FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial, October 2014

John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue fifty-three of Lightspeed!

In case you missed the news last month: Lightspeed won a Hugo! You can check out the September editorial for details about that. But the short version is: We’ve been nominated four years in a row for Best Semiprozine, and this year we won! Huzzah! It’s all very exciting and we’re super proud to be part of the glorious history of the Hugos. And it just seems really appropriate for a magazine called Lightspeed to win a rocket-shaped award, doesn’t it?

• • • •

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 cash flow, 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, just a reminder that the latest 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 Lightspeed’s September issue. Pop over to johnjosephadams.com/apocalypse-triptych for more information about the book and/or to read more free samples from the anthology.

• • • •

This month also marks the publication of our other two special issues.

Over at Nightmare, we’re presenting Women Destroy Horror!, our special double-issue celebration of women writing and editing horror. Guest editor Ellen Datlow has selected original fiction from Gemma Files (“This Is Not for You”), Livia Llewellyn (“It Feels Better Biting Down”), Pat Cadigan (“Unfair Exchange”), Katherine Crighton (“The Inside and the Outside”), and Catherine MacLeod (“Sideshow”). We’re also sharing reprints by Joyce Carol Oates (“Martyrdom”), Tanith Lee (“Black and White Sky”), and A.R. Morlan (“. . . Warmer”).

Our WDH nonfiction editor, Lisa Morton, has a line-up of terrific pieces — a feature interview with American Horror Story’s producer Jessica Sharzer; a roundtable interview with acclaimed writers Linda Addison, Kate Jonez, Helen Marshall, and Rena Mason; a feature interview with award-winning author Joyce Carol Oates; and insightful essays from Maria Alexander, Lucy A. Snyder, and Chesya Burke.

Over at Fantasy Magazine, we’re presenting Women Destroy Fantasy!, our special double-issue celebration of women writing and editing fantasy. The guest editor for this volume is long-time Fantasy editor Cat Rambo, and she’s selected original fiction from Julia August (“Drowning in the Sky”), H.E. Roulo (“Making the Cut”), Kate Hall (“The Scrimshaw and the Scream”), and T. Kingfisher (“The Dryad’s Shoe”). Plus we’ll have reprints (selected by none other than Terri Windling!) from Delia Sherman (“Miss Carstairs and the Merman”), Carol Emshwiller (“The Abominable Child’s Tale”), Emma Bull (“Silver or Gold”), and Nalo Hopkinson (“The Glass Bottle Trick”).

Likewise, our WDF nonfiction editor — our amazing Managing Editor, Wendy N. Wagner — has lined up some great work for us, including Kameron Hurley’s critical examination of epic fantasy; a roundtable interview with Carrie Vaughn and Kelley Armstrong in a frank discussion of women writing urban fantasy; a roundtable panel of RPG tie-in writers Margaret Weis, Marsheila Rockwell, Elaine Cunningham, and Erin M. Evans; and a massive discussion of women in fantasy illustration, featuring Julie Dillon, Galen Dara, Elizabeth Leggett, Julie Bell, Irene Gallo, Rebecca Guay, Lauren Panepinto, and Zoë Robinson. We’ve also got thought-provoking essays from Sofia Samatar and Kat Howard, and a reading guide from the contributors and friends of WDF.

Both issues turned out really great, and we can’t wait to hear what everyone thinks about them. They’re available now in both ebook ($2.99) and trade paperback ($10.99). For more information about the issues, including where you can find them, visit our new Destroy-related website at DestroySF.com.

• • • •

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

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 Kelly Link (“Water Off a Black Dog’s Back”) and Ysabeau S. Wilce (“The Biography of a Bouncing Boy Terror!”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with bestselling author James S. A. Corey and physicist Lawrence Krauss.

For our ebook readers, our ebook-exclusive novella reprint is “Jesus and the Eightfold Path” by Lavie Tidhar. For novel excerpts this month, we’ve got a sneak peek at Paolo Bacigalupi’s new novel, The Doubt Factory, along with an excerpt from Ancillary Sword — Ann Leckie’s sequel to her Nebula, Clarke, and Hugo award-winning debut novel Ancillary Justice. Plus, we have an excerpt from the new Wild Cards mosaic novel, Wild Cards: Lowball, from contributor Carrie Vaughn.

Our issue this month is sponsored by our friends at Tor Books. This month, make sure to look for the aforementioned new Wild Cards book, Wild Cards: Lowball, edited by George R.R. Martin and Melinda Snodgrass. Learn more at Tor-Forge.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

Dust

Daniel José Older

Very late at night, when the buzz of drill dozers has died out, I can hear her breathing. I know that sounds crazy. I don’t care.

Tonight, I have to concentrate extra hard because there’s a man lying beside me; he’s snoring with the contented abandon of the well-fucked and all that panting has heavied up the air in my quarters. Still, I can hear her, hear her like she’s right behind my ear or curled up inside my heart. She’s not of course. If anything, I’m curled up in hers.

But then again, her dust covers everything, all of us. It coats the inner walls of this station even though it’s airtight. It coats my inner walls. It’s reddish and probably lethal, but who knows? We’ve never seen anything like it before.

The man beside me is Arkex. He is just another dustfucker amongst many; he mans the drill. Today I’m a man too — very much so it turns out — and I was surprised because I’d always taken Arkex for straight. I don’t bother hiding my stares when his muscles gleam in the foul glare of our excavation lights. He never looked back, though, not on my man days, not on my woman days, and I gave up noticing. But tonight he showed up, appeared at my door without a word, just a smile softer than any I’d seen him wear before. Before, his only smiles fought off the impossible monotony of the ‘stroid mines or spilled sloppily out at bad jokes over Vanguard at the Rustvine. This one comes from deeper in him: Comely, it requests permission to be held.

I considered for a few moments, took my time. In these thick seconds, he maybe thought back on the times he’d snickered with the others. The jokes about me I’m sure I’d rather not know, the ones I can see from across the bar in sidewise glances, suppressed laughs. On the days I wake up a woman, Arkex’s sneer thickens. We’re all hidden beneath layers of protective gear out there in the caves, just thick genderless grunts, hard at work and always on the brink of death. Still, word gets out what body I’ve woken to, idiocy ensues.

Tonight, his shoulders hunched, his eyes ask forgiveness. I scowled, took the fullness of him: a tight shirt, once white, now dust red, and those big yellow shield pants, all laden with pouches and rope. Skin red like mine. I stepped to the side and motioned him in with my chin.

It’s not like he’s the first. Usually, I turn them away. They are curious, hungry for a story to yap out at Rustvine, and suddenly meek. The handful I’ve let in, their vulnerability radiated past the layers of dust and couldn’t be faked.

It doesn’t matter to me: their soft smiles and whispered promises in the thick of the heat. They always fall asleep and then I lie there, tuning out their snores so I can hear her breath; trying to match mine with hers. Silently, impossible like love, I feel it inside me. And tonight, tonight, for no reason I can discern and for just a few perfect, rockstar seconds, I catch hold and we do breathe as one, the asteroid and I, taking in the immensity of space. In the moment between, when the air lingers inside, I ask it to shift course. I don’t ask, I plead. Because time is running out. Swerve, goes my prayer. One word: swerve. Because a full turn just seems like too much to ask. A U-turn? Come now: These are celestial bodies, not space ships. So, Swerve, I whisper silently. And when we exhale, together, we release that tiny prayer and mountains and mountains of dust.

• • • •

A few hours later, I’m bleary eyed and raw at the Rustvine. I’d passed out to the lullaby of the asteroid’s susurrations and woke up with wet pebbles in my head. Too much Vanguard. Still, something had happened. It’s nothing I could explain to anyone, not without getting thrown in the brig and losing my hard-earned Chief Engineer position. But I know it was real.

Slid my hand beneath the sheets between my own legs and I’d switched again; soft folds where last night was a full throbbing dick, put to good use, too. It’s happening more and more these days. I linger. A few tasty ghosts of last night at my fingertips: Arkex beneath me, behind me, his hands on my shoulders, mine on his. I wondered if he’d grasp my womanbody with the same savage tenderness. Would he be too gentle? Not interested at all? I leaned over him, my fingers still rolling circles between my legs, but then the gnawing sense of somewhere to be surfaced, overtook everything. The Triumvirate. Their star glider was probably already docked in the hangar, their irritating little envoy slinking his way along our dust-covered corridors to the Rustvine.

I disentangled from the sheets. All my shield pants and dress shirts lay crumpled in the bin. All that was left was this stupid skirt that I only have for stupid parties I show up to uninvited. Absurd. But I threw it on, laced up my caving boots beneath it and pulled on an old Sour Kings t-shirt. Glanced in the mirror, ignored the feeling that it wasn’t quite me looking back and then nudged Arkex with a steel-tipped toe.

“Ay. Got places to be. Find your way out, eh.”

Arkex had mumbled a curse, not even registering I was now a woman, maybe not caring, and turned over. The sheets slipped from his body; the redness even tinged his chest. I poured the dregs of yesterday’s coffee into a stained paper cup and shambled down the corridors.

• • • •

At the far end of the Rustvine, the more ornery dustfuckers trade grimaces and slurp down Vanguard shots. A whispered debate rages, you can see it play out in those tiny face flinches. Everyone knows impact is only a matter of hours now; everyone knows the galaxy may be about to witness the most colossal suicide mission of all time. Discontent catches slow fire, thickens every day.

Arkex is among them now, having risen from his satisfied stupor, and so is Zan, one of the few female squad leaders. From their scowls and studious refusal to even glance my way, I know some foul fuckery is afoot.

They say the best cure for Vanguard pebble brain is Vanguard, so I order my second shot and turn back to the awkward little man sitting across from me.

“Jax,” Dravish says, glaring at me. “Are you even paying attention?”

“His Holiness the Hierophant,” I say, “Minister of the Noble Triumvirate, who you represent most humbly, wants an update on our trajectory, delicately reminds the crew of asteroid Post 7Quad9 that the destruction of the asteroid and the post along with it is on the pulldown menu of possibilities if Earth remains at risk.”

Dravish nods, trying to affect a meaningful glare but only getting a half-smirk peeking out from somewhere beneath his handlebar mustache. “All eyes are on you, Jax. The universe is watching.”

“Even though,” I add unnecessarily, “no one lives on Earth any more. Are you enjoying your stay at our lovely facility?”

He’s a small man with alarmingly long fingers and a tendency to call attention to them by rubbing his hands together like a plotting marsupial. “I don’t like being without my jag pistons. The Barons have spies everywhere.”

I shrug. There’s enough firepower and political intrigue focused on this one hurling rock to destroy several galaxies, so I instituted a strict no firearms policy from the get-go. Anyway, it makes bar fights more fun. “It just means you have to be more creative when you kill people, Dravish. I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

Dravish taps his steel cane on the tiled floor and snorts.

I have more important things to consider than the Hierophant and his passive aggressive secretaries. The dustfuckers have stopped consorting and spread out across the room; more trouble. Beyond all that, I still carry the memory of that perfect clicking into place earlier, when our breathing became one.

“There’s something else, Jax.” Annoyed that I’m not looking at him, Dravish fiddles his fingers faster against themselves. A murmur ripples through the Rustvine; someone unusual has just entered and the denizens accumulate to catch a glimpse.

My shot arrives. “What?” I throw it back.

“The Hierophant sent his daughter along with me.”

I spit the shot back into the glass. “Maya?”

“He has only one.”

The crowd opens and a figure in a long black robe strides out. The ornate silver machinery of the Triumvirate halos her; beneath it, a gilded faceguard catches the ill orange glow of the Rustvine’s security lights. Elaborate leather belts crisscross her chest and another wraps around her waist. Still, she moves like a leaf pushed in on a gale of wind. Real wind, I mean, not the endless monotony of exhaust fans. She is a thing alive, glistening even, and completely out of place in this underground trashhole of dustfuckers and the taste of disaster.

Moving effortlessly, she sits. I put a handrolled Garafuna in my mouth, light it. Dravish mumbles something and finds somewhere else to be. The faceguard emits a mechanical sigh, lifts, and there’s Maya, smiling like a jerk. “Smoking is bad for the environment.”

I exhale a ringlette and take in her face. It hasn’t changed much since the academy days. Maya has three moles reaching like Orion’s belt from the edge of her mouth to her right eye. That’s the eye that’s always squinting, just a little bit, like she doesn’t quite believe you. It’s the gap between her two front teeth that gets you, though. You can’t miss ‘em, those big ol’ teeth, and whenever she lets that grin loose, the gap reaches out to you and says hi. She has pudgy cheeks, too, like a brown girl version of those horrible little dolls the Chemical Barons distribute to make us all forget how they flooded Earth. Except the dolls are heinous and Maya, Maya is stunning.

“You know what else is bad for the environment?” I take another drag. Exhale. “Blowing up people’s asteroid homes.”

She scrunches her face. “It’s not your home, it’s your job.”

“It’s a busy season; I keep having to sleep at the office.”

“Is that why I haven’t seen you in two years?”

I shrug, tear my eyes away from her face. “I’m not hard to find.”

The Rustvine has settled back into its regular banter: Filthy, dust-covered men mutter their dust-covered prayers to each other, sip Vanguard till everything tastes like oblivion, which is slightly less bitter than disaster. Directly across from me, Arkex hunches over the bar. A few seats away, Zan mutters to one of her men.

“As an opening gambit, I’d say you’ve softened some since our Ac days.”

I look back at Maya, scowl, look away. “You want a drink?”

“Really, Jax?”

“People change. You could be a regular heathen like the rest of us now. I don’t make assumptions. A simple ‘no, thank you’ would do.”

“But why pass up a chance to annoy you?”

Finally, I allow a smile out. She’s been demanding one since she sat down and I’ve never been able to say no to her.

She sits back, releases the gap-tooth grin. “See now! There it is.”

“Shut up, Maya.”

A few tables away, Dravish eyes the bar. He sees it too — the small ways that men move when their bodies teeter on the brink of violence, the stiff backs and forced stillness. Dravish’s long fingers caress the empty air above his holsters.

“Anyway, you were telling me what you’d discovered,” Maya says.

I laugh, swig from the bottle of Vanguard that just arrived. “Hardly.”

“Hardly discovered anything or you were hardly telling me?”

“Both. Neither.”

“Jax.”

I peel my eyes from goings on at the bar and meet hers. “Maya.”

“How much time is left?”

“Before impact?”

She nods.

I’m familiar with this wide-eyed face of hers. It is used for pleading. “Depends.”

The wide eyes narrow. This is when Maya doesn’t get what face #1 had quietly demanded. She used to make this one a lot in close combat class. It’s not a bluff; Maya was the only student to make it through the academy without a single point being scored off her and she hospitalized a few of the biggest grunts along the way.

“Hours,” I say. “Less than a dozen. Assuming Earth doesn’t suddenly jump out of its regular orbit. And assuming 7Quad9 doesn’t change course by itself.”

Maya eases out of her attack face, raises one eyebrow. “Is that even possible?”

“Literally, at this moment, and I’m not being coy with you at all, anything is possible.” This is a test. I raise my eyebrows when I’m done. Maya’s face can do so many things right now, and each will be a message.

She hunches her shoulders and leans across the table, a conspiratorial smile across her face. The ever-squinting eye squints tighter. “Go on.”

“I think I can get it to swerve.” I say it very, very quietly.

Now both eyes squint; the smile fades. “Oh?”

“I . . . I know I can.” I hadn’t meant for that to come out; that information is a surprise even to me. The Vanguard may have taken the wheel at this point.

“How? You’re rigging up an engine of some kind? You don’t give updates, Jax! This shit matters.”

I shake my head. “No engine.”

A whole new kind of understanding dawns on Maya’s face; it is wide open.

“There is no precedent for what this is. The dust matches nothing we’ve seen. The corner of space it comes from is a star graveyard: There is nothing there. But something about it is . . . familiar. I think maybe . . .” My voice trails off as I feel the haze of Vanguard settle in a little deeper. “Maybe.”

“Well, look, the Triumvirate wants to study it too, but you’re talking about a matter of hours.”

“Study until it’s a threat and then destroy, huh? That’s the name of the game.”

“Jax, if the Barons get ahold of . . .”

“Shh,” I whisper.

“Wha . . .”

“Shh!”

My eyes are closed, purple and green blobs dance across the darkness. I block out Maya’s gnawing impatience, concentrate on whatever it was in the air that just caught my attention. It’s quiet. That’s what it is: It’s quiet. The Rustvine is never quiet. My hands close around the metal legs of my chair, I open my eyes as I stand, swinging the chair over my head. I only catch a momentary glimpse of the dustfucker throng advancing before I hurl the chair with all my strength at Zan. It catches her full in the face, topples her. I grab the bottle of Vanguard and brain the next closest one.

Maya dives forward, out of the fray and out of my sightline, and then they close around me, a throbbing mass of yells and pumping fists. Someone’s chain club finds my cheek and a few more get their hits in as I stumble to the side. They’re easily stumped, though; my fall makes them sloppy with such a quick victory. I catch one with a steel-tipped boot to the ‘nads, and then slip on spilled Vanguard. I roll out of the fray, topple a table, and rise just in time to see three dustfuckers collapse beneath a vicious swatting from Dravish’s metal cane. Each hit is precise and the aging Triumvirate secretary moves easily out of the way from dustfuckers’ haphazard flailing.

I’m tensing to launch into the throng when Dravish stops moving. His cane clatters to the ground and a rusty metal shaft pokes out of his chest.

Zan’s face appears behind Dravish. She’s bleeding from where she caught the chair with her face. “Kill the faggot middling and his Triumvirate bitch friend,” she says into the sudden silence. “And then we take the ‘stroid.”

Dravish sputters, blood speckles his elegant mustache, then he drops. The dustfuckers turn to me. I have the Vanguard in my hand still, and my stupid skirt on. And I’m tipsy. I smash the bottle on the floor and hold up the business end. Two of the bigger guys come swinging forward and then for a millisecond everything goes bright white. A bang so loud I can feel it inside my brain shatters the air around me. I’m ducking when the second one erupts. Zan and another dustfucker lay hemorrhaging in front of me; the others have all scattered for cover.

“C’mon,” Maya says. Smoke rises from the jag piston in her hand. She doesn’t even look fazed.

“You . . .” I stutter.

“Come. The fuck. On.”

I’ve never stopped loving this woman.

• • • •

When we first carved our way onto this asteroid with drill-headed subterranean tanks and dynamite, we didn’t know there were actual canals reaching through the thing. It’d be rock rock rock and then nothing, and the nothing was deep enough to crash a few of our best drillteams. Maybe two dozen dustfuckers got crushed or incinerated before we figured out we could build the outpost along the natural corridors instead of going against them. Now, reinforced steel lines the canal walls and wraps above them, creating wild, windy corridors that dip and circle through the asteroidal bowels. Red dust stains every surface, a mottled, ever growing paint job that no one knows how to keep at bay.

“You have a jag piston,” I say. We’re both panting, working a quick, careful path through the tunnels. The overheads cast grim specters of light, divided by darkness.

“I saved your life.”

“I know, I wasn’t complaining. I’m sorry about Dravish.”

The corridor winds around a sharp curve, becomes dim. We stop and breathe. Maya shakes her head, one arm leaning up against the wall. “Dravish died doing what he loves the most.”

A clamor of boots and angry voices echoes down the corridor. “My room,” I say. “I have a codex. We can get a message out to your people.”

Maya doesn’t follow me, gazes instead down the hallway behind us. “The Chemical Barons have someone down here. They’ve infiltrated the dustfuckers.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised. They’ve gotten so irritable from so much of the same. Makes ‘em easy to rile up. And that fight was more coordinated than I’ve ever seen them.”

“That and the imminent collision with Earth. You could see how they might have a pretty decent gripe. Anyway, Zan was probably in on it, but there’s someone else, too, from what we can tell.”

She’s right. My mind begins cycling through faces, but part of me already knows.

“If the Barons take control of the ‘stroid, they can weaponize it. And then . . . well, game over, so to speak.”

I just shake my head. “It wasn’t enough fucking up Earth? They gotta ruin everything else to?”

Down the corridor, someone screams. “Get him down,” a voice yells. “Get him.” There’s more yelling, another scream, and then the sound of boots stomping gets louder. I imagine Arkex is with them.

Maya pulls the shiny cylinder from her robes, holds it ready.

“How many shots you got in that thing?”

“Not enough.”

We climb a slope, wind around another corner and then I tap a code into a keypad and a section of the wall groans and gives way into darkness. Maya eyes me, then ducks in.

The floor is littered with rumpled clothes and yes, a few bottles. An ashtray — not spilled, though. Not spilled. There’s a desk somewhere beneath all those paper stacks and books.

“Doesn’t this even bother you on the days you wake up as a woman?” Maya says.

I sneer. “Your simplistic ass. I’m even messier on my woman days. Anyway, look.” Wires snake out of a brand new hole in the wall. “He took my codex and the damn mount I charged it with.”

“Who?”

“Arkex. The Chemical Baron’s man underground.”

“How’d he . . .”

By way of an answer, I look at the ruffled sheets on my cot.

Maya shakes her head. “Oh, Jax.”

“Occasionally, I make very reckless decisions.”

“But . . .”

“We don’t have time for you to browbeat me at this moment. They’re sure gonna head straight for my den.”

Maya’s mouth wrestles with a retort but she stays quiet.

“If we go out into the corridor, we’re done.”

“Where then?”

“Up.”

• • • •

For a few minutes, the only sound is our knees and elbows clanging along the corrugated metal air duct and me panting and wheezing. Then we stop, and when I catch my breath, I light a Garafuna. Maya just rolls her eyes.

“I know,” I say. “And I’m not interested.”

“You don’t think they’ll smell it? They’re already probably crawling through these pipes trying to get to us.”

I shake my head, take a drag in a nonchalant kind of way that I’m sure drives Maya up the wall. “They don’t know I have an entranceway through my room. They’re scouring the corridors, and there’s plenty for them to scour.”

“Well, then, what now?”

I point down. “The hangar’s right below us. They’re going to check it. Then we put you on your ship and send you on your way.”

“You’re not . . .”

Far away, someone yells. A metal clanging echoes its way through the vast open space beneath us. We wait. Nothing happens. We wait.

• • • •

“Do they care here?” We have our backs against opposite sides of the duct; our bent knees form an M shape in the middle of the passageway.

I give her a look. I know what she means but I want her to say it.

“About . . . you know . . .”

“Of course.” I relent. I don’t have it in me to play games with people’s discomfort after all. “They’re quieter about it than they were at the Academy, of course, but only because I’m in charge here. And they don’t try to study me here like they did there, no more pee samples and blood draws. Here they just glare and mutter. I shut things down quick with a few nasty scuffles at the Rustvine and everyone got into place.”

“You always were quick to clobber a fool that stepped out of line.”

I shrug, look away. “Survival.”

Maya stares at me. I feel that glare burning into my cheek like laser beams and I think maybe, maybe, she kind of understands. So I look at her. Those eyes have gone wide again; they want something. Her lips are slightly parted, those round cheeks illuminated by the dim light strips along the duct. Framed by her robes and the Triumvirate crown, Maya’s face looks like the moon. I realize how long it’s been since I’ve breathed fresh air, felt the embrace of the night instead of the air conditioners and vent systems.

“More than a year,” I say.

“What?”

“Been on this thing.”

“Ah.”

“Your face.”

“What about it?”

“Reminds me of the moon.”

I’ve never said anything like that to Maya. I don’t say things like that. I think them. Sometimes, on nights drenched in Vanguard and the loneliness of the life on an asteroid, I write them on sprawling messages on my codex, put her communique address in the To field and let my finger hover over the Send button. Then I delete them and troll whatever porn the dustfuckers are posting till I pass out.

Maya doesn’t smile, doesn’t even move, and my stomach clenches. I don’t look away though, a tiny victory over my usual chickenshittedness. She doesn’t look away either. Is there a move I’m supposed to make? It’s easy with the others; they come to me. I turn them away or I don’t. With Maya, all my move-making information always seems to get lost between my two bodies: out of reach. For all our intimacy, she never reveals what she has a taste for. Maybe nothing. I’ve forgotten, for a moment, what I woke up as today. In the chaos it ceased to matter, or maybe it’s being with Maya that has rendered it irrelevant. Maybe, but no: Then it comes crashing back down and I’m neither-nor and woefully not enough and anyway.

And anyway, I feel filthy. Filthy from the dust of a year of asteroid life. Filthy from Arkex and Delmond, Catinflax and Sastra. Filthy from all these cheap nights with heartless fucks I barely bothered staying awake for and then gleefully booted before dawn. Looking back, they become a blur: Some were men, some the rare female dustfucker. Sometimes I was a man, sometimes a woman. I topped and bottomed, sighed, grunted, cursed, came. And still I am empty.

