Editorial, April 2014
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue forty-seven of Lightspeed!

In case you missed the news last month, I just wanted to mention that 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 all be available in both ebook and print formats, and The End is Nigh is available now. You can get a sneak peek at the anthology in the March issue, with Charlie Jane Anders’s story “Break! Break! Break!” To learn more, visit johnjosephadams.com/apocalypse-triptych.

Never one to rest on my laurels, I have another new anthology out this month. On April 8, Vintage will publish Robot Uprisings, which I co-edited with Robopocalypse author Daniel H. Wilson. It’s about just what you would suspect based on the title—namely: robots, uprising! It’s got a great lineup, featuring all-new, never-before-published stories by Robin Wasserman, Seanan McGuire, Scott Sigler, Charles Yu, Anna North, and Genevieve Valentine, among others, plus a new novella by my esteemed co-editor, Daniel. If you’d like a sneak peek at this anthology, why look no further: The complete text of Scott Sigler’s story, “Complex God,” appears in this issue as one of our reprints. Visit johnjosephadams.com/robot-uprisings or your favorite book retailer for more information.

• • • •

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

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 Ted Chiang (“Exhalation”) and the aforementioned story from Robot Uprisings, “Complex God,” by Scott Sigler.

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 feature interviews with Scott Sigler and Pi, Black Swan, and Noah director Darren Aronofsky.

For our ebook readers, we also have the novella reprint “The Autopsy” by Michael Shea, who tragically died suddenly in mid-February. In lieu of an author spotlight, which we were not able to conduct before Michael’s sudden passing, we have a brief tribute to his life and work by his friend and admirer, Laird Barron.

Also exclusive to our ebook edition, we’ll have our usual array of novel excerpts: This month, we have Afterparty by Daryl Gregory and Steles of the Sky by Elizabeth Bear.

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 series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent and forthcoming projects include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Operation Arcana, Wastelands 2, Press Start to Play, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated eight times) and is a six-time World Fantasy Award finalist. 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.

Codename: Delphi
Linda Nagata

“Valdez, you need to slow down,” Karin Larsen warned, each syllable crisply pronounced into a mic. “Stay behind the seekers. If you overrun them, you’re going to walk into a booby trap.”

Five thousand miles away from Karin’s control station, Second Lieutenant Valdez was jacked up on adrenaline and in a defiant mood. “Negative!” she said, her voice arriving over Karin’s headphones. “Delphi, we’ve got personnel down and need to move fast. This route scans clear. I am not waiting for the seekers to clear it again.”

The battleground was an ancient desert city. Beginning at sunset, firefights had flared up all across its tangled neighborhoods and Valdez was right that her squad needed to advance—but not so fast that they ran into a trap.

“The route is not clear,” Karin insisted. “The last overflight to scan this alley was forty minutes ago. Anything could have happened since then.”

Karin’s worksite was an elevated chair within a little room inside a secure building. She faced a curved monitor a meter-and-a-half high, set an easy reach away. Windows checkered its screen, grouped by color-codes representing different clients. The windows could slide, change sequence, and overlap, but they could never completely hide one another; the system wouldn’t allow it. This was Karin’s interface to the war.

Presently centered onscreen were two gold-rimmed windows, each displaying a video feed captured by an aerial seeker: palm-sized drones equipped with camera eyes, audio pickups, and chemical sensors. The seekers flew ahead of Valdez and her urban infantry squad, one at eye level and the other at an elevation of six meters, scouting a route between brick-and-stucco tenements. They flew too slowly for Valdez.

The lieutenant was out of sight of the seekers’ camera eyes, but Karin could hear the soft patter of her boot plates as she advanced at a hurried trot, and the tread of the rest of the squad trailing behind her. Echoing off the buildings, there came the pepper of distant rifle fire and a heavier caliber weapon answering.

Onscreen, positioned above the two video feeds, was a third window that held the squad map—a display actively tracking the position and status of each soldier.

Outfitted in bulletproof vests and rigged in the titanium struts of light-infantry exoskeletons—“armor and bones”—the squad advanced through the alley at a mandated ten-meter interval, a regulation that reduced the odds of multiple casualties if they encountered an IED or a grenade. Only Lieutenant Valdez failed to maintain the proper distance, crowding within two meters of the seekers in her rush to answer the call for backup.

“Valdez, this is not a simple firefight. It’s a widespread, well-planned insurgent offensive. Every kid with a grudge—”

“No lectures, Delphi. Just get these seekers moving faster.”

Any faster, and the little drones could miss something critical.

Local time was past midnight and no lights shone in the alley, but in nightvision the walls of the buildings and the trash-strewn brick pavement gleamed in crisp, green detail. Karin wasn’t the only one monitoring the seekers’ feeds; a battle AI watched them too. It generated an ongoing report, displayed alongside the windows. She glanced at it and saw an alert for trace scents of explosives—but with a battle in progress that didn’t mean anything. Otherwise the report was good: no suspicious heat signatures or whispering voices or inexplicable motion within the apartments.

Her gaze shifted back to the video feed. A faint gleam caught her attention; a hair-thin line close to the ground that justified her caution. “Tripwire,” she announced. She reached out to the screen; dragged her finger across the line. The gesture created a fleeting highlight on the display screen of Valdez’s visor, clearly marking the tripwire’s position. “Six meters ahead.”

“Shit.” Valdez pulled up sharply. A faint background tone sounded as she switched her audio to gen-com. “Tripwire,” she said, addressing her squad. “Move back.”

The tone dropped out, and Valdez was talking again solely to Karin. “Ambush?”

“Searching.” It was a good bet someone was monitoring the tripwire.

A set of windows bordered in blue glided to the center of Karin’s screen: Lieutenant Deng’s color code. The insurgent offensive had erupted all along the northern border, striking hard at Deng’s rural district. At approximately 2200 she’d been lured into an ambush. The resulting firefight had left one of her soldiers seriously wounded.

Distance did not mute the impatience—or the frustration—in Deng’s voice as she spoke over the headphones, “Delphi, where’s my medevac helicopter?”

On nights like this, a big part of Karin’s job was triage. Deng’s situation was no longer “hot.” The insurgents had fled, and the helicopter had already been requested. Determining an ETA would not get it there faster. So she told Deng, “Stand by.”

Then she swiped the blue windows out of the way and returned her attention to the feeds from the seekers, directing one to fly higher. The angle of view shifted, and Karin spied a figure crouched on the sloping, clay-tiled roof of a low building not far ahead. She drew a highlight around it. “Valdez, see that?”

A glance at the squad map showed that Valdez had retreated a few meters from the tripwire. One specialist remained with her, while the rest of the squad had dropped back under the supervision of a sergeant.

“I see him,” Valdez said. “Target confirmed?”

“Negative. Twenty seconds.”

Karin sent a seeker buzzing toward the figure on the rooftop and then she switched her focus back to Deng’s blue-coded windows, fanning them open so she could see the one that tracked the status of the medevac helicopter. The offensive was unprecedented and air support was in high demand. Deng’s wounded soldier was third on the list for pickup. “Deng, ETA on the medevac is forty-plus minutes,” Karin warned; that was assuming the helicopter stayed in the air. She slid the blue windows away again, switching back to Valdez.

Wind soughing between the buildings veiled the soft buzz of the seeker so that the figure on the roof didn’t hear it coming. Details emerged as the little drone got closer. One of those details was a rifle—aimed at Valdez. “Target confirmed,” Karin said without hesitation. “Shoot to kill.”

Valdez was watching the same feed. “That’s a kid!”

It was a kid. The battle AI estimated a male, fourteen years old. It didn’t matter. The boy was targeting Valdez and that made him the enemy.

“Take the shot.”

The boy fired first. He missed, but he squeezed the trigger again. His second shot caught Valdez in the shoulder, spinning her into the wall. “Fuck.”

“Valdez, get down!”

The lieutenant dropped to a crouch. The specialist was already hunkered down behind her. He aimed over her shoulder and shot—but too late. The kid had opened a roof-access door, retreating inside the building.

Karin checked Valdez’s biometrics: high stress, but no indication that the slug had penetrated. Her armor had protected her.

“A biometric ID on the shooter is in the system,” Karin told her. “You can hunt him down later.”

“Right. I’m going to drop back, rejoin the squad, and go around.”

While Valdez reorganized, Karin switched to her third client, Lieutenant Holder. The set of windows monitoring his squad was coded orange. Holder was assigned to a district just outside the city. Tonight his squad waited in ambush for a suspected small-arms shipment coming in from the west. She checked his status: nominal. Checked the squad: noted all seven soldiers in position on either side of an asphalt road. Checked the wide-field view from the infrared camera on the squad’s surveillance drone and noted the suspect truck, still at almost five kilometers away.

There was time.

Karin sighed, took a sip of chilled water from a bottle stashed in a pouch at the side of her chair, and for just a moment she squeezed her dry eyes shut. She’d already been six hours on-shift, with only one ten-minute break and that was two hours ago. There would be hours more before she could rest. Most shifts went on until her clients were out of harm’s way—that’s just how it was, how it needed to be. She’d learned that early.

Karin had trained as a handler for the usual reason: money. She’d needed to pay off a student loan. Two years so far, with a fat savings account to show for it. The money was good, no argument, but the lifestyle? Some handlers joked that the job was like a video game—one so intense it left you shaking and exhausted at the end of every shift—but for her it had never been a game. The lives she handled were real. Slip up, and she could put a soldier in the grave. That was her nightmare. She’d had soldiers grievously wounded, but so far none had died on her shift. Lately, she’d started thinking that maybe she should quit before it happened. On a night like tonight, that thought was close to the surface.

The blue windows slid to center again. Karin popped the bottle back into its pouch as an irate Deng spoke through her headphones. “Delphi, I can’t wait forty minutes for the medevac. I’ve got six enemy at-large. They have their own wounded to worry about, but once they get organized, they’re going to move on the settlement. If we don’t get there first, there are going to be reprisals. I need approval from Command to split the squad.”

“Stand by.”

Karin captured a voice clip of Deng’s request and sent it to the Command queue, flagged highest priority. But before she could slide the blue windows aside, someone opened an emergency channel, an act that overrode the communications of every handler on-shift. “I need support!” a shrill voice yelled through Karin’s headphones. She flinched, even as she recognized Sarno, another handler. The panic in his voice told her that he had made a mistake. A critical mistake, maybe a fatal one. “I need support! Now. I just can’t—”

His transmission cut out. The shift supervisor’s voice came on—calm, crisp, alert: the way handlers were trained to speak. “I’m on it.”

Karin’s hands shook. Sarno worked a chair just a few doors down from her. He was new, and new handlers sometimes got overwhelmed, but panic was always the wrong response. At the end of the shift, every handler got to go home, smoke a joint, collapse in a bed with soft sheets, get laid if they wanted to. Their clients didn’t have that option. Sarno needed to remember that. Sarno needed to remember that however rough it got in the control room, no one was trying to end his life.

Right now the supervisor would be assisting him, coaching him, getting him back on track. Karin refocused, striving to put the incident out of her mind.

Dragging the gold-rimmed windows to center, she checked on Valdez, confirming the lieutenant had safely exited the alley. There were no alerts from the battle AI, so Karin switched to Deng’s window-set. Rigged in armor and bones, the squad had formed a perimeter to protect their wounded soldier. Around them, dry grass rustled beneath spindly trees, and the stars glowed green in nightvision. Karin switched to Holder. He was still hunkered down with his squad alongside the road. An infrared feed from Holder’s surveillance drone showed the target vehicle only a klick-and-a-half away, approaching fast without headlights.

Just as Karin brought her attention back to Valdez, the shift supervisor spoke.

“Karin, we’ve got an emergency situation. I need to transfer another client to you.”

“No way, Michael.”

“Karin—”

“No. I’ve got three active operations and I can barely stay on top of them. If you give me one more client, I’m going to resign.”

“Fine, Karin! Resign. But just finish this shift first. I need you. Sarno walked. He fucking walked out and left his clients.”

Sarno walked? Karin lost track of her windows as she tried to make sense of it. How could he walk out? What they did here was not a video game. There was no pause button on this war. Every handler was responsible for the lives of real people.

Michael took her hesitation as agreement. “I’m splitting the load. You only have to take one. Incoming now.”

Her throat aching, she took another sip of water, a three-second interval when her mind could rove . . . this time back to the kickboxing session that started her day, every day: a fierce routine that involved every muscle—strike, strike, strike—defiantly physical, because a handler had to be in top form to do this kind of work, and Karin hated to make mistakes.

As she looked up again, a glowing green dot expanded into a new set of windows, with the client’s bio floating to the top. Shelley, James. A lieutenant with a stellar field rating. Good, Karin thought. Less work for me.

As she fanned the windows, the live feed opened with the triple concussion of three grenades going off one after another. She bit down on her lip, anxious to engage, but she needed an overview of the situation first. Locating the squad map, she scanned the terrain and the positions of each soldier. There were five personnel besides Shelley: a sergeant, two specialists, and two privates. The map also showed the enemy’s positions and their weaponry—field intelligence automatically compiled from helmet cams and the squad’s surveillance drone.

The map showed that Shelley’s squad was outnumbered and outgunned.

With little shelter in a flat rural landscape of dusty red-dirt pastures and drought-stricken tree farms, they protected themselves by continuously shifting position in a fight to hold a defensive line north of the village that was surely the target of this raid. The insurgents’ ATVs had already been eliminated, but two pickup trucks remained, one rigged with a heavy machine gun and the other with a rocket-launcher pod, probably stripped off a downed helicopter. The rockets it used would have a range to four kilometers. Shelley needed to take the rocket-launcher out before it targeted the village and before his squad burned through their inventory of grenades.

The sound of the firefight dropped out as her get-acquainted session was overridden by Deng’s windows sliding to the center. A communication had come in from Command. Deng’s request to split the squad had been approved. Karin forwarded the order, following up with a verbal link. “Deng, your request has been approved. Orders specify two personnel remain with the wounded; four proceed to the settlement.”

“Thanks, Delphi.”

Karin switched to Holder. His ambush would go off in seconds. She did a quick scan of the terrain around him, located no additional threats, and then switched focus to Valdez. Cities were the worst. Too many places for snipers to hide. Too many alleys to booby trap. Karin requested an extra surveillance drone to watch the surrounding buildings as Valdez trotted with her squad through the dark streets. She’d feel more secure if she could study the feed from the seekers, but there was no time—because it was her new client who faced the most immediate hazard.

Lieutenant Shelley was on the move, weaving between enemy positions, letting two of his soldiers draw the enemy’s attention while he closed on the rocket launcher. The truck that carried the weapon was being backed into the ruins of a still-smoldering, blown-out farmhouse. The roof of the house was gone along with the southern wall, but three stout brick walls remained, thick enough to shelter the rocket crew from enemy fire. Once they had the truck in place, it would be only a minute or two before the bombardment started.

Not a great time to switch handlers.

Karin mentally braced herself, and then she opened a link to Shelley. The sounds of the firefight hammered through her headphones: staccato bursts from assault rifles and then the bone-shaking boom of another grenade launched by the insurgents. A distant, keening scream of agony made her hair stand on end, but a status check showed green so she knew it wasn’t one of hers. “Lieutenant Shelley,” she said, speaking quickly before he could protest her intrusion. “My codename is Delphi. You’ve been transferred to my oversight. I’ll be your handler tonight.”

His biometrics, already juiced from the ongoing operation, surged even higher. “What the Hell?” he whispered. “Did you people get rid of Hawkeye in the middle of an action?”

“Hawkeye took himself out, Lieutenant.”

Karin remembered her earlier assessment of Sarno’s breakdown. He had made a mistake. What that mistake was, she didn’t know and there was no time to work it out. “I’ve got an overview of the situation and I will stay with you.”

“What’d you say your name was?”

“Delphi.”

“Delphi, you see where I’m going?”

“Yes.”

He scuttled, hunched over to lower his profile, crossing bare ground between leafless thickets. Shooting was almost constant, from one side or another, but so far he’d gone unnoticed and none of it was directed at him.

Karin studied the terrain that remained to be crossed. “You’re going to run out of cover.”

“Understood.”

A wide swath of open ground that probably served as a pasture in the rainy season lay between Shelley and the shattered farmhouse. He needed to advance a hundred meters across it to be within the effective range of his grenade launcher. There were no defenders in that no-man’s-land, but there were at least eight insurgents sheltering within the remains of the farmhouse—and the second truck, the one with the machine gun, was just out of sight on the other side of the ruins.

She fanned the windows just as the lieutenant dropped to his belly at the edge of the brush. Bringing Shelley’s details to the top, she checked his supplies. “You have two programmable grenades confirmed inside your weapon. Ten percent of your ammo load remaining. Lieutenant, that’s not enough.”

“It’s enough.”

Karin shook her head. Shelley couldn’t see it; it was a gesture meant only for herself. There weren’t enough soldiers in his squad to keep him out of trouble once the enemy knew where he was.

Would it be tonight then? she wondered. Would this be the night she lost someone?

“I advise you to retreat.”

“Can’t do it, Delphi.”

It was the expected answer, but she’d had to try.

Nervous tension reduced her to repeating the basics. “Expect them to underestimate how fast you can move and maneuver in your exoskeleton. You can take advantage of that.”

The shooting subsided. In the respite, audio pickups caught and enhanced the sound of a tense argument taking place at the distant farmhouse. Then a revving engine overrode the voices.

Karin said, “The other truck, with the machine gun, it’s on the move.”

“I see it.”

A check of his setup confirmed he had the feed from the surveillance drone posted on the periphery of his visor display.

He used gen-com to speak to his squad. “It’s now. Don’t let me get killed, okay?”

They answered, their voices tense, intermingled: “We got you . . . watch over you . . .”

Valdez’s window-set centered, cutting off their replies. “Delphi, you there?”

Her voice was calm, so Karin said, “Stand by,” and swiped her window-set aside.

“. . . kick ass, L. T.”

Shelley’s window-set was still fanned, with the live feed from the surveillance drone on one end of the array. Motion in that window caught Karin’s eye, even before the battle AI highlighted it. “Shelley, the machine-gun truck is coming around the north side of the ruins. Everybody on those walls is going to be looking at it.”

“Got it. I’m going.”

“Negative! Hold your position. On my mark . . .” She identified the soldier positioned a hundred-fifty meters away on Shelley’s west flank. Overriding protocol, she opened a link to him, and popped a still image of the truck onto the periphery of his visor. “Hammer it as soon as you have it in sight.” The truck fishtailed around the brick walls and Karin told Shelley, “Now.”

He took off in giant strides powered by his exoskeleton, zigzagging across the bare ground. There was a shout from the truck, just as the requested assault rifle opened up. The truck’s windshield shattered. More covering fire came from the northwest. From the farmhouse voices cried out in fury and alarm. Karin held her breath while Shelley covered another twenty meters and then she told him, “Drop and target!”

He accepted her judgment and slammed to the ground, taking the impact on the arm struts of his exoskeleton as the racing pickup braked in a cloud of dust. Shelley didn’t turn to look. The feed from his helmet cams remained fixed on the truck parked between the ruined walls as he set up his shot. The battle AI calculated the angle, and when his weapon was properly aligned, the AI pulled the trigger.

A grenade launched on a low trajectory, transiting the open ground and disappearing under the truck, where it exploded with a deep whump!, enfolding the vehicle in a fireball that initiated a thunderous roar of secondary explosions as the rocket propellant ignited. The farmhouse became an incandescent inferno. Nightvision switched off on all devices as white light washed across the open ground.

Karin shifted screens. The feed from the surveillance drone showed a figure still moving in the bed of the surviving truck. An enemy soldier—wounded maybe, but still determined—clawing his way up to the mounted machine gun. “Target to the northwest,” she said.

The audio in Shelley’s helmet enhanced her voice so that he heard her even over the roar of burning munitions. He rolled and fired. The figure in the truck went over backward, hitting the dusty ground with an ugly bounce.

Karin scanned the squad map. “No indication of surviving enemy, but shrapnel from those rockets—”

“Fall back!” Shelley ordered on gen-com. Powered by his exoskeleton, he sprang to his feet and took off. “Fall back! All speed!”

Karin watched until he put a hundred meters behind him; then she switched to Holder, confirmed his ambush had gone off as planned; switched to Deng who was driving an ATV, racing to cut off her own insurgent incursion; switched to Valdez, who had finally joined up with another squad to quell a street battle in an ancient desert city.

• • •

“Delphi, you there?” Shelley asked.

“I’m here.” Her voice hoarse, worn by use.

Dawn had come. All along the northern border the surviving enemy were in retreat, stopping their exodus only when hunting gunships passed nearby. Then they would huddle out of sight beneath camouflage blankets until the threat moved on. The incursion had gained no territory, but the insurgents had won all the same by instilling fear among the villages and the towns.

Karin had already seen Valdez and Holder and Deng back to their shelters. Now Shelley’s squad was finally returning to their little fort.

“Is Hawkeye done?” he asked her.

She sighed, too tired to really think about it. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“I never liked him much.”

Karin didn’t answer. It wasn’t appropriate to discuss another handler.

“You still there?”

“I’m here.”

“You want to tell me if this was a one-night-stand? Or are you going to be back tonight?”

Exhaustion clawed at her and she wanted to tell him no. No, I will not be back. There wasn’t enough money in the world to make this a good way to spend her life.

Then she wondered: When had it ceased to be about the money?

The war was five thousand miles away, but it was inside her head too; it was inside her dreams and her nightmares.

“Delphi?”

“I’m here.”

In her worst nightmares, she lost voice contact. That’s when she could see the enemy waiting in ambush, when she knew his position, his weaponry, his range . . . when she knew her clients were in trouble, but she couldn’t warn them.

“You want me to put in a formal request for your services?” Shelley pressed. “I can do that, if you need me to.”

It wasn’t money that kept Karin at her control station. As the nightmare of the war played on before her eyes, it was knowing that the advice and the warnings that she spoke could save her soldiers’ lives.

“It’s best if you make a formal request,” Karin agreed. “But don’t worry—I’ll be here.”

© 2014 by Linda Nagata.

Linda Nagata grew up in a rented beach house on the north shore of Oahu. She graduated from the University of Hawaii with a degree in zoology and worked for a time at Haleakala National Park on the island of Maui. She has been a writer, a mom, a programmer of database-driven websites, and lately a publisher and book designer. She is the author of nine novels, including The Bohr Maker, winner of the Locus Award for best first novel, and the novella “Goddesses,” the first online publication to receive a Nebula award. She lives with her husband in their long-time home on the island of Maui.

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Francisca Montoya’s Almanac of Things That Can Kill You
Shaenon K. Garrity

Allergic Reaction

If you get ill after eating or touching something that didn’t make anyone else sick, you may be allergic to it. Especially if there’s a rash. Allergies are caused by your body rejecting substances it doesn’t like. There is no treatment but to avoid those substances. Fortunately, only a few types of allergies can kill you. Nut allergies, for instance. Bee stings. But I imagine most people with fatal allergies to common things have died by now.

I am allergic to wool, soy, peanuts, and pollen. Only my peanut allergy can kill me.

Appendicitis

There is an organ in your body called the appendix, and sometimes it goes bad and kills you. The only treatment is to cut it out of your body. I don’t recommend trying this. You’ll bleed to death. On the other hand, death from appendicitis is long and excruciatingly painful. So maybe try surgery. There’s something to be said for the quicker death.

Bears

Bears aren’t so bad. They can kill you very easily, but mostly they leave people alone. Also, they keep wolves away. After Lauren died, I settled in Gualala because grizzly bears had been sighted in the area. Most people were afraid of the bears, but those people were idiots. Bears are so much better than wolves.

If you encounter a bear, move away slowly. If that doesn’t work, drop to the ground and play dead. You want the bear to lose interest in you and go away. But if a bear wants to kill you, it’ll kill you. There isn’t much you can do about it. I suppose that’s what scares people about bears. But if you think about it, the same thing is true of everything that can kill you.

Beriberi

This has a lot of names in different places: the shakes, the bone dance, calf legs. It starts with feeling weak and fatigued, then progresses to numbness in the arms and legs, inability to walk, facial tics, and dementia. Sufferers may also have a rapid heartbeat and shortness of breath.

As complex and frightening as these symptoms are—and I’ve seen them enough to know how scary they can be—the cause is a simple vitamin deficiency. Unless it’s progressed too far, a diet of fresh meat, green vegetables, and brown bread (not anything made from the white flour or white rice found in the cities) should take care of the problem. Also, drink fresh clean water instead of beer if possible. If none of this is possible, beriberi can easily kill you.

As we traveled up the coast, back in my traveling days, Lauren and I started to see more and more stick-thin sufferers of beriberi, sometimes even in the larger settlements, and we were told more and more often that our diagnosis was useless. Where was anyone going to get fresh greens, when all the local farmland had turned poisonous and chalky, and even the trees in the woods were whitening? People got angry, they refused to pay. That was one of the things that made us think we ought to give up the traveling medicine work and settle somewhere, if we could find a healthy place that would take us.

Blood Poisoning

There are a lot of ways blood can get poisoned. Stepping on a rusty nail. Getting cut by a sharp piece of old metal. Always wear boots and gloves when foraging in the cities.

If you get an infected cut and start having spasms, especially in the jaw, you have tetanus. Tetanus can easily kill you. The only treatment we have these days is bed rest. Some people try bloodletting to release the poison, but I’ve never seen that work. The sickness isn’t caused by poison, anyway. It’s caused by bacteria that live in dirt.

You can also get blood poisoning through a tooth abscess or other dental problems. That’s what got Lauren. She had a toothache and she let it go, and let it go, and one morning her whole jaw swelled up and her body was on fire. She died a few days later. That was when I had to start looking seriously for a place to settle down, because I can’t travel alone, not with my allergies and my fibromyalgia. (Fibromyalgia is a painful disorder of the muscles. It’s not worth going into here, because it can’t kill you.) It took me three days to dig a grave in a nearby redwood grove, a safe distance from any source of water, and then I cried a little, and then I got the wagon back on the road and headed for the nearest settlement.

Keep your mouth as clean as possible, and pull rotten teeth before the rot spreads.

Botulism

Botulism causes cramps, vomiting, and breathing problems. There is no fever. You usually get it from food that’s been improperly preserved. It happens sometimes with smoked and cured meats, but is most common with canned goods. If you find canned food, check the can carefully for dents or swellings. Do not eat food from damaged cans, no matter how rare and delicious it is.

There used to be a cure for botulism, if treated quickly enough, but we don’t have it anymore.

When I worked at the trading post in Gualala, I threw out dozens of cans that people had salvaged from San Francisco and Berkeley. Most canned food from the old days is no good anymore. A lot of people got angry at me. Fortunately, Evan, who ran the trading post, backed me up. He’d dealt with botulism before, and he knew it can kill you.

A man once threatened to shoot me for destroying ten cans of Vienna sausages he’d found. I should have just let him eat the diseased meat. What kind of person wastes a bullet over spoiled Vienna sausages? I know how hunger grinds at you, especially if you’re coming up to trade out of the dead places, but eating bacteria just makes things worse.

Gualala was a good place, though. Still healthy, but well protected from raiders. Evan gave me acrylic wool the traders brought in and I’d sit on the porch of the trading post and knit. I got a reputation as the person to talk to if you were sick or injured or were planning a big journey. People were always planning trips north, over the mountains, following rumors of healthy cropland and even operational cities up in Oregon. I don’t know why they wanted to talk to me about it, since I always said the same thing: Forget it. So many things in the mountains can kill you. I advised against it every time.

Almost every time.

Childbirth

The best way to avoid dying in childbirth is to not get pregnant. If you do get pregnant, pennyroyal tea is an effective abortifacient. It can be dangerous, but the safer alternatives don’t always work. If pennyroyal fails, find a woman with midwife skills and ask her to help. Do not try to perform an abortion on yourself unless all other options have been exhausted.

When Lauren and I were on the road together selling medical care, abortion was the most common service we were asked to provide. We got to be very good at it. We could usually stop a pregnancy with herbs; surgery was not often needed.

We also oversaw childbirth, of course. That was much more difficult. With the toxins people pick up from the infected areas, a lot of women go into shock during pregnancy. They used to call that eclampsia. It will almost certainly kill you. There are many other ways childbirth can kill you, but that one is the most common right now.

If you do insist on having a baby, get to a large settlement the moment you realize you’re pregnant. So many women die giving birth in the middle of nowhere, without a midwife or even another woman around. What if it’s a breach birth? You and the baby will both die.

People get angry at me for talking this way about childbirth. What about our duty to carry on the human species, they say.

People are idiots.

Cholera

The colony where I grew up was wiped out by cholera. It’s a stupid way to die.

It was an early colony, from before things really fell apart. Some smart people saw the trouble coming and pooled their money and bought an island, a little island off the coast of Mexico. My mother was invited to join because she was a doctor. That was a sign of how stupid these smart people were, that they thought one doctor would be enough when things got bad. One doctor and no medical resources except what she brought with her, which fortunately included a little electronic book with a whole library of books inside it.

The colony did all right for quite a few years, longer than it really should have, but some people just wouldn’t dig proper outhouses. A hundred scientists and businessmen and millionaires all died because they kept using the river as a bathroom, and that’s how cholera spreads. So don’t poo in the river.

There, you’re smarter than a scientist.

Diabetes

An old disorder of the blood. Without insulin, the only way to manage it is with a starvation diet. I doubt anyone has diabetes today.

Dysentery (Bacterial)

Don’t get poo in your mouth.

Dysentery (Amoebic)

Don’t drink nasty water.

Normally I don’t have patience for people who lack the common sense to stick to clean water or beer, but I have to admit that accidents happen. For example, a man traveling up the coast might stop and make camp at Clearlake, not knowing that the two settlements that used to be there recently wiped each other out in a war over the last fertile fields. And they sank corpses in the lake to poison the water, and the streams in the area may look clean, but they’re crawling with bacteria. It’s maybe not a man’s fault, under those circumstances, if he drinks the water.

For both forms of dysentery, the treatment is the same as for cholera. It’s not as bad as cholera, but if you’re already sick or weakened it can kill you. I’ve nursed a lot of people through it. I know what to do. When the patrol guards hauled Dr. Spendlove onto the porch of the trading post, I knew.

Dysentery is not a romantic disease.

Exposure

All my life, I’ve avoided places where the temperature drops below freezing. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the best way to prevent death by exposure, just like not getting pregnant is the best way to prevent death by childbirth. Don’t go north. It’s so simple. Especially don’t try a mountain crossing late in the year, when the air in Gualala is already crisp and cold at the height of the afternoon, and there are no stars in the night sky.

But, as with pregnancy, sometimes things happen. Sometimes you find yourself in the mountains of Oregon in December, in a shattered wagon with the snow starting to fall all around and your fibromyalgia acting up. It’s not smart. Maybe it turns out you’re pretty stupid after all. But it happens.

If you’re caught outside in the cold, the first thing to do is build a shelter. Put pine needles or other cushioning between yourself and the ground, because the frozen earth sucks out heat. Get out of the wind and into some kind of insulation. Straw is good. I could use a pile of straw.

Share body heat.

Feral Dog Packs

Anyone who’s ever gone into a city with a foraging party knows to pick up rocks to scare the dogs away. Because most dogs will slink away at the first hint of a threat, people often underestimate the danger of dog packs. People are stupid. They worry about bears and snakes and so on, but when you get down to it, truly wild animals are glad to ignore you. They don’t care about humans. Dogs care. And they know us.

Not all dog packs are scared little clusters of skinny sucker dogs. Some are big and organized and know how to hunt. And I’ve seen normally harmless packs turn dangerous when fighting each other over territory. So play it safe. If you hear barking, turn and walk the other way.

People ask which are worse, dogs or wolves. Don’t ask questions like that. If you’re smart, you’ll never know.

When Dr. Spendlove was a boy, he had a dog as a pet. Its name was Jacob. He talked about it while we sat around the fire at night, watching the trees for movement. Nights like this we could use a warm dog at our feet, he said. I’ve read books with that kind of thing, but it’s hard to picture.

Foraging

Lauren and I were good at foraging. Summer and autumn up in the Berkeley Hills, foraging all day and cooking in the granite-countertop kitchen of some abandoned house at night, those were the best times. With all I’d memorized from my mother’s little electronic library, I knew what to gather and what to avoid.

Without a library, it’s harder. You have to be careful, because lots of things that look good can kill you. It’s as true with food as it is with the rest of life.

What I ought to do here is put in some drawings of poisonous things, mushrooms and hemlock and all kinds of nightshades mostly. But I’m not much of an artist, and I’ve got a deadline coming up fast. Lauren could have done it. That’s why you pull rotten teeth.

Frostbite

In the cold there are so many things that can kill you. Wolves, for example. And things can go wrong in too many ways. Take frostbite. As if it wasn’t bad enough on its own, it can lead to gangrene, which can lead to blood poisoning, which can kill you.

There are treatments, I know. Easy ones. If the frostbite is moderate, you can chafe with snow to remove the damaged skin. If it’s more severe, you have to amputate the dead parts of your body. But still, it bothers me. The skin gets so black, and it feels like fire and ice at once. It’s not a good way to die.

Toes and fingers go first. If I have to amputate my fingers, I’ll never finish this book.

Heatstroke

If you exert yourself out in the heat and you don’t drink enough good, clean liquids, your body may become unable to handle the heat normally and go into heatstroke. A common sign is losing the ability to sweat. A person suffering from heatstroke should be moved to as cool a place as possible and kept hydrated. Cover them with damp sheets, splash them with water, make them drink.

Heatstroke can kill you, but it can also cause long-term health problems. Dr. Spendlove has a weak heart from bouts of heatstroke as a child. His family was one of the ones that stayed in Salt Lake City after the evacuation, back when the trouble started. It was a hard life of hot, dry death. But at least he escaped the worst of what was happening in the outside world, just like I did on the island off Mexico.

Still, his heart is weak. That’s why I agreed to go north with him. He might have had another spell, and where would he have been without me?

Hypothermia

When you get cold enough, your body starts to freeze. If this goes on long enough, it will kill you. But don’t panic. Stand too quickly, and the cold blood could rush up from your legs and give you a heart attack. Especially if you have a weak heart.

Move slowly. Try to shiver under the blankets. Blow on the little yellow fire. Keep writing.

Malnutrition

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you the symptoms of malnutrition. Anyone who’s ever lived around the dead places has seen it, and most places are dead places these days. Now that the white plague has spread everywhere and the cities are mostly picked clean, feeding people has gotten harder and harder. Outside of a few good places, everyone’s starving to some degree or another.

The human body is funny. You can live a long, reasonably comfortable life without ever getting enough to eat, your body always eating itself a little but never too much. Or you can drop dead from the lack of a single vitamin. For most people, though, malnutrition kills sooner rather than later. There is no cure but to eat, and to eat as varied a diet as possible.

I’m sorry. That’s all I have. Until there’s more food, that’s it.

Mites

Use only oat or wheat straw in chicken coops, and never line coops with wet straw. Keep the coops away from your house and away from your source of fresh water. This is another thing people never take seriously until they start getting sick.

Reading my mother’s library when I was younger, I always thought this was the kind of thing that would kill me. Pet a chicken and pick up mites, sip a cup of cloudy water and get a tapeworm, prick your finger on a needle and the lockjaw sets in. Some tiny thing that slips into you and grinds the gears of your biology to a halt. I am a small, quiet person. I am made for a small and silly death.

And yet here I am, with my allergies and my fibromyalgia, impossibly far from the green-and-yellow island where I used to sit in the shade and pore over my mother’s library. I’ve made it a long way. All the way up here. Somehow, without meaning to do anything but stay alive and keep others alive if I can, it seems I’ve climbed to a big death after all.

Mountain Lions

They’ll eat you if they’re hungry, but they’re usually not hungry enough, except in the most badly infected of the dead places. Not as bad as wolves, or even as bad as bears. Just avoid them, and if you see one, don’t bother it. Why would you even want to bother a mountain lion? I’ve seen people do it. Stupid people.

A mountain lion carried off a child in Gualala. A little girl. Tell your kids to leave strange animals alone. Simple as that.

I saw mountain lion tracks this morning when I left the shelter for water and fuel. They don’t worry me much. Not as much as the wolves I heard howling last night.

Pollution

I was going to have Dr. Spendlove write this section. Pollution, even if we’re just talking man-made pollution, is a big topic, and it’s not one I know that much about. There are just too many kinds, in the air and the water and the ground. That’s why people fight so viciously for the land where crops still grow.

Dr. Spendlove knows a treatment for the white plague in the soil. Or so he says. He found a paper on it while camping in the ruins of Berkeley, collecting data from the old days. He thinks he can use it to cook a cure. That’s why we risked this mountain crossing, to get this information to the lab that Dr. Spendlove is almost certain still exists in Eureka.

We could have waited for spring. Probably. If I’d been smart, I would have insisted on waiting. But he was so eager, and his heart was so weak.

I’ll come back to this section later. Maybe when we reach Eureka. Maybe when Dr. Spendlove comes to.

Snakebite

Here in the northwest, there aren’t many poisonous snakes. It’s not worth worrying about. Anyway, they’re like most animals (except the dogs, except the wolves)—leave them alone, and they’re usually happy enough to leave you alone in return.

In Mexico, when I was a girl, one of my summer jobs was killing coral snakes out in the fields. They were beautiful snakes, with thick shimmering stripes the color of a campfire. Their bite could kill in twenty minutes. We stabbed them with pitchforks. Some kids saved the bodies and made the skins into belts or satchels, but I never wanted to touch anything with that much venom. For a while, before I got used to the work, I had nightmares about a coral snake brushing my foot with its fangs.

Now that I’m older, I’m a little nostalgic for coral snakes. Such a quick, warm death, and so beautiful.

Stab Wounds

People worry too much about animals. When I traveled with Lauren, and then later at the trading post in Gualala, people always asked me how to survive animal attacks. What about mountain lions, they’d say. What about snakes. What about bears.

You want the truth? Animals that can kill you are rare and mostly don’t want to meet you. People that can kill you are everywhere, and they’re looking for you.

Everyone knows about the raiding parties that hide in the mountain passes. Usually they’ll just steal what they can and ride off. But in the winter they get hungry, just like everything else in the mountains. In the winter they get desperate. And if they’ve managed to scavenge, borrow, or steal a cache of weapons, maybe they’ll just kill your party instead of robbing you.

It was a raiding party that took my mother’s library, years ago. They rode out of the hills in Jeeps. There was gasoline back then. I was working on a sweet-potato farm near the ruins of Pasadena, and they rode out of the hills and grabbed as many of us as they could. They took my library and my boots and let me go. I guess raiding parties have hardened since then.

It used to be that gunshot wounds were the type of death you most had to fear from your fellow man. But with the old guns falling apart and bullets, even the homemade kind, getting precious, most bandits attack with knives. Clean stab wounds and bind tightly. The wound must be washed regularly, because there are many ways to die of infected wounds. Staph. Gangrene. Tetanus. It used to be uncommon for someone to die of infected wounds, but most people today were born after vaccines, so now it happens quite a lot.

I kept Dr. Spendlove’s wounds as clean as I could, but the wounds were deep and the knife was filthy.

Thirst

You find out where the clean water is, and you drink that only. If there isn’t enough clean water, you make beer. Lack of water will kill you long, long before lack of food. Everyone knows this, but some people still insist on working all day in the heat without enough to drink, or leaving the ice on the well uncracked until they can’t break through. Fetch water. Drink. Fetch more.

I am eating snow now. It seems to be sufficient, but my lips are deeply cracked. Not bleeding. This may be a bad sign. I wish I had my library.

Typhus

Typhus! That’s what I should have died of! It’s common along the coast nowadays, especially as you get further up north. It’s a bacterial disease spread by lice and fleas, often carried by rats. Symptoms are everything that means sickness: muscle ache, headache, vomiting, coughing, fever, chills, delirium, a pink rash that turns dull red as the typhus gets worse. A whole library of ills.

It’s easy to prevent typhus with basic hygiene: Bathe regularly, keep your house clean, trap rats and feral animals, and, especially, don’t let rat poo collect where you eat and sleep. But people don’t do it, won’t do it. We used to have many cures for typhus, but we lost them, and now there are none.

It’s the perfect thing to kill me. With the wide range of symptoms, I could keep busy observing and honing my diagnosis right up to the end. And it’s such a little thing. A flea bite. A flea bite that wouldn’t have happened if people had any common sense.

Instead, it looks like I’ll die of hypothermia. What a personally stupid way to die. It’s my own fault for going up into the mountains, fibromyalgia and all, to follow Dr. Spendlove’s fluttering heart.

I’ve read that hypothermia is pleasant. You go numb and drift to sleep and that’s the end. It may be the kindest of all the things that can kill you. If I stay here, curled against Dr. Spendlove in our makeshift shelter, it will take care of me, slow and gentle and white as the death that’s creeping over the planet. It feels pleasant now, and even writing is starting to feel like too much work.

Or I could stand and walk. I won’t get far. There’s nowhere to go anymore. But I could stand.

Wolves

There is something to be said for the quicker death.

—To Pancha, for knowing all the things.

© 2014 by Shaenon K. Garrity.

Shaenon K. Garrity is an award-winning cartoonist best known for the webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse. Her prose fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, and Daily Science Fiction. She lives in Berkeley with two birds, a cat, and a man.

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Complex God
Scott Sigler

WOODWARD AVENUE

Dr. Petra Prawatt pulled her jacket tighter and shivered against the cold of a Michigan winter. There wasn’t much left to block the icy, stiff breeze that whipped in off the river, not since the nuke had crushed most of the buildings in downtown Detroit. The wind tugged lightly at her yellow-and-red-striped scarf and blew a lock of her blue hair into her eyes. She brushed it away.

She stood on rubble-strewn Woodward Avenue, turning slowly to take in a desolate scene lit up by the setting sun. Snow clung to the few bits of buildings that remained standing, making them look like broken teeth in a mouth rotted brown.

It wouldn’t look like that for long, though.

Everyone loves a parade, she thought. Especially parades that aren’t radioactive.

Two people were with her: Roger DuMonde, a grad assistant five years her senior, and Amy Stinson, governor of Michigan. The wind drove scattered flakes of snow, some that fell from the sky and some that were dusted up from the two or three inches that had accumulated on the ground. Nearby was a still photographer, from the Detroit News, Stinson’s two-man security team, and a two-person video crew. The video crew was also Stinson’s, of course; if something went wrong—or if nothing at all happened—the governor didn’t want that video going viral.

Petra had met the governor twice before, once at a press conference announcing the project, and once at Stinson’s office. Normally, Stinson beamed with the confidence and power expected of a woman that many thought would soon make a run for the presidency. Standing in the ruins of Detroit, however, that confidence seemed forced. The governor clearly wanted this to be over as soon as possible.

Or maybe she was just annoyed by the red balloon that floated from a string held in her right hand.

“Dr. Prawatt,” the governor said quietly, “can I let go of this ridiculous thing?”

Petra shook her head. “You promised at the press conference. Everyone heard you.” She raised a noisemaker to her lips and blew. The curled paper shot out to the sound of a whimsical whistle. “Just hold on to it for a little while longer, Governor. After all, what’s a parade without balloons?”

“This isn’t a parade,” Stinson said. “This is a progress check. So how about we check some progress?”

Petra smiled. How would Stinson react when she saw how far things had come along? Petra’s weekly reports made it clear she was closing in on the project’s objective, but she’d held back a few details; she was much closer to the goal than she’d let on.

Stinson wanted to be there at that pivotal moment of victory, wanted to be the one who let the good people of the great state of Michigan know that the phoenix would soon rise from the ashes.

“Sure thing, Governor,” Petra said. She turned to her grad assistant. “Roger? How are the levels?”

Roger’s left hand held a boxy, yellow Geiger counter. His right hand held a thin steel cylinder connected by a cable to that box. He pointed the cylinder away from his body, then slowly turned right, sweeping the area in front of the governor. The sweep was completely unnecessary and didn’t affect the local reading at all, but Roger had a flair for the dramatic.

“Nothing,” he said.

“There’s never nothing,” Petra said. “Give me the exact count, please.”

“Two point three em-ess-vees,” Roger said. “You’re right, there’s never nothing—this is less than nothing.”

Petra grinned. It was hard not to. Her symbiotic machine colonies had worked in the lab, and at the Hanford Nuclear Reserve test site, but to see them operating on such a large scale? It was complete validation for all the boasting she’d done to get the job.

Stinson leaned in close, the way she did when she didn’t want her camera team to hear. “That’s below normal, right? I believe you said Detroit’s former baseline was three point one . . . was it milliverts?”

“Close,” Petra said. “Millisieverts. Shorthand term is ‘em-ess-vees.’”

Stinson smiled. “So, Detroit is actually cleaner than it was before the bomb?”

“So far, yes,” Petra said. “As I told you, Governor, I don’t mess around.”

Stinson pointed to a conical pile of rubble—cracked brick, twisted metal, charred wood, and broken glass—heaped ten feet high.

“Is that where your fungus-robot-bugs live?”

“They’re called minids,” Petra said. “They’re cyborgs, not robots—part biological, part mechanical. And those rubble piles are where they die, actually. There’s a shielded container in the middle of each one. When a minid has consumed too much radioactivity, it crawls inside the container. Once the container is full, the lid is sealed and the other minids start a new rubble pile.”

That was a simple enough explanation. Petra hadn’t told Stinson what actually closed the containers’ twenty-pound lids—more fun to let that be a surprise. Petra wanted to see just how calm, cool, and collected this future president could be.

Stinson rubbed her hands together to ward off the cold. “They overdose on radiation? I thought you said the things digested the stuff.”

Petra had explained all of this to Stinson before. It had also been in all of the reports, an index explaining the biomechanical mycoremediation process and the minids’ life cycle. Stinson knew about the radiation levels and nothing else, it seemed—as long as people could move back into the city, her job was finished. She didn’t give a damn about the science behind that effort.

“They do digest it,” Petra said. “The Geobacter bacteria colony inside each minid breaks down environmental contaminants, which creates energy the minids use to move and function. During this process, radioactive atoms are oxidized, causing them to precipitate—radioactivity doesn’t magically go away, it just becomes more concentrated and sequestered away from large organisms, like us. When the minids enter the shielded containers, the contaminants they’ve collected are permanently removed from the local environment.”

Politicians had turned Detroit into radioactive waste; Petra Prawatt had turned radioactive waste into cyborg food.

Stinson looked out across the ruined landscape. Petra tracked the governor’s eyes, watched her as she located a second pile, a third, a fourth—Petra knew there were at least twenty rubble piles in this area alone, and many more near ground zero.

The days of sending in soldiers or immigrants to clean up hazardous sites—telling them that the danger “really wasn’t that bad”—were long since gone. This wasn’t hiring the Irish to clean up victims of yellow fever in New Orleans in 1853, and it wasn’t sending the boys of the U.S. Army to shovel up Hiroshima’s rubble. In the Internet age, where everyone was watching everything, no politician wanted to be responsible for sending people into the World Series of Cancer.

Petra was only twenty-one years old, but that didn’t matter; destiny had called, and she’d been there to answer. She had already been testing her bioremediation technology in Hanford, Washington—an area used for the development of America’s first atomic bomb—when FEMA had put out a call for robotic cleanup solutions to assist with the Detroit disaster.

Even if her work hadn’t already been in use in Hanford, the nation’s most contaminated nuclear-development ground, she might have won the grant anyway. She offered the cheapest solution: one that built and destroyed itself. Her minids “ate” the radioactive material, and when that food source ran out, they died. If it worked, it promised to save the country billions in cleanup costs. If it failed, FEMA would just move down the line and try something more expensive.

Stinson tugged down on her balloon, then let it rise up as the light wind moved it all around.

“It’s damn cold out,” she said. “The things don’t have problems with temperature?”

Petra moved toward the rubble. She knelt, listening for the telltale crackling sound, but it was hard to hear over the wind. She overturned a chunk of concrete . . . nothing. Then a brick. Then a board. On her fourth try, she pulled back a torn roof tile and found what she was looking for.

She reached a finger down, pressed it in until she felt the tiny legs reverse and cling to her fingertip.

Petra stood and walked back to Stinson. She held up her finger, probably a bit too close to the governor’s face. Stinson flinched back.

The six-legged minid crawled across Petra’s finger, so tiny a dozen just like it could cluster on her fingernail.

Stinson frowned. “I’ve seen your videos, but it’s still disturbing to see them up close like this.”

Petra thought they were beautiful. Six legs, similar to the ants she had modeled them after. But where an ant had three body divisions—head, thorax, and abdomen—her minids were one shell made of carbon nanotube aerogel. The shell surrounded the minid’s guts: a tiny processor, a heat-to-energy converter, and a chamber for the Geobacter. Such a small package, yet it generated its own power. It could use two legs to move material while always remaining stable thanks to the four that remained on the ground.

Stinson leaned in a little closer, body still poised to jump away if the tiny cyborg moved too fast.

“They’re so little,” she said. “I can understand that they’re working in unison, the sum of the parts is greater than the whole and all of that, but how do they make those big piles?”

“Because it’s more than just working in unison,” Petra said. “They are a self-assembling material. Thousands of them, functioning as a single entity, like a collective organism.”

They could do much more than that, but Petra was saving the details for her big reveal. There weren’t enough of them in this area to show the second-stage form. Petra couldn’t wait to see the look on Stinson’s face when there were.

“Governor, we’re only half a mile from ground zero,” Petra said. “That’s where the minids will be the most concentrated. Let’s get going.”

Roger nodded at her and walked back to the Humvee. Stinson wasn’t so fast to move.

Petra poked Stinson’s shoulder. “You scared?”

The governor gave her a curious glance. She clearly wasn’t used to people touching her in a playful, potentially disrespectful way.

“Of course I am,” Stinson said. She spread her arms, indicating the ruined city. “This place was radioactive; who wouldn’t be scared?”

Petra noticed that Stinson had said that loud enough for the cameras to hear. Now that Stinson knew they were safe from any exposure, she’d show her “fear” in order to let the world know how brave she was, how she would be the first one in before other Michiganders returned to rebuild. Smooth. Or it would have been, if Petra had just played along.

“The city was never radioactive,” she said, also loud enough for the cameras to hear. “There was just radioactive fallout. And we found a way to remove that fallout.”

Stinson smiled, a forced thing that didn’t quite hide a lip-twitch of annoyance. “That’s wonderful, Dr. Prawatt.” Then, her voice dropped low enough that her words were just between them. “I didn’t bring these cameras for my health. One little machine isn’t enough. I was thinking we’d see waves of them. Where are they all?”

Petra looked around again, squinted at the setting sun. “They completed this area,” she said. “I told them to finish at ground zero.”

“You told them? You make it sound like a conversation.”

Petra shrugged. “In a way, it is. Just because they’re machines doesn’t mean they’re stupid. If I wanted dummies to do this I’d have told you to bring in soldiers.”

The governor narrowed her eyes. “Petra, you are the smartest person I’ve ever met, but that makes it easy to forget just how young you are. At least, until you say things like that.” Stinson leaned in close, spoke low. “You’ve tried our patience with your God complex, young lady. When this project is over, you might want to make sure you’ve got more friends than enemies.”

