FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial, February 2014
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue forty-five of Lightspeed!

We told you last month about our Women Destroy Science Fiction! special issue, and our Kickstarter campaign to help make it the best it can be. Well, we launched on January 15 as planned, and it’s going very well so far—in fact, you could say we destroyed our funding goal. We actually funded in about seven hours! And as I write this we've exceeded $18,000 in funding, more than 350% of our goal! As such, we've added some cool stretch goals: If we reach $25K of funding, we'll also destroy horror with a Women Destroy Horror special issue, guest-edited by by the legendary editor-queen of the dark and the macabre, Ellen Datlow! But not ones to rest on our laurels, we've also set a $35K stretch goal, and if we reach that one we'll also destroy fantasy, with a special Women Destroy Fantasy issue, guest edited by former Fantasy Magazine editor Cat Rambo! To learn more about the Kickstarter and our stretch goals, or to back the project, please visit lightspeedmagazine.com/kickstarter. The Kickstarter ends February 15, so there's still lots of time to spread the word and/or get in on the action. Thanks so much to everyone who has already shown their support!

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

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 (“None Owns the 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 novel excerpts from Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer and Dreamwalker by C.S. Friedman.

Our issue this month is sponsored by our friends at EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing. This month, look for The Trillionist by Sagan Jeffries (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:

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

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.

SCIENCE FICTION

Coma Kings
Jessica Barber

So I guess the story begins, fittingly, with someone handing me a Coma rig and saying, play me.

Two a.m. and I’m at this party in somebody’s trailer out in the trashy part of town. I’m stoned out of my mind and there’s something on the television, either one of those cheesy infomercials or some sort of comedy thing making fun of those cheesy infomercials, and I’m trying to figure out which. I keep turning to the kid sprawled out beside me and saying, “Is this for real? Or is this like, a joke?” and he keeps blinking at me and going, “What? I don’t . . . ” and then trailing off. And so I’m deep into this important cultural assessment when somebody shoves a Coma rig into my hands.

“Fuck off,” I say, even though my fingers automatically curl into the wires. “I’m stoned, I don’t wanna play.”

“Come on,” says the guy who handed me the rig. “You’re Jenny, right? I hear you’re really good,” he says. True. “I hear you’re like, the best in the state, easy.” Not true, because of Annie, but I guess he’s not counting her. “I’ve wanted to play you like, forever.”

Either I’m really susceptible to flattery when stoned, or I actually just want to be playing Coma all the time, twenty-four/seven, no matter what, but either way I say fine and start to pull on the rig.

In each of my temples there are three distinct depressions, dents where the electrodes of my own rig have sat for hours on end. When I play Coma using my own gear, pulling on the headpiece feels like slotting a puzzle piece into place, but this kid’s rig is too big for me, not broken in. I try my best to align the electrodes properly, but in the end I just can’t get it to sit right, so I say fuck it and let it go all crooked. If you’ve played Coma you know this is a dumb idea, because it means the calibration will be all off and it will make you play like a spaz, but this is a throwaway game and I figure, who cares. I slide the opaque goggles over my eyes, fumble for the headphones and settle their huge soft cups over my ears, and the world disappears.

This is the point where usually I’d access my own personal Coma account, but like I said, I’m stoned, the rig doesn’t fit, and I don’t want some stupid throwaway game to drop me in the rankings. So I log in as a guest on the kid’s account instead.

Which is what fucks me over so badly, in the end.

When Coma first came out, it was this gimmicky thing, a rich kid’s game, nothing I cared about or could have afforded if I did. I played for the first time at a mall. One of those demo booths set up spanning the food court, and the only thing I noticed about it then was that it was blocking my way to Sbarro’s. I hadn’t been interested, but Annie thought it looked like the coolest thing ever, and she begged me to let her play.

Forget it, I’d said, it looks stupid, I’m hungry, but she whined until I told her fine, get in line. Tough luck for her, though, you had to be thirteen and at the time she was only eleven. I played just to spite her, since I was fourteen and made the age cutoff.

I love how you can do these things that fuck you over forever, that change your goddamn life, and not even care at the time, not even know.

I won that first game at the mall easily, even though I had no clue what I was doing. Then I won the next game, and the game after that too, and by the end of the day I had more wins than anybody else and guess what that meant? Two free Coma rigs for the trouble.

I planned on selling them. They were going for five hundred bucks apiece, I mean, shit. But when we got home Annie goaded me into playing against her. Well, she won, of course, you know that much, and then I could hardly sell them off, could I? Not until I beat her.

I suppose you can guess how long it took for that to happen.

I should probably tell you how that game at the party went, but I never know how to explain Coma when I’m out of the rig. It’s not like chess or something, it never makes sense when your brain is in the real world. If you really care, the game is on record, like every other game of Coma ever played.

It’s not worth watching; the kid is fucking terrible. We turn on our rigs and there’s nothing. I start building a box. Then there’s nothing but the inside of my box. One corner starts to crumble a little, and that’s the kid trying real hard, but then I just make it not crumble and that’s the end of that. I place a single white stone in the center of the box, and the game is over.

All of this is hardly worth telling you, except for what happens next. I feel the kid log out in a huff, and I’m about to do the same. But then there’s a ping up in the left corner of my consciousness, letting me know that Annie is requesting a game, and it’s a good thing I’m sitting down back in the real world because otherwise I would have fallen right over.

Here’s the thing. I have been trying to get Annie to play me again literally for years. I have sent game requests, again and again, and have gotten rejected each time. She absolutely will not play me. And now she’s been tricked, she doesn’t know it’s me, I finally get to play her, and here I am: wasted out of my mind with a Coma rig that doesn’t even fit.

If I were slightly less stoned, I might have started crying. As it is, I can’t even try to play, can’t even make the vaguest real effort because I know I’ll just get slaughtered, immediately, without mercy. Instead I start building useless structures, crumbling shapes that spell out Annie, it’s me, come back, I miss you.

The shock buys me about two solid minutes before Annie annihilates me and I am kicked out of the game. I can’t even bring myself to try and send her messages, try to request another chance. I just pull myself back into the real world, gut hurt and gasping for air.

I get home several hours before dawn, but my mother is up, sitting at the kitchen table and turning an unlit cigarette in her fingers, staring at the vinyl tabletop. The long walk home has cleared my head a bit, but I still feel shell-shocked, like there’s something sharp worming its way through the spaces between my organs. Like I’m going to burst apart at any moment.

My mother doesn’t look at me. “Where you been?”

“Went to a party,” I say. “Told you I was gonna go.” She makes a rough noise, deep in her throat, and I keep talking before she can say whatever it is she’s sitting on. “How’s Annie? You checked in on her?”

“She’s the same as ever, what do you think?” Ma says, which I take to mean no.

I try not to grit my teeth. “You still gotta check on her,” I mutter, move to squeeze past her but her hand darts out, catching me around the forearm.

“Don’t you tell me how I gotta care for my own child,” she snaps. Her cheap fake nails have half broken off, and their edges bite deep crescents into the underside of my wrist. We glare at each other until she releases me.

I bite down hard on the sides of my tongue and shove my way into the room I share with Annie.

Annie lies on her bed, just like she always does, a vanishing outline of a human body under a nubbly blanket, her head obscured by goggles, oversized headphones. She is surrounded by a small forest of medical equipment: stands for IV drips and catheter bags and heart rate monitors with their slow steady pulse of life.

The port at the base of her skull is hidden among pillows, under wide bandages. No electrodes. She doesn’t need those anymore.

Once I would have been overwhelmed by the urge to rip away every bit of equipment that surrounds her. Fuck, I’ll admit it: More than once I have given into this urge, but by now I know it doesn’t make any difference. She still lies there, just as unresponsive but now stripped bare, the heart rate monitor sending up a wailing protest in her absence.

So I don’t touch her. I just slide to the floor, scrape my thighs and palms across the synthetic roughness of the carpet and glare. “Goddammit, Annie,” I tell her.

There is a sound from the doorway and I fling myself around to face my mother, cheeks burning. She isn’t looking at me, though. Her eyes are trained on Annie.

“I can’t keep this up forever, you know,” she says. “It ain’t cheap. They don’t give me enough to look after her right. Sooner or later, we’re gonna have to let her go.”

She has been threatening this for years.

I don’t respond, just turn around and fit my molars together, like a small child, like if I pretend she isn’t there maybe she’ll disappear.

It doesn’t work. It never does.

“Jennifer, I really need to see you applying yourself,” says Miss Denton. “You’ve already missed two tests this quarter, and I haven’t gotten any homework at all from you yet.”

I used to like school. I mean, maybe “like” is a strong word. But it was all right. These days, when I manage to go, it feels like trying to pull my limbs through molasses, impossibly difficult and never-ending. This is a compounding problem. It’s hard enough getting my ass to school by seven-thirty in the morning on a good day. Getting my ass to school when I’m just going to get yelled at for the last time I failed to get my ass to school is just adding indignity to injustice.

“I know,” I say. “I’m going to make them up, honest. I’ve just been . . . ” I don’t know what to say, here. Tired, is what almost comes out of my mouth. But that’s not the sort of excuse you can use.

I can tell by the way Miss Denton’s expression folds in on itself that she is supplying her own narrative. Poor Jennifer, with her crazy sister. Miss Denton wears tiny frameless glasses perched on the end of her nose, and she takes them off to polish them, stalling for time. “I know it’s been a hard year for you,” she begins.

Christ, I’m tired of this speech. I know it’s rude, but I let my body hunch forward, rest my forehead against the laminate desktop. It’s cool, and slightly sticky. I don’t even have the energy to be disgusted.

Miss Denton perseveres. “I know it’s been a hard year for you. But your junior year is just starting, and your grades right now are so important for college. You do still want to go to college, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I say, because I am supposed to. I wonder if it’s true. Standard small town dream: Make it out, make it somewhere far away.

I wonder if they’d let me keep Annie in my dorm room.

I don’t make it to second period. I get to the door, then think of sitting at a desk for a solid hour and a half, the real world feeling cramped and finite, and just can’t. I find myself pushing through a side door out into the parking lot, twisting my way through rows of cars baking in the early sun. I can feel my rig tucked safe in my trunk, like a fucking siren song, and before I can think, I’m angling my steering wheel toward the city.

People go to Coma parlors for one of two reasons.

The first reason—why I go—is just to have a safe, quiet space to play Coma uninterrupted. The full-immersion aspect means it’s different than how gaming used to be. You can’t yell at your mom to get out of your room, or shove the cat away if it walks across the keyboard. Or worse, if something catches fire, or you’ve got a crazed family member screaming obscenities and threatening to kill you. If you’re planning to really settle in for a long game, better to be someplace supervised, someplace safe.

The second reason people go to Coma parlors is to hack their rigs. For some people, tweaking the electronics is just as much of a draw as actually playing the game. They think adding extra electrodes, overclocking the microprocessor, whatever-the-fuck else will give them an edge, help them achieve some sort of in-game nirvana. I think this is mostly bullshit; I use two-year-old stock parts and the occasional firmware upgrade, and I play better than most of the gearheads. Plus, we all know what it actually takes to get to that place of inseparability from the game.

There just aren’t very many people willing to go that far.

Lady K’s place looks like somebody’s garage workshop. Bare cinderblock walls, concrete floor. There’s a smattering of institutional couches around the outer edge, about half taken up by prone bodies, but the majority of its real estate is occupied by long, cobbled-together workbenches, ringed by kids bent industriously over the exploded innards of their Coma rigs. Soldering irons send fine wisps of smoke upward; someone’s running a Dremel carefully along the rim of their goggles.

The eponymous Lady K, a short, apple-cheeked chick who can’t be much older than me, is peering into a microscope when I come in, but she looks up at the door chime and gives me a little grin. I’m not in here often enough to be considered a regular, but Lady K knows me regardless. I’m higher ranked than anybody else who plays here, which probably helps my notoriety.

That, and Annie.

Always fucking Annie.

“Hey Jenny,” says Lady K. “You working on something today? Or just playing?”

“Just playing, for now,” I say. “Can I crash out on that couch?”

“Go for it,” says Lady K, and minutes later I am deep in Coma.

It’s good, I have a good morning. I play a guy I haven’t played before, some up-and-coming star from South Korea. We play off each other well, building up a huge structure, an entire city of improbable shapes. It takes a two-and-half-hour battle for me to bring the entire thing down around his ears.

When I come out from under I’m in a way better mood than I’ve been ever since that fucking party. A few people have plugged in to watch my game, and I actually manage a grin for them as we all disentangle from our rigs.

“That was a sweet trick with the arches,” someone says, and someone else offers to run out for pizza since it’s now past noon, and soon there’s a crowd of us sitting cross-legged in a circle on the floor, pizza grease seeping through paper plates and onto our fingertips. There’s a dimpled, heavy-set kid trying to tell everyone why he still prefers to use passive electrodes even though it means getting your hair gunked up with conductive paste, and I feel some unrecognized tightness below my collarbones soften, relax.

Lady K, sitting next to me, waves a slice of pepperoni to get my attention. “You sticking around for the rest of the afternoon?” She pauses, arches an eyebrow. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

I am about to say something disparaging, when a fragment of conversation cuts through the rest of the chatter, the way fragments of conversation sometimes do, loud and unmistakable. “—kid in California hardwired himself two days ago.” It’s a pretty, wide-eyed girl with a punk-rock haircut talking; no wonder all the attention is on her. “That’s like over two dozen people hardwired in, just in America. It’s just so scary, I mean can you even imagine, drilling into your own skull like that? I hear there’s someone not too far from here, do you think—” the guy next to her finally cuts her off with an elbow jab to the ribs. She turns an inquiring glare on him, and he leans toward her, starting up a furious, whispered conversation.

The tightness underneath my collarbones spools back into existence. I ignore the guilty glances being slanted my way, and take a large, deliberate bite of pizza instead.

“Skipping,” I explain to Lady K once I am finished chewing. The conversation is still hushed and awkward. I fold the paper plate into a careful fat wedge, wipe my fingers on my jeans. “I’m gonna plug back in.”

There are too many eyes on me as I try to settle into my rig, I can’t get the electrodes to sit quite right. I never have problems with my rig but it’s taking too long, I’m starting to look like an idiot so I turn the whole thing on anyway, blissful blank order sliding over my brainwaves.

It fits my current luck that none of my active play partners are connected, so I drift uncomfortably, paging through lists of other people looking for games, trying to find someone whose stats make them look interesting. I am just about to accept an offer to play a teaching game with some newbie, when Annie’s pseud pops up as available.

I send her a game request without even really thinking about it; I’ve done this so many times it’s like a reflex now. And like all the other times before, she declines immediately.

Because I am childish and bitter, I send her two dozen game requests in quick succession, the Coma equivalent of ringing someone’s doorbell repeatedly.

Just admit you’re scared, I message her, and as usual, am informed that she is not accepting messages. I game-request her three more times and think really hard about flipping her off, as if the Coma network might somehow be able to convey my displeasure, might carry along my vitriol to resonate into the base of Annie’s wretched skull. Then I accept the game against the newbie and try to forget about it.

I’m a half hour into it when Annie’s game request pings along the edge of my brain.

I stop breathing. For at least thirty seconds I am essentially paralyzed; I know this because when I come back to myself my opponent is making good headway toward tearing down the defenses I’ve built up, sending me a little stream of surprised and pleased messages about how he thinks he’s finally really getting it. Sorry, I say, sorry, I have to go, and forfeit the game, just like that.

I accept Annie’s game request and the world is a clean slate.

Then Annie starts building a box.

Maybe you can see what’s coming here. I don’t know. Maybe it was obvious from the outside. If you had asked me before, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what I thought was going to happen, because I didn’t think anything. I wanted to play Annie. Of course I did, she’s my sister, my sister who I lost, and I wanted to have her again, in any way I could. And I wanted to beat her, because she’s my sister, and you always want to win against your siblings. That’s just the way things work, right? That should have been enough.

So I didn’t think anything. But here’s the thing, and I know this makes me a fool, but deep down, I believed, somehow, that if I could just beat her everything would be all better. Believed, with that sort of secret inner ferocity of a fairy tale or a religion. I would win against her, like nobody ever had, and there would be a silent, eternal moment. And then her name would blip out of existence, and I’d pull off my rig and look over to where she was doing the same, prying her goggles away from her eyes and sliding the probe out from the back of her skull. And we’d look at each other, and start laughing, and everything would be okay.

In fairytales, you can wake somebody out of death with a kiss. Does waking somebody up like this really seem like so much to ask?

When I beat Annie, there is indeed one silent, eternal moment. And right then I don’t even realize what I’m waiting for, bated breath and tense muscles, until it doesn’t happen, until she leaves the space we created without comment, until she doesn’t blip out of existence.

Until she starts up another game, immediately, against someone else, as if absolutely nothing has changed.

When I get home my mother is waiting for me.

“The school called to tell me you missed classes today,” she says.

My keys bite into my palms, hard and irregular. I get past my mother without looking at her, make my way into the living room. Climb onto the couch, pull my knees up to my chest. Turn my face into the cushion so the upholstery forces my eyes shut.

I have mostly stopped crying by this point.

“You listen when I’m talking to you,” says my mother.

I can hear her moving into the living room after me. The shadows behind my eyelids get darker as she stands over me, half-blocking the light. I expect her to grab hold of me, yank me upright, something, but she doesn’t move.

“Would you unplug me?” I hear myself asking. My voice filters through the cushions, muffled and strange. I doubt my mother can even understand what I’m saying. “If I was like Annie. Would you unplug us both?”

Silence. The tender spots at my temples throb in time with my pulse, thudding slow and regular. Then I feel her moving, feel the couch shifting as she sinks down next to me. Her fingertips press into my scalp, thumb curling into the fine hairs at the base of my skull.

“I don’t know,” she says, almost a whisper.

I almost want to believe she sounds sorry.

“Okay,” I say. Her fingernails catch in my hair when she pulls her hand away, bringing long strands with them. I feel them lift and separate, imagine them shining and infinite, like wires. “Okay.”

© 2014 by Jessica Barber.

Jessica Barber lives in Cambridge, MA, where she spends her days (and sometimes nights) building open-source electronics. Her work has previously appeared in Strange Horizons.

Go to Author Spotlight

Water
Ramez Naam

The water whispered to Simon’s brain as it passed his lips. It told him of its purity, of mineral levels, of the place it was bottled. The bottle was cool in his hand, chilled perfectly to the temperature his neural implants told it he preferred. Simon closed his eyes and took a long, luxurious swallow, savoring the feel of the liquid passing down his throat, the drops of condensation on his fingers.

Perfection.

“Are you drinking that?” the woman across from him asked. “Or making love to it?”

Simon opened his eyes, smiled, and put the bottle back down on the table. “You should try some,” he told her.

Stephanie shook her head, her auburn curls swaying as she did. “I try not to drink anything with an IQ over 200.”

Simon laughed at that.

They were at a table at a little outdoor café at Washington Square Park. A dozen yards away, children splashed noisily in the fountain, shouting and jumping in the cold spray in the hot mid-day sun. Simon hadn’t seen Stephanie since their last college reunion. She looked as good as ever.

“Besides,” Stephanie went on. “I’m not rich like you. My implants are ad-supported.” She tapped a tanned finger against the side of head. “It’s hard enough just looking at that bottle, at all of this . . . ” She gestured with her hands at the table, the menu, the café around them. “Without getting terminally distracted. One drink out of that bottle, and I’d be hooked!”

Simon smiled, spread his hands expansively. “Oh, it’s not as bad as all that.” In his peripheral senses he could feel the bottle’s advertech working, reaching out to Stephanie’s brain, monitoring her pupillary dilation, the pulse evident in her throat, adapting its pitch in real-time, searching for some hook that would get her to drink, to order a bottle for herself. Around them he could feel the menus, the table, the chairs, the café—all chattering, all swapping and bartering and auctioning data, looking for some advantage that might maximize their profits, expand their market shares.

Stephanie raised an eyebrow. “Really? Every time I glance at that bottle I get little flashes of how good it would feel to take a drink, little whole-body shivers.” She wrapped her arms around herself now, rubbing her hands over the skin of her tanned shoulders, as if cold in this heat. “And if I did drink it, what then?” Her eyes drilled into Simon’s. “Direct neural pleasure stimulation? A little jolt of dopamine? A little micro-addiction to Pura Vita bottled water?”

Simon tilted his head slightly, put on the smile he used for the cameras, for the reporters. “We only use pathways you accepted as part of your implant’s licensing agreement. And we’re well within the FDA’s safe limits for . . . ”

Stephanie laughed at him then. “Simon, it’s me! I know you’re a big marketing exec now, but don’t give me your corporate line, okay?”

Simon smiled ruefully. “Okay. So, sure, of course, we make it absolutely as enticing as the law lets us. That’s what advertising’s for! If your neural implant is ad-supported, we use every function you have enabled. But so what? It’s water. It’s not like it’s going to hurt you any.”

Stephanie was nodding now. “Mmm-hmmm. And your other products? VitaBars? Pure-E-Ohs? McVita Burgers?”

Simon spread his hands, palms open. “Hey look, everybody does it. If someone doesn’t buy our Pura Vita line, they’re gonna just go buy something from NutriYum or OhSoSweet or OrganiTaste or somebody else. We at least do our best to put some nutrition in there.”

Stephanie shook her head. “Simon, don’t you think there’s something wrong with this? That people let you put ads in their brains in order to afford their implants?”

“You don’t have to,” Simon replied.

“I know, I know,” Stephanie answered. “If I paid enough, I could skip the ads, like you do. You don’t even have to experience your own work! But you know most people can’t afford that. And you’ve got to have an implant these days to be competitive. Like they say, wired or fired.”

Simon frowned inwardly. He’d come to lunch hoping for foreplay, not debate club. Nothing had changed since college. Time to redirect this.

“Look,” he said. “I just do my job the best I can, okay? Come on, let’s order something. I’m starving.”

Simon pulled up his menu to cut off this line of conversation. He moved just fast enough that for a split second he saw the listed entrees still morphing, optimizing their order and presentation to maximize the profit potential afforded by the mood his posture and tone of voice indicated.

Then his kill files caught up, and filtered every item that wasn’t on his diet out of his senses.

Simon grimaced. “Looks like I’m having the salad again. Oh, joy.”

He looked over at Stephanie, and she was still engrossed in the menu, her mind being tugged at by a dozen entrees, each caressing her thoughts with sensations and emotions to entice, each trying to earn that extra dollar.

Simon saw his chance. He activated the ad-buyer interface on his own implant, took out some extremely targeted ads, paid top dollar to be sure he came out on top of the instant auction, and then authorized them against his line of credit. A running tab for the new ad campaign appeared in the corner of his vision, accumulating even as he watched. Simon ignored it.

Stephanie looked up at him a moment later, her lunch chosen. Then he felt his own ads go into effect. Sweet enticements. Subtle reminders of good times had. Sultry undertones. Subtle, just below normal human perception. And all emanating from Simon, beamed straight into Stephanie’s mind.

And he saw her expression change just a tiny bit.

Half an hour later the check came. Simon paid, over Stephanie’s objection, then stood. He leaned in close as she stood as well. The advertech monitors told him she was receptive, excited.

“My place, tonight?” he asked.

Stephanie shook her head, clearly struggling with herself.

Simon mentally cranked up the intensity of his ads another notch further.

“I can make you forget all these distractions,” he whispered to her. “I can even turn off your ads, for a night.” His own advertech whispered sweeter things to her brain, more personal, more sensual.

Simon saw Stephanie hesitate, torn. He moved to wrap his arms around her, moved his face towards hers for a kiss.

Stephanie turned her face away abruptly, and his lips brushed her cheek instead. She squeezed him in a sudden, brisk hug, her hands pressing almost roughly into his back.

“Never,” she said. Then she pushed away from him and was gone.

Simon stood there, shaking his head, watching as Stephanie walked past the fountain and out of his view.

In the corner of his sight, an impressive tally of what he’d just spent on highly targeted advertising loomed. He blinked it away in annoyance. It was just a number. His line of credit against his Pura Vita stock options would pay for it.

He’d been too subtle, he decided. He should have cranked the ads higher from the very beginning. Well, there were plenty more fish in the sea. Time to get back to the office, anyway.

Steph walked north, past layers of virtual billboards and interactive fashion ads, past a barrage of interactive emotional landscape ads trying to suck her into buying perfume she didn’t need, and farther, until she was sure she was out of Simon’s senses.

Then she reached into her mind and flicked off the advertising interfaces in her own implant.

She leaned against a building, let her brain unclench, let the struggle of fighting the advertech he’d employed against her pass.

That bastard, she thought, fuming. She couldn’t believe he’d tried that crap on her. If she’d had any shred of doubt remaining, he’d eliminated it. No. He deserved what was coming.

Steph straightened herself, put out a mental bid for a taxi, rode it to Brooklyn, and stepped up to the door of the rented one-room flat. She knocked—short, short, long, long, short. She heard motion inside the room, then saw an eye press itself to the other side of the ancient peephole.

They knew too well that electronic systems could be compromised.

The door opened a fraction, the chain still on it, and Lisa’s face appeared. The short-haired brunette nodded, then unlatched the chain, opened the door fully.

Steph walked into the room, closed the door behind her, saw Lisa tucking the home-printed pistol back into her pocket. She hated that thing. They both did. But they’d agreed it was necessary.

“It’s done?” Lisa asked.

Steph nodded.

“It’s done.”

Simon walked south along Broadway. It was a gorgeous day for a stroll. The sun felt warm on his brow. He was overdressed for the heat in an expensive grey silk jacket and slacks, but the smart lining kept him cool nonetheless. The city was alive with people, alive with data. He watched as throngs moved up and down the street, shopping, chatting, smiling on this lovely day. He partially lowered his neural firewalls and let his implants feed him the whisper of electronic conversations all around him.

Civic systems chattered away. The sidewalk slabs beneath his feet fed a steady stream of counts of passers-by, estimates of weight and height and gender, plots of probabilistic walking paths, data collected for the city planners. Embedded bio-sensors monitored the trees lining the street, the hydration of their soils, the condition of their limbs. Health monitors watched for runny noses, sneezing, coughing, any signs of an outbreak of disease. New York City’s nervous system kept constant vigil, keeping the city healthy, looking for ways to improve it.

The commercial dataflow interested Simon more than the civic. His pricey, top-of-the-line implants let him monitor that traffic as only a few could.

In Tribeca he watched as a woman walked by a storefront. He saw a mannequin size her up, then felt the traffic as it caressed her mind with a mental image of herself, clothed in a new summer dress, looking ten years younger and twenty pounds lighter. Beneath the physical the mannequin layered an emotional tone in the advert: feelings of vigor, joy, carefree delight. Simon nodded to himself. A nice piece of work, that. He took note of the brand for later study. The woman turned and entered the shop.

He felt other advertech reaching out, all around him, to the networked brains of the crowd. Full sensory teasers for beach vacations from a travel shop, a hint of the taste of chocolate from a candy store, the sight and feel of a taut, rippling body from a sports nutrition store. He passed by a bodega, its façade open to the warm air, and came close enough that the individual bottles of soda and juice and beer and water reached out to him, each trying a pitch tailored to his height and weight and age and ethnicity and style of dress.

Simon felt the familiar ping of one of the many Pura Vita water pitches and smiled. Not bad. But he had a few ideas for improvements. None of it really touched him, in any case. His implants weren’t ad-sponsored. He felt this ad chatter only because he chose to, and even now it was buffered, filtered, just a pale echo of what most of the implanted were subjected to. No. Simon tuned into this ambient froth of neural data as research. He sampled it, observed it from afar, because he must. His success in marketing depended on it.

He was almost to his own building when he passed the headquarters of Nexus Corp, the makers of the neural implant in his brain and millions more. Stephanie didn’t understand. This was the real behemoth. So long as Nexus Corp maintained their patents on the neural implant technology, they held a monopoly. The ad-based model, all that most people could afford, was their invention. Simon was just one of thousands of marketers to make use of it to boost demand for their products.

And hell, if people didn’t like it, they didn’t have to get an implant! It was just the way the world worked. Want to be smarter? Want a photographic memory? Want to learn a new language or a new instrument or how to code overnight? Want all those immersive entertainment options? Want that direct connection with your loved ones? But don’t have the cash?

Then accept the ads, boyo. And once you do, stop complaining.

Not that Simon wanted the ads himself, mind you. No, it was worth the high price to keep the top-of-the-line, ad-free version running in his brain, to get all the advantages of direct neural enhancement without the distraction of pervasive multi-sensory advertising. And, of course, to be able to monitor the traffic around him, to better understand how to optimize his own pitches.

Simon reached his building at last. The lobby doors sensed him coming and whisked themselves open. Walking by the snack bar in the lobby, he felt the drinks and packaged junk food reaching out to him. His own Pura Vita water, of course. And NutriYum water. Simon gave their top competitor’s products the evil eye. Someday Pura Vita would own this whole building, and then he’d personally see to it that not a single bottle of NutriYum remained.

The lobby floor tiles whispered ahead to the inner security doors, which in turn alerted the elevators. Simon strode forward confidently, layers of doors opening for him of their own accord, one by one, perfectly in time with his stride. He stepped into the waiting elevator and it began to ascend immediately, bound for his level. The lift opened again moments later, and he strode to his window office. Smart routing kept subordinates out of his path. The glass door to his magnificent office swung open for him. A bottle of cold Pura Vita was on his desk, just how he liked it.

Simon settled into his ready-and-waiting chair, kicked his feet up on the table, and reached through his implant to the embedded computing systems of his office. Data streamed into his mind. Market reports. Sales figures. Ad performance metrics. He closed his eyes and lost himself in it. This was the way to work.

On the back of his jacket, a tiny device, smaller than a grain of sand, woke up and got to work as well.

Lisa started intently at Steph. “He didn’t notice?”

Steph shook her head. “Not a clue.”

“And you still want to go through with it?” Lisa asked.

“More than ever.”

Lisa looked at her. “The ones who’re paying us—they’re just as bad as he is, you know. And they’re going to profit.”

Steph nodded. “For now they will,” she replied. “In the long run—they’re just paying us to take the whole damn system down.”

Lisa nodded. “Okay, then.”

She strode over to the ancient terminal on the single desk in the flat and entered a series of keypresses.

Phase 1 began.

Around the world, three-dozen different accounts stuffed with crypto-currency logged on to anonymous, cryptographically secured stock market exchanges. One by one, they began selling short on Pura Vita stock, selling shares they did not own, on the bet that they could snap those same shares up at a far lower price in the very near future.

In data centers around the world, AI traders took note of the short sales within micro-seconds. They turned their analytical prowess to news and financial reports on Pura Vita, on its competitors, on the packaged snack and beverage industries in general. The computational equivalent of whole human lifetimes was burned in milliseconds analyzing all available information. Finding nothing, the AI traders flagged Pura Vita stock for closer tracking.

“Now we’re committed,” Lisa said.

Steph nodded. “Now let’s get out of here, before Phase 2 starts.”

Lisa nodded and closed the terminal. Five minutes later they were checked out of their hotel, and on their way to the airport.

In a window office above the financial heart of Manhattan, a tiny AI woke and took stock of its surroundings.

Location—check.

Encrypted network traffic—check.

Human present—check.

Key . . .

Deep within itself, the AI found the key. Something stolen from this corporation, perhaps. An access key that would open its cryptographic security. But one with additional safeguards attached. A key that could only be used from within the secure headquarters of the corporation. And only by one of the humans approved to possess such a key. Triply redundant security. Quite wise.

Except that now the infiltration AI was here, in this secure headquarters, carried in by one of those approved humans.

Slowly, carefully, the infiltration AI crawled its tiny body up the back of the silk suit it was on, towards its collar, as close as it could come to the human’s brain without touching skin and potentially revealing itself. When it could go no farther, it reached out, fit its key into the cryptographic locks of the corporation around it, and inserted itself into the inner systems of Pura Vita enterprises, and through them, to the onboard processors of nearly a billion Pura Vita products on shelves around the world.

In a warehouse outside Tulsa, a bottle of Pura Vita water suddenly labels itself as RECALLED. Its onboard processor broadcasts the state to all nearby. Within milliseconds, the other bottles in the same case, then the rest of the pallet, then all the pallets of Pura Vita water in the warehouse register as RECALLED. The warehouse inventory management AI issues a notice of return to Pura Vita, Inc.

In a restaurant Palo Alto, Marie Evans soaks up the sun, then reaches out to touch her bottle of Pura Vita. She likes to savor this moment, to force herself to wait, to make the pleasure of that first swallow all the more intense. Then, abruptly, the bottle loses its magic. It feels dull and drab, inert in her hand. An instant later the bottle’s label flashes red—RECALL. The woman frowns. “Waiter!”

In a convenience store in Naperville, the bottles of Pura Vita on the store shelves suddenly announce that they are in RECALL, setting off a flurry of electronic activity. The store inventory management AI notices the change and thinks to replace the bottles with more recently arrived stock in the storeroom. Searching, it finds that the stock in the back room has been recalled as well. It places an order for resupply to the local distribution center, only to receive a nearly instant reply that Pura Vita water is currently out of stock, with no resupply date specified. Confused, the inventory management AI passes along this information to the convenience store’s business management AI, requesting instructions.

Meanwhile, on the shelves immediately surrounding the recalled bottles of Pura Vita, other bottled products take note. Bottles of NutriYum, OhSoSweet, OrganiTaste, and BetterYou, constantly monitoring their peers and rivals, observe the sudden recall of all Pura Vita water. They virtually salivate at the new opportunity created by the temporary hole in the local market landscape. Within a few millionths of a second, they are adapting their marketing pitches, simulating tens of thousands of scenarios in which buyers encounter the unavailable Pura Vita, angling for ways to appeal to this newly available market. Labels on bottles morph, new sub-brands appear on the shelves as experiments, new neural ads ready themselves for testing on the next wave of shoppers.

In parallel, the rival bottles of water reach out to their parent corporate AIs with maximal urgency. Pura Vita bottles temporarily removed from battleground! Taking tactical initiative to seize local market opportunity! Send further instructions/best practices to maximize profit-making potential!

For there is nothing a modern bottle of water wants more than to maximize its profit-making potential.

At the headquarters of OhSoSweet and OrganiTaste and BetterYou, AIs receive the flood of data from bottles across the globe. The breadth of the calamity to befall Pura Vita becomes clear within milliseconds. Questions remain: What has caused the recall? A product problem? A contaminant? A terrorist attack? A glitch in the software?

What is the risk to their own business?

Possible scenarios are modeled, run, evaluated for optimal courses of action robust against the unknowns in the situation.

In parallel, the corporate AIs model the responses of their competitors. They simulate each other’s responses. What will NutriYum do? OhSoSweet? OrganiTaste? BetterYou? Each tries to outthink the rest in a game of market chess.

One by one, their recursive models converge on their various courses of action, and come to that final, most dreaded set of questions, which every good corporate AI must ask itself a billion times a day. How much of this must be approved by the humans? How can the AI get the human-reserved decisions made quickly, and in favor of the mathematically optimal course for the corporation that its machine intelligence has already decided upon?

Nothing vexes an AI so much as needing approval for its plans from slow, clumsy, irrational bags of meat.

Johnny Ray walked down the refrigerated aisle, still sweaty from his run. Something cold sounded good right now. He came upon the cooler with the drinks, reached for a Pura Vita, and saw that the label was pulsing red. Huh? Recalled?

Then the advertech hit him.

“If you liked Pura Vita, you’ll love Nutri Vita, from NutriYum!”

“OrganiVita is the one for you!”

“Pura Sweet, from OhSoSweet!”

Images and sensations bombarded him. A cold refreshing mountain stream crashed onto the rocks to his left, splashing him with its cool spray. A gaggle of bronzed girls in bikinis frolicked on a beach to his right, beckoning him with crooked fingers and enticing smiles. A rugged, shirtless, six-packed version of himself nodded approvingly from the bottom shelf, promising the body that Johnny Ray could have. An overwhelmingly delicious citrus taste drew him to the top.

Johnny Ray’s mouth opened in a daze. His eyes grew glassy. His hands slid the door to the drinks fridge open, reached inside, came out with some bottle, the rest of him not even aware the decision had been made.

Johnny Ray looked down at the bottle in his hand. Nutri Vita. He’d never even heard of this stuff before. His mouth felt dry, hungry for the cold drink. The sweat beaded on his brow. Wow. He couldn’t wait to try this.

While the corporate AIs of the other brands dithered, wasting whole precious seconds, debating how to persuade the inefficient bottleneck of humans above them, the controlling intelligence of NutriYum launched itself into a long prepared course of action.

NutriYumAI logged on to an anonymous investor intelligence auction site, offering a piece of exclusive, unreleased data to the highest bidder.

30 SECOND ADVANTAGE AVAILABLE—MARKET OPPORTUNITY TO SELL FORTUNE 1000 STOCK IN ADVANCE OF CRASH. GREATER THAN 10% RETURN GUARANTEED BY BOND. AUCTION CLOSES IN 250 MILLISECONDS. RESERVE BID $100 MILLION. CRYPTO CURRENCY ONLY.

Within a quarter of a second it had 438 bids. It accepted the highest, at $187 million, with an attached cryptographically sealed and anonymized contract that promised full refund of the purchase price should the investment data fail to provide at least an equivalent profit.

In parallel, NutriYumAI sent out a flurry of offer-contracts to retailers throughout North America and select markets in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

ADDITIONAL NUTRIYUM WATER STOCK AVAILABLE IN YOUR AREA. 10 CASES FREE, DELIVERY WITHIN 1 HOUR, PLUS 40% DISCOUNT ON NEXT 1000 CASES—EXCHANGE FOR 75% ALLOCATION OF PURA VITA SHELF SPACE AND NEURAL BANDWIDTH ALLOCATION. REPLY WITH CRYTPOGRAPHIC SIGNATURE TO ACCEPT.

Within seconds, the first acceptances began to arrive. Retailers signed over the shelf space and neural bandwidth that Pura Vita had once occupied in their stores over to NutriYum, in exchange for a discount on the coming cases.

By the end of the day, NutriYum would see its market share nearly double. A coup. A rout. The sort of market battlefield victory that songs are sung of in the executive suites.

The AI-traded fund called Vanguard Algo 5093 opened the data package it had bought for $187 million. It took nanoseconds to process the data. This was indeed an interesting market opportunity. Being the cautious sort, Vanguard Algo 5093 sought validation. At a random sample of a few thousand locations, it hired access to wearable lenses, to the anonymized data streams coming out of the eyes and brains of Nexus Corp customers, to tiny, insect-sized airborne drones. Only a small minority of the locations it tried had a set of eyes available within the one-second threshold it set, but those were sufficient. In every single location, the Pura Vita labels in view were red. Red for recall.

Vanguard Algo 5093 leapt into action. SELL SHORT! SELL SHORT!

It alerted its sibling Vanguard algorithms to the opportunity, earning a commission on their profits. It sent the required notifications to the few remaining human traders at the company as well, though it knew that they would respond far too slowly to make a difference

Within milliseconds, Pura Vita Stock was plunging, as tens of billions in Vanguard Algo assets bet against it. In the next few milliseconds, other AI traders around the world took note of the movement of the stock. Many of them, primed by the day’s earlier short sale, joined in now, pushing Pura Vita stock even lower.

Thirty-two seconds after it had purchased this advance data, Vanguard Algo 5093 saw the first reports on Pura Vita’s inventory problem hit the wire. By then, $187 million in market intelligence had already netted it more than a billion in profits, with more on the way as Pura Vita dipped even lower.

Simon’s first warning was the stock ticker. Like so many other millionaires made of not-yet-vested stock options, he kept a ticker of his company’s stock permanently in view in his mind. On any given day it might flicker a bit, up or down by a few tenths of a percent. More up than down for the last year to be sure. Still, on a volatile day, one could see a swing in either direction of as much as two percent. Nothing to be too worried about.

He was immersing himself in data from a Tribeca clothing store—the one he’d seen with the lovely advertech today—when he noticed that the ticker in the corner of his mind’s eye was red. Bright red. Pulsating red.

His attention flicked to it.

-11.4%

What?

It plunged even as he watched.

-12.6%

-13.3%

-15.1%

What the hell? He mentally zoomed in on the ticker to get the news. The headline struck him like a blow.

PURA VITA BOTTLES EXPIRING IN MILLIONS OF LOCATIONS.

No. This didn’t make any sense. He called up the sales and marketing AI on his terminal.

Nothing.

Huh?

He tried again.

Nothing.

The AI was down.

He tried the inventory management AI next.

Nothing.

Again.

Nothing.

Simon was sweating now. He could feel the hum as the smart lining of his suit started running its compressors, struggling to cool him off. But it wasn’t fast enough. Sweat beaded on his brow, on his upper lip. There was a knot in his stomach.

He pulled up voice, clicked to connect to IT. Oh, thank god.

Then routed to voicemail.

Oh no. Oh please no.

-28.7%.

-30.2%

-31.1%

-33.9%

It was evening before IT called back. They’d managed to reboot the AIs. A worm had taken them out somehow, had spread new code to all the Pura Vita bottles through the market intelligence update channel. And then it had disabled the remote update feature on the bottles. To fix those units, they needed to reach each one, physically. Almost a billion bottles. That would take whole days!

It was a disaster. And there was worse.

NutriYum had sealed up the market, had closed six-month deals with tens of thousands of retailers. Their channel was gone, eviscerated.

And with it Simon’s life.

The credit notice came soon after. His options were worthless now. His most important asset was gone. And with it so was the line of credit he’d been using to finance his life.

[NOTICE OF CREDIT DOWNGRADE]

The message flashed across his mind. Not just any downgrade. Down to zero. Down into the red. Junk status.

The other calls came within seconds of his credit downgrade. Everything he had—his mid-town penthouse apartment, his vacation place in the Bahamas, his fractional jet share—they were all backed by that line of credit. He’d been living well beyond his means. And now the cards came tumbling down.

[NexusCorp Alert: Hello valued customer! We have detected a problem with your account. We are temporarily downgrading your neural implant service to the free, ad-sponsored version. You can correct this at any time by submitting payment here.]

Simon clutched his head in horror. This couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t.

Numbly, he stumbled out of his office and down the corridor. Lurid product adverts swam at him from the open door to the break room. He pushed past them. He had to get home somehow, get to his apartment, do . . . something.

He half-collapsed into the elevator, fought to keep himself from hyperventilating as it dropped to the lobby floor. Adverts from the lobby restaurants flashed at him from the wall panel as they dropped, inundating him with juicy steak flavor, glorious red wine aroma, the laughter and bonhomie of friends he didn’t have. The ads he habitually blocked out reached him raw and unfiltered now, with an intensity he wasn’t accustomed to in his exclusive, ad-free life. He crawled back as far as he could into the corner of the lift, whimpering, struggling to escape the barrage. The doors opened, and he bolted forward, into the lobby and the crowd, heading out, out into the city.

The snack bar caught him first. It reached right into him, with its scents and flavors and the incredible joy a bite of a YumDog would bring him. He stumbled towards the snack bar, unthinkingly. His mouth was dry, parched, a desert. He was so hot in this suit, sweating, burning up, even as the suit’s pumps ran faster and faster to cool him down.

Water. He needed water.

He blinked to clear his vision, searching, searching for a refreshing Pura Vita.

All he saw was NutriYum. He stared at the bottles, the shelves upon shelves of them. And the NutriYum stared back into him. It saw his thirst. It saw the desert of his mouth, the parched landscape of his throat, and it whispered to him of sweet relief, of an endless cool stream to quench that thirst.

Simon stumbled forward another step. His fingers closed around a bottle of cold, perfect, NutriYum. Beads of condensation broke refreshingly against his fingers.

Drink me, the bottle whispered to him. And I’ll make all your cares go away.

The dry earth of his throat threatened to crack. His sinuses were a ruin of flame. He shouldn’t do this. He couldn’t do this.

Simon brought his other hand to the bottle, twisted off the cap, and tipped it back, letting the sweet cold water quench the horrid cracking heat within him.

Pure bliss washed through him, bliss like he’d never known. This was nectar. This was perfection.

Some small part of Simon’s brain told him that it was all a trick. Direct neural stimulation. Dopamine release. Pleasure center activation. Reinforcement conditioning.

And he knew this. But the rest of him didn’t care.

Simon was a NutriYum man now. And always would be.

© 2013 by Ramez Naam.

Originally published in Networked Matter,

edited by The Institute for the Future.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Ramez Naam is a computer scientist and the H.G. Wells Award-winning author of four books: the near future science-fiction brain-hacking thrillers Nexus and Crux and the non-fiction books More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement and The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet. He’s a fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and serves as Adjunct Faculty at Singularity University, where he lectures on energy, environment, and innovation. Follow Ramez on twitter: @ramez or visit him at rameznaam.com.

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Harry and Marlowe and the Intrigues at the Aetherian Exhibition
Carrie Vaughn

Finally, Harry arrived at the Royal Albert Hall in Kensington with her mother and her older sister Victoria. Once they entered through the great gilt doorway, a friendly attendant waited to show them to the royal salon. Harry glimpsed, through another ornate archway, the main hall and the exhibition installed there. She stopped and stared, holding up the whole party.

Harry had thoroughly studied the Aetherian craft from the Surrey crash—as much as she could, as a woman who wasn’t a scientist and whose position in the royal family curtailed her activities to a surprising degree. She knew the exhibition contained machines and devices, photographs and drawings, the evidence and discoveries brought about by the crash of the alien spacecraft twenty-five years before. Given that, she thought she was prepared, but to see it all in one place, on public display, was astonishing. Struts, pipes, twisted wires, and glass bulbs lit by a glow that cast Aetheric light over the gathering, turning the floors and walls green, the upturned faces sickly. Two dozen mechanisms—engines, pumps, generators, weapons—devices that would guide the Empire into a new, even greater technological age than the Age of Steam the Aetherian Revolution had supplanted.

The reception had been organized by the Royal Society to display the latest developments in Aetherian technology made to assist in the war effort. A show to increase public morale, to prove British superiority over the German foe. We shouldn’t have to prove it; it ought to be assumed, Harry thought testily. But the war had been on for over a year now. A year longer than anyone had predicted.

Harry had made her own contributions to said developments, but her involvement was kept very much secret. The scientists on hand would only speak of new discoveries gleaned from Doctor Carlisle’s files, or how long study finally resolved the purpose of mysterious artifacts retrieved from the Surrey crash. No one would say—and only a handful of people knew—that Harry had been instrumental in revealing Doctor Carlisle’s secret experiments in Aetherian biology, and that some of the mysterious artifacts hadn’t been retrieved from the crash at all. She’d been the one to prove that Aetherians had visited the planet previously and left artifacts all over the world. That information was being kept very secret indeed. She did not mind the subterfuge; not really. She didn’t work for fame, but for understanding of Aetherian technology and what it had wrought upon the Earth. Of course this was how it had to be.

Harry had a mental exercise where she thought of all the things she could not speak about, folded them into a little box in her mind—and then forgot about them, at least until the moment she could safely draw the box out again. For now, her tightly laced corset and high-necked gown, her quiet expression and royal demeanor, were her armor. They reminded her that here, she was Maud, Princess of Wales.

A swarm of uniformed guards made a good show of the realm’s military might, guarding the exhibit against any nefarious goings-on. She wondered if Marlowe was here . . . probably not. Last she heard, he was with the aerial fleet out of Portsmouth.

“Monstrous! It’s all so monstrous!” Mother—the Dowager Princess Alexandra—quickly averted her gaze from the exhibits. “I’ll have nothing to do with those machines.” Harry did not mention the engine-driven carriage that had brought them here.

Their conversation up to that point had been predictable and relentless, and it still hadn’t ended.

“George will be here, yes?” Alexandra asked.

“Yes, Mother,” Harry sighed. She’d answered the question five times already.

“It is the only reason I’d dare go out, as weak as I’ve been, but I will not be calm until I see George. He hasn’t been the same since he married. He never should have married, he simply doesn’t have the disposition.”

“He’s the heir to the throne, Mother,” Harry said. “He couldn’t not marry.”

“It’s all so troublesome,” Alexandra stated, rearranging her handkerchief in her hands.

“Come, Motherdear, we’ll manage somehow,” Toria said. This family had dozens of Victorias and the need for ever more creative nicknames was paramount. Hence, Toria.

The royal salon was comfortable, with sofas, tea service, and an attentive maid. The family could gather, and Motherdear would have as much company as she wished and not have to move a step.

From across the room, a man standing tall in a starched naval uniform, his beard trim and his eyes alight with pride, caught her gaze and gestured to her. The Crown Prince—George, her older brother. He’d just dismissed a pair of very important-looking men in suits and high collars.

“Harry! Very good of you to come.” He was the only one who still called her by the childhood nickname. Him, and Marlowe, that is.

“Your Highness seemed most insistent.”

“And how is Toria? Motherdear?”

“You could go and see for yourself. Toria survives and Mother is desperate to speak with you, so you’d better make time for her.”

“Ah, yes. In the meantime—might we have a word?” He captured her arm for what looked like a turn about the room, the prince harmlessly conversing with his beloved youngest sister. “Have you had a look at the exhibit yet? What do you think?”

“Just a glimpse. It’s astonishing. Seeing it all together, it’s like art. Or a nightmare. Does this have anything to do with the siege breaking?”

“Indeed, our first group of official visitors has arrived from the continent, hoping for a council of war. The Home Office fully expects they have, however inadvertently, brought more nefarious elements with them.”

“Spies, you mean,” she said.

George looked as if he’d eaten something sour. “We’ve known for some time we’ve had someone—or a collection of someones—leaking information to the Germans. This display is partly to prove our strength—and partly to draw them out. I know it’s quite a lot to ask of you—but do keep an eye out, won’t you?”

“Surely the large quantity of guards present could better ferret out spies.”

“Yes, but my dear, you have a good eye for this sort of thing. And I trust you.”

God, they were doomed. The gathering of scientists, government officials, soldiers, and society gawkers took on an ominous cast, everyone looking over their shoulders, gazes narrowed.

He steered them around to deposit her close to Motherdear and the other women. She nudged him, and he obligingly went to give their mother a peck on the cheek. The dowager princess turned on him a particularly forlorn expression of abandonment.

Before Harry could flee, May took her arm, the one George had just released, and led her off. May—Princess Mary—was a poised and clever woman whom Harry looked forward to seeing become queen someday. Normally Maud quite liked speaking with her—easier to be Maud with her than with nearly anyone else in her family—but May was wearing a wicked expression that put Harry on guard.

“He forgot to tell you, didn’t he?” George’s wife said.

“Tell me what?” She couldn’t have meant the search for spies—

“Leave it to George to forget something like that. Carl is going to be here.” Her smile was delighted.

Carl. The Prince of Denmark—her cousin—as most royals from the continent these days were cousins. And in this case, her friend. The kind of friend that made her female relations put that suggestive arch to their brows, oh yes.

Dear Lord, she couldn’t be thinking about that and looking for spies at the same time. Because as soon as May said the name, she stopped looking for suspicious figures and started looking for Carl.

“Just thought I should warn you,” May said, patting her arm before leaving to return to George’s side, taking her place in a receiving line, managing to stand perfectly on that boundary between aloofness and personability required of the crown. It was a skill Harry—or Maud, for that matter—could never manage.

She should have known this wouldn’t be a simple family outing to view an enlightening and educational display of modern technology. Nothing about this family, this display—this entire modern world—was simple.

Immediately, she was pulled back toward the sofa where her mother had settled. This time it was Toria who lay claim to her, squeezing her hand with undue desperation.

“Poor May,” Toria exclaimed. “Look at her, so pale. She shouldn’t be out so soon after her confinement; she’ll make herself ill. She really isn’t up to so much public attention, I think.”

Having already produced two little princes to continue the line, May looked better than ever, Harry thought. She rolled her eyes. “Toria, do be quiet.”

“No, dear, Toria is right,” Motherdear, observed. “Women must be so, so careful. So very careful. You can never be too careful.”

Harry had rappelled down the sides of buildings, hooked on to the outside of an airship flying at its highest limit, traveled to the far reaches of the North Atlantic. All in the company of the dashing aeronaut Lieutenant Marlowe. Her mother would die if she knew. Harry wished she were back there now. She could do more good there than she was doing here.

Toria added, “You’ve seen what’s happened to Louise. Poor Louise!”

Their eldest sister, Louise, had escaped into marriage several years previous, and Mother and Toria went on and on about how terrible it was and how lonely she must be and how awful it was that she would not bring her children to visit more often. In her letters to Harry, Louise seemed ridiculously happy, and why shouldn’t she be? She was lady of her own house now and could do as she pleased. Much like being on an airship over the North Atlantic.

Louise had been one of the people Harry was supposed to be visiting during her weeks’ long absence from society, when she and Marlowe made that expedition to Iceland. George had told Louise of the necessity of the lie without giving details, and their sister was good-natured enough to comply. But goodness, there were secrets inside secrets, weren’t there?

Harry leaned in close to say, “Motherdear, I’ve got to go, George asked me to look over the exhibit. I’ll return shortly, Toria will look after you—”

“Oh, George! He’s looking quite ill since he married, don’t you think? It’s so difficult, seeing him like that! You won’t leave me again, Maud, will you? I hardly lived through your absence this past summer, I won’t last through another.”

The dowager princess was still lamenting. She’d lost Eddy, then Father, all in the same year. Harry ought to be more sympathetic; her whole world upended and nothing left but to worry about her remaining children. Harry had done exactly the opposite: ran from the grief and found a million other worries to occupy her.

Harry patted her mother’s hand and left for the exhibit hall.

The first display presented a complex mechanism a foot and a half or so on each side and crammed full of organic-looking tubes and coils tangled together, like an octopus stuffed into a glass box. A neatly printed placard described the machine’s function, but Harry didn’t have to read it. A cone-shaped vent on one side took air in, separated it into its composite molecules, and fed the resulting gases through slender tubes on the other side. The gaseous byproducts might be used in various specialized pneumatic processes, including filling the bladders of airships. As always when she examined Aetherian mechanisms, she felt uneasy. Yes, this was built by human hands and yes, it was human ingenuity that interpreted the alien wreckage and developed such machines from it. But the principles behind this device, the underlying features—they were not human, and she could never forget that, no matter how much she might ride trains driven by Aetherian engines or use hand torches lit by Aetherian luminescence.

Crowds bunched up before marble pedestals topped with steel coils, swimming through the green glow of light and the low hum of Aetherian generators. Overhead, a miniature airship drifted, demonstrating the latest developments in propulsion. Shivering with a sudden chill, she crossed her arms and moved to the next display.

Once or twice she thought she saw Marlowe among the soldiers standing watch—his wry smile, disheveled hair pressed under a cap. But she was mistaken—the soldiers all looked so similar with their uniforms and military demeanors.

She needn’t have worried about looking for Prince Carl; he found her first, came straight to her. He was a refined-looking man, with a pleasing form and polished features. He wore his Danish naval uniform well and not a hair on his head was out of place. He had every reason to be vain and arrogant, but he was not. He had a bashful, studious, kind look about him. Her smile lit when she saw him, and she reached her hands to him without thinking.

“Carl, your highness,” she said, squeezing his hands.

“Maud, your highness,” he answered. He kissed the knuckles of her right hand, then released her to keep a more polite distance between them. They had known each other since they were children; they couldn’t be completely decorous with one another. But if she kept hold of his hands, people would think they were already engaged. It was enough to make her run off and hide behind Motherdear.

“How are you? The journey wasn’t too difficult?” she asked. “We were all so worried about you during the siege, and Grandmama and Papa.”

“Everyone is fine, I assure you. But I confess, it’s a relief not facing German gunships on a simple Channel crossing. We took the navy’s fastest airship; we were in no danger.”

She was sure he made light of it for her sake. As a naval officer he might very well have taken part in maneuvers to break the siege. If she asked, he would brush off the question as unimportant. It would be hideous, to lose him in battle. She bit her lip and clasped her hands to suppress the chill the thought inspired.

“I’m very glad to see you,” she said simply, and he beamed at her.

“You look very well. You’ve been spending time outdoors, I think.”

She could not tell him of her other life, not under any circumstances. “It’s true, I’ve been keeping quite busy.”

“Good—you should distract yourself from the awfulness of events. I feel better, knowing you’re safe.”

What a terrible conversation this was turning into. “Have you had a chance to look around? The exhibition—it’s quite marvelous.”

“Why don’t you show me? Oh, but first—Maud, some of my officers have accompanied me; I would be honored if you would allow me to introduce you to them.”

“Of course.”

Lieutenants Holm and Clausen were close to Carl in age and obviously friends as well as fellow officers. If I marry Carl, if I live in Denmark with him, I’ll see these men often, she thought. It felt like another life. The two men bowed smartly, mentioned that they had heard much talk of her and how the reality was even more brilliant, and so on. She blushed mightily.

Holm had a small, black leather box slung over his shoulder by a strap. It instantly drew her attention. “Pardon me, Lieutenant, but is that one of the new Kodak cameras?”

“Why, yes it is, your highness.” He proceeded to explain to her not only the workings of the camera—a simple button worked the shutter and exposed a roll of celluloid film, which must then be sent back to the factory to develop—but the principles of photography as well. She murmured polite encouragement rather than tell him she already knew.

If she had had such a portable camera in Iceland, she could have photographed the murals and symbols in the Cult of Egil’s temple. She’d acquire one for next time. But she could not assume there ever would be another expedition.

“Would you mind terribly,” Holm continued, “if I took your photograph? Both of your highnesses, to commemorate the event?”

She smiled. “You might have a care, Lieutenant. Rumor has it this regiment of soldiers is here looking for spies, and they might not take kindly to your photographing the wonders of our Aetherian technology. And I’m not sure they would distinguish a Danish accent from a German one.”

“Ah, quite right.” Blushing, Holm tucked the camera into a uniform pocket, which rested heavy with the weight. His pockets seemed stuffed with photographic equipment.

“Surely my men wouldn’t be suspect,” Carl declared, smiling to make it a joke.

“Alas, I am not the one making these judgments,” she answered. “As much as I would like to trust everyone, I certainly shouldn’t, don’t you think?”

“What terrible times, that make a blushing young lady so fearful.”

She had forgotten—she was supposed to be demure and sheltered. Drat it all.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Clausen regarded the nearby display. “Did the Aetherians have such things as cameras? Was there anything like photographic equipment found among the Surrey wreckage?”

“I don’t believe so,” Holm replied. “We have Aetherian lights and Aetherian engines driving locomotives and airships, Aetherian weapons and Aetherian wireless. But our cameras are still our own.”

Harry said, “There’s a hypothesis that the Aetherians had some means of capturing and storing images with electricity. Writing and sounds as well—some researchers believe it’s why we never found any written records in the wreckage. It’s all done by electrical means, but of course we haven’t any idea how to retrieve such information, since we’ve no idea exactly how it’s recorded.”