Maya reaches out her hand, palm out. I put mine against it. According to Jax’s third rule of booty-getting, if I close my fingers, the culminating momentum will peak and the sudden burst of energy will propel us both forward into a tangled embrace, layers will slide off easily, like all along our bodies had been begging to be naked together, and together we will float slightly above the corrugated steel as our belts and boots dance through the air away from us. My fingers will find their way inside her, and hers inside me and I will hear the asteroid breathing like it does when it’s very quiet, late at night.

I don’t close my fingers, though; I close my eyes. I hear her long breaths, they let me know she’s in this moment, too: Her heart beats through her palm. Beneath that I hear something else: the asteroid breathing like it does when it’s very quiet, late at night.

And then, just like that, Maya’s breathing falls away and there is only the asteroid, and our breath is one. I keep my eyes closed, because if I think too hard, if I allow the rest of the world in, everything will shatter. Our breath is one and I let the tiny prayer erupt from me, swerve, but this time, instead of another breath, there is a tremor.

Somewhere far, far away, Maya says, “What was that?”

Swerve.

The world trembles, a lover on the brink. Swerve. Not pleading this time, a command. Another shiver erupts. Maya yells but me, I’m smiling. I exhale, the asteroid exhales with me. Because inside me, there is dust, it coats my lungs, my heart, it heeds me, and inside the asteroid, there is me, tiny, complex, and alive with desire. We breathe as one.

“Jax.” Maya’s eyes don’t ask for anything now. They’re wide, yes, but not with pleading. Her jag piston glares out at me from her robes.

I cock my head to the side, frown. “You never came to negotiate.”

“No.”

“The sitdown was a ruse.”

“Well, I did want to speak to you.”

One of my eyebrows goes up; the skeptical one. I can’t help it.

“But I knew you wouldn’t listen.”

“The Triumvirate has given up on the asteroid.”

“Long ago. I’m the only thing keeping them from blowing it, and you’re the only thing keeping me from keeping them from blowing it.”

“I’ll be that.”

“Jax, you’re coming off this thing with me. And we’re sending a transport for the dustfuckers. If the Chemical Barons get a hold of it . . .”

“They won’t.”

“They were a bar fight away from doing it just now. And if you can’t divert the thing before it hits earth.”

“Come.”

“Jax. What just happened?”

“Come with me, I’ll show you.”

Maya doesn’t lower the gun but ever so slightly her face relaxes. Tears slide down the round cheeks, her jawline, her neck. Instead of kissing them away, I stand, smile, help her up.

I’m sure I’m glowing. Or maybe it’s the dust that covers my body, the dust that marks places on Maya’s body I have touched.

• • • •

She removes the paneling and climbs down a ladder into the hangar. More yelling erupts from somewhere, not far away; I can’t tell if it’s celebration or anger. I don’t care. The hangar dwarfs everything; we are two tiny specks crossing beneath its cavernous void, darting between the landing gear of dust-covered transporters and armored drilldozer wheels to the Triumvirate’s sleek star glider. It’s already slightly reddened from its brief stay here. In the small cockpit, she turns to me and is about to speak when a codex crackles to life right beside us. “Triumvirate Station Seven-five to Harpsbringer, copy.”

Maya’s jag piston is already out and directed at the cockpit storage closet when the door swings slowly open.

I roll my eyes. “Don’t shoot him.”

Arkex is crying, cradling the codex, hemmed in by tubes and wires like some pathetic saint in a box. “I . . . I . . . Last night wasn’t just about this,” he gurgles. “I’m sorry.”

“What did they give you?” I ask.

“They promised they’d get me offa here. Said we’d crash into Earth if I didn’t.”

“Triumvirate Station Seven-five to Harpsbringer, do you copy?” the codex crackles. “We have an urgent message. Do you copy Harpsbringer?”

I put out my hand and Arkex gives me the codex.

“This is Harpsbringer.”

“Be advised, your course has changed, Harpsbringer. Repeat, your course has changed. New coordinates take you outside of the Earth’s gravitational pull.” In the background, I hear celebrating. Cheers go up around the ship. Arkex has tears streaming down his face.

Maya just shakes her head. I give Arkex the fuck-off look and he stumbles off the ship in a hurry. I’ll deal with what needs to be dealt with later. “So,” Maya says.

“So.”

“Don’t look so pleased with yourself. Whatever you did, the Barons are still gonna be throwing whatever they got at this thing to get it on their side.”

“Good thing I have friends in powerful places with lots of spaceships and fancy guns.”

“We’ll see about that.”

Then we pause and the moment becomes thick between us, I breathe deep, the asteroid breathes with me and I let the moment slide away, because there will be another, better one in the not too distant future. Right now, though, right now the galaxy around us has just let out an enormous cheer all at the same time, like a breath released in perfect synchronicity, as one.

© 2014 by Daniel José Older.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Daniel José Older is the author of the upcoming young adult novel Shadowshaper (Arthur A. Levine Books, 2015) and the Bone Street Rumba urban fantasy series, which begins in January 2015 with Half Resurrection Blues from Penguin’s Roc imprint. Publishers Weekly hailed him as a “rising star of the genre” after the publication of his debut ghost noir collection, Salsa Nocturna. He co-edited the anthology Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History and guest edited the music issue of Crossed Genres. His short stories and essays have appeared in Tor.com, Salon, BuzzFeed, New Haven Review, PANK, Apex, and Strange Horizons and the anthologies Subversion and Mothership: Tales of Afrofuturism and Beyond. Daniel’s band Ghost Star gigs regularly around New York, and he facilitates workshops on storytelling from an anti-oppressive power analysis. You can find his thoughts on writing, read dispatches from his decade-long career as an NYC paramedic, and hear his music at ghoststar.net and @djolder on Twitter.

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

Scarey Rose in Deep History

Rebecca Ore

“History should not be ancestor worship,” Sarey Rose told them as she brought in the last of the time-viewer components and began to calculate how to form the microgates big enough for past light. Her hair was bound up for work. Whether or not she approved of the target, she was working.

“We need to see our ancestors as people,” Peter said. Wearing his family reunion T-shirt, he sat down in one of the reproduction chairs in the plantation house. Mulatto wasn’t a word that was used much these days, but Peter was significantly mulatto. His great-grandfather had owned his great-grandmother. The modern day family reunions included both sets of kin. So liberal, Sarey Rose thought, and such a neat way to avoid poor white trash. Now, he and his white half-kin had finagled use of the time-viewer to get back to the primal event. “After all, we’re all from here. And we’re pretty typical.”

“Who is this us?” Sarey Rose said. “I’m one of those people whose promised land was always the future. When the old regime fell, we rose like rockets. Typical wasn’t planters and their children.”

“But you are in on this project.”

“I would have rather taken a look at Tom Paine or Heisenberg.”

Sarey Rose thought that using the time-viewer for Deep River wasted both her time and the money invested in the equipment. But the engineering department needed the history department to get funding, so here it was. Sarey thought that the history department, along with all other liberal arts departments, provided a refuge for upper-class twits who couldn’t master calculus and feared computers.

Peter said, “The only way we can really escape the past is to understand it.”

Martha, a brown-haired woman who always wore either suits or paint-stained jeans, came in and scowled. Probably she hated the two of them talking about “her” project when she wasn’t around. Martha also seemed surprised each time she saw Sarey Rose, the way a cat periodically seems surprised to realize that its human companion is a very large animal. Sarey Rose knew that if she’d been homely, in glasses, Martha would have been happier. Her image of Sarey didn’t fit the unruly reality. Scary Rose, the boys in high school used to call her, the girl who should have left the technology to them. Only ugly girls needed high-tech skills to compensate, the son of the high school science teacher told her. Two weeks later, Sarey blew up the toilets in the teachers’ bathroom. The principal couldn’t believe that a girl did it. Sarey’s classmates knew better.

About three decades earlier, Martha’s father finished his Ph.D. in classics on the last money from plantation acreage and never came back. Martha said, “Rose, are we ready?”

“Tractor beams holding the past, ready to beam up March 12, 1853, Captain.”

“Rose, I know that tractor beams are physically impossible.”

“Last week, then, were you being awful polite about my techno-babble?” But now Martha pretended she’d never fallen for the gobbledygook explanation. Sarey thought she’d omit asking Martha if she’d known better when she’d nodded sagely last week. No point in goading a High Wasp Queen. Oh, plenty of point, but after a while, the glaze of politeness and double-speak made a woman feel like she was walking in molasses.

Peter said, “We’re going to focus on the main bedroom, my great-grand-mother’s cabin, and the front parlor. We all know what went on.”

Sarey Rose said, “I doubt it was all as neat as the family legends say. I’d like another two sites.”

Martha said, “You’re not an historian.”

“My people have their traditions, too.”

Peter said, “I thought you didn’t care about your own past?”

“I don’t care, personally, but if you are trying to get a picture of this time, we need other sites besides two plantation rooms and a slave cabin. I know enough history to know that!”

Peter said, “Wouldn’t it be okay to start with these, then find two more sites based on what we hear from our first three sites?”

Martha looked like she wanted to argue, but her white liberalness forced her to nod to her second-half-cousin-several-times-removed. Sarey wondered if Peter’s great-grandmother got fucked by her owner because she was equally too diplomatic.

Individual glass fibers penetrated to three spaces in March 12, 1853. Screen one in the parlor cleared, showing a black woman dusting the mantel with a feather duster. On screen two, Sarey saw the newer version of one of the big beds in the present-day restored plantation house. Then the slave hut appeared. It looked rather good for a slave hut, containing a wooden dresser with a tortoise shell brush and a necklace of turquoise beads on it. Martha said, “He gave her my great-grandmother’s beads, but we must have gotten them back.”

Peter didn’t speak, just moved closer to the screen, looking at the cabin’s wood floor, two silk dresses, one purple, the other bright yellow, hanging from wall pegs, the bedstead with a feather bed and woven rope mattress support. “Bed cords! We’d always heard she tried to put him off. That he forced her.”

Sarey Rose sighed. “Now, we need a fourth site.”

“Do you have the capacity?” Martha asked.

“We can go in next door for a quick look around, then re-site to one of the main targets. Another slave cabin would give us a comparison.”

“If you can do it quickly,” Martha said.

Sarey Rose pulled from the master bedroom into another slave cabin. The floor there was dirt, the bed a lumpy mattress like a giant pillow on a rough wicker frame, rather like Iroquois beds.

Peter said, “Shit! She sure did have it better.”

Sarey Rose said, “Maybe he was bribing her not to poison him in his sleep?” She looked back at Peter’s ancestral cabin.

Martha said again, “She’s got my great-grandmother’s beads.”

Sarey Rose leaned back and said, “Do you want to know all the way, or should I find us other places that would be less emotionally stressful to view?” Knowing the high WASPs and their kin as she did, Sarey figured that saying that would lock them here. She hoped their eyeballs would blister. In a metaphorical way.

On the parlor screen, the woman dusting looked up as a white woman in her forties came into the room. The picture was somewhat grainy. Sarey Rose wanted to reach in and touch the feathers, the ashes, the crocheted bedcover — linen, cotton? Inquiring primate fingers wanted to know.

“What would it look like without the computer enhancement?” Martha asked.

Sarey said, “We have a tiny fan of optic fibers that moves. We’re copying the raw data stream, but the computer is enhancing the screens. If we saw a zebra, we might get a horse, but then we never see completely what’s out there, anyway. The brain always interprets. The resolution should pick up as the program picks up new data.” She put the master bedroom back on the third screen.

In 1853, the white woman spoke to the black woman. The computer threw up a small window in clearer pixels of Martha’s great-great-grandmother.

“Could she be anyone else?” Martha asked.

“She’s acting like she owns the other woman,” Sarey Rose said. She keyed the computer to provisionally accept the earlier scan of a photo of the white woman. The image sharpened.

Then the black woman became clearer.

“What happened?” Martha asked.

“The machine learned how to see them,” Sarey said.

“She looks like an aunt of mine,” Peter said.

Sarey Rose leaned back, wishing they could hear back to 1853, but sound waves were too big to pass though the tiny gates. The white woman left the room. The black woman crossed her eyes, shook the duster hard, really banging it against the hearth. She seemed to be giggling. Then she brushed her face with the feather duster, leaving nothing on the skin, then there was a faint whitening as the computer figured out that the data the quivering glass fibers fed it wasn’t noise.

“So she looks like she’s been working,” Peter explained.

In the master bedroom, the white woman lay across her bed, one hand over her eyes. The black woman disappeared from the downstairs parlor, reappeared at the bedroom door. The computer sharpened the images as Sarey keyed in that the women in this scene were the same as the women in the parlor screen.

Martha said, “We’ll have a lip reader check this, but I think that the black woman . . .”

“Alice,” Peter said.

“. . . is asking the white woman, my ancestor Ann, if she’d free her.”

Sarey Rose said, “Will she free her?”

“Well, the war . . .”

“No, Alice is asking if Ann will free her. Did your ancestor leave a will freeing his slaves?”

Martha said, “No.”

Sarey Rose said, “So he lied.”

Martha said, “How can you infer that from such a tentative question?”

Peter said, “We always heard that the master promised to free Alice and his children with her, but the mistress crossed him.”

Martha said, “My family knew that manumitted slaves had terrible lives, so we kept them, never sold them, buried them in the family cemetery.”

“Your people sold one,” Peter said, before Sarey could.

“Your people hated him. We sold him to make your people happy.”

“I’d like to remind everyone that family traditions are unreliable historical sources unless verified by corroborating evidence, like a manuscript will, court records, letters with good provenance . . .”

“Thank you, Sarey Rose,” Martha said. “I know that. That’s why we’re looking.”

A man came in to the parlor downstairs. The computer sketched him in. Sarey Rose thought that he must be the master of the house. He wore riding boots, and gloves that the computer, after some dithering, painted with marks made by reins. Sarey Rose called up a photo of the house’s founder. The computer tried those features, but threw a query: IS TINT ABSOLUTE?

Sarey typed: NO.

The computer jiggled the man’s features and came up with slightly wider cheekbones and nose than the photo showed, darker skin. Sarey said, “We always said the old man didn’t look pure white. What were your family traditions on that, Martha?”

“We’re not racist,” Martha said.

“Hey, I’m not either,” Sarey Rose said. “But I always wondered why your people just showed up about 1809 without any big lies about your Tidewater kin and their English lord kin.”

Martha said, “If you’re having trouble with that, it’s your own bigotry that’s showing.”

Peter didn’t answer. He was staring at the man who disappeared. Then, in the time it took to walk the hall and go up the staircase to the big upstairs room, he came into the bedroom. The two women froze, cringing, Sarey Rose would guess. Ann spoke. The angle of her face made lip reading impossible. Did you really promise to free this bitch? Can we sell her? If you can have a slave lover, can you buy me a nice white-looking likely boy? Was she saying something like that? They could never know for sure. Sarey Rose said, “Even if we could get something as big as a sound wave through a micro wormhole, we’d still never know what they were thinking.”

“Flint could have been a Cherokee name,” Martha said. “We thought it was just his nickname.”

Flint seemed amused. He spoke. The black woman left the room. The white woman sat on the bed, not looking at him. He took her by the chin. Again, no way to tell what he said. You’re the mother of my children, but she is, too, so try to get along? You’re my white bride who’ll make our children look even more proper? Without you and your family connections, someone might wonder about me? Men prosper the more they get laid, so get over it, bitch?

Ann turned her face. The lips seemed to say, So, you just tell her that to keep her happy.

Flint nodded.

Men, Ann’s lips said.

He must have asked her what she wanted, because Ann seemed to say, a diamond brooch.

Flint grunted and sat down. The black woman came back with a glass full of clear liquid. Flint sat down in a chair and let the black woman pull his boots off. Ann sat on the bed staring out the window.

Flint smiled at both of them.

Peter said, “Her name was Alice. He lied to her, didn’t he? Son-of-a bitch wasn’t even pure white.”

Martha said, “Cherokee women wouldn’t have let one of their men get away with adultery without him getting mobbed by his wife’s clanswomen. If he were part Cherokee, having access to more than one woman must have been male heaven.”

Sarey Rose said, “You’re not surprised that he looks like this?”

“We’ve wondered. One of the photos we have of him looks like it was re-touched. A tintype. When we did a book on the family, we reproduced a copy of the tintype. But, no, I’m not real surprised. Again, I’m not bigoted, am I, Cousin Peter.”

Peter said, “Could this be a history that doesn’t lead to ours?”

“We can theorize alternative histories. We can’t theorize a way to get to them,” Sarey Rose said. She wondered if she was a bigot. So some nonAnglo — octoroon, mestizo — slipped across the Virginia color bar before it became so rigid. Did it matter? Even in the most moralistic of times, the 1950s, ten percent of all married women gave their husbands other men’s children.

“Just leave it on to record,” Martha said. “Or do you have to constantly monitor it?”

Sarey Rose wondered if Martha thought that she massaged the data to get images she liked. “I can leave it on. The computer has samples of the family photographs.”

“Was your kinsman working for us at this time?” Martha asked.

Sarey Rose said, “All we know is, your kin tried to pay him in slaves and he refused.”

Martha said, “We don’t know what that meant.”

“In 1853, it could have meant anything,” Peter said.

“What did they do with the children?” Sarey Rose asked.

“Half of them died before ten,” Martha said.

Sarey Rose thought about all the dead children on all the sides. She sighed, and set up the machine to continue recording. When she moved to turn off the display terminals, Martha reached for her hand.

“No,” Peter said. “We want to watch it.”

Martha said, “You can go now, Sarey Rose.” High WASP whip in the voice, now.

• • • •

Sarey Rose knew what they’d ask her: Was the machine interpreting correctly, was she interfering with the images? The machine wouldn’t make chimpanzees when the shapes were closer to people, had fifteen gradations of skin color to work with, and with only five minutes of scan at ten feet would be within one-sixteenth of an inch of true facial contours. Would use the reconstructed house to model the past light streams.

The man in the house last night looked mulatto to her. If a man were rich enough, did his face look whiter to his neighbors?

Neither Martha nor Peter looked at her as she came into the office. The master slept with his slave on her special bed. The mistress of the house faced a black man in the parlor who lacked the owned deference Sarey would have expected.

“Rose, we can’t identify this man.”

“I don’t know your slaves,” Sarey Rose said.

“He’s not acting like a slave,” Peter said.

“Maybe your ancestor wasn’t interested in taking unruly slaves?” Martha said.

“Did you watch last night?” Sarey Rose said.

“We did,” Peter said. “We’d appreciate it if you didn’t review the recordings.”

Sarey Rose looked at them both. Whatever the sex had been like, both of these people couldn’t get to sleep after what they saw. She decided to leave them and the recordings alone for a while. “So what did you learn?”

Peter said, “He sure didn’t force her.”

Martha said, “I think he loves her.”

“Then, who is the guy in the parlor?” Sarey Rose asked. “Her dad?”

“We didn’t sell anyone after we sold Esau,” Martha said. “Ann brought the slaves to the marriage, but they like Flint better than they like her.”

Sarey Rose realized that they’d been slipping into talking about the ancestors in contemporary terms: your people, we, you. “Esau got sold over 180 years ago. Don’t you think we ought to have gotten over it by now?”

Peter said, “I always wondered how he felt about being sold, rejected by his own people.”

“Hell, Peter, if he got lucky, he ended up owned by a guy in Tennessee who collected rascally niggers. He’d buy rascally ones because they were bright, let them teach each other how to read because he thought blacks were apter than whites at that, and then turn them loose to run his farm while he took a percentage.”

Martha said, “I’ve read that passage in Frederick Law Olmsted, too. It’s unlikely a slave sold in this part of Virginia would end up in Tennessee.”

“I said if he got lucky.” Sarey Rose found Olmsted’s account fascinating. She’d rather be investigating that farm than this one. What was it like to have been a bright slave with such a master? You take what you can get, her grandfather said from his cane rocking chair back in her memories. Psychologically, the South trapped one in a Klein bottle, some topological psychological distortion that flung everyone, including those who’d merely moved South, back into the past just when they felt they’d finally moved into the future.

Was the South still looking, as Olmsted had described it over a hundred years ago, for the right highway, the newest relocated factory with imported management? Bring in outsiders rather than surrender power to the uppity white trash or the blacks.

In 1853, the black man left Ann in the parlor, went out, came back with a white man who took off his hat and looked at Ann. You okay? I’m sorry you’ve got such a sorry husband. Sarey Rose said, “My ancestor. Old Joe. We didn’t get any photos of him until the 1870s, but it looks pretty much like him.”

The black man looked from Ann to Joe, said, perhaps, I’ll tell the master the overseer is here. Can’t do to stay in here with the lady, Mr. Overseer.

Joe bobbed his head and stayed, holding his hat in both hands in front of him, covering his groin. Sarey wondered if the pose was arbitrary or by design, to hide an erection.

Ann got up from the sofa. Joe spoke, You’ve been crying, Miss Ann.

He can fuck her, but if I even speak to a man, the slaves tattle on me.

Was that really what she said? Sarey Rose looked at Martha and Peter.

Joe put his right hand on her shoulder. She flinched, turned her head toward the door.

The black man showed Flint in. Flint spoke. The overseer cringed, looked at the black man. The black man seemed unusually calm and didn’t lower his eyes to the overseer.

The overseer might have said, Who were your people back to the east? Who were your people before you came here?

Then they turned slightly, nodding at each other, Joe nodding at the black man, who nodded back, just not as deep a nod as Joe’d given him.

Ann went to the bedroom, crawled back into the bed, and began to masturbate under the covers, her face muscles clenched in a grimace. “Can you blank the screen, for God’s sake!” Martha said.

Sarey Rose said, “Didn’t know those lily-white slaver women did such things.” But she blanked the screen.

Peter said, “Always heard that the mistress made old Flint mean. Shit.”

Sarey Rose said, “She seems fond of the overseer.”

“At the end of the year, she dies, you know. Brain congestion.”

Sarey Rose said, “After she had your great-grandfather, right?”

Martha said, “He was raised on a black woman’s tit. Took care of her after the war.”

Peter said, “We don’t recall that. After the war, Flint’s son sold us land enough to farm. We paid him for it in work and cash. Maybe that was ‘doing for us,’ but the deal cost us same as he charged other folks. Man needed help, niggers needed land.”

Sarey Rose said, “We can skip forward in time, unless you want to watch the whole fucking year.”

“It’s the story of us all,” Martha said.

“Not my story,” Sarey Rose told her. “I didn’t have a history before 1937, when my daddy got to go to college thanks to Mr. Roosevelt.”

• • • •

Two months later in 1853, and a day later in the present, Sarey Rose watched her ancestor on a poster bed with Ann. Daytime — all the blacks should be in the fields or working in the kitchen.

“Well, who said they didn’t lie?” Sarey Rose said. Martha and Peter walked out of the room. Sarey sat watching the now-dead woman sobbing in the overseer’s arms. He doesn’t understand me. He loves that bitch he owns, not me.

The overseer seemed nervous. Sarey knew he didn’t get killed for this. He ran off, joined some rag-tail deserters’ camp in Floyd County, came slinking back after Flint was dead and his son in charge of things. “Are they quite through?” Martha asked from the other room.

“Jeez, he’s my ancestor. Is getting fucked by the overseer so shameful? After all, your great-whatever-removed-granddaddy liked black meat.”

Peter said, “Are they dressed yet?”

“No, she’s having a hissy fit in his arms. Those times weren’t fair for white women and black men.”

“White women like Ann didn’t have to lift a finger.”

“Dumber than their cooks and weavers, the poor stupid bitches,” Sarey said. “Taught, maybe, how to play the piano and draw some, but never well enough to work.” Her ancestresses back in 1853 worked on looms and sewed, just as her cousins did these days, only these days, they programmed computers to lift the threads and cut the cloth.

“Look, just tell me when they’re dressed,” Martha said.

The black slave woman wasn’t in her gaudy cabin, gone with the master on business, but the old male slave came in with another young black woman, carrying cooked food from the outdoor kitchen to Miz Ann at dinner time. The old slave looked at Ann and the unmade bed, turned and went away. The second young black woman put a tray on Ann’s bedside table, sniffed the air, and stood waiting.

“Could you add the dining room?” Peter asked.

“Yes, they’ll be eating in the dining room when Flint comes back,” Martha said. “The interactions would be interesting.”

Sarey Rose wondered if they’d decided to forget what had just happened, what had happened in 1853. The two families, owners and owned, had managed to forget it the first time, why not the second time? Southern women never minded that their menfolk kept black mistresses, because those women weren’t a real threat to the marriage. Southern men did this because they lived in a matriarchal society. Right? As though any matriarchal society let its men believe that not having orgasms would make males sick.

“I can get the dining room online sometime next week if the engineering department has more glass fiber the right size,” Sarey Rose said.

• • • •

Dining room, bedroom, parlor, slave cabin. A quartet in two centuries, Sarey Rose thought as she brought up the screens on July 31, 1853.

How long could Ann and Joe meet without Flint killing one or the other of them? Sarey Rose decided Flint had killed Ann. She was pregnant, nervous.

In the slave concubine’s cabin, Flint met with his slaves. Mistress ain’t faithful. She’s gonna bring you a poor white-trash baby.

Joe disappeared, a man who knew when to run. Sarey Rose taped the next several weeks, running the tapes fast to see if Joe reappeared.

Ann swelled. The black mistress swelled. At dinner, September 14, 1853, Flint looked from the black woman’s belly to his wife’s, his fingers moving to the count of nine.

Martha said, “Oh, shit.” Sarey had forgotten she was there. Peter left them alone most of the time now, wondering perhaps if he was the true heir to the estate, not Martha, the descendant of a poor white-trash overseer who helped run a pro-Union deserters’ camp, and who came back only when the man he’d cuckolded was dead.

Sarey remembered her great-grandfather saying, “The Southern men died in the War for pure meanness.”

And the local black schoolmaster, a former slave, chose Sarey’s grandfather to be his lord back in the 1920s. Every black man needed a lord in those Klan-addled days, and what better choice than a Lincoln Republican?

Ann twisted her wedding band, ate, twisted her wedding band, ate.

The concubine spoke to Flint, saying, perhaps, I’m a truer woman than she is. Now you gonna let me free?

Perhaps Flint didn’t quite believe that Ann carried another man’s baby. White women didn’t like sex. All men needed it to prevent illness. That white man’s burden, sperm. Old Flint purged his system every chance he got, stayed healthy.

Sarey Rose wondered if Martha believed that herself, if that’s what made her so tolerant of Peter, or if, as a historian, she accepted the foibles of study cultures.

Ann said something that might have been, But I loved you. You could have loved me.

Flint looked up at her sharply and spoke. I married you, provided for you. Even if you brought slaves to the marriage as a dowry, you needed me more than I needed you. Slaves don’t work for women the way they work for a man.

The slave concubine must have spoken. Her back was to the optical pick-ups. Flint seemed contrite. He might have said, Sorry. The pregnant slave woman left the room. Ann picked at her food. Flint shoved his into his mouth, cutting his meat with a clasp knife he pulled from his pocket.

Sarey Rose said, out loud, “We never owned slaves. Never.”

Martha said, “But they wouldn’t work for women.”

“You read that the same way I did?” Sarey asked.

“Yeah. I talked to someone in linguistics. We could do a program that would give us best approximation, see the several choices.”

“We’re recording.”

“But . . .”

“We’re only getting an approximation of the light patterns as is. I don’t know if a lip-reading program operating on real time would help the visual recognition program or cause feedback distortions.”

“But we both read that.”

“We’ve got more context than a lip-reading program would have, too. If we’d decided that Flint was perfectly white, he’d be looking perfectly white on the screen now. I’d have corrected once, the computer would have assumed it was in error if it came up with darker than white values for his skin.”

Martha said, “I want to hear them.”

“You can’t. Soundwaves are too big.”

“We’re not even really seeing them.”

“Close enough. Maybe she’s smiling, not grimacing.”

Martha said, “And your ancestor disappeared like a coward.”

“Should he have died for her? The law then was on Flint’s side.”

“Couldn’t he have taken her away?”

“We don’t know that Joe didn’t ask. We don’t know . . .”

Martha interrupted. “Was he married?”

“I never heard of a wife before the war,” Sarey Rose said, resenting the interrogation. “But maybe Ann was too big a snob to marry him, even though she would sleep with him.”

“She cared for him more than that,” Martha said.

“Only definite ancestor in the mix you’ve got left, isn’t she?” Sarey Rose said. Lip-reading program, shit, she realized she didn’t want to install it now, coordinate it with the visual recognition program. Bitch of time to do it.

At the table in the past, the two people ate in silence. Flint’s mistress left the room and a second female slave brought in a dish of stewed apples.

Sarey Rose said, “At least, he’s considerate of one of them.”

• • • •

Brain congestion — Sarey Rose remembered brain swelling was often a side effect of a failed strangulation.

• • • •

In one month, the half-white baby was born from a squatting woman, caught by an older black woman. In the next month, the white baby came down onto boiled and dried scrap sheets on the bed in the master bedroom. The same black woman caught the baby. In the future, the observers came in, stared, left, came back, stared, went without talking. Flint came in to see both sons, held both of them. Peter said, “There have been worse fathers.”

Sarey Rose heard that as a rebuke to her ancestor.

Martha spent less time on site, took recordings of the raw data as though a different computer and screens might show her a past she approved of more. She wore jeans more often, seemed more casual about her hair.

Perhaps, Sarey Rose thought, Martha has decided to succumb to her technologically discovered white-trash roots. Sarey took a day off and bought a suit. When she came back, Peter said, “Joe’s back.” Martha was watching the screen in the master bedroom as though she wanted to turn into photons heading pastward.

“Back?” Sarey Rose wondered if the people in the rooms they watched ever noticed the future light — too small to be more than sparkles in a black room, something that could be explained away as an eye twitch. But the human eye could catch a photon.

Joe sat on the bed, talking desperately to Ann, leaning on one arm. His body bobbed closer, then moved back, over and over, like a rocking toy. The baby lay in her arms, looking at the stranger.

Ann’s lips moved. No, he’s being decent about it. But then he’s got another son down in the quarters.

“We haven’t picked up Flint all day. I scanned today’s tapes when I came in and saw this,” Martha said.

The overseer bent over Ann then, grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. The baby began squalling. Joe picked up the baby. According to the lip-reading program, he said, I’m taking my son then.

“It was his first child,” Sarey Rose said. She expected that Flint would burst into the room at any second, but he didn’t, wasn’t around to hear the baby squalling. His black mistress and the man who appeared to be her father came into the room and took the baby from Joe. Ann must have said, Get out, because they left then.

Ann argued with Joe. Joe grabbed her. By the neck. The two past people writhed on the screen, Ann’s legs flailing out from her bedclothes.

Sarey Rose wanted to run, but she watched on, aware of the others breathing in a rhythm different from her own shallow breaths. They looked at her once, quick stab of eyes. My white-trash ancestor.

Then the older black man came back, stood in the doorway. Spoke. You’ve done her enough damage.

Joe loosened his hands, said something that seemed like, You gonna tell your owner? Ann lolled back on the bed, gasping. “She’s still alive,” Martha said.

Sarey Rose knew that strangling didn’t kill necessarily at once. The violent fluctuation in brain blood pressure did damage.

Then the slave concubine came up without the baby, with towels and water. She and her father let Joe go.

Martha said, “So are they going to kill her?”

“She dies in a day or two,” Peter said.

“Aftermath of his choking her, throwing her about,” Sarey Rose said.

The slaves seemed familiar with the concept. The woman looked at Ann, who was still gasping as though the air had clotted in her windpipe. Her father spoke. She left and came back with wet towels and rice powder.

Ann tried to fight the black woman as she washed Ann’s throat bruises and lay down a dusting of powder over Joe’s nail marks. Martha said, “I’ve got to consult a physician.”

Peter said, “She’s not hurting Ann further. She’s just trying to disguise what happened.”

Sarey Rose said, “Maybe Joe was fucking all Flint’s women.”

“God, that’s ugly,” Martha said.

Sarey had known how ugly she’d been before the sentence left the air. But then maybe the slave woman thought it’d have a better chance of getting freed if Miz Ann was dead. How many slave concubines had the hope that the master would free them for bearing his children? What proportion of slaves who bore their masters’ children did get freed? It must have happened just enough to make the dream a common hope. Or maybe just being treated better was enough.

Whatever, Miz Ann wouldn’t run off to the mountains with her white-trash lover. And, like so many contemporary uneducated white-trash men, Joe killed his lover when he couldn’t have her the way he wanted to have her. “Uneducated,” Sarey said out loud.

“What?” Peter said.

“I’ve got a distant kinsman who killed his ex. White trash still do that when they’re dumb and uneducated.”

“Kill their lovers?” Martha said.

“So now we know about the past,” Sarey Rose said. “It was stupid.”

“We weren’t just malleable work folk,” Peter said. “We had our own agendas.”

“Bunch of uneducated wishful thinkers, all of them,” Sarey Rose said.

Martha said, “So Flint came home just in time to bury her. Her mother comes tomorrow to see her, but everyone wants to cover up why the overseer was in her bedroom. Her people were better than Flint, even.”

“But you’re half my kin,” Sarey said. “Do we need to watch through the end?”

Martha looked at Peter. He said, “We’d prefer that you don’t.”

Sarey Rose walked out. She’d been excluded again. Not by blood links this time, but by her own rudeness. She put her hands in the pockets of her new jacket, feeling overdressed and lumpish.

She sat down under the ancient catalpa tree and leaned her head back against it and told herself she was good at what she did. Told herself over and over.

And the Civil War came, and Joe hid out in a deserters’ camp and came back when it was over, and the ex-slaves wouldn’t let him on the property, and Ann’s son went away forever and Joe married, and the lineage spread up to Sarey Rose and Martha, and the past twisted them in knots. How many layers of ancestor, of family lies?

Sarey Rose thought, Someday, we’ve got to forget it all. Because we can’t really know.

In the parking lot of the restored plantation house, two kids traded off on a portable computer linked to the rest of the modern world by modem, sending, reading, giggling, pushing the laptop at each other. Sarey Rose wondered if anyone in the future cared enough about the dead to watch them.

© 1997 by Rebecca Ore.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rebecca Ore is the pseudonym of science fiction writer Rebecca B. Brown. She was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1948. In 1968 she moved to New York and attended Columbia University. Rebecca Ore is known for the Becoming Alien series and her short stories. Her novel, Time’s Child, was published by Eos in February 2007. Centuries Ago and Very Fast, described as a “collection of linked stories” was published by Aqueduct Press in April 2009.

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

Jupiter Wrestlerama

Marie Vibbert

Two-Ton Tony had a hard body, and though Karen knew the facts of life cold and backward by the time she got her chance to push him against a wall, she’d never had anything so sweet. Biceps like boulders, arms to swing on and hips to ride: a body like a playground. She’d held on to him and never quite believed her luck that he let her. Artificial gravity made most station folk skinny, flabby, or flabby and skinny, but Tony had worked on his body all his life, stealing and cheating extra rations wherever he could, lifting whatever heavy objects ended up near him, doing push-ups with conveyor gears on his back. His body was his big accomplishment in life, his ticket out.

Now Karen stood at the entry to C-stairwell, on her way to work, and saw that body still and crooked at the base of the stairs.

“Oh god, Kay!” One of her neighbors stepped in front of her, blocking the view, and tried to push her back from the crowd. She shook the hands off. Another pair landed in their place. Living on a space station meant always having someone in touching distance. The cops arrived and pushed back the people in the stairwell, which pushed Karen back further. She collapsed against the bulkhead that led into her and Tony’s room. All she’d wanted was to straighten his neck. It wasn’t right, Tony’s neck being bent like that, backward over the bottom step, like he was giving up.

And then she was numb. The cops took the body away. They asked her questions. When had she seen him last? Had he been in any fights, had any enemies?

Bret Richards, across the hall, said, “How about the Bombay Bomber? Or Mr. Black?”

Bret Richards had no more sense than a crocheted spacesuit.

Karen told them that no one didn’t like Tony. She didn’t tell them that the homemade knife sticking out of his chest belonged to Joey Vaughn. They’d figure that out for themselves. The fabric wrapped around the handle came from his mother’s drapes, and there weren’t many people on the station who even had drapes, much less purple ones with silver moons.

When the cops finally left, Karen wanted nothing more than to take a nap. Wasn’t that funny? But she couldn’t. She picked up her purse, still packed with all the things she’d need for the workday, and headed up the D-stairwell to the Strip to tell her boss at The Blue Cricket that she was going to take the day off.

She had to stop on the landing, under the cheerful red and yellow signs that said “Upspin stair” and “Downspin stair” with arrows, reminding passers that the switchback stairs were designed by an idiot comfortably at home on Earth and they should turn slowly to avoid vertigo. “Don’t Fall!” both signs said, with a cartoon leaning back and waving his arms.

She spent a long time looking down at the base of the D-stairwell thinking of the C-stairwell. People paused as they passed, a stream of touches and soothing tones.

Karen’s boss had already heard, and told her to take the week off before she could even open her mouth.

It was a numb day, an unreal day. When she woke up, she rolled over, reaching for him and touching the cold sheet.

Two days later she read the police report. She’d been checking every day for news. The bastards didn’t have the decency to come to her.

Accidental death, they said. Apparently Tony had fallen on that knife in his chest before falling down the stairs. It was the fall that killed him, so maybe “accident” made sense and tied it up all neatly, but Karen knew the station cops. She couldn’t believe they’d do that to Tony.

Karen went to see Joey Vaughn’s mom. The Amazing Magdalena, real name Judy, was an old friend of Karen’s mom, from way back in the day when her dad had been around and they’d lived in better quarters farther from the Strip. Joey’s dad had been station personnel, too, but his parents split and Judy took over from the old Amazing Magdalena to make ends meet.

There was a camaraderie among former personnel, like being employed by the station made you slightly better than those who worked the gas mine or the docks, and they always ended up working the Strip — because fleecing tourists was a more noble pursuit than lifting or carrying. Karen didn’t buy into that. Tony’s folk were dockworkers, right up until his momma had been crushed by a malfunctioning bulkhead and his dad went a little nuts.

Judy’s shop was an old service closet on one of the smaller access corridors near the tourist strip. The bulkhead was wedged permanently open, supporting a purple neon sign with an outline of a hand. A beaded curtain hung from the empty track where the sealant should sit. The other walls were covered in fabric, including the purple drape with silver moons. Karen scanned the hem for a ragged edge or missing piece.

“I heard about Tony,” were the first words out of Judy’s mouth. She stood in the door, bead curtain drawn back. “Did they catch who did it?”

Karen opened and closed her mouth. She had a lot she wanted to say, more than could fit in words. “Accidental death,” was all that came out.

Judy was still. She covered her mouth. “Those bastards!”

“I . . . I don’t know why I expected different. The same happened with poor Betsey Carmi. They just don’t want to get feds involved.”

“Oh, baby,” Judy drew her into her little shop. “All people like you or me or Tony are to them are cheap parts, easily replaced.” She huffed, pulling scarves and folded pamphlets out of the way to clear her client chair for Karen to sit on. “If they could get tourists to pay for holographic porn, they’d have the wrestlers and dancers out of here in a second. But it’s what they expect, I think. The tourists, I mean. They expect the wild frontier, loose laws, they expect to get away with murder . . . oh gosh, I didn’t mean it that way.”

Karen sank into the soft, over-stuffed chair. “Is Joey around?”

“He’s been up at the gym since 0900. Oh, of course — you don’t want to be alone, do you? I didn’t even think. Hang on, I’ll call him to come get you.”

“No, it’s not that,” Karen said, though of course she didn’t want to be alone. All she could think of when alone was the last time she’d put her hand down Tony’s pants.

Judy ran out of things to tidy up and wrung her hands instead. “I’ve been doing Tony’s chart.”

Karen’s eyebrows rose, and she almost laughed for the first time that day. “His star chart?”

Judy nodded mournfully. “From the moment I found out. You remember when you two first got serious and I found out you had the same moon sign? I just thought . . . I don’t know. It’s like examining the evidence, for me. Sometimes you find things. Like his destiny is in Uranus. That’s a dark planet — a big, fat warning sign, and I missed it.”

“Judy . . .”

“I know. ‘Random patterns.’ I know. You’re going to doubt me, but sometimes it’s scary. I wanna do your chart again, just in case.”

There was no way to explain to Judy that the alignment of planets and stars — as seen from a place over six hundred million kilometers away — had nothing to do with miserable fate. Karen had tried. “Maybe later. I really just want to talk to Joey right now.”

“I’ll call him, he’ll take the rest of the day off for you. He loves you like a sister, you know.”

“No. I’ll stop up there.” Karen stood. Stiffly, she said, “Thanks.”

“You know you can always come here, Kay.”

Not if I’m right, she thought, but nodded. “I’m going to find who done for him, Judy. I’m going to find who killed my Tony.”

“Course you will, baby girl.” Judy gave her a hug. Her cheek was wet. “You find that bastard, and my Joey will make him pay.”

• • • •

Karen had to walk down the Strip to get to Joey’s gym, past the Wrestlerama, where Tony had worked. The doors were open already. Sanjay Narayanan — the Bombay Bomber — was bussing tables in preparation for the Wrestlerama’s afternoon opening. Behind him, Jenna Waite was testing the springs on the performance mat. Tourists liked to think the station’s light gravity would make the wrestlers fly, so the mat was really a trampoline, and the wrestlers wore guy ropes like stuntmen. The squeaking sound echoed hollowly through the room while Jenna did flips, reminding Karen of mattress springs and unenthusiastic sex.

“Kay!” Sanjay wrapped his big arms around her. She stiffened like a caught rat. The gentle hardness of his body touched her off like a spark on dry grass, burning away the false strength that had been carrying her through the day. For the first time since seeing the crowd gathered at the base of the stairs, she cried.

Sanjay pulled her closer, holding her and rubbing up and down her back. “There, there, Kay. It’s okay. We’ll find the bitch. We’ll get her.”

She wiped her face on his tight t-shirt. “‘Her’? You think it was a woman?”

“I probably shouldn’t say nothin’.” Sanjay glanced over his shoulder. Jenna was the only other person out on the main floor. He let Karen go gently, as though afraid she’d collapse. “There’s this corporate. Grabby Sue, we call her. She kinda had her eye on Tony, y’know? And she hasn’t been back since, even though she never misses a show when she’s on station.”

Karen almost laughed. It felt good. “No woman pushed Two-Ton Tony down a flight of stairs.”

“Hey, if there’s one thing you learn in this business, it’s that it doesn’t take a lot of strength, or skill, to hurt someone. We spend all our time learning not to.”

“What about Joey Vaughn?”

“Joey? He was fixing Tony up with carbs. Why would Joey shiv his best customer?”

“I didn’t know Joey had business with Tony.”

“Sure. He hooks all of us up. It isn’t easy, you know, looking like this.” Sanjay leaned back and glanced down at his muscular chest with a self-deprecating smirk.

Karen bit her lip. “Thanks. I think I’ll go talk to Joey.”

“Whoa, hey. You aren’t gonna go accusing no one? C’mon, Kay, we all breathe the same air around here.”

“So because it’s more convenient, it has to be an outsider?”

“Don’t make me sound stupid, Kay. You know what I’m saying.”

“How much does Joey charge for the food?”

Sanjay shrugged. “Couple hundred a week. I work the loading dock days to cover it.”

“Tony didn’t have a second job.”

“That doesn’t mean nothing.”

“Yeah, it does. We shared expenses, Sanj. I would have noticed a couple hundred a week. He came up short now and again, but never that much.”

“Maybe Joey floated him. They were tight. You haven’t seen this corporate chick. I’m telling you, she looks like a killer. And you know, she . . .” he looked over his shoulder again and lowered his voice, “She hangs out, y’know? After shows? Some of the guys, they go with her. For money.”

Karen had to laugh at the pained expression on Sanjay’s face. “You check it out. If you find anything, let me know.”

• • • •

She hadn’t been to the gym since Tony’s death, and the sudden smell of it shocked her like a slap. Tony and the gym were linked in her memory, for all that she’d been coming there since before she could walk. Weights and time in the heavy room punctuated every stationer’s life, especially the young, who wanted so desperately to get out. Lazy folks couldn’t pass the strength test to leave the artificial gravity for the real thing. Hell, you couldn’t even just be lazy for a few years and make up for it, because if you weren’t careful your bone density went down too far and you never got it back. Even working all the time just forestalled the effects of low gravity. Eventually, everyone failed the test. Bone density was a phrase Karen associated with embarrassing tests in the school gym teacher’s office and chalky pills that coated your mouth with glue.

And then she had met Tony. Tony and his big plan: Someday, someone would stop at Jupiter Station, see his perfect body in the ring and decide the world needed one more barbarian movie. He made the losing battle against their bones a competition, an exciting promise.

Joey Vaughn glanced up from setting clean towels on the shelf by the free weights when Karen entered. He had been working at the gym since high school — minus that year he had to serve time for gang fighting. He was nine years younger than her and still looked like a kid — like he hadn’t grown into his bones yet. Karen watched closely, alert for any strangeness in his behavior. He just walked over. “Hey. Bike three is open if you want it.”

Karen couldn’t breathe.

“You okay?” Joey wadded his hand towel. “Maybe you should come back later. No one’s going to blame you for taking time off, Karen.”

“No. I’m fine. I mean, I will be. I wanted to lift some. Spot me?”

For a moment he looked angry, like she’d challenged his strength. Then it was gone. Karen wasn’t sure what to make of that. He cleared his throat and said, “Sure, I have time.” He threw his towel over his shoulder and lead the way to the bench press.

Karen leaned back on the sweat-smelling plastic and stared up at the pudding surface of Jupiter, scrolling serenely by the public gym’s glass roof. All the windows in the station faced Jupiter, even if they had to put them on the ceilings. The good thing about Jupiter was that though it was always in motion, it was always the same, and so looking at it wasn’t really looking at anything at all. This was what the tourists came for — to gaze at swirls of gas because there was something magical about beauty you couldn’t touch.

Karen’s arms felt heavy. “I can’t do this,” she said.

“What? You were at 140 last week, weren’t you?” Joey slapped the bar over her head.

Karen rubbed her sweaty palms on her stomach and grasped on either side of Joey’s thin, calloused hands. “Did you and Tony do this?” she asked. “Lift on this bench?”

Joey didn’t answer right away. “Yeah,” he said.

“How much was Tony benching the last time he worked out?”

Joey’s fingers flexed on the bar. “God, that’s morbid.”

“C’mon, how much?”

He started to raise the bar off for her. Karen grunted and took over. It fell fast and the air strained in her lungs until she remembered to exhale. The bar shook as she raised it, fitfully falling back into place. “Like hell that’s 140!” she shouted.

Joey leaned over the bar, smiling down at her. A little sweat dripped from his nose. “One-sixty. You going to do the set, girl? That’s still forty pounds shy of Tony’s light set.”

“Bastard,” Karen said. This was an old game she’d forgotten. Joey would do anything, say anything, to get more mass lifted. He grinned down at her, his teeth star-white, Jupiter a halo behind him.

She sucked in a big breath and lifted the bar off its rest.

Just because Joey’s knife had been in Tony’s breast didn’t mean Joey’s hand was on it when it entered. This was Joey. Judy’s kid. She remembered him giving her his G.I. Joe for her eighteenth birthday — it was his favorite and best toy and all he could think to give his babysitter on an occasion so important.

And he grew into this sensitive young man, sinewy and earnest with eyes that pleaded for just one more rep, as though the fate of worlds hung in the balance.

She did fifteen reps at 160, a rest, and twelve more. Joey asked her if she wanted to do a third set, but she shook her head, sat up and crossed her arms, feeling the burn in her pecs. “I wanna bulk up,” she said.

“What?”

“I want Tony’s old job.” Karen wasn’t sure where the idea came from; the words just flew out of her mouth. She turned to see Joey staring at her. “It’s open, isn’t it? And I’m every bit as athletic as that Jenna chick. What do you think, Joey?”

He stood behind the barbell like a priest at his lectern. “I think it’s not a good time for you to be making career decisions, Karen.”

“I need something to keep me busy, right now. I heard you could hook me up with extra carbs.”

His expression was flat and cold — a face she’d never seen on Joey. “I can’t help you.”

“Are you afraid I’m not good for it?”

“I have to get back to work,” he said.

“Can you point me to someone else? Joey!” He ignored her, crossing the gym to the employee’s door without a look back.

• • • •

Sanjay crouched on the elastic ropes, thighs wide and low and glistening. Mike Black strutted a half-turn on the other side of the mat. Then Sanjay sprang, the guy ropes hoisting him and making his leap a slow arc. He stretched one leg forward, a ballet pose for landing.

Karen admired the way Mike threw himself backward precisely when Sanjay’s foot grazed his cheek. She also had to admit that the two men looked very nice locked in struggle.

Jenna gave her a basket of deep-fried spicy tofu on the house and a shoulder-squeeze in passing.

Sanjay raised Mike over his head and spun in a circle. Mike flew out over the audience, landing in a carefully choreographed pile of folding chairs.

Karen finished her food and went to wait for Sanjay by the back entrance.

He led her to a video booth at the head of the short corridor to the L-stairwell. Drawing the little curtain almost all the way, they could see the Wrestlerama’s employee entrance through a slit of orange polyester. “She’ll be out soon. She waits right there,” he said, leaning over her, warm, heavy. “She . . . you know. I told you.”

“Does anyone say yes?” Karen asked.

He leaned into the back of the booth. “That’s the thing. Mike Black was telling me he wants to stop seeing her, but he’s scared. She’s a VP or something. She could make a body gone. Those were Mike’s words. Me, I turned her down flat.”

“Sanj, look me in the eye and tell me: Did Tony?”

Sanjay’s big brown eyes met hers a moment and flicked to the wall of video adverts. “I think he led her on, Kay, for tips. She gives big when you flirt. We all do it. But you know he’d never go beyond that. He loved you.”

“You flirt with her?”

Sanjay twisted back from her. “C’mon, Kay.”

Karen looked away from him just in time to see the older bottle blonde cop a feel off Mike, who draped his arm over her shoulder and followed her down the corridor back to the main strip.

There was an awkward silence as they stepped out of the photo booth. The bars were all closed, and the big corridor echoed with after-hours emptiness. Karen faced the main strip, the direction Mike had gone. “You said you turned Grabby Sue down flat, right? Then why didn’t she go after you?”

Sanjay uncrossed and re-crossed his arms. He looked down the corridor and then at the floor. He was beautiful when he looked down like that, his lashes thick and his cheek foreshortened against the pale wall. “Kay . . . I’m a total coward. I stayed late or snuck out the front. She never had a chance to ask me.”

“Sanj,” Karen said. “I need your help. How . . . how much would you do, to find out for sure?”

Sanjay fell back against the wall. The cheap plastic squeaked. “The woman’s got the face of a dog.”

“I’m not asking you to close your eyes and think of England. But you could lead her on.”

“She’d kill me. No, I’m not on the fence on this issue. The more I think about it, the more I think we should just leave Grabby Sue alone. If she’s innocent, no loss. If she’s guilty, Kay, what’s to stop her doing it again?”

“How can such big men be so chicken?”

“Kay!”

“No one is supposed to have any secrets on this damn station, and suddenly I can’t find out anything. You can help me, or stop bothering me.”

It was her turn to walk off without looking back.

• • • •

Karen had to do laundry — there wasn’t much clean in the apartment. She started to gather up Tony’s clothes, too. She left them in a pile on the bed, helpless against the smell of him.

She felt like she was fleeing the apartment, and maybe she was, pushing her way through the corridors with her basket of clothes like a shield in front of her. It worked like a shield, too, warding off three attempts at hallway conversations.

She ran too fast down the stairs and got caught with vertigo at the bend of the stairs, that seasick feeling when you turn too quickly from up-spin to down-spin. She gripped the railing, and a pair of panties tumbled out of the basket. How she hated this station! She swung the basket into the wall in frustration.

Then, of course, she had to just pick up the fallen laundry and continue. What else was there to do?

Ironic that this was the place her mother talked about fleeing to. She thought of Earth, of her parents’ origins, as a mythic and glorious place. Her own world was bounded in plastic and titanium. She had paced every inch of it by the time she was eleven, including sneaking into restricted areas. There was nothing to discover, and she breathed in the same air her parents had breathed out.

She knew every permanent resident on the station — if not by name, by face. She felt like she’d talked to all of them that week, looking for some clue as to what had happened that night when Tony hadn’t come home.

Tammy, the cop she knew best, said, “Corporate only wants closed cases. We can’t rock the boat. But we’re looking, Kay. We do care, you know.”

So there was that.

Karen sat watching the washing machine when Judy burst in. Her face was as livid as Jupiter himself. “Why are you asking people about Joey? You think he did it?”

There was that legendary lack of privacy. Karen kept her eyes on the progress bar over the washing machine. “He was smuggling food for Tony, and I don’t think Tony had any way of paying for it.”

Judy slapped her, hard and sudden. “How dare you! Joey loves you like a sister! And you!”

Judy’s lips trembled, unable to form words. She turned and ran out of the laundromat. Karen touched her stinging cheek and wondered if there was any point to anything, anymore.

• • • •

“You were right, I’m a chicken, Kay; I admit that, okay? Some people never get off this station because life catches up with them. Me, I never tried, you know?”

Sanjay leaned against the door to her compartment, picking at his cuticles. His eyes flashed up, just once, a curtain of shy lashes descending again. “So I decided, for Tony, this I would do, because I was so convinced, Kay. I thought I knew it so clearly. She was always so mean, and ugly, and I thought that made her the perfect jealous fan, you know? But she ain’t. I mean, if she was . . . look, I did it, I went out the back, knew she’d run into me. She’s had her eye on me, you know? She took me back to her hotel room, but I couldn’t go through with it. She cried, Kay. She just cried. She’s a sad, lonely woman who really likes wrestling. That’s all. I’m sorry, this whole thing was in my head, I guess. Tony . . . Tony wasn’t no angel, Kay. Whoever did for him, well, they probably had a reason. I just hoped it was a romantic reason, I guess.”

Karen set the last clean shirt in her dresser and closed it. “All right,” she said. “I’m going to confront Joey.”

Sanjay’s answer was a liquid expression, pleading and worry. She wrapped her arms around him and let her head rest against the hard, flat plane of his chest. “Sanj, I love you. Be near a phone for me, okay?”

He hugged her back. “I still think you’re wrong. Joey and Tony were close.”

“I know. I used to babysit him. Relax.” She squeezed him once more and gently ushered him out into the hall.

• • • •

Karen had a shiv — most people did on the station. It was a natural artifact of having to import everything. (The joke was the only exports from Jupiter station were gases and idiots.) A good kitchen knife wouldn’t be worth the shipping expense. So she had made her own. Like Joey had.

Karen was unreasonably proud of her homemade knife. It had a little notch for snipping threads and a comfortable handle formed from quick-foam.

She carried it by her thigh as she walked to the Vaughns’ apartment. She wasn’t sure what she was going to say, but she knew she wanted to have her knife there for the conversation.

Joey met her at the head of the corridor. He’d been running — had probably seen her on the security monitor. “Karen.” He caught his breath.

“Joey, I want to talk to you.”

“Yeah, I want to talk to you, too.” He shifted nervously. “Come with me.” He turned.

His narrow back made her think of violence, but she kept cool and followed. “How much money did Tony owe you?”

Joey walked in silence a while, and Karen thought he wasn’t going to answer, until he said, “Little over a grand.”

“You let a wrestler work up over a grand in credit? Are you stupid?”

Joey glared at her over his shoulder. “He said he had a new way to get money. Something sure.”

Karen wondered if that way was Grabby Sue. They were walking very fast, now, and she had to almost jog to keep up. “Where are we going?”

“Here.” Joey looked back, then in front of them, and then shoved Karen toward the wall.

It was an airlock — one of the small emergency ones, and the interior door was open. Karen had all of a second of horror to realize what Joey planned. She dropped low and struck at him with her elbow, but he was stronger and she was over the threshold. She scrabbled at rubber and metal with her fingernails and twisted, jamming her knife into Joey’s thigh.

He howled, and let up just enough for her to crawl over him, back to the corridor-side of things. He looked up at her in betrayal — wasn’t that ironic — both his hands clasped over the spreading blood on his trouser-leg.

She yanked her knife from his leg and held it to his neck. “You’re so stupid, Joey. They monitor all the airlocks. You think they’d let you slide again?”

“It was an accident, Karen. An accident.”

“Oh, now you want to talk.”

“I only wanted to get him to pay up. I swear! But we were on the stairs, and he started fighting, and you know how it is when you turn from up-spin to down-spin . . . Karen, please don’t kill me.”

“Trying to push me out an airlock wasn’t an accident.” She pressed the knife closer to his throat. She had her knee on his chest, pressing him down. They were in the airlock door, and dimly she became aware that the alarms were sounding. Cold as yesterday’s coffee, she felt Joey’s life in her hands. She could kill him. He deserved it. And the cops would just cover it up again.

“Please, Karen. I didn’t want to. You know I didn’t. I’m just so scared. If anyone found out, everyone would find out. How could I live here? Trapped with what I’d done and my mom and everyone?”

“Be quiet,” Karen said. She noticed the blood starting to seep around the knife while Joey panted under her. His face was white as a moon. There were feet rushing toward them in the corridor, and she knew this was her moment, her decision, and the anger and hatred all evaporated into cold, calm thoughts.

She stood up, wiped her knife, and put it into her pocket.

She didn’t hear the words she said to the station cop — something about a misunderstanding — the things you say in these situations. They let her walk toward home. She didn’t acknowledge any of the people whose faces passed her. She was cold and empty inside, like space.

A hand closed on her arm, and she turned to see Joey standing next to her. The cut on his neck didn’t look so bad. “Karen,” he said, and his mouth opened and closed again, working on words he couldn’t quite get out.

They walked together to the big windows on the Strip. It was convenient. They looked at Jupiter instead of each other.

At last, Karen spoke. “All Tony wanted was to get off this station. Well, he didn’t make it. And I’m old enough and smart enough to know I’m not gonna make it, either. Neither are you.”

“I know that,” he said, in a voice like breaking glass.

The silence said more than either of them could about the futility of their situation. They had to live together, in one tin can, with an eye on every airlock and their hands on their shivs.

“Get me some carbs,” Karen said. “I’m going to work at the Wrestlerama.” Joey started to speak and she cut him off. “Don’t say a damned thing, Joseph Vaughn, while I’m still deciding what to do with you.”

“Okay,” he said, and nodded.

They spent a long time together, staring at Jupiter’s slowly unfurling banners of cloud. There was nothing else to say.

© 2014 by Marie Vibbert.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marie Vibbert joined her Cleveland-based writing workshop when she was sixteen. They gave her a teddy bear to hold for her first critique. Today she still attends meetings, and is an IT professional and a lineman for the Cleveland Fusion women’s tackle football team. She lives with her very supportive husband, Brian, whom she married in 2001.

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

The Puzzle

Zoran Živković
Translated from the Serbian by Alice Copple-Tošić

Mr. Adam only started to paint late in life, after his retirement. It happened quite unexpectedly. For the first sixty-five years of his life he had never shown any predisposition towards painting, for which he had neither talent nor interest. The arts in general attracted him very little.

The only exception might have been music, although he didn’t really enjoy it. Sometimes he would find a radio station devoted mainly to music and leave it on low, just enough to dispel the silence that surrounded him during his long, dreary hours at work. It didn’t matter what sort of music was being played; almost any would serve his purpose equally well, although he preferred instrumentals since singing distracted him. All he did at home was sleep, and often not even that, so there was little opportunity for anything else.

Retirement brought Mr. Adam an abundance of empty hours which he had to fill. Experience gained at work had taught him that whenever he had to wait an indeterminate time for something, he had to impose obligations upon himself, and then discharge them doggedly, regardless of how unusual they might seem. This at least gave a semblance of meaning to everything. And one could not live without some meaning, however illusory.

He set himself one obligation for every day of the week. On Sunday he cooked, something he had never done before. He bought the biggest cookbook he could find in the bookstore and set himself to prepare every dish in it, in alphabetical order. The uncertainty of how far he dared hope to get at this tempo did not disturb him. He was aware that he would require extreme longevity to reach the end of the book, but that was of no importance to him.

He followed the instructions for each recipe to the letter, and the only trouble he encountered was when they were not specific enough, but allowed the cook to use his own judgment or taste. He did not like everything he cooked, but that did not bother him greatly. He ate his culinary creations down to the last spoonful, throwing nothing away. This was almost a matter of honour to him. Sometimes, when the recipe was intended for several people, he ate the same food the whole week through.

On Monday Mr. Adam rode his bicycle. This was also a new departure. He learned how to ride easily and quite rapidly, despite his advanced age. He was not deterred by bad weather, though he would dress accordingly. The only trouble he had was when the rain spattered his glasses, unpleasantly fogging his vision. He preferred to ride without glasses in a downpour, though that rendered his vision equally foggy.

He always took the same route, each time increasing the distance a little. He tried to conserve his energy so he had enough left to go back by bike. He was only forced to return by other means of transport on the few occasions when there was a sudden turn in the weather, or he was overcome by fatigue. His conscience always plagued him when he gave up like that.

Unlike cooking, cycling had its limits. The route he took never actually ended, since it connected to many others, but even if he were to ride the whole day without stopping, which was not very likely, at midnight he would be required to stop. Tuesday was not for bike riding, but imposed its own obligation.

While still employed, he had read very little except professional journals. Not because there was no opportunity — many of his colleagues read for pleasure to pass the time at work — but because it seemed to him a sign of insufficient dedication to the job. Of course, his work would not have suffered for it, particularly since computers had taken over the bulk of his responsibilities. Now he decided to make up at least partially for this lapse. He became a member of the town library and went there every Tuesday. He entered as soon as it opened and stayed until it closed, only taking a short break early in the afternoon to eat something.

His initial subject was science fiction. This was a natural choice, but Mr. Adam soon gave it up. What he read about first contact seemed unsophisticated for the most part, often to the point of inanity — pulled out of thin air, at best. The number of writers demonstrating any knowledge of the real state of things was quite small, though such knowledge was easy enough to obtain. Disappointed, he was briefly tempted to abandon reading entirely. But giving up in the face of adversity was not in his nature, and besides, he had paid his dues a year in advance. Finally, were he to stop going to the library he would have to think up a new obligation for Tuesday, and that prospect did not please him at all.

He found a solution to this problem, using the same means he had often resorted to at work. Whenever his search in one area drew a blank, he simply broadened his field of vision. Not knowing what else to choose, this time he broadened the field to the farthest limit, like suddenly taking the whole sky instead of one small sector. Instead of science fiction he chose literature in its entirety, but as this turned out to be far greater even than the cookbook, he had no idea at first where to begin.

The main catalogue was indexed by author, and he briefly considered adhering to that order. But then he thought again, and concluded that this would not be a satisfactory approach. He spent some time at the library computer, classifying titles by publication date, and finally obtained a list of books from the oldest to the most recent. The scale of this list did not discourage him at all — he had become accustomed to such challenges long ago. He started to read steadily, without rushing, as if all the time in the world lay before him.

On Wednesdays Mr. Adam went to the zoo. The middle of the week was the right time to visit, when there were far fewer visitors than at weekends. Moreover, if the weather was bad, he would often see no one in the vicinity for long periods. That suited him best. Ideally he would have liked to be completely alone at the zoo, but of course, he was never able to count on that.

Mr. Adam did not behave like the ordinary sort of visitor, who just wanders around enjoying himself. First he found out which animals were housed in the zoo, then he drew up a schedule of visits. Each animal was allotted a whole day. Few of the zoo’s inhabitants were worthy of such dedication, but the systematic patience with which Mr. Adam approached everything did not allow him to act otherwise.

He would arrive in the morning at the chosen cage and sit in front of it. When there was no bench, he brought a small folding chair from home. He would stay in that spot until nightfall, doing nothing but observing the animal carefully through the bars. He did not know exactly what to expect. Certainly nothing special. What he hoped for was at least a certain reaction to his presence, just an awareness that he was there, perhaps a glance that deliberately crossed his own. Anything short of complete disregard.

It was actually quite easy to attract the animals’ attention by offering them food, but Mr. Adam never did. It would be a form of cheating, and he would brook no cheating. Therefore he took no food with him, not even for himself. When he left the zoo on a Wednesday evening, he was often faint with hunger.

On Thursdays Mr. Adam visited churches. Not being religious, he had never been to such places before, and was surprised to learn that the town held sixteen of them. Sometimes he had to walk the whole day in order to take them all in. He could have used public transport, of course, which would have sped things up considerably, but that would have run contrary to Mr. Adam’s basic intention. His Monday bike ride was by no means sufficient to keep him in shape, and his need for additional exercise was the more acute after spending all Wednesday sitting still at the zoo. What could be more appropriate than a seriously long walk?

In order to avoid the tedium of repeating the same walk every time, Mr. Adam took a different route every Thursday. This was not done at random; he had worked out a precise plan. He approached it as a simple problem in combinatorial mathematics. There were far more ways of ordering the sixteen points than he imagined he would ever need. The itineraries greatly varied in length, because the algorithm he had chosen took no account of the distance between the churches. He bore up stoically under this inconsiderate mathematical dictate, consoling himself with the reflection that he found longer walks more enjoyable.

Mr. Adam could have visited points other than churches. In principle, the direction of his walks was immaterial to him, so he could not have explained why he had made churches his choice. Luckily, no one ever asked him, which saved him from embarrassment. On reaching a church he began by walking all the way round it, examining it inquisitively, as if seeing it for the first time. Then he would take a little rest, sitting in the churchyard if there was one, before continuing on his way.

In time he got to know the exteriors of all sixteen churches quite well, and came to regard himself as a real expert in this field. He believed that he alone had noted some of the details. For example, there was always an even number of birds’ nests under the eaves. Who knows why? He rarely felt any urge to examine the churches’ interiors. He was only tempted to enter on two or three occasions, but he always refrained, and here again he was unable to say what it was that had dissuaded him.

Friday was his day to go to the movies. Mr. Adam would always watch four films in a row, from mid-afternoon to late in the evening. This was by any standard too much. After the second film his impressions were already becoming confused, and by the end of the fourth he would feel truly exhausted, as though he had been working at some strenuous task, rather than sitting in a comfortable seat the whole time. But this did not prompt him to decrease the number of films.

Mr. Adam was not the least bit selective regarding the repertoire. He did not have a favourite film genre, although he felt most relaxed watching romantic comedies. Action films left him rather indifferent, and although they were loud as a rule, he even managed to doze off to them, particularly if they were the last of that day’s four. He found thrillers unconvincing, although not as much as most science fiction films. Those sometimes appeared outrageously idiotic; he could never understand why filmgoers got so excited about them. Overly erotic scenes embarrassed him, but fortunately that was not noticeable in the dark.

Although it might have appeared that Mr. Adam chose his films at random, this was not at all the case. He bought his tickets with great care, concentrating on films that were expected to sell out. Just before the lights dimmed, Mr. Adam would stand up for a moment and look all around. He would feel annoyed should he spot any empty seats. Those empty places would bother him until the end of the show. He only felt at ease in a full house. That alone could temporarily lighten the burden of solitude, which, like some sinister inheritance, hung over from his former work.

Mr. Adam passed Saturday in the park. He needed to spend time outside in the fresh air after so many hours indoors the previous day. Late in the morning he would go to the large city park with its pond in the middle, and head for the bench where he always sat. On the rare occasions when someone was already sitting in the place he considered his own, on the far left-hand end of the bench next to the wrought iron armrest, Mr. Adam would wait unobtrusively to one side for the bench to come free. It did not bother him if the remainder of the bench was occupied, though he avoided entering into conversation with strangers.

On warm, sunny days he would stay there until dusk, doing nothing but idly watching what was happening around him: people strolling by, dogs chasing each other frantically on the grass, leaves rustling in the surrounding treetops, birds gliding silently through the blue sky, sudden ripples on the smooth surface of the pond. Until recently this idleness would have seemed an extremely foolish waste of time. Now, however, the tables were turned. He saw everything which had gone before as a waste of time. All his previous life. All the years, all the effort, all the hopes.

That was not how it had seemed, at any rate not in the beginning. Not in the least. It was a pioneering time of great excitement. Great expectations. And great naïveté. They thought that contact was only a matter of time. The cosmos was teeming with life, messages were streaming between worlds, all that was needed was to prick up our electronic ears to hear them. Without this optimistic certainty, the money for the first projects would never have been found — investments that could pay off stupendously as soon as the inexhaustible wealth of knowledge started to pour in from the stars.

Mr. Adam had fond memories of those early days, despite later disappointments. There was something romantic in the anticipation that overcame him whenever he put on his earphones. He spent countless hours listening to the cacophony streaming from the skies, straining to recognize some sort of orderly system in it. Like all his colleagues, he secretly hoped that he would be the first to hear the signal.

But as time passed and nothing arrived except inarticulate noise, the true proportions of the task started to emerge. Since listening to the closest star systems produced no results, there was a shift to more distant ones, but each new step brought a substantial increase in their number. The initial enthusiasm foundered when it was established that more than one generation might be needed to complete the task. This led many people to leave the search for extraterrestrial life in favour of more promising areas, and financiers were less and less willing to continue investing in something so vague and unreliable.

Fortunately, at that point computers were introduced, with their numerous advantages over people: They are incomparably faster, more effective and dependable, and do not quickly lose heart in the face of failure. Even so, Mr. Adam did not look upon their use with total approval. Computers reduced people to commonplace assistants whose sole purpose was to serve them. What had begun as a noble project for the chosen few degenerated into a routine technical duty that almost anyone could perform — mere waiting, leached of any true excitement. The last remnants of romance vanished without a trace.

After several decades had passed, and the computers had meticulously checked many millions of sun systems but detected no sign of extraterrestrial intelligence, Mr. Adam felt a certain gloomy exultation. His feelings were paradoxical, because only under opposite circumstances, with contact made, would he be able to say that his life’s work had meaning. On the other hand, contact achieved with the assistance of computers would to him be some sort of injustice, almost an anticlimax.

Despite the silence of the cosmos, the search programs were not discontinued. Although large, the number of investigated stars was trifling compared to the total number of suns in the galaxy. In principle, one of the giant radio telescopes could start receiving the long-awaited message from the very next spot in the sky. However, as his retirement approached, Mr. Adam became more and more skeptical in this regard.

It was not just the realization that the prospects of finding Others within his lifetime were negligible; he could somehow reconcile himself to that if he was sure they were on the right track. But the suspicion started to trouble him that the reason for failure lay not in the fact that only a tiny part of the sky had been investigated, rather in something much more fundamental. What if some of the basic assumptions upon which the entire project was founded were wrong?

Maybe there was no one out there after all. Maybe sentient beings were so unlikely that they had only appeared in one place. Everyone was convinced of the opposite, but this conviction had no solid basis. Behind it might lie an unwillingness to accept the terrifying fact of cosmic solitude. As the years passed, Mr. Adam started to feel anxious under the unbounded wasteland. The starry sky pressed heavily upon him at times. The strange need arose for some sort of shelter, for consolation.

Suppose extraterrestrials exist and are communicating, but we don’t recognize it? What if they were doing it in some other way, and not the way we presumed? Mr. Adam had never asked himself this question seriously. Whenever it stole quietly into his consciousness, he would expel it hurriedly, with a sense of hostility and guilt, as any true believer rejects a heretical thought. All his sober, scientific being opposed it. Similar inconsistencies had prevented him from coming to like science fiction.

He still considered this the proper approach, despite all the unfulfilled hopes in the life that yawned behind him. And at the end of the day, what other means besides electromagnetic waves could be used to communicate between the stars? With regard to his past, the daily obligations he set himself helped put it out of his mind. Perhaps these obligations really were meaningless, but the problem of meaning no longer plagued him. He enjoyed everything he was doing now, even idling in the park each Saturday, and that pleasure was all that mattered. In any case, he was not just idly passing the time. He had recently started to paint.

Music had been the catalyst. Upon reaching the park one Saturday at the beginning of summer, he found that a bandstand had been erected near his bench. It had not been there seven days previously, nor had anything heralded its advent. This had irritated Mr. Adam to no end. Although pretty, with its slender columns and domed roof, he considered it an unconscionable desecration of the environment. In addition, the bandstand largely blocked his view of the pond, and he seriously considered looking for another place to sit. But habit won out and he stayed on his bench, scornfully endeavouring to disregard the interloper.

This ceased to be possible when musicians climbed onto the bandstand at noon. They were formally dressed and the conductor even wore a tuxedo with a large white flower in his lapel. They sat on chairs placed in a circle and spent some time tuning their instruments. Mr. Adam found this dissonance an additional nuisance. It not only sounded awful but started to attract park visitors, and rather a large crowd soon formed. A crowd of people, however, was the last thing Mr. Adam wanted after his Friday spent in a packed movie theatre.

He would have to move after all. He couldn’t stand this. But just as he started to rise, the music began. He stopped halfway, transfixed, then slowly sat down again on the bench. All at once he was no longer surrounded by too many people, his bad mood disappeared, and nothing existed beyond the music. He stared fixedly at the bandstand, immobile, listening intently.

This paralysis did not last long. He came out of it suddenly and began feverishly rummaging through his jacket pockets. It seemed to take forever to find what he was after. He always carried a notebook and pen with him. Since retirement he had not written anything in it, but he carried it with him nonetheless. He opened it hurriedly and started to draw. He dared not miss a thing.

He drew short, brusque lines, just like a stenographer taking rapid dictation. The pages in the notebook were small, so he filled them quickly. He was afraid he would run out of pages before the music ended, but fortunately the notebook was thick enough. Even so, he made the last drawing on the brown cardboard covers. Had the music lasted a moment longer, there would not have been enough room. The very thought suddenly filled him with horror.

The listeners’ echoing applause after the last chords had the effect of an alarm clock suddenly going off. Mr. Adam jerked like one waking from restless sleep; he turned this way and that in confusion for several moments as if trying to figure out where he was. He feared he would arouse the suspicion of those around him, but no one paid any attention to the old man on the end of the bench, engrossed in his writing. All eyes were turned toward the conductor who was bowing theatrically.

Mr. Adam stood up and walked away unobtrusively. There was no reason to stay there any longer. During his extensive walks between churches he had come to know the town quite well, so he knew exactly where to find a shop with painting supplies. There might have been one closer, but he would waste more time inquiring after and finding it than it took to reach the other. The salesman noted with a smile that he was clearly preparing a serious project, judging by the quantity of materials he had purchased. Mr. Adam returned the smile, mumbled something vague, then hurried home.

Unskilled at painting, he had trouble setting up the easel properly, but then got down to work. He opened the notebook and began carefully transferring onto the canvas what he had written, as if neatly copying over rough notes taken in a hurry. He worked slowly but with passion, unaware of the passage of time. When he had finished it was already quite dark.

He did not know what he had painted. Viewed from up close it looked just like random strokes of paint. He was convinced, however, that not a single stroke of the brush had been accidental, that everything was exactly as the music ordered, in spite of his inexperience. When he moved back from the painting a bit, he thought he could make out part of a larger shape, but he wasn’t sure. It suddenly crossed his mind that before him was just one piece of some larger puzzle. He thought briefly about what to do with the canvas, and then he hung it unframed on one of the bare walls.

The next Saturday he went to the park well prepared. He no longer needed the notebook as intermediary. He sat at his usual place on the bench and set up the easel in front of him, holding paintbrush and palette. In different circumstances he would have abhorred the inquisitive peering of bystanders, although a painter at work was certainly not unusual in the park. Now, however, he paid no attention, concentrating exclusively on the impending concert.

This time he painted rapidly. It lasted just as long as the music. When the applause resounded, Mr. Adam, panting and sweaty, had just finished covering the last white space with paint. Before the crowd dispersed, several pairs of eyes glanced at the painting, perplexed, since it did not depict anything recognizable. A short, elderly woman dressed in a bright orange dress stopped by the bench for a moment. She took an enormous pair of glasses out of her handbag and examined first the painting and then the painter. “Very nice,” she said with a smile. She put her glasses back in her handbag, nodded in brief approval and walked away.

As a man unaccustomed to compliments, Mr. Adam felt ill at ease. The woman’s words were by no means unpleasant, quite the contrary, yet he was still glad she had not lingered. He would have been in the awkward situation of having to say something in reply. He waited a while for the elderly woman to move on, then collected his equipment and hurried home. He could have stayed in the park longer — his work was completed and the day was very fine — but curiosity got the better of him.

He put the new canvas next to the other one on the wall. He had no expectations and thus was not very disappointed when it turned out they had no points in common. For a moment, though, he thought he could make out some part of a greater whole in the second painting, too, but here again it was most likely just his imagination. In the absence of any recognizable form, he thought he saw something that was not actually there. This was a trap he had learned to avoid back in the early period, before computers, while listening to the stars with his own ears. If you’re expecting a horseman, you have to be very careful not to mistake your heartbeat for the beat of a horse’s hoofs.

The next fourteen Saturdays, all summer long, each time Mr. Adam returned from the park he had one more painting to place on the wall next to the others. In time, his brisk, almost frenetic painting became something of an attraction at the park, and a good many music-lovers would stand around to watch him work. He paid no attention to them. At the end of the music and painting he would quickly glance through those gathered around him, but never once did he catch sight of the slight figure in orange.

When Mr. Adam reached the park on the first Saturday in September, carrying his painting materials as usual, a surprise awaited him. The bandstand had disappeared as unexpectedly as it had arrived. It had been removed very carefully, leaving no trace behind — not even trampled grass. He darted in bewilderment around the spot where the little structure had stood, overcome by completely opposite feelings from those which had assailed him in the beginning. Now he missed the bandstand, and the environment seemed somehow naked and incomplete without it. For a moment he considered inquiring as to why it was no longer there, maybe even lodging a complaint, but he did not know where this should be done and in the end dropped the idea.

He returned home in a dejected mood and sat in the armchair facing the wall covered with paintings. The canvases formed a large square: four paintings in each of four rows. He stayed there for seven full days, only leaving the armchair to take a quick bite or go to the bathroom. He even slept there in his clothes, but the brief, restless, erratic sleep did not refresh him. He changed the distribution of the paintings from time to time. During that long week filled with almost constant pouring rain, he tried all possible combinations of the sixteen canvases.

On the evening of the following Saturday he got up from the armchair, stretched, and went to the window. Rays from the low sun in the western sky were cutting a path through patchy clouds, just like gleaming swords. He stayed there a while looking absently at the flickering play of light. Then he went to the wall and took down the paintings. He couldn’t carry them all at once and had to make two trips to the basement, where he left them.

When he came up from the basement the second time, he went into the kitchen, took the large cookbook down from the shelf, opened it at the bookmark and became immersed in reading the recipe that was next in line. The following day was Sunday, his cooking day.

© 2001 by Zoran Živković.

Originally published in Interzone.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Zoran Živković (pronounced ZHEEV-ko-vitch) was born in Belgrade, former Yugoslavia, in 1948. In 1973, he graduated from the Department of General Literature with the theory of literature, Faculty of Philology of the University of Belgrade; he received his master’s degree in 1979 and his doctorate in 1982 from the same school. In 2007, Živković was made a professor in the Faculty of Philology at his alma mater, the University of Belgrade, where he now teaches Creative Writing. The author of twenty books of fiction and eight books of nonfiction, Živković continues to push the boundaries of the strange and surreal. His writing belongs to the middle European fantastika tradition, and shares much in common with such masters as Mikhail Bulgakov, Franz Kafka, and Stanislaw Lem.

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

FANTASY

Water Off a Black Dog’s Back

Kelly Link

“Tell me which you could sooner do without, love or water.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, could you live without love, or could you live without water?”

“Why can’t I have both?”

• • • •

Rachel Rook took Carroll home to meet her parents two months after she first slept with him. For a generous girl, a girl who took off her clothes with abandon, she was remarkably close-mouthed about some things. In two months Carroll had learned that her parents lived on a farm several miles outside of town; that they sold strawberries in summer, and Christmas trees in the winter. He knew that they never left the farm; instead, the world came to them in the shape of weekend picnickers and drive-by tourists.

“Do you think your parents will like me?” he said. He had spent the afternoon preparing for this visit as carefully as if he were preparing for an exam. He had gotten his hair cut, trimmed his nails, washed his neck and behind his ears. The outfit he had chosen, khaki pants and a blue button-down shirt — no tie — lay neatly folded on the bed. He stood before Rachel in his plain white underwear and white socks, gazing at her as if she were a mirror.

“No,” she said. It was the first time she had been to his apartment, and she stood square in the center of his bedroom, her arms folded against her body as if she was afraid to sit down, to touch something.

“Why?”

“My father will like you,” she said. “But he likes everyone. My mother’s more particular — she thinks that you lack a serious nature.”

Carroll put on his pants, admiring the crease. “So you’ve talked to her about me.”

“Yes.”

“But you haven’t talked about her to me.”

“No.”

“Are you ashamed of her?”

Rachel snorted. Then she sighed in a way that seemed to suggest she was regretting her decision to take him home. “You’re ashamed of me,” he guessed, and Rachel kissed him and smiled and didn’t say anything.

• • • •

Rachel still lived on her parents’ farm, which made it all the more remarkable that she had kept Carroll and her parents apart for so long. It suggested a talent for daily organization that filled Carroll’s heart with admiration and lust. She was nineteen, two years younger than Carroll; she was a student at Jellicoh College and every weekday she rose at seven and biked four miles into town, and then back again on her bike, four miles uphill to the farm.

Carroll met Rachel in the Jellicoh College library, where he had a part-time job. He sat at the checkout desk, stamping books and reading Tristram Shandy for a graduate class; he was almost asleep when someone said, “Excuse me.”

He looked up. The girl who stood before the tall desk was redheaded. Sunlight streaming in through a high window opposite her lit up the fine hairs on her arm, the embroidered flowers on the collar of her white shirt. The sunlight turned her hair to fire and Carroll found it difficult to look directly at her. “Can I help you?” he said.

She placed a shredded rectangle on the desk, and Carroll picked it up between his thumb and forefinger. Pages hung in tatters from the sodden blue spine. Title, binding, and covers had been gnawed away. “I need to pay for a damaged book,” she said.

“What happened? Did your dog eat it?” he said, making a joke.

“Yes,” she said, and smiled.

“What’s your name?” Carroll said. Already, he thought he might be in love.

• • • •

The farmhouse where Rachel lived had a wrap-around porch like an apron. It had been built on a hill, and looked down a long green slope of Christmas trees towards the town and Jellicoh College. It looked old-fashioned and a little forlorn.

On one side of the house was a small barn, and behind the barn was an oval pond, dark and fringed with pine trees. It winked in the twilight like a glossy, lidless eye. The sun was rolling down the grassy rim of the hill towards the pond, and the exaggerated shadows of Christmas trees, long and pointed as witches’ hats, stitched black triangles across the purple-grey lawn. House, barn, and hill were luminous in the fleet purple light.

Carroll parked the car in front of the barn and went around to Rachel’s side to hand her out. A muffled, ferocious breathing emanated from the barn, and the doors shuddered as if something inside was hurling itself repeatedly towards them, through the dark and airless space. There was a sour animal smell. “What’s in there?” Carroll asked.

“The dogs,” Rachel said. “They aren’t allowed in the house and they don’t like to be separated from my mother.”

“I like dogs,” Carroll said.

• • • •

There was a man sitting on the porch. He stood up as they approached the house and came forward to meet them. He was of medium build, and had pink-brown hair like his daughter. Rachel said, “Daddy, this is Carroll Murtaugh. Carroll, this is my daddy.”

Mr. Rook had no nose. He shook hands with Carroll. His hand was warm and dry, flesh and blood. Carroll tried not to stare at Mr. Rook’s face.

In actual fact, Rachel’s father did have a nose, which was carved out of what appeared to be pine. The nostrils of the nose were flared slightly, as if Mr. Rook were smelling something pleasant. Copper wire ran through the bridge of the nose, attaching it to the frame of a pair of glasses; it nestled, delicate as a sleeping mouse, between the two lenses.

“Nice to meet you, Carroll,” he said. “I understand that you’re a librarian down at the college. You like books, do you?” His voice was deep and sonorous, as if he were speaking out of a well: Carroll was later to discover that Mr. Rook’s voice changed slightly, depending on which nose he wore.

“Yes, sir,” Carroll said. Just to be sure, he looked back at Rachel. As he had thought, her nose was unmistakably the genuine article. He shot her a second accusatory glance. Why didn’t you tell me? She shrugged.

Mr. Rook said, “I don’t have anything against books myself. But my wife can’t stand ‘em. Nearly broke her heart when Rachel decided to go to college.” Rachel stuck out her lower lip. “Why don’t you give your mother a hand, Rachel, setting the table, while Carroll and I get to know each other?”

“All right,” Rachel said, and went into the house.

Mr. Rook sat down on the porch steps and Carroll sat down with him. “She’s a beautiful girl,” Mr. Rook said. “Just like her mother.”

“Yes sir,” Carroll said. “Beautiful.” He stared straight ahead and spoke forcefully, as if he had not noticed that he was talking to a man with a wooden nose.

“You probably think it’s odd, don’t you, a girl her age, still living at home.”

Carroll shrugged. “She seems attached to both of you. You grow Christmas trees, sir?”

“Strawberries, too,” Mr. Rook said. “It’s a funny thing about strawberries and pine trees. People will pay you to let them dig up their own. They do all the work and then they pay you for it. They say the strawberries taste better that way, and they may be right. Myself, I can’t taste much anyway.”

Carroll leaned back against the porch rail and listened to Mr. Rook speak. He sneaked sideways looks at Mr. Rook’s profile. From a few feet away, in the dim cast of the porch light, the nose had a homely, thoughtful bump to it: It was a philosopher’s nose, a questing nose. White moths large as Carroll’s hand pinwheeled around the porch light. They threw out tiny halos of dark and stirred up breaths of air with their wings, coming to rest on the porch screen, folding themselves into stillness like fans. Moths have no noses either, Carroll thought.

“I can’t smell the pine trees either,” Mr. Rook said. “I have to appreciate the irony in that. You’ll have to forgive my wife, if she seems a bit awkward at first. She’s not used to strangers.”

Rachel danced out onto the porch. “Dinner’s almost ready,” she said. “Has Daddy been keeping you entertained?”

“He’s been telling me all about your farm,” Carroll said.

Rachel and her father looked at each other thoughtfully. “That’s great,” Rachel said. “You know what he’s really dying to ask, Daddy. Tell him about your collection of noses.”

“Oh, no,” Carroll protested. “I wasn’t wondering at all — ”

But Mr. Rook stood up, dusting off the seat of his pants. “I’ll go get them down. I almost wore a fancier one tonight, but it’s so windy tonight, and rather damp. I didn’t trust it not to rain.” He hurried off into the house.

Carroll leaned over to Rachel. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he said, looking up at her from the porch rail.

“What?”

“That your father has a wooden nose.”

“He has several noses, but you heard him. It might rain. Some of them,” she said, “are liable to rust.”

“Why does he have a wooden nose?” Carroll said. He was whispering.

“A boy named Biederbecke bit it off, in a fight.” The alliteration evidently pleased her, because she said a little louder, “Biederbecke bit it off, when you were a boy. Isn’t that right, Daddy?”

The porch door swung open again, and Mr. Rook said, “Yes, but I don’t blame him, really I don’t. We were little boys and I called him a stinking Kraut. That was during the war, and afterwards he was very sorry. You have to look on the bright side of things — your mother would never have noticed me if it hadn’t had been for my nose. That was a fine nose. I modeled it on Abraham Lincoln’s nose, and carved it out of black walnut.” He set a dented black tackle box down next to Carroll, squatting beside it. “Look here.”

The inside of the tackle box was lined with red velvet and the mild light of the October moon illuminated the noses, glowing as if a jeweler’s lamp had been turned upon them: noses made of wood, and beaten copper, tin, and brass. One seemed to be silver, veined with beads of turquoise. There were aquiline noses; noses pointed like gothic spires; noses with nostrils curled up like tiny bird claws. “Who made these?” Carroll said.

Mr. Rook coughed modestly. “It’s my hobby,” he said. “Pick one up if you like.”

“Go ahead,” Rachel said to Carroll.

Carroll chose a nose that had been painted over with blue and pink flowers. It was glassy-smooth and light in his hand, like a blown eggshell. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “What’s it made out of?”

“Papier-mâché. There’s one for every day of the week,” Mr. Rook said.

“What did the . . . original look like?” Carroll asked.

“Hard to remember, really. It wasn’t much of a nose,” Mr. Rook said. “Before.”

• • • •

“Back to the question, please. Which do you choose, water or love?”

“What happens if I choose wrong?”

“You’ll find out, won’t you.”

“Which would you choose?”

“That’s my question, Carroll. You already asked yours.”

“You still haven’t answered me, either. All right, all right, let me think for a bit.”

• • • •

Rachel had straight reddish-brown hair that fell precisely to her shoulders and then stopped. Her eyes were fox-colored, and she had more small, even teeth than seemed absolutely necessary to Carroll. She smiled at him, and when she bent over the tackle box full of noses, Carroll could see the two wings of her shoulder blades beneath the thin cotton T-shirt, her vertebrae outlined like a knobby strand of coral. As they went in to dinner she whispered in his ear, “My mother has a wooden leg.”

She led him into the kitchen to meet her mother. The air in the kitchen was hot and moist and little beads of sweat stood out on Mrs. Rook’s face. Rachel’s mother resembled Rachel in the way that Mr. Rook’s wooden nose resembled a real nose, as if someone had hacked Mrs. Rook out of wood or granite. She had large hands with long, yellowed fingernails, and all over her black dress were short black dog hairs. “So you’re a librarian,” she said to Carroll.

“Part-time,” Carroll said. “Yes, ma’am.”

“What do you do the rest of the time?” she said.

“I take classes.”

Mrs. Rook stared at him without blinking. “Are your parents still alive?”

“My mother is,” Carroll said. “She lives in Florida. She plays bridge.”

Rachel grabbed Carroll’s arm. “Come on,” she said. “The food’s getting cold.”

She pulled him into a dining room with dark wood paneling and a long table set for four people. The long black hem of Mrs. Rook’s dress hissed along the floor as she pulled her chair into the table. Carroll sat down next to her. Was it the right or the left? He tucked his feet under his chair. Both women were silent and Carroll was silent between them. Mr. Rook talked instead, filling in the awkward empty pause so that Carroll was glad that it was his nose and not his tongue that the Biederbecke boy had bitten off.

How had she lost her leg? Mrs. Rook watched Carroll with a cold and methodical eye as he ate, and he held Rachel’s hand under the table for comfort. He was convinced that her mother knew this and disapproved. He ate his pork and peas, balancing the peas on the blade of his knife. He hated peas. In between mouthfuls, he gulped down the pink wine in his glass. It was sweet and strong and tasted of burnt sugar. “Is this apple wine?” he asked. “It’s delicious.”

“It’s strawberry wine,” Mr. Rook said, pleased. “Have more. We make up a batch every year. I can’t taste it myself but it’s strong stuff.”

Rachel filled Carroll’s empty glass and watched him drain it instantly. “If you’ve finished, why don’t you let my mother take you to meet the dogs? You look like you could use some fresh air. I’ll stay here and help Daddy do the dishes. Go on,” she said. “Go.”

Mrs. Rook pushed her chair back from the table, pushed herself out of the chair. “Well, come on,” she said. “I don’t bite.”

Outside, the moths beat at his face, and he reeled beside Rachel’s mother on the moony-white gravel, light as a thread spun out on its spool. She walked quickly, leaning forward a little as her right foot came down, dragging the left foot through the small stones.

“What kind of dogs are they?” he said.

“Black ones,” she said.

“What are their names?”

“Flower and Acorn,” she said, and flung open the barn door. Two Labradors, slippery as black trout in the moonlight, surged up at Carroll. They thrust their velvet muzzles at him, uttering angry staccato coughs, their rough breath steaming at his face. They were the size of small ponies and their paws left muddy prints on his shirt. Carroll pushed them back down, and they snapped at his hands.

“Heel,” Mrs. Rook said, and instantly the two dogs went to her, arranging themselves on either side like bookends. Against the folds of her skirt, they were nearly invisible, only their saucer-like eyes flashing wickedly at Carroll.

“Flower’s pregnant,” Mrs. Rook said. “We’ve tried to breed them before, but it never took. Go for a run, girl. Go with her, Acorn.”

The dogs loped off, moonlight spilling off their coats like water. Carroll watched them run; the stale air of the barn washed over him, and under the bell of Mrs. Rook’s skirt he pictured the dark wood of the left leg, the white flesh of the right leg, like a pair of mismatched dice. Mrs. Rook drew in her breath. She said, “I don’t mind you sleeping with my daughter but you had better not get her pregnant.”

Carroll said, “No, ma’am.”

“If you give her a bastard, I’ll set the dogs on you,” she said, and went back towards the house. Carroll scrambled after her.

• • • •

On Friday, Carroll was shelving new books on the third floor. He stood, both arms lifted up to steady a wavering row of psychology periodicals. Someone paused in the narrow row, directly behind him, and a small cold hand insinuated itself into his trousers, slipping under the waistband of his underwear.

“Rachel?” he said, and the hand squeezed, slowly. He jumped and the row of books toppled off their shelf, like dominoes. He bent to pick them up, not looking at her. “I forgive you,” he said.

“That’s nice,” she said. “For what?”

“For not telling me about your father’s — ” he hesitated, looking for the word, “ — wound.”

“I thought you handled that very well,” she said. “And I did tell you about my mother’s leg.”

“I wasn’t sure whether or not to believe you. How did she lose it?”

“She swims down in the pond. She was walking back up to the house. She was barefoot. She sliced her foot open on something. By the time she went to see a doctor, she had septicemia and her leg had to be amputated just below the knee. Daddy made her a replacement out of walnut; he said the prosthesis that the hospital wanted to give her looked nothing like the leg she’d lost. It has a name carved on it. She used to tell me that a ghost lived inside it and helped her walk. I was four years old.” She didn’t look at him as she spoke, flicking the dust off the spine of a tented book with her long fingers.

“What was its name?” Carroll asked.

“Ellen,” Rachel said.

• • • •

Two days after they had first met, Carroll was in the basement stacks. It was dark in the aisles, the tall shelves curving towards each other. The lights were controlled by timers, and went on and off untouched by human hand: There was the ominous sound of ticking as the timers clicked off row by row. Puddles of dirty yellow light wavered under his feet, the floor as slick as water. There was one other student on this floor, a boy who trod at Carroll’s heels, breathing heavily.

Rachel was in a back corner, partly hidden by a shelving cart. “Goddammit, goddammit to hell,” she was saying, as she flung a book down. “Stupid book, stupid, useless, stupid, know-nothing books.” She kicked at the book several more times, and stomped on it for good measure. Then she looked up and saw Carroll and the boy behind him. “Oh,” she said. “You again.”

Carroll turned and glared at the boy. “What’s the matter,” he said. “Haven’t you ever seen a librarian at work?”

The boy fled. “What’s the matter?” Carroll said again.

“Nothing,” Rachel said. “I’m just tired of reading stupid books about books about books. It’s ten times worse than my mother ever said.” She looked at him, weighing him up. She said, “Have you ever made love in a library?”

“Um,” Carroll said. “No.”

Rachel stripped off her woolly sweater, her blue undershirt. Underneath, her bare flesh burned. The lights clicked off two rows down, then the row beside Carroll, and he moved forward to find Rachel before she vanished. Her body was hot and dry, like a newly extinguished bulb.

Rachel seemed to enjoy making love in the library. The library officially closed at midnight, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays when he was the last of the staff to leave, Carroll left the East Entrance unlocked for Rachel while he made up a pallet of jackets and sweaters from the Lost and Found.

The first night, he had arranged a makeshift bed in the aisle between PR878W6B37, Relative Creatures, and PR878W6B35, Corrupt Relations. In the summer, the stacks had been much cooler than his un-air-conditioned room. He had hoped to woo her into his bed by the time the weather turned, but it was October already. Rachel pulled PR878W6A9 out to use as a pillow. “I thought you didn’t like books,” he said, trying to make a joke.

“My mother doesn’t like books,” she said. “Or libraries. Which is a good thing. You don’t ever have to worry about her looking for me here.”

When they made love, Rachel kept her eyes closed. Carroll watched her face, her body rocking beneath him like water. He closed his eyes, opening them quickly again, hoping to catch her looking back at him. Did he please her? He pleased himself, and her breath quickened upon his neck. Her hands smoothed his body, moving restlessly back and forth, until he gathered them to himself, biting at her knuckles.

Later he lay prone as she moved over him, her knees clasping his waist, her narrow feet cupped under the stirrups of his knees. They lay hinged together and Carroll squinted his eyes shut to make the Exit sign fuzzy in the darkness. He imagined that they had just made love in a forest, and the red glow was a campfire. He imagined they were not on the third floor of a library, but on the shore of a deep, black lake in the middle of a stand of tall trees.

“When you were a teenager,” Rachel said, “what was the worst thing you ever did?”

Carroll thought for a moment. “When I was a teenager,” he said, “I used to go into my room every day after school and masturbate. And my dog Sunny used to stand outside the door and whine. I’d come in a handful of Kleenex, and afterward I never knew what to do with them. If I threw them in the wastebasket, my mother might notice them piling up. If I dropped them under the bed, then Sunny would sneak in later and eat them. It was a revolting dilemma, and every day I swore I wouldn’t ever do it again.”

“That’s disgusting, Carroll.”

Carroll was constantly amazed at the things he told Rachel, as if love was some sort of hook she used to drag secrets out of him, things that he had forgotten until she asked for them. “Your turn,” he said.

Rachel curled herself against him. “Well, when I was little, and I did something bad, my mother used to take off her wooden leg and spank me with it. When I got older, and started being asked out on dates, she would forbid me. She actually said I forbid you to go, just like a Victorian novel. I would wait until she took her bath after dinner, and steal her leg and hide it. And I would stay out as late as I wanted. When I got home, she was always sitting at the kitchen table, with the leg strapped back on. She always found it before I got home, but I always stayed away as long as I could. I never came home before I had to.

“When I was little I hated her leg. It was like her other child, the obedient daughter. I was the one she had to spank. I thought the leg told her when I was bad, and I could feel it gloating whenever she punished me. I hid it from her in closets, or in the belly of the grandfather clock. Once I buried it out in the strawberry field because I knew it hated the dark: It was scared of the dark, like me.”

Carroll eased away from her, rolling over on his stomach. The whole time she had been talking, her voice had been calm, her breath tickling his throat. Telling her about Sunny, the semen-eating dog, he had sprouted a cheerful little erection. Listening to her, it had melted away, and his balls had crept up his goose-pimpled thighs.

Somewhere a timer clicked and a light turned off. “Let’s make love again,” she said, and seized him in her hand. He nearly screamed.

• • • •

In late November, Carroll went to the farm again for dinner. He parked just outside the barn, where, malignant and black as tar, Flower lolled on her side in the cold dirty straw. She was swollen and too lazy to do more than show him her teeth; he admired them. “How pregnant is she?” Carroll asked Mr. Rook, who had emerged from the barn.

“She’s due any day,” Mr. Rook said. “The vet says there might be six puppies in there.” Today he wore a tin nose, and his words had a distinct echo, whistling out double shrill, like a teakettle on the boil. “Would you like to see my workshop?” he said.

“Okay,” Carroll said. The barn smelled of gasoline and straw, old things congealing in darkness; it smelled of winter. Along the right inside wall, there were a series of long hooks, and depending from them were various pointed and hooked tools. Below was a table strewn with objects that seemed to have come from the city dump: bits of metal; cigar boxes full of broken glass sorted according to color; a carved wooden hand, jointed and with a dime-store ring over the next-to-last finger.

Carroll picked it up, surprised at its weight. The joints of the wooden fingers clicked as he manipulated them, the fingers long and heavy and perfectly smooth. He put it down again. “It’s very nice,” he said and turned around. Through the thin veil of sunlight and dust that wavered in the open doors, Carroll could see a black glitter of water. “Where’s Rachel?”

“She went to find her mother, I’ll bet. They’ll be down by the pond. Go and tell them it’s dinner time.” Mr. Rook looked down at the black and rancorous Flower. “Six puppies!” he remarked, in a sad little whistle.

Carroll went down through the slanted grove of Christmas trees. At the base of the hill was a circle of twelve oaks, their leaves making a thick carpet of gold. The twelve trees were spaced evenly around the perimeter of the pond, like the numbers on a clock face. Carroll paused under the eleven o’clock oak, looking at the water. He saw Rachel in the pond, her white arm cutting through the gaudy leaves that clung like skin, bringing up black droplets of water. Carroll stood in his corduroy jacket and watched her swim laps across the pond. He wondered how cold the water was. Then he realized that it wasn’t Rachel in the pond.

Rachel sat on a quilt on the far side of the pond, under the six o’clock oak. Acorn sat beside her, looking now at the swimmer, now at Carroll. Rachel and her mother were both oblivious to his presence, Mrs. Rook intent on her exercise, Rachel rubbing linseed oil into her mother’s wooden leg. The wind carried the scent of it across the pond. The dog stood, stiff-legged, fixing Carroll in its dense liquid gaze. It shook itself, sending up a spray of water like diamonds.

“Cut it out, Acorn!” Rachel said without looking up. All the way across the pond, Carroll felt the drops of water fall on him, cold and greasy.

He felt himself turning to stone with fear. He was afraid of the leg that Rachel held in her lap. He was afraid that Mrs. Rook would emerge from her pond, and he would see the space where her knee hung above the ground. He backed up the hill slowly, almost falling over a small stone marker at the top. As he looked at it, the dog came running up the path, passing him without a glance, and after that, Rachel, and her mother, wearing the familiar black dress. The ground was slippery with leaves and Mrs. Rook leaned on her daughter. Her hair was wet and her cheeks were as red as leaves.

“I can’t read the name,” Carroll said.

“It’s Ellen,” Mrs. Rook said. “My husband carved it.”

Carroll looked at Rachel. Your mother has a tombstone for her leg? Rachel looked away.

• • • •

“You can’t live without water.”

“So that’s your choice?”

“I’m just thinking out loud. I know what you want me to say.”

No answer.

“Rachel, look. I choose water, okay?”

No answer.

“Let me explain. You can lie to water — you can say no, I’m not in love, I don’t need love, and you can be lying — how is the water supposed to know that you’re lying? It can’t tell if you’re in love or not, right? Water’s not that smart. So you fool the water into thinking you’d never dream of falling in love, and when you’re thirsty, you drink it.”

“You’re pretty sneaky.”

“I love you, Rachel. Will you please marry me? Otherwise your mother is going to kill me.”

No answer.

• • • •

After dinner, Carroll’s car refused to start. No one answered when they rang a garage, and Rachel said, “He can take my bike, then.”

“Don’t be silly,” Mr. Rook said. “He can stay here and we’ll get someone in the morning. Besides, it’s going to rain soon.”

“I don’t want to put you to any trouble,” Carroll said.

Rachel said, “It’s getting dark. He can call a taxi.” Carroll looked at her, hurt, and she frowned at him.

“He’ll stay in the back room,” Mrs. Rook said. “Come and have another glass of wine before you go to bed, Carroll.” She grinned at him in what might have been a friendly fashion, except that at some point after dinner, she had removed her dentures.

Rachel brought him a pair of her father’s pajamas and led him off to the room where he was to sleep. The room was small and plain and the only beautiful thing in it was Rachel, sitting on a blue and scarlet quilt. “Who made this?” he said.

“My mother did,” Rachel said. “She’s made whole closetsful of quilts. It’s what she used to do while she waited for me to get home from a date. Now get in bed.”

“Why didn’t you want me to spend the night?” he asked.

She stuck a long piece of hair in her mouth, and sucked on it, staring at him without blinking. He tried again. “How come you never spend the night at my apartment?”

She shrugged. “Are you tired?”

Carroll yawned, and gave up. “Yes,” he said and Rachel kissed him goodnight. It was a long, thoughtful kiss. She turned out the light and went down the hall to her own bedroom. Carroll rolled on his side and fell asleep and dreamed that Rachel came back in the room and stood naked in the moonlight. Then she climbed in bed with him and they made love and then Mrs. Rook came into the room. She beat at them with her leg as they hid under the quilt. She struck Rachel and turned her into wood.

As Carroll left the next morning, it was discovered that Flower had given birth to seven puppies in the night. “Well, it’s too late now,” Rachel said.

“Too late for what?” Carroll asked. His car started on the first try.

“Never mind,” Rachel said gloomily. She didn’t wave as he drove away.

• • • •

Carroll discovered that if he said “I love you,” to Rachel, she would say “I love you too,” in an absentminded way. But she still refused to come to his apartment, and because it was colder now, they made love during the day, in the storage closet on the third floor. Sometimes he caught her watching him now, when they made love. The look in her eyes was not quite what he had hoped it would be, more shrewd than passionate. But perhaps this was a trick of the cold winter light.

Sometimes, now that it was cold, Rachel let Carroll drive her home from school. The sign beside the Rooks’ driveway now said, “Get your Christmas Trees early.” Beneath that it said, “Adorable black Lab Puppies free to a Good home.”

But no one wanted a puppy. This was understandable; already the puppies had the gaunt, evil look of their parents. They spent their days catching rats in the barn, and their evenings trailing like sullen shadows around the black skirts of Mrs. Rook. They tolerated Mr. Rook and Rachel; Carroll they eyed hungrily.

“You have to look on the bright side,” Mr. Rook said. “They make excellent watch-dogs.”

• • • •

Carroll gave Rachel a wooden bird on a gold chain for Christmas, and the complete works of Jane Austen. She gave him a bottle of strawberry wine and a wooden box, with six black dogs painted on the lid. They had fiery red eyes and red licorice tongues. “My father carved it, but I painted it,” she said.

Carroll opened the box. “What will I put in it?” he said.

Rachel shrugged. The library was closed for the weekend, and they sat on the dingy green carpet in the deserted lounge. The rest of the staff was on break, and Mr. Cassatti, Carroll’s supervisor, had asked Carroll to keep an eye on things.

There had been some complaints, he said, of vandalism in the past few weeks. Books had been knocked off their shelves, or disarranged, and even more curious, a female student claimed to have seen a dog up on the third floor. It had growled at her, she said, and then slunk off into the stacks. Mr. Cassatti, when he had gone up to check, had seen nothing. Not so much as a single hair. He wasn’t worried about the dog, Mr. Cassatti had said, but some books had been discovered, the pages ripped out. Maimed, Mr. Cassatti had said.

Rachel handed Carroll one last parcel. It was wrapped in a brown paper bag, and when he opened it, a blaze of scarlet and cornflower blue spilled out onto his lap. “My mother made you a quilt just like the one in the spare bedroom,” Rachel said. “I told her you thought it was pretty.”

“It’s beautiful,” Carroll said. He snapped the quilt out, so that it spread across the library floor, as if they were having a picnic. He tried to imagine making love to Rachel beneath a quilt her mother had made. “Does this mean that you’ll make love with me in a bed?”

“I’m pregnant,” Rachel said.

He looked around to see if anyone else had heard her, but of course they were alone. “That’s impossible,” he said. “You’re on the pill.”

“Yes, well,” Rachel said. “I’m pregnant anyway. It happens sometimes.”

“How pregnant?” he asked.

“Three months.”

“Does your mother know?”

“Yes,” Rachel said.

“Oh God, she’s going to put the dogs on me. What are we going to do?”

“What am I going to do,” Rachel said, looking down at her cupped hands so that Carroll could not see her expression. “What am I going to do,” she said again.

There was a long pause and Carroll took one of her hands in his. “Then we’ll get married?” he said, a quaver in his voice turning the statement into a question.

“No,” she said, looking straight at him, the way she looked at him when they made love. He had never noticed what a sad hopeless look this was.

Carroll dropped his own eyes, ashamed of himself and not quite sure why. He took a deep breath. “What I meant to say, Rachel, is I love you very much and would you please marry me?”

Rachel pulled her hand away from him. She said in a low angry voice, “What do you think this is, Carroll? Do you think this is a book? Is this supposed to be the happy ending — we get married and live happily ever after?”

She got up, and he stood up too. He opened his mouth, and nothing came out, so he just followed her as she walked away. She stopped so abruptly that he almost fell against her. “Let me ask you a question first,” she said, and turned to face him. “What would you choose, love or water?”

The question was so ridiculous that he found he was able to speak again. “What kind of a question is that?” he said.

“Never mind. I think you better take me home in your car,” Rachel said. “It’s starting to snow.”

Carroll thought about it during the car ride. He came to the conclusion that it was a silly question, and that if he didn’t answer it correctly, Rachel wasn’t going to marry him. He wasn’t entirely sure that he wanted to give the correct answer, even if he knew what it was.

He said, “I love you, Rachel.” He swallowed and he could hear the snow coming down, soft as feathers on the roof and windshield of the car. In the two beams of the headlights the road was dense and white as an iced cake, and in the reflected snow-light Rachel’s face was a beautiful greenish color. “Will you marry me anyway? I don’t know how you want me to choose.”

“No.”

“Why not?” They had reached the farm; he turned the car into driveway, and stopped.

“You’ve had a pretty good life so far, haven’t you?” she said.

“Not too bad,” he said sullenly.

“When you walk down the street,” Rachel said, “do you ever find pennies?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Are they heads or tails?”

“Heads, usually,” he said.

“Do you get good grades?”

“As and Bs,” he said.

“Do you have to study hard? Have you ever broken a mirror? When you lose things,” she said, “do you find them again?”

“What is this, an interview?”

Rachel looked at him. It was hard to read her expression, but she sounded resigned. “Have you ever even broken a bone? Do you ever have to stop for red lights?”

“Okay, okay,” he snapped. “My life is pretty easy. I’ve gotten everything I ever wanted for Christmas, too. And I want you to marry me, so of course you’re going to say yes.”

He reached out, put his arms around her. She sat brittle and stiff in the circle of his embrace, her face turned into his jacket. “Rachel — ”

“My mother says I shouldn’t marry you,” she said. “She says I don’t really know you, that you’re feckless, that you’ve never lost anything that you cared about, that you’re the wrong sort to be marrying into a family like ours.”

“Is your mother some kind of oracle, because she has a wooden leg?”

“My mother knows about losing things,” Rachel said, pushing at him. “She says it’ll hurt, but I’ll get over you.”

“So tell me, how hard has your life been?” Carroll said. “You’ve got your nose, and both your legs. What do you know about losing things?”

“I haven’t told you everything,” Rachel said and slipped out of the car. “You don’t know everything about me.” Then she slammed the car door. He watched her cross the driveway and go up the hill into the snow.

Carroll called in sick all the next week. The heating unit in his apartment wasn’t working, and the cold made him sluggish. He thought about going in to the library, just to be warm, but instead he spent most of his time under the quilt that Mrs. Rook had made, hoping to dream about Rachel. He dreamed instead about being devoured by dogs, about drowning in icy black water.

He lay in his dark room, under the weight of the scarlet quilt, when he wasn’t asleep, and held long conversations in his head with Rachel, about love and water. He told her stories about his childhood; she almost seemed to be listening. He asked her about the baby and she told him she was going to name it Ellen if it was a girl. When he took his own temperature on Wednesday, the thermometer said he had a fever of 103, so he climbed back into bed.

When he woke up on Thursday morning, he found short black hairs covering the quilt, which he knew must mean that he was hallucinating. He fell asleep again and dreamed that Mr. Rook came to see him. Mr. Rook was a black Lab. He was wearing a plastic Groucho Marx nose. He and Carroll stood beside the black lake that was on the third floor of the library.

The dog said, “You and I are a lot alike, Carroll.”

“I suppose,” Carroll said.

“No, really,” the dog insisted. It leaned its head on Carroll’s knee, still looking up at him. “We like to look on the bright side of things. You have to do that, you know.”

“Rachel doesn’t love me anymore,” Carroll said. “Nobody likes me.” He scratched behind Mr. Rook’s silky ear.

“Now, is that looking on the bright side of things?” said the dog. “Scratch a little to the right. Rachel has a hard time, like her mother. Be patient with her.”

“So which would you choose,” Carroll said. “Love or water?”

“Who says anyone gets to choose anything? You said you picked water, but there’s good water and there’s bad water. Did you ever think about that?” the dog said. “I have a much better question for you. Are you a good dog or a bad dog?”

“Good dog!” Carroll yelled, and woke himself up.

He called the farmhouse in the morning, and when Rachel answered, he said, “This is Carroll. I’m coming to talk to you.”

But when he got there, no one was there. The sight of the leftover Christmas trees, tall and gawky as green geese, made him feel homesick. Little clumps of snow like white flowers were melting in the gravel driveway. The dogs were not in the barn and he hoped that Mrs. Rook had taken them down to the pond.

He walked up to the house, and knocked on the door. If either of Rachel’s parents came to the door, he would stand his ground and demand to see their daughter. He knocked again, but no one came. The house, shuttered against the snow, had an expectant air, as if it were waiting for him to say something. So he whispered, “Rachel? Where are you?” The house was silent. “Rachel, I love you. Please come out and talk to me. Let’s get married — we’ll elope. You steal your mother’s leg, and by the time your father carves her a new one, we’ll be in Canada. We could go to Niagara Falls for our honeymoon — we could take your mother’s leg with us, if you want — Ellen, I mean — we’ll take Ellen with us!”

Carroll heard a delicate cough behind him as if someone were clearing their throat. He turned and saw Flower and Acorn and their six enormous children sitting on the gravel by the barn, next to his car. Their fur was spiky and wet, and they curled their black lips at him. Someone in the house laughed. Or perhaps it was the echo of a splash, down at the pond.

One of the dogs lifted its head and bayed at him. “Hey,” he said. “Good dog! Good Flower, good Acorn! Rachel, help!”

She had been hiding behind the front door. She slammed it open and came out onto the porch. “My mother said I should just let the dogs eat you,” she said. “If you came.”

She looked tired; she wore a shapeless woolen dress that looked like one of her mother’s. If she really was pregnant, Carroll couldn’t see any evidence yet. “Do you always listen to your mother?” he said. “Don’t you love me?”

“When I was born,” she said. “I was a twin. My sister’s name was Ellen. When we were seven years old, she drowned in the pond — I lost her. Don’t you see? People start out losing small things, like noses. Pretty soon you start losing other things too. It’s sort of an accidental leprosy. If we got married, you’d find out.”

Carroll heard someone coming up the path from the pond, up through the thin ranks of Christmas trees. The dogs pricked up their ears, but their black eyes stayed fastened to Carroll. “You’d better hurry,” Rachel said. She escorted him past the dogs to his car.

“I’m going to come back.”

“That’s not a good idea,” she said. The dogs watched him leave, crowding close around her, their black tails whipping excitedly. He went home and in a very bad temper, he picked up the quilt to inspect it. He was looking for the black hairs he had seen that morning. But of course there weren’t any.

The next day he went back to the library. He was lifting books out of the overnight collection box, when he felt something that was neither rectangular nor flat. It was covered in velvety fur, and damp. He felt warm breath steaming on his hand. It twisted away when he tried to pick it up, and when he reached out for it again, it snarled at him.

He backed away from the collection box, and a long black dog wriggled out of the box after him. Two students stopped to watch what was happening. “Go get Mr. Cassatti, please,” Carroll said to one of them. “His office is around the corner.”

The dog approached him. Its ears were laid back flat against its skull and its neck moved like a snake.

“Good dog?” Carroll said, and held out his hand. “Flower?” The dog lunged forward and, snapping its jaws shut, bit off his pinky just below the fingernail.

The student screamed. Carroll stood still and looked down at his right hand, which was slowly leaking blood. The sound that the dog’s jaw had made as it severed his finger had been crisp and businesslike. The dog stared at Carroll in a way that reminded him of Rachel’s stare. “Give me back my finger,” Carroll said.

The dog growled and backed away. “We have to catch it,” the student said. “So they can reattach your finger. Shit, what if it has rabies?”

Mr. Cassatti appeared, carrying a large flat atlas, extended like a shield. “Someone said that there was a dog in the library,” he said.

“In the corner over there,” Carroll said. “It bit off my finger.” He held up his hand for Mr. Cassatti to see, but Mr. Cassatti was looking towards the corner and shaking his head.

He said, “I don’t see a dog.”

The two students hovered, loudly insisting that they had both seen the dog a moment ago, while Mr. Cassatti tended to Carroll. The floor in the corner was sticky and wet, as if someone had spilled a Coke. There was no sign of the dog.

Mr. Cassatti took Carroll to the hospital, where the doctor at the hospital gave him a shot of codeine, and tried to convince him that it would be a simple matter to reattach the fingertip. “How?” Mr. Cassatti said. “He says the dog ran away with it.”

“What dog?” the doctor asked.

“It was bitten off by a dog,” Carroll told the doctor.

The doctor raised his eyebrows. “A dog in a library? This looks like he stuck his finger under a paper cutter. The cut is too tidy — a dog bite would be a mess. Didn’t anyone bring the finger?”

“The dog ate it,” Carroll said. “Mrs. Rook said the dog would eat me, but it stopped. I don’t think it liked the way I tasted.”

Mr. Cassatti and the doctor went out into the hall to discuss something. Carroll stood at the door and waited until they had turned towards the nurses’ station. He opened the door and snuck down the hallway in the opposite direction and out of the hospital. It was a little hard, walking on the ground — the codeine seemed to affect gravity. When he walked, he bounced. When walking got too difficult, he climbed in a taxi and gave the driver the address of the Rook farm.

His hand didn’t hurt at all; he tried to remember this, so he could tell Rachel. They had bound up his hand in white gauze bandages, and it looked like someone else’s hand entirely. Under the white bandages, his hand was pleasantly warm. His skin felt stretched, tight and thin as a rubber glove. He felt much lighter: it might take a while, but he thought he could get the hang of losing things; it seemed to come as easily to him as everything else did.

Carroll thought maybe Rachel and he would get married down by the pond, beneath the new leaves of the six o’clock oak tree. Mr. Rook could wear his most festive nose, the one with rose-velvet lining, or perhaps the one painted with flowers. Carroll remembered the little grave at the top of the path that led to the pond — not the pond, he decided — they should be married in a church. Maybe in a library.

“Just drop me off here,” he told the taxi driver at the top of the driveway.

“Are you sure you’ll be okay?” the driver said. Carroll shook his head, yes, he was sure. He watched the taxi drive away, waving the hand with the abbreviated finger.

Mrs. Rook could make her daughter a high-waisted wedding dress, satin and silk and lace, moth-pale, and there would be a cake with eight laughing dogs made out of white frosting, white as snow. For some reason he had a hard time making the church come out right. It kept changing, church into library, library into black pond. The windows were high and narrow and the walls were wet like the inside of a well. The aisle kept changing, the walls getting closer, becoming stacks of books, dark, velvety waves. He imagined standing at the altar with Rachel — black water came up to their ankles as if their feet had been severed. He thought of the white cake again: if he sliced into it, darkness would gush out like ink.

He shook his head, listening. There was a heavy dragging noise, coming up the side of the hill through the Christmas trees. It would be a beautiful wedding and he considered it a lucky thing that he had lost his pinky and not his ring finger. You had to look on the bright side after all. He went down toward the pond, to tell Rachel this.

© 1995 by Kelly Link.

Previously published in Century

and in Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt),

Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kelly Link is the author of the story collections Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and Pretty Monsters, as well as the founder, with her husband Gavin J. Grant, of Small Beer Press. A fourth collection of stories, Get in Trouble, is forthcoming from Random House in 2015.

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

The Herd

Steve Hockensmith

As long as we’re waiting, why don’t I tell you a little story? You look like the kind of man who could profit by it.

Don’t take offense, now. I meant that as a compliment. You remind me of me, that’s all. I’m a cowhand myself. Or was, anyway. I’ve been up and down the Chisholm Trail so many times I could walk it blindfolded from Brownsville to Abilene.

That’s where my story starts: on the trail. Some time back, you see, me and a dozen other punchers were bringing two thousand head north for the Lone Star Land and Cattle Company. It was going about as smooth as a big drive can — by which I mean no one had died yet — but as we got near the Washita River a squall blew in the likes of which you never saw. The sky didn’t just turn black. It seemed to wink out all at once, like the sun was but a candle and God — or the Devil — had up and snuffed it. Just as quick, the wind went from dead still to near-twister, and the rains that came didn’t fall in drops but bucketloads by the billions. Thank god for the lightning, for though it spooked the beeves, without it we’d have had nothing at all to see by, and said beeves would’ve been wearing us as slippers within seconds.

Well, you know how it goes. The cattle bolted, and off we went with them, riding hell for leather hither and yon. When the storm finally ended and the sun decided to grace us with its presence again, I was relieved to see we still had one nice big herd as opposed to a hundred little ones scattered across all the West. We hadn’t lost a single hand, either, which I counted as a miracle on par with the loaves and fishes.

Of course, there were some strays to round up, and as we set about it, I noticed something peculiar about the terrain thereabouts. Something wrong. The bluffs were higher, the brush sparser and scrubbier and the earth rockier and more yellowed than as should have been. It was like we’d chased those cows all the way to New Mexico over the course of a couple hours.

I might have thought I was getting my dreaming done without benefit of sleep, I was so tired after all we’d been through. But when our cookie called us in at twilight, I discovered I wasn’t the only fellow feeling buffaloed.

“Anyone know where the hell we are?” one of the boys asked as he settled himself by the fire with his plate of frijoles and sinkers.

There was a lot of head shaking and shrugging and comments of the “Damned if I know” variety, and every man there turned to look at Riggs, the trail boss.

“I don’t know either,” he said. “But north is still north. We’ll head that way in the morning, and sooner or later we’ll hit the Washita. It won’t be hard to find the trail from there.”

It couldn’t have been easy — a trail boss admitting he was lost. Riggs just about pulled it off, though. He was a stern, taciturn man with a quiet strength we all respected. But there was a wee problem with what he’d said, and the fellows got to whispering about it as soon as Riggs was out of earshot.

Even from the highest hills, none of us had seen sign of any river.

What we did see come morning light, much to our surprise, was a town. It looked to be about three miles away, in a punchbowl valley with rocky, sloping sides. It wasn’t much more than one long main street lined with low, boxy buildings — a speck of civilization that would make your Peabody or your Lincolnville look like London or Paris — yet no one could figure how we’d missed it the day before.

“I should’ve caught the smell of women, at the very least,” my pal Jawbone said. “Why, I’m surprised it didn’t keep me up all night.”

For Jawbone to go a week without female companionship was like you or me going a month without breathing. And he wasn’t the only one who was girl crazy — or crazy for whiskey, beer, and cards. Which is why Riggs announced that he was headed into town alone. Cut us young bucks loose to pursue our vices, and we wouldn’t be back on the trail till Christmas.

As it was, we still got a bit of a holiday. Riggs’s secundo, a slow-moving, slow-thinking slab of fat named Foley, didn’t have half the backbone of his boss. So the second Riggs rode off, most of the boys were stretched out on their soogans catching up on their snoring while Foley and the cookie played dominoes and dipped biscuits in molasses. The rest of us were left to drift about on horseback keeping an eye on the herd, but the cows had no more mind to stir themselves than we did.

Our lead steer for that drive was a big, wily longhorn called The General. He was such a natural at the front of a herd he’d been spared the slaughterhouse and sent back south twice. As long as he stayed put, the other beeves did likewise, and the only rope I had to throw that day was on a heifer with a broken leg who wasn’t going to make it to market anyhow. We took her aside a ways and ended her suffering, and the rest of the cows were content to go on grazing and dozing while us two-legged types feasted on fresh steak.

Yes, sir — it was just one big, happy picnic out there on the prairie. The only things missing were the girls in their white summer dresses and the iced cream.

And Riggs. No one was anxious for him to come back, yet none wished him to disappear either. But disappear he did. He’d left not long after dawn, and come dusk he still wasn’t back.

“Dammit. We shouldn’t have let him ride off alone,” the cookie fretted. “There could be Cheyenne out there. Kiowa. Comanche.”

“Oh, smooth your skirts,” Foley said. “No Indian’s going to stir up trouble anywhere near the Washita River. Friend Custer saw to that two years ago. Riggs probably just threw a shoe or something. Mark my words: He’ll be back tomorrow morning after spending a lovely night as the guest of Reverend Killjoy and his dried-up old Mrs.”

This was an enticing way of thinking — necessitating, as it did, no worry, action or self-recrimination on our part — and we were happy to follow Foley’s lead in it. That got harder to do twenty-four hours later, however, for Riggs still hadn’t returned. He’d given explicit orders that no one else should go into town. But that, of course, assumed that he’d eventually manage to leave it. Something had to be done.

And so it was that the next morning — two full days after Riggs had left us — Foley mounted up and set off to search for him. He still pooh-poohed the notion that our trail boss had crossed paths with a war party, but that didn’t stop him from mustering up an escort for himself: me and Jawbone.

Now, usually around a town you’ll find spreads and little homesteads clustered up like puppies crowding in around their mother’s teats. Not so here. We passed nothing more than scrub brush and the occasional stand of trees. There wasn’t even a trail into town, let alone a road. One second we were riding over tall, untrod grass, the next we were on a dirt street.

And about that street. I can’t say it was deserted, for there were people scattered along it from one end to the other, most of them rough-looking men of the sort you’d expect out in the middle of nowhere. Punchers, buffalo hunters, would-be miners and the like. What I didn’t see were wagons or drays or buggies or so much as a single solitary horse. The town didn’t even seem to have a livery stable, which is an oddity on the order of water lacking wet. Folks will crack jokes about one-horse towns, but there’s no such thing as a no-horse one.

“The locals sure must do a lot of walking,” I said.

But I was talking to myself. Foley and Jawbone’s undivided attention was affixed to a sign in a saloon window.

FREE BEER
ALL WELCOME

It was obvious where we’d be beginning our search — and perhaps ending it, as well. Riggs had more starch in his collar than your average drover, but could even he resist an offer like that?

Of course, I didn’t really expect the beer to be free beyond an introductory thimbleful, after which the price would rise considerably. Or perhaps the proprietor would explain that the beer was indeed free but there’d be a four-bit “cleaning fee” for the glass. When it comes to fleecing cowhands, saloonkeepers elevate deviousness to the level of genius.

To my very pleasant surprise, however, there seemed to be no catch. We walked into the place, asked for our free beers, and were given them, simple as that. The barman even told us complimentary sandwiches would be coming out shortly and we should feel free to avail ourselves of the gaming tables in the meantime. Or not. It was up to us.

And most shocking of all: The beer was good. So good the three of us polished ours off in a few chugs and were promptly given refills, still on the house.

“I’ll be damned if this isn’t the most hospitable saloon I ever set foot in,” I declared. “How can you afford to stay in business?”

The bartender took to “cleaning” glasses with a rag the color of piss.

“We’re under new management.”

Of course, it doesn’t pay to irritate someone who’s pouring you free drinks, so I did not point that the barman hadn’t exactly answered my question. Instead, I let Foley get to the matter at hand: Where were we, and had Riggs been here before us?

The answers were “Schultzton” and “No.”

“Schultzton?” I said. “Never heard of it. How far are we from the Washita?”

The barman shrugged. “Not close, not far.”

He was a husky, lumbering man with a saggy, sleepy face, and I got the feeling if we hadn’t been there to further dirty his glasses he’d have been under the bar sawing logs. There were maybe a dozen other people in the place — men playing cards, mostly, with a few chippies whispering to each other toward the back — and they all moved (when they moved) with the same droop-shouldered, heavy-lidded lethargy. And why shouldn’t they? It wasn’t free coffee they were swilling. Still, it struck me as strange, and I found the longer I stayed in the place, the more I felt like nodding off myself.

“I suppose we ought to try the local constable next,” I said. “Who you got around here?”

“Town marshal. Office is up the street,” the bartender told me.

“Thanks.”

I turned to go.

Foley and Jawbone didn’t.

“What’s your hurry?” Foley said. “The sooner we find Riggs, the sooner we’ll have to leave.”

“Yeah,” Jawbone threw in. “Might as well wait for the sandwiches, at least.”

It wasn’t the sandwiches my friend was drooling over, though.

I jerked my head at the saloon girls.

“I doubt if they’re on the house, amigo.”

Jawbone grinned. “That hardly matters with all the money I’m saving on liquor.”

I looked at Foley, but he just stared back at me and sipped at his beer.

“Well,” I sighed, “at least save a sandwich for me.”

“Take your time getting back,” Foley said.

Jawbone was already headed for the chippies.

Once I was outside, I turned to gaze at the far-off hills upon which we’d left the cattle and the other hands. But a haze had settled over the valley despite the near-noon sun overhead, and all I could see beyond the town were wispy swirls of gray.

I wasn’t too worried about the herd. There was plenty of green grass thereabouts, and a stream just big enough to keep thirst at bay. As long as The General was lazing around putting on fat, the other cows would be happy to, as well. The boys would be short-handed should another storm whip up or some braves pop in wearing war paint, though, and I resolved not to take Foley’s advice.

I started looking for the marshal’s office.

It didn’t take long to find it. Finding the marshal, on the other hand, wasn’t as easily done. The door was locked, and a handwritten sign in the window actually said, “OUT TO LUNCH.”

I stopped a passerby — a portly, shuffle-stepping gent who was either drunk or sleepwalking — and asked if he knew where the marshal took his meals.

“Take your pick,” he said, giving the hotels and lunch rooms and melodeons lining the street an airy wave of the hand. Then on he shambled toward a sign most fellows would only expect to see on the other side of the pearly gates: “THE WHISKEY’S ON US.”

I started to turn to someone else but found myself turning and turning and turning some more till I’d completed a full circle. All without seeing the man I’d meant to speak to. He’d been walking by on my right, I’d thought — a brawny, bearded fellow in a checked shirt. Either he’d streaked like lightning into some nearby dive or the beers I’d had were hitting me hard.

I looked around for someone more sober than myself to consult, but everyone I saw was of a piece. Moving slow, wobbling or weaving, and plump to boot. None of which could come as a surprise in a community where, it seemed, you couldn’t pay for booze or food if you tried. I was just dismayed I’d never heard of the place. You’d have thought every red-blooded man on the continent would be making a beeline for Schultzton, the paradise on the prairie.

I spent the next half hour popping in and out of saloons and restaurants (most of them offering free biscuits or complimentary slices of pie). But I never saw Riggs — or Jawbone and Foley, as they’d apparently restricted their search to the first bar we’d cozied up to. I did eventually spot a man I took to be the town marshal, though. He had a tin star on his coat and a chippie on his lap. Like most of the women I’d seen that day, this one was half-smiling in a tired, slack-faced way that suggested opium could be found as free for the taking as beer, whiskey and biscuits.

“You the law around here?” I asked the man.

He put a pudgy finger to his badge. “Either that or I’m wearing its clothes.”

“Well, I’m looking for someone. The trail boss from a herd not far from town. He should’ve ridden into Schultzton two days ago to — ”

The marshal burst out laughing. The girl on his lap tittered, too, but her half-closed eyes gave me the feeling it was pure reflex. The next sound I expected out of her was a snore.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“You must’ve been in that dump Schultz just took over,” the marshal said. “Sounds like he’s laid claim to the whole town now.”

“This isn’t Schultzton?”

“Nope. Goddard City.”

The girl giggled again, then belched.

“All right.” I took a deep breath and started again. “I’m looking for my trail boss. He should’ve come into Goddard City two days ago. His name is Riggs, he’s just a shade taller than me, and he has black hair and a mustache. He was riding a dun mare with a diamond T brand. You know anything about him?”

“Sure. He was here. A disagreeable fellow. Not of a mind to be sociable.”

“He wasn’t here to be sociable.”

For the first time, the marshal managed to look like a real lawman. Which is to say he scowled at me.

“Are you here to be sociable?” he said.

“There’s nothing I love more than socializing, and I plan to do plenty of it . . . once I’ve found Riggs.”

The marshal smiled, but the glower lingered in his eyes.

“Feel free to look for him,” he said. “There’s plenty of places a man can amuse himself here. I can’t guarantee you’ll find this Riggs fellow, though. Unsociable folks don’t tend to stick around long.”

He lifted a mug to his mouth and focused all his attention on draining it. I took this as a dismissal and acted accordingly.

“Want another, Marshal Goddard?” I heard someone call out as I pushed through the saloon’s batwing doors.

I froze.

So the marshal was an even bigger son of a bitch than I’d taken him for. Never mind help finding Riggs — I hadn’t even got the true name of the town out of him.

I was simmering on that, tempted to head back inside and uncork a few choice turns of phrase I’d been saving for a rainy day, when a voice seemed to speak to me out of nowhere.

“Your friend tried to cause trouble. Don’t make the same mistake.”

I looked this way and that, but saw no one nearby. “Who said that? Where are you?”

“Down here.”

I looked down. The town had rickety wooden sidewalks raised a couple feet off the sod, and just enough sunlight pierced the warped slats for me to see a man staring up from the shadows below. He answered my next question before I could ask it.

“Saves me a lot of walking if I do my passing out down here. I’d just be back the second I was sober anyhow.”

I went down on one knee and tried not to feel too self-conscious about carrying on a conversation with a boardwalk.

“You heard me talking to the marshal?”

“Sure, when people weren’t stomping past overhead.”

“And you say you know what happened to Riggs?”

“No, that I didn’t say. I said he stirred up trouble, that’s all.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“The talking-too-much, talking-too-big kind.”

“Talking too much and too big about what?”

“Oh, you’ll see. I bet you already have seen it, actually. You just don’t know it. It’s the same for everybody, at first. They catch it out of the corner of their eye, and it’s like it didn’t happen at all. But when it’s right in front of your face, that’s different. You can’t ignore it . . . though you can do your damnedest to forget it.”

I shook my head in disgust as I stood up.

“That’s what I get for talking to a man under the sidewalk,” I muttered.

“You think I’m crazy?”

“I think you’re drunk.”

“Of course I am. But why should that make me wrong?”

I started walking away.

“Stop and take a good look around,” the man said. “Don’t move. Don’t blink. Then you’ll see I’m not crazy. You’ll think you are.”

“Go back to sleeping it off!” I called over my shoulder. Then I headed across the street, bound for the saloon where I’d left Foley and Jawbone. I figured it was their turn to wander around talking to S.O.B.s and lunatics. I’d earned myself a sandwich.

When I reached Schultz’s place, though, I paused before stepping inside. This town — whatever it was called — was without a doubt the most peculiar I’d ever come across. I gazed back up the street, half-expecting to spot a sign I’d somehow overlooked before. “WELCOME TO THE NORTH TEXAS SANITARIUM FOR THE INSANE,” it might say. Or perhaps “ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE” — though no description of Hell I’d ever heard had mentioned free eats and liquor. I thought Marshal Goddard would make a passable Old Scratch, however, so long as he took up a pitchfork and grew himself a . . .

I rubbed my eyes and blinked hard and rubbed my eyes some more.

A little pot-bellied dude in a checked suit had been walking toward me up the sidewalk. And then he simply wasn’t. Wasn’t walking. Wasn’t there.

I moved toward the spot where I’d last seen him, thinking maybe he’d ducked through a doorway so fast I hadn’t noticed. But there was no little pot-bellied dude and nowhere he could have gone.

The man under the sidewalk had been right about this much: I’d started wondering if I was losing my mind.

I turned back toward the street and made myself stare stare stare, stock still, unblinking, for as long as I could. And just when my eyeballs got to itching and my brain was telling me not to believe what they’d supposedly seen in the first place and my throat piped up to say it was getting mighty dry, it happened again.

Three soldiers stepped out of a music hall together, but only two made it to the street. The third just winked out, disappeared, vanished without even the puff of smoke a sideshow magician would have felt obliged to supply. And I knew for a fact it was no mirage or imagining, for I saw the other two troopers react.

Not that they reacted how you’d want your comrades in arms to. They stopped, looked at each other, glanced over their shoulders, then shrugged and shook their heads and carried on across the street.

“My god,” I said. “What is this place?”

A pair of punchers staggering past heard me.

“You only find out when you leave it, we reckon,” one of them said. “In the meantime, you may as well enjoy the stay.”

The other cowboy stopped, looked at me as if he had some wisdom to impart, then hunched over and threw up.

I whirled around and tore off into Schultz’s saloon.

“Where are my friends? The men I came here with?”

Schultz was still behind the bar giving glasses spit shines.

“Now don’t go getting excited,” he began.

“Where are they, god damn it?”

Schultz waggled his chins at a door at the back of the saloon. “With some crib girls. But you know you shouldn’t interrupt a fellow when he’s — ”

I was already bolting toward the door.

Beyond it were four grubby little rooms. Stalls, more like. Small compartments with no doors of their own, just filthy sheets hung up to provide the illusion of privacy. I drew one back to find a glassy-eyed girl in a chemise counting out money on a cot.

“Finders keepers,” she said, clutching the greenbacks to her chest.

On the cot beside her was a hat and a pair of trousers I recognized. They’d belonged to Foley.

I went to the next crib.

Now you’re a man of the world, I’m sure. I don’t have to describe what Jawbone was up to in there. But I’ll tell you this much: He didn’t want to stop, even when I told him we were in danger. “Go away” was all he’d say. “I’m busy.”

“I tell you, we’ve got to get out of here! Now!”

I grabbed Jawbone and dragged him off the painted lady who’d been reciprocating his sweaty affections with all the ardor of a cigar store Indian. He allowed himself to stay uncoupled from her just long enough to slam a fist to the side of my face. By the time I was done staggering back, he was already “busy” again with the girl.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into you,” he puffed. “But if you bother me again, you’re getting a lot more than a punch.”

It’s sad, isn’t it? Pleasure’s so irresistible a thing a man will leave his neck in a noose so long as parts due south are being pleased. If I’d just waited five minutes, Jawbone would probably have listened to reason. But I was feeling neither philosophical nor patient just then, and with a “Suit yourself!” I lit out.

When I got out front, I found no horses at the hitching post, though. Our mounts were gone. I didn’t bother running around chasing after thieves, for if you can pluck men from existence easy as you please, doing the same for some saddle ponies shouldn’t be hard.

No, there was but one thing to be done, so I did it: I pointed myself toward the hills and started running.

I headed out the south side of town. And not a dozen strides past the last building there was a moment of blackness, a blink I didn’t blink myself, and suddenly I was running into the north side. I whirled around, scampered out of town northward, and blink — there I was coming into town from the south.

It was the same story to east and west and southwest and northeast and southeast and northwest and probably, if I’d wings or shovel, up and down, too. Whichever way I tried to leave, I’d find myself coming back in again on the opposite side.

This provided great amusement to whatever fellows weren’t drinking their cares away indoors, and soon a little clump of a crowd was gathered out in the street to cheer and jeer me.

“Try it running backwards!”

“Try it skipping!”

“Try it doing cartwheels!”

“Five dollars says he goes another quarter hour before he gives up.”

“You’re on!”

I didn’t last the quarter hour. Another five minutes, and I got the idea. Whoever had us penned up wasn’t going to just let me leave. I’d have to make them let me.

The closest I knew of to someone in charge — Marshal Goddard — had come out to see what all the fuss was about. So I drew my forty-five and aimed it his way.

The men around him scattered. He just heaved a sigh.

I came toward him, my gunsight level with his eyes.

“Tell them to let me go.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Goddard said. “I don’t even know who ‘them’ is.”

“What about the booze? The food? Someone has to bring it here.”

Goddard shook his head. “No. They don’t. It just . . . shows up.”

I stopped maybe six feet from Goddard, my Colt still pointed at the bridge of his nose.

“Like people just go,” I said.

“Exactly like that.”

“And you don’t do anything about it?”

Goddard shrugged. “Everyone tries to get away at first. You saw, though. It’s pointless. And even if one of us was to escape, what would he be escaping to? Just look around. You won’t see any Vanderbilts here.”

I did look around. And here’s what I saw eyeing me back.

Saddle bums. Soldiers. Homesteaders. Nesters. Drummers. Drifters. Whores. Every kind of dirt that gets picked up in that special wind that blows from East to West. All settled here. They’d stumbled in tired and hungry and beaten down, no doubt, and now they had everything they could possibly ask for — except freedom. Was that such a big price to pay for the good life?

I knew the answer for Goddard and the rest.

And I knew the answer for me.

I holstered my gun, turned, and started marching toward the edge of town again.

“You don’t want me here!” I shouted at the clouds. “I’m not like them! I’ll cause trouble, you can count on it!”

“Don’t do it, cowboy!” Goddard called after me. “Just hunker down and shut up and you’ll learn to like it here!”

I didn’t stop.

“You’d best let me walk up into those hills!” I hollered skyward. “‘Cuz I’ll burn this whole damn town down if you make me stay! I mean it! There’s nothing you can gain from keeping me here!”

The street ended, turned suddenly into grassland, just five strides ahead of me now.

Then four.

Then three.

Then two.

Then one.

I took the last step — and for once didn’t end up back at the opposite end of town.

No. I went somewhere a million times worse.

It was unbearably hot and unbearably bright and unbearably loud. I shut my eyes tight and clamped my hands to the sides of my head, but the light burned right through my eyelids, and the noise — the screech of a hundred trains blowing their whistles at once — pierced my ears like ice picks. The air wasn’t just lung-searing hot but noxious, too, and soon I was gagging and kecking. And just when I started to keel over, praying I was falling into a faint so the pain would stop, that’s when they grabbed me.

I never saw them. Even the quickest peek would have blinded me. But I could feel them. Like thick ropes slathered in jam, one to each wrist and ankle. They held me down while something else got to work. Of that, all I felt was the tugging and the cutting and then a burn like a brand fresh from the fire put where you’d least like it. Then it was over, and Goddard was leaning over me whispering “Jesus lord,” and the sky above him was blue.

I recovered fast, considering what had been done to me. In fact, just two days later I was able to help the rest of the boys from the drive see reason when they finally followed us down from the hills. And when the next gaggle of wayward punchers or deserters or pilgrims came into town, I gave them a good talking to, as well. Just like I’m talking to you.

You whisk a troublemaker away to god knows where, never to be seen again, and what does anyone learn from it? Not much. But you take that same man and you calm him down — the same way you’d calm a he-calf you don’t need for breeding — and then you send him back? That makes an impression.

So the cracks you’ve probably heard about me are true. I don’t have all god gave me . . . and I couldn’t care less. Just look at me! Fat and happy! Even going a little gray.

Yes, I’ve had a nice, long stay here. Because I’m sociable, you see, and I bring out the sociable side in others. It could be the same for you. All you’ve got to do is —

Finally! Here it comes! Lunch! Would you just look at the beef on those sandwiches? I can taste it already! But where are my manners?

After you, amigo.

© 2014 by Steve Hockensmith.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Steve Hockensmith made his first professional short-story sale to Analog way back in the late 1990s. Soon afterward, he switched his focus to the mystery genre, becoming a regular contributor to both Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen magazines. His first novel, the mystery/Western hybrid Holmes on the Range, was a finalist for the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, and Dilys awards. He went on to write four sequels as well as a pair of bestselling follow-ups to the international publishing sensation Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. More recently, he’s written (with collaborator “Science Bob” Pflugfelder) the middle-grade mysteries Nick and Tesla’s High-Voltage Danger Lab and Nick and Tesla’s Robot Army Rampage. His corporeal form can usually be found in Alameda, Calif., while his Web presence lurks somewhere in the vicinity of stevehockensmith.com.

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

The Biography of a Bouncing Boy Terror!

Ysabeau S. Wilce

Part One: Crime Commences

Once upon a time, my little waffles, far across the pale eastern sands, a baby boy bounced from his mother’s womb into a dark and dangerous world, into a land well full of hardship, turmoil, and empty handball courts. This boy, starting tiny and growing huge, would one day become a legend in the minds of his minions, a hero in the hearts of his hobbledehoys, the fanciest lad of them all: Springheel Jack!

And this, my dovetails, is the story of how it all started.

Now in the beginning young Jack was not a rowdy tyke, well full of the jiggamaree and the falder-a-oo. The other childer might drive their mammas mad with fancy ideas of fun, but young Jack was not made for sportive tricks. He was his mamma’s muffin and he kept to her side, helping in the smelly sport of making matches, which phosphoric occupation was how the family kept fed. They were a poor household, with no extra divas for white sugar or white bread, and all ten of Jack’s tiny brothers and sisters must put paws into keeping the darkness of poverty at bay. Dipping lucifers at ten glories a decade leaves little room for boisterous fun.

Well dingy was the rundown tenement in which Jack’s family lived, perched atop a noisome blind tiger from which issued rousting and revelry all hours of the night — illegal whist games, bitter beer, and up-against-the-wall fiddling. Well dingy was the rundown room into which Jack’s family squeezed, tiny oil lamp the only tiny light, tiny window opening into tiny alley, and tiny pinch-faced siblings with cold blue fingers dipping match sticks into glowing blue poison. Instead of a cat, the family kept Hunger, which crouched in the corner of the tiny room, wiggling its tail and licking its prickly chops, waiting, just waiting. They had each other but they had nothing else, not even shoes to cover their frigid toes. Their days were poisonous and dreary.

But at night, dear doorknobs, when the dipping was done and the little pots of phosphorus illumined the shadows, Jack lay in his nest of rags, tucked up against his baby mice siblings and he dreamed away the pallid gray world: the knobby fingers, the tightening tummies, each drab day dribbling into another drab day, endlessly endless. At night Jack dreamed of colors: glimmering, glittering, glistening, glowing colors — cyan, jade, celadon, amber, cobalt, wheat, orange, plum, lavender, and magenta. But the color that shone the most through Jacko’s dreams was the brilliant tang of red: cerise, sangyn, vermilion, carmine, crimson, gules, rust, rose, cochineal. Rushing friendly warm red, delicious and hot.

Well, my nifty needles, once a week Jack’s mamma would take the little boxes of matches and place them into her market basket to redeem. The other childer stayed home, under the concern of Jack, but the baby who coughed went with mamma, wrapped in newspaper and tucked also into the basket, sleeping uneasily among the boxes of spark. At the factory of Zebulon Quarrel & Dau., Manufacturers of Lucifers, Phosphates, & Triggers, Jack’s mamma would turn in the week’s hundred boxes and receive into her thin hand one dull gold diva and eleven dingy glories, and on this happy day, there would be moldy cheese and squashed kale pie for supper.

But one day, Jack’s mamma could carry neither basket nor baby. The sickly prickles were itching through the City, and like all Disease, they enjoyed the poorest people first, leaving the rich for a luscious fat dessert. In Jack’s mamma’s illness, it fell to her muffin to do her duty, else gobbling Hunger would creep from its corner and snatch the childer up, one by one. So, leaving the basket for the baby who coughed, Jack packed the boxes of matches in a crumpled cracker box and set out down the splashy wet streets to Zebulon Quarrel’s crenellated factory.

Through the sloppy streets he sloshed, brave Jackling, clutching his cracker box from the splashing dillys, the clippy horsecars, and the pushing people who were eager to get home to their toasted cheese dinners and hot tea before darkfall. At the hulking behemoth gates of Quarrel’s factory, wee Jack stood upon the iron shoe scraper and handed his cracker box upward to the grimacing factotum behind the window rail. Handed down he was, after a few minutes of stolid counting, the munificent sum of one dull-faced diva and eleven chipped glories. A fortune in coin.

Thus paid, Jacko slogged to the 99 Glory Tuckshop where to buy squashed pie and moldy cheese, and perhaps even a crock of spinach paste for the hungry childer’s evening sup. Full darkness lingered in the wings of the sky, waiting for its cue, and the graying rain drove down like needles, stitching the evening in silvery sorrow. The streets were most empty and wet now, and only sweet Jacko, with his blue bare feet and his ragged sweater, hopped through the puddles, shivering.

Then-Jack paused.

Then-Jack poised.

Then-Jack stood staring into a glowing window front by which he had just been hurrying, and there he saw a thing that caught in his head like happy, stuck in his sight like sugar, a vision that near tore his breath away. A vision that seemed sprung from his most secret special dreams.

A pair of red sparkly boots.

And what boots — heels as high as heaven and toes as sharp as salt. Gleaming stove pipe uppers greaving tall and slick, and on the tip of each pointy toe a snake’s head leered, spitting tongue and bone sharp teeth.

And what sparkle — glistening and glittering in the evening light like diamond rain after the shower has stopped, like snow in the sun, like a thousand stars clustered in the midnight sky.

And what red — slick wet red, sparking like sunshine, thick and rich as paint, gleaming like a pricked finger, like a stormy dawn, like first love.

Jacko opened the door and inside he went. The shop contained a vast smoky gloom from which sprang the vague hulk of cabinets and large pieces of carved wood whose shapes Jack could neither see fully nor understand. He cared not for the shadows or the smoke; he cared only for the brilliant boots in the window.

“Do you see love?” A squeaky voice inquired from the distant reaches of the room.

“Those red sparkly boots in the window — ” stuttered Jack, overcome by fog and fright. A jackdaw flapped out of the shadows, perched upon a hat rack, and regarded our boy with flat button eyes.

“A most discerning young dasher,” said the grammer who leapt from the back of the store with a flash of blue petticoats and took up stand beside him, gripping his arm with a grandmotherly pinch. In the gloam her teeth shone as green as grass, and her ancient monkey head was surmounted by a soufflé of a cap. “Best in the house. Chop-chop, my little darlings, and come to your bungalow baby boy.”

The boots jumped out of their window, driven by their own joie-de-vie and began to caper nimbly on the counter top, heels clacking a fandango, tongues flapping a jaunty tune. The jackdaw cawed accompaniment and even the old grammer snapped gnarled fingers as the heels clicked and spun, snapping upward, diddling downward, the snake heads gnashing their needley teeth and spitting. Jack’s blue toes began to tap the splintery floor and his heart jiggled and jumped in his chest. Never before had he seen such a glorious slick shade of red and now he was completely caught.

“The boots like your sweetness,” said the grammer, and both she and the jackdaw giggled. “For a small price they shall be your daisies and together such fun you shall have.”

Jack’s jiggly heart flopped. What funds did he have to purchase anything other than moldy cheese and squashed kale pie? What funds would he ever get, in his dull little room, dipping poison matches for plungers to light their cigars from? And the hungry childer and the sick mamma waiting at home for his return. His world would be forever dull, all else was a forlorn hope. Jack’s wiggly heart died and he began to turn away.

“Cheap at the price, but dear in the taking,” the grammer said. “And naught price that you cannot pay, I warrant.”

“I have no flash,” Jacko said, his sad exit halted. But his fingers felt the twist of his sweater wherein he had carefully placed the coins, rubbing their rounded shapes through the thin cloth.

The jackdaw spoke up then, its voice a buzz of suggestion. “What then burns in your hand, Jackanapes?”

Jack looked down to the sudden heat in his grubby paw and there lay the coins, not so dull now. The diva gleamed like the sun, with eleven little tiny silver moons circling its golden glow.

“But — ”

The boots clicked their crimson heels together and the snake heads said, in slithery tandem voices: Darling Burning Boy, with us you shall be the Fleet Footed Fancy Lad, the Red-Haired Child of Sunset. No obstacle you cannot leap, no hunger you cannot fill, no thirst you cannot quench. Come and let us jump for joy!

Looking at the red sparkly boots, the color of his dreams, what could Jack think of hungry tummies in the tenement home, waiting for their crusty sup? What could he think of a sick mamma and a skull-headed baby, coughing instead of cooing? What could he think other than the glorious tap-dancing of the slaphappy boots, the rich radiant red which filled his heart with warmth, flooded his brain with fun, and made his toes tap? Oh, our Jack was a good boy and perhaps for a tiny momento he did consider the cold little faces, the grinning Hunger waiting patiently in the corner, his mamma’s red swollen hands, but then the boots drummed a furious rhythm and in that rhythm, all else Jack forgot.

When all your life you have been cold, little inkwells, how can you then resist the fire?

The grammer took the diva and eleven glories and dropped them into the gaping maw of the jackdaw, which flapped off into the dark shadows, still cackling. Then the knobby old lady flicked her hankie at Jacko, who jerked at the waft of hyacinth that washed over him. He coughed and as he coughed she flicked again, speaking a strange word that crackled and snapped in the air, sparking, arcing.

Jack shut his peeps to the brilliant flicker and when he opened them full wide again, the grammer was gone, the darkness was gone, the shop was gone, and he stood, light-footed, in the center of the street. Rosy daylight suffused the air, pooling pinkly on the surface of the puddles and the wet walls of the surrounding buildings. He looked down, and the snakes hissed happily, little tongues tasting the clean morning air. Then his boots took to the sky like big red balloons, carrying him upward on their flight. The boots capered, they danced, they trotted, they gavotted, and they leapt full fifty feet in the air, tongues clacking with joy, Jack shouting with joy, as they flew.

Over the bright morning roofs, they sprang, Jack and his Jackboots, traipsing across treetops. They jumped over the milk cart, and the trash cart, and little lines of childer trailing off to school. They scattered traffic brass and barouches, flyers and flowerbeds, leaping ever higher into the sterling blue sky. Never before had Jack felt so lovely, so wise, so tall, and so very, very clever, and in his happiness he yodeled a little tune, full of hope and wonderment. The red sparkly boots were just the thing and now that he had them, he could not imagine his feet, his heart, his life, without them. The world was fresh and new, and Jack with it, all dewdrop eager-eyed, truly footloose and fancy-free.

But after a time, Jack grew tired of the jumping and wanted to rest. He watched the cool green grass bounce by his springs, and yet when he tried to halt so to rest under the shade trees, the sparkly red boots kept bouncing him along. He grabbed at railings as he passed, sweaty hands sliding from the iron; he was flying so fast now that it seemed perhaps the Wide World itself was moving and he was the one standing still. Jacko shouted for help — to the brass directing traffic, to the washwoman kneeling on marble steps, to the costermonger polishing her apples, but his shouts wisped in the wind and were lost. Still he bounced on, going ever higher and higher with each leap, until his ears rang and his head spun, and he was fair ill with dizziness. He snatched at chimney pots and streetlights, at lightning vanes and flag pole finials, but still he sprang onward.

Then suddenly he stopped.

Jackie stopped and he tumbled, down into the dust and lay there, thankful that the bouncing had ceased, although his head still seemed to leap and spin, spin and leap. His tum twisted and turned but was too empty to urp.

“Well, now, little leaper,” a voice said, “How far can you go before you kiss the sun and burn your roly poly red lips?”

Jack squinted up, but only a shadow could he see, bright sun burning behind a darkened head.

“I cry sorrow,” said Jacko, “And offer thanks. The boots fair well skint me.”

“So I see,” said the friendly voice. “Perhaps you’d like me to help you take them off?”

“Ayah so,” agreed Jack, whose tender tootsies, not yet used to being enfolded in leather, were now painfully raw. But no amount of pulling would remove the sparkly red boots from Jack’s wee feeties, and while you, clever tulips, are probably not surprised by this turn of the ankle yourselves, it came as a huge and utter gasp to our poor little Jackomydarling.

“You have bought a bargain,” said the gramper, for tugging and pulling had revealed him to be so. “And keep it you shall. The boots are tired now and need to rest, but once they have had their kip, you’ll be bouncing again.”

“But bouncing be done!” cried Jack. Now that the fun was resting, he was suddenly recalling the hungry siblings, the sick mamma, the coughing baby, all waiting for him to return with their chow. But now he had no money and no chow, nothing but sparkly red boots which soared and galloped but which could not keep Hunger at bay. “I must slip the boots and return for my flash, for the coins I need to buy munch for my dear loves at home.”

The gramper smiled, and shook his stick. A jackdaw flapped down and perched upon his shoulder, gazing at young Jacko with flat black eyes. “The shop is closed and the shopkeeper gone. What is bought cannot be returned.”

“But my lovely lollies? My sweet mamma and my tiny siblings? The baby who coughs? Can they live? Must they die for my sparklies?” Tears begin to stir in Jack’s eyes and all his joy in red was gone.

“Perhaps this consideration should have come before the purchasing,” the gramper said, “But such is the rashness of youth. You say you are fair well skint, of both flash and dash — maybe so.”

From its perch upon the gramper’s shoulder, the jackdaw spoke up then, its voice a burr of suggestion: “What then burns in your hand, Jackolantern?”

Jack looked down to the sudden coldness in his grubby paw and there, caught in his fingers, gleamed a strand of pearls, tiny white moons strung on a golden cord. Never had he seen anything so round and pure, and yet how had it come to be in his hand? In his soaring, he must have snatched and noticed not.

“Did you not look before you leapt? Or while leaping look?” The stick was shook again, and pointed upward, towards an open window and a fluttering drape. “Doors are lock’d but who could imagine that larceny might leap on springy heels?”

The jackdaw opened his wings in a great flutter, launching upward with a hoarse cry and when Jack lowered his shielding arm, the gramper and his fetch were gone. But the pearls remained, cool and knobby, and so too did the open window. Jack looked from one to the other, considering, and a rough red magick began to burn in his brain. He stood and tapped one red sparkly heel upon the grass. The snake head spit, and with the tamp Jack felt vigor anew course upward through his tender tootsies, his knobby knees, his empty tum, his sad heart. When he stamped again, this time with both heels, upward he soared, like an arrow, to the beckoning window.

When Jack bounced home to his family’s tenement room, laden down was he with gifts bestowed upon him by his bouncing boots and many open windows. With high springy heels and unlocked doors, roofs and balconies, the whole city was his huckleberry.

The tiny siblings greeted his arrival with weak squeals of joy, for instead of squashy kale pie, Jacko brought spicy chicken galantine, savory and strong. Instead of moldy cheese, there was cherry cream custard for afters and never more that sticky gritty spinach paste. The sick mamma and the baby who coughed got a spoonful of Madam Twanky’s Super Celebrated Celery Salt Med-I-Cine, which fixed them both right up. After much munching, Jack chucked the horrible match pots out of the window and the entire family removed to the Palace Union Hotel, where they reveled in lush carpets, hot water, and toast on demand. Hunger, left behind in the empty tenement room, slunk sadly down the street, looking for a new corner to call home.

And thus, darling dishrags, did wee Jacko take to a life of snuggery and sin, poaching purses, fixing races, mashing lovers, cutting cards. Thus was Springheel Jack born, the Bounciest Boy Terror ever to be seen. The reign of the Boots had begun!

© 2014 by Ysabeau S. Wilce.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ysabeau S. Wilce was born in California and has followed the drum through Spain and most of its North American colonies. She became a lapsed historian when facts no longer compared favorably to the shining lies of her imagination. Prior to this capitulation, she researched arcane military subjects and presented educational programs on how to boil laundry at several frontier army forts. She is a graduate of Clarion West and has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, the James Tiptree Award, and won the Andre Norton Award. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is very fond of mules.

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

The Quality of Descent

Megan Kurashige

The trick begins like this:

The magician throws an egg up into the air, where it flies — small and white and full of import — up and up, high into the black reaches of the proscenium. We await the descent, holding our breaths, expecting at any moment the crash of slapstick hilarity, exploding like a bomb.

But the egg simply vanishes.

• • • •

Ava arrived with the night. I had abandoned the air-conditioned silence of my office for a street that was just going dark when Ava, about to change my life, erupted around the corner on a bicycle that clattered. She wore rubber slippers of fluorescent orange. Her legs flailed and the pedals spun around and around. Her clothes streamed through the air like a crowd of flags, and I might never have noticed the strange thing about her, on account of how funny she looked, if she hadn’t stopped in front of me and spoke.

“Hey!” She threw her bicycle to the ground. She had on too many clothes, layers piled on layers as if she didn’t have anywhere else to keep them. “Are you still working?”

“No,” I said. I wondered if she were homeless.

“But I’ve got a proposition for you,” Ava said. “Seriously. Let me show you.”

Propositions mean doing something awkward for the benefit of someone else, and I would have said so, except that there was this pretty stranger standing in front of me, unbuttoning her coat. She might have been crazy, but my eyes would not peel themselves away.

Ava took off a coat, a sweater, a long robe with a cord sash. She was skinny underneath all that, and her t-shirt had two holes sliced through the back to make way for the things that stuck out from the white fabric, which were a pair of wings.

A pair of wings that protruded from her shoulder blades and hung in smooth, brown-specked dignity to her knees. For a moment, I forgot to breathe.

“Unusual,” she said. “Unexpected. Not the kind of thing you want to see at the end of the day. Sorry about that.”

I didn’t know what to say. The wings shifted when she talked, rising and settling with the brittle plush of a canary. They were never quite still, and when she shrugged, the edge of one brushed the side of my arm and drew back, apologetically, of its own accord.

“I understand if you have nothing to say,” she said. “You haven’t prepared a speech for this situation because you never expected to come across a woman with a pair of wings. It’s not like it’s part of the ordinary repertoire. You want to know: Is this a trick? Are they real? is probably the first question that comes to mind, but you might try something else because that would be kind of rude.”

I waited for the moment to stretch too far, to burst. Someone would jump out with a camera. She would apologize for the joke.

But that didn’t happen, and I couldn’t ask the question that mattered because Ava had already mentioned it. She said it might be rude.

“What is it that you do?” I asked.

“Birthday parties,” Ava said. “Theatrical productions. Magic shows. I like magic shows. Advertising banners. Washing windows, cleaning out gutters on very tall houses. I’m comfortable with heights.”

I should have asked the question then. Did she use a ladder, or did she ascend by some other means? It pressed against my teeth and I was afraid it would fly out from between them to puncture the girl standing in front of me. I imagined her deflating, melting away, leaving me to walk home to eat a cold sandwich and fall asleep in the middle of a movie that I would be unable to remember. I held the question back and swallowed it instead. It hurt my throat.

• • • •

I arrange entertainments for people. If there is a camel in your opera, or if you need an elephant to appear at your party and impress your guests by dispensing rides, then I can get them both. I have several times delivered a box half as tall as me, but light enough to lift with one arm, and packed inside, between layers of chilled glassine, several hundred butterflies dreaming of escape.

I specialize in living creatures, and I’m good at what I do, though it’s mostly a case of knowing who to call. Ava said she found my name in the phonebook, next to an ad for custom-dyed helium balloons.

• • • •

“How did you get into this anyway?” Ava asked. She breathed on the framed thank you notes I keep in my office, then wiped the fog away. “I mean, you have a job that no one ever thinks about until they need someone who does it, and then when you do, you can’t believe it actually exists.”

“I worked for a florist,” I said. This is an old story and I tell it all the time. I could tell it in my sleep. I could tell it to anyone, even a girl with wings. “Someone ordered twenty-five centerpieces of cream roses and hosta leaves in black vases. They wanted them for a wedding, and they wanted something unique to surprise the guests with over their hors d’oeuvres. I suggested goldfish. I thought pairs of them would go with the romantic theme.”

“That sounds pretty,” Ava said.

It was pretty. The goldfish dropped in like handfuls of tangerines. I like to make sure my audience has considered this before I go on, how good everything must have looked with the green, and the black, and the living, vivid gold.

“The goldfish died,” I said. “I offered to pick them out, but the bride refused. They meant something, she said. Something romantic and important, like art, is how I think she put it.”

This is when people either laugh or make a face and reconsider the complications of dealing with living things. I’ve lost business telling this story. I’ve also watched people decide they’re in this all the way to their noses, toss aside the guilt and extravagant expense, and sign my check. Ava laughed so hard that she staggered. Her laugh rolled up from her stomach and poured out of her mouth. It soaked everything, including my ears. It made her tip over until she had to fling out her hands, or crash to the floor.

I caught her, just, but her wings fell around us, the tips of them fluttering with alarm. The smell of her feathers, hollow and dry, assaulted the inside of my nose.

• • • •

Ava stayed with me because she said she didn’t know anyone else in the city, and because I have a tall, narrow house with too many empty rooms. My last girlfriend filled it with people she knew, almost-discovered musicians and old acquaintances from college on the East Coast, but since she left, the sofas and futons had gone uninhabited and I hadn’t bothered to clear them away. Sofas are graceful things when they’re empty.

I asked Ava if she wouldn’t rather go to a hotel.

“Haven’t you noticed how hotels aren’t real places?” she asked. “It’s like they get scrubbed too frequently and never get the chance to develop a personality. They smell like cleaning products. They give me the creeps.”

She stayed up late, listening to sounds I didn’t hear anymore. She hung over the sofa’s cushions and pressed her cheek and ear to the floor, all upside down like she was riding a trapeze. The wings slumped against her neck as if they would, at any moment, fall off and smother her.

“Isn’t that uncomfortable?” I asked.

“What’s that?”

I repeated myself, but she shook her head and pointed at the floor.

“That noise.” The wings pulled her shirt askew and I could see the place where skin ran into down.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “Just the house. It’s old.”

“Oh.”

There were no straps on the wings. No strings. No telltale crust of dried glue. If there had been, I could have kept my hands flat on the creaking floor. It wasn’t even a clean transition. Stubs of feather dotted the skin on her shoulders and down the center of her back like freckles gone insane.

I wrapped my hand around the closest wing and pulled, gently.

“Satisfied?” Ava asked.

I got a firm grip through warm feathers and pin fine struts that would crackle and snap if bent too far. I stretched out the wing as far as it could go, stood and walked backwards until it unfurled in sagging, mechanical beauty. I wanted to lay my face on it. I wanted her to flap it until the whole room shook with beaten air.

“What would you do,” Ava said, “if it just came off? If — pop! — and there you are with a big piece of make believe hanging in your face? Glue. Wires. Fishing line and goose feathers.”

I put the wing down and it sat still on the floor between us. Feathers skimmed my bare feet and the wing sat there. It sat there and it might have been dead.

“I guess I would give it back to you,” I said. “But I’d want to look at it first to see how you did it.”

“You could keep it for a souvenir.”

We both looked at the wing, and then Ava hauled it in. It moved slowly, sweeping up lint and dust, until Ava shrugged and it folded into a smooth cape behind her. I wondered what kind of person would keep a giant wing for a souvenir.

I stayed up and watched Ava while she watched late night movies on the TV. The wings pushed her to the edge of the sofa, but she reclined into them and the feathers took her in, nestled around her shoulders and curled over her feet like a fringe of velvet leaves.

In the morning, I watched her over bowls of cereal and milk. I watched her reflection in the window above the sink while I washed our dishes and she talked about how she kept losing telephones, not on purpose, she assured me, though she was starting to think it might be more than bad luck. A personal flaw, unconscious and inconvenient, but impossible to get rid of because it was hidden somewhere under everything else.

“It’s like always putting on your right shoe before your left,” Ava explained. “It’s not that one is better than the other, but you can’t help it because if you do it the other way, it feels like you made a mistake. Your socks get wrinkled up wrong and you might have to stop and adjust.” Ava examined a spoon before putting it in the drawer. “Sometimes I feel sorry for anybody who tries to call, but then I figure that if it’s really important, they can always write.”

• • • •

Where is this headed? Somewhere predictable. Not that there’s anything wrong with a story because you think you can see the ending from across the room, from a mile away, from the other side of the world.

• • • •

I got Ava a job in a magic show. The magician was a client who went by Charles on stage and Charlie everywhere else, and on the rare occasions when he was in town, we would take each other out for tacos and discuss work.

“You’re looking great,” Charlie said. “It must be the weather, you lucky bastard. I’ve been traveling through this stuff that you wouldn’t believe . . . No, wait, that’s not good enough. It must be a girl. Isn’t that it? I can always tell. They make you handsome if they don’t do you in, and you are looking all shiny and puffed up on something good.” He raised one eyebrow and winked in slow motion.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess. She makes me happy.”

We sat down and Charlie poured a container of salsa over his meal, completely obliterating the taste of the fish, and said that I had all the luck. “You’re in love. You’ve got this nice job. You just have to find people what they think they need, while I’ve got to deal with a dying world. Nobody gets their kicks anymore from watching rabbits hopping out of top hats, you know. I have to find that particular detail that’s going to reach out and dig its fingers into people’s calloused guts.

“You have to go about things sideways in my business,” he said. “And then, when they’re least expecting it, you shoot them in the heart.”

Be indelible, was Charlie’s advice, not forgettable. Which is why he never hired people’s girlfriends. He didn’t need an assistant. He was a solo act.

I found a picture of Ava on my phone and put it on the table.

“Rules,” Charlie said, “are built with exceptions.”

• • • •

“A magician never reveals her secrets,” Ava said. “You can’t expect people to believe a trick unless you can convince them that it’s real first.”

She liked to lay in bed with the windows open so the night came drifting in on top of us. It made me cold, but I didn’t want to admit it, so I hid my hands under her wings where her feathers were warm and dry on one side and her skin was warm and barely damp on the other.

“You’re not a magician,” I said.

“I don’t have a silly three piece suit,” Ava said. “With pocket cuffs for playing cards and secret lighters for turning things into smoke. That doesn’t mean anything. Assistants can be magicians, too. Didn’t you ever read fairytales when you were a kid?”

“Of course I did.” I tried to remember some names, but all I got were lists of characters. “Poor boys turn out to be princes. Old ladies are really fairies. Girls run away from home. You could be in a fairy tale.”

Ava prodded my forehead with the tip of her nose. Then she ruffled her wings so air puffed through all the feathers and brushed her hair across my face.

“Don’t be stupid,” she said.

• • • •

Wings are an obvious thing. See them every day and they should still be bigger than everything else in the room. They should poke you in the eye.

But wings are like the rest of us. They fade away with too much seeing. First go the edges, then the rest, and then all you see is Ava’s sharp, funny nose, the creases on the inside of her elbows, her lazy shuffle when she can’t be bothered to lift her feet. Most of the time, all I saw was Ava.

Except for when all I saw were the wings. When we were lying in bed together. When I was walking down the street alone. When I was waiting in the dark behind the theater, high on anticipation for the moment, the sudden, surprising moment when the door became a rectangle of light pushing Ava out to meet me.

The wings crouched on her back like a monster, inciting me to dissection.

She showered and brought them, soaked and dripping, into the bedroom. They left water on the floor and transferred cold, clinging damp to the sheets.

“Is that really necessary?” I pushed the wings away, bunched the blankets into a wall between us.

“What?”

“I mean, are they real?”

Ava turned her head and the blankets became an actual wall, one with a wide parapet and a vertiginous drop. “I can’t hear you,” she said.

The worst times were at the magic show. I sat in the audience and the questions collected in heavy piles somewhere behind my ribs while Charlie pattered on, making way for Ava’s wings.

• • • •

The trick went like this:

“Imagine the egg,” Charles says. He holds up an egg.

Ava told me that he blew them clean himself, after pricking the ends with a pin.

“Not much bigger than the space between an average pair of hands,” Charles says. He claps his own clever, bony hands together and makes the egg vanish before it can be crushed between them.

Ava said that, if I knew where to look, I would see him putting it away inside one of his sleeves.

“They say the inhabitants are aware of the world waiting outside. Noise. Light. Warmth. The walls aren’t very good.” Charles folds his hands together, and the egg is there again, balanced on the flat of his palm. He taps the side of it with his finger. “Hello?” he says. “Hello?”

The audience laughs. Charles fumbles the egg. The audience holds its breath as the egg shoots between his careful fingers and flies up into the darkness. Then here it comes! Falling into view, speeding downwards, growing larger and larger as it falls. This is no mere function of distance and perspective, no, it is a goose egg, an ostrich egg, the egg of something extinct and large. It is not an egg at all, the audience swears. It is a boulder; it is a moon, unslung from alien orbit. It is an unidentