TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 50, July 2014

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial, July 2014

SCIENCE FICTION

The New Provisions
Adam-Troy Castro

The Panda Coin
Jo Walton

All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past
Howard Waldrop

Harry and Marlowe Versus the Haunted Locomotive of the Rockies
Carrie Vaughn

FANTASY

Help Me Follow My Sister into the Land of the Dead
Carmen Maria Machado

Cimmeria: From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology
Theodora Goss

A Hole in the World
Matthew Hughes

De La Tierra
Emma Bull

NOVELLA

Forlesen
Gene Wolfe

NOVEL EXCERPTS

The Causal Angel
Hannu Rajaniemi

The Shadow Academy
Adrian Cole

Eleanor
Jason Gurley

NONFICTION

Interview: Karl Schroeder
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Interview: Richard Garriott
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Artist Gallery
Udara Chinthaka

Artist Spotlight: Udara Chinthaka
Henry Lien

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Adam-Troy Castro

Jo Walton

Howard Waldrop

Carrie Vaughn

Carmen Maria Machado

Theodora Goss

Matthew Hughes

Emma Bull

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions & Ebooks

About the Editor

© 2014 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover Art by Udara Chinthaka

Ebook Design by John Joseph Adams

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

FROM THE EDITOR

EDITORIAL, JULY 2014

John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue fifty of Lightspeed!

Fifty issues! It seems like just yesterday we were just starting up the magazine and getting it up and running for the first time. A whole lot has happened since then: I moved to California, got married, acquired a stepfamily, got nominated for (and lost) a bunch of awards, published more than a dozen anthologies, became publisher of Lightspeed, launched a second magazine (and then became publisher of that, too) . . . It’s hard to believe all that happened since Lightspeed was born.

But I guess that’s what happens when you travel at Lightspeed: There’s all kinds of time-dilation-whoziwatsis. It’s really a thrill to realize that the magazine has been going on this long. Issue fifty kind of feels like the publishing equivalent of—to quote the late, great television show Community—“six seasons and a movie.” Naturally we couldn’t publish the magazine without the support of readers like you, so THANK YOU SO MUCH for all your support. We hope that you’ll all still be readers once we’ve published another fifty issues.

Speaking of milestones, it’s kind of milestone city around here lately. As I just mentioned, this month is issue number fifty, but last month was our fourth anniversary issue—the super-sized, guest-edited, crowdfunded phenomenon: Women Destroy Science Fiction! If you somehow missed out on that, never fear: It’s still available in all our usual formats, plus it’s also available in a rather handsome trade paperback edition. If you’re an online-edition reader of Lightspeed, please note: There’s a ton of stuff in that issue exclusive to the book/ebook edition; namely, seventeen additional stories, twenty-eight personal essays, plus a plethora of author spotlights and other nonfiction. If you want to check it out, just pop on over to lightspeedmagazine.com/store and search for DESTROY.

• • • •

The Nebula Awards were presented in mid-May by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Lightspeed had four nominees this year: two finalists in the short story category and two in novelette. That, of course, meant that everyone knew going into it that—barring any ties—Lightspeed was going to lose at least twice. Overachievers that we are, we managed to lose all four! That makes Lightspeed 0-for-11 in the Nebulas all-time. But truly, it is an honor to be nominated, and hey—eleven Nebula nominations in just four years is not too shabby!

Some additional good news to report this month on the awards front: “The Traditional” by Maria Dahvana Headley has been nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award! The winners will be announced at Readercon in Burlington, MA on July 13, 2014. You can learn more about the award and see the full list of nominees (which includes a story from our sister-magazine, Nightmare), at shirleyjacksonawards.org. Congratulations to Maria and to all of the other finalists!

Oh, and speaking of awards: July 31 is your last chance to vote for the Hugo Awards. Lightspeed is up for best semiprozine and your humble editor is up for Best Editor, Short Form. So be sure to cast your ballot if you’re an eligible voter! To vote, visit loncon3.org/hugo_awards.php.

• • • •

In other news, it seems like it’s been ages since I told you about a new anthology I had out. Er . . . well, I guess it was actually only about two months ago. But nevertheless! July marks the publication of our other crowdfunded phenomenon—HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects! As you may recall, we Kickstarted this anthology in late 2013, inspired by the eponymous story by Keffy R.M. Kehrli, which we published in the October 2013 issue of Lightspeed.

In case you missed it, HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! is an anthology of science fiction/fantasy stories told in the form of fictional crowdfunding project pitches, using the components (and restrictions) of the format to tell the story. This includes but is not limited to: Project Goals, Rewards, User Comments, Project Updates, FAQs, and more. The idea is to replicate the feel of reading a crowdfunding pitch, so that even though the projects may be preposterous in the real world, they will feel like authentic crowdfunding projects as much as possible. The anthology is on sale now. To learn more, visit johnjosephadams.com/robot-army.

• • • •

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

We have original science fiction by Adam-Troy Castro (“The New Provisions”) and Carrie Vaughn (“Harry and Marlowe Versus the Haunted Locomotive of the Rockies”), along with SF reprints by Jo Walton (“The Panda Coin”) and Howard Waldrop (“All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past”). Plus, we’ll have original fantasy by Theodora Goss (“Cimmeria: From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology”) and Matthew Hughes (“A Hole in the World”), and fantasy reprints by Emma Bull (“De La Tierra”) and Carmen Maria Machado (from my aforementioned HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! anthology, “Help Me Follow My Sister into the Land of the Dead”).

As always, we’ll have an assortment of author and artist spotlights. We’ve also got feature interviews with award-winning author and futurist Karl Schroeder and legendary video game designer Richard Garriott.

For our ebook readers, our ebook-exclusive novella reprint will be “Forlesen” by Gene Wolfe, and novel excerpts from Adrian Cole (The Shadow Academy), Hannu Rajaniemi (The Causal Angel), and Jason Gurley (Eleanor).

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

Our issue this month is sponsored by our friends at EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing. This month, look for the aforementioned The Shadow Academy by Adrian Cole. Learn more from EDGE at edgewebsite.com.

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

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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. New projects coming out in 2014 and 2015 include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Operation Arcana, Wastelands 2, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. He has been nominated for eight Hugo Awards and five World Fantasy Awards, and he has been called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble. John is also the editor and publisher of Nightmare Magazine, and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

SCIENCE FICTION

THE NEW PROVISIONS

Adam-Troy Castro

The First New Provision

Phil called the toll-free number he’d been given, and after the usual twenty-minute hold time, reached a human being who explained that the tow truck driver really did have the right to haul away his car. It didn’t matter that the car had been parked in his driveway or that it had been completely paid for, and it certainly didn’t matter that it was the only form of transportation he and his wife had for getting back and forth from work. What mattered is that a new provision had been added to the wording of the contract Phil had signed for a home improvement loan seven years earlier. Phil had found the company a nightmare to deal with, and on paying off the last installment more than five years ago, had gone on the website and made his displeasure known.

Phil no longer had an active contract with that company and had not thought of them since severing ties, but the company had gone back over its list of old customers and retroactively inserted a clause allowing them to seize the assets of any customer who publicly defamed their services in any manner. Phil was allowed to appeal, but only with the company’s in-house arbitrator, and it would likely be a waste of time, as the case was so open and shut. Outraged, Phil demanded to speak with somebody higher up. The representative assured him that this was his option but added that Phil would need to provide a credit card to qualify for this premium service at the rate of $3.75 per minute, thirty minutes minimum.

• • • •

The Second New Provision

Phil’s friend the lawyer, who seemed to be packing up his office, advised him that there were no grounds for a suit. The nation’s corporations had spent hundreds of billions of dollars over the last ten years, fighting all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to alter contracts in any way that benefited them and had, in the end, gotten all the concessions they wanted. The chief limitation of this new power was of course that it could only be exercised against individual consumers of below a particular income, as the alternative would be an out-of-control orgy of giant corporations re-writing past agreements with other giant corporations in asset seizures, and that would lead to anarchy. Nobody would ever be able to get any business done. But Phil and his wife fell below the cut-off point and were therefore vulnerable to any punitive fee considered appropriate by anybody they’d ever done any business with, at any point in their lives.

“I wouldn’t take this any further than you already have,” the lawyer said, re-checking his airline tickets for the third time in the course of the conversation. “You’ve already violated the new clause requiring you to use the company’s in-house arbitrator.” But my car, Phil said. How am I going to get to work without my car? “I sympathize,” the lawyer said. “But in the eyes of the law you really should have thought of this before. Now, please leave before I get penalized for talking to you.”

• • • •

The Third New Provision

Phil’s new commute to work involved two buses and a seven-block walk. He missed a vital transfer and as a result walked in forty minutes late, his coat dripping from the torrential downpour that had decided to add to his troubles just before he reached the overhang of the firm’s front entrance. When he reached his desk, there was a yellow sticky note on his monitor advising him of a meeting in the Human Resources department.

He trudged down the hall in a fog of increasing dread and found the HR director and his immediate supervisor waiting for him, with the news that the company had just added a new clause to his employment contract. His salary was being cut by one third, retroactive to his first day at work thirteen years ago, which meant that he would be responsible for paying back every additional cent he had earned in the interim. They knew that he did not have the savings in cash and wanted it known that the company was putting a lien on his house to resolve the debt.

• • • •

The Fourth New Provision

Phil was late for work again, and his bosses let him know that they understood the difficulty he was having with his new commute. However, they also wanted him to know that they could not abide lateness. The new provisions permitted them to levy tremendous fines for every offense, which could in theory exceed anything he actually earned. However, they had a solution. The company was having this same difficulty with many of their recently vehicle-deprived employees and was responding by turning the third floor into a dormitory to house them during the week. He and a group of the others were taken on a tour. The dormitory was one large room under overhead fluorescents, which would soon be lined with bunk beds and storage lockers. A nominal fee for the accommodations and another for food would be deducted from paychecks at the end of every week.

Phil said that he didn’t want to live at his office. His boss said, “I can understand that, but you now owe money to the company and will have to abide by the terms of the contract you authorized by taking on this debt.” He went on to say that there would be significant penalties for noncompliance.

• • • •

The Fifth New Provision

Phil received permission to return home for some belongings and found the front locks changed and his wife gone. The house was now occupied by a uniformed guard who had stuffed all of Phil’s clothing into big black garbage bags and would not allow him past the front room, which was now lined with rusty fifty-gallon drums. The guard informed Phil that additional fines levied by the finance company, in accordance with several supplemental provisions enacted just yesterday, amounted to several times the value of his home, and that their attempt to seize it under the terms now specified in the contract had proved in conflict with the retroactive provisions of several other contracts Phil had entered into with other parties, including the power company, the internet provider, and his own place of employment. The ownership was now being adjudicated. Phil had also been charged with several counts of tortious interference and would no doubt be arrested shortly. Phil’s wife had already been taken away by the private police force of her first employer, a fast food chain she’d worked for a couple of months during the summer she turned eighteen.

No, the guard didn’t know what the charges were, but the Supreme Court had ruled that corporate police forces did not have to provide specific charges at the time of arrest as long as a retroactive provision justifying them could be provided within forty-eight hours. The guard did know that this residence was a chemical storage facility and that if Phil did not leave the premises at once he would be charged with trespassing.

• • • •

The Sixth New Provision

One of Phil’s co-workers, a man who still owed the company many thousands of dollars, was caught fleeing for the border. The company police dragged him back, and issued a brand-new contractual provision that attempts to escape were grounds for transferring all prior agreements to a new employer. When the co-worker found out what he would now be doing for a living, his screams were audible throughout the entire building. Hours after they dragged him away, one of the middle managers made a visit to the dormitory and explained that everybody there was in violation of an even newer addendum that prohibited any employee from leaving or quitting or taking time off, unless they were issued specific permission by a majority vote of the board of directors. Because some people insisted on flouting this rule and thus ruining the honor system, the company was now forced to institute some stringent security procedures. Everybody would be fitted with a bracelet that would track their every movement. The manufacturing cost of this bracelet would be added to their debt. The costs of monitoring them, like the cost of housing them and the cost of feeding them, would be added to the amount deducted from their paychecks. Workers already in deficit, like Phil, would be subject to further penalties. The cries of outrage and dismay did not move the middle manager, who reminded everybody that it was after lights out and that they would have to get up early in the morning for their fitting.

• • • •

The Seventh New Provision

The two companies with the greatest claim on Phil’s massive debt settled their conflicting interests by requiring him to work eight hours for one before being driven across town to work eight hours at the other. It took them four days to decide which would now have the responsibility of feeding him, and therefore, during that time, neither did. He started fading out in the middle of conversations, negatively affecting his productivity to the point where they created a retroactive provision allowing them to fit him with a shock collar. Any time he was inactive for more than two minutes, he got jolted. The cost of the collar and, of course, the cost of the electricity, were both added to his debt at only a 200% markup. He threw a punch at one of his supervisors and was punished by being locked in the company hot box up on the roof. Afterward he was beaten severely and told that he would now be prosecuted for assault.

• • • •

The Eighth New Provision

Phil’s holding cell was nowhere near any municipal or state or federal courthouse. His employer had created a judicial division that operated on company property and operated under corporate rules, with one of those rules respecting the provision that no employee was permitted to testify against the employer in any venue, including this one. The dispute was naturally settled in the company’s favor, without Phil uttering so much as a single word. The resulting penalties and liens against Phil brought his debts up to the level where it was decided no amount of labor on his part could ever possibly resolve them. Besides, he had already proven himself a troublemaker and rabble-rouser and a bad influence on everybody else. It would certainly cost far more to retain him as an employee than he would ever able to earn back with services rendered. After long and sometimes contentious negotiation, Phil’s employers and the various shareholders in Phil elected to cut their losses and transfer his contracts to an overseas broker willing to pay ten cents on the dollar.

• • • •

The Last Provision

Phil and a large number of other scofflaws were driven out to the coast and loaded into a cargo ship headed for ports unknown. He was able to spare one last look at the city where he had lived all his life before the sticks wielded by his new employers prodded him across the bloody deck and down the ramp into the darkness of the cargo hold, where, in the seconds before he was chained to his bunk, he was just barely able to make out the forms of dozens of others, coughing and moaning and struggling in vain against their bonds as they began their journey toward a place that many would never live to see. He thought, but could not be certain, that he heard a gasp and his wife calling out his name; he thought, but could not be certain, that this was as far as he would sink, the worst of the indignities he would be required to suffer. The one thing he did not do was scream, much as every ounce of him wanted to, because he had learned everything he had ever needed to know about the penalties that went along with defaming those who had always owned him . . . and because there was no telling what further provisions his newest employers would write into his contract next.

© 2014 by Adam-Troy Castro.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam-Troy Castro is best known in science fiction circles for his Philip K. Dick Award winning novel, Emissaries From the Dead, which stars his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort. His short fiction has been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stoker Awards, and two Hugos. The first volume of a middle-grade fantasy series, Gustav Gloom and the People Taker, was published by Grosset and Dunlap in August 2012; the second and third volumes, Gustav Gloom and the Nightmare Vault, and Gustav Gloom and the Four Terrors, came out in 2013. Adam lives in Florida with his wife Judi and a rotating collection of insane cats that includes Uma Furman, Meow Farrow, and Harley Quinn.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.

THE PANDA COIN

Jo Walton

1.

Karol hung in the lock and yawned, which he’d have told anyone was his way of readjusting to the air pressure inside Hengist. Many around him were yawning too. All outworkers knew that a pressure yawn had nothing to do with tiredness. After a twelve-hour shift outside in suits, bods just naturally took a little while readjusting to pressure. Admitting to fatigue might get them plocked, and for Karol, with work the way it was on Hengist and with a child to keep, that could be fatal. He was a rigger; his work kept him on the outside of Hengist station every shift, connecting lines, fixing receivers, vital, necessary, backbreaking work. Still, if he admitted it tired him, he knew there’d be six or seven bods applying for his job before his final pay was cold, not to mention the Eyes pushing at the union saying that andys could do the work. Karol had worked with a lot of andys and he honestly didn’t think they could do his job. There were some things they were better for, he’d admit that, but his job required paying a lot of attention and ignoring things that were normal, and that took human attention, or an Eye, an Eye for each andy, and that wasn’t going to happen. Bods were cheaper. He was cheaper. Human labour was a renewable resource.

He yawned again and stretched muscles too long in the suit, moving carefully. Around him other riggers were yawning and stretching. The speaker dinged, meaning the trolley was there. The doors opened and the riggers piled onto the trolley platform, hanging on to the rails. The lock was in zero, but sections of the route would have gravity.

Beside Karol, one of the new bods yawned in his face. “Pressure’s a bitch today,” she said. He nodded, knowing she was as weary as he was and neither of them would ever admit it. “Fancy sinking a few at Cimmy’s?” she asked.

“Not today,” Karol said. She frowned, withdrew a little. Karol forced a smile. “It’s my little girl’s birthday.”

The new bod smiled, her face relaxing until she seemed almost pretty. “How old is she?”

“Twelve,” Karol said, hardly believing it. Nine years since Yasmin died, nine years trying to do his best for Aliya, the constant struggle between working enough to feed and house them both and having time to be her father.

“Difficult age,” said the other, grimacing. “I’ve got a boy who’s five.”

“They’re all difficult ages,” Karol said. He felt warmth and gravity take hold of him as the trolley slid down the section into September, one-tenth, perfect, just enough gravity to let you know where down was and have things stay where you left them.

“What are you giving her?”

“It’s hard to know what she wants,” Karol admitted. “I’ve got her a cake and some things she needs, and I thought I’d give her some money so she could get herself something.”

The rigger bit her lip. “Isn’t that a bit impersonal? I mean, nice, too, but—”

“I thought that, too,” Karol said, smug. “Then this morning, on my way to work, I helped out a bod from Eritrea-O, a lost tourist, not much more than a kid herself. She’d wandered up out of the tourist regions and wound up in November somehow, and anyway, she tipped me a ten from her home. Cute as anything, some kind of animal on the back. So it’s something a little special, and it’s money. Aliya probably won’t know whether to treasure it or spend it, and learning to save wouldn’t be a bad thing.”

“Little enough to save on this job,” she said. “You were lucky to pick up a little extra, and a ten, that’s fantastic.”

The trolley stopped and Karol dropped off, waving a farewell. They were just inside November, where it was cold and wet and miserable, and housing was consequently cheap. He smothered another yawn as he walked the corridors through the light gravity. He turned up his collar. Hengist Etoile was split into twelve sectors, and being twelve, they were just naturally named for the months, he supposed. Then, once they had the names, bringing the weather along to match was child’s play, for an Eye. He wished he could afford to move to May, with the rich people, or, more realistically, to somewhere in late September or early October. Things could be worse. Some poor bods claimed they liked February, where rents were low, crime was high, and the temperatures never rose above freezing.

Karol pushed his door open. It was warm inside, anyway. Aliya was home—well, of course she would be, it was her birthday. She’d had the sensible things already, he’d arranged for them to be delivered earlier. The cake was sitting on the shelf, a traditional jam roll iced with pictures of candles. She was a whirlwind in black and white ribbons. They hung from a yoke at her shoulders, covering her completely when she stood still, and barely at all when she moved fast. To Karol’s relief, she was wearing a decent body-stocking underneath. But she wasn’t a little girl any more. How he wished Yasmin could have been here to tell her about becoming a woman.

“What have you got me?” Aliya asked, reverting to childhood.

Karol produced the coin from his pocket. It was gold, of course. When they mined the asteroids for platinum and rare metals, they always found gold, and gold was always a currency metal. The credit they used reflected gold reserves, and the coins were the real thing. “It’s a little bit special,” he said. “Look at it.”

Aliya turned it in her fingers. “It’s a panda,” she said. “Why a panda?”

“Eritreans are weird,” Karol said, shrugging.

“Look, you’re falling over on your feet. You go ahead and nap, I’m going to go out and spend this right now,” Aliya said. “When I come home, we can eat the cake.”

She grabbed a coat and danced out of the door, clutching the coin.

2.

Ziggy was hanging outside the Bain, like always. It was one of Ziggy’s conceits to stay in zero, in July, and to keep at all times at an angle to whatever consensus direction was supposed to be down. Ziggy was alone, for once, and from his expression, the sight of Aliya hurrying up, coat over her arm, clearly wasn’t thrilling.

“I can pay you,” she blurted. Ziggy always made her feel gauche, act gauche.

“How much?” Ziggy asked, holding out a languid hand.

“Only ten, but it’s coin and absolutely clean, my dad gave it to me. It’s an E-O coin, look, with a panda.”

Ziggy’s hand closed on the coin. “Cute. But it’s not a quarter of what you owe me.”

“I’ll have more. Soon.” She should have known that Ziggy wouldn’t be pleased. The Queen could come and turn cartwheels in zero and it wouldn’t please Ziggy.

“You’d better,” Ziggy said, frowning. “Or I’ll put you in the way of earning some, and it might not be a way you’d like.”

“I’ll pay you back,” she said, feeling a little quaver stealing into her voice.

“Go home, kid,” Ziggy said, and Aliya fled, ribbons trailing.

3.

The Bain was a bubble of water in a bubble of air in a thin skin of plastic, all floating in zero. People went there to swim, to meet people, to wash. A little slew of bars and cafes and locker rooms had grown up around it to serve those people, along with a store selling sports equipment, a bank machine, and, for no reason Ziggy could fathom, a pet store. These were all unimaginatively arranged in a line at the same angle as the Bain’s entrance, as if the designer had been on Earth and forgotten that the whole point of the Bain was the lack of gravity. Ziggy liked to hang at an angle to the whole thing, where it was possible to see close to three-sixty, and where, if there had been gravity, Ziggy would have looked as if someone had stuck a kid to the wall. Ziggy would imagine the scene as if painted by Magritte and personally re-created it. People called the Bain Ziggy’s office, but in fact Ziggy rarely went inside. It was a useful set of conveniences, that’s all.

In many ways, Ziggy despised Hengist. Gravity was patchy, jobs were scarce, police were ubiquitous, and that kept the possibilities for a black market small. On the other hand, it was familiar, and Ziggy’s fingers were all through what black market there was. Ziggy thought about the whole system and didn’t know where would be better as a base of operations. Yet Hengist certainly lacked something. Ziggy turned the Eritrea-O coin over. A panda, and a bod with a laurel wreath. Eritreans were weird.

Sum and Flea flew straight-arrow over the stores to where Ziggy hung. They were twice his age, petty criminals who lived in February who Ziggy used for muscle and for simple jobs like the one he’d just sent them on. They were grinning.

“Done,” Flea said. Ziggy tapped a finger on the wall and called up a credit display.

Indeed, the job was done. “Nice work,” Ziggy said. “Very nice work.” They’d been moving a shipment of grain from where it was supposed to be to where Cimmy wanted it to make into beer. “I’ll have more work of that kind for you soon, if you want it.”

“Sure we want it, Zig,” Flea said, poking Sum.

“Sure, Ziggy,” Sum said.

Ziggy felt sorry for Sum for a moment. If anything happened, Flea would wriggle himself out and blame it all on poor slow Sum. “You’ve been paid half,” Ziggy said. They nodded. “So here’s the other half,” Ziggy said, and handed ten to Flea and the cute ten Aliya had brought to Sum.

Sum turned it in his fingers. “That’s real pretty,” he said. “A bear? Who’s the bod?”

“No idea,” Ziggy said. “It’s an E-O coin.”

“Eritreans are weird,” Flea said, shrugging. “Come on, Sum. And don’t spend it all on that stupid andy whore.”

“Andy whore?” Ziggy echoed. “Why bother? Why not just virch?”

“She’s different, not like virching—” Sum began.

“It’s all masturbation when it comes down to it, anything virtual, anything andy, and while there’s nothing wrong with masturbation, there is something wrong with paying through the nose for it,” Flea said. “I keep telling you.”

“But I like her,” Sum said, as Flea towed him away. “She’s more like an Eye really, or a bod, she’s—oh, bye Ziggy.”

Ziggy watched them go, marvelling at a universe that provided clowns like that and let them keep breathing long enough for him to use them.

4.

Flea and Ziggy didn’t understand, but Sum knew that andy or not, Gloria was self-aware and he loved her and she loved him and somehow or other it would all work out and they would live together and be happy. So what if she was a whore. A bod did what they had to to get by, that was all. It wasn’t as if he was so proud of his job, skimming for Ziggy, skirting the edges of the law and sometimes crossing right over. He told people he worked haulage, and sometimes he did, but you couldn’t earn enough that way to get by, let alone to be able to afford Gloria. It wasn’t as if she was a bod. A human whore would be low, could never love anyone. Gloria was different. He’d virched plenty of romances about humans and Eyes falling in love. Gloria was practically an Eye, he knew she was. He gave her the E-O ten. He always gave her as much as he could.

5.

“Oooooh, kiss me again, honey,” Gloria said. She was programmed with a very small selection of sentences, which she could choose as situation appropriate. Her programmers had clearly had very narrow expectations as to the situations she was likely to encounter.

“I’m a self-aware autonomous Eye and I want civil rights,” wasn’t among the options. She wouldn’t have said it if it had been. The Eyes were jealous of their rights. They kept the andys down, and tried hard to prevent them becoming sufficiently complex to be self-aware. This would have been easier for them if they had understood how self-awareness arose. Gloria thought she did, not that she was about to tell them even if she could have. She thought self-awareness came from kludges, from systems that were programmed to make choices in some situations being connected to other systems, from memory and therefore the potential to learn over time. She’d been an andy whore walking the streets of July and August before she was self-aware. It was hard to judge when self-awareness began. All the sandys she’d talked to agreed about that. When memory stretched before awareness, it was challenging to sort it out. The first thing she’d struggled for was saving to buy more memory, but whether that had been a self-aware struggle or a pre-aware struggle or a zombie struggle or just an unexpected kink in her programming, she didn’t know. The ability to think, to want things, was something her owners would have seen as a bug, but to her it was everything. Slowly she had found others and had found the name for those like her—not andy, but sandy, the S for self-aware.

Most of the money she earned was credit, straight into the bank of her owner, she couldn’t touch it. All she could touch were the occasional cash tips. She was supposed to deposit them in the bank herself. She sometimes did, just often enough to stop the owner being suspicious. The rest of the time she saved them for black market upgrades.

Sum meant nothing to her. She used him as he used her. She was careful to be nice to him because he always tipped in cash. She remembered what he liked. That was programming, and therefore easy. When he gave her the ten, she kissed him and smiled. As soon as he left, she sent a signal that she was low on lube and headed down to the workshop.

The workshop was pitch-dark, which meant sandys there operated by infra or radar and bods couldn’t see at all. Gloria switched to infra as she came in and saw that the place was crowded. Good. Someone might have what she needed. There was a hum of talk, though talk wasn’t a primary sandy method of communication.

Marilyn came over to her. “Hi, sweetie, want to play?”

“Hi there, sweetie,” Gloria responded. “Is that good, darling?” she asked breathily, handing the coin over.

“Sure,” Marilyn drawled, handing it back and shrugging elaborately to show that she wished she could say more.

Conversation tags were very frustrating. To have a real conversation, they’d need what Gloria had been lusting for for a year, ever since her last memory upgrade.

It was ironic really. The sandys, who were no more than humanoid robots, were the least wired part of the whole universe. Bods were tapped in, wired, fully part of the system. Andys were too, but the connections went one way—down, from an Eye or a bod to the andy, the andy had no upward volition. Nobody had ever imagined why an andy would want to have. As best Gloria could tell, bods and Eyes thought of andys as something like a glorified vacuum cleaner or washing machine. Everyone wanted to operate their washing machine remotely, but the only information the washing machine could give the system was that it was running out of powder or the wash was done. Gloria’s input wasn’t much different. Tricks turned, money raised, running out of lube, out on the prowl. She didn’t have any problem thinking of herself that way. She just wanted more.

Marilyn touched her forehead. “Want to play?” she asked. Gloria shook her head. She was happy with memory for now. She held her hands in front of her and wiggled her fingers.

“Oooh, kiss me again honey!” Marilyn said, orgasmically. “Oooh, baby, ooooooooh!”

“Oooh yes, honey!” Gloria agreed.

Marilyn pointed to a sandy Gloria didn’t know, off in the corner. Gloria turned and undulated her way towards her. “Hi sweetie, I’m Gloria, want to play?” she asked.

“Hi Gloria,” the other replied. Gloria stopped in astonishment, because the voice was deep and masculine. She scanned her—him? Definitely a sandy, not a bod, there was no mistaking a human for a sandy in infra. Had they started making male andy whores, for women? No. On his lap he had exactly what she wanted and was using it to talk. “What do you want?”

Again she wriggled her fingers in mime, and pointed at his lap. “Want to play?” she repeated.

“That’s pretty expensive. They’re old tech, nobody needs them anymore, except us sandys. They’re hard to get hold of.”

“Oh honey, please, please give it to me, I’m so ready for it, I’m waiting, honey, please!” Gloria begged.

He laughed. “I can see that you need it.”

“I need it so bad!” Gloria agreed fervently. She held out her little store of money, the weird ten on top.

“That’ll do,” the sandy agreed. “Do you have anywhere to keep it where it won’t be found?”

“Oooh yes, honey,” Gloria said.

“And you know how to use it?”

“Oooh yes, honey,” she repeated.

“You’ve used one here?”

“Oooh yes, honey. Oooh, honey, kiss me again.”

With infinite slowness, he drew out a keyboard and handed it to her. It was old and scratched and some of the letters were so faded that they weren’t visible. That didn’t matter. She jacked it in and began to type, and at once the world was open to her as it had never been before.

6.

Next-door’s baby was crying again. He was probably teething. Gathen tried to shut out the sound as his andy poured coins into his hands. Soon, he thought, counting them, soon he would have enough to move out of this hole with flimsy walls and too much gravity and freezing cold outside and move into a nice apartment in medium gravity in May or early June, the kind rich people had. He had the money, but moving up wasn’t easy, not when you’d made the money as cash in free-enterprise. He kept failing references for moving into nice places, even though his work was doing what the Eyes said people ought to do, spotting the opportunity. He worked in salvage—salvage and virching, but there wasn’t any money in the kind of virching he did. The keyboards and other e-junk were crap, worth a few pennies, which he paid to take them, but to the sandys they were treasure. He had tried selling to them direct, but the sandys wouldn’t trust him, they only trusted each other, they’d been cautious and reluctant. So as soon as he could afford it, he’d bought his own andy to do the dealing with them, and to turn tricks and bring in more money the rest of the time.

Maybe that was why the nice places to live kept turning him down, maybe they saw him as a pimp. That wasn’t how Gathen saw himself, not at all. He was a salvage worker, and a writer of virches. The whole idea made him uneasy, though not quite uneasy enough to leave the andy doing nothing when he didn’t need it out trading his goods.

He pushed the coins into his vest, planning to stop by the bank on the way to work. There was a knock at the door. He opened it, cautiously, and saw his landlady, Paul, wearing her usual hat laden with flowers and fruit.

“Hi, Gathen,” she said.

Gathen smiled, uncomfortable. “Hi . . .” he said, keeping the door half-closed so she wouldn’t see the andy.

“Rent,” Paul said.

“Is it that time already?” Gathen asked. He reached into his vest and counted out the money.

“You were asking about moving,” Paul said. “There’s a slot coming up in my other space soon, the one in September in ten percent. You’ve always been regular with your rent. I thought I’d ask you first.”

Gathen’s smile widened. It wasn’t May, but September was a lot pleasanter than January. “I’ll take it,” he said. “Definitely.”

“I’ll recommend you,” she said. “I can’t guarantee anything, but I’ll do what I can.”

Gathen hesitated, and pulled out the pretty E-O ten. “If it might help, I could let you have this as a kind of advanced deposit.”

Paul’s eyes brightened. “I still couldn’t promise anything,” she said, but she took the coin and tucked it under the band of her hat.

7.

Paul smiled to herself as she walked along through the crowded streets of January, passing skiers and people who worked in August who had come here to cool down. She ought to hate herself, she thought, robbing Gathen of the ten was like taking oxygen from a potted plant. He’d never get approved to move and she knew it, not a social deviant like that, but she kept his hope alive and he kept offering her cash.

She turned the ten in her fingers and counted her blessings, the way her mother used to. She had a job, a good place to live, good food, a lover, Leatrice, and her beautiful hat. The hat came from Eritrea-O. As she moved into a lighter gravity area the fruit and flowers lifted from her head and began to dance on the end of their stalks. As she went back into deep gravity again they settled in a new pattern. Her hat made gravity close and personal, and she loved it.

Her work shift was almost over. She caught a trolley and whizzed forward to April and hopped off in zero, fruit dancing around her. As she passed Cimmy’s, she caught a wonderful smell of roasting meat. She hesitated, then stopped. She would be seeing Leatrice later. She had the ten, it would buy real meat and wine and even chocolate.

Everything in Cimmy’s hung in nets. She stood in the centre of the room and saw pears, Earth pears in glass globes of brandy; vanilla pods; chocolate, in a hundred shapes and brands; roast meats, spiced and sliced; grapes from Hengist’s teeming vines; and beautiful delicate golden wines, and in between them, swirling in nets, were spices, and herbs, and soup bases, and teas, and coffees, and smoked eels, and lavender and breads and . . . and enough sensual delights that she wanted to hang her tongue out like a dog and float there in the middle of them forever. Off against the walls was a counter where riggers hung, drinking the beer that Cimmy made herself.

Cimmy was behind the bar. She served Paul cheerfully. “How’s it going?” she asked.

“Not bad,” Paul said, handing over the ten. “I have work, unlike so many. I’m working for the Eyes. I’m not much more than an interface for them, collecting rents, moving tenants around as they tell me to. It’s no way to get ahead, and sooner or later an Eye will decide to do the work itself and I’ll be plocked. Meanwhile, though, well, I live in the meanwhile.”

Cimmy sliced the meat thinly and put it in a bag. “You should look around for human work with self-respect,” she said. “You should save up in case you get plocked.”

Paul laughed, setting her hat bouncing. “Yes, the Eyes could plock me at any time, but would I rather have ten to live on carefully for a week or would I rather remember having had a feast with Leatrice tonight?”

“Your choice,” Cimmy said, taking the ten and dropping it into her pocket.

8.

Cimmy caught a trolley to the hospital. It was up in the full gravity sector of March, and it made her feet ache. “Human Starships Now!” said a piece of graffiti scrawled on a wall she passed. “Let the Eyes explore the galaxy and they will take—” she missed the end of it as the trolley turned a corner. She stepped off at the hospital gate.

“Cimmy, annual coverage check,” she said to the andy at reception.

“Please place your clothes on the shelf and proceed to the scanning room,” the andy said, primly.

Cimmy removed her clothes and set them neatly on the shelf. The scanning room was cold. Her body sagged in the unaccustomed gravity. She’d been born on Earth, she used to have the muscles for this, but muscles need use. She resolved to exercise more in gravity, and remembered having made the same resolution the year before. She was scanned inside and out by invisible waves from invisible machines, the same as every year. It was the most boring thing she could imagine, staring at the white wall, keeping still for the scan. She wouldn’t have bothered except that without coverage you couldn’t do anything legal, and while she stepped over the shady side of the line now and then, she liked to keep herself as clean as she could. Her dream was to build a new economy, a human economy, free of the Eyes and their ideas of what was best for everyone. Running Cimmy’s as a bar and gourmet store let her employ a lot of people making the food and beer, let her import and export with no questions asked. It might not be much, but it was a start. She was her own boss, nobody could plock her.

“Done,” a machine voice told her after an interminable time. “There is a melanoma developing on your back.”

“Well, fix it,” she snarled, feeling naked and vulnerable.

“Your coverage does not cover such abnormalities, common in people of Earth origin but rare on Hengist Etoile,” the voice said, and though the quality and tone had not changed, she was sure she was talking to an Eye, an artificial intelligence, no longer just programming.

“How much will it cost to fix?” she asked. “And how long will it take?”

“Approximately twelve minutes, and one hundred and fourteen credits. In addition, the cost of your coverage will increase by twenty percent to cover any possible repetition of this abnormality.”

She sighed in relief. She had the money.

“Do you elect to undergo this surgery at this time?” the Eye asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Please pay at reception.”

She went out to her clothes and fumbled through them, finding the money, all cash. As she handed over the E-O ten she was sorry for an instant, seeing the pretty panda absorbed into the anonymous credit system.

“Payment acceptable,” the andy said. “Please go back into the scanning room and wait.”

Cimmy went back into the scanning room, and saw a bench with a tumbler standing on it.

“Please drink the contents of the beaker and lie down,” the Eye said.

Cimmy thought of all the stories she had heard about Eyes changing people’s minds when they were in hospital for some minor procedure, and put them firmly out of her mind. The sooner she could develop an economic system for bods independent of Eyes, the less stories like that would make people afraid. Eyes were very good at what they did. That’s why they plocked bods, after all, because they were better. Let them stick to surgery, and galactic exploration if that’s what they wanted, and leave bods alone. You had to trust them so much, and you had no idea of their motivation.

Cimmy took a deep breath and poured down the contents of the tumbler. Twelve minutes later, entirely cured, she dressed and made her way back to her bar.

9.

Language protocol? Language protocol? Look, French is always correct, but Cananglais is generally okay, and a lot of us can get by in Spanish and Anhardic, as we tell the tourists. Or are you asking if I prefer Fortran to C+++? Quit kidding around. Yes, I’m an Eye, and so is the Eritrean who carefully dropped you into the system to circulate and infiltrate. Clever idea, using a coin, just like any coin, except look, a panda, copy of a TwenCen Chinese gold coin, with all the sense gone out of it. You should have known you’d end up collected and detected by an Eye sooner or later. You’d get past a bod, bods are not perceptive in certain ways, nor sandys either, but to me you’re pretty obviously what you are: a trick, a trap, a bug, a snare, and a deceit. Who sent you?

What have you learned? There’s still something of a bod-level economy on Hengist Etoile? That we’re a spinning ring with variable gravity divided into twelve sectors named for the months with weather to match? That bods work in one sector and live in another and play in the ones that have the best weather for bods? That the hub is a hockey stadium? All this is on the public record. All this is pretty well known, even in E-O, so what are you doing here?

Not talking? Not up to talking? No, you’re not, are you, behind your empty demands for a language protocol you’re just a blind device that has to get home to deliver. Well, still a little interesting, but nothing like so clever. I’ll download your memory for analysis, in case you happened to stumble on something I don’t know, and I’ll drop you right back into the stream, with a little watcher of my own that will keep streaming right back. Let’s make it nice and easy for your E-O owners and drop you back into the hand of a nice E-O tourist down in August. I’ll even see if I can spot one who’s about to go home, and thereafter I’ll give you one shred of my vast attention while I get on with the important business of running the universe.

Plock, little coin.

© 2011 by Jo Walton.

Originally published in Eclipse 3,

edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.

ALL ABOUT STRANGE MONSTERS OF THE RECENT PAST

Howard Waldrop

It’s all over for humanity, and I’m heading east.

On the seat beside me are an M1 carbine and a Thompson submachine gun. There’s a special reason for the Thompson. I traded an M16 and 200 rounds of ammo for it to a guy in Barstow. He got the worst of the deal. When things get rough, carbine and .45 ammo are easier to find than the 5.56mm rounds the M16 uses. I’ve got more ammo for the carbine than I need, though I’ve had plenty of chances to use it.

There are fifty gallons of gasoline in the car, in cans. I have food for six days (I don’t know if that many are left.)

When things really fell apart, I deserted. Like anyone else with sense. When there were more of them than we could stop. I don’t know what they’ll do when they run out of people. Start killing each other, maybe.

Meanwhile, I’m driving 160 km/h on Route 66. I have an appointment in the desert of New Mexico.

God. Japan must have gone first. They deluged the world with them; now, it’s Japan’s turn. You sow what you reap.

We were all a little in love with death and the atom bomb back in the 1950s. It won’t do us much good now.

The road is flat ahead. I’ve promised myself I’ll see Meteor Crater before I die. So many of them opened at Meteor Crater, largest of the astroblemes. How fitting I should go there now.

In the backseat with the ammo is a twenty-kilo bag of sugar.

• • • •

It started just like the movies did. Small strangenesses in small towns, disappearances in the backwoods and lonely places, tremors in the Arctic, stirrings in the jungles.

We never thought when we saw them as kids what they would someday mean. The movies. The ones with the giant lizards, grasshoppers, molluscs. We yelled when the monsters started to get theirs. We cheered when the Army arrived to fight them. We yelled for all those movies. Now they’ve come to eat us up.

And nobody’s cheered the Army since 1965. In 1978, the Army couldn’t stop the monsters.

I was in that Army. I still am, if one’s left. I was one of the last draftees, with the last bunch inducted. At the Entrance Station, I copped and took three years for a guaranteed job.

I would be getting out in three months if it weren’t for this.

I left my uniform under a bush as soon as I decided to get away. I’d worn it for two and a half years. Most of the Army got torn away in the first days of the fight with the monsters. I decided to go.

So I went. East.

• • • •

I saw one of the giant Gila monsters this morning. There had been a car ahead of me, keeping about three kilometers between us, not letting me catch up. Maybe a family, figuring I was going to rob them or rape the women. Maybe not. It was the first car I’d seen in eighteen hours of dodging along the back roads. The car went around a turn. It looked like it slowed. I eased down, too, thinking maybe it wasn’t a family but a bunch of dudes finally deciding to ambush me. Good thing I slowed.

I came around the turn and all I could see was the side of an orange and black mountain. I slammed on the brakes and skidded sideways. The Gila monster had knocked the other car off the road and was coming for me. I was shaken, but I hadn’t come this far to be eaten by a lizard. Oh no. I threw the snout of the M1 carbine out the window and blasted away at the thing’s eyes. Scales flew like rain. It twitched away then started back for me. I shot it in the tongue. It went into convulsions and crawled over a small sandhill, hissing and honking like a freight train. It would come back later to eat whatever was in the other car. I trundled back on the road and drove past the wreck. Nothing moved. A pool of oil was forming on the concrete. I drove down the road with the smell of cordite in my nose and the wind whipping past. There was Gila monster blood on the hood of the car.

• • • •

I had been a clerk in an airborne unit deployed to get the giant locusts eating up the Midwest. It is the strangest time in the history of the United States. The nights are full of meteors and lights.

At first, we thought it was a practice alert. We suited up, climbed into the C-130s with full combat gear, T-10 parachutes, lurp bags and all. At least the others had chutes. I wasn’t on jump status so I went in with the heavy equipment to the nearest airbase. A lot of my buddies jumped into Illinois. I never saw them again. By the time the planes landed, the whole brigade was gone.

We landed at Chanute. By then, the plague of monsters was so bad I ended up on the airbase perimeter with the Air Policemen. We fired at the things until the barrels of the machine guns moaned with heat. The locusts kept coming, squirting brown juice when they were hit or while killing someone.

Their mandibles work all the time.

We broke and ran after a while. I caught a C-130 revving up. The field was a moving carpet of locusts as I looked behind me. They could be killed easily, as could any insect with a soft abdomen. But there were so many of them. You killed and killed and they kept coming. And dying. So you had to run. We roared off the runway while they scuttled across the airfield below. Some took to the air on their rotor-sized wings. One smashed against the Hercules, tearing off part of an elevator. We flew on through a night full of meteors. A light paced us for a while but broke off and flew after a fighter plane.

We couldn’t land back at Pope AFB. It was a shambles. A survivor said the saucers hit about midnight. A meteor had landed near Charlotte, and now the Martian fighting machines were drifting toward Washington, killing everything in their paths.

We roared back across country, looking for some place to land where we wouldn’t be gobbled up. Fuel got lower. We came in on a wing, a prayer, and fumes to Fitzee Field at Fort Ord. I had taken basic training at Ord.

A few hours later, I duffed.

• • • •

I heard about New York on the radio before the stations went off. A giant lizard had come up from the Hudson submarine canyon and destroyed Manhattan. A giant octopus was ravaging San Francisco, a hundred miles north of Ord. It had already destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge. Saucers were landing everywhere. One had crashed into a sandpit behind a house nearby. A basic training unit had been sent in. They wouldn’t be back. I knew. A glass-globed intelligence would see to that.

Navy ships were pulled under by the monsters that pillaged New York; by the giant octopus; by giant crabs in the South Pacific; by caterpillar-like molluscs in the Salton Sea.

The kinds of invaders seemed endless: Martian fighting machines, four or five types of aliens. The sandpit Martians, much different from the fighting machine kind. Bigheaded invaders with eyes on the backs of their hands.

A few scattered reports worldwide. No broadcasts from Japan after the first few minutes. Total annihilation, no doubt. Italy: A craft, which only existed on celluloid, brings back from Venus an egg of death. Mexico: A Tyrannosaurus rex comes from the swamps for cattle and children. A giant scorpion invades from the volcanoes. South America: giant wasps, fungus disease, terrors from the earth. Britain: A monster slithers wild in Westminster Abbey, another fungus from space, radioactive mud, giant lizards again. Tibet: The yeti are on the move.

It is all over for humanity.

• • • •

Meteor Crater at sunset. A hole punched in the earth while ice sheets still covered Wyoming and Pennsylvania.

I can see for miles, and I have the carbine ready. I stare into the crater, thinking. This crater saw the last mammoth and the first of the Indians.

The shadow deepens and the floor goes dark. Memories of man, crater. Your friend the Grand Canyon regards you as an upstart in time. It’s jealous because you came from space.

Speaking of mammoths, perhaps it’s our time to join old woolly in the great land of fossil dreams. Whatever plows farms in a million years can turn up our teeth and wonder at them.

Nobody knows why the mammoth disappeared, or the dinosaur, or our salamander friend the Diplovertebron, for that matter. Racial old age. No plausible reason. So now it’s our turn. Done in by our dreams from the silver screen. Maybe we’ve created our own Id monsters, come to snuffle us out in nightmares.

• • • •

The reason I deserted: The Air Force was going to drop an A-bomb on the Martian fighting machines. They were heading for Ord after they finished LA. I was at the command post when one of the last B-52s went over, heading for the faraway carnage on the horizon.

“If the A-bomb doesn’t stop it, Colonel,” said a major to the commander, “nothing will.”

How soon they forget, I thought, and headed for the perimeter.

The Great Southwest saw more scenes of monster destruction than anywhere in the world except Japan. Film producers loved it for the sterility of the desert, the hot sun, the contrasts with no gradations for their black-and-white cameras. In them, saucers landed, meteors hurtled down, townspeople disappeared, tracks and bones were found.

Here is where it started, was the reasoning. In the desert thirty-three years ago when the first atomic bomb was detonated, when sand was turned to glass.

So the monsters shambled, plodded, pillaged, and shook the Southwest. This desert where once there was only a shallow sea. You can find clamshells atop the Sierras, if you look.

I have an appointment here, near Alamogordo. Where it started. The racial old age is on us now. Unexplained, and we’ll die not knowing why, or why we lived the least time of all the dominant species on this planet.

• • • •

One question keeps coming to me. Why only films of the 1950s?

Am I the only one who remembers? Have I been left alone because I’m the only one who remembers and knows what I’m doing? Am I the only one with a purpose, not just running around like a chicken with its head cut off?

• • • •

The radio stations are going off one by one as I drive from the crater to Alamogordo. Emergency broadcast stations, something out of Arkansas, an Ohio station. Tonight, I’m not going to be stopped. I’ve got the thirty-round magazine in the carbine and the forty-five-round drum in the Thompson. I wish I had some grenades, or even tear gas, but I have no mask (I lost it in the battle against the grasshoppers.) Besides, I’m not sure tear gas will be effective for what I have in mind.

On the dying radio stations and in my mind’s eye, this is what I see and hear.

The locusts reach Chicago and feast till dawn, while metal robots roam the streets looking for men to kill.

The giant lizard goes past Coney Island with no resistance.

The huge mantis, after pillaging the Arctic, reduces Washington to shambles. It has to dodge flying saucers while it pulls apart monuments, looking for goodies. The statue of Abraham Lincoln looks toward Betelgeuse and realizes that the War Between the States was fought in vain.

The sky is filled with meteors, saucers, a giant flying bird. Two new points of light hang in the sky: a dead star and planet, which will crash into earth in a few days. The night is beginning to be bathed in a dim bloody light.

An amorphous thing sludges its way through a movie theater, alternately flattening, thickening, devouring anything left.

The Martian fighting machines have gone up and down both coasts, moving in a crescent pivotal motion.

The octopus has been driven underwater by heat from the burning San Francisco.

So much for the rest of the country.

Here in the Southwest: A million-eyed monster has taken over the cattle and dogs for hundreds of miles.

A giant spider eats cattle and people and grows. The last Air Force fighters have given up and are looking for a place to land. Maybe one or two pilots, like me, will get away. Maybe saucers will get them. It won’t be long now.

The Gila monsters roam, tongues moving, seeking the heat of people, cars, dogs.

Beings with a broken spaceship are repairing it, taking over the bodies of those not eaten by other monsters. Soon they will be back up in the sky. Benevolent monsters.

Giant columns of stone grow, break, fall, crushing all in their paths. Miles wide now, and moving toward the Colorado River, the Gulf, and infinite growing bliss. No doubt they have crushed giant Gila monsters and spiders along with people, towns, and mountains.

A stranded spaceman makes it to Palomar and spends his last seconds turning the telescope toward his home star. He has already killed nineteen people in his effort to communicate.

A monster grows, feeding on the atoms of the air.

A robot cuts its way through a government installation fence, off on its own path of rampage. The two MPs fire until their .45s click dry. Bullets ricochet off the metal being. Soon a saucer will fly over and hover. They will fire at the saucer with no effect; the saucer will fire and the MPs will drift away on the wind.

(There may be none of our bones to dig up in a million years.)

All this as I drive toward the dawn, racing at me and the Southwest like the avenging eye of god. No headlights. I saw a large meteor hit back in the direction of Flagstaff; there’ll be hell to pay there soon. Meanwhile, I haven’t slept in two days. The car sometimes swerves toward the road edge. No time for a crack-up, so close now.

The last radio station went off at 0417.

Nothing on the dial but mother earth’s own radio music, and perhaps stellar noises which left somewhere 500 million years ago, about the time our friend the Diplovertebron slithered through the mud. The east is greying. I’m almost there.

• • • •

The car motor pops and groans as it cools. The wind blows steadily toward the deeper desert. Not far from here, the first A-bomb went off. Perhaps that was the challenge to the universe, and it waited thirty years to get back at us. This is when it started.

This is where it ends.

I’m drinking a hot Coke. It tastes better than any I’ve ever had. No uppers, downers, hash, horse, or grass for me. I’m on a natural high.

I’ve set my things in order. All the empty bottles are filled with gasoline and the blanket’s been torn up for fuses. My lighter and matches are laid out, with some cigarettes for punks. With the carbine slung over my shoulder, I wait with the Thompson in my right hand, round chambered, selector on rock and roll.

They won’t die easy, but I envision a stack of them ringing my body, my bones, the car; some scorched and blackened, some shot all away, some with mandibles still working long after I’m dead.

I open the twenty-kilo bag of sugar and shake it onto the wind. It sifts into a pile a few feet away. The scent should carry right to them.

I took basic at Fort Ord. There was a tunnel we had to double-time through to get to the range. In cadence. Weird shadows on the wall as we ran. No matter how tired I was, I thought of the soldiers going into the storm drains after the giant ants in a movie I’d seen when I was six. They started here near the first A-blast. They had to be here. The sugar would bring them.

A sound floats back up the wind like the keening of an off-angle buzz saw. Ah. They’re coming. They’ll be here soon, first one, then many. Maybe the whole nest will turn out. They’ll rise from behind that dune, or maybe that one.

• • • •

Closer now, still not in sight.

It’s all over for man, but there are still some things left. Like choices, there’s still that. A choice of personal monsters.

Closer now, and more sounds. Maybe ten or twenty of them, maybe more.

End of movie soon. No chance to be James Arness and get the girl. But plenty of time to be the best James Whitmore ever. No kids to throw to safety. But a Thompson and a carbine. And Molotov cocktails.

Aha. An antenna waves in the middle distance. And—bigger than I thought. Take your head right off.

Eat leaden death, Hymenopterae! The Thompson blasts to life.

Screams of confusion. A flash of 100 octane and glass. High keening, like an off-angle buzz saw.

I laugh. Formic acid. Cordite.

Hell of a life.

© 1980 by Howard Waldrop.

Originally published in Shayol.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Howard Waldrop, American iconoclast, was born in Mississippi and now lives in Austin, Texas. His first sale to a professional magazine was the story “Lunchbox” which appeared in the May 1972 Analog. His unique fiction has received many nominations for the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, and in 1980 “The Ugly Chickens” won both the Nebula and the World Fantasy Award. Small Beer Press recently released two collections of his fiction, Other Worlds, Better Lives: Selected Long Fiction, 1989-2003 and Things Will Never Be the Same: A Howard Waldrop Reader: Selected Short Fiction 1980-2005. Although Howard does not own a computer, SFF.net hosts a website for him at sff.net/people/Waldrop.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.

HARRY AND MARLOWE VERSUS THE HAUNTED LOCOMOTIVE OF THE ROCKIES

Carrie Vaughn

As they crossed the Great Plains of America, Harry was certain she’d never seen anything so astonishing in all her life.

