FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial, September 2014

John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue fifty-two of Lightspeed!

Good news, everyone: Lightspeed won a Hugo!

The 2014 Hugo Awards were presented at Worldcon in London last month. Prior to this year, it’s been my great honor to have been nominated for six Hugo Awards for editing: three for Lightspeed in the Semiprozine category and three for myself personally in the Best Editor (Short Form) category. Up until now, both Lightspeed and myself had each been 0-3 in our respective categories.

If you’re reading this editorial then you probably already know that this year both Lightspeed and I were again nominated in the two aforementioned categories. But now THE STREAK HAS BEEN BROKEN: Lightspeed won the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine! I immediately started a new losing streak by losing the Best Editor (Short Form) award to Ellen Datlow, but naturally I’m thrilled that Lightspeed took home the prize. And honestly if I’d had to choose which of the two categories I would win, I would definitely have chosen Lightspeed winning Best Semiprozine, so I’m not even a little bit sad.

I wasn’t able to be in London for Worldcon this year to accept the award in person, but Lightspeed’s Podcast Producer, Stefan Rudnicki, was there and accepted on behalf of the magazine.

Here’s our Hugo, in the hands of Stefan himself:

Lightspeed's Hugo | Photo by GilesG Photography
Photo by GilesG Photography

Isn’t it glorious?

Here’s a zoomed-in shot of the Hugo itself so you can see the plaque.

Lightspeed's Hugo | Photo by GilesG Photography
Photo by GilesG Photography

Thanks again so much to everyone who reads and who voted for Lightspeed, and, of course, to all of the amazing authors who have helped make it possible by allowing us to feature their work. We salute you!

Lightspeed might seem like it’s a one-man show, but it very much is not—it’s a huge collaborative project, and it could not exist if not for the diligent efforts of many, many individuals behind the scenes, including Wendy N. Wagner, Christie Yant, Rich Horton, Stefan Rudnicki, Robyn Lupo, Jim Freund, Karen Jones, Andrew Liptak, Jude Griffin, Laurel Amberdine, Dana Watson, Anthony Cardno, Jeremiah Tolbert, and many others. Let us all also salute them.

• • • •

In other happy news, our sister magazine Nightmare is now available as a subscription via Amazon.com! The Kindle Periodicals division has been closed to new magazines for quite a while now (and has been since before Nightmare launched), but by employing some witchcraft we were able to get the doors unlocked just long enough for us to slip into the castle. Amazon subscriptions are billed monthly, at $1.99 per issue, and are available now. To learn more, please visit nightmare-magazine.com/subscribe.

Speaking of subscriptions, we’ve also made a change to the way our lightspeedmagazine.com ebookstore subscriptions work. We’re discontinuing the bill-you-every-month subscription option in favor of a more traditional type of magazine subscription; now when you subscribe, you’ll sign up for a six ($17.94), twelve ($35.88), or twenty-four ($71.76) month subscription and then will only be billed once per subscription term. This change is going to make it a lot easier for us to process subscriptions and should help improve our cashflow, which of course we’ll use to make Lightspeed even more awesome. If you’re a current subscriber, you don’t need to do anything; when your current subscription runs out, we’ll just send you an email to remind you to renew and then you’ll be presented with the new subscription options at that time.

To learn more about these and our other subscription options, please visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe.

• • • •

In anthology news, the next installment of The Apocalypse Triptych—the apocalyptic anthology series I’m co-editing with Hugh Howey—is now available. The new volume, The End is Now, focuses on life during the apocalypse. The first volume, The End is Nigh (about life before the apocalypse) is also available. If you’d like a preview of the new anthology, you’re in luck: You can read Tananarive Due’s The End is Now story in this very issue! Pop over to johnjosephadams.com/apocalypse-triptych for more information about the book.

• • • •

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

We have original science fiction by Saundra Mitchell (“Starfall”) and Sam J. Miller (“We Are the Cloud”), along with SF reprints from the new anthologies: Monstrous Affections (Holly Black’s “Ten Rules for Being an Intergalactic Smuggler (the Successful Kind)”) and the aforementioned The End is Now (Tananarive Due’s “Herd Immunity”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Sarah Pinsker (“No Lonely Seafarer”) and Matthew Hughes (“Under the Scab”), and fantasy reprints by Aliette de Bodard (“Prayers of Forges and Furnaces”) and Rhys Hughes (“Eternal Horizon”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with authors Mary Robinette Kowal and Diana Gabaldon.

For our ebook readers, we also have a reprint of the novella “Giliad” by Gregory Feeley, and novel excerpts from The Brothers Cabal by Jonathan L. Howard and The Necromancer Candle by Randy McCharles.

Our issue this month is sponsored by our friends at EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing. This month, make sure to look for the aforementioned The Necromancer Candle by Randy McCharles. 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. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated eight times) and is a six-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Nightmare Magazine and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

SCIENCE FICTION

Herd Immunity

Tananarive Due

A man was far ahead of her on the road. Walking and breathing. So far, so good.

That he was a man, Nayima was certain. His silhouette against the horizon of the rising roadway showed his masculine height and the shadow of an unkempt beard. He pulled his belongings behind him in an overnight suitcase like a business traveler. Maybe she trusted him on sight because of the unmistakable shape of a guitar case slung across his back. She’d always had a thing for musicians.

“Hey!” she screamed, startling herself with her bald desperation.

He paused, his steady legs falling still. He might have turned around. She couldn’t quite make out his movements in the quarter-mile or more that separated them. The two of them, alone, were surrounded on either side by the golden ocean of central California farmland, unharvested and unplowed, no trees or shade in sight as the road snaked up the hillside.

His attention gave her pause. She hadn’t seen anyone walking in so long that she’d forgotten the plan that had kept her alive the past nine months: Hide. Observe. Assess.

But fuck it.

She waved and called again, so he would be certain she wasn’t a mirage in the heat.

“Hey!” she screamed, more hoarsely. She tried to run toward him, but her legs only lurched a stagger on the sharp grade. She was dizzy from heat and modulated hunger. The sky dimmed above her, so she stopped her pathetic chase and braced her palms against her knees to calm the cannon bursts from her heart. The world grew bright again.

He walked on. She watched him shrink until the horizon swallowed him. She remembered a time when terrifying loneliness would have made her cry. Instead, she began following him at the pace her body had grown accustomed to. He didn’t seem afraid of her; that was something. He hadn’t quickened. He was tired and slow, like her. If she was patient, she would catch up to him.

Nayima hadn’t planned to stay on State Road 46 toward Lost Hills. She had wanted to follow the last highway sign—one of the few conveniences still in perfect working order—toward a town just ten miles east. But she decided to follow the man instead. Just for a while, she’d told herself. Not so far that she’d run too low on water or go hungry.

Nayima followed him for three days.

She wasted no energy or hope checking the scattered vehicles parked at odd angles for fuel or food, although most still had their keys. She was far too late for that party. Cars were shelter. Handy when it rained. Or when it was dark and mountain lions got brave, their eyes glowing white in her flashlight beam. (“Bad, bad kitty,” she always said.)

The cars on SR-46 weren’t battered and broken like the ones in Bakersfield, witnesses to riots or robberies. For a time, carjacking had been the national hobby. She’d jacked a car herself trying to get out of that hellhole—with a sprained ankle and a small mob chasing her, she’d needed the ride more than the acne-scarred drunk sleeping at the wheel. On the 46, the pristine cars had come to rest, their colors muted by a thin veil of burial dust.

Nayima missed her red Schwinn, but she’d hit a rock the day before she’d seen the man on the road—the demon stone appeared in her path and knocked her bicycle down an embankment. She’d been lucky only to bump her elbow hard enough to make her yell. But her bike, gone. Crumpled beyond salvage. Nayima didn’t allow herself to miss much—but damn. And this man, her new day job, meant she didn’t have time to peel off to look for tucked-away farmhouses and their goodies. Too risky. She might lose him. Instead, Nayima walked on, following her ghost.

She imagined how they would talk. Testify. Teach what little they knew. Start something. Maybe he could at least tell her why he was on the 46, what radio broadcast or quest had beckoned. She hadn’t heard anything except hissing on radios in three months. She didn’t mind walking a long distance if she might arrive somewhere eventually.

Each morning she woke from her resting place—the crook of a tree, an abandoned car that wasn’t a tomb, in the cranny beneath the inexplicably locked cab of an empty eighteen-wheeler parked ten yards off the road like a beached whale—and wondered if the man had gone too far ahead. If he’d walked the whole night just to shake her. If he’d found a car that had sung him a love song when he caressed her and turned the key.

But each day, she saw signs that he was not lost. He was still walking ahead, somewhere just out of sight. Any evidence of him dampened her palms.

He left a trail of candy wrappers. Chocolate bars mostly; always the minis. Snickers, Twix, Almond Joy (her favorite; that wrapper made her stomach shout at the sight). Her own meals were similarly monotonous, but not nearly as colorful—handfuls of primate feed she’d found overlooked at a vet’s office outside Bakersfield. Her backpack was stuffed with the round, brown nuggets. Monkey Balls, she called them. They didn’t taste like much, but they opened up her time for walking and weren’t nearly as heavy as cans.

On the third morning, when the horizon again stretched empty, and sinking dread bubbled in her stomach, the road greeted her with a package of Twizzlers, six unruined sticks still inside. The Twizzlers seemed fresh. She could feel his fingertips on the wrapper. The candy was warm to her tongue from the sun. So good it brought happy tears. She stood still as long as she dared while the sweetness flooded her dry mouth, coated her throat. Feeling anything was a novelty.

She cried easily over small pleasures: a liquid orange sunset, the wild horses she’d seen roaming a field, freed to their original destiny. She wondered if he had left her the Twizzlers in a survivors’ courtship rite, until she found a half-eaten rope of the red candy discarded a few steps away. A Red Vines man, then. She could live with that. They would work it out.

By noon on Twizzlers Day, she saw him again, a long shadow stretching only half a mile ahead of her. Time was, she could have jogged to catch up to him easily, but the idea of hurry made her want to vomit. Her stomach wasn’t as happy with the candy feast as the rest of her.

So she walked.

He passed a large wooden sign—not quite a billboard, but big—and when she followed behind him, she read the happy script:

COUNTY LINE ROAD FAIR!!!!
June 1-30 2 MI

Beneath that, cartoon renderings of pigs with blue ribbons, a hot dog grinning in his bun, and a Ferris wheel. A dull fucking name for a fair, she thought. Or a road, for that matter. She vowed that when the renaming of things began, she and the man on the road would do better. The Fair of Ultimate Rainbows, on Ultimate Rainbow Road. A name worthy of the sign’s colors.

She was nearly close enough to touch the sign before she made out the papers tacked on the right side, three age-faded, identical handbills in a vertical line:

RESCUE CENTER

Stamped with a Red Cross insignia.

Red Crap. Red Death. Red Loss.

Nayima fought dueling urges to laugh and scream. Her legs nearly buckled in rebellion. The sun felt ten degrees hotter, sizzling her neck.

“You have got to be goddamn kidding,” she said.

The man on the road could not hear her.

She cupped her hands to her mouth. “Do you still believe there’s a Wizard too?”

Moron.

But she kept the last word silent. She shouldn’t be rude. They needed to get along.

He didn’t stop walking, but he gave her a grumpy old man wave over his shoulder. Finally—communication. Candor was the greatest courtesy in the land of the Seventy-Two Hour Flu, so she told him the truth. “They’re just big petri dishes, you know! Best way to get sick is in evac camps! Was, I mean. Sorry to bear bad news, but there’s no rescue center here!”

Nine months ago, she would have believed in that sign. She’d believed in her share. Back when the best minds preached hope for a vaccine that would help communities avoid getting sick with precautions, she’d heard the term on the CDC and WHO press conferences: herd immunity. As it turned out, the vaccine was a fable and herd immunity was an oxymoron.

Only NIs were left now: naturally immune. The only people she’d seen since June were other NIs floating through the rubble, shy about contact for fear of the attacks of rage and mass insanity. Nayima had escaped Bakersfield, where anyone walking with pep was a traitor to the human experience. Nayima had seen radiant satisfaction on the face of an axe-wielding old woman who, with her last gasps of breath, had split open the skull of the NI nurse offering her a sip of water. No good deed, as they say. This man was the first NI she’d met on the road in the three months since.

The formerly populated areas would be quieter now. That was the thing about the Seventy-Two-Hour Flu: it settled disputes quickly. The buzzards were building new kingdoms in the cities, their day come at last.

“The dead can’t rescue the living!” Nayima shouted up the godless road.

Her new friend kept walking. No matter. He would be stopping in two miles anyway.

She could smell the fair already.

• • • •

She thought maybe, just maybe—not enough to speed her heart, but enough to make her eyes go sharp—when the rows of neatly parked cars appeared on the west side of the road. A makeshift parking lot, with rows designated in letter-number pairs on new cedar poles, A-1 through M-20. Because of the daylight’s furious glare across the chrome and glass, the cars seemed to glitter like fairy-tale carriages. It was the most order Nayima had seen in months.

Then she saw the dust across their windows.

Everywhere she went, too late for the party. Even at the fair.

Buzzards and crows sat atop the COUNTY LINE ROAD FAIR—FREE PARKING banner, bright white and red, that hung across the gravel driveway from SR-46. The Ferris wheel stood frozen beyond, marking where the fair began, but it was so small it seemed sickly. The cartoon had been so much grander. Everything about the sign had been a lie.

The sound of mournful guitar came—picking, not strumming. She had never heard the melody before, but she knew the song well. The Seventy-Two-Hour Blues.

In the parking lot, she glanced through enough rear windows to start smiling. The Corolla had a backpack in plain sight. A few had keys in their ignitions. One was bound to have gas. This was a car lot Christmas sale. The cars on the road were from the people who’d given up on driving and left nothing behind. These cars were satisfied at their destination, although their drivers had left unfinished business inside. A few cars with windows cracked open stank of dead pets; she saw a large dog’s white fur carpeting the back seat floor of a Ford Explorer. A child’s baseball cap near the fur made her think of a pudgy-cheeked boy giving his dog a last hug before his parents hurried him away.

The cars screamed stories.

She saw her own face in the window. Hooded. Brown face sun-darkened by two shades. Jaw thin, showing too much bone. You gotta eat, girl, Gram would say. Nayima blinked and looked away from the stranger in the glass.

Tears. Damn, damn, damn.

Nayima dug her fingernails into her palm, hard. She drew blood. The cars went silent.

The guitar player could claim he’d found the treasure first, but there was enough to share. She had a .38 if he needed convincing, but she hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Even the idea of her .38 made her feel sullied. She didn’t want to hurt him. She didn’t want him to try to hurt her. She wanted the opposite; someone to keep watch while she slept, to help her find food, to keep her warm. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d wanted anything so badly.

The music soothed the graveyard in the parking lot. The guitarist might be the best musician she would ever know; just enough sour, not too much sweet. He was playing a song her grandmother might have hummed, but had forgotten to teach her.

Dear Old Testament God of Noah, please don’t let him be another asshole.

He was out of sight again, so she followed the music through the remains of the fair.

The Ferris wheel wasn’t the only no-frills part of the County Line Road Fair, which had been named right after all. She counted fewer than a dozen rides—the anemic Ferris wheel was the belle of the ball. The rest was two kiddie fake pony rides she might have found at a good-sized shopping mall, a merry-go-round with mermaids among the horses (that one actually wasn’t too bad), a spinner ride in cars for four she’d always hated because she got crushed from centrifugal force; and a Haunted Castle with empty cars waiting to slip into the mouth of hellfire. A giant with a molten face guarded the castle’s door, draped in black rags. Even now the Haunted Castle scared her. As she passed it, she spat into one of the waiting cars.

Crows scattered as she walked.

This fair was organized like all small fairs—a row of games on one side, food vendors on the other. Birds and scavengers had picked over the empty paper popcorn cups and foil hot dog wrappers, but only a few of the vendors had locked their booths tight with aluminum panels. A large deep fryer stood in plain sight at Joe’s Beef Franks as she passed—nothing but an open doorway between them—so she was free to explore. Cabinets. Trash. Counters. So many possibilities. Now her heartbeat did speed up.

With a car and enough essential items, she could think about a future somewhere. The guitar seemed to agree, picking up tempo and passion. The music reminded her that she didn’t have to be alone in her getaway car.

Words were nearly useless now, so she didn’t speak right away when she found his camp alongside the elephant ear vendor’s booth. He had laid out a sleeping bag in the shade of the awning promising “Taysteee Treets,” his back supported against the booth. She stood across the fairway by the ring-toss and took him in.

First surprise: he was wearing a dust mask. A summer look for the fall. Ridiculous.

The mask was particularly disappointing because it was already hard to make out his face beneath his hair and the dirt. He had light brown skin, she guessed, a dark tangle of thinly textured hair, a half-fed build to match hers. He looked nearly a foot taller, so he would have an advantage if they had to fight. Nayima slipped her hand to the compartment in her backpack she kept in easy reach. She took hold of the gun slowly, but she didn’t pull it out.

“Guitar’s mine to keep, and nothin’ else is worth taking,” he said. His voice was gravel. “Grab your pick of whatever you find here and move on.”

“You think I followed you three days to rob you?”

“I don’t try to guess why.”

Nayima shook off her light jacket’s hood. She’d shaved her head in Bakersfield so she wouldn’t be such an obvious rape target. Most of her hair was close to her scalp—but she had a woman’s face. She imagined his eyes flickering, just a flash.

“I’m Nayima,” she said.

He concentrated on his guitar strings. “Keep your distance.”

“You’re immune.” Dummy. She didn’t call him names, but it dripped in her voice.

He stopped playing. “Who says?”

“You do,” she said. “Because you’re still breathing.”

He went back to playing, uninterested.

“Let me guess,” she said. “Everyone in your family got sick and died—including people you saw every day—but you never got even a tummy-ache.”

“I was careful.”

“You think you’re still alive because you’re smarter than the rest?”

“I didn’t say that.” He sounded angry. “But I was very careful.”

“No touching? No breathing?”

“Yes. Even learned how to play with these on.” He held up his right hand. She hadn’t seen his thin, dirty gloves at first glance.

“Your fingertips never brushed a countertop or a window pane or a slip of paper?”

“Doing my best.”

“You never once got unlucky.”

“Until now, I guess,” he said.

“Bullshit,” she said. Now she felt angry. More hurt, but angry too. She hadn’t realized any stranger still held the power to hurt her feelings, or that any feelings were still so raw. “You’re living scared. You’re like one of those Japanese soldiers in World War II who didn’t know the war was over.”

“You think it’s all over. In less than a year.”

“Might as well be. Look how fast the UK went down.”

His eyes dropped away. Plenty had happened since, but London had been the first proof that China’s Seventy-Two Hour Virus was waging a world war instead of only a genocide. Cases hadn’t appeared in the U.S. until a full two days after London burned—those last two days of worry over the problems that seemed far away, people that were none of their business. The televisions had still been working, so they had all heard the news unfolding. An entire tribe at the fire, just before the rains.

“What have you seen?” Finally, he wasn’t trying to push her away.

“I can only report on Southern and Central California. Almost everybody’s gone. The rest of us, we’re spread out. You’re the only breather I’ve seen in two months. That’s why it’s time for us to stop hiding and start finding each other.”

“‘Us?’” he repeated, hitched brow incredulous.

“NIs,” she said. “Naturally Immunes. One in ten thousand, but that’s a guess.”

“Jesus.” A worthy response, but Nayima didn’t like the hard turn of his voice.

“Yes.” She realized she didn’t sound sad enough. He might not understand how sadness made her legs collapse, made it hard to breathe. She tried harder. “It’s terrible.”

“Not that—you.” He sang the rest. “Welcome, one and all, to the new super race . . .”

Song as mockery, especially in his soulful, road-toughened tenor, hurt more than a physical blow. Nayima’s anger roiled from the memory, the rivulets of poisoned saliva running down her cheeks from hateful strangers making a last wish. “They spit in my face, whenever they could. They tried to take me with them—yet here I stand. You can stop being a slave to that filthy paper you’re wearing, giving yourself rashes. We’re immune. Congratulations.”

“Swell,” he said. “I don’t suppose you can back any of that up with lab tests? Studies?”

“We will one day,” she said. “But so far it’s you, and me, and some cop I saw high-tailing out of Bakersfield who should not have still been breathing. Believe me when I tell you: this bad-boy virus takes everybody, eventually. Except NIs.”

“What if I just left a bunker? A treehouse? A cave?”

“Wouldn’t matter. You’ve been out now. Something you touched. It lives on glass for thirty days, maybe forty-five. That was what the lab people in China said, when they finally started talking. Immunity—that’s not a theory. There were always people who didn’t get it when they should’ve dropped. Doctors. Old People.”

“People who were careful,” he said.

“This isn’t survival of the smartest,” she said. “It’s dumb luck. In our genes.”

“So, basically, Madame Curie,” he said, drawing out his words, “you don’t know shit.”

Arrogant. Rude. Condescending. He was a disappointment after three days’ walk, no question about it. But that was to be expected, Nayima reminded herself. She went on patiently. “The next one we find, we’ll ask what they know. That’s how we’ll learn. Get a handle on the numbers. Start with villages again. I like the Central Valley. Good farmland. We just have to be sure of a steady water supply.” It was a relief to let her thoughts out for air.

He laughed. “Whoa, sister. Don’t start picking out real estate. You and me ain’t a village. I’ll shoot you if you come within twenty yards.”

So—he was armed. Of course. His gun didn’t show, but she couldn’t see his left hand, suddenly hidden beneath a fold in his sleeping bag. He had been waiting for her.

“Oh,” she said. “This again.”

“Yeah—this,” he said. “This is called common sense. Go on about your business. You can spend the night here, but I want you gone by morning. This is mine.”

“Rescue’s coming?”

He coughed a shallow, thirsty cough—not the rattling cough of the plague. “I’m not here for rescue. Didn’t know a thing about that.”

“I have water,” she said. “I bet there’s more in the vendor booths.” Let him remember what it felt like to be fussed over. Let him see caring in her eyes.

His chuckle turned into another cough. “Yeah, no thanks. Got my own.”

“If you didn’t come here to get rescued, then why? Jonesing for hot dog buns?”

He moved his left hand away from his gun and back to his guitar strings. He plinked.

“My family used to come,” he said. “Compete in 4-H. Eat fried dough ’til we puked. Ride those cheap-ass rides. This area’s real close-knit, so you’d see everybody like a backyard party. That’s all I wanted—to be somewhere I knew. Somewhere I would remember.”

The wind shifted. Could be worse, but the dead were in the breeze.

“Smells like their plan didn’t work out,” Nayima said.

“Unless it did.” He shrugged. “You need to leave me alone now.”

Coming as it did at the end of the living portrait he’d just painted, the theft of his company burned a hole in her. She needed him already. Father, son, brother, lover, she didn’t care which. She didn’t want to be without him. Couldn’t be without him, maybe.

His silence turned the fairgrounds gloomy again. This smell was the reason she preferred the open road, for now.

“At least tell me your name,” she said. Her voice quavered.

But he only played his fantasy of bright, spinning lights.

• • • •

With only two hours left before dark, Nayima remembered her situation. She was down to her last two bottles of water—so there was that. She noted every hose and spigot, mapping the grounds in her mind. Even with the water turned off, sometimes the reserves weren’t dry.

Nayima went to search for a car first, since that would decide what else she needed. She didn’t break into cars with locked doors during her first sweep. She decided she would only break a window if she saw a key. Glass was unpredictable, and her life was too fragile for everyday infections. The first vehicles she found with keys—the first engines she heard turn—had less than an eighth of a tank. Not enough.

Then she saw the PT Cruiser parked at B-7. Berry purple. The cream-colored one she’d driven in college at Spelman had been reincarnated in her favorite color, calling to her. Unlocked door. No stench inside. Half a bottle of water waiting in the beverage cup, nearly hot as steam from a day in the sun. No keys in the ignition, but they were tucked in the passenger visor, ready to be found. The engine choked complaints about long neglect, but finally hummed to life. And the gas tank, except by a hair, was full. Nayima felt so dizzy with relief that she sank into the car’s bucket seat and closed her eyes. She thanked the man on the road and his music in the sky.

She could pack a working car with enough supplies for a month or more. With so much gas, she would easily make it to the closest town. She would stake out the periphery, find an old farmhouse in the new quiet. Clean up its mess. Rest with a proper roof.

Nayima’s breath caught in her throat like a stone. Her first miracle in the New World.

The rest of her searching took on a leisurely pace, one step ahead of the setting sun. Nayima avoided the guitar player while she scouted, honoring his perimeter. She drove from the parking lot to the fairway, her slow-moving wheels chewing the gravel. Her driver’s seat was a starship captain’s throne.

Weather and dust were no match for the colors at the County Line Road Fair. Painted clowns and polar bears and ringmasters in top hats shouted red, blue, and yellow from wildly-named booths promising sweet, salty, and cold. In the colors and the guitar music, ghostly faces emerged, captured at play. The fairground teemed with children. Nayima heard their carefree abandon.

For an instant, she let in the children’s voices—until her throat burned. The sky seemed ready to fall. She held her breath until her lungs forced her to suck in the air. To breathe in that smell she hated. The false memory was gone.

As she’d expected, airtight packages of hot dog buns looked fresh enough to last for millennia. She found boxes of protein bars in a vendor’s cabinet and a sack of unshelled peanuts so large she had to carry it over her back like a child. She stuffed the PT Cruiser with a growing bounty of clean blankets, an unopened twenty-four pack of water bottles and her food stash—even a large purple stuffed elephant, just because she could. The PT Cruiser, her womb on wheels, cast a fresh light on the world.

But there was the question of the passenger seat, still empty. The may, maybe, might part was making her too anxious to enjoy her fair prizes.

Then Nayima saw the stenciled sign:

RESCUE CENTER ➩

The arrow pointed away from the vendors’ booths, toward the Farm World side of the fair, with its phantom Petting Zoo and Pony Rides in dull earth tones; really more an alleyway than a world. On the other end, a long wood-plank horse stall like one she had seen at the Kentucky Derby stood behind an empty corral, doors firmly shut.

Nayima climbed out of her PT Cruiser, pocketing her precious keys. She followed the dried tracks of man and beast side by side, walking on crushed hay. On the Farm World side, she could barely make out the sounds of the guitar. She felt like she had as a kid swimming in the ocean, testing a greater distance from shore. He might stop playing and disappear. It seemed more and more likely that she had only dreamed him.

But she had to see the rescue center. Like the driver from the PT Cruiser who had left her water bottle half full, in her imagination Nayima melted into scuffling feet, complaining children, muffled sobs.

The signs were posted on neatly-spaced posts. Each sign, helpful and profound.

FAMILIES SHOULD REMAIN TOGETHER

YOUR CALM HELPS OTHERS STAY CALM

SMILE—REMOVE YOUR MASK

The smell worsened with each step toward the looming structure. In front of the closed double doors stood two eight-foot folding tables—somewhat rusted now. Sun-faded pages flapped from a clipboard. Nayima glanced at a page of dull bureaucracy: handwritten names and addresses: Gerald Hillbrandt, Party of 4. As she’d guessed, a few hundred people had come.

SHOES ➩

Nayima’s eyes followed the next sign to the southwest corner of the stall, where she found rows of shoes neatly paired against the wall. Mama Bear, Papa Bear, Baby Bear, all side by side. Cheerfully surrendered. Nayima, who wore through shoes quickly, felt a strange combination of exhilaration and sorrow at the sight of the shoes on merry display.

ENTRANCE ➩

The next sign pointed around the corner, away from the registration table and cache of shoes. The entrance to the intake center had been in the rear, not the front. The rear double barn doors were closed, but they also had tables on either side, each with a large opaque beverage dispenser half-filled with a dark liquid that could be iced tea.

A refreshments table, she thought—until she saw the signs.

MAKE SURE EVERYONE IN YOUR PARTY TAKES A FULL CUP

PARENTS, WATCH YOUR CHILDREN DRINK BEFORE DRINKING YOURSELF

MAKE SURE CUPS ARE EMPTIED BEFORE ENTERING

TRASH HERE, PLEASE

Beneath the last sign, a large garbage can halfway filled with crumpled plastic cups. Nayima stared. Some cups were marked with lipstick. Several, actually. Had they come to the Rescue Center wearing their Sunday best? Had they dressed up to meet their maker?

The smell, strongest here, was not fresh; it was the smell of older, dry death. The door waited—locked, perhaps—but Nayima did not want to go inside. Nayima laid her palm across the building’s warm wooden wall, a communion with whoever had left her the PT Cruiser. And the shoes she would choose. What visionary had brought them here in this humane way? Had they known what was waiting? Her questions filled her with acid grief. She was startled by her longing to be with them, calm and resting.

Just in time, she heard the music.

• • • •

“Look what I found,” she said, and held up the sign for him to see.

“Can’t read that from here.”

“I can come closer.”

“Wouldn’t do that.”

So, nothing had changed. She sighed. “It says—‘Smile, Remove Your Mask.’”

He laughed. She already loved the sound. And then, the second miracle—he tugged his mask down to his chin. “Hell, since it’s on the sign.” He pointed a finger of judgment at her. “You stay way over there, I’ll keep it off.”

His voice was clearer. It was almost too dark to see him now, but she guessed he couldn’t be older than fifty, perhaps as young as forty. He was young. Young enough. She wasn’t close enough to see his eyes, but she imagined they were kind.

“I’m Kyle,” he said.

She grinned so widely that she might have blinded him.

“Easy there, sister,” he said. “That’s all you get—my name. And a little guitar, if you can be a quiet audience. Like I said, you’re moving on.”

“Some of the other cars have gas. But this one has a full tank.”

“Good for you,” he said, not unkindly.

“You’ll die here if you’re afraid to touch anything.”

“My cross to bear.”

“How will you ever know you’re immune?” she said.

He only shrugged. “I expect it’ll become clear.”

“But I won’t be here. I don’t know where I’ll be. We have to . . .” She almost said We have to fight back and make babies and see if they can survive. “. . . stay together. Help protect each other. We’re herd animals, not solitary. We always have been. We need each other.”

Too much to comprehend lay in his silence.

“All you need is a full tank of gas,” he said at last. “All I need is my guitar. Nothing personal—but ever hear of Typhoid Mary?”

Yes, of course she had heard of Typhoid Mary, had lived under the terror of her legacy. In high school, she’d learned that the poor woman died in isolation after thirty years, with no one allowed close to her. Nayima had decided long ago not to live in fear.

“We have immunity,” she said. “I won’t get you sick.”

“That’s a beautiful idea.” His voice softened practically to a song. “You’ll be the one who got away, Nayima.”

She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had called her by name. And he’d pronounced it as if he’d known her all her life. Not to mention how the word beautiful cascaded up and down her spine. While her hormones raged, she loved him more with each breath. Nayima was tempted to jump into her PT Cruiser and drive away then, the way she had learned to flee all hopeless scenarios.

Instead, she pulled her car within fifteen yards of him and reclined in the driver’s seat with her door open, watching him play until he stopped. The car’s clock said it was midnight when he finally slept. Hours had melted in his music. She couldn’t sleep, feverish with the thought of losing him.

At first, she only climbed out of the car to stretch her limbs. She took a tentative step toward him. Then, another. Soon, she was standing over him while he slept.

She took in his bright guitar strap, woven from a pattern that looked Native American. The wiry hairs on his dark beard where they grew thick to protect his pink lips. The moonlight didn’t show a single gray hair. He could be strong, with better feeding. Beneath his dusty camo jacket, he wore a Pink Floyd concert shirt. He could play her all of the old songs, and she could teach him music he didn’t know. The moonlight cradled his curls across his forehead, gleamed on his exposed nose. He was altogether magnificent.

Nayima was sure he would wake when she knelt beside him, but he was a strong sleeper. His chest rose and fell, rose and fell, even as she leaned over him.

Was the stone rolling across her chest only her heartbeat? Her palms itched, hot. She was seventeen again, unexpectedly alone in a corner with Darryn Stephens at her best friend’s house party, so aware of every prickling pore where they were close. And when he’d bent close, she’d thought he was going to whisper something in her ear over the noise of the world’s last dance. His breath blew across her lips, sweet with beer. Then his lips grazed hers, lightning strikes down her spine, and the softness . . . the softness . . .

Kyle slept on as Nayima pressed her lips to his. Was he awake? Had his lips yielded to her? It seemed so much like Kyle was kissing her too, but his eyes were still closed, his breathing uninterrupted even as she pulled away.

She crept back to her PT Cruiser, giddy as a twelve-year-old. Oh, but he would be furious! The idea of his anger made her giggle. She dozed to sleep thinking of the gift of liberation she had given Kyle. Freedom from masks. Freedom from fear. Freedom to live his life with her, to build their village.

• • • •

By dawn, Nayima woke to the sound of his retching.

She thought she’d dreamed the sound at first—tried to will herself to stay in her happy dream of singing Kumbaya with well-groomed strangers in the horse stalls, hand in hand—but she opened her eyes and saw the guitar player hunched away from her. He had pushed his guitar aside. She heard the splatter of his vomit.

Nausea came first. Nausea came fast.

Shit, she thought. Her mind was a vast white prairie, emptied, save that one word. She remembered his laughter, realized she would never hear him laugh again now.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought for sure you were like me. An NI.”

She wished her voice had sounded sadder, but she didn’t know how. She wanted to explain that he might have contracted the virus somewhere else in the past twenty-four hours, not necessarily from her. But despite the odds and statistics on her side, even she didn’t believe that.

It’s only a mistake if you don’t learn from it, Gram would say. Nayima clamped her fingernails into both palms. Her wrist tendons popped out from the effort. Hot pain. The numbness that had thawed with his music and 4-H stories crept over her again, calcified.

The man didn’t turn to look at her as she stood over him and picked through his things. His luggage carrier held six water bottles and a mountain of candy bars. The necessities. She left him his candy and water. His 9mm had no ammo, but she took it. She left his guitar—although she took the strap to remember him by. She might take up guitar herself one day.

The man gagged and vomited again. Most people choked to death by the third day.

“I’m leaving now,” she said, and knelt behind him. She searched for something to say that might matter to him. “Kyle, I found that Rescue Center over in Farm Land—Farm World—and it looks nice. Somebody really thought the whole thing through. You were right to come here. Where I grew up, they just burned everything.”

Even now, she craved his voice. Wanted so badly for him to hear her. To affirm her. To learn her grandmother’s name and say, “Yes, she was.” Yes, you were. Yes, you are.

The man did not answer or turn her way. Like the others before him, he was consumed with his illness. Just as well, Nayima thought as she climbed back into her car. Just as well. She glanced at her visor mirror and saw her face: dirt-streaked, unrepentant. She blinked and looked away.

Nayima never had been able to stomach the eyes of the dead.

© 2014 by Tananarive Due.

Originally published in The End is Now,

edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tananarive Due is the Cosby Chair in the Humanities at Spelman College. She also teaches in the creative writing MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles. The American Book Award winner and NAACP Image Award recipient has authored and/or co-authored twelve novels and a civil rights memoir. In 2013, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. In 2010, she was inducted into the Medill School of Journalism’s Hall of Achievement at Northwestern University. She has also taught at the Geneva Writers Conference, the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and Voices of Our Nations Art Foundation (VONA). Due’s supernatural thriller The Living Blood won a 2002 American Book Award. Her novella “Ghost Summer,” published in the 2008 anthology The Ancestors, received the 2008 Kindred Award from the Carl Brandon Society, and her short fiction has appeared in best-of-the-year anthologies of science fiction and fantasy. Due is a leading voice in black speculative fiction.

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

Starfall

Saundra Mitchell

KV-62 went supernova today.

Well, according to the news, it went supernova on March 14, 1592, but we’re just now finding out about it. Other things that happened on this day in history: Eli Whitney got a patent for the cotton gin, Charles I granted a royal charter to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and I was fished out of a trash can in the Union Square subway station.

That’s not in order, not chronologically, or in order of importance. They’re just facts, presented for your amusement and edification.

Like my arrival into this world, KV-62’s demise is a surprise. It wasn’t on the Wikipedia list of stars about to shit themselves. It was, until this morning anyway, a lonely little nobody star, sort of in the middle of nowhere. Now it’s in the middle of nothing; actually, it has been for four hundred twenty-two years.

This fact, I’m thinking, is going to be repeated frequently as the day goes on. Speed of light, light years away, Star Wars jokes, when you wish upon a . . . oops, never mind.

Hair wrapped, lunch packed, I step into the morning. I look at the sky, but it’s a waste of motion. The only stars in the city are the ones sitting in puffy coats, cordoned off from the masses, backing up traffic in every direction while they shoot the five thousandth episode of Law and Order: Epic Crimes Division.

So for me, the supernova isn’t real yet, even though it’s ubiquitous. It’s the top story on my news feed, the TV, the radio. Print papers are pissed as hell, I bet, but who reads print papers anymore, anyway? There’s already a Google doodle for it. Hazy pictures crowd my Twitter timeline, shots of the sky with a bright point fixed in the middle.

The story’s big enough, or weird enough, or something enough, that strangers on the bus look up when I get on. A general buzz of conversation fades, and a black man with an iPad leans toward me, interested.

“Did you hear about the star?” he asks.

This feels like a movie. A stage play. The opening act of a web series or something. Looping my messenger bag over my neck, I slide into the space beside him. “Yeah, weird, huh?”

A little blonde I’ve seen a million times and never spoken to cranes into the aisle. “If you get out of the city, you can see it. Like, in the daytime, even.”

“That’s what I heard,” another woman says. She balances a basket of oranges and mandarins on her knees. The fruit’s ripe, nipping scent perfumes the air. It’s a nice switch up from the usual BO, motor oil, and general-city-life smell. “They didn’t even see it coming!”

The man with the iPad turns the screen to her. “Just like that meteor in Russia. Came out of nowhere, and bam!”

“Makes you wonder what else they don’t know,” Fruit Basket says. Suspiciously, like there might be a conspiracy theory. Astronomy versus the world. Rogue planets lying in wait. Celestial ambushes.

“What’s that URL?” the blonde asks. Cell phone whipped out, she watches iPad expectantly. “Because I can tell right now, my daughter’s going to end up doing fifty million supernova projects at school. I may as well start collecting citations.”

The passengers buzz around me, and I fade into my own quiet. Listening, but not listening, I press the tip of one index finger to the other. A tingle runs between them, like the skin fell asleep. But just there, just on the tip of one finger.

I can’t tell if this supernova thing is really important or if it’s just a slow news day. So I fixate on my finger, numb but not numb. It’s real and it’s mine, and basically, that’s how people are, right? If it’s about you, it’s the center of the universe, no matter what.

• • • •

This is my job: I check out a sequentially numbered binder from the archive. I carry it to my desk; I open it. Then I log onto my computer, and search the server until I find the database that matches the binder. Open. Start on page one. Type.

See, when Vital Statistics started going digital, technology still sucked. In the beginning, there were some seriously screwed up methods in play. Photographs of documents—actual photos, the kind you have to develop. Then someone scanned them.

Into what format? Well. Some of the databases are full of giant, ancient bitmap files. Some of them are slightly less blurry PDFs and JPGs.

Occasionally, I hit a goldmine—a binder that got scanned after the advent of OCR, which means I only have to manually correct every entry on the birth certificate instead of typing it all in fresh.

People want to search Vital Statistics. They want to do it from their phone, from their home; they want to pull the sudden wild hair up their ass at 2:30 A.M., was Great-Great Grandma Sookie’s maiden name Manolis or Marinos?

So that’s my job. I’m the retronaut. I’m the one who creates digital records of birth certificates for people born before 1912. That way, every eager genealogist comes back from our website warm and happy. Their heuristic Boolean searches kick out text copies of GGGSookie’s birth certificate as well as an image, where available. You’re welcome.

Picking up where I stopped the day before, I frown. I search for my place; I tap my numb finger on the desk. Currently, I’m working through 1889 and I know I stopped on Cleolinda Pickering Navel because what kind of name is Cleolinda Pickering Navel? But I turn the plastic-sheathed pages and there’s only an aged, blank certificate where the printed one used to be.

Evie, my supervisor, appears at my desk. She’s psychic. No. She’s chatty. Moving my mug from the corner of the desk, she hitches herself to sit in a tiny triangle of bare wood. “Did you hear about the supernova?”

“The whole bus was talking about it,” I say.

“Some woman on the street walked up to me this morning and was like, well how about that!? We were totally simpatico; I knew exactly what she meant!”

The numb tingle slips up my finger. I scratch my cheek, just to see if I can feel it. Verdict? Unsure. Evie doesn’t move, so I tell her, “People were trading links back and forth. Never seen anything like it.”

“Seriously! I was talking to Johnnie in Deaths, and she’s thinking about renting a van to go up to the Adirondacks this weekend to see it. You want in?”

Squinting at her, I ask, “Will there be anything to see?”

“There should be! In the daytime, for a couple weeks at least. And at night, maybe for a couple months. Metafilter said that the last time a star went out like this, you could see it for two whole years.”

My head churns that fact, trying to turn it into something solid. The time traveling light was already messing with me. Not sure I’ll ever figure out how an explosion can last for a couple of years. This isn’t something I’m going to admit to my supervisor, so I say wow, because she expects me to. Then I turn my binder to her.

“Sorry, do you know what happened here? There was a completed record in here yesterday, but it’s gone now.”

With a hummed sigh, she takes the binder. Flicking through the pages back and forth, she shakes her head. Sliding to her feet, she closes the binder. “Let me check with Rohan.” Padding toward the front office, she turns back suddenly. Like she’s just remembered something. Perhaps my birthday.

“If there’s enough of us,” she says, “It’ll probably only cost us twenty bucks each to get that van. Let me know, okay?”

Pressing my lips together, I nod.

• • • •

In high school, I had a friend who said that if people forgot your birthday, it was your fault.

This is probably true. I don’t have parents to remember it; telling my co-workers is out of the question. After graduation, all my best friends forever caught currents and drifted away—Seattle, Las Vegas, Kuala Lumpur. I don’t wish them happy birthday, either.

Evie didn’t solve the case of the missing birth record. The digital version is gone, too. I know, know, know that I typed it in yesterday. Who forgets a name like that? It’s easier to remember than a birthday. It’s easier to remember than KV-62, the explosion formerly known as a star.

I feel like I’m unraveling a little. A very little. There’s one loose thread that started in my index finger. It winds around and around; now I’m numb to my wrist. On the bus home, I try to search for my condition online. I don’t know why; the rule is, if you search for it online, it’s probably cancer. I could save myself a lot of time by spinning a wheel of metastases to pick the location and lethality.

Except my phone has decided to shun me. When I touch the screen, nothing happens. I slide and pinch and nothing. Annoyed, I search my pockets for a stylus I know I lost months ago. Suddenly, getting online is very, very important. Not only do I have to find out what kind of cancer I have, I need to find out how late Butterfly Bakery is open.

There’s nothing wrong with buying your own cake. The rulebook plainly states: cake on birthdays, one wish per customer, with sufficient lung capacity. Nowhere does it stipulate that someone else has to buy you the cake. Or the candle.

This isn’t sad. It seems like it should be, but I’ve been alone most of my life. Bouncing from foster home to short-term placement, I met a lot of people. And I learned not to get attached to any of them. Including social workers; I had seventeen in eighteen years. It’s my understanding that this is a fairly standard turnover rate.

Maybe I’m a liar. Maybe I always have been. Right now, I don’t care because I sweep my fingers across the face of my phone and nothing happens. Again. I shake it. Close to my ear—maybe something is loose. In front of me, perhaps a broken bit will fall out. Breathing hot breath on my fingers, I try again.

Nothing.

Since the morning bus ride was nothing but camaraderie, I take a chance. The woman next to me has a tablet open. She’s drawing a bright, primary flowerpot for a stranger, somewhere, far-away and anonymous.

Waiting for her to submit her drawing, I say, “I’m sorry, my phone’s not working. Could you look something up for me real quick?”

She does, but she doesn’t like it.

Neither do I.

• • • •

In my bed, I stare at the ceiling. I stare through the ceiling. I fill in the night sky with images culled from movies and pictures and books. There’s a rich, blue-black velvet expanse, millions of stars twinkling against it. I see the Milky Way, cutting things in half long ways. My mental sky is inaccurate. Too perfect. Too bright.

It’s missing KV-62. I don’t have a science fiction-pop culture-old masters-new digital well to draw from on a supernova. While I ate dark chocolate truffle cake, I watched the news, but those pictures are too new. Too clinical. Everybody tries to focus on it, and the light blurs out of existence.

Poor star. Barely noticed in life, overlooked in death. Though astronomers are excited. That particular star is dead, they agree. But it’s not gone, they enthuse. It’s the law of mass conservation. Matter never disappears, it simply converts. Once, online, I read a eulogy or an essay (both?) about why you want a physicist to speak at your funeral.

It made me cry, because I don’t know a physicist. I don’t know who will speak at my funeral. I don’t know that his words, meant to be comforting, could apply to me. Something about all my light and heat still being in the universe, and all my particles starting out as stardust, and becoming new stars or maybe I made that part up.

What I remember is what the scientist on TV tonight keeps repeating: Nothing goes away. According to Angie, the guy who refills the pop machine in the basement cafeteria, everybody lives forever in pi, too.

At first, I thought he meant pie—which didn’t make sense in context, to be fair. But neither did a little circumferential number make me feel eternal.

“Mara,” he said, because people can’t deal with an extra vowel at the beginning of a name. Amara becomes Mara, time and again. I don’t correct them. “Okay. Look. What’s your social security number?”

I didn’t stop smoothing my dollar bill, but I did shoot him a look. “Yeah, right.”

“No, don’t tell me. But I’m telling you—it’s somewhere in pi. Pi is infinite! It contains every possible combination of numbers. Ever. Forever. No matter what.”

“So what?”

Tossing me a bag of free Cheetos, he grinned. It was a nice smile, his cuspids slightly sharp, his front teeth slightly flat. Maybe it was more the way that it transformed his face, a fairly ordinary face, into something beautiful. “So, everything about you, you can break it into a number.

“For example, your DNA sequence, all those abba-gaba-babas, if you convert those into binary, those become numbers. And those numbers are coded somewhere into pi! There’s a recipe for making you in there; you live forever.”

I shook my head. “That’s not me, though.”

“But it is!” He shoved a whole row of cheese puffs into place, then turned to me. “Everything you ever said is in there, in code. Every book you ever read. Every birthday present you ever got. Your birthday is in pi. They have it calculated out, like, into the trillions. We could search it right now and find your birthday, I bet.”

I stepped back. I was younger then. Nineteen. Easily impressed by a crooked smile; easily triggered, easily broken. My pieces shifted around, a broken glass in a sealed box. Schrodinger’s orphan: I had a birthday but I didn’t have a birthday.

All my records list the day a commuter found me stuffed in a Macy’s bag as my birthday, but I was already alive by then. No umbilical stump, so a couple weeks alive by then. Hardy enough to survive a chilly March morning, blanketed by Egg McMuffin wrappers.

But when Angie offered to find my birthday, my forever in pi, I realized something. If I ever invited someone new into my life, I’d have to explain all of that. No, I was not wanted. No, the flurry of news stories at the time failed to find me a permanent home. No, I don’t know my real name, or my birthday, or if my father had a green freckle in his left eye, too.

At least in foster care, I came with a folder. A dossier, I’ll call it a dossier, it’s more romantic and mysterious and meaningful. I wish I’d taken it with me when I hit eighteen and they kicked me out on my ass. Here, I could say to prospective friends and paramours, here’s my dossier. Read up. If I don’t hear from you by twenty-two hundred hours, I’ll know you’re gone.

Instead, what I said to Angie was, “That’s cool.”

Then I made sure to avoid the basement on Thursdays, because that’s when he came to refill the machine. Forever. I don’t eat Cheetos or Doritos or even sunflower seeds on Thursdays. Angie lives forever in pi, but I don’t. I live in an efficiency with a hot plate, because I don’t need more. No one sits on my couch-bed but me. Nobody’s head falls on the pillow beside mine.

My hand slips through the mattress. Through it. I would wrap my fingers around the springs, but I can’t feel them anymore.

• • • •

“In more troubling news,” the CNN anchor says, her face converting from comedy to tragedy in the blink of a teleprompter, “Police in major cities are reporting an unprecedented number of missing persons reports filed in the last four days.”

“That is troubling,” I tell the TV.

I use my left hand to spread jam on my toast, because the right one is gone completely. I see it. Other people must see it too, because nobody runs screaming. Evie at work came by to shake twenty bucks out of me for van rental and didn’t clap a hand on the back of her neck and yell, “What the hell happened?!”

Which is good. I don’t know what happened. The thread that started unraveling at the tip of my finger has wound all the way up my arm now. I don’t know if my atoms are getting looser, or if I’m enjoying a particularly vivid hallucination (brain tumors, the Internet says, can do that). All I know is that everything is not all right for Amara Moore. It’s all left. Ha ha, all left, oh Jesus, if I had a dad, he’d tell jokes like that ALL DAY LONG.

So I brush with my left hand, and make toast with my left hand, and it’s surprising how much typing I can get done at work with just one hand. Or maybe not surprising. I guess all those jokes about guys, porn, and unilateral touch-type proficiency have some basis in fact.

“Mental health professionals,” the anchor goes on, interrupting my train of thought, “are suggesting that some of these missing people might have left their homes voluntarily for astronomical reasons. One scientist is calling it Starfall Syndrome.”

Cue the interview with a scientist from some-college-I-missed-it. She’s dark brown, from hair to skin to clothes. A silver chain glints around her neck, thin and subtle. It catches my eye—that’s what I watch as I listen to her explain that some people, perhaps people who were in full control of their faculties just last week are suffering from mini-delusions and psychoses due to the unexpected trauma of the supernova.

She sweeps hair behind one ear. “It’s similar to Jerusalem Syndrome. Normal, healthy people arrive in Israel and are suddenly overwhelmed by the religious history of the region and start to believe they are figures from the Bible.

“We’ve never seen a supernova in our lifetime, but think of all the movies that feature stars exploding, black holes . . . The realization of an unexpected and overwhelming phenomena such as the supernova of KV-62 might have driven otherwise sane individuals temporarily out of their homes and their minds.”

I try to brush crumbs from my lap with the hand that doesn’t exist anymore. I wave non-existent fingers at the scientist. At the reporter. “Have you considered brain tumors, Dr. Ndebele? I think it could be brain tumors.”

She doesn’t answer. She’s a recording, or live, but anyway, not in my living room except in an existential way. Leaning toward the microphone she smiles and says, “The good news is, as soon as you remove the stimulus, that is, as soon as the patient leaves Jerusalem, or in this case, the supernova fades, so too will the delusions.”

That is good news. I wonder what she would think if I told her that I’m unraveling. Or if I told her that birth records are disappearing from my binders, too. Evie never found Cleolinda. More and more documents are turning up blank. Maybe once or twice somebody would have spaced it and put a blank record in a plastic sheath.

But every other one? I have no idea what Dr. Ndebele would say if I told her this, but I suspect it would end with me on Thorazine and fitted for a nice, new jacket. But there’s hope! There’s hope she says. I just have to wait for KV-62 to flicker its very last.

According to the latest push-notifications, that will be in a short fifteen days. I think I should have given Evie that twenty bucks.

• • • •

This happened before, in 1604.

Back then, Vital Statistics weren’t as full-bodied and rich as they are now, so if thousands of people started disappearing when Kepler’s Star did, we have no way of knowing it. When my shoulder unraveled, I sat on a park bench and tried to rub it. So chilly, I pretended to be cold, brr brr. That way, if people failed to notice my missing arm, they wouldn’t call the cops because some deranged woman was slapping her right side repeatedly in public. There’s gotta be a law for that.

In California, police are blaming Starfall Syndrome for a rash of suicides. It’s always a rash of suicides, isn’t it? A flock of sheep, a murder of crows, a rash of suicides. Depending on the news station, the supernova may well be a sign of the impending end times. That’s why twelve hundred people gassed themselves to death in an abandoned warehouse outside Pasadena last night. They thought the world was ending.

Now the scientists get strident. When they appear on the screen, they shake. This is a natural, normal event. This happens all the time; we simply don’t see it. There’s literally no way that anything on Earth is being affected by the destruction of KV-62.

“But what about this arm?” I want to ask them.

They would frown quizzically. “What arm?”

“My point exactly.” I’d nod. Possibly, I’d pull off serene. “Until the supernova, I had one.”

Imaginary scientists throw up their hands (both of them) and take their leave. My curiosity isn’t the right kind of curiosity. Shame on them, though. If you clap, Tinkerbell lives. I know that, even if they don’t. Although I think that being a big reader isn’t the same as being smart. I’ve never been smart, just average.

Slapping my side again, I watch the pigeons congregate. To them, I say, “I’m right here.”

They nod. They’re very agreeable.

• • • •

I found that eulogy again. And it is a eulogy, and you can listen to it on NPR. Don’t—his voice isn’t as sonorous and rich and moving as it might be in your head. Reading it is better; I read it again.

“You Want a Physicist to Speak at Your Funeral” by Aaron Freeman.

There’s nothing in there about stardust; I was wrong about that. I must have gotten that from somewhere else. No, what he said was: “Not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly.”

I’m less orderly.

When the weekend comes, I decide to head up to the Adirondacks by myself. Knowing that the supernova is out there but invisible to me—it makes me itch.

This morning, I lost most of my right shoulder, half of my right breast, and my hip is starting to fade. At work, it’s easy to skip out early. No one notices. Not one look turns my way. Not even one, but do I want one? I do not.

What’s frustrating is that I can’t get a cab. There are plenty. They sweep past me, I wave. I whistle. Finally, I step into the street, adrenaline coursing through me. The cab careens past, oblivious. This city has a bad reputation when it comes to cabs, but this is ridiculous.

Fine, I can walk and I do. The sidewalks aren’t too crowded, no tourists anchor themselves in the middle of the pavement. Thirty blocks is no big deal. I’m not even winded when I reach the train station. Neither is anyone else; it’s a beehive. An anthill. All the people who weren’t in my way before have congregated here.

Reading the signboards, I slip into place. The line for the Adirondacks is ridiculous. Stupid. Chaos enough that police patrol with dogs, and I’m pretty sure a handful of those would-be vacationers are air marshals on the ground. Voices ring out, Starfall, Starfall. This is what people have started to call KV-62.

After a couple of days, you have to address your guest by name. KV-62 is a code number for robots. We’re people, damn it, we’re having a moment. That thing in the sky that went supernova four hundred twenty two years ago, that’s Starfall now. Somebody ahead of me calls the ticket line the Starfall Express. We’re all heading north, out of the light. Into the dark. That’s backwards, but we need to see it. The itch is universal.

It’s my turn. I step up to the window, and the clerk looks past me. Bored, slash frazzled, slash exhausted. “Next?”

“Yes, I’d like a round trip ticket please,” I say.

“Next!”

Looking over my shoulder, I notice a man gesturing wildly and talking to the air. Or the Bluetooth in his ear, probably that. People behind him agitate and shift. Their weight thrums on the waxed floor; they’re restless cattle on the edge of the prairie.

With a frown, I turn my attention to the clerk again. “Yes, I’d like a round trip ticket please; if I could put it on my credit card . . .”

“Sir,” the clerk bellows. She doesn’t have time for this shit. She can’t say that out loud, but I hear the thought very clearly. “Sir, if you need more time to make your call, step aside.”

“I’m right here,” I say.

I am. I’m right there. I slap both hands on the counter, but they go right through. Disorderly panic tightens in my chest. A winter storm, cold and lighting at once, plays on my skin. The logical explanation is that she can’t see me. That’s the logical explanation.

How can that be?

Swinging my arms, I try to touch her. I grab at her stapler, not a Red Swingline, not a nice stapler at all. It remains in place, ungrabbed. I throw my head back and scream. The sound plucks my ribs and rends my throat. Nobody looks. Nobody cares.

Bluetooth finishes his very important call and steps right through me.

• • • •

That asshole has the gall to say, “That was important.”

No shit, Sherlock, the clerk thinks. Somehow, she forces a vaguely unpleasant smile and says, “Can I help you?”

Yes, yes she can. Him, not me. I punch straight through his head; he doesn’t care. He doesn’t notice.

Bewildered, I walk home and walk right through my front door. The numb touches me everywhere now. I’m one long thread, stretched out forever instead of one woman, fixed in place. I sit on my couch and stare out the window. I ponder the kinds of things most people ponder in college, when they’re high, when they want to feel deep in a shallow world.

If I can walk through a door, then how does my messenger bag stay on? Why don’t I sink through this couch? If nobody can hear me scream, did I scream?

Crying does me no good, because I question every tear. I name them, like pulling petals off a daisy, this tear is a brain tumor, this tear is a psychotic break, this tear is a coma, this tear is a dream and I just need to wake up.

I can’t. I try.

On Monday morning, the phone rings. It’s Evie; I don’t need to answer to know that. She’s pissed because she thinks I’m a no-call, no-show. Technically, I am. I neither called. Nor will I show. What pisses me off, I’m orderly enough to be pissed off, is that she wants to rip into me.

As if I haven’t been early to work every single day for five years. As if I haven’t done everything asked of me, dutifully. Quietly. I made no mark there at all. My binders are neat and properly catalogued. No one ever had to spend money on a get well card for me; they don’t know my birthday.

I don’t know my birthday, but fuck them. I deserve a day off. I deserve all the days off. Maybe I should have smiled back at Angie. Maybe I should have taken out an ad in the paper when I turned eighteen, ARE YOU MY MOTHER? Maybe I should have made one new friend. Maybe.

KV-62 didn’t.

KV-62 barely existed until she turned herself inside out one unsuspecting March morning in 1592. No one said goodbye at the time. At the time, no one saw her leave.

But she did, all the same.

• • • •

As far as human beings go, we don’t really exist. Not long enough to matter; not when we measure our lives against the lives of the stars.

They filled the heavens for billions of years before we had brains enough to call the expanse of space the heavens. They’ll go on when we blink out. After the last light turns off.

We’re all made of stardust. We live forever in pi. We’re immortal, you and me. Every one of us; what we’re made of cannot be destroyed. There are rules. Laws. Immutable physics, which sometimes complements dime-store philosophy.

Astronomers say that Starfall’s shock waves will ripple and expand and become new stars one day. Maybe I will, too. Next time, my parents will keep me. Next time, they won’t. I’ll be a movie star and a monster. I’ll make a friend; I’ll break forty-two hearts. I’ll leave a mark, however temporary.

As the world melts away, I have one last coherent thought. One final flicker of the light and the heat that make up my particular signature in the universe. I think I’m literally made of stardust, of the pieces that made up KV-62. Whatever cosmic storm bore her carried me, too. Everyone who went missing, they’re Starfall’s children, too.

When she starts over, we start over with her.

How many hundreds of thousands of planets and minds and places and worlds were contained in her, I wonder. If my binders are correct, there are hundreds of us in the five boroughs alone. Multiply exponentially—I’m sure the answer is somewhere in pi.

Will we all come together when we finally fall completely apart? I can’t wait. I can’t wait to find out.

I don’t have to anymore.

© 2014 by Saundra Mitchell.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Saundra Mitchell has been a phone psychic, a car salesperson, a denture-deliverer, and a layout waxer. She’s dodged trains, endured basic training, and hitchhiked from Montana to California. She teaches herself languages, raises children, and makes paper for fun. The author of seven young adult novels including her most recent, Mistwalker, she was nominated for an Edgar for her debut novel and for a Pushcart Prize in short fiction. She always picks truth; dare is too easy.

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

Ten Rules for Being an Intergalactic Smuggler (the Successful Kind)

Holly Black

1. There are no rules.

That’s what your uncle tells you, after he finds you stowing away in his transport ship, the Celeris, which you used to call the Celery when you were growing up, back when you only dreamed of getting off the crappy planet your parents brought you to as a baby. No matter how many times you told them their dumb dream of being homesteaders and digging in the red dirt wasn’t yours, no matter how many times you begged your uncle to take you with him, even though your parents swore that he was a smuggler and bad news besides, it wasn’t until you climbed out of your hidey-hole with the vastness of space in the transparent alumina windows behind you that anyone really believed you’d meant any of it.

