FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial, March 2014
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue forty-six of Lightspeed!

As you know from our newsletter, editorials, and (incessant?) social media posting, we ran a very successful Kickstarter in January-February to fund the publication of our Women Destroy Science Fiction! special issue, which will be guest-edited by Lightspeed’s own Christie Yant. We asked for $5000, and we got $53,136 in return, which was 1062% of our funding goal. Wow! As a result of all that sweet success, we announced—and met—some rather excellent stretch goals: Once we surpassed $25K of funding, that unlocked a Women Destroy Horror! special issue of our sister-magazine, Nightmare (guest edited by Ellen Datlow!), and once we passed $35K, that unlocked a Women Destroy Fantasy! special issue of our other sister-mag, Fantasy (guest-edited by Cat Rambo!). Look for the Women Destroy Science Fiction! special issue this June, and then you can expect the Women Destroy Horror! and Women Destroy Fantasy! issues in October.

• • •

Awards season is officially upon us, with the first of the major awards announcing their lists of finalists for last year’s work. Neither Lightspeed nor Nightmare got any love from the Bram Stoker Awards (alas), but we’re delighted to announce that the Nebula Awards, on the other hand, seem to be absolutely infatuated with us: Lightspeed has four Nebula finalists this year! (That brings Lightspeed’s lifetime Nebula nomination total to eleven since we launched in June 2010.) Our nominees for this year are: “Paranormal Romance” by Christopher Barzak, “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King” by Ken Liu, “The Sounds of Old Earth” by Matthew Kressel, and “Alive, Alive Oh” by Sylvia Spruck Wrigley. For a complete list of the finalists, visit SFWA.org.

• • •

In other news, my new anthology—The End is Nigh—is on sale now. It’s the first volume of what I’m calling The Apocalypse Triptych—a series of three anthologies looking at three different modes of apocalyptic fiction: before the apocalypse, during the apocalypse, and after the apocalypse. I’m editing—and publishing—all three volumes of the Triptych in collaboration with bestselling author Hugh Howey. All of the books will be available in both ebook and print formats, and The End is Nigh is available now. Visit johnjosephadams.com/apocalypse-triptych or your favorite book retailer for more information. Meanwhile, you’ll find a sneak peek of The End is Nigh right here in this very issue: Charlie Jane Anders’s story “Break! Break! Break!” Enjoy!

• • •

And in a case of maybe saving the best for last and/or burying the lede: I’m delighted to announce that I have agreed to serve as the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, a new entry in the prestigious Best American series® published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Our inaugural guest editor will be bestselling author and all-around swell guy Joe Hill. The first volume will be published in October 2015, collecting the best of 2014. To learn more about the series, including information about how you can recommend stories for consideration, visit johnjosephadams.com/best-american.

• • •

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

We have original science fiction by Sofia Samatar (“How to Get Back to the Forest”) and Chen Qiufan (“The Mao Ghost,” translated by Ken Liu), along with an SF reprint by Jo Walton (“Turnover”) and the aforementioned story by Charlie Jane Anders ("Break! Break! Break!").

Plus, we have original fantasy by Kat Howard (“A Different Fate”) and Matthew Hughes (“Phalloon the Illimitable”), 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, along with a pair of feature interviews.

For our ebook readers, we also have the novella reprint “The Lucky Strike” by Kim Stanley Robinson and novel excerpts from Sand by Hugh Howey and The Milkman by Michael J. Martineck.

Our issue this month is sponsored by our friends at EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing. This month, look for The Milkman by Michael J. Martineck (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, and Wastelands 2. The first volume of The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, is now available, and volumes two (The End is Now) and three (The End Has Come) are coming soon. 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

Break! Break! Break!
Charlie Jane Anders

Earliest I remember, Daddy threw me off the roof of our split-level house. “Boy’s gotta learn to fall sometime,” he told my mom just before he slung my pants-seat and let go. As I dropped, Dad called out instructions, but they tangled in my ears. I was four or five. My brother caught me one-handed, gave me a spank, and dropped me on the lawn. Then up to the roof for another go round, with my body more slack this time.

From my dad, I learned there were just two kinds of bodies: falling, and falling on fire.

My dad was a stuntman with a left-field resemblance to an actor named Jared Gilmore who’d been in some TV show before I was born, and he’d gotten it in his head Jared was going to be the next big action movie star. My father wanted to be Jared’s personal stunt double and “prosthetic acting device,” but Jared never responded to the letters, emails, and websites, and Dad got a smidge persistent, which led to some restraining orders and blacklisting. Now he was stuck in the boonies doing stunts for TV movies about people who survive accidents. My mama did data entry to cover the rest of the rent. My dad was determined that my brother Holman and I would know the difference between a real and a fake punch, and how to roll with either kind.

My life was pretty boring until I went to school. School was so great! Slippery just-waxed hallways, dodgeball, sandboxplosions, bullies with big elbows, food fights. Food fights! If I could have gone to school for twenty hours a day, I would have signed up. No, twenty-three! I only ever really needed one hour of sleep per day. I didn’t know who I was and why I was here until I went to school. And did I mention authority figures? School had authority figures! It was so great!

I love authority figures. I never get tired of pulling when they push, or pushing when they pull. In school, grown-ups were always telling me to write on the board, and then I’d fall down or drop the eraser down my pants by mistake, or misunderstand and knock over a pile of giant molecules. Erasers are comedy gold! I was kind of a hyper kid. They tried giving me ritalin ritalin ritalin ritalin riiiitaliiiiin, but I was one of the kids who only gets more hyper-hyper on that stuff. Falling, in the seconds between up and down—you know what’s going on. People say something is as easy as falling off a log, but really it’s easy to fall off anything. Really, try it. Falling rules!

Bullies learned there was no point in trying to fuck me up, because I would fuck myself up faster than they could keep up with. They tried to trip me up in the hallways, and it was just an excuse for a massive set piece involving mops, stray book bags, audio/video carts, and skateboards. Limbs flailing, up and down trading places, ten fingers of mayhem. Crude stuff. I barely had a sense of composition. Every night until 3 a.m., I sucked up another stack of Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, or Jackie Chan movies on the ancient laptop my parents didn’t know I had, hiding under my quilt. Safety Last!

Ricky Artesian took me as a personal challenge. A huge guy with a beachball jaw—he put a kid in the hospital for a month in fifth grade for saying anybody who didn’t ace this one chemistry quiz had to be a moron. Sometime after that, Ricky stepped to me with a Sharpie in the locker room and slashed at my arms and ribcage, marking the bones he wanted to break. Then he walked away, leaving the whole school whispering, “Ricky Sharpied Rock Manning!”

I hid when I didn’t have class, and when school ended, I ran home three miles to avoid the bus. I figured Ricky would try to get me in an enclosed space where I couldn’t duck and weave, so I stayed wide open. If I needed the toilet, I swung into the stall through a ventilator shaft and got out the same way, so nobody saw me enter or leave. The whole time in the airshaft, my heart cascaded. This went on for months, and my whole life became not letting Ricky Artesian mangle me.

One day I got careless and went out to the playground with the other kids during recess, because some teacher was looking. I tried to watch for trouble, but a giant hand swooped down from the swing set and hauled me up. I dangled a moment, then the hand let me fall to the sand. I fell on my back and started to get up, but Ricky told me not to move. For some reason, I did what he said, even though I saw twenty-seven easy ways out of that jungle-gym cage, and then Ricky stood over me. He told me again to hold still, then brought one boot down hard on the long bone of my upper arm, a clean snap—my reward for staying put. “Finally got that kid to quit hopping,” I heard him say as he walked across the playground. Once my arm healed up, I became a crazy frog again, and Ricky didn’t bother me.

Apart from that one stretch, my social life at school was ideal. People cheered for me but never tried to talk to me—it was the best of human interaction without any of the pitfalls. Ostracism, adulation: flipsides! They freed me to orchestrate gang wars and alien invasions in my head, whenever I didn’t have so many eyes on me. Years passed, and my mom tried to get me into dance classes, while my dad struggled to get me to take falling down seriously, the way my big brother did. Holman was spending every waking moment prepping for the Army, which was his own more socially acceptable way of rebelling against Dad.

• • •

Sally Hamster threw a brick at my head. I’d barely noticed the new girl in my class, except she was tall for a seventh grader and had big Popeye arms. I felt the brick coming before I heard it, then people shouting. Maybe Sally just wanted to get suspended, maybe she was reaching out. The brick grazed my head, but I was already moving with it, forward into a knot of basketball players, spinning and sliding. Afterward I had a lump on my head but I swore I’d thrown the brick at myself. By then the principal would have believed almost anything of me.

I didn’t get the reference to those weird Krazy Kat comics about the brick-throwing mouse until years later, but Sally and I became best friends thanks to a shared love of hilarious pain. We sketched lunch-trolley incidents and car pile-ups in our heads, talking them out during recess, trading text messages in class, instant messaging at home. The two of us snuck out to the Winn-Dixie parking lot and Sally drilled me for hours on that Jackie Chan move where the shopping trolley rolls at him and he swings inside it through the flap, then jumps out the top.

I didn’t know martial arts, but I practiced not being run over by a shopping cart over and over. We went to the big mall off I-40 and got ourselves banned from the sporting goods store and the Walmart, trying to stage the best accidents. Sally shouted instructions: “Duck! Jump! Now do that thing where your top half goes left and your bottom half goes right!” She’d throw dry goods, or roll barrels at me, and then shout, “Wait, wait, wait, go!” Sally got it in her head I should be able to do the splits, so she bent my legs as far apart as they would go and then sat on my crotch until I screamed, every day for a couple months.

The Hamster family had social aspirations, all about Sally going to Harvard and not hanging out with boys with dyslexic arms and legs. I went over to their house a few times, and it was full of Buddhas and Virgin Marys, and Mrs. Hamster baked us rugelachs and made punch, all the while telling me it must be So Interesting to be the class clown but how Sally needed to laser-beam in on her studies. My own parents weren’t too thrilled about all my school trouble, and why couldn’t I be more like Holman, training like crazy for his military future?

• • •

High school freshman year, and Sally got hold of a video cam. One of her jag-tooth techno-hippie uncles. I got used to her being one-eyed, filming all the time, and editing on the fly with her mom’s hyperbook. Our first movie went online at Yourstuff a month after she got the camera. It was five minutes long, and it was called The Thighcycle Beef, which was a joke on some Italian movie Sally had seen. She had a Thighcycle, one of those bikes which goes nowhere with a lying odometer. She figured we could light it on fire and then shove it off a cliff with me riding it, which sounded good to me.

I never flashed on the whole plot of The Thighcycle Beef, but there were ninja dogs and exploding donuts and things. Like most of our early short films, it was a mixture of live-action and Zap!mation. Sally figured her mom would never miss the Thighcycle, which had sat in the darkest basement corner for a year or so.

We did one big sequence of me pedaling on the Thighcycle with Sally throwing rocks at me, which she would turn into throwing stars in post-production. I had to pedal and duck, pedal while hanging off the back wheel, pedal side-saddle, pedal with my hands while hanging off the handlebars, etc. I climbed a tree in the Hamsters’ front yard and Sally hoisted the Thighcycle so I could pull it up there with me. Then I climbed on and “rode” the Thighcycle down from the treetop, pedaling frantically the whole way down as if I could make it fly. (She was going to make it fly in post.) The Thighcycle didn’t pedal so good after that, but Sally convinced me I was only sprained because I could scrunch all my fingers and toes, and I didn’t lose consciousness for that long.

We were going to film the climax at a sea cliff a few miles away, but Sally’s ride fell through. In the end, she settled for launching me off the tool shed with the Thighcycle on fire. She provided a big pile of leaves for me to fall onto when I fell off the cycle, since I already had all those sprains. I missed the leaf pile, but the flaming Thighcycle didn’t, and things went somewhat amiss, although we were able to salvage some of the tool shed thanks to Sally having the garden hose ready. She was amazingly safety-minded.

After that, Sally’s parents wanted twice as hard for her not to see me. I had to lie and tell my parents I’d sprained my whole body beating up a bunch of people who deserved it. My brother had to carry stuff for me while I was on crutches, which took away from his training time. He kept running ahead of me with my junk, lecturing me about his conspiracy theories about the Pan-Asiatic Ecumen, and how they were flooding the United States with drugs to destabilize our country and steal our water, and I couldn’t get out of earshot.

But all of my sprains were worth it, because The Thighcycle Beef blew up the Internet. The finished product was half animation, with weird messages like “NUMCHUK SPITTING TIME!” flashing on the screen in-between shots, but the wacky stunts definitely helped. She even turned the tool shed into a cliff, although she also used the footage of the tool shed fire elsewhere. People two or three times our age downloaded it to their phones and watched it at work. Sally showed me the emails, tweets, and Yangars—we were famous!

• • •

I found out you can have compound sprains just like fractures, and you have to eat a lot of ice cream and watch television while you recuperate. My mom let me monopolize the living room sofa, knitted blanket over my legs and Formica tray in my lap as I watched cartoons.

My mom wanted to watch the news—the water crisis and the debt crisis were freaking her shit. I wanted to catch the Sammo Hung marathon, but she kept changing to CNN, people tearing shopping malls apart with their bare hands in Florida, office windows shattering in Baltimore, buses on fire. And shots of emaciated people in the formerly nice part of Brooklyn, laying in heaps with tubes in their arms, to leave a vein permanently open for the next hit.

Did I mention ice cream? I got three flavors, or five if you count Neapolitan as three separate flavors, like all right-thinking people everywhere.

I went back to school after a week off, and the Thighcycle had a posse. Ricky—arm-cracking Ricky Artesian—came up to me and said our movie rocked his freaking head. He also said something about people like me having our value, which I didn’t pay much attention to at the time. I saw one older kid in the hallway with a Flaming Thighcycle T-shirt, which I never saw any royalties for.

Sally snuck out to meet me at the Starbucks near school and we toasted with frosty mochas. Her round face looked sunburned, and her hair was a shade less mouse than usual.

“That was just the dry run,” she said. “Next time, we’re going to make a statement. Maybe we can go out to the landfill and get a hundred busted TVs and drop them on you.”

I vetoed the rain of TVs. I wanted to do a roller disco movie because I’d just watched Xanadu.

We posted on Yangar.com looking for roller-disco extras, and a hundred kids and a few creepy grown-ups hit us back. We had to be super selective, and mostly only took people who had their own skates. But Sally still wanted to have old televisions in there because of her Artistic Vision, so she got hold of a dozen fucked old screens and laid them out for us to skate over while they all showed the same footage of Richard Simmons. We had to jump over beach balls and duck under old power cords and stuff. I envisioned it being the saga of skate-fighters who were trying to bring the last remaining copy of the U.S. Constitution to the federal government in exile, which was hiding out in a bunker under a Chikken Hut. We filmed a lot of it at an actual Chikken Hut that had closed down near the Oceanview Mall. I wanted it to be a love story, but we didn’t have a female lead, and also Sally never wanted to do love stories. I showed her Harold Lloyd movies, but it made no difference.

Sally got hooked on Yangar fame. She had a thousand Yangar friends, crazy testimonials, and imitators from Pakistan, and it all went to her head. We had to do what the people on the Internet wanted us to do, even when they couldn’t agree. They wanted more explosions, more costumes, and cute Zap!mation icons, funny catchphrases. At fifteen, Sally breathed market research. I wanted pathos and chaos!

• • •

Ricky and some other kids found the school metal detectors missed anything plastic, ceramic, wood, or bone, and soon they had weapons strapped all over. Ricky was one of the first to wear the red bandana around his neck, and everyone knew he was on his way. He shattered Mr. MacLennan’s jaw, my geography teacher, right in front of our whole grade in the hallway. Slow-time, a careful spectacle, to the point where Ricky let the onlookers arrange ourselves from shortest in front to tallest in back. Mr. MacLennan lying there looking up at Ricky, trying to assert, while we all shouted, “Break! Break! Break! Break!” and finally Ricky lifted a baseball bat, and I heard a loud crack. Mr. MacLennan couldn’t say anything about it afterward, even if he could have talked, because of that red bandana.

Sally listened to the police scanner, sometimes even in the classroom, because she wanted to be there right after a looting or a credit riot. Not that these things happened too often in Alvington, our little coastal resort city. But one time, Sally got wind that a Target near downtown had gone crazy. The manager had announced layoffs and the staff just started trashing the place, and the customers joined in. Sally came to my math class and told Mr. Pope I’d been called to the principal’s, and then told me to grab my bag of filming crap and get on my bike. What if we got there and the looters were still going? I asked. But Sally said looting was not a time-consuming process, and the crucial thing was to get there between the looting and everything being chained up. So we got there and sneaked past the few cops buddying in the parking lot, so Sally could get a few minutes of me falling under trashed sporting goods and jumping over clothing racks. She’d gotten so good at filming with one hand and throwing with the other! Really nobody ever realized she was the coordinated one of the two of us. Then the cops chased us away.

My brother got his draft notice and couldn’t imagine such luck. He’d sweated getting into the Army for years, and now they weren’t even waiting for him to sign up. I knew my own draft notice was probably just a year or two down the line, maybe even sooner. They kept lowering the age.

My mom’s talk shows were full of people saying we had to stop the flow of drugs into our country, even if we had to defoliate half the planet. If we could just stop the drugs, then we could fix our other problems, easy. The problem was, the Pan-Asiatic Ecumen or whoever was planting these drugs were too clever for us, and they had gotten hold of genetically-engineered strains that could grow anywhere and had 900 times the potency of regular junk. We tried using drones to burn down all their fields, but they just relocated their “gardens” to heavily populated areas, and soon it was block-by-block urban warfare in a dozen slums all around Eurasia. Soldiers were fitted with cheap mass-produced HUDs that made the whole thing look like a first-person shooter from 40 years ago. Some people said the Pan-Asiatic Ecumen didn’t actually exist, but then how else did you explain the state we were in?

• • •

Sally fell in love with a robot guy named Raine, and suddenly he had to be big in every movie. She found him painted silver on Main Street, his arms and legs moving all blocky and jerky, and she thought he had the extra touch we needed. In our movies, he played Castle the Pacifist Fighting Droid, but in real life he clutched Sally’s heart in his cold, unbreakable metal fist. He tried to nice up to me, but I saw through him. He was just using Sally for the Yangar fame. I’d never been in love, because I was waiting for the silent-movie love: big eyes and violins, chattering without sound, pure. Nobody had loved right since 1926.

Ricky Artesian came up to me in the cafeteria early on in eleventh grade. He’d gotten so he could loom over and around everybody. I was eating with Sally, Raine, and a few other film geeks, and Ricky told me to come with him. My first thought was, whatever truce we’d made over my arm-bone was over and gone, and I was going to be fragments of me. But Ricky just wanted to talk in the boy’s room. Everyone else cleared out, so it was just the two of us and the wet TP clinging to the tiles. The air was sour.

“Your movies, they’re cool,” he said. I started to explain they were also Sally’s, but he hand-slashed. “My people.” He gestured at the red bandana. “We’re going to take it all down. They’ve lied to us, you know. It’s all fucked, and we’re taking it down.”

I nodded, not so much in agreement, but because I’d heard it before.

“We want you to make some movies for us. Explaining what we’re about.”

I told him I’d have to ask Sally, and he whatevered, and didn’t want to listen to how she was the brains, even though anyone looking at both of us could tell she was the brains. Ricky said if I helped him, he’d help me. We were both almost draft-age, and I would be a morning snack to the military exoskeletons. I’d seen No Time For Sergeants—seventeen times—so I figured I knew all about basic training, but Ricky said I’d be toast. Holman had been telling me the same thing, when he wasn’t trying to beat me up. So Ricky offered to get me disqualified from the Army, or get me under some protection during training.

When I told Sally about Ricky’s offer, the first thing she did was ask Raine what he thought. Raine wasn’t a robot that day, which caught me off-guard. He was just a sandy-haired, flag-eared, skinny guy, a year or so older than us. We sat in a seaside gazebo/pagoda where Sally thought she could film some explosions. Raine said propaganda was bad, but also could Ricky get him out of the Army as well as me? I wasn’t sure. Sally didn’t want me to die, but artistic integrity, you know.

The propaganda versus artistic integrity thing I wasn’t sure about. How was making a movie for Ricky worse than pandering to our fans on Yourstuff and Yangar? And look, my dad fed and housed Holman and me by arranging tragic accidents for cable TV movies where people nursed each other back to health and fell in love. Was my dad a propagandist because he fed people sponge cake when the whole world was flying apart?

Sally said fine, shut up, we’ll do it if you just stop lecturing us. I asked Ricky and he said yes, neither Raine nor I would have to die if we made him a movie.

This was the first time we ever shot more footage than we used. I hadn’t understood how that could happen. You set things up, boom! you knocked them over and hoped the camera was running, and then you moved on somewhere else. Life was short, so if you got something on film, you used it! But for the red bandana movie we shot literally hundreds of hours of footage to make one short film. Okay, not literally hundreds of hours. But a few.

Raine didn’t want to be the Man, or the Old Order, or the Failure of Democracy, and I said tough shit. Somebody had to, plus he was older and a robot. He and Sally shot a ton of stuff where they humanized his character and explained how he thought he was doing the right thing, but we didn’t use any of it in the final version.

Meanwhile, I wore the red bandana and breakdanced under a rain of buzz saws that were really some field hockey sticks we’d borrowed. I also wanted to humanize my character by showing how he only donned the red bandana to impress a beautiful florist, played by Mary from my English class.

After a few weeks’ filming, we started to wonder if maybe we should have had a script. “We never needed one before,” Sally grumbled. She was pissed about doing this movie, and I was pissed that she kept humanizing her boyfriend behind my back. You don’t humanize a robot! That’s why he’s a robot instead of a human!

Holman came back from basic training, and couldn’t wait to show us the scar behind his left ear where they’d given him a socket that his HUD would plug into. It looked like the knot of a rotten tree, crusted with dried gunk and with a pulsating wetness at its core. It wasn’t as though they would be able to remote-control you or anything, Holman said—more like, sometimes in a complicated mixed-target urban environment, you might hesitate to engage for a few crucial split seconds and the people monitoring the situation remotely might need to guide your decision-making. So to speak.

Holman seemed happy for the first time ever, almost stoned, as he talked us through all the crazy changes he’d gone through in A.N.V.I.L. training and how he’d learned to breathe mud and spit bullets. Holman was bursting with rumors about all the next-generation weapons that were coming down the pike, like sonic bursts and smart bullets.

Ricky kept asking to see the rushes of our movie, and Raine got his draft notice, and we didn’t know how the movie was supposed to end. I’d never seen any real propaganda before. I wanted it to end with Raine crushing me under his shiny boot, but Sally said it should end with me shooting out of a cannon (which we’d make in Zap!mation) into the Man’s stronghold (which was the crumbling Chikken Hut) and then everything would blow up. Raine wanted the movie to end with his character and mine joining forces against the real enemy, the Pan-Asiatic drug lords, but Sally and I both vetoed that.

In the end, we filmed like ten different endings and then mashed them all up. Then we added several Zap!mation-only characters, and lots of messages on the screen like, “TONGUE-SAURUS!” and “OUTRAGEOUS BUSTAGE!” My favorite set piece involved me trying to make an ice cream sundae on top of a funeral hearse going one hundred mph, while Sally threw rocks at me. (I forget what we turned the rocks into, after.) There was some plot reason I had to make a sundae on top of a hearse, but we borrowed an actual hearse from this guy Raine knew who worked at a funeral home, and it actually drove one hundred mph on the cliff-side road, with Sally and Raine driving alongside in Raine’s old Prius. I was scooping ice cream with one hand and squirting fudge with the other, and then Sally beaned me in the leg and I nearly fell off the sea cliff, but at the last minute I caught one of the hearse’s rails and pulled myself back up, still clutching the full ice cream scoop in the other hand. With ice cream, all things are possible.

The final movie clocked in at twelve minutes, way, way longer than any of our previous efforts. It was like an attention-span final exam. We showed it to Ricky in Tanner High’s computer room, on a bombed-out old Mac. I kept stabbing his arm, pointing out good parts like the whole projectile rabies bit and the razor-flower-arranging duel that Raine and I get into toward the end.

Ricky seemed to hope that if he spun in his chair and then looked back at the screen, this would be a different movie. Sometimes he would close his eyes, bounce, and reopen them, then frown because it was still the same crappy movie.

By the time the credits rolled, Ricky seemed to have decided something. He stood up and smiled, and thanked us for our great support for the movement, and started for the door before we could even show him the “blooper reel” at the end. I asked him about our draft survival deal, and he acted as if he had no clue what we were talking about. Sally, Raine, and I had voluntarily made this movie because of our fervent support of the red bandana and all it stood for. We could post the movie online, or not, it was up to us, but it had nothing to do with Ricky either way. It was weird seeing Ricky act so weaselly and calculating, like he’d become a politician all of a sudden. The only time I saw a hint of the old Ricky was when he said he’d use our spines as weed-whackers if we gave any hint that he’d told us to make that movie.

The blooper reel fizzed on the screen, unnoticed, while Raine, Sally, and I stared at each other. “So this means I have to die after all?” Raine said in his robotic stating-the-obvious voice. Sally didn’t want to post our movie on the Internet, even after all the work we’d put into it, because of the red-bandana thing. People would think we’d joined the movement. Raine thought we should post it online, and maybe Ricky would still help us. I didn’t want to waste all that work—couldn’t we use Zap!mation to turn the bandana into, say, a big snake? Or a dog collar? But Sally said you can’t separate a work of art from the intentions behind it. I’d never had any artistic intentions in my life, and didn’t want to start having them now, especially not retroactively. First we didn’t use all our footage, and then there was talk of scripts, and now we had intentions. Even if Raine hadn’t been scheduled to go die soon, it was pretty obvious we were done.

I tried telling Raine that he might be okay, the Pan-Asiatic Ecumen could surrender any time now and they might call off the draft. Or—and here was an idea that I thought had a lot of promise—Raine could work the whole “robot” thing and pretend the draft didn’t apply to him because he wasn’t a person, but Sally told me to shut the fuck up. Sally kept jumping up and down, cursing the air and hitting things, and she threatened to kick the shit out of Ricky. Raine just sat there slump-headed, saying it wasn’t the end of the world, maybe. We could take Raine’s ancient Prius, load it up, and run for Canada, except what would we do there?

We were getting the occasional email from Holman, but then we realized it had been a month since the last one. And then two months. We started wondering if he’d been declared A.U.T.U.—and in that case, if we would ever officially find out what had happened to him.

• • •

A few days before Raine was supposed to report for death school, there was going to be a huge anti-war protest in Raleigh, and so we drove all the way there with crunchy bars and big bottles of grape sprocket juice, so we’d be sugared up for peace. We heard all the voices and drums before we saw the crowd, then there was a spicy smell and we saw people of twenty different genders and religions waving signs and pumping the air and chanting old-school style about what we wanted and when we wanted it. A platoon of bored cops in riot gear stood off to the side. We found parking a couple blocks away from the crowd, then tried to find a cranny to slip into with our signs. We were looking around at all the other objectors, not smiling but cheering, and then I spotted Ricky a dozen yards away in the middle of a lesbian posse. And a few feet away from him, another big neckless angry guy. I started seeing them everywhere, dotted throughout the crowd. They weren’t wearing the bandanas; they were blending in until they got some kind of signal.

I grabbed Sally’s arm. “Hey, we have to get out of here.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? We just got here!”

I pulled at her. It was hard to hear each other with all the bullhorns and loudspeakers, and the chanting. “Come on! Grab Raine, this is about to go crazy. I’ll make a distraction.”

“It’s always about you making a distraction! Can’t you just stop for a minute? Why don’t you just grow the fuck up? I’m so sick of your bullshit. They’re going to kill Raine, and you don’t even care!” I’d never seen Sally’s eyes so small, her face so red.

“Sally, look over there, it’s Ricky. What’s he doing here?”

“What are you talking about?”

I tried to pull both of them at once, but the ground had gotten soddy from so many protestor boots, and I slipped and fell into the dirt. Sally screamed at me to stop clowning around for once, and then one of the ISO punks stepped on my leg by mistake, then landed on top of me, and the crowd was jostling the punk as well as me, so we couldn’t untangle ourselves. Someone else stepped on my hand.

I rolled away from the punk and sprang upright just as the first gunshot sounded. I couldn’t tell who was firing, or at what, but it sounded nearby. Everyone in the crowd shouted without slogans this time and I went down again with boots in my face. I saw a leg that looked like Sally’s and I tried to grab for her. More shots, and police bullhorns calling for us to surrender. Forget getting out of there, we had to stay down even if they trampled us. I kept seeing Sally’s feet but I couldn’t reach her. Then a silver shoe almost stepped on my face. I stared at the bright laces a second, then grabbed at Raine’s silvery ankle, but he wouldn’t go down because the crowd held him up. I got upright and came face-to-shiny-face with Raine. “Listen to me,” I screamed over another rash of gunfire. “We have to get Sally, and then we have to—”

Raine’s head exploded. Silver turned red, and my mouth was suddenly full of something warm and dark-tasting, and then several people fleeing in opposite directions crashed into me and I swallowed. I swallowed and doubled over as the crowd smashed into me, and I forced myself not to vomit because I needed to be able to breathe. Then the crowd pushed me down again and my last thought before I blacked out was that with this many extras, all we really needed would be a crane and a few dozen skateboards and we could have had a really cool set piece.

© 2014 by Charlie Jane Anders.

Originally published in The End is Nigh,

edited by John Joseph Adams & Hugh Howey.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Charlie Jane Anders’ story “Six Months Three Days” won a Hugo Award and was shortlisted for the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Awards. Her writing has appeared in Mother Jones, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Tor.com, Tin House, ZYZZYVA, The McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes, and elsewhere. She’s the managing editor of io9.com and runs the long-running Writers With Drinks reading series in San Francisco. More info at charliejane.net.

How to Get Back to the Forest
Sofia Samatar

“You have to puke it up,” said Cee. “You have to get down there and puke it up. I mean down past where you can feel it, you know?”

She gestured earnestly at her chest. She had this old-fashioned cotton nightgown on, lace collar brilliant under the bathroom lights. Above the collar, her skin looked gray. Cee had bones like a bird. She was so beautiful. She was completely beautiful and fucked. I mean everybody at camp was sort of a mess, we were even supposed to be that way, at a difficult stage, but Cee took it to another level. Herding us into the bathroom at night and asking us to puke. “It’s right here,” she said, tapping the nightgown over her hollow chest. “Where you’ve got less nerves in your esophagus. It’s like wired into the side, into the muscle. You have to puke really hard to get it.”

“Did you ever get it out?” asked Max. She was sitting on one of the sinks. She’d believe anything.

Cee nodded, solemn as a counselor. “Two years ago. They caught me and gave me a new one. But it was beautiful while it was gone. I’m telling you it was the best.”

“Like how?” I said.

Cee stretched out her arms. “Like bliss. Like everything. Everything all at once. You’re raw, just a big raw nerve.”

“That doesn’t sound so great,” said Elle.

“I know,” said Cee, not annoyed but really agreeing, turning things around. That was one of her talents.

“It sounds stupid,” she nodded, “but that’s because it’s something we can’t imagine. We don’t have the tools. Our bodies don’t know how to calculate what we’re missing. You can’t know till you get there. And at the same time, it’s where you came from. It’s where you started.”

She raised her toothbrush. “So. Who’s with me?”

• • •

Definitely not me. God, Cee. You were such an idiot.

• • •

Apparently, a girl named Puss had told her about the bug. And Cee, being Cee, was totally open to learning new things from a person who called herself Puss. Puss had puked out her own bug and was living on the streets. I guess she’d run away from camp, I don’t really know. She was six feet tall, Cee said, with long red hair. The hair was dyed, which was weird, because if you’re living on the streets, do you care about stuff like that? This kind of thing can keep me awake at night. I lie in bed, or rather I sit in the living room because Pete hates me tossing and turning, and I leave the room dark and open all the curtains, and I watch the lights of the city and think about this girl Puss getting red hair dye at the grocery store and doing her hair in the bathroom at the train station. Did she put newspapers down? And what if somebody came in and saw her?

Anyway, eventually Cee met Puss in the park, and Puss was clearly down-and-out and a hooker, but she looked cool and friendly, and Cee sat down beside her on the swings.

• • •

“You have to puke it up.”

• • •

We’d only been at camp for about six weeks. It seemed like a long time, long enough to know everybody. Everything felt stretched out at camp, the days and the nights, and yet in the end it was over so fast, as soon as you could blink. Camp was on its own calendar—a special time of life. That was Jodi’s phrase. She was our favorite counselor. She was greasy and enthusiastic, with a skinny little ponytail, only a year or two older than the seniors. Camp is so special! The thing with Jodi was, she believed every word she said. It made it really hard to make fun of her. That night, the night in the bathroom, she was asleep down the hall underneath her Mother Figure, which was a little stuffed dog with Florida on its chest.

• • •

“Come on!” said Cee. And she stuck her toothbrush down her throat, just like that. I think Max screamed. Cee didn’t start puking right away. She had to give herself a few really good shoves with that toothbrush, while people said “Oh my God” and backed away and clutched one another and stared. Somebody said “Are you nuts?” Somebody else said something else, I might have said something, I don’t know, everything was so white and bright in that moment, mirrors and fluorescent lights and Cee in that goddamn Victorian nightgown jabbing away with her toothbrush and sort of gagging. Every time I looked up I could see all of us in the mirror. And then it came. A splatter of puke all over the sink. Cee leaned over and braced herself. Blam. Elle said, “Oh my God, that is disgusting.” Cee gasped. She was just getting started.

• • •

Elle was next. All of a sudden she spun around with her hands over her mouth and let go in the sink right next to Cee. Splat. I started laughing, but I already felt sort of dizzy and sick myself, and also scared, because I didn’t want to throw up. Cee looked up from her own sink and nodded at Elle, encouraging her. She looked completely bizarre, her wide cheekbones, her big crown of natural hair, sort of a retro supermodel with a glistening mouth, her eyes full of excitement. I think she even said “Good job, Elle!”

Then she went to it with the toothbrush again. “We have to stop her!” said Katie, taking charge. “Max, go get Jodi!” But Max didn’t make it. She jumped down from the third sink, but when she got halfway to the door she turned around and ran back to the sink and puked. Meanwhile Katie was dragging Cee away from the sink and trying to get the toothbrush, but also not wanting to touch it, and she kept going “Ew ew ew” and “Help me, you guys,” and it was all so hilarious I sank down on the floor, absolutely crying with laughter. Five or six other girls, too. We just sort of looked at each other and screamed. It was mayhem. Katie dragged Cee into one of the stalls, I don’t know why. Then Katie started groaning and let go of Cee and staggered into the stall beside her, and sploosh, there she went.

• • •

Bugs.

It’s such a camp rumor. Camp is full of stories like that. People say the ice cream makes you sterile, the bathrooms are full of hidden cameras, there’s fanged, flesh-eating kids in the lake, if you break into the office you can call your parents. Lots of kids break into the office. It’s the most common camp offense. I never tried it, because I’m not stupid—of course you can’t call your parents. How would you even get their number? And bugs—the idea of a bug planted under your skin, to track you or feed you drugs—that’s another dumb story.

Except it’s not, because I saw one.

The smell in the bathroom was terrible now—an animal smell, hot; it thrashed around and it had fur.

I knew I was going to be sick. I crawled to the closest place—the stall where Cee knelt—and grabbed hold of the toilet seat. Cee moved aside for me. Would you believe she was still hanging onto her toothbrush? I think we both threw up a couple of times. Then she made this awful sound, beyond anything, her whole body taut and straining, and something flew into the toilet with a splash.

I looked at her and there was blood all over her chin. I said, “Jesus, Cee.” I thought she was dying. She sat there coughing and shaking, her eyes full of tears and triumph. She was on top of the world. “Look!” she breathed. And I looked, and there in the bowl, half-hidden by puke and blood, lay an object made of metal.

It actually looked like a bug. Sharp blood-smeared legs.

“Shit!” I said. I flushed the toilet.

“Now you,” said Cee, wiping her mouth on the back of her wrist.

“I can’t.”

“Tisha. Come on.”

Cee, I couldn’t, I really couldn’t. I could be sick—in fact I felt sicker than ever—but I couldn’t do it that hard. I remember the look in your eyes; you were so disappointed. You leaned and spat some blood into the toilet.

I whispered: “Don’t tell anyone. Not even the other girls.”

“Why not? We should all—”

“No. Just trust me.”

I was already scared, so scared. I couldn’t bear the idea of camp without you.

• • •

We barely slept that night. We had to take showers and clean the bathroom. Max cried the whole time, but for at least part of the night, I was laughing. Me and Katie flinging disinfectant powder everywhere. Katie was cool, always in sweatpants, didn’t give a shit about anything.

“You know your friend is a headcase, right?” she said.

It was the first time anybody’d called Cee my friend. We got out the mop and lathered up the floor. Everyone slipped and swore at us, coming out of the showers. Cee went skidding by in a towel. “Whee!” she shrieked.

• • •

You cannot feel your bug. I’ve pressed so hard on my chest. I know.

“I could feel it,” said Cee. “After they put it back in.” It wasn’t exactly a physical thing. She couldn’t trace the shape of the bug inside her, but she could feel it working.

“Bug juice,” she said, making a sour face. She could feel bug juice seeping into her body. Every time she was going to be angry or afraid, there’d be this warmth in her chest, a feeling of calm spreading deep inside.

“I only noticed it after I’d had the bug out for a couple of weeks.”

“How did your parents know you needed a new one?”

“I didn’t need one.”

“How did they know it was gone?”

“Well, I kind of had this fit. I got mad at them and started throwing food.”

We were sitting on my bed, under my Mother Figure, a lamp with a blue shade. The blue light brought out the stains on Cee’s Victorian nightgown. We were both painting our toenails Cherry Pink, balancing the polish on my Life Skills textbook, taking turns with the brush.

“You should do it,” Cee said. “I feel better. I’m so much better.”

I thought how in a minute we’d have to study for our Life Skills quiz. I didn’t think there was bug juice in my body. I couldn’t feel anything.

“I’m so much better,” Cee said again. Her hand was shaking.

• • •

Oh, Cee.

• • •

The weird thing is, I started writing this after Max came to visit me, and I thought I was going to write about Max. But then I started writing in your book. Why? This book you left me, your Mother Figure. You practically threw it at me: “Take it!” It was the worst thing you could do, to take somebody else’s Parent Figure, especially the mom. Or maybe it was only us girls who cared so much about the moms. Maybe for the boys it was the dads. But anyway, taking one was the worst; you could basically expect the other kids to kill you. A kid got put in the hospital that way at a different camp—the one on the east side—but we all knew about it at our camp. They strung him up with electric wires. Whenever we told the story we ended by saying what we would have done to that kid, and it was always much worse.

But you threw this book at me, Cee, and what could I do? Jodi and Duncan were trying to grab your arms, and the ambulance was waiting for you downstairs. I caught the book clumsily, crumpling it. I looked at it later, and it was about half full of your writing. I think they’re poems.

dank smells underground want to get back

no pill for it

i need you

I don’t know, are they poems? If they are, I don’t think they’re very good. A nap could be a door an abandoned car. Does that even mean anything? Eat my teeth. I know them all by heart.

I picked up this book when Max left. I wrote: “You have to puke it up.” All of a sudden I was writing about you. Surprising myself. I just kept going. Remembering camp, the weird sort of humid excitement there, the cafeteria louder than the sea. The shops—remember the shops? Lulu’s was the best. We’d save up our allowance to go there. Down in the basement you could get used stuff for cheap. You got your leather jacket there. I got these red shoes with flowers on the toes. I loved those shoes so much! I wonder where they went? I wore them to every mixer, I was wearing them when I met Pete, probably with my white dress—another Lulu’s purchase I don’t have now.

It was summer, and the mixer had an island theme. The counselors had constructed this sort of deck overlooking the lake. God, they were so proud of it. They gave us green drinks with little umbrellas in them and played lazy, sighing music, and everyone danced, and Pete saw a shooting star, and we were holding hands, and you were gone forever and I forgot you.

• • •

I forgot you. Forgetting isn’t so wrong. It’s a Life Skill.

• • •

I don’t remember what my parents looked like. A Parent Figure cannot be a photograph. It has to be a more neutral object. It’s supposed to stand in for someone, but not too much. When we got to camp we were all supposed to bring our Parent Figures to dinner the first night. Everyone squeezed in at the cafeteria tables, trying to find space beside their dinner trays for their Figures, those calendars and catcher’s mitts and scarves. I felt so stupid because my Mother Figure was a lamp and there was no place to plug it in. My Father Figure is a plaque that says Always be yourself.

Jodi came by, as the counselors were all going around “meeting the Parents,” and she said, “Wow, Tisha, that’s a good one.”

• • •

I don’t even know if I picked it out.

• • •

“We want you to have a fabulous time at camp!” Jodi cried. She was standing at the front with the other counselors: Paige and Veronica and Duncan—who we’d later call “Hunky Duncan”—and Eric and Carla and the others.

Of course they’d chosen Jodi to speak. Jodi was so perky.

She told us that we were beginning a special relationship with our Parent Figures. It was very important not to fixate. We shouldn’t fixate on the Parent Figures, and we definitely shouldn’t fixate on the counselors.

My stupid lamp. It was so fucking blue. Why would you bring something blue? “The most important people in your life are the other campers!” Jodi burbled. “These are the people you’ll know for the rest of your life! Now, I want you to turn to the person next to you and say, Hi, Neighbor!”

• • •

Hi, Neighbor! And later, in the forest, Cee sang to the sky: Fuck you, Neighbor!

• • •

Camp was special. We were told that it was special. At camp you connected with people and with nature. There was no personal tech. That freaked a lot of people out at first. We were told that later we’d all be able to get online again, but we’d be adults, and our relationships would be in place, and we would have learned our Life Skills, and we’d be ready. But now was special: Now was the time of friends and of the earth.

Cee raised her hand: “What about earthquakes?”

“What?” said Veronica, who taught The Natural World. Veronica was from an older group of counselors; she had gray hair and leathery skin from taking kids on nature hikes and she was always stretching to show that you could be flexible when you were old.

“What about earthquakes?” Cee asked. “What about fires? Those are natural. What about hurricanes?”

Veronica smiled at us with her awesome white teeth, because you could have awesome white teeth when you were old, it was all a matter of taking care of yourself with the right Life Skills.

“What an interesting question, Celia!”

We were told that all of our questions were interesting. There’s no such thing as a stupid question! The important thing was always to participate. We were told to participate in classes and hikes and shopping sprees and mixers. In History we learned that there used to be prejudice, but now there wasn’t: It didn’t matter where you came from or who you loved, just join in! That’s why even the queer girls had to go to the mixers; you could take your girlfriend, but you had to go. Katie used to go in a tie and Elle would wear flowers. They rolled their eyes but they went anyway and danced and it was fun. Camp was so fun.

Cee raised her hand: “Why is it a compliment to tell somebody it doesn’t matter who they are?”

We were told to find a hobby. There were a million choices and we tried them all: sports and crafts and art and music. There was so much to do. Every day there was some kind of program and then there were chores and then we had to study for class. No wonder we forgot stuff. We were told that forgetting was natural. Forgetting helped us survive, Jodi told us in Life Skills class, tears in her eyes. She cried as easily as Max. She was more like a kid sister than a counselor. Everybody wanted Jodi to be okay. “You’ll always be reminded,” she said in her hoarse, heroic voice. “You’ll always have your Parent Figures. It’s okay to be sad! But remember, you have each other now. It’s the most special bond in the world.”

Cee raised her hand: “What if we don’t want us?”

Cee raised her hand, but of course she raised her hand. She was Cee. She was Cee, she’d always been Cee, do you see what I mean? I mean she was like that right from the day we arrived; she was brash, messy Cee before the night in the bathroom, before she supposedly puked out her bug. I couldn’t see any difference. I could not see any difference. So of course I had second thoughts. I wished so bad I hadn’t flushed the toilet. What if there wasn’t anything in it? What if somebody’d dropped a piece of jewelry in there, some necklace or brooch and I thought it was a bug? That could have happened. Camp was so fun. Shaving my legs for the mixer. Wearing red shoes. We were all so lucky. Camp was the best thing ever. Every Child at Camp! That was the government slogan: ECAC. Cee used to make this gag face whenever she said it. ECAC. Ick. Sick.

• • •

She took me into the forest. It was a mixer. Everybody else was crowded around the picnic tables. The lake was flat and scummy and the sun was just going down, clouds of biting insects golden in the haze.

“Come on,” Cee said, “let’s get out of here.”

We walked over the sodden sand into the weeds. A couple of the counselors watched us go: I saw Hunky Duncan look at us with his binoculars, but because we were just two girls they didn’t care. It only mattered if you left the mixer with a boy. Then you had to stop at the Self-Care Stand for condoms and an injection, because becoming a parent is a serious decision! Duncan lowered his binoculars, and we stepped across the rocks and into the trees.

“This is cool!” Cee whispered.

I didn’t really think it was cool—it was weird and sticky in there, and sort of dark, and the weeds kept tickling my legs—but I went farther because of Cee. It’s hard to explain this thing she had: She was like an event just about to happen and you didn’t want to miss it. I didn’t want to, anyway. It was so dark we had to hold hands after a while. Cee walked in front of me, pushing branches out of the way, making loud crackling sounds, sometimes kicking to break through the bushes. Her laugh sounded close, like we were trapped in the basement at Lulu’s. That’s what it was like, like being trapped in this amazing place where everything was magically half-price. I was so excited and then horrified because suddenly I had to take a dump, there was no way I could hold it in.

“Wait a sec,” I told Cee, too embarrassed to even tell her to go away. I crouched down and went and wiped myself on the leaves, and I’m sure Cee knew what was up but she took my hand again right after I was done. She took my disgusting hand. I felt like I wanted to die, and at the same time, I was floating. We kept going until we stumbled into a clearing in the woods. Stars above us in a perfect circle.

“Woo-hooooo!” Cee hollered. “Fuck you, Neighbor!”

She gave the stars the finger. The silhouette of her hand stood out against the bright. I gave the stars the finger, too. I was this shitty, disgusting kid with a lamp and a plaque for parents but I was there with Cee and the time was exactly now. It was like there was a beautiful starry place we’d never get into— didn’t deserve to get into—but at the same time we were better than any brightness. Two sick girls underneath the stars.

Fuck you, Neighbor! It felt so great. If I could go anywhere I’d want to go there.

• • •

The counselors came for us after a while. A circle of them with big flashlights, talking in handsets. Jodi told us they’d been looking everywhere for us. “We were pretty worried about you girls!”

For the first time I didn’t feel sorry for her; I felt like I wanted to kick her in the shins. Shit, I forgot about that until right now. I forget so much. I’m like a sieve. Sometimes I tell Pete I think I’m going senile. Like premature senile dementia. Last month I suggested we go to Clearview for our next vacation and he said, “Tish, you hate Clearview, don’t you remember?”

It’s true, I hated Clearview: The beach was okay, but at night there was nothing to do but drink. So we’re going to go to the Palace Suites instead. At least you can gamble there.

Cee, I wonder about you still, so much—I wonder what happened to you and where you are. I wonder if you’ve ever tried to find me. It wouldn’t be hard. If you linked to the register you’d know our graduating class ended up in Food Services. I’m in charge of inventory for a chain of grocery stores, Pete drives delivery, Katie stocks the shelves. The year before us, the graduates of our camp went into the army; the year after us they also went into the army; the year after that they went into communications technologies; the year after that I stopped paying attention. I stopped wondering what life would have been like if I’d graduated in a different year. We’re okay. Me and Pete—we make it work, you know? He’s sad because I don’t want to have kids, but he hasn’t brought it up for a couple of years. We do the usual stuff, hobbies and vacations. Work. Pete’s into gardening. Once a week we have dinner with some of the gang. We keep our Parent Figures on the hall table, like everyone else. Sometimes I think about how if you’d graduated with us, you’d be doing some kind of job in Food Services too. That’s weird, right?

• • •

But you didn’t graduate with us. I guess you never graduated at all.

• • •

I’ve looked for you on the buses and in the streets. Wondering if I’d suddenly see you. God, I’d jump off the bus so quick, I wouldn’t even wait for it to stop moving. I wouldn’t care if I fell in the gutter. I remember your tense face, your nervous look, when you found out that we were going to have a check-up.

“I can’t have a check-up,” you said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because,” you said, “because they’ll see my bug is gone.”

And I just—I don’t know. I felt sort of embarrassed for you. I’d convinced myself the whole bug thing was a mistake, a hallucination. I looked down at my book, and when I looked up you were standing in the same place, with an alert look on your face, as if you were listening.

You looked at me and said: “I have to run.”

It was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. The whole camp was monitored practically up to the moon. There was no way to get outside.

But you tried. You left my room, and you went straight out your window and broke your ankle.

A week later, you were back. You were on crutches and you looked . . . wrecked. Destroyed. Somebody’d cut your hair, shaved it close to the scalp. Your eyes stood out, huge and shining.

“They put in a bug in me,” you whispered.

And I just knew. I knew what you were going to do.

• • •

Max came to see me a few days ago. I’ve felt sick ever since. Max is the same, hunched and timid; you’d know her if you saw her. She sat in my living room and I gave her coffee and lemon cookies and she took one bite of a cookie and started crying.

Cee, we miss you, we really do.

Max told me she’s pregnant. I said congratulations. I knew she and Evan have been wanting one for a while. She covered her eyes with her hands—she still bites her nails, one of them was bleeding—and she just cried.

“Hey, Max,” I said, “it’s okay.”

I figured she was extra-emotional from hormones or whatever, or maybe she was thinking what a short time she’d have with her kid, now that kids start camp at eight years old.

“It’s okay,” I told her, even though I’d never have kids—I couldn’t stand it.

They say it’s easier on the kids, going to camp earlier. We—me and you and Max—we were the tail end of Generation Teen. Max’s kid will belong to Generation Eight. It’s supposed to be a happier generation, but I’m guessing it will be sort of like us. Like us, the kids of Generation Eight will be told they’re sad, that they need their parents and that’s why they have Parent Figures, so that they can always be reminded of what they’ve lost, so that they can remember they need what they have now.

I sat across the coffee table from Max, and she was crying and I wasn’t hugging her because I don’t really hug people anymore, not even Pete really, I’m sort of mean that way, it’s just how I turned out, and Max said “Do you remember that night in the bathroom with Cee?”

Do I remember?

Her eyes were all swollen. She hiccupped. “I can’t stop thinking about it. I’m scared.” She said she had to send a report to her doctor every day on her phone. How was she feeling, had she vomited? Her morning sickness wasn’t too bad, but she’d thrown up twice, and both times she had to go in for a check-up.

“So?” I said.

“So—they always put you to sleep, you know . . .”

“Yeah.”

I just said “Yeah.” Just sat there in front of her and said “Yeah.” Like I was a rock. After a while I could tell she was feeling uncertain, and then she felt stupid. She picked up her stuff and blew her nose and went home. She left the tissues on the table, one of them spotted with blood from her bitten nail. I haven’t really been sleeping since she left. I mean, I’ve always had trouble sleeping, but now it’s a lot worse, especially since I started writing in your book. I just feel sick, Cee, I feel really sick. All those check-ups, so regular, everyone gets them, but you’re definitely supposed to go in if you’re feeling nauseous, if you’ve vomited, it might be a superflu! The world is full of viruses, good health is everybody’s business! And yeah, they put you to sleep every time. Yeah. “They put a bug in me,” you said. Camp was so fun. Jodi came to us, wringing her hands. “Cee has been having some problems, and it’s up to all of us to look after her, girls! Campers stick together!” But we didn’t stick together, did we? I woke up and you were shouting in the hall, and I ran out there and you were hopping on your good foot, your toothbrush in one hand, your Mother Figure notebook in the other, and I knew exactly what they’d caught you doing. How did they catch you? Were there really cameras in the bathroom? Jodi’d called Duncan, and that was how I knew how bad it was: Hunky Duncan in the girls’ hallway, just outside the bathroom, wearing white shorts and a seriously pissed-off expression. He and Jodi were grabbing you and you were fighting them off. “Tisha,” called Jodi, “it’s okay, Cee’s just sick, she’s going to the hospital.” You threw the notebook. “Take it!” you snarled. Those were your last words. Your last words to me. I never saw you again except in dreams. Yeah, I see you in dreams. I see you in your white lacy nightgown. Cee, I feel sick. At night I feel so sick, I walk around in circles. There’s waves of sickness and waves of something else, something that calms me, something that’s trying to make the sickness go away. Up and down it goes, and I’m just in it, just trying to stand it, and then I sleep again, and I dream you’re beside me, we’re leaning over the toilet, and down at the very bottom there’s something like a clump of trees and two tiny girls are standing there giving us the finger. It’s not where I came from, but it’s where I started. I think of how bright it was in the bathroom that night, how some kind of loss swept through all of us, electric, and you’d started it, you’d started it by yourself, and we were with you in that hilarious and total rage of loss. Let’s lose it. Let’s lose everything. Camp wasn’t fun. Camp was a fucking factory. I go out to the factory on Fridays to check my lists over coffee with Elle. The bus passes shattered buildings, stick people rooting around in the garbage. Three out of five graduating classes join the army. Give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change! How did I even get here? I’d ask my mom if she wasn’t a fucking lamp. Cee, I feel sick. I should just grab my keys, get some money, and run to Max’s house, we should both be sick, everybody should lose it together. I shouldn’t have told you not to tell the others. We all should have gone together. My fault. I dream I find you and Puss in a bathroom in the train station. There’s blood everywhere, and you laugh and tell me it’s hair dye. Cee, it’s so bright it makes me sick. I have to go now. It’s got to come out.