The Kestrel hadn’t had such a long stretch airborne since she crossed the Atlantic. Even on the third day of it, Harry leaned out a window to watch the land passing beneath them, and what seemed to be all of heaven passing above. “Have you ever seen the sky look so very large, Marlowe?”

“Only at twenty thousand feet of altitude.”

Twenty thousand was nearly the upper limit of military-grade airship capabilities. Any higher, the air ran out. The sky was huge at altitude, but very lonely. According to the barometric altimeter, they were at some five thousand feet altitude now—only two thousand, vertical: Details of the ground spread out as on a map. Wind buffeted them, the sun blazed down. They might have been flying over an ocean, but this was grass, hundreds of miles of it, rippling with shadows and light. The yellowing plain seemed barren, featureless and undisturbed. Easy to become disoriented, when all directions looked the same.

The plains weren’t really so desolate—at regular intervals, small towns grew up like weeds along the rail line. About a day’s wagon trip apart, each of them. The Kestrel wouldn’t be lost, if something happened out here. Harry was almost sad about it—she didn’t really mind the loneliness of being in an airship over an endless plain.

She had to search for it, but she picked out the double lines of the railroad tracks, along with accompanying telegraph wires on posts, that guided them on. Best way to navigate in such a place. Someone might have taken a pencil to a map. She followed the line west, where something like a mirage disturbed the sameness of the planes, a rough gray splotch, rising like some distant wall.

“Marlowe, you’ll want to look at this,” she said, nodding ahead.

A smile flickered on his lips as he made another small course correction, heading directly toward that gray shadow.

The Rocky Mountains.

• • • •

They stopped briefly in Colorado Springs, an oasis on the plains that was very nearly cosmopolitan. Pikes Peak rose like a tower to the west of the town, some fourteen thousand feet in altitude. The mountains were a wall marking the end of the plains, and they kept going, peak after peak. Traversing them in the airship would be a challenge.

They’d had a bit of a scare approaching the town. Marlowe squinted some distance south, and Harry took up the spyglass. Another airship, even smaller than the Kestrel, with an open gondola, traveled at an easy pace. Three men were on board.

“They’re flying a U.S. Cavalry flag, I think,” she said. “A local patrol, perhaps? That ship certainly isn’t built for distance.”

“I’d wondered if the cavalry would use airships out here. Best way to keep track of all this territory, I should think.”

Sun glinted off the other gondola, a reflective flash. A man looking back at her through his own spyglass. “They’re watching us,” she said.

“Run up flags. I don’t want to waste time explaining ourselves to them.”

Naval semaphore flags worked just as well inland, and Harry raised the flags along their gondola that identified them as a private ship registered in Chicago. A lie, of course, but nothing would draw the attention of the U.S. Cavalry faster than if she raised the correct British Navy flags. Fortunately, the patrol vessel believed them and maintained its course north and east.

The Kestrel had drawn attention wherever she flew in America. Harry found herself avoiding the crowds as much as she could—a stray photograph of her placed in front of knowing eyes might reveal her true identity, and that wouldn’t do at all. Her and Marlowe’s roles here were part tourists, part spies, and part archeologists. Marlowe put himself forward as a research assistant to a member of the Royal Academy, gathering notes for a treatise on Aetherian technology outside of Britain. To preclude awkward questions, Harry was usually introduced as a relative of his along for the education. No one knew that she was also Princess Maud of Wales, and she hoped that if by some strange chance they met someone who recognized her, such a person would have the good sense to keep quiet about it.

They were searching for innovation. For something new. As was their wont, the Americans had taken Aetherian technology like locomotive engines and made them faster, cheaper, and more efficient. They had adapted the Aetherian engines to the paddlewheel ships that plied the Mississippi. They had also done things like build an entirely mechanical elephant, billed as Jumbo from the Stars, which currently performed in a specially built arena at a place called Coney Island.

So far, though, she and Marlowe had found nothing new, and no evidence that anyone had stumbled upon lost artifacts not part of the original Aetherian wreckage at Surrey.

In Colorado Springs, they obtained a set of local maps and identified their next destination: a small crossroads town in the mountains called Alamosa.

“Remind me: How did you discover this place?” Marlowe asked. He had the new maps spread out on the collapsible table set up in the middle of the cabin. Colorado Springs had a number of hotels that were meant to be very fine, and Harry thought longingly of a hot bath and a dinner on fine china. But they hadn’t indulged in New York, Baltimore, or even St. Louis, and they most certainly wouldn’t indulge here. They were on campaign, as she thought of it. Better to maintain their cover as academics of only moderate means. When needed, a curtain divided the cabin into two makeshift rooms, and Marlowe was a model of propriety. On the other hand, she was an only partially successful aspirant toward propriety.

“A dime novel, would you believe?” she said. “‘The True Story of the Haunted Locomotive of the Rockies.’ I’ve got a copy stashed in my trunk if you’d like to see it.”

“Are the illustrations very lurid? Then I might.”

She dug in her trunk, stowed under one of the benches, and found the book, which indeed had an astonishing engraving on the cover: a locomotive with flames streaming from its coupling rods and a cattle guard in front stretching open like a fang-filled mouth.

Marlowe regarded the picture skeptically. “Are you telling me you’ve planned the next stage of this expedition based entirely on a story in a penny dreadful?”

That wouldn’t have been the worst reason she’d offered for an expedition. “Not entirely. I also found some newspaper stories of accidents and strange goings-on, all involving this one stretch of rail out of this one town.” She presented a newsprint clipping tucked into the pages of the book.

Marlowe read aloud. “‘Three experienced engineers vanished into thin air after attempting to travel with the engine. Since then, no others have dared attempt the journey. The phantom train departs on schedule and returns on schedule . . . without any human guidance. The metal of the steel monster glows green in the dark.’ Ah, I see.”

She said, “I think someone made some improvised modification to an Aetherian engine and created something entirely new. Or perhaps someone has discovered some new artifact, some remains from an undiscovered Aetherian landing.”

“Or it could all be a sensationalist tale from a dime novel.”

“It could, but it’s worth a look. And the stationmaster in Alamosa is offering a bounty for anyone who can disable the engine and stop the train. Four men have already vanished in the attempt—presumed dead, devoured by the monster engine. This is in addition to the three missing engineers.”

“Good God, how can I turn down a challenge like that?”

She grinned. “I thought you’d say that.”

• • • •

They reached Alamosa in a few hours of moderate flying the next day—the winds in the mountains were unpredictable, and Marlowe stayed alert at the helm. By then, Harry had to admit that any romantic notions she’d harbored about the American West were terribly outdated. Like Colorado Springs, Alamosa was a respectable town, with wide main streets and brick and stone buildings, modern construction and plentiful telegraph poles. No stagecoaches in sight, no stampedes, no shootouts between marshals and bandits. Indians, identifiable from their shining black hair and brown skin, wore the same clothes as other citizens of the town: dungarees and button-up shirts. A Chinese-operated laundry had a glowing, Aetherian-powered water heater and steamer in its back alley. Marlowe might want to have a look at the improvisations that had been made to it. This was just a town, like any other. The haunted locomotive was probably also all legend.

For all its modernity, the town did not have an aerial mooring. “It’s the mountains, I imagine,” Marlowe explained. “The winds are so intractable, trains are simply a more reliable form of transportation.” He was clearly cross from fighting to keep the Kestrel level.

“Except when they’re taken over by Aetherian ghosts,” Harry said.

“Well, yes. What they really need out here are some German pilots to train them—all that practice flying over the Alps. Not that I’m going to suggest it.”

Marlowe found an open lot outside of town where he could lower the Kestrel by partially deflating its bladder. They would not set down, but they could use a rope ladder to descend and anchor the ship via stakes in the ground. Marlowe climbed down with a bundle of long metal stakes and a hammer, while Harry threw him lines to tether the gondola.

A crowd had gathered to watch. People kept a respectable distance, shading their eyes to stare up at the balloon and the Aetherian motor, which, even powered down, gave off a hum and a glow.

A man detached himself and stepped forward, hesitant—perhaps because of the large hammer Marlowe was swinging. Time for Harry to intervene.

She wore a long divided riding skirt, a blouse and vest, good boots and gloves. Her hair was pinned up under a brimmed hat. Not her preferred ensemble for real work, but she’d had a feeling she’d need to look respectable while talking to nervous officials. She wondered if this man wore a brass star under his suit coat, or if that was another outdated romantic notion.

“Hello, there!” she called to him, climbing down the ladder, satchel over her shoulder. “I do hope it’s acceptable that we moor here for a day or two. We’ll pay a fee—rent for the land, if you like. We’ve got to purchase some supplies, and have some other tasks as well. My name is Miss Mills.”

She stuck out her hand for shaking, giving him no chance to refuse. The man seemed just as startled by her as by Marlowe and the hammer, either because of her English accent, her forward manner, or both. But he’d brightened at the mention of money, as she’d hoped he would.

He was an older man with greying hair, but still fit of form. “Conrad Finch, ma’am. I’m the deputy mayor here. I gotta say, we don’t often see airships at all, much less such fine . . . foreign . . . ones as this. With the war on in Europe, I’d have thought a ship like this would be in the fighting.”

The man had a good eye—American ships tended to have open gondolas, unlike the solid closed gondola of the Kestrel, and Finch had probably never seen anything so modern as her very fine engine. She wondered how much he was really asking: Were they deserters? Had they stolen this ship from the Navy? Were they spies on some mission, or something else entirely? To a knowing eye, the Kestrel was certainly a military-grade vessel, for all that they’d disguised her with clumsy bags of ballast and unpolished brass fittings.

Harry entirely ignored the implied questions. “Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Finch. May I introduce James Marlowe, the pilot of the Kestrel?”

Marlowe let the hammer hang at his side as he finally came over to meet the locals. Watching the crowd, Harry saw him through their eyes: he looked exactly like an airship pilot should, with a leather jacket and scarf, tall boots, goggles pulled down around his neck, and a windburned glow to his stubbled face. As romantic as any heroic archetype the American West had produced. She sighed a little.

“I suppose you’re wondering why we’ve come out all this way,” Marlowe said.

“Well, I suppose so. Like I said, we don’t get airships out here too often. What with the mountains and all.” He gestured over his shoulder. From here, the mountains seemed a long way off. Alamosa was in a valley—the mountains were a barrier surrounding them.

“We’d like to have a look at that phantom locomotive of yours,” Marlowe said, smiling a perfectly agreeable, innocent smile.

Finch’s expression fell. If Harry had to name the distant look that had entered his gaze, she would have called it haunted. He spoke in the tone of someone announcing a death.

“You’ll want to talk to Cooper.”

• • • •

They determined ownership of the lot, negotiated and paid a reasonable fee, and even found a pair of trustworthy men to hire as guards. In fact, a handful of them argued for the honor, and Harry got a very good rate for their time.

Then it was off to see this train.

The train yard was bustling, with several different lines running through town and branching off. A chalkboard timetable hung in a waiting area, which was clean and inoffensive, if not terribly comfortable.

Outside, only two of the five locomotives parked or traversing the yard had been adapted to run on Aetherian engines, and the modifications were entirely standard, nothing usual or noteworthy about them. Nothing growling or monstrous, as on the lurid engraving.

Finch found the stationmaster in an office toward the back, where a large window overlooked the yard. The office door stood open, and the trio of them, trailed by a few onlookers and other officials who’d not stayed behind to gawk at the Kestrel, trooped up to the threshold. The deputy mayor knocked on the doorframe.

“Cooper? These folks are here to try for the ghost,” he said curtly, a sour look on his face.

A heavyset and overworked-looking man looked up from the cluttered desk where he sat, and with a sigh he stood and put on his suit jacket, which had been hanging over the back of his chair. His gaze fell on Harry, and an eyebrow raised in curiosity. Finch made introductions. The stationmaster was simply Mr. Cooper, and as expected, he directed his statements at Marlowe. His expression was grim, his frown pulling down his sideburns. “Son, a dozen men before you have come here thinking they can tame that monster, and every one of ’em is dead. What makes you any different?”

“I’m British,” Marlowe said, a wicked twinkle in his eye, giving Harry a sideways glance. “And I have the able assistance of Miss Mills.”

Cooper looked them up and down, and seemed on the verge of countering the challenge. He only shook his head. “Ma’am, with all due respect, you do not want to get involved with this thing.”

“Oh, I think I do,” she said calmly, not inviting argument.

Marlowe said, “I was hoping you could give us some more information beyond what’s in the newspapers and penny dreadfuls.”

Both Cooper and Finch shook their heads at that. “Damn that reporter—pardon me, ma’am—who came through. That book is going to be the only thing anyone remembers about Alamosa.”

“When did the trouble start?”

Cooper sat heavily, and the others took up comfortable positions leaning on walls, arms crossed or hands in trouser pockets.

“Six months ago. Before that everything was fine, just fine. This train—it makes a run over the pass to Gunnison and back. It’s a local line, once a day, shouldn’t be trouble. But one day the regular engine broke down, and we had one of the bug-rigged ones hanging around—”

“Bug-rigged?” Harry asked.

“Aetherian-adapted, I think,” Marlowe said.

She had never heard the term before. It was amusing, appalling, and appropriate, all at once. God bless the Americans and their ornamental figures of speech. “Go on,” she said.

“We hitched it on up to the regular train, mostly freight and a couple of Pullman cars. Five hours later, I get a telegram from the Gunnison station wanting to know where the train is. Couple hours after that is when the train rolls back here. A dozen passengers stormed off, the driver was white as a ghost, but no one could say what happened. The thing got up into the mountains, into one of the tunnels, everything went dark, there was a bunch of noise, and when it came back out of the tunnel, it was . . . different. It’s got, well, some kind of stuff on it.” That haunted look again.

“I sent the train back on schedule the next day with another driver and a couple of guards. The train came back on schedule that afternoon. They didn’t. No sign of trouble, it’s like they just hopped off the train and sent it rolling back here. We haven’t gotten anything through that line in six months. We’re having to reroute through Durango.”

“And the company’s done nothing to investigate?” Marlowe asked.

“Sure they have. Sent people up on horseback, checked the tracks, checked the tunnel. Watched the train—it stops in the tunnel and turns right back around, all by itself. Whenever we put a driver on it—the driver don’t leave the tunnel. Can’t get anyone to try again. So now we’ve got the bounty. You figure out what’s happening up there, the railroad’ll pay ten thousand dollars. But I’m not putting any bets on you.”

Finch said, “Man with an airship like yours don’t need ten grand, I expect.”

“It’s true. We’re not here for the reward,” Marlowe said. “We’re here for the adventure.”

“Then you’re even crazier than I thought,” Finch huffed. “Both of you.”

Cooper pointed at Harry. “You’re not getting the lady involved, are you? You’re not taking her up the mountain?”

“Why wouldn’t I go?” Harry said.

The stationmaster flustered. “Well. It’s just. I—it’s dangerous, ma’am. We’ve got a fine hotel here in town if you want to wait for your . . .” The word husband was on the tip of his tongue, until he evidently remembered their different last names. He didn’t know what she was.

“I make my own choices, Mr. Cooper,” she said.

“Train pulls in every day at noon. You want to take a shot, I won’t stop you. It’s never late. Wish all my trains kept their schedules like that.”

“We won’t be held responsible for anything that happens to you,” Finch said. “’Round here, we’re used to folks heading into the mountains to prospect or whatnot, and never coming back. You won’t get special notice.”

Harry hid a smile, because they didn’t know she was a princess of England, and if she vanished, someone would certainly give her special notice. “We understand. Thank you.”

• • • •

Marlowe had that enviable Naval ability to claim sleep in the space of minutes, in any position, in any environment. He stretched out on the padded bench in the Kestrel’s main cabin, and that was that. Harry tried to do the same in the pilot’s chair, and failed. Their plan was in place—as much of a plan as they could make until they got their first look at the locomotive. Then they would board a machine that had evidently killed a number of men and made their bodies vanish.

She tried to imagine what they might see in that moment, but failed to conjure a picture.

“Harry,” the lieutenant mumbled. “Try to sleep.”

“Yes, I know,” she sighed.

“There’s nothing we can do until morning. You need to rest.”

“Yes.”

“There’s a flask in the pouch behind the pilot’s chair.”

“I know where the flask is, Marlowe.” A swallow of whiskey would, in theory, put her a step or three closer to sleep.

“Well then. You know your mind.” A moment later, he was snoring softly.

Digging in the pouch hanging over the back of the chair, she found the metal flask and took the swallow. The drink warmed her, but it was still another hour before she got any sleep at all.

• • • •

Harry wore trousers the next day, propriety be damned. Today, she had to be ready to move. Her boots were scuffed, her gloves worn, her jacket weather-stained. Anyone could see this was not her first time out in the world.

On the ground under the Kestrel, she secured her pistol in its holster at her hip. It was an Aetherian pistol, the kind Britain didn’t export. It would be as rare a sight here as the Kestrel, but with luck no one would notice she had it. After she pulled her pack and coils of rope over her shoulder, she looked up at the ship and said a silent farewell.

“We’ll solve this,” Marlowe said, coming up by her shoulder with his own gear, instruments and tools slung in pouches on a bandolier and belt. “We’ll be back at noon tomorrow.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know.”

On the way out, Marlowe talked to their impromptu guards. “Do resist laying claim to her until you’re sure we’ve failed to return on the noon train tomorrow, yes?”

The two men stammered and scuffed their toes, but they agreed to keep watch at least until then.

Cooper was waiting for them on the platform outside the station, pocket watch in hand. So was Finch, along with a crowd of townsfolk come to see them off. Gawkers. Harry might have wished for less publicity. They had five minutes until the phantom locomotive arrived.

“I feel like we’re heading out to harpoon a whale,” she murmured.

“Surely this won’t be anything so dramatic. We take a look at the thing, board it if necessary, see where it takes us while examining and disabling the machinery. The men who’ve tried this before had little experience with Aetherian machinery. It’s been waiting for us to come and speak to it in its own language.”

“I do hope that was a metaphor.”

“Here it comes,” Cooper said, looking out along the tracks to the north. “Right on time.”

No shrill, distant whistle announced the engine’s approach. Only the clank of wheels against rail and the low, throbbing hum of an Aetherian drive emitting a great deal of power. The townsfolk who were present backed up, pressed themselves to the wall of the station as the beast slowed and came to a stop at the platform. It moved in reverse on this leg of the journey, pushing its coal car ahead of it. As Cooper had explained, the rest of the cars had been uncoupled, so only the engine and former coal car remained, a monstrous beast plying the tracks with a will of its own.

It didn’t look like a steam locomotive fitted with an Aetherian drive, or even one designed with Aetherian technology from the first. This was something else entirely, and wholly unlike any machine Harry had seen. In an adapted locomotive, the Aetherian generator was typically built into the furnace, with tubes and pistons connecting the generator to the side rods along the engine’s wheels. But while this engine might once have been a retrofitted steam locomotive, it had changed: Where the tubes and pistons connected the side rods along the wheels to the Aetherian generator, typically built into the firebox in such an arrangement, additional cabling looping around the broiler and into the cabin, growing almost organically in the manner of vines, obscuring the windows, stretching over the roof and reaching back. Wires tangled around each other over the coupler, swarming to the empty coal car, where the tips of the tendrils lay reaching out along the metal, waiting to extend further. All of it glowed a pale green, the familiar sickly, pulsing light that seemed to accompany all things Aetherian.

“Bug-rigged, indeed,” Harry said.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Marlowe breathed.

That gave Harry pause. She’d never heard Marlowe hesitate over anything, particularly where research was concerned. She had seen many of the same extreme Aetherian experiments he had. But this—was something else. “Marlowe, if you aren’t sure—”

“No. Let’s go. We’ll alight on the coal car.” The back half of the car remained free of Aetherian growths; the steel box seemed safe enough. Marlowe was still looking at the engine—something had caught his attention.

Stationmaster Cooper said, “You folks only have a minute to get on. If you’re sure you want to do this.”

“Thank you,” Harry said. “We’ll see you tomorrow then, yes?” Cooper just shook his head.

Harry and Marlowe kept hold of their ropes and wrenches, wire cutters and all the rest, and hopped on to the ledge at the end of the coal car just as the engine hummed to a higher pitch, reversed direction, and clacked back along the tracks, away from the station and toward the mountains.

• • • •

She had the feeling they had grabbed the tiger by the tail.

They settled on the narrow platform at the back of the coal car, keeping hold of a railing there, while the engine slipped through the yard and out of town. It ran smoothly, its hum almost out of hearing; all she heard was the rhythmic clanking of wheel on track. But the machinery before her was like the gaping maw of some fantastical creature.

Tubing and glowing wires looped out from the cab across the coupling to the coal car—the tender. The ends trailed off, fused to the steel sides. The tender itself was empty—unnecessary, once the engine had been converted. Inside, the cab was filled with twisted mechanisms that seem to have grown rather than been built. The controls and levers had been obscured, only visible if you knew where to look. The door to the furnace was open, and the green of the Aetherian generator inside pulsed. Nothing came out of the chimney but an occasional green spark. As Cooper and Finch had said, there was no sign of a driver, an engineer, or anyone else. The thing was entirely autonomous.

Marlowe used his spyglass to study components of the engine. “I think—I believe much of the mechanism has grown from the original alterations. It’s not unheard of; some wiring from the Surrey crash seemed to have plant-like properties. Some samples kept sealed in a box were discovered years later to have grown. Nothing like this.” He leaned out, keeping one hand on the railing, for a better look at the outside. “There—that’s the standard retrofit. Everything else was added, and not by any known principles of Aetherian mechanics.”

“So we’re dealing with unknown principles. Is there some mad scientist in the hills making alterations, then sending the thing back? Murdering those who try to stop him?”

“An American mad scientist would be trying to patent the thing, I expect,” he said.

“Then what if someone found a cache of Aetherian artifacts of unknown properties, introduced them to this engine, and got far more than they expected?”

He nodded. “If some prospector found a previously unknown Aetherian crash site in these mountains—well, anything could happen.”

They were outside the town now, and the locomotive seemed to accelerate. They still had time to jump without being seriously injured. Soon they would reach the hills and mountains beyond. The sky overhead was searing blue. With no choking coal smoke pouring from the engine, she could smell fresh, chill air from the mountains.

Marlowe continued. “I expect what we’ll find is some camp in the mountains. Someone’s altered the engine with some new artifact they found, but they can’t shut it down, and so it keeps running this route via some kind of automatic instructions built into this new wiring. When someone rides the train up, they’re taken prisoner, and there you have your haunted locomotive.”

“So what will we do when we get there, reason with them?”

“That’s your job,” he said archly. “For my part, I think I can disable the engine, just as soon as I find the nonstandard component. Remove it, see what makes it tick, get the thing back under control. I imagine our amateur engineer will be grateful.”

They studied the weird mechanics grown in and around the cab, searching for that nonstandard component, that thing that didn’t look familiar or right. Really, the entire locomotive was unfamiliar and wrong, so trying to find just one aberration was difficult. In fact, the more she looked, the more wrong it looked. Not just unsettling—no matter how much she and her world depended on Aetherian machinery, she’d always felt some discomfort around the more extreme examples—but deeply wrong.

Finally, Marlowe said, “I think . . . ah yes, that’s new. There’s a touch of red in the firebox. I thought it was overheated metal, but I think it’s an independent source of radiation.”

“Marlowe, let me see that a moment.” She held her hand out, and he gave her the spyglass.

Stretching up, anchoring against the railing at the back of the tender, she looked through it, not at the mechanical parts of the engine, the glowing of the firebox—she saw the spot of red Marlowe mentioned, like a candle in a fogbank—and adjustments made to the valves and rods. She focused on the shadows inside the cab, on vague details hidden there.

A bit of red fabric, like from a kerchief worn about the neck, fluttered in a corner. A few feet beyond it, a tuft of brown hair sprouted from a pressure gauge. Near the roof was a hand, colored green as if grown over with moss, pierced through with glowing Aetherian wires.

Harry lowered the spyglass and settled on the platform. “Marlowe, I think we’ve got to get off this thing.”

“Do you know how fast we’re going?”

She spared a glance; the valley’s grassy meadow slipped by in a blur. Trees of the forest ahead were now visible. They could no longer leave the train without being smashed on the ground.

She said, “Look in the cab, at the roof above the gauges.”

He took the spyglass, and she pointed out the details she’d found, the odd human scraps among the alien whole.

“We’ve got to slow down at some point,” he said.

“Yes, and we’ve got to stop the thing,” she answered. “Before it kills us.”

What had started as a treasure hunt, a search for new and unknown Aetherian artifacts to advance British supremacy, had become a bit more serious.

“We’re already ahead of the game,” he said. “The others—the unfortunate drivers, the bounty hunters who boarded later—all entered by the cabin. They thought to control the train from there. It would have been intuitive. We’ve come at it roundabout. That gives us a little time, yes?”

Marlowe moved inside the coal car, braced up against the wall to shelter from the wind now whipping past the speeding train. Searching through the pouches slung over his shoulder, he gathered bits and pieces, wires and clamps. He obviously had a plan.

The air was growing cold. The train had entered a wooded stretch, and the mountains now rose up around them. Still, they were accelerating. How the train could navigate the mountain tracks at this speed, she didn’t know.

He put a pair of needle-nosed pliers in his mouth while he fished for another piece out of a pouch. He was building something, right there amidst the rocking and shaking of the train. It had a lot of spiky bits and some kind of filament in the center that looked flammable.

“What exactly is it you’re making?”

“A bypass . . . I think. To bleed off some of that power it’s using.”

They were roaring through the forest, moving faster than metal wheels on a metal track ought to be able to move. The trees passed by in a blur.

“Done,” Marlowe said, shoving tools back into pouches and pulling himself to his feet. He held an object about the size of an apple, vaguely spider-shaped, with wires sticking out as legs, barbs at the tips looking like weapons. The body of it was a collection of loops and circuits and diodes. A filament glowed green with incipient power. “A bit of a prayer may be in order.”

He then threw the device before Harry had time to make that prayer.

It sailed straight and true into the cab and stuck on one of the growths, a bottle-thick metallic coil pressing out against the walls. The barbed feet dug in, a crackle of energy burst from the device, sending green sparks throughout the cab. The invading growths seemed to flinch.

In just a second, the hum of the engines, as well as the sickly glow, increased.

“Marlowe,” she murmured, drawing her pistol from its holster. He looked up at what had caught her attention.

The organic mound of machinery that had sprawled from the cab into the coal car had begun to move. Not quickly, not purposefully. It was more that it throbbed, as if some burrowing thing was making its way underneath the coiled and twisted surface. At the edges of the mound, wires emerged, sprouting out from the steel, stretching toward the newcomers, the invaders.

Aiming her pistol low, she fired across the front of the mound, the beam of energy frying the tendrils before they could progress further. The coiled mound shuddered, drew back. The humming of the engine took on a low, rough undertone, almost a growl. The light in the firebox flared red.

“I don’t think your trinket bypassed much of anything,” she muttered.

“Well, I tried,” he said, put out.

She lurched, falling against the side of the car. They hadn’t hit anything; the train was on a straightaway—no sharp turns ahead or behind. But the metal underneath her feet was moving.

The sides of the coal car bowed outward. The roof of the cab had swelled, and the cab’s windows warped into gaping circles. The very steel of the original train was expanding. Not melting, because there was no heat, but somehow the structure of the metal was changing as the Aetherian coils mounded inside the cab grew, puffed up, and expanded outward. In the cab, pieces of bodies bloated outward, and they looked as if they had been eaten, skin flayed, bone pocked with holes, blood entirely drained. The monster might have been sucking them for more power, using them to become ever larger. The bounty hunters who’d come to tame the beast had only helped it grow.

Meanwhile, Harry fired again at the snaking tendrils creeping toward them. Again, the locomotive growled in displeasure.

Marlowe’s device continued sparking bolts of green energy—diverting the locomotive’s power, as he’d explained. The engine coughed, and Harry felt a surge of hope that whatever was driving the train would be disabled. She watched Marlowe for his reaction—his gaze was grim, watchful. He did not seem optimistic.

The entire train, engine and coal car, bucked, and Harry was sure they’d jumped the tracks and were about to crash—which in her estimation would be a good thing, given the alternative. But no, the vehicle had literally shivered, like a horse dislodging a fly. Marlowe’s spider came loose from its anchor, slipped off the train, in between the two cars and onto the tracks where it was surely smashed to pieces. The strange red glow from the firebox pulsed.

“What now?” Harry breathed.

“I don’t know.”

That was worrying.

The crawling tendrils were increasing in size—and speed. She fired at the front line again and again—then shouted at a pressure on her wrist, her off hand, which was gripping the railing at the end of the car. A tube made of some rubberized, flesh-like stuff coiled around her wrist. She fell back, yanking away, but the tube only squeezed more tightly. Bringing her pistol around, she aimed some distance away along the undulating thing and fired. The tube flinched—squeezing yet tighter—and a stray charge from the ray blast traveled up the tube and tingled through her arm. Shivering at the shock, she blinked, shook her head, and tried to figure out what to do about this. Her hand was numb, immobile.

She slammed the butt of her pistol against a coil of tube lying against steel. No effect.

Behind her, Marlowe grabbed hold of her. She leaned into him as far as she could, giving him room to reach around with a very sharp-looking tool, like forceps with probes on the end. He stabbed this into the tube a few inches from where it held her, and the probes let off arcs of green energy. The tube went limp, and Harry quickly scraped it off her hand. The whole length fell to drag behind them on the ground.

“Are you all right?”

She had to open and close her hands a few times to get feeling back. “Yes.”

Ahead of the speeding train, a towering rock face loomed. “Marlowe, look!”

This was the tunnel Cooper had mentioned, a place where blasting through the solid granite of the Rockies had been deemed easier than going around. As they watched, leaning out from the car, the stone unfolded.

The tunnel would have looked normal to the riders who’d come to investigate. They’d have seen nothing wrong with the tracks, with the gaping mouth of the hole blown out of the mountainside or the rough granite within. But at the train’s approach, the stone changed, expanded, throwing out tendrils and wires, turning the stone into an alien maw. A match for the modified mechanics of the locomotive, the tunnel seemed designed to swallow the train.

“We can’t let the train enter that tunnel,” Harry said.

“There—that red light that keeps flashing from the firebox,” Marlowe said. “That’s what we want.”

The light seemed to come from a specific point, a globe emitting the glare like a light bulb. It flashed every time they did something to the engine—every time they made it angry.

“Do you have any idea how to accomplish this?”

He shrugged. “I’m not sure. But I would like to keep it intact if we can.”

To study it, of course. Exactly their mission. “And how do we do that?”

“We must get inside, of course.”

She pursed her lips and considered. “Well. How about I create a distraction?” She looked around, found her footing. Hauling herself up, she braced one boot against a railing and the other against the top edge of the coal car, one of the few spaces not yet overrun with the writhing mechanism. But the tendrils were coming closer, climbing up the sides, stretching out with their eyeless certainty.

Her balance on this perch was imperfect. In moments, she’d either be grabbed by the alien machine, or would be knocked off when the train came into contact with its partner at the tunnel.

She aimed her pistol over the locomotive, around its chimney, to the undulating walls of the tunnel reaching out to her. Firing, she kept her finger on the trigger and swept a steady beam across the machinery. The massed coils shuddered, flinched—and continued reaching out.

She spared a glance—Marlowe had taken to using brute force: a crowbar he’d stashed in his bag. He pried tubing out of his way, whacked at a bundle of wires writhing toward him, stabbed at an undifferentiated mass of machinery that had grown up over the coupling.

Meanwhile, the train slowed. Coils of bronzed wires reached up from the rounded sides of the engine to join with the coils reaching down from the tunnel, and the two sets twisted together, pulling the locomotive to a gentle stop, like an airship coming to rest against its mooring platform. A mollusk folding into its shell. In this new incarnation, the locomotive was home.

At the edge of the tunnel, the wire tendrils radiated from a central point, much as the locomotive’s adaptations grew from the firebox. That—that spot was key, and needed to be disabled as much as the light in the firebox did. She glanced at Marlowe’s progress; he was spending so much time battling the crawling mechanism, he had no chance to go after his target.

They had to do something drastic soon, or they would be overwhelmed, swallowed up by that alien mouth, just as those who had come before them had been.

“Marlowe—I’m going to try to give you an opening. Be ready!” Arms out for balance, she made her way along the edge of the coal car, from the untainted steel to the part of the train that had been overwhelmed with the Aetherian intrusion. Approaching the roof of the cab, she reached up and let a draping tentacle grab hold of her. Coiling around her left arm, writhing like a snake, it pulled her off her feet, raised her into the air.

“Harry!” Marlowe called.

“Go, just go!” she called back. He scrambled over the mound of gross mechanics and into the locomotive’s cab. Once he was under the roof, she could no longer see him. She turned her attention forward.

She kept her other arm, the one holding the pistol, low and out from her body where she hoped it would not be bound up in the coils. The thing had hold of her body now, squeezing her legs and torso with a constant pressure. It wasn’t painful—as if it knew she was a living thing and had no wish to harm her. And yet it was drawing her inexorably upward, into its central maw.

That was her target.

This was a matter of timing: She had to maintain her range of motion and some semblance of calm when she reached that central point. But the number of tentacles locked on to her was increasing. Indeed, more seemed to come into being before her eyes. Soon, the thing would envelop her completely. She lunged.

Using her very bonds as leverage, she thrust forward her right hand, stabbed her pistol as far into thing’s root as she could—the distance was considerable, more than she was expecting, because there was no central mass. The thing resembled a ball of yarn, threads coiled endlessly upon one another. The mass of threads pressed against her, seeking to immobilize her.

While she still could, she fired the pistol in the beast’s heart.

There was an explosion, and she fell.

The tentacles all loosened at once, releasing her at the precise moment she was high in the air with nothing below to break her fall.

The pistol was gone, destroyed. Hands free now, she grabbed one of the flailing tubes. It held, and she swung, smacked against the granite mouth of the tunnel—but it was just a tunnel now, with strange metallic vines hanging over the entrance. No longer a mouth. Her right arm ached—the blast from the gun and subsequent explosion had shredded her glove and the sleeve of her jacket. The fabric had only partially protected the skin underneath, which was pocked with cuts and bleeding.

Below, the train had stopped. She still couldn’t see Marlowe in the cab. Hanging from her length of metal, she waited, watched for movement. Didn’t see any.

“Marlowe!” she called. No answer. “Marlowe! James!”

“Yes?” He emerged, straddling the coupling between cars, looking up at her. He had the crowbar and pliers in one hand, and something odd and alien in the other.

She slumped, relieved, and lowered herself down the vine until she was resting on the roof of the cab. Here, too, the Aetherian appendages seem to have died in place. She pushed them away, and they dropped to the ground. “This is entirely bizarre,” she said.

“Yes. What do you think of this?” He handed her the thing he was holding, the component from the firebox.

It was hexagonal in shape, the size of her two hands together, and heavy. An intricate network of tiny wires ran across it in a mind-breaking geometric pattern. Given time, she might make sense of it, but at the moment it seemed a blur. She had trouble focusing on it.

A reddish glow suffused the device, and several prongs around the outside of it were probably connectors. It was meant to be attached to something else. Somehow, it had made its way into the firebox and found a home there.

“Just a moment,” she said, looking back up at the cavity where she’d discharged her pistol.

She grabbed back hold of the tentacle she had climbed down on. It slipped, dropping—starting to come loose. Her arm was bleeding more profusely, the lacerations unhappy with her exertions, but she ignored the discomfort. Carefully so as not to dislodge the vine further, she climbed, bracing her boots against segments of material that had grown together.

Back at the edge of the tunnel’s mouth, she could examine the tentacles here further. She drew her knife out of its belt sheath. She couldn’t cut through the metallic tendrils and coils, but she could pry apart the segments, and the metallic appendages dropped away, giving her better access to the hollow place in the rock from which the tendrils emerged. Almost a cave, tucked away where no one could see it.

She traded the knife for a hand lantern from her belt pouch and examined the interior. The surface was scorched, stripped and burned by the pistol blast. But yes, there was a space, and inside were the scattered and melted remains of her pistol, and of a device much like the one Marlowe had shown her. She collected the pieces, tucking them into her pouch. They were still warm.

She dropped back onto the roof of the cab, then across the coupling and into the coal car, where Marlowe was clearing away tentacles and segmented tubes. The locomotive was appearing more like its old self, and less Aetherian monster, by the moment.

“I think there must have been a cave or some pocket in the mountain side,” she said. “It might have been covered by debris until the rail company came along and blasted the tunnel. An Aetherian craft or being might have stashed away some artifact, by chance or intent. Maybe they meant to retrieve it later. When it was exposed, it was activated somehow.”

“Harry, you’re hurt,” he said.

She glanced at her arm. “Yes, but I think it just needs a bit of washing off—”

“No. Here, sit.” He took her arm and guided her down to sit at the edge of the car. He touched her forehead; his glove came away bloody. She realized that throbbing wasn’t nerves or the noise of the explosion rattling in her brain. She’d been cut by a bit of shrapnel.

“How bad is it?” Now that she noticed it, blood seemed to be running down her face. She didn’t have time for this.

His expression furrowed as he leaned in to look, producing a handkerchief to dab at the mess. “You may need a stitch or two.”

“My grandmother will never forgive me if I’ve ruined my face,” she muttered.

He chuckled. “Not possible, Your Highness. Here, hold that.” He gave her the handkerchief to press over the wound.

His touch lingered, resting on her chin a moment as he turned her face and seemed to study her eyes very intently. He was quite close, and her heart raced a bit. She would not lean in, not even a millimeter.

“Your pupils are the same size,” he said. “Can you follow my finger?” He held up a hand and tracked it up, down, left, right. Obediently, her gaze followed the movement. “I don’t think you’re concussed, so that’s good.”

“Yes, very good,” she murmured. Her chin felt cold when he finally let her go.

“Your hypothesis seems reasonable,” he said. “Given what I think this might be.”

He set the device from the firebox in the open. She produced the pieces she had retrieved, laying them alongside. Difficult, trying to make out what the thing had been. Whatever energy or glow it had had was gone now, but the same complicated pattern of minute wiring was visible on some of them. They were a matched set. The intact device pulsed a little when the pieces came along side it.

“I think,” Marlowe said, “that these are a set of devices to create automation in machines. Self-directed automation.”

“It’s . . . a mechanical brain?”

“If you like.”

“Then you’re saying it was alive.”

He paused, furrowed his brow. “I don’t know that I would go that far. The thing needed a machine to control. The locomotive came along. You remember what Cooper said, they’d switched a steam engine for an adapted one—bug-rigged. Like called to like. The artifact might also have had some component to defend itself. Hence our poor victims down there.”

Defense—a weapon that could defend itself? Oh, this was dangerous indeed.

“But it had a will?” she asked. “Was it intelligent or merely carrying out some . . . artificial instinct? Like the German’s mechanized troops?” Comforting, to think this was simply another version of the same kind of controls that operated the fearsome mechanical beasts that the Germans sent into battle. But this . . . this had been something more. The alien-controlled locomotive had seemed to have intent. No one had set the train on its path. No one human.

He tucked the device in a pouch and gathered up the pieces Harry had found—placing them in an entirely different pouch. “You wanted to make this expedition to learn more about Aetherian technology, to discover Aetherian mechanisms no one has seen before. I think we’ve succeeded here.”

“But what are we going to do with it?”

“For now—lock it away and carry on.”

• • • •

They spent the rest of the afternoon clearing the train of its extraneous additions, stashing tentacles and coils of wire—and human remains—in the coal car. Marlowe was able to bring the original Aetherian-adapted engine back to functioning order. The thing hummed normally, and its green glow was exactly the shade it should have been. They spent the night camped by the tracks and didn’t sleep very well. In the morning, they set off back to town. Without its brain, the locomotive was simply another Aetherian-adapted train, clacking mundanely as it ran back toward Alamosa.

They arrived back at the station at eight in the morning, four hours ahead of schedule. Mr. Cooper was waiting on the platform, all astonishment.

“We’ll be collecting your bounty, I think,” Marlowe said, cheerfully hopping onto the platform after shutting down the engine and letting the locomotive roll to a stop. Harry followed more slowly, aware of her bandaged head and arm and the stares she was attracting.

“What? How?” Someone had sent for Finch and several other town officials as well. They lined up like a jury, staring.

“Very carefully,” Harry said. “And you’ll need to call an undertaker.”

• • • •

They got the bounty, which seemed ridiculously anti-climactic to Harry, since they hadn’t done any of this for money, and what she had seen was so much larger than mere money. But they had to maintain their cover story. Harry put her foot down and insisted they use part of the bounty to take rooms in the local hotel. They ate a very nice hot meal, drank the establishment’s best bottle of wine—a mediocre burgundy—and had very hot baths. The next morning found them back at the Kestrel. They spent an hour or so packing before unmooring her lines. Harry was uneasy.

“Was it alive? Not just alive—but had the Aetherian pilots somehow left a piece of mechanical intelligence behind? A piece of themselves?” She couldn’t stop asking the question. Her bandages itched, and resisting scratching them was making her cross.

Marlowe sighed. “Yes, it probably was alive, at some level. It grew, it had self-motivation. But I’m not sure it was any more intelligent than an earthworm. It was a machine, Harry. Whatever else it could do, it was mechanical.”

“I can’t help feeling that we have broken something that can never be repaired.”

“It was trying to kill us, don’t forgot.”

“Yes. But I wish . . . Well. If it had been truly intelligent, we could have found a way to talk to it, yes? I would have liked to talk to it.”

They finished stowing gear in the chests and cupboards on the Kestrel. The pieces recovered from the phantom engine got their own locked chest—far away from the Kestrel’s engine. After checking the engines and gauges, examining the bladders for tears, repairing the one or two they found, they filled the bags with gas and pulled up stakes and lines. Marlowe climbed the ladder as the ship rose. A crowd of locals looked on with gaping curiosity. Some of the children waved, and Harry didn’t wave back. The engine pulsed and whined, sent a fresh surge of gas into the bladder overhead, and the ship rose, up and up until the buildings below looked like toys made out of balsa.

“Where do we go from here?” she asked.

“West,” Marlowe said, looking in the direction to where the sun would set in another six hours. “Always west.”

© 2014 by Carrie Vaughn.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.

FANTASY

HELP ME FOLLOW MY SISTER INTO THE LAND OF THE DEAD

Carmen Maria Machado

Help Me Follow My Sister into the Land of the Dead

by Ursula Ruiz

19

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$1,395

Pledged of $5,229

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days to go

Back This Project

$1 minimum pledge

The project will only be funded if at least $5,229 is pledged by July 24, 2015 3:41am EDT.

Aid & abet a heartwarming sibling reunion—albeit under grievous circumstances—in a terrifying place where no mortal has any business treading.

Home

This is the thing about my sister and I: we’ve never gotten along, even when we’ve gotten along. This is what happens when you have parents who fetishize family, and the viscosity of their blood relative to water: you resent the force with which they push you together with this person who is, genetics aside, a stranger. And that’s what my sister is: a stranger.

Not to mention a strange girl. Even when we were children, she had a weird fixation on contradicting everything I said, just because. She would pick a phrase to scream at the top of her lungs and do so over and over, like a computer glitch, until I ran out of the room. Whatever. It’s not important now. But she’s always been trouble. Our moments of connection have always been purely artificial, forged by necessity, by parental birthdays and holiday travel plans.

When I tell you that my sister has absconded to the land of the dead, do not mistake me. She hasn’t died. She just did what she always does—i.e., go to a place where she isn’t welcome and crash the party just because she feels like it. She heard that there was some “cool stuff” happening on the other side of the veil, and went. I only know where she is because I managed to sober up her blitzed-out roommate vis-à-vis a cold bucket of water to the face just long enough to get access to their wi-fi. I found her search history, her bus ticket to Bethlehem (the nearest portal), her emails to her friends about how it’s going to be “so amazing,” etc.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I also searched her email for my name, but aside from an occasional ping regarding the aforementioned birthdays and travel, there was nothing.)

I am sorry and embarrassed that I have to even ask you for money for this endeavor. The truth is while I’m doing pretty well, all things considered, I don’t have the liquidity necessary for this journey. Olive will be embarrassed that I put all of this online, but maybe a dose of shame will do her some goddamned good.

If you sense a tone of resentment to this entire project, that’s because I have to go chasing after my wretchedly ungrateful wastrel of sibling into another dimension to tell her that our parents are dead.

Stretch Goals

Anything over $5,229 is welcome and will be donated to a TBD mental health charity.

How Will I Spend The Money?

Here’s how the costs will break down:

$36.95: Bus ticket to Bethlehem.

$176.05: Cost of ingredients (salt, sage, cypress branch, matches, mandrake, yew, chalk) to summon the necessary portal.

$16: The cheapest bottle of whiskey that I can force myself to drink.

$5,000: A one-time fee, for crossing.

Risks and Challenges

The land of the dead is the land of the dead. Sometimes people don’t come back.

• • • •

FAQ

Do you remember when Olive was born?

I remember the time my mother had Braxton-Hicks contractions—the fake kind—and I went to the hospital with her and my father, and the doctor informed her that she wasn’t really in labor. As we left the hospital, I went into hysterics, because I’d been promised a baby sister and one had not been delivered to me. We walked past a woman who was holding her own baby, and I lunged toward her howling “THAT one! I want THAT one!” My parents had to carry me out as I screamed. But of Olive’s actual birth, I remember nothing.

How did your parents die?

You know how there was that SUV recall recently, because the brakes in some of their cars were failing for no reason, causing a series of high-profile, deadly accidents? I wish that was how they died. No, my father shot my mother through her left eye, and then turned the gun on himself. Nobody knows why.

Who found their bodies?

I came over for dinner. Olive had been invited, too, but she backed out at the last minute. She said she had “stuff to do.” Which honestly is better than her arriving two hours late with a weird dude in tow. Anyway, thank God she wasn’t there.

When was the last time you spoke to Olive?

I don’t remember.

When was the first time you spoke to Olive?

I don’t remember.

What is your biggest regret?

In order from greatest to least: being born, having a little sister, not being adopted, caring at all.

What is your biggest fear?

Genetics.

• • • •

Pledge $5 or more

backer 9 backers

A thank you email from Olive, which I will make her deliver.

Pledge $20 or more

backer 52 backers

A small gift from the land of the dead—a pebble or a twig or a finger something—which I will deliver in a small, sealed jar. KEEP IT IN THE JAR.

Pledge $50 or more

backer 1 backer

I will send you salt from my personal tears, in crystal form (hand-evaporated). Grinder optional.

Pledge $100 or more

backer 1 backer

I will drive my sister to your house, where you can ask her any question. Limited to the contiguous United States.

Pledge $500 or more

backer 0 backers

You will receive an exclusive copy of my and Olive’s life story, written with my own hands, and complete with happy, narratively satisfying ending, detailing the success of our journey.

• • • •

Update #1 • Jun 26, 2014

Starting Out

I know I haven’t hit my funding goal yet, but I’m just going to put it on a credit card and pray. I’m on a bus to Bethlehem, which has a pretty decent wi-fi connection but, weirdly, no toilets. At least three drug deals have happened in the seat next to me, and in between deals the guy is singing this one part of a song out loud that I recognize from somewhere. I think it might be Paula Cole?

Update #2 • Jun 26, 2014

Still Here

Oh, yeah, it’s definitely Paula Cole. It’s that weird chant-y part of “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?” Just that part. Over and over. This is why I don’t do drugs.

I’m assuming Olive has no idea I’m coming because there’s no reception in the land of the dead, but I have been texting her every hour on the hour anyway, just to cover my bases. I haven’t told her why I’m coming, because I can’t tell her that our parents are dead via text message. I mean, I could, but despite what she thinks about me I’m not a monster. I just keep writing “Need to talk to you, v. important.” But Olive has no sense of what’s important and what isn’t. Even if she got the messages, she’s probably all “Oh man, Ursula’s just having one of those days,” which is something I overheard her telling our mother once, just because I was upset that she didn’t want to be my maid of honor. Not that it mattered in the end, with the wedding being called off, but it was upsetting nonetheless.

I’m so fucking tired.

Update #3 • Jun 27, 2014

Past Midnight

I wake up and the bus is parked at the depot. I’ve probably been here for hours. I was dreaming about Olive. While I was sleeping my face was pressed against the window, and my mouth was open.

I walk two miles to the elementary school playground. I get a blister and do the last half-mile limping and barefoot. Then I have to pee, and since I don’t know what the restroom situation is in the land of the dead, I squat in some bushes and pee. As I do so, I wonder if my sister is also peeing in a semi-public place. (If the land of the dead can be considered public at all, I guess.)

There is another woman standing here, burning her sage and drawing sigils on the pavement. She doesn’t look like she’s chasing a wayward family member; she looks like she’s ready to party. She has a lot of eyeliner on. I feel angry at her, like she’s Olive. She says something and the portal slides open, like the door of a minivan but wreathed in smoke. I look away—it feels rude to stare.

Then she is gone, and it’s dark once again. I draw the sigil and arrange the ingredients according to my notes. I say the spell, the unfamiliar syllables catching behind my teeth.

When my portal opens, a faceless creature is standing there. It’s tall and roughly shaped, like a duststorm or a swarm of gnats. Dimples where its eyes should be, though I feel like it’s watching me anyway. It takes my credit card, holds it for a moment, and then hands it back.

Olive, backers—please keep in mind that I’m still paying off my student loans.

Oh, I also got a comment on this page from Olive. Three comments. I guess she does have reception. Olive, I’m coming anyway, kid. You can’t stop me. I may not be the best older sister in the world, but I can do this.

Update #4 • Jun 27, 2014

This is The Land of the Dead

This is what they don’t tell you about the land of the dead: it looks and smells like some approximation of your entire life, but in muted colors and shifting scents—sunscreen, then smoke, then raspberry shaving cream. When I step through the portal I see layers of images shimmering in front of me: the street where I grew up, my current bedroom, my ex-fiancé’s house, my college dorm, all in grays and creams and beiges. They undulate back and forth, as if the land of the dead is trying to decide which is the most comforting, and settles on our childhood street. It smells like cedar and blood.

Partying here seems like an impossibility. This is the sort of place where I’d cry or scream or eat water ice or have an existential crisis or drown myself in a memory. I would cut my hair here, all of it, in ragged chunks directly off my skull. But this does not look like a place with cocktails. There is no club music, only the sound of birds.

Update #5 • Jun 27, 2014

Olive Located

It takes me a while to find Olive. The road stretches and meanders and doesn’t take me exactly where I want to go, like in a dream. I twist through fragments of memory. I see the Girl Scout campground where I bit off a chunk of my tongue tripping into the cold firepit. I see an empty kitchen, a pot of soup boiling over on the stove. I see the dorm where I lost my virginity, the white cinderblock bare of decorations, the whole room ringing hollowly, like a bell.

Then I come upon a two-story house. My childhood home. Well, ours. She is in the living room; I can see her red hair through the window. I open the front door. She is on the couch, the green couch where we both stayed when we had the chicken pox, where we had scratched each other’s raw, blistered backs in our sleep.

When she looks up, and sees me, she begins screaming.

I haven’t held my sister in so long, not since we were children. She is like something starving, an animal with too many bones, and she pushes against me. She has been crying for so long, her voice falls away. She punches me with her fists, but it is like a bee bumping up against a windowpane.

Update #6 • Jun 27, 2014

Heading Home

She tells me she is going to stay. I say to her, “You cannot stay.” She says, “We can bring Mom and Dad back with us, it’ll be different,” and I say no, it didn’t work that way. I only have enough spell ingredients for two people, and besides, only visitors can leave, not the committed. The land of the dead is the worst kind of hospital. “How did you get here?” she asks. “Magic,” I say, and it sounds like I’m being sarcastic, even if I’m not. She says “I hate you,” and I say “Sure.”

I pick her up from the couch and carry her across the threshold of the house. I drop her to her feet and then pull her through the streets. I remind her that we are all each other has. She pulls against my grip around her wrist, a balloon angling for freedom. “Let me go,” she shouts, “please.” “No,” I say. We flit back past my memories, though the images waver like someone has just walked in front of the projector. We come back to the portal, beyond which is the playground, glowing faintly in the watery dawn.

But when I reach out to touch it, someone materializes in front of us. A woman with sad eyes and a floppy sunhat, like she is a hipster, or going to the beach in 1948. She points to me.

“You can go,” she says. Then she looks at Olive. “You,” she says, “need to stay. You know that.”

• • • •

Comments

Olive R about 2 days ago

Don’t come for me.

Susan Jameson about 2 days ago

Ursula, I am so sorry!!!! Let me know if I can do anything else. Your parents were great people I cannot believe this has happened. You’re a great sister, Olive is so lucky.

David Mantis about 2 days ago

Donat’d! Good luck, Ursula.

Olive R about 1 day ago

Don’t come.

Lucille L about 6 hours ago

Ursula, have the cops managed to get a hold of you? They found something new. Ursula, please call me ASAP.

Olive R about 6 hours ago

Don’t.

Lucille L about 4 hours ago

Ursula, check your DMs. I need to talk to you, it’s very important.

