, Icarus.”

“Taya, Exalted.” Taya pressed a leather-gloved palm against her forehead and ducked her head, sketching as much of a bow as she could while squatting in the cobblestone street. Her loose wings tugged at her armature as they swayed.

“I am Viera Octavus, Taya Icarus, and I am in your debt.”

“Are either of you hurt?” The lictor sounded more confident now that the exalted’s face was hidden again.

“No, by the Lady’s grace, neither of us has been injured. Give me something to cover myself,” Viera demanded. “Where is my son?”

“They’re carrying him down now, Exalted.” The lictor obediently unbuttoned his greatcoat and shrugged it off. He handed it to the woman as she pulled herself to her feet.

“Taya! Taya, are you all right?” A familiar voice. Taya looked up.

The icarus who’d slowed their descent pulled off his goggles and cap, revealing a shock of curly black hair. His wings were locked high and his straps neatly bundled.

The crowd let him through, and even the lictors reluctantly stepped aside.

“Hi, Pyke.” Taya let him grab her hand and haul her to her feet. She leaned her forehead on his broad chest, gathering her strength. “Thanks.”

“Anytime.” He patted her shoulder. “Wings up, babe.”

Her metal wings were drifting horizontally, knocking into bystanders who tried to crowd too close. With a groan, Taya slid her arms back into them long enough to lock them in a vertical line up her back and over her head.

She winced as she pulled her arms back down. Her shoulders were going to kill her tomorrow. She pulled off her flight cap and ran her hands through her short, sweat-dampened hair. The cool breeze felt good against her scalp.

“Taya Icarus.” Exalted Viera Octavus turned. Barefoot, wearing a borrowed greatcoat and a makeshift mask, she looked more like a child playing exalted than a full-blooded member of the ruling caste. However, the steady, dark eyes over the veil revealed that she was already recovering her dignity. “Will you please introduce me to your friend?”

“This is Pyke, ma’am. He’s the one who threw us the safety line.”

“At your service.” Pyke tapped his palm against his forehead and gave a perfunctory bow. Taya glared at him, and he lamely added, “Exalted.”

“I am grateful for your assistance, as well, Pyke Icarus.” Viera looked up. Taya followed her gaze.

The girder had collapsed, and twisted metal struts were trapped in the wireferry lines that held them suspended overhead as if in a metal net. The ferry car had slammed into the side of one of the station towers and was nothing more than a tangle of wreckage. Several of its dislodged ondium keel plates had floated up and tangled in the cables.

“Scrap,” Pyke breathed, shaking his head. “You owe the Lady a couple of candles next holyday, Taya.”

“I sure do,” Taya murmured, staring.

“Exalted, if you’ll please follow me, I’ll escort you inside,” a lictor said. “We’ll bring your son to you and semaphore up to Oporphyr Tower to notify your husband.”

“Very well. We shall speak again, Taya Icarus. House Octavus shall not forget what you have done for it today.” Viera touched one of Taya’s wings before allowing herself to be led away. Taya looked after her, admiring the exalted woman’s élan. After a few thousand rebirths, maybe she’d be that self-possessed after a near-death experience, too.

“Excuse me,” another lictor said, politely but less deferentially, to Taya and Pyke. “I will now hear your account of this occurrence.” He was tall, pale, and fair-haired—Taya didn’t even need to register his accent to guess he was of Demican descent. However, the black lictor’s stripe tattooed down the right side of his face proved that he was a full citizen of Ondinium.

“I don’t have much to say.” Taya stripped off her gloves and loosened the top buttons of her flight suit. “I didn’t see anything until I heard the girder giving way.”

“Interviewing participants is mandatory,” the lictor insisted. “This way, Icarii.”

“All right,” Taya acquiesced. Arguing with a lictor, especially a Demican lictor, was worse than useless. One of the selection criteria for the caste was stubbornness.

“You don’t have to interrogate us,” Pyke protested, balking. “We didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Pyke, come on. The sooner we give our statements, the sooner we can get out of here.”

“This is harassment! We’re innocent—why do we have to be questioned?”

She rolled her eyes.

“He’s just doing his job. And I’m almost certain that people are never beaten and brainwashed for rescuing exalteds.”

“You never know,” Pyke said darkly. “Octavus is a decatur.”

“I know.” Octavus was among the many names she’d memorized while cramming for the diplomatic corps examination. “So?”

“So, you know what that means.” Pyke gave her a meaningful look. “Council. Do you think it’s coincidence that a wireferry broke while his wife was riding it?”

“Oh, Lady, not now.” Taya grabbed his arm and pulled him along after her. “Come on. Let’s go.”

“But what if the stripes are in on it?” Pyke objected, digging in his heels. “It could be a military coup. They might decide to get rid of the witnesses.”

“Pyke. I’m tired, and I have to attend a wedding tonight. Let’s just answer the man’s questions and go, all right?”

“You’re too trusting,” he growled.

“Uh-huh.” Several months ago they’d gone out a few times. At first Pyke’s gloomy mistrust of authority had been amusing, but after a few weeks, his conspiracy theories had gotten on her nerves. “I don’t feel particularly threatened by lictors, all right?”

“Well, they’re probably not as much of a threat as collapsing wireferries,” Pyke admitted. Taya laughed, despite herself, and his eyes warmed.

Pyke was a skilled flier and a thoughtful friend, and he had all the good intentions a girl could want. Not to mention broad shoulders, a strong chest, and hard muscles in his arms and legs from years of flying. Her best friend, Cassilta, thought she was crazy to cut him loose, but Taya hadn’t been able to take the lectures about corruption and cover-ups. She’d ended the relationship with the reliable “just friends” excuse. To his credit, Pyke had taken the rejection well, and now Cassi regarded him as fair game.

“If you will please follow me,” the Demican lictor insisted.

“You were great up there, Taya,” Pyke said as they trailed after the official. “Just wait until the eyrie hears about it.”

“Not great enough. I think the car clipped one of my feathers.” She craned her neck, but she couldn’t see the tips of her wings without stumbling over her own feet.

“It’s just a little bent. My uncle can fix it in no time.”

The lictor led them up a short flight of steps into the nearest guard station, and Pyke waved a dramatic good-bye as they were parted.

“If you wish to remove your wings, you may,” the Demican lictor said, leading her into a small office. Deciding she deserved a rest, Taya unbuckled the harness straps and swung open the metal keel. Her back prickled as the leather flight suit pulled away from her sweat-covered skin.

Her ondium armature swayed in the air, its metal wingtips touching the ceiling. Taya frowned as she inspected the feathers. Two primaries were bent out of shape, but Pyke was right. They wouldn’t be hard to repair.

She’d been lucky.

“You were very brave,” the lictor said, pulling two chairs away from desks and swinging them around. “This will not take long. Please sit down. Would you like some water?”

“That’s all right. I’m fine.” She sank into a chair and rubbed her neck. Her muscles twanged like plucked strings. “What’s your name?”

“I am Lieutenant Janos Amcathra.” The soldier dropped into the other chair and pulled out a sheet of paper. “Your papers?”

A Demican name. No surprise. He couldn’t be more than a second-generation citizen. Taya switched to Demican as she passed over her identification papers.

“Well met in peacetime, Lieutenant Janos Amcathra.”

“Well met in peacetime, Taya Icarus,” he replied in the same language, glancing over her papers before handing them back. He switched back to Ondinan as he picked up a pen. “Please describe everything that happened.”

Taya recounted the event. It took her longer to tell it than it had to live it. Amcathra took detailed notes.

“Then it was a coincidence that you were close to the accident scene,” he summarized. “If you had not stopped to rest—”

“We were lucky.”

“Yes.” Amcathra handed her a printed form and a pencil. “The last thing I must have is your signature and eyrie number. I will send you a message if I need to talk to you again.”

Taya blinked, surprised.

“That’s it? I thought we came in here because it was going to take a long time.”

“We came in here so that you would not be mobbed by the crowd.”

“Oh. Well, thank you.”

“I do not often beat and brainwash Ondinium’s citizens,” he said, dryly.

Taya grinned. “Don’t mind Pyke. He’s harmless.” She picked up the form and skimmed through it.

Amcathra watched as she signed, then added his own signature.

“Your associate may be correct about one matter. The collapse may not have been an accident.”

“What do you mean?” Taya remembered Pyke telling her about stacked contract bids and substandard building materials in one of his anti-government rants.

“Incidents of political violence have been on the rise, and this event fits the pattern.”

“Is Octavus . . . political?” She knew that Octavus was a technological conservative, which made him popular among the plebeians but alienated many of the cardinal castes that depended on technology for their living.

Amcathra shrugged.

“I am only speculating. An icarus flies high and sees much. If you spot anything suspicious, I expect you will report it to me.”

Typical. It was just like a lictor to drop enough hints of criminal activity to make a person uneasy, and then use that uneasiness to his own ends. Suspicion was a way of life for the military. And icarii were always asked to aid their investigations.

Best just to agree and get out.

“Of course. Is that all?”

Amcathra glanced at her floating armature. “Do you require any assistance with your equipment?”

“No.” She rose to her feet, suppressing a flinch. Her back and arms ached.

“Fly safely, Icarus,” he said, nodding and leaving.

“Thanks.”

Taya set about strapping herself back in, moving more slowly than usual. The metal exoskeleton and leather straps had left bruises all over her body. A hot bath would be nice. With luck, she’d have time to take one before the wedding.

Once the armature was strapped on, its buoyant ondium helped support her sore muscles. Taya’s legs had stiffened up after sitting, and now they twinged as she walked.

Back on the street, lictors kept the crowd of rubberneckers out of the way as engineers scrambled over the wireferry towers, running cables back and forth like a giant safety net to keep the wreckage from hitting the street.

Taya stood on the wide station steps wondering how long it would take to lower the broken girder safely to the ground. She was glad she didn’t have to rely on the wireferry to move from sector to sector. The cars would have to be rerouted around the accident site, and a lot of important people were going to find themselves delayed on their way home.

A few members of the crowd began to cheer. She looked around and realized they were waving at her. She lifted a hand, embarrassed. Scattered applause greeted the gesture.

Uncomfortable at being the focus of attention, Taya limped across the street to the base of the wireferry tower. She considered waiting for Pyke, but she had no idea how long it would take him to give his statement. With his attitude toward authority, they might decide to hold him for the night.

The lictors allowed her to climb up to the lowest launch dock, only fifty feet off the ground. It was high enough. She rolled her shoulders one last time and pulled on her cap, goggles, and gloves. Muscles protesting, she slid her arms into the wings, unlocked them with a backward shrug, and ran to the edge of the dock.

The citizens below clapped as if they’d never seen an icarus take off before. Taya made a face and swept her wings out, searching for a thermal to lift her away from the broken girders and the unwanted attention.

[End Excerpt]

Copyright © 2013 by Dru Pagliassotti.

Excerpted from Clockwork Heart by Dru Pagliassotti.

Published by permission of the author and

EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing.

All rights reserved.

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

Dru Pagliassotti is a professor of communication at California Lutheran University, where she teaches media theory and practice. She published and edited The Harrow, an online literary magazine for fantasy and horror, from 1998 to 2009. As a long-time roleplayer, Dru worked at About.Com’s Guide to roleplaying games from 1998 to 2001, writing weekly columns about roleplaying and reviewing hundreds of RPG systems and supplements; she had a brief appearance in About.com’s very first commercial, dressed as a swordswoman in a black doublet and pantaloons. Her martial arts training in judo, ju-jitsu, and aikido comes in handy when writing fight scenes.

NONFICTION

Interview: Allie Brosh
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Allie Brosh is the creator of the popular webcomic Hyperbole and a Half. The comic, which mostly deals with funny stories from the author’s childhood as well as touching on more serious subjects, like her ongoing battle with depression, is intentionally drawn to look like something a child would create using Microsoft Paint, and has a devoted following with almost 400,000 likes on Facebook. A print version entitled Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Stuff that Happened is out now.

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.

Since you do a comic, one problem we have with doing an audio podcast is that we can’t show people what the comic looks like. But I think many, many people who don’t know your name or the name of the comic would recognize it visually if they saw it because the pictures appear everywhere.

Yeah, it’s become a meme.

It occurred to me that you must run into this problem just when you’re talking to people, right? Do you have some way of describing your comic to people in words so that they’re like, “Oh yeah, I know that comic.”

There’s a crudely drawn character who has a triangle ponytail thing on top of its head; it’s yellow, and then there’s sort of a pink, tube dress. It’s got really buggy eyes and squiggly arms. That’s the thing that I draw. I also draw dogs.

I was thinking maybe like a stick figure with a fish face maybe?

Sort of tadpole-like, right? A stick figure tadpole-like thing that’s vaguely humanoid, but also vaguely tadpole-y.

Hopefully a lot more people now know what we’re talking about. You mentioned that your comic has inspired a lot of memes. Do you want to say what some of those memes are that people might recognize?

The “All the Things,” the “X all the Y” meme that came from a post that I did. The “Alot.” There have been a couple of pictures. Every now and then they’ll circulate, but the big one is the “X all the Y.”

Do you want to explain a little bit more about what that is?

It came from a story where I’m talking about how I struggle with adulthood, and I periodically make conquests on adulthood, or make an attempt at it, and it’s always very involved. So I decided one day I’m going to just change everything about myself and start doing everything on time: paying bills on time, going to the grocery store and getting healthy food, learning how to cook well, and I’m going to clean everything. Basically try to change everything at once, and because I was doing that, I can’t change anything because it all comes crashing down. You have to take baby steps. Anyway, one of the frames was where I’m so motivated in trying to do all these things, and there’s a picture of my character standing there holding a broom and yelling, “Clean all the things!”

People have done all sorts of variations on this. I read your Ask Me Anything (AMA) that you did on Reddit, and someone mentioned that this has even appeared in Warcraft. Where did it appear on Warcraft?

I did not know it had made an appearance in Warcraft. That’s crazy.

How about the “Alot” one? Why don’t you tell us about that?

The “Alot” is a monster I invented because of a grammatical mistake that people sometimes make where they take the phrase “a lot” and make it one word. I like to imagine a monster when people say that. They will say, “Wow, they’re charging alot.” I imagine an alot monster charging directly at them. It just helps me cope with grammar mistakes, I suppose.

That one drives me crazy too. Have you considered doing a monster called the “All right” where it’s like “alright” as one word?

“All right”—I only recently learned how that’s supposed to go. “Awhile”—that one’s got some peculiar rules to it.

You could have a whole monster manual. Monsters starting with A—

There’s an idea. “Grammatical mistakes monsters.”

One of your memes showed up unauthorized on a bus ad. What’s the story with that?

I haven’t had a chance to deal with that yet. I’ve been so busy doing book stuff. I’ve just finished dealing with a billboard that 7-11 Mexico ran that was using the same image, and we had to be like, “Hey, that’s not okay.” We don’t want to set a bad precedent, where I just let anybody use this thing to promote whatever they want. So we had to say, “Hey guys, this isn’t okay.” We got lawyers involved and everything, and that was a long process that I am dreading repeating, but we’ll get to that after all the book stuff has settled down.

You mentioned that people have even used some of your memes to promote causes that you disagree with. What have been some of those?

There was one that was like “Save all the babies.” It was used on a pro-life site. I didn’t really enjoy that one. It’s been used as hateful stuff against gay marriage. I am totally in support of gay marriage, so I cringe at my character being used in that way, to promote something that oppresses people.

In those cases, is there anything you can do?

If I did that to every site, if I tried to go out and find every instance where that happened, I would be doing nothing but doing that. It takes so long to send them a cease and desist letter, and if they don’t cease and desist, then to proceed with legal action. It’s such an involved thing that it would take all of my time, and I wouldn’t be able to write or do anything other than just that.

We certainly want you spending time writing. You mentioned that you’ve just turned your blog into a print book. Do you want to tell us about that process?

After the blog became popular on the internet, I was contacted by my literary agent Monica, and we started the process of creating a book. I took some of the stories from the blog and added eleven new stories. So there’s seven old stories and eleven new ones, and it’s just the same stuff that’s on my website. It’s illustrated sort of like standup comedy in writing form. That’s the best way I’ve found to describe what I do.

Doing the new stories for the book, was that a different process than doing the ones for the internet?

Nope, exactly the same. I got more efficient toward the end of it because I had to learn how to do away with stuff. I would start drawing the pictures before I was done writing all the text, and then if I decided to restructure the story or focus on a different aspect of it, I would have to scrap all of these days’ worth of pictures. There were some posts where I would get rid of maybe three hundred pictures that I’d drawn by the end of it. I had to streamline it a little bit and learn how to be more efficient in writing and really hammering out the story before I start drawing and before I commit ink to paper or digital ink to digital paper.

The books dedication begins “For Scott. What now, fucker?” What’s the story behind that?

Scott is a friend of mine, and he is very pranky. That was retaliation for a prank he pulled on me.

What was the prank he pulled on you?

He stole my car and cleaned it, and then left a note in it that said, “This vehicle has been confiscated by the Oregon Department of Health for sanitation.” It was very funny and very nice. So I decided to retaliate in the same vein. My book’s dedicated to him, but it’s still sort of like, “Yeah, fucker, you got yours.” This is my way of retaliating.