Once you’re caught, he gives you a long lecture about how there are laws and there’s right and wrong, but those aren’t rules. And, he says, there are especially no rules for situations like this. Which turns out to be to your advantage, because he’s pissed but not that pissed. His basic philosophy is to laugh in the face of danger and also in the face of annoyance. And since he thinks his brother is a bit of a damp rag and likes the idea of being a hero to his niece, it turns out that no rules means not turning around and dumping you back on Mars.

He also turns out to be a smuggler. Grudgingly, you have to admit that your parents might not be wrong about everything.

2. Spaceports are dangerous.

Your uncle tells you this several times as you dock in the Zvezda-9 Spaceport, but it’s not like you don’t know it already. Your parents have told you a million stories about how alien races like the spidery and psychopathic Charkazaks—fugitives after their world was destroyed by InterPlanetary forces—take girls like you hostage and force you to do things so bad, they won’t even describe them. From all your parents’ warnings about spaceports, when you step off of Celeris, you expect a dozen shady aliens to jump out of the shadows, offering you morality-disrupting powders, fear inhibitors, and nucleus accumbens stimulators.

Except it turns out that spaceports aren’t that interesting. Zvezda-9 is a big stretch of cement tunnels, vast microgravity farms, hotel pods, and general stores with overpriced food that’s either dehydrated or in a tube. There are also InterPlanetary offices, where greasy-looking people from a variety of worlds wait in long lines for licenses. They all stare at your homespun clothes. You want to grab your uncle’s hand, but you already feel like enough of a backworld yokel, so you curl your fingers into a fist instead.

There are aliens—it wasn’t like your parents were wrong about that. Most of them look human and simultaneously inhuman, and the juxtaposition is so odd that you can’t keep from staring. You spot a woman whose whole lower face is a jagged-toothed mouth. A man with gray-skinned cheeks that grow from his face like gills or possibly just really strange ears loads up a hovercart nearby, the stripes on his body smeared so you know they are paint and not pigmentation. Someone passes you in a heavy, hairy cloak, and you get the impression of thousands of eyes inside of the hood. It’s creepy as hell.

You do not, however, see a single Charkazak. No one offers you any drugs.

“Stop acting stupid,” your uncle growls, and you try to act less stupid and keep from staring. You try to act like you stroll around spaceports all the time, like you know how to use the gun you swiped from your mother and strapped to your thigh under your skirt, like the tough expression you plaster on your face actually makes you tough. You try to roll your hips and swagger, like you’re a grown lady, but not too much of a lady.

Your uncle laughs at you, but it’s a good kind of laughter, like at least you’re sort of maybe pulling it off.

Later that night, he buys you some kind of vat-meat tacos, and he and some of his human “transporter” buddies get to drinking and telling stories. They tell you about run-ins with space pirates and times when the InterPlanetary Centurions stopped their ships, looking for illicit cargo. Your uncle has a million stories about narrow getaways and hidey-holes, in addition to a large cast of seedy accomplices able to forge passable paperwork, but who apparently excel at getting him into dangerous yet hilarious situations. You laugh your way into the night.

The next day your uncle buys you a pair of black pants and a shirt like his, made from a self-cleaning material that’s both hydrophobic and insulating, plus a shiny chromium steel clip for your hair. You can’t stop smiling. And although you don’t say it out loud to him, in that moment you’re sure that the two of you are going to be the greatest smuggling duo of all time.

3. When someone says they’ll pay double your normal rate, they’re offering to pay at least half what you’d charge them if you knew the whole story.

The Celeris stays docked in the spaceport for a couple of weeks while your uncle buys some used parts to repair the worst of wear and tear to her systems and looks for the right official job—and then an unofficial job to make the most of that InterPlanetary transport license.

You try to keep out of your uncle’s way so he doesn’t start thinking of you as some kid who’s always underfoot. You don’t want to get sent back home. Instead, you hang around the spaceport, trying to make yourself less ignorant. You go into the store that sells navigational charts and stare at the shifting patterns of stars. You go into the pawnshop and look at the fancy laser pistols and the odd alien gadgets, until the guy behind the counter gets tired of your face and orders you to buy something or get out.

After a while the spaceport seems less scary. Some of your uncle’s friends pay you pocket money to run errands, money that you use to buy caff bars and extra batteries for your mother’s gun and holographic hoop earrings that you think make you look like a pirate. Just when you start to feel a little bit cocky and comfortable, your uncle informs you that it’s time to leave.

He’s lined up the jobs. He’s found a client.

A little man with a red face and red hair sits in their eating area on the ship, sipping archer ethanol, booze culled from the Sagittarius B2 cloud, out of a coffee can. The man tells your uncle that he supplies alien tissue to a scientist who has his laboratory on one of the outer worlds, where the rules about gene splicing and cloning are more lax. The little man has come across a particularly valuable shipment of frozen alien corpses and needs for it to get where it’s going fast, with few questions asked.

The assignment creeps you out, but you can tell that your uncle has been distracted by the ludicrously high offer the man is waving around. It’s more money than you’ve ever imagined being paid for anything, and even with the cost of fuel and bribing Centurions, you’re pretty sure there would be enough to refit the Celeris in style. No more used parts, no more stopgap repairs. He could have all new everything.

“Half now,” the man says. “Half when the cargo arrives intact. And it better get there inside a month, or I will take the extra time out of your hide. I am paying for speed—and silence.”

“Oh, it’ll be there,” your uncle says, and pours a little archer ethanol into a plastic cup for himself. Even the smell of it singes your nose hair. “This little ship has got hidden depths—literally.” He grins while he’s speaking, like the offer of so much money has made him drunker than all the booze in the sky. “Hidden depths. Like me.”

The red-haired man doesn’t seem all that impressed.

You have lots of questions about where the alien bodies came from and what exactly the scientist is going to do with them, but a quick glance from your uncle confirms that you’re supposed to swallow those and keep pouring drinks. You have your guesses, though—you’ve heard stories about space pirates with alien parts grafted on instead of their own. New ears and eyes, new second stomachs tough enough to digest acid, second livers and new teeth and organs humans don’t even have—like poison glands or hidden quills. And then there were worse stories: ones about cloned hybrids, pitiless and monstrous enough to fight the surviving Charkazak and win.

But you’re a stupid kid from a backworld planet and you know it, so you quash your curiosity. After the client leaves, you clean up some and fold your stuff so it tucks away in the netting over your bunk back in your room. You go down to the cargo hold and move around boxes, so the way to the secret storage compartment is clear for when the redhead comes back with his alien parts in the morning. That night you look out through the transparent alumina windows at ships docking on Zvezda-9, and you get excited about leaving for your first mission in the morning.

But in the morning, the Celeris doesn’t depart.

It turns out that it takes time to get ready for a run like this—it takes supplies and paperwork; it takes charting a course and new fuel and lots of batteries and a ton of water. The whole while you careen between sadness over leaving Zvezda-9 now that you’ve become familiar with it and wishing you were in space already. You visit your favorite spots mournfully, unsure if you’ll ever see them again, and you pace the halls of the Celeris at night until your uncle orders you to your bunk. His temper is a short-sparking fuse. He sends you to buy supplies and then complains loudly about what you get, even though you’re the one who’ll be doing the reheating and reconstituting.

The client arrives in the middle of the night. You sit in the shadows above the cargo bay and watch what he loads—a long cylindrical casket, big enough for several human-size bodies. Smoke curls off of it when it’s jostled, as though it is very, very cold inside.

An hour later you’re back among the stars. There, your uncle starts to relax, as though space is his real home and being on a planet for too long was what was making him tense. Over the next week, he teaches you a few simple repairs he has to do regularly for the Celeris, shows you a few of his favorite smuggling hidey-holes, teaches you a card game and then how to cheat at that card game, and even lets you fly the ship for an hour with him hanging over your shoulder, nagging you about everything you’re doing wrong.

Considering that he turns on autopilot while he sleeps, letting you put your hands on the controls while he watches isn’t that big of a vote of confidence, but sitting in the cockpit, gazing out at the spray of stars, makes you feel important and wholly yourself, as though all your time laboring in that red dirt was worth something, because it brought you to this.

Mostly the trip is uneventful, except for an evening when your uncle comes up from the cargo hold and won’t look at you. He downs a whole bottle of archer ethanol and then gets noisily sick while you watch the computer navigate and fiddle with your earrings. He never says what set him off, but the next day he’s himself again and you both try to pretend that it never happened.

Then you wake up because the whole ship is shaking. At first you think you’re passing through an asteroid field, but then you realize something bad is happening. There’s the faint smell of fire and the sound of the ship venting it. Then the gravity starts going crazy—lurching on and off, bouncing you against the floor and the walls.

Once it stabilizes, you manage to crawl out into the corridor. Your heart is pounding like crazy, fear making you light-headed. You clutch your mother’s gun to you like it’s some kind of teddy bear. There’s shouting—more voices than there should be on board. You think you hear your uncle calling your name and then something else. Something loud and anguished and final.

You head automatically for the cockpit when a man runs into the corridor, skidding to a stop at the sight of you. Based on the mismatched array of weapons and armor, you figure he’s got to be a pirate—if he was a Centurion, he’d be in uniform. He reaches for his weapon, like he’s just shaking off the shock of seeing a kid in her nightgown aboard a smuggling ship, but you’ve already swung your mother’s gun up. You blast him in the head before you allow yourself to consider what you’re doing.

When he drops, you start trembling all over. You think you’re going to throw up, but you can hear more of them coming, so you try to concentrate on moving through the ship, on remembering all the hidey-holes your uncle pointed out to you.

The lights go out all of a sudden, so you have to feel your way in the dark, but soon you’ve found one big enough for you to fit yourself into and you’re shut up inside.

Snug as a bug in a rug, your mom would say.

You start crying, thinking about her. You know your uncle is probably dead, but you don’t want to admit that to yourself yet, so you pretend you’re not thinking of him when you wipe away your tears.

4. If your ship gets raided by space pirates, don’t hide in the cargo hold, because everybody wants what’s in the cargo hold.

The Celeris is a small enough ship that you can hear the pirates walking through it, talking to one another. You try to count different voices, but all you can figure out is that there’s more than five and probably less than ten. Which doesn’t mean that much, since they boarded from another ship and there could be any number of them back there.

Did you find it? you hear them say, over and over again. We’ve got to find it before it finds us.

Which doesn’t mean anything to you. You wonder if they attacked the wrong ship. You wonder if your uncle got murdered for nothing, for less than nothing, since the credits he got paid are in his bank account and not anywhere aboard the ship.

You hear the acceleration of the engines and feel the odd sensation of forward momentum. Which means they’re probably taking the whole ship, not just gutting it for parts and leaving it to spin endlessly in the void—which would have meant no life support for you. Maybe you’ll survive this, you think. Maybe no one even knew you were aboard, maybe they thought the guy you shot was shot by your uncle. If they docked on a planet, even a terrible planet, maybe you could sneak off the ship and hide in the station.

To do that, you need to make sure you stay hydrated. You’ll need food too, but not right away. A bathroom, ideally. You and your uncle usually ate in the little kitchen area—he called it the galley—off the main cockpit, where there’s a small burner, lots of packages of freeze-dried food, tubes of paste, and a jar of nutrient powder. You’re sure that some of the pirates have raided it by now, drinking through your uncle’s supply of archer ethanol—you’ve heard them, rowdy and full of good cheer, like they’d done something heroic instead of something awful.

If they catch you, they’ll most likely kill you. You’re using up oxygen, just breathing. But you know all the other things pirates might do instead—sell you, use you, cook you, eat you. Your parents loved to tell you how bad things could get when you talked about wanting to have adventures in space.

There’s food in the cargo hold, you know—those were the supplies that went on the official roster as his official shipment. Your uncle had the papers to sell that stuff to a homesteader planet. He’d been planning on sending you down to haggle with them—and had loaded you down with plenty of pieces of dubious bargaining wisdom in preparation.

Don’t be afraid of silence, he’d told you. Silence shows your strength. Have a bottom line, he’d told you. Sometimes to make a deal, you’ve got to walk away from a deal.

But it turned out that pirates didn’t care about negotiating. Just like your uncle had told you in the beginning, there aren’t any rules.

You doze impatiently waiting for your chance to slip down to the cargo hold. Your leg cramps from the position you’ve folded yourself into, and finally you decide that even though you can still hear voices, they’re faint, and you’re going to have to go for it.

You unfold yourself and step into the hallway. The floor is cold against your feet, and you feel light-headed from being in one position so long, but you begin to pad your way toward the cargo bay. There’s a steel ladder to a crow’s nest above the cargo bay, and as you climb down it, you know that if there’s a pirate patrolling beneath you, he’s going to see you before you see him, your pale nightgown fluttering around you like a white flag of surrender. There’s nothing you can do about it, though, so you just try to keep on going and stay quiet.

You’re in luck. There’s no one there. You climb all the way down and start to open up the shipping crates. You find luxuries that settlers love—caff bars, tins of coffee, jars of spicy peppers, fermented soy, and plenty of both salt and sugar. Ripping into one of the caff bars, you realize the stuff won’t keep you fed until the pirates dock, unless they dock very soon. Worse, there’s nothing to drink.

Despairing, you grab another caff bar and begin to look over the few remaining crates. You find some machinery—farming stuff—and what appears to be an array of tents suitable for a desert environment.

You’re freaking out, sure that you’re about to be caught, when you remember the secret hold, where the alien bodies are being stored. There might not be anything particularly useful there, but it’s at least a little more spacious than your last hiding place, and if you keep to the corners, you’ll have a great shot at picking off any pirates who discover the compartment before they can spot you.

It takes you a few tries to get the hatch open, but you manage it and slide down into the darkness. The only lights are the dim blinking green and blue and red buttons on the side of the cylindrical casket. You crawl over to it and look at the buttons. Maybe, you think, maybe it has life support built into it. Maybe you could dump out the contents and put yourself inside if things got really bad.

You squint at the control panel. There’s a large button, clearly labeled: VIEW SCREEN.

You press it.

5. If your ship gets raided by space pirates and you wind up hiding in the cargo hold, even though you know it’s a bad idea, don’t go poking through the secret cargo.

A square of the shiny white case turns clear and the inside glows. The whole thing hums a little, as though expecting more instructions, a thin mechanical whine. You lean down, looking at what’s inside, and then it’s all you can do not to scream.

There’s a Charkazak, its eight terrible black legs drawn up against the shiny black carapace of its chest. Its humanoid face, with black lips and red tattoos along its cheekbones. A chest that rises and falls with breath.

That thing is alive.

You stumble back, falling against the steel, more scared than you were when you faced down the pirate in the hallway, more scared than when you felt the blast hit the side of the ship and realized the Celeris was being raided.

You’ve heard horror stories about the Charkazaks all your life, on the news, whispered about at slumber parties of kids on the farm, and even on Zvezda-9. They were a race of warriors who worshipped death, becoming bodyguards for the most corrupt merchants and glorying in being soldiers on the front lines of the most awful wars just so they’d have more opportunities for bloodshed. They were so awful that they wouldn’t follow InterPlanetary laws regarding who it was okay to kill and who it wasn’t, nor did they believe in things like surrender or mercy. They invaded planets, brought down ships, and generally behaved like the monsters they appeared to be. When Centurions were dispatched to discipline the Charkazaks, they fought back with such viciousness that the only way to keep them from overrunning the galaxy was the obliteration of their planet and all the Charkazaks on it. Those that were off-planet when the Charkazaks homeworld was destroyed became even more vicious than before. And as you look at the living one cocooned in metal, you feel like a child hearing those stories for the first time—more like a child than you’ve felt since you stowed away after that last stupid fight with your parents.

This—this must have been what the pirates meant when they worried about it finding them before they found it. You wonder how the redheaded dirtbag who hired your uncle acquired such a thing and where you’d really been transporting it. That Charkazak is the reason your uncle is dead.

The whine gets a little louder, and one of the red buttons on the side of the case begins to blink, like a throbbing pulse. Between that and the dim light from the screen, the secret cargo area feels too bright, but you wait and wait and finally all the lights switch themselves off.

You wouldn’t think you could sleep with that thing near you, but you’re so relieved to be able to stretch out your limbs that you sleep after all. You dream of someone calling your name from very far away. When you wake, your body is stiff with cold and everything is still dark. You realize that you’re freezing and that if you don’t get warmed up fast, you might be in serious trouble.

Tents, you remember. There are tents up in the regular cargo hold. But as you feel around in the dark, you can’t quite make out how to open up the hatch. Then you remember that the casket lit up—surely that would be enough for you to find the latch by—so you go over and press the green button again.

It lights up the case and you try not to look inside. You scuttle up instead and grab a couple of tents. You’re dragging them back down when you hear the tramping of heavy footfalls. They speed up, like maybe they heard the thud of the material hitting the floor, and you swear under your breath. You move as quickly and quietly as you can, back under the floor, yanking the cover of the hidden compartment into place.

The light is still shining from the casket, and you’re afraid that the glow will show through the seams and reveal your hiding spot. You press the green button again, hoping that will turn off the view screen, but it doesn’t. The other light—the red one—starts blinking again, and you’re panicking, because it’s brighter and more obvious than the glow from the casket.

Push to open, the red button says. And as the footfalls come closer, as you hear the pirate feel around for the latch, a sudden strange calm comes over you. Since you’re going to die—or worse—you figure, screw everything. Screw the pirates, screw yourself, screw every goddamn thing. You owe your uncle some final revenge. You’re not going out like some dumb farmer kid. You’re going to give those pirates exactly what they were looking for.

So you press the button. Twice. There is a horrible loud sound, like a giant exhalation of breath. The top of the casket slides open.

6. And if you do go ahead and poke through the secret cargo, then for the love of all that is holy, watch out which buttons you push.

For a moment, you almost believe that you can take back the last five minutes. It seems so impossible that you could have done what you did. You were tired and freaked out, but you’d been pretty clever right up until then, clever and quiet and careful. Not crazy. No death wish. For a moment, you’re just angry, so angry—at yourself, at the world. It feels so unfair that you’re going to die because of one stupid decision, one bad moment.

“Hey,” the pirate calls. “Kid, we know you’re on board. We knew you’d show yourself eventually. Now come on out, and we’ll go easy on you.”

You snort, because it’s a ridiculous thing to say. What does that mean—go easy on you—like surely he knows that implies nothing easy at all? Plus, it’s too late. He’s swaggering around, cocky, without realizing that you’re both about to be dead. You’re all about to be dead.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” he calls, a laugh in his voice.

From the casket the Charkazak unfolds itself, bathed in the glow of the light from within. It rises, up and up and up. Eight legs, two sets of arms with six-jointed fingers on its shining onyx chest, and large luminous eyes. It might have human features, but you can’t read its expression. It seems to shudder all over, then swings its head your way.

Fear makes you nearly pee your pants. You freeze so completely that you don’t even draw in breath. It moves toward you—fast, its legs a blur—and leans down, all wide eyes and flaring nose slits.

Your mother’s gun is lying beside you, but you don’t grab for it. You released the Charkazak, after all. There’s no point fighting it.

You whimper.

“Come on, girl,” calls the pirate. “You think I’ve never been on a cheap old smuggling ship before? You think I can’t find you? Come out or I’m going to make you sorry.”

You close your eyes, but you can still hear the scratch of Charkazak feet against the floor, can smell the medicinal odor that clings to it from its containment, can hear its ragged breaths.

“I know you killed Richard,” says the pirate, his voice falling into a false, honeyed tone. He’s come closer to the grate that conceals the hidden cargo area. Maybe he knew where it was all along. Maybe you were a fool, thinking they didn’t know where you were. He laughs. “You did me a favor there. I owed him money.”

You hear the slide of metal on metal and open your eyes. The Charkazak is no longer in front of you. You let out your breath all at once, so fast that you feel dizzy.

“Hey, there, you—” the pirate says, then there’s a gasp and a wet, liquid sound.

You sit in the cargo hold for a while—you don’t know for how long—too scared to move. But then you force yourself numbly to your feet. You walk past the body of the pirate, with a massive bloody hole in his chest like that Charkazak thrust a clawed hand into his chest and pulled out his heart. The pirate’s gurgling a little, but his eyes are shut, and you wouldn’t know how to help him, even if you wanted to, which you don’t.

You go straight to the galley, passing two more bodies. They are bent at odd angles, one missing the top of her head, her long red-blond hair in a cloud around her face. There is an odd spatter of red along one wall, and laser blasts have blackened the corridor.

In the galley, you wash your hands and then make yourself a cup of tea. You eat an entire sleeve of sugar cookies and then you heat up a freeze-dried package of salty, soy-drenched noodle soup and eat that, too. There’s no point in dying on an empty stomach.

After that, you feel super sleepy, your eyes heavy, so you go back to your tiny room, climb under the covers, and close your eyes.

7. On a spaceship, there really aren’t that many places to hide.

The Charkazak isn’t like the pirates. It’s a monster, and you can’t hide from monsters. So you don’t.

But it doesn’t come for you.

You go into the bathroom and take a shower. You change your clothes and check your mother’s gun for ammo.

Out in the hallway, the bodies are gone. You return to the galley and drink more tea, noting how the food has been picked over. You didn’t count the night before, though, so you’re not sure what was eaten by pirates and what was eaten by the alien.

You make some oatmeal with powdery reconstituted milk.

While you’re eating, there’s movement in the hallway. You duck down under the table, hoping that you’re not worth the Charkazak’s notice. Maybe you’re like a rat to it, some kind of ship vermin. Maybe you don’t matter. You wrap your arms around your legs and hope you don’t matter.

It skitters into the room, and you can’t help noticing that as large as it is, there is a certain gliding elegance to its movements.

Then the Charkazak’s body crouches low, bending forward, two pairs of arms reaching to the floor to take its weight. Its head tilts under the table, looking straight at you.

It blinks. Twice.

“Um, hi,” you say, because you don’t know what else to do.

It keeps looking at you, tilting its head the other way this time. Don’t be afraid of silence, your uncle told you, but you are afraid.

You don’t have the upper hand in this situation. You don’t have anything to bargain with in trade for your life.

8. You’ll catch more Charkazaks with salt than with sugar.

“I could make you something,” you say, “if you don’t know how to cook.”

“I know how,” it says after a long moment, and you’re completely startled by its voice, which has a little hiss behind it and an accent you’re not used to but that you understand easily enough. It’s a young voice, a not-much-older-than-you voice, and you have no idea what to make of that.

Of course some part of you knew that Charkazaks could talk—or at least understand commands. They couldn’t have betrayed any treaties if they didn’t talk, couldn’t have committed treason if they hadn’t sworn fealty to the InterPlanetary government, but you’re still surprised. Monsters aren’t supposed to sound like everybody else.

It—he—leans up and begins to move things on the counter, turning on the water heater and setting out two tin cups. His many legs move, swift as a centipede’s, and equally disturbing.

“I am going to make some of this red fern tea,” he says, opening one of the tins of leaves. “You will drink it.”

You listen to the crinkle of paper, the whine of the steam, and the sound of water splashing into the cup. Tea making is confusing, because you associate it with comfortably curling up with your holo-reader and sleeping off a minor illness. Monsters aren’t supposed to be able to make tea. If monsters can make tea, then nothing’s safe.

“What happened to their ship?” you ask, because he hasn’t killed you so maybe he’ll keep on not killing you.

You heard the metal spoon clank against the sides of the cup. “Their ship is unharmed.”

Which meant that everyone who’d once been inside of it was dead.

The Charkazak leans down again and passes you a cup with his delicate, multi-jointed fingers. It’s warm in your hands.

“Th-thank you,” you manage, and take a sip. Then you start to cough. It’s salty, like your mother described the seas of old earth.

“Is there something wrong with it?” the Charkazak asks, folding his limbs under him, so he can look at you.

You shake your head, terrified. You force yourself to take another swig and try not to choke. You don’t think you quite pull it off, though, because he looks oddly stricken, studying you with those large, pale eyes.

“Was this your parents’ ship?” he asks, taking the cup from you and drinking deeply, as though he’s not afraid of tasting your spit or getting your germs. As though he really, really likes salt.

“How do you know the Celeris isn’t mine?” you ask. Then you remember that you’re trying to get him to think of you as some kind of ship vermin, entirely unimportant, and wish you could take back those words.

“Is it yours?” he asks, not seeming unwilling to believe it, just confused.

“No,” you admit. “The ship belonged to my uncle, but I’m pretty sure he’s dead.”

He tilts his head and narrows his eyes, studying you. “You freed me,” he accuses softly. “By accident?”

You don’t want to tell him that you thought of him as a bullet to the head. Your big murder-suicide plan, now staring at you with that implacable gaze. “I—” you begin, but you can’t think of a lie fast enough.

He nods and picks up something from the counter. Then he leaves, the sharpness of his many steps across the floor a reminder of just how fast and lethal the Charkazaks are.

Once he’s gone, you draw up your legs, wrap your arms around them, and feel smaller and stupider than ever.

You no longer believe that he’ll just kill you outright, but that makes you realize how bleak your future has become. Even if the Charkazak dumps you off at some space station, even if you drain your uncle’s bank account of all his credits, the only place you have to go is home. You didn’t learn enough from your uncle to fly the Celeris yourself. You’ve got no way to make any money back on Zvezda-9. You’re just a farming kid with delusions of grandeur.

Of course, you’re not sure that the Charkazak will let you off the ship. He’s from a fugitive race, hunted by InterPlanetary Centurions—he might want to keep you around so he could shove your face in front of any call screens until he moved outside regulated space. Then you’d be in the same situation you were in with the pirates; he could sell you or eat you or . . . well, you’ve heard stories about Charkazaks ripping humans apart in a sexual frenzy, but you’re trying not to think about that.

You decide you’re going to make dinner for him. You break out more rehydratable noodles and start in on making a vat-meat goulash. There’s a tube of apple-quince jelly and some cheese that you figure you can either make into a dessert or some kind of first course.

Halfway through, you think about cooking for your uncle, and tears come to your eyes. You have to sit down and sob for a little while, but it passes.

Once the food’s done, you pad through the halls of the ship to find the Charkazak. A smear of blood still marks one of the walls, wiped by something but not wiped clean.

9. The dead are a lot less trouble than the living.

You look for the Charkazak in the cargo area, but you find dead bodies instead. They’re lined up on the floor, the cold keeping them from decaying quickly, but they’re still a mess. Eleven pirates, men and women, scarred and tough-looking, and your uncle, all with their eyes open, staring at a nothing that’s even bigger than space. Your uncle’s shirt is blackened from blaster fire. They must have shot him soon after boarding. You lean down and take out his identification card from his pocket, running your finger over the holo-picture of him, the one where he’s not horribly pale, the one where his lips aren’t blue and his eyes aren’t cloudy. The one where he isn’t dead.

You wanted to be just like him—you wanted to have adventures and see the universe. You didn’t want to believe there were rules.

See where it got him, your mother would say. See where it got you.

Leaning over his body, you close his eyes. “I love you,” you tell him, brushing his hair back from his face. “I love you and all your hidden depths.”

On your way out, you can’t help but notice how nine of those eleven pirates died, though. They were sliced open or stabbed through. One was missing a limb as though it had been pulled clean off her.

You find the Charkazak in the cockpit, pressing buttons with those long, delicate fingers, his dagger-like feet balanced easily against the floor. He turns toward you swiftly, a blur of gray skin and gleaming black carapace, his body hunched, as if braced for flight.

“I made dinner,” you say lamely, heart pounding.

He doesn’t immediately respond. You watch as he slowly relaxes and wonder if, for a moment, he’d thought you were stupid enough to attack him.

“It’s ready, b-but I could j-just bring you a plate if you’re b-busy.” You’re stammering.

He touches the screen again, twice, quickly, then begins to unfurl toward you. “I am honored by your hospitality,” he says, and each time he speaks, you are startled anew that he sounds almost human. “We will eat together.”

You go together through the hall, with you walking in front. You can hear him behind you, can hear the clattering sound of his many feet, and you steel yourself not to look, because you’re afraid that if you do, despite everything, you’ll run. You’ll scream.

10. Good food is universal. And it’s universally true that you’re not going to get any good food in space.

In the galley, he manages to perch on the bench while you plate the goulash. He waits, watching.

Finally, he says, “I’m called Reth.”

Which is odd, because of course you knew he must have a name, but you’d never have asked him for it. “I’m Tera.”

“Tera,” he echoes, and then begins to eat, his long fingers making him seem like a mantis.

You wait until you’ve pulled out the cheese and apple-quince paste to ask him the question that’s been haunting you. “What are you going to do with me?”

He tilts his head, studying you. “I know you’re afraid. I even know why.”

You are silent, because of course you’re scared. And of course he knows why.

“They caught me off the salty sea of Callisto—and I heard them talking while they processed me. I am on my way to be harvested for experiments and organs, just like the rest of my race.”

You study his strange face—those luminous eyes, the grayish color of his skin, those tattooed marks that remind you of the stripes on a tiger, his high cheekbones, and the sharp elegance of his features, which make him both almost human and very alien. You hear the anger in his voice, but he’s got something to be angry about.

“I know what they say about my people. I know the rumors of savagery and horror. Not all of it is untrue, but the war—the reasons you have heard it was declared, those are lies. The InterPlanetary government wanted us to fight their wars, wanted our own government to sacrifice its children, and when the Charkazaks would not become a slave race, they decided to destroy us and engineer the army they desired from our flesh.”

He could be lying, but he doesn’t sound like he’s lying.

He could be mistaken, but he doesn’t sound like his knowledge is secondhand.

“I’m sorry,” you say, because you can’t imagine being hunted across the galaxy, whatever the reason.

Reth shakes his head. “No, don’t say that. Because I have become like your legends about my people. I can kill quickly and surely now—and as for where I am taking this ship, I am completing the course that your uncle had set. I am planning on docking and destroying those scientists who would have cut me open and used my body for their experiments. I am going to destroy their laboratory, and I am going to free whatever creatures are being tormented there.” He slams down two of his fists on the table and then seems startled by the action. He looks over at you with haunted, hunted eyes. He was trying to stop you from being scared, and he thinks he’s scared you worse.

But he hasn’t really. He’s just startled you. You never heard of any Charkazaks saving anyone, and the anger in his voice is righteous fury, not the desire for bloodshed. He might not sell you to anyone, you realize. Might not rip you apart or eat you. Might not even mean you any harm at all, despite being the scariest thing you’ve ever seen.

You force yourself to reach across the table and touch his arm. His skin feels smooth, almost like patent leather. He tenses as your fingers brush up his arm and then goes entirely still.

“This dish you made is very good,” he says suddenly, and you can hear in his voice a shy nervousness that fills you with a sudden giddy power. “I told you I knew how to work the cooking things—but all the food was unfamiliar. I ate one of the green packages and found it entirely strange. I feel sure I was supposed to do something more to it, but I wasn’t sure what. . . .”

You keep your hand on his arm a moment more, fingers dragging over his skin, and his words gutter out. You wonder when the last time it was that someone touched him—or touched him without anger. You wonder how lonely it’s possible to become out in the void of space.

The comm crackles at that moment, a voice booming from the speakers in the wall. “Centurion ship Orion hailing the Celeris. Are you there, Captain Lloyd?”

Reth’s eyes narrow and he rises, looming above you on those long black legs.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he says softly. It makes you try to imagine what it would be like to grow up with all the world against you. “But if they know I’m here, they will destroy your ship. They won’t face me—they’ve heard the same stories you have. They’ll kill us both to avoid facing me.”

Don’t be afraid of silence, your uncle told you. Silence shows your strength.

You know it’s not the nicest thing you’ve ever done, especially because you’re pretty sure Reth’s correct about the Centurions’ likelihood of blowing up the ship rather than fighting him, but you make yourself stay quiet as the seconds tick by. Reth needs you to go to that comm, but you need things from him, too. Promises.

“Please,” he says again.

“If you want my help, you have to agree to my terms,” you say. “Agree that you’ll teach me how to fly. That we will split the salvage profits from the pirate ship fifty-fifty. And that we’ll be partners.”

“Partners,” he echoes, as though he’s trying out the word, as though he doesn’t know what to do with it. As though you’re giving him something, instead of asking for something from him.

Have a bottom line, your uncle told you. Sometimes to make a deal, you’ve got to walk away from a deal.

But there isn’t going to be any walking away this time. There was nowhere to walk to, not for either one of you.

“Agreed,” he says, and the relief in his voice is enormous. You probably could have asked him for a lot more, and he would have agreed. You’re even worse at this bargaining thing than you thought.

“And you have to agree that once we finish attacking the planet of the mad scientists, we’ll take some actually profitable jobs,” you amend, trying your best to sound tough. “Since I don’t think we’re going to get paid for the last one.”

The comm crackles again. “Captain Lloyd, are you there? Please respond.”

“Agreed, Tera,” Reth says softly, like a vow.

11. One more for the road. There really are no rules. There’s laws and there’s right and wrong, but those aren’t rules. You make it up the best you can as you go along.

You grin at Reth and go over to feed your uncle’s ID into the comm. “This is Captain Tera Lloyd of the Celeris,” you say, once you get the right frequency. “Captain David Lloyd—my uncle—is dead, and I have taken control of the ship. We were in distress, but you’re a little late to be of much help, Orion.”

Reth watches you speak, smiling a fierce alien smile as you tell the Centurions to buzz off, swearing up and down that they don’t need to board and you don’t need a tow. Finally, you agree to a small bribe, pull out your uncle’s ID card, and wire the credits over.

The whole thing reminds you of one of your uncle’s stories. You hope it would have made him laugh. You hope it would have made him proud.

You know you’ve been wrong a lot since you left home, but as you look out at the stars and the Charkazak begins to explain how the controls work, you begin to believe that you might still have a chance to become one-half of the best smuggling duo of all time.

© 2014 by Holly Black.

Originally published in Monstrous Affections,

edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant.

Reprinted by permission of the author and Candlewick Press.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Holly Black is the author of bestselling contemporary fantasy books for kids and teens. Some of her titles include The Spiderwick Chronicles (with Tony DiTerlizzi), The Modern Faerie Tale series, The Good Neighbors graphic novel trilogy (with Ted Naifeh), and her new Curse Workers series, which includes White Cat and Red Glove. She has been a finalist for the Mythopoeic Award, a finalist for an Eisner Award, and the recipient of the Andre Norton Award. She currently lives in New England with her husband, Theo, in a house with a secret door.

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

We Are the Cloud

Sam J. Miller

Me and Case met when someone slammed his head against my door, so hard I heard it with my earphones in and my Game Boy cranked up loud. Sad music from Mega Man 2 filled my head and then there was this thud like the world stopped spinning for a second. I turned the thing off and flipped it shut, felt its warmth between my hands. Slipped it under my pillow. Nice things need to stay secret at Egan House, or they’ll end up stolen or broken. Old and rickety as it was, I didn’t own anything nicer.

I opened my door. Some skinny thug had a bloody-faced kid by the shirt.

“What,” I said, and then “what,” and then “what the,” and then, finally, “hell?”

I barked the last word, tightening all my muscles at once.

“Damn, man,” the thug said, startled. He hollered down the stairs “Goddamn Goliath over here can talk!” He let go of the kid’s shirt and was gone. Thirty boys live at Egan House, foster kids awaiting placement. Little badass boys with parents in jail or parents on the street, or dead parents, or parents on drugs.

I looked at the kid he’d been messing with. A line of blood cut his face more or less down the middle, but the gash in his forehead was pretty small. His eyes were huge and clear in the middle of all that blood. He looked like something I’d seen before, in an ad or movie or dream.

“Thanks, dude,” the kid said. He ran his hand down his face and then planted it on the outside of my door.

I nodded. Mostly when I open my mouth to say something the words get all twisted on the way out, or the wrong words sneak in, which is why I tend to not open my mouth. Once he was gone I sniffed at the big bloody handprint. My cloud port hurt, from wanting him. Suddenly it didn’t fit quite right, atop the tiny hole where a fiber optic wire threaded into my brainstem though the joint where skull met spine. Desire was dangerous, something I fought hard to keep down, but the moment I met Case I knew I would lose.

Egan House was my twelfth group home. I had never seen a kid with blue eyes in any of them. I had always assumed white boys had no place in foster care, that there was some other better system set up to receive them.

• • • •

I had been at Egan House six months, the week that Case came. I was inches away from turning eighteen and aging out. Nothing was waiting for me. I spent an awful lot of energy not thinking about it. Better to sit tight for the little time I had left, in a room barely wider than its bed, relying on my size to keep people from messing with me. At night, unable to sleep, trying hard to think of anything but the future, I’d focus on the sounds of boys trying not to make noise as they cried or jerked off.

On Tuesday, the day after the bloody-faced boy left his handprint on my door, he came and knocked. I had been looking out my window. Not everyone had one. Mine faced south, showed me a wide sweep of the Bronx. Looking out, I could imagine myself as a signal sent out over the municipal wifi, beamed across the city, cut loose from this body and its need to be fed and sheltered and cared about. Its need for other bodies. I could see things, sometimes. Things I knew I shouldn’t be seeing. Hints of images beamed through the wireless node that my brain had become.

“Hey,” the kid said, knocking again. And I knew, from how I felt when I heard his voice, how doomed I was.

“Angel Quiñones,” he said, when I opened the door. “Nicknamed Sauro because you look a big ol’ Brontosaurus.”

Actually my mom called me Sauro because I liked dinosaurs, but it was close enough. “Okay . . .” I said. I stepped aside and in he came.

“Case. My name’s Case. Do you want me to continue with the dossier I’ve collected on you?” When I didn’t do anything but stare at his face he said “Silence is consent.

“Mostly Puerto Rican, with a little black and a little white in there somewhere. You’ve been here forever, but nobody knows anything about you. Just that you keep to yourself and don’t get involved in anyone’s hustles. And don’t seem to have one of your own. And you could crush someone’s skull with one hand.”

A smile forced its way across my face, terrifying me.

With the blood all cleaned up, he looked like a kid. But faces can fool you, and the look on his could only have belonged to a full-grown man. So confident it was halfway to contemptuous, sculpted out of some bright stone. A face that made you forget what you were saying mid-sentence.

Speaking slowly, I said: “Don’t—don’t get.” Breathe. “Don’t get too into the say they stuff. Stuff they say. Before you know it, you’ll be one of the brothers.”

Case laughed. “Brothers,” he said, and traced one finger up his very-white arm. “I doubt anyone would ever get me confused with a brother.”

“Not brothers like Black. Brothers—they call us. That’s what they call us. We’re brothers because we all have the same parents. Because we all have none.”

Why were the words there, then? Case smiled and out they came.

He reached out to rub the top of my head. “You’re a mystery man, Sauro. What crazy stuff have you got going on in there?”

I shrugged. Bit back the cat-urge to push my head into his hand. Ignored the cloud-port itch flaring up fast and sharp.

Case asked: “Why do you shave your head?”

Because it’s easier.

Because unlike most of these kids, I’m not trying to hide my cloud port.

Because a boy I knew, five homes ago, kept his head shaved, and when I looked at him I felt some kind of way inside. The same way I feel when I look at you. Case.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“It looks good though.”

“Maybe that’s why,” I said. “What’s your . . . thing. Dossier.”

“Nothing you haven’t heard before. Small town gay boy, got beat up a lot. Came to the big city. But the city government doesn’t believe a minor can make decisions for himself. So here I am. Getting fed and kept out of the rain while I plan my next move.”

Gay boy. Unthinkable even to think it about myself, let alone ever utter it.

“How old? You.”

“Seventeen.” He turned his head, smoothed back sun-colored hair to reveal his port. “Well, they let you make your own decisions if they’ll make money for someone else.”

Again, I was shocked. White kids were hardly ever so poor they needed the chump change you can get from cloudporting. Not even the ones who wanted real bad to be down. Too much potential for horrific problems. Bump it too hard against a headboard or doorframe and you might end up brain-damaged.

But that wasn’t why I stared at him, dumbfounded. It was what he said, about making money for someone else. Like he could smell the anger on me. Like he had his own. I wanted to tell him about what I had learned, online. How many hundreds of millions of dollars the city spent every year to keep tens of thousands of us stuck in homes like Egan House. How many people had jobs because of kids like us. How if they had given my mom a quarter of what they’ve spent on me being in the system, she never would have lost her place. She never would have lost me. How we were all of us, ported or not, just batteries to be sucked dry by huge faraway machines I could not even imagine. But it was all I could do just to keep a huge and idiotic grin off my face when I looked at him.

The telecoms had paid for New York’s municipal wireless grid, installing thousands of routers across all five boroughs. Rich people loved having free wireless everywhere, but it wasn’t a public service. Companies did it because the technology had finally come around to where you could use the human brain for data processing, so they could wave money in the faces of hard-up people and say, let us put this tiny little wire into your brain and plug that into the wireless signal and exploit a portion of your brain’s underutilized capacity, turning you into one node in a massively-distributed data processing center. It worked, of course. Any business model based around poor people making bad decisions out of ignorance and desperation always works. Just ask McDonald’s, or the heroin dealer who used to sell to my mom.

The sun, at some point, had gotten lost behind a ragged row of tenements. Case said: “Something else they said. You’re going to age out, any minute now.”

“Yeah.”

“That must be scary.”

I grunted.

“They say most guys leaving foster care end up on the street.”

“Most.”

The street, the words like knives driven under all my toenails at once. The stories I had heard. Men frozen to death under expressways, men set on fire by frat boys, men raped to death by cops.

“You got a plan?”

“No plan.”

“Well, stick with me, kid,” Case said, in fluent fake movie gangster. “I got a plan big enough for both of us. Do you smoke?” he asked, flicking out two. I didn’t, but I took the cigarette. His fingers touched mine. I wanted to say It isn’t allowed in here, but Case’s smile was a higher law.

“Where’s a decent port shop around here? I heard the Bronx ones were all unhygienic as hell.”

“Riverdale,” I said. “That’s the one I go to. Nice office. No one waiting outside to jump you.”

“I need to establish a new primary,” he said. “We’ll go tomorrow.” He smiled so I could see it wasn’t a command so much as a decision he was making for both of us.

• • • •

My mother sat on the downtown platform at Burnside, looking across the elevated tracks to a line of windows, trying to see something she wasn’t supposed to see. She was so into her voyeurism that she didn’t notice me standing right beside her, uncomfortably close even though the platform was bare. She didn’t look up until I said mother in Spanish, maybe a little too loud.

“Oh my god,” she said, fanning herself with a damp New York Post. “Here I am getting here late, fifteen minutes, thinking oh my god he’s gonna kill me, and come to find out that you’re even later than me!”

“Hi,” I said, squatting to kiss her forehead.

“Let it never be said that you got that from me. I’m late all the time, but I tried to raise you better.”

“How so?”

“You know. To not make all the mistakes I did.”

“Yeah, but how so? What did you do, to raise me better?”

“It’s stupid hot out,” she said. “They got air conditioning in that home?”

“In the office. Where we’re not allowed.”

We meet up once a month, even though she’s not approved for unsupervised visits. I won’t visit her at home because her man is always there, always drunk, always able, in the course of an hour, to remind me how miserable and stupid I am. How horrible my life will become, just as soon as I age out. How my options are the streets or jail or overclocking; what they’ll do to me in each of those places. So now we meet up on the subway, and ride to Brooklyn Bridge and then back to Burnside.

Arm flab jiggled as she fanned herself. Mom is happy in her fat. Heroin kept her skinny; crack gave her lots of exercise. For her, obesity is a brightly colored sign that says NOT ADDICTED ANYMORE. Her man keeps her fed; this is what makes someone a Good Man. Brakes screamed as a downtown train pulled into the station.

“Oooh, stop, wait,” she said, grabbing at my pantleg with one puffy hand. “Let’s catch the next one. I wanna finish my cigarette.”

I got on the train. She came, too, finally, hustling, flustered, barely making it.

“What’s gotten into you today?” she said, when she wrestled her pocketbook free from the doors. “You upset about something? You’re never this,” and she snapped her fingers in the air while she looked for the word assertive. I had it in my head. I would not give it to her. Finally she just waved her hand and sat down. “Oh, that air conditioning feels good.”

“José? How’s he?”

“Fine, fine,” she said, still fanning from force of habit. Fifty-degree air pumped directly down on us from the ceiling ducts.

“And you?”

“Fine.”

“Mom—I wanted to ask you something.”

“Anything, my love,” she said, fanning faster.

“You said one time that all the bad decisions you made—none of it would have happened if you could just keep yourself from falling in love.”

When I’m with my mom my words never come out wrong. I think it’s because I kind of hate her.

“I said that?”

“You did.”

“Weird.”

“What did you mean?”

“Christ, honey, I don’t know.” The Post slowed, stopped, settled into her lap. “It’s stupid, but there’s nothing I won’t do for a man I love. A woman who’s looking for a man to plug a hole she’s got inside? She’s in trouble.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Below us, the Bronx scrolled by. Sights I’d been seeing all my life. The same sooty sides of buildings; the same cop cars on every block looking for boys like me. I thought of Case, then, and clean sharp joy pushed out all my fear. My eyes shut, from the pleasure of remembering him, and saw a glorious rush of ported imagery. Movie stills; fashion spreads; unspeakable obscenity. Not blurry this time; requiring no extra effort. I wondered what was different. I knew my mouth was open in an idiot grin, somewhere in a southbound subway car, but I didn’t care, and I stood knee-deep in a river of images until the elevated train went underground after 161st Street.

• • • •

WE ARE THE CLOUD, said the sign on the door, atop a sea of multicolored dots with stylized wireless signals bouncing between them.

Walking in with Case, I saw that maybe I had oversold the place by saying it was “nice.” Nicer than the ones by Lincoln Hospital, maybe, where people come covered in blood and puke, having left against medical advice after spasming out in a public housing stairwell. But still. It wasn’t actually nice.

Older people nodded off on benches, smelling of shit and hunger. Gross as it was, I liked those offices. All those ports started a pleasant buzzing in my head. Like we added up to something.

“Look at that guy,” Case said, sitting down on the bench beside me. He pointed to a man whose head was tilted back, gurgling up a steady stream of phlegm that had soaked his shirt and was dripping onto the floor.

“Overclocked,” I said, and stopped. His shoulder felt good against my bicep. “Some people. Sell more than they should. Of their brain.”

Sell enough of it, and they’d put you up in one of their Node Care Facilities, grim nursing homes for thirty-something vegetables and doddering senior citizens in their twenties, but once you were in you were never coming out, because people ported that hard could barely walk a block or speak a sentence, let alone obtain and hold meaningful employment.

And if I didn’t want to end up on the street, that was my only real option. I’d been to job interviews. Some I walked into on my own; some the system set up for me. Nothing was out there for anyone, let alone a frowning, stammering tower of man who more than one authority figure had referred to as a “fucking imbecile.”

“What about him?” Case asked, pointing to another guy whose hands and legs twitched too rhythmically and regularly for it to be a dream.

“Clouddiving,” I said.

He laughed. “I thought only retards could do that.”

“That’s,” I said. “Not.”

“Okay,” he said, when he saw I wouldn’t be saying anything else on the subject.

I wanted very badly to cry. Only retards. A part of me had thought maybe I could share it with Case, tell him what I could do. But of course I couldn’t. I fast-blinked, each brief shutting of my eyes showing a flurry of cloud-snatched photographs.

Ten minutes later I caught him smiling at me, maybe realizing he had said something wrong. I wanted so badly for Case to see inside my head. What I was. How I wasn’t an imbecile, or a retard.

Our eyes locked. I leaned forward. Hungry for him to see me, the way no one else ever had. I wanted to tell him what I could do. How I could access data. How sometimes I thought I could maybe control data. How I dreamed of using it to burn everything down. But I wasn’t strong enough to think those things, let alone say them. Some secrets you can’t share, no matter how badly you want to.

• • • •

I went back alone. Case had somewhere to be. It hurt, realizing he had things in his life I knew nothing about. I climbed the steps and a voice called from the front-porch darkness.

“Awful late,” Guerra said. The stubby man who ran the place: Most of his body weight was gristle and mustache. He stole our stuff and ate our food and took bribes from dealer residents to get rivals logged out. In the dark I knew he couldn’t even see who I was.

“Nine,” I said. “It’s not. O’clock.”

He sucked the last of his Coke through a straw, in the noisiest manner imaginable. “Whatever.”

Salvation Army landscapes clotted the walls. Distant mountains and daybreak forests, smelling like cigarette smoke, carpet cleaner, thruway exhaust. There was a sadness to the place I hadn’t noticed before, not even when I was hating it. In the living room, a boy knelt before the television. Another slept on the couch. In the poor light, I couldn’t tell if one of them was the one who had hurt Case.

There were so many of us in the system. We could add up to an army. Why did we all hate and fear each other so much? Friendships formed from time to time, but they were weird and tinged with what-can-I-get-from-you, liable to shatter at any moment as allegiances shifted or kids got transferred. If all the violence we visited on ourselves could be turned outwards, maybe we could—

But only danger was in that direction. I thought of my mom’s man, crippled in a prison riot, living fat off the settlement, saying, drunk, once, Only thing the Man fears more than one of us is a lot of us.

I went back to my room, and got down on the floor, under the window. And shut my eyes. And dove.

Into spreadsheets and songs and grainy CCTV feeds and old films and pages scanned from books that no longer existed anywhere in the world. Whatever the telecom happens to be porting through you at that precise moment.

Only damaged people can dive. Something to do with how the brain processes speech. Every time I did it, I was terrified. Convinced they’d see me, and come for me. But that night I wanted something badly enough to balance out the being afraid.

Eyes shut, I let myself melt into data. Shuffled faster and faster, pulled back far enough to see Manhattan looming huge and epic with mountains of data at Wall Street and Midtown. Saw the Bronx, a flat spread of tiny data heaps here and there. I held my breath, seeing it, feeling certain no one had ever seen it like this before, money and megabytes in massive spiraling loops, unspeakably gorgeous and fragile. I could see how much money would be lost if the flow was broken for even a single second, and I could see where all the fault lines lay. But I wasn’t looking for that. I was looking for Case.

• • • •

And then: Case came knocking. Like I had summoned him up from the datastream. Like what I wanted actually mattered outside of my head.

“Hey there, mister,” he said, when I opened my door.

I took a few steps backwards.

He shut the door and sat down on my bed. “You’ve got a Game Boy, right? I saw the headphones.” I didn’t respond, and he said, “Damn, dude, I’m not trying to steal your stuff, okay? I have one of my own. Wondered if you wanted to play together.” Case flashed his, bright red to my blue one.

“The thing,” I said. “I don’t have. The cable.”

He patted his pants pocket. “That’s okay, I do.”

We sat on the bed, shoulders touching, backs against the wall, and played Mega Man 2. Evil robots came at us by the dozen to die.

I touched the cord with one finger. Such a primitive thing, to need a physical connection. Case smelled like soap, but not the Ivory they give you in the system. Like cream, I thought, but that wasn’t right. To really describe it I’d need a whole new world of words no one ever taught me.

“That T-shirt looks good on you,” he said. “Makes you look like a gym boy.”

“I’m not. It’s just . . . what there was. What was there. In the donation bin. Once Guerra picked out all the good stuff. Hard to find clothes that fit when you’re six six.”

“It does fit, though.”

Midway through Skull Man’s level, Case said: “You talk funny sometimes. What’s up with that?” and I was shocked to see no anger surge through me.

“It’s a thing. A speech thing. What you call it when people have trouble talking.”

“A speech impediment.”

I nodded. “But a weird one. Where the words don’t come out right. Or don’t come out at all. Or come out as the wrong word. Clouding makes it worse.”

“I like it,” he said, looking at me now instead of Mega Man. “It’s part of what makes you unique.”

We played without talking, tinny music echoing in the little room.

“I don’t want to go back to my room. I might get jacked in the hallway.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Can I stay here? I’ll sleep on the floor.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re the best, Sauro.” And there were his hands again, rubbing the top of my head. He took off his shirt and began to make a bed on my floor. Fine black hair covers almost all of me, but Case’s body was mostly bare. My throat hurt with how bad I wanted to put my hands on him. I got into bed with my boxers on, embarrassed by what was happening down there.

• • • •

“Sauro,” he whispered, suddenly beside me in the bed.

I grunted; stumbled coming from dreams to reality.

His body was spooned in front of mine. “Is this okay?”

“Yes. Yes, it is.” I tightened my arms around him. His warmth and smell stiffened me. And then his head had turned, his mouth was moving down my belly, his body pinning me to the bed, which was good, because God had turned off gravity and the slightest breeze would have had me floating right out the window and into space.

• • • •

“You ever do this before? With a guy?”

“Not out loud—I mean, not in real life.”

“You’ve thought about it.”

“Yeah.”

“You’ve thought about it a lot.”

“Yeah.”

“Why didn’t you ever do it?

“I don’t know.”

“You were afraid of what people might think?”

“No.”

“Then what were you afraid of?”

Losing control was what I wanted to say, or giving someone power over me, or making a mess.

Or: The boys that make me feel like you make me feel turn me into something stupid, brutish, clumsy, worthless.

Or: I knew a gay kid, once, in a group home upstairs from a McDonald’s, watched twelve guys hold him down in a locked room until the morning guy came at eight, saw him when they wheeled him towards the ambulance.

I shrugged. The motion of my shoulders shook his little body.

• • • •

I fought sleep as hard and long as I could. I didn’t want to not be there. And when I knew I couldn’t fight it anymore I let myself sink into data—easy as blinking this time—felt myself ebb out of my cloud port, but instead of following the random data beamed into me by the nearest router, I reached—felt my way across the endless black gulf of six inches that separated his cloud port from mine, and found him there, a jagged wobbly galaxy of data, ugly and incongruous, but beautiful, because it was him, and because, even if it was only for a moment, he was mine.

Case, I said.

He twitched in his sleep. Said his own name.

I love you, I said.

Asleep, Case said it, too.

• • • •

Kentucky Fried Chicken. Thursday morning. For the first time, I didn’t feel like life was a fight about to break out, or like everyone wanted to mess with me. Everywhere I went, someone wanted to throw me out—but now the only person who even noticed me was a crazy lady rooting through a McDonald’s soda cup of change.

Case asked, “Anyone ever tell you you’re a sexy beast?” On my baldness his hands no longer seemed so tiny. My big thick skull was an eggshell.

“Also? Dude? You’re huge.” He nudged my crotch with his knee. “You know that? Like off the charts.”

“Yeah?”

I laughed. His glee was contagious and his hands were moving down my arm and we were sitting in public talking about gay sex and he didn’t care and neither did I.

“When I first came to the city, I did some porn,” Case said. “I got like five hundred dollars for it.”

I chewed slow. Stared at the bones and tendons of the drumstick in my hand. Didn’t look up. I thought about what I had done, while clouddiving. How I said his name, and he echoed me. I dreamed of taking him up to the roof at night, snapping my fingers and making the whole Bronx go dark except for Case’s name, spelled out in blazing tenement window lights. It would be easy. I could do anything. Because: Case.

“Would you be interested in doing something like that?”

“No.”

“Not even for like a million dollars?”

“Maybe a million. But probably not.”

“You’re funny. You know that? How you follow the rules. All they ever do is get you hurt.”

“Getting in trouble means something different for you than it does for me.”

Here’s what I realized: It wasn’t hate that made it easy to talk to my mom. It was love. Love let the words out.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because. What you are.”

“Because I’m a sexy mother?”

I didn’t grin back.

“Because I’m white.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” he said. “Right. You see? The rules are not your friend. Racists made the rules. Racists enforce them.”

I put the picked-clean drumstick down.

Case said “Whatever” and the word was hot and long, a question, an accusation. “The world put you where you are, Sauro, but fear keeps you there. You want to never make any decisions. Drift along and hope everything turns out for the best. You know where that’ll put you.”

The lady with the change cup walked by our table. Snatched a thigh off of Case’s plate. “Put that down right this minute, asshole,” he said, loud as hell, standing up. For a second the country-bumpkin Case was gone, replaced by someone I’d never seen before. The lady scurried off. Case caught me staring and smiled, aw-shucks style.

• • • •

“Stand up,” I said. “Go by the window.”

He went. Evening sun turned him into something golden.

Men used to paralyze me. My whole life I’d been seeing confident charismatic guys, and thought I could never get to that place. Never have what they had. Now I saw it wasn’t what they had that I wanted, it was what they were. I felt lust, not inferiority, and the two are way too close. Like hate and love.

“You make me feel like food,” he said, and then lay himself face down on the floor. “Why don’t you come over here?” Scissored his legs open. Turned his head and smiled like all the smiles I ever wanted but did not get.

• • • •

Pushing in, I heard myself make a noise that can only be called a bellow.

“Shh,” he said, “everyone will hear us.”

My hips took on a life of their own. My hands pushed hard, all up and down his body. Case was tiny underneath me. A twig I could break.

Afterwards I heard snoring from down the hall. Someone sobbed. I’d spent so long focused on how full the world was of horrible things. I’d been so conditioned to think that its good things were reserved for someone else that I never saw how many were already within my grasp. In my head, for one thing, where my thoughts were my own and no one could punish me for them, and in the cloud, where I was coming to see that I could do astonishing things. And in bed. And wherever Case was. My eyes filled up and ran over and I pushed my face into the cool nape of his sleeping neck.

• • • •

My one and only time in court: I am ten. Mom bought drugs at a bodega. It’s her tenth or hundredth time passing through those tall tarnished-bronze doors. Her court date came on one of my rare stints out of the system, when she cleaned up her act convincingly enough that they gave me briefly back to her.

The courtroom is too crowded; the guard tells me to wait outside. “But he’s my son,” my mother says, pointing out smaller children sitting by their parents.

I am very big for ten.

“He’s gotta stay out here,” the guard says.

I sit on the floor and count green flecks in the floor. Dark-skinned men surround me, angry but resigned, defiant but hopeless. The floor’s sparkle mocks us: our poverty, our mortality, the human needs that brought us here.

• • • •

“Where I’m from,” Case said, “you could put a down payment on a house with two thousand dollars.”

“Oh.”

“You ever dream about escaping New York?”

“Kind of. In my head.”

Case laughed. “What about you and me getting out of town? Moving away?”

My head hurt with how badly I wanted that. “You hated that place. You don’t want to go back.”

“I hated it because I was alone. If we went back together, I would have you.”

“Oh.”

His fingers drummed up and down my chest. Ran circles around my nipples. “I called that guy I know. The porn producer. Told him about you. He said he’d give us each five hundred, and another two-fifty for me as a finder’s fee.”

“You called him? About me?”

“This could be it, Sauro. A new start. For both of us.”

“I don’t know,” I said, but I did know. I knew I was lost, that I couldn’t say no, that his mouth, now circling my belly button, had only to speak and I would act.

“Are you really such a proper little gentleman?” he asked. His hands, cold as winter, hooked behind my knees. “You never got into trouble before?”

• • • •

My one time in trouble.

I am five. It’s three in the morning. I’m riding my tricycle down the block. A policeman stops me. Where’s your mother/ She’s home/ Why aren’t you home?/ I was hungry and there’s no food. Mom is on a heroin holiday, lying on the couch while she’s somewhere else. For a week I’ve been stealing food from corner stores. So much cigarette smoke fills the cop car that I can’t breathe. At the precinct he leaves me there, windows all rolled up. Later he takes me home, talks to my mom, fills out a report, takes her away. Someone else takes me. Everything ends. All of this is punishment for some crime I committed without realizing it. I resolve right then and there to never again steal food, ride tricycles, talk to cops, think bad thoughts, step outside to get something I need.

• • • •

Friday afternoon we rode the train to Manhattan. Case took us to a big building, no different on the outside from any other one. A directory on the wall listed a couple dozen tenants. ARABY STUDIOS was where we were going.