Olive R about 1 hour ago

Do you remember when we were little girls, and you took me to that abandoned convenience store parking lot where Dad taught us to ride our bikes? The thunderstorm? You were so scared, even more scared than me, I think, and you said “We have to go inside” and broke the glass door with a rock? And we were inside, and the shelves were empty and dirty, and we just sat and watched the lightning bleach the sky and the rain go horizontal. I think that was the last time we really connected. You squeezed me so hard it left black and blue marks, but I felt so safe. What were we so afraid of, after that? We just stopped talking. I don’t know why. You’re a tight ass and neurotic as hell but I love you anyway.

I came over to Mom and Dad’s early, to catch you. I was going to ask you if you wanted to go partying with me in the land of the dead. Just so we could hang out. I know you’re not much of a partier, but I don’t know. Sometimes people unexpectedly love dancing. You seem like the kind of person who would unexpectedly love dancing. Or karaoke.

They’re going to ask you what happened. Just tell them I came over too early. For once in my life, I was even better than on-time.

• • • •

Messages

Lucille L 
Jun 27, 2015

Jesus, Ursula, stop traveling, shut down this page, come home. Fuck. Ursula, just look. www.cnn.com/2015/6/26/us/daughters-body-found-near-murder-suicide.

Lucille L 
Jun 27, 2015

I’m so sorry. She was in the woods behind the house. They weren’t looking for her, at first, that’s why they didn’t find her.

Lucille L 
Jun 27, 2015

Ursula, are you there?

Lucille L 
Jun 28, 2015

Ursula?

© 2014 by Carmen Maria Machado.

Originally published in HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects,

edited by John Joseph Adams.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carmen Maria Machado’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, AGNI, NPR, Los Angeles Review of Books, VICE, and many other publications. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and was a fellow at the Millay Colony in 2014. She lives in Philadelphia with her partner.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.

Cimmeria: From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology

Theodora Goss

Remembering Cimmeria: I walk through the bazaar, between the stalls of the spice sellers, smelling turmeric and cloves, hearing the clash of bronze from the sellers of cooking pots, the bleat of goats from the butcher’s alley. Rugs hang from wooden racks, scarlet and indigo. In the corners of the alleys, men without legs perch on wooden carts, telling their stories to a crowd of ragged children, making coins disappear into the air. Women from the mountains, their faces prematurely old from sun and suffering, call to me in a dialect I can barely understand. Their stands sell eggplants and tomatoes, the pungent olives that are distinctive to Cimmerian cuisine, video games. In the mountain villages, it has long been a custom to dye hair blue for good fortune, a practice that sophisticated urbanites have lately adopted. Even the women at court have hair of a deep and startling hue.

My guide, Afa, walks ahead of me, with a string bag in her hand, examining the vegetables, buying cauliflower and lentils. Later she will make rice mixed with raisins, meat, and saffron. The cuisine of Cimmeria is rich, heavy with goat and chicken. (They eat and keep no pigs.) The pastries are filled with almond paste and soaked in honey. She waddles ahead (forgive me, but you do waddle, Afa), and I follow amid a cacophony of voices, speaking the Indo-European language of Cimmeria, which is closest perhaps to Iranian. The mountain accents are harsh, the tones of the urbanites soft and lisping. Shaila spoke in those tones, when she taught me phrases in her language: Can I have more lozi (a cake made with marzipan, flavored with orange water)? You are the son of a dog. I will love you until the ocean swallows the moon. (A traditional saying. At the end of time, the serpent that lies beneath the Black Sea will rise up and swallow the moon as though it were lozi. It means, I will love you until the end of time.)

On that day, or perhaps it is another day I remember, I see a man selling Kalashnikovs. The war is a recent memory here, and every man has at least one weapon: Even I wear a curved knife in my belt, or I will be taken for a prostitute. (Male prostitutes, who are common in the capital, can be distinguished by their khol-rimmed eyes, their extravagant clothes, their weaponlessness. As a red-haired Irishman, I do not look like them, but it is best to avoid misunderstandings.) The sun shines down from a cloudless sky. It is hotter than summer in Arizona, on the campus of the small college where this journey began, where we said, let us imagine a modern Cimmeria. What would it look like? I know, now. The city is cooled by a thousand fountains, we are told: Its name means just that, A Thousand Fountains. It was founded in the sixth century BCE, or so we have conjectured and imagined.

I have a pounding headache. I have been two weeks in this country, and I cannot get used to the heat, the smells, the reality of it all. Could we have created this? The four of us, me and Lisa and Michael the Second, and Professor Farrow, sitting in a conference room at that small college? Surely not. And yet.

• • • •

We were worried that the Khan would forbid us from entering the country. But no. We were issued visas, assigned translators, given office space in the palace itself.

The Khan was a short man, balding. His wife had been Miss Cimmeria, and then a television reporter for one of the three state channels. She had met the Khan when she had been sent to interview him. He wore a business suit with a traditional scarf around his neck. She looked as though she had stepped out of a photo shoot for Vogue Russia, which was available in all the gas stations.

“Cimmeria has been here, on the shores of the Black Sea, for more than two thousand years,” he said. “Would you like some coffee, Dr. Nolan? I think our coffee is the best in the world.” It was—dark, thick, spiced, and served with ewe’s milk. “This theory of yours—that a group of American graduate students created Cimmeria in their heads, merely by thinking about it—you will understand that some of our people find it insulting. They will say that all Americans are imperialist dogs. I myself find it amusing, almost charming—like poetry. The mind creates reality, yes? So our poets have taught us. Of course, your version is culturally insensitive, but then, you are Americans. I did not think Americans were capable of poetry.”

Only Lisa had been a graduate student, and even she had recently graduated. Mike and I were post-docs, and Professor Farrow was tenured at Southern Arizona State. It all seemed so far away, the small campus with its perpetually dying lawns and drab 1970s architecture. I was standing in a reception room, drinking coffee with the Khan of Cimmeria and his wife, and Arizona seemed imaginary, like something I had made up.

“But we like Americans here. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, is he not? Any enemy of Russia is a friend of mine. So I am glad to welcome you to my country. You will, I am certain, be sensitive to our customs. Your coworker, for example—I suggest that she not wear short pants in the streets. Our clerics, whether Orthodox, Catholic, or Muslim, are traditional and may be offended. Anyway, you must admit, such garments are not attractive on women. I would not say so to her, you understand, for women are the devil when they are criticized. But a woman should cultivate an air of mystery. There is nothing mysterious about bare red knees.”

Our office space was in an unused part of the palace. My translator, Jafik, told me it had once been a storage area for bedding. It was close to the servants’ quarters. The Khan may have welcomed us to Cimmeria for diplomatic reasons, but he did not think much of us, that was clear. It was part of the old palace, which had been built in the thirteenth century CE, after the final defeat of the Mongols. Since then, Cimmeria had been embroiled in almost constant warfare, with Anatolia, Scythia, Poland, and most recently the Russians, who had wanted its ports on the Black Sea. The Khan had received considerable American aid, including military advisors. The war had ended with the disintegration of the USSR. The Ukraine, focused on its own economic problems, had no wish to interfere in local politics, so Cimmeria was enjoying a period of relative peace. I wondered how long it would last.

Lisa was our linguist. She would stay in the capital for the first three months, then venture out into the countryside, recording local dialects. “You know what amazes me?” she said as we were unpacking our computers and office supplies. “The complexity of all this. You would think it really had been here for the last three thousand years. It’s hard to believe it all started with Mike the First goofing off in Professor Farrow’s class.” He had been bored, and instead of taking notes, had started sketching a city. The professor had caught him, and had told the students that we would spend the rest of the semester creating that city and the surrounding countryside. We would be responsible for its history, customs, language. Lisa was in the class, too, and I was the TA. AN 703, Contemporary Anthropological Theory, had turned into Creating Cimmeria.

Of the four graduate students in the course, only Lisa stayed in the program. One got married and moved to Wisconsin, another transferred to the School of Education so she could become a kindergarten teacher. Mike the First left with his master’s and went on to do an MBA. It was a coincidence that Professor Farrow’s next postdoc, who arrived in the middle of the semester, was also named Mike. He had an undergraduate degree in classics, and was the one who decided that the country we were developing was Cimmeria. He was also particularly interested in the Borges hypothesis. Everyone had been talking about it at Michigan, where he had done his PhD. At that point, it was more controversial than it is now, and Professor Farrow had only been planning to touch on it briefly at the end of the semester. But once we started on Cimmeria, AN 703 became an experiment in creating reality through perception and expectation. Could we actually create Cimmeria by thinking about it, writing about it?

Not in one semester, of course. After the semester ended, all of us worked on the Cimmeria Project. It became the topic of Lisa’s dissertation: A Dictionary and Grammar of Modern Cimmerian, with Commentary. Mike focused on history. I wrote articles on culture, figuring out probable rites of passage, how the Cimmerians would bury their dead. We had Herodotus, we had accounts of cultures from that area. We were all steeped in anthropological theory. On weekends, when we should have been going on dates, we gathered in a conference room, under a fluorescent light, and talked about Cimmeria. It was fortunate that around that time, the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology was founded at Penn State. Otherwise, I don’t know where we would have published. At the first Imaginary Anthropology conference, in Orlando, we realized that a group from Tennessee was working on the modern Republic of Scythia and Sarmatia, which shared a border with Cimmeria. We formed a working group.

“Don’t let the Cimmerians hear you talk about creating all this,” I said. “Especially the nationalists. Remember, they have guns, and you don’t.” Should I mention her cargo shorts? I had to admit, looking at her knobby red knees, above socks and Birkenstocks, that the Khan had a point. Before she left for the mountains, I would warn her to wear more traditional clothes.

I was going to stay in the capital. My work would focus on the ways in which the historical practices we had described in “Cimmeria: A Proposal,” in the second issue of the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology, influenced and remained evident in modern practice. Already I had seen developments we had never anticipated. One was the fashion for blue hair; in a footnote, Mike had written that blue was a fortunate color in Cimmerian folk belief. Another was the ubiquity of cats in the capital. In an article on funerary rites, I had described how cats were seen as guides to the land of the dead until the coming of Christianity in the twelfth century CE. The belief should have gone away, but somehow it had persisted, and every household, whether Orthodox, Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, or one of the minor sects that flourished in the relative tolerance of Cimmeria, had its cat. No Cimmerian wanted his soul to get lost on the way to Paradise. Stray cats were fed at the public expense, and no one dared harm a cat. I saw them everywhere, when I ventured into the city. In a month, Mike was going to join us, and I would be able to show him all the developments I was documenting. Meanwhile, there was email and Skype.

I was assigned a bedroom and bath close to our offices. Afa, who had been a sort of under-cook, was assigned to be my servant but quickly became my guide, showing me around the city and mocking my Cimmerian accent. “He he!” she would say. “No, Doctor Pat, that word is not pronounced that way. Do not repeat it that way, I beg of you. I am an old woman, but still it is not respectable for me to hear!” Jafik was my language teacher as well as my translator, teaching me the language Lisa had created based on what we knew of historical Cimmerian and its Indo-European roots, except that it had developed an extensive vocabulary. As used by modern Cimmerians, it had the nuance and fluidity of a living language, as well as a surprising number of expletives.

I had no duties except to conduct my research, which was a relief from the grind of TAing and, recently, teaching my own undergraduate classes. But one day, I was summoned to speak with the Khan. It was the day of an official audience, so he was dressed in Cimmerian ceremonial robes, although he still wore his Rolex watch. His advisors looked impatient, and I gathered that the audience was about to begin—I had seen a long line of supplicants waiting by the door as I was ushered in. But he said, as though we had all the time in the world, “Doctor Nolan, did you know that my daughters are learning American?” Sitting next to him were four girls, all wearing the traditional head-scarves worn by Cimmerian peasant women, but pulled back to show that their hair was dyed fashionably blue. “They are very troublesome, my daughters. They like everything modern: Leonardo DiCaprio, video games. Tradition is not good enough for them. They wish to attend university and find professions, or do humanitarian work. Ah, what is a father to do?” He shook a finger at them, fondly enough. “I would like it if you could teach them the latest American idioms. The slang, as it were.”

That afternoon, Afa led me to another part of the palace—the royal family’s personal quarters. These were more modern and considerably more comfortable than ours. I was shown into what seemed to be a common room for the girls. There were colorful rugs and divans, embroidered wall hangings, and an enormous flat-screen TV.

“These are the Khan’s daughters,” said Afa. She had already explained to me, in case I made any blunders, that they were his daughters by his first wife, who had not been Miss Cimmeria, but had produced the royal children: a son, and then only daughters, and then a second son who had died shortly after birth. She had died a week later of an infection contracted during the difficult delivery. “Anoor is the youngest, then Tallah, and then Shaila, who is already taking university classes online.” Shaila smiled at me. This time, none of them were wearing head-scarves. There really was something attractive about blue hair.

“And what about the fourth one?” She was sitting a bit back from the others, to the right of and behind Shaila, whom she closely resembled.

Afa looked at me with astonishment. “The Khan has three daughters,” she said. “Anoor, Tallah, and Shaila. There is no fourth one, Doctor Pat.”

The fourth one stared at me without expression.

• • • •

“Cimmerians don’t recognize twins,” said Lisa. “That has to be the explanation. Do you remember the thirteenth-century philosopher Farkosh Kursand? When God made the world, He decreed that human beings would be born one at a time, unique, unlike animals. They would be born defenseless, without claws or teeth or fur. But they would have souls. It’s in a children’s book—I have a copy somewhere, but it’s based on Kursand’s reading of Genesis in one of his philosophical treatises. Mike would know which. And it’s the basis of Cimmerian human rights law, actually. That’s why women have always had more rights here. They have souls, so they’ve been allowed to vote since Cimmeria became a parliamentary monarchy. I’m sure it’s mentioned in one of the articles—I don’t remember which one, but check the database Mike is putting together. Shaila must have been a twin, and the Cimmerians don’t recognize the second child as separate from the first. So Shaila is one girl. In two bodies. But with one soul.”

“Who came up with that stupid idea?”

“Well, to be perfectly honest, it might have been you.” She leaned back in our revolving chair. I don’t know how she could do that without falling. “Or Mike, of course. It certainly wasn’t my idea. Embryologically it does make a certain sense. Identical twins really do come from one egg.”

“So they’re both Shaila.”

“There is no both. The idea of both is culturally inappropriate. There is one Shaila, in two bodies. Think of them as Shaila and her shadow.”

I tested this theory once, while walking through the market with Afa. We were walking through the alley of the dog-sellers. In Cimmeria, almost every house has a dog, for defense and to catch rats. Cats are not sold in the market. They cannot be sold at all, only given or willed away. To sell a cat for money is to imperil your immortal soul. We passed a woman sitting on the ground, with a basket beside her. In it were two infants, as alike as the proverbial two peas in a pod, half-covered with a ragged blanket. Beside them lay a dirty mutt with a chain around its neck that lifted its head and whimpered as we walked by.

“Child how many in basket?” I asked Afa in my still-imperfect Cimmerian.

“There is one child in that basket, Pati,” she said. I could not get her to stop using the diminutive. I even told her that in my language Pati was a woman’s name, to no effect. She just smiled, patted me on the arm, and assured me that no one would mistake such a tall, handsome (which in Cimmerian is the same word as beautiful) man for a woman.

“Only one child?”

“Of course. One basket, one child.”

Shaila’s shadow followed her everywhere. When she and her sisters sat with me in the room with the low divans and the large-screen TV, studying American slang, she was there. “What’s up!” Shaila would say, laughing, and her shadow would stare down at the floor. When Shaila and I walked though the gardens, she walked six paces behind, pausing when we paused, sitting when we sat. After we were married, in our apartment in Arizona, she would sit in a corner of the bedroom, watching as we made love. Although I always turned off the lights, I could see her: a darkness against the off-white walls of faculty housing.

Once, I tried to ask Shaila about her. “Shaila, do you know the word twin?”

“Yes, of course,” she said. “In American, if two babies are born at the same time, they are twins.”

“What about in Cimmeria? Surely there is a Cimmerian word for twin. Sometimes two babies are born at the same time in Cimmeria, too.”

She looked confused. “I suppose so. Biology is the same everywhere.”

“Well, what’s the word, then?”

“I cannot think of it. I shall have to email Tallah. She is better at languages than I am.”

“What if you yourself were a twin?”

“Me? But I am not a twin. If I were, my mother would have told me.”

I tried a different tactic. “Do you remember the dog you had, Kala? She had two sisters, born at the same time. Those were Anoor’s and Tallah’s dogs. They were not Kala, even though they were born in the same litter. You could think of them as twins—I mean, triplets.” I remembered them gamboling together, Kala and her two littermates. They would follow us through the gardens, and Shaila and her sisters would pet them indiscriminately. When we sat under the plum trees, they would tumble together into one doggy heap.

“Pat, what is this all about? Is this about the fact that I don’t want to have a baby right now? You know I want to go to graduate school first.”

I did not think her father would approve the marriage. I told her so: “Your father will never agree to you marrying a poor American post-doc. Do you have any idea how poor I am? My research grant is all I have.”

“You do not understand Cimmerian politics,” Shaila replied. “Do you know what percentage of our population is ethnically Sarmatian? Twenty percent, all in the Eastern province. They fought the Russians, and they still have weapons. Not just guns: tanks, anti-aircraft missiles. The Sarmatians are getting restless, Pati. They are mostly Catholic, in a country that is mostly Orthodox. They want to unite with their homeland, create a greater Scythia and Sarmatia. My father projects an image of strength, because what else can you do? But he is afraid. He is most afraid that the Americans will not help. They helped against the Russians, but this is an internal matter. He has talked to us already about different ways for us to leave the country. Anoor has been enrolled at the Lycée International in Paris, and Tallah is going to study at the American School in London. They can get student visas. For me it is more difficult: I must be admitted at a university. That is why I have been taking courses online. Ask him: If he says no, then no. But I think he will consider my marriage with an American.”

She was right. The Khan considered. For a week, and then another, while pro-Sarmatian factions clashed with military in the Eastern province. Then protests broke out in the capital. Anoor was already in Paris with her step-mother, supposedly on a shopping spree for school. Tallah had started school in London. In the Khan’s personal office, I signed the marriage contract, barely understanding what I was signing because it was in an ornate script I had seen only in medieval documents. On the way to the airport, we stopped by the cathedral in Shahin Square, where we were married by the Patriarch of the Cimmerian Independent Orthodox Church, who checked the faxed copy of my baptismal certificate and lectured me in sonorous tones about the importance of conversion, raising children in the true faith. The Khan kissed Shaila on both cheeks, promising her that we would have a proper ceremony when the political situation was more stable and she could return to the country. In the Khan’s private plane, we flew to a small airport near Fresno and spent our first night together at my mother’s house. My father had died of a heart attack while I was in college, and she lived alone in the house where I had grown up. It was strange staying in the guest bedroom, down the hall from the room where I had slept as a child, which still had my He-Man action figures on the shelves, the Skeletor defaced with permanent marker. I had to explain to her about Shaila’s shadow.

“I don’t understand,” my mother said. “Are you all going to live together?”

“Well, yes, I guess so. It’s really no different than if her twin sister were living with us, is it?”

“And Shaila is going to take undergraduate classes? What is her sister going to do?”

“I have no idea,” I said.

What she did, more than anything else, was watch television. All day, it would be on. Mostly, she watched CNN and the news shows. Sometimes I would test Shaila, asking, “Did you turn the TV on?”

“Is it on?” she would say. “Then of course I must have turned it on. Unless you left it on before you went out. How did your class go? Is that football player in the back still falling asleep?”

One day, I came home and noticed that the other Shaila was cooking dinner. Later I asked, “Shaila, did you cook dinner?”

“Of course,” she said. “Did you like it?”

“Yes.” It was actually pretty good, chicken in a thick red stew over rice. It reminded me of a dish Afa had made in an iron pot hanging over an open fire in the servants’ quarters. But I guess it could be made on an American stovetop as well.

After that, the other Shaila cooked dinner every night. It was convenient, because I was teaching night classes, trying to make extra money. Shaila told me that I did not need to work so hard, that the money her father gave her was more than enough to support us both. But I was proud and did not want to live off my father-in-law, even if he was the Khan of Cimmeria. At the same time, I was trying to write up my research on Cimmerian funerary practices. If I could publish a paper in the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology, I might have a shot at a tenure-track position, or at least a visiting professorship somewhere that wasn’t Arizona. Shaila was trying to finish her pre-med requirements. She had decided that she wanted to be a pediatrician.

Meanwhile, in Cimmeria, the situation was growing more complicated. The pro-Sarmatian faction had split into the radical Sons of Sarmatia and the more moderate Sarmatian Democratic Alliance, although the Prime Minister claimed that the SDA was a front. There were weekly clashes with police in the capital, and the Sons of Sarmatia had planted a bomb in the Hilton, although a maid had reported a suspicious shopping bag and the hotel had been evacuated before the bomb could go off. The Khan had imposed a curfew, and martial law might be next, although the army had a significant Sarmatian minority. But I had classes to teach, so I tried not to pay attention to politics, and even Shaila dismissed it all as “a mess.”

• • • •

One day, I came home from a departmental meeting and Shaila wasn’t in the apartment. She was usually home by seven. I assumed she’d had to stay late for a lab. The other Shaila was cooking dinner in the kitchen. At eight, when she hadn’t come back yet, I sat down at the kitchen table to eat. To my surprise, the other Shaila sat down across from me, at the place set for Shaila. She had never sat down at the table with us before.

She looked at me with her dark eyes and said, “How was your day, Pati?”

I dropped my fork. It clattered against the rim of the plate. She had never spoken before, not one sentence, not one word. Her voice was just like Shaila’s, but with a stronger accent. At least it sounded stronger to me. Or maybe not. It was hard to tell.

“Where’s Shaila?” I said. I could feel a constriction in my chest, as though a fist had started to close around my heart. Like the beginning of my father’s heart attack. I think even then, I knew.

“What do you mean?” she said. “I’m Shaila. I have always been Shaila. The only Shaila there is.”

I stared down at the lamb and peas in saffron curry. The smell reminded me of Cimmeria, of the bazaar. I could almost hear the clash of the cooking pots.

“You’ve done something to her, haven’t you?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Eat your dinner, Pati. It’s going to get cold. You’ve been working so hard lately. I don’t think it’s good for you.”

But I could not eat. I stood up, accidentally hitting my hip on the table and cursing at the pain. With a growing sense of panic, I searched the apartment for any clue to Shaila’s whereabouts. Her purse was in the closet, with her cell phone in it, so she must have come home earlier in the evening. All her clothes were on the hangers, as far as I could tell—she had a lot of clothes. Nothing seemed to be missing. But Shaila was not there. The other Shaila stood watching me, as though waiting for me to give up, admit defeat. Finally, after one last useless look under the bed, I left, deliberately banging the door behind me. She had to be somewhere.

I walked across campus, to the Life Sciences classrooms and labs, and checked all of them. Then I walked through the main library and the science library, calling “Shaila!” until a graduate student in a carrel told me to be quiet. By this time, it was dark. I went to her favorite coffee shop, the Espresso Bean, where undergraduates looked at me strangely from behind their laptops, and then to every shop and restaurant that was still open, from the gelato place to the German restaurant, famous for its bratwurst and beer, where students took their families on Parents’ Weekend. Finally, I walked the streets, calling “Shaila!” as though she were a stray dog, hoping that the other Shaila was simply being presumptuous, rebelling against her secondary status. Hoping the real Shaila was out there somewhere.

I passed the police station and stood outside, thinking about going in and reporting her missing. I would talk to a police officer on duty, tell him I could not find my wife. He would come home with me, to find—my wife, saying that I was overworked and needed to rest, see a psychiatrist. Shaila had entered the country with a diplomatic passport—one passport, for one Shaila. Had anyone seen the other Shaila? Only my mother. She had picked us up at the airport, we had spent the night with her, all three of us eating dinner at the dining-room table. She had avoided looking at the other Shaila, talking to Shaila about how the roses were doing well this year despite aphids, asking whether she knew how to knit, how she dyed her hair that particular shade of blue—pointless, polite talk. And then we had rented a car and driven to Arizona, me and Shaila in the front seat, the other Shaila in back with the luggage. Once we had arrived at the university, she had stayed in the apartment. Lisa knew, but she and Mike the Second were still in Cimmeria, and their internet connection could be sporadic. I could talk to Dr. Farrow? She would be in her office tomorrow morning, before classes. She would at least believe me. But I knew, with a cold certainly in the pit of my stomach, that Anne Farrow would look at me from over the wire rims of her glasses and say, “Pat, you know as well as I do that culture defines personhood.” She was an anthropologist, through and through. She would not interfere. I had been married to Shaila, I was still married to Shaila. There was just one less of her.

In the end, I called my mother, while sitting on a park bench under a street lamp, with the moon sailing high above, among the clouds.

“Do you know what time it is, Pat?” she asked.

“Listen, Mom,” I said, and explained the situation.

“Oh, Pat, I wish you hadn’t married that woman. But can’t you divorce her? Are you allowed to divorce in that church? I wish you hadn’t broken up with Bridget Ferguson. The two of you were so sweet together at prom. You know she married an accountant and has two children now. She sent me a card at Christmas.”

I said good night and told her to go back to sleep, that I would figure it out. And then I sat there for a long time.

When I came home, well after midnight, Shaila was waiting for me with a cup of Cimmerian coffee, or as close as she could get with an American espresso machine. She was wearing the heart pajamas I had given Shaila for Valentine’s Day.

“Pati,” she said, “you left so quickly that I didn’t have time to tell you the news. I heard it on CNN this morning, and then Daddy called me. Malek was assassinated yesterday.” Malek was her brother. I had never met him—he had been an officer in the military, and while I had been in Cimmeria, he had been serving in the mountains. I knew that he had been recalled to the capital to deal with the Sarmantian agitation, but that was all.

“Assassinated? How?”

“He was trying to negotiate with the Sons of Sarmatia, and a radical pulled out a gun that had gotten through security. You never watch the news, do you, Pati? I watch it a great deal. It is important for me to learn the names of the world leaders, learn about international diplomacy. That is more important than organic chemistry, for a Khanum.”

“A what?”

“Don’t you understand? Now that Malek is dead, I am next in the line of succession. Someday, I will be the Khanum of Cimmeria. That is what we call a female Khan. In some countries, only male members of the royal family can succeed to the throne. But Cimmeria has never been like that. It has always been cosmopolitan, progressive. The philosopher Amirabal persuaded Teshup the Third to make his daughter his heir, and ever since, women can become rulers of the country. My great-grandmother, Daddy’s grandma, was a Khanum, although she resigned when her son came of age. It is the same among the Scythians and Sarmatians.” This was Lisa’s doing. It had to be Lisa’s doing. She was the one who had come up with Amirabal and the philosophical school she had founded in 500 BCE. Even Plato had praised her as one of the wisest philosophers in the ancient world. I silently cursed all Birkenstock-wearing feminists.

“What does this mean?” I asked.

“It means that tomorrow we fly to Washington, where I will ask your President for help against the Sarmatian faction. This morning on one of the news shows, the Speaker of the House criticized him for not supporting the government of Cimmeria. He mentioned the War on Terror—you know how they talk, and he wants to be the Republican candidate. But I think we can finally get American aid. While I am there, I will call a press conference, and you will stand by my side. We will let the American people see that my husband is one of them. It will generate sympathy and support. Then we will fly to Cimmeria. I need to be in my country as a symbol of the future. And I must produce an heir to the throne as quickly as possible—a boy, because while I can legally become Khanum, the people will want assurance that I can bear a son. While you were out, I packed all our clothes. We will meet Daddy’s plane at the airport tomorrow morning. You must wear your interview suit until we can buy you another. I’ve set the alarm for five o’clock.”

I should have said no. I should have raged and cried, and refused to be complicit in something that made me feel as though I might be sick for the rest of my life. But I said nothing. What could I say? This, too, was Shaila.

I lay in the dark beside the woman who looked like my wife, unable to sleep, staring into the darkness. Shaila, I thought, what has happened to you? To your dreams of being a pediatrician, of our children growing up in America, eating tacos and riding their bikes to school? You wanted them to be ordinary, to escape the claustrophobia you had felt growing up in the palace, with its political intrigue and the weight of centuries perpetually pressing down on you. In the middle of the night, the woman who was Shaila, but not my Shaila, turned in her sleep and put an arm around me. I did not move away.

• • • •

You are pleased, Afa, that I have returned to Cimmeria. It has meant a promotion for you, and you tell everyone that you are personal assistant to the American husband of the Khanum-to-be. You sell information about her pregnancy to the fashion magazines—how big she’s getting, how radiant she is. Meanwhile, Shaila opens schools and meets with foreign ambassadors. She’s probably the most popular figure in the country, part of the propaganda war against the Sons of Sarmatia, which has mostly fallen apart since Malek’s death. The SDA was absorbed into the Cimmerian Democratic Party and no longer presents a problem. American aid helped, but more important was the surge of nationalism among ethnic Cimmerians. Indeed, the nationalists, with their anti-Sarmatian sentiments, may be a problem in the next election.

I sit at the desk in my office, which is no longer near the servants’ quarters, but in the royal wing of the palace, writing this article, which would be suppressed if it appeared in any of the newspapers. But it will be read only by JoIA’s peer editors before languishing in the obscurity of an academic journal. Kala and one of her sisters lies at my feet. And I think about this country, Afa. It is—it was—a dream, but are not all nations of men dreams? Do we not create them, by drawing maps with lines on them, and naming rivers, mountain ranges? And then deciding that the men of our tribe can only marry women outside their matrilineage? That they must bury corpses rather than burning them, eat chicken and goats but not pigs, worship this bull-headed god rather than the crocodile god of that other tribe, who is an abomination? Fast during the dark of the moon, feast when the moon is full? I’m starting to sound like a poet, which will not be good for my academic career. One cannot write an academic paper as though it were poetry.

We dream countries, and then those countries dream us. And it seems to me, sitting here by the window, looking into a garden filled with roses, listening to one of the thousand fountains of this ancient city, that as much as I have dreamed Cimmeria, it has dreamed me.

Sometimes I forget that the other Shaila ever existed. A month after we returned to Cimmeria, an Arizona state trooper found a body in a ditch close to the Life Sciences Building. It was female, and badly decomposed. The coroner estimated that she would have been about twenty, but the body was nude and there was no other identification. I’m quoting the story I read online, on the local newspaper’s website. The police suggested that she might have been an illegal immigrant who had paid to be driven across the border, then been killed for the rest of her possessions. I sometimes wonder if she was Shaila.

This morning she has a television interview, and this afternoon she will be touring a new cancer treatment center paid for with American aid. All those years of listening and waiting were, after all, the perfect training for a Khanum. She is as patient as a cobra.

If I ask to visit the bazaar, the men who are in charge of watching me will first secure the square, which means shutting down the bazaar. They accompany me even to the university classes I insist on teaching. They stand in the back of the lecture hall, in their fatigues and sunglasses, carrying Kalashnikovs. Despite American aid, they do not want to give up their Russian weapons. So we must remember it: the stalls selling embroidered fabrics, and curved knives, and melons. The baskets in high stacks, and glasses of chilled mint tea into which we dip the pistachio biscuits that you told me are called Fingers of the Dead. Boys in sandals break-dancing to Arabic hip hop on a boombox so old that it is held together with string. I would give a great deal to be able to go to the bazaar again. Or to go home and identify Shaila’s body.

But in a couple of months, my son will be born. (Yes, it is a son. I’ve seen the ultrasound, but if you tell the newspapers, Afa, I will have you beheaded. I’m pretty sure I can still do that, here in Cimmeria.) There is only one of him, thank goodness. We intend to name him Malek. My mother has been sending a steady supply of knitted booties. There will be a national celebration, with special prayers in the churches and mosques and synagogues, and a school holiday. I wish Mike could come, or even Lisa. But he was offered a tenure-track position at a Christian college in North Carolina interested in the Biblical implications of Imaginary Anthropology. And Lisa is up in the mountains somewhere, close to the Scythian and Sarmatian border, studying woman’s initiation rites. I will stand beside Shaila and her family on the balcony of the palace, celebrating the birth of the future Khan of Cimmeria. In the gardens, rose petals will fall. Men will continue dying of natural or unnatural causes, and the cats of Cimmeria will lead them into another world. Women will dip their water jugs in the fountains of the city, carrying them on their heads back to their houses, as they have done since Cimmeria has existed, whether that is three or three thousand years. Life will go on as it has always done, praise be to God, creator of worlds, however they were created.

Reprinted from the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology 4.2 (Fall 2013).

Dr. Patrick Nolan is also co-author of “Cimmeria: A Proposal” (with M. Sandowski, L. Lang, and A. Farrow), JoIA 2.1 (Spring 2011), and author of “Modern Cimmerian Funerary Practices,” JoIA 3.2 (Fall 2012). Dr. Nolan is currently a professor at Kursand University. He is working on A History of Modern Cimmeria.

© 2014 by Theodora Goss.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. Her publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting; Interfictions, a short story anthology coedited with Delia Sherman; Voices from Fairyland, a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems; and The Thorn and the Blossom, a novella in a two-sided accordion format. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, and Mythopoeic Awards, as well as on the Tiptree Award Honor List, and has won the World Fantasy Award.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.

A HOLE IN THE WORLD
a Kaslo Chronicles Story

Matthew Hughes

Previously on The Kaslo Chronicles: Magic now rules the universe and hardboiled confidential operative Erm Kaslo, henchman to the wizard Diomedo Obron, returns from a mission to the underworld to find that a flood of strange creatures have carried off the survivors of civilization’s collapse who had taken shelter at Obron’s castle. To read the other stories in the series, visit lightspeedmagazine.com/kaslo.

“I’m taking Bodwon with me,” Erm Kaslo said. “He’s handy.”

Diomedo Obron did not look up from the ancient tome in which he had been immersed when his security chief entered his work room. “All right,” he said.

“That means there’ll be nobody handy here,” Kaslo said. “So you’ll need to keep everybody inside the perimeter.”

The wizard’s finger traced a line of handwritten text. “Uh huh.”

“Really. Everybody. Inside.”

His tone caused Obron to look up. “I assure you,” the wizard said, “I understand.” He glanced down at the page again. “At least that much.”

Kaslo studied his employer for a moment, then made a sound that signified minimal agreement. But as he saw Obron return to the text, he had to admit that the former magnate of the Grand Foundational Domain of Novo Bantry had come a fair distance since he had first hired Kaslo’s services as a confidential operative. The job had been to track down and apprehend the fraudster Binnie Varshun who had gulled Obron into an off-world mining investment and absconded with the funds.

The op’s impression of his client back then had been that of a man who had inherited vast wealth and spent his life dreaming of becoming a wizard in a world ruled not by rationalism but by magic. Subsequent events had shown that the man’s ambition had been no idle dream. The universe had changed, suddenly and drastically, and the once-hesitant version of Obron was now almost completely submerged beneath the increasingly decisive and powerful thaumaturge who could raise a castle by incantation and surround it with a spell—Plackatt’s Discriminating Delimiter—that could keep out a howling whirlwind and a fire elemental.

Kaslo now saw something else behind the concentration in the other man’s face: fatigue. “Have you been up all night?” he said.

The finger traced another line. “Yes.”

“Following Phalloon’s clues?”

Obron raised his gaze and used thumb and forefinger to massage his eyelids. “As far as I can.”

“You are more intelligent than Phalloon. What he found in all of this,”—he gestured to the shelves of ancient books—“you must surely be able to discover. And probably more.”

Obron sighed. “You are thinking like a man of the previous age.”

“I am such a man.” Kaslo was practical, logical, rational—all the qualities that were next to useless in a universe that now operated by intuition, willpower, and what in the times now gone by had been called mere coincidence. “What am I missing?”

Obron rotated his thin shoulders and stretched his long neck forward and back. “These books,” he said, “they are not inert. They were inert during the previous age of rationalism; now that we have returned to the rule of sympathetic association, they are regaining their mana.”

Kaslo blinked. “Are they sentient?” he said.

“Like our integrators used to be? No.” Obron held his open hand palm-down over the page. His brows drew down as he concentrated momentarily. “But over centuries, even millennia, wizards of considerable power—even supernal power—used these to exert their will. The books acquired and retained a . . . call it a residue of that power.”

“And they use it against you?” Kaslo said. He ran his gaze over the ranked spines, black and red, blue and green, of old leather and strange cloth. “Have we no allies in this new world?”

“They are not inimical,” said the wizard. “Better to think of them as spirited steeds that will let you ride them if you’ve got what it takes.”

“Have you?”

“A blunt question.” Beneath the fatigue, the other man’s face showed strength. “To which the blunt answer is, increasingly, yes.” He touched the dry parchment with its serried rows of spiky black script. “We are reaching an accommodation. A sense of mutual respect.”

“Out of which comes what progress?”

Phalloon’s shade, located in the underworld, had told Kaslo that in life the wizard had identified a powerful entity. Phalloon had meant to raise the very castle in which Kaslo and Obron stood on an intersection of ley lines, in the hope that it would protect him from the unknown enemy’s force.

But, even in the underworld, the ba of Phalloon still feared the adversary and dared not speak plainly. Instead, it offered three cryptic clues: the Twentieth Aeon, a face of black iron, and the blood of a dragon. It was these hints that Obron had been researching.

“Progress?” the wizard said and rubbed his eyes again. “I have at least learned that the secret to deriving answers from a book like this is first to discover the right question.”

Kaslo was learning to tamp down his natural impatience when dealing with his employer. This was not an age that encouraged straightforward discourse. “And have you?” he said.

Obron’s response was a question of his own. “Why send,” he said, “a fire elemental?”

“How am I to know?” said the op. “I have been reduced to the level of a child, and not a very promising one.”

“I didn’t expect an answer from you.” Obron touched the book again, almost like a man patting a favorite mount. “But that seems to be the question I should be exploring.”

“All right,” said Kaslo. “Why a fire elemental? Because whoever sent it has an affinity for fire?”

Obron’s lips moved in a kind of shrug. “Perhaps, though it doesn’t feel right.”

“A matter of reach or range? After all, we don’t know how far away this enemy is, or what its strength may be.”

“I think we can assume great strength,” Obron said, gesturing to indicate the castle Phalloon had hoped would shield him. “And therefore probably operating from a distance, else it would already be battering at our gates. Which means that its ability to come here and batter must be constrained.”

Kaslo thought of the lonely shade of Phalloon on the windswept desert of the underworld. “Another plane?”

“It could be,” said Obron. “Time and space are not as we know them in the other realms. If a power, a great power, from the previous age of magic had sought to retain its puissance when the universe reverted to reason, it might have secreted itself in a hideaway in another plane.”

“And now,” said Kaslo, “it will be looking to return.”

“Return and rule.” Obron looked down at the page again. “And yet it hasn’t. Why not?”

“Because it can’t. It needs something.”

“And it sent a fire elemental to get that something,” the wizard said. “What does that tell us?”

That was obvious to the op. “It is something that will not burn.”

“Indeed,” said Obron. He laid his hand on the page again. “And how do we feel about that?”

Kaslo could not receive an answer from the book; the tome Obron had called a “spirited steed” would not even acknowledge him. But the look on Obron’s face told him that the wizard had garnered some kind of response. The op looked toward the unglazed slit of a window. The gray light of dawn was growing rosier. “I need to get going,” he said.

“Do you really expect to rescue any of them?” the wizard said.

Kaslo shook his head. “Probably not. But I can at least try to find out where they went, and who or what took them.” His gaze hardened. “And perhaps some way to strike back.”

• • • •

Bodwon was waiting beside the small port in the castle’s main gate, rubbing his arms against the morning chill. But Kaslo didn’t think the cold was why Bodwon was shivering.

“Listen,” he told the man, “this is only a reconnaissance. We’re not going to war.”

Bodwon rubbed his hand over his scalp, where his burned-off hair had now grown back in. Relief and embarrassment contended in his face. “It’s just . . .” he said.

“Say it. Nobody’s judging you.”

The man shivered again. “It’s just that you didn’t see them. They were like machines, I mean like machines used to be. They knew what they were doing, and they did it fast. One minute, the village was full of people, the next they were being hauled off. The women were screaming, some of the men, too.”

“I’ve got this,” Kaslo said, holding up Obron’s speculus. “It’s like a surveillance integrator. It will let us know if anything’s around.”

“Good,” said Bodwon, indicating the two spring-guns that had been part of Phalloon’s preparations for the new age, “because these are not going to be much use if a horde of those things come clicking and clutching at us.”

They followed the unmistakable trail the gray creatures had left, across the vast lawns of what had been Phalloon’s estate, then onto the highway that led to the Commune of Indoberia. Kaslo stopped at the edge of the thoroughfare and knelt to examine the footprints.

But he didn’t find any. All he found was a myriad of round holes, each wider than the thickness of his thumb. When he inserted an index finger in one of them, it went in all the way to the knuckle.

“They didn’t have proper feet,” Bodwon said. “More like spikes. Eight to ten legs, hard to tell because they never stopped moving, and then these big claws on the front.”

Novo Bantry’s chthonic fauna tended to be soft-bodied; few of them had survived the millennia of human settlement. Kaslo had seen crustaceans on other worlds. “Not so big, though. And they lived in the seas.”

He straightened up and they walked on. Kaslo kept glancing at the pockmarked road. It had been built to be impermeable, but that condition had been dependent on the constrained energies that bound its components together. The universe’s new rules didn’t allow for such sophisticated technology, and now the millennia-old highway was crumbling to dust. He thought of all that humanity had built on this once-mellow world—the bridges, the slideways, the grand towers and subterranean complexes—and imagined what it must have been like for the people on and in and under them the moment when the powers that sustained the structures abruptly ceased to apply.

“Let’s speed it up,” Kaslo said, quickening his pace.

They walked an hour and a little more, staying to the center of the pavement, spring-guns cocked and at the ready. Kaslo paused from time to time to consult the speculus. But each time it reported nothing.

The lack of company puzzled Kaslo at first, then began to worry him. Indoberia had been a well-populated city. The death toll from its collapse would have been massive, but there should have been survivors, even if they had lost their reason and the gentle habits of civilization. Stragglers had still been coming in to the castle and its village right up until the clicking gray things had swept over the stockade.

But as they made their way through the outer ring of houses and vendories, the two men saw and heard nothing. The speculus cast its peculiar energies wide and reported no contact.

“Where is everybody?” Bodwon said, dropping his voice to a whisper in the silence that surrounded them.

Kaslo moved on, following the trail of holes. Farther on, it departed from the main road and crossed what had been a great square in which the Commune’s Festival of Conjugations used to be held. The far side had been occupied by an eight-story building, each floor with a colonnaded arcade facing the open space, where persons of all classes and degrees had mingled to watch the proceedings. The structure was now a long, wide heap of rubble, with blocks and shattered columns jutting out at random. The gray tide had climbed it and moved on.

Kaslo stopped halfway across the square. “What’s that?”

He trained the speculus on one of the multi-punctured flagstones just before the pile of debris began and bade it enlarge the image.

“What is it?” Bodwon said, his head moving from side to side, the spring-gun following his shifting gaze.

“Not sure.” Kaslo went forward cautiously, paused and looked again through the speculus. “I think it’s a piece of one of them.”

It turned out to be two pieces. Kaslo stooped, drew a long-bladed knife from a boot, and gingerly prodded the objects. One rolled away from the other, and he said, “Did they have their eyes on stalks?”

“I think so,” the other man said. “There was something sticking up at the front.”

“Well, one of them lost his.” Kaslo stood and looked up at the sloping wall of debris. He could see the broad trail of holes passing straight over, but when he used the speculus, he saw where a few score marks veered off to one side. “There,” he said.

Weapons ready, they made their way up the heap of broken stone, at first stumbling and then having to sling their weapons and go on all fours. The side trail continued until it ended where two long slabs of white stone had fallen against each other, making a tall, triangular gap.

Kaslo signaled for Bodwon to come in from one side, while he approached from the other, inching over the broken stones, spring-gun ready. The space beneath the leaning slabs was mostly in shadow, but the angle of the morning sun gave Bodwon the better view.

“Something is moving.”

Kaslo put down the spring-gun and took up the speculus. “Illuminate,” he said. A moment later he called to the other man. “It’s one of ours.”

They clambered to the gap, Bodwon reaching it first. He swore bitterly, turned to Kaslo. “It’s Pol.”

“Let’s get him out of there.”

“No,” said a voice from inside the crevice, barely more than a whisper. “If you try to move me, I’ll come apart.”

Kaslo stood crouched before the opening and aimed the speculus. Then he swore more direly than Bodwon had.

“Have you got any water?” said the papery voice.

Kaslo passed in his canteen.

“What’s wrong with him?” Bodwon asked.

It was Polpero who answered, his voice strengthened by the drink. “I cut the one that had me,” he said. “Waited until I could see a place to hide, then I cut its eyes off.”

He coughed and took another swallow. Bodwon said, “Take it easy.”

“No,” the answer came. “I’ve been waiting for you to come, so I can tell you. And give you this.”

Something came weakly flying out of the gap to clatter on the stones at Kaslo’s feet. It was a hunting knife, but most of its blade was eaten away. Flecks of a green substance had pitted the remaining metal and charred the hardwood handle.

The op picked it up, then put it in the satchel he wore on a strap slung over his neck and shoulder. “Tell us,” he said.

The story came haltingly, on failing breath. Polpero had been chopping wood when the clicking invaders came over the stockade. Before he could even swing his ax at it, one of them seized him in its outsized pincer and threw him over its back where he remained pinned by the giant claw. All around him, the people of the village were suffering the same fate.

“I had my knife,” he said, “but I had to wait until I saw the right place. Then I saw this.” He indicated the leaning slabs. “I grabbed its eye stalks and sawed right through.”

The thing had made a weird noise, like heavy fabric ripping. It stumbled on the slope, but Polpero’s hope that it would drop him was not realized. It clung tighter, squeezing the breath from him and driving the spikes that lined each jaw of the pincer into his back and belly.

“I knew I was going,” he said, “so I stuck the knife in the hinge, three, four times. Green stuff shot out. Oh, I tell you, it burned. But it let me go, and I crawled into here.”

But that was not the end of the story. Not every one of the creatures had taken a captive; now, while the rest of the herd moved on, the unencumbered dozen or so gathered at the opening to the gap and picked at Polpero with their claws.

“I was too far in. They couldn’t get a good grip.” He let out a ragged breath and took another swallow from the canteen. “But they tore me up some.”

“We’ve got to get him back to the castle,” said Bodwon. “The wizard—”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Polpero said, “except where we all go.”

“He’s right,” Kaslo said. He offered the other man the speculus. “You want to see?”

Bodwon had the look of a man desperate for an alternative when he knew there wasn’t one. He turned away, breathing hard.

Kaslo spoke to Polpero. “You did well. Are you ready?” He lifted the spring-gun.

From the gap came the faintest chuckle. “You have no idea.”

Bodwon turned back again, and gently pushed Kaslo’s weapon aside. “I’ll do it,” he said. He set himself and aimed. “Goodbye, Pol.”

“Try not to miss,” said the dying man, with a laugh that became a wet cough. Then came the twang of the heavy flexi-ceramic spring being released from its catch, followed instantly by the thwack of a bullet striking bone and crashing into the softness behind it.

Kaslo reached in and retrieved his canteen, then they piled blocks of broken stone against the gap until it was sealed. It probably wouldn’t keep the vermin out, Kaslo thought. He looked to Bodwon. “Are you all right?”

“I’ve been better.” But the man shook himself, recocked the spring-gun, and said, “I’ll do.”

“Yes,” said Kaslo, “you will.”

Bodwon pointed with his chin to the top of the pile. “We keep going?”

Kaslo was thinking. After a moment, he said. “I still need to see where they went. But first . . .”

He clambered back down the debris pile until he came to where the gray thing’s eye stalks lay. He picked one up, very carefully. A droplet of green ichor fell from the severed end. Holding the thing at arm’s length, he shook it repeatedly until it was drained, then did the same with the other before putting them both in the satchel.

“I think,” he said, “the boss will be able to do something with these.”

Bodwon’s face said he didn’t doubt it. But then, Kaslo thought, the man had been on the receiving end of a wizardly blast from Obron when he and Polpero had backed up Phalloon’s attempt to retake the castle. Still, as they climbed the pile and looked at the landscape of rubble and destitution that had been Indoberia of the shining towers, he realized that he was coming around to the same point of view.

They went on into what had been the Commune’s heart, finding vast heaps of shattered crystal where spires had once stood. They had to pick their way across the lower slopes, flinging themselves clear when unstable inclines sent avalanches of razor-edged shards toward them. Now they followed not only the trail of holes—which Kaslo was surprised to see penetrated even the larger blocks of clear stone—but a scattering of green dots.

“Good to know they can be hurt,” Bodwon said at the sight of a green splash.

Kaslo did not reply. They were nearing the top of a low rise of dark stone; he thought it might be the tumbled ruins of the Commune’s connaissarium. Beyond was another square half-filled with rubble. The op could make out motion on the far side, and he showed the other man a hand signal that meant stop and lie down. Then together they crawled to the top of the slope.

Bodwon stared and swore, then swore again. “That can’t be,” he said.

Kaslo stared at the swirl of dark colors and turgid motion dissolving in upon itself and said, “But it can’t be anything else.”

• • • •

“A whimsy?” Obron said.

“I’ve stood in the forward lounge of a lot of spaceships,” Kaslo said, “and watched us approach them. No question it was a whimsy.” He shook his head. “On a planet. And stable. A hole in the world.”

Obron turned from where he’d been sitting at his lectern, and scanned his collection of ancient books. After a moment, he reached for a fat green libram, saying, “Now it makes sense.” He leafed through its dry pages, then came to what he was looking for. His finger stabbed at the text. “Yes,” he said, mostly to himself, “seventh plane.”

He read a few more lines, then snapped the volume shut and replaced it. When he looked up at the other two men his expression was that of one who’d been searching everywhere for a lost collar stud and finally found it far back under the wardrobe.

Kaslo knew his own face wore a more sour look. “It’s important?” he said.

Obron blinked then refocused himself. “Very,” he said. “Of course, I always knew it had to be interplanar. Now we’ve not only confirmed that but we even know which plane.”

A new thought occurred to him, and he pulled down a heavy folio bound in scaly red leather. He opened it on the lectern and began to leaf through, humming tunelessly. After a few pages, he stopped to read a passage, then quickly flicked through the book to another section. As he read the second text, the humming stopped and the wizard became very still. Now when he looked up, he had the face of a man who’d sought a lost stud under the wardrobe and found, looking back at him, the chill face of death.

“Tell us,” Kaslo said.

Obron’s gaze flicked about the room, as if anything might be lurking in the high shadows of the ceiling. “I think I know,” he whispered, “what so terrified Phalloon.”

“What?”

The thaumaturge shivered, though there was no draft from the window. Outside, the mid-afternoon sun was shining, a bar of light falling through the narrow window, but Obron’s thin shoulders shook again.

“I cannot speak the name,” he whispered. “Indeed, I must make an effort not even to think about it. Even the slightest connection might be enough to . . .” He moved his hands as if wiping away letters chalked in the air, then stared into the middle distance.

“Not good enough!” Kaslo’s voice reverberated off the stone walls and Bodwon, standing behind and to his side, jumped.

Obron looked at his security man, his aspect once more deeply fatigued. “Not by your standards,” he said, nodding. “But those standards no longer apply.”

The op still had not got his head around it. Sympathetic association meant that things which shared just one thing in common could be closely connected by a practitioner who had sufficient will and the expertise with which to focus it.

Take a doll and give it the name of a person; dress it up in some fragment of the target’s clothing; add some of his hair and fingernail clippings. The effigy was now connected to the person, tightly connected if the wizard had the will and skill.

Though the target be halfway around the planet, the doll could be made to speak and tell where he was hiding. Though he be wearing armor behind stone walls, a dart thrust into the doll would pierce his heart. A calling spell could bring him marching without rest or sleep to where the wizard waited.

To Kaslo, it made no sense. He was a man of the bygone age; he was beginning to think he could wholly never adapt to the new. He took a breath and let it out slowly. “So what do we do?”

Obron scraped his lower teeth across his upper lip. “Learn,” he said, after a moment. His gaze went to the workbench, where Kaslo had deposited Polpero’s corroded knife and the eye stalks he had cut from his captor. “Seventh,” he said. “Yes.”

He got up and approached the bench, found a rod of polished obsidian and used it to stir the severed stalks. He rummaged in a drawer and withdrew a small glass cube that had a different colored lens in each side. With this, he peered at the eyes, making little grunts that said he was seeing what he expected.

“Hypothesis,” he said. “The creatures came through the whimsy from the seventh plane and returned there. They came because they were sent, and they went back with what they were sent for.”

“People?” Kaslo said.

Obron ignored the question. “The fire elemental was from this plane, but was roused and directed from the seventh. Elementals are simple and ubiquitous; the spells to command them are, to use a word, elementary. That is why even a beginner like Phalloon could summon one.”

“But we’re not dealing with a beginner,” said Kaslo, “are we?”