Do you have a particularly messy car, I guess? Or you used to before it got cleaned?

This was after a road trip I had taken, and so I was living out of my car pretty much. It got quite messy. There were, like, food wrappers in the passenger seat. It wasn’t disgusting, but it was definitely not a clean car. I don’t wash cars that often because it just gets dirty again.

I also have a very dirty car, so I’m not going to judge you.

Oh, good.

Some people might judge you for swearing as much as you do in this comic that kind of looks like it’s for children at first glance. What have been some of the most extreme reactions you’ve gotten to your constant swearing?

I wouldn’t call it constant. Maybe once or twice per post, if that. There’s often not even any profanity at all. I use it quite judiciously, but I think that swear words are sort of like a fine spice. You can’t use them too much, but they punch up the flavor of the writing a little bit. You need that for humor; sometimes you need to just have that word in there for the tempo of it.

I think “motherfucker” is one of the funniest words in the English language. It’s beautiful to me. I don’t know. I’ve had people write very angry emails being like, “You don’t need to do this. You don’t need to say this.” What I say to them is, “I write this based on my sense of humor.” The things that make me laugh are the only barometer I can really use, and I’m not going to start pandering, and being like, “Oh, I can’t swear because it’s offensive.” It’s just words. To me they’re very funny words. I’m not actually doing anything bad. I’m not being violent or obscene, I’m just using a word that is somehow classified as a naughty word.

It’s funny that you compare swearing to spicing up food, because in the book you mention that you used to be confused about salt and pepper and how they don’t cancel each other out. I was wondering, did you ever go through a phase where you thought that “fuck” canceled out “shit” or something, and then you’re like, “Wait, no, it actually just makes it even worse.”

[Laughter]

Maybe. I haven’t analyzed that yet. I’ll have to go back and look at my writing progression, and see if I’ve used “fucks” to cancel out “shits.”

I mentioned that I read this Ask Me Anything that you did on Reddit. It seems like you spend a lot of time on Reddit. Is that accurate?

Yeah, I do. Reddit is my preferred procrastination device. I spend a lot of time there. I don’t spend a lot of time logged into my main account anymore just because I’ll try to make a comment, and I don’t like being visible as me all the time. People have me tagged on there; there’s a feature where you can tag people so you know who they are later, and it flags your attention, like, “Oh, this is this person.” Sometimes I like just being totally anonymous, so I have an alternate account that I use and it’s sort of fun. I get to test out humor and try to see how many up votes I can get with a funny comment, and that helps me with my writing process to do that. To see what works and what doesn’t. It’s actually a great tool for comedy.

What’s the name of your alternate account?

I can’t tell you. I’m sorry.

Ah! Almost got you there.

[Laughter]

One place you popped up on Reddit was in the No Sleep subreddit where you posted this really creepy short story called “Cologne.” What was the story behind that?

I actually read a lot of horror, and I think that there are some great parallels between horror and comedy. They both rely a lot on suspense, and building tension, and then releasing it. This was an exercise that I wanted to do. I wanted to actually try to write horror, and see how much suspense I could build.

It was a good writing exercise for me. I wrote this creepy story that was based on my worst fears, and the suspense came from all of my safety checks that I use to combat these fears. I tried to undermine those. If I lock my house, then the killer gets in through an unlocked door or a door that didn’t quite latch right. It’s basically about somebody breaking through all the things that make me think I’m safe. It’s not me—the narrator isn’t me necessarily—but this character is living out my greatest fears.

You really do do those safety checks, like checking to make sure there’s not a serial killer. You say in the book you actually pull over on the side of the road every once in a while just to make sure there’s not a serial killer hiding in the backseat of your car.

I actually used to be a lot more anxious and paranoid before I became depressed, but my depression has cured me of a lot of my anxiety by making me not care as much. I’m not quite that way anymore. I’m much less fearful now.

You also say in the book that you watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre while your parents thought you were asleep, and you were hiding behind the couch watching it.

I’m not actually sure if it was The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I actually don’t know the name of the movie I watched. I used The Texas Chainsaw Massacre because that was a well-recognized movie. With that one I don’t actually remember the name of the movie it was, but it was terrifying.

Did you watch a lot of horror movies? Are you a horror movie fan?

I do now. I went through a phase where I was really scared of them, and I wouldn’t watch them, but I really do enjoy horror movies, and I enjoy reading horror as well. I read a lot of Stephen King in my formative years. When I was like eleven and twelve, I was reading Pet Sematary.

What horror authors would you have been reading lately?

I actually haven’t read a lot lately. I don’t read other authors while I’m writing because I find that when I read someone else’s writing while I’m trying to write I sort of start writing in their voice. And that’s harmful because later it doesn’t sound like me, it sounds like them. I’ve had to go on a reading hiatus. Then I’ve been so busy since I finished the book that I haven’t had a chance to sit down and really, really read. I’ve started to reread Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide series, but that’s not horror, that’s comedy.

Since we’re The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, obviously we’re well acquainted with Douglas Adams.

Oh, I didn’t make that connection. That’s awesome.

My parents owned the original BBC radio drama of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and we would listen to that on car trips, so I’ve listened to it like fifty times or something like that.

That’s amazing. Very cool.

Speaking of that, it was interesting, we actually talked about Douglas Adams back in episode forty-two of our podcast.

Oh, perfect.

My co-host—who couldn’t join us tonight—and his wife were both on, and they both said that as teenagers that they both went through very difficult times in their lives, and that reading Douglas Adams really helped them get through that. I was wondering if you felt that way at all.

It wasn’t during a difficult time in my life that I was reading it. I think I started reading Douglas Adams maybe in seventh grade, and I do remember laughing so hard that I couldn’t breathe and being legitimately concerned that I was going to die. I was sitting in the back of my mom’s car. We were picking my sister up from some after-school activity that she was doing, and my mom left to go inside to pick up my sister. I was sitting in the back of the car reading Hitchhiker’s Guide; I think it was the part with the whale falling out of the sky, and I was laughing so hard that I couldn’t breathe, and I kept thinking about it, and it kept making me laugh more, so that I couldn’t stop laughing. I remember being like, “Oh my god, I hope my mom comes back, because this is really turning into an emergency situation.”

That’s like a horror story. Someone dies from laughing so hard.

See, horror and comedy, lots of parallels.

Have you written any other prose fiction besides that “Cologne” story?

I used to write all the time when I was a kid. I wrote these gigantic monstrosities about these heroic men fighting things. My main character was named Jathem, like a very manly warrior name. He would just wander around, and find different things to fight, and then fight them, and continue wandering around until he found more things to fight. That was pretty much the storyline for every single thing that I wrote in this series of “books.” That was my first assault on literature. I’d play around with it. I’d write things every now and then; there’s nothing that I’ve finished. I’m bad at finishing things. I was very happy to actually finish my book.

That Jathem thing that you mentioned, that was sort of an epic fantasy story?

Yeah, something like that. I read a lot of Tolkien growing up, so I was very into the Aragorn-type characters. Those were my idols. I very much wanted to be a fearsome warrior.

You would describe yourself just overall as a fantasy and science fiction fan?

I probably haven’t read a whole lot recently but I enjoy fantasy. I play Magic: The Gathering. I do enjoy fantasy quite a lot. I would like to take a stab at actually, legitimately writing it someday. We’ll see if that comes to fruition.

Just reading some of your stuff, it sounds like you’re really pretty hardcore into Magic: The Gathering. I just played it a little bit when it first came out, and I didn’t even understand half the stuff you were talking about. It was so arcane.

[Laughter]

That’s sort of my relaxing thing that I do; I get online and play Magic. I’ll get online and join a draft queue and play for like nine hours in a row. Just play and play. I have obviously far-fetched dreams of, “Oh, I want to be a professional Magic player.” Because that’s clearly what you do when you try to take on any new calling, is to try to be the best at it, right?

You go on YouTube and watch people play Magic?

I watch Twitch.tv streams, so I watch players play there. There’s different sites. There’s Star City Games and Channel Fireball, and I watch videos that they put out. Then, for YouTube, there’s old tournament videos that I’ll sometimes watch or archived Channel Fireball videos. I watch a lot of Magic.

Could you say some Magic stuff that would sound like gibberish to me, but would totally prove your cred to the hardcore Magic crowd?

Oh, gosh, I don’t know. Coming up with it on the spot is sort of difficult. I’ve been trying to make a bug deck work. Bug is a term for a blue/black/green deck, and basically you use disruption cards like Thoughtseize to disrupt your opponent’s game plan and feed your graveyard, which you can then use as a source of card advantage with cards like Snapcaster Mage and Tarmogoyf. Then it’s sort of scary because you’ve got bobs in there, and they’re always trying to get your life total, but then you have Deathrite Shamans to gain it back. It’s good against combo decks because you can disrupt their game plan, but it’s also good against more fair decks because you have enough removal and enough hand deception and counterspells to deal with those decks as well. Does that sound jargony?

Yeah, that was perfect—I have no idea what you’re talking about.

[Laughter]

It wasn’t very eloquent. It was jargony, but not very eloquent. To somebody who plays Magic that would seem very rudimentary, I feel like. Like, “Well, yeah, that’s how bug works, of course.”

You mentioned earlier that you moved from anxiety when you were younger to depression in more recent years. You have these two really, really amazingly good comics that you did about depression. I’ve seen a lot of people, including clinical psychologists, say that this comic presents the best explanation of clinical depression of anything they’ve ever seen. I was wondering, do you think that we should throw out all psychology textbooks and just replace them with your comics instead?

I think that those are useful. I certainly learned stuff in psychology textbooks to help me understand myself well enough to explain it. I think that a lot of people who write psychology textbooks maybe haven’t been depressed, or if they have, maybe they didn’t approach it in quite the same way I did where I tried to fix everything from the ground up. I had this really intense way to cure my own brain. I tried to figure it out, like nothing that anyone was saying was helping me, so I was like, “Well, I have to go in here and try to figure out how to explain it better so that I can get better help.” And it’s sort of a result of that.

A lot of people responded very powerfully to that on Reddit. Do any of the responses that you’ve gotten to those comics stick out in your mind?

There’ve been a few, and they’re mostly like personal messages and emails where I’ll talk to people. I’ve talked to people who are suicidal at the time they wrote me in the message. We’ve talked about it, and I’ve spent late nights staying up with people who are suicidal just talking and trying to figure out how to keep them from killing themselves. It’s tough because you don’t want to delegitimize their feelings—if someone wants to kill themselves you can’t be like, “Well, just don’t,” because that takes away any of the legitimacy of what they’re going through, and makes it feel like, “Well, you don’t understand,” and that’s a tough thing.

There’re always these questions of, “If you don’t know me, why should I keep going?” There’s no real answer to that that doesn’t sound super Hallmark-y and cheesy or just bullshit basically. So I’ve stayed up very, very late just talking it out and figuring things out with people, but those are the ones that stick out the most to me. Probably the more real discussions I’ve had with people over email or personal message.

These are people, they just contact you through your website or something?

It happens sometimes where I’ll get messages on Reddit, and then a couple people have contacted me through an email account I have linked to on my blog. I get a lot of mail so I can’t read everything, but sometimes I’ll catch these ones that will be like, “Help, I don’t know what to do.” I try my best to actually help.

Do different sorts of emails that you’ve gotten also stick out for you among all the fan mail that you get?

I’ve gotten some really funny emails. I’m trying to think of any particular ones that really, really stand out. When I was really depressed, actually, a group of my readers got together and made me a quilt and sent it to me in the real mail. That really stuck out.

Were these all people who lived in the same area?

No, it came from all over. They knitted or crocheted different squares and then sent them from all over. There’s even one from Iceland in there. It was incredible. It was a great project.

What does the quilt look like?

It’s very colorful and there are all these different knitted and crocheted squares that have been sewn together. There’s one of the “Alot”; there’s a heart on it; there’s a really cool one where it looks like there’s text on it, but you can only see it when looking at it from a side angle because of the way the yarn is raised up, the specific knitting pattern they used. It’s really cool. I have it on my bed. Not right now, because I’m traveling, but it’s on the bed at home.

That would be funny if you just took the quilt with you everywhere you went.

I’d be afraid I would lose it. I tend to leave things behind in hotel rooms, so I don’t take anything that really, really matters.

You’ve also talked about, in addition to the depression, that you were treated recently for endometriosis, and I think a lot of people don’t even know what that is. Do you want to talk about that?

It’s sort of crappy that it’s like that. There’s not a lot of research. Even scientists and doctors don’t really entirely understand endometriosis, and the pathology of it, why it happens. Basically, we didn’t know it was endometriosis until the surgeon opened me up and took everything out. They thought it was cancer prior to that, so it’s sort of scary. But after they opened me up, they found that everything in my pelvic region and my abdominal cavity was scarred together. What happens is, I get cysts on my ovaries that are basically like giant blood balloons, and then they burst, and it’s this horrible, appendicitis-like pain where there’s violent immediate reactions, there’s fluid in your abdominal cavity that’s not supposed to be there, so there’s a lot of inflammation and incredible amounts of pain. Because of all that inflammation, scar tissue starts to form, and so my organs were all scarred together and fused into a tangled mass. The surgeon had to undo that, and then take out my uterus and ovaries; I have one ovary, I’m hoping that it will be scared into submission because all of its friends were brutally murdered in front of it.

You said that you went to a number of doctors who didn’t take your complaint seriously, right?

I got a lot of hand waving and, “Oh, it’s just cramps, sweetheart. We all go through that.” It made me feel like maybe I’m just being a big baby about it, but there were times where I was throwing up and passing out because it hurt so bad, and I couldn’t deal with this happening every month. This would be three days of agony and not being able to get up. If I stood up for any length of time my legs would give out, they’d start shaking and I wouldn’t be able to stand anymore because it hurt so bad. So that’s not normal, and I would try to explain that to doctors, and they’d usually be like, “Well, we don’t know what’s going on.” I’d been evaluated for appendicitis. I’d gotten probably four CT scans because doctors thought I had appendicitis. They didn’t realize that endometriosis is a thing that can be crippling.

Is there anything that you just want people to know, people who might be in this situation that you were in when you didn’t know what was wrong with you?

Don’t let doctors treat you like you’re faking it. I went into the emergency room once because I was in such horrible pain; I didn’t know what was wrong with me—I thought that there was something seriously wrong inside of me. They thought that I was just looking for drugs, and so they didn’t take it seriously. They did an exam and then they sent me home with some drugs, but they thought that that’s what I was after.

Be more assertive about your pain, and describe it, and if you are experiencing this particular brand of agony, you really need to be an advocate for yourself so that you get the care you need, and get a doctor who really takes you seriously. There were some things that happened to me where I could have died. So if you have something that seems to be related to your lady parts, and it seems really dangerous and scary and painful, get it diagnosed, don’t settle and feel like maybe you were being a big baby, because you probably aren’t.

In one of the stories in the book, you describe how you have these conflicting aspects of your personality. For example, you would simultaneously see yourself as a skeptic, but also imagine that you have a very pretty aura. Skepticism is something I’m interested in, so I’m wondering, was that completely a joke, or do you see yourself as a skeptic at all?

I’m definitely a skeptic, but there’s still a part of me that’s just this really selfish, greedy part that isn’t rational at all. If somebody starts talking about auras, that part pipes up and is like, “Oh my god, I bet I have the prettiest aura.”

What about just in general, when it comes to ghosts, psychics, and horoscopes?

No, I’m not a believer in those. I’m an atheist. I’m totally skeptical. I rely more on science and logic than the more metaphysical stuff. It’s still fun to talk about, but I don’t believe in any of it.

Is that how you grew up?

My mom was very spiritual and metaphysical, and she was always trying to tell me how I could straighten out my energy. She’s into that whole The Secret philosophy of positive thinking, like you create things with your thoughts. It’s funny sometimes, because she thinks that I’m very negative. I’m like, “No, mom, things are just shitty. That’s the way they are. I’m not panicking about it.” I don’t have to be any more negative than necessary, but it doesn’t hurt to look at things being shitty. You don’t have to hide behind this panicked shield of positivity all the time.

That was something I thought was really interesting when we were talking about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, because that’s sort of the whole message behind The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in a way. You don’t have to pretend that the universe makes sense or is a nicer place than it is. When you accept it for what it is, it’s still kind of funny.

Exactly, it’s funny and it doesn’t have to be scary. Like, there’re so many things that seem scary, and people’s automatic inclination is: “Well, I don’t want to be negative about it, so I’m just going to be positive.” If you’re being attacked by a bear, it doesn’t do you any good to pretend that you aren’t being attacked by a bear. You’re much more prepared if you can acknowledge this is happening—“The bear is attacking me, what do I do?”—than to sit there and pretend, “Oh, well, maybe the bear is being friendly. Maybe the bear isn’t a bear, maybe it’s a happy unicorn rainbow thing.”

What are you working on now? Do you have any other blog posts in the works or another book or anything?