“I have an appointment with Mr. Goellnitz,” Case told a woman at a desk upstairs. The place smelled like paint over black mold. We sat in a waiting room like a doctor’s, except with different posters on the walls.

In one, a naked boy squatted on some rocks. A beautiful boy. Fine black hair all over his body. Eyes like lighthouses. Something about his chin and cheekbones turned my knees to hot jelly. Stayed with me when I shut my eyes.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Just some boy,” Case said.

“Does he work here?”

“No one works here.”

“Oh.”

Filming was about to start when I figured out why that boy on the rocks bothered me so much. I had thought only Case could get into my head so hard, make me feel so powerless, so willing to do absolutely anything.

• • • •

A cinderblock room, dressed up like how Hollywood imagines the projects. Low ceilings and Snoop Dogg posters. Overflowing ashtrays. A pit bull dozing in a corner. A scared little white boy sitting on the couch.

“I’m sorry, Rico, you know I am. You gotta give me another chance.”

The dark scary drug dealer towers over him. Wearing a wife beater and a bicycle chain around his neck. A hard-on bobs inside his sweatpants. “That’s the last time I lose money on you, punk.”

The drug dealer grabs him by the neck, rubs his thumb along the boy’s lips, pushes his thumb into the warm wet mouth.

• • • •

“Do it,” Goellnitz barked.

“I can’t,” I said.

“Say the fucking line.”

Silence.

“Or I’ll throw your ass out of here and neither one of you will get a dime.”

Case said “Come on, dude! Just say it.”

—and how could I disobey? How could I not do every little thing he asked me to do?

Porn was like cloudporting, like foster care. One more way they used you up.

One more weapon you could use against them.

I shut my eyes and made my face a snarl. Hissed out each word, one at a time, to make sure I’d only have to say it once

“That’s.” “Right.” “Bitch.” I spat on his back, hit him hard in the head. “Tell.” “Me.” “You.” “Like it.” Off camera, in the mirror, Case winked.

Where did it come from, the strength to say all that? To say all that, and do all the other things I never knew I could do? Case gave it to me. Case, and the cloud, which I could feel and see now even with my eyes open, even without thinking about it, sweet and clear as the smell of rain.

• • • •

“Damn, dude,” Case said, while they switched to the next camera set-up. “You’re actually kind of a good actor with how you deliver those lines.” He was naked; he was fearless. I cowered on the couch, a towel covering as much of me as I could manage. What was it in Case that made him so certain nothing bad would happen to him? At first I chalked it up to white skin, but now I wasn’t sure it was so simple. His eyes were on the window. His mind was already elsewhere.

• • • •

The showers were echoey, like TV high school locker rooms. We stood there, naked, side by side. I slapped Case’s ass, and when he didn’t respond I did it again, and when he didn’t respond I stood behind him and kissed the back of his neck. He didn’t say or do a thing. So I left the shower to go get dressed.

“Did I hurt you?” I hollered, when ten minutes had gone by and he was still standing under the water.

“What? No.”

“Oh.”

He wasn’t moving. Wasn’t soaping or lathering or rinsing.

“Is everything okay?” Making my voice warm, to hide how cold I suddenly felt.

“Yeah. It was just . . . intense. Sex usually isn’t. For me.”

His voice was weird and sad and not exactly nice. I sat on a bench and watched him get harder and harder to see as the steam built up.

• • • •

“Would you mind heading up to the House ahead of me?” he said, finally. “I need some time to get my head together. I’ll square up things with the director and be there soon.”

“Waiting is cool.”

“No. It’s not. I need some alone time.”

“Alone time,” I smirked. “You’re a—”

“You need to get the hell back, Angel. Okay?”

Hearing the hardness in his voice, I wondered if there was a way to spontaneously stop being alive.

• • • •

“I got your cash right here,” the director said, flapping an envelope at me.

“He’ll get it,” I said, knowing it was stupid. “My boyfriend.”

“You sure?”

I nodded.

“Here’s my business card. I hoped you might think about being in something of mine again sometime. Your friend’s only got a few more flicks in him. Twinks burn out fast. You, on the other hand—you’ve got something special. You could have a long career.”

“Thanks,” I said, nodding, furious, too tall, too retarded, too sensitive, hating myself the whole way down the elevator, and the whole walk to the subway, and the whole ride back to what passed for home.

When the train came above ground after 149th Street, I felt the old shudder as my cloud port clicked back into the municipal grid. Shame and anger made me brave, and I dove. I could see the car as data, saw transmissions to and from a couple dozen cell phones and tablets and biodevices, saw how the train’s forward momentum warped the information flowing in and out. Saw ten jagged blobs inside, my fellow cloudbounds. Reached out again, like I had with Case. Felt myself slip through one after another like a thread through ten needles. Tugged that thread the tiniest bit, and watched all ten bow their heads as one.

• • • •

Friday night I stayed up ’til three in the morning, waiting for Case to come knocking. I played the Skull Man level on Mega Man 2 until I could beat it without getting hit by a single enemy. I dove into the cloud, hunted down maps, opened up whole secret worlds. I fell asleep like that, and woke up wet from fevered dreams of Case.

Saturday—still no sign of him.

Sunday morning I called Guerra’s cell phone, a strict no-no on the weekends.

“This better be an emergency, Sauro,” he said.

“Did you log Case out?”

“Case?”

“The white boy.”

“You call me up to bother me with your business deals? No, jackass, I didn’t log him out. I haven’t seen him. Thanks for reminding me, though. I’ll phone him in as missing on Monday morning.”

“You—”

But Guerra had gone.

• • • •

First thing Monday, I rode the subway into Manhattan and walked into that office like I had as much right as anyone else to occupy any square meter of space in this universe. I worried I wouldn’t be able to, without Case. I didn’t know what this new thing coming awake inside me was, but I knew it made me strong. Enough.

The porn man gave me a hundred dollars, no strings attached. Said to keep him in mind, said he had some scripts that I could “transform from low-budget bullshit into something really special.”

He was afraid of me. He was right to be afraid, but not for the reason he thought. I could clouddive and wipe Araby Studios out of existence in the time it took him to blink his eyes. I could see his fear, and I could see how he wanted me anyway for the money he could make off me. There was so much to see, once you’re ready to look for it.

Maybe I was right the first time: It had been hate that made it easy to talk to my mom. Love can make us become what we need to be, but so can hate. Case was gone, but the words kept coming. Life is nothing but acting.

• • • •

I could have:

Given Guerra the hundred dollars to track Case down. He’d call his contacts down at the department; he’d hand me an address. Guerra would do the same job for fifty bucks, but for a hundred he’d bow and yessir like a good little lackey.

Smiled my way into every placement house in the city, knocked on every door to every tiny room until I found him.

Hung around outside Araby Studios, wait for him to snivel back with his latest big, dumb, dark stud. Wait in the shower until he went to wash his ass out, kick him to the floor, fuck him endlessly and extravagantly. Reach up into him, seize hold of his heart and tear it to shreds with bare bloody befouled hands.

The image of him in the shower brought me to a full and instant erection. I masturbated, hating myself, trying hard to focus on a scenario where I hurt him . . . but even in my own revenge fantasy I wanted to wrap my body around his and keep him safe.

• • • •

Afterwards I amended my revenge scenario list to include:

Finding someone else to screw over, some googly-eyed blond boy looking to plug a hole he has inside.

Becoming the most famous, richest, biggest gay porn star in history, traveling the world, standing naked on sharp rocks in warm oceans. Becoming what they wanted me to be, just long enough to get a paycheck. Seeing Case in the bargain bin someday; seeing him in the gutter.

Burning down every person and institution that profited off the suffering of others.

Becoming the kept animal of some rich, powerful queen who will parade me at fancy parties and give me anything I need as long as I do him the favor of regularly fucking him into a state of such quivering sweat-soaked helplessness that childhood trauma and white guilt and global warming all evaporate.

Finding someone who I will never, ever, ever screw over.

Really, they were all good plans. None of it was off the table.

• • • •

Leaving the office building, I ignored all the instincts that screamed get on the subway and get the hell out of here before some cop stops you for matching a description! Standing on a street corner for no reason felt magnificent and forbidden.

I shut my eyes. Reached out into the cloud, felt myself magnified like any other signal by the wireless routers that filled the city. Found the seams of the infrastructure that kept the flow of data in place. The weak spots. The ways to snap or bend or reconstruct that flow. How to erase any and all criminal records; pay the rent for my mom and every other sad sack in the Bronx for all eternity. Divert billions in banker dividends into the debit accounts of cloudporters everywhere.

I pushed, and when nothing happened I pushed harder.

A tiny pop, and smoke trickled up from the wireless router atop the nearest lamppost. Nothing more. My whole body dripped with sweat. Some dripped into my eyes. It stung. Ten minutes had passed, and felt like five seconds. My muscles ached like after a hundred push-ups. All those things that had seemed so easy—I wasn’t strong enough to do them on my own.

Fear keeps you where you are, Case said. Finally I could see that he was right, but I could see something else that he couldn’t see. Because he thought small, and because he only thought about himself.

Fear keeps us separate.

I shut my eyes again, and reached. A ritzy part of town; hardly any cloudbounds in the immediate area. The nearest one was in a bar down the block.

“What’ll you have,” the bartender said, when I got there. He didn’t ask for ID.

“Boy on the rocks,” I said, and then kicked at the stool. “Shit. No. Scotch. Scotch on the rocks.”

“Sure,” he said.

“And for that guy,” I said, pointing down the bar to the passed-out overclocked man I had sensed from outside. “One. Thing. The same.”

I took my drink to a booth in the front, where I could see out the window. I took a sip. I reached further, eyes open this time, until I found twenty more cloudporters, some as far as fifty blocks away, and threaded us together.

The slightest additional effort, and I was everywhere. All five boroughs—thousands of cloudporters looped through me. With all of us put together I felt inches away from snapping the city in two. Again I reached out and felt for optimal fracture points. Again I pushed. Gently, this time.

An explosion, faraway but huge. Con Edison’s east side substation, I saw, in the six milliseconds before the station’s failure overloaded transmission lines and triggered a cascading failure that killed all electricity to the tri-state region.

I smiled, in the darkness, over my second sip. Within a week the power would be back on. And I—we—could get to work. Whatever that would be. Stealing money; exterminating our exploiters; leveling the playing field. Finding Case, forging a cyberterrorism manifesto, blaming the blackout on him, sending a pulse of electricity through his body precisely calibrated to paralyze him perfectly.

On my third sip I saw I still wasn’t sure I wanted to hurt him. Maybe he’d done me wrong, but so had my mom. So had lots of folks. And I wouldn’t be what I was without them.

Scotch tastes like smoke, like old men. I drank slow so I wouldn’t get too drunk. I had never walked into a bar before. I always imagined cops coming out of the corners to drag me off to jail. But that wasn’t how the world worked. Nothing was stopping me from walking into wherever I wanted to go.

© 2014 by Sam J. Miller.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Nightmare, Shimmer, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Electric Velocipede, Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, The Minnesota Review, and The Rumpus, among others. He is a graduate of the 2012 Clarion Writer’s Workshop and the co-editor of Horror After 9/11, an anthology published by the University of Texas Press. His story “57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides” won the 2013 Shirley Jackson Award for best short story. Learn more at samjmiller.com.

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

FANTASY

No Lonely Seafarer

Sarah Pinsker

On the nights Mrs. Wainwright let me work in the barn instead of the tavern, I used to sing to the horses. They would greet me with their own murmurs, and swivel their ears to follow my voice as I readied their suppers. That was where Captain Smythe found me: in the barn, singing a song of my own making. I shut up as soon as I heard the door squeal on its hinges.

“You’re Freddy Turlington’s boy, aren’t you?” His voice was rummy but not drunk. There were men around I felt the need to hide from, but he didn’t seem like one of them.

“Turlington was my father.”

I watched him from one of the stalls. He sat down heavily on a bale of bedding straw, grunting as if the effort pressed all the air from his lungs. He wore a well-fitted blue coat and his boots still shone with care, which set him apart from most of our patrons these days.

“You must be, what, ten now?”

I didn’t answer, but resumed my feeding rounds. Thirteen. Close enough. The horses rumbled their “pleases” and “thank yous.”

“What’s your name, child?”

“Alex,” I answered.

“Alex, do you know who I am?”

“Captain Smythe. My father sailed with you.”

“Freddy was a good sailor and a good cook. I was sorry he got himself killed.”

That one didn’t really have an answer, so I left it. I climbed up into the loft, dangling my legs over. He looked up at me. His face was red, but less from drink than from exposure, as far as I could tell from the uniformity of the color. His skin had the look of leather left out in the sun.

“Can you sail, child?”

“Yes, sir.”

I wished he would get to his point, whatever it was, but he was in no hurry. He closed his eyes. I thought for a moment he had fallen asleep, but then he addressed me again.

“I’d like you to sail out with me next week.”

I assessed him again. I hadn’t thought him drunk, but he had to know we couldn’t sail anywhere. I chose to take the practical tack first. “I can’t. My father bonded me to Mrs. Wainwright when he left me here.”

“I spoke with Mrs. Wainwright about buying your bond. Or leasing it, I should say. I’ll only have need of you for a short trip. I need somebody your age on board. Do you know why?”

I considered for a moment. “You think I can get you past the sirens?”

He smiled. “Well done. Yes. We must get past the sirens, and beeswax doesn’t bloody well do it, contrary to anything Homer said. Bright child.”

It didn’t take intelligence. There wasn’t a person in Dog’s Bay who hadn’t heard about the sirens now nesting on the headland, singing at anyone who tried to pass, keeping ships from getting in or out. The streets and the taverns and the boardinghouses were all clogged with sailors, who were in turn clogged with their desire to be back on the sea. It was part of why I felt so much safer in the barn. The Salt Dog tavern became rowdier with each passing night. Fights and fires would come next, according to Mrs. Wainwright. She said she was old enough to have seen it all before.

“What about sirens?” I had asked her.

She shook her head. “Not personally, but search the sea long enough and you’ll see most stories have some truth to them.”

Everyone in port had an opinion on how to get past the sirens. In recent evenings past, clearing tables, I had heard debate after debate on the matter. Lucius Nickleby had been the first to try to leave. He and his men had stuffed their ears with beeswax, the way the Greeks had done. John Harrow watched through his spyglass on shore as they threw themselves from the deck. Ahmed Fairouz, with his fluyt Mahalia, had attempted to outrun the bewitching songs. The Mahalia was dashed to splinters on the rocks below the promontory. A month later, pieces were still washing to shore with each tide.

“You understand what I’m proposing, boy?” Smythe asked.

“You’re hoping that their voices don’t work on a child.”

“I’m betting my life on it.”

I dropped down from the loft and walked over to where he was sitting. He was not a large man, though I was much smaller. Up close, his blue coat was stained and split-seamed. It made me bolder than I might have been otherwise. “You’re betting my life on it as well. Do you expect to rouse an entire crew of children, then? Or am I to tie all your men to the masts until we pass?”

He was silent as he appraised me afresh. Maybe my voice was older than he expected, or maybe he caught a glimmer of what Mrs. Wainwright called “the off thing” about me. When he spoke again, the false cheer was gone from his voice. “I’m thinking it would be the two of us, in a small fishing boat I purchased for the purpose. And yes, I would have you tie me up, but no use risking my men or my ship if I’m wrong. If I’m right, we can pass unharmed, then return to port. If I’m mistaken, well, at least I die at sea, as I was meant to do.”

“As you were meant to do,” I echoed, emphasizing the “you.” His chosen destiny, not mine. Not that I had any reason to expect a choice. If Mrs. Wainwright wanted to sell or rent my bond, she had every right. Then again, I liked that Smythe had come to me as if it were a question. I liked the idea of seeing something beyond Dog’s Bay, even if only briefly. I had never considered myself an heir to my father’s wanderlust, but maybe some small sliver of it in me begged to be entertained. I wanted to see how the ocean differed from the cove, and why it called to all of the men of our town as persuasively as any siren.

“If you’ve already spoken with Mrs. Wainwright and she’s said I’m to go, I’ve no business saying otherwise.” His rough hand dwarfed mine when we shook on it.

• • • •

I waited until the next day to seek out Mrs. Wainwright. I found her overseeing the morning meal, making sure the twins ladled each customer exactly the right amount of porridge. She rarely cheated a patron, just made sure they got what they had paid for and nothing more. It had taken a long time to get the twins to understand that nuance; now, at seven, they needed only minimal supervision.

I waved a greeting. Eliza waved back, but Simon was clearly using all his attention to make sure the spoon got to the bowl and back without making a mess.

I came around the bar and Mrs. Wainwright swatted me with a towel. The gesture was friendly, her tone only mock stern. “Don’t be distracting them now. I might allow them to serve stew if this comes off right. Are the horses fed and watered?”

“Yes, ma’am. That little chestnut that came in with the knife salesman is still not drinking, though.”

“Hopefully he’ll leave again before he notices. Bit of a fool in any case. Try giving it some beer in its water when you go out next. Maybe the water here tastes different from the other side of the island. I’ll tell you, I’ll be happy when all of these opportunists hitch up and drive away and things get back to normal.”

She squinted at me, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “Something bothering you, Alex?”

“That captain you sent out to the barn last night?”

She nodded. “Smythe. Good man. Used to come around a fair bit back in the day. Bad luck for him that the first time he swings out our way in a dog’s year is when those screechy biddies settle down to roost. Here, make yourself useful.”

I took the rag she held out, and began to wipe the closest unoccupied table. A couple of groggy sailors sat on the fringes of the room and one at the far end of the bar. I lowered my voice so the discussion could continue without them or the twins overhearing. “But—why’d you send him to me?”

“His idea is better than anything the rest of these fools came up with. Silas Hill—that fellow in the far corner—he’s trying to work up the dash-fire to make himself deaf, if he can figure out how. Only he’ll have to deafen his whole crew as well, won’t he?” She made sure Silas Hill heard her. He stared into his ale.

“But Smythe’s idea is to have a young boy take him, and you know I’m not as young as that, and,” I walked to her side to whisper, “you know I’m not exactly the boy we say I am.”

“All the better for it,” she whispered back. “I think you have more chance than anyone, and this has to happen soon, before things get out of control.”

“Why not one of those lady captains that come in here sometimes?”

She shook her head. “One of them tried as well, not two days ago. That’s her mast sticking out of the rocks like a flagpole. But you’re no lady captain.”

“So you’re trying to kill me. You want me out of here. Sold to the highest bidder.” I swiped at a sticky spot on the bar with my rag until she stopped my hand.

“I have a right to do that if I want, but you’ve always worked hard, and I’m not of a mind to lose your help. I think you’ll survive because you’re not like any of the others who have tried.”

“I see,” I said in mock comprehension, not bothering to hide my anger. “Then it’s because I’m neither-nor?”

She took the rag from my hand. “No. Because you know what you are, in a way that most people don’t ever have to think about. Now take those fool children and clean them off before I’m tempted to beat them.”

I looked over to see that the twins had managed to knock over the vat of porridge in their own direction. They were working together to right the pot, but wearing most of the dregs.

I wasn’t going to win any argument here. “Come on, you two. Looks like you’re getting a scrubbing, but it’s better than a beating.”

They followed me outside. Simon’s left foot squished as he walked. Step, squish. Step, squish. Even in my dark mood, I found it hard not to laugh.

“Fetch two buckets each,” I said, sliding the barn door open wide enough for them to wriggle through. They returned a moment later, and we went to the pump. I took pity on them and carried two back myself, leaving each of them with one full bucket. Sometimes two is better than one, though. Balance. Eliza lost half of hers on the walk back, most onto her own shoes and trousers. Simon trailed us, careful not to spill a drop.

The day was mild enough, so I poured the four buckets into the barnyard trough.

“Empty your shoe into one of those buckets,” I told Simon. “And both of you, any porridge you can scrape off yourselves.”

They did as they were told.

“Now into the trough with you ducklings.” They both hesitated, then Simon shrugged and climbed over the edge, and his sister followed with a whimper. I slipped into the barn to give the shoe-porridge to the little chestnut mare that wouldn’t drink.

When I returned to the barnyard, I heard the twins bickering. Eliza sounded more put upon, so I suspected the accident had been her fault. They were both still in their clothing, but I figured that needed washing, too.

I had been in charge of their baths and their nappies from the time they had arrived, when I was seven. The smooth cleft between Eliza’s legs and the nub between Simon’s taught me everything that I was supposed to be and wasn’t. I suspected later that was part of the reason Mrs. Wainwright had put me to the task.

“Why?” I asked the first time she showed me how to clean each of them properly.

“Why are they different from each other, or why are you different from both of them?”

I considered. “Yes.”

“Most everyone is born into this world a boy, like Simon, or a girl, like Eliza. I guess there are some people in the world born like you, with boy parts and girl parts that don’t really add up to either. That isn’t really a why, but I’m not sure there is one. You’ve seen that tabby cat running around with the extra toes? That doesn’t bother her none, so I guess you have to make up your mind that this won’t bother you neither.”

The cat in question unlatched box stalls and unscrewed jars. She did pretty well for herself.

“It won’t bother me neither,” I echoed.

“Do you feel more like one than the other?”

I looked at the two babies. Up until that point I hadn’t really thought about it either way. It didn’t seem to make much difference.

“I don’t know,” I answered honestly.

“It’ll be safer for you to live as a boy. You can piss standing up, and you won’t get pawed by as many of the drunks so long as your chest stays flat, and they won’t get any surprise sticking a hand down your skirt someday. Though that would serve them right. I wouldn’t mind teaching that lesson myself.”

“I can be a boy.” More than anything, I wanted to please her. I was rewarded with a smile.

“You’re a good child, Alex. Whatever else you are doesn’t matter to me.”

I had one more question. “Is that why my father left me here?”

She gave Simon a final powdering of wood dust and put him into my arms. “Yes and no. Your father left you because a seafaring man can’t be expected to care for a baby, and he knew I’d raise you and give you work. How he wound up with you? I would guess that the woman that bore you, whoever she was, got a little put out by that collection of parts you’re carrying and decided to wash her hands of you. No matter, though. It’s just an odd thing, and one better not to discuss with anyone else. You understand?”

I nodded, bouncing Simon on my knee. He giggled. I made a face, and he copied it. That would be how I would learn, too.

• • • •

I draped the wet clothing over a rail to dry, and bade the two naked children to sit on an old blanket while I cleaned stalls.

“Why do you sing to the horses?” Eliza asked, tucking in her toes to stay clear of my wheelbarrow.

“To let them know where I am, and to keep them calm while I work around them. And because I like it. There, that’s three reasons.”

“Are we allowed to sing?”

“Always, little duck. Pick a song.”

I dumped the barrow outside, then joined my voice with theirs as I hoisted my pitchfork again.

By the time I finished all fourteen occupied straight stalls and the two boxes, the sun was well past noon. I much preferred the horse waste to human waste, but most of the guests would be out by now, and chamber pots needed emptying. The twins levered themselves into clothes half-dry and stiffened in the sunlight.

My intention was to head straight back, but a commotion in the square distracted me. “Run home and start on the chamber pots,” I told Eliza and Simon. “Take care not to mess.”

I crept closer to the source of the sounds, staying up against the buildings in case it was a fight. Silas Hill, who looked to be even more in his cups than he had that morning, stood on the edge of the old well.

“How much longer are we going to stare at our ships as they rot in this bay? How much longer will we spend away from our homes?”

Hill swayed as he talked; he was probably lucky the well had been bricked over when the pumps were installed. The crowd murmured and swayed with him. They sounded like they agreed on the sentiment, even if they couldn’t put an actual number on it.

I noticed my friend Ginny, the baker’s daughter, and went to stand by her. “What’s he on about?”

She flashed me a smile. “Alex! He’s trying to get a party together—a troop, I think he said—to sneak up on the sirens over land.”

“Can he do that? The sneaking up part, not the over land part.”

She blushed, and I looked down. We both knew it was possible to climb up to the headland, and to sit in the rocky meadow and watch the ships come and go, and to share a single kiss before scrambling back down with our hearts hammering out of our chests. We hadn’t spoken of it since.

“He thinks he can. The question is how many he’ll rally, I suppose. And what weapons they’ll bring.”

“Weapons?”

“That’s why they’re sneaking up. To shoot the sirens before they can sing.”

The idea of killing them wasn’t one I had heard before. I knew the seamen needed to get back out to sea and that we needed supplies to come in. Still, I had figured the sirens would find some other place to nest at some point, and leave us alone. Or Captain Smythe’s idea would work, and ships could get by again. I wasn’t sure it was fair that they should have to die for doing what was their nature.

Ginny and I watched as Hill rounded up eleven men, all as drunk or drunker than he was. “Cowards!” he shouted at the rest. None of them seemed to mind. Somebody put a rifle in his hand and he swung it like a sword. Another man raised a bow and a handful of arrows. The group stumbled down the cobblestones in the right general direction. A couple of snickers came from the larger crowd.

“Bunch of suicides,” said a woman standing at the back.

“If you’re going to get yourself killed by sirens, it’s only proper to go by ship,” agreed a man standing next to her. “I’m working up to it myself.”

I saw Captain Smythe at that moment, facing me from the other side of the well. He had heard the other man too, but he caught my eye and shook his head. He believed in his solution. The others had too, of course.

“Hey! Boy!” A hand clamped down on my shoulder, though the derision in the voice had already rooted me to the spot. Ginny’s mother, Mrs. Arietti. “Aren’t you supposed to be working? You aren’t needed here.”

I threw an apologetic glance at Ginny as her mother marched me away. Had she noticed the way her mother said “boy”? My cheeks burned.

“What have I said about speaking to my daughter?” she whispered when we were out of Ginny’s earshot.

“D-don’t do it.”

“So what makes you think I didn’t mean it?” Each of her fingers was like a separate nail biting into my collarbone. “You’re not the type I want sweet on my daughter.”

I wondered what the type was. In this town, her choice was pretty much one of the seafaring men or me, or one of the island’s few inland farmers. Maybe she was waiting for some rich merchant to roll in and whisk Ginny away to a better life. It wouldn’t happen so long as the sirens had us locked in and the world locked out.

She rounded on me one last time outside the tavern. She crooked a finger at my face, the knuckles swollen from kneading dough. “If you so much as walk on the same side of the street as Ginny, I’ll make sure you regret it.”

Somebody stumbled out of the Salt Dog at that moment, and I took the opportunity to squirm from Mrs. Arietti’s grasp and duck inside. For the next minute my breath came in gasps as I waited for her to follow.

• • • •

The tavern was full that night and the next, and for once I was grateful to have no time to think about anything but chores. Even the twins were called to duty. They kept busy fetching empties and unwatched half-empties, and giving us a running tally of what was going on in the corners we couldn’t see.

The patrons fell into two categories, surly and morose. Nobody sang, nobody played card games. I broke up one fight, earning myself a black eye in the process, and Mrs. Wainwright broke up two more. She sent Simon and Eliza back to her rooms upstairs.

Not long after, a sober and ragged-looking man slunk through the door. I recognized him as the one who had brandished the bow and arrows the day before. Someone at the closest table stood up to let him have a chair, and someone else handed him a mug of ale, which he drained in one draught.

“What happened?”

“Are the sirens dead?”

“Quiet, all of you,” said Mrs. Wainwright, banging on the bar. “Let him have another drink. Can’t you see his tail’s down? Give him a moment and he’ll speak when he’s ready.”

They grew silent. Another mug appeared in front of the man. He drank that one slowly, sighing when he reached the bottom. I expected a long story, but he didn’t have much to say.

“They’re all dead, the men I left with. We went to sneak up only they must have heard us coming, ’cause they started singing. We heard ’em, the sirens, like, and every man among us dropped his weapons and started running toward ’em.”

“How did you get away?” asked the sailor who had hit me a few minutes before.

“I tripped and hit me head on a rock.” The man tipped his cap to show a gash and bruise on his temple. “Knocked meself out cold.”

A laugh went round the room. “That sounds about right for old Charley,” someone shouted.

“What did you do when you woke up?”

“I left, of course, before those bitches got to thinking I was trying to pass them and started singing at me. Only I was a little confused, see, and when I got to the bottom I got turned around and went the wrong way. Took me half a day to realize I was walking away from the port.”

Almost everyone laughed.

“What did they sing?” Smythe asked, his voice cutting through the chuckles. I hadn’t even realized he was in the room.

Old Charley looked confused.

Smythe repeated himself, then rephrased the question. “The sirens. What did they sound like? You’re the first person we know who has heard them and lived. I’ve heard different stories, but most of them say if anyone hears their song and resists the temptation, the sirens fall away or die.”

Charley touched a hand to his bruise. “I’m sorry. I didn’t resist. And I don’t have much of a head for a tune on the best of days.”

“That’s no lie,” someone shouted from the back of the room. More laughter.

“Not the tune, then. The words? Anything?” Smythe’s voice held no humor.

“It was about singing, I think.” Charley frowned. “They were singing about singing. I remember that much. Not too many songs are about singing. Most of them are about women or ships.”

Someone launched into “Married to a Mermaid,” and for the first time all night the customers sang. Mrs. Wainwright joined in, and I would have liked to, but I made sure not to sing where strangers might hear. I noticed Captain Smythe wasn’t singing either. He pushed his way through the crowd to talk to me.

“I’ve had enough of this, Alex. We’ll go tomorrow morning. Out and back, to show it can be done.”

“Yes, sir.”

The mood in the tavern brightened. Mugs were raised to Old Charley and to Silas Hill and the other dead men.

“We’re leaving in the morning,” I told Mrs. Wainwright.

“Feed the horses before you go, then, and you’ll be back to feed them again come evening.” She turned away from me quickly, but not before I noticed tears in her eyes.

I slipped upstairs to her rooms, where Simon and Eliza were playing jacks on the floor. I sat down beside them.

“I have to go away tomorrow.”

Eliza cocked her head at me. “Go away?”

“With one of the captains.”

“But I thought nobody could leave. Not by ship.”

“We’re going to show there’s a way to leave by ship and come back.”

Simon’s hug surprised me, coming out of nowhere. “I hope you come back.”

I hugged him. “I hope so too.”

“Do we have to do your chores if you don’t?” Eliza asked.

“I imagine you do. But I’ll be back.” I tried to keep my tone light.

I spent the night in their bed with them, and extricated myself from their little bodies at the first light of dawn, having not slept a minute myself. I went through my rounds in the barn, feeding and watering the horses, singing them “Married to a Mermaid,” and giving each an extra pat and scratch behind the ears. The chestnut mare had finally drunk. If we reopened the port, the knife salesman would be on his way, and she could go home to where she liked the water better. If we reopened the port, I’d be back here to see her off. I tried not to think about the other option.

Captain Smythe met me at the docks. I had expected a crowd, but I was happy to see only his own men had gathered to see him off. I wasn’t much for attention. I only wished Mrs. Wainwright had come. Maybe the previous night was as much goodbye as she could stand to say. I knew she cared about me, even if she didn’t say it outright.

Smythe’s rented fishing boat was as small as he had said, though it had a small cabin and sails. He was chatting with his men, so I jumped on board and began looking over the rigging, to show him I knew a little bit. Not that I knew much. I had only sailed around the bay now and again with some friend or another of Mrs. Wainwright. One had actually taken the time to teach me. “It’s not right to live in a port town and not know how to sail,” she said. So I checked the lines and the cleats, and felt pleased with myself.

Smythe joined me a few minutes later, with one last wave to his men. I imagined he had charged them to watch and report back if we didn’t return, or to serve as our witnesses if we made it back and nobody believed us.

He cast off with practiced hands. I left him alone while he worked. When he finally addressed me, he did so without looking in my direction, pointing to a heavy iron lock on the outside of the cabin and a key on a hook beside it.

“I’m going to go below as soon as I can, and you’re to lock me in. No sense in risking getting any closer when we don’t know how far their voices carry.”

I nodded.

“You’re not to let me out, no matter how much I beg. Not until we’re out of the bay.” I nodded again, and watched as he lashed the tiller to hold direction. He didn’t say another word, but gave an ambiguous gesture in my direction as he went below. Goodbye, perhaps, or good luck, or don’t wreck us, or just get on with it. I closed the lock and hung the key back on the peg.

I had never been alone on the deck of a boat before. It felt strange to sit at the tiller as if I were a captain. Powerful. How much more so would it feel to succeed in our task? Maybe if I returned a hero, Ginny’s mother would let us speak again.

A mast stuck out between the rocks. Here and there, pieces of other ships that had preceded us. Ahead lay the mouth of the bay, wide and glittering gold-blue where the morning sun hit the water. The two rocky promontories that sheltered us loomed taller than I had ever seen them before.

The one to the starboard side was the one I watched now. I didn’t know what to expect. Would the sirens appear? Would they sing first? What did it feel like to be lured by a song, lulled by a song? What went through the heads of the captains as they dashed their own ships on the rocks? I wanted to know. I didn’t want to know.

There was a decent breeze by the shore, but it lessened as we sailed toward the open sea. I hummed to myself to pass the time. The air now hung like a woolen blanket on a washline. I took my hand off the tiller; I was only pretending to be a captain. Really, I had no clue what to do if we were becalmed.

“Let me out!”

I spoke to the locked door. “Captain, I’m not supposed to let you out. But do you hear them? I don’t.”

He moaned in response. I scanned the rocks for any sign of the sirens.

And then I heard them.

Their voices were hideously beautiful. I made out some of the words. As Old Charley had said, it was a song about the song itself, daring the listener to listen, as if anyone had a choice. The words drifted in the air.

“Listen to our two voices,” they said, and I did.

“Sweet coupled airs we sing,” and something about a green mirror, and the whole time they were singing, I kept expecting some key to turn in my own lock, something to make my hand move on the tiller. And the whole time they were singing, I kept thinking: I know this song. I knew it in my bones, knew it though I had never heard it. Not the words, but the challenge behind them.

The sail moved of its own accord, fighting any direction. A new wind swirled, pushed about by the force of enormous wings. Wings that blocked the sun and sent the boat rocking. The sirens landed on the deck, feather-light, and I saw them for the first time.

They were like me. Or I thought they were, for a moment of wishful thinking. They weren’t, but I found it hard to look at them straight on. They were naked, and they had wings, or they didn’t, and they threw their shoulders back and their chests forward like strutting birds. I understood the two voices, understood the mirror, understood.

Smythe still moaned in the cabin, but with luck the tide would bring the boat safely to shore even if I didn’t return. His men could pry the door.

I took off my shirt and unwrapped the binding round my small breasts. I removed one boot, then the other, then my trousers. I dared them to look at me, and they did it as if it wasn’t a dare at all. Like nothing I had ever wanted in my life, I suddenly knew I wanted to grow wings and scales. I wanted to roost with them on rocks in their green meadow.

No. What about Mrs. Wainwright and Captain Smythe? Roost with the sirens in some other green meadow, overlooking some other sea. Teach them new songs that didn’t sing sailors to their graves.

“Draw near, bring your ship to rest,” they sang. They never stopped singing. “No man passes without hearing the sweet sound from our lips.”

I am not a man, some small part of me said. I am but I am not. But the female captain had run aground as well, and I knew I wasn’t exactly a woman either. While I puzzled, each of them took one of my arms. They lifted me into the sky. I squeezed my eyes shut.

It took me a moment to work up the nerve to look. Everything appeared much smaller viewed from above. I saw the shape of the whole island, the rocky cliffs that made any other landing impossible. The bay really was shaped like a dog’s head, pinched by the collar of the two headlands. Our town, the dog’s snout. I saw the town square, and the tavern, and the barn, where I had sung only to horses. I pictured Mrs. Wainwright starting the porridge, and the twins stirring in their bed, and Ginny’s lips on mine, and I missed them all as if I was already gone.

“Wait,” I said. What belonging could the sirens offer me? I wasn’t one of them. Whatever they were offering wasn’t love, or furtive kisses, or even the satisfaction of a job done well. If I went with them, what would Mrs. Wainwright think of me? The choice overwhelmed me. I wasn’t sure if it even was a choice. Maybe I was already another sailor lost to the sirens.

I didn’t know what else to do, so I sang. The sirens closed their mouths and listened as I sang their own song back at them, and then shifted the tune to one of my own, keeping some of their words. Their two voices? I lived that story every day. They sang that no life could be hid from their dreaming, so I offered mine as proof. I thought maybe they had never heard a creature such as I was: alone in my knowing, alone of my kind. I sang another song, turning their mirror back on them.

“But we can tell you everything that will ever happen in the world. All the secrets.” Their voices had lost some luster.

“I already know what happens. Everybody lives until they die, and most have hard lives, and some have easy ones, and some give up their children and some take them in, and some get a home even with an odd thing about them.”

“Come with us. No lonely seafarer rows past our green mirror.”

“I’m not lonely. They’re the lonely ones, all these sailors that long for the sea when they’re home and their homes when they’re at sea. They’re stuck in between. I’m in between, but I’m not stuck. I just am.”

Their wings beat slower now, and we descended a bit. The hesitation gave me confidence. “I think I won. I heard your song, but mine was better. I’m not going with you. I’m staying here, and you’re leaving, because I won.”

The sirens dropped me over open water. I might have taken that for a kindness, but it didn’t feel intentional. By the time I hauled myself onto the boat, they were specks on the horizon. Someone else’s problem. I lay naked for a moment on the deck, basking in the bright sunlight. Then I clothed myself and unlocked the cabin. The horses would be waiting for me, swiveling their ears to catch my song over top of the breeze that would bring our small boat back to shore.

© 2014 by Sarah Pinsker.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sarah Pinsker lives in Baltimore, Maryland, in a hundred-year-old house on the top of a hill. She is the author of the novelette “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind,” winner of the 2014 Sturgeon Award and 2013 Nebula Award finalist. Her fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Lightspeed’ss Women Destroy Science Fiction!, and in anthologies including Long Hidden, Fierce Family, and The Future Embodied. She is also a singer/songwriter and toured nationally behind three albums on various independent labels, one with her rock band, the Stalking Horses. A fourth is forthcoming. She has toured nationally in a van with a bed in the back and a ghost in the radio, and gets lost on purpose. Find her online at sarahpinsker.com or twitter.com/sarahpinsker.

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

Prayers of Forges and Furnaces

Aliette de Bodard

The stranger came at dawn, walking out of the barren land like a mirage—gradually shimmering into existence beside the bronze line of the rails: a wide-brimmed hat, a long cloak, the glint that might have been a rifle or an obsidian-studded sword.

Xochipil, who had been scavenging for tech at the mouth of Mictlan’s Well, caught that glint in her eyes—and stopped, watching the stranger approach, a growing hollow in her stomach. Beneath her were the vibrations of the Well, like a calm, steady heartbeat running through the ground: the voice of the rails that coiled around the shaft of the Well, bearing their burden of copper and bronze ever downwards.

The stranger stopped when he came up to her. They stared wordlessly at each other. He was tall, a good two heads taller than Xochipil; he held himself straight, like an axle or a rod that wouldn’t break. The glint wasn’t a sword or a rifle, after all—but simply that of a dozen obsidian amulets, spread equally around his belt, shining with a cold, black light that wasn’t copper or bronze or steel, but something far more ancient, from the old, cruel days before the Change.

Xochipil’s heart contracted. Perhaps it wasn’t too late to run away. But he’d catch up with her easily, with those big legs of his. She’d never been a fast runner, not with her right leg trailing behind her, permanently out of shape. Before the Change, cripples such as her would have been killed: sacrificed to the old gods to bring the harvest or the sunlight.

The stranger’s eyes rested on her leg, but showed no change of expression. “This would be Mictlan’s Well?”

Xochipil, not trusting her voice, nodded.

“I see.” The stranger’s eyes were brown, almost without pupils. “My name is Tezoca. I’m told there is an inn here, for travellers?”

Xochipil nodded again. She stared at him, trying to decide what he was; but he didn’t appear fazed by her appearance, or aggressive. “But you need a travel licence. Or the will to serve the community and bind yourself to the workers, in this age and the next and the next,” she said. The words of the Well’s oath of loyalty came irrepressibly out of her mouth.

The words fell in the silence between both of them. Under her feet, the earth was quiescent, as if the rails themselves waited for Tezoca’s answer.

“I see.” He smiled; his teeth were dark, stained with soot, or coal-dust. “I see. What makes you think I don’t have a permit, little one?”

“Don’t call me ‘little one,’” Xochipil snapped, annoyed that he’d used the same condescending name for her as the townspeople did. “My name is Xochipil.”

Tezoca spread his hands. “My apologies. What makes you think I don’t have a travel permit, Xochipil?”

Wordlessly, she pointed at the dangling amulets on his belt.

“This?” he asked, lifting one of them. In the rising sunlight, it shone as red as blood—and it wasn’t an amulet after all, she saw, but a shard with a sharp edge, barely reworked to make it seem innocuous. In its depths was an odd, cold light, a beat quite unlike the voice of the rails, speaking of a forgotten time, of altars slick with blood and the smoke of incense rising against the pristine blue of the skies, above a city that wasn’t steel and bronze, but simple adobe . . .

A hot, sharp pain burst across her cheek; startled, she realized Tezoca had just struck her. Warmth spread from the blow, to her face, to her bones. It wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling—Uncle Atl had been fond of calling her to order when she failed to be grateful for anything—but it was the first time a complete stranger had struck her, at all. And he wasn’t getting away with none of it, never mind that he was taller or bigger than her.

“Apologies,” Tezoca said, his gaze still on her, as if he could read her thoughts. “I had to tear you away from that.” He didn’t sound angry, or sad—just thoughtful, and perhaps a little proud, though she wasn’t sure why.

That didn’t do anything to lessen the pain. “From what?” Xochipil asked, defiantly.

He’d lowered his hands, and was now busy tucking all the shards into the folds of his cloak—hiding them from view. “I scavenged them from the desert,” he said. “They’re broken, and broken things are often more dangerous than when they’re whole.”

“I don’t understand,” Xochipil said.

“You don’t need to, believe me.” Tezoca gazed behind her, at the depths of the Well—the thrum of the steam-cars, the hubbub of workers jostling each other on the footpaths, the slow, inevitable beat coursing along the rails and resonating through the earth.

“Have they reached the bottom?” he asked.

Down, down, went the rails, vanishing into the depths of the shaft—linking Mictlan’s Well to the distant capital, and the god-machine ensconced in its palace.

“Two days ago,” Xochipil said. It had been the talk of the Well.

Tezoca smiled. “I thought so,” he said. “I felt it.”

She’d felt it, too—the deeper resonance in the rails, the richer beat that coursed along their bronze rods. Whatever it was that the god-machine was looking for, it had found it. “You’re an engineer, then?”

“No, not quite,” Tezoca said. He looked at her again, thoughtfully. “Tell me, Xochipil . . . if I wanted to stay somewhere that’s not the inn, where would I go?”

“So you don’t have a travel permit,” she said, with a touch of satisfaction.

“Of course not,” Tezoca replied, airily.

“And why would I help you?” she asked carefully. “The penalties for aiding fugitives aren’t light.”

Tezoca smiled. “I’m not a fugitive. And I could offer you money, but I doubt that’s what you really want, is it? Very well.” He pulled out one of the obsidian shards, and rubbed it absentmindedly. “Do you like the god-machine, Xochipil?”

Even the question was sacrilege—her hands reached out, sketched the Sign of the Sacred Cog, to ward against the wrath of the machine. “What kind of question is that?” she asked.

Tezoca hadn’t moved. “Humour me.”

“Do I like the god-machine? Why would I have to? It sees everything and punishes everything. It is, was, and will ever be, throughout the ages of the world.”

“It wasn’t always,” Tezoca said, very softly.

Xochipil glanced around, suddenly frightened. A fugitive was one thing; a heretic quite another. The townspeople tolerated her, but this would be going too far. “The Change was so long ago we don’t remember it,” she said. “What does it change, if the machine wasn’t always?”

“Things that are born can die,” Tezoca said, with a quick nod of his head. “Let me ask you the question again. Do you like the engineers, the technicians, the soldiers? Do they treat you well?”

Xochipil shook her head—once, twice. What right had he, to come here in the midst of her life, and question everything? “You know what the leg would have meant, before the Change. I have a life, under the god-machine.”

“So do caged birds. Answer the question.”

“Machine break you,” she whispered. “You know the answer, don’t you?” That she was lame, and thus had no place on any of the work crews; that she’d survived on the “kindness” of relatives until they grew bored and left her to fend for herself; that she scavenged for broken tech at the edge of the Well, the small, useless artefacts that passing steam-cars thoughtlessly discarded—and sold them, day after day, barely eking out her living.

“Perhaps I do know the answer. But I’d want it from your own mouth.”

“No,” she said, low and savage, the word out of her lips before she could take it back. She waited for him to laugh, to throw back his cloak and reveal himself as a servant of the machine, to take her away for heresy. But he did nothing. He merely watched her.

At length Tezoca nodded. “You have a fiery heart,” he said, his hand rubbing the shard, again and again, as if he could wear it down to nothing.

“And you’re a madman.”

Tezoca smiled. “That’s often been said. But you haven’t answered my question.”

The earlier one, the one about lodgings and food. Still shaking inwardly—remembering the shock of his question, the shock of her answer—that she, Xochipil, the daughter of workers, should question the god-machine, that she should imply she’d gladly see it stop functioning . . .

She shook her head angrily. Why not, after all? It had never been much of a life. “I have a room. It’s not much—upper levels, not much surface—but it could stretch to two people.”

Again, that quick smile of his, daring and reckless, revealing the darkness of his teeth. “That will do nicely, I think.”

Luckily, they didn’t have to go far: Xochipil’s assigned room was one of the dingiest ones, just under the mouth of the Well. The best rooms were near the bottom, as close as possible to the edge of the rails and the source of the endless thrumming. That was where the supervisors lived; and the governor, and all his staff of master engineers and elite soldiers.

She left Tezoca there to unfold his belongings in the cramped room, its wrought ceiling so low he had to bend to stand under it, its shelves covered in scraps of metal and empty vials in addition to her clothes and tools.

She had no doubt he’d wander around, but she had other things to do: It was almost time for the noon pause, and Malli would be ready to do business. Hastily wrapping some of her better findings in her bag, she hurried onto the filigreed walkway that led back to the main path—and then down along the footpaths.

Above and below her pulsed the rails, plunging into the dizzying darkness below the surface. Steam-cars loaded with tools and bags of excavated soil slid past, with a whine like air through a cut throat. Further down were the subsidiaries of the machine scooping out the earth, and the men and women toiling to lay down the bronze rods for the new rails.

A faint light oozed from the bottom of the shaft—a shimmering, pulsing radiance that was achingly comforting—and the beat of the rails was stronger, richer, echoing in her lame leg and in her chest, squeezing around her heart until it seemed to be one with her.

She wondered what they’d found, down there; what Tezoca was really looking for.

She found Malli on the twenty-fifth level, sitting a little apart from her work cadre. The rotund woman barely raised her eyes when Xochipil slid next to her, onto the warm metal of the bench. “What have you got?” she asked, without preamble.

Xochipil unpacked her things, laid them out on her knees. Malli scrutinised them for a while. Xochipil tensed, expecting the usual session of bargaining, but Malli merely pointed to two of the less broken artefacts, a filigreed hummingbird and a rusty cog.

“Those two. Three tlazos.”

Xochipil, surprised, pocketed the money without showing what she felt. Malli wrapped the artefacts in her own shirt, finished her crushed maize and amaranth, and got up. “Do you have urgent business?” Xochipil asked.

Malli tossed her head disdainfully. “There’s a hierarch there, Xochipil. From the god-machine itself.” Her eyes shone with excitement; and clearly she wouldn’t understand why Xochipil didn’t rejoice.

Mictlan’s Well was not so big or so important to warrant regular visits from the capital. “What does he want?” Xochipil asked. She thought, with a sinking in her stomach, of Tezoca methodically unpacking his things in her room. But a hierarch wouldn’t visit that high: They’d be lodging with the governor’s staff at the bottom, near the heart of the Well.

“Are you daft?” Malli asked. “We’ve reached the bottom, girl! Of course he’d want to see what’s there.”

“You too?” Xochipil asked.

Malli looked at Xochipil as if she’d just offered to worship the old gods. “He’s a hierarch! Of course he’s holding a grand procession, and a remembering.”

And of course, everyone would want to attend it, to be touched by the god-machine’s essence—to feel the unending communion with the rest of the Commonwealth: with the network of towns and mines and wells connected by the beat of the rails and the whine of steam-cars, and with the thousand cadres of workers toiling away in the bowels of the machine’s subsidiaries, ceaselessly raising bronze and copper and chrome to its undying glory.

Xochipil realized with a shock that Malli was waiting for her—caring little about her outcast status—and there was no way she could refuse, not without both vexing Malli and raising suspicions she couldn’t afford to raise.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Xochipil had never been to the lower floors, but somehow she wasn’t surprised to find them made of chrome and steel: white and shining in the harsh light from sunspheres, still thrumming with the beat of the rails, an echo so strong it was almost paralyzing.

She kept her head high, ignoring the odd looks the various work crews threw at her—a cripple, here in the centre of the Well, an unthinkable thing if ever there was one—and walked slightly behind Malli, unwilling to draw closer. Malli herself hadn’t shown any desire for friendship; just a wish for her to join with the god-machine.

They were almost at the bottom of the Well now. The reverberation shook Xochipil’s bones and her muscles, echoed in her ribcage like a second heartbeat. They wouldn’t be going all the way down, though: Xochipil was sure that the hierarch wouldn’t show the workers what lay on the last floor. It was the supervisors who had dug the last pit, and the governor himself who had broken the last seal and connected the last rails.

On the vast platform that filled most of the shaft at the Eightieth Level, a dizzying array of cadres had gathered. Every one of them wore their own colours and badges of allegiance, a dizzying sea of drab cotton and maguey-fibre clothes. The platform near the centre held a steel altar with the Sacred Symbols: the Cog, the Chain, the Bolt, the Wires, and the Vial.

On the platform stood the hierarch.

He was alone: a tall, unprepossessing silhouette in flowing robes of stark whiteness, bearing a symbol Xochipil couldn’t make out. But even standing away from the platform, even wedged between the resentful members of Malli’s cadre on the narrow footpath, she could feel the strength of his presence, the aura that somehow was the pulsing of every city of the Commonwealth—and the mind of the god-machine, straining towards the bottom of the Well, extending itself along the length of the rails to be with them in this moment of great glory.

The hierarch raised his head, and silence spread across the cavern. His skin was gleaming copper—and his hands extended towards them all, the hands of the god-machine, which was, had been, and would be, forever and ever in this age of the world and the next and the next.

“Behold,” the hierarch whispered, a single word that echoed against the walls of the shaft, quivering in the rails themselves, twisting in Xochipil’s chest until her heart ached with need. “The Age of Wonders has come. Let the old gods remain dead, let the altars be of pristine steel, let the blood and the breath remain in our bodies . . .” A litany, whispered over and over—and abruptly Xochipil realized the rumble was the sound of thousands of voices joining it—of her own voice, raised in praise of the god-machine and the Commonwealth, but she couldn’t stop, she was as much a part of it as Malli, as the hierarch . . .

“Let the sun remain silent, let our prayers be made with forges and furnaces, let the blood and the breath remain in our bodies . . .”

The words were said, over and over, thousands of voices filling the Well to bursting—and even the memory of Tezoca was very far away, words that made no sense, for how could he ever hope to challenge such power as this—how could he put an end to what was, would be and had ever been?

“Let the pyramids remain broken, let our labour be our worship, let the blood and the breath remain in our bodies . . .”

Pyramids. Tezoca had said—

He—

Abruptly, her mind torn from the communion, she saw Tezoca. He was standing on the edge of the crowd on one of the neighbouring footpaths, dressed in the colours of the Fifty-Fourth Hummingbird Cadre. He held a dark-skinned woman in his embrace, kissing her lips, her forehead, her earlobes—and the voice of the god-machine was receding in the distance, replaced by Tezoca’s mocking words.

It wasn’t always. Things that are born can die.

Tezoca raised his gaze to Xochipil, pulling away from the woman; and in the split moment before he did, she saw, very clearly, the blood still clinging to his lips, the blood still flowing from the woman’s earlobes, wounds that sealed themselves even as she watched.

Blood. He’d been . . . drinking blood, and using it to work against the machine’s communion. But only one kind of being had ever fed on blood, and only one kind of being had ever drawn power from it.

The old gods—who were all dead, bested by the machine, their remains scattered over the desert like ashes.

When she came back to her room, exhausted from the strain of the communion, she found Tezoca already there. He had made himself at home, as neatly as a soldier on the move: He’d managed to unfold his things in a small patch of free space amidst the clutter on the ground, and he’d wedged his lanky body between the cooking-stove and the pallet. Even cramped as he was, he looked ludicrously at ease.

“It’s an interesting town,” he said. His face was expressionless; his lips thin, the colour of bronze—no blood anywhere, not anymore.

But Xochipil was too tired and too frightened to pretend she hadn’t seen anything. “What in the machine’s name are you?” she asked. “What game do you think you’re playing?”

Tezoca’s face did not move. “You can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Not—” of what you were, she wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come out of her mouth. She tried again, but the enormity of what she was about to say dwarfed her. “You’re dead,” she whispered finally, because it was the only thing that her mind could hold onto—hoping he would deny it, that he would laugh at what she suggested. “All the old gods are dead.”

“Some things,” Tezoca said darkly, “are hard to kill.”

“The machine?” she asked, because it was the only thing that came into her mind. A god, she was standing there facing a god . . .

“That too.” For once, he didn’t look amused. He unfolded himself, gradually, standing bent under the ceiling, his hair almost tangling with the iron filigrees. His eyes held her, quiet, thoughtful; and in their depths she saw the blue of the sky, smelled the reek of copal incense rising into the heavens, and the rankness of blood pooling down the altar grooves, watering the earth, mingling with the rivers and with the lakes.

It would have been her, in the old days: her they held onto the altar, her they split open with obsidian blades, her heart they held aloft to the glory of the sun or of the rain. Her blood. He’d have drunk it all, as he’d drunk the blood of the woman—and with no more pity than he had shown her.

Something, long kept at bay, finally snapped. “How dare you—how dare you come here, how dare you work your foul magic and your blood sacrifices in full sight of the hierarch? How dare you—” She quelled the shaking of her hands, and went on, “Do you have any idea of what they do to those they catch still practising the old rites?”

“I guess it doesn’t happen very often.”

“We still remember the last one. They can make the dismantling last for days.” She couldn’t suppress a shiver, remembering the screams that had rent the Well from top to bottom, drowning even the beat of the rails.

“Well,” Tezoca said lightly, “that won’t happen here.”

“How can you be so sure?” Hadn’t he seen the god-machine, hadn’t he felt the communion? Even with his blood-magic, all he had done was tear one mind, for a small time. That was pitifully slight.

His voice was light, arrogant. “The histories are right: I’m cruel, and twisted, and vicious. But I take care of my own.”

“Your own?” So much like one of the old gods, to see the world in terms of ownership, and to take everything for themselves. The histories were right.

Tezoca pulled out one of the obsidian shards, stared at it for a while. “You’ve forgotten, haven’t you? What a sacrifice truly was. You don’t remember anything.”

“I remember enough.” Bodies tumbling down the altars, so many hearts that they rotted in the sacred vessels, so much blood that the grooves overflowed, skins, casually flayed and worn like costumes—and the old gods, laughing at them from the heavens, seeing nothing in mankind but veins and arteries, nothing but beating hearts, waiting to be gobbled whole . . .

Why had she ever thought it was a good idea to welcome him into her room? Why had she believed he’d make her life better? The days he’d bring back weren’t days she could desire, not under any age of the world.

“Get out,” she said, fighting not to strike him across the face. “Get out of this room now, and don’t come back.”

Anger leapt into Tezoca’s eyes. She expected him to strike her again, or worse, to do to her what he’d done to the woman—but he did none of that. Simply stood, tall, unmoving, waiting for her fury to spend itself.

When it did, and she still hadn’t said another word, Tezoca said, “Very well.” And he picked up his things, one by one, and left.

She watched him go, her heart more at ease than it had been for a long, long while.

Xochipil woke up the following morning and instantly knew that something was wrong. The beat of the rails was so strong it was shaking her room, making the tech on the shelves ring against each other—the deep, resonant sound of glass against copper, of bronze against crystal—and the fundamental wrongness at the heart of the Well, so strong it was splitting her apart.

“Attend,” a voice said, resonating within the confines of her room. The hierarch’s voice, as deep and far-reaching as it had been on the previous day. “Workers of Mictlan’s Well. There has been a violation of the Commonwealth. Stand on your thresholds and wait for the inspection.”

A violation? Tezoca. Machine break him, what had he done? What had he done to set the Well afire in such a way?

Time to see later. Right now, what she needed to do was survive the inspection—with blood-magic still clinging to her, a stink that couldn’t be washed off.

The inspection started at the bottom. Xochipil stood on her threshold for what seemed like ages and ages, feeling the rising beat in her chest, in her lame leg—tearing her apart, slowly grinding her bones to dust, turning her muscles to mush.

From the corner of her eye, she saw the procession approach: the hierarch in his robes so white they hurt the eye, the governor and the supervisors in muted turquoise all servile behind him.

He stopped by each worker, asked them a few questions, looked at them for a while, and then moved on. Ten workers left before he reached her—nine, eight . . .

He’d be a poor hierarch indeed, if he couldn’t see what she’d done. But there wasn’t anything she could do, other than stand straight, and hope against all hope that he wouldn’t see, that he’d move on without a second glance.

And then the hierarch was standing before her—his skin gleaming in the dim light, his verdigris gaze boring into her eyes—quivering in her vision, blurred by the throbbing of the rails. “Your name?” he asked.

“Xochipil,” she said. “Worker 18861 of Mictlan’s Well.”

He was silent for a while, looking at her as if something bothered him. Please, please . . .

“Daughter of Huexocanauhtli and Camahuac,” the hierarch said, finally.

“Yes.”

“Do you know why I’m here, Xochipil?” His eyes were a wide, shining green: a many-layered patina over the perfect, pristine metal of his skin—wide, compassionate, it would be so easy to tell him, to throw herself on his mercy before he discovered the truth . . .

“No,” she whispered. “No.”

The hierarch’s gaze held her, weighed her. “Is that really the truth, Xochipil?” He put a peculiar stress on her name—lingering on it, like a lover, like a mother, caring for her, for the communion she had with the machine and everything it meant to her.

No. It wasn’t the truth. Of course it wasn’t. She had only to confess—

Machine break him, she wasn’t going to give in so easily. “Yes,” she said, and words came pouring out of her mouth almost faster than she could think them. “Every word the truth, by my will to serve, by my bond to the god-machine, in this age and the next and the next.”

The hierarch’s hand reached out, brushed her hair. His touch left a tingling, a slighter beat to counter the excruciating one of the rails. “I see,” he said. “Thank you, Xochipil.”

And then he was gone, and it was as if someone had cut tight bands of copper from Xochipil’s chest. She stood, breathing in the beat of the rails, the throbbing within her, knowing she’d won, for now.

It was only after the inspection was over that it occurred to her that everything had gone far too smoothly. The taint of blood-magic wouldn’t have been so easily removed; and the hierarch should have seen it.

Unless . . .

It took her half an hour to find it. By then, the beat of the rails was so strong it watered her eyes, and she could barely focus on what she was doing—could barely keep her thoughts straight enough to act.

But it was there, all right: a small, barely visible glyph inked in blood, and its twin on the other side of the threshold, forming the word for “protection”. They throbbed, too, beneath her fingers—not like the rails, but like a living heart.

Tezoca, it seemed, had left her a farewell gift.

Xochipil went down, knowing that whatever had happened would be at the bottom of the Well, where the power was stronger—where whatever Tezoca had been looking for doubtless resided.

Work had resumed, and the crews had little patience for a crippled girl. Even Malli threw Xochipil a warning look as she descended the footpath. Xochipil retreated instead: going down again, on the paths that coiled around the shaft of the Well. All the while, the intensity of the beat increased, and there came a growing sense of anger, of outrage from the rails.