All three men were both staring at her. “At least, this is what I’ve heard,” she added, giving as sweet a smile as she knew how.

“Your highness seems to have quite an interest in the topic,” Holm said.

Indeed. “I was born the same year as the Surrey crash. It seems . . . relevant, to have an interest.”

Clausen gestured at the nearby display. “I’ve heard tell that scientists are working to improve such generators so they might produce enough power to destroy entire cities.”

“One can hardly call that an improvement,” Harry murmured.

“Certainly, but if anyone is to have such power, it should be us and our allies, yes?” Carl offered.

“Or we might think of working to prevent the need for such power entirely,” Harry offered.

“Really, gentlemen,” Holm said. “We shouldn’t bother a young lady with such talk of destruction. We’ve no wish to upset her, do we?”

Harry’s smile was vague and polite.

The two lieutenants wandered to the next display—to give her and Carl privacy, Harry expected. At Harry’s prompting, Carl spoke about conditions on the continent, how Germany was seeking out alliances and finding more than a few, and how Denmark was hoping to remain allied to Britain, but some factions did not believe the Empire could protect them. Germany wanted the technology Britain had, and if they had to occupy all of Europe to get it, they would. Their sceptered isle began to feel small indeed.

“George wants to change the family name to Windsor,” Harry said. “Being named to the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha seems politically inexpedient of late.”

“House of Windsor,” Carl said. “It sounds lovely. Very English.”

“Yes, that’s the idea. But it will never happen while the Queen is alive. Saxe-Coburg and Gotha is Prince Albert’s house, you see. She will never abandon it.” Holm and his camera reminded her, she was meant to be looking for spies as well as being polite. “Lieutenants Holm and Clausen seem like fine young men. How long have you known them?” she asked innocently.

“We trained together. Had our first airship cruise together. I trust them with my life.”

“That’s exactly what I thought. I feel better then, knowing they’re looking after you.”

“You’re very sweet, my dear.”

It would be easy to marry Carl. Easy, and hard. Her mother and Toria were right on that score: Marriage would be the death of her old life as well as the start of a new one. She, too, could give birth every year, like May, like Louise, like her own mother . . . It was another world, as much as Iceland was.

And why should she think of Marlowe in that moment? Lieutenant Marlowe, aeronaut, Aetherian engineer, adventurer, who’d gone along with her Iceland scheme, who was her access to another life entirely. An impossible life. Prince Carl was in the circle of men she could entertain romantic notions about. Marlowe was not, and that was all there was to it.

She needed to distract herself from such wool-gathering.

She surveyed the room. She’d done a bit of clandestine work, certainly, but she didn’t know that she’d recognize a spy on sight. Anyone looking at her at the moment, lurking, hands clasped, her expression creased with worry, might assume she was a spy.

Her gaze passed over a corner by a display of experimental spotlights that could illuminate the skies over London, then returned to it. And why should she think of Marlowe? Because he was standing there, looking back at her. She wasn’t mistaken this time, it was definitely him. The tightly sealed mental container of things she could not speak of burst open.

“Are you all right?” Carl said.

She must have frozen in place when she spotted the aeronaut. When she looked again he was gone. He would be, wouldn’t he?

“No, it’s just—this is all very overwhelming.”

One of the liveried footmen arrived, which could only mean Harry was about to be drawn into some minor domestic turmoil. The young man, blushing, bowed apologetically and stammered that she was required in the royal salon. She politely took temporary leave of Carl, struggling to compose herself.

“What is it, Mother?” Harry asked, arriving at the salon and taking Alexandra’s reaching hand. Her mother gripped her hard. “Maud! Oh, thank goodness, I have news, I must tell you, I’ve just heard it myself—Carl is here!”

Harry managed a calm expression. “Yes, Mother, I know. I’ve already spoken with him.”

“You have? Well—” She leaned in and whispered conspiratorially. “Has he asked you yet?” That was a very suggestive lift to her eyebrow.

“Oh, Mother.”

“When he does, I suppose you must tell him yes. Even though I’ll be bereft without you.”

“I’m going back to the hall now,” Harry said. “Will you be all right?”

She waved herself with her handkerchief. “I suffer, but I’ll live.” Harry glanced at Toria for her opinion. Her sister shrugged.

Before she could flee the salon, George sneaked up to intercept her. “Anything?” he demanded curtly. He meant the search for spies, she assumed, and not Carl.

“Lieutenant Marlowe is here, did you know that?”

“Why, yes. He’s just back from Portsmouth.”

“And you didn’t tell me! I can’t speak to Marlowe here, do you have any idea—”

“Why not? I thought you liked him.”

“George!” She shook her head. “Never mind. May I go?”

“Certainly.”

After dipping the Crown Prince a rather rude curtsey, she marched off.

She failed to find Carl again right away. Holm and Clausen were across the hall, standing close to an Aetherian cannon modulator.

When Marlowe stepped out from behind one of the pedestals, she should have expected it. Nevertheless, she jumped, biting back a startled yelp. Hand to her throat, she glared at the man who stood sheepishly regarding her.

“I beg your pardon, your highness. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“Marlowe!” She lowered her voice, collected herself. “Lieutenant—I thought you were at Portsmouth.”

He was in uniform, and she had never seen him so polished, all his brass buttons shining, propeller insignia of the aeronautic corps pinned smartly to his breast. He was not in a civilian disguise, or in the field in his coat and fatigues. He’d even trimmed his hair.

“I was worried about you,” she finished.

She had never seen him smile quite like that, either. Not out of exhilaration or glee or triumph. This was a gentle smile. “Thank you, your highness. You’re looking well.”

He had probably never seen her quite so polished either. He had never really seen Princess Maud in her element. Self-consciously, she tugged at her sleeves, resisted patting at her curls.

He said, “Might I ask . . . who was the very fine gentleman walking with you earlier?”

The arch in his brow was similar to the expression May had given her earlier, but without the warmth. She was suddenly uneasy because she couldn’t read this Marlowe like she could read the one she thought she knew.

“His Highness, Prince Carl of Denmark,” she said. She walked on, and side-by-side they strolled along the row of displays.

“Oh. I see. He seems . . . nice.”

“What are you saying, Lieutenant?”

“Not a thing, highness. It’s just that the two of you seem—”

“We’ve known each other since we were children.”

“Then I shouldn’t be suspicious of him—a gentleman recently arrived from the continent, from a country that borders Germany . . . ”

She turned away to study an ornate pumping mechanism, copper tubing and wires protruding at unlikely angles.

“I expected you to deny the possibility,” he said.

“I trust Carl completely. But events have become muddled.” She ought to just tell him that she and Carl were all but engaged, had been decidedly matched by all their relatives. She ought to, but couldn’t.

He followed her gaze to the arch formed by tubes and wires, a gaseous bulb glowing with the green of swamp gas. “It’s extraordinary, isn’t it, what the Academy has been able to hide while seemingly putting so much on display?”

“To tell you the truth, seeing all this together in one place—I’m horrified. We’ve worked to advance human knowledge, to expand our abilities, and yet we keep dragging ourselves into destruction. Half the machines here have weapons applications, and all anyone can talk about is how we might destroy Berlin. As if an Aetherian death ray that could be used to force Berlin to surrender could not also be used to smash London.”

“Once the war ends, we’ll pursue other interests than weaponry. I hope.”

They were standing too close together. Another inch and her silk sleeve would brush his uniform. Natural, because they were speaking in hushed tones and needed to hear each other. But it wasn’t proper. She made herself take a step away, walking on to the next display.

“But isn’t all of this the reason we’re fighting a war in the first place?” She gestured to encompass the room, the unsettling devices, the circling model airship loaded with model armaments. All weapons, when they should be doing what Marlowe always spoke of—breaching the atmosphere, sailing the highest altitudes. Discovering where the Aetherians came from and why they had ever come to Earth in the first place.

They had returned to the first display: the pneumatic pump, the octopus in a box. But something about it had changed. A hundred people might walk past and not notice—a hundred people had. A tiny coil, no bigger than a pocket watch, was now attached to one of the machine’s exterior bolts. Made to look like simply another component, its color was nevertheless wrong. The curl of the wire was a bit too tight. A hair-like filament, not entirely hidden by the other wires, glowed an ominous red.

“Marlowe, do you see that?” She nodded at it.

“That . . . isn’t British, I think.”

“And I swear to you it wasn’t there an hour ago. I stood here studying this very display—it’s been placed here since.”

A myriad of possibilities occurred to her. Sabotage—it was a bomb, or it would release poisonous gas or set the hall on fire. It was some kind of wireless communicator that was even now transmitting their voices. A location beacon—

“Pardon me, miss? Sir?” A short, dapper man with dark hair, a full moustache, and a lively gaze intruded. He ducked his head apologetically, but his gaze was insistent. “Please forgive me for eavesdropping. You were speaking of the war, of the Aetherian Revolution, and reservations you have about the same?”

Deftly, in quite a guard-like manner, Marlowe stepped around to interpose himself between her and the stranger. “Quite right, sir, and as an officer in Her Majesty’s Navy I must point out that such talk might be considered treasonous.”

The man was undeterred. “But you are not worried—oh, you’re Maud of Wales! Your highness, this is an honor!” He made a bow with arms spread wide. “And you, Lieutenant, must be her . . . bodyguard?”

She would have preferred that he not recognize her at all—especially now, when all she wanted was to look again at the odd device attached to the pneumatic pump. But his apparent lack of chagrin at addressing a member of the royal family, not to mention his complete lack of trepidation at Marlowe’s suggestion of treason, intrigued her.

Hoping she behaved with as much dignity as May would in such an encounter, she answered, “Thank you, sir. And if I may inquire—what is your name?”

“Wells, ma’am. Mr. Herbert Wells. I’m a writer of sorts, if I flatter myself. You seem to have strong opinions regarding the exhibition?” The hint was obvious.

She spoke as broadly as she could, to draw him out—perhaps this was the spy? “I simply wonder where it will all end. Aetherian technology has given us so much more power than we were ready for, I think.”

He donned a keen examining look, indicating she had just become even more interesting to him—far more than one of the “Royal Shynesses,” as she and her sisters were sometimes called in the papers.

“I am writing a novel, your highness, if I may be so bold as to tell you of it. It’s about the crash, about the Aetherians, though I’ll most likely dress it all up with other names. It’s meant to be allegorical, you see. A story of an alternate outcome. Suppose for a moment that the Aetherian craft had purposefully landed rather than crashed. And then suppose that there had been more than one of them. That there had been an invasion, you might call it.”

Not a spy but a novelist. Almost as bad. Did she believe him? Had he also heard the rumors that the Surrey crash was not the first time Aetherians had visited Earth? She had approached the question as an archaeologist might, as a search for artifacts and long-dead evidence requiring excavation. This author answered the question tactically, and with a paranoia she had not considered. The Aetherians came to this planet on more than one occasion. Of course this begged the question: What did they want here? Would they come again? And what would they think when they found that perversions of their technology had overrun the planet? She wondered if Mr. Wells could see her unease.

He made an expansive gesture toward the displays. “You see what weaponry we’ve cobbled together from their machinery, without knowing where to start, just using common sense and good English know-how. But we’re like children playing with a loaded pistol. Imagine what Aetherian machines—Aetherian weaponry—must be like in their fully functional forms? Now imagine them traveling across the countryside, laying waste, conquering as they go? What would we do in such a case, your highness? How would we even hope to resist?”

“This is an allegory, you say?” she asked. “That you fear the technology may thus be destroying us, without its masters to control it?”

“I could not have stated it more clearly myself. Would you be terribly offended if I sent you a copy of the novel, ma’am, when it is finished?”

That was a crowded street she did not want to step into, but fortunately Marlowe bowed his head and murmured, “Beg your pardon, ma’am, but I believe you’re wanted.”

He gestured, and there was Carl approaching. But what about that bloody anomaly on the machine? She cast a pleading glance at Marlowe, who only shrugged.

Quickly she said, “If you’ll excuse me, Mr. Wells, my duties claim my attention. Good luck with your writing.” She turned away as he gave an awkward bow and departed.

“Was he quite serious?” she said to Marlowe. “About writing a book? What would you call it . . . an alternate future?”

“I’ll certainly be looking into his credentials.”

“What are we going to do about that thing?” she hissed.

“Hold off, your friend is here.”

Her smile was strained as she tried not to let on that anything was amiss.

“Hello again, my dear! Is everything well?” Carl said as he eyed Marlowe. And what must it look like, this military man lurking so close to her for no apparent reason?

“Carl, this is one of the Crown Prince’s valued Aetherian engineers. Lieutenant James Marlowe, this is His Highness of Denmark. Lieutenant Marlowe was answering some of my questions about the exhibit.”

Marlowe bowed smartly, as he could do very well when the situation warranted. “Your Highness.”

“This must all make perfect sense to you then.”

“Not entirely, sir. There will always be mysteries.”

Carl said, “Lieutenant, would excuse her highness and I for a moment?”

“But of course,” Marlowe said and moved away, because he would follow orders, wouldn’t he? He moved behind the velvet rope setting off the exhibit to examine the anomaly. She was desperate to get a better look at it herself, but Carl had taken up her hand and squeezed, rather hard. She couldn’t get away.

Harry said, “Where are your friends, Carl? Shouldn’t you be looking after them?” And not here, when she was trying to solve a mystery . . .

Another matter seemed to occupy him entirely. “Maud. I had hoped to speak to you this afternoon. This . . . this isn’t the setting I would wish. If I were a cleverer man I would arrange some scene in a garden spilling over with flowers and musicians—”

“Carl, what is it?” Her heart was both sinking and racing.

“I spoke with your brother. He said . . . he said I’ll have to speak to your grandmother as well and win her approval, but he said he would arrange a meeting. In the meantime, I can’t bear to spend another moment without asking you. Maud, will you consent to be my wife?”

She adjusted her grip to fold her hand over his. She didn’t know what to say. She truly didn’t. If they stood in the garden he had mentioned, she would likely give an enthusiastic yes. But here, she could not help but think of the war that would carry him away again sooner rather than later. The future was uncertain, like Mr. Wells’s alien machines of war bearing down on them all. And that damned thing stuck to the pump—

“Oh, Carl . . . ” She didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing. “I’m very sorry, but an emergency requires my immediate attention.” She pulled away from him and crossed the velvet rope to join Marlowe next to the exhibit.

“Maud!”

Guards that hadn’t blinked at Marlowe approaching the display shouted at her. Probably, she could have found a different way to accomplish this, but the moment overtook her.

Soldiers rushed from every direction. “You there! Get away from there! What do you think—”

“Sergeant, this is Her Highness Maud of Wales, do step back please.” Marlowe used a sharp, commanding voice that pulled the soldier up short.

“Her Highness?” one of the guards sputtered. “What? But? I mean—”

“Harry, look at this,” Marlowe said.

A closer study of the thing made her believe it presented no immediate danger. No critical wires connected it to the pneumatic pump. It wasn’t warm to the touch, it made no ticking noise. A bug, she thought of it, with a pair of flat receivers like wings, the coils like legs, the glowing filaments like antennae. All of it no bigger than a half-crown piece. It was attached by a magnet, nothing more. She popped it straight off, and waited for some dreadful consequence—

“Ma’am, highness, please, I must ask, if you would please—” That same soldier pleaded with her. The poor man was sweating under his cap, obviously restraining himself from reaching out.

“Is she really Maud of Wales?” another of the guards declared plaintively.

“What on Earth is going on here?” Carl added his own commanding voice to the mix. Other onlookers had been drawn over by the commotion. She and Marlowe probably should have kept quiet and alerted the guard regiment commander later on. Nothing Harry could do about that now. She handed the device to Marlowe. He drew a loupe from his pocket, and held the strange device up to the light to study it better.

“Maud, what is this, what’s all the fuss?” Carl was hovering and glaring accusingly at Marlowe, who took a moment from his examination to glare back. These two never should have met. Never should have been in the same room together. She never wanted to have to explain her two lives to each other.

“I’m afraid there’s a serious problem,” she said, pained.

Someone had finally gone to fetch George, the ostensible patron of the exhibition, who marched over, flanked by a veritable army. Or maybe it only seemed that way.

“What is it?” the Crown Prince demanded. “What’s going on here. Harry? Marlowe?” He saw them and was quite taken aback, as if he, too, had never expected to see them both standing together in public like this.

“It’s an ultra-compact listening device,” Marlowe declared. “There’s a phonic receiver here, and this is the wireless transmitter. We should assume that we’re being listened to even now.”

An abrupt quiet fell over the gathering.

George glowered at the thing in Marlowe’s hand, blustered a moment. Harry recognized the simmering anger in his eyes.

“Well. This was the whole point,” the prince said. “A spy would learn nothing from these displays. This is all readily available, public technology. And now we’ve drawn them out.”

“Yes,” Harry said. “But we expected them to try to steal something. To take photographs or make drawings,” she said, nodding at Holm and his camera. Holm and Clausen had both come to stand near Carl. “But these exhibits would all be taken back to laboratories and workshops after the exhibition, where new experiments are taking place, and our enemies could listen at their leisure.”

“There will be more,” Marlowe said, just as Harry made a dash for the next display, copper tubes wrapped around bundles of wire, a capacitor for airship engines. After only a moment of searching, she found what she’d expected to find and reached in to pry free another of the glowing red bugs.

She might as well have held up a rat she’d discovered in the royal kitchen. “I think we will find these on many of the exhibits.”

Her gaze immediately went to Holm and his heavy pockets, which she had assumed were filled with photographic equipment. But it was all a distraction, wasn’t it?

“Lieutenant Holm?” Harry said. “Might I ask what’s in your pockets?”

The Danish lieutenant took a step back. The guards moved up behind him.

“What is this?” Carl demanded again, and he had such a look of betrayal on him, part of Harry’s heart broke. But only part of it.

“Oh, Carl,” she murmured. “I don’t know how to resolve this without dragging you into it. I’m sorry.”

“Wait a moment, what is your concern in all this? How can you possibly be involved—”

Then Marlowe shouted, “Harry!” and Lieutenant Holm lunged for her over the velvet rope. Grabbed her hand, twisted her around, locked his arm across her neck. Someone screamed—Motherdear, Harry thought, but that couldn’t have been right.

A hard piece of metal pressed against her cheek. Peering down, she was able to see the nose of the Aetherian pistol Holm held to her; the faint green of its battery glowed.

“Stop! Everyone stop where you are! I will shoot the princess!”

She didn’t think, except to imagine that later on George and Marlowe would both tell her she was an idiot and she should have stayed quiet and let them take care of all this. But they both knew her. Not staying quiet had gotten her into this situation, and it would get her out.

She grabbed the man’s wrist and shoved it up as she dropped her weight. Oddly, her corset and heavy skirts supported her as much as they restricted her movements. She did not tip over when Holm yanked away from her. She kept hold of his wrist, grabbed the pistol to keep him from turning it back on her. He never had a chance to fire.

By then, Holm was restrained by soldiers, who also surrounded Clausen and Prince Carl. And it was over.

“Her Majesty approaches!”

The crowd parted, and the tableau was struck in time for the queen to see it all. Soldiers, finely dressed members of society, the Crown Prince—and his youngest sister, holding a pistol and still confronting the man who’d tried to take her captive. Everyone stopped, held a collective breath, and dropped into instinctive bows and curtseys.

The queen was an old woman, small and round, a miniature warship in her black mourning gown with its high collar, draped sleeves, wide skirt. Her face was as pale as the lace veil under her cap. Pale as the face on a photograph. Sadness pulled her expression into an eternal frown. She took her time reviewing the scene, gaze passing over them all, lingering a particularly long moment on her granddaughter.

Finally, the queen made a gesture, and they all rose. Marlowe’s military training kept him straight as a pole, unmoving as a statue. Harry felt like she was five years old and being presented, then scolded because her pinafore was crooked. Even George seemed chagrined.

“Lieutenant Marlowe,” the queen said. “Be so good as to tell us what you find in the Danish gentleman’s pocket.”

Marlowe quickly patted down Holm’s uniform coat—and found the secret pockets on the inside, containing just two more of the transmitters. Holm’s expression went still and cold. Harry looked at Carl, and did not know what to think when he didn’t seem particularly surprised.

The authorities interviewed Carl, Prince of Denmark. But they interrogated Holm and Clausen.

The exhibition closed for the day. Harry sent her mother and Toria home in the carriage, claiming that George and May needed her help with social duties that evening. Really, though, May returned to the palace and her boys, while George retreated to the now empty salon with Harry and Marlowe. She perched at the edge of an armchair while George sat heavily in his own chair, rubbing at his beard like an old man. This is what he will look like when he is king, she thought. Marlowe did not sit at all, but stood at attention like a guard.

George explained, “Carl is likely blameless, according to the initial assessment. His friend abused his connection to the prince, knowing Carl would give him access to the highest levels here. Any potential engagement between him and you . . . need not be impossible, Harry.”

But it might as well be. She saw the way Carl looked at her, there at the end. She was not the ideal princess. Everyone had seen that at last. She might find a way to make it right—convince them all, and Carl, that she could be lovely and demure and certainly not caught up in intrigues. If she wanted to.

“I forgot to give him an answer,” she said simply, sadly. She hadn’t meant to hurt him.

A royal footman entered and bowed at the doorway. “Her Majesty, the Queen.”

They stood. The queen entered and regarded them with a stately lack of emotion before turning to the far wall and the portrait there, of Prince Albert. Harry had paid it little attention when she first arrived. Pictures of her grandfather were like the very air among the royal palaces. So ubiquitous, they hardly required mentioning. And like the air, utterly necessary.

The Queen said, “Albert has become a symbol of the old Britain, from before the Revolution. Dignified, more contemplative. My Britain.”

“Ma’am,” they all murmured in quiet agreement.

“You favor him, Maud, I think. You have a certain refinement in your features that reminds me of him.”

This was likely the deepest compliment Her Majesty was able to give. Blushing, Maud ducked another curtsey. “Ma’am.”

“I wish you could have known him. Both of you.”

If they were any other family, any normal family, she would give into the urge to rush forward and embrace the woman, who was still so stricken with grief some fifty years after her husband’s death.

“So do I, ma’am,” Harry said softly, and was rewarded with the flicker of a smile.

The queen drew herself from the painting and her thoughts to address them. “Maud, Lieutenant Marlowe: His Royal Highness has told us of your expedition to Iceland and the great success it brought our realm. We ourselves have witnessed your . . . aptitude for discovering the plots of our enemies. We are convinced, then, that we are justified in encouraging your further expeditions.”

This was not at all what Maud expected of this meeting. She resisted an urge to glance at Marlowe.

“You have the skills and the knowledge, and your Empire is in need of your abilities.”

The queen was the great defender of propriety and decorum. Could she possibly know what she was asking? Did she truly realize what Maud had already done? “Ma’am . . . Your Majesty. I thought you would be scandalized—” She would never forget it, the looks on all their faces after she had wrestled herself from her captor, holding the pistol as though she had always held one.

“Maud. These times are strange. You should stay at home, marry Carl, and be a good wife, a good lady. But George is right, I fear. You have already proven yourself, and we trust you as we cannot trust anyone who isn’t close to us. So we must send you off to learn what you can. Bring back what you can. And you—” She turned to Marlowe. “We charge you with protecting our granddaughter and bringing her home safely.”

“Ma’am,” Marlowe said, nodding.

“We bid you good day, then.”

They repeated their obeisances while the queen made her slow way out of the salon, flanked by her footmen.

Maud stared after her, stunned.

“Our grandmother is a very practical woman,” George said, almost cheerfully. “Don’t you agree?”

“I think I may faint,” Marlowe said.

“You don’t have time for that, Lieutenant,” George said. His amusement was gone, and now he was another self—not Crown Prince, not elder brother, but officer preparing for battle. “You’ll have an airship and all the resources you need. You’ve seen today how determined the Germans are to overcome us. Therefore, you must track every lead you have on every possible Aetherian landing or artifact. You must return with all you can find as quickly as you can. The realm depends upon it.”

This was a massive undertaking. And finally, she felt as if she had a role to play, a proper job besides wearing lovely gowns and comforting her mother. George ordered them to meet with him tomorrow to make further plans, then left them standing in the foyer, blinking at one another.

“Well then,” Marlowe said finally. “You have your wish. You’ll learn everything there is to discover about the Aetherian presence on Earth.”

It was all she ever wanted, to do some good, to help her country. To learn the secrets of the crash that had irrevocably altered the world, that had ensured she would never know an Earth without alien technology. What she had not considered, what she had not realized until the fact stood directly before her, was how this road, in all ways, led to a destination that lay in complete, unknowable darkness. When she shone that light ahead of her, she did not know what she would find staring back. But she must shine that light.

“Your Highness,” he prompted, after a stretch of silence. “Harry—”

“Marlowe. We have plans to make.”

© 2014 by Carrie Vaughn.

Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of the Kitty Norville series, the most recent of which is the twelfth installment, Kitty in the Underworld. Her superhero novel Dreams of the Golden Age was released in January 2014. She has also written young adult novels, Voices of Dragonsand Steel, and the fantasy novels, Discord’s Apple and After the Golden Age. Her short fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, from Lightspeed to Tor.com and George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards series. She lives in Colorado with a fluffy attack dog. Learn more at carrievaughn.com.

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Fireborn
Robert Charles Wilson

Sometimes in January the sky comes down close if we walk on a country road and turn our faces up to look at the sky.

Onyx turned her face up to the sky as she walked with her friend Jasper beside a mule-cart on the road that connected Buttercup County to the turnpike. She had spent a day counting copper dollars at the changehouse and watching bad-tempered robots trudge east- and west-bound through the crust of yesterday’s snow. Sunny days with snow on the ground made robots irritable, Jasper had claimed. Onyx didn’t know if this was true—it seemed so, but what seemed so wasn’t always truly so.

You think too much, Jasper had told her.

And you don’t think enough, Onyx had answered haughtily. She walked next to him now as he lead the mule, keeping her head turned up because she liked to see the stars even when the January wind came cutting past the margins of her lamb’s-wool hood. Some of the stars were hidden because the moon was up and shining white. But Onyx liked the moon, too, for the way it silvered the peaks and saddles of the mountains and cast spidery tree-shadows over the unpaved road.

That was how it happened that Onyx first saw the skydancer vaulting over a mountain pass northwest of Buttercup County.

Jasper didn’t see it because he was looking at the road ahead. Jasper was a tall boy, two breadloaves taller than Onyx, and he owned a big head with eyes made for inspecting the horizon. It’s what’s in front of you that counts, he often said. Jasper believed roads went to interesting places—that’s why they were roads. And it was good to be on a road because that meant you were going somewhere interesting. Who cared what was up in the sky?

You never know what might fall on you, Onyx often told him. And not every road goes to an interesting place. The road they were on, for instance. It went to Buttercup County, and what was interesting about Buttercup County? Onyx had lived there for all of her nineteen years. If there was anything interesting in Buttercup County, Onyx had seen it twice and ignored it a dozen times more.

Well, that’s why you need a road, Jasper said—to go somewhere else.

Maybe, Onyx thought. Maybe so. Maybe not. In the meantime she would keep on looking at the sky.

At first she didn’t know what she was seeing up over the high northwest col of the western mountains. She had heard about skydancers from travelers bound for or returning from Harvest out on the plains in autumn, where skydancers were said to dance for the fireborn when the wind brought great white clouds sailing over the brown and endless prairie. But those were travelers’ tales, and Onyx discounted such storytelling. Some part of those stories might be true, but she guessed not much: maybe fifty cents on the dollar, Onyx thought. What she thought tonight was, That’s a strange cloud.

It was a strange and brightly-colored cloud, pink and purple, even in the timid light of the moon. It did not move in a windblown fashion. It was shaped like a person. It looked like a person in a purple gown with a silver crown and eyes as wide as respectable townships. It was as tall as the square-shouldered mountain peak Onyx’s people called Tall Tower. Onyx gasped as her mind made reluctant sense of what her stubborn eyes insisted on showing her.

Jasper had been complaining about the cold, and what a hard thing it was to walk a mule cart all the way home from the turnpike on a chilly January night, but he turned his eyes away from the road at the sound of Onyx’s surprise. He looked where Onyx was looking and stopped walking. After a long pause he said, “That’s a skydancer—I’ll bet you a copper dollar it is!”

“How do you know? Have you ever seen a skydancer?”

“Not to look at. Not until tonight. But what else could it be?”

Skydancers were as big as mountains and danced with clouds, and this apparition was as big as a mountain and appeared to be dancing, so Onyx guessed Jasper might be right. And it was a strange and lonely thing to see on a country road on a January night. They stopped to watch the skydancer dance, though the wind blew cold around them and the mule complained with wheezing and groaning. The skydancer moved in ways Onyx would not have thought possible, turning like a whirlwind in the moonlight, rising over the peak of Tall Tower and seeming for a moment to balance there, then flying still higher, turning pirouettes of stately slowness in the territory of the stars. “It’s coming closer,” Jasper said.

Was it? Yes, Onyx thought so. It was hard to tell because the skydancer was so big. Skydancers were made by the fireborn, and the fireborn made miraculous things, but Onyx could not imagine how this creature had come to be. Was it alive or was it an illusion? If it came down to earth, could she touch it?

It began to seem as if she might have that opportunity. The skydancer appeared to lose its balance in the air. Its vast limbs suddenly stiffened. Its legs, which could span counties, locked at the knee. The wind began to tumble it sidelong. Parts of the skydancer grew transparent or flew off like evanescent-colored clouds. “I think it’s broken,” said Jasper.

Broken and shrinking, it began to fall. It’ll fall near here, Onyx thought, if it continued on its wind-tumbled course. If there’s anything left of it, the way it’s coming apart.

It came all apart in the air, but there was something left behind, something small that fell more gently, swaying like an autumn leaf on its way from branch to winter. It fell nearby—down a slope away from the road, on a hillside where in summer wild rhubarb put out scarlet stalks of flowers.

“Come on, let’s find it,” Jasper said.

“It might be dangerous.”

“It might,” said Jasper, who was not afraid of the possibility of danger but all the more inclined to go get into it. They left the mule anchored to its cart and went hunting for what had fallen, while the moonlight was bright enough to show them the way.

They found a young woman standing on the winter hillside, and it was obvious to Onyx that she was fireborn—perhaps, therefore, not actually young. Onyx knew the woman was fireborn because she was naked on a January night and seemed not to mind it. Onyx found the woman’s nakedness perplexing. Jasper seemed fascinated.

Though the woman was naked, she had been wearing a harness of cloth and metal, which she had discarded: It lay on the ground at her feet, parts of it glowing sunset colors, parts of it twitching like the feelers of an unhappy ant.

They came and stood near enough to speak to the woman. The woman, who was about Onyx’s size but had paler skin and hair that gave back the moonlight in shades of amber, was looking at the sky, whispering to herself. When she noticed Onyx and Jasper she spoke to them in words Onyx didn’t understand. Then she cocked her shoulder and said in sensible words, “You can’t hurt me. It would be a mistake to try.”

“We don’t want to hurt you,” Jasper said, before Onyx could compose a response. “We you saw you fall, if you falling was what we saw. We thought you might need help.”

“I’m in no danger,” the woman said, and it seemed to Onyx her voice was silvery, like a tune played on a flute, but not just any old wooden flute: a silver one. “But thank you.”

“You must be a long way from home. Are you lost?”

“My devices misfunctioned. My people will come for me. We have a compound on the other side of the pass.”

“Do you need a ride, ma’am? Onyx and I can take you in our cart.”

“Wait, that’s a long way,” Onyx said. Anyway, it was her cart, not Jasper’s, and he shouldn’t be offering it without consulting her.

“Yes,” Jasper agreed, “much too far for an undressed woman to walk on a night like this.”

Onyx considered kicking him.

The fireborn woman hesitated. Then she smiled. It was a charming smile, Onyx had to admit. The woman had shiny teeth, a complete set. “Would you really do that for me?”

“Ma’am, yes, of course, my privilege,” said Jasper.

“All right then,” the woman said. “I might like that. Thank you. My name is Anna Tingri Five.”

Onyx, who knew what the “Five” meant, gaped in amazement.

“I’m Jasper,” said Jasper. “And this is Onyx.”

“You should put on some clothes,” Onyx said in a small voice. “Ma’am.”

Anna Tingri Five twitched her shoulder and blinked, and a shimmery robe suddenly covered her nakedness. “Is that better?”

“Much,” said Onyx.

On the road to the fireborn compound, as the mule cart bucked over rutted snow hard as ice, the three of them discussed their wants, as strangers often do.

Onyx was expected at home, but her mother and father and two brothers wouldn’t worry much if she was late. Probably they would think she had stayed the night in Buttercup Town, detained by business. Onyx worked at the changehouse there and was often kept late by unexpected traffic. Her parents might even hope she had stayed late for the purpose of keeping Jasper company: Her parents liked Jasper and had hinted at the possibility of a wedding. Onyx resented such talk—she liked Jasper well enough, but perhaps not well enough to contemplate marriage. Not that Jasper had hinted at any such ambition. Jasper wanted to sail to Africa and find the Fifth Door to the Moon and grow rich or immortal, which Onyx imagined would leave him little time for wedding foolishness.

Anna Tingri Five perched on a frozen bag of wheat flour in the mule cart, saying, “I am, as you must suppose, fireborn.”

No doubt about that. And how astonished Onyx’s parents and two brothers would be to discover she had been consorting with the fireborn! The fireborn came through Buttercup County only on rare occasions, and then only one or two of them, young ones, mostly male, riding robots on their incomprehensible quests, hardly deigning to speak to the townspeople. Now here Onyx was right next to a five-born female—a talkative one!

“Was that you in the sky, dancing?” Jasper asked.

“Yes. Until the bodymaker broke.”

“No offense, but you looked about five miles tall.”

“Only a mile,” said Anna Tingri Five, a smile once again dimpling her moonlit face.

“What’s a skydancer doing in Buttercup County, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Practicing for the Harvest, here where there are mountain winds to wrestle with and clouds that come high and fast from the west. We mean to camp here through the summer.”

Without so much as a by-your-leave, Onyx thought indignantly, though when had the fireborn ever asked permission of common mortals?

“You mean to dance at the Harvest?” asked Jasper.

“I mean to win the competition and be elevated to the Eye of the Moon,” said Anna Tingri Five.

The Eye of the Moon: best seen when the moon was in shadow. Tonight the moon was full and the Eye was invisible, but some nights, when only a sliver of the moon shone white, Onyx had seen the Eye in the darker hemisphere, a ring of red glow, aloof and unwinking. It was where the fireborn went when they were tired of living one life after another. It was what they did instead of dying.

Since Anna Tingri Five had divulged an ambition, Onyx felt obliged to confess one of her own. “I’m nineteen years old,” she said, “and one day I mean to go east and see the cities of the Atlantic Coast. I’m tired of Buttercup County. I’m a good counter. I can add and subtract and divide and multiply. I can double-entry bookkeep. I could get a city job and do city things. I could look at tall buildings every day and live in one of them.”

Spoken baldly into the cold air of a January night, her desire froze into a childish embarrassment. She felt herself blushing. But Anna Tingri Five only nodded thoughtfully.

“And I mean to go east as well,” Jasper said, “but I won’t stop in any city. I can lift and haul and tie a dozen different knots. I’ll hire myself onto a sailing ship and sail to Africa.”

He ended his confession there, though there was more to it. Onyx knew he wanted to go to Africa and find the Fifth Door, which might gain him admission to the Eye of the Moon. All the world’s four Doors, plus perhaps the hidden Fifth, were doorways to the moon. Even a common mortal could get to the Eye that way, supposedly, though the fireborn would never let a commoner past the gate. That was why Jasper dreamed about the hidden Fifth. It was his only hope of living more than one life.

Skeptical Onyx would have bet the Fifth Door was a legend without any truth at the heart of it, but she had stopped saying so to Jasper because it made him irritable. Lately he had begun to guard his ambition as if it were a fragile, secret possession, and he didn’t mention it now.

“This is my fifth life,” Anna Tingri Five said in her silver flute voice, “and I’m tired of coming through the juvenation fires with half my memories missing, starting out all over again with nothing but the ghosts of Anna Tingri One, Two, Three, and Four to talk to when I talk to myself. I want to live forever in the Eye of the Moon and make things out of pure philosophy.”

Onyx didn’t comprehend half this peroration, but she understood the yearning in the words of Anna Tingri Five.

“Both of you want to leave this place?” Anna Tingri Five asked.

Yes. Both.

“Come into our encampment then,” said Anna Tingri Five. “It’s warm inside. Let me repay you for your interesting kindness.”

They came to the place the fireborn had made for themselves. No one in Buttercup County had seen the fireborn arrive, and their camp was over the rim of a hill where no one went in the leafless winter. But the camp itself was not leafless. A mortal commoner passing by, Anna Tingri Five explained, would see nothing unusual. Some ensorcellment kept the campground hidden from casual glances. But Anna Tingri Five allowed Onyx and Jasper to see the place and pass inside its perimeter. Inside, the fireborn had undone winter. In their enchanted circle it was a pleasant summer night. The trees were leafy, the meadow plants flowering. Vast silken pavilion tents of many colors had been staked to the fragrant ground, and hovering radiant globes supplemented the pale moonlight. It was late, and Onyx supposed most of the fireborn were asleep, but some few were still passing between the tents, talking in unknown languages, as lean and tall and perfect as flesh can be. Supple robots moved silently among them, performing inscrutable robot tasks. Onyx marveled at the warmth of the air (she shrugged out of her woolen coat, loosened a button on her hempen shirt), and Jasper’s eyes grew big with awe and eagerness.

“Spend the night with us,” said Anna Tingri Five.

Anna Tingri Five had never been out of contact with her compound even after her bodymaker failed; at the first tickle of a wistful thought a robot would have flown her home through the January sky. But she had been intrigued and interested by the helpful commoners who appeared out of the darkness. She had met few real commoners and was curious about them. She thought this pair might be worth keeping. That was why, a few days later, she offered them jobs in the encampment and a free ride, come the end of summer, to the continent’s great Harvest Festival.

Onyx’s parents begged her not to accept the offer. Her mother wailed; her father raged; but they had known they were raising a rover ever since they named their restless baby girl Onyx. And they had two stout and unimaginative sons who were bound to remain in Buttercup County and lead useful and sensible lives.

Jasper’s father had milled grain all his life, had continued to mill grain after the death of his wife ten years ago, and would mill grain until the day he died. He had once harbored his own ambition to see the world outside Buttercup County, and was pleased and terrified in equal parts by the prospect of his son’s departure. “Write me letters from foreign places,” he demanded, and Jasper promised to do so. When father and son said goodbye, both wept. They knew that life was short and difficult and that, as a rule, commoners only lived once.

It was soon obvious to Onyx that the fireborn had no real need of hired help. It was not that she and Jasper did no work—they did—or that they were not paid for their work—they were, in genuine copper dollars. But the carrying of water and the serving of food had previously been conducted by robots, and Onyx felt embarrassed to be doing robot work, even for generous wages. The fireborn said please and thank you and smiled their thin, distant smiles. But we’re pets, Onyx complained to Jasper one day. We’re not good for anything.

Speak for yourself, said Jasper.

It became increasingly clear that Anna Tingri Five favored Jasper over Onyx.

Onyx assigned herself the task of learning all she could about the fireborn. The first thing she learned was that there were greater and lesser ranks among them. Some of the fireborn in the skydancer camp were firstborns, who had never passed through the rejuvenating fire and who had trivializing Ones attached to their names. As old as some of them might seem, the first-borns were novices, junior members of the troupe. They watched, listened, kept to their own circles. They were not skydancers but apprentices to skydancers; they managed the small incomprehensible machines that made the dances possible.

The dancers themselves were many-born: some Fives, some Sevens, a couple of Nines. And despite her reservations, Onyx loved to watch them dance. Whenever they danced, she would leave her unimportant work (folding ceremonial silks, crushing seeds to flavor soup) and study the process from its beginning to its end. The dancers’ apprentices helped them don the harnesses they called bodymakers, and in their bodymakers the dancers looked like some robot’s dream of humanity, perfect coffee-colored flesh peeping out between lashings of glass and sky-blue metal. But there was nothing awkward about the way the harnessed dancers moved. They grew buoyant, they stepped lightly to the launching meadow, they flexed their supple limbs as they assembled. Then they flew into the air.

And once they were aloft, still and small as eagles hovering on an updraft, the bodymakers made their bodies.

Onyx understood that the bodies were projections of the dancers’ bodies, and that the projected bodies were made of almost nothing—of air momentarily frozen and made to bend light to create the illusion of colors and surfaces. But they looked real, and they were stunningly large, one mile or more top to bottom as nearly as Onyx could calculate. Because they were insubstantial the bodies were not affected by even the most powerful winds, but they touched and rebounded and gripped one another as if they were real things. In the rondo dances, vast hands held vast hands as if air were flesh.

“I’ll bet I could do that,” Jasper said yearningly, on one of the mornings when they sat together at the edge of the flying meadow and watched until their necks ached with up-staring.

“Bet a copper dollar you couldn’t,” said Onyx.

“Someday you’ll die of not believing.”

“Someday you’ll die of dreaming!”

The greatest of the dancers—a category that included Anna Tingri Five—were rivals, and they danced alone or with single partners selected from among the lesser dancers. During the Harvest festivities a single Finest Dancer would be selected, and that individual would be offered transit to the Eye of the Moon. Only two dancers in the troupe were eligible to compete for this year’s Moon Prize: Anna Tingri Five and a man named Dawa Nine.

Both danced beautifully, in Onyx’s opinion. Anna Tingri Five danced as a blue-skinned goddess with bells on her wrists and ankles. When she flirted with the white clouds that climbed the sunlit mountains from the west, her bells tolled sonorously. Dawa Nine danced as an ancient warrior, with silver armor and a silver sword on his hip. Often in his practice he rose to impossible heights and swooped like a predatory bird to within a feather’s-breadth of the treetops.

But Jasper had eyes only for Anna Tingri Five, an attention the fireborn dancer enjoyed and encouraged, much to Onyx’s disgust. Jasper pleased Anna Tingri Five by befriending the apprentice who maintained her gear, helping him with small tasks and asking occasional pertinent questions. On idle days he folded Anna Tingri Five’s silk and poured her dinner wine. What he hoped to accomplish with this foolish fawning was beyond Onyx. Until it became clear to her.

One cloudless night in spring, when the fireborn were gathered under a great pavilion tent for their communal meal, Anna Tingri Five stood and cleared her throat (like the sound of a silver flute clearing its throat, Onyx thought) and announced that she had revised her plan for the Festival and that she would teach the commoner Jasper to dance.

The fireborn were startled, and so was Onyx, who nearly dropped the pitcher of wine she was carrying. Last month she had been given a device the size of a pea and the shape of a snail, which she wore behind her ear, and which translated the confusing languages of the fireborn into words she could mostly understand. In that startled moment the device conveyed a tumult of dismay, disapproval, disdain.

Anna Tingri Five defended her decision, citing examples of novelty dancers who had been admitted to tournaments in supporting roles, citing the elevation of certain commoners to near-fireborn status for certain sacred functions, citing Jasper’s fascination with the dance. A few of the fireborn nodded tolerantly; most did not.

Jasper had been training in secret, said Anna Tingri Five, and tomorrow he would make his first flight.

Jasper wasn’t present in the tent that night, or Onyx would have given him her best scornful glare. She was forced to save that for the morning, when she joined a crowd of the fireborn for the occasion of his ascent. She watched (he avoided her eyes) as Jasper was strapped and haltered into a bodymaker by Anna Tingri Five’s sullen apprentices. She watched with grim attention as Anna Tingri Five escorted him to the launching meadow. She watched as he rose into a mild blue sky, bobbing like a paper boat on a pond. Then he engaged his bodymaker.

Jasper became a mile-high man. A man dressed like a farmer. A flying peasant. An enormous gawking rube.

The false Jasper flexed its county-wide limbs. It turned an awkward, lunging pirouette.

Now the fireborn understood the nature of the dance: They laughed in approval.

Onyx scowled and stalked away.

“It’s a silly custom,” Onyx said. “Skydancing.”

Perhaps she shouldn’t have said this—perhaps especially not to Dawa Nine, the troupe’s other keynote dancer. But he had come to her, not vice versa. And she guessed he deserved to hear her true and honest opinion.

“You only say that because you’re jealous.”

Dawa Nine was a tall man. His skin was dark as hard coal, even darker than Onyx’s skin. His head was well-shaped and hairless. He had lived nine lives and that was enough for him. He aimed to dance his way into immortality, and the most immediate obstacle in his path was Anna Tingri Five. “I am not jealous,” Onyx said.

It was noon on a spring day and the sun was shining and he had come to her tent and asked to speak with her. Onyx had agreed. But what could Dawa Nine have to say that would interest Onyx? She cared very little about the fireborn or their ambitions. In five days the troupe would leave Buttercup County for the windswept granaries of the Great Plains. Onyx planned to leave them there and make her own way to the cities of the Atlantic Coast. She had saved enough copper dollars to make the journey easier.

“Be honest,” Dawa Nine said. His voice was not a flute. His voice was the wind hooting through the owl-holes of an old tree, and his smile was soft as moonlight. “With yourself if not with me. You came here with Jasper, and he was your everyday boyfriend, and now he’s flying with a beautiful fireborn dancer. What sane woman wouldn’t be jealous?”

“It’s not like I ever would have married him,” Onyx protested.

“In that case, you should stop paying him such close attention.”

“I’m not! I’m ignoring him.”

“Then let me help you ignore him.”

I’m doing fine in that department, thought Onyx. “What do you mean?”

“Work as my apprentice.”

“No! I don’t want to fly. I don’t want to be some dancer’s clown.”

“I’m not suggesting you learn to fly, Miss Onyx. But you can husband my machinery and harness my bodymaker. The boy who does it for me now is a mere One, and you’re smarter than he is—I can tell.”

Onyx took this for fact, not flattery. And—yes—Jasper would be gratifyingly annoyed to find Onyx working for Anna Tingri Five’s bitter rival. “But what do you get out of this, Old Nine? Not just a better apprentice, I’ll bet.”

“Of course not. You’re a commoner. You can tell me about Jasper. Who he is, what he wants, how he might dance—what Anna Tingri Five might make of him.”

“I will not be your spy,” Onyx said.

“Well, think about it,” said Dawa Nine.

Dawa Nine’s offer was on Onyx’s mind as the troupe packed its gear and left Buttercup County.

The fireborn all rode robots, and robots carried their gear and supplies, and even Onyx and Jasper were given robots to ride. The troupe found and followed the road that ran through Buttercup Town, and Onyx was able to wave to her parents from the comfortable shoulder of a tall machine. They waved back fearfully; Jasper’s father was also present, also waving and weeping; and Onyx burned with the pangs of home-leaving as they passed the hotel, the counting house where she had worked, the general store, the barber shop. Then Buttercup Town was behind them, and her thoughts moved differently.

She thought about commoners and the fireborn and the Eye of the Moon.

Now that she had dined and slept and bathed with them, the fireborn were far less daunting than they had seemed to her in stories. Powerful, yes; masters of strange possibilities, yes; rich beyond calculation, surely. But as striving and envious as anyone else. Cruel and kind. Thoughtless and wise. Why then were there two kinds of people, commoners and fireborn?

Legend had it that commoners and fireborn had parted ways during the Great Hemoclysm centuries ago. But not even the fireborn knew much about that disaster. Some said the Eye of the Moon had watched it. Some said the Eye of the Moon had only just come into existence when the world began to burn. Some said the Eye of the Moon had somehow caused the Hemoclysm (but Onyx kept that notion to herself, for it was a heresy; the fireborn considered the Eye a holy thing).

Onyx cared little about the Eye. It was where the fireborn went after they had lived their twelve allotted lives—or sooner, if they tired of life on Earth and could claim some worthy achievement. In the Eye, supposedly, the fireborn wore whatever bodies they chose and lived in cities made entirely of thought. They could travel across the sky—there were Eyes, some claimed, on other planets, not just the moon. One day the Eye would rule the entire universe. Or so it was said.

As a child on a pew in Buttercup County’s Church of True Things, Onyx had learned how Jesu Rinpoche had saved wisdom from the Hemoclysm and planted the Four Doors to the Moon at the corners of the Earth. The story of the Fifth Door, in which Jasper so fervently believed, was a minor heresy much favoured by old pipe-smoking men. What was the truth of it all? Onyx didn’t know. Probably, she thought, nine-tenths of these tales were nonsense. She had been called cynical or atheistic for saying so. But most of everything people said was nonsense. Why should this be different?

All she really knew was that there were commoners and there were fireborn. The fireborn traveled at will and played for a living and made robots that mined mountains and cultivated harvests. The commoners lived at the feet of the fireborn, untroubled unless they made trouble. That was how it had been since the day she was born, and that was how it would be when she left the world behind. Only dreamers like Jasper believed differently. And Jasper was a fool.

Jasper’s foolishness grew so obvious that Onyx gave up speaking to him, at least until they argued.

The troupe descended in long robotic marches from the mountains to the hinterland, where the only hills were gentle drumlins and rolling moraines, and where the rivers rippled bright and slow as Easter ribbons. Some days the sky was blue and empty. Some days clouds came rolling out of the west like gray monsters with lightning hearts.

The road they followed was paved and busy with traffic. They made their camps by the roadside where wild grass grew and often stayed encamped for days. A month passed in this lazy transit, then another. Where the plains had been farmed, a vast green bounty mounded and grew ripe. The Harvest approached.

Jasper’s dancing skills improved with practice, though Onyx was loathe to admit it. Of course he wasn’t as good as the fireborn dancers, but he wasn’t supposed to be. He was a foil, as Dawa Nine explained to her: a decorative novelty. The theme of Anna Tingri Five’s dance was the misbegotten love of a fireborn woman for a young and gawkish commoner. It was a story the fireborn had been telling for centuries, and the tale was always tragic. It had been set to music many times, though Anna Tingri Five would be the first to dance it. Jasper was required only to clump about the sky in crude yearning poses, and to adopt a willing stillness while Anna Tingri Five beckoned him, teased him, accepted him, loved him, and forsook him in a series of highly symbolic set-dances. The rehearsals were impressive, and with her head turned to the late-summer sky, Onyx even felt a kind of sour pride: That’s our Jasper a mile high and another mile tall, she thought. That’s the same Jasper who walked behind a mule cart in Buttercup County ten months ago. But Jasper was as stupid and bemused as the peasant he portrayed in the dance.

And then, one night as she served wine, Onyx discovered Jasper with Anna Tingri Five in a dark corner of the fireborn pavilion, the two of them exchanging bird-peck kisses.

Onyx left the pavilion for the bitter consolation of the prairie night. Jasper guessed what she had seen and followed her out, calling her name. But Onyx didn’t stop or look back. She didn’t want to see his traitorous face. She went straight to Dawa Nine instead.

Jasper caught her the next day, as she passed along a row of trees where a creek cut the tabletop prairie. The day was warm. Onyx wore a yellow silk skirt one of the fireborn women had given her, and a yellow silk scarf that spoke in gestures to the wind. The troupe’s lesser dancers rehearsed among clouds high above, casting undulant shadows across the wild grass.

“Don’t you trust me?” Jasper asked, blocking her path.

“Trust you to do what? I trust you to do what I’ve seen you doing,” said Onyx.

“You have no faith!”

“You have no sense!”

“All I want is to learn about the Eye of the Moon and how to get there,” Jasper said.

“I don’t care about the Eye of the Moon! I want to live in a city and look at tall buildings! And all I have to do to get there is walk toward the sunrise!”

“I’ll walk alongside you,” said Jasper. “Honest, Onyx!”

“Really? Then let’s walk!”

“. . . after the Dance, of course, I mean. . .”

“Hah!”

“But I owe her that much,” he said, not daring to pronounce the name of Anna Tingri Five for fear of further provoking Onyx. His big eyes pleaded wordlessly.

“She cares nothing for you, you mule!”

These words wounded Jasper in the tender part of his pride, and he drew back and let his vanity take command of his mouth. “Bet you’re wrong,” he said.

“Bet how much?”

“Ten copper dollars!”

“It’s a bet!” cried Onyx, stalking away.

The Harvest Festival came at summer’s decline, the cooling hinge of the season. The troupe joined a hundred others for the celebration. Onyx marvelled at the gathering.

There were many harvests in the world but only a few Festivals. Each of the world’s great breadlands held one. Prosaically, it was the occasion on which the fireborn collected the bounty of grain and vegetables that had been amassed by their fleets of agricultural robots, while commoners feasted on the copious leavings, more than enough to feed all the mortal men and women of the world for the coming year. That was the great bargain that had sealed the peace between the commonfolk and the fireborn: Food for all, and plenty of it. Only overbreeding could have spoiled the arrangement, and the fireborn attended to that matter with discreet lacings of antifertility substances in the grain the commoners ate. Commoners were born and commoners died, but their numbers never much varied. And the fireborn bore children only rarely, since each lived a dozen long lives before adjourning to the Eye of the Moon. Their numbers, too, were stable.

But the Harvest Festival was more than that. It was an occasion of revelry and pilgrimage, a great gathering of people and robots on the vast stage of the world’s steppes and prairies, a profane and holy intermingling. The fireborn held exhibitions and contests, to be judged by councils of the Twelve-Lived and marvelled at by commonfolk. Jugglers juggled, poets sang, artisans hawked their inscrutable arts. Prayer flags snapped gaily in the wind. And of course: Skydancers danced.

Several troupes had arrived at the site of the North American festival (where the junction of two rivers stitched a quilt of yellow land), but the troupe Onyx served was one of the best-regarded and was allotted the third day and third night of the Festival for its performances.

By day, the lesser dancers danced. Crowds gawked and marvelled from below. Warm afternoon air called up clouds like tall white sailing ships, and the skydancers danced with them, wooed them, unwound their hidden lightnings. The sky rang with bells and drums. Sunlight rebounding from the ethereal bodies of the avatars cast rainbows over empty fields, and even the agricultural robots, serene at the beginning of their seasonal rest, seemed to gaze upward with a metallic, bovine awe.

Onyx hid away with Dawa Nine, who was fasting and praying in preparation for his night flight. The best dancers danced at night, their immense avatars glowing from within. There was no sight more spectacular. The Council of the Twelves would be watching and judging. Onyx knew that Dawa Nine was deeply weary of life on Earth and determined to dance his way to the moon. And since the day she had discovered Jasper and Anna Tingri Five exchanging kisses, Onyx had promised to help him achieve that ambition—to do whatever it was in her power to do, even the dark and furtive things she ought to have disdained.

She could have offered Dawa Nine her body (as Jasper had apparently given his to Anna Tingri Five), but she was intimidated by Dawa’s great age and somber manner. Instead, she had shared secrets with him. She had told him how Jasper worked Anna Tingri Five’s gear, how he had learned only a few skydancing skills but had learned them well enough to serve as Anna’s foil, how he had mastered the technical business of flight harnesses and bodymakers. He had even modified Anna Tingri Five’s somatic generator, making her avatar’s vast face nearly as subtle and expressive as her own—a trick even Dawa Nine’s trained apprentices could not quite duplicate.

None of this information much helped Dawa Nine, however; if anything, it had deepened his gloomy conviction that Anna Tingri Five was bound to outdance him and steal his ticket to the Eye. Desperate measures were called for, and time was short. As the lesser dancers danced, Dawa Nine summoned Onyx into the shadow of his tent.

“I want you to make sure my bodymaker is functioning correctly,” he said.

“Of course,” said Onyx. “No need to say, Old Nine.”

“Go into the equipment tent and inspect it. If you find any flaws, fix them.”

Onyx nodded.

“And if you happen to find Anna Tingri’s gear unattended—”

“Yes?”

“Fix that, too.”

Onyx didn’t need to be told twice. She went to the tent where the gear was stored, as instructed. It was a dreadful thing Dawa had asked her to do—to tamper with Anna Tingri Five’s bodymaker in order to spoil her dance. But what did Onyx care about the tribulations of the fireborn? The fireborn were nothing to her, as she was nothing to them.

Or so she told herself. Still, she was pricked with fleabites of conscience. She hunched over Dawa Nine’s bodymaker, pretending to inspect it. Everything was in order, apart from Onyx’s thoughts.

What had Anna Tingri Five done to deserve this cruel trick? (Apart from being fireborn and haughty and stealing kisses from Jasper!) And why punish Anna Tingri Five for Jasper’s thoughtlessness? (Because there was no way to punish Jasper himself!) And by encouraging this tampering, hadn’t Dawa Nine proven himself spiteful and dishonest? (She could hardly deny it!) And if Dawa Nine was untrustworthy, might he not blame Onyx if the deception was discovered? (He almost certainly would!)

It was this last thought that troubled Onyx most. She supposed she could do as Dawa had asked: tamper with the bodymaker and ruin the dance Anna Tingri Five had so carefully rehearsed—and it might be worth the pangs of conscience it would cause her—but what of the consequences? Onyx secretly planned to leave the Festival tonight and make her way east toward the cities of the Atlantic coast. But her disappearance would only serve to incriminate her, if the tampering were discovered. The fireborn might hunt her down and put her on trial. And if she were accused of the crime, would Dawa Nine step forward to proclaim her innocence and take the responsibility himself?

Of course he would not.

And would Onyx be believed, if she tried to pin the blame on Dawa?

Hardly.

And was any of that the fault of Anna Tingri Five?

No.

Onyx waited until an opportunity presented itself. The few apprentices in the tent left to watch a sunset performance by a rival troupe. The few robots in the pavilion were downpowered or inattentive. The moment had come. Onyx strolled to the place where Anna Tingri Five’s bodymaker was stored. It wouldn’t take much. A whispered instruction to the machine codes. A plucked wire. A grease-smeared lens. So easy.

She waited to see if her hands would undertake the onerous task.

Her hands would not.

She walked away.

Onyx left the troupe’s encampment at sunset. She could not say she had left the Festival itself: The Festival was expansive; pilgrims and commoners had camped for miles around the pavilions of the fireborn—crowds to every horizon. But she made slow progress following the paved road eastward. By dark she had reached a patch of harvested land where robots like great steel beetles rolled bales of straw, their red caution-lights winking a lonesome code. A few belated pilgrims moved past her in the opposite direction, carrying lanterns. Otherwise she was alone.

She stopped and looked back, though she had promised herself she would not.

The Harvest Festival smoldered on the horizon like a grassfire. A tolling of brass bells came down the cooling wind. Two skydancers rose and hovered in the clear air. Even at this distance Onyx recognized the glowing avatars of Jasper and Anna Tingri Five.

She tried to set aside her hopes and disappointments and watch the dance as any commoner would watch it. But this wasn’t the dance as she had seen it rehearsed.

Onyx stared, her eyes so wide they reflected the light of the dance like startled moons.

Because the dance was different. The dance was wrong!

The Peasant and the Fireborn Woman circled each other as usual. The Peasant should have danced his few blunt and impoverished gestures (Supplication, Lamentation, Protestation) while the Fireborn Woman slowly wove around him a luminous tapestry of Lust, Disdain, Temptation, Revulsion, Indulgence, Ecstasy, Guilt, Renunciation, and eventually Redemption—all signified by posture, motion, expression, repetition, tempo, rhythm, and the esotery of her divine and human body.

And all of this happened. The dance unfolded in the sky with grace and beauty, shedding a ghostly rainbow light across the moonless prairie . . .

But it was the Fireborn Woman who clumped out abject love, and it was the Clumsy Peasant who danced circles of attraction and repulsion around her!

Onyx imagined she could hear the gasps of the crowd, even at this distance. The Council of the Twelve-Lived must be livid—but what could they do but watch as the drama played out?

And it played out exactly as at rehearsal, except for this strange inversion. The Peasant in his tawdry smock and rope-belt pants danced as finely as Anna Tingri Five had ever danced. And the Fireborn Woman yearned for him as clumsily, abjectly, and convincingly as Jasper had ever yearned. The Peasant grudgingly, longingly accepted the advances of the Fireborn Woman. They danced arousal and completion. Then the Peasant, sated and ashamed of his weakness, turned his back to the Fireborn Woman: They could not continue together. The Fireborn Woman wept and implored, but the Peasant was loyal to his class. With a last look backward he descended in a stately glide to the earth. And the Fireborn Woman, tragically but inevitably spurned, tumbled away at the whim of the callous winds.

And kept tumbling. That wasn’t right, either.

Tumbling this way, Onyx thought.

It was like the night so many months ago when the January sky had come down close and Anna Tingri Five had fallen out of it. Now, as then, the glowing avatar stiffened. Its legs, which could span counties, locked at the knee. The wind began to turn it sidelong, and parts of the skydancer grew transparent or flew off like evanescent-colored clouds. Broken and shrinking, it began to fall.

It came all apart in the air, but there was something left behind: something small that fell more gently, swaying like an autumn leaf on its way from branch to winter. It landed nearby—in a harvested field, where copper-faced robots looked up in astonishment from their bales of straw.

Onyx ran to see if Anna Tingri Five had been hurt. But the person wearing the bodymaker wasn’t Anna Tingri Five.

It was Jasper, shrugging out of the harness and grinning at her like a stupid boy.

“I doctored the bodymakers,” Jasper said. “I traded the seemings of them. From inside our harnesses everything looked normal. But the Peasant wore the Fireborn Woman’s body, and the Fireborn Woman appeared as the Peasant. I knew all about it, but Anna Tingri Five didn’t. She danced believing she was still the Fireborn Woman.”

“You ruined the performance!” exclaimed Onyx.

Jasper shrugged. “She told me she loved me, but she was going to drop me as soon as the Festival ended. I heard her saying so to one of her courtiers. She called me a ‘dramatic device.’”

“You could have told me so!”

“You were in no mood to listen. You’re a hopeless skeptic. You might have thought I was lying. I didn’t want you debating my loyalty. I wanted to show it to you.”

“And you’re a silly dreamer! Did you learn anything useful from her—about the Fifth Door to the Moon?”

“A little,” said Jasper.

“Think you can find it?”

He shrugged his bony shoulders. “Maybe.”

“You still want to walk to the Atlantic Coast with me?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

Onyx looked back at the Harvest Festival. There must be chaos in the pavilions, she thought, but the competition had to go on. And in fact Dawa Nine rose into the air, right on schedule. But his warrior dance looked a little wobbly.

“I crossed a few connections in Dawa Nine’s bodymaker,” she confessed. “He’s a liar and a cheat and he doesn’t deserve to win.”

Jasper cocked his big head and gave her a respectful stare. “You’re a saboteur too!”

“Anna Tingri Five won’t be going to the moon this year, and neither will Dawa Nine.”

“Then we ought to start walking,” said Jasper. “They won’t let it rest, you know. They’ll come after us. They’ll send robots.”

“Bet you a copper dollar they can’t find us,” Onyx said, shrugging her pack over her shoulder and turning to the road that wound like a black ribbon to a cloth of stars. She liked the road better now that this big-headed Buttercup County boy was beside her again.

“No bet,” said Jasper, following.

© 2012 by Robert Charles Wilson.

Originally published in Rip-Off!

edited by Gardner Dozois.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Born in California, Robert Charles Wilson grew up in Canada. He is the author of many acclaimed SF novels, including Darwinia, Blind Lake, Julian Comstock, and the Hugo Award–winning Spin. His latest novel is Burning Paradise.

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FANTASY

Detours on the Way to Nothing
Rachel Swirsky

It’s midnight when you and your girlfriend, Elka, have your first fight since you moved in together. Words wound, tears flow, doors slam. You storm out of the apartment, not caring where you go as long as it’s far away from her. When you step off the front stoop onto the sidewalk, that’s the moment when the newest version of me is born.

You get on the subway heading toward Brooklyn and ride until the train rumbles out of the tunnels and squeaks into a familiar aboveground stop. The neighborhood isn’t good, but a friend of yours used to live a few blocks away, so you know the area pretty well. At least you won’t get lost while you work off the rest of your anger. You disembark, let your feet pick a direction, and start walking.

That’s how the logic seems from your perspective, but there’s another explanation: I want you to come to me.

By a series of what you think are random turns, you end up in an alley between high-rise buildings. Reinforced doors protect apartments built like warehouses; skulls grin on rat poison warning signs nailed beneath barred panes. Abandoned mattresses and broken radios decay in the gutter, accumulating mold and rust.

In the spotlight of a streetlamp, an old Puerto Rican man hurls bottles at a fifth story window. “Christina!” he yells. “Open up!” A voice shouts down, “She doesn’t live here anymore!” but the man keeps throwing. Translucent shards collect around his feet. None have flown back into his face yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

The distraction stops you, as I intended. I wanted people around so you’d be less likely to spook.

You look up and see me. I’m the girl on the roof. The edge where I stand is flat as the sidewalk and has no guardrail. You gasp when you notice my toes edging over the precipice—then gasp harder a moment later when you see my hair floating in the wind. It looks like feathers. Just like feathers.

The Puerto Rican man runs out of bottles. He rubs his sore palms, repeating, “Christina, my Christina, why won’t you open the window?”

Looking up, you gesture between me and the Puerto Rican man, asking: Are you Christina? I shake my head and make walking motions with my fingers to say I’ll come down. Not knowing quite why, you put your hands in your pockets and wait.

When I get down to street level, you’re shocked to see it wasn’t an illusion: My hair really is made of feathers. They’re bright blue, such a vivid color that it’s obvious they weren’t plucked from any real bird. They remind you of the ones you and your sister decorated carnival masks with when you were children: feathers dyed to match the way people think birds look.

You reach out to touch them before your sense of propriety kicks in and pulls your hand back. You shuffle your feet with embarrassment. “Hi.”

I find your shyness endearing. I take one hand out of the lined pocket of my ski jacket and wave.

“I’m Patrick,” you say.

I smile and nod, the way people do when they hear information they don’t find relevant.

“What’s your name?” you ask.

I step closer. You tilt your ear toward my lips, assuming I want to whisper. It’s a reasonable assumption, though wrong. I take your chin and gently lift your face so that your gaze is level with mine, then open my mouth to show you where my tongue was cut out.

You back away. Another second and you’d bolt, so I act fast, pull a card out of my pocket and give it to you.

“Voluntary surgery?” you read. “What are you, part of some cult?”

It’s more a philosophy than a cult, but since it isn’t really either, I wave my hand back and forth: in a way.

Debate wavers in your expression. You still might go. Before you can decide, I take your hand and pull your fingers through my hair.

You breathe hard as your fingertips touch skin beneath my feathers. “All the way to the scalp,” you murmur.

That’s when I know I’ve got you. I can see it in the way your eyes turn one dark color from pupil to iris. You’re thinking, how can this be real?

The fantasy has been with you since adolescence. Maybe it started with the feathers you and your sister glued on the carnival masks. They felt so soft that you pocketed a pair—one blue, one white—and took them back to bed with you. Your vision of a bird-woman appeared soon thereafter. Beautiful and silent, she wrapped you nightly in sky-colored feathers that smelled like wind.

In the nearby park, I recreate this. Behind us, a levy of black rocks stands against the East River. Reflected Manhattan lights form a sheen on the water, shimmering like a fluorescent oil spill.

I strip off my clothes and stand naked for you, my shadow falling onto gravel cut with glints of glass. I’m skinny with visible ribs, but soft and fleshy around the belly where you like to stroke your lovers as if they were satin pillows—all the conflicting traits you prefer, combined in one body. Your eyes never leave my feathers.

You will never know how I am possible. My philosophy—my cult, as you called it—is old and secretive. We have no organization, no books of dogma, no advocates to harangue passersby with our rhetoric. Each initiate finds us alone, deducing our beliefs through meditation and self-reflection. Only the magic of our sacrificed tongues unifies us.

Our practices have few analogues in Western thought, though you could call us philosophical cousins to the Buddhists. We believe there is no way to lose the trappings of self so completely as to become someone else’s desire.

If you see me again, I will not be a bird. I will be a figure made of jewels or a woolly primate with prehensile lips. My skin will be rubber. My cock will be velvet. Each of my six blood-spattered breasts will be tattooed with the face of a man I’ve killed. The goal is endless transformation.

I’m still distant from that goal. Though I’ve been transforming for decades, I’m only inching along the path to self-dissolution. I cling to identity; indulge fantasies like this one of telling you my story. Cutting out our tongues is supposed to silence us. Instead, I speak internally. Can you hear me?

I tease you with my feathers, encompassing your face, hands, and cock in turn. When you tire of that, you pull me up against the rocks with my legs around your waist. I throw my head back to let my plumage stream in the wind and you come. I don’t know if you think of Elka, but don’t worry. You can’t be unfaithful with a fantasy.

You recline against the black rocks.

“Wow,” you say, “I’m not the kind of person that would ever do this. Elka and I were together three months before . . . ”

Your eyes glaze. This could be bad. There are two possibilities now. You may pull back, stammering her name, or:

You reach for my shoulder. “I know you can’t talk, but can you write? Is there someplace we could go? I have so much to ask.”

I’ve done my job too well. It’s time to leave. I shrug away from your grip and raise one hand to wave. Goodbye.

“Hey, wait!” you shout.

In your fantasies, when you’re done, the bird-woman dissolves into a shower of feathers. Unfortunately, my magic isn’t that versatile. I have to walk away.

You try to chase me so I maneuver through sharp turns and unexpected byways. You don’t know this area as well as you think you do. Soon, your footsteps grow distant and faint.

I retreat to my rooftop and watch from above as you pace in circles around the neighborhood. I hope you will go soon. If you don’t, it may be a sign I’ve done you permanent damage. Some people can’t survive getting what they wish for.

Finally, you head back to the subway. I have to admit, I’m a little sad when you go. A little jealous, too.

I climb down the building and discover the Puerto Rican man huddled next to a fire escape, muttering in soft Spanish. Tiny cuts bleed on his arms and calves. I consider remaking myself for him, but all he wants is his human Christina. I catch an impression of her: short and blonde, she hates dancing, speaks seven languages badly, calls him The Man She Should Have Loved Less.

As his yearning for this specific, clumsy, jovial woman flows through me, I realize how little I am to you. What is a fantasy? A scrap of yourself made into flesh. An illusion to masturbate with.

Moving away from the Puerto Rican man, I shelter in a doorway and will myself to molt. My feathers float away on the wind and something I was clinging to flies away with them, carried on the same breeze.

I say goodbye to the girl with feathered hair and wait for another’s desire to overtake and shape me. In the few seconds before it does, for one moment, just one, my soul becomes pure essence without form.

It’s the closest I’ve come to nothingness yet.

© 2008 by Rachel Swirsky.

Originally published in Weird Tales.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Rachel Swirsky holds a masters degree in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop, and graduated from Clarion West in 2005. She’s published more than 50 short stories in venues including the New Haven Review, Clarkesworld Magazine, and Tor.com. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, and the Sturgeon Award, and in 2010, her novella “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window” won the Nebula. If it were an option, she might choose to replace her hair with feathers, preferably bright macaw feathers.

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So Sharp That Blood Must Flow
Sunny Moraine

In the end, the water goes black with the witch’s blood.

Before this happens, the little mermaid understands that a deal is a deal, a bargain a bargain, and there can’t be reneging. But this isn’t reneging, she tells herself as she sinks down, down, down into water so black that in truth it would be difficult to discern witch’s blood within it even had a hundred witches been slaughtered in its depths.

She is not sea foam. That was the first lie.

She is also not alive. That was truth.

Being not alive, she has no need to breathe. This is terribly convenient, given what she needs to do next.

Surrounded by a hundred crystal lanterns, a prince dances with his princess. This is iconic, archetypal; many of the people in the assembly sense this on some level and take pleasure in its even perfection. This is the ending of all the stories they have ever been told as children, all the stories they have ever told their children, all the stories their children will tell. The prince marries his princess and they dance and are blissfully happy.

She watches them from the parapet, her eyes burning and her feet cut to ribbons by invisible knives.

This was not her ending. And she sees no reason why she should take it gracefully.

The water is dark and deep below her, and she arcs down into it, her gown fluttering around her. She takes particular care to hit the water at such an angle as to break her neck, and so she sinks before she can dissolve on the little waves.

She dies with purpose. This is a truth she makes.

If she were sea foam, she thinks—and perhaps this is after and perhaps it is before or perhaps it is both things simultaneously—she could become the rain and patter down onto his windowpanes, trickle down the glass and watch him inside in his bright warmth. Or in a storm she could come to him riding, or walking, or anywhere unsheltered, and cut down through the air to strike his cheeks. She could fling herself at him and run down his body like sweat, down his face like tears.

She aches with it. It’s worse than the knives ever were. The witch never told her that the knives on which she danced would be the lesser pain.

Did she know? She must have. Witches know all the secrets of love; it’s what gives them the power to bargain with all its points and angles and gemstone facets.

If she were sea foam. But she is not. Before, she wants it. After, she wonders at what possessed her, but even in the cold heart of the water she still knows.

It takes her a long time to sink, a long time for the deep currents to carry her. Sometimes she thinks she can still hear the music. It works its way into her ears like droppers of poison, and though the cold water denies her rictus, she feels her teeth clench and grind.

As tiny fish nibble on her legs and toes—she still has them, even now, and hates them more every passing second though the knives have at least allowed her a reprieve—she wonders about death, turns the fact of it over in her mind. She is dead, she’s sure of that much, but either the witch lied, and that is why she is not foam on the waves—or something else has happened.

Her spirit is not free. And has not passed away.

Perhaps this is what rage does.

She has never felt rage like this, all-consuming, like the coals of deep-sea volcanoes in the core of her breast. She wanted. She reached for. She did everything she should have done. And him.

Him.

But if she’s still here, there are other options.

She whispers to the current. It still knows her, and carries her corpse to where she wants to be.

It sets her gently down at the mouth of the sea witch’s cavern and there she comes to rest against the rocks, the waving fronds of posidonia caressing her limbs. She waits.

“Why have you come back to me?” All at once, without any stirring of the water at her coming, the witch is looming over her, the rags of her twelve tails like surf-beaten kelp, the thin strands of her hair like ancient seaweed. Her eyes are like the coals that burn in the mermaid’s heart. “You should be foam on the waves, daughter.”

By the witch’s magic, the mermaid knows she’ll be heard, the voice of that coal as it burns higher and more violent. I’m no daughter of yours.

“No. At that, not. So, then.” The witch reaches down and lifts the mermaid under the arms, clasps her cold body close to hers, which is hot for a host of dark and unnatural reasons. “This tale has ended badly for you.”

You meant it to.

“I meant to exact a price. I would in any case. You must know how these things work. I don’t make the rules.”

The witch glides backward through the water, back into her cavern, carrying the little mermaid with her. It is an embrace, close and dangerous, not intending comfort, not intending any good, but the mermaid has suffered and is dead and is now not afraid of anything. She has spent some of her time of sinking in wondering what might happen to her now, whether the witch might cut her into pieces and use her disparate parts for her magics, whether she might be skinned and used as a bag or a drifting blanket, whether her muscles and fat might be peeled away and eaten raw, her blood spilling down the witch’s chin and floating like red gauze in the little currents.

But now she doesn’t think those things will happen. Pressed to the witch’s bare, sagging breasts, she can sense the direction of movements. She can see way ahead with her blank, dead eyes.

The witch lays her down in a bed of kelp. The bones of whales hang from the cavern’s ceiling and make a soft clunk sound when the shifting water brings them into contact with each other. The water itself smells of blood, crushed plants, decay, dark things. The blood might draw sharks, but the rest keeps them away. Keeps everything away but the desperate.

And the dead.

The witch floats above her, arms loose at her sides.

I want to make a deal.

The witch cocks her head on one side. This close, the mermaid sees that tiny, pale shrimp are crawling through the strands of her hair, picking over her scalp. “Another? The way this one has ended? Be serious with me, girl. What could you offer me? And what would you want?”

You know.

The witch is silent for a time. Her fingers wander over the mermaid’s body. Perhaps she is learning humanity. Perhaps she has never touched a human woman.

“It would be difficult,” she says at last. “It would require much. Heavy magic. Dense and drawn from the core of the world, through the fire towers in the deepest of deeps. And that still leaves open the question of what you could give me in trade. What would be worth so much effort and such a cost to me.”

The little mermaid has had an answer for this ready since her body hit the water. She wishes she could smile.

There is one thing. And against all possibility, the corners of her mouth twitch.

Life and strength flow back into the mermaid both together, a great rush like a wave crashing on the shore of her heart.

Her body wrenches itself upward, a great heave, her chest twisting in on itself with the lungs she no longer has. Her legs are bound and blended, her feet splay and stretch into fins. She opens her mouth wide in a scream with no voice to make it heard.

The witch watches her in silence. She was pale before; now her skin is almost translucent. She is exactly the color of the shrimp that infest her hair. She looks as if she’s trying to smile but can’t, as if she’s taken a little of the mermaid’s death into herself, because of course she has.

Death always has to go somewhere.

But that leaves the rest of it. The death the mermaid has promised.

The witch places the silver blade into the mermaid’s hand. Two seconds later its point is buried in the witch’s breast.

This was not part of the deal, not the promised death in trade. But the witch doesn’t look particularly shocked as she dies.

The little mermaid sits in the center of the black-gauze witch’s blood. It flows into her gills. She opens her mouth and tastes its old metal and rotten wood. What she promised the witch, what she’s offered in exchange—she’s done offering. Done exchanging.

This is all for her.

She can hear the music of the prince’s ship as she nears the surface.

It’s music to dance to, and for a moment she stops just beneath the surface, head cocked, listening. She danced once, danced on the blades of knives and never bled, never screamed, and it had not just been that she had no voice. Love silenced her, terrible love, and she only had eyes for him as he laid his hands on her and spun her across the floor. Alone she had danced for his delight, her eyes beseeching him. She had believed he saw and answered her in the same kind. She had believed that he had entered the cloak of silence that covered her. That when his lips touched hers he had shared in it all.

Now she listens, cold as the water around her.

She breaks the surface. The knife is very heavy in her hand.

The ship is strung with fairylights, bathed in starlight. On the deck she can see bodies turning, turning. She can’t see the prince or his precious princess, but she can feel him there. Whether or not he meant to, he did share himself with her—if, as she now knows, not his better part. Not the part he’s given now.

She stabs the blade into the wood of the ship’s side and begins to climb.

She knows they won’t see her, not at first. They had never seen her, not even him, and now will be no different, though she’s a thing of legend, of fairytale, as much as the prince and his princess. She’s not a thing of this fairytale, has no place here, and so will be unseen. She is supposed to be dead. To them, she is.

She can make use of this.

She pulls herself onto the deck behind a table laden with food. Her gills should make this difficult but some part of her remembers, some part of her unable to shed that form just as she can’t yet shed all of her death, so the air she pulls into her is harsh, sharp, a little like the knives that used to torment her. Her tail is strong and she uses it to push herself across the deck, behind the guests, behind the men in their fine suits of clothing and the ladies in their rich gowns. Behind the musicians with their strings and pipes and delicate drums.

And there, in the center of the gathering, him and her.

The mermaid closes her hand on the edge of the shear’s blade and bleeds. Because what’s a little more blood?

The prince and his princess turn around each other, spinning and laughing, voices high and clear over the music. The mermaid, in spite of herself, briefly loses herself in watching them. They are so lovely in light that dances as they do, fire and stars, and for an instant—a traitorous instant—she wants this again. Wishes. Dreams. Because it might, it might, have been worth the pain.

She lets out a sharp hiss.

All at once, the prince and his princess stop, standing in the center of the circle, gaze to gaze, hand in hand, breathless and flushed and so clearly happy.

This is the last scene of the fairytale, the point at which it ends, the book closes, the light goes out and all the good little children snuggle into their covers and drift to sleep on waves of sea foam.

The little mermaid slaps her tail against the deck and leaps.

There’s silence. She can hear it. The world itself gone frozen and still, and all eyes on her. Her hands hit the prince squarely in the chest, one hand over his heart, and the shock on his face gives her pleasure as keen as any blade that has ever touched her.

From somewhere in the crowd, a scream. The prince himself is opening his mouth to do the same. The little mermaid opens her own in mimicry of him, and before he can utter a sound she plunges her head down and sinks her teeth into his throat.

He convulses under her. His choked-off scream comes out as a gurgle as her teeth dig in and in; hot blood floods her mouth, flesh giving under the force of her bite, and the prince twists, trying to get away, and this is all the help she needs as she whips her head to the side and tears out his throat, meat and voice sweet together on her tongue.

She swallows. The prince lies there, twitching, drowning in his own blood.

Voiceless.

Now the screams, a chorus of them, women and men alike, and the sweetest scream of his princess, but the little mermaid barely hears any of this over the sound of her own laughter, hard and high and like all the songs she used to sing to him unheard beneath the waves. She eats his scream, the blood running down her chin, and as her death flows into the gaping hole in him, his life burns hot in her belly.

Why, he’s mouthing. Silent and already half dead. Why.

She lowers herself against him and kisses him once, painting his mouth with his own blood, smiling against him, and now understanding that this is a kind of joy he would have never given her willingly. Now there are running feet on the deck, the pounding of fleeing and panicked people, the shouts of the few guards he’s brought with him on what should have been a voyage to celebrate life and love. Over the din of all of these things she opens her mouth and speaks to him for the first time.

“Fair’s fair,” she crows. “Fair is so very fair, and I’ll spare you the knives you’d dance on, my love, my love.”

She’s singing as she begins to cut off his legs with the blade. It is very sharp. The witch gave it magic. He can’t scream, of course, as his blood pools on the deck and drips through the slats, but she can feel his cries echoing in her own throat and she turns them into music. To this music, she thinks, she’d dance on knives.

She’d dance and she’d laugh, her teeth glistening like rubies in her mouth.

No one touches her. No one comes near her. She takes the prince’s legs in each hand and leaves the knife buried in his heart. She moves to the railing, and before she leaps into the dark she glances back at his princess, still standing at the edge of the crowd, pale as the witch with tears streaming down her face.

Her story has not ended well.

The little mermaid regards her dispassionately, though really, she bears her no malice—the princess has, of course, been allowed to live. In another story the little mermaid knows that it might have been herself. It might have been anyone.

She gives her chin an imperious tilt. The one thing she would never have cared about being was royalty.

“Make your own deals,” she says. And lets herself fall.

She slices into the water, a limb in each hand. She lifts the legs to her mouth and kisses each, on the sole of the foot, where the knives had always hurt her most.

And she lets them go.

As she plunges down into the fathoms below, she doesn’t look back. The prince’s legs float to the surface and bubble, dissolve into sea foam on the waves, and are soon lost and nothing at all.

She allows herself a second to float, light above her and deepest darkness below.

This is a crossroads, a turning-away-forever. But there isn’t any going back; that was the deal she made, and she can make her own deals and her own truths, make them solid and real as her flesh will now always be.

© 2014 by Sunny Moraine.

Sunny Moraine is a humanoid creature of average height, luminosity, and inertial mass. They’re also a doctoral candidate in sociology and a writer-like object whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, Clarkesworld, and Shimmer, among other places, all of which has provided lovely reasons to avoid a dissertation. Their first novel Line and Orbit, co-written with Lisa Soem, is available from Samhain Publishing. Their solo-authored novel Crowflight is coming this fall from Masque Books. They can be found at sunnymoraine.com.

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Love in Another Language
Eugene Mirabelli

1

Linguists estimate that of the 6,000 or so languages now spoken in the world, about half will be gone within the next 100 years. In his paper “Endangered Languages of the Pacific Region,” Osamu Sakiyama reports that Nasarian has only twenty speakers, Maragus and Ura have only ten speakers each, and Aore has only a single speaker—and by the time you read this, those speakers will have died. These are plain facts.

2

Shozo Sakurado was the solitary speaker of his language, the language itself a harmonious hodge-podge of musical vocables that sounded more like song than speech. He had been born on an island in the Pacific, but had found his way to the United States where he acquired a new life and an education. Sakurado had a cheerful energy about him, which was both good and necessary, because his strongest desire was to revive his dying language—a hopeless task which would have plunged anyone else into despair. He worked out of a storefront in watery Portland, Oregon.

Sally Raven knew Shozo Sakurado was crazy. But that was perfect for Sally because she was a psychiatric social worker completing her PhD, and Sakurado was her dissertation topic. Sally Raven was a Native American, a Tlingit, born in a village in the Tlingit area that stretches from southeast Alaska along the coast of Canada and southward toward the United States. The Tlingit language has a complex grammar and some exotic phonemes, but it’s spoken only by about five hundred people and is probably going to go extinct in this century. Sally spoke, or used to speak, Tlingit, but she had put that and much else behind her when she left home—home being a succession of villages, fjords, islands, and beaches. That was years ago. Last week Peter Drock had asked to move in with her, and she had said yes. By the next afternoon they were sprawled side by side naked on Sally’s brass bed, both of them glistening with sweat and exhausted. To be precise, Peter was sprawled star-shape on the bed, and Sally was curled up on the margin but, yes, they were both sweaty and exhausted. Sally noticed that even with the curtains drawn against the sunlight, his pale body appeared to glow with lunar brightness beside hers.

“You know this is only for the summer,” Peter reminded her.

“Of course, I know,” she said.

“I like to make everything clear and completely understood,” he said.

“I understand.”

“Otherwise people imagine things.”

“Well, that’s not always so bad, is it? Imagination, I mean.” Sally’s eyelids felt heavy with sleep.

“I hope you didn’t say yes just because you were lonely.”

“No, I’m used to being lonely,” she assured him. “I’ve been lonely for years.” She let her eyes close.

“Maybe you said yes because you need somebody,” he suggested.

Sally gave a long contented sigh and let herself drift toward sleep. “Maybe I said yes because you said you needed a place to stay,” she murmured. “Or maybe because I’d never gone to bed with anyone so, so—so white.”

Peter Drock believed Sally was overly emotional and was probably falling in love with him, but that was all right with Peter because at summer’s end he was flying back to the East Coast. He had an expensive apartment in Cambridge and an office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was deep into information theory: packets of information, redundancy, noise—things like that. He had come to Portland for a communications conference, had seen Sally in a Starbucks and decided to stay for the summer. She was drinking coffee and memorizing words from a big ocean-blue notebook. He had struck up a conversation and, as he expected, he found she had an interest in language. Later he learned she was only a social worker, which disappointed him, and up close she was not so young as he usually liked, but she was clearly impressed when he told her what he was going to achieve in life. Peter was writing a book, a book to make mathematical linguistics understandable to non-specialists and make himself better known, probably even famous.

Unfortunately, the book wasn’t coming along well and he realized that he hated writing. That’s why he slammed shut the lid on his laptop this morning and told Sally, “I’ll come with you to your dissertation. I’ll pretend to take one of his language lessons.”

“Great!” Sally said, delighted. “Sakurado is a wonderfully paranoid person and very likeable.”

“Anything will be more likeable than writing a book,” Peter said. He pulled on a sweatshirt imprinted with God said followed by Maxwell’s equations for light.

“Just don’t upset him. Sometimes he weeps,” she said, kissing Peter’s cheek. “Let’s go.”

3

Shozo Sakurado’s classroom was jammed between a tattoo parlor and a shop that sold incense and scented candles. His sign above the sidewalk said Learn A Sound Language Free Lessons, formerly Seattle, San Francisco, etc. As they approached it, Peter said, “Let me go in first, by myself, to make it look real.”

Sally started to say something, but by then Peter had turned in at the open door, discovering abruptly the whole place was not much wider than the door and only five feet deep. It was so shallow that the man (copper-color face, shaved head, rugby shirt) seated behind the desk had been able to tilt his chair back to the rear wall and was singing with his eyes closed against the sun. It was a mournful song, the unintelligible words coming slower and slower until there were only solitary vowel sounds, solitary musical notes, like drops of water falling from a tree after a lashing rain. When he had finished he opened his eyes, saw Peter and crashed forward in his chair. “Come in, sir! Come in, come in, come in,” he said, cheerfully.

Peter took a half-step forward, all there was room for. “What is this language, this sound language?”

“You would like to become a student,” Sakurado declared, quite pleased.

“Yes, and the song—”

“Not to worry. If you listen, you will learn.” He had swung a small folded lawn chair up over the desk and gave it a brisk shake, snapping it open.

“That song you were singing, what language was that?”

“The words of the rain. Beautiful, yes. And also very sad. Please sit down. First lesson is the introduction. Not difficult at all.”

Peter sat down, the back legs of his chair on the sidewalk outside and his knees bumping against the desk. “What language—,” he began.

“Ah! Here she is,” he said, smiling past Peter. “My very faithful student. She doesn’t need a first lesson, but will keep you company.” He gently handed a folding chair over his desk to his very faithful student, Sally Raven. Sally sat down, opened the large blue notebook in her lap and, poising her pen at the top of page, looked up at her teacher and smiled encouragingly.

“Shozo Sakurado,” he said.

“What?” Peter said.

“My name. Shozo Sakurado.”

“I don’t know what language you teach but your name and accent sound Japa—” Peter stopped because Sally had flung out her arm, slapping him in the chest with a page ripped from her notebook.

“You can use this to take notes!” she said, cutting him off.

Peter took the paper but continued to speak, saying, “Mr. Sakurado, I don’t believe—” But Sally’s hand smacked into his chest with another sheet torn from her notebook. “Hey!” Peter cried, turning to her. “All right, all right,” he muttered. “He’s not about to weep.” He sat back in his lawn chair, sighed and folded his arms.

“Please begin,” Sally said politely.

Sakurado vanished beneath the desk, leaving his students to gaze at the back wall which was painted a patchy, blotchy blue and decorated with bright picture postcards of white sand beaches and clear lagoons, plus an antique poster of a phrenological head—the profile of a bald person with areas of the head labeled like countries on a map. The labels had been imperfectly whitewashed over and other words had been written near the mouth describing different sounds, such as sibilants, dentals, fricatives. Peter leaned toward Sally and said, “Does he read head bumps too?” Sakurado emerged with a cardboard box, which he set bottom-side-up on the desk, and on that he placed his lecture notes.

He began by talking about the Pacific island where he had lived, an island so small it would not show up on a map “unless the map is too big to unfold.” He described the broad white beaches, the lavish greenery, the coral reefs that broke the incoming waves and threw off spray “as clear and sparkling as tears.” He spoke of the rising sea, how it flooded the island and dispersed the islanders, sent them into exile where they must “live as strangers among strangers, learning a new language and forgetting their own.” Peter, growing bored, glanced at Sally and was astonished to see her eyes were glistening, filled almost to overflowing with tears.

Sakurado had lectured for about forty-five minutes. Now he was discussing the grammar and curious verbal structure of his language, in which, he emphasized, the words sounded like the things they represented. In other languages there was no connection between the sound of a word and what the word stood for. “For example, the same animal we refer to by making the sound—” and here Sakurado paused, then carefully enunciated the sound dog. “That same animal is referred to in France by the making sound chien, and on the islands of Japan by the sound inu. But all that is different in my native language, the sound language, the language of the island, Nagori.” Then he swept away the cardboard box and said, “Lesson over.”

Sally shut her notebook and exchanged a smile with Sakurado. Peter stood up to shake hands, saying, “Congratulations, whoever you are.”

“Shozo Sakurado,” he replied.

“Very imaginative, all of it,” said Peter.

The handful of passersby who had stopped to listen to the lesson had drifted off. Sally waited a few steps away and as Peter turned to her, he heard Sakurado behind him say, “Bow-wow!” He looked back and saw Sakurado sitting with his hands folded on the desk, quite sober. “Bow-wow!” he repeated and waved good-bye.

4

They walked along, Peter’s blond hair glittering in the sunshine, Sally’s hair swaying like a black banner in the breeze. “What did you think?” she asked him. “Isn’t that a beautiful story? Isn’t he interesting?” She cradled the big blue notebook against her breasts. “He’s the real thing, all right.”

“He’s a fraud is what he is. He’s bogus,” Peter informed her.

“Oh, no. Please don’t say that. He’s just a little paranoid, that’s all,” Sally said.

“You mean like when he said bow-wow to me when we left?”

“No. That’s the way he always ends the first lesson,” she said. “Whenever anyone new drops in he gives the first lesson. I’ve heard it a lot. But hardly anyone stays for the next lessons. Except for some homeless men who used to come in the mornings between when the shelter would make them leave and the library would let them in. But they only lasted a week.”

“He’s sane. He’s also a con man,” Peter said, his voice firm.

Sally winced and abruptly stepped off the curb, saying, “Let’s eat.” She zigzagged through the street traffic and ducked into a sandwich shop. They chose a table, ordered their sandwiches, and while Peter listened to his accumulated cell phone messages, Sally looked over her old language notes. After their sandwiches came they carefully talked not of Sakurado but about the decayed Old Town neighborhood and it wasn’t till they were finishing that Peter said, “Why do you think he’s paranoid?”

She brightened. “He thinks there’s a conspiracy aimed at him and people are trying to control his mind.”

“Oh. Well. That does sound like paranoia,” he conceded.

“Exactly!” She smiled, clearly relieved. “He thinks people are plotting to help him out, to do him favors behind his back. He believes persons unknown are trying to jolly him up, make him feel good.”

Peter’s coffee cup halted halfway to his mouth, and he looked at Sally to see if she were joking. “I never heard of paranoia like that,” he said.

“It’s a rare case. That’s why I want to write about him. And because he’s so interesting, so authentic.”

“Maybe he’s faking that, too.”

Sally ordered a fresh sandwich wrapped to go and they left the shop. “We haven’t got much time to get back to the language school,” she said, dodging between two cars in the ragged street traffic.

“It’s not a school, it’s a hole in the wall,” Peter said, catching up with her. “And why do we have to get back there?”

“Because at this hour he shuts the door and walks down to the river and simply stares at the water. I know because I’ve followed him. I think he can’t afford to eat lunch.”

“He doesn’t look starved to me. He looks trim.”

“I didn’t notice,” she said vaguely. “Maybe he meditates. Many well-built people meditate.”

“He probably works out at a gym. And you can’t tell how old he is with that shaved head.”

She thought about that. “I don’t think age matters that much. Not to me, anyway.—So. Well. One day in class he was looking for some misplaced notes under his desk, and he came up with a small square pillow and a folded blanket. I think he sleeps there. And I know he closes the school and goes for a walk at this hour.”

Sure enough, when they reached Sakurado’s place, the big door was closed. Sally hauled it open wide enough to reach inside; she took a glossy brochure from her notebook and laid it on the desk and then placed the sandwich on the paper. She pressed the door closed with her hip. As they walked away Peter asked what the booklet was about.

“It’s about social services in Portland. I think he could use it.”

“I don’t know what kind of a scam he’s running, but he sure has you hooked,” he said.

Then they split—Sally to the clinic where she worked part-time, Peter to make calls on his cell phone and then back to their apartment to begin his book.

5

Before Peter Drock moved into Sally Raven’s apartment, the two had gotten to know each other, of course. Sally had told him about her youth among the Tlingit (absent father, drunken husband, dead baby), and Peter had told her about himself (Newton public schools, Rensselaer Polytech, Stanford.) And their first love-making on Sally’s brass bed had been a complete success for both of them, finally, more or less. But an awkwardness developed between them after Peter attended Sally’s language class at Sakurado’s storefront.

Now they got along somewhat like suitemates. Peter bought groceries, Sally made dinner, and they shared the bedroom. Actually, to be precise, Sally decided to sleep alone in the big brass bed but she let Peter sleep on it in a sleeping bag that she had loaned him. Peter had his half-dozen books lined up on the sitting room window sill and there by the window he typed and deleted on his laptop. Sally scribbled her dissertation at the kitchen table and lowered her voice when she practiced Sakurado’s strange vocabulary lists. Some of the so-called words sounded like soft noises, others resembled songs or solitary musical tones. Most unnerving to Peter were the more recognizable sounds—the cries of sea birds, the gusts of rain blowing through abandoned houses, the sound of great waves that rolled from the kitchen to the sitting room. Peter still admired Sally’s generosity, her stamina, and her being a Native American Tlingit. But, frankly, he was disappointed by her naiveté, or maybe annoyed by it, for she truly believed in that make-believe language.

This evening Peter didn’t bother to open his laptop but sat by the window wondering how to get Sally Raven to stop believing in Sakurado. Sally came in from the kitchen with a glass of white wine in each hand. “I learned a beautiful poem tonight,” she said, handing him a glass. “And I practiced the word for ear and to listen—those words are variations on the same sound, which means sea shell. And there’s a soft deep luminous sound that means when the eyes of two people in love meet and see into each other.”

“How long have you been listening to that Sakurado person?”

“Not long. He began two months ago. I know the language pretty well now. It’s easy, more like learning a song or a poem,” Sally said. “And they all fit together.”

“Why keep going back?”

“Sometimes he forgets the grammar or he uses the wrong word, and that’s embarrassing when there’s other students in class. But I’ve taken good notes so I can help him out, help him remember things right.”

“He forgets his own language?” Peter laughed and laughed.

“I don’t see what’s so funny! Besides, his stories about the island always make me feel better. The native people are like an endless family, and there’s always children playing at the edge of the sea. In fact, I’d like to go there,” she added.

“He said the islands were underwater now. And you told me global warming or something had made the sea rise and everything washed away, all the people drowned.”

“I’m not sure what happened. I think it’s still there, someplace. I mean, if we can get enough people to learn the language, and if we all pay for a ship—”

“Ever wonder where that fraud gets his money?”

“He works nights for a printer on Market Street. I know because I sort of followed him,” she said. “It’s such a beautiful language—”

“There’s no such language.”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“I’m a scientist. I know linguistics. Your Sakurado is a fraud.”

“Shozo isn’t about linguistics,” she said, hotly. “That’s like saying Picasso is about paintbrushes!”

“Did you ever hear of Ferdinand de Saussure? Let me tell you about Saussure,” Peter said. But just then Peter’s cell phone rang and he had to answer it.

6

Ferdinand de Saussure established modern linguistics and invented semiotics, now you know. He was born in Switzerland in 1857, a remarkably bright kid. He entered graduate school at nineteen, wrote a book on Indo-European languages at twenty-one, and had his doctorate by the time he was twenty-three. Scholars hadn’t been able to create a science of linguistics, he said, because they hadn’t understood the nature of language. They had been examining individual words, and doing a nice job of it, but the essence of language is in the formal system, or code, which controls those words. So the true science of linguistics, Saussure said, was the study of that system. And Saussure also laid the cornerstone of a new science, semiology, the study of signs. After all, words are simply signs pointing to things. And, it turns out, signs and the way they relate to each other create reality. But to get back to plain words, Saussure taught that words are arbitrary sounds and don’t have any essential connection to what they refer to. There’s no language composed of words that sound like what they mean. And that’s the point that Peter Drock wanted to make when he was interrupted by that phone call.

7

Peter must have overslept the next morning, because by the time he got to the kitchen table, Sally was already on her way out. “I made a pot of coffee,” she said, gathering up her purse, her keys, a lipstick. “On the stove.”

“The call was from the person renting my Cambridge apartment for the summer,” Peter explained. “That’s why I had to answer it. And the reception is better outside. That’s why I went outside.”

Sally shrugged. “That’s all right. I already knew about So-sure. I’m not a complete dummy.—I got the morning hours today,” she added, sweeping up her notebook. “See you later,” she said over her shoulder.

Sally rarely used her car because it was falling apart again, but this morning she drove to the clinic and when her shift was over, she drove to the river. A soft rain had begun to fall. She parked and walked along the grassy margin and found Shozo Sakurado sitting on a bench facing the water.

“Professor Sakurado, you’ll get wet,” she said.

Sakurado turned. “Ah, Miss Raven. And it really, really is you,” he added.

“Only me.”

He smiled and stood up. “And I say really you because there have been times—in broad daylight, at noon—when I thought I saw you out of the corner of my eye when I was walking here, but when I looked, no one was there.”

“That happens to everybody.”

“Does it? That’s good. I was afraid someone from your office might say I was paranoid.—Do you have time to join me?” he asked, gesturing to the damp bench.

Sally seated herself at the nearest end of the bench.

Sakurado resumed his place at the other end, saying, “I even thought I saw you one night on Market Street on my way to my night job.”

“What happened?”

“It turned out to be only another shadow in the darkness. But here’s the actual true Miss Raven. In the rain.”

“I think this is falling mist, not rain,” she said, holding her palm out to catch the drops. They discussed the weather for a while, and Professor Sakurado agreed with Miss Raven that it was merely falling mist, not rain, and a warm mist at that, though the drops were getting larger.

“And please call me Sally,” said Sally. “I have a question. Did you ever hear of a man named So-sure?”

Sakurado looked puzzled. “Maybe,” he replied slowly. “Maybe, Ferdinand de Saussure?”

“That’s the one. Who is he?”

“Let’s see. He was Swiss. His most famous book is called A Course in General Linguistics.” Shozo smiled, his face lighting up. “But he didn’t write it. It was composed by students who took good notes in class.” He laughed. “If you would call me Shozo—,” he began.

“Oh, I do. In my mind, I mean, love.” She gave a quick laugh, shaking her head to erase her misspeaking. “I mean, I love your classes. The sound of the language.”

“Thank you.”

“And the poems or songs,” Sally continued. “They fit together. They tell a story, almost.”

Shozo looked at her a long moment. “Only a person like yourself—or, no—only you, yourself, would notice that. Only you have listened to them, all of them.”

“I’m sure—,” she began, but broke off, distracted by his sad eyes. “I’m sure there are many more,” she said, plucking a heavy rope of wet hair from her cheek.

“No, no more. The end,” he told her.

She hesitated. “No more? What do you mean, no more?”

“Everything ends,” he said. “Everything ends on July twelve.”

“Tomorrow? That’s impossible! What happens to the classes?”

“No more,” he said mechanically.

“But I need more. They have to go on.”

“Everything ends on July twelve, always.”

The air was thick with rain and Sally’s face had become gray, her lips violet. “What do I do now?” she asked, looking at him, her hair glistening black, streaming rainwater.

Shozo scrambled to his feet and pulled off his rugby shirt, saying. “You’re getting chill. Here, take this, at least it has sleeves.” The copper colored flesh of his chest had a sparse peppering of short hair, the same as on his jaws.

“What?”

“The rain is chilling you.”

“Oh. My car’s near here,” she said, looking around.

Shozo had pulled her to her feet, or else Sally had taken him by the hand to lead him to her car. In any case, he had lifted his shirt over his head and stretched it over Sally’s head and they ran (huddled together this way) to her car. They ducked in, but then Sally sat behind the wheel, staring blankly ahead. “Where do I go from here?” she murmured.

“I’ll show you the way.”

“What? Oh, that. Don’t worry.” She tried to start the car, but it didn’t catch.

“At least we are dry,” he said, wringing out his shirt. “And cozy.”

“It’s a VW, but it came in from Mexico. They don’t make them this way anymore.—What am I talking about? Am I making any sense?” Abruptly the car leapt forward, halted, jerked forward once more and then pulled smoothly ahead. “I’ll drive you back to the school,” she told him.

They sat inches apart, their elbows touching at every rattling bounce, neither one saying a word. The windows fogged up. Sally rubbed her hand vigorously on the glass to clear a porthole to peer through. “You are a good driver,” Shozo announced.

Sally glanced at him. “Really? Do you think so?”

“Like a harbor pilot in a storm, very good.”

They pulled up at Shozo’s place. He got out and turned to her. “Thank you, Sally.”

He smiled, the corners of his eyes wrinkling, and she smiled in return.

“Thank you, Shozo.” She pulled away from the curb and drove home, her smile gone, her face a desolate blank.

8

Sally didn’t go to the last class. She woke up at the usual time that morning but lay heavily in bed and gazed at the ceiling. She remained that way while Peter got up, shaved, showered, and pulled on his clothes. He shook out the sleeping bag, smoothed it and turned down the open corner. “Are you okay?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said, her voice flat, tuneless. She pushed herself halfway to a sitting position and tucked a pillow behind her head. “I mean no,” she emended. She wore a sloppy old t-shirt in bed; her hair had fallen in front of her eyes, but she seemed not to care and didn’t push it away.

“What’s wrong?”

She told him the language classes were over.

“Does that mean you can’t write your dissertation? Is that the problem?” he asked.

“What?”

“You said Sakurado was your dissertation subject. Can you still write about him?”

Sally lifted her hands a bit and let them drop listlessly on the blanket. “Oh. That. Yes. I can still write about him. I’m already halfway through. For what it’s worth.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

“How’s your book coming?” she asked, just to change the subject.

“I can’t get into the third paragraph.” Peter sat on the edge of the bed, his shoulders bent. “I loathe writing.”

“You told me you published lots of papers. You said you had a publications list as long as your arm.”

“I do. But the papers are mostly math. I can write math,” he told her.

“I thought you were writing about communications.”

“I am. Information theory.”

“Ferdinand de Saussure,” she said, carefully articulating each syllable.

“No. Saussure is a hundred years old. Claude Shannon is the man. He was a genius. Let me tell you about him,” he said, turning toward her.

“Don’t,” she said.

“He made some great equations about communicating.”

“I’ll make you breakfast if you shut up,” Sally told him.

Sally fried ten strips of bacon, scrambled four eggs, and toasted three slices of bread. While arranging the bacon strips in the pan she heard that Claude Shannon had gone to the University of Michigan where, among his courses in science and in mathematics, he came across the curious works of George Boole—an obscure and long-dead teacher who had devised a way to write logic statements in mathematical notation. She was cracking eggs when she learned that after Claude Shannon left Michigan he continued his studies at MIT, where he worked with electrical circuits. At some point Shannon was struck by the similarity of electrical circuits and switches to the mathematical logic invented by Boole. By the time Sally had finished breakfast, Shannon had written his MIT master’s thesis and demonstrated how Boolean logic could be used to solve the problem of arranging switches in an electric circuit. “Then he turned his idea around and showed how an arrangement of switches could be used to solve Boolean logic problems,” Peter said, clearly delighted. “It was the greatest master’s thesis ever, and it created the computer!”

“What’s that got to do with language?” Sally asked.

“I haven’t told you that part yet.”

“I’m going to take a shower,” She said.

Peter’s cell phone rang. He looked at the caller’s number and said, “It’s the crazy woman who’s renting my apartment.”

“Don’t forget to do the dishes when you’ve finished the call,” Sally told him over her shoulder. After her shower she drove all the way to Cannon Beach (she didn’t care if the car broke down), meandered barefoot down the shore, stared at the gray Pacific, then drove back to Portland. That took care of the day.

9

Sally felt no better the next morning, but she got up anyway. When Peter crawled out of his sleeping bag, he found the brass bed was empty, smooth and tight. He pulled on his jeans and an old t-shirt and washed up, all the while listening to her singing from the kitchen—or not singing, but rather chanting, or reciting, or whatever it was that she did when she gave voice to that fraud Sakurado’s make-believe language. Peter identified the cri-cri-cri of gulls, the crash-and-hush of waves against the shore, the sounds of children playing at the edge of the sea, and that was followed by a passage of recitative (which, frankly, he found simply tuneless) and then a lovely, slow melody of such nostalgia, such intense longing, that he stopped toweling his wet head and stood at the kitchen doorway, listening. Sally didn’t see Peter until she had finished singing. “I almost let it slip through my fingers,” she announced, apparently stunned.

“What are you talking about?”

“Reality,” she said, sweeping her car keys from the table. “Whatever that is.”

She drove to Shozo Sakurado’s place. The sign was gone, but the door was partway open, and Shozo was behind the desk in the shadowy light, wedging a handful of picture postcards into a bulging backpack. There was a plump duffle bag open beside it.

“Ah, Sally Raven,” he said, his face brightening for a moment. “Good. You are here. Yes. Excellent,” he said briskly, tugging the zipper shut on the backpack.

“What are you doing?’

“Packing, as you can see.” He gave her a quick smile. “Good-bye, San Francisco. Good-bye, Seattle. Good-bye, West Coast—”

“Where are you going?”

“Portland.”

“Shozo, please,” she said, her voice a mix of anger and panic. “You’re already in Portland.”

“Portland on the other side. Portland in Maine on the East Coast. You think I’m crazy? You think I don’t know where I am?”

“I don’t know what to think, I—”

“You think I don’t know truth from fiction?” He laughed.

“I don’t—,” she began.

“Next, Portland in Maine. Said to be beautiful. Have you packed? Or are you here only to see me off, wave good-bye?” A note of hostile gaiety had crept into his talk.

He turned to the back wall and began to take down the drawing of the phrenological head, the one with areas mapped on the bald skull. Freshly inked Japanese kanji filled each part of the head.

“Wait! What’s the writing? What did you write on it?”

Shozo turned and looked at her a moment, then turned back to the diagram. “This one says grief, this one says loneliness, this one says loss, this one says—” He broke off, pounded both fists into the wall, buckling and shattering the thin gypsum-board so it collapsed, fell to the side. The room extended far, far back into the dark. Shozo had begun sobbing, wailing, moaning as he wandered farther and farther back, the echoes of his monstrous grief heaping up in waves, one upon the other, booming like surf. Sally scrambled over the desk, waded into the echoing dark, grabbed Shozo and hauled him back to the light. He lay across the desk, slowly getting his breath back. Sally pushed the door wide open, filling the little room with sunlight, then she took up his knapsack and duffle bag and tossed them into her car. Shozo sat up, rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hands, looked at her.

“Sally Raven,” he said.

“Yes.”

“That’s a beautiful name.”

“I’m a Native American, born a Tlingit in the Tlingit nation. I’ll tell you about me another day. And you?”

“I was born in Hawaii. My parents were Japanese, and when I was a little boy we returned to Japan, to Okushiri, an island in the Sea of Japan.”

“No!” Sally cried. “I want the real story. I want the island where they speak the musical language!”

“I’m telling you the real story,” Shozo said. “The kind you read in newspapers.”

For a moment Sally felt dizzy. She shook her head as if to clear it, or maybe to signal no.

“Yes,” said Shozo.

“Tell me the rest,” Sally said, looking directly into his eyes to keep her balance.

“Does it matter?”

“It matters to me,” she told him. “Everything about you matters to me.”

“In Hokkaido, I re-learned English. I have a talent for languages, so I became a teacher of English, then a teacher of Japanese in this country. In San Francisco, I married a Japanese-American like me. We had a little boy. Then I took them to visit my parents in Okushiri. That was the summer of 1993. On July 12, at 10:17 at night, an earthquake shook the island and a few minutes later a tsunami rolled over the town of Aonae, taking away my father and my mother and my wife and my little boy.”

For a long moment there was nothing more to say. Sally Raven and Shozo Sakurado simply looked at each other.

“And now you tell stories about an island and a loss,” Sally said.

“Yes.”

“In a beautiful language nobody understands.”

“I think one person understands,” Shozo said.

“I’ll drive us to my place.”

“I’m going to Portland. On the Atlantic side.”

“We can do that later,” she said.

10

When they got to Sally’s, they found Peter and a woman with straw-colored hair at the kitchen table, a small banged-up suitcase on the floor by her chair.

“Oh, ah, well,” Peter said to Sally. “This is Erica. She just got in. Flew in. From Cambridge. Massachusetts.”

The woman, whose hair stood up in all directions, wore a black swim-top and big turquoise earrings the color of her eyes.

“Let me guess,” Sally said. “This is the crazy woman who’s renting your place for the summer.”

“Renting?” said Erica, astonished. She looked to Peter, then back at Sally. “I don’t know what little fiction he told you, but we’ve been living together for five years. Who are you?”

“I’m Sally Raven, and this is my apartment,” Sally told her.

Erica stood up and shook Sally’s hand, saying, “I’m Erica Lindstrom, and I came here to get the money for my restaurant. And this is—?”

“This is Shozo Sakurado, the poet,” Sally said.

“Poet?” Peter cried, as if he had not heard right. “Poet?”

“Hey, I recognize your t-shirt,” Shozo told him. “You came to one class.”

Peter plucked his t-shirt out to see what he was wearing. “Oh. This. Maxwell’s equations.”

Shozo laughed. “You think God speaks in equations?”

“The language of God is mathematics.”

“Oh, no, no. You got that wrong,” Shozo informed him. “The language of God is language.”

“What the hell is going on here?” Erica asked.

Peter and Shozo and Sally started to explain, all talking at once, while at the same time Shozo and Sally unloaded the grocery bags onto the table. Erica put her hands over her ears. “Never mind!” she said. “I came here to get my money.”

“Peter owes you money?” Sally asked.

“I paid off his student loans and his maxed-out credit cards. Yes, he owes me.”

“Hey, wait a minute,” Peter cried. “It isn’t that way at all. We agreed, Erica, we agreed.”

“We agreed on what, Peter? Apparently I’ve never understood what we agreed on. Apparently you didn’t make yourself completely clear and completely understood,” said Erica. “Despite your reverence for your god, Shannon.”

“He has a god named Shannon?” Shozo asked.

“You make it sound as if all we have is a financial relationship, a banking arrangement,” Peter said. “We’re more than that and you know—”

“More than that until you decided to stay out here to shack up with—” Erica broke off, turned to Sally and said, “I’m sorry I said that,” then back to Peter, saying, “Until you decided to stay out here all summer and scam this decent Sally Raven.”

Sally waved her hand as if brushing away a fly. “There’s nothing going on between Peter and me. Is anybody hungry? Other than me? Because I’m hungry.”

“We have to leave,” Erica announced, picking up her suitcase. “Peter, out the door!”

“No one has to leave,” Sally told her. “Everybody’s invited to stay.”

Erica sent Peter out to get more bread and more wine. Meanwhile, Shozo found the bedroom, rolled up the sleeping bag and tossed it into the closet, put his knapsack and duffle bag on the brass bed. Peter returned with three bottles of chilled wine and a loaf of Italian bread. Shozo unfolded fresh linen over the kitchen table, lit the candles. Then everyone sat down to salad and salmon prepared by Erica and Sally—the salmon baked under chopped tomatoes and celery and black seaweed powder, echoing a Tlingit recipe from when Sally was a kid. Maybe everyone drank too much wine. Maybe that’s why Shozo turned to Peter and asked him to explain the equations on his t-shirt.

“They’re electromagnetic equations. Light is a form of electromagnetic radiation. God said this.” Peter pointed to the equations.

Shozo shook his head. “No, no. God created light by saying Let there be light, and he called the light Day and the darkness he called Night. He did it all with words.”

“After which God created mathematics to find out what he had done,” Peter said.

“There’s a Tlingit story that says Raven created the world,” Sally put in, hoping to change the conversation.

It worked, and for a while Sally kept everyone entertained with Tlingit myths and legends. But then Shozo turned to Peter and said, “Tell me about your god Shannon.”

“That’s Claude Shannon, not god Shannon. Claude Shannon, the mathematician, the inventor of communication theory. It’s about getting the message across clear and completely understood.”

“What’s his theory of communication?”

“Well, to begin with, he applied the mathematics of probability to information, and his equations using log—”

Shozo cut in. “Another equation? More math?”

Erica turned to Sally, saying, “The nice thing about being a chef is that you begin with a recipe and end up with something to eat. Which is more than you can say about any theory.”

“Math is the most refined language there is,” Peter continued. “It’s pure, absolutely pure.”

“Pure, because it refers only to itself,” Shozo said. “Math is the most impoverished language there is.”

Those four at the kitchen table could have broken up at any time, but each of them felt unreasonably contented to stay there and talk. The windows were open with the curtains pulled aside to let in the soft night air. The candle flames were tall and unwavering.

Shozo spoke passionately about the thousands of languages populating the globe, how each was different in ways that would astonish the speakers of another language, how some use clicks and others use tones, how some have tenses unknown in this land, how one has words in sixteen genders while another has no gender at all, and some inflect verbs to signal how certain the speaker is in saying what he says. But above and beyond all this, said Shozo, is the power of language to shape our reality and create whole worlds.

“No. Reality is what you can measure,” Peter said, pouring more wine into his glass. “No measurement, no reality.”

“Your mathematics is an anemic language and all it can provide is those measurements. Reality is richer and more complex than that.” Shozo opened his arms as if to embrace the disorderly table, the candle-lit room, and the world outside. “This is reality.”

Peter tilted his head back, drained his glass, and set it down so hard it rang. “Numbers is facts, and fiction is lies,” he said.

Shozo laughed. “Our lives are not equations, our lives are stories,” he said.

11

The last speaker of Aore lived on Mafea Island in the Republic of Vanuatu, an archipelago nation in the South Pacific—all of which sounds fictional but is factual. And it’s a fact that on July 12, 1993, an earthquake staggered the west coast of Hokkaido, producing a tsunami that swept onto Okushiri Island and rolled over the town of Aonae. The words Aonae and Aore are similar, but they mean quite different things, like Portland and Portland. Sally Raven forgot her childhood Tlingit and the language is fast disappearing, though some are striving to teach it to the young. Peter Drock and Erica Lindstrom are no longer living together in Cambridge, a city of many restaurants, including a small one owned by Erica. Shozo Sakurado and Sally Raven, husband and wife, live in the hillside city of Portland—the one in Maine—overlooking the ocean where you can hear the cries of gulls, listen to the crash and hush of great waves, and see children at play on the shore.

© 2009 by Eugene Mirabelli.