I’ve been working on a whole collection of blog posts. I’m working on a whole group of them now with the intention of publishing another book and also using some of them for blog posts.

There’s a couple about the dogs. And there’s one about my crazy Aunt Laurie.

There’s also one about a friend of mine and me; we invented this game called “Doggie Detective” when we were kids. We were detectives who were inexplicably dogs, and we would try to solve different crimes. How many crimes are there around an elementary school? We had to make up our own mayhem to solve. We weren’t the forces of good that we thought we were going to be. We ended up having to make mischief to then solve and be heroes.

Then on Reddit, your husband mentioned you’re working on “Depression, Part 3.”

I am working on that one. There’re so many parts to depression, there’s so many things you can say about it because it’s just this big thing, it becomes your entire life. In part three, I’m describing the aftermath and what it’s like living. It’s not cured. I’m still depressed. It comes and goes. It becomes more depressed and less depressed, but I still consider myself depressed. And so what that’s like, what it’s like living with it.

There’s a little bit of horror in there, in a comedic tone of course, but I have enjoyed it so far, writing about it. What it’s like trying to motivate yourself after you’ve found out that you can live in total squalor and you don’t die; there’s nothing bad that actually happens to you, so some of that fear that I used to motivate myself isn’t there anymore, and that’s what I’ve been struggling with. Just stuff like that, about the more day-to-day aspects of depression and what it’s like actually living with it.

The format of this show is that we do an interview and then we have a panel discussion afterward, and the panel discussion is going to be on comic strips. So I was wondering, after people read your blog and your book, what other comic strips or webcomics should they go check out?

There’s this one that I’ve always wanted to plug because I think it’s brilliant. It’s called Romantically Apocalyptic. It’s a webcomic and the writer says a lot with very little. The humor is fantastic and subtle. The art is beautiful. I can’t say enough good things about it.

It’s about relationships?

No, it’s a post-apocalyptic comic. It’s about this guy called The Captain, and he’s just this post-apocalyptic guy. One brilliant thing about it is, because the characters are all wearing gas masks, you can’t see any actual facial expressions, so the creator has to get really creative with how he exhibits emotion in his characters.

Unfortunately, we’re just about out of time here, so I think we’re going to have to wrap things up there.

I hope that was somewhat verbally fluent. I feel like I’m falling apart at this point in the interview schedule, where everything comes out rapidly and partially deformed.

I think our listeners should understand that you’ve done about thirty interviews today or something. It was great. I really enjoyed talking to you and good luck on your next thirty interviews that you have to do.

Thank you so much.

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 five-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 Boot Camp, 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: Scott Lynch
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Scott Lynch is the author of the World Fantasy Award nominee The Lies of Locke Lamora and its sequels, Red Seas Under Red Skies and The Republic of Thieves. His short fiction has been published in several anthologies and in Popular Science. His online serial Queen of the Iron Sands is available for free at his website, www.scottlynch.us. Born in Minnesota in 1978, Scott currently lives in Wisconsin.

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 Republic of Thieves and it’s the third book in the Gentleman Bastard series. So just for readers who are new to your work, do you want to just describe the basic premise of the series?

The Gentleman Bastard series, starting with The Lies of Locke Lamora, is a set of sword and sorcery crime novels. The protagonists are con artists in a Renaissance-era world where con artistry as we know it is not a very developed form of art; they’re essentially the first people to play with the deep and the long con. It’s essentially the story of how they are thrown from bad situation to bad situation, book after book, and have to live on their wits.

The first book in the series, The Lies of Locke Lamora, got published originally because an editor came across the opening chapters, which you’d posted online. Do you want to tell us about that?

Back in the dark days of the internet, or I guess the second dark age of the internet—this was back in 2004—I had been part of an online community that is now very, very defunct unfortunately. It was a discussion forum for people who were very serious about fantasy—double underlined, exclamation point. But there were some really great people involved in that, including Matthew Woodring Stover and Kage Baker, and a bunch of other people I’m still in contact with. Like many people, I was alleging to write a novel and threatening to write a novel, and finally people in the community just kind of lost their patience with me and said, “Look: Put up or shut up. Show us what you’re working on,” and I finally did.

So what I posted on a blog was what became the prologue to The Lies of Locke Lamora and everyone said, “Oh, that’s very, very nice,” and went on about their business. Unbeknownst to me, one of them was an associate of Simon Spanton, who is an acquiring editor for Gollancz in London and has been my editor since 2004, which is how the story turns out. So Simon contacted me and first said, “This is interesting. Do you have any more?” So I produced what became the first chapter in The Lies of Locke Lamora. So at that point there were about sixty pages in existence.

Simon sent me an increasingly desperate and fast-paced series of emails basically saying, “Okay, I’d like to approach my buying committee about maybe making an offer,” which sped up to, “Screw them, I’m just going to make an offer.” So in short order he had secured the rights to the novel and then all I had to do was actually write the novel.

I should disclaim at this point: This is not how it usually happens. This is how it very rarely happens, and my girlfriend is making gestures at me in the background, like a man being hanged and some very rude gestures I can’t repeat on the air. This is not how she got published. She did it the hard way.

And we should say that your girlfriend is also a writer, right?

Yes, I’m sorry. Elizabeth Bear, or as her new legal name goes, Four-Time Hugo-winning Novelist Elizabeth Bear.

You recently posted in a series of blog posts, taking a look back at The Lies of Locke Lamora, including a post titled, “You suck, Lynch.” What do you think are some of the strengths and weaknesses of that book, looking back on it?

Looking back on it, it’s not that I’m not proud of it. I’m very proud of it, and I would not want to rewrite it even though I think that I could rewrite it in several respects and make a stronger piece of work. It’s a testament to what it is and what it was. I mean, I was desperate in several ways and very passionate and that was the big break-out. I got the big chance to finally do it. So it’s an artifact of actually learning how to write a novel as I was writing it.

Structurally, it has this issue where you’ve got two plot threads, one of which is in the past and one of which is in the character’s present. The past episodes sort of wind down and the past story is told, and I started substituting in, rather than more narrative episodes from the past, bits of blatant worldbuilding and local lore and pithy sentiments. Some of these work thematically but some of them do not. Of course, it’s a first novel, so my grasp of language is not necessarily what it might have been. My grasp of gender roles, my ability to communicate what I wanted to. It is what it is for something written nine years ago. I’m still very proud of it, but all first novels have issues.

Speaking of structural issues, on your blog you said one of your friends took you to a Disney movie and said, “I’ve already seen this movie but I want you to watch it to learn basic plot structure.”

[Laughter] That was several years before The Lies of Locke Lamora, when I was even more of a neo-neophyte writer. Apparently it was his impression that basic story structure was eluding me and to some extent he was right. He was absolutely right. I appreciated that and actually I’ve often recommended that if you want to learn plot, you want to learn story, you want to learn how to construct these things on a very basic but effective level, what you want are good Pixar films, because they are as good a tutorial in basic story-crafting as you can possibly find anywhere on Earth. The good ones, mind you. There’s some you should skip, but nearly everything they did from Toy Story onward for a number of years is an excellent and valid model for a story in any genre.

What about the sequel to The Lies of Locke Lamora, Red Seas Under Red Skies—has there been enough distance from that that you can be objective about that or is it still too fresh? Do you have any thoughts on that book?

It was written in late 2006, very early 2007, and it was a different experience because at that point you learn that you can write the novel, and you set up to do it again so it’s not as daunting the second time around. I mean the project is as daunting, but at least you know you could do it once. Lies was a very rough time for me and for my then-fiancé, who is now my ex-wife, because we were living on our own together. We moved out on my first advance, and so we were learning to be adults together. We were learning about each other in ways we hadn’t previously. We were living on our own, and we were far from our friends. I mean, we moved to the outermost ring of suburbs, having lived in the middle of the city more or less previously, and I was locked in my room fourteen hours a day working like mad to produce this novel.

It was very stressful on our relationship and she basically delivered an ultimatum that the second book could not be like that. The second book was not like that. We, for a while, got along much, much better and it was a smoother process, life-wise and writing-wise, and I really wish that I could recall more of the specific process because it’s all sort of fading into the gray mists of memory because I don’t have the same level of documentation as I did for Lies of Locke Lamora, which of course was preceded by years of research and false starts and everything that goes into a first novel.

Let’s talk about the newest book, the third book in the series, The Republic of Thieves. Like The Lies of Locke Lamora, this one also has a storyline that takes place in the past and a storyline that takes place in the present. In the present, our heroes have to engineer a winning election strategy; in the past, they have to put on a play under very high stakes circumstances. What was it just about theater and electioneering that made you want to make them the focus of the book?

Well, some of them are obvious; it’s just the obvious metaphorical parallels to the life of crime and the life of false-facing that the protagonists tend to lead. It’s in some respects totally congruent in both politics and with acting. As Father Chains, the mentor figure of this little gang, tells his charges in The Republic of Thieves when they are sent off on this errand, they don’t know anything about this and he says, “To the contrary. You’ve had training in speaking, in deportment, in poise, in manners. You’ve got skills that can be applied; you just need to learn how to apply them on a stage so the people can appreciate them. The experience will be good for you, get lost,” and the jokes write themselves, as Locke and Jean observe.

They’re not changing careers; they’re just doing what they usually do in another city for different clients. There was literary discussion in the second book when we bump into a couple of characters who are strangely erudite for pirates. I’ve always wanted to sort of expand on that. Locke’s world has a Shakespeare figure and a Marlowe figure. There was this whole artistic flowering in the last years of this empire that collapsed six or seven hundred years previously, and that body of work has been handed down through Locke’s culture as their great plays. It’s a very cool narrative framework to hang everything on. It’s the classic play-within-the-play.

The title of the book, The Republic of Thieves, actually comes from the play that the characters perform, and you go into an enormous amount of detail about the plot of that play and the characters, and you actually provide long sections of the play that’s written in a sort of Elizabethan poetic style. How much of the play did you actually flesh out in your mind, and what was it like writing those poetic passages?

I wrote a plot summary. It’s your standard-issue Elizabethan five-act structure sort of play. So I just scribbled out all the events I needed to cover and then just wrote the bits that seemed the most interesting. I like to think that enough glimpses of it are given so that the reader can construct the full length and breadth of the plot.

As for writing it, I decided very early on that I would avoid writing in strict iambic pentameter simply because it was always going to be awkward and the expressiveness was going to be constrained to the format and whatever was being said was going to be lessened because I’m not a particularly great poet and compressing what I wanted to say into that format never struck me as a very wise decision. It’s not meant to directly emulate anyone’s notion of blank verse or iambic pentameter, it’s just meant to work and sound a bit different than the standard spoken language of Locke’s world.

One really cool section of the book is the initiation ritual for the Priesthood of the Crooked Warden. How did you come up with that?

That I’m very proud of, actually. I think that scene turned out really well. If I may be allowed to gloat, I dig that section of the book.

Every once in a while you have something turn out more or less exactly as you want it and you just kind of go, “Ah,” and then nothing will happen again for months, but that one happened.

That one was an “Ah,” because the thieves in Locke’s world have this priesthood—the secret priesthood—that they take seriously. They’re very devout, but they don’t have temples. They don’t have constant meetings. They don’t have literature. They have an oral tradition and a lot of scuttling around in shadows. Now, this is also part of showing the general structure of the Therin religion because this is how they all work, all the twelve gods and goddesses and then their nameless thirteenth brother, the black sheep of the family. All their theology follows this pattern, that essentially you can pledge yourself to live loosely on behalf of all the gods or you can choose one that you’re going to be especially faithful to. It’s supposed to be a two-way street. You are supposed to expect better things of that god but you are also expected to open your wallet more often on their behalf.

The third and deepest level of religious devotion is of course becoming a priest or a priestess. I wanted to show these characters interacting with the structure and how it physically, emotionally, and sociologically works, and also how it doesn’t work. This is not a grand gathering of every thief in the city. It’s always easier to mouth platitudes and proclaim yourself to be a believer than it is to show up on time at the temple, and that’s very much the case for this initiation ceremony. It’s only a segment of the underworld of Camorr. It’s not everybody.

Speaking of thieves, I think one character that readers have been looking forward to seeing the most is Sabetha—who was mentioned in some of the earlier books—but this book is the first time we really see her as a character. Did you know when you wrote The Lies of Locke Lamora what she was like or did the character develop in your mind in the meantime as you started writing this book?

I tried to put her in The Lies of Locke Lamora. One of the failed prologues that I wrote for the first book became a chapter in Republic of Thieves called “The Undrowned Girl.” It’s there in Republic of Thieves in more or less its original form.

It became very apparent to me very early on that Sabetha should either be a full part of the proceedings or she should be concealed for maximum effect until it was time for her to do so. I did not want her to have just one little appearance and then vanish for a long, long period of time. Again, it was structurally unbalanced and plus it seemed like it might be a lot of fun to torment readers, in the best possible way, as much as they scream and howl.

Part of the fun is not revealing every secret at the earliest possible opportunity; part of the fun is saving something for every book in the series.

As for who she was: When I started writing Lies I had a conception of her as a young girl. She’s a redhead for a very simple reason: She is and was originally an homage to Charlie Brown’s little redheaded girl, an eternal symbol of Charlie Brown’s unrequited love, which is something I very much sympathized with as a boy growing up. I had a lot of little redheaded girls in my life, but she’s evolved well beyond that because as it turns out, what’s going on between her and Locke is not unrequited love, even though it was at first. It’s just a meeting of two very complex minds and worldviews, and they each have their problems and weaknesses and hang-ups and limitations.

Part of the fun of not having her for two books is I want readers to wonder just how much of what they thought they learned about her comes from an unbiased source. Because with Locke and Jean and the Sanzas as our only real witnesses to who Sabetha was and what she did, there’s got to be an element of serious observer bias here. When she shows up, she might or might not confirm those things that the boys have been saying about her all these years. I leave it to the reader to judge.

In this book we see Sabetha express the feeling that she’s been treated differently by the gang because she’s a girl and that they don’t take her opinions as seriously. I also saw that you wrote in your blog that in Republic of Thieves you wanted to “Frame some issues of consent and false idealization that I think sex in Science Fiction/Fantasy has at times, been prone to.” Could you just talk about that aspect of the story?

This is a relationship between teenagers, and Locke and Sabetha have a lifelong relationship starting when she was perhaps seven or eight and he was about six or seven. But they’re teenagers together. When you are a teenager, you’ve grown no protective coverings on your nerve endings yet. You are a bundle of nerves and hormones and everything is felt so deeply and so hard and everything is so new and everything is more difficult than it needs to be.

We, in our culture, not just in fantasy, not just in literature, but in general—I mean, listen to the pop music, or at least cheesy pop music—we fictionalize this version of carefree teenage years and easy teenage romance and say, “Oh isn’t it wonderful to be young and in love and everything is just effortless.” Those of us that actually remember being a teenager, remember that. I mean, yeah, everything was wonderful. These sensations are wonderful and exciting the first time it happens, but goddamn, it’s difficult. It’s confusing. It’s stressful. You are wrapped up in so many competing stresses on so many different sides of your life, it’s not an idyllic summer of nonsense as adults would have it. I really wanted to translate that into Locke and Sabetha’s situation.

Actually there was a piece on Jezebel last year that mentioned your response to a reader who criticized you for writing about female pirates. You want to talk about that a little bit?

That was in relation to Red Seas Under Red Skies. That actually happened in 2005, which is hard to believe, but I hadn’t even written Red Seas Under Red Skies at that point. All I had were a few scattered scenes, so I posted one as a preview and it happened to be that little bit with Zamira Drakasha. It’s made very clear in the text that Zamira is black, and so I got this email from this complete tool. Fortunately I don’t get an awful lot of crazy email. I don’t get an awful lot of stupid email, but this guy’s tone of voice and the approach he took spurred me to send him a love note back.

[His email went something like] “Hey dude, let me rescue you from yourself. You’re a prisoner of political correctness. What are you doing? You don’t have to put black people in your fiction,” like I had been brainwashed or forced to do it, and it wouldn’t have happened otherwise, like I could be free with all the other free white writers who don’t have to write about black people in their work, so I snapped. It’s fucking offensive to me. I live in the 21st century and if you want to sulk and pretend that we don’t, that’s your own business, but don’t tell me to participate in your bullshit.

It was that whole, “Well, now I’m not going to tell my friends to buy your book.”

“Fine. Don’t tell your racist fuck-head friends to buy my book.” I am happier with the sales of the hundreds of people who wrote in appreciation of me telling him to get bent.

I mean, I’ve seen a couple of people saying, “Oh, well that was harsh.” Well, you know what, I don’t give a shit. If you send me stupid demands in my email, you don’t get the right to dictate what you should expect in return. You should probably expect something very colorful in return.

Have there been other occasions like that where you felt compelled to respond to people?