Down, down, past the sunspheres and the stark whiteness of steel and chrome—fewer workers now, and the fevered beat was so strong she could barely walk, could barely hold on to the thought that she had to put one foot before the other, that she had to . . .

She realized that for the past moments she’d been standing absolutely still—and started walking again.

The rails were above and below her. They had narrowed, becoming close enough to reach, with the steam-cars steadily going up and down, and Xochipil was standing alone between them, staring at the white steel of the walls. The beat was too strong—in her bones and in her heart, growing until it was all she could do not to fall to her knees.

She couldn’t go further down—not to the platform where the hierarch had stood, not to the very bottom and whatever had gone wrong.

Turn back, she had to—it was folly to come here, folly to seek Tezoca. Everything was fiery pain, a pain she couldn’t bear, not for this long . . .

Machine break her, she wasn’t made of such pliable stuff.

She reached out and touched the rails.

Pain unfolded a thousandfold within her: The beat coursed up her arm, squeezed around her heart, spread in her chest like a starburst of knives—and her hand was welded to the rails, she couldn’t take it away—

She was falling, down, down, into a chasm that had no end, the earth opening itself to receive her, and the beat pounding in every fibre of her body was the beat of a huge, glistening heart, buried under the soil of the desert—a heart that was the only thing of flesh amidst the entombed human bones.

Over and over it beat within her, booming, overflowing in her ears, the liquid sound of blood in an organ so vast she could barely apprehend it—over and over . . .

At last, at long last, it ended, and she fell to her knees, gasping, with the beat still coursing in her—muted now, the pain almost bearable, almost, like rubbed salt instead of knives . . .

But the beat was a voice now, and it whispered, over and over, brother, brother . . .

A god. There was a god down there, buried beneath Mictlan’s Well. The power Tezoca had been seeking, the power the god-machine was finally ferrying back to itself—a god’s heart, a god’s magic, setting the earth atremble, energizing the rails.

That was . . . impossible.

Why would it be? Was it such a great leap of imagination, once you accepted that gods were as hard to kill as the machine?

Brother, whispered the rails—and they were angry, so angry because he was dead, or going to die—it wasn’t clear, just a jumble of impressions, a hodgepodge of words she couldn’t untangle. And, in the distance, steadily rising, was the voice of the machine, seeking to subsume the god in its midst—a persistent ache, a darkness slowly rising to smother everything.

Dare she—?

There was no other choice.

Xochipil reached out and touched the rails again.

The pain was the same, arcing straight to her heart, the beat that was so much stronger than her. Through gritted teeth she fought to get the words out, to ask her question . . .

Where is he?

Where is Tezoca?

Brother, whispered the rails.

Where . . . is . . . he?

The machine’s voice was rising, blindly questing for whoever had the audacity to touch the rails, to meddle in the link it was establishing between Mictlan’s Well and itself . . .

She had to let go; but if she did so, she wouldn’t know what had happened. Still she kept her hands on the rails, asking them over and over about Tezoca.

“You won’t find him there,” a voice said, far behind her.

Startled, Xochipil withdrew her hands from the rails—and the pressure in her body and in her mind diminished, faded to a dull, throbbing ache.

Behind her, on the floor of steel and chrome, stood a woman. Her hair was the black of congealed blood, her skin the colour of dulled copper and her face was achingly familiar.

“What do you mean?” Xochipil asked.

“You shouldn’t be here,” the woman said, shaking her head.

Xochipil suddenly realized that this was the woman Tezoca had used to cast his blood-magic, and who now stood beside the rails as if they were a minor discomfort. “What would you know?” she asked.

The woman smiled, and raised her hands. Thin red lines ran along the tips of her fingers; and there were scabs on her arms, too.

Blood-magic. Blood-offerings. But the age of gods was past, the Change had come upon them—there was no longer need . . .

“He forced this on you,” Xochipil whispered—move, move, they had to move, for the hierarch would soon come, attracted by her touch on the rails . . . “He bewitched you, tricked you into making your offerings . . .”

The woman smiled again. “I make my own choices. And so should you.” Then, without preamble, “They cast his broken body into the desert, to be devoured by carrion birds and scavengers.”

“Tezoca?” Xochipil asked, though she knew the answer. “Then he failed.”

The woman said nothing, but the dullness in her eyes was answer enough. “The god-machine is strong,” she whispered, raising her bloodied hands as if to ward off a blow. “Very strong.”

There was movement, at the edge of Xochipil’s field of vision—workers, and a flash of white robes from downwards—and the voice of the hierarch echoing all around them: “Attend. There has been a violation of the Commonwealth—”

The compulsion was overwhelming; as before, there was nothing Xochipil could do to resist, she could do nothing but to abase herself and beg the forgiveness of the machine for interfering . . .

Hands, holding her—tracing something on the nape of her neck, warm and pulsing—a push in her back, sending her sprawling, out of the path of the advancing hierarch. “Run!”

And Xochipil was up, before she could think, slipping away from them—up, up, with barely any memory of being lame—away from the pressure of the rails and the voice of the hierarch, the instinct for survival stronger than anything.

It was only when she reached the twentieth floor that she stopped, the pain and weariness she’d kept at bay slamming into her, seeing, again and again, the face of the woman, transfigured as she stood awaiting the hierarch; feeling, again and again, the touch of the blood-magic on her, sharpening her mind around the single thought of saving herself.

“Why?” she whispered, but the woman, after all, had already answered her.

I make my own choices. And so should you.

Outside, the sun shone bright and unbearable, its warm light bleaching the desert sands, shimmering over the throbbing rails. Xochipil walked, her lame leg trailing behind her, the blistering heat shrivelling her skin, her lips, her eyes.

She’d had no choice but to leave the Well, for the alarm would be raised by now; and this time the hierarch would know her, take her as his own, break her into her smallest parts and remould her into the service of the machine . . .

Rocks tumbled under her feet. It was only after a while that she realized she was looking at the sky: for the sound of beating wings, the gathering of vultures overhead.

They cast his broken body into the desert, to be devoured by carrion birds and scavengers.

Tezoca . . .

She followed the rails, feeling the distant rumble in her body, weak and watered down—the beat of the god, the beat of the machine, all one and the same for this age of the world, and the next, and the next.

After a while, there was nothing but the merciless sun, nothing but the light swathing the rocks and the boulders, and the bronze of the rails. The flask of water by her side was heavy, but she mustn’t drink, mustn’t empty it so soon . . .

Let the sun remain silent, the machine whispered, its voice coursing along the rails, mingling with the voice of the buried god, rising to silence it forever. Let the altars be made of pristine steel, let the blood and the breath remain in our bodies . . .

Let the sun remain silent . . .

After a few hours—an afternoon—an eternity—she saw in the sky the first vultures, circling over her.

“Not dead,” she whispered, stumbling on. “Not dead.”

But really, what was the point?

“Not . . . dead . . .”

When the vultures became a crowd, she walked on, towards the shrieking column of birds, away from the familiar beat of the rails—away from the god-machine and the hierarch and the heart buried in the soil, towards a mound at the base of a hill, a tangle of blood and broken limbs, wrapped in a torn cloak.

She threw rocks at the birds, and screamed until her voice was hoarse. They hopped away, watching her warily—waiting for her, too, to tumble and fall, to become carrion.

Then, in silence, she knelt by Tezoca’s side.

The skin of his face was torn and bloodied, the limbs slack under her touch. Broken bones shifted within the mass of glistening flesh.

She reached out to take the voice of the heart—and stopped herself inches from the bloody mass of the wrist. That would have been pointless. He was dead, clearly dead, his promises and goals meaningless.

Machine break you, she’d wished on Tezoca; and the machine had, indeed, broken him so thoroughly that nothing was left.

A hiss startled her. One of the birds, coming back? But no, it came from the body—a last exhalation of breath from shattered lungs, a last oozing from some mangled organ.

Tezoca’s eyes were open, and staring straight at her.

The shock of that sight travelled up her arm, devolved into the frantic beat of her heart.

“You’re dead,” she whispered, and remembered what he had told her, back in the Well.

Some things are hard to kill.

Again, the same hiss: words, whispered through crushed lips. Asking for her help?

“I wasn’t able to help myself,” she said bitterly. She hadn’t even been able to help the woman. Nevertheless, she tipped the last of the water within her flask—a few sips, nothing more—past his wasted lips.

His throat contracted, swallowing the water; then he convulsed, and the water came rushing back out in a spurt that splattered on the rocks.

The hiss again, and his eyes, boring into hers—not angry, not amused, but pleading.

She knew, of course, the only thing which would sustain him. The mere thought was revolting.

But here they were, both of them, both broken and dying in the desert; and he had given her his protection, in the cruel, desultory way of the old gods—but it was still more than the god-machine had ever given her.

“All right,” Xochipil said. She reached out and foraged in the cloak, spreading out the obsidian shards as she found them. They glimmered in the sunlight, with the remembrance of a dead age.

She picked what looked like the sharpest one, and held it for a while in her hand. “It’s not because I worship you,” she said. His eyes watched her, unblinking, unwavering. “It’s not because I fear your anger, or that the sun will tumble from the sky if you’re not properly honoured. But you watched out for me, and I’d be sorry to see you go.”

Then, as smoothly, as effortlessly as if she’d done it all her life, she brought the edge of the obsidian against her wrist, and before she could think, sliced through her veins. Blood spurted up in an obscene fountain—much, much faster than she’d expected, a stream of red falling like rain upon the dried earth.

Pain spread, too—lines of fire radiating from the slit, pulsing in her arm like a red-hot axle. Her hand wouldn’t stop opening and closing, her fingers clenching like claws; she couldn’t control its movements. She had to use her other hand to guide the wound over Tezoca’s mouth, and watched him swallow and not spit anything out, his wasted throat muscles greedily contracting.

Something was flowing, a shadow across the desert floor, an invisible wind. The air shivered as if in a storm, and dust rose, billowing like yellow sheets unfolding. Grains of dust skittered across the obsidian shards, making a noise like nails on copper, skittering across the body of Tezoca until his skin seemed to shift in the wind, until the colour of the desert had sunk into his bones and covered the red sheen of his muscles.

His hands reached up, iron coils, and drew Xochipil’s slit wrist against his mouth. His lips closed around the wound, hungrily sucking at the flowing blood like a child at his mother’s breast.

And he didn’t stop. The wound didn’t close, and still he drank, making quiet, sickening suckling sounds. Pain knifed her with each sip he took—repeated stabs with obsidian blades.

Xochipil’s thoughts were scattering, growing hazier and hazier—how much like an old god, to take everything that was given; how naïve had she been, to slit her wrist and expect it to heal, to feed a god and hope he would stop . . .

The shadows were growing, pooling under the obsidian shards—and then, in a flash of dazzling light, the shards leapt towards each other and vanished.

“Enough,” Tezoca said, his voice echoing like the anger of the storm. “Enough!” He pushed her away—sent her stumbling, fighting to hold herself upright, her fingers fumbling to close the wound in her wrist.

The ground would not stop shaking under her. Through hazy eyes she saw her blood spattered among the rocks, encircling the place where Tezoca now stood.

He was tall, and his face was streaked with black and yellow; and the stars shone in the curls of his hair; and his eyes glimmered like water in underground caves. In his hand, something shone: an obsidian mirror, in which she could still guess at the faint line of cracks. It reflected nothing but smoke; but even from where she was she could feel its heat, and the power within, the beat as strong as that of the rails.

And he was walking—flowing across the sand, reaching out to her—and in a single gesture pinching shut the wound in her wrist. Xochipil stood, shaking, trying to hold herself up, falling to one knee, and then face down on the ground, until oblivion swallowed her whole.

She dreamt that he carried her in his arms, under the shelter of a large rock, and carefully laid her on the ground like a sick child. She dreamt that he was sitting by her side, staring at the skies, weeping tears of blood for all the old gods who had fallen—for his brother Quetzalcoatl, who had once been his friend, who had once been his enemy, and who was now subsumed into the machine, in this age and the next and the next.

She dreamt that he gathered rocks and scraggly bushes and turned his smoke-filled mirror towards them—that they burst into flickering, warm flames—and that he stood outlined by the fire, watching her sleep.

Now you understand about sacrifices, he whispered.

And she didn’t, and he must have seen something of that, because he said, his voice booming like the wrath of the heavens, Not out of fear or of greed or because the sun will tumble from the sky, but because you cared.

I was sorry for you, Xochipil thought, thrashing, trying to reach him through a pane of glass—but he wouldn’t answer.

When she woke up in the dim light of the rising sun, she was alone, and the air still smelled like ashes.

He had left her his wide-brimmed hat, and some food; and had refilled her water-flask. Her hands throbbed: He had traced the glyphs for “safe journey” and “water” on their backs—all the favour he would grant her, all the thanks he would ever condescend to give.

Rising, she walked away from the ashes. In the distance was the familiar line of the rails, pulsing on the rhythm of the god-machine; and, still further away, growing fainter and fainter, a figure walking, with the stars in his hair and the glimmer of obsidian in his hands.

She could still hear his voice in her mind, lightly amused.

All gods are cruel, Xochipil. What else did you expect?

He would make his way to the capital, as aloof and as lonely as he had always been, bearing alone the burden of his struggle against the machine, never allowing his devotees to offer more than a little aid, a transitory comfort. And in the end, he would stand in the huge palace of bronze and copper: alone against the machine and its endless might, so pitifully small and defenceless, as easily crushed and broken as his obsidian mirror.

Pity closed like a fist around her heart. “Please be safe,” Xochipil whispered to the silent desert. “Please come back. Please.”

And her words, rising under a sky as red as blood, had the intensity of a prayer.

© 2012 by Aliette de Bodard.

Originally published in The Mammoth Book of Steampunk,

edited by Sean Wallace.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a System Engineer. In her spare time, she writes speculative fiction: Her stories have appeared in Interzone, Clarkesworld Magazine, and won a Nebula and Locus Award. Her Aztec noir fantasy Obsidian and Blood is published by Angry Robot, and her latest release is the ebook On a Red Station, Drifting.

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

Under the Scab
(a Kaslo Chronicles Story)

Matthew Hughes

Previously on The Kaslo Chronicles: As a new age of magic dawns amid the ruins of the former technological civilization on Novo Bantry, wizard’s henchman Erm Kaslo is on the trail of the horde of multi-legged creatures that carried off the survivors who had taken shelter at the castle of his employer, the wizard Diomedo Obron. The tracks lead to an interplanar portal into the Seventh Plane. Kaslo has no idea what awaits him there, but knows that he must go through.

To read the other stories in the series, visit lightspeedmagazine.com/kaslo.

It was too late in the day to start back to Indoberia. Kaslo tried to find ways to busy himself about the castle, but his thoughts would not leave him alone. Finally, he went up to the flat roof of one of the larger towers and leaned against the parapet as the planet’s sun sank below a horizon no longer broken by the Commune’s skyline. In the opposite direction, the stars were coming out, but Kaslo saw only a handful of the glittering orbitals that used to stretch in a sparkling, glinting arc across the night sky. Some had been thrown off into space, some had come down in searing fireballs, some had just gone dark and died.

He thought about the millions of people who had lived up there, thought about how they had died and about how a few desperate survivors might be gasping for their last breaths of dwindling air even now. Nothing could be done for them, just as nothing could be done for the people snatched from the village where he had promised them safety.

When he’d made the promise, he’d thought it genuine. A sturdy palisade, a rotation of sentries, a tocsin to sound a warning: all just matters of common sense. But he saw now that he had been playing by the rules of another game—a game whose pieces had all been brutally swept from the table, to be replaced by a new and sinister collection of elements.

And the rules, he thought. I not only don’t know them; I may never know how to play.

• • • •

Kaslo and Bodwon did not go straight to the whimsy. Instead, they went to the southern edge of the city, to where the spaceport still stood. The op was surprised to find the place virtually intact. The only major destruction he saw was where a liner must have been just about to touch down at the moment of change. When its in-atmosphere drive failed, the huge vessel had crashed onto the pad, bursting apart like a great ceramic ball. Broken fittings, broken crockery, broken bodies, were scattered in a circular field of destruction all around the ruptured hulk.

They made their way past the edge of the debris. Their destination was the main terminal, where the supplies were kept. Then Kaslo spotted a familiar shape sticking out of the liner’s remains. “Wait,” he said.

He picked his way through the mess and came to the still recognizable remains of a second-class bunk. The compartment built into the headboard was closed, and of course it no longer knew how to open itself at Kaslo’s command. But he wedged the end of his knife into a crack and heard a click.

The cubby sprang open. The op reached inside and found what he’d been looking for: several ampoules of the medications taken to reduce mental stress and the possibility of permanent derangement among passengers who went through the irreality of a whimsy. The find meant they wouldn’t have to search the spaceport’s supply center, which he expected would have been heavily looted.

Kaslo called up his mental map of Indoberia as it had been, and worked out the shortest route to the Commune’s connaissarium. It would mean crossing the ornamental canal, but he was hopeful that at least one of the simple footbridges would still be standing. If not, they’d make some kind of raft.

As it turned out, they arrived dry-footed at the square where the connaissarium had stood, though they were tired from scaling and descending more piles of shattered crystal and masonry. The buildings fronting the square had all been extravagantly tall, their elements bound together by energy webs. When the matrices had ceased to function, the structures had come down in an avalanche of destruction, like great glass dominoes smashing and crashing against each other. Though it had been more than a month, Kaslo could smell the reek of corruption from the thousands of people torn, crushed, and buried in the rubble.

He and Bodwon stood and watched the whimsy for a while. It looked like swirls and billows of dark smoke, charcoal gray and burgundy, confined by a wall of clear glass.

“It looked the same yesterday,” Bodwon said.

“Yes,” said Kaslo, “it’s stable.”

“Never seen one before. Thought they were only in space.”

“Not anymore, apparently.”

They watched it a little longer, until Kaslo hitched his shoulders and said, “Well . . .”

They approached it slowly, spring-guns ready, in case something emerged. In space, Kaslo knew, whimsies went in only one direction. But that had been in the space of the old universe.

The op knew what everybody had known about whimsies. There were nine planes of existence, and spacetime occupied the third. The Underworld was the second plane, the Overworld the fourth. The first plane was an empty limbo, thought to be the workshop from which the now-departed demiurge and his helpers had fashioned and launched the other eight realms.

The higher dimensions did not usually impinge on the third plane. The exception was the seventh, through which passed the whimsies, each of which connected some arbitrary point in third-plane space with some other point at an immense distance.

No one knew their origin. Some thought that a now-vanished spacefaring species had burrowed them through the seventh dimension, using powers beyond humanity’s grasp. Others believed the denizens of the upper realms had built them for their own purposes, and that humankind trespassed upon them in the same manner as vermin took advantage of houses and food stores.

Whatever the answer, whimsies had been waiting when humanity took its first flights beyond the system that contained the original home world, which some said was a remote place far up The Spray called Old Dirt. They were stable and reliable, although sometimes a ship went into one and did not emerge where it was expected. Again, theories abounded. The lost ship might have come out a million years too late, or too early. Spacers told tall tales about seventh-plane creatures that captured ships and wore them as jewelry, or swatted them like annoying pests.

Kaslo and Bodwon reached the whimsy. Its flat surface was larger than it had looked from a distance. It towered over them like a wall of dark glass. Kaslo felt his back muscles tighten, the skin over them going cold. He shook off the sensation before it could cause him to shiver.

“The rope,” he said.

They had brought rope from the castle, Bodwon wearing it like a bandolier. He now unwound it and tied one end to Kaslo’s waist. While that was going on, the op sorted through the medications he had retrieved from the liner. There were three kinds: a heavy sedative that brought instant unconsciousness; an ameliorative that prevented the sedative from depressing the brain’s functions beyond the point of no return; and a complex synthetic hormone that cushioned the neural circuits against permanent restructuring, should the other two components fail.

Kaslo left the sedative and ameliorative in his satchel and held the third capsule in his palm. “I’ll try it this way, first,” he said. “I’ll put my head through. You count to five, then pull me back.”

“You don’t want the eyes?” Bodwon said.

“Not yet.”

The other man shrugged and stepped back a few paces, then wound the rope around his wrist and bicep. “Ready,” he said.

Kaslo faced the whimsy. He pushed his fears back into a far corner of his awareness. With his thumb, he pressed the ampoule against his palm, as he had done so many times while lying in a spaceship’s bunk. He felt a coolness penetrate, then permeate, his hand, and flow up his arm, shoulder, and neck. It reached his head and filled his skull with calm clarity. The fear he had pushed away now faded to nothing.

He stepped forward, bent at the waist, and let his head enter the whimsy.

Instantly, the world he knew disappeared, to be replaced with a flood of sensations he could not process. He could see nothing, because here there was no energy called light. He could hear nothing, because there was no medium to transmit sound.

Yet his brain, even cushioned by the hormone, tried to make sense of what his sensory organs reported, so he experienced flashes of color, garish reds and purples too intense for comfort. He sensed a flatness, as if he was standing on an immense plain, and a highness, as if there a great space hung above him—though he could see neither.

There were sounds, though he knew they were being produced only in his head: a hollow fluttering, like liquid moving though a metal pipe, and a deep hum that cycled from soft to painfully loud. The skin of his forehead was trying to report impressions of temperature and pressure, hot, cold, mild, intense.

No good, he said within the confines of his mind, and saw the words become jagged-edged shapes, silver and green, that flew off and faded in the distance until they disappeared.

He tried to pull his head out of the whimsy, but something like gravity worked against the motion. He strained harder, but it was as if the muscles of his head and neck had lost almost all strength. He tried to gesture with his hands that were still back in the third plane, but could not tell if the signals from his brain were reaching their muscles and nerves. He realized he could not feel the rope around his middle or the pressure of his feet against the ground outside; all sensation was confined to his head, and none of it made sense.

A new thought came: If space was so different here, time must also have an alien dimension. While on the third plane Bodwon counted to five, an aeon might pass for Kaslo’s head. And who knew what might come by and take an interest in it?

His fear blossomed anew, overpowering the medication. He fought against it, but saw the emotion rise like tendrils of a sea-plant, bright green and sickly yellow, tossed by tide and waves. Calm and center, he told himself, reaching for the mental exercises he had practiced since his youth. But they were partly based on breath control, and he could not find a connection between his will and the muscles of his diaphragm. The sea-forest grew more dense, its motion more wild.

And suddenly he was under Novo Bantry’s yellow sun, breathing air and hearing Bodwon’s footsteps approaching and his voice saying, “Are you all right?”

The hormone-induced clarity was back. “I think so.”

“What was it like?”

Kaslo just looked at the man. “If you really need to know,” he said, “take a look.”

Bodwon put up his hands in a manner that declined the invitation. “Now what?” he said.

Kaslo was surprised to feel almost completely restored. He stooped and opened the satchel he had left on the ground. Out of it he took a strip of tanned leather, long enough to tie around his head. Embedded in the hide were the eyes that had been on the ends of the stalks Polpero had cut from the clicker. Examination had shown Obron that the creature’s natural organs had been covered over with crystal cusps that had unusual properties. The wizard had worked overnight to adapt their function to Kaslo’s vision. He had not been entirely sure that the things he had done would make them serve Kaslo’s needs, but Obron had said, “They will not make things worse, and they well make possible that which otherwise could not be.”

Kaslo had now experienced the impossible. He was willing to give his employer’s growing level of ability a chance. He tied the strap around his skull, positioning over his eyes the faceted crystal cusps that had been grafted onto the clicker’s eyes. Immediately the world of the third plane became a kaleidoscope of contending angles.

He turned once more toward the whimsy, then looked back over his shoulder and told the segmented face of Bodwon, “This time, count to ten, then pull me back.”

He fought a flash of revulsion and put his head and shoulders through the barrier. It was the same, yet it was different. He still heard the wuthering pipe sounds and the cyclic hum, still felt the alternating temperatures and pressures on his face. But now flashes of color and transient shapes in his vision were less intense. He felt a moment of dizziness and closed his eyes beneath the cusps. When he opened them again, the dizziness flooded back then abruptly dissipated.

He felt a kind of shifting in the back of his head, as if a muscle had flexed in his brain. All right, he said to himself, let’s go with that. He exercised his will, and felt the sensation again.

Kaslo had not risen to the top of the difficult profession of confidential operative without developing willpower. Now, as he applied it, his vision suddenly stabilized. He was no longer experiencing assaults on his optic neural systems that caused them to produce spasmodic splashes of meaningless color and form. He was seeing.

And what he saw was a plain and a sky, with a range of rounded hills in the distance, all of them a featureless gray. But then there came another flex of whatever was active in the back of his skull. With the sensation came a realization: This is not reality I am experiencing, but an interpretation of irreality that my sensorium can cope with.

He made another mental effort, and the irritating sounds ceased. Now he re-examined the gray landscape and came to another conclusion: The things I’m seeing don’t have to be gray. I can choose.

He chose, and the plain became ocher, the sky a light blue, the hills a deeper shade.

That’s better, he thought. Now, let’s see what happens if . . . He willed his vision to sharpen, to magnify as the speculus had done. Instantly, the hills loomed closer, their slopes oddly rounded and folded. He could see motion.

Tighter, he told himself, and the image in his field of vision grew both larger and more in focus. Still the moving objects were difficult to discern against the similar-colored background. So he put his will behind his need, and changed the hills from dark blue to pale cream.

The things that were moving now stood out. They were clickers, a lot of them, and they were busy doing something. But he couldn’t make out what—there were too many shapes, too much movement, and his vision would not sharpen further, for all his efforts to will it to do so.

I need to get closer. No sooner had he formed the thought than he was drifting effortlessly across the plain. And no sooner had the motion begun than he was suddenly yanked backwards.

“You just disappeared into it,” Bodwon was saying from somewhere above him. Kaslo turned toward the sound and realized he was sitting on the stone surface of the plaza, looking up through the fracture-producing lenses of the clicker’s eye cusps. He pulled them from his face, but it still took several seconds before his vision-processing circuits could make sense of the other man’s face.

He closed his eyes, reopened them, then waited for a sudden wave of dizziness to fade. He blinked again and started to rise. “The eyes worked. And I could move,” he said.

Relief washed across Bodwon’s face. “I thought something had maybe grabbed you, was pulling you through.”

“No.” Quickly, Kaslo told him what he’d seen, then said, “How much rope have we got?”

It was good, lightweight fiber, but there was no hope of its stretching even partway to the hills.

As Bodwon recoiled the line, Kaslo stepped back and looked up at the whimsy again. Its swirls of colors had not changed. His passage through it apparently did not affect its stability.

Except, he thought. He asked Bodwon, “Does it seem smaller to you?”

The other man eyed the great circle. “Don’t know. Maybe.”

The op was glad of the medications he’d taken. “There’s nothing else to do,” he said. “I’ve got to go back in.”

• • • •

Standing before the impossible—a stable whimsy on a planet—Kaslo gave the situation only a moment’s thought. Then he told Bodwon to fetch a chunk of broken building stone from the ruins around them. He tied one end of their rope around the fragment, then heaved it through the whimsy.

He redonned the crystal cusps that had once covered a clicker’s eyes and poked his head through the barrier and was again met by a maelstrom of mental dissonance. But he flexed the newly found “muscle” in his visual cortex and in a moment he saw the thrown block of stone lying half-sunk into the ground, the rope tied to it.

He pulled his head back into third-plane space and told Bodwon to hand him his spring-gun. Then he said, “Wait here. If I’m not back before the sun begins to set, go home and report to Obron.”

“You don’t want me to come look for you?”

Kaslo touched the cusps over his eyes. “Without these, you’d be blind.”

The man nodded. “What’s it like?”

The op shook his head. “Different,” was all he could manage.

• • • •

Before he set off toward the hills, Kaslo checked the fragment of stone that anchored the rope. It had softened and now had the consistency of dense clay. He examined the rope and found it unaltered. That was good, because he was going to have to rely on its remaining where it was, leading up from the transmuted stone to a point where it disappeared into the air—because there was no other way to tell where the exit to the third plane stood.

Into the air, he thought, that’s not really the case, is it? When he waved his hand, he felt no stir of air from its passage. Come to think of it, he wasn’t breathing, yet he remained conscious.

He felt his clothing, made from organic fibers. It was unchanged. The flexi-ceramic mechanism that powered the spring-gun was also unaffected, but when he broke open the weapon to check its magazine, he found that the steel-coated lead bullets had become soft as overripe grapes. He dumped them out, thought, Now what?

He focused on the ground at his feet. It was neither soil nor rock, but seemed to be a tightly packed mass of small spheres, ranging in size from pinhead to pea, with far more of the former than the latter. He scooped up a handful of it and saw the depression he had made instantly fill itself in. He let the tiny grains flow through his fingers but closed his grip on one of the larger orbs.

It was hard and smooth, and about the size of a spring-gun bullet. He put it into the weapon’s receiving chamber and cranked back the ceramic spring, which he was glad to see was unaffected by seventh-plane conditions. Then he pointed the muzzle straight up and pulled the trigger. The sphere shot high up, went instantly out of sight. Kaslo stepped back a few paces and waited. After several seconds, he saw a large dimple suddenly form in the ground before him, then close.

He spent a little time searching for more nodules of the right size, filling the spring-gun’s hopper and putting several more in a pocket of his upper garment. Then he cocked the weapon once more and turned toward the hills. A moment later, he was gliding smoothly across the plain, though he felt no breeze from his silent passage.

Not only silent, but dreamlike. One moment the pale hills were distant, the next he was nearing the point where they touched the plain. Time is different here, he thought. He willed himself to stop, then focused on the motion above. From this angle, he could make out less detail than he had from out on the plain. He saw segmented legs, as if he was looking up at a ledge and could only see movement near its edge.

One thing he could tell for certain was that the hill was no more made of rock than the ground was made of soil. It seemed to have a fibrous surface, with intersecting strands of various sizes meeting and interweaving at a thousand different angles. He moved toward it, reached out a hand, and touched.

Unlike the ground, it would not let his hand penetrate. It felt neither warm nor cold, but the touch transmitted a sensation to his nervous system that he could not identify—a kind of vibration without motion. He knew the feeling was supposed to convey information, but his brain did not know how to receive and interpret it.

The clickers were busy above, ignoring him. He readied the spring-gun and said to himself, Up. Immediately, he began to glide up the slope of the hill. As he neared the locus of the creatures’ activity, he thought, Slower, and felt his rate of ascent slacken. But still the many-legged beasts paid him no heed.

The slope curved out, then in again, and met another curve that came down from above, creating a kind of ledge. Along this the clickers ran in two streams, one in each direction. The file moving to Kaslo’s right carried nothing; those going left carried lengths of the fibrous material the hill was made of.

The op willed himself to drift to the right, around a shallow curve. He saw a scar on the hill’s surface where the clickers were prizing up and snipping off strands of the slope’s substance. He went left and followed the other stream, and soon came to a sharper bend in the ledge. Beyond it, a crevice opened in the hill, wide and tall, and lit from within by pale golden light. The fiber-bearing creatures were disappearing into it, and their unburdened cohorts were hurrying out.

Still, none of them paid any attention to the observer, hovering beside the trail. Kaslo moved closer and higher, then willed himself to descend between the two streams, his thumb on the spring-gun’s release catch. He was jostled and brushed against, but still attracted no notice.

Back on the third plane, he would have taken a long breath to steady himself. Here there was no breath to take or release. So he simply willed himself forward and entered the golden crevice.

The way was narrower here, the walls pressing in, but there was enough headroom for Kaslo to float above the two hustling streams of clickers. The passage sloped gradually down and he followed it at the speed of an easy walk. The light remained the same.

He rounded a long, gentle curve and the scene before him changed. The passage debouched into a vast chamber, its ceiling lost above in the golden glow, its farthest extent equally misty. The in-bound clickers were streaming along the space’s floor, then climbing partway up one of the side walls. They congregated busily at a point too far away for Kaslo to make out details of what they were doing, but out of the roil of motion came the other file of creatures, heading back for more of the fiber.

The op willed himself toward the cluster of activity, rising at a gradual incline until he was level with that part of the wall. As he drifted toward it, he saw a large, circular discoloration in the wall’s surface, and the closer he came the more it resembled an ulcer. The clickers were laying down the fibers on the edges of the laceration and weaving them together.

The image suddenly made sense to Kaslo. They’re making a scab, he thought. With that realization came the obvious corollary: the “hill” into which he had followed the stream of gray creatures was not a geological feature. It’s an organism. It’s alive.

He moved closer. The surface of the ulcer was thin and semi-transparent, pinkish in color. Behind it he could see vague shapes and feeble motion. A horrific thought half-formed in his mind, but he forced himself not to allow it to emerge full-blown. He drifted in, slowly approaching the center of the circular feature, now as wide as one of the slider tunnels that ran beneath Indoberia.

At an arm’s length from the surface, he willed himself to stop. The motions beyond the pink membrane did not suggest struggle—they were more like the peristaltic movements of a body’s natural systems. He inched closer. The spring-gun was in the way, and he slung it across his back, then drew his knife. But when he had the weapon before him he saw that its blade was drooping from the hilt, as soft as an over-boiled vegetable.

Having nothing else to cut with, he forced the limp metal back into its sheath and, reaching out with both hands, he tore the skin with his fingernails. Kaslo looked through the rent and now the nascent thought he had forced from his mind came rushing back with the force of a flash flood.

Behind the barrier a wide, deep cavity had been scooped out of the wall. But there was no empty space; the cavity was now filled with human beings, jammed and jumbled together, bound to each other and to the walls of the depression by a network of the same fibers the clickers were using to repair the ulcer.

Kaslo saw limbs, faces, the soles of feet and the crowns of heads. He saw movements that told him the captives were still alive, mouths that opened, eyelids that fluttered, fingers that crooked and straightened. A cold horror took hold of him. He saw a face he recognized, a middle-aged man who had been one of the mob Kaslo had taken in. The lips moved as if forming words, but no sound came; there was no air to carry it.

A hand protruded toward Kaslo. He reached and took it, with the thought that he might be able to pull someone free of the tangle of flesh. But before the fingers could close on his, he yanked his hand back. At the touch of the cool flesh he had learned two terrible things: first, that whoever had owned that hand no longer did; second, that the organism whose substance the clickers had opened and filled with captured humanity was not just alive—it was sentient, it was aware of what was being done to it, and it suffered.

A wave of anguished knowledge flooded through Kaslo. Not only did he feel the entity’s despair, he felt the traces of all the personalities that it had been helplessly made to absorb from the people who had been pressed into it. Then it got worse. The pain came from more than just this occasion; Kaslo became aware of a vast expanse of time, of aeons spent in bondage, of great power stolen and misused.

And as he knew the slave, he began to be conscious of the bondmaster. His mind reached toward that knowledge, but even as it did so, some instinct—or perhaps some knowledge acquired from the individuality he had just encountered—shoved him away from that thought. He thought of the shade of Phalloon in the Underworld, terrified even to let a name cross its diminished mentality, of Obron’s fear to make a connection.

Now a new thought came: I need to get out of here. Even as the words formed in his mind, he noted that the scene before him had changed. The clickers were no longer busy at their work. The streams no longer went to and from the distant entrance. Now they all stood still, their eyestalks in constant motion, their pincers feeling the space around them, as if they were blind.

They cannot see me, he thought, but now they know I am here, and they are looking.

He didn’t know what had kept them from noticing him. It might just be that whoever or whatever controlled them had not told them to look. But it appeared that things were about to change. He was already moving across the cavern toward the entrance, but he willed his speed to increase.

Something was happening in the gap. The clickers were massing there. As he drew closer, Kaslo could see that several of them had sunk their pincers into the edges of the slit, now they were interlocking their legs with others of their kind. A barrier made of gray bodies and meshed segmented limbs was building, a layer at a time, from the base of the gap.

And it was closing fast. When he had come through, it had been four times his height and he had floated through vertically, the soles of his feet well above the backs of the hustling creatures. Now, the exit was more than half blocked and, because it narrowed toward the top, the gap was closing faster and faster.

Kaslo willed himself to fly horizontally, head-first, and was glad to find that his orientation changed. Faster, he thought and it seemed that his speed increased. But the clickers were piling up, and now one stood on the backs of two others, seized the top edges of the gap’s apex and blocked the last space.

The op was zooming toward the topmost creature at undiminished velocity. He meant to crash through, and wondered if he should—or could—try it feet-first. No, he thought, the spring-gun.

It was still slung on his back. He pulled the weapon over his head and into his grip. It was still cocked. He worked the feed to line up several missiles in the chamber. He was approaching the blocked exit at a speed that seemed to be about as fast as he could have run in the third plane.

The topmost clicker’s eyestalks had been moving, as if casting about for something elusive. Now they stopped, and fixed themselves on Kaslo’s approach. He saw the thing’s complex mouth parts working, and wondered if they had some kind of language.

But now it was too late for wondering. The clicker stood on its rearmost pair of legs, but the rest of its sharp-pointed limbs reached toward him like hard fingers ready to pierce and grasp. He remembered Polpero’s ghastly wounds.

Kaslo did not know where to aim the spring-gun. It wouldn’t matter. When he was moments away from impact, his thumb pressed the release. The weapon made no sound, but three of the spheres he had collected on the plain shot from its muzzle and penetrated the clicker’s hard-shelled belly, making a vertical line of three circular wounds.

The effect was more than the op could have hoped for. The holes in the creature’s abdomen immediately began to widen, like smoldering fire through a sheet of paper, a glow of energy around the growing rim of each. As Kaslo still sped toward it, the three wounds became one, then that one spread like a wildfire—out toward its limbs, upward toward its head and upraised pincers, down toward its rudimentary tail.

In a blink, the clicker was no longer there. The gap was open, and Kaslo shot through it and out into the emptiness above the plain. He wasted no time but called up into his mind’s eye the block of softening stone with its rope leading back to the world of space and time.

It seemed to him that he flew toward it like a missile. In moments, he saw the rope ahead of him, still disappearing into emptiness. The stone had flattened under its own weight and now resembled a pool of thick liquid.

Kaslo willed himself to slow and to come down feet first. He reslung the spring-gun and took the rope in both hands. He yanked, then gripped hard, hoping that Bodwon would pull him through.

But there was no response. A chill went through him. They had not established that it was possible to pass through the whimsy from this direction without someone pulling from the other plane. Kaslo had just assumed it could be done.

He followed the rope, letting it pass through his hands but without tugging on it. He came to where the cord disappeared and slid his fingers along its length. Their tips disappeared, but there was resistance and it had taken a lot of Kaslo’s strength just to push through to the first joints.

Will it, he thought. But when he tried, it made no difference. And even as he drove his hands deeper into the invisible whimsy, he became aware that something was happening behind him. If he had been in the third plane, the hairs on his neck would have risen, and he would have known that someone was watching him.

He looked back, saw the place where the clickers had been so busy, up the slope of what he had thought was a hill. There was more motion there now, but it was different. The distant, tiny figures were no longer traveling back and forth along the fold in the slope. They were streaming down onto the plain and rushing toward him.

Kaslo turned back to where his hands and wrists had disappeared. He thrust his arms deeper into nothingness, and tried to dig the balls of his feet into the ground to gain purchase. But with no ground, no purchase could be gained. He still hovered a little above the granular surface of the plain.

He did not know how quickly the clickers would reach him. He knew only that he had to push through, or be carried back to the chamber of golden light and pushed into the mass of now mindless people packed into the wall.

Or perhaps his would be a worse fate, he thought. If the thing he dared not think about now knew about him . . .

He forced the thought from his mind and pushed again. It was like trying to force his hands through rapidly setting concrete. He was trying harder, trying his hardest, but he had managed to pass only the length of his forearm through. And now he was completely stopped.

There was nothing for it but to pull his arms out, turn and face the oncoming horde, and use the spring-gun for as long as he could. At least he wouldn’t have to worry about running out of ammunition.

But when he tried to draw his arms back into the seventh plane, they would not move. He struggled, the skin of his back twitching as he imagined the clickers racing ever closer. But he was stuck solid, as if the concrete had set.

In a life that had occasionally presented Kaslo with opportunities to die, he had sometimes wondered how it might come to him. He hadn’t thought of this one. He wondered if the clickers would be able to pull him free, or if he would be worried to death as Polpero had been.

And what happens if you die outside your own plane? he wondered. Would his ba and ka be able to find their way to the Underworld and Overworld?

I shouldn’t have to be worrying about things like that at a time like this, he told himself. I’ve got enough to be getting on—

The thought was interrupted as he felt a sudden forward motion. A moment later, he was blindly hurtling through real, third-plane space, his wrists tightly held by two strong hands. He was in darkness and he stumbled and almost fell, but the hands held him upright.

“Let me go,” he said. “I can’t see with these things on.”

Released, he tore off the cusps strapped over his eyes, to find himself still in darkness. His head swam for a moment, then the circuits in the back of his head reoriented themselves and he could see again: a campfire burning on the stone flags of the connaissarium’s square, its light showing him the grinning face of Bodwon.

Kaslo looked up and saw the diminished night sky. “I told you not to wait,” he said.

The other man put on an innocent expression. “It was too dark,” he said. “I was afraid I’d get lost.”

“Never mind,” the op said. “We’ve got to go, and right now. The clickers are coming again.”

Bodwon looked past him. “I don’t think so.”

Kaslo turned and saw what Bodwon had been seeing. Or what he hadn’t been seeing, because there was no longer a whimsy to be seen.

“It really started to shrink after you went through,” Bodwon said, “Slow and gradual, but steady. By the time I saw your hands come back out, it was only this wide.” He held his own hands apart, making a space not much wider than his body. “And now it’s gone completely.”

“That’s got to be good,” Kaslo said. “Let’s make some torches and get ourselves home.”

Bodwon had looted the ruins of the connaissarium for firewood, breaking up furniture and artworks from a dozen different periods in the long, rich history of Indoberia. Now they tore strips of canvas from a famous triptych and wrapped them around broken pieces of its frame.

“What did you find in there?” Bodwon said, cocking his head toward the vanished whimsy.

“If I tell you,” Kaslo said, “you won’t be able to sleep.”

They set off by torchlight, picking their way through the debris in the square. They had gone a score of paces when Kaslo abruptly stopped and clapped his hand to the pocket of his upper garment.

“What?” Bodwon said.

Kaslo was remembering the moment in Obron’s old manse, when the magnate had reached through the speculon he and Varshun had made and brought from the sixth plane a handful of “soil”—which had immediately set fire to the furniture he placed it on. And now Kaslo had brought a pocket full of whatever passed for the ground in the seventh plane.

He leaned forward and tipped the lip of the pocket so that the spheres he had used for ammunition avalanched out onto the flagstones. As they bounced and rolled, they no longer looked like colorless, perfectly spherical pebbles. Instead, in the light of the torches, they glowed with an iridescent sheen, a rainbow of transient, ever-shifting hues.

Carefully, Kaslo reached for one. It was warm in his palm.

Bodwon bent to see the thing. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “What is it?”

“A nouble,” Kaslo said. He remembered the three that had been smuggled off the secondary world New Gargano in the dying man’s sleeper. They had been worth a fortune, and now Kaslo had a whole bagful of them.

He put the glowing sphere back in the satchel and slung it around his neck again. “Obron should be pleased,” he told Bodwon as they set off again. “These things are supposed to be useful to wizards.”

This time he took only three steps before his tired mind made the connection. He remembered how the contraband noubles had passed unharmed through the fire that consumed the corpse of Osvert Chittipath.

I think, he said to himself, I may know the answer to the question: Why a fire elemental?

© 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.

Eternal Horizon

Rhys Hughes

Suddenly the horizon gave birth.

There were effects. I was affected by them. I sat with my goddess on my knee. She didn’t need me, nor I her. So everything was equal and free. We were in love.

Renuka is short and beautiful. Her skin glows in the twilight. Her hair is black and curly. I never drown in her deep brown eyes, but my image constantly bathes there, cleansing itself of all disappointments and miseries. I am happy and almost powerful.

I met her in the depths of the Indian Ocean. Somewhere between the Seychelles and the Maldives. I had been thrown from my ship by pirates. That’s what occasionally happens when you stop to ask directions from a galleon with crimson sails. The eyepatches, accordions, and cutlasses should also have awakened my suspicions. When I pulled up next to them, they swarmed over the side.

I hardly managed to utter a word before I was pitched into the sea!

That wasn’t too bad. After all, a man might be rescued by a miracle, and in fact this is what nearly happened. A dolphin surfaced and allowed me to cling to its back. In gratitude, I played and sang to it, shanties and salty ballads. It was an hour before it could bear no more. It dived with an exasperated flick of its tail.

I was alone again. I sank in due course, my lungs full of water.

My entire life passed before my eyes. When it reached the present, it became stuck in a loop, because it had to include the moment when my entire life passed before my eyes. And so on.

There was no end. I couldn’t die.

Immortal, I bounced lightly on the seabed.

• • • •

Renuka was already there. She was combing her hair.

She regarded me with a flicker of surprise. Then she winked. We couldn’t talk underwater, so we just nodded and kissed. I guess I’m not the first man to have an affair with a deity of the ocean, but I felt very special. And still do.

Days later we came up for unnecessary air and allowed the currents to wash us onto an unnamed island. This became our love nest. We ravished each other on the warm sand. We returned often to the same spot. There were always offerings waiting for us. Our presence had been noted. Her worshippers are generous and inventive.

I am grateful for the fruits and wine, but my favourite gifts are the jars of honey. I unscrew these and trickle the liquid gold onto the beautiful quim of my divine girlfriend. Then I lick it off and bring her to the sweetest orgasms. The best taste in the world.

Not far from our island there is a gaping hole in the floor of the sea. Not the entrance of a cave, but something more substantial. The mouth of a secret river that flows far under the dreams and thoughts of fish and men. We decided to explore it. Renuka is an impulsive goddess. We swam together into the darkness, holding hands. I used my little guitar as a rudder.

The waters grew chill and only the feel of strange currents told us that this hidden river was fed by equally mysterious tributaries. But we continued along the main channel, which narrowed until we scraped our backs on the rock ceiling. We heard peculiar sounds beyond the walls of this submerged passage, frightful howls and groans, though whether of geological activity or unimaginable beasts was impossible to determine with any confidence.

We kept going, lands and cities and people high above us. At last, the tunnel twisted upward and we surfaced at the bottom of a deep well. The eroded sides provided many suitable handholds. We scrambled to the top and lay panting in an ancient temple in a cold desert. We had emerged just south of the Altai Mountains in Central Asia, about as far from the ocean as it’s possible to be.

For a sea goddess and her lover, that is very exotic.

• • • •

It became our private retreat. A second love nest.

Nomads on camels brought us wild honey.

One morning I discovered an unusual property of our mutual desire. When Renuka is sufficiently excited by the attentions of my fingers and tongue, her quim becomes a mouthpiece for the sea. Placing my ear to her moist lower lips, I can hear the waves crashing beyond her womb. And ships passing in the dawn.

I confess I was amazed the first time.

She stroked my hair. “It makes perfect sense. Even through ordinary shells, the music of the ocean is audible. The more beautiful they are, the more accurate the surging and swelling. And my little shell is the most gorgeous of all.”

This is true. I kissed and listened again. Her pubic hair is so black it is almost blue. A natural harbour for my love.

“There is something else,” I said. “Not the sea. Wild chanting.”

She frowned. “My worshippers are praying. They must be calling for me. I wonder why? Will you listen more carefully? Repeat to me their words.”

I caressed her until she opened still wider. Then I returned my ear to its former position. Our distant island was throbbing with ritual. A festival dedicated to Renuka. Her followers wanted a favour, or else they were trying to warn her. Without understanding, I reported what they were saying. I felt my goddess tense, but without pleasure. She pushed me away.

“Bad news. Another horizon has appeared on the sea. It is red and possibly bloody. A baby horizon. Clearly the first horizon has given birth. An unexpected event!”

“I didn’t realise the edge of the world was female,” I replied.

“Nor I. Who or what could have impregnated it?”

We pondered briefly. I soon had the answer. All the seamen who had sailed to the horizon from sundry ports for thousands of years. Millions of seamen. It only takes a single individual to fertilise a geographical concept or optical illusion. Obviously one had.

I said, “We will get used to the new arrival.”

She shook her head. “No. The second horizon lies between the land and the original horizon. What if the sun sets behind the new one by mistake? This is what my worshippers are worried about. It will set in the sea and boil away all the water.”

I gasped in horror. “What shall we do?”

She smiled gently. “It is still only early morning. We have a full day to think of a solution. But first I suggest we take a look at the situation ourselves.”

I agreed. I always agree with her. Partly because I am in love, but mostly because she is never wrong.

• • • •

There wasn’t enough time to travel overland by camel or feet, nor to swim back down the subterranean river. So Renuka took emergency measures. She turned herself into a wave. She doesn’t do this too often. It’s a bore, or so she claims. There’s a joke there, don’t know where. Nor did I know precisely where we were going at any given moment when we flowed out of our crumbling temple. I rode her like a surfer and she carried me south.

We crossed the desert and accelerated over Xinjiang, washing the Old Silk Road, but leaving not a drop behind, for she gathered all up into herself. I laughed in the foam. Nomads bowed as we passed. Then into the high plateau of Tibet, where briny pools, remnants of ancient seas that had been unable to drain off, compared their waters with ours unfavourably.

My mirth ceased as we swirled through the towering peaks of the Karakoram range. I grew dizzy and wished to be let down. But our mission was too urgent. There was the great desert of Rajasthan to glide across and the marshes west of Gujarat. At last she slowed, for we had almost returned to the ocean. Entering a port city, she stopped and changed back into a woman and we stood together on a harbour of the Arabian Sea, looking out in the direction of our unnamed island, but not at it, for it was too small and far.

The second horizon was a remarkable sight.

Exactly halfway to the old horizon, it glimmered red on the waters.

It was noon already. The sun had ceased climbing. Down it would roll now into the evening and the probable destruction of all liquid and life. I trembled. And then I began to sing.

I made up the lyrics as the melody progressed. I crooned a ballad about the sun, how it was no fool and was sure to set behind the further horizon as it always had. But I was less confident than my tone indicated, for I knew that mistakes can be made by anyone or anything, and I was overwhelmed with a sudden vision of the flaring red ball dipping its rays into the tops of the waves, turning them to steam and hissing more and more angrily as it eased the rest of its stellar bulk into the bleeding blue. I almost smelled the purple vapours, felt them baste my cheeks and cook me alive.

I was unable to continue. My song dissolved in tears.

• • • •

Renuka brushed a stray ringlet from her eyes.

“Our island is stuck somewhere between the two horizons. It won’t stand a chance.”

I mumbled, “What shall we do?”

“Singing is no use, that’s for sure.”

I accepted the rebuke. It was a familiar one.

I haven’t introduced myself properly yet. Forgive the omission. My name is Luís Rodrigues. I came originally from Lisbon. I play the cavaquinho, a type of guitar with four strings. All my girlfriends have been goddesses. Pure luck, I suppose. Or adulterated fate. Don’t mind which.

“We should evacuate my worshippers,” said Renuka.

I nodded, though I knew it would make little difference. With the seas boiled away, nowhere on the planet would be safer than anywhere else. But as a goddess with a strong mothering instinct, she undoubtedly considered it her duty to try to rescue her people. I wondered aloud how we would physically remove them from their present location. There were hundreds of them.

“They can’t all surf on my wave,” she answered. “We need a ship.”

“Can we afford to hire one?”

She stroked her earrings. These were little oysters on chains and under her touch they sprang open, disgorging two black pearls, which she held up for my inspection. Cool and lustrous, they rolled together in her cupped palm.

“With respect,” I ventured, “those aren’t quite rare enough to pay for an adequate vessel. We require a galleon at the very least.”

She flashed me a lovely smile. “I’m aware of everything. These pearls will pay for a raindance. Run now to the market and find me a fakir skilled at magic, but not too skilled. And fetch a jar of local honey while you’re at it!”

• • • •

I did so. The name of the port city was Porbandar and it was a confusion of sounds, people and things for which no apologies were offered. I stumbled into the market almost by accident, but it might have been more difficult to avoid it, so sprawling was this collection of stalls and booths. I parted the curtains of spice dust with my hands and approached an obscure corner shaded by a forest of umbrellas, all open and fixed high on frames, for this was a kiosk whose owner wished to fully display his wares. Below these clustered canopies, prone in the overlapping penumbras, a group of fakirs and wonder workers rested their powers.

I strolled among them, careful not to knock over any baskets, for many of these were full of cobras and their spit. And maybe worse. Flutes and naked swords also made my progress perilous. But with uncut and unsplintered feet, I eventually located the man I sought. He was the scrawniest and most desperate looking of all, so ruined by his lack of ability that his eyes barely widened when I showed him the pearls. But he meekly followed me back to the harbour. On the way out, I secured the honey.

Renuka studied the fakir with a mild frown.

“He was the least promising there,” I explained.

She relaxed and asked him, “Can you make rain? If so, hurry!”

He licked his thin lips and proceeded to cast an ornate but imperfect spell. I alternated my attention between his graceless antics and the new horizon that wavered on and through the deep like a duelling scar on a belly or streak of tomato paste on a simmering curry. With a cracked voice, our fakir called out incantations that belonged to a time before turbans and slippers. I noticed a slight cooling of the early afternoon heat, almost a tickle on my brow. But our magician was sweating and puffing with oven exertion. A pitiful figure. He danced in a circle, arms upraised and tongue protruding. Then he collapsed.

I assume he had held some sort of dialogue with the local rain god or goddess. I asked Renuka about this, but she wasn’t familiar with any such deity, though she always appreciated any being or agent that returned to her realm the water which evaporation kept stealing. There was no point questioning the fakir on this point. He was unmoving, seemingly drained of all vitality. I looked up. A small cloud was nudging the face of the day. A very light shower began.

“Is that the best he could manage?” I snorted.

Renuka held me close. “Yes, but that’s exactly what we want. A decent magician would have conjured up a monsoon and blotted out the sun completely. This clumsy amateur has given us a pathetic raincloud. It is most fortunate!”

And she pointed with a splendid finger.

A rainbow was forming in the sky. It dipped its spectrum into the sea as they often do, but it must have been confused, for the point of contact was the new horizon, the closer edge of the world, not the old unreachable one.

“For the first time,” crooned Renuka, “a rainbow has a real end.”

“How will this assist us?” I blurted.

“Don’t you see? The pot of gold kept guarded by every rainbow is now available! It is only halfway to infinity! The original horizon is an illusion created by the rules of geometry. As we approach it, so it recedes at an equal rate. But the new one is less distant than the limits of our vision! So it can be reached. I was hoping for this. We now have a source of considerable funds to pay for a ship. It was also a test. If a rainbow can be tricked by a second horizon, so can the sun, or any other meteorological or astronomical phenomenon.”

“I understand,” I responded, “and this result reinforces our worries.”

Renuka clapped her hands and cried, “Staggering wealth is available to any shipowner or captain willing to lend their vessel to me! Spread the news among the sailors of the port! Enough gold to make every volunteer rich! Don’t delay! All your dreams will be affordable, at least until the end of the world later today! But an afternoon of riches is still better than one full of lack!”

She called this to the general crowd gathered near us. Some ignored her or just blinked confused eyes or rubbed suspicious chins. But a few decided her offer was worth serious attention. They began to scuttle, seeking captains and permission. It seemed an important cargo had just come in, so complex was the bustle along the quays. There were good navigators and mates at a restaurant on Rupalee Corner. They were fetched, fingers still sticky and licked as they rushed to the goddess to experience the fuss of her offer for themselves. I stood quietly and made shade over the fakir.

It soon became apparent that none of the ships moored in Porbandar on this particular day were powerful or strong enough to embark on a mission through and beyond the rainbow. Or perhaps it was the sailors who were at fault, for when they realised exactly what was involved, they shook their heads and slowly recoiled, cheeks hot with shame. But this was acceptable cowardice. For although there was open sea between the two horizons, the closer horizon was still the edge of the world, and one which could actually be attained, and the idea of sailing over any edge of a world is not pleasant. So fear overcame greed and it appeared our islanders would never be rescued. These sailors just weren’t desperate enough.

• • • •

But news of our offer had spread along the coast to other towns. And now a ship manned by real reckless types pulled in and dropped its anchor less than a mile out. It must have sailed here from one of the neighbouring ports such as Kuranga or Navibandar. It was large, too, a galleon made of teak with tall masts. Renuka was delighted, but I was furious, for its sails had been dyed crimson. It was my lost ship, converted into a pirate vessel! I hopped up and down and blubbered my distress to my goddess.

She soothed me to coherence with caresses and wisdom.

“What temerity!” I grumbled at last.

The chief of the pirates, whoever he was, was standing on the deck with a spyglass. He examined the houses and inhabitants of Porbandar, sweeping his gaze across the smoking factories, the carved wooden balconies of the buildings, the rickshaws in the narrow streets, the market, the mouth of the freshwater creek, and finally the harbour. He lingered over the individual expressions of the sailors. Then he chanced on Renuka’s face and my own, which were pressed close together as she sought to comfort me. I noted that he adjusted his focus. He dropped the spyglass. He ran over the deck shouting orders.

It must have been some quality in the features of Renuka that alarmed him so. He probably realised she was a goddess with powers greater than those of any human, including pirates. Seeing her so closely associated with a former victim, practically kissing him, he must have feared the worst kind of vengeance. Red sails full of wind, the galleon turned and sailed away again, the crew struggling to pull the anchor back up.

They managed to escape faster than they could reclaim it from the seabed. The ship accelerated directly away from us, the anchor scraping and bouncing along behind, catching on coral reefs and ripping them to pieces, so that millions of fragments of coral were washed ashore on the tide, like a necklace for the entire subcontinent. Suits you, India! As the ship grew smaller with increasing distance, I turned to Renuka with a wild laugh.

“Transform yourself into a wave again and let us chase them!”

But she smiled and took my hand. “I don’t believe in revenge. Sorry.”

I pulled away from her loving grip and snarled, shaking my fist at the dwindling speck. As if in response to this angry gesture, a strange thing happened. Another strange thing, I should say, for this life of mine is full of peculiarities. Anyway, there was a ripple on the sea very close to the edge of the quay, where I stood, and a dolphin surfaced and nodded politely. Furthermore, I recognised it as the same creature that had abandoned me to the mercy of the ocean currents all that time ago. Imagine that!

It would be a lie to say it winked. And dolphins always seem to be grinning, even when they don’t mean to, but some aspect of its demeanour, I can’t state what, gave me the impression it was asking for forgiveness. It hoped to redeem itself by helping me. I jumped into the sea, swam the few strokes to its back, clung to its fin with one hand, my cavaquinho held aloft and dry in the other, and with a hasty kiss blown over my shoulder at Renuka, I allowed myself to be carried off in pursuit of the pirates.

• • • •

We began to catch up with the galleon, but a totally unexpected event occurred at the new horizon. The pirates had been pulling up the anchor all this time and it had slowly risen higher through the briny deep until it was almost out of the water. Just a single barb now trailed under the waves. This was a fortunate or contrived coincidence, depending on how you looked at it, for the barb actually caught on the line of the horizon itself. But it didn’t brake the galleon, which was large and possessed of considerable momentum. No, it stretched and curved like the string of a crossbow.

I nearly lost my balance as I observed and chased developments. The galleon kept going and the horizon kept stretching and the tension was alarming and I wondered what would happen if it slipped loose from the anchor. It would probably spring back and catch the dolphin and myself and propel us backward at high speed. We would be like an arrow, but what would be our target? The roof of a house in Porbandar? Or a stall in the market? Then I envisaged other possibilities, which were more extreme and more useful.

I pictured to myself the galleon slowing up as the pressure of the stretched horizon increased. But it would reach the secret island of Renuka and myself. Frantic to abandon ship, the pirates would steer onto the nearest beach. The vessel would be stuck on the white sands. But at this point, the tension would simply be too great. Like a giant piece of elastic, the horizon would snap back into place, hurling the ship and our island with it high into the atmosphere. The island would collide with the sun, which was coming in for its daily setting, and knock it back toward noon.

The world would be saved, at the cost of our love nest, our secret paradise, which would be vaporised. Very apt really, for Renuka is a sea goddess and the isle of her cult would extinguish the blazing threat, if not the blaze itself, to the human race.

This didn’t happen. I’m still grateful.

Instead, the ship proved stronger than the illusion. Stretched beyond endurance, the new horizon broke at both ends of infinity, at the left and right limits of my vision, and ended up dangling limply on the barb of the anchor, like a length of mystic spaghetti. Then I saw my island ahead. I was struck with three quite different but very forceful emotions. I felt relief at no longer being the horizon’s arrow, delight at coming home to paradise, and regret that Renuka was not with me. I needed to express this tumult in my heart in the only way I knew. A song. I relinquished my hold on the dolphin’s fin, kept my balance by clenching my knees and strummed my instrument. Then I opened my mouth.

It was too much for the dolphin, which promptly dived again, regretting its regret, and also for the galleon, which had endured years of my songs when I owned it. The timbers were obviously shocked at this resumption of their musical torment and abruptly split apart. The ship went down with all its pirates, dragging the slack new horizon with it. Then I felt the water rise up below and rush me the rest of the way to the island. It was Renuka in wave form, not seeking revenge but rendering assistance, and I surfed her on my little guitar, as I had done before all the way from Central Asia.

• • • •

The day didn’t end there, though the sun now only had one horizon to set behind, the original edge of the world, and did so safely. We lay on one of our beaches, surrounded by devotees, in a close embrace but unreasonably chaste, to contrast with the pirates, who had been reasonably chased, and stared up at the emerging stars, the brightest of which refused to twinkle. I was bewildered.

“What’s the matter?” Renuka asked.

And I replied, “Look at the sky. Mars appears to be missing!”

“So it does! Why is that, do you think?”

I considered this enigma. Then I had the answer. It was astounding.

“The old horizon didn’t give birth after all!” I cried. “No, the new horizon was a visitor. The edge of a smaller world. The Martian horizon!”

“It was on vacation from the Red Planet? That explains its ruddy colour, which we mistook for blood. And also why Mars has disappeared from the firmament. Without its horizon, it can’t have a shape and thus can’t be seen!”

“There are no seas on Mars. It must have fancied a swim.”

Renuka sighed. “But now it has drowned.”

We kissed lightly while we waited for fresh honey.

I said casually, “This makes sense. Imagine believing that a geographical feature is female and could be fertilised by generations of seamen! How ridiculous! I’m glad everything has turned out to have a sober explanation.”

“The pirates snagged an adult alien horizon.”

I smirked. “If they had sailed up or down the coast, they might have escaped. But they believed that once over the curve of the world, they would be out of sight. This was formerly true, and is true again, but not when they tried it. The original horizon was too distant, so they steered for the closer one. It was their downfall, literally.”

Renuka replied, “I can’t help but imagine your ship at the bottom of the sea, a new home for clams and fish, with its cargo of dead buccaneers and the horizon of another planet tangled around its anchor, undulating in the currents.”

“I know what you’re thinking,” I remarked.

“Shall we visit it down there? Shall we? Oh, let’s! Come with me into the depths now and we will swim around and into the wreck. It will be haunting, mysterious, romantic, and sombre at the same time! Hold my hand and follow.”

I was in no position to argue. Our worshippers prostrated themselves in the sand as we stood and walked to the sea. Our honey exploits would have to be postponed. I was just able to cope with the disappointment. As we entered the surf, I glanced up at the glittering heavens again. I wondered how many other horizons had left their own planets and taken vacations on ours. They probably envied the fact we had oceans. That is understandable. But how many horizons had never come back from holiday? All sorts of accidents might have happened to them. The solar system might once have been crowded with planets that no longer had shapes. And now Mars had been lost as well.

• • • •

My speculations turned out to be alarmingly accurate. We reached the seabed, but there was no galleon and no drowned pirates. The vessel had sunk directly above the mouth of the subterranean river. So it had been sucked down and along the narrowing passage, dragging the loose horizon with it. Then I realised that the howls and groans we heard when we first explored this river were the horizons of those missing planets, lost down tributaries of that secret waterway, writhing like worms to seek a way out. This thought made me reluctant to approach the entrance and my terror must have communicated itself to Renuka, for she swam away quickly still holding my hand and I went gratefully with her.

We surfaced again and returned to our island. We forgot our cares in tropical peace. But within a few months, we received an unlikely guest. A camel was climbing out of the ocean with its rider, his robes dripping and his scimitar already turning to rust in his sash. The beast had swum across half the Arabian Sea! The messenger was one of our other worshippers from our ruined temple under the obscure peaks of the Altai Mountains. He dismounted and prayed to us. Then he looked up and told us that a crew of dead pirates had surfaced at the bottom of the well in the centre of the temple and had hauled themselves out. They had taken up residence in our second love nest. This was no great loss to us and we were barely annoyed. Central Asia might be an exotic location for a sea goddess and her lover, but for pirates and their ghosts, it is purgatory and a just punishment. The only gold in that cold desert is sand and honey. The only booty is the occasional discarded sandal of a nomad.

Our guest departed and I lay between the thighs of my goddess, listening to the sea through her sweet quim, hearing the gentle swell and the splash of the camel’s hooves. There was no need for either of us to say anything. We had just had a big adventure with a new horizon, but it no longer mattered. Ordinary horizons come and go, for they are nothing more than optical illusions, but there is one eternal horizon and it is independent of planets. It is even independent of time, music, and honey.

The eternal horizon is our love, for it has no edge or end.

© 2003 by Rhys Hughes.

Originally published in Album Zutique,

edited by Jeff VanderMeer.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rhys Hughes was born in 1966 and began writing from an early age. His first short story was published in 1991 and his first book followed four years later. Since then he has published more than thirty books and his work has been translated into ten languages. His main ambition is to complete a grand sequence of exactly one thousand linked short stories, a project he has been working on for more than two decades. He is now three-quarters of the way through this opus. His latest book is the “steamprog” novel Captains Stupendous.

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

NOVELLA

Giliad

Gregory Feeley

Trent’s pleasure in being asked to βeta-test Ziggurat deeply annoyed Leslie, who watched without comment as he slid in the CD but left when summer-movie music began to vibrate from the speakers as cuneiform characters appeared on the screen and slowly turned into the company’s name. She was in the kitchen when he called her to come see something, and had nearly finished preparing lunch when he appeared at the door. “No, I’m not interested,” she answered, ignoring his crestfallen expression. “Go role-play as Sargon, but don’t tell me its history. And that anachronistic Greek letter is pretty dumb.”

“They’re just showing off their HTML,” he protested, hurt. “You say you hate not being able to underline in email.” He took a sandwich, an act he made seem like a peace offering. “Was there really a king named Sargon?”

Leslie sighed. “Yes, and he’s certain to appear in the game, since his name sounds like someone out of Star Trek.” Trent laughed. “You know what else they’ll put in?”

“Gilgamesh?” he guessed after a second. Trent hated being made to feel he was being tested.

“Beer,” she answered, handing him a bottle. “The Sumerians invented it.”

“Really?” His pleasure at some bauble of fact was unmediated, like a child’s. “And there were seven cities vying for supremacy?”

“In Sargon’s time? I don’t know.” Leslie thought. “Uruk, then Kish . . .”

“Nippur, Eridu, Ur, Lagash, and Umma.” Leslie looked skeptical, and he added, “I know, it depends on when.”

“These are independent city-states? Then this would be before Sargon, or sometime after.” She sighed. “I’ll look it up, okay? But I don’t want to deal with your game.”

When she entered the office, however, a color map of the Tigris-Euphrates valley was glowing on the monitor. Trent was nowhere to be seen. Leslie pulled down her Cambridge Ancient History, and as she turned back toward the desk, a half-dozen cities appeared within the lopsided gourd formed by the two rivers. She stepped closer and saw that the symbols marking the sites were ragged-sloped triangles, ziggurats. Kish was nearest the stem, with the rest farther south; but after a second a constellation of features began to appear: the word AKKAD materialized just beneath the bottleneck, while stylized inverted V’s, ominous as the peaks of Mordor in Tolkien’s map of Middle Earth, rose to the east and became The Zagros Mountains. ELAMITES, AMORITES, and GUTIANS threatened from the periphery. Leslie glanced at the speakers and noticed that the volume had been turned down.

Not wanting to sit with her back to the monitor as it cycled through these changes, she took her book into the bedroom. She could hear tapping from the living room, where the laptop was plugged in by the couch. She sat in the armchair—the squeak of sprawling across the bed would doubtless bring Trent—and browsed through the pages on Mesopotamia.

Reading history will send you repeatedly to the bookcase to consult other sources on the subject, unless the author has managed to catch you in the spell of his narrative (which means you are not reading history). This volume was so introductory that Leslie would have found herself standing up with every page, save that she did not own the books to consult. Finally she went to the back hallway and searched the double-shelved rows to locate an old paperback, History Begins at Sumer. Anecdotal and lacking an index, it led readers by the hand through successive “firsts”—first library catalogue; first farmer’s almanac—with little discussion or analysis. She wondered whether the game designers had quarried it for local color.

Returning the books to the office, Leslie saw that the screen now showed a stylized face with dark holes for eyes and the corrugated beard of an Assyrian sculpture. She recognized it as a bronze head thought to be of Sargon, with its damaged eye-hole digitally restored. The image stared out at the viewer, its probable accompaniment muted.

“That’s somebody,” said Trent, who had appeared at the doorway.

“True enough,” Leslie replied. “Ancient statues don’t bear plaques, but they always turn out to be of specific gods or individuals—never some generic woman or warrior.”

“How about epic heroes?”

“You mean like Gilgamesh and Enmerkar? They were probably historical figures.”

“Enmerkar?” Trent said, startled.

“Sounds like Earwicker?” asked Leslie, smiling. He was already going to his shelf, pulling down the Third Census and the Concordance. After a minute he reported, “No . . . no references to Enmerkar or Gilgamesh. Rather surprising, when you think of it. Isn’t the poem about the search for immortality, and bringing back the dead?”

“No, not really. Is that what fantasy writers think?”

Trent flushed at this, then sat down to consult one of his reference works. Leslie picked up the book on Sumer and tracked down the chapter on Gilgamesh (“First Case of Literary Borrowing”). Kramer’s precis did make the poem sound more about seeking immortality than Leslie remembered. As Trent was doubtless about to find corroboration of this, she decided to withdraw the remark.

“Hey,” she said suddenly, “pause that.” She was pointing to the monitor, where the image of a desert landscape dominated by an enormous crumbling mound was undergoing digital transformation. By the time Trent had turned and clicked to freeze the image, the mound had risen into angular prominence, like an ice sculpture melting in reverse, and the surrounding wastes had sprouted small buildings. With a keystroke Trent restored the original photograph, and they gazed at the massive ruin, so decayed that the eye first saw it as a natural formation.

“I’ve seen that picture,” said Leslie. “There’s a modern structure on top, built by archeologists. It looks like a Crusader’s castle.”

“Really?” Trent drawled. “They must have edited it out.”

Leslie explained that while the later Babylonians incorporated the various Gilgamesh poems into a single sequence that did include a quest for immortality, the Sumerian originals—composed during the period in which Trent’s game seemed to be set, around 2500 B.C.—told a different story, in which Enkidu is physically detained in the nether world and Gilgamesh merely seeks to get him back.

“But it’s the Babylonian version that everyone knows, right?”

“Well, yes.” Leslie thought irritably that Trent was crowing, but he looked back to his reference book—an encyclopedia of fantasy, she saw—and she got it.

“That’s right, the great man wrote about immortality, didn’t he?”

It came out sharper than intended, but Trent didn’t take offense. “He always said it wasn’t immortality, simply an extremely prolonged life span,” he said mildly. “He was far too obsessed with the end of things to preclude its eventuality.”

And you had to be similarly obsessed to write his life, thought Leslie. Most of Trent’s enthusiasms—Finnegans Wake, the works of James Branch Cabell, Wagner’s Ring—were those of the great man, whom he was seeking, through a kind of literary archeology, to understand. That this required the intentness of the scholar rather than the enthusiasm of the dilettante was for Leslie its primary value.

“He would have hated computer games,” Leslie pointed out.

“Certainly these games,” Trent agreed. “He would have hated postmodernism’s embrace of pop culture and mass media; he still believed in great modernist masterpieces rising above a sea of trash. Yet look at his best work: commercial SF novels, his ‘serious’ efforts unpublished. And his narratives are fragmented and decentered, mixing prose with verse and embedding texts within texts like—” He looked at the monitor, where overlapping windows had opened atop one another, and laughed at the too to-hand analogy.

He had been gesturing unconsciously towards the top shelf, too close to the ceiling to hold any but small format paperbacks, and Leslie glanced up at their titles. “If you want to write about po-mo sci-fi, why not the guy who wrote The Simulacra?”

“He’s not as interesting,” Trent said in a conspiratorial whisper, as though broaching heresy. “My guy isn’t trendy; he’s still out in the margins.”

Images were appearing one after the other on the screen: an ancient map of Nippur, an artist’s rendition of the walls of Uruk, a detailed relief of charioteers riding into battle. Scenes of war, which the city-states waged incessantly upon each other until they were conquered from without. Was this how players would busy themselves? An image of naked prisoners in a neck-stock was followed by a stele fragment of soldiers dumping earth over a mound of enemy dead.

“How do you win?” she asked. “Conquer everyone else, or just stay on top of your own small heap until you die of old age?”

“I’ll let you know,” he said. The screen was once more displaying the entire region, and Trent leaned forward to study it. “Why do they call it a river valley? The land between the rivers is wide and flat, with mountains on one side only.”

“It’s an alluvial plain.” Except for the levées that gradually build up along the banks of the river and any canals, the land appears perfectly flat. But the basins defined by these ridges, too wide and shallow for the eye to discern, would determine the flow of water as it floods, an issue of gravest consequence.

“Annalivia, Annaluvia,” Trent mused.

“Yes, dear.” Outside, Megan’s shout echoed off the tier of condo balconies across the grass, and she looked out the window. “Beta testers play with the product, right? They don’t work at it.”

“Not exactly, but I take your point.” Leslie was already heading for the door, where Ursuline was blocking the threshold, evidently to alert her to anyone coming or going. She stepped over the sleeping Labrador and padded quietly down the hall, leaving her book on the table outside their bedroom. Through the back screen she could hear the children’s shouts, none pitched to the pain or alarm she was always listening for.

Four kids were visible or audible through the dining room window, circling each other on the trimmed lawn. Their game seemed improvised yet intuitively understood, and even the fluid shifting of rules that Leslie observed provoked neither confusion nor protest. What games did children play in the ancient world, without structures dedicated to their edification? Would the diversions of ancient Greece be more familiar to us than those of early Sumer, a culture twice as old and incomparably stranger?

Leslie took chilled coffee from the refrigerator, added ice, and stood watching out the kitchen window, a few degrees’ different perspective. Without a ball or demarcated spaces, their game seemed the frolic of will in a field of limitless play, the impulse to sportiveness before it has touched a limit.

At one point the four children were all facing one direction, paused before a prospect invisible to Leslie. Something in their hesitancy immediately reminded her of the scene, shown earlier in this Kubrick’s year on living room DVD, of the killer apes crouched warily before the slim, featureless monolith. “It looks like the World Trade Center!” cried Megan, still weeks shy of her eighth birthday. “Where’s the other one?” Trent had laughed, anticipating the coming scenes depicting life in 2001. “You’ll see,” he said.

The sun retained the brightness of midafternoon, though it was after five and Leslie, had she not taken a half-day from work, would be on the train home by now. The resumption of school still left what seemed an entire play day for Megan, who would go back outside for more than an hour after dinner. This plenitude, possible only in the first weeks of the school year, possessed the transient glamour of enchantment: one layer of time folded onto another. Partake while the feast is before you, she wanted to tell her daughter, who consumed her good fortune with youth’s grassfire prodigality.

She brought a glass in for Trent, who had called up another map of Mesopotamia, this one showing the network of canals running between rivers and cities. “It’s all connect-the-dots on a flat surface,” he said in mild surprise. “I bet news travelled by boat and canal path, along these lines. Like a computer chip,” he added after a moment.

“Watch it with the cute conceits,” Leslie warned. She wondered whether the map’s density of crisscrossings (which seemed to include all the thirty or so Sumerian city-states, not the just Big Seven chosen for gaming purposes) was largely imaginative reconstruction. How many of those first distributaries could still be discerned beneath millennia of subsequent history, flooding, and war? Perhaps through satellite photography, of which the last decade must have seen a lot.

Trent, angling his head to regard the map northside up, seemed to be thinking along the same lines. “The entire region is now part of . . .”

“Iraq, yes.” Where children now perished for the imperial ambitions of their leaders, as had doubtless happened five thousand years ago.

Trent grimaced. “At least Great Games never pandered to the help-kill-Saddam market.” He was reminding her that he had refused to get involved with a project called The Mother of All Battles nearly ten years ago, when turning down assignments was hard to do.

Leslie recognized that she was looking for a reason to dislike the game. “Ancient Sumer was such a strange culture, you’re not going to gain a understanding of it by playing geopolitics.”

“I don’t think this is all wargaming,” Trent replied as he clicked through a series of menus. “Here’s a module on the economy of mud bricks. Look, you have to bake the ones that go into the bottom rows, or they will draw moisture out of the ground. And you need wooden frames to make them, which are expensive.”

“That’s not a mud brick,” Leslie pointed out. “It’s a clay tablet.”

“Whoa, you’re right.” Trent backed up to restore a rectangular image that had appeared as a sidebar. “That might be a bad link.” He scribbled for a moment on a clipboard next to the monitor.

Leslie leaned forward as Trent, exploring the program’s architecture, followed a series of links that brought up more cuneiform images: tablets, cylinders, a pieced-together stele. “Wait, stop,” she cried. The clay square on the screen was evidently small, as it contained only five rows of text. “I remember that one from college. See the first characters of the top three registers? They are ‘Day 1, Day 2, Day 3.’”

“Really?” Trent studied the pictograms—a pair of curved lines, suggesting sunrise over the saddle between two hills, with one, two, and three vertical slashes beneath—while Leslie explained that the tablets dated from 3000 B.C., the dawn of writing, and that these three characters were for a long time the only ones on the tablet whose meaning was known. She had seen a slide of it in a history lecture, and when the teacher asked the class to guess she felt a thrill at the unmediated transmission of meaning, like current, across five thousand years. “How many hash marks till the base number?”

“The Sumerians had a sexagesimal system, based on factors of sixty, but their place notation progressed in alternating tens and sixes. It was very complicated.”

“Hey!” Trent looked delighted. “So their system partook of both hex and decimal.”

“Watch it,” she repeated. “I didn’t say hexadecimal.” But Trent had already returned to the computer and was searching the game’s list of tables.

Any history game that gave an explanation of the Sumerian notation system had a good chance of positioning itself out of the market, Leslie reflected as she returned to the living room. This one would have a tough time in any event, with Civilization III, the industry’s 900-lb. gorilla, about (she remembered Trent saying) to burst onto the scene. She wondered whether games that big paid their beta-testers.

The living room window looked onto the front yard, away from the angled patterns of the condo complex behind them. Their lease allowed the owner to terminate on two months’ notice if he sold the house to the developers, who evidently had plans to expand the complex next spring. This agreement reduced the rent but also, they learned, discouraged the owner from maintaining his property.

“History begins at Sumer.” And ended, presumably, a few years ago, at least according to that silly book her Dad sent her one Christmas. Leslie worried less about inhabiting a post-historical world than a post-boom one, which seemed now to be fully upon them.

Trent was clicking rather than tapping, evidence he was venturing deeper into the game. Fair enough, late Friday afternoon in early September; it was anyway Leslie’s turn for supper. The DSL being free, she plugged in the laptop’s phone jack and went online, and spent the next twenty minutes (the ingredients for salad were already prepared) browsing through the pages that a search on Sumer, Akkad, Mesopotamia brought up.

Gamespace isn’t textspace, which tilts the plane to create page, tablet, screen: upright to the eye like the drawings that words once were. Gamespace models the earth, a field of play for agents, not the gaze, to move through. Battlefield means battleground, its participants grounded as text never is. Sumer was a plain, even as its texts, lying forgotten beneath the successive accumulations of history, eventually become. You may claim equivalence, each plane perpendicular to its opposite, but the fallen tablets make clear which one subsumes the other.

Perhaps the computer game holds out the promise of genuine space, the three dimensions produced by intersecting planes. A surface isn’t space at all, though references to “the white space” between words or “floor space” underfoot may seduce us into thinking otherwise. Leslie is undressing for bed, whose flat cotton expanse (it’s too hot for blankets) extends unbroken almost to fill the room. Pulling a fitted corner back over the mattress, she causes a spray of rills—converging on an adjacent corner like improbably straight ridges—to widen and disappear. Every bedsheet is a landscape.

Sumerian scribes held their tablets at an angle while writing, as an old stele shows. So the act of writing takes place in space, even if it is read flat? Leslie plans to be asleep before Trent joins her; she is halfway there already. She can hear him in Megan’s room reading about Greeks besieging Troy, with occasional glosses. There are probably also excisions of repeated lines, although Leslie can’t hear them.

Scribes excised lines with a wet finger, smoothing the clay to blankness. Dried clay couldn’t be altered, but fresh material was plentiful; Mesopotamia left no palimpsests like the scraped parchments of the West, too precious to discard. Leslie blanked texts at a stroke, words with no physical fixity dispersed even from the dance of forces that had briefly held them. Drawing the mouse across its pad, its faint drag pacing the ribbon she extended across the page, Leslie unworded the clumsy locution, restored the soothing emptiness, ready for words better chosen, as a child might fill in the surface she had scored. Scribes prepare their own tablets, but merchants are too busy, and Nanshe could push the set clay into the frame’s corners with stronger fingers than her brothers, who preferred to scoop mud and hurl. She was not allowed to cut reeds but could bring them to her father, who let her lift the damp fabric and make marks on the pristine square so long as she smoothed them before he needed it.

A female scribe would be laughable, but women in merchant families were often taught to read. Nanshe plied needle, dowel, and chopping knife—awkwardly, but she could still hold a reed better than either brother. Carefully she positioned it between her fingers so that the nib was angled correctly, then sank it cleanly into the surface. The tactile pleasure of its yielding was intensified when she lifted the stylus to see the sharp wedge she had made. Twisting her fingers slowly, she added diagonal and perpendicular strokes: syllables, a word. She yearned to match her father’s fluency, but the pride she took in producing a recognizable “wheat” swelled her heart, and she drew the cover back over the tablet without effacing it, a secret message for her father to find.

Dampness fled swiftly in the midday heat, and Nanshe stood up with the two frames in her arms and began to pick her way to the upper bank. Enannatum could bear them faster, but he and his friends were busy diverting a stream past their walled mud city, which would soon suffer attack from rival fortifications. Atop the rise, where a footpath paralleled the straight-ruled canal, Nanshe could see across leagues of fields, orchards, and low, shaded houses. It seemed readily plausible that if she set down her frames and climbed the nearest tree she would see, wavering on the horizon, the walls of the enemy.

Writing, trade, and a premonition of the consequence: endless warfare and eventual destruction. Ineluctable modality of the geographical, the scribe thought as he rolled a fresh sheet into the platen; at least that, if no more.

He was a half-dozen pages into a science fiction story, about a nuclear war fought with long-range bombers. Given time, the Soviet Union would doubtless be able to fire rockets halfway round the world, children of the V-2 with H-bombs as warheads. At the moment, it didn’t seem the world would wait that long.

“There’s panic buying in the streets,” called Cyril from the front hall. The scribe heard the clink of bottles in the paper bag, and the sound of the door being kicked shut. He realized that he had been unconsciously listening to the elevator ascending, and had set down the book and returned to his story in anticipation of Cyril’s entrance.

“Just closing time for the liquor stores,” he said calmly. “They’re not open Sunday.”

“I know panic when I see it.” Cyril came in with a pair of bottles and an opener. “There will be fistfights in the grocer’s, old ladies trampled in the crush.”

“Well, we’ll be sure not to hoard.” He flipped off the bottle cap and took a deep drink.

“Whoever imagined Armageddon would arrive through the Suez? Hungary was galling enough. What’s this?” Cyril lifted the book off the chair and read the cover. “From the Tablets of Sumer. A subsidiary of Pfizer?”

“You know very well what Sumer is,” the scribe retorted. “And the tablets are dried clay.”

“My people used stone. Actually, we took whatever God handed out.”

“And look where that got—” said both men together. Cyril grinned blackly and tossed the book onto the desk. “Not a great title,” he remarked.

“They’ll probably change it for the paperback.” The scribe typed the rest of his sentence, a brief rattle, and pushed his chair back.

The elevator began to descend back to the lobby, a rickety hum that did not register when he was typing or listening to music, but would start up during a lull to remind him that he lived in a hive. He had moved his family to Milford expressly to get outside the blast radius, and here they were back again, just across the river from Manhattan as Western Civilization seemed to be entering its death throes.

The basement shelter in Milford, with its blankets, chemical toilet, and emergency provisions, seemed in his imagination to lie still underwater. The image, literary and unreal, could not be contemplated in the intolerable present: It belonged to some other category of time. He imagined the occupants of a New York apartment building crowding down into the basement in the minutes before attack.

Cyril was leafing through the book. “Firsts?” he asked curiously. “Sumer was the beginning of civilization?”

“As we are its end. Great cities whose literate class is kept busy producing official documents, and so don’t distract their masters. They found the Gilgamesh epic among thousands of temple inventories and official genealogies.”

“First tame writers, eh?” Cyril commented. “Guess that’s why they also had to invent beer.” His own bottle, the scribe noticed, appeared to be bourbon.

“In their beginning is our end,” he murmured.

“It’s a cute idea,” Cyril said, meaning that’s all it was. “Is there a story in it?”

“I don’t really feel like mining it for story potential,” the scribe replied, a bit waspishly. Which wasn’t really true, he realized: Without thinking about it, he had been doing exactly that.

“I suppose you’ve been digging for references to Sumer in that damned thick square book,” Cyril continued.

“It’s not square; it’s circular,” he protested mildly.

“Found some already, I’ll bet. Care to read me one? Go on; you know you want to.”

With only a token show of reluctance, he pulled out the big book, supple-spined as a dictionary from frequent opening, and found the marked passage.

“Behailed His Gross the Ondt, prostrandvorous upon his dhrone, in his Papylonian babooshkees, smolking a spatial brunt of Hosana cigals, with unshrinkables farfalling from his unthinkables, swarming of himself in his sunnyroom, sated before his comfortumble phullupsuppy of a plate o’monkynous and a confucion of minthe . . .”

“A bigshot,” Cyril commented. The scribe blinked at this, and jotted lugal = bigshot on a pad beside his typewriter. “Lots of bug imagery: drone, cigals, papillon—this is the ant and the grasshopper story, right?”

The scribe nodded. Cyril would love the Wake if he allowed himself.

“Dhrone also meaning throne, meaning the crapper. The great man’s preoccupations never recede far, do they? I can bet what the ‘unthinkables’ are, but what about the ‘unshrinkables’?”

“Pajamas, I think,” the scribe replied. His mind flinched away from unthinkable. “There’s a later passage, which contrasts ‘Summerian sunshine’ with ‘Cimmerian shudders.’” Cyril looked about to smirk, and he added sharply, “Not Robert E. Howard’s, but the land of shadows.”

Cyril nodded wisely. “Sumer is igoin out,” he said. “Lhude sing Goddamn.”

There was nothing the scribe could add to that. The faint whine of an overhead jet, some 707 bound for Idlewild, reached them faintly through the window. The scribe looked at the pane, thinking about shutters. Flying glass; blast sites in the financial district, the naval shipyards. Apartments with a view of the Manhattan skyline might prove less of a premium.

“You’re thinking story ideas.” Cyril became very acute, not to say accusing, when he got drunk.

The scribe flushed. “The greatest temptation is the final treason,” he began, then stopped: He seemed to have no more control over his words than his thoughts. “I was thinking about shudders.”

Cyril laughed, then finished the bottle and set it on the floor. “Well, tell me what you decide.”

The scribe’s bottle was also empty, and it occurred to him that when Virginia took the kids to a movie so he could entertain in the tiny apartment, he should be quicker in realizing that he had to go to the kitchen himself. Indurate though he was to alcoholic remorse, the scribe felt a stab of grief, that he had brought his family back to the targeted city, now near the endpoint of history.

And Cyril, who sometimes seemed to read minds (but likelier knew to follow one’s stream of consciousness to where it pooled), said, “There’s your title: Last and First Gravamen.”

The scribe found he could not bear to contemplate the word gravamen. He was standing in front of the refrigerator, looking at containers of the juice, whole milk, condiments that he usually saw only at table. The quart bottle was cool in his hand, its heft comforting, but the hum of electricity and wisps of Freon-cooled vapor seemed fragile to evanescence, and the emanating chill breathed a message that he hoped not to hear.

• • • •

Leslie was halfway through an aggravating Monday afternoon when Trent called with his proposal. “That game?” she said distractedly, waving away a colleague who had poked his head into her cubicle. Trent had fooled around with it all weekend, reasonable behavior for someone who spends his workdays editing documentation, but was expected to set it aside for Monday.

“I have been exchanging email with the developers, and they’re planning a series of novel tie-ins.”

“Novels? You mean, like Dungeons & Dragons books?” Leslie had seen such paperbacks in Barnes and Noble.

“Not gaming novels, but novels set in the game’s era. They would be packaged to tie in with Ziggurat, but wouldn’t follow its story line or anything—it doesn’t have one, of course. Three novels, each one long enough for a slim book, and historically authentic, which is a selling point. But dealing with wars, trade conflicts, dynastic succession: just like the game.”

Leslie didn’t like the sound of this. She had met friends of Trent who had worked on such projects, which seemed a good way to earn six thousand dollars in four months rather than four weeks.

“What are they offering you?” she asked.

“They want to see a proposal, maybe two or three outlines. I told them about your history, and said you would be involved.”

“In writing a novel?” Leslie was sure she was misunderstanding something.

“I’ll do the work, I just need input for the outlines.”

“Trent, this makes no sense.” Her phone began blinking, a call routed to voicemail. “Isn’t this game coming out in November? There isn’t time for all this.”

“It’s been pushed back till spring; they’re afraid of the competition from You-know-what. This repackaging is kind of desperate, and they need the books fast. I can do that, I just need to get the contract.”

Leslie sighed. “We’ll talk tonight, okay?” Another co-worker appeared, and Leslie waved her in. Another light went on and she jabbed at the button, too late. “Sit down, I just need to check my messages.”

On the way home Leslie returned the weekend video rental to the library, where she checked the 930s shelf for books on Mesopotamia. She brought back several, which Megan studied curiously while Trent made supper.

“These must be very old people,” she remarked. Then she added confidingly: “Daddy is reading me the oldest story in the world.”

“The Sumerians were around long before the Trojan War. They probably invented the wheel.”

Can something so obvious be startling? Megan looked surprised—of course wheels must have appeared at some discrete point—but said nothing until dinner, when her parents’ conversation brought it back to mind.

“Their civilization was stranger than those game designers realize. You can’t write a popular novel about it without distorting everything.”

“Oh, come on—how strange can their motivations be? The cities fight over resources and influence, their churches slowly turn into bureaucracies, and individuals pray for solutions to their personal problems and worry about dying. Sounds familiar to me.”

“That’s a gamer’s-eye view. A novel would have to go inside the heads of one of these characters, and their value system—it’s as far from the Greeks’ as they are from us.”

“They invented the wheel, so they wanted to be like us. The Pequots didn’t have wheels, and Ms. Ciarelli read us a book about them.”

Both parents stared at their daughter.

“That’s an excellent point, dear. The Sumerians even had chariots, which they used in their battles just like the Greeks. Did I show you the images of them on the computer?”

“Not yet. Do they look like the ones the Greeks rode around the city walls?”

“We don’t actually know what early Greek chariots looked like,” said Leslie. “But Daddy is right, there are actual pictures of Sumerian ones.”

“Even though they’re older?” Megan thought for a moment. “I guess if you invented the wheel, you’d want to make sure everyone knew it.”

Trent showed Megan images of Sumerian carts and chariots while Leslie washed up, then took her to the library to get a video. Leslie spent the hour reading about early Mesopotamia, the laptop beside her for taking notes. The glow of domestic contentment—the parents’ eyes meeting after Megan said something wonderful could spark the most luminous serenity—still suffused the otherwise empty house, and this, plus perhaps the fact that she generally curled up in this armchair with a novel (the glass of wine also helped), shifted something within her, and the customs and practices of kalam, “The Land,” began to suggest the most familiar and comfortable of stories: a Mystery (turning upon a former scribe’s ability to enter a darkened chamber and read the clay tablets with his fingertips), a Melodrama (legal records told of wicked uncles challenging the legitimacy of their dead brothers’ sons), a Gothic (involving the Sumerian custom of burying the family dead within one’s house), and even a Romance (a marriage contract could bring the future bride, sometimes still a girl, into her husband’s household without specifying who the husband will be, so that she grows up wondering which brother she shall marry). How easily the third millennium B.C. accommodated itself to the varieties of the twentieth century (or nineteenth century, if Leslie is honest) novel, the template of bourgeois sensibility.

Trent came down the stairs, hardcover in hand, with the careful tread of one leaving a child just asleep. Leslie smiled and waved. “Still on Book III?”

“For every category of ships I omit, I have to add an explanation for something else. She has already suggested that the story may last as long as the war.”

Leslie laughed. “Switch to the Odyssey, fast! I’m surprised you have kept her interested so long in a story where no one travels.”

“I suspect she’s waiting for the captive princess to be rescued and flee toward home.” Trent dropped into the couch opposite Leslie. “Raymond Queneau once said that all novels are either iliads or odysseys. He wrote one, Odile, that was intended to encompass both modes.”

“As its title suggests?”

A look of astonishment spread across Trent’s face. “I never thought of that.”

Leslie shook her head fondly. “But does this rule apply to pre-Homeric literature?”

“Good question. The Gilgamesh poem would be an odyssey, wouldn’t it?”

“Maybe the later versions, not the Sumerian one. No descriptive journeys, but lots of dialogue and social clashes.”

“Huh.” Trent pondered this. “So what do you call a Gilgamesh-Iliad? A Giliad?”

“Go to bed, Trenchant. I’ll have something for you later.” It was only after he had left, a grin on his face, that she realized what he was thinking.

He was asleep when she finally came to bed, the reading lamp on and a splayed book beside him on her pillow. Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time. It was one of Trent’s endearing qualities, that he fell in love with the assignments that were tossed to him: gave them his heart, which got bruised when they were kicked into some chute and later mashed flat in a change of plans. Entering the realm of novel tie-ins, land of the flat fees, he was already resolved to do more than asked. She shifted the book to the bedside table and slid in beside him, feeling an affection that flared brightest at the sight of her daughter’s features visible in her sleeping husband.

As she pulled the sheet over her and darkness expanded beyond the bedroom walls, Leslie found herself thinking of the Iliad, seemingly more modern than the Odyssey, beginning with the war it treats already in progress and ending before its conclusion. Megan must already know the story of the Trojan Horse; will she be upset the hear of the burning towers, the slaughtered populace, and what awaits the victors who set out on triumphant returns? Gilgamesh was an iliad in that respect, too.

It is the last night of the end of history, and Leslie—who had been reading of the three tiers of cultivation in Mesopotamian farming—dreams of Nanshe climbing a tamarisk: emerging above the lower canopy of citrus and pomegranate to look across the grove, the date palms standing like aloof grownups surrounded by crowding children. Nanshe’s playmates, feet planted among the cucumbers and lettuce, stood looking up as she scrambled higher, the breeze unimpeded in her hair. The sound of men raising the sluice gate carried clearly from the canal, and Nanshe imagined the water, trickling through the channels and branchings into the orchard, reaching at last to wet their toes. Their startled shrieks would rise like birds, and Nanshe would laugh and hurl down twigs.

“Your faces are tablets,” she once cried, exulting at her friends’ alarm, “I see what you really feel!” Father had been explaining to Enannatum how a man’s expression and posture can disclose his true feelings, vital skill for any merchant. Invisible in a corner, Nanshe listened. Now every visage contained characters effaced and rewritten, yet legible to her questing eye. The canopy is a face, where stirring leaves bespeak Ekur’s stealthy efforts to climb. The horizon is a register, the line where dust storms, the winter rains, attacking armies will first inscribe themselves. The world is a tablet, a stele, the frameless burst of meaning that Nanshe, alone between the fruit trees and the unforthcoming sky, resolves to see hear feel for her own.

• • • •

The rentals were returned unwatched, Trent’s redaction of Helen and Paris’s rapprochement left dangling. Cubicle workers stared transfixed before streaming video; officials disappeared into shelters; the skies fell silent. In the shocked still evening, the intolerable images replayed.

Connecticut, untouched by war in nearly two hundred years, got an upwind look. Leslie and Trent lived closer to Stamford than to Bridgeport, but it was toward the older city that Leslie traveled each day, to a thirty-floor gleaming wafer whose daily occupants flowed in and out on the nearby commuter trains. That afternoon, in response to a whispered comment by an ashen co-worker, she rode up to the roof and looked out west. It was there: a low smudge on the horizon, widening as it spread on its own terrible winds into Brooklyn and New Jersey.

No work was done next day, and the weeks that followed were traversed in a cloud of dazed grief. Megan, who had gotten (they later realized) a good dose of live coverage while her parents stood white-faced before the TV, had scary dreams about jets. Trent took a long time completing his assignments, then found new ones hard to get. It was somehow still that Tuesday, so violently nailed to history one could not pull free and move on.

“They now say less than ten thousand.” No real numbers known at all, just vast uttered estimates, to be slowly refined by counting absences. From the hole in Pennsylvania, perhaps a salvageable black box. Amid horror, Leslie found herself yearning for story: a cockpit transcript, defiant last letter, jubilant claim of victory. Which of you have done this? The loathsome Taliban of Afghanistan denounced the attack, Saddam Hussein hailed it.

Work resumed, though badly. Leslie had to tell her tech staff not to go to CNN.com so often. She came home to a consistently clean house, sign enough of how Trent wasn’t spending his days. Megan’s school held its postponed Open House, and they stood before her cubby and examined her activities book, album of drawings, and her daily journal. Leslie turned to the journal entry for September 11, and they read:

Today somthing is going on but I don’t know what. Marry came in and said somthing is getting wors. Somthing aubt a plane. But what that’s the onley quchin I have. I’m probley going to ask her to tell me the ansor becas quechins are ejacashnal.

Trent shook his head. “You couldn’t make up something like that,” he said. Leslie looked at him with annoyed bemusement. Who said anything about making things up?

• • • •

Their first trip to the City was a rainy Sunday excursion to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, where an exhibit on Japanese anime was about to close. They were quiet as they crossed the bridge to Queens, which afforded them a good look at the south Manhattan skyline. Trent perked up as they entered the lobby, however, and led Megan off to the fifth floor while Leslie checked the map for the Assyrian collection.

Most of the Mesopotamian exhibits were Babylonian, but Leslie found one extremely strange artifact from the era of Ziggurat: a teapot-sized terracotta jug bearing a chicken’s head and four clay wheels. She stared at the thing, which looked more Dada than Sumerian, then read how such vessel carts could be dated to the mid-third millennium, but that scholars were divided as to whether they had been built as toys or for temple rituals. Leslie thought that the saucer-sized wheels were too crude for religious purposes, and noticed something that the description hadn’t mentioned, a half-ring emerging from the front of the vessel, from which a rope could be tied to pull the device. Of course it was a toy, though she could not imagine why wheels had been put on a pouring jug (it had two openings, one for filling from the top and a spout in front) rather than a chariot.

More compelling was a copper statuette on the opposite wall, of a man wearing a helmet with long curving horns and strange boots that curled up extravagantly at the toes. His pointed beard and wide staring eyes reminded Leslie of a medieval devil, a conceit that would give pleasure to a fantasy writer or a fundamentalist. The text noted that the horns resembled those of a species of ram found in the mountain regions, whose present-day inhabitants wore pointed slippers. So perhaps the figure had been made there: No one knew.

“. . . It wasn’t the actual film at all, just the video projected onto a big screen, so we saw the clamshell version with its sides trimmed off.” Trent was talking about a kid’s movie that had been shown as part of an exhibit. It was raining on the ride back, and Leslie was concentrating on the road.

“So what were these creatures like?” she asked dutifully. She was trying to get onto the Whitestone Bridge, but the lane for the turnoff was stalled as a stream of cars, most bearing American flags, passed on the left to cut in just before the exit.

“They were mammals, I guess: furry, with serene expressions. You couldn’t tell from the dubbing whether totoro was a made-up word or the Japanese term for a forest spirit.”

“Like Huwawa?” Trent was always gratified when she remembered an earlier subject of interest to him.

“Hey, maybe. Huwawa fought back, but then the totoro were never attacked. They did have enormous teeth.”

Leslie wanted to ponder the nature of wheeled vessels, but consented to discuss Gilgamesh and Enkidu’s journey to the Cedar Forest to slay its guardian. The strange passage held more interest than Ziggurat’s political macaronics, and spoke (in some way) of the distances Sumerians had to travel to get wood for their roof beams and chariots.

“Huwawa was supposed to be evil,” Trent mused. “An odd quality for a forest guardian.”

“It was Gilgamesh who called him that,” Leslie pointed out. “It seemed pretty plain that he wanted to kill him for the glory. You will recall that Enkidu, closer to nature, hated the whole idea.”

“A totoro wouldn’t kill anyone for the glory,” Megan observed from the back seat. “They don’t need glory.”

Her parents exchanged glances. “Good girl,” said Trent. “More people should think that way.”

After dinner Trent showed Megan a game board on his computer. “Archeologists called it ‘the Royal Game of Ur,’ because the first boards were found in the Ur royal cemetery. But other versions were found elsewhere, even drawn on paving-stones, so it wasn’t just for kings.”

Megan studied the irregularly shaped board, which comprised a rectangle made of twelve squares and another made of six, joined by a bridge two squares long. Each square was brilliantly colored with one of several complex designs. “How do you play?” she asked.

“Nobody really knows. Some rules were discovered for a much later version, and it seems that each player threw dice to move tokens around the board. The two players each move in opposite directions, and can land on each other’s tokens and bump them off, especially along the narrow stretch here.”

Megan reached out and traced her finger down one board’s side. “Can we play it online?”

Trent shook his head. “Sorry, this is just an image of the original board. It wouldn’t surprise me if there was a website somewhere to play it, though.

“Maybe the designers should add that feature to Ziggurat,” he said later to Leslie.

“They know their audience better than you do,” she replied. “You know what they would say? ‘There’s no place here for a game.’”

Trent laughed. “True enough. I like the narrow defile, though. It compels the player to move his tokens along the equivalent of a mountain trail.”

“No mountain trails in Sumer. Were you hoping to give players a pleasant suggestion of the Khyber Pass?”

That night Leslie opened a file on her laptop and began to organize her notes on Sumer into something that could provide the outline of a novel. War had to be the theme of at least one book, Trent had said, and present in the background for the other two. Leslie decided to think about agriculture and water rights, a likelier cause for conflict than the poems suggest. Even a prosperous landowner would have no reason to read, but Leslie suspected that a middle-class audience would have problems with an illiterate protagonist, so she invented a younger son who was intended to become a scribe. Worldly doings would dominate the action, but it was the kid sister who would prove the novel’s secret protagonist, and not merely for Leslie. Women always constitute more of these books’ audience than the men realize, Trent had told her. You craft the book to please them, like the baby food that is flavored for the mother’s palate.

She sketched out some paragraphs about a girl who helped her younger brother prepare practice tablets for school, while the older brother learned the family business with their father. Nobody knew how the clay tablets were made, though she could make some obvious guesses. Nobody knew the location of Agade, Sargon’s magnificent capital. Leslie was tempted to set the novel there, though of course she realized she should use sites that readers would find in Ziggurat.

In fact . . . Leslie padded into the office, where the flexing trapezoids of Trent’s screensaver moved silently across their bit of darkness. Trent used her own machine’s better speakers to play music, so had left the Ziggurat CD in his drive, its icon present (she saw after tapping the side of the mouse) on the task bar at the bottom of his screen. She twirled the volume knob, then brought the cursor gliding down to click on the tiny pyramid. As the game instantly resumed, she brought the volume up to the lowest audible level, and the clashing sounds of battle faintly reached her.

Leslie clicked rapidly backward, undoing whatever war Trent had gotten himself involved in, then paused in the silence to examine the lists of artifact images. Might as well use implements actually pictured in the game, if you’re going to write a tie-in. But the sub-directories showed few agricultural or domestic tools (the designers favoring scenes of splendor or warfare), and she found herself studying the gorgeous works of art, museum photographs—had the producer cleared the rights for these?—of enormous-eyed statuettes; gold jewelry of exquisite workmanship; goddesses carved of alabaster and serpentine, the later ones of Attic accomplishment, the earlier ones deeply strange.

What kind of culture could carve these stone figures, hands clasped reverently and eyes like saucers, and place them in their temples, presumably as stand-ins for individual worshippers? Their gaze was neither submissively lowered nor raised towards heaven; they were looking at their gods, with an alertness Leslie knew she could not understand. Did the temple’s divine statues—made certainly of gold, meaning leaf covering perishable wood, which was why none had ever been found—gaze back, or were they intent upon other matters? The gods were sometimes taken from their temples and transported to other cities; vase paintings and cylinder seals showed them being poled along the river.

These were “idols,” Leslie supposed, but it was foolish to conclude that they were literally worshiped, any more than those statues of the Blessed Virgin that Connecticut Italians still carried to festivals. Carved images of supplicants stood before gilt representations of divinities in an enactment doubly signified, creating a field of force no instruments can measure.

Trent couldn’t use this, though he might be interested in the “sacred marriage” hymns, which made clear that the new year’s ritual ended in sexual consummation between the city’s ruler (who assumed the role of the god Dumuzi) and a priestess who represented divine Inanna. More metonymy, although perhaps the gods were recognized as physically present in their surrogates.

Same with the food, she wrote in a file she was compiling for Trent’s use. Everyone knew that the food set out for the gods was actually consumed by the temple staff. Nothing is stone literal, it all hovers between levels of mediation, and we can’t tell where to draw the line.

This was evasion, and Leslie knew that Trent would brush it impatiently aside. The “Stele of the Vultures” was so named because one panel showed vultures flying off with the heads of slain soldiers, and there was no reason to believe that Sumerian armies showed mercy to their captives in any of their endless campaigns. Prisoners who could not be ransomed were killed or mutilated, and what else could you expect? The ancient world did not have POW camps. Trent’s novelizations could not gratify the gamers’ zeal for battles without acknowledging this truth.

The textbooks gave few women’s names, but Leslie remembered a goddess known for mercy named Nanshe, and decided in the absence of evidence to the contrary that Sumerians sometimes named their children after minor gods. She added some more lines about the girl and her family, spent a few minutes reading news updates (a habit now faintly obsessive, but she couldn’t help it), then took herself to bed. Drifting past shoals toward sleep, she thought of Nanshe, who spoke sometimes with the water-carrier, a great-shouldered man baked like a brick by the sun, who had been captured and blinded during a war years ago. He stood all day drawing water from the levée and carrying it along the road to the village square, the thick pole with buckets swaying at either end bowing across his back like an ox yoke. Mudu, the kids called him, as he had apparently said it once when asked his name.

“Were you a farmer?” Nanshe asked him as he walked back toward the well, buckets and pole slung easily over one shoulder. She felt pleased to have inferred this after watching his practiced motions with the shaduf—when temple servants were sent for water, they slopped and wasted effort.

“La-ul,” the man replied curtly. The intensifier suggested disdain for the question.

Nanshe was taken aback. “You weren’t an artisan,” she guessed after a moment; a blind potter or weaver could still ply his trade, or at least serve as assistant.

“Sataru,” he said simply. The verb meant to have incised, but Nanshe was slow to understand.

“You mean you were a scribe?”

Mudu didn’t turn his face toward her, which was a relief, since his gaze was frightening. “Palace, not temple. Records.”

His calloused hands did not look as though they had once held a reed. Nanshe looked at his powerful arms and back, which she had supposed been his since youth. Various thoughts contested within her, but her merchant’s thrift won out and she protested, “Scribing is a valuable trade.”

The man grunted. The sounds of men working the shaduf on the levée had evidently reached him, for he turned without pausing onto the path that led to the well, where he set down the pole and began to tie up the first bucket’s handle. The polished crossbar over which the rope was slung squealed as he let the bucket drop, and he stretched his arms while they listened to the splash and then the glug of its sinking.

“Water is heavier than clay,” he said suddenly.

Nanshe looked up at him, puzzled. “That’s not true,” she said. She started to say something more, then realized that speaking betrayed her location. She took a step back, and added, “Clay tablets will sink.”

Mudu turned and began drawing up the rope. It occurred to Nanshe that he was probably saying that scribes do not carry loads all day. She was still trying to work out why the Palace hadn’t ransomed him to his city, or set him to work keeping its own records, or otherwise turned his tangible value to account.

“How many years ago?” she asked. It occurred to her that he might have had children.

A shout carried faintly across the open air. Nanshe turned and saw an adult waving from the path bordering the adjacent field’s far side, her mother’s cook. She set off at a run, then whirled round to call “Goodbye!” to the slave. If Mudu had once been a palace scribe, he was something other than she had thought.

“If you like dallying at the well, you could bring home some water,” Cook observed. She could not discern detail at a distance, or she would have cuffed Nanshe for speaking to the slave.

“You didn’t send me out with a bucket,” Nanshe observed. Then, “How long ago was the war with Umma?”

Cook laughed. “You sound like a tablet-house instructor.” Nanshe scowled, and Cook pretended to flick water at her. “Which war do you mean?”

Nanshe began to say When they brought back all the slaves, but thought better of it. Sitting in the courtyard with a basket of legumes, she watched Cook cleaning a turtle with a small bronze knife, and wondered whether scribes impressed into battle for their city fought with better weapons than laborers. The household’s other knives were flint, while vendors in the market sliced their wares with blades of clay. Was Mudu’s weapon also carried back in triumph to Lagash; did it serve Ningirsu in his temple today?

Later Nanshe retrieved her doll from Sud, whose tiny clay soldiers had overrun it. Sitting in the shade of the poplar that arched over the house, she took a reed she had cut and positioned it beside Dolly’s arm, as though it were a spear. The figure now looked like Inanna—Nanshe could not imagine an armed woman otherwise—and she reflected that if she took Dolly out to the house they had made for her in the tamarisk brush (Sud had helped, under the impression that he was building fortifications), then the knee-high mud brick structure, its thatched roof removable to disclose partitioned rooms within, would become perforce Her temple. Nanshe, who knew nothing of any temple’s inner chambers, was thrilled at the thought of now gazing upon them.

As she lay that night with Dolly in her arms, the reed spear forgotten under the tree, Nanshe wondered whether she could recruit her mother’s assistance in making Dolly a new dress for Festival. Attired like a prosperous merchantwife, Dolly would certainly

This isn’t what my readers want. The plot must conform to a gaming scenario; any novelistic texture must grow in the cracks between.

Your readers? They are the game’s readers; you’re just brought in to entertain them.

Okay, I’m sorry. But if they’re reading something I wrote, can I think of them as mine, even if the copyright isn’t? At least for as long as they hold open the pages?

This is only a brief scene. Even a novelization can’t be incessant action.

I’ll give it a paragraph. One can introduce new themes in that little space, establish a counterpoint, okay? If I write more the editors will cut it.

Clay soldiers stood atop the house’s perimeter, like invaders breaching the city walls. With an annoyed cry Nanshe swept them clear, but the point returned to her as she lay remembering: Sud thought in terms of armies because the lugals did; the cities did—it was the way things were. Perhaps the gods did.

War with Umma precluded trade with Umma, but Umma (Nanshe’s father often said this) produced little that Lagash did not, and competed with Lagash for trade elsewhere. If the arrogance of Umma’s people regarding water boundaries roused Ningirsu’s ire, there was no reason why Lagash’s merchants should question the will of the city.

Shock troops thunder across the plain, impossibly loud, each chariot drawn by two onagers. Lugal Eannatum’s chariot commands four, and the songs will declare that it moved twice as fast. They far outpace the infantry, which disappears behind boiling clouds of dust, emerging seconds later, a forest of speartips glinting above their helmets, like figures marching out of a mountainside. The enemy ranks break and scatter, and though the chariots do not run them down as in song, no soldier stands fast to attack as they sweep through the line, causing spearmen to drop shields, spring away like panicked grasshoppers, trample each other. Umma’s own chariots, fewer and slower, have not yet reached the advancing Lagashites, who see the rout, roar terrifyingly, and present speartips to the spooked Umman onagers. The plain dissolves into a swirling chaos of smoke, noise, and trembling earth, but the contest is already over.

The sickle-sword in Eannatum’s hand would be portrayed in steles and (now lost) wall paintings, the implicit metaphor—of his enemy falling like wheat before him—apparent to the most unsophisticated viewer. Sumer’s plains, where nothing stands waving in ranked thousands but the wind-tossed stalks, themselves compel the image. Shall Ninlil, goddess of grain, bow down like grain before warlike Inanna?

As her city did before Inanna’s. That is the story—Gilgamesh of Uruk’s—he wants most to write, the wordstring that will reach from inscribed clay to etched polycarbonate. Beginning with young Gilgamesh’s defeat of Agga’s army and ending with the elder king building a shrine in subjugated Nippur, it will bracket the period (a few years, presumably, of his early maturity) when Gilgamesh gained and lost Enkidu, and so must deal with it, though in terms a gamer will not balk at. If Gilgamesh’s triumphs over Kish and Ur are dramatized with suitable élan—Trent accepts that there must be several battle scenes—then the reader will sit still for the journeys to the Cedar Forest and the netherworld: perhaps even in the less familiar Sumerian versions. The harmonics of mythopoesis, echoing even from this profoundly alien culture, can inform any story, however strong its appeal to gamers.

He is trying to decide whether either The Epic of Gilgamesh or the earlier poems can be considered either iliads or odysseys. Declaring the Epic an odyssey is banal but probably unavoidable, just as “Gilgamesh and Agga,” the only Sumerian Gilgamesh poem not to have been incorporated into the Epic, is an iliad in every respect. Role-playing games are all iliads, since they deal with battles, depict societies primarily in terms of their ability to sustain a war effort, and see individual psychology only through the lens of fitness for combat.

Longingly he thinks again of Enmerkar, the figure not in the carpet, whose presence in the Wake he yearns to discover. He suspects that Enmerkar and his friend Lugalbanda were the models for Gilgamesh and Enkidu, but the fragmentary nature of the few surviving tablets leaves this unclear. For these oldest of texts Queneau’s schematic dissolves, and we are confronted with the stuff of myth, which Trent wants to rub between his fingers, raise to his nose. O show me the substrate of meaning, psyche’s bedrock.

What did Lugalbanda cry when he awoke and found that his companions had left him for dead? The steppes of Mount Hurum, dry and desolate, must have seemed the Sumerian underworld; did he realize at first that he still lived? The tablet here crumbles into powder; the rest of the story is lost.

Enmerkar and the army commanded by his seven heroes succeed in subjugating Aratta (the poem could hardly have gone otherwise) and they return to Erech along their original route, intending to reclaim Lugalbanda’s body and bear it home. Upon reaching Mount Hurum,

1. They find Lugalbanda, who has been roaming the steppes in despair. He

1a. is overjoyed to see them, or perhaps reproachful, but accepts in the end his retrieval by his peers and his return to the land of the living.

1b. rages and does not forgive; the story becomes one of irreparable breach.

2. They do not find Lugalbanda, who

2a. has wandered deeper into the wilderness.

2b. has been taken away by the gods.

Trent imagines more pathways, a thorough exploration of the branching possibilities that, like books opened in dreams, can appear but not actually be read. Some he knows can’t work: It’s the Greek gods who take up petitioners in extremis and turn them into constellations. Nor can Lugalbanda break with Enmerkar; Sumerian myths don’t deal with character conflict in that way. So Enmerkar and Lugalbanda are reunited; the ordeal of Lugalbanda abandoned is a wound that heals up by poem’s end.

Such wounds make us feel what we can’t understand: That’s what myth is. Niobe, still weeping for her children though turned to stone, or the centaurs’ anguished thrall to wine and lust, retain their power to claw at the reader. The Wake doesn’t claw, though the great man, a lesser writer in every other way, knew enough to.

Untitled, obscure in meaning, often fragmentary, the two or three dozen narrative poems that exist in Sumerian versions seem too blunt and odd to move us as the Greek myths can. Except for the line about mankind being created from “the clay that is over the abyss,” the only tale that Trent found deeply affecting was Lugalbanda’s abandonment on Hurum and his undescribed reaction.

Mount Hurum is not on Ziggurat’s map—no one knows where it is—and Trent recognizes that his novels must reside within the game’s geography. He hovers above the plain, watching the words IRAQ and Baghdad fade away and the coastline press inward until it is resting against the city that now labels itself Ur. Trent begins to fall, slowly at first, then faster as the land below growing larger and more detailed until it tilts abruptly away, like the view from a plane pulling out of a dive, and he is skimming above a landscape that has lost its lettering and cartographic flourishes and assumed almost the realistic detail of a desert seen in the opening shot of a nature documentary.

A ripple breaks the horizon’s flat line, and at once the ground flashing below is not sand but cultivated fields, divided by roads and levées. The structures ahead swell and gain definition, a great wall bristling with towers, its ramparts topped only by the central ragged pyramid. The viewpoint circles the city center, temple and palace readily identifiable (Trent remembers close-ups of them) and the ziggurat’s corrugated slopes rendered in vivid detail, then swoops down to alight in the central square.

The city is full but empty, for Trent knows (with the logic of dreams) that moving crowds would strain the resources of role-playing games: Yet this is the Uruk of his book, anchored to the CD yet ranging freely, ungameably peopled by people. Trent moves through the throng in this confidence, secure in his characters’ imaginative reality even as their bodies pass through him, or perhaps his through them. Cinched tight by the city walls, the crowded buildings radiated heat—unrelieved by winds—and a terrible stench, electronically imperceptible but evoked, made real in the mind’s nostrils, by the twining long molecules of words, complex chains that twist to do anything, like wisps of smoke weaving themselves into firewood.

Stinks and gritty skin, heaped refuse and open water glimpsed from ramparts: immaterial perceptions electrons are too crude to trace. Why are words finer than particles, which are older than anything? The meaning of Sumerian myths elude us, but not because their tablets are fragmentary or our grip on their language infirm. Every word sprouts wings, turns metaphor, and flits off at an angle we hadn’t seen. These angles are not ours, they disregard our geometry. This unbegetting language, spoken by no one, is hardware that only ran thoughts now incomprehensible, their myths a food our minds cannot digest.

No single stuff of myth, then, no wellspring feeding every people. To work in the digital realm is to accept this: The sentences you construct do not pretend to be transcriptions of spoken words, nor do your images seek validity as representations of nature, judged by their fealty to something. Music—always disconcertingly itself, especially when not giving tune to words—still plays while you play, but no longer serves only as dramatic accompaniment. Word, image, and tone alike emerge from the difference between zero and one, the contrast between fields of force that needs, can have, no touchstone.

Game-players don’t know this; they blithely enter these regions (paying for admission), thinking them flat, directional. Assume our forest is merely your path, cheer yourselves after walking its length. Contention is stranger than you know, gamers, who strain at the lines we draw round you, roar at the points we dole out, and imagine yourselves at play in the fields of the board.

• • • •

Trent frequently checked the online news outlets, a practice he justified on the grounds that it kept him at his desk instead of sending him into the living room to turn on the radio. Some days he merely glanced for new headlines; others he read to the bottom of what stories were available, searching for hints of the attack that was surely coming. He knew that Leslie was doing the same from work, and sometimes imagined them sharing a second in the pages of msnbc.com/news or www.bushwatch.net, invisibly present to each other.

When it came, the websites gave it headlines, although there was nothing more than reports of rocket bombardments. “It has begun,” he said aloud. What someone had told him a dozen years ago, coming out of a late movie to students gathered on the sidewalks and word that Baghdad was under attack.

They ate dinner before the TV news: few facts, much commentary. “Word from halfway round the world,” Leslie murmured, her thoughts on a different track than Trent’s. “How long have most people waited for news of distant battles?”

“We’re not getting much,” he replied. Anchormen, bleating helplessly, were being replaced one by one with roundtable discussions. Trent cycled through the channels once more, then left it on public television.

“True; I was thinking of information reaching the strategic command, not the sorry populace. Do you think reporters will make it in before they flatten everything?”

“Afghanistan isn’t Kuwait,” Trent replied. “It’s a big country, mountainous; far from the sea. You can’t pulverize it from aircraft carriers.”

“I don’t know,” said Leslie. She was sick with hatred for the Taliban, whose recent demolition of two immense Buddhas seemed their only assault upon something not living. But George W. Bush had declined to distinguish between them and al Qaeda, as though playing to a constituency that would regard such nicety as treason. His demands had been provocative and insulting, impossible to meet although the Taliban seemed to have tried. Yet had the Western nations invaded Afghanistan in the spring, she would have cheered.

“Is the President our foe?” Megan asked while Leslie was loading the dishwasher.

“In what sense?” she said, startled.

“I just heard Daddy on the telephone, and he was talking about our ‘foe President.’”

On his desk Leslie noticed a photocopied page, with several sentences highlighted and scribbled dates and numbers in the margin. She squinted at the text, calling upon her grad school French. Il y eut une attaque. Les villages insoumis . . . There was an attack. The unsubdued villages illuminated themselves in turn, marking the progress of conquest, like the little flags in commercial cafés.

A shadow from the other side darkened the sheet, which she turned over to find a sentence in Trent’s handwriting. The resisting villages burst alight one after another, illuminating the path of ?victory, like the ?snapping banners of a streetside café. The photocopy had been made with their scanner, his usual practice when he wanted to mark a passage from a library book.

“I hear you likened our President to Dario Fo,” she said as they were getting ready for bed.

“I did?” He thought about it, then laughed. “He could be played by Dario Fo.”

Reaching to turn off the light, she saw a book on the floor and turned it over to see the title. Her lips quirked: There was nothing to smile about, but confirmation of her husband’s nature prompted an odd comfort. The photocopy had pleased her more than the scrap noting his daily progress, as though the assignment he had sought were a ditch to be measured in linear feet dug. He should have been writing books all along—books that encompassed history and literature, like the biography he had begun, rather than novelizations, mixing non-history with non-literature as though he was afraid to pull free of this world well lost. Could that last tug hurt as much as Trent seemed to fear?

She spoke of Trent when reluctant to speak of herself, her therapist had once noted, but wasn’t she supposed to voice her cares? Trent had moved on, getting tech work and even a small grant, but privately raged, rejected (at least in his own mind) by a profession he should have rejected. It was only after tearing free, Leslie explained, that the wound could begin to heal.

“Do you think he is still suffering from that ‘wound’?” her therapist asked.

“I’m sure he does.” Leslie shifted slightly in the armchair, away from the view of Long Island Sound, and let her gaze rest on the pottery lining the bookcase. “It gnaws at him, that some people believe it, and that others won’t declare they don’t.”

“Do you believe it?”

“No.” This time she spoke firmly. “I’ve met her, remember? The whole industry is full of misshapen people who design games because they don’t have the social skills to work in other environments. I mean—” she laughed—“I’ve got computer nerds reporting to me; I know about badly socialized people. But my guys don’t claim creative temperaments. He shouldn’t have been working for someone who lived with her boss, however stable she seemed.”

“Does the fact that you believe him offer some solace?”

“You’d think it would.” Leslie thought. “I guess it does, but not enough. He wanted to write a book called Complicity, a study of why people side with their peers’ oppressors. I told him to stop it.”

“And this was when Tobias was ill?”

“Right before he was born. It was still going on, afterward. Maybe that’s . . .” She shrugged, her eyes suddenly stinging.

“That was four years ago,” her therapist observed delicately. “This dispute may have exacerbated matters for Trent, since it struck directly at his role as a family man.” She was reminding Leslie that she is not Trent’s therapist. “That might explain his continued anger over professional problems that, by now, are ancient history.”

Four years ago, Leslie had been in bad shape, and the return of what she now recognized as clinical depression threatened to wash away the ground gained since. She began doing things only when she had to, and didn’t pick up Ancient Mesopotamia at the library until they threatened to send it back. Trent made oblique comments on her listlessness, and even word that a Florida newspaper office had been contaminated by a rare form of anthrax—another grotesque intrusion from the world of techno-thrillers—failed to jar her out of numbed and ringing stillness.

Was everybody hurting? Leslie supposed so: The avidity with which her co-workers followed the war news smacked of self-medication. Updates rarely came during the workday, but she knew they checked regularly. Trent glared at the TV news, bitter and conflicted, while Megan, unselfconsciously mimicking the familiar Texas accent, asked about “the War Against Terra.” Afghanis, caught in the irruption of renewed warfare as winter began to close the passes to their under-provisioned villages, experienced a brief rain of brightly colored food packets.

She sat on the couch, the household still after Trent had gone sullenly to bed, and considered her new book, whose full title proved to be Ancient Mesopotamia: The Eden that Never Was. It compared favorably with Sumer: Cities of Eden, the pretty Time-Life volume that the library already had on its shelves. History Begins at Sumer was unaccountably absent, but Kramer had contributed the text for another Time-Life title, Cradle of Civilization. Leslie was annoyed with Kramer for his tendency to make judgmental distinctions between “conquerors in search of booty” and “peaceful immigrants eager to better their lot,” as though migrating populations’ worthiness to move into a land depended on their adherence to some United Nations-like ideal of peaceful coexistence. Did that notion represent the spirit of the mid-sixties, or the spirit of Time-Life Books?

In the absence of Kramer’s own tome, the earliest volume in Leslie’s modest collection was A. Leo Oppenheim’s Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization. Its forthright subtitle intimated Oppenheim’s contention that Sumerian-Akkadian-Assyrian civilization was extinct and should be studied for its own sake rather than for its supposed value as the seedbed of human progress. Leslie found she preferred this austere honesty to the pious melioration that saw Gilgamesh, cuneiform, and the Code of Hammurabi as the first toddling steps of mankind’s march.

The weeks that followed pulled Leslie in opposite directions: toward the fixity of the past and the lunacy of a fantasy future. She read with disbelief the mornings’ news of anthrax spores mailed to TV studios and the nation’s capital, with senators’ offices contaminated and postal employees dead. The conclusion was inescapable: The United States was under attack by biological agents. The twenty-first century was turning out just as her teenaged sci-fi reading had predicted.

“They say it’s Saddam.” Trent was following the links from news reports on the spores’ surprising sophistication to declarations by “fellows” at right-wing institutions that Iraqi responsibility was certain.

“Well, it certainly isn’t the Taliban.” The medieval theocrats who were regrouping in disarray under assaults from their warlord adversaries and miles-high bombers seemed poor candidates for the invisible attack that sent the world’s superpower into panic, though perhaps (pundits mused) al Qaeda’s penchant for low-tech operations staged within the target country had led them to obtain a cache of Soviet-era war germs. Such a theory did not require the hand of Saddam, but Leslie found it hard to push the reasoning further. The idea of pestilence blooming in the nation’s nerve centers like sparks falling on straw left her disoriented. She did not fear for her own safety, but felt the axis of her being tilt vertiginously, a slow tipping into boundless free fall.

There were no further attacks, although a Manhattan woman with no traceable connection with the contaminated mails died of inhaled anthrax in Manhattan, and then another—a ninety-four-year-old widow named Ottilie—in central Connecticut. Midway geographically, Leslie wondered if she should feel her family was in the crosshairs. She didn’t, taking comfort in statistics. Word that spores might cling to letters that came through New Jersey moved Leslie to discard all junk mail at the curb.

A week later, a letter was delivered sealed in a plastic wrapper containing a notice that the U.S. government had discovered traces of anthrax on the envelope and had subjected it to irradiation: It should be discarded unopened if it was believed to contain food or camera film. Leslie and Trent stared, unwilling to tear through the wrapper (the letter within was indeed junk mail) or to throw it away. It was an undoubted historical document, but to save the thing would make it a relic. Trent carefully photographed both sides with their digital camera and sold it on eBay for $85.

Cries for retaliation rose, angrier for being balked. Since Afghanistan could not be attacked twice, other targets were deemed plausible, usually Iraq. “Look at this,” said Trent angrily, gesturing at his screen. “They’re all so sure of themselves.”

“I don’t know why you’re reading that at all,” Leslie replied. “The chat boards of wargame fans isn’t a place for political insight.”

“These are my potential readers; I should know what they’re thinking.”

“I don’t even believe that’s true.” Trent was clawing for a toehold, anxious for demographics that the Web couldn’t give him. He showed more self-confidence with work that he respected.

Later she glanced at her screen and found a window open to the posts that had enraged him. Vaunting and aggressive, they bore the signature of angry, powerless guys desperate to be knowledgeable. Let’s do it right this time and Next time we nuke the K’abah and It’s time we revisited The Land Between the Rivers.

By this point Trent was convinced that the anthrax attacks had not been the work of Islamic militants at all. He suspected rogue forces within the American “bioweapons community,” which had secretly developed the strain of anthrax. “Even the administration has admitted that the spores belong to the ‘Ames strain,’” he argued, link-clicking deeper toward the documentation he sought. Leslie found his explanations painful to listen to, and she shrank without looking at those windows he left on her screen: laparoscopic images of warblog, like lab reports of current pathology.

Had Sumer suffered from pestilence? Though Leslie recalled no references to the plague, or even to disease as something contagious, it seemed incredible that cities of thirty thousand people, which created standing bodies of water and relied upon wells for drinking, were not periodically ravaged by pandemics, especially during wars. Perhaps Nanshe loses much of her family to cholera during a siege; it was a more plausible involvement than engaging her somehow in the business of battle.

No Sumerian myths mention plague; none of the images of piled dead picture it, nor is it mentioned in legal records. Mortality is ubiquitous, but the index entries for DEATH in Kramer’s Cradle show an exclusive interest in the Sumerian afterlife, while those for The Eden that Never Was focus on the archeology of gravesites. Gilgamesh showed no fear of catching Enkidu’s fever, nor Enmerkar of Lugalbanda’s. Death did not leap from victim to victim like a flea; each mortal possessed his own, patient and implacable. Whatever the hero’s achievements in life, in the Land of No Return he wandered naked, like all the other dead, hot and eternally thirsty.

It was stifling on the second floor, the day’s unseasonable warmth undispersed by the mild evening, and Leslie kicked away the damp sheets to rise and open windows. She continued through Megan’s room and the baby room, now choked with books, opened the bathroom window (the tiles were barely cool beneath her soles and the toilet seat actually warm, as though someone had preceded her on it) and thence to the end of the hall, where the far window would allow a cross breeze. From there it seemed natural to descend the stairs, for the screened patio doors admitted the night air and she could walk around freely in the unlit rooms.

Opening the refrigerator would illuminate the uncurtained kitchen, and an attempt to fill a cup in the dark clattered the stacked dishes so loudly that she jumped back. Leslie wandered instead toward the front of the house, slowly—she sank her bare foot into the warm, furry side of Ursuline, too torpid even to stir—but guided by the faint light coming from the office. Her own computer adjoined an open window so she sat at Trent’s, where the monitor’s low setting cast just enough light to see by. Trent never kept loose papers on his desk, but she could make out a page of his handwriting lying between Odile and History Begins at Sumer. She turned the light up slightly, and saw the journal Megan had given him for his birthday, blank sheets bound in dyed silk, held open between the two volumes. He had written in it with his fountain pen—another gift—and weighted the pages flat to dry.

If it had been a paragraph, manifest Dear Diary prose, Leslie would not have bent forward to read, but the two lines were centered like aphorisms, and there was something odd in the lettering. The monitor brightened slightly as the screen saver turned some corner in its workings, and the words leaped up at her.

βeta-testing for βeta males? And underneath: Real men write their own βooks.

The Mont Blanc rested in the gutter, a third object to disturb if she wished to turn back the page. Leslie sat back, feeling her face redden in the cool air. Seeking refuge for her gaze, she smacked lightly at the mouse, and the saver vanished, presented her a vista, dim in the darkness, of a burning city. Only the flames actually moved, the fleeing populace and spear-waving invaders caught as in a frieze, but the central building, one side lit by the conflagration, was a recognizable stepped tower, which its builders called “unir” and the successors to Sumer knew as “ziggurat.”

Leslie moved her hands to the keyboard, hesitant lest she disrupt the game in progress. Within a minute, however, she had slipped past the undisturbed scenario and was reviewing Trent’s interaction with the program, which proved to be the only one open. She checked the system documentation and saw, with a start, that the game had been running for days.

It was the work of a moment to settle in front of her own screen and search its flotilla of icons for Trent’s preferred word-processing program. She ran it and found a list of textfiles: research on Sumer, downloaded online data, and Ramparts.txt, which proved to contain The Ramparts of Uruk, 56,917 words, last revised that afternoon. Trent had moved his work files onto her computer, presumably (it seemed obvious after a second) to allow Ziggurat to run unimpeded on his older machine. She had forgotten what gluttons for RAM these new games were.

The image was poignant: Trent keeping his writing files in a crevice between her hard drive’s enormous programs—nothing takes up less room than text—while abandoning his own machine to the demands of Ziggurat. Doing his work at Leslie’s desk, getting his email through the laptop, returning at intervals to his own computer where Ziggurat flourished, like a cowbird’s chick, to consult with the creature that his own work not exceed it in grace or wit: This was austere to the point of penitential. Was Trent setting burnt offerings before the thing?

She clicked on another file, BookTwo.txt. It appeared to be mostly outline, but there was a title, Wheels for Warring. Leslie shook her head. It was just like Trent, to start with a safe title and have a better one ready for the next book.

The outline was followed by notes, which Leslie scrolled through idly. Some comprised bits of research that she had passed to him; others surprised her. Only two types of personages are portrayed naked in Sumerian art: humiliated prisoners, and priests engaged in sacred ceremony. Why no sexual connotations? Leslie shifted her bottom on the wicker chair and smiled. For Trent all nudity held sexual connotations. The dogwalker outside, glimpsing screen light falling on her breasts, doubtless felt the same. Fragments of those statuettes of worshippers were found incorporated into the floors of the Inanna Temple. I.e., these objects remained sacred, even when no longer used?

That lone blue eye in the display at the Met: they often used lapis lazuli for eyes (look at the blue-eyed ibex in the next case!), though they could never have seen such features. A legend of men with blue eyes?

“No, Jurgen, you must see my palaces. In Babylon I have a palace where many abide with cords about them and burn bran for perfume, while they await that thing which is to befall them.” Epigraph? (No.)

Afghanistan is the opposite of Mesopotamia: a land crumpled into inaccessibility. Geographical barriers everywhere, the bane of invaders; while Sumer was open to all armies, the “Kalam” as flat as a board game.

Title for Book 3: A Game Without A Name. Problematic because the Sumerians of course knew its name; we don’t. The game as metaphor for war; if it was also used for divination, then a guide to the Sumerian cosmos & psyche. Historians call it the game “of Ur” since that is where the first boards were found; if I call it the Ur-game can I make allusions to the original FORTRAN “Adventure”? How many of Ziggurat’s players were even alive in 1975?

Leslie created a new file, named it Book3.txt, and began to type. Trent, you don’t want to construct one of your novels around that board game. You are appealing to an audience that won’t spend its money on books.

You want to write about a female protagonist, preferably young and, though not herself powerful, able to glimpse its workings. If you must include that game, you can show her watching it played: It was laid out in the streets, remember? A little girl can watch almost anything unnoticed.

Women bring food, nurse the wounded, bury the dead. You want an aperture on war? Don’t use the viewpoint of a young soldier; soldiers see almost nothing of the totality of war, they are brought in like a load of rocks and then hurled. Women see everything, and when it is over, they are often what is left.

The wind blew the smoke roaring through the streets, blinding the fleeing villagers and lofting scraps of glowing reed to settle like fireflies on the roofs not already burning. Scattered soldiers came at them, whom Nanshe first saw terrifyingly as the enemy, then realized with a greater shock were the defenders of Lagash. One flung away his shield as he sprinted past.

They had sought to watch the battle from the rooftops, but the wheeling armies had raised a cloud of yellow dust, immense as those seen in the sky, which obscured everything. The city wall was lined with spectators who enjoyed a better view of the action, although the settlement across the canal was closer. Perhaps they saw the flank of battle shift then spill into the barley fields, concealed from the village by stands of date palm and poplars; perhaps the waving cityfolk had been trying to warn them. Nanshe could remember little of that disordered hour, of anxious inquiry between adults who blocked her view, the surmises and cries, people swarming down the ladders to shout questions, to call for their families, and finally to run.

Nanshe had become separated almost immediately, buffeted by legs and swinging arms. She tried to head home, but a cry to make for the city gates sent the crowd rushing against her, and by the time she emerged from the side streets she could smell smoke. Someone lunged for her, not the person she later saw stabbed with a spear, though events seemed alike unreal save what was happening now, grit biting her legs where she crouched. She could see Sud lying in the road, and started repeatedly when a large scrap caught in the rubble waved like a sleeve.

Smoke spattered the sky, and when night fell she thought it another gout from the burning market, to recede after some minutes. At some point she found herself stumbling over littered ground, eyes stinging in the darkness. Unnatural sounds reach her, a loud snap or the crash of walls. A groan from somewhere, and for an instant she imagined the slave moving confidently through the blackness, eyeless and unsmarting, calling out in an accent the marauders would recognize.

A shift in wind pushed aside smoke to disclose still-burning houses, flames from their collapsed roofs flickering through doors like glowing ovens. Occasionally Nanshe could hear a faint shout call down, and so knew the direction of the city walls. Lips cracked, she groped across open ground to the well, which she discovered surrounded by corpses. Desperation drove her to the exposure of the levée, where at last she fell forward to drink.

It is Gilgamesh come to subjugate Lagash, if you like, or else the Gutians sweeping out of the hills. Better perhaps a Sumerian enemy, for Nanshe had been assured that the armies would clash on the plains beyond the cultivated fields, or else before the city gates, and that soldiers would only kill soldiers. Hiding in the tamarisk brush, Nanshe understands only that what the boys had said about war was not true. She is not pondering the implications of this, any more than she is thinking about her parents or their smoldering home, for she is in a kind of shock. Alert to any movement in the brightening morning, she knows that nothing around her will proceed as she had been told.

Can you tell that story? The vaunting steles do not, nor any poems that officials preserved.

It cannot be reduced to a game, nor presented in terms of one. The metaphor itself is immoral.

A wail floated down the stairs, its eerie pitch catching the agelessness of the dreaming mind. Leslie left the room at once, negotiating the darkened floor’s furniture and doorways with intimate familiarity. At the top of the stairs she heard it again, wavering between frightened and querulous, and went to her daughter’s room. Megan was asleep but in distress, her head turning from side to side in the faint moonlight as her mouth shaped half-words. As Leslie approached, she saw the dim glint of open eyes.

“It’s all right, honey.” Experts advise that children having nightmares not be wakened, but her parents had learned how to offer Megan comfort without disturbing her. Leslie stroked her daughter’s hair and murmured that everything was okay.

“I heard the plane and it scared me.”

“Plane?” The Bridgeport Airport was a few miles away, and corporate jets sometimes landed late at night. Leslie tried to recall whether she had heard a plane a minute before.

“It sounded like a jet,” Megan said lucidly.

Leslie doubted that her daughter had ever heard a non-jet engine overhead, but she took her true meaning. Storm-tossed but hearing the lighthouse, she realized with a pang that her misery did not matter, nor Trent’s professional tribulations nor his baffled fury, but only her daughter’s well-being, which she had heeded, but not enough. “It’s all right,” she said, leaning forward to touch foreheads in the dark. “No more bad planes.”

• • • •

What is wrong cannot soon be put right—at least not what lies in the mind, which occupies not two or even three dimensions, but the infolds of a space no one has mapped. Leslie began attending her daughter more closely, reading to her at night (no Homer) and stopping with her for hot chocolate on their way back from the library or soccer practice. Megan worried about the school’s winter pageant, holiday plans, a classmate’s parents’ divorce. She mentioned the World Trade Center only when discussing an assignment to summarize the week’s news. What more concerned her was an image she had come upon while searching the Net with a friend’s older sister: a condemned woman being forced to kneel while a Taliban executioner put a rifle to her skull.

“It’s a horrible picture,” Leslie agreed. She was furious that her daughter had been shown it.

“The people who did that . . .” Megan spoke with unaccustomed hesitancy. “They belong to al Qaeda, don’t they?”

“Not exactly.” If you want to get technical. “The Taliban let al Qaeda stay in their country, but they did not help carry out the attacks. The President insisted that they turn over Osama bin Laden, which they probably couldn’t do, so he launched an invasion.”

“I don’t care,” said Megan firmly. She was staring into the middle distance, where the woman kneeling facedown was visible to both of them. “I’m glad he’s dead.”

He wasn’t the only one, though. As the death toll from the September attacks steadily dropped from the initial six thousand to just more than half that, a reciprocal number of those killed in Afghanistan rose to match it. The first, dwindling value was widely followed and subtly resented—one couldn’t actually accuse those refining it of unpatriotism—while the second, swelling one was neither: its extent (reported only on dissident websites) unacknowledged and enjoyed.

Leslie spoke twice with Megan’s teacher, and even rejoined the listserv of women who had become pregnant the same month she had, which she had dropped four years ago. She read online reports of children experiencing anxiety and bad dreams, spoke to her therapist of Megan rather than herself, and watched her daughter: eating breakfast, doing homework, asleep. When troubled Megan was before her, she ignored everything else.

Rumblings from the shocked economy sounded dimly from work and home. Great Games, losing market share, cancelled its plans for a line of Ziggurat novels, and Trent (midway through the second book but not yet paid for the first) slid from stunned rage into depression. Leslie comforted him distractedly. Truckloads of rubble filed by the thousands, like a column of ants reducing a picnic’s rubbish, from the still-smoldering wreckage of Ground Zero to Staten Island’s Fresh Kills landfill, where it was sifted for personal effects and body parts. Troops of the “Northern Alliance” (a cognomen worthy of Star Wars) drove the remains of the Taliban into the mountains, which shuddered beneath the impact of enormous American bombs called “daisycutters.”

Leslie wanted to spend the hour before dinner with her daughter, but Trent finally protested at cooking every night. Coming from the kitchen, she heard them sitting in the office together, discussing return trips to favorite movies.

“Dumbledore is kind of like Gandalf,” Megan was saying matter-of-factly. “Except I don’t think Gandalf would be very good with children.”

“He treated those hobbits like children.”

“. . . But Sauron and Lord Voldemort are even more similar, aren’t they?”

“Well, it’s hard to put much spin on evil incarnate, isn’t it?”

“Incarnate?” Leslie could hear her taste the word. “Is that what they call the ‘evil-doers’?”

Trent groaned softly. “How I hate that term.”

“Because they don’t think what they’re doing is evil,” said Megan wisely. Leslie stood outside the doorway, leaning forward slightly to see them. “They think that God wants them to do this.”

“That’s right. And our culture—what the President calls ‘Western Civilization’—believes that we are doing what God wants, though the government is careful not to say so in as many words. In the real world, your enemy doesn’t oblige you by acting like Sauron or Voldemort.”

“Or Darth Vader.” Megan has a happy thought. “We’ll be seeing Part Two of all three movies next year! Too oh oh too!”

“It must be the age of sequels.”

“And the age of Evil-doers.”

Trent laughed. “In movies, yes. In real life, it would be better if people were more careful about using that word.”

“Or ‘cowardly.’”

“Indeed.” Trent looked at their daughter closely. “You still think about that?”

Megan shrugged. “Julie’s dad almost got killed.” She paused, then asked, “Did Gilgamesh represent Western values?”

“Gilgamesh? He lived before there was a West, or a Middle East.”

She is changing the subject, Leslie wanted to cry out, but Megan turned to face her father and said, “I’m sorry your book’s not going to be published.”

Trent blinked. “Heavens, dear, don’t worry about that. Maybe someone else will publish it. Maybe I was writing the wrong book.” He extended an arm, and Megan slipped under it. “That’s an awfully tiny problem, if you think about it.”

Lying awake, Leslie listened to her husband’s steady breathing and wondered at the loss of his dream, the rout of the last ditch. He had told her in college that prose narrative was dead, that they stood at the end of its era just as the—had he actually said ancient Sumerians?—stood at its birth. Science fiction was the mode of the era, but its future masterpieces would not come in strings of sentences. The Web—he had charmed her by admitting that he, too, had reflexively read www. as “World War Won”—had blossomed in their college years from a jury-rigging of dial-ups to a vast nervous system, and Trent’s vision of nonlinear, multimedia fictions—richly complex structures of word, image, and sound, detailed as Cibachrome and nuanced as Proust—seemed ready to take shape in the hypertrophied craniums of the ever-cheaper CPUs.

Trent seemed untroubled that the point of entry to this technology would be through electronic games, which were being developed solely for audiences uninterested in formal innovation and poststructural différance. He expected not to retain copyright to his early work, which would be remembered only as technical exercises and crude forerunners of the GlasTome. Its form would emerge by pushing against commercial boundaries from the inside. Even product, he told Leslie, could be produced with a greater or lesser degree of artistry.

When asked to reconcile this conviction with his love of novels, Trent replied that he also loved verse dramas. Reading the draft chapters of his biography of the great man, Leslie wondered at the wretched fellow’s dogged attempts (remorselessly documented by Trent) to traverse the swamp of commercial fiction and pull his soles free of it later. Better to emulate the great man’s own master: Subordinate all to your work, let creditors and family wait upon your genius? Perhaps, as with the intervening James, fame will greet you anyway!

Lie down in bogs, wake up with fees. Trent had ended his unhappy sojourn in the land of the games without copyright or royalties, footloose into the barrens. But we have our daughter, dear. The occasional classes he taught, the magazine articles and the tiny fellowship, offered no visible path back to the realm where word and image alike danced in the flux of Aye and Nought. But what you do is valued, and I love you. An old colleague had offered the chance to beta-test and Trent had obliged, poor hopeful fool, been sucked in and spat out. Write something about ancient Sumer. Your banishing Eden beguiles then betrays you, leaving you stunned with grief, lost to truer pleasures, deaf to your lover’s cry. It is the fracture of the unmalleable heart, the oldest story in the world.

• • • •

It is Christmas Day, “a celebration of great antiquity,” as the great man once put it. Dinner with Leslie’s sister in Riverside Heights, their first trip to Manhattan since summer. Megan balks at going (she has heard some report of a possible “terrorist attack” over the holidays), and must be reassured that Caroline lives on the other end of the island from Ground Zero. Despite Christmas carols on the car radio and a half hour of The Two Towers on tape, she is moody and withdrawn.

“Are you still reading Odile?” Leslie asks, seeing the book resting in Trent’s lap.

Trent picks up the book, studies a passage, then translates rapidly. “‘For years I have deluded myself and lived my life in complete error. I thought I was a mathematician. I now realize that I am not even an amateur. I am nothing at all: I know nothing, understand nothing. It’s terrible but that’s how it is. And do you know what I was capable of, what I used to do? Calculation upon calculation, out of sight, out of breath, without purpose or end, and most often completely absurd. I gorged myself on figures; they capered before me until my head spun. And I took that to be mathematics!’”

Leslie glances sidelong at him; she isn’t sure if this is the point where Trent had stopped reading or a passage he had marked. “So is the novel both an iliad and an odyssey?” she asks carefully.

“Not that I can tell. I asked an old classmate, who wrote back last night: He says that the novel was written years before Queneau published that theory, and that the title was likelier a play on ‘Idyll’ and ‘Odalisque.’”

“Oh.” Leslie frowns. “Academics exchange e-mail on Christmas Eve?”

“Why not? And now I can’t remember where I read that claim—probably online.”

“Did you search for the site?”

“Can’t find it now.”

Leslie gets her brooding family to the apartment of her sister, whose husband speaks with zest about the coming assault on Iraq. Caroline and Megan exchange whispers about presents in the kitchen, while Trent politely declines to be baited. Kubrick’s film, sound muted, plays on the DVD; Leslie can see the second monolith tumbling in space. Sipping her whiskeyed eggnog, she thinks about 2002, the first year in a while that doesn’t sound science-fictional.

On the third day Lugalkitun rode out to survey the damage, striding angrily through the village that had been destroyed when the battle overran its intended ground. Vultures took wing at his approach, though with insolent slowness, and a feral dog fled yelping after he shied a rock into its flank.

Beside the fields of an outlying farm he regarded the body of a girl, sufficiently well attired to be of the owner’s family. Her clothing had been disturbed, either before or after death, and the king turned away, scowling. If the enemy had enjoyed the leisure for such diversions, they would also have paused to contaminate the wells.

Caroline asks Trent about a news item that appeared a few days ago announcing that a quantum computer, primitive but genuine, had successfully factored a number by using switches comprising individual atoms, which could represent zero and one simultaneously. Is this still digital? she wonders. Trent, who was examining his gift—a new hardcover edition of the great man’s Cities in Flight—offers a wintry smile and tells her that the spooky realm of quantum physics will make software designers feel like the last generation of engineers to devote their careers to zeppelin technology.

They go outside, mid-November weather of the warmest Christmas in memory. Down the street, a circle of older women are singing, some of them wearing choir robes. A wind off the river blows the sound away, and Megan, looking anxiously upward, does not see them.

Near the burned house he came upon a toy cart, intact among so much rubble. Its chicken head stared as though astonished to find itself upended, and the king righted it with the tip of his boot. He had seen such contrivances before, and they vexed him. Miniature oxcarts and chariots he could understand, they were copies for children; but the wheeled chicken possessed no original—it stood for something that didn’t exist. Set one beside a proper boy’s clay chariot and you irresistibly saw both at full size, the huge head absurd in a way that somehow spilled onto the chariot.

The toy’s wheels, amazingly, were unbroken: It rolled backward from his pettish kick. It never occurred to Lugalkitun to crush it; a shadow cast by nothing is best left undisturbed. He looked at the ruins about him, pouring smoke into and summoning beasts out of the open sky. Neither emptiness above nor crowding below concerned him; his brown gaze ranged flat about his own realm, imagining retribution in full measure, cities aflame, their people in flight across the hard playing ground of The Land.

The wind shifts, and the last strains of melody—a gospel hymn—reach them. “Let’s go listen,” says Caroline, taking her niece by the hand. By the time they cross the intersection the choir is singing again, in a mournful, swelling contralto that courses through Leslie like vibrations from a church organ.

There is a balm in Gilead

To make the wounded whole;

There is a balm in Gilead

To heal the sin-sick soul.

Megan begins to cry. “I don’t want a bomb,” she sniffles, pressing her face against her mother’s side.

Leslie and Trent exchange bewildered expressions. The notes soar into the air, fading with distance. Leslie pats Megan’s shoulder, feeling wet warmth soak through her sweater. My daughter is not well, she thinks, deeply disordering words. Their wrongness reaches through her, and she tells herself furiously not to cry, that composure will calm her child. But the stone of resolve begins to crack, and two beads of moisture seep through, welling to spill free—their path will trace the surest route—and carve twin channels down her face.

—August 2001 – July 2002

© 2004 by Gregory Feeley.

Originally published in The First Heroes: New Tales of the Bronze Age,

edited by Noreen Doyle & Harry Turtledove.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gregory Feeley is the author of numerous novels, stories, and essays. His first novel, The Oxygen Barons, was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award, and his short fiction has been nominated for the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon awards. His most recent book is Kentauros, a half-fiction, half-essay exploration of a strange and obscure Greek myth. He is currently working on a long novel as well as a biography of James Blish.

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

NOVEL EXCERPTS

NOVEL EXCERPT:
The Brothers Cabal

Jonathan L. Howard

Forthcoming from Thomas Dunne Books

CHAPTER 1:
IN WHICH THE DEAD ARE RAISED, BLOOD IS DRUNK, AND EAVES ARE DROPPED

The party travelled through the flatlands, guided by an unhelpful map. They were a sombre and sober group, ten men and three women, who wore hiking clothes and impressively stacked backpacks. An astute observer would have noted that their clothes and gear were all new, and that several showed signs of blisters due to their boots not being properly worn in, and that none looked happy in a woolen hat. There were no observers, however, for the flatlands are unutterably tedious and usually lacking in things worth the observing.

Their leader paused and consulted the map again. This took the form of a large square of predominantly blank paper upon which the legend and gridlines had consumed far more ink in the printing than any physical features. There were a few paths—even to call them ‘lanes’ would be an aggrandisement—a few ditches with pretensions towards being streams, and one long earthwork that travelled into the centre of the map and then petered out, as so many things in the flatlands tended to. Drystone walls, interest, lives . . . all fading away.

At least the earthwork had the decency to stick up: a long railway bed for a spur line to nowhere, abandoned decades before. They could see it was heavily overgrown on the steep sides of the artificial ridge, but there were also signs that, relatively recently, much of the heavier undergrowth had been cut back or felled. They clambered up onto its top, past the unhealthy bushes and saplings that grew there, and found themselves on the rail bed itself, still bearing—slightly surprisingly—sleepers and tracks. Even more surprisingly, there was a train there, hidden behind the trees and shrubs.

This discovery certainly surprised the hiking party, and even overawed them. The locomotive, although matte with rust the shade of dried blood, still exuded an air of exultant mechanical malevolence, as if somebody had crammed a black dragon into a giant jelly mould in the form of a steam locomotive and, with the wave of a wand, transformed the creature into the machine. But no; a wand would be insufficient. A magic staff perhaps. Or an enchanted caber. In any event, the iron dragon now slumbered in the sleep of years. Behind it was a train of assorted carriages, flatbeds, and freight cars, all once painted in black with red detailing, the exquisite work now peeling and forlorn. Just readable on the side of one of the cars was the legend The World Renowned Cabal Bros. Carnival.

The leader of the group looked at the words for a long moment, and then smirked a very superior smirk of the type that starts at the corner of the mouth and finishes with trouble.

‘This is the place,’ he said. ‘Start the search.’

The search went uncommented upon by passersby because there were no passersby. The flatlands went nowhere in either geographical or metaphorical terms, and no one went into them without the explicit intent to come out again, quickly. It was, in theory, an ideal place for footpads to operate, but the lack of potential victims had always kept its criminal population low, dwindling to none in relatively recent times. So, there was nobody to see as twelve hikers, chivvied on by the thirteenth, dutifully dumped their packs, split the area into a search grid, produced strangely wrought weights on lengths of cord from identical pouches each had in their duffel coat pockets, and proceeded to methodically dowse the squares of the grid one by one. As an activity, it combined the mundane with the strange with the clandestine, and thereby rendered itself sinister. This was fair, for their intentions were sinister.

Nor was their apparent efficiency a chimera. Within ten minutes one of the hikers was excitingly calling to their leader. He came over, as did the others, to see the hiker’s plumb weight swinging in a manner harsh and angular, showing a brutalist disregard for physics that would have made Galileo enter the priesthood. They watched it twitch in silence, watched it marking out a pentacle in the air.

‘Here?’ whispered the hiker, aquiver with excitement.

‘Here,’ said their leader with magisterial certainty.

Again, their activities were efficient yet strange. Quickly they doffed duffel coats and woolly hats and map cases. Quickly they donned robes and then struggled to strip naked beneath them like a charabanc party changing at the beach of a Whitsun weekend. When the undignified hopping and kicking off of trousers was complete, they hastened to create a circle of blue powder about the spot they had detected, and then they gathered around it as the dying sun sank beneath the horizon. It wasn’t a happy circle—they were now all barefooted and the area was scattered with chippings from the rail bed—but it was a disciplined one, and they awaited the words of their leader.

When they came, they were incomprehensible.

‘Vateth He’em!’ he cried, excellent projection betraying a thwarted career in the theatre. ‘Oomaloth T’y’araskile!’ And so he continued, booming forth an apparently endless litany of dreadful names and imprecations from memory, all bedewed with apostrophes. The hikers-turned-cultists chanted the occasional response, a ‘Gilg’ya!’ here and a ‘Ukriles!’ there, and kept their eyes turned to the ground, for the grey skies were darkening and a wind was rising. Something was coming, and none dared to see its arrival.

Around them, the air swirled, centring upon the blue circle. The powder was blown, yet remained in the circle, stray motes caught and carried back into it. The breeze was not dispersing the circle; it was concentrating it.

The landscape flickered under silent lightning, and those present scented a change in the air, a mixture of rage and blood that dizzied the mind and turned the stomach. Something wrathful was coming, a creature of death, and their fear was mixed with triumph, for all this was planned. The wind turned and dust was drawn in from their surroundings, drawn in from across the circle to grow in the middle, skittering particles the colour of bone, dancing from their hiding places between stones and from the soil itself. Nearby, a tattered and faded jacket fluttered where it lay at the base of the earthwork.

Then, with a roar that they felt rather than heard, the circle was filled, and they all fell silent in the awful presence, an aching tintinnabulation of the soul sounding a single peal within their hearts that turned their knees weak with dread as it faded.

‘Master,’ said the leader of the cultists. It came out weakly, his mouth and throat dry. He swallowed and tried again, stumbling over his carefully prepared words. ‘Master, you bless us with your baleful . . . personage. We fall in obeisance before you.’

It took a moment before they collectively realised that they’d forgotten to fall, and there were a few seconds of hasty kneeling and sharp intakes of breath as bare knees found jagged gravel.

The leader was belatedly realising that he could have organised the circle a little better before now and he was reduced to hissing urgently, ‘The sacrifices! The sacrifices!’ until the three women in the group were gathered before the monster in the circle.

‘Master,’ said the leader, eager to recover face, ‘Lord of Death. Please accept these sacrifices we humbly offer you, that you may feed and gain strength after your long and dreamless sleep.’ He lowered his head and hoped that three would be enough. Even among their fanatical ranks, it had proved difficult to find three who would willingly sacrifice themselves for the greater good.

Then the Lord of Death spoke.

And he said, ‘I won’t say I’m not a bit peckish. Famished, in fact. But not nearly as much as I’m surprised. And naked. I don’t suppose anyone thought to bring along a spare pair of trousers, did they? There are ladies present, and I was raised to believe that being naked in front of strange ladies is something reserved for special occasions.’

They had not, in fact, remembered to bring along any clothes for the Lord of Death, indicating another failure in planning that would later result in some sharply worded memos. One of the cultists was, however, about the same size as the Lord of Death, and was pleased to give him a change of clothes from his pack. The Lord of Death thanked him and promised that he would give them back, freshly laundered, as soon as he was able. The cultist said it was fine, really. The Lord of Death insisted, and also said that everybody should stop calling him ‘Master’ and the ‘Lord of Death’, and just call him ‘Horst’ instead, because that was his name.

‘My Lord Horst,’ said the leader, who was slightly scandalised that any puissant supernatural force of darkness and destruction should want to be on first-name terms so early in their acquaintance, ‘you must feed.’

It was true; Horst did not look well after his period as dust. His eyes were sunken deep within their sockets and bone showed beneath the parchment of his skin. He looked like a corpse in the mid-stages of mummification, and his borrowed trousers would not stay up without assistance.

The three women who knelt at his bony feet were quickly running through personal variants of ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done’, and drew back their cowls and exposed their jugulars to him.

‘No,’ said Horst, shaking his head slowly, the best speed his desiccated neck could manage. ‘No, no, no. That’s not enough.’

‘Not . . . enough?’ The leader looked around the circle of his acolytes and saw faces as worried as his own. ‘How many will you require?’

‘Well, if I just feed from these three . . . Hello, ladies . . . I’ll kill them, and that’s not very polite. If I take a little from all of you, nobody has to die. I’m sure everybody would be happier with that, don’t you think?’

The leader was slightly baffled. ‘But, master . . .’

‘Horst.’

‘My Lord Horst, you are the embodiment of Death. You live without breath or vital spark in the umbral shadows, you are the wolf that preys upon we mortal cattle, you are . . .’ The leader’s voice was no longer very magisterial, just petty and wheedling. ‘Well, you’re a vampire, damn it. We brought these three here specially.’

‘I’m sure their mothers . . . Hello, ladies . . . didn’t raise them to be all-you-can-eat buffets. As for me, I’ve beaten up a few people in my time, but I’ve never killed anyone. Never felt the need to. I’m not saying I’m incapable of it, but it’s not something I’ve ever really aspired to, yes?’

‘But you’re the Lord of Death!’

‘No,’ said the monster in the loose clothes. ‘I’m Horst Cabal, and I don’t murder for the sake of a snack. Now, as you pointed out, I need to feed. I shall only take what each of you can spare.’

The leader was feeling peevish that the sacrifice that he had so selflessly ordered others to make was being snubbed. ‘We dragged those three all the way out here for nothing,’ he muttered furiously under his breath. Unhappily for him, inhumanly sharp senses are common amongst vampiric folk.

‘I think,’ said Horst, regarding the leader with a wolfish expression, ‘we’ll start with you, shall we? Leading from the front, and all that.’

‘Me?’ The leader was certainly intending to protest in the strongest terms, but then he made the mistake of looking at Horst’s eyes and whatever he had been intending was lost in a sudden simplification of his mind’s working.

Horst flicked back the leader’s cowl with an offhand gesture, took hold of his hair, and pulled his head back to expose his throat. ‘Yes. You.’ Horst’s lips parted and unusually long canine teeth showed as he leaned in. He paused and said to the silent onlookers, ‘The rest of you, form an orderly queue.’

About halfway through the ad hoc transfusion session, Horst noticed that those that had already donated were clearly envied by those that hadn’t, and those that hadn’t were being patronised by those that had. He wondered vaguely if, in the time he had been away, vampirism had become fashionable. How long had he been away, exactly?

He was feeling sated before he had finished with the ninth. Not completely revivified, he knew, but he was conscious of taking too much too quickly. He had been careful the first time he had drunk blood, and that had proved wise. It would prove equally wise to stop now, but then he looked at the faces of Victims 10–13 and felt he couldn’t let them down. Sighing inwardly, he finished with 9 and wearily gestured over 10. It would just be a nip, but at least duty would be honoured. His situation was not improved by 13, the third of the women, who insisted on making orgasmic noises at the first graze of his fangs. Under the circumstances, it seemed ungentlemanly to be perfunctory, and so he soldiered on until she’d run out of expressions of passion. He straightened up, feeling replete, reborn, and generally resanguinated, but also irked that performance anxiety should pursue a fellow beyond the grave.

‘So,’ he said as the cultists—practically, if unromantically—passed around a box of sticking plasters, ‘now what?’

‘We must take you to the castle with all dispatch, my lord,’ said the leader, who it transpired was called Encausse.

‘The castle. Of course. Should have known there would be a castle involved. Which particular castle would that be?’

Encausse looked uncomfortable, and Horst guessed he was wrestling between a conspirator’s natural desire for secrecy and a conspirator’s equally natural desire to tell everyone how brilliant the conspiracy is. ‘I am not permitted to say, my lord.’

Horst considered softening his mind a little until the concept of ‘permission’ became more malleable, but reined in the impulse. After all, that was the sort of thing real monsters did, and Horst didn’t care for it.

‘Well, is it far?’

‘Yes, my lord. It will take several days to transport you there. I am sorry.’

‘For what?’

‘The inconvenience.’

Horst looked down at his newly reconstituted hands, and rubbed them in the manner of one getting down to brass tacks. ‘The inconvenience . . . Well, don’t be too hard on yourself. You’ve resurrected me, which was decent of you. We’ll just consider ourselves even between that and the inconvenience.’

Horst was finding all manner of things not to like about the situation, and nestling high upon the parapets of his misgivings was why such a band of well-equipped and well-informed eccentrics had gone to all this trouble in the first place. For the first time he felt a small pang in his slowly beating heart. He hoped Johannes was still alive somewhere and he wished he could be here. All this occult malarkey was much more his brother’s meat and drink. Johannes would have identified the group concerned, insulted everyone, and probably settled into a spirited gunfight by this juncture. The pang troubled Horst again; to his profound surprise, he was missing his brother.

He looked at Encausse and saw the man was nervous. Horst guessed he’d got it into his head that vampires kill people willy-nilly for every little disappointment. Perhaps they usually did. How would he know? Nobody had ever given him an induction lecture or even a pamphlet on the subject. He spoke to defuse the tension as much as anything. ‘And how do you intend to get me to this castle? I think my passport has probably run out by now and, anyway, wouldn’t being dead invalidate it?’

Encausse waved away the point, his relief at not being summarily murdered clear. ‘All is in preparation, my lord. The means to transport you are at hand.’

Horst looked around. They didn’t seem to be that at hand. He looked quizzically back at Encausse, who smiled awkwardly. ‘Not exactly here, that is. But, there is a small port a mile or two away to the west. There, the means to transport you are at hand.’

At least, thought Horst, the man hadn’t added ‘. . . honest’ at the end of the sentence, and thereby undermined all credibility.

As it turned out, however, planning was clearly a strong suit with whatever organisation had decided to, for reasons that currently remained obscure, locate the place of Horst’s second death by means that remained obscure, resurrect him by means that also remained obscure, and then blithely offer him three lives. Three volunteered lives at that. As the lid of his beautifully appointed coffin closed upon him, Horst wondered if he was doing the right thing going along with them. Escaping his honour guard would have been simple, yet it would have left him with no answers, and he had a feeling that answers might be important, and not only to him.

They had a castle, for heaven’s sake. A castle. From his conversations with Johannes, Horst had received the impression that most occult groups might stretch to hiring the local Scouts’ hut monthly for their meetings under the pretence of being philatelists or something. A castle made things seem very well funded. Also, Encausse had dropped enough hints to confirm to Horst’s satisfaction that the thirteen cultists were by no means the entire strength of this particular organisation. Between all this and their single-minded desire to avail themselves of a ‘Lord of Death’, he was sure their aims were not at all philanthropic and that they deserved whatever scrutiny he might bring to bear upon them. Being a vampire didn’t mean he couldn’t be socially responsible. If things turned unfriendly, he was confident he could light out of the proceedings before the unfriendliness manifested in the form of a stake through the heart, he would find some way to report the affair to the forces of law and order, and his curiosity and conscience would be assuaged.

This was his plan, simple to the point of barely being a plan at all. Still, as he reassured himself, it wasn’t as if he was busy doing something else.

His coffin was loaded aboard a train at the head of the flatland’s spur line; the track there not having been certified as safe for some time, the points at the junction were locked against it. They travelled through the night in a secure baggage van, and Horst was able to stretch his legs in the company of Encausse and some of his entourage. The thirteenth woman sat on some mail bags and regarded Horst silently the whole night, biting her lip now and then. Horst returned wan smiles and felt more awkward about the situation than a Lord of Death probably ought. He was relieved when dawn approached and he was able to return politely to his coffin with expressions of regret that he in no way felt.

Encausse had told him that they were heading to the port before embarkation for the rest of the trip. Horst had naturally assumed he would awaken at the next dusk aboard a ship. Ideally not one called the Demeter; it never pays to tempt fate. He was therefore, astonished, delighted, and yet slightly disturbed to find himself aboard an aeroship, the Catullus, a relatively small but well-appointed pleasure yacht apparently donated or lent to the cult by one of its supporters. Horst was astonished because he had naturally understood the port they were making for to be a coastal one, not an aeroport, delighted because he had never been aboard such a vessel despite years of yearning, and disturbed because, once again, his benefactors seemed to have very deep pockets indeed.

Benefactors. No, that was looking very unlikely in itself. Presumably the bill for all this largesse would be presented on arrival at the castle.

The journey was eastwards; that much at least was apparent, and they had crossed the Channel onto the Continent as he slept the first day. Encausse was still evasive about details, and—for the moment at least—Horst was still reluctant to use methods of persuasion more supernatural than gentle nagging. For the moment at least.

Only Encausse’s two lieutenants had joined them aboard, leaving Horst’s admirer behind. This relieved him greatly. It would only have been a matter of time before he would have awoken one evening to find her fluttering around his stateroom in a peignoir, draping herself over the furniture here and there like a particularly available moth, and his life was complicated enough as it was.

The crew was small, and taciturn to a man. They wore black uniforms without any insignia at all, only the design of the clothes serving to designate rank and role. Horst, who had an eye for such things, noted the paramilitary styling of the uniforms and the distinctly Teutonic aesthetic informing them, and wondered if he was bound for the Germanys. He imagined the coincidence if they were to set down in Hesse, his homeland. He could drop in on his mother. And probably put her in her grave with shock. No, perhaps that wasn’t the best idea. His former life was gone, twice over. That Horst Cabal only lived on in memoriam and legal declarations of death in absence of a body.

So he sat silently in the yacht’s small but extravagantly appointed salon, watched the clouds go by, and accepted that he wasn’t really Horst Cabal at all, but just an echo of a slamming crypt door. He was aware of being observed at such times by Encausse and his people, and observed approvingly. The more laconic he became, it seemed, the more seriously he was taken. Certainly his brown studies were far more in keeping with the image of a saturnine Lord of Death, so he maintained them even when his spirits rose.

Instead of engaging his keepers in conversation, he amused himself by practising the abilities that had replaced such trivial things as being able to walk in direct sunlight without messily combusting. He did not care to practice the placing of the human will into neutral—it was too addictive a sensation—but he had always taken some pleasure in the remarkable bouts of speed of which he was now capable. They were short, a matter of seconds, but for those few seconds he could travel with such speed as to become momentarily invisible. This he tried and was pleased to discover he still did easily. Indeed, there was a distinct impression of improvement, which perplexed him. Where before he had found it necessary to apply himself carefully to navigating around obstacles, now it seemed so instinctive as to be reflexive. He hypothesised two possible reasons. Firstly, in his first bout of being vampirically inclined, he had been nervous about taking too much from any single donor in case he seriously weakened or, heavens forfend, killed them. His current experience, he realised, was the first time he had ever been truly replete. It made him feel powerful. It made him feel very good indeed.

The other theory was that, in conversation with his brother, Johannes had made reference to a steady increase of puissance throughout a vampire’s existence. Did that existence include periods as dust? Perhaps so. In any event, he found it child’s play to be out of his chair and into the corridor behind the sidekick of Encausse who had been surreptitiously watching him.

Horst saw the man start, heard him gasp, and smelled the adrenalin suddenly flush his system. The man reflexively turned to scan the corridor behind him and looked straight at Horst. Another little gift of the vampiric unlife was that of psychic invisibility. Horst pushed himself out of the man’s perception and the man accepted him as something of no interest. Indeed, with an irritated grunt, the man leaned to one side, looking past Horst as he looked for Horst. ‘Where the Hell has that bastard leech gone?’ he muttered, proving that eavesdroppers seldom hear well of themselves.

As the man scurried into the salon to search behind the bar, under chairs, and beneath the cushions, Horst strolled forward at a more human speed, but still repressing his presence.

He heard voices and found them coming from the ventral observation room, a small chamber protruding slightly from the yacht’s belly, glass walled and floored but for a solid section on which were arranged a cluster of armchairs. The intention presumably was for the owner and his or her guests to gather here to look down on the world below, literally and figuratively. At night, however, the view was unengaging even to Horst’s sharp eyes. Occasionally the lights of a town might go by below, but otherwise the nocturnal landscape was disappointing.

Encausse and his other lieutenant were sitting there and watching the darkness, a half-empty bottle and a pair of wine glasses sitting on the table between them. ‘. . . set up for a fall,’ Encausse was saying. ‘I’ve got a couple of people who’d love to see me look a fool.’

‘Von Ziegler,’ offered the lieutenant, a surly man called Donner.

‘Von Ziegler for one, arse licker that he is. I can’t see how they can blame me, though. The mission’s a success. We have the vampire, alive and . . . Well, you know what I mean. Up and around. Not what I was expecting, though.’

‘Not what any of us were expecting.’

‘Did you hear what he said? He’s never killed anyone. What kind of vampire’s never killed anyone? I don’t understand why he was chosen. There must be others, mustn’t there? Even if they’re dust, we can still raise them. Vlad Țepeș. Lord Varney. And we end up getting Count Form-an-Orderly-Queue.’

He touched the side of his neck and winced at the memory. ‘Ours may not be to reason why, but I cannot help but wonder if the Ministerium hasn’t made a mistake.’

Horst raised an eyebrow. The Ministerium? Interesting. Very interesting. He had no idea what it meant, but that didn’t stop it being interesting.

‘I thought the order didn’t come from them?’ said Donner.

‘What?’ Encausse was taken aback. ‘Of course the order came from them.’

‘Well, maybe via them,’ conceded Donner. ‘I thought Her Majesty insisted.’

There was a definite sneer in Donner’s voice, and Horst wasn’t sure if the honorific was meant sarcastically or not. But then Encausse replied, ‘The queen wanted him?’ He sank back in his chair and took a draft of wine that was an indecent use of a good vintage. ‘I didn’t know. I didn’t know. I just thought . . . We fulfilled our orders to the letter. It’s not our fault the “Lord of Death” is a namby-pamby, is it?’

Donner shook his head. ‘We did as we were told. She was the one who did the choosing. She picked him, he’s her problem.’

Encausse seemed reassured by this line of reasoning. ‘Yes, true enough. We didn’t choose him. I’d have gone for a proper nosferatu if it had been left to me, not that bloody fop.’ Horst raised both eyebrows; spying was turning out to be quite hurtful to one’s feelings. ‘But what the queen wants, she gets, and she can’t blame anyone else if that’s a bad choice.’ A pause, and he added a little shakily, ‘Can she?’ He took another gulp of wine.

‘Wouldn’t worry about it. She’s hardly there most of the time. By the time she turns up again, his nibs will be the Ministerium’s problem. How he got from where he was to where he is won’t matter anymore.’

Further reassuring noises from Donner were interrupted by the arrival of the other lieutenant, Bolam. ‘He’s gone! He was in the salon and he just vanished! Poof! I was looking right at him! I can’t find him anywhere!’

The ensuing search was short and confusing for Bolam, as the missing Horst was found to be exactly where he was supposed to be, in the salon, watching the darkness through the aft windows.

‘Is there a problem, gentlemen?’ he asked as the three men burst through the door.

As dawn approached, he was escorted to his coffin perhaps more assiduously and with far more narrow-eyed suspicion than previously. To these unfriendly airs he seemed blithe and friendly, but he was markedly aware of them all the same and wondered how the night’s events might have altered their perception of him. Momentarily, he remembered standing behind the astonished Bolam, and the thought of how easily he might have reached out and snapped the man’s neck flittered across his mind. Before he could quell it, there was the flickering beginning of the next idea to follow on, a spectral carriage in a ghost train of thought. He saw Bolam’s exposed neck, saw the blood in him. How easy to drain, kill, and fling the corpse from the aeroship.

Horst paused by the coffin in the small, windowless freight hold as Bolam and Donner lifted the lid off. Encausse saw his face tighten and watched with concern as Horst swayed a little.

‘My lord? Did we leave it too close to daylight? Are you well?’

Horst swung his head sideways to look at Encausse. There was something dreadful burning in Horst’s eyes that made Encausse take a sudden breath in surprise and even fear, a sullen, dark fire that had no place in the face of anything human.

‘When we arrive,’ said Horst, and his voice was grating and unfamiliar even to him, ‘I will require blood.’

‘Yes.’ Encausse blinked quickly. He had a growing sense of danger of a sort that was alien and terrible to him. ‘Yes, my lord. It will be arranged.’

Horst shifted his gaze forward, and Encausse felt he could breathe more easily again. Horst stepped quickly into the coffin on its low bier, settled onto his back and, for the first time Encausse had seen in their short acquaintance, crossed his arms across his heart. Scowling, Horst closed his eyes very positively, dismissing them with contempt by the action. Bolam and Donner were very happy to replace the coffin’s lid, and the three of them left the hold with haste.

They closed the hatch behind them and, without thinking, Encausse locked it—another first. He looked at his lieutenants in silence for a moment and saw that they were as pale as he felt.

‘Well,’ he said at last, unsurprised and unashamed by the waver in his voice. ‘Perhaps the Red Queen knows her business after all.’

© 2014 by Jonathan L. Howard.

Excerpted from The Brothers Cabal by Jonathan L. Howard.

Published by permission of the author and Thomas Dunne Books.

All rights reserved.

No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jonathan L. Howard is an author and scriptwriter, the creator of the Johannes Cabal, Russalka Chronicles, and Goon Squad series. He lives in the English West Country with his wife and daughter.

NOVEL EXCERPT:
The Necromancer Candle and Two Additional Tales of Contemporary Fantasy

Randy McCharles

Forthcoming from EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing

PROLOGUE

Near Prague, 1161 A.D.

The wind outside the bone house howled with the agony of whole herds of pigs being slaughtered, their moist flesh thrown onto the coals, the bones, skin, and fat tied together to be brought to Master Dupek and then boiled and separated, the tallow gleaned for the dipping of candles. Yet Jiri knew it was not pigs he heard in the wind. The pigs had been slaughtered hours earlier. What howled now was something else.

Master Dupek shouted from the doorway. “Is the cauldron ready?” The old boneman leaned heavily against the open door, his skeletal hands clutching at the wooden beam as though to keep his lean frame from being blown out into the storm.

“The water begins to steam,” Jiri answered from where he stood hunched over the vast cauldron, waiting for the heat of the flames and warming water to seep beneath his skin and thaw his numb hands.

If Jiri was cold, the old boneman must be half frozen. If only he would close the door and trap the escaping warmth inside.

On most winter nights the bone house was a source of boundless heat, but shortly after nightfall Master Dupek had returned unexpected and ordered Jiri to empty and clean the cauldron.

“But the rendering has only just begun,” Jiri complained. He gestured to the huge vat where the fat and bones from the slaughtered pigs had scarce begun to boil. It was Jiri’s task to attend the boiling and rendering, which took all the hours of night. With the rising sun he would collect the white fat from the surface of the cauldron into a tall, narrow kettle in which Master Dupek would dip the wicks, later to sell the candles to the townsfolk.

“We’ll have new fat,” Master Dupek had said. “Bishop Straka brings rendering to be made into candles. And,” the old boneman smiled rapaciously, “he’ll pay richer coin than the dirty pennies of the townsfolk.”

“Have the Church bonemen died then?” asked Jiri, for he could see no reason for the Church, with its copper kettles and perfumed beeswax, to seek tallow candles from the town.

“Don’t be a fool!” spat Master Dupek. “When the Church offers to pay good silver, you don’t ask why.”

And so Jiri had cooled the fires and dumped the cauldron into the trench, scraped the metal clean, poured in fresh water and added new wood. And as he did, the storm had risen and the sky grown cold, and the heat from the newly stoked fire was not sufficient to warm him.

Outside the open doorway, lightning broke the sky much like the fingers of leading in the stained glass of the tall church on the hill above the town. Time was, after long nights tending the cauldron, Jiri had enjoyed going to morning mass. Old Bishop Dagar had never spoken with a loud voice or acted condescending when Jiri didn’t have a penny for the plate. But when the old Bishop had died, the town died with him.

The arrival of Bishop Straka had failed to resurrect the town. If anything, the town had died anew. The new Bishop never smiled, nor had a good word for anyone. And from the pulpit he preached brimstone and damnation. Jiri had not once heard the words love or forgiveness leave the new Bishop’s lips.

Jiri had ceased attending mass, as had others. Neither was he fool enough, despite Master Dupek’s frequent calling him such, not to notice how some of the townsfolk flocked to Bishop Straka. Townsfolk who had sneered at old Bishop Dagar.