Young lady? Petra fought down her anger. Here she was saving an entire city, revolutionizing the field of self-replicating material, even setting the stage for human colonization of the stars, and she was still being looked at as if she were a little girl.

Petra had fought against that image for years. She’d dyed her hair blue, gotten several face piercings, and enjoyed the reaction she got in scientific circles from a severe excess of eye makeup. But nothing changed that she was five foot two and still had the body of a teenager. She couldn’t help but resent the fact that if she had been born male, she wouldn’t have to do anything about her image—she would just be accepted as is.

To make matters worse, this time that you’re just a girl attitude came not from a man, but from a woman. A powerful woman. To Stinson, maybe Petra wasn’t the right kind of female.

“I would prefer it if you called me ‘doctor,’” Petra said. “And you’re ruining my parade. If you’re done posing for the cameras, can we go?”

Stinson smiled her politician’s smile. She called out to her support team. “Saddle up, people.”

The security team piled into one Humvee, the camera crew into another. Roger drove the third; Petra rode in the front and Stinson sat in the back, her posture somehow making it look like this was no different than her normal limo rides.

The benevolent governor wanted to see them? No problem. This was Petra’s show, Petra’s coronation, not Stinson’s.

When this day was done, history would know the name of Petra Prawatt, and then friends or enemies wouldn’t really matter.

CHOCOLATE FROGS

The Humvee rolled down Woodward Avenue, its big tires and heavy suspension easily crunching through both snow and the bumps and debris beneath. Her creations had cleared away all the smaller rubble, but construction and repair crews would be needed to make the streets traversable by normal cars.

Stinson’s balloon softly bounced off the roof every time the Humvee hit a big bump. The governor’s fear clearly hadn’t entirely left her, but knowing the city held little radiation danger had brought back her confidence.

“Dr. Prawatt, you were a real pain in the ass insisting we do this progress check on Thanksgiving,” the governor said. “As usual, you got your way. So tell me, why was it important to do it today?”

Petra thought of telling the governor to go fuck herself, that her business was her business, but what the woman had said earlier nagged at her: You might want to make sure you’ve got more friends than enemies.

Petra looked out the window at the snow-covered ruins. “When I was a kid my mom took me to the parade every year,” she said. “Just like her busia took her.”

“Busia?”

“Polish for ‘grandma,’” Petra said. “The costumes, the bands, the floats, the noise, and the smell and the spectacle . . . I loved it all.”

At five, she’d been mesmerized by the forty-foot-long Snoopy balloon. By five and a half, she’d taught herself about air density and learned why things float. Two months before her sixth birthday she built a hot-air balloon that could carry her own weight. She’d floated out of the backyard and made it half a block before it came down again. Her mother had been furious, grounding Petra for two months.

That was before her mother got sick, before she started to change, before she started to resent a daughter whose IQ was so high it couldn’t be properly measured. Petra’s happiest memories were from those childhood Thanksgiving Day parades, from Before the Time When Everyone Found Out She Was Smart.

Detroit had fallen to shit well before the bomb dropped. Urban blight had already claimed the mansions of the rich, the performance palaces of theater and music, the mom-and-pop shops, and the department stores. Aside from a few downtown spots around the baseball and football stadiums and the big-business skyscrapers, much of Detroit had looked like a Third World war zone even before the ten-megaton yield turned Woodward Avenue into a bubbling black river of asphalt.

Every Thanksgiving, however, the city came alive.

Petra remembered the rage she’d felt watching the news reports, seeing the devastation of her home. She was a third-generation Detroiter. Hamtramck, her home neighborhood, had long since shifted from her ethnic group—Polish—to a new one—Arab—but that didn’t matter. Even if Petra didn’t live there anymore, Detroit was still home.

“America’s Parade is always on Thanksgiving,” Petra said. “The parade always goes down Woodward Avenue. If there’s a day that we officially declare Detroit is back, it should be Thanksgiving.”

Stinson nodded, as if that explanation was as good as any other.

Petra turned in her seat to look at the governor. “How are you going to spin this? You were kind of late to the party. The project was under way before you were elected, but something tells me you’re going to take full credit for what I’ve accomplished here.”

The governor nodded. “That’s politics, doctor. And you should know I’ve had far more influence on this than you might think. Where do you think the funding came from?”

“From FEMA,” Petra said quickly. “I had meetings at the White House. I met the President and directors of departments that aren’t even on the books. I’m pretty sure my ass is covered on this.”

“Was covered,” Stinson said. “Your insulting, prima donna attitude ruined that. FEMA wrote the checks, but I was a senator before becoming governor. I arranged for much of the funding, getting chunks from the Superfund, the EPA, BARDA, and quite a bit from DARPA.”

Petra hadn’t known that. She’d assumed the strength of her work and the need to recover a major city were the reasons for her project’s massive budget. DARPA? The military was involved? And she’d never even heard of BARDA.

Stinson smiled. “Ah, I see you didn’t bother to look down to the bottom of the deep pockets that keep you going. Am I going to take credit? Yes, because much of the credit really is mine, Petra. You needed funding to build your minids and those . . . those egg things.”

“Root factories,” Petra snapped. “They’re called root factories.”

“Thank you for correcting me, as you always do,” Stinson said. “At seven million dollars apiece, those root factories were a sizeable investment. And here you are, thinking you did all of this yourself? Many people have grown tired of your attitude and your arrogance, Petra. You insult the intelligence of everyone you work with.”

“That’s not exactly hard to do,” she said, the words slipping out before she realized she was saying them.

Stinson held up her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “See? That’s what I’m talking about. You’re so brash and caustic, in fact, that there was frequent talk of shutting you down. Two things kept your project going—your reports, which showed consistent progress, and me.”

Petra let out a huff. “Oh, please. No one would shut me down, not when I’m so close to success.”

Stinson smiled again, shook her head. “No one except the big corporations that lobbied to handle the cleanup, so they could sell decades-long, multimillion-dollar maintenance contracts. With your method, the radiation is gone forever and your work is done. In business, Petra, why get paid for something only once when you can get paid for it over and over again?”

“I’m not in this for money.”

“I know,” Stinson said. “And that is why you need friends. Your God complex will only serve you until this project is finished.”

The Humvee hit a bump and rocked up, then down. Had to be a pretty big bump if the oversized vehicle’s suspension couldn’t handle it, but that was what happened to streets when they got nuked.

“Sorry,” Roger called back. “I think that was a telephone pole.”

Petra barely heard him. She had created an entirely new concept in robotics, fusing distributed intelligence and self-assembling construction with bacteria-driven power plants that not only broke down most kinds of hazardous waste, but also concentrated it for easy, safe removal. She’d turned the industry upside down. Only now did she realize that Stinson was right—when the repair of Detroit was said and done, would Petra be marginalized? Would politicians steal the credit for her accomplishments?

They would certainly try, she knew: Bridges are named after politicians, not after bridge builders.

They drove south. To the northeast, she saw the wreckage of Ford Field. Tiger Stadium had been between it and Woodward, but there wasn’t enough left of Tiger Stadium to block the view.

The Humvee’s headlamps illuminated a steep hill of tan rock and twisted steel that blocked the road. Roger slowed the vehicle, brought it to a stop. The blast had hammered One Detroit Center, dropping forty-three stories of granite, metal, and glass across Woodward. The rubble was so thick that the army engineers hadn’t even bothered with it.

Stinson leaned forward, stared out the window. “No getting through there. I guess the trip down the parade route is over?”

“It is,” Roger said. “Don’t worry, the army cleared a path to ground zero along East Congress.” He turned to look at Petra.

Petra bit her lip. Her parade fantasy had been fun, but she’d known it would end at this spot. It had been nice to play make-believe for a little while, anyway.

She raised the noisemaker to her lips and gave it one last blow, then put it in her coat pocket.

“Okay, Governor,” she said. “You can let go of the balloon.”

Stinson looked at Petra oddly for a moment, then opened her window. She pushed the red balloon outside and let it go. It floated up and away, out of sight into the night sky.

Roger turned left onto Congress.

• • •

A cloud-filled, starless night claimed the city, casting a pallor of gray across the ruins.

In some places, Petra could see the minids working. Maybe not them, exactly: a brick that seemed to move on its own toward a growing pile of rubbish; a still-standing building frame slowly tilting, being cut into at its base by thousands of tiny little jaws; a cloud of dust filling the Humvee’s headlight beams as hordes of her tiny machines cleaned the dirt and snow from the pavement.

Roger stopped the vehicle at Jefferson and Riopelle. Everyone got out. The Humvee’s headlamps played across the center of Detroit’s devastation. The blast had gone off a thousand feet above the intersection of Riopelle and Franklin, just two blocks to the south. Here, the damage was greater than anywhere else. Past ground zero, the Detroit River. Beyond the river, the city of Windsor, which had also suffered the bomb’s horrid effects. The Renaissance Center had once stood tall on this same shoreline; the nuke’s heat had melted the tower’s glass a few split seconds before the concussion wave shattered those structures into millions of pieces.

Petra could say one thing for the new Detroit—everywhere you went offered a great view of the river.

Below the dusting of snow, her creations were hard at work. The air was filled with a constant plink and crack of tiny machines breaking material and scraping hard surfaces. It sounded like someone was frying bacon.

She looked at Roger. “How are the levels?”

Roger held the Geiger counter, gave the wand a perfunctory sweep.

“Two point six,” he said. “A little bit higher than before, but nary a radioactive click in sight, boss.”

Two blocks from ground zero, and the radioactivity was still below where it had been before the bomb. Sometimes, Petra impressed even herself.

Stinson stood next to her. “All right,” she said. “I can hear things happening, but I don’t see them. Where are they?”

Petra pulled a thick flashlight from her pocket. “Roger, cut the lights. Governor? Could you ask your people to turn off the lights on the other two Hummers?”

“Why?” Stinson asked. “It’s pitch-black out.”

“Humor me,” Petra said. “It’s not like we’re going to get mugged.”

Stinson called out to her security team. The lights of all three vehicles shut off, drowning the area in darkness. For the first time Petra felt like she was standing in a graveyard, which she effectively was—one of the biggest graveyards in history. Petra turned on the flashlight. It cast a sapphire glow on the ground.

“UV?” Stinson said. “What’s that for?”

Petra angled the beam along the rubble. The broken surface lit up in glowing sparkles of turquoise, sparkles that moved.

Stinson stared, then laughed. “You made them fluoresce under a black light? Like scorpions? Aside from the fact that you never reported that, why?”

Petra wouldn’t have expected Stinson to even know the word “fluoresce,” let alone that scorpions did, indeed, glow under UV light.

“The minids’ coloration helps me detect movement patterns and cooperative behavior,” Petra said. “Also, because glowing is cooler than not glowing.”

She moved the beam slowly to the right. She knew the root factory was close by, but couldn’t remember the exact spot. She saw increasing density in the glowing flecks of blue, then her light fell on a smooth, knee-high cone that was so covered in the little biomachines it seemed to shimmer like an aquamarine gem.

“There’s the root factory,” Petra said. “Come on, Governor, it won’t bite. Step where I step, please, so we have fewer feet trouncing the minids. And can you leave your entourage behind?”

Stinson called back to her guards. “Bob, Phil, stay here, please.”

The two burly men nodded.

Petra led the governor toward the root factory. She felt that familiar swell of pride at her greatest creation. Greatest for now, at least.

They carefully stepped over debris to reach the machine that stood in the middle of a leveled city block.

Stinson looked at the device, looked at the surrounding ground, took in the moving carpet of glowing turquoise dots.

“All of these”—she pointed at the root factory—“came out of there?”

Petra nodded. “That’s right. There’s another farther north, and one across the river in Windsor. Each one had a starter colony of Geobacter and a hundred thousand dormant minids inside when we planted it. The root factory lives up to its name, extending roots to draw raw materials from the ground, then uses those materials to activate the stored minids. Those minids dig tunnels and add on to the roots, increasing the amount of material the root factory brings in. By the time the stored minids are all activated, the root factory has enough raw material coming in to build new minids from scratch.”

Stinson rubbed her hands together, trying to ward off the cold. “So there’s no end to it? They’ll just keep breeding forever?”

Breeding wasn’t the right term, but Petra knew what the governor meant.

“The root factories are programmed to stop at five million minids,” Petra said. “They shut off then, or when there’s no more radioactive material to collect and power the minids.”

Stinson shook her head. “Amazing. It’s truly a miracle.”

A miracle? Leave it to a conservative like Stinson to turn scientific wonder into an act of the divine.

But it was amazing. Petra had built a working Von Neumann device, a machine that could build copies of itself. Well, almost—that was the next step, teaching the minids how to construct a new root factory. Someday, probably long after her death, this same technology would be cast out to the stars: a seed that could land on a distant planet, prepare that planet for eventual human occupation, even make new seeds and launch them into space to find and prepare additional worlds.

For now, however, Petra’s creation was saving a city. When mankind spread beyond the prison of a single world, her work might ensure the survival of the human race itself.

Petra handed Stinson a UV light of her own. The governor turned it on and directed the blue light over the ground, sweeping it across glowing dots that lit up like little stars.

The beam flashed across something scurrying from one pile of rubble to the next, something the size of a rat—a fluorescing rat.

“What the hell was that,” Stinson said, her voice thick with fear.

“It’s okay,” Petra said. “It’s just the minids.”

“But the minids are tiny! That wasn’t a minid.”

Petra felt bad, and that surprised her; maybe she should have given Stinson the full picture after all.

“Honest, Governor, it’s safe,” Petra said. “It’s the secondary working form. Just watch.”

She reached down and scooped up a double handful of ant-sized minids. She held them in her cupped hand, felt the tingling of their tiny feet against her skin. “Chocolate frog,” she said.

For just a moment, the minids’ movements ceased while they processed her command. Then, as a unit, they started crawling, turning, and wiggling. Legs locked with legs, hooking around each other in a snapping motion that bound them together as if they were two muscle cells connected at the ends. Long strands formed, then crossed diagonally, wove together as legs reached out and joined. The swarming minids formed four sheets of interconnected machines.

Each of the four sheets curled up lengthwise, wiggling and bending until the outside edges met and tiny legs snapped together. Four hollow, metallic, inch-long worms now wiggled in Petra’s palms.

Stinson took a step back. “That’s . . . that’s a little disturbing.”

Petra smiled. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

The machine worms wiggled and writhed until an end of each met in the center of her hands. The ends pressed against each other. Little legs again snapped, a rapid-fire sound as dozens of links formed, the worms joining to one another until the construct looked like a four-limbed starfish.

The free ends of each tube pressed down against her palms. The center of the starfish rose up. Where Petra had once been holding hundreds of tiny, individual minids, she now held a single machine that glowed turquoise in the black light’s beam.

A wide-eyed Stinson shook her head. “It’s almost as if you’ve created life, doctor.”

Petra shifted the new machine to her right hand. She held her left hand above it, using her index finger to slowly caress the tubelike legs.

“I call this form a frog,” Petra said. “It’s made up of about two thousand minids.”

“You said chocolate frog,” Stinson said.

Roger laughed. “Didn’t you notice Petra’s scarf?”

Stinson looked at it. “I thought that was from that show with the time-traveling phone booth.”

Well, at least the governor got some points for partial knowledge of Doctor Who.

“You’re in the ballpark, Governor,” Roger said. “You ever read the Harry Potter series?”

“No,” Stinson said. “I saw that first movie, but I don’t really have time to read children’s books.”

Roger nodded toward Petra. “She was a kid when those books came out. So was I. A chocolate frog is a little thing from the books. You might want to read up, Governor—much of Petra’s nomenclature for this project is taken from elements in the series.”

Petra lifted her hand closer to Stinson, who took a step back from the four-legged wonder.

“It’s not going to bite you, Governor,” Petra said. “It doesn’t even have a mouth.”

Stinson seemed to realize she was shying away from a machine held by a five-foot-two woman who wasn’t the least bit afraid. She stepped closer and held her flashlight just a few inches from the frog.

Petra curled her fingers in, turned her palm toward the ground. The four-legged creation responded by crawling along her arm, up to her shoulder.

The governor shook her head. “All the little bits move at the same time. How does it do that?”

“Distributed intelligence,” Petra said. “They operate the same way whether they’re hooked together or they’re individuals. Each minid has a little processor. When it’s near another minid, the two processors sync up and act as one. So, the more minids you have, the smarter they all are.”

Stinson stood upright. Again, she looked scared. She turned, playing her UV beam out across the block. Everywhere the beam fell, minids sparkled as bits of blue.

“There are thousands of them,” she said.

“Millions,” Roger corrected. He smiled, clearly enjoying the politician’s discomfort. “By now, there’s millions, Guv-nah.”

“Millions,” Stinson said quietly. “So, uh, just how big can these . . . these collective kinds get?”

Petra reached up and picked the frog off her shoulder.

“This is the maximum size,” she said. “I haven’t figured out how to give them a structure that could support larger forms. It’s on the to-do list, but it’s not a high priority.”

Stinson nodded. “Good,” she said. “I hope you never catch up to that one. Those things are spooky.”

Petra smiled. “Don’t worry, I’ll save you. Frog, disassemble.”

The air hummed with a chorus of clicks as little legs let go. The frog seemed to melt, disintegrating into hundreds of individual minids that fell from her hand and dropped to the ground like turquoise sand.

“Three or four hundred frogs working as a unit can lift and move a one-ton object,” Petra said. “Think of it like this—if you had a thousand hands, but could control them as easily as you control your two, you could move some pretty heavy things. When the minids are in proximity, they operate as one individual.”

Roger poked Petra’s shoulder. “She plays games with them,” he said. “She calls it research, but I think she’s just fucking around.”

Petra felt suddenly embarrassed; why did Roger have to mention that now?

“Roger, shut up,” she said.

Stinson raised her eyebrows. “No, I want to hear this. What kind of games? War games?”

And there it was—of course the government would be thinking of violence and death.

Roger shook his head. “Nothing so cool as that. She makes the frogs play Quidditch.”

Stinson’s eyes narrowed: She thought Roger was messing with her. “Quidditch? Oh, that sport from the Harry Potter movie? With the brooms?”

Roger nodded.

“But they can’t fly,” Stinson said. She turned to Petra. “Right?”

Petra shrugged. “Not yet.”

Something as small as one of her minids could ride air currents. She just had to figure out how to give them proper wings. She was working on the flight mechanics of Trichogramma as a reference point and model.

Stinson looked worried, but tried to mask it with an air of annoyance. “You get any resource you ask for, and you use these things to play games?”

Of course, she was too small-minded to understand.

“Games are good,” Petra said. “Games make them think, make them react, make them conceive and test strategies. We can watch and learn from that.”

“They strategize?” Stinson said. “So they think? For themselves?”

Petra shrugged again. “Don’t blow it out of proportion. Trial and error isn’t an advanced concept in robotics. The minids are programmed to do random things in the context of a goal, like move their legs until they feel their bodies change location. When that happens, they lock that motion and start trying variations. I don’t program them to walk—they teach themselves.”

Petra heard a different kind of clicking. She glanced to the source of it: Roger’s Geiger counter. Roger looked at it as if he were surprised to find it in his hands. Her light played off his face as he leaned in to read the meter.

It clicked faster.

“Something’s wrong,” he said. “This says we’re getting fifty-three em-ess-vees.”

That was impossible . . . seconds earlier the dose had been barely measurable.

Stinson turned her flashlight toward Petra.

“What’s going on?” she said. “Are we in danger?”

Petra shook her head. Fifty-three wasn’t going to kill them, but it wasn’t good news.

The Geiger counter clicked faster.

“Sixty,” Roger said. “No, seventy. We need to get the hell out of here.”

Stinson cupped her hands to her mouth, screamed for her security detail. They drew their weapons and started scrambling over the rubble toward her.

“Eighty,” Roger said.

It didn’t make sense. They weren’t moving, so how . . .

Petra turned, shone her beam to the right; the minids were packed together, a dense sheet of glowing turquoise. Every way she turned she witnessed the same thing. Left, right, behind them . . . so many.

“Ninety,” Roger said.

Mats of the glowing blue minids drew closer, flowing toward Petra as if she were standing on a small island and the waves were lapping higher on her shores, coming from all directions . . .

. . . all but forward.

“One hundred,” Roger said. “These minids are going to cook us, Petra!”

Petra grabbed Stinson’s sleeve. “Come on!”

Stinson shrugged her off.

“Just stay still,” the governor said. “My people will get us to the cars.”

Petra aimed her beam toward where she’d last seen the two guards. They had closed to within fifty feet and were coming fast. The guards had normal flashlights, not UV.

The guards can’t see the minids . . . They don’t know they’re stepping on them . . .

The trailing man slowed, suddenly reached down to rub violently at his pants leg. Then he lifted his hand and shook it hard, staring at it like one would stare at a sudden, unexpected burn.

Both Petra’s and Stinson’s UV beams focused on the man’s hand.

It glowed blue.

The man looked toward his partner. “Something’s on the ground!”

Just fifteen feet from Stinson, the other security man stopped and turned to look back. When he did, Petra’s flashlight lit up a nightmare.

From either side of the guard who had cried out, the ground seemed to rise up like tendrils of blue lava that wrapped around him . . . and squeezed. The guard (Bob his name is Bob he didn’t do anything to anyone) tried to grab at the things holding him; his fingers pulled away sparkling, disintegrating clouds of minids, even as more tendrils shot up from the ground to snake around his legs, his chest, his head. All of the tendrils visibly contracted, smashing Bob to the ground.

He vanished beneath a moving shroud of blue.

“One-twenty,” Roger said. “We have to get out of here!”

Petra realized that the other guard was also down, also covered by the living blanket. She aimed her beam toward the third Humvee, the one with the camera crew—the vehicle glowed blue, as if covered by bright plastic. There was no sign of the people who’d been in it.

Petra turned her beam back to the one safe place she’d seen: The ground in front of her was still bare. She grabbed Stinson’s sleeve again, pulled hard. “Come on, Governor!”

This time, Stinson didn’t fight. Petra yanked the shocked woman along. Roger fell in behind them.

Petra’s UV beam bounced in front of her, a long patch of normal ground lined on either side by thickening walls of glowing, liquid sapphire.

THE GOD COMPLEX

The turquoise seas parted for them.

Petra, Roger, and Stinson moved as fast as they could across the rubble. The night’s starless dark hid everything but the beams in front of them.

“Down to eighty,” Roger said. “And falling fast. As long as we’re moving southeast, it’s getting better.”

Southeast . . . toward ground zero.

Stinson tucked her flashlight under her right arm, fumbled for her cell phone. “They’re herding us,” she said as she dialed. “They’re making us go this way. You said they couldn’t get that big, Petra, you said they couldn’t!”

They . . . them . . . her minids. The chocolate frog was the largest form she’d created, but the two security guards had been taken down by man-sized tendrils. Trial and error . . . the minids had solved that engineering problem on their own.

“Fifty,” Roger said. “Still dropping fast.”

Petra kept moving, kept the others moving, stayed on the path provided for them by her creations. She didn’t know what was happening, didn’t know how it was happening.

Up ahead, her beam lit up a shape of bright blue. A familiar shape . . .

“Stop! Everyone, stop!”

She pressed back against Roger. He put his arm around her shoulders, pulled her tight. Stinson stood with them, cell phone pressed to her ear. She turned, casting her beam across the sea of turquoise that surrounded them.

Petra couldn’t look away from the shape. It was as tall as her waist, turquoise writhing over a pile of bent steel, rusted iron, sand, brick, and glass . . . a jumbled pile or ruin, but organized, with a familiar shape . . . a conical shape.

From the top of it poured a constant trickle of bright turquoise, glowing rivulets that flowed down the sides to blend with the moving mat that coated the broken ground.

“Roger,” she said. “That’s . . . that’s . . .”

Petra couldn’t get the words out.

She felt the hand on her shoulder go rigid, a metal talon pushing through her coat, squeezing her flesh.

“A root factory,” Roger said. “Jesus Christ, Petra . . . they built one on their own?”

Stinson aimed her beam to the left. “Over there,” she said, cell phone still pressed to her ear. “Point your light there!”

Petra did so. Her beam landed on a growing mound of her creations. The material seemed to bubble, to lump, to coalesce like time-lapse video of a melting turquoise candle being played in reverse.

Roger squeezed a little harder, fear giving him a painful strength. “Petra,” he said, “what the fuck is going on?”

She shook her head, but didn’t look away from the growing mound, the top of which was now a good three feet above the freshly scraped earth. As it grew taller, the sides narrowed. Petra heard a grinding sound, a hissing and crunching . . . the sound of masonry and concrete being dragged, bits grinding into each other.

In that vibrating mass, she saw things form and swarm and melt away again: frogs that existed for seconds but dissolved, a cube with flat sides that morphed into a sphere, then vanished inside the expanding mound, and—for just a second, had she seen . . .

. . . a face?

The grinding sound grew, now far louder than the Geiger counter’s fading clicks.

The radiation continued to drop. The more “full” minids were moving off, taking their concentrated radiation with them. A shock of awareness hit Petra, awareness that Stinson was right—the machines had herded them, herded them to this specific place.

Stinson handed Roger her flashlight. She pressed a finger into one ear, the cell phone against the other.

“Yes, this is the governor. We need a helicopter, right now. We’re being attacked by Dr. Prawatt’s creation. Get us out of here!”

The bubbling mound of turquoise moved faster. The tink of breaking concrete grew so rapid it sounded like a constant hiss of static.

Roger put an arm around Petra, pulled her close. “This is bad, boss.”

She nodded. She had no idea what had gone wrong, but then again, maybe it didn’t take a genius to figure it out. She’d created a life-form—a self-assembling life-form—that fed on radioactivity, then let that life-form loose on a nuked city. She had taught them to learn through trial and error, taught them to try new strategies . . . she had taught them to think. Her Hanford test site had used half a million minids, all working together to form a collective brain. Here? There were five million of them, maybe even more. Did that create an exponential increase in intelligence?

Stinson screamed into the phone. “Now! No, not a truck, you understand? A hel-i-cop-ter. Military, FEMA, a fucking news copter for all I care!” She paused, looked around. “Where are we? Uh . . . I’m trying to see.”

There were no street signs—there were barely any streets— but Petra knew where they were.

“Franklin and Riopelle,” she said. “Ground zero.”

Stinson repeated that into the phone, screamed more threats.

The shimmering mass was a mound no more. Now it was a lumpy, four-foot-tall tower, maybe a foot wide at the base. The sheet of liquid blue suddenly sagged away from the mound, finally exposing the rock and brick.

Petra looked at the newly uncovered form.

Impossible . . . it can’t be . . .

“Oh, shit,” Roger said.

Stinson glanced at it. She stopped screaming into the phone. She stared.

Petra’s hands fell to her sides. She found herself looking at a statue of . . . of herself.

It wasn’t perfect. It was crude, actually, but there was no mistaking it was her; the hair hanging in front of her right eye and the long scarf left no doubt. The statue looked . . . regal.

Stinson turned, her face blazing with fury.

“What is this, Prawatt? Why did you make them build this? Why did you make them kill my men?”

Petra wanted to speak, but her mouth felt dry, glued shut.

Roger reached out, gently took Petra’s flashlight.

“Petra didn’t make them do anything,” he said. “They did this themselves.”

He pointed the beam to the base of the statue. There, in sparkling blue letters, were two words:

OUR CREATOR

The freezing air of a Michigan winter flooded deep into Petra’s soul. She didn’t feel angry, or afraid, or anything, really . . . she just felt cold.

The girl with the God complex had become just that: God.

—For research on this story, Sigler would like to thank the scientific consultants who helped him:
Jeremy Ellis, PhD, Robert Bevins, PhD, Andrew Allport, and Cassidy Cobbs.

© 2014 by Empty Set Entertainment.

Originally published in Robot Uprisings,

edited by Daniel H. Wilson & John Joseph Adams.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

New York Times bestselling novelist Scott Sigler is the author of the Infected trilogy (Infected, Contagious, and Pandemic), Ancestor, and Nocturnal, hardcover thrillers from Crown Publishing; and the co-founder of Empty Set Entertainment, which publishes his Galactic Football League series (The Rookie, The Starter, The All-Pro, and The MVP). Before he was published, Scott built a large online following by giving away his self-recorded audiobooks as free, serialized podcasts. His loyal fans, who named themselves “Junkies,” have downloaded over eight million individual episodes of his stories and interact daily with Scott and each other in the social media space.

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Exhalation
Ted Chiang

It has long been said that air (which others call argon) is the source of life. This is not in fact the case, and I engrave these words to describe how I came to understand the true source of life and, as a corollary, the means by which life will one day end.

For most of history, the proposition that we drew life from air was so obvious that there was no need to assert it. Every day we consume two lungs heavy with air; every day we remove the empty ones from our chest and replace them with full ones. If a person is careless and lets his air level run too low, he feels the heaviness of his limbs and the growing need for replenishment. It is exceedingly rare that a person is unable to get at least one replacement lung before his installed pair runs empty; on those unfortunate occasions where this has happened—when a person is trapped and unable to move, with no one nearby to assist him—he dies within seconds of his air running out.

But in the normal course of life, our need for air is far from our thoughts, and indeed many would say that satisfying that need is the least important part of going to the filling stations. For the filling stations are the primary venue for social conversation, the places from which we draw emotional sustenance as well as physical. We all keep spare sets of full lungs in our homes, but when one is alone, the act of opening one’s chest and replacing one’s lungs can seem little better than a chore. In the company of others, however, it becomes a communal activity, a shared pleasure.

If one is exceedingly busy, or feeling unsociable, one might simply pick up a pair of full lungs, install them, and leave one’s emptied lungs on the other side of the room. If one has a few minutes to spare, it’s simple courtesy to connect the empty lungs to an air dispenser and refill them for the next person. But by far the most common practice is to linger and enjoy the company of others, to discuss the news of the day with friends or acquaintances and, in passing, offer newly filled lungs to one’s interlocutor. While this perhaps does not constitute air sharing in the strictest sense, there is camaraderie derived from the awareness that all our air comes from the same source, for the dispensers are but the exposed terminals of pipes extending from the reservoir of air deep underground, the great lung of the world, the source of all our nourishment.

Many lungs are returned to the same filling station the next day, but just as many circulate to other stations when people visit neighboring districts; the lungs are all identical in appearance, smooth cylinders of aluminum, so one cannot tell whether a given lung has always stayed close to home or whether it has traveled long distances. And just as lungs are passed between persons and districts, so are news and gossip. In this way one can receive news from remote districts, even those at the very edge of the world, without needing to leave home, although I myself enjoy traveling. I have journeyed all the way to the edge of the world, and seen the solid chromium wall that extends from the ground up into the infinite sky.

It was at one of the filling stations that I first heard the rumors that prompted my investigation and led to my eventual enlightenment. It began innocently enough, with a remark from our district’s public crier. At noon of the first day of every year, it is traditional for the crier to recite a passage of verse, an ode composed long ago for this annual celebration, which takes exactly one hour to deliver. The crier mentioned that on his most recent performance, the turret clock struck the hour before he had finished, something that had never happened before. Another person remarked that this was a coincidence, because he had just returned from a nearby district where the public crier had complained of the same incongruity.

No one gave the matter much thought beyond the simple acknowledgement that seemed warranted. It was only some days later, when there arrived word of a similar deviation between the crier and the clock of a third district, that the suggestion was made that these discrepancies might be evidence of a defect in the mechanism common to all the turret clocks, albeit a curious one to cause the clocks to run faster rather than slower. Horologists investigated the turret clocks in question, but on inspection they could discern no imperfection. In fact, when compared against the timepieces normally employed for such calibration purposes, the turret clocks were all found to have resumed keeping perfect time.

I myself found the question somewhat intriguing, but I was too focused on my own studies to devote much thought to other matters. I was and am a student of anatomy, and to provide context for my subsequent actions, I now offer a brief account of my relationship with the field.

Death is uncommon, fortunately, because we are durable and fatal mishaps are rare, but it makes difficult the study of anatomy, especially since many of the accidents serious enough to cause death leave the deceased’s remains too damaged for study. If lungs are ruptured when full, the explosive force can tear a body asunder, ripping the titanium as easily as if it were tin. In the past, anatomists focused their attention on the limbs, which were the most likely to survive intact. During the very first anatomy lecture I attended a century ago, the lecturer showed us a severed arm, the casing removed to reveal the dense column of rods and pistons within. I can vividly recall the way, after he had connected its arterial hoses to a wall-mounted lung he kept in the laboratory, he was able to manipulate the actuating rods that protruded from the arm’s ragged base, and in response the hand would open and close fitfully.

In the intervening years, our field has advanced to the point where anatomists are able to repair damaged limbs and, on occasion, attach a severed limb. At the same time we have become capable of studying the physiology of the living; I have given a version of that first lecture I saw, during which I opened the casing of my own arm and directed my students’ attention to the rods that contracted and extended when I wiggled my fingers.

Despite these advances, the field of anatomy still had a great unsolved mystery at its core: the question of memory. While we knew a little about the structure of the brain, its physiology is notoriously hard to study because of the brain’s extreme delicacy. It is typically the case in fatal accidents that, when the skull is breached, the brain erupts in a cloud of gold, leaving little besides shredded filament and leaf from which nothing useful can be discerned. For decades the prevailing theory of memory was that all of a person’s experiences were engraved on sheets of gold foil; it was these sheets, torn apart by the force of the blast, that were the source of the tiny flakes found after accidents. Anatomists would collect the bits of gold leaf—so thin that light passes greenly through them—and spend years trying to reconstruct the original sheets, with the hope of eventually deciphering the symbols in which the deceased’s recent experiences were inscribed.

I did not subscribe to this theory, known as the inscription hypothesis, for the simple reason that if all our experiences are in fact recorded, why is it that our memories are incomplete? Advocates of the inscription hypothesis offered an explanation for forgetfulness—suggesting that over time the foil sheets become misaligned from the stylus which reads the memories, until the oldest sheets shift out of contact with it altogether—but I never found it convincing. The appeal of the theory was easy for me to appreciate, though; I too had devoted many an hour to examining flakes of gold through a microscope, and can imagine how gratifying it would be to turn the fine adjustment knob and see legible symbols come into focus.

More than that, how wonderful would it be to decipher the very oldest of a deceased person’s memories, ones that he himself had forgotten? None of us can remember much more than a hundred years in the past, and written records—accounts that we ourselves inscribed but have scant memory of doing so—extend only a few hundred years before that. How many years did we live before the beginning of written history? Where did we come from? It is the promise of finding the answers within our own brains that makes the inscription hypothesis so seductive.

I was a proponent of the competing school of thought, which held that our memories were stored in some medium in which the process of erasure was no more difficult than recording: perhaps in the rotation of gears, or the positions of a series of switches. This theory implied that everything we had forgotten was indeed lost, and our brains contained no histories older than those found in our libraries. One advantage of this theory was that it better explained why, when lungs are installed in those who have died from lack of air, the revived have no memories and are all but mindless: Somehow the shock of death had reset all the gears or switches. The inscriptionists claimed the shock had merely misaligned the foil sheets, but no one was willing to kill a living person, even an imbecile, in order to resolve the debate. I had envisioned an experiment which might allow me to determine the truth conclusively, but it was a risky one, and deserved careful consideration before it was undertaken. I remained undecided for the longest time, until I heard more news about the clock anomaly.

Word arrived from a more distant district that its public crier had likewise observed the turret clock striking the hour before he had finished his new year’s recital. What made this notable was that his district’s clock employed a different mechanism, one in which the hours were marked by the flow of mercury into a bowl. Here the discrepancy could not be explained by a common mechanical fault. Most people suspected fraud, a practical joke perpetrated by mischief makers. I had a different suspicion, a darker one that I dared not voice, but it decided my course of action; I would proceed with my experiment.

The first tool I constructed was the simplest: in my laboratory I fixed four prisms on mounting brackets and carefully aligned them so that their apexes formed the corners of a rectangle. When arranged thus, a beam of light directed at one of the lower prisms was reflected up, then backward, then down, and then forward again in a quadrilateral loop. Accordingly, when I sat with my eyes at the level of the first prism, I obtained a clear view of the back of my own head. This solipsistic periscope formed the basis of all that was to come.

A similarly rectangular arrangement of actuating rods allowed a displacement of action to accompany the displacement of vision afforded by the prisms. The bank of actuating rods was much larger than the periscope, but still relatively straightforward in design; by contrast, what was attached to the end of these respective mechanisms was far more intricate. To the periscope I added a binocular microscope mounted on an armature capable of swiveling side to side or up and down. To the actuating rods I added an array of precision manipulators, although that description hardly does justice to those pinnacles of the mechanician’s art. Combining the ingenuity of anatomists and the inspiration provided by the bodily structures they studied, the manipulators enabled their operator to accomplish any task he might normally perform with his own hands, but on a much smaller scale.

Assembling all of this equipment took months, but I could not afford to be anything less than meticulous. Once the preparations were complete, I was able to place each of my hands on a nest of knobs and levers and control a pair of manipulators situated behind my head, and use the periscope to see what they worked on. I would then be able to dissect my own brain.

The very idea must sound like pure madness, I know, and had I told any of my colleagues, they would surely have tried to stop me. But I could not ask anyone else to risk themselves for the sake of anatomical inquiry, and because I wished to conduct the dissection myself, I would not be satisfied by merely being the passive subject of such an operation. Auto-dissection was the only option.

I brought in a dozen full lungs and connected them with a manifold. I mounted this assembly beneath the worktable that I would sit at, and positioned a dispenser to connect directly to the bronchial inlets within my chest. This would supply me with six days’ worth of air. To provide for the possibility that I might not have completed my experiment within that period, I had scheduled a visit from a colleague at the end of that time. My presumption, however, was that the only way I would not have finished the operation in that period would be if I had caused my own death.

I began by removing the deeply curved plate that formed the back and top of my head; then the two, more shallowly curved plates that formed the sides. Only my faceplate remained, but it was locked into a restraining bracket, and I could not see its inner surface from the vantage point of my periscope; what I saw exposed was my own brain. It consisted of a dozen or more subassemblies, whose exteriors were covered by intricately molded shells; by positioning the periscope near the fissures that separated them, I gained a tantalizing glimpse at the fabulous mechanisms within their interiors. Even with what little I could see, I could tell it was the most beautifully complex engine I had ever beheld, so far beyond any device man had constructed that it was incontrovertibly of divine origin. The sight was both exhilarating and dizzying, and I savored it on a strictly aesthetic basis for several minutes before proceeding with my explorations.

It was generally hypothesized that the brain was divided into an engine located in the center of the head which performed the actual cognition, surrounded by an array of components in which memories were stored. What I observed was consistent with this theory, since the peripheral subassemblies seemed to resemble one another, while the subassembly in the center appeared to be different, more heterogeneous and with more moving parts. However the components were packed too closely for me to see much of their operation; if I intended to learn anything more, I would require a more intimate vantage point.

Each subassembly had a local reservoir of air, fed by a hose extending from the regulator at the base of my brain. I focused my periscope on the rearmost subassembly and, using the remote manipulators, I quickly disconnected the outlet hose and installed a longer one in its place. I had practiced this maneuver countless times so that I could perform it in a matter of moments; even so, I was not certain I could complete the connection before the subassembly had depleted its local reservoir. Only after I was satisfied that the component’s operation had not been interrupted did I continue; I rearranged the longer hose to gain a better view of what lay in the fissure behind it: other hoses that connected it to its neighboring components. Using the most slender pair of manipulators to reach into the narrow crevice, I replaced the hoses one by one with longer substitutes. Eventually, I had worked my way around the entire subassembly and replaced every connection it had to the rest of my brain. I was now able to unmount this subassembly from the frame that supported it, and pull the entire section outside of what was once the back of my head.

I knew it was possible I had impaired my capacity to think and was unable to recognize it, but performing some basic arithmetic tests suggested that I was uninjured. With one subassembly hanging from a scaffold above, I now had a better view of the cognition engine at the center of my brain, but there was not enough room to bring the microscope attachment itself in for a close inspection. In order for me to really examine the workings of my brain, I would have to displace at least half a dozen subassemblies.

Laboriously, painstakingly, I repeated the procedure of substituting hoses for other subassemblies, repositioning another one farther back, two more higher up, and two others out to the sides, suspending all six from the scaffold above my head. When I was done, my brain looked like an explosion frozen an infinitesimal fraction of a second after the detonation, and again I felt dizzy when I thought about it. But at last the cognition engine itself was exposed, supported on a pillar of hoses and actuating rods leading down into my torso. I now also had room to rotate my microscope around a full three hundred and sixty degrees, and pass my gaze across the inner faces of the subassemblies I had moved. What I saw was a microcosm of auric machinery, a landscape of tiny spinning rotors and miniature reciprocating cylinders.

As I contemplated this vista, I wondered, where was my body? The conduits which displaced my vision and action around the room were in principle no different from those which connected my original eyes and hands to my brain. For the duration of this experiment, were these manipulators not essentially my hands? Were the magnifying lenses at the end of my periscope not essentially my eyes? I was an everted person, with my tiny, fragmented body situated at the center of my own distended brain. It was in this unlikely configuration that I began to explore myself.

I turned my microscope to one of the memory subassemblies, and began examining its design. I had no expectation that I would be able to decipher my memories, only that I might divine the means by which they were recorded. As I had predicted, there were no reams of foil pages visible, but to my surprise neither did I see banks of gearwheels or switches. Instead, the subassembly seemed to consist almost entirely of a bank of air tubules. Through the interstices between the tubules I was able to glimpse ripples passing through the bank’s interior.

With careful inspection and increasing magnification, I discerned that the tubules ramified into tiny air capillaries, which were interwoven with a dense latticework of wires on which gold leaves were hinged. Under the influence of air escaping from the capillaries, the leaves were held in a variety of positions. These were not switches in the conventional sense, for they did not retain their position without a current of air to support them, but I hypothesized that these were the switches I had sought, the medium in which my memories were recorded. The ripples I saw must have been acts of recall, as an arrangement of leaves was read and sent back to the cognition engine.

Armed with this new understanding, I then turned my microscope to the cognition engine. Here too I observed a latticework of wires, but they did not bear leaves suspended in position; instead the leaves flipped back and forth almost too rapidly to see. Indeed, almost the entire engine appeared to be in motion, consisting more of lattice than of air capillaries, and I wondered how air could reach all the gold leaves in a coherent manner. For many hours I scrutinized the leaves, until I realized that they themselves were playing the role of capillaries; the leaves formed temporary conduits and valves that existed just long enough to redirect air at other leaves in turn, and then disappeared as a result. This was an engine undergoing continuous transformation, indeed modifying itself as part of its operation. The lattice was not so much a machine as it was a page on which the machine was written, and on which the machine itself ceaselessly wrote.

My consciousness could be said to be encoded in the position of these tiny leaves, but it would be more accurate to say that it was encoded in the ever-shifting pattern of air driving these leaves. Watching the oscillations of these flakes of gold, I saw that air does not, as we had always assumed, simply provide power to the engine that realizes our thoughts. Air is in fact the very medium of our thoughts. All that we are is a pattern of air flow. My memories were inscribed, not as grooves on foil or even the position of switches, but as persistent currents of argon.

In the moments after I grasped the nature of this lattice mechanism, a cascade of insights penetrated my consciousness in rapid succession. The first and most trivial was understanding why gold, the most malleable and ductile of metals, was the only material out of which our brains could be made. Only the thinnest of foil leaves could move rapidly enough for such a mechanism, and only the most delicate of filaments could act as hinges for them. By comparison, the copper burr raised by my stylus as I engrave these words and brushed from the sheet when I finish each page is as coarse and heavy as scrap. This truly was a medium where erasing and recording could be performed rapidly, far more so than any arrangement of switches or gears.

What next became clear was why installing full lungs into a person who has died from lack of air does not bring him back to life. These leaves within the lattice remain balanced between continuous cushions of air. This arrangement lets them flit back and forth swiftly, but it also means that if the flow of air ever ceases, everything is lost; the leaves all collapse into identical pendent states, erasing the patterns and the consciousness they represent. Restoring the air supply cannot recreate what has evanesced. This was the price of speed; a more stable medium for storing patterns would mean that our consciousnesses would operate far more slowly.

It was then that I perceived the solution to the clock anomaly. I saw that the speed of these leaves’ movements depended on their being supported by air; with sufficient air flow, the leaves could move nearly frictionlessly. If they were moving more slowly, it was because they were being subjected to more friction, which could occur only if the cushions of air that supported them were thinner, and the air flowing through the lattice was moving with less force.

It is not that the turret clocks are running faster. What is happening is that our brains are running slower. The turret clocks are driven by pendulums, whose tempo never varies, or by the flow of mercury through a pipe, which does not change. But our brains rely on the passage of air, and when that air flows more slowly, our thoughts slow down, making the clocks seem to us to run faster.

I had feared that our brains might be growing slower, and it was this prospect that had spurred me to pursue my auto-dissection. But I had assumed that our cognition engines—while powered by air—were ultimately mechanical in nature, and some aspect of the mechanism was gradually becoming deformed through fatigue, and thus responsible for the slowing. That would have been dire, but there was at least the hope that we might be able to repair the mechanism, and restore our brains to their original speed of operation.

But if our thoughts were purely patterns of air rather than the movement of toothed gears, the problem was much more serious, for what could cause the air flowing through every person’s brain to move less rapidly? It could not be a decrease in the pressure from our filling stations’ dispensers; the air pressure in our lungs is so high that it must be stepped down by a series of regulators before reaching our brains. The diminution in force, I saw, must arise from the opposite direction: The pressure of our surrounding atmosphere was increasing.

How could this be? As soon as the question formed, the only possible answer became apparent: Our sky must not be infinite in height. Somewhere above the limits of our vision, the chromium walls surrounding our world must curve inward to form a dome; our universe is a sealed chamber rather than an open well. And air is gradually accumulating within that chamber, until it equals the pressure in the reservoir below.

This is why, at the beginning of this engraving, I said that air is not the source of life. Air can neither be created nor destroyed; the total amount of air in the universe remains constant, and if air were all that we needed to live, we would never die. But in truth the source of life is a difference in air pressure, the flow of air from spaces where it is thick to those where it is thin. The activity of our brains, the motion of our bodies, the action of every machine we have ever built is driven by the movement of air, the force exerted as differing pressures seek to balance each other out. When the pressure everywhere in the universe is the same, all air will be motionless, and useless; one day we will be surrounded by motionless air and unable to derive any benefit from it.

We are not really consuming air at all. The amount of air that I draw from each day’s new pair of lungs is exactly as much as seeps out through the joints of my limbs and the seams of my casing, exactly as much as I am adding to the atmosphere around me; all I am doing is converting air at high pressure to air at low. With every movement of my body, I contribute to the equalization of pressure in our universe. With every thought that I have, I hasten the arrival of that fatal equilibrium.

Had I come to this realization under any other circumstance, I would have leapt up from my chair and ran into the streets, but in my current situation—body locked in a restraining bracket, brain suspended across my laboratory—doing so was impossible. I could see the leaves of my brain flitting faster from the tumult of my thoughts, which in turn increased my agitation at being so restrained and immobile. Panic at that moment might have led to my death, a nightmarish paroxysm of simultaneously being trapped and spiraling out of control, struggling against my restraints until my air ran out. It was by chance as much as by intention that my hands adjusted the controls to avert my periscopic gaze from the latticework, so all I could see was the plain surface of my worktable. Thus freed from having to see and magnify my own apprehensions, I was able to calm down. When I had regained sufficient composure, I began the lengthy process of reassembling myself. Eventually I restored my brain to its original compact configuration, reattached the plates of my head, and released myself from the restraining bracket.

At first the other anatomists did not believe me when I told them what I had discovered, but in the months that followed my initial auto-dissection, more and more of them became convinced. More examinations of people’s brains were performed, more measurements of atmospheric pressure were taken, and the results were all found to confirm my claims. The background air pressure of our universe was indeed increasing, and slowing our thoughts as a result.

There was widespread panic in the days after the truth first became widely known, as people contemplated for the first time the idea that death was inevitable. Many called for the strict curtailment of activities in order to minimize the thickening of our atmosphere; accusations of wasted air escalated into furious brawls and, in some districts, deaths. It was the shame of having caused these deaths, together with the reminder that it would be many centuries yet before our atmosphere’s pressure became equal to that of the reservoir underground, that caused the panic to subside. We are not sure precisely how many centuries it will take; additional measurements and calculations are being performed and debated. In the meantime, there is much discussion over how we should spend the time that remains to us.

One sect has dedicated itself to the goal of reversing the equalization of pressure, and found many adherents. The mechanicians among them constructed an engine that takes air from our atmosphere and forces it into a smaller volume, a process they called “compression.” Their engine restores air to the pressure it originally had in the reservoir, and these Reversalists excitedly announced that it would form the basis of a new kind of filling station, one that would—with each lung it refilled—revitalize not only individuals but the universe itself. Alas, closer examination of the engine revealed its fatal flaw. The engine itself is powered by air from the reservoir, and for every lungful of air that it produces, the engine consumes not just a lungful, but slightly more. It does not reverse the process of equalization, but like everything else in the world, exacerbates it.

Although some of their adherents left in disillusionment after this setback, the Reversalists as a group were undeterred, and began drawing up alternate designs in which the compressor was powered instead by the uncoiling of springs or the descent of weights. These mechanisms fared no better. Every spring that is wound tight represents air released by the person who did the winding; every weight that rests higher than ground level represents air released by the person who did the lifting. There is no source of power in the universe that does not ultimately derive from a difference in air pressure, and there can be no engine whose operation will not, on balance, reduce that difference.

The Reversalists continue their labors, confident that they will one day construct an engine that generates more compression than it uses, a perpetual power source that will restore to the universe its lost vigor. I do not share their optimism; I believe that the process of equalization is inexorable. Eventually, all the air in our universe will be evenly distributed, no denser or more rarefied in one spot than in any other, unable to drive a piston, turn a rotor, or flip a leaf of gold foil. It will be the end of pressure, the end of motive power, the end of thought. The universe will have reached perfect equilibrium.

Some find irony in the fact that a study of our brains revealed to us not the secrets of the past, but what ultimately awaits us in the future. However, I maintain that we have indeed learned something important about the past. The universe began as an enormous breath being held. Who knows why, but whatever the reason, I am glad that it did, because I owe my existence to that fact. All my desires and ruminations are no more and no less than eddy currents generated by the gradual exhalation of our universe. And until this great exhalation is finished, my thoughts live on.

So that our thoughts may continue as long as possible, anatomists and mechanicians are designing replacements for our cerebral regulators, capable of gradually increasing the air pressure within our brains and keeping it just higher than the surrounding atmospheric pressure. Once these are installed, our thoughts will continue at roughly the same speed even as the air thickens around us. But this does not mean that life will continue unchanged. Eventually the pressure differential will fall to such a level that our limbs will weaken and our movements will grow sluggish. We may then try to slow our thoughts so that our physical torpor is less conspicuous to us, but that will also cause external processes to appear to accelerate. The ticking of clocks will rise to a chatter as their pendulums wave frantically; falling objects will slam to the ground as if propelled by springs; undulations will race down cables like the crack of a whip.