There have been a handful that I’ve felt compelled to respond to. There was another guy that I responded to in public a couple of years later. Some of us experimented with donation-model online serial fiction, and someone sent me this really snotty, hoity-toity, “Oh, you’re a professional author. Who are you to rattle your cup like a bum on the side of the road selling pencils?” It’s that whole misconception of “All authors are rich,” we’re just rolling in dough. Again, it was the tone of voice, the weird demands and the feigned disinterest, “Well, I’m not very interested,” and that’s like, “Bullshit. Of course you’re interested or you wouldn’t be sending me this email. You didn’t stumble across my frickin’ planetary romance serial project by accident; you were interested in the subject or in my work and you’ve got this just very sort of controlling attitude.”

So I smacked him around in public and he actually sent me an email saying, “I’m very sorry. I think I was a dick.” The guy who sent me the Zamira Drakasha email I’ve never heard back from, but this guy apologized.

I guess we should say your serial project is called Queen of the Iron Sands; it’s sort of an Edgar Rice Burroughs homage. How is that going? Do you think serial fiction is working for you?

It was created for a couple of reasons. I mean, it was a dream project, literally; I had an extremely vivid dream that I was holding a new book in my hands and woke up to discover that the book didn’t exist, which is the worst thing your own head can do to you when you’re a writer. It was a stylistic experiment and it was also a therapeutic effort because I had, and I still have, some pretty serious anxiety issues, but they were overwhelming at this point. They have been mitigated now with therapy and medication and more life experience, but oh, they were bad when this began because I was not in treatment and I was not medicated.

I attempted to use this project as a way of dealing with and overcoming my own anxieties, at which it was only intermittently successful. It is on a sort of unofficial hiatus at the moment because Republic of Thieves is just eating so much of my time. But it will continue. It is plotted out and it’s good to go, and it will continue, and I want to finish it and have it be a novel-length project.

The character Locke really struggles with some depression and hopelessness at the beginning of both The Republic of Thieves and Red Seas Under Red Skies. Do you feel like your own experiences with that helped and formed the character?

At the time I wrote Red Seas I was pretty functional. I was perhaps occasionally moody and quirky, but in that the way that artists are traditionally supposed to be. We’re supposed to be flakes and weirdos.

I did not consciously write anything that was happening to him from the perspective of depression. I was working on Republic from about late 2007 onward, and I didn’t begin therapy until 2009. There were two long years of this worsening situation and it was still bad for quite some time afterward. It never magically goes away. It hasn’t magically gone away. It’s just not as bad as it was.

I’ve talked at length about it on my LiveJournal and in a couple of other places. I don’t want to infect everything I write with whatever the latest thing that’s happened in my life is. I don’t necessarily want to explore depression through my work right now. Locke has had some pretty understandable situational depression. He’s a mercurial sort of character, and his temperament suits itself to periods of sulkiness and low periods. Without getting into too formal a diagnosis of what ails him, I think there’s explanations for it other than clinical depression.

Republic of Thieves was a distinctly different animal when I began writing it than it is now because the guy who went in on one side is very different than the author who turned in the book. I’ve been through this illness, the therapy, my divorce, and my view of some things in the world has shifted significantly. I think it makes for a better book.

Of course that’s what you would expect me to say: “Oh, it’s a really fortunate thing we’ve had, this five and a half year pause. I think it’s great. Everybody should try it.” Obviously I’m going to try to sell it that way, but seriously, it started out being written by a guy who thought that he was in a relationship that was going to last forever and it was finished by a guy who made the discovery that relationships are work. That’s a very, very, very trite and simple way of putting it, but the whole “one true love happens by destiny” thing, it’s not what the book is about. The book is sort of dedicated to shooting that whole notion down.

You mentioned earlier that you’re in a relationship now with writer Elizabeth Bear. Has spending a lot of time with her influenced your writing generally or this book in particular?

It has influenced my process most definitely, and she gets to be the first set of eyeballs in anything I write, so her input is very important. We’re both, as we’ve discovered, strong-willed individuals with serious control issues.

We have not fully integrated our creative processes. We’ve tried to collaborate a couple of times but we’re still working on getting it right. We have not slipped effortlessly into one another’s narratives, but she seems to trust me to give her a lot of feedback as a first reader and an editor, and I trust her in the same fashion.

She’s a very, very, very sharp cookie, as you might expect, and I’ve always been a very, very lone wolf sort of author. I’ve never had a writing group. I essentially lived under a rock and hissed at anybody who tried to look at my work-in-progress. This was not emotionally healthy and this was not necessarily artistically healthy. I’m still not part of anything I would describe as a writing group, but I have broadened my little circle of trusted readers. I’ve added new people and made an effort to seek out new opinions. That started with her. Her influence has definitely brought that approach to things into my affairs.

On your blog you mentioned that at a Kaffeeklatsch at Readercon you told an embarrassing personal story from your teenage years about a prank that caused unexpected emotional grief?

[Laughter] Oh god …

And somehow involves The Stainless Steel Rat books. Do you care to share that?

I would actually prefer not to. It is a very amusing story. It is a story of how Scott learned many, many difficult and important things, but the thing is there was a party that was hurt, and I’m just not comfortable with having a recorded version of me talking about what I did. I mean, I was a minor. I was still a teenager, but it was a very complex prank involving an awful lot of phone shenanigans, nothing creepy or stalkery, just a lot of services and goods were ordered and sent to this house: taxis, pizzas, plumbers.

These were the days right before ubiquitous caller ID and we thought it was harmless harassment, but it actually scared them and that was not what we were after at all, so for the sake of that I’m not going to tell the story like I’m proud of it. I love The Stainless Steel Rat books and it’s not their fault. I took them to heart, and I was a very, very energetic sixteen-year-old with a little too much time on my hands. And maybe my social conscience was a little bit underdeveloped at that point and the thought of sneaking into places and pranking people and being a general malcontent Stainless Steel Rat sort of character was very appealing. Eventually I learned the hard way that people have feelings that you can’t control and people have situations you might not know about and you might accidentally scare the bejesus out of somebody without meaning to.

Speaking of Kaffeeklatsches, and at the risk of setting off a rant, you recently posted that you’re declining to attend the Kaffeeklatsches at World Fantasy this year. Do you want to tell us about that?

[Laughter] Great. I love controversy. Controversy’s awesome, but I guess I have been public about this, so I will try to be as polite as I can. Yes, in relation to the World Fantasy Convention this year, I’m a member of a couple of different mailing lists, and a number of authors who are attending were contacted and asked if we would like to do these Kaffeeklatsches and some of the things that were offered to us in these terms, they made us uncomfortable. WFC, or whoever is responsible for this announcement, the organizers at WFC in Brighton announced that there would be a five-pound surcharge for those attending the Kaffeeklatsches.

It really seems like nickel-and-diming the participants and since the participants in a Kaffeeklatsch are basically readers and people who want to meet us as authors, we bristle because we felt like our readers were being mistreated or insulted. The wording of it has been insulting; there was this whole presumption that the people signing up for these things must be such deadbeats that they’ve got to have a preemptive monetary fine in place to keep them from running off someplace else.

I don’t mean any disrespect to those people who have elected to do the Kaffeeklatsches. The con has not been particularly evil in its communications; they’ve been very polite. They haven’t shown up and burned poop on my doorstep or anything. I don’t think they’re bad people for this; it’s just part and parcel with the fact that a lot of the communications going out from this WFC, for whatever reason, have not been particularly diplomatic, friendly, or well-considered. I like WFC. I want to support WFC. I want to be a good con-going citizen. I agreed to be on a panel too. This particular instance, I think, went a little too far toward something that I really can’t support.

As we start wrapping this up here, do you want to mention some of the other projects that you’ve done the last few years? On your website you mentioned “The Effigy Engine” and “He Built the Wall to Knock it Down?”

“He Built the Wall to Knock it Down” is the leadoff short story in an anthology called Tales of the Far West from Adamant Entertainment. It is a Weird West setting that takes a little getting used to because it is not just the historical United States. It is all an analogy and a remix. So you have an East-Coast Empire that is actually a cross between Feudal China and the United States in the 1860s/1870s, and then you have this magically unrolling frontier that just keeps on going to the western horizon with no evident end in sight for thousands and thousands and thousands of leagues. So it’s decidedly not our world: It’s the tropes of our world stretched on a totally different canvas. That short story is my contribution to it.

“The Effigy Engine” is a short story in an anthology from Jonathan Strahan. It is the first Solaris Book of New Fantasy and it was out in May of this year. It was called Fearsome Journeys and it featured a really, really, really good set of original tales. It’s got Saladin Ahmed, Elizabeth Bear, Ellen Kushner, K.J. Parker, Jeffrey Ford, and Ellen Klages. A bunch of really good stuff. “The Effigy Engine” is the first tale in a little sequence I’m calling the Red Hats, which are my very not subtle homage to Glen Cook’s Black Company stories. For my sins, in presumption, there’s a Black Company story in the book too. But the Red Hats are mercenaries in a sort of a “gunpowder and sorcery” world and there’ll be more adventures from those guys, “The Effigy Engine” is just the first.

I have a story called “A Year and a Day in Old Theradane,” which is going to be coming out hopefully in 2014 in a big, big George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois anthology called Rogues, which is a follow up to their Warriors anthology a couple of years ago. I’m in it, Neil Gaiman’s in it, Matt Hughes is in it. Basically it’s a cross-genre anthology of original tales of thieves and skullduggery and everything the word rogue is associated with. I wrote a nice long story for that one that is once again set in a fairly high-magic sword and sorcery setting with lots of action. I’m pretty proud of it and I think it’ll be a lot of fun.

I’ve got other short stories lined up. I’m doing a lot better functionality-wise these days, and I’m getting past some of the anxiety and trouble I’ve had with these, so my short-story production is definitely accelerating, and I would really like to continue building a solid retinue of short pieces to accompany the novels.

There’s that and there’s the next book in the Gentleman Bastard sequence after Republic, which is The Thorn of Emberlain, which is what I’m writing at the moment.

There’s also a set of novellas coming from Subterranean Press, which will bridge the story between Republic of Thieves and Thorn of Emberlain, and the first of those will be called The Mad Baron’s Mechanical Attic.

When could we expect to see those?

I don’t know if it’s going to be late this year or early next. I still have stuff to turn in to Bill at Subterranean Press, but the artwork is finished for it. Once I get my crap together and pass it all on to him, the production process should be relatively quick.

We’re certainly looking forward to all that stuff, and I think we’re going to wrap things up there. We’ve been speaking with Scott Lynch. His new book is called The Republic of Thieves. Scott, thanks for joining us.

Hey, thank you for having me.

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 five-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 Boot Camp, 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.

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Artist Spotlight: Mukesh Singh
Henry Lien

Mukesh Singh was born in Mumbai, India in 1976. He received a BFA in painting from the Sir J.J. School of Arts in Mumbai in 1997. Since then, he has been working as a freelance illustrator, motion graphics artist, senior game artist, CG modeler and animator, and senior illustrator and concept artist for various comics, game, and film and television projects. He was awarded Best Colorist at the Comic Critique Awards in 2008, was nominated for Most Promising Newcomer at the International ComicCon San Diego 2008, and was featured in an exhibition entitled “Heroes and Villains: The Battle for Good” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2010. He currently works as a freelance illustrator and concept artist. He lives in Mumbai. His website is http://nisachar.deviantart.com.

The uniting visual motif in all your work appears to be the exuberant ornamental designs that you incorporate into almost every painting. From armor to headdresses, to defensive shields of laser light, the images always seem to come from a world where people value forms as well as function. Are these designs specifically Indian in origin and is their inclusion conscious?

“[T]he images always seem to come from a world where people value forms as well as function.” What a wonderful inference! The land of Bharat [India] has been described as a massive super continent, possibly the only major landmass of its time. I played with that description by making the 18 Days world [Singh’s reimagining of the Indian folkloric masterpiece the Mahabharata, published by Liquid Comics] the progenitor of virtually every civilization that has ever existed since, its influence finding echoes in the eras of our collective human history. Thus, even though a large portion of the design themes are decidedly Indian in nature, there are shades of other cultural influences too. Throw a hint of steampunk into the mix, but one that is fused with an Indian design sense rather than the classical Victorian, and we get a nice retro touch. 18 Days had to feel like it had happened in a fantastic, bygone age when mighty beasts roared challenges to ponderous battle cruisers, when super warriors smote hundreds with one blow.

One of my “hidden in plain sight” themes for 18 Days was that its technology had advanced to a point where it was, to borrow from an eminent author, indistinguishable from magic. But the advance in technology didn’t bring forth the inevitable mass production system and its consumer culture. There was a sense of personal reverence for all that they obtained from the gods, from mighty sages, or from their own heroic quests.

Our instinctive desire for form to go with function, to endow the objects we possess, lifeless as they are, with personalities, to recreate them in our minds as extensions of our own selves exists even in the ostensibly impersonal but deadly theatre of war. If it doesn’t, why do pilots paint their warplanes? Why do warriors give exotic names to their swords and bows and guns? Why are deadly missiles named after gods and dead warriors and decorated for military parades? Why do common soldiers and army generals alike festoon their uniforms with symbolic buttons?

The 18 Days age was an age of proud warriors. It is given then that this pride would find its voice in everything from arrowheads to gunships. It seems form here is a force multiplier of a different kind—the ego.

Talk to us about the use of color. The color schemes sound so wild and garish on paper, especially with the collision between golds and reds and turquoises and oranges, etc. Yet they never overwhelm, because as bright as they are, you never seem to use too many colors in the same painting, or else they are accents that are repeated in an orderly pattern, usually in an ornamental armor design. Again, would you say that this restrained use of wild color was conscious?

Color is probably the trickiest of painting devices. Color accents help to establish contrast or to draw attention to small but important areas in a busy layout, since the shifts in value of my color works tend to be gradual and shallow. There is probably no great need for sharp value differences for an ink and color workflow because the inked lines already help define the forms. Color can do the rest.

By employing one dominant hue for my illustrations, I hope to give them a certain mood that helps illustrate the idea. At times color is used simply to make the art stand out. Other times, the color shifts gradually for the sake of harmony. Sometimes it is all of the above.

Also, since most of my works are intended for printing on low quality paper, saturation helps to deal with the loss of the subtle hues. They usually come out just right on paper.

If you were afflicted by some disorder such that you could only see, and create work with, two colors ever again, what two colors would they be?

Black. And white. Technically they aren’t colors, but if I could create artwork in only two, they would be the ones. You don’t need anything else.

What is the technique used for your work? It looks all hand drawn and colored but some of the lighting effects are so sophisticated that they look like they were digitally enhanced. Do you have a preference for working by hand or digitally?

Although I have no preference one way or the other, most of my commercial works have been done digitally. A typical workflow goes something like this: I do my sketches either traditionally on paper or digital, or at times a combination of both. Lately it has been mostly paper. Once I feel I am getting somewhere, I proceed to the layout, pencils/ink, and color stages in Photoshop.

The hand-drawn look could well be due to my tendency to recreate a traditional workflow in a digital one. Layouts use the time-honored approach of the foreground, middle ground, and background parts. Photoshop layers become light-boxes and tracing sheets, digital brushes become markers and sponges and color pencils. If a line strays or is flawed, I might let it be, just to simulate that traditional feel.

One benefit of the digital medium is that it does away with the whole scanning process, no messy colors, no running out of ink or that crucial shade of color midway into the artwork process only to find that the local art shop has run out of stock as well. Those and chemical fumes.

Tell us about some of the material that inspired you the most to want to create imagery. Is it fair to assume that the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and Indian folkloric tradition are the prime inspirations for your work?

For Indian mythology-based works, yes. But I have tried to have my own take on things. For 18 Days, I had a certain feel in mind and I have tried to employ it in the concept drawings. If I were to re-do it in a different context, I might shift the angle and use a different approach. Mahabharata is the story of all ages. Change the look and design and it will still ring true. We humans are remarkably consistent that way!

The traditional imageries of Indian mythology have been filtered through the cultural and artistic prisms of their respective times. I have tried to inform them with mine. For 18 Days, I wanted my version of Bheem to look like he has the strength of 1,000 elephants, as has been suggested in the original text. Like every warrior’s costume in the story, his own costume augments his manifold natural abilities. When the armies launch at each other, I wanted to put the audience in the middle of the chaos, with screaming missiles and burning craters. There are no orderly and graceful figures in repose here. When Krishna reveals his true self to Arjun, I wanted to depict him shredding the fabric of the universe. Durga rides ominous war clouds and mythical lions. When Bheeshma blesses, he is all heart and grandfatherly pride. I wanted to depict what a war of super beings, with their false prides and doomed fates, could look like.

For other works, if it is a book or a graphic novel, it is usually the story that inspires me.

What about other influences? Where do you look? Fashion, film, literature, music, architecture, video games?

My influences draw from the great American illustrators of old to American and European comics artists to literature and art masterpieces in the science fiction and fantasy genres. I can stare at a Klimt or Sargent painting for hours or read a Gene Wolfe book for the umpteenth time. But I am not sure how much of an influence they have had on my work. Maybe it is lingering somewhere, waiting to burst out. That would be something!

While playing video games, one is too busy fragging the next guy or scampering to ward off a rush of zerglings to notice the art on the screen. At least I am.

Finally, I love nature. Her genius puts us all to shame.

If you could go in cosplay disguise as a character from one of your works, which character would it be?