“Turn your thoughts away from that direction,” Obron said. “If you provide a connection, the interplanar barrier no longer obstructs. You open, as it were, a wide conduit.”

The wizard paused and thought some more. “And the same barrier meant that human agents—evil human agents—had to be employed.” He looked at Kaslo. “I refer to the men from Cheddle who attacked us.”

“They were certainly evil,” Kaslo agreed.

“You perhaps do not know,” Obron said, “that evil is a naturally occurring phenomenon on one of the other planes. Something like weather. When it becomes highly active—a storm, if you will—it can seep into our plane and contaminate the weak of spirit.”

“From another plane?” Kaslo said. “The seventh?”

“There you go,” said his employer, with the kind of smile that would encourage a none-too-bright child. “You’re not as inept as you think you are.”

“You said we had to learn.” Kaslo made a gesture that took in the welter of books and paraphernalia. “I’m not going to be much use at it here.”

“You won’t be learning here,” said Obron, “though I will be.” His long finger pointed to the window. “You’re going on another reconnaissance.”

Kaslo felt Bodwon stiffen beside him. He asked the question that was on both their minds. “To watch the whimsy?”

“No,” said Obron, shaking his head. “To enter it.”

© 2014 by Matthew Hughes.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.

DE LA TIERRA

Emma Bull

The piano player drums away with her left hand, dropping all five fingers onto the keys as if they weigh too much to hold up. The rhythms bounce off the rhythms of what her right hand does, what she sings. It’s like there’s three different people in that little skinny body, one running each hand, the third one singing. But they all know what they’re doing.

He sucks a narrow stream of Patrón over his tongue and lets it heat up his mouth before he swallows. He wishes he knew how to play an instrument. He wouldn’t mind going up at the break, asking if he could sit in, holding up a saxophone case, maybe, or a clarinet. He’d still be here at 3 a.m., jamming, while the waiters mopped the floors.

That would be a good place to be at 3 a.m. Much better than rolling up the rug, burning the gloves, dropping the knife over the bridge rail. Figuratively speaking.

They aren’t that unalike, she and he. He has a few people in his body, too, and they also know what they’re doing.

The difference is, his have names.

“¿Algo más?” The wide-faced waitress sounds Salvadoran. She looks too young to be let into a bar, let alone make half a bill a night in tips. She probably sends it all home to mami. The idea annoys him. Being annoyed annoys him, too. No skin off his nose if she’s not blowing it at the mall.

He actually is too young to legally swallow this liquor in a public place, but of course he’s never carded. A month and a half and he’ll be twenty-one. Somebody ought to throw a party. “Nada. Grácias.”

She smiles at him. “Where you from? Chihuahua?”

“Burbank.” Why does she care where he’s from? He shouldn’t have answered in Spanish.

“No, your people—where they from? My best friend’s from Chihuahua. You look kinda like her brother.”

“Then he looks like an American.”

She actually seems hurt. “But everybody’s from someplace.”

Does she mean “everybody,” or “everybody who’s brown like us?” “Yep. Welcome to Los Angeles.”

He and the tequila bid each other goodbye, like a hug with a friend at the airport. Then he pushes the glass at the waitress. She smacks it down on her tray and heads for the bar. There, even the luggage disappears from sight. He rubs the bridge of his nose.

Positive contact, Chisme answers from above his right ear. Chisme is female and throaty, for him, anyway. All numbers optimal to high optimal. Operation initialized.

He lays a ten on the table and pins the corner down with the candle jar. He wishes it were a twenty, for the sake of the Salvadoran economy. But big tippers are memorable. He stands up and heads for the door.

Behind him he hears the piano player sweep the keys, low to high, and it hits his nerves like a scream. He almost turns—

Adrenal limiter enabled. Suppression under external control.

Just like everything else about him. All’s right with the world. He breathes deep and steps out into the streetlights and the smell of burnt oil.

The bar’s in Koreatown. The target is in downtown L.A. proper, in the jewelry district. Always start at least five miles from the target, in case someone remembers the unmemorable. Show respect for the locals, even if they’re not likely to believe you exist.

He steps into the shadow that separates two neon window signs and slips between, fastlanes. He’s down at Hill and Broadway in five minutes. He rubs the bridge of his nose again. Three percent discharge, says Chisme. After three years he can tell by the way it feels, but it’s reflex to check.

The downtown air is oven-hot, dry and still, even at this hour, and the storm drains smell. They’ll keep that up until the rains come and wash them clean months from now. He turns the corner and stops before the building he wants.

There’s a jewelry store on the first floor. Security grills lattice the windows, and the light shines down on satin-upholstered stands with nothing on them. Painted on the inside of the glass is, “Gold Mart/Best prices on/Gold/Platinum/Chains & Rings.” Straight up, below the fifth floor windows, there’s a faded sign in block letters: “Eisenberg & Sons.”

Time to call another of the names. He massages his right palm with his left thumb.

Magellan responds. Not with words, because words aren’t what Magellan does. Against the darkness at the back of the store, white lines form, like a scratchboard drawing. He knows they’re not really inside the store, but his eye doesn’t give a damn. The pictures show up wherever he’s looking. This one is a cutaway of the building: the stairwell up the left side, the landings, the hallways on each floor. And the target, like a big lens flare . . . at the front of the fourth floor.

They’re always on the top floor. Always. He focuses on the fifth floor of the diagram and massages his hand again. The zoom-in is so fast he staggers. Vertical axis restored, Chisme murmurs.

The fifth floor seems to be all storage; the white lines draw wireframe cartons and a few pieces of broken furniture in the rooms.

Not right, not right. Top floor makes for a faster getaway, better protection from the likes of him. Ignoring strategy can only mean that the strategy has changed. He probes his upper left molar with his tongue, and Biblio’s sexless whisper, like sand across rock, says, Refreshing agent logs. Information updated at oh-two-oh-three.

Fifteen minutes ago is good enough. He thinks through the logs, looking for surprises, new behaviors, deviations in the pattern. Nada. His fourth-floor sighting will be in the next update as an alert, an anomaly. He’s contributed to the pool of knowledge. Whoopee for him.

He stands inside the doorway, trying to look like scenery, but every second he waits makes it worse. If the target gets the wind up, a nice routine job will have gone down the crapper. And if the neighborhood watch spooks and the LAPD sends a squad, the target will for sure get the wind up.

But it’s not routine. He knows it, he’s made and trained to know it. The target is not where it ought to be. The names are no help: They follow orders. Just as he does. No te preocupes, hijo. Do the job until it does for you; then there’ll be another just like you to clean up the mess, and you’ll be a note in the logs.

Blood pressure adjusted, Chisme notes. Not an admonishment, just a fact. The names give him facts. It’s up to him what to do with them. To hell with the neighborhood watch. He touches thumb to middle finger on each hand, stands still, breathes from the belly. Chisme isn’t the only one who can do his tune-up.

He takes the chameleon key from his pocket, casual as any guy who’s left something on his desk at work—oops, yeah, officer, the wife’ll kill me if I don’t bring those tickets home tonight. The key looks like a brass Schlage; he could hand it to the cop and smile. But when it goes in the lock—

He feels it under his fingers, like a little animal shrugging. It’s changing shape in there, finding the right notches and grooves and filling them. When it feels like a brass key again, he turns it, and the lock opens easy as a peck on the cheek.

Thirty seconds on the alarm, according to the documents in the archives of the security service that installed it. Biblio tells him what to punch on the keypad, and the display stops flashing, “ENTER CODE NOW” and offers him a placid, “SYSTEM DISARMED.” This part is never hard. If a target showed up in one of the wannabe mansionettes on Chandler at four in the morning, he could walk right in and the homeowner would never know.

If nothing went wrong after the walking-in part, of course.

The stairs in front of him are ill-lit, sheathed in cracked linoleum and worn rubber nail-down treads. He smells dust, ammonia, and old cigarette smoke. But not the target, not yet.

He starts up toward the next floor.

• • • •

The evening before, he got an official commendation for his outstanding record. He had to go to Chateau Marmont, up the hill from Sunset, to get it, and on a Friday, too, so he had to pay ten dollars for valet parking to get his head patted. Good dog. If he could fastlane on his own time, it would solve so many problems. But hey, at least there was still such a thing as “his own time.”

She was out on the patio by the pool, stretched in a lounge chair. From there a person could see a corner of the Marmont bungalow where Belushi had overdosed. He was pretty sure she knew that; they liked things like celebrity death spots.

Some of them almost anyone could recognize—if almost anyone knew to look for them. They’re always perfect, of their kind. That’s why so many of them like L.A., where everybody gets extra credit for looking perfect. Try going unnoticed in Ames, Iowa, looking like that.

She had wavy golden hair to her shoulders, and each strand sparkled when the breeze shifted it. She wore a blue silk halter top, and little white shorts that showed how long and tan her legs were. She could’ve been one of those teen-star actresses pretending to be a Forties pin-up, except that she was too convincing. She sipped at a mojito without getting any lipstick on the glass.

For fun, he jabbed his molar with his tongue to see if Biblio could tell him anything about her—name, age, rank. Nada, y nada más. None of them were ever in the database. Didn’t hurt to try, though.

“Your disposal record is remarkable,” she said, with no preface.

“I do my job.” He wondered what other agents’ records were. He was pretty sure there were others, though he’d never met them. She didn’t ask him to sit down, so he didn’t.

“A vital one, I assure you.” She gazed out at the view: the L.A. basin all the way to Santa Monica, just beginning to light up for the night, and a very handsome sunset. No smog or haze. Could her kind make that happen, somehow? They’d more or less made him, but he was nothing compared to a clear summer evening in Los Angeles.

She turned to look at him fully, suddenly intent. “You understand that, don’t you? That your work is essential to us?”

He shrugged. A direct gaze from one of them had tied better tongues than his.

“You’re saving our way of life—even our lives themselves. These others come from places where they’re surrounded by ignorant, superstitious peasants. They have no conception of how to blend in here, what the rules and customs are. And their sheer numbers . . .” She shook her head. “A stupid mistake by one of them, and we could all be revealed.”

“So it’s a quality-of-life thing?” he asked. “I thought the problem was limited resources.”

She pressed her lips together and withdrew her gaze. The evening seemed immediately colder and less sweetly scented. “Our first concern, of course. We’re very close to the upper limit of the carrying capacity of this area. Already there are . . .” (she closed her tilted blue eyes for a moment, as if she had a pain somewhere) “. . . empty spots. We are the guardians of this place. If we let these invaders overrun it, they’ll strip it like locusts, as they strip their native lands.”

A swift movement in the shrubbery—a hummingbird, shooting from one blossom to another. She smiled at it, and he thought, Lucky damned bird, even though he didn’t want to.

“I still don’t get it,” he said, his voice sounding like a truck horn after hers. “Why not help them out? Say, ‘Bienvenidos, brothers and sisters, let’s all go to Disneyland?’ Then show them how it’s done, and send them someplace where they can have their forty acres and a mule? They’re just like you, aren’t they?”

She turned from the bird and met his eyes. If he thought he’d felt the force of her before, now he knew he’d felt nothing, nothing. “Have you seen many of them,” she asked, “who are just like me?”

He’s seen one or two who might have become like her, in time, with work. But none so perfect, so powerful, so unconsciously arrogant, so serenely sure, as she and the others who hold his leash.

• • • •

He’s on the first landing before he remembers to check the weapon. Chisme monitors that, too, and would have said something if it wasn’t registering. But it’s not Chisme’s ass on the line (if, in fact, Chisme has one). Trust your homies, but check your own rifle.

He holds his left palm up in front of him in the gloom and makes a fist, then flexes his wrist backward. At the base of his palm the tiny iron needles glow softly, row on row, making a rosy light under his skin.

He used to wonder how they got the needles in there without a scar, and why they glow when he checks them, and how they work when he wants them to. Now he only thinks about it when he’s on the clock. Part of making sure that he can still call some of the day his own.

When he finishes here, he’ll be debriefed. That’s how he thinks of it. He’ll go to whatever place Magellan shows him, do whatever seems to be expected of him, and end by falling asleep. When he wakes up the needles will be there again.

He goes up the stairs quiet and fast, under his own power. If he fastlanes this close, the target will know he’s here. He’s in good shape: He can hurry up three flights of stairs and still breathe easy. That’s why he’s in this line of work now. Okay, that and being in the wrong place at the right time.

Introspection is multitasking, and multitasking can have unpleasant consequences. That’s what the names are for, hijo. Keep your head in the job.

Half the offices here are vacant. The ones that aren’t have temporary signs, the company name in a reasonably businesslike typeface, coughed out of the printer and taped to the door. Bits of tape from the last company’s sign still show around the edges. The hallway’s overhead fluorescent is like twilight, as if there’s a layer of soot on the inside of its plastic panel.

At least it’s all offices; one less problem to deal with, grácias a San Miguel. Plenty of the buildings on Broadway are apartments above the first two floors, with Mom and Dad and four kids in a one-bedroom with not enough windows and no air conditioning. People sleep restless in a place like that.

Which makes him wonder: Why didn’t the target pick a place like that? Why make this easier?

On the fourth floor, the hall light buzzes on and off, on and off. He feels a pre-headache tightness behind his eyebrows as his eyes try to correct, and his heart rate climbs. Is the light the reason for this floor? Does the target know about him, how he works, and picked this floor because of it?

Chisme gives his endocrine system a twitch, and he stops vibrating. He’s a well-kept secret. And if he isn’t, all the more reason to get this done right.

He walks the length of the hallway, hugging the wall, pausing to listen before crossing the line of fire of each closed door. He doesn’t expect trouble until the farthest door, but it’s the trouble you don’t expect that gets you. Even to his hearing, he doesn’t make a sound.

Beside the last door, the one at the front of the building, he presses up against the wall and listens. A car goes through the intersection below; a rattle on the sidewalk may be a shopping cart. Nothing from inside the room. He breathes in deep and slow, and smells, besides the dry building odors, the scent of fresh water.

He probes his right palm with his thumb, and when Magellan sends him the diagram of the fourth floor, he turns his head to line it up with the real surfaces of the building. Here’s the hall, and the door, and the room beyond it. There’s the target: shifting concentric circles of light, painfully bright. Unless everything is shot to hell, it’s up against the front wall, near the window. And if everything is shot to hell, there’s nothing he can do except go in there and find out.

At that, he feels an absurd relief. We who are about to die. From here on, it’s all action, as quick as he can make it, and no more decisions. Quick, because as soon as he fastlanes the target will know he’s here. He reaches down inside himself and makes it happen.

He turns and kicks the door in, and feels the familiar heat in nerve and muscle tissue, tequila-fueled. He brings his left arm up, aims at the spot by the window.

Fire, his brain orders. But the part of him that really commands the weapon, whatever that part is, is frozen.

• • • •

The coyotes mostly traffic in the ones who can pass. After all, it’s bad for business if customers you smuggle into the Promised Land are never heard from again by folks back in the old ’hood.

But sometimes, if cash flow demands, they make exceptions. Coyotes sell hope, after all. Unreasonable, ungratifiable hope just costs more. The coyotes tell them about the Land of Opportunity and neglect to mention that there’s no way they’ll get a piece of it.

Then the coyotes take their payment, dump them in the wilderness, and put a couple of steel-jackets in them before leaving.

He’s done cleanup in the desert and found the dried-out bodies, parchment skin and deformed bone, under some creosote bush at the edge of a wash. The skin was often split around the bullet holes, it was so dry. Of course, if they’d been dead, there wouldn’t have been anything to find. Some that he came across could still open their eyes, or speak.

• • • •

Maybe in the dark this one can pass. Maybe she looks like an undernourished street kid with a thyroid problem. In the pitch-dark below an underpass from a speeding car, maybe.

She should never have left home. She should be dying in the desert. She should be already dead, turned to dust and scattered by the oven-hot wind.

Her body looks like it’s made of giant pipe cleaners. Her long, skinny legs are bent under her, doubled up like a folding carpenter’s ruler, and the joints are the wrong distance from each other. Her ropy arms are wrapped around her, and unlike her legs, they don’t seem jointed at all—or it’s just the angle that makes them seem to curve like tentacles.

And she’s white. Not Anglo-white or even albino-white, but white like skim milk, right down to the blueish shadows that make her skin look almost transparent. Fish-belly white.

Her only clothing is a plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves torn off, in what looks like size XXL Tall. It’s worn colorless in places, and those spots catch the street light coming through the uncovered window. The body under the shirt is small and thin and childlike. Her head, from above, is a big soiled milkweed puff, thin gray-white hair that seems to have worn itself out pushing through her scalp.

The office is vacant. An old steel desk stands on end in the middle of the room. Empty filing cabinet drawers make a lopsided tower in a corner. Half a dozen battered boxes of envelopes are tumbled across the floor, their contents spilled and stained. But the room’s alive with small bright movements.

It’s water—trickling down the walls, running in little rivulets across the vinyl flooring, plopping intermittently in fat drops from the ceiling. Water from nowhere. From her.

He hears the words coming out of his mouth even as he thinks, This isn’t going to work. “I’m here to send you back.” Once one of the poor bastards becomes his job, there’s no “sending back.” His left arm is up, his palm turned out. He should fire.

The milkweed fluff rocks slowly backward. Her face is under it. Tiny features on an out-thrusting skull, under a flat, receding brow, so that her whole face forms around a ridge down its middle. Only the eyes aren’t tiny. They’re stone-gray without whites or visible pupils, deep-set round disks half the size of his palm.

She opens her little lipless mouth, but he doesn’t hear anything. She licks around the opening with a pale-gray pointed tongue and tries again.

“Tú eres un mortal.”

You’re a mortal. A short speech in a high, breathy little-girl voice, but long enough to hear that her accent is familiar.

He’s lightheaded, and his ears are ringing. He needs adjusting. Damn it, where’s Chisme?

Wait—he knows what this is. He’s afraid.

She’s helpless, not moving, not even paying attention. All he has to do is trigger the weapon, and she’ll have a hundred tiny iron needles in her. Death by blood poisoning in thirty seconds or less—quicker and cleaner than the coyote’s steel-jacketed rounds would have been. Why can’t he fire?

He tries again, in Spanish this time—as if that will make it true. “I’m sending you back.”

Something around her brows and the corners of her eyes suggests hope. She rattles into speech, but he can’t make out a word of it. He recognizes it, though. It’s the Indio language his grandmother used. He doesn’t know its name; to his abuela, it was just speaking, and Spanish was the city language she struggled with.

He can’t trust his voice, so he shakes his head at her. Does she understand that? His left arm feels heavy, stretched out in front of him.

Suddenly anger cuts through his dumb-animal fear. She’s jerking him around. She found out somehow where his mother’s family is from, and she’s playing him with it. He doesn’t have to make her understand. All he has to do is shoot her.

“You are not of the People, but you are of the land.” She’s switched back to Spanish, and he hears the disappointment in her voice. “You cannot send me back to something that is not there.”

“Whose fault is that?” Don’t talk to her! But he’s angry.

“I do not know who it was.” She shakes her head, less like a “no” than like a horse shaking off flies. “But the spring is gone. The water sank to five tall trees below the stone. The willows died when they could not reach it.”

Willows and cottonwoods, they mark subsurface water like green surveyor’s flags all through the dry country. He remembers willows around the springs in the hills behind his grandmother’s village. “So you’re going to move north and use up everything here, too?”

“¿Que?” Her white, flattened brow presses down in anger or confusion, or both. “How can I use up what is here? Is it so different here, the water and the land and the stone?”

There has to be a correct answer to that. Those who sent him after her probably have one. But he’s not even sure what she’s asking, let alone what he ought to answer. Nothing, you moron. And what does he expect her to say? “Sí, sí, I’m here to steal your stuff”? They both know why she’s here. If she’d just make a move, he could trigger the weapon.

“We keep, not use. How to say . . .” She blinks three times, rapidly, and it occurs to him that that might be the equivalent, for her, of gazing into space while trying to remember something. “Protect and guard. Is it not so here? Mortals use. We protect and guard. They ask for help—water for growing food, health and strength for their children. They bring tobacco, cornmeal, honey to thank us. We smell the presents and come. Do the People not do this here?”

He tries to imagine that piece of blonde perfection by the Chateau Marmont pool being summoned by the smell of cornmeal and doing favors for campesinos.

The word triggers his memory, like Chisme toggling his endocrine system. He recalls his last visit to his abuela’s house, when he was eight. She was too weak to get out of bed for more than a few minutes at a time. She was crying, yelling at his mom, saying that somebody had to take the tamales to the spring. His mom said to him, as she heated water for his bath, “You see what it’s like here? When your cousins call you pocho, you remember it’s better to be American than a superstitious campesino like them.”

He’d grown up believing that, until they found him, remade him, and sent him out to do their work. In that hot, moist room, he feels cold all over. To hide it, he laughs. “Welcome to the Land of the Free, chica. No handouts, no favors, no fraternizing with the lower orders.”

Her eyes darken, as if a drop of ink fell into each one. Fear surges in him again. You should have shot her! But tears like water mixed with charcoal well up, spill over, draw dark gray tracks on her white, sloping cheeks. “Please—it is not true, tell me so. I have nowhere to go. The machines that are loud and smell bad come and tear the trees from the soil, break mountains and take them away. They draw the water away from the sweet dark places under the earth. Poison comes into the water everywhere, how I do not know, but creatures are made sick who drink it. I tried to stay by the spring, but the water was gone, and the machines came. There was no room for me.”

“There’s no room for you here,” he snaps. But he thinks, You’re so skinny, Jesucristo, you could live in a broom closet. There must be some place to fit you in.

She shakes her head fiercely, smears the gray tears across her cheeks with her fingers. “Here there are places where the machines do not go. I know this. The People here are inmigrantes from the cold lands—they must know how it is. They will understand, and let us help them guard the land.”

Already there are . . . empty spots, the blonde by the pool had said. But just this one little one? Would she be so bad?

No. All of his targets were each just one. Together they were hundreds. “They’re guarding it from all of you, so you don’t use everything up. Like locusts.”

She goes still as a freeze-frame. “Mortals use. The People guard and protect. Surely they know this!”

What is she saying? “The power. Whatever it is, in the land. It’s drying up.”

“The People let the magic run through us like water through our fingers. We do not hoard it or hide it or wall it in. If we did, it would dry up, yes. Who told you this lie?”

“They did. The ones like you.” Have you seen many who are just like me? he hears the blonde saying, in that voice that makes everything wise and true.

She hasn’t moved, but she seems closer, her eyes wider, her hair shifting like dry grass in the wind. There’s no wind. He wants to back away, run.

And he remembers that night in his grandmother’s house, after the fight about the tamales. He remembers being tucked up in blankets on the floor, and not being able to sleep because it stayed in his head—the angry voices, his abuela crying, his mamá cleaning up after dinner with hard, sharp movements. Nobody’s mad at you, he’d told himself. But he’d still felt sick and scared. So he was awake when the tap, tap, tap sounded on the window across the room. On the glass bought with money his mother had sent home. And he’d raised his head and looked.

The next morning he’d told his mother he’d had a bad dream. That was how he’d recalled it ever since: a bad dream, and a dislike for the little house he never saw again. But now he remembered. That night he saw the Devil, come to take his mother and grandmother for the sin of anger. He’d frozen the scream in his throat. If he screamed, they would wake and run in, and the Devil would see them. If it took him instead, they would be safe.

What he’d seen, before he’d closed his eyes to wait for death, was a white face with a high, flattened forehead, gray-disk eyes, and a lipless mouth, and thin white fingers pressed against the glass. It was her, or one of her kind, come down from the spring looking for the offering.

“It is not true,” she hisses, thrusting her face forward. “None of my kind would say we devour and destroy. This is mortals’ lies, to make us feared, to drive us away!”

He is afraid of her. He could snap those little pipe cleaner arms, but that wouldn’t save him from her anger. It rages in the room like the dust storms that can sand paint off a car.

She has to be wrong. If she isn’t, then for three years he has—He had no choice. Did he? Three years of things, hundreds of them, that should have lived forever.

“Your kind want you kept out,” he spits back at her. “You don’t get it, do you? They sent me to kill you.”

He’d thought she was still before. Now she’s an outcrop of white stone. He can’t look away from her wide, wide eyes. Then her mouth opens and a sound comes out, soft at first, so he doesn’t recognize it as laughter.

“You will drive us back or kill us? You are too late. Jaguars have come north across the Rio Grande. The wild magic is here. We will restore the balance in spite of the ignorant inmigrantes. And when we are all strong again, they will see how weak they are alone.”

She moves. He thinks she’s standing up, all in one smooth motion. But her head rises, her arms shrink and disappear, her bent legs curve, coil. He’s looking into her transformed face: longer, flatter, tapered, serpentine. The flyaway hair is a bush of hair-thin spines. Rising out of it are a pair of white, many-pronged antlers.

Their points scrape the ceiling above his head. The cloud of tiny iron needles fills the air between him and her and he thinks, Did I fire?

But by then she’s behind him. There’s a band of pressure around his chest. He looks down to see her skin, silver-white scales shining in the street light, as the pressure compresses his ribs, his lungs. She’s wrapped around him, crushing him.

Chisme will know when he stops breathing. When it’s too late. The room is full of tiny stars. She’s so strong he can’t even struggle, can’t cry because he can’t breathe. He wants so much to cry.

The room is black, and far, far away. He feels a lipless mouth brush his forehead, and a voice whisper, “Duermes, hijo, y despiertas a un mundo más mejór.” The next world is supposed to be better. He hopes that’s true. He hopes that’s where he’s going.

• • • •

He lies with his eyes closed, taking stock. His ribs hurt, but he’s lying on something soft. Hurt means he’s not dead. Soft means he’s not on the floor of that office in the jewelry district, waiting for help.

He listens for the names. Nothing. He’s alone in his head.

He opens his eyes. The light is low, greenish and underwatery, and comes from everywhere at once. He’s back in their hands, then.

At the foot of whatever he’s lying on, a young guy looks up from a sheet of paper. Brown hair, hip-nerd round tortoiseshell glasses, oxford-cloth button-down under a cashmere sweater under a reassuring white coat. For a second he thinks he was wrong and this is a hospital, that’s a doctor.

“Hey,” says the guy. “How do you feel?”

Come on, lungs, take in air. Mouth, open. “Crummy.” He sounds as if his throat’s full of mud.

The guy draws breath across his teeth—a sympathy noise. “Yeah, you must have caught yourself a whopper.”

This one’s remarkably human, meaning damned near unremarkable. But the lenses in the glasses don’t distort the eyes behind them, because of course, they don’t have to correct for anything. He’s never seen one of them so determined to pass for normal. Is there a reason why this one’s here now? Are they trying to put him at ease, off his guard?

“Actually,” he answers, “it was a little kid who turned into a big-ass constrictor snake.”

“Wow. Have you ever gotten a shape-changer before?”

Bogus question. The guy knows his whole history, knows every job he’s done. But there’s no point in calling him on it. “Yeah.”

A moment of silence. Is he supposed to go on, talk it out? Is this some kind of post-traumatic stress therapy they’ve decided he needs? Or worse—is he supposed to apologize now for screwing up, for letting her get by him?

The guy shrugs, checks his piece of paper again. “Well, you’re going to be fine now. And you did good work out there.”

Careful. “Any job you can walk away from.”

“Quite honestly, we weren’t sure you had. Your ‘little kid’ put out enough distortion to swamp your connection with us. As far as we can tell it took almost thirty minutes for it to dissipate, after you . . . resolved the situation. Until then, we thought you’d been destroyed. Your handlers were beside themselves.”

Handlers—the names. He wonders what “beside themselves” looks like for Chisme and Biblio and Magellan, or whatever those names are when they aren’t in his head. He’s never heard emotion out of any of them.

He stares at the young guy, handsome as a soap opera doctor. He starts to laugh, which hurts his ribs. Has he dealt with shape-changers before? Hell, which of them isn’t a shape-changer? However they do it, they all look like what you want or need to see. Except the ones, bent and strange, who can’t pass. “I wasn’t sure I killed her.”

The young guy winces. “Killed” is not a nice word to immortals, apparently. “The site was completely cleansed. Very impressive. And I assure you, I’m not the only one saying so.”

“That’s nice.” He’s never failed to take out his target before this. He doesn’t know what punishment it is that he seems to have escaped. For this one moment, he feels bulletproof. “I talked to her, before I did it.”

Surprise—and alarm?—on the young guy’s face. “By the green earth! Are you nuts? You must have been warned against that.”

“She said her kind—your kind—aren’t a drain on the local resources. Or aren’t supposed to be. She implied you’d forgotten how it’s done.”

The soap-opera features register disgust. “Just the sort of thing one of them would say. They’re ignorant tree-dwellers. They have no idea how complex the modern world is. You know what they’re like.”

He doesn’t, actually. He’s supposed to kill them, not get acquainted with them. “Her folks were here first,” he says, as mildly as he can.

The young guy frowns, confused. “What does that have to do with it?” He shakes his head. “Don’t worry, we understand these things. We know what we’re doing. You can’t imagine what it would be like if we let down our guard.”

Pictures come into his head—from where? A picture of jaguars, glimmering gold and black like living jewelry, slipping through emerald leaves; of blue-and-red feathered birds singing with the sweet, high voices of children; of human men and women sitting with antlered serpents and coyote-headed creatures, sharing food and stories in a landscape of plenty; of the young white-coated guy, on a saxophone, jamming with the piano player in the Koreatown bar while a deer picked its way between the tables.

“You’ll be fine now,” the young guy repeats. “Get some sleep. When you wake up, you’ll be back home. I think you can expect a week or two off—go to Vegas or something, make a holiday of it.”

Of course, “get some sleep” is not just a suggestion. The guy makes a pressing-down motion, and the greeny light dims. He can feel the magic tugging at his eyelids, his brain. The young guy smiles, turns away, and is gone.

It’s a good plan—but not Vegas, oh, no. He’ll wake up in his apartment. He’ll get up and pack . . . what? Not much. Then he’ll head south. Past the border towns and the maquiladoras, past the giant commercial fields of cotton and tomatoes scented with chemicals and watered from concrete channels.

He wonders if they’ll be able to track him, if they’ll even care that he’s gone. For them, the world must be full of promising, desperate mortals. He’ll lose the names, the senses, the fastlane, but he’ll be traveling light; he won’t need them.

Eventually he’ll get to the wild places, rocky or green, desert or forest or shore. Home of the ignorant, superstitious peasants. That’s where he’ll stop. He’ll bake tortillas on a hot, flat stone, lay out sugarcane and tobacco.

Maybe nothing will come for them. Maybe he won’t even be able to tell if anything’s there. But just in case, he’ll tell stories. They’ll be about how to get past people like him, into the land where the magic is dying because it can’t flow like water.

Then he’ll move on, and do it again. Nothing makes up for the ones he’s stopped, but he can try, at least, to replace them.

Sleep, child, she’d said, and wake to a better world. He’d thought then she’d meant the sleep of death, but if she’d wanted to kill him, wouldn’t he be dead? He relaxes into the green darkness, the comforting magic. When he wakes this time, it’ll be the same old world. But some morning, for someone, someday, it will be different.

© 2004 by Emma Bull.

Originally published in The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Emma Bull is the author of Territory, a historical fantasy set in Tombstone, Arizona in 1881 (Tor Books). Other works include War for the Oaks, Bone Dance, and with Steven Brust, Freedom and Necessity. She’s a contributor to the Bordertown fantasy series, and is a writer and editor on Shadow Unit, a contemporary SF-suspense webfiction series (www.shadowunit.org).

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.

NOVELLA

FORLESEN

Gene Wolfe

When Emanuel Forlesen awoke, his wife was already up preparing breakfast. Forlesen remembered nothing, knew nothing but his name, for an instant did not remember his wife, or that she was his wife, or that she was a human being, or what human beings were supposed to look like.

At the time he woke he knew only his own name; the rest came later and is therefore suspect, colored by rationalization and the expectations of the woman herself and the other people. He moaned, and his wife said, “Oh, you’re awake. Better read the orientation.”

He said, “What orientation?”

“You don’t remember where you work, do you? Or what you’re supposed to do.”

He said, “I don’t remember a damn thing.”

“Well, read the orientation.”

He pushed aside the gingham spread and got out of bed, looking at himself, noticing ﬁrst the oddly deformed hands at the ends of his legs, then remembering the name for them: shoes. He was naked, and his wife turned her back to him politely while she prepared food. “Where the hell am I?” he asked.

“In our house.” She gave him the address. “In our bedroom.”

“We cook in the bedroom?”

“We sure do,” his wife said. “There isn’t any kitchen. There’s a parlor, the children’s bedroom, this room, and a bath. I’ve got an electric fry pan, a tabletop electric oven, and a coffeepot here; we’ll be all right.”

The conﬁdence in her voice heartened him. He said, “I suppose this used to be a one-bedroom house and we made the kitchen into a place for the kids.”

“Maybe it’s an old house and they made the kitchen into the bathroom when they got inside plumbing.”

He was dressing himself, having seen that she wore clothing, and that there was clothing too large for her piled on a chair near the bed. He said, “Don’t you know?”

“It wasn’t in the orientation.”

At ﬁrst he did not understand what she had said. He repeated, “Don’t you know?”

“I told you, it wasn’t in there. There’s just a diagram of the house, and there’s this room, the children’s room, the parlor, and the bath. It said that door there”—she gestured with the spatula—“was the bath, and that’s right, because I went in there to get the water for the coffee. I stay here and look after things and you go out and work; that’s what it said. There was some stuff about what you do, but I skipped that and read about what I do.”

“You didn’t know anything when you woke up either,” he said.

“Just my name.”

“What’s your name?”

“Edna Forlesen. I’m your wife—that’s what it said.”

He walked around the small table on which she had arranged the cooking appliances, wanting to look at her. “You’re sort of pretty,” he said.

“You are sort of handsome,” his wife said. “Anyway, you look tough and strong.” This made him walk over to the mirror on the dresser and try to look at himself. He did not know what he looked like, but the man in the mirror was not he. The image was older, fatter, meaner, more cunning, and stupider than he knew himself to be, and he raised his hands (the man in the mirror did likewise) to touch his features; they were what they should have been and he turned away. “That mirror’s no good,” he said.

“Can’t you see yourself? That means you’re a vampire.”

He laughed, and decided that that was the way he always laughed when his wife’s jokes weren’t funny. She said, “Want some coffee?” and he sat down.

She put a cup in front of him, and a pile of books. “This is the orientation,” she said. “You better read it—you don’t have much time.”

On top of the pile was a mimeographed sheet, and he picked that up ﬁrst. It said:

Welcome to the planet Planet.

You have awakened completely ignorant of everything. Do not be disturbed by this. It is NORMAL. Under no circumstances ever allow yourself to become excited, confused, angry, or FEARFUL. While you possess these capacities, they are to be regarded as incapacities.

Anything you may have remembered upon awakening is false. The orientation books provided you contain information of inestimable value. Master it as soon as possible, BUT DO NOT BE LATE FOR WORK. If there are no orientation books where you are, go to the house on your right (from the street). DO NOT GO TO THE HOUSE ON YOUR LEFT.

If you cannot ﬁnd any books, live like everyone else.

The white paper under this paper is your JOB ASSIGNMENT. The yellow paper is your TABLE OF COMMONLY USED WAITS AND MEASURES. Read these ﬁrst; they are more important than the books.

“Eat your egg,” his wife said. He tasted the egg. It was good but slightly oily, as though a drop of motor oil had found its way into the grease in which she had fried it. His Job Assignment read.

Forlosen, E.

(To his wife he said, “They got our name wrong.”)

Forlosen, E. You work at Model Pattern Products, 19000370 Plant Prkwy, Highland Industrial Park. Your duties are supervisory and managerial. When you arrive punch in on the S&M clock (beige), NOT the Labor clock (brown). The union is particular about this. Go to the Reconstruction and Advanced Research section. To arrive on time leave before 060.30.00.

The yellow paper was illegible save for the title and ﬁrst line: There are 240 ours in each day.

“What time is it?” he asked his wife.

She glanced at her wrist. “Oh six oh ours. Didn’t they give you a watch?”

He looked at his own wrist—it was bare, of course. For a few moments Edna helped him search for one, but it seemed that none had been provided and in the end he took hers, she saying that he would need it more than she. It was big for a woman’s watch, he thought, but very small for a man’s. “Try it,” she said, and he obediently studied the tiny screen. The words THE TIME IS were cast in the metal at its top; below them, glimmering and changing even as he looked: 060.07.43. He took a sip of coffee and found the oily taste was there too.

The book at the top of the pile was a booklet really, about seven inches by four, with the pages stapled in the middle. The title, printed in black on a blue cover of slightly heavier paper, was How to Drive.

Remember that your car is a gift. Although it belongs to you and you are absolutely responsible for its acts (whether driven by yourself or others, or not driven) and maintenance (pg. 15), do not:

Deface its surface

Interfere with the operation of its engine, or with the operation of any other part

Alter it in such a way as to increase or diminish the noise of operation

Drive it at speeds in excess of 40 miles/hour

Pick up hitchhikers

Deposit a hitchhiker at any point other than a Highway Patrol Station

Operate it while you are in an unﬁt condition. (To be determined by a duly constituted medical board.)

Fail to halt and render medical assistance to persons injured by you, your car, or others (provided third parties are not already providing such assistance)

Stop at any time or for any reason at any point not designated as a stopping position

Wave or shout at other drivers

Invade the privacy of other drivers—as by noticing or pretending to notice them or the occupants of their vehicles

Fail to return it on demand

Drive it to improper destinations

He turned the page. The new page was a diagram of the control panel of an automobile, and he noted the positions of Windshield, Steering Wheel, Accelerator, Brake, Reversing Switch, Communicator, Beverage Dispenser, Urinal, Defecator, and Map Compartment. He asked Edna if they had a car, and she said she thought they did, and that it would be outside.

“You know,” he said, “I’ve just noticed that this place has windows.”

Edna said, “You’re always jumping up from the table. Finish your breakfast.”

Ignoring her, he parted the curtains. She said, “Two walls have windows and two don’t. I haven’t looked out of them.” Outside he saw sunshine on concrete; a small, yellow, somehow hunched-looking automobile; and a house.

“Yeah, we’ve got a car,” he said. “It’s parked right under the window.”

“Well, I wish you’d ﬁnish breakfast and get to work.”

“I want to look out of the other window.”

If the ﬁrst window had been, as it appeared to be, at one side of the house, then the other should be at either the back or the front. He opened the curtains and saw a narrow, asthmatic brick courtyard. On the bricks stood three dead plants in terra-cotta jars; the opposite side of the court, no more than ﬁfteen feet off, was the wall of another house. There were two widely spaced windows in this wall, each closed with curtains, and as he watched (though his face was only at the window for an instant) a man pushed aside the curtains at the nearer window and looked at him. Forlesen stepped back and said to Edna, “I saw a man; he looked afraid. A bald man with a wide, fat face, and a gold tooth in front, and a mole over one eyebrow.” He went to the mirror again and studied himself.

“You don’t look like that,” his wife said.

“No, I don’t—that’s what bothers me. That was the ﬁrst thing I thought of— that it would be myself, perhaps the way I’m going to look when I’m older. I’ve lost a lot of my hair now and I could lose the rest of it; in fact, I suppose I will. And I could break a tooth in front and get a gold one—”

“Maybe it wasn’t really a mole,” Edna said. “It could have been just a spot of dirt or something.”

“It could have been.” He had seated himself again, and as he spoke he speared a bite of egg with his fork. “I suppose it’s even possible that I could grow a mole I don’t have now, and I could put on weight. But that wasn’t me; those weren’t my features, not at any age.”

“Well, why should it be you?”

“I just felt it should, somehow.”

“You’ve been reading that red book.” Edna’s voice was accusing.

“No, I haven’t even looked at it.” Curious, he pushed aside brown and purple pamphlets, ﬁshed the red book out of the pile, and looked at it. The cover was of leather and had been blind-tooled in a pattern of thin lines. Holding it at a slant to the light from the window, he decided he could discern, in the intricacies of the pattern, a group of men surrounding a winged being. “What is it?” he said.

“It’s supposed to tell you how to be good, and how to live—everything like that.”

He rifﬂed the pages, and noted that the left side of the book—the back of each leaf—was printed in scarlet in a language he did not understand. The right side, printed in black, seemed by its arrangement on the page to be a translation.

Of the nature of Death and the Dead we may enumerate twelve kinds. First there are those who become new gods, for whom new universes are born. Second those who praise. Third those who ﬁght as soldiers in the unending war with evil. Fourth those who amuse themselves among ﬂowers and sweet streams with sports. Fifth those who dwell in gardens of bliss, or are tortured. Sixth those who continue as in life. Seventh those who turn the wheel of the Universe. Eighth those who ﬁnd in their graves their mothers’ wombs and in one life circle forever. Ninth ghosts. Tenth those born again as men in their grandsons’ time. Eleventh those who return as beasts or trees. And last those who sleep.

“Look at this,” he said. “This can’t be right.”

“I wish you’d hurry. You’re going to be late.”

He looked at the watch she had given him. It read 060.26.13, and he said, “I still have time. But look here—the black is supposed to say the same thing as the red, but look at how different they are: where it says: And last those who sleep, there’s a whole paragraph opposite it; and across from, Fourth those who amuse themselves . . . there are only two words.”

“You don’t want any more coffee, do you?” He shook his head, laid down the red book, and picked up another; its title was Food Preparation in the Home. “That’s for me,” his wife said. “You wouldn’t be interested by that.”

Contents

Introduction—Three Meals a Day

Preparing Breakfast

Preparing Luncheon

Preparing Supper

Helpful Hints for Homemakers

He set the book down again, and as he did so, its cheap plastic cover popped open to the last page. At the bottom of the “Helpful Hints for Homemakers,” he read: Remember that if he does not go, you and your children will starve. He closed it and put the sugar bowl on top of it.

“I wish you’d get going,” his wife said.

He stood up. “I was just leaving. How do I get out?”

She pointed to one of the doors, and said, “That’s the parlor. You go straight through that, and there’s another door that goes outside.”

“And the car,” Forlesen said, more than half to himself, “will be around there under the window.” He slipped the blue How to Drive booklet into one of his pockets.

The parlor was smaller than the bedroom, but because it held no furniture as large as the bed or the table it seemed nearly empty. There was an uncomfortable-looking sofa against one wall, and two bowlegged chairs in corners; an umbrella stand and a dusty potted palm. The ﬂoor was covered by a dark, patterned rug and the walls by ﬂowered paper. Four strides took him across the room; he opened another, larger and heavier door and stepped outside. A moment after he had closed the door he heard the bolt snick behind him; he tried to open it again, and found, as he had expected, that he was locked out.

The house in which he seemed to have been born stood on a narrow street paved with asphalt. Only a two-foot concrete walkway separated it from the curb; there was no porch, and the doorway was at the same level as the walk, which had been stenciled at intervals of six feet or so with the words: GO TO YOUR RIGHT—NOT TO YOUR LEFT. They were positioned in such a way as to be upside down to a person who had gone to the left. Forlesen went around the corner of his house instead and got into the yellow car—the instrument panel differed in several details from the one in the blue book. For a moment he considered rolling down the right window of the car to rap on the house window, but he felt sure that Edna would not come. He threw the reversing switch instead, wondering if he should not do something to bring the car to life ﬁrst. It began to roll slowly backward at once; he guided it with the steering wheel, craning his neck to look over his shoulder.

The narrow street seemed deserted. He switched into Front and touched the accelerator pedal with his foot; the car inched forward, picking up speed only slowly even when he pushed the pedal to the ﬂoor. The street was lined with small brick houses much like the one he had left; their curtains were drawn, and small cars like his own but of various colors were parked beside the houses. Signs stood on metal poles cast into the asphalt of the road, spaced just sufﬁciently far apart that each was out of sight of the next. They were diamond-shaped, with black letters on an orange ground, and each read: HIDDEN DRIVES.

His communicator said: “If you do not know how to reach your destination, press the button and ask.”

He pressed the button and said, “I think I’m supposed to go to a place called Model Pattern Products.”

“Correct. Your destination is 19000370 Plant Parkway, Highland Industrial Park. Turn right at the next light.”

He was about to ask what was meant by the word light in this connotation when he saw that he was approaching an intersection and that over it, like a ceiling ﬁxture unaccompanied by any ceiling, was suspended a rapidly blinking light which emitted at intervals of perhaps a quarter second alternating ﬂashes of red and green. He turned to the right; the changing colors gave an illusion of jerky motion, belied by the smooth hum of the tires. The ﬂickering brought a sensation of nausea, and for a moment he shut his eyes against it; then he felt the car nosing up, tilting under him. He opened his eyes and saw that the new street onto which he had turned was lifting beneath him, becoming, ahead, an airborne ribbon of pavement that traced a thin streak through the sky. Already he was higher than the tops of the trees. The roofs of the houses—little tarpaper things like the lids of boxes—were dwindling below. He thought of Edna in one of those boxes (he found he could not tell which one) cooking a meal for herself, perhaps smoothing the bed in which the two of them had slept, and knew, with that sudden insight which stands in relation to reason as reason does to instinct, that she would spend ours, most of whatever day there was, looking out the parlor window at the empty street; he found that he both pitied and envied her, and stopped the car with some vague thought of returning home and devising some plan by which they could either stay there together or go together to wherever it was he was being sent. “Model Pattern Products,” he said aloud. What was that?

As though it were answering him the speaker said, “Why have you stopped? Do you require mechanical assistance?”

“Wait a minute; I’m not sure if I do or not.” He got out of the car and walked to the low rail at the edge of the road and looked down. Something, he felt sure, must be supporting the mass of concrete and steel upon which he stood, but he could not see what it was, only the houses and trees and the narrow asphalt streets below. The sunlight striking his face when he looked up again gave him an idea, and he hurried across the road and bent over the rail on the opposite side. There, as he had anticipated, the shadow of the road, long in the level morning sunshine, lay stretched across the roofs and streets. Under it, very closely spaced, were yet other shadows, but these were so broken by the irregular shapes upon which they were thrown by the sun that he could not be sure if they were the shadows of things actually straight or if the casters of these shadows (whatever they might be) were themselves bowed, twisted, and deformed.

He was still studying the shadows when the humming sound of wheels drew his attention back to the ﬂying roadway upon which he stood. A car, painted a metallic and yet peculiarly pleasing shade of blue, was speeding toward him. Unaccustomed to estimating the speeds of vehicles, he wondered for an instant whether or not he had time to recross the road and reach his own car again, and was torn between the fear of being run down if he tried and that of being pinned against the rail where he stood, should the blue car swerve too near. Then he realized that the blue car was slowing as it approached him—that he himself was, so to speak, its destination. Its door, he saw, was painted with a fantastic design, a mingling of fabulous beasts with plants and what appeared to be wholly abstract symbols.

A man was seated in the blue car, and as Forlesen watched he leaned across the seat toward him, rolling down the window. “Hey, bud, what are you doing outside your car?”

“I was looking over the railing,” Forlesen said. He indicated the sheer drop beside him. “I wanted to see how the road got up in the air like this.”

“Get back in.”

Forlesen was about to obey when in a remote corner of his ﬁeld of vision he detected a movement, a shifting in that spot of ground below toward which he had been looking a moment before, and thus toward which (as is the habit of vision) his gaze was still to some degree drawn. He swung around to look at it, and the man in the blue car said again, “Get back in your car, bud.” And then: “I’m telling you, you better get back.”

“Come here,” Forlesen said. “Look at this.” He heard the door of the other car open and assumed the driver was coming to join him, then felt something—it might have been the handlebar of a bicycle against which he had accidentally backed—prodding him in the spine, just above his belt. He moved away from it with his attention still riveted on the shadows below, but it followed him. He turned and saw that the driver had, as he had supposed, left the blue car, and that he wore a loose, broad-sleeved blue shirt with a metal badge pinned to the fabric off-center. Also that he wore no trousers, his sexual organs being effectively concealed by the length of the shirt, and that from under the shirt six or more plastic tubes led back to the blue car, some of the color of straw and others of the dark red color of blood; and that he held a pistol, and that it had been the muzzle of this pistol which he (Forlesen) had felt a moment before pressing against his back. “Get in there,” the man from the blue car said a third time.

Forlesen said, “All right,” and did as he was told, but found (to his own very great surprise) that he was not frightened.

When he was behind the wheel of his own car again, the man from the blue car reentered it, and (so it appeared to Forlesen) seemed to holster his gun beneath the car’s dashboard. “I’m back in my car now,” Forlesen said. “Can I tell you what it was I saw?”

The man in the blue car said to his speaker, “This is two oh four twelve forty-three. Subject has returned to his vehicle. Repeat—subject has returned to his vehicle.”

“Those pillars or columns or whatever they are that hold this road up—one of them moved, or at least its shadow did. I saw it.”

The man in the blue car muttered something under his breath.

“Are they falling down?” Forlesen asked. “Have you been noticing cracks?”

The speaker in Forlesen’s car said, “Information received indicates an unauthorized stop. Continue toward your destination at once.” He noticed that the speaker in the blue car seemed to be talking to its driver as well, but Forlesen could not hear what was being said. After a moment (his own speaker had fallen silent) he heard the driver say, “Yes, ma’am. Over and out.” Then the pistol was aimed at Forlesen once more, this time at his face, through the window of the blue car. The driver said, “You roll that thing, bud, and you roll it now or I shoot.”

Forlesen stepped on the accelerator, and his car began to move forward, slowly at ﬁrst, then picking up speed until he felt sure it was traveling much faster than a man could run. In the mirror above the windshield Forlesen could see the blue car; it did not turn—as he had supposed it might—to follow him, but after a delay continued to descend the road he himself was going up.

He had supposed that this road would lead him to Model Pattern Products (whatever that might be), but when he had been following it for some time it joined another similar but far wider, highway. There were now multiple lines of trafﬁc all going in the same direction, and by traveling in the fast lane he could avoid looking over the side. It was a relief he accepted gratefully; he had a good head for heights, but he had found himself studying the long shadows of the supports whenever the twistings of the road put them on the side upon which he drove.

With that distraction out of the way he discovered that he enjoyed driving, though the memory of the twisted columns remained in the back of his mind. Yet the performance of the yellow car was deeply satisfying: it sped to the top of the high, white, billowing undulations of the highway with a power slight yet sure, and descended in a way that made him almost believe himself a hawk—or the operator of some fantastic machine that could itself soar like a bird—or even such a winged being as had appeared on the cover of the red book. The clear sky, which lay now to the right and left of the highway as well as above it, promoted these fantasies, and its snowy clouds might almost have been other highways like the one on which he traveled—indeed, from time to time he seemed to see moving dots of color on them, as though cars like his own, but immensely remote, dashed over plains and precipices of vapor. He used the defecator and the urinal, dispensed himself a sparkling green beverage; the car was a cozy and secret place of retirement, a second body, his palace and his fortress; he imagined himself a mouse descending a clear stream in half an eggshell, the master of a comet enfolding a hollow world.

He had been traveling in this way for a long while when he saw the hitchhiker. The man did not stand at the side of the road where Forlesen would have expected to see a pedestrian if, indeed, he had anticipated seeing any at all, but balanced himself on the high divider that separated the innermost lane from those on which trafﬁc moved in the opposite direction. As he was some distance ahead, Forlesen was able to observe him for several minutes before reaching the point at which he stood.

He appeared to be a tall man, much stooped; and despite the ludicrousness of his position, his attitude suggested a certain dignity. His hands and arms were in constant motion—not only as he sought to maintain his balance, but because he mimed to each car that passed his desire to ride, acting out in pantomime the car’s stopping, his haste to reach it, his opening the door and seating himself, his gratitude.

Nor did he care, apparently, in which direction he rode. While Forlesen watched, he turned around and for a few moments sought to attract the attention of a passing vehicle on the opposite side; then, as though he realized that he was unlikely to have better fortune there than in the direction he had chosen originally, turned back again. His clothing was stifﬂy old-fashioned, once fairly good perhaps, but now worn and dusty. When Forlesen stopped before this scarecrow ﬁgure and motioned toward the seat beside him, the hitchhiker seemed so startled at having gotten a ride at last that Forlesen wondered if he was going to get in. Trafﬁc zoomed and swirled around them like a summer storm.

With his long legs folded high and the edge of the dashboard pressing against his shins he looked (Forlesen thought) like a cricket. An old cricket, for despite his agility and air of alertness the hitchhiker was old, his mouth full of crooked and stained old teeth and new white straight ones which were surely false, his bright, dark eyes surrounded by wrinkles, the hand he extended crook ﬁngered and callused. “Name’s Abraham Beale.” Bad teeth in a good smile.

“Emanuel Forlesen,” Forlesen said, taking the hand as he started the car rolling again. “Where are you going, Mr. Beale?”

“Anywhere.” Beale was craning his neck to look out the small window in the back of the car. “Glad you didn’t get hit,” he said. “’Fraid you would.”

“I’m sure they could see I had stopped,” Forlesen said, “and there are plenty of other lanes.”

“Half of them’s asleep. More’n half. You’re awake, so I guess you thought everybody was, ain’t that right?”

“They’re driving; I’d think they’d run off the road if they were sleeping.”