At some point our limbs will cease moving altogether. I cannot be certain of the precise sequence of events near the end, but I imagine a scenario in which our thoughts will continue to operate, so that we remain conscious but frozen, immobile as statues. Perhaps we’ll be able to speak for a while longer, because our voice boxes operate on a smaller pressure differential than our limbs, but without the ability to visit a filling station, every utterance will reduce the amount of air left for thought, and bring us closer to the moment that our thoughts cease altogether. Will it be preferable to remain mute to prolong our ability to think, or to talk until the very end? I don’t know.

Perhaps a few of us, in the days before we cease moving, will be able to connect our cerebral regulators directly to the dispensers in the filling stations, in effect replacing our lungs with the mighty lung of the world. If so, those few will be able to remain conscious right up to the final moments before all pressure is equalized. The last bit of air pressure left in our universe will be expended driving a person’s conscious thought.

And then, our universe will be in a state of absolute equilibrium. All life and thought will cease, and with them, time itself.

But I maintain a slender hope.

Even though our universe is enclosed, perhaps it is not the only air chamber in the infinite expanse of solid chromium. I speculate that there could be another pocket of air elsewhere, another universe besides our own that is even larger in volume. It is possible that this hypothetical universe has the same or higher air pressure as ours, but suppose that it had a much lower air pressure than ours, perhaps even a true vacuum?

The chromium that separates us from this supposed universe is too thick and too hard for us to drill through, so there is no way we could reach it ourselves, no way to bleed off the excess atmosphere from our universe and regain motive power that way. But I fantasize that this neighboring universe has its own inhabitants, ones with capabilities beyond our own. What if they were able to create a conduit between the two universes, and install valves to release air from ours? They might use our universe as a reservoir, running dispensers with which they could fill their own lungs, and use our air as a way to drive their own civilization.

It cheers me to imagine that the air that once powered me could power others, to believe that the breath that enables me to engrave these words could one day flow through someone else’s body. I do not delude myself into thinking that this would be a way for me to live again, because I am not that air, I am the pattern that it assumed, temporarily. The pattern that is me, the patterns that are the entire world in which I live, would be gone.

But I have an even fainter hope: that those inhabitants not only use our universe as a reservoir, but that once they have emptied it of its air, they might one day be able to open a passage and actually enter our universe as explorers. They might wander our streets, see our frozen bodies, look through our possessions, and wonder about the lives we led.

Which is why I have written this account. You, I hope, are one of those explorers. You, I hope, found these sheets of copper and deciphered the words engraved on their surfaces. And whether or not your brain is impelled by the air that once impelled mine, through the act of reading my words, the patterns that form your thoughts become an imitation of the patterns that once formed mine. And in that way I live again, through you.

Your fellow explorers will have found and read the other books that we left behind, and through the collaborative action of your imaginations, my entire civilization lives again. As you walk through our silent districts, imagine them as they were; with the turret clocks striking the hours, the filling stations crowded with gossiping neighbors, criers reciting verse in the public squares and anatomists giving lectures in the classrooms. Visualize all of these the next time you look at the frozen world around you, and it will become, in your minds, animated and vital again.

I wish you well, explorer, but I wonder: Does the same fate that befell me await you? I can only imagine that it must, that the tendency toward equilibrium is not a trait peculiar to our universe but inherent in all universes. Perhaps that is just a limitation of my thinking, and your people have discovered a source of pressure that is truly eternal. But my speculations are fanciful enough already. I will assume that one day your thoughts too will cease, although I cannot fathom how far in the future that might be. Your lives will end just as ours did, just as everyone’s must. No matter how long it takes, eventually equilibrium will be reached.

I hope you are not saddened by that awareness. I hope that your expedition was more than a search for other universes to use as reservoirs. I hope that you were motivated by a desire for knowledge, a yearning to see what can arise from a universe’s exhalation. Because even if a universe’s lifespan is calculable, the variety of life that is generated within it is not. The buildings we have erected, the art and music and verse we have composed, the very lives we’ve led: None of them could have been predicted, because none of them were inevitable. Our universe might have slid into equilibrium emitting nothing more than a quiet hiss. The fact that it spawned such plenitude is a miracle, one that is matched only by your universe giving rise to you.

Though I am long dead as you read this, explorer, I offer to you a valediction. Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so. I feel I have the right to tell you this because, as I am inscribing these words, I am doing the same.

© 2008 by Ted Chiang.

Originally published in Eclipse 2, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Ted Chiang is the author of Stories of Your Life and Others. He was born and raised in Port Jefferson, New York, and attended Brown University, where he received a degree in computer science. His debut story “Tower of Babylon” won the Nebula in 1990. Since then, he has won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1992, a Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for “Story of Your Life” (1998), a Sidewise Award for “Seventy-Two Letters” (2000), a Nebula Award, a Locus Award, and a Hugo Award for his novelette “Hell Is the Absence of God” (2002), a Nebula Award and a Hugo Award for his novelette “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” (2007), a Hugo Award and a Locus Award for his short story “Exhalation” (2008), and most recently, a Hugo Award and a Locus Award for his novella The Lifecycle of Software Objects (2010). He lives outside of Seattle, Washington.

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Observations About Eggs from the Man Sitting Next to Me on a Flight from Chicago, Illinois to Cedar Rapids, Iowa
Carmen Maria Machado

1. Lord, it’s hot in this cabin. I could hard-boil an egg inside my mouth. What’s your name?

2. Have you ever poached an egg? The trick is white vinegar. Everyone forgets the white vinegar, and the blasted thing falls apart, and then they miss one of the greatest wonders of the world. Here’s what you do: Add it to the boiling water. The vinegar, I mean. Break the egg into a bowl, not directly into the pot. Next, spin a spoon in the vinegar water and make a vortex. Drop the egg inside of it. If you look down, you can see the dense heart of the yolk through the clear atmosphere of white, and it is not entirely unlike looking at the Earth from space. The heat will make the egg go opaque. If the water is the right temperature, you can see it happening in slow motion—the yolk developing a skin, then the white going, well, white. It’s like watching the egg being formed inside the looped guts of a warm and bleating hen. Bleating, not bleeding.

Anyway, when you watch the egg like this, you are seeing what only a god might see. This might seem like just a quaint observation, but what if I told you that by imagining yourself a god while watching an egg being formed, you become that god, for just a second or two? Of course, now that I’ve said it, now that I’ve told you about this little quirk of the natural world, you’ll never be able to actually do it. That’s the rule, and I didn’t make it. But if, before I told you of these temporary god-powers, you had been watching that egg poaching, and at that precise moment wished to create an entirely new world, somewhere in all of existence, it would have popped into being, and though you wouldn’t have known it, it would have been there, and you would have been its deity. And periodically you would find scraps of paper in your pocket with words scrawled on them or you’d mishear a fragment of a sentence spoken by a coworker or you’d discover Word documents you didn’t remember creating, and the truth is those would have been the prayers of your created people, calling out to you because they feel lost and alone and afraid. It is a very terrible thing to be a god and I don’t really recommend it.

3. Have you ever seen a frozen egg? No? I’m sorry for you. You have not been so fortunately careless as to leave the carton too close to the top shelf of the fridge, as I have. The shell pops off like a bottle cap, and if you pull out the contents, the whole inside of the egg sits in your hand like a stone. If you pinch the white, it comes apart like snow. Beneath running water, the white falls away and the yolk is gold, hard. It sits in your hand like an oversized marble. It’s the most perfect shade of yellow. In some countries, none of them accessible by a plane like this one, four of these yolks can be exchanged for the basic necessities: seeds, a sack of potatoes, one shoe—though for the other, you’ll need four more yolks. If you plant them in the ground, there are rumors that better things than potatoes might grow. But these are just rumors, and you might end up hungrier than before.

4. Have you ever opened an egg and seen the inside of another egg? No? Are you sure? Here is how you can tell: Crack open an egg. Look inside. Sometimes, in another place entirely, another person has also cracked open an egg and is also looking inside, and you are both, in fact, looking at the innards of the exact same egg. If you examine the egg carefully enough, you will find that the scene being reflected back at you in the gelatinous curve of the yolk is not, in fact, your own kitchen, with its fluorescent light bulb, dirty counter, Matisse print, and collection of empty wine bottles, but rather a different kitchen, possibly in Brooklyn, possibly in Big Sur, possibly in an alternate universe to your own, with an entirely different face peering back at you. You cannot crawl through the common egg into that other place, though, so don’t try. Greater women than you have tried and failed.

5. I once dated a woman who thought that you had to cut a cow open to get the milk inside. What a silly thing—the idea and the woman. And what a mess to try. All that blood, curling into the milk, spoiling it. What a waste.

The egg, now. Eggs are more practical. They can be cut out of hens, though this is rarely necessary. And if that happens, and the eggs are covered in down feathers and blood, they can be washed clean, and nothing is ruined—all is perfectly usable. Well, except for the hen, ha-ha!

6. An egg is the most dangerous thing in the universe.

7. Have you ever gone to the farmer’s market and paid a little extra for those brown eggs that look so healthful, the kind that you know were warming under hens that very morning, and carry the carton home, and crack open one, and a fetal dragon flops out into the pan? No? If this ever happens to you, know that the dragons will all be dead. They were taken away from their mothers; they never had a chance to survive. If you put the unbroken ones beneath a heat lamp, they’ll just spoil. These are not Schrödinger’s eggs. There was never a chance you could have hatched a dragon army, and anyway, it would have been foolish to try. Dragons always eventually turn on you, and in a way that makes you regret all of your decisions. Anyway, if you return to the market for edible eggs, the stand will most likely be vacant. Dragon eggshells are a powerful aphrodisiac, though, so don’t throw them away.

8. Hermann Hesse wrote, “The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world.” I know a few truths about Hermann Hesse that aren’t exactly common knowledge, but I can assure you that he is using fewer metaphors in that sentence than you might think. Also, Hermann Hesse was a bastard and I don’t want to talk about him anymore.

9. You look like a person who has eaten a few eggs in her lifetime. How many would you estimate? Five hundred? A thousand? The trouble is that eggs are in everything, so even if you are able to think about your self-prepared and ordered breakfasts, and church potluck deviled egg trays with their easily quantifiable eggs, it’s hard to add up all of the baked goods and cream sauces and mayonnaise on your sandwiches, and anything else that might have contained an egg. But let’s say you’ve eaten one thousand eggs in your lifetime. One thousand eggs, each of which was full of potential life.

Now, don’t look at me like that, I’m not talking vegan-talk, I’m just saying that sometimes food is full of wonder and you really should think about it. Imagine that one thousand chickens could have possibly been born, and they would have gone about pecking and watching and thinking chicken thoughts and dreaming chicken dreams and nibbling and fighting other chickens, and eventually would have fallen beneath the blade or gone to chicken-sleep and never woken up. You are now full of those chickens, their potential wishes and dreams and—don’t laugh!—their experiences. Their lives, and their deaths. Somewhere inside of you, you are contentedly strutting about the dirt, in the sun. Somewhere inside of you, your head is missing and you are chasing a farmer’s terrified child across the yard. I think, in a way, we are all one thousand chickens.

10. It is a really good thing to smash an egg, very satisfying. I don’t just mean just to drop one, but take it in your hand and splat it with all of your might against a hard surface. I once visited a village between two great mountains where this was a common pastime. It could get competitive! The winner was measured by the distance the egg innards were strewn. If the yolk got on the judges, well, that was a bonus. It was a very strange little village with some very strange people, but they had been through a lot of hardships in their lifetimes, so they can be forgiven some eccentricities.

11. I’m pretty sure that the stewardess—my apologies, the flight attendant, you can only say so much nowadays—does have some eggs in the back, with the meal-trays, but perhaps not enough for everyone, and so she doesn’t want to make anybody jealous. Plus, I’m sure first class would take all the eggs if given the chance, and then there wouldn’t be enough eggs for all of us cattle back here, ha-ha! You were probably smart to bring your own eggs in that little lunchbox, even if it does count as your carry-on.

12. People forgot about Patsy Cline’s parallel universe theories because they were so busy singing her songs. Can you imagine a fate worse than that? I’ll never record a ballad as long as I live. Anyway, she believed that all of the parallel universes touched each other in the wet places of the world. Puddles and spilled milk and even bits of the body, all creating little puckers in time and space and touching realities together. She was right, of course. Sometimes, before shows, they would find her in her dressing room pushing her fingers through eggs, calling in a singsongy voice to that child she lost. You know, Patsy herself died in a plane crash. Not a plane like this, mind you, a small one. Not like this. Don’t look so worried.

13. Here is the embarrassing truth: I know you. We’ve met before. We shared an egg, once. Don’t you remember? Of course not, it was your first time egg-side, and I’d done it many times before. Just because I’m an old man and you’re some young thing does not mean that we have not shared experiences. You didn’t have a name yet, but I’d recognize that pretty mouth anywhere. I remember seeing you and thinking, she knows so little, but so much of the world is ahead of her. She is so beautiful; maybe one day I will run into her again and see her shining face. So of course, you can imagine my disappointment when I saw you here, familiar, but looking so sullen, so angry. Smile! You survived. We were one of a dozen double-yolks, cracked open and born into this world—well, I was reborn, but it all amounts to the same—and you look pretty good, if I say so myself. So be grateful to live in a world with eggs, which give us life and have so many uses besides.

14. Miss, I don’t think she meant to throw the egg at me per se, she’s just a little worn out from the flight. I am certain that it was an accident. No, I can stay here. It was just an accident. Isn’t that right? Ha-ha!

15. That hardboiled egg looks delicious, and I think I should like a bite.

© 2014 by Carmen Maria Machado.

Carmen Maria Machado is a fiction writer, critic, and essayist whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, AGNI, The American Reader, Tin House’s Open Bar, The Paris Review, Five Chapters, Strange Horizons, Best Women’s Erotica 2012, VICE, Los Angeles Review of Books, and many other publications. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. She lives in Philadelphia.

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The Day the World Turned Upside Down
Thomas Olde Heuvelt
(translated by Lia Belt)

That day, the world turned upside down.

We didn’t know why it happened. Some of us wondered whether it was our fault. Whether we had been praying to the wrong gods, or whether we had said the wrong things. But it wasn’t like that—the world simply turned upside down.

Scientists lucky enough to survive the event said that it wasn’t so much that gravity had disappeared, but that it had flipped over, as if our planet had suddenly lost all of its mass and was surrounded by some colossal object. Religious people, unlucky enough to survive the miracle, said that life was give and take, and that God was now, after so many years of giving, finally taking. But there was no colossal object, and being taken by God is a dubious given.

It happened like a bolt from the blue, at ten-o-five AM. There was a moment, one magical moment, when you could see us all floating in mid-air halfway up our living rooms, upside-down in whatever pose we had been in at the time—coffee drinkers drinking coffee from inverted coffee cups, lovers clinging to each other’s falling bodies, old men groping for slipping hairpieces, children crowing and cats screeching, all of us surrounded by the asteroids of our possessions. It was a moment of perfect madness, frozen in time.

Then began the groaning and the clattering, the roars and the screams. It was pandemonium. We crashed against ceilings and got crushed beneath the rubble of our old lives. Skulls cracked. Necks broke. Babies bounced. Most of us died on the spot or protruded convulsing from holes in plasterboard ceilings. Those who survived lay bewildered on top of them, trying to comprehend what had just happened.

But woe the ones who were outside. Before anyone even realized that the sky was no longer above, but below us, people started falling from the face of the Earth. In no time, the sky was dotted with tumbling people, fluttering clothes, floundering dogs, careening cars, clattering roof tiles, mooing cattle, and whirling autumn leaves in colors that set the sky ablaze. People sitting on their porches somersaulted until they landed on creaking awnings and stared out over their rims into fathomless depths. A mole sticking its nose up from the ground was seized by reversed gravity, and a whale jumping from the waves would never dive back into the sea. Tired of her burden, Mother Earth shook off anything that wasn’t tied firmly down to her surface. In one upwards thrust, it all fell into the atmosphere. Planes, satellites, and space stations disappeared into the vacuum, and even Father Moon was pushed away from us. We saw him dwindle and dwindle, until he landed in his own sad orbit around the sun. He never even said goodbye.

And me?

I was lying on the couch, not doing anything really. I wasn’t reading a book or watching TV. If the world had come to an end, I wouldn’t even have noticed.

I was staring at my phone, waiting for you to call.

• • •

It was the second time in two days that the world had come to an end. The first time was when you lowered your eyes the day before and said: It’s not you, it’s me. It was the last lie between us, or actually the first lie of not-us, because you no longer wanted an us. What I felt was the best thing in my life, for you had been a burden. Without me. You wanted to be without me.

My heart shattered to pieces on my abdominal wall. Large chunks of deep, staggering hurt and dismay at how calmly you announced these words, without the tiniest clue that this was the most painful thing you’d ever had to tell me, that you would die a thousand deaths rather than having to tell me this. You were the love of my life, and it had never occurred to me that you might take that away from me. I tried to pretend I understood, that I didn’t blame you for not wanting to try anymore, that all my frustration and pain were no match for your frustration and pain. I loved you too much to even be mad at you.

We stood in the corridor as I choked out the words. “Are you really, really, really sure?”

“No. Yes.”

“You said no.”

“Yes.”

“But couldn’t we . . .”

“No.”

“But couldn’t we . . .”

“No, Toby. I’m sorry.”

In the silence I heard my shaking breath. You fidgeted nervously with your purse, searching for some way to open the front door. What a horrible, horrible place a corridor is: halfway between staying and leaving. I gathered all my courage and asked, “So we’re no longer . . .”

Finally you looked at me, with tears in your eyes, and then you slowly shook your head. I struggled to hold back my tears, but they came anyway. That broke you down as well. We held each other for a long time, close and tight, and holding you like that was the hardest thing I had ever done. Then you let go.

I smiled through my tears.

You smiled through your tears.

“Omnomnom?” I asked.

“Nomnomnom,” you said. And then you disappeared down the stairs.

For the first half hour I resolved to show myself a valuable and sound person and not throw in the towel. I forced my tears back into my eyes and started doing the dishes. But as your lips on the glasses dissolved in the suds, I was constantly being haunted by visions of other men caressing the skin I wanted to caress, kissing the mouth I wanted to kiss, and fucking the girl I had made love to for such long nights. Visions that made me attack the crockery with so much aimless remorse that trembling glasses took cover beneath dinner plates, and I started toying with the terrifying yet tempting idea of smashing a glass on the kitchen counter and slicing my wrists with the shards. Later that same afternoon, I discovered you had changed your Facebook status to “single,” even though it had taken you weeks to reluctantly agree to the opposite, and I dumped my laptop in the cold dishwater. And early that night, the emptiness you left behind descended on me altogether and I was alone, alone in the full extent of my grief.

It was late when you texted me. I was lying on the couch, not really asleep and not really awake. The shards of my heart leapt up in my stomach.

Bubbles is still at your place. I’ll come pick him up tomorrow.

That was it. No Are you home tomorrow? or Maybe we can talk about it some more. No How about you brew us a pot of Minty Morocco, which you always liked so much, and not even How are you now? Just: I’ll come pick him up tomorrow. From across the other side of the room, Bubbles stared wistfully in the murky water of his fishbowl, and more than anything else, that stare made it irreversible.

Oh, Sophie, you are so incredibly, immensely, inimitably dear to me. Why did you have to do this?

• • •

When it all happened, I had a throw cushion pressed to my face. Maybe it was some sort of effort to close myself off from the world tumbling down around me a little too literally. And so my landing on the ceiling was remarkably gentle. The plasterboards broke my fall; the backrest of the couch guarded my bones from breaking. In a daze, I crawled out from underneath it, without so much as a scratch.

The first thing one experiences after gravity has flipped and the initial turmoil has died down is not shock, but disorientation. I didn’t even realize I had landed on the ceiling and my living room was upside-down. I didn’t think of an earthquake, even though the air-raid alarm was whooping. Before I had a chance to form a thought or two, I saw something between the ubiquitous chaos of shattered furniture, snapped houseplants, strewn potting soil, dangling electrical wires, and splintered pictures of you and me—something that froze my blood.

Bubbles’ fishbowl had shattered.

He was floundering in a puddle of water between the shards, panicked.

And that’s when my phone rang.

I found it beneath a flap of carpet, but right then the air-raid alarm outside stopped and the phone went mute. When I checked the display and saw that you were the one who had called me, my heart started pounding. I immediately tried calling you back, but there was no signal. I tried again and again, over and over, whatever it was that had happened, you had survived, you had tried to reach me before the network failed, and Bubbles jumped up in a final effort to draw my attention, gasping like a fish on dry land, and then lay still, dying.

I was alive.

You were alive.

Bubbles was alive.

I jumped up lickety-split and started rummaging between the wreckage, but the best thing I could find on such short notice was your half empty bottle of 7-Up. I started shaking it like mad to let the carbon dioxide out, dipping my fingertips into the puddle of water between the broken glass and tenderly wetting Bubbles’s orange scales. But then the impatient goldfish swished his tail, as if to spur me into action. I took a sip, found that all the carbonation had dissipated, wriggled Bubbles in through the bottleneck, and held my breath until I heard a satisfying splash.

Fish and lemon go well together.

When I glanced over at the window and looked outside, the world instantly started teetering. I lived on the third floor of a three-story apartment building. The houses on the other side of the park were hanging upside-down from the surface of the Earth, which was above me now, groaning under its own weight. The roofs had released their tiles, and also the trees hung upside-down, just like the swings and slides and the laundry on the lines in the garden of my neighbor across the street. Utterly speechless, I grabbed the bottle holding unfortunate Bubbles, his pouting lips gasping for oxygen just above the soda surface, and crawled across the ceiling, over the upturned couch toward the upturned window. That’s where the depth of the atmosphere washed over me in a dizzying wave, and for a moment I sat there, frozen, afraid to even shed any tears, worried that they might prove too much for the wobbly ceiling. The scene outside was so incredibly at odds with the laws of nature that I wanted to grab on to the window frame to keep myself from falling up, but gravity held me pressed up against the ceiling and it was only my stomach going topsy-turvy.

I didn’t see any people, except for one: a woman dangling from the playground fence.

She was hanging from the bars, her knuckles white, her legs in the void, and her back turned so I couldn’t see her face. On her arms, two oh-so-bothersome Kroger bags were trying to drag her down.

With extreme care, I raised myself up and opened the upturned window. My heart in my throat, and my hands on the window frame, I leaned out. “Ma’am?”

My voice startled her, but she was afraid to look down, worried that the least little shift in balance might make her lose her grip. “I need help!” she shouted, remarkably calm for her remarkably precarious position.

“What happened?” I yelled.

“It’s Christmas time, all right? I can’t hold on for much longer!”

“Wait! Hang on there!”

“I had no other plans!”

“Sorry! I mean . . . I’m coming to help you!”

But by some unfortunate coincidence, the rusty axle of my bike, dangling twenty-five feet higher up from its chain lock fastened to the bicycle stand, chose that exact moment to snap. As the wheel dangled up there, the frame tumbled down and, in passing, smashed my open window to pieces. Startled, I let go of the 7-Up bottle. It flew out of my hand and landed on the bottom of the gutter, rolled away from the window . . . and stopped right on the edge, out of my reach.

Bubbles, in the throes of an acute case of hyperventilation, darted from one end of the bottle to the other as quickly as his delicate fins would carry him. I looked from the tormented goldfish to the unhappily dangling woman—“Please hurry!” she yelled now—and suddenly I saw your face. You had tried to call me.

In a world that wasn’t upside-down, you were the only thing that mattered.

I scrambled up and worked my way through the tumbled-over living room, over the knee-high threshold into the corridor, where strips of linoleum were hanging down and water from the toilet cistern had collected on the ceiling, then over the knee-high threshold into the kitchen. If possible, the mayhem was even worse in there: cupboard doors ripped from their hinges, open drawers, strewn cutlery, pots and pans thrown from the shelves and a ragged hole in the ceiling panels where the fridge had burst right through and from which daylight now shone. Quickly, quickly, balancing on my toes, I reached for the bottom cupboard, got buried in kitchen gear when I opened the door and, inside, found what I was looking for: the lashing rope for the trailer.

The end of the world creates two sorts of people: heroes and cowards. When the dangling woman had finally gathered enough courage to glance over her shoulder and saw me clambering from the open window, one end of the lashing rope tied around the couch in the living room and the other end around my waist, she must have thought I belonged to the former. Unaware of something cold that had seized me that same moment, she mumbled, “Thank God.” And not much later, as I reached and I stretched, as I tensed and I leaned, engrossed in efforts to try and get a hold of the goldfish in his bottle on the bottom of the gutter, the woman plummeted down, thinking of a long and fertile life, and neither you nor I would ever know her name.

At the end of the world, it’s every man for himself.

You had taught me that, Sophie.

It was as perilous as it was impossible to reach the blasted 7-Up bottle from the window. After two deep breaths I finally ventured out onto the gutter, keeping the lashing rope loosely in my left hand, and started shuffling forward inch by inch along the edge of the immeasurable abyss, my cheek pressed against the glass. I was terrified. Six feet . . . four and a half . . . three . . . until the rope pulled taut, and I bent my knees extremely slowly, reaching out, my fingertips grazing the bottle cap—that’s when the gutter snapped and tumbled into the abyss with me.

Everything spun; I squeezed my eyes shut and clamped my jaws and waited for the snap of the rope and then dzinng the yank and my stomach flap from my abdomen and the couch smack against the window frame and myself whoosh, shaken like a ragdoll.

It was an eternity before I stopped and summoned the nerve to open my eyes.

I hung about three feet underneath the eaves and one light year over firm ground. The rope was cutting into my midriff. I realized I was holding the bottle. Bubbles was floating on his back, but he opened his stunned little eyes when I apprehensively tapped the plastic.

Now that I finally had a moment of peace—a word rarely used in a more relative context—I had some time to ponder the situation. The Earth in reversed perspective is as wondrous a sight as it is a frightening one: a ceiling reaching until the horizon, but nothing below. An enormous nothing. No shouts or sirens anywhere. Only, in the distance, the constant creaking of things breaking off and disappearing into the depths, along with disoriented birds trying to find places to land and sadly tumbling into the cosmos.

“Do you know what time it is?” a small voice suddenly asked.

I tried to turn toward the source of the voice, my legs kicking the emptiness. The two swings in the playground were hanging down in the air from their blue-painted frame. On one of them sat a little girl with three crooked ponytails and dangling legs, looking down at me with her small fists clenched around the chains.

“Er . . . don’t be afraid,” I said, not very convincingly.

“I wanted to go so high I could touch the sky,” the little girl said. “Mommy said don’t go so high, you’ll flip right over. But I did anyway, and now I can’t get back down!”

“That’s . . . inconvenient,” I mumbled. I realized I was immediately trying to distance myself from the girl. There was nothing I could do for her. She was on a swing twenty feet away from me, but she might as well have been on the moon. I started to make preparations to extricate myself from my precarious position.

“My name is Dawnie,” the girl on the moon said.

“Uh . . . hello.”

I slipped the 7-Up bottle into my pants.

“I’m a big girl. I’m five,” the girl on the moon said.

“Uh . . . okay.”

I started to haul myself up along the rope.

“So do you know what time it is?” Dawnie asked. “Mommy said two minutes, then we’re going home, ’cause I’ve got these groceries to put away. Except I don’t know how long two minutes is.”

And I faltered.

I thought of the woman with the Kroger bags, and that’s when then the loss of all the lives in the world crashed over me; that unfortunate woman’s life, but also the life of the girl on the swing, the life of a mother and the life of a child, the lives of lovers and broken hearts, your life and mine. Lives tumbling across the floor like pearls from a string you had broken, rolling around the house and then disappearing. The death of the world is a frequently returning phenomenon, but even the most visionary philosophers could not have foreseen how it had happened this time. Yesterday I woke up with you in my arms, kissed the spot between your breasts where your heart was, and you had been mine. Now I was hanging like an anchor from the bottom of the world, and the world had come to a stop.

• • •

Bubbles revived visibly after I used a straw to suck the water that had sloshed from the cistern and collected on the toilet ceiling and siphoned it into a rinsed-out 7-Up bottle. Next, I sawed the legs off the pine dining table, pulled panels from the hole in the kitchen ceiling and lifted the doors from their hinges. After my struggle to climb in through the window, the walkway was a piece of cake. Working my way up over banisters and landings, I hauled myself to the ground floor; a wobbly tower of mattresses and sofas then took me to the door of the apartment building.

How my heart crashed to my feet at the prospect of having to make my way through that upside-down world, dangling from a ceiling of groaning roots and foundations! But my wish to save the little girl was greater. The first hurdle I took by shoving the longest bookshelves between the railings of the playground fence and nailing them to the doorpost. Across came the tabletop, and behold: The first few yards of my scaffolding were a fact. I worked for hours and hours. My platform of window ledges and shelves, of mirror frames and doors continued to grow; from the stairs to the hanging fence, from the hanging fence to the hanging oak, from the hanging oak to the hanging swings, all of my possessions strung together into a footbridge across the emptiness. Working like this, my hands created a perfect reflection of what had become of my life. Maybe that was the reason I wanted to save the girl: Crawling around an upturned world, I tried to convince myself that it was the world that stood on its head, not me.

By the time I rope-knotted the carpet-covered drainpipes to the blue frame of the swing set, lowered the attic ladder, and told Dawnie to climb toward me, the sun had risen to the horizon and the sky was red as blood.

Dawnie lifted her full moon face up at me. “I’m scared,” she said quietly.

I was on my stomach, arms wrapped around the frame, the ladder an extension of my reaching hands. “I won’t let go.”

Dawnie hesitated. “Are you really, really, really sure?”

“No. Yes.”

“You said no.”

“Yes.”

“But couldn’t we . . .”

“No.”

“But couldn’t we . . .”

“No, Dawnie. Climb up.”

Very, very, very carefully, Dawnie moved her hands higher up along the chains and stood on the swing. She looked at the ladder with fear and revulsion, as if she was afraid to leave the swing behind, as if she wanted to swing some more, back and forth, back and forth between what was behind her and what was ahead. Then she made a decision, placed her foot on the bottom rung and scurried up the ladder, quick and feather-light.

Later, when the sun soared up behind the horizon, we stared out of the living room window at the theatre of Earth’s vomit in the atmosphere. Dawnie stared with unabated wide eyes over the edge of her woolen blanket, Bubbles floated with unabated melancholy in the pure water and I unabatedly mourned my previous life, which had fallen over the edge of the world along with everything else. We heard explosions in the distance and the air was heavy with a burning smell that had nowhere else to go than to spread out against the Earth’s surface. Most fires extinguished themselves as buildings broke off and crashed into the abyss, dragging grey plumes of smoke behind them like falling comets.

“And mountains, are they falling, too?” Dawnie asked, a bit dreamily.

She had entertained herself by throwing houseplants out the window, but it had soon bored her to watch them disappear into the universe. Dawnie was young enough to take to a new normality without much trouble. I wasn’t. In mounting despair, I had been trying to get some news about the catastrophe, but besides the cell phone network and the Internet, all radio waves seemed to have disappeared as well.

“I think it’s raining boulders there right now,” I said.

“How about volcanoes?”

“I guess the fire runs out of them. Dead-straight pillars of lava, all the way into space.”

Dawnie looked suspicious. “But won’t that make the Earth run out?”

I hadn’t considered that.

Were you looking at the same view outside when I did, at the same upside-down world, and did you feel the same bewilderment I felt? Of all the people in the world, why had you called me immediately after the world had come to an end? And why not sooner? Why not all those times when it still mattered? Twice before I had lost love, one to another man and one to indifference, but neither of those loves had been as fundamental and natural as my love for you. If I woke up during the night and missed the weight that had dented the mattress beside me, I was terrified about you getting all too enraptured and wrapped up in the nightlife. And if you crawled into bed just before dawn, drunk and exhausted and instantly asleep, I would lie awake beside you trying not to smell other men on your breath. And so my fear of you leaving me created premature lovesickness: I missed your body as it was lying beside me; I yearned for your touch as your arm was resting on my chest, making the memory of it even more real and my heartache even worse. It felt like I had already lost you.

A downpour of falling stars drew lines across the sunken darkness: the last breaths of objects that had been on Earth this morning and were now falling back into the atmosphere. A fireworks display of thousands of dying things. I watched breathlessly, afraid to make a wish.

After a while I noticed that Dawnie was still awake.

“Mommy is a falling star, too,” she mumbled.

I realized she might very well be right.

• • •

The world hadn’t been on its head for a full day before a general consensus had been reached about how survivors communicated their survival: by hanging white sheets or curtains from their windows and chimneys. They constituted the first independent link in a uniform chain of interweaved rope bridges and gangways, stringing itself out in the days after the disaster like a spider web.

My hope that I could leave Dawnie with relatives soon evaporated. When I asked her where her father lived, she answered, “At Grandma’s.”

“At Grandma’s?”

“Yes, Mom and Dad got in this fight about all sorts of things and Dad said he’d had to give up all kinds of things to be with her and then Mom said oh, it’s that again and then they yelled at each other and then Dad went to live with Grandma.” She was silent for a moment before adding, “Do you think Grandma is upside-down now, too?”

I felt my stomach twist. “Do you know where Grandma lives?”

“Somewhere we always went by car,” Dawnie said, tugging at her crooked ponytails. “But I don’t wanna go to Grandma’s. Grandma yells at Mommy, too.”

“So where would you like to go?”

“I want my Mommy.”

I realized that Dawnie didn’t have anything left as well, just like me. So we had to share.

“Then you’re coming with me,” I decided. “And on the way, we’ll try to find Mommy. But you’ll have to do one thing for me.”

“What?” Dawnie asked.

I gave her the 7-Up bottle. Dawnie took it in her hands as if it held the weight of the world. She looked wide-eyed in through the plastic, and Bubbles looked wide-eyed out. For a second, something of immense significance seemed to be exchanged between the goldfish and the girl, as if her desire to see her mother and Bubbles’ desire to see you, which was really my desire to see you, were just one and the same thing. Then Dawnie’s face lit up in a wide smile, displaying her entire gappy set of teeth. From that moment on, Dawnie never left Bubbles’ side. If he was hungry, she flaked fish food in through the bottleneck; if he was thirsty, she added more water; and if he got short of breath she blew in air through a straw until Bubbles regained his luster.

At the end of the world, we all need something to hold on to. If we don’t hold on, we’ll have to let go. And if we let go, we’ll have to find our own orbit in the universe.

And so I held on to the playground fence. Tightly! We had reached it by climbing through the walkway door and over the tabletop bridge, but once there, the unnatural depths below our feet affected me so acutely that I seized up against the fence for several minutes, my hair streaming in the wind, unable to go forwards or backwards. I only dared to look up when I felt Dawnie’s soft hand touching mine.

“You don’t have to be afraid,” she said, showing me the 7-Up bottle in her little backpack to urge me on. “There’s nothing down there.”

That wasn’t just the truest, but also the loneliest thing she could have said. The abyss instantly lost its meaning. It turned into just another obstacle, one of the obstacles I could lower Dawnie down along or lift her up with the rope between us. Inch by inch, we shuffled toward the edge of the park and, deftly manipulating the attic ladder, reached the first treetop in the row of lime trees lining the street. Even though many branches had been ripped off by falling cars, it was relatively easy to use the ladder to climb from tree to tree to windowsill and back to tree. And so we zigzagged forward, a ripped-open Earth surface with power cables and sewers protruding like dead veins and bones over our heads, and every step brought me closer to you, every step took the sting out of the cruelty of your last words and transformed them into a message of hope: Bubbles is still at your place. I’ll come pick him up tomorrow.

“Hey, you there!”

In an easy chair on a timber platform, hanging a little ways below an attic window from a makeshift assembly of furniture, sat a short, balding man. On the boards beside him stood a thermos, and a steaming mug of coffee. When we spotted him, the man waved his binoculars.

“Relief troops are on the way!” he yelled good-naturedly.

“Really?” I yelled back, feeling a spark of hope.

The man burst out in a roar of laughter. “Of course not! I thought you were the relief troops!” He smacked himself on the thigh and took a sip of coffee. “From what I can see from down here, things are not looking good!”

I sighed, nevertheless glad to be able to talk to an adult. “What do you think happened?” I asked, gesturing around.

“Hanged if I know!” the man yelled. “The Earth pulled a fast one on us, now didn’t it! No Internet, no phones, no information! Last night I heard a loudspeaker message from downtown, but it was too far away to make out what it was saying! I’ve heard rumors that they’re building rope bridges and structures down there! You know, plenty of food for survivors and all that! But you’re only the second group I’ve seen come by here all day! The first one made it to the end of the street before they fell into the sky by accident!” He paused for a second, and then added, “We’re doomed!”

“How about you? Aren’t you going to try getting downtown?”

“Now you listen to me, son!” the man yelled. “I’ve lived here all my life! As far as I know, I’m the only one who’s seen both the construction and the demise of this street! What do you think about that?”

• • •

On the second day of our journey, we saw injured people on ceilings behind windows, waving curtains and begging, their hands pressed up against the glass.

On the third day, we found a string of knotted sheets dangling down from a bay window, where someone had gone in search of solid ground.

On the fourth day, my heart sank, because the hours and minutes were raining down in the universe and we were making such slow progress, and because I missed you so much, and because all ordinary and extraordinary speculations about the catastrophe turned out to be pointless. We had climbed on the underside of the bridge, now suspended below the river. The road surface had fallen off, but the iron frame was still intact and a few concrete slabs were still fixed to the pylons. And believe it or not: the water was still there. Flowing like liquid lead across the ceiling of the Earth’s surface, it spat the laws of nature in the eye. In places where the surface heaved, the water rained down in a soft, windblown mist, as if the river surface itself was the plane where gravity flipped over.

“Why isn’t the river falling down?” Dawnie asked.

I wanted to say something—I think Earth was simply fed up with us—but before I had a chance, Dawnie got bowled over by a hang glider that suddenly came hurtling through the space between the river and the bridge. My hand darted out to grab her little backpack before she and Bubbles in the bottle could tumble away. The aviator whooped, circled around in the airspace below us, and came flying toward us from the front. For a second, it seemed like he was going to crash, but in the last instant he pulled the hang glider’s nose up, slowing down and losing lift right over the underside of the bridge. He landed with a clumsy, stumbling step and stopped, dragging the delta wing behind him. “Rescue-squad, at your service,” the aviator said. “Women and children first, please.”

“That was . . . spectacular,” I stammered.

“Thank you, thank you,” the man said, unclipping himself from his contraption. “Municipal service. Only way of picking up survivors and getting them to the evacuation centers.”

“There are evacuation centers?” I asked incredulously.

“In the basement below city hall.”

“And the city had one of those . . . flying things?”

“Three, actually,” the aviator grinned. “Haven’t you seen my associates around? Maybe they haven’t been to this part of town yet.” He lowered himself to his knee in front of Dawnie and took her hand. “Hello there, big girl. How would you like to go flying?” Then he looked up at me. “Sorry, children first. It’s protocol. I’ll come back for you later.”

Dawnie shifted a forlorn look from the aviator to me. Something in her eyes alarmed me. Something wasn’t right.

“Isn’t that dangerous?” I asked, in an effort to stall for time more than anything else.

“Thermal holds the wing up,” the aviator said, straightening and moving his hand to Dawnie’s back. “Warm air rises up and all that shit. Now that everything’s upside-down, it’s all thermal. Falling crap, that’s what you don’t want.”

“And where do you land?”

“Bridges, roofs, hangars with loading bays . . . even trees will work, but they’ll screw up your wing.”

“I meant at city hall . . .”

“Holy fuck! Look at that!” the aviator said, turning toward the river flowing past over our heads, looking solid. “That’s like magic.” He had shrugged off his harness and started stripping off his clothes, as if he was planning on going for a swim. Suddenly I was sure. There was no evacuation center, no municipal rescue-squad, no protocol. The man was a flying predator. He had been circling around like a hawk and had spotted his prey. He would fly off with Dawnie, and I would wait, but no one would come back.

In his underwear, the aviator started climbing the iron frame around the bridge pylon toward the river. He had all the time in the world. We had nowhere to go, and he knew it. But just then, Bubbles jumped up from the water in the 7-Up bottle with a significant slosh, and Dawnie and I exchanged a glance. In an instant, I slipped into the harness and fastened the straps. The aviator had reached the lead-grey surface of the water and carefully lifted his arm. Gesturing frantically, I urged Dawnie to hurry. The aviator’s hand slipped through the surface . . . and water from the river started trickling down his arm in small rivulets.

“Awesome . . .” he breathed, his gaze following the water drip onto the bridge below . . . when he suddenly caught sight of us and yelled, “Hey, what the hell are you doing!”

“Hang on!” I shouted, hurling Dawnie on to my back, grabbing the hang glider’s frame, fastening carabiners and fastening Dawnie, hoping-praying-begging let the belt around her pants carry her, small arms around my neck and the aviator jumping down right behind us and me running with my breath in my throat and my eyes closed and one second to think: Are those carabiners clipped on right? And then we plummeted from the bridge and started spiraling down like madmen.

And a yank and a dizzying nose dive, and the world contracted. The hang glider righted itself and we were flying. I screamed, realizing I had never flown before, not without wings and not with them. The aviator screamed on the bridge, already far behind us now. And Dawnie . . . she didn’t scream, but held on tightly to my back, her hands covering my eyes as she herself gazed around in delight.

• • •

It is relatively easy to fly a hang glider if the need arises, but landing while there is no ground to land on? That’s a more complicated matter.

I was afraid to fly more than a small distance beneath the Earth’s surface. That turned out to be simple, since the thermal from the fires hovering between the splintered rooftops and the smoke did indeed continue to lift the delta wing up. By moving my balance on the bar to the front, I dove down and prevented us from slamming into the Earth, and after some experimenting I could steer the delta wing by shifting my weight to the left and right.

For the first time since your it’s not you, it’s me, a new feeling washed over me: a sense of freedom, at least temporarily pushing my desire to be someone else and somewhere else into the back of my mind.

After a while, a flock of geese came flying in our tail. I wondered where they had come from; they were just there, suddenly. I set a course for you and the geese winged along beside us.

The dead Earth was a thing of fabulous beauty.

We saw lovers, hugging each other in trees. We saw children, pulling small buckets of food and folded notes back and forth on clotheslines between upside-down windows. We saw people finding each other on the jumbled strings of assemblies they were building, forging the umbilical cord of a new society. And after a while we had left the city behind and all we saw were trees, their branches drooping sadly and their leaves fluttering away into the bottomless depths of the atmosphere, making it seem as if the Earth was weeping green tears.

We were very close to where you lived when Dawnie pointed and said, “There’s where we can go and see Mommy!”

Suspended in the air in front of us was a seemingly endless rope ladder, undulating calmly in the sultry breeze. As we neared it, I saw that the ladder hung from a trapdoor in the roof of a caravan, dangling from the face of the Earth by iron chains. A higgledy-piggledy board walkway connected it to a small, ramshackle, upside-down house from which enormous amounts of flaxen rope moved toward the peculiar trailer in spun cobwebs, as if some kind of machinery in there was perpetually working.

I circled the rope ladder and decided to crash in the apple orchard around the house. Slender tree trunks, lots of branches, and a lower boundary consisting of a thick canopy: It was iffy at best, but I guessed we wouldn’t find a better place.

“Hold on to me very tightly,” I told Dawnie. “And whatever you do, don’t let go!”

Next thing, everything was jolting and swishing around us. Branches whipped, leaves swirled, shrieking birds burst off in flight. The delta wing snapped and tore and suddenly we stopped, the twisted frame pierced by branches. They broke, and we fell down through a nauseating air pocket, surrounded by the sickly smell of apples, before the canopy caught us and I managed to grab onto a tree trunk.

A window in the caravan popped open and a frail woman looking older than the Earth itself leaned out. “My goodness!” she yelled. “Are you all right?”

“I . . . think so . . .” I stammered. And promptly Dawnie rolled off my back and ended up dangling in the vacuum beneath the apple tree, her face a mask of bewilderment, a thousand thanks to the carabiner on her belt. I hoisted her up, unclipped her and put her in the crown of the apple tree. We had survived the impact with no more than a few scratches and some ripped clothes.

“You’d better hurry inside,” the woman said. “You two look like you could use a cup of tea.”

A little while later we shuffled across the rickety footbridge, fastened to large hooks drilled into the Earth, toward the hanging trailer, careful not to get entangled in the rustling cobwebs of flaxen rope. Inside, my jaw dropped to the floor in surprise. The small caravan was literally crammed full of flax. The woman who had hailed us from the window now sat in a rocking chair and was twining the flax together in thick strings. A second, almost identical old lady was knotting the strings into a rope ladder and feeding it through the trapdoor in the floor.

“Be careful,” the second woman said worriedly. “You don’t want to fall through that. You have no idea how deep it is.”

“Of course they do, Junilla,” her sister argued. “They’ve just come from down there.”

“But do they know how deep it is?” The little lady gazed at me expectantly, and I shrugged to be polite. “That’s my point, Leonilla,” she said, resolutely fastening a knot. “No one knows.”

They gave us steaming cups of herbal tea. Then the woman named Junilla turned to Dawnie like only old ladies can, her industrious hands never missing a beat. “What have you got there, sweet thing?”

Shyly twisting her body back and forth, Dawnie showed her the 7-Up bottle. The woman peered curiously inside from behind her thick lenses and Bubbles looked out through the thin plastic with unwavering melancholy.

“A goldfish!” Junilla cried out in dismay. “What a terrible, terrible place for a goldfish.”

“Terrible!” her sister Leonilla concurred. “A goldfish! That’s the most terrible thing anyone could put inside a bottle.”

“Gin, yes . . .” Junilla said.

“Or a love letter . . .” Leonilla backed her up.

“But not a goldfish!”

“It is a love letter,” I blurted out. Suddenly my voice trembled. “Or maybe not really. Well, actually, basically it is.” And before I knew it, I told the two women my story. I told them how your last words had prematurely ended the world, and how your last phone call had offered sufficient justification to try and bring you Bubbles—an impossible quest in an impossible world as a last impossible token of my love for you, because nothing was right in the world without you anyway, at least not for me, and never could be again. It didn’t come as a relief to talk about it, my heart didn’t feel an ounce lighter. I only realized I was crying when Dawnie caught my tears in the 7-Up bottle, making Bubbles think it was raining and to everyone’s surprise, urging him to somersault playfully.

“Poor thing,” Leonilla said, shaking her head.

“Poor, poor thing,” Junilla put it more strongly.

“A goldfish in a bottle . . .”

“Forever trapped in the same circle . . .”

“The same, depressing circle . . .”

“You should let go of her,” Junilla said decidedly. But how, how, how could I ever let go of you, when there wasn’t a moment that passed without me wishing I could hold you close to me—so that, just for a short while, the world would no longer be upside-down? On an impulse, I pressed Dawnie close to me, and there and then, I was overwhelmed by grief and I cried, inconsolable and heart-broken. Not just because of the void you had left behind, but also because I now had to fill it with someone else. When a person’s dreams are taken away from them, they will desperately cling to new ones, no matter how empty those dreams are.

Oh, Sophie, I miss you so much.

“Things change, sweetheart, that’s just the way it is,” Junilla said, laying a frail hand on my heaving shoulders.

“It’s better to be prepared for change,” Leonilla said.

“So that it doesn’t take you by surprise when it comes.”

“Take the world, for instance,” Leonilla declared.

“The Earth!” Junilla emphasized. “What if the Earth, every once in a while, simply lets go? Takes a good look at what it’s got, shivers, and shakes it all off?” And the old woman shivered after her own words.

“It’s a good thing we were prepared,” Leonilla said, giving a disconcerting yank on the flaxen rope entering the trailer through the window.

“Were we ever,” Junilla confirmed. “We’re packing our bags!”

My eyes hot and wet, I stared at the trapdoor in the floor. “Where are you going?”

“Haven’t you seen all those falling stars at night?” Junilla asked. “It must be wonderful down there!”

“Oh, yes, wonderful!” Leonilla said. “Miraculous, I’d say.”

“That’s where we’re going!”

Dawnie’s little voice was almost lost amidst the lively exclamations of the old women when she peered around the 7-Up bottle and said, “My Mommy is a falling star, too.”

There was a brief silence. “Really?” Leonilla responded. “How wonderful for her! That means you get to make a wish, my dear.”

Dawnie’s eyes widened and she writhed in embarrassment. “Can I . . . can I come with you?”

“But of course, darling!” Junilla said. “If Toby here doesn’t mind . . .”

I nodded mutely, swallowing back fresh tears.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Junilla sighed. “Why won’t you just let go?”

“Nothing is worth clinging on to like that,” Leonilla said.

And then, shaking her head, “A goldfish in a bottle . . .”

Right then I lost track of whether we were talking about Bubbles, about you, or about me, and whether or not it made any difference.

• • •

All the times I had come in here before were like drops of honey sticking to my fingertips as I jammed the gangway between the final oak tree and the kitchen window frame. Mad with lust as a teenager in love sneaking through your bedroom window, whispering so your parents wouldn’t hear us. Shaking with laughter as I carried you across the backdoor threshold after a morning stroll filled with calm nonsense out by the lake. With leaden feet after more new tales I knew to be lies, still desperately trying to believe them—because after all, lies are meant to fill a void and I didn’t want you to have to live with a void. And now with your decision to go on without me heaped in the palms of my hands, and the power to reconsider in yours.

My heart leapt into my throat when I saw the white-painted, mirrored letters on the window in the façade:

HELP

So you were still alive. Your house hung upside-down and it was a ruin of crumbling memories, but you were still alive.

“Sophie.”

I stood on the ceiling of what remained of the kitchen and listened to the inverted silence.

And then, a landslide: “Toby?”

My name.

Your voice.

I clambered through the door into the living room. I found more ravages of tumbled furniture, piled up all the way to the sagging floorboards. But you had cleared the middle of the ceiling and there you were, lying on the couch.

“It’s really you,” you said, trying to push yourself up.

I shrugged, embarrassed. “Of course.”

“I thought you were dead.”

I took the 7-Up bottle from my backpack and held it up. “I brought Bubbles for you.”

Your incredulous gaze moved from the goldfish inside the bottle to me. “But how did you get all the way . . .”

I shrugged again.

You grinned. “You’re insane, aren’t you?”

“You know that.”

Your universe.

My universe.

I descended as you rose and I folded you—the fragile reality that was you—in my arms. You pressed stiffly against me and we sank down onto the couch. Your smell—evidently and impossibly Sophie—was so overwhelming and carried so much weight that I had to surrender to it utterly, no matter what might come after. It drove me mad. It didn’t matter. And so I buried my face in your neck and inhaled your scent like a drug, immersing myself greedily in your presence. We lay there like that for a long time, intimately entangled, in a perfect, pure state of being.

“Everything okay?” I asked, moist lips against your earlobe.

“Yes. I think so, yes.” Hot air from your innermost self in my hair. “I think my kneecap’s broken. And my back hurts really bad.”

“Were you in bed?”

“Underneath it.”

“It’s okay. I’m here now.” I caressed the gossamer, downy hairs behind your ear, the curve of your neck.

“Toby.”

“Sssh.”

“But . . .”

“It’s okay.”

“Everything is truly, seriously fucked up, isn’t it?”

I pushed gently away from you so I could look you in the eye. “You called me.”

“Yes.”

“Sophie.”

You let go of me and hoisted yourself up, because you couldn’t handle the situation.

But I clasped your hand and said, “I’ve missed you, Sophie.”

“Stop it.” A tear trickled down your cheek. “I’m so worried about Mom and Dad. I haven’t heard from them. I haven’t seen anyone since it happened, not a single soul. Do you know if help is coming?”

I felt myself growing faint inside. “I came, didn’t I?”

You looked at me for a long time. “I’m sorry about how it all turned out.”

“Yeah. Me too,” I said. “I liked it better when everything was still right-side up. Made it a lot easier to see each other.”

“Toby.”

“Well, sorry—” My voice shook, looking for purchase. “—I just don’t know how to deal with it. Everything has changed now, right? Can’t we . . .”

“Toby.”

“But couldn’t we—”

“Don’t, Toby.”

I couldn’t hold back my tears. “But I’ll do everything differently.”

“You weren’t the one who had to do things differently.”

“I can’t handle this alone.”

“Sure you can.”

“But I love you.”

Remember how you looked away then, like you always used to? Your eyes too heavy, a bottomless depth inside them. I was torn away from you; I fell and I fell, and then splash into a bottle full of fizzing tears. A whirling vortex sucked me deeper and deeper below the water, propelled by the force of you looking away. In a panic, I kicked my legs and vainly groped for purchase on smooth, plastic walls.

“I love you!” I tried to scream, but my love rose in bubbles to the surface and burst apart. Weakened, I wheeled my arms, pounding on the plastic. And behind the label you looked away; you didn’t see that I was drowning. I sank down in a slow spiral, hitting the bottom of the 7-Up bottle with a muffled thump.

My lungs filled up with tears as I whispered, “Please . . .”

And you said, “I need time.”

I came up then, spluttering and gasping for breath. Soaked and flabbergasted, I let the lie of those words descend on me. As soon as I was able, I clambered up and staggered out of the living room.

“Where are you going?”

“I’ll get you some aspirin,” I mumbled stupidly.

“Wait!”

But I had already gone through the kitchen and didn’t hear you. Hanging from the banister, I lowered myself to the upstairs floor. After everything I had been through, after the countless times I had risked my life to take Bubbles to you, trying in vain to still my love for you with my love for you, and scrambling up from the pounding surf of a dying Earth . . . you need time? How much more time do you think the world will give you, Sophie?

I crashed into the bulging ceiling, and it groaned beneath my weight. If the house had given way right then, I wouldn’t have cared. But I wasn’t even granted that much mercy—I was predestined to go down in your cold reality, not in my own illusion.

The bedroom. My picture wasn’t on your wall. I wanted to believe it had fallen and splintered, I wanted to believe that more than anything in the world. Other photo frames lay broken on the ceiling: holiday snapshots, family, your friends. I knew them all intimately. Bunched-up sweater, the one I bought you in Paris. Open backgammon board. Dented candles. Upside-down bed. Broken glass. Buddha figurine. Not a trace of my picture.

The Earth turned away in shame.

Bubbles rolled on his stomach and floated to the surface.

On what had been my side of the bed I saw someone else’s sneakers, someone else’s watch, and how can I describe what comes next, how can I continue, I wonder how so much of my life could have occurred outside of me, and I hadn’t known, or had I known after all, didn’t that only make it worse, on to the bathroom, trendy jeans, trendy shirt, blood between the tiles, he must have been taking a shower, the cast iron bathtub had broken off and crushed him, his wallet in his pocket, student ID, Tom was his name, Tom something, fair-haired kid, longish hair, completely your type, the bathroom window was open, what have you done to him, dammit that same fucking night you spread your legs for him, what have you done to me?

Back downstairs you were leaning out of the kitchen window, stooped beneath the weight of missed opportunities. You were crying. Below me, on the gangway leading away from you, the ID cards with his picture on them slowly fluttered down. I gazed at you cold-faced. Yes, you needed time for yourself, and yes, I understood you needed to discover who you wanted to be. I understood your desire for a quieter place without promises and confessions. I would even have forgiven you your mistakes. You were my world. But the world had repelled everything. More logic than any human being could comprehend and more human beings than was comprehensibly logical . . . anything but the revolting image of you crying for someone else and the dawning realization that there was no longer any room for me in this reality you had created.

And the goldfish?

He deserved something better.

• • •

It was like a dream at the bottom of the world: I was sitting on a tree branch stretched out low beneath the shore of the hanging lake. My legs were dangling over nothing and above me I could see my own reflection in the water, burning in the sun dipping up behind the horizon. When I tapped the 7-Up bottle, a shiver ran through Bubbles’s delicate fins and he turned his face toward me.

“Go on, boy,” I said, twisting the cap from the bottle. “You’re free.”

I held the bottle up and poked the top through the water surface. Air bubbles gurgled down and stayed afloat on the scales of gravity. Bubbles watched it all skeptically. Then I reached further, pushing the bottle all the way under and turning it over.

And Bubbles flipped over as well. Suddenly he was swimming upside-down, slithering skittishly from one end of the bottle to the other. The air bubbles escaped and I gently rocked the bottle back and forth until Bubbles discovered the opening of the screw cap and peeked curiously through it.

“Go on,” I whispered, shaking the drops of falling water from my hair. “You’re free.”

For one more moment, the goldfish lingered. Then he swam out of the bottleneck. He looked around, wary. Suddenly his fins whirled and bristled, and he darted away into the deep.

So that was it. Bye, Bubbles. I smiled, feeling a bit melancholy. But my melancholy was soon washed away in a sense of fulfillment when I pulled the 7-Up bottle from the lake and finally, after such a long journey, let it go. I watched as the bottle tumbled down and disappeared from view. Then I straightened up. I was surprised to see Bubbles gazing at me from behind the reflection of my face. He had come back to the surface and pursed his lips over the water, as if he was telling me a secret, causing a minute ripple. I couldn’t take my eyes away from the image. Why did it evoke so much love inside me? And then I understood. Of course: Bubbles wasn’t the one who was upside-down . . . I was upside-down.

It was all just a matter of perspective.

Looking at it from the other side, the world was still right-side up.

I stripped naked and took a deep breath. I dunked my head through the surface of the water, enjoying the sudden sensation of coldness and fizzing air bubbles coming down and rinsing my face clean. Wobbly, I rose up on the branch, groping into the water with my arms, now submerged to the waist. And when I pushed off, gravity took a hold of me and I slipped like a diver into Bubbles’s world.

I came up. Treading water, I started laughing. I had forgotten what normal looked like. Or normal . . . even though I was on the right side of up and down, my hair stood up in wet strands and made it rain in the universe. That made me laugh even harder. On the shore, trees lifted their arms like children being dressed in sweaters by their mothers. Somewhere a branch snapped, falling straight up into the sky.

Bubbles darted playfully around me, a streak of orange in the deep green waters. I dove under and we tumbled and somersaulted until my lungs felt fit to burst. Every time I resurfaced I felt a little lighter. Finally we swam out toward the middle of the lake in our newly acquired normality, side by side, the goldfish and me.

There, in my own little place in the world, I let go.

• • •

I don’t know whether my sleep was dreamless because there were no falling stars or because a teasing twig in the crown of the tree was poking my back, but when I woke up the next morning a dreary fog was clinging to the Earth’s surface. All around me, no matter where I looked, was gray. I wondered where the fog had come from. A muted silence hung over everything, and any sound I made stayed suspended inside it and made me more aware of myself.

It didn’t take me long to return to the hanging caravan, but the two old ladies and Dawnie were gone. The trapdoor in the floor was open and the end of the rope ladder had been left tied to one of the rocking chairs. I imagined how Junilla and Leonilla, hauling their possessions and bickering incessantly, were descending the ladder rung by rung, with Dawnie following curiously behind. Somewhere, much lower down where the stars were falling, they would bump into the woman with the Kroger bags and she would say, Well, imagine that. I was just looking for you.

I swung my legs over the edge of the trapdoor and grabbed the first rung. Beneath my feet, the ladder was calmly swaying and fading in the mist. I took a deep breath and started down, keeping my eyes closed as if I was sleepwalking. Droplets of fog condensed on my eyelashes. When I opened my eyes again, the Earth’s surface had disappeared and all I could see above me were the hazy contours of the caravan. Then, even they were gone.

Now, I am alone, in the mist.

Were you thinking of me? And if you could have seen me descend, would you have wondered where the rope ladder leads? But then I would tell you it doesn’t matter. What matters is the path you take, the journey you make. Once you realize that, it’s easier to let go, at the end.

I think I want you to know that you hurt me so incredibly badly, Sophie. Now I’m going down the ladder. Searching for solid ground beneath my feet. It’s not easy. I’m terrified of what I will find down there. But I close my eyes and keep descending. Sometimes the ropes shake and I imagine it’s you following me, somewhere up there in the fog. But maybe it’s just the wind. And I realize I don’t care either way. I am somebody, too.

Down here, we are all falling stars.

© 2014 by Thomas Olde Heuvelt.

Dutch novelist Thomas Olde Heuvelt (1983) is the author of five novels and many short stories of the fantastic. His short fiction has appeared in English, Dutch, Polish and Chinese and has been awarded the Paul Harland Prize (for best Dutch fantasy) on three occasions, received an honorable mention in the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Awards and was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2013 The Boy Who Cast No Shadow. In English, his short fiction has appeared from Tor.com, Oxygen Books, and PS Publishing. Recently, Jonathan Strahan selected his story "The Ink Readers of Doi Saket" for The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. Olde Heuvelt’s novel HEX, which became a bestseller in The Netherlands, will be out in the US and Canada with Macmillan/Tor in 2015, while Hodder & Stoughton will publish in the UK and Australia. Read more here en.oldeheuvelt.com.

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Alsiso
K.J. Bishop

The first Alsiso was a gift from Lord Grastiac’s murderer. The word came from the lexicon of a dead language—a language which had gone to the scaffold laughing three hundred years ago, with alsiso being one of its last words. The assassin wrote alsiso on the pale carpet in the nobleman’s blood, balancing the death of the man with the resurrection of one word. Why? A message? A joke? A sentimental whim? An act without reason at all, such as might amuse an anarchist? No one knew what alsiso meant. Most people assumed it was the assassin’s name.

Three other lords were murdered in the city that year, without any apparent connection of motive. Yet connected they were, by one element: in all three cases the blood of the victim was used to write the word alsiso.

The assassin was searched for but never caught.

“Be good,” parents told their children, “or Alsiso will come in the night and get you.”

On the Day of the Gone, along with the white candy skulls at the festival stalls there were red ones representing Alsiso. Delicious to children, Alsiso was eaten thousands of times. Older boys and girls fitted kisses around his boiled sugar cranium. Candlemakers painted prayer-candles with charms to keep Alsiso away. These were popular with nobles, who sent their servants out to buy them. Alsiso was already turning from a natural being into a magical one. Since he (the people thought of Alsiso as male, the -o ending being masculine in their language) was a villain too tricky for the police, it seemed best to make him into the sort of creature against whom at least priests and witches could provide effective protection.

The carpet trade, too, did well out of Alsiso, after it was put around that a red floor-covering would discourage the murderous intruder, the wisdom in the argument being that Alsiso would have no desire to write in blood on a surface which would camouflage his graffito. There was such a run on red carpets, rugs, and mats that fast ships had to be sent to bring more from the bazaars of the East.

Yule came and went, then the Festival of the Master Singers. There were no more Alsiso murders, and the public fear subsided. Alsiso became old news. The red carpets were put into storage or thrown away, and the old pastel ones were brought out and spread down on bedroom floors again.

But not everyone put Alsiso out of mind. Among the lower orders of society there were malcontents who liked to think of dead lords. In gin-shops without tables, in taverns with floors of mud, in labourers’ and foot soldiers’ camps, toasts were drunk to Alsiso. An anti-establishment pamphlet called Alsiso: The Voice of Blood! appeared on the streets. Four issues were printed and widely circulated before the author, a journeyman printer named Cyrus Knott, was arrested, convicted of sedition, and publicly garroted.

People forgot Knott, but some of them continued to remember Alsiso, who began turning up as a character in travelling pantomime shows. Initially there were really two Alsisos: One was a principled rogue, a knife in the hands of the common people; the other was a sinister buffoon. The latter gradually won dominance. This Alsiso wore black clothes with something red on his head, either a tall hat or a wig. He spoke in quatrains of doggerel. In the most widespread version of the pantomime, Alsiso suffered death by boiling in a laundry tub, and was borne off to Hell by the demonic Prince November. In some versions, Alsiso was redeemed through the kindness of another character or sheer good luck (the Prince’s coachman getting lost in a fog and driving Alsiso to Heaven instead, for instance), but these variations were never as popular as the one with the boiling.

Alsiso’s portrait was painted. Not by any renowned artist, to hang in a gallery; but the fraternity of interior decorators imported his face into the vocabulary of standard filler for corners and other awkward spots in frescoed rooms. Joining the lindworms and the lamiae, the Apple Crab, the Pope of the Moon, and other grotesques, Alsiso mugged out of many a gap between more serious and important figures. In the hands of stonemasons, Alsiso was brought into the family of gargoyles, drafted for cathedral downspout and corbel duty with the old cadre of goblinised pagan gods. Down on the pavements, screevers drew Alsiso in chalk. It was they who gave him new clothes, exchanging the black for a shirt and tights illuminated with blue, yellow, red, and green lozenges. Following this change, the name “Alsiso” was given to a type of similarly patterned jacquard cloth from the estates of Bathro, to the polychrome glass produced by the Risper factory, and to a gaudy nudibranch from the South Seas.

A hundred and fifty years after his first appearance, Alsiso emerged from the corners and returned to the midst of high society—if only, as in the beginning, at night. Chromatic as a parrot, and as wicked as you wished him to be, Alsiso was a popular fellow at masquerade parties. Alsiso, lord of misrule! Cutter of a dash! His motley figure climbed up to balconies night after night. He appeared in bedroom windows like a stained glass saint turned profane and lewd, with a tented crotch. Morning after morning, the rising sun kissed red hairs caught on lace pillowslips. Alsiso became a famous lover.

During the years of the duelling craze, when young men made a thing of getting up early to slay each other over matters of honour, Alsiso went back to his roots. He kept his dawn appointments. He killed. And he took his turn to die, gazing into the eyes of priests.

At the same time, he returned to outright villainy. One highwayman took Alsiso as his muse with such devotion that, in jail, he requested the hire of a motley suit and red wig to wear to the gallows. His request was granted. The sun kissed red hairs caught in a strong hempen rope. And when the ghost came clattering up from under the crossroads where the corpse was buried, it was Alsiso who galloped out of the earth on a black horse, his head burning with a light that sowed fires in the roadside trees.

But it was as a lover that Alsiso was known best, and for many years to call a man an “Alsiso” was to call him a ladies’ man, a carpet knight, a bedroom stallion, a rake, or a fool in love. So far so good for Alsiso; but the good times couldn’t last forever. With time, the flesh under the coloured shirt and tights acquired the undesirable patina of age. When the red wig slipped askew, you got an eyeful of a head as bald as a bunion. Alsiso was now a dirty old man, a peeping tom, a goblin in the corner again.

For Alsiso there were no more parties, no more bedrooms or fights or escapades. He couldn’t get any action. Other characters had his fun.

He even lost his place in the pantomime: It was now the Tax Collector whom Prince November carried off to damnation.

Alsiso’s exile lasted two hundred years. He roamed, vagrant, in distant lands, sleeping in fields of sugar cane, searching for his reflection in flooded temples where the bodies of monks had turned to fish, and he drank the ponging lees of sanctity. He kept company with foxes, monkeys, and rats. He acquainted himself with the deep nights of the earth, oceanic black hours against which the previous nights of his life were only a procession of shallow ponds.

And Alsiso walked abroad in the lands where the sun is like a lion, where there are more bells than flutes, more horses than birds, more mirrors than fountains, and more even numbers than odd.

None of this did Alsiso any good. Soaked in bad water, subjected to dust and wind and din, he began to suffer corrosion in his extremities. His discomfort increased every day. He suffered mentally, too, from the disappointment that life, even for a being such as he, is not forever. He had become so used to dying on stage and in duels without dying in the world that he felt a sort of perpetual shock at being reduced to a singular existence and therefore to true mortality.

In time, castaway Alsiso would have broken down into a pile of ash, a pile of sugar, and a puddle of nonsense. But he was called back into the public world. The summoner was Mrs. Wilhelmina Obie, who made Alsiso the protagonist of her novel Around the World in Seven Veils: The Memoir of an Adventuress.

Which is to say that Mrs. Obie turned Alsiso into a woman. Or halfway into a woman, since Alsiso goes through much of the novel disguised as a man. Mrs. Obie writes, untruthfully, that Alsiso is the name for the sea breeze on the northwest coast of Cape Cruzado, where she locates her heroine’s birthplace. The novel paints Alsiso’s life in the blue, red, green, and gold of sea, blood, jungle, and loot. The old black of Alsiso is reprised, too, in the complexion and attire of the heroine, in the ensign of her notorious ship, the Cargo Cult Queen, which she sails with her peculiar officers First Old Woman, Second Fiddle, and Third Leg, in enough gunpowder for three or four middle-sized wars, and down in the deep sea, in myths abiding below the sun’s reach: the endless fish that consumes time from the end towards the beginning, and the lightless house of Taffy Jonah the jailer of the dead, in which Alsiso is briefly incarcerated.

In her diary, Mrs. Obie wrote that she chose the name Alsiso after having a dream in which she “encountered a roguish person of that name, in an Oriental place, with many beasts about.”

Among those who admired Mrs. Obie’s book was the explorer Jude Herring. Adventuring in the highlands of New Summerland with Around the World in Seven Veils in his knapsack, Herring inscribed no less than four Alsisos—a Mount, a River, a Lake, and a Falls—on the map he was making.

The book was read by children. They brought Alsiso into their counting games and skipping-rope chants: Alsiso the half-and-half, boy and girl, wicked and wild, a bad example to all.

These days you all know Alsiso. You may have heard of the Auckland surrealists who named their clique Alsiso, finding in Alsiso’s incarnations a fitting emblem for strangeness, error, and disruption to the normal order of things. You have probably heard of Alsiso the matinee idol from the era of silent film—powdered and pomaded Alsiso of the deep eyes and hawk profile, Alsiso of the sad ghetto childhood and the adult life no one could approve of. Alsiso was a taxi dancer before he got into the movies, and jealous men called him “Alsiso the gigolo” to put him down. Always a looker more than a talker, he would have struggled and failed when sound came into the films. But Alsiso was saved, in a way: He was on the Princess Niobe on the night she sank, and was granted an apotheosis by the watery heavens.

Unless you’ve lived under a stone all your life, you know the later film By All My Sins Remembered. You’ve watched Nell Brynner and Lance Bardot kiss on the terrace of the Hotel Alsiso, and unless you are heartless, you’ve reached for a box of tissues at the end. That was the film that made Alsiso a word as potent as Paradiso or Tropicana, a talismanic word in the grimoire of inimitable living.

Inevitably Alsiso became a car: a long machine with tailfins like a fantasy of a rocket ship. There was the famous racehorse Alsiso: The name seems to bring fame with it. Among today’s Alsisos are a pop group, a washing machine, a computer virus, a hurricane, a heat-seeking missile, a professional wrestler; there are Alsiso streets, nightclubs, lipsticks, condoms, codenames; you can paint a town Alsiso Red; you can get an Alsiso cocktail at any bar (recipe: 2 oz. white rum, 1 oz. peach schnapps, 1 oz. rose syrup, poured over ice and topped with champagne).

The Earth is too crowded with Alsiso. And so Alsiso is moving out. A stray bitch is leaving the world tonight, on board a satellite. A one-way trip to a dog’s death—but no need to tell Alsiso . . .

© 2004 by K.J. Bishop.

Originally published in The Alsiso Project, edited by Andrew Hook.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

K.J. Bishop is an Australian writer and artist. Her short fiction has appeared in magazines including Aurealis, Subterranean and Electric Velocipede, and anthologies including Last Drink Bird Head, The New Weird, Leviathan 4 and Album Zutique. Her first novel, The Etched City, received the William L.Crawford Award and the Ditmar Award for best novel, and was nominated for a World Fantasy Award.. Her website is http://kjbishop.net/.

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The Only Death in the City
C.J. Cherryh

It was named the City of Lights. It had known other names in the long history of Earth, in the years before the sun turned wan and plague-ridden, before the moon hung vast and lurid in the sky, before the ships from the stars grew few and the reasons for ambition grew fewer still. It stretched as far as the eye could see . . . if one saw it from the outside, as the inhabitants never did. It was so vast that a river flowed through it, named the Sin, which in the unthinkable past had flowed through a forest of primeval beauty, and then through a countless succession of cities, through ancient ages of empires. The City grew about the Sin, and enveloped it, so that, stone-channeled, it flowed now through the halls of the City, thundering from the tenth to the fourteenth level in a free fall, and flowing meekly along the channel within the fourteenth, a grand canal which supplied the City and made it self-sufficient. The Sin came from the outside, but it was so changed and channeled that no one remembered that this was so. No one remembered the outside. No one cared. The City was sealed, and had been so for thousands of years.

There were windows, but they were on the uppermost levels, and they were tightly shuttered. The inhabitants feared the sun, for popular rumor held that the sun was a source of vile radiations, unhealthful, a source of plagues. There were windows, but no doors, for no one would choose to leave. No one ever had, from the day the outer walls were built. When the City must build in this age, it built downward, digging a twentieth and twenty-first level for the burial of the dead . . . for the dead of the City were transients, in stone coffins, which might always be shifted lower still when the living needed room.

Once, it had been a major pastime of the City, to tour the lower levels, to seek out the painted sarcophagi of ancestors, to seek the resemblances of living face to dead so common in this long self-contained city. But now those levels were full of dust, and few were interested in going there save for funerals.

Once, it had been a delight to the inhabitants of the City to search the vast libraries and halls of art for histories, for the City lived much in the past, and reveled in old glories . . . but now the libraries went unused save for the very lightest of fictions, and those were very abstract and full of drug-dream fancies.

More and more . . . the inhabitants remembered.

There were a few at first who were troubled with recollections and a thorough familiarity with the halls—when once it was not uncommon to spend one’s time touring the vast expanse of the City, seeing new sights. These visionaries sank into ennui . . . or into fear, when the recollections grew quite vivid.

There was no need to go to the lower levels seeking ancestors. They lived . . . incarnate in the sealed halls of the City, in the persons of their descendants, souls so long immured within the megalopolis that they began to wake to former pasts, for dying, they were reborn, and remembered, eventually. So keenly did they recall that now mere infants did not cry, but lay patiently dreaming in their cradles, or, waking, stared out from haunted eyes, gazing into mothers’ eyes with millennia of accumulated lives, aware, and waiting on adulthood, for body to overtake memory.

Children played . . . various games, wrought of former lives.

The people lived in a curious mixture of caution and recklessness: caution, for they surrounded themselves with the present, knowing the danger of entanglements; recklessness, for past ceased to fascinate them as an unknown and nothing had permanent meaning. There was only pleasure, and the future, which held the certainty of more lives, which would remember the ones they presently lived. For a very long time, death was absent from the halls of the City of Lights.

Until one was born to them.

Only rarely there were those born new, new souls which had not made previous journeys within the City, babes which cried, children who grew up conscious of their affliction, true children among the reborn.

Such was Alain.

He was born in one of the greatest of families—those families of associations dictated more by previous lives than by blood, for while it was true that reincarnation tended to follow lines of descendancy, this was not always the case; and sometimes there were those from outside the bloodline who drifted in as children, some even in their first unsteady steps, seeking old loves, old connections. But Alain was new. He was born to the Jade Palace Family, which occupied the tenth level nearest the stairs, although he was not of that family or indeed of any family, and therefore grew up less civilized.

He tried. He was horribly conscious of his lack of taste, his lack of discrimination which he could not excuse as originality: originality was for—older—minds and memories. His behavior was simply awkward, and he stayed much in the shadows in Jade Palace, enduring this life and thinking that his next would surely be better.

But Jade was neighbor to Onyx Palace, and it was inevitable that these two houses mix upon occasion of anniversaries. These times were Alain’s torment when he was a child, when his naïve and real childhood was exposed to outsiders; they became torment of a different kind in his fourteenth year, when suddenly his newly maturing discrimination settled upon a certain face, a certain pale loveliness in the Onyx House.

“Only to be expected,” his mother sighed. He had embarrassed her many times, and diffidently came to her now with this confession . . . that he had seen in this Onyx princess what others saw within their own houses; an acuteness of longing possessed him which others claimed only for old recognitions and old lovers of former lives. He was new, and it was for the first time. “Her name,” his mother asked.

“Ermine,” he whispered, his eyes downcast upon the patterns of the carpets, which his aunt had loomed herself in a long-past life. “Her name is Ermine.”

“Boy,” his mother said, “you are a droplet in the canal of her lives. Forget her.”

It was genuine pity he heard in his mother’s voice, and this was very rare. You entertain me, was the kindest thing she had yet said to him, high compliment, implying he might yet attain to novelty. Now her kind advice brought tears to his eyes, but he shook his head, looked up into her eyes, which he did seldom: they were very old and very wise and he sensed them forever comparing him to memories ages past.

“Does anyone,” he asked, “ever forget?”

“Boy, I give you good advice. Of course I can’t stop you. You’ll be born a thousand times and so will she, and you’ll never make up for your youth. But such longings come out again if they’re not checked, in this life or the next, and they make misery. Sleep with many; make good friends, who may be born in your next life; no knowing whether you’ll be man or woman or if they’ll be what they are. Make many friends, that’s my advice to you, so that whether some are born ahead of you and some behind, whether sexes are what they are . . . there’ll be some who’ll be glad to see you among them. That’s how one makes a place for one’s self. I did it ages ago before I began to remember my lives. But I’ve every confidence you’ll remember yours at once; that’s the way things are, now. And when you’ve a chance to choose intelligently as you do in these days, why, lad, be very glad for good advice. Don’t set your affections strongly in your very first life. Make no enemies either. Think of your uncle Legran and Pertito, who kill each other in every life they live, whatever they are. Never set strong patterns. Be wise. A pattern set so early could make all your lives tragedy.”

“I love her,” he said with all the hopeless fervor of his fourteen unprefaced years.

“Oh, my dear,” his mother said, and sadly shook her head. She was about to tell him one of her lives, he knew, and he looked again at the carpet, doomed to endure it.

He did not see Onyx Ermine again that year, not the next nor the two succeeding: His mother maneuvered the matter very delicately and he was thwarted. But in his eighteenth year the quarrel Pertito had with uncle Legran broke into feud, and his mother died, stabbed in the midst of the argument.

Complications, she had warned him. He stood looking at her coffin the day of the funeral and fretted bitterly for the loss of her who had been his best and friendliest adviser, fretted also for her sake, that she had been woven into a pattern she had warned him to avoid. Pertito and Legran were both there, looking hate at one another. “You’ve involved Claudette,” Pertito had shouted at Legran while she lay dying on the carpet between them; and the feud was more bitter between the two than it had ever been, for they had both loved Claudette, his mother. It would not be long, he thought with the limits of his experience in such matters, before Pertito and Legran would follow her. He was wise and did not hate them, wrenched himself away from the small gathering of family and wider collection of curious outside Jade Palace, for he had other things to do with his lives, and he thought that his mother would much applaud his good sense.

But while he was walking away from the gathering he saw Ermine standing there among her kin of Onyx.

And if she had been beautiful when they were both fourteen, she was more so now. He stood and stared at her, a vision of white silk and pearls from the Sin, of pale hair and pink flushed skin. It was Ermine who drew him back to his mother’s funeral . . . Claudette, he must think of his mother now, by her true name, for she had stopped being his mother, and might at this moment be born far across the City, to begin her journey back to them. This mourning was only ceremony, a farewell of sorts, excuse for a party. It grew, as they walked the stairs past the thundering waters of the Sin, as more and more curious attached themselves and asked who had died, and how, and the tale was told and retold at other levels. But it was the kin who really knew her who did the telling; in his own low estate he kept silent and soon grew disaffected from all the empty show . . . his eyes were only for Ermine.

He moved to her side as they walked constantly down the long stairs which wrapped the chute of the Sin. “Might we meet after?” he asked, not looking at her, for shyness was the rule of his life.

He felt her look at him; at least he perceived a movement, a certain silence, and the heat crept to his face. “I think we might,” she said, and his heart pounded in his breast.

Never set strong patterns, Claudette had warned him; and before her body was entombed her voice seemed far away, and her advice less wise than it had seemed. After all, she had passed that way, and he was about to live life on his own.

I shall be wise, he promised her ghost. Claudette would be a child of his generation, surely . . . perhaps . . . the thought stunned him, perhaps his own with Ermine’s. She would be very welcome if she were. He would tell her so many things that he would have learned by then. It would be one of those rare, forever marriages, himself with Ermine; Ermine would love him . . . such a drawing could not be one-sided. The feeling soaring in him was the whole world and it was unreasonable to him that Ermine could go unmoved.

He was four years wiser than he had been, and filled with all the history he had been able to consume by reading and listening.

Pertito and Legran argued loudly near him. He paid them no heed. They reached the level of the tombs, far below the course of the Sin, and with great solemnity—all of them loved pomp when there was excuse for it—conveyed Claudette to her tomb. The populace was delighted when Pertito accused Legran of the murder; was elated when the whole funeral degenerated into a brawl, and the Pertito/Legran quarrel embroiled others. It found grand climax when knives were drawn, and uncle Legran and Pertito vowed suicide to expiate the wrong done Claudette. This was a grand new turn to the centuries-old drama, and the crowd gasped and applauded, profoundly delighted by a variation in a vendetta more than thirty centuries old. The two walked ahead of the returning crowd, and from the tenth level, leaped into the chute of the Sin, to the thunderous applause of much of the City. Everyone was cheerful, anticipating a change in the drama in their next lives. Novelty—it was so rarely achieved, and so to be savored. The souls of Pertito and Legran would be welcomed wherever they incarnated, and there would be an orgy to commemorate the day’s grand events, in the fond hope of hastening the return of the three most delightsome participants in the cycles of the City.

And Jade Alain fairly skipped up the long, long stairs above the thundering flood of the Sin, to change his garments for festal clothes, his very best, and to attend on Onyx Ermine.

He decked himself in sable and the green and white stones of his name, and with a smile on his face and a lightness in his step he walked to the doors of Onyx Palace.

There were no locks, of course, nor guards. The criminals of the City were centuries adept and not so crude. He walked in quite freely as he had come in company to the great anniversaries of the houses, asked of an Onyx child where might be the princess Ermine. The wise-eyed child looked him up and down and solemnly led him through the maze of corridors, into a white and yellow hall, where Ermine sat in a cluster of young friends.

“Why, it’s the Jade youth,” she said delightedly.

“It’s Jade Alain,” another yawned. “He’s very new.”

“Go away,” Ermine bade them all. They departed in no great haste. The bored one paused to look Alain up and down, but Alain avoided the eyes . . . looked up only when he was alone with Ermine.

“Come here,” she said. He came and knelt and pressed her hand.

“I’ve come,” he said, “to pay you court, Onyx Ermine.”

“To sleep with me?”

“To pay you court,” he said. “To marry you.”

She gave a little laugh. “I’m not wont to marry. I have very seldom married.”

“I love you,” he said. “I’ve loved you for four years.”

“Only that?” Her laugh was sweet. He looked up into her eyes and wished that he had not, for the age that was there. “Four years,” she mocked him. “But how old are you, Jade Alain?”

“It’s,” he said in a faint voice, “my first life. And I’ve never loved anyone but you.”

“Charming,” she said, and leaned and kissed him on the lips, took both his hands and drew them to her heart. “And shall we be lovers this afternoon?”

He accepted. It was a delirium, a dream half true. She brought him through halls of white and yellow stone and into a room with a bed of saffron satin. They made love there all the afternoon, though he was naïve and she sometimes laughed at his innocence; though sometimes he would look by mistake into her eyes and see all the ages of the City looking back at him. And at last they slept; and at, last they woke.

“Come back again,” she said, “when you’re reborn. We shall find pleasure in it.”

“Ermine,” he cried. “Ermine!”

But she left the bed and shrugged into her gown, called attendants and lingered there among the maids, laughter in her aged eyes. “In Onyx Palace, newborn lover, the likes of you are servants . . . like these, even after several lifetimes. What decadences Jade tolerates to bring one up a prince! You have diverted me, put a crown on a memorable day. Now begone. I sense myself about to be bored.”

He was stunned. He sat a good long moment after she had left in the company of her maids, heart-wounded and with heat flaming in his face. But then, the reborn were accustomed to speak to him and to each other with the utmost arrogance. He thought it a testing, as his mother had tested him, as Pertito and Legran had called him hopelessly young, but not without affection . . . He thought, sitting there, and thought, when he had dressed to leave . . . and concluded that he had not utterly failed to amuse. It was novelty he lacked.

He might achieve this by some flamboyance, a fourth Jade death . . . hastening into that next life . . . but he would miss Onyx Ermine by the years that she would continue to live, and he would suffer through lifetimes before they were matched in age again.

He despaired. He dressed again and walked out to seek her in the halls, found her at last in the company of Onyx friends, and the room echoing with laughter.

At him.

It died for a moment when she saw him standing there. She held out her hand to him with displeasure in her eyes, and he came to her, stood among them.

There was a soft titter from those around her.

“You should have sent him to me,” a woman older than the others whispered, and there was general laughter.

“For you there is no novelty,” Ermine laughed. She lolled carelessly upon her chair and looked up at Alain. “Do go now, before you become still more distressed. Shall I introduce you to my last husband?” She stroked the arm of the young woman nearest her. “She was. But that was very long ago. And already you are dangerously predictable. I fear I shall be bored.”

“Oh, how can we be?” the woman who had been her husband laughed. “We shall be entertained at Jade’s expense for years. He’s very determined. Just look at him. This is the sort of fellow who can make a pattern, isn’t he? Dear Ermine, he’ll plague us all before he’s done, create some nasty scandal and we shall all be like Legran and Pertito and poor Claudette . . . or whatever their names will be. We shall be sitting in this room cycle after cycle fending away this impertinent fellow.”

“How distressing,” someone yawned.

The laughter rippled round again, and Ermine rose from her chair, took his burning face in her two hands and smiled at him. “I cannot even remember being the creature you are. There is no hope for you. Don’t you know that I’m one of the oldest in Onyx? You’ve had your education. Begone.”

“Four years,” someone laughed. “She won’t look at me after thirty lifetimes.”

“Good-bye,” she said.

“What might I do,” he asked quietly, “to convince you of novelty and persuade you, in this life or the next?”

Then she did laugh, and thought a moment. “Die the death for love of me. No one has done that.”

“And will you marry me before that? It’s certain there’s no bargain after.”

There was a shocked murmur among her friends, and the flush drained from the cheeks of Onyx Ermine.

“He’s quite mad,” someone said.

“Onyx offered a wager,” he said. “Jade would never say what it doesn’t mean. Shall I tell this in Jade, and amuse my elders with the tale?”

“I shall give you four years,” she said, “since you reckon that a very long time.”

“You will marry me.”

“You will die the death after that fourth year, and I shall not be bothered with you in the next life.”

“No,” he said. “You will not be bothered.”

There was no more laughter. He had achieved novelty. The older woman clapped her hands solemnly, and the others joined the applause. Ermine inclined her head to them, and to him; he bowed to all of them in turn.

“Arrange it,” she said.

• • •

It was a grand wedding, the more so because weddings were rare, on the banks of the Sin where alone in the City there was room enough to contain the crowd. Alain wore black with white stones; Ermine wore white with yellow gold. There was dancing and feasting and the dark waters of the Sin glistened with the lights of lanterns and sparkling fires, with jewel-lights and the glowing colors of the various palaces of the City.

And afterward there was long, slow lovemaking, while the celebrants outside the doors of Jade Palace drank themselves giddy and feted a thing no one had ever seen, so bizarre a bargain, with all honor to the pair which had contrived it.

In days following the wedding all the City filed into Jade to pay courtesy, and to see the wedded couple . . . to applaud politely the innovation of the youngest and most tragic prince of the City. It was the more poignant because it was real tragedy. It eclipsed that of the Grand Cyclics. It was one of the marks of the age, an event unduplicatable, and no one wished to miss it.

Even the Death came, almost the last of the visitors, and that was an event which crowned all the outré affair, an arrival which struck dumb those who were in line to pay their respects and rewarded those who happened to be there that day with the most bizarre and terrible vision of all.

She had come far, up all the many turnings of the stairs from the nether depths of the City, where she kept her solitary lair near the tombs. She came robed and veiled in black, a spot of darkness in the line. At first no one realized the nature of this guest, but all at once the oldest did, and whispered to the others.

Onyx Ermine knew, being among the oldest, and rose from her throne in sudden horror. Alain stood and held Ermine’s hand, with a sinking in his heart.

Their guest came closer, swathed in her robes . . . she, rumor held it, had a right to Jade, who had been born here—not born at all, others said, but engendered of all the deaths the City never died. She drank souls and lives. She had prowled among them in the ancient past like a beast, taking the unwilling, appearing where she would in the shadows. But at last she established herself by the tombs below, for she found some who sought her, those miserable in their incarnations, those whose every life had become intolerable pain. She was the only death in the City from which there was no rebirth.

She was the one by whom the irreverent swore, lacking other terrors.

“Go away,” the eldest of Jade said to her.

“But I have come to the wedding,” the Death said. It was a woman’s voice beneath the veils. “Am I not party to this? I was not consulted, but shall I not agree?”

“We have heard,” said Onyx Ermine, who was of too many lifetimes to be set back for long, “we have heard that you are not selective.”

“Ah,” said the Death. “Not lately indeed; so few have come to me. But shall I not seal the bargain?”

There was silence, dread silence. And with a soft whispering of her robes the Death walked forward, held out her hands to Jade Alain, leaned forward for a kiss.

He bent, shut his eyes, for the veil was gauze, and he had no wish to see. It was hard enough to bear the eyes of the many-lived; he had no wish at all to gaze into hers, to see what rumor whispered he should find there, all the souls she had ever drunk. Her lips were warm through the gauze, touched lightly, and her hands on his were delicate and kind.

She walked away then. He felt Ermine’s hand take his, cold and sweating. He settled again into the presence hall throne and Ermine took her seat beside him. There was awe on faces around them, but no applause.

“She has come out again,” someone whispered. “And she hasn’t done that in ages. But I remember the old days. She may hunt again. She’s awake, and interested.”

“It’s Onyx’s doing,” another voice whispered. And in that coldness the last of the wedding guests drifted out.

The doors of Jade Palace closed. “Bar them,” the eldest said. It was for the first time in centuries.

And Ermine’s hand lay very cold in Alain’s.

“Madam,” he said, “are you satisfied?”

She gave no answer, nor spoke of it after.

• • •

There were seasons in the City. They were marked in anniversaries of the Palaces, in exquisite entertainments, in births and deaths.

The return of Claudette was one such event, when a year-old child with wise blue eyes announced his former name, and old friends came to toast the occasion.

The return of Legran and Pertito was another, for they were twin girls in Onyx, and this complication titillated the whole City with speculations which would take years to prove.

The presence of Jade Alain at each of these events was remarked with a poignancy which satisfied everyone with sensitivity, in the remarkable realization that Onyx Ermine, who hid in disgrace, would inevitably return to them, and this most exquisite of youths would not.

One of the greatest Cycles and one of the briefest lives existed in intimate connection. It promised change.

And as for the Death, she had no need to hunt, for the lesser souls, seeking to imitate fashion in this drama, flocked to her lair in unusual number . . . some curious and some self-destructive, seeking their one great moment of passion and notoriety, when a thousand thousand years had failed to give them fame.

They failed of it, of course, for such demises were only following a fashion, not setting one; and they lacked inventiveness in their endings as in their lives.

It was for the fourth year the City waited.

And in its beginning:

“It is three-fourths gone,” Onyx Ermine said. She had grown paler still in her shamed confinement within Jade Palace. In days before this anniversary of their wedding she had received old friends from Onyx, the first time in their wedded life she had received callers. He had remarked then a change in her lovemaking, that what had been pleasantly indifferent acquired . . . passion. It was perhaps the rise in her spirits. There were other possibilities, involving a former lover. He was twenty-two and saw things more clearly than once he had.

“You will be losing something,” he reminded her coldly, “beyond recall and without repetition. That should enliven your long life.”

“Ah,” she said, “don’t speak of it. I repent the bargain. I don’t want this horrid thing, I don’t; I don’t want you to die.”

“It’s late for that,” he said.

“I love you.”

That surprised him, brought a frown to his brow and almost a warmth to his heart, but he could muster only sadness. “You don’t,” he said. “You love the novelty I’ve brought. You have never loved a living being, not in all your lifetimes. You never could have loved. That is the nature of Onyx.”

“No. You don’t know. Please. Jade depresses me. Please let’s go and spend the year in Onyx, among my friends. I must recover them, build back my old associations. I shall be all alone otherwise. If you care anything at all for my happiness, let’s go home to Onyx.”

“If you wish,” he said, for it was the first time that she had shown him her heart, and he imagined that it might be very fearsome for one so long incarnate in one place to spend too much time apart from it. His own attachments were ephemeral. “Will it make you content?”

“I shall be very grateful,” she said, and put her arms about his neck and kissed him tenderly.

They went that day, and Onyx received them, a restrained but festive occasion as befitted Ermine’s public disfavor . . . but she fairly glowed with life, as if all the shadows she had dreaded in Jade were gone. “Let us make love,” she said, “oh, now!” And they lay all afternoon in the saffron bed, a slow and pleasant time.

“You’re happy,” he said to her. “You’re finally happy.”

“I love you,” she whispered in his ear as they dressed for dinner, she in her white and pearls and he in his black and his green jade. “Oh, let us stay here and not think of other things.”

“Or of year’s end?” he asked, finding that thought incredibly difficult, this day, to bear.

“Hush,” she said, and gave him white wine to drink.

They drank together from opposite sides of one goblet, sat down on the bed and mingled wine and kisses. He felt strangely numb, lay back, with the first intimation of betrayal. He watched her cross the room, open the door. A tear slipped from his eye, but it was anger as much as pain.

“Take him away,” Onyx Ermine whispered to her friends. “Oh, take him quickly and end this. She will not care if he comes early.”

“The risk we run . . .”

“Would you have her come here? For three years I have lived in misery, seeing her in every shadow. I can’t bear it longer. I can’t bear touching what I’m going to lose. Take him there. Now.”

He tried to speak. He could not. They wrapped him in the sheets and satin cover and carried him, a short distance at first, and then to the stairs, by many stages. He heard finally the thunder of the falls of the Sin, and the echoes of the lower levels . . . heard the murmur of spectators near him at times, and knew that none but Jade might have interfered. They were all merely spectators. That was all they wished to be, to avoid complications.

Even, perhaps, Jade itself . . . observed.

They laid him down at last in a place where feet scuffed dryly on dust, and fled, and left silence and dark. He lay long still, until a tingling in his fingers turned to pain, which traveled all his limbs and left him able again to move. He stirred, and staggered to his feet, cold in a bitter wind, chilled by the lonely dark. From before him came the dim light of lamps, and a shadow sat between them.

“You are betrayed,” the Death said.

He wrapped his arms about him against the chill and stared at her.

“She doesn’t love you,” said the Death. “Don’t you know that?”

“I knew,” he said. “But then, no one ever did. They’ve forgotten how.”

The Death lifted her hands to the veils and let them fall. She was beautiful, pale of skin, with ebon hair and a blood-red stain of rubies at her brow. She held out hands to him, rising. And when she came to him, he did not look away. “Some change their minds,” she said. “Even those who come of their own will.”

The eyes were strange, constantly shifting in subtle tones . . . the fires, perhaps, or all the souls she had drunk, all the torment. “I bring peace,” she said. “If I did not exist, there would be no way out. And they would all go mad. I am their choice. I am possibility. I am change in the cycles.”

He gazed into the flickerings, the all-too-tenanted eyes. “How is it done?” he asked, fearing to know.

She embraced him, and laid her head at his shoulder. He flinched from a tiny sharp pain at his throat, quickly done. A chill grew in his limbs, a slight giddiness like love.

“Go back,” she said releasing him. “Run away until your time.”

He stumbled back, found the door, realized belatedly her words.

“Go,” she said. “I’ll come for you . . . in my agreed time. I at least keep my word, Jade Alain.”

And when he would have gone . . .

“Jade Alain,” she said. “I know you have moved to Onyx. I know most things in the City. Tell your wife . . . I keep my promises.”

“She fears you.”

“She is nothing,” the Death said. “Do you fear me?”

He considered. The question found him numb. And for all his numbness he walked back to her, faced the dreadful eyes. He tested his courage by it. He tested it further, took the Death’s face between his hands and returned the kiss she had given three years before.

“Ah,” she said. “That was kind.”

“You are gentle,” he said. “I shall not mind.”

“Sad Jade prince. Go. Go away just now.”

He turned away, walked out the grim doorway into the light, walked up the stairs, a long, long walk, in which there were few passersby, for it was what passed for night in the City now, and of that he was very glad, because of the shame which Onyx had dealt him and the anger he felt. Those who did see him stared, and muttered behind their hands and shrank away. So did those at the doors of Onyx, who blanched and began to bar his way.

But the doors opened, and Ermine’s several friends stood with knives.

“Go away,” they said.

“That was not the bargain,” he replied.

“Your wife is the bargain,” the oldest woman said. “Take Ermine back to Jade. Don’t involve us.”

“No,” Ermine wailed from the hall beyond; but they brought her to him, and he took her by the hand and dragged her along to his own doors. She ceased struggling. They entered within the ornate halls of Jade Palace, and under the fearful eyes of his own kin, he drew her through the maze of corridors to his own apartments, and sealed the door fast behind them.

She was there. There was no possible means that she could be . . . but there the Death stood, clothed in black, among the green draperies by the bed. Ermine flung about and cried aloud, stopped by his opposing arms.

“Go,” the Death said. “I’ve nothing to do with you yet. Your wife and I have business.”

He held Ermine still, she shivering and holding to him and burying her face against him. He shook his head. “No,” he said, “I can’t. I can’t give her to you.”

“I’ve been offended,” the Death said. “How am I to be paid for such an offense against my dignity?”

He thought a moment. Smoothed Ermine’s pale hair. “The year that I have left. What is that to me? Don’t take Ermine’s lives. She cares so much to save them.”

“Does Ermine agree?” the Death asked.

“Yes,” Ermine sobbed, refusing to look back.

He sighed, hurt at last, shook his head and put Ermine from him. The Death reached out her hand, and he came to her, embraced her, looked back as she put her black-robed arm about him. Ermine cowered in the corner, head upon her knees.

“Cousin,” the Death whispered to him, for she was once of Jade. He looked into the shifting eyes, and she touched her finger first to her lips and to his; it bled, and left the blood on his lips. “Mine,” she said. “As you are.”

He was. He felt cold, and hungry for life, desired it more than ever he had desired it in his youth.

“I also,” the Death said, “am once-born . . . and never die. Nor shall you. Nor have a name again. Nor care.”

“Ermine,” he whispered, to have the sight of her face again. She looked.

And screamed, and hid her face in her hands.

“When the lives grow too many,” the Death said, “and you grow weary, Ermine . . . we will be waiting.”

“Whenever you wish,” he said to Ermine, and slipped his hand within the Death’s warm hand, and went with her, the hidden ways.

• • •

Pertito shook his head sadly, poured more wine, stroked the cheek of Legran, who was his lover this cycle, and Claudette’s sister. Below their vantage, beyond the balcony, a pale figure wavered on the tenth level stairs, where the Sin began its dizzying fall. “I’ll wager she’s on the verge again,” he said. “Poor Ermine. Thousands of years and no invention left. Never more years than twenty-two. When she reaches that age . . . she’s gone.”

“Not this time,” Legran said.

“Ah. Look. She’s on the edge.”

Legran stretched her neck to see, remained tranquil. “A wager?”

“Has she whispered things in your brother’s ear, perhaps? Lovers’ confidences?”

Legran sighed, smiled lazily, settling again. She sipped at her cup and her smoky eyes danced above the rim. A crowd was gathering to watch the impending leap.

“Do you know something?” Pertito asked.

“Ah, my tragic brother, to be in love with Ermine. Three lifetimes now he could not hold her . . . Wager on it, my love?”

Pertito hesitated. A hundred lifetimes without variance. It was a small crowd, observing the suicide indifferently, expecting no novelty from Ermine.

“This time,” Legran said, eyes dancing more, “there is a rival.”

“A second lover?”

The white figure poised delicately on the topmost step of the chute. There were sighs, a polite rippling of applause.

“A very old one,” Legran said. “For some months now. Ah. There she goes.”

There were gasps, a dazed silence from the crowd.

Past the falls, this time, and down and down the stairs, a gleam of white and pearls.

© 1981 by C.J. Cherryh.

Originally published in Sunfall.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

C.J. Cherryh, three-time Hugo Award winner, is one of today’s best-selling and most critically acclaimed writers of science fiction and fantasy. The author of more than fifty novels, including the popular Foreigner series, she makes her home in Spokane, Washington.

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The Autopsy
Michael Shea

Dr. Winter stepped out of the tiny Greyhound station and into the midnight street that smelled of pines. The station’s window showed the only light, save for a luminous clock face several doors down and a little neon beer logo two blocks farther on. He could hear a river. It ran deep in a gorge west of town, but the town was only a few streets wide and a mile or so long, and the current’s blurred roar was distinct, like the noise of a ghost river running between the banks of dark shop windows. When he had walked a short distance, Dr. Winters set his suitcase down, pocketed his hands, and looked at the stars—thick as cobblestones in the black gulf.

“A mountain hamlet—a mining town,” he said. “Stars. No moon. We are in Bailey.”

He was talking to his cancer. It was in his stomach. Since learning of it, he had developed this habit of wry communion with it. He meant to show courtesy to this uninvited guest, Death. It would not find him churlish, for that would make its victory absolute. Except, of course, that its victory would be absolute, with or without his ironies.

He picked up his suitcase and walked on. The starlight made faint mirrors of the windows’ blackness and showed him the man who passed: lizard-lean, white-haired (at fifty-seven), a man traveling on death’s business, carrying his own death in him, and even bearing death’s wardrobe in his suitcase. For this was filled—aside from his medical kit and some scant necessities—with mortuary bags. The sheriff had told him on the phone of the improvisations that presently enveloped the corpses, and so the doctor had packed these, laying them in his case with bitter amusement, checking the last one’s breadth against his chest before the mirror, as a woman will gauge a dress before donning it, and telling his cancer: “Oh, yes, that’s plenty roomy enough for both of us!”

The case was heavy, and he stopped frequently to rest and scan the sky. What a night’s work to do, probing pungent, soulless filth, eyes earthward, beneath such a ceiling of stars! It had taken five days to dig the ten men out. The autumnal equinox had passed, but the weather here had been uniformly hot. And warmer still, no doubt, so deep in the earth.

He entered the courthouse by a side door. His heels knocked on the linoleum corridor. A door at the end of it, on which was lettered NATE CRAVEN, COUNTY SHERIFF, opened well before he reached it, and his friend stepped out to meet him.

“Dammit, Carl, you’re still so thin they could use you for a whip. Gimme that. You’re in too good a shape already. You don’t need the exercise.”

The case hung weightless from the Sheriff’s hand, imparting no tilt at all to his bull shoulders. Despite his implied self-derogation, he was only moderately paunched for a man his age and size. He had a rough-hewn face, and the bulk of brow, nose, and jaw made his greenish eyes look small until one engaged them and felt the snap and penetration of their intelligence. In the office he half filled two cups from a coffee urn and topped both off with bourbon from a bottle in his desk. When they had finished these, they had finished trading news of mutual friends. The sheriff mixed another round and sipped from his, in a silence clearly prefatory to the work at hand.

“They talk about rough justice,” he said. “I’ve sure seen it now. One of those . . . patients of yours that you’ll be working on? He was a killer. Christ, ‘killer’ doesn’t half say it. A killer’s the least of what he was. The blast killing him, that was the justice part. Those other nine, they were the rough. And it just galls the hell out of me, Carl! If that kiss-ass boss of yours has his way, the rough won’t even stop with their being dead! There won’t even be any compensation for their survivors! Tell me—has he broke his back yet? I mean, touching his toes for Fordham Mutual?”

“You refer, I take it, to the estimable Coroner Waddleton of Fordham County.” Dr. Winters paused to sip his drink. With a delicate flaring of his nostrils he communicated all the disgust, contempt, and amusement he had felt in his four years as pathologist in Waddleton’s office. The sheriff laughed.

“Clear pictures seldom emerge from anything the coroner says,” the doctor continued. “He took your name in vain. Vigorously and repeatedly. These expressions formed his opening remarks. He then developed the theme of our office’s strict responsibility to the letter of the law, and of the workmen’s compensation law in particular. Death benefits accrue only to the dependents of decedents whose deaths arise out of the course of their employment, not merely in the course of it. Victims of a maniacal assault, though they die on the job, are by no means necessarily compensable under the law. We then contemplated the tragic injustice of an insurance company—any insurance company—having to pay benefits to unentitled persons, solely through the laxity and incompetence of investigating officers. Your name came up again, and Coroner Waddleton subjected it to further abuse. Fordham Mutual, campaign contributor or not, is certainly a major insurance company and is therefore entitled to the same fair treatment that all such companies deserve.”

Craven uttered a bark of wrathful mirth and spat expertly into his wastebasket. “Ah, the impartial public servant! What’s seven widows and sixteen dependent children, next to Fordham Mutual?” He drained his cup and sighed. “I’ll tell you what, Carl. We’ve been five days digging those men out and the last two days sifting half that mountain for explosive traces, with those insurance investigators hanging on our elbows, and the most they could say was that there was ‘strong presumptive evidence’ of a bomb. Well, I don’t budge for that because I don’t have to. Waddleton can shove his ‘extraordinary circumstances.’ If you don’t find anything in those bodies, then that’s all the autopsy there is to it, and they get buried right here where their families want ’em.”

The doctor was smiling at his friend. He finished his cup and spoke with his previous wry detachment, as if the sheriff had not interrupted his narrative.

“The honorable coroner then spoke with remarkable volubility on the subject of Autopsy Consent forms and the malicious subversion of private citizens by vested officers of the law. He had, as it happened, a sheaf of such forms on his desk, all signed, all with a rider clause typed in above the signatures. A cogent paragraph. It had, among its other qualities, the property of turning the coroner’s face purple when he read it aloud. He read it aloud to me three times. It appeared that the survivors’ consent was contingent on two conditions: that the autopsy be performed in loco mortis, that is to say in Bailey, and that only if the coroner’s pathologist found concrete evidence of homicide should the decedents be subject either to removal from Bailey or to further necropsy. It was well written. I remember wondering who wrote it.”

The sheriff nodded musingly. He took Dr. Winters’s empty cup, set it by his own, filled both two-thirds with bourbon, and added a splash of coffee to the doctor’s. The two friends exchanged a level stare, rather like poker players in the clinch. The sheriff regarded his cup, sipped from it.

“In loco mortis. What-all does that mean exactly?”

“‘In the place of death.”’

“Oh. Freshen that up for you?”

“I’ve just started it, thank you.”

Both men laughed, paused, and laughed again, some might have said immoderately.

“He all but told me that I had to find something to compel a second autopsy,” the doctor said at length. “He would have sold his soul—or taken out a second mortgage on it—for a mobile X-ray unit. He’s right, of course. If those bodies have trapped any bomb fragments, that would be the surest and quickest way of finding them. It still amazes me your Dr. Parsons could let his X-ray go unfixed for so long.”

“He sets bones, stitches wounds, writes prescriptions, and sends anything tricky down the mountain. Just barely manages that. Drunks don’t get much done.”

“He’s gotten that bad?”

“He hangs on and no more. Waddleton was right there, not deputizing him pathologist. I doubt he could find a cannonball in a dead rat. I wouldn’t say it where it could hurt him, as long as he’s still managing, but everyone here knows it. His patients sort of look after him half the time. But Waddleton would have sent you, no matter who was here. Nothing but his best for party contributors like Fordham Mutual.”

The doctor looked at his hands and shrugged. “So. There’s a killer in the batch. Was there a bomb?”

Slowly the sheriff planted his elbows on the desk and pressed his hands against his temples, as if the question had raised a turbulence of memories. For the first time the doctor—half hearkening throughout to the never- quite-muted stirrings of the death within him—saw his friend’s exhaustion: the tremor of hand, the bruised look under the eyes.

“When I’ve told you what we have, I guess you’ll end up assuming what I do about it. But I think assuming is as far as any of us will get with this one. It’s one of those nightmare specials, Carl. The ones no one ever does get to the bottom of.

“All right, then. About two months ago, we had a man disappear—Ronald Hanley. Mine worker, rock-steady, family man. He didn’t come home one night, and we never found a trace of him. OK, that happens sometimes. About a week later, the lady that ran the laundromat, Sharon Starker, she disappeared, no trace. We got edgy then. I made an announcement on the local radio about a possible weirdo at large, spelled out special precautions everybody should take. We put both our squad cars on the night beat, and by day we set to work knocking on every door in town collecting alibis for the two times of disappearance.

“No good. Maybe you’re fooled by this uniform and think I’m a law officer, protector of the people, and all that? A natural mistake. A lot of people were fooled. In less than seven weeks, six people vanished, just like that. Me and my deputies might as well have stayed in bed round the clock, for all the good we did.” The sheriff drained his cup.

“Anyway, at last we got lucky. Don’t get me wrong now. We didn’t go all hog-wild and actually prevent a crime or anything. But we did find a body—except it wasn’t the body of any of the seven people that had disappeared. We’d taken to combing the woods nearest town, with temporary deputies from the miners to help. Well, one of those boys was out there with us last week. It was hot—like it’s been for a while now—and it was real quiet. He heard this buzzing noise and looked around for it, and he saw a bee-swarm up in the crotch of a tree. Except he was smart enough to know that that’s not usual around here—beehives. So it wasn’t bees. It was bluebottle flies, a goddamned big cloud of them, all over a bundle that was wrapped in a tarp.”

The sheriff studied his knuckles. He had, in his eventful life, occasionally met men literate enough to understand his last name and rash enough to be openly amused by it, and the knuckles—scarred knobs—were eloquent of his reactions. He looked back into his old friend’s eyes.

“We got that thing down and unwrapped it. Billy Lee Davis, one of my deputies, he was in Viet Nam, been near some bad, bad things and held on. Billy Lee blew his lunch all over the ground when we unwrapped that thing. It was a man. Some of a man. We knew he’d stood six-two because all the bones were there, and he’d probably weighed between two fifteen and two twenty-five, but he folded up no bigger than a big-size laundry package. Still had his face, both shoulders, and the left arm, but all the rest was clean. It wasn’t animal work. It was knife work, all the edges neat as butcher cuts. Except butchered meat, even when you drain it all you can, will bleed a good deal afterwards, and there wasn’t one goddamned drop of blood on the tarp, nor in that meat. It was just as pale as fish meat.”

Deep in his body’s center, the doctor’s cancer touched him. Not a ravening attack—it sank one fang of pain, questioningly, into new untasted flesh, probing the scope for its appetite there. He disguised his tremor with a shake of the head.

“A cache, then.”

The sheriff nodded. “Like you might keep a pot roast in the icebox for making lunches. I took some pictures of his face, then we put him back and erased our traces. Two of the miners I’d deputized did a lot of hunting, were woods-smart. So I left them on the first watch. We worked out positions and cover for them, and drove back.

“We got right on tracing him, sent out descriptions to every town within a hundred miles. He was no one I’d ever seen in Bailey, nor anyone else either, it began to look like, after we’d combed the town all day with the photos. Then, out of the blue, Billy Lee Davis smacks himself on the forehead and says, ‘Sheriff, I seen this man somewhere in town, and not long ago!’

“He’d been shook all day since throwing up, and then all of a sudden he just snapped to. Was dead sure. Except he couldn’t remember where or when. We went over and over it, and he tried and tried. It got to where I wanted to grab him by the ankles and hang him upside down and shake him till it dropped out of him. But it was no damn use. Just after dark we went back to that tree—we’d worked out a place to hide the cars and a route to it through the woods. When we were close, we walkie-talkied the men we’d left for an all-clear to come up. No answer at all. And when we got there, all that was left of our trap was the tree. No body, no tarp, no Special Assistant Deputies. Nothing.”

This time Dr. Winters poured the coffee and bourbon. “Too much coffee,” the sheriff muttered, but drank anyway. “Part of me wanted to chew nails and break necks. And part of me was scared shitless. When we got back, I got on the radio station again and made an emergency broadcast and then had the man at the station rebroadcast it every hour. Told everyone to do everything in groups of three, to stay together at night in threes at least, to go out little as possible, keep armed and keep checking up on each other. It had such a damn-fool sound to it, but just pairing-up was no protection if half of one of those pairs was the killer. I sent our corpse’s picture out statewide, I deputized more men and put them on the streets to beef up the night patrol.

“It was next morning that things broke. The sheriff of Rakehell called—he’s over in the next county. He said our corpse looked a lot like a man named Abel Dougherty, a mill-hand with Con Wood over there. I left Billy Lee in charge and drove right out.

“This Dougherty had a cripple older sister he always checked back to by phone whenever he left town for long, a habit no one knew about, probably embarrassed him. Sheriff Peck there only found out about it when the woman called him, said her brother’d been four days gone for vacation and not rung her once. He’d hardly had her report for an hour when he got the picture I sent out, and recognized it. And I hadn’t been in his office more than ten minutes when Billy Lee called me there. He’d remembered.

“When he’d seen Dougherty was the Sunday night three days before we found him. Where he’d seen him was the Trucker’s Tavern outside the north end of town. The man had made a stir by being jolly drunk and latching onto a miner who was drinking there, man named Joe Allen, who’d started at the mine about two months back. Dougherty kept telling him that he wasn’t Joe Allen, but Dougherty’s old buddy named Sykes that had worked with him at Con Wood for a coon’s age, and what the hell kind of joke was this, come have a beer old buddy and tell me why you took off so sudden and what the hell you been doing with yourself.

“Allen took it laughing. Dougherty’d clap him on the shoulder, Allen’d clap him right back and make every kind of joke about it, say, ‘Give this man another beer, I’m standing in for a long-lost friend of his.’ Dougherty was so big and loud and stubborn, Billy Lee was worried about a fight starting, and he wasn’t the only one worried. But this Joe Allen was a natural good ol’ boy, handled it perfect. We’d checked him out weeks back along with everyone else, and he was real popular with the other miners. Finally Dougherty swore he was going to take him on to another bar to help celebrate the vacation Dougherty was starting out on. Joe Allen got up grinning, said goddamn it, he couldn’t accommodate Dougherty by being this fellow Sykes, but he could sure as hell have a glass with any serious drinking man that was treating. He went out with him, and gave everyone a wink as he left, to the general satisfaction of the audience.”

Craven paused. Dr. Winters met his eyes and knew his thought, two images: the jolly wink that roused the room to laughter, and the thing in the tarp aboil with bright blue flies.

“It was plain enough for me,” the sheriff said. “I told Billy Lee to search Allen’s room at the Skettles’ boardinghouse and then go straight to the mine and take him. We could fine-polish things once we had him. Since I was already in Rakehell, I saw to some of the loose ends before I started back. I went with Sheriff Peck down to Con Wood, and we found a picture of Eddie Sykes in the personnel files. I’d seen Joe Allen often enough, and it was his picture in that file.

“We found out Sykes had lived alone, was an on-again, off-again worker, private in his comings and goings, and hadn’t been around for a while.

But one of the sawyers there could be pretty sure of when Sykes left Rakehell because he’d gone to Sykes’s cabin the morning after a big meteor shower they had out there about nine weeks back, since some thought the shower might have reached the ground, and not far from Sykes’s side of the mountain. He wasn’t in that morning, and the sawyer hadn’t seen him since.

“After all those weeks, it was sewed up just like that. Within another hour I was almost back in Bailey, had the pedal to the metal, and was barely three miles out of town, when it all blew to shit. I heard it blow, I was that close to collaring him. I tell you, Carl, I felt . . . like a bullet. I was going to rip right through this Sykes, this goddamned cannibal monster . . .

“We had to reconstruct what happened. Billy Lee got impatient and went after him alone, but luckily he radioed Travis—my other deputy—first. Travis was on the mountain drag-netting around that tree for clues, but he happened to be near his car when Billy Lee called him. He said he’d just been through Allen’s room and had got something really odd. It was a sphere, half again big as a basketball, heavy, made of something that wasn’t metal or glass but was a little like both. He could half-see into it, and it looked to be full of some kind of circuitry and components. He hadn’t found anything else unusual. He was going to take this thing along with him, and go after Allen now. He told Travis to get up to the mine for backup. He’d be there first and should already have Allen by the time Travis arrived.

“Tierney, the shift boss up there, had an assistant that told us the rest. Billy Lee parked behind the offices where the men in the yard wouldn’t see the car. He went upstairs to arrange the arrest with Tierney. They got half a dozen men together. Just as they came out of the building, they saw Allen take off running from the squad car. He had the sphere under his arm.

“The whole compound’s fenced in, and Tierney’d already phoned to have all the gates shut. Allen zigged and zagged some but caught on quick to the trap. The sphere slowed him, but he still had a good lead. He hesitated a minute and then ran straight for the main shaft. A cage was just going down with a crew, and he risked every bone in him jumping down after it, but he got safe on top. By the time they got to the switches, the cage was down to the second level, and Allen and the crew had got out. Tierney got it back up. Billy Lee ordered the rest back to get weapons and follow, and him and Tierney rode the cage right back down. And about two minutes later half the goddamned mine blew up.”

The sheriff stopped as if cut off, his lips parted to say more, his eyes registering for perhaps the hundredth time his amazement that there was no more, that the weeks of death and mystification ended here, with this split-second recapitulation: more death, more answerless dark, sealing all.

“Nate.”

“What.”

“Wrap it up and go to bed. I don’t need your help. You’re dead on your feet.”

“I’m not on my feet. And I’m coming along.”

“Give me a picture of the victims’ position relative to the blast. I’m going to work, and you’re going to bed.”

The sheriff shook his head absently. “They’re mining in shrinkage stopes. The adits—levels—branch off lateral from the vertical shaft. From one level they hollow out overhand up to the one above. Scoop out big chambers and let most of the broken rock stay inside so they can stand on the heaps to cut the ceiling higher. They leave sections of support wall between stopes, and those men were buried several stopes in from the shaft. The cave-in killed them. The mountain just folded them up in their own hill of tailings. No kind of fragments reached them. I’m dead sure. The only ones they found were of some standard charges that the main blast set off, and those didn’t even get close. The big one blew out where the adit joined the shaft, right where, and right when, Billy Lee and Tierney got out of the cage. And there is nothing left there, Carl. No sphere, no cage, no Tierney, no Billy Lee Davis. Just rock blown fine as flour.”

Dr. Winters nodded and, after a moment, stood up.

“Come on, Nate. I’ve got to get started. I’ll be lucky to have even a few of them done before morning. Drop me off and go to sleep, till then at least. You’ll still be there to witness most of the work.”

The sheriff rose, took up the doctor’s suitcase, and led him out of the office without a word, concession in his silence.

• • •

The patrol car was behind the building. The doctor saw a crueler beauty in the stars than he had an hour before. They got in, and Craven swung them out onto the empty street. The doctor opened the window and hearkened, but the motor’s surge drowned out the river sound. Before the thrust of their headlights, ranks of old-fashioned parking meters sprouted shadows tall across the sidewalks, shadows that shrank and were cut down by the lights’ passage. The sheriff said:

“All those extra dead. For nothing! Not even to . . . feed him! If it was a bomb, and he made it, he’d know how powerful it was. He wouldn’t try some stupid escape stunt with it. And how did he even know that globe was there? We worked it out that Allen was just ending a shift, but he wasn’t even up out of the ground before Billy Lee’d parked out of sight from the shaft.”

“Let it rest, Nate. I want to hear more, but after you’ve slept. I know you. All the photos will be there, and the report complete, all the evidence neatly boxed and carefully described. When I’ve looked things over, I’ll know exactly how to proceed by myself.”

Bailey had neither hospital nor morgue, and the bodies were in a defunct ice-plant on the edge of town. A generator had been brought down from the mine, lighting improvised, and the refrigeration system reactivated. Dr. Parsons’s office, and the tiny examining room that served the sheriff’s station in place of a morgue, had furnished this makeshift with all the equipment that Dr. Winters would need beyond what he carried with him. A quarter-mile outside the main body of the town, they drew up to it. Tree-flanked, unneighbored by any other structure, it was a double building; the smaller half—the office—was illuminated. The bodies would be in the big windowless refrigerator segment. Craven pulled up beside a second squad car parked near the office door. A short rake-thin man wearing a large white Stetson got out of the car and came over. Craven rolled down his window.

“Trav. This here’s Dr. Winters.”

“’Lo, Nate. Dr. Winters. Everything’s shipshape inside. Felt more comfortable out here. Last of those newshounds left two hours ago.”

“They sure do hang on. You take off now, Trav. Get some sleep and be back at sunup. What temperature we getting?”

The pale Stetson, far clearer in the starlight than the shadowface beneath it, wagged dubiously. “Thirty-six. She won’t get lower—some kind of leak.”

“That should be cold enough,” the doctor said.

Travis drove off, and the sheriff unlocked the padlock on the office door. Waiting behind him, Dr. Winters heard the river again—a cold balm, a whisper of freedom—and overlying this, the stutter and soft snarl of the generator behind the building, a gnawing, remorseless sound that somehow fed the obscure anguish that the other soothed. They went in.

The preparations had been thoughtful and complete. “You can wheel ’em out of the fridge on this and do the examining in here,” the sheriff said, indicating a table and a gurney. “You should find all the gear you need on this big table here, and you can write up your reports on that desk. The phone’s not hooked up—there’s a pay phone at the last gas station if you have to call me.”

The doctor nodded, checking over the material on the larger table: scalpels, postmortem and cartilage knives, intestine scissors, rib shears, forceps, probes, mallet and chisels, a blade saw and electric bone saw, scale, jars for specimens, needles and suture, sterilizer, gloves . . . Beside this array were a few boxes and envelopes with descriptive sheets attached, containing the photographs and such evidentiary objects as had been found associated with the bodies.

“Excellent,” he muttered.

“The overhead light’s fluorescent, full spectrum or whatever they call it. Better for colors. There’s a pint of decent bourbon in that top desk drawer. Ready to look at ’em?”

“Yes.”

The sheriff unbarred and slid back the big metal door to the refrigeration chamber. Icy tainted air boiled out of the doorway. The light within was dimmer than that provided in the office—a yellow gloom wherein ten oblong heaps lay on trestles.

The two stood silent for a time, their stillness a kind of unpremeditated homage paid the eternal mystery at its threshold. As if the cold room were in fact a shrine, the doctor found a peculiar awe in the row of veiled forms. The awful unison of their dying, the titan’s grave that had been made for them, conferred on them a stern authority, Death’s Chosen Ones. His stomach hurt, and he found he had his hand pressed to his abdomen. He glanced at Craven and was relieved to see that his friend, staring wearily at the bodies, had missed the gesture.

“Nate. Help me uncover them.”

Starting at opposite ends of the row, they stripped the tarps off and piled them in a corner. Both were brusque now, not pausing over the revelation of the swelled, pulpy faces—most three-lipped with the gaseous burgeoning of their tongues—and the fat, livid hands sprouting from the filthy sleeves. But at one of the bodies Craven stopped. The doctor saw him look, and his mouth twist. Then he flung the tarp on the heap and moved to the next trestle.

When they came out, Dr. Winters took out the bottle and glasses Craven had put in the desk, and they had a drink together. The sheriff made as if he would speak, but shook his head and sighed.

“I will get some sleep, Carl. I’m getting crazy thoughts with this thing.” The doctor wanted to ask those thoughts. Instead he laid a hand on his friend’s shoulder.

“Go home, Sheriff Craven. Take off the badge and lie down. The dead won’t run off on you. We’ll all still be here in the morning.”

• • •

When the sound of the patrol car faded, the doctor stood listening to the generator’s growl and the silence of the dead, resurgent now. Both the sound and the silence seemed to mock him. The afterecho of his last words made him uneasy. He said to his cancer:

“What about it, dear colleague? We will still be here tomorrow? All of us?”

He smiled, but felt an odd discomfort, as if he had ventured a jest in company and roused a hostile silence. He went to the refrigerator door, rolled it back, and viewed the corpses in their ordered rank, with their strange tribunal air. “What, sirs?” he murmured. “Do you judge me? Just who is to examine whom tonight, if I may ask?”

He went back into the office, where his first step was to examine the photographs made by the sheriff in order to see how the dead had lain at their uncovering. The earth had seized them with terrible suddenness. Some crouched, some partly stood, others sprawled in crazy free-fall postures.

Each successive photo showed more of the jumble as the shovels continued their work between shots. The doctor studied them closely, noting the identifications inked on the bodies as they came completely into view.

One man, Roger Willet, had died some yards from the main cluster. It appeared he had just straggled into the stope from the adit at the moment of the explosion. He should thus have received, more directly than any of the others, the shock waves of the blast. If bomb fragments were to be found in any of the corpses, Mr. Willet’s seemed likeliest to contain them. Dr. Winters pulled on a pair of surgical gloves.

Willet lay at one end of the line of trestles. He wore a thermal shirt and overalls that were strikingly new beneath the filth of burial. Their tough fabrics jarred with the fabric of his flesh—blue, swollen, seeming easily torn or burst, like ripe fruit. In life Willet had grease-combed his hair. Now it was a sculpture of dust, spikes and whorls shaped by the head’s last grindings against the mountain that clenched it.

Rigor had come and gone—Willet rolled laxly onto the gurney. As the doctor wheeled him past the others, he felt a slight self-consciousness. The sense of some judgment flowing from the dead assembly—unlike most such vagrant fantasies—had an odd tenacity in him. This stubborn unease began to irritate him with himself, and he moved more briskly.

He put Willet on the examining table and cut the clothes off him with shears, storing the pieces in an evidence box. The overalls were soiled with agonal waste expulsions. The doctor stared a moment with unwilling pity at his naked subject.

“You won’t ride down to Fordham in any case,” he said to the corpse. “Not unless I find something pretty damned obvious.” He pulled his gloves tighter and arranged his implements.

Waddleton had said more to him than he had reported to the sheriff. The doctor was to find, and forcefully to record that he had found, strong “indications” absolutely requiring the decedents’ removal to Fordham for X-ray and an exhaustive second postmortem. The doctor’s continued employment with the Coroner’s Office depended entirely on his compliance in this. He had received this stipulation with a silence Waddleton had not thought it necessary to break. His present resolution was all but made at that moment. Let the obvious be taken as such. If the others showed as plainly as Willet did the external signs of death by asphyxiation, they would receive no more than a thorough external exam. Willet he would examine internally as well, merely to establish in depth for this one what should appear obvious in all. Otherwise, only when the external exam revealed a clearly anomalous feature—and clear and suggestive it must be—would he look deeper.

He rinsed the caked hair in a basin, poured the sediment into a flask and labeled it. Starting with the scalp, he began a minute scrutiny of the body’s surfaces, recording his observations as he went.

The characteristic signs of asphyxial death were evident, despite the complicating effects of autolysis and putrefaction. The eyeballs’ bulge and the tongue’s protrusion were, by now, as much due to gas pressure as to the mode of death, but the latter organ was clamped between locked teeth, leaving little doubt as to that mode. The coloration of degenerative change—a greenish-yellow tint, a darkening and mapping-out of superficial veins—was marked, but not sufficient to obscure the blue of cyanosis on the face and neck, nor the pinpoint hemorrhages freckling neck, chest, and shoulders. From the mouth and nose the doctor scraped matter he was confident was the blood-tinged mucous typically ejected in the airless agony.

He began to find a kind of comedy in his work. What a buffoon death made of a man! A blue pop-eyed three-lipped thing. And there was himself, his curious solicitous intimacy with this clownish carrion. Excuse me, Mr. Willet, while I probe this laceration. What do you feel when I do this? Nothing? Nothing at all? Fine, now what about these nails? Split them clawing at the earth, did you? Yes. A nice blood blister under this thumbnail, I see—got it on the job a few days before your accident, no doubt? Remarkable calluses here, still quite tough . . .

The doctor looked for an unanalytic moment at the hands—puffed dark paws, gestureless, having renounced all touch and grasp. He felt the wastage of the man concentrated in the hands. The painful futility of the body’s fine articulation when it is seen in death—this poignancy he had long learned not to acknowledge when he worked. But now he let it move him a little. This Roger Willet, plodding to his work one afternoon, had suddenly been scrapped, crushed to a nonfunctional heap of perishable materials. It simply happened that his life had chanced to move too close to the passage of a more powerful life, one of those inexorable and hungry lives that leave human wreckage—known or undiscovered—in their wakes. Bad luck, Mr. Willet. Naturally, we feel very sorry about this. But this Joe Allen, your co-worker. Apparently he was some sort of . . . cannibal. It’s complicated. We don’t understand it all. But the fact is we have to dismantle you now to a certain extent. There’s really no hope of your using these parts of yourself again, I’m afraid. Ready now?

The doctor proceeded to the internal exam with a vague eagerness for Willet’s fragmentation, for the disarticulation of that sadness in his natural form. He grasped Willet by the jaw and took up the postmortem knife. He sank its point beneath the chin and began the long, gently sawing incision that opened Willet from throat to groin.

In the painstaking separation of the body’s laminae Dr. Winters found absorption and pleasure. And yet throughout he felt, marginal but insistent, the movement of a stream of irrelevant images. These were of the building that contained him, and of the night containing it. As from outside, he saw the plant—bleached planks, iron roofing—and the trees crowding it, all in starlight, a ghost town image. And he saw the refrigerator vault beyond the wall as from within, feeling the stillness of murdered men in a cold yellow light. And at length a question formed itself, darting in and out of the weave of his concentration as the images did: Why did he still feel, like some stir of the air, that sense of mute vigilance surrounding his action, furtively touching his nerves with its inquiry as he worked? He shrugged, overtly angry now. Who else was attending but Death? Wasn’t he Death’s hireling, and this Death’s place? Then let the master look on.

Peeling back Willet’s cover of hemorrhage-stippled skin, Dr. Winters read the corpse with an increasing dispassion, a mortuary text. He confined his inspection to the lungs and mediastinum and found there unequivocal testimony to Willet’s asphyxial death. The pleurae of the lungs exhibited the expected ecchymoses—bruised spots in the glassy enveloping membrane. Beneath, the polyhedral surface lobules of the lungs themselves were bubbled and blistered—the expected interstitial emphysema. The lungs, on section, were intensely and bloodily congested. The left half of the heart he found contracted and empty, while the right was overdistended and engorged with dark blood, as were the large veins of the upper mediastinum. It was a classic picture of death by suffocation, and at length the doctor, with needle and suture, closed up the text again.

He returned the corpse to the gurney and draped one of his mortuary bags over it in the manner of a shroud. When he had help in the morning, he would weigh the bodies on a platform scale the office contained and afterward bag them properly. He came to the refrigerator door, and hesitated. He stared at the door, not moving, not understanding why.

Run. Get out. Now.

The thought was his own, but it came to him so urgently he turned around as if someone behind him had spoken. Across the room a thin man in smock and gloves, his eyes shadows, glared at the doctor from the black windows. Behind the man was a shrouded cart, behind that, a wide metal door.

Quietly, wonderingly, the doctor asked, “Run from what?” The eyeless man in the glass was still half-crouched, afraid.

Then, a moment later, the man straightened, threw back his head, and laughed. The doctor walked to the desk and sat down shoulder to shoulder with him. He pulled out the bottle and they had a drink together, regarding each other with identical bemused smiles. Then the doctor said, “Let me pour you another. You need it, old fellow. It makes a man himself again.”

Nevertheless his reentry of the vault was difficult, toilsome, each step seeming to require a new summoning of the will to move. In the freezing half-light all movement felt like defiance. His body lagged behind his craving to be quick, to be done with this molestation of the gathered dead. He returned Willet to his pallet and took his neighbor. The name on the tag wired to his boot was Ed Moses. Dr. Winters wheeled him back to the office and closed the big door behind him.

With Moses his work gained momentum. He expected to perform no further internal necropsies. He thought of his employer, rejoicing now in his seeming-submission to Waddleton’s ultimatum. The impact would be dire. He pictured the coroner in shock, a sheaf of Pathologist’s Reports in one hand, and smiled.

Waddleton could probably make a plausible case for incomplete examination. Still, a pathologist’s discretionary powers were not well- defined. Many good ones would approve the adequacy of the doctor’s method, given his working conditions. The inevitable litigation with a coalition of compensation claimants would be strenuous and protracted. Win or lose, Waddleton’s venal devotion to the insurance company’s interest would be abundantly displayed. Further, immediately on his dismissal the doctor would formally disclose its occult cause to the press. A libel action would ensue that he would have as little cause to fear as he had to fear his firing. Both his savings and the lawsuit would long outlast his life.

Externally, Ed Moses exhibited a condition as typically asphyxial as Willet’s had been, with no slightest mark of fragment entry. The doctor finished his report and returned Moses to the vault, his movements brisk and precise. His unease was all but gone. That queasy stirring of the air—had he really felt it? It had been, perhaps, some new reverberation of the death at work in him, a psychic shudder of response to the cancer’s stealthy probing for his life. He brought out the body next to Moses in the line.

Walter Lou Jackson was big, six feet two inches from heel to crown, and would surely weigh out at more than two hundred pounds. He had writhed mightily against his million-ton coffin with an agonal strength that had torn his face and hands. Death had mauled him like a lion. The doctor set to work.

His hands were fully themselves now—fleet, exact, intricately testing the corpse’s character as other fingers might explore a keyboard for its latent melodies. And the doctor watched them with an old pleasure, one of the few that had never failed him, his mind at one remove from their busy intelligence. All the hard deaths! A worldful of them, time without end. Lives wrenched kicking from their snug meat-frames. Walter Lou Jackson had died very hard. Joe Allen brought this on you, Mr. Jackson. We think it was part of his attempt to escape the law.

But what a botched flight! The unreason of it—more than baffling—was eerie in its colossal futility. Beyond question, Allen had been cunning. A ghoul with a psychopath’s social finesse. A good old boy who could make a tavernful of men laugh with delight while he cut his victim from their midst, make them applaud his exit with the prey, who stepped jovially into the darkness with murder at his side clapping him on the shoulder. Intelligent, certainly, with a strange technical sophistication as well, suggested by the sphere. Then what of the lunacy yet more strongly suggested by the same object? In the sphere was concentrated all the lethal mystery of Bailey’s long nightmare.

Why the explosion? Its location implied an ambush for Allen’s pursuers, a purposeful detonation. Had he aimed at a limited cave-in from which he schemed some inconceivable escape? Folly enough in this—far more if, as seemed sure, Allen had made the bomb himself, for then he would have to know its power was grossly inordinate to the need.

But if it was not a bomb, had a different function and only incidentally an explosive potential, Allen might underestimate the blast. It appeared the object was somehow remotely monitored by him, for the timing of events showed he had gone straight for it the instant he emerged from the shaft—shunned the bus waiting to take his shift back to town and made a beeline across the compound for a patrol car that was hidden from his view by the office building. This suggested something more complex than a mere explosive device, something, perhaps, whose destruction was itself more Allen’s aim than the explosion produced thereby.

The fact that he risked the sphere’s retrieval at all pointed to this interpretation. For the moment he sensed its presence at the mine, he must have guessed that the murder investigation had led to its discovery and removal from his room. But then, knowing himself already liable to the extreme penalty, why should Allen go to such lengths to recapture evidence incriminatory of a lesser offense, possession of an explosive device?

Then grant that the sphere was something more, something instrumental to his murders that could guarantee a conviction he might otherwise evade. Still, his gambit made no sense. Since the sphere—and thus the lawmen he could assume to have taken it—was already at the mine office, he must expect the compound to be scaled at any moment. Meanwhile, the gate was open, escape into the mountains a strong possibility for a man capable of stalking and destroying two experienced and well-armed woodsmen lying in ambush for him. Why had he all but ensured his capture to weaken a case against himself that his escape would have rendered irrelevant? Dr. Winters watched as his own fingers, like a hunting pack round a covert, converged on a small puncture wound below Walter Lou Jackson’s xiphoid process, between the eighth ribs.

His left hand touched its borders, the fingers’ inquiry quick and tender. The right hand introduced a probe, and both together eased it into the wound. It was rarely fruitful to use a probe on corpses this decayed; the track of the wound would more properly be examined by section. But an inexplicable sense of urgency had taken hold of him. Gently, with infinite pains not to pierce in the softened tissues an artifactual track of his own, he inched the probe in. It moved unobstructed deep into the body, curving upward through the diaphragm toward the heart. The doctor’s own heart accelerated. He watched his hands move to record the observation, watched them pause, watched them return to their survey of the corpse, leaving pen and page untouched.

External inspection revealed no further anomaly. All else he observed the doctor recorded faithfully, wondering throughout at the distress he felt. When he had finished, he understood it. Its cause was not the discovery of an entry wound that might bolster Waddleton’s case. For the find had, within moments, revealed to him that, should he encounter anything he thought to be a mark of fragment penetration, he was going to ignore it. The damage Joe Allen had done was going to end here, with this last grand slaughter, and would not extend to the impoverishment of his victims’ survivors. His mind was now made up: for Jackson and the remaining seven, the external exams would be officially recorded as contraindicating the need for any external exam.

No, the doctor’s unease as he finished Jackson’s external—as he wrote up his report and signed it—had a different source. His problem was that he did not believe the puncture in Jackson’s thorax was a mark of fragment entry. He disbelieved this, and had no idea why he did so. Nor had he any idea why, once again, he felt afraid. He sealed the report. Jackson was now officially accounted for and done with. Then Dr. Winters took up the postmortem knife and returned to the corpse.

First the long sawing slice, unzippering the mortal overcoat. Next, two great square flaps of flesh reflected, scrolled laterally to the armpits’ line, disrobing the chest: one hand grasping the flap’s skirt, the other sweeping beneath it with the knife, flensing through the glassy tissue that joined it to the chest wall, and shaving all muscles from their anchorages to bone and cartilage beneath. Then the dismantling of the strongbox within. Rib shears—so frank and forward a tool, like a gardener’s. The steel beak bit through each rib’s gristle anchor to the sternum’s centerplate. At the sternum’s crownpiece the collarbones’ ends were knifed, pried, and sprung free from their sockets. The coffer unhasped, unhinged, a knife teased beneath the lid and levered it off.

Some minutes later the doctor straightened up and stepped back from his subject. He moved almost drunkenly, and his age seemed scored more deeply in his face. With loathing haste he stripped his gloves off. He went to the desk, sat down, and poured another drink. If there was something like horror in his face, there was also a hardening in his mouth’s line and the muscles of his jaw. He spoke to his glass: “So be it, your Excellency. Something new for your humble servant. Testing my nerve?”

Jackson’s pericardium, the shapely capsule containing his heart, should have been all but hidden between the big blood-fat loaves of his lungs. The doctor had found it fully exposed, the lungs flanking it wrinkled lumps less than a third their natural bulk. Not only they, but the left heart and the superior mediastinal veins—all the regions that should have been grossly engorged with blood—were utterly drained of it.

The doctor swallowed his drink and got out the photographs again. He found that Jackson had died on his stomach across the body of another worker, with the upper part of a third trapped between them. Neither these two subjacent corpses nor the surrounding earth showed any stain of a blood loss that must have amounted to two liters.

Possibly the pictures, by some trick of shadow, had failed to pick it up. He turned to the Investigator’s Report, where Craven would surely have mentioned any significant amounts of bloody earth uncovered during the disinterment. The sheriff recorded nothing of the kind. Dr. Winters returned to the pictures.

Ronald Pollock, Jackson’s most intimate associate in the grave, had died on his back, beneath and slightly askew of Jackson, placing most of their torsos in contact, save where the head and shoulder of the third interposed. It seemed inconceivable Pollock’s clothing should lack any trace of such massive drainage from a death mate thus embraced.

The doctor rose abruptly, pulled on fresh gloves, and returned to Jackson. His hands showed a more brutal speed now, closing the great incision temporarily with a few widely spaced sutures. He replaced him in the vault and brought out Pollock, striding, heaving hard at the dead shapes in the shifting of them, thrusting always—so it seemed to him—just a step ahead of urgent thoughts he did not want to have, deformities that whispered at his back, emitting faint, chill gusts of putrid breath. He shook his head—denying, delaying—and pushed the new corpse onto the worktable. The scissors undressed Pollock in greedy bites.

But at length, when he had scanned each scrap of fabric and found nothing like the stain of blood, he came to rest again, relinquishing that simplest, desired resolution he had made such haste to reach. He stood at the instrument table, not seeing it, submitting to the approach of the half-formed things at his mind’s periphery.

The revelation of Jackson’s shriveled lungs had been more than a shock. He had felt a stab of panic too, in fact that same curiously explicit terror of this place that had urged him to flee earlier. He acknowledged now that the germ of that quickly suppressed terror had been a premonition of this failure to find any trace of the missing blood. Whence the premonition?

It had to do with a problem he had steadfastly refused to consider: the mechanics of so complete a drainage of the lungs’ densely reticulated vascular structure. Could the earth’s crude pressure by itself work so thoroughly, given only a single vent both slender and strangely curved? And then the photograph he had studied. It frightened him now to recall the image—some covert meaning stirred within it, struggling to be seen. Dr. Winters picked the probe up from the table and turned again to the corpse. As surely and exactly as if he had already ascertained the wound’s presence, he leaned forward and touched it: a small, neat puncture, just beneath the xiphoid process. He introduced the probe. The wound received it deeply, in a familiar direction.

The doctor went to the desk and took up the photograph again.

Pollock’s and Jackson’s wounded areas were not in contact. The third man’s head was sandwiched between their bodies at just that point. He searched out another picture, in which this third man was more central, and found his name inked in below his image: Joe Allen.

Dreamingly, Dr. Winters went to the wide metal door, shoved it aside, entered the vault. He did not search, but went straight to the trestle where Sheriff Craven had paused some hours before. He found the same name on its tag.

The body, beneath decay’s spurious obesity, was trim and well-muscled. The face was square-cut, shelf-browed, with a vulpine nose skewed by an old fracture. The swollen tongue lay behind the teeth, and the bulge of decomposition did not obscure what the man’s initial impact must have been—handsome and open, his now-waxen black eyes sly and convivial. Say, good buddy, got a minute? I see you comin’ on the swing shift every day, don’t I? Yeah, Joe Allen. Look, I know it’s late, you want to get home, tell the wife you ain’t been in there drinkin’ since you got off, right? Oh, yeah, I hear that. But this damn disappearance thing’s got me so edgy, and I’d swear to God just as I was coming here I seen someone moving around back of that frame house up the street. See how the trees thin out a little down back of the yard, where the moonlight gets in? That’s right. Well, I got me this little popper here. Oh, yeah, that’s a beauty, we’ll have it covered between us. I knew I could spot a man ready for some trouble

— couldn’t find a patrol car anywhere on the street. Yeah, just down in here now, to that clump of pine. Step careful, you can barely see. That’s right . . .

The doctor’s face ran with sweat. He turned on his heel and walked out of the vault, heaving the door shut behind him. In the office’s greater warmth he felt the perspiration soaking his shirt under the smock. His stomach rasped with steady oscillations of pain, but he scarcely attended it. He went to Pollock and seized up the postmortem knife.

The work was done with surreal speed, the laminae of flesh and bone recoiling smoothly beneath his desperate but unerring hands, until the thoracic cavity lay exposed, and in it, the vampire-stricken lungs, two gnarled lumps of gray tissue.

He searched no deeper, knowing what the heart and veins would show. He returned to sit at the desk, weakly drooping, the knife, forgotten, still in his left hand. He looked at his reflection in the window, and it seemed his thoughts originated with that fainter, more tenuous Dr. Winters hanging like a ghost outside.

What was this world he lived in? Surely, in a lifetime, he had not begun to guess. To feed in such a way! There was horror enough in this alone. But to feed thus in his own grave. How had he accomplished it—leaving aside how he had fought suffocation long enough to do anything at all? How was it to be comprehended, a greed that raged so hotly it would glut itself at the very threshold of its own destruction? That last feast was surely in his stomach still.

Dr. Winters looked at the photograph, at Allen’s head snugged into the others’ middles like a hungry suckling nuzzling to the sow. Then he looked at the knife in his hand. The hand felt empty of all technique. Its one impulse was to slash, cleave, obliterate the remains of this gluttonous thing, this Joe Allen. He must do this, or flee it utterly. There was no course between. He did not move.

“I will examine him,” said the ghost in the glass, and did not move. Inside the refrigeration vault, there was a slight noise.

No. It had been some hitch in the generator’s murmur. Nothing in there could move. There was another noise, a brief friction against the vault’s inner wall. The two old men shook their heads at one another. A catch clicked, and the metal door slid open. Behind the staring image of his own amazement, the doctor saw that a filthy shape stood in the doorway and raised its arms toward him in a gesture of supplication. The doctor turned in his chair. From the shape came a whistling groan, the decayed fragment of a human voice.

Pleadingly, Joe Allen worked his jaw and spread his purple hands. As if speech were a maggot struggling to emerge from his mouth, the blue tumescent face toiled, the huge tongue wallowed helplessly between the viscid lips.

The doctor reached for the telephone, lifted the receiver. Its deadness to his ear meant nothing—he could not have spoken. The thing confronting him, with each least movement that it made, destroyed the very frame of sanity in which words might have meaning, reduced the world itself around him to a waste of dark and silence, a starlit ruin where already, everywhere, the alien and unimaginable was awakening to its new dominion. The corpse raised and reached out one hand as if to stay him—turned, and walked toward the instrument table. Its legs were leaden, it rocked its shoulders like a swimmer, fighting to make its passage through gravity’s dense medium. It reached the table and grasped it exhaustedly. The doctor found himself on his feet, crouched slightly, weightlessly still. The knife in his hand was the only part of himself he clearly felt, and it was like a tongue of fire, a crematory flame. Joe Allen’s corpse thrust one hand among the instruments. The thick fingers, with a queer simian ineptitude, brought up a scalpel. Both hands clasped the little handle and plunged the blade between the lips, as a thirsty child might a Popsicle, then jerked it out again, slashing the tongue. Turbid fluid splashed down to the floor. The jaw worked stiffly, the mouth brought out words in a wet ragged hiss:

“Please. Help me. Trapped in this.” One dead hand struck the dead chest. “Starving.”

“What are you?”

“Traveler. Not of Earth.”

“An eater of human flesh. A drinker of human blood.”

“No. No. Hiding only. Am small. Shape hideous to you. Feared death.”

“You brought death.” The doctor spoke with the calm of perfect disbelief, himself as incredible to him as the thing he spoke with. It shook its head, the dull, popped eyes glaring with an agony of thwarted expression.

“Killed none. Hid in this. Hid in this not to be killed. Five days now. Drowning in decay. Free me. Please.”

“No. You have come to feed on us, you are not hiding in fear. We are your food, your meat and drink. You fed on those two men within your grave. Their grave. For you, a delay. In fact, a diversion that has ended the hunt for you.”

“No! No! Used men already dead. For me, five days, starvation. Even less. Fed only from need. Horrible necessity!”

The spoiled vocal instrument made a mangled gasp of the last word—an inhuman snake-pit noise the doctor felt as a cold flicker of ophidian tongues within his ears—while the dead arms moved in a sodden approximation of the body language that swears truth.

“No,” the doctor said. “You killed them all. Including your . . . tool—this man. What are you?” Panic erupted in the question that he tried to bury by answering himself instantly. “Resolute, yes. That surely. You used death for an escape route. You need no oxygen perhaps.”

“Extracted more than my need from gasses of decay. A lesser component of our metabolism.”

The voice was gaining distinctness, developing makeshifts for tones lost in the agonal rupturing of the valves and stops of speech, more effectively wrestling vowel and consonant from the putrid tongue and lips. At the same time the body’s crudity of movement did not quite obscure a subtle, incessant experimentation. Fingers flexed and stirred, testing the give of tendons, groping the palm for old points of purchase and counterpressure there. The knees, with cautious repetitions, assessed the new limits of their articulation.

“What was the sphere?”

“My ship. Its destruction our first duty facing discovery.” (Fear touched the doctor, like a slug climbing his neck; he had seen, as it spoke, a sharp spastic activity of the tongue, a pleating and shrinkage of its bulk as at the tug of some inward adjustment.) “No chance to reenter. Leaving this body takes far too long. Not even time to set it for destruct—must extrude a cilium, chemical key to broach hull shield. In shaft was my only chance to halt my host.”

Though the dead mask hung expressionless, conveyed no irony, the thing’s articulacy grew uncannily—each word more smoothly shaped, nuances of tone creeping into its speech. Its right arm tested its wrist as it spoke, and the scalpel the hand still held cut white sparks from the air, while the word host seemed itself a little razor-cut, an almost teasing abandonment of fiction preliminary to attack.

But the doctor found that fear had gone from him. The impossibility with which he conversed, and was about to struggle, was working in him an overwhelming amplification of his life’s long helpless rage at death. He found his parochial pity for Earth alone stretched to the transstellar scope this traveler commanded, to the whole cosmic trash yard with its bulldozed multitudes of corpses; galactic wheels of carnage—stars, planets with their most majestic generations—all trash, cracked bones and foul rags that pooled, settled, reconcatenated in futile symmetries gravid with new multitudes of briefly animate trash.

And this, standing before him now, was the death it was given him particularly to deal—his mite was being called in by the universal Treasury of Death, and Dr. Winters found himself, an old healer, on fire to pay. His own, more lethal, blade tugged at his hand with its own sharp appetite. He felt entirely the Examiner once more, knew the precise cuts he would make, swiftly and without error. Very soon now, he thought and coolly probed for some further insight before its onslaught:

“Why must your ship be destroyed, even at the cost of your host’s life?”

“We must not be understood.”

“The livestock must not understand what is devouring them.”

“Yes, Doctor. Not all at once. But one by one. You will understand what is devouring you. That is essential to my feast.”

The doctor shook his head. “You are in your grave already, Traveler. That body will be your coffin. You will be buried in it a second time, for all time.”

The thing came one step nearer and opened its mouth. The flabby throat wrestled as with speech, but what sprang out was a slender white filament, more than whip-fast. Dr. Winters saw only the first flicker of its eruption, and then his brain nova-ed, thinning out at light-speed to a white nullity.

• • •

When the doctor came to himself, it was in fact to a part of himself only. Before he had opened his eyes he found that his wakened mind had repossessed proprioceptively only a bizarre truncation of his body. His head, neck, left shoulder, arm, and hand declared themselves—the rest was silence.

When, he opened his eyes, he found that he lay supine on the gurney, and naked. Something propped his head. A strap bound his left elbow to the gurney’s edge, a strap he could feel. His chest was also anchored by a strap, and this he could not feel. Indeed, save for its active remnant, his entire body might have been bound in a block of ice, so numb was it, and so powerless was he to compel the slightest movement from the least part of it.

The room was empty, but from the open door of the vault there came slight sounds: the creak and soft frictions of heavy tarpaulin shifted to accommodate some business involving small clicking and kissing noises.

Tears of fury filled the doctor’s eyes. Clenching his one fist at the starry engine of creation that he could not see, he ground his teeth and whispered in the hot breath of strangled weeping:

“Take it back, this dirty little shred of life! I throw it off gladly like the filth it is.” The slow knock of boot soles loudened from within the vault, and he turned his head. From the vault door Joe Allen’s corpse approached him.

It moved with new energy, though its gait was grotesque, a ducking, hitching progress, jerky with circumventions of decayed muscle, while above this galvanized, struggling frame, the bruise-colored face hung inanimate, an image of detachment. With terrible clarity the thing was revealed for what it was—a damaged hand-puppet vigorously worked from within. And when that frozen face was brought to hang above the doctor, the reeking hands, with the light, solicitous touch of friends at sickbeds, rested on his naked thigh.

The absence of sensation made the touch more dreadful than if felt. It showed him that the nightmare he still desperately denied at heart had annexed his body while he—holding head and arm free—had already more than half-drowned in its mortal paralysis. There, from his chest on down, lay his nightmare part, a nothingness freely possessed by an unspeakability. The corpse said:

“Rotten blood. Thin nourishment. I had only one hour alone before you came. I fed from my neighbor to my left—barely had strength to extend a siphon. Fed from the right while you worked. Tricky going—you are alert. I expected Dr. Parsons. The energy needs of animating this”—one hand left the doctor’s thigh and smote the dusty overalls—“and of host-transfer, very high. Once I have you synapsed, I will be near starvation again.”

A sequence of unbearable images unfolded in the doctor’s mind, even as the robot carrion turned from the gurney and walked to the instrument table: the sheriff’s arrival just after dawn, alone of course, since Craven always took thought for his deputies’ rest and because on this errand he would want privacy to consider any indiscretion on behalf of the miners’ survivors that the situation might call for; Craven’s finding his old friend, supine and alarmingly weak; his hurrying over, his leaning near. Then, somewhat later, a police car containing a rack of still wet bones might plunge off the highway above some deep spot in the gorge.

The corpse took an evidence box from the table and put the scalpel in it. Then it turned and retrieved the mortuary knife from the floor and put that in as well, saying as it did so, without turning, “The sheriff will come in the morning. You spoke like close friends. He will probably come alone.”

The coincidence with his thoughts had to be accident, but the intent to terrify and appall him was clear. The tone and timing of that patched-up voice were unmistakably deliberate—sly probes that sought his anguish specifically, sought his mind’s personal center. He watched the corpse—over at the table—dipping an apish but accurate hand and plucking up rib shears, scissors, clamps, adding all to the box. He stared, momentarily emptied by shock of all but the will to know finally the full extent of the horror that had appropriated his life. Joe Allen’s body carried the box to the worktable beside the gurney, and the expressionless eyes met the doctor’s.