The sky outside the bone house blossomed again with lightning, illuminating Master Dupek’s gaunt face. Master Dupek was one of those who had sneered.

The wind, if it were possible, increased its wailing. Jiri smelled smoke, or thought he did. There was too much wind for fire to burn. Too much icy damp in the air.

The lightning raged a third time and Jiri knew the storm was not natural. It seemed a battle cry. Or a cry of bitter wounding. Or both. Evil imbued the night.

Jiri knew what evil was. Not the stench of raw flesh boiling in a cauldron, though the townsfolk said the stink was the worst evil there was, almost as bad as the tallow candles Master Dupek sold them. Jiri knew real evil. Tiny children laid out in pine boxes. Wars that took the town’s strong men and killed them, with no benefit to the town that Jiri could see. Disease wasting young and old alike. Theft, and murder, and hate. All these were evil. Then there was the secret evil Bishop Dagar had claimed was in the world. The Serpent’s Lie, more subtle and dangerous than any wrong devised by mortal Man.

The evil in the wind and the lightning was of that sort. The kind that crept into one’s soul and made a man shudder for no reason he could put his finger on. Jiri could warn Master Dupek that the lightning was evil, but the old boneman would just call him a fool. “Lightning is lightning,” he would say. “It just is. Now get back to work.”

Jiri could hear screaming in the wind. Not the wail of gusting air through the houses and trees, but the death cries of a soul being rent.

The lightning flashed a final time and Jiri knew that would be the end of it. The battle was over, the outcome decided, and not to the good, he was sure.

Master Dupek cursed in the doorway and Jiri could see that it had begun to rain. The wind was dying and, except for the hammering of raindrops against the bone house roof and the hard earth outside, the night had grown silent.

“I see him,” said Master Dupek.

Despite the heavy fall of rain, Jiri could hear movement outside, the tread of many men slogging across ground grown suddenly muddy. Through the open doorway he looked past the boneman to see the new Bishop, tall and imposing in his scarlet cape, kicking up mud as he stamped toward the shelter of the bone house.

Bishop Straka pushed through the doorway with a fury of animal triumph and flying water. His mitre, rochet, and cape were sopping. Water coursed down his face and beard. Master Dupek fell back as the Bishop brushed past him and stood examining the iron cauldron and its accompanying implements. The Bishop’s deep, coal eyes were sharp and fierce as he took in the rough metal and the smoking branches of the fire. “It will have to do,” he said. The Bishop did not see Jiri standing beyond the cauldron. Jiri was beneath the Bishop’s notice.

A half-dozen men followed the Bishop into the bone house. They were dressed in the scarlet and black of the Church garrison. Soldiers of Christ. Bishop Dagar had not required any of the townsfolk to serve the Church in this fashion. Bishop Straka, on the other hand, had made himself a small army.

Between them, Straka’s Church Dogs dragged a man, broken and stripped of most of his clothing, and threw him onto the ground before the cauldron. Blood leaked darkly from several wounds.

“Your Eminence?” Master Dupek asked in a strained voice. “Where . . . where is the vegetable oil and beeswax?”

Jiri knew his master had made a mistake even before the Bishop cast him his barbed gaze. Straka said nothing, but turned his cold eyes to the man on the ground.

Master Dupek’s face paled, and then he squinted at the beaten man’s face. The old boneman trembled. “The necromancer,” he whispered.

Bishop Straka’s lips parted in a feral grin. “Yes. The sorcerer himself. Milos Radimir. Old Dagar would not raise a finger against him, but I am unafraid. God is on my side.”

As are the Church Dogs, thought Jiri. With their strong arms and swords. Jiri had recognized poor Milos when the Dogs first threw his beaten body to the earthen floor.

Old Bishop Dagar, too, had called Milos a sorcerer, a necromancer, for the small magics he was rumored to practice in his house by the river. Some few went to Milos for simple healings and advice, and no one was ever hurt. Bishop Dagar had seen no cause to make trouble.

Bishop Straka, however, delighted in trouble. He beckoned to one of his Dogs, who produced a sack filled with silver moulds. Jiri had seen candle moulds before, used only by the Church and the wealthiest of townsfolk for the making of ornamental candles, candles that look pretty on a table or shelf, but that burned poorly or inefficiently. The Bishop’s moulds, however, were unlike any Jiri had ever seen. They stood six inches high and four inches across, with a delicate hinge along one side that allowed them to snap open after the tallow had hardened. From the flickering light of the cauldron fire, Jiri saw the suggestion of etchings on the inner surface of the moulds.

“You will make twelve candles,” Bishop Straka told Master Dupek. “Fill the moulds to an even height so that none is taller than the others. You must use all the renderings. Throw none away. Add nothing to contaminate the tallow. Fail me in this,” the Bishop glared at Master Dupek, “and you will pay with your soul.”

Master Dupek looked again at the man lying beaten on the ground. Jiri watched in silence as the boneman made his second mistake. “But, your Eminence, he isn’t dead.”

That Master Dupek made no complaint of rendering a human body led Jiri to believe that he had done this before. How many rich folk, Jiri wondered, even now display trophies on their shelves—candles made from the fat of their enemies?

Bishop Straka scowled at Milos Radimir. “He is a necromancer. Cold steel will not kill him. But no man, not even a sorcerer, can survive the cauldron. He’ll be dead when he is in your pot an hour.” The Bishop nodded to one of his Dogs. “Stay here and see to it the boneman does as he’s told.” Then he led the others out into the rain.

When the door was closed, Master Dupek cursed and yelled at Jiri to remove the necromancer’s remaining garments.

Jiri did as he was told. He did not know whose wrath he feared more, Master Dupek’s or Bishop Straka’s. The Bishop’s Watchdog, scowling near the door, would make a detailed report.

The necromancer did not resist Jiri’s ministrations. He was badly beaten, stabbed repeatedly, and bled from at least a dozen wounds that should have been fatal. The dirt where he lay was fast becoming thick with black mud. Only the slow rise and fall of the man’s chest convinced Jiri that he was alive. Perhaps the Bishop’s words were true, that Milos Radimir could not be killed by the sword.

Jiri prodded the necromancer’s trousers and smallclothes into the flames beneath the cauldron. There was a ring on the middle finger of the right hand that Jiri removed and slipped into his pocket before Master Dupek’s greedy eye could see it. The Bishop’s Dog did not seem to care.

Milos opened his eyes and looked at Jiri, but there was no anger there. No hatred. Only sadness, making Jiri feel all the worse for being party to this evil.

“Let’s get him into the pot,” Master Dupek muttered, gripping the necromancer beneath the arms. Jiri quickly took the feet and together they lifted the still-living man into the cauldron.

The water was hot, though not yet boiling. Milos did not resist, nor did he breathe a sound as his flesh was lowered into the scalding bath. The necromancer was very light, Jiri thought, like smoke, though his flesh felt warm and solid. As his head slipped beneath the water, Jiri prayed that Milos did not have the strength to raise it up again. Drowning would be a quicker, easier death than boiling.

When they were finished, Straka’s Dog snorted and glared at them like they were about the devil’s work, which Jiri believed was true despite it being the Bishop’s bidding.

Master Dupek slouched to a far corner and sat on a crate, where he stared at the cauldron without seeming to see it.

Jiri alone stood by the steaming cauldron, more for penance than a desire to thaw his frozen bones, which still could not seem to get warm. Within the pot, the water steamed and swirled, like smoke in a troubled breeze. He expected at any moment for the scalded man to leap up screaming from the cauldron and run naked into the icy rains outside, but within the clouded water there was no movement.

Jiri had heard gossip of Milos Radimir, that the man was a self-made healer who had learned to tap into the forces of nature. Widow Novosad claimed he had raised her youngest son from the dead, thus earning him the title necromancer. Milos had denied the praise and denied also that he consorted with demons. Old Bishop Dagar had agreed. “God made nature. If Milos has learned in some small way to use one of God’s tools, what evil is there? So long as his heart is good.”

Bishop Straka did not share his Church-brother’s view. “Radimir is a sorcerer and a heretic, and must be destroyed.” And this night Straka’s will had won out. What, Jiri could not help but wonder, would Bishop Straka do with the ungodly candles?

A small bubble broke the surface of the water, followed by another, and soon the water was well to boiling. Necromancer or no, surely the man was now dead.

“Fool,” Master Dupek muttered bitterly from his cold corner of the bone house. “The fire needs wood. Can you not perform the simplest of tasks?”

Jiri quickly began feeding branches and hewn bark to the embers beneath the cauldron. How long had he been staring into the waters? Straka’s Dog, he saw, was leaning against the bone house wall, his sword sheathed and his eyes half-closed. Master Dupek had not moved, but now wore a blanket about his shoulders. The cauldron emanated heat like an oven, but the boneman would not come near it.

Jiri found he was no longer cold. Sweat rolled down his face and soaked his clothes, but it was not a comfortable warmth; he had preferred feeling numb.

The water in the cauldron had become a roiling soup. Jiri could not help but envision Milos lying in its depth, the dead man’s flesh softening with the heat and coming free of the bones.

The burning wood beneath the cauldron filled the bone house with a familiar smoke. Even so, Jiri imagined he could smell tallow smoke, the acrid aroma of burning candles. The necromancer had used candles in his magic, he remembered suddenly. Not the beeswax candles from the Church or the tallow candles Master Dupek made, but candles of his own devising. Milos Radimir had been a man of moderate means, and kept his own kettle and cloth and candle moulds.

“Stir,” the old boneman said angrily from his crate.

It was too soon to stir, but Jiri did as he was told. The wooden paddle was stout as a boat oar, though shorter. It slid into the boiling water along the side of the cauldron and moved freely along the bottom. Jiri felt the necromancer’s body shift as the oar scraped along the cauldron wall. In no place had flesh stuck to the hot metal. It was too soon. Jiri pulled the paddle out of the water.

“Must I do everything!” Master Dupek screamed as he stamped across the bone house and wrenched the paddle from Jiri’s hands. The oar broke the water with a violent splash that threatened to spill over the cauldron’s sides. The old boneman stirred vigorously. His eyes were wild, and within them Jiri could see the shame of a murderer.

Straka’s Dog came awake at Master Dupek’s agitation, and eyed the boneman.

Tiring quickly, Master Dupek thrust the paddle back into Jiri’s hands. “You know what to do. I shall return before sunrise.” Without another word the old boneman stamped out into the rain.

Through the open door, Jiri watched him go. The bone house had grown hot so there was now no need to close it. A shadowed figure slouched after Master Dupek, another of Straka’s dogs.

Jiri removed the paddle from the cauldron and set himself to waiting, which was what most of his job entailed. The water settled into a steady boil, and the stench of smoke was stronger than ever. Straka’s Dog moved further away from the cauldron, but remained alert after his earlier doze.

The hours of night passed, with Jiri feeding just enough wood to the flames to keep the cauldron at a boil. He stirred the contents regularly to prevent the renderings from sticking to the hot metal. Slowly, the bubbles of oil on the water’s surface thickened into an oily film.

Shortly before dawn Jiri let the flames die down and the bone house began to cool. Straka’s Dog, instead of approaching the cauldron for warmth, shut the door and took up Master Dupek’s blanket.

Jiri stirred the vat, expertly freeing up pockets of oil from the flesh and bones in the depth of the pot. When further stirring threatened to contaminate the congealing tallow on the surface, he set Master Dupek’s brass dipping kettle over a smaller fire, poured in two inches of clear water, and tied a loosely woven cloth across the top.

With a shallow ladle, Jiri scooped the rendered fat off the surface of the cauldron and poured it onto the taut cloth. The tallow remained liquid enough to leak through the loose weave, which collected tiny bits of bone, flesh, and other impurities like fish in a net.

Jiri had performed this task so often that he could forget the tallow came from a man and not a pig or a sheep. It was a long, onerous task, requiring waiting for the cloth to drain before adding more tallow.

During this time the rain ceased to fall and Master Dupek returned, though the roughness about his eyes and in his voice suggested that he had slept little. The old boneman stared into the cauldron and complained that Jiri had not done as the Bishop had instructed and harvested all the tallow.

Jiri said nothing, but repeatedly scraped his ladle across the surface water, scooping up tiny globules of oily tallow and pouring them onto the cloth.

When at last Master Dupek was satisfied, Jiri removed the filthy screen from the kettle and stirred the creamy white liquid with a clean metal spoon. Since the boneman had kept him overlong with the cauldron, gleaning for fat, the tallow and water mixture in the dipping kettle had become too thick. Soon it would burn and blacken. Jiri quickly added additional water beneath Dupek’s scowling gaze and stirred the tallow to an even thickness.

“Now it is too thin,” grumbled the boneman. But without further castigation he went to his work table and set out a wide board upon which he placed the Bishop’s moulds. With bony fingers he snapped the hinged edges together: twelve silver cups with no bottoms. Jiri derided himself for not examining the unusual moulds during the long night.

Master Dupek’s usual morning task was to dip lengths of twisted flax into the narrow kettle, repeating his efforts until tall, thin candles hardened about them. In the afternoon he would sell the results of his labor to the townsfolk.

Candle moulds were more difficult. One mould at a time, Master Dupek held twisted flax through the center of the mould while Jiri lifted the hot kettle and poured the steaming tallow.

“Spill that and Bishop Straka will have you in the cauldron next,” said the Soldier of God.

“Fool,” Master Dupek muttered, though Jiri was not certain whether the boneman meant him or Straka’s Dog.

Jiri poured until each mould was almost filled before moving onto the next. He remembered the Bishop’s words that the candles were to be of the same height, and knew he would be told to melt the candles down and start again if Straka was not satisfied.

When the twelve moulds were done, Jiri set the kettle back over the flames to loosen the remaining tallow and then quickly added a spoonful more to each of the moulds. Master Dupek grunted and cursed as he cut the wicks and smoothed the surface of the candles with practiced fingers.

“Is it done?” boomed an acid voice from the doorway.

Jiri looked up to see Bishop Straka and his contingent of Dogs.

“The moulds need to cool,” said Master Dupek. “But not too long or the candles will break when they are opened.”

Bishop Straka sniffed at the now lukewarm cauldron. Chunks of flesh and bone floated on the surface and the smell was insufferable. The Bishop seemed not to mind. His gaze searched for unharvested tallow but seem satisfied there was none.

He pointed to two of his Dogs. “Bring it,” he said and turned to go. The Soldiers of God lifted the board with the twelve candle moulds and followed the Bishop outside. The rest, including the Dog who had stayed with Jiri through night, followed.

Master Dupek watched them go in silence and apparent relief, then remembered that he had not been paid.

“Clean this up!” he snapped at Jiri before racing out the door after the Bishop.

Jiri waited only a moment before piling wood onto the embers beneath the cauldron and waving a piece of board to stoke the flames. He then rebuilt the small fire and placed on it a pot with a little water. The straining cloth from the dipping kettle he stuffed into the water, and then he picked up the paddle and stirred the cauldron.

Sour meat and bone roiled to the surface then plummeted again as Jiri stirred the soupy mixture. The water in the cauldron was still warm and did not take long to resume boiling. Jiri stirred continuously, then stopped and broke up the fire when he grew worried that Master Dupek might return and see what he was doing. The old boneman would have gotten his thirty pieces of silver by now, but would likely lurk about the Church hoping to see what Straka would do with his candles.

The small pot was steaming, so Jiri added more water and then rinsed the gore and fat out of the straining cloth. He added a small amount of water to the dipping kettle and restretched the cloth over its mouth. Then he poured the steaming contents of the pot onto the cloth, harvesting the tallow that had clung to the threads.

With the ladle, he quickly skimmed new bubbles of fat from the surface of the cauldron. There was always more fat to be harvested if you stirred long enough. With pig fat it was never worth the effort, but Bishop Straka had been adamant. “You must use all the renderings. Throw none away.” Jiri knew there must be good reason. He ladled the congealing fat onto the cloth and eventually acquired a good quantity of milky tallow.

The Bishop had taken the silver moulds, but Master Dupek had a few ancient copper moulds stored in a chest. Jiri selected one that was similar to the Bishop’s, though perhaps slightly narrower and taller. It was round and hollow, with no etchings, and no delicate hinge that allowed it to pop open. Jiri held a flaxen wick in place with his teeth while using both hands to pour his collected tallow from the heated kettle.

The tallow came near to filling the mould. The resulting candle would be taller than those Dupek had made for the Bishop, which satisfied Jiri. Straka was adamant that the candles all be of the same height. Why, Jiri did not know. But he did know that he would do everything in his power to frustrate the Bishop’s plans.

He remembered then the ring from the necromancer’s finger and pressed it deep into the still soft tallow, being careful not to disturb the wick.

When the candle had hardened sufficiently, Jiri plunged the mould into water he had heated in the pot. The hot water scalded his fingers but he did not care. Master Dupek would be returning, and Jiri feared the Dogs would be close behind. The heated water softened the tallow sufficiently for Jiri to push the candle free of the mould.

While the thirteenth candle made from the murdered necromancer hardened on the table, Jiri poured out the cauldron into the trench and cleaned all the implements. He took care to return Master Dupek’s mould to its place, and then peered out the bone house door.

Master Dupek was coming down the path from the Church. There was a smile on the old boneman’s face, a smile that would disappear when he turned to see the Church Dogs following behind him.

Jiri knew then that his fears were justified. If Bishop Straka was not above murdering Milos Radimir for necromancy, doing away with his accomplices in murder was only prudent. Master Dupek would not live out the day, and neither would Jiri if he stayed.

After wrapping the necromancer candle in soft cloth and stuffing it into a sack, he began his long escape. He could not leave by the door without the boneman and Straka’s Dogs seeing him, so he went out by way of the trench, little caring that he could not avoid smearing his clothes with rendered gore.

It was a terrible thing the Bishop had done to Milos Radimir, though perhaps less terrible than the evil Straka would enact with candles rendered from a man with true magic.

Bishop Dagar had once said that great evils might be thwarted by small, goodly acts. Jiri only hoped that this night he had wrought such an act, in rendering a thirteenth candle.

© 2014 by Randy McCharles.

Excerpted from The Necromancer Candle and Two Additional Tales of Contemporary Fantasy by Randy McCharles.

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

Randy McCharles is active in Calgary, Alberta's writing community with a focus on dark, humorous fantasy and is a recipient of the prestigious Aurora Award for speculative short fiction. Publishing credits include Tesseracts 11, 12, and 16; Okal Rel Opus 2 and 6; The Puzzle Box; Year’s Best Fantasy 9; and is a regular contributor to the 10th Circle Project. He also helps organize literary events and SF/F conventions. In 2005 he co-chaired the first Calgary Westercon, and chaired the 2008 World Fantasy Convention. Randy is a long-time member of IFWA, the Imaginative Fiction Writers Association.

NONFICTION

Interview: Mary Robinette Kowal

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Mary Robinette Kowal’s Glamourist series has been described as “Jane Austen with magic.” The fourth book, Valour and Vanity, is out now.

This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by David Barr Kirtley. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the host and his guests discuss various geeky topics.

Your new book is called Valour and Vanity, and it’s the fourth book in the Glamourist series. Why don’t you tell us a bit about that series?

The Glamourist Histories are set in the Regency. They take place between 1814 and 1818, and they are basically Jane Austen with magic. Pretty dresses, and then the magic, glamour, which is where the series gets its name and is kind of like painting with light; it’s creating illusions, and it’s largely useless, which is why it’s something that young ladies of quality are taught to do. The fourth book is a little more swashbuckling than your usual Jane Austen fare. We’ve actually described it as “Jane Austen writes Ocean’s Eleven with magic.” It’s a heist novel of manners.

The different books in the series have all been in different subgenres, right?

I joke a little bit that the third one is secretly a political thriller disguised as a Regency romance.

I was really interested in reading about the second one in the series—it’s a spy thriller and features Napoleon and stuff like that.

It’s a little quieter than most fantasy fans are expecting when they go in because my main character, particularly at the beginning of the book, is the product of an English country drawing room. She’s newly married, she’s a little naïve, and although she’s very smart, she’s dealing with a lot of stuff she hasn’t dealt with before. The first part of the book has a drawing room feel, in part because she is not in on the spying that’s happening, and then once she understands what’s going on, we get progressively more swashbuckling as the book goes on.

I was reading that you also deal with the Luddite uprising, and that’s interesting to me. What’s your take on the Luddites?

The Luddites are in Without a Summer, which is the third book. One of the things that I found really interesting about the Luddites as I was researching was I think of them as being people who are afraid of technology, which is not actually the case.

The Luddites were protesting a social shift. Basically, up until weaving machines came into being, weaving was something that was done at home. It was skilled labor, and it was something the whole family was involved in. Then you would take your wares to something that was called a factory, but it’s not like what we would think of as a factory today. It was where people would collect things, and it had multiple people working for it, but you would work at home and bring things in. The weaving machines meant that suddenly you had to work outside the home, so childcare became an issue, and it was something that unskilled labor could do. It was a huge disruption to the life of the Luddites.

What I’m doing with this is I’m playing with actual Luddites, because this is the tail end of the Luddite movement, but I’m also using their uprisings as a model for something that the coldmongers are going through. Coldmongers are glamourists who can chill things. They can’t completely freeze something, except under very rare special circumstances, but they can cool things. They are usually employed in greengrocers and things like that. There’s a conflict regarding their employment, so I was basing a lot of that on what happened with the Luddite movement.

I heard you say in an interview that when the coldmongers come into this, that reveals that the series is almost science fiction in a way.

If anyone is paying attention to what I’m doing, the glamourists are manipulating the electromagnetic spectrum. Specifically, what the coldmongers are doing is a thermodynamic transfer, but I have to communicate all of that without using a lot of those words because I do try to be period correct in language. I have a scientific basis for everything that is going on in the magic, although if you look too deep, at a certain point it does fall apart because it’s magic.

I know a lot of science fiction fans, and there seems to be an enormous crossover between science fiction fans and Jane Austen fans. Do you agree with that? What’s your take on that?

I do. I think part of it is because there’s a crossover between fans of a lot of different things and Jane Austen fans. One of the things that Jane Austen is really good at is the small, telling detail. A lot of times, that small, telling detail is something that science fiction spins on—that one thing that you thought wasn’t very important, but it turns out to be the MacGuffin of all MacGuffins. I think there’s a fondness for that. Of course, she’s heavily character-based, so it’s easy to get sucked into what is going on with the characters, and that’s appealing.

Let’s talk a little bit more about this newest book, Valour and Vanity, which takes place in Venice. Actually, I just interviewed Christopher Moore in our last episode, and his book, The Serpent of Venice, also takes place in Venice, so it’s an interesting coincidence. Why did you decide to go to Venice for this book?

To be honest, one of the reasons that I decided to go to Venice was because of a mistake that I made in Glamour and Glass: I sent them to Brussels, where I’d never been and where everyone speaks French. I don’t speak French. So, I decided that with this book I was, by God, going to send them to a country where I spoke the language, because I do the audiobooks. I knew that I wanted them to be working with glass, which meant that I had two choices. One was Bohemia, and the other was Venice. Of the two, I don’t speak Czech and wasn’t going to learn it. So, they went to Venice. The other thing that Venice offered, and I didn’t know this when I started researching, was that Lord Byron was living in Venice and had been for a couple of years in 1817, which is when the book takes place. As soon as I saw that, I changed a lot of my plot on the spot, because how can you not use Lord Byron? He’s an amazing historical figure.

Maybe for people who aren’t as familiar with him, do you want to say what it is about him that makes him so attractive as a character?

Lord Byron is the prototypical brooding hero. He is the archetype from which the fictional ones stem. He was, and still is, regarded as one of the best English poets. He was a little bit of a playboy. Caroline Lamb famously referred to him as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” He seduced everybody, and also got into terrible trouble. Reading his letters, he’s an amazing flirt, and he is, of course, a wonderful wordsmith. He’s a very dynamic figure. He went off and sailed with pirates, although he denied it, while also saying that he did, all at the same time.

Could you say a bit more about that? What’s the pirate part?

He has a poem called “The Corsair,” and it’s this wonderful epic about Barbary corsairs, the pirates. There are several references that Byron makes in letters, in essays, in which he hints that he actually went and spent some time with them and that was how he knew what to write, but at the same time he absolutely says, “No, of course I didn’t spend time with pirates. That’s absurd.” He’s an unreliable narrator of his own life.

The opening chapters of this book involve a pirate attack. Did you live with pirates for a time to research this?

I did. I did live with pirates for a number of years. Four years I spent on the board of The Science Fiction and Fantasy—I mean no, there’s no piracy involved there.

Another thing involving Byron in this book is that you have an original Lord Byron poem that you wrote for this book. Tell us about that.

That was a pain in my hiney. Because I’m dealing with an alternate history, I actually had a Lord Byron poem that I was planning on using. I had written this entire scene around the poem, and I had the date wrong that it came out. For the scene to function, I needed it to be something that he had not yet published, and I had the publication date wrong. I needed to replace it, but I had this whole scene built around it. I couldn’t find anything suitable from before 1817, so I took an existing poem and used that as my template and wrote a Byronic poem. There are still sections in it that are actually Byron, so I can’t claim to have written it from scratch. But it was really interesting to sit down and break apart how he used language, the rhyme structure, and the meter. I don’t normally work with poetry, so it was a really interesting exercise for me and probably the hardest thing to write in the entire novel.

Could you articulate anything that you noticed about how to impersonate Lord Byron?

The first thing I did, as I said, was I used an existing poem as a template. It’s much easier to catch the rhythms of someone if you can write on top of what they did. There’s a poem in there called “The Glamourists,” which I actually based on “The Prophecy of Dante.” Honestly, one of the reasons I picked that was because the poem that I was replacing and the scene was all revolving around Prometheus, and this had some lines about Prometheus in it. In the original poem the line is: “Many are poets, but without the name, / For what is poesy but to create.” This is an example of how I’m overwriting things: “Many are glamourists without a claim, / yet what is glamour for but to create.” You can see that I’m very much following his model there. There are places where I have to deviate farther in order to maintain his rhyme structure. He was using something called a terza rima, which means that as he’s going through, the rhyme pattern is ABA, and then the next set is BCB, and the next set is CDC. You can’t shift any one line without having this rippling effect through the thing. There were places where, in order to talk about glamour in this, I had to do fairly significant rewrites. What I was looking at with Byron is he’ll use alliteration: “transformed,” “transfigurated.” He’ll do things like that, fairly long sentence structures. He’s very interesting because the language is not overlabored. Sometimes you’ll hit a poet and it very much feels like you’re reading poetry, even if you broke it apart into blank verse. But with Byron, it absolutely wants to be in the verse, and yet you can also read it straight. I find him very approachable and with a really, really lovely use of language.

So that’s how to impersonate Lord Byron. Do you have any tips for impersonating Patrick Rothfuss?

Actually, I did exactly the same thing. You are clearly referring to either the Twitter extravaganza or the Kvothe fan fiction or both. When I was impersonating Pat as part of “The Real Rothfuss,” I would take sentences that Pat had actually written about his subjects. Someone would tweet at me, “How do you feel about lemonade?” (This is not an actual question.) I would go over to Pat’s blog, and I would type in “lemonade” to see if Pat had said anything about it. Then, I would grab a sentence that he actually said about lemonade, and I would tweak it a little bit so that it wasn’t precisely what he had said before but very close, and then I would tweet that. Or I would just write something, and then if I used any idioms or unusual expressions, I would go back and search to see if he had used it. I used “fifty bajillion,” and I went to his site and looked to see how he used large numbers—large imaginary things. He doesn’t use “bajillion,” but he used—I can’t remember what the construction was now—but it was a different construction of that. So, I used that instead. A lot of it is paying attention to how someone uses punctuation, because punctuation informs where the natural pauses and rhythm of the speech are. And then vocabulary—I built a Patrick Rothfuss spellcheck dictionary, much like my Jane Austen spellcheck dictionary, and it was completely useless because Pat uses all the words.

Do you want to explain how that Twitter thing worked, for people who don’t know?

Pat had not been on Twitter. So over the years, he or his assistants had reserved a Twitter name, and eventually he had six and had also hit the point of “Okay, I really need to be on Twitter.” So rather than just doing what normal people do, which is just to start tweeting, he ran a contest. It was Pat and five friends, and we were impersonating him over the course of a couple of weeks, the goal being that all of the people watching the hashtag “#TheRealRothfuss” would try to guess which of us was really Pat and then vote on it at the end. The one of us that got the most votes would get a thousand dollars donated by DAW to the charity of our choice. I won. I had forty-two percent of the votes. The next closest, @PatrickRothfuss, was Pat himself with fifteen percent. I am unbearably smug about this.

What was the Jane Austen dictionary?

For these novels, I want the language to be as accurate as possible without being distracting, because I feel like language reflects culture. I’m trying to use words that only existed in the culture at the time. So I took the complete works of Jane Austen, I ran it through a concordance engine, and came up with a list of unique words, and that created a spellcheck dictionary. I use it as my spellcheck dictionary. It flags every word that Austen didn’t use, and then those words I look up to see if they existed in the language and if the meaning had shifted.

I don’t confine myself to only words that Austen used, but I do try to confine myself to only words that exist in the time period I’m writing. I give myself a little bit of flex, because a lot of times words will come into the language before they appear in print. But it’s interesting to see the things that there just aren’t words for yet. And then also words that are completely period correct that I cannot use because they sound like an anachronism—like “electricity”: Can’t use it. Jane Austen did; I can’t.

I’ve also heard that different slang expressions go in and out of style. So, a word like “fly”—like “that’s so fly”—is actually fairly archaic, but if you were to use it, people wouldn’t believe you.

Absolutely. “Dude” is from the early to mid-1800s. It’s not in yet as a word in Austen’s time, but you will run across that in Victorian literature. “Look at that dude standing on the street.”

Speaking of cool stuff that you can’t use, tell us about the steampunk wheelchair.

In the fifth book, Of Noble Family, I had the need for a wheelchair, so I was researching to see what they were actually called. Was it a wheelchair? Was it a wheeled chair? Invalid chair? What was it called? “Wheeled chair” is the answer, mostly, but while I was researching that, I came across a chair by Merlin—yes, an inventor named Merlin—so immediately I’m like, “Well, that’s going to be tricky to use.” The language about this wheelchair includes a small steam engine attached to it.

I’m like, “What?” because this is something that was invented in 1811. The problem is—even though it is, of course, completely accurate to use it, even though I could come up with a way to explain why this existed in the world so that it didn’t seem like an anachronism—there was no way I could keep it from looking like steampunk, because the moment we see a steam-powered gadget that is not something that is in our common-knowledge vocabulary, we will assume that the author has made it up, and that it’s a steampunk invention. It’ll take it into a different genre, and these books are not in the steampunk genre. So I was like, “I cannot use this.” As a weird trivia note, the first automobile—the first self-powered, horseless carriage, steam-powered—was in the 1750s. Also can’t use it—totally looks like steampunk.

You mentioned the fifth book in the series, Of Noble Family, which is not out yet. Is there anything you want to say about that upcoming book?

I don’t have a good elevator pitch for it. The thing I say is “Jane Austen takes a walk on the dark side,” which is so misleading for what the book is. I also joke that I appear to have invented the genre “Regency grimdark.” In the book, my main characters go to Antigua to a slave plantation, so it is dealing with slavery and race and lots of family issues. I don’t pull any punches. So it is Regency grimdark in a lot of ways. But there’s still the love story; there’s still humor. From my beta readers, I think that all of the things that keep people coming back to the books are still there. It’s just a grim topic.

What do you think about the way that Jane Austen handles race, and how are you handling it yourself?

Actually, the interesting thing about Jane Austen is that people tend to, from a modern lens, think that Jane Austen didn’t deal with race at all or slavery, which is not true. The thing about Jane Austen is that she was writing for an audience of her contemporaries, so she could do references to contemporary events and people would totally know what she was talking about.

For instance, in Emma, she talks about Mrs. Elton and Mrs. Elton’s father, and the line is something like, “. . . was a merchant—if we can call him that—of Bristol.” Now, anyone in Jane Austen’s time period would know that Bristol is famous for being a slave market. So, she’s making these very pointed references to things like that all through the books.

She does a lot of social commentary. In her last book, Sanditon, which was unpublished, the most eligible young lady in there is Miss Lamb, who is, using the parlance of the day, a mulatto from the West Indies. There’s a lot of West Indian characters in the novel, all of which are seen as people who are high in stature, who are desirable to have in town because they have money. There is the racism that we know today, and our interpretations of it is very, very different from the way it actually played out, which is not to say there was not racism in the period, but it doesn’t happen the same way that it does in the contemporary United States.

When you say somebody at the time would know that Bristol had this implication, how do you know that? Is there an annotated version, or do you just know that much about it?

At this point, I’ve just done a heck of a lot of research. Actually, there are a couple of really good annotated editions, if you’re interested in such things. The one I recommend is by Harvard Press. They’re doing all of them—the Annotated Austen series—and they’re large, beautifully illustrated books and very well annotated. I highly recommend those.

When you’re writing Of Noble Family for a more contemporary audience, do you feel that you need to handle that differently?

This is a yes and a no. I am not going to alter the views of the time period. I try to give my characters viewpoints that are consistent with the period in which they live. What I have to do, though, is help my readers unlearn some of the things that they know.

For instance, one of the things I had in reaction to a couple of early drafts of Without a Summer and Of Noble Family was a reaction to the fact that I have people of color. I had a number of people saying that Jane and Vincent appear to have very modern views about slavery, and they don’t. At the time, the abolition movement was very big in Britain, and probably slavery would have been overturned a good twenty or thirty years before it was, if it hadn’t been for Parliamentary mismanagement. But people were doing protests, and again, you’ll see this in Northanger Abbey, people were doing protests where they wouldn’t use cane sugar to protest the slave trade. There were all sorts of things going on. In order to explain that to a modern reader—I couldn’t rely on them to know that—I had to insert additional material, the kinds of things that Austen wouldn’t have to do, like talking about how they had signed the abolitionist petitions along with most of England.

Tell us about the Doctor Who cameo in Valour and Vanity.

There’s a Doctor Who cameo in all of the novels, because I am a giant geek. The one in Valour and Vanity is perhaps my most favorite, because it is so completely natural. Lord Byron had a travelling companion, Dr. Polidori, and in his letters and journals—Lord Byron was an inveterate letter writer—he refers to Dr. Polidori frequently as just “the Doctor.” It seems clear to me what’s going on here. Lord Byron wrote journals and letters all the time. There’s a two-week period in which they are more or less unaccounted for. I’m like, “Well, obviously, there is some time-travelling happening there.” Then, Dr. Polidori mysteriously dies, and Lord Byron’s father was “Captain Mad Jack,” so I’m like, “Hello! Could we have some more references?”

When I was writing this, it was clear who my Doctor Who cameo was going to be in this particular novel. It’s Dr. Polidori, who’s “il Dottore” in the novel. Then I had something that was really fun happen, which is that I’m friends with Paul Cornell, who has actually written for the television show. He was joking about one of the previous ones and had said something about how he should tweak the dialogue for me, and when I wrote this, I was like, “Were you serious about being willing to tweak dialogue?” He said, “Yes!” So, I sent him those scenes. In this particular incarnation, the doctor is an odd young man with a fez. So he Matt-Smithed him for me, and sent it over and said, “You’ll probably have to tone this down a little bit.” He was right; I did have to pull it back a little bit, but not as much as you would think. I just had to get rid of a couple of pieces of archaic language.

Speaking of the language like that, you mentioned that you did the audiobook for this. Tell us a little bit about what it’s like doing the performance of your own novel.

I am an audiobook narrator, so I narrate for other people. When I’m narrating my own work, one of the things that I have the luxury of doing, which I don’t when I’m recording someone else’s, is that if it doesn’t play well for audio or if it’s just awkwardly phrased, and I don’t realize it till I’m narrating, I can make changes, which is glorious. Then we record at a point in the production process where I can go back and make those changes to the print version so that it matches the audio. That’s just a really lovely thing.

The flipside of this is that, with some of the other books, I have forgotten that I was going to be the one narrating it, and I’ve put in some things. I hit them in the book, and I’m like, “Really, Mary? Really? This seemed like a good idea? Including a song that you don’t know in the book? That was a good idea? Because now you have to sing it. Thank you.” Actually, Valour and Vanity was pretty funny because, as I mentioned, I picked going to Venice in part because I speak Italian. I’m not going to struggle. They speak Venetian at this point in history, which is not Italian. It’s not even a dialect of Italian. People talk about it as being a dialect of Italian, but it’s its own language. So if you are reading the book, you will note I have a couple of places where Italian phrases are used. Every time someone’s talking Venetian, it’s all, “And he said something very rapid in Venetian that she could not understand.” At no point do I use Venetian except for some names.

We have some listener questions for you. On that subject, Zach Chapman says that, since you’re a voice actress and podcaster, he’d like to hear, “What are your favorite podcasts and/or audiobooks?”

I’m a big fan of Escape Pod. I really like their selection. I think they tend to have good narrators. I very much enjoy that. In audiobooks, I highly recommend Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone. I’m very picky; I actually often will pick books because of the narrator. There are some books that should not be in audio, and I’m not going to give you examples of those, because that’s just mean. But Daughter of Smoke and Bone is phenomenally performed by Khristine Hvam. She’s wonderful—so good. The book is beautifully written, and it’s a wonderful merging of the two media. Diana Rowland’s My Life as a White Trash Zombie, again, really well performed, very compelling story. I very much liked those. Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane—I picked that up, and I had heard that he was a good reader, but I hadn’t actually heard him read before, and his narration of this knocked me out of the park. It was just spot on in terms of the emotional intimacy, so really, really beautifully done.

Robert Coleman wants me to ask you about the recent SFWA contretemps regarding women writers in SF and F careers. I don’t know how anxious you are to relive all of that, but is there anything you want to say on that subject?

First of all, as someone who used to be an officer, it frustrates me when I see SFWA’s name attached to things that have nothing to do with us. The fact that there is a science fiction and fantasy writer who had opinions about women in science fiction does not make it something that SFWA did. In this case, SFWA had nothing to do with it. It didn’t appear in any of our publications. I say “our” as if I’m still on the board, but as a member, it didn’t appear in any of our publications, it wasn’t on our forums, it was not in an SFWA space.

So, it bothers me to see our name linked with it when the organization itself, for the last several years, has been taking a lot of steps to become more inclusive and to make the inclusivity more apparent in cases where we have always been welcoming, but perhaps not done such a good job of making sure the door was visibly open. That’s thing one.

Thing two, about women’s careers in science fiction—frankly, what bullshit. When you look at the history of science fiction, women have always played an important role. There’s been a lot of issues with women not being able to identify themselves as women—James Tiptree, Jr. being a prime example of that—and some sexism that was inherent in the era but not necessarily inherent in science fiction and fantasy. I don’t think it’s any more a part of it than it was about the era in general.

You’ll see places where the sexism was apparent and kept the glass ceiling in place, and we’re seeing that change, and we’re definitely seeing a higher percentage of women showing up in fiction, in ballots, as artists. We’re definitely seeing a change, but again, that is not something that I think is inherent to science fiction and fantasy. I don’t think there’s anything about our genre that requires or encourages sexism. I think that it is something that is a problem with the larger society, and that it is something that we have to be aware of and work against and with, but it is certainly not something that is inherent to our genre. I think our genre is actually doing a really good job of calling people out on problems and trying to make changes. Thank you for providing me a soapbox.

You’re one of the hosts of the Writing Excuses podcasts. I just listened to your episode on how to have an opinion as a public figure, and I was wondering if you have any thoughts on when somebody is attacking you online or when there’s trolls and stuff like that. What are the best approaches for dealing with that?

It depends on the kind of trolling that’s going on and each individual person, because a lot of it has to do with how much energy you want to put into it. There are people who attack for the sake of attacking, and I don’t think that you need to give those people any energy. I think that if they are attacking me, personally, that I have the privilege of ignoring them, should I choose to.

When they’re attacking someone else, then it becomes a different thing because, while I do have the privilege and luxury to ignore something that theoretically doesn’t affect me, by remaining silent I am condoning that behavior, and I am leaving the person who is being attacked without any support structure. It depends on whether you are being attacked or whether a colleague is being attacked.

The other thing is where that attack is coming from. Sometimes people will say things that are sexist or racist, and it comes from a place where they have so taken on the aspects of racism and sexism that are inherent to our society that they don’t even realize that it is part of the fabric of the society or something that they have picked up. In those cases, I think that it is possible to attempt to educate the person and hopefully turn them into an ally. A lot of times they’re coming from a place of ignorance. That said, I don’t think that anyone is obligated to educate people. It is exhausting and not your job. But if you’re interested in trying to change the narrative, then looking at where that attack is coming from can be a useful thing if you have the energy—and this is one of the really big things—all of this takes time and energy, and as a writer, you’re supposed to be writing, and you have to make a choice about where your energy is going to be spent.

Sometimes you look at something and think, “I’m just going to back away from this.” Sometimes you think, “This is too important to back away from. I know I’m going to have to sacrifice writing time, but it’s the right thing to do.”

One possible approach is to form your own insect army, right?

You can also form your own insect army, which is something that John Scalzi and I did after someone complained about how all of these new writers were nothing but insects. I’m like, “Sweetie, everyone’s been a new writer at some point.” John’s point was, “Yeah, and insects significantly outnumber you and will eat your carcass.” We formed the insect army, which is basically a way of saying to everyone, “Look, there’s a lot of us, and we have each other’s backs, and you don’t have to try to deal with these things all by yourself.” That is about being a good ally and coming to the support of other people. With a lot of voices, we can make a difference.

Let’s move on to some other fun topics. Tell me about the steampunk cruise that you went on.

The steampunk cruise is so much fun. The next one is coming up in 2015. My books are not steampunk; they’re historical fantasy—and the thing that I really enjoy about the steampunk cruise is that they are very open to other time periods and to any playing with time and culture and genre crossovers. It’s basically a cruise. I never thought that I would be someone who would say I love going on a cruise, but it’s like going to a convention at a really high-end resort and every day the front door of the convention center is at a different location, which is fantastic.

They’ve got three thousand people on the boat, of which on this last cruise sixty-four of us were in costume—sixty-four steampunkers amid a bunch of mundanes, and it was so much fun. There’s this instant tribe marking that happens when you’re walking through the concourse or the promenade and you see someone else who is wearing a beautiful costume, and you’re like, “Oh, we’re in the same tribe. Hey there.” There was this real sense of community, interesting topics, some lectures, some workshops, and then you can go ashore. We went to NASA on this last one, and some people went in their street clothes, and some people went in costume. Great opportunities for photos. We had high tea at a building from the early 1800s when we were in the Bahamas. It’s so much fun to dress up and spend a week with like-minded people.

If people want to go on a steampunk cruise with you, are there any opportunities for that?

I am in fact one of the guests of honor on the next one—the 2015 one. They can go to steampunkcruise.com.

I saw a video of you singing “Roxanne” in the voice of a puppet.

There are times when something seems like a good idea, and then you realize a video camera is on. I’m a professional puppeteer. I was on the cruise, and I was in costume, and there was karaoke happening. I had always thought that it would be hilarious to sing “Roxanne” as if I were a puppet. So, I did that while dressed in Regency costume, because you do, and someone videotaped it. It’s online. “Roxanne, you don’t have to put out the red light.”

That’s a really good puppet voice, I have to say. Leave that to the professionals.

Yes. Don’t try this at home.

Speaking of puppets, you recently did a Sesame Street puppetry workshop. Tell us about that.

That was amazing. I’ve been a professional puppeteer for twenty-plus years, but these days most of my time is spent with writing. I haven’t been doing as much puppetry as I like, and this workshop came up. Now, Sesame Street and Henson used to do these workshops every couple of years, but they’ve stopped for at least a decade. Additionally, they did two workshops with a total of fifty people, but twenty-five in my group. It was taught by Marty Robinson, who does Mr. Snuffleupagus and Telly Monster on Sesame Street; Matt Vogel, who is a long-time Sesame Street performer and is Big Bird’s understudy and does other Sesame Street performers—in the recent Muppet film he was Constantine, the devilish Kermit the Frog look-alike—and then Peter Lentz, who, also in the new Muppet film, is Walter, who’s the main character, and he was also in Bear in the Big Blue House. These are really good performers, and they’re really good teachers. It was really fun. We were using actual Sesame Street puppets. I had my hand up a chicken. That sounded very different when I said that in my head.

You’ve had so much experience puppeteering. Can you think of something you learned that was new at this workshop?

There were a lot of things that I learned that were new, a number of which are difficult to explain in a strictly verbal medium, but Marty was having us do this thing where he was having us pop into frame and out of frame. It was a focus exercise, and the purpose of the exercise was to focus on what the puppet is looking at.

One of the keys of video puppetry is being able to look directly at the camera. Every puppet has a slightly different focus. Where you are standing in relationship to the camera is going to vary how that focus works, so you cannot rely on muscle memory. When you’re doing video puppetry, you’re looking at a monitor. The way I think about it is that the puppet is actually the image on the monitor, and you’re using the figure on your hand to manipulate that image. What you have to do with this exercise is pop the puppet in from the side of the frame, nail the focus directly at the camera, and then go down and pop up again, and again nail the focus, and pop in and out. The goal is to get to a point where it is instinctive.

The thing that Marty said that was a moment of “Aha” because it applies to so many different forms of creative endeavor, including fiction, is: “I make the same mistakes you guys do, but I can correct them fast enough that you can’t see them most of the time.” That was a real moment of “Oh, okay.” This is very much something that is a practice thing and understanding that it’s not that he has developed to the point that, when he pops it in, his focus is always perfect—although it is usually—it is that when it is off, he understands where the problem is and how to fix it so fast that he can do it without it being apparent to someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing.

A few years ago, we interviewed Ian McDonald on this show, and Ian worked with Sesame Street for a little while, and he said what no one warns you about is how bad those puppets smell on the inside. Is that your experience?

You’re sticking your hand up and sweating. You can use Febreeze. In the old days, they would spritz vodka, and that was an old trick because it evaporated very quickly and it would kill most germs. Puppets can get really stinky inside. No question—personal hygiene as a puppeteer is even more important than at a science fiction and fantasy convention.

We’re just about out of time here. Do you have any other recent or upcoming projects you want to mention?

I have two short stories that are coming out this year in the next couple of months. One is Spectrum Magazine, and that’s called currently “Water over the Dam,” and it’s a story about energy. Then, I have a hundred-and-thirty-five-word short story for Popular Science, in which I’m being paired with an artist, and we’re both exploring the idea of food. Then just more novels, working on the next novels and more fiction.

Could you give us a sneak preview of the hundred-thirty-five-word story? Like the first eight words or something?

Sure, just give me a second to grab that.

As long as that doesn’t contain any spoilers.

It’s a hundred and thirty-five words. Everything is a spoiler. I was very proud of myself for being able to pull off a story with a beginning, middle, and an end in a hundred and thirty-five words.

Was that the assignment?

The assignment was to write a story that was between ten and a hundred and fifty words around the idea of food and that it needed to be science fiction. That was it. So this is the first sentence of a story that’s a hundred and thirty-five words: “Renee scowled at the vertical garden lining the promenade of the space station.”

Great, I can’t wait for the other hundred and twenty-odd words. I think we’re going to wrap things up there. We’ve been speaking with Mary Robinette Kowal, and her most recent novel is called Valour and Vanity. Mary, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast hosted by David Barr Kirtley. David 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: Diana Gabaldon

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series has been called “The smartest set of science fiction, adventure romances ever written by a science PhD with a background in scripting Scrooge McDuck comic books.” The series is currently being adapted for TV by Battlestar Galactica’s Ron Moore and premiered on Starz on August 9, 2014.

This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by David Barr Kirtley. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the host and his guests discuss various geeky topics.

I’m sure that a lot of our listeners are big Doctor Who fans, and so they might be interested to hear that your Outlander series was actually inspired by Doctor Who. Could you tell us about that?

I was intending to write a novel for practice and had decided that, for me, the easiest kind would probably be historical fiction. I was a scientist in my previous incarnation, but I was a university professor, and I knew my way around a library because it seems easier to look things up than to make them up, and if I turn out to have an imagination, I can steal things from the historical record. So the next question was, “Well, where am I going to set this?” because I have no background in history to speak of. I was looking for a convenient time and place, and in this malleable frame of mind, I happened to see a really old Doctor Who rerun. It was one of the old Patrick Troughton episodes. Luckily, I don’t have to stop and explain to your listeners who Doctor Who is, but in this one, the Doctor picked up a young Scotsman from 1745 named Jamie McCrimmon who was eighteen or nineteen and appeared in his kilt, and I said, “Well, that’s kind of fetching.” I found myself still thinking about this the next day in church, and it occurred to me that if you want to write a book, the important thing is to just pick up one and get started. So I said, “Fine, why not—Scotland, eighteenth century.” So that’s where I began, knowing nothing about Scotland or the eighteenth century, having no plot, no outline, and no characters. Nothing but the rather vague images conjured up by the notion of a man in a kilt.

Is writing science fiction something that you had wanted to do for a long time?

I wouldn’t say writing science fiction particularly. I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy and everything else. I just wanted to learn how to write a novel. I wrote Outlander for practice in order to learn how to write a novel because to that point, I had been a professional writer as well as a university professor for some years, but that was all nonfiction. I had sort of slid sideways and became a quote “expert” in scientific computation, so I wrote extensively for the computer press and anything else anyone would pay me for, basically, including comic books for Walt Disney. But that genre just wasn’t anything I thought about at that particular point.

But it does have this prominent time-travel science fiction aspect to it.

It does, yes. That’s had actually nothing to do with Doctor Who, though. It was about the third day of writing, and I had been doing a bit of research and decided to use the Jacobite rising as my backdrop and said, “Well, I must have a lot of Scotsmen, of course, because of the kilt factor, but I think it would be good if I had a female character to play off these guys. We’ll have sexual tension, that’s conflict, that’s good.” So I said, “Well, it looks like Scots vs. English so if I make her an English woman, we’ll have lots of conflict.” About the third day of writing, I introduced this English woman. I had no idea who she was, what she was doing there, how she got in the plot, but I loosed her into a cottage full of Scotsmen to see what she’d do, and they were all muttering around the fire, turned around and stared at her, and thinking, “My, does she look odd.” One of them stood up slowly, and he said, “My name’s Dougal MacKenzie and who might you be?” and without stopping to think, I just typed, “My name’s Claire Elizabeth Beauchamp and who the hell are you?” I said, “Well, you don’t sound at all like an eighteenth century person.” I fought with her for several pages trying to beat her into shape and make her talk like an eighteenth century person. She wasn’t having any; she just kept making smartass modern remarks, and she also took over and started telling the story herself. I said, “Well, I’m not going to fight with you all the way through this book. No one’s ever going to see it. It doesn’t matter what bizarre thing I do, go ahead and be modern. I’ll figure out how you got there later.” So it’s all her fault for this time travel.

How did you go about developing the rules for time travel? I saw that you actually published an article in the Journal of Transfigural Mathematics.

I did, yeah. I dabbled in the theory of time travel. I thought about it as a teenager and in my early twenties. I had, of course, read quite a lot of science fiction and some classic time-travel novels and so forth. I’d noticed that anyone who writes about time travel rolls their own. You have to figure out how it’s going to work for your particular setting. The basic question, of course, is can the past be changed, or rather, can the future be changed by different actions being taken in the past? If that’s the case, exactly how does it work? Can it always be changed? Only under certain circumstances? Basically I just sat down and thought about it until I had figured out what seemed to be a good, working model. Evidently, the Journal of Transfigural Mathematics agreed.

What is transfigural mathematics and why was time travel relevant for that magazine?

Well, they came to me rather than me going to them, so you would probably have to ask them exactly what is covered under transfigural. I gather it to be something of an umbrella term for mathematics that borders on metaphysics and problematical or hypothetical situations.

Did you know a lot of science fiction authors? One of my favorite books growing up was a book called Redshift Rendezvous by John Stith.

I’ve read that one, certainly. John was a friend of mine on CompuServe. He left CompuServe and I haven’t spoken to him in some years. I did run into him briefly about ten years ago, I think, at the Rocky Mountain Writers Festival, where he was in the audience and introduced himself to me.

He introduced you to your agent, right?

He did. I knew him on CompuServe, as I say, and I was asking people randomly about their agents, anyone who I knew as a professional writer, because I was just doing research and zeroing in on a man who I thought might suit me. His name was Perry Knowlton and he was a very reputable agent. The people whose agent he was—I knew a few of them on CompuServe—they all thought he walked on water, and besides being an A-list agent, which I wanted, he was not afraid of unorthodox books or unusual books or very long books, both of which it had struck me I had. So it seemed like a good match, but I didn’t know how to get at him. Anyway, one day, I was in conversation with John—this was on a bulletin board service, not a chat room that’s back and forth—I said, “I’m asking everyone about agents, John, do you have one?” He said, “Well, yeah, I do by coincidence, the same as so-and-so. His name is Perry Knowlton.” He said, “I know you’re almost ready to look for an agent. Would you like me to introduce you to Perry?” to which I said, “Why, yes, John, that would be very nice.”

Now I was afraid that John would leave CompuServe or be run over by a bus before I finished writing the book so I said yes, please. So he hastily wrote a nice note of introduction to Perry. Now Perry, god rest his soul, was a much older man who never touched a computer in his life, so at this point, the story leaves the online world. Everything else was conducted just as anyone off the street would do it, but John sent Perry a regular typewritten note saying, “I know this woman. People think she’s hilarious and she might be worth looking at,” and I followed that with my own query and said, “Dear Mr. Knowlton, I’ve been writing and selling nonfiction by myself for several years. Now that I’m writing a novel, though, I understand I need good literary representation. You’ve been recommended to me by John, Judy, Carol, and Sherry, and all these people whose opinions I respect. I have this very long historical novel. I don’t want to waste your time. Would you be willing to read excerpts from it?” He kindly called back and said yes, he’d be happy to read my excerpts. So I hastily wrote a twenty-six page single-spaced synopsis and sent it with my bundle of excerpts. I didn’t tell him I wasn’t through writing the book. He took me on, on the basis of an unfinished first novel, which is not usual now. I don’t know if it was usual then, but very lucky for me.

At that time, did you have any other involvement in the science fiction world? Were you attending conventions or did you know any other authors?

I knew several authors, again on CompuServe, at that point. There was the science fiction forum and also SF media. I hung around in the SF lit division for some time back in those days, as well as the literary forum, and I knew a number of people—Mike Resnick and a few others. But I was a university professor with another full time job and three small children, so no, I didn’t really go to cons at that point. After the book was published, I went to some of the local ones. I was invited as a local author and in my later years, I certainly attend them with a great deal more frequency. I’ll be at San Diego ComicCon next month, for instance.

Great. The new book is called Written in My Own Heart’s Blood, and the other big news is that there’s going to be an Outlander TV show coming out. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about how that came about and what sort of involvement you’ve had with it?

It’s a long story, for the most part a very boring one, so I’ll skip the boring part. The books have been optioned several times over the last twenty years. You want to be careful who you do an option with because there’s always the chance that they will, in fact, put a deal together, and at that point, once they’ve bought the rights, you’ve lost them forever. So you want to make sure you can trust the people you’re dealing with, insofar as it is possible to use the word “trust” in the same sentence as the word “filmmaker.” We have to have done four options at least. The last guy to hold the option, Jim Kohlberg, also wanted to make a two-hour movie of it and to this end, he hired several very respectable screenwriters whose names you would recognize if I were indiscreet enough to speak them aloud, but all to no avail because, as I could have told him, it’s impossible to make a two-hour movie out of that book and have it resemble the original in any way, shape, or form. It’s just too large, too complex, and too tightly constructed. You take out one chunk and the rest of it just doesn’t make sense. Jim was a very faithful optionor; he renewed his option, I think, three times and kept trying.

Meanwhile, Ron Moore, whose name you will know from Battlestar Galactica, of course, had become aware of the books because both his wife and his production partner were huge fans and had drawn his attention to them. He read the book over one night, said, “Yeah, I think this is great, let me see what we can do with it.” So he went to find who had the option, found Jim, Jim said, “No, I’m trying to make a movie out of it,” and this went on with Ron coming back at intervals just to check. Finally, Jim said, “Well, I’m beginning to think you’re right. It might be a TV series.” At this point ensued eighteen months of insane negotiations and this is why I’m glad I have an agent (though it’s no longer Perry). This resulted in this unwieldy five-corner arrangement between Sony, who actually holds the rights; Starz, which is the production company actually making the show—and they, therefore, have the US distribution rights; Sony keeps the international rights, which are in the process of being sold to various other countries—so between Sony, Starz, Ron, Jim, and me. This had to be signed by everybody and all these things agreed to, and we finally got it done about a year ago at the end of May. They started casting immediately. They started filming the first week of October in Scotland, by which time they had taken over this used circuit board factory. We made it into Outlander world and set up this absolutely fabulous production apparatus.

I don’t know how much time you have to watch TV, but when you heard that Ron Moore was associated with the project, were you familiar with Battlestar Galactica and his other TV work?

Yeah, I was struck by his sense of character and how he develops character and that the stories are all focused very tightly around character, which, if you ask me, is the sole ingredient for a good story. Without that, it’s not worth reading, or watching for that matter.

I heard you say that you were friends with George R. R. Martin, and you guys have been comparing notes on what it’s like having your books turned into a TV series.

Yeah, to a limited degree. He lives in Santa Fe and my husband and I live in Santa Fe part-time, so when we’re both in town together, we go out for breakfast and chat. We’re just friends.

Could you say what kind of conversations you’ve had? I heard you say that you told him your series was going to have sixteen episodes a season, and he said, “Hey, my series only gets ten episodes a season.”

He did say that. On the other hand, he has a terrific budget for every one of those episodes. So they can do these fabulous location shots and so forth. Well, mine, too—we have quite a generous budget for ours, as well, but it is all shot in Scotland, so there’s not nearly as much expensive location work to be done.

It seems to me that Game of Thrones really—the success of it—has enabled a lot of these other similar fantasy-oriented shows.

You bet it has, absolutely. I was told so by any number of production people and agents and so forth, saying Starz is really looking for a series that they can adapt. Talk like that was around for quite some time before this deal came together.

You’ve been watching Game of Thrones I assume?

No, I have not. I have been, for the past six months, neck-deep in finishing the final book as well as doing a certain amount of work for—I wouldn’t really call it work, but just looking at the stuff the production people send me requires a certain amount of time and attention. So no, I actually didn’t watch television at all for about the last eight months. I’ve been saving Game of Thrones as a treat for when I finish.

Then I don’t know if you followed any of the controversies around some of the ways that Game of Thrones was adapted in terms of the sexual violence and things like that.

I catch the breezes because I hang on Twitter and all that. I don’t take part in the conversation, but I see bits of it.

But I mean, there are a lot of aspects of Outlander that are potentially controversial. Do you have any idea how those will be adapted for television?

Well, like Ron says, if it’s in the book, we’ll film it the way it is in the book. I couldn’t ask better than that.

So, for example, in the book, there’s a scene where Jamie beats Claire, right, in the first Outlander book?

Well, he doesn’t exactly beat her. He’s not punching her in the mouth or throwing her against the wall. He spanks her with his sword belt because she did something incredibly dangerous and nearly got them all killed. This was basically what the Highland justice was like. If you screwed up, you got punished for it, and then you were back in the good graces of the clan. That’s what he’s doing; it’s his duty as her husband basically to correct her, set her on the right path, and mind you, she doesn’t like it because she’s a twentieth-century woman. She’s very affronted that he’s hurting her.

But do you think that will be portrayed in the TV show the same way it was in the book?

I know it will. I’ve seen it.

What sort of reaction do you think that that will get from viewers?

There will undoubtedly be a certain amount of knee-jerk feminism from very young women. Anybody over the age of thirty-five will appreciate both the cultural conflict in that scene—it’s one of my favorite scenes, in fact, because each person in it is completely right according to his or her own view of the situation, and yet, in this untenable situation, they aren’t both going to get their way. When push comes to shove, he outweighs her by eighty pounds. Most people, as I say, above a certain age will appreciate it for the inherent ironies and also for the considerable humor in the situation.