© 2014 by Sofia Samatar.

Sofia Samatar is the author of the novel A Stranger in Olondria. Her short stories and poetry have appeared in Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, and Stone Telling, among others. She is and Poetry Editor for Interfictions: A Journal of Interstitial Arts, and has just moved to southern California to teach literature and Arabic at California State University, Channel Islands. Find her at sofiasamatar.com.

The Mao Ghost
Chen Qiufan
Translated by Ken Liu

I still remember that evening: In the heavy air, the plastic dragonflies hovered just below the eaves like miniature helicopters, drifting about slightly even though there was no wind.

I came home, and Dad was already in the house but kept the lights off. The setting sun came in through cracks in the window, and his face seemed indescribably thin in the dim, yellow light, like a stranger’s. He extended an arm toward me and the sleeve hung loose as though it contained only bones and no muscle. Without even realizing I was doing so, I tried to hang back, staying away from him.

“Qianer, come here. Let Daddy get a look at you.”

I struggled to understand the meaning behind his words. He tried to look at me every day, regardless of my wishes. It seemed that other than looking at me, he had nothing else to say or do. He was always getting my age wrong. Sometimes he would ask me if I was getting along with the other children, and I felt that he was only making conversation because whenever I brought up Xiao Qing or Nana, he always put on an expression that said I’m-interested-but-who-is-that? even though I’d already repeated those names for him at least eight million times.

“Qianer,” he said, and seemed unsure if he should go on. “I want to tell you something.”

“Are you about to go on another business trip?” I asked dutifully.

“No, it’s not that. I’m never going on a trip again.”

“Then you won’t be able to buy me the newest Little Pixies?”

Little Pixies were colorful plastic dolls with fluorescent wings. Dad thought every girl in the world liked them, and so every time he went on a business trip he’d bring back the season’s models from the big cities. They formed a cheerleading squad at the foot of my bed.

“Little Pixies? Oh, we can buy them through the mail, as long as you like them.” He seemed to think of something, and his eyes brightened. “Qianer, I want to tell you that I’ve been Chosen as a host.”

I looked at him blankly, letting him know that I didn’t understand the term.

“It means that the spirit of an animal has chosen to live in my body and make use of my strength until it can become a real animal.”

“Wow, that sounds cool!” I had never heard of such a thing, and asked suspiciously, “But what kind of animal?”

“Oh . . . A snake? A parrot? Definitely not a rhinoceros. To be honest, I don’t know. Before its form is fixed, a spirit can become any animal, and it’s up to me. What animal would you like?”

“A mao,” I said. “A Bosi mao.” I’d always wanted a white-haired, blue-eyed Persian cat, but Mom had always mercilessly refused. It’s hard enough raising you, she always said.

“Then it will be a mao spirit, the spirit of a cat. You have to work together with me, all right?” The light in his eyes dimmed.

“Okay,” I said. But I didn’t really believe him.

• • •

Dad wasn’t always like that.

Back when I was still in kindergarten, I remember him riding his bicycle to the school every afternoon to wait for me. When little me got to sit on the child’s seat on the rear carrier of the 28” bike, I was as excited as if I got to ride a dinosaur. I most looked forward to rainy days so that Dad would cover me with the wide, spacious tent of his rubbery-smelling raincoat. All I could see then were the tire spinning under me and the rapidly receding ground, and I had to guess where we were.

- Are we at Zhongshan Road yet?

- Not yet.

- Are we at Red Pavilion yet?

- We already passed it.

- Are we home yet?

- Guess.

A crisp and joyful braking sound.

Dad stayed home every evening. He would watch TV and then fall asleep on the couch. He was fat then, and again and again his belly would swell like an angry puffer fish and then deflate, jittering, accompanied by his snores. I liked to press my ear against it and listen to the thunderous rumbling from within, which had a hypnotic magic.

Back then Mom and Dad often argued, as if playing some secret game. Whenever I caught them, they pretended that nothing was wrong and changed the topic to me. Of course I knew that most of the arguments were because of money.

Each time, after they fought, Dad would be silent for a few days, like a TV set that was put on mute.

Later, he spent less and less time at home. He went on many business trips and brought back lots of presents for Mom and me. They didn’t fight as much, but it wasn’t clear if that was due to the presents or because it was hard for them to even spend much time together. His potbelly disappeared, and when he put on his uniform, he looked as handsome as a movie star. The way Mom looked at him changed as well, as if she had turned from a tiger to a rabbit.

For me, Dad became a Santa Claus that showed up too often, bringing me new toys that no one at school had seen. The other kids liked to mill about me, asking about this and that, and I was always glad to share with them and lend them my toys. Compared to those lifeless objects, I preferred small animals, the sort that were lively and active. I read all the animal encyclopedias that could be found in the library. My interest wasn’t in the background explanatory text, but the pictures, so that I could imagine what they were like before they went extinct.

And so, the next time Dad went on a trip, he would bring back artificial animals that had ever more lifelike movements and made ever more realistic noises. I stuffed all of them into the toy chest under my bed.

We had less and less to say to each other. Like all third graders, I began to see my parents as mechanical auto-response programs.

- Have you had dinner?

- Yes.

- How was school today?

- All right.

- How’s studying for the midterms coming?

- Pretty good.

- Study hard and get a good grade. Then we’ll take you on a vacation to the reservations and see real animals.

- Oh.

Like the frog that slowly crawled out of the well, too many new sights competed for our attention. In this vast world, our parents slipped irrevocably from the center to the periphery, their colors dulling, their voices fading.

Dad was no exception. I could never be sure when he would appear. He was like a bat at night, revealing himself only momentarily as he skimmed below a streetlight.

I never even noticed his clothes growing looser and looser on him.

I guess Mom did notice. She always told Dad to eat more at dinner. Finally, one night, Dad threw up.

• • •

Every Monday through Thursday, Dad went to the Chosen Center to be counseled. This meant that I only had to endure the sounds of his vomiting on weekend nights. At first I believed that what was inside him was a Persian because he sounded like paws were continuously scratching at his inner organs and something couldn’t wait to come out of his throat.

I kept on asking what the Chosen Center was like and what sort of counseling they were giving Dad, but Mom just glanced at me, wearily, without answering.

Weakly, Dad parted his pale, chapped lips full of bloody cracks. He smiled and said, When the Persian has fixed its form, then you can come to the Chosen Center. Mom gave him a look, and he shut up.

Mom seemed to have turned from a rabbit back into a tiger, but Dad was now so thin he was like a skeleton. They fought again, but most of the time I only heard Mom’s voice. Dad’s endless coughing was his only response.

Before I fell asleep, I heard Dad’s coughing slowly drifting closer. It erupted into a fit right outside my door before quieting down. Dad came in and sat down on the edge of my bed. He hadn’t told me a bedtime story in a long time.

I pretended to be interested, but inside I prayed that he wouldn’t repeat those ancient fables from books that I’d heard a thousand times.

“I want to tell you what it means to be Chosen as a host.”

My eyes opened wide.

When Dad was a little boy, the world still had many living animals. They weren’t kept in special, sealed cages and could freely play and run about. Other than specially engineered pets, people could also touch untamed, wild animals without worrying about unknown viruses. But time changed everything. People cut down the forests, dug holes in the rich soil, erected steel cities and pipes, released polluted water and poisonous gases—until other living things had nowhere to run. They left their countless dead bodies behind, drying in the wind and then rotting away.

“Their souls drifted about, searching for hosts.” Dad’s deliberately casual tone only terrified me more.

“But why you?”

“Where I go on my business trips is close to the edge of the protective cover. There, souls sometimes float in.”

My textbook said that in order to keep the heavy pollution out, the government wrapped the city in a protective cover. But the book never mentioned anything about souls.

“Then, what will you look like?”

Dad was seized by a sudden fit of coughing: His veins stood out on his forehead, his eyes bulged, his neck turned red, and I seemed to be able to see the cat’s green eyes from down his throat.

“Are you talking nonsense again? It’s time for your medicine!” Mom had appeared at my door without either of us noticing. She seemed angry. “Qian Qian, it’s time to sleep. You have school tomorrow.”

Dad coughed until tears came out of his eyes. He waved his hand, and Mom helped him out of my room.

“Don't turn off the light!” I begged Mom.

The light went out.

In the darkness, I closed my eyes. Around me, tiny sparks of light of all colors drifted, like a whole zooful of souls.

• • •

Mom always thought I wasn’t as pretty as her, and of course the part of me that made me not as pretty came from Dad. So she came up with a detailed plan to compensate for this unfixable defect.

She signed me up for all kinds of classes: fitness, music, and history, which I hated. She hoped to mold me into an elegant, graceful, cultured young lady. Everything was so that I’d find a good husband. Or as she put it: Worst comes to worst, you’d at least be able to get a decent job.

Just don’t be like me, she always added in a whisper to herself.

The history teacher was a fat woman whose messy hair sat on top of her head like a clump of sun-dried seaweed. She would recite events and dates in a voice like a squealing dolphin, and I would sit there, struggling not to fall asleep. Perhaps because I hated the class so much, I always thought what she said each week was different from what she had said the week before. For example, last week she said that the Great Wall was built to defend against foreign invaders, but this week she said that the Great Wall was a symbol for how the people were enslaved. But the textbook really did say that. I couldn’t tell who was wrong.

I liked to draw pictures of animals in the corners of the textbook pages. I’d sketch them so that they were crouched next to a poet, or about to bite off the beautiful head of some Imperial consort. The doodles would disappear each week as the textbook automatically refreshed itself.

Still, I had to carefully avoid having Mom see them. I couldn’t forget how she had reacted that one time when she discovered my creations.

She had stared at me wordlessly, her face as cold as a stone.

“You’re nothing like me,” she said. “When I was young, I hated furry little things. You’re not my child.”

Even though she had said this more than once, hearing it still felt like having a bucket of ice water thrown on me. I trembled and erased the animal drawings with an electronic eraser. The outlines, fur, and bodies of the animals gradually disappeared into blank, white space.

“Now you’re a tiny bit like me.” Mom stroked my head, her lips showing the hint of a smile.

• • •

I told Xiao Qing and Nana about my Dad. Xiao Qing was envious.

“Wow, that sounds so cool. A real Persian! It must cost a lot if you were to buy one.”

“My mom wouldn’t let me keep it.”

“You can keep it at my house. My mom wouldn’t care.”

“Can I go see it every day?”

“Um . . . You can see it every Wednesday and Friday. I don’t have extra lessons then.”

Timidly, Nana asked, “Are you sure it’s a mao spirit?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“My grandfather once told me a story that sounded a bit like your story, but . . .”

“What?”

“He called them mao ghosts.”

I can never forget Nana’s story. Because of it, I didn’t speak to her for half a semester.

A thousand years ago there was a dynasty called the Sui Dynasty. At that time people practiced a kind of magic in which the mage could make the ghost left behind after a cat has died kill specific victims and seize their property. Thus, mages often deliberately slaughtered cats to increase the number of mao ghosts. Countless cats lost their lives back then for such evil purposes.

Among the many relations of the Sui Imperial clan there was a man named Dugu Tuo. He directed a mao ghost to kill his own sister, Empress Dugu. After the plot was exposed, the Sui court banned mao ghosts and exiled all the mages who practiced mao ghost magic along with their families to the remote frontiers of the empire. For a long time after, it seemed as if this kind of magic had disappeared from the world, but such was not the case.

When Nana’s grandfather was a young man, he had experienced a period when madness reigned. During those ten years, the magic of mao ghosts was revived. The fad was so popular that every family had to keep a cat to deter potential enemies. It was said that when a mao ghost attached itself to a man, his body and inner organs would all be subjected to the pain of being stabbed by needles as the mao ghost ate away the inner organs. Soon after, the man would die, vomiting blood.

“You lie!” I remember crying as I screamed at Nana. “You’re just like your grandfather, a big liar!”

• • •

I remember Mom and Dad arguing about things like “Those Ten Years Under Mao” and such similar topics late at night. Maybe they were certain that I was already asleep, or maybe they thought I couldn’t understand them. Since I was doodling animals as I hid under the blanket, I decided to add dialog bubbles to the rabbit and the tiger as I listened.

Tiger: “Haven’t you seen? They’re again spreading those foolish rumors about mao ghosts.”

Rabbit (sigh): “What do you wish them to say?”

“The truth.”

“Who knows what’s the truth now? All the books have been carefully filtered, and all we can read are reports from newspapers that are refreshed daily at the designated time. Without these ghost stories, I’m afraid no one will remember anything.”

“Don’t you think that’s exactly what they want? Using myths, ghost stories, and fairy tales, they make us forget the past, forget the crimes they committed, whether it’s ‘Those Ten Years’ or the protective cover. And then they shift all the responsibility to the ghosts of cats and dogs.”

“But you must admit that this has made people less angry so that they can focus on the life in front of them.”

“I don't want my daughter to live like us: a lifetime of being fooled. I want her to know history.”

“But history has already been filtered.”

“. . .”

“All right. They pretend to preach, and we pretend to believe. As long as we know the truth inside our heads, everything is fine.”

“It’s because you’re so good at knowing the truth but pretending to be confused that you ended up where you are today.”

“Isn’t that why you love me?”

“. . .”

I flipped through the sketchbook to that page. As I read through the dense dialog between Tiger and Rabbit, I seemed to understand something, and seemed to understand nothing.

• • •

I couldn’t believe this was my father.

His hair had all disappeared so his face appeared even smaller, more wrinkled. From deep down in his throat, I could hear gulping sounds like some fish in the ocean. But wasn’t he supposed to be a Persian cat?

“Daddy!” Tears flowed from my eyes. “Are you going to die?”

He opened his eyes only after a while, as though trying to recall some dream. He saw me and smiled with great difficulty. The smile was more unbearable than if he were crying.

“Qianer, do you remember the mao spirit? Daddy won’t die. Daddy will become a cat and live on.”

I told him the story about mao ghosts.

He laughed again, but the laugh turned into a violent fit of coughing. Tilting his neck, he spat into the spittoon next to the bed. The spittle was thick and faintly red.

“Qianer,” he said, his voice raspy. “In ancient times, an emperor believed that if his name were used by the people, his power would weaken and even his life might be shortened. So he decreed the following: Whenever people needed to use one of the characters in his name, they had to substitute another character with the same reading or else be put to death.

“After some time, the people ended up with a superstition: Not only would using the characters in the emperor’s name bring misfortune, but it was dangerous to even discuss what happened at the Imperial court. They invented many ways to use one word to substitute for another, to make one thing mean another. The animals were one way to make such substitutions. This allowed them to live more comfortably.”

He seemed to have talked too much and began to cough again. For a moment I feared that the cough would never stop.

He spat out more reddish liquid and continued, “Nana’s grandfather told you a story in which he used the cat as a substitute for the emperor on the throne back then. He had suffered a great deal. Maybe he just didn’t want Nana to suffer in the same way.”

I was suspicious. “I don’t remember the textbook ever mentioning any emperor whose name was Mao.”

“His name was like a mao ghost, possessing the magic to kill anyone. The people who lived back then would use his images and little red books filled with his words as weapons to attack others and to protect themselves. Nowadays, we’re not allowed to mention his name or ‘Those Ten Years.’ But his soul still drifts around us, waiting for an opportunity for a host to be Chosen.”

I shivered without knowing why. The hairs on the backs of my arms stood up.

“This sounds even scarier than mao ghosts . . .”

“I think you’re right, Qianer. When people are seized by madness, they’re far more savage than animals.”

“So . . . does that mean you won’t die? But why don’t you have any hair?”

“I’m guessing it’s because the cat loves to shed.”

“Is it like a superpower?”

“Yes, just like a superpower.”

“But why have you been Chosen? I also want to have superpowers. You also promised you’d take me to the Chosen Center.”

Dad’s eyelids drooped like a sleepy cat’s. I shook him, and meowed at him softly, but he didn’t respond.

• • •

Mom told me not to bother Dad. He needed to rest, she told me.

“But when will Dad turn into a Persian cat?”

Mom’s face grew dark, the same expression she had when she saw me doodling. I shivered.

“Qian Qian, do you want your father, or do you want a Persian cat?”

I answered timidly, “. . . Both.”

She took a deep breath. “What if you can pick only one?”

I stared at her, remembering Dad’s words.

Daddy won’t die. Daddy will become a cat and live on.

“I want . . . a Persian cat.”

Mom slapped me in the face, hard.

“You are not my child! You’re also not your father’s child. You’re something we pulled out of a garbage heap!” Her voice trembled.

I howled, crying with every ounce of strength in my body. Tears flooded my face.

“You made Daddy go on those business trips! You’re the one who got him Chosen by the mao spirit! It’s all because of you!”

Mom was stunned. Her eyes turned red, and she suddenly hugged me tight, mumbling, “I didn’t know. I really didn’t know . . .”

Her tears soaked my hair. This was the first time I can ever remember that happening.

• • •

Dad took off my blindfold. “Ta-da! We’re here!”

My eyes struggled to adjust to the light after the darkness. We were in a brightly lit, open, white room. Dad told me that only the Chosen could come in here. In order to sneak me in, my eyes had to be covered.

This was so cool, even though I had long stolen glances at the building from afar. The building’s sign started with a huge “C”, followed by five more letters that had been covered by so much graffiti that they were no longer recognizable, and then the word “Center.” “C Center” was what people usually called it. Dad was the first to let me know that the first word was “Chosen.” I was glad to learn of this even though I thought the graffiti-covered letters seemed to say something else.

Dad was in good spirits. He brought me around to visit all the other Chosen.

Mr. Ding’s belly seemed to have a large centipede on top of it right under the skin, crawling from left to right, waving its pincers. He very generously allowed me to touch the centipede’s fleshy pincers. I touched it carefully, and it responded by moving. I pulled my hand back in fright. Both he and Dad laughed.

Uncle Liu’s arms had loose folds of skin hanging from them. He pulled the skin taut against the sunlight so that I could see the capillaries through the translucent skin like the veins of a leaf. He waved his stick-thin arms, and the loose skin flapped around. He whispered to me that he was actually Batman, but he had forgotten to wear his mask.

Uncle Zhang looked like a non-purebred Dalmatian. He extended a paw to me, very friendly, and then stuck out his bright pink tongue.

Grandpa Sun’s body was full of transparent tubes stuck into him, even in his nose. Dad said that he had been Chosen by an octopus, and those tubes were his tentacles. But I thought he resembled some long-legged spider more.

A young woman dressed in white came in with a tray and handed everyone a dark brown beverage and a small cup holding pills.

“Is that cola?” I asked. “I want some, too.”

“That’s not cola, but a kind of nutritious soup that will help the animal spirit in each host grow. Only the Chosen may drink it.”

Everyone frowned as they swallowed the pills and drank the beverage. One after another, they burped. The room was soon filled with a terrible smell. I held my nose and giggled.

I shouted, “I want to be like you when I grow up and become a Chosen host.”

Their bald heads turned to each other, as though not understanding what I said. Then they all looked at Dad. Dad scratched his equally hairless head and raised the empty cup in his hand.

“To the Persian!”

“To the Persian!”

Everyone raised their empty cups.

• • •

One night, before sleep, Mom came to my bed and tucked me in.

Then she sat and stared at me, as though trying to discover something new on my face.

“Mom, what are you looking at?”

“Nothing.” Mom smiled. “I’m thinking that maybe it’s not so bad that you look like your father. At least, when I want to see him, I can just look at you.”

“You’re saying . . .”

“Your father is a simple man. He wants everyone to be happy, to live the life they want. But I always want others to live the life I want.”

“Mom . . .”

“Before, I always thought that since you came out of me, you’re my second life. So I wanted to make you realize all the dreams that I couldn’t fulfill.”

She fell silent. The light limned her face in a soft glow, and in the shadows of her eye sockets bright lights sparkled.

“Chosen—is that what he said? I was Chosen by you. Right now, I only want you to be healthy and happy.”

She stroked my face, leaned down to give me a light kiss on the forehead, got up and left.

She left the glowing, orange light on.

• • •

I woke to find something heavy sitting on my chest.

A white-haired, blue-eyed Persian was curled on top of the blanket. Placidly, it looked at me.

“Dad, is that you?” I whispered.

It opened its mouth and yawned.

I fed it, bathed it, combed its hair. It shed thin, soft tufts of hair all over the house, just like Dad; it liked to chew different kinds of leaves and then heave its shoulders and vomit up large, sticky hairballs, just like Dad; every day, after getting home, I would tell it everything that had happened at school—the new outfits that Xiao Qing and Nana had on, the new, sparkling toy jewelry they wore—it always yawned and turned its face away, bored, and then used its paws to bat at the Little Pixies and artificial animals scattered on the floor, just like Dad.

I tried to draw it: pencil sketches and colored portraits, asleep and in mid-leap, on paper and on textbooks—teeth bared and claws extended, it would pounce at the famous historical figures. Sometimes, the images of those emperors, great leaders, scientists, or poets would disappear without cause, leaving only my cat to jump up and down between the lines of text in the history books. I began to think that this class wasn’t so bad after all.

I never knew what to name it.

I was sure that if I called it by Dad’s name, Mom wouldn’t be happy. But I didn’t want to call it a cutesy name like “Mimi,” “Blanca,” or “Isabella.”

In the end, I decided to call it “Mao.”

It was just like Dad taught me: Using one thing to substitute for another allowed one to live more comfortably.

Sometimes Mom would come in to help me go to sleep. We’d lie on the bed together, Mao curled between us. We’d stroke Mao’s soft, warm back, talking about one thing or another. Sometimes Mao might lift its head and softly meow, as though giving its opinion. Then we’d stop talking and, silently, by the orange glow of the light, gaze together at the pictures of Mao in various poses hanging on the wall.

I knew what Mom was thinking about: Dad. Just like me.

I really miss him.

“Mom,” I blurted out. “Mao isn’t going to get cancer too, is he?”

She looked at me, her eyes glinting in the light. I could tell she struggled between telling the truth and substituting something else. She put her hand against my face. “I don’t know. We never know. We can hope.”

Quietly, Mom got off the bed and walked away.

“Mom, please turn off the light,” I called to her.

The light went out. In the darkness, two floating green lights slowly appeared like two beautiful emeralds, sparkling and gazing at me. I knew that was Dad wanting to see me. I closed my eyes, and the lights remained there. I knew that they’d always be there, accompanying me into my dreams . . .

© 2014 by Chen Qiufan (translated by Ken Liu).

Chen Qiufan (A.K.A. Stanley Chan) was born in Shantou, Guangdong province. Chan is a science fiction writer, columnist, and online advertising strategist. Since 2004, he has published over thirty stories in Science Fiction World, Esquire, Chutzpah!, many of which are collected in Thin Code (2012). His debut novel, The Waste Tide, was published in January 2013 and was praised by Liu Cixin as “the pinnacle of near-future SF writing”. Chan is the most widely translated young writer of science fiction in China, with his short works translated into English, Italian, Swedish and Polish and published in Clarkesworld, Interzone, and F&SF. He has won Taiwan’s Dragon Fantasy Award, China’s Galaxy and Nebula Award, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award along with Ken Liu. He lives in Beijing and works for Baidu. http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/chen_qiufan

Turnover
Jo Walton

I was on my way to Teatro del Sale when I saw the crow that hangs around near the entrance to the Newton strut. Birds don’t generally do all that well on Speranza. Jay says it’s because they like light and the whole inside of Speranza is like an Earth city night, with the lights along the struts and the street lighting. It’s never really dark, but it’s never really as light as an Earth day would have been, except under the farm lights, and of course they discourage birds from hanging around the crops. Besides, he says, they might have trouble with what happens with gravity if you go up the struts, and the most trouble of all with the freefall zone in the middle. So birds are mostly in pictures, and in the gene freezers. This one family of crows seems to keep on thriving, all the same.

Mei Ju startled when she saw it, but I like them. They remind me of my family, not the most refined, perhaps, but getting along. The crow flew up off the ground and away over the rooftops, calling out his hoarse squawk, not a proper song the way birds are supposed to. “We’re okay here,” is what it seemed to say, then repeated it, “Okay here. Okay right here.” Then off it flapped, big black wings pointed and divided at the ends like fingers.

My name is Fedra Oreille. I was born in the year of the Water Rat and grew up in the Ditch. My family still live there. My mamma has got by most of her life on baby supplements. She was lucky there, as all her kids bar Lou were born at the time when we were a little light on people and you got a subsidy for having them. It was pure dumb luck and not a calculated strategy, because if she’d done it on purpose she’d have held off a year on having Lou and come out no worse than breaking even instead of taking the hit she did. It speaks well of her that she doesn’t blame Lou, crazy as that would be, plenty would. Population on Speranza is kept even by what Jay calls “mild social and financial pressures,” which means baby supplements when births are lower than they should be and baby fees when they are higher. The rate for any given year is announced each New Year’s for the next year after, so as to give everyone plenty of time to make plans. My mamma didn’t pay any attention to this, but enough people do that population pretty much does stay even—nine hundred thousand people left Earth a hundred and twenty-five years ago and we’re just under a million now. Jay says there are laws on the books for strongly encouraging or discouraging births but they’ve never been needed. Some people disapprove of people who don’t have any children—though I don’t see it. They’ve made their contribution to the gene banks, haven’t they? More people disapprove of people like my mamma who have seven babies with seven different fathers, six of them timed well enough that she can live in the Ditch in reasonable comfort.

By the day Mei Ju and I saw the crow, which was late in the year of the Fire Rat, I didn’t live in the Ditch any more, though I went back there often to see Mamma and the little ones. I got out of there through my own efforts, Serendipity, and the redeeming power of Ballette. Ballette is a form of dance done in partial gravity halfway up a strut. It’s based on an ancient Earth form of dance called Ballet, pronounced “bal-ay,” which was done in full gravity but used a lot of the same kinds of music and the same kinds of movements, but hampered by gravity. In Ballette you can rise off your pointes and turn four or five times in the air before landing perfectly back on them, facing the audience, and gliding off again. When I was eleven years old, back in the Year of the Water Pig, my school class got taken up the Newton strut to the Theatre Coppelie to see a performance. It was “Orpheus and Eurydice” and it changed my life. I couldn’t speak, coming out, I was so full of it. I could barely understand that it hadn’t had the same transformative effect on my friends, who had found it boring, or pleasant enough, or mildly fun, the way most kids are when exposed to most arts. Only I had been enraptured. Some dancers don’t like doing school matinees, they say the kids don’t understand it and don’t sit still. I always remember sitting there completely caught up in the moment, and think as I warm up that I will dance for that one child among the shuffling multitudes.

Of course, once I knew Ballette existed, I wanted to see more, and more, I wanted to do it. I wanted it in a completely different way from the way in which I had wanted things in my life up until then. It was as if I knew from the very first leap that Ballette was mine. I wanted it with a fierce burning determination. I knew nobody could stop me, and nobody could. I asked my mother, who was amiably bemused about the whole subject. She was heavily pregnant with what would be my sister Laura. My brother Lenny, just weaned, was constantly tugging at her for attention. I asked the teacher who had taken us to the Theatre Coppelie, M. Agostini, and she said she believed dancers started training at seven and there was in any case no Ballette at our school. I went online and found classes, all of them naturally at studios up the struts and way out of my price range. Undeterred, I started searching for scholarships. All of them were for younger children—M. Agostini had been right that Ballette training began young. I persisted, with ever more esoteric queries, and that was when I met Jay.

Jay was a Metal Dog, two years older than I was. That’s nothing when you are both adults but an eternity when you are thirteen and eleven. He couldn’t have been more different from me. He was from Massima, near the head of Copernicus strut, a neighbourhood about as far removed from the Ditch as you could be in a world as small as Speranza. He was an only child. His parents were rich. His mother was an engineer and his father a professor of literature. They lived up the strut in gravity too low for a child—leaving Jay alone with nannies and tutors. He was desperately lonely, though he says he did well enough. He kept a flag out for under-fifteens doing interesting searches, and when one of my more desperate Ballette school queries triggered it, he suddenly popped up in my chat window. To Jay, I was a project, a cause, something to care about and change. To me he was a gift from the Google-gods, literally; he was Serendipity in person. Jay was Serendipity’s darling. He used to joke that he had the Index, and I sometimes thought he really did. He found the program for older Ballette beginners and the obscure needs-based scholarship I needed and showed me how they could work together. He even helped me apply. Then, at the last minute, when it seemed that getting to classes would be impossible—the law is absolutely inflexible on children sleeping in full gravity—he found me a travel grant out of nowhere. I learned later that he’d set it up himself, out of his allowance, but had told me it was another grant to save my pride. By the time I actually met Jay, when he was eighteen, we’d already been friends for years.

“That crow startled me,” Mei Ju said as we walked around the strut to the entrance.

“You must have seen it before?”

“Only coming here. There are lots of bats up around Kong Fu, and I have seen an owl, but these are the only crows I know about.”

I knew Mei Ju through Jay, who knew her through the same flagging program which had connected us. I don’t know what interesting search led Jay to her. She’s a massotherapist and a poet, a year older than me and a year younger than Jay, a Yin Metal Pig. Jay and I are both Yang, of course, which might be part of our problem.

We reached the tiny unobtrusive door to Teatro del Sale, distinguished only by the gold letters spelling out “Florentia” over the lintel. Mei Ju pushed open the door and we both walked in. We showed our membership cards, though I’m sure Maddalena would have let us in without. She barely glanced at them. “Buon giorno,” she said.

“Buon giorno,” we chorused back. While neither of us is opted Italian, we’ve been coming to Teatro del Sale for long enough that we understand lots of it.

Teatro del Sale means the Theatre of Salt, and it’s a lunch club, just under the foot of Newton strut, which gives it its strange shape and cavernous ceiling. It’s a theatre too, mostly classic Commedia del Arte, but with occasional vaudeville or political satire in Italian. (My least favourite. I don’t understand that much Italian, and politics is boring enough even when you do understand all the words.) The place has been in existence, and been a theatre and lunch club, ever since our ancestors came onto Speranza, and it has the look of venerability and tradition that so few places do. It’s supposed to be based on a place just like it in Florence, and I liked to imagine Machiavelli and Dante and Savonarola rushing up when the gnocchi was announced or cheering when meat was led in with a fanfare. It was, needless to say, another of Jay’s finds. Serendipity Search will find anything for anyone, but the problem with it is that it will either find what it thinks you want or else bury you in data. Jay, thanks to his miserable childhood, had it eating out of his hand.

Jay and Midge and Genly were sitting at our favourite table, a sixer down near the stage. Teatro del Sale has everything from small tables for singles and couples to huge trestles for enormous parties. One of the things I like about it is the way you see people of all ages there—groups of old people, courting couples, groups of young friends, families with little kids, mixed-age families, working people, business people, students. It costs five hundred a year, but you can eat there every day for that if you want to. Yes, there are cheaper lunch clubs, the one my mamma belongs to only costs eighty, but Teatro del Sale gives you twelve courses, and it includes wine and as much water as you want, and they often have truffles and even meat. I’ve bought memberships for my sister Lucy, and my brothers Luke and Liam, as eighteenth birthday presents. Liam was still in his first year for another couple of weeks. Lucy didn’t renew after her year was up, but Luke did—I caught sight of him sitting on a table for two over against the wall. I waved, but he ignored me, intent on his companion, a long-haired Sino.

“You’re late, get your chickpeas before they’re all gone,” Jay said.

“As long as we haven’t missed the gnocchi,” Mei Ju said.

“They’re about to call it, I think.” Jay always sat where he could look into the kitchen. He says the drama there is better than the drama on the stage, and he’s often right. I went to the back of the room and loaded up a plate of chickpeas. I tapped Luke on the shoulder on my way past; he looked up and grinned but didn’t speak, so I didn’t stop. If he was on a date, I didn’t want to interrupt.

“So the lung capacity tweak definitely scaled up to rabbits,” Midge was saying as I squeezed in next to Jay. On the stage, Pierrot and Columbine were miming their eternal tragic love. Midge was a Sino who’d opted Anglo. Genly had met her at Ting when he was taking some bio class she was teaching. She was Jay’s age, twenty-seven now, another Metal Dog. “I’m going to apply to take it further. They don’t like large animal tests, but this is going to make such a difference.”

“What are you going to test on next?” I asked.

“Sheep, if they let me,” she said, shovelling in the last of her chickpeas. I ate mine. They were very good.

“More sheep tests means more delicious lamb,” Genly said. “I’m in favour.” Genly was another person whose searches had come up in Jay’s flag. He was a Water Ox, a year younger than I was. He was a hydro engineer and fiendishly smart, I was a little in awe of him. The group of people who clustered around Jay all tended to be much better educated than I was, since while I was always taking Ting classes in something or other my only real expertise was in Ballette. After all, Midge had a PhD and talked casually about tweaking animal genes. But Genly was some whole other kind of genius. His parents were Franco, and one of the few times I’d had a real conversation with just him it had been about the way French terms were used in Ballette—one of the things it inherited from the original Ballet.

“I wish you were on my committee,” Midge said to Genly. “It would be so much easier to make the argument. More sheep equals more lamb on the menu. No need to justify it with how useful it will be when we get to the New World.”

“We’ll never get to the New World,” Jay said.

Just then, Il Magnifico stood up, flourished his red cape, and called the gnocchi. Kitchen workers processed out singing, carrying the flat, steaming trays, and we made a mad dash, along with everyone else in the room, to get it while it was hot.

“What do you mean?” Mei Ju asked as we stood in line. “We’ll get to the new world in a hundred and twenty-five years.”

“Indeed, saying anything different is like questioning gravity,” Genly said.

Jay laughed, and held up his hands, pale palms towards us. “Speranza will get there, sure as taxes. But we will not. We’ll be dead. If you have grandchildren, perhaps they’ll get there as old people. Your great-grandchildren will no doubt settle it. But us? No. Were our ancestors who got onto Speranza going to the New World? Were their parents who died on Earth? Were theirs who never even heard of the Starship Project? How about my ancestors dragged across the Atlantic from Africa in the hold of a slaver, were they on their way to the stars?”

The line moved forward and we moved with it. “They were in a way. Their genes were going. Our genes will get there,” Midge said.

“The only thing you care about is genes,” Genly said, grinning.

“Whereas I,” said Jay, reaching the head of the line and putting his plate out for the server to ladle the gnocchi onto it, “care nothing about genes at all.” Jay despised his parents. He hadn’t even wanted to make his Contribution, even though nobody gets to be an adult without. I’d eventually persuaded him that just as he’d give a kidney to save a life, making his Contribution was giving his genes to help some infertile or consanguineous couple after he was dead. “Maybe the genes of my poor devil slave ship ancestors will get to the New World, maybe the genes of all our ancestors back to Olduvai Gorge. But I won’t. And I’m glad I won’t.” He bowed to the server. “Grazie, mille grazie.”

He took his plate back to the table. I waited, thanked the server as she loaded mine, then followed him. “How can you be glad?” I asked him. The gnocchi were heavenly, they always are. I’ve had gnocchi elsewhere and even made them myself, but they’re nothing compared to the way they do them at Teatro del Sale. They taste the way I imagine Ambrosia would taste.

“I’m glad because I like living on Speranza,” he said. “I think life farming on the New World sounds tedious in the extreme. And I think you’d hate it even worse than I would.”

“It won’t all be farming,” Genly said, with his mouth full.

“True. They’ll also need genetic engineers and also plumbers, and possibly massotherapists as well, which is all right for Midge and you and Mei Ju. But they’re unlikely to need artists, which scrapes for me, and as for Fedra, well, Ballette isn’t possible in full gravity. Even if it was, the first generation down will be scraping away at the planet, they’ll have a completely different kind of civilization. Our ancestors who got onto Speranza had the sense to make it a metropolis, and we enjoy a metropolitan style of living, with arts and scientific research and a high culture.”

“I am not a plumber,” said Genly, getting up and heading back to see if there was any gnocchi left.

“We get scientific data from Earth,” Midge said.

“Art too. And we send it back. But as it takes years going to and fro, it’s not part of the conversation.”

“In science it is,” Midge said. “Really, you know nothing about this, Jay, any more than our ancestors who fretted that they were taking their descendants out of the mainstream of human culture.”

“They were,” Jay said. “They didn’t realise that we’d like it this way.”

“I like it,” Midge said. “But I’m working every day for when we get there. When our descendants get there.” Midge had a two-year-old who lived with his father, so she was the most likely of all of us to have literal descendants. I didn’t know whether I did yet. I’d donated a whole ovary with no conditions as my Contribution, because you get a bonus that way and I wanted the money to get out of the Ditch, and also for a breast tuck so I could keep on with Ballette. I had the other left in case I wanted kids when I was too old to dance.

“Your real work is for the future. Mine is for today. I love Speranza. I love the colours of light on the spurs and the colours of light in the growing tents. I love lunch clubs and art openings and Ballette. I love gnocchi and dim sum and food as art. I love living in a city where there’s always something going on. I love finding things.”

“There’ll be plenty to find there,” Mei Ju said.

“And Serendipity Search won’t know about any of it,” Jay said. “It will be a different kind of finding out. You’d like it. I wouldn’t. I love this world, the world we’ve made on this city, this ship. There won’t be much of an audience for poetry on the New World.”

Mei Ju writes wonderful poetry in English. She only hasn’t opted Anglo because she doesn’t want to upset her parents, which is probably the most Sino thing about her. I asked her once whether they hadn’t guessed, and she said no, they just thought she was very clever. “I don’t see why people colonising a new planet won’t want poetry, or art either,” she said. “I should think it would be an inspiration for all kinds of things to write about. New stories.”

Genly came back with another plate of gnocchi, and I wished I’d gone back too. There usually isn’t anything left over. “Do you really mean that they won’t have Ballette?” I asked. “I never thought of that before.”

“Yes, Ballette will die with this voyage,” Jay said. “It was invented on Speranza. Other ships won’t necessarily ever think of it, and certainly they won’t develop our styles and traditions. It’s a very transitory art you practice, two generations old and doomed to die in another two.”

To Jay this was an interesting idea, slightly sad but perfectly endurable. He was even smiling slightly. I wanted to cry, or scream, or throw something at him. It was a good thing that the saxophonist came out of the kitchen at that moment and started blowing a fanfare as Il Magnifico announced a spaghetti carbonara. All the actors came onto the stage and bowed towards the kitchen. They always make a huge fuss when there’s meat, to make sure we appreciate what we’re getting. Usually I do, but that day I really didn’t care. “I don’t want Ballette to end,” I said, barely in control of my voice.

Genly, who is genuinely kind and sensitive as well as being a genius, saw that I was really upset. He put his hand on my arm.

“What are you saying?” Jay asked. Everyone had got to their feet and was drifting towards the back of the room, where we were going to be last in line.

“I don’t think we should condemn our children to this,” I said, quoting President Murphy’s speech forbidding US embarcation in Speranza, the reason Anglos are still a minority on Speranza today.

Jay snorted.

“We can’t lose Ballette,” I said. “It’s too important. We just can’t.”

“It’s inevitable,” Midge said.

“We’ll see about that,” I said.

I thought about it while I was eating. It was all tangled up with the fact that I wanted a future. I always had. I wanted children. And I wanted my children, and my grandchildren, and their children, to be able to watch Ballette, to be able to dance if they wanted to. I wasn’t planning to be one of those awful Ballette parents, pushing their kids harder than they wanted to be pushed. Marie, my best friend in Ballette school, had had a father like that, a father who lived for his daughter’s triumphs and wept at her setbacks. Marie gave up Ballette and opted Vietnamese, she went into navigation training and got married and had a baby when she was twenty-four. He’s the cutest thing. She lives up by Nav, which is hell to get to so I don’t see her very often. Her father tried to latch onto me when Marie dropped out, and I had to tell him in no uncertain terms to kagg off. I wouldn’t be like him. I wouldn’t force my children into Ballette, or anything else. It wasn’t that I wanted Ballette for them as much as I wanted it to be there for the kids like me, whoever they were, whoever their parents were. I didn’t want to live in a world without Ballette, and I didn’t want anyone to live in a world where that door was closed to them. I was really sure about that, as sure as I’d been about anything, ever.

Naturally, I turned to Jay. Two more courses had gone by—the carbonara and a spicy soup. On stage, Pulchinella was singing while some of the men clowned behind her. Teatro del Sale shook slightly as each lift went up the spur, and they were shuddering exaggeratedly every time and making it part of the act. “How could I make it so Ballette went on forever?”

“Well, Speranza would have to go on forever,” Jay said.

“Okay, how do I get that?” I asked.

“No, Fedra, it really is impossible,” Midge said. She had the faintest Chinese accent in English, it only showed when she was stressed. “We’ll reach—all right, our descendants will reach—the New World and that will be the end of the voyage.”

“What if we kept on going?” Jay asked.

“That would be crazy!” Mei Ju said. “What would be the point of that? Just going on and on forever?”

“We’d also run out of trace minerals and chemicals,” Midge said.

“Oh come on, we could get those from comets the same as we do extra water. We do that already,” Genly said. “Not that I’m necessarily endorsing this idea. But there’s no scientific reason we’d have to stop.”

“The scientists and the engineers want to get to the New World!” Midge said.

“They’re not going to,” Jay said. “And to answer Mei Ju’s very pertinent question, what’s the point of anything? We didn’t volunteer to be here, we’re here because our ancestors made certain decisions. We could change those decisions for ourselves, and for our descendants.”

“We could get to the New World and let some people off and have other people go back to Earth,” Genly said. “Then some people could get off at Earth and others could embark and turn around and go to the New World, and keep doing that. Over and over, like a lift going up a spur. That way Midge and Fedra would both get what they wanted.”

“Brilliant,” I said, and kissed Genly, who blushed. His skin is quite pale, so it really shows.

“It won’t work though,” Jay said. “Well, it might once it got going, but it won’t work the first time.”

“Why not? I see no technical problem.”

“No, technically it would work. It wouldn’t work for people reasons. All the scientists would get off, right? They’d be mad keen to explore the New World and get data.”

“Of course they would,” Midge said. “And so would lots of other people.”

“Exactly,” Jay said. “If it was us, now, getting there next year, you’d get off, and who else?”

Mei Ju raised her hand, and Genly held his out flat. “I’d have to think about it,” he said.

“I’d stay on,” I said.

“I’d stay on too, but just as the planet won’t need Ballette dancers and artists, the ship will need other people too. The engineers would stay on, probably, lots of them—their vocation is making Speranza go. But too many people would get off for us to be able to maintain a high civilization. We wouldn’t have enough audience for Ballette, or enough kids wanting to train for it. We’d be down to one lunch club.”

“This one,” I said, and simultaneously Genly said “Kam Fung,” which was the dim sum hall where we ate the other half of the time.

As if on cue, il Magnifico bellowed that there were deep-fried zucchini flowers, and we all rushed to get them.

“There is another problem,” Genly said, as we were all back in our seats and munching away. “I hadn’t remembered about the fusion drive.”

“What about it?” Jay asked. “Isn’t it good pretty much forever?”

“Not forever, but for thousands of years,” Genly said, in his precise way. “But the plan is that when we arrive at the New World it will be disassembled and taken down to provide power for the first years of the colony. If the ship were to return, that couldn’t happen.”

“Couldn’t we build another one?” I asked.

“I . . . don’t know.” Genly said. “It would certainly be a technical challenge. And it would be much easier to go with the plan and take down the one we have—it was designed for disassembly. That’s why I know about this, the design is an engineering classic. Combined with the human issue Jay saw, I think people would have a number of plausible objections.”

Midge had finished her zucchini blossoms and was looking at me very strangely. “Are you really serious about this?”

“Yes,” I said, emphatically.

Mei Ju sketched the sign for calm. “There’s nothing we can do about it. It will be up to our descendants to make up their own minds what to do.”

“We can make it harder or easier for them,” Genly said. “If we needed to make another fusion drive, for instance, it would be better to think about that in advance.”

“We can do something,” Jay said. He had his burning look, I don’t know how better to describe it. Jay has been my best friend since I was eleven and sometimes I don’t understand him at all. “Turnover,” he said. “We’re going to do it in a few months, right? The halfway point, the point where we stop accelerating away from Earth and start decelerating towards the New World.” Everyone was nodding, wondering where he was going. “We don’t have to do it. We’re not compelled to. We could just omit Turnover and keep on going.”

“But that would be—” Midge began.

“Condemning our children to this?” Jay asked. “We already did that one.”

Up to that moment I had mostly thought about Turnover in terms of the great arts festival that was being planned to celebrate it. I was playing the lead in Jin Cullian and the teacher in Flowers for Algernon, which has two wonderful but terribly difficult pas des deuxs. We were already in rehearsal.

“You mean we could persuade people to just keep going?” I asked.

“It would mean politics,” Genly said.

Despite what the idiotic American refusniks had thought, we had everything on Speranza, including politics. My Auntie Vashti had started off as a community organizer in the Ditch and was now one of the assistant mayors. She’d help me. And I had Jay, my secret weapon. Jay could find anything.

“You’re not serious?” Midge said. “This is ridiculous. We have to make Turnover.”

“I don’t think there’s time before Turnover to decide properly,” Mei Ju said. “We’d be deciding for our descendants.”

“We are anyway,” Jay said.

“But there are more choices when we get to the New World,” Mei Ju said. “Not turning over, just going on, would be closing off choices for them. They’d never be able to stop.”

Genly was sketching on his phone and ignoring us. After a moment he looked at Jay. “Can you find me the rejected designs for the fusion plant?”

Jay turned his wrist and typed for a moment, then Genly nodded and sank back into ignoring us. He even ignored dessert being announced. The rest of us went up to get it. My brother Luke deigned to introduce me to his date as we were in line, so we made small talk for a few minutes, which Jay hates, of course. Dessert was chocolate and hard sweet hollow cookies. I brought back extra chocolate for Genly, and a jug of water for all of us.

Genly glanced up from his phone when I put the chocolate and water down next to him. “I think I have it,” he said.

“What?”

“If we could replicate the fusion plant, which is a challenge some of my colleagues would be delighted to have, then our descendants would have three choices. They could go down to the New World, as planned. They could stay on Speranza and turn it around to go back to Earth, which would have the problems Jay pointed out. Or they could keep Speranza in orbit as a city. They could use the rockets to go up and down. Those who want to colonize can colonize, they can come up every few months to see Ballette. They would be farmers, but they’d still have a metropolis to visit, and those who wanted metropolitan life could stay. And of course there are scientific uses to having a manned space station.”

“That’s amazing,” I said, seeing it at once. “That’ll actually work.”

“It might be easier to make the new fusion plant on the planet rather than copy the exact design.” He took some of the chocolate and smiled amiably.

“That’s just a plumbing detail,” Midge said.

“Plumbing beats politics every time,” Jay said.

“And of course, we can’t say what our descendants will want, any more than our ancestors knew what we want,” Mei Ju said. “They might all want to go down. Or they might all decide to turn back. Or somebody might invent something that changes everything.”

“That could always happen, at any moment,” Genly said. “What I want is to keep everyone’s options as open as possible, so that people can make their own choices when it’s the right time.”

“We’re okay here,” I said, thinking of the crow. “We’re okay here—and did I tell you that I’m dancing the lead in Jin Cullian in the Turnover Festival?”

© 2013 by Jo Walton.

Originally published in a chapbook published by the 2013 Novacon convention.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Jo Walton is the author of nine science fiction and fantasy novels, including the Hugo and Nebula award winning Among Others; a tenth, My Real Children is coming out in May. She has recently published a collection of her Tor.com blog pieces, entitled What Makes This Book So Great. She also writes poetry and very occasional short stories. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal, where she writes, reads, and eats great food. It worries her slightly that this is so exactly what she always wanted to do when she grew up.

FANTASY

A Different Fate
Kat Howard

One.

Two.

Three.

Triune. Trinity.

Separate and inseparable.

We are one. We are three. We are sisters, together and individual. Past, present, future. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. One of us must have been born first, but the stories say there were always three, and so there were. Fate is too weighty a thing to be dealt by only one. And certainly then we must also be eternal, always and neverending, untouched by time or death. Certainly. If you tell a story enough times, it will have weight of its own. It will reshape fate.

We are governed by fate, as well. Spin, measure, cut.

One.

Two.

Three.

• • •

As the story is told, Penelope’s husband was away for quite some time. Ten years of war, and then ten years more of wandering before he returned to her. An entire generation passed in his absence. A woman who had just become a mother when Odysseus had left might see her own daughter do the same before he returned.

Through all those years, Penelope wove.

There were men who thought it was wrong, to see the lands and wealth of Penelope’s husband with no man to manage them. There were men who looked upon Penelope with lust, and felt it was wrong that there was no man to manage her, as well.

And as they looked, and as they lusted, Penelope wove.

The men told Penelope that she must accept her fate. That Odysseus was not coming back, that her lands needed someone to plow them, and frankly, she needed the same. They told her this again and again, until her ears rang with the telling. And so Penelope agreed. She would choose a man from among her suitors, but not until she finished weaving a great tapestry.

The men agreed to Penelope’s condition. A woman with skill was a prize.

Every day she wove. Every night, she picked the threads apart, undoing the day’s work. She did this for years, before the men, blind with impatience, noticed.

Some will not see their fate, even as it is woven in front of them.

Odysseus returned, inside the time that Penelope had woven out of nothing. He slayed the suitors, his fate and theirs, intertwined.

And Penelope smiled to have her husband home, and still she wove.

• • •

I don’t remember exactly when my sister started weaving. It didn’t seem important at the time. Kacey collected hobbies, the more unusual the better. Previous enthusiasms had included making her own candles, training homing pigeons, spending the better part of a year making stained glass images of saints, and keeping bees for three years.

I liked the beekeeping. There was a fall where everything tasted golden and sweet. I still have some of the honey.

But no matter how good or bad she was at any of these activities, Kacey eventually grew bored. She required novelty, and when that wore off, it was on to the next enthusiasm, the former discarded like dust.

Weaving, however, stuck.

• • •

Here is an old story. Some might say it is ours, and it might well be. In it, there is a choice, which is the thread from which all fate is woven. The choice is this: beauty or virtue. A curse will be set upon the women, who for one half of the day will be ugly, and for the other will be beautiful. The implication is that virtue only goes with one, and you can guess which. Needless to say, it is not to the women who will be so cursed that the choice is offered.

Days and nights do not divide evenly. There are the betweens of twilight and dawn, and who is to say that beauty and virtue cannot coexist, that women cannot be as complex as time? Still, the choice is presented as an absolute, either one thing or the other.

The stories, the old ones, the ones that contains this cursed choice, they ask: What do women want? They pose this as the highest question, upon which the very fate of the world might hang. Then they send a knight on the quest to discover the answer, as if a woman’s desire were a dragon to be slain.

Only one choice between two things for three sisters.

If you meet us during the day, we are ugly. If you meet us at night, we are beautiful. Such was our chosen fate.

Spin. Measure. Cut.

• • •

There was a maze, and in that maze was a monster.

There was a young woman, and in her hand, there was a ball of thread. Thread Ariadne had spun, thread she had enchanted. It would unspin and untangle, and make a path, a line to safety, in and out of the woven twists of the maze. Its twists and blind ends were paths she knew full well, for she was the guardian of the labyrinth’s secrets, and of its monsters as well.

And well a man might fear to walk, where a woman with a spindle stands. But the man was not afraid, either of the woman before him, or of the monsters in the maze. He had unwoven their secrets. She had given him the ball of thread.

The man Ariadne saved abandoned her. She had thought there were bonds of love between them, bonds of loyalty, but he cut those threads, and left her to her own fate. In one fate, she dies. Hanged by her own hand, with thread she herself wove. In the other, she becomes a goddess.

Give honey to the mistress of the labyrinth.

• • •

When Kacey took up weaving, it wasn’t something simple. No, Kacey wove tapestries. She stuck very close to tradition—linen for the warp-thread, and wool for the weft-thread, and her images were scenes from mythology.

She particularly liked making tapestries of women weaving. I asked her if that wasn’t just a little recursive, and she laughed and said that was the point.

Long after I expected her to grow bored and find some new preoccupation, Kacey kept weaving. She started selling her tapestries, and then she started selling them for serious money. She opened a gallery, and I worked there a few mornings a week.

The two women who came in that Wednesday morning looked like they belonged in a show on the BBC. At first I thought it was a woman and her mother, but when the light shifted, I thought them the same age, perhaps sisters. They were timeless, elegant, in well-tailored suits and heels, with hair rolled back and perfect red lipstick. They walked through the gallery slowly, occasionally pausing before a tapestry, then spent a long time in front of Kacey’s depiction of the Three Fates.

“We would like to buy this.”

“As a gift for our sister, who is ill.”

Their voices were so similar I couldn’t tell one speaker from the other.

“It’s a lovely piece,” I said. “I hope she likes it.”

“We’re sure she will.”

“It reminds us of us.”

“If you’ll give me her address, I’ll be happy to arrange delivery,” I said.

“We would prefer to pick it up.”

“We would like to meet the artist, too. We enjoy meeting other weavers.”

“You both weave?” I asked.

“All three of us do.”

“We always have.”

Kacey would love them, I knew, so I made the appointment, then wrote it down on the back of one of her business cards and handed it to one of the women.

She looked at the name on the card, and handed it to the other, who asked, “Is this her given name?”

“Yes.” I smiled. “Our mother loved Greek mythology, though we wanted more usual names, growing up. I’m Andromeda, so I go by Anne. Lachesis usually goes by Kacey.”

Kacey joked about it now, how Mom had chosen such an apt name for her. She had even woven her own image into the tapestry of the Fates. “Though when she’s weaving, she goes by Lachesis.”

“Our mother loved that name as well.”