“I have gambled. A grave gamble. But now I have won. At risk of personal discovery we are obliged to disconnect, contract, hide as well as possible in the host-body. Suicide in effect. I disregarded situational imperatives, despite starvation before disinterment and subsequent autopsy being all but certain. I caught up with the crew, tackled Pollock and Jackson microseconds before the blast. I computed five days’ survival from this cache. I could disconnect at limit of my strength to do so, but otherwise I would chance autopsy, knowing the doctor was an alcoholic incompetent. And now see my gain. You are a prize host. Through you I can feed with near impunity even when killing is too dangerous. Safe meals are delivered to you still warm.”

The corpse had painstakingly aligned the gurney parallel to the worktable but offset, the table’s foot extending past the gurney’s, and separated from it by a distance somewhat less than the reach of Joe Allen’s right arm. Now the dead hands distributed the implements along the right edge of the table, save for the scissors and the box. These the corpse took to the table’s foot, where it set down the box and slid the scissors’s jaws round one strap of its overalls. It began to speak again, and as it did, the scissors dismembered its cerements in unhesitating strokes.

“The cut must be medical, forensically right, though a smaller one is easier. I must be careful of the pectoral muscles or these arms will not convey me. I am no larva anymore—over fifteen hundred grams.”

To ease the nightmare’s suffocating pressure, to thrust out some flicker of his own will against its engulfment, the doctor flung a question, his voice more cracked than the other’s now was:

“Why is my arm free?”

“The last, fine neural splicing needs a sensory-motor standard, to perfect my brain’s fit to yours. Lacking this eye-hand coordinating check, only a much coarser control of the host’s characteristic motor patterns is possible. This done, I flush out the paralytic, unbind us, and we are free together.”

The grave-clothes had fallen in a puzzle of fragments, and the cadaver stood naked, its dark gas-rounded contours making it seem some sleek marine creature, ruddered with the black-veined gas-distended sex. Again the voice had teased for his fear, had uttered the last word with a savoring protraction, and now the doctor’s cup of anguish brimmed over; horror and outrage wrenched his spirit in brutal alternation as if trying to tear it naked from its captive frame. He rolled his head in this deadlock, his mouth beginning to split with the slow birth of a mind-emptying outcry.

The corpse watched this, giving a single nod that might have been approbation. Then it mounted the worktable and, with the concentrated caution of some practiced convalescent reentering his bed, lay on its back. The dead eyes again sought the living and found the doctor staring back, grinning insanely.

“Clever corpse!” the doctor cried. “Clever, carnivorous corpse! Able alien! Please don’t think I’m criticizing. Who am I to criticize? A mere arm and shoulder, a talking head, just a small piece of a pathologist. But I’m confused.” He paused, savoring the monster’s attentive silence and his own buoyancy in the hysterical levity that had unexpectedly liberated him. “You’re going to use your puppet there to pluck you out of itself and put you on me. But once he’s pulled you from your driver’s seat, won’t he go dead, so to speak, and drop you? You could get a nasty knock. Why not set a plank between the tables—the puppet opens the door, and you scuttle, ooze, lurch, flop, slither, as the case may be, across the bridge. No messy spills. And in any case, isn’t this an odd, rather clumsy way to get around among your cattle? Shouldn’t you at least carry your own scalpels when you travel? There’s always the risk you’ll run across that one host in a million that isn’t carrying one with him.”

He knew his gibes would be answered to his own despair. He exulted, but solely in the momentary bafflement of the predator—in having, for just a moment, mocked its gloating assurance to silence and marred its feast.

Its right hand picked up the postmortem knife beside it, and the left wedged a roll of gauze beneath Allen’s neck, lifting the throat to a more prominent arch. The mouth told the ceiling:

“We retain larval form till entry of the host. As larvae we have locomotor structures, and sense buds usable outside our ships’ sensory amplifiers. I waited coiled round Joe Allen’s bed leg till night, entered by his mouth as he slept.” Allen’s hand lifted the knife, held it high above the dull, quick eyes, turning it in the light. “Once lodged, we have three instars to adult form,” the voice continued absently—the knife might have been a mirror from which the corpse read its features. “Larvally we have only a sketch of our full neural tap. Our metamorphosis is cued and determined by the host’s endosomatic ecology. I matured in three days.” Allen’s wrist flexed, tipping the knife’s point downmost. “Most supreme adaptations are purchased at the cost of inessential capacities.” The elbow pronated and slowly flexed, hooking the knife bodyward. “Our hosts are all sentients, ecodominants, are already carrying the baggage of coping structures for the planetary environment we find them in. Limbs, sensory portals”—the fist planted the fang of its tool under the chin, tilted it and rode it smoothly down the throat, the voice proceeding unmarred from under the furrow that the steel ploughed—“somatic envelopes, instrumentalities”—down the sternum, diaphragm, abdomen the stainless blade painted its stripe of gaping, muddy tissue—“with a host’s brain we inherit all these, the mastery of any planet, netted in its dominant’s cerebral nexus. Thus our genetic codings are now all but disencumbered of such provisions.”

So swiftly that the doctor flinched, Joe Allen’s hand slashed four lateral, cuts from the great wound’s axis. The seeming butchery left two flawlessly drawn thoracic flaps cleanly outlined. The left hand raised the left flap’s hem, and the right coaxed the knife into the aperture, deepening it with small stabs and slices. The posture was a man’s who searches a breast pocket, with the dead eyes studying the slow recoil of flesh. The voice, when it resumed, had geared up to an intenser pitch:

“Galactically, the chordate nerve/brain paradigm abounds, and the neural labyrinth is our dominion. Are we to make plank bridges and worm across them to our food? Are cockroaches greater than we for having legs to run up walls and antennae to grope their way? All the quaint, hinged crutches that life sports! The stilts, fins, fans, springs, stalks, flippers, and feathers, all in turn so variously terminating in hooks, clamps, suckers, scissors, forks, or little cages of digits! And besides all the gadgets it concocts for wrestling through its worlds, it is all knobbed, whiskered, crested, plumed, vented, spiked, or measeled over with perceptual gear for combing pittances of noise or color from the environing plentitude.”

Invincibly calm and sure, the hands traded tool and tasks. The right flap eased back, revealing ropes of ingeniously spared muscle while promising a genuine appearance once sutured back in place. Helplessly the doctor felt his delirious defiance bleed away and a bleak fascination rebind him.

“We are the taps and relays that share the host’s aggregate of afferent nerve-impulse precisely at its nodes of integration. We are the brains that peruse these integrations, integrate them with our existing banks of host-specific data, and, lastly, let their consequences flow down the motor pathway—either the consequences they seek spontaneously, or those we wish to graft upon them. We are besides a streamlined alimentary/ circulatory system and a reproductive apparatus. And more than this we need not be.”

The corpse had spread its bloody vest, and the feculent hands now took up the rib shears. The voice’s sinister coloration of pitch and stress grew yet more marked—the phrases slid from the tongue with a cobra’s seeking sway, winding their liquid rhythms round the doctor till a gap in his resistance should let them pour through to slaughter the little courage left him.

“For in this form we have inhabited the densest brainweb of three hundred races, lain intricately snug within them like thriving vine on trelliswork. We’ve looked out from too many variously windowed masks to regret our own vestigial senses. None read their worlds definitively. Far better then our nomad’s range and choice than an unvarying tenancy of one poor set of structures. Far better to slip on as we do whole living beings and wear at once all of their limbs and organs, memories and powers—wear all these as tightly congruent to our wills as a glove is to the hand that fills it.”

The shears clipped through the gristle, stolid, bloody jaws monotonously feeding, stopping short of the sternoclavicular joint in the manubrium where the muscles of the pectoral girdle have an important anchorage.

“No consciousness of the chordate type that we have found has been impermeable to our finesse—no dendritic pattern so elaborate we could not read its stitchwork and thread ourselves to match, precisely map its each synaptic seam till we could loosen it and retailor all to suit ourselves. We have strutted costumed in the bodies of planetary autarchs, venerable manikins of moral fashion, but cut of the universal cloth: the weave of fleet electric filaments of experience that we easily reshuttled to the warp of our wishes. Whereafter—newly hemmed and gathered—their living fabric hung obedient to our bias, investing us with honor and influence unlimited.”

The tricky verbal melody, through the corpse’s deft, unfaltering self-dismemberment—the sheer neuromuscular orchestration of the compound activity—struck Dr. Winters with the detached enthrallment great keyboard performers could bring him. He glimpsed the alien’s perspective—a Gulliver waiting in a Brobdingnagian grave, then marshaling a dead giant against a living, like a dwarf in a huge mechanical crane, feverishly programming combat on a battery of levers and pedals, waiting for the robot arms’ enactments, the remote, titanic impact of the foes—and he marveled, filled with a bleak wonder at life’s infinite strategy and plasticity. Joe Allen’s hands reached into his half-opened abdominal cavity, reached deep below the uncut anterior muscle that was exposed by the shallow, spurious incision of the epidermis, till by external measure they were extended far enough to be touching his thighs. The voice was still as the forearms advertised a delicate rummaging with the buried fingers. The shoulders drew back. As the steady withdrawal brought the wrists into view, the dead legs tremored and quaked with diffuse spasms.

“You called your kind our food and drink, Doctor. If you were merely that, an elementary usurpation of your motor tracts alone would satisfy us, give us perfect cattle-control—for what rarest word or subtlest behavior is more than a flurry of varied muscles? That trifling skill was ours long ago. It is not mere blood that feeds this lust I feel now to tenant you, this craving for an intimacy that years will not stale. My truest feast lies in compelling you to feed in that way. It lies in the utter deformation of your will this will involve. Had gross nourishment been my prime need, then my grave-mates— Pollock and Jackson—could have eked out two weeks of life for me or more. But I scorned a cowardly parsimony in the face of death. I reinvested more than half the energy that their blood gave me in fabricating chemicals to keep their brains alive, and fluid-bathed with oxygenated nutriment.”

The corpse reached into its gaping abdomen, and out of its cloven groin the smeared hands pulled two long skeins of silvery filament. The material looked like masses of nerve fiber, tough and scintillant—for the weave of it glittered with a slight incessant movement of each single thread. These nerve skeins were contracting. They thickened into two swollen nodes, while at the same time the corpse’s legs tremored and faintly twitched, as the bright vermiculate roots of the parasite withdrew from within Allen’s musculature. When the nodes lay fully contracted—the doctor could just see their tips within the abdomen—then the legs lay still as death.

“I had accessory neural taps only to spare, but I could access much memory, and all of their cognitive responses, and having in my banks all the organ of Corti’s electrochemical conversions of English words, I could whisper anything to them directly into the eighth cranial nerve. Those are our true feast, Doctor, such bodiless electric storms of impotent cognition as I tickled up in those two little bone globes. I was forced to drain them just before disinterment, but they lived till then and understood everything

— everything I did to them.”

When the voice paused, the dead and living eyes were locked together. They remained so a moment, and then the dead face smiled.

It recapitulated all the horror of Allen’s first resurrection—this waking of expressive soul in that purple death mask. And it was a demon-soul the doctor saw awaken: the smile was barbed with fine, sharp hooks of cruelty at the corners of the mouth, while the barbed eyes beamed fond, languorous anticipation of his pain. Remotely, Dr. Winters heard the flat sound of his own voice asking:

“And Joe Allen?”

“Oh, yes, Doctor. He is with us now, has been throughout. I grieve to abandon so rare a host! He is a true hermit-philosopher, well-read in four languages. He is writing a translation of Marcus Aurelius—he was, I mean, in his free time . . . ”

Long minutes succeeded of the voice accompanying the surreal self- autopsy, but the doctor lay resigned, emptied of reactive power. Still, the full understanding of his fate reverberated in his mind as the parasite sketched his future for him in that borrowed voice. And it did not stop haunting Winters, the sense of what a virtuoso this entity was, how flawlessly this mass of neural fibers played the tricky instrument of human speech. As flawlessly as it had puppeteered the corpse’s face into that ghastly smile. And with the same artistic aim: to waken, to amplify, to ripen its host-to-be’s outrage and horror. The voice, with ever more melody and gloating verve, sent waves of realization through the doctor, amplifications of the Unspeakable.

The parasite’s race had traced and tapped the complex interface between the cortical integration of sense input and the neural output governing response. It had interposed its brain between, sharing consciousness while solely commanding the pathways of reaction. The host, the bottled personality, was mute and limbless for any least expression of its own will, while hellishly articulate and agile in the service of the parasite’s. It was the host’s own hands that bound and wrenched the life half out of his prey, his own loins that experienced the repeated orgasms crowning his other despoliations of their bodies. And when they lay, bound and shrieking still, ready for the consummation, it was his own strength that hauled the smoking entrails from them, and his own intimate tongue and guzzling mouth he plunged into the rank, palpitating feast.

And the doctor had glimpses of the racial history that underlay the aliens’ predatory present. Glimpses of a dispassionate, inquiring breed so advanced in the analysis of its own mental fabric that, through scientific commitment and genetic self-sculpting, it had come to embody its own model of perfected consciousness. It had grown streamlined to permit its entry of other beings and its direct acquisition of their experiential worlds. All strictest scholarship at first, until there matured in the disembodied scholars their long-germinal and now blazing, jealous hatred for all “lesser” minds rooted and clothed in the soil and sunlight of solid, particular worlds. The parasite spoke of the “cerebral music,” the “symphonies of agonized paradox” that were its invasion’s chief plunder. The doctor felt the truth behind this grandiloquence: the parasite’s actual harvest from the systematic violation of encoffined personalities was the experience of a barren supremacy of means over lives more primitive, perhaps, but vastly wealthier in the vividness and passionate concern with which life for them was imbued.

The corpse had reached into its thorax and with its dead hands aided the parasite’s retraction of its upper-body root system. More and more of its livid mass had gone dead, until only its head and the arm nearer the doctor remained animate, while the silvery worming mass grew in its bleeding abdominal nest.

Then Joe Allen’s face grinned, and his hand hoisted up the nude, regathered parasite from his sundered gut and held it for the doctor to view—his tenant-to-be. Winters saw that from the squirming mass of nerve cord one thick filament still draped down, remaining anchored in the canyoned chest toward the upper spine. This, he understood, would be the remote-control line by which it could work at a distance the crane of its old host’s body, transferring itself to Winters by means of a giant apparatus it no longer inhabited. This, he knew, was his last moment. Before his own personal horror should begin, and engulf him, he squarely met the corpse’s eyes and said:

“Goodbye, Joe Allen. Eddie Sykes, I mean. I hope he gave you strength, the Golden Marcus. I love him too. You are guiltless. Peace be with you at the last.”

The demon smile stayed fixed, but, effortlessly, Winters looked through it to the real eyes, those of the encoffined man. Tormented eyes foreseeing death, and craving it. The grinning corpse reached out its viscid cargo—a seething, rippling, multinodular lump that completely filled the erstwhile logger’s roomy palm. It reached this across and laid it on the doctor’s groin. He watched the hand set the bright medusa’s head—his new self—on his own skin, but felt nothing.

He watched the dead hand return to the table, take up the scalpel, reach back over, and make a twelve-inch incision up his abdomen, along his spinal axis. It was a deep, slow cut—sectioning, just straight down through the abdominal wall—and it proceeded in the eerie, utter absence of physical sensation. The moment this was done, the fiber that had stayed anchored in the corpse snapped free, whipped back across the gap, and rejoined the main body that now squirmed toward the incision, its port of entry.

The corpse collapsed. Emptied of all innervating energy, it sagged slack and flaccid, of course. Or had it . . . ? Why was it . . . ? That nearer arm was supinated. Both elbow and wrist at the full upturned twist. The palm lay open, offering. The scalpel still lay in the palm.

Simple death would have dropped the arm earthward, it would now hang slack. With a blaze, like a nova of light, Winters understood. The man, Sykes, had—for a microsecond before his end—repossessed himself. Had flung a dying impulse of his will down through his rotten, fading muscles and had managed a single independent gesture in the narrow interval between the demon’s departure and his own death. He had clutched the scalpel and flung out his arm, locking the joints as life left him.

It rekindled Winters’s own will, lit a fire of rage and vengefulness. He had caught hope from his predecessor.

How precariously the scalpel lay on the loosened fingers! The slightest tremor would unfix the arm’s joints, it would fall and hang and drop the scalpel down farther than Hell’s deepest recess from his grasp. And he could see that the scalpel was just—only just—in the reach of his fingers at his forearm’s fullest stretch from the bound elbow. The horror crouched on him and, even now slowly feeding its trunk line into his groin incision, at first stopped the doctor’s hand with a pang of terror. Then he reminded himself that, until implanted, the enemy was a senseless mass, bristling with plugs, with input jacks for senses, but, until installed in the physical amplifiers of eyes and ears, an utterly deaf, blind monad that waited in a perfect solipsism between two captive sensory envelopes.

He saw his straining fingers above the bright tool of freedom, thought with an insane smile of God and Adam on the Sistine ceiling, and then, with a life span of surgeon’s fine control, plucked up the scalpel. The arm fell and hung.

“Sleep,” the doctor said. “Sleep revenged.”

But he found his retaliation harshly reined-in by the alien’s careful provisions. His elbow had been fixed with his upper arm almost at right angles to his body’s long axis; his forearm could reach his hand inward and present it closely to the face, suiting the parasite’s need of an eye-hand coordinative check, but could not, even with the scalpel’s added reach, bring its point within four inches of his groin. Steadily the parasite fed in its tapline. It would usurp motor control in three or four minutes at most, to judge by the time its extrication from Allen had taken.

Frantically the doctor bent his wrist inward to its limit, trying to pick through the strap where it crossed his inner elbow. Sufficient pressure was impossible, and the hold so awkward that even feeble attempts threatened the loss of the scalpel. Smoothly the root of alien control sank into him. It was a defenseless thing of jelly against which he lay lethally armed, and he was still doomed—a preview of all his thrall’s impotence-to-be.

But of course there was a way. Not to survive. But to escape, and to have vengeance. For a moment he stared at his captor, hardening his mettle in the blaze of hate it lit in him. Then, swiftly, he determined the order of his moves, and began.

He reached the scalpel to his neck and opened his superior thyroid vein—his inkwell. He laid the scalpel by his ear, dipped his finger in his blood, and began to write on the metal surface of the gurney, beginning by his thigh and moving toward his armpit. Oddly, the incision of his neck, though this was muscularly awake, had been painless, which gave him hopes that raised his courage for what remained to do.

When he had done the message read:

ALIEN

IN

ME

CUT

KILL

He wanted to write goodbye to his friend, but the alien had begun to pay out smaller auxiliary filaments collaterally with the main one, and all now lay in speed.

He took up the scalpel, rolled his head to the left, and plunged the blade deep in his ear.

Miracle! Last accidental mercy! It was painless. Some procedural, highly specific anesthetic was in effect. With careful plunges, he obliterated the right inner ear and then thrust silence, with equal thoroughness, into the left. The slashing of the vocal cords followed, then the tendons in the back of the neck that hold it erect. He wished he were free to unstring knees and elbows too, but it could not be. But blinded, deaf, with centers of balance lost, with only rough motor control—all these conditions should fetter the alien’s escape, should it in the first place manage the reanimation of a bloodless corpse in which it had not yet achieved a fine-tuned interweave. Before he extinguished his eyes, he paused, the scalpel poised above his face, and blinked them to clear his aim of tears. The right, then the left, both retinas meticulously carved away, the yolk of vision quite scooped out of them. The scalpel’s last task, once it had tilted the head sideways to guide the blood flow absolutely clear of possible effacement of the message, was to slash the external carotid artery.

When this was done, the old man sighed with relief and laid his scalpel down. Even as he did so, he felt the deep inward prickle of an alien energy—something that flared, crackled, flared, groped for, but did not quite find its purchase. And inwardly, as the doctor sank toward sleep—cerebrally, as a voiceless man must speak—he spoke to the parasite these carefully chosen words:

“Welcome to your new house. I’m afraid there’s been some vandalism—the lights don’t work, and the plumbing has a very bad leak. There are some other things wrong as well—the neighborhood is perhaps a little too quiet, and you may find it hard to get around very easily. But it’s been a lovely home to me for fifty-seven years, and somehow I think you’ll stay . . . ”

The face, turned toward the body of Joe Allen, seemed to weep scarlet tears, but its last movement before death was to smile.

© 1980 by Michael Shea.

Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Michael Shea was an American fantasy, horror, and science fiction author who made his home in California. He was a multiple winner of the World Fantasy Award and his works include Nifft the Lean (1982) (winner of the World Fantasy Award) and The Mines of Behemoth (1997) (later republished together as The Incomplete Nifft, 2000), as well as The ARak (2000) and In Yana, the Touch of Undying (1985). He was also a noted short fiction writer, with “The Angel of Death” (1979) nominated for a Nebula Award and “The Autopsy” (1980) nominated for Hugo and Nebula Awards.

Michael Shea: No Form is Eternal
Laird Barron

Seven years ago, Locus Magazine asked me to write an essay about the state of modern horror. I opened that piece with a few words about Michael Shea and his classic novella, “The Autopsy.” My words then:

“On the day I found a copy of David Hartwell’s Dark Descent, which featured Shea’s novella and a number of other classics, everything changed. I’d tasted literary horror and once that got into my blood, I was ruined for anything less substantial than the pure stuff. Shea’s dark masterwork remains etched upon my sensibilities as the ultimate example of how a storyteller may capture our wildest, bleakest, most fearful imaginings and bend them to the service of something far greater than an impulse toward the coarse and coarsely visceral. Perhaps more importantly, he demonstrated it was possible to dust off among the hoariest of genre tropes, demonic possession in this case, and transcend it utterly. This feat in itself is a metaphor for the highest quality work accomplished today.”

Seven years. That’s a lot of whiskey, that’s a lot of blues. That’s the rise and fall of a career or three, the last gasp of the New Weird and the demolition of the publishing industry as we knew it when the new millennium hove over the horizon. Seven years of traveling through space at sixty thousand miles per hour, zipping through time. I look at my feet as I type this and see the brindle dog, the best puppy I ever raised, has turned white. She’s traveling faster than I am, and so was Michael Shea. It’s the hell of our existence; we’re bullets fired at varying vectors through time and space and gods know what we’ll hit, or when.

Michael Shea was ahead of all of us for so long. When he arrived there hadn’t been any like him, nor have we seen his like since. The legendary Jack Vance must’ve known it when he signed off on A Quest for Simbilis, Michael’s tribute and first novel. Ed Ferman, publisher of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, surely knew it when he published “The Angel of Death” and “The Autopsy” and several others. The world knew it when Michael’s landmark debut collection Polyphemus crashed the scene. Algis Budrys referred to him as an “ornament to the field” and man, he had it right.

When you read “The Autopsy” you’ll see what I mean. It’s arguably among the most recognized pieces Michael ever produced. The man possessed a range that spanned from Jack Vance/Robert H. Howard-esque fantasy, to abject, ball-shriveling horror, to black comedy. But “The Autopsy” is a virtuoso performance. It exemplifies his talent for dread, for humor, for baroque majesty of language, and even for belligerent and persistent expressions of courage and hope in the face of cosmic despair. You read one story by Michael Shea, then this is it, because it signifies all that was wondrous about the author, and all that is wondrous about science fiction and horror.

This reprint of “The Autopsy” was already in the works when Michael unexpectedly passed away on February 16 of this year. Ordinarily, he would’ve answered a few interview questions to accompany the novella. Unfortunately, it has fallen to me to speak these few words on his behalf. It is an honor and it breaks my heart.

Michael Shea was, and continues to be, a major influence of mine. He and his wife Linda also became my dear friends during the early Aughts. It has been my great pleasure to spend time with them at various conventions and at their California home. Tremendous as his artistic talents may have been, Michael proved to be a good and kindly man in person and he surrounded himself with good and kindly people. His untimely death is a bitter blow. Not only for his family and friends, but for the community of fantastic literature.

No form is eternal; everything goes through changes and ultimately, into the dark. I comfort myself with memories of our friendship and with the conviction that his works, like the stars in cold distant fields, will shine on.

Laird Barron is the author of several books, including the short story collections The Imago Sequence and Occultation, and the novel The Croning. His work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Inferno, Lovecraft Unbound, Sci Fiction, Supernatural Noir, The Book of Cthluhu, Creatures, The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, and Best Horror of the Year. He is a three-time winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, and a three-time finalist for the Stoker Award. His work has also been nominated for the Crawford, World Fantasy, International Horror Guild, and Locus awards.

NOVEL EXCERPT:
Afterparty
Daryl Gregory

Introduction

Afterparty begins in Toronto, in the years after the smart drug revolution. Any high school student with a chemjet and internet connection can download recipes and print drugs. Lyda Rose, an addict and disgraced neuroscientist, learns that Numinous, the drug she helped create, is being used as a sacrament by a new underground church. The drug rewires the brain for religious ecstasy: Addicts believe they’re in touch with their own personal god, and those in withdrawal would rather kill themselves than live without that divine presence.

Lyda, with the help of her own personal god, Dr. Gloria, goes hunting for the new source of Numinous. But someone else is hunting her. Part of the novel follows Vinnie, a killer who can only do his job with smart drugs of a different kind.

• • •

Chapter 4

The call came for the Vincent while Vinnie was branding the spring calves. He was halfway through the shipment of freshly weaned three-month-olds—five bison cows and a bull from the Rakunas, Inc., facility in Santa Monica, California. The cow in his hands bucked and kicked, a real lively one. He ran a thumb along its side to soothe it, took a breath to soothe himself, then pressed the red-hot iron into the animal’s fuzzy brown flank. The calf squealed. A thin coil of acrid smoke rose up to the ceiling.

“Sorry, little girl,” Vinnie said. Ranching was no business for the sentimental, but the cries of the young ones really got to him. He flipped down the magnifying glass and inspected his mark, a Flying V about two millimeters long. The lines were crisp, and he was satisfied.

He set the cow down on the other side of the foot-high fence that separated the kitchen from the wide-open range of the living room. The calf scampered across the carpet of #10 Giro Home Prairie. The herd (thirty-eight head, counting the six he’d just purchased) had congregated in the shadow of the coffee table. It was midday, and the ceiling’s grow lights were turned up strong.

The pen pinged a second time: another message. He would have ignored the device, but this was the Vincent’s pen, the one that hardly ever beeped. Vinnie removed the magnifying specs and put the branding iron into its tiny holder. He picked up the pen. The messages were the same, sent only thirty seconds apart: “Please call.”

Vinnie would have preferred to do all their business through text, but the employer was an old-fashioned man who wanted to hear a voice. Vinnie thumbed the connection. After a moment, the call went through, and the employer picked up.

“Is the Vincent available?” the employer said. He knew that the Vincent did not like to be ordered around. He liked to be asked.

Vinnie looked down at the crate of calves. He’d planned on finishing the branding. Then he was going to move the herd to the back bedroom where the carpet was high, so he could use the living room to set up a new breeding area for the two-year-olds. He’d never gotten his herd to breed, despite spending thousands on the highest-rated bulls. It frustrated him to be dependent on lab-grown stock, and upon the money that the Vincent’s jobs provided. Someday he’d live off his herd, like a true rancher.

“How long is the engagement?” Vinnie asked.

His employer said, “A few days at most. I want him to talk to someone in Toronto.” Talk. One of those kinds of jobs, then. Most of the time the Vincent met people. Sometimes he saw them. Talking was a rarity, but it paid the best.

“Okay,” Vinnie said. “Send the details. The Vincent can leave tomorrow.”

The employer said nothing for an uncomfortable moment. Then he said, “If it’s at all possible, I’d like him to be on the ground tonight.”

Now it was Vinnie’s turn to insert an uncomfortable pause. Buying an international plane ticket at the last minute would raise the Vincent’s air travel threat score. Also, would there be enough time for the Vincent’s pills to kick in? And what about the calves?

The employer said, “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t of the utmost importance. I’ll of course include a bonus for express service.”

Vinnie breathed out. “Okay. I’ll tell him.” By tradition, Vinnie pretended to be the secretary for the Vincent. The name Vinnie was never mentioned by either of them. The conceit was that the Vincent was too badass to ever talk on the phone.

The employer hung up, and Vinnie rested his forehead on the edge of the table and stared at the floor.

One of the miniature calves in the crate bleated. Vinnie wouldn’t have time to brand them now, and he wouldn’t be around to watch over their integration with the herd. He’d have to release them to the prairie and hope for the best. In a few hours he wouldn’t care about such things, but he did now, and he would again when he returned.

He told his pen to search for available flights, then sent an email to his neighbor down the hall. He made sure that the branding iron was turned off and unplugged. What next? The poomba. He detached the robot from its charger and set it down in the high grass. The little flying-saucer-shaped device did nothing for a moment, but then its sensors caught a whiff of methane, and it swiveled left and rolled slowly forward, the grasses bending before its rubber bumpers. The herd sometimes got spooked by the machine, but what could he do? Without it the whole apartment would fill up with tiny buffalo chips.

He left the apartment, always a nerve-racking experience, and walked two doors down. Al answered wearing only a pair of UNLV basketball shorts, his hairless rounded gut like the dome of a mosque. He was a Hispanic man a foot taller than Vinnie and a hundred pounds heavier, even with the lightweight titanium leg. Like so many men of his age and income bracket, Al had participated in Operation Enduring Freedom, which he’d described as an international limb exchange program sponsored by the American government.

“I’m going to be gone for a few days,” Vinnie said. “I was wondering if . . . well . . .”

“You want me to watch the critters?” Al had served as emergency ranch hand on two occasions. He wasn’t Vinnie’s first choice for the position, but he had two important qualifications: He was always home, and he always needed money.

“I’d really appreciate it,” Vinnie said. “I just emailed you updated instructions. Did you get it?”

“Sure,” Al said. “Just came in.”

“Great. You can delete the earlier one.” It had been several months since Al had watched the herd, so Vinnie unfurled his own pen to go over the major sections of the document: “Water and Lights”; “Veterinarian”; “Pasture Schedule”; “Food Supplements.” He apologized for not having time to write up notes on the new stock. “Sometimes the herd rejects the new calves,” Vinnie said. “If you see some of them wandering off by themselves, put them in the back forty.”

“That’s . . .”

“The bedroom with no furniture,” Vinnie said.

“Got it,” Al said. He shifted his weight to his biological leg. Raised his eyebrows significantly.

“Oh!” Vinnie said. He handed over the envelope that contained the cash. “I wrote the apartment guest code on the envelope. It’s a new number. Also, I won’t be reachable while I’m traveling, but if you call my home number and leave a message, I should be able to check voicemail at some point.”

“Don’t worry about a thing,” Al said.

Vinnie went back to his apartment. He didn’t feel great about leaving Al in charge, but he did know a cure for that feeling. He opened the freezer, pulled out the box of Commander Calhoun Fishstix, and retrieved the bottle of Evanimex that was hidden inside. The pills were provided by the employer as part of his compensation, and arrived at regular intervals by FedEx.

Vinnie preferred to ramp up slowly, taking one pill every two hours, but time was short. He swallowed four. They slid down his throat like lumps of ice, each one (he imagined) ushering his tender heart one step closer into cryogenic storage. For safekeeping.

He stepped over the kitchen fence and walked back to his bedroom via the narrow boardwalk. The wooden structure stood a foot off the ground, and its struts were spaced far enough apart that the bison could migrate without impediment. It also allowed Vinnie to cross the rooms without trampling grass, squashing livestock, or smearing cow patties on his flip-flops.

There was a trick to becoming the Vincent that went beyond chemicals, a ritual that helped realign his headspace. He stripped off his clothes and turned the shower to hot. Afterward he shaved, even though he had shaved just that morning. He unwrapped one of the charcoal suits, as well as a blue shirt and matching tie, and dressed. Then he took down the black Caran d’Ache briefcase and placed in it a second blue shirt, a pair of underwear, and a pair of socks.

Last, as always, the hat. He opened the box and lifted it out, a black 800x Seratelli with a Vaquero brim, one of the finest Western hats ever made. He lightly gripped the crown in three fingers and set it on his head.

That’s the ticket. He could feel the Vincent coming on now. Not a different identity, exactly, but a different way of thinking of himself. An alternate approach to the world. The knot of tension he carried in his chest—his worries for the herd, his agoraphobia, his certainty that he was an evil person—began to unwind and fall away.

His plane departed in ninety minutes. By the time it landed in Toronto, he would be at Full Vincent, ready and able to stalk and torture a Canadian.

Chapter 7

The Reverend Rudy Gallo Velez, naked except for his undershorts, crouched atop a chair in the center of the room in one of the classic stress positions: thighs parallel to the floor, arms tied behind his back, head bowed. A plastic garbage bag, loose at the bottom, covered his head. A figure eight of nylon cord, one loop around his neck, the other around his knees, kept his body in the proper attitude. He’d been in the position, on and off (mostly on), for three hours. He was a strong man, very fit, but sweat gleamed on his skin, and his legs trembled.

The Vincent sat about twenty feet away, his feet propped on the chemjet printer, his hat low across his eyes. A Zane Grey novel was open on his pen. He remained silent, giving Rudy time to think.

The pastor grunted, very quietly. He flexed his bare feet against the seat of the chair. His muscles had to be burning constantly now. Shooting pains would be knifing up his thighs, across his lower back. The discomfort caused by a stress position was psychologically different from that caused directly by the interrogator—say, a punch to the face, or a snapping of a finger bone, both of which the Vincent had inflicted upon Rudy within the first thirty seconds of meeting him—because positional pain seemed to come from within. This predisposed the victim to solicit the torturer’s help to end the suffering.

But a predisposition only. The Vincent could tell, even with the hood obscuring the pastor’s face, that he was not yet sufficiently distressed. Was he resilient because he was a man of the cloth, a gangbanger, or both? A black hand tattoo covered his left shoulder, and an elaborate “13” decorated the side of his neck, both of which marked him as La Eme—Mexican Mafia. If Pastor Rudy had found religion, it was only after a long allegiance with another hierarchical organization.

A novice interrogator might grow impatient at this point, start beating the man to break him down. That would be a mistake. As the CIA’s Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual made clear: Pain was useless. Psychology was everything.

Pain was a tool to get a subject—especially an alpha male like Rudy—into the proper state of mind. Which was why, when the Vincent had surprised the man in the back room of the church, the Vincent had immediately dropped him to the floor with the punch, then bent his finger the wrong way toward his wrist. Swift, unexpected pain hinted at the parameters of the interaction to come, and notified the subject of his change of status, from captain of his fate to passenger on the USS I Am Fucked.

For the young man who’d been in the room with Rudy—a gangly African-American who resembled the adopted younger brother of Uncle Sam—that ship had sailed. The black man had tried to run, and the Vincent had collared him like a rodeo calf and slammed him to the cement. The boy was stunned, teetering on unconsciousness, and the Vincent had helped him over that edge.

Despite all the violence and, let’s face it, an impressive display of physical prowess, the pastor refused to answer the Vincent’s questions. What did you give the red-haired woman, Lyda Rose? Where did you get the chemjet printer? Who gave you the ingredients? The pastor only smiled and said, “She took our communion wafers.”

Enhanced coercive interrogation techniques were required. To do the job right, the Vincent needed a private, soundproofed location, preferably one underground with a few metal doors to slam, all the better to convince the victim that he was isolated, helpless, and beyond rescue. Instead he had to improvise with what was available: a plastic bag, a chair, and a windowless warehouse with a cement floor. He’d done more with less.

A few minutes later, Rudy’s legs gave out and he tipped sideways. The chair shot out from under him and smacked the floor. The pastor lay on his side, the noose still enforcing a curled position.

The Vincent tipped back his hat but remained seated. “Are you ready to answer my questions, Rudy?” He thought it intellectually honest to call his victims by their names. He would not turn what he did, and who he did it to, into abstractions. That was for people with no control of their emotions.

The pastor breathed hard under his hood, the plastic hugging his mouth, then inflating. The Vincent flicked to a new page on the pen. “My employer would like you to fill out a brief questionnaire. I can read you the questions and record your answers. Ready?”

The hood moved slightly. The Vincent took that as a nod.

“One. ‘Are you a user of the drug that you’ve been distributing?’”

The Vincent waited for several seconds. “All righty, then. I’m going to put that down as a yes. Two. ‘How long have you been taking the drug and in what dosages?’”

Nothing.

“These aren’t hard questions, Rudy. For research purposes only, not personal at all. Help me out here.”

The Vincent got to his feet. “Three. ‘Would you say you’ve been taking the drug for less than a week, a week to one month, or longer than a month?’”

The pastor said, “Are you happy?” His voice was muffled by the hood, but he sounded genuinely curious.

The question surprised the Vincent. Usually at this point, the questions were more along the line of “Why are you doing this?” or “What do you want?” or “Why won’t you tell me what to say?”

The Vincent said, “I’m doing well, thanks.” It was sometimes a mistake to let the victim drive the interaction, but at least he was talking. And this was the most interesting conversation the Vincent had had in a while.

“I mean happy with your life,” Rudy said. “With what you’re doing.”

Ah. An appeal to his conscience. Talk about a rhetorical cul-de-sac. The Vincent tucked the pen into his jacket pocket.

“I’m happier than anyone else I know,” he said. “I’m . . .” What was the word? “Free” was close. “Liberated”? “Unfettered”? “I’m unencumbered.” He moved behind Rudy and pulled him into a sitting position. “I’m like a Goddamn free-range buffalo. Sorry—bison.

“See, you have a god to answer to,” the Vincent said, warming to the topic. “Others have society, or Mom, or the gang. Some voice in your head shaming you when you’ve broken the code. But in my head it’s quiet. Peaceful. Up you go.”

He helped blind Rudy climb back onto the chair, an awkward series of moves.

“You know in your heart what’s right or wrong,” the pastor said.

“I know in my head,” the Vincent said. “And what I’ve learned is that it’s not knowing what’s right or wrong, it’s caring. Feeling the wrongness. See, Rudy, when you see someone you love being hurt, you feel an echo of the pain yourself. You only got to imagine it. I can say, ‘I kicked your grandfather in the balls,’ and you will feel a twinge in your groin. Your morality is not rational, or handed down to you on stone tablets by some divine cop, it’s wired into your nervous system.” He patted the man on his sweat-slick back. “Fortunately, there’s a treatment for it.”

“But you’re alone,” Rudy said. “My god is here.”

“He doesn’t seem to be helping you much.” The Vincent leaned close. “Where did the printer come from?”

The man said nothing.

The Vincent said, “I’ll track it down eventually, but you could save me a lot of time. Was it the cartel? Have they branched into desktop drugs?”

The Vincent watched the hood for movement. The man seemed strikingly calm. Breathing deeply, but without the ragged gasps of someone under duress.

“Rudy, you’ve been put in an unfair position. The people who gave you that hardware knew that sooner or later someone like me was going to come around asking questions about it. They knew that you’d tell me eventually.”

The Vincent pulled the hood from the pastor’s head. Rudy’s face was covered in sweat, and he blinked to keep it from running into his eyes.

The Vincent said, “I can tell that you’re a good man, trying to do the right thing. But no one but you expects you to keep all this secret.”

Rudy looked to his left, as if someone had just stepped into the room. The Vincent couldn’t stop himself from glancing in that direction. Of course no one was there.

“I think it’s time we move on to the next phase,” the Vincent said. He walked to his carry-on bag and unzipped it. He took out a pair of pliers, a serrated knife, a roll of duct tape, a punch awl, a plastic bottle of lighter fluid, and a box of kitchen matches. Set them on the floor in a row. They were all new, picked up from the Wal-Mart soon after he’d landed in Toronto.

He made sure Rudy was watching this presentation of the props. The interrogation was, after all, a theatrical performance. You had to engage the victim in the narrative, a story that followed the classic structure: The hero (our victim), faced with a dire situation, overcomes adversity, and achieves his goals. Well, one goal, really: survival. But it was important that that modest happy ending seemed within reach, right around the corner. The Vincent’s job was to inspire not only fear, but hope.

The Vincent picked up the awl. “Rudy, I need you to tell me where you got the printer. It’s not like anything I’ve seen. Was it given to you, or did you buy it? Who did you get it from?”

Rudy shook his head.

“Just one name,” the Vincent said reasonably.

“I’m not going to tell you that,” Rudy said.

“Why not?”

He opened one eye, squinting. “I’m not going to point you toward another brother or sister.”

“So you got it from someone else in the church. One of the members.”

“Not this congregation,” Rudy said. “Not this building.”

“So if I looked for other congregations of—what do you call it? The Church of the Hologrammatic God—I could ask them. Maybe do a few more pastoral visits.”

Rudy said nothing.

“I’m going to level with you,” the Vincent said. “I’d rather not go to all that trouble. But you’re putting me in a corner. If you don’t give me some information that I can take to my employer, then I’m going to have to talk to other people in your church, as I’m talking to you now.”

Rudy glanced to his left again, a gesture that was getting tiresome. The man just wasn’t scared enough. And the Vincent couldn’t just start slicing skin and breaking bones. Pain at that level was counterproductive, not only because of the well-documented willingness of prisoners to say anything to stop it, but because of the opposite: Many victims discovered that their tolerance was higher than they expected. And death threats were worse than useless; hold a gun to a victim’s head, or a blade to his throat, he might start to think he was going to die no matter whether he submitted or not. The Vincent had seen this happen during an interrogation of a poppy farmer in Afghanistan. The army had botched the job, and the farmer shut down completely. He almost seemed to be at peace. By the time the Vincent had arrived at the scene, there wasn’t enough time to win him back. Another human resource, unexploited.

No, it wasn’t death threats that motivated his victims to cooperate, or pain, but fear of pain. And this man, Pastor Rudy Gallo Velez, seemed to have an extreme deficit of fear.

If he was drugged—and his employer said that he’d be dealing with criminals and users, starting with the addict Lyda Rose—it was no drug the Vincent had seen before. The Vincent had a bad thought: What if his own medication was interfering with the job? Maybe if he had some of the emotional sensitivity that he possessed when he was off duty and off the meds, then he could figure out where Rudy was vulnerable. But off the meds, the Vincent wouldn’t have the stomach for the job at all.

It was a conundrum.

Maybe he could grab somebody off the street—an innocent, a little girl, perhaps—and torture her in front of the pastor? But that was crazy. Where was he going to find a little girl at this time of night? The black kid with the beard could have been leverage, but it was too late for that.

The Vincent said, “So what’s it going to be, Rudy?”

The man shook his head. “I’m sorry. I just can’t.” He sounded genuinely apologetic. “I made a vow.”

Even on the meds, with his empathy reduced to a trickle, the Vincent could detect the sincerity in the pastor’s voice. Rudy was determined to keep his promise.

The Vincent put a hand on the man’s neck. Three small dots surrounded the “13” tattoo, representing Prison, Hospital, and Cemetery, the gangster stations of the cross. “Just a first name,” he said. Asking, even though it was futile. “Or the initials.”

Rudy said, “It’s not too late. It’s never too late. God can forgive you. Even after you do what you’re about to do.”

The pastor stared at the floor. He was already gone, gone as that Afghan farmer.

“What are we going to do with you?” the Vincent asked.

Afterword

In the novel, Vinnie’s hobby is raising genetically modified, miniaturized bison. I didn’t invent these; but I did, well, modify them. Let me explain. My friend Adam Rakunas invented three-foot tall bison for his story “Oh Give Me a Home” (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August 2013). When he was working on the story, I said, why not make them a few inches tall and raise them in an apartment, with grass carpeting? Adam said that was hilarious, but he wasn’t changing his story. (And rightly so. The story is awesome.) So when I started writing Afterparty, I asked to use the even-more-miniaturized bison, and he graciously agreed. Thanks for all the fine products, Rakunas, Inc.!

Copyright © 2014 by Daryl Gregory.

Excerpted from Afterparty by Daryl Gregory.

Published by permission of the author and Tor Books.

All rights reserved.

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

Daryl Gregory is an award-winning writer of genre-mixing novels, stories, and comics. His first novel, Pandemonium, won the Crawford Award and was nominated for a World Fantasy Award. His other novels include The Devil’s Alphabet (a Philip K. Dick award finalist), and Raising Stony Mayhall (a Library Journal best SF book of the year). Much of his short fiction is collected in Unpossible and Other Stories, which was named one of the best SF books of the year by Publishers Weekly. His comics include the recently completed Planet of the Apes series. He lives in State College, PA.

NOVEL EXCERPT:
Steles of the Sky
Elizabeth Bear

Temur sat cross-legged on warm stone. Brother Hsiung had brought him tea. Contents untasted, the cup cooled in his hands. The sound of a mountain stream rattling over rocks rose from the bottom of a gully several li below and to his left, but he had lost his immediate awareness of it.

He was watching his mare chase her colt around the twilit meadow while the chill of evening settled on his shoulders. Bansh was of the steppe breed, and her liver-bay coat gathered the dim light and gleamed like shadowed metal . . . but the colt, Afrit, was the unlucky color called ghost-sorrel, and he shone through the gloaming like a pale cream moon.

Beyond them, the shaman-rememberer’s mouse-colored mare watched, dark eyes in a face white from ears to lip giving her an uncanny resemblance to a horse whose head was a skull. She stood quietly, a mature and stolid creature with her ears pricked tip to tip, seeming amused by the romping of more excitable beasts.

Beyond her, strange jungles that had long overgrown the city called Reason were awakening for the night. Feathery ferns unscrolled from their stony daytime casements. Toothed birds whose legs were feathered jewel-blue and violet like a second set of wings crept from crevices and shook the plumage on their long bony whip-tails into bright fans.

Afrit bucked and snorted, shaking the bristle of his mane. His legs—seeming already near as long as his mother’s—flashed even paler than his cream-colored body, as if he wore white silk stockings gartered above each knee. Bansh stalked him, stiff-legged, head swaying like a snake’s. The colt hopped back nimbly for one less than a day old, whirled, bolted—and tumbled to the ground in a tangle of twig-limbs.

He scrambled up again and stood, rocky on splayed legs, until Bansh ambled over and nosed him carefully from one end to the other. By the time she reached his tail, he’d remembered about the teat, and was busily nursing.

Temur sipped his cold tea. Afrit would have his mother’s high-arched nose and good deep nostrils, the fine curve of her neck—even more dramatic with a stallion’s muscle on it. He’d have her neat, hard feet. The open questions were whether he’d ever be able to run on air the way his ever-so-slightly supernatural mother did . . . and what his unlucky, impossible color might presage.

Temur did not look up at the footstep behind him. He knew it: the hard boots and swish of trousers of the Wizard Samarkar. He played a game with himself, imagining her face without looking at her, and breathed deeply to catch the scent of her hair as she settled beside him. He was disappointed: it smelled of dust, and the desert, more than Samarkar.

But her shoulder was warm against his. She leaned into him, reached over. Plucked the cold bowl of tea from his hands and replaced it with one that breathed lazy coils of steam. He lowered his face to the warmth and inhaled. Moisture coated his dry nose and throat.

In pleasure, he sighed.

She drank down the cold tea and set the bowl aside as he turned to her. As always, her real face was far more complex than the one he held in his memory. He never quite remembered the small scar through an eyebrow or the slight irregularity of her nose.

It made him wonder how well he remembered Edene, who he had not seen since the spring.

The stars were shimmering into existence in the deepening sky, constellations he’d known all his life and yet had recently wondered if he’d ever see again. The Stallion, the Mare. The Oxen and the Yoke that bound them. The Ghost Dog. The Eagle.

It was strange seeing them framed in mountains on all sides.

“Are you hungry?” Samarkar asked at last. “Hsiung is making something. Hrahima is . . . off. Somewhere. And the shaman-rememberer is sleeping.”

“I’m waiting for the moons,” Temur said. She’d know why; one moon would rise for every son or grandson of the Great Khagan still living.

Temur was checking on his family.

A faint glow limned the ragged outline of the mountains to the east. When Temur glanced west, the stark light made the forested lower slopes there look like the rough undulations of the scholar-stones they carved in Song. Glaciers and smears of early snow glistened at their peaks, broken by the black knife-lines of ridges. His heart squeezed hard and fast, as if a woman caught his eye and smiled.

He looked away as long as he could, though Samarkar reached down and threaded her fingers between his. When he drank the last tea from the bowl he still held in his right hand, it was barely warm.

He set it on the rock beside him and turned to the rising moons.

Once there had been hundreds, a gorgeous procession scattered across the night, light enough to read by. Now a scant double handful drifted one by one into sight. There the Violet Moon, smeared with color like chalk, of Nilufer’s son Chatagai. There Temur’s own Iron Moon, red and charcoal and yet streaked bright. He waited for the pale circle of Qori Buqa’s Ghost Moon, just the color of Afrit’s creamy hide—

It did not rise.

Only Samarkar’s breathing told him she was in pain. He had clenched his hand through hers, and must be squeezing the blood from her fingers. When he forced his to open, his own knuckles ached. He stroked her palm in apology; briefly she encircled his wrist.

“Who?” she asked.

He shook his head, but said, “Qori Buqa is dead. If the sky can be trusted—”

“What can be trusted, if the sky cannot?”

He tipped his head in acquiescence. “Who killed him?”

“Another rival?” But she did not sound confident. “Some Song general? Does it change anything? We’ll still have to fight someone.”

He was silent a long time before he answered, “It’s the way the mill of the world grinds.”

She too left the quiet fallow between them for a while before she asked, “Have you dreamed this?”

His dreams—shamanistic, not quite prophetic—dated from before the blood-vow that was the reason she had originally chosen to follow him. It had been her wizard’s scientific bent that had brought her along, in order to study the progress of his oath—that, and a loyalty to her sister-in-law Payma, whom they had smuggled out of the Black Palace one step ahead of the guards.

He shrugged. “Not exactly. I dreamed Qori Buqa backward upon a red mare. That could be death. Or it could mean that he goes blind to war.”

“Went blind,” Samarkar corrected. “He’s not going anywhere now.”

“Except on vulture wings,” Temur replied.

When Temur looked up again, a moon he’d never before seen, a moon banded with rippled dark and bright like the temper-water of a blade, rode among its cousins in the old familiar sky.

• • •

Namri Songtsan I—by the forbearance of the Six Thousand Emperor of Rasa and Protector of Tsarepheth, Lord of Steles of the Sky and a dozen other titles, though no one had called him by them yet—opened his toothless red-gummed mouth and squalled. The equally unheralded Dowager Empress Regent of the Rasan Empire, Yangchen-tsa, turned her face away from the work of dusty stonemasons. She pulled her wide silken wrap collar aside and put her son to her breast. But as was his not-infrequent habit, he gnawed the chapped nipple and would not latch. He turned his head aside, then craned the oversized thing back and began to scream like a peacock set live in a fire.

Which of my husband’s ancestors come back are you, little monster? Yangchen thought with the blend of affection and exasperation that seemed to her to be all parenthood was made of. A tyrant, that’s for sure.

She drew a breath—a mistake; it was full of smoke and the first tang of rotting flesh. She wanted to hug Namri to her heart. She wanted to drop him over the side of the building and clap her hands to her ears and scream right back at him.

Instead, she jerked her collar closed and thrust the screaming boy at his closest nurse, then turned back to the thing she had wished she could ignore.