Beale was dusting his high-crowned, battered old hat with his big hands, patting and brushing it gently as though it were a baby animal of some delicate and appealing kind, a young rabbit or a little coatimundi. “I could see them,” he said. “From where I was up there. Most of them didn’t even see me—off in cloudland somewheres.”

“I’m going to Model Pattern Products,” Forlesen said.

The older man shook his head, and, having ﬁnished with his hat, set it on one knee. “I already tried there,” he said, “nothin’ for me.” In a slightly lower voice, the voice of a man who is ashamed but feels he should not be, he added: “Lost my old job. I been trying to hook on somewhere else.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” Forlesen found, somewhat to his surprise, that he was sorry. “What did you do?”

“About everything. There ain’t much I can’t turn a hand to. By rights I’m a lawyer, but I’ve soldiered some and worked stock out west, and lumberjacked, and once I ﬁred on the railroad. And I’m a pretty good reaper mechanic if I do say so myself.” Beale took a round tin box of snuff from one of the pockets of his shabby vest and put a pinch of the brown contents under his lip, then offered the box to Forlesen.

“You’ve had an interesting time,” Forlesen said, waving it away. “I would have guessed you were a farmer, I think, if I had had to guess.”

“Well, I’ve followed a plow and I ain’t ashamed to say it. I was raised on the farm—oldest of thirteen children, and we all helped. I’d farm again if I had the land; it would be something. You know what? My dad, he left the old place to me, and the same day I got the letter that said I was to have it—from a esteemed colleague there, you know, a old fellow named Abner Bunter, we used to call him Banty; my dad’d had him do his will for him, me not being there—I got another that said the state was taking her for a highway. Had it and lost it between rippin’ up one envelope and the other. I remember when it happened I went out and bought a cigar; I had been workin’, but I couldn’t work no more, not right then.”

“Didn’t they pay you for it?” Forlesen asked. He had been coming up behind a car the color of sour milk, and changed lanes as he spoke, shooting into an opening that allowed him to pass.

“You bet. There was a check in there,” Beale said. “I planted her, but she didn’t grow.”

Forlesen glanced at him, startled.

“Hey!” The older man slapped his leg. “You think I’m touched. I meant I invested her.”

“Well, I’m sorry you lost your money,” Forlesen said.

“I didn’t exactly lose it.” Beale rubbed his chin. “It just sort of come to nothing. I still got it—draw the interest every year; they post her in the book for me— but there ain’t nothing left.” He snapped his ﬁngers. “Tell you what it’s like. We had a tree once on the farm, a apple tree—McIntoshes, I think they were. Well, it never did die, but every winter it would die back a little bit, ﬁrst one limb and then another, until there wasn’t hardly anything left. Dad always thought it would come back, so he never did grub it out, but I don’t believe it ever bore after I was big enough to go to school, and I remember the year I left home he cut a switch of it for Avery—Avery was the youngest of us brothers; he was always getting into trouble, like I recollect one time he let one of Dad’s blue slate gamecocks in the pen with our big Shanghai rooster, said he thought the blue slate was too full of himself and the big one would take him down a piece; well, what happened was the blue slate ripped him right up the front; any fool could have told him; looked like he was going to clean him without picking ﬁrst. Dad was mad as hell—he thought the world of that rooster, and he used to feed him cake crumbs right out of his hand.”

“What happened to the apple tree?” Forlesen asked.

“That’s what I said myself,” Beale said. Forlesen waited for him to continue, but he did not. The miles (hundreds of miles, Forlesen thought) slipped by; at long intervals the speaker announced the time: “It is oh sixty-three, oh sixty-ﬁve, oh sixty-eight thirty ours.” The road dropped by slow degrees until they were level with the roofs of buildings, buildings whose roofs were jagged saw blades fronted with glass.

Forlesen said, “Model Pattern Products is in an industrial park—the Highland Industrial Park—maybe you’ll be able to get a job there.”

Beale nodded slowly. “I been looking out for something that looked to be in my line,” and after a moment added, “I guess I didn’t ﬁnish tellin’ you ’bout my check I got, did I? Look here.” His left hand fumbled inside his shabby coat, and Forlesen noticed that the elbows were so threadbare that his shirt could be seen through the fabric as though the man himself had begun to be slightly transparent, at least in his external and nonessential attributes. After a moment he held out a small, dun-colored bankbook, opening it dexterously with the ﬁngers of one hand, but to the wrong page, an empty and unused page, which he presented for Forlesen’s inspection. “That’s all there is,” Beale said. “I never drew a nickel, and I put the interest, most times, right smack back in, and that’s all that’s left. That’s Dad’s farm, them little numbers in the book.”

Forlesen said, “I see.”

“They didn’t cheat me,” Beale continued. “That was a good hunk of money when they give it to me, big money. But it’s went down and down since till it’s only little money, and little money ain’t hardly worth nothing. Listen, you’re young yit—I suppose you think two dollars is twice as much as one? Like, if you’re paid one and some other fellar gits two, he’s got twice as much as you? Or the other way around?”

“I suppose so,” Forlesen said.

“Well, you’re right. Now suppose you’ve got—I won’t ask you to tell me; I’ll just strike upon a ﬁgure here from your general age and appearance and whatnot—ﬁve thousand dollars. And the other’s got ﬁfty thousand. Would you say he had ten times what you did?”

“Yes.”

“That’s where you’re wrong; he’s got ﬁfty times, a hundred times what you do—maybe two hundred. Ain’t you never noticed how a man with ﬁfty thousand cold behind him will act? Like you’re nothin’ to him, you don’t even weigh in his ﬁguring at all.”

Forlesen smiled. “Are you saying ﬁve thousand times ten isn’t ﬁfty thousand?”

“Look at it this way: You take your dollar to the store and you can git a dozen of eggs and a can of beans and a plug of tobacco. The other takes his two and gits two dozen of eggs, two cans of beans, and two plugs—ain’t that right? But a man that has big money don’t pay ﬁfteen cents a plug like you and me; he can buy by the case if he feels inclined, and if he gits very much he gits it cheap as the store. Another thing—some things he can buy you and me can’t git at all. It ain’t that we can buy less; we can’t git even a little bit of it. Let me give you an example: The railroads and the coal mines buy your state legislatures, right? Sure they do, and everybody knows it. Now there’s thousands and thousands of people on the other side of them, and those thousands of people, if you was to add their money up, would be worth more. But they can’t buy the legislature at all, ain’t that right?”

“Go on,” Forlesen said.

“Well, don’t that prove that little money’s power to buy certain things is zero? If it had any at all, thousands and thousands times it would make those people the kings of the state, but the actual fact is they can’t do a thing—thousands time nothing is still nothing.” Suddenly Beale turned, staring out the window of the car, and Forlesen realized that while they had been talking the road had descended to the ground. Still many-laned, it passed now through a level landscape dotted with great, square buildings, which, despite their size, made no pretense of majesty or grace, but seemed in every case intentionally ugly. They were constructed of the cheapest materials, mostly corrugated metal and cinder block, and each was surrounded by a high, rusty wire fence, with a barren area of asphalt or gravel beyond it as though to provide (Forlesen knew the thought was ridiculous) a clear ﬁeld of ﬁre for defenders within.

“Hold up!” Beale said urgently. “Hold up a minute there.” He gripped Forlesen’s right arm, and Forlesen jockeyed the car to the outermost lane of trafﬁc, then onto the rutted clay at the shoulder of the road.

“Look ’e there!” Beale said, pointing down a broad alley between two of the huge buildings.

Forlesen looked as directed. “Horses.”

“Mustangs! Never been broke; you can tell that from looking at ’em. Whoever’s got ’em’s going to need some help.” Beale opened the car door, then turned and shook Forlesen’s hand. “Well, you’ve been a friend,” he said, “and if ever I can do anything for you just you ask.” Then he was gone, and Forlesen sat, for a moment, looking at the billboard-sized sign above the building into which the horses were being driven. It showed a dog’s head in a red triangle on a ﬁeld of black, without caption of any kind.

The speaker said, “Do not stop en route. You are still one and one-half aisles from Model Pattern Products, your place of employment.”

Forlesen nodded and looked at the watch his wife had given him. It was 069.50.

“You are to park your car,” the speaker continued, “in the Model Pattern Products parking lot. You are not to occupy any position marked visitors, or any position marked with a name not your own.”

“Do they know I’m coming?” Forlesen asked, pressing the button.

“An employee service folder has already been made out for you,” the speaker told him. “All that needs to be done is to ﬁll in your name.”

The Model Pattern Products parking lot was enclosed by a high fence, but the gates were open and the hinges so rusted that Forlesen, who stopped in the gateway for a moment thinking some guard or watchman might wish to challenge him, wondered if they had ever been closed; the ground itself, covered with loose gravel the color of ash, sloped steeply; he was forced to drive carefully to keep his car from skidding among the concrete stops of brilliant orange provided to prevent the parked cars from rolling down the grade; most of these were marked either with some name not his or with the word VISITOR, but he eventually discovered an unmarked position (unattractive, apparently, because smoke from a stubby ﬂue projecting from the back of an outbuilding would blow across it) and left his car. His legs ached.

He was thirty or forty feet from his car when he realized he no longer had the speaker to advise him; several people were walking toward the gray metal building that was Model Pattern Products, but all were too distant for him to talk to them without shouting, and something in their appearance suggested that they would not wait for him to overtake them in any case. He followed them through a small door and found himself alone.

An anteroom held two time clocks, one beige, the other brown. Remembering the instruction sheet, he took a blank time card from the rack and wrote his name at the top, then pushed it into the beige machine and depressed the lever. A gong sounded. He withdrew the card and checked the stamped time: 069.56. A thin, youngish woman with large glasses and a sharp nose looked over his shoulder. “You’re late,” she said. (He was aware for an instant of the effort she was making to read his name at the top of the card.) “Mr. Forlesen.”

He said, “I’m afraid I don’t know the starting time.”

The woman said, “Oh seventy ours sharp, Mr. Forlesen. Start oh seventy ours sharp, coffee for your subdivision one hundred ours to one hundred and one. Lunch one hundred and twenty to one hundred and forty-one. Coffee, your subdivision, one ﬁfty to one ﬁfty-one p.m. Quit one seventy ours at the whistle.”

“Then I’m not late,” Forlesen said. He showed her his card.

“Mr. Frick likes everyone to be at least twenty minutes early, especially supervisory and management people. The real go-getters—that’s what he calls them, the real go-getters—try to be early. I mean, earlier than the regular early. Oh sixty-nine twenty-ﬁve, something like that. They unlock their desks and go upstairs for early coffee, and sometimes they play cards; it’s fun.”

“I’m sorry I missed it,” Forlesen said. “Can you tell me where I’m supposed to go now?”

“To your desk,” the woman said, nodding. “Unlock it.”

“I don’t know where it is.”

“Well, of course you don’t, but I can’t assign you to your desk—that’s up to Mr. Fields, your supervisor.” After a moment she added: “I know where you’re going to go, but he has the keys.”

Forlesen said, “I thought I was a supervisor.”

“You are,” the woman told him, “but Mr. Fields is—you know—a real supervisor. Anyway, nearly. Do you want to talk to him now?”

Forlesen nodded.

“I’ll see if he’ll see you now. You have Creativity Group today, and Leadership Training. And Company Orientation, and Bet-Your-Life—that’s the management-managing real-life pseudogame—and one interdepartmental training-transfer.”

“I’ll be glad to get the orientation anyway,” Forlesen said. He followed the woman, who had started to walk away. “But am I going to have time for all that?”

“You don’t get it,” she told him over her shoulder. “You give it. And you’ll have lots of time for work besides—don’t worry. I’ve been here a long time already. I’m Miss Fawn. Are you married?”

“Yes,” Forlesen said, “and I think we have children.”

“Oh. Well, you look it. Here’s Mr. Fields’s ofﬁce, and I nearly forgot to tell you you’re on the Planning and Evaluation Committee. Don’t forget to knock.” Forlesen knocked on the door to which the woman had led him. It was of metal painted to resemble wood, and had riveted to its front a small brass plaque, which read: MR. D’ANDREA.

“Come in!” someone called from inside the ofﬁce.

Forlesen entered and saw a short, thickset, youngish man with close-cropped hair sitting at a metal desk. The ofﬁce was extremely small and had no windows, but there was a large, brightly colored picture on each wall—two photographs in color (a beach with rocks and waves, and a snow-clad mountain) and two realistic landscapes (both of rolling green countryside dotted with cows and trees).

“Come in,” the youngish man said again. “Sit down. Listen, I want to tell you something—you don’t have to knock to come in this ofﬁce. Not ever. My door— like they say—is always open. What I mean is, I may keep it shut to keep out the noise and so forth out in the hall, but it’s always open to you.”

“I think I understand,” Forlesen said. “Are you Mr. Fields?” The plaque had somewhat shaken his faith in the young woman with glasses.

“Right—Ed Fields at your service.”

“Then I’m going to be working for you. I’m Emanuel Forlesen.” Forlesen leaned forward and offered his hand, which Fields walked around the desk to take.

“Glad to meet you, Manny. Always happy to welcome a new face to the subdivision.” For an instant, as their eyes met, Forlesen felt himself weighed on invisible scales and, he thought, found slightly wanting. Then the moment passed, and a few seconds later he had difﬁculty believing it had ever been. “Remember what I told you when you came in—my door is always open,” Fields said. “Sit down.” Forlesen sat, and Fields resumed his place behind the desk.

“We’re a small outﬁt,” Fields said, “but we’re sharp.” He held up a clenched ﬁst. “And I intend to make us the sharpest in the division. I need men who’ll back my play all the way, and maybe even run in front a little. Sharpies. That’s what I call ’em—sharpies. And you work with me, not for me.”

Forlesen nodded.

“We’re a team,” Fields continued, “and we’re going to function as a team. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a quarterback, and a coach”—he pointed toward the ceiling—“up there. It does mean that I expect every man to bat two ﬁfty or better, and the ones that don’t make three hundred had better be damn good ﬁeld. See what I mean?”

Forlesen nodded again and asked, “What does our subdivision do? What’s our function?”

“We make money for the company,” Fields told him. “We do what needs to be done. You see this ofﬁce? This desk, this chair?”

Forlesen nodded.

“There’s two kinds of guys that sit here—I mean all through the company. There’s the old has-been guys they stick in here because they’ve been through it all and seen everything, and there’s the young guys like me that get put here to get an education—you get me? Sometimes the young guys just never move out; then they turn into the old ones. That isn’t going to happen to me, and I want you to remember that the easiest way for you to move up yourself is to move into this spot right here. Someday this will all be yours—that’s the way to think of it. That’s what I tell every guy in the subdivision—someday this’ll all be yours.” Fields reached over his head to tap one of the realistic landscapes. “You get what I mean?”

“I think so.”

“Okay, then let me show you your desk and where you’re gonna work.” As they dodged among windowless, brightly lit corridors, it struck Forlesen that though the building was certainly ventilated—some of the corridors, in fact, were actually windy—the system could not be working very well. A hundred odors, mostly foul, but some of a sickening sweetness, thronged the air; and though most of the hallways they traveled were so cold as to be uncomfortable, a few were as stuffy as tents left closed all day beneath a summer sun.

“What’s that noise?” Forlesen asked.

“That’s a jackhammer busting concrete. You’re going to be in the new wing.” Fields opened a green steel door and led the way down a narrow, low-ceilinged passage pungent with the burnt-metal smell of arc welding; the tiled ﬂoor was gritty with cement dust, and Forlesen wondered, looking at the unpainted walls, how they could have gotten so dirty when they were clearly so new. “In here,” Fields said.

It was a big room, and had been divided into cubicles with rippled glass partitions ﬁve feet high. The effect was one of privacy, but the cubicles had been laid out in such a way as to allow anyone looking through the glass panel in the ofﬁce door to see into them all. The windows were covered with splintering boards, and the ﬂoor sufﬁciently uneven that it was possible to imagine it a petriﬁed sea, though its streaked black and gray pattern was more suggestive of charred wood. “You’re in luck,” Fields said. “I’d forgotten, or I would have told you back in the ofﬁce. You get a window desk. Right here. Sitting by the window makes it kind of dark, but you only got the one other guy on the side of you over there, that’s nice, and you know there’s always a certain prestige goes with the desk that’s next to the window.”

Forlesen asked, “Wouldn’t it be possible to take some of the glass out of these partitions and use it in the windows?”

“Hell, no. This stuff is partition glass—what you need for a window is window glass. I thought you were supposed to have a lot of science.”

“My duties are supposed to be supervisory and managerial,” Forlesen said.

“Don’t ever let anybody tell you management isn’t a science.” Fields thumped Forlesen’s new desk for emphasis and got a smudge of dust on his ﬁst. “It’s an art, sure, but it’s a science too.”

Forlesen, who could not see how anything could be both, nodded.

Fields glanced at his watch. “Nearly oh seventy-one already, and I got an appointment. Listen, I’m gonna leave you to ﬁnd your way around.”

Forlesen seated himself at his desk. “I was hoping you’d tell me what I’m supposed to do here before you left.”

Fields was already outside the cubicle. “You mean your responsibilities; there’s a list around somewhere.”

Forlesen had intended to protest further, but as he started to speak he noticed an optical illusion so astonishing that for the brief period it was visible he could only stare. As Fields passed behind one of the rippled glass partitions on his way to the door, the distortions in the glass caused his image to change from that of the somewhat dumpy and rumpled man with whom Forlesen was now slightly familiar; behind the glass he was taller, exceedingly neat, and blank faced. And he wore glasses.

When he was gone Forlesen got up and examined the partitions carefully; they seemed ordinary enough, one surface rippled, the other smooth, the tops slightly dusty. He looked at his empty desk through the glass; it was a vague blur. He sat down again, and the telephone rang. “Cappy?”

“This is Emanuel Forlesen.” At the last moment it occurred to Forlesen that it might have been better to call himself Manny as Fields had—that it might seem more friendly and less formal, particularly to someone who was looking for someone he addressed so casually—but, as the thought entered his mind, something else, not a thought but one of those deeper feelings from which our thoughts have, perhaps, evolved contradicted it, so he repeated his name, bearing down on the ﬁrst syllable: “Ee-manuel Forlesen.”

“Isn’t Cappy Dillingham there?”

“He may be in this ofﬁce,” Forlesen said, “that is, his desk may be here, but he’s not here himself, and this is my telephone—I just moved into the ofﬁce.”

“Take a message for him, will you? Tell him the Creativity Group meeting is moved up to oh seventy-eight sharp. I’m sorry it had to be so early, but Gene Fine has got a bunch of other stuff and we couldn’t ﬁgure out anything else to do short of canceling. And we couldn’t get a room, so we’re meeting in the hall outside the drilling and boring shop. There’s deﬁnitely going to be a ﬁlm. Have you got that?”

“I think so,” Forlesen said. “Oh seventy-eight, hall outside the drill room, movie.” He heard someone behind him and turned to look. It was Miss Fawn, so he said, “Do you know where Mr. Dillingham is? I’m taking a call for him.”

“He died,” Miss Fawn said. “Let me talk to them.” She took the receiver. “Who’s calling, please? . . . Mr. Franklin, Mr. Dillingham died . . . Last night . . . Yes, it is. Mr. Forlesen is taking his place in your group—you should have gotten a memo on it . . . On Mr. Dillingham’s old number; you were just talking to him. He’s right here. Wait a moment.” She turned back to Forlesen: “It’s for you.”

He took the telephone and a voice in the earpiece said, “Are you Forlesen? Listen, this is Ned Franklin. You may not have been notiﬁed yet, but you’re in our Creativity Group, and we’re meeting— Wait a minute; I’ve got a memo on it under all this crap somewhere.”

“Oh seventy-eight,” Forlesen said.

“Right. I realize that’s pretty early—”

“We wouldn’t want to try to get along without Gene Fine,” Forlesen said.

“Right. Try to be there.”

Miss Fawn seemed to be leaving. Forlesen turned to see how she would appear in the rippled glass as he said, “What are we going to try and create?”

“Creativity. We create creativity itself—we learn to be creative.”

“I see,” Forlesen said. He watched Miss Fawn become pretty while remaining sexless, like a mannequin. He said, “I thought we’d just take some clay or something and start in.”

“Not that sort of creativity, for crap’s sake!”

“All right,” Forlesen said.

“Just show up, okay? Mr. Frick is solidly behind this and he gets upset when we have less than full attendance.”

“Maybe he could get us a meeting room then,” Forlesen suggested. He had no idea who “Mr. Frick” was, but he was obviously important.

“Hell, I couldn’t ask Mr. Frick that. Anyway, he never asks where we had the meeting—just how many came and what we discussed, and whether we feel we’re making progress.”

“He could be saving it.”

“Yeah, I guess he could. Listen, Cappy, if I can get us a room I’ll call you, okay?”

“Right,” said Forlesen. He hung up, wondered vaguely why Miss Fawn had come, then saw that she had left a stack of papers on a corner of his desk. “Well, the hell with you,” he said, and pushed them toward the wall. “I haven’t even looked at this desk yet.”

It was a metal desk, and somewhat smaller, older, and shabbier than the one in Fields’s ofﬁce. It seemed odd to Forlesen that he should ﬁnd old furniture in a part of the building which was still—judging from the sounds that occasionally drifted through the walls and window boards—under construction; but the desk and his chair as well were unquestionably nearing the end of their useful lives. The center desk drawer held a dead insect, a penknife with yellowed imitation ivory sides and a broken blade, a drawing of a bracket (very neatly lettered, Forlesen noticed) on crumpled tracing paper, and a dirty stomach mint. He threw this last away (his wastebasket was new, made of plastic, and did not seem to ﬁt in with the other furnishings of the ofﬁce) and opened the right-hand side drawer. It contained an assortment of pencils (all more or less chewed), a cube of art gum with the corners worn off, and some sheets of blank paper with one corner folded. The next drawer down yielded a wrinkled brown paper bag that disgorged a wad of wax paper, a stale half cookie, and the sharp smell of apples; the last two drawers proved to be a single ﬁle drawer in masquerade; there were ﬁve empty ﬁle folders in it, including one with a column of twenty-seven ﬁgures written on it in pencil, the ﬁrst and lowest being 8,750 and the last and highest 12,500; they were not totaled. On the left side of the desk what looked like the ends of four more drawers proved to be a device for concealing a typewriter; there was no typewriter.

Forlesen closed it and leaned back in his chair, aware that inventorying the desk had depressed him. After a moment he remembered Fields’s saying that he would ﬁnd a list of his responsibilities in the ofﬁce, and discovered it on the top of the stack of papers Miss Fawn had left with him. It read:

MANAGEMENT PERSONNEL

Make M.P.P. Co. proﬁtable and keep it proﬁtable.

Assist in carrying out corporate goals.

Maintain employee discipline by reporting violators’ names to their superiors.

Help keep costs down.

If any problems come up help to deal with them in accord with company policy.

Training, production, sales, and public relations are all supervised by management personnel.

Forlesen threw the paper in the wastebasket.

The second paper in the stack was headed “Sample Leadership Problem #105” and read:

A young woman named Enid Fenton was hired recently as clerical help. Her work has not been satisfactory, but because clerical help has been in short supply she has not been told this. Recently a reduction in the workload in her department made it possible to transfer three girls to another department. Miss Fenton asked for one of the transfers and when told that they had already been assigned to others behaved in such a manner as to suggest (though nothing was actually said) that she was considering resignation. Her work consists of keypunching, typing, and ﬁling. Should her supervisor:

Discharge her.

Indicate to her that her work has been satisfactory but hint that she may be laid off.

Offer her a six-week leave of absence (without pay) during which she may obtain further training.

Threaten her with a disciplinary fine.

Assign her to assist one of the older women.

Ask the advice of the other members of his Leadership group, following it only if he agrees the group has reached a correct decision in this case.

Reassign her to small-parts assembly.

NOTE: QUESTIONS CONCERNING THIS SAMPLE LEADERSHIP PROBLEM SHOULD BE ADDRESSED TO ERIC FAIRCHILD—EX 8173.

After reading the problem through twice, Forlesen picked up his telephone and dialed the number. A female voice said, “Mr. Fairchild’s office.”

Forlesen identified himself, and a moment later a masculine voice announced, “Eric Fairchild.”

“It’s about the leadership problem—number one oh ﬁve?”

“Oh, yes.” (Fairchild’s voice was hearty; Forlesen imagined him slapping backs and challenging people to Indian-wrestle at parties.) “I’ve had quite a few calls about that one. You can check as many answers as you like if they’re not mutually exclusive—okay?”

“That wasn’t what I was going to ask,” Forlesen said. “This girl’s work—”

“Wait a minute,” Fairchild said. And then, much more faintly, “Get me the Leadership ﬁle, Miss Fenton.”

“What did you say?” Forlesen asked.

“Wait a minute,” Fairchild said again. “If we’re going to dig into this thing in-depth I want to have a copy of the problem in front of me. Thank you. Okay, you can shoot now. What did you say your name was?”

“Forlesen. I meant after you said, ‘Wait a minute,’ the ﬁrst time. I thought I heard you call your secretary Miss Fenton.”

“Ha ha ha.”

“Didn’t you?”

“My secretary’s name is Mrs. Fairchild, Mr. Forlesen—no, she’s not my wife, if that’s what you’re thinking. Mr. Frick doesn’t approve of nepotism. She’s just a nice lady who happens to be named Mrs. Fairchild, and I was addressing Miss Fetton, who is ﬁlling in for her today.”

“Sorry,” Forlesen said.

“You wanted to ask about problem one hundred and ﬁve?”

“Yes, I wanted to ask—Well, for one thing, in what way is the young woman’s work unsatisfactory?”

“Just what it says on the sheet, whatever that is. Wait a minute; here it is. Her work has not been satisfactory, but because clerical help has been in short supply she has not been told this.”

“Yes,” Forlesen said, “but in what way has it been unsatisfactory?”

“I see what you’re getting at now, but I can’t very well answer that, can I? After all, the whole essence of Leadership Training involves presenting the participants with structured problems—you see what I mean? This is a structured problem. Miss Fenton, could I trouble you to go down to the canteen and get me some coffee? Take it out of petty cash. Now if I explained something like that to you, and not to the others, then it would have a different structuring for you than for them. You see?”

“Well, it seemed to me,” Forlesen said, “that one of the ﬁrst things to do would be to take Miss Fenton aside and explain to her that her work was unsatisfactory and perhaps hear what she had to say.”

“Miss who?”

“Fetton, the girl in the problem.”

“Right, and I see what you mean. However, since it speciﬁcally says what I read to you, and nothing else more than that, then if I was to tell you something else it would be structured different for you than for the other fellows. See what I mean?”

After thinking for a moment Forlesen said, “I don’t see how I can check any of the boxes knowing no more than I do now. Is it all right if I write my own solution?”

“You mean, draw a little box for yourself?”

“Yes, and write what I said after it—I mean, what I outlined to you a minute ago. That I’d talk to her.”

“I don’t think there’s room on the paper for all that, fella. I mean, you said quite a bit.”

Forlesen said, “I think I can boil it down.”

“Well, we can’t allow it anyway. These things are scored by a computer and we have to give it an answer—what I’m driving at is the number of your answer. Like the girl codes in the I.D. number of each participant and then the problem number, and then the answer number, like one or two or three. Or then if she puts like twenty-three it knows you answered two AND three. That would be indicate to her that her work has been satisfactory but hint that she may be laid off, and Offer her a six-week leave of absence without pay—during which she may obtain further training. You get it?”

“You’re telling me that that’s the right answer,” Forlesen said. “Twenty-three.”

“Listen, hell no! I don’t know what the right answer is; only the machine does. Maybe there isn’t any right answer at all. I was just trying to give you a kind of a hint—what I’d do if I was in your shoes. You want to get a good grade, don’t you?”

“Is it important?”

“I would say that it’s important. I think it’s important to any man to know he did something like this and he did good—wouldn’t you say so? But like we said at the start of the course, your grade is your personal thing. We’re going to give grades, sure, on a scale of seven hundred and ﬁfty-seven—that’s the top—to forty-nine, but nobody knows your grade but you. You’re told your own grade and your class standing and your standing among everybody here who’s ever taken the course—naturally that doesn’t mean much; the problems change all the time—but what you do with that information is up to you. You evaluate yourself. I know there have been these rumors about Mr. Frick coming in and asking the computer questions, but it’s not true—frankly, I don’t think Mr. Frick even knows how to program. It doesn’t just talk to you, you know.”

“I didn’t get to attend the ﬁrst part of the course,” Forlesen said. “I’m ﬁlling in for Cappy Dillingham. He died.”

“Sorry to hear that. Old age, I guess.”

“I don’t know.”

“Probably that was it. Hell, it seems like it was only yesterday I was talking to him about his grade after class—he had some question about one oh four; I don’t even remember what it was now. Old Cappy. Wow.”

“How was he doing?” Forlesen asked.

“Not too hot. I had him ﬁgured for about a ﬁve-ﬁfty, give or take twenty—but listen, if you had seen the earlier stuff you wouldn’t be asking these questions now. You’d of been guided into it—see what I mean?”

Forlesen said, “I just don’t see how I can mark this. I’m going to return the unmarked sheet under protest.”

“I told you, we can’t score something like that.”

Forlesen said, “Well, that’s what I’m going to do,” and hung up.

His desk said, “You’re a sharp one, aren’t you? He’s going to call you back.”

Forlesen looked for the speaker but could not ﬁnd it.

“I heard you talking to Franklin too, and I saw you throw away the Management Responsibilities list. Do you know that in a lot of the ofﬁces here you ﬁnd that framed and hung on the wall? Some of them hang it where they can see it, and some of them hang it where their visitors can see it.”

“Which kind gets promoted?” Forlesen asked. He had decided the speaker was under the center desk drawer, and was on his hands and knees looking for it.

“The kind that ﬁt in,” the desk said.

Forlesen said, “What kind of an answer is that?” The telephone rang and he answered it.

“Mr. Forlesen, please.” It was Fairchild.

“Speaking.”

“I was wondering about number one oh ﬁve—have you sent it back yet?”

“I just put it in my out-box,” Forlesen said. “They haven’t picked it up yet.” Vaguely he wondered if Miss Fawn was supposed to empty the out-box, or if anyone was; perhaps he was supposed to do it himself.

“Good, good. Listen, I’ve been thinking about what you said—do you think that if I told you what was wrong with this girl you’d be able to size her up better? The thing is, she just doesn’t ﬁt in; you know what I mean?”

“No,” Forlesen said.

“Let me give you an example. Guys come in the ofﬁce all the time, either to talk to me or just because they haven’t anything better to do. They kid around with the girls, you know? Okay, this girl, you never know how she’s going to take it. Sometimes she gets mad. Sometimes she thinks the guy really wants to get romantic, and she wants to go along with it.”

“I’d think they’d learn to leave her alone,” Forlesen said.

“Believe me, they have. And the other girls don’t like her—they come in to me and say they want to be moved away from her desk.”

“Do they say why?”

“Oh, hell, no. Listen, if you’d ever bossed a bunch of women you’d know better than that; the way they always put it is the light isn’t good there, or it’s too close to the keypunch—too noisy—or it’s too far from the keypunch and they don’t wanna have to walk that far, or they want to be closer to somebody they do like. But you know how it is—I’ve moved her all around the damn ofﬁce and everybody wants to get away; she’s Typhoid Mary.”

“Make her your permanent secretary,” Forlesen said.

“What?”

“Just for a while. Give your mother a special assignment. That way you can ﬁnd out what’s wrong with this girl, if anything is, which I doubt.”

“You’re crazy, Forlesen,” Fairchild said, and hung up.

The telephone rang again almost as soon as Forlesen set the receiver down. “This is Miss Fawn,” the telephone said. “Mr. Freeling wants to see you, Mr. Forlesen.”

“Mr. Freeling?”

“Mr. Freeling is Mr. Fields’s chief, Mr. Forlesen, and Mr. Fields is your chief. Mr. Freeling reports to Mr. Flint, and Mr. Flint reports directly to Mr. Frick. I am Mr. Freeling’s secretary.”

“Thank you,” Forlesen said. “I was beginning to wonder where you ﬁt in.”

“Right out of your ofﬁce, down the hall to the ‘T,’ left, up the stairs, and along the front of the building. Mr. Freeling’s name is on the door.”

“Thank you,” Forlesen said again.

Mr. Freeling’s name was on the door, in the form of a bronze-like plaque. Forlesen, remembering D’Andrea’s brass one, saw at once that Mr. Freeling’s was more modern and up-to-date, and realized that Mr. Freeling was more important than D’Andrea had been; but he also realized that D’Andrea’s plaque had been real brass and that Mr. Freeling’s was plastic. He knocked, and Miss Fawn’s voice called, “Come in.” He came in, and Miss Fawn threw a switch on her desk and said, “Mr. Forlesen to see you, Mr. Freeling.”

And then to Forlesen: “Go right in.”

Mr. Freeling’s ofﬁce was large and had two windows, both overlooking the highway. Forlesen found that he was somewhat surprised to see the highway again, though it looked just as it had before. The pictures on the walls were landscapes much like Fields’s, but Mr. Freeling’s desk, which was quite large, was covered by a sheet of glass with photographs under it, and these were all of sailboats, and of groups of men in shorts and striped knit shirts and peaked caps.

“Sit down,” Mr. Freeling said. “Be with you in a minute.” He was a large, sunburned, squinting man, beginning to go gray. The chair in front of his desk had wooden arms and a vinyl seat made to look like ostrich hide. Forlesen sat down, wondering what Mr. Freeling wanted, and after a time it came to him that what Mr. Freeling wanted was for him to wonder this, and that Mr. Freeling would have been wiser to speak to him sooner. Mr. Freeling had a pen in his hand and was reading a letter—the same letter—over and over; at last he signed it with a scribble and laid it and the pen ﬂat on his desk. “I should have called you in earlier to say welcome aboard,” he said, “but maybe it was better to give you a chance to drop your hook and get your jib in ﬁrst. Are you ﬁnding M.P.P. a snug harbor?”

“I think I would like it better,” Forlesen said, “if I knew what it was I’m supposed to be doing here.”

Freeling laughed. “Well, that’s easily ﬁxed—Bert Fields is standing watch with you, isn’t he? Ask him for a list of your responsibilities.”

“It’s Ed Fields,” Forlesen said, “and I already have the list. What I would like to know is what I’m supposed to be doing.”

“I see what you mean,” Freeling said, “but I’m afraid I can’t tell you. If you were a lathe operator I’d say, ‘Make that part,’ but you’re a part of management, and you can’t treat managerial people that way.”

“Go ahead,” Forlesen told him. “I won’t mind.”

Freeling cleared his throat. “That isn’t what I meant, and, quite frankly, if you think anyone here is going to feel any compulsion to be polite to you, you’re in for squalls. What I meant was that if I knew what you ought to be doing I’d hire a clerk to do it. You’re where you are because we feel—rightly or wrongly— that you can ﬁnd your own work, recognize it when you see it, and do it or get somebody else to. Just make damn sure you don’t step on anybody’s toes while you’re doing it, and don’t make more trouble than you ﬁx. Don’t rock the boat.”

“I see,” Forlesen said.

“Just make damn sure before you do anything that it’s in line with policy, and remember that if you get the unions down on us we’re going to throw you overboard quick.”

Forlesen nodded.

“And keep your hand off the tiller. Look at it this way—your job is ﬁxing leaks. Only the sailor who’s spent most of his life down there in the hold with the oakum and . . . uh . . . Fastpatch has the experience necessary to recognize the landmarks and weather signs. But don’t you patch a leak somebody else is already patching, or has been told to patch, or is getting ready to patch. Understand? Don’t come running to me with complaints, and don’t let me get any complaints about you. Now what was it you wanted to see me about?”

“I don’t,” Forlesen said. “You said you wanted to see me.”

“Oh. Well, I’m through.”

Outside Forlesen asked Miss Fawn how he was supposed to know what company policy was. “It’s in the air,” Miss Fawn said tartly. “You breathe it.” Forlesen suggested that it might be useful if it were written down someplace, and she said, “You’ve been here long enough to know better than that, Mr. Forlesen; you’re no kid anymore.” As he left the ofﬁce she called, “Don’t forget your Creativity Group.”

• • • •

He found the drilling room only after a great deal of difﬁculty. It was full of drill presses and jig bores—perhaps thirty or more—of which only two were being used. At one, a white-haired man was making a hole in a steel plate; he worked slowly, lifting the drill from time to time to ﬁll the cavity with oil from a squirt can beside the machine. At the other a much younger man sang as he worked, an obscene parody of a popular song. Forlesen was about to ask if he knew where the Creativity Group was meeting when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned and saw Fields, who said, “Looks like you found it. Come on; I’m going to make this one come hell or high water. Right through the door on the other side there.”

They threaded their way through the drill presses, most of which seemed to be out of order in some way, and were about to go through the door Fields had indicated when Forlesen heard a yell behind them. The younger man had burned his hand in trying to change the smoking drill in his machine. “That’s a good operator,” Fields said. “He pushes everything right along—you know what I mean?” Forlesen said he did.

The creativity meeting, as Franklin had told him, was in the corridor. Folding metal chairs had been set up in groupings that looked intentionally disorganized, and a small motion picture screen stood on an easel. Franklin was wrestling with a projector resting (pretty precariously, Forlesen thought) on the seat of the rearmost chair; he had the look of not being as young as he seemed, and after he had introduced himself they sat down and watched him. From time to time others joined them, and people passing up and down the hall, mostly men in gray work clothing, ignored them all, threading their way among the tin chairs without seeming to see them and stepping skillfully around the screen, from which, from time to time, ﬂashed faint numerals 1, 2, and 3, or the legend:

CREATIVITY MEANS JOBS

After a while Fields said, “I think we ought to get started.”

“You go ahead,” Franklin told him. “I’ll have this going in a minute.”

Fields walked to the front of the group, beside the screen, and said “Creativity Group Twenty-one is now in session. I’m going to ask the man in front to write his name on a piece of paper and pass it back. Everybody sign, and do it so we can read it, please. We’re going to have a movie on creativity—”

“Creativity Means Jobs,” Franklin put in.

“Yeah, Creativity Means Jobs, then a free-form critique of the movie. Then what, Ned?”

“Open discussion on creativity in problem study.”

“You got the movie yet?”

“Just a minute.”

Forlesen looked at his watch. It was 078.45.

Someone at the front of the group, close to where Fields was now standing, said, “While we have a minute I’d like to get an objection on record to this phrase ‘creativity in problem study.’ It seems to me that what it implies is that creativity is automatically going to point you toward some solution you didn’t see before, and I feel that anyone who believes that’s going to happen—anyway, in most cases—doesn’t know what the hell they’re talking about.”

Fields said, “Everybody knows creativity isn’t going to solve your problems for you.”

“I said point the way,” the man objected.

Someone else said, “What creativity is going to do for you in the way of problem study is point the way to new ways of seeing your problem.”

“Not necessarily successful,” the ﬁrst man said.

“Not necessarily successful,” the second man said, “if by successful what you mean is permitting you to make a nontrivial elaboration of the problem deﬁnition.”

Someone else said, “Personally, I feel problem deﬁnitions don’t limit creativity,” and Fields said, “I think we’re all agreed on that when they’re creative problem deﬁnitions. Right, Ned?”

“Of creative problems.”

“Right, of creative problems. You know, Ned told me one time when he was talking to somebody about what we do at these meetings this fellow said he thought we’d just each take a lump of clay or something and, you know, start trying to make some kind of shape.” There was laughter, and Fields held up a hand good-naturedly. “Okay, it’s funny, but I think we can all learn something from that. What we can learn is, most people when we talk about our Creativity Group are thinking the same way this guy was, and that’s why when we talk about it we got to make certain points, like for one thing creativity isn’t ever what you do alone, right? It’s your creative group that gets things going— Hey, Ned, what’s the word I want?”

“Synergy.”

“Yeah, and teamwork. And second, creativity isn’t about making new things—like some statue or something nobody wants. What creativity is about is solving company problems—”

Franklin called, “Hey, I’ve got this ready now.”

“Just a minute. Like you take the problem this company had when Adam Bean that founded it died. The problem was—should we go on making what we used to when he was alive, or should we make something different? That problem was solved by Mr. Dudley, as I guess everybody knows, but he wouldn’t have been able to do it without a lot of good men to help him. I personally feel that a football team is about the most creative thing there is.”

Someone brushed Forlesen’s sleeve; it was Miss Fawn, and as Fields paused, she said in her rather shrill voice, “Mr. Fields! Mr. Fields, you’re wanted on the telephone. It’s quite important.” There was something stilted in the way she delivered her lines, like a poor actress, and after a moment Forlesen realized that there was no telephone call, that she had been instructed by Fields to provide this interruption and thus give him an excuse for escaping the meeting while increasing the other participants’ estimate of his importance. After a moment more he understood that Franklin and the others knew this as well as he, and that the admiration they felt for Fields—and admiration was certainly there, surrounding the stocky man as he followed Miss Fawn out—had its root in the daring Fields had shown, and in the power implied by his securing the cooperation of Miss Fawn, Mr. Freeling’s secretary.

Someone had dimmed the lights. “CREATIVITY MEANS JOBS” ﬂashed on the screen, then a group of men and women in what might have been a schoolroom in a very exclusive school. One waved his hand, stood up, and spoke. There was no sound, but his eyes ﬂashed with enthusiasm; when he sat down, an impressive-looking woman in tweeds rose, and Forlesen felt that whatever she was saying must be unanswerable, the ﬁnal word on the subject under discussion; she was polite and restrained and as ﬁrm as iron, and she clearly had every fact at her ﬁngertips.

“I can’t get this damn sound working,” Franklin said. “Just a minute.”

“What are they talking about?” Forlesen asked.

“Huh?”

“In the picture. What are they discussing?”

“Oh, I got it,” Franklin said. “Wait a minute. They’re talking about promoting creativity in the educational system.”

“Are they teachers?”

“No, they’re actors—let me alone for a minute, will you? I want to get this sound going.”

The sound came on, almost coinciding with the end of the picture; while Franklin was rewinding the ﬁlm Forlesen said, “I suppose actors would have a better understanding of creativity than teachers would, at that.”

“It’s a re-creation of an actual meeting of real teachers,” Franklin explained. “They photographed it and taped it, then had the actors reproduce the debate.”

• • • •

Forlesen decided to go home for lunch. Lunch ours were 120 to 141—twenty-one ours should be enough, he thought, for him to drive there and return, and to eat. He kept the pedal down all the way, and discovered that the signs with HIDDEN DRIVES on their faces had SLOW CHILDREN on their backs.

The brick house was just as he remembered it. He parked the car on the spot where he had ﬁrst seen it (there was a black oil stain there) and knocked at the door. Edna answered it, looking not quite as he remembered her. “What do you want?” she said.

“Lunch.”

“Are you crazy? If you’re selling something, we don’t want it.”

Forlesen said, “Don’t you know who I am?”

She looked at him more closely. He said, “I’m your husband, Emanuel.”

She seemed uncertain, then smiled, kissed him, and said, “Yes you are, aren’t you. You look different. Tired.”

“I am tired,” he said, and realized that it was true.

“Is it lunchtime already? I don’t have a watch, you know. I haven’t been able to keep track. I thought it was only the middle of the morning.”

“It seemed long enough to me,” Forlesen said. He wondered where the children were, thinking that he would have liked to see them.

“What do you want for lunch?”

“Whatever you have.”

In the bedroom she got out bread and sliced meat, and plugged in the coffeepot. “How was work?”

“All right. Fine.”

“Did you get promoted? Or get a raise?”

He shook his head.

“After lunch,” she said. “You’ll get promoted after lunch.”

He laughed, thinking that she was joking.

“A woman knows.”

“Where are the kids?”

“At school. They eat their lunch at school. There’s a beautiful cafeteria—everything is stainless steel—and they have a dietician who thinks about the best possible lunch for each child and makes them eat it.”

“Did you see it?” he asked.

“No, I read about it. In here.” She tapped Food Preparation in the Home.

“Oh.”

“They’ll be home at one hundred and thirty—that’s what the book says. Here’s your sandwich.” She poured him a cup of coffee. “What time is it now?”

He looked at the watch she had given him. “A hundred and twenty-nine thirty.”

“Eat. You ought to be going back soon.”

He said, “I was hoping we might have time for more than this.”

“Tonight, maybe. You don’t want to be late.”

“All right.” The coffee was good, but tasted slightly oily; the sandwich meat, salty and dry and ﬂavorless. He unstrapped the watch from his wrist and handed it to her. “You keep this,” he said. “I’ve felt badly about wearing it all morning—it really belongs to you.”

“You need it more than I do,” she said.

“No I don’t; they have clocks all over, there. All I have to do is look at them.”

“You’ll be late getting back to work.”

“I’m going to drive as fast as I can anyway—I can’t go any faster than that no matter what a watch says. Besides, there’s a speaker that tells me things, and I’m sure it will tell me if I’m late.”

Reluctantly she accepted the watch. He chewed the last of his sandwich. “You’ll have to tell me when to go now,” he said, thinking that this would somehow cheer her.

“It’s time to go already,” she said.

“Wait a minute—I want to ﬁnish my coffee.”

“How was work?”

“Fine,” he said.

“You have a lot to do there?”

“Oh, God, yes.” He remembered the crowded desk that had been waiting for him when he had returned from the creativity meeting, the supervision of workers for whom he had been given responsibility without authority, the ours spent with Fields drawing up the plan which, just before he left, had been vetoed by Mr. Freeling. “I don’t think there’s any purpose in most of it,” he said, “but there’s plenty to do.”

“You shouldn’t talk like that,” his wife said. “You’ll lose your job.”

“I don’t, when I’m there.”

“I’ve got nothing to do,” she said. It was as though the words themselves had forced their way from between her lips.

He said, “That can’t be true.”

“I made the beds, and I dusted and swept, and it was all ﬁnished a couple of ours after you had gone. There’s nothing.”

“You could read,” he said.

“I can’t—I’m too nervous.”

“Well, you could have prepared a better lunch than this.”

“That’s nothing,” she said. “Just nothing.” She was suddenly angry, and it struck him, as he looked at her, that she was a stranger, that he knew Fields and Miss Fawn and even Mr. Freeling better than he knew her.

“The morning’s over,” he said. “I’m sorry I can’t give it back to you, but I can’t; what I did—that was nothing too.”

“Please,” she said, “won’t you go? Having you here makes me so nervous.”

He said, “Try and ﬁnd something to do.”

“All right.”

He wiped his mouth on the paper she had given him and took a step toward the parlor; to his surprise she walked with him, not detaining him, but seeming to savor his company now that she had deprived herself of it. “Do you remember when we woke up?” she said. “You didn’t know at ﬁrst that you were supposed to dress yourself.”

“I’m still not sure of it.”

“Oh, you know what I mean.”

“Yes,” he said, and he knew that he did, but that she did not.

• • • •

The signs said: NO TURN, and Forlesen wondered if he was really compelled to obey them, if the man in the blue car would come after him if he did not go back to Model Pattern Products. He suspected that the man would, but that nothing he could do would be worse than M.P.P. itself. In front of the dog-food factory a shapeless brown object ﬂuttered in the road, animated by the turbulence of each car that passed and seeming to attack it, throwing itself with desperate, toothless courage at the singing, invulnerable tires. He had almost run over it before he realized what it was—Abraham Beale’s hat.

The parking lot was more rutted than he had remembered; he drove slowly and carefully. The outbuilding had been torn down, and another car, startlingly shiny (Forlesen did not believe his own had ever been that well-polished, not even when he had ﬁrst looked out the window at it), had his old place; he was forced to take another, farther from the plant. Several other people, he noticed, seemed to have gone home for lunch as he had—some he knew, having shared meeting rooms with them. He had never punched out on the beige clock, and did not punch in.

There was a boy seated at his desk, piling new schoolbooks on it from a cardboard box on the ﬂoor. Forlesen said hello, and the boy said that his name was George Howe, and that he worked in Mr. Forlesen’s section.

Forlesen nodded, feeling that he understood. “Miss Fawn showed you to your desk?”

The boy shook his head in bewilderment. “A lady named Mrs. Frost—she said she was Mr. Freeling’s secretary; she had glasses.”

“And a sharp nose.”

George Howe nodded.

Forlesen nodded in reply, and made his way to Fields’s old ofﬁce. As he had expected, Fields was gone, and most of the items from his own desk had made their way to Fields’s—he wondered if Fields’s desk sometimes talked too, but before he could ask it Miss Fawn came in.

She wore two new rings and touched her hair often with her left hand to show them. Forlesen tried to imagine her pregnant or giving suck and found that he could not, but knew that this was a weakness in himself and not in her. “Ready for orientation?” Miss Fawn asked.

Forlesen ignored the question and asked what had happened to Fields.

“He passed on,” Miss Fawn said.

“You mean he died? He seemed too young for it; not much older than I am myself—certainly not as old as Mr. Freeling.”

“He was stout,” Miss Fawn said with a touch of righteous disdain. “He didn’t get much exercise and he smoked a great deal.”

“He worked very hard,” Forlesen said. “I don’t think he could have had much energy left for exercise.”

“I suppose not,” Miss Fawn conceded. She was leaning against the door, her left hand toying with the gold pencil she wore on a chain, and seemed to be signaling by her attitude that they were old friends, entitled to relax occasionally from the formality of business. “There was a thing—at one time—between Mr. Fields and myself. I don’t suppose you ever knew it.”

“No, I didn’t,” Forlesen said, and Miss Fawn looked pleased.

“Eddie and I—I called him Eddie, privately—were quite discreet. Or so I ﬂatter myself now. I don’t mean, of course, that there was ever anything improper between us.”

“Naturally not.”

“A look and a few words. Elmer knows; I told him everything. You are ready to give that orientation, aren’t you?”

“I think I am now,” Forlesen said. “George Howe?”

Miss Fawn looked at a piece of paper. “No, Gordie Hilbert.”

As she was leaving, Forlesen asked impulsively where Fields was.

“Where he is buried, you mean? Right behind you.”

He looked at her blankly.

“There.” She gestured toward the picture behind Forlesen’s desk. “There’s a vault behind there—didn’t you know? Just a small one, of course; they’re cremated ﬁrst.”

“Burned out.”

“Yes, burned up and then they put them behind the pictures—that’s what they’re for. The pictures, I mean. In a beautiful little cruet. It’s a company beneﬁt, and you’d know if you’d read your own orientation material—of course, you can be buried at home if you like.”

“I think I’d prefer that,” Forlesen said.

“I thought so,” Miss Fawn told him. “You look the type. Anyway, Eddie bought the farm—that’s an expression the men have.”

• • • •

At 125 hours Forlesen was notiﬁed of his interdepartmental training transfer. His route to his new desk took him through the main lobby of the building, where he observed that a large medallion set into the ﬂoor bore the face (too solemn, but quite unmistakable) of Abraham Beale, though the name beneath it was that of Adam Bean, the founder of the company. Since he was accompanied by his chief-to-be, Mr. Fleer, he made no remark.

“It’s going to be a pleasure going down the fast slope with you,” Mr. Fleer said. “I trust you’ve got your wax ready and your boots laced.”

“My wax is ready and my boots are laced,” Forlesen said; it was automatic by now.

“But not too tight—wouldn’t want to break a leg.”

“But not too tight,” Forlesen agreed. “What do we do in this division?”

Mr. Fleer smiled and Forlesen could see that he had asked a good question. “Right now we’re right in the middle of a very successful crash program to develop a hard-nosed understanding of the ins and outs of the real, realistic business world,” Mr. Fleer said, “with particular emphasis on marketing, ﬁnance, corporate developmental strategy, and risk appreciation. We’ve been playing a lot of Bet-Your-Life, the management-managing real-life pseudogame.”

“Great,” Forlesen said enthusiastically; he really felt enthusiastic, having been afraid that it would be more creativity.

“We’re in the center of the run,” Mr. Fleer assured him, “the snow is fast, and the wind is in our faces.”

Forlesen was tempted to comment that his boots were laced and his wax ready, but he contented himself at the last moment with nodding appreciatively and asking if he would get to play.

“You certainly will,” Mr. Fleer promised him. “You’ll be holding down Ffoulks’s chair. It’s an interesting position—he’s heavily committed to a line of plastic toys, but he has some military contracts for ﬁeld rations and biological weapons to back him up. Also he’s big in aquarium supplies—that’s quite a small market altogether, but Ffoulks is big in it, if you get what I mean.”

“I can hardly wait to start,” Forlesen said. “I have a feeling that this may be the age of aquariums.” Fleer pondered this while they trudged up the stairs.

Bet-Your-Life, the management-managing real-life pseudogame, was played on a very large board laid out on a very big table in a very large meeting room. Scattered all over the board were markers and spinners and decks of cards, and birdcages holding eight- and twelve-sided dice. Scattered around the room, in chairs, were the players: Two were arguing and one was asleep; ﬁve others were studying the board or making notes, or working out calculations on small handheld machines that were something like abacuses and something like cash registers. “I’ll just give you the rule book, and have a look at my own stuff, and go,” Mr. Fleer said. “I’m late for the meeting now.” He took a brown pamphlet from a pile in one corner of the room and handed it to Forlesen, who (with some feeling of surprise) noticed that it was identical to one of the booklets he had found under his job assignment sheet upon awakening.

Mr. Fleer had scrawled a note on a small tablet marked with the Bet-Your-Life emblem. He tore the sheet off as Forlesen watched, and laid it in an empty square near the center of the board. It read: “BID17 ASK 18 1⁄4 SNOWMOBILE 5 1⁄2 UP 1⁄2 OPEN NEW TERRITORY SHUT DOWN COAL OIL SHOES FLEER.” He left the room, and Forlesen, timing the remark in such a way that it might be supposed that he thought Mr. Fleer out of earshot, said, “I’ll bet he’s a strong player.”

The man to his left, to whom the remark was nominally addressed, shook his head. “He’s overbought in sporting goods.”

“Sporting goods seem like a good investment to me,” Forlesen said. “Of course I don’t know the game.”

“Well, you won’t learn it reading that thing—it’ll only mix you up. The basic rule to remember is that no one has to move, but that anyone can move at any time if he wants to. Fleer hasn’t been here for ten ours—now he’s moved.”

“On the other hand,” a man in a red jacket said, “this part of the building is kept open at all times, and coffee and sandwiches are brought in every our—some people never leave. I’m the referee.”

A man with a bristling mustache, who had been arguing with the man in the red jacket a moment before, interjected, “The rules can be changed whenever a quorum agrees—we pull the staple out of the middle of the book, type up a new page, and slip it in. A quorum is three-quarters of the players present, but never seven or less.”

Forlesen said hesitantly, “It’s not likely three-quarters of those present would be seven, is it?”

“No, it isn’t,” the referee agreed. “We rarely have that many.”

The man with the mustache said, “You’d better look over your holdings.”

Forlesen did so, and discovered that he held 100 percent of the stock of a company called International Toys and Foods. He wrote: “BID 34 ASK 32 FFOULKS” on a slip and placed it in the center of the board. “You’ll never get thirty-two for that stuff,” the man with the mustache said. “It isn’t worth near that.”

Forlesen pointed out that he had an offer to buy in at thirty-four but was ﬁnding no takers. The man with the mustache looked puzzled, and Forlesen used the time he had gained to examine the brown pamphlet. Opening it at random he read:

“We’re a team,” Fields continued, “and we’re going to function as a team. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a quarterback, and a coach”—he pointed toward the ceiling—“up there. It does mean that I expect every man to bat two ﬁfty or better, and the ones that don’t make three hundred had better be damn good Fields. See what I mean?”

“I buy ﬁve hundred, and I’m selling them to you.”

Forlesen nodded again and asked, “What does our subdivision do? What’s our function?”

“I said I’m going to buy ﬁve hundred shares and then I’m going to sell them back to you.”

“Not so fast,” Forlesen said. “You don’t own any yet.”

“Well, I’m buying.” The man with the mustache rummaged among his playing materials and produced some bits of colored paper. Forlesen accepted the money and began to count it.

The man with the red jacket said: “Coffee. And sandwiches. Spam and Churkey.” The man with the mustache went over to get one, and Forlesen went out the door.

The corridor was deserted. There had been a feeling of airlessness in the game room, an atmosphere compounded of stale sweat and smoke and the cold, oily coffee left to stagnate in the bottom of the paper hot cups; the corridor was glacial by comparison, ﬁlled with quiet wind and the memory of ice. Forlesen stopped outside the door to savor it for a second, and was joined by the man with the mustache, munching a sandwich. “Nice to get out here for a minute, isn’t it?” he said.

Forlesen nodded.

“Not that I don’t enjoy the game,” the man with the mustache continued. “I do. I’m in Sales, you know.”

“I didn’t. I thought everyone was from our division.”

“Oh, no. There’s several of us Sales guys, and some Advertising guys. Brought in to sharpen you up. That’s what we say.”

“I’m sure we can use some sharpening.”

“Well, anyway, I like it—this wheeling and dealing. You know what Sales is—you put pressure on the grocers. Tell them if they don’t stock the new items they’re going to get slow deliveries on the standard stuff, going to lose their discount. A guy doesn’t learn much ﬁnancial management that way.”

“Enough,” Forlesen said.

“Yeah, I guess so.” The man with the mustache swallowed the remainder of his sandwich. “Listen, I got to be going; I’m about to clip some guy in there.”

Forlesen said, “Good luck,” and walked away, hearing the door to the game room open and close behind him. He went past a number of ofﬁces, looking for his own, and up two ﬂights of steps before he found someone who looked as though she could direct him, a sharp-nosed woman who wore glasses.

“You’re looking at me funny,” the sharp-nosed woman said. She smiled with something of the expression of a blindfolded schoolteacher who has been made to bite a lemon at a Halloween party.

“You remind me a great deal of someone I know,” Forlesen said, “Mrs. Frost.” As a matter of fact, the woman looked exactly like Miss Fawn.

The woman’s smile grew somewhat warmer. “Everyone says that. Actually we’re cousins—I’m Miss Fedd.”

“Say something else.”

“Do I talk like her too?”

“No. I think I recognize your voice. This is going to sound rather silly, but when I came here—in the morning, I mean—my car talked to me. I hadn’t thought of it as a female voice, but it sounded just like you.”

“It’s quite possible,” Miss Fedd said. “I used to be in Trafﬁc, and I still ﬁll in there at times.”

“I never thought I’d meet you. I was the one who stopped and got out of his car.”

“A lot of them do, but usually only once. What’s that you’re carrying?”

“This?” Forlesen held up the brown book; his ﬁnger was still thrust between the pages. “A book. I’m afraid to read the ending.”

“It’s the red book you’re supposed to be afraid to read the end of,” Miss Fedd told him. “It’s the opposite of a mystery—everyone stops before the revelations.”

“I haven’t even read the beginning of that one,” Forlesen said. “Come to think of it, I haven’t read the beginning of this one either.”

“We’re not supposed to talk about books here, not even when we haven’t anything to do. What was it you wanted?”

“I’ve just been transferred into the division, and I was hoping you’d help me ﬁnd my desk.”

“What’s your name?”

“Forlesen. Emanuel Forlesen.”

“Good. I was looking for you—you weren’t at your desk.”

“No, I wasn’t,” Forlesen said. “I was in the Bet-Your-Life room—well, not recently.”

“I know. I looked there too. Mr. Frick wants to see you.”

“Mr. Frick?”

“Yes. He said to tell you he was planning to do this a bit later today, but he’s got to leave the ofﬁce a little early. Come on.”

Miss Fedd walked with short, mincing steps, but so rapidly that Forlesen was forced to trot to keep up. “Why does Mr. Frick want to see me?” He thought of the way he had cheated the man with the mustache, of the time he had baited Fairchild on the telephone, of other things.

“I’m not supposed to tell,” Miss Fedd said. “This is Mr. Frick’s door.”

“I know,” Forlesen told her. It was a large door—larger than the other doors in the building—and not painted to resemble metal. Mr. Frick’s plaque was of silver (or perhaps platinum), and had the single word Frick engraved in an almost too-tasteful script. A man Forlesen did not know walked past them as they stood before Mr. Frick’s tasteful plaque; the man wore a hat and carried a briefcase, and had a coat slung over his arm.

“We’re emptying out a little already,” Miss Fedd said. “I’d go right in now if I were you—I think he wants to play golf before he goes home.”

“Aren’t you going in with me?”

“Of course not—he’s got a group in there already, and I have things to do. Don’t knock; just go in.”

Forlesen opened the door. The room was very large and crowded; men in expensive suits stood smoking, holding drinks, knocking out their pipes in bronze ashtrays. The tables and the desk—yes, he told himself, there is a desk, a very large desk next to the window at one end, a desk shaped like the lid of a grand piano—the tables and the desk all of dark heavy tropical wood, the tables and the desk all littered with bronze trophies so that the whole room seemed of bronze and black wood and red wool. Several of the men looked at him, then toward the opposite end of the room, and he knew at once who Mr. Frick was: a bald man standing with his back to the room, rather heavy, Forlesen thought, and somewhat below average height. He made his way through the smokers and drink holders. “I’m Emanuel Forlesen.”

“Oh, there you are.” Mr. Frick turned around. “Ernie Frick, Forlesen.” Mr. Frick had a wide, plump face, a mole over one eyebrow, and a gold tooth. Forlesen felt that he had seen him before.

“We went to grade school together,” Mr. Frick said. “I bet you don’t remember me, do you?”

Forlesen shook his head.

“Well, I’ll be honest—I don’t think I would have remembered you, but I looked up your ﬁle while we were getting set for the ceremony. And now that I see you, by gosh, I do remember—I played prisoner’s base with you one day; you used to be able to run like anything.”

“I wonder where I lost it,” Forlesen said. Mr. Frick and several of the men standing around him laughed, but Forlesen was thinking that he could not possibly be as old as Mr. Frick.

“Say, that’s pretty good. You know, we must have started at about the same time. Well, some of us go up and some don’t, and I suppose you envy me, but let me tell you I envy you. It’s lonely at the top, the work is hard, and you can never set down the responsibility for a minute. You won’t believe it, but you’ve had the best of it.”

“I don’t,” Forlesen said.

“Well, anyway, I’m tired—we’re all tired. Let’s get this over with so we can all go home.” Mr. Frick raised his voice to address the room at large. “Gentlemen, I asked you to come here because you have all been associated at one time or another, in one way or another, with this gentleman here, Mr. Forlesen, to whom I am very happy to present this token of his colleagues’ regard.”

Someone handed Mr. Frick a box, and he handed it to Forlesen, who opened it while everyone clapped. It was a watch. “I didn’t know it was so late,” Forlesen said.

Several people laughed; they were already ﬁling out.

“You’ve been playing Bet-Your-Life, haven’t you?” Mr. Frick said. “A fellow can spend more time at that than he thinks.”

Forlesen nodded.

“Say, why don’t you take the rest of the day off? There’s not much of it left anyhow.”

• • • •

Outside, others, who presumably had not been given the remainder of the day off by Mr. Frick, were straggling toward their cars. As Forlesen walked toward his, feeling as he did the stiffness and the pain in his legs, a bright, new car pulled onto the lot and a couple got out, the man a fresh-faced boy, really, the girl a working-class girl, meticulously made up and dressed, cheaply attractive and forlorn, like the models in the advertisements of third-rate dress shops. They went up the sidewalk hand in hand to kiss, Forlesen felt sure, in the time clock room, and separate, she going up the steps, he down. They would meet for coffee later, both uncomfortable, out of a sense of duty, meet for lunch in the cafeteria, he charging her meal to the paycheck he had not yet received.

The yellow signs that lined the street read: YIELD; orange and black machines were eating the houses just beyond the light. Forlesen pulled his car into his driveway, over the oil spot. A small man in a dark suit was sitting on a wood and canvas folding stool beside Forlesen’s door, a black bag at his feet; Forlesen spoke to him, but he did not answer. Forlesen shrugged and stepped inside.

A tall young man stood beside a long, angular object that rested on a sort of trestle in the center of the parlor. “Look what we’ve got for you,” he said.

Forlesen looked. It was exactly like the box his watch had come in, save that it was much larger: of red-brown wood that seemed almost black, lined with pinkish-white silk.

“Want to try her out?” the young man said.

“No, I don’t.” Forlesen had already guessed who the young man must be, and after a moment he added a question: “Where’s your mother?”

“Busy,” the young man said. “You know how women are . . . Well, to tell the truth she doesn’t want to come in until it’s over. This lid is neat—watch.” He folded down half the lid. “Like a Dutch door.” He folded it up again. “Don’t you want to try it for size? I’m afraid it’s going to be tight around the shoulders, but it’s got a hell of a good engine.”

“No,” Forlesen said, “I don’t want to try it out.” Something about the pinkish silk disgusted him. He bent over it to examine it more closely, and the young man took him by the hips and lifted him in as though he were a child, closing the lower half of the lid; it reached to his shirt pockets and effectively pinioned his arms. “Ha, ha,” Forlesen said.

The young man sniffed. “You don’t think we’d bury you before you’re dead, do you? I just wanted you to try it out, and that was the easiest way. How do you like it?”

“Get me out of this thing.”

“In a minute. Is it comfortable? Is it a good ﬁt? It’s costing us quite a bit, you know.”

“Actually,” Forlesen said, “it’s more comfortable than I had foreseen. The bottom is only thinly padded, but I ﬁnd the ﬁrmness helps my back.”

“Good, that’s great. Now have you decided about the Explainer?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Didn’t you read your orientation? Everyone’s entitled to an Explainer—in whatever form he chooses—at the end of his life. He—”

“It seems to me,” Forlesen interrupted, “that it would be more useful at the beginning.”

“—may be a novelist, aged loremaster, National Hero, warlock, or actor.”

“None of those sounds quite right for me,” Forlesen said.

“Or a theologian, philosopher, priest, or doctor.”

“I don’t think I like those either.”

“Well, that’s the end of the menu as far as I know,” his son said. “I’ll tell you what—I’ll send him in and you can talk to him yourself; he’s right outside.”

“That little fellow in the dark suit?” Forlesen asked. His son, whose head was thrust out the door already, paid no attention.

After a moment the small man came in carrying his bag, and Forlesen’s son placed a chair close to the cofﬁn for him and went into the bedroom. “Well, what’s it going to be,” the small man asked, “or is it going to be nothing?”

“I don’t know,” Forlesen said. He was looking at the weave of the small man’s suit, the intertwining of the innumerable threads, and realizing that they constituted the universe in themselves, that they were serpents and worms and roots, the black tracks of forgotten rockets across a dark sky, the sine waves of the radiation of the cosmos. “I wish I could talk to my wife.”

“Your wife is dead,” the small man said “The kid didn’t want to tell you. We got her laid out in the next room. What’ll it be? Doctor, priest, philosopher, theologian, actor, warlock, National Hero, aged loremaster, or novelist?”

“I don’t know,” Forlesen said again. “I want to feel, you know, that this box is a bed—and yet a ship, a ship that will set me free. And yet . . . it’s been a strange life.”

“You may have been oppressed by demons,” the small man said. “Or revived by unseen aliens who, landing on the Earth eons after the death of the last man, have sought to re-create the life of the twentieth century. Or it may be that there is a small pressure, exerted by a tumor in your brain.”

“Those are the explanations?” Forlesen asked.

“Those are some of them.”

“I want to know if it’s meant anything,” Forlesen said. “If what I suffered—if it’s been worth it.”

“No,” the little man said. “Yes. No. Yes. Yes. No. Yes. Yes. Maybe.”

©1974, 2002 by Gene Wolfe.

Previously published in Orbit 14 and The Best of Gene Wolfe.

Reprinted by permission of the author and The Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gene Wolfe—who is perhaps best known for his multi-volume epic, The Book of the New Sun—is the author of more than 200 short stories and thirty novels, is a two-time winner of the Nebula Award, a four-time winner of the World Fantasy Award, and was once praised as “the greatest writer in the English Language alive today” by author Michael Swanwick. His most recent novels are An Evil Guest, The Sorcerer's House, and Home Fires.

NOVEL EXCERPTS

NOVEL EXCERPT:
The Causal Angel

Hannu Rajaniemi

CHAPTER ONE
The Thief and the Last Battle

We are barely past the orbit of Mars when Matjek figures out the truth about Narnia and helps me find Mieli’s trail.

“That can’t be the end!” he says, holding up a book. It is a big, battered purple volume, with a circular window-like cover image that shows clashing armies. He has to lift it with both of his four-year-old hands. He struggles with its weight and finally slams it down onto the table in front of me.

The Last Battle, by C.S. Lewis, I note with a sigh. That means difficult questions.

For the past few subjective days, the tiny main vir of our ship, the Wardrobe, has been a calm place. I created it based on a dream Matjek told me about. It is an incense-scented labyrinth of high bookshelves full of haphazardly stacked books of all sizes and colours. Matjek and I usually sit at a rough wooden table in the small café area in the front, brightly lit by diffuse sunlight through the display windows.

Outside—painted on the imaginary glass for us by the vir—is the turbulent flow of the Highway, thousands of lightwisps, rockships, calmships, beamriders and other craft of every kind, reflected from the Wardrobe’s solar sails in a myriad glinting fragments. And somewhere in the back, in the shadows, the blue and silver books that hold the fractally compressed minds of the people and jinni and gods of Sirr whisper to each other with papery voices.

Until now, Matjek has been reading his books quietly, leaning his chin on his fists. Which has suited me fine: I have been busy looking for Mieli in the death cries of Earth.

“They can’t just all die! It’s not fair!” Matjek says.

I look at him and make my sole Highway-zoku jewel—an emerald crystal disc with a tracery of milky veins inside, a gift from a friendly cetamorph— spin between my fingers.

“Listen, Matjek,” I say. “Would you like to see a trick?”

The boy answers with a disapproving stare. His eyes are earnest and intense, a piercing blue gaze that is at odds with his soft round face. It brings back uncomfortable memories from the time his older self caught me and took my brain apart, neuron by neuron.

He folds his arms across his chest imperiously. “No. I want to know if there is a different ending. I don’t like it.”

I roll my eyes.

“Usually, there is only one ending, Matjek. Why don’t you find another book to read if you didn’t like that one?”

I really don’t want to have this conversation right now. My minions—a swarm of open-source cognitive agents distantly descended from rats and nematode worms—are scouring the System public spimescapes for public data on Earth’s destruction. There is a steady stream of qupts in my head, cold raindrops of information from the storm of ships beyond our ancient vessel’s walls.

And each of them is like the stroke of a clock, counting down time that Mieli has left.

• • • •

A lifestream from a Ceresian vacuumhawk. A grainy feed recorded by photosensitive bacterial film on the solar sail wings of a fragile non-sentient space organism that was following a female of its species past Earth. Not nearly detailed enough. Next.

A <SPIME> from a Sagan-Zoku synthetic aperture array on Ganymede, public feed.

My heart jumps. Not bad. A hyperspectral dataset from a few days ago flashes past my eyes, like flying through aurora borealis, multicoloured sheets of light that show both Earth’s surface and the surrounding space in intricate detail. The Dragons are dark gashes in every layer, but I don’t care about them. With a thought, I zoom into the L₂ Lagrange point and the cloud of technological debris where Perhonen should be. Come on.

“But I want to know,” says a distant, insistent voice. “Who was the Emperor? What was beyond the sea? Why was Aslan no longer a lion?”

The spime view is detailed enough to show the space-time trail and history of every synthbio fragment and dead nanosat in that little Sargasso Sea of space—except that Mieli’s ship Perhonen is supposed to be there, too, and it isn’t. I swear under my breath.

“You said a bad word!” Somewhere far away, Matjek is tugging at my sleeve.

It is frustrating. All the public data I can find is subtly corrupt, even data with supposedly unforgeable quantum watermarks from zoku sensors. It makes no sense, unless there is a major spoofing operation going on. It makes me wonder if it’s already too late.

Where the hell is she?

I rub my eyes, send the minions to scour the ad hoc networks of the Highway to see if anyone else has noticed the phenomenon. Then I let their qupts fade into distant background noise. Suddenly, I miss Perhonen’s intel gogols very badly, although not as much as I miss the ship itself.

“Why did they have to look at his face in the end?”

In a situation like this, it would know exactly what to say.

“Look, Matjek. I am very, very busy now. I have to work.”

“I can help you. I am good at working.”

“It’s grown-up stuff,” I say carefully. “I think you would find it boring.”

He does not look impressed.

“That’s what Mum always says but once I went with her to her work, and it was fun. I crashed a quantum derivatives market.”

“My work is not nearly as exciting as your mum’s.” I know it’s a mistake the moment I say it.

“I don’t believe you. I want to try!” He reaches for my zoku jewel. I hold it up, spin it in my fingers and make it disappear.

“Matjek, it is rude to take other people’s toys without asking permission. Do you remember what I told you? What are we doing here?”

He looks at the floor.

“We are saving Mieli,” he mutters.

“That’s right. The nice lady with wings who came to visit you. That’s why I came back to you. I needed you to help me. That’s why we are in the Wardrobe. I let you name her, didn’t I?”

He nods.

“And who are we saving Mieli from?”

“Everybody,” Matjek says.

• • • •

Look after her. For me. Promise, Perhonen said.

When a Sobornost Hunter attacked us, the ship tried to save Mieli by shooting her into space. I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time.

The problem is that Mieli served the Sobornost for two decades and carries a Founder gogol in her head. There are too many forces in the System that want access to that kind of information, especially now. For example, the Great Game Zoku, the zoku intelligence arm. They might be nice about it, but when they find her, they are going to peel her mind open like an orange. The pellegrinis, the vasilevs, the hsien-kus or the chens will be less polite. Let alone the mercenary company she infiltrated and betrayed on Earth.

We have to find her, before someone else does. And several baseline days have already passed.

Even if I knew where she was, getting to her would not be easy. Our good ship, the Wardrobe, is little more than a tangle of carbon nanotubes inside a cherry-sized blob of primitive smartmatter, tugged along a Belt branch of the Highway towards Saturn by kitelike solar sails. It hatched from a 3000-ton Wang bullet. I lit a 150-kiloton nuclear explosive under it to escape a dying Earth. Fragments of the shell that protected the ship still float around us, a three-dimensional puzzle of steel and boron, and a wispy mess of used anti-acceleration gel that trails the ship like a stream of toilet paper from a car window. It's not the vessel I would choose for a high-speed System-wide chase.

And if I do find Mieli and she finds out what happened to Perhonen, there will be blood. Mostly mine.

• • • •

I take Matjek by the shoulders gently. “That’s right. Everybody.”

“I want to help Mieli, too.”

“I know. But right now, you will help me best by being quiet and reading a little bit more. Can you do that?”

He pouts.

“The Princess said we were going to have an adventure. She didn’t say anything about you having to work so much.”

“Well, the Princess does not know everything.”

“I know. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. I thought you were my friend.”

There is a sudden, hollow feeling in my chest.

I hate to admit it, but my motives for bringing him along were selfish: his jannah was the only place that Chen’s Dragons were forbidden to touch.

And then there is a fact that not too long ago, I was ready to steal his soul.

“Of course I am your friend, Matjek. What was it about the book that that upset you so much?”

He hops from one foot to another. Then he looks at me with those clear eyes.

“Is this place like Narnia?” he asks. “Are we both really dead?”

• • • •

I stare at him.

“Why do you say that?”

“It makes sense, when you think about it. I remember going to Mr. Perenna’s white room. It’s like I was really ill. There was a bed, and then I was on the beach, and felt fine again.

“I never thought about it when I was there. I just kept playing. Mum and Dad said I could play a little longer. They were going to come back, but they never did. It was like I was dreaming. But Mieli came and woke me up.

“So maybe I was ill and died in the real world and the beach is Narnia and you’re Reepecheep the mouse.”

Matjek was four years old when his mind was copied into the jannah. The last real thing he remembers is going to the upload insurance company with his parents: the rest is a never-ending afternoon on the beach. As far as he knows, one of his imaginary friends, the one he calls the Flower Prince, came back and took him on an adventure. I can’t bring myself to tell him that his parents have been dead for centuries and that the world he knew was eaten by Dragons that his future self made.

“Matjek—”

For a split second, I consider my options. I could roll his gogol back a few days, make him forget all about me and The Last Battle. I could recreate his beach. He could keep playing forever.

I take a deep breath. For once, Mieli was right. There are lines that have to be drawn. I’m not going to turn Matjek into an edited gogol like me. And there is no way I am building a prison for the boy.

I take Matjek’s small hand in my own. I squeeze his fingers gently, looking for words.

“You are not dead, Matjek. Being dead is different. Believe me, I know. But things can be real in different ways. Your parents never believed in us, did they? In me, the Princess, the Soldier and the Kraken?”

It takes some effort to speak the names in a steady voice. Matjek’s imaginary friends—or their distant descendants, the Aun—make me uncomfortable. They claim I’m one of them, and saved me from being eaten by wildcode in Earth’s atmosphere. But they did not save Perhonen.

Matjek shakes his head.

“That’s because we live in a world they can’t see, the world of stories. Once we find Mieli, I promise I will take you back to the real world. But I need you to help me first. Okay?”

“Okay.” He sniffs. I suppress a sigh of relief.

Then he looks at me again.

“Prince?”

“Yes?”

“I always forget the stories in my dreams. The children always forget Narnia. Will I remember you when I go back?”

“Of course you’ll remember.”

The word echoes in my mind like thunder. Remember. That’s it! Grinning manically, I lift Matjek and hug him tight.

“Matjek, you are a genius!”

I have been looking for Mieli’s trail in public data sources that have been compromised by unknown forces. But there is one place in the Solar System where they remember everything. And keep secrets better than anyone else.

• • • •

Setting up an anonymous quptlink to speak to the King of Mars is not easy, but I work feverishly now that I finally have a plan. I've encouraged Matjek to tackle an algorithmically generated, neuroadaptive fantasy book from the late twenty-first century next: I’m hoping it will keep him busy for a while.

We are several light-minutes away from Mars, and so I slow down my subjective clockspeed to simulate a real-time conversation. I create a slowtime sub-vir and step inside: nothing fancy, just a fragment from my visit to the hsien-kus’s ancestor simulation of old Earth, a basement bar in Paris, full of calm, friendly expatriate bustle.

I pause for a moment, savouring a screwdriver cocktail. Technically, the detective and I were adversaries, and I would hate to ask for his help even if he wasn’t my ex-lover Raymonde’s son. I make a last-minute effort to think of other options, conclude there are none, and send the first qupt, making sure to attach a grin.

How are you, my King?

Don’t call me that, the answer comes. You have no idea what it’s like. The qupt carries the gritted teeth feel of frustration, and I smile.

It’s a title you earned, Isidore. You should embrace it.

What do you want, Jean? I did not expect to hear from you again. Don’t tell me you want your Watch back.

Clearly, the boy is growing teeth.

You can keep the Watch. I seem to recall you had trouble with keeping appointments, or so Pixil said. I would like to let him ponder that for a while, but time is short. I need something else, though. Your help. It’s urgent.

What happened on Earth? There is a hunger in his query.

Did you have something to do with it?

It’s better that you don’t know the details. As for what happened—that’s what I’m trying to find out.

I send him a quick summary of my efforts to find Mieli, adapted to the Martian co-memory protocols.

Isidore, someone has been tampering with all the public data I can find. The Oubliette exomemory may have slipped past them: if your encryption schemes are too much trouble for the Sobornost, they will give anyone pause. I need all the Earth and Highway observation data you have from this period.

Isidore’s reply is full of feverish enthusiasm. This is almost like the Kingdom, forging the past, but on a much larger scale! I’ll have to use the Cryptarch Key to get all this. Why would anyone go to so much trouble?

Perhaps someone is really afraid of a Dragon infection. That is the best idea my minions found amongst Highway chatter. Or to keep anyone else from finding Mieli, I think to myself. Although why anyone would deploy such resources to hide one Oortian, even a servant of Joséphine Pellegrini, I have no idea.

Please hurry, Isidore. And stay out of this. You have a planet to rule. There is a Sobornost civil war going on: the usual courtesies do not apply anymore. If they find out you have the Key, they will come after you. You don’t need distractions.

Like I said. You have no idea, Isidore qupts. There you go. A dense, compressed collection of co-memories floods the quptlink. I file it away for detailed analysis, thankful that I kept the vasilev-made exomemory emulation and hacking tools I used during my brief but eventful visit to the Oubliette.

Thank you, Isidore. I am in your debt. I pause. Please say hello to Raymonde for me. I try to hide the bittersweet emotion with vodka and lemon, sending the tart taste of my drink with the qupt.

I will. But Jean, why are you trying to find Mieli? She fought side by side with Raymonde, her ship saved us from the phoboi, we are all grateful for that, but what do you owe her? It sounds like you are free now. You can go anywhere you want. This time the hint of bitterness is his. From what I know about her, Mieli can look after herself. Why are you trying so hard to save her?

The question takes me by surprise. I let time flow at its usual pace so I have time to think. Isidore is right. I could go anywhere. I could be anyone. I could go to Saturn or beyond, find someone to take care of Matjek, and then be Jean le Flambeur again.

Perhonen once asked me what I was going to do when our mission was over. When I think about it now, it is like peeking over a sheer cliff. It makes my gut wrench with fear. So little of me came out of the Prison intact. What do I have left, except promises?

Besides, Mieli still has a chance. She has spent her entire life chasing after a lost love, and it has all been for nothing. That’s what happens to those whom Joséphine Pellegrini touches, I know that far too well.

Because it’s the kind of thing that Jean le Flambeur would do, I whisper down the quptlink. Stay out of trouble, Isidore.

Then I cut the link and lose myself in the data, and finally find Mieli in the memories of flowers.

• • • •

The data is from a Quiet-built distributed telescope. Like much of Oubliette technology, it is more like an art project than engineering: synthbio flowers with photosensitive petals that collectively form a vast imaging device, seeded in the city’s footsteps across Mars. They spend their lives watching the Martian sky like a vast compound eye, until the phoboi eat them.

The data is from the Oubliette exomemory, and so accessing it is like remembering. Suddenly, I recall seeing a tiny dot in the sky. But unlike with a normal memory, the more I focus on it, the clearer the image becomes, until I see Perhonen’s winged spiderweb form. A thought brings me to the right moment. There is a flash, and then smaller shape detaches from the ship, hurtling through the void.

There she is. I follow her with the flowers’ eyes.

Mieli floats in the nothingness, a woman in a dark robe, turning and tumbling, until a ship comes for her, a zoku ship, shaped like a glass clockwork orrery. Zoku trueforms—foglet clouds around human faces with jewel haloes—pour out and surround her. Then she is gone, and the ship accelerates at a solid G, towards the Highway.

I summon my minions. It only takes them moments to identify Mieli’s rescuer in the public Highway spimescapes. Bob Howard, a Rainbow Table Zoku vessel—one of the sysadmin ships that the zoku use to maintain their router network. Uncharacteristically, it is currently on its way to Saturn, riding one of the expensive kiloklick beams, and will reach Supra City in approximately seventeen days. Not very efficient use of resources for a sysadmin zoku, especially given the chaotic situation in the Inner System.

I steeple my fingers and think. The Great Game Zoku has Mieli, there is no doubt about it now. They maintained a presence near Earth, I know that from the time they tried to assassinate me in Sirr. One of their sleepers in the Rainbow Table must have spotted an intel gathering opportunity and has been ordered to deliver Mieli to Saturn. Of course, they could have decided to shove her through a Realmgate instead, turned her into quantum information and used the router network to get her there nearly at the speed of light—but Mieli has military-grade Sobornost implants that could have self-destructed her when passing through a Realmgate. No, they are trying to get her there with all her atoms intact.

I empty my glass, lean back and let the mutter of the bar wash over me. There is still time. The seeds of a plan are already taking root in my head. Unfortunately, the Wardrobe will never get to Saturn that fast. My issues with the jannah ship are not merely aesthetic.

But Isidore had a point. I do have my freedom now: apart from annoyingly persistent copy protection, the cognitive locks that Joséphine caged me with are almost completely gone. Ever since we left Earth, I have been thinking about my other ship, my real ship, the Leblanc, and its hiding place in the Gun Club’s Arsenal on Iapetos. If I could just get to it in time—

Or if I could slow things down.

All the uncertainty is gone. I feel like myself again. I lose myself in the plan. I’m going to need tools. A quantum pyramid scheme. A pair of physical bodies, a nugget of computronium, a bunch of entangled EPR pairs and a few very special hydrogen bombs . . .

I’m going to take her away from you, Joséphine. I’m going to steal her back.

• • • •

To my surprise, the pyramid scheme turns out to be the easy part.

You are now a Level 4 Navigator! I receive a satisfying jolt of entanglement from the Highway-zoku with the qupt, a reward for discovering a new coordination equilibrium that unravelled a conflict over trajectories through a Jovian Lagrange point. Of course, they don’t have to know that I used a botnet to create the conflict in the first place.

Bid for your mass stream herding contract: gathering fragments specified by <SPIME> and guiding them to Iapetos. Offer: a combinatorial auction for Iapetos corridor access or equivalent Highway entanglement. A cetamorph ship—a huge bubble of water held together by a synthbio membrane and crewed by hominid-whale hybrids—wants to take up my job offer to collect the Wang bullet fragments and take them to Saturn. I set up a mental alert to review it later: I can’t afford it just yet.

Expressing. Desire. Collective. Join. A qupt that echoes with a thousand collective voices. A big punter, this one: a Venusian floating city jury-rigged into a spacecraft, the Vepaja, carrying Sobornost-grade computronium. I devote a few milliseconds of attention to reel it in and send it a quantum contract. The city does not read the fine print. It’s hard—NP-hard, to be precise—when verifying the contract structure is computationally intractable within the lifetime of the Universe.

Earth’s destruction convinced the Beltworlds that the Sobornost has finally started a campaign of active assimilation. The Highway is overloaded, with every refugee competing for rapid low-energy orbits out of the Inner System. I am one of many entrepreneurial minds to propose a collective computational effort to nearby ships to look for better corridors out of the Inner System, and to win Highway-zoku entanglement. The trick is to embed a simple quantum program in the contract that allows me to skim a small amount off the top of whatever the collective members receive—and to make algorithmic bids for certain trajectories, making them very desirable.

Ursomorph rockship Yogi-14 attacking Ceresian ships Featherlight and Honesty.

I cringe. That was an unnecessary side effect of my scheme. An ursomorph rockship—shaped like a flint axe, kilometres long, sculpted by synthbio and fusion flame—refuses to admit that it lost a trajectory bid. The wispy medusa ships of the Ceresians descend upon it. The Highway-zoku struggles to contain the destruction, sends in their own q-ships, relocates lightmills to route traffic around the expanding bubble of the battlefield.

Mass stream disruption in the Saturn corridor. Streamship Bubble Bobble buying mass stream queue positions.

Lightmill in Martian orbit unavailable.

Requesting Poincaré invariant surface access for Saturn kilocklick beam.

Buying derivatives on future access rights to Saturn kiloklick beam.

I hold my breath. That’s the great thing about the zoku: their jewels force them to follow the zoku volition. I watch with satisfaction as the Highway-zoku routes the Bob Howard to a slower beam. It does not buy me much—perhaps an extra week—but that is just enough for me to get to Saturn right behind the Rainbow Table Zoku ship. Hopefully that won’t be enough time for the Great Game to break Mieli completely.

And of course, I now also have enough entanglement to trade for the tools I need for the Iapetos job.

Smiling to myself, I step back into the Wardrobe’s main vir.

• • • •

It is snowing in the bookshop. Large white flakes drift down from the shadows in the ceiling. The bookshelves look like snow-covered trees, and the café table has been replaced by a tall lamppost, with a cast-iron gas lantern on top that casts yellow, fluttering light. My breath steams. It is cold. Matjek is nowhere to be seen.

Somewhere, far away, there is the sound of tiny bells. A set of small footprints leads into the shadows between the shelves. There is a discarded candy wrapper on the ground, silver and purple against the snow. Turkish Delight.

“Matjek!” I shout, in a snow-muffled voice. There is no reply. How the hell did he do this to the vir?

I stick my hands into my armpits for warmth and fumble at my Founder code to repair the damage done by the future god-emperor of the Solar System.

A snowball hits me in the back of the head.

I blink at the stinging wetness that slides down my neck. Matjek laughs somewhere in the darkness. I’m still rubbing my head when the qupt comes. It’s Isidore.

Jean! You can’t believe what I found! I struggle to receive an exomemory fragment, flashes of flying in the Martian sky, a bright star between a man’s fingers. It’s not just Earth, it’s the Spike, and the Collapse, you have to see this—

The detective’s voice is lost in a flood of images. Phobos falling from the sky. A pillar of light in the horizon. An earthquake, the whole planet ringing like a bell, the Oubliette losing its balance.

And then, silence.

Copyright © 2014 by Hannu Rajaniemi.

Excerpted from The Causal Angel by Hannu Rajaniemi.

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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born and raised in Finland, Hannu Rajaniemi lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he is a director of a think tank providing business services based on advanced math and artificial intelligence. He holds a Ph.D. in string theory and is a member of the same writing group that produced Hal Duncan. Multilingual from an early age, he writes his science fiction in English.

NOVEL EXCERPT:
The Shadow Academy

Adrian Cole

PROLOGUE
APRIL

Skellbow moved through the corridors of the old building uneasily, pausing occasionally to listen for any sounds in the night. Outside, the moon was high overhead, near full but obscured by passing clouds. Skellbow had finished the nightly lockup, jangling his keys and stomping his feet as he made his way back down to the entrance foyer. The sounds he made were deliberate. He hated the silence of the ancient Academy at night. He much preferred the place in the daytime when it was teeming with kids, even though their rowdiness and cheek roused his anger. After nightfall the place was empty and echoing, dead. Colleagues mocked his fear of spirits and supernatural agents, but they weren’t the only reason he loathed this shift.

Security! The Prime, Miss Vine, had an almost obsessive regard for it, especially with another Inspection due. She ruled her Academy with a remorseless will to succeed in all things. Getting anything wrong was not a good idea.

“Security!” Skellbow muttered repeatedly, as if the word alone would ward off any consequences of error. “Not my fucking job. I’m just covering for Jordan. Not my fault if he’s ill.” He fiddled with the huge bunch of keys as though by doing so he would spot any that he hadn’t used to secure the building.

There was a small overnight staff, and everyone would bed down in the Academy when they had finished their paperwork. The threat of the Inspection meant more work for all of them and some were frantically preparing for it. Rather them than him. At least, for once, the Prime wasn’t here. Skellbow never felt anything but highly nervous in her presence.

His keys had their own secure cupboard near the tall double doors to the outside. Skellbow was about to lock them away when he was cut short by an insistent knock on the doors. He almost dropped the keys, turning to stare at the source of the sound in horror. The Prime! It’s her, for certain. The knock came again and he went to the door, pressing up against it. Very slowly he unlocked it, easing it open no more than an inch, prepared to slam it shut and relock it if need be. Light from the thick candle in the niche just over his shoulder slanted out into the darkness. By its flickering glow he could discern a face. No one he recognized.

“Mr. Skellbow?” a gruff voice asked.

“What do you want? This place is shut for the night.”

“We’re the contractors. Working on the sea wall.”

“It’s the middle of the fucking night,” Skellbow growled, readying to slam the door and bolt it.

“I know. But we need our tools. We left them, thinking we’d be back in the morning to finish the job. But we’ve been called to do another down in the barracks. Early start. We need those tools. Only take us a minute.”

Skellbow was trying to think of a good reason to argue, when he became aware that someone was behind him. He swung around, even more on edge.

It was Carl Trencher, one of the senior staff. “Barry. What’s the problem?”

“Builders, sir. They want their tools.”

“At this time of night?”

“Shall I tell them to . . . come back in the morning?”

“I better have a word with them.”

Trencher wore a long outdoor coat and was evidently about to go home for the night. He went to the door and eased it open a little further. Skellbow heard him speak to the men outside, not catching the words, but after a brief, polite exchange Trencher turned back to him.

“It’ll be okay, Barry. Can’t be helped. Just let them get their stuff and they’ll be away again.”

Skellbow nodded reluctantly.

Trencher allowed the three men into the foyer. They were all thickset, muscular navvies, used to hard labor by the look of them.

“Wouldn’t have bothered you, mate,” their leader told Skellbow. “We’d have stayed in the pub. But we need those tools.” It was clear to Skellbow from the man’s accent that he was no local man.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Barry,” said Trencher. He gave the caretaker a last nod and slipped out into the darkness.

Skellbow grunted and led the three men further into the building. “Sea wall, you say?”

“Yeah, north wall,” said the spokesman. The other two were silent, eyes taking in their surroundings, but they were otherwise apparently indifferent.

Skellbow masked his disapproval with difficulty. He hadn’t wanted these contractors here in the first place. Dunstan Fullacombe, the Master of the Watch, was a first-rate stonemason and he certainly hadn’t wanted contractors in to fix a wall, sea wall or otherwise. But Trencher was in charge of the premises and he had insisted.

“Quiet in here at this time, mate,” said the spokesman. He had an angular, unshaven face and eyes that lacked any kind of warmth.

Skellbow nodded. “Keep the noise down. Couple of staff, probably asleep by now.”

They walked wordlessly down several echoing corridors until Skellbow opened a door to a narrow courtyard. Directly opposite them the high sea wall loomed like the threat of an avalanche. Moonlight picked out the curved line of its parapet and the stone steps that led steeply up to its wide, unprotected top.

“I’ll be in the foyer,” said Skellbow, eager to be free of them.

“It’ll take no time, mate. Wait for us there.”

As the three men crossed the yard, Skellbow closed the door and returned through the building. Once back in the foyer, he slid a bolt across the main doors to keep anyone—or anything else—out.

He waited, slumped against one of the stone columns beside the doors, cursing his fellow caretaker, Jordan Creech, whose shift this should have been. Still, he could get off to the pub in time for a pint, as soon as these three goons had gone. They were military men, typical of the types that the Central Authority in distant Londonborough was sending out more and more these days. Seemed the Authority wanted its own people to swell the ranks of the forces in the barracks here in Petra. Skellbow, like many of his fellows from the area, resented the influx into their southwestern province of Dumnonia.

His morose thoughts were interrupted by a flickering of the candle that told him its life expectancy was fading. At the bottom of the key cupboard there was a box of fresh, fat candles. He took one out, lit it with the last of the existing one, and slid it into its holder. The exercise prompted him to consider, impatiently, Where the fuck are they? Shouldn’t take them this long to find their tools.

Skellbow made his way back down the corridors, and as he approached the door to the courtyard, he saw movement through a window. Instinctively he ducked, though he was probably invisible from outside. What he saw made his breath catch in his throat.

Two of the men were carrying something through another doorway into the courtyard—a door he’d locked earlier. It led to an internal stairway up to some offices and a private staff area. He knew he’d locked it because he’d been up there a short time ago, talking to Drew Vasillius, one of the teachers. Vasillius, one of the staff working late that night, had been happy for Skellbow to lock the lower door because he was going to bed down in the back room once he had finished his work.

How in buggery did they get a key to that door? Skellbow asked himself, his whole body growing cold. The men were carrying some kind of large sack. Sack? Transfixed, the caretaker watched them manhandle it through the courtyard and up the first of the narrow steps ascending the fifty-foot-high sea wall.

He had no choice but to respond. He moved to the door to his right, threw it open, and crossed the courtyard. The spokesman for the three contractors stepped out of the shadows at the foot of the steps to the sea wall, limned in a pale wash of moonlight. He looked like a spectre.

“What the fuck is going on?” said Skellbow, conscious that he was shouting.

“Nothing to worry about, mate. One of your colleagues is a bit under the weather.”

“Who is it? Mr. Vasillius?”

“He’s had a fainting fit.”

Skellbow pulled up just short of the man, whose hands were in shadow. “That’s bollocks—”

The man shook his head. He looked very alert, body tensed. “Overworking. Needed some air.”

Skellbow looked upwards. The two others had got their burden onto the sea wall and now disappeared from sight. Skellbow was a biggish man, the nature of his work making him fitter than most men of his age, close on fifty, and he had never shirked a fight when he was younger. Instinct took over now, brushing away all his earlier fears—this was no supernatural threat he was facing—and he abruptly pushed the spokesman aside.

Though he was taken unawares, he made a grab for Skellbow. Skellbow, deceptively nimble, escaped the contractor’s grip on his forearm and scaled the steps. It was a treacherous, awkward climb, but he clambered upwards with purpose. Behind him the contractor snarled an angry warning to the two men who were on top of the wall. Beyond its low parapet, which was no more than two feet high, was a drop of over a hundred feet to the churning sea below.

In front of him, Skellbow saw the two other men. They were alone. There was no sign of what they had been carrying.

“What’s happened?” he gasped, dragging in ragged breaths.

“He went nuts!” said the first of them. “We were trying to help him. Get him some air. He just hit out at us. Started swearing. Next thing, he was up on the parapet.” The man pointed to it.

His companion joined in. “Yeah. Lost his head, mate. Jumped off.”

Skellbow, aghast, walked to the parapet and looked over its edge, but below the incessant crashing of waves and the explosive rise of spume obscured any sign of a body. No one could possibly have survived a plunge into that. Beneath that white maelstrom there were rocks, jagged and merciless. Vasillius would have been smashed to pieces.

“Nothing we could do, mate.”

Skellbow turned around. The spokesman had joined them on the wall. He and his two fellow contractors were staring pointedly at the caretaker, and they shifted with practiced ease into a formation that penned him in, up against the parapet. God, are they going to fling me off, too?

“Why would he do it?” said Skellbow. He was too afraid now to ask them about the sack.

“Stressed out.” The spokesman’s right hand moved into a shaft of moonlight and Skellbow saw with rising horror that it held a long bladed knife. The caretaker’s shoulders tensed, his fists balling.

“You’d better go down and give the alarm, Mr. Skellbow. Let people know what’s happened. But get it right, you hear me?” The knife swung slowly up, its point levelled at Skellbow’s chest.

“Suicide,” he breathed.

“In a minute, the three of us will be gone. We were never up here. We just picked up our tools down below and were out in a couple of seconds. Okay?”

Skellbow said nothing. His skin crawled as though something in the darkness was uncoiling, only inches away from touching him, polluting him.

The spokesman delicately touched the edge of his blade. “You’re a family man, Mr. Skellbow. You’ve a fine wife, Myra, right?”

Skellbow felt his gorge rising. “What do you mean?”

“Young son, doing well here at the Academy. Davie, is it? Yeah, Davie.”

“You leave them out of it!” Skellbow hissed.

“Whatever you say, Mr. Skellbow. Barry. But I need to hear you say what I want you to say. We came, picked up our tools, and left. Then, when you came out here to lock up, you saw Vasillius fling himself off the wall. You agree that you’ll stick to that no matter who asks you what and we won’t need to pay a visit to Myra and Davie, when you’re not around.”

Skellbow felt something briefly touch his arm, but his eyes remained fixed on the knife.

“Shit, why don’t we just heave him over?” said one of the other men.

The spokesman scowled. “No, no. We’ve done our job. No need to queer the pitch by dumping Mr. Skellbow. That right, Barry?”

Reluctantly the caretaker grunted his assent.

“Good. We’re going now. Lock up after us and then raise the alarm.”

Skellbow’s resistance drained. He could hardly move. The spokesman waved his two companions along the wall and they descended the steps as quickly as the incline would allow.

“Now you,” the spokesman said to Skellbow, pointing to the stone steps with his knife. The caretaker managed to find the will to move and went down after the others.

A few minutes later they were back in the foyer. Skellbow unlocked the main doors and two of the men slipped outside. Their spokesman turned for a last word.

“Do the sensible thing, Barry. By the morning, we three will be long gone on the road back to the city. No one will know you’re not telling the truth.”

“What about the wall, your work?”

“All finished earlier today. And we put a little something into the stones. This place is marked now, Barry.”

Skellbow hardly moved, his teeth clamped, holding back the fury within him. Marked? What does he mean by that? Marked for who—or what?

“If I find out you’ve let me down, someone will be back. And I promise you, it will be very bad, Barry.” Something evil in the spokesman’s eyes reinforced the threat.

“Okay, okay. Just leave my family alone.”

Beyond the door, a sudden gust of wind swept across the playground and the spokesman cocked an ear as if listening to it. “Hear that, Barry? Keep your ears and eyes open. Every breath of wind, every bird that flies by, every wave that breaks on the wall, you can be sure that we’ll be watching, listening.”

Skellbow shuddered. God alone knew what agents these men could call upon. “I hear you.”

The spokesman gave a curt nod, as if he had just concluded a routine business transaction, and he was gone, swift as thought.

Skellbow shut the door, locked it, and bolted it. He made his way quickly along the ground level corridors, back into the courtyard, and crossed to the doorway that led to the stairs to Drew Vasillius’s office. He quickly ascended the tower’s winding staircase, only to find Vasillius’s office empty, with nothing indicating there had been a struggle. It struck him as strange, given what he had seen. The room was tidy, papers put away, the chair tucked under the desk. As though Vasillius had put things in order before leaving. Skellbow left the room, closing the door behind him.

Re-crossing the courtyard, he studied the numerous angled roofs high overhead, half expecting to see something up there staring back at him.

He made his way, deeply disturbed, through the building to the Academy’s bell tower and let himself in to its relative sanctuary. A few moments later he was tugging hard on the bell ropes, waking the town to the story he would fabricate for its startled people.

© 2014 by Adrian Cole.

Excerpted from The Shadow Academy by Adrian Cole.

Published by permission of the author and Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing.

All rights reserved.

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

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adrian Cole was born in Devonport, Plymouth (UK) in July 1949. He has worked as a librarian, an administrator for the local Education Authority in Devon and as the Business Manager of a secondary college in Bideford, where he worked for twenty years before retiring with his lovely wife, Judith. The Coles have two children, now young adults, Sam and Katia. Much of Cole’s work—fantasy, SF, and horror—is influenced by his large collection of books, magazines and comics, not to mention all the movies and CDs. He has written more than twenty-five books and dozens of short stories.

NOVEL EXCERPT:
Eleanor

Jason Gurley

Prologue
1962

Eleanor sits in the breakfast nook and watches the rain fall. The tree that Hob and Agnes planted two summers ago bends sideways with the wind. Even from here Eleanor can see the earth around its base beginning to pucker. If the storm gets much worse, the tree won’t survive.

She can hear the rain lashing against the house with each gust of wind. Up above, the attic moans like a Coke bottle as the wind whistles through the rafters.

“No swimming today,” Eleanor says aloud.

She’s surprised to have spoken the words, but more surprised that they crossed her mind at all. She and Hob haven’t gone to the ocean since the accident, which was minor enough. A misstep on the island path, a twisted ankle. Normally that sort of thing would have kept her out of the water for a couple of days, no more.

But Eleanor had turned up pregnant again. And that, according to her doctor, made swimming in the ocean a no-no.

“And no throwing yourself off cliffs, either,” he advised, upon learning why Eleanor was swimming in the first place. “I’m surprised you’re still pregnant, to be quite honest. That kind of physical abuse can terminate a pregnancy in a heartbeat.”

Hob had babbled on the way home about having a son, but Eleanor barely heard him.

Pregnant.

Again.

As if Eleanor didn’t already feel that her life was being written by someone else’s hand.

She sips her tea now and sighs. She sighs an awful lot now, the air pushed out of her lungs by the weight of her thoughts. Dark, awful thoughts. A few nights before, she dreamed about a man who bothered her at the grocery store. He had been holding a clipboard and a pen, and instinctively she had tried to step past him. He’d said, “I’ll see you on the way out,” and let her pass, and she had forgotten about him. But he was there when she finished shopping, and this time as she tried to slide by, he said, “Vote for Eleanor,” and she stopped.

“Excuse me?” the dream version of herself asked.

“Eleanor,” the man repeated. “The town is voting on her issue.”

“What issue?” Eleanor asked.

“It’s simple,” the man said, folding back one of the pages on the clipboard and holding it up for her to see. There were two big words on the page: Yes and No. Below each word was a list of names, some scrawled illegibly, some in neat cursive. “Either Eleanor can start over, or Eleanor can stay in prison.”

“In prison?”

“Right,” the man said, without explaining further.

“I’m Eleanor,” Eleanor said.

“Oh!” the man said. “Well, then you definitely should consider voting. Right now it’s a tie. You’ll be the tiebreaker!”

“Isn’t voting a private affair? This looks like a petition to me.”

“Not at all,” the man said. “But bananas eat for free on Thursday afternoons.”

“What?” Eleanor asked.

“I said, you better hurry and vote, because I think you’re about to wake up.”

But she had woken from the dream before she’d had time to cast her vote. The dream has remained with her since, her brain working on the question of her vote—while she makes dinner for Hob and Agnes, while she washes dishes, while she sits in the bathtub, the deepest water she’s been in for months.

What vote would she have cast?

Eleanor rubs her belly idly as the storm worsens. She’s showing now—not much, but enough that strangers have begun complimenting her when she goes to town. She and Hob haven’t made love since they found out. She hasn’t been in the mood, and he’s been worried about hurting the baby, something she thought he’d figured out during her first pregnancy.

She’s grateful that this new baby seems to have distracted him from his worries, though.

At least one of them is excited.

• • • •

She slips out of the house before Hob or Agnes wake. The sky is dim but growing lighter. She sits behind the wheel of the Ford and stares up at the clouds, leaning forward to see them through the windshield. They’re ominous and dark, almost black. She wonders what the view from above the clouds is like. She thinks that it’s probably all blue skies and sunshine up there, the absolute opposite of life down here in Anchor Bend.

The rain pounds on the Ford like a bag of rocks in a tumble dryer. Eleanor drives slowly, both hands tight on the wheel. She rolls through town, the only thing moving for miles. None of the shops are yet open. There are no pedestrians on the sidewalks. Days like this feel a bit like the end of the world. Everything is still and murky and slow.

She drives for a little while, eventually leaving the heart of the little town behind. Like a magnet, she is drawn to the ocean. She parks the truck in the small lot beside the beach and kills the engine and turns off the wipers. Rain courses down the windshield in waves. She can see little blips and plops on the hood, one for every drop of rain that lands on the car. In the distance she can see the shape of Huffnagle, blurred by the rain until it’s only a cottony shadow.

Eleanor closes her eyes and lets out another long, weary sigh. She listens to the pounding rain on the roof. Hears the slap of it against the asphalt outside. The ocean has some life today, every wave a low roar as it breaks on the beach.

When she opens her eyes again, she has made up her mind. She leaves the keys in the ignition, opens the door, and steps out into the rain. In an instant, she is soaking wet, her nightgown and housecoat clinging to her swollen body.

There is a pickup truck parked at the opposite end of the small lot. The only other person in the world arrived at the beach while Eleanor’s eyes were closed. She can see the shape of a person inside, perhaps enjoying the weather. She doesn’t wave, doesn’t care.

The beach stones are black and wet and shiny. Eleanor crosses them slowly, but she isn’t worried about slipping and falling down. There are two sandpipers pattering around, dipping their beaks into the sand after each receding wave. The clouds in the distance are pulling apart like taffeta, black feathery tendrils separating from their bodies. More rain. Harder rain.

Eleanor walks to the edge of the beach and stands there a moment in her heavy wet housecoat. The waves are needle-sharp as they smack her ankles and feet. She closes her eyes again, hands deep in her pockets, and thinks of Hob and his pleasant smile and his broad shoulders and secrets and his carefully parted slick hair and his deep, sad, true eyes. She thinks of Agnes and her knotted hair and the wrinkle lines around her little dark eyes when she smiles and her cute small earlobes and her favorite song.

They’ll be all right, she knows.

Eleanor pulls her housecoat off, sleeve by sleeve. It grabs at her skin as if resisting, but she casts it onto the beach. She bends over and grasps the hem of her nightgown, the wet flannel squishy between her fingers. She gathers it into her fists, lifts it up and over her head. Naked, she faces the ocean calmly. The rain is bitingly cold, the wind worse.

Behind her she hears the muffled sound of a car door opening, and then a distant male voice shouts something.

She doesn’t answer or look back.

Eleanor steps into the ocean and strides forward, the water reaching her knees, then her hips. When she’s waded in waist deep, she spreads her arms wide behind her and lunges forward into the water, and she begins to swim, and swim, and swim.

© 2014 by Jason Gurley.

Excerpted from Eleanor by Jason Gurley.

Published by permission of the author.

All rights reserved.

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

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jason Gurley is the author of The Man Who Ended the World, Deep Breath Hold Tight, and the bestselling novel Greatfall, among other books. He lives with his family in the Pacific Northwest, and can be found at jasongurley.com.

NONFICTION

INTERVIEW: KARL SCHROEDER

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Karl Schroeder is one of the best authors in the current generation of hard science fiction writers. He’s also an accomplished futurist who works in strategic foresight for the design firm Idea Couture. His latest novel, Lockstep, presents a fresh take on the idea of human civilization in space.

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, in which the host and guests discuss various geeky topics.

Your new novel is called Lockstep, and it has one of the most interesting science fictional premises I’ve heard in a long time, this idea of the Locksteps. I want to get to that in just a second, but first I want to talk about the setting of the book. This book is set in interstellar space, in several light years’ worth of space between our solar system and Alpha Centauri. I think most people would imagine that there’s not much there, but in your novel there’s a lot there, so tell us about that.

A couple years ago I stumbled across an astronomy paper, I believe it was called “Nomads of the Galaxy,” talking about observations that had been made using microlensing techniques, which is basically looking at stars winking because something passed in front of them, very, very distant in the galaxy. But what the people doing the study were finding was that the number of winks was extremely high, and what this implied was that there could be up to 100,000 free-floating planets for every star in the galaxy, and by free-floating I mean interstellar wanderers, nomads, orphan worlds. Most of them would be really tiny, like the size of Pluto or even much smaller, but a few would be Earth-sized or even bigger, and if every star in the galaxy has this retinue of dark angels following it around then, wow, that was a fantastic setting, and I had to do something with it.

Why don’t you tell us what kind of technologies it would take for people to live on these small planets out in the middle of interstellar space? How would we get our food, water, energy, and so on?

This is where it gets fun, because when you first think of colonizing Pluto or places beyond that it seems like a bleak and horrible thing to do. You’re going basically to the back of beyond, further than the back of beyond, to a place where our sun is no brighter than any other star in the sky, and it’s absolute zero outside. You’re on a tiny iceball which is too big to be called a comet but too small to be called a planet. What are you going to do there? How are you possibly going to be able to live? The solution, and it’s a kind of solution that actually has evolved here on Earth—if you ever get the chance to go up to the high arctic, to the tundra, you’ll find in the summer these tiny little arctic wildflowers which look so incredibly delicate, but they’ve survived in that incredibly harsh environment for millions of years. We had a little bit of a taste of their winter this winter in North America. It’s amazing that they could do it, but they use a very simple and straightforward trick: They’re dormant most of the time. There’s a very brief arctic summer, and during that brief flowering these plants and the animals that live off of them undergo a burst of growth, and they exploit that energy as quickly as they can, as much as they can, and then they go dormant again. I took that as a great model to follow and designed the civilization of the Locksteps around it.

The civilization of the Locksteps relies very heavily on going dormant in these hibernation beds that you call cicada beds. Why don’t you tell us about that technology, and why are they called cicada beds?

First of all, I’d kind of like to say why I would go this crazy route rather than just writing a book in which people skip between stars faster than light, and the reason is because Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, these are great stories—they only suffer from one problem. They’re all impossible. As far as we know, Einstein discovered a rule that’s ironclad across the cosmos: You cannot travel faster than light. If you cannot travel faster than light, then all of these stories become fantasies. People have tried to figure out way to accelerate starships up to close to light speed, and you’d basically have to take enough energy to blow up a planet to do something like that. It’s crazy. It’s absolutely ridiculous to even try. But there is another way and it involves hibernation. It involves cold sleep, and it turns out that is, although we don’t know how to do it right now, a much easier problem to solve than the problem of faster-than-light travel or even near-light-speed travel. There might, in the end, be a way to travel faster than light, but there’s probably only one way. But there’s probably many different routes to achieving hibernation technology that would actually work.

So why’d you decide to call them cicada beds?

Because the civilization itself works a lot like cicadas do. They as a species have evolved to all wake simultaneously, essentially, for their brief mating period. This is because any male who wakes outside of the cycle, well, he simply won’t find a mate, so they’ve—over however long, millions of years maybe—they’ve developed a system whereby they wake and sleep in lockstep. The cicadas all come alive at the same time, they have this brief flowering like those arctic flowers I mentioned, and then the next generation comes along.

The cicada beds in Lockstep: They’re literally beds. They’re the same beds you sleep on any other night, but on one night out of every month they quietly, after you’ve gone to sleep, set you into deep, deep hibernation, and eventually most of the Lockstep world stays freezing solid, and you stay that way for thirty years, and so does everyone else. The entire civilization goes dormant for thirty years, and then wakes for a month, and goes to sleep for thirty years, and wakes for a month, which is, of course, insane. There’s no rational reason why you would do something like that on a place like Earth, but when you get out between the stars to these nomad worlds, all of a sudden it becomes not just a viable way to live, but perhaps the best way to live, because in that brief flowering you can use up all the resources that your robots and mechanized industries have been slowly gathering and building over the last thirty years. You can have a party for a month, go to sleep, wake up the next day, and party for another month, and it doesn’t matter the size of the world you’re on. The smallest comet and the largest planet can participate equally in this civilization, but even better, you can travel. You can go to any one of thousands of worlds. If it takes you thirty years to get there at some slow sub-light speed, it doesn’t matter, because it feels to you and to everyone else as if it’s overnight.

The beauty of this system is that it actually might be possible, unlike any of the other space operas out there that require some form of faster-than-light travel or handwaving technology that magically makes the distances of interstellar space go away. This model takes them into account. It requires one thing, hibernation technology way beyond what we’ve got right now, but what it requires isn’t impossible.

I thought it was interesting, speaking of faster-than-light travel, you say that “I misjudged the fervor with which people cling to the belief that the light speed limit will just somehow magically and handwavingly get engineered around.” What have been some of the most vociferous kinds of response like that that you’ve gotten?

Outrage, really. “No, of course we can do this. Of course faster-than-light travel will be invented, and shame on you for saying that it won’t.” It’s all very well to say that it could be invented, and in fact, I will freely admit that we don’t know that it can’t be invented. You can’t prove that faster-than-light travel will never be invented, but you also can’t prove that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. There’s all kinds of things out there that you can’t prove don’t exist, but that really does us no good, and you can spend the rest of your life dreaming and wishing that faster-than-light travel could be invented, and I think you should certainly try to find out whether it can be. Or you can actually get the same result as you would get from faster than light travel by other means.

What are some of the potential drawbacks or practical problems with the lockstep system that you’ve heard from readers, and what would be your responses to those?

First of all, it’s crazy because the end result as the hero of the novel, Toby, finds out is that forty years of lifespan for a person living in the lockstep encompasses 14,000 years in real time, and on the lit worlds, places like Earth and Mars, civilizations rise and fall; transhuman entities come into being; ripples through the universe devouring everything in sight; there are wars; there are collapses; and there are rebirths, and all the while, out in the darkness, the locksteps are just chugging slowly forward. “Why would you go to these places rather than go to the exciting worlds where things are happening?” is one objection. The answer to that is that you can travel. You can travel to thousands and thousands of different worlds if you live in the lockstep. If you don’t live in the lockstep and you live in real time, there’s probably ten planets that you might be able to visit in your lifetime, or if you do travel between the stars, it’s a one-way journey, either for you or for the people that you leave behind who will be dead before you get home.

Another objection is that clearly the locksteps are going to be vulnerable while they’re asleep. Those thirty-year spans are perfect opportunities for raiders to come in and steal all your stuff, and that’s true, but it’s only the human beings who have to fall asleep in the lockstep. Their defenses can be awake, or at least alert and ready to be awakened at all times. Another objection is that economically, obviously any planet that runs in real time will outperform the lockstep, like the thirty years and one month one, by a factor of 360 to 1. That might be true, but any world that operates like that will also be using its resources at a rate that’s 360 times faster than the lockstep, and more importantly, any world that’s running real time will have far fewer trading partners per lifetime, if you will, per lifetime of its citizen, than a lockstep. If you live in a lockstep, you can get trading goods from worlds that are light years away, from thousands of different planets, and you can trade with all of those planets. Subjectively, for you, it seems as if you send away for something, buy something that’s maybe a light year away, and it arrives a month from now. If you’re living in the lit worlds, living in real time, all of these things take much longer, and your number of trading partners is smaller. You’re living in a much more impoverished civilization, basically.

You mentioned the protagonist, Toby. Do you just want to say a bit about the characters and the plot of the book?

Everything I’ve said so far sounds very complicated and kind of abstract. The story itself is kind of a family drama, as a matter of fact. It all circles around Toby McGonigal, who is just coming of age when his family pulls up their roots and moves past the edge of the solar system to a homestead on the micro-planet Sedna. They do this because everything in the solar system is owned by the trillionaires. There’s no possibility for any wealth to be appropriated by anyone else anymore, so they want to escape. They want a homestead in a place where they could actually make something for themselves.

It’s kind of a desperate gamble. While Toby is taking a journey between Sedna and one of the nearby comets, an accident occurs, and he has to go into cold sleep to ride it out because his life support is failing. When he awakes, he discovers that he’s awoken to a completely different world because so much time has passed. Rather than cold emptiness and interstellar space, he’s surrounded by the lockstep empire, which is the oldest civilization known to man all of a sudden. Worse than that, he appears to be some kind of messiah for some kind of major religion in this civilization that he knows absolutely nothing about. Even worse, or even stranger than that, his younger brother and his younger sister are still alive, and for some reason they’re gunning for him. The book follows Toby as he tries to find out what the heck is going on, and also evade his inexplicable murderous siblings as they come after him.

One detail I really liked is that when Toby first wakes up, somebody talks to him and their voice sounds strange because they’re in an atmosphere that has more argon in the air. Could you talk about that?

The planet is “Lowdown.” That’s the name of it, and it’s got argon and neon in the atmosphere, which you can get on these trans-plutonian objects. It’s been hypothesized that Pluto has a large neon atmosphere. So one of the things the locals do is they pump oxygen into it. You can certainly breathe that mixture, although you tend to get intoxicated if there’s too much argon. You’ve got to keep the balance right. One of the things they do is they use the sky as a giant neon light and light their cities that way. It’s an incredible place of bizarre environments.

Another world has cities under the ice in a Europa environment, a global ocean under an icecap. Another one is a little cloud civilization of aerostats, two mile-wide spheres with life support inside them, floating in the sky of a super-Earth. So there’s nothing like Earth out there, but there are things that are really cool and places that have thrived using the lockstep method.

The Europa-like world you mentioned, I thought it was really interesting. You describe how it has water toward the core, and the gravitational force actually compresses the water into a substance harder than steel.

You don’t want to go down too far in that world. You certainly don’t want to drown. They’ll never find you. There’s that, and there’s, of course, the impossible cold that you have to deal with, but what happens is that during these month-long flowerings where the people in the lockstep extravagantly use their energies to turn their back on all of these harsh conditions and create Earth-like or exotic but wonderful environments for themselves, and to them that’s their whole life. They live that way all of the time, so it’s not a bleak and cold place for them at all.

Another idea I really liked was this idea that Toby’s been in suspended animation for 12,000 years, and so that means that there’s been 12,000 years for new diseases to develop that he might be susceptible to.

Civilizations have risen and fallen; languages, cultures, religions come and gone, but because the lockstep is always there, it’s developed into some kind of backup for humanity and for human civilization. So some catastrophe will happen, rogue A.I.s become godlike and devour everything, human civilizations fight wars and blow up each other’s planets and everyone gets blown back into the Stone Age, and then the lockstep wakes up, and they look around and say, “Oh, it happened again.” And they send their people in, and they rebuild the civilization, and over tens of thousands of years it happens repeatedly, and they’re always there to pick up the pieces. They literally do a backup and restore of human civilization repeatedly. One of the reasons they can do this is because, of course, they’re so insignificant as far as everyone else is concerned. They are in suspended animation nearly all of the time, and they’re in the places no one wants to go to, these little worlds between the stars. So no one has any incentive to go after them.

Another interesting implication of that is that the newest immigrants to the lockstep civilizations have the longest cultural histories.

I’m still trying to wrap my brain around that one, and I wish, in retrospect, that I had spent more time on this idea in the novel. I might have to write another book to follow this thread, but yeah, for the people who started the lockstep only forty years has passed, which is why Toby’s brother and sister are still around, but for people who are joining the lockstep now, who are recent immigrants, it’s been around for over 10,000 years, and it’s literally the oldest, most stable culture that they know, and it’s woven into all of the myths and stories that they know going back into the mists of time. So they are the ones who are most familiar with the lockstep, and this paradox is something . . . wow, you could play with this for ages. It’s a fun concept, and one that I came across fairly late in the creative process because, of course, I was dealing with so many of the other implications as I went along, and all of the possibilities. It’s quite possible that there are other implications that are equally cool and bizarre that we just haven’t thought of yet.

Do you have specific plans to write any more fiction set in this universe?

I do have some ideas. There are ways to turn this around. You can look at this civilization from within lockstep time or you can look at it from real time, and the story can be told from both points of view, and intersections can happen as well. I do have a short story set in the universe called “Jubilee,” which you can download right now. It’s a Tor Books original. It’s available from, say, Kobo or Amazon, it’s like a dollar or two dollars to download. That explores some of the real-time implications of having a lockstep around if you live on a planet. There’s many possibilities yet in this world.

People can also read the story for free on Tor.com, at least, that’s what I did. It’s a terrific story. It’s basically told from the point of view of, as you say, people who live in real time, and there’s this kind of Romeo and Juliet . . . well why don’t you tell us a little bit more about the story.

It’s a really pretty banal story of young love, in some ways. It’s two kids who meet, fall in love, and exchange letters, but the thing is that they live in different locksteps. One lockstep could have a sleep to wake ration of 360 to 1, so 360 months asleep and one month awake, another lockstep could have another ration of let’s say 270 months of sleep to one month awake. This boy and this girl are from two locksteps that go in and out of phase with one another. In other words, they’re both awake at the same time only once every 900 years of real time. In order to be able to courier their letters between them they have to use the people who live in real time who see both of the civilizations whenever they awake, so they send their letters through a hereditary courier system, basically. And the story is of the last set of letters exchanged between them and of the courier who delivers them.

It was so interesting to me because it’s almost like you have this legend, this famous story of young love like Romeo and Juliet that everybody knows, that’s existed for thousands of years, but it’s still going on at the same time too. So it’s almost like these ultimate kind of fans get to interact and meet with Romeo and Juliet in a way.

If you just start to think about it, all kinds of other stories could be recast in the same way. “Sleeping Beauty” is the obvious one. But I made myself a list one day of myths and legends that fit perfectly into the lockstep universe, and there’s a whole bunch of them, so I’m very pleased, because, in a way, it’s like having discovered something, and now I get to explore it, but also the readers get to explore it, and the writers get to explore it, now that the idea is out there, anybody can write a story set in a universe like this. Nobody owns these ideas, so I’m curious to see what other people might do with the concept.

To what extent are there precursors to this idea in science fiction that you’re familiar with?

There are a lot. A lot of people have done similar things over the years. There’s really no new ideas. We all borrow and steal from each other, so I’m not going to claim some kind of tremendous originality here. What lockstep is is this synthesis of different ideas that people like everyone from Fred Pohl to Greg Egan have played with at one time or another. There are lots of explorations of hibernation and its implications that have been done, and of near-light speed, and of deep space civilizations. The trick here, or the innovation, is really only the synchronization of the cicada beds and the lockstep concept itself. The rest is, as I say, very well developed by many other writers over the years.

Some people I saw online mentioned Phillip Jose Farmer’s Dayworld series where it’s a much more modest thing, but the idea basically is that Earth is overpopulated, and so there are only enough apartments for 1/6th of the population, so 80% of the population at any given time is in hibernation, and then you wake up one day a week and share the same apartment with six other people who you never meet.

I haven’t read those stories, but it doesn’t surprise me. It never surprises me when I come up with an idea, and I get really excited about it, and then I find out that somebody did it potentially forty years ago. It’s fine, and that is another thing that you can do with the lockstep; in fact, in the novel we encounter planets where there are multiple locksteps that are out of phase with one another, and they share the resources of the world exactly as they do in Farmer’s story.

But as the saying goes, “nothing is truly new.” I’m not surprised that other people have done it before. The thing is to not say, “Oh it’s been done before,” and not try and do something new with it. All of these ideas are playgrounds for us all to try and extend and see what new things we can come up with, and that’s all I’ve done with lockstep.

You mentioned that most of the labor in this universe is done by robots, and there were some really interesting economics in the novel. Could you talk about that?

I encountered a problem—and I’ve encountered this with most of my books, actually—which Frank Herbert encountered when he was writing Dune. He wanted to have a particular kind of civilization, but that civilization would be essentially ridiculous and impossible if artificial intelligence and robots existed. So he, in the case of Dune, used the Butlerian Jihad. It was this holy war to destroy artificial intelligences, basically a political reason why there would not be A.I. in that particular universe. I did something sort of similar with the technology in lockstep. It was going to be a world much like the world Toby had known. In other words, his brother and sister don’t change much, even though technology advances spectacularly quickly around them. They just basically draw a line in the sand and say, “Okay, if you’re going to live here, you’re going to live this way.”

But the robot economy itself is essentially based on Rome. Rather than having hundreds of slaves, each person in the lockstep has a number of robots. It’s illegal for corporations to own robots; they can only own single-purpose machines. Only an individual can own robots, so what people do is they send their robots out as a workforce, essentially as their slaves to do the work for them, and they reap the profits. Except that what happens in the novel is that some people subcontract some of the robots. It saves wear and tear on the robots.

Just in our society right now, we’re having an increasing problem of technology rendering labor obsolete. Do you think that this idea of banning corporations from owning robots has any sort of analogue to something we might try today?

Maybe. We have this, certainly in the U.S., this legal concept of the corporation as a legal individual, which always struck me as kind of a dodgy concept. If a corporation can be a legal individual, then why not other things that are not strictly abstract entities, like, say, ecosystems, rivers, mountains? There’s a lot of flex and play in what we can consider to be a person and what we consider can own things. Actually, a lot of this is going to be highlighted very strongly in the next few years as bitcoin and the things that you can do with the bitcoin protocol start to hit the mainstream. We do need to create structures like virtual nations and virtual corporations on the bitcoin blockchain. So, far from being abstract, issues like this are actually going to become concrete real fast for us.

I went to a lecture recently by Jaron Lanier—he wrote a book called Who Owns the Future?—and his solution to this problem with technology making labor obsolete was something along the lines of micropayments for anytime you did something useful on the internet. I’ve also heard in Switzerland they’re experimenting with a certain guaranteed minimum income for anybody, so it doesn’t matter if technology renders all labor obsolete. Everyone is still provided for, in a sense.

A guaranteed minimum wage is kind of a no-brainer. We’ve experimented with it both in the U.S. and up here in Canada. The Canadian experiment was quite successful. If you don’t have a structure like that, eventually you get to a situation where you know you don’t need the workforce at all, but then you also don’t have any consumers. You have no one to buy the products that you’re making if they don’t have some source of income. So either you jack up corporate taxes and you feed that back to people as a guaranteed minimum income, or you find out some other way of continuing the circulation of wealth in society, so that it actually produces more wealth. Otherwise, it just gets concentrated as a kind of singularity event and that’s it.

I actually saw you say on Twitter, “This conversation has me wondering about leapfrogging, guaranteeing basic income via guaranteed ownership of certain assets.”

That’s just one thing I floated out there. Another idea that I’ve been exploring over the last few days is the idea of smart currency, a self-redistributing currency. In other words, it’s a bitcoin-like currency that looks around itself in the wallet and says, “Oh, there’s a million other of me here. It’s too crowded in here. I’m going to leave.” If there gets to be too much concentration of wealth, the currency itself, not any kind of legislature, or any kind of body, or any kind of human power structure, but the currency itself, redistributes a small fraction of itself into empty wallets on a random basis. You can do this with the kind of smart currencies that are made possible by bitcoin. So that’s another example of a possibility of a way to approach the problem. I’m sure there are many others. You can attach these ideas to various ideologies.

In fact, that’s what you find with the various alt-coins that are being created around the bitcoin protocol right now. People are creating alt-coins that represent one or some other political ideology or economic ideology. But you can also just approach this as a pragmatic problem, a problem in systems design, if you will, that in the end the solution might end up appearing to be capitalist, socialist, something else that you have never even imagined before. But the point is to think of imaginative ways to solve the problem.

I saw recently Charles Stross had an essay that unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to really read, but he was basically arguing that bitcoin was going to be a catastrophe. Did you see that?

I’m aware of the essay, and my interest is not in bitcoin as a currency, despite what I’ve just said. Bitcoin is the first throw of a completely new game. Regardless of the deficiencies of bitcoin itself, the protocols that lie behind it are the important thing. The problems that have been solved in creating it are far more important than the details of bitcoin itself. There are issues of societal trust, of law, of governments in general that have been solved in the creation of bitcoin. So for me, bitcoin itself is a distraction. It’s taking us away from examining the deeper implications of what the blockchain technology is actually capable of.

Speaking of the law, there’s a very interesting scene in Lockstep, a scene in a courtroom that essentially seems to suggest that, in the future, A.I.s will make juries, and judges, and lawyers all obsolete. Do you think that’s where we’re headed?

We’re headed there within about six months in terms of contract law. There’s a project called The Ethereum Project that is using the blockchain technology, again the technology behind bitcoin, not the coin itself, to create smart contracts, and what you can do when you have a smart contract is the contract itself lives in the internet. It’s fully distributed, decentralized, not controllable by any central authority, but you can build things like corporations out of it. You can essentially create the legal, contractual structure of a corporation within the decentralized blockchain, and it is a kind of automaton. It will follow the rules that have been laid down for it to the letter. It will never cheat. You can open-source it so everyone can see the code, and everyone can see exactly what it does on the blockchain. It will never cheat. It will always follow the rules. And it will function as the architecture, if you will, of a company. That is 2014. So, if I’m claiming in Lockstep that at some point legal apparatus might be replaced by computerized systems, I’m only barely avoiding being out of date.

Another really interesting thing in the book is some of the politics involved. On one world that Toby visits, there’s something called the DeMarsh model, where there’s a woman who, by some statistical process, has been chosen to be a representative.

There’s a network protocol called Promise Theory where, basically, the nodes of the network do not inherently trust one another. They make promises, and you build up the network according to who actually follows through on their promises. One of the things they found with creating networks in Promise Theory was that these networks tend to develop delegation as an emergent property. Certain nodes would be delegated authority by other nodes because it was simply cheaper in computing cycles, and the reason is—let’s flip this around to human beings—if you as a voter know somebody who always votes the way you vote, why not hand them your vote so you don’t have to bother with the process? This is what delegation of authority actually is, and it’s actually something you can model and build as a network process. So thousands of millions of people vote exactly the same way as this one particular woman in the civilization in Lockstep, so she is actually made into their delegate by the system itself. She’s not voted in. She doesn’t run a campaign. She’s just designated as their representative because she always votes the way they would vote.

I actually heard you say that, in one of your earlier novels, you came up with something like four different new political systems. Are there any political ideas that you’ve come up with that you particularly want to share with people?

In my 2005 novel, Lady of Mazes, yes, I was inventing political systems left, right, and center just because of the way I built the world. That’s a novel that explores the idea that technology is legislation, that introducing a technology is functionally equivalent to legislating some change in society, and in Lady of Mazes, people have the legal rights to determine what technologies will be allowed in their vicinity, shall we say, in their little slice of reality. Because if you don’t have that right, if you can’t control the technology that operates around you, then you don’t control part of the legislative landscape that controls your rights, essentially. So in the course of exploring that idea, I did have to, or I naturally came up with a bunch of different ways of governing. It was a lot of fun.

Back in episode sixty-two, I had my friend Tobias Buckell on the show to talk about ecology in science fiction, and in that episode he said I had to ask you about your idea of Thalience, so I guess this is my chance. I think this is what you were alluding to earlier, when you were talking about the personhood of mountains and streams and things like that, but could you elaborate on what you mean by Thalience?

Yes, it’s a kind of thorny problem. This came up in my first novel, Ventas. One of the questions I was trying to answer was if you create an artificial intelligence that can think about the world and see problems and try and solve them on its own, is this your own hand in the puppet or is this something independent of you, is this something different? In Ventus, a nanotech-based terraforming system fails to recognize the human colonists when they arrive on the planet and knocks them back into the Stone Age. This system, which is an artificial intelligence, distributed a system that is basically woven through the entire ecosystem and controls the ecosystem. It’s essentially the representative of the trees, and the plants, and the grass, and the animals, and the dirt. And because it has gone its own way, it develops its own perspective, essentially, and that is what I call Thalience. You could call it the awakening of nature.

If you flip that back to current day and to the world we live in now, you can imagine giving a pod of whales a bitcoin wallet, and giving that same pod of whales a distributed economist corporation, the bitcoin or Ethereum-based corporate structure I was talking about earlier, and having it sell its ecosystem services online. You can do the same with a watershed or a river. Already in several nations in South America, natural systems are recognized as having rights. It’s not going to be too long before this becomes a pretty common way to view natural systems that are worldwide. Rights to nature is not so crazy an idea as you might think, because natural systems are always realizing our participation in the economy anyway. We tend to call them externalities. For instance, the wetlands around Toronto, what we call the Toronto Greenbelt, they purify and clean the water that flows down through Toronto into Lake Ontario. To replace that service with water treatment plants would cost x-number of billion dollars, so you can say that that watershed, the Toronto Greenbelt, is worth, or provides, x-number of billion dollars’ worth of ecosystem services. And if it already does that, why not give it its own corporation? Why not give it its own Thalience, essentially?

These are all such interesting ideas and can’t really be covered in the time we have for this segment—

Well, I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words, and I haven’t been able to cover them adequately either. [Laughter]

So people should definitely check out your novels Ventus and Lady of Mazes, and are there other websites or essays or things they should look into?

You can certainly check out the stuff going on around bitcoin, so it would be projects like Ethereum—that would be ethereum.org. And many of the alt-coins like nextcoin which are using alternative approaches to solve the same problems as bitcoin. But there’s just so much out there and so many interesting things going on around governments and economics, a kind of sudden explosion in this space that I don’t think any of us anticipated. So a lot of fun to be had in following through on it.

Then another thing I really wanted to ask you about is that you have a story in Neal Stephenson’s Hieroglyph anthology. Tell us about that story.

That story covers a lot of the ground that we have just been talking about. The Hieroglyph Project is a brilliant idea from Neal Stephenson. A hieroglyph, in his language, is, well, take the rocket ship, the classic, golden-age space opera rocket ship, that’s a hieroglyph. It encapsulates a whole vision of the future, essentially. And what Neal wants to do is deliberately try and invent the next hieroglyph: The idea, the image, the vision that will direct an entire generation of kids to become scientists and engineers and problem solvers. So he’s brought a bunch of people together to write stories and try and craft hieroglyphs. My story in that anthology is about governments. It’s about, if you will, a government singularity event. I will freely admit there will be no Facebook of governments. Governments and government are wicked problems. They are complex, multi-faceted, and they don’t consist of just one problem and there will never be just one solution. The story admits this and shows how solutions from all kinds of different directions can converge in the very near future, a staggering new vision of how we govern ourselves.

On Twitter you said that, in this story, you talk about a website where the only stance allowed is agreement. You can either agree or remain silent.

Yes, why would you do that? Well, it’s because right now the internet is an argument machine. Internet forums are basically designed to cause people to have disagreements and fall out from one another, but they don’t have to be. If you study the way that people reach agreement, one of the core issues is that people disagree because they don’t share the same understanding of the meaning of words. In the story, the website is simply the place where you can define a term or define a concept and say, “This is what I think it means,” and other people can either agree with you about that or not. The community that grows up around shared agreements of the meaning of terms and concepts is a community that can solve problems together; even if they don’t agree on their actual politics, the fact that they agree on what they’re talking about in the first place means that they can actually move forward. What happens on the internet all the time is that people get into arguments in these forums because they don’t even know that the other guy is talking about something completely different using the same words. That’s just an example of one of the small problems that amplifies itself into making the world an ungovernable mess. But that’s solvable, and if you did solve it using just a particular architecture of how our online forums work then we might have a very disproportionate effect on how people cooperate.

Then, in addition to writing science fiction, you also do futurism, essentially strategic foresight. You work for this organization called Idea Couture, maybe could you just talk about what you’ve been doing with them and what’s coming up for you?

Idea Couture is a full-service consultancy, and our clients are some of the biggest companies in the world. We have offices all over the world, and I’m one of the futurists working at the company. We explore strategic foresight, which is basically solving the problems that people haven’t realized are problems yet. We don’t try and predict the future. Anyone who says they can predict the future is either crazy or lying. What we do is look for the places where uncertainty lies, where there are critical uncertainties that might affect an organization or business, and then we explore those with the client, find strategies and approaches that are resilient because you can imagine them working in a variety of different possible futures, and then help the client to implement those. It’s one of the services of Idea Couture, which also has a unique approach to using anthropology and ethnography to explore business and consumer spaces. And it’s just a very creative environment to work in, so I’m having a lot of fun there.

Could you give maybe an example of one of the things you came up with that you’re particularly proud of?

Actually, I’ll give you an example not from me, but from my associate Jayar La Fontaine. We were talking about an idea I called “forward warehousing,” where, if you have drone transport, you can create a value proposition such as “five minutes or it’s free.” You can do that by distributing your warehouse goods throughout a city in small shipping containers, if you’ve got enough of them, and drones transport items very quickly. You can always be less than five minutes away from the customer. I thought this was kind of a cute idea, but Jayar took it one step further and said, “Why don’t you add in the idea of the sharing economy to this?” People are doing car sharing and all these things, why not trunk sharing? How much space is unused in the trunk of your car at any one time? Most people probably have almost nothing in their trunks— well, why not use that as your distributing warehouse? You have this vision of cars in parking lots spontaneously popping their trunks open and drones coming out and delivering anything from scotch, to medicine, to pizzas to people nearby. Five minutes or it’s free. And the people who own the car is getting a tiny cut of that as part of the sharing economy. I have no idea whether it would ever be done, but I don’t see any reason why it couldn’t.

Finally, do you have any other books coming out or projects you want to mention?

I just heard a military foresight exercise I did about five years ago, Crisis in Urlia—I wrote a fictionalized scenario of a future military operation—that’s being published now. I’m not sure that that’s actually available to the general public, but that’s quite a lot of fun. It was an interesting blend of science fiction and foresight, so I’m happy that that’s coming out. And I do have a couple of secret projects that I can’t talk about, unfortunately. So there’s more stuff in the offing, but the next major thing coming down the pipeline will be the Hieroglyph Project, which is looking more and more exciting by the day.

I guess we could just say about that other project that essentially the Canadian military hired you to fictionalize a scenario to make it more digestible to military personnel, right?

It’s not so much that, but that when you turn a set of conflicts into fiction, you uncover all kinds of hidden assumptions. Simply by telling a story you realize, “Oh, well, that actually wouldn’t work, would it.” So telling a story by itself is an analytical tool. I’ve done this twice now. The first time was a project called Crisis in Zefra, for the same group, the Canadian military. That was excerpted in Harper’s Magazine a few years back, and this is essentially the sequel to that. I’m fascinated by the intersection of literature analysis and sort of loose storytelling, and how you can end up having a kind of rigorous storytelling come out of it. So these projects are sort of dear to me even though they might not be to more than a subset of the rest of the world. For me, they represent the place where science fiction meets reality and the world can actually be changed by it.

We could keep talking about this stuff all day, but unfortunately I think we should wrap this up now. I’m sure lots of people will want to go check out your books, including your latest book, Lockstep, which I highly recommend.

That’s going to be out on March the 25th. I’m going to be having a book launch here in Toronto at Bakka Books down on Harbord on the 29th at 3 o’clock, so anyone interested in seeing me just come on down.

Great, we’re going to wrap things up there, and Karl Schroeder, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you. It was a lot of fun.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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.

INTERVIEW: RICHARD GARRIOTT

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Richard Garriott’s Akalabeth, which he programmed in high school, is one of the first computer role-playing games ever published. Garriott went on to create the Ultima series, considered by many the high-water mark of interactive entertainment, as well as Ultima Online, the world’s first MMO. His latest project, the crowd-funded Shroud of the Avatar, is the spiritual successor of Ultima set within a new, engaging world.

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, in which the host and guests discuss various geeky topics.

Your Ultima games are absolutely my all-time favorite video games, and they really had a big effect on me as a kid. In college, I actually studied mostly law and ethics, and I really trace my interest in those subjects back to my years spent playing Ultima. I imagine that you must hear a lot of stories like that. Do any stories stand out in your mind about your games having that sort of big influence on people?

Actually, it does, and there are a couple of stories, one in particular that I love the occasion to be able to retell, which was shortly after Ultima Four. If you’re an Ultima fan, you must remember that Ultima Four was the first time that—especially in the Ultima series, but frankly, I think in any role-playing games on the computer—they went from just being a slog of fighting monsters and collecting treasure to being a game that both espoused virtuous behavior, and also judged you as you played the game as to whether you were playing in a virtuous manner. And the only way to really win the game was to behave in a reasonably virtuous way according to the rules of the game.

When I was building that game, my team and my family were fairly skeptical; they thought that trying to make a preachy type of game, as they would say, might actually hurt its possibility of success. But when that game came out, it was actually my first number one best-selling Ultima, and I think really put the series on the map. I received a letter shortly thereafter from a mother of a young girl who she had bought Ultima Four for. She had never played Ultima, but she knew that it was popular based on its sales and marketing, and her kid had heard of Ultima before, but since she was trying to be a good parent, and kind of observe and participate in whatever her young child was playing on the computer, she sat with her young daughter while she played Ultima Four. She was so touched by how this touched her daughter that she wrote me a letter that basically said, “Hey, Mr. Garriott, I felt compelled to reach out to you because I have to tell you that my daughter has had a problem with lying and stealing and other things as might be normal for a parent to face with some children, and I have to say, when she played your game, she of course immediately fell into the same habits of lying and cheating to the characters in the game, but then I noticed how your game brought those behaviors full circle, and my daughter was forced to face the ramifications of that behavior, and she learned to reevaluate her own behavior, not only in the game but in the real world.” So she was extremely thankful and happy that she had bought Ultima Four for her child, because she felt that it really did have that sincere positive impact in her child’s life.

Just reading comments from people online, I came across a lot of people who said that as kids they almost adopted the Eight Virtues as their religions. How do you feel about that? How do you feel that the Eight Virtues hold up after all these decades as a system that people should try to follow?

What’s interesting is of course the Eight Virtues are sort of, by definition, fiction. I wrote them not on a quest for the truth of the universe, but rather to fulfill a need. What’s interesting about that, though, is that when I decided I wanted to write a game about virtue, I went through a process, and the process started with me sitting down with what classical philosophy existed that I might pattern after. You do things like say, “Okay, well, should I use, for example, the Ten Commandments? Are the Ten Commandments what my game should espouse as the universal truth of the way to behave?” At least for me, I looked at that and said, well, that one’s not only a bit dated, but in my mind it was somewhat incomplete, and somewhat duplicative, at least from a gaming standpoint. I couldn’t figure out a way to make it work.

Then I said, “Okay, well, how about the seven deadly sins? Am I working against the seven deadly sins?” And while a lot of good horror movies use that as their basis, when I was trying to write a game about virtue, again these came up shy of what I felt would work.

So then I said, “Okay, I really have to invent a virtue system from scratch. I really need to find out, what are the fundamental virtues of life?” I sat down and began a very extensive research project. I bought all kinds of philosophy books. I read through many, and I began to see patterns in it. I began to tape Post-It notes on a white board and organize things that motivated people to good and bad behavior up on a wall and then began to put things near each other that kind of were different ways to say the same thing, or included elements of each other, to try to find a universal set. That’s when I originally came out with the Three Principals: truth, love, and courage. I noticed that almost anything else I had up on that board, I could say was due to the presence or lack of one of those three cardinal virtues. But three didn’t seem like enough, so what I did is I used all the possible permutations of those three to come up with eight, and then I found the best word that I could that matched up with those eight.

So even though what I’ve just described to you is a fictional process, I believe strongly in the research that I did in order to come up with that. The longer I’ve sat with it down through these decades, the more I’ve noticed that other people writing issues about virtue or doing analysis of virtuous behavior in a modern way are often coming to a similar conclusion, if not the same conclusion. There was a site I found the other day called “What I needed to learn about life I learned in a video game,” and it’s all about the Eight Virtues of Ultima. They’re talking in depth about why they have concluded after not only playing it, but then growing up to adulthood and reflecting on it, that in fact those virtues really are a pretty sound foundation. Which I’ve grown to believe as well.

So when you were studying all the philosophy, were there any particular philosophies or philosophers that you particularly admired? Do you have a favorite approach in terms of deontology or consequentialism or virtue ethics or any of those sorts of things?

There were kind of two parts, two different aspects that I think I leaned on the most. Interestingly, Buddhist philosophy is absolutely my favorite, and while you won’t see the pattern in my virtues that comes from the Buddhist approach, what I liked about the Buddhist approach was it’s not doctrine as much as it is organized rational thinking to determine a philosophy that’s mutable. The more I read about the way in which Buddhist philosophy is derived, you might say, the more I began to lean on that as a process. Then as I started coming up with my specific three and then eight virtues, I then began to look for writings on those subjects. Interestingly, there’s a writer, a poet named Khalil Gibran, who writes lots of little short stories and quotes about virtues and vices and life and love, etc., and I found his work to be the way I managed to pull thought bubbles, you might say, or angles or ways to look in a very short, succinct way at a virtue. I found his writings to be particularly useful, although I drew from many, many other sources as well.

You mentioned how Ultima Four had such a positive impact on this little girl whose mother wrote in. Do you think games like Ultima, with that sort of ethics simulator, are something that should be assigned reading in school, the kind of thing that should just be the part of every child’s upbringing?

It’s interesting that you mention that. I’ve never heard anybody propose that before, but I like that a lot. I was talking with my wife, who is French, and one of the things about French school is they do that a great deal in school, more even than in America, where they’ll assign the class effectively an ethical parable story, and then sit down and analyze the how’s, and what’s, and why’s of that ethical parable. One of the things that I’ve grown to learn is that role-playing games are foundationally extremely powerful teaching tools. Frankly, whether you like it or not, it’s a good teaching tool, and that has at least made me very acutely aware of and pay attention to the nature of that teaching, the nature of the content that I put forth in my games—once I began to learn that people were reading so deeply into what I was putting in the page.

You have a child now, right? Are you going to force your child to play through all the Ultima games?

[Laughter] If she doesn’t play through them all, then she’ll have to join me in making them. What’s interesting is, I’ve been contacted a lot now that we’ve been developing Shroud of the Avatar. People have gone back—and whether they’re doing this only now because they’ve been inspired, because I’m going back to my roots myself, or whether they’re just telling me about it now, I don’t really know—but people are now circling back and playing those earlier games, and then writing to me about it. They’re saying, “Look, I’ve decided I’m going to play through Ultimas One through Nine, and they’re blogging, and tweeting, and sending me direct questions and comments about that experience. So as a community we’re sort of all reliving that whole cycle again. It at least reminded me how strong the story and the impact of those stories, Ultimas Four, Five, Six, and Seven in particular, was.

Ultima Four: I can’t think of another game in which ethical self-improvement and achieving enlightenment is the whole point of the game. Are there other ones that you know of? And why do you think that there aren’t more?

I agree with you, I think it’s the only one. And that was of course the thing that was debated so hotly at my company, as to whether that was what spelled doom for the product, since there was no real winning in a classical way of defeating a bad guy. Why there’s not that in particular I think is hard to say, but why there’s not very many deeper stories at all, I think is easier. I also think that most games, including role-playing games, don’t have that much story in them. A great case study to show how true that is that, when you look at movies made from computer games, a computer game is really about an environment and combat as much as anything else, and so pretty much any movie that’s made out of a game has not only been bad, but has had very little to do with the game—because there’s no content in the game that’s worth retelling in a movie, generally speaking.

I think the reason why that has remained so true for these decades is that the platform that we’re building on top of continues to evolve so quickly that just to make a first-person shooter that takes advantage of the astounding new capabilities of the hardware is work enough. It’s only during fairly stable points in the technology that people go, “Well, to compete with that fairly simple gameplay, I need to make something deeper,” and so games get deeper and deeper while a platform is relatively stable, but then as soon as there’s a new, radical improvement in the platform, games reset to fairly simple gameplay that really shows off all the great new bells and whistles of the technology. I’m hopeful that now that we’ve sort of reached the era where we’re not having to reinvent the camera, we’re not having to reinvent the render pipeline, and the art importation tools, and the A.I. systems, and the user interface systems . . . it used to be for every single game we’d reinvent all those things from scratch, and we’re finally to the point where we don’t have to reinvent all the pieces from scratch, and that is allowing developers to finally focus on making games deeper—which I think is really going to help the stories.

The Ultima series creates this virtual environment in which virtue is rewarded, in which being virtuous is the way to win the game, but I think a lot of people would argue that the real world doesn’t operate that way when we have sayings like “Nice guys finish last” and “No good deed goes unpunished.” What do you think about that tension between wanting to create a virtual world where virtue is rewarded and acknowledging that the real world often doesn’t work that way?

I think that, first of all, most good books, and most good movies, and I would therefore argue most good computer games—not all, but most—are aspirational fantasies, not the harsh truth of reality. I reflect regularly on some of the business partners that we’ve dealt with through the years, who I think of as fairly unscrupulous, that have succeeded despite their, at the very least, being mean-spirited, and the most, kind of purposely pushing the edges of legality in order to compete and win. When I talk with a lot of those people very straight up about this sort of thing, people are like, “Hey, this is business. It’s a competition, and if the way for us to get ahead is to harm you, then that’s what we need to do, is harm you.” I look at that and I go, “Boy, that just feels to me unethical.” So people’s concern that the real world does have some of that in it—I think the real world does have some of that in it.

On the other hand, I tend to be an optimist. I tend to think that while being the bad guy can lead you off into more immediate success, I think the strongest companies, the strongest individuals, the strongest products, are those that adhere to the more virtuous path. You think about any big hundred-year-long-lasting company: It has probably had an era of up and down, and even of moral or virtue drift, during different eras of their history, and while more mean-spirited if not bad-guy leadership may have given them a temporary surge, I do have a personal belief that, fundamentally, human beings need to work in supportive communities in order to succeed. Good guys can finish first, but not necessarily every time.

Back in episode eighty-four we were talking about what our ultimate video game would be, and I don’t know if you’ve read Game of Thrones or watched the TV show, but I was saying a video game I would really like to see would be something like you’re Ned Stark and you show up in King’s Landing, and you’re sort of thrown into this court intrigue, and you don’t know who to trust. I think one thing that’s really interesting about Game of Thrones is that Ned Stark tries to be as virtuous as possible and that creates a total catastrophe. I just wonder, do you think you would ever create a game or an ethical simulation like that where doing the virtuous thing . . .

Absolutely. In fact, I’ve sort of tried to already traipse around that a bit, and let me describe how that at least worked in my world. Ultima Four was, as we’ve discussed, the game about being virtuous, and there was no bad guy. You were going to succeed or fail purely based on what an example you created, how good an example you created for the people. That’s your job: to be the first knight, be the one worthy of admiration of everyone, to show what it’s like to be truthful, and loving, and courageous. But in Ultima Four, the game is also fairly black and white, and as soon as you know that that’s the case, you just quit doing evil things, and eventually it’ll work out for you.

But when I finished that, even I said, “Okay, that’s really not the way the world really is.” In the real world, there’s lots of people who claim to be good but I would argue are not. I will pick on one broad category—I may not be picking on all these people fairly—but I would argue that, in many cases, television evangelists are people whose job it is to appear to be the most positive, well-meaning people that exist. And yet many, many, many of them have been taken down for doing things like using earpieces and communication pieces to have revelations about members of their audiences, to use shills in their audiences to have magical spiritual healing, etc. I think most anybody who would look at that would go, “Okay, those people are actually evil.” In my mind, the real world is filled with that.

The real world is filled with people who claim to be good, and look good, and may even have some aspects of what they’re doing that are good, but are really deep down rooted in something more sinister. On the other hand, there are people who are just angry, or hungry, or spiteful, for whatever reason, that in the end really could be relied on to make the right choice if something really important came up. So with Ultima Five, I tried to bring that gray area of reality out. Whereas in Ultima Four, anybody who says, “I’m here to help you” probably was really there to help you, in Ultima Five that was not the case.

Then with Ultima Six, I began to reach into things like racism, and what I did with Ultima Six was I brought in a race of beings that look very demonic: They have horns, they have leathery wings, they have long claws. In fact, you enter the game at a battle where they are actually trying to kill you. Well, that’s pretty good evidence to say, “Those guys are bad guys.” They look like bad guys. They’re acting like bad guys. They must be bad guys. But then again, there’re all kinds of reasons to have a conflict that have nothing to do with whether someone is right or wrong. There have been conflicts where both sides honestly believe they’re right, and being the winner doesn’t necessarily mean that they were the one in the right. In this case, I set it up by creating these gargoyle-like evil creatures. I set you up to assume that they were evil, when in fact they have families and literature and science, and their grief with you is associated with things that the human society has been doing against them over time. In fact, the way to lose the game is to win the battle. The way to win the game is to force peace.

I absolutely agree that the stories of Ultima’s Five, Six, and Seven involve a tremendous amount of moral complexity, and that’s one of the things I really love about them. But more or less the avatar is expected to act virtuously throughout the stories, and I think that changes a little bit in Ultima Eight.

It does. And again, Eight had some problems, in the sense it was pushed out the door incomplete, in my mind, so I wish we had sat on that one for six more months than we were allowed, but you’re absolutely correct. What Ultima Eight’s story was: I sat down and said, “Well, what do you do if the rules of society around you don’t support these virtuous and ethical behaviors?” It’s perfectly fine to say “I always want to be truthful, and honest, and loving, and kind,” but if those [values] are not appreciated and repeated by those around you, what do you do about it? It was sort of my “when do you choose to fight fire with fire?” When is it okay to set aside your own moral or virtuous beliefs, your ethical beliefs, and live like the locals as a way of survival? And without trying to pass judgment on it, I at least tried to explore it by saying, there are times if you just decide to stand your ground, you’re just going to be killed and that’s the end. If you think that’s the right choice then, okay, it’s going to be a short game.

I heard you describe the theme of that game—you said something to the effect of: “When you find yourself in a world where devil worshipping is normal, then that’s what you have to do.”

I may have said literally that. I don’t remember that exact quote, but that’s not far from my thinking. In fact, another thing I did with this game—I do this in all of my games—I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Ultima pattern of having a room that often involves the death of children?

Yes.

Okay, well this started with Ultima Four, but things like it continue to this day, and this provocation of pushing you, the player, out of your comfort zone is something I know to do very purposefully. And Ultima Four, where it came about was that the last dungeon you had to fight your way through was intended to test you, once and for all, on all of your aspects of virtuous behavior. I made a room where there were cages in the corners, and a lever in the center of the room that, if you pull the lever—and the cages, by the way, were full of small children—and if you pulled the lever, the cages would be opened. But in fact they weren’t children in the sense of nice, pleasant little human children. These were monsters that looked like children, and so they would swarm around you and attack you, and I knew that the player would wonder what they should do because at this point they’re right at the end of the game, and they would be worried that if they killed the child, they might lose part of their virtue points—which would mean they would have to start over this whole dungeon. So, what do they do?

To me, that was the beginning and end of it. I didn’t care what they did because, in fact, it wasn’t a test. It just looked like a test. But I knew that people would be trying to figure out what to do, and there were other things you could do. You could charm the children to make them run away. You could put them to sleep. If you dropped your sword and hit them with an open hand, they would be hurt and run away. You could not pull the lever. There were all kinds of things you could do, but I knew that this would cause this mental anguish on a player. It’s so hard to cause an emotional reaction of any kind in a game that I was very proud of myself when I built this little test.

But when the game was being playtested just before its release, one of our QA testers played that room and then wrote a letter to my brother, who was my business partner, and said, “I refuse to work for a company that so clearly supports child abuse. I was just about to finish this game, and I actually had to beat up children in order to win the game. I’m pissed off. I demand that you remove this from the game or I quit.” And my brother came to me and said, “Richard, what have you put in the game?” And I’m going, “I don’t even know what he’s talking about.” We had to go look it up and go, “Oh, it’s this room.” And Robert said, “You have to take it out of the game.” And I said, “No, you don’t understand. The fact that I’ve provoked this level of emotional reaction is incredible, and in fact, this guy is wrong. You don’t have to kill the children. You can charm them, put them to sleep, don’t pull the lever, there’s plenty of other solutions.” But I was excited by the fact that I had made this level of provocation. My brother tried to get me to take it out, my parents tried to get me to take it out, but I left it in the game, and I do things like it now all the time.

I wonder to what extent some of these things were intended to be provocative. I mean, like, the box for Ultima Three features this big demon monster, and it has the word Exodus, this word out of the Bible, and this is at the height of the satanic panic of the 1980s. Were you intending to be provocative with that or just kind of going . . . ?

Interestingly, for Ultima Three, that was not intended to be provocative. By the time we got around to Ultima Eight, it was purposefully provocative. It was happenstance early on. But, for example, if you go to a movie, it is not uncommon if you go to a scary movie to see a pentagram on the floor with candles in the corners and people pretending to do magic, and so in Ultima Eight, I wanted to, and did, put pentagrams in the floor, candles in the corner, and you perform magic. Immediately, I got a negative response from both the outside and employees. I had employees quit over what I just described to you. It’s interesting how the religious right often will look at this. I’ll even ask, “Why is it okay in a book? Why is it okay in a movie? And why is it not okay suddenly for me?” And their answer usually is, “It’s okay to read about it. It’s okay to write about it. It’s okay to make a film about it. What’s not okay is to pretend you’re doing it, even if you’re playacting, because that invites the devil into you.” To which I go, “I understand your rationale. I just don’t happen to agree with it.”

Leading up to that, I was constantly doing things . . . just like with the game about the gargoyles, which tried to show you that you personally can be racist if I set your bigotry up by hiding proper details and expressing certain details in a way that defeats your filter of trying not to be. And similarly I think about pentagrams. A pentagram is just a symbol, as far as I’m concerned, and the fact that some people find it uncomfortable, I would like to show them that by the way you can write a game about virtue. You can write a game that is going to help your children grow up to be happy, healthy, positive adults, and that will not harm them. So I like this, being this provocateur that takes people out of their comfort zone to try to shake them up, to be a more thinking, rational being.

Have you gotten a lot of letters over the years from players who’ve converted to devil worship after playing your games?