Originally published in Not One of Us.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Eugene Mirabelli had his first novel published 54 years ago. He is the author of eight novels, one novella, and a mini-book, numerous journal articles and reviews. Though Mirabelli’s novels are mainstream literary fictions, his short stories are in the realm of science fiction and fantasy, and include the Nebula Award finalist “The Woman in Schrodinger’s Wave Equations.” His sci-fi and fantasy tales have been published in Czech, French, Hebrew, Polish, Russian, and Sicilian. His novel, The Language Nobody Speaks, is one of the few erotic novels from the West published in Turkey. He’s received grants for his work, including one from the Rockefeller Foundation, and earlier this year his novel Renato, the Painter, received a gold medal, tying for first place as the best work of literary fiction from an independent press. He can be found at his eclectic website, CriticalPages.com, and at Mirabelli.net.

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None Owns the Air
Ken Liu

“Push! Push! Damn it, put your backs into it!” Kino Ye’s voice rose to a panicked screech as the four sweat-drenched soldiers strained against the spokes of the giant winch. “Push!”

But one of the spokes snapped as the man leaning against it fell face-first into the sand, and the winch whipped around and tossed the other three men through the air to land sprawling on the beach a few paces away. The finger-thick cable began to unwind from the winch rapidly, the howling of the spinning drum rising in pitch. The cable reached its end and snapped with a loud crack.

The soldiers at the winch for the other control cable, twenty paces away, stumbled as the counterbalancing force from the first cable disappeared. They looked up, jaws wide open.

“Oh, by Kiji’s beard!” Kino covered his face.

Having been freed from one of its two control cables, the giant kite—with a straw man hanging underneath as the test pilot—bobbed in the air a few times before spinning into a nose dive. It accelerated downward, spinning faster and faster, until it crashed into the sea with a noiseless splash in the distance.

“I didn’t realize that the king’s officers are now paid to fly kites and to take the gods’ names in vain.”

The speaker was a young woman at the top of the sand dunes. Instead of a dress, she wore a pilgrim’s white leggings and pale robes. Her hair was worn loose in the manner of unmarried maids, and her face was a feminine copy of Kino’s. She gave Kino an affectionate smile.

“Lowi! What . . . are you doing here? You should have written first.” Flustered, Kino told the soldiers to take a break and came over, embracing the young woman awkwardly.

“What kind of greeting is that to give your only sister? Your last letter home said that you had been selected for the Navy. The Navy! I thought, but my brother has always wanted to be an army engineer. . . I couldn’t wait to find out what you were up to. But then not a word in two months! Mother and Father are worried sick. So I offered to come out for a surprise visit.”

“I’m sorry I haven’t written. I’ve been . . . occupied.”

Lowi looked at the spools of cables and half-finished giant kites scattered around the beach and lifted an eyebrow.

“It’s complicated. Why don’t we have lunch, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

Kino watched the young boy capering and singing and giggling on the stone floor as though he were performing in some rustic inn full of drunken, indulgent patrons instead of the court of King Dézan, one of the seven most powerful men in the world.

What gives man power? What adds to his fame?

The gods move us, pieces in the Great Game.

Kino squinted to discern the king’s reaction to this performance. As he listened to the boy’s eerie song from atop his high throne, the king’s face was hidden in the shadows cast by the flickering torches below.

The boy’s head and arms convulsed as he twirled in place, the very image of someone in the throes of religious ecstasy.

King Dézan’s palace in Kriphi, capital of Xana, was small by the standards of the Seven States of Dara. After all, Xana consisted of only the two smallest and most remote islands of the archipelago. The beams of the Great Hall were only as thick as a man’s waist; the walls were not covered in gold leafs or hung with rich tapestries; and the floor was tiled with rough-hewn, plain blocks of stone, without the intricate patterns one might see in the palaces of cosmopolitan Boama or magnificent Çaruza. Yet, as the boy’s reedy voice echoed off the bare walls and floor, the palace’s stark furnishings added to the sense of foreboding and awe.

Two rows of ministers and generals lined the sides of the Great Hall, and every pair of eyes was focused on the dancing figure.

The will of the gods is dark, murky, an ocean,

Read the currents, oh king, and do not fear motion.

“What do you think?” whispered Sora Ingda to Kino, the young aide standing behind him. Ingda, former Secretary of the Navy, had recently been demoted to a minister of the fifth rank, temporarily administering the Navy until a suitable replacement could be found. He and Kino stood at the very end of the line on the left, almost at the door, as far away from the king as was possible while still remaining in the Great Hall.

“He sounds just like a street performer I saw the other day who claimed to hear the voices of the gods,” whispered Kino. Then, realizing how his comment could be taken to be sacrilegious, he quickly added, “Though, of course, Lord Kiji works in mysterious ways.”

I really need to learn to stop blurting out whatever comes to mind, Kino thought. Having been a part of Minister Ingda’s staff for only a week, he had no idea how pious his master was.

Sora Ingda chuckled. “We shall see. The currents of fortune have pushed me out here. But perhaps the tides are turning.”

Kino wondered, for the hundredth time, how it was that, out of all the students who had taken the civil service examination this year, he had ended up with Sora Ingda. He had wanted to join the Army’s engineering division, and his free-form essay discussed ideas for improving the field logistics of the Xana Army with a new type of all-terrain transportation vehicle that rode on spring-loaded mechanical legs instead of wheels. Why would the former Navy Secretary be interested in him?

The Xana fleet’s surprise invasion of Crescent Island had been Ingda’s brainchild, and the armada’s defeat by the combined Amu-Haan fleet had almost cost Ingda his head in addition to his office. Serving Ingda was not a great start for his career.

Sora Ingda continued to whisper, “Lord Kiji may be mysterious, but palace politics is not. Duke Zyn brought this ‘oracle’ in to see the king; that tells me all I need to know.”

“I’ve heard that Duke Zyn does not have much use for ships,” Kino said. He was encouraged by the apparent irreverence in Ingda’s comment.

“Yes, he thinks of the Navy as but ferries for his troops. You might also find it helpful to know that there are rumors that Prince Ponahu of Amu is seeking a new secondary consort, and Duke Zyn’s daughter is said to be a favorite of the young man—though I suspect he’s more interested in Duke Zyn’s money.”

Kino looked over at Duke Zyn, standing at the other end of the Great Hall, almost at the foot of the throne. There was just the barest hint of a smile under the pious expression on the face of the commander-in-chief of the Xana Army.

The four elements guide and bind the fates,

The paths of both greater and lesser states.

Amu’s people are blessed with watery souls,

Earthy Cocru cannot long stand their roles.

Kino nodded, gradually coming to understand Ingda’s hint. Duke Zyn had been advocating that Xana seek an alliance with the seafaring power of Amu to counterbalance the overwhelming superiority of Cocru cavalry on the Big Island. (If Duke Zyn’s daughter were to become one of the higher-ranked royal wives of Amu, he would surely say it was but a happy coincidence.)

Ingda had objected to the proposal, pointing out that Amu and Cocru were friendly neighbors and that Amu had always been even more contemptuous of Xana than the other states. Besides, it made no sense to ally with Amu, the closest state to Xana. If Xana was to expand its territory, it should ally with states that were farther away while attacking its neighbors.

King Dézan had been vacillating between Zyn and Ingda’s arguments. And it seemed that Zyn had finally decided to bring in a “prophet” as support. If Zyn’s policy were adopted, Ingda’s Navy would be starved of funding in favor of the duke’s Army. Kino’s career prospects just got even worse than abysmal.

Sora Ingda turned around and looked Kino in the eyes. He whispered, “I know you’re not religious. But you do know how to act like you are, yes?”

Kino was flustered. “I . . . think so.”

“Good, if you don’t want to be stuck in a tiny office all your life, follow my lead. When the currents are turning, sometimes you have to jump in and see where the flow takes you. I picked you because in your essays I saw a glimmer of boldness and creativity and a lack of pious nonsense. I hope I was right.”

Before Kino could ask for clarification, Ingda had stumbled into the middle of the Great Hall like a drunken man. Arms and legs spasming, he zigzagged his way to the boy dancing before the throne and pounced on him, wrestling him to the floor in a heap.

The assembled ministers and generals were too stunned to say anything, except for Duke Zyn, who sputtered, “What . . . what is the meaning of this?”

Ingda rolled off the boy and lay on his back, flapping his arms and legs wildly. His eyes were turned up in his head so that only the whites were visible, and foam gathered at the corners of his mouth. When he began to speak, his voice was oddly inflected, deep, otherworldly.

“Silence! I am Kiji, Master of Winds and Lord of the Open Sky. Who dares to mangle my message?”

Duke Zyn’s face darkened. “Guards, seize him!”

Ingda sat up and continued to intone solemnly, “Those who would be great must follow the direction of the winds. Observe the currents flowing through air, not water.” His face was turned toward Kino.

Kino cursed under his breath. This might be the end of his patron, and this act could take him down as well. But a surge of excitement made his face flush. Ingda was right about him: He did like to gamble.

He stumbled into the middle of the hall, imitating Ingda’s drunken gait. He rolled his eyes up and made spittle gather between his lips. “I am Tazu, Lord of the Sea. Kiji, it is good to see you! This boy was sent by me as a joke, but I see you have seen through my trick.”

Not quite as elevated as the speech of the gods ought to be, thought Kino. And the voice is a bit squeaky. But the best I can do considering I’ve only had ten seconds to come up with it.

From the flickering shadows atop the throne, the king gestured once with his left hand. The palace guards who were about to rush at Ingda stopped.

Still flapping his arms and legs on the ground, Ingda began to sing:

Two fight over the earth, one dominates through fire,

Three sail over the water, but none owns the air.

By now the boy had slinked away into the shadows, and Ingda and Kino were the only two figures in the middle of the hall. Ingda repeated his song a few more times.

“Lord Kiji’s wisdom may be too obscure for mere mortals, I’m afraid,” said the king. “Perhaps Lord Tazu can help interpret?”

What in the world is Ingda getting at? Kino decided that he had no choice but to roll with it. Follow the direction of the winds.

Kino began to sing, imitating Ingda’s tune:

Power abhors a vacuum, need demands complement.

Cocru and Faça draw their strength from solid land;

Deep miners of Rima wield fire in either hand.

With ships, Amu, Haan, and Gan rule the watery element,

But he who masters air, the empty realm,

Seizes the vantage point, holds the world’s helm.

“Your Majesty,” Duke Zyn said, rage making his voice tremble. “We all know that Minister Ingda is not known for his piety. I doubt he has been to the temple on Mount Kiji more than once in his life. Why would Lord Kiji speak through him? Plainly, he’s trying to undermine the true prophesy of the gods, which points to strengthening our army and an alliance with Amu as the right path forward for Xana. We have put up with his nonsense for far too long, I’m afraid. I demand that he be immediately arrested and tried for blasphemy.”

Sora Ingda flopped around on the ground like a fish that had just been dragged out of the water, moaning incoherently. Kino fell down and began to do the same. Soon he was out of breath; being possessed by the gods was surprisingly hard work. A part of him wanted to laugh at the absurdity of their performance.

“My beloved Duke Zyn, you don’t get to demand anything.” King Dézan’s voice was as thin and unsteady as the flickering flames, but there was a sense of authority to it that could not be defied. “It’s true that Minister Ingda, a bold and irreverent man, is not known for his regular gifts to the Temple of Kiji, while you have been one of its most lavish donors. But it’s hard to imagine that a young aide, barely more than a boy, would have the temerity to pretend to speak for the gods in front of me.”

Kino buckled even harder on the ground, willing every tired muscle to demonstrate an otherworldly air. The urge to laugh at the spectacle he and Ingda were making had completely disappeared.

“But Sire—”

“Enough! When Minister Ingda is released from this trance, tell him what Lord Kiji and Lord Tazu have said. And inform him that he is now the Secretary of the Xana Air Force.”

“. . . and so now I’m supposed to come up with a way for Xana to dominate the skies.”

Kino stretched out his legs and tried to enjoy the way the smooth sand cushioned him. The siblings were sitting under a thatched roof held up by four poles on the beach. The sea breeze was cool and refreshing, their lunch of salty seaweed tea and plank-grilled fish filling but not heavy.

“Oh, will wonders never cease! Mother and Father were so worried about the corruption of the capital on your spirit, but I always had faith that you would find your way back to Lord Kiji. What was it like to have Lord Kiji speak through you?”

Kino had left out the truth about the “prophesy” in his account. His little sister had always believed far more than he in the power and involvement of the gods in the world. So he just shrugged noncommittally.

“I understand, of course, it’s indescribable. But how have you come to think the thing to do is to build bigger kites?”

Kino was relieved to be asked a question that he could answer.

“I know that battle kites aren’t too useful except for shoreline reconnaissance. But what else can I try? I came up with some new dual-cable designs to see if I could get better maneuverability, but you’ve seen the results. Men aren’t birds. We don’t know how to fly.”

“But if Lord Kiji prophesied it, you will figure out how to fly. Like all true prophesies, it seems so obvious once it’s been made: Kiji is our patron god, and, of course, Xana’s rise must depend on the element over which Lord Kiji holds sway. It makes perfect sense.”

Kino laughed in a way that was closer to despair than mirth, and took a sip of salty, bitter tea. “I’m glad this is all so simple to you. Sometimes I feel like I’ve been thrown into the middle of a storm, and I have no idea where to steer my vessel. Others have placed bets that I have to cover.”

“I believe in you. You’re the cleverest person I know. Lord Kiji wouldn’t have picked you if you weren’t the right man for the job.”

“I’d better come up with something, quick. The king isn’t going to wait forever, and Ingda and I both are living on borrowed time.”

“You make the king sound like a tyrant! He’s not going to kill you if you can’t carry out the will of the gods.”

Oh, if only you knew, Kino thought. I doubt if the king really was fooled by that “prophesy.” He tried to sound more positive. “I suppose I could end up just pushing paper in a windowless basement warehouse for the rest of my career. That would be a fitting punishment for failing to fly.”

“Oh, Kino, you sound so selfish. This isn’t about you, or Secretary Ingda, or even King Dézan. Have you forgotten why Xana is going to war? The rest of Dara have never viewed us as their equals just because we’re poor and out of the way. Amu and Haan took Crescent Island from us; none of the other states would aide us against pirates from the north; our ships pay more duties at the ports on the Big Island than everyone else’s.”

She grew more impassioned and waved her arms as she went on. “Don’t you remember how Father lost his business and all his property in Cocru because the local officials thought they could get away with treating a man from Xana that way? Don’t you recall how the tourists from Amu were shocked to find that Mother could read because they thought the women of Xana little better than animals? Have you blotted from your memory the time I went to visit Ginpen and the teahouses wouldn’t even let me be seated inside, claiming that I reeked because I was a Xana peasant?”

Kino’s face flushed. Lowi was right. For the last few months, he had been so absorbed in the task at hand and his own career prospects that he had, in fact, thought little about why Xana was fighting in the first place. Truth be told, he had never been as patriotic as his sister. The causes of nations and peoples and gods never held the same appeal to him as simple curiosity and the drive to solve a problem. But his sister reminded him of his duty.

“Xana’s injustices will not be forgotten by any son of Xana. I promise you that I’m doing my best, Sister.”

Lowi’s voice softened. “Sometimes we must trust in a power greater than ourselves. I was planning to go on a pilgrimage to Mount Kiji after visiting you. Why don’t you come with me?”

Why not? It’s not as if I’m getting so much done sitting around here, thought Kino. He looked affectionately at his sister. And this might be my last chance to take a scenic trip with someone who loves me before the king throws me into a prison, or worse, chops off my head for blasphemy.

“If you pray fervently, Lord Kiji will surely give you the inspiration you need.”

Mount Kiji, a towering, broad stratovolcano, dominated the landscape of Roui Island. It possessed several craters, two of which were filled with lakes: Lake Arisuso, higher, bigger, evening-sky blue, and Lake Dako, lower, smaller, emerald green. The western shore of Lake Arisuso was the site of the Temple of Kiji, and Lake Dako, where the hostel for the pilgrims was attached to an abbey. From here, the journey to the Temple would take another day.

By the time the monks at the hostel had settled Kino and Lowi into their room, there was still about an hour of daylight left. Kino wanted to rest up for the arduous hike the next day, but Lowi, energized by proximity to the holy site, would have none of it.

“We should go see the Mingén falcons,” she said, and dragged Kino outside. The monks pointed them to a short path through the dense evergreen forest surrounding the hostel, and soon they were on the shore of Lake Dako.

Even though it was now the beginning of summer, the water in the glacial lake and the air around it were still bone-chilling cold. Kino pulled his light summer cloak tighter around himself.

“There!” Lowi pointed up into the sky.

From the ground, the falcons circling overhead looked like stringless kites. With a wingspan of about twenty feet, these fearsome and majestic raptors were bigger than any other predatory bird found on all the islands of Dara. The birds lived only near the peak of Mount Kiji and were sacred, said to act as the god’s messengers and guards.

“Could you not learn the secret of flight from them?”

Kino snorted. “Do you think you’re the first to think that way? Countless scholars and philosophers have asked that question since the beginning of time. Decades ago, the great engineer Mouji had looked into the topic deeper than most. He studied birds great and small, from hummingbirds to hawks, from wild geese to sparrows, and he came to the conclusion that Man could not imitate the birds.”

“Why not?”

“A matter of mathematics. Birds have hollow bones and are relatively light, but they still have to have fairly large wings to fly. He took measurements of different species of birds and found a relationship between wing size, weight, and flight speed. All else being equal, weight increases proportionately with volume. But as the dimensions of a bird are increased, volume goes up as a cube while surface area only goes up as a square.”

“You’ve lost me.”

Kino picked up a branch and drew some explanatory diagrams on the muddy shore. “Basically, you can’t just scale up a small bird to get a bigger bird. A bigger bird generally requires much bigger wings, proportionately speaking, to achieve flight. The alternative to bigger wings is to fly faster. But at the weight of a human being, we do not know how to flap smaller wings at a speed necessary to fly nor how to build larger wings sufficiently light and rigid to permit a slower speed.”

“How big would the wings have to be for me to fly as fast as the falcons?”

Kino squinted up and tried to do the calculations in his head.

“Big, really big. Much bigger than the falcons’. Impossibly light and strong.”

“You sound like a worshipper of Lutho, all this talk about numbers and impossibilities.”

Kino shrugged. “I’m not a mystic chanting Lutho’s name. I simply elucidate the laws of nature.”

“But what you say doesn’t make sense. Look at the falcons. Their torsos are much larger and look heavier than men’s, and yet they fly slowly with wings that you say are too small.”

“That . . . is a mystery,” Kino conceded. “I don’t recall reading about the Mingén falcons in the collected notes and papers of Mouji. The falcons are sacred, as you well know, so he couldn’t capture them, measure them, and dissect them the way he did with other birds. It’s possible that their bodies are even less dense than other birds’.”

Lowi laughed. “Or perhaps their closeness to Kiji gives them an extra lift.”

Kino shook his head. “Though I cannot explain precisely how, it must be the case that the falcons also follow the same rules as other birds. We just don’t know enough about them. Even the gods cannot break the laws of creation and nature.”

“How can you still lack faith even after your experience?”

Kino gave an ambivalent smirk and said nothing.

One of the Mingén falcons broke out of its circular pattern and folded its wings tight against its body. It dove straight down, first slowly, then faster and faster. Plunging like a meteor through the air, the huge bird splashed into the water barely a hundred paces away from where Lowi and Kino stood. The impact sounded like thunder, and foamy waves rose up and collapsed like a watery tower.

“Blessed be Lord Kiji,” said Lowi, her eyes sparkling. “Aren’t you glad you came? Who can doubt the prophesy of Lord Kiji in the presence of such power?”

A few seconds later, the falcon burst out of the lake, water cascading off its iron-black feathers in sheets. The bird followed a graceful arc and landed on a branch overhanging the lake, one of its monstrous claws clutching a struggling fish at least as long as a grown man.

“Messenger of Lord Kiji, please restore my brother’s faith,” prayed Lowi.

But Kino’s brows were furrowed. Something . . . wasn’t right. He gazed at the falcon and the branch it was resting on.

The branch barely dipped under the falcon’s weight.

The next morning, no matter how much Lowi pleaded and threatened, Kino refused to budge from his bunk.

“I really don’t feel well. Hiking up to the Temple will be the end of me.”

“But you seemed perfectly fine last night—even drank a full flask of rice wine while you asked the groundskeeper all those questions about the falcons!”

“Maybe I ate something that didn’t agree with me.”

“I ate the same things you did.”

Kino moaned and pulled the blanket over his head.

“All right.” Lowi’s voice softened. “I’ll go up without you and pray especially hard. Try to sleep and get better. Perhaps Lord Kiji will visit you in a dream and give you the answer you seek. I’ve often heard such tales.”

As soon as he was sure Lowi was really gone, Kino rolled out of the bunk. Tiptoeing past the other hostel cells and the central hall where some of the monks and pilgrims were engaged in morning prayer, he slipped outside and onto the path into the woods.

Once he had reached the spot by the lake where he and Lowi had stopped the day before, he turned and walked along the muddy shore, taking care not to get his moccasins and leggings in the ice-cold water. Staying alert, he peered into the dense trees and climbed up one of them from time to time to get a wider view.

There! He had found it. Plunging through the undergrowth, he reached a giant stone cairn, as tall as a man and as wide around as a small house.

The hostel groundskeeper had been a trove of information the night before, telling him about the monks’ practice of giving burials to the corpses of Mingén falcons after they died from old age or disease. Assuming Kino had found the right one, this particular grave was only about a month old.

It took Kino two hours to remove enough stones to reveal the carcass, and four more to completely free it. Luckily, the dead bird was a juvenile with a wingspan of only about eight feet. The torso itself was about the size of a child of ten or twelve. The chill glacial air around the lake had kept the corpse from decomposing, and the bird looked as though it had just died. As irreligious as Kino was, he felt a sense of awe at being this close to something that was considered by everyone to be sacred. He muttered a prayer and steeled himself.

Ever since Lowi raised the question, Kino had thought of nothing except how it was possible for heavier-than-man falcons to achieve flight. He knew that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find the answer. Studying these birds—capturing them and dissecting them as though they were any other wild animal—would immediately mark him as a blasphemer.

But the desire for the answer was like hunger. He felt compelled to move into forbidden territory. He tried to reassure himself with thoughts that investigating the corpses of the sacred birds was likely to get him into less trouble than studying live birds if he were caught.

Taking firm hold of the legs, Kino took a deep breath and pulled.

The body did not move.

Kino squatted and pulled harder, grunting. The corpse barely shifted. He examined the feathers and squeezed the skin underneath. No, the corpse didn’t seem to be waterlogged.

Based on how little the branch yesterday had dipped from the weight of the fully-grown Mingén falcon, this juvenile shouldn’t be too heavy for Kino to move. He had settled on the theory that the Mingén falcons had some kind of body structure that made them much lighter than their size would suggest.

So much for that idea. I’ll have to cut the bird open. Kino took a deep breath to steady his nerves before committing sacrilege.

That afternoon, Kino accomplished something no one in all of Dara had ever done: dissect a Mingén falcon. He meticulously peeled away each layer of the bird’s body, making note of any interesting features that might have something to do with flight.

The feathers were light, dense, and oiled to catch the wind and keep the water out. The bones were hollow but strong. The muscles around the breast bulged with the strength necessary to power the wings.

So far, all was as expected.

But inside the body cavity, Kino discovered something odd: a network of thin-skinned sacs connected to each other and to the bird’s lungs. Empty and flabby, they took up little space inside the body. He had no idea what they were.

Careful measurement showed that the body of the falcon was at least as dense, if not denser, than a human body.

Yet it can fly, thought Kino, feeling his heart speeding up.

Again, in his mind he saw how little the branch had dipped with the falcon standing on it.

There was no choice. He had to capture a live bird.

Lowi returned from the Temple three days later, and found a Kino who had suddenly discovered religion.

“What a miracle!” said Lowi when she saw her brother.

Kino had to bite his tongue as he listened to Lowi recount how the monk in charge of the hostel described Kino’s conversion to her, “I’ve never seen anything like it. The young master spends all day meditating at remote spots along Lake Dako, vowing to not journey up to the Temple until he has sufficiently purified himself. When he returns in the evenings, he spends all his time at the abbey, studying the scriptures and wisdom sutras left by generations of monks. I’ve never seen a pilgrim more dedicated or fervent. He says that he will not go into the presence of Lord Kiji until he has completely recovered his faith, and that is why he has requested an extended stay here.”

Earnestly, Lowi asked, “Can I meditate and study with you?”

Kino looked away, embarrassed. “Though I’m your older brother, in spiritual development I’m far less advanced. I feel this is a journey I have to make myself.”

Lowi nodded in understanding. “The path to Kiji is different for everyone. I’ll stay at the abbey for a while, too. When you need me, I’ll be here.”

In truth, the “wisdom sutras” that Kino studied in the evenings were the observation logs of the Mingén falcons maintained by the monks over the centuries. The monks kept the notes in an effort to extract messages from the movements and habits of the falcons, thought to be messengers of Kiji.

Thick volumes were filled with interpretations by monks who specialized in divination: Three falcons whose head feathers were white rising to hunt in the morning meant that the three brother states of Faça, Haan, and Rima were on the warpath; an especially large falcon diving into Lake Dako in the afternoon ten times meant that Amu would suffer ten years of drought on the island of Arulugi; and so on. Other monks with a more philosophical bent of mind construed the patterns of the falcons’ flights as expressions of Kiji’s (and by transference, his worshippers’) love of freedom and indomitable spirit, of Xana’s special status as the scorned guiding star for the rest of Dara, of forbearance and hope and disdain for worldly goods, and any number of other positive values.

To Kino, the mystical and fanciful passages were of no interest at all, but the meticulous observations of the falcons over the centuries, including charts, tables, drawings, maps, formed a valuable collection of natural history data. He poured over the notes to detect patterns and tried to confirm his theories with further observations during the day on his “meditation” trips.

He had big plans, plans that he had no intention of revealing to Lowi.

It took most of the day for Kino to apply what he knew about fishing in water to the new medium of air.

He found a shallow cove at the eastern end of Lake Dako and built a funnel-shaped stone weir across its opening. Fish could swim into the cove easily but had a much harder time getting out.

After a while, so many fish had become trapped in the cove that their panicked movements churned up the muddy bottom, turning the cove into a brownish flaw in the otherwise perfect emerald that was the lake.

The falcons hunting over the lake noticed the commotion and flew over to investigate. Though they were the top predators in the region, most were cautious by nature and only circled high overhead, observing and trying to understand this new development.

But one of the falcons, an adolescent, apparently decided that it had waited long enough. Tucking the wings around its body, it dove, aiming its talons at one particularly large fish that wriggled tantalizingly in the shallow mud. With a loud splash, the falcon disappeared beneath the surface.

Kino leapt up from his hiding place behind the reeds and swung his dagger at the rope tied to the stake driven into the shore. The pulled-back sapling sprang up and launched the strongest net that Kino could acquire over the spot where the falcon had disappeared.

As the astounded falcons circled overhead and cried out indignantly, Kino struggled to complete his ambush. The young falcon, snared by the net, tried to fight its way out of the water and turned into an explosion of feathers and fury. Kino tossed bags of sand he had prepared onto the net, trying to knock the bird back into the water so that it would drown.

The young falcon almost managed to free itself from the net when Kino’s last bag of sand hit it right on top of the head. Stunned, it seemed to hang suspended between air and water for just a second before finally falling back, its cries choked off by the water.

Kino had worried about how he was going to drag the net holding the drowned falcon onto the shore. After all that studying and hard work to set up a trap that worked, it would be a shame to lose the body. But the corpse practically bobbed onto the surface of the water.

Kino waded into the water and managed to pull the corpse onto the shore without too much trouble. Compared to the month-old carcass of the dead juvenile that Kino had examined earlier, this body was much larger but also far, far lighter.

Curiouser and curiouser.

In a few places, the monks’ records had noted the surprising lightness of the dead falcons. But the monks had attributed the phenomenon to the birds’ proximity to Kiji, and Kino had not known what to do with the information.

Over the rest of the afternoon, Kino repeated his dissection. The blood from the newly dead bird was bright red and smelled rich, strong. But Kino paid little attention to how his clothes were quickly soaked. He had to get inside the body cavity before the body cooled.

Instead of being flabby and empty, the strange sacs inside were puffed up and translucent. They reminded Kino of the swim bladders inside a fish (except there were many more of them), or the air-filled ox bladders that fishermen out on the Gaing Gulf used to make their rafts float better. The filled sacs took up most of the space inside the bird’s chest cavity and squeezed the other organs against the walls.

Holding his breath, Kino sliced through one of the sacs with his knife.

The sac hissed and collapsed as whatever gas was trapped inside escaped. Kino put his nose down and took a deep whiff. There was no smell save the sharp tang of the falcon’s blood.

Kino sliced through a few more sacs quickly. Then he tried to lift the carcass again.

It was much heavier now.

Impossible as it might seem, the Mingén falcon had been held aloft by a gas that was lighter than air.

But where did the gas come from and what was it? Kino had no idea. Solving one mystery had only led to another.

“Brother, what are you doing?”

Kino turned around, his heart pounding.

In a moment, Lowi’s face was drained of blood as she took in the sight. Her eyes kept on moving between the dismembered carcass on the ground and Kino’s bloody hands. She seemed to have lost the power of speech.

And so Kino spoke for both of them. He told Lowi everything in a hurry: his own lack of faith in Kiji or any of the other gods of Dara; the comfort and joy he found in learning of another invariant law of nature that could be expressed in numbers and measurements; the compulsion that had gripped him and forced him to try to probe for the truth, even at the risk of committing a crime that would bring shame and disgrace and worse to the whole family.

Lowi listened, her face impassive. And finally, even after Kino had run out of words, she remained silent, seeming to stare through and past Kino.

“It’s the River of Air,” said Lowi. “It has to be.”

“What?” asked Kino, carefully.

Lowi turned to face him, her eyes now focused. “There is a spot on the shore of Lake Dako that cannot be reached by any path. There, at the bottom of a steep cliff, an endless stream of bubbles rises from the bottom of the lake to burst into air. The Mingén falcons travel there every few days, and they seem to take delight hovering and perching over the bubbles.”

Kino was incredulous. “How do you know this?”

“It’s a secret concerning the Mingén falcons, revealed only to those who have taken holy orders at the Temple.”

Kino realized with a pang that this meant that Lowi had already decided to join the nuns at one of the shrines to Kiji. He had always known that, given her fervent faith, there was a possibility that Lowi would decide on a life of permanent spiritual and physical seclusion from her family.

It took a few moments for the full implications of what she had just told him to sink in. “Wait, why are you telling me this? It’s forbidden—”

“Let me finish! At first I was going to report you to the abbot. Even though you’re my brother, one who aids and abets a blasphemer is as bad as the blasphemer himself.

“But then, the way you described that compulsion to know the truth, to find out . . . is very familiar to me. I’ve always felt that way, too, about the mysteries of Kiji and the other gods. I want to understand the mission that Kiji has for us as a people, the signs he has placed into the world to guide us, the way he shapes the world and moves all of us to do the right thing. Even though we’ve known each other all our lives, I never realized that you felt the same way—only the god you worship goes by a different name.”

Kino wanted to argue, but he had to concede that there was something irrational about the compulsion he felt for knowledge, the curiosity that moved him like no other desire. It is, perhaps, no different than the love a mortal held for a god.

“I don’t understand what you’re doing, Kino, but I can empathize with your devotion. I have prayed for guidance all this time, and my heart tells me that what you’re doing is not a crime. Why else would Lord Kiji allow his messenger to be caught? The gods work in mysterious ways. And I think Lord Kiji is speaking and working through you, even though you don’t know it. Just as the fool is often uplifted over the wise man, it may be that the least pious are also in some ways closest to the gods.

“I had knowledge that would be helpful to you, and because I believe in you, I wanted to share it with you, no matter that it’s forbidden. I do not know if I have defied Lord Kiji or carried out his will by doing so, but sometimes in life we must take a plunge and let forces greater than ourselves lift us or throw us down, as the case may be.

“I pray that whatever penance may be due be visited only upon me.”

Kino admired the view from the gondola of the Dézan Falcon with a mixture of pride and sorrow.

Below, fields, forests, mountains, and lakes passed at a dizzying clip. Outside the window, he could see the great feathered oars, like fans, beating against the air rhythmically as though the Dézan Falcon was swimming through air. The shanties from the oarsmen echoed through the gondola.

This is how it feels to be a bird. This is how it feels to be on top of the world.

Kino Ye, First Pilot and Assistant Secretary of the Xana Air Force, now had a bright career ahead of him. Yet all he could think about was a young girl locked away in a windowless cell in a monastery.

The body of the great airship on top of the gondola was cylindrical, as long as a racetrack from end to end, with a diameter in excess of thirty feet. The cylinder was made from flexible, strong bamboo bent into circular hoops connected to each other with longitudinal, thicker bamboo poles. Every twenty feet or so, internal cross-girders provided more structural rigidity. The whole frame was then covered in a layer of thin leather.

But it was the inside of the airship that was truly wondrous. Twenty spherical lift gas bladders, each thirty feet in diameter, were squeezed into the bamboo frame. Made from layers of silk made airtight with wax and oil, these bladders gave the airship the gift of flight.

The airship arrived over the Gaing Gulf, where a few old warships, survivors from Secretary Ingda’s ill-fated adventure near Crescent Island, were moored. The ships were empty shells, devoid of crew.

Kino looked over at Secretary Ingda. “We’re ready for the trial.”

Ingda had been smiling nonstop since he came aboard, marveling at everything. Who could blame him? He had been given a budget that was bigger than the combined budgets of the Navy and the Army, and his nemesis, Duke Zyn, had just been thrown into prison by royal decree. The charge: suspected treason against Xana and spying for Amu.

“Go ahead,” said Ingda.

Calmly, Kino gave the order, “Prepare the firebombing run.”

The order was relayed from the cockpit to the back of the gondola, and the smell of burning tar gradually wafted into the cockpit.

“At this height, we’re beyond the range of even the strongest longbows,” Kino explained. The ships on the sea below bobbed like toy boats in a bathtub.

“Ready,” came the response from the back of the gondola.

Kino looked over at Ingda, who nodded.

“First salvo, standard parabolic pattern,” Kino said.

They felt the ship jerk upward slightly as the fire pots, filled with burning tar, were released from the gondola. They fell toward the surface like diving falcons, and moments later, exploded in fountains of flames against the ships below. The burning tar stuck to the sails, the rigging, and the slick decks. Before long the ships had turned into smoking, fiery infernos.

“How are you able to hit them so accurately from this high up?” Ingda asked.

“It’s just a matter of basic math,” said Kino. But the pride in his voice was unmistakable. “It will be harder to hit ships in actual battle conditions, especially with a choppy sea, but still, with the right surface support, two or three airships should make quick work of entire armadas,” Kino said.

“There are no possible countermeasures?” Ingda asked.

Kino considered this. “The other states will need to find their own sources of lift gas to construct airships. Meanwhile, maybe they can launch battle kites to engage the airships or take evasive maneuvers, especially if the ships are small. But it will take time to develop such tactics.”

“This will change the balance of power in all of Dara,” said Ingda. He stroked his beard and continued to smile. “I was right to bet on you. You’ve done it. You’ve really done it!”

Kino’s smile was ambivalent. He didn’t feel the excitement he had expected to feel at finally coming up with a weapon that would force the rest of Dara to treat Xana as an equal. He didn’t sense the joy he had hoped for at fulfilling the dreams of his people. Revenge, now within reach, did not taste sweet.

Instead, his mind was filled with imagined scenes of horror on the ships below. He thought about the men who would die helplessly at sea while the airships hovered over them with impunity, raining down fiery death like gods motivated by whim, striking at mortals who could not fight back. His stomach turned at the thought of such a war among unequals.

In truth, he had wondered if there was a place for fairness in war. Many atrocities had been committed against Xana by the other states. War seemed to be a force that compelled everyone it touched to behave in ways barbarous and impossible to comprehend.

For a man who didn’t believe that the gods intervened much in the affairs of the world, he didn’t feel much in control of his own destiny. Whether it was the machinations of courtly intrigue or the aspirations of the people of Xana, the compulsion to know the truth or the unswerving logic of escalating force—he seemed doomed to be moved by currents that he could not direct.

One might as well call such forces gods.

And now, with the invention of the airship, what force have I unleashed upon the world? Which way will the currents of history flow? Oh, Lowi, did you know that your faith in Xana’s just cause would lead to so much suffering and death?

But still, he was a man who had to function within a bureaucracy, and there were roles to play, forces to appease. “I’ve done nothing but follow the inspiration of Lord Kiji,” said Kino, avoiding looking into Ingda’s eyes. “And your lordship, of course. Without you, the airships could never have gotten off the ground.”

Secretary Ingda looked at Kino with interest. “I do believe you’ve learned the art of deflecting praise upward, Assistant Secretary Ye.”

“I speak but the truth. You were the one to convince King Dézan of the importance of the lift gas, and induced him to issue the decree to the Temple.”

The priests of Kiji had been outraged by the royal order that the Air Force be allowed to set up a lift gas collection plant at the holy site of the River of Air next to Lake Dako. But the outrage was quickly muted after the king made a lavish gift of land and jewels to the Temple. Whether or not something was sacrilege, it seemed, depended on how much one was willing to pay for it.

“You praise me too much,” said Ingda lightly. “The real credit belongs to King Dézan, as I’m sure we can all agree.”

“Of course, I have learned how to drift with the currents,” said Kino. “And I studied under the best.” Better that this ship of death bear the king’s name than mine.

Secretary Ingda chuckled. “I look forward to how high you can fly, Kino. You have been commissioned to lead the first battle group. I hope you aren’t thinking of taking time off any time soon. It’s the price of success.”

Kino’s heart sank. “I had hoped to visit my sister for a few weeks.”

The greedy and crass bargaining from the priests had disgusted Lowi. That the heads of her order could be swayed in a matter of spirituality by money—they made little attempt to come up with a theological explanation for why they capitulated to the royal decree—was beyond belief. That she herself had played a role in the desecration of the holy site was almost too much to bear. The embarrassment created by her loud condemnations of the decision finally gave the priests no choice. Lowi ceased to be allowed visitors, and her family was told that she was sequestered in deep meditation that could not be interrupted.

Kino had hoped that his newly exalted status as the king’s favorite might buy Lowi a measure of respite.

Ingda shook his head. “There’s too much to do to prepare for an invasion. I can’t allow you to leave your post.”

“But I’m an engineer, not a soldier.”

“No one knows how to make war with an airship. New weapons require new tactics. Who could be better at inventing them than you, the hero of Xana?”

Ingda had told Kino once that serving a king was a bit like being friends with a tiger: One had best never forget who was really in charge. Servants who allowed their own fame to exceed that of their master did not have long careers.

Alas, it seemed that Kino had been too careless in “deflecting praise upward,” as Ingda had put it. In a moment, Ingda’s veiled threat made Kino understand his calculus: Kino would either die in battle—if the airships failed to perform—or forever be associated with the brutality and horrid deaths that such a monstrous weapon produced. Either way, he was out of the way as a rival.

Kino gazed at Ingda, who stared back impassively. “I’d like to ask for a favor, Secretary.”

“Speak.”

“My sister is a novice at the nunnery near Lake Arisuso. But I have not heard from her for some time. I’d like it made clear to the monks and priests there that she must be cared for properly.”

“It is done. Go to battle without any worries.”

And Kino understood that was all the concession he would get.

Searching for the truth of the world, discovering how it functioned—whether through the will of the gods or inflexible laws of nature—was a pure pursuit that was not enough by itself. Credit had to be assigned, money had to be made, and the right names had to be glorified. Anyone who was careless in navigating the currents of power could suddenly find himself trapped in a net and sinking, struggling, into an alien world.

Lowi could not tolerate the priests’ hypocrisy, while Kino thought he had learned how to interpret the false meanings behind every sentence spoken at court. But both of them, as it turned out, had too much faith in forces that ultimately could only be ridden, but not mastered.

The currents will go where they will, Kino thought. But he wasn’t sure if he should be comforted by the idea.

“Launch the long-haul kites,” Kino ordered. “Pull in the oars and let’s ride the currents for a while and see where they take us.”

“May Kiji’s blessing be with you,” said Ingda.

“And also with you,” said Kino.

The gods do work in mysterious ways. Lowi would perhaps say that all that has happened was willed by the gods, and I could say that everything has gone according to random chance and human plan. Between religious ecstasy and a practiced act, who can tell the difference?

© 2014 by Ken Liu.

Ken Liu is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in magazines such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Nature, Apex, Daily SF, Fireside, TRSF, and Strange Horizons, and has been reprinted in the prestigious Year’s Best SF and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year anthology series. He has won the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

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NOVELLA

Hellhound
Robin McKinley

Miri had been the sort of child who believed that every pony with a star on its forehead had been born a unicorn and had agreed to give up its horn to become a pony and bring happiness into some child’s life.

“After Tamari, I don’t see how you kept that one up,” her mother said. Tamari was an exquisitely beautiful half-Welsh pony, dark dappled brown, with four white socks and a perfect four-pointed white star on his forehead. He also had the temperament of a back-alley mugger. “Do you remember the time Tamari cornered that poor little sap Trudy behind the manure pile and you had to rescue her?”

“Or the time Jojo jumped out of the paddock next to Tamari because a single fence between them wasn’t enough?” added her father helpfully.

“Lovely form too. Nobody knew Jojo had it in her. We started entering her in hunter classes after that,” her mother said.

Miri smiled faintly. “Some unicorns mind more than others, after the change.”

Her brother Mal guffawed. “Don’t forget Peggy.”

Peggy had been one of their mother’s reclamation projects. “Jane, I really think—” Miri’s father had begun, as they watched the poor bony thing totter down the ramp of the horse trailer. They were used to her coming home from the horse-rescue with a new four-legged adventure, but this one looked beyond what food and love could rehabilitate. “She came up and put her nose under my arm,” Jane said defensively. “What was I going to do?” Peggy had become a stalwart of the lesson program and the weekend trail rides, and while most of her welts and weals healed without trace, there was a peculiarly matched pair of marks behind her should that Miri said were wing scars, and named her Pegasus.

It was an old family routine, trotted out for old friends and relatives rarely seen; after the friends or relatives had exclaimed over how grown-up the children had become since they’d last seen them, her father told the unicorn story and her mother brought up Tamari, and if the visitors were still enjoying themselves, Mal said, “Don’t forget Peggy.”

There were lots of animal stories in their family. Her father’s fish tanks were scattered all over the downstairs (and terrariums full of invisible chameleons and tree frogs upstairs); her brother had an African grey parrot who said things like, “Are you sure you locked the stables?” and “Have you cleaned the tack yet?” with deadly accuracy; and her mother usually had two or three (or four or five) cats underfoot in the house (the tanks and terrariums all had cat-proof lids; the African grey had a permanent “make my day” look in her eye) as well as several generations of mousers patrolling the barns.

And then there were the horses. Jane ran a riding stable. She gave lessons on her own horses and boarded other people’s. Tamari had been a boarder. When Jane had finally told his very nice owner that he had to go, the owner had sighed and said, “He’s been here almost a year. That’s almost twice as long as he’s ever been anywhere else. I was beginning to hope . . . oh, well.” Tamari was a show pony; his manners were always as perfect as his looks at shows, and he had the trophies and ribbons to prove it. It was only when he was home again that he turned into something out of a bad creature feature.

Miri wanted a dog. When she’d been very young and they had first moved to the then-derelict farm, there had been a man who came several weekends in a row with what seemed to Miri, at six, to be at least forty terriers—ferocious ratters, who had dealt implacably with the resident population. Twelve years later the man was still coming occasionally (her mother refused to put down poison, and there are always rats around a barn), although he had less hair than he’d had and more waistline, and the number of terriers had dwindled to three. Miri had been fascinated from the first by the gallant, indomitable little dogs, even though she couldn’t bear to watch them at their grisly business for long. And the boarders often had dogs; her mother occasionally permitted barn privileges for these on a case-by-case basis—and on the understanding that any dog caught misbehaving was instantly banned.

Miri’s favorite was a border collie named Fay. Fay’s owner Nora had once told Fay to lie down at some little distance from where she was hosing her horse off, so she wouldn’t hose Fay too. But the hose and tap were at the edge of the driveway, and Fay was lying in the middle of it. Miri and her mother were coming back from a show with two tired, eager-to-be-home horses in the trailer when her mother had to stop because Fay was lying in the way. Her mother tried a gentle toot on the horn. Fay raised her head long enough to direct a withering glare in their direction, and then laid her head back on her paws.

Her mother laughed. “Well, that put us in our place. Go tell Nora to call her dratted dog, will you please? She’s got that radio turned up so loud she can’t hear us.”

But Miri liked Oscar too, and Sammy, and Bramble. Miri liked dogs.

“I want a dog,” Miri often said.

“No,” her mother equally often replied. “There are enough animals around the place already.”

“Enough of your animals,” Miri said.

“What is Balthazar, then?” said her mother. “Chopped liver?”

Balthazar was Miri’s horse. He could do anything, including nod, count, and lie down on request, but his chief virtue in her mother’s eyes was that he and Miri led the weekend trail rides and, with Miri on his back, nothing ever bothered him: rabbits, raccoons, frisky ownerless dogs appearing as if by magic, plastic bags left by careless picnickers fluttering threateningly from the undergrowth, horses and riders who behaved rationally and competently in the outdoor arena having sudden inexplicable meltdowns without a fence around them: all the standard trail hazards. Unflappability had a price above rubies at a stable that needed weekend trail rides to make ends meet, and for this he was forgiven anything, including how much he ate. He had been—and for that matter still was—the best birthday present Miri had ever had.

She still wanted a dog.

“A stable needs a dog,” she said. “The next time somebody tries to break into the tack room, it would bark.”

Her mother winced. Her insurance premiums had gone up after the last claim. “No,” she said firmly. “It would not bark. It would be asleep on your bed, and your bedroom’s on the wrong side of the house.”

“What do you have against dogs?” said Miri. “You like animals. We even have guinea pigs because when the Stantons emigrated to Australia they didn’t have anyone to give them to so they gave them to us. We have tortoises because that stupid man at Dad’s office thought they could live in the fish tanks, and Dad’s as bad as you are and couldn’t say no.” Her dad cleaned the tortoise cages. Miri only mucked out warm-blooded animals.

Her mother sighed. “Dogs are too much like horses—I mean the kind of care they need. They’re not all like Fay. Fay wouldn’t be like Fay, except Nora has put a huge amount of work into her. Cats will almost look after themselves, if there’s enough space for them to keep themselves amused in.”

Miri didn’t say anything. Space to keep themselves amused in, in Miri’s experience of cats, was under some human’s feet, and what about the cat food? If all the money for cat food went to dog food, they could have two dogs. Two large dogs. But it wasn’t that she didn’t want not to have cats. She felt there was a principle of fair play involved.

“Dogs you have to do things for. You have to train them, and you have to know where they are all the time. You have to be there for a dog.”

“We are here. We’re always here. We’re going to be here forever.” Jane gave her a harassed look. It was true they hadn’t been away on a vacation in four years, since their last barn-sitter had left without warning after two days. Their stall-cleaner had arrived the next morning and found the barns closed and dark, and the horses still waiting for breakfast. (Also the cats, the fish, the tree frogs, and the tortoises. Four years ago had been before either the guinea pigs or the parrot, Dorothy. Miri rather thought that her brother would never be able to go on vacation again, and wondered what any possible future wife would think about a parrot going on the honeymoon with them. He’d lost at least one girlfriend already on account of Dorothy: A happy, contented African grey is both jealous and demanding, and Dorothy recognized a challenger and behaved accordingly.)

“Honey . . . are you still sure you want to work here full-time after you graduate from high school? Including living at home and all? Because you know I can’t afford to pay you enough to let you move out.” Miri knew. Her dad did the books, and was always trying to make both her and Jane pay more attention. She also knew because when she was still too young to be much use, they’d had live-in barn help. Her family had quite a few live-in barn help stories too.

“Mom, it’s a dead issue. We’ve got all these plans for what we’re going to do once I’m here full-time, remember?”

Her mother laughed. “I remember only too well. With you working twenty-four hours a day we’re going to have the money to build an indoor arena in three years. I feel I must have brainwashed you or something. Kids are supposed to want to grow up and leave.”

“And I want to grow up and stay. You didn’t brainwash me, you just gave me all your DNA.” It was a family joke that Miri was her mother’s clone: They were both small, dark, tough, compact, horse-obsessed, and couldn’t add a column of figures to save their lives.

“Well, here’s my best offer, then. The day after you graduate from high school, you can get yourself a dog.”

It took her almost a week after graduation to make time to go to the dog pound. The primary school got out a week before the high school did, and the barn was immediately deluged with little kids wanting extra lessons. Miri was good with kids, especially the ones torn between adoring horses and being scared to death of them. Some of these then transferred their adoration to Miri, and would only take lessons from her. Every time she looked at her schedule for a space to shoehorn another lesson in, she thought of the indoor arena, and found time.

She knew her mother was hoping she’d forgotten about the dog . . . but that Jane also knew her well enough to know that she would not forget.

So one day—finally—at lunch she said, “Carol’s mom cancelled, poor Carol’s sick, and I moved Harriet to last thing. If you can spare me, I’m going to the pound this afternoon.”

Jane gallantly refrained from sighing, and said immediately, “Of course we can spare you. Remember to buy dog food on the way home.”

Miri suppressed a grin. Her mother also knew her well enough to know that if there was no farm dog by dinnertime, it could only be that a roc had stooped from nowhere, picked up the car with Miri in it, and was bearing them away to an unknown island in the Pacific.

She drove very carefully on the way to the pound. She had had her license from the moment she was old enough to be legal, and had been efficiently backing horse trailers around corners at the farm some time before that; it wasn’t the driving. It was that today was a special day. Today she’d have—she’d finally have—a dog. It wasn’t even only the dog: this would be the first time she’d done something clearly, absolutely, definitively hers. She loved the farm and the riding stable, and had every intention of staying there for the rest of her life. (She even had the site picked out to build her own house on, if she managed to acquire a husband who had a job that earned genuine money so they could afford to. But the site was only on the other side of the driveway plus a few trees from the old farmhouse. There was six A.M. breakfast for horses to think about, and you wanted to be within earshot for sounds of trouble.) And budgeting for the indoor arena was her idea (maybe she had one or two of her father’s genes after all), but it was still something she was doing with her mother. A dog would in a way be the first step toward making the riding stable genuinely individually hers too.

Ronnie was behind the counter at reception. “So, how does it feel to be a grown-up and have to start paying your own bills?” he said jovially. Ronnie coached the local Little League team Mal had been on, and had six dogs of his own, all from the pound. He tended to specialize in the hard-to-place ones, so he had three-legged dogs, blind dogs, old dogs, and hyperactive incontinent dogs. He also had a very patient wife.

“It feels okay. I’m only working forty-two hours a day for seventy-five cents an hour—that’s pretty good, isn’t it?”

Ronnie whistled. “Your mother’s getting soft.”

“Yes, that’s what I thought. So I decided I’d better get a dog fast before she tightens up.”

“Good plan.” He lifted the end of the counter and came out. “I’ll take you round. Do you have any idea what you’re looking for?”

“Not really. Something that can put up with a lot of cats and people and won’t chase horses.”

The pound was nearly full, so there were a lot of dogs to look at. And most of them were barking. Miri began to think there were more advantages to cats than she’d realized. Her head started to hurt, and it was hard to look at each dog, especially the barking ones. But shouldn’t she want a dog that barked? In case it happened to be on the right side of the house the next time someone tried to break into the tack room.

They turned down a row of large runs. “I also don’t want anything that it takes two days’ salary to feed for one day,” said Miri, as something that looked like a cross between a St. Bernard and a Shire horse shambled up to the front of its run to look them over.

“They’re not all like Marigold,” said Ronnie. “Some of ’em are just tall.”

Miri stopped at a run a little over halfway down the row. This dog was not only not barking, which was unusual enough, but it was curled up in a far corner with its back to them.

“This one’s a funny one,” Ronnie said. “You won’t want him, though. Nobody does. I’d’ve taken him home by now, but my wife says six is enough. He’s a complete gentleman; he wouldn’t chase your cats or your horses. But you won’t want him. He’d scare your little kids.”

Miri’s curiosity was now fully aroused. All she could see was a long reddish-chestnut back: part setter, maybe.

“I’m going to take him home soon anyway, though,” said Ronnie. “I hate seeing him like this. Some dogs almost don’t mind being pound dogs, but he’s a sensitive soul, and he’s been here too long. He’s pining, poor thing. No one even stops to talk to him, let alone take him home.” He unlocked the wire-mesh door and went in; Miri followed. “Hey there, my friend,” said Ronnie. “You’ve got a visitor. Come say hello.”

The dog raised his head and looked back over his shoulder at them. He had a long narrow head with lopped-over ears, and a slightly bristly red coat—although more streaky merle than setter. He also had enormous, slanted, almond-shaped eyes, with slightly drooping lower lids. But the interior of those lids was a brilliant scarlet red, flame red, and the rim all round was red; and the eyes themselves were a curious reddish brown, almost the color of his coat. The whites of his eyes, visible at the angle he was looking at them from, were also scarlet red.

“Oh,” said Miri.

“The vet can’t find anything wrong with him. He seems to see perfectly well, the eyes don’t seem to be sore or tender and there’s no swelling, no wounds; the lab reports all come back negative. He just looks . . . odd. Somebody saw him by the road and called him in; but when Diane went out with the van she almost didn’t bring him back, because of the way he looks.”

The dog was looking at them sadly. Miri wasn’t sure how she knew this; it was hard to read an ordinary dog expression in those eyes. But she was sure she knew what she was seeing. It wasn’t just what Ronnie had said about him.

“So, dog, how’s it going?” she said, and held out her hand tentatively.

The dog looked at her for a moment longer and then slowly uncoiled and stood up. Oops, thought Miri, well, he’s certainly one of the tall ones. He waited, watching them, before he turned around so he was facing them, and paused again, still looking at them. The way he moved reminded her of the way you move around a nervous horse: slowly, gently, with lots of pauses, and watching carefully both for any reaction and any opportunity to try to make friends. This was suddenly so clear to her that she grinned, and held her hand out more positively. The dog cautiously walked the length of the run to them, stared into her face a moment longer, and then dropped his vivid eyes and lowered his head to put his nose in her hand.

“It’s only that he’s a hellhound,” Miri said. “That’s why he has those eyes. I’ll take him.”

Ronnie, grinning so hard his face was in danger of splitting, left her in the run with her new dog and went in search of a collar and leash. She glanced down. The hellhound looked up immediately. The scarlet of his eyes seemed to swirl and flicker, like real flames.

When Ronnie returned, he was apologetic. “This is the only one I could find in his size,” he said, holding out a loop of bright red. Miri laughed.

“No, I think red’s exactly right. Anything else would only make it worse.”

He was a rather beautiful dog—except for the eyes—and she was already getting used to them by the time she’d buckled the collar round his neck. He ignored all the frenzy from the other dogs as they made their way back through the rows of kennels to reception. There was a surprising amount of paperwork to adopting a dog—and it cost more than she was expecting too. Drat, she thought, there goes the indoor arena for an extra—oh, six minutes or so. While Ronnie went into the office for the adoption forms she stood by the counter and looked at her hellhound some more. Her hellhound looked back. The faintest suggestion of a wag rippled through his hindquarters and tail.

“I wonder if you know anything?” she said. “I mean any of the ordinary dog things. I wouldn’t want to guess what you really know.” She’d done a lot of dog-minding and dog-sitting for people who came to the barn so she didn’t feel at a total loss, although there was a strange fluttery feeling in the base of her throat. As Ronnie came back again, holding a wad of papers, she stooped down and tapped the floor. “Lie down,” she said. And then she heard herself add: “Please?”

The hellhound had obligingly lowered his head to watch her. He looked at her tapping finger and put his nose on it. Then he looked at her face again—and she had the extremely disconcerting sensation that he was changing his mind as he looked at her, thinking something on the order of, no, I can’t keep it up. Keep what up? she thought. That you’re a dog? Or that you’re not a dog?

He lay down. He lay down like the statue of a jackal on an Egyptian tomb, or like a stone lion in front of a library. She almost felt that she ought to stay crouched in front of him.

She stood up.

“Wow,” said Ronnie. “I don’t think I’d be teaching that one to fetch my slippers, though.”

“No,” she agreed. “But any self-respecting tack-room thief ought to take one look at him and run away.”

She’d named him Flame by the time they got home. She found herself pressing the gas pedal more gently as she turned into the sandy, gravelly drive to the barn, as if by doing so the truck’s wheels would make less noise, and she—and Flame—would be able to slip in unnoticed.

Of course this is not what happened. The old truck, perhaps as a result of over ten years of pulling horse trailers, had developed a unique wheeze, not unlike a horse with broken wind. (“If you had a horse that made a sound like that, you’d retire it,” said Miri’s father. “Ned,” said Jane with dignity, “it’s a truck.”) So even though there were always cars and trucks (and frequently old croaky cars and trucks) pulling in and out of the stable-yard, Jane, Mal, and Ned—and two of the current regiment of barn cats—were all standing at the edge of the drive by the time she’d parked and turned the engine off. Mal’s summer job—he still had two years of high school left—was second shift. Just my luck, though, she thought, to have picked a day when Dad is working at home. Oh, well. Maybe better get it over with . . .

She climbed out of the driver’s side and paused. Flame was sitting up in the passenger seat, so her family could see that there was, indeed, a dog.

“Well, come on,” said Jane. “I have a class to teach in two minutes. Let’s see him. Her.”

“Him,” said Miri. She opened the passenger door slowly, and clipped Flame’s leash on. Then she led him round the back of the truck to where her family was waiting. The two cats ran away. Flame paid them no attention.

“Good god,” said her father.

“Oh, poor thing, but what’s wrong with him? It’s not contagious, is it?” said Jane.

“Yuck,” said Mal. “I thought you wanted a dog.”

“He’s a hellhound,” said Miri. “That’s all. There’s nothing wrong with him and it’s not contagious. Ronnie gave me the letter from the vet that says so.” In fact the letter didn’t say anything of the kind: It hedged. That the writer was puzzled and confused was apparent; but the letter did say that the vet hadn’t been able to find anything wrong with Flame.

There was a little silence.

“I hope you bought a large bag of dog food,” Jane said finally.

“Yes,” said Miri, but her heart sank. Her family liked animals; Flame wasn’t that awful, was he? Didn’t anyone even want to say hello to him? Give him a pat? She hooked the leash over her wrist and dropped her own hand on his head; the hair on the top of his head was very silky, as if it had been specially organized there to be good for stroking.