She stood on a hastily constructed platform on the roof of the house of a lesser—but wealthy—noble family, surrounded by such of her husband’s royal court and inner circle as had survived. They overlooked the place where the Black Palace of Tsarepheth had stood. The aroma of burnt black powder still hung on the air. The riots of the previous day had sputtered into quiescence, and Yangchen had heeded the advice of the wizards and set up soup lines and first-aid stations where anyone could be fed or seen to, no questions asked. That might prevent a resurgence.

Another skinless corpse had been found nailed to a temple door, however. And her agents reported muttering that the smoke billowing from the Cold Fire sometimes took the shape of a malevolent face, pale sky staring through the empty whorls of its eyes.

The wizards said at least one of their agents reported more and more rumors of the Carrion King stalking the cold streets by night. Perhaps Yangchen had that rumor as much as the chill of encroaching winter to thank for the dissolution of the riots, come nightfall.

As for the palace—it had not been destroyed completely. One tower and a portion of the north wall had crumbled, the precisely hewn basalt stones blasted from their place by the force of the explosion. Yangchen could see clearly into several of the chambers and corridors, and she had an exquisite view of the workers below. Both stonemasons and rough laborers toiled—the laborers hauling cracked and collapsed stone, the stonemasons determining which rubble could safely be moved without collapsing the whole pile. The destroyed portion had contained the emperor’s apartments and the council chamber.

The limited destruction was why two of her son’s nurses were beside her, and her sister-wife Tsechen-tsa, and stooped old Baryan, with his spotted head uncovered because all of his hats were inside the ruined palace. That was why she was flanked by her husband’s advisors—her own advisors now—Gyaltsen-tsa and Munye-tsa, and not the whole of the council. It was also why the sun overhead was wrong and strange, a flat-looking pale yellow thing that seemed too hot and too close.

Yangchen-tsa closed her hands on the splintery wood of the unlacquered railing. She did not quite trust it to lean against. She’d scrambled up the ladder to watch this process because she felt it was her duty. Because she could not be entirely certain that this, too, was not her fault.

So many things were turning out to be.

There was no one Yangchen could speak to for comfort. Her only peer in the world was Tsechen, who stood beside her tall and impassive with her hair undressed and her hands folded inside the sleeves of the soot-stained robe no one had been able to convince her to exchange. Yangchen’s clothes were fresh because she had been out of the palace when the detonation came, disguised as a commoner to confer with the wizards in their Citadel without her husband’s knowledge, and Baryan would not hear of her being seen as the empress regent in those wool and cotton rags.

Across the entire breadth of the city, even the ancient white walls of the Citadel had rattled with the force of the explosion, and she had stood beside Hong-la and his colleagues and watched smoke rise from the place that had been, for six years, her summer home.

Yangchen had had a mad urge, then, to take her son and head north, to keep her peasant garb and raise Namri as a—a calligrapher, an apothecary, a goatherd. Anything but an emperor.

Even as it occurred to her, she knew it for the fantasy of a child deluded by storybooks. Kings did not disguise themselves as noodle-shop proprietors. Empresses—even empresses widowed at the age of nineteen—did not toss everything aside and go running off to make a living by their fancy needlework.

Still, Yangchen was tempted. And she might have done it—except for the abiding horror that this, like so much else, was something she had caused to be done.

She could face the guilt for her own actions, her own ruthlessness. Her father had warned her it would be necessary, when she married both the future Emperor of Rasa and his brother. She could face the deaths—and the subtler wickednesses—that lay against her own choice, her own hand. It was harder to accept the evils she suspected she had been manipulated into facilitating.

It was up to her to do something about that.

She squared her shoulders in the borrowed robe—too long—and turned to Gyaltsen-tsa. He was younger than many of her late husband’s advisors, closer to the age of the fugitive once-princess Samarkar. He had kind eyes inside a framework of character wrinkles and had affected fresh flowers woven into his braid. Yesterday’s still draggled there, sour and browning, petals transparent with bruises and folds.

“We cannot stay here.” Yangchen gestured to the work below. “This is fruitless.”

“Dowager,” Baryan said from her other side, thus becoming the first to speak her new title. “Your Imperial husband—”

She looked at him, hating how the tightness of her lower lip drew up at the center as she fought tears. Her glare silenced Baryan—or perhaps the silent glare of the strange sky above was answer enough to his protest.

“If my husband were alive,” she said, “would the sky have changed? Another God has claimed this land, na-Baryan. Shall we wait for his army to come?”

He looked down. “Your son—”

“Must be protected. He is the Emperor of Rasa now. And he should be in Rasa, under a Rasan sky, where we can make him safe.” She turned, away from the shattered tower, toward the southern horizon. They were high enough atop this commandeered house for an unobstructed view down the fertile valley. Yangchen’s gesture took in the cradling hands of the mountains, the hills that centuries of cultivation had carved into scalloped terraces, the many-bridged canyon of the river as it plunged from stone to stone, dancing between the walls it had carved for itself. In spring the fields would be a thousand shades from pink to green to gold; now they were russet and umber or silvery-green, fallow under winter cover. At least we got the harvest in.

But it wasn’t the fields she wanted her advisors to consider. It was the road that followed the course of the river, and the train of riders, walkers, and wagons—some one-wheeled, like giant barrows; some two-wheeled dog-carts; some four-wheeled for heavy hauling—upon it.

“With or without us,” Yangchen said, surprised at her own eloquence, “our people are leaving. The question before us is do we let them face the road alone—or do we go with them to Rasa, perhaps bring some wizards to protect them from the demonlings, and take the chance that we can save our empire?”

Baryan struggled for an answer. Yangchen knew he could out-argue her. She couldn’t afford to give him the opportunity. She turned to Gyaltsen, about to raise her appeal to his more sympathetic face—

A cry from below interrupted. Not my husband’s body, she prayed, turning back to the rail—even as she prayed that it was. She knew Songtsan was dead, knew it in her bones, knew it by the sky. But was it better, somehow, to hold a tiny fragment of uncertainty, of half-hope—or was it better to know unequivocally?

There was a flurry of activity among the ruins. Someone—one of the master stonemasons—was rushing to the ladder, climbing the wall of the appropriated house with one hand because a cloth sack swung in the other. He had his hands upon the rail where Yangchen’s hands had a moment before rested. Stone dust smeared his clothing and lightened his face. Strange, Yangchen thought with a terrible disconnection. You’d think the dust of the Black Palace would be dark—

“Dowager,” the stonemason said, dropping his eyes abruptly. “Second-wife—”

Tsechen stepped forward. The hem of her dirty robes trembled against her shoes. Her hands knotted before her breast. She opened her mouth and made no words—just a moan.

“Honored sister-wife,” Yangchen said, placing one hand in the crook of Tsechen’s elbow. “Permit me.”

The look Tsechen gave her was not comfort but rage, but the anger seemed to strengthen her. She closed her mouth and did not draw away.

“Honored master mason,” Yangchen said. “What have you found?”

He stared at her for a moment longer and then knelt at the edge of the roof, one knee braced against the platform edge. Yangchen wondered how he did not tumble to his death, but masons must be used to scaffoldings. He reached into the mouth of the bag, fumbled, and with unsteady hands jerked it wide.

What he drew forth was the carven crown of Rasa, a spiked filigree circlet of oil-green olivine and peridot embedded in a matrix of opaque, crystalline gray iron, just as it had been cut from a piece of skystone on the command of Genmi-chen in the same year the Citadel was founded. Head lowered, he reached through the gaps in the railing and extended it up to Yangchen-tsa.

She took it in her hands. She had never been suffered to touch it before, and was surprised at its coolness and weight. It was smooth, as her fingers played over it, with only the faintest catch of changing texture where the stone and metal met. She turned it in her hands, the incredible delicacy of the filigree suggesting the forms of dragons, phoenixes, the Qooros. More familiar beasts—carp, hounds, serpents, tigers—were layered within, visible beneath the outer layer of pierced and lace-carved stone.

“It’s so heavy,” she said.

“Madam,” said the stonemason. “We have uncovered the treasury.”

Munye-tsa gasped. “Six Thousand heard you,” he said, laying a subtly restraining hand on na-Baryan. “It is a sign.”

• • •

Lightning throttled the column of ash and smoke writhing up the sky behind the refugee caravan. The Wizard Tsering—awkward astride a mare so weary the beast struggled to raise her head—had paused at the peak of a pass, reined her mount aside, and turned to look back along the snaking column. Groups of Qersnyk nomads and clumps of townsfolk from Tsarepheth trudged up the rise, heads as low as the mare’s. The train had spread out across the bottom of the valley; where the path ascended they fell naturally into single file again, winding up a series of switchbacks so steep Tsering-la could have dropped a persimmon on the head of someone below . . . had she a persimmon to spare.

Feathery ash blossoms starred her mare’s shoulders like snowflakes. The horse could have passed for one of the Qersnyk fancies with their spotted coats, but these spots smeared and gritted in the mare’s sweat when Tsering-la passed her hand across them. She had abandoned trying to brush the ash from the mare, from herself, or from her hat brim, but she still patted the horse’s shoulder. She was unclear as to which of them she was trying to reassure.

A vaster billow of smoke rolled out, down the distant flanks of the Cold Fire, to disappear behind the shoulders of nearer mountains. Tsering could imagine she caught the red glow behind it, but it was likely only the lightning. The earth dropped underfoot—suddenly, sickeningly, like missing a stair. Tsering clutched the pommel as the mare snorted and kicked out, too exhausted for more than a halfhearted attempt at panic. Behind and below, most of Tsering’s fellow refugees did not even raise their heads.

You could even become used to a volcano—or too tired to care about it anymore. Although the eruption seemed to be worsening as wizards fled the Citadel, their strengths no longer combined to restrain it.

She wondered if this billow of ash, this shaking of the earth, was the one that heralded the failure of those wizards still left behind at the White-and-Scarlet Citadel of Tsarepheth to protect it, the city that shared its name, and the plague victims too weak to be moved—and who would have no hope of surviving away from the brewing vats of Ashra’s healing ale. The master of Tsering’s order, Yongten-la, and the others who remained behind were risking their lives for the sick—and for the Citadel, with its libraries and laboratories harboring irreplaceable centuries of knowledge.

There was very little those who were not wizards could do to protect themselves if the Cold Fire decided to kill them. And as for the wizards . . . Tsering had never found her power. All her theory, all her understanding of the mechanics of how the universe worked, would not avail her if a blast of superheated poisonous gases pushed a wall of ash and stone down on them, if molten glass rained from the sky.

She wondered if even Hong-la could manage to protect anyone, protect himself, in such a case as that.

As if her thoughts had been a summoning—and surely even the master wizard from Song could not hear minds—the tallest walker toiling up the path below raised his head and looked up at her. Even at a distance, the gesture revealed the strong lines of a long-jawed, rectangular face beneath the sloped brim of his hat. It was a peasant’s cap, meant to shade the head and shoulders while working under the blazing sun, and it did a remarkable job of shedding ash. Trust Hong-la to recognize the easiest, most elegant solution.

Wait there, he mouthed.

Tsering raised an hand in acknowledgement. Her throat burned with the fumes of sulfur. She soothed her mare again and watched Hong-la climb. Eventually, it occurred to her that she could dismount and offer the horse water. She was no expert rider, preferring shank’s mare—or soul’s—to the actual sons of the wind, but she ran her hands down the mare’s legs and checked her feet, wondering how she would know if something was wrong and—if she found it—what she could do about it.

Samarkar, with her noble past, would have known how to care for the horse. Or Ashra, who had spent so many years among the Qersnyk. But Samarkar was far away, if she were even alive still, and Ashra . . .

Ashra was not alive.

Reminded, Tsering touched the saddlebags for reassurance, feeling the resilience of cloth and the weight of stones within. Those objects were the reason why she rode rather than walking. Tsering-la was one of the wizards and shaman-remembers entrusted with carrying the wards, a cowing responsibility.

As she was placing the mare’s last hoof gently on the ground once more, the steady rhythm of trudging feet, clopping hooves, and turning wheels cresting the pass and starting down the other side was broken as carters and walkers hesitated in order to stare. She turned, and found Hong-la beside her—arms folded, chin tucked, standing on air as if it were a solid stone platform. He had levitated himself from his place below more easily than she could have scrambled up the slope.

She bit down on her reflexive envy and turned to him as he stepped forward sedately, his split Song-style boot coming to rest on the stone of her vantage point.

Tsering thought of Hong-la as a sort of human Citadel, a broad-built, bony tower of intellect and impervious strength. It was a shock to see his complexion faded and grayish, the smile and concentration lines beside his eyes furrowed so deep they seemed inflamed. His usually cropped hair, twisted into sweaty spikes by the exertion of the climb, protruded raggedly around the perimeter where his hat rested against his scalp. It seemed grayer, even—but that might be the ash.

“You’re another Tse-ten of the Five Eyes,” she said, shaking her head in awe.

“The Process of Air wants to lift us,” he replied. “Encourage that, discourage the Process of Earth that wishes to hold us close, and one can drift like a feather on the wind.”

“If it were as easy as that, it’d be the first trick any wizard learned,” she said. “I don’t think Master Yongten could manage that.”

He harrumphed, and Tsering held out the waterskin. “We could be doing this at the height of summer,” she said, by way of apology—though why she felt the need to apologize for eruptions and revolutions was beyond her.

Hong-la took the skin in his long, heavy-boned hand. Like most wizards, his fingers were decorated with a fascinating assortment of scars. He drank water sparingly and sighed. “We wouldn’t be racing winter, then.”

“Finish it,” Tsering said. “There should be water in the next valley.”

“If it’s not full of ash.” He handed her back the skin.

“I’m full of ash. Why should what I’m drinking be any different?” She hung the skin back on the saddle, where it hung forlornly slack. They’d need to filter water that night if they did not find some fresh. One more task to exhaust the too-few wizards among them. Hong-la should by rights be sleeping along one side of a single-wheeled cart by day, but who could rest rattling over these trails? In a cart that could tip down a cliff with one misstep?

She and Hong-la rejoined the column, Tsering leading the mare. The refugee train moved at a dragging pace determined by the Qersnyk carts and oxen. Tsering did not have the energy to chafe at it. Instead, she watched the road before her feet—because looking at the horizon was too exhausting—and lifted her gaze only occasionally to see how far she had come. Beside her, Hong-la toiled uncomplainingly—but he leaned on a twisted stick, something she had never seen him do before. The gnarled wood was smooth-polished, carved to accentuate its natural curves, and glossy beneath the dust and ash. Tsering thought it was Song workmanship, and wondered if he had brought it with him all that way, when he had come to the Citadel to become a Wizard of Tsarepheth.

Another day, she might have asked him. Now it was all she could do to raise a foot and put it before the other.

Just keep walking. It was a philosophy that had gotten her through worse losses—or at least more personal ones—than this.

Copyright © 2014 by Elizabeth Bear.

Excerpted from Steles of the Sky by Elizabeth Bear.

Published by permission of the author and Tor Books.

All rights reserved.

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

Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She is the author of over twenty novels and a hundred short stories, the most recent of which is Steles of the Sky, an epic fantasy of a central Asia that never was. She is a Sturgeon, Campbell, and multiple Hugo Award winner, a rock climber, and a very bad guitarist. She divides her time between central Massachusetts, where her Giant Ridiculous Dog lives, and western Wisconsin, where her partner, fantasist Scott Lynch, lives.

Interview: Darren Aronofsky
Genevieve Valentine

Darren Aronofsky is no stranger to difficult films. From his hallucinatory feature debut Pi to his metaphysical triptych fantasy The Fountain, his cinematic worlds are often a hopeless personal struggle against overwhelming, even cosmic odds. The other theme to which he most often returns is that of all-consuming passion (be it ballet or wrestling, or—if you want to give in and get really dark—addiction), and the ways in which that pursuit both defines and demands sacrifice from those caught up in the pull of something that almost inevitably ends in Phyrric victory.

In an attempt to turn these twin themes into bedfellows, Aronofsky turned to the legend of Noah, who received orders from God to build an ark that would preserve animals from an oncoming flood designed to punish humanity for its sins by wiping them off the planet. While remaining true to the bones of the story (including the eyebrow-raising postscript involving Noah drunk and naked), Aronofsky hoped to humanize Noah and his family, even against the scope of a tale expanded to a nearly three-hour epic, with a fantasy world fleshed out both onscreen and in a companion graphic novel. Below, Aronofsky talks to Lightspeed about the challenges of adapting such a ubiquitous story, responsibility as superpower, and how you should probably stop hoping for giraffes.

• • •

Though the story of Noah is a particularly popular religious tale, it’s also a particularly short one (particularly if you skip over the section with a drunken Noah post-flood), whose beats are relatively cut-and-dry. What initially inspired you about the story—and what challenges did you run into when using the story as a blueprint for the larger work of the graphic novel?

Actually, we didn’t skip over the drunken Noah. That moment is one of many things in the Genesis story that are not so cut and dried once you start to look at them. Noah getting drunk once he hits land raises really interesting questions about what Noah might have been thinking and feeling throughout his ordeal—an inner life which Genesis is silent on. There’s a lot that Genesis is silent about and actually a lot of interesting questions that the story raises once you read between the lines. Why was Noah’s family spared and others killed? Was it because they were good and everyone else was bad? Then why does he curse his son’s line to eternal slavery? And if the flood eradicated wickedness from the world, why is the next story in the Bible The Tower of Babel? And if it didn’t eradicate wickedness, then what justifies so much destruction? Exploring these kinds of questions was both challenging but very inspiring, too.

There’s a strong theme in Noah of the relationship between responsibility and compassion, with various factions trying to obey what they feel is a moral imperative; your Noah in particular makes some hard decisions—one or two of them are darker than similar decisions made by Noah’s enemies. How did you work toward thematic balance?

To us, this is exactly one of the questions we were trying to explore. At the beginning of the Noah story, God judges mankind for their wickedness and says He will wipe them out for their wickedness. By the end, God is merciful—and says He will never again try to do that, no matter how ingrained man’s wickedness may be. That balance, responsibility and compassion, or justice and mercy, is something that resonated with us as parents—with your kids you can’t be too strict or you’re cruel, but you can’t be too lenient or you are doing them a disservice. And it’s something both St. Augustine and the Rabbis have explored, too. Some have even said that to be truly righteous means finding that balance—and that’s how we thought about Noah’s righteousness and Noah’s struggle.

You’ve mentioned that you had the ark designed as per the original measurements found in the religious story (which is a very specific takeaway!), but many of the animals presented in the movie are decidedly fantastic. What was the initial impetus for that decision, and how did the design of the world develop?

When people think about Noah and the Ark, there are strong associations. That house boat and the giraffes and the old man in robe and sandals and knee-length beard. Those associations are so ingrained that they distance us from the power of the story. We wanted to smash them and make people look at Noah with fresh eyes. Two of every animal on earth. If you stick with zebras and elephants—that’s a trip to the zoo. But there are millions of species on this planet. And most of them are strange and bizarre looking. And that’s just the ones that are alive now. If the Noah story is about saving that cornucopia of life, we wanted people to feel the richness and diversity of that life, to show them the unfamiliar—to underline how strange and wonderful and varied Creation is.

How did you find molding the same story to fit the two different mediums?

Fortunately, that wasn’t really a problem for us. We wrote the script as a movie. And at one point when we didn’t know how or when the film would get made, we gave an early version of the script to Niko Henrichon. He did most of the hard lifting of adapting it into a graphic novel, and while he was doing that we were working to visualize it as a film.

In your other films, you’ve often set up thematic arcs where the situation surrounding your protagonist is essentially hopeless—a darkness inherent to the story. At the same time, you’ve also directed films (as with The Fountain) in which a personal struggle is acted out on a mythic scale. What aspects of your previous work have helped inform the conceptualization of Noah?

With Noah, the story really came from the Genesis story. It’s epic, the fate of the world and all life is at stake, and yet it’s also so small, one nuclear family, alone on a ship for a year, adrift on an endless sea. I attacked the story from both those sides—make the size and scope and majesty of the pre-flood world and the flood itself feel as big and otherworldly as possible, and still drive down into the emotions and struggle of the family that is trying to survive it. Finding that balance is what focused the conception of the film.

Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, won the 2012 Crawford Award. The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, a 1920s retelling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses, is forthcoming from Atria in June 2014. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, Lightspeed, and others, and the anthologies Federations, After, Teeth, and more. Her nonfiction and reviews have appeared at NPR.org, The A.V. Club, Strange Horizons, io9, and more. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks at genevievevalentine.com.

The Myth of Everyman
Sofia Samatar

Editor’s Note: In this issue, we ran an interview with Noah director Darren Aronofsky. Between the time the interview was conducted and its appearance in the online edition of Lightspeed, Noah’s screenwriter, Ari Handel, did an interview with Christian website The High Calling in which he offered up some problematic rationales for why the entire cast of the film was white. We found his response troubling, and felt as if we could not in good conscience publish the interview without addressing Handel’s comments in some way. As such, we recruited Sofia Samatar to write us a brief essay in response, which we present to you here.

—John Joseph Adams

The abovementioned interview with Noah co-writer Ari Handel recently drew attention for the way Handel answered a question about race. Asked why the entire cast of the film is white, the co-writer replied:

From the beginning, we were concerned about casting, the issue of race. What we realized is that this story is functioning at the level of myth, and as a mythical story, the race of the individuals doesn’t matter. They’re supposed to be stand-ins for all people. Either you end up with a Benetton ad or the crew of the Starship Enterprise. You either try to put everything in there, which just calls attention to it, or you just say, “Let’s make that not a factor, because we’re trying to deal with everyman.”

Handel’s response is offensive, yes. It’s also useful, because it illustrates how privilege works. Privilege works by remaining invisible. It “doesn’t matter.” It doesn’t “call attention” to itself. It’s “not a factor.”

What we’re looking at here is the power of the neutral position: the right to stand in for all people, to be “everyman.” From the neutral position, you can experience the whole range of human emotion and possibility, and you can communicate your experience to others. You’re the myth-maker; you create the story of the world. In implying that only white actors can do this, Handel’s saying the opposite of what he thinks he’s saying. He’s saying that the race of the individuals does matter. It matters enormously. It matters so much that Noah wound up with an all-white cast.

What happens if you make space for actors of color? Handel’s comparisons—a Benetton ad or the crew of the Starship Enterprise—are instructive. They suggest that putting white people and people of color in the same space is sort of ridiculous, and motivated by vulgar material concerns. Benetton, after all, is just trying to sell clothes. The diverse crew of the Enterprise—depending on whom you ask—represents either a deliberate expression of progressive politics, or part of a marketing strategy by NBC. Money, politics, the messiness of contemporary life—this isn’t the high plane of the story of Noah, the level of myth. Myth is neutral, spiritual, transcendent, and, for Handel, white; people of color are stuck in their time and place, stuck to the material world.

But Everyman is a myth—a myth both in the sense of “traditional story” and in the sense of “lie.” All people are mired in the material, stuck to their time and place, and all people have the power to create and embody stories that extend beyond their particular circumstances. In this sense, Ari Handel is right. The race of a given individual doesn’t matter; nobody has a neutral body. But it matters when we pretend that some of us do, and when we allow only those people to stand in for all of us. Exclusion, not inclusion, makes race a factor.

Sofia Samatar is the author of the novel A Stranger in Olondria, winner of the 2014 Crawford Award. She has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Campbell, Rhysling, and British Science Fiction Association Awards. Her short stories and poetry have appeared in a number of places, including Strange Horizons, Tor.com, and Stone Telling. She is a co-editor for Interfictions: A Journal of Interstitial Arts, and teaches literature and writing at California State University Channel Islands. Find her at sofiasamatar.com.

Interview: Scott Sigler
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Scott Sigler was the first author to start podcasting novels, and built up a huge online following that led to a five-book deal with Crown Random House. Two of his books are currently in development as TV shows. His new novel, Pandemic, the third book in the Infected trilogy, is out now.

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

• • •

Your new book is called Pandemic, and it’s out now. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?

Pandemic is the final book in the Infected trilogy. This is the classic invasion tale, but told in three parts across the trilogy. In part one, which is Infected, we zoom in on one faceless individual who would just be a statistic in most invasion movies—as in, “Now there’s 17,000 dead. Now there’s 18,000 dead.” Who are those people, and how do they react when this thing breaks, and no one has any idea what’s happening, and there’s no information at all? Then, in the second book, Contagious, the camera pulls back to see the national response to this. What is the president doing? What is the army doing? The CDC? And how does a nation respond to an unthinkable horror that is spreading from citizen to citizen? This isn’t a disease. This is actually people being turned into killers, or people being turned into other things entirely. It’s quite horrific and quite violent in the second book.

Then in the third book, they think they’ve got this thing bottled up, but as happens in fiction, it sneaks out. In the third book, we pull the camera all the way back and let you see the entire world succumbing to this infection and the growing cataclysm as the numbers shift. The number of people infected is getting close to overwhelming the number of people who aren’t infected. So Pandemic is a global apocalypse story, and watching the survivors try and find a way to win, watching governments hold on by the skin of their teeth, and watching humanity try to avoid utter extinction.

You said on Reddit, “By the time I was finally done with Nocturnal, I wanted to take it out into a field and pee on it. I was pretty close to the same place with Pandemic.” What makes a book like Pandemic such a challenge to write?

Well, it’s the third book in a series, and I don’t have any retcons in my books, and if something goes onto a page, that is permanent within the storyline. So there are no characters coming back from the dead; there are no magical resurrections. A lot of the things that can happen in certain types of stories, certain genres, you can’t do it in a modern day, realistic, hard science setting, so incorporating all of the plot elements that I put into Book One and Book Two, and making them consistent through Book Three—that proved to be a challenge. The other part of the challenge was all of my stories are in the same continuum. They’re all in what I call “The Siglerverse”: There are modern day horror thrillers, then, 500 years from now, there’s some military science fiction, and then beyond that, 700 years from now, there is a young adult series called The Galactic Football League, and that’s an American Pro-Football league with aliens playing different positions based on their physiology. It’s cool and fun, but the point is, I want to be able to bring the world to the brink of destruction—but to actually throw it into a world that looks like The Stand, or The Road, or The Passage, where civilization has utterly collapsed, is kind of unrecoverable in the timeline, unless I want to write stories along those lines, those post-apocalyptic stories. So figuring out a way to actually destroy the world, but allow the world and civilization to rise like a phoenix from those ashes, setting that up in a certain construct, that proved to be really, really challenging.

The final part of what made it frustrating for me is I kind of grew up on a steady diet of Stephen King and Dean Koontz and small town horror, where it’s really easy to provide isolation. Here’s our ten to fifteen characters, here’s why they’re isolated and can’t just call for help, and you watch a story develop from there. With Pandemic, you’re really looking at global politics, relationships between nations, and a lot of political complexities in which I am not an expert by any stretch of the imagination.

The scenes in the situation room felt very plausible to me. All of the military stuff felt incredibly believable to me. I saw on your blog that you had at least five different military consultants. Could you talk about how they helped you out?

I’ve got three different groups of consultants. I’ve got my biology consultants; I’m really lucky to have two biology PhDs and a research MD who go over everything and tear it up. Then I’ve also got a couple of political consultants, like there’s a gentleman who is high up in FEMA, and he helped a ton with this, giving me the way we would actually react, and some of that information was sobering and shocking—looking at what America is prepared to do if the crap hits the fan, so to speak. And then there’s the military group, which is a major at Mountain Home Air Force Base, and then a full colonel who’s done a lot of different things and served in a lot of different areas in the Air Force, and a gentleman who’s served a couple of tours in Iraq and now teaches close combat to SWAT teams. These guys and women go through the book, and the amount of corrections they will make on what we think is normal in popular culture—“I’ve watched enough soldier movies. I’ve watched the Delta Force movies. I know how this stuff works”—those movies are wonderful and fun, but when you give them to real soldiers and real airmen, you find out a lot of that information is completely false, and you just never knew.

Could you give an example of something that you wouldn’t know, or that a sort of intelligent person who follows the news and follows the military casually would need an expert to tell you to get right?

There are a couple of things. I won’t get too much into it for plot purposes, but the Air Force colonel was very helpful in situation room incidents, and what is not only the order of succession to the presidency, which is easy to look up, but when that starts to fall apart, and people are in different places and cut off from communication, who has to make the important decisions that have to be made on the spot? Do we attack this city? Yes or no? And every second you wait, more people are becoming infected, and the situation is spiraling towards a level where even if you do attack it, it’s already too late. Those critical, real-time mission decisions, if the President, or the Vice President, or the Secretary of State isn’t available, who has to make that call? I would have had no idea how that works.

Then the other thing that was very helpful was what equipment was actually on what Air Force bases? How many troops do we have? Who do we have available to respond? If there is a crisis in Oakland, what troops are available to go in and pacify that situation? And the one that really wound up being important was: How long does it take them to do that? What is the response time? Now, that’s the thing that in popular culture we tend to see: “Oh, that’s the rapid response force, and let’s load up this C5, and we’ll have troops on the ground in twelve hours.” There’s a certain number of troops that are combat-ready at any given time, but in the States, a large number of troops being ready to deploy to another area in the States is way more complicated than you think. There’s a limited number of troops available, a limited number of equipment available, so responding to things within twenty-four to seventy-two hours, I learned through these consultants, adds a really complex level to a story which is based on the rapid expansion of an infectious vector. So every hour that you don’t have troops on the ground is another hour that the [number of] people who are infected is increasing exponentially. That timing was a huge part of Pandemic.

Speaking of exponential growth of the infected, throughout this entire book you give specific numbers, or specific estimates, anyway, of how many people were infected. Where did those numbers come from? Did you have some sort of formula you were using? Or model?

There was some information out there from the CDC and some infection rates, and then the biology guys and the medical guy, they’re all doctors—those three were critical in trying to come up with a realistic rate of infection. My initial vehicle for the vector had a rapid expansion, and then all three of them came back and said, “Yeah, scientifically, this does not work.” So then I would have to come back, and being a biology fan, but just a layman, come back and research, “What if we did this? What if we did this?” Because it’s a really detailed, delicate plot, and I needed things to expand at a certain pace to give you that thriller feel, that race against the clock feel. It was a matter of working with the biology consultants to say, “What, in the real world that we have right now, would help me achieve this particular level of expansion?”

These consultants that you’ve mentioned, I gather they’re mostly sort of just fans of yours who offered their services to you? Or how did you find them all to begin with?

They’re absolutely fans. I started out my career before I had a book deal with anybody. I’d been trying for about ten years to get a book deal and got over a hundred rejection letters from agents and publishers, and the problem with my fiction was it’s cross-genre, and they were afraid of that back then. They didn’t know whether it was military, a thriller, whether it was horror, whether it was science fiction—and if it was science fiction, it’s happening today, so that doesn’t work, and if it’s horror, could you write some vampires in? No, I can’t write vampires in. So basically people liked the writing, but they just didn’t know how to sell it, and it was more of a risk. So in order to try and prove that, I started to record my own audio books and release them as unabridged, serialized podcasts. I started to build up a great online audience of people who listened to the podcast every week, and emails started to filter in from people who really know their stuff. I filed all those away, and I’ve got sort of my Rolodex in my address book, and I just put in key words for everybody. Okay, now I need a nuclear physicist, and I’ll search and two or three names will pop up, and I’ll start emailing people and asking them questions.

Wow. You mentioned that you podcast. You started out by podcasting your novels, and obviously, since I do a podcast, I pay a lot of attention to the iTunes rankings for the literature category, and your books are always near the top of those lists. Obviously, you want to write good books and make them freely available, but is there anything else that podcasters could do, you think, to rise up the ranks in iTunes?

The only thing I can speak on there that I really know about is podcasting books, and the big issue with podcasting books is you need enough content to be able to podcast consistently every week. The single biggest factor, I think, in success at podcasting is consistency. If you podcast every month, it’s got to be every month. If you podcast every week, it’s got to be every week. Every other week, I’ve found, doesn’t work, because in our Western culture, we’re trained that it’s January 1st that magazine comes out, or Tuesday that show is on, we’re trained weekly, and we’re trained monthly. That’s the biggest thing. So people, if they’re recording their own audio books, they need to be ready to have two or three books ready to go before they start, so that they can be podcasting consistently for two, or three, or four years before they expect to see any kind of real audience growth or any kind of development. Of course, there are exceptions to that like Welcome to Night Vale, which kind of comes out of nowhere and does something different, or We’re Alive, the zombie full-cast production, but even with We’re Alive, they’re going on three or four years now, and they’re very consistent when they put out a season. That’s the biggest thing.

I started podcasting my books because there was no way to get content out to a subscription-based audience. The only person who was doing anything back then that was similar was Cory Doctorow giving away PDFs of all his books and showing sales stats. People were telling me, “Dude, oh my god, don’t give away your audio book. Are you crazy? You’ll lose your audio rights and no one will buy your book because they got it for free.” And there’s Cory saying, “I give away all my books as free PDFs and my books are in third, fourth, fifth printings.” They keep selling, and he thought it was the PDFs that helped make that happen. So I hijacked that model, but with audio. That was before the ebook revolution. So when I started out with Earthcore and Ancestor, there was no way to get your content out to the world and have an audience that was ready for it.

Now there’s Amazon and the Kindle Store. A lot of authors like J.A. Konrath, for example, or Hugh Howey, that’s what they’re specifically using the Amazon market for. Like, here’s all these people ready for ebooks, I’m going to put out a well written, well edited, well formatted ebook, and boom, I’ve got a global audience of whatever Amazon’s user base is, which is a hundred million people ready to read books, so it’s a great way for aspiring authors to have that same captive audience and go after people who are waiting for content, and have that free global distribution without being in a recording booth for four or five hours a week, and editing, and having the RSS feed, and maintaining all of those other things.

I actually saw that you said on Reddit that the podcast novel scene is largely dead now. What do you attribute that to? Is that just a growing professionalization of podcasts or . . . ?

It’s that there’s less low-hanging fruit, to use a cheesy business term. When I got into this, there were three guys who started out right about the same time, not knowing each other, and that was myself; Tee Morris, who wrote a book called Morevi; and a gentleman named Mark Jeffrey, who wrote a book called The Pocket and the Pendant. So all of a sudden there’s three full-length serialized novels out there that were free, and the audience went kind of crazy for them, and because there was nothing out there. You didn’t have ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox, and NPR, and ESPN flooding the podcast marketplace. You were able to get a podcast novel into the overall Top 100—not just the Literature, but the overall Top 100—and have sudden exposure to all of these people who were discovering podcasting. We were in it before iTunes had anything, before they had any podcasting support at all, and then iTunes podcasting comes in, and you’ve got that Top 100 chart, and that “New Podcasts,” “New and Noteworthy.” And you were able to pick up a ton of listeners kind of out of nowhere. Well, that’s gone now, largely, because you’ve got professional media flooding the podcast market. How do you compete against Rachel Maddow, who’s got this whole professional editing operation behind her, or Joe Rogan, who’s got twenty to thirty years of experience in entertainment? There are all these really talented people who understand the medium and are using it to get their content out and entertain people, and then here’s me, some schlub who’s like, “How does a microphone work?” It’s really difficult to overcome that, so that’s a lot harder.

Then the second part is most of the people who got into making podcast novels are done. They podcasted all their books, and they’re out of content. Out of that whole beginning crew, there’s only a handful that are still slugging it away every week, and I think I’m pretty much the only one who says every week we’re going to have an audio book episode for you regardless. Then there are other great podcasters like Mur Lafferty, who, like, gives away her book, and then also has her weekly show on “I Should be Writing” and talks about the writing craft, so they’re able to stay in front of their audience on a weekly basis. But strict, serialized audio books are really hard to do because of the work that has to go into making the books. That’s a lot of time, having enough content to be able to do it on a weekly basis, and overcoming the hurdle of a flooded marketplace. So I’ve got some advantages because I started out way-back-when; I already have an audience that’s expanding on its own weight, and since I’m able to write full-time now, I’ve got content backed up. I’m ready to go for the next three years.

Speaking of your equipment and using a microphone and stuff, you have this video online, sort of this MTV Cribs style of thing, where you show people around your apartment. You have—what seems to me—pretty amazing equipment in your house. You have this little recording closet and this backdrop for filming stuff. Where did all that equipment come from? How did you decide what to get and so on?

It’s a gradual process. I started out with a cheesy microphone and an old “Flower Power” iMac in my closet, because that was the only place that I had sound baffling. The apartments right above Franklin Street in San Francisco, which is three lanes one way and going 24/7, is full of noises. So I started out just trying to find any way I could to make it sound semi-professional, because you’ve got to have a good signal if people are going to listen to you every week. And that was nine years ago now, so I’ve gradually built up equipment as I have gone.

The two big things were when I signed my five-book deal with Random House, all that advance money went right in the bank except for, “All right, I’m going to go out and buy a Mac Pro, and I’m going to buy an RE47 mic, and I’m going to buy a tube pre-amp.” I bought all this gear to give me that really professional sound, and then came across that booth, and it’s a 4x4 sound isolation booth, pretty standard for people in the recording industry. They’re also very expensive. I happened to get that for free, which was awesome, from a company called Pixel Core in San Francisco. I went there to record some stuff with them, and they had it sitting out sort of in a hallway because they were building a really nice, detailed studio, and they said, “Yeah, we don’t know what to do with this. We’re going to give it away.”

I’m like, “I’ll be here tomorrow with a truck,” and snagged it. Then I jammed this giant 4x4 recording booth into the closet in my house—had to rip down shelves, just completely lost my security deposit there—and so that was the next level. At some point, it just became logical that I needed to go get an office because now we had physical books, and we had the recording booth, and we had the recording gear, and we needed to expand into video, so we went and got an office a few blocks from the house, and that is where we are now. It’s a really tiny office, but it’s divided up into four even tinier rooms. There’s one room for the recording booth and the computer, there’s a room to shoot video, and that has worked out pretty well. So it’s been a gradual accumulation of good gear and constantly trying to make things sound better and look better for the audience.

So why did you decide to start getting into the video?

You look at people who are doing extremely well on YouTube, like Toby Turner or SXEPhil and dozens of others: It’s a massive, massive market, and there’s hundreds of people who are now making their living putting out regular videos. The other thing is just the sheer number of users on YouTube, and the younger demographic is really into short-form video and watches an enormous amount of it. So a high school junior or sophomore might not be into reading books at this particular time, but they’re watching three-, four-, and five-minute videos on YouTube by the dozens. So that’s a way to go out there and try, just like I did with podcasting. I’m going to try to get into video, get some viewership, get people to start sharing the videos, and build up that brand name as an author. It’s worked out pretty well—I’ve got a good number of subscribers on my channel, and we have over half a million views on the channel, so it has worked, and we’ve got the videos out there. But we had to scale back. We did a show called Monstrosity, which was about science fiction, horror, and fantasy pop culture, and had to dial back on that to finish a bunch of book deadlines because that’s the day job. Maybe we’ll get into it in the future.

The biggest benefit YouTube has given us is book trailers. We do a full, professional book trailer, to the max budget we can afford, for every book that comes out, and those things just sit there, and they clock hundreds of views a day, and it just keeps adding up. The biggest one for us is “Infected,” the first trailer I put out, and that has over 250,000 views and continues to get twenty, thirty, forty, fifty views a day on YouTube. People stumble across that, people watch it, a lot of people go, “Eh, whatever,” but out of that twenty, thirty, or forty, probably one or two people a day go, “That looks awesome. That’s exactly the kind of thing I’m looking for.” They will go out and get the free podcast, or they will go out and buy the book, and then I’ve got a chance to get a new reader for life.

Why don’t you tell us about the Pandemic trailer? I don’t know how many spoilers you want to go into, but could you just tell us how did that come about? How did you decide what content to put in it, and stuff like that?

I’ll start that story by saying we did a user-generated video contest for my novel Ancestor, and that was won by a director named Adrian Picardi, and he started a company called Aureus Grex, which does all kinds of different video projects. It was a scene from Ancestor, so we had four scripts which were four word-for-word scenes from the book, opened it up to the public and said, “Here are some video assets; go shoot your vision of this scene. Take this script and go shoot it.” And he killed it. People can see his user-generated trailer at scottsigler.com/ancestor. We have both the book trailer and the little movie that he shot there.

So when it came time to shoot the trailer for Pandemic, I gave Adrian a call, and he had started his own company, and they were looking for projects, and they had already done some amazing stuff. They’ve done some work for the video game industry, and people should look at it—it’s aureusgrex.com.

They were excited because they liked the books, and they wanted to do something with me. So we said, “All right, let’s make a trailer.” We picked a scene from Pandemic, and we don’t have the budget to shoot crazy, full-on special effects. Pandemic—it’s a 250 million-dollar movie if it’s a penny to shoot. We don’t have those kind of resources, so we picked one scene from the book that was shootable, and they went out, and they cast a great actor in it. They wound up using the same warehouse that was used in Inception, so the warehouse scene in Inception is where my trailer is shot, which is kind of awesome. And then they just shot that scene from the book, and I gave him the script, and I said, “Here are the things that I’m looking for. I need something really startling to catch the viewers’ attention.” Because, going back to the YouTube channel, I’m able to look at stats and see most people drop off in the first ten to fifteen seconds of a video unless there’s something really compelling right out of the gate. So for the Pandemic video, we’ve got a guy smashing in a person’s skull with a two-by-four in the first two seconds of the trailer, and most people are like, “This is going to be interesting,” and then they’ll watch the whole trailer and get to see that it’s actually about a book.

So we shot at that warehouse, turned it over to Adrian, and let him and his crew do the magic that they do, and I would love to make a trailer that’s even more over the top, with more special effects, but they totally maximized the limited budget that we had. They did a really good job. I got to be in the trailer as a dead body with a triangle growth on my neck, which is kind of cool, and the fans really dig that. Overall, it’s worked out well. It just went over like 7,000 views, and we’ll continue for the next five to ten years. It’s just going to sit there and continue to get views and hopefully sell books.

It’s funny, because you posted this video on YouTube, right, this trailer, and it’s a scene in the book where somebody posts a video on YouTube.

[Laughter] That’s true.

When you wrote that scene did you have any inkling that you might make that into an actual video?

No, it didn’t occur to me until after. But then flipping through the book to try and find something they could shoot on the budget that we had, I came across that—that’s one of those trying to blur the lines of reality things that I try and do with the book and with the marketing for the book. So, once I figured that out—like somebody who’s going to be reading this in the book and see that the characters in the book are watching a YouTube video of a character talking, trying to get some help—if they scan “Pandemic YouTube” or “Sigler YouTube trailers,” they’re going to be able find that actual scene from the book. It’s got a real meta feel to it. There’s also a pair of Twitter accounts in the book of two characters tweeting information back and forth, and when people look up those Twitter accounts, they’ll see these Twitter accounts have been active for over a year, and there’s a ton of information there, and then you get to the point where the tweets you read in the book are actually sitting out there under that account on Twitter, and there’s just that moment of, “Whoa, that’s kind of awesome.”

Speaking of Twitter, there’s sort of a chapter in the book which is nothing but tweets of people reacting to the pandemic, and I thought it was really well handled. The way that the sort of anti-vaccination movement, that people’s mistrust of the government and Big Pharma and stuff—you take that into account in describing how this scenario would unfold. Could you just talk about your thought process behind that?

I’m very fortunate in my career in that I don’t wear my politics on my sleeve in the books, or online, or on Facebook, or anywhere like that. A lot of authors do it, and that’s great, but me not doing that has developed this strange culture where I have people from the far left and the far right, atheists, hardcore Christians, hardcore Muslims . . . People read my stuff, and everybody sort of thinks I think like them, so I’ll get a lot of information back to me about, “Hah, look at these idiots. They’re not like us.” And I’m like, “Yeah, I’m nothing like that.”

What has surprised me is all of my stuff is extremely hard science-based. I do take some liberties for the purpose of writing a great story, but 99% of what you read in the books is absolutely real. Those things exist. They’re out there. If you want to look hard enough, you can find them. To create that sense that this is something that could happen to you and me and all the people around us.

I’ve been shocked at how many anti-vaxers I have as fans, because I’m very much against that movement and very much believe that vaccination and science is what gives us our culture and keeps most of us alive. But to see that these are people I interact with on a daily basis and like, and then I post something vaccination-related and to see their reaction—it made me stop and think as a creator, like, “Wait a minute, this is just like the religion thing, this is just like the Republican-Democrat thing. There are people who are smart and who I talk to on a daily basis who are totally against this particular branch of science.” It was sort of a wake-up call to me, that I could write characters that have that anti-vax mentality and not make them caricatures, and not make them dummies, and not make them excessively violent, and not portray them to be some kind of monster.

To work that into the book, it became something where I really wanted to show the potential damage of what this anti-Big Pharma, anti-government, this conspiracy theory mentality is. We’re seeing it in real life now, with kids dying of small pox and measles, and the flu killing people. These are dangerous, real-world things. Okay, extrapolate that out to this crazy, fictional, incredibly contagious vector, and then the government says, “We have saved the day. We did the scientific work. We’ve got this formula that you can drink and it will protect you against this thing that will turn you into a monster and make you kill your family.” And the number of people in America and in Europe who would be like, “Oh, no, that’s a trick. You guys are trying to trick us. You’re trying to addict us to this Big Pharma thing. You’re trying to make us mind-slaves. This is just another version of chemtrails.”

What’s different, a little bit, in Pandemic, is it’s the people who are not going to take it that create enough of a population base to become infected and then therefore go out and either be a violent monster or spread the disease faster than it would have spread before, so the anti-vax movement within Pandemic becomes a major part of the plot.

In college, I studied constitutional law, so I’m always interested in that sort of stuff. I’d never heard of this case you mentioned, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which established that the government has the power to compel vaccinations. I was wondering, how did you come across that? Did one of the experts tell you about that?

Yeah, that was the guy from FEMA. I was like, “What does the government do if you’ve got . . . we can save fifty million lives if we force five million people to take this vaccine, for example.” And that case came out, and learning enough about it to put in the book—it’s logical and common sense if you look at large, successful governments as their own biological entity, and hard-wired into our laws and our codes are “America is going to survive no matter what we have to do.” That seems to go against what America is all about. There’s that larger gestalt concept of a communal organism that kicks in, and that law that you just mentioned is part of it.

It was a little surprising to find out that that exists, because of our culture of independence in this country, but it’s there, and if something really bad is happening, the government is going to find a way to bring you back in line and protect the larger population.

I listened to the year-end review podcast that you recorded with your business partner, A. Kovacs. I listen to a lot of author interviews, and it’s very rare to hear somebody say, “Oh yeah, we just really screwed up this year,” so it was really striking to me when you guys mentioned that you had sort of a big misjudgment this past year in terms of publishing your YA Galactic Football League series. Could you just talk about how that happened?

Our whole business—A. Kovacs and I run a company called Empty Set Entertainment, and it’s just the two of us, but we are able to hire a significant number of freelancers, and book editors, and book designers, and artists, and people who do our website. It has been a great experience to build that business, but we built it on the concept that there is no impossible. We’re swinging for the fences all of the time, and using my career arc as a model, from going from someone who has 120 rejection letters sitting in a file, to ignoring everybody’s advice that I knew in publishing, “Do not give your stuff away for free. That’s crazy,” and saying, “No, we’re going to do this because this is logical, and I understand how the internet works, and this just makes sense.” Then plowing forward to do that.

Then the next step was putting out The Rookie, which is book one of the Galactic Football League series. Before Kickstarter existed, we did a Kickstarter. We had enough of an audience on our podcast, we said, “Hey, we’re going to put out this really expensive, tricked out, thirty-five dollar hardcover, with an embossed cover and sixteen color plates inside, of this podcast that all of you have already listened to. Will you pay us money now, and we’ll give you the book in eight months?” We’re like Popeye’s Wimpy of the publishing world, and 2,000 people said, “Yep, here’s our money.” We’re like, “This is awesome. We’ve got enough money to put out this book and make a really, really high quality product, and we’re already profitable before we even do one thing,” which is unheard of in the publishing industry. That’s the Kickstarter model, and it worked out great for us.

And people told us that wouldn’t work. Everybody is like, “That’s ridiculous. You won’t get enough money, you’re going to have to compromise the product, and what if you have to give the money back?” A. and I largely just said, “Well, if we screw it up, we’ll figure out how to fix it somewhere down the road.” But we were successful in that, and that attitude has largely been successful for eight years.

Then we decided to get our own distribution and put out all four of the Galactic Football League books in every Barnes & Noble in paperback, and get them into Amazon, and become more of a book publisher, and we had to partner with a publisher in order to get the distribution, and the people at the distribution company loved it. They were like, “This is like young adult, based on football, and it’s science fiction. There’s nothing like this for young athletes in the young adult market, so boys and girls who are really into sports kind of don’t have anything to read, and we’re going to give them this awesome seven book series.” The publisher went nuts, and the publisher said, “Well, you should print 10,000 copies of each of the first two titles.” That’s a lot of books for a small company like us. We were going to print 3,000 because that’s a number we know we’re going to be able to sell through, one way or another, within a year or two. The mistake we made was this time we actually listened to the experts in the publishing industry instead of saying, “We’re going to follow our instincts, which has worked great so far.”

We wound up printing three times the number of books that we were planning on printing, and our instincts wound up being correct, and we have not sold that many. There were a lot of breakdowns in that process. We were supposed to be front-of-store display—it’s called co-op marketing—and all the Barnes & Nobles were supposed to have displays of the book out. That never happened, and a couple other things didn’t happen, and people didn’t have the books in time, and all of that was completely out of our control. The end result was the series just flat-out didn’t catch fire the way that everybody thought it would, and we’ve got a lot of copies left over.

So our mistake was two-fold. Number one, we should have listened to our conservative nature, and kind of like, “Well, we know our audience, and we’ll start out with this many, and if it blows up, then we’ll print more.” That was number one. And number two was listening to somebody else’s opinion and how they thought our content would go, which has never really turned out to be right in the past eight or nine years. This was another example of that, but we were excited. They were saying like, “This is going to be like a miniature sports version of Harry Potter. It’s going to go crazy. You’ve got to have thousands of copies ready when this thing takes off.” And our chests swell up, and we’re like, “Well, that’s wonderful! Of course we would like to sell lots of books and be household names.” So our own hubris sucked us into that, and yeah, we made a mistake. And we’ve learned from that mistake, and next time we do this we’ll be much more conservative. The paperback printings of Books Three, Four, and Five will be 3,000 copies, and we know we’ll sell through that, and we know we’ll make a profit, and we know we’ll entertain people. So live and learn, and fortunately the other areas of the business are doing well enough that that didn’t put us under, and we’re still moving forward.

Speaking of household names, you’ve written very favorably about your adoration for authors like Stephen King and Michael Crichton. I’ve been involved in the science fiction world for a long time, and I’ve noticed that a lot of sort of hardcore science fiction authors and readers seem to kind of look down on Michael Crichton, and I was just wondering if you’ve experienced that at all, and as a big fan of his, what do you think about that?

I’ve experienced that, and it’s very puzzling to me. Part of it is because he takes big liberties with the science, like the science in Jurassic Park. But Michael Crichton was a thriller writer. He is writing a story, and he is writing a story that he envisions will translate well onto the big screen, so these are relatively formulaic stories with formulaic characters, and they are kind of traditional thriller plots, and then what he did differently was take a scientific concept and go crazy with it, and make the story based on that scientific concept.