• • •

Or perhaps that is not how we appear, one thing and then the other. Neither time nor fate runs straight, and it may be that we are not so absolute as all that. We are not two after all, but three.

Mother, maiden, crone.

Interchangeable. Symbols. Other words for times of life, for destiny, for fate.

You might see those words and think of them as a progress. Phases through which a woman passes, though it is true that not all women choose to become all of these things. For us, they are now, they are always. We are all three of us each of them. They are things that have been, and things that will be. Fate does not change you. It reveals you.

Maiden. Mother. Crone. One, two, three.

• • •

There was a woman, violated by a man, and then violated again, her tongue torn out so she could not speak of his wrong. But Philomela refused to accept silence as her fate, and wove her story into a tapestry, so that it might speak the truth of her fate, no matter what he willed. She sent the tapestry to her sister, who spoke her story.

Sometimes, the thing that matters is the speaking.

A nightingale sang, and in that singing Philomela is remembered, always.

Another woman, who wove and wove all the visions that came to her in a mirror, wove herself protected, wove herself even into the framework of her loom. And then came a knight, and then came a night, and then came night eternal and unwoven, and Elaine’s body on a boat to Camelot, and that is a fate, too.

So long as there have been stories, and women, there has been magic in the weaving of a story. Eve spun. Joan the Maid wielded spindle and distaff before taking up arms to lead France in battle. Arachne wove, and so well it was as if she had eight arms, and then she did. Some unnamed girl’s father promised on her life that her skill with a spindle was so great it was as if she spun straw into gold. Another girl—nameless too—wove nettles in silence to free her brothers from their swan-shapes.

We are all of them. They are us. Every woman who has spun her thread, and woven her story. They are our sisters.

There was a woman, and she wove.

There was a woman, and she wove her own fate.

• • •

We are time simultaneous. We see all in a point.

For you, life spreads out. Birth, childhood, youth, adulthood, middle age, old age, death. Between each are breaths, heartbeats, minutes, and months. Time for you is linear, the beginning and the end of the thread.

We see you in all those times as one. Now, always, then.

We weave a story. We spin out its threads. And so life is a tapestry, and life is a story, woven.

And then, when it is fated, we cut the thread.

• • •

The tapestry was still hanging in the gallery the morning after it should have been picked up. I figured it was because the two women had decided to have it delivered after all—it was heavy and awkward to carry—and looked in Kacey’s files for the order change.

Instead, there was a note on her stationery: “It has a different fate. So do I. Love you.”

I never saw her again, except for once.

Spin.

Measure.

Cut.

© 2014 by Kat Howard.

Kat Howard is the World Fantasy Award-nominated author of over twenty pieces of short fiction. Her work has been performed on NPR as part of Selected Shorts, and has appeared in Lightspeed, Subterranean, and Apex, among other venues. Her novella, The End of the Sentence, written with Maria Dahvana Headley, will be out in August from Subterranean Press. You can find her on twitter as @KatWithSword and she blogs at strangeink.blogspot.com.

A Drink for Teddy Ford
Robert Jackson Bennett

It was often said in certain circles of town that no event could hope to match Jerry Ulkridge’s New Year’s Eve parties. The entire year was spent in anticipation of what the next one might feature. Could he possibly beat the ice sculptures of ’21? The champagne fountain of two years back? Would the first chairs of the symphony make an appearance again, performing in their elite quartet? No one could say for sure, and many would have fought or even killed to find an invitation nestled in the corner of their mailbox, promising admission to those merry, oh-so-exclusive wonders.

So it would have shocked anyone to know that Teddy Ford had received such an invitation, but had no intention of attending. He did not plan to go out at all that night, having spent the waning days of the year confined to his one-room apartment, lying on the bed and smoking and sipping wine with the radio on, and he’d decided New Year’s Eve would be no different.

But early in the evening his friend Michael Creamier came calling, and would not be turned away. “Are you completely unaware of what you’re missing, old son?” he called through the closed door. “Are you totally out of your mind? Are you barking, Teddy? Please, tell me.”

Teddy did not answer.

“Listen, sport, it’s high time you forgot about her,” Michael said. “Better to have loved than lost, other fish in the sea, chin up, and all that.”

“Leave me alone,” said Teddy.

“Come on, Teddy, there’ll be plenty of replacements at Jerry’s! This I promise you, my boy. This I swear.”

“I don’t want to go.”

“Oh, he doesn’t want to go. Listen, son, do you like girls? Do you?”

Teddy sighed.

“Well, really, one’s as good as another, I say. Now toss your glad rags on and foot it on out here. I will be very disappointed in you, young man, if I’m forced to come in and fetch you. Very disappointed indeed. Besides, you have to admit—it’s your own fault you lost her, old boy. You said so yourself.”

When Michael proved relentless, Teddy finally surrendered, and both of them, dressed to the nines, ventured out into the winter night to catch a cab to Jerry’s labyrinthine townhouse atop the hill. All his old school chums would be there, Michael assured him, and that would cheer him up, wouldn’t it? But the idea simply depressed Teddy more. He did not think he could stand their jocular, wheedling greetings and their overweening bravado. But lots of people came to Jerry’s parties. Perhaps someone would offer an interesting diversion.

Things did not bode well when the valet ushered them inside. They were nearly bowled over by the bellowed hellos and inundation of violent handshakes. There was a vigorous round of how-d’ye-do’s, and those that needed to be called bastards were gleefully called bastards. Teddy tried his best to smile and shook all the necessary hands, hating himself all the while for his capitulation. Then he was swooped into the parlor room to see Jerry’s new level of decadence.

As it turned out, the New Year’s Eve party was a masquerade. Ornate tin masks with the visages of animals were piled on a table by the door, and a big tin lamb mask was stuffed onto Teddy’s head and he was shoved into the party. There he saw the masks were just the beginning: Not only had Jerry booked a top-notch jazz band, but he’d also hired ballerinas from the local company to twirl through the crowd like living decorations. Bars lined the party floor on either side, and guests adorned with fantastic faces were already shambling across the room cawing laughter, with highballs dribbling from their gloved hands.

“Can’t believe they’re ossified already!” cried Michael happily, eyes glinting through his bear mask as he bounded over to the bar to catch up. Teddy reluctantly followed.

It was, as expected, a satisfactorily merry occasion: Debates were held in the corners as to whether or not Jerry had outdone last year, with an even split on the issue. But Teddy did not join in; he did not accept any proffered cigars, or get caught up in conversation, and he barely noticed when his friends tried to usher a ballerina his way.

“What’s with Teds?” he heard someone ask.

“Bastard’s nursing a broken heart,” someone answered. “Been dippy for over a month. Some schoolteacher or other. You know him. Always the romantic, Teddy.” And they laughed.

Something cold and terrible calcified in Teddy’s heart. He ordered a pony of scotch, and another, and then another, and sometime around eleven, when everyone was very tight indeed, Teddy found himself propped up against the bar listening to a discussion about cocktails.

“Menken was correct,” declared Otto Eyison through his immense swan mask. “A martini is a sonnet. A perfect sonnet. It’s their best export.”

“Gin or vodka?” asked someone.

This elicited so many awful glares that the speaker physically recoiled. “What?” he asked defensively.

“A martini is always made with gin,” said Patricia Aberforth. “Never vodka. Vodka is a recent perversion.”

“As is the shaker,” said Otto.

“Oh, but I like the shaker,” said Patricia. “It gives it that nice chill.”

“It’s a French innovation,” said Otto with disgust. “Crushes the gin. Smashes the ice. A stirred pitcher is the proper form. Can’t be beat, like I said.”

They next evaluated the strengths of the negroni, a rather new and delicious cocktail, though it did have the misfortune of being Italian. Teddy stared at his own glass, as he was not entirely sure what was in it, though he’d been drinking it for the past half-hour. He grew bored and went outside to the townhouse’s courtyard, where he wandered through the starlit statues. When he came to the steps down to the garden, he sat down and gave a great sigh. After a moment he began to feel tired, and rested his head against the handrail.

“Cold night, isn’t it?” said a voice.

Teddy sat up and turned. He saw that one of the courtyard statues was not a statue at all; it was a tall, thin man wearing a stork-like bird mask. He stood very still with a flute of champagne in one hand. Even at this distance Teddy could see his small, sad eyes shining in his mask.

Teddy agreed that it was a very cold night.

“I almost hesitate to ask what could have driven you out into this chill weather,” said the man, walking over.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Teddy. “The conversation, I suppose. They’re debating cocktail knowledge like it’s a philosophy course, or something.”

“Ah, but it can be, in a way,” said the man. “I, for instance, have always personally felt that a cocktail should most resemble a life.”

“A what?” said Teddy.

“A life.”

“How so?”

“Well, a lot of work goes into a good cocktail,” said the man. “Many ingredients, much preparation. It can take hours or even years of labor to get the ingredients ready and mix them properly. And then, once it’s all done, why, it all seems to go by in a heartbeat, doesn’t it?”

“Does it?” said Teddy, but thought to himself: Did he say years?

“Yes,” he said. “Just a few sips. A fleeting taste. A pleasant suffusion of warmth, beginning in the belly. And then it’s all over. Much like a life. That is what a real cocktail should be. It should mirror the greater experience, shouldn’t it?”

Teddy smiled, confused. “I think I’d like to try a cocktail like that.”

“Would you?” said the man. He thought for a bit, then tossed out his remaining champagne. “Well, everyone gets one eventually. And it seems your time has come. Here, my dear soul, let’s go back inside. I shall make you one.”

“Oh, no, you don’t have to do that.”

“But I insist,” said the man. “Come. Let me educate you a little.”

Teddy wobbled to his feet and followed the man to the bar, where his new friend reached over and plucked up a large Boston shaker. “You don’t mind, do you?” the man asked the barman.

The barman, startled, shook his head.

“Good.” The man skillfully spun the shaker around in one hand. “Now. What sort of drink do we want?”

“Well, I’ve always been partial to scotch,” said Teddy.

“Scotch? For your year’s last moments? Oh, no. No, no. That’s much too coarse. But what is it we need? What drink is fitting for such an end?” He turned to the window. Outside the winter night seemed even more barren and lonely than before. Snow was beginning to fall, and the gray light of the moon made the statues in the courtyard look icy and lonesome.

He turned back to look at Teddy. “I think what we need,” he said, “is a cocktail of heartache.”

“Of what?” said Teddy.

“Heartache,” he said again. “And unless I’m mistaken, you just might have that in spades. Am I wrong?”

Teddy opened his mouth, taken aback, but for some reason the man’s small, sad eyes calmed him. He shut his mouth and lowered his head a little. “No,” he said quietly.

“I see,” said the man. “It is evident that you’re quite tormented. Someone is lost from your life, perhaps never to return.”

Teddy sighed. And as he sighed the man swooped forward with the shaker and seemed to snatch something out of the air.

“Ah, good. This will serve quite nicely.” He held up the shaker. There at the bottom were several ounces of a very thin, powder-blue, illusory fluid, and for reasons Teddy did not understand the mere sight of it put pangs in his heart. It was the color that filled his head when he was alone on the streets at night, or when he pored over old letters in the early hours of the morning, or clapped a handkerchief to his nose to catch a lingering scent. It was the color of that most painful despair, the most wretched of depressions. He looked away.

“How did you get that?” he asked.

“Oh, most things are very easily gotten,” said the man. “Provided you are looking for them the right way. This is very high quality, you know. I’ve not seen such good heartache in years. Were it a bit purplish we’d know we had something more hysteric and self-indulgent, but this . . . This is pure, and cold.”

Teddy admitted that the color did seem very good.

“Well, now,” said the man. “We shall need to find something to balance out the malty flavor. Then some spice, a sweetener, some bitters, and something to chill it. And then a garnish, of course.” He turned his sad eyes back on Teddy and looked him up and down. “The garnish will be the hardest. It most always is. But it will be such a marvelous cocktail, my dear soul. It will suit this night and you perfectly. I promise it.”

Teddy scratched his head. “I’m sorry, I don’t . . . I don’t think I ever got your name. Did you come with Lawrence? Are you from his firm?”

The man scanned the crowd, looking for something, and absently said, “A firm? No. But I was a judge, once.”

“I thought so,” said Teddy. “You had the look of a legal man about you. I guess parties like this attract all kinds.”

“You’ve no idea,” said the man. “On such cold nights a gathering of warmth and happiness like this calls all kinds of things down out of the dark skies. Now. What is next? Ah! I have it. I think perhaps a fond embrace would do the trick.”

The man took Teddy by the arm and they wove through crowds of cackling people until they came to an elderly couple dancing slowly on the dance floor. They were probably too old for such a party, but they did not seem to care: They simply turned about, hand in hand, staring into one another’s eyes and trying to get ever closer.

The man in the bird mask sighed. “Look at them. How happy they are! Clearly they have spent years in each other’s company, yet the love is still visible in their faces. Have you ever known such happiness, my dear soul? I should hope you have.”

“I did, once,” said Teddy weakly. “For a little while.”

“All whiles are little. No matter how sweet.” He held the shaker out and clapped it on something in the air. The dancing couple blinked a little, but otherwise did not react.

“Look,” said the man in the bird mask. He held up the shaker. The powder-blue fluid within had become a much stronger, brighter blue. “Similar to heartache, but different. A fond embrace has all the longing, but it has what it longs for. It is complete.”

“I see,” said Teddy, though he didn’t.

“That should balance out the maltiness, but now what . . . Oh, yes! The spice. I know just what we need. Shouldn’t some lies work well?”

“Lies?” said Teddy, but again the man grabbed him by the arm and pulled him until they were standing behind Jerry Ulkridge himself, who was talking to three young men Teddy did not know.

“So honestly, Jerry,” said one of them. “How do you do it? How can you keep funding such magnificent parties each year?”

“Funding?” said Jerry. “You wish to talk about that tonight? Are we really going to be so distasteful?”

“We’re just curious,” said another. Then, in a sly tone, “After all, I’ve heard from someone that your father’s estate isn’t quite what it used to be.”

“What!” said Jerry. “Who on earth would say something so despicable? I’ll have you know that my father’s estate is getting along very well, thank you!”

“Oh?”

“Yes! As a matter of fact, our income has trebled over the past four years. Investing in the cotton trade, you see. I’d do the same if I were you boys. It’s got nowhere to go but up.” He smiled, though he still appeared agitated.

The man in the bird mask reached over Jerry’s shoulder and wafted something towards them. Then he opened the shaker again and lifted it up as though scooping it out of the air. The blue tinge at the bottom of the shaker grew a bit red, though some powder-blue whorls still remained.

“Of course, his father’s estate is not doing nearly so well,” said the man in the bird mask, withdrawing. “In truth, Mr. Ulkridge has driven it into debt, and each of these parties only makes it worse. So, he lies. These lies are more than a little angry, you can tell by the red color and the speed of the whorls. But we all lie, don’t we? Haven’t you told your fair amount of lies, sir?”

Teddy did not wish to answer the question. “How do you know that about him?”

“I told you,” said the man. “I am a judge.”

“Oh. Were you a judge in one of Jerry’s cases?”

The man sighed. “I do not judge in many cases these days, though I sometimes intervene on a whim. Now. A sweetener. What could we use . . .” He turned to look at the wall, and his eyes trailed up as if staring through the ceiling. “Well, well! Aren’t we lucky? Come.”

Teddy followed the man upstairs. As they walked down the hall Teddy saw they weren’t the only deserters: Many couples had left the party to find solace in the shadows of the second floor. They conversed quietly, sharing caresses or meaningful, silent stares, and some had abandoned all pretension and were deep in passion. But the man in the bird mask passed by all these and came to a small bedroom door, open a crack. He peeked through and said, “Yes. Here we are.” He pushed it open and entered, gesturing for Teddy to follow.

It took some time for Teddy’s eyes to adjust. He saw people in the room, but they had not noticed his entry. He made out the considerable bulk of Michael Creamier on the bed, and below him a flash of a white calf and a slippered foot, and the pale ring of a petticoat. Michael’s hand slowly crept under the petticoat, and the leg tensed as his hand advanced.

“Michael,” said a girl’s voice. “Please, I don’t . . . I don’t want to.”

“But you do, really,” he said huskily. “Don’t you?”

“But I’ve never . . . Oh, I don’t know about this.”

“Don’t you love me?” The soft tap-tap of drunken kisses in the dark.

“Yes, but . . .”

“Then be still.” Michael’s backside shifted, and there was the tinkle of a belt buckle and a shifting of clothes. “Let’s get these . . . off . . .”

“Michael, no,” whispered the girl. “Michael, please . . .”

But Michael’s back flexed, and a soft cry came from beneath him. “There,” he said, his voice trembling. “There.”

Teddy thought he saw the man in the bird mask move in the dark, and he heard the shaker open and close.

“What was that?” said the girl.

“Be still,” said Michael. “Please, be still.”

The man in the bird mask crooked a finger, and they softly walked out and shut the door.

“Michael Creamier,” said Teddy with disgust. “That’s a true bastard if ever there was one. The things he’s done . . . I can’t believe I still think him a friend. How drunk must he be that he didn’t even see us?”

The man held up the shaker. The mixture inside had taken on a greenish hue. “I’m sure I can’t say. But what could be sweeter than a virgin’s last gasp? Her last gasp as a virgin, I mean. Have you ever heard one yourself?”

Teddy stared at him. Then, ashamed and miserable, he nodded.

“Yes,” said the man. “This one is laced with regret. Look at how light and frothy it has made our cocktail. How she must have hoped that he would listen, and stop. It must have been so terrible for her, yes?”

Teddy stood still. He was trying not to remember a night in his own past, only a few weeks ago, a night of mistakes and heedless words and too much wine, and the awful morning after when he’d realized what he’d done, and how irreparable everything had become in the wake of those few fragile moments in the dark. “It must have been very terrible,” he said.

“Very,” said the man in the bird mask. “Now come. Bitters are next.”

They went back downstairs and out into the courtyard. It was snowing very hard now. Teddy half-wished to go back in and get a coat, but the man in the bird mask walked on among the moonlit statues, looking from stony face to stony face. “Aren’t you cold?” asked Teddy.

“Hm?” said the man. “Oh, a little. But I always am, here. I come from very hot climes, with lots of sand and deserts. Very dry, except in the flood years. But I don’t mind. Do you?”

Teddy realized he did feel a little warmer. Or did he? He found he did not really feel either hot or cold. “I suppose not.”

“How hard their lives must be, these statues,” said the man. “They are stuck out here in the cold, the dark, watching the merriment within. And they can never enter, never join. Do you not feel the same sometimes?”

“Yes,” he said. “All the time, recently.”

“Yes,” said the man in the bird mask. He ran the shaker under the still lips of the statues. As he did the mixture within turned slightly translucent. “A bitter thing, that desire. It almost curdles.” Swishing the shaker about, he walked to the edge of the courtyard and set it down on the steps. “And now to be chilled by the winter wind. Then all we’ll need is the garnish. Come here and sit by me, my dear soul.”

As Teddy sat he took off his lamb mask and threw it away into the spindly bushes.

“Has this been a good year, sir?” asked the man in the bird mask. “Is this a beginning for you, or an end?”

Teddy thought about it. “An end.”

“But what could be ending for you?”

“It feels like . . . everything,” said Teddy. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“I just might,” said the man. “I have heard quite a few confessions in my day.”

Teddy sat, head bowed. “I don’t know. It’s . . . It’s as if I’ve given something up, and the giving of it hollowed me out. It was my own fault. I know what I did. And I wish I could take it back. But I can’t. It’s all part of love, isn’t it?”

“I cannot say,” said the man.

“It’s feeling complete, it’s feeling whole. There’s nothing like it in the world. And it feels so strong. But it isn’t strong. It breaks so easily. It just takes one mistake, and then . . .”

“Then what?” said the man in the bird mask. Teddy noticed his mask had changed a little. The tin seemed to glimmer in the starlight, and was he imagining things, or were those real feathers at the edges of the face?

“And it’s gone,” said Teddy. “Everything. You won’t ever feel so wonderful again. And all the years after . . . They’ll be muted and gray in the face of what you’ve lost, what you threw away. And you did it. You did this to yourself.”

The man in the bird mask picked up the shaker and examined it contemplatively. “A life is a matter of moments,” he said. “They take so much preparation, these moments. Years of shaping, of simmering. And then they come to a head, and are drunk, and gone. I do wish people would enjoy them more. That is all I ever judge people by. Of all the words I ever fashioned, the most important are still repeated today, long after those who worshipped me have gone.”

“What are they?” asked Teddy.

The man in the bird mask turned to him. And when he spoke his beak opened as if it was his mouth, and Teddy could not discern where his mask stopped and his flesh began: “Eat, drink, and be merry,” said the man. “For tomorrow, we die.”

“What’s wrong with your mask?” asked Teddy.

“My mask?” said the man. “I am not wearing a mask, Teddy Ford.”

Teddy stared at him. He began to feel very cold. “Who are you?”

“A friend, Teddy Ford,” said the man. “And a judge. I intervene so very rarely these days, like I said, but you came stumbling into my lap, didn’t you?”

“I did? What do you mean?”

The man pointed at something beside him. Teddy looked and saw they were not alone on the steps: There was a man seated a few steps down, leaning against the handrail. But his skin was very pale, almost blue, and his eyes were closed as if sleeping. Teddy peered at his face, and realized he recognized him.

“Oh,” he said softly. He touched his own face. “I see. I . . . I didn’t go back inside, did I?”

“No,” said the man. “You did not.” He took two glasses from his pocket and poured the cocktails. He picked them both up and held them beneath the frozen man’s nose. A tiny cloud of condensation puffed from his nostrils, and something crystal-white crept across the glasses’ rims. “I am sorry about the garnish. I told you it was the hardest part. But it must always be the same. The drinker’s last breath, you see. But it is worth it, isn’t it, to experience a handful of moments once more before they are gone?” The man held one glass out to him. “For you, Mr. Ford.”

Teddy took it and stared at the cocktail. Then he drank. And as he drank he tasted things he thought he’d forgotten long ago: the delight of a bright morning spent walking with a warm hand in his; the scent of jasmine wafting over to him across green hills; the way a candle flame dances in a darkened restaurant, making the eyes across from him gleam with hope and excitement; a tight embrace he wished could last for years; and then the bitterness of lies, the awful torn feeling of wanting a thousand things at once, and the frustration brought by the sight of soft white flesh, and pinkened lips, and the terrible, trembling desire to be known and held and loved whatever the cost.

“Your life, Mr. Ford.” The man’s voice seemed very far away now. “I suggest you drink it slowly now, and enjoy it.”

But soon the last drop was gone.

• • •

When it came close to midnight everyone began preparing for the countdown. Otto Eyison looked around. “Where’s Teddy got to?” he said. “He was just here. He can’t miss midnight.”

“Perhaps he went outside,” said Patricia. “He did keep looking out the windows.”

“I thought he came back in with that tall fellow,” said a friend. “Didn’t he?”

“A tall fellow?” asked Patricia. “I didn’t see anyone like that.”

“Bloody fool,” said Otto. “I shall have to fetch him, won’t I.”

Otto opened the French doors and walked out into the courtyard. It was terribly cold outside, and the wind clawed at his flesh. He stuffed himself into his coat and called, “Teddy! Teddy, are you out here?”

There was no answer. He walked to the top of the steps that led down to the garden, and stopped. There was a crumpled shape at the foot of the stairs. In his drunkenness Otto almost thought it was a person, but that was foolish; no sane man would come out to sit in such cold. He thought about investigating, but noticed something bright beside his foot on the top step.

He blinked and looked down. On the ground were two highball glasses. One was empty, but the other had a few sips left. He picked it up and examined the drink within.

It was the most peculiar color, a soft, translucent blue. And though he could not say why he thought such a thing, he felt the color was that of heartache, if it could have a color at all.

He sniffed it. The drink smelled very appealing. He considered tasting it, but shook his head. “Can’t leave such nice glasses out here,” he said, and he tossed the drink out, picked up the other glass, and walked back inside to the party.

© 2011 by Robert Jackson Bennett.

Originally published in Broken Time Blues,

edited by Jaym Gates & Erika Holt.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Robert Jackson Bennett‘s 2010 debut Mr. Shivers won the Shirley Jackson award as well as the Sydney J. Bounds Newcomer Award. His second novel, The Company Man, won a Special Citation of Excellence from the Philip K. Dick Award, as well as an Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original. His third novel, The Troupe, has topped many “Best of 2012” lists, including that of Publishers Weekly. His fourth novel, American Elsewhere, is now out to wide acclaim. He lives in Austin with his wife and son. He can be found on Twitter at @robertjbennett

Phalloon the Illimitable
Matthew Hughes

Previously on The Kaslo Chronicles:

With galactic civilization about to collapse as the universe shifts from rationalism to magic, hardboiled confidential operative Erm Kaslo is working for Diomedo Obron, a wealthy magnate who aims to become a powerful wizard in the new order. But a rival has tried to destroy Obron, and the thugs who made the attempt came from the direction of an estate owned by a proto-thaumaturge who styles himself Phalloon the Illimitable. And Phalloon is building himself an unbreachable redoubt.

The estate of Phalloon the so-called Illimitable was in most respects much like that of the budding thaumaturge Diomedo Obron, Erm Kaslo’s new employer: It had a large, solid house, some remote outbuildings, lawns and a lake, clumps of mature trees, and an all-enclosing wall. What made it different, Kaslo saw as he surveyed it from a hill in the middling distance, was a rocky prominence that stood in the estate’s northeast corner.

He had come to his vantage point by a roundabout route, leaving a nondescript rented aircar an hour’s walk from the hill on which he had spent the day and which he had scaled from the far side. He was lying on his belly just short of the summit, where a leafy bush grew. Beneath the bush he had placed a compact device that was bedecked with an array of surveilling percepts trained on the territory below. Before he left Obron’s estate, he had also decanted his integrator’s core into a garment that resembled a plump scarf, and now wore his assistant around his neck.

After closely surveying the estate’s powerful but concealed defenses, he told the integrator to concentrate the surveillance suite’s attention on the northeast corner.

“What are we seeing?” Kaslo said.

“By outward appearance, a geological folly,” said his assistant. “As if the man has built himself a hill.”

“It is definitely artificially constructed?”

“Definitely. There have been no geological processes in the area that would account for it. More to the point, although the exterior resembles a naturally occurring mound, the interior is built of stone blocks arranged to create rooms and corridors, staircases and subtly camouflaged windows. There are also two subterranean levels, one of which resembles nothing so much as a dungeon.”

Kaslo studied the schematic his integrator caused to appear a handsbreadth before his eyes. “So we can probably discount the notion that Ser Phalloon intends to be a wizard of the benevolent persuasion.”

“Yes. The rooms are not empty, though most are undecorated. They have been furnished with items from the main house. In fact, a carryall is now on its way from the manse to deliver kitchen utensils and food stores.” The device showed Kaslo an image of the ground vehicle trundling across the open space.

“That’s making a mess of the lawn, isn’t it?” The heavy tires gouged parallel ruts in the deep green sod, whose perfection must have needed centuries of mowing and rolling. “What does that suggest?”

“The same as the construction of a false hill that has a dungeon: that Ser Phalloon, like Diomedo Obron, has gone insane.”

Kaslo’s response was a creaky rumble in the back of his throat. It was a noise that meant he was thinking through a situation and coming to a dark conclusion. He told his assistant to maintain its watch and to advise him of any developments, then turned his thoughts inward.

His new employer, Obron, had told him that the universe’s fundamental operating principle was about to shift from rationalism to sympathetic association—what was vulgarly called “magic.” It happened, arbitrarily, two or three times in every aeon, with catastrophic effects on the civilizations that had grown up and flourished under the old order. A month before, Kaslo would have received that information in the same spirit as his integrator had—as proof that the speaker’s sanity was gravely suspect. Since then, he had seen and participated in events that had forced him to revise his viewpoint.

Obron had said that the change, when it came, would come swiftly. “Not like a flood, with the waters gradually rising. More like a field effect. Before the sudden switch, there is a brief period of instability, during which magic becomes slightly more reliable and cause-and-effect a little less so. We are in that phase now. Soon the curtain will fall, and all will be as new.”

New, but hardly better, Kaslo thought. He considered his integrator and the surveillance suite: powerful, sophisticated, the products of millennia of acquired and applied knowledge. When the change came, they would become no more useful than the rock on which the spy gear rested. And all his hard-won skills at building and using such devices, as well as the other abilities that had carried him to the top rank among confidential operatives on the Grand Foundational Domain of Novo Bantry, would be in vain. He had no talent for magic.

He spoke a short word that was completely out of context, yet succinctly expressed his emotions. His situation was far from good, and needed immediate improvement. Hiring on as a confidential op with Obron had involved Kaslo in a deadly struggle between the magnate and a ruthless rival who worked from concealment. The enemy had sent thugs to kill them both and to steal Obron’s collection of ancient spellbooks and magical paraphernalia. He had planted a spy in Obron’s household then caused that spy to self-combust before Kaslo could question him.

The evidence indicated that this shadowy adversary was likely Phalloon, who was known to be keeping Obron under surveillance and was certainly seeking to position himself to emerge from the coming transition as a powerful thaumaturge. The artificial hill, if improved upon, would make a strong redoubt.

A thought occurred. He told his assistant, “Recall Obron’s map of ley lines.” He was referring to an ancient chart that recorded lines of arcane power that ran across the terrain of Novo Bantry, said to be very useful to wizards. When an image of the map appeared in the air before him, he said, “Overlay the position of Phalloon’s and Obron’s estates.”

A schematic appeared. Obron’s demesne was crossed by a thin red line, some distance from his house and the workroom where he conducted his experiments. But on Phalloon’s land, a solid red and an even wider green line intersected.

“Magnify Phalloon’s estate and show me the lines in relation to his unnatural hill.” He swore again when he saw what he expected to see. The redoubt was built right above the crossing point.

“We have a problem,” he said to his assistant. “When the moment comes—and it may do so at any time—our little wizard will be as a newly hatched chick without a nest, while the enemy will be a fully fledged raptor swooping down from its impregnable eyrie, all beak and talons.”

“There are no such things as wizards,” his integrator said. “I wish to make a recommendation.”

“Make it.”

“You should submit yourself to an examination of your mental faculties. Lately, you have been confusing Obron’s fantasies with reality.”

“You don’t accept that the universe is about to change, swiftly and drastically?”

“It would be irrational to think so.”

“And I built you to be rational.”

“Indeed.”

Kaslo contemplated for a moment a world without integrators, without weapons that aimed themselves, without reliable machines of any kind—a world ruled by the whims of an Obron or a Phalloon.

It was not a pleasant prospect. Of course, he did not have to accept it. When the change came, civilization would collapse. The devices that created food and water and maintained health would fail. Millions would surely die; he could find a quiet corner and, with dignity, become one of the countless and uncounted dead.

But then he pushed the thought away. He was not made to go meekly down into the ground. He would stay and fight. And, weak-minded as his employer might be, he would not be the worst thaumaturge to rise up in the new times—whereas Phalloon the Illimitable had probably chosen an apt sobriquet, and Kaslo knew that of those who will endure no limits inevitably grow into monsters.

“Only one thing to do,” he told his assistant.

“The examination?” it said. “I have found a diagnostician.”

“No. We will leave the surveillance unit to watch the redoubt.” He slid down the slope until he could stand up, then made his way to the woods where he had hidden Obron’s aircar. He flew it just above the ground for quite a distance, before he took it into the upper air and head for his employer’s estate.

• • •

Diomedo Obron paced his workroom floor, the knuckle of an index finger pressed against his bared teeth. The schematic of ley lines meeting at Phalloon’s new construction hung in the air. Kaslo told his integrator to turn it off.

Obron stopped and gave him a haunted look. “It’s not just a redoubt,” he said.

“Then what is it?”

“He showed me some of his books once,” the thaumaturge said, “just to rub grit in my eyes. He has a copy of Sholoff’s Extravaganza—a complete round-up of Nineteenth Aeon fabrication spells.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means that when the change comes, with his full spell-casting power augmented by the ley-line node, he can transform that rough assemblage of stone into a wizard’s castle.”

“Not a good thing,” said Kaslo.

“Monstrous! He would be impregnable, with the capability to lash out in all directions.” The proto-wizard sank onto a stool and put his head in his hands. “We’re done before we’ve even started. Nothing I have can withstand what he’ll bring against us.”

Kaslo’s integrator interrupted. “Report from the surveiller: Two cartloads of goods are being transferred from the house to the redoubt. From the tinkling of the cargo, the device infers bottles of liquid.”

“He’s moving his wine cellar,” Obron said. “His most precious possession. He must expect the change to come very soon.” He got up and went to his workbench, picked up a set of rune-covered ivory sticks and tossed them, then studied the pattern they made. “The node must give him greater accuracy than I can achieve. But it will surely be soon.” He swept the sticks to the floor. “We are defenseless, finished.”

“When I was a boy,” Kaslo said, “I won many a fight against schoolyard bullies by not allowing them to set the rules for the engagement.”

“How do you mean?”

“They always liked to talk before they acted. I would hit them while they were still talking, then keep hitting them.”

Obron waved a defeated hand. “Phalloon is not a schoolboy.”

“True, but he thinks he can set the stage for the fight before it happens. Why should we wait until he is ready?”

“The ley-line node,” Obron said. “Do you not know the meaning of the word, impregnable?”

“I do,” Kaslo said, “and he isn’t. Not yet.”

• • •

“Report,” said Kaslo.

“Almost finished,” his assistant said. “His house integrator’s defenses are massive but not terribly subtle. I just need to circumvent another one thousand and twelve scenarios and”—there was a brief pause— “it’s done.”

“Good,” said the op. “And the camouflage drape on the aircar?”

“Still holding. It will register as a pair of mating moths.”

“Then over the wall,” said Kaslo. He directed the volante to skim the top of Phalloon’s wall, coming in from the south at moth speed. Then it dropped and sped toward the pile of stone. It stopped and settled to the turf so that the rough structure was between the intruders and the main house. “Out we go,” the op whispered, encouraging Obron with a strong grip on the thaumaturge’s limp bicep.

Kaslo’s employer was shivering, though the evening air was mild. He clutched a large satchel to his chest and stumbled as the op urged him into a shambling run toward the castle-to-be. “This is v-very d-dangerous,” he said.

“Not as dangerous as waiting for the enemy to outmatch us.” Kaslo opened the hold-all he had brought from the aircar and took out a self-aiming disorganizer. It was a more powerful weapon than he expected to need, but for this operation he did not care to be found wanting. He spoke to his integrator using an almost silent, subvocal system he had designed himself. “Report.”

The device’s voice spoke deep inside his ear. “Nothing to report.”

“Activity?”

“One servant in the cellar, arranging wine.”

“Phalloon?”

“His house integrator shows him in his workroom, packing items in a trunk. Two bodyguards with him.”

“Defenses, wards, alarms in this structure?” Kaslo tapped the stone wall.

“Nothing,” said the integrator. “Most curious. He is moving from a heavily, if clumsily, defended location to one that is completely undefended.”

“That is because he expects to defend his castle by means magical.”

“So it’s a shared delusion,” his assistant said. “Is it contagious?”

“Never mind.” The op turned to Obron. “Can you see if there’s anything to attack us or keep us out?”

His employer looked up from a globe of clouded crystal he had taken from the satchel. Kaslo could see milky shapes swirling within the sphere. Obron’s voice quavered as he said, “He has laid the bases for two spells I recognize, one that I don’t. But none is yet active. They await the final steps.”

Kaslo swung the disorganizer on its shoulder strap so that it hung across his middle. He activated its system, waited for the telltale light to glow. “Then in we go.”

He led a still-shaking would-be wizard along the wall until they came to a set of steps leading down into the structure. At the bottom was a door. Kaslo consulted his integrator.

“Latched, but unlocked,” it said.

He went down the steps, found the latch, and silently lifted it. The door swung noiselessly inward on shiny new hinges, revealing a basement room lit by an oil lamp. A plump, balding man was taking dust-covered bottles out of padded baskets and slipping them carefully into a wall-spanning rack. He moved slowly, fully absorbed in his task.

Kaslo stepped inside and drew Obron after him. He lifted the disorganizer and cleared his throat. The servant turned, saw the weapon’s emitter aimed at him, and dropped a bottle. It smashed on the stone floor and wine ran past his feet.

“Over here,” Kaslo said, gesturing toward the wall beside him. He had to repeat the instruction, because the man was staring down at the fragments of green glass in a red puddle as if it were the worst horror he could imagine. Finally, the servant crossed the distance on trembling legs, his jowly face paste-colored, his eyes huge with sadness. When told to sit, he did so, staring at nothing.

Kaslo swung the disorganizer aside and drew a restraint from the hold-all, along with a combination gag and blindfold. Moments later, he had the servant fettered, tethered, and incommunicado. As he straightened up, his integrator spoke in his ear.

“Surveillance reports activity: Phalloon and the bodyguards leaving the house, heading this way on foot.”

“Arms?”

“Energy weapons. Also, and this is odd, they are carrying antique, spring-operated bolt-throwers.”

“How long before they arrive?”

“Two minutes at their present hurried pace.”

Kaslo turned to Obron. “Upstairs, quickly!”

An inner staircase led from the cellar to a kitchen. Kaslo had time to notice that the room was equipped with rudimentary appliances before he found another set of utilitarian stairs plainly meant for staff. They went up again and came out in a sizable room lit by a pair of narrow slit-windows. The space was walled and floored in stone, with heavy wooden furniture stacked in a corner. Sheets of paneling leaned against one wall and a large, rolled-up carpet lay beneath the windows.

“Where are Phalloon and his men now?” he asked his assistant.

“I . . . I am not sure,” it said.

“Why not?”

“The surveillance suite is not functioning correctly.”

“Use your own percepts.”

“I . . . cannot. The scans are . . . unreliable.”

“Define ‘unreliable.’”

“They are nonsense. I see three men, then a crowd, then no one. Now they appear to be trees, now some kind of cake.”

“Cease,” Kaslo said. To Obron, he said, “I think the moment has come. Let us hurry.”

Obron did not move. He had the look of a man who has just experienced an unexpected inner pang. “What is it?” Kaslo said.

The other man turned a face toward him that seemed to glow with a new vitality. It had been thin before; it seemed broader now, and somehow more solid. “There’s a spell I put on myself, weeks ago,” Obron said. “Vilzai’s Vivifier, it’s supposed to . . . Never mind. I think it has just really taken effect.”

He took a long, deep breath, and plainly drew immense enjoyment from the simple act. Kaslo had seen men react much the same way to powerful stimulants. Though he knew they had little time, he asked his employer, “The spells Phalloon started but did not complete—could you complete them now?”

The glowing face became thoughtful. After a moment came the answer. “Oh, yes.”

“Is one of them intended to defend or isolate this place?”

“Yes. Plackatt’s Discriminating Delimiter. It keeps out what you don’t want in, and keeps in what you don’t want out.”

“Apply it now,” Kaslo said, “and specify Phalloon to be excluded.”

“Give me a moment.” Obron reached into a pocket of his upper garment and withdrew a scarred old libram. He flicked through its pages with an authoritative air, stopped at one, and quickly read what was there. Then he put the book away, sniffed, and placed his feet in a certain alignment and put his fingertips together in an unusual combination. He paused as if waiting for a beat only he could hear, then spoke seven syllables.

A chill wind rushed through the room, and Kaslo felt the air crackle with a silent energy. His teeth vibrated uncomfortably for a moment and it was as if invisible hands traced the shape of his body and the lineaments of his face. He shivered at the phantom touch, then the sensations were gone.

Obron wore a look of pleasant surprise. He looked at his hands, held before him, as if they were new and different appendages. Kaslo noticed that they no longer shook. “Well,” the wizard said, “that was . . . something.”

“Has the spell worked?”

“I should think so. We’ll know when Phalloon tries to cross it.”

Kaslo asked his integrator if it could guide him to Phalloon’s workroom. It made no reply. He tried again, adding a fundamental command word that allowed the device no leeway for prevarication.

“Oom,” said its voice in his ear. “Oom-aloom-a.” Then it began to hum a simple melody.

“Stop that,” he said. He had to repeat the instruction with the command word. After another verse, the device went silent.

“Let’s go,” the op said. He led the way out of the room into a stone hallway, saw an open door down the corridor. He slung the disorganizer into the ready position then stopped and checked the weapon. It was inert. He unslung it so that he could use it as a club and crept to the open doorway. He glanced back to see Obron sauntering after him, rubbing his thumbs and fingers together as if the sensation was novel.

Beyond the doorway was a large room with a vertical slit of a window. Its walls held open shelves and cupboards, half-full of materials Kaslo would recently have called junk, but now recognized as magical paraphernalia. The op went to the window and peered out. He saw Phalloon and his two retainers making their way toward the false hill. The self-propelled trunk had malfunctioned, slowing their progress. The two hirelings had now grasped its handles and were half-carrying, half-dragging it after the thaumaturge, who kept taking a few quick strides toward their objective, then stopping to tap his foot impatiently as the others struggled with his burden.

Kaslo looked beyond them to where the towers of the city loomed on the horizon. The distance was too great for him to be sure that he was not seeing a buzz of traffic in the air above the spires. Reflexively, he began to tell his integrator to use its percepts, then remembered its last contribution and stopped.

He peered at the far skyline. He thought he saw a thin line of smoke rising. If he could see it at this distance, at the source it must be a thick column. In a moment, it was joined by another. And now that he let his eyes focus on individual towers, he was sure that he saw smoke issuing from near the top of one of the tallest.

His imagination showed him volantes and heavier airbornes losing their power and crashing to the ground. Or losing their senses and slamming into buildings. It was too much to take in. He fought off a shudder; he had enough to deal with already.

Down on the lawn, Phalloon had scaled the long slope leading to the prominence on which he had sited his castle-to-be. He paused where the land leveled out and watched impatiently as his henchmen labored up with his luggage. They stopped halfway up, consulted for a moment, then tried rolling the trunk up the incline, top over bottom. But Phalloon’s shrill squawk, followed by a high-pitched hectoring, returned them to their earlier, more laborious approach.

Kaslo’s original plan had been simple: When Phalloon came within range, he would have used the disorganizer. That would technically have been murder, but the enemy’s bodyguards were armed, and the op had no doubt they would have shot first if ordered to. Proactive self-defense, he would have deemed it.

But now, the great change had come and the disorganizer was nothing more than an intricately fashioned blunt object. Kaslo turned to Obron. “It’s your fight from here on in.”

His employer had already made his way to the shelves and cupboards and was examining his rival’s possessions. He chose a few of them, and after a cursory examination lined up three objects on the workbench. Then he opened his satchel and from its contents added some items of his own. He pursed his lips, pinched the bottom one between thumb and forefinger, humming tunelessly to himself.

“When will Phalloon encounter the barrier?” Kaslo asked him.

The wizard broke off his musings and glanced out the window. “Soon,” he said. He drew Kaslo’s attention to the trunk. “Too bad about that,” he said.

“Why?” said the op.

“I had a rough idea as to what Phalloon possessed.” He gestured at the shelves and the bench. “These are the lesser part of it.”

Kaslo saw the implication. “So, what’s he’s got out there—”

“There’s some power in it.”

“Can he collapse the barrier?”

“Doubtful. But just because he can’t cross it, doesn’t mean that he can’t hurl things through it. At least some things.” Obron directed a thoughtful look Phalloon’s way. “I’ll admit he has more learning than I—I’ll assume he has more will, though not much more.” He gestured toward the objects on the bench. “I, however, have a few items—some of them thanks to you—that should even the odds.”

“Who will win?” Kaslo said.

“I expect some touch and go,” said his employer. “Judgment will play a role. His impetuosity and arrogance will weigh against him. And he has one serious problem.”

“And that is?”

“I am in here, above the node of the red and green. He is not. Proximity may be the key. Moreover, I believe I have progressed slightly farther into the green school.”

He turned his gaze back toward the scene outside. Kaslo joined him. There was a definite pall of smoke above the distant crystal towers of Indoberia now, and a flicker of flames reflected in the shining spires. As he looked, a huge slab of one tower’s substance split off near the top, and fell toward the ground like an iceberg calving from a sea-touching glacier. As Kaslo saw tiny shards fly into the air, he reflected on how the builders would have used constrained forces to hold the great structures together. Now those powers were dissipated.

His mind offered him a series of unsought images: All up and down The Spray, on the Grand Foundational Domains, on their secondary worlds now themselves grown ancient, even on the roughest minor planets, the products of engineering and science would be failing. Great orbitals were falling from the skies; sliders buckling and heaving, throwing pedestrians from their speeding surfaces, towers and arches collapsing, dams yielding to gravity-mad torrents.

Again, he thrust the apocalyptic visions from his mind. There was nothing to be done about a universe gone mad. There was only what could be done in the here and now.

And here came a thaumaturge who would surely do his worst. Phalloon’s men had got the trunk up the slope. Rubbing his palms together, the wizard turned from them and stepped briskly toward the structure’s main door. A quick stride, then two more steps, a third, though not a fourth—because the small nose projecting from his round face abruptly struck an invisible wall. But the wizard did not just rebound; he was picked up, his feet clearing the ground, then hurled back almost to where his retainers were wrestling the trunk forward. They stopped, gaped, set down their burden, unslung their weapons, found them dead, and took up the bolt-throwers instead.

The wizard stood up, shook his head to clear it, and stood staring at the doorway. He struck a precise pose, moved his arms and hands in unlikely ways, and spoke words Kaslo could not hear. Then he felt his way forward, his hand outstretched until it was suddenly seized and jerked forward. Then again he was thrown back and down. Phalloon rose, his face now a moon covered by a dark cloud. He put his fists on his hips and glared at the door. Then he raised his eyes until he was looking up into the window from which Kaslo and Obron stood looking down at him. Kaslo could now see the whites of the wizard’s eyes, all around the irises. He need not be able to hear the words that Phalloon was mouthing to understand their meaning. Or the intent behind them.

Obron offered the other wizard an ironic salute, then turned to the items he had arrayed on the workbench. “And so it begins,” he said.

• • •

If Phalloon’s weakness was an impetuous nature, he managed to overcome it for the initial passage of wizardly arts. He did not return Obron’s salute, but turned and gestured brusquely to his men to take up the trunk and carry it back down the slope. Back on the flat, at a distance of a hundred paces, he bid them set it down. He then stood behind the chest and made a sequence of hand-waves over its top, which obliged him by popping open. Phalloon disappeared behind the upraised lid as he bent to delve within.

“I think I know what he’ll try first,” said Obron. He stepped to the bench and took up an object that resembled a three-pronged fork of green crystal, a little longer and wider than his hand. He voiced a few sounds over it and the chamber was immediately filled with a pervasive hum that became a buzz that quickly climbed in pitch until the op felt his teeth vibrating in his skull, before the frequency finally became too high for his ears to register.

Obron held the fork aloft. It now shone from within, growing ever brighter as the wizard whispered sibilant phrases over it, until Kaslo had to turn his eyes away. The thaumaturge carried it to the window, needing two hands to do so. From the manner in which he wove a wandering path across the room, it seemed to Kaslo that the glowing trident was being pushed this way and that by invisible forces.

The op could not see what was happening outside. Obron blocked the window and, besides, the light from the fork was nearly blinding. His master was still whispering incomprehensible sounds, while struggling to hold the trident in a two-handed grip that put Kaslo in mind of an angler trying to control a monster fish.

Then from beyond the window came a warble of thunder, a sound like a giant gargling on thickened blood. A huge pressure began to build in the chamber, and Kaslo had to clap his palms to his ears to save their sensitive membranes from being battered into his skull. Obron grimaced in pain, but his grip on the trident remained strong and now he brought both arms down so that the three ultraradiant prongs pointed through the slit in the wall. Instantly, the fork’s light was extinguished and the room shook to a ker-ack! louder than the discharge of any lightning bolt.

The pressure in the chamber instantly dropped back to normal; the op had to yawn and stretch his jaw to equalize the sudden change. Through spots of color that bloomed in his field of vision, he saw Obron hurry over to the bench, discard the now dull fork, and begin leafing through Hentero’s Compendium.

Kaslo went to the window. As his eyesight restored itself, he saw Phalloon sprawled upon his back in a circle of scorched grass. In the farther distance, the two henchmen half-ran, half-staggered away, one of them slapping at the back of his head, where small flames consumed his hair.

Kaslo was about to congratulate his master—employer now seemed an old-fashioned term—on victory, but he saw the more distant wizard raise his head, shake it once, then get to his knees and from there to his feet. With an air of fell determination, Phalloon marched to the trunk and stood looking down into it. Then he cast toward the stone pile a glance so baleful that the op felt something inside him turn cold.

“Out of the way,” said Obron, pushing him aside. “He’s employing Porthry’s Basilisk. He used to do it to mice and roaches, then offer us the results as parting gifts. As if anyone would be impressed by stone vermin.”

He sketched a figure in the air. Kaslo actually saw the lines of some complex symbol in green fire, then it faded.

So, too, did the chill in his belly.

Obron was leaning out the window now, calling in a mocking tone to his dispossessed rival. Kaslo heard him say, “. . . couldn’t cohere your fluxions if your life depended on it,” and “I’ve seen fancier digitation when the neighborhood loon picks his nose.”

“What are you doing?” Kaslo said.

Obron stepped back from the window. “Phalloon’s weakness,” he said, “is his tendency to overreach. I must engage his emotions.”

“I think you’ve already done that,” said Kaslo, as a stream of high-pitched vituperation sounded from outside.

“I need him to try something truly large, something beyond his means that I can then turn and apply against him.”

“And if it turns out to be beyond your means, as well?”

The thaumaturge shrugged. “I thought you were a man who could take a risk.”

“A calculated one,” said the op. “But the mathematics of your business are beyond me.”

“The discussion is now moot,” said Obron, peering again through the window slit. Kaslo looked, too, and saw Phalloon blowing into the neck of what appeared to be a large red balloon whose surface was marked by occult symbols in gold and silver. The sphere was already twice the size of his head and growing with each exhalation.

“As I hoped,” said Obron. “Prudence would see him using the breath of a well prepared subject—the best is a prepubescent boy fed on bread and milk. By using his own wind, he intensifies the force, but risks a rising dissonance that . . . Well, never mind. Now we will see.” He rubbed his hands together and went back to the items on the bench, chose a six-holed flute of yellow bone that had once been part of someone’s arm and returned to the window.

Kaslo had been watching the inflation of the sphere. Now the red-faced wizard paused to take several breaths. Obron leaned out the window and called, “What, out of wind so soon? That’s not the puffed-up bladder of hot air we all knew as Phalloon the Severely Limited.”

The taunt galvanized the puffing thaumaturge. He returned the neck of the balloon to his lips. His face turned first scarlet, then an alarming shade of purple as the figured orb doubled in size.

“Lovely,” said Obron. “A driven elemental is one thing; an elemental seethed in maniacal fury is altogether a different pail of eels.”

Kaslo had heard the term, but could not fit a meaning to it. “An elemental?”

Obron pursed his lips and blew a short breath through the flute, apparently too soft to raise a note. But the op had the impression that the instrument grew a tiny bit larger. “An air elemental,” the wizard said. “And a very angry one. He is causing it great distress.”

Outside, Phalloon was holding the balloon, now waist-high, by the neck, while his free hand made circular motions above it. The purple had spread to his neck and his bald pate resembled a large grape of surpassing ripeness.

“And, for good or ill,” said Obron, “here we go.” Raising the bone once more to his lips, he began to blow and finger the instrument, though Kaslo heard no sound. Outside, the sphere of air in Phalloon’s grip had begun to move of its own accord, displaying transient bulges and top-to-bottom ripplings of whatever material it was made from. Though it resembled a balloon, its red had not faded to pink as it had expanded. If anything, it was a deeper shade. The symbols and figures on it stood out starkly, shining through the gathering darkness.

Kaslo looked skyward. A black cloud had formed over the estate, a swirling mass of inky vapor, from which spirals of dark gray mist reached halfway to the ground before they were torn apart by eddies of air. Now Phalloon also looked up, and a vengeful smile split his flushed face. With a final clenching of his fist followed by a springing open of its thumb and fingers, he relaxed his other hand’s grip on the neck of the balloon.

Kaslo had expected an eruption of gases, even for the inflated sphere to fly off as its pent-up contents were released. Instead, the sphere sat as if weighted to the ground, while from its open neck issued a white, swirling fog that convoluted and roiled upon itself, seeming as thick as curds. As more of the thick gas emerged from confinement, it formed a long, conical shape that began to rotate, at first slowly, then faster and faster as its mass increased.

Phalloon stepped back, his hands busy in the air before him, his mouth constantly moving. The enlarging cyclone hung between earth and overhanging cloud, swelling as it spun at ever-increasing speed. It was paler now, the color of skimmed milk, and as it reached higher the dark cloud above began to rotate in harmony. The tendrils of gray mist that reached down now grew darker and more substantial, and when they touched the top and sides of Phalloon’s elemental, they were instantly sucked into its spin.

Kaslo could hear it now. It had begun as a soughing moan, as of wind playing about a house’s eaves, but it soon grew to the strength of a gale and kept building, as more and more of the overhead cloud was drawn down into the tornado. And now it was a roaring, ear-battering, constant blast.

The whirlwind towered up to the sky, where black clouds were racing from all directions to join its ever-growing mass. Phalloon had stepped back, his clothes and hair-fringe flapping as if frantic to escape. He glanced up, and Kaslo saw a worried look briefly cross the wizard’s round face, but then his fury returned. Phalloon bit his lip and raised a hand, its digits bent into strange alignments. He paused, then brought his arm down in a chopping motion that ended with his forefinger aimed squarely at the window where Kaslo stood.