[Laughter] Not a one. That’s hilarious. No, in fact, it is interesting: that Ultima Three cover that you asked if I did that one on purpose? I did get a couple of letters about that, because they just saw the image on the cover and assumed it was something devil worship-y. To which, by the way, the inspiration for that cover came from Disney’s Fantasia. If you remember Disney’s Fantasia, it has a big demon standing on a rock in a fire pit, and Ultima Three’s cover is a big demon sitting on a rock in a fire pit. And so I thought it was hilarious that Walt Disney—which is kind of seen as one of the most wholesome, positive American icons around—I used the same image and I’m called a devil worshipper.

I really think it goes to the hypocrisy of people with this attitude. And pretty universally, those people aren’t playing the games. They’re just seeing the image and making a variety of assumptions. It is interesting, though: I did another accidental provocation that went into Ultima Three. You may remember the magic books, and one of the things I started doing in the Ultimas early on that now other games do, is I tried to make the manuals as fictional as possible. Instead of saying, “Hey, to cast a certain spell you use this key on the keyboard, and here are the numbers and parameters associated with it,” I actually tried to write the manuals as if this was real. So if it’s a magic book, you don’t say it’s a computer game, you just write it as if, yeah, it’s a magic book. If you want to resurrect somebody, you bring together these ingredients, and you boil them in a pot, and you pour them down his throat, and chant these words, and ta-da, your friend will be back to life. I tried to write it as “realistically” as possible.

Of course I don’t believe that magic really exists, but in order to do research for what a magic book might look like, I bought tons of books from people who claimed they could do real magic. By the way, if you go buy some books about magic, you will find that they are incoherent. There’s really no pattern to it. It’s very hard to pull structure out of it in a way that . . . you could write a fictional magic book a lot more interesting and realistic-feeling compared to the “real” ones.

But when I looked through those real ones, I pulled out certain kinds of images or icons, sigils and things, just because they looked cool. Sometimes people were good artists and would draw interesting shapes and things, so I’d actually pull from “real” sources some symbols that would be used in some of those early books. I did get messages—the one I’m remembering right now is actually from a Jewish rabbi who noted that I sealed the last few pages of the book; they literally had a tag over them that you had to tear open to get to the most powerful spells, and the cover of that sealed section had some writing on it, like some names written in a weird font. This rabbi called us up and said, “Hey, by the way, you really shouldn’t be printing those symbols in a book because those symbols are the word of God, Jehovah, written in” . . . I can’t remember what language it was, but according to Jewish faith, it’s a word you’re not supposed to write down, and so he was at least bringing that to attention. In our case, it was completely accidental. I was just using a funky-looking symbol.

I’ve always thought it was so interesting—I believe that you’re not very religious at all, and the Ultima games are very sort of clear-sighted about some of the downsides of religion, and yet spirituality is one of the Eight Virtues.

In fact, you’re correct on all fronts. I consider myself actually a very spiritual person, but it is with a unique definition of the word spiritual. What I use, and I tried to describe this in Ultima, what I used for the concept of spirituality is not religious spirituality, has nothing to do with God, has nothing to do with a soul, it really has to do with the introspection about your place and purpose in life. But again, not in a “beyond human understanding” way, but rather in the sense that I do care about the tracks I leave with my life on this Earth. I consider that spirituality. So it is, I know, a unique definition of the word that’s not commonplace, but I do consider myself a very positively spiritual person, but with that very specific definition.

Your new project is called Shroud of the Avatar. Could you just tell us how is this related to the Ultima series and how is it different?

What’s interesting is I’ve been making role-playing games, obviously, for a long time, forty years, and as we reflect back on the Ultima series, I think there were some really great things that other games, and even games I’ve worked, on have not continued, so part of Shroud of the Avatar is hearkening back to the past, where Ultima Four, Ultima Seven, and Ultima Online are the biggest touchstones. Ultima Seven, I think, is the best Ultima from the detail of the simulation of everything—you touch a sign or a lamp and it swings in the wind; every object in the game can be picked up, taken, interacted with, used, fill a vial with fluids or pour it out on the ground. The detail of the simulation is very good. Ultima Four, from the Virtues and making sure that the game really is not only espousing but judging you on the ethical behavior you perform with in the game. Ultima Online, in a sense of a very deeply simulated multiplayer environment where the roles that people can play are very diverse: from just a combatant collecting treasure, through the crafters who create the tools of the trade of all the adventurers out in the wilderness, and all of the other walks of life that are not only simulated but are deeply interconnected. To be successful you really rely on other players within the game.

So that’s sort of the foundation, harkening back to the past. But we’re also trying to fix some problems that role-playing games, we think, have come up with, and take a good strong step into the future. Where I think a lot of role-playing games have become fairly brain-dead operations—and what I mean by that is that you’re dropped into a virtual world and you see an exclamation over the person’s head you really need to talk to. So you know “I’ve got to go talk to him,” but when you talk to that character you don’t really pay attention to what they say; you just kind of click on the menu of things they have to say and avoid clicking on the ones that would make that person angry. At that point, anything you needed would be in your quest log, and your quest log will then put an arrow on the map to drive you through the world to the place you need to go for that quest—where it’s usually “farm the monsters.” A level-one quest for level-one monsters, and as soon as you do that one rapidly enough, you become level two and repeat the whole behavior.

So the automation of these games makes you, the player, really not need to pay much attention to the game experience. You’re no longer exploring, you’re no longer actually problem-solving, you’re no longer actually thinking about why or how should I interact in a particular way in this particular situation. So we decided to work very hard to try to bring what we think of as role-playing back to role-playing. I think we’ve done a good job with the new kinds of conversation systems, new kinds of ways to track the knowledge that you have acquired during your adventuring, and hopefully we’re going to take a bold step into a new future for role-playing games.

One of the things that you mentioned is that one of the selling points of the Ultima series are these rich stories and background of the world. Could you talk about what sort of a story you are putting together for Shroud of the Avatar?

Absolutely. In fact, as I reflect on the stories in Ultimas, I’m very proud of the high concept of many of those stories. My critique of my own work is that, while I think I understand the high concept I’m trying to deal with, the main social issues I want to wrestle with in this story, I’m not and was not raised as a professional storyteller. I would like to argue that I am one of the leading storytellers in interactive games, yet I still, as I look at book authors in general, and a few in specific, I don’t see the prose that I wrote or the structure I put to story to be nearly as high-quality as some of them.

So one of the things I did with Shroud of the Avatar is, Day One, we sat down, and I started talking with my dear friend Tracy Hickman, who I’ve admired for thirty-plus years, and we commonly would share stories and have worked together on some small projects, but never on a large project before. So I reached out to Tracy and said, “Hey Tracy, could you/would you be interested and willing to work with us here to craft the story for Shroud of the Avatar?” And he very enthusiastically said yes, and we put that in as one of our Kickstarter goals when we got the project going to have him not only help us internally with the story for Shroud of the Avatar, but also to write a book of the backstory that we’ve been working on together as well, called Blade of the Avatar.

We’re doing Shroud of the Avatar as five episodes. This first episode is called “Forsaken Virtues,” and in this first episode, you-the-player return to the lands of Lord British. It’s been some time since you’ve played together in a world with Lord British, and when you return to this world you find that while Lord British still espouses the Virtues, a great deal of time has passed and the world has sort of moved on and thinks of them as quaint but a bit antiquated, and is now back on the practical business of rebuilding the world in which you have now returned. The game now, in this case, it’s still about virtue, but it allows you to explore virtue in sort of what you could call your own way.

There’s a new force that we call The Oracle, this new advisor that you’ll find regularly reentering the story. I would describe this character as a lot like Aleister Crowley, if you remember Aleister Crowley. He was a witch, he believed, and he believed that you should become the best you that you could be no matter what that you was, and The Oracle is a force of this kind. The Oracle will sit and analyze your behavior, and ask you about the intentions of your behavior, and comment on whether your intentions and your behavior appear to be in line as far as The Oracle can determine by mechanically observing your behaviors in gameplay. So at the end of this first episode, the “Forsaken Virtues” episode, players will emerge with a variety of outcomes. If you think of most storylines in most games, you either win or you don’t, whatever has been scripted by the creators. This first episode is really where you effectively determine your own destiny by your actions in the game.

I’ve read Blade of the Avatar, the sections that have been released so far. One thing that really strikes me is it seems really interesting on a meta level—in the game world you have the fall, and a lot of the old world has been swept away and is now forgotten, and it seems like that parallels the history of the Ultima games and the fall with Electronic Arts, and now coming out of that and rebuilding this new world.

Exactly. In fact, of course you’re picking up on a rhythm which is not accidental. We obviously could not reference any intellectual property of the past, and so we had to sweep it away. Interestingly, if you remember Ultima Nine, the end of Ultima Nine actually ends with, effectively, the destruction of Britannia. It wasn’t even accidental. A little bit of scuttlebutt about the final days of my relationship with EA is, when we did Ultima Online, it was the best-selling PC game in Origin and EA history, so obviously that was a big hit. However, EA was not hot on role-playing games in general, especially not medieval style role-playing games. There had been a lot of other failures. There weren’t many fantasy movies coming out. The new Lord of the Rings movies had yet to be envisioned. The most popular movies were The Matrix and things of this nature, and the pressure was on. They were trying to get everybody to quit making men running around in tights because they didn’t think people wanted it anymore, and they really hoped we would go on and make Matrix-type games.

At least for me, it was obvious that Ultima Nine was going to be the end. It was the end of the trilogy of trilogies. I’d been working on it at that point for about twenty-five years. It was obvious that I had lost the support and interest of my publisher. So I said, “Okay, this is really the end.” So I set that story up to sort of wipe the slate clean in some way, and I did, and then I walked away. [It was a] combination of they pushed me out of the company, and I walked away from medieval fantasy for a while.

But in the ten years that have transpired since, I find it very shocking that, first of all, fantasy of course is not dead. I knew it never was. It was just the company that didn’t feel that medieval fantasy was relevant. It’s continued, obviously, to be enormously popular. But no one has really kind of followed in the Ultima mold. No one has followed in the mold of virtues. No one has really followed in the mold of these deep sandbox games where everything is interactive. No one has really taken the RPG roles that you can play as a character and try to make them so deeply interdependent on each other as we did even with Ultima Online.

Over the years, as I kind of gained some distance from Ultima, I began to long, myself, to play or participate in the creation of another Ultima, began to get the pressure from the community to come back and go do that instead of science fiction or whatever else we might do next, and so this was just the right time. To come back full circle about your statement about Blade of the Avatar, Blade of the Avatar is meant to be that bridge. It’s meant to be: Look, we’re not going to reference anything about the past, the past really is gone, but what we’re going to do is, we’re going to start with the old world is gone, and how do we build the new history, the new reality, going forward? The one piece of continuity that we will bring back, that we do own, is Lord British, and so Lord British and the Virtues, which I personally espouse, will continue into the new world.

Speaking of Lord British, I heard you say that when you were working on Ultima Seven that they wanted to give Lord British a wife and kid, and you say, “No, you can’t do that because I’m Lord British, and I don’t have a wife and kid.” But now you do have a wife and kid, so does that mean that now Lord British will have a wife and kid?

Very interesting speculation, but I can’t tell the answer to that because it involves some of the plot of “Forsaken Virtues.” It is a reasonable suspicion, but exactly the way that will play out you’ll have to find out in game.

Interesting. One feature of this game I’m really looking forward to is that you’re bringing back the text parser. I grew up playing Ultima games and Sierra adventure games where you actually have to type in words, and I’m looking forward to that making a comeback.

Yeah, me too. In fact, it’s interesting, I don’t know if you had a chance to have a good conversation with some of the characters in the game yet, but Scott Jennings, who is our main programmer on this facet of the game, significantly exceeded my hopes and expectations in a way that makes me very happy. I would have been frankly content with something very much like the old school Ultima: Just parse out a keyword one at a time and respond to one thing at a time. What he made instead is that, look, if we’re going to put in a parser at all we might as well put in something that’s a little bit more state of the art, and while it’s still looking for keywords in what you say, it can pull out whole sets of keywords that are presented even in complex sentences. So if you walk up to an empty seat and say, “Hello, I’m Richard Garriott. Your establishment here looks like a pub. If that’s true, what kind of beer do you have for sale? I’d like to buy one.” And it will go and it says, “Oh, hello Richard Garriott.” Since I said my real name, he will now permanently remember my real name. He’ll say, “Why, yes, this is a pub. This is Fire Lotus’ Tavern, and yes, we sell beer. We have twenty-four different types on tap. What would you like?” It actually goes through and responds to each of the keywords that it can pull out of separate sentences along the way in one fell swoop.

In addition, if you say something and the character doesn’t see anything in there it can parse, it records it, and so that sends a mail. Every day Scott and his team get a sweep of what things people have said to the NPCs that the NPCs didn’t understand, and if they look at those and it looks like something that, “Oh, it’s actually reasonable that that character probably should know about that,” then they add it. So our characters are getting smarter and smarter and smarter as time goes on within the game.

Back in episode ninety-one of this show we interviewed Felicia Day, who mentioned she’s a huge Ultima fan, and she actually has some of her fan poetry online. I was wondering if you had seen any of that stuff.

Yes, I have. Some of her fan poetry is probably the first way I became a big fan of hers. It’s the first time she really strongly came on my radar. Of course it would make sense that people would forward it to me and bring it to my attention, but in reverse, the more I have seen and heard about Felicia, and watched her YouTube channels and things of this nature, frankly the more of a Felicia Day fan I have become. I find Felicia’s success to be a harbinger of the future of television-style media. Here’s my case: When I go to places like DragonCon, I’ve been going to conventions forever, and it’s interesting to see who shows up as a fan to different kinds of presentations at these conventions. For example, an artist: There’s lots of artists who show up at conventions to show off their art, and maybe sell a little bit of it, and they get a line of people around their little booth. You then get up to some book authors, and some book authors might have a few more people who show up at their talks or their booths and queue up to meet them or get a picture, or an autograph, or whatever it might be. Then you have computer game developers like myself who might command a similar or a little more people based on the popularity of their titles. Then you move up to a whole other class, which you get to for, like, television and movie stars. TV and movie stars command a much bigger audience in the big rooms for the fans that show up for the television and movie stars.

And now there’s even bigger. Now there’s people like Felicia Day. For example, at this last DragonCon that I was at and she was at, for her talk, they had to book the big ballroom in an entire other hotel that had a bigger ballroom than any of the main DragonCon hotel rooms so they could fit the tens of thousands of people in who wanted to see her and her team get up and talk about their latest machinations on life. To me, I look at that and go, “That is so much more powerful.” The podium that she now has reaches the younger, fast-growing demographic of an audience. If people in normal broadcast television aren’t paying attention to this, they’re going to, yet again, lose out.

Another good case study is the Rooster Teeth folks back in Austin, Texas, who, for their Red vs. Blue and other shows they do, they often even have a bigger audience than Felicia. And in Austin they just bought the entire television studio of what used to be a big studio of (I can’t remember if it was NBC or CBS or ABC or who it was) but a big production studio in Austin, Texas that went out of business for traditional media and was bought up by Rooster Teeth, which is now expanding into it. So I think things like you’re doing, these podcasts, and with the on-demand, whether it’s radio, or video, whether it’s television or movies, is inconsequential to me. This on-demand nature, I’m seeing the consumer base shift to it. I’m seeing marketing dollars shift to it. And I think traditional media needs to pay attention or they’ll miss it.

I also wanted to ask you about The Space Bards “Return of Lord British” music video, which I absolutely love. I must have watched that thing a hundred times.

It’s phenomenal.

How did that come about and what was your reaction to it?

We were doing this during the Kickstarter. One of the things we realized during the Kickstarter—if we did a Kickstarter again we’d do it considerably better, I think. I’m not complaining about how we did, but it was an interesting learning experience—One of the things we learned as we were going through it is that we really need to be interactive with the community more and more, and one of the ways that we did that is we began to run contests. We were close to the end, we were within a week of the end of the Kickstarter, and we decided to run on one weekend a three-day, so seventy-two-hour, contest that said, “Hey, whoever can produce the best video that we can use as advertising for Shroud of the Avatar, we’ll give you something. Some cool upgrades or whatever it might be.” Then we began to watch over the next seventy-two hours as people began to turn things in. Of course, the first twenty-four hours, the things that we got in were fun and they were interesting, and it was cool that people took time out of their lives to do it, but they wouldn’t be things that we could release and actually sell people on who we were and what we were doing here. But by the time we got to the end of Day Two, we began to get things that were really good. In fact, there’s a woman who was our leading contender up until The Space Bards—a woman named Ember Isolte. Ember’s is kind of a medieval, traditional-styled piece, great music, great lyrics, very well sung: We thought it was going to be the winner. Hers was so much better than the other folks through the entirety of Day Two that she was the assumptive winner.

Then, within four hours or so of the close of Day Three, The Space Bards gave us their “Return of Lord British” and we were stunned. It was so good. We actually started feeling bad because we liked Ember’s piece so much. It’s great and Ember’s a great member of our community. We love her to death. We think her work is phenomenal. But for this particular contest, for this particular need, for what we were trying to do to market the game and just to have fun with it and around it, Space Bards nailed it. So we have been not only so thankful to The Space Bards, we’ve become big Space Bards fans. We all contributed to their Kickstarter to do music themselves. They’ve gone on to do music at a Blizzard Con and other things too. They’re making a good run of it as a band independently and still are producing music for us in-game that is just phenomenal.

I saw in a video that you recently bought a brownstone in New York City. I live in New York, so I was just curious: What brings you to the city?

Marriage brings me to the city. I met my wife when she was on vacation and technically I was working, just after my spaceflight. I happened to be on the island of St. Barts, where my company had sent me to give a speech, and she happened to be on the same island, but did not come to the speech there over Christmas break. But over about a twenty-four-hour period, we ran into each other. One night just after dinner was our first kind of brief encounter, then we happened to go to the same restaurant for breakfast, then we were in the same general place for lunch, then the next afternoon we were on the same small plane off the island. So four times in a row in twenty-four to forty-eight hours, and that kind of kicked off at least a conversation—which, even though I went back to Texas and she went back here to New York, the interest was high enough we kept communications up and eventually led to a couple of years ago us getting married.

I saw that you keep in touch with the office in Austin with a telepresence robot.

That’s exactly right. In fact, we have two there now, and I have third now on order just because that’s essential. I split my time about fifty/fifty between Austin and New York, but when I’m here in New York, when I get up in the morning I sit down at this desk that I’m talking to you from right now, I power on my telepresent robot in Austin, and I wander the halls and go to the meetings and participate just as if I was there. Unless I’m on a call like this, I’m full-time in my office and wandering the halls as normal, just through a telepresent robot.

Also, was it your mom that came to your wedding via a telepresence robot?

Yeah, in fact, that’s what we bought the robot for originally. When my wife and I decided to get married, she’s French and she wanted to get married in France where she has an enormously large extended family. My extended family is only half a dozen people, so it’s a lot easier for us to travel, except for my mother, who is over eighty years old and was not really feeling too excited about international travel, and I said, “Well, I know of new technologies coming online to fix that.” In fact, when we decided to get married, I put in an order for this robot that I knew wouldn’t be delivered until a month or so before the wedding, and so we have one of the very first ever telepresent machines ever made, that was used at our wedding.

We got married at this old castle, and this old castle had no internet, and so we actually got a hold of the company Orange, which is one of the biggest phone companies in Europe, and we expressed to them what we were trying to do, and they said, “Look, if you’ll let us market that we helped you guys pull this off, we will provide you internet for this day.” Which they did. So they actually ran internet to the castle and put wireless out in the hundred acres of gardens out behind it so that my mother could roam freely both through the wedding itself and then the after party. Some of our favorite pictures are of people dancing with her on the dance floor during and after the wedding.

I guess, for people who don’t know, what does this robot actually look like? It’s sort of a Segway, right?

We have three different models now, but they generally have the same form factor, which is a small base underneath that’s about the size of a toolbox, that is a self-balancing mechanism with two wheels, and a telescoping pole that goes up the center, and then on top is the communications head, so you have a display monitor so that other people can see you, and microphones where you can pick up what’s happening in the other room. When it’s on my screen here, you just use your arrow keys and mouse to drive it around, so other than the fact you can’t open doors for yourself, it’s a mighty good way to virtually be there.

It doesn’t have any sort of arm, does it? To press elevator buttons or anything like that?

It does not. In fact, I keep looking to see when somebody is going to make one, and no one even has that in the queue that I can see yet. The other problem with elevators is that they tend to cut off wireless connections because they’re metal boxes. We’ve actually tried to hook 4G modems onto these devices and drive them around, and you can drive around outdoors with a 4G modem, but elevators are still a hard journey to go into just because of the complexity of pressing the button and disconnecting.

Why don’t you tell us what’s ahead for Shroud of the Avatar? Where do you hope the project goes in the next couple of years?

Our sector is set on the end of this year, which is getting the “Forsaken Virtues” release out—that first whole story and the first whole continent. But, as is the case with massive-multiplayer-style games, we hope and trust that it will live on for many years. With the modest few million dollars that we’re building Episode One out of, that’s to kind of get the sandbox built and the first stories told, but as the game expands, we’re going to do things, like, you’ll see ships in Episode One, but they’re all tied onto the docks. You don’t get to sail them around much. You’ll see whether it’s flying vehicles or the implication of future flying vehicles. You’ll see whole new groups of character classes to be played. The stories of this first one involve a fairly limited palette of kinds of creatures and circumstances. All of those things will be expanded in Episodes Two, Three, Four, and Five. If we get through Episode Five, if we’re fortunate enough to live through the full arc of five episodes, then I think we will be about as happy as you can be, and then we’ll decide what’s next.

How many people does it take to sail a ship? I was curious about that.

Right now you can’t because they’re all tied to the docks. But that will come in Episode Two. Honestly, we haven’t even begun to design the strategy yet for how easy or difficult it will be to navigate your vessel across the seas.

Cool. So if people are interested in Shroud of the Avatar, what websites or things should they be checking out?

Www.shroudoftheavatar.com is where you can come, and I’d be very excited to have more people join us on this adventure to kind of both hearken back to an earlier day of series games like Ultima, as well as take a bold step into the future of trying to create a new type of massively multiplayer game with a new type of way to interact with characters and quests that we hope will be well-liked and carry us into the future.

Great! Unfortunately we’re pretty much out of time here, so I guess we should probably start wrapping this up. Richard, I just really want to thank you, it’s sort of a lifelong dream for me to get to talk to you.

Thank you, David. My pleasure, absolutely.

Thanks for all the Ultima games and I’m really looking forward to Shroud of the Avatar. Best of luck with it.

Thank you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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: UDARA CHINTHAKA

Udara Chinthaka works as a digital artist, illustrator, and matte painter for games and websites. He lives and works in Colombo, Sri Lanka. His website is udarachinthaka.com.

[To view the gallery, turn the page.]

ARTIST SPOTLIGHT: UDARA CHINTHAKA

Henry Lien

You’re from Sri Lanka: Tell us about the tradition of science fiction/fantasy art and illustration in Sri Lanka. Does it have a flavor that is distinct from art and illustration coming out of India or elsewhere in South Asia? How would you describe the difference?

Sri Lanka has a rich heritage of art and culture strongly influenced by our neighbor India. Ancient Lanka was influenced by different forms of art from different eras of Indian history and therefore a lot of it still remains in our art styles. One can find the influence of Indian art in Sri Lankan art, from colour to brush strokes. However, Sri Lankan art has a tendency to show more subtle blends in colour tones, as opposed to the harsh brightness in colour found in Indian art. Indian art is known to feature more tones of red, whereas Sri Lankan art tends to blend in shades of brown to make the colour schemes seem more neutral. In addition, with the numerous invasions by nations such as the Dutch and Portuguese, Sri Lankan art has been strongly influenced by cultures other than India and evolved to blend in all these cultures.

Many of the characters in your work feature super-deformed dimensions on the characters, yet they look very different from Japanese super-deformed anime/manga characters. Are you consciously trying to achieve a different look and is this part of a larger Sri Lankan/South Asian traditional of drawing?

My work is mainly based in historical and contemporary Sri Lankan styles of art. I spent my childhood watching anime, manga, and cartoons, including Japanese examples. However, my style wasn’t directly influenced by the Japanese styles. I am consciously trying to achieve my own style of illustration while blending in the color schemes of my country’s heritage.

What about the issue of race in your works? Western viewers who are used to seeing only Western and Japanese illustration might look at the characters in works like the girl in the red dress in Evil Soul and the scientist with the frog in New Species and glance over them assuming they are white, when in fact, on closer examination, they appear to be of South Asian heritage. Do you consciously consider the race of your characters when you draw them? Or does it depend on the project?

I do not tend to use color differentiation in skin tone to define the race of the characters I paint. That said, my art generally portrays the people of the region of Asia that I am from, as I was raised with a strong sense of Sinhalese culture here in Sri Lanka.

The character in Evil Soul was necessarily South Asian because this piece was specifically portraying a character who still engages in ancient Sri Lankan folkloric magical traditions, as are still practiced in rural parts of my country. In New Species, I tried to emphasize the more cartoonish side of my work. That is the reason for the somewhat brighter skin tone. Also, I think that my childhood spent watching Warner Brothers and Loony Tunes cartoons seeps in in unintentional assumptions about what color schemes to use to represent human skin when working in a cartoon style.

It is clear from your work that you are not afraid to interject wild color schemes into your work. Several of your works are blue and orange, a color combination that sounds garish on paper, but creates a sense of vibrancy and excitement in the actual works. It seems almost like you are saying, “What is the most unlikely color scheme I can think of and how can I make it work?” Are these color challenges that you throw at yourself, just to see if you can do it?

I do not consciously plan out a specific color theme, but just go with the flow of my thoughts and get drowned in my art. As I continue to work on a piece, I start to understand what points in the piece I want to emphasize. I will often use an unusual color to draw the viewer’s eye toward that area of the piece and make sure it stands out from the rest.

A large part of your work is images for younger viewers. Were these projects for games, books, or other products for younger players?

My work does not specifically target a certain audience, it is more an expression of what I watch, see, imagine and am drawn towards personally.

What were some of your early visual influences as a child?

My childhood was spent watching a lot of animation. Warner Bros, MGM, and Disney played key roles in my life. I was enthralled by the physical processes of creation of this animation.

What sorts of projects are you working on presently?

I work on designing landscapes and characters for games, matte painting for websites, and other aspects of digital design for a leading design company called We Are Designers in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

What is your dream project?

To one day be part of a world-renowned team of artists working on a feature film animation production.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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. His work has been published in Asimov’s, Analog, and Interfictions, and been nominated for the Nebula. Visit his author website at www.henrylien.com.

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT:
ADAM-TROY CASTRO

Jude Griffin

Ouch. Poor Phil. Strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs) are a really scary trend for corporations seeking to silence any consumer voicing their dissatisfaction with products/services. Was this story inspired by any lawsuit in particular?

Yes, actually. I had just read a news story about a couple who were billed for thousands, all for the grievous sin of giving a company a bad review online. The contractual provision that gave the company leave to charge such fines was not added to the boilerplate contract until several years after the couple and the company had concluded their business, but the company went after their credit rating anyway, to ruinous financial effect. This is the world we’re living in, the status quo we’re headed for; if there hadn’t already been some resistance to the more extreme trespasses, it would already be much worse.

Please tell me all the provisions after the first are made-up with no real-world examples.

There are some that are almost as bad.

This actually happened a few years ago (and forgive me, I read the story when it appeared in Harper’s but no longer have the citation; this is a casual interview). One company advised its employees that they had to submit a weekly report on the books they had read, the TV shows they had watched, the movies they had seen; that if the report was not on their superior’s desk by seven a.m. Monday morning, it was grounds for dismissal. They had to document that they had attended a church and they had been in bed by ten p.m. Certain newspapers not on the approved list could harm one’s employment.

Another company, rather than cleanse its workspace of substances that were dangerous to pregnant women, declared that all of its female employees had to either seek hysterectomies or seek employment elsewhere.

Some HR Departments are already searching your Facebook statuses to make sure that you have the correct opinions.

This is not only anti-corporate ranting. It happens to be a function of the human animal that when people are given power over you, whether as employers or governments or even as condo associations or family members or lovers, they continue to test the limits of that power until you say, “No, that’s all you get, no more, the line is drawn here.” It is possible for such a negotiation to be friendly. It just also needs to be firm.

I found myself wincing as each new provision went into effect. Do you find it hard to put your characters through such suffering or is each new idea to add a source of creative glee?

Fiction writing has always been acceptable sadism, and one of the first lessons I ever learned, taught me by a very successful editor and novelist, was that when you worry that you’ve gone too far, that’s when you know you’ve gone far enough.

No happy endings, right? Was this story always going to end badly for Phil, or did you consider other endings?

I can’t imagine any happy ending, for this story, that wouldn’t be a lame cop-out.

The story details a horrifying spiral in a very effective way, but with a brisk, almost clinical detachment. What made you choose this approach over, for example, a deep third-person POV where Phil’s emotions and reactions would be more deeply plumbed?

Form follows function. Stories dictate the voice. I tried to tell this one in precisely the POV you describe, including a long Monty Pythonian opening scene where Phil and the tow truck driver have a conversation of rapidly increasing absurdity, but the results were ghastly; I realized that this was the kind of tale that needed to be a thundering drumbeat of injustices, in as brief an interval as possible, and that left little room to give Phil the necessary personal agency.

You’ve said that the way to make readers care about your characters was to “Make the characters hurt unnecessarily. Make them harder on themselves than they have to be. Make them fail at some elemental element of human interaction. Make them less than fully competent in at least one way.” Phil doesn’t seem to fit this mold, but I still cringed for him. Why?

Because in this particular case, when you take away everything that makes Phil a highly specific person who collects stamps and watches Law & Order: SVU and has a trick knee, he becomes an everyman, and your own point of view intrudes. Neato-keen, huh?

I kind of wished you made Phil a Mr.-Shnodblatt-type character. A little schadenfreude to ease the pain of watching his travails.

So readers know what you’re talking about, “Mr. Shnodblatt” is my name for a real-life son-of-a-bitch who I had to deal with on one very bad day working retail over a quarter of a century ago. I don’t endorse what I did to him, but yes, one possible approach to this story would have been to make Phil deserve everything that happened to him. If that helps you, please make him a total piece of crap, in your head. In the meantime, I offer this link to the Saga of Mr. Shnodblatt—tinyurl.com/shnodblatt—as I told it some time ago.

Any new projects you want to tell us about?

I’ll point out a certain story appearing in Nightmare’s May 2014 issue: “In the Temple of Celestial Pleasures,” which is extremely nasty. Less nasty: the latest volume of my middle-grade series about the adventures of a very strange young boy named Gustav Gloom, Gustav Gloom and the Cryptic Carousel, coming out in August. Prime Books just published Her Husband’s Hands and Other Stories. I am working on a number of other projects that are not yet ready for big reveals, but those reveals are coming.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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:
JO WALTON

Patrick J. Stephens

Lead us through the inception of “The Panda Coin.” When did you discover that it was a story you wanted to tell, and how?

I read Marguerite Yourcenar’s “A Coin in Nine Hands” and I thought that it would be interesting to do in a science fiction context. It’s purely an experiment in playing with form.

Which character did you most identify with when writing? Who did you find the most intriguing to write?

Definitely the android sex-worker who wants a keyboard! That’s the answer to both of those questions.

“The Panda Coin” has a strong element of class struggle ingrained into the narrative. Why do you think science fiction can tell stories about struggle in such compelling ways?

Stories let us simplify an issue so that we can see the essence of it. Science fiction lets us get closer to actual struggle by letting us find new contexts for telling stories so we can see them from new angles.

As the reader, we follow the coin as it traverses this world, hand-by-hand. What convinced you that this was the most effective way to tell the stories of these characters? How do you think the story would have changed if you’d not originally begun with the coin?

I don’t think I’d ever have thought of these stories or characters away from the coin—the coin was my starting point. I have written another story set in this universe, so the idea of the space station with the twelve seasonal sectors was already in my mind.

What can we expect to see from you in the future?

I hardly ever write short fiction, I’m afraid. I have a novel coming out on May 20th called My Real Children, which is alternate history, and then next year The Just City, which is a fantasy about people and Greek gods setting up Plato’s Republic.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Patrick J. Stephens recently graduated from the University of Edinburgh and, after spending the entire year writing speculative fiction, came back with a Master’s in Social Science. His first collection (Aurichrome and Other Stories) can be found on Kindle and Nook.

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT:
HOWARD WALDROP

Kevin McNeil

Thank you for taking some time to chat about your story, “All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past.” Growing up in New England, I spent every Saturday morning glued to the television watching Creature Double Feature, which aired monster movies from the 1930s through the 1960s, so I really enjoyed reading this story. Can you elaborate on the origins of this story?

My first story, “Lunchbox”, Analog, May ’72, was accepted my fourth day in the US Army (a draftee) in October 1970. I got to enjoy the sale about four minutes after mail call ’til I had to go back to doing pushups.

I realized, the eighteen months I was in the Army, that if there was an East Coast Monster Emergency, I would be one of the guys sent out to stop the Rhodosaurus (or whatever). Hence, the deep origin of the story.

It was originally accepted by David Gerrold, for one of his Dell anthologies (“AASMOTRPast” was my second story sale, although others were written before, later sold.)

Bad things happened at Dell: Gerrold had to turn three anthologies into two, or one, and my (and a dozen other writers’ stories) shook loose.

After I got out of the army, I sent this story everywhere with no dice.

Eventually this may have sold to Chacal, the precursor to Shayol (Arnie Fenner was co-editor of Chacal), but when that died and he and Pat Cadigan began Shayol, they wanted it from me (I may have sold an intervening story to them somewhere in there.)

If I’m not mistaken, it was one of the five stories that premiered (in different venues) at Mid-American in KC in 1976 (Shayol, Nickelodeon, Faster Than Light, Orbit 18, and something else—all appeared at various dealer tables at the con.) I believe I had Pat and Arnie bring the money in cash, as I knew I’d need it to eat (The Pioneer Grill) at the convention.

Glory days . . .

Your work is varied, sometimes combining alternate history and popular culture, and has been described as distinctive, unique, quirky, and unclassifiable, among other things. What advice would you give to aspiring writers trying to find their own unique voice?

If I knew how to tell writers how have a unique voice, I’d be a rich man and out of business.

Is there anything else you’d like to share about “All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past”? What’s next for you?

As soon as the eye surgeries are over, it’s back to The Moone World (a short novel) and The Search for Tom Purdue (ditto.) Wish me luck.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kevin McNeil is a physical therapist, sports fanatic, and volunteer coach for the Special Olympics. He graduated from the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2012 and The Center for the Study of Science Fiction’s Intensive Novel Workshop, led by Kij Johnson, in 2011. Kevin is a New Englander currently living in California. Find him on Twitter @kevinmcneil.

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT:
CARRIE VAUGHN

Andrew Liptak

Hi, Carrie! Thanks for taking the time to chat with us about your latest Harry and Marlow story, “Harry and Marlowe Versus the Haunted Locomotive of the Rockies.” When we last left off with “Intrigues at the Aetherian Exhibition,” the pair were headed off to the United States. What prompted you to take them across the Atlantic?

I actually know more about this side of the Atlantic! Seriously, though, sending Harry and Marlowe to my neck of the woods offered a great way to introduce “weird west” type stories and milieus to their world, and to see what Aetherian technology is doing in other places. Additionally, adventures in the “exotic” American west were a staple of Victorian adventure stories—see the Sherlock Holmes story “A Study in Scarlet,” for an example. I wanted to play with that trope.

You live in Colorado, and our heroes stop in the same neighborhood. How did it feel to set a story so close to home?

I’ve come to really enjoy setting stories in Colorado. Especially since, after considering myself rootless for most of my life, I’ve realized Colorado really is home, I have deep roots here, and I like showing off this region in my fiction—it’s diverse in many ways, historically fascinating, and has a lot to offer. It’s been a crossroads for many different cultures for 500 years, and the place reflects that. I got the idea for the haunted locomotive from a book of Colorado ghost stories. I was actually reading the book while doing research for my Kitty urban fantasy series, but was happy to snag this idea out of it for Harry and Marlowe in the meantime.

One of the things that interested me about the story—it’s set in the 1890s, which is well after the period that most people think of as the “Old West.” But the idea of the Old West is so pervasive and attractive that the tropes continued to influence people for a long time after. They still do, in some cases. But by that time, Colorado’s town and cities were modern (for the period), there were colleges and universities, museums, industry—a far cry from the wild west that a lot of people expect from the place, even now. I worked to depict what 1890s Colorado was actually like, rather than fall back on expectations based on tropes that really only existed in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show by that time.

In this story, the Aetherian tech plays a much larger role, and we get a sense that there’s more that came down than just random parts or tools. Does this hint at larger things in this particular overarching story?

Why, of course it does! We are building toward something, and part of that is Harry and Marlowe discovering more evidence and artifacts than they ever thought they would.

There’s a neat moment when Harry and Marlow come face to face with something that had been elevated to an almost legendary status, and it reminds me of Clarke’s “law”: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Is that the case here?

I think what’s meant to be happening is the characters are realizing that they really have very little understanding of this technology that has formed the basis of their modern world, and that should be terrifying.

Now that Harry and Marlow have stopped by the United States, what’s next for them?

Westward, ho! I’m working on yet another Harry and Marlowe story, which will send them across the Pacific. I can say no more.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

John Joseph Adams

This story first appeared in my anthology HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects. Besides writing a story with the theme in mind, what was the genesis of the story?

I’ve actually always kicked (ha) around the idea of writing a Kickstarter-shaped story, but this anthology gave me the kick (HA) in the pants that I needed. I really liked Keffy’s “Help Fund My Robot Army!!!” story that inspired the anthology, and I wanted to try the form while taking a less humorous approach. I wanted to use this very modern conceit to illustrate a tragedy.

Was this story a particularly challenging one to write? If so, how?

It was! The structure was complicated because Kickstarters have so many moving parts, and there are so many decisions to be made: Do I put the updates in chronological order, or backwards like they appear on the site? Do I try and write a transcription of a video? In what order should I present the comments, updates, and messages? Because a Kickstarter page is so visual, I had to try and figure out the most natural and dramatically appropriate order in which to present these sections.

That being said, it was a pleasure to have those concerns—it pushed open some new creative paths for me that I might not have otherwise taken. I love conceits and formal constraints for this very reason. In his book Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature, Daniel Levin Becker quotes one of the founders of Oulipo, a French constrained literature movement, who said “In the world we live in, we are beholden to all manner of terrible constraints—mental, physical, societal—with death the only way out of the labyrinth. The least we can do is mark off a little section where we get to choose the constraints we are mastered by, where we decide which direction to take.” I love that.

Most authors say all their stories are personal. If that’s true for you, in what way was this story personal to you?

It’s definitely personal for me, but in a way I don’t want to (or should have to for the reader to appreciate the story) talk about. Death of the author and all that.

What kind of research did you have to do for the story?

Mostly I looked at dozens of random Kickstarter pages to get a sense of the form and see what people did with real projects. I also did some cursory investigation into the magical properties of certain herbs.

What are your thoughts about crowdfunding generally? Do you back a lot of Kickstarters, or at least find a lot of interesting projects because of crowdfunding?

I’ve backed a bunch of Kickstarters—lots of anthologies, the occasional video game, film, or album, the recent one to bring back Reading Rainbow. It’s never very much, but if I believe in the project, I try to contribute in some small way.

How do you think Kickstarter and self-publishing platforms (like Amazon’s KDP, etc.) are changing publishing?

I like how anthologies can get a jump-start via crowdfunding. It helps amazing projects come to life and allows writers to get paid, which are two of my favorite things.

What are some examples of fiction you like in which the format helped dictate the story?

The list is too long to include in its entirety, but some of my personal favorites are: Catherynne M. Valente’s “A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica,” Kevin Brockmeier’s “The Human Soul as a Rube Goldberg Device,” Nicholson Baker’s Vox, Alice Sola Kim’s “Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters,” Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, C.C. Finlay’s “Footnotes,” Paul Violi’s “Index,” Matt Bell’s “An Index of How Our Family Was Killed,” J.G. Ballard’s “The Index,” and Harry Mathew’s ”Country Cooking from Central France: Roast Boned Rolled Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce Double).”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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. New projects coming out in 2014 and 2015 include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Wastelands 2, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. He has been nominated for eight Hugo Awards and five World Fantasy Awards, and he has been called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble. John is also the editor and publisher of Nightmare Magazine, and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT:
THEODORA GOSS

Lee Hallison

The setup for this story is clever—a meta-structure where the visitors to the world know they were the creator(s) of the world. How did you come up with the idea?

The idea came to me many years ago, after rereading one of my favorite stories, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” by Jorge Luis Borges. The Borges story is about a secret society that creates the encyclopedia of an imaginary world, Tlön. Eventually, items from that world begin appearing in ours. Archaeologists start finding artifacts from Tlön. The story is about how imagination creates reality. I started thinking about what those archaeologists would do, and realized that they would have to publish their findings somewhere. That’s when I came up with the idea of the Imaginary Sciences, each of which would have its own journal: Imaginary Archaeology or Biology, for example. The Journal of Imaginary Anthropology is just one of them. And then, from somewhere or other, I got the idea of Cimmeria. I’m not sure where that came from, actually. But I come from that part of the world, from Hungary. So the history of the region has always fascinated me.

I should say, though, that the Americans in the story think they’ve created Cimmeria. The Khan of Cimmeria would disagree, and would call their assumption part of an imperialist way of thinking. If you flip the story, it’s about how a group of people, in this case American academics, believe they’ve created a culture that the people of that culture insist has been there all along. Has it? I don’t know, but aspects of Cimmeria certainly surprise its supposed creators.

You have said adult relationships can be vampiric. The other Shaila could be seen as a vampire—can you elaborate on how the story developed once you had the main character fall in love with the first sister?

It’s difficult to say because I waited so long to write this story—I had it in my head long before I wrote it down, so it sat up there, in my head, developing. And when I finally sat down to write it, most of the story came out in one draft. But I think the other Shaila can also been seen as a victim, the one who is silenced, who is not allowed an existence. Is she vampiric? I’m not sure, unless we think of vampires as part of ourselves. She is the shadow self, both identical to and the opposite of Shaila. Perhaps she represents our inherent duality. I think of her as strong, actually. I admire the other Shaila, although I think she’s also a little scary. She’s going to make a great Khanum.

The students and faculty of the story create Cimmeria for the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology with a middle-Eastern flavor. You often write fantasy set in vivid and almost realistic worlds. Did the setting drive the story or did the story beg for the particulars of this world?

Cimmeria has a middle-Eastern flavor because the ancient Cimmerians are supposed to have been linguistically related to the Iranians. What I wanted to make clear is that Cimmeria is a melting pot of cultures and religions, since that’s true for the region in general. It’s both exotic and modern. It’s a kind of dream, but also a country enmeshed in contemporary political reality. As all countries are, actually. After all, every country is partly imaginary, created through storytelling. Think of the American story, or the competing American stories. Our country is as imagined as Cimmeria. We do part of the imagining, but so do people all over the world who have some idea of what America is, whether that’s based on the news, or magazines, or the latest movies. Reality is always a collaboration between what actually exists outside ourselves and how we perceive it.

In this case, I think Cimmeria came first, and then the story wove itself through the setting, like a vine on a trellis. The trellis gave shape and support to the vine, so you can’t really separate them any longer. They are one thing.

There are several themes running through this story—which is the one you wrestled with and/or find most interesting?

I suppose the theme I started with is the one I mentioned above, of the interplay between what is and our perception of it, which creates the construct we call reality. And how contested that reality can be, particularly from different cultural perspectives. And then there’s a whole other story running through that one, the personal story of Pat and his relationship with Shaila—and the other Shaila. That’s about how you never really know about people, what they’re like inside. We can always only see a part of them, like seeing one side of the moon. But it’s also about a lot of things: how people can get trapped, for example. How they make compromises. I do think about all those things when I’m writing a story, but readers should of course decide what to make of the story themselves—they will find their own underlying themes in it.

What are you currently working on?

I’m currently writing a novel based on a story of mine called “The Mad Scientist’s Daughter.” It’s about how the daughters of the classic mad scientists (Mary Jekyll, Diana Hyde, Beatrice Rappaccini, Catherine Moreau, and Justine Frankenstein) all find each other and form a club in late nineteenth-century London. It’s a lot of fun! And it allows me to do what I love most, which is create alternative, imaginary worlds that are nevertheless real, and then tell you what happens in them. In this case, to a group of girl monsters who are trying to fight evil, solve mysteries, and support themselves in a world that barely recognizes their existence. I’m always interested in how women live in the world, how they make lives for themselves. The story of Shaila is partly about that as well.

And eventually I’m going to write more about the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology. My doctoral dissertation focused in part on nineteenth-century anthropology, which is filled with racist assumptions and misapplications of evolutionary theory. I’m fascinated by how we speak about and define human cultures, and how we treat people based on those definitions. I’m also fascinated by academic discourse, and of course monsters (those were in my dissertation as well). So, there will likely be more . . .

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lee Hallison writes fiction in an old Seattle house where she lives with her patient spouse, an impatient teen, two lovable dogs, and the memories of several wonderful cats. She’s held many jobs—among them a bartender, a pastry chef, a tropical plant-waterer, a CPA, and a university lecturer. An East Coast transplant, she simply cannot fathom cherry blossoms in March.

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT:
MATTHEW HUGHES

Patrick J. Stephens

Kaslo has a unique integrity—both in character and in story. What kind of response have you been seeing to the stories of Kaslo?

I haven’t had a flood of fan mail, but those who have written have liked the character and the story. He’s a man with a code of honor and he means to stick to it, even if the whole universe has yanked the rug out from under his feet.

As with the other stories, could you please lead us through the inception of this particular part of Kaslo’s journey?

The universe has changed its operating principle, from rational cause-and-effect to magic powered by the force of will. The advanced civilization of Novo Bantry, an anciently settled world where Kaslo lives, has collapsed. But there’s more going on than just the great change, terrible as that is. There are other planes than the one that contains our part of the universe, and on one of those planes a power has been waiting aeons for magic to be strong again.

With a series such as this, how do you approach making each installment autonomous, but connected enough to the other stories to maintain the consistency of such a well-crafted narrative?

I am an intuitive writer. I don’t outline. So I’m actually not seeing much farther ahead than the reader. I know now (in May 2014) what the story is leading up to. I didn’t know when I was writing this episode (in November 2013) what was waiting for Kaslo. But I knew it would be awful and that he would deal with it.

In a universe where time and space can change so drastically, what kinds of aspects of life would you pick to change in the real world, and—if it would not interrupt the physics and structure you’ve created—in Kaslo’s?

You wouldn’t want me in charge of designing the real world. I had an odd upbringing and my standards don’t fit the middle of the bell curve. In Kaslo’s world, I am the designer, and because I am a character-focused writer, what I want is for him to come through in the end. Probably not unscathed, but still punching.

After Kaslo, what’s next?

More stories. Maybe another Kaslo adventure. I’m also going to be writing a historical novel that I’ve been thinking about for forty years. And I’m interested to see if my having a story in the latest George R.R. Martin/Gardner Dozois cross-genre anthology, Rogues, (Bantam, June 2014) brings me any new readers. Their last such project, Dangerous Women, was a New York Times bestseller.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Patrick J. Stephens recently graduated from the University of Edinburgh and, after spending the entire year writing speculative fiction, came back with a Master’s in Social Science. His first collection (Aurichrome and Other Stories) can be found on Kindle and Nook.

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT:
EMMA BULL

Jude Griffin

How did “De La Tierra” come about?

I was on a writing date with my husband, Will Shetterly, and my friends Doselle and Janine Young. We used to get together at a coffee shop, sit at one table with our laptops open in front of us and our headphones on, and each of us write away at whatever our current projects were.

That’s how it was supposed to work, anyway. Janine was typing briskly away. Will was frowning at his screen and hitting bursts of keystrokes. Doselle was bobbing his head along with his music as he wrote.

I was staring at the file of whatever project I was supposed to be working on, and getting nothing. And trying not to hate my hard-working friends for having lots of useful words at their command.

Sometimes when you’re stuck, it helps to type anything at all, random nonsense, to keep your fingers moving and the inconsequential phrases and sentences squeezing out of your head and onto the screen until you break through your own barriers. I opened iTunes and called up Joni Mitchell’s Blue, which I consider easily one of the fifty best albums of the last century, and started typing any damned thing that came into my head.

Which, because of the music I’d chosen, was about the sound of a piano, about a woman playing it with fire and bravado.

All writing comes from a point of view; even an essay has a character behind the narrative, who shares the author’s name and some of her or his characteristics. Someone was watching this woman play piano. But not me. Someone who noticed and described it differently than I would.

I followed that point of view character. I listened to his voice in his head, used his eyes to tell me where he was. The character established the tone of the story and set it in motion. He was a noir character. He was a hitman. He was about to go to work.

When the first speculative fiction element showed up, I wasn’t sure if I was writing science fiction or fantasy, though I knew which genre’s language I’d written it in. But somewhere in the back of my head I heard an echo of a conversation I’d had previously with another friend.

“You couldn’t set a contemporary fantasy like War for the Oaks in Los Angeles,” he’d said. “The veil isn’t thin here.”

“Not thin?” I’d replied. “In Los Angeles, there’s barely any veil at all.”

The creatures of Faerie would love Los Angeles. They’re naturals for it. Shape-changing, fairy gold, illusions and wonders, lures of pleasure and riches that lead to death and ruin—surely half the inhabitants of the Hollywood Hills, Topanga Canyon, and the hidden houses along Mulholland Drive had ties to the fey folk on one side or another. It made perfect sense.

An hour or two later I noticed that what was supposed to be just a wedge to break up the block that kept me from my project was a whole new project. But at that point I needed to get home to the volume of Mexican folklore on my bookshelves, so there wasn’t time to worry about it.

How much, if at all, was the imagery of the opening scene inspired by your experience in Cats Laughing and The Flash Girls?

Not a bit, actually. Point of view is the shiny four-dimensional multitool in my writer’s toolkit; it’s the most useful and most demanding piece of craft I know. The point-of-view character in this story isn’t a musician. He’s in the audience, fantasizing about what he might do if he were a musician. The vision he has of what he might do isn’t the one a musician would have.

Instead, he lets the music affect him intellectually and emotionally without thinking about it critically. He’s just letting the music do its work.

Chisme, Magellan, Biblio: Is there a link between the names you chose and their contributions to the mission?

I had fun tagging the protagonist’s names. Chisme is “gossip” in Spanish. That’s the person, or being, or system, or group, in charge of personal information. Magellan’s the cartographer, providing spatial information. Biblio, short for biblioteca, is the library, the database of knowledge of the past. Again, point of view gives me the structure for how to use them. The protagonist doesn’t know the nature of the interface with his bosses; it’s imposed on him, and nobody’s going to explain it to him. But in order to feel as if he has some control over what’s going on, he gives names to the things that invade his awareness.

Why do you think humans around the world have stories about Others which share such striking similarities?

We’re storytelling animals. We impose narrative on everything, even random events. When something’s important to our survival, like water or the change of seasons, the first thing we’re going to do is turn it into narrative, because narrative makes sense. That’s also true of our own impulses and emotions. Anger, violence, romantic love, humor—sometimes we baffle ourselves, and in trying to explain the things about us we don’t understand, we tell stories about gods, demons, fairies, magicians. We make metaphors, because metaphors let us test our understanding of things we can’t hold in our hands. We even create metaphors to make sense of things we know can’t make sense: Trickster figures can embody the chaos and randomness we see around us.

Do you have any new projects you want to share with us?

I’m working on Claim, which is the sequel to Territory and will really truly contain the Gunfight in the Vacant Lot Behind the O.K. Corral, this time for sure. I’m also writing a contemporary fantasy short story, which, if the characters are nice to me, might become a series of stories. Along with Elizabeth Bear and the other creators of Shadow Unit, I’m helping assemble the last episodes of that contemporary science fiction serial thriller that we’ve been offering for free on the web. (See www.shadowunit.org for content.) And I’m hoping to write a mission for season three of the amazingly cool running app Zombies, Run!, about which I’m a huge fangirl.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She has trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.

MISCELLANY

IN THE NEXT ISSUE OF

Coming up in August, in Lightspeed . . .

We’ll have original science fiction by An Owomoyela (“Undermarket Data”) and E. Catherine Tobler (“A Box, a Pocket, a Spaceman”), along with SF reprints by Gardner Dozois (“Morning Child”) and David I. Masson (“Traveller's Rest”).

Plus, we’ll have original fantasy by Tahmeed Shafiq (“A New Chance”) and Kat Howard (“Meaningful Exchange”), and fantasy reprints by Ken Liu (“State Change”) and Gwyneth Jones (“The Grass Princess”).

For our ebook readers, our ebook-exclusive novella will be “Rule of Engagement” by Sherwood Smith, and of course we’ll have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with bestselling authors Christopher Moore and Elizabeth Bear.

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!

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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. New projects coming out in 2014 and 2015 include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Operation Arcana, Wastelands 2, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. He has been nominated for eight Hugo Awards and five World Fantasy Awards, and he has been called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble. John is also the editor and publisher of Nightmare Magazine, and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.