Haha . . . I am not sure, but maybe Jayadrath [second to final image]? I think he has a really cool costume. Or if I could turn somehow myself into a two-ton, forty-foot long Allosaur, then maybe Scar from Dinosaurs vs. Aliens [final image].

What would be your dream project to work on as an artist?

I would love to throw away what little I know, stomp all over the rules and just do something really weird and out there, common sense notwithstanding.

To speak more truthfully, though, anything that rocks my imagination is a dream project.

Henry Lien is an art dealer in Los Angeles (www.glassgaragegallery.com). He represents artists from North America, South America, Europe, and Asia. His artists have appeared in ARTnews, Art in America, Juxtapoz, the Huffington Post, and Time Magazine, and been collected by and exhibited in institutions and museums around the world. Henry has also served as the President of the West Hollywood Fine Art Dealers’ Association and a Board Member of the West Hollywood Avenues of Art and Design. Henry also has extensive experience as an attorney and teaches at UCLA Extension. In addition, Henry is a speculative fiction writer. He is a Clarion West 2012 graduate and has published work in Asimov’s and Interfictions. Visit his author website at www.henrylien.com.

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Author Spotlight: M. Rickert
Robyn Lupo

What made you write “The Chambered Fruit”?

I wrote this story for one of my failed novel writing attempts. I decided that the protagonist of failed novel was a writer who worked in retelling the old myths. This piece, based on the Persephone myth, was one of those stories.

How much do you empathize with Chloe’s choice to raise Steffie out of the world?

Hmmm, it’s been a long time since I read this story so I don’t remember; does Chloe actually express that she is raising Steffie “out of the world?” If so, that’s not a sentiment I empathize with at all. However, I have a great deal of affection for the idea that, in spite of popular culture’s dictate, we actually do get to choose how we want to live our lives, and what material/technological aspects we wish to embrace. It is a long time ago now, but I lived in Sequoia National Park for two years, and that time still has a tremendous influence on the choices I make for how I want to live, and it’s not “out of this world” at all; there are as many ways of living as there are people.

What sort of challenges did writing this story present? Was it particularly difficult writing about death as you did?

This story taught me a lot about writing. I had the basic Persephone story to work with (which of course has had some staying power, to say the least, so that was a great source) but I had to figure out how to make it move. The mythic stories, often told in very spare prose, have a tendency to feel like they are sitting still and the readers or listeners become observers in a disengaged way. I wanted to activate the story and in reaching to do so I made a fairly large mistake in execution, though I did not recognize it as such at the time. Gordon Van Gelder rejected the story and told me where he felt it had gone wrong, and as soon as I read his note I realized he was right, and made that adjustment. The rewritten story immediately felt true to me. In fact, it felt so true that I’d really rather not reveal the wrong turn I took, which feels like a lie and a great disservice to the characters and the story. I don’t know what to say about whether writing about death in this story was difficult or not. I can say that I have often thought of Chloe and Steffie and the girl whose name I no longer remember—the minister’s daughter—and more than once began to write a sequel.

What’s next for you?

I have a novella, “The Mothers of Voorhisville,” coming out on Tor.com in March. I am also very excited to announce that my first novel, The Memory Garden, is coming out in May 2014. To learn more, visit my website at www.mrickert.net.

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

Author Spotlight: Jeremiah Tolbert
Bradley Englert

The “space whales” or “messengers” are the catalyst to the story, but “In the Dying Light, We Saw a Shape” is much more about the connection that develops between Thom and Lilian. How do you strike that delicate balance between character development and science fiction elements?

Meaningful science fiction stories are really about the human condition, or so I’ve been told enough times that I’ve begun to believe it. We’re a pretty self-centered species at a fundamental level, so a story that deals only with an extremely “alien” entity would not be very satisfying to our need for stories. At the core of any story, there has to be a human soul, regardless of how dressed up it is as “other.”

The balance for me has gotten easier with time. I’m usually obsessed with the science fiction idea in my story, but I know if anyone is going to get to read my favorite part of the concepts and SF toys, I need to hook them with the characters and their development. As I worked on the story, I came to really sympathize with both Thom and Lilian, and so ultimately, I was passionate about both aspects. When I write a story in which I’m not as interested in the characters as I am the science fiction, I make a strong effort to find people I really care about who are impacted by the ideas I want to explore. That helps a lot.

There are a lot of great details about our future that are woven naturally into the story, so what is important for the reader to understand about the science fiction and the world and what do you feel like you can skim over or skip?

Details are an important tool in making a story feel like it exists beyond the margins of the actual story; one thing that’s important for me is to make sure the world in which my story takes place is a rich one, as complex as the world we live in. Ideally, all the details worked in would be important to the story, but I’m kind of bad about this; I like to work in ideas wherever I can that simply expand the scope of things, that make you feel like if you could step off the rails of the amusement park ride of a story, you’d find something beyond just two dimensional cardboard cutouts of buildings; you’d find rooms, filled with people and furniture doing things—a place that’s lived in.

There were various hints at government conspiracies and conspiracy theories in general throughout “In the Dying Light, We Saw a Shape.” What, if any, conspiracy theories influenced you? Would you say any conspiracy theories have particularly affected you?

That’s interesting; I didn’t really see any aspect of the government’s behavior as being a conspiracy. Really, I think the government in the story is trying to do its job of protecting the people. But I fear that a government as divided as ours is would not really be able to do much thinking about the situation, only to react in a pretty stereotypical manner of containment. Fundamentally, playing with aliens like the messengers is dangerous, and law enforcement branches of the government would aim to minimize that risk—that’s just the nature of what they do when dealing with the unknown.

It’s possible, though, that all those X-Files episodes I watched growing up had a more fundamental impact on my views of the role and behavior of government than I thought.

Exploring space and the mystery of space are central themes to the story. How do you feel about the continual budget reductions that are put on NASA and the rise that this seems to be giving to companies like SpaceX?

I think that the era of government-led space exploration is nearly over. Right now, space exploration is still far, far too expensive for the average person to do more than oooh and ahh over the pictures coming in from the Mars probes. But there’s a deep hunger for space exploration in us because we are still filled with awe at it. To go into space and survive is fundamentally the most difficult undertaking we have accomplished as a species—I really do believe that. There’s so much more out there, and I hope to see more of it before I die.

Organizations like SpaceX are interesting to me, but I’m not that interested in space tourism, which seems to be a major focus of theirs, at least in the short term. I’m much more interested in enterprises looking into asteroid mining; those are the kinds of commercial efforts that might actually get a human presence established off this rock, I think. And I do think we have to get off this rock and out there, if for no other reason than it turns out living on just one rock is a really good way to increase your chances of extinction.

That said, I also acknowledge that the motivations to go into space physically are pretty weak. In some ways, this story was an attempt to find a motivation that would spark everyone’s desire, to really push things forward at a faster pace. What would it take to get some people behind space exploration again? Maybe communion with a space whale would be enough. I’d like to think so, anyway.

Is there anything else you’d like to say about “In the Dying Light, We Saw a Shape?” What’s up next for you?

I hope that readers enjoy the story!

Coming up, I’m hard at work on a 150-page graphic novel called Nightfell. I’m also doing research on a young adult time travel novel set in Kansas that deals with teen troublemakers who are press-ganged by a desperate young girl into sailing a boat on the Cretaceous oceans to find and rescue her missing parents.

Bradley Englert is currently an undergrad at Western Kentucky University where he studies English, creative writing, and film. He enjoys writing fiction and directing short films. One day he hopes to have something written in italics in this section.

Author Spotlight: Terry Bisson
Earnie Sotirokos

“Bears Discover Fire” combines family, uplifted animals, and tire maintenance. Where did the idea for this one come from?

The idea came to me on a NY (not KY) interstate, musing on the wide, wooded medians as a sort of created wilderness. I imagined a campfire and even “saw" the bears sitting around it. The story itself is your standard Southern old-timers' nostalgia tale, with old tires instead of corn bread and sorghum as the icons of tradition.

The flickering flashlight in the beginning ratcheted up the tension nicely. How can sprinkling in elements suspense enhance a story?

No suspense there, just an annoyance. You will notice there is no suspense in this story. It would diminish rather than enhance it.

Why did you choose bears?

Same reason they appear in other fairy tales. They look like people if you don't look close. And they can kill you but they don't generally come after you. Sort of like neighbors.

Any tips for up and coming authors?

Quit. There are plenty of authors already.

What can we expect from you in the future?

The usual odd story.

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. His work can be found by searching for “Sotirokos” wherever ebooks are sold. Follow him on Twitter @sotirokos.

Author Spotlight: Anaea Lay
Robyn Lupo

How did Salamander Patterns start for you?

It started with the images in the ceiling. Sharon's ceiling is pretty much an exact copy of the ceiling in my childhood bedroom. Projecting images on to abstract things like clouds or ceilings is something humans are wired to do, and which colors our experiences - especially if it's something permanent like a ceiling and you'll never unsee an image once you see it - and so I was wondering what something that wasn't human would make of it. That led me to the conversation with the salamander, and the rest of the story fell out from there.

What was the hardest part about writing this story?

The ending was a bit hard for me to nail. From the instant I met Sharon's mom I knew the story had to end with her deciding to leave her family, but getting that right was hard to do. I didn't want the story to just be, "Abandon your parents when they're problematic," because that's too simple and easy, and not actually realistic. It took me a little while to come up with the idea of having her change the ceiling to give us a sort of symbolic closure on the family front, even as she's walking away.

'We want you to be happy. But if you’re a salamander host, how can that happen?” - this line, for me, summed up the relationship between Sharon and her parents; they seem to be oblivious to Sharon's lived experience. How did you strike that balance between love and a fundamental misunderstanding? Do you think Sharon misunderstands her parents to a similar degree?

I'd argue that Sharon's parents don't actually love her, they love the Sharon-shaped person they think their daughter is, and that's the whole problem - people make up versions of the people around them in order to make those people easier to like or love, then hold the actual person responsible for divergences between them and the made-up them. So I'd say I didn't strike a balance, I just portrayed the delusion.

As far as Sharon's perspective on them, I think she's too occupied with her awareness of not understanding them to misunderstand them. She's got a very keen sense of their patterns of behavior, but doesn't have any idea what their internal lives are like, and the contradictions inherent in their claims about intent and their actions fuddles her.

What was it about this world that appealed to you? Will you write other stories in the same or similar settings?

It wasn't the world that appealed to me - in my head it's just our world, a few years from now, except that a benevolent alien showed up and tried to teach us some things about engineering. My draw was Sharon, as somebody whose emotional life is out of sync with the emotional life she's expected to have. We seem to be going through a bit of a cultural fetish for the clinically emotionally aberrant - you can't turn around without finding Asperger's or psychopathy or other things pop culture interprets as abnormal on that front. I think it's because our emotional lives frequently don't follow the scripts they're expected to, so when a sexy new diagnosis comes along we start using them to find our place: Oooh, let me identify with that person because they're confused by social cues and sometimes I fail at social interactions, or Golly, that person is completely unfathomable and strange and I'm only a little off, so I must be fine.

But that's not really what's going on with those disorders, and using them that way puts people who are too far out of step with the typical expectations to fake "normalcy" but who are perfectly fine, functional people in a really awkward, isolating place. Sharon's resentment at the assumptions around her ambitions about being an astronaut made her somebody I wanted to give time to.

As far as future stories, I'll almost certainly write stories in similar settings. I don't currently have any plans to write more stories in this particular setting, but I don't really plan what I do much so for all I know, tomorrow I'll feel compelled to write a story from the POV of the marker Sharon uses at the end.

What's next for you?

Now that I've thought about it, I may be writing a story with a permanent marker as a protagonist. It occurs to me that they're underrepresented in fiction. I'm also engaging in research on methods for deploying tactical nukes against a day of the week, so I may soon be removing Tuesday from the calendar. Apologies to any Tuesday partisans, but even though I didn't start that particular war, I'm prepared to end it.

More seriously, I'm finishing up some revisions on a novel in preparation for agent hunting. I'm told that a sling loaded with cupcakes is the traditional weapon for this particular hunt, so this involves an awful lot of cake flour. I'll also be making an appearance later this year at Writers of the Future to claim my glory for placing on the first quarter. After that it's either world domination, or petting my cat. I'll decide which later.

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

Author Spotlight: Zhao Haihong
Patrick J. Stephens

What was the driving force behind “Exuviation”?

Every person may experience many changes in one’s life. You are willing to change yet still you may feel a bit uneasy about what may come after the change. Personally speaking, as a young writer who felt a bit bored about my old way of writing, I wanted to try something new and I was not afraid at that moment. But a good story should be the story of everyone, a story which could touch everyone. So I needed to reveal the other half of humanity: the other half that is afraid of what lies ahead. In the story I’ve created two characters, Tou and Gong, the special Cavers who should exuviate nine times in their life. But Cavers are not human beings, so the [aim of the] story is to gradually let in multiple meanings and directions in the process of writing; it’s not only a story of whether to change or not to change, but a story of the Other in the human world. Even the “authenticity” and “inauthenticity” of Heidegger’s Dasein could be introduced in the further understanding.

“Exuviation” was published in 2000 in Science Fiction World Magazine and received the Galaxy Award. You also have an MA in English Literature. How have these acknowledgements changed or affected your approach to writing science fiction?

Studying literature helped me to understand the literature in a different way; before that I was a constant reader of literature for more than sixteen years, but what I’d gotten from that was the natural feeling of a reader—my feedback was not guided by anything else. After I studied for the M.A., I came to know more about the theories and how to understand a story from a scholar’s perspective. Personally, I don’t think studying literature can tell us how to create good literary work, yet it’s not totally irrelevant. Since I know how to appreciate the beautiful images in poems and stories, I may consciously create some images in my stories, like in “Exuviation.”

In an interview dated in 2010 with Small Beer Press, you mentioned that you said “to continue writing is like exuviation to me” in a discussion with your editor in 1999. Taking into account the difference between that first quote and today, how does this quote still hold true to your writing?

“Exuviation” is more like a symbolic story to me. I had established my writing style in 1999 with “Yocasta”, which had won the Galaxy Award in Science Fiction World Magazine and marked the maturity of my first period. Since then, I had really felt the need to change. I had already published eight short stories, all together over 100,000 Chinese characters (about 50,000 words) by the end of 1999. The idea of “how to create a story more like a pure story but not very typical SF” appeared in my thoughts at that moment.

I’ve started my new study as a doctoral candidate for Art History in the Chinese Academy of Art. The new studies enlarge my knowledge and broaden my horizon. I believe if I can learn more and improve myself through study, I could have more to share in my future stories. Therefore, I may not concentrate on the change of styles or techniques but what I understand of life and the world.

As a translated work, which was hardest: writing the story, or ensuring the vision through the change to English?

“Exuviation” is not the most difficult one to translate of my stories. Still I should admit it takes a lot of trouble for me to translate it into English, as it’s not a 100% translation actually, but involves a little bit of rewriting. I was always afraid that some of the words and phrases I used were not proper for native speakers. I should show my gratitude to a list of people here: Geoffrey Landis and Mary Turzillo had assisted me greatly in my first translation, and they told me some words in my first translation were not often used in current English. Michael Swanwick helped me to fix my second edition and Gavin Grant, the editor of LCRW, discussed the final edition with me very carefully. He didn’t make any changes without my permission.

Among all my stories published in Chinese, “1923, a Fantasy” would be the greatest challenge to translators, and the brilliant English translation by Nicky Harman and Pang Zhaoxia was published in 2012 in a special issue of Renditions, a Chinese-English magazine founded by the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Their Special Issue of Chinese Science Fiction, edited by Mingwei Song, will be republished in the U.S. by Columbia University Press, or so I am told.

What can we expect from you in the future?

I have three different plans for new SF novels and more for short stories. If the time is available (I’ve been a very busy teacher-student-mother in the past four years), I will try to rewrite some of my stories in English, and if I can get the help, may have them translated.

The World series is the most important one among them all. I started the World series in 2005, and the first short story of the series, “The World,” was published in 2006 in Science Fiction World. It creates a new world on the terrestrial planet Gaya, which has become the sole human civilization after a series of disasters that hit Earth as well as most of the human colonies on different planets. The World is running on a very special system called the Soulwave/Magicwave (a special material which may restore solar energy and collect all the friction from industry and people’s activities which would have been wasted in the old times) system. Soulwave taxes are put on everyone and a new utopia is built on that system. It’s an eco-friendly culture and since everyone is devoted to the process of creating energy, new beliefs in life and in society are created. The series started from the angle of a man who finds himself an outsider from the society and begins to find some dark secrets of the World. Up till now, three World series stories have been published in Science Fiction World and the fourth one might be a novel.

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 Science. His first collection (Aurichrome and Other Stories) can be found on Amazon.com.

Author Spotlight: Rosamund Hodge
Amber Barkley

How did “Apotheosis” begin? What inspired you?

Usually my stories begin with a long, slow process of accretion. “Apotheosis” was different—the first line came to me while I was standing in line at the supermarket, and I wrote the entire story in the next twenty-four hours. At the time, my main conscious inspiration was “The Ballad of God-Makers,” a creepy, haunting poem by G. K. Chesterton. (I was also thinking of the imagery in Hayao Miyazaki’s movie Spirited Away, particularly when I came up with the Commotionless Sea.)

But several months after writing “Apotheosis,” I looked at it again. And suddenly I realized that it was a completely blatant response to Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” I had read that story as a teenager and loved it, but I had probably taken it a bit more literally than I was meant to, because my first reaction was, “Why are you walking away? GET A GUN AND BREAK THAT KID OUT OF THERE.”

Of course, that’s not the story Le Guin was trying to write. But it ended up being the story that I did.

In many old tales, the youngest son is the hero. “Apotheosis” uses a similar structure—three sons on a quest to save their people—but while the youngest son is the one who brought Ipu a new goddess, it is the middle son who understands the world most clearly. What is the reasoning behind your decision to make the middle son the most enlightened of the three, the “hero” of sorts?

Because “Apotheosis” is about the corruption of stories and ideals. The people of Ipu understand the trope of sacrifice, they just don’t get the meaning. So it was only appropriate that the son who followed the city’s ideals would be the youngest, and that he would believe he embodied the trope of the wise and heroic youngest son.

The gods in Tsubarime’s factory in “Apotheosis” seem rather helpless. Freshly released from the grave, Siriumana is passive to the youngest son’s intention to bind her to Ipu. Why did you choose to write them this way? What is Tsubarime’s role in making them what they are?

It would have been really interesting to write a story from the POV of the gods in the factory, and if I had done that, they probably would have been less passive and ended up rebelling on their own. But I was writing a story about the people of Ipu, and about the choice of whether or not to accept their system. And that choice becomes a lot more dramatic if the system works.

There isn’t much moral drama in deciding not to oppress people when you know that the oppression will not work. That’s just enlightened self-interest. There’s more drama when you think that oppression might help you. But if you knew beyond all doubt—and in the real world, you could never know, but fantasy lets you take things to the limit—if you knew that torturing an innocent would bring your city peace and wealth and happiness without any other drawbacks, then the choice of yes or no would be really interesting. That’s what puts the sting into “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” and into the similar parable in The Brothers Karamazov. So that’s what I decided to do in “Apotheosis.”

Tsubarime’s role is, uh, magic? I don’t know any more about her than is in the story.

Near the beginning of their journey, the youngest son says “Dulce et decorum est,” part of a line from Horace’s Odes. Was that connection deliberate? Why that particular line from that particular poem?

I wish I could say that it was a complex and erudite comment on Horace. But actually, at the time I wrote that bit, I had just discovered the allure of stories with kitchen sink worldbuilding/aesthetic. I thought the line sounded good, so in it went. If I were writing the story now, I probably wouldn’t use it, because I think it brings in a bunch of connotations that aren’t balanced out by the rest of the story. (Basically, this story is not kitchen sink enough.)

That being said: I used that line because when I think of hardcore devotion to the city, I think of Rome. And when I think of Rome—the stories of Horatius and Cincinnatus and Gaius Mucius Scaevola, whom I imprinted on as a teenager—I find those words genuinely moving. But I was nearly as young when I read Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce et Decorum Est,” and so those word also always have a cynical overlay in my mind. Which made them perfect for expressing the good but twisted ideals of the youngest son.

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: Matthew Hughes
Bradley Englert

In “His Elbow, Unkissed,” Kaslo and Obron have strong similarities but also key differences in how they think. Obron understands much more of the magical realm and assumes that these are the only ways to solve problems, while Kaslo is a practical and strategic thinker. What was your process of writing these two characters like?

The process is intuitive. There’s a little piece of wisdom I sometimes offer to people who are starting out to write fiction: You think it’s your story because you’re writing it, but it’s actually the characters’ story and you’re just writing it for them. So when I’m writing from Kaslo’s point of view, I become him, although in a non-psychotic way. I don’t become Obron, because I’m seeing him from Kaslo’s POV. But I feel him hovering at my elbow.

The story has a lot of new and original terms constantly being used; how much do you worry about your reader understanding context clues besides just spelling things out? You fully explain what a “reciprocating weapon” is even though both characters would know, but at other points you drop a new word or phrase in and keep the story rolling.

My experience is that most people who read science fiction (and science fantasy, as this story is) tend to be of more-than-average intelligence. I count on them to catch what I’m pitching, as long as I don’t throw too many screwballs. The explanation of a reciprocating weapon was self-indulgence; I thought it was a neat idea.

You’ve spoken before about how the Ten Thousand Worlds go through these switches in operating principles from rational cause-and-effect to “sympathetic association,” which is magic. That seems to be one of the key aspects of “His Elbow, Unkissed,” and the focus is mostly on three of the major players here: Erm Kaslo, Diomedo Obron, and Phalloon. Who else would know of this shift? How soon would it theoretically be happening?

On every world there are a few who know it’s going to happen. They are dismissed as kooks, because when rationalism is in the ascendant, everybody knows that magic is hokum. Conversely, when magic rules, everybody knows that cause-and-effect physics is unreliable in a universe that operates on the basis of focused will.

The change will actually happen in the next episode, “Phalloon the Illimitable.”

You’ve also mentioned that you’re publishing the Kaslo series as a serial or an “episodic novel.” How many episodes do you plan on writing? The world seems incredibly interesting, entertaining, and fleshed out, so after you finish the episodes would you ever see yourself returning to the Ten Thousand Worlds?

At this point, I’ve written six episodes, of which “His Elbow, Unkissed” is the third. I’m not an outliner, so I’m not entirely sure how many more there will be, but at least twelve. As for the Ten Thousand Worlds milieu, I’ve been setting novels and stories in it, under the general heading of the Archonate, for almost twenty years. I’m sure I’ll be doing more.

Besides more of the Kaslo series for Lightspeed, what’s up next for you?

I’m working my way toward finally starting a historical novel I’ve been thinking about for more than forty years.

Bradley Englert is currently an undergrad at Western Kentucky University where he studies English, creative writing, and film. He enjoys writing fiction and directing short films. One day he hopes to have something written in italics in this section.

Author Spotlight: Ursula K. Le Guin
Patrick J. Stephens

Within “Elementals” is a wonderful connection to belief in something we might never see. The chthons exist visibly, but only in darkness; draks live in white-hot lava. How much did faith play in the story and the elementals themselves?

Actually, it’s not just the chthons and draks; none of the elementals in “Elementals” can ordinarily be seen. But vision isn’t our only access to reality, is it? We can know something we can’t see exists—no need to invoke faith. If I fall over the cat in the dark, I don’t believe that it’s the cat, I know it’s the cat. So does the cat.

Of course I’m not asking you to believe in the existence of the elementals, except while you’re reading the story. I have faith in my readers. I believe they know that I made up the whole damn thing. That’s the covenant of fiction. The bond of trust between writer and reader is the story itself.

What was more exciting in creating something like the airlings or draks—the absolute unknown, or expanding upon the theoretical? Where was your focal point in their creation?

It’s always exciting to discover a new species.

I’ve always thought the nicest honor you could be given would be a newly discovered species named for you. Testudo ursulae . . . Pestifer leguini . . .

I don’t think any theories were involved, except possibly when I discovered the existence of booklets. Typographical errors are the kind of random anomaly that the tidy human mind likes to explain away with a theory, a hypothesis. The more we type, the more typos there are. How can this be? The (hypothetical) existence of booklets explains it all.

What prompted the encyclopedic format? How do you think the story would have changed if you’d written about the elementals as characters interacting with other characters or plots?

The various elemental species revealed themselves to me one by one, at fairly long intervals. They didn’t come as stories. They came pretty much as they are in “Elementals.” Maybe at another period of my life I’d have used one or another of them in a conventional plotted story, but at this point, that seemed unnecessary. Pointing out their existence and characteristics was enough.

If “you can photograph anything you believe in” holds firm—what subject of current mistrust and doubt would you like to photograph, and why?

We seem to be up against the question of faith again. The sentence “You can photograph anything you believe in” comes right after the sentence “There are photographs of Nessie in Loch Ness.” Arthur Conan Doyle took photographs of fairies at the bottom of his garden. And now we have Photoshopping . . . A photograph of Barack Obama burning the American flag while pissing on the Constitution wouldn’t prove a damn thing except to the people who wanted it to.

What can we expect to see from you in the near future?

I’m working on a sort of cowboy story at present.

I never have any idea what’s coming next. I just hope it keeps coming.

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 Science. His first collection (Aurichrome and Other Stories) can be found on Amazon.com.

Author Spotlight: Adam Troy Castro
Earnie Sotirokos

In “The Thing About Shapes to Come,” a mother struggles with the challenges of caring for her unique child. Did the idea for this story originate from real life issues?

I have never had that particular challenge, no. Nor was the issue in the forefront of my mind in the same way that, let’s say, the trauma of post-traumatic stress syndrome came up in the composition of my prior Lightspeed story, “Her Husband’s Hands.” This just happens to be one of those stories where an insane idea, coming from god alone knows what part of the gray matter, suggested everything that followed, and the natural human responses just came up the way they normally would.

The harshness of close-minded parents and the little zip we all get from drinking coffee brought a degree of familiarity to a fantastic situation. How do you balance the speculative and commonplace elements of a story?

That just happens to be where the tension comes from. The commonplace grounds the speculative; the speculative gives wings to the commonplace.

You left a lot of the worldbuilding up to the reader’s imagination. Do you often find yourself leaving out background information in your fiction?

Nothing is quite the same flavor of irritating as completing a story and realizing that the two pages you did on mass transit in a given future is utterly irrelevant to the story at the center and can be deleted. I get caught by that kind of problem from time to time and it sometimes prevents me from finishing a piece, unless I can realize what it is irrelevant; witness a recent story that leads up to a certain fantastic event where I realized, with maybe two pages to go, that I would not actually have to show the event or its years of aftermath, as I’d intended. Short stories present facets. At this point in my career, I am practiced enough that most of the time, if a given issue comes up at all, I can think, “Naaah, that isn’t important,” and save myself the work.

That being said . . . care to speculate about what happened to Monica after she stepped through Di’s doorway?

That is an intensely private moment between mother and daughter and I think we should be ashamed of ourselves for even contemplating intrusion.

What can we expect from you in the future?

Some of these short stories may have already appeared, depending on when exactly this does. But so far my other 2014 fictions include “The Totals,” a horror story for Nightmare Magazine; “Just Another Friendly Day In the Antique Trade,” a fantasy for the new magazine Jamais Vu; “Hide and Shriek,” a novelette which will be appearing in the anthology Games Creatures Play; and a story that is simultaneously science fiction, horror, and some say sword and sorcery, “In The Temple of Celestial Pleasures,” which shall also be in Nightmare Magazine. In addition, the fourth volume of my middle-grade series about the adventures of a very strange but very heroic young boy, Gustav Gloom and the Cryptic Carousel, shall be released in August, and all prior books in that saga remain available. Finally, I am working on a new young-adult series yet to find a home.

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. His work can be found by searching for “Sotirokos” wherever ebooks are sold. Follow him on Twitter @sotirokos.

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Coming up in February, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Jessica Barber (“Coma Kings”) and Carrie Vaughn (“Harry and Marlowe and the Intrigues at the Aetherian Exhibition”), along with SF reprints by Ramez Naam (“Water”) and Robert Charles Wilson (“Fireborn”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Sunny Moraine (“So Sharp That Blood Must Flow”) and Ken Liu (“Lighter Than Air”), and fantasy reprints by Rachel Swirsky (“Detours on the Way to Nothing”) and Eugene Mirabelli (“Love in Another Language”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with a pair of feature interviews.

For our ebook readers, we also have the novella reprint “Hellhound” by Robin McKinley and a pair of novel excerpts.

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. We’ve got work from the following authors coming up over the next couple of issues: Sofia Samatar, Kat Howard, Sarah Pinsker, Seth Dickinson, Chen Quifan (translated by Ken Liu), Carmen Maria Machado, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Sandra McDonald, Shaenon K. Garrity, Fred Van Lente, Linda Nagata, and Theodora Goss. Plus, we’ve got two more 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!

Subscriptions & Ebooks

If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. For more information, visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe.

We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors, and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

About the Editor

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Lightspeed, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Oz Reimagined, The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Epic: Legends of Fantasy, Other Worlds Than These, Armored, Under the Moons of Mars, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. Upcoming anthologies include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Wastelands 2, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. He has been nominated for six Hugo Awards and five World Fantasy Awards, and he has been called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble. John is also the editor and publisher of Nightmare Magazine, and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

BONUS CONTENT

Bonus Content from The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

If you enjoy The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy interviews we’ve been presenting to you here in Lightspeed, good news: Now you can buy complete episode transcripts in ebook format. So now in addition to reading the great interviews we line up for Geek’s Guide, you can also read transcripts of our panel discussions, which cover topics such as rationality in science fiction, swordfighting in fiction and film, The Wizard of Oz, Robert H. Howard film adaptations, weird fiction and much more. If you’d like to learn more, just go to geeksguideshow.com to find out where you can get the ebook transcripts. Meanwhile, herewith you will find the complete text of a Geek’s Guide panel from one of our recently-released ebook editions. Please enjoy with our compliments—and, if you do, please consider checking out the full ebook editions, which include three full episodes each and are available for just $2.99.

Panel Discussion: Video Games
David Barr Kirtley, John Joseph Adams, Ted Kosmatka

Dave: For our panel today we’ll be talking about video games, and just going into a bit more depth about some of the issues that came up during our interview with Austin Grossman. We’re joined by ‘guest geek’ Ted Kosmatka. His short fiction has been reprinted in nine Year’s Best anthologies, and he’s also a full-time writer at Valve, creators of the video game Half-Life. His second novel, Prophet of Bones, is out now. So, Ted, welcome to the show.

Ted: Thanks for having me.

Dave: One of the things that came up during the interview is the question: How easy was it to get hired at a video game company in 1997? I know a little bit about this. When I was in high school my friend Pete and I were really, really, really into Doom. Then I graduated and went off to college and, while I was at college, I talked to Pete, and he says, ‘Hey you know, John Romero—one of the guys who made Doom—has left to start his own company called Ion Storm and they’re hiring. So I think I’m going to apply for a job as their concept artist.’ And I was like, ‘Why would they possibly hire a high school kid to be a concept artist? I’m sure they’re going to hire somebody who’s worked in comics.’ So he applies and then I hear from him a couple months later, and he says, ‘Well they didn’t hire me as a concept artist; they hired somebody from Marvel.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I figured.’ And he says, ‘But they did hire me as a 3D modeler.’

He had no experience whatsoever doing 3D modeling. I was so jealous because I’d been designing pen-and-paper roleplaying games my whole life, and programming computer games my whole life—and I was building Doom levels, and I had taught him how to play Doom. So I was like, ‘How could he get hired?’ What basically happened was that John Romero had kind of gotten fired from id Software, the company that made Doom, because they felt like he was playing video games all day. So when he started his own company, he was like, ‘All right, well this is going to be a company where everybody plays video games all day.’ One of the primary qualifications for getting hired was: Can you beat him at Doom? Pete beat him at Doom, and that was a big part in how he got hired.

I was really jealous. I’m a freshman in college and Pete’s off living in a mansion, and driving this fancy sports car, and dating models and all this stuff. There was a lot of money involved at Ion Storm; unfortunately they lost all of it. The game he was working on was Daikatana; it’s sort of a legendary fiasco in gaming. But so, because of that, I know for a fact that you could get a job in 1997 with no experience whatsoever.

After college, I moved out to Austin. I was sort of trying to get into the video game industry as a writer. Pete and I would go out to bars with all these people who worked in gaming, and Pete would introduce me, and he’s like, ‘You guys need a writer?’ And they were like, ‘No, why would you need a writer for video games?’ At one point they were going to hire a writer for Deus Ex 2, and people at the companies by that point had read my short fiction and were like, ‘Oh you should apply for that. You’re really good.’ I had emailed this guy who was going to interview me, and he kept saying, ‘Yeah, yeah come in, just wait a couple more weeks then come in for an interview.’ I kept waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and then finally there was one week where I went to Europe with my parents, and the second day I was there I get an email from this guy and he says, ‘Hey can you come in tomorrow for an interview?’ And I was like, ‘Well, no, I’m in Europe, but I’m really interested in the job. I’ll be back next week, I hope we can do it then?’ And then I get back and I email him and I don’t hear anything and I hear, sort of through the grape vine, that they already hired someone else while I was gone. And that guy had no qualifications. So I know that as recently as 2001 you could still get into gaming with no qualifications.

Ted: Oh man, that’s a rough story. So the big question is, could you beat your friend in Doom?

Dave: Yeah.

Ted: Oh! Aw, man—that’s rough.

Dave: Nobody could beat me in Doom in 1997. But Ted, you just got hired at Valve within the past few years. So what was the experience like when you did it?