“Sorry,” said Jane, who could read her daughter very easily. “He’s just—I wasn’t expecting a hellhound.” She stepped forward and then dropped down on one knee. The huge scarlet eyes looked at her gravely. She reached out and stroked her hand down his bristly throat and chest. “And a dog brush with the dog food. No mud and no burrs past the mudroom, okay?”

“Okay,” said Miri, smiling with relief. At least Jane wasn’t going to try to banish him from the house.

A long pink tongue unrolled from Flame’s mouth, and he just touched the back of Jane’s hand with it. It was barely a lick; it was more like an acknowledgement.

“I think he’s trying to charm me,” said Jane.

“Is he succeeding?” said Miri.

Jane and Flame stared at each other a little more.

“Yes,” said Jane. “I rather think he is. You’ve got a lesson yourself in half an hour, you know, and I’m not at all sure how Lynn is going to react to your hellhound.” Lynn was one of Miri’s timid ones. A good lesson with Lynn was getting her off the longe line for a turn or two around the arena by herself. “What are you going to do with him while you’re teaching? I don’t want him loose till we know he’ll behave and—er—”

“You don’t want mass panic if the kindergarteners all catch sight of him at once,” said Miri calmly. She was feeling much better now that her mother was (more or less) won over. One or two of the kindergarteners at a time were fine, but in aggregate they were unfortunately prone to shrieking. They enjoyed shrieking. Flame might bring on quite a bad attack of this.

The kindergarteners were, in fact, the nine- to eleven-year-old group, but Mal had started calling them that three or four years ago when he wasn’t much older than they were, and despite Jane’s having forbidden him to do so. Possibly because most of them had had a crush on him, they’d decided en masse that they liked the name, and the Kindergarten Quadrille was now an established part of the barn’s annual horse show, and places in it were much sought after. (Miri had said sourly, about a year ago, that having a crush on Mal was still a requirement for entry. Mal had knocked her down and sat on her—they were in the hayloft at the time—and Jane had said that if they wanted to behave like eight-year-olds, then bedtime was eight o’clock and Saturday night curfew nine.) The class Jane was about to teach was kindergarteners, and so was Lynn.

“I’ll introduce him to Lynn,” she went on, trying to sound more confident than she felt. “She’ll like being first. And if fraidy-cat Lynn is okay with him the other kids won’t want to be anything else.” She looked at Mal.

He too could read her easily. “It’ll cost you,” he said.

“Okay,” said Miri.

“What?” said Jane. “What’s going to cost? What are you two up to, under my nose?”

“Mal’s going to help the kindergarteners adjust to my hellhound.”

“I haven’t adjusted to your hellhound yet.”

“I haven’t adjusted to Dorothy. And I bet Flame’s table manners are better than Dorothy’s!”

“Flame?” said Mal. “You didn’t tell me his name was Flame. The price has just gone up.”

“Children, children,” said Ned.

“There’s Lynn’s mom’s car,” said Jane. “You’d better figure out what you’re doing fast.”

There were a few rather hairy moments in the first few weeks of Flame’s tenancy, but Jane said, “We haven’t lost any customers, and that’s all that matters. The rest will sort itself out.” Lynn had, in fact, given a little gulp and sob—almost a shriek—but Mal had sauntered in with Miri and Flame, and Lynn (who was nine) wasn’t going to look like a real kindergartener in front of Miri’s gorgeous brother. Miri, not knowing what else to do, tied Flame to a tree outside the small arena they used for private lessons, where he had the shade and the shadows disguised him. Lynn glanced his way nervously a couple of times, but Flame didn’t do anything but lie quietly, and she soon forgot him.

By the time Lynn was leading her horse back into the stable, Mal was working his wiles on Jane’s class. They couldn’t believe their luck that Mal was actually hanging around to talk to them. Miri thought, watching them, he could tell them to go jump off a cliff, and they’d all say, where? What cliff? But there weren’t any cliffs nearby and all he said was, “Hey, Miri’s got a new dog. He’s really cool. He’s got these scary red eyes. He’s a hellhound. His name is Flame. Want to meet him?”

They all giggled at hellhound but with Mal there watching there was no shrieking. And one or two of them were even brave enough to pat him.

She collected the new nametag that said FLAME with the stable phone number on it the next day, and began letting him cautiously off the leash when she was cleaning tack or mucking out or anything she didn’t have to concentrate on. By the following week he was accompanying her when she took horses in and out to the paddocks. He never showed the least inclination to chase anything—despite several of the cats’ best efforts—and the horses didn’t react to his red eyes. Balthazar liked him: He’d reach his nose down over the half door of his stall to say hello. She still tied him up when she was giving lessons, but Ned rigged up a running line between two trees outside the two outdoor arenas so he had room to move around, although all he ever seemed to do was shift to whichever end was nearer where Miri was and lie down.

The price of Mal’s cooperation had been that she pick him up after all the parties he went to, for the rest of the summer—and he was invited to a lot of parties. Fortunately he didn’t go to very many of them—Dorothy wouldn’t let him. But he still managed one or two a week. Since his job got out at eleven, this meant that she was picking him up at four or five o’clock in the morning—occasionally she was lucky, and they went on till after six, when the buses started running again. She’d pointed out that even extortion has its limits, and by six o’clock she was out feeding horses, with a cup of strong coffee steaming on the windowsill in the feedroom. He’d promised that if it was after six, he’d catch the bus to the end of Highland Road, and walk the rest of the way home.

But usually the phone rang at four or five. This had been its own problem, because the farm was in a dead zone, where cell phones didn’t work. So on party nights Miri had to remember to unplug the three other phones in the house, leaving only the one in her room—and then to plug them back in again on her way out of the house. Five wasn’t so bad; she was usually thinking about getting up then anyway. Four was rough. She was still asleep, dawn was barely a smudge on the horizon, and by the time she got home again it would be too late to go back to bed.

Flame always came with her. He was, of course, sleeping on her bed, and when she got up, he got up. It obviously never occurred to him that he might be left behind, and she was glad to have him with her. The parties were not always in places she particularly wanted to be at four or five in the morning. Usually Mal was waiting on the street for her—sometimes with someone else who needed to be dropped off home—but once or twice she’d had to wait.

On one of these occasions three guys who were obviously the worse for their night’s entertainment had seen her and come reeling over to . . . she wasn’t sure if they meant to scare her, or if it was just that they were too drunk to notice the effect they were having. She’d turned the dome light on so she could read while she waited, which was probably why they’d noticed her. She tried to ignore them, but they were banging on the driver’s window and laughing. One of them went to the front of the truck, grabbed the bumper, and started rocking it. The other two thought this was hilarious.

Flame was curled up on the passenger seat. He’d let this go on for about twenty seconds, but when the rocking started he slowly uncurled. He didn’t have enough room to stand up on the seat, but he put one forepaw on the gearshift and the other one delicately between Miri’s legs, and leaned toward the window. He put his nose very close to the glass, pulled his lips back and growled.

“Jesus H. Christ, what the hell is that?” yelled the noisiest of the three, who was the window-banger, and backed off a step. The bumper-rocker stood up. Flame turned his head so he was staring out over the steering wheel. Miri felt rather than heard Flame’s growl deepen.

And the man screamed. He threw his hands up in front of his face, and backed away, stumbling over the curb, falling onto the hood of the next car. His two friends grabbed him, and the three of them ran.

Mal, at that moment, appeared at the top of the steps of the one house on the street that still had lights on in all its windows. Miri unlocked the door for him to get in. “Is everything all right?” he said.

“Everything’s fine,” she replied. She was still stroking Flame with hands that trembled very slightly. Flame slithered over the back of the front seat and lay down in the narrow strip between the seat and the back of the cab, where mysterious bits of tack tended to accumulate. Miri had cleared it out and put a blanket down for him.

“Your hellhound’s eyes are redder than usual,” said Mal.

“It’s just the dome light,” she said.

“It wasn’t a very good party,” said Mal. “I’d rather have been home with Dorothy. You won’t have to come here again.”

“Good,” she said.

The one thing that still worried Miri about Flame was that she didn’t have time to walk him enough. He had the long legs and deep chest of a running dog but mostly all he ever had the chance to do was wander around the stable-yard, and when she was teaching she still tied him up.

Mostly the addition of a hellhound to the Greyhaven Stables went remarkably smoothly. The cats were adjusting; or all but Camilla, one of the house cats, who had decamped to live with a family about a mile down the road. Jane was a little testy for a day or two, but once she had been assured (several times) that the Johnsons were happy to have Camilla, she got over it. The guinea pigs, let out of their cage, hid under the sofa, but the guinea pigs had always hidden under the sofa when they were let out of their cage. Dorothy, once she had ascertained that Mal was not very interested in Flame, put up with him, and deigned to learn his name.

One or two more boarders’ dogs had been banned because they couldn’t get along with Flame, but most were wary but polite. Flame tended to ignore other dogs, although he made an exception of Fay, who adored him, and would rather lie under his tree with him than go out on the trail with Nora and her Pinto horse, Carey (short for Caramel Cashew Swirl), much to Nora’s disgust. “Well, she’s spayed,” Nora said. “There’s not a lot of trouble she can get into.” Flame would occasionally rest his chin on Fay’s back.

“She’s like one of the kindergarteners with Mal around,” Miri said to Jane. Although the kindergarteners were having a bad summer; Mal had a steady girlfriend. Mal often had girlfriends, but they rarely survived meeting Dorothy, and after he’d lost his first sweetheart to his parrot he’d started bringing new girlfriends home quickly to get it over with. After Kim, he never seemed to mind when they disappeared, but then, for Mal, there were always more girls out there.

Leslie was different. In the first place, after high school she wanted to train to work in a zoo, and had been working summers and weekends at the little local sheep-pigs-and-llamas kids’ petting zoo for two years. She was fascinated and thrilled by Dorothy, and while as rivals for Mal’s affection they had to be mortal enemies, Leslie got round this by ignoring Mal in Dorothy’s presence, and Dorothy couldn’t resist playing to an apparently worshipping audience. Leslie was even fascinated and thrilled by the tropical fish and the invisible tree frogs and chameleons, which was a first, and put Ned firmly on her side. And she’d been the only person ever to meet Flame without an initial cringe. “Oh, wow,” she’d said, and immediately stooped to make friends.

She was also extremely pretty.

Jane started calling her the Paragon. “Cynic,” said Miri.

“There has to be something wrong with her,” said Jane.

There was. She had two left feet. “I’m all left feet,” she said. “I’m not just chosen last for volleyball or whatever, whichever team has to have me bursts into tears.” And Mal was determined to teach her to ride.

Mal wasn’t horse-obsessed like his mother and sister, but he (like Ned) helped out when they were shorthanded—which was, as with most stables, rather often—and was rarely cranky about it. He was also quite a good rider himself, to his sister’s considerable annoyance, because he had a natural gift for it and she had to work hard for every tiny scrap she learned.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Jane. “It was just like that with my brother and me.”

“The brother who made his first million when he was twenty-four and has a ranch in Wyoming?”

“He’s never in Wyoming. He’s too busy earning his next million. You wouldn’t want to be like that, would you?”

“I’d get out to Wyoming more often,” said Miri.

But Mal, being a natural rider, didn’t have a clue how to teach someone who wasn’t. Jane and Miri assumed that teaching Leslie to ride would fizzle out: Mal couldn’t teach and Leslie couldn’t learn. But it didn’t. Mal kept asking if any of the beginner horses were free and if so when, and Leslie kept showing up looking determined, and trying to give Jane or Miri money, which they kept refusing.

The afternoon that Leslie appeared in a new pair of riding breeches and riding helmet (she’d been using one of the stable’s helmets), Miri said, “Okay, look. This is silly. I’ll give you lessons. Mal couldn’t teach a tadpole to swim.”

“It’s not him,” Leslie said. “Two left feet, remember? It’s me.”

“Then why do you want to learn to ride?” Miri said with genuine curiosity.

Leslie turned away and stroked the cheek of Rainbow, who had her head over her stall door, hoping for stroking. “Because . . . oh, because I’m used to being good with animals. I’m resigned to being horrible at sports. I’ve always avoided riding lessons because I was afraid this would happen—because I knew this would happen—but I’d love to be able to ride, you know? I don’t have to be good—like you or Mal—just—oh, I’d like to be able to go trail riding with Mal. And canter where there’s a good place to canter. And jump over the big log.”

“Okay,” said Miri. “It’s always good to know what you’re aiming at. I’ll teach you to ride till you can canter out on the trail” (to herself adding, on a carefully selected bombproof horse) “although I don’t promise any jumping. We’ll see how it goes. Okay?”

Leslie, to her surprise, hesitated momentarily. “How much does—do you charge?”

“Save your money for a car,” said Miri. “So I don’t have to pick Mal up after any more parties.”

Leslie was hard work. Miri pulled every trick she knew about teaching riding out of her hat and Leslie still needed two bounces for every stride when she tried to post to the trot. She could drop her legs straight down the horse’s sides when her feet were out of the stirrups but as soon as she put them back in the stirrups she stiffened up and began to crouch. “Let’s play a game,” said Miri. “Let’s pretend that you don’t know that you have two left feet. Let’s pretend you’re just an ordinary person who wants to learn how to ride.”

“It’s hopeless, isn’t it?” said Leslie.

“It is not hopeless, damn it,” said Miri. “Stop trying to make it hopeless, you know?”

“Sorry,” said Leslie, and sighed.

Once Miri was (relatively) sure Leslie wouldn’t fall off at the walk, she took her out on the trail, thinking that a change of scenery would be good for both of them. Leslie was on the (bombproof) Peggy, and Miri on Balthazar. Balthazar was disappointed by all the walking, but he was accustomed to such disappointment. And Flame came with them.

At first they did the baby loop, which only took about fifteen minutes and you were never really out of sight of the barn. But Miri’s sharp eye took in that, out on the trail, Leslie occasionally forgot that she was all left feet and couldn’t possibly learn to ride, and relaxed. Once, when she’d forgotten for more than a minute, Peggy put her head down and blew.

“There,” said Miri.

“What?” said Leslie. “Did I do something wrong? Isn’t she supposed to do that?”

“No, you did something right. You stopped perching on her like a bird on a wire and she relaxed and started to enjoy herself.”

“Oh, am I hurting her?” said Leslie in deep distress.

“Okay, I take it back,” said Miri. “You are hopeless.”

There was a brief tortured pause, and then Leslie laughed. “Oh. I get it.”

“Good,” said Miri.

But after that Leslie did begin—just a little—to learn to ride. Miri stopped trying to teach her anything in the arena, and they went straight out onto the trails, leaving the baby loop behind and diving deep into the preserve. And Flame always came with them. Once, when Leslie began one of her (regular) apologies for how much time she was taking away from all the other more important things Miri should be doing (which would then lead into another attempt to pay for lessons), Miri interrupted and said, “You’re doing me a favor. I’ve been worrying about giving poor Flame enough exercise.”

Flame, hearing his name, came lolloping up to them, tongue flying, his eyes so crinkled up from grinning that he looked almost ordinary.

“I wonder what his background is,” said Leslie, and Miri could see her immediately as the zookeeper to be: focusing on the strange animal she has been presented with. “There’s a lot of sighthound in there somewhere—deerhound maybe.”

“Very likely,” Miri said neutrally. He looked as much like a deerhound as he looked like any dog. Since she was the only one who brushed him, she was the only one who knew that he had not merely the common system of a longer coarser outer coat and finer softer undercoat, but a third coat beneath the second, dense and almost prickly, almost as if it might be suitable for repelling hellfire. He also had two extra pairs of ribs, disguised by the length of his back. If it had been only one extra pair she probably wouldn’t have noticed; but she’d thought, stroking him, that his ribcage seemed to go on a surprisingly long time, and so she counted, and checked the result with a helpful website on dog anatomy. She might have asked the vet about this, except that she had recently observed, while checking for ticks, that his testicles had regrown. He had, of course, been castrated at the pound. She didn’t want to get Ronnie in trouble for having released an unneutered dog, and if Flame stayed healthy, the vet might not notice the testicles. She wondered if the pound’s vet had noticed the ribs and the third coat, or if he’d just be totally distracted by the eyes.

There were other anomalies. The last inch or so of his tongue had a narrow smooth white streak down the center, like scar tissue, as if his tongue had once been forked. He ate charcoal out of the fireplace. (He would have eaten charcoal briquettes too, only Miri felt sure that the chemical stuff that made them burn faster and hotter wouldn’t be good for anything to eat, even a hellhound.) She’d known Labradors that ate anything, including charcoal, but Flame did not also eat bricks, shoes, houseplants, and small pieces of furniture—just charcoal. And while he liked to lie in front of the fire like a normal dog, he liked to lie facing it, staring into it like a philosopher—or a hellhound. The flicker of the flames on his wide-open red eyes looked like the reflection of a forest fire.

But he had perfect manners around the stable, the horses, and the clientele. There were one or two nervous parents who didn’t like him, but Miri simply learned who they were and made sure he was tied up under his tree when they were due to arrive. And he was now proving to have perfect manners on trail rides.

It was still only Leslie, Miri and Flame. Miri had suggested they invite Mal some time—even that Leslie was ready to go out with Mal by herself—but Leslie said, “Oh, not yet. Please. If you can stand it a little while longer. I can almost relax now, when it’s just you, but I know I’ll stiffen up again as soon as anyone comes with us—especially Mal. But I’ve been thinking, what I’d like to do is tell Mal I’m taking him on a picnic for his birthday—and then tell him at the last minute it’s going to be on horseback. Is that a good idea, do you think?”

“It’s an excellent idea,” said Miri.

“Oh, I hope so,” Leslie said in her earnest way. “I mean I’m trotting now and everything. You are so patient. I guess you have to be, to be a riding teacher, but it’s still pretty amazing. And I really don’t understand why you’ve put so much time into me. It’s not just Flame.”

“Don’t you worry about that,” said Miri, who found taking Leslie for a trail ride twice a week a nice change from her nervous kindergarteners, “I’m going to get it out of Mal later.”

During this conversation Miri hadn’t been paying attention to how far they’d come. It was true that Leslie could trot, and Miri was considering whether it was time to risk a canter. It would be really great—not to mention having Mal in his sister’s hip pocket for the rest of his life—if his girlfriend could canter by the time his birthday picnic happened.

And then Peggy, bombproof Peggy, shied.

She didn’t shy very far, and she shied into Balthazar, who put his ears back and held his ground. Leslie, who was only clumsy and not a fool, merely said “ugh” and dragged herself back upright again; a good instinctive convulsive grab for Peggy’s mane had kept her in the saddle. Both horses were standing, tense and alert, looking in the same direction. Miri now noticed that Flame was standing right in front of them, looking in the same direction too, with his tail and his hackles raised.

“Damn,” said Miri. “I didn’t notice where we’d got to. I wouldn’t have brought you here, although it’s not usually as bad as this.”

“What isn’t?” said Leslie.

“Our haunted graveyard,” said Miri. “Don’t tell me you haven’t heard that story?”

“Oh,” said Leslie. “I guess. But I thought it was like Pegasus and unicorns.”

“When I got old enough to answer back, I used to tell my parents that if they’re going to bring a six-year-old whose favorite bedtime stories are all fairy tales to a haunted farm then they deserved what they got. There’s still a rumor for anyone who remembers that my parents got the place cheap because of the graveyard, although the fact that the house only had electricity downstairs and the only indoor plumbing was the pump in the kitchen might have had something to do with it too.”

“Wow,” said Leslie.

“Yeah. We moved in the beginning of the summer so we had all summer to get a toilet and a shower put in. Mom and Dad decided I was old enough to have my baths in the pond but Mal had to have his in a plastic tub in the kitchen.” She smiled reminiscently. “I don’t think he’s ever forgiven me. Anyway. I don’t know what the graveyard’s problem is and a lot of the time it’s perfectly fine, you can go in there and look around and nothing happens. There’s only six tombstones—all the same family—they all died within a few weeks of each other, in 1871. Probably flu or something, Dad says. It must have been awful for whoever was left, whoever buried them. When I started school here the kids all said that nobody had lived in the house since. It took me a few years to figure out that they didn’t have electricity out here in 1871.”

“You mean,” Leslie said, “that it still spooks you.”

“Yeah,” said Miri, whose own hackles were trying to rise. There was a big tree to one side of the little path into the graveyard that led off the trail they were standing on. Every time she blinked there were, briefly, goblins sitting in its branches, chittering at her. “Who wouldn’t prefer unicorns? The only reason I know it’s usually okay is because Mal comes here a lot. He likes it. He likes it partly because his big sister is afraid of it—the big sister who got to have her baths in the pond when he had to have his in a big plastic tub in the kitchen, when she was six and he was four. But I think he really does like it too. He says the sky is bluer there or something. And he says if it’s having a bad day he goes away again. I never bring the trail rides this way—in case of bad days. Like today.”

“I thought we were still out in the middle of the reserve,” said Leslie.

“That’s one of the things I don’t like about it, the graveyard,” said Miri. “It’s like you’ll be out in the middle of the reserve and then suddenly you’re coming this way. Usually I notice that time and geography have folded themselves up again and turn off before we get here, but I didn’t today.”

“Does it happen to other people?”

“Oh, yeah. That’s why the kids at school were so happy to tell me I lived on a haunted farm. And I know that a lot of people told Mom she’d never get a riding stable going here because of it.”

“I’ve lived here all my life and I’d never heard about it,” said Leslie.

Miri told herself to get a grip, of course there were no goblins. It was a bright day, and maybe she’d been staring into flickering leaf-and-sunlight patterns too long and too hard and her eyes were tired. “Dad says even ghosts wear out eventually, like socks, and Mom says that the riding stable probably just sort of outnumbers it—them—now. You know, like when the development went up around the old Danforth house. When the first couple of houses went up the old Danforth place totally dominated. Now you can hardly see it. We’re the development.” She swallowed hard, and forced herself to look away. But she looked back again almost immediately. Flame was still standing, staring at the path, and at the tree. As if he saw goblins in its branches. “But if you go to the tourist center at the reserve and look at the map, there’s a red box around the boundary with our farm and down at the bottom it says that there’s something wrong with the earth’s magnetic field here and it’s easy to get lost so pay extra attention to the trail markers and don’t use your compass.”

“Maybe that’s it.”

“I don’t think magnetic weirdness makes horses shy sometimes,” said Miri.

“Look at Flame,” Leslie said wonderingly.

Miri was looking at Flame, and thinking about the way the guy who’d been bouncing her fender had thrown up his hands and screamed. She didn’t think Flame was reacting to the earth’s magnetic field either. And it wasn’t only Flame; both horses were staring straight at the little path that led only to the old cemetery. Some horses like to wind themselves up, so they can dance and act foolish; Peggy and Balthazar weren’t like that. If they were tense and worried, they were tense and worried for a reason.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said. “There’s a good stretch for trotting up ahead. Have I taught you half-seat yet?”

Miri cheated, teaching Leslie to canter. She taught her half-seat at the trot, and one day, when she was nicely balanced, her head up and looking straight ahead, her hands lightly but firmly against Peggy’s neck, Miri said, “Peggy, canTER,” and Peggy, veteran of many hours in the arena on a longe line, cantered. Balthazar, veteran of many beginner trail rides, kept pace exactly, in case some kind of rescue was required. But Leslie gave a little, quickly repressed squeak, and then settled down, keeping both her legs and hands steady. “And waaaaalk,” said Miri at the end of the wide bit of path, and both horses dropped calmly back to a walk. Leslie turned a shining face to Miri, and Miri leaned over and patted her leg.

“That was terrific,” she said. “Perfect. Now we’re going to go back into the arena so you can learn to sit the canter, and you are not going to stiffen up on me, and then you’re going to have the best birthday picnic ride that anyone has ever had, okay?”

The day of the picnic dawned grey and drizzly and Leslie was on the phone to the farm at seven, twittering about the weather.

Miri had been expecting this, and had the portable in her pocket so she could answer at the first ring, before anyone had the opportunity to get testy about it. Everyone was usually awake by seven, but her father and brother would be pre-articulate, and cranky. Miri made suitable soothing noises to Leslie, including saying (truthfully) that it was burning off, and that the weather report had promised a fine day. She didn’t add that the weather report had also said thunderstorms moving in overnight—it was a lunchtime picnic, after all—nor did she add that she didn’t like the way Flame was behaving.

To any riding stable without an indoor arena, the weather was of paramount, and frequently bitter, importance, and she and her mother grasped any straw of prediction. Miri had discovered that Flame predicted the weather rather well by the way he met it when they first went outdoors in the morning for Miri to feed the horses. If he went out blithely, head and tail high, then there was a fine day coming; to whatever extent he was slinky and furtive, to that extent it would be a miserable day. She told herself that his present manner, which seemed to be that there was something coming to get him which was immediately behind him whichever way he stood, leaped, or swapped ends, was probably his response to the approaching storms; these would be the first thunderstorms they’d had since she brought him home from the pound. She just hoped it didn’t mean the storms would get here early; she wanted Mal’s picnic ride to go well almost as badly as Leslie did.

She let her eleven o’clock lesson warm up a few minutes longer than usual so she could say “happy birthday” and “have fun” as Mal and Leslie set off; also to run a falsely casual eye over Peggy and make sure that in her agony of perfection Leslie hadn’t done something like forget to tighten Peggy’s girth. When Mal graciously allowed a small giggling group of his admirers to wish him happy birthday, Miri took the opportunity to take hold of Leslie’s heel and give it a vicious yank. “‘Relax,’ she said. Remember relax? You’re already crouching and you’re not out of the stable-yard yet.”

Leslie gave a shaky laugh, and the heel in Miri’s hand dropped about two inches. “Keep thinking about Peggy,” said Miri. “You want her to have a good time too, right? Just nudge her forward gently—keep your hands and legs steady. Try—oh—try to make her take the bit down to her ankles—till you’re holding the reins by the buckle. Do that every time you notice you’ve been crouching. Well, maybe not every time. That’ll keep you busy.”

Mal, in his detestably easy way, swung up into Twilight’s saddle. He wasn’t wearing his helmet, and out of the corner of her eye Miri just saw their mother bursting out of the barn where she was overseeing the Kindergarten Quadrille team tacking up, when Mal leaned over, put his hand on the back of Leslie’s neck, and kissed her. For quite a long time. Jane was now standing beside Miri, who felt she could almost hear Jane’s mouth closing with a snap. She could see several of the Quadrille members watching this performance in varying postures of longing and despair—and Leslie was quite pink by the time he stopped. Mal being Mal, he would know perfectly well that his mother had just almost bitten his head off for not putting his helmet on before he mounted. But he didn’t look their way as he unslung the helmet over his arm and carefully strapped it in place; and he gave a careless wave as they rode out of the yard. Leslie waved too, but she looked back, her expression a combination of joy and consternation.

“They’re too young to be that serious,” said Jane.

Miri silently agreed that that hadn’t been any old birthday kiss. “You and Dad were just that age,” she said. “And I was born two years later, and you told Gran you were waiting tables while she looked after me when you were training three-year-olds and Dad was in college, and we’re all still alive to tell the story.”

Jane grimaced. “Don’t remind me. I don’t suppose you’d buy ‘that’s different’?”

“No,” said Miri. “A baby wouldn’t be nearly as much trouble as Dorothy.”

By four o’clock, both Jane and Miri were beginning to glance a little too often down the old road that led to the nature reserve. There was no reason the birthday party needed to be back yet; five o’clock was probably the time to start expecting them, and it could be later still; it wouldn’t be dark till after seven. But the clouds were beginning to stack up, genuine thunderheads, grey and ominous. Five o’clock came and went, and the last lessons of the day. A couple of boarders were still out on the trail, but Miri (it being Jane’s turn to get dinner: steak, for Mal’s birthday) would come out, check around, and lock up later.

Flame had spent the day looking for goblins, and for the first time ever, when Miri tied him between his trees while she gave lessons, paced back and forth. It wasn’t only Flame; Oscar had refused to get out of Cindy’s car, and had stayed in the back seat and howled. Cindy left early.

They were heading back to the house, emphatically not saying anything to each other about wondering where Mal and Leslie were, when the two missing boarders came trotting down the old road. Jane and Miri stopped dead. Riders walked their horses back down that road, finishing the cooling-off process before the horses were put away; and both these horses had sweat darkening their shoulders and white showing around their eyes.

Miri could hear how hard Jane was working to keep her voice level: “You two don’t look too happy. Or you four.”

Miri made a grab at Applepie’s bridle as he jigged past sideways, his nose curled into his own shoulder; it wasn’t a good idea to let a horse trot into the barn. Applepie, recognizing the hand of authority, stopped, but Miri could feel the tension in him just from his mouth clamped on the bit. Sheila dropped the reins with a sigh.

“Thank you. I don’t know what’s got into him; I’ve never seen him like this. I know there’s some weather coming but . . . ” Applepie was middle-aged, round and—most of the time—placid, rather like Sheila; Sheila rode for exercise, not excitement.

It was beginning to rain.

Charis dismounted from Moose, who had never pranced in his life, but was trying to do so now “This must be the mother and father of all storms, is all I can say,” said Charis.

Miri thought, somebody tell me it’s just the barometric pressure that is making my hair stand on end. But she looked at Flame, and he was looking back down the road the way Sheila and Charis had come—the way Mal and Leslie should have come, and hadn’t—and he was so still he looked like the statue of a dog. The statue was entitled Awaiting the Arrival of the Enemy.

As Sheila and Charis led their horses away Jane said, “There’s nothing we can do.”

“No,” said Miri.

“And standing around in the rain is dumb,” said Jane.

“Yes,” said Miri, but neither of them moved.

There was a little silence, and then Jane said, “I suppose we might as well go indoors and start getting supper ready.”

Any other evening it was Jane’s turn to cook, Miri would have corrected her: “And you can start getting supper ready.” Tonight she only said, “Yes.”

They went indoors and were instantly mobbed by restless, fretful house cats. There being only four human ankles to twine around, Jessica, always the bravest, chose to avoid the crowd, and twined around Flame’s. Mal’s birthday cake sat on the kitchen table, under a meat save to protect it from the cats, but HAPPY BIRTHDAY MALACHI was still clearly visible through the mesh. There was a little pile of presents next to the cake. Miri listlessly started peeling potatoes, for something to do, something that would stop her looking at the cake and the presents.

Dorothy rocked back and forth on her perch in the living room, screaming, “Mal! Mal! Mal! Mal!” Ordinarily Miri could ignore Dorothy in one of her tantrums; tonight Miri wanted to scream along with her. Flame crept under the kitchen table and stayed there. Jessica and Charlotte joined him. It was a big old table with a lot of gnarly bent legs, and the cats disappeared in the shadows, but Miri could see Flame’s eyes glowing if she looked carefully. She thought, he almost looks like a very large dust bunny. No, a dust hellhound. She hoped, if she ran a broom under the table, he wouldn’t disintegrate. She finished the potatoes, pulled a chair out of the way and joined Flame and the two cats under the table. She put her arms around him and hugged him hard; he was warm and solid.

“You haven’t hidden under the table since you were seven,” said Jane in that too-level voice she’d used to Sheila and Charis.

I used to hide under the table because I was afraid that the ghosts in the old graveyard would come back here and get me, she thought, but she didn’t say it aloud. “If you want to join us,” she said, “bring a cushion. Two cushions.”

Jane’s hands had stopped rinsing lettuce. She was staring out the kitchen window. Even from under the table Miri saw the flash and when the thunder immediately followed the whole house rattled. She was pressed so closely to Flame that she felt the vibration when he made a noise; but it wasn’t a whine, it was more of a groan.

“That looked like it was right over the old graveyard,” said Jane in a voice even flatter and more remote than the one she’d been using.

Miri climbed out from under the table and joined her mother at the sink. She turned the still-running tap off. “You can’t know that,” she said.

“No,” agreed Jane. She turned the tap back on, and went back to swishing lettuce. “But it might have been. It was certainly somewhere over that way.”

Miri stared out the window for a while. There was another flash of lightning, but farther away; the thunder, when it came, was only a distant growl. The sky was still dark grey, but the wind had got up, and the clouds were rolling and twisting around each other like enormous snakes. It was still raining; when a gust of wind threw a handful of rain at the kitchen window, Miri started, as if it had been deliberately thrown at her. “We still can’t do anything,” she said.

“No,” said Jane. She was loading the clean lettuce into the salad spinner.

“We don’t even know which way they went,” said Miri.

“No,” said Jane.

“And they could have taken shelter somewhere,” said Miri.

“Yes,” said Jane. She was about to give the salad spinner’s handle the first pull when there was a blur among the trees at the end of the old road that led to the preserve. “Oh, no,” said Miri, and Jane looked up, fractionally later, and gasped. Miri had her hand on the doorknob before her brain had confirmed that the blur was a galloping horse; but it was Jane, behind her, who’d seen who it was: “Peggy,” she said.

Flame was there too, getting between their legs as they crowded out of the door. You don’t run at a panicky horse; Miri made a grab for Flame’s collar and discovered that he was already walking half a step behind her “Oh, god,” said Jane. Peggy was riderless, and alone.

She came to a bouncing, unhappy stop in the corner between the barn and the first arena, switching her forequarters back and forth as if looking for the way through. She turned around and saw them, let out a frantic whinny, and trotted toward them. Jane reached out quietly and took her bridle with a hand that trembled.

“Her reins have been knotted and her stirrups run up,” said Miri. “They’ve sent her to us. Twilight—must have hurt herself. But they’re okay. They must be okay.”

“If they were okay,” said Jane grimly, “Leslie—or Mal—would have ridden Peggy back. Whoever ran the stirrups up didn’t dare leave the other one.”

Miri was already jogging toward the barn. She could see Balthazar’s head over his stall door: He always looked out when he heard her voice. Jane followed, leading Peggy. “You still don’t know where to go,” said Jane. It would be Miri and Balthazar that went looking; Balthazar was the most reliable horse they had, and he was at his steadiest with Miri.

“No,” said Miri. “But Flame does. Look at him.” She’d let go his collar as soon as Jane had pulled Peggy’s reins over her head. He was standing at the nearer end of the old road, staring into the trees. His head and tail were high; as they looked at him he turned his head and looked at Miri, clearly saying, Hurry up. “Yes,” said Miri, and ran for the tack room.

She led Balthazar to the mounting block and tested everything once more, forcing herself to pay attention; she was so preoccupied she wasn’t certain that she could be trusted to buckle a bridle, to tighten a girth, things she did several times a day, every day, and had done for years. She checked the first-aid kit and the thermos of hot coffee twice: but even these were familiar adjuncts from the ordinary weekend trail rides. She settled her helmet on her head and swung into the saddle. Both wind and rain were lessening, but they were still going to get wet. Peggy was tied up in the breezeway. Jane had made the coffee in the tiny barn kitchen and then pulled Peggy’s saddle off and was running her hands down her legs and looking at her feet, checking for any injury. Or possibly for any sign that whoever had sent her home was bleeding. She straightened up as Miri mounted.

“Good luck,” was all she said.

Miri nodded. The moment Balthazar moved away from the block, Flame took off. Miri asked Balthazar to trot. She already knew where they were going: They were going to the old graveyard.

The wind seemed to drive the rain into her eyes; she kept shaking her head and holding the reins with one hand so she could wipe her eyes with the other. But Balthazar seemed to know that he was supposed to be following Flame, and Flame clearly knew where he was going. Occasionally Balthazar had to slow to a walk to pick his way, and Flame would stop and wait for them, but Flame, who was never impatient, paced or danced in place; and once he lost himself so far as to bark, a single, sharp, commanding sound. Balthazar raised his head as if to say, “You might as well calm down; I know what I’m doing.” Miri had to hope he did, because she couldn’t see well enough to guide him. It was not only the wind and rain; it was also getting dark. And she was lost. And should it be taking this long to get to the old graveyard?

She thought, why am I so certain Flame is going to find Mal and Leslie? That if I follow him I’ll find them too? He glanced back just at that moment, his red eyes flaring weirdly in the twilight. He was an unearthly figure, and he seemed bigger, somehow, out here in the malign-feeling, restless, still-volatile end of the storm; he seemed nearly as big as Balthazar. Don’t be silly, Miri said to herself, but her thoughts wouldn’t shut up: He’s the sort of thing that ought to live at that graveyard, they gibbered on, with the ghosts, and the—the lamias, or the vampires, or whatever. Even if he is going to find Mal and Leslie, he could just be leading me to the same fate. Why did I know him at once for a hellhound? She watched the long bristly-feathery red tail ahead of her for a moment, thinking about her first sight of him, at the pound, when he’d turned around and she’d seen his eyes for the first time, and seen the hopelessness in them. I might as well mistrust Balthazar, she thought. I’m just not going to.

And at that moment she saw the old bent tree that stood or leaned over the path into the graveyard. And at the foot of it she saw a bulky shadow that she was sure wasn’t usually there . . . and then it moved, and she saw Leslie’s face looking up at her. Leslie was sitting on the ground holding one of Mal’s hands with both of hers . . . and Mal was lying in a strange, twisted position . . .

Miri nearly fell, getting off Balthazar. “It’s okay,” Mal said in a hollow hoarse voice nothing like his normal one. “I’m not dead or anything. It’s just . . . I can’t feel much below my neck.”

Leslie said, “It had been such a lovely afternoon. Blue and clear and warm.”

No, it hasn’t, thought Miri, startled. It’s been grey and thundery-feeling all day, in spite of the weather report. But she didn’t say anything. She was too busy staring at Mal. Don’t move him, she thought. Spine injury. Don’t move him. Mom’ll have called the ambulance by now—I’ll leave in a minute and tell them where to come. But she couldn’t help herself dropping to her knees beside him and picking up his hand. It was like picking up a stone or a grain bag or a baking dish to put in the oven, except that it was warm. There was no tension, no response—no life. Leslie was clinging to his other hand; her other hand alternated between wiping her face—it could have just been the rain, but Miri could see her crying—and stroking Mal’s hair. “Such a lovely afternoon. Mal brought me here, we had our picnic here. The storm came out of nowhere. It was—it wasn’t right, that storm.”

“Leslie,” said Mal, in his stranger’s voice.

“It wasn’t right,” Leslie said, and Miri realized she was near hysterics, near breaking down completely. “The lightning struck as if it was aiming for us. Twilight bolted—and that tree reached down and knocked Mal off . . . ”

“Leslie,” Mal said again.

It wasn’t the tree, thought Miri . . . and then she thought, how do I know that?

Flame was standing beside them, at the end of the path, staring toward the graveyard as he had stared into the forest while he waited for Miri to tack Balthazar up and follow him. As he had stared up the path a few short weeks ago, when Miri and Leslie had come this way.

“I ran Peggy’s stirrups up and—and knotted her reins,” said Leslie.

“She did that all by herself,” said Mal. “I didn’t tell her to. I was so proud of her.”

And Miri saw that he was crying too.

“And led her onto the path and pointed her toward home and told her to go and she went,” said Leslie. “As if she knew. I didn’t dare leave Mal. I—In case of concussion, you know. You mustn’t leave someone alone if they might be concussed, in case they fall asleep or—or go into shock . . . ” Her voice cracked on the last word.

Miri was horribly aware of the inert hand she was holding. The fingers lay limply in hers; she had to hold on with an effort to prevent the hand from sliding away from hers and flopping back to the ground. She saw the two riding helmets and the remains of the picnic piled up behind where Leslie and Mal were. In the middle of the crisis that little heap of human gear—Mal’s useless helmet, which had not prevented what had happened—suddenly seemed the saddest thing she had ever seen.

She laid the hand down gently and stood up. She had brought blankets and the useless first-aid kit and a thermos of instant coffee with half a bag of sugar in it. She was embarrassed by the first-aid kit, by her adult-ed emergency training, by her ability to splint a broken bone on a healthy unbroken volunteer at the adult-ed center, while an EMT with a clipboard watched her. She’d never had to do more than put a Band-Aid on a graze, and once she’d created a sling for a sprained wrist. She unrolled the blankets and retied the first-aid kit to the back of Balthazar’s saddle. She uncapped the thermos and made Leslie and Mal each drink some of the hot too-sweet coffee; Leslie drank a few sips mechanically, and then held the plastic mug awkwardly for Mal. She does it better than I would have, Miri thought. They didn’t teach us that in the first-aid course. She laid one blanket over Mal as he lay, and tucked the other one around the sitting Leslie. Neither of them seemed to notice.

It had stopped raining, and the wind had died, but the feeling of tension and fear didn’t ease. Almost as if they were in the eye of a hurricane.

“I’d better go tell the ambulance crew where to come,” she said. She paused. She had to say something, but the words didn’t exist. “Will you be okay?”

Leslie looked up, an expression on her face not unlike the one that had been on Flame’s, that day at the pound. She didn’t bother to try to smile, but she understood what Miri was saying. “Yes,” she said. “We’ll be fine.” And Miri clearly heard in her voice that she wouldn’t break down or have hysterics while Mal needed her.

But when Miri turned away, to go back to Balthazar, to mount up and ride back as quickly as she still could—dusk would be black dark soon, and if they were following a flashlight she’d have to dismount and both of them walk—there was Flame, standing in her way. She tried to brush past him, but he wouldn’t let her. “Flame,” she said, “we have to go back—well, I have to go back. If you want to stay here and—and guard them, that’d be good. But I have to go.” And she reached over him to pick up Balthazar’s reins.

And he bit her.

It was, briefly, as if the world had ended. The world, in some ways, had already ended; although she was still able not to think about what had happened to Mal, to her little brother, to one of the three people she loved best in the world, the awareness of it was horribly near. Still without really facing what had happened, she told herself that doctors were miracle workers these days, that hospitals had machines that could do everything, that Leslie, wonderful Leslie, had kept her head and wisely refrained from trying to move him, so that anything any doctor or any machine could do for him could still be done. But the encroaching darkness of this evening still felt like her own life closing in, as if, after this, there would be no dawn.

And then her dog bit her.

She looked down from what felt like a very long way away, as if she were floating up among the treetops somewhere . . . as if she might float away entirely. He had bitten her swiftly and decisively—but, she now realized, gently. He still had hold of her arm; she could feel his teeth, but they weren’t hurting her. She thought, I’m a balloon and he’s holding my string. Slowly she floated back down from the treetops, till she could feel her feet on the ground, her breath going in and out. Her dog’s teeth in her arm. She let Balthazar’s reins drop back on his neck and said to Flame, “What is it?”

He let go her arm and turned away, trotting straight back to the path to the graveyard. Slowly she unfastened Balthazar’s tethering rope, and looped it around a tree—a smaller, innocent tree, a little distance from the path, and from Leslie and Mal. Then reluctantly she followed Flame.

“What is it?” said Leslie.

“I don’t know,” said Miri. “But he brought me here. He brought me a lot faster than I’d’ve been able to find the way myself, in this weather. I’d like to see what he wants. It won’t take long. I promise.”

As soon as she set foot on the little track into the graveyard she knew something was terribly wrong. It was like . . . she couldn’t think of anything that it was like: That was part of the wrongness. She felt dizzy and sick, and as if she was no longer sure which way was up and which down; it was an effort to pick up each foot and think where to put it down. Especially because her feet kept wanting to go backwards; the one in front kept trying to pick itself up and move it behind the one in back. She concentrated on Flame’s tail. She had been following Flame’s tail for a very long time; leagues; centuries; all the way from the barn to here, somewhere on the journey unknowingly crossing a boundary to this other country where this awful thing had happened to her brother . . .

The path itself was short. When they reached the end of it and the sky opened out before them, she was astonished to discover that there were streaks of sunset lighting up the retreating storm clouds in gold and pink and pale orange, and the sky above them was a glorious deep blue. There was a huge pale amber moon just above the trees. She was dumbfounded that such beauty could still exist, in this foreign country where her brother lay twisted and helpless where he had fallen.

The trees around the edges of the graveyard were black, and the crooked, leaning tombstones were black. All the rest was washed in the rose-grey of the sunset. Flame himself was a deep vivid russet, like a maple tree in October.

No; one other thing was black. There was a tall, hunched, half-human shape in the middle of the clear space; in the middle of the little cluster of tombstones. She didn’t come here often, but she was sure that no such tall thing had ever stood where this one was now.

She stopped. Flame turned around instantly and came back to her; went round behind her and leaned against the backs of her legs. I don’t want to go forward, she thought. I don’t want to go any nearer that thing—whatever it is.

And then it opened its eyes, or turned its head, or threw back its hood. All of the rest of it was still black, lightlessly black, black as if light were an unconvincing myth, but it had red eyes. Large, slanted, almond-shaped, scarlet-red eyes.

Miri put her hands over her mouth to stop herself from screaming.

Flame backed away a pace or two and then slammed into her, and she staggered forward, away from the encircling trees, out into the graveyard. She dropped her hands and whimpered like a scolded puppy, but raised her face to the sky and tried to imagine the touch of the moonlight like a real touch: like the nose of your horse or your dog in your hand, against your face or your arm, hoping for something nice to eat, or at least a pat; saying “hello,” saying “I’m here,” saying “how are you?” saying “can I help?” The moon was a silvery gold. The shadows on its face were grey, and there was no red anywhere.

She felt Flame’s nose on her arm, and then the sweep of his tongue, over the place where he had bitten her, minutes or months before. She did not look down. She did not want to see his red eyes. She stared at the nearest tombstone, so she need not look at the thing’s eyes either.

You’re too late. The boy has fallen; it’s over. He loves it here; he always has. Soon he will be here forever.

No! she cried.

Yes. He will die, because he will not want to live. And his mother will remember how he loved it here, and so he will come here, although his sweetheart will struggle against this.

No, she thought. No, no, no. She raised her hands again, and put them on either side of her face and squeezed, as if this were a known tactic in an emergency, like artificial respiration for someone who has stopped breathing, like not moving someone with a spine injury. No. . . . And Jane would never let anyone she loved be buried here in this place, this awful place . . .

buried

Why? she cried again. Why?

The thing quivered as if it were laughing, and so she knew it was the thing who spoke—if speaking was how to describe what it did. She heard it; that was enough—more than enough.

A third voice: Do not ask why. There is no why. Because he can. That is enough. Because he is wicked. Because this is a place of power, and his kind are drawn to power.

Ah, Gelsoraban. You appear at the most unexpected moments. I should have thought you had grown weary of mortals by now.

I should have thought you had grown weary of wickedness.

Again it laughed. Never.

Well, then.

But you were born—created—cast and carved as were we. You of all of us have gone away from us.

Not only I. Jry and Krobekahl and Strohmoront too.

It seemed to her that the thing went still in a way it had not been still before, and that there was no laughter in it anywhere. That is not enough.

To stand against the rest of you? To create light where you have brought darkness? No, it is not. But it is a beginning. We have begun.

And then the thing did laugh again. Begun! You’re a dog. What is Jry? A squirrel? A frog? Perhaps Krobekahl is a teapot or a chair. And I have the boy. And through him this place—this place of power, as you have called it.

You do not have him! Miri said. He is my brother! He is human—he is daylight and breathing!

Not for long, said the thing. Not for much longer.

Give him back! she said. Give him back!

You can claim him, if you dare, said the thing, and it was obvious that it was sure she did not dare. I would not want Gelsoraban to think there is no—what is it?—mercy in me.

How? she said fiercely.

Why, said the thing, you need only ask—nicely—each of the nice people who lie here already. Who have lain here for so long with no one but themselves to talk to. They are quite looking forward to someone new. I have promised them, you see. You will have to convince them to give him up. I do not think they will wish to do so. I think they will need a great deal of persuading. Too much, perhaps, for someone as young as you. Someone as fragile as you. For daylight and breathing are very fragile—especially after dark.

She looked up. Sunset was fading quickly; the first stars were out above the remains of the clouds. Again she looked at the moon, and this time she willed herself to feel the moon’s light like the touch of a friend. And then she looked down, into the blazing red eyes of the creature she’d brought home from the pound; the creature that looked enough like a dog—though it obviously wasn’t a dog—that it had been taken to the pound. She remembered Ronnie saying: When Diane went out with the van she almost didn’t bring him back, because of the way he looks. Gelsoraban. And the horrible black thing that had broken her brother knew him. Who—what—was Gelsoraban?

Flame gave a tiny, doglike whine. It was exactly the whine of a dog who is suddenly sure its beloved owner doesn’t love it any more. It was like the look in his eyes at the pound; the look in Leslie’s eyes when she’d said, “We’ll be fine.”

And at that moment the black thing laughed. That was its second mistake; it must have thought that would finish breaking Miri’s nerve. But instead it drove her back on the things she knew. She knew that their mother would never let Mal be buried here. And she knew that if there was any chance for her brother, however remote, however dreadful, she would take it. And she knew that it didn’t matter what Flame was or who he had been—or what color his eyes were. What mattered was that she trusted him.

It didn’t seem right to stroke the head of something capable of defying the black thing—to stroke it like a dog. But this was Flame—Flame, whom she’d rescued from the pound, the top of whose head was particularly silky, as if to invite stroking. She drew her hand down his sleek head—and took a deep shuddering breath—and felt a little braver.

She didn’t want to ask the black thing what she had to do to talk to the ghosts, and so she walked forward—toward the black thing as it stood in the center of the graveyard. Her stomach was threatening to turn inside out and her knees were threatening to drop her to the ground, but she crossed the few steps to the first tombstone and hesitantly put her hand on it . . .

She was dead and trapped and cold and terrified and smothered by darkness and paralyzed and dead and she couldn’t move and couldn’t breathe and she had never been so cold and this was darker than anything could be she was blind and dead and helpless and she could not see or hear or feel except fear and cold and this is what it was to be dead . . .

No. She could hear. She could hear the black thing laughing.

She could see too. She could see Flame’s flaming eyes, even in this darkness, and she knew them for his eyes, not the thing’s. She thought, how lucky I am you are not a dog. I would not be able to see a dog’s eyes in this darkness. And I think I might be frightened to death if I couldn’t see you—couldn’t see your eyes.

She said—she tried to say—“Pardon me, is anyone there? I’ve come to ask—to ask you—if I could have my brother back, please? We would miss him so much and—and I know accidents happen, but it wasn’t an accident, it was the black thing.”

Loneliness. Loneliness, and dark and cold and death and . . . and going on and on. On and on and on and on and on. No change. Never. Just dark and cold and death . . . and loneliness. Especially loneliness.

Flame’s eyes blazed at her and she thought, wait a minute. Why are these—people—stuck here? Being dead and cold and lonely?

Most graveyards aren’t haunted. She thought of the cemetery where her grandfather was buried. It was huge and beautiful and full of trees, and there were picnic tables and families came there on nice days and the kids played while the grown-ups changed the flowers and—sometimes—whispered the news to the person they were visiting. She’d always imagined her grandfather somewhere sitting on a long porch with a dog at his feet. The porch sometimes looked out over a wildflower field and sometimes it looked out over a lake, but the dog at his feet was always the dog he’d told her stories about, that he’d had when he was a boy. She couldn’t imagine him as a boy, so he was the grandfather she had known, but she was sure she knew exactly what the dog looked like, and how he would lie at her grandfather’s feet.

It was as if she saw him now. The porch, and the cottage behind it, stood in the wildflower meadow. She raised her hand and waved. The dog saw her first; he lifted his head and thumped his tail. Then her grandfather noticed her. What are you doing here, girl? he said.

I—it’s about Mal, she said. I—I have to get him back.

Her grandfather ran his hand over his head, just the way his son still did. You got a special permission, do you, girl?

I—I guess so. She thought: I have a hellhound. With eyes as red as your wild poppies.

You be careful. Don’t you come any farther this way.

There are some—people here, who—shouldn’t be here, I think. I think they’re lost.

You want to send ’em this way? You do that. I’ll help ’em. You just don’t come any farther.

Grandad—

Yes, girl?

I miss you.

I miss you too. But I sit here, watching you. Watching you grow up. Watching Jane and Ned grow you up. It’s nice here. Peaceful. It’s nice to have old Sunny with me too, and he leaned over and put his hand on the dog’s back. And I’ll see you here someday, and that’ll be wonderful. But that day’s a long way off for you. I think you better go back now.

Mal—

You send those people along of me, and go back to Mal. It’s a long time for Mal too.

Her heart had jumped up from its leaden misery at her grandfather’s last sentence, before she realized that it didn’t necessarily mean what she wanted it to mean. Oh, but—she began, and then Flame was in front of her, bumping her backwards as he had bumped her forwards, into the old graveyard. And she heard her grandfather laugh.

Gelsoraban, he said. You sure show up in the strangest places.

And then she was back in the black, cold, dead place, surrounded by loneliness. She made a huge effort and said, “My grandfather will help you. He says so. You don’t have to stay here. You don’t have to be so lonely you let horrible black things k-kill people to give you some company. Come on. It’s this way. Look.” And she made an even greater effort, and she was no longer cold and dead and paralyzed, and she looked over her shoulder, and she could still see the meadow, and her grandfather, and Sunny. It didn’t look too far. It didn’t look like too far to walk, even if you were old and weak and had known for too long that you were hopeless and there was no way out.

And then the darkness and the cold began to break up, like storm clouds after a storm. There was something like a gentle breeze that blew past her; something like the rustle of people walking past you in the dark. It was a clean-smelling breeze, not rotten or moldy; it smelled of freshly turned earth, of the fields in spring right after the farmer has dragged his harrow over them.

There was something else too. Something she could not put a name to: This is a place of power. For a moment she felt borne up by something large and strong and—and—she had no idea, but she thought that if she could have seen it, it would have been beautiful. Beautiful and free. Free.

As the darkness cleared she found she was standing in the old graveyard, with Flame standing leaning against her, and her hands wrapped around his ears as if he were a sturdy tree limb and she had just fallen over a cliff. When she let go, her fingers felt stiff. It was a clear, calm night, with a million stars overhead, in spite of the bright moonlight.

There was no black thing standing among the tombstones, and the old graveyard felt strangely . . . empty.

And then there was a scream—Leslie’s scream. Miri turned and bolted back down the path, in spite of the dark under the trees.

Mal was sitting up, and had put his arms around her and was saying, “There, there, I’m sorry I frightened you—I frightened the hell out of myself, believe me—but I guess I was just stunned somehow—I’m okay now—I’m okay—” And Leslie was clinging to him and crying and crying and crying.

Miri firmly put both Mal and Leslie on Balthazar, and walked beside them as they started home. Mal and Leslie had both tried to argue, but not very hard, and before they’d gone far Miri had her hand on Mal’s leg to help keep him in the saddle, or rather to pinch him when he fell asleep. Every time she dug her fingers into his thigh and he twitched awake with an “uggh, take it easy, that hurt,” she remembered the limp, insensible hand she had held when she’d first found them. Leslie sat behind him, and sometimes Miri had to let go of Mal long enough to pinch her.

Flame had shot on ahead of them as soon as they’d got themselves sorted out and were started back in the right direction, and sooner than she’d expected she saw flashlight beams and heard voices, and then Flame reappeared, dancing like a puppy. “Here!” she shouted. “We’re here!”

Jane reached them first. She threw her arms around Miri because, Miri thought, she had to throw her arms around someone, and Miri was the only person available on the ground. But Miri was glad to hug her back. Balthazar had stopped when Miri did, but when Leslie made to slide down so that Mal could dismount more easily, Jane put her hand on Leslie’s leg and said, “No. You just stay up there. I’m sure you’re exhausted. Flame—”

But she didn’t have a chance to finish, because Ned was there and began saying all the same things, and by that time the first of several strangers had arrived, wearing what Miri guessed was a police uniform although it was hard to tell in the dark, and Mal and Leslie had to insist to each of them as they appeared (especially a very bossy woman who appeared to be the head of an ambulance crew) that they were fine and were happy to ride the rest of the way back and did not need a stretcher or anything else.

While this was going on Miri was discovering just how exhausted she was. She moved a little away from the gathering crowd around Balthazar and his two riders, bumped into something that felt like a tree stump, and sat down on it. It was very uncomfortable but for a moment at least it was better than standing up. She felt that even sitting up was almost too much, and slumped over, propping her elbows on her thighs. And then there was a flicker of red in the corner of her eye, and Flame put his nose in her ear. She sat up again.

She reached out to cup his long face between her hands. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, thank you, thank you. Gelsoraban, or whatever your real name is. I don’t know what you did but—thank you. I can’t begin to . . . I’d feed you steak every day for the rest of your life only I can’t afford it. Or foie gras or—or—” And she discovered she was crying.

A very, very long tongue extruded itself and licked her face. “Yes, you’re right,” she said. “Silly of me to get all collapsed and shocky when everything’s okay. Everything’s fine. Thanks to you. No. No, I’m not going to cry any more, I’m really not. I think you’ve got some extra tongue, like all those ribs . . . ” But her hands were shaking, so she took them back, and chafed them together. “I’m sorry I’m behaving like such a dork . . . ”

There was the oddest sensation in her head. It was a little like finding a parcel on your doorstep that someone had left for you, that you weren’t expecting, that you’d overlooked. There was nothing so clear as words, but she realized that she’d been given an awareness that what had happened in the graveyard was as much her responsibility—her achievement, her victory—as it was Flame’s. “I don’t know,” she said, because she was a human and words were what she used. “I don’t know. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. Mal’s okay. That’s all that matters.”

Another awareness: that the old graveyard was now clear and clean. That the things that had been happening for over a century because it was neither clear nor clean would now stop happening.

“You mean cell phones will work here? The next time somebody casts a shoe and we have to walk home I can ring ahead and say we’ll be late? That’ll be brilliant. And totally lost and hopeless walkers from the preserve won’t turn up at the stables and want to know where they are. Well, not as many anyway.”

Jane’s voice, and a cone of flashlight beam: “Hiding under the table and talking to your dog again, are you?” Miri told herself that Jane wouldn’t be able to see anything that was the wrong kind of revealing by flashlight, but Jane came straight up to her and crouched down to give her another hug. “Honey, are you all right? I have the feeling more happened than Leslie or Mal is telling us.” She paused to give Miri a chance to answer, but when Miri said nothing she went on, “We were just getting organized to start looking ourselves. We’ve got cops, firefighters, and an ambulance, and a few guys from the preserve, and Leslie’s mom is probably here by now too. I hated ringing her but . . . And then Flame came prancing into the yard and barked to make us all look at him—you know he never barks—and he gamboled around like a lunatic for a minute or so and then ran straight up to me and threw himself down and waved all his legs in the air, still barking and wagging his tail like he was trying to wag it off. And I said, without even knowing I was going to say it, They’re all right. He’s telling us they’re all right.”

There was another little silence, but this time it was a silence they both wanted to listen to.