And where Obron also waited, bent over his six-holed humerus, blowing his breath across the aperture at one end, his fingers rising and falling. Kaslo still could hear no sound from the instrument, though the wizard’s fingertips covered and uncovered the stops in what seemed a complex pattern. Obron’s brows were drawn down in intense concentration, and beads of sweat stood out on his forehead and upper lip.

Impossibly, the sound from outside grew even louder, causing the op to clap his hands to his ears once more. The whirling white cone had absorbed so much substance from the lowering clouds that it was now the color of black iron. And it was advancing steadily toward the half-built castle.

Until it met Plackatt’s Discriminating Delimiter. To Kaslo, it was like seeing dense fog come up against clear glass. The swirling mass of gray vapor flattened against the barrier, and the op could see into the whirlwind’s raging center. The spell had clearly stopped the elemental, he thought, but beyond the cyclone he could see Phalloon’s arms still thrashing the air, his mouth opening and closing as he chanted fresh words of power.

The barrier did not break—but it began to bow inward. Kaslo looked to the wizard he had chosen to follow, and wondered again if he had backed the wrong contender. Obron was piping for all he was worth, his fingers flying over the bone flute’s stops, perspiration now pouring from his brow, desperation in his eyes. Proximity to the ley-line node or not, Kaslo saw that the attempt to counter Phalloon’s power was failing. Obron had gambled, and was losing.

Kaslo looked around the chamber. Magical paraphernalia abounded, but it was of no use to him. He drew his energy pistol and realized that it was no more useful than a rock he could throw. He let it drop. Then he remembered.

To Obron, he said, “Keep blowing. I have an idea.” He left the chamber and found the stairs to the cellar. The plump, balding man was where he had left him, even though the restraint had ceased to function when the great change had come. The servant was sitting against the wall, staring at the broken bottle, his face an image of misery.

“You could have escaped,” Kaslo said.

The man did not look up. “To what?” He gestured to the smashed glass and pooled liquid. “That was a Grand Empyreal, of the 5546 vintage. The master will have my hide.” He blinked morosely then said, half to himself, “And, sad to say, that is not a metaphor.”

“It was not your fault.”

“Phalloon does not trifle with irrelevancies. I am the wine steward. Grand Empyreal stains the floor. No more need be said.”

“He values his wine highly?” Kaslo said.

“The refinement of his palate is his great pride.”

“And, society being in the process of falling apart, these are now irreplaceable.”

The majordomo nodded, tears in his eyes. “They were scarcely less so before the event. And I, of course, am not.”

Kaslo looked about the cellar. There were other racks, deeper in shadow, all filled with dusty bottles. “Which of these,” he said, “are dearest to Phalloon’s refined palate?”

• • •

The tornado was taking up a good deal of space now, pressing farther in against the discriminating barrier. Once outside of the castle-to-be, Kaslo had to step well to the side of the roaring, swirling mass of air to put himself within Phalloon’s line of sight. But the thaumaturge, intent on stirring his elemental to even vaster energies, did not notice the op.

Kaslo held up a dusty bottle. The wizard’s gaze remained fixed on the whirlwind, his hands in frantic, though precise, motion, his mouth chanting a stream of syllables that were inaudible over the constant blast.

The barrier bent further, and Kaslo felt the first stirring of a breeze that lifted the hair on the back of his neck. He picked up a second bottle from the crate he had brought from the cellar, and held both above his head. Still Phalloon remained focused on his elemental’s management.

Kaslo tapped the neck of one bottle against another, heard a faint clink over the sound of the storm. Phalloon’s eyes flicked his way, though his hands and mouth continued their strict machinations. The op tapped the bottles together again, a little harder, the musical sound a little louder.

Phalloon shuddered, a man intent on his work who was resisting an irresistible distraction. Kaslo shrugged, flipped the bottle in one hand so that he was now holding it by its neck, then performed the same maneuver with the other one. He held them both aloft, and his face communicated a silent message to the thaumaturge: You think I won’t? Of course, I will.

A spasm went through the wizard. His hands moved faster, though without losing their precision; his mouth spat inaudible sounds at a frantic rate. The whirlwind not only roared, but keened. Kaslo heard in the voice of the wind a frustrated rage that dwarfed any ire he had ever known or seen.

Phalloon’s gaze was locked on him now, the irises again rimmed by fury’s white. Kaslo offered the wizard another shrug, spread his arms wide above his head, brought them together. The bottles smashed. A cascade of richly aromatic wine and shards of thin glass showered his head, trickled down his neck, and soaked the collar of his shirt.

Just before the impact, he had seen Phalloon’s mouth form a new word. The op could not hear it over the roar of the wind, but he had no doubt that the purple-faced man had shouted No-o-o-o-o!

Unfortunately for Phalloon, the long, drawn-out exclamation was not part of the spell that bound the elemental—a spell whose spoken component must be expressed just so, lest the enslaved and tormented air spirit break the thaumaturgical bonds in which Phalloon had netted it, and become free to do as its nature dictated.

The elemental’s nature dictated that it take full-bodied revenge on the wizard who had dragged it from its plane, humiliated it with fetters, and lashed it with ever-sharper agonies—at least, as such terms apply to a creature of spirit. It ceased to batter itself against the barrier and instead sped across the distance between it and Phalloon. The wizard raised his hands and tried to say something, but the whirlwind was upon him in a blink of an eye. He was lifted from his feet, turned end over end and swept skyward in a circular rush as the elemental stretched out the kinks that Phalloon’s spell had inflicted upon its substance. The last Kaslo saw of him was a vision of the man’s eyes, now wholly white. A moment later, a thin rattle of red drops struck the barrier, followed by a few morsels of flesh and one shattered bone. Then the whirlwind rose into the dark cloud above and tore it to shreds. Before Kaslo had crossed the distance to the castle’s basement door, the sky was clear.

He resisted the wine steward’s attempts to seize his hand and rain kisses on it. “Just put away the rest of the wine, then find yourself other duties,” he said.

When he arrived back in what had been Phalloon’s workroom, Obron was leaning against the edge of the window slit, the bone flute loose in his fingers. Kaslo took a stool over to where Obron stood. The wizard looked tired but appeared serviceable. “You’d better sit,” Kaslo said, then helped steady the wizard as he sank down onto the seat, shoulders slumped, head fallen forward. The op took the flute from his hand—it had a warm, greasy feel that raised the bile of revulsion in him—and put it on the bench.

“Now what?” he said.

Obron looked up. Vilzai’s Vivifier seemed to need a reapplication, Kaslo thought. The wizard flourished a fatigued hand. “First we bring in Phalloon’s trunk, then I consult Sholoff’s Extravaganza and finish the castle. After that, rest, consolidate, plan.”

“Should we not go to Indoberia, try to help?”

Obron shook his head. “We would be overwhelmed.”

“We sit here, safe, while the world collapses?”

“What makes you think,” the wizard said, his voice sounding as weary as he looked, “that we are safe?”

© 2014 by Matthew Hughes.

Matthew Hughes writes science-fantasy. His sf novels are: Fools Errant and Fool Me Twice, Black Brillion, Majestrum, The Commons, The Spiral Labyrinth, Template, Hespira, The Damned Busters, The Other, Costume Not Included, and Hell to Pay. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Postscripts, Storyteller, Interzone and a number of “Year’s Best” anthologies. Night Shade Books published his short story collection, The Gist Hunter and Other Stories, in 2005. Formerly a journalist, he spent more than twenty-five years as a freelance speechwriter for Canadian corporate executives and political leaders. His works have been short-listed for the Aurora, Nebula, and Philip K Dick Awards. His web page is at matthewhughes.org.

The Armies of Elfland
Eileen Gunn and Michael Swanwick

It was the middle of the night when the mirrors came out of the elves. With a sound like the cushioned patter of an ice storm, the tiny mirrors fell to the ground, leaving a crust of glitter behind the marching elf army. They bled, of course, but the elven blood restored the dry land, undoing the effects of the drought, and moss emerged green from the ground in the troops’ wake.

The sight of the moss brought forth the drought-starved humans and their pathetic get to the mouths of their caves.

“Stay here!” the new father commanded. Not one of the children was his. But all the real fathers were dead, so they had no choice but to obey him or be beaten.

“Don’t go,” Agnes wanted to say. “Don’t trust them.” But Richard gently touched her lips to silence her. Richard was the oldest of the children, indeed almost an adult himself, and he did what he could to protect the others.

The adults fell on the damp moss, tearing it up by the double-handful like so much bread dough. They sucked the moisture from it and crammed its substance down their throats. Briefly, all seemed well. One of the new father’s wives was raising an arm to beckon the children down when the minute mirrors they had ingested suddenly expanded to ten, a hundred, a thousand times their original size. Jagged shards of mirror erupted from their flesh as horns, tusks, and spines. Blood fountained into the air and pooled on the ground, glimmering in the moonlight. The adults splashed through it, lurching grotesquely, writhing and howling in pain.

The children hid their eyes and turned away. The littlest ones cried.

Then, suddenly, there was silence. That was the hardest to bear of all.

But though the adults had ceased screaming, they did not fall. Brutally sharp glass fragments jutted from every inch of their bodies, holding them upright and rigid.

Nothing that was human remained of the adults. They had turned to crystal.

“We’ve got to bury them,” Agnes said firmly. “We can’t just leave them standing like that.”

“How?” Richard asked. “We can’t even touch them.”

The children had no shovels, but even with shovels they would have had a tough time trying to dig graves on the dry, barren beach. Where they stood had once been the shore of a small arm of the Pacific Ocean. But then the ocean had dried up and become a low, mountainous land of cliffs and sudden rifts, blanketed with dead fish and rotting seaweed. The sun had baked the wasteland that the elves had first created and then crossed as black and hard as obsidian. There would be no burials there.

“We can throw stones,” Frederic said. He was the youngest of the children. He hadn’t spoken until he was three, which was over five years ago. When he did start to speak, however, his first words were, “Things are not as they once were.” Followed, after two days of intense thought, by, “In any case, they could be arranged better.” He came up with ideas nobody else could have.

So they did as he suggested, smashing the starlight-glittery figures from a distance until they were nothing but mounds of broken glass. Richard, who had read a lot back when there were books, said, “In ancient times, when men were warriors and carried spears, they buried their dead in mounds of rocks called cairns. This was an honorable form of burial. Even kings and queens were buried that way.” Then he turned to Agnes. “You’re good with words,” he said. “Please. Say a few words over the dead.”

Agnes took a deep breath. At last she said, “The adults were stupid.” Everybody nodded in agreement. “But the elves are cruel, and that’s worse.” Everybody nodded again. “I’m sick of them, and I’m sick of their war.” She raised her voice. “I want to have enough food to eat! All the food I want, every day of my life. I’m going to get it, too. I don’t know how. But I do know that I’m never going to be fooled by the elves or their mirrors or their green moss ever again!”

She spat on the ground, and everyone else followed suit.

“Amen,” she said.

She had no idea how futile her vow would prove.

• • •

During the Alien Invasions, as they were called before the world learned that the armies of Elfland came not from someplace unimaginably far away but from somewhere impossibly nearby, the children and their parents had been vacationing on a resort near Puget Sound. So shocked were the parents that at first they didn’t think to shield the children from their television sets. So the children saw the slaughter—what happened to the people who resisted the elves, and then what happened to the people who didn’t. When the elves came to Seattle, they left the television stations untouched, and courteously escorted the cameramen to Volunteer Park to broadcast their victory celebration to whoever might still be watching.

Under the guidance of their ghastly, beautiful queen, the invaders flayed their prisoners. This they did with exquisite skill, so that all were still alive when the work was done. Then they roasted them over coals. Troubadours wandered up and down the rows of scorched and screaming flesh, playing their harps in accompaniment. Elf-lords and elf-ladies formed quadrilles on the greensward in front of the band shell and danced entrancingly. Afterwards, they threw themselves down on the grass and ate heaping platters of roasted human flesh, while goblin servants poured foaming wine into sapphire goblets.

Then they torched the city.

• • •

The children understood cruelty far more intimately than did the adults, who had the army and the police and a hundred other social institutions to shield them from schoolyard beatings, casual theft, and having bugs and other vermin dropped into one’s food or mouth or clothing simply because somebody larger was bored. But they had never before seen such cruelty as this. What shocked them was not the deeds in themselves—they had imagined much worse—but that nobody took pleasure from them. These cruelties were not done with fiendish playground glee. There was no malice behind them, no glorying in the cruelty of what was done. Just a string of horrifying and senseless images running night and day on the television, until one day the transmitters stopped and there were no more.

That was when Frederick told the children that they had to go into the caves, and Richard led them all there. When the adults came to bring them back to the rental bungalows, Richard led the children deeper into the darkness and the adults followed. Thus it was that they few survived when every building on the island simultaneously burst into flames. It was cold in the caves, but at night the adults went out and foraged for food and blankets and fuel. Every now and then some of them didn’t return.

Months passed.

When the elves changed the weather and shrank the seas, the grasses and crops dried up. There was little to eat, and the adults weren’t anything like they used to be. Hunger made them unpredictable, violent, and impulsive.

It was no wonder, then, that the elves were able to catch them by surprise.

• • •

The adults were dead. Human history was over.

In the wake of the elves, grass returned, and then flowers. Trees rocketed to the sky. Some bore fruit. Agnes was roasting apples in the coals of a campfire one morning, when Richard sat down beside her, the sun bright in his golden-red hair. “We need weapons,” he said. “For when the elves return. I tried making a bow and arrows. But it’s just a toy. It wouldn’t kill anything larger than a sparrow.”

Agnes thought. “We can make spears, like the ones the cairn-people had. Spears are easy to use, and almost anything sharp would do for a head.”

Richard laughed with delight. “If you were older, I’d kiss you!” he cried, and hurried off to look for materials.

Leaving Agnes with the strangest feeling. Almost, she wished she was older. Almost, she wished he would kiss her.

That afternoon the elves returned and took them all prisoner.

This time, they killed nobody. Lean elves with long, stinger-tipped abdomens, like yellow-jackets, injected venom into the children’s bodies. They were immobilized and stacked like cordwood on a long wooden tray, then flown by winged elves back to their camp. There, they were dumped to the ground and dosed with antivenom. As they came back to life, the smaller children began to cry.

Not Agnes, however. Her body ached from being stung, but she was far more concerned about what was going to happen next. She looked around carefully. The elven camp was made up of brightly colored tents, far loftier than the ones people used for camping, with long silk pennons flying from their tips. They stood on a hilltop and the tents went on forever below them, like a field of flowers that had no end.

There was a groan behind Agnes, and somebody clutched her shoulder. With a shriek, she whirled about, only to discover Richard groggily staggering to his feet. “Oh!” she cried. “You scared me!”

A bamboo whip cut across her back.

It was just a single blow, but it was stunning in its effect. Agnes fell to her knees. Looking up through brimming tears, she saw an elegant and fearsomely beautiful grey-skinned elf in armor of ice lowering his whip. He made a gesture, lightly squeezing his own lips shut. Then he raised his eyebrows questioningly: Do you understand?

Richard started forward, fists clenched, as if to attack the elf, but Agnes flung her arms around him and held him back. When he twisted angrily toward her, she shook her head. Then, facing the elf, she nodded.

The elf made a sweeping gesture that encompassed all seven children. Gracefully, he gestured with his whip up a broad grassy avenue between the tents: Go that way.

They obeyed. Agnes went first, keeping her head down submissively, but secretly observing all that she could and filing it all away for future use. A half-step after her came Richard, head high and face stony. Next were the three middle children, Lexi, Latoya, and Marcus. Last of all came Frederic and Elsie, who were the youngest. If Agnes dawdled or started to glance behind herself, she felt a light flick of the grey elf’s whip on the back of her neck. It was just a reminder, but a potent one. Agnes hoped the littler children were being more circumspect than she, but she doubted very much that they were.

They were marched past a corral where centaurs fought with fists and hooves for the entertainment of their elven captors, and then by a knackery where unicorn carcasses were hung on meat hooks to cure. Under an arch made of two enormous ivory tusks they went and around a pyramid of wine barrels being assembled by red-bearded dwarves only half as tall as the hogsheads were. At last they came to their destination.

It was a tent as wide and bright as the sunset, whose billowing walls of silks and velvets burned ember red and blood ochre, shot through with molten golds and scarlets that shimmered as if they came from a spectrum alien to human eyes. Banners and swags of orange and purple and black flew from the tops of the tent poles, kept permanently a-flutter by small playful zephyrs that smelled of cinnamon, cardamom, and hot peppers. She could not read the sigils on the flags, but she did not need to. By the psychic wind of terror and awe that gushed from the doorway to the tent, she felt, she sensed, she knew who lay within.

It could only be the dreadful Queen of Elfland.

At the castle-tent’s salient, the younger children were marched down a passage to the left, while Richard and Agnes were gestured inside. Almost, she cried after them. But the ice-armored elf raised his whip warningly. So Agnes made no sound, though she stretched out her arms toward the little ones as they disappeared from her ken.

• • •

Entering the tent was like stepping into another world. Gone were the somber reds and sullen crimsons, exchanged for sprightly greens and yellows and blues. Hummingbirds darted here and there. There was a tinkling of small bells, like wind chimes in a summer breeze. The sun shone brightly through the silk walls, making luminous the embroidered draperies showing scenes of war and feasting, of lovemaking and animal-hunting, and of things for which Agnes had no words. They wavered with every movement of the air, so that the figures seemed to be alive and in motion, pleading to be freed.

Their guard came to a stop. Overcome with dread, Agnes seized Richard’s hand. He squeezed hers back, reassuringly.

A gong sounded. The air shattered like the surface of a pond after a frog leaps into its center, and when the reverberations stopped and the air was still again, the elf-queen was simply there.

She reclined casually on the air just above a brocade-covered divan in the center of the tent. She wore a cream-colored man’s Brioni suit, cunningly retailored to fit her elegant body, an apricot silk blouse open to the navel, from which peeked a teardrop-shaped rock-crystal pendant, and no shoes. Her skin was the color of polished bronze, with hints of verdigris and subtle green depths. Her cheekbones were high and sharp. Her eyes were set at an angle, and they flashed jungle-green, an emerald effulgence from a star that did not shine in the night sky of this world. Unbidden, a name popped into Agnes’s mind: Melisaundre.

Queen Melisaundre was beautiful. Even Agnes could see that.

Beside her, Richard was transfixed.

“We came here by accident,” the elf-queen said casually, as if returning to a conversation already in progress. “We didn’t know your world even existed here on the marches of Avalon, that fey land we set out to conquer. Imagine our surprise and delight! A realm of possibilities opened before us! As it happened, of course, we destroyed your lands and killed your people. But, well . . . we were bored, pure and simple. What else could we have done? What other would any sensible being have done in our position?”

Agnes knew it would be a mistake to answer, and she kept her mouth shut. She was relieved at first that Richard did the same, but then she dared a quick sideways glance and saw that he was blushing. At a time like this! Agnes all but stamped her foot. If Richard, of all people, couldn’t be relied on to keep his wits about him, then who could?

Melisaundre dangled her bauble before her lips and blew softly upon it, setting it swinging gently on the pendulum of its chain. She reached out and delicately touched it—like so!—with the tip of a tongue as pink as a cat’s. “Don’t you wish you could be this jewel?” she asked. “Wouldn’t you like to lie between my breasts forever? Wouldn’t that be the pleasantest doom imaginable?”

“Thank you, ma’am, no,” Agnes said quickly, dipping the briefest of curtseys. It was essential to be polite: She realized that instinctively. And the higher the level of danger, the more polite you had to be. She knew she had to be very, very polite to the queen of the elves.

Richard stepped forward involuntarily, his eyes glowing as if lit by a flash from a hidden mirror. In a dazed voice, he said, “I think that . . .”

“Richard! No!” Agnes said.

“I mean, it kind of sounds like . . .”

“Stop! Stop! Stop!”

“Maybe, I don’t know . . .”

“Think, Richard! Don’t just—”

“. . . I’d like that.”

And he was gone.

The elf-queen held the pendant up, admiring its newly flawed interior. “A jewel with a soul reflects a better quality of light, don’t you think?” she remarked lightly. “And as we have none of our own, we are so grateful when you volunteer yours.”

Without thinking, Agnes launched herself at the elf-queen, clawing, kicking, and screaming. And found herself immediately frozen in mid-air, suspended about four feet above the floor.

“Cassis and asphalt,” said the elf-queen. “Hints of anise. An elusive smoky quality. Just a trace of honey. And a flintiness under it all. We could bottle that and sell it at market.” She placed her long, sharp nose in the crook of Agnes’s neck and inhaled deeply. Sharp fingers pinched Agnes’s arms and the inside of a leg, as if assessing her plumpness. “But with encouragement, what might you not become? Worthy, perhaps, of even a queen’s palate.” She raised her voice. “Store her with the others, and we’ll do more with her later.”

• • •

Agnes was taken away and fed—on marzipan, melon slices, and sugared oranges, on candied ginger and great slabs of baklava so intensely sweet they made her teeth ache, washed down with honeyed tea. She ate until her stomach hurt. But all the while, though she was careful to hide it, she burnt with that deep inner anger of which children, in the sentimental imagination, were deemed incapable. Any casual observer of a kindergarten or a schoolyard, however, can see that the younger the child, the less capable it is of hiding any anger it may harbor. By Agnes’s age, most children are able to bank their fury so that it is generally unseen by adults and, often, by the child itself. Agnes certainly could do that.

Then she was washed, in water that had been heated to body temperature, and had hibiscuses afloat in it. Needle-toothed yakshis dried her down with impossibly fluffy towels and helped her into new garments. They were of elven make and did not cover her stomach, but otherwise they seemed decent enough. Finally she was led to a large oval cushion which, though it looked suspiciously to her like the sort of thing people had for their pet dogs or cats, was nevertheless so comfortable that she fell asleep almost immediately.

• • •

When Agnes awoke, the bed was rocking gently under her. She drew aside the bed-curtain and discovered that the armies were on the march again, and that her bed was being carried by two trolls. She swung her legs over the edge so she could climb down.

“I’d advise you not to do that, Missy,” one of the trolls said. He was a tusked grotesque with legs like a rhinoceros’s.

“If you did,” said the second, “we’ll reflexively stop you in the most painful available manner.”

“Which, truth be told, we’d really rather not.”

“You’re just another victim of elvish depravity, like we are, after all.”

“So just stay with the program, okay?”

Agnes scrambled back into the center of the bed. “Okay,” she said. And, “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to get you in trouble.”

“You can’t get us in trouble, Missy.”

“Even if you could, what would we care?”

“We’re not self-aware.”

“Just bundles of reflexive responses, is all. It’s not as if we were actually conscious.”

So she spent most of the day, dozing off and on, being carried along with the trooping armies of Elfland. When at last they made camp, she climbed down and fed herself from one of the many tables overflowing with food of all kinds. Then Melisaundre sent for her.

“You are a green gemstone, I believe,” the elf-queen said. “So you shall be treated with jealousy.”

“Ma’am? I don’t understand.”

“You don’t need to understand. Only to obey.”

Thus it was that for thrice a thousand and one nights in a row, Agnes served as the elf-queen’s cup bearer. Silent and attentive, she sat on a small chair in a shadowy corner while her liege lady consulted with scholars and annotated books. Slim in green livery, she watched the elf-queen practice her archery, and brought iced tea to slake her thirst between bouts. At banquets, she poured a sip of every libation into a shallow bowl and drank it down, to test for poison. Rarely did she speak. Always did she watch. In this way, she picked up something of an
education in the ways of polite society.

Even more did she learn at night, when the elf-queen retired to her bed and comported herself with whomever had caught her eye during the long day. Agnes brought flagons of wine to set the mood beforehand, vials of aphrodisiacs when the queen’s lovers began to flag, and fruit-flavored ices to refresh them afterwards. She watched as the elf-queen coupled with warriors, scholars, poets, fauns, women by threes and men by the brace, with centaurs and imps as small as lapdogs and quilled apes with extra arms. It was the queen’s custom that her lovers should begin by entertaining her with oration, and so, night after night, they related gesta taken from the history of Elfland, or ornate tales of bawdry stemming from their own experiences. Scholars taught her alchemy and astrology and the secret workings of the crystal spheres that moved the stars and planets through their complex dance in the night. Soldiers spoke of battles they had fought and heroic deeds they had seen.

Agnes watched. And she listened.

Sometimes, when Melisaundre was bored, she brought Richard out of his gem. He hardly noticed Agnes’s presence, so besotted was he with the elf-queen. Agnes, for her part, watched him steadily, but her stare was hard. Once, during the heat of passion, his eyes accidentally met hers and the elf-queen immediately plunged a hand into his chest and pulled out his living, beating heart. He arched and spasmed until she returned the organ to its proper place.

“You liked that, didn’t you?” Melisaundre murmured, looking Agnes straight in the eye.

“Whatever you want me to like,” he gasped, “I will.”

Agnes, as always, said nothing.

After the elf-queen had ridden him like a horse, Richard rolled over onto his back, and when Agnes emerged from the shadows with the ices, he looked surprised to see her. He grinned shyly and started to say something, only to be shushed by an imperious royal finger laid across his lips. “You two are not to talk,” the queen said. “Not now. Not ever.”

Then she turned to Agnes. “Do you envy me, little virgin? Do you envy how many men come to pay me court, your precious friend among them, and how avidly they do so?”

“Yes, your majesty,” Agnes said tonelessly.

“They’ll never do any of that to you, I assure you. He will never so much as touch you. I’ll make sure of that.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“Oh, you don’t fool me. You may not want it yet, but already you know you will. And every night you’ll stand and watch, yearning, always yearning . . . Those whom I bring to my bed are a complaisant lot. They’d be only too happy to oblige you, especially your lovely, dimwitted Richard here. But you shall stand and watch and grow old and withered and filled with regrets, while I remain gloriously young forever. When you die, I’ll have your ashes made into a godemiché, which will rest near my orgies every night, with Richard immortal and at my service. But never—not even once!—will it be used.”

“As you please, ma’am.”

In a fury, the elf-queen seized a goblet and flung it down on the flagstone floor. It shattered, sending fragments of crystal everywhere. “You wicked, stubborn child! Do you think stunting your potential will make you happy? It will not! Embrace your anger, and it will bring you vividly alive. You will be an avid, thwarted, hopelessly vengeful avatar of spite!”

“As you wish, ma’am.”

Queen Melisaundre screamed in rage. Then she bade Richard mount her once more, as Agnes stood by.

• • •

But the prize of the elf-queen’s collection was Frederic.

“My rough little diamond,” the elf-queen called him. She dressed him in jester’s motley, and brought him out to amuse her guests at banquets. They would lie in triples, twains, and tangles, on chaises about the court, while Frederic stood in the center and harangued them.

“You have no emotions of your own,” Frederic said. He looked so solemn, Agnes thought, in those big round glasses of his. “That’s your greatest weakness, and someday it will be your downfall.”

The elves responded with gales of laughter.

“You made a terrible mistake when you destroyed almost all of my people. It made those of us who remain rare. It made us powerful. Without us, you wouldn’t even know you’re alive.”

“And what about you, little fool?” an elf baron shouted back at him. “What would you do without us?”

“I’d just go on living. I wouldn’t miss you at all.”

They howled.

Another time, Frederic said, “The Earth is a sphere that revolves about a spherical Sun. The Moon is spherical too, and it revolves around the Earth.” Then, as his audience convulsed, “How many years have you marched around this world without finding its boundaries? Always you search for the way back to your own world. The land you came from is as flat as a checkerboard and so ours baffles you. You stupids! You are trapped here forever by your own ignorance.”

Finally, Frederic said, “You think us your prisoners, but it is you who are held captive by the topology of your thoughts. I am free! Unlike yourselves, I can move as I wish in all Euclidian dimensions. The only reason I share this with you is that you cannot possibly comprehend it. Should I wish, I can leave at any time by simply turning from your plane.”

Abruptly he crouched down and somersaulted away, out the door and gone.

The elves continued jeering and laughing at his japes for another hour, just as if he hadn’t left.

• • •

After the queen’s orgies that night, Agnes lay on her pallet thinking as hard as ever she had thought before. Frederic had been speaking directly to her—she was sure of it. Was it rolling into a ball that had rendered Frederic invisible to the elves? Or was it simply his bold, spit-in-your-face self-confidence?

Agnes felt anything but bold. But the challenge had been put to her. She had to follow Frederic’s example, curl into a ball, and roll outside. Either she would survive or the guards would kill her. It was as clean and simple as that.

So she rolled herself into a ball and tumbled off her pallet and out of the tent. The demon-hounds crouching by the salient did not even see her, though their eyes darted everywhere, their nostrils flared, and their ears were pricked for sounds far subtler than those she made.

Agnes somersaulted out into the moonlight.

Out on the grassy sward and down the bank she rolled, out of sight of the guards. When she came to a halt, she was not surprised to see Frederic tumbling to meet her.

“It certainly took you long enough,” he said.

“Unlike you,” Agnes replied tartly, “I can’t simply do and say whatever I want, whenever I wish.”

“And whose fault is that? The elves have no concept of reality save what they see reflected through us. I’ve been trying to explain that to you since forever.”

“Do you know what happened to Richard? The queen—”

“What befell Richard would not have happened if he hadn’t allowed it.”

“She keeps him in a jewel around her neck!”

“He was the oldest. He had the choice of staying and protecting us as best he could, or a safe life of cosseted slavery, and he chose wrong. It was despicable of Melisaundre to offer such a choice to someone so weak, of course.”

“You understand everyone so well,” Agnes said bitterly.

“I think we have argued enough for one night,” said Frederic. “Be sure to somersault your way back to your pallet. It confuses the elves when we rotate or spin, and somersaults short-circuit their brains entirely. I suspect that, like paper dolls, they’re not completely suited to life in three dimensions.”

He tumbled away.

Agnes stood motionless for a long time. The tents of the armies of Elfland stretched away to the horizon as numerous as blades of grass in a meadow, and the queen’s tent sat at the very center of the camp. A lunar moth fluttered raggedly past, and Agnes reflected that they two—she and it—were equally free and purposeless. Yet the lunar did have a purpose: to procreate, to lay clutches of tiny eggs on the leaves of trees. She had no such destiny; in its place she was forced to watch the futile carnival of Melisaundre’s endless couplings.

Now that Frederic had given her the key to freedom, she didn’t know what to do with it. Where would she go? During waking hours, she could find the other children, for they were held close to the elf-queen’s court, in case her whim required them. But when the revelries wound down into exhaustion, they were packed away to the fringes of the camp, to tents pitched among the ogres, dwarves, and other enslaved races.

She would not find the children tonight. And tomorrow, after the marching was done, their tents would be pitched elsewhere.

Nor could she escape into the outside world. There was nothing there but wilderness and ruins. Perhaps there were still people huddling fearfully in caves, as she once had. But what point was there in resuming that wretched and untenable existence?

Frederic, with his unique way of thinking, might be free, but Agnes was not. All the world was her prison.

Still, she had learned something tonight, and who could say it would not turn out to be useful? Clutching the knowledge tight to herself, Agnes tumbled back to her humble pallet at the foot of Queen Melisaundre’s luxurious bed.

• • •

Months passed, possibly years. Agnes had no way of measuring time: marks on paper, knots in her lacings, any accounting whatsoever eased away while she slept, leaving no trace.

At last there came a day when the armies did not march. The camp swarmed with activity. Elves flew into the nearest abandoned city and plundered it of building materials. Draft-giants hauled wagonloads of stone and enormous timbers. An arena arose in what had been a meadow the night before. Bleachers surrounded the oval of grass. Tall white walls soared upward and were decorated with clusters of the severed heads of ghastly inhuman creatures that Agnes had never seen alive.

Queen Melisaundre came silently out of her tent and gazed upon the arena. Then she turned to Agnes. “So,” she said. “The day has arrived at last.”

Agnes did not ask, but the queen answered her anyway: “You idiot child! The day we contend in battle and one of us kills the other, of course. Whatever happens, it will be a relief to be free at last of your constant witless questioning.”

Agnes knew she needed to control her response. Anger the queen would understand, and know instinctively her most effective response. Fear and defiance as well. But disregard? How could anybody dare ignore so dangerously mercurial a monarch? Agnes yawned and walked off, leaving Melisaundre speaking sharply to empty air.

She found Frederic in a brocade tent the color of dried blood, with jacquard dragons in its weave. Inside was a library whose stacks went on forever, dwindling into dusk. Bespectacled hobgoblins clambered up and down ladders, fetching and returning leather-bound manuscripts. Trolls stood by like bookstands, holding out dictionaries and volumes of encyclopediae.

Frederic sat at a small table, reading.

“What’s this about me killing the queen?” Agnes asked. Somehow, she did not doubt it could be done.

Frederic shut his book. “It’s time. I can read these grimoires without the queen’s scholars now. So we no longer need her.”

“You mean we could have been free of her before this and you did nothing?” Agnes was accustomed to holding back her emotions, but now she found herself quivering and white with rage.

“Yes, of course, long ago. You’d have noticed this yourself, if you hadn’t been mooning over Richard.”

Agnes slapped him as hard as she could.

One side of Frederic’s face began slowly turning red. His voice remained mild, nevertheless. “I deserved that, I suppose. However, when we are married, you must not hit me again. It’s not conducive to marital harmony.”

“Married!?”

“Married.” Frederic stood. He was taller than Agnes, which had never been the case before, and when he took off his glasses, as he did now, he was not entirely unhandsome. He was, Agnes realized with a shock, an adult, a man. “This has nothing to do with your personal feelings. Or mine, really. Agnes, you are the only human capable of assuming the elf-queen’s role. But you have, as yet, no idea of how to wield power, and you know it. I, on the other hand, do; so we must be wed.”

“It would be a loveless marriage.”

“That will change,” said Frederic, “if we want it to. We need each other. Our strengths are complementary; the weaknesses of one can be negated by the other.” His face was as pale and expressionless as the moon. “As a basis for marriage, need is stronger than love.”

Agnes thought back to all she had learned from the elf-queen’s advisors and political philosophers and realized that it was true: Need was a very strong bond indeed. Those same sources, however, had also taught that once needs were met, such bonds would dissolve like fairy dew.

• • •

Agnes prepared for battle. She was given, by the elven court, an armory shed at one end of the lists and two pages to dress her. They were pubescent boys, milky-skinned, beautiful, and naked. So far as she could tell, they were identical twins.

The pages were removing her clothing when Frederic rolled in. He grabbed one by the scruff of the neck and forcibly ousted him. The second followed after.

Agnes snatched up her blouse and struggled back into it. But Frederic did not so much as glance at her. He put down a cloth-wrapped package as long as a sword and started rummaging through the armor laid out for her. “She’s going to strike you three times,” he said. “First, on your upper right arm. So you’ll need a pauldron.”

The pauldron covered her entire upper arm and was padded underneath. He strapped it on her, right over her blouse.

“The second blow will strike you directly above your left knee. You’ll need a cuish.”

“I feel unbalanced,” Agnes said, to hide her embarrassment, as he reached between her thighs to tighten the cinches. “And just a little foolish, too.”

Frederic ignored her. “Neither of those blows will be lethal: They are intended to disable and unbalance you. The third and, potentially, the killing blow will come not from the elf-queen’s sword like the first two, but her spear. She’ll toss the sword aside and then flip the spear up into the air and catch it back-handed behind her, so that her arm is up and ready for the strike.” He held up his arm to demonstrate. “Then it will come down, and hard, right in the middle of your stomach.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I’ve been studying. This sort of thing is all written down.”

Frederic took from his kit a triple length of stiff brown leather. He wrapped it around and around Agnes’s abdomen so tightly she could barely breathe. Over it he placed a chain mail stomacher. Then, atop all, he strapped on an item of shaped metal he called a tace. “There,” he said at last. “She might knock the wind out of you, but she won’t kill you.”

“What weapon should I use?”

“None of these,” Frederic said, dismissing with a glance a gleaming selection of swords, spears, and morning stars. “They’re enchanted not to hurt her—you might as well try to take down a tank with a custard pie.” He unwrapped the package he had brought with him. “Use this instead.”

Agnes laughed involuntarily.

It was a baseball bat.

“Take it,” Frederic said. “Try it out.”

She swung the bat stiffly back and forth.

“Put your back into it. Swing from the shoulders.” He grabbed the bat and showed her what he meant.

Agnes took back the bat and swung again, with more strength. “I could never keep my eye on the ball. It’s so small and it comes at you so fast.”

“It won’t be a ball. It will be Queen Melisaundre’s head, and it will be the size of a small melon, plenty big enough to see. Just think of how you have served her, over the years, and she you.”

Agnes swung the bat with force.

“I think you’re getting the feel of it.”

“I wish I was a boy,” Agnes said. “I hope I don’t look as stupid as I feel.”

To her profound surprise, Frederic grabbed her and kissed her full on the lips. Then he pushed her away and stared straight into her eyes. “You look like you’re going to free us from elven tyranny forever,” he said fervently. “You look like the very first human queen of all the world. I don’t wish you were a boy at all.”

Then the heralds blew their clarions and the doors of the shed flung themselves wide.

“Go,” Frederic said. “Set us free.”

• • •

Agnes did not so much stride out into the lists as stumble. Yet the throngs of elves (with, here and there, a human bobbing in the air; only she, it seemed, knew no magic) roared at the sight of her, as if she were an Amazon champion.

Directly across the arena, Queen Melisaundre stepped down from her throne, looking every inch the warrior-queen. Her slim, powerful figure was clad in dazzling gold plate. A scarlet cape flew out behind her, lifted by a wind that did not exist for Agnes. Her helmet was adorned with wings, as if she were a Valkyrie, and so cut that her hair flowed out becomingly behind her.

In her hand was a sword of moon-silver, harder than steel and lighter than a feather. At her back was a long spear.

Agnes hoisted her baseball bat, feeling like a clumsy human yokel. She closed her eyes in silent prayer: Make this quick, she thought. Whether I win or whether I lose, make it quick.

Somebody threw a cloth-of-gold scarf into the air. It fluttered lazily downward, drawing all eyes after it.

When it touched the ground, Queen Melisaundre screamed like an eagle and ran straight toward Agnes. Her long legs carried her quickly and effortlessly across the green lawn. She was beautiful to watch.

Agnes suddenly realized that she should be running too and began to lumber forward.

They met.

It all went as Frederic had said it would. Queen Melisaundre delivered a stinging blow to Agnes’s armored and padded shoulder, and a second to her leg that would have crippled her had it not been for the cuish. Then she tossed the sword aside as if it were a plaything she had tired of. One hand deftly undid the strap holding the spear to her back. The other reached behind her and flipped the spear up into the air.

Queen Melisaundre caught the spear and froze for an instant, a goddess incarnate. Then, with her hair lashing and the battle-light blazing about her face, she drove the spear downward with every ounce of her strength.

The spearhead pierced Agnes’s tace with a shriek of ripping metal. But the chain mail underneath held, and the wrapped layers of leather softened the blow.

Somewhat.

It felt like getting kicked in the stomach by a horse. All the breath flew out of Agnes and she was driven back a good three feet. But, though for an instant all the world went black and there was nothing in it but pain, she did not fall down.

Then she could see again, and she was running forward, all in a rage, the baseball bat cocked and ready to swing. Take this, bitch, she thought. You with your perfect face and perfect legs and perfect everything else. With your courtiers and sycophants and lovers by the score. With your cruelty and power and the admiration of all the world and Richard too.

A fierce blood-lust filled her. Take this for being everything I am not.

It was that last thought that pulled Agnes out of her madness, for she recognized in it—as who would not?—the envy, jealousy, and spite that the elf-queen had so long been nurturing in her. And so recognizing it, she rejected it. She refused to let it be a part of her.

It was not a rational decision, for on purely logical grounds she understood that she had to kill the queen. It was simple revulsion that caused her to pull back before her blow reached its target. The bat swung past the elf-queen, missing her by a whisker.

Queen Melisaundre’s head shattered anyway.

• • •

Frederic led Agnes away from Melisaundre’s lifeless corpse toward the throne, whispering urgently in her ear. “You are the queen now. It’s important that you act the part. Speak slowly and clearly. Say that your rule will be benign but absolute. A new empire shall arise from the ashes of the old—a human empire. All magical talismans, potions, et cetera, are to be presented to the royal court that they may be made subject to your power. In this way all magicks will support the State and we need never fear rebellion. Finally, if it please you, your majesty, let us be married immediately. Announce that I am to be your consort and in no sense king. I will act in a purely advisory manner, subordinate to the throne. Do you understand?”

Agnes nodded once, regally, and withdrew her arm from his. With the slightest flutter of the fingers of one hand she gestured him back into the crowd.

Frederic backed away, struggling not to grin.

She ascended to the throne.

Everyone cheered, elves as well as the humans. Looking out over them, Agnes was surprised to see that the other children were all grown now. Some of them had children of their own.

Human history has begun again, she thought. And this will be known forever as the Day of Two Queens.

Agnes raised a hand for silence. “I am your new queen and my power is absolute. Does anyone here dispute that?”

Nobody spoke.

“Well, then. My reign shall consist entirely of three edicts. The first is that Frederic shall search through the grimoires and books of spells to either discover a way to return the elves to their own world or, failing that, otherwise rid our world of their presence. That shall be his sole employment until his task is done, however many years it may take.”

Frederic looked stricken.

“The second is that until that happy day when they are gone, the elves shall be set to work restoring our world to what it was before they came. We will settle here and scour the wilderness for human survivors. When such are found, those who will may join us. Those who will not shall be left in peace.

“The third and last edict is that henceforth we shall have no queens or absolute rulers of any kind. Form committees, hold elections, do whatever you like—but I will not tell you how to live your lives.” Mouths fell open. Eyes widened in shock. Frederic put his head in his hands.

Agnes stepped down from the throne, a queen no more.

• • •

After her abdication, she went to see Richard.

Agnes dressed as carefully for this meeting as ever she had in her life. Her clothing was deliberately modest. Yet it did nothing to disguise her newly adult shape. Her jewelry drew no attention to itself. She wore makeup, though she doubted that Richard, used as he was to Queen Melisaundre’s theatrical extravagance, would notice.

The elf-queen’s tent smelled as always of incense, spices, and perfume. Yet the air felt strangely clean, for the cat-in-heat stench of the queen herself was gone. Beside her bed (sheeted in green and blue satins with foams of lace so that it was almost as vast and billowy as the sea itself) was a small obsidian box. In it rested Richard’s gemstone.

When Agnes had laid out shirt and trews on the bed, she took the rock crystal gem and warmed it between her hands. It had been clear and ordinary once, but Richard’s soul had deepened its color into a golden-red topaz with hints of flame at its heart. Speaking a word she had often heard from the lips of Queen Melisaundre, she summoned Richard from its depths.

He appeared, smiling sleepily, in the middle of the bed.

When Richard saw that he and Agnes were alone, he sat up and donned the russet-colored clothing—first the trousers and then the sark. They fit him well and seeing him thus clad Agnes felt a sudden flush of desire that, paradoxically, she had not felt on beholding him naked.

It was true, she thought. She genuinely had come of age, if Richard’s mere presence could disorder her thinking so.

“Where is Melisaundre?” he asked.

Agnes’s mouth felt dry. She could not form words with it at first. But at last she managed to croak, “There have been . . . I have made some changes.”

Then she told him.

• • •

When Agnes emerged from the tent at last, her face was grim and a golden-red stone hung from a silver chain about her neck.

Frederic was waiting for her. “What shall we do with that?” he asked, gesturing toward the tent.

“Burn it,” she said. She knew she had surrendered all authority to give such a command. But listening to her own voice, she knew too that she would be obeyed. “Burn it to the ground.”

Frederic nodded and two lovely young women whom Agnes realized with dull astonishment used to be the young Lexi and Latoya raised up hands that burst into fire. Stepping forward, they stroked the silks and velvets. Soft flames rose up the sides of the tent, merged, and became an inferno. When Agnes made no motion to get away from the heat, Frederic gently took her by the arm and led her toward the cool.

Agnes could feel the flames at her back. Shadows leaped and cavorted before her.

“What of Richard?” Frederic asked.

She touched the gem. “He did not care to share our lives without Melisaundre,” she said. “I gave him permission to return to his crystal, to his oblivion.”

Frederic crooked a sad smile. “‘He is not dead but sleeping,’” he quoted from one of Richard’s favorite books. “Perhaps he will reconsider someday, when we have remade the world into a pleasant place again. I . . . I will become the junior husband then, if that is what you wish.”

Agnes looked at him evenly, and realized for the first time how much Frederic desired and even, in his own peculiar way, loved her. Raising her head, she looked into the future. The humans would not rebuild the cities in her lifetime, but there would be towns. The elves would one by one fade away, into wells, into trees, into small, pathetic beings who served mankind and were rewarded with dishes of milk. She would have children, and then grandchildren. She would grow old, and fat, and revered. She would desire Richard often. But she would never see him again.

“No,” said Agnes firmly. “He’s gone forever. The time for fairy tales is past.”

© 2009 by Eileen Gunn & Michael Swanwick.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction.

Reprinted by permission of the authors.

Eileen Gunn is the author of the story collection Stable Strategies and Others and co-editor of The WisCon Chronicles Two. Her fiction has received the Nebula Award in the US and the Sense of Gender Award in Japan, and has been nominated/short-listed for the Hugo, Philip K. Dick, World Fantasy, and James Tiptree, Jr. awards. She edited and published the influential Infinite Matrix webzine, which the Science Fiction Encyclopedia describes as “one of the three leading online [SF] magazines at the start of the new millennium, establishing a plateau of quality, respectability, and achievement to which all others would aspire.” A graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop, she also served for twenty-two years on the board of directors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and was instrumental in its survival and success. Her most recent story is “Hive Mind Man,” written with Rudy Rucker, in Asimov’s, Feb/2012. You can follow her on Twitter @eileen_gunn.

Michael Swanwick is one of the most acclaimed and prolific science fiction and fantasy writers of his generation. He has received a Hugo Award for fiction in an unprecedented five out of six years and has been honored with the Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, World Fantasy, and five Hugo Awards, as well as receiving nominations for the British Science Fiction Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and in numerous anthologies, and has been collected in Cigar-Box Faust, A Geography of Unknown Lands, Gravity’s Angels, Moon Dogs, Puck Aleshire’s Abecedary, Tales of Old Earth, and The Dog Said Bow-Wow. Michael’s latest novel is Dancing With Bears, a post-Utopian adventure featuring confidence artists Darger and Surplus. He is currently at work on two new novels. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter.

NOVELLA

The Lucky Strike
Kim Stanley Robinson

War breeds strange pastimes. In July of 1945 on Tinian Island in the North Pacific, Captain Frank January had taken to piling pebble cairns on the crown of Mount Lasso—one pebble for each B-29 takeoff, one cairn for each mission. The largest cairn had four hundred stones in it. It was a mindless pastime, but so was poker. The men of the 509th had played a million hands of poker, sitting in the shade of a palm around an upturned crate, sweating in their skivvies, swearing and betting all their pay and cigarettes, playing hand after hand after hand, until the cards got so soft and dog-eared you could have used them for toilet paper. Captain January had gotten sick of it, and after he lit out for the hilltop a few times some of his crewmates started trailing him. When their pilot Jim Fitch joined them, it became an official pastime, like throwing flares into the compound or going hunting for stray Japs. What Captain January thought of the development he didn’t say. The others grouped near Captain Fitch, who passed around his battered flask. “Hey, January,” Fitch called. “Come have a shot.”

January wandered over and took the flask. Fitch laughed at his pebble. “Practicing your bombing up here, eh, Professor?”

“Yah,” January said sullenly. Anyone who read more than the funnies was Professor to Fitch. Thirstily January knocked back some rum. He could drink it any way he pleased up here, out from under the eye of the group psychiatrist. He passed the flask on to Lieutenant Matthews, their navigator.

“That’s why he’s the best,” Matthews joked. “Always practicing.”

Fitch laughed. “He’s best because I make him be best, right, Professor?”

January frowned. Fitch was a bulky youth, thick-featured, pig-eyed—a thug, in January’s opinion. The rest of the crew were all in their mid-twenties like Fitch, and they liked the captain’s bossy, roughhouse style. January, who was thirty-seven, didn’t go for it. He wandered away, back to the cairn he had been building. From Mount Lasso they had an overview of the whole island, from the harbor at Wall Street to the north field in Harlem. January had observed hundreds of B-29s roar off the four parallel runways of the north field and head for Japan. The last quartet of this particular mission buzzed across the width of the island, and January dropped four more pebbles, aiming for crevices in the pile. One of them stuck nicely.

“There they are!” said Matthews. “They’re on the taxiing strip.”

January located the 509th’s first plane. Today, the first of August, there was something more interesting to watch than the usual Superfortress parade. Word was out that General LeMay wanted to take the 509th’s mission away from it. Their commander Colonel Tibbets had gone and bitched to LeMay in person, and the general had agreed the mission was theirs, but on one condition: One of the general’s men was to make a test flight with the 509th, to make sure they were fit for combat over Japan. The general’s man had arrived, and now he was down there in the strike plane, with Tibbets and the whole first team. January sidled back to his mates to view the takeoff with them.

“Why don’t the strike plane have a name, though?” Haddock was saying.

Fitch said, “Lewis won’t give it a name because it’s not his plane, and he knows it.” The others laughed. Lewis and his crew were naturally unpopular, being Tibbets’ favorites.

“What do you think he’ll do to the general’s man?” Matthews asked.

The others laughed at the very idea. “He’ll kill an engine at takeoff, I bet you anything,” Fitch said. He pointed at the wrecked B-29s that marked the end of every runway, planes whose engines had given out on takeoff. “He’ll want to show that he wouldn’t go down if it happened to him.”

“’Course he wouldn’t!” Matthews said.

“You hope,” January said under his breath.

“They let those Wright engines out too soon,” Haddock said seriously. “They keep busting under the takeoff load.”

“Won’t matter to the old bull,” Matthews said. Then they all started in about Tibbets’ flying ability, even Fitch. They all thought Tibbets was the greatest. January, on the other hand, liked Tibbets even less than he liked Fitch. That had started right after he was assigned to the 509th. He had been told he was part of the most important group in the war, and then given a leave. In Vicksburg a couple of fliers just back from England had bought him a lot of whiskies, and since January had spent several months stationed near London they had talked for a good long time and gotten pretty drunk. The two were really curious about what January was up to now, but he had stayed vague on it and kept returning the talk to the blitz. He had been seeing an English nurse, for instance, whose flat had been bombed, family and neighbors killed . . . But they had really wanted to know. So he had told them he was onto something special, and they had flipped out their badges and told him they were Army Intelligence, and that if he ever broke security like that again he’d be transferred to Alaska. It was a dirty trick. January had gone back to Wendover and told Tibbets so to his face, and Tibbets had turned red and threatened him some more. January despised him for that. The upshot was that January was effectively out of the war, because Tibbets really played his favorites. January wasn’t sure he really minded, but during their year’s training he had bombed better than ever, as a way of showing the old bull he was wrong to write January off. Every time their eyes had met it was clear what was going on. But Tibbets never backed off no matter how precise January’s bombing got. Just thinking about it was enough to cause January to line up a pebble over an ant and drop it.

“Will you cut that out?” Fitch complained. “I swear you must hang from the ceiling when you take a shit so you can practice aiming for the toilet.” The men laughed.

“Don’t I bunk over you?” January asked. Then he pointed. “They’re going.”

Tibbets’ plane had taxied to runway Baker. Fitch passed the flask around again. The tropical sun beat on them, and the ocean surrounding the island blazed white. January put up a sweaty hand to aid the bill of his baseball cap.

The four props cut in hard, and the sleek Superfortress quickly trundled up to speed and roared down Baker. Three-quarters of the way down the strip the outside right prop feathered.

“Yow!” Fitch crowed. “I told you he’d do it!”

The plane nosed off the ground and slewed right, then pulled back on course to cheers from the four young men around January. January pointed again. “He’s cut number three, too.”

The inside right prop feathered, and now the plane was pulled up by the left wing only, while the two right props windmilled uselessly. “Holy smoke!” Haddock cried. “Ain’t the old bull something?”

They whooped to see the plane’s power, and Tibbets’ nervy arrogance.

“By God, LeMay’s man will remember this flight,” Fitch hooted. “Why, look at that! He’s banking!”

Apparently taking off on two engines wasn’t enough for Tibbets; he banked the plane right until it was standing on its dead wing, and it curved back toward Tinian.

Then the inside left engine feathered.

War tears at the imagination. For three years Frank January had kept his imagination trapped, refusing to give it any play whatsoever. The dangers threatening him, the effects of the bombs, the fate of the other participants in the war, he had refused to think about any of it. But the war tore at his control. That English nurse’s flat. The missions over the Ruhr. The bomber just below him blown apart by flak. And then there had been a year in Utah, and the viselike grip that he had once kept on his imagination had slipped away.

So when he saw the number two prop feather, his heart gave a little jump against his sternum and helplessly he was up there with Ferebee, the first team bombardier. He would be looking over the pilots’ shoulders . . .

“Only one engine?” Fitch said.

“That one’s for real,” January said harshly. Despite himself he saw the panic in the cockpit, the frantic rush to power the two right engines. The plane was dropping fast and Tibbets leveled it off, leaving them on a course back toward the island. The two right props spun, blurred to a shimmer. January held his breath. They needed more lift; Tibbets was trying to pull it over the island. Maybe he was trying for the short runway on the south half of the island.

But Tinian was too tall, the plane too heavy. It roared right into the jungle above the beach, where 42nd Street met their East River. It exploded in a bloom of fire. By the time the sound of the explosion struck them they knew no one in the plane had survived.