Ted: Valve is a lot like this massive ant colony where there’s all these different specialists. So you just have to find a niche where you’re very, very good at the one thing you do, and then that can attract attention to you, and thus sort of present yourself in such a way that the company says, ‘All right this person could sit in this niche here at the company.’ And in my case, I think it was probably all the Year’s Best anthologies that I was in. I doubt I would’ve gotten hired by them if it wasn’t for that.

John definitely had a part in that; I don’t know if he ever told you that story. But he was the one who introduced me to Marc Laidlaw, a writer at Valve, and sort of got the conversation started. I sent Marc a bunch of my stories and then, one thing sort of led to another, and several months later I was moving my whole life across the country and starting over in Seattle as a video game writer.

So it was definitely a big shift for me; previous to that I just worked in a research laboratory. I worked with electron microscopes, so I didn’t really have any expectation of being able to work in video games. I’d always wanted to, but I didn’t have any background in it. I had a background in being—basically—a lab rat, and I had a background in writing short stories. So somehow those two things combined and I ended up at Valve.

John: The lab you worked at was either Aperture Science or Black Mesa, I assume.

Ted: Here’s a funny story. When I quit my lab job, I explained I was leaving to go write for video games. And I got this sort of stare from my boss that was like, ‘Wait, what do you mean?’ It didn’t really compute. After I talked to him some more, he sort of patted me on the back, like, ‘Well you got to chase your dreams—congratulations. I hope everything is successful.’

And so a year later I came back to visit, and I happened to be wearing an Aperture shirt [from Portal]. So I came back to the lab, and I was hanging out with my old lab buddies. When my boss walked in, he was like, ‘Wait a second—I thought you moved to take a video game job?’ And I could tell he thought that I had just left to take another lab job, because he saw the Aperture Science shirt I was wearing. So I had to explain to him, ‘No, no—this is actually part of the video game.’ Then it was all good again.

Dave: Yeah, the old ‘I’m leaving to pursue a career in video games excuse.’ We’ve all heard that.

Ted: Right. Yeah, exactly. Really, I’m working for a competitor at another lab.

John: When I introduced Ted to Marc Laidlaw, it was funny because Ted and I were at a convention, and we were both represented by the same agent at the time, and we were just having breakfast together. It was the first time I’d really gotten to talk to Ted, I think. I knew him because I’d worked at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and we had published a couple of his stories. So I was just talking to him, really for the first time, and we were getting to know each other, and somehow Marc Laidlaw, and or Half-Life or Valve, got brought up. When I mentioned Marc’s name, Ted’s eyes just got real big and he was like, ‘Oh my god—you know Marc Laidlaw?’ And I said, ‘Well, I kind-of, sort-of know him—just to email him, because I worked at the magazine and we had published a couple of his stories.’ But Ted just got really excited and I said ‘I guess I could try to introduce you by email, or something.’ So I did that after the convention. I honestly didn’t think anything was going to happen about it. I certainly didn’t think he’d end up going to work at Valve. But it’s funny to me that Ted sort of credits me as getting him his job at Valve, but I was completely hapless in the situation. I had no idea that this would happen. But then, just recently, it ended up getting me a sweet tour at the Valve complex in Seattle, so that was nice.

Ted: See, it all comes around. I got a nice picture of you next to the Portal turret.

Dave: Yeah, and actually, Chet Faliszek—another developer who works at Valve—was the first person we ever interviewed on the show.

Ted: Oh, cool! Yeah, I know Chet well.

Dave: One of the topics I want to bring up, that came up in the interview, is this whole issue of story in games. Austin described himself as a ludologist. Is that something that gets talked about a lot around the office at Valve?

Ted: When he started talking about ludology, I immediately thought: What is that? I don’t know what that is. It made me want to Google it. I have a feeling that he has a really complex, interesting, fascinating, intelligent answer for all that. I just don’t know what it is.

John: I wasn’t familiar with the term as he was using it, except that Dave and I had talked previously about ‘ludonarrative dissonance,’ which was a term I was not actually previously familiar with. It’s a term that describes that disconnect that you have between the narrative parts of a video game and the game that you’re actually playing.

Dave: One example of ludonarrative dissonance can be found in the new Tomb Raider game. In portions of the game, Lara Croft kills like 150 people with a rock, and then you get to a cut scene where she’s like, ‘I just don’t know if I can do this.’ And her friend’s like, ‘No, Lara, you have to have more confidence in yourself!’ And you just can’t believe that someone who would kill 150 people with a rock would also be that insecure. You know?

John: Here’s another example I read about. I haven’t played this game, but I think it’s Call of Duty 4 or maybe it was Modern Warfare 2. But it’s a war game where you’re on a mission, and you have a buddy with you, and you can totally just kill your buddy as you’re playing the game, but the cut scenes never actually reflect that. So whether or not you kill your buddy, your buddy is there in the cut scenes. Obviously that doesn’t make any sense.

Dave: Ted, just generally, where do you fall on that ludologist issue? Do you like stories in games, or are you against stories in games?

Ted: As a game writer, it’s probably no surprise to anyone that I love stories in games. For me, it’s why I play—that’s sort of the point of playing, to be able to lose yourself in this other world, and to experience stories in this new medium. Speaking of good stories in games, right now I’m playing BioShock Infinite, and I’m just totally loving the story.

Dave: I haven’t played BioShock Infinite, but I was reading a little bit about it. It looks really fascinating. The premise basically is that there’s a separatist state that built its own flying cities. So you visit these flying cities and there are themes of racism, and it’s sort of like a dystopian thing where the city is ruled by this guy named Comstock, who has a revisionist view of historical events, like the massacre at Wounded Knee, and the Boxer Rebellion in China. I was reading that one part of the game, right at the beginning, is that there is a mixed race couple, and you are being encouraged to throw a ball at them as sort of a carnival game. Could you describe how that works?

Ted: You’re in the crowd, and you win some sort of a raffle, which I guess gives you the right to throw this ball at these people. You’re given this choice—you can throw it at them or not—and I chose not to throw it at them; instead, I threw it at the person who [rigged] it so that I won the raffle. I threw it at him instead and I was immediately punished for it, and enforcers came down and a bunch of bad stuff happens and it started this chase scene in the game. I was a bit curious what would happen if I had thrown it, but I think part of the beauty of the game is that you can’t really know that. Once you make a choice then you move beyond that choice tree and you’re in another branch and you never know what might have happened.

John: That reminds me of something in Skyrim. There’s an assassin’s guild in the game. At some point, they kidnap you and they put you in this cabin, and you’re in there with a person who is in charge of the guild. You’re in a room with four innocent people and they all have bags on their heads; they’ve been captured obviously, and the guild leader says, ‘You have to kill one of the people in this room.’ I didn’t want to kill one of the innocent people, so I killed her. I just thought that was interesting because it was one of those real choice trees, and it’s like, well you’re either going to proceed and you’re going to join the guild after killing one of these innocent people, or you’re going to earn the wrath of the guild by killing their leader.

Dave: The big problem I have with choice trees in most games is that there’s almost always a clear right choice and wrong choice. There’s the ‘light side choice’ and the ‘dark side choice,’ and if you make too many light side choices, you end up on the light side, or if you make too many dark side choices you end up on the dark side. But there aren’t very many—generally speaking—ambiguous decisions where it’s a tough choice.

Actually, in the Ultima games that we were talking about in the interview, at the beginning, what kind of character class you played in the game was determined by these choices that you had to make. So, for example, it would present you with a situation: this guy did this horrible thing and you swore to track him down and kill him, but it takes you years to find him, and by the time you find him you discover that he’s not such a bad guy anymore, and he’s adopted this girl, and he’s her sole source of support. Do you choose justice and kill him like you had sworn too, or do you choose compassion out of the best interest of this child? I always thought those were so compelling, but then unfortunately in the actual game, you never got very many chances to have those sorts of choices because it’s pretty complicated to play out the consequences of those sorts of decisions. That’s always what I wanted to see—more ambiguous, difficult choices like that.

Dave: I know there are a lot of people who hate story in games. Having played the kind of games that I grew up on, like the adventure games and the roleplaying games like Ultima, I never really understood that view. But with a lot of the console games today I do kind of understand why you would hate the story in the games. A lot of times, the story and the gameplay are at odds, almost more than they’re contributing to each other. A lot of the games like that—like the new Tomb Raider game, or like Uncharted 2—a lot of times I feel like, either the game play is really good, in which case the cut scenes come to seem like an unwelcome distraction, or I get more interested in the story, in which case the actual game comes to seem like an unwelcome distraction and I’m just, like, ‘Come on, I just want to see what happens next in the story.’

Ted: It’s hard to find that balance where the two sides complement each other. It’s a very difficult dilemma.

Dave: I just think in a lot of games the storytelling isn’t actually integrated into the game dynamics. Some of my favorite games like Monkey Island 2 and Ultima 7, you can’t imagine those games without the story—if you take away the story, there’s nothing left. The game is about the story. Whereas, one of my other favorite games is Doom, and Doom has no story in it and doesn’t need a story. If you were to have cut scenes in it, if it was done really well, it might be enjoyable, but it becomes much more problematic to integrate it in that kind of case where the game doesn’t really need the story.

Ted: In the best case scenario you could find a way that you wouldn’t even need cut scenes. It’s like you’re actually telling the story within the gameplay, and you wouldn’t have any cut scenes at all.

Dave: That’s been Valve’s design philosophy, right? With Half-Life and Half-Life 2, there are no cut scenes; all the story stuff happens in-game, right?

Ted: Yeah, that’s the philosophy.

John: One of my favorite stories in games has always been Portal and Portal 2, just because it’s a very subtle type of storytelling in the game. It’s doled out so sparingly to the player that once you get to the end of it, it feels like this really amazing story that you’ve actually played through as opposed to just having it told to you, which is what happens in a lot of narrative heavy games, like in something like Skyrim. Now don’t get me wrong—I love Skyrim, but it is really kind of an interactive novel in a way because there’s only certain options that can even be possible.

Dave: It occurs to me that the story of Portal 2 does a really good job of justifying the game conventions. Essentially what you want in a game is the player has to be limited to one track or a couple tracks. A lot of the time, streets will be blocked off in a really strangely contrived way or you just find they are invisible—i.e., for some reason you can’t get to the rest of the city when you should be able to. But when you’re trapped in this obstacle course by this evil computer, then it makes perfect sense why you can’t just choose to go anywhere else.

Dave: One topic that came up during the interview was what is your ultimate game? So what do you guys think about that? John, what would be your ultimate game?

John: The only thing that I can imagine as my ultimate game is something that I don’t know that you could really make. Something like Skyrim is sort of close. I love that type of game, or like Fallout 3—both of those games are very close to what my ideal game is. But ultimately, like what you were saying, if there were more options so that the player could actually, really just interact with the environment and do whatever he wants, that would be ideal I think.

Ted: For me, it’d be a lot like real life, in a lot of ways, and it would be very different from real life in other ways. It would have to be massively multiplayer, just like real life, and you’d have the ability to interact with other, real people, just like real life. One thing that real life isn’t particularly good at is finding deeper meaning. There’s so much of our daily lives that is very mundane and you’re constantly searching for a way to find meaning in your life, to feel like you’re moving forward and accomplishing things. I think that’s something that could be done very well in a video game compared to the average daily existence of people. So I think my ideal game would have to do that—it would have to allow you to really explore who you are and discover who you are, and find out who you are, and it would have to be possible that your experience could be unique compared to everyone else because you are unique compared to everyone else.

John: It would be cool if you take what I said, but then you also added this other layer to it where you incorporate what Dave was talking about earlier with the Ultima games, but instead of at the start of the game you answer those questions, telling the game what would you do in each of those situations, you play through this grand adventure game that takes hours, and hours, and hours to play, and then, based on your choices in the game, it actually tells you a little bit about yourself at the end of it, because instead being asked what would you do in this situation, it forces you to actually make those decisions (and forces you to deal with the consequences) and then actually tracks what you do in each of those situations.

Dave: Well, it seems like computers are just really good at doing math. As a result of that, all of our games—or I’ll say, all of our single player games—are basically built around what computers are good at, which is dealing with spatial relationships between objects and inventory management kind of things. You can get a lot of fun out of those, but they’re not the most interesting things. And I think what’s really interesting is actually navigating social situations, and computers are really, really bad at that because, essentially, to have a single player game with any kind of interesting social interaction, the computer has to be at least as smart as a human being to give any kind of reasonable model of their behavior. If we did have true Artificial Intelligence, some sort of really advanced modeling of intelligence in a computer, and you could have just a hundred NPCs in the game who actually did behave as intelligently as real people. You could have fascinating, fascinating games like that.

I was thinking my ultimate game—or at least one I would really like to see—would be something where it was like the beginning of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones where you’re Ned Stark, and you know that one of your friends has been murdered, so you go to the capitol city, and you have to navigate this web of court intrigue. It’d be really cool if it were randomized every time—every time you play it, a different person committed murder, a different conspiracy was behind it all, etc. And it would present you with these really difficult choices, like the ones Ned Stark faces in Game of Thrones: Who do you reveal what you know to? When do you reveal it? Do you compromise your ethics to protect your family? stuff like that. It seems like it’s hard to get good stakes in a video game, like: How do you make people feel bad about killing characters when they know they’re just video game characters? A big part of Ned’s motivation in the story is the need to protect his family, and how do you make a player care about the video game character’s family, especially if they can just start the game over?

John: A lot of these games—like for instance Fallout 3—have a Karma scale, and so if you do bad things, you get negative karma and if you do good things you get good karma. So some of the game is cut off to you if you’re ‘too good’ and some of the game is cut off to you if you’re ‘too evil.’ Because certain people won’t interact with you because you have this or that reputation.

When I go to play a game like that, I always play the good way, and I always try to be as good as possible. I’m like a white knight. I won’t do anything wrong, and I always feel bad if I ever do anything wrong. But the thing is, even though I would like to be able to play the game and see all those different aspects of the game that I didn’t see because I played it the good way, when I try to replay it and I try to be evil it’s typically not fun to me. I don’t enjoy doing it.

Dave: I think one problem I have with games is that doing the right thing never has bad consequences. I think one of the great insights of Game of Thrones is that Ned Stark is a character who always makes the morally right choice, or almost always, and is punished for it. And I think it would be interesting to play a game where making all of the right choices dooms you, and you have to figure out how good can you be—how much can you compromise your integrity?

John: So since we’re talking about Game of Thrones and, in a game context, have either of you ever actually played the Game of Thrones game? There was one that came out recently; I haven’t heard many people talking about it. Games based on properties usually aren’t great, so I didn’t have high hopes, but have either of you played it?

Dave: I really liked the board game. I think there are at least two computer games. I don’t think either of them were well received so I never looked at them. My impression is they’re just making a game like a Skyrim—a Skyrim-type gameplay and just slapping Game of Thrones themed stuff on it. And that seems totally wrong.

Ted: Does it follow the story of the books at all?

Dave: No. My understanding is that they’re made-up characters from the wider world of the books, and so you see some of the characters from the books or TV show, but you’re not playing as them and the events of the game are peripheral to any of the 68 main plots of the series.

John: Well, what I want to know is: Can you monologue while prostitutes are giving each other oral sex? That would be my ultimate game really. [That’s a reference to a questionable ‘sexposition’ scene inserted into the HBO TV show adaptation of Game of Thrones. –eds.]

Dave: Sticking to Game of Thrones for a second, I just think it would be really interesting to be able to play as Ned over and over again, and try different things and just see what the consequences of different courses of action would be. If I took Renly’s offer what would happen? If I took Cersei’s offer what would happen?

John: You’re right. That is totally what a Game of Thrones game should be.

Dave: Another topic that came up during our interview was the whole subject of ‘indie games.’ I have this friend, Keith Burgun, who I went to high school with. He was our guest geek back in episode 47. He’s an indie game developer. In the past couple of years I’ve spent a lot of time playtesting his games. He’s a very ‘anti-story’ guy; he wants you to be making a choice at every moment of the game. There is something to be said for that because I do really enjoy his games that I played on my iPod. But that’s pretty much my only experience with indie games. Have you guys played any other ones?

Ted: Super Meat Boy is a game I played recently that I really loved. We were talking earlier about the way the gameplay should match the themes of the game itself. In Super Meat Boy, you’re playing as this hunk of meat that is basically traveling its way through this game, and then what you’re always trying to get is your girlfriend; your girlfriend is a bandage. So it’s like Super Meat Boy is raw meat, you’re just this walking-wound where everything hurts you and, what you’re trying to get of course is the love of your life, or your soul mate, which is this bandage girl. You don’t have to explain to the player why that bandage girl is perfect for you, because you just know because she’s bandage girl—of course she’s perfect for you.

Dave: Have you guys seen Indie Game: The Movie, because the developers of Super Meat Boy are featured in that.

John: That’s a great movie.

Ted: Yeah, great movie.

Dave: The guys who did Super Meat Boy, I think one is the programmer, one is the artist or something like that. But the guy who is the artist, he’s done a lot of games—I don’t know if you’ve ever seen them. He does really, really bizarre games like one where you’re like a penis shooting semen at monstrous vaginas, and stuff like that. They’re always like really super grotesque things. If you go and look at his website, it’s just all sorts of weird, weird games on there.