“Flame knew where to go, of course, but I knew you’d been heading for the old graveyard, so we didn’t have to argue much about coming this way first. Everybody else is kind of on hold. The cops were saying there’s not a lot we can do now it’s dark and the preserve guys were saying they know the ground really well and they’d be happy to do some looking anyway, it’s not high summer any more, exposure, you know, if you’re out all night and you’re hurt . . . ” That wasn’t a silence they wanted to listen to and Jane hurried on:

“Look, darling, there are some stretcher-bearers just longing for something to do, and Mal and Leslie are refusing to get off Balt.” Miri smiled a little at this. “Would you like a lift back?”

“No. Good grief. I’m just a little—shaken. It was—scary, you know?”

Jane said grimly, “Yes. I know. And it did happen at the graveyard? Mal says the lightning struck almost like it was aiming for him, and he fell off.”

He didn’t fall off. He was pulled off. “Yes.”

Jane sighed. “You’re as communicative as they are. Never mind. I don’t care, so long as you’re all back safe. Twilight’s come home, by the way. She’s got a very strange—what looks like a burn, on her flank, but it can’t be a burn. If the lightning had actually struck her they’d both be dead, or at least really messed up. She’s a little spooked but I hope she’ll be okay. We’ll turn her out for a week and see how she goes. Come on, child. If you won’t accept a friendly passing stretcher you can at least lean on me.” She pulled Miri’s arm over her shoulder and stood up.

When they got back to the barn, the ambulance driver, who’d been listening to the hospital dispatchers, told them there’d been a bad accident on the way out of the city, and the highway was blocked solid. So when he’d heard the message coming in on the barn machine he’d picked up the phone: Leslie’s mother had been two miles from the nearest exit for the last hour and a half. (There were already two messages on the barn answering machine, and when they got indoors they discovered three more on the house machine.) Jane said, “Oh, poor woman,” and to Leslie, “You aren’t going anywhere tonight, you can sleep here.” Jane rang back, told her to go home as soon as she could, said they’d ring again as soon as everyone else had gone, and put Leslie on the phone.

It was nearly eleven by the time the last of the searchers and rescuers had left. Miri was so exhausted she could hardly walk the hundred yards from the barn to the house. She hadn’t decided what she was going to say about what had happened, and she hadn’t had a chance to talk to Mal and Leslie about what they wanted to say, or not say. Fortunately the cop who tried to talk to her thought she was just tired and shaken—which was only too true as well—and patted her shoulder and told her to come in to the station when she’d had some sleep and fill a form out, please. It wouldn’t be that easy with Jane.

When they got into the house, Leslie rang her mother again, and Jane rescued the salad that had been sitting in the sink for the last five hours. They’d decided to save the steak and the cake till tomorrow; Ned started slicing bread. Miri looked dubiously at the peeled potatoes, and put them in the refrigerator. Mal was saying hello to Dorothy, who was carrying on, Miri thought, as if she knew the truth. The cats had decided that whatever it was, it was over, and supper was late.

Miri dropped her eyes to Flame. Flame was looking at her, but then he often looked at her. She sat down in the nearest chair—she’d leaned harder on Jane on the walk back to the barn than she wanted to admit—and Flame put his head in her lap. He was too tall to do this easily, so Miri slid off the chair and sat on the floor beside him and leaned against him. He put his nose in her hair and whuffled gently. Under the cover of Dorothy’s shrieks and Leslie’s conversation with her mother she said to him, “I don’t suppose we’re going to be able to talk to each other after this?”

There was no answer. She didn’t really expect one. But she was having a hard time with what had happened a few hours ago. And she couldn’t explain away the impossible part because she remembered Mal’s lifeless hand in hers too clearly. She whispered, so that only Flame could hear her, “If the only way I get to talk to you is because . . . because something incredibly awful has happened, then I’d rather you were just a . . . dog.” He whuffled a little more. His breath always smelled clean and sweet—a kind of running-water smell, like the stream through the nature preserve. It must be all that charcoal he ate. “How does a . . . a . . . become a dog? I bet Jry and Kro—Kro-something aren’t squirrels or teapots. Maybe they’re hellhounds, like you. I wish . . . ” But she couldn’t say what she wished, even to Flame.

Jane said, “Okay, everyone. This isn’t going to be the best meal you’ve ever eaten, but we all need to eat—you three especially. Leslie, you sit there. Miriam, you may not sit under the table with your dog, even that dog.”

It was hard to think about food at midnight. Flame got Miri’s first sandwich but she managed to eat the second. It did begin to make her feel better, but that only made her thoughts even harder to duck or switch off. Jane disappeared briefly and returned carrying a bottle of wine and a corkscrew. “This feels like a special occasion,” she said. “I mean a special occasion that doesn’t have anything to do with Mal’s birthday. I’ve had horses come home riderless before—memorably when you, Miri, took that four-legged maniac Padraic out against my express orders, and he lost you—”

Just as we were passing the turn off to the old graveyard, thought Miri, but she didn’t say it aloud.

“But I’ve never had this sense of having someone snatched back from—from—from—” but she couldn’t say it aloud. “And the way you all look isn’t helping. You wouldn’t be in shock like this—and I’m not sure Miri isn’t the worst—if all that had happened is that lightning struck a little too close and Twilight took exception and dumped Mal. For one thing, if that’s all that happened, the two of you would have come back on Peggy, instead of sending her home with her stirrups run up as a message that you needed rescuing.”

There was a little silence. Finally Mal said, “So, tomorrow, whatever we say now, we get to blame the wine, is that it?”

“That’s the idea,” said Jane. “And the hour, of course. No one says sensible things at midnight. So talk. What the hell really happened?”

There was another little silence. Miri could hear the grandfather clock in the hall ticking. Dorothy was standing on one leg with her head under her wing. The only sound besides the clock was Ned eating his third sandwich. Mal reached out and picked up one of his Presents. He’d decided to save opening them till the steak dinner, but he looked at the one he held carefully, as if he was going to guess what was in it. But Miri thought he was looking at his hand and arm more than he was looking at the gift. It was a small flat box and the wrapping paper was blue and white and the ribbon around it was red. Miri knew what was in it because she’d wrapped it: a gift certificate for a new pair of running shoes. His old pair were blue and white and red. All he had to do was go round to the sports shop and choose the new ones. He’d met Leslie when she had been one of the volunteer gofers for away matches for the cross-country team last year.

Mal put the little box down and picked up his wine glass briskly, took a giant swallow and set it down again with an air of resolution. “Okay. I didn’t just come off Twilight. I broke my neck.”

Silence again. Horrible silence. Ned stopped chewing. The clock went tick tick.

“I heard it. Tiny little crunch. And then I was on the ground and couldn’t feel a thing below my neck. All I felt . . . It was . . . no. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Miri looked up just as the tears began to slide down Leslie’s face again. Mal reached his hand out—the hand that Miri had briefly held—and covered hers with his. “I don’t want to talk about it for me, not just for Leslie. Leslie was brilliant. Peggy was pretty stirred up by the lightning and Twilight taking off, but Leslie got her quieted down—and the storm left almost as fast as Twilight did—”

“As if it had done what it was meant to do,” said Leslie in a strange flat voice—a voice very like Jane’s when she’d said, That looked like it was right over the old graveyard. Leslie picked up her wine glass in the hand Mal wasn’t holding and took a mouthful.

“Yes,” said Mal. “It was a bit like that. But this is the wine talking, right? So Leslie tied Peggy up and—and found out I wasn’t getting up because I couldn’t, and she said that she mustn’t move me, and that she’d send Peggy home and you’d be sure to come looking for us and you’d even know where to come because Miri had told her that I liked the old graveyard, and you’d’ve seen the lightning strike.

“And it was pretty much forever, lying under that tree, till Miri and Balthazar and Flame showed up . . . ”

“Don’t,” said Leslie. Mal squeezed her hand. “Yeah. So Miri showed up and she . . . she saw it was pretty bad. And then . . . well, Flame went kind of nuts. That was pretty weird. Miri decided to see what he was carrying on about and followed him into the old graveyard.”

Jane glanced at Miri and back at Mal.

“I thought she was kind of . . . you know, postponing the inevitable. About me. And . . . well . . . I don’t know. There was this feeling for a little while like . . . I don’t know, like the world was coming to an end, except I was already . . . I was pretty out of it. It’s just I was even more out of it there for a while . . . ”

Leslie said, “It was like the sky had come down and was mashing us into the ground. It was like . . . it was like being in a waffle iron and they’re closing the lid. I thought . . . I thought what had happened to Mal was making me crazy, that I was cracking up. And then suddenly it went away.”

“Okay, it was like that for you too? That’s pretty much what it felt like to me. Except when they opened the waffle iron and let us out I could move again. It was like everything that had happened since the lighting struck had been the waffle iron. Had been a bad dream. Except it wasn’t. I remember. I remember just . . . kind of not being there, except for this awful . . . Also I feel like I’ve been in a waffle iron. I’ve fallen off horses before and I’ve never been beat up the way I feel beat up now You’re going to need a winch to get me out of bed tomorrow morning, I think.”

Miri was looking at Mal when he turned to look at her. Leslie was looking at her too, and Jane. She couldn’t see where Ned was looking but she could guess he was looking at her. She looked down at Flame to give her courage, and gently pulled his ears, one silky ear per hand. “It was Flame really. I didn’t know. He—it really is—was—haunted, you know. The graveyard.” This is a place of power. She taught riding at her mother’s riding stable—no, she taught riding with her mother at their riding stable—places of power were nothing to do with her. Flame looked up at her, and the end of his tail twitched. She took a deep breath.

“Flame knew the—the thing that was haunting it. He’s a hellhound, you know?” She wanted to laugh, but she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to stop. “I guess he defected. But I guess he knows his old colleagues. This one knew him. It said I could have Mal back if I convinced the—the ghosts to let him go. The—the thing seemed to think that the way—the way Mal was, he—he wouldn’t live long.” He will not want to live. “And then . . . ” But she realized she couldn’t tell them about her grandfather, about Ned’s father, not when they all still missed him so much, especially Ned. It would be like Mal talking about what happened to him after Leslie said don’t. She might try to tell Jane about it later, some time when they were alone. “I—I guess I kind of told them that they didn’t have to stay there. That they weren’t trapped. They didn’t seem to know—that was the thing, not letting them know. I think Flame must have stopped the thing from stopping them while I—told them. So they left. And when we came back out of the graveyard again Mal was sitting up.”

There was another, longer silence. “Do you suppose Flame would like some wine?” said Jane. She passed Miri an empty plate and Miri poured a few drops of wine into it and set it on the floor. Flame came out from under the table and solemnly lapped it up. Then he raised his head and looked around the table as if checking that this was what he was supposed to do. Or as if he was including them all in . . . it was like ratifying a contract, thought Miri. Sealing a pact. “I think the graveyard really . . . isn’t haunted anymore,” said Miri. “Maybe cell phones will work here now.”

“Well, that would be convenient,” said Jane. “Except that then we’ll have to forbid people to use them while they’re riding and insist they turn them off before they get on their horses. Leslie, you’re dropping. Let me show you where you’ll sleep. Miri, can you loan her a nightgown?”

Miri fetched an old, half-worn-out flannel nightgown because it was, in her opinion, the most comfortable and comforting, and then began to collect the dirty dishes and ran water in the sink. “For pity’s sake, Miri,” said her father, “go to bed. I’ll do this.”

Miri shook her head. “I’m not quite ready to go to bed,” she said. “I don’t want to have to dream about anything yet.” Ned put his arm around her and they stood silently for a moment.

Then he sighed. “It’s one thirty A.M. and I believed every word you said. Tomorrow morning I have to give a presentation to the trustees of a big charity so they’ll hire us, and what happened here just now will all be nonsense. But at one thirty A.M. . . . thank you.” He kissed the top of her head. “If you really want to struggle with the dishes, I’m going to bed.”

Miri nodded at the billow of detergent suds. “You go. The horses won’t care if I’m awake, so long as they get their breakfast. Your trustees probably would mind.”

She didn’t notice that Jane had returned till she began lifting dishes out of the draining rack and drying them and putting them away. They’d finished and Miri was mopping the counter when Jane said at last, “It’s all true, isn’t it? It’s all true.”

Miri said, “Yes.”

Flame was sprawled in the middle of the kitchen floor, where they had to keep stepping over him, but neither of them wanted to tell him to move.

“It’s two in the morning, and I can say anything I like,” Jane began, and paused.

“That’s what Dad said.”

“Do you suppose he was—Flame was—somehow—sent?”

Miri thought about his sad red eyes when she’d first seen him at the pound—about the depth of that sadness. Had she been drawn to that sadness because she was supposed to be? “No,” she said, after a moment. “I think he—after he—after he defected, I think he’s been having, um, culture shock. I think that’s probably why he’s . . . a dog.”

“I don’t like the way this conversation is going,” said Jane. “Next you’re going to tell me there’s a lot of stuff like the graveyard—what that graveyard used to be—around.”

Miri said, “I think there probably is. But there’s a lot of stuff like us and Leslie and our barn too, isn’t there? Like those two guys from the preserve who were going to look for Mal and Leslie even after dark because they know the area so well. Or even you telling Leslie’s mom to go home, that Leslie can spend the night here. And we have Flame.”

At the sound of Miri’s voice saying his name, Flame opened his eyes and thumped his tail.

“Then maybe,” Jane said drily, “you were right about Peggy and Tamari too.”

Miri knelt beside Flame and began stroking his long extra-ribby side. “Maybe I am.”

Flame moaned with pleasure, just like an ordinary dog.

Jane said, “Tamari’s owner rang yesterday. She’s got a new show pony. She says it’s an angel. In fact that’s its name—Angel. She says Greyhaven is the best barn she was ever at and she wants to come back.”

“But there’s a catch,” Miri said.

“She’s still got Tamari.”

Miri sat back on her heels and laughed. Laughing felt good. “Tell her we’ll have him—at double rates. Because only you and I will be able to do anything around him, even fill his water bucket. Tell her that the extra money will go into the indoor arena fund—we’d be even better than the best barn she’s been at if we had an indoor arena.”

“My decisive new business partner,” said Jane. “That’s kind of the way my mind was going too. You’re two years older and here all the time. We can cope.”

Flame had raised his head and was looking at Miri meaningfully. She started petting him again. “And you know,” she added, “I bet they’ll write a big newspaper story about what happened tonight—isn’t Leslie’s mom dating a journalist?—and they’ll get everything wrong because we won’t tell them any of what we’ve been talking about, but we’ll tell them about Flame finding Mal and Leslie and then coming back to the barn to tell you he’d found them and to lead you back. And I bet all these people come out to get a look at this weird hero dog with the red eyes. And I bet some of them decide we look like a nice place and they and their kids should take some riding lessons. And when we can put the indoor arena up in two years instead of three, we can call it the Flame Arena.”

Now Jane laughed. It was a nice sound: Easy. Happy. “Okay. It’s a deal. Are you ready to go to bed yet?”

“Yes,” said Miri. “I have to feed the horses in four hours. And I’m going to dream about the Flame Arena.”

© 2009 by Robin McKinley.

Originally published in Fire: Tales of Elemental Spirits,

edited by Robin McKinley & Peter Dickinson.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Robin McKinley has won various awards and citations for her writing, including the Newbery Medal for The Hero and the Crown and a Newbery Honor for The Blue Sword. Her other books include Sunshine; the New York Times bestseller Spindle’s End; two novel-length retellings of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast: Beauty and Rose Daughter; and a retelling of the Robin Hood legend, The Outlaws of Sherwood. She lives with her husband, the English writer Peter Dickinson.

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NOVEL EXCERPTS

Novel Excerpt:
Annihilation
Jeff VanderMeer

The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth in a place just before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp and then the reeds and wind-gnarled trees of the marsh flats. Beyond the marsh flats and the natural canals lies the ocean and, a little farther down the coast, a derelict lighthouse. All of this part of the country had been abandoned for decades, for reasons that are not easy to relate. Our expedition was the first to enter Area X for more than two years, and much of our predecessors’ equipment had rusted, their tents and sheds little more than husks. Looking out over that untroubled landscape, I do not believe any of us could yet see the threat.

There were four of us: a biologist, an anthropologist, a surveyor, and a psychologist. I was the biologist. All of us were women this time, chosen as part of the complex set of variables that governed sending the expeditions. The psychologist, who was older than the rest of us, served as the expedition’s leader. She had put us all under hypnosis to cross the border, to make sure we remained calm. It took four days of hard hiking after crossing the border to reach the coast.

Our mission was simple: to continue the government’s investigation into the mysteries of Area X, slowly working our way out from base camp.

The expedition could last days, months, or even years, depending on various stimuli and conditions. We had supplies with us for six months, and another two years’ worth of supplies had already been stored at the base camp. We had also been assured that it was safe to live off the land if necessary. All of our foodstuffs were smoked or canned or in packets. Our most outlandish equipment consisted of a measuring device that had been issued to each of us, which hung from a strap on our belts: a small rectangle of black metal with a glass-covered hole in the middle. If the hole glowed red, we had thirty minutes to remove ourselves to “a safe place.” We were not told what the device measured or why we should be afraid should it glow red. After the first few hours, I had grown so used to it that I hadn’t looked at it again. We had been forbidden watches and compasses.

When we reached the camp, we set about replacing obsolete or damaged equipment with what we had brought and putting up our own tents. We would rebuild the sheds later, once we were sure that Area X had not affected us. The members of the last expedition had eventually drifted off, one by one. Over time, they had returned to their families, so strictly speaking they did not vanish. They simply disappeared from Area X and, by unknown means, reappeared back in the world beyond the border. They could not relate the specifics of that journey. This transference had taken place across a period of eighteen months, and it was not something that had been experienced by prior expeditions. But other phenomena could also result in “premature dissolution of expeditions,” as our superiors put it, so we needed to test our stamina for that place.

We also needed to acclimate ourselves to the environment. In the forest near base camp one might encounter black bears or coyotes. You might hear a sudden croak and watch a night heron startle from a tree branch and, distracted, step on a poisonous snake, of which there were at least six varieties. Bogs and streams hid huge aquatic reptiles, and so we were careful not to wade too deep to collect our water samples. Still, these aspects of the ecosystem did not really concern any of us. Other elements had the ability to unsettle, however. Long ago, towns had existed here, and we encountered eerie signs of human habitation: rotting cabins with sunken, red-tinged roofs, rusted wagon-wheel spokes half-buried in the dirt, and the barely seen outlines of what used to be enclosures for livestock, now mere ornament for layers of pine-needle loam.

Far worse, though, was a low, powerful moaning at dusk. The wind off the sea and the odd interior stillness dulled our ability to gauge direction, so that the sound seemed to infiltrate the black water that soaked the cypress trees. This water was so dark we could see our faces in it, and it never stirred, set like glass, reflecting the beards of gray moss that smothered the cypress trees. If you looked out through these areas, toward the ocean, all you saw was the black water, the gray of the cypress trunks, and the constant, motionless rain of moss flowing down. All you heard was the low moaning. The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.

As noted, we found the tower in a place just before the forest became waterlogged and then turned to salt marsh. This occurred on our fourth day after reaching base camp, by which time we had almost gotten our bearings. We did not expect to find anything there, based on both the maps that we brought with us and the water-stained, pine-dust-smeared documents our predecessors had left behind. But there it was, surrounded by a fringe of scrub grass, half-hidden by fallen moss off to the left of the trail: a circular block of some grayish stone seeming to mix cement and ground-up seashells. It measured roughly sixty feet in diameter, this circular block, and was raised from ground level by about eight inches. Nothing had been etched into or written on its surface that could in any way reveal its purpose or the identity of its makers. Starting at due north, a rectangular opening set into the surface of the block revealed stairs spiraling down into darkness. The entrance was obscured by the webs of banana spiders and debris from storms, but a cool draft came from below.

At first, only I saw it as a tower. I don’t know why the word tower came to me, given that it tunneled into the ground. I could as easily have considered it a bunker or a submerged building. Yet as soon as I saw the staircase, I remembered the lighthouse on the coast and had a sudden vision of the last expedition drifting off, one by one, and sometime thereafter the ground shifting in a uniform and preplanned way to leave the lighthouse standing where it had always been but depositing this underground part of it inland. I saw this in vast and intricate detail as we all stood there, and, looking back, I mark it as the first irrational thought I had once we had reached our destination.

“This is impossible,” said the surveyor, staring at her maps. The solid shade of late afternoon cast her in cool darkness and lent the words more urgency than they would have had otherwise. The sun was telling us soon we’d have to use our flashlights to interrogate the impossible, although I’d have been perfectly happy doing it in the dark.

“And yet there it is,” I said. “Unless we are having a mass hallucination.”

“The architectural model is hard to identify,” the anthropologist said. “The materials are ambiguous, indicating local origin but not necessarily local construction. Without going inside, we will not know if it is primitive or modern, or something in between. I’m not sure I would want to guess at how old it is, either.”

We had no way to inform our superiors about this discovery. One rule for an expedition into Area X was that we were to attempt no outside contact, for fear of some irrevocable contamination. We also took little with us that matched our current level of technology. We had no cell or satellite phones, no computers, no camcorders, no complex measuring instruments except for those strange black boxes hanging from our belts. Our cameras required a makeshift darkroom. The absence of cell phones in particular made the real world seem very far away to the others, but I had always preferred to live without them. For weapons, we had knives, a locked container of antique handguns, and one assault rifle, this last a reluctant concession to current security standards.

It was expected simply that we would keep a record, like this one, in a journal, like this one: lightweight but nearly indestructible, with waterproof paper, a flexible black-and-white cover, and the blue horizontal lines for writing and the red line to the left to mark the margin. These journals would either return with us or be recovered by the next expedition. We had been cautioned to provide maximum context, so that anyone ignorant of Area X could understand our accounts. We had also been ordered not to share our journal entries with one another. Too much shared information could skew our observations, our superiors believed. But I knew from experience how hopeless this pursuit, this attempt to weed out bias, was. Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.

“I’m excited by this discovery,” the psychologist interjected before we had discussed the tower much further. “Are you excited, too?” She had not asked us that particular question before. During training, she had tended to ask questions more like “How calm do you think you might be in an emergency?” Back then, I had felt as if she were a bad actor, playing a role. Now it seemed even more apparent, as if being our leader somehow made her nervous.

“It is definitely exciting . . . and unexpected,” I said, trying not to mock her and failing, a little. I was surprised to feel a sense of growing unease, mostly because in my imagination, my dreams, this discovery would have been among the more banal. In my head, before we had crossed the border, I had seen so many things: vast cities, peculiar animals, and, once, during a period of illness, an enormous monster that rose from the waves to bear down on our camp.

The surveyor, meanwhile, just shrugged and would not answer the psychologist’s question. The anthropologist nodded as if she agreed with me. The entrance to the tower leading down exerted a kind of presence, a blank surface that let us write so many things upon it. This presence manifested like a low-grade fever, pressing down on all of us.

I would tell you the names of the other three, if it mattered, but only the surveyor would last more than the next day or two. Besides, we were always strongly discouraged from using names: We were meant to be focused on our purpose, and “anything personal should be left behind.” Names belonged to where we had come from, not to who we were while embedded in Area X.

[End Excerpt]

Copyright © 2014 by Jeff VanderMeer

Excerpted from Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer (on sale February 4, 2014).

Published with permission of the author and Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

All rights reserved.

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

Jeff VanderMeer recently signed a six-figure deal with Farrar, Straus & Giroux for the Southern Reach trilogy; Annihilation (February 2014) is the first book in the trilogy, and will be followed by Authority (May 2014) and Acceptance (September 2014). His novels have made the year’s best lists of the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and he is the recipient of both an NEA-funded Florida Individual Writers’ Fellowship and Travel Grant. VanderMeer is a three-time winner of the World Fantasy Award, twelve-time finalist, and has been a finalist for the Nebula, Hugo, Philip K. Dick, and Shirley Jackson Awards, among others. His latest short story collection is The Third Bear (2010). He also regularly reviews books for the New York Times Book Review, the Guardian, Los Angeles Times Book Review, and the Washington Post. He has lectured at MIT, the Library of Congress, and many other institutions. He serves as the co-director of Shared Worlds, a unique teen SF/F writing camp located at Wofford College in South Carolina.

Novel Excerpt:
Dreamwalker
C.S. Friedman

PROLOGUE:

MYSTIC CAVERNS, VIRGINIA

With a last furtive glance behind him, the grey man began to climb down the ladder. Its metal rungs were damp from recent rains, making them dangerously slick, and the jagged walls of the narrow passage scraped against his shoulders, but it was not the first time he’d come this way, and he moved quickly and confidently into the cool depths of the earth. Summer in this version of Virginia was hotter than in his own, and he was glad that his business today was underground. Was this a price the locals had to pay for all their fancy technology? Or was it just a quirk of nature, part of the natural variation of the universe? This close to the heart of creation one could never be sure.

The tunnel grew darker as he descended, the light of sun-drenched land slowly giving way to the underworld’s all-consuming darkness. It didn’t bother him. His great black eyes drank in what little light there was, and when he looked up they flashed green, like a cat’s. Darkness was an ally to men of his Guild, and with his mottled grey skin and neutral-colored uniform he knew he was all but invisible in such lighting. Indeed, for as long as the sheen of summer sweat still lingered on his skin, he was a near-perfect match for the rain-slicked stone surrounding him, almost impossible for an observer to pick out.

A useful quality for someone in his line of work.

At the bottom of the ladder the tunnel opened out into a small natural cavern. A narrow strip of steel grating had been suspended several feet above the floor to serve as a walkway, with rusty handrails flanking it. The metal grate shuddered as he stepped onto it, and he could hear a thrumming vibration run down its length, like a bass note traveling down a guitar string: the music of the underworld.

He removed the glow lamp from his belt and activated it, casting beams of cool blue light about the cavern. Normally, he avoided the use of artifacts from home while on duty, but here in the depths of the earth no one was likely to question him. The small globe of energy hovered steadily in its sealed compartment, the etched sigil of the Guild of Elementals glowing like a tiny thread of blue neon on its hood.

Recent rains had worked their way down into the earth, and as a result the cave formations glistened with moisture, making it seem as if the entire chamber had been coated in glass. Tiny puddles of water had gathered in pockmarks along the limestone floor, and reflections from his lamp twitched across their still surfaces like fairy flames as he began to walk, jerking in time to his footfall. There was a time when such effects had fascinated him, but familiarity had dulled the edge of novelty. And today he had bigger things to worry about.

Maybe the Shadows already know what’s happening here, he thought, nervous.

Maybe I won’t have to be the one who breaks the news to them.

The steel walkway led him to a sizeable chamber, a large circular cavern with rippling stone formations on every side. Tourists had crowded in here not so long ago, eyes wide as they listened to tales of how bootleggers had once partied in this chamber, far from the watchful eyes of Prohibition authorities. How exotic those ancient parties must have been, with the sounds of drunken revelry echoing from every stalactite! In such a setting it was easy for a man to envision the fabric of this world giving way to another, allowing the dead—and perhaps the living—to pass through.

These days there were no tour guides. The owners of the property had fallen on hard times in the late ’90s and been forced to sell this land as part of a bankruptcy settlement. How their children had wept when it was time to say goodbye! Such a cavern was a perfect playground for the young, its walls riddled with secret nooks and crannies filled with ink-black shadows. Slip into a crevice, hold your breath for silence, and your own mother could stand five feet away and not know you were there. But finances had forced the family to surrender its holdings to a new owner—one who had no children and who didn’t intend to let tourists visit the place—and now it was lost to children forever.

No one ever questioned the source of the financial ruin which had forced them to sell the caverns. Of course. The grey man’s Guild was good at what it did.

A great stone archway dominated the far end of the chamber. Once it had been a simple enough structure, a sleek limestone arch inscribed with the usual patterns. But calcium-rich water dripping down from above, combined with tremors of temporal seepage from within, had resulted in an explosion of formation growth. Now every inch of the arch was covered with clusters of crystalline needles, some of them as tiny and delicate as flowers, others breathtakingly dramatic in size. Some of the longest needles had even sprouted secondary clusters, which glittered within the absolute blackness of the Gate like stars in a velvet night sky. Beautiful but treacherous. The grey man had snagged his clothing on them more than once, and last week a haughty apprentice had scratched her arm in crossing, necessitating a Healer’s attention. Sooner or later he was going to have to take up a hammer and start clearing them all away.

But not yet. Not until he had to. Creations this beautiful—and this rare—should never be destroyed lightly.

Off to one side of the arch the grey man’s charges were waiting: a dozen sleeping bodies carefully arranged on wheeled tables, white sheets covering them from head to foot. The corners of the sheets had been neatly folded so that their points all hung precisely the same distance from the floor, he noted. One of his assistants was a bit on the compulsive side.

All was as it should be.

Ignoring the nervous flutter in his stomach, he set his glow lamp down on a short stalagmite and waited.

There was little prelude to his visitor’s arrival. Perhaps the air shimmered ever so slightly within the arch, for less than a second. Perhaps if one listened closely enough one could hear echoes of another world . . . or whispers of the dead. Perhaps someone whose Gift was strong enough would be able to sense a glowing pattern take shape within the archway, for only a moment.

A cold wind gusted into the cavern, raising goose bumps along his arms. Then a tall, thin man stepped through the arch. Or perhaps it was something else that wore the shape of a man. His skin was translucent white, with cold blue veins that fanned out from his eyes. His long, dark hair curled in the air like wisps of smoke. And his eyes! They were as dark and as colorless as the abyss between the worlds, and it seemed to the grey man that as the visitor gazed around the room he sucked all the heat out of the air. There were spirits stirring in the depths of those eyes that no living man should ever have to learn the names of.

That was something the grey man never got used to.

“My Lord.” He bowed his head respectfully, trying to look calm even though his heart was now pounding in his chest. “How may I serve you?”

The man wore the robes of a Master of the Guild of Shadows, but whether he was here in his leadership capacity or just running errands was anyone’s guess. The hierarchy of the Shadows was based upon concepts no living man could grasp, and the grey man had long ago given up trying to make sense of them.

“I came to see that you are prepared for tonight’s passage.” The visitor looked around the chamber. It was impossible to tell whether he was pleased or displeased by what he saw.

“Yes, My Lord.” Because the grey man took pride in his work he gestured toward one of the bodies and offered, “This youngest one is HIV positive. That seemed a good match for Master Roland’s condition—”

The black eyes fixed on him—empty, unreadable—and the grey man flushed. Had he really expected a Shadow to care about the fine points of his Guild’s work? As long as commerce flowed steadily from one world to another, the Shadows had little interest in how it was managed. Only when things went wrong did they start asking questions.

The grey man shivered inwardly, remembering the last time he’d had to answer such questions.

The Shadow said, “Passage is set for eight o’clock local time. Be ready.”

The grey man bowed his head, acknowledging the order.

His visitor looked about the cavern, hollow eyes drinking in everything. Had the Shadowlord ever been here before? Or had he perhaps devoured the memories of someone who had been here before? No matter how often the grey man dealt with his kind, he never quite got used to that concept.

“A rather large expedition is also being planned for later this month,” the Shadow said at last. “Several Guildmasters wish to bring their apprentices with them. Some kind of training exercise.” His mouth curled in distaste. “Will you be able to accommodate them?”

“How many people are we talking about?”

“A dozen at least. The list is still growing. Probably two dozen, by the time all are accounted for.”

“I’m surprised you’re permitting so many to cross at once.”

The Shadow’s lips tightened but he said nothing. Clearly he was not about to discuss the business of his secretive Guild with outsiders.

Two dozen visitors. It wasn’t beyond the capacity of the grey man’s operation, but it would certainly strain his resources. “Will there be children in the group?”

“Given the nature of the party, I imagine so.” The Shadow raised an eyebrow. “Will that be a problem?”

“Of course not,” he said hurriedly. “But I’ll need extra time to gather the necessary supplies.”

“You have two weeks. No more, no less.”

The grey man nodded tightly. There were beads of cold sweat on his forehead, but he didn’t want to do anything as obvious as reaching up to wipe them off. In truth, he hated dealing with children. Infants weren’t a problem—transporting them was his bread and butter—but once a child reached the age of puberty things became . . . well, complicated. They changed so fast it was hard to get everything right. He knew of one case where the improper handling of a teenager’s passage had resulted in a three-week temporal displacement. Which wasn’t a major issue as far as his Guild was concerned—it was well within the bounds of acceptable distortion—but the parents had been livid. Something about a university examination the boy had missed, lifetime opportunities now compromised forever, etc., etc. Far be it for the grey man to point out that maybe if the exam were so important the boy should have been home studying for it, rather than playing walkabout on strange worlds. But logic bore little weight in such a dispute.

It was rumored that the operator responsible for that incident had been reassigned to a mosquito-laden swamp in the middle of nowhere, which might or might not be true. No one had heard from him for a long time.

“I’ll need their profiles as soon as possible,” the grey man said.

The black eyes glittered coldly. “I’m familiar with what the process requires.”

The grey man flushed. “Forgive me, My Lord. I just . . . I just want to make sure everything goes smoothly.”

“It will go smoothly,” the Shadow said coldly. “I’m certain of it.” The unspoken message was clear: nothing else is acceptable to us.

The grey man bit his lip and said nothing. It had taken him years to accumulate enough seniority to be assigned to this particular post, but he knew that he could lose it all in a heartbeat. Rivalry within his Guild was fierce, and the displeasure of a Shadowlord could impact who was promoted . . . or demoted. If anything went wrong at this facility he might well find himself assigned to some dreadful backwater, where the locals hadn’t worked out the basics of personal hygiene yet.

And in fact, something had gone wrong. Odds were that more than one head would roll for it in the end. Maybe even his own.

For one brief, mad moment he was tempted to keep his silence. Let someone else tell the Shadows the bad news. Let someone else explain why their usual strategies wouldn’t fix things in this case. It isn’t my fault, he told himself defiantly. Surely they will see that!

As if the Shadows were known for their sense of justice.

As the visitor turned to leave, the grey man thought he saw a wisp of darkness flit across his robe. A ghost perhaps? Some said that the Shadowlords drew spirits of the dead to them like flies, in such quantities that even common men might see them. Others claimed that the dead were as wary of the Shadows as the living were, and that only a ghost who had lost all vestiges of free will would ever come within ten feet of one.

The grey man was glad he did not belong to the Guild whose job it was to keep track of such things.

The Shadow paused before the archway, bracing himself for passage. A faint golden light seemed to flicker about him.

Tell him what’s wrong, the grey man urged himself. Right now. It will only get worse if you wait.

“My Lord.” The words came out in a hoarse whisper. The sweat on his forehead felt like ice.

Slowly the Shadow turned back. His eyes were mirrors that reflected the grey man’s own fears back at him. Perhaps other men’s fears as well. Who could say how many souls were hidden behind that gaze, each one passing judgment upon this moment? The thought of it made his skin crawl.

“They know,” the grey man told him. “The children. They developed a science we didn’t foresee, discovered things they weren’t meant to learn. They’re talking to each other now, all across this world, asking questions as a group that no one would have thought to ask alone. And others are starting to listen.”

The Shadowlord stared at him. There was no way to read that half-dead expression or to guess at what thoughts lay behind it. Anger? Condemnation? Uncertainty? The grey man held his breath, bracing himself for the worst.

Then, with a sharp nod of dismissal, the Shadow turned back to the arch. He paused for a moment in concentration, then quickly stepped through. Wisps of darkness that might have been ghosts followed him into the void, like pet dogs at the heel of their master.

And then there was silence.

After a long moment—when it was finally clear that no one else was going to come through the Gate—the grey man dared to breathe again.

I did my job. Now the Shadows know the truth. They’ll decide how to handle this mess.

It wasn’t a reassuring thought.

[End Excerpt]

Copyright © 2014 by C.S. Friedman.

Excerpted from Dreamwalker by C.S. Friedman.

Published by permission of the author and DAW Books.

All rights reserved.

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

An acknowledged master of Dark Fantasy, Celia Friedman is a John W. Campbell award finalist, and the author of the highly acclaimed Coldfire Trilogy, New York Times Notable Book of the Year This Alien Shore, In Conquest Born, The Madness Season, The Wilding, and The Magister Trilogy. Ms. Friedman worked for twenty years as a professional costume designer, but retired from that career in 1996 to focus on her writing. She lives in Virginia, and can be contacted via her website, www.csfriedman.com.

Novel Excerpt:
The Trillionist
Sagan Jeffries

Prologue

Gravity squeezed him into his seat and a deep-throated growl filled his ears. He could barely breathe.

A voice crackled over the communicator, smooth, professional. Inside his helmet the amplified sound of his own breathing was offset by the steady rhythmic thumping of his heart.

“We have liftoff!”

The power of the massive three-stage rocket beneath him threatened to tear itself apart.

There was a moment of lessening roar and relative lightness as the first stage fell away. Then the rumble and shake of the second stage ignition, thrust, and eventual jettison, leaving the third stage to begin its slow burn, boosting Sage Rojan to where no Tidonese had gone before.

His home planet was miles below and the sight of the arching horizon and the star-splashed blackness beyond caused Sage to catch his breath. Memories flashed: his mother’s teary final goodbye, his father’s proud smile, and a lingering kiss from Tamara, who, as corny as it sounded, was always in his orbit and seldom showed any fear of the unknown.

He squeezed his eyes shut; waiting for the moment when the supreme Artisan noticed his presence in a place he had no right to be.

Chapter Twenty

The parallel lines across the runway flashed by faster and faster in Sage’s peripheral vision as the shuttle accelerated down the long strip of concrete. This was his first solo flight in one of the big birds, and it was good, phenomenally good, to be on his own—or as much on his own as he could be.

Sage pulled back on the yoke and the shuttle’s nose rose into the air. The thrum of the big tires on the hard surface ceased. He was airborne. He kicked in the engines’ full power and his body slammed against the pilot’s seat, his eyes driven into their sockets.

A moment later he activated the anti-grav. The display indicating the strength of the anti-gravity field registered maximum, a fact confirmed by the tingle in his muscles.

Shuttle Fortitude tore through billows of clouds, effortlessly higher with constantly accelerating speed through the ever-thinning tropo-, strato-, meso-, and exo-spheres . . . and then, into the cold, dark emptiness of space. Sage cut the anti-gravity drive, throttled back the engines, and set the automatic pilot to locate his small space station.

There wasn’t another person on the planet who could walk into BYSA and say, “I need a shuttle for a private mission.” Even Duggin Bristol would’ve received an argument. But all Sage Rojan had to tell Mission Control was that he needed to check on his experiment at the seven hundred-mile-high orbiter, and schedules were rearranged.

“What you got cooking up there?” the head controller had asked. “Another world-changer?”

“Something like that.”

“Can’t wait to see it.”

This day was no errand run. Sage was not interested in the Ferdason complex or the satellites at two hundred miles up, or the larger BYSA-Bristol space station at three hundred miles, or even the Rojan Space Telescope at four hundred miles above the surface.

The coordinates of the private space station and its Quantronix were already programmed into the shuttle’s computer. Sage let the spacecraft take the con as he enjoyed the view of the beautiful blue Tidon. He felt big compared to the humans who were less than infinitesimal dots somewhere back on the surface. Perhaps this was how the shadow has always viewed human life.

The shuttle continued to climb, orbiting Tidon in a widening spiral. Even as he checked the spacecraft’s altitude, he saw the burst of flame from the leading edges of the wings—meaning that the shuttle was decelerating. He’d been out of his pilot’s chair—floating—and although he couldn’t feel much of the slowing, he bumped gently against the far wall. Worse, he also felt the shadow’s impatience with him as he pushed off, sending him back toward the controls.

In the days since he’d activated the Quantronix, Sage had regularly checked its output, by way of a deeply encrypted data feed on his computer in the Cos-Ob dome. The scale the Quantronix’s sensors used meant nothing to Sage; the information was solely for the shadow’s use. One thing he was sure of, the Quantronix’s rate of production did not satisfy Sage’s master—it was easy to think of his second personality in those terms—and Sage had come under irrepressible pressure to arrange this expedition. Even now, as the shuttle completed its twelfth orbit and aligned itself to match the station’s path and speed, Sage felt a testy prod to get the job done.

“Lay off,” he said aloud. “I’m cutting the autopilot now to bring her in by hand. If you make me screw it up, your precious Quantronix might be damaged.”

The shadow receded, but did not disappear.

Sage guided the big spacecraft close to the small space station, working the micro-controls to regulate the shuttle’s position. When he had the two orbiting objects exactly aligned, he looked more closely at the station and its bolted-on matter-spinner.

The Quantronix’s light-gatherer was fully extended. Outside of the station, a ball of dark matter spun within the containment field. It looked to be a good twelve feet in diameter, though Sage could distinguish nothing more about it than its size, its spherical shape, and the fact that its deep blacker-than-black surface did not reflect light.

Sage did not really know anything about how the Quantronix worked. It spun matter from light, and it was presently set at a slow speed. To have created that much matter from photons in the time since Sage had built it, struck him as impressive.

But the shadow was nowhere near happy. Sage realized he was here to reset the machine for faster production. But that would require moving the station to a higher orbit, so as not to endanger Tidon.

“Wait a minute,” Sage said. “What kind of danger?”

The shadow writhed serenity: Sage was not to worry about it. Everything was in hand. And the shadow did not have time to explain every detail to—Sage got an impression of a clumsy neophyte.

Sage gritted his teeth. “What kind of danger?”

Frustration and impatience snapped back across the serenity. None of your concern.

“If what we’re doing is a danger to the planet and the millions of people on it, I’m pretty sure it is of my concern.”

His hands and arms ceased to be under his control. One palm came up, giving him a hard slap across the face.

The shadow’s derision was plain to feel. Fight me if you want. We can leave the Quantronix where it is. But you can’t stop me from setting it for faster production. Help move it or let’s see what happens when I don’t.

“All right,” he said, his heart fluttering uneasily in his chest. “Just show me what to do.”

The image was clear: tie the space station and its Quantronix to the shuttle, and then haul them higher into space. And keep well clear of the new-spun matter.

Cabling the space station was not too difficult although Sage did not like the idea of working outside the shuttle with no one aboard to help him if anything went wrong. He decided to depressurize the cargo bay and leave the spacecraft via its hatch rather than go out via the personnel airlock. Airlocks had been known to malfunction, and if Sage was going to find himself stranded in space, he wanted the tools in the cargo bay to be available.

He began the process of depressurization, and the shadow nudged him angrily. Go out the smaller airlock to save time.

“It’s a matter of minutes,” Sage told it, then painted a picture of himself stuck outside the shuttle, waiting to die when his air ran out. The entity’s response—a blast of rage—surprised him.

But the sudden flare of anger was not the surprising part. Sage was taken aback by the realization that the shadow had brought him up here, all on his own, without considering the possibility that, in the unforgiving non-environment called space, he might easily die—and leave the great work uncompleted.

“Do you not consider the consequences of your actions? Are you in that much of a hurry to make a moon?” Sage’s impressions of his shadow lowered.

The response was a stab of pain from one end of his skull to the other.

“Dackt!” He blew out a breath when the agony faded.

The shadow swirled inside him, furious at Sage’s resistance and the loss of minutes the punishment had produced.

“Do that at the wrong time out here, and you’ll find yourself looking for a new beast of burden.”

The shadow churned, but held itself in check.

Sage exited the spacecraft without incident, air-jetting to the space station with a cable of braided microfilament unrolling behind him. He rigged the tow-line, attaching it to a cleat on the end of the station, then hauled himself hand-over-hand back to the shuttle. He made it back inside, buttoned up the airlock and removed his suit.

Sage reseated himself in the pilot’s chair and oh-so-slowly brought the engines back on line. They were weightless at this height, but the space station, the Quantronix, and most especially, the new ball of matter in its containment field, had the same mass and inertia as they would’ve had on Tidon. Sage didn’t want to test the tow cable by a sudden jerk and find it wanting.

Hurry it up! The words sounded in his head.

“Dackt it! I know you think I have no brain, but that’s a lot of mass out there. Or hadn’t you considered that? You want me to have to go out and splice the cable, when it breaks? Take up extra time making unnecessary repairs?”

The response was as much a growl, as anything. Just get us up to speed, came the answer.

“We’ll take it slowly, and speed up as we build momentum.”

The shadow gave off more frustration and impatience the way stars gave off heat and light.

Sage gently adjusted the shuttle’s speed.

“There, twelve miles an hour over the previous orbital velocity. By the way, you haven’t told me how high we’re going.”

Sage got no answer. He eased the throttle up a little more. “Even a smallish moon is a lot bigger than a one-man space station. We’re less than a thousand miles out. Nothing compared to the moons: Filus is three hundred and fifty thousand miles out, Sotus is four hundred and twenty thousand, and Milus four hundred and fifty thousand.”

No answer.

“I figure you’ll want to go even farther out than Milus, because what’s the point of making a new moon if it just crashes into one of the old ones? So I’m figuring five hundred thousand miles at least. And, even when we get up to a decent speed, that’s going to take a while. Days.”

The dark mood thickened. It was like being in a house with a basement filling up with foul, black water. Sage didn’t need to see it to know it was there.

Still, Sage was interested to know if he could exploit what he was beginning to see as a fatal flaw in the shadow’s character. It was grossly impatient. It rushed things, and rushing things created errors.

He put the shuttle on auto and caught a shift of sleep. When he woke, the shuttle was passing Milus. He was now well beyond the furthest that any human had ever been from Tidon. He’d seen plenty of pictures of the scarred moon—there had even been a couple of unmanned landings—but it was different to see it close-up and personal. Milus had had a long-past history of volcanism; the cones and lava fields were plain to see. So were the pit-marks of impact craters, uneroded in that airless, waterless place.

Sage recalled again the fairytale book, Lunar Four, that his dad had shown him as a child—where Tidon had once had a fourth moon; which exploded when its first powerful Pimple Burst volcano split the entire rock. It was destroyed in that cataclysm during the early years of the solar system. Most of the remnants of the broken moon had crashed onto Tidon or been swept up by the other three circling moons, which accounted for the huge spread of craters on the face of moon Milus.

Tidon had been named because of the gravitational effect its three moons had upon its tides, particularity when the moons—which all orbited in the same direction—rode in the same part of the sky. What effect would a fourth moon have on the three bodies’ interrelated trajectories?

He shook his head to rid himself of the swirl of thoughts, and turned back to the porthole. Behind Milus sat Tidon, a blue orb hanging against the speckled blackness. How beautiful. How wrong for someone to mess with its beauty.

He did not begrudge all the improvements and advances that his captor, through him, had brought to Tidon. But the planet was inhabited by an intelligent species; in time, they would’ve invented all the wondrous things they’d been force-fed. And none of the inventions had been for the benefit of the Tidonese. That was just a side effect of the shadow’s overweening ambition. If it could have achieved its ends by making Sage’s people miserable, it would have done so without a qualm.

Moon Milus faded into the distance. Sage kept the speed constant at five thousand miles an hour. At least another day to go, he ate and slept. He used the lucid dreaming techniques twice, trying to track down the shadow, wherever it lurked in his skull, but it avoided him and this time there was no sensory beacon to tell him where to go. It could hide behind any of the doors, and the odds of Sage just stumbling into it were effectively nil. He decided that the next chance he got he would use the time in his dreamscape to consult the Library instead, and hopefully learn something useful about artificial moons.

Sage was at the shuttle’s controls. He felt the shadow. Awake, examining the readouts through his eyes, checking up on their progress. “What happens after? When you produce the new moon?”

No answer came.

“Does someone give you a promotion? Extra marks for showing initiative?”

The head pain came, like a shard of ice-cold steel transfixing his skull. Sage rocked in the pilot’s seat, and his hand slammed against the controls. The engines roared and the ship lurched forward. The pain instantly faded, and his hands reached independently, easing the throttle back.

“Idiot! Slowing the ship doesn’t slow the tow.”

The shadow released his hand—why? Was it uncertain? Did it want Sage to explain himself?

“If that mass hits our engines, we could be up here forever.”

The shadow withdrew. Not happily.

The shuttle blipped as it registered the station barreling towards them under its own momentum. Sage nudged the throttle to match the station’s new speed and decided he would worry about slowing it back down when they reached their destination.

Five days after departing home, the shuttle and its payload reached six hundred thousand miles. It took some careful maneuvering of the auxiliary thrusters to let the space station pass the shuttle without tearing the cable. Sage matched its speed once the station was visible out the front viewport then slowly eased the reverse thrusters until the tow-line was taut and the station began to shed momentum. Finally they established a stable, geosynchronous orbit above Tidon.

Again, Sage, alone, had to get into his spacesuit unaided, and again he went out through the cargo bay hatch.

Solo in his spacewalk, Sage pulled himself along the tow-line until he reached the space station. It checked out, so he turned his attention to the Quantronix and the newly created matter. The stuff was blacker-than-black, standing out against the glitter-spangled darkness of space. He had a moment of the vertiginous perspective shift that could happen in space: he suddenly felt as if he were looking down into a bottomless black pit. An object this black, he knew, must be composed of something that absorbed all the wavelengths of light—which was odd, when he thought about it, since it was matter created from light itself.

A flashlight was clipped to his belt harness. He pulled it free and shone its beam toward the ball of matter. Mistake. Even before the shaft of light was centered on the dark object, the beam narrowed laser-thin and he felt a sudden pull on the flashlight, as if he was holding a magnet beside a strong magnetic field. His hand holding the flashlight pulled toward the object. He locked the fingers of his free hand around the cleat at the end of the space station and jerked himself back.

The flashlight was still caught in the invisible grip of the dark sphere. As he pulled back, trying to free it, the beam of light bent towards the mass, curving like a fishing line when the angler hooked a big one.

His flesh chilled, even in the heated suit. Dackt, there’s only one thing that could be doing this.

The matter accumulating at the end of the Quantronix was not ordinary matter.

It was dark matter, the seed of a black hole.

Sage could not free the flashlight beam from the dark matter’s grip. Let it go? Sage had no idea what would happen if the flashlight’s mass encountered the newly created dark matter. He feared to think.

Turn it off.

Of course. Sage pulled back his thumb and flicked the switch of the flashlight’s barrel. The effect was like cutting a taut fishing line. His arm jerked back and the torch would have gone flying if it hadn’t been tethered to his glove. Dackt.

Stunned, Sage worked his way down to the space station’s airlock and let himself into the life-support module. Its systems came to life and in a few minutes he was able to shuck his helmet. Water dripped from his suit—his own sweat, not yet recycled by the internal systems. Sintosy had nearly boiled Sage inside the suit, despite the near-absolute-zero temperature of the vacuum that had surrounded him. He toweled off, drying away the sweat before it had the chance to become airborne.

He crawled along the conduit that led to the module housing the Quantronix’s control panel and checked the Quantronix’s data feed.

The shadow took control of Sage’s limbs. It reset the dials and indicators on the Quantronix, cranking it up to its highest possible speed. Sage felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. The shadow didn’t have to say anything for Sage to feel the illicit risk involved in the action.

The shadow disappeared and Sage felt the sudden heaviness of sleep. He pushed himself to the life-support module and strapped himself into the harness. He decided it was time to learn what he could from the Library about the thing he had spent the last days dragging up here. Sage drew one even breath then another and the dreamscape rose to meet him.

[End Excerpt]

Copyright © 2013 by Sagan Jeffries.

Excerpted from The Trillionist by Sagan Jeffries.

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.

Sagan Jeffries is the pen name of Ed Lukowich, former world curling champion. The two names prevent his careers from colliding with each other. The Trillionist is his first novel. He also has a companion book, Trillion Universe Theory, in the works. Though neither of these books have anything to do with the sport which made him famous, he is also the author of three curling-instruction books and a coffee-table book on the sport of curling.

NONFICTION

Interview: Doug Dorst
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Doug Dorst is the author of the novel Alive in Necropolis and the short story collection The Surf Guru. His latest book, S., was written in collaboration with J.J. Abrams, director of the recent Star Trek films as well as the upcoming Star Wars sequels. S. is a very unusual book; when you open the slipcase you’re presented with a surreal political novel entitled Ship of Theseus written by V. M. Straka, but the real story unfolds in the margins of that text as two modern-day college students scribble notes back and forth in an attempt to unravel the author’s true identity.

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.

This new book, S., was written in collaboration with J.J. Abrams. Do you want to say how that came about?

J.J. had had this idea to do a book that worked in a certain way, that there would be a novel that unfolds within the margins of another novel. Lindsey Weber, who is head of features at Bad Robot, which is J.J.’s production company, he asked her if she knew of any writers who might be a good fit for a project like that, and she had read my first book, so she passed it along to him, and then I got a call out of the blue from my agent saying, “Would you conceivably want to work with J.J. Abrams on a project?” Of course I said, “No. How dare you insult me with such an offer?” No, that’s really how it all got started.

You said that you had to pitch them, or sort of explain what you would do with the story, and I thought it was interesting—you said that one thing that appealed to J.J. about your pitch is that you had your own ideas, and you weren’t just giving him what you thought that he wanted to see. Could you elaborate on what you meant by that? What do you think he wanted to see?

I think he wanted to see someone pick up on an insane idea and take it to an even more insane place. As opposed to maybe just doing something that felt safe and formulaic. Part of it was simply that I was certain that I was auditioning for the gig, probably competing against twenty other writers, and so I thought, “Well, there’s no way I’ll get it, so I might as well propose this project that is absolutely over the top and build for maximum fun.” So maybe that worked in my favor.

What sort of insanity did you bring to the project?

Essentially that of the endless world. So we’ve got this interior novel called Ship of Theseus by this mysterious writer that our two present-day readers are commenting on, and the novel itself is an odd creature. It’s designed so that you could talk about it endlessly if you were interested in it. In part because of its connection to the mysterious writer, but even if the novel weren’t offering a great many hints about the mysterious writer, the mysterious writer’s backstory could conceivably go on forever. Nobody knows who he or she was, and there are all these possible candidates, and there are all these possible stories. I guess I thought too, “This is interesting to me.” Authorship controversies and a sort of eggheaded academic, or one of the characters is an academic, and I thought, “I don’t know how people in the real world will react to that.” I’m not an academic, but I play one three days a week.

Speaking of the authorship controversy, you’ve said that you’re interested in the Shakespeare author controversy. Talk a little bit about your interest in that.

It’s not like a deep and durable interest. It’s that I was reading a book at the time this all started up called Contested Will. There are various factions who insist that “no, the man William Shakespeare did not write the things that we attribute to the playwright Shakespeare,” and so there are all these other theories. That it was the Earl of Oxford, or Queen Elizabeth herself, and some of them are silly. Some of them, like the Oxford [theory], there are very serious people who believe it deeply. Some people don’t believe Shakespeare did it because he was a provincial guy who became an actor, and he could not have had access to all the sort of nuanced intrigue of court life, of royalty, which I don’t know, I guess I kind of took as a little bit of an affront. Because personally, I’m a writer, I want to be able to do whatever I want, and I have to have the hubris of believing I can do it plausibly.

Exactly. In this case, you have to become V. M. Straka, right? Could you talk about how Straka’s writing is different from yours and how do you make this book seem like it’s out of the 1940s?

It wasn’t particularly calculated. I knew I had to write not like myself as much as possible, which is kind of freeing. It’s not simply writing anonymously; I’m writing explicitly as someone who is not me. Because Straka’s name had a sort of Central European feel to me, and I knew roughly the time period that I wanted Straka to be writing in, I started with a book called The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch, who’s an Austrian writer, and I think that’s from ’39. But I actually didn’t go back and read it. I just relied on my vague memory of what it sounded like or felt like.

One review I saw referred to the book as part Camus and part Keyser Söze [the antagonist in the film The Usual Suspects]. I would sort of describe it as Kafka meets Lovecraft meets Robert Ludlum. The premise is that there’s a character with amnesia and he gets caught up in all these conspiracies and there’s paranormal elements and stuff like that.

Yeah, that sounds great. I love Kafka. I love Camus. And I have read my share of Ludlum. I had a really intense Lovecraft period, so it’s not surprising to me that some of that would creep in.

One of the things, in particular, that made me think of Lovecraft was the obscure vocabulary that Straka uses. I just wrote down some of these words: leptorrhine, aphotic, quincunxes, revanchist, and cyanotic. Where did those kinds of words come from?

Some of them I know, and some of them I just bump in to in real life somehow. I guess that’s partly Straka, but it’s also partly me. I really dig the music of words sometimes. I suppose I wanted Straka to be someone who would in fact engage with language on that level . . . because also it might be Straka, but it also might be the translator. So there’s a translator who appears in the footnotes of the book, and that translator has his or her own sensibility, so while I was creating a Straka voice, I had to bear in mind that I was creating this other voice, and that the text itself might actually be Straka’s voice as we’re experiencing it, or it might have been modified a little by this other voice. All of which is to say, it felt like everything was “in bounds,” and I might as well take advantage of it, and if I thought too hard about it my brain would just tie itself in knots.

As you said, there are all these different layers to the story. There’s the text of The Ship of Theseus itself, and then the translator is footnoting, and maybe they’re sending messages to each other, the author and the editor, and then the students are writing on the book, and they’re sending messages to each other. There’s all these levels of it. Is metafiction something that you have a particular interest in? Are there any other books or anything like this you’ve ever read or thought about?

I’m very interested in metafictional stuff. I guess I first got turned on to it in college when a professor had us read a bunch of Donald Barthelme’s stuff, which I just was entranced by. At one point, I had a graduate fellowship in which I got to study with Gilbert Sorrentino, who not as many people know as [they] should—he was incredible, and the master of not just breaking the rules but tearing them up and throwing them in your face and laughing as he did so. Let me put in a plug for Gil’s work. Mulligan Stew is this particularly insane beast of a book that is also really funny.

Whether or not they’re all sort of metafictional impulses, I’m really interested in telling stories in odd ways. In one of the short stories in my collection, you learn about the character and the character’s narrative solely via these mini-biographies that he’s written about all the peers that he has axes to grind with. Again there are footnotes and photographs. It’s a story called “Splitters,” about horrible rivalries in the world of botany. It might be that that’s part of the reason why I got the gig with J.J., is that when I heard the proposal, all of those circuits lit up. The puzzle part of my mind, the game playing part of my mind just lit up.

Had they read The Surf Guru, your short story collection?

I don’t know. I know Lindsey read Necropolis, and that’s what she handed to him. I don’t know if the stories were part of that.

Alive in Necropolis has sort of police reports—could you talk about that?

The main character is a cop who is working a town called Colma, which is south of San Francisco. It’s a real town, and it was created as a cemetery city, as a place to bury all of San Francisco’s dead, because they did outlaw cemeteries in San Francisco because of land values and such. It’s not really a ghost story, but there are dead people walking around causing problems. The boundary for him, between the world of the living and the world of the dead, gets a little blurred. I guess I liked that as a conceit, telling some of the narrative through the police reports that he writes about the incidents that he has to deal with that are in this blurry area or the area of the not quite real.

Did you read a lot of actual police reports and use those as models?

Yeah, I did. I had a friend who was a cop at the time, and he coached me on some of the phrasings, or really, sort of how you have to process events to write them up in this way.