Black smoke towered into white sky. In the shocked silence on Mount Lasso insects buzzed and creaked. The air left January’s lungs with a gulp. He had been with Ferebee there at the end, had heard the desperate shouts, seen the last green rush, been stunned by the dentist-drill-all-over pain of the impact.

“Oh my God,” Fitch was saying. “Oh my God.” Matthews was sitting. January picked up the flask, tossed it at Fitch.

“C-come on,” he stuttered. He hadn’t stuttered since he was sixteen. He led the others in a rush down the hill. When they got to Broadway a jeep careened toward them and skidded to a halt. It was Colonel Scholes, the old bull’s exec. “What happened?”

Fitch told him.

“Those damned Wrights,” Scholes said as the men piled in. This time one had failed at just the wrong moment; some welder stateside had kept flame to metal a second less than usual—or something equally minor, equally trivial—and that had made all the difference.

They left the jeep at 42nd and Broadway and hiked east over a narrow track to the shore. A fairly large circle of trees was burning. The fire trucks were already there.

Scholes stood beside January, his expression bleak. “That was the whole first team,” he said.

“I know,” said January. He was still in shock, in imagination crushed, incinerated, destroyed. Once as a kid he had tied sheets to his arms and waist, jumped off the roof and landed right on his chest; this felt like that had. He had no way of knowing what would come of this crash, but he had a suspicion that he had indeed smacked into something hard.

Scholes shook his head. A half hour had passed, the fire was nearly out. January’s four mates were over chattering with the Seabees. “He was going to name the plane after his mother,” Scholes said to the ground. “He told me that just this morning. He was going to call it Enola Gay.”

At night the jungle breathed, and its hot wet breath washed over the 509th’s compound. January stood in the doorway of his Quonset barracks hoping for a real breeze. No poker tonight. Voices were hushed, faces solemn. Some of the men had helped box up the dead crew’s gear. Now most lay on their bunks. January gave up on the breeze, climbed onto his top bunk to stare at the ceiling.

He observed the corrugated arch over him. Cricketsong sawed through his thoughts. Below him a rapid conversation was being carried on in guilty undertones, Fitch at its center.

“January is the best bombardier left,” he said. “And I’m as good as Lewis was.”

“But so is Sweeney,” Matthews said. “And he’s in with Scholes.”

They were figuring out who would take over the strike. January scowled. Tibbets and the rest were less than twelve hours dead, and they were squabbling over who would replace them.

January grabbed a shirt, rolled off his bunk, put the shirt on.

“Hey, Professor,” Fitch said. “Where you going?”

“Out.”

Though midnight was near, it was still sweltering. Crickets shut up as he walked by, started again behind him. He lit a cigarette. In the dark, the MPs patrolling their fenced-in compound were like pairs of walking armbands. The 509th, prisoners in their own army. Fliers from other groups had taken to throwing rocks over the fence. Forcefully January expelled smoke, as if he could expel his disgust with it. They were only kids, he told himself. Their minds had been shaped in the war, by the war, and for the war. They knew you couldn’t mourn the dead for long; carry around a load like that and your own engines might fail. That was all right with January. It was an attitude that Tibbets had helped to form, so it was what he deserved. Tibbets would want to be forgotten in favor of the mission, all he had lived for was to drop the gimmick on the Japs, he was oblivious to anything else, men, wife, family, anything.

So it wasn’t the lack of feeling in his mates that bothered January. And it was natural of them to want to fly the strike they had been training a year for. Natural, that is, if you were a kid with a mind shaped by fanatics like Tibbets, shaped to take orders and never imagine consequences. But January was not a kid, and he wasn’t going to let men like Tibbets do a thing to his mind. And the gimmick . . . the gimmick was not natural. A chemical bomb of some sort, he guessed. Against the Geneva Convention. He stubbed his cigarette against the sole of his sneaker, tossed the butt over the fence. The tropical night breathed over him. He had a headache.

For months now he had been sure he would never fly a strike. The dislike Tibbets and he had exchanged in their looks (January was acutely aware of looks) had been real and strong. Tibbets had understood that January’s record of pinpoint accuracy in the runs over the Salton Sea had been a way of showing contempt, a way of saying you can’t get rid of me even though you hate me and I hate you. The record had forced Tibbets to keep January on one of the four second-string teams, but with the fuss they were making over the gimmick January had figured that would be far enough down the ladder to keep him out of things.

Now he wasn’t so sure. Tibbets was dead. He lit another cigarette, found his hand shaking. The Camel tasted bitter. He threw it over the fence at a receding armband, and regretted it instantly. A waste. He went back inside.

Before climbing onto his bunk he got a paperback out of his footlocker. “Hey, Professor, what you reading now?” Fitch said, grinning.

January showed him the blue cover. Winter’s Tales, by an Isak Dinesen. Fitch examined the little wartime edition. “Pretty racy, eh?”

“You bet,” January said heavily. “This guy puts sex on every page.” He climbed onto his bunk, opened the book. The stories were strange, hard to follow. The voices below bothered him. He concentrated harder.

As a boy on the farm in Arkansas, January had read everything he could lay his hands on. On Saturday afternoons he would race his father down the muddy lane to the mailbox (his father was a reader too), grab the Saturday Evening Post, and run off to devour every word of it. That meant he had another week with nothing new to read, but he couldn’t help it. His favorites were the Hornblower stories, but anything would do. It was a way off the farm, a way into the world. He had become a man who could slip between the covers of a book whenever he chose.

But not on this night.

• • •

The next day the chaplain gave a memorial service, and on the morning after that Colonel Scholes looked in the door of their hut right after mess. “Briefing at eleven,” he announced. His face was haggard. “Be there early.” He looked at Fitch with bloodshot eyes, crooked a finger. “Fitch, January, Matthews—come with me.”

January put on his shoes. The rest of the men sat on their bunks and watched them wordlessly. January followed Fitch and Matthews out of the hut.

“I’ve spent most of the night on the radio with General LeMay,” Scholes said. He looked them each in the eye. “We’ve decided you’re to be the first crew to make a strike.”

Fitch was nodding, as if he had expected it.

“Think you can do it?” Scholes said.

“Of course,” Fitch replied. Watching him January understood why they had chosen him to replace Tibbets: Fitch was like the old bull, he had that same ruthlessness. The young bull.

“Yes, sir,” Matthews said.

Scholes was looking at him. “Sure,” January said, not wanting to think about it. “Sure.” His heart was pounding directly on his sternum. But Fitch and Matthews looked serious as owls, so he wasn’t going to stick out by looking odd. It was big news, after all; anyone would be taken aback by it. Nevertheless, January made an effort to nod.

“Okay,” Scholes said. “McDonald will be flying with you as copilot.” Fitch frowned. “I’ve got to go tell those British officers that LeMay doesn’t want them on the strike with you. See you at the briefing.”

“Yes, sir.”

As soon as Scholes was around the corner Fitch swung a fist at the sky. “Yow!” Matthews cried. He and Fitch shook hands. “We did it!” Matthews took January’s hand and wrung it, his face plastered with a goofy grin. “We did it!”

“Somebody did it, anyway,” January said.

“Ah, Frank,” Matthews said. “Show some spunk. You’re always so cool.”

“Old Professor Stoneface,” Fitch said, glancing at January with a trace of amused contempt. “Come on, let’s get to the briefing.”

The briefing hut, one of the longer Quonsets, was completely surrounded by MPs holding carbines. “Gosh,” Matthews said, subdued by the sight. Inside it was already smoky. The walls were covered by the usual maps of Japan. Two blackboards at the front were draped with sheets. Captain Shepard, the naval officer who worked with the scientists on the gimmick, was in back with his assistant Lieutenant Stone, winding a reel of film onto a projector. Dr. Nelson, the group psychiatrist, was already seated on a front bench near the wall. Tibbets had recently sicced the psychiatrist on the group—another one of his great ideas, like the spies in the bar. The man’s questions had struck January as stupid. He hadn’t even been able to figure out that Easterly was a flake, something that was clear to anybody who flew with him, or even played him in a single round of poker. January slid onto a bench beside his mates.

The two Brits entered, looking furious in their stiff-upper-lip way. They sat on the bench behind January. Sweeney’s and Easterly’s crews filed in, followed by the other men, and soon the room was full. Fitch and the rest pulled out Lucky Strikes and lit up; since they had named the plane only January had stuck with Camels.

Scholes came in with several men January didn’t recognize, and went to the front. The chatter died, and all the smoke plumes ribboned steadily into the air.

Scholes nodded, and two intelligence officers took the sheets off the blackboards, revealing aerial reconnaissance photos.

“Men,” Scholes said, “these are the target cities.”

Someone cleared his throat.

“In order of priority they are Hiroshima, Kokura, and Nagasaki. There will be three weather scouts: Straight Flush to Hiroshima, Strange Cargo to Kokura, and Full House to Nagasaki. The Great Artiste and Number 91 will be accompanying the mission to take photos. And Lucky Strike will fly the bomb.”

There were rustles, coughs. Men turned to look at January and his mates, and they all sat up straight. Sweeney stretched back to shake Fitch’s hand, and there were some quick laughs. Fitch grinned.

“Now listen up,” Scholes went on. “The weapon we are going to deliver was successfully tested stateside a couple of weeks ago. And now we’ve got orders to drop it on the enemy.” He paused to let that sink in. “I’ll let Captain Shepard tell you more.”

Shepard walked to the blackboard slowly, savoring his entrance. His forehead was shiny with sweat, and January realized he was excited or nervous. He wondered what the psychiatrist would make of that.

“I’m going to come right to the point,” Shepard said. “The bomb you are going to drop is something new in history. We think it will knock out everything within four miles.”

Now the room was completely still. January noticed that he could see a great deal of his nose, eyebrows, and cheeks; it was as if he were receding back into his body, like a fox into its hole. He kept his gaze rigidly on Shepard, steadfastly ignoring the feeling. Shepard pulled a sheet back over a blackboard while someone else turned down the lights.

“This is a film of the only test we have made,” Shepard said. The film started, caught, started again. A wavery cone of bright cigarette smoke speared the length of the room, and on the sheet sprang a dead gray landscape: a lot of sky, a smooth desert floor, hills in the distance. The projector went click-click-click-click, click-click-click-click. “The bomb is on top of the tower,” Shepard said, and January focused on the pinlike object sticking out of the desert floor, off against the hills. It was between eight and ten miles from the camera, he judged; he had gotten good at calculating distances. He was still distracted by his face.

Click-click-click-click, click—then the screen went white for a second, filling even their room with light. When the picture returned the desert floor was filled with a white bloom of fire. The fireball coalesced and then quite suddenly it leaped off the earth all the way into the stratosphere, by God, like a tracer bullet leaving a machine gun, trailing a whitish pillar of smoke behind it. The pillar gushed up and a growing ball of smoke billowed outward, capping the pillar. January calculated the size of the cloud, but was sure he got it wrong. There it stood. The picture flickered, and then the screen went white again, as if the camera had melted or that part of the world had come apart. But the flapping from the projector told them it was the end of the film.

January felt the air suck in and out of his open mouth. The lights came on in the smoky room and for a second he panicked, he struggled to shove his features into an accepted pattern, the psychiatrist would be looking around at them all—and then he glanced around and realized he needn’t have worried, that he wasn’t alone. Faces were bloodless, eyes were blinky or bug-eyed with shock, mouths hung open or were clamped whitely shut. For a few moments they all had to acknowledge what they were doing. January, scaring himself, felt an urge to say, “Play it again, will you?” Fitch was pulling his curled black hair off his thug’s forehead uneasily. Beyond him January saw that one of the Limeys had already reconsidered how mad he was about missing the flight. Now he looked sick. Someone let out a long whew, another whistled. January looked to the front again, where the psychiatrist watched them, undisturbed.

Shepard said, “It’s big, all right. And no one knows what will happen when it’s dropped from the air. But the mushroom cloud you saw will go to at least thirty thousand feet, probably sixty. And the flash you saw at the beginning was hotter than the sun.”

Hotter than the sun. More licked lips, hard swallows, readjusted baseball caps. One of the intelligence officers passed out tinted goggles like welder’s glasses. January took his and twiddled the opacity dial.

Scholes said, “You’re the hottest thing in the armed forces, now. So no talking, even among yourselves.” He took a deep breath. “Let’s do it the way Colonel Tibbets would have wanted us to. He picked every one of you because you were the best, and now’s the time to show he was right. So—so let’s make the old man proud.”

The briefing was over. Men filed out into the sudden sunlight. Into the heat and glare. Captain Shepard approached Fitch. “Stone and I will be flying with you to take care of the bomb,” he said.

Fitch nodded. “Do you know how many strikes we’ll fly?”

“As many as it takes to make them quit.” Shepard stared hard at all of them. “But it will only take one.”

• • •

War breeds strange dreams. That night January writhed over his sheets in the hot wet vegetable darkness, in that frightening half-sleep when you sometimes know you are dreaming but can do nothing about it, and he dreamed he was walking . . .

. . . walking through the streets when suddenly the sun swoops down, the sun touches down and everything is instantly darkness and smoke and silence, a deaf roaring. Walls of fire. His head hurts and in the middle of his vision is a bluewhite blur as if God’s camera went off in his face. Ah—the sun fell, he thinks. His arm is burned. Blinking is painful. People stumbling by, mouths open, horribly burned—

He is a priest, he can feel the clerical collar, and the wounded ask him for help. He points to his ears, tries to touch them but can’t. Pall of black smoke over everything, the city has fallen into the streets. Ah, it’s the end of the world. In a park he finds shade and cleared ground. People crouch under bushes like frightened animals. Where the park meets the river red and black figures crowd into steaming water. A figure gestures from a copse of bamboo. He enters it, finds five or six faceless soldiers huddling. Their eyes have melted, their mouths are holes. Deafness spares him their words. The sighted soldier mimes drinking. The soldiers are thirsty. He nods and goes down to the river in search of a container. Bodies float downstream.

Hours pass as he hunts fruitlessly for a bucket. He pulls people from the rubble. He hears a bird screeching and he realizes that his deafness is the roar of the city burning, a roar like the blood in his ears but he is not deaf, he only thought he was deaf because there are no human cries. The people are suffering in silence. Through the dusky night he stumbles back to the river, pain crashing through his head. In a field, men are pulling potatoes out of the ground that have been baked well enough to eat. He shares one with them. At the river everyone is dead—

—and he struggled out of the nightmare drenched in rank sweat, the taste of dirt in his mouth, his stomach knotted with horror. He sat up and the wet rough sheet clung to his skin. His heart felt crushed between lungs desperate for air. The flowery rotting jungle smell filled him and images from the dream flashed before him so vividly that in the dim hut he saw nothing else. He grabbed his cigarettes and jumped off the bunk, hurried out into the compound. Trembling he lit up, started pacing around. For a moment he worried that the idiot psychiatrist might see him, but then he dismissed the idea. Nelson would be asleep. They were all asleep. He shook his head, looked down at his right arm and almost dropped his cigarette—but it was just his stove scar, an old scar, he’d had it most of his life, since the day he’d pulled the fry pan off the stove and onto his arm, burning it with oil. He could still remember the round O of fear that his mother’s mouth had made as she rushed in to see what was wrong. Just an old burn scar, he thought, let’s not go overboard here. He pulled his sleeve down.

For the rest of the night he tried to walk it off, cigarette after cigarette. The dome of the sky lightened until all the compound and the jungle beyond it was visible. He was forced by the light of day to walk back into his hut and lie down as if nothing had happened.

• • •

Two days later Scholes ordered them to take one of LeMay’s men over Rota for a test run. This new lieutenant colonel ordered Fitch not to play with the engines on takeoff. They flew a perfect run. January put the dummy gimmick right on the aiming point just as he had so often in the Salton Sea, and Fitch powered the plane down into the violent bank that started their 150-degree turn and flight for safety. Back on Tinian, the lieutenant colonel congratulated them and shook each of their hands. January smiled with the rest, palms cool, heart steady. It was as if his body were a shell, something he could manipulate from without, like a bombsight. He ate well, he chatted as much as he ever had, and when the psychiatrist ran him to earth for some questions, he was friendly and seemed open.

“Hello, Doc.”

“How do you feel about all this, Frank?”

“Just like I always have, sir. Fine.”

“Eating well?”

“Better than ever.”

“Sleeping well?”

“As well as I can in this humidity. I got used to Utah, I’m afraid.” Dr. Nelson laughed. Actually January had hardly slept since his dream. He was afraid of sleep. Couldn’t the man see that?

“And how do you feel about being part of the crew chosen to make the first strike?”

“Well, it was the right choice, I reckon. We’re the b—the best crew left.”

“Do you feel sorry about Tibbets’ crew’s accident?”

“Yes, sir, I do.” You better believe it.

After the jokes and firm handshakes that ended the interview, January walked out into the blaze of the tropical noon and lit a cigarette. He allowed himself to feel how much he despised the psychiatrist and his blind profession at the same time he was waving good-bye to the man. Ounce brain. Why couldn’t he have seen? Whatever happened it would be his fault . . . With a rush of smoke out of him January realized how painfully easy it was to fool someone if you wanted to. All action was no more than a mask that could be perfectly manipulated from somewhere else. And all the while in that somewhere else January lived in a click-click-click of film, in the silent roaring of a dream, struggling against images he couldn’t dispel. The heat of the tropical sun—ninety-three million miles away, wasn’t it?—pulsed painfully on the back of his neck.

As he watched the psychiatrist collar their tail-gunner Kochenski, he thought of walking up to the man and saying I quit. I don’t want to do this. In imagination he saw the look that would form in the man’s eye, in Fitch’s eye, in Tibbets’ eye, and his mind recoiled from the idea. He felt too much contempt for them. He wouldn’t for anything give them a means to despise him, a reason to call him coward. Stubbornly he banished the whole complex of thought. Easier to go along with it.

And so a couple of disjointed days later, just after midnight of August 9th, he found himself preparing for the strike. Around him Fitch and Matthews and Haddock were doing the same. How odd were the everyday motions of getting dressed when you were off to demolish a city, to end a hundred thousand lives! January found himself examining his hands, his boots, the cracks in the linoleum. He put on his survival vest, checked the pockets abstractedly for fishhooks, water kit, first aid package, emergency rations. Then the parachute harness, and his coveralls over it all. Tying his bootlaces took minutes; he couldn’t do it when watching his fingers so closely.

“Come on, Professor!” Fitch’s voice was tight. “The big day is here.”

He followed the others into the night. A cool wind was blowing. The chaplain said a prayer for them. They took jeeps down Broadway to runway Able. Lucky Strike stood in a circle of spotlights and men, half of them with cameras, the rest with reporter’s pads. They surrounded the crew; it reminded January of a Hollywood premiere. Eventually he escaped up the hatch and into the plane. Others followed. Half an hour passed before Fitch joined them, grinning like a movie star. They started the engines, and January was thankful for their vibrating, thought-smothering roar. They taxied away from the Hollywood scene and January felt relief for a moment until he remembered where they were going. On runway Able, the engines pitched up to their twenty-three hundred rpm whine, and looking out the clear windscreen he saw the runway paint-marks move by ever faster. Fitch kept them on the runway till Tinian had run out from under them, then quickly pulled up. They were on their way.

• • •

When they got to altitude, January climbed past Fitch and McDonald to the bombardier’s seat and placed his parachute on it. He leaned back. The roar of the four engines packed around him like cotton batting. He was on the flight, nothing to be done about it now. The heavy vibration was a comfort, he liked the feel of it there in the nose of the plane. A drowsy, sad acceptance hummed through him.

Against his closed eyelids flashed a black eyeless face and he jerked awake, heart racing. He was on the flight, no way out. Now he realized how easy it would have been to get out of it. He could have just said he didn’t want to. The simplicity of it appalled him. Who gave a damn what the psychiatrist or Tibbets or anyone else thought, compared to this? Now there was no way out. It was a comfort, in a way. Now he could stop worrying, stop thinking he had any choice.

Sitting there with his knees bracketing the bombsight, January dozed, and as he dozed he daydreamed his way out. He could climb the step to Fitch and McDonald and declare he had been secretly promoted to major and ordered to redirect the mission. They were to go to Tokyo and drop the bomb in the bay. The Jap War Cabinet had been told to watch this demonstration of the new weapon, and when they saw that fireball boil the bay and bounce into heaven they’d run and sign surrender papers as fast as they could write, kamikazes or not. They weren’t crazy, after all. No need to murder a whole city. It was such a good plan that the generals back home were no doubt changing the mission at this very minute, desperately radioing their instructions to Tinian, only to find out it was too late . . . so that when they returned to Tinian, January would become a hero for guessing what the generals really wanted, and for risking all to do it. It would be like one of the Hornblower stories in the Saturday Evening Post.

Once again January jerked awake. The drowsy pleasure of the fantasy was replaced with desperate scorn. There wasn’t a chance in hell that he could convince Fitch and the rest that he had secret orders superseding theirs. And he couldn’t go up there and wave his pistol around and order them to drop the bomb in Tokyo Bay, because he was the one who had to actually drop it, and he couldn’t be down in front dropping the bomb and up ordering the others around at the same time. Pipe dreams.

Time swept on, slow as a second hand. January’s thoughts, however, matched the spin of the props; desperately they cast about, now this way, now that, like an animal caught by the leg in a trap. The crew was silent. The clouds below were a white scree on the black ocean. January’s knee vibrated against the squat stand of the bombsight. He was the one who had to drop the bomb. No matter where his thoughts lunged, they were brought up short by that. He was the one, not Fitch or the crew, not LeMay, not the generals and scientists back home, not Truman and his advisors. Truman—suddenly January hated him. Roosevelt would have done it differently. If only Roosevelt had lived! The grief that had filled January when he learned of Roosevelt’s death reverberated through him again, more strongly than ever. It was unfair to have worked so hard and then not see the war’s end. And FDR would have ended it differently. Back at the start of it all he had declared that civilian centers were never to be bombed, and if he had lived, if, if, if. But he hadn’t. And now it was smiling bastard Harry Truman, ordering him, Frank January, to drop the sun on two hundred thousand women and children. Once his father had taken him to see the Browns play before twenty thousand, a giant crowd—“I never voted for you,” January whispered viciously, and jerked to realize he had spoken aloud. Luckily his microphone was off. But Roosevelt would have done it differently, he would have.

The bombsight rose before him, spearing the black sky and blocking some of the hundreds of little cruciform stars. Lucky Strike ground on toward Iwo Jima, minute by minute flying four miles closer to their target. January leaned forward and put his face in the cool headrest of the bombsight, hoping that its grasp might hold his thoughts as well as his forehead. It worked surprisingly well.

His earphones crackled and he sat up. “Captain January.” It was Shepard. “We’re going to arm the bomb now, want to watch?”

“Sure thing.” He shook his head, surprised at his own duplicity. Stepping up between the pilots, he moved stiffly to the roomy cabin behind the cockpit. Matthews was at his desk taking a navigational fix on the radio signals from Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and Haddock stood beside him. At the back of the compartment was a small circular hatch, below the larger tunnel leading to the rear of the plane. January opened it, sat down, and swung himself feet first through the hole.

The bomb bay was unheated, and the cold air felt good. He stood facing the bomb. Stone was sitting on the floor of the bay; Shepard was laid out under the bomb, reaching into it. On a rubber pad next to Stone were tools, plates, several cylindrical blocks. Shepard pulled back, sat up, sucked a scraped knuckle. He shook his head ruefully: “I don’t dare wear gloves with this one.”

“I’d be just as happy myself if you didn’t let something slip,” January joked nervously. The two men laughed.

“Nothing can blow till I change those green wires to the red ones,” Stone said.

“Give me the wrench,” Shepard said. Stone handed it to him, and he stretched under the bomb again. After some awkward wrenching inside it he lifted out a cylindrical plug. “Breech plug,” he said, and set it on the mat.

January found his skin goose-pimpling in the cold air. Stone handed Shepard one of the blocks. Shepard extended under the bomb again. “Red ends toward the breech.” “I know.” Watching them January was reminded of auto mechanics on the oily floor of a garage, working under a car. He had spent a few years doing that himself, after his family moved to Vicksburg. Hiroshima was a river town. One time a flatbed truck carrying bags of cement powder down Fourth Street hill had lost its brakes and careened into the intersection with the River Road, where despite the driver’s efforts to turn it smashed into a passing car. Frank had been out in the yard playing, had heard the crash and saw the cement dust rising. He had been one of the first there. The woman and child in the passenger seat of the Model T had been killed. The woman driving was okay. They were from Chicago. A group of folks subdued the driver of the truck, who kept trying to help at the Model T, though he had a bad cut on his head and was covered with white dust.

“Okay, let’s tighten the breech plug.” Stone gave Shepard the wrench. “Sixteen turns exactly,” Shepard said. He was sweating even in the bay’s chill, and he paused to wipe his forehead. “Let’s hope we don’t get hit by lightning.” He put the wrench down and shifted onto his knees, picked up a circular plate. Hubcap, January thought. Stone connected wires, then helped Shepard install two more plates. Good old American know-how, January thought, goose pimples rippling across his skin like cat’s paws over water. There was Shepard, a scientist, putting together a bomb like he was an auto mechanic changing oil and plugs. January felt a tight rush of rage at the scientists who had designed the bomb. They had worked on it for over a year down there in New Mexico; had none of them in all that time ever stopped to think what they were doing?

But none of them had to drop it. January turned to hide his face from Shepard, stepped down the bay. The bomb looked like a big long trash can, with fins at one end and little antennae at the other. Just a bomb, he thought, damn it, it’s just another bomb.

Shepard stood and patted the bomb gently. “We’ve got a live one now.” Never a thought about what it would do. January hurried by the man, afraid that hatred would crack his shell and give him away. The pistol strapped to his belt caught on the hatchway and he imagined shooting Shepard—shooting Fitch and McDonald and plunging the controls forward so that Lucky Strike tilted and spun down into the sea like a spent tracer bullet, like a plane broken by flak, following the arc of all human ambition. Nobody would ever know what had happened to them, and their trash can would be dumped at the bottom of the Pacific where it belonged. He could even shoot everyone and parachute out, and perhaps be rescued by one of the Superdumbos following them . . .

The thought passed and remembering it January squinted with disgust. But another part of him agreed that it was a possibility. It could be done. It would solve his problem. His fingers explored his holster snap.

“Want some coffee?” Matthews asked.

“Sure,” January said, and took his hand from the gun to reach for the cup. He sipped: hot. He watched Matthews and Benton tune the loran equipment. As the beeps came in, Matthews took a straightedge and drew lines from Okinawa and Iwo Jima on his map table. He tapped a finger on the intersection. “They’ve taken the art out of navigation,” he said to January. “They might as well stop making the navigator’s dome,” thumbing up at the little Plexiglas bubble over them.

“Good old American know-how,” January said.

Matthews nodded. With two fingers he measured the distance between their position and Iwo Jima. Benton measured with a ruler.

“Rendezvous at five thirty-five, eh?” Matthews said. They were to rendezvous with the two trailing planes over Iwo.

Benton disagreed: “I’d say five-fifty.”

“What? Check again, guy, we’re not in no tugboat here.”

“The wind—”

“Yah, the wind. Frank, you want to add a bet to the pool?”

“Five thirty-six,” January said promptly.

They laughed. “See, he’s got more confidence in me,” Matthews said with a dopey grin.

January recalled his plan to shoot the crew and tip the plane into the sea, and he pursed his lips, repelled. Not for anything would he be able to shoot these men, who, if not friends, were at least companions. They passed for friends. They meant no harm.

Shepard and Stone climbed into the cabin. Matthews offered them coffee. “The gimmick’s ready to kick their ass, eh?” Shepard nodded and drank.

January moved forward, past Haddock’s console. Another plan that wouldn’t work. What to do? All the flight engineer’s dials and gauges showed conditions were normal. Maybe he could sabotage something? Cut a line somewhere?

Fitch looked back at him and said, “When are we due over Iwo?”

“Five-forty, Matthews says.”

“He better be right.”

A thug. In peacetime Fitch would be hanging around a pool table giving the cops trouble. He was perfect for war. Tibbets had chosen his men well—most of them, anyway. Moving back past Haddock, January stopped to stare at the group of men in the navigation cabin. They joked, drank coffee. They were all a bit like Fitch: young toughs, capable and thoughtless. They were having a good time, an adventure. That was January’s dominant impression of his companions in the 509th; despite all the bitching and the occasional moments of overmastering fear, they were having a good time. His mind spun forward and he saw what these young men would grow up to be like as clearly as if they stood before him in businessmen’s suits, prosperous and balding. They would be tough and capable and thoughtless, and as the years passed and the great war receded in time they would look back on it with ever-increasing nostalgia, for they would be the survivors and not the dead. Every year of this war would feel like ten in their memories, so that the war would always remain the central experience of their lives—a time when history lay palpable in their hands, when each of their daily acts affected it, when moral issues were simple, and others told them what to do—so that as more years passed and the survivors aged, bodies falling apart, lives in one rut or another, they would unconsciously push harder and harder to thrust the world into war again, thinking somewhere inside themselves that if they could only return to world war then they would magically be again as they were in the last one—young, and free, and happy. And by that time they would hold the positions of power, they would be capable of doing it.

So there would be more wars, January saw. He heard it in Matthews’ laughter, saw it in their excited eyes. “There’s Iwo, and it’s five thirty-one. Pay up! I win!” And in future wars they’d have more bombs like the gimmick, hundreds of them no doubt. He saw more planes, more young crews like this one, flying to Moscow no doubt or to wherever, fireballs in every capital, why not? And to what end? To what end? So that the old men could hope to become magically young again. Nothing more sane than that.

They were over Iwo Jima. Three more hours to Japan. Voices from The Great Artiste and Number 91 crackled on the radio. Rendezvous accomplished, the three planes flew northwest, toward Shikoku, the first Japanese island in their path. January went aft to use the toilet. “You okay, Frank?” Matthews asked. “Sure. Terrible coffee, though.” “Ain’t it always.” January tugged at his baseball cap and hurried away. Kochenski and the other gunners were playing poker. When he was done, he returned forward. Matthews sat on the stool before his maps, readying his equipment for the constant monitoring of drift that would now be required. Haddock and Benton were also busy at their stations. January maneuvered between the pilots down into the nose. “Good shooting,” Matthews called after him.

Forward it seemed quieter. January got settled, put his headphones on and leaned forward to look out the ribbed Plexiglas.

Dawn had turned the whole vault of the sky pink. Slowly the radiant shade shifted through lavender to blue, pulse by pulse a different color. The ocean below was a glittering blue plane, marbled by a pattern of puffy pink cloud. The sky above was a vast dome, darker above than on the horizon. January had always thought that dawn was the time when you could see most clearly how big the earth was, and how high above it they flew. It seemed they flew at the very upper edge of the atmosphere, and January saw how thin it was, how it was just a skin of air really, so that even if you flew up to its top the earth still extended away infinitely in every direction. The coffee had warmed January, he was sweating. Sunlight blinked off the Plexiglas. His watch said six. Plane and hemisphere of blue were split down the middle by the bombsight. His earphones crackled and he listened in to the reports from the lead planes flying over the target cities. Kokura, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, all of them had six-tenths cloud cover. Maybe they would have to cancel the whole mission because of weather. “We’ll look at Hiroshima first,” Fitch said. January peered down at the fields of miniature clouds with renewed interest. His parachute slipped under him. Readjusting it, he imagined putting it on, sneaking back to the central escape hatch under the navigator’s cabin, opening the hatch . . . he could be out of the plane and gone before anyone noticed. Leave it up to them. They could bomb or not, but it wouldn’t be January’s doing. He could float down onto the world like a puff of dandelion, feel cool air rush around him, watch the silk canopy dome hang over him like a miniature sky, a private world.

An eyeless black face. January shuddered; it was as though the nightmare could return any time. If he jumped nothing would change, the bomb would still fall—would he feel any better, floating on his Inland Sea? Sure, one part of him shouted; maybe, another conceded; the rest of him saw that face . . .

Earphones crackled. Shepard said, “Lieutenant Stone has now armed the bomb, and I can tell you all what we are carrying. Aboard with us is the world’s first atomic bomb.”

Not exactly, January thought. Whistles squeaked in his earphones. The first one went off in New Mexico. Splitting atoms: January had heard the term before. Tremendous energy in every atom, Einstein had said. Break one, and—he had seen the result on film. Shepard was talking about radiation, which brought back more to January. Energy released in the form of X-rays. Killed by X-rays! It would be against the Geneva Convention if they had thought of it.

Fitch cut in. “When the bomb is dropped, Lieutenant Benton will record our reaction to what we see. This recording is being made for history, so watch your language.” Watch your language! January choked back a laugh. Don’t curse or blaspheme God at the sight of the first atomic bomb incinerating a city and all its inhabitants with X-rays!

Six-twenty. January found his hands clenched together on the headrest of the bombsight. He felt as if he had a fever. In the harsh wash of morning light the skin on the backs of his hands appeared slightly translucent. The whorls in the skin looked like the delicate patterning of waves on the sea’s surface. His hands were made of atoms. Atoms were the smallest building block of matter, it took billions of them to make those tense, trembling hands. Split one atom and you had the fireball. That meant that the energy contained in even one hand . . . he turned up a palm to look at the lines and the mottled flesh under the transparent skin. A person was a bomb that could blow up the world. January felt that latent power stir in him, pulsing with every hard heart-knock. What beings they were, and in what a blue expanse of a world!—And here they spun on to drop a bomb and kill a hundred thousand of these astonishing beings.

When a fox or raccoon is caught by the leg in a trap, it lunges until the leg is frayed, twisted, perhaps broken, and only then does the animal’s pain and exhaustion force it to quit. Now in the same way January wanted to quit. His mind hurt. His plans to escape were so much crap—stupid, useless. Better to quit. He tried to stop thinking, but it was hopeless. How could he stop? As long as he was conscious, he would be thinking. The mind struggles longer in its traps than any fox.

Lucky Strike tilted up and began the long climb to bombing altitude. On the horizon, the clouds lay over a green island. Japan. Surely it had gotten hotter, the heater must be broken, he thought. Don’t think. Every few minutes Matthews gave Fitch small course adjustments. “Two seventy-five, now. That’s it.” To escape the moment January recalled his childhood. Following a mule and plow. Moving to Vicksburg (rivers). For a while there in Vicksburg, since his stutter made it hard to gain friends, he had played a game with himself. He had passed the time by imagining that everything he did was vitally important and determined the fate of the world. If he crossed a road in front of a certain car, for instance, then the car wouldn’t make it through the next intersection before a truck hit it, and so the man driving would be killed and wouldn’t be able to invent the flying boat that would save President Wilson from kidnappers—so he had to wait for that car because everything afterward depended on it. Oh damn it, he thought, damn it, think of something different. The last Hornblower story he had read—how would he get out of this? The round O of his mother’s face as she ran in and saw his arm—The Mississippi, mud-brown behind its levees—Abruptly he shook his head, face twisted in frustration and despair, aware at last that no possible avenue of memory would serve as an escape for him now, for now there was no part of his life that did not apply to the situation he was in, and no matter where he cast his mind it was going to shore up against the hour facing him.

Less than an hour. They were at thirty thousand feet, bombing altitude. Fitch gave him altimeter readings to dial into the bombsight. Matthews gave him windspeeds. Sweat got in his eye and he blinked furiously. The sun rose behind them like an atomic bomb, glinting off every corner and edge of the Plexiglas, illuminating his bubble compartment with a fierce glare. Broken plans jumbled together in his mind, his breath was short, his throat dry. Uselessly and repeatedly he damned the scientists, damned Truman. Damned the Japanese for causing the whole mess in the first place, damned yellow killers, they had brought this on themselves. Remember Pearl. American men had died under bombs when no war had been declared; they had started it and now it was coming back to them with a vengeance. And they deserved it. And an invasion of Japan would take years, cost millions of lives—end it now, end it, they deserved it, they deserved it steaming river full of charcoal people silently dying damned stubborn race of maniacs!

“There’s Honshu,” Fitch said, and January returned to the world of the plane. They were over the Inland Sea. Soon they would pass the secondary target, Kokura, a bit to the south. Seven-thirty. The island was draped more heavily than the sea by clouds, and again January’s heart leaped with the idea that weather would cancel the mission. But they did deserve it. It was a mission like any other mission. He had dropped bombs on Africa, Sicily, Italy, all Germany . . . He leaned forward to take a look through the sight. Under the X of the crosshairs was the sea, but at the lead edge of the sight was land. Honshu. At two hundred and thirty miles an hour that gave them about a half hour to Hiroshima. Maybe less. He wondered if his heart could beat so hard for that long.

Fitch said, “Matthews, I’m giving over guidance to you. Just tell us what to do.”

“Bear south two degrees,” was all Matthews said. At last their voices had taken on a touch of awareness, even fear.

“January, are you ready?” Fitch asked.

“I’m just waiting,” January said. He sat up, so Fitch could see the back of his head. The bombsight stood between his legs. A switch on its side would start the bombing sequence; the bomb would not leave the plane immediately upon the flick of the switch, but would drop after a fifteen-second radio tone warned the following planes. The sight was adjusted accordingly.

“Adjust to a heading of two sixty-five,” Matthews said. “We’re coming in directly upwind.” This was to make any side-drift adjustments for the bomb unnecessary. “January, dial it down to two hundred and thirty-one miles per hour.”

“Two thirty-one.”

Fitch said, “Everyone but January and Matthews, get your goggles on.”

January took the darkened goggles from the floor. One needed to protect one’s eyes or they might melt. He put them on, put his forehead on the headrest. They were in the way. He took them off. When he looked through the sight again there was land under the crosshairs. He checked his watch. Eight o’clock. Up and reading the papers, drinking tea.

“Ten minutes to AP,” Matthews said. The aiming point was Aioi Bridge, a T-shaped bridge in the middle of the delta-straddling city. Easy to recognize.

“There’s a lot of cloud down there.” Fitch nodded. “Are you going to be able to see?”

“I won’t be sure until we try it,” January said.

“We can make another pass and use radar if we need to,” Matthews said.

Fitch said, “Don’t drop it unless you’re sure, January.”

“Yes sir.”

Through the sight a grouping of rooftops and gray roads was just visible between broken clouds. Around it green forest. “All right,” Matthews exclaimed, “here we go! Keep it right on this heading, Captain! January, we’ll stay at two thirty-one.”

“And same heading,” Fitch said. “January, she’s all yours. Everyone make sure your goggles are on. And be ready for the turn.”

January’s world contracted to the view through the bombsight. A stippled field of cloud and forest. Over a small range of hills and into Hiroshima’s watershed. The broad river was mud brown, the land pale hazy green, the growing network of roads flat gray. Now the tiny rectangular shapes of buildings covered almost all the land, and swimming into the sight came the city proper, narrow islands thrusting into a dark blue bay. Under the crosshairs the city moved island by island, cloud by cloud. January had stopped breathing, his fingers were rigid as stone on the switch. And there was Aioi Bridge. It slid right under the crosshairs, a tiny T right in a gap of clouds. January’s fingers crushed the switch. Deliberately he took a breath, held it. Clouds swam under the crosshairs, then the next island. “Almost there,” he said calmly into his microphone. “Steady.” Now that he was committed his heart was humming like the Wrights. He counted to ten. Now flowing under the crosshairs were clouds alternating with green forest, leaden roads. “I’ve turned the switch, but I’m not getting a tone!” he croaked into the mike. His right hand held the switch firmly in place. Fitch was shouting something—Matthews’ voice cracked across it—“Flipping it b-back and forth,” January shouted, shielding the bombsight with his body from the eyes of the pilots. “But still—wait a second—”

He pushed the switch down. A low hum filled his ears. “That’s it! It started!”

“But where will it land?” Matthews cried.

“Hold steady!” January shouted.

Lucky Strike shuddered and lofted up ten or twenty feet. January twisted to look down and there was the bomb, flying just below the plane. Then with a wobble it fell away.

The plane banked right and dove so hard that the centrifugal force threw January against the Plexiglas. Several thousand feet lower Fitch leveled it out and they hurtled north.

“Do you see anything?” Fitch cried.

From the tail-gun Kochenski gasped, “Nothing.” January struggled upright. He reached for the welder’s goggles, but they were no longer on his head. He couldn’t find them. “How long has it been?” he said.

“Thirty seconds,” Matthews replied.

January clamped his eyes shut.

The blood in his eyelids lit up red, then white.

On the earphones a clutter of voices: “Oh my God. Oh my God.” The plane bounced and tumbled, metallically shrieking. January pressed himself off the Plexiglas. “’Nother shockwave!” Kochenski yelled. The plane rocked again, bounced out of control, this is it, January thought, end of the world, I guess that solves my problem.

He opened his eyes and found he could still see. The engines still roared, the props spun. “Those were the shockwaves from the bomb,” Fitch called. “We’re okay now. Look at that! Will you look at that sonofabitch go!”

January looked. The cloud layer below had burst apart, and a black column of smoke billowed up from a core of red fire. Already the top of the column was at their height. Exclamations of shock clattered painfully in January’s ears. He stared at the fiery base of the cloud, at the scores of fires feeding into it. Suddenly he could see past the cloud, and his fingernails cut into his palms. Through a gap in the clouds he saw it clearly, the delta, the six rivers, there off to the left of the tower of smoke: the city of Hiroshima, untouched.

“We missed!” Kochenski yelled. “We missed it!”

January turned to hide his face from the pilots; on it was a grin like a rictus. He sat back in his seat and let the relief fill him.

Then it was back to it. “God damn it!” Fitch shouted down at him. McDonald was trying to restrain him. “January, get up here!”

“Yes sir.” Now there was a new set of problems.

January stood and turned, legs weak. His right fingertips throbbed painfully. The men were crowded forward to look out the Plexiglas. January looked with them.

The mushroom cloud was forming. It roiled out as if it might continue to extend forever, fed by the inferno and the black stalk below it. It looked about two miles wide, and a half-mile tall, and it extended well above the height they flew at, dwarfing their plane entirely. “Do you think we’ll all be sterile?” Matthews said.

“I can taste the radiation,” McDonald declared. “Can you? It tastes like lead.”

Bursts of flame shot up into the cloud from below, giving a purplish tint to the stalk. There it stood: lifelike, malignant, sixty thousand feet tall. One bomb. January shoved past the pilots into the navigation cabin, overwhelmed.

“Should I start recording everyone’s reaction, Captain?” asked Benton.

“To hell with that,” Fitch said, following January back. But Shepard got there first, descending quickly from the navigation dome. He rushed across the cabin, caught January on the shoulder. “You bastard!” he screamed as January stumbled back. “You lost your nerve, coward!”

January went for Shepard, happy to have a target at last, but Fitch cut in and grabbed him by the collar, pulled him around until they were face to face—

“Is that right?” Fitch cried, as angry as Shepard. “Did you screw up on purpose?”

“No,” January grunted, and knocked Fitch’s hands away from his neck. He swung and smacked Fitch on the mouth, caught him solid. Fitch staggered back, recovered, and no doubt would have beaten January up, but Matthews and Benton and Stone leaped in and held him back, shouting for order. “Shut up! Shut up!” McDonald screamed from the cockpit, and for a moment it was bedlam, but Fitch let himself be restrained, and soon only McDonald’s shouts for quiet were heard. January retreated to between the pilot seats, right hand on his pistol holster.

“The city was in the crosshairs when I flipped the switch,” he said. “But the first couple of times I flipped it nothing happened—”

“That’s a lie!” Shepard shouted. “There was nothing wrong with the switch, I checked it myself. Besides, the bomb exploded miles beyond Hiroshima, look for yourself! That’s minutes.” He wiped spit from his chin and pointed at January. “You did it.”

“You don’t know that,” January said. But he could see the men had been convinced by Shepard, and he took a step back. “You just get me to a board of inquiry, quick. And leave me alone till then. If you touch me again,” glaring venomously at Fitch and then Shepard, “I’ll shoot you.” He turned and hopped down to his seat, feeling exposed and vulnerable, like a treed raccoon.

“They’ll shoot you for this,” Shepard screamed after him. “Disobeying orders—treason—” Matthews and Stone were shutting him up.

“Let’s get out of here,” he heard McDonald say. “I can taste the lead, can’t you?”

January looked out the Plexiglas. The giant cloud still burned and roiled. One atom . . . Well, they had really done it to that forest. He almost laughed but stopped himself, afraid of hysteria. Through a break in the clouds he got a clear view of Hiroshima for the first time. It lay spread over its islands like a map, unharmed. Well, that was that. The inferno at the base of the mushroom cloud was eight or ten miles around the shore of the bay and a mile or two inland. A certain patch of forest would be gone, destroyed—utterly blasted from the face of the earth. The Japs would be able to go out and investigate the damage. And if they were told it was a demonstration, a warning—and if they acted fast—well, they had their chance. Maybe it would work.

The release of tension made January feel sick. Then he recalled Shepard’s words and he knew that whether his plan worked or not he was still in trouble. In trouble! It was worse than that. Bitterly he cursed the Japanese, he even wished for a moment that he had dropped it on them. Wearily he let his despair empty him.

A long while later he sat up straight. Once again he was a trapped animal. He began lunging for escape, casting about for plans. One alternative after another. All during the long grim flight home he considered it, mind spinning at the speed of the props and beyond. And when they came down on Tinian he had a plan. It was a long shot, he reckoned, but it was the best he could do.

• • •

The briefing hut was surrounded by MPs again. January stumbled from the truck with the rest and walked inside. He was more than ever aware of the looks given him, and they were hard, accusatory. He was too tired to care. He hadn’t slept in more than thirty-six hours, and had slept very little since the last time he had been in the hut, a week before. Now the room quivered with the lack of engine vibration to stabilize it, and the silence roared. It was all he could do to hold on to the bare essentials of his plan. The glares of Fitch and Shepard, the hurt incomprehension of Matthews, they had to be thrust out of his focus. Thankfully he lit a cigarette.

In a clamor of question and argument the others described the strike. Then the haggard Scholes and an intelligence officer led them through the bombing run. January’s plan made it necessary to hold to his story: “. . . and when the AP was under the crosshairs I pushed down the switch, but got no signal. I flipped it up and down repeatedly until the tone kicked in. At that point there was still fifteen seconds to the release.”

“Was there anything that may have caused the tone to start when it did?”

“Not that I noticed immediately, but—”

“It’s impossible,” Shepard interrupted, face red. “I checked the switch before we flew and there was nothing wrong with it. Besides, the drop occurred over a minute—”

“Captain Shepard,” Scholes said. “We’ll hear from you presently.”

“But he’s obviously lying—”

“Captain Shepard! It’s not at all obvious. Don’t speak unless questioned.”

“Anyway,” January said, hoping to shift the questions away from the issue of the long delay, “I noticed something about the bomb when it was falling that could explain why it stuck. I need to discuss it with one of the scientists familiar with the bomb’s design.”

“What was that?” Scholes asked suspiciously.

January hesitated. “There’s going to be an inquiry, right?”

Scholes frowned. “This is the inquiry, Captain January. Tell us what you saw.”

“But there will be some proceeding beyond this one?”

“It looks like there’s going to be a court-martial, yes, Captain.”

“That’s what I thought. I don’t want to talk to anyone but my counsel, and some scientist familiar with the bomb.”

“I’m a scientist familiar with the bomb,” Shepard burst out. “You could tell me if you really had anything, you—”

“I said I need a scientist!” January exclaimed, rising to face the scarlet Shepard across the table. “Not a G-God damned mechanic.” Shepard started to shout, others joined in and the room rang with argument. While Scholes restored order, January sat down, and he refused to be drawn out again.

“I’ll see you’re assigned counsel, and initiate the court-martial,” Scholes said, clearly at a loss. “Meanwhile you are under arrest, on suspicion of disobeying orders in combat.” January nodded, and Scholes gave him over to the MPs.

“One last thing,” January said, fighting exhaustion. “Tell General LeMay that if the Japs are told this drop was a warning, it might have the same effect as—”

“I told you!” Shepard shouted. “I told you he did it on purpose!”

Men around Shepard restrained him. But he had convinced most of them, and even Matthews stared at him with surprised anger.

January shook his head wearily. He had the dull feeling that his plan, while it had succeeded so far, was ultimately not a good one. “Just trying to make the best of it.” It took all of his remaining will to force his legs to carry him in a dignified manner out of the hut.

• • •

His cell was an empty NCO’s office. MPs brought his meals. For the first couple of days he did little but sleep. On the third day he glanced out the office’s barred window, and saw a tractor pulling a tarpaulin-draped trolley out of the compound, followed by jeeps filled with MPs. It looked like a military funeral. January rushed to the door and banged on it until one of the young MPs came.

“What’s that they’re doing out there?” January demanded.

Eyes cold and mouth twisted, the MP said, “They’re making another strike. They’re going to do it right this time.”

“No!” January cried. “No!” He rushed the MP, who knocked him back and locked the door. “No!” He beat the door until his hands hurt, cursing wildly. “You don’t need to do it, it isn’t necessary.” Shell shattered at last, he collapsed on the bed and wept. Now everything he had done would be rendered meaningless. He had sacrificed himself for nothing.

• • •

A day or two after that the MPs led in a colonel, an iron-haired man who stood stiffly and crushed January’s hand when he shook it. His eyes were a pale, icy blue.

“I am Colonel Dray,” he said. “I have been ordered to defend you in court-martial.” January could feel the dislike pouring from the man. “To do that I’m going to need every fact you have, so let’s get started.”

“I’m not talking to anybody until I’ve seen an atomic scientist.”

“I am your defense counsel—”

“I don’t care who you are,” January said. “Your defense of me depends on you getting one of the scientists here. The higher up he is, the better. And I want to speak to him alone.”

“I will have to be present.”

So he would do it. But now January’s lawyer, too, was an enemy.

“Naturally,” January said. “You’re my lawyer. But no one else. Our atomic secrecy may depend on it.”

“You saw evidence of sabotage?”

“Not one word more until that scientist is here.”

Angrily the colonel nodded and left.

• • •

Late the next day the colonel returned with another man. “This is Dr. Forest.”

“I helped develop the bomb,” Forest said. He had a crew cut and dressed in fatigues, and to January he looked more Army than the colonel. Suspiciously he stared back and forth at the two men.

“You’ll vouch for this man’s identity on your word as an officer?” he asked Dray.

“Of course,” the colonel said stiffly, offended.

“So,” Dr. Forest said. “You had some trouble getting it off when you wanted to. Tell me what you saw.”

“I saw nothing,” January said harshly. He took a deep breath; it was time to commit himself. “I want you to take a message back to the scientists. You folks have been working on this thing for years, and you must have had time to consider how the bomb should have been used. You know we could have convinced the Japs to surrender by showing them a demonstration—”

“Wait a minute,” Forest said. “You’re saying you didn’t see anything? There wasn’t a malfunction?”

“That’s right,” January said, and cleared his throat. “It wasn’t necessary, do you understand?”

Forest was looking at Colonel Dray. Dray gave him a disgusted shrug. “He told me he saw evidence of sabotage.”

“I want you to go back and ask the scientists to intercede for me,” January said, raising his voice to get the man’s attention. “I haven’t got a chance in that court-martial. But if the scientists defend me then maybe they’ll let me live, see? I don’t want to get shot for doing something every one of you scientists would have done.”

Dr. Forest had backed away. Color rising, he said, “What makes you think that’s what we would have done? Don’t you think we considered it? Don’t you think men better qualified than you made the decision?” He waved a hand— “God damn it—what made you think you were competent to decide something as important as that!”

January was appalled at the man’s reaction; in his plan it had gone differently. Angrily he jabbed a finger at Forest. “Because I was the man doing it, Doctor Forest. You take even one step back from that and suddenly you can pretend it’s not your doing. Fine for you, but I was there.”

At every word the man’s color was rising. It looked like he might pop a vein in his neck. January tried once more. “Have you ever tried to imagine what one of your bombs would do to a city full of people?”

“I’ve had enough!” the man exploded. He turned to Dray. “I’m under no obligation to keep what I’ve heard here confidential. You can be sure it will be used as evidence in Captain January’s court-martial.” He turned and gave January a look of such blazing hatred that January understood it. For these men to admit he was right would mean admitting that they were wrong—that every one of them was responsible for his part in the construction of the weapon January had refused to use. Understanding that, January knew he was doomed.

The bang of Dr. Forest’s departure still shook the little office. January sat on his cot, got out a smoke. Under Colonel Dray’s cold gaze he lit one shakily, took a drag. He looked up at the colonel, shrugged. “It was my best chance,” he explained. That did something—for the first and only time the cold disdain in the colonel’s eyes shifted to a little, hard, lawyerly gleam of respect.

• • •

The court-martial lasted two days. The verdict was guilty of disobeying orders in combat and of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. The sentence was death by firing squad.

• • •

For most of his remaining days January rarely spoke, drawing ever further behind the mask that had hidden him for so long. A clergyman came to see him, but it was the 509th’s chaplain, the one who had said the prayer blessing the Lucky Strike’s mission before they took off. Angrily January sent him packing.

Later, however, a young Catholic priest dropped by. His name was Patrick Getty. He was a little pudgy man, bespectacled and, it seemed, somewhat afraid of January. January let the man talk to him. When he returned the next day January talked back a bit, and on the day after that he talked some more. It became a habit.

Usually January talked about his childhood. He talked of plowing mucky black bottom land behind a mule. Of running down the lane to the mailbox. Of reading books by the light of the moon after he had been ordered to sleep, and of being beaten by his mother for it with a high-heeled shoe. He told the priest the story of the time his arm had been burnt, and about the car crash at the bottom of Fourth Street. “It’s the truck driver’s face I remember, do you see, Father?”