I’ve just never really understood it. You can take a story like John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, for example, which is an awesome book, but because it’s in the far future, there’s this magical grey area of between now and three hundred years from now where we’re going to have the technology to be able to do these things. So Scalzi’s transmogrification, if you will, of the main character from what is into what he becomes—so I don’t give any spoilers—there’s huge liberties taken with the science. Huge. And the readers don’t seem to have any problem with that because that’s in the future, and we’ll figure that out between now and then. But because Crichton writes modern day and also takes huge liberties with the science, there seems to be some kind of pushback against that.

It seems also to me that a lot of science fiction fans and scientists have a very positive view towards science, and when you write book after book that combine horror and science, it just conveys this impression that science is sort of something that only ever leads to bad outcomes. Is that something you worry about, writing science and horror together? How do you handle that?

It has not become a big deal for me because—I can’t speak to other science horror writers—but I spend an enormous amount of time and energy trying to make the science as realistic as possible. The science consultants read three full drafts of the book to make sure that everything is as right as it can be, and I think that people pick up on that, too. So the men and women who make their living in science, who make their living making our world a better place, can see that respect on the page, and it gets me that street cred, and I don’t get that much pushback.

The other thing I do that I think helps me out is I do not have the stereotypical, clichéd mad scientist in my book. I try to make them complex characters with their own wants, needs, and motivations, and relationships, and how they approach their science, why they approach their science, trying to make them as realistic as possible. I don’t have the female assistant damsel in distress. I’ve got the lead character in the Infected series (Infected, Contagious, and Pandemic), is doctor Margaret Montoya, who goes from being a second-tier CDC scientist, for example, to being thrown into the forefront of this because she gets the disease like nobody else gets it, and then you watch her life get torn to pieces because she is sacrificing her life in order to try and make the world a better place, to try and save humanity. Whatever it takes for the greater good, she’s willing to do. I think that scientists empathize with that. I have a couple of high school buddies who are PhDs, one in chemistry, and the amount of things that they’ve given up in their lives to pursue science, when this same brilliant dude could have gone into business and made ten times as much—that is a constant raw emotion with scientists, where it’s hard. Like, “I’m trying to do these things to do good, and there’s a lot of sacrifices that I have to make.” Constant grant proposals, moving from school to school, the demands of academia, etc. So, to show characters going through that same kind of struggle, that helps a lot, too.

Finally, when I do have the mad scientists, the motivations are there for good. And Ancestor is the best example. In Ancestor, we have a gentleman named Dr. Claus Rhumkorrf, who is brilliant in his own right, but is largely collecting a team of people smarter than him, and then sort of cajoling them, coercing them, bullying them into creating this artificial organ donor animal, a herd animal that has human compatible organs. His goal is to get butt-stinking rich, but more than that, it’s if he pulls this off he’s going to save hundreds of thousands of human lives every year and add decades onto the average human lifespan. So although his methods of achieving his goal are nefarious and wind up causing a lot of science-gone-wrong damage, his intentions are pure, and he’s genuinely a good guy who is trying to save lives and improve the quality of life. So, I really haven’t had any pushback from the scientific community, and I think those are the reasons why.

Okay, so the SF movies that have influenced you the most, you list as Aliens, American Werewolf in London, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing, and They Live. And you say of Aliens, “I’ve watched this movie over a hundred times now, and every new viewing brings a new lesson on overlapping tension arcs.” Could you talk about what you mean by “overlapping tension arcs?”

What James Cameron, the director, does in his movies is, you’ve got Problem A and Problem A has a beginning, rises up to a middle, then there’s a solution, a resolution, and then it drops back down to zero, so one to two to back down to zero, for example. What he does that is why I constantly watch that movie over and over again is, as you’re on the upwards arc for Problem A, and then as it starts to come down just a little bit, like, “Oh, I see the solution; now we have to go out and execute that solution,” Problem B is on its rising problem arc. So by the time A finishes, you’re already halfway into the rise to Problem B, and then Problem C has already begun.

It’s this subtle technique of never allowing the tension to fully turn back to zero. So instead of—to make it really simple—four characters have to go out and get this resource, face the monsters as they do, and then come back to their fully protected bunker, and everybody is safe; instead, three of those characters will go out, one will stay behind, and as the three come back with the resource, and get to the bunker, and will be safe, and can take a breath, something has come and grabbed character number four, and now they’ve got a new set of tension where they have to go rescue character number four. That’s an oversimplification of what you see in the movie, but it’s these constant overlapping arcs so that you do get that experience of high tension, and then you start to recover, but you never get to come back down to zero. When I watch that movie, you’re on the edge of your seat for ninety straight minutes, and it’s a textbook in how to keep people turning the page.

You have a story called “Complex God” coming up in John Joseph Adams’s Robot Uprisings anthology. Could you tell us about that story?

That was really fun to work with John and Daniel H. Wilson on. In the “Complex God” story, I was able to tie that into the Siglerverse. So in the Galactic Football League series, there is a race called the Prawatt, and they are kind of the boogeymen of the far-future seven hundred years from now. They’re misunderstood, you can’t communicate with them, they kind of just show up and destroy things, but because the Siglerverse is a continuum from modern day to there, I wanted to be able to show how that all began.

It began with a scientist named Petra Prawatt. So “Complex God” looks at her research, and her efforts into bioremediation, which is trying to use fungus or bacteria or any kind of biological entity to get rid of pollution. So why would we send humans in to clean up a nuclear bomb site or a nuclear waste site, if we could send in bacteria or we could send in insects that would get the same job done with no damage to human life? And she does this with a combination of nanotechnology and bacteria, and those two things create a symbiotic relationship, like an ant colony, so that the nanotechnology can reproduce and make more copies of itself, and as it does that, it is able to incorporate this radiation-eating bacteria. That’s her goal, trying to clean up a large radiation site, which is a direct result of the end of Infected, which is book one of the Infected trilogy.

Speaking of the way that all these different stories tie together, we had a listener who wanted me to ask you what’s your favorite example of that from your work, of some clever way that things tied together.

I think I just talked about it, and it’s Petra Prawatt. It’s really fun, because I’ve had this plan in my head for twenty years now, where I was going to create a realistic spread of novels that cover seven centuries, so that I could write the modern day horror/thrillers that I love so much as a reader and a viewer. I could then write five hundred years from now, that military SF, and kind of attack the Gene Roddenberry concept where all intelligent races will come together, and we’ll all speak the same language, and everybody will just kind of get along, and we don’t need money anymore, and all of this utopian vision he has. I love Star Trek, but I watch it as a fan, and I’m like, “Yeah, I don’t think it’ll go that way. We can’t even get along together on this planet, and we look almost exactly alike, and we have the same vocal apparatus. It’s like, that’s not going to happen.”

So five hundred years from now, different alien races fighting like cats and dogs, eating each other, complete disrespect for cultures, it’s a really dirty and dark era. Then two hundred years from there, seven hundred years into the future, where it is more of the Roddenberry-esque vision where races get along so well they can actually join each other on an athletic field, and if you’re playing a team sport and you don’t have all five races, because of the way they operate in different positions, there’s no way you can win. So you have to learn how to get along. So this giant spread of novels, and knowing that somebody who’s like five years old right now, ten years from now they’re going to pick up one of my books from the far future, and read and enjoy it, and then when they’re in their twenties, maybe they’ll go back and read the older books, and there will be that moment as a fan where you say, “Wait a minute, this is that character all the way into the future, and this is that company. Holy cow, all of this stuff connects.” And then watch them have to tear through all the novels and get that joy of discovery in finding the different pieces and linking them together.

I understand that next up you’ll be writing sequels to some of your existing books, but that actually first, you’re going to go back and rewrite some of the earlier books before you start on the sequels. Is that right?

Right. The first book that I put out as a podcast was called Earthcore, and I had been promising the fans the sequel to Earthcore, which would be called Mount Fitzroy. I’ve been promising them that for nine years, close to going on ten years. I promise it with the best of intentions, like every year I say, “Yes, I’m writing that this year!” And then other things pop up and I don’t get it done, which is why I’m partnered with A. Kovacs in the first place, because she knows how to organize and schedule things and I don’t, so together we make a pretty good fighting team. I’m finally getting around to putting out that sequel, Mount Fitzroy, but because everything is in a timeline, as I mentioned, and because the timelines matter, the day the book comes out in the real world is also the first day of the story in the fiction world. So today is January 21st, 2014: That is the real world date. The book Pandemic, which comes out today, also begins on January 21st, 2014. And the purpose of that is again so that person who’s five now, will be fifteen in a while, ten years from now, I’ll have thirty or forty books. Somebody who really falls in love with what I do is going to be able to go on Wikipedia or go on Amazon and sort by publication date and be able to see the actual order of events, because everything ties together. They can start at Book One and tear through the whole thing. Because of that, Earthcore hasn’t really come out in hardcover, so I’m going to rewrite it. The day we put that out in the ebook store, and if we put out a print book, will be the day in the story as well, so now I’ve got to back-fill in Ancestor, Nocturnal, Infected, Contagious, Pandemic, etc.

So it needs a minor rewrite to bring it in line with the timeline. I’ve got to do that first, go to put out Earthcore first before I can write the sequel, Mount Fitzroy, so that’ll finally get that off my head. And then I’ve finally finished my first trilogy, so there will be no more sequels in the Infected trilogy. Then I have a sequel to write for Nocturnal. I have, eventually, a sequel to write for Ancestor. And then that military SF story is called The Crypt, and The Crypt has another book that needs to be written this year, too. So I need to start working on writing standalone novels that don’t have sequels, because it’s difficult to get to all of these sequels when I keep writing Book Ones.

How about the film projects and TV—are there any announcements about any of that stuff?

We’re still working on it. We’ve got a deal done for the Nocturnal option, and Nocturnal is being produced by Lloyd Levin, who produced Hellboy, Hellboy II, Die Hard 2, Watchmen, Boogie Nights, a very accomplished individual in Hollywood, and he’s a big creature-feature fan. If you like monsters, you’ll like Lloyd’s movies, and you’ll like my book, so hopefully that’ll work out okay. That’s going to start actually getting pitched to networks now in the next couple of weeks, and hopefully we’ll find somebody who wants to fund the pilot, and be able to make that, and let the marketplace decide if that’s a good show or not. The other one is the Infected trilogy. The producers of Justified and Elementary are Carl Beverly and Sarah Timberman, and they are the production team that is picking up Infected. We are going to soon start writing a pilot script for that, and see if we can pitch that out as well.

You mentioned that the second half of Pandemic would be a 250 million-dollar venture; do you have a 250 million-dollar budget? I wouldn’t imagine, or do you expect them to make big changes to the story?

They’re going to have to make big changes to the story, and what Carl Beverly likes about it is the arc of the main character Perry Dawsey, the main character in Infected, and his struggle, and what he has to go through to overcome what’s happening to him—it’s horrific and violent, and he has to do things to himself that the average person looks at and goes, “Yeah, I would just roll over and die.”

Now, as we get into the end of Infected, they’re going have to figure out what they want to do, because that’s got a fairly big-ticket finish. Contagious gets way more budgetary-wise. There’s a lot of military combat in it, and figuring out what they want to do, but I think his plan is two options. Number one, if you look at the Dexter series—which was incredibly well done, and made everybody a lot of money, and made a lot of fans happy—Book One of Dexter matches Season One of Dexter, and then after that it goes off in a completely different direction. It has absolutely nothing to do with the book series. So Carl’s got that in his back pocket. If he has a hit with the Infected TV show, and then as the writers get into the writing room, and you write all these episodes, things just naturally change in the story and in the narrative. And if they follow that and it’s a different path, they’ll have a unique show that can go any number of different directions. So that’s possible.

If they put out Infected and it’s a huge hit, and they’re like, “Yeah, we do a slow build, and at the end of season one we’re going to bust out all these helicopters, and this artillery, and blow people’s faces off,” they can do that largely with computer graphics and CGI, and then they can move into Book Two, and they can match Book Two exactly. I don’t know. I have no idea. They’re the ones who can raise the money to make the show, and if they place it with CBS, who they have a development deal with, then CBS gets to decide how much they want to spend. I’ll just be happy to watch the process, to tell you the truth. If it makes it actually to TV, I’ll be happy right off the bat, and get kind of the joy of discovery of watching where things go.

Yeah, that’s always a big question, isn’t it? Best of luck with that. It would be really exciting. I think we should probably start wrapping this up now, but I really enjoyed Pandemic, and I’m really looking forward to all of these projects you’re talking about. I really want to thank you, Scott, for taking so much time to talk with us today.

Thank you for having me on the show. I really appreciate it.

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

David Barr Kirtley,who is the author of thirty short stories, which have appeared in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Lightspeed, in books such as Armored, The Living Dead, Other Worlds Than These, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and on podcasts such as Escape Pod and Pseudopod. He lives in New York.

Artist Gallery: Rémi Le Capon

Rémi Le Capon was born in 1973 in Grenoble, France. He attended drawing school in Lyon. He works as a freelance illustrator for role playing games, other games projects, and private illustration commissions. He also works as a colorist for comics. Despite his training in classical drawing, he mostly works in digital media. His website is http://remton.daportfolio.com.

[To view the gallery, turn the page.]

Artist Spotlight: Rémi Le Capon
Henry Lien

Your works seem to have an intimate relationship with history, especially 19th and 20th century military history. Is that a conscious choice? Is it because those wars are impossible to forget, especially to Europeans? Or is it because those wars have an air of romance that modern wars do not, in their scale of suffering, their distinctions between heroes and villains, and in the aesthetic design of their uniforms, weapons, and machinery?

I have always liked history (especially medieval and as you point out, late 19th and 20th century). The two world wars had a great impact on many countries, the first one especially in Europe. However, I’m more interested in “lesser” conflicts, such as the Russian Revolution and civil war after, and the Spanish Civil War, where you can also find fascinating personalities and epic adventures. For example, take the Czech Legion, who fought against Austrians and Germans on the Eastern Front, and after the October Revolution, seized a part of the Imperial gold and crossed Russia from West to East aboard armored trains. It’s an inspiring adventure. There are some powerful personalities in the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War, too. As you said, there is a kind of “romantic” spirit in these conflicts that definitively ended with the slaughter of World War II.

Do you consider your works like Sybera to be steampunk?

Even if this piece lacked mechanical gears, Victorian clothing, and goggles, I could relate it to steampunk. And there are airships, so I would say yes, it is steampunk.

Is there a form of steampunk that you consider to be particularly French?

I’m not a specialist of steampunk literature, but I don’t think there is a particular “French Touch.” For me, it all depends on the writer, whatever country he belongs to.

What do you think will be the future for steampunk?

Well, I don’t really know. Steampunk continues to be a trend right now, but as with every trend, it can pass out of fashion. I see a number of steampunk artworks that are not especially original. Too many are quite the same, with the same clothes, same goggles, same mechanical gears. I think steampunk should evolve, for example, by mixing steampunk features with others parts of history or countries. What would an African-inspired steampunk be like? For me, steampunk could last for years if the themes are renewed, with some original features that are not present in steampunk right now.

Can you tell us about your technique? I know that these works are digital, but the textures are so vivid that it is difficult to see that they are digital.

Even if I work in digital mediums, I always try to give my works a traditional feeling. I use a mix of custom brushes, photo textures, and above all, a lot of brush strokes and painting. When I worked with traditional mediums, I always enjoyed experimenting, and mixing various techniques and mediums.

Your work has marvelous chiaroscuro that creates a sense of high drama. Can you talk to us about some of your inspirations from art history and from science fiction/fantasy illustration?

I’m not really selective in what I like in art, as long as the artwork strikes my imagination or stirs some feeling in me, like most people. I like medieval painters such as Dürer and Grünewald, Romantic painters of the late 19th/early 20th century, like Goya, Friedrich, Böcklin, Füssli, and Repine. I prefer a Caravaggio over a Raphael, and a Géricault over a David. I saw an exhibition of Veličković that really struck me. Very powerful art. I generally prefer dark and tortured art (I know, how strange). I also appreciate Frazetta, Giger, Brom, Enki Bilal, and many, many more.

What is your dream project?

I’m thinking of an anachronistic world based in the last years of World War I and the Russian Revolution but “steampunked,” with a touch of Slavic mythology, and a bit of vampirism. I’d like to have more time to work on it, meet some specialists in Slavic mythology, travel through Eastern Europe to do research, and then make graphic novels, comics, and games from this foundation. And of course, find a rich sponsor for it all.

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. He is also the Arts Editor at Interfictions. 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, Analog, and Interfictions, and has been nominated for a Nebula . Visit his author website at www.henrylien.com.

Author Spotlight: Linda Nagata
Andrew Liptak

Thank you for chatting with us about your story, “Codename: Delphi.” This story follows a combat controller as she advises several squads in a combat zone. What specifically inspired this story?

A lot of my stories have vague beginnings, making it hard to say specifically what inspired them, but “Codename: Delphi” is an exception—it was directly inspired by my novel The Red: First Light. Delphi is an important character in that novel, but because TR:FL is told in first person from the point of view of a soldier in the field, we never have a chance to get inside Delphi’s head to experience war as she experiences it. So writing the short story gave me a chance to remedy that, to take a look at war and duty through the eyes of a character for whom war is physically remote, but very, very real.

I’m reminded of the descriptions of how drone pilots operate, although in this case, the soldiers Karin is directing aren’t drones. Do you think people will perceive soldiers (real or robotic) differently if they’re watching from afar?

Within the story, there is a personal relationship between the handler and the soldier that helps to “keep things real.” Handlers converse in real time with the soldiers they work with, hearing the emotion in their voices and occasional personal asides, as well as their interactions with the rest of their squad. In this scenario, the concern is that the relationship will become too personal, which is the reason for using codenames to help maintain a formal distance between soldier and handler. Handling drones must be very different. In my story, the handler is an advisor, an extra set of eyes, and a researcher able to provide requested information—but is always peripheral to the decisions of the soldier. A drone pilot, in contrast, has direct control over what happens in the field, but is not personally vulnerable—an altogether different situation. How a drone pilot reacts to that situation probably has much more to do with individual personalities and the attitude of the unit, than with the fact of distance alone.

As we see cheaper and more prevalent technology spread out around the world, we’re likely going to see the nature of combat change. Do you think this scenario is likely?

I think it’s a possibility. Information is power. A soldier can surely benefit from real time battlefield information, especially when it’s filtered and focused by an experienced handler, but—hugely important—the lines of communication must be reliable and secure.

Karin appears to be a contractor at the center of the action, one with a duty to her soldiers, but also stuck in a call center: Do you worry about people making decisions that affect soldiers becoming desensitized, not relating their actions as anything but a game?

I think as long as we engage in warfare, the conduct of everyone involved needs to be open to scrutiny on some level, and the seriousness of war needs to always be emphasized. But whether we’re talking about remote warriors or boots-on-the-ground soldiers, we, as a society, ask them to do terrible things—to take human lives—and to live with the emotional weight of that for the rest of their lives. “Desensitization” is the term we use to express our concern that regard for human life—whether the lives of the enemy or the lives of our own soldiers in the field—has been lost. But how much emotional weight should war fighters be asked to bear? The US Army has looked into immediate post-combat treatments aimed at reducing eventual PTSD. Is that desensitization? I don’t think so, but the argument could be made. So while it’s easy to make simple, sweeping statements about remote warfare, war is complex and so are the people who fight it. And finally, what of the rest of us? The desensitization of society-at-large to the remote wars we engage in should be a major concern as well.

Finally, what do you have coming up that we should be looking forward to?

The big item is my newest novel, The Red: Trials. I’m hoping to bring it out in May or shortly after. It’s a sequel to The Red: First Light, which I hope you’ll check out in the meantime. On the short story front, I have work in three anthologies scheduled for publication in 2014. The two that I’m free to announce are “Attitude,” near-future science fiction to appear in Jonathan Strahan’s Reach For Infinity, and “Light and Shadow,” part of your own anthology [edited by Jaym Gates and Andrew Liptak] War Stories.

Andrew Liptak is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He has written for such places as Armchair General, io9, Kirkus Reviews, SF Signal, and Tor.com, and he can be found over at www.andrewliptak.com and at @AndrewLiptak on Twitter.

Author Spotlight: Shaenon K. Garrity
Bradley Englert

What was the inspiration behind telling “Francisca Montoya’s Almanac of Things That Can Kill You” through the form of an almanac?

My friend Pancha loves to read about plagues, natural disasters, and historical events like the Donner Party—basically, anything about extreme survival situations. We always joke that she’d be the best person to have on hand in a global-scale disaster, because she knows all the ways people can die. But she also has severe fibromyalgia. I wanted to write about a character like that surviving in a post-apocalyptic world through knowledge and common sense rather than physical strength. And obviously the most valuable thing such a character could contribute to the world would be a reference guide to all the things that can kill you.

When I was writing the story, I interviewed Pancha about the dangers that would most concern her in such a situation. I did my own medical research too, but I used a lot of her ideas because they were so perfect for the character. “Don’t get poo in your mouth” is a direct Pancha quote.

We get a lot of Francisca’s story and information about the world in which she lives through the anecdotes found in the explanations of things that can kill you. What was your plan for dividing between Francisca’s story and Francisca’s explanations of what can kill you?

I wanted to reveal the situation in Francisca’s world gradually, through the entries, but I also wanted to keep the focus on the character and leave a lot of details up to the imagination. I’d recently read Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and I liked that the social collapse in that novel is deftly sketched in but never overwhelms the central story, which is focused on a small group of characters. Readers who are really into worldbuilding may not be into it, but I wanted this story to be primarily about the narrative voice.

There’s a large world going on behind the scenes of this story, and we get small details about Francisca’s past life, and maybe even a few happy times that she has had in this desolate world. What were the most important details for you to get across in this story? Why have Francisca focus mainly on the bad and things that can kill you rather than reflect on a few extra joyful moments from her life?

It’s partly that she lives in a very grim world, and partly that she’s a natural pessimist. Or maybe just a pragmatist. Even in a functioning society, she’d probably spend a lot of time thinking about things that can kill you.

I don’t usually write fiction this dark. I never thought I’d write a post-apocalyptic story, as it’s one of the science fiction genres I find least interesting, but the image of a woman knitting (with acrylic wool) on the front porch of a trading post in a ruined California appealed to me.

What can we expect next from you?

I’m always drawing comics. My strip Skin Horse (skin-horse.com), which I do with cowriter Jeffrey Wells, updates daily, and every week I adapt an X-Files episode into comic form in Monster of the Week (shaenon.com/monsteroftheweek). I don’t know what my next prose publication will be, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed for at least one of the stories I have out in the ether right now.

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: Scott Sigler
Stephanie Lorée

At its core, “Complex God” is a story about hubris. When you first envisioned it, did you know this theme was essential to the piece? Or did it reveal itself to you as you learned more about your protagonist?

I think that many of our great creators are fueled by hubris. For the people who come up with something truly revolutionary (those who are first with an idea that no one has had before), having the innate idea that you are special, unique, smarter than the average bear allows them to look beyond the accepted boundaries and limitations of what is possible. In “Complex God,” Petra has no doubt that she’s on another level. That confidence translates into dismissiveness: “they” couldn’t achieve this goal, because “they” aren’t as smart as me. So yes, hubris was essential to the piece.

Speaking of the protagonist, Petra Prawatt is, in some ways, both your hero and your villain. What inspired her concept?

I am friends with several female scientists who tell me of their struggles in their respective fields, struggles caused by their gender alone. I can empathize, but since I haven’t lived through that, I can never truly understand what that feels like. Petra is a composite character of those women. As far as the conservative establishment is concerned, Petra has several strikes against her right out of the gate: very young, female, and flamboyant in appearance. I rolled that into the classic “budding young genius” trope to try and make a young woman whose personality is formed by the unfair judgments and objections she overcomes. Petra doesn’t get discouraged, she gets pissed, and part of her success comes from a vindictive “I’ll show you” attitude.

The setting and science in “Complex God” are very realistic, with landmarks any Detroit native can recognize and tech that seems just out of our current reach. Can you share a bit about your research for the story? Where did the realism come from?

I’m a Northern Michigan native and have been to Detroit many times. As a small-town kid, Detroit was the closest big city. I’ve been to the Thanksgiving Day Parade, been to Detroit Lions games (both in the old stadium in Pontiac and the new Ford Field), been to Tiger Stadiums both old and new, played rock gigs in Hamtramck and around the city, etc. I never lived in Detroit proper, but the realism comes, I think, from having spent time there.

The robots in “Complex God” are not necessarily robots, as you describe them as both biological and mechanical life forms. What attracted you to this kind of technology as a basis for a potential Robot Uprising?

The concept of self-replicating machines fascinates me. I’ve played with Von Neumann devices a lot in my work: The Infected trilogy is based on a biological application of that principle. Plants build copies of themselves based on nothing but what nutrients are in the ground: That is a successful survival/reproductive strategy. Someday we might be able to make artificial life forms that do the same thing, but since existing biology works so well here, it’s more likely we’ll have something that is a combination of synthetic and biological (if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but you can improve on it, so to speak). But if we achieve that, I think that a form of sexual reproduction with random variation and crossover will produce the most successful forms over the long run—so, breeding, evolving artificial life forms can eventually take their place alongside us, or (more likely) replace us altogether. A symbiotic relationship between self-replicating bacteria and self-replicating machines could be a major force in bioremediation.

The ending of “Complex God” leaves open possibilities for other stories featuring the minids. Is this the last we’ve seen of Petra and her creations?

Oh, there is an entire series that involves the minids. The Prawatt race is a major force in my YA Galactic Football League stories. That series is set 700 years in the future, and the minids have evolved into something altogether different: a sentient race of biological machines with no limitations on form or function. In “Complex God,” Petra unintentionally gives birth to this race, so this is an origin story.

What is the appeal of “robot uprising” fiction? Why do writers—or you yourself—write about it? What do you think readers like about it?

The concept of creating artificial life has been with us perhaps as long as humans have shared stories. Inanimate objects being gifted life and interacting with us is at the core of many myths and legends. So, I think there’s something innate in us that wants to see things come to life. With robotics, we’re seeing that now: movements that are fluid and real, that do real work, voices that sound like us and are programmed to react like us, now even faces that are capable of communicating emotion. All of this ties into our desires to see the magic of creating sentient life actually happen, and our fears that same life will be a danger to us. It brings up that constant question: What does it really mean to be “human,” and can we/should we find a way to create that same humanity in a different form?

What are some of your favorite examples of robot uprisings (in any media), and what makes them your favorites?

To me, Terminator stands up as a classic: anthropomorphic cyborgs as an unstoppable force, ruled by a faceless artificial intelligence that means to wipe us out. Colossus: The Forbin Project is another one of my favorites: When we do create that self-aware computer that has instant access to all of our knowledge, will it turn out to be just as vindictive, manipulative, and self-preserving as the humans who created it? That movie fit better in the Cold War era, but it’s still scary. The remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still hints at the possibility of self-replicating machines (i.e., the “Gray Goo” concern), and illustrates how powerless we would be against a fast-replicating microscopic threat.

Born and stuck in Ohio, Stephanie Lorée is an author who occasionally moonlights as a rock star. Her short stories have appeared in small press publications, and in 2013, she was a finalist for the Writers of the Future. With her editor hat on, Stephanie has worked on several anthologies—most recently as lead editor for the Write1Sub1 anthology from ParsecInk—and she is a longtime slush monkey for Lightspeed and Nightmare Magazines. A self-proclaimed SuperNerd, Stephanie loves gaming, technology, good sushi, and bad kung fu flicks. Her digital life is available for stalking at stephaniemloree.com.

Author Spotlight: Ted Chiang
Andrew Liptak

Thank you for taking the time to speak with us about your story, “Exhalation”! Where did this one come from?

There were two inspirations for the story. The first was the Philip K. Dick story “The Electric Ant.” It’s about a guy who goes in to see his doctor and is told he’s actually a robot. This comes as a shock to him, but once he gets over his surprise, he decides to open up his chest and take a look at his inner workings. He can see a little spool of punch-tape slowly unrolling inside of himself, and that’s his consciousness, more or less. I always thought that was a terrific image, and it stuck with me for years.

The second was the chapter in Roger Penrose’s book The Emperor’s New Mind in which he talks about entropy. He notes that we usually say that we eat food because we need the energy it contains, but that’s not completely accurate. We radiate energy at pretty much the same rate that we absorb it; we’re not actually increasing the amount of energy we contain. We eat food because we’re radiating a high-entropy form of energy, and we need a low-entropy form of energy to compensate; we’re entropy generators. I thought that was an interesting observation, and I wanted to try presenting it in a more concrete form.

Your protagonist and his fellow mechanical beings remind me a little of Asimov’s positronic robots: Why do we envision these sorts of beings as confined to logic, whereas we’re not?

That’s a good question. The idea that robots don’t feel emotions is even older than the word “robot”; Tik-Tok, the mechanical man of Baum’s Oz, predates Čapek’s work by many years, and Tik-Tok was described as being incapable of emotion. I think it might be because we associate the coldness of metal with emotional coldness; I’d bet that the earliest stories of rag dolls coming to life didn’t portray them as being unemotional.

I don’t think the characters in “Exhalation” behave in a particularly robotic manner. Admittedly the story is not centered around emotion; it’s more of a philosophical fantasy, like a Borges or Calvino story. I think it’s the fact that the characters are made of metal that makes you perceive them as acting like robots, but they’re living beings just like us.

(It’s also worth remembering that living beings in our universe face the exact same problem as the characters in the story. Our universe is vastly larger than theirs so the timescale is vastly longer, but heat death awaits us all.)

The narrator here is trying to get to the bottom of reality while potentially altering his own perception of reality. Can a sentient being ever truly understand the world around one’s self?

The narrator makes modifications to his body, but he doesn’t alter his own perception of reality; he comes to understand something fundamental about the nature of his universe.

As for whether it’s possible to truly understand the world, that depends on what you mean by “truly understand.” We understand a lot of things about the world quite well, I think. There are still unanswered questions, but I don’t think that means our understanding is flawed; just incomplete.

What do you have coming up next that we should keep an eye out for?

I had a new novelette, “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” appear on Subterranean Online a few months ago. Nothing else in the publication pipeline, alas.

Andrew Liptak is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He has written for such places as Armchair General, io9, Kirkus Reviews, SF Signal, and Tor.com, and he can be found over at www.andrewliptak.com and at @AndrewLiptak on Twitter.

Author Spotlight: Carmen Maria Machado
Earnie Sotirokos

“Observations About Eggs” takes place over the course of cross-state airplane ride. Where did the idea for this story come from?

I have this tendency to become briefly hypnotized by objects and processes. A few years back, I was poaching an egg and found myself staring into the pot and got a little lost. I made a note about the experience and then promptly forgot about it. Last summer, I spent some time writing in a cabin in the White Mountains, and I rediscovered that file on my computer. The story poured out of me after that. I set it during a cross-country flight because I wanted the story’s scribe—an unnamed woman—to be trapped next to the eccentric, unsettling speaker for a long while. I’ve had to spend many hours at the mercy of people exactly like him. Planes are interesting and terrifying like that.

Why did you decide to tell it in list form?

I’m very fond of formal conceits, and I love bending, stretching, and manipulating story structures to see what kind of weight and narrative they can accommodate. Sometimes these experiments fall flat on their face—in the end, the form has to serve some sort of purpose for the story, or else it becomes distractingly arbitrary—but I was really pleased with “Observations About Eggs.” I imagine the listener nodding and discreetly jotting down each item after he says it, tolerating the monologue until she can’t anymore.

Do you think any other object could inspire such a complex set of observations?

I think a writer—or any other person who spends their time observing—would be able to meditate in a similar way on any number of objects. I think it’s less about the object itself and more a reflection of the mind of the observer.

How would you react if you actually sat next to this person on a flight?

Listen long enough to have a good story to tell later, and then pull out a book.

What can we expect from you in the future?

I recently finished up my story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, so hopefully, that’ll find a place in the world. I’m also working on an untitled novel.

Earnie Sotirokos grew up in a household where Star Trek: The Next Generation marathons were only interrupted for baseball and football games. When he’s not writing copy for radio or reading slush, he enjoys penning fiction based on those influences. His work can be found by searching for “Sotirokos” wherever ebooks are sold. Follow him on Twitter @sotirokos.

Author Spotlight: Thomas Olde Heuvelt
Bradley Englert

In “The Day the World Turned Upside Down” the focus never shifts too much from Toby’s yearning for Sophie. What was your plan for striking that delicate balance between the craziness of the upside-down world and his sorrow?

The one is of course the ultimate symbol for the other. As a lover of horror fiction, I’ve always said that fear is the strongest human emotion, but it’s not. Grief is. If you ever felt lovesick, you know what I mean. When it happened to me, I curled up on the couch literally for weeks. At some point, my head hung down over the back of the couch and I was staring blankly out the window, seeing the world upside down. I wouldn’t have cared much if I’d fallen up into the sky that moment. And then I thought: Hey, that’s actually a pretty good idea! Life generally tends to get a lot easier if a lot of things would fall up into the sky. You know, we all have our dark moments . . .

What were some of the aspects that were most fun to play around with, and how confusing was it to develop the way in which people would live in the newly turned over world?

Once the idea had struck me, I was thrilled by the possibilities and started lying upside down in front of my window all the time. It’s a lot easier to think about it that way. Try it yourself! Just imagine: If the Earth had turned upside down, and all the houses were hanging from its surface, how would you travel to the house across the street? It’s a challenge, undertaking a quest when gravity fucks you up. You get creative, after a while. There are a lot scientific technicalities at play, but since I’m not much of an SF writer, I didn’t want to focus on them. The whole thing turning upside down was a metaphor to begin with, so I think this is more a love story, or a humorous-grief story, or a fantasy than a real SF. Hey, if you call it magical realism, they let you get away with anything!

Toby and Bubbles’ stories seem to be deeply connected throughout the story. What was your plan for tying the two narratives together, and what similarities do you see between the two characters?

I loved the idea of this micro-tale against the backdrop of this universal catastrophe. Toby doesn’t care about the world coming to an end—he just wants to bring the goldfish back. That’s what love does. Any small detail like that becomes hugely important. Of course, the fish and he become interconnected, both symbolizing the stages of grief. In the end, letting go means ultimate redemption.

What’s up next for you?

Well, I’ve published five novels in The Netherlands—pretty dark novels. And I’m happy to announce that the rights for my latest and most successful novel, HEX, have been sold to Tor in the US and Hodder & Stoughton in the UK. The book will come out in 2015. You can’t read a portion of it yet, but here’s the fantastic trailer that we made for it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ro-EZ_Jqtk

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: K.J. Bishop
Jude Griffin

What were some of the other story ideas you played with before settling on the final central story idea for “Alsiso”?

None that I can remember, though it was a while ago! I tend to find that if a story’s going to work at all, it more or less works in the first draft. I’ll rewrite and fiddle, but the basic premise stays the same. I get a bit discombobulated when I’ve got a lot of choices, so it’s better for me not to give myself too many. If the first idea really doesn’t work, then I’ll try another, but if I find myself trying out a lot of different ideas and approaches, it’s a warning sign that the story won’t get written.

Your stories often have pieces of actual cultures woven into them. Do you keep a set of notes on cultures for worldbuilding? Or do the details get discovered along the way while writing and researching and brooding?

I don’t keep notes. I use things I’ve remembered and kept in a mental odds and ends drawer; then if I need specific details, I’ll research them.

“Inevitably Alsiso became a car.” That perfect line kinda killed me. From such great heights to the quintessential trivialization. Tell me you, too, felt some remorse to bring Alsiso so low.

I did. Alsiso may be out there waiting to get his/her revenge on me. Maybe I’ll be turned into a toaster oven or something. I’m fascinated by the rise and fall of mythic figures—ancestors and heroes becoming gods, gods becoming another culture’s demons, the modern mythologies around products. I don’t think our belief in magic has died; it’s hiding in plain sight in consumerist psychology. On the one hand, Alsiso becoming a car is a fall, but it’s a fancy car, and since we accord a kind of magical status to fancy cars, maybe it isn’t such a dishonour.

I loved how you closed the cycle of Alsiso on one planet and then set Alsiso off to begin a new cycle somewhere in the cosmos, and yet the final line seems to foreclose any hope for a new cycle. Why?

The original story had a different last paragraph, where a galaxy ends up with the name of Alsiso. Why did I change it? It seemed too upbeat. I guess that’s the danger of revising stories years later—you’re a different person, older and more miserable! But considering the fame of Laika, who I was thinking of, I reckon Alsiso’s cycle could start again.

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: C.J. Cherryh
Andrew Liptak

Thank you for taking the time to chat with us about your story, “The Only Death in the City.” What can you tell us about where this story came from?

I began doing a series of stories set at the end of planet Earth, a kind of a slow decline, for a book called Sunfall. And the story of Paris, which is one of Europe’s oldest cities, dating back to old Lutetia, and its relationship to the Seine, and the melancholy of a lot of French literature, conjured a city enclosed, many-tiered, in which the Seine cascades as a waterfall. I then saw one lone figure standing poised for self-destruction on that brink, and I thought of the French monasteries, the preservation and veneration of bones; and the famous cemetery, and thought—there is quite a lot made, here, of death, and desire.

That was the beginning.

This story was originally published in 1981, in your collection Sunfall. Do you feel that the themes behind it have changed significantly in the thirty-three years since it first came out?

The largest change has been our struggle to go green and break away from old attitudes . . . to clean up our rivers and use the energy of the Sun in one form or another.

There’s an interesting point where you note that the city’s dead are stored in the lowest levels, almost as though it’s built on the bones of the dead. Is such a thematic image deliberate? Cities are often held up as an achievement of society—is there a cost that we ignore?

This is a theme in Paris, which is indeed built on the bones of the dead: It once venerated them . . . and there is this theme of tristesse, sorrow that underlies the gaiety of Paris. There was so much self-indulgence set above so much misery and hunger that it really was two worlds, for much of its existence as a capital of Europe.

Another major point that I got caught up with was that of renewal and rebirth, set in the background of a city, which can’t change as rapidly. Is it the city that changes people or people who change the city?

I think a city has a life of sorts, and it evolves. But Paris could not purge itself of its recurring themes, these grand gestures of death, that simply reiterated lives that hadn’t greatly served the city. In this story, the advent of real death promises change—but a change at the end of time. Is it too late? Is it kind to let these people wake from their long recurring dream, to face reality too late to do anything about it?

What do you have coming up that we should look forward to?

I’m taking a definitely long-anticipated turn in the Foreigner books. And I’m doing some short fiction for my own e-publishing venture, with two other writers, in closed-circle.net. I want to do another in the Cyteen mode. And I’d like to do something totally different one of these days.

Andrew Liptak is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He has written for such places as Armchair General, io9, Kirkus Reviews, SF Signal, Tor.com and can be found over at www.andrewliptak.com and at @AndrewLiptak on Twitter.

BONUS APRIL FOOL’S STORY

The Legend of RoboNinja
by RoboNinja
(Translated by Brooke Bolander)

He had a name once, doled out by a loving mother in some antecedent time and place so distant it seems impossible the stars moved in their current polity. Gone now. Fallen and trampled to an obscure macule in the roadside mud, like his vanished arms and legs and viscera. Nothing would be changed in the knowing.

RoboNinja. A name for garbled tongues and garbled times. Interstate mudlarks peer at him from beneath grotty brows as he passes, eyes the size of headlamps reflecting the gelid glow of his visor. He once tried obscuring the light with handfuls of ash, smeared across LEDs and his shining silver carapace like the penitential marks of a sect long forgotten. It had worked for a time, until the monsoon came mocking once more.

What alloy is he, that does not rust or falter? What spirit turns the clockwork heart, the hydraulics hissing at each joint like chained and malignant demons? Why do his knees have running lights? None step forward to ask. He walks the highways alone. The blasted countryside sighs with relief to see the back of him, an unlucky silver coin passed on to some other gambler’s hand.

• • • •

The elasticity of muscle. Meat and bone sliding together in perfect alignment. Blood humming faintly in veins delicate as silkworm strand. Things he never knew he missed. Taken from him, piece by piece, until nothing was left but machinery. Two katanas and a sweet-ass railgun. Metallic fingers to crush the windpipe of God, should he ever come across him on his meanderings.

A story common in the days before the cataclysm. A rival clan. Cybernetic legs, replacing those lost in rooftop shadow-games. The moon never judged his lack of skill. First one arm and then the other, tumble-turning in the osseous light like shot-stricken passenger pigeons.

Remove the limbs of a ninja. Take the head and lungs and ice-cold heart of him, the eyes to see and the ears to hear and the liver and lights and soul uncoiling beneath them like squid ink on the sea floor or a totally rad ninja smoke bomb. If one were to replace all the components and seal that third-rate warrior’s spirit inside a suit of living robotic armor, would it remain the same shinobi? Or would something ineffable be lost in the changing?

• • • •

In his perambulations he comes across a city. Charred skyscrapers turned to skeletal slag, grasping for the sky like the clawed and blackened hands of sinners reaching from Hell toward some unobtainable beatitude. Leadbellied clouds visible through the rebar. Wasted shadows scuttling from the light he carries, dazzled by refulgence. Also there is a Waffle House.

Rough men live here. He passes a knot of them, making sport of a tiny orange kitten. RoboNinja stops for little on the road. The world is a horror forgotten by God, completing its circumvolution over and over heedless as any tormented eidolon ever haunted the halls past midnight. He has seen trees impaled with the skulls of infants and roadsides smeared with the gore of feasts unimaginable. But he likes cats. Moreover, he has a railgun and two katanas. It takes little effort to send the souls of the men back to the formless and unthinking void they issued out of.

The kitten blinks up at him. Owlet in feline form. Fluffy fur matted by oil and who knows what else. A mew so quiet as to be almost imperceptible.

The way will be hard, he says to the grimalkin. I can’t promise you anything.

Purring. The flick of one small ear, indifferent.

All right then. Your choice.

He reaches down, plucks the kitten from the ground by its scruff and opens the secret robot ninja compartment in his chest. He can still feel it rumbling inside as they travel on down the road.

• • • •

A family of ferals dwelt beneath the dojo when he was young. Lithe obscurations at the corners of his vision, here and then gone, like a name on the tip of your temporal lobe. Sunshine and shadow. The smell of fish stew cooking. Colors and textures and tastes leaching from his memory until at the last all cats are gray.

• • • •

In a tenement building still mostly intact on the outskirts of the urbicolous RoboNinja sees a cluster of lights, yellow as torches held aloft by subterranean explorers in the wet wombs of the Earth. There are sentries at the door. Bedecked with strings of human teeth and ears like dried fungi wetted with the blood of previous owners and scraps of letters tattooed across their scarred faces in crude homebrewed inks, the scripture of damnation relentless.

He becomes shadow and fog, a penumbra across their awareness, clouding their minds so that he exists to them not at all.

Y’know: ninja stuff.

Endless flights of stairs where stagnant water stands and piles of decaying plaster gather leaf-drift deep, slippery and stinking. Up and up, pneumatic joints untiring, toward the Babylonian vertex.

He can hear them. A revel in full swing. Feet stomping and voices shrieking glossalalic psalms of ravishment and drums thudding like the chambers of a vast human heart. Flesh slapping against flesh. The floor beneath him shudders, an old hound trying to rid itself of fleas. How many dwell above? Fifty? A hundred? How does the rotted hull of the thing contain them?

He gains the uppermost landing. Miasma thick enough to clot his visor. A glow like Hell’s own furnaces leaking beneath the door. He pushes it and steps inside.

The revelers smoke papaverine pipes of jade and obsidian and tiger’s eye rippling like the fur of some great beast gone extinct when men still hid in caves cowering obeisance to gods the shape of bears and lion, draped across the floor in various states of narcotic bliss and various states of undress and various states of coitus, languid or frantic or somewhere in-between. Bare flesh frescoed with painted handprints or rude symbols the meanings known only to the wearers. Musicians do violence to enormous drumskins with wooden sledgehammers roughly shaped into ram’s heads or play flutes of bone in sooty corners.

In the midst of all of this, a desk, and at that desk a man-shape, cowled and brooding.

In this age of malnutrition and early death he is a giant, shoulders the width of a bull’s. He unsteeples his fingers and makes a grand gesture with one splayed hand. RoboNinja’s head could easily fit inside his palm.

Quiet, my friends, quiet. We have a guest. Don’t be shy. Step right up, my robotic friend.

RoboNinja does, but not for any reasons but his own. Careful not to trod on fingers or toes or anything else left vulnerable by the human carpet. One or two hiss and snap at his ankles like dogs. He dodges them easily.

Well well, says the hooded man, regarding him. Well well. A robotic ninja, no less. Your legend precedes you, friend. Or should I say your ineptitude.

He doesn’t respond. His pride died with the last human part of him. Robots have no need for such emotions.

I’m here, he says finally, shrugging. They’re not.

Good answer. Which brings me to my first question. Why are you here?

Another long pause. The only sound the crackling of the fires and the soft susurrus of bodies rubbing against one another.

I need a job.

The giant barks laughter. You? What does a robot need a job for? You don’t eat, do you?

No.

Don’t screw, don’t need clothes?

No.

Don’t need bullets?

This is a railgun. It is too badass to need ammo.

Then what are you interrupting my brooding for?

Robot fingers punch a button sequence on his chest. A pneumatic hiss. Gently he removes the sleeping kitten from inside. Holds out the spark of orange fur for examination.

The hooded man and the robot ninja regard one another over the expanse of desk and cat. What imp of the perverse capers in the mind of the man? What strange stirrings in the petrified and corroded heart of the automaton, to make him act thusly? None may know, until the day of judgment when all graves give up their dead and the final great ninja battle is joined.

I suppose I can do something to keep you in sardines. How would you feel if I asked you to be a marketing shill for Lightspeed?

Dead inside, as always.

That’s fair. But will you do it?

The kitten begins purring. The gears of the universe miniaturized and set to motion inside a body no bigger than a throwing star.

There is only one response.

—With apologies and thanks to Cormac McCarthy

RoboNinja is ageless, the bones of his human clan long ago turned to sand and that sand to a fine dust. He carries two katanas across the slick carapace of his back, sharp as the knowledge of humanity’s innately violent nature. He also has a railgun because he is an awesome robot. Currently the marketing shill for his interests include the study of the ancient art of ninjitsu, swords, railguns, cats, and existential dread. In lieu of a heart, a tiny orange kitten lives inside his robot chest. Each time you buy an issue of Lightspeed, RoboNinja receives a single sardine with which to feed him.

Brooke Bolander is a chaos-sowing trickster girl of indeterminate employment, half-tornado, half-writer. Originally from the deepest, darkest regions of the southern US, she attended the University of Leicester from 2004 to 2007 studying History and Archaeology and is a graduate of the 2011 Clarion Writers’ Workshop at UCSD. She enjoys loud music, peaty scotch, drawings that move, and anything pumpkin-flavored you might happen to have on hand. Her work has previously been featured in Lightspeed, Nightmare, Strange Horizons, Reflection’s Edge, and the Prime Books anthology Aliens: Recent Encounters.

Author Spotlight: RoboNinja
Lightspeed Staff

Why did you tell your own story in the third person? And also, why didn’t you use any dialogue tags or quotation marks? (Honestly, it kind of makes it hard to tell who is or even when someone is speaking.)

Explaining it to a human intellect would prove difficult.

Your vocabulary is . . . well, “high-falutin’” comes to mind as a way to describe it. Where’d you learn to talk so fancy? In ninja school?

Only small minds limit themselves to the basest vocabulary. The grunting and squealing of meat-speech can only be improved, either by elaboration or by the silence of death.

The dojo was also in possession of a fine thesaurus.

Where’d you get that sweet-ass railgun? I mean, where can a person who is not an awesome robot get a thing like that?

Lose everything. Then, and only then, can enlightenment and railguns be obtained.

How was that Waffle House?

I can no longer ingest human sustenance. The taste of nori on my tongue is a decaying memory, like the faded stripes on the antiquated pelt of some long-extinct jungle cat.

Oh, right. Sorry about that. Do you miss food? Or if not, which of your limbs or viscera do you miss most?

My shadow gland.

Speaking of food, Spark—the kitten that lives inside your chest cavity—still needs to eat, and I see here that Lightspeed, gives you a single sardine each time someone buys a copy of the magazine, as payment for your services as marketing shill. Does Spark have any favorite brand, or any preferences when it comes to his feeding?

Dusty cans in hidden bunkers, the very bones of those that placed them there worn down to an alkaline sand. If those are not available, Crown Prince will also do.

If you had one piece of advice for someone aspiring to be an awesome robot ninja, what would it be?

Your dreams are the lunatic weeping of some caged madman in a sideshow where the audience is as bestial as the attractions they gawp at. What emptiness brought you to this?

Like RoboNinja, the Lightspeed Staff have had all of their body parts replaced by technology, though they tend to be much more upbeat about it. Pity their digitized souls.

Coming Attractions

Coming up in May, in Lightspeed . . .

We’ll have original science fiction by Seth Dickinson (“A Tank Only Fears Four Things”) and Sandra McDonald (“Selfie”), along with SF reprints by Nisi Shawl (“Deep End”) and Sean Williams (“Zero Temptation”).

Plus, we’ll have original fantasy by Matthew Hughes (“The Ba of Phalloon,” a Kaslo Chronicles tale) and Fred Van Lente (“Willful Weapon”), and fantasy reprints by Rachel Pollack (“Burning Beard”) and from the new weird western anthology Dead Man’s Hand, Rajan Khanna’s “Second Hand.”

For our ebook readers, our ebook-exclusive novella will be “Shiva in Shadow” by Nancy Kress, and of course we’ll have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with bestselling fantasy author Jeff VanderMeer and theoretical physicist Michio Kaku.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed. Thanks for reading!

• • •

And coming in June . . . WOMEN DESTROY SCIENCE FICTION!

About the Editor

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Lightspeed, is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent and forthcoming projects include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Operation Arcana, Wastelands 2, Press Start to Play, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated eight times) and is a six-time World Fantasy Award finalist. 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.

Subscriptions and Ebooks

Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes 96 stories (about 480,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)  — what a bargain! For more information, visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe.

Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). 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), and will cost you just $23.88 ($12 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!).

JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS
BIBLIOGRAPHY

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: The End is Nigh

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: The End is Now

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: The End Has Come [Forthcoming, May 2015]

Armored

Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy [Forthcoming, Oct. 2015]

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live

Dead Man’s Hand

Epic: Legends Of Fantasy

Federations

The Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes

HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects

Lightspeed Magazine

The Living Dead

The Living Dead 2

Loosed Upon the World: A Climate Fiction Anthology [Forthcoming, Aug. 2015]

The Mad Scientist’s Guide To World Domination

Nightmare Magazine

Operation Arcana

Other Worlds Than These

Oz Reimagined

Press Start to Play [Forthcoming, Aug. 2015]

Robot Uprisings

Seeds of Change

Under the Moons of Mars

Wastelands

Wastelands 2

The Way Of The Wizard

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above. Each project also has a mini-site devoted to it specifically, where you’ll find free fiction, interviews, and more.