We should say with S. there’s stuff kind of like that in it too, because there’s the postcards and the maps drawn on napkins, all these sorts of external-to-the-book things that are kind of stuffed in the pages of the book. Did you come up with all those? What was the process for those?

We knew from the beginning that we wanted to be able to do stuff like that with this book, that there would be pieces external to the text that would become part of it. As for what they would be, we didn’t decide that in the beginning; it was me going along as I wrote, keeping a list for myself about what would be cool. My list was incredibly long. I sort of decided I wouldn’t worry about practicality or even bang for buck. I was just like, “Let me put in everything that I think would be cool.” Then when we got the draft together, finished, and turned in, then J.J., Lindsey, I, and Josh Kendall, our editor at Mulholland, we had conversations about which of these is going to pay off the most. We cannot do 150 of them, but if we’re going to do twenty, which twenty should they be? Which was actually fairly easy to do. It was obvious which twenty were the most important. Twenty-two is what we ended up with.

This very much takes advantage of the book form. It really gets a lot of its power from the physical form. I guess there is an ebook version, but I think the primary way you would want to experience this is as a physical book. One thing that really interested me about this book is that it’s such an object and also within the story it creates this world where books are so important. Straka is this character with political influence—he brings down governments and stuff like that. People are willing to kill over this book. The grad students care so much about literature. I was thinking it’s almost like this book does for English lit what Indiana Jones does for archaeology.

That would be great. I’m a lit geek, always have been, and will probably always identify that way. I think that’s one of the things that at various points I was worried about. “Am I going too far into the lit geek world in a way that’s really alienating to other people?” That was another place where it was great to be working with J.J. and Lindsey, and having people saying, “No, this is interesting. Run with it. If it’s taking you to strange places, by all means. If it’s working, it’s working.”

The voices of the students, Jen and Eric, are so believable, and also what was very believable to me was the academic wrangling in the book. Maybe it’s an awkward question, but since you worked at a college, did you draw on any of the students and faculty kind of stuff that you know to create this world?

Not really—because Eric, who’s the grad student, he’s in a PhD program, but actually at the beginning of the book we find out that he’s sort of washed out of his PhD program, just destroyed his own career in a fairly dramatic manner. I’ve actually never had that experience. Yes, I teach at a university. I don’t have a PhD, and technically I’m not really a lit guy. I have a Master of Fine Arts degree. I’m a creative writing guy. In a way, it’s the vicarious pleasure of the pursuit of a PhD that I’m drawing on here, and I’m idealizing it in some way. Like idealizing the pleasure of it, and idealizing the horrible backstabbery of it. But actually, because I’m aware primarily of feuds in the scientific community, that’s where the botany story came from, and maybe because I think I was working on the botany story when I was starting to put this together, maybe that found its way in. If people can be so territorial and so quick to anger in this field, then surely that’ll be in this other field, but I don’t actually know if it happens there.

We should explain your wife is a plant taxonomist, so that’s where some of your interest in that comes from.

Yeah, it was me completely appropriating her world. I have an inner science geek, and so what I do, being a writer, allows me to explore that, pretty much explore anything I want to. It’s a great job. You get interested in something, you can make it the thing that you do, which very few jobs in the grownup world really allow.

Could you talk a little bit more about what sort of reactions the book has been getting? I thought it was interesting, you said in an interview that you expected the book to be polarizing. Can you say why that is?

I think because I still wasn’t, and maybe continue not to be in some ways, just absolutely sure, because I did get to indulge like every lit geek impulse that I had, and it’s a demanding read, too. I’m sure that there are going to be people who are put off by it or who decide it’s not worth their time to engage with it on the level that it demands engagement. Maybe polarizing is a little strong—

You’re not going to have secret societies hunting you down?

Yeah, I think that’s pretty safe to assume. So polarizing might not have been the right word, but maybe it translates to: “I think some people will really dig and probably some people will be alienated by what it is.”

Are you getting a sense from people of how they’re physically reading it? Has anyone read The Ship of Theseus and then gone back and looked at the footnotes?

Yeah, several people have, and that’s what I’m finding out most about, is that’s what people want to talk about, or I’ve been getting emailed questions about how best to read this thing. It seems like there’s the complete range of approaches. Yes, some people have read Ship of Theseus all the way through and then gone back to the margin story, and actually the ebook version facilitates that. It’s got a thing that you can toggle off the margin notes if you want, which is kind of cool that you can in fact get this clean read of Ship of Theseus. Then there are some people who go chapter by chapter. Read a chapter of Ship of Theseus and then go back. There are some people who are doing it a page or two at a time, or even a paragraph at a time. I haven’t yet heard from anybody who is doing it perfectly simultaneously. I think it all depends on how your brain is wired, like how best you absorb information, or what engages you the most. I think if I were to try to do it perfectly simultaneously my brain would explode because I’m not wired that way, but I’m sure there are people out there who are.

Could you talk about the titles, Ship of Theseus and S.—were those things that were given to you?

No. [I went with] Ship of Theseus because I got started thinking about the authorship questions, then that got me to thinking about identity. What does it mean when we say, “Was Shakespeare Shakespeare?” So Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment, or it’s one of the names for a particular thought experiment. Assume you have this ship and a part of it breaks, and you repair it, and so on, and so on, and so on, until you’ve replaced everything. There’s not one original bit of anything that’s composing that ship at that point. Is it still the same ship? Which is an interesting question, and people have been wondering about it for millennia, probably. There are many names for that thought experiment, and Ship of Theseus, I thought, was the most interesting because, especially taken literally, it gives you, “Okay, a ship. I’m looking for places to start with the story.” That’s where it started.

We worked for a long time without a sense of what the larger project would be called, I think. In my head, I did not refer to it as S., but whenever we got together there was this consensus that that was probably the best thing to call it.

You mentioned that you enjoyed Lovecraft, and I saw that you said Stephen King’s The Shining was one of the first books that really captured your imagination. This is largely a podcast for fantasy and science fiction fans, so I was wondering, are you a fantasy and science fiction fan yourself? Do you read much of it?

I haven’t lately, and that’s in part because I teach in an M.F.A. program, and yes, there are plenty of people who teach in M.F.A. programs who teach or who incorporate the study of various sorts of genre fiction. I haven’t ever felt confident enough to do it, I think in part because even if I were reading more, I would not be expert in it, and I feel like I should be expert in the stuff that I’m trying to teach. Then, feeling that way, my time is fairly limited because I’m trying to write and teach, and I’ve got a kid now, so in a way, I’ve gotten tracked into reading generally more straightforward literary fiction. Although I want to acknowledge it’s not like I think there’s a firm boundary between them, and I think most people who do think that are either lying to themselves or missing something fundamental.

Certainly Alive in Necropolis has supernatural elements—ghosts and stuff. Do any of the short stories in The Surf Guru have paranormal/fantastical elements?

That’s a good question. There are strangenesses. There are surreal moments. But I don’t think there’s any “genre” stuff going on. Even in Necropolis, I didn’t necessarily think of it as a genre work or as a walled-off from genre literary work. It was more like, “Here’s a story I want to tell. I’m going to try to tell it as best I can, and pay attention to language, and depth of character, and also have dead people running around causing trouble.”

Certainly in Ship of Theseus there are fantastical elements as well. Could you talk about some of those and how far you wanted to go with that and stuff like that?

That was all improvised. At some point I realized, “Oh wait, time is going to be a tricky thing here. Okay, here’s the rule for how time will work. Great.” Again, not really worrying so much of, “Wait, is this within the ground rules of the book? Can I do this? Does it become a different kind of book if I start messing with time in that way?” It was really kind of a gut decision that got me there, and the thought of, “Well, what the hell? The story seems to want it that way, so let’s see what happens.”

There’s this crew of characters who stitch their mouths shut. Can you talk a little bit about where that image comes from?

I’m not sure. I know there are examples of that image having appeared before in film and apparently in other books, so that must have been in the back of my head. I can’t say for sure, but I knew I wanted S. (the character) to be shanghaied onto this very strange ship that would be a hostile, unpleasant place to be, but it seemed like silence would be the best part of that hostility. To have it be just like this really hard to define, but intensely uncomfortable place to be, so I thought: The crew will not speak to him. It’ll be a completely silent ship. Then I thought, “Well, they need to have a good reason. There has to be something interesting about their silence. Let me stitch their mouths shut, that makes me feel creepy, so why not give it a shot?”

I wasn’t really expecting anything like the image that concludes the first trailer that Bad Robot made, because it’s this figure walking up to the camera, and you actually see this disturbing face that’s all sewn up. That freaked me out. I was like, “I wrote the damn thing, and this is going to give me nightmares.”

Why don’t you talk a little bit about the trailer and some of the advantages that come from having this movie production company associated with the project?

They can and did generate all kinds of attention for the thing that generally books don’t get unless it’s a book that’s an anticipated release from someone like George R. R. Martin or Stephen King. People know the next book is coming, and they’re stoked about it. I’m not those guys, so how wonderful to have access to this group of people who are behind the project and really trying to generate interest in it. There are a lot of pieces to S. that are not in the book itself, and are not in the physical objects that are tucked into the book. There’s a lot of stuff floating around out there. Some of which hasn’t been discovered yet.

Is this like Radio Straka? Like stuff online you’re talking about?

I guess I don’t want to say too much about it because I think the whole idea is for people to discover it, as opposed to me just saying, “Go here. Click on this.”

Actually, Radio Straka was the U.K. publisher, Canongate, who put it together just as a way of generating interest. They did five hours of ostensibly pirate radio broadcasts of a guy who is maybe a slightly unhinged Straka enthusiast and conspiracy theorist [who is] kind of riffing on things on the Straka world and on things possibly tangentially connected to it, and it’s like this uneasy blend of what is real and what isn’t. We had a lot of awesome music in there—the production is really fun. I didn’t write the scripts for it. I really had nothing to do with it other than smiling and saying, “Hell yes! That sounds great.” And it worked because I think they totally got it, but also ran with it in their own direction, which frankly only makes the Straka world bigger and more interesting.

I did want to ask you, in addition to being a writer, you’re also a three-time Jeopardy champion. I watch Jeopardy, and I’m like, “I would do pretty good, I think.” But then I think, “Well, if I got on there, there would be so much pressure, would I just totally not do as well as I not do at home?” Could you talk about what your experience was with that?

The thing is, you might do better, or, and I think this is more my experience, you might do better for five minutes, and then totally lose your mojo, and then get really flustered because then you realize, “Oh my god, I’m on TV. People are watching this.” Then maybe you get your mojo back. That’s one of the things that’s most interesting to me when I watch Jeopardy now. You can totally see when people are in the groove and are no longer aware that they’re being watched in any way. They’re just like in that purely, wonderfully competitive place where nothing else matters, and then you can see people starting to lose it, and then you can see people completely losing it. Then of course the question is, “Okay, are you going to be able to gather yourself enough to get back to that place?”

Actually, I was on the Tournament of Champions. I played one game and just got my clock cleaned, but that’s where I could tell I didn’t have the buzzer timing down. I did for a minute at the beginning, but then totally lost it, and I remember really fighting the button. Of course, once you’re fighting the button, it’s all over. I think with most of the questions, I would say like with three-quarters of the questions, all three people know the answer, so it’s about who’s in the groove.

There was this guy I saw, he had made this app, and it would test you and see what categories you were weak on, and then test you with previous Jeopardy questions in those categories, and he won like eight or nine times in a row or something. I guess the same kind of “The Bible” and “Shakespeare” questions come up over and over again.

Yeah, but I was doing it analog, man. No, that’s a great idea. I was on in early ’06, so there was some online stuff going on. There were fan and contestant boards where things would be discussed, like sort of the theory of Final Jeopardy wagering, but I was only on the fringes of that at best. Obviously I’m sure there’s a whole lot more going on like that example.

Alive in Necropolis is the one novel that you’ve published, are there any others that you’ve written?

No. I’ve been pretty lucky in that I haven’t had to put away the unpublished novel and say it’s a loss, because that’s a tough thing to do. I have many friends who’ve done it. And you realize, “Okay, that’s two years of my life, and all it’s ever going to do is sit in a drawer.” That said, Necropolis took me forever to write. It was like eight years. So in a way, maybe I have like three manuscripts in the drawer.

Did you feel like it was a big leap of faith on the part of Bad Robot and for yourself, that you’d written just one novel before that had taken eight years, and they’re giving you this big project to do?

Oh yeah, completely. It was absolutely insane for them to trust me with it, and it was absolutely insane for me to feign that kind of competence. Also, too, they work in the world of film and TV, in which, if you have a screenwriter who says, “I need to make it up as I go along,” you do not hire that screenwriter.

With film and TV scripts, generally, you’ve got to have every beat planned out before you get a line of dialogue out there. It’s really, in some ways, a more mechanical process. I was worried that they were going to be made uneasy by the fact that I have difficulty creating structure and abiding by structure. It would be great if I could do it. I would probably be well served by it, but I am not at all wired that way. But they went with it.

Whether or not they said it out loud, I think they understood, okay, the novel is a different thing from TV and film scripts, and it also might be that this guy is a writer who approaches the novel in this way, which is not that. But I never got anything from them that wasn’t, “Follow the story where it takes you. Do what you need to do. Do it your way.” Which is ideal.

We’re almost all out of time here, but before I let you go, what’s next for you? Do you have another book you’re working on? Or stories?

I’ve got some stuff that I laid aside when this opportunity came up. A few stories and a thing that might grow or have grown into a novel, although my gut tells me it’s more of a novella. Once the semester ends, I’ll have a bit more time to go back and figure out what still has life for me and pursue it. As I’ve been going along with this, I’ve had a notebook going for ideas for another novel, although it looks like it’s going to be a big, sprawling thing, and I actually kind of need to sit down and make sure that that would be the right choice because this is a big, sprawling, insane thing. It doesn’t make any kind of sense to jump into that. It might actually. It might be insane to do that. I might choose to do it.

I’m kicking around some TV ideas. It’s actually going to be kind of fun to get back and feel like, “Okay, what is going to snag my attention and demand my effort now?” Because I was writing up until midnight the night before the book came out. I’m still in that position of kind of gathering myself and looking around, and it’s like, “Oh, where am I now?” But it’s going to be fun to get back to that.

Great. I think we’re going to wrap things up there. We’ve been speaking with Doug Dorst. The new book is called S. Doug, thanks for joining us.

Thanks a lot. It was fun.

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

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-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.

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: Chris Hadfield
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Chris Hadfield is the first Canadian to walk in space, and also the first Canadian to command the International Space Station. Many of the videos he posted while in orbit became internet sensations, especially his zero-gravity rendition of the David Bowie song “Space Oddity,” which has been viewed over twenty million times on YouTube. His memoir, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, 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.

In your new book, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, you mentioned that growing up, one of your interests was reading science fiction. I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you first got into reading science fiction and who some of your favorite authors were?

I’ve always liked reading, of course, and science fiction just pushes the edge of what is exciting and possible at the edge of imagination. I read several different types of science fiction books growing up. I’m not sure I was as fanatic as some, but I was definitely a lot more than others. I liked a lot of the short stories of Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, of course. I read some of the early science fiction as well, Edgar Rice Burroughs and stuff, science fiction that I found quite interesting to look at through sort of the Victorian side. Mysterious Island by Jules Verne—that type of early science fiction, or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, those were really interesting to read. I really enjoyed A Canticle for Leibowitz and then The Sheep Look Up I thought [had some] interesting insight as well.

In interviews, I also saw you mention Alfred Bester and Robert Heinlein.

I enjoyed Heinlein as well. I thought he was a very original writer and [offered] a lot of original thinking. I read it all kind of voraciously. I was not an analytical reader, and I wasn’t writing reviews for anybody at the time, it was mostly just letting those good writers help my imagination stretch and soar.

You mentioned Arthur C. Clarke’s short stories. Do any of those short stories stick out in your mind?

Gosh, I knew you were going to ask me specifics, and I didn’t study up in advance. There was one, and I can’t remember, it might have been Asimov or [maybe] it was Clarke; I remember one [where the author] wrote the entire story so they could come up with the pun of a “star-mangled spanner,” which was kind of disappointing to get to.

But there was another where they solved the propulsion problem just by punching a hole by, I think, their water tank on board in order to get a vectored thrust that would allow them to save the day.

I actually thought of that while I was living on the space station, thinking “What a clever and interesting idea,” because when we vent things from the space station or when we vented them from a space shuttle, they’re almost always propulsive to some degree. We do our best with t-junctions and t-bells to try to take their propulsive nature away, but often they end up different than you expect.

I got to meet Arthur C. Clarke and spend a day with him walking around space shuttles at The Kennedy Space Center. I was his escort for a day back in the early ’90s, which was a fascinating day for me. Kind of surreal to talk to a man who I felt obliged to use his middle initial every time I talked to him, which isn’t normally how I greet people. He was such a visionary—not just as an author, but [because of] the science element behind [his stories] and the projects he always worked on. There’s [even] an orbit named after him, The Clarke Orbit.

He was just so prescient, and he was behind 2001, which became such an influential movie. I watched it when it was first in the theaters, so that crossover was really important to me.

I’m not sure who wrote that story specifically about the water vent, punching a hole in a tank in order to get a propulsive solution to their problem, but even in the recent movie Gravity, basically they were looking for the same sort of crazy solution to how do you get propulsion out of a system that isn’t going to give it to you, and I thought when I first read it that that was a clever idea, and I kept that clever idea in the back of my mind even when I was living in space, just in case.

I would imagine, if you’re flying in space, that your mind would often go back to science fiction that you’ve read; it would remind you of things. Were there other examples of that that you could think of?

Something funny that happened: I flew in space first back in 1995 on the space shuttle Atlantis, and we went to help build the Russian space station Mir. One of the most powerful things that you experience in orbit, of course, are the views of the world. It is such an omnipresence, an undeniable draw to your eyes—the beauty of it.

When I came back a month or two later, and I was sitting with my wife on the couch, and we were flipping through channels, the original [series] of Star Trek came on with that sort of iconic scene of Kirk sitting in his chair and looking forward, and there is that view of the world sort of rolling by at orbital speed underneath you. I was shocked because it was exactly right. I actually said to my wife, “It looks just like that! That’s exactly how it looks.” I remember just being delighted at the crossover.

You mentioned 2001: A Space Odyssey, and I saw that you called that the most realistic science fiction movie. What’s something that sticks in your mind that just is really true to life in that movie?

When Dave was in the process of trying to fight HAL, and eventually lobotomize him, what he heard when he was outside on his spacewalk was absolutely dominated by his own breathing. The directors of the movie recognized that it wouldn’t be silent outside. If you’re wearing a voice-activated microphone, and you’re out there working hard, you’re going to hear your own breath in the headset, and you’re sort of going to be maybe a little more aware of your own existence because you’re alone. It is just you inside some bubble of air that is held around your body in the universe.

When I did spacewalks, I remember remarking to myself, after I got over the initial rush of seeing the world that way, I started comparing it with the written and movie portrayals of it, and thinking, “Wow, in 2001 they guessed right.” They did an accurate portrayal of the sense of aloneness and the sounds and what it would really be like, and it helped to be slightly more familiar.

Speaking of HAL, I saw you tweeted that at one point you were servicing a computer on the space station and noticed that the person on the ground you were talking to was named Hal.

That was beyond irony, and I couldn’t let it pass, but the Hal that I was talking to had worked for NASA for many years. He’s a US Air Force pilot who had retired from the Air Force and come to work for NASA, and was very experienced as a Capcom—one of the people working in mission control. On that day we had been trying to help out with a major upgrade of the software that commands and controls the whole space station, and [both] ground and we had thrown the switch—basically when the new software was going to take control—we lost control and everything crashed, and the vehicle went stupid. So it was a pretty busy afternoon as we tried to recover from a loss of command and control of a great big ship, but I also I just thought it was funny that it was Hal down there we were talking to, and to say, “I’m sorry, Hal, that’s not possible right now.” The irony of it was not lost on Hal either, but he has a pretty dry wit anyway, so he just took it in good stride.

You mentioned Star Trek, and I saw that you were tweeting to William Shatner.

Not just with William Shatner but with several members of the cast as well. Social media is a wonderful way to share communication and to share an experience, and when you’re doing something on behalf of literally billions of people it’s nice to be able to share it as simply and widely as possible. I was primarily using Twitter on board because it took the least amount of time for me to share as much information. I could just take a picture and then just send it—via Twitter with a caption—to the world.

My son, Evan, was managing the ground version of it, looking at all the social media sites and working with them and working with regular media and such to try and make sure that people were seeing it and that it was sending. He said, “Hey, look, William Shatner has written you a note back. You’ve got to reply.” So I found it very funny because, of course, the blending in my mind of fact and fiction when Star Trek was on was complete. I was seven or eight, I couldn’t tell the difference between a comic book hero and a real person, and so for James Tiberius Kirk to send me an email or a communique while I was actually living on board a space station was such a delightful crossover of fact and fantasy.

I couldn’t let it go by, so I thought I’d have a little fun with it, and just typed out a quick answer back to him. It opened up communication between us and we ended up having a long conversation afterward not just on Twitter, but actually he phoned through the Canadian space agency up to the space station. We had a long, really interesting, far-ranging conversation about the future and the work that we were doing and the capability of the spaceships and the changes in time. I’ve spoken to him several times since, and he’s a really interesting guy to get to know, which was delightful since for me as a kid, he was Captain Kirk.

I actually saw you say that Galaxy Quest is your favorite movie.

It’s not my favorite movie, but it’s one of my favorite movies. I think it’s my favorite space movie just because it is such a great send-up, but not a slapstick one. It takes a genre of film, and the genre of all of the comic-cons, and all of the Trekkies, and all of that, and it blends them together in just as perfect a way as anybody could imagine. The casting in it, I’m not even sure how intended the casting was, but it ended up being inspired with Sigourney Weaver just being so brilliant in that role, just comically good, and of course Tim Allen as the washed-up person, but who actually could rise to the occasion as needed. And each of the characters really being interesting and sort of an amalgamated character of a lot of different space movies fundamentally based on Star Trek. I just found it delightful and with so many memorable lines in it.

I just love the moment in that movie where there’s the kid who’s basically the ultimate Star Trek fan, and Tim Allen calls him on the phone, and the kid says, “Look, I know it’s all made up. It’s just a TV show,” and Tim Allen says, “Listen to me, it’s all real,” and the kid says, “I knew it!”

“I knew it!” That’s exactly right. Which is hilarious. And when the character who played the chief engineer comes through some sort of liquid time warp drive thing and says, “Well, that was a hell of a thing.” I just thought that was priceless. The complete acceptance of something so wildly different and just being like, “Ah, okay, fine, next.” I just thought it was hilarious and fun to watch. I’d be happy to watch it again right now.

You mentioned the recent movie Gravity with Sandra Bullock, and I assume you’ve seen the satirical article “Chris Hadfield Ejected from Movie Theater for Loudly Heckling Gravity.”

I found that very funny. Actually, the guy who wrote it tweeted me the satire he wrote. He was happy that I liked it. What’s funny was Australian media picked it up as truth, and they actually started sending it through their normal media. They didn’t spend any effort corroborating sources or even thinking, and they picked it up as truth. But I thought it was pretty funny and good for the Beaverton to manage to confuse people that they might think that was real. I thought it was cute.

He quotes you as saying “Oh yeah, because that’s what hypoxia as caused by rapid cabin decompression looks like, you idiots!” Is that the sort of thing you might say?

Uh, no. No, I don’t spend a lot of my worry critiquing Hollywood for their technical accuracy. I wouldn’t want to sit next to a policemen during a presidential defense movie or Air Force One or anything. Any doctor movie. I like to be able to watch House or E.R. and not be troubled by the scientific inaccuracy. It’s supposed to be entertainment. Sandra Bullock describes Gravity as an amusement park ride. It’s supposed to be an amusement park ride for the people who watch it, and that’s exactly what it is. I love amusement park rides, and Gravity is the same way. It’s not supposed to be a documentary or an astronaut training film. It’s an amusement park ride, and it’s a good one.

I agree; it is. But you were on Conan recently, and you were criticizing the lack of adult diapers in the movie.

You should see what it’s actually like to do a spacewalk. Imagine if you were going to the gym, and you knew that you would be lifting weights steady, without a break, for seven hours, and you’d be doing it inside a rubber suit so that you couldn’t go to the bathroom, and then at the very end of it, you’re going to peel that rubber suit off your body. Imagine how it would look, like you’d worn a wetsuit for the whole time. Imagine what you would look like. You’d look soaking wet. Your hair would be matted down. You’d be wearing a diaper. You’d just look awful. No one wants to see Sandra come out wearing a full diaper and all filthy in the liquid cooling ventilation garment. It wouldn’t have been nearly as fun to watch.

Did you see the movie The Europa Report?

I have not. I’ve actually been pretty busy since I landed. Since I’ve landed from space, I’ve seen a total of one movie and that was Gravity, and that’s because I was invited to the North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. But I’ve been on the road every day for months, so no. I’m looking forward to seeing movies and relaxing. It just hasn’t happened yet.

The other recent movie I was curious about was Ender’s Game because they have this sort of zero-gravity laser tag game that they play.

I heard about it. I was actually with Harrison Ford in one of the green rooms and he was there because of Ender’s Game, so I knew it existed, but I haven’t read it, nor have I seen it yet, but he was there talking about it. Unfortunately, the closest I’ve come to seeing Ender’s Game is to sit and talk with Harrison Ford for twenty minutes.

I’ve always sort of wondered what it would be like to have a gunfight or do martial arts in zero gravity. Do you have any thoughts on what that would be like—trying to fight someone in zero gravity?

I remember once when my kids first started scuba diving and they were about fourteen, thirteen, and twelve, I think. They got all their scuba qualifications and then we went scuba diving for their open water stuff down in the Bahamas. I remember going down under the water, and my daughter—who was the youngest—was my buddy, and then I made the two boys buddies, and I watched them as sort of a bemused and concerned Dad.

Of course, like young teenage boys do, they spent most of the time punching each other. But I watched them underwater scuba diving punching each other thinking, “Oh, that’s fine.” Because you can’t punch each other very hard when you’re underwater, and it’s kind of clumsy, and because of the drag of the water it’s pretty tiring.

I think it would be similarly problematic [in zero gravity]. Or at least you would have to invent whole new techniques to fight somebody where you didn’t have gravity. We rely on leverage to get a good punch—you rely on position. If someone really had time and was good at martial arts or even a ballet dancer—or someone who’s really lithe and graceful with the ways that they move—I think they would love weightlessness. They could really learn how to use it to be graceful and to a three-dimensional advantage. But for most of us, it would make you like my teenage sons punching each other off the reef of the Bahamas.

I just had a couple more movies I was going to mention. Maybe I’ll just throw these movies at you, and you can just say whether you saw them and maybe like a one-sentence reaction. Armageddon?

I saw Armageddon. Great soundtrack.

Red Planet.

I didn’t see Red Planet.

Mission to Mars.

I saw Mission to Mars. Nice monsters.

The Astronaut’s Wife.

I did not see The Astronaut’s Wife.

And Contact.

I saw Contact. Jodie Foster plays an intense, worried person better than just about anyone, and she did a great job in that. Kind of a fun, big machine to watch that they built, but beyond that, not much.

Getting into your book a little bit.

Not Close Encounters? I thought Close Encounters was a great one.

Oh, all right.

I really enjoyed Close Encounters because, sort of like 2001, they let you draw a lot of the conclusions yourself. They didn’t overdo it. They didn’t turn it into a western right away. They let you think for a while. It was sort of a Hitchcock or some sort of long, brooding buildup to what was going to happen based on a lot of secondary or tertiary clues. I enjoyed that. I thought it was very cleverly put together, and it’s a movie, even though it’s dated now, but it’s still iconic and I enjoy that movie.

I was trying to limit it to just astronaut movies.

Cowboys and Aliens, yeah.

Actually, just on the subject of aliens, do you have any overall thoughts about life elsewhere in the universe?

Personally, just because of the statistics, I’m convinced we’re not alone in the universe. The bigger the telescopes we build, with the Hubble telescope perhaps being the best ever, the more stars we discover, the more galaxies we discover, and with our latest telescopes, the more planets we discover. We’re basically proving that every single star has planets. As far as the human imagination can reach, there are essentially an unlimited number of planets. Unlimited. And to think that ours is the only planet that developed life in an unlimited universe of time and space and opportunity, to me, is just a self-centered arrogance. That we’re so special.

I think there’s probably life somewhere else. To think that some intelligent derivation of that life has travelled all the way across the universe and come to the Earth and is sneaking around, finding us fascinating, and only revealing themselves to people that believe in it—and that’s always in the shape that we expect it to be, a flying saucer or a cigar shaped thing—to me, that’s also just a self-important arrogance. I think the universe houses life besides our own, but I think it’s going to be up to us to prove it and find it.

That’s why we’re looking around on Mars. That’s what Curiosity has shown us, great indicators of at least the potential for life on Mars. When it discovered that there’s so much water trapped in the topsoil of Mars, the opportunity is there. I think that life probably does exist somewhere else. Maybe we can answer that conclusively just by digging down into the rock of Mars eventually and finding whether there’s primitive life [there].

Speaking of Mars and Arthur C. Clarke, I saw that the Canadian Space Agency has something called the Arthur Clarke Mars Greenhouse. Do you know anything about that?

Of course. On a planet with low atmospheric pressure but still enough sun power, like Mars, if we’re going to be able to grow anything on Mars—and when we go there, it will obviously make sense to grow things there, not just to transport food all the way from Earth—we’re going to have to learn how to grow things in a place like Mars, so it would obviously be in some sort of pressurized greenhouse that takes advantage of natural light as well as manmade light. The Canadian Space Agency tried to set up an early analogue of that to understand how to operate one of those remotely, how to monitor the health of plants from thousands of miles away. And at the research station that several of the research agencies co-developed up on Devon Island, up on the Haughton Crater—which is an ancient asteroid or meteor crater up in the Canadian arctic on the world’s largest uninhabited island—on Devon Island they built a research greenhouse up there. It was really interesting. I was up there and did some training and work up there and was inside that greenhouse.

As with anything, you really want to choose names to honor the pioneers, and the visionaries, and the inspirers of the past, and so I thought that was a really good name for it.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about going to Mars, even going to Mars on one-way trips. What do you think are the prospects, in our lifetime, of a manned Mars mission?

I don’t think we will go to Mars until we invent different engines. It’s a nice idea, and it’s one that will inevitably happen, but I just don’t think we’re technologically advanced enough to do it yet. With chemical rockets—which are really the best that we have right now that we can count on—it takes so long to get to Mars that it becomes self-defeating. Plus, how do you actually stop and land in an atmosphere that’s too thin to support a parachute, but way too thick to let you just come in fast and let you slow down like you would on the moon? It’s a very complex matrix of problems to solve.

It’s sort of like . . . to me, I look for a parallel example: It’s like saying in 1912, “Hey, I want to fly to Australia. We’ve got airplanes. Let’s go. Why don’t we fly to Australia?” And it’s like, “Well, we will, but it’s 1912. We can’t yet. We can barely fly across the English Channel. We can’t fly to Australia. It’s too far.” Right now, if we were willing to kill people all the time, then we could jump right into it and start learning the lessons at the cost of a loss of life, but it’s expensive and nobody is willing to do it like we’ve explored a lot of the other places on the Earth. Our early explorers were expected to die regularly, it was just a normal part of exploration, but in space flight we don’t expect people to die regularly, so it’s a little different.

It’s not about us not going. Inevitably, of course we’ll go. We’re only limited by technology. But I think it’s premature right now. I think technology is far too limited for us to credibly mount an expedition to Mars unless we absolutely had to. And the world isn’t threatened nearly seriously enough to put us into that boat.

Actually, speaking of that, on Twitter you posted, “The dinosaurs went extinct because they didn’t have a space program.” Did Larry Niven first say this?

Yeah, I’d heard that quote attributed to various different people, but I understand that Larry Niven first said it. I was just wondering if anybody had heard any different or if he got the idea from someone else, but of course there’s lots of geologic evidence to show how the Earth has been bombarded by asteroids in the past, and the Manicouagan crater is one of the most visible scars on Earth, but there are a lot of others that the majority of them are buried by weathering and by continental drift. The Earth hides its past well. Whereas the Moon is just an agonized portrait of horrific acne of four and a half billion years of bombardment from the universe. So you can see just how vulnerable we are to being hit by things that are coming through space, and as we build better detectors we find more and more asteroids that are on the scale of at least serious death and destruction on Earth, if not complete civilization killers that exist out there, which have a given probability of hitting the world.

So all of the people that are mounting efforts . . . the first stage is to detect. We have to be able to try and detect one coming and catalogue the number of asteroids that cross our orbit. I think we need as many of those sensors as possible as the first step.

Then the next step, of course, is what do you do about it? Whether you try and deflect it, or whether you try and vaporize it, or break it into pieces, or you just evacuate that part of the world. What is the right answer? And who is the governing body that is going to make that decision?

So the reason that I chose that quote by Larry Niven is that it so eloquently states the bottom line of it, which is the dinosaurs were here for a long time and their entire species, to a large degree, apart from the small remnants, was obliterated by one day’s events—one big rock coming from the universe. And the universe is full of rocks—and another one is going to hit the world again at some point—and it would behoove us as a species, if we really want to survive, to try and predict it and try and do something about it in advance. Because if we don’t do anything, then we will just go the way of the dinosaurs.

Do you read Larry Niven or other more recent science fiction authors?

No, I’ve read very little of Larry Niven. I don’t read very much right now at all. People don’t know how busy astronauts are. They really don’t. Some people ask me, “Oh, what do you do in between spaceflights?” Which just makes me laugh. It is such a fanatically busy life of study and preparation and taking care of each other while we’re all flying in space. It’s an all-engrossing and demanding job, the majority of which you are on the road somewhere else.

So, no. I would love to do more reading, but the circumstances of my life unfortunately have kept me from reading all the things that I would like to.

Speaking of how demanding it is being an astronaut, I read in your book that the internet on the International Space Station, you describe it as being “dial-up slow.” Just the thought of having slow internet for five months is almost too horrible to contemplate.

We have email onboard, but it’s slow enough that we just do email syncs. We synchronize our email a certain number of times per day and maybe once a day on the weekend. So it’s like a lot of the world where you have very limited capability, and we upgraded the connectivity while I was on the station. We increased it by about a hundredfold in speed which gave us great ability to uplink and downlink videos so that I could make all of those educational videos and fun videos and get them down to the ground for people to release. But it almost got to the point where you could stream up to the space station but not quite. So it’s improving.

I can barely get Comcast to fix my internet—and I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this, but I live on Earth, so you would think that that wouldn’t be that much of a problem.

The way that we linked up our internet onboard is pretty complex, but it eventually got linked down through Houston. Eventually, that long train of connections through relay satellites out in the geostationary orbit and the big ground arrays that bring information back, they all eventually went and connected to a desktop that was sitting at the Johnson Space Center that then tied us into the internet. That one is still [reliant] on Comcast to keep us connected.

You’ve gotten a lot of attention for your YouTube videos, particularly your performance of David Bowie’s song “Space Oddity.” What have been some of the biggest reactions to that that you’ve gotten?

The biggest reaction is Bowie himself who said it was the best cover of that song ever done, which is pretty high praise from the artist himself. My son made that video. I recorded the music and the singing, and then a musician named Emm Gryner, a super recording artist, she did the piano part, and Joe Corcoran did the rest of the instrumentals. But it was really my son. He edited the video, he put it all together, it was all his idea, and he posted it to the internet. That one place where my son Evan posted it, almost twenty million people have seen it, but it’s been reposted many other places, and it’s been rebroadcast on regular media such that hundreds of millions of people around the world have seen that video, and I hear echoes of it everywhere all the time.

It’s kind of funny for people to say, “Hey, I saw your video,” like in my life I’ve made only one video, but that’s the level of ubiquitous impact that it had. What’s interesting about it, going back to the central core of the conversation, is why is it an interesting video? And I think it’s because, much like science fiction in the late sixties with Star Trek and 2001, they were overlaid at the same time by the reality of the race to the moon, and I think that video, which took an iconic fantasy/science fiction kind of view of space travel and very brilliantly told a little story and created a sense of emotion, somehow that became real when I had a chance to sing it and record it onboard the space station.

It interweaves science fiction and science fact, and all sorts of people have sent me pictures of their kids or someone just hypnotically watching that over and over again and trying to square inside their head how could this be? The normality of it and the juxtaposition of it. I think the reason that hundreds of millions of people have seen it is just that: That it links science fiction and fantasy with reality. That we have built something, the world has built a place where science fiction and fantasy become real, and that’s what the space station is. I was delighted that my son talked me into it because the impact and the thought provocation that’s gone along with the impact has been so huge.

Your book, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, contains a lot of valuable life lessons that you’ve learned as an astronaut and a pilot that can be applied to everyday life. I was wondering, is one of those lessons that you should always check your cockpit for dangerous animals before you take off?

[Laughter] I do now. That was a real surprise the day I found a live snake in the cockpit with me while flying an airplane. What’s funny is, a common expression amongst fighter pilots when you’re super busy in the cockpit—because most fighter airplanes have one seat, and you have to do everything by yourself, and so it can get extremely busy, especially when you’re doing a dogfight or something—the common expression we would use was “I was killing snakes and putting out fires.” And so to actually deal with a live snake in the cockpit, it was a little bit like Raiders of the Lost Ark or something. Flying an airplane and having to deal with a writhing, very unhappy snake in the cockpit with me was a first and hopefully a last in my experience.

That snake found himself ejected from the airplane.

Yeah, what would you do? Russ Wilson, the firefighter friend of mine that I was with, we both decided, “Let’s get this little window open and send the snake on his final flight, and we’ll go back to the business of flying this airplane.” We were up high—we were at about 10,000 feet—so that snake fell a couple miles and hopefully landed somewhere innocently and not in the front seat of somebody’s convertible driving down the highway.

Another thing in the book that really struck me was you talk about having a psych evaluation before you can go into space, and one of the questions is, “Have you ever thought about killing your mother?” I think it was. It just made me wonder, how useful are those psych evaluations? Do they actually catch anyone?

If you were being evaluated to be an astronaut, and you really wanted to be one, then how would you approach a test like that? If you knew that you were going to do a psychiatric evaluation, what would you do? Would you just take it and hope for the best? Well, I thought, okay, I’m going to do a psych exam. I’m going to call a psychiatrist friend of mine and say, “Hey, how do you do well on these exams? What are they going to ask for? What are they looking for? Is there a pass-fail? Is there a grade? What are they really looking for?” And what she said was, “No, it’s pretty much just to identify people with some really strong psychological problems. It’s not going to be much of a discriminator at all. If you’re not seriously troubled psychologically, if you’re not schizophrenic, or manic, or something, then you’re going to be fine.”

So when I was doing it, I more felt like the answers I was writing weren’t important, but I felt that there must be a television camera watching me fill out these questions and just looking for my incredulous reactions. Because it was 500 questions, I think, or some enormous battery of questions, and a lot of them were nonsensical. You try and write down what you think is the right answer. Like: “When I was a kid, I always answered the doorbell first. Yes or no?” I’m going, “Number one, I don’t remember. There were five of us in the household. I don’t think we even had a doorbell because it was a farmhouse, and also, what would be the right answer? Should I have answered the doorbell first? Should I have not?” I didn’t know. I just treated the whole thing as a big exercise, and I don’t think they have eliminated very many applicants. By the time you get to the stage where they’re giving you the psychiatric test, there’s not too many people who could have gotten all of the other qualifications that would still be very psychologically aberrant.

You recently wrote an article for Wired called “We Should Treat Earth as Kindly as We Treat Spacecraft.” Could you just talk about how that came about?

I was approached by Wired Magazine to write the lead-in article or conversation question article for the December issue that was just edited by Bill Gates, and they basically said, “You can write it about whatever you want.” I thought about some of the issues that had puzzled or intrigued or challenged me while I was in orbit; the beauty of my third spaceflight was the amount of time that I had, the better part of half a year off the planet, to look at it and think about it and puzzle over some of the problems and potential solutions.

When I was writing that article, I took myself through that same thought process of how looking at the world that way starts to make you think, and then it starts to help you boil down to the key problems to the real things that are facing us, and how we might get together and solve them—a viewpoint that isn’t driven just by local concerns, but one that’s given by global concerns.

To me, it’s all about power generation and the pollution that it causes. How are we going to generate power so that it decreases the scarcity of resources and decreases the deleterious effects on the atmosphere?

I tried to go through that long process, and if you look at a spaceship, it’s just a microcosm of the Earth, or the Earth is just the exaggeration of a spaceship. You have crew, you have limited resources, you have a habitable zone, you have a system that maintains that habitable zone, and you are still subject to external forces that can cause havoc at any time.

I was really pleased with how the article came out. It helped me go through the whole thought process, and all sorts of people commented and said that they really enjoyed the thoughts that went into that article. Even Bill Gates himself wrote an unbidden note that he found it very thought-provoking and insightful, so I was really pleased to have a chance to write that.

I saw that you just took a new position as adjunct professor at the University of Waterloo.

Yeah, I’m an adjunct professor. I went to the University of Waterloo for post-graduate work in mechanical engineering. It’s a great school. It’s one of the top academic universities—technical, engineering, cutting-edge kind of challenging universities. One of the hardest universities to get into in all of Canada. A lot of great ideas come out of there.

The Perimeter Institute, with all of the physics research going on, is right there in that same town. And COM DEV, one of the leading aerospace companies in the country, is right there too. It’s a really fertile area.

When they asked me to come and be an adjunct professor, I had to go and look up what adjunct meant. It means part-time, or guest, or whatever time allows, and things are pretty busy right now, so I think primarily my role will be largely as a guest lecturer or occasional lecturer, but I think it’s an investment both on my part and on the university’s part for years to come. I’m really looking forward to building my relationship and my time at the school, because of all the people that have taught me over the last fifty years, all these different things, and the levels of experience and technical skill that I’ve gained as a result, and hopefully, therefore, some of the useful lessons and teaching opportunities that will help the students going through there, so that they not only come out of university with good academic knowledge, but with as much practical insight and potentially the ability to avoid making mistakes as I did. I’m really looking forward to it.

What else is keeping you busy these days? You’re probably speaking, and are you writing anything else? What else are you up to?

The book tour. [The book is] a New York Times bestseller, and it’s the number one bestselling book in Canada; it’s selling extremely well in the UK and Ireland and Australia, and it’s being translated into ten different languages in other countries. So the book tour is keeping me extremely busy, which is great. I’m really pleased that people are enjoying the book. I’ve been travelling a lot just on the book tour, and meeting folks, and signing books.

There is, as you say, lots of public speaking, a great demand for me to come and speak, and so I do that on a regular basis, and I’m consulting a little bit to the aerospace industry as well, which I think is a good thing to develop—to try and not just talk to academia, but also talk to government and industry about the practicalities of what I’ve learned over the last quarter-century.

Eventually, hopefully, I’ll take a day off, which would be welcome as well. But it’s busy. I was with the government thirty-five years, and I just retired, so the transition is important. I was outside of Canada for twenty-six years, in the US and Russia, so I’m getting settled back, and just trying to pick my battles now and decide where I want to apply my efforts full-time, but I’m not in a big hurry to commit to anything quite yet.

We appreciate that you’re busy, and we really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us today, Chris.

Thanks. It was really lovely to have a chance to talk with you as well, and thanks for having done all the research. You did vast research in getting ready to talk to me here, and it made it a lot more interesting for me as well, so thanks very much. It was a real pleasure to talk with you.

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-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.

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.

Artist Gallery: Scott Grimando

Scott Grimando was born in 1968 in New York. He studied at Nassau Community College and Stevenson Academy of Traditional Painting. He maintains dual careers doing work in both advertising and illustration. He works in various mediums, including sketching, painting, digital painting, and photography, often utilizing more than one medium in each work. He has done book illustration work for major publishing houses as well as for Warner Brothers, Disney, Harley Davidson, Lucas Films, Nike, and major sports franchises. His work has been collected in an art book entitled SQP The Art of the Mythical Woman: Lucid Dreams. He currently lives in Long Island. His website is www.grimstudios.com.

[To view the gallery, turn the page.]

Artist Spotlight: Scott Grimando
Henry Lien

You have done illustration work for some of the most famous writers in speculative fiction (Heinlein, Stross, Anne McCaffrey) and some of the most famous properties (Star Wars, Blade Runner). Talk to us about the process of working on such projects. What sort of freedom were you given on various projects? And if there is a film version of the property, when are you required to use the faces of the actors from the film versions?

With a property like Star Wars, the characters were clearly defined from the get go. Funny that the original Star Wars poster by the Hildebrandt Brothers utilized their friends as Luke and Lea. Aside from that, Lucas Films doesn’t allow for interpretation so an illustrator has to be creative with the composition and hope his unique style comes across despite the restrictions.

With something like The Lord of the Rings, the characters have been open to interpretation since the beginning. Tolkien wasn’t overly descriptive about his characters. Unless an artist was hired for a movie studio licensed project, it would show an incredible lack of imagination to use the films as templates for an illustration.

In the case of my Golden Compass illustrations or anything I’ve done for, say, Disney or Warner Brothers, they’re licensing projects. So I’m bound to the licensor’s style guide.

It is hard to figure out what your technique is. There appear to be both extremely fine, classical painting techniques at play as well as some digital enhancement of textures and colors. Can you walk us through your process technically?

I’m a classically trained painter, having studied under Harold Stevenson, one of the few students of Norman Rockwell, as a teenager. I guess that influence is always going to come through. Painting theory influences everything I create, but I think that my digital work has become completely divergent from my painted work. I’m trying to stay ahead of the trends and create a new form of fine art.

As far as technique, everything starts with a rough sketch to work out the composition. After that I begin gathering reference from my photography library. I’ve been shooting reference since I was a teenager. If I don’t have what I need for the rough stage of the assignment I’ll shoot a friend as a stand-in until I can get approval on the design. After that I start looking for a model, book a shoot, and make a costume if I need to.

If there’s something I can’t piece together in Photoshop, I’ll make a 3D model and render that at the angle and with the lighting I need to match the scene.

Everything gets composited in Photoshop and heavily reworked until it’s seamless and believable. That’s where the painting skill really comes in.

While the works are illustrational, they are employing clear techniques of composition from classical fine art training. For example, in The Stairs, the repetition of the circular pattern in the position of the figure at the center of the spiraling stairs, while also placing the viewer floating impossibly in the middle of the stairwell, at risk of dropping several floors at any time, creates a delicious, vertiginous disorientation. You have similar repetition of circular motifs in the illustration for Robert Heinlein’s Future History, creating a sense of expansive space radiating outward on the composition. How much room do you have to incorporate such fine art techniques in the context of a commissioned illustration?

Very observant of you! Repetitive patterns are a good way to draw the viewer into the image. If you’re subtle about it, they don’t even realize what’s drawn them in. I learned that trick from reading one of Robert Bateman’s art books. He’s a wildlife painter who has been a huge influence on my composition style. Especially in my wildlife photography. When I’m framing a shot in the wild, I’m always thinking, “What would Robert Bateman do?”

You bring all of your knowledge and experience to every creative project you tackle.

Publishers hire an illustrator because they like their style. They want the illustrator to come up with a visually interesting solution to the design problem at hand.

It is clear that you are extremely comfortable with anatomy and faces and figurative work. However, your interest in structure and engineering is apparent from the beautiful ship and architectural design that you do. Why do you not do more pieces with vehicles or architecture as subjects?

My first passion is the human form, but I do love to create imaginary worlds. The heavy architectural or spacecraft driven work is very time consuming. I’m always excited to tackle that sort of space opera project when a publisher calls for it.

I recently divided my science fiction art page into three categories, with space opera in the middle, to show that I do have a large body of work in that vein.

It appears from your projects that you grew up immersed in Golden Age Science Fiction. Is that the case, or is it simply due to the fact that you have been hired to work on such projects? What stories/imagery captured your imagination the most and made you want to be an illustrator?

What’s Golden Age SF? The 1940s or ’50s? I’m not that old. When I was a little kid in the 1970s, we watched nothing but science fiction and fantasy. Although we were a physically active family, we didn’t watch any sports. I saw every rerun of Star Trek and The Twilight Zone, as well as every movie that came out, because my father was into it, too.

When I was little, I wanted to be a comic book artist. I think the turning point was when my father bought me a Boris Vallejo calendar in 1981. I knew then that I wanted to be an illustrator.

A professional artist has to be very aware of the trends in the industry and always try to stay current. Hopefully I stay ahead of the trends and help to define the next one. The trend right now is towards a very photographic look. I get hired because I can achieve that with elements that can’t be photographed.

I’ve been developing a hyperrealism style that looks so three-dimensional that it almost jumps off the page. We’ll see how the art directors and fans respond.

Do you have a favorite character among the characters you have created?

I’ve really had the opportunity over the past ten years to define the look of Mike Shepherd/Moscoe’s Kris Longknife Universe. Even though the main characters are prominent on all of the covers (fifteen so far) I still create a new piece of architecture or spaceship every time.

I’m looking forward to doing more concept design for film and TV. I’ve done work for Hallmark Entertainment as well as various gaming and costume companies.

What is your dream project?

My dream project is to become a hermit and live in the mountains surrounded inexplicably by gorgeous models that I can paint.

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: Jessica Barber
Jude Griffin

What was the seed for “Coma Kings”?

I’m an electrical engineer, and I occasionally work building hardware for neuroscience labs, so on a day-to-day basis I spend a reasonable amount of time discussing and thinking about brain-machine interfaces. One day a co-worker and I were having a conversation about what we were jokingly referring to as “brain DJs,” the idea being that you’d take, say, EEG recordings of somebody who was in a deep meditative state (or tripping, or whatever), and then induce somebody else to match their “brain waves” using magnetic stimulation (or flashing lights, or whatever). Super fun at parties! So “Coma Kings” sprung from that sort of idea of collaborative hallucination.

I loved the description for Lady K’s place—was it inspired by some place you’ve been?

Thanks! And no one place in particular; more an amalgam of various labs and hackerspaces I’ve worked in or visited over the years, with a dash of high school friends’ garages/basements for good measure.

Why “kings” in the title when the protagonist, Jennifer, is female (as is her sibling, Annie)?

Honestly, only that I had the title in mind before I’d really fleshed out the plot, and then was disinclined to change it. There’s probably some snarky meaning to be assigned there about gaming/tech culture and the demographics to which it tends to cater, but that would be giving myself too much retroactive credit.

See also, in the “formative childhood influences” sub-category, Patricia C. Wrede’s Dealing With Dragons and the gender non-specificness of the title of “King of the Dragons,” which absolutely blew my little brain when I first read it.

Did you have the end in mind when you started? If not, how did it evolve during the shaping of the story?

Yes, I definitely knew from the beginning that I wanted the story to end this way. I’m a fan of ambiguous endings. I wanted to screw around with genre fiction tropes and thwarting expectations; with the idea that in real life, winning your hacker showdown (or magical battle, or whatever) isn’t always enough to defeat the big bad and live happily ever after. That sometimes there’s still work to do to overcome whatever you’ve got going on.

That being said, I did get critiques of a “that’s it?!” nature, so I suppose YMMV.

Any news or projects you want to tell us about?

I write at a truly glacial pace, so nothing in the immediate publishing pipeline. I’m just wrapping up a novelette about lake monsters and growing up in southern Appalachia, so hopefully you’ll see that somewhere soon!

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She has trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.

Author Spotlight: Ramez Naam
Bradley Englert

One of the main aspects of “Water” is the fact that companies have turned water, the most essential thing for humans, into a profitable market. We see this today as well, with the huge market that already exists for bottled water. There are hints at other advertising techniques, too, with the clothing store’s mannequin and the way that the restaurant’s menu shifts, but the main focus is on bottled water, so why did you decide to have the emphasis be on water?

The story “Water” is really sort of an alternate reality of my novels Nexus and Crux. In my novels, this sort of brain-computer and brain-to-brain linking technology is developed by scientists and the main conflict is between governments that want to restrict it or use it to control people (think “war on drugs,” “war on terror,” or the recent NSA revelations) and hackers and subculture elements who want to see it liberated.

One of the most interesting comments I got about Nexus was, “Hey, great novel—but you left out the whole corporate angle. Wouldn’t this be massively used for advertising?”

So I wanted to explore that. And when I set out to do so, I wanted to do it with a product that was as ubiquitous and banal as possible—something that you literally run into on a daily basis. Sure—you could use direct neural marketing to sell sports cars. But in a lot of ways it’s actually creepier and more interesting when it’s so pervasive that it’s being used to sell something as commonplace as a bottle of water.

There are multiple comparisons between marketing and war. Do you feel like advertising really is a “battleground?” Why the focus on a “war” between companies?

Absolutely. We tend to think of the corporate world as being full of behemoths. But it’s actually fiercely Darwinian. If Darwin were alive today, he’d have a field day studying how corporations live, die, combine, reproduce, mutate, fragment, and so much more. That’s something that anti-corporate motifs in fiction miss a lot. The big companies are occasionally in cahoots with each other. But far more often, they’re trying to eat each other’s lunch! It’s all-out war, only with marketing techniques and promotions and new product launches (and the occasional patent wars and corporate espionage) as the weapons, instead of guns.

The speed of the story, and the way in which all of the AIs almost instantaneously share information, feels like the speed of real life technology. Every day there are new technological products vying for our time and money. How critical was portraying this rapid pace to you? Do you feel that the speed in which technology and advertising can shift was important in the overall theme of “Water”?

I was influenced by current trends in high-speed algorithmic trading. On many days now, a majority of the trades being made on the stock market are being made by algorithms, not by humans. And the structure of the market is such that an advantage of a few milliseconds is huge. You have trading firms investing in high-speed fiber connections and massively accelerated hardware to try to shave a millisecond or two off their trading times. Because if you can be the first to buy a stock that you know is about to go up, or the first to sell a stock you know is about to go down, you do so at a better price, and make a bigger profit.

Now, the same isn’t true of in-store ads today. Those are primarily made of static paper and cardboard. But the cost of displays is coming down to the point that eventually those ads will be digital. And once they are—why not run experiments where you test different ads against each other and see which one sells more product? And if you find some new market conditions, why not roll that new info—and the new ads—out to all your stores at once?

At the end of the story, Simon is bombarded with ads like he’s never experienced before, and it’s incredibly intriguing to think about someone who has never experienced ads before, but now has to see them literally everywhere. It would be like an insane neural overload. How do you think this would actually work in life today? You show Simon’s terror and then acquiescence to NutriYum in a powerful way, so how did you plan that last scene out? What were the most important ideas to fit in there?

Heh heh heh. I just like torturing people, I guess. And that scene is poetic justice. So for me, a whole lot of the story, at the emotional level, is building up to that moment of dark justice. It’s not even a good guy winning. It’s a bad guy suffering at the hands of some other bad guy, really.

Will it actually be like that? Oh, I doubt it. People don’t tend to be very keen on letting others into their heads without permission. But it was fun to play with. And as an allegory for much that already happens in pervasive advertising, it was enjoyable.

The ending evokes an interesting idea of being told that you should like something and so you do. This is much more intense than the advertisements we have now, because it directly stimulates pleasure centers, but even in today’s society we see celebrities telling us to buy certain products or the happiest people we’ve ever seen eating at certain restaurants. How did today’s advertising techniques affect the way that you showed this idea and emotion at the end of the story?

If you read the ending carefully, it’s doing a bit more than telling Simon that he should like this. It’s building up a craving, a sense of need, a sense of deep insufficiency.

That, I think, is the most insidious form of advertising there is—the kind that tells you that you’re not really good enough or happy enough or pretty enough or accomplished enough unless you buy this product or wear this brand or take this vacation or what not. I think, in particular, that sort of advertising is aimed at women in society.

What’s hitting Simon isn’t quite that complex. It’s actually invoking a deep biological need—an overwhelming thirst—that the bottle of water can quench. But again, it’s an allegory for the forms of advertising that are aimed at hitting the viewer’s self-esteem as a way to sell products.

No, I don’t actually know how well that sort of advertising actually works to sell products. In fact, there’s a deep debate about how well most advertising works, period. But, really, advertising that’s aimed at hitting self-esteem? Not cool.

A summary for your book More than Human, which is about biological enhancement, uses this sentence at the end: “Ultimately More Than Human concludes that we should embrace, rather than fear, the power to alter ourselves—that in the hands of millions of individuals and families, it stands to benefit society more than to harm it.” But in “Water” you focus on the harm that biological enhancements, like neural implants, could potentially cause humanity. Do you believe that biological enhancement could be a benefit to society as long as it is used properly and not exploited as is the case in “Water”? Where is the line in the sand for you as far as biological enhancement goes?

In general, when you look at new technologies, mostly they’ve done more good than harm, particularly when they’re widely disseminated. That doesn’t mean they do zero harm. If you say with a straight face “new technology X is going to be amazing and have no downsides whatsoever” then you’re—forgive me—an idiot.

But if you say “new technology X is going to ruin the world” then the burden of proof is on you. Because while every new technology has caused social ills—the internet makes child porn and online hate easier, cars create smog, airplanes are used in war, the mechanical loom put human clothworkers out of work—overall, the world has gotten better and better, and a great deal of that has been because of technology.

And by the way, some of the smartest people ever to have lived have been very, very worried about new technologies. Socrates, pretty famously, worried that mass literacy would be terrible for society, because it would weaken the minds of the young. Well, big respect to Socrates, but how wrong he was!

So in all my writing, I’m a technological optimist. But to be a credible optimist, you have to acknowledge the kinds of things that could go wrong. And you should be willing to put forth ideas on how to reduce those risks. Maybe we need sensible laws and regulations around those things.

As far as the line in the sand: Mostly for me it’s about choice. The places where technology really looks like a nightmare for society have been those where only a few people have had control. Why did the USSR fear copy machines? Because they put information technology in the hands of the masses. Why was the world of 1984 so horrible? Because the government had a monopoly on information technology. The same is true for biotech and Brave New World. Mostly, the key is to get technology widely disseminated and use the law to protect the rights of individuals to make choices for themselves. And also to ensure things like safety, like protection from being ripped off or defrauded by companies selling this stuff, etc.

What’s coming up next for you?

My first two novels, Nexus and Crux both came out in the last twelve months. I was stoked to see that Nexus made NPR’s list of the Best Books of 2013! So now I’m writing the third and final book in that trilogy, Apex. It’ll be out in 2014. And then we’ll see!

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: Carrie Vaughn
Andrew Liptak

Hi Carrie! Thanks for taking the time to chat with us about your latest story with us, “Harry and Marlowe and the Intrigues at the Aetherian Exhibition”! First off, since this is the latest of a set of adventures from Harry and Marlow: How does it feel to return to them again?