“Yes,” the young priest said. “Yes.”

And he told him about the game he had played in which every action he took tipped the balance of world affairs. “When I remembered that game I thought it was dumb. Step on a sidewalk crack and cause an earthquake—you know, it’s stupid. Kids are like that.” The priest nodded. “But now I’ve been thinking that if everybody were to live their whole lives like that, thinking that every move they made really was important, then . . . it might make a difference.” He waved a hand vaguely, expelled cigarette smoke. “You’re accountable for what you do.”

“Yes,” the priest said. “Yes, you are.”

“And if you’re given orders to do something wrong, you’re still accountable, right? The orders don’t change it.”

“That’s right.”

“Hmph.” January smoked a while. “So they say, anyway. But look what happens.” He waved at the office. “I’m like the guy in a story I read—he thought everything in books was true, and after reading a bunch of westerns he tried to rob a train. They tossed him in jail.” He laughed shortly. “Books are full of crap.”

“Not all of them,” the priest said. “Besides, you weren’t trying to rob a train.”

They laughed at the notion. “Did you read that story?”

“No.”

“It was the strangest book—there were two stories in it, and they alternated chapter by chapter, but they didn’t have a thing to do with each other! I didn’t get it.”

“. . . Maybe the writer was trying to say that everything connects to everything else.”

“Maybe. But it’s a funny way to say it.”

“I like it.”

And so they passed the time, talking.

• • •

So it was the priest who was the one to come by and tell January that his request for a Presidential pardon had been refused. Getty said awkwardly, “It seems the President approves the sentence.”

“That bastard,” January said weakly. He sat on his cot.

Time passed. It was another hot, humid day.

“Well,” the priest said. “Let me give you some better news. Given your situation I don’t think telling you matters, though I’ve been told not to. The second mission—you know there was a second strike?”

“Yes.”

“Well, they missed too.”

“What?” January cried, and bounced to his feet. “You’re kidding!”

“No. They flew to Kokura, but found it covered by clouds. It was the same over Nagasaki and Hiroshima, so they flew back to Kokura and tried to drop the bomb using radar to guide it, but apparently there was a—a genuine equipment failure this time, and the bomb fell on an island.”

January was hopping up and down, mouth hanging open, “So we n-never—”

“We never dropped an atom bomb on a Japanese city. That’s right.” Getty grinned. “And get this—I heard this from my superior—they sent a message to the Japanese government telling them that the two explosions were warnings, and that if they didn’t surrender by September first we would drop bombs on Kyoto and Tokyo, and then wherever else we had to. Word is that the Emperor went to Hiroshima to survey the damage, and when he saw it he ordered the Cabinet to surrender. So . . .”

“So it worked,” January said. He hopped around, “It worked, it worked!”

“Yes.”

“Just like I said it would!” he cried, and hopping before the priest, he laughed.

Getty was jumping around a little too, and the sight of the priest bouncing was too much for January. He sat on his cot and laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks.

“So—” he sobered quickly. “So Truman’s going to shoot me anyway, eh?”

“Yes,” the priest said unhappily. “I guess that’s right.”

This time January’s laugh was bitter. “He’s a bastard, all right. And proud of being a bastard, which makes it worse.” He shook his head. “If Roosevelt had lived . . .”

“It would have been different,” Getty finished. “Yes. Maybe so. But he didn’t.” He sat beside January. “Cigarette?” He held out a pack, and January noticed the white wartime wrapper. He frowned.

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Oh well. That’s all right.” January took one of the Lucky Strikes, lit up. “That’s awfully good news.” He breathed out. “I never believed Truman would pardon me anyway, so mostly you’ve brought good news. Ha. They missed. You have no idea how much better that makes me feel.”

“I think I do.”

January smoked the cigarette.

“. . . So I’m a good American after all. I am a good American,” he insisted, “no matter what Truman says.”

“Yes,” Getty replied, and coughed. “You’re better than Truman any day.”

“Better watch what you say, Father.” He looked into the eyes behind the glasses, and the expression he saw there gave him pause. Since the drop, every look directed at him had been filled with contempt. He’d seen it so often during the court-martial that he’d learned to stop looking; and now he had to teach himself to see again. The priest looked at him as if he were . . . as if he were some kind of hero. That wasn’t exactly right. But seeing it . . .

January would not live to see the years that followed, so he would never know what came of his action. He had given up casting his mind forward and imagining possibilities, because there was no point to it. His planning was ended. In any case he would not have been able to imagine the course of the post-war years. That the world would quickly become an armed camp pitched on the edge of atomic war, he might have predicted. But he never would have guessed that so many people would join a January Society. He would never know of the effect the Society had on Dewey during the Korean crisis, never know of the Society’s successful campaign for the test ban treaty, and never learn that, thanks in part to the Society and its allies, a treaty would be signed by the great powers that would reduce the number of atomic bombs year by year, until there were none left.

Frank January would never know any of that. But in that moment on his cot, looking into the eyes of young Patrick Getty, he guessed an inkling of it—he felt, just for an instant, the impact on history.

And with that, he relaxed. In his last week, everyone who met him carried away the same impression, that of a calm, quiet man, angry at Truman and others, but in a withdrawn, matter-of-fact way. Patrick Getty, a strong force in the January Society ever after, said January was talkative for some time after he learned of the missed attack on Kokura. Then he became quieter and quieter, as the day approached. On the morning that they woke him at dawn to march him out to a hastily constructed execution shed, his MPs shook his hand. The priest was with him as he smoked a final cigarette, and they prepared to put the hood over his head. January looked at him calmly. “They load one of the guns with a blank cartridge, right?”

“Yes,” Getty said.

“So each man in the squad can imagine he may not have shot me?”

“Yes. That’s right.”

A tight, unhumorous smile was January’s last expression. He threw down the cigarette, ground it out, poked the priest in the arm. “But I shot the blank. I know.” Then the mask slipped back into place for good, making the hood redundant, and with a firm step January went to the wall. One might have said he was at peace.

© 1984 by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Originally published in Universe 14, edited by Terry Carr.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Kim Stanley Robinson is the bestselling author of sixteen novels, including three series: the Mars trilogy, the Three Californias trilogy, and the Science in the Capitol trilogy. He is also the author of about seventy short stories, much of which has been collected in the retrospective volume The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson. He is the winner of two Hugos, two Nebulas, six Locus Awards, the World Fantasy Award, the British Science Fiction Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His latest novels are 2312 and Shaman.

NOVEL EXCERPTS

NOVEL EXCERPT:
Sand
Hugh Howey

1 • The Valley of Dunes

Starlight guided them through the valley of dunes and into the northern wastes. A dozen men walked single file, kers tied around their necks and pulled up over their noses and mouths, leather creaking and scabbards clacking. The route was circuitous, but a direct line meant summiting the crumbling sand and braving the howling winds at their peaks. There was the long way and there was the hard way, and the brigands of the northern wastes rarely chose the hard way.

Palmer kept his thoughts to himself while the others swapped lewd jokes and fictitious tales of several kinds of booty scored. His friend Hap walked farther ahead, trying to ingratiate himself with the older men. It was more than a little unwise to be wandering the wastes with a band of brigands, but Palmer was a sand diver. He lived for that razor-thin line between insanity and good sense. And besides, these braggarts with their beards and foul odors were offering a month’s pay for two days of work. A hike into the wastes and a quick dive were nothing before a pile of coin.

The noisy column of men snaked around a steep dune, out of the lee and into the wind. Palmer adjusted his flapping ker. He tucked the edge of the cloth underneath his goggles to keep it in place. Sand peppered the right side of his face, telling him they were heading north. He could know without glancing up at the stars, know without seeing the high peaks to the west. The winds might abate or swell in fury, but their direction was as steady as the course of the sun. East to west, with the sand that rode along lodging in Palmer’s hair, filling his ears, stacking up in curving patterns of creeping dunes, and burying the world in a thousand meters of hellish grit.

As the piratical laughter from the column died down, Palmer could hear the other voices of the desert chorus. There was the moaning of the winds, and a shushing sound as waves of airborne sand crashed into dunes and raked across men like gritpaper. Sand on sand made a noise like a hissing rattler ready to strike. Even as he thought this, a wrinkle in the dune beside him turned out to be more than a wrinkle. The serpent slithered and disappeared into its hole, as afraid of Palmer as he of it.

There were more sounds. The clinking of the heavy gear on his back: the dive bottles and dive suit, the visor and fins, his regulator and beacons, all the tools of his trade. There was the call of cayotes singing to the west, their piercing wails uniquely able to travel into the wind to warn neighboring packs to stay away. They were calling out that men were coming, couldn’t you smell them?

Beyond these myriad voices was the heartbeat of the desert sands, the thrumming that never ceased and could be felt day and night in a man’s bones, day and night from womb to grave. It was the deep rumbles that emanated from No Man’s Land far to the east, that rolling thunder or those rebel bombs or the farting gods—whichever of the many flavors of bullshit one believed.

Palmer homed in on those distant grumbling sounds and thought of his father. His opinion of his dad shifted like the dunes. He sometimes counted him a coward for leaving in the night. He sometimes reckoned him a bold sonofabitch for setting off into No Man’s Land. There was something to be said for anyone who would venture into a place from where no soul had ever returned. Something less polite could be said about an asshole who could walk out on his wife and four kids to do so.

There was a break in the steep dune to the west, an opening in the sand that revealed a wide patch of star-studded sky. Palmer scanned the heavens, eager to dwell on something besides his father. The ridgeline of the impassible Stone Mountains could be seen even in the moon’s absence. Their jagged and daunting edge was marked by a black void where constellations suddenly ended.

Someone grabbed Palmer’s elbow. He turned to find that Hap had fallen back to join him. His friend’s face was underlit by the dive light dangling from his neck, set to dim.

“You aiming for the strong and silent type?” Hap hissed, his voice muffled by ker and wind.

Palmer hitched his heavy dive pack up his shoulders, could feel the sweat trapped between his shirt and the canvas sack. “I’m not aiming for anything,” he said. “Just lost in thought.”

“All right. Well, feel free to cut up with the others, huh? I don’t want them thinking you’re some kinda psycho or nuthin.”

Palmer laughed. He glanced over his shoulder to see how far behind the next guy was and which way the wind was carrying their words. “Really?” he asked. “Because that’d be kinda boss, dontcha think?”

Hap seemed to mull this over. He grunted. Was probably upset he hadn’t come up with it first.

“You’re sure we’re gonna get paid for this dive?” Palmer asked, keeping his voice down. He fought the urge to dig after the sand in his ear, knowing it would just make it worse. “I don’t wanna get stiffed like last time.”

“Fuck no, these guys have a certain code.” Hap slapped him on the back of the neck, sand and sweat mixing to mud. “Relax, Your Highness. We’re gonna get paid. A quick dive, some sand in our lungs, and we’ll be sipping iced drinks at the Honey Hole by Sunday. Hell, I might even get a lap dance from your mom.”

“Fuck off,” Palmer said, knocking his friend’s arm away.

Hap laughed. He slapped Palmer again and slowed his pace to share another joke about Palmer’s mom with the others. Palmer had heard it before. It got less funny and grew more barbs every time. He walked alone in silence, thoughts flitting to his wreck of a family, the sweat on the back of his neck cooling in the breeze as it gathered sand, that iced drink at the Honey Hole not sounding all that bad, to be honest.

2 • The Belt of the Gods

They arrived at the camp to find a tall fire burning, its beating glow rising over the dunes and guiding the men home in a dance of shadows. There were manly reunions of slapped backs and shoulders held, sand flying off with each violent embrace. The men stroked their long beards and swapped gossip and jokes as though they’d been apart for some time. Packs were dropped to the ground, canteens topped from a barrel. The two young divers were told to wait by the fire as some of the others ambled toward a gathering of tents nestled between steep dunes.

Palmer was thankful for the chance to sit. He shrugged off his dive pack and arranged it carefully by the fire. Folding his aching legs beneath him, he sat and leaned against the pack and enjoyed the flickering warmth of the burning logs.

Hap settled down by the fire with two of the men he’d been chatting with during the hike. Palmer listened to them argue and laugh while he gazed into the fire, watching the logs burn. He thought of his home in Springston, where it would be a crime to fell a tree and light it on fire, where coals of hardened shit warmed and stunk up homes, where piped gas would burn one day but then silently snuff out a family in their sleep the next. In the wastes, such things didn’t matter. The scattered groves were there to be razed. The occasional animal to be eaten. Bubbling springs lapped up until they were dry.

Palmer wiggled closer to the flames and held out his palms. The sweat from the hike, the breeze, the thoughts of home had turned him cold. He smiled at an eruption of voices that bravely leapt through the tall flames. He laughed when the others laughed. And when his twisting stomach made noises, he lied and said it was because he was hungry. The truth was that he had a very bad feeling about this job.

To start with, he didn’t know any of these men. And his sister had warned him of the savages he did know, much less those strange to him. Hap had vouched for the group, whatever that was worth. Palmer turned and watched his friend share a joke in the firelight, his face an orange glow, his arms a blur of enthusiasm. Best friends since dive school. Palmer figured they would go deeper for each other than anyone else across the sands. That made the vouch count for something.

Beyond Hap, parked between two steep dunes, Palmer saw two sarfers with their sails furled and masts lowered. The wind-powered craft rocked on their sleek runners. They were staked to the sand but seemed eager to race off somewhere, or perhaps Palmer was projecting. He wondered if after this job, maybe these guys would give him and Hap a ride back into town. Anything to avoid the night hikes and the bivouacking in the lee of blistering dunes.

A few of the men who had hiked with them from Springston dropped down and joined the loose circle around the fire. Many of them were old, in their late forties probably, more than twice Palmer’s age and about as long as anyone was meant to last. They had the leather-dark skin of nomads, of desert wanderers, of gypsies. Men who slept beneath the stars and toiled under the sun. Palmer promised himself he would never look like that. He would make his fortune young, stumble on that one cherry find, and he and Hap would move back to town as heroes and live in the shade. A dune of credits would absolve old sins. They would open a dive shop, make a living selling and repairing gear, equipping the unlucky saps who risked their lives beneath the sand. They would see steady coin from the fools chasing piles of it. Chasing piles just as he and Hap were right then.

A bottle was passed around. Palmer raised it to his lips and pretended to drink. He shook his head and wiped his mouth as he leaned to the side to pass the bottle to Hap. Laughter was thrown into the fire, sending sparks up toward the glittering heavens.

“You two.”

A heavy hand landed on Palmer’s shoulder. He turned to see Moguhn, the black brigand who had led their march through the dunes. Moguhn gazed down at him and Hap, his silhouette blotting out the stars.

“Brock will see you now,” he said. The brigand turned and slid into the darkness beyond the fire.

Hap smiled, took another swig, and passed the bottle to the bearded man at his side. Standing, he smiled at Palmer, an odd smile, cheeks full, then turned and spat into the flames, sending the fire and laughter higher. He slapped Palmer on the shoulder and hurried after Moguhn.

Palmer grabbed his gear before following along, not trusting anyone to watch after it. When he caught up, Hap grabbed him by the elbow and pulled him aside. Together, they followed Moguhn down the packed sand path between the firepit and the cluster of tents.

“Play it cool,” Hap hissed. “This is our ticket to the big time.”

Palmer didn’t say anything. All he wanted was a score that could retire him, not to prove himself to this band and join them. He licked his lips, which still burned from the alcohol, and cursed himself for not drinking more when he was younger. He had a lot of catching up to do. He thought of his little brothers and how he’d tell them, when he saw them again, not to make the same mistakes he had. Learn to dive. Learn to drink. Don’t burn time learning wasteful stuff. Be more like their sister and less like him. That’s what he would say.

Moguhn was nearly invisible in the starlight, but came into relief against tents that glowed from the throb of flickering lamps. Someone threw a flap open, which let out the light like an explosion of insects. The thousands of stars overhead dimmed, leaving the warrior god alone to shine bright. It was Colorado, the great sword-wielding constellation of summer, his belt a perfect line of three stars aimed down the path as if to guide their way.

Palmer looked from that swath of jewels to the dense band of frost fire that bloomed back into existence as the tent was closed. This band of countless stars stretched from one dune straight over the sky to the far horizon. It was impossible to see the frost fire in town, not with all the gas fires burning at night. But here was the mark of the wastes, the stamp overhead that told a boy he was very far from home, that let him know he was in the middle of the wastes and the wilds. And not just the wilds of sand and dune but the wilds of life, those years in a man’s twenties when he shrugs off the shelter of youth and before he has bothered to erect his own. The tent-less years. The bright and blinding years in which men wander as the planets do.

A bright gash of light flicked across those fixed beacons, a shooting star, and Palmer wondered if maybe he was more akin to this. Perhaps he and Hap both. They were going places, and in a hurry. Flash and then gone, off to somewhere new.

Stumbling a little, he nearly tripped over his own boots from looking up like that. Ahead of him, Hap ducked into the largest of the tents. The canvas rustled like the sound of boots in coarse sand; the wind yelped as it leapt from one dune to the next; and the stars overhead were swallowed by the light.

3 • The Map

The men inside the tent turned their heads as Hap and Palmer slipped inside the flap. The wind scratched the walls like playful fingernails, the breeze asking to be let in. It was warm from the bodies and smelled like a bar after a work shift: sweat and rough brew and clothes worn for months.

A dune of a man waved the two boys over. Palmer figured him for Brock, the leader of this band who now claimed the northern wastes, an imposing man who had appeared seemingly out of nowhere as most brigand leaders do. Building bombs one year, serving someone else, until a string of deaths promotes a man to the top.

Palmer’s sister had warned him to steer clear of men like this. Instead of obeying her, he now steered toward the man. Palmer set his gear down near a stack of crates and a barrel of water or grog. There were eight or nine men standing around a flimsy table set in the middle of the tent. A lamp had been hung from the center support; it swayed with the push and pull of the wind on the tent frame. Thick arms plastered with tattoos were planted around the table like the trunks of small trees. The tattoos were decorated with raised scars made by rubbing grit into open wounds.

“Make room,” Brock said, his accent thick and difficult to place, perhaps a lilt of the gypsies south of Low-Pub or the old gardeners from the oasis to the west. He waved his hand between two of the men as though shooing flies from a plate of food, and with minimal grumbling, the two bearded men pressed to the side. Hap took a place at the waist-high table, and Palmer joined him.

“You’ve heard of Danvar,” Brock said, forgoing introductions and formalities. It seemed like a question, but it was not spoken like one. It was an assumption, a declaration. Palmer glanced around the table to see quite a few men watching him, some rubbing their long and knotted beards. Here, the mention of legends did not elicit an eruption of laughter. Here, grown men looked at hairless youths as if sizing them up for dinner. But none of these men had the face-tats of the cannibals to the far north, so Palmer assumed he and Hap were being sized up for this job, being measured for their worthiness and not for some stew.

“Everyone’s heard of Danvar,” Hap whispered, and Palmer noted the awe in his friend’s voice. “Will this lead us there?”

Palmer turned and surveyed his friend, then followed Hap’s gaze down to the table. The four corners of a large piece of parchment were pinned down by meaty fists, sweating mugs, and a smoking ashtray. Palmer touched the edge of the parchment closest to him and saw that the mottled brown material was thicker than normal parchment. It looked like the stretched and tanned hide of a cayote, and felt brittle, as though it were very old.

One of the men laughed at Hap’s question. “You already are here,” he roared.

An exhalation of smoke drifted across the old drawing like a sandstorm seen from up high. One of Brock’s sausage fingers traced the very constellation Palmer had been staring at dizzily just moments before.

“The belt of the great warrior, Colorado.” The men around the table stopped their chattering and drinking. Their boss was speaking. His finger found a star every boy knew. “Low-Pub,” he said, his voice as rough as the sand-studded wind. But that wasn’t the name of the star, as Palmer could tell him. Low-Pub was a lawless town to the south of Springston, an upstart town recently in conflict with its neighbor, as the two wrestled over wells of water and oil. Palmer watched as Brock traced a line up the belt, his fingertip like a sarfer sailing the winds between the two towns and across all that contested land. It was a drawn-out gesture, as though he were trying to show them some hidden meaning.

“Springston,” he announced, pausing at the middle star. Palmer’s thought was Home. His gaze drifted over the rest of the map, this maze of lines and familiar clusters of stars, of arrows and hatch marks, of meticulous writing built up over the years in various fades of ink, countless voices marked down, arguing in the margins.

The fat finger resumed its passage due north—if those stars really might be taken to represent Low-Pub and Springston.

“Danvar,” Brock announced, thumping the table with his finger. He indicated the third star in the belt of great Colorado. The map seemed to suggest that the buried world of the gods was laid out in accordance with their heavenly stars. As if man were trapped between mirrored worlds above and below. The tent swayed as Palmer considered this.

“You’ve found it?” Hap asked.

“Aye,” someone said, and the drinking and smoking resumed. The curled hide of a map threatened to roll shut with the rise of a mug.

“We have a good guess,” Brock said in that strange accent of his. “You boys will tell us for sure.”

“Danvar is said to be a mile down,” Palmer muttered. When the table fell silent, he glanced up. “Nobody’s ever dove half of that.”

“Nobody?” someone asked. “Not even your sister?”

Laughter tumbled out of beards. Palmer had been waiting for her to come up.

“It’s no mile down,” Brock told them, waving his thick hand. “Forget the legends. Danvar is here. More plunder than in all of Springston. Here lies the ancient metropolis. The three buried towns of this land are laid out according to the stars of Colorado’s belt.” He narrowed his eyes at Hap and then Palmer. “We just need you boys to confirm it. We need a real map, not this skin.”

“How deep are we talking?” Hap asked.

Palmer turned to his friend. He had assumed this had already been discussed. He wondered if the wage he’d been promised had been arrived at, or if his friend had just been blowing smoke. They weren’t here for a big scavenge; they were here to dive for ghosts, to dig for legends.

“Eight hundred meters.”

The answer quieted all but the moaning wind.

Palmer shook his head. “I think you vastly overestimate what a diver can—”

“We dug the first two hundred meters,” Brock said. He tapped the map again. “And it says here on this map that the tallest structures rise up another two hundred fifty.”

“That leaves . . .” Hap hesitated, waiting no doubt for someone else to do the math.

The swinging lamp seemed to dim, and the edges of the map went out of focus as Palmer arrived at the answer. “Three hundred fifty meters,” he said, feeling dizzy. He’d been down to two fifty a few times on twin bottles. He knew people who’d gone down to three. His sister, a few others, could do four—some claimed five. Palmer hadn’t been warned they were diving so deep, nor that they were helping more gold-diggers waste their time looking for Danvar. He had feared for a moment there that they were working for rebels, but this was worse. This was a delusion of wealth rather than power.

“Three fifty is no problem,” Hap said. He spread his hands out on the map and leaned over the table, making like he was studying the notes. Palmer reckoned his friend was feeling dizzy as well. It would be a record for them both.

“I just wanna know it’s here,” Brock said, thumping the map. “We need exact coordinates before we dig any more. The damn hole we have here is a bitch to maintain.”

There were grumbles of agreement from the men that Palmer figured were doing the actual digging. One of them smiled at Palmer. “Your mum would know something about maintaining holes,” he said, and the grumbles turned into laughter.

Palmer felt his face burn. “When do we go?” he shouted over this sudden eruption.

And the laughter died down. His friend Hap turned from the dizzying map, his eyes wide and full of fear, Palmer saw. Full of fear and with a hint of an apology for bringing them this far north for such madness, a glimmer in those eyes of all the bad that was soon to come.

Copyright © 2014 by Hugh Howey.

Excerpted from Sand by Hugh Howey.

Published by permission of the author.

All rights reserved.

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

Hugh Howey is the author of the acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel Wool, which became a sudden success in 2011. Originally self-published as a series of novelettes, the Wool omnibus is frequently the #1 bestselling book on Amazon.com and is a New York Times and USA TODAY bestseller. The book was also optioned for film by Ridley Scott, and is now available in print from major publishers all over the world. Hugh’s other books include Shift, Dust, Sand, the Molly Fyde series, The Hurricane, Half Way Home, The Plagiarist, and I, Zombie. He is also the co-editor, with John Joseph Adams, of The Apocalypse Triptych series of anthologies. Hugh lives in Jupiter, Florida with his wife Amber and his dog Bella. Find him on Twitter @hughhowey.

NOVEL EXCERPT:
The Milkman: A Free World Novel
Michael J. Martineck

Chapter One

To Edwin McCallum, every act of insubordination was a work of art. Charcoal sketch thefts. Abstract expressionist assaults. A smuggling operation could have all the intricacies of an oil landscape. Despite this, he considered very few policy transgressions to be masterpieces. No one put the time in. Most insubordination spawned from opportunity, passion or a bottoming out of IQ. But this one. This fresco. He saw something more.

The girl could have been his daughter, had his life unfolded into a different shape, if he’d creased and bent this side instead or that, leaving him in another space, not on the street, in the cold, staring at a face turned and pressed to concrete, beautiful if you imagined it asleep, if you ignored the puddle of cold blood and the jagged hack marks in her flesh.

McCallum threaded his fingers and thrust out his arms, bending his wrists back, stretching, stimulating blood flow. He had no extra pounds and used his various muscles frequently and hard. When the cold started poking around, he felt reminders of every indiscretion, lack of good judgment, and bad luck his bones had suffered over the years. His face had found some of the creeks and rumples he noticed on other men his age. Only some. His walnut hair showed maybe two strokes of grey. For the most part, he only noticed the middleness of his age in his joints, and on nights like this one.

“Geri Vasquez,” the uniformed operative reported. Brick red pants and cap. Black leather everything else. One of mine, McCallum thought. “24, lived up on West Ferry Street, grade 15 Marketing Field Researcher.”

“Grade 15.” McCallum snorted. Was there a grade higher? Newborn? “Anything off her cuff?”

“Waiting for the advocate.” The uniform op couldn’t be too much older than the victim, but he seemed to have his buckle polished, as his old boss used to say. McCallum liked him.

“This an India Group pub?” McCallum pointed a thumb at the large, frosty picture windows.

“Yes sir,” another uniform op answered. Black pants and jacket. An India Group patrolperson. Not one of his. She stood close to the pub door, helping to keep a safe perimeter around the body.

“Anyone come out?” McCallum asked.

“No sir,” she answered.

“You go in?”

“Waiting for an inspector.”

“Really?” McCallum looked into the windows. Faces filled every inch to about the eight-foot line. People used bar stools to get over the first row of viewers and look into the insubordination scene. He hated the lookey-loo part of human nature. This poor girl had been pretty, with nice clothes, a decent haircut; she would not have wanted them all to see her this way. Still, the ghouls served a momentary purpose. Everyone in the pub knew a dead girl lay outside. Someone inside waiting for her would have stormed out by now.

“She died at the door?” McCallum asked himself. “Why’s an Ambyr girl trying to get into an IG place without a buddy?”

“Don’t know, sir,” the female op answered. “Maybe fleeing her assailant?”

“Lots of maybes,” he mumbled.

An India Group detective would be here any second. McCallum wondered who was on tonight. The lazy one, the well-dressed one, or that guy who lost a hand disarming a small explosive a few years back. He was pleasant enough, quiet, but never—

—he never expected to see her.

• • •

Sylvia Cho didn’t care for the choice of restaurant. It was the kind used to woo people—clients, actors, investors, whomever. Sylvia didn’t like to be wooed, schmoosed, ass-kissed, or sucked up to. At least . . . most of the time. She believed in merit. She judged people and projects on their value and expected the same. No one should ever need to be sold on something. She also understood that here, in Hollywood, in this belief, she was quite alone.

Adorned in miles of bamboo and white cotton, lit with millions of tiny candles, the place had appeal. She didn’t deny that, it just reminded her of a great-looking guy who knew it. The kind that aimed his smile, prying a rise out of you. The town was full of them, many trying to get this very spot, at the top of two small stairs, peering out for a well-juiced producer.

She didn’t feel out of place. She kept herself fit, her obsidian hair current, and paid attention to fashion. Sylvia had chosen a pencil skirt and sheer top for this meeting. She knew the effects of tight clothing. She also knew her way around a restaurant. She had found herself in most of the Los Angeles catchment’s finer places, at one time or another. That was, after all, how things were done. She hadn’t had a meeting in an office or conference room in nine years, since that impossible year after college, when she thought she’d have to club someone in the head to get any attention. Club several people, actually. One murder didn’t turn heads.

Gavin Stoll sat in the center of the room, smiling. Black suit, white silk T-shirt, over a near-perfect body. He was the unnatural offspring of a cheetah and a penguin. He gave Sylvia a quick flick of the hand. Sylvia smiled, using her forceful, professional grin. The mask, she called it. The face that fooled all the boys, and some of the girls. Gavin stood as she crossed the room.

Good God, she thought. What the fuck was he going to want?

“So happy to see you,” he said like he meant it. Maybe he did. She didn’t know him any better than he knew her. “Tobacco Road was a blast. Loved, loved, loved it.”

Thank God for the mask. She doubted this guy saw, saw, saw her last film.

“Thank you,” she replied. “It’s done better than I expected.”

“You’re too modest. Refreshing, but useless. Revel in your success.”

“I’ll try my best.”

“So how does it feel?” They both sat.

“Stunning.” She didn’t like to lie if she didn’t have to.

Gavin laughed. “I knew the movie tested well, but it hadn’t prepared me for . . . the explosion. With no disrespect, I don’t think anyone foresaw your peculiar demographic draw. You’ve had more females 18 to 34 down your picture than any other documentary in decades, while holding on to the boys. Hybrid demos, sister. Those frost the cake, eh?”

“Mmmm, cake,” Sylvia said.

“You’ve come to the right place.”

The waiter stood next to the table. Sylvia hadn’t seen him approach. Creepy.

“I’d like the St. George,” Gavin said. “And hope you don’t make any mistakes back there.” He locked eyes with the waiter and waggled his head.

“Excellent choice, sir.” The waiter gave a conspiratorial smirk and padded away.

“I hope you don’t mind that I ordered for us.” Gavin leaned over the table and dropped his voice to loud whisper. “They have a St. Germain pinot noir here, accidently delivered by an IG truck. It’s exquisite. I’ll cry when they run out.”

“Perhaps there’ll be another accident.”

“I can only pray. IG has so many choice vineyards, I’ve been tempted to jump ship.”

Sylvia laughed politely. She didn’t want to encourage Gavin’s pretentions. When it came to wine, she wasn’t a hair-splitter. She could tell the difference between good, bad, and awesome. Further subdivisions held little interest to her. Comparing vineyards outside the company held even less. The taste of forbidden fruit? There were probably two India Group people dining right now, pining for Ambyr wine in hushed voices.

“What’s the deal?” Sylvia said.

“A movie. Funding is locked up.”

“Already?” Without a director? she decided not to say out loud. “Who’s attached?”

“No one,” Gavin said. “I’m hoping you want to come aboard.”

There is a formula in Hollywood. Good director, good cast, good script. You can only afford to take a chance on one. Everyone knows this rule. Nobody puts up money without two absolutes. The fact that Gavin didn’t have a director or cast, but plenty of money, didn’t all mesh. This scene wasn’t working.

“This must be one Hell of a script.”

“There’s no script.”

Check, please, she yelled in her head.

• • •

Emory Leveski drove his blue Mazda sedan. Somehow. He couldn’t see the black and blue night, the spots of light from other cars, street lights, sconces over house numbers, and ground-level lanterns releasing the last of their solar charge from the day. His body remembered how to keep the car in the lane and the peddle at the right angle and when to turn left and right. His conscious mind had no part of it. It refused to process any new information. That last chunk, with the stabbing and shrieking and collapsing body . . . that plugged up the pipelines. He was lucky he remembered how to breathe.

Chapter Two

“Operative McCallum,” she said as a simple statement of fact. No question, no surprise, no rise in volume to get his attention.

“Operative McCallum,” he said back, trying to match the flatness of her tone.

“Effchek, now. Again.”

“Back to your maiden name. That’s tough to do.”

“I know people,” she said. “What we got?”

Her uniformed operative gave her the rundown. McCallum watched. Rosalie Effchek. Now. Great. He knelt down next to the dead girl. Blond, in great shape, save the six deep lacerations in her back, clear through her coat. A weird coat. McCallum couldn’t recall ever seeing one like it before. Orange fabric, covered in a kind of transparent jelly. The blood oozed off it, like rain on wax.

“She was cute.” Rosalie squatted down next to McCallum.

“Congratulations on the promotion,” he said.

“Thanks. I guess. Nights like tonight . . .”

“I know.”

McCallum stood. He watched the egg back up, a mobile forensics lab. Looking more like a bread loaf, and officially called a Mobile Evidence Processing Unit, he had no idea how it got its nickname. Didn’t make any sense. So much about this job failed to make sense.

The egg had an advertisement on the side, a photo of a cigarette smoldering on a dead man’s mouth. Tobacco Road. A movie he’d never see. He hadn’t seen a movie since . . .

“You going inside?” McCallum glanced in the direction of the pub.

“Yeah,” Rosalie. “I’ll check out the feeds.”

McCallum’s uniformed operative brought him a small, clear bag with a woman’s cuff inside. Thick. Brushed aluminum with thin strips of pale bamboo embedded at set intervals.

“The egg heads cleared it,” the op said. “And the advocate.”

McCallum took the bag and held it up for a second, in the glow of the egg’s rear work lights. The bracelet looked caught, like a fish. Dead outside its natural habitat, which was a young woman’s wrist. Cuffs were such personal things, beyond the obvious, McCallum had learned. The type of cuff a person chose, the number and depth of its scratches, did the owner lock it around his or her wrist or something else? He knew a sculptor who kept his bracelet around his ankle so it wouldn’t mar his media. He had to sit down cross-legged every time he wanted to make a call. The tiny details said big things. This bracelet had been on the shelf two months ago. Flawless. A smart design, went with everything, a bit too expensive for grade 15, but not so expensive that it was a gift from a well-off other. Fresh, new, ready to advance. Flawless. No signs of a fight. Somebody stabbed this girl from behind without any kind of build-up she knew about. McCallum wanted to toss the bag into the egg and walk away. He slipped the cuff out of the bag, tapped it awake, called Help.

“Ambyr Communications,” he heard in his ear.

“Police over-ride. Authorization—” He gave his code.

The top of the bracelet changed from dull silver to something like rice-paper. Geri Vasquez’s life appeared, organized into little bubbles of data. She had 60 friends, eight of whom she called regularly, none of whom had been selected tonight. No messages for the last two hours. No one asking Geri where she was, why she was late, how the date was going. Prior to six tonight, she exchanged between ten and twenty messages an hour. Then nothing. Odd. McCallum tapped the name Geri called the most. “Katrina.”

A buzz in his ear, then “Gee?” A young woman’s voice, crystal clear, popping with energy.

“I’m afraid not.”

Katrina’s voice lowered, tensed, and nastied-up. “Who is this?”

“Detective McCallum. Ambyr Systems Security. Sorry to alarm you.”

“What are you . . . where’s Geri?”

McCallum had heard the confusion before. No one called from someone else’s cuff. Unless . . .

“Katrina, what was Geri doing tonight?”

“Where’s Geri?”

“I need your help. Can you help me, Katrina?”

“Yeah. I’m rattling here. Is she OK? Is something wrong?”

“Something’s wrong. I won’t lie to you,” McCallum said slowly and softly. “Can you tell me what Geri was doing tonight?”

“Work,” Katrina said. “She was working tonight. A pie night. No idea what that means.”

“That’s alright.”

“Is she alright? Why are you on her cuff? Can I talk to her? She can’t be in trouble. She was working.”

“I will have to get back to you.” He clicked off. He couldn’t listen to her descent into pleading. He couldn’t tell the girl her friend was dead before telling the parents.

Official messages were easy to find on Geri’s bracelet. She had them separated by color and shape. Aqua squares for work-related memos. None related to tonight.

“What were you up to, honey?” McCallum said.

“No feeds,” Effchek shouted from the door of the pub.

“What?” McCallum turned, scrunching up his face. He must have misheard.

“No feeds,” Rosalie shouted again. “Either end. The manager says they’re malfunctioning.”

Damn them all to Hell, McCallum shouted in his head. The uniform operative didn’t need to hear his frustrations. Not yet, anyway. He’d have to see how long he was going to keep all this steam in his kettle. With no video images of the act, that might not be too long.

• • •

Sylvia stared at Gavin Stoll’s mouth. The tiny curl in the corners, the “I know something you don’t” grin both irked and intrigued her. She didn’t get into the movie business because she was incurious; she could get past a grin she wanted to slap away.

“The Milkman,” Gavin said.

“What the fuck are you talking about.” She decided coy time had elapsed.

“The Milkman. In the Lake Erie region.”

“Is this a title? A working title, I hope.”

“There’s a guy somewhere in the Niagara Falls catchment who tests milk and posts his findings.”

Sylvia’s lips scrunched hard to the right, all on their own. This didn’t make a whole lot of sense. “The company lets some guy product test and post results?”

“Yeah,” Gavin said. “He outs dairy farms that hold milk too long or contain too much feces or whatever.”

“And the company lets him.”

Gavin leaned forward, full smile glaring. “The company can’t find him.”

“No way.” She didn’t give the answer any thought. Her mind jumped ahead, tracking the vigilante down, interviewing supporters and dairy farmers, wide pastoral shots, cut to tight dark ones of some ghost-geek in a barn, with bales of electronics, fooling the company, a Robin Hood of milk.

The waiter returned with a bottle swaddled in a napkin. He made a show of secretly giving Gavin a glimpse of the label. They exchanged grins and the waiter uncorked and brought the neck to the top of Sylvia’s glass. Her hand sliced over the opening, peach-color knuckles like a tiny but impassable mountain range.

“None for me, thanks,” Sylvia said.

Gavin said, “Really? You don’t know what you’re missing.”

“Sorry.” She wanted to get on with the conversation. It took the waiter five hours to pour a drop into Gavin’s glass, watch him swish it and smell it and taste it and pronounce it perfect. The Milkman, she wanted to snap. Is he real? Can we sniff around better than Ambyr Systems detectives? Is this doable? Because if it is . . .

“Interested?” Gavin asked.

“What are we talking?” She knew how to be crisp. Don’t ever let them see your tongue hanging out. Hold the drool. Besides, it sounded too good to be true.

“A quick documentary. Couple of talkers, a little corporate shit, how this bastard can’t be trusted. That type of thing. Of course, you . . . you, Sylvia Cho . . . you can hide the pill in the peanut butter. You could slip the real message in under the corporate one without their lifting an eyebrow.”

She could. She knew she could. Let Public Affair’s coifed, tailored models talk while the whole time she gets to tell the world about some wacko who is actually beating the system. Amazing. It didn’t even matter if the guy existed. Just the chance to prance the idea around was golden. This could be a masterpiece—redemption for all the propaganda she had to film. Art. Meaning. A difference.

“Who has sign off?” She asked.

“That’s the best part. I bundled. Lots of private savings and surplus. Corporate has little to say.”

“Little’s not nothing.”

“Such is the world,” Gavin said. “Such is the world you can change.”

That was a bit strong, but the sentiment was right. She loved the Milkman. Three minutes in and she was in love.

“What do you need from me?”

Gavin glanced at the empty wine glass, then up to her.

“An abortion. Then you’ll be clear to work.”

• • •

Emory Leveski sat at his kitchen table, in the dark. He wanted a glass of water. Warm. Body temperature. Nothing too cold. He just wasn’t sure he could handle a glass. He still shook. Maybe if he concentrated. Maybe if he used both hands, like a little kid. Yeah, that gave him another idea. Emory stood, went to the cupboard and took out a plastic sippy cup, with a lid and a stopper, hiding a tiny membrane. The cup had cartoony butterflies and frogs and bent green cattails on it. He got the lid off, water in, and the lid back on without too much spillage. He sat back down to suck on the little spout.

The water felt so good in his mouth. He could feel cell walls cheering the rush of liquid, imagined them opening their gates and welcoming water like a hero returning from battle. Dry spots cracking and surrendering across his palate and down his throat. This is better, he thought. The sippy cup makes me drink more slowly. You had to work at it, suck . . . like that girl, wheezing in her last breath.

The tremors returned. He set the cup down and pressed his palms to the table. No matter what he tried thinking about—sex, long division, picturing the most perfect brook rolling over speckled, polished stone—his mind replayed the same scene. That girl, the jelly coat, the stab, the stab, the stab.

Crazy. He had to get control. Emory was a compact person. He understood that. That didn’t mean fragile. He could do better than this. What about those Lamaze techniques? Those classes weren’t that long ago. Breathe in through the mouth, out through the nose? No.

“What are you doing?” Lillian’s voice, from his right. He turned and looked at her, arms folded across her chest. A T-shirt and long, flannel pajama-pants. She looked so cute in her short, new-mom hair.

“I don’t know,” he answered.

“It’s creepy.” She turned on the kitchen light and strolled to the refrigerator. “How did things go?”

“I don’t honestly . . . I saw a girl get murdered.”

“What? You’re kidding me.”

“No,” Emory said. “Right where I was going. Right at my meeting spot. I was still in the car and  . . .”

Lillian plunged into the chair next to him.

He said, “God, it was awful.”

“Did you . . . what did you do?”

“Nothing. I couldn’t. It was like . . . like when you’re running up a beach, in the water, you know? You can’t move half as fast as you want. It was like that. By the time I figured out what was happening, it was the past. I’m so freakin’ slow.”

“Oh, sweetie,” Lillian said. “Are you all right?”

“I don’t know. I mean, nothing happened to me. Nothing physical.”

“Did you get a good look at the killer? Did you tell the ops? Did they give you any trouble?”

“None,” Emory said. “I didn’t stay.”

Lillian reached over and took his hands. She tried to press the shaking out of them. “It’s OK. I’m sure they’ll do what they do.”

“No, it’s not OK. I wanted to help, but then, I kept thinking . . . I wanted to stay and tell the ops everything, but, in the back of my head, I kept thinking, ‘Shit, Emory. You’re insubordinate yourself.’”

“You are not insubordinate. Not that kind.”

“Yeah, see what you just did? Not that kind.”

“What you do is not murder. It’s the antithesis.”

“To the company?”

Lillian gave his hands another squeeze. “There are policies and there are policies.”

“I agree,” Emory said. “But what if someone else understood that too? What if they decided to mix things up? No . . . together.”

“Calm down,” Lillian said. “I’ll make you some tea or something.”

“No. Listen. What if this wasn’t a wrong place, wrong time thing? What if this wasn’t a coincidence? What if somebody out there decided the best way to get the Milkman was framing him for a murder?”

Copyright © 2014 by Michael J. Martineck

Excerpted from The Milkman by Michael J. Martineck.

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 author.

Michael J. Martineck has written for DC Comics, several magazines (fiction and non-fiction), the Urban Green Man anthology, and two novels for young readers. His last novel for adults, Cinco de Mayo, (EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy), was a finalist for the 2010 Alberta Reader's Choice Award. Michael has a degree in English and Economics, but has worked in advertising for several years. He lives with his wife and two children on Grand Island, NY.

NONFICTION

Interview: Joe Haldeman
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Joe Haldeman is the author of the classic 1974 novel The Forever War. That book and many of Joe’s other works are based on his experience of being drafted to fight in Vietnam, where he was wounded in combat. His most recent book is a thriller called Work Done for Hire.

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

Your new book is called Work Done for Hire, and it’s the story of a man named Jack Daley. Do you want to tell us about him?

Jack Daley is a guy who was drafted into a slightly future army, maybe just as little as ten years from now, and having trained as a sniper, he goes off to a place that they just call “The Desert.” I think that it’s Iran, but I’m not sure what it is. I don’t really care because he’s back from it when the story starts. He was wounded. He lost a finger—from another sniper, evidently.

But he’s getting along okay. He’s got a little disability pension, and he’s writing, and basically, when the story opens up, he gets an interesting contract offer to write a treatment for a movie, and then within a few days he gets a more sinister kind of proposal. There’s a knock on the door, and when he opens it, there’s a long, rectangular box, and inside it is a sniper rifle, exactly the kind he used in the war, with a little note saying, “Would you kill a really bad man for $100,000?” They give him $10,000 down as earnest money, so he’s kind of in a quandary. He definitely is not going to kill anybody for hire, but it is a little bit tempting, and he did kill a lot of people for not any great reason as far as he is concerned. He can entertain it as a thought experiment, even though he is not going to say yes. But then he finds out that the people who are offering the money will also punish him if he doesn’t take it, and they threaten to kill his girlfriend. It starts to get more complicated.

You mention that it’s set in the very near future, but it’s essentially a straight thriller novel, unlike most of your work, which is more science fiction. Did you set out to write a more realistic novel or did the story just develop that way?

It really just developed that way. As often happens, I just started writing without any plan as to what the novel was going to be about, and I’ve been reading about the war in the Gulf, and I read a couple of books about sniping, and I’d been interested in that for an earlier novel about ten years ago.

[Sniping]’s always been an art that’s well studied. Although I’m not a very good shot myself, and the army didn’t have me do any sniping while I was in Vietnam, it was always kind of an interesting thing: This illusion of godlike power—and being able to murder strangers and be paid for it, which is just a strange kind of a fantasy.

So I was drawn to write a story about a sniper, but I didn’t want things to have gone well for him. He didn’t enjoy being a sniper. He was always sort of morally confused, and slowly going mad during the job, so he carries that into civilian life, and he doesn’t really have a chance to recover from it when he’s approached by these people who want to take advantage of his experience.

You mentioned that he is given this sinister offer to be a contract killer, and he’s also given this offer to write a screenplay novelization. Could you talk a little bit more about the title Work Done for Hire, and just what that means for writers?

“Work done for hire,” in terms of contract law, is a book or a movie or whatever that you agree to do, but you will not take credit for it, and you will not get the copyright—the copyright will be assigned to a third party. Basically, I’ve done works done for hire myself. It’s kind of an ambiguous sort of achievement. It means somebody thinks you can do a book, and is willing to pay you for it, but they’re also willing to take the copyright themselves. Usually it’s associated with Hollywood. I’ve done two of them, and then did not do the third. It’s not too uplifting an exercise.

Could you tell us a little bit about the work for hire assignment that Jack is given in this book?

In this one, basically, they call him and say—or rather his agent gets in touch with a book producer in Hollywood—and the book producer wants Jack to write the treatment for a movie from a two- or three-paragraph description of what the story will be. He says, sure, he can do that, and really he just rattles it out without too much concern for literary value or anything. I drop chapters from that book into [the novel], and he actually has a lot of fun with it. But then it takes a sinister turn, and stories start to come together.

The story that he’s writing: It’s about a private investigator who’s hired to track down a serial killer, and the serial killer believes that he’s an alien.

The serial killer thinks that he’s from another planet, and we, the readers, are given to understand that that’s probably just a fantasy that he’s living through. But no external, objective proof is given for either assertion. I try to keep the reader a little off balance there.

The serial killer character, who calls himself “Hunter,” is himself a science fiction fan, so there’s sort of like different layers to it. He’s a science fiction fan within a science fiction story within a novel. One novel that we see Hunter reading is called The Poems of Null-A by A.E. van Vogt. Does that title have any particular significance?

The Poems of Null-A was a great classic of the 1950s which is often used as an example of how horrible science fiction was in the 1950s. Van Vogt was a really good writer of adventures and a certain kind of freewheeling science fiction which does not bear close analysis from a modern or postmodern point of view. Poems of Null-A was one of his most successful of these, but if it came out today it probably wouldn’t have been published, even though it’s a classic in the way science fiction and genre fiction books can be classics and still have bad writing. Really old-fashioned, and people who love them probably love them for their being old-fashioned.

But they appeal to serial killers and aliens probably?

[Laughter] Yeah, probably. That was just another thing that came to me. I wrote a short story from that guy’s point of view, which was in an anthology a couple of years ago.

Which anthology?

I’m trying to think of the name of it. The thing is, I’ve written so many stories, and if I don’t have my list in front of me, it’s hard to pin them down. It was a big red book. Does that help? It was a thing that I wrote for a friend, and then thought it had some real possibilities as a more commercial novel, and then I thought, “Well, no, I’ll use this as the secondary novel in this more literary novel about a hack writer.” So, it gets more and more complicated, I’m afraid.

What is it like using a writer for a protagonist? Are there any particular advantages or disadvantages to doing that?

One disadvantage is you probably know too much about it, and you want to be accurate about the details of a writer’s life, and yet you want to make a good story out of it. I know more writers than I know [people in] any other profession, except perhaps professors, and I can guarantee writers don’t have exciting lives. They basically sit there and type away and eventually rewrite the thing until it is in shape to be sold, and then they start another one, and it goes on. To me, it’s an exciting life because I think that writing is exciting, even other people’s writing, but I can see that an objective observer would look at me sitting here, and it doesn’t look very exciting. Probably a pharmacist or even a drugstore clerk probably sees more interesting stuff, and in some ways has a more exciting life.

It occurred to me, reading this book, though, that one advantage of using a writer as a protagonist is that you can give that character almost any skill you can imagine because you just have to say, “Oh, I wrote a book about this a couple of years ago, and I had to research X.” And they could do it.

Yeah, that was fun.

Because Jack has all sorts of obscure knowledge involving telecommunications and things like that in the book.

Right. And weapons, and all sorts of stuff you would expect an adventure writer to know.

He also spends a lot of this book on a bicycle, and I know that you’re a fairly serious bicyclist, so how much of your own cycling experience did you draw on to write the book?

Just some mechanical stuff. Actually, the part of the trip where he rides was part of a trip I made with my wife from the East Coast to the West Coast. We took a set of maps that a national organization published years ago, and we just followed that. It was fun.

So when I wanted to write this part of the book, I pulled out my old maps, and put it in the middle of a part of the American South. A place where somebody would hang around if he wanted to be able to kill people and spirit them away. I don’t want to give away too much of the book, but there is a fellow like that in there.

I was reading a little bit about your cycling trip on your blog. There was some funny stuff in there—like you helped put out a house fire at one point?

That was very fun. We were just pedaling along, and there were all these people standing around a lawn which was on fire, and they were sort of carrying a little bucket back and forth, and so we got off our bicycles and ran in to help them put on blankets and things to actually put the thing out. We were dressed like superheroes in spandex, and they were this little bunch of country folks in Georgia, and they thought we were much more exciting than the fire, I think. So that was our fifteen minutes of fame.

From reading your blog, it sounds like you had a bicycle accident and didn’t finish the trip.

I did finish it up, ultimately. In Alabama, I had an accident at a pretty high rate of speed for a bicycle, and landed on my helmet, and broke the helmet and my shoulder, and got scraped up and such. But all we did was, we had an RV, so we just went to an RV park, and sat and drank beer for a few weeks, and then took off again.

You say in your blog that you were planning to turn that trip into a book called Road. What happened with that?

In fact, I wrote about thirty pages, and my agent said, “Don’t do this.” He said, “You don’t have any idea how many hundreds of manuscripts that are exactly this, a record of a bike trip across America. You couldn’t sell that if you were Ernest Hemingway.” I thought, “Oh, okay.” I’m not a really practical man, but I thought that was pretty practical advice.

You were able to use that in Work Done for Hire, though, to some degree.

Yeah, in fact, quite a bit of it.

One thing I was wondering about in Work Done for Hire is one of the places that they pass is called Carlinville, and there’s just this line about how this was once the home of the woman H. G. Wells called “The Most Intelligent Woman in America.” What is the story behind that?

The story is: I got that out of a book. That is a book that was describing various small towns we were going through, and I thought, “Oh my god, that is so cool.” I had to put it into my own book. I don’t know anything about it except for that one quote.

You don’t know who the woman is or anything?

Nope.

I’ll have to Google it. You mentioned that doing work for hire writing is this ambiguous sort of thing, and you mentioned that you did two novels, and you have actually had some dealings with Hollywood as well. You worked on a screenplay for the movie Robot Jox.

That was a lot of fun.

Tell me if this is true. The story I heard was that this wealthy Hollywood producer or something invited you and your wife to come with him for a couple of months and work on that screenplay.

That’s not quite it. Actually, we went to Rome and stayed in a hotel. The producer did have a chalet, just a wealthy man’s dream, which was about fifty or sixty miles outside of Rome, and we did go there for an all-day feast and a walk around the town that was basically like a baronial estate. It was fun to see how the other half lives, but no, they didn’t offer to put us up there. But they did pay for a really, really nice hotel.

I gather that they made a lot of changes to the story though.

That’s Hollywood. I don’t have any real ambition to do that again. I wanted to do that once, and that was enough. It was fun. But ultimately, it is work done for hire, and you work hard, and somebody else gets the credit. It’s not a great deal.

So, basically, that and contract killing are two things you don’t have much interest in?

[Laughter] Well, I’m not a good enough shot. They’d find out and fire me. That would be a bad bunch to get on the wrong side of.

You had another book that came out recently called The Best of Joe Haldeman, which was edited by Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe. Could you talk a bit about how that project came about?

Basically it’s the best short stories that I’ve written. I’m actually a novelist. I don’t write that many short stories, so I looked at the list of all the short stories I’ve ever published, and I found that their [selections] comprised almost exactly half of the stories, so there is room for another book which is “the worst of Joe Haldeman.” The mirror image of all those wonderful stories. But I haven’t actually proposed it to anybody.

Has anyone ever done a “worst of”? You’d think maybe just the novelty of it would get it some attention or something.

I wonder. I’m sure that somebody has done it as a title. In fact, I do remember a “worst of”—it was an advertisement in Publishers Weekly. That’s all I know of it. But somebody years and years ago did a “Worst of Mike Jacowsky” or something.

For this “Best of” book, you wrote a note for each story. What was it like looking back at all those stories? Did you see patterns or see ways that your writing had changed or things like that?

Yeah, it was fun. I saw my writing become more sophisticated, of course. But pretty quickly—I learned the game five years or seven years after I’d started; I was producing some of the things that were the best I’ve done, which I shouldn’t be too proud of. I guess I haven’t improved that much over the last thirty years.

I saw patterns repeating which had been pointed out to me before. A guy wrote a book about my work, and he identified this trope of beheading because about half the stories I’ve written have somebody being beheaded, which is kind of a singular habit for a writer. But in fact, I saw somebody beheaded in Vietnam.

I don’t study the people who write about me. I think that way lies some kind of madness. And I don’t write to satisfy critics and such. I write for myself and for my readers secondarily.

It seems like you also write for friends of yours, because a lot of the stories in this book were written for various editors who requested stories for themed anthologies.

It’s not a selfless thing, of course. They offered money, and I thought, “That sounds like a cool idea.” It’s kind of fun because the decision basically is made for you about whether you should write the story or do something else. When you tell someone you’re going to write a story about shoes in the future, you have to sit down and figure out something about shoes in the future, and go ahead and write it. It’s fun in a way because of the smaller personal investment in it. If the story sucks, you can say, “Well, it was his idea.”

Could you say what some of those themes were? Were any of those themes really challenging or did you write a story that you never would have written in a million years if not for that theme?

If I had the book in front of me, I could probably think about that better, but no. By and large, it’s somebody who is doing a theme anthology, and they give you a lot of latitude. I’m trying to think of the title of one. Janis Ian coordinated a book, Stars, it’s called, and the stars are various writers who she wanted to write stories. And we each wrote a story about one of her songs, and that was an interesting challenge because, of course, the song was its own narrative, and then you want to incorporate the pattern of the song into the story, so that someone who knows the song will recognize it in the story, but if you don’t know the song, it doesn’t hurt. The story is still coherent. That was fun to do.

That was kind of like a hat trick. I got to satisfy all these friends. A lot of the stories that I wrote back in the ’70s and ’80s were based on cover illustrations or paintings or drawings that somebody had done that a magazine had purchased, and then they were getting somebody to write a story about it. So I’m up here with my hand up, so I got chosen for some of those.

“Tricentennial” was one of those, right? That was written for an illustration?

That’s right. It was as restricted an assignment as I’ve ever had because the illustration had all sorts of singularities in terms of physics and art, and I had to satisfy all of that at once. It was tremendously successful. It won awards and everything. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, it was not the kind of story that I could expand into a novel, so I couldn’t get into that particular category.

But this Best of Joe Haldeman, it does include your story “Hero,” which was expanded into a novel, into The Forever War. I read The Forever War years ago, and I just read “Hero,” and I was really struck, in your author’s note, like you were saying earlier about Work Done for Hire, that you didn’t really have any outline or anything when you sat down to write it. And I was just amazed by how much detail there is in this story, and how well worked-out everything is regarding the suits, and the environment on Charon and stuff. I was just wondering, did all that just come straight out of your head, or did you research and then go back and rewrite it or anything?

What I did was: I did research on the fly. Of course, that story was written before computers, and so I basically was going into the library every day and looking up stuff so that I could write about it tomorrow. That was my pattern in those days. I basically wrote my fiction during the morning hours, and in the afternoon I’d go out and do research, and so computers probably save me a certain amount of shoe leather, but I don’t get as much exercise as I did back in the day.

Another thing that really struck me about “Hero” is that it doesn’t feature what I think of as being the central conceit of The Forever War, which is the idea that the Earth is different every time the soldiers come back. Had you come up with that idea at that point or did that come later?

In fact, I came up with the idea before “Hero” came out. I wrote a short story for Amazing Science Fiction which was exactly about that, about people who go out over the course of years, they go out to be soldiers, and they come back and years have passed on Earth when only months have passed in their own lives. That was the basic point and the plot logic of that short story. I looked at the two stories, and I thought, “I can cross-fertilize these two and get an actual novel out of the situation.” Although I don’t remember, there was never an “Ah-ha” moment saying, “Oh my god, I can make million dollars this way.” But it’s obvious if you look at the two stories that the end result is The Forever War.

What was the title of that story that was published in Amazing Stories?

It’s called “Time Piece.”

I’ll have to go check that out. Another thing in “Hero” that really struck me is the way it portrays women in combat. For those who haven’t read the story: There are women who fight alongside men, and also the enlisted soldiers are all expected to have sex with each other.

I got a lot of flak for that one.

Could you talk a little bit more about the reactions you got to that?

I didn’t get much reaction from feminists, or rather I got positive reaction from feminists, because the guy who edited Analog showed me the file of letters they got over that story. It’s hundreds of letters, and they were mostly about, “How dare you think that we could be so inhumane as to make women into combat soldiers.” And those probably outnumbered twenty-to-one the ones who said, “Yeah, this makes sense. Why should men have to do all the fighting and killing?” Which is basically my own thinking behind it.

But the subtext is no longer obvious. When I was writing in Vietnam, the North Vietnamese did have female combat soldiers, and we thought that that was just bizarre. We wouldn’t do that to American women, at least not in the 1960s or ’70s. Of course, now women do fly combat missions, and they work hand-in-hand on the battlefield with men, and I think by and large it’s a good thing.

How about the aspect of the soldiers being assigned to have sex with each other? Do you just see that as an alienating sort of thing or do you think that that might actually happen in a hundred or two hundred years?

Of course it happens now, to a certain extent. People are not assigned bed partners or anything like that. I think at the time I wrote it, it was just a weird kind of wishful thinking. If you’re going to have women fighting side-by-side with you, I’d think that intimacy would be, not a guarantee, but it would happen pretty often. Talking to people who are fighting now, it still is kind of a fantasy for men. The idea of fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with women, I think, has helped the cause of feminism a lot, but it hasn’t made being a soldier any simpler or being a woman any simpler.

I’ve heard you say that you, to this day, get letters every day from veterans, people who are serving in combat right now. What kind of things are they saying in recent letters that you’ve been getting?

Well, not every day, but probably once a week I get letters saying, partly, how amazing it is that forty years ago I was able to predict the present day military; it’s not predicted at all, but it’s just that metaphorically there are things that are startling considering how old the story is. I get letters from people who are soldiers now who say, “Wow, you really got it. You know exactly what it’s like here.” But I’ve got news for them—it hasn’t changed that much. If I could get a letter from somebody fighting in the Civil War, it’d probably say, “You know? That’s pretty accurate. That’s the way we feel. Although we don’t have disintegrating rays now. We don’t even know what rays are.” But it’s just the way soldiers are.

Given the sort of anti-war perspective of a lot of your writing, do you have any optimism that war is becoming less common or will become less common in the future?

It would be a nice thing to believe. I suspect that war will become obsolete only when something worse supersedes it. I think we’ll keep using force to bring about political ends, but the way the force manifests itself may be more sophisticated in the future.

Like killer plagues and stuff like that, you mean?

We’ve used plagues, and we’ve used them to help conquer the West with the blankets we gave to the Indians, but I’m thinking more in terms of weapons that don’t look like weapons. I’m thinking of ways you could win a war without obviously declaring the war in the first place. That seems to be a direction that combat could go. Nanomachines and biological warfare are the obvious directions for the future.

So you’re thinking more in terms of mind control or super propaganda or something like that?

Propaganda that actually works and is predictable would be a first order weapon for the future. One hopes that they never will be able to use mind control kind of weapons, because we’re all done for if that happens. I don’t want military people or political people to have that kind of power over those of us who just [live] day to day.

Speaking of letters that you’ve received, I like the note for your story “Angel of Light.” In that story you invent this imaginary religion called Chrislam, which is a combination of Christianity and Islam, and in your author’s note you say, “Please don’t write me any letters about how wrong I’ve gotten it, or if you do please make them interesting.” Have you gotten angry letters about that story?

I actually haven’t. I’ve gotten a couple of notes from people who are Muslim who appreciated the sympathetic nature of the character. But most people go, “Okay, he’s a science fiction writer, so he’s taking a science fictional look at a religion.” I tried not to be offensive. I have to admit, I read The Idiot’s Guide to Islam to try to not make too terrible mistakes about the basic parts of it.

Another really, really great story from The Best of Joe Haldeman is your novella “The Hemingway Hoax,” which you also expanded into a novel. It’s funny, I bought a copy of that book at a convention years ago, and I had you sign it, and while you were signing it, your wife said that while you were writing that story that she could hear you in your room laughing out loud the whole time that you were writing it.

I don’t often write deliberately funny books, but that one was. I had a riot with it. I was the perfect audience for it, of course, being a writer who writes about Hemingway.

The premise of the story, we should say, is it’s about a Hemingway scholar who tries to produce a fake version of the manuscripts that Hemingway lost early in his career that his wife left on the train.

Yeah, so that was pretty fun. I came up with the whole idea for it in about ten seconds. A friend was putting me on an airplane to Australia or New Zealand, and we had some time to kill in the airport; basically, on the way back from the men’s room, I had this whole idea about the story, and I wrote it down as soon as we stopped—which was in the Galapagos—and that was fun to write. I loved writing that book. It was like not working at all. I’d just type it up, and as my wife said, I was laughing all the way through it.

You’re something of an amateur Hemingway scholar yourself, right? You attend the Hemingway conference every year.

That’s true.

What’s hot in Hemingway studies these days that people would talk about at a conference like that?

There’s a kind of a backlash from the usual cliché of Hemingway being anti-women and anti-feminist and so forth. Hemingway studies cover an awful lot of stuff, and in fact, part of it is because his life is so tremendously well documented. He wrote thousands of letters, and they were all kept, and because he was famous, every little thing that he did was written down, and so he must be the most public American writer right now.

On your blog, you quoted from The New York Times Book Review, and you quote this article that says, “by the mid-80's, the brawling, womanizing train wreck that had characterized so many of the Lost Generation and post-war writers had gone out of style, replaced by weedy, thin-haired minimalists who had learned their craft at writers' colonies and lived in college towns teaching in master's programs.” What was it about that line that struck you?

I just think it’s so true because I’ve known writers . . . The guys who were like twenty years older than me whom I hung around with in the ’60s and ’70s when I was still a young writer—they were very much influenced by this kind of hairy-chested Hemingway myth. You say it changed over the next twenty or thirty years to a kind of obvious rejection of masculinist ideals, and I guess Ray Carver is the obvious avatar of that. I may have mentioned him in that article. But you don’t want to be a hairy-chested, overly male writer because it’s way out of fashion.

Do you think that that represents a cultural maturity, to move past the macho writer, or do you think something has been lost to people who went out and experienced life and got in bar fights and stuff like that?

I think that particular kind of experience would not help anybody’s reputation, but they still do go out and do things, and the idea of a writer as an activist is still strong. But no, I think you get more points for being politically concerned, if not correct, and not being such a selfish . . . I’m trying to use some sort of polite language here, but you don’t want to be a jerk. Hemingway was a jerk. I mean, he was really a great jerk. He was a good writer, and he did all sorts of things that I would never have the courage to do, but I don’t think I’d enjoy being in the same room with him. He’s not my kind of person.

In “The Hemingway Hoax,” it’s actually suggested that the sort of macho effect that Hemingway had on the culture might lead to World War III.

I had fun with that one. You get two leaders, one in the United States and one in the Soviet Union, who both were totally influenced by Hemingway, and a man doesn’t back down, right? A man fights his fights. And if they both have nuclear weapons at their disposal, that’s really a bad attitude for them to have.

Was that just sort of a fun idea, or do you think that fiction actually has that sort of impact on the world? Do you ever write a story and worry that you might start World War III if you write the wrong thing?

I don’t think so. It’s a foolish and funny idea. I had to carry it out to its end. I suppose in some world, men of action would be so much influenced by literature that they would go off the deep end because they read a book that would reward them for it. I don’t see it happening in our society. In a simpler world, the world that we all came from, yes, one piece of writing could profoundly change the course of human events. The Gospel of Matthew, for instance, could change a lot. I don’t know. Uncle Tom’s Cabin definitely did. But you don’t hear about books that were pivotal that way anymore. I’m trying to think of any one in our culture.

Of course, in other cultures where the distribution of literature is more strongly controlled, you can get political things succeeding, because they’re not in an open market of ideas. If everybody is reading and agreeing with the same book, you have a different kind of a situation.

I’ve heard anecdotally that totalitarian regimes are famously hostile to science fiction because they don’t want people thinking about possibilities.

Well, that’s true, or it seems to be true. When I was in the Soviet Union, science fiction was considered a part of children’s literature, and paradoxically that gave them a certain freedom, if only because the critics who read science fiction were the critics of children’s literature, and they didn’t go into politics deeply. They were more about entertainment and amusing ideas and this and that. So the science fiction writers, they could say some amazing things. They could criticize the regime with broad, humorous strokes, and the readers saw the game that was going on, but the critics just brushed it off because they had more important things to do. It was a very interesting time to be a science fiction writer, the ’70s and ’80s.

We’re sort of short on time here, so we should start wrapping this up. Recently you announced that you’re stepping down from your teaching position at MIT. Could you talk about that?

I turned seventy, and that’s old enough. I’d taught for thirty years, and that’s long enough. So, basically, I want to try living a simpler life and just writing. What I’d done for the past thirty years was go up to Cambridge every September, and then come back to Florida every December, and it’s just an awful lot of packing and unpacking and traveling, and just a more complicated life than I want to live, basically. I enjoy teaching, and I think I’m okay at it, but I’ve always been mainly a writer who just taught as a hobby. I don’t need hobbies so much as time right now.

We’ve had Junot Diaz on the show twice, and he also teaches at MIT. Have your paths crossed there?

Oh yeah, we had dinner together every now and then, and go to movies. Junot loves movies, and so do I. When we can, we hang out, and he’s a lot of fun to play with. He lives both in New York and Cambridge, so I never know when I can get him.

Now that you’re going to be writing full-time, do you have projects you have in mind, or do you have anything in the works?

I’m working on a complex science fiction novel now, which is taking all of my time and effort. I haven’t even sent in a proposal for my next novel yet, but I’ve never had any trouble coming up with ideas, and for many, many years I haven’t had trouble getting contracts for the books that I want to write, so basically I’ll just work on this one for another six months or so, and then I’ll work up a proposal for the next one, and they overlap, so I’ll turn in a manuscript and basically rest for a week or two, and then can start writing the next one. That’s been my pattern since the ’70s.

We’re definitely looking forward to seeing whatever you come up with. I’d really like to thank you for being on the show today.

I’m glad to do it. Thank you for thinking of me.

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

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.

Panel: YouTube for Geeks
David Barr Kirtley, John Joseph Adams, Matt London, Cate Matthews

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

Dave: Our panel topic today will be YouTube for geeks. We’re joined by not one, but two Guest Geeks. First up, we’ve got Matt London, making his eighth appearance on the show. He’s the creator of Space Pirates in Space, an animated web-series that premiered on YouTube in 2012. His fiction has appeared in The Living Dead Two, Daily Science Fiction, and is forthcoming in Space and Time Magazine. He’s also written extensively about video games and other geeky stuff for Lightspeed Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, and Tor.com. Matt, welcome to the show.

Matt: Thanks for having me back, guys.

Dave: Joining us for the very first time is Cate Matthews. She’s a graduate of the Alpha Young Writers Workshop, and a recent college grad who’s been vlogging on YouTube since 2010, where she’s racked up over three thousand subscribers. Cate, welcome to the show.

Cate: Hello, thank you.

Dave: Just to start out with, we’re going to talk about what our personal experiences have been with uploading stuff to YouTube. I’d like Matt to go first and tell us about Space Pirates in Space. Describe it a little bit, and what’s its current status?

Matt: Space Pirates in Space is an animated web-comic about a crew of incompetent space pirates robbing the galaxy one screw-up at a time. I call it an animated web-comic because each episode is only about thirty to ninety seconds long. It’s not like your normal web-series that’s like three- to five-minute episodes or longer. I really like the idea of this bite-sized video content. It allows you to consume them really, really quickly, and it’s structured more like a lot of the web-comics that I love. We’re about to wrap up our first season, and then the second season will premiere sometime in the fall. It’s been an awesome project to work on. The inspiration for it was that I always wanted to be the showrunner of an animated TV series, but the opportunities for that are few and far between. I really wanted to emulate that style of production in making a web-series. I brought together a team of actor, improv-er, writer types, and got them all into a room to brainstorm ideas and collaboratively craft a script for the series. Then after that, we recorded dialogue for everybody, and then I animated the entire season.

Dave: You can do an animated series as basically a one-person production team? What kind of equipment and software do you use?

Matt: It’s not an easy task to do it all by myself, but I have a background in film and television production, so I came with a lot of those skills when I started. It’s mainly editing dialogue, something I’m sure you’re very familiar with, Dave. Then I build character assets inside of Photoshop, then export those to After Effects, where I animate the characters like puppets. After Effects is a really great tool for creating three-dimensional animation. Then I finish it all off in Final Cut Pro.

Dave: Do you watch a lot of animated web stuff on YouTube?

Matt: I try to. It’s funny, there are varying degrees of quality. What got me hooked into it was Machinima, which is this style of animation where you perform the animated film inside of a video game, and then dub over the motion of the game with your own dialogue. I think the first real break-out show was Red vs. Blue from Rooster Teeth. Now, Rooster Teeth has become this titan in the web animation industry. They do all sorts of comedic and game content. Beyond that, Machinima does all sorts of shows. A couple of my favorites are: Mega Man Dies at the End and Sonic for Hire, which take classic video game characters and put them into really absurd situations.

John: We should mention that Red vs. Blue is set in the Halo-verse of the Halo video game, and “Red versus Blue” means that, if you’re playing a “versus” game, then one team is red and one is blue, and then they have humorous stuff happening and make fun of the silly little conventions of the game. It actually is quite hilarious.

Matt: It’s a really funny show. The production value of web content can vary a lot, just because some people don’t have the resources to make something look really slick and first-tier professional. The truth is that it doesn’t take a budget to write something really smart or really funny. What you end up with is really brilliant writing. That’s the thing that makes good web entertainment.

Dave: When you mentioned video game characters in absurd situations, it makes me think of the Dorkly videos. I don’t know if you’ve seen any of those, but they’re like video game characters, and in one of them Link rescues Zelda from Ganon in The Legend of Zelda, and then her boorish boyfriend shows up and goes off with her, and that was really funny. There’s this funny one where the main character from Braid is at a bar, and there’s all these other sidescroller characters like Mario and stuff, and the main character from Braid is really pretentious, and he’s like, “I’m not hanging out with you guys. I’m in a completely different class.” Mario is like, “Whoa, we’re both characters.” Braid is like, “No, but I rewind time.” Mario says, “You mean like Banjo Kazooie?” Braid says, “No, not like Banjo Kazooie, that’s outrageous.” That’s a really funny video.

Matt: That’s exactly the kind of thing. Mega Man Dies at the End is a spoof on the Mega Man series. It sort of turns Mega Man into an ’80s action movie, where he’s grizzled with a beard, out in the woods, cutting lumber, and some robot comes out to bring him back for one last mission. He doesn’t want to go and he’s all conflicted, and then hilarity ensues as he navigates the seedy robot underworld.

Dave: Cate, do you watch any animated movies on YouTube?

Cate: I’ve seen a few, just one-offs. I can’t say that I make a habit of it. Some of the best ones I’ve seen were actually involving Batman and Superman, just parody videos.

Matt: Did you see the video that they did of the death of Superman?

Cate: Yeah, I did.

Matt: Who is in it? There was somebody famous in it. I think it might have been through College Humor or Funny or Die, but they did a retelling of The Death of Superman: “If you’ve never seen The Death of Superman, I’m going to explain to you in ten minutes The Death of Superman, the whole saga,” but then they acted it out on the streets of Los Angeles, and it’s just completely absurd and ridiculous.

Dave: I didn’t realize you were quoting that. I thought you were about to spend ten minutes describing The Death of Superman. I was getting a little nervous there.

Matt: [Laughter] No.

John: Actually, one of my favorite things on YouTube, which I was going to mention later, but since we’re talking about video games, is this “Breaking Bad Sixteen-Bit RPG.” I think this was College Humor. They took the story of Breaking Bad, it’s like the first four seasons, and they tell it in the style of a sixteen-bit role-playing game. It’s basically like playing Final Fantasy from the sixteen-bit days, but with Breaking Bad characters. It has all the ridiculous things that happen in the show, like when you strip away all the character stuff that’s so great on the show, and you look at it just on the surface, it seems ridiculous. It starts off with Walt going to the doctor and finding out that he has cancer, and then it pops up with a choice tree, and you have to decide what to do. It’s like, “Ask for help,” “Do this,” “Do this,” and then the last one was, “Sell meth.” So of course he just goes to “Sell meth,” ignoring the three other reasonable options that were above it. There’s all kinds of stuff like that. Then it has this really great coda at the end, where it’s like, “Breaking Bad Two: The Adventures of Walt Jr.,” which is Walt’s son, and it’s basically like his only option is “Eat breakfast.” On the show he’s basically eating breakfast and that’s what he does. Then it’s like, “Okay, go away, Walt Jr. Go to school.”

Dave: I posted my top ten videos, and a bunch of these are animated. I don’t know if anyone got a chance to watch any of them.

Matt: Love them. Ze Frank’s True Facts is maybe the most genius thing I’ve ever seen on YouTube. You can guess why I like it so much. It’s talking about the perverse sex habits of weird, alien-looking animals.

John: Those aren’t animated though.

Matt: No, they’re not, but that’s even more horrifying. You look at the sex lives of sea horses, or land snails, and you can be horrified.

Dave: Did you see, I think this is animated, Scientifically Accurate Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and stuff like that? They have actual horrifying facts of turtle biology, and make it so that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have those characteristics. It’s so terrifying. You can’t even begin to imagine. They do it for a bunch of different animal-mutant kind of shows.

John: Two other things that I had on my list of favorites that were animated: Do you guys know the comedian Tim Minchin? He’s a comedian-singer, so he has this song called “Storm,” and somebody made an animated movie out of it. It’s like poetry more than an actual song, he’s just reciting this story, but it’s kind of like a song. The animated film version is really cool to watch, and he’s a great geek-oriented comedian. His humor is very rational-based. He has a lot of atheist-type humor, and this one is specifically about being a skeptic, and running into someone at a party who’s a believer.

Dave: Oh yeah, that’s great. One of the things on mine is NonStampCollector on YouTube. People sometimes say that atheism is just another religion, and one retort to that is, “Yeah, atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.” So that’s where the NonStampCollector handle comes from. He has a video called Noah’s Ark, and I don’t know if anyone watched it, but it’s so funny. It goes through all the practical problems you would have trying to get every animal on Earth onto a big wooden boat, and nine thousand species of spiders, and how do you feed them? How do you get the polar bears together with the camels? It’s really, really funny.

Matt: One of the things that you linked to, Dave, that I really liked was the They’re Made of Meat short film, based on the Terry Bisson short story. I really love how short video content, whether live action or animated, is a great way to share some of the awesome short stories in the science fiction world. It’s funny because occasionally they’ll try to turn a short story into a feature film—obviously a lot of Phillip K. Dick stories have gone this way. There was that horrendous movie The Box. Whenever you try to expand a short story into a feature film it always ends up being a bloated disaster, but when it’s a short film, or an animated short, I think it can really deliver the essence of a story really well. An animation teacher of mine named Nick Fox-Gieg won the best animated short at South by Southwest a couple of years ago with a Benjamin Rosenbaum story called “The Orange.” That’s an awesome film that perfectly conveys the story. It’s just the text of the story recited with animation, and it looks and feels great. It’s this awesome story.

Dave: They’re Made Out of Meat is the number one thing on my list. The premise is that it’s a conversation between two aliens, and it turns out that most alien life in the universe is not organic, so they’re just horrified to discover that humans are organic and have brains with blood. They’re like, “They’re made out of meat, this is so freaking wrong.” It’s really funny. It’s the kind of thing that couldn’t be longer than four or five minutes. It’s perfect at that length.

Matt: ’Cause then one of the aliens would have a girlfriend, and a boss who’s mean to him, and it would turn into this bloated thing.

Dave: Cate, since Matt has brought up non-animated videos, do you have any non-animated videos you want to mention?

Cate: Goodness, there are so many. When you suggested that I look up some of my geekier videos that I’ve enjoyed over time, the first video I thought of was MC Frontalot’s “Spoiler Alert." I’m sure some of you have seen that, but it’s basically a nerdcore rap spoiling every single thing in every single movie. It’s really funny to watch, and actually really horrifying, too, because you know you’re spoiling things for yourself.

John: Well, I will never watch it, probably, then.

Dave: Speaking of music videos, one I had on my list is the—not safe for work warning—“Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury” music video by Rachel Bloom, in which she’s like a school girl, and she sings about how she wants to fuck Ray Bradbury. When this came out, every single one of my friends linked to this. Saladin Ahmed said it’s like catnip for the internet because it’s boobs plus science fiction books.

John: That actually ended up getting nominated for the Hugo Award for “Best Dramatic Presentation.” Then she actually went to Worldcon that year. They do autographing sessions, and there will be like four people in a row, and they have lines for everybody to come get their autographs. She was actually at the session right before mine. I didn’t get to talk to her, but we sort of nodded at each other as we were passing by.

Dave: Wait, does she know you?

John: No, no.

Dave: So, you just nodded at her basically.

John: Yeah.

Dave: And she’s like, “Who is that guy?”

Matt: [Laughter]

Dave: It’s funny because Sam Weller, who wrote the biography of Ray Bradbury, he actually showed that video to Ray Bradbury, so there’s a video where you can see Ray Bradbury’s reaction to watching it.

John: I was going to say, when Matt was talking about They’re Made out of Meat and adapting stories to short videos, when my anthology The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination came out, I think we talked about this on the show before, but David Levine has a story in the book called “Letter to the Editor,” and he turned it into a short film. It’s basically a mad scientist laying out his plans for why what he’s been doing over the course of his mad scientist career has actually been for the benefit of the planet. He’s making this case, and he’s explaining it all. It’s told first-person, like he’s talking to you, the reader. He did a short film of himself dressed up as the mad scientist, and he’s talking right to the camera. He does a really great job performing it. I’ve heard him read it live at conventions, and it was even more wonderful than having just read it myself. It’s very simple, and they did a little bit of editing, but it’s mostly one shot on him doing it.

Dave: Speaking of adapting short stories, because I actually tried that, the first couple of videos I posted on YouTube, I took the audio from some of my stories that had appeared as podcasts, and I took the audio from the first scene of the story and did, every five seconds or something, a new image would come up to accompany the audio. They got a couple thousand views, nothing huge, but it was so labor intensive that I gave up after the first scene. I think it would have worked pretty well if I had a team to help me. If I had Matt to do it for me. I think that would be a good idea.

John: I know you wanted to talk about book trailers, and what I was just saying about the Mad Scientist’s Guide video that David Levine did, to me, I think, for an anthology, that’s like the perfect sort of book trailer. I actually do have a couple of book trailers. I have one for The Living Dead and one for Seeds of Change. There was a very primitive one for Wastelands that we had on YouTube at some point, but I took it down because it just wasn’t up to par. But, David Levine’s video was like, okay, that’s content that you would watch independently of having any interest in the book. Most book trailers, it feels to me like, you kind of have to already be interested in it to watch it. Some of them are good—the one for Scott Sigler’s Nocturnal is pretty good; I happened to see it because I was watching Sword and Laser and they aired the trailer on there—but most book trailers that I’ve seen don’t seem very good at capturing the audience because it’s like a trailer for a movie, but then the experience of reading the book is not going to be anything like watching the trailer for the book.

Dave: I agree that most book trailers are just so underwhelming. Especially because we’re used to movie trailers where they spend hundreds of millions of dollars making a movie, and then they take all the best shots from it, and put it together in two or three minutes. You’re just like, “Wow, that’s amazing.” Then the movie usually turns out to be terrible. But then a book trailer is like they get some random person, and they have some cheap costume, and then it’s shot on a crummy camera. It doesn’t make you want to read the book at all. The only ones that I’ve ever thought were good was one for Stephen King’s Duma Key that was super produced. That one was pretty good. Actually, there was one for Carrie Ryan’s book The Forest of Hands and Teeth that actually made me want to read that book. I agree that it’s totally problematic, trying to do book trailers.

John: I think the problem with these is that they’re just being posted on YouTube and online elsewhere, and you have to go want to watch them. If they were airing at the beginning of a movie reel, while you’re just sitting in the audience waiting for the actual movie trailers to start, if they were airing them then, they might actually play well. They’re introducing the audience to this thing that maybe they haven’t heard of, but there is that visual component so you watch it to check out what it is, and then maybe you’ll get interested in it. Like I said, it still has the same problems of not really feeling like the experience of reading the book, but at least it might actually reach a new audience, whereas you’re sort of self-selecting who’s going to ever click on these things the way it is now.

Dave: When we interviewed Rick Yancey, he was saying as part of that $750,000 marketing campaign that they actually are showing trailers for The 5th Wave in movie theaters before movies, so it would be interesting if there was some way to know whether that actually was effective.

John: That’s very exciting.

Matt: John, I think you’re touching on something that I’ve noticed a lot in the online space, which is that there are so many fans out there, and everyone has really specific interests. I think that the barriered entry for a lot of people to finding new, exciting stuff that they would really be into is just knowing that it exists. So much about searching the internet is needle in a haystack stuff. It’s sort of the result of search engine optimization, where you go looking for something like, “Sci Fi Comedy,” right? And the first hundred thousand results for that will be the same fifty things that are the fifty biggest things in the world, but beyond that there is so much other content that’s just harder to find. I wish that there was a way for people to be introduced to new and exciting stuff without requiring a trailer to be at the front of a movie, which obviously would be really expensive. Or, like a two-page spread in Entertainment Weekly, or a banner ad on the front page of YouTube.

Cate: There’s a concept in new media that good content rises to the top, and that’s becoming a little bit less true now that there’s a lot of big money getting involved, and a lot of sponsorship and advertising, and that’s all complicated. But, good content does rise to the top. It’s not just Justin Bieber that goes viral, luckily. You find someone, and then they like it, and they share your video, and then they mention it to a friend, and that’s just how it works.

Dave: See, Cate, have you ever bought a book or been tempted to buy a book after seeing any sort of video about it?

Cate: To be honest, I haven’t. I’ve seen very good book trailers, though, and I think the best book trailers are when it acknowledges that it’s fundamentally a literary activity. It kind of embraces what makes books strong, which is the voice, and the voice moving the plot forward.

John: I mentioned that I have two book trailers, so there’s one for The Living Dead, which was actually done by a professional studio that was looking to get into doing book trailers. They approached me because at the time The Living Dead was very popular, it had just come out, and they wanted to do something with zombies, I guess. They offered to do it for free, so I said, “Yeah, sure.” I thought it turned out okay. It’s pretty cool to watch. It has good original music to it. It has some nice visuals. The trailer I have for Seeds of Change—to me, that actually feels like the best kind of trailer you could have for an anthology like that. Short of actually adapting a story into a full short film, like with David Levine. The Seeds of Change trailer, my friend Jack Kincaid did it for me. He found a bunch of public domain images and video, and he cut together this thing that did a little excerpt of each story. He’s a voice actor, so he did a lot of the voices, and he narrated a little segment of each story, and he did all this original music for it. It’s really an impressive production. I still get chills watching it, maybe because it’s my book, but it really feels like that’s a really good job of introducing the book quickly to an audience.

Dave: I just want to say that The Living Dead trailer, it’s for a zombie anthology, and he used stock footage of kids hanging out, and then did some sort of digital processing on it to make them look zombified. There’s this shot where this girl turns her head to look at the camera, and I was like, “No, when she turns her head the far side of her head should be all messed up and bloody.” So they went back and did that. I just want to say that that was my idea, if anyone watches that video.

Matt: I did a book trailer for Amanda Cohen’s Dirt Candy Cookbook. It’s this comic book cookbook, which I think really translated well to video because you can actually see the art from the interior of the book. It makes it much easier to do a video presentation for something textual if it has really great art or illustrations. So, comics work better in a lot of ways.

Dave: Cate, why don’t you tell us a bit about your vlogging. How did you get into that?

Cate: My friend referred me to the Vlog Brothers channel because I was going to college with someone who was closely associated with them. That’s why I found out that there was this entire world on YouTube with people talking to each other with cameras. I started putting videos online as many, many teenagers now do, and it just blossomed from there. Some of my videos were more well received than others, and they got some modicum of attention within the community.

Dave: What kind of equipment and/or software did you use?

Cate: I started out, and I’m a little embarrassed to say this, just with my iSight on my Mac. I would just sit in front of it and talk for a bit and then edit that together with iMovie, even though I already had a video camera; it was just easier. Then I eventually got a better quality camera, not as good as a DSLR, but a pretty good handicam, and I graduated to Final Cut, which is a little bit complicated, but still fun to use.

Matt: Cate, I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about who the Vlog Brothers are, and what’s your story for how you discovered them, and what it was that you liked about them so much.

Cate: The Vlog Brothers are a pair of brothers who have this incredibly amazing community that they’ve created over the years. I think they started in 2007. John Green is the first of them, and he is currently a New York Times best-selling author, and his most recent book, The Fault in Our Stars, is being made into a movie, and that’s very exciting. When he started vlogging, he already had a fair bit of online presence, but it was nowhere where it is now, where he has hundreds of thousands of followers and subscribers. Hank Green created several eco websites in the beginning of the 2000s, and he was working on that. Together they decided to start a project where they would talk to each other, and through John’s notoriety and participation from the outside world, they got more and more important. It’s really interesting the community that’s been built up around them, which is about all things geek and celebrating what is nerdy and what is often ignored. They have this new channel called The Brain Scoop that they are directing that follows someone who exhumes animals for a living. It’s a very interesting thing. It made me realize that video could be more than just viral videos and punch lines, and it could be an actual conversation, and a very meaningful one at that.

John: One of the things about their plan to do the Vlog Brothers channel was that they actually agreed to not to communicate with each other for a full year other than via the vlog. No email, no text, and no communication in any way. I think they said they might allow each other to talk on the phone, but they were basically going to only be communicating with each other via the vlog. One would do a vlog and the other would reply in a vlog, and that’s how they were going to communicate for the whole year.

Matt: The thing I really like about the story is that their fame and notoriety played off each other. It started off because John Green was an author and had fans, it brought a small group of people to watch this conversation between him and Hank Green. Hank Green is, I don’t know if you’d call him a filker, but he’s like a wizard rocker. He writes a lot of songs about the Harry Potter world, so he had a song about the last book, or something, and the video of him singing that song went viral and brought this huge influx of fans to the vlog-cast. Then, because of that influx of fans, it allowed John Green’s next book to hit the Times list, which then created this new burst of fandom for him because it was on the Times list, it brought new fans to the vlog, and it grew and grew from there, to the point now where—I guess one of the Google grants that Cate was talking about earlier—they received a Google grant to start a new series of shows on YouTube.

Dave: When Cate was mentioning that was before we started recording. Cate, could you repeat that for the benefit of our listeners?

Cate: Right now, YouTube is straddling two worlds. They’re this burgeoning hub of online, independent content, but also they’re trying to figure out how to address that there’s a TV-like quality to them, and they’re trying to mix their new media with old media. They developed this YouTube original content initiative where they gave some of the top independent content creators on YouTube a TV-like grant where they could take, depending on how much money, some of it was smaller, a couple hundred thousand dollars and see what they could do with that, what shows they could create. Some were more successful than others.

Dave: You were sort of saying that none of them have really made back the money that was invested in them, right?

Cate: They were expected to do it within the first year, and I think that maybe one or two channels at most have out-earned that grant, at least through advertising alone. That would be SourceFed, because it’s a very small operation. It doesn’t take much to make, but it’s very viral. It’s a news show, basically.

Matt: One of the interesting things that John and Hank Green have been doing is this new venture called Subbable, which is an online surface that curates interesting YouTube content. If you’re a fan, then you can subscribe and donate money in a Kickstarter kind of form. You can watch all the content for free, but if you’re a fan, then you can send in money to support the shows and content that you like. It’s an interesting attempt to break away from the ad-connected model. I think that as the internet evolves, and internet entertainment evolves, there’s going to be a point where the amount of content, and the budget at which that content is being produced, can’t be sustained by YouTube ads alone.

Dave: We were mentioning that there was Sword and Laser, it’s a similar podcast to this one, they discuss fantasy and science fiction books. They had a video show that Felicia [Day] hosted on [the] Geek and Sundry [channel]. If you ever watched it, the production values are amazing. I would watch it, and I’m like, “Oh my god, I’m so jealous. They have a smoking dragon head.” They have a whole set. They also had little animations. It must cost thousands of dollars to produce one of these episodes. It’s really hard for me to see how a book show is going to recoup that kind of investment, although I wish I could figure out some way to do it, because it was pretty cool.

John: I’d just be happy if we could record in a studio together, as opposed to doing everything via Skype. I don’t need a whole dragon studio like they’ve got. If we could just be sitting in the same place with mics, that would be nice. They have the whole production team and everything. It’s kind of ridiculous.

Matt: John, you have a little bit of experience with Lightspeed of having people be willing to pay different amounts of money for the content that you’re providing. Some people want to lurk on the site and read all the stories you publish, but other people, I know that you’ve told me stories in the past about people who are totally willing and say, “I’m going to throw a bunch of money at this because I think it’s awesome, and I want to support it.”

John: At Lightspeed, we have lifetime subscriptions, and we have a couple of lifetime subscribers, so it’s like five hundred dollars to buy a lifetime subscription, but of course, like Matt says, most of the content is online for free. We started adding some exclusive content to the ebook editions, but the majority of the content is online for free, so nobody really has to pay for it, but you’re paying for the exclusivity of the content that’s in the ebook and the convenience of the ebook format, and that kind of thing. Even though people might not be doing the big-ticket lifetime subscription, they might just buy regular subscriptions, whereas they could totally read it for free, I think a lot of people are willing to do that kind of thing. I recently did a reader survey—if you’re a Lightspeed reader, you can still fill out the reader survey, and you have a chance to win a free subscription; go to lightspeedmagazine.com/survey if you want to—in the survey I was asking some questions, sort of asking people, “Hey, do you know who the publisher of Lightspeed is?” I had a couple different options, and it became very clear, very quickly, that most people don’t know who the publisher is, and they don’t realize it’s me. Just some dude, me. It’s not like a major company or anything, so one of my follow-up questions was, “Now knowing that I’m the publisher, does that change your thoughts about whether or not to support the magazine financially?” A lot of them said yes. That they didn’t realize it was just me publishing it. They thought it was a company that was publishing the magazine or something. Obviously, if it’s just me publishing it, they feel like, “Oh, well, that’s more worthy of my financial support than just feeding the beast of some major company.”

Dave: That’s funny, because sometimes people will post bad reviews for this show and say, “These hosts suck. Just replace the hosts and it will be so much better.” We’re like, “Umm, if you replace the hosts, there’s no one else working on this. I don’t know who else you think is involved.” Maybe there is a profit model that would make doing a video book show viable. I think that leads into the issue of, does video benefit a book show, really? Do you need to see the people’s faces when they’re talking about an inherently non-visual kind of media?

John: I wonder that with a lot of the things I was watching for this. I watched a lot of the stuff on Geek and Sundry, and there were a lot of things that, if you took away the video and it was just an audio show, basically the same as an audio podcast like this, I don’t know that there was going to be much of a difference. On Geek and Sundry, they have The Story Board, which was like a Google Hangout discussion. Felicia [Day] has Vaginal Fantasy, which is also a Google Hangout recorded session like that. Both of those you don’t really need to see the people to enjoy that content. You can just have it as a podcast instead. I wonder if it’s worth doing all that video stuff as well.

Dave: It seems like video is a lot harder to edit, maybe Matt and Cate can speak to this, but how much latitude do you have to edit the audio when the video is included?

Matt: You can fake audio much easier than you can fake video. There are some things, just in the language of the moving image, that it’s incredibly difficult to break those rules and not have your audience feel like something is wrong with it, even if they don’t know what it is that’s wrong with it. I learned this term for the first time this week that’s amazing, it’s called the Frankenbite—anyone who’s ever edited audio or watches a reality television show will be familiar with this phenomenon even if they don’t know the term itself. It’s when a testimonial interview with a reality show contestant is hacked to pieces to the point where the original statement is completely indecipherable, but the editor has sculpted a new statement to better fit the narrative of the show. You’ll hear something, it’ll sound like this, “I think (pause) Dave (pause) is a (pause) jerk.” Right? Now “jerk” is from one sentence, and I think is from a sentence three episodes ago, and it all just gets mashed together to create the story that they want to. If you’ve worked in post-production before, you can hear those cuts, even though for the uninitiated viewer, sometimes it’ll sort of flow naturally. In pure audio, it’s so much easier to cut those things up; if you were just doing that with a face on camera shot, it would be very difficult. You need to add in other images to mask some of those audio cuts.

Dave: I’ve really been struck, having done so much audio editing for this show now, how when I watch TV, I can tell where it’s been edited, and I never would have noticed that before. Cate, why don’t you tell us how much editing you do on your videos. What’s been your experience with that?

Cate: I do quite a bit of editing on my videos, and that’s just because there’s so much of it that you don’t want to include for the final product, like you were talking about. It’s mostly simple. I think as long as it looks like a good quality product with decent lighting and a straight-on camera shot that’s above four hundred and eighty pixels, I don’t think it would be that difficult to make it seem super professional, even though you guys are mostly experienced with audio.

Dave: I’ve actually noticed with vlogs that it’s almost sort of a convention of the form that you have these very obvious cuts. They’re not even trying to mask the fact that there’s a cut, that’s almost part of the appeal, or something.

Cate: It’s supposed to be. There’s two things that have really risen because of talking vlogging. You’re supposed to speak faster because it’s supposed to sound more interesting and more exciting, and obviously you get more words in for your three- or four-minute video. It’s a little bit more frenetic than a podcast. Also, you’ve got these jump cuts, and you just cut from sentence to sentence because on YouTube there’s no time for breath or a sneeze.

Dave: I was actually wondering, Cate, you’re kicking our ass as far as YouTube views and subscribers, do you have any theories on why your videos have been as popular as they have been?

Cate: I really lucked out, and I was lucky enough that people found my videos, and they shared them. There’s no secret trick. It’s just sort of sharing good content, and good content rises, in theory.

John: For YouTube, I think one of the issues for us is that our show is obviously an audio product. It’s not a video product. You’re putting it on YouTube and you have the image there, but when people go to YouTube, I think most of the time people want the video experience because it is a different experience. I can’t really explain it, like why I might watch a video of someone talking, but then I wouldn’t listen to that same podcast necessarily. Specifically, when I go to YouTube, I’m not necessarily going there because I want to sit and listen to something, I’m going there because I want to watch something. If there’s nothing to watch, it’s just listening, then I think that we’re not going to get a lot of “viewers” for the podcast there. We’d be more likely to get people to say, “Oh, I’ve discovered that, now I’m going to go subscribe to the podcast, and I’ll listen to it while I’m on my commute or whatever.”

Dave: I think we should explain that we take all of our podcasts and post them on YouTube just as one more place that people could find the podcast, and most of our subscribers are not through YouTube. There’s just sort of a slideshow, which has our logo and photos. I didn’t expect those to set the world on fire or anything. A couple of them have gotten a couple thousand views, but it’s just really striking that someone will post a picture of them falling down the stairs and that gets like five billion views. You sort of get the impression that anything that gets posted on YouTube will at least get ten thousand views and that’s not true. You can post really good stuff on it, and nobody will watch it at all.

Cate: The other thing is for every falling down the stairs video that goes viral, there’s a couple hundred thousand that are just someone banging their knee.

John: I emailed you about this, Dave, after I watched a bunch of those Geek and Sundry things, including the ones that I mentioned were Google Hangouts, and I wondered, should we try recording the show using a Google Hangout? Not necessarily so that we could record the video of it, just because it felt to me, especially when we’re doing a larger panel like this, it would actually be really useful to be able to see everybody else. Not just because it’s easier to talk to someone when you can see them, but because we can give hand signals and stuff, like if I want to jump in, but if we did do that, we could conceivably experiment with recording a show and putting it on YouTube. It would be hard, because you couldn’t edit it like you’re used to being able to edit it, so I don’t know if it will actually be viable at all, but it could be something we could try as an experiment. Maybe if we pick the right show, and we set up very firm rules for what we could talk about, and everybody only had two minutes, and we had a timer, or something like that. It would be very challenging, but it might be something worth experimenting with.

Dave: I was thinking if we did a show on our favorite book covers, for example, it would make sense to have that be video, because then we could actually show the book covers we’re talking about. If it had some visual component, it might be worth experimenting with a video format.

What do people just think about YouTube generally? I used to be a huge fan of YouTube, I’d spend all day on it, but ever since the ads came on, and you can put these stupid text bars over the video, they just drive me crazy. Especially when, say I want to see the trailer for a new movie, and I type that in, and then I start watching it, and ten seconds in I realize it’s actually a fan-made trailer and it sucks. I’m like, “No, that’s not the right video.” So then I’ll type in the title again, and then it’ll start playing a thirty-second ad, and I’m like, “Ugh, this is just insane that it plays an ad when I just watched a video that turned out to be the wrong video.” I just wonder, do people feel like YouTube is just going down the drain? Are there alternatives?

John: I’m surprised how much I enjoy doing the prep for this. When you first suggested the idea, I didn’t think that I was that big of a YouTube fan, but then when I was looking back through my viewing history, I was like, “Oh, actually there was a lot of stuff on here that I really loved watching.” It’s mostly viral stuff that somebody linked to somewhere. Not necessarily hugely viral, but some geek that I know linked to it. There’s a lot of stuff that I really enjoyed. As I was doing research, and I was checking out Geek and Sundry and some related stuff to things that I watched, I found a lot of stuff that was really, really funny that I like now, and I’m going to definitely try to look for more. I know what you’re saying, though, the ad stuff is kind of annoying. There’s multiple ads on each one sometimes. There will be the banner along the bottom that you have to click to kill, and then there’s another little box in the right or left hand corner, and it’s like, “I don’t even understand. Go away.” It’s confusing because it looks like it’s part of the same channel, but it’s not, it’s just some random ad. It is a little frustrating. I have seen a couple YouTube alternatives, but it doesn’t seem like they’ve really caught on. There’s things like Vimeo and other services that are basically the same thing, but they don’t seem to have the same community feel that YouTube does.

Matt: Each one has a different kind of community. Vimeo is gigantic, it’s a huge institution. There’s a style difference between the two of them. YouTube deliberately looks unprofessional. They do that specifically to encourage non-professionals to produce content for the site. Vimeo, on the other hand, is trying to be the slicker, more corporate, more professional video aggregation site. Where if you are an artist, an editor, or a designer, if you want to present something in a very professional manner, Vimeo may be more for you.

Cate: I think that YouTube has definitely taken a turn for the less than user friendly. Actually, when I started vlogging, they weren’t totally profitable. I think they were actually losing venture, the company itself, when it was bought by Google. Now it’s suddenly very focused on profit, and we can see that because of the ads, the influx of them all of a sudden. The partnership program was a wonderful thing when it allowed independent creators to place ads on their videos. Now ads are put on almost every video. Also, the subscription model where you could subscribe to one channel, like Geek and Sundry, like Matt’s, has changed dramatically, and it has actually caused several of my friends who use YouTube and making videos on it is their primary source of income, it has caused their view counts to fall dramatically. That’s because instead of immediately presenting users with their subscription list and the videos they’ve said they wanted to see, YouTube instead presents a mix of viral videos and related videos, and it’s not the same.

John: One of my favorite things about YouTube, regardless of its problems with ads and stuff, is that almost any clip that you want to find, that you want to reference to someone, you can find it on YouTube. They’re not always legit, but when we did our sword fighting postgame, and we were trying to find the best sword fighting scenes in film, that was amazing. I created like a seventy item playlist that you can go watch. Anybody who watches that episode can then go back and watch all of the sword fighting scenes that we talked about in the episode. I think that’s cool. It’s allowing people to share stuff and talk about stuff in a way that wouldn’t be possible without something like YouTube. For instance, when I was doing the prep for this show, I created a playlist called YouTube for Geeks, and we can share the link for that on geeksguideshow.com. I created this playlist, and I was just adding the first episode of the different series so you can check those out, and a bunch of it is from Geek and Sundry, a bunch of it is some other stuff I discovered as I was going along. Then I also created one that’s just my favorites, and we’re not going to get to talk about all of my favorites, but I made a list of some of my favorites as well. I think that’s cool that we can do that kind of thing and just share it. It’s almost like curating an anthology, but like a short film anthology.

Dave: The other big drawback to YouTube that strikes me, as someone who uses it fairly casually, is that it seems to have the dumbest, most vicious comments of anywhere I go on the internet. It was funny actually, Felicia Day, in one of the other interviews I listened to, said that her experience on YouTube taught her that the worst super power that you could possibly have would be telepathy, because it would just be like reading YouTube comments twenty-four hours a day. Is that just my imagination or are YouTube comments literally the worst comments?

John: They are.

Matt: Yes, YouTube video comments are the worst comments in the world. One of my all-time favorite YouTube videos is “Charlie Bit My Finger,” which for the one of six billion of you listening who have never heard of this video, it’s basically two British toddler brothers sitting in a chair, hanging out, and the little one bites the big ones finger, and over the course of five to ten seconds the older brother goes through like six emotional states, from amusement to surprise to pain to shrieking agony to defensive hurt and then finally bemusement. It’s an amazing video and it deserves the hundred and eighty million views that it has. But, if you go to YouTube right this second as you’re listening to this, and type in “Charlie Bit My Finger,” and look at the first five comments, they will all be profanity-laden, pornographic, advertisements, super critical, disgusting, filthy, horrendous stuff. I know that because the top five comments on that video are always that. If you’re on the page right now and you’re looking, you’ll see that the most recent one will have been less than an hour ago, and it’s just because people are always on it being offensive, selling their own stuff, and trying to draw attention to themselves.

John: It just occurred to me that the comments are definitely the worst ever, but I figured it’s probably especially bad for women just because there are so many misogynist assholes that seem to leave comments there. Felicia with her shows, I imagine she must have to put up with a lot of b.s., and Annalee Newitz and Esther Inglis-Arkell from io9, they did this video show on YouTube for a while, and as soon as I saw them doing that—I know Dave and I talked about it at some point—and I was like, “Oh, I bet the comments on that are terrible. Just the worst, vilest shit.” Because there’s two women doing a show, and I can predict what the comments are going to be because it’s like, “Oh, they’re not super models,” or whatever, so everyone’s going to comment on their appearance. It’s repugnant.

Dave: Cate, what has been your experience with YouTube commenters?

Cate: I’ve been lucky enough that since I’m not “Charlie Bit My Finger,” I’m not anywhere near anything like that. I’ve been lucky that the community that I’m a part of is a small, supportive community that would never leave a comment like that, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t generally men who haven’t found my videos. One in particular that got a little scary. Currently, this weekend, Vidcon is going on, and yesterday there was a discussion at the “Becoming YouTube” and the “Women on YouTube” panels about why there aren’t more women creators in the top one hundred most subscribed. There are many reasons for this, and they’re all unfortunate, but one of them is because there’s quite a lot of harassment that occurs when you start getting up there.

Dave: We’re getting toward the end of our time here, but why don’t we run through some of the best channels and videos that we haven’t mentioned yet? We have this whole big list here, but maybe I’ll just mention a couple of the people that our listeners recommended. You’ve got How It Should Have Ended, they make fun of movies, point out plot holes, or have an improved ending. The one that sticks in my mind is its “Lord of the Rings: How It Should Have Ended,” and they just have the eagle fly them to the volcano, and they drop the ring in, and they fly home, and they’re like, “Imagine if we had walked that whole way, how hard that would have been.” I think there is stuff in the book that says why they can’t do that with the eagles, but it’s still funny. A couple people said Red Letter Media; have you guys seen the seven-part takedown of The Phantom Menace?

Matt: It’s almost as long as The Phantom Menace.

Dave: It is epic and amazing. The part that sticks in my mind from that is that they ask people on the street to describe the characters from the original movies: Princess Leia, Han Solo, and they say all this stuff about their personalities. Then they’re like, “Now describe the personality of Princess Amidala.” People are like, “Umm, she’s a princess?”

Matt: Exactly. In terms of Star Wars-related content, one of my all-time favorites is Star Wars Uncut. Star Wars Uncut was this crowd-sourced fan film where this guy asked his viewers to film fifteen seconds of Star Wars: A New Hope. He got hundreds of submissions of all these people putting together these tiny little short films.

Dave: This is in their backyards with cheap costumes.

Matt: Yeah, some of them are animated, some are spoofing old video game styles, a lot of them are people in bathrobes in their backyards with painted sticks. He then assembled them all into the film, and had them edited, smoothed out, used awesome sound effects, and blended it all together until he had a brand new version of Star Wars: A New Hope. I remember when I first watched it, I was like, “Oh, I’ll watch five minutes of this.” I got to like fifteen minutes in and was like, “I’m in trouble. I’m going to sit here and watch this whole thing.” And I did. It was like watching the movie again for the first time, because it gives you this new sense of discovery. You know what happens in Star Wars, but you don’t know how it’s going to happen again. They’re working on an Empire Strikes Back one now. I cannot wait to watch it. I think that there should be more stuff like this. If there is a leader orchestrating really quality, crowd-sourced content, I think the result could be amazing.

Dave: I don’t know if you ever saw ASCII Star Wars, but someone was trying to do all of A New Hope using ASCII art. He did forty-five minutes of it or something, but you look at this, and you’re like, “Oh my god, how long must it have taken to do this?” It’s funny, because if you look at the FAQ, the first question is like, “Why? Oh, for the love of god, why?” His answer is, “Eh, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

John: That reminds me, I totally forgot about this, and I’m ashamed that I didn’t include it on my list of favorites, but speaking of things that took an ungodly amount of time, that makes me think of Claymation, but there is this great Claymation video called Chainsaw Maid. It’s this ridiculously over the top, violent zombie thing. It’s about a maid who’s in this house, and the zombies start coming in, and she ends up getting a chainsaw. It’s so ridiculous, but it’s so gloriously violent. It’s a lot of fun. It’s hilarious, and so ridiculous and over the top. Actually, on the subject of Star Wars, though, there’s a lot of great Star Wars content that’s sort of spoofing things. On Geek and Sundry they have Space Janitors, which is basically a comedy show that is spoofing Star Wars. The main characters are space janitors on the Star Destroyer. Also the Auralnaughts, that’s another channel that has a whole ton of stuff, including some of my favorites. One of them was a show called Jedi Party, and it’s a parody of Phantom Menace: Instead of going to stop the trade federation Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon, they’re just there for a party and they’re jerks. It’s really funny.

Dave: We should say that that’s Auralnaughts, a-u-r-a-l, not o-r-a-l.

John: Right, that would be a different channel.

Dave: Speaking of Star Wars, it makes me think of Star Wars Kid, and like the dark side of YouTube. I don’t know if you guys have read what happened to him, but he was bullied, and he had to change schools, and was in therapy, and all sorts of crazy stuff.

Matt: It’s sad. You should have a choice if you’re going to be posted on YouTube yourself. I think that this technology has appeared very quickly, and faster than societal norms and ethical questions can be defined and answered. It happened before it could become publicly accepted that that kind of thing is not okay.

Dave: Cate, do you have any favorite channels or videos you wanted to mention?

Cate: We’ve mentioned the Vlog Brothers, and Hank Green of the Vlog Brothers has a show called Scishow, which kind of talks about popular science and debunks some of the myths, and I think that is very enjoyable to watch, and it’s very interesting. Also, Feminist Frequency by Anita Sarkeesian, she analyzes tropes in science fiction and games, and that’s always interesting. Those would be my two recommendations.

Dave: Speaking of science, some people wanted us to mention Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson, which is a video show on the Nerdist network.

John: We mentioned Ze Frank in passing, but his True Facts series is pretty great. It’s definitely one of my favorite things on YouTube. It’s like he takes some weird animal, and there’s video of it, and he just narrates like it was a nature documentary, but it’s very sarcastic, and he kind of sounds like Morgan Freeman being sarcastic, which is great. He does the anglerfish, the mantis shrimp, and the dung beetle. They’re just hilarious. They’re all like two minutes long, so they’re the perfect length for YouTube. That’s probably my favorite science thing.

Matt: I have a lot of favorite channels. I’m really big into [the] video game [show] Let’s Play—I already mentioned Machinima, but Let’s Play is more of you can actually sit and watch somebody play through a video game. So, if it’s on a system that you don’t have, but you want to sort of have the cultural experience of playing the game, you can watch it kind of like a movie.

John: Dave, you do that all the time, don’t you?

Dave: I forget where I heard this, but there was a guy, he says, “I beat it on YouTube.” That just means I just watched through the game on YouTube, and then you didn’t have to pay for the game. I did that all the time. There was just a zombie game called The Last of Us, which is actually really well written, I thought. I started watching the Let’s Play, and after maybe an hour, I was bored with the game play section, but I was still interested in the story, so I just found someone who had cut all the cinematic scenes together into basically an hour-long movie, and I just watched that whole thing, and I loved it.

Matt: It’s an awesome game. I’m really kind of getting into e-sports, like pro-gaming, and one of the things about that that I really like is that there’s so many, not just like ESPN-style produced competitions that you can watch online, either recorded videos on YouTube or streaming live on a site like Twitch.tv, but some of the shout-casters, or commentators, that come out of that world become internet celebrities themselves. Day[9], aka Sean Plott, is one of the biggest. He has a series that just has so many viewers, even though he’s not even a professional player anymore of StarCraft, he is probably the most famous person to come out of that e-sports world. There’s a Magic commentator that I really like named Marshall Sutcliffe, who runs a podcast called Limited Resources about playing limited Magic: The Gathering. He’ll do not just strategy conversations, but also gameplay videos where he’ll take you through a game and talk about all of the decisions that he’s making. If you’re interested in learning to play either a game like Magic better, or a video game like StarCraft, or even something like The Last of Us, you can find that on YouTube, and experience it, and learn how to be better.

Although, I will say that my all-time favorite show on YouTube is from this pro-gamer named Frankie on PC, and there was this mod game, and John, you and I might have talked about this at some point, a game called Day Z. The way it works is it’s a mod of a very realistic military shooter, but the game was modded so that it all takes place on this one enormous map, and you spawn on the map somewhere with an empty backpack and your shoes, and you have to survive the zombie apocalypse. There are zombies all over this map, and you have to scrounge for food, guns, and supplies, and then meanwhile the zombies are all trying to eat you, and the other players—it’s sort of an MMO, a persistent world—but the other players are even more dangerous than the zombies because they may find you, and think, “Oh, this guy’s got a backpack full of food. That’s much easier than going into a grocery store filled with zombies. I’ll just murder this guy and take all of his stuff.” There’s permanent death in the game, so if you die that’s it, it’s over. What this guy Frankie does, is he just plays the game, and sort of comments his way through it, and because the social interaction between the other players is so relevant to the game, it takes on the feel of this serialized zombie survival horror show, where you have to watch him stay alive in this game. The series itself spans dozens of episodes and hours of content. It’s so gripping even though it’s just gameplay videos of a video game.

Dave: This came up in the interview with Felicia, but the Ultima series, there’s a whole series where Warren Spector, the legendary game designer, he interviews different game designers. There’s one called “Warren Spector interviews Richard Garriott,” about his game design career, and it really covers his whole career and a lot of stuff about the Ultima games. It’s really interesting. That’s the stuff that, if there was no YouTube, it isn’t going to be on Netflix or anything, it’s way too specialized. There’s a lot of stuff like that. My favorite author is Roger Zelazny, and for years and years and years I looked for some video of him online. I could never find anything. Finally on YouTube this video pops up, it’s called “Book V: Roger Zelazny Reads at 4th Street Fantasy Convention, 1986,” and as far as I know, this is the only video of Roger Zelazny online, at least the only one I could find after years of searching. It’s just amazing that stuff like this pops up on YouTube, and you can actually find it.

Matt: There was an old French Saturday morning cartoon show, and I couldn’t remember what it was called, I just remember that when I was a little kid I used to wake up very early in the morning, sneak downstairs, and watch this cartoon with my brother at five-thirty or six in the morning. It was a syndicated thing, so it wasn’t even anywhere close to being on the original network that it was on. I couldn’t remember the name of it, so eventually on YouTube, just typing in search terms, trying different combinations, and trying to guess at it, I finally found it. It was so amazing to think that YouTube is this amazing resource for archiving childhood memories that people have.

John: Actually, on the subject of video games, I just had one other thing I wanted to mention because it’s so amazing. There’s a trailer for this video game called Leviathan Warships. It’s so hilarious. The trailer goes for pure humor, and the game isn’t humorous at all, as far as I can tell, it’s just a warship strategy game, but they do this weird sort of Barry White-type voice, and there’s music in the background, and it’s like, “Leviathan Warships.” And they make all these ship puns, so they’re like, “Ship just got real.” They’re describing the gameplay and stuff, but it’s so hilarious. You’ll have to go check it out because it’s like, at the end, “You’ll ship yourself.” So many ship puns, and it’s just so beautiful. It’s a work of art. I feel like if every trailer could be that entertaining, we’d really be in business.

Matt: The problem with advertising is that, because companies have to put so much money behind a campaign, it’s terrifying to try and make a daring experiment like that commercial, but on the web the risk is so much lower that you can take chances and end up creating a hit for yourself just out of a daring ad campaign.

Dave: I also want to mention a couple other listener suggestions. I don’t know anything about these, but people recommended The SlowMo Guys, I think they just shoot stuff and show it in slow motion or something.

Matt: They’re awesome.

Dave: The SMBC Theater and Cinema Sins are somewhat similar to How It Should Have Ended, where they go through movies and say their problems with it and count them off.

John: Cinema Sins is entertaining. I like that. I didn’t know about it either, but I watched some because of this.

Dave: Let’s wrap this up because we could go on all day with YouTube videos. We’ll probably post some more of these on our Facebook page, and if there’s anything that we didn’t mention that you think we should check out, then mention it on Facebook or Twitter or whatever. Otherwise, I think we’re going to wrap things up there. Matt, thanks for joining us for the eighth time.

Matt: Great to be here.

Dave: Cate, thanks for joining us for the first time.

Cate: Thanks so much for having me.

John: No thanks to me for joining us for the ninety-first time?

Dave: [Laughter] And thanks to John for joining us for the ninety-first time!

John: Oh, thank you, thank you. And thanks to Dave for hosting for the ninety-first time!

Dave: Yay.

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

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: Mark Zug

Mark Zug was born in 1959 in Indiana. He attended the Pennsylvania School of Art and Design. He has worked as a freelance artist doing illustration for works by authors ranging from Edgar Rice Burroughs, Harlan Ellison, and Isaac Asimov to Diana Wynne-Jones and Tanith Lee. He has created cover art and fantasy game book and product art in the Dune, Star Wars, Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Battletech, Shadowrun, and Magic: The Gathering universes, among others. His work has been featured in magazines such as Popular Science, Dragon, and Dungeon. He is the illustrator for the best-selling Septimus Heap series of fantasy novels by Angie Sage. His work has won a Jack Gaughan award, a Chesley award, and an Illie award, and is regularly featured in Spectrum: The Best in Contemporary Fantasy Art. He lives in Lewisberry, Pennsylvania. His website is www.markzug.com.

[To view the gallery, turn the page.]

Artist Spotlight: Mark Zug
Henry Lien

The influence of Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth and the Brandywine school of illustrators is apparent in your work. The sense of adventure and optimism in their work reflects a lot of the viewpoints and values of Romanticism in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century and strikes me as particularly American in feel. Somehow, you’ve managed to capture and transplant that sense of brightness and potential in your works depicting very different times and places. How are you achieving that? Is it the light, the composition, the breathtaking sense of expansiveness and scale in clouds and vistas? Even for viewers who are not familiar with Pyle and Wyeth, there is a sense of excitement your works convey that viewers naturally respond to. What are you doing as an artist to trigger such response?

First of all, I believe in that romanticism myself. The frontier romanticism, which is often seen as American, is really a siren song that unknown spaces sing to humans down through all ages. And your question is really how to compose a romantic picture, which requires a very long answer. But I think I can boil it down to a couple of things: The painting must be concerned with the problem of being alive, and so include some sort of actor who is motivated. Second, the environment is a star in its own right and must be rendered as multi-dimensionally as the main character(s)—whether that environment is a vista with mountains and clouds, or a dark prison cell illuminated by a single shaft of moonlight. The environment is like a “Dungeon Master,” setting terms and possibilities for the actor. I think this is the sense of immersion emanating from Pyle’s or Wyeth’s work, which you interpret as expansiveness—because the environment is rendered truthfully enough to seem to extend way past the edges of the canvas.

Are you familiar with the work of N.C. Wyeth’s grandson Jamie Wyeth, who explicitly embraces a sense of otherworldliness in his paintings while still showing the clear lineage of the Wyeths and Pyle? And the book Wondrous Strange that collects the works of Pyle, N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, and Jamie Wyeth, emphasizing the sense of otherworldliness that characterizes the works of Pyle and the Wyeths?

I’m not familiar with that book, though of course I know Jamie’s work. He was firstly always a fine artist, with the perpetual freedom to explore a kind of idiosyncratic wit through odd juxtapositions and unexpected perspectives. His mission was different from N.C.’s—he never had to imbue a potboiler with an aura of excitement to please a recalcitrant art director, for instance. And Jamie was, like his father and grandfather, preoccupied with the luxurious texture of his paints. N.C. did it with meaty smacks of broken color, Andrew did it with a meticulous “hair” of fine tempera brush strokes, and Jaime seemed to be running a perpetual skunkworks experiment in how to apply oil paint. In style, the three generations of realists could not be more different from each other. And yes, N.C. is my favorite—though I do enjoy the work of both son and grandson.

The other elephant in the room is Maxfield Parrish. The elemental paintings such as Helium, skating on a wire above the beautiful forms of a fantastical metropolis, clearly have the dramatic lighting, saturated hues, and neo-classical feel of Parrish’s work. Talk to us about the influence of Parrish on your work.

Maxfield Parrish had more influence on me as an experimenter in magical paint quality in my early days than he does explicitly on my compositions. Helium was one of the rare times when I deliberately flatten or cartoon elements of the composition, doing so with the radial streaks of sunlight—and I owe more to J.C. Leyendecker for that. I think you may be seeing the amount of Parrish which generally soaked into my DNA during all of my museum-haunting and poring over his reproductions in books. It’s hard not to be seduced by his sheer chromatic power, masterful gradients, hard contrasts, and perfect rounding of forms. I used to create tints out of huge dilutions with oil or varnish and put them on in transparent layers as he did, which is tremendous fun—even though I’ve long since come back to just plain linseed oil and mineral spirits. So if Parrish is an elephant in the room, then he is just as frequently out of the room, displaced by other acts in my circus—I challenge you to see any Parrish at all in Radon, for instance.

You have worked on some of the most famous properties in science fiction, including Dune. Further, you were tasked with interpreting an existing visual interpretation, namely, David Lynch’s film version. Can you tell us about the experience of working on the card series based on Dune? I, like you, adored the David Lynch version. He made the narrative changes he needed to in order to make the film coherent as a stand-alone interpretation of a massive book introducing us to a sprawling world. And the visual interpretations that he came up with were astounding. The sandworms with their tripartite mouths have become iconic. The bald Bene Gessirit with their metal teeth. The outrageously Baroque architecture and costumes. The cackling Baron Harkonnen with his shock of bristle brush red hair. The subway trolley spice cradles for the Navigator. The little gold earring on the Padishah Emperor. The Atreides family royal pug. All Lynch’s innovations and contributions. How did you work under the weight of interpreting an interpretation that already achieved such wildly original imagery? And then, when the film license was taken away and you were directed to avoid Lynch’s interpretations as much as possible, how did you drag yourself out from under its weight when you had to?

Through my natural capacity for flippantly second-guessing the mighty! I first read Dune in 1974, and the visions I came away with were ones a fourteen-year-old in that year might do. Safe to say that there were more things on Arrakis than were dreamt of in my philosophy, and David Lynch saw a few of them. The movie, when I saw it, quickly displaced many of my inferior visions, some of which you’ve named. Others were eerie in their correspondence: The casting of Paul and Jessica seem almost clairvoyant. On the other hand, Lynch made choices I didn’t agree with: His Baron was a very cardboard psychopath with pustules to boot, while in Herbert he was a more nuanced sybarite with a ruthless political sense. Lynch’s Sardaukar just looked like welders—no aura at all of the “terror troops” they were supposed to be. And Sting was not at any time Feyd Rautha. So with my awe perforated by a smattering of nerd grievances, I was well-placed not to feel too much of a burden. And it helped that the guys from Last Unicorn [Games], Christian Moore and Owen Seyler, were nonchalant about it. They encouraged me to draw from Lynch at will, but not slavishly, which is a way to work that is second nature to me. Later when they steered me away from the Lynchian stuff, it was not so much dragging myself out from under a weight as throwing off some mooring lines. It was no big deal. You also have to realize that I got paid very little for the Dune stuff, and it was literally the job I landed just before walking into a temp agency to investigate the prospective whoring out of my hours. So in terms of possibly shortchanging some creative legacy or other, I was definitely staring at a much more depressing alternative. Plus I had already done Ellison and Asimov, so I may have been a bit devil-may-care.

With the Septimus Heap series, you are given the opportunity to be the first to create visual interpretations of a deep fantasy world with a wide readership. How much freedom do you have in interpreting these works and how much feedback or control does the author or publisher have? What has the reaction of Septimus fans been to your interpretations?

The reaction of the Septimus fans has been uniformly wonderful. I’m flattered by the Septimus fan art on deviantART that is drawn from my work, and given the young ages of these artists, reminded me of the cyclical nature of life and of inspiration. As for creative freedom, every sketch and final drawing gets shown to Angie Sage, who is contractually entitled to utter control and approval. And so she has the ability to really make my life hell if she wanted. I also think Katherine Tegen, her publisher, has a lot to say in that brain trust. But I’d say that 99% of the time, she and Katherine are completely and supportively on board with what I’m doing. I do follow the manuscript carefully, and am an utter orthogonal geek about getting things right vis-à-vis directions, terrain, architectural layout, et cetera. Angie has been much sweeter than she needed to be on the occasions when I’ve stressed the need to have this to the Northeast and that due South, based on “facts” laid down in the first book. Thankfully it’s been a good alchemy—she is convinced that I “get” Septimus’ world, and I’m convinced that she’s writing a world that is crazily easy for me to envision.

So many artists working in science fiction/fantasy illustration today are turning to or at least partially incorporating digital methods into their work. From what I can tell, your work remains strictly hand-painted using traditional techniques and materials. Is this because you simply have not explored digital techniques, or is it a deliberate choice to keep your work defiantly handmade and analog because you feel that something is lost by digitizing parts of the process?

I’ve explored digital techniques since my first time owning a computer, around the year 2000. I’ve gotten some interesting and fun results along the way, and I also use it to quickly build color roughs for publishers. I have in fact published digital art, in the book Septimus Heap: the Magykal Papers. You can see some of it on my website: it’s the stuff that looks for all the world like watercolors—it’s actually Photoshop. I think there is more of that kind of digital in my future, where I use it as a way to color pencil or ink drawings. But whenever I am confronted with the job of facilely rendering a strongly dimensional form in paint, it is so much easier for me to work in oil paints than to fight with software. So, no, it’s not got anything to do with purity or with defiance, much less with digiphobia. I’m a science fiction devotee and a technology enthusiast who’d love nothing better than to see the invention of a perfectly compliant medium. But at this stage, it’s still an issue of sheer practicality, finished quality, and not messing with a good thing.

Do you remember your dreams? Do you ever draw from your dreams for imagery in your works?

I do remember some of my dreams, and I’m pretty sure they’re of interest to no one. And I almost never make art from dream imagery. I say “almost” because it’s possible I’ve forgotten one or two—but really, I doubt it. It’s probably because I don’t consider them terribly important. I do envy artists able to believe in and draw from this resource. Zdzisław Beksiński is one example; he has said that he wanted to give the impression of having photographed dreams, and at this he succeeds past all reason: His work is mind-twistingly arresting. My work however, is drawn almost always from daydreams, which I much prefer.

What is your dream project?

To illustrate an audiobook. I think the explosion of Audible.com is symptomatic of our thirst for a basic, primal storytelling, voice-to-ear, the same kind of storytelling they could have done 100,000 years ago. And we could see an accompanying slideshow of art on a listening device—I’m sure we have the technology. Speaking as a visually-occupied worker who could more easily spare a few seconds to look at a piece of art in the middle of an audiobook, than say, watch a movie, I want this both as creator and consumer.

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: Charlie Jane Anders
Robyn Lupo

I found Rock Manning’s voice to be particularly vivid and bright. How did you come up with Rock’s voice?

This story is an excerpt from a novel that I’ve been working on for a long time. And Rock’s narrative voice sort of evolved over the course of working on the book. I wanted a really energetic, reckless, crazypants persona, so that you could imagine this character being willing to pilot a flaming exercise bike off a tool shed without a second thought. I read different versions of this opening section at different spoken word events over the years, and hearing how audiences reacted was really helpful in figuring out how to make it “sound” right. I also based Rock’s way of talking a little bit on Lynnee Breedlove, spoken word artist, comedian, author, and former lead singer of punk-rock band Tribe8—in fact, years ago we experimented with doing a podcast featuring Lynnee reading the opening section, reprinted here.

Two other excerpts from the novel, which together form a complete story, are going to run in the second and third volumes of the Apocalypse Triptych, if all goes according to plan.

What was the element that started this as a story?

I’ve always been fascinated with different types of humor, and this novel (and especially this chunk of it) came out of thinking about physical comedy and slapstick. I’d done a lot of humor writing that was more verbal, and based on people being quippy or silly, but I hadn’t done a lot of writing that was more based on describing mayhem in a funny way. I wanted to try writing more broad physical comedy.

I was also thinking about the difference between slapstick violence and “real” violence: Someone can get knocked down, and it’s either horrifying or hilarious, depending on your point of view. And as the project developed, I think I got more interested in the mass psychology of laughing at something together versus fascism, and how those two things are similar or different. But hopefully none of that stuff comes through in a “hit you over the head” way, and I hope the story is mostly just a fun, silly read that gets scary as it goes along.

I didn’t anticipate the change in tone, and then found myself swept up in the action. What prompted this narrative choice?

I’m sort of hoping that the story has an element of scary weirdness lurking under the surface from the beginning—there are lots of hints that society is falling apart, even before we meet the red bandanas. I’m always a fan of things where the nastiness sort of sneaks up on you, although that’s hard to pull off. Mostly, I hope if Rock feels like a real (if cartoony) character, then the reader can accept the world changing around him.

Sally’s force of character seemed to really clash with Rock’s laissez-faire attitude, but it really only became fractious when they were asked to do the red bandana gig. Can you comment on the nature of their friendship? Do you think their relationship could’ve recovered, if circumstances permitted?

The Rock/Sally relationship is definitely at the center of this story—that was even clearer when I started carving out a roughly 20,000-word novelette to be published in the three Apocalypse Triptych volumes. I think Sally and Rock really need each other, and neither of them can really create anything without the other.

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

Author Spotlight: Sofia Samatar
Bradley Englert

In “How to Get Back to the Forest,” Cee is one of those people who appear in our life for a brief, wondrous flash and then disappear. Her character is incredibly intriguing. Was she based off of anyone in your own life or just the idea of these people who come into our lives and change our perspectives on the world?

Cee was inspired by a number of people—some are people I’ve known, and others are writers I’ve read but never met. She’s that person who’s a little bolder than you are, the one who cares a little less what people think. A truth-seeker and a truth-teller. I was trying to get at the way these people affect others, even those who initially reject them. If you’re lucky, their passion stays with you, even haunts you, the way Cee’s passion haunts Tisha in the story.

The Parent Figures were an interesting notion, because often kids are babysat or raised by television, video games, novels, or any other physical object. You completely took the parents out of the equation and replaced them with real, physical, and meaningless objects. What was your idea behind this concept?

Well, basically, I was looking at the creation of lack, the creation of need. In a consumer society like ours, a sense of lack is extremely important, because need feeds consumption. The more people believe they need, the easier it is to control them. So in the story, I tried to expose that by imagining a society in which children’s parents are taken away and replaced with these physical objects, and the children are conditioned to constantly meditate on the objects, to think of themselves as irreparably damaged because they’ve lost their parents. This is a system of control: It creates a sad, uncertain, and malleable population. It’s really less a critique of kids getting raised by TV or something, than it is a critique of the way we tell kids that being raised by TV has ruined them. The story asks: Do you really need everything you think you need? Who convinced you that you need it—and why?

The Life Skills quiz was funny to me because it gives off the idea that you can teach people or children how to behave in real life based off of some formulated exam. Do you think that you can actually teach skills about life through standardized tests? Or were the “Life Skills” quizzes more of a parody of real life?

I don’t think you can teach anything at all through standardized tests, because they’re not designed for teaching, they’re designed for measuring. So the Life Skills—definitely a parody. Also of course it goes back to control, because the kids in the story are being raised in a state-run camp. Every aspect of their lives is supposed to be visible, measurable, and adjustable. They’re taught how to live; they’re not supposed to believe they already know, or could find out.

Each class that graduates from the camp seems to be forced into a particular job or role in society. Do you feel that this is how we train people in real life? That if I go to college for this specific thing, then that is what I will do forever? There seems to be more leeway in today’s society, but could you see the forcing of roles onto people ever happening?

I think it’s already happening. People are pressed toward certain roles based on their resources, where they live, what schools they attend. In the U.S. we tend to focus on the people who’ve “made it,” on those rags-to-riches stories, because belief in the American Dream is as important to our society as lack. But it doesn’t describe the majority. My story exaggerates, as speculative fiction often does, it takes things to their logical conclusion, but I certainly didn’t make up class divisions! I just sort of played with “class,” as in socioeconomic class, and “class,” as in graduating class.

Also, I wrote this story when I was graduating myself—I was finishing graduate school and getting ready to start my current job, teaching literature and writing at California State University Channel Islands. “How to Get Back to the Forest” grew out of my anxiety about that. What kind of teacher am I going to be? Am I going to be like the counselor in the story—always peppy, telling students everything’s fine, as I prepare them for the labor market? You know, as an English professor, you have these two conflicting goals: On the one hand, you’re supposed to introduce students to ideas, often radical ideas, and encourage them to think creatively; and on the other hand, you’re supposed to teach them to follow the rules—the rules of writing, and other social rules that will enable them to fit in and get a job. It’s an impossible project, which makes it very exciting, but also scary. This story engages the fear.

Toward the end of the story there seems to be the idea that those who question society or their circumstances are “sick.” There are multiple references to Cee being unhealthy and needing to go to the hospital to be “fixed.” She also has to be physically ill to remove the bug that may or may not be in her system. It seems like you were playing with the idea that we drug our children and don’t really take care of them, so they have this emotional disconnect with reality. They need objects to be happy, in this case, the “Parent Figures.” Tisha even feels ill at the end of the story. What were your methods and goals in portraying this “societal sickness” throughout the story?

This is such a great question. First of all I have to mention three pieces of writing that inspired the story: “Everyday Barf” by Eileen Myles, “Barf Manifesto” by Dodie Bellamy, and “Apoplexia, Toxic Shock, and Toilet Bowl: Some Notes on Why I Write” by Kate Zambreno. Three amazing women writing about vomit! In these writings, there’s a connection between, as Zambreno puts it, the revolting and the revolt. So yes, my characters are sick, but in a sick society, their sickness is a kind of health. This goes back to the idea of control—what is health, actually, and what is sickness, and who gets to decide? Very often, as you pointed out, people like Cee, who rebel against the status quo, are dismissed as “sick.” So when Tisha looks for liberation, for escape, that’s the only language she has for it. She wants to get sick. The science-fictional element of the implant or “bug” inside her is social control made literal: control imagined as a device that you can actually throw up. If only it were that easy!

The other important aspect of sickness in the story is that it’s catching: One person vomits and then everybody else wants to throw up too. This is something we all know, and it can be really funny—think of the “barf-o-rama” scene in the movie Stand by Me. In my story—and again, I owe this notion to the three writers I mentioned earlier—there’s a liberating power in this contagious urge to throw up. If nausea is rebellion, and nausea is catching, then it has real political implications. Of course it’s no accident that my rebels are a bunch of girls, girls whose bodies are controlled, and who get up to a secret vomit-fest in the bathroom. Feminist writing has always been concerned with the body and its potential, the body as a site of resistance, and how that affects writing.

What’s up next for you?

I’m working on the sequel to my novel A Stranger in Olondria. I’m also working on a chapbook of monstrous prose poems called Monster Portraits, with images by my brother, Del Samatar. I want to write an essay about the concepts of Afropolitanism and Afrofuturism, and the links between them. And I want to write an essay about Charlie Parker.

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: Chen Qiufan
Robyn Lupo

What was the spark that set you to writing “The Mao Ghost”? What was the most challenging aspect of writing this story?

The initial inspiration came from reading Ken Liu’s “The Paper Menagerie.” I wanted to write something about family relationships, Chinese style: Sometimes you feel they’re the closest people to you in the world, but a lot of times you treat them with extreme cruelty (or vice versa).

My father had liver cancer (fortunately, he survived); many of my female friends have difficult relationships with their mothers (this seems to be fairly common); I wanted to put these pieces together and tell a story about love and lies using the tropes of science fiction.

The biggest challenge for me was that I rarely write stories from a female point of view, let alone a young girl’s point of view. I tried to make the story plausible and to make the characters emotionally real. I consulted with and sought feedback from some of my female friends, and hopefully the result doesn’t feel too awkward to readers.

You wrote: “Who knows what’s the truth now? All the books have been carefully filtered, and all we can read are reports from newspapers that are refreshed daily at the designated time. Without these ghost stories, I’m afraid no one will remember anything.” Censorship of the larger world seems to be a theme in this story. Can you tell us more about censorship and how you see it in relation to “The Mao Ghost”?

There are several layers of deception in the story: The father hides the truth of his illness from the daughter; the state falsifies and tampers with history; and finally, the daughter, taught by everything around her, begins to view the world through a distorted lens, following unspoken rules.

This is, of course, like the reality of today’s China. The most visible aspect of the censorship apparatus is its control of public speech and tampering with media. But the censorship apparatus itself is undergoing change, adopting more intelligent techniques for managing opinions and ideas: to tell a beautiful story, to construct a national myth, even if it’s not true, as long as it can substitute for people’s understanding of reality.

The end of this strand of development is that everyone, almost imperceptibly, is guided into engaging in self-censorship, or self-deception, to distort their own thoughts to fit society’s mainstream values. This is what ought to be feared.

I hope members of the younger generation in China can have their own independent thoughts, to understand themselves, their nation, and the world truly.

I was really caught up in the complicated relationship between Qian and her mother. Can you tell us more about bringing this relationship to the story?

The well-known story of the “Tiger Mother” is an extreme example of the stereotype of Chinese mothers. In reality, this has to do with the generational experiences of Chinese society.

For those of us born in the 1970s and 1980s, our parents went through some of the most tumultuous times in Chinese history as they grew up: the Great Famines of 1959 through 1961, the Cultural Revolution of 1966 through 1976, the mass layoff of state-owned enterprise workers during the 1990s, etc. Too much was missing from their lives, and they had always been taught to live as only a component in a larger whole, to do everything for the benefit of the collective.

Thus, many of them placed their dreams, deeply buried in their hearts, onto the next generation. They used their own values to guide and measure the lives of their children, and so the intergenerational conflict between us is especially severe.

But as members of our generation become parents, the situation is improving. Many younger parents treat their children with a more open attitude and respect their children’s own dreams and lives, hoping that their children can pick paths in life that suit themselves.

Why do you think Qian’s father stuck with the ruse of being Chosen?

My mother went through the Great Famines when she was seven or eight, and she was always hungry. My grandmother would tell her stories filled with all kinds of delicious foods. She would describe in detail the shapes, textures, tastes, and smells. The effect was like the ancient Chinese general who told his soldiers, as they were marching through a desert and parched with thirst, that there would be a stand of plum trees ahead. The soldiers, salivating at the thought of the plums, marched faster and survived the desert.

In extreme conditions, people would try to manufacture beautiful illusions to deceive, numb, or encourage themselves to survive. This wasn’t a phenomenon limited to China—it also occurred in Nazi concentration camps.

In my story, the father created a lovely lie to maintain the daughter’s innocence and faith, so that she could live, as much as was possible, in a fairy tale in the midst of a cruel world, even if it was a very fragile and cheap fairy tale.

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

Author Spotlight: Jo Walton
Jude Griffin

How did “Turnover” come about?

I was on a panel about generation starships and people kept talking about how small they could make them, the minimum number of people you could have and keep genetic diversity and have enough people to work the ship. And I said “But what if they didn’t all want to do their jobs, after the first generation?” and Alison Sinclair said “What if they don’t want to be engineers, what if they want to be ballet dancers?” And I was excited by the idea of a ballet dancer on a generation starship.

You wrote on your blog last May that you had given up on “Turnover,” but it was published as a chapbook for Novacon this year—what happened?

I wanted “Turnover” to be a novel, and that’s what I gave up on. What we have here may seem like a short story . . . but it’s really the first chapter of a novel I’m not writing.

You said once that “As well as history, all of my books are very informed by landscape. Almost all the places in all my books are real.” Since Speranza is set in space, is that why you recreated the Teatro del Sale in Speranza? Have you ever been to the Teatro del Sale in Florence?

Yes. I am a member of Teatro del Sale in Florence, which is exactly the way it’s described in the story, except for being in Florence and not on a generation starship. The first time I went there, my son said that it was the ultimate form of Western food, as dim sum was the ultimate form of Chinese food—and it does have something in common with dim sum, in terms of multiple small, delicious courses. Thinking about that, I naturally thought that these are the food arts we should take to the stars. Speranza, the spaceship, is made up, of course, but I have very solid imaginations of what it looks like and feels like, extrapolated out from real places. It’s about the size of Montreal, where I live, and, like Montreal, it has two major languages and cultures, with other cultures all over the place.

There’s a lot of discussion of choice in this story and how not making a choice to change the way things are is still as much of a choice to keep on with the way things are. Is clarity about the choices one makes the theme of the story?

Yes. Everyone makes choices every moment, and that’s what shapes the future. And the present is shaped by everyone’s past choices—our own, and other people’s. A generation starship allows us to see that in focus, because, after all, there they are, partway through a voyage they didn’t choose. They are the middle generation. But it’s true for all of us all the time—we didn’t choose where we’d be born or the choices made that shaped our world—and yet here we are, shaping the future and the choices of people who don’t even exist yet.

I like that none of the characters have physical descriptions: What was your thinking behind this?

In first person, I only write about what the character notices. People don’t really see their friends unless something has changed about them—a haircut, a new shirt. They just see their familiarity. So Fedra’s having lunch with friends and she’s noticing their expressions and what they’re saying, not what they look like. And she comes from a culture where what people look like is significant in different ways from ours. It’s more interesting that way.

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: Kat Howard
Jude Griffin

What was the seed for “A Different Fate”?

I was rereading Lloyd Alexander’s The Black Cauldron. He has those terrific and terrible sisters, Orwen, Orddu, and Orgoch, and they got me to thinking about the repeating pattern of triune women in mythologies. Or, to be more accurate, it plucked that ongoing fascination with triune women out of the back of my brain, and put it into a place where I needed to write something about it. I had also recently reread a bunch of Greek tragedies, and so that was why the story took on the particular flavor that it did.

Did you uncover anything interesting while researching for the story?

It’s odd to think about actively doing research for this story, because in the absolute sense of “did I look up things specifically for this story,” the answer is no—except for checking the kind of fibers that might be used in weaving—I didn’t do any. But in another sense, most of the pieces of this story come from things that have fascinated me for a while, or stuck in my head like tiny, irritating grains of sand, just waiting for something to come along that would let me string them together in a story. Like the question of “What do women want?” and the archetype of the Loathly Lady, from “The Wife of Bath’s Tale”—it’s a fascinating look at desire and consent and autonomy, stuck into a monster story, so of course I want to write about that. Because part of that story is based around the question of a woman’s appearance, I could use that here, combining it with the idea that if there is a triune figure of womanhood, maybe the appearance of those three women changes, and the question of who gets to decide about that appearance—even the other sisters don’t ever want to be Orgoch.

You’ve said that “. . . one of the best things I can do to feed my own creativity is to immerse myself in art that is different than writing.” Did you immerse yourself at all into the art of weaving?

I wish that I had! Fiber arts fascinate me, and I would love to learn more about spinning and weaving, and maybe even be able to do them myself someday.

How can choice exist within the context of fate?

I don’t believe in predestination—the idea that everything is already written and planned out and that all we are doing is dancing a set of steps that have already been choreographed. I very much believe that we have the individual freedom to fuck up, and to be full of grace. I also believe that humans are story-telling animals—we like things to make sense, we like narrative. So when we look back, and try and make sense of things, we impose a context, a narrative, on top of events, and one of the names we call that context is Fate.

Why name the other sister Andromeda?

I needed a name from Greek mythology that wasn’t one associated directly with tragedy, so some of my favorite names—Iphigenia, Phaedra—were right out. And I love that Andromeda becomes a constellation after her death. It’s a good fate.

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: Robert Jackson Bennett
Patrick J. Stephens

Where did “A Drink for Teddy Ford” find its beginning?

I started thinking about exactly how to write a speculative story set in the 1920s, as that was the theme of this anthology. Naturally, I started thinking about aspects of the era I’ve researched before and just generally liked, and that made me gravitate toward the P.G. Wodehouse stories about Bertie and Jeeves and the other foppish, empty-headed aristos boozing it up and causing havoc. This made me decide to set the story in a cocktail party, but it quickly took a darker, more sentimental turn. I find I can’t write purely light humor, unfortunately.

Which of the characters do you feel you most identified with as their author?

Probably Thoth. I can see Teddy, and I know what he’s done and what will happen to him, but despite what people may think of authorial power, I can’t change his fate, or what he did. Once you know the story and where it wants to go, there’s not much you as the author can do but watch.

Considering the historical importance, how did you approach blending the tone of the story with the speculative element?

It was really quite easy. Parties by nature have a somewhat fantastical atmosphere: A good party makes you feel like anything can happen, which is very much a fantastical state. Dress everyone up in costumes and stick them in a ramshackle mansion, and there you go. A god can walk among you and go pretty much unnoticed.

“A Drink for Teddy Ford” was originally published in an anthology called Broken Time Blues: Fantastic Tales in the Roaring 20s. What do you think the appeal of these types of stories is, and how do you see “Teddy Ford” fitting into that niche?

Honestly, I think these historical forays might have the same primary appeal we see in Downton Abbey, and Mad Men, and the like—costumes and sets. It’s a superficial attraction, but an irresistible one. Who doesn’t want to play around in sumptuous clothing and historical venues?

What can we expect to see from you in the future?

My fifth novel, City of Stairs, comes out from Crown Publishing in September of 2014. Much like “Teddy Ford,” it deals with gods and their interactions with humanity; but unlike “Teddy Ford,” it’s set in a secondary world, and the gods have all been killed by a foreign power. The instant a god dies, everything they created vanishes along with them, and as the gods of this particular land were performing a lot of the basic duties of urban infrastructure—buildings, water, roads, etc.—all that was gone in an instant. Reality has grown schizophrenic and confused after so many “edits,” like a bad patchwork quilt, and as the leaders of this new world try to avoid international catastrophe, they slowly begin suspecting the past isn’t quite as dead as everyone seems to think.

It’s a story of statesmanship, spycraft, and diplomacy, set among ruined miracles and the fading divine. Should be a lot of fun.

Patrick J. Stephens recently graduated from the University of Edinburgh and, after spending the entire year writing speculative fiction, came back with a Master’s in Social Science. His first collection (Aurichrome and Other Stories) can be found on Kindle and Nook.

Author Spotlight: Matthew Hughes
Patrick J. Stephens

For readers being introduced to Kaslo through “Phalloon the Illimitable,” could you give the readers an overview of the universe you’ve created through this serial?

It’s a universe I’ve been writing about for twenty years: a far-future, galactic civilization. The thing most of its inhabitants don’t know is that every few thousand years, the universe arbitrarily shifts its fundamental operating principle between rationalism and magic. And one of those changes is just about to happen.

With the title of “Phalloon the Illimitable” and the first line calling that into question, beyond what we get on the page, who is Phalloon to you? What kind of character?

Phalloon is one of the few who know that the change is coming. Ineffectual under the regime of science, he expects to come into his own once the rule of magic is reestablished. He has been studying old books from the last such period and acquiring ancient magical paraphernalia. He is, like most wizards, a thoroughgoing narcissist and rather emotional when his own perquisites are being trod upon.

What’s one aspect of “Phalloon the Illimitable” you would love to have explored more?

I’m not sure he has any that attract me.

Each story in Kaslo’s serial has remained strong and powerful. What, or who, draws you back to this universe?

It’s space opera combined with Dying Earth fantasy. What could be more enjoyable to write about?

Outside of Kaslo, what can we expect to see from you in the future?

There’s a historical novel I’ve wanted to write for forty years. I hope to begin, at least, this year. I’m also doing a series of fantasy stories about a thief named Raffalon that appear in F&SF. And I’ll surely write more space opera.

Patrick J. Stephens recently graduated from the University of Edinburgh and, after spending the entire year writing speculative fiction, came back with a Master’s in Social Science. His first collection (Aurichrome and Other Stories) can be found on Kindle and Nook.

Author Spotlight: Eileen Gunn and Michael Swanwick
Jude Griffin

Michael blogged about the genesis of “The Armies of Elfland” and “The Trains That Climb The Winter Tree,” mentioning that, while the opening paragraphs were written about twelve hours apart, the writing of “Armies” came much later than that of “Trains.” Was anything different about your process or your approach to collaborative writing for “Armies” than for “Trains”?

Eileen: We have a process? We have at least two processes. Michael is a great idea-guy, plus he writes rich, assured prose, filled with dynamic characters vying for the reader’s attention and suggesting a dark underside to the strange world of the story. Right from the start. Michael’s beginnings always terrify me, because they are coherent. Generally, I have no idea where I’m going, and if a story starts to make sense early in the writing, I get worried that the story will be too conventional.

So, in this case, he sent me the beginning of “The Trains that Climb the Winter Tree,” complete with title. It was just a paragraph or two, but it had elves in it, and they came out of a mirror. I thought, “Why is Michael trying to get me to write about elves and mirrors? Is it just to torture me?” I didn’t realize he had a plan, and that it involved a lot more than a mirror and a handful of elves. I also didn’t realize the elves and the mirrors were actually my own fault, tossed off glibly in a moment of whimsy. (Michael explains all this in his aforementioned blog post (http://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-to-write-collaborative-story.html), so you can get his side of the story there, and the details of his plan.)

At any rate, I thought, however unjustly, “Ha! Two can play at this game.” And I turned his opening paragraph inside out, making the mirrors come out of the elves. In short, I was misbehaved. I did not hear Michael’s anguished scream, 2,827 miles away, when he opened my email, but there was definitely a disturbance in the Force. The next day, I received an email saying, “Now we have two stories.”

I think what keeps the game of collaboration going (for me, anyway) is that it could change at any moment. At some point, Michael would yell, “Okay! We’re done! Don’t you do another thing! I’ll write the ending!” And then he’d finish it and send it back to me with the warning, “Don’t you change anything!” And I would change something.

Now that I think of it, our collaborations were a lot like the part in our elf-free story, “Zeppelin City,” where Rudy is running hell-bent-for-leather through the underground tunnels, chased by the cops, following little glow-in-the-dark markers he has placed there himself, when all of a sudden, he realizes he’s been following someone else’s markers, and he has no idea of where he is.

This is not probably the healthiest way to collaborate, but writing with Michael kept my mind alive and taught me how to plot energetically instead of passively. I have no idea what collaborating with me did for him.

Michael: As I recall, we used my usual method for collaborations: One of us has control of the story for a month to do as much or little as he or she cares to and then has to surrender it to the other. Who then has license to make any changes whatsoever—including restoring material the other removed. Ultimately, the person with the stronger vision of how the story should go will prevail. In this case, it was Eileen. In “The Trains That Climb the Winter Tree,” it was me. But I found the endings for each. That’s one of my talents: If a story is good enough, I can figure out how it wants to end.

Will there be any more stories of elves and mirrors or any more collaborations?

Michael: There was no thematic reason for there to be two elves-and-mirrors stories. But I had written a lovely opening to a story, with elves coming out of the mirrors and when I offered it to Eileen, she immediately changed it to a very different story opening with mirrors coming out of the elves and then fell in love with the new version. So the only way to get the story I’d originally envisioned was for us to write them both. It’s unlikely, therefore, that we’ll extend the franchise.

As for other collaborations, that’s entirely up to Eileen. I am the most easygoing and cooperative of men.

Eileen: No more elves, if I can help it. And probably no more collaborations, as we are hoping to remain friends. Instead, Michael has sent me, every so often, a very detailed description of a story he has decided I should write, along with the suggestion that writing it will be very good for me, and will take only four hours of my time. He has also said “These are not collaborations!” and suggested that if I link the finished story to him, he’ll deny all knowledge, just like the government in Mission Impossible. So my lips are sealed. I cannot guarantee, however, that—no matter how much readers may prefer never to read another story of the deeply conflicted Swanwick-Gunn elves—Michael will not someday take it into his head that he should make me write another damned elf story, and I may be powerless to stop him. I may not even recognize it as an elf story until it’s too late.

Michael: That’s actually not a bad idea. I’ll give it some thought.

From the opening paragraphs of each story, it seems like you both had a clear and consistent vision of the nature of elves. Whose elf stories have you enjoyed? Were they all in the same cold, cruel camp of elvish characterizations?

Eileen: I enjoy Michael’s elves in stories that we have not collaborated on, because in those stories, the elves are not torturing me. Michael’s the one with the consistent vision of elf-nature, and he takes a very dark view of the elven psyche. He’s sort of the anti-Tolkien: His elves are not tall, wise, silver-haired elders. They’re more Icelandic elves, and they do not have your best interests at heart. Of course, his humans often don’t have anyone’s interests at heart but their own, either. My current favorite is his story “A Bordello in Faerie,” which is in his collection The Dog Said Bow-Wow, from Tachyon Publications.

Michael: My vision of elves is shaped by years of reading in mythology, where they’re consistently portrayed as being soulless, capricious, and without conscience. Their value seems to be in holding up a steely and pitiless mirror to the human soul. Poul Anderson’s novel The Broken Sword and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s collection Kingdoms of Elfin are big favorites of mine, and the elves of both are cold, cold, cold. Tolkien’s elves have more than a touch of that too.

What was behind the trolls and reflexive behavior?

Eileen: I don’t really know: they don’t have a very substantial role—mostly they loom, holding clubs or books. But not knowing the answer has never kept me quiet before, so I’ll go ahead. I thought of them as being sort of meat puppets, synthetic creatures that have a certain scripted conversational ability, perhaps derived from humans they have eaten, but no emotional capacity at all. Trolls of legend are generally large and strong and dimwitted. These particular trolls seem to be violent but without any particular malice, which is what makes them, in my opinion, more than a bit creepy. Mean and violent, that seems comprehensible, but disinterested and violent is subtly more disturbing. It never occurred to me to ask Michael what he thought the trolls’ psychological underpinnings were, and I doubt he would have told me if I’d asked.

In some way, perhaps that’s probably an indication of our process: Michael might know what’s happening, but he doesn’t tell me for the longest while, and I certainly don’t ask what’s going on, because I think the clues are there in the text, and it’s my job to figure them out. Michael won’t tell me, anyway. But I’m pretty sure he knows.

Michael: Half of it was just for the weirdness of it. But also, the trolls were essentially slaves and so not responsible for what was done to the human race. If they were conscious beings, the story would have had to find a just way of dealing with them—and that would have distorted its shape. I believe that the elves too were ultimately revealed to be non-sentient, though at a much more high-functioning level. Simply because neither Eileen nor I wanted to have a happy ending involving genocide or racial enslavement.

I won’t explain to Eileen anything that hasn’t already been written because she has a perverse streak and will immediately set out to subvert it. If I don’t tell her what I have planned, she can’t prevent it.

All this stems from the fact that Eileen is at heart a trickster. If I could only get her to understand that, it would double her productivity overnight.

Euclidean geometry and elves—how did that come about?

Michael: Well, the elves came out of the mirrors originally, and objects in mirrors are stranger than they appear. But also, the point of fantasy is not to take elves, queens, trolls, knights, and the like, and arrange them in new patterns like so many action figures. It’s to create impossible worlds of such surpassing strangeness—and beauty, too—as to tell us something about our own. By contrast, if in no other way. But I think we achieved something meaningful here too.

Eileen: The elves came to our world from another dimension, and they are basically two dimensional, so when humans rotate or move quickly in three dimensions, with curving motions, the elves can’t actually see them. It made sense to me, because, although I did very well in high school geometry, I have never really understood vectors. I don’t see mathematics well in three dimensions—perhaps I have elven ancestors. At any rate, the geometry underlying the elves makes this a science-fiction story, in my opinion, rather than strictly a fantasy story.

Any news or projects you want to tell us about?

Michael: I’ve just finished and turned in to my agent my latest novel, Chasing the Phoenix. This is the second book-length adventure of post-Utopian confidence artists Darger and Surplus, and in it they accidentally acquire armies and conquer China. These things happen to them. And Eileen has a new collection in the works, but I’ll let her talk about that.

Eileen: I have a new short-story collection, Questionable Practices, coming out on March 18, from Small Beer Press, and I’m hysterically excited about that. The book was designed by the very talented typographer and book designer, John D. Berry, who is also my husband, and who designed my previous two books. Also, I’m hard at work on a novel. Yes, Michael gave me the idea for it, but he thought it was a short story . . .

Michael: It could have been a short story, too. But I told Eileen it was. So of course she had to turn it into something completely different.

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: Kim Stanley Robinson
Jude Griffin

You described your writing process as typically like this: “It usually starts with an idea, fairly simple and basic . . . Then I build from there. Often it takes many years, and eventually I have a sense of the story’s basic outline, with some events, and the climax or ending, but a lot of vagueness. Eventually I need to figure out a form, and then a narrator. The story tends to create the characters necessary to live the story. And so on it goes. Much is never decided until I am faced with writing particular scenes. That’s when it gets really hard.” Can you talk about how the writing of “The Lucky Strike” followed or diverged from this?

It fit this pattern really well. The original image that came to me was the Enola Gay tipping over and flying down into the Pacific. That only survived as a thought in my protagonist’s head, but it set me to thinking what it meant, and started the research and all. When I saw it was somehow about not bombing Hiroshima, much was set; an alternative history, and a need for a character that would do something different than what really happened. I read all I could about what really happened, and wrote the story rather quickly after that, in a month or less sometime in 1983, in Davis while teaching at UCD.

In your research for the story, were there any surprises? Anything that reshaped your vision for the story?

I was surprised that when the Hiroshima plane got back from the bombing, they had a barbeque. I was surprised that the Nagasaki plane got back to Tinian Island with “no more gas than would fill a cigarette lighter.” I was also surprised to learn of Leo Szilard’s attempts to advocate for a demonstration of the bomb, and the whole decision process around Truman. Much of John Hersey’s book Hiroshima is “surprising” if you can call it just that, which you can’t.

What worried/challenged you the most while writing “The Lucky Strike”?

The main problem was this; the more likely Frank January was to have decided to do something different as bombardier, the less likely that he would have been in the position to do it. So the whole crux of the story was to try to make plausible a bombardier secretive about his doubts and his potential to disobey. Thus the name January, from Janus the two-faced; and every detail of his biography is in support of making his act seem plausible.

Of all the reactions you have gotten to “The Lucky Strike,” what were some of the most interesting?

WWII vets told me Lucky Strike packets were white during the war because the green dyes were used elsewhere in the war effort. I was also given details of the B-29 bombardier’s compartment that I had gotten wrong, and some encouragement from vet readers who liked the basic message of the story.

You’ve expressed your admiration for Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. What other alternate histories did you enjoy?

The Man In the High Castle by P. K. Dick, and Pavane by Keith Roberts. These along with the Chabon are my three favorite alternative histories, although I also will include my own The Years of Rice and Salt.

January finds the resolve/courage to not drop the bomb on Hiroshima through a series of empathetic moments: a shattering dream; the face of the truck driver; the burn on his arm; the similarity of Hiroshima to his hometown—both river towns. Is empathy the foundation of ethics? The key to peace?

Yes, I think so. Empathy was a crucial word and concept for Sturgeon. For me in this story, the way I thought of it was more using the word imagination. But being able to imagine oneself as the other or in the position of the other, is a good definition of empathy, so it came to the same thing. One thing that I felt important was to portray Frank January as a man who had loved reading fiction as a boy and youth. Reading literature is an imaginative act, the whole point of which is to try to get inside someone else’s thinking and life. This is a really good exercise for people.

January focuses his time on imagining what the people of Hiroshima will suffer and how he will feel if he drops the bomb as planned. He doesn’t spend time imagining the myriad terrible ways that people on both sides might die, in surpassingly high numbers, if the bomb doesn’t bring about the end of the war, and how he might feel about that. Why?

Couple things come to me here: He was focused on what he himself was being asked to do. The other considerations were more abstract and distant, thus not as powerful. Also, he had experienced enough to know that civilian suffering was much more than militarily necessary, and that the military decision makers were not all-knowing wise people. If he had known how completely defenseless Japan actually was in the summer of 1945, these ongoing excuses for the nuclear bombs would have had even less force for him. But those things he couldn’t have known. Lastly, the atom bomb was a new thing and could be considered unnatural, beyond all that had come before; perhaps a bombardier would see this best of all, by comparison to any previous bomb. So I think he was shocked by what he was asked to do.

Any news or projects you want to tell us about?

My novel Shaman will be out in paperback in June 2014.

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.

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Coming up in April, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Linda Nagata (“Codename: Delphi”) and Shaenon K. Garrity (“Francisca Montoya's Almanac of Things That Can Kill You”), along with SF reprints by Gardner Dozois (“Morning Child”) and Ted Chiang (“Exhalation”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Carmen Maria Machado (“Observations About Eggs from the Man Sitting Next to Me on a Flight from Chicago, Illinois to Cedar Rapids, Iowa”) and Thomas Olde Heuvelt (“The Day the World Turned Upside Down”), and fantasy reprints by K. J. Bishop (“Alsiso”) and C. J. Cherryh (“The Only Death in the City”).

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 “Shiva in Shadow” by Nancy Kress as our 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, Sandra McDonald, Fred Van Lente, Matthew Hughes, Steve Hockensmith, Adam-Troy Castro, Maria Dahvana Headley, Seanan McGuire, Daniel José Older, 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

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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.