John: Actually, there are a couple other games that were in Indie Game: the Movie that I played. I downloaded Super Meat Boy after watching that to check it out, and I liked it. I haven’t gotten too far into it but, also there’s Braid and Fez. Both of those games are cool. Ultimately my favorite indie game, though, is a game called Limbo. I don’t actually remember how I came across it, but—

Dave: That’s from when we interviewed Ron Gilbert.

John: Oh did he talk about that? Okay. Yeah and so it’s this really creepy, atmospheric game and it’s very simple. That really inspired me to check out some of the other indie games because there was this simplicity to it that modern games tend to avoid. Modern games are often so complex that, honestly, I buy them, and then I don’t get around to playing them for a while because I’m like, ‘Oh god, it’s going to be so much work to actually learn how to play this damn thing.’

Dave: I look at a game like Skyrim, and I’m like, ‘Wow, that looks really cool, but I don’t want to devote 100 hours, or whatever, to play this game.’ Whereas some of these indie games, you play them for half an hour or something, and you jump right into them. A lot of them are just side–scrollers; they’re really self-evident. Did you see this one, Guacamelee? It looks really cool. It’s sort of a Mexican-themed side-scroller where the basic game mechanic is that you switch back and forth between two parallel worlds at the push of a button. And so in some worlds there might be a wall. But you might switch to the other world and in that world that wall’s not there, and then you walk past it and switch back. And then some monsters are in one world or the other, and if there’s a monster about to attack you, you can switch out of that world and then run over here and switch back.

John: Although it’s not an indie game, the original Portal game actually feels a lot like an indie game, at least in terms of the size of it, because it’s a smaller game. That was one of the things that got me to play it in the first place, actually. I hadn’t heard of it because I’d been out of touch with video games for a bit. So I was at New York Comic Con with our friend Matt London (who has been a frequent guest geek) and I saw all this merchandise that said ‘The Cake is a Lie,’ and I was like, ‘What the hell is that? I don’t understand that reference.’ And so Matt said, ‘Oh, it’s from this game called Portal—it’s awesome.’ At the time, I was really busy and I was like, ‘I don’t have time to get into a game,’ because I get obsessed with the games, and then I spend all of my time playing them. But Matt said, ‘No, no, no it’s really short.’ So I went ahead and tried and, of course, got obsessed with it.

John: Ted, maybe you could talk a little bit about the background of Portal, because it kind of started as an indie game, right? Didn’t a couple of students develop the general idea and then it got developed into what became Portal?

Ted: I believe at Digi Pen there was a class project and it was called Narbacular Drop. The students came up with this game mechanic where it conserved physics as you fly through these different portals, and somehow this class project at Digi Pen caught Valve’s attention. I know Valve ended up hiring a whole bunch of the students out of that class, and together they built Portal, which is just an amazing, amazing game. I remember when I first met you, John, that was actually the first time I’d ever heard of Portal. You were telling me about it. And then, after I left, and I went home I immediately got the game and was playing it, and I was just totally blown away by it.

Dave: In our last episode, we talked to Hugh Howey, and he was saying how there’s this sea change in publishing where—instead of people sending stories to publishers and the publisher decides what things are good and those works get the professional release—people are now starting to just publish everything on the Kindle Store and then let the readers decide what’s good or bad and then, if something becomes popular that way, then the publisher will approach the author and repackage it in a more professional way. I wonder if we’re going to see a similar thing with indie games, where rather than big developers developing game concepts in-house, indie game developers just put out these basic game mechanics with really rough graphics and limited content and stuff, and then the ones that get super popular or catch the eye of developers, they bring them in and develop them into full retail products.

John: Penny Arcade (I think) was talking about indie games a little bit, or at least the sort of cheap iOS-type game, and they were saying, ‘Well, is something like Skyrim, that costs sixty dollars, actually sixty times better than a game that you can get for a dollar on your iPhone?’ I understand that argument because in a lot of cases it does seem ridiculous. It’s like: Could it really be to be that much better? To me, though, you take something like Skyrim and I would say yes, totally 100%—that is definitely sixty times more valuable to me than one of these games that I play on my iPhone. But it is an interesting question. Is the value out of whack? But if you take something like Limbo, for instance—wow, what value I got out of that five dollars that the game costs. To me, that would be a much better comparison. Is Skyrim ten times better than Limbo? I don’t know. I spent a lot more time playing Skyrim, because it’s so much larger, but, in terms of just the sheer amount of enjoyment I got out of both, it’s much more close to a parallel.

Dave: I think that the 3D graphics revolution that Austin was talking about has been both a blessing and a curse for the industry because when 3D graphics first came out I felt like the actual quality of gameplay had dropped enormously; we went from games like Ultima 7, to much, much simpler 3D games. I think only now with stuff like Skyrim are you getting back to the sort of gameplay complexity of something like Ultima 7. I think it’s a good thing that in indie games, since you don’t need the graphics to be so labor–intensive, you can actually do more experimental stuff with the gameplay and maybe develop the gameplay more.

Dave: Another thing that came up in the interview was indie games being financed via Kickstarter. The new game by Ultima-creator Richard Garriott, Shroud of the Avatar was actually financed via Kickstarter, and we’ve seen this with all sorts of things recently; it was Double Fine Adventure (now called Broken Age) that was the big thing that really kicked it off. Recently all sorts of things from our childhood are promised to be resurrected: Space Quest; Quest for Glory; Wasteland 2. And I just saw that the Kicktarter for a sequel to Planescape Torment (Torment: Tides of Numenera) just passed four million dollars, and it’s now the most successful Kickstarter ever. What do you guys think about this trend of Kickstarting games?

John: I’m going to have to learn how to get back into playing PC games because of this trend. I’ve been mostly a console gamer for the last several years. But I supported a bunch of those Kickstarters. I bought Wasteland 2, Torment: Tides of Numenera, and Shroud of the Avatar. So I’m going to be getting a whole bunch of PC games in the near future, and I’m going to have to learn how to play them again. I think it’s awesome because we get these games that are sort of being brought back from our childhoods, to revisit them in a contemporary context.

And actually I think Wasteland 2 is sort of a similar situation to the Ultima situation we mentioned in the interview. The first Fallout game actually grew out of the original Wasteland game. But then the developers had lost the rights to the Wasteland franchise because they were tied up with some other developer, and so they went and they made Fallout instead. Which is a different type of game, but what they really wanted to make was Wasteland 2. Now I guess they must have somehow gotten control of the rights back to the Wasteland name. So now they actually are going back and making Wasteland 2. The original Wasteland is one of the most formative games I’ve ever played. When I was 13 I would swear I did nothing but play Wasteland. And ultimately it led to my first book, because it started off my lifelong interest in post-apocalyptic fiction.

Ted: Oh, your Wastelands anthology.

John: Yeah, and I also stole the title.

Ted: As for Kickstarters . . . When you buy a game, you’re voting with your money, right? So I think Kickstarter is a way to move that process earlier, so you’re not just voting with your money when you buy the game, you’re actually voting with your money to get the game made in the first place. So, anything that allows people in the general public, and the audience, and the people who are actually going to be playing the game—anything that allows them to have more control over what you’re going to get a chance to play, I think that’s a good thing. So I’m definitely in favor of Kickstarters.

John: It kind of seems like Kickstarter, or something like it, is basically the way of the future in terms of determining what’s worth spending all of our time and money on. I think about this with anthologies; it can be very difficult to get publishers to be on board with an anthology. And I’m thinking, even if I had a publisher in mind for a book, it seems to me like it could be very beneficial to everyone to do it as a pre-order on Kickstarter ahead of time because then you know what level of interest there is. That way the publisher doesn’t have to put out all this money ahead of time and potentially have a big disaster on their hands if it doesn’t do as well as expected. That way you have a lot of information before you even put all of this stuff into motion.

Dave: This sort of came up in our discussion with Tobias Buckell in our last episode—that there’s this tendency, whenever there’s some new opportunity like this, for everyone to suddenly say, ‘Oh, this is the new normal, all the old rules are gone.’ I do think that Kickstarter is going to be a valuable way, to—like you say—prove that there’s an interest in something, and sort of give it a boost that way. But I don’t think that four million dollar Kickstarters for twenty- or thirty-year-old game franchises is the new normal, right?

John: No, no.

Dave: Because, like you, I supported Double Fine Adventure, the Space Quest Guys, the Quest for Glory people, Wasteland 2—and I don’t even know how many others. I don’t even own a PC anymore, I have a Mac laptop; I can’t play anything on it. But I have such a reservoir of pent-up good-will toward these people who provided me with so much pleasure in my youth. So I’m happy to give them fifty bucks, and if they never make the game, I don’t care. I’m giving it to them more in gratitude for what they’ve already done for me. But that reservoir is not inexhaustible, right? There will come a point when I’m like, okay, I can’t just keep giving fifty dollars to every thirty-year-old game that comes along.

John: Kickstarter fatigue is a real issue. Especially in social media because when you’re doing a Kickstarter—and I did a Kickstarter, so I know—it’s really easy to start flogging your product too much and, it’s a really fine line between flogging it too much and not enough. Because on the one hand, you want to make sure that everybody knows about it, but on the other hand you don’t want to annoy the crap out of everybody who follows your Facebook or Twitter, or whatever. I’ve certainly had to unfollow people just because they were doing a Kickstarter, figuring I’ll refollow them after the Kickstarter’s over—because it’s too much. I can’t stand to every day see another tweet, another dozen retweets of other people talking about it; it gets to the point where it’s just like, ugh, enough already.

But getting back to the Indie Game movie for a minute . . . When I saw that, I was really interested to find other forms of entertainment that are related to video games, because I’m really interested in the video game industry, and how it works, and the whole creative process. I actually came across this book called Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter by Tom Bissell. Tom Bissell is this amazing video game critic, and so this book is basically an in-depth criticism of ten or so different games. He talks about Fallout 3, the Mass Effect series, Grand Theft Auto 4, and several other games. When I read the book, I was really fascinated by all of his insights into the different games, but when I got to the part where he’s talking about Grand Theft Auto 4, I was kind of astonished because, aside from the fact that he was on cocaine the entire time he was playing it, my experience playing that game almost exactly mirrored his own. It was really interesting and kind of validating in a way to be like, ‘Oh, well, yes, somebody else was moved by that game in exactly the same way as I was, and liked it for the same exact reasons as I did.’

Dave: There’s a really, really good book called Masters of Doom by David Kushner, that’s about id software and the development of Doom and Quake. It sort of focuses on John Romero and John Karmac. I read that whole book in like an evening. I absolutely couldn’t put it down. I really, really strongly recommend it.

Dave: Ted, before we let you go, why don’t you tell us a bit about your non-video game writing. You mentioned you’ve had, what, nine stories in Years Best anthologies? How did you swing that?

Ted: Just great fortune, I guess. I published my first story in 2005 in Asimov’s magazine, and I definitely was not one of those writers that decided he was going to write and started publishing. That first sale was after about ten solid years of nothing but rejection. It was really after the point at which I’d totally given up; I’d just assumed that I would never be able to sell anything. But the problem was I couldn’t actually stop writing, and once I would finish I story I thought, ‘Well, I have it written, I might as well send it out and get a couple rejections for it.’ That was sort of the process under which I was submitting my stories around the time I had finally managed to sell one of them. That first sale to Asimov’s kind of led to everything else. When I would send my stories out, I was able to say, ‘Oh, I already published one story in Asimov’s,’ so I figured it puts you in a different sort of slush pile at magazines. And then I just started selling, and pretty much everything I sent out would, I’d eventually be able to sell.

Dave: Did you feel like your work was better, like was there a key change in your work or was it just that that one foot in the door did it?

Ted: I’m not sure. Well, it’s hard for me to say better or worse. But it was definitely different because, at the point where I totally gave up on ever publishing anything, there was a qualitative change that happened in my fiction, because I remember the story where I just decided, ‘All right, screw it, I’m never going to publish anything, I’m just going to write this story the way I want to write it. I’m not going to worry about if anybody gets it.’ The little editorial voice that was always in my head that was saying, ‘Well, you know, this isn’t going to be clear to people,’ I just turned that off. And I said, ‘I don’t care if anybody gets this story, I don’t care if it isn’t going to make any sense at all, because at least I know what I’m talking about, and I’m just going to write it how I want to write it because no one’s ever going to see it anyway.’ So, at the point when I started doing that, is actually the part where I started selling stories.

Dave: Why don’t you tell us about your new novel, Prophet of Bones? What’s that about?

Ted: Prophet of Bones is an alternate history where young Earth creationists won their argument. The Earth really is fifty-eight hundred years old, and that becomes the speculative leaping off point for the story. They’re able to test all the scientific evidence that demonstrates that the Earth really is fifty-eight hundred years old, but everything else is the same. So you have the same fossil records, you still have dinosaur bones, you still have Neanderthal bones, you still have homo erectus, and you then are forced to confront the fossil evidence with this idea that the Earth is young and actually try to explain it within the context of a young Earth. The premise of the book is that that is actually a far more frightening idea to face than the idea that the Earth is actually a lot older, because you also wonder, ‘What are these things that are in the ground? What is a Neanderthal in the context of a fifty-eight hundred year old planet?’ The story is centered around the science on Island Flores; I don’t know if you’ve heard about the homo floresiensis hobbit, the little three-and-a–half-foot dwarf hobbit that they found on the island of Flores. There’s been a lot of scientific argument about what this fossil is exactly, and even just a few weeks ago I read another scientific paper where they talked about trying to determine if it’s just a pathological, anatomically modern homo sapiens that has some deformities, or if it’s actually another branch of humanity that split off much earlier. There are some theories that it’s actually this isolated remnant population of australopithecus. There’s just a constant argument about what these bones represent. I thought, with as much argument that is taking place around these fossils now, imagine a world where Earth is actually fifty-eight hundred years old and what these fossils are could actually have religious significance, or cultural significance far beyond what exists in our world. So that was the kicking-off point of the novel, which follows a researcher who goes on a dig on the Island of Flores and helps to dig up these bones, and then he ultimately is going to be doing some clandestine DNA analysis of them.

Dave: I read your story, ‘N-Words,’ which is just absolutely brilliant. It takes place in the near future in which a population of Neanderthals have been recreated from genetic samples, and it’s about a woman who falls in love with a Neanderthal.

Ted: Yes, yes.

Dave: I hear you have a big skull on your desk. Could you talk about that and your background in paleontology?

Ted: When I first started college, I actually had this idea that I was either going to be an anthropologist or a geneticist. I remember the very first class I took was an anthropology course, and the professor, I think on the very first day, asked people to raise their hand if they were intending to major in anthropology. I don’t remember if I raised my hand or if I just thought about raising my hand. But he looked sadly at the class and then he said, ‘Let me explain to you what my life is like,’ and then he basically said he had a master’s degree in anthropology and he was an untenured professor, and he just sort of painted this portrait—‘You don’t want to go into anthropology unless you’re sort of independently wealthy and don’t really need to make a living.’ And so that told me, ‘Well maybe I better not go in that direction—

Dave: So you decided to enter the lucrative field of science fiction short story writing instead?

Ted: Right, exactly. But I decided I actually do need to make a living, so I better major in something else. I still took all the classes. I actually got an intra-library loan when I was twelve years old from the University of Chicago; the book was called Human Variation, and it’s this giant, two thousand page book, and it was just full of this really complex anthropology and genetics stuff, most of which I couldn’t understand, but I was very interested in it. So from a super early age, I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of where we come from and why we are the way we are. So, I majored in biology instead, and then I kept anthropology as a side interest of mine, and I kept reading up on it, and I’d still take classes on it—I just didn’t major in it.

Dave: Okay, but somehow you ended up working at a lab with a big skull on your desk.

Ted: The big skull is actually on my desk at home. It’s a recreation of a Neanderthal skull with the old man, La Chapelle-aux-Saints. More recently, I got an actual, museum-quality replica of the hobbit skull from Flores. So the skull that I wrote the novel about? My wife bought me that for my birthday. It’s not really work-related in any way, it’s just a side-interest.

John: So I know that "N-Words" accounts for two of your Year’s Best appearances. Where did that story originally appear?

Ted: That appeared in a little anthology called Seeds of Change, edited by, hmmm, let me think, John Joseph Adams.

John: I just wanted to pat myself on the back there.

Ted: Well, you deserve it because that story had been rejected elsewhere, so you were the first person to take a chance on that story. The fact that it ended up in a Year’s Best, I think, was a big vindication.

Dave: Ted, why don’t you tell us about what are you working on now. Got anything coming up?

Ted: I’m working on my third novel, which I don’t really have a title for yet, but it’s based on my short story, Divining Light. It’s a quantum mechanics madness story. The general premise is a mentally unstable physicist discovers a flaw in reality, and you follow what happens with the development of that. And other than writing another novel, I’m also writing for Dota 2, so I’m hard at work every day at Valve working on that game.

Dave: Well, I think we’re going to wrap things up there. So, Ted, thanks for joining us.

Ted: Thanks for having me, I appreciate it.