In terms of feminism generally, what sort of relationship would you say you have with feminism? Would you describe yourself as a feminist? What do you think about that?

No, I wouldn’t describe myself as that, but I try to avoid describing myself by any sort of label, so to speak. I’m a Roman Catholic and a Libertarian, but that’s as far as I’d go in description. No, I can’t help but be a de facto feminist merely by virtue of when I was born and what I do for a living. But that does not mean that I’m agenda-driven, let’s say. I sort of think agendas are detrimental to art.

I was just wondering, as a woman, do you have any perspective on being a woman in science or a woman writing science fiction? Have you had any particular experiences with that?

Not to speak of, not that would strike me as being different than writing anything else. It’s all a question of whether you tell a good story; is it something that people would like to read?

You mentioned that you have a cameo in the TV show. Can you say a bit more about that?

Actually, I can’t. I’m not supposed to tell everyone who I am or where I appear because they would like people to be looking for me in the crowd scenes.

So we’ll keep an eye out for you, then.

Great!

I saw an interview with you and Ron Moore, and he said something that kind of struck me. He said that, in his experience, science fiction fans are all historians.

Yes, he’s right about that, because almost always the protagonist in a science fiction or fantasy story, if you care to make the distinction, is an alien of some sort. They’re an outsider; they come into this mysterious world, and in fact, that’s exactly what a time traveler or a historian does, is they look into this alien time. It’s a former version of their present time, but even so, it’s just as alien in its concepts, its cultures, its customs.

The American Revolutionary War plays a really prominent role in these books. Could you just talk about some of the things you’ve learned about the Revolutionary War era that you think might be the biggest surprise to modern-day Americans?

Well, I don’t know. There’s a tremendous amount of detail to the eighteenth century, of course, and you will find a tremendous amount of detail in my books. They’re immersive in that regard. As for the American Revolution, there were a great number of conflicts, both political and military, that aren’t really talked about in the history books. For instance, how many people who don’t live in New Jersey have ever heard of the battle of Monmouth, and yet, that’s sort of the military centerpiece of this particular book. It was a big, messy battle; it was the longest battle of the Revolution. It took place from before dawn until after dark. Hundreds of men died, but mostly of heat stroke. It was a series of pitched battles; it was terribly confusing. No one on the field had any idea what was going on, and yet, it was a really important battle. And why is that? Not because the Americans won, but because they didn’t lose.

It was the first battle fought when Washington’s troops emerged from their long winter in Valley Forge, so he had spent endless months drilling this raw-boned army into something that could confront the might of the British army—he hoped. So when the British began to leave Philadelphia, Washington and his men took out after them. They were only twenty miles away in Valley Forge, so they were hot on General Clinton’s heels. Now, Clinton was not merely withdrawing from Philadelphia. He was guarding the safety of thousands of Loyalists who were also escaping from Philadelphia, because they didn’t want to be left behind if Washington was going to come in and occupy the city, which he was, instantly. So General Clinton was at a substantial disadvantage here. At the same time, he did have the British army. He had about two thousand more men than Washington did. They were trained troops. Washington’s troops were about half militiamen—that is, they were not trained and were carrying just what they had at home, which in some cases was a musket and others was a hoe. The fact that Washington’s army did not lose that engagement was tremendously heartening to the whole American cause. If they had lost it, the Revolution would have ended right there.

Were there any particular resources that were helpful in researching this book in particular?

Yeah, for specific battles and so forth, the best resource that I found is usually the Osprey’s Men at War series. They’re very carefully written and they include a lot of minutiae, including the order of battle and the names of the individual commanding officers with the units and things like that, as well as doing the lead-up to the battle and then fighting it step-by-step with maps and everything. They’re very, very detailed and usually very clearly written. I used their guide to the Battle of Monmouth as kind of the backbone for that part of the story. However, that battle also included a number of figures of the American Revolution, from George Washington down to Marquis de Lafayette and Anthony Wayne and a number of other people whose names are memorable. This was their first major engagement for the most part, so I picked up a few of them and spotlighted them in a little more detail, and for them, I would look up individual biographies. Nathanael Greene, for instance, who was what they called a “Fighting Quaker,” in that he had been raised as a Quaker but had abandoned that faith—not only to fight in the American Revolution, but that was what allowed him to be a general.

That’s interesting, because the Quakers are famously pacifistic. Were there a lot of fighting Quakers like that?

Yes, there were, and particularly in that battle because of the nearness of Philadelphia, which was a major center for the Quakers. So there were a lot of them from the surrounding countryside and a good many of them decided. The basic structure of Quakers is the meeting, and they really have no clergy, no rituals, no liturgy or whatever, but there is this weekly or bi-weekly meeting where the entire congregation comes together and discusses anything they think needs discussing and they join together and worship, but worship as they feel individually moved to do so. They do not have exactly an authority, but there are what are called “weighty” meetings. This would be a central meeting that sent out not directives, but stated what they felt to be the sense of the meeting—how a Quaker should conduct him or herself in the current circumstances.

In a Philadelphia yearly meeting, which was the weightiest of the meetings, they had sent out an opinion to the Quakers throughout the colonies, saying that, given their dedication to pacifism, they felt that Quakers should support the cause of King George and let the rebellion be taken care of by the army and then crushed, because this seemed to them to be the better path toward peace, which it might have been. It would have resulted in . . . well, we’d be Canada essentially. But there were a number of Quakers who disagreed with this, and Quakers are very contentious in terms of speech, if not always in terms of action, and a great many of Quakers felt “moved at the spirit,” as they said, to take up arms in the cause of the rebellion.

We do have a Quaker physician working with the army who is a friend of Claire Fraser’s and we explore the Quaker philosophy in some detail throughout the book, not merely with regard to this particular battle. It’s an interesting philosophy and the more interesting when it comes up against what you might call the reality of life on the frontier.

How did that affect their relationship with the wider Quaker community after the war?

A great many of them were put out of their meetings, or read out of meetings, as they sometimes say, for doing this, and some of them formed smaller independent meetings of likeminded people, and some of them just practiced their faith on their own outside of a meeting. Some abandoned it completely and perhaps joined the faith of their spouse, if they were married to someone who wasn’t a Quaker.

That’s interesting. Also, I heard you say in your podcast that an example of an historical detail you gave was that there were landmines in 1752. Could you talk about these landmines? Where’d they come from?

Well, they were essentially gun powder-filled devices, and they were triggered by fuses. The way that eighteenth-century battles worked was that generally, as a matter of procedure, the armies would line up facing each other in ranks and then advance on each other until they got close enough either to charge with bayonets, to fire volleys, or, if you had artillery, until the other side came within cannon shot. So what you would do, if you knew where the ground was that a fight was going to take place on, was you would mine parts of it, and you wait for the enemy to advance over it, then set off your fuses. Land mines weren’t extensively used, but they were used. They were more frequently used, though, in undermining fortifications for cities that were under siege, so you would plant essentially a bomb at the base of a wall and then retire to a safe distance and set it off.

I actually heard you say that you get a lot of letters from soldiers who read your books.

Yes, I do. The books are very popular with servicemen. A lot of them who are deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan will go to a bookstore and pick up the biggest book they can find for the flight, which is often enough one of mine. When they get to the other side, they call their families and say, “Send the rest of the series.”

They empathize with Jamie Fraser. He’s a warrior, as they are, and he’s fighting for the same things that they are, so they identify with him. They’re very concerned with his burdens and his responsibilities, and how he reacts to them. But beyond that, they are also surprisingly interested and involved in the relationship of the main characters.

One of them said to me in a letter, “You get a weekly phone call and usually half of it is taken up with domestic inquiries—‘How’s your cold? Did Tommy flunk out of school?’—and it’s very stilted, and by the time you’re relaxed with each other again, the phone call is over.” It’s kind of unsatisfying. He said, “With the books to talk about, you can say ‘I’m up to chapter so-and-so. Have you read this yet?’ And if she has, then you can say, ‘Well, would you do what she did?’” Maybe she says yes, maybe she says no, but anyway, the conversation takes place on a much more immediately intimate level because they can discuss their own relationship in the safe context of the relationship with these characters, and it develops a strong sense of intimacy and rapid communication.

Could you talk about male readers in general? Your books, I think, have a predominately female readership because they were published initially as romance.

Well, yeah, that’s why they have a predominately female readership. It took me years to make Barnes and Noble take them out of their romance section, but I finally made it. When I sold the book, it was bought by a general fiction editor who bought it because she said, “This is the best book I’ve ever read,” and she took it to her editorial meeting and said the same thing. They said, “Oh, great, what kind of book is it?” And she looked at them and said, “Well, I have no idea really.” There was a lot of marketing discussion, which I was not privy to, of course. I had no idea that it was taking them any time at all, but it took them about eighteen months.

I learned much later that they came very close to canceling the contract and giving me back the book because they could not decide how to market it. This was before Amazon and other online marketers made it possible to have multiple categorizations of a book, so any given book that went to a bookstore went on a shelf; the shelf had a label, so you had to call a book something, and they just couldn’t decide what to do because it actually isn’t one thing or another, it’s an amalgam of maybe six or seven different genres that I personally liked when I was writing the book.

Finally, my agent called and said, “Well, they’ve made up their minds at last what to do with your book.” He said, “It’s a hardcover, softcover deal, so the hardcover is easy. It just goes up front with the other hardcover fiction.” This was still back in the days of B. Dalton and Waldenbooks, and that’s all there was. All the hardcover fiction went up together in the front section. And he said, “But they’d like to try to sell in the paperback as romance.” I said, “What? I read romance. I like well-written romance, but I have read enough of it to know that’s not what I’m writing.” So I’ve got two objections to this. You call it romance and it will never be reviewed by the New York Times—not that that’s a big problem, I can live with that—but much more important, it will cut off the entire male half of my readership. I said, “There are things in these books that men see that women don’t see, and there are things that they respond to in a much different way than women do. And I wouldn’t like that to be lost.” Well, he was a man, and he said, “Yes, I understand.” He said, “We could insist that they call them science fiction or fantasy because of the supernatural element. But bear in mind that a bestseller in SF/F is fifty thousand in paperback; a bestseller in romance is five hundred thousand.” I said, “Well, you’ve got a point.”

As my first editor famously said, “These have to be word-of-mouth books because they’re too weird to describe to anyone,” which is totally true. What I figured is, if that’s the case, then obviously it makes much better sense to expose them to five hundred thousand people who all go out and tell their friends, than to start with fifty thousand and grow more slowly because once someone has read the book, they will, of course, immediately recognize that it is not this or it is not that but that it is a distinct thing unto itself, and they can go out and tell their friends this is the best book I’ve ever read.

What are some of those things that your male readers and female readers tend to see differently?

They tend to see certain situations differently. For instance, I have never, ever had a male reader even faintly upset by the spanking scene, whereas, as I said, the younger female readers just jump up and down and froth at the mouth about it. But the men, they see where Jamie is coming from; they sympathize with him, and consequently, they find the scenes funnier rather than anything else. They’re just not bothered about it, whereas some women find it deeply erotic. Well, actually, some men do, too, but that’s a similarity rather than a difference, but that would be one of the scenes.

Others are scenes involving—I’m not sure what you would call it—anti-social actions. There are some cases in which, for instance, a man comes across a young girl whose been burned almost to death when her cabin was set on fire, and he finds her near death in the ashes and, unable to let her suffer, he smothers her. Men are okay with it. They find it very deeply upsetting, and they tell me how upset they would be themselves to have to do that, but they always put it that way, “to have to do that,” whereas women write and say, “Oh, I could never do that.” It’s like they feel they have a choice and the men don’t.

I heard you say that the men are a lot more squeamish about the scene where Jamie is tortured?

I just had the occasion to explain to one of the production people regarding a line in one of the scripts about a situation in which nonconsensual buggery might have been involved, and they had the character saying, “My father wouldn’t have minded about the buggery,” to which I wrote back and I said, “Oh, I bet he would.” This is a fairly gut-level response on the part of straight men. It’s not that they have any objection to anyone doing that if they want to. It’s just that they find the notion personally repulsive. They don’t even want to think about it.

But everyone involved in the production, though, has been good about maintaining all this stuff?

Yeah, they’re very, very kind about including me in discussions and showing me things. They’re kind enough to ask my opinion, but under no legal compulsion to accept it. But they do pay attention, and if I have a real concern, which is very rare, in fact—I’m extremely pleased with what they’ve been doing and would not dream of getting in their way—but every once in a while, I’ll point out something and say, “This just wouldn’t happen in the eighteenth century in Scotland because . . .” In such cases, they will do something to change it or to address the situation.

Can you think of any other examples of that where you made a suggestion and they tweaked something a little bit?

Yeah, there was one scene, it was just an incidental scene where Claire is passing time while waiting for the rent-collecting party to get going, and she comes across a group of women who invite her to join them for afternoon tea and they’re playing cards and chatting. I said, “In the eighteenth century in Scotland, everybody regarded playing cards as a straight ticket to hell. You wouldn’t find a pack of cards anywhere in the Scottish Highlands,” and I said, “You wouldn’t have found tea either for that matter.” Only in the large cities like Edinburgh or Inverness, but not out in the remote villages. And I said, “Furthermore, in the remote highlands, these women would have been working eighteen hours a day. They would have been milking goats or cutting grass, or they would have most likely been waulking wool.” That’s a specific word “w-a-u-l-k-i-n-g,” waulking, and what it meant was two lines of women who would sit down with a length of freshly woven and freshly dyed wool, and they would wet it with boiling hot urine, and then they would squish it back and forth between the lines with their hands or in some cases their feet with a big bulky roll of cloth. What this did was to both to set the dye—hot urine is mordant for dye—and also to felt the surface. So make it waterproof. It’s a very time-consuming process, so over the years waulking songs evolved and there are a lot of traditional waulking songs, but they much more likely had been doing something like that. When I actually saw some of the footage from that bit, they had gone to the Highland Folkways Museum and had actually had women waulking wool, and that Claire joined. So I was really pleased that they did that. It turned out to be very effective.

Wow, yeah, that’s pretty cool. Actually, I was reading an article, I don’t remember when this was from exactly, but it was talking about how people used to think that reading novels was just really bad for your character.

That’s entirely true. Cultural concepts are one of the most fascinating things about historical fiction, but in some cases, there’s always a temptation amongst some historical writers to shade things toward the modern point of view. They won’t show people doing something that would have been perfectly normal for the time, but that is considered reprehensible today. For instance, women drinking alcohol while pregnant. I get a lot of people—they’re just appalled that Claire drinks wine while she’s pregnant. I’m saying it was 1743. Everyone drank wine regardless, and in fact, while Claire comes from 1945, there was absolutely no idea in anyone’s head that drinking alcohol while pregnant would cause any trouble whatsoever. The thought that you ought not to drink while pregnant was much, much later. In fact, I had my first child in 1982 and I was still told by actually nurses and so forth, “Have a glass of wine at dinner, it will help you relax.”

So was eighteenth-century America, this period you’re writing about, a time in which reading novels was considered suspect?

Yes, in fact, Nathaniel Greene, the Quaker general I mentioned to you earlier, said that he broke with his sect in part because his father considered reading to be a pastime that tended to separate men from God, whereas he himself was an avid reader.

Speaking of avid readers, tell us about the Ladies of Lallybroch.

They are the oldest of the online fan groups. They formed themselves in 1994, partly as a means of finding a place to talk to other likeminded readers. They told me that they had tried going to various book discussion sites and mostly romance sites, as the book was being sold as a romance at that point, and they said that the reception they got was so hostile and negative with people—certified romance readers—saying, “Well, that’s not a romance.” In general, they were all driven away and so they were moved to start their own group, which has been a very long-running group. I think they have about ten thousand members or have hit their peak. It’s worldwide. I have been to some of their gatherings in which they had people from New Zealand and Japan.

There was just a big gathering in Seattle, right? Just recently?

Yes, but it’s not them. That was a fan retreat held by my Random House publisher. I have no idea where they came up with this idea, but it was three days before pub date and they said, “We want you to come and spend the day with five hundred of your fans.” I said okay, and they said, “Everybody will get a free book, a free copy of the mobi, so they’ll get it pre-pub. They can buy one more copy for a friend if they want to, and we’ll have all this interesting programming going on for them.” The Starz people came and brought a couple of special trailers they had made for the thing. But the idea was not explained to me, it’s just my notion of what they had in mind was to seed the market with all these enthusiastic people who had seen the trailer and had had a chance to read the book before publication all rushing out and talking about it and how great it was on their various blogs and websites, which is pretty much what happened.

What was some of the programming you mentioned?

Well, I talked, I gave a speech and then I went to sign books, which took several hours. They had some Scottish country dancers. They had a comedy improv troop—I couldn’t tell exactly what they were doing, but they seemed to be fairly funny. They were riffing off lines from the books and getting the audience to participate and so forth. They had eighteenth-century crafts and a cook who specializes in eighteenth-century recipes taken from my books. Outlander Kitchen is her handle, and she does a lot of this. Then we did the trailers for the Starz stuff, followed by a panel that had me and the Starz lady, and they had publicists from Random House and my editor and the very well-known bookseller from my town. The Poisoned Pen bookstore is who handles my autograph sales. In other words, they take pre-orders and will ship anywhere in the world, so if you want a personalized book, you just call them, and I go by the store once every week or two and sign everything, and they ship it out. It’s a very long-standing relationship. But anyway, all these people were talking about their relationships with my books starting with Outlander and their relationships with me. It was very nice, and they had a nice video that the fans had made that had been invited to send in little clips of “what Outlander means to me.” It was very moving, very touching, all very sweet, and then we had an hour and a half sort of meet-and-greet, mingle over cocktails and eighteenth-century snacks kind of thing in the afternoon. The whole thing was beautifully organized, very well run, and everybody who was there seemed to have a ball.

When people are talking about how much your books mean to them, do any of those things that they said stand out particularly?

Various people had particularly moving stories, especially the ones who say that they came to the books in the middle of a crisis, or having terrible health problems themselves, or in the wake of the death of a loved one. And they found that the books were sufficiently absorbing that they were able to escape into the book and that, I guess you would say, the ethos of the book uplifted them, and they felt protected and heartened by the stuff that went on with the book, which is very gratifying to me as an author.

What sort of reactions have your fans had so far to the stuff from the TV show that’s been released publicly?

They’ve absolutely loved every bit that they’ve seen, and I’m pretty sure that they will love the show itself. I saw the complete first episode, complete with score and with all the production values keyed in, at the Sony L.A. screenings last month, and it was just fabulous.

I’ve heard people talking about how hot Sam Heughan is . . .

He’s a lovely actor, and so is Caitriona [Balfe], who plays Claire.

Although someone was saying her eyes are the wrong color or something like that?

Well, you’re always going to get a certain amount of whining going on. Oh, her eyes are blue, I don’t think I can bear to watch the show! It’s the eighteenth-century. The lighting is such that ninety percent of the time, you can’t tell what color anybody’s eyes are, and this is completely irrelevant to the character. It’s just that people develop their own very vivid mental images based on what’s in the book, which is a compliment to the writing, I think, but at the same time, it’s obviously completely impossible for production people to telepathically extract the images of twenty million people and distill them into something that would be instantly recognizable to all twenty million, and find an actor who embodies that and who can also act. This is silly. I think people will very rapidly get over these things, like within five seconds of beginning to watch.

The show sounds really great, and I know everyone’s really excited about this new book. Do you want to just tell us what you have coming up? Are there any new or upcoming projects you want to mention?

There are lots of them. I’m actually on a heavy-duty book tour at the moment and won’t be able to work until I get back home. I have a two-week break in July, but other than that, it’s going to be pretty non-stop between now and September, which is finally when I go get my regular writing routine back. But I have a half-finished crime novel. There is book nine awaiting my attention. There’s a prequel volume about Jamie Fraser’s parents, Brian and Ellen, and the Jacobite rising in 1715. There are a number of interesting novellas. I write novellas to kind of fill in lacunae and beef out side stories, so there are all these little sprouts all over the bodies of the large novels. There is also the second Outlandish Companion, which is the nonfiction book that accompanies the series. The first Companion, which has been very popular, covered the first four books of the series. The second volume will cover the second four books and will include all the kinds of trivia and background information that people are interested in. That’s about eighty-five percent complete, though, and with luck, we might actually have that out by spring.

We’ve been speaking with Diana Gabaldon, and her new book is called Written in My Own Heart’s Blood, and the Outlander TV series premiers on Starz on August 9. Diana, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast hosted by David Barr Kirtley. David 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: Steve Tung

Steve Tung was born in Taipei in 1994. He studied at Fu-Hsin Trade and Art School. He is currently a freelance artist and animation student at National Yunlin University of Science and Technology. His website is o-fon.deviantart.com.

[To view the gallery, turn the page.]

Artist Spotlight: Steve Tung

Henry Lien

How important is story in your works? Do you always imagine a story that happens before and after the moment in time shown in the work or do you look at it as a completely visual creation?

I always think of the story behind the work, but sometimes I’ll think of it when the work is complete. I don’t want to limit the process in my work. I need to use feelings, too. Some works are only visual, but I think every good work has a great story at its heart. Stories and visuals are equally important.

Your work is surprisingly minimalist in the colors that you use, even in New Life [second image in gallery], which has hundreds of different elements in motion. Did you do this to make certain that the composition would be easy to read and not become too busy?

Yes, I always care about that when I look at a piece of art. I discovered my own ways to color and it still feels easy to read.

Your work also is very minimalist in its use of negative, empty space in the compositions. Child, Beautiful Girl, Doggy Warrior, and Smoke [third through sixth images in gallery], are so much more interesting because you have left so much negative space. Was this intentional?

I don’t like a painting to be too full, just like outer space. We can see the closest planet, but the distance to many other planets is so far away from us, with lots of space. That’s the same with my paintings, too.

Please tell us more about the smoke child with the balloon in Child.

This is about losing our youth and childlike heart. It’s a reaction to the social media phenomena in our world, but it can also have a different interpretation for other viewers.

Doggy Warrior is wonderful in so many ways that I do not know where to begin. Please tell us more about this work.

Doggy Warrior is actually my pet dog. Sometimes I imagine her riding a big mech, walking around. Then one day I thought, “Hmmm . . . I’ll just paint it.” Thus Doggy Warrior was born. It’s my way of saying how much I like my dog.

Do you see any distinct aspects of art/illustration coming out of Taiwan that are different from what is coming out of Japan, Korea, mainland China, and other parts of Asia? Do you see anything inherently Taiwanese about your work?

I think there are some small differences between the Asian styles. I think that the biggest factor influencing illustrators in Taiwan is that in Taiwanese society, artists are not that highly regarded. As a result, artists interested in illustration have to rely on a lot of self-exploration and self-education, rather than having lots of tradition and institutions as resources. But there is an upside to that because sometimes you can go farther precisely because there are not a lot of established traditions and institutions. That is the big difference with Taiwan I think.

What are your greatest influences as an artist? Film? Illustrators? Fine art painters?

When I was learning traditional painting, I wasn’t aware of CG painting and what a great tool it can be. One day I was researching science fiction-related artwork and I saw a work called Tears of a Distant Sun by Kai Lim [previously featured in Lightspeed at lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/artist-showcase/artist-spotlight-kai-lim]. I was shocked by the atmosphere that the image portrayed and the mechs were almost like real people walking in the desert. I changed my way of thinking about painting after that. Regarding film, I think it has to be ID4. I watched this when I was quite young. It influenced me a lot. My favorite fine art artist is Antonio López García.

Which of your works is your favorite? Why?

Currently, it is Border [final image in the gallery]. It is the turning point in my painting. I used lots of new technical ideas and as a result, I learned a lot.

What is your dream project?

I would really like to realize my 2D concepts into real 3D models.

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. He has sold stories to publications including Asimov’s, Analog, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and been nominated for the Nebula. Visit his author website at www.henrylien.com

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Author Spotlight: Tananarive Due

Jude Griffin

This story first appeared in The End is Now, volume 2 of The Apocalypse Triptych, edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey. How did this story come about?

I was intrigued by the entire idea for the Triptych, since I am naturally drawn to apocalyptic fiction as a writer. I chose a plague in my first story because a pandemic is one of my true-life concerns, given how small the world has become and how often our population has been ravaged by disease historically. It’s not far-fetched. I wanted to follow the character from my previous story, Nayima, after she fled for safety. It was difficult to pinpoint “the moment the world ends” with a plague, so this story is about the end of the world for my character.

And I almost forgot: I was severely blocked about where Nayima was and what she might be doing as the deadline approached, so I challenged myself to begin my story with a writing prompt I gave my students at a speculative fiction writing workshop at Voices of Our Nations (VONA): I randomly drew the words “trees” and “deep fryer.” That prompt kickstarted the story.

People living forever, or at least outliving most of the population, appear in a number of your works: Is mortality as a theme just a coincidence or indicative of a larger fascination for the topic?

I am very focused on mortality in my fiction. My first novel, The Between, was about a man who escaped death and had to face the consequences as death chased him. My African Immortals series that began with My Soul to Keep is about people who never age or die. I have been very aware of death since I was a child, and living with that awareness has been an important part of my life and growth. My mother’s struggle with cancer and her death in 2012 only reinforced this. Much of my fiction is my conversation with myself about having the courage to face loss and death—and hopefully then create more joy as I continue the blessing of life. Denial is also a recurring theme in my fiction, since most of us confront the notion of mortality with denial.

What do you do to flesh out your characters before/while writing them?

As with many writers, my characters tend to be different versions of me. I exaggerate my own strengths and weaknesses and modify my characters according to their circumstances—but always, I think, with a version of myself lurking in them. Nayima as a fanciful schoolgirl is one version of me. I might have been very much like her in my early twenties. If a character is more difficult to access, i.e. the older male scientist Lucas Shepard in my novel The Living Blood, I supplement Me with research and character-building techniques such as a resumé. But I do truly believe we are all made of the same human stuff, and accessing characters comes easily to me.

Why China as the origin of the flu?

As I researched “Herd Immunity,” China emerged as a possible forcing ground for a plague—with a combination of population density and the level of state control over information that could potentially keep a plague quiet even as it became harder to control.

Twizzlers: strawberry or cherry?

All artificial cherry flavors were ruined for me by sore throat lozenges when I was a kid. It’s strawberry all the way!

Did any accounts of real-life choices like those made at the Rescue Center feed into your depiction?

The Rescue Center was mostly a product of my imagination, but it carries tinges of Jim Jones and Jonestown, since that was a hugely impactful story when I was young. I can still see the bodies sprawled on the cover of Newsweek. But my idea with the Rescue Center was to create a community with enough organization and, frankly, love to have taken a clear-eyed choice in how they would face the plague. In my previous story, “Removal Order,” Nayima’s community was forced to scatter and everything was destroyed in their wake—another death metaphor. This community took a very different approach, although obviously it won’t seem comforting to some readers. My favorite sign at the Rescue Center is “Smile—Take Off Your Mask.”

Why does the rescue center sign ask people to take their shoes off?

The truth is, we will never know. But the shoes are another glimpse of a horrifying image I first saw as a teenager—the shoes collected off murdered Jews at Nazi concentration camps. At the Rescue Center, the shoes were discarded willingly, perhaps left toward a charitable cause in an unknown future. In any case, many of us have visited homes where we must remove our shoes before entering, which to me is another image of both order and familiarity.

That was a hard ending to read—was it the one you always had in mind?

Unfortunately, yes. Nayima was trapped by my interpretation of the anthology’s theme—the end of the world. It’s not that she is literally the last person left on Earth (and I do expect her to find community one day), but it is the moment in which she sheds her last illusions. As much as she has clung to her own wit and memories of popular culture and notions of rebuilding, she is now truly alone. To a degree, our existence is defined by the mirrors of ourselves we see in others. Who are we when there is no one else to reflect us?

Whose post-apocalyptic stories do you most admire?

I loved Stephen King’s The Stand, which I read while I was sick with a cold as a teenager, and I thought I had every symptom of Captain Trips. (I also had the pleasure of playing keyboard on the stage with Stephen King, Dave Barry, Amy Tan, Mitch Albom, and late the Kathi Goldmark with the Rock Bottom Remainders.)

I also love the work of Octavia E. Butler, particularly Parable of the Sower and its transcendent Earthseed verses (“The only lasting truth is Change”), which I often teach my writing students. Junot Díaz’s short story “Monstro,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker, is actually a novel excerpt, and I can’t wait to read the rest. Post-apocalytpic fiction is such a great way to delve into meaty questions of individual strength, the impact of loss, human nature, community, and how to claim order from chaos.

Any news or projects you want to share with us?

I will be publishing my first short fiction collection, Ghost Summer, in the summer of 2015, and I’m very excited about that. I am also working on a novel set at a Florida reformatory in the 1930s.

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: Saundra Mitchell

Laurel Amberdine

What inspired you to write “Starfall”?

“Why You Want a Physicist to Speak at Your Funeral” [a eulogy written by NPR commentator Aaron Freeman] resonated with me. It haunted me from the moment I read it. Then I watched a documentary about supernovae. In 1604, there was one so brilliant it lasted for months in the daytime sky. Johannes Kepler tracked it for over a year, and wrote his observations—which is why most people call SN 1604 “Kepler’s Supernova.”

I found it interesting that there are tons of stars with no names, just alphanumeric labels. (KV-62 is not a real star. I named it after Tutankhamun’s tomb designation.) Somehow in my head, the stardust left over from Kepler’s Supernova mingled with a physicist explaining that matter is never destroyed, stirred up the idea that we’re all made of stardust, and bam. I wondered, what would happen if we were unmade when the star that bore us went supernova?

I really liked the astronomical and mathematical details included in the story. Did you do any special research? Were there any neat facts that you weren’t able to include?

There was a lot of research involved. Math isn’t my strong suit, and I do much better at soft sciences (because of the math!) I’d heard about Kepler’s Supernova in a documentary. I had to learn more about that (and supernovae in general.) I’m a big history geek—that’s my initial attraction to the supernova idea.

Some of the facts I had to leave out was that there are supernovae immortalized in ancient Chinese writings, in indigenous Brazilian people’s stone carvings, in Anasazi Indian petroglyphs. There are Japanese, Egyptian, and Persian records of the same supernova in antiquity!

There was no way to include all of them, but I found it fascinating that as long as people have kept records, there are records of supernovae.

Amara Moore has an unusual background, with her history of abandonment and her isolation, and she’s profoundly affected by the supernova of KV-62. But a lot of people seem affected by Starfall, too. Were people affected because they and Amara shared some similarity, or was it random?

Jerusalem Syndrome is a real syndrome; I discovered there are other versions of it that occur only in particular cultures, or only in particular locations. It doesn’t matter your personal background—Jewish or Christian or Muslim, you can suffer Jerusalem Syndrome all the same. Or Stendahl Syndrome in Florence. Or Paris Syndrome, especially if you’re Japanese.

So I wondered, well, what if what ties those people together is the star their stardust came from? If the universal forces that built that star (and ultimately) those people out of the same bits and pieces, wouldn’t it be interesting if they ceased to exist in their current form together? More accurately, what if the people made out of KV-62 suffered from Starfall Syndrome? Faced with the realization that something as great and eternal as a star can be snuffed out, they convinced themselves they no longer existed . . . so they didn’t.

Is there any significance to Amara’s dissolution starting in her right index finger?

Leonardo da Vinci’s last painting of John the Baptist shows him pointing heavenward with one right index finger. Why? No one knows for sure; everyone has lots of theories. It’s a hermetic sign, it’s a Templar code, it’s an admission that John’s church is lesser than Jesus’ church, et cetera, et cetera. da Vinci originated it, and it became part of popular iconography in art. It’s discussed so often that it’s called The John Gesture. It later appears in gravestone iconography, remembering the deceased to heaven.

I don’t know the beginning or end of the universe, we’re all made of stardust, we live forever in pi, we live for an infinitesimally small blink of time . . . we all know, and we all don’t know. So that finger was a nod to that—and it was the easiest part of Amara’s body to erase. It would cause her troubles without being unnoticeable by others. (If it started with her pinkie toe, she couldn’t expect anyone to see it!)

What was the trickiest part of writing this story?

Keeping it active! There was a whole section that I told that I had to go back and show. When there’s only one character, and the story is about her inner workings, it’s easy to slip into static storytelling.

What are you working on now?

I just finished a piece of historical fiction about a Depression-era bank robber that will appear in Jessica Spotswood’s forthcoming Pistols and Petticoats anthology. And I’m currently working on an SF novel called Switch.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She recently moved to San Francisco with her husband, and is enjoying its vastly superior weather. Between naps she’s working on polishing up a few science fiction and fantasy novels, and hopes to send them out into the world soon.

Author Spotlight: Holly Black

Robyn Lupo

What was the most difficult thing about writing this story? The easiest? (Was there an easy part?)

The hardest thing about this particular story was the language—I had to constantly stop and research the parts of a ship, what different places in a station might be called, plus I had to do a lot of research to find particular things about space that I might be able to use to flesh out the miniature world of the story. My greatest delight was discovering there are clouds of space booze floating out in the galaxy, just waiting to be harvested (and filtered of poisons).

I’m not sure there was an easy part, but writing something very different from what I normally write was a lot of fun.

What gave you the idea to frame the story with these rules? How did this story start for you?

The story actually started with the rules. I’d been reading a lot of Karin Lowachee and Lois McMaster Bujold and I wanted to experiment with writing science fiction of the sort I’ve read a bunch of, but never written. As I was thinking through the story I wanted to tell, I thought of a few of the rules and wondered if I could play with them as structural markers.

By the end, it seems that Tera has a good handle on being a smuggler, and perhaps has a future as freedom fighter for the Charkazak. Do you see any future stories with her?

I don’t currently see any future stories with Tera, but one of the great joys of writing short fiction, for me, is that those stories let me try out a character or a concept. I’ve come back to several of my short stories and expanded them, so I like having that option still open.

What’s next for you? Any parting authorly wisdom you’d like to give?

I have two books coming out this year. One is a co-written middle grade with author Cassandra Clare, called The Iron Trial, the first book of the Magisterium series. And the other is a YA novel called The Darkest Part of the Forest.

As for authorial wisdom, I guess the thing I remind myself most often is to write to please my reader self and not worry so much about pleasing my writer self.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robyn Lupo has been known to frequent southwestern Ontario with her graduate student husband and elderly dog. She writes, reads, and plays video games. She is personal assistant to three cats.

Author Spotlight: Sam J. Miller

Lee Hallison

How did you come up with the idea of cloudporting in your story “We Are the Cloud”?

Like a lot of SF readers and writers, I got very excited by the concept of the Singularity, and all the science-fictional tropes that come along with it—brain uploading, AI, nanotech-medical developments, the whole utopian shebang of how really fast computers will allow human beings to transcend biology and become immortal data clusters . . . and then, at Clarion 2012, I heard Ted Chiang give a talk where he pointed out a lot of the flaws in the science of the Singularity as it’s popularly understood, and how lazy so many writers are about invoking its tropes uncritically. That jibed really well with one of my own personal fixations as a writer, which is looking at how tech and progress make things worse. “Progress” isn’t linear—one person’s breakthrough is another person’s nightmare. I love my smart phone, but the workers in the factories that make them are committing suicide because of how bad conditions are. Medical breakthroughs trickle down problematically—just look at Tuskegee, or people with cancer without insurance in the USA today. Every awesome new scientific development will be used by capitalism to exploit people, especially poor people. So I figured if we ever do find a way to tap into the human brain’s processing power, the reality of that will be pretty awesome for a small group of people and pretty crummy for a large group of people. Cloudporting is one potential way that a really big step forward for medical technology will also open up a new frontier to exploit people in tough spots.

Tell us some more about the boy on the rock poster. Why is Sauro so disturbed?

The boy on the rocks is a symbol of desire, and desire is a profoundly unsettling thing . . . a revolutionary force, even, if properly harnessed. For Sauro, seeing that poster is the moment where he realizes that his feelings for Case are just the tip of the iceberg of what it means to be gay. In giving in to the queer desire he’s been able to keep bottled up for so long, he’s become something different—stronger, in some ways, more powerful, but also vulnerable in a new way, with a whole new set of priorities.

The gradual awakening of Sauro is such an important part of the story. Did you begin this story with him, or with the setting and the idea of the cloud and cloud-diving?

When I lived in the Bronx, I walked past a foster care group house on my home from work every day. And it was horrible, seeing the youth who lived there hanging out outside—these were kids, playing and joking and laughing and fighting like kids do, but I know the realities of what life is like for boys and girls in the foster care system, the traumas they’re subject to, how statistically most of them are likely to end up homeless or in prison upon leaving the system. Sauro was the heart and the root of this story—somebody stuck in a profoundly fucked-up situation that unfortunately tons of people are actually in right now, trying his best to get through it, believing that if he plays by the rules everything will turn out all right, who realizes that the rules are not in place to help him.

The story extrapolates from the current reality of life “in the system” for a child taken away from his parents to a world where children are in barely supervised halfway houses and exploited by most everyone they come in contact with. How much of this was inspired by your work as a community organizer?

A lot, unfortunately. “We Are the Cloud” extrapolates from the very real and interconnected systems of exploitation that I was seeing up close through my work with homeless people. The people I met at soup kitchens had aged out of foster care; the moms I met in shelters had lost kids to the foster care system. The boys I saw hanging out in Morningside Park in Harlem were the ones who got arrested and fed into the prison system by cops looking to fill their quotas; they were also in the super-low-budget gay porno flicks some guys I worked with would share. So this is a marginally turned-up version of the world we live in now, where the systems that are supposed to help people end up hurting them, not for lack of resources (New York City really does spend four times as much to keep someone in a shelter as it does to provide someone with housing) but because these systems are in place to control and divide and disempower certain communities. A world where, as in ours, big businesses make a ton of money profiting off the poor decisions that people in a tough spot are forced to make to survive.

Sauro spends time at the end fantasizing different revenge scenarios, and has not quite decided which he will go with or to whom. What do you think he will do with his power?

I hope he uses it to smash the state and unite his exploited brothers and sisters to build a new world of justice. I think he might. But maybe not. For me and many of my activist friends, coming to understand what it means to have a sexual identity (or gender, or race, or class) that’s hated and oppressed meant deciding to fight to fix that oppressive system . . . the Magneto school of oppressed identity formation. But I also know lots of folks who face oppression but for whatever reason don’t believe that the status quo needs changing, or don’t believe that they can change it . . . or believe that the best way to change the system is to become its biggest boosters, tying oneself in knots to be tolerated by the people who hate you—the Professor X approach. The story leaves Sauro in that pivotal moment where you’ve finally understood who you really are and what a fucked-up world it is . . . and that realization can make you decide to fight to fix it, or focus on doing for yourself and screw everyone else.

What is next—are you working on more short stories or something longer?

Stories, stories, always stories . . . but also a novel, maybe, or several, it depends, I don’t know, wow, this is a pretty simple question, but I still don’t think I know how to answer it, so I’ll refer you back to my earlier responses, where I sounded like I knew how to use words.

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: Sarah Pinsker

Sandra Odell

The narrative voice for “No Lonely Seafarer” is very smooth and easy to read. What were your thoughts about the tone of the story and creating a protagonist accessible to both younger and older readers?

I usually let the characters dictate the tone. The tone of this story arose naturally from Alex’s voice, which is practical and straightforward, unadorned.

This wasn’t a story written with younger readers in mind, despite the young protagonist, but I think it would be accessible to them.

You seem to know your way around a stable and horses. Have you ever worked with large animals?

I’ve spent my whole life around horses. I was one of those kids who couldn’t afford a horse, so I rode every horse anyone would let me ride, and traded work for lessons and rides at trail barns and polo barns and combined training and dressage barns. Eventually I even got paid for the privilege instead of the other way around.

In the story, you look at budding sexual attraction, the possibility of same-sex relations, and the intersexed, all in a respectful, straightforward manner. It’s not often readers see intersexed characters, even those of a fantastic nature. How would you like to see the awareness of such characters continue in the future of genre writing?

I want to stress that Alex is not “of a fantastic nature.” Alex is an ordinary intersex character in a world with fantastic elements. Their relationship can’t necessarily be called same-sex, either. Alex has been living as a boy, and treated as a boy, and interacts with Ginny as a boy, but doesn’t fully identify as male. Until just before the events of the story, some of their decisions have been governed more by practicality or perceived necessity than desire. That may change.

I love giving voice to characters who aren’t typically seen in SF, or fiction in general. That’s part of the beauty of all the projects in the last few years like Long Hidden and Fierce Family and Women Destroy Science Fiction: They show that these characters and these stories are wanted and needed. Characters and relationships that reflect the diversity and complexity of real people, even if they’re in fictional settings.

There is just enough worldbuilding in the story to turn mundane history into the fantastic. If you could return to this world, what other creatures might you add?

In the story, Homer got sirens only partly right, so I suppose some of the other creatures that he and Aeschylus and Euripedes wrote about might also be out there, harpies and centaurs and such. Things they heard about from people who heard about them from other people, so that there’s a broken telephone effect, explaining why one might describe harpies as ugly, but another might describe them as beautiful, and until you encounter them you don’t know what’s truth and what’s fiction. Mrs. Wainwright sounds like she’s seen other creatures. I think they’re around.

Music plays a significant role in your life and many of your stories. How do you balance that creative mix? Do you find that one influences the other?

The balance between the two is tricky. When I’m in heavy songwriting mode for an album, I have trouble writing fiction, and when I’m writing a lot of fiction, I stop writing songs. When I’m playing a lot that tends to be late nights, but my most productive writing time is early morning. On the positive side, I think songwriting gives my stories some interesting rhythms and cadences at a line level. And fiction definitely influences my songwriting, since I tend to write songs from perspectives other than my own. My upcoming album features songs from the perspective of a circus sideshow’s “living doll,” a Dust Bowl farmer, and a Victorian couple out for a short boating trip who get pulled out to sea. So really it all falls under the umbrella of storytelling.

Part of the appeal of the story is how the characters, even minor ones, relate to one another. As a writer, what challenges do you face when it comes to exploring such relationships on the page?

I think if you’re writing characters who are true to themselves, they’ll relate to one another in a way that feels real as well. The easiest stories are the ones where every voice develops naturally and you just have to see what happens as you combine characters. How do these two talk when they’re in a room alone together? Does that change when a third person is introduced?

You are one of the writers featured in the Women Destroy Science Fiction issue of Lightspeed. What’s in store for Sarah Pinsker? Are there any plans to destroy other genres?

I take it one story at a time! Tiny destructions. I’ve got more stories coming up in Lightspeed and Asimov’s, and several in the pipeline.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sandra Odell is an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. She attended Clarion West in 2010. Her first collection of short stories was released from Hydra House Books in 2012. She is currently hard at work avoiding her first novel.

Author Spotlight: Aliette de Bodard

Jude Griffin

Aztec steampunk! How did this story come about?

I was doing some work for my Obsidian and Blood trilogy, and I had this very vivid image of a gunslinger coming to a mine—except I couldn’t really fit it anywhere into my novels. So I took the image, added the research I’d done into Aztec customs, and more or less made up the universe on the spot, throwing in a few references to not-quite-steampunk-y things (the god-machine is actually more a reference to Asimov’s positronic machines in his short stories, who end up ruling the world).

It’s exciting to read steampunk outside of its traditional settings—do you plan to bring steampunk into other dusty corners of the universe?

I wrote a couple stories in the same mould (“Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders” in Interzone is set in the same universe, except centred around another Aztec god; and “Memories in Bronze, Feathers and Blood” is inspired by many of the same setting elements). I would love to do some steampunk set in Nguyen dynasty Vietnam, but haven’t got around to it yet; mainly because I would need to get serious again about my Vietnamese so I could find decent sources . . .

There’s so much depth here: What was the biggest challenge in pulling all of the story elements together?

Part of the challenge was keeping a balance around the character of Tezoca: I wanted him to be deliberately unpleasant, arrogant, and cocksure, but not so unpleasant that the reader would hate his guts and wish him dead—it’s a tricky balance to strike.

Any surprises between the initial conception of the story and its final form?

This was actually a fairly easy story to write: It doesn’t happen very often, but it practically wrote itself, and I had very little to do other than follow the muse. I hadn’t envisioned, when I started it, that Tezoca would end up all but dead, which gave me a bit of a fright when that part came around out of nowhere—I wasn’t really sure how to resurrect him enough for my planned ending!

What role did Marshall Payne and Rochita Loenen-Ruiz play in the story’s final form?

Marshall helped me a lot by doing detailed line-edits on the story, fixing my disastrous tendency for run-on sentences and making sure that the message in my head got on the page in a comprehensible fashion. Rochita is a very good friend, and we’ve been corresponding and supporting each other for a long, long time—notably, she read the first draft of this and made very incisive comments about it, which helped me polish it into shape, but in general she’s always been there for me.

Is there anything in the story that you think tends to get missed by readers? Like, who is Tezoca?

Tezoca is actually the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca—it’s a bit of an Easter egg, really, as you can read the story perfectly well without knowing this, but there are a few clues. The fact that he calls Quetzalcoatl his brother and his enemy is a big one—the two gods were at odds in the Aztec pantheon; and of course the shards of obsidian that he carries are the shards of his obsidian mirror (Tezcatlipoca means “Smoking Mirror,” and he had an obsidian mirror in the place of his foot). Another thing that people would miss if not familiar with Aztec mythology, I think, is Quetzalcoatl being buried underground, which is a deliberate reference to the myth of Quetzalcoatl going into the underworld to find the bones of the dead and repopulate the devastated earth—there is a slight promise there that he will come up one day, bearing humanity’s salvation.

Can we expect more set in this and the world of “Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders”?

I might come back to this universe later on—I had plans at one point for a longer novella detailing what happened to Tezoca and Coztic (the main character in “Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders”)—but right now I’m focusing on other projects in the limited time that I have.

Any news you want to share with us?

I just finished the first draft of my novel, a sort of post-apocalyptic urban fantasy set in Paris, complete with fallen angels, Vietnamese dragons, and entirely too many murders. I hope to get it polished soon; and of course I’m working on short stories: I published two set in the universe of Xuya recently, “In the Days of the War, as Red as Blood, as Dark as Bile” in Subterranean, and “The Breath of War” in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and have a couple more upcoming in various anthologies.

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: Matthew Hughes

Sandra Odell

In “Under The Scab,” you play with language and sensory impressions to explore the boundaries of science and magic. Did you consciously work to create such an effect, or do you feel it grew out of the narration?

I consciously worked at expressing the inexpressible.

“Under The Scab” may be the first time some readers have encountered Kaslo. How do you present the character so as to appeal to those who have followed his adventures, while still hoping to hook new readers?

The only way I know how to present characters is in the “show-don’t-tell” mode. I show them acting in characteristic ways and hope that the reader infers enough from seeing and hearing what they do and say to understand what they’re all about—or if not all, enough for the purposes of the story.

But, if people are encountering the Kaslo story in midstream, all the previous episodes are archived on the Lightspeed site, so they can soon catch up.

The moment where Kaslo realizes the truth about the captive humans and the enslaved entity is the stuff of delicious nightmares, in particular when the clickers start to become aware of his presence. What inspired this particular passage?

I wanted something truly awful that spoke of a conscious evil at work. Stories hang on their villains, after all.

You have written a diverse body of work, including several series such as The Kaslo Chronicles, the To Hell and Back series of novels, the Fool books, and the occasional Luff Imbry tale. As a writer, what is it about serial work that appeals to you?

I suppose it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other. From my perspective, I’m writing a science-fantasy novel. It’s only a serial from the reader’s point of view.

You are a prolific writer with a variety of fiction and non-fiction titles to your credit. Growing up, what writers stirred your creative fancy and encouraged you to try your hand at writing? Where do you turn for pleasure reading today?

Growing up, Jack Vance was my favorite SF writer, though I read widely in the science fiction of the fifties and sixties. I also read historical novels and was much taken by Lionel Sprague de Camp’s romps through the ancient world. Today, I like a good (i.e., unanachronistic) historical, like Patrick O’Brien’s masterful Aubrey/Maturin tales, and I read a lot of crime fiction. People who are familiar with my work will know that I’m actually a crime writer trapped in a science-fiction author’s career.

What’s in store for Kaslo now that he’s discovered an important truth about the clickers? Is there a happily-ever-after for the erstwhile op?

That would be telling. But Kaslo will do what seems right to him. He’s motivated by duty and professionalism.

What’s in store for Matthew Hughes? Will we see another To Hell and Back novel any time soon?

There won’t be another of those. The story was Chesney’s and it rounded out to a completion.

I’m now in the almost-ready-to-write phase of a historical novel I’ve been thinking about for more than forty years. The Canada Council for the Arts has given me a substantial grant, and that’s mostly what I’ll be doing over the next year. Once I finish The Kaslo Chronicles, of course.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sandra Odell is an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. She attended Clarion West in 2010. Her first collection of short stories was released from Hydra House Books in 2012. She is currently hard at work avoiding her first novel.

Author Spotlight: Rhys Hughes

Patrick J. Stephens

Where did “Eternal Horizon” begin—an idea, a character, or an event? And could you also detail how it shaped into the form we see today, such as complications and successes?

This story began very precisely. Sometimes ideas bubble and percolate through unknown passageways in my mind for many years before they finally find expression in a story, but in the case of “Eternal Horizon,” everything developed very quickly indeed. I was walking along a remote beach and looking out to sea and a submerged sandbank halfway to the horizon made a line of surf that looked like another horizon nearer to shore. On the way back home all the elements came together from this single observation. I knew that the smaller horizon was the child of the bigger, that the sun would get confused and accidentally set into the sea between them, that the oceans would boil away unless someone prevented this from happening. Then it seemed natural that a goddess had to be involved, as one of the few beings powerful enough to avert such a disaster. I threw in some pirates for good measure. It was all very easy and the story seemed almost to write itself.

The narrator and Renuka-lead us through how you molded both characters, and which was the most intriguing to write?

I was in love with a girl at the time and so I named the goddess after her and modelled the character’s appearance and character on her. Later, I decided it would be less intrusive if I changed the name of the goddess, which is what I have done. She was therefore easy to create. The narrator is the same narrator who appears in all my stories that have a first-person narrator. Or rather, they are all variations of the same narrator, avatars of themselves. They aren’t quite me, but they do share many aspects of perspective and attitude with me. My fictional characters are never very real. I tend to believe that the only two real characters in a story are the author and the reader.

As the writer, what was the most compelling part of the story to craft?

I enjoy taking an absurd conceit and pushing it to see how far I can take it. This is always the most enjoyable part of writing fiction for me. I rarely ask “Is this possible?” but “Is this logically rigorous even though it’s impossible?” and I generally prefer the latter approach because it seems more conducive to original invention and imagination. This is just my own view, of course. And by “logic,” I don’t necessarily mean empirical logic, the causality of everyday events, but the logic of word-association or lateral ideas. I also enjoy trying to put many different ideas, usually whimsical, into each story and seeing how they interact, connect, bounce off each other, in the hope that something very unexpected might result. I like complicated and intricate plotting, or rather, the way in which elements, conceits, and ideas can be juxtaposed and meshed, either to blend or react in some other way. So really, for me, it was simply a case of taking the original idea, of the horizon giving birth to another horizon, and extrapolating a fictional scenario from this that would be both absurd but also coherent, whimsical but seriously engineered.

Romance has a place in many stories, and science fiction allows it to have seemingly infinite possibilities. However, what were the challenges of telling this type of story under the scope of “Eternal Horizon”?

My biggest influences aren’t science fiction or fantasy writers but those authors from mainland Europe who work with a fusion of fantasy, irony, philosophy, fable, satire, and thought experiment. It’s a style of fiction that doesn’t have an obvious parallel in English literature. It’s somehow lighter in tone than science fiction, but more ideas-based than fantasy. I guess that the term speculative fiction is close but still not quite right. The desire to write absurdist romances has been with me almost since I started writing and it was confirmed and strengthened when I discovered the works of Calvino, Pavić, Queneau, Perec, Vian, and others. It seems to me that these writers manage to successfully blend the concerns of the heart with those of the head, giving equal weight to intellectual and emotional pleasure and problems. So the challenge of writing this story was simply to try to write the kind of story I most enjoy reading and to do so as well as I could. It’s not up to me, however, to say how well I have succeeded or how badly I have failed.

What can we expect to see from you in the near future?

I am always working on something new. I have many projects in gestation at the moment and several books due to appear over the next few years. I plan to embark on some grander projects soon, too, but I have been intending to begin these for years, even decades, so whether they ever actually happen or not is another question! The main thing that occupies me is continuing with my cycle of 1000 short stories that are all independent but also linked to each other. I am now three quarters of the way through this project, which has taken twenty-five years so far.

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: Gregory Feeley

Jude Griffin

In lieu of responding to each of our usual array of questions separately, Gregory Feeley responded to everything in the following essay, so we present it here in that format. —eds.

Most accounts of how an author came to write a story are not very interesting, but if any story of mine offers an exception, it would be “Giliad.”

In 2001, my friend Noreen Doyle began assembling an anthology of original stories about the Bronze Age. (I suggested she call it The First Heroes, because the idea of a hero is a Bronze Age concept—earlier than that, there were only gods.) Other contributors had picked out various Bronze Age subjects to write about, and she asked me if I would do ancient Sumer.

Virtually everything I knew about Sumer came from a 1956 book, History Begins at Sumer by Samuel Noah Kramer. (Historians date the beginning of history to the invention of writing; everything before that is pre-history.) I knew that Sumerian civilization was extremely interesting, but what caught my interest was the idea of the “beginning of history.” In 1992, Francis Fukuyama had published The End of History and the Last Man, which argued that with the development of “Western liberal democracy” (by which he meant affluent capitalist societies), social evolution had reached its endpoint, and all future political strife would take the form of movement toward this ideal. I was very dubious about this, but the idea of contrasting the “beginning of history” with “the end of history” seemed intriguing, especially since the land of Sumer is now present-day Iraq, and the year 2001 had begun with the inauguration of a President who seemed intent—it was clear even then—on invading that country.

I had finished a short novel, Arabian Wine, that summer, so in August I turned to Noreen’s anthology project. I began reading about Sumer, pondering “history,” and devising a two-track story line set at both its “beginning” and “end” (i.e. now). By Labor Day, I was trying to get something underway, and on Thursday—that would be September 6—I read something in the New York Times (I don’t remember what) and everything clicked. The linking device between then and now would be a video game, something like the enormously popular Civilization, that would focus on Sumer. The present-day protagonists would be a married couple, the wife a former history major who disapproved of such games, the husband someone who worked in developing them.

I had one more cute idea: I would write the story in real-time: the fall of 2001. The story would begin that day and take place over the coming fall. On that day and the next I drafted the opening pages.

The irony is too obvious to belabor: 9/11 was the following Tuesday. I don’t know that I got much writing done that week, but when I did return to my desk, it was clear that my story was going to be about how my characters (who lived in Connecticut; they are about fifteen years younger than my wife and I am, but otherwise share a number of background traits) dealt with the catastrophe, which was close enough that they could faintly see the smoke if they got on the roof of an office building.

A great deal of the story is accurate reportage of what we experienced: the drive into Brooklyn later that month and its view of the Manhattan skyline; the postponed Open House at our daughter’s school and what Megan wrote in her daily journal. Megan’s passage in the journal for September 11—about a teacher coming into the classroom and telling Megan’s teacher that “somthing is getting wors. Somthing aubt a plane”—is all true, every word of it. (I had to ask my daughter Emily for permission to quote her journal in my story, and felt a bit guilty because how can an eight-year-old really give informed consent?) I decided early on that the story would end around Christmas, but I did not finish it until well into the following year. I wrote very slowly; there was a lot of research needed, and a lot that I was trying to do.

So the story is almost rawly “topical,” but it is also constructed in part on wordplay and puns: “Giliad,” “balm in Gilead,” “Terra/terror.” Trent shares a lot of my interests—Finnegans Wake, the life of James Blish—and I worked in a scene involving Blish (identified only as “the scribe”), who was obsessed with the end of history, which he thought was imminent.

There is also one other element, which feels a bit creepy even now. Our daughter Emily was indeed eight years old in 2001, and many of the words “Megan” speaks came right out of Emily’s mouth; but we also have a son, Nathaniel, two years younger. Nathaniel is fine, but there was a medical crisis a week after he was born, and it was several months before we knew that he would make a full recovery. The couple in “Giliad” lost their second child (you have to read carefully to catch this), and even while I was writing it, I recognized that I was dealing on some level with the question of how life would have gone on had this happened to us. Nathaniel, a normal eighteen-year-old with no interest in his father’s writing, has never read “Giliad,” but if he ever did, I would have to explain why Emily is in some sense “in” the story while he was, in some sense, “killed off.”

Looking at the story now, I am forcefully reminded of those days immediately after 9/11—casualty estimates were as high as 10,000, and the perpetrators were universally decried as “cowards,” fatuous invective that Susan Sontag got in trouble for questioning. It was weeks before it was clear that the perpetrator was not Saddam Hussein, nor the Taliban, but al-Qaeda, though it was clear to many of us that George Bush was going to use this as a pretext to invade Iraq. The letter wrapped in plastic with a government notification that traces of anthrax had been detected on it is true—it happened to a neighborhood friend, who actually did sell it on eBay—and my protagonist’s rather paranoid musings about the spores’ origin turned out to be essentially correct.

As a story that mediates between two—actually more than two—timelines, “Giliad” probably reflects my desire to write stories that rely on more than what Joyce called “wide-awake language, cut-and-dry grammar, and go-ahead plot.” Arabian Wine was all that (though I like to think it was done well), but my next book, Kentauros, departs even further from the go-ahead plot. My current project—a very long novel, which I have been working on for years—has what looks like a straightforward story line, so perhaps it will reach more readers than my earlier fiction has managed.

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 October, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Daniel José Older (“Dust”) and Marie Vibbert (“Jupiter Wrestlerama”), along with SF reprints by Zoran Živković (“The Puzzle”) and Rebecca Ore (“Scarey Rose in Deep History”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Steve Hockensmith (“The Herd”) and Megan Kurashige (“The Quality of Descent”), and fantasy reprints by Ysabeau S. Wilce (“The Biography of a Bouncing Boy Terror!“) and Kelly Link (“Water Off a Black Dog's Back”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with a feature interviews with theoretical physicist Lawrence M. Krauss and SF author James S.A. Corey.

For our ebook readers, we also have our novella reprint (“Jesus and the Eightfold Path” by Lavie Tidhar) and a pair of novel excerpts.

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

• • • •

Also in October, be sure to look for the next two installments of the Women Destroy! series of special issues, with all-women written and edited double-issues from the our sister magazines, Nightmare and Fantasy (coming out of retirement for this one special issue!).

• • • •

Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got a lot of great short fiction to share. We’ll be featuring work by writers new to Lightspeed such as Nik Houser, Sequoia Nagamatsu, Will Kaufman, Vajra Chandrasekera, Joseph Allen Hill, Shale Nelson, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, and Sunny Moraine. And naturally we'll also be featuring the return of some folks who have appeared in our pages previously, including Kat Howard, Maria Dahvana Headley, Damien Angelica Walters, Matthew Hughes, Jeremiah Tolbert, Marissa Lingen, Caroline M. Yoachim, Sarah Pinsker (another story!), Megan Arkenberg, Ken Liu, Dale Bailey, C.C. Finlay, Carrie Vaughn, and Brooke Bolander.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

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All caught up on Lightspeed? Good news! We also have lots of ebooks available from our sister-publications:

Nightmare Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions: Like Lightspeed, our sister-magazine Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles, and subscriptions available as well. For instance, you can get the complete first year (12 issues) of Nightmare for just $24.99; that’s savings of $11 off buying the issues individually. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month subscription to Nightmare includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), and will cost you just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price).

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

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. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated eight times) and is a six-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Nightmare Magazine and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.