It really doesn’t feel like I’ve left—I always have a Harry and Marlowe story or two cooking in my hindbrain, and I’ve got future plans. It’s just a matter of when I have time to write them.

After a couple of adventures with Harry and Marlowe, this seems to be a bit more of a quiet story, with more of a spy-thriller flair. Why the change?

I always planned to tell a story where we meet Harry’s family—the family of the Crown Prince of Britain—and see Harry in her role as Princess Maud. This was it. A story where Harry is balancing her two personae also makes a good fulcrum between what I see as two halves of the series—the early adventures where Harry and Marlowe begin their relationship and we learn about Aetherian technology, and the later stories, where the two will travel all over the world. Things will get much bigger and stranger after this.

We meet a certain Mr. Wells in this installment, who’s looking to write an allegorical novel about the alien crash and potential invasion. It’s a very meta moment, with one of the creators of the genre present in a genre story! Is there a certain level of allegory you planning with this world?

I’m not sure allegory is the right word. I see it as pure alternate history. I posit my alternate history as beginning when an alien spacecraft crash lands in Surrey—at some point I had to address the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room, which is: What happens to H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds in a world that really did have an alien invasion of sorts? My answer is: The novel itself doesn’t change much, but its meaning does.

We see Wells, but do you have any idea of what a certain Mr. Verne is up to?

I would have to go back to the events of “Harry and Marlowe Escape the Mechanical Siege of Paris” and learn how Mr. Verne fared during the German invasion of the city . . . I imagine he has his own ideas of what people should be doing with Aetherian technology.

With four stories featuring Harry and Marlow under your belt, are we going to see more adventures from them, or possibly a longer work?

Yes, I’ve got more stories planned. My hope is to eventually collect them all into one large book, where something resembling an overarching storyline will become clear.

What’s next for the pair, and what should we be looking forward to next from you?

As you can see in this story, Harry and Marlowe have been charged by Queen Victoria herself to travel the world searching for technology that will give Britain a desperately needed edge in its war with Germany. That’s where we’re going next. As for what else: My urban fantasy series continues this year with a novel about bounty-hunter bad boy Cormac called Low Midnight, and my second superhero novel, Dreams of the Golden Age, will be released in January.

Andrew Liptak is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He has written for such places as Armchair General, io9, Kirkus Reviews, SF Signal, Tor.com and he can be found over atwww.andrewliptak.com and at @AndrewLiptak on Twitter.

Author Spotlight: Robert Charles Wilson
Patrick J. Stephens

What was the inception of “Fireborn”?

I was invited by Gardner Dozois to contribute to an audiobook anthology he was editing called Rip-Off! The conceit was that authors could steal a first line from any work of fiction or nonfiction (as long it was safely in the public domain and out of copyright) and build a science fiction story around it. I liked the idea—it seemed like an interesting challenge.

On your website (robertcharleswilson.com/) you stated that “Fireborn” borrows indirectly from Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories. Could you explain more about this?

I’ve had an off-and-on fascination with Sandburg’s cycle of designedly American fairy tales for years. They occupy such a strange and interesting literary space—part fable, part poetry, silly and curiously affecting at once. Fragments of phrases from the Rootabaga Stories are permanently lodged in my head. “Only the fireborn understand blue” was one of those cryptic, incredibly suggestive lines. So when Gardner approached me about a story for Rip-Off!, Sandburg’s stories immediately came to mind. I didn’t want to write an imitation Sandburg story, but I did want to let his gorgeous, playful language and democratic populism infuse the story I did write.

Lead us through the worldbuilding for “Fireborn.” Were there any real-world inspirations for locations like Buttercup County, or the idea of skydancing?

Buttercup County is a kind of science-fictional embodiment of Sandburg’s fanciful rural landscapes. Skydancing—an artform in which dancers are embodied inside huge virtual airborne avatars—was an idea I’d been carrying around for a while: It started as a daydream when I was staring out the window of an airplane during a long overseas trip.

I placed all this in a future in which the world has recovered from an unexplained but probably man-made disaster—a “hemoclysm” that drastically reduced the human population and is associated with the construction of “the Eye of the Moon,” a lunar structure visible from Earth. Humanity is divided into a technologically advanced and quasi-immortal class of aristocrats and a well-fed but mortal and largely ignorant peasantry. The predominant religion in Buttercup County is a kind of syncretic Christianity that incorporates elements of Tibetan mythology.

Jasper, Onyx, or Anna Tingri Five—which one borrowed most from your own personality, and which was the most difficult to understand in terms of character?

Jasper and Onyx are folks I would happily spend time with. The aristocratic Anna Tingri Five was harder to write—she’s on her fifth lifetime, she lives an existence that is in some regards almost godlike, but she’s as self-centered and vulgarly ambitious as a child.

What can we expect to see from you in the future?

My novel Burning Paradise was released last month, and I’m about to hand in a new book called The Affinities. After that, I’m under contract for a time-travel novel tentatively titled The Last Year.

Patrick J. Stephens 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 and his first novel (Sondranos: the Narrative of Leon Bishop) will be available in early 2014.

Author Spotlight: Rachel Swirsky
Jude Griffin

What was the genesis for “Detours On The Way To Nothing”?

I usually start writing stories with an idea, instead of an image, but for this one, it just started with an image. I was sitting at my grandmother’s table at about one a.m. at night, listening to meditation music with my earphones in, and trying to write something pretty and short.

I didn’t have any idea where I was going. There was just something about a girl with feathers for hair. I kept writing about her as “the girl with feathered hair” until I realized what that actually meant. (It looks like I kept the phrasing in once anyway.)

I often default to writing in first person talking to “you” if I’m not thinking about it too carefully. It comes very naturally to me. Then the question becomes trying to figure out who “I” is, who “you” is, and why “I” needs to address “you.” Usually, as I write, I figure that out, and then I know what the story is about and how it can proceed and end. That was definitely the case with this one.

Why Brooklyn as the setting for “Detours”?

I realize this isn’t the most inspiring answer, but I set it there because I had just been there. I wrote the story as an unfolding series of images, and those were the ones ready to tap.

A friend of mine lived in a neighborhood similar to the one I was describing, and I’d spent several nights walking around it, in his company, and staying overnight in his single room, on his couch. He loved his neighborhood so much, and it was impossible not to fall in love with it a bit, too.

It was very different from the places I had lived all my life, not only the suburbia in which I was born and raised, but also different from the more rundown places as well. In San Jose, poor areas don’t look like decaying skyscrapers. It has a very different appearance, smell, and texture.

How does the subplot of Christina and The Man She Should Have Loved Less underpin the main arc of “Detours”?

I feel like the gist of this interview is, “It turns out I really didn’t know what I was doing!” It’s funny because most of my stories are very planned and meticulous, and this one just wasn’t written the same way.

Also, it’s been a few years now, so I’ve got to go back and look and then try to reconstruct my thought process from the time.

I stole the story of the man throwing bottles at the window, looking for a girl who didn’t live there anymore, from that same friend I mentioned earlier. I still feel a little guilty about that. (Sorry, friend.)

I think, for me, those two people were actually in love, and thus very much the opposite of what is going on between “I” and “you.” They’re grounded in themselves, their senses, and their senses of self are vital to that. They aren’t two ciphers, trying to get an archetypal thing from each other (a fantasy, a means to an end). They’re concrete people, who loved each other’s specifics and imperfections.

That’s what the girl with feathered hair is giving up at the end of the story. By the time the story begins, she’s already stopped looking for someone to love her as a person; that’s part of her desire to lose her sense of self. But it’s these events that allow her to realize what that really means, as she makes love distantly to this man who becomes obsessed with her sheerly because of a role she’s playing for him, which has nothing to do with what she actually is, in contrast to these other two, real people who had real, specific love.

But their love is gone, too. Because everything goes. Even Christina acknowledges that she should have loved this man less. And something about seeing that allows the girl with feathers for hair to let her vestigial desire go, too.

The protagonist’s goal is to lose the trappings of self and s/he pursues this through the embodiment of the desires of others. What is the detour in this story?

Well, I think from her perspective, any experience she has is a detour. Any time she dwells in a moment, feels her own sense of self inside it, that’s a moment when she isn’t becoming nothing.

Any news or projects you want to tell us about?

My second short story collection, How the World Became Quiet: Myths from the Past, Present and Future, came out a couple of months ago from Subterranean Press. It’s my first full-length collection, and it has a gorgeous illustration from Shaun Tan. It’s got a lot of my best work in it.

Also, I’m honored to be editing reprints for Lightspeed’s upcoming issue, Women Destroy Science Fiction. I can’t wait to put out some great fiction, and I hope the readers will enjoy it as much as I will.

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She has trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.

Author Spotlight: Sunny Moraine
Bradley Englert

What inspired such a dark retelling?

Honestly, I think a lot of it was general anger around sexism and misogyny in SF&F and how it was being talked about at the time the story was written. A number of things were happening in the community in terms of arguments for the need for different stories with different approaches, for the representation of people who had been invisible for too long, and of course there was the usual group of people who were unable to or refused to Get It. Watching that debate—though really I hesitate to call it a debate—was profoundly frustrating, and that frustration came out in the writing of the story. I wanted to twist things around and get a kind of creative revenge.

Losing your voice is a large theme of the story. What was your plan for making this clear theme of male dominance?

See above. One of the things that I think comes up a lot in discussions around representation in fiction—both in terms of characters and authors—is the idea that groups of people are rendered voiceless, that they simply aren’t heard and space is not made for them to speak when they do. Losing one’s voice feels like an especially vicious form of oppression, and fighting for the right to reclaim that voice is such a powerful form of resistance. One of the things that’s always bothered me about “The Little Mermaid” is that willingness to give up so much power, and I think it’s a theme that comes up again and again in fiction: the expectation that women will sacrifice agency for the love and approval of men. I wanted to try to subvert that trope in a really aggressive way.

There’s appropriately a lot of water and sea foam imagery throughout the story. For you, what was the importance of “sea foam,” and how important was establishing the underwater world, especially the witch’s layer?

The significance of that was mostly unconscious on my part, and it was only after that I noticed it at all. In the original fairy tale, that’s the fate of a mermaid when she dies—to turn into foam on the waves, to literally become almost nothing. Humans, meanwhile, have eternal souls and can achieve Paradise. That’s something else that I found very unfair at an early age, the idea that sentient creatures are worth nothing if they don’t adhere to a standard of humanity. The mermaid wants a soul in addition to her prince, which is part of why she makes a deal with the witch. Perhaps most anger-inducing for me is the fact that if the mermaid fails to get her prince to marry her, she’ll lose her chance at getting a soul anyway. Without the prince, she is nothing. She ceases to exist. So for me, the foam plays a similar role to the loss of a voice: a symbol of a fate that the mermaid is purposefully rejecting.

The world under the sea, rather, is what she embraces, not as a place where she has to be but a place in which she chooses to live. Even the witch’s home is a place into which she goes without fear, and it’s where she makes the choice that ultimately frees her. It’s where she decides that she owes nothing to anyone but herself.

What else do you have coming up?

I’m currently working on a number of cool projects! Most of them are longer works rather than short stories, though I also have some of those in the pipeline. I have a story in the anthology Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History that I’m very excited about; it looks like an amazing book and I’m so happy to be involved in it. I also have a story coming out in Apex sometime in 2014, which is actually another, more general take on fairy tale themes and the Monstrous Feminine. Otherwise, I’m working on the sequel to my QUILTBAG space opera Line and Orbit (the latter will be out in print this February), as well as the third book in my Casting the Bones trilogy. I also just completed another standalone novel set in the Line and Orbit universe, which I’m hoping will get a release sometime in late 2014/early 2015.

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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: Eugene Mirabelli
Jude Griffin

How did “Love in Another Language” come about?

I never know how these stories come about. I like language. I’ve often played with the idea of a language in which the sound of a word is directly connected to the object it refers to. Of course, that’s the exact opposite of basic linguistic theory. We humans speak an amazing variety of languages—some of them truly extraordinary compared to our own—but this wonderful plenitude is rapidly disappearing. I wondered what it would be like for one of the last speakers of an onomatopoeia-like language. I imagine that such a terribly lonely speaker would want to preserve it, pass it on, teach it to others. I guess those ideas and others were going around in my head when I began to write.

By the way, most of the exterior facts in the story are, indeed, actual facts and are not made up. That includes everything from Claude Shannon to the tsunami that devastates Shozo’s life.

What role does Shozo’s paranoia play in the story? We don’t see it enacted, but we do see Sally’s description of its unusual manifestation.

Shozo’s paranoia is a very special kind: He believes that people are secretly working behind his back to do him good. That’s just about the reverse of conventional paranoia, and it struck me as rather comic. Oddly enough, Sally, the psychiatric social worker who is using Shozo as her dissertation subject, is nurturing his unique paranoia by covertly following him and surreptitiously doing him a good deed, like leaving him lunch. So maybe Shozo isn’t really crazy, or at least not crazy the way Sally thinks he is. And speaking of crazy, what about Peter Drock who “knew Sally was overly emotional and was probably falling in love with him,” when, as a matter of fact, he’s about as wrong as you can get? And he’s sure he’ll become famous when he finishes his book about language, but he’s not making progress because he loathes writing. Still, I feel a certain sympathy for him. Yes, he’s obtuse and ridiculously vain and self-assured without reason, but life is always outwitting him and he’s always a few steps behind everyone else in figuring out what’s happening.

There is a lot of quiet humor in this story—did it ever threaten to take a larger role? The Shozo character is so rich with potential.

I’m grateful you found the quiet humor in the story. When I was writing it, I sometimes wondered if the comic elements would be noticed. Near the end, when Peter’s East Coast woman, Erica, unexpectedly arrives, the comedy becomes almost farcical. At the same time, the characters go far deeper into the nature of reality, language, and mathematics. I think a lightness of tone, a sense of humor, and a lyrical view all help to bring the tale to a good end. That’s my hope, anyway.

The ending was wonderful—so unexpected, it made me slow down and then reread the dinner scene with Shozo, Sally, Peter, and Erica. Was there ever another ending you played with?

I never had any alternative endings in mind. It seemed to me that the conclusion grew naturally out of what had preceded it. I said earlier that I like language, and that’s certainly true, but it’s also true that I like mathematics. Because I couldn’t make up my mind about what I liked best, I spent the first two years of college at MIT, where I played around with mathematics, and the last two at Harvard where I indulged in language and literature. Unfortunately, I wasn’t very good at either.

Any news or projects you want to tell us about?

I’m working on another book. I hope it’s a short one. At my age, it better be.

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She has trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.

Author Spotlight: Ken Liu
Kevin McNeil

“None Owns the Air” is set in the world of your novel, The Chrysanthemum and the Dandelion, which will be published in 2015. Can you elaborate on the origins of this story?

“None Owns the Air” takes place a few decades before the events of the novel. I wanted to tell the story of the beginning of Xana’s rise and how the winged airships came to be.

As I wrote the novel, many side stories and subplots had to be trimmed because they didn’t fit with the main arc. I thought it would be interesting to see if any of these could be developed into stand-alone short stories, and this was one such example.

As I read this story, I thought about how technology is often developed and used for violent purposes before consideration is given to how that same technology might benefit the world. Is this a theme you feel strongly about?

This is certainly a theme that recurs in the history of technology (as is the opposite situation: A technology is developed for peaceful purposes before its potential for war-making is realized).

I think this illustrates a larger point which comes up in my fiction from time to time: Technology, by itself, does not have a moral stance; it simply magnifies the power of humans to accomplish what they want to do. I’m generally skeptical about “progress” as a pure positive for that reason.

Your story ends with mixed emotions. Kino successfully achieves his goal, but he’s not sure whether or not this is a good thing. I was left questioning the fate of Kino and Lowi. Why did you choose to end the story at this point?

I don’t like stories that end very neatly with a problem “solved.” Most of the time, solutions just uncover or create new problems. By the end of this story, Kino has solved his main challenge and Xana has its new weapon, but Kino and Lowi are caught up in a game of politics in which they cannot wholly determine their own fates.

That’s a scenario that comes up often in history, but it doesn’t seem that many speculative works—especially fantasy—address it.

What’s the best writing advice you ever received and who gave it to you? What advice do you have for aspiring writers?

My friend and fellow writer Tobias Buckell wrote a blog post about distinguishing milestones (nice things that you’d like to happen to you: having a story accepted, getting a good review, selling a book) from goals (things that you can control: choosing to tell this story versus that one, shutting off Twitter, writing more words). Sometimes writers confuse milestones with goals, and end up neurotically chasing the wrong thing. If you haven’t read Toby’s post, I highly, highly recommend it. It really changed the way I think about writing.

Is there any piece from your body of work so far that you’re particularly proud of?

That would be “The Man Who Ended History: a Documentary,” a story about the meaning of history and our responsibility to it. Like a lot of my earlier work, it’s not as technically polished as some of my later stories. But I set out with the goal of writing a story that I wanted to read that wasn’t being told, and I think I accomplished that very well. It’s the most personally meaningful piece in all my short fiction.

Congratulations on selling three novels and a collection of short stories to Simon & Schuster’s new genre imprint. I imagine this will keep you busy for a while. What’s next for you?

Thank you! Right now, the top priority is to revise the first novel based on the editorial letter I got—there’s a lot to do in very little time. After that, I’ll need to write a new story for the collection, start on the second novel, and also meet some short fiction commitments. I feel very lucky to have gotten to this point in my career, and I’m learning a lot about what it takes to work on long-term writing projects with definite deadlines.

Kevin McNeil is a physical therapist, sports fanatic, and volunteer coach for the Special Olympics. He is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and The Center for the Study of Science Fiction’s Intensive Novel Workshop, led by Kij Johnson. Kevin is a New Englander currently living in California. Find him on Twitter @kevinmcneil.

Author Spotlight: Robin McKinley
Kevin McNeil

Can you tell us a little bit about your writing process and what inspired “Hellhound”?

“Process?”

::Looks around worriedly::

Computer, hellhounds [sic], hellterror [sic], mug of tea, pile of CDs (Joyce DiDonato is on the player at the moment: Yes, I still play actual CDs in an actual CD player), many piles of books, magazines, and newspapers, fewer but still somewhat out of control piles of sheet music not quite hiding the piano, sketchbooks, several jars of pens and pencils, notebooks (yes paper notebooks: mostly unlined so I don’t have to decide till I put a mark-making implement to one whether I’m drawing or writing), and a stack of my books I’m supposed to squiggle doodles in before I put them in mailing envelopes, several tote bags of yarn (bearing apt and useful slogans like “She has read too many books and it has turned her brain” and “I knit so I don’t kill people”) with knitting needles sticking out of them since I have a little problem with finishing projects, too many frelling catalogues (I’m writing this less than a fortnight before Christmas AND NO, I’M NOT READY), a vase of red roses because my husband is a kind, thoughtful man, and assorted snacks.

I don’t see anything remotely resembling a process. Do you have any idea what a writing process looks like? I could sure use one. It could still be in here somewhere, just buried. . . . Things do get buried . . . the bill for my new printer, the book I really, really wanted to finish/look something crucial up in, the hellterror’s current favourite toy . . . My hellterror is a mini English bull terrier: thirty pounds of boundless enthusiasm, perpetual motion, and creative mayhem.

My two hellhounds are lurchers—or longdogs, if you’re up on the lingo: whippet x deerhound. They look like slightly larger, sturdier whippets and they generated their nom de guerre when they were puppies: They are litter brothers, and I thought they’d keep each other company while I got on with my writing process. Well, they did keep each other company. They just generously wanted me to share in the joy.

I can’t tell you where my ideas come from or what my process is. Stories happen. You keep up with them or you don’t. You can keep up with them or you can’t: There are a few parcels (which arrive with air holes and snarling noises and a tendency to jump off tables) that the Story Council has sent to me by accident or mistake; I don’t know enough, or I don’t know the right things, or (having warily opened the parcel) my legs aren’t long enough to run that fast.

Flame—the hellhound in the story—isn’t much like my hellhounds. But by the simple expedient of living with two of them I’ve grown fond of the concept of hellhounds and I’m sure there are significant variations within the breed (ahem). And most of my human protagonists are outsiders of one sort or another; it doesn’t surprise me that the Story Council sent me Flame.

And Miri. I didn’t make Miri up—I don’t think storytellers do make things up: As I say, stories happen, and if you’re lucky, and you’re a storyteller, you’ll bump into a story that resonates with you in a way you can tell it—but she’s living one of the lives I might like to have had if I hadn’t had this one. I’ve always been horse-mad, and I’ve worked with horses in other people’s yards and stables and I know how hard it is making that life successful. I, who have never written sequels and am now embroiled in the second volume of a blasted trilogy—I am hoping to write at least another short story about Miri. I know most of what it’s about. Famous last words. The trilogy referred to started life as a short story . . .

What would you like an ideal reader to take away from this story?

Pleasure. And a desire to read more of my work!

You’ve won several awards, including the Newbery Medal, the World Fantasy Award, and the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature. Does your work tend to explore particular themes?

I don’t think in terms of themes; I think in terms of telling a story. (“Theme” is one of those words that misguided English lit teachers use to destroy perfectly good books for their students. I probably wouldn’t have liked A Tale of Two Cities anyway—mostly I love Dickens’ story-telling but I think his novels are better longer: In full Dickensian hurrah, he needs a lot of room to move around in—but Two Cities was hammered flat for me by clumsy classroom handling. I had some terrific English teachers too. But I don’t think they talked much about themes.) I know some of the things that are important to me that come out in my writing however: The two big ones are the ability of ordinary people to rise to extraordinary situations, and girls and women who do things and don’t assume that competence, decision-making, and adventures are for the guys. There are an awful lot of critters in my stories too. And a fair amount of food.

Is there anything else you’d like to share about “Hellhound”? What’s next for you?

There are still things hiding in the nature preserve behind the Greyhaven Stables. And Miri gets a boyfriend. And Leslie and Mal . . . well, I’ll have to write it down.

At the moment I’m trying to finish part one of Kes, which is the fiction serial I’ve been running on the blog for the last year and a half plus, and I need to get on with the second book of the trilogy I mentioned. There are only about six hundred and forty-seven other things clamouring for attention. I do wish I could write faster.

Kevin McNeil is a physical therapist, sports fanatic, and volunteer coach for the Special Olympics. He is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and The Center for the Study of Science Fiction’s Intensive Novel Workshop, led by Kij Johnson. Kevin is a New Englander currently living in California. Find him on Twitter @kevinmcneil.

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Coming up in March, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Sofia Samatar (“How to Get Back to the Forest”) and Chen Quifan (“The Mao Ghost,” translated by Ken Liu), along with an SF reprint by Jo Walton (“Turnover”) and a new story by Charlie Jane Anders ("Break! Break! Break!") that is simultaneously appearing here in Lightspeed and also in my new anthology The End is Nigh (co-edited with Hugh Howey), which goes on sale March 1.

Plus, we have original fantasy by Kat Howard (“A Different Fate”) and Matthew Hughes (“Phalloon the Illimitable,” a Kaslo Chronicles tale), and fantasy reprints by Robert Jackson Bennett (“A Drink for Teddy Ford”) and Eileen Gunn & Michael Swanwick (“The Armies of Elfland”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights. And for our nonfiction features next month, we’ll have an interview with science fiction legend Joe Haldeman, along with a panel discussion from The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy.

For our ebook readers, we also have our usual ebook-exclusive novella reprint 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: Sarah Pinsker, Seth Dickinson, Carmen Maria Machado, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Sandra McDonald, Shaenon K. Garrity, Fred Van Lente, Linda Nagata, Matthew Hughes, Steve Hockensmith, Adam-Troy Castro, and Theodora Goss.

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

Subscriptions: 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. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes 96 stories (about 480,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain! For more information, visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe.

Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently 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. Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

All caught up on Lightspeed? Good news! We also have lots of ebooks available from our sister-publications:

Nightmare Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions: Like Lightspeed, our sister-magazine Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles, and subscriptions available as well. 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. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month subscription to Nightmare includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), will cost you just $25 (about $11 off the cover price).

Fantasy Magazine Ebooks & Bundles: We also have 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!).

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 our esteemed editor produces 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. Enjoy!

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: Swordfighting in Fiction and Film
David Barr Kirtley, John Joseph Adams, Kat Howard

Dave: For our panel today we’ll be talking about swordfighting. We’re joined by a special Guest Geek, Kat Howard. Her short fiction has appeared in magazines such as Lightspeed, Apex, and Subterranean. She trains with the Twin Cities Fencing Club. Kat, welcome to the show.

Kat: Hey, it’s nice to be here.

Dave: Just to start out, I’d like to talk about your background with fencing. Could you just talk a little bit about how you got into it? What kind of stuff you do?

Kat: I fence the modern competitive foil. There’s three weapons in modern fencing and I only compete in one of them. My interest started when I was really little, 3 or 4 years old. I saw a cartoon of Zorro and I loved the swooshing sound that the blade made when he carved Zs into things. I expressed that love by drawing Zs all over my mother’s walls. She decided that maybe we could look for something a little bit more constructive to do with that. So, we looked for fencing lessons. I was a little bit too young at the time, and we moved around a lot, but I started training pretty seriously in high school and then competed in college. I was part of the University of Texas’ fencing club, and I’m currently with the Twin Cities Fencing Club as you mentioned.

Dave: I fenced in college although it was pretty low quality because, when I was a freshman, there was a guy who was a senior, and he was the one guy that was in the fencing club, and then he graduated. So, we were kind of running the fencing club after that and nobody knew anything—nobody actually knew how to fence. We had all the equipment but didn’t have any techniques or anything—

Kat: Oh, no.

Dave: So we basically just horsed around with the equipment and stuff. We weren’t at a very high level. All the new recruits who would join, I would ask them, "How did you get interested in fencing?" and they would say, "From watching The Princess Bride." Literally every single person.

Kat: Still, when I’m at the club, and we have nights that are open battle nights, you still hear people quoting lines of dialog from that movie to each other on the strip while they’re fencing. I think it’s a testament to how well the movie actually incorporated actual fencing and the training. I mean, Bonetti’s Defense really does exist.

Dave: What is Bonetti’s Defense?

Kat: There’s a guy, I want to say that the book was published in 1485 or something like that, but it’s this very, very old manual of swordfighting techniques and stuff like that. The names and things like they mention [in The Princess Bride] in that "Oh, I’m doing this. Assuming the rocky terrain, I would counter with that" [scene]; all of that is actually taken from the history of fencing.

Dave: I just think it’s really striking that, when I would always want to watch fencing when I was a kid, the Olympic games would come on and they would always show fencing in montages, but they would never actually show any actual fencing. I’ve been told that fencing is not a good spectator sport. I just think that’s interesting, that actual fencing is not considered to be a good spectator sport, but fencing-style fighting is such a fixture of movies.

Kat: Fencing, as a sport, recognizes that it’s not a good spectator sport and so they tried about two Olympics ago to start making it more spectator-friendly. Unfortunately, the thing they tried—"Let’s put Plexiglas into the masks so that you can see the fencers faces and see the expressions that they’re making"—was a really bad idea, because if you got hit in the face with a weapon, the Plexiglas popped right out. Then you were risking serious, serious injury to your athletes. They, thankfully, stopped doing that.

If you look at London, they tried to make it a little more TV friendly, too. You can see the big lights so that everyone knows when the touch is being scored, but I think the big thing is, if you think about the movie scenes, the fight scenes that you watched, those are so very slow compared to the pace of actual modern competitive fencing. You’re not going to see the blade contact back and forth, back and forth, that thing where it looks like you’re testing your opponent to see what they’re doing. For sport fencing, that’s a lot of wasted motion. There’s no need to do that.

Dave: Watching the swordfighting in movies, that they look like they’re trying to hit each other’s swords rather than hit each other’s bodies.

Kat: Absolutely. Part of that is the safety of the choreography, too. If you have a good fight choreographer you can get something that looks very dramatic without actually putting your actors at risk.

Dave: I just expect a real fight to look a lot uglier, and for people to just be stumbling around more, confused, and the timing to all be off and stuff because they’re actually trying to kill each other.

John: In preparation for this episode, we wanted to just sort of try to survey as many swordfighting clips as we could find, so I went on Twitter and I asked a bunch of people for recommendations. Of course, me and Dave and Kat all had our own recommendations, as well, but I wanted to crowdsource it and see what other people came up with. So I just put all these things together in a spreadsheet and I got my intern to help me find those clips on YouTube and we just hunted down as many swordfighting clips as we could find. We put together a playlist, which you can find under my account on YouTube. It’s four hours of clips from various movies just ranging from The Princess Bride to Star Wars to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to Thundercats and all kinds of stuff.

Dave: What was the distribution of the suggestions? Were there a couple that everybody mentioned or was it evenly distributed?

John: There were definitely several that everybody mentioned. When I asked the question, I almost said, "No need to mention The Princess Bride," but everyone still felt the need to mention it. It was kind of getting annoying. I was like, "Duh, of course." But, a bunch of people mentioned Star Wars, various Star Wars lightsaber duels, but there were a lot that were just from one person. I think only one person mentioned Scaramouche. There were a lot of singular mentions here and there and some puzzling suggestions, actually, too, but we don’t have to talk about those.

Dave: Let’s get into the realism then. Kat, what did you think were some of the more realistic clips?

Kat: I think, before I actually get into that, you have to consider: Is it going to look like a real fight, where you actually have an edged weapon and the purpose of holding that weapon in your hand is to kill the person standing opposite you, or: Is this going to be recognizable to somebody who actually fences today? I’m not talking about historical recreation, the people who practice with broadswords and rapiers and things like that, but if you take somebody who competes and says, "OK, does this look like what you do?" Is it realistic in that fashion is a different question.

I can’t speak as much to the first because I’ve never actually picked up my sword with the intention of trying to kill someone, tempted as I might have been. But the question is when I’m looking at somebody, are they in lines of attack that I recognize? Are they doing motions that I can recognize? Does that look like something that I would see at practice? Is this a drill that my coach would run me through?

I am actually going to go back to The Princess Bride because in that opening sequence, I can actually see they’re en garde in a low 7. And the tick-tock drill that they do at the beginning, this is something that I have done and practiced, and while they’re actors—they’re not fencers—they don’t look like they’re goofing it up.

Dave: In terms of sport fencing did any of these movies exceed The Princess Bride?

Kat: I don’t think so.

Dave: OK.

Kat: The fight choreographer that they used for that, Bob Anderson, unfortunately he passed away about this time last year. But he was a former Olympic fencer.

John: Did he do the fight choreography on tons of different movies that we would also know? So, if we loved The Princess Bride fight scenes, should we check those out, too, or is that really the only thing that he did?

Dave: Didn’t he also do Star Wars and Lord of the Rings?

Kat: Yes, Star Wars, and actually, the scenes in The Empire Strikes Back with Darth Vader fighting Luke Skywalker, he is actually playing Darth Vader at that point.

John: Really?

Kat: Yes, because they couldn’t put Mark Hamill in a fencing mask, and it is fairly complicated fencing choreography that they’re doing. They needed someone who would be good enough that they could trust him not to hurt their actor.

John: That’s interesting, actually, because when I rewatched the Luke vs. Vader duel in Empire, when I analyzed it to see if they look like they’re actually trying to kill each other, it didn’t look to me like they were. For instance, if you compare the original trilogy’s lightsaber duels to the scene in The Phantom Menace (which is the only redeeming feature of the movie)—Qui-Gon and Obi Wan vs. Darth Maul, that’s an amazing sequence and honestly, if you’re talking about the best fight sequences or best swordfighting scenes you have to talk about that because it’s amazing. I don’t know how realistic it is or whatever, but it’s a really good duel. Almost every strike that Qui-Gon makes looks like he’s trying to kill Darth Maul.

In regards to Star Wars, too, in those scenes, especially in Empire, I’m inclined to give it a little slack regarding the realism in terms of them trying to kill each other because, at that point, Luke doesn’t really have that much training on how to be a Jedi at all, and so he’s just lucky he’s not cutting his own feet off with the lightsaber. Also, you might wonder why Vader isn’t doing better in the fight, but he’s toying with Luke, and he knows that he’s his son, and he doesn’t want to kill him. So I think there are a lot of complicated reasons why that fight scene might not look as polished as we would expect a Darth Vader fight scene to look.

Dave: It’s probably some of that and some of just not being able to see anything in that Darth Vader mask.

Kat: Another scene that Bob Anderson did is he did the choreography for the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. I love that opening battle between Jack Sparrow and Will Turner. They’re in the smithy and they’ve got the poor donkey involved and everything. None of that stuff would I ever, ever try and do, but I love that scene because it fits the characters, they are behaving with a sword in hand like they would behave as characters. Jack is still ridiculous.

Dave: I do think that, for a lot of movies, how cool it looks is a lot more important than how realistic it is.

Kat: Absolutely.

Dave: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, that’s got one of my favorite swordfights, but they’re just spinning around and all sorts of stuff that I can’t believe you would actually want to do. But man that looks really cool.

Kat: In some of the wire-fu movies—The House of Flying Daggers and Crouching Tiger—you could see how they used those non-realistic techniques to really enhance the scene and the drama, like using your sleeves and flying through the air and all that sort of thing; it was beautiful.

John: All three of the wire-fu movies that I have on my list—Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The House of Flying Daggers, and Hero—are all just really, really beautiful movies with stunning cinematography, but to me, when I’m watching those scenes, it really does look like they’re trying to kill each other with their maneuvers.

Dave: But a lot of this stuff, I forget which movie it was, but there was a scene where a guy jumps up, and he’s hanging from his legs upside-down fighting it’s just like—

John: Yeah, that’s a little silly.

Kat: I kind of wish that I could do that, though.

John: Before we get too far afield from The Princess Bride, I just wanted to say that one of the things that I’ve always loved about the Cliffs of Insanity fight sequence—and also at the end in the one with Count Rugen—is the way that they incorporate the music into the scene. The music is amazing, but then they also incorporate the clangs of the swords as they’re fighting into the music and that’s just brilliant. It really adds this whole extra layer to the scene in a way that no other movie has managed to do.

Dave: If you watch the commentary, William Goldman says that when he wrote the Cliffs of Insanity scene, he wrote in the script, "This is going to be the second best swordfight ever filmed." And when he wrote the Count Rugen scene he wrote "This is going to be the best swordfight ever filmed," and it sounds like the general consensus is that that is exactly what they accomplished.

John: I would actually say the other way around. I prefer the Cliffs of Insanity fight over the Count Rugen fight, but both are amazing.

Dave: I would say we watched about four and a half hours of these clips, but out of all that only one of them looked like a real fight to me, and that was the fight in Rob Roy.

Kat: Yes. It was interesting because you have two different weapons and two different fighting styles happening there, which was really interesting to watch.

John: I really liked how Liam Neeson kind of looks like a giant compared to Tim Roth. It was really nice to see this sort of slender, effeminate, princely-type of guy who looked like he’d be afraid to get his hands dirty, but he’s kicking this giant’s ass and it’s all just skill. They’re trying for skill over might and it was really nice to see. Ultimately Liam Neeson wins, but he’s the hero of the movie so you would expect him to.

Kat: That point that you just made about the triumph of—or at least the temporary triumph of—skill over might is one of the things that I find really attractive about using fencing in fiction. You don’t have to be super strong. This is not one of those things where if you aren’t an enormous giant you can’t use this weapon. It’s a weapon that rewards training and that rewards being smart so that you can actually have a teeny, tiny person just sort of wailing on somebody larger if they’ve trained enough.

Dave: One thing, though, is that these movies make it seem like if you’re really, really good you could kill 50 people, no sweat. There actually was a clip where that happens.

John/Kat: Yeah!

Dave: Whereas, Kat: Realistically, if you have the best fencer ever versus average fencers, how many could they take on at once? No more than just a handful I would think.

Kat: That’s actually hard for me to think about because it’s not the way we train now; we don’t train for melee-type fighting. It depends. If there’s a chaotic situation where you’re fighting in battle, could you take down a lot of people? Sure.

If it’s you and one sword versus ten other guys: If you’re really good maybe three or four?

John: When you see these fight scenes in movies where there’s one guy against a ton of enemies, those are awesome to watch. But of course you have to be aware that this is fantasyland stuff for sure. I don’t know if you guys watched that Three Musketeers clip from the 2011 version. It’s actually a really entertaining fight sequence, but it’s—oh my god—so completely implausible in every shot.

Dave: Then there was that one samurai movie where the guy has set up 50 swords just stuck in different crevices and things and he’s just running around and every time one of his swords gets jammed in somebody’s bone there’s another one at hand to just keep fighting with them.

Kat: Well, you know, if you have 50 swords just lying around you want to use them.

[Laughing]

John: Actually, though, speaking of fight scenes where there is one person against a ton of others, that just makes me think of Kill Bill. The Bride verses the Crazy 88s—that’s an amazing sequence (though it might actually be outdone by the one right after it, the Bride verses O-ren Ishii). The Crazy 88 scene is just so insane. Obviously it’s ridiculous and it’s completely over the top, but what’s not to love about one woman in a tracksuit fighting a million dudes with swords? That’s amazing.

That’s the scene that the censors complained about, right? And that’s why part of it is in black and white?

Dave: What really struck me, going back and rewatching it, was how slapstick and cartoony it is.

How can you complain about violence when it’s that silly?

John: I know. It’s ridiculous, but as I was saying, as much as I love that scene, I think the fight with O-Ren Ishii after that is actually even better because it’s just masterful filmmaking. Regardless of the fight scene, that is masterful direction right there. The snow and the music and the sound—there’s this weird little wooden thing just sort of funneling water and making noise over in the corner of the shot, and when it gets quiet it’s just this sort of eerie noise. It’s just breathtaking.

Dave: Kat, did any of these clips stick with you for any reason?

Kat: The thing that I thought was really interesting was, in the Errol Flinn / Basil Rathbone era . . . my god if you didn’t have a staircase in your fight scene you would have been flogged.

[Laughing]

Kat: But some of it, I would just laugh. There’s all this throwing your sword and it sticks in the wall, vibrating back and forth, and I was like, really? In what universe does this happen?

Dave: You mentioned the staircases and stuff. The swordplay by itself isn’t interesting enough to sustain the scene for more than two minutes or something, so then you’ve got to be knocking over a lamp and candelabras, and swinging from curtains.

Kat: That movie Scaramouche? Swinging from the stage and . . . wow.

John: Actually, when I was watching that scene I was thinking, this scene is actually kind of a good argument for gun control. Look at how much goddamn work it is to kill that guy. That scene went on forever. It was like 10 minutes long. With a gun it would have been over in 2 seconds. But with a sword you have to be seriously committed to try to kill a guy.

Dave: There was that anime clip with that guy with the sword that goes up against the girl with the two guns and she somehow was unable to kill him.

[Laughing]

John: Yeah, I know, that one was pretty silly.

Dave: There were a bunch of scenes where they give their opponent a chance. There’s a whole honor thing going on with swordfighting where if somebody is disarmed or they drop their sword or something and the person is like, "No, pick it up again."

Kat: That actually is still very much part of the culture, even in the competitive sport. The action stops if someone is disarmed. If you curse during a fencing bout you can lose a touch. At least if you curse in a language that the line judge actually speaks. You shake hands both before and after each bout. You salute the judge, you salute the audience.

Dave: I think that’s interesting speaking of rules, because whenever you see Gladiator type movies the rules are always like, everyone is trying to kill everyone and the last person left standing is the only survivor. There was this really good lecture I listened to called "Myths and Realities of the Roman Gladiator" by Garrett Fagan. You can find it online. It sounds like virtually all gladiatorial combat had tons of rules. There was a referee who would stop the fight. It was almost always one on one and there were very strict rules about which weapons and different styles the gladiators could use, and what moves they were allowed to do in response to other moves and stuff like that. It’s not at all like what you see in the movies.

John: Actually, speaking of gladiators, I didn’t think to get any clips from it for the playlist, but the TV show Spartacus has a lot of good swordfighting scenes. I don’t know how accurate they are but they sure are fun to watch. It would be a spoiler to explain it in detail, but the end of the first season has this amazing scene that just . . . I’ve never seen anything like it, and it’s one of the most violent hours of television I’ve ever seen for sure. Although I will warn you that you have to suffer through maybe three episodes of it being pretty bad and then it starts to get good both story-wise and action-wise.

Dave: Kat, you mentioned that Zorro really got you into swordfighting in the first place. What did you think of the Zorro fight from the movie that we watched?

Kat: Again, Bob Anderson’s choreography. I like that. Banderas is actually a pretty decent fencer for an actor. Zeta Jones isn’t that bad either. But I would really like to correct Catherine Zeta Jones’ hand position every time I watch that movie.

This is a scene that really shows something about them as characters, it makes us like them, it starts to show that chemistry there. Again, I think it was John who mentioned something earlier about "This is why we show a scene with a sword instead of a scene with a gun." You can actually do things; if you want to have a fight scene with swords in hand you can. If you’re just shooting everyone, if you’re punching people in the face, I think it can really be a stylistic choice for somebody who wants to work with these things.

Dave: I don’t remember the movie that well so I was watching that scene completely out of context and it was making me a little uncomfortable that he’s cutting her clothes off and kissing her apparently against her will and stuff like that.

Kat: Yeah, there’s that bit. It’s the whole film thing of these two are supposed to wind up together so as we watch we’re like, "Yeah, everything is going to be fine." What it’s supposed to be doing is showing that he’s got this great technique and control with his blade where he can make the cut that goes that close and doesn’t actually break the skin and hey, sexy Catherine, awesome, but then there’s the whole problem that yeah, you really shouldn’t cut a lady’s clothing off of her body. That’s not good form.

John: So you end up with this really good swordfight and it ends, and they start kissing. And Zorro sticks his tongue entirely down her throat, and I was just like, "Dude, Zorro, back up, man. Take it easy. Ladies don’t like that."

[Laughing]

Kat: I think I watched a different clip. I don’t remember that.

John: No, he kisses her and it’s just like, "Oh my god, dude, leave her tonsils alone."

[Laughing]

Dave: We’re all in agreement, The Princess Bride: best swordfight ever. What would be your next top five, say, out of the ones we watched.

John: I would go with Kill Bill, either the Crazy 88s fight or the Bride versus O-Ren Ishii. Also The Phantom Menace: Darth Maul vs Qui Gon and Obi Wan. Those are just amazing.

Kat: I would probably follow The Princess Bride with the Jack Sparrow and Will Turner scene from The Pirates of the Caribbean movie and then Crouching Tiger. And then there was a scene from Hero: The red leaves scene, where the two women are fencing and then everything, all the leaves, turn from gold to red and I just kind of sat and stared at my computer like, "Wow, that was wonderful!"

Dave: Yeah, I would definitely go with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Rob Roy. I also actually really liked the Vampire Chateaux fight in Matrix Reloaded. I’ve watched that many times. I’m a little torn on that Darth Maul scene. It’s cool, but whenever you have somebody jumping over somebody else’s sword I just . . . I don’t know.

John: Yeah, I know what you’re saying and I’m sure Kat could nitpick a lot of the technical stuff, but dude, it’s got a double-bladed lightsaber in it. Whoa. Although I have to say that that’s the most amazing technology design, that you can cut that thing in half and it still works.

Kat: Yes.

Dave: What do we think, just generally, of the idea of swords in futuristic science fiction movies? I just think that’s a really interesting phenomenon. I think that just goes back to John Carter for me.

John: Well, yeah, because there’s the whole sword and planet subgenre which John Carter is certainly part of, but there was a lot of stuff that dealt with that. Not necessarily laser swords like in Star Wars, but just swords on other planets.

Dave: Watching that Phantom Menace clip where the big doors open and Darth Maul is standing there and the two Jedi are like, "We’ll handle this," I’m like, "Dude, you’ve got 25 guys with guns there. Just shoot him."

[Laughing]

Dave: He can’t block them all.

Kat: I think that’s because of the whole idea of the Jedi, which is this very ancient order and again, these ideas of honor and behavior get wrapped up in what kind of weaponry you use and what kind of fight you have.

Regarding swords in futuristic movies and futuristic sci-fi and things like that, I look at my gear and I’m wired up and I’m electric. I plug in when I fight, except I’m fighting with a sword which is this really old thing and so you get this sort of blend of history and futuristic technology in the same weapon, which if you like telling stories, and you like symbolism, this is a great thing.

Dave: I think there’s just this romance to the sword that makes it irresistible. They’ll bend every rule of the universe to have it make sense for somebody to use a sword, you know? I actually really think it’s really good in Dune, too, where they have these force fields where the force field’s effectiveness is inversely proportional to the velocity of the incoming projectile. So, something going as fast as a bullet it blocks, but something going as slow as a sword it doesn’t. That’s just a genius way of justifying swords and stuff.

John: I really like the idea of using old technology like that in futuristic stuff. Or even just imagine an alternate history where gunpowder or guns have never been invented, or people just decided that they are too barbaric; I kind of like the idea of taking say, something gritty and realistic, like The Wire, and take out all the guns and replace them with swords.

Dave: Well, one of my favorite series is Roger Zelazny’s Amber series, and in that there are worlds where the laws of physics are such that gunpowder doesn’t work and so that’s another way of saying, "Oh, we’ve got to have some swords somehow."

John: Actually, one thing that I wanted to ask, Kat: In the Lord of the Rings clip where it’s Eowyn vs. the Nazgul, and also in Kill Bill, there’s a swordsman who’s fighting somebody who has a giant flail. So, how big of a disadvantage or is there any disadvantage to a swordsman to be fighting somebody who has a weapon like that?

Kat: If I’m standing there with an actual edged weapon, not my fencing foil or something like that, and somebody is coming at me with a flail, my fighting technique is to turn around and run as fast as I can because I can’t even begin to think of what you would do. All you could do was hope to get your blade up and hope the chain wrapped around your blade, and then neither of you have a weapon, but in terms of that much extra reach and velocity, I can’t get under someone’s guard that fast. It’s great on film; it’s absolutely beautiful. In terms of would this actually work in real combat? The poor person with a sword would be dead. Just dead.

Dave: I think that raises the question: Why swords? Why are we talking about swordfights rather than flail fights? There were some staffs in a lot of these clips, but it’s almost all swords. It seems like the sword is the only weapon that you can attack and defend with in an aesthetically pleasing sort of way.

Kat: I think that what you just said—the aesthetics of it—is a huge reason why it gets brought into film again and again. It’s an easy thing to see and it’s an easy thing to put distance between your actors. You can see faces. You can extend the scene and so there’s good reasons to use it.

John: So I think that what we’re basically saying is that it’s just wide open for somebody to make The Way of the Flail.

[Laughing]

Dave: All of the flail clubs in America will go see that.

Kat: Absolutely.

Dave: An untapped market.

John: It’s a goldmine.

Dave: Any other clips that you guys want to mention before I move on?

John: Did you want to talk about Game of Thrones for a little bit with Syrio Forel? He’s pretty badass.

Kat: I actually really liked the clips that you sent. They were the first ones that I’ve seen. I haven’t seen the show on television. I know, I’m bad, but I loved, especially, the first scene with Arya—the training when he first meets her? Because even though it wasn’t the kind of technique that I’m used to seeing, it felt very realistic. He’s telling her you have to think differently. You have to hold this like this and put your preconceptions aside and change the way you think to be able to do this well. I thought that was very well done.

John: And then in the second clip he kicks the asses of three armed knights with a wooden sword.

Kat: Yes.

John: That’s pretty great.

Kat: Those were great to watch.

Dave: That’s straight out of the book. Those scenes are really faithful to the book and are all the better for it. I also really liked the fight between Bronn and Ser Vardis Egan. George R.R. Martin writes really awesome fight scenes. When you’re writing, it’s hard to write action scenes in fiction because you can’t see what’s going on, and I think George R.R. Martin does it so well by focusing on the emotion and what it shows about the characters and not getting too much into "the person was standing in this stance and did this move," but just showing the key things that set the tempo of the fight and that change the situation.

Kat: Absolutely.

John: I agree about Martin for sure. That’s one of the things that used to bug me about The Wheel of Time series when I was reading it. I didn’t get very far in it, but whenever Jordan described the action, he would describe these maneuvers that they did, and I couldn’t picture that. I don’t know what that is. It was like, it has a cool name, but that doesn’t mean anything to me, and so it’s like I’m supposed to imagine what it is but it didn’t really help me.

Dave: Yeah, the author is like, and then he used Bonetti’s defense.

John: Exactly.

Kat: Even as somebody who does this and who absolutely loves this sport, I don’t want to read a scene where it’s like, well, they both came en garde and Parry 6, counter-Riposte 8, parry, parry, touch. Great, thanks, I would love to watch that, but I don’t want to read it; it’s not interesting to read and I think that your point about Martin focusing on the emotions and the character development, that’s a great way to actually write a fight scene.

Dave: Kat, you mentioned that, in addition to fencing, there’s also people that are trying to recreate older styles of swordfighting like that you would do with a longsword or a two-handed sword or something like that.

In a previous episode I had mentioned this documentary called Reclaiming the Blade and so, since I mentioned that, we got a letter from one of our longtime listeners, Gavin McMenamie, who is one of the moderators of the largest English-speaking fencing community online, fencing.net, and the main moderator at fencing forum.com. He says he’s a fencer of 20 years experience who has represented his country and here’s what he had to say about Reclaiming the Blade:

“I was a bit disappointed to hear you guys mention Reclaiming the Blade. That’s not a good documentary let alone one which can be relied on to make any kind of assertion about the modern forms. To put it all into perspective, modern fencing is the last true western tradition of swordplay. All the weapons have a recognizable history with traditions and rules passed down from generation to generation. All other forms, with the exception of one or two others such as schlager fencing are extinct and have been extinct for a long time. What this means is that there is no one alive who can claim to be from a specific tradition or mode of sword use. It’s all been made up based on wood cuts and very old treatises from which people infer truth but do not have the cultural underpinnings to appreciate. This means there’s a lot of B.S. out there. In particular, this idea that there are old techniques that would defeat any modern fencer is complete nonsense. If you want to read an interesting history of fencing check out Richard Cohen’s By the Sword.”

Kat: Yes. Or at least, I agree with him very strongly on the last part. Richard Cohen’s By the Sword is a terrific book.

Dave: Do you agree with him on all the other stuff, too?

Kat: I don’t disagree, but I think that based on his letter I might be more willing to give people credit for what they can get out of those old manuals and old diagrams. It’s part of history and so anything that gets people excited about that and asks them to look back and to try and recreate these things, even if it’s not completely accurate, then great, you know? It gets people excited about something new. It gets them thinking about different things, so I’m all for that. Do I think that somebody in a historical reenactment club could defeat a modern Olympian? Absolutely not.

Dave: I don’t know if you guys had a chance to watch Reclaiming the Blade, but there’s a part where one of these recreationist guys describes fighting an Olympic style fencer, and he says he’d just grab the guy’s sword and stab him in the head or something. And the guy’s like, "You can’t do that." And he’s like, "Oh? I just did it." That’s actually what happens at the end of Rob Roy. He just grabs his sword.

I think there is something to be said for tripping and punching and throwing sand in someone’s eyes. All those things that you wouldn’t actually study as part of the sport, but that you could actually do in a real fight.

I don’t know if you guys got a chance to watch this Gladiatoria clip I posted. In this clip, it’s sort of showing techniques for fighting in plate armor. They hold the sword with one hand on the grip and then one hand on the blade so you’re holding it almost like a spear or something. In the first clip, he actually has the blade, the point of the weapon, pointed away from his opponent and then when the guy tries to stab him, he brings the point down and cuts the back of the guys knee out with it.

John: I thought that was really interesting, actually, because I wondered, at first, if he was holding the sword in both hands like that because they were just doing instruction or if they were going to fight like that. It does make sense if you’re wearing plate armor and you have a gauntlet on your hand that you could grab the blade and it’s not going to matter. It was just really interesting and I agree, I’d never seen anything like that or really ever heard anybody talking about that kind of thing.

Kat: Again, I think that’s where through history and research we can go back and can recreate these old styles, and figure out how they actually did these things. How much did the armor weigh? How did it fit on the body? And how could you actually move when you were wearing that? The more we learn about that, the more likely it is that people can borrow those techniques in film and literature because all of a sudden you’re saying, "Oh, hey! This does actually work on screen! It looks great!" and people will pay attention to it because it’s something new and different that they haven’t seen before.

Dave: Did you guys get a chance to watch the clips I posted from lindybeige? He has a series of videos. I don’t know who the guy is, but he seems to know a lot about swords. The first video I watched is called "A Point About Swords"; you can just Google or search for it on YouTube. He says that he has a whole bunch of swords and he draws them all and they make almost no noise when you draw them. He’s like, "Notice that it doesn’t make a Paachiing sound."

[Laughing]

Dave: And he just goes through this really funny rant about how that makes no sense that a sword would go Paachiing when you pull it out of the scabbard. He also has a thing about how it’s basically impossible, if you have a sword on a scabbard over your shoulder, to pull it out. And people say that you have to reach across your body to pull a sword from a hip scabbard, but actually you can do it either way. He says that people say that pommels are supposed to be really heavy to act as a counterbalance, and he just talks about how that doesn’t make any sense at all. He goes through all of these physics reasons why that would just be bad.

John: I can’t remember which clip it was in, but there was a clip that actually showed somebody fighting with two weapons and that was actually something that I was wondering about too, as far as the reality vs. the fiction. It seems like a really cool thing to be able to fight with two swords, and yet we don’t see it very often in movies.

Kat: This is totally a guess, but I guess that it becomes a choreography issue. Like: OK, so if I’ve got a longer weapon, rapier-style, and then a short sword or a dagger, the reason that I’ve got that other one is that they want you to be able to do more close-up work. So when you’ve got the guys and they’re holding their swords, and their faces are right next to each other, and they’re sort of snarling at each other or something like that—you want something that looks like that, except now there’s a risk because now you have two sharp pointy things pointing at your actors’ very expensive faces and maybe that’s not the best idea.

John: Actually, Dave, you might remember this from the Ultima games, but that was the first time I think I had actually encountered two-weapon fighting. They had a weapon called a main gauche. I’m not really sure what that is. Is it sort of like a small sword or—

Dave: It’s like a dagger with a really long hilt so you would be able to block with it.

John: So it’s a defensive weapon, and I thought that was really interesting, and I’ve never really seen anyone fight with something like that.

Dave: Or in movies, even just a shield. There was that clip from The 13th Warrior. I think that was the only clip in four-and-a-half hours where someone used a shield.

[Laughing]

John: Actually, Eowyn has one when she fights with the Nazgul, which he also destroys with a flail right away.

Dave: Is that just wimpy to have a shield? Most soldiers, I think that you had a sword in one hand and a shield in the other. I think that was the standard way to fight.

Kat: I don’t remember historically when it became less common. The clips that we saw, a lot of them were like, this is a duel that two noble people are having that happened over dinner or something, and so you’re not in full battle armor, and you’re not carrying your shield around. But you always have your sword because that’s the sort of social class that you come from and so it’s always with you and so you can defend your honor. You can jump up on the dinner table and kick the guy who’s insulted your king, your wife, or whatever.

Dave: What did you guys think of Neal Stephenson’s Clang video game project? Neal Stephenson, who we interviewed last year, says that he’d really like a swordfighting game where you’re actually holding something that you swing around, not just pressing buttons to attack. He’s also very interested in recreating these medieval fighting techniques. He and a bunch of other authors have been getting together and writing stories utilizing some of these old fighting techniques and practicing them and stuff like that and so he did a successful Kickstarter to fund a prototype for this project. So it’s now in development and it looks really cool to me.

John: I think it looks amazing, and they had me at "Guitar Hero with swords." It’s like, "What? Yes? Give me two!"

I did actually kind of wonder, though, as I was watching the video, if it was going to end up more like Guitar Hero with swords or more like Rocksmith with swords. Guitar Hero is a game where you have a fake guitar controller and it has like five buttons on the fret bar and then it has a little strummer, so it’s not very realistic in terms of playing a guitar. But Rocksmith is a game that’s like Guitar Hero except that you actually plug a real guitar into your Xbox and then it teaches you how to play guitar while playing the game; you’re learning how to play in a game environment. I wondered would Clang be more like Guitar Hero or more like Rocksmith? I mean, obviously you’re going to be playing a game, but would learning how to play the game actually transfer over better to learning swordfighting techniques or would it all be just nonsense like Guitar Hero is for playing actual guitar?

Kat: I don’t know, but the thing that I really liked was that it looks like they’re trying to build in different options so that you have weapon choices and fighting style choices. What you normally get, you press a bunch of buttons and it’s nothing like actually wielding a sword. Watching the demonstrations that they had, they’ve got sensors on people, and sensors on the actual weapons to sort of recreate what would this look like and how would this hit and everything else and just all the geeky little parts in my brain are just like, "Yes, yes! This is wonderful. Do more."

John: Yeah, I have to say that the game looks kind of intimidating to learn, but in an awesome way. I’m just watching it like, "Oh my god this looks awesome, but will I ever be able to learn how to play it?"

Dave: That’s what’s so frustrating about swordfighting is that it’s actually hard. I think you grow up reading fantasy novels you’re like, "I’ve read so many fantasy novels I’d just be awesome with a sword." Then you’re like, "Oh, wait, it actually takes like 10 years to learn how to use this. That sucks."

Kat: I will just say, though, that it’s the kind of sport where you can pick it up at any age and I’d encourage this very much. It’s a lot of fun. It makes you think in interesting ways. It’s not easy to get good. But it’s not like gymnastics where if you don’t start when you’re 3 then forget it. If you think you could do it, I’ll help you find a club.

Dave: Say someone is listening to this and they’re like, "Oh, I’d like to learn how to fence,” but they have no idea what to do. What do they do?

Kat: Go to the US Fencing website which is usfencing.org. They actually keep a list of all clubs that are registered with USFA, the United States Fencing Association, and they’ll let you know where you can go in your area. Go check it out. See if you get along with the coaches, see if you get along with the other people at the club. But you can start anywhere. I remember when I was competing in Texas there was a guy in his 70s who was still showing up for tournaments and doing well.

Dave: I guess we should start wrapping this up. Kat, do you have any stories or anything coming out that people should go check out?

Kat: I have a story in one of John’s upcoming anthologies, Oz Reimagined, which is coming out February 26th. I will also have a flash fiction piece in the February issue of Apex.

Dave: What’s your Oz story about?

Kat: It’s called "A Tornado of Dorothys" and it’s about what happens when you decide maybe you don’t want to go home again.

Dave: And people can find you on Twitter @Katwithsword?

Kat: Yes, they can.

Dave: So I think we’ll wrap things up there. Kat, thanks for joining us.

Kat: Thank you. This was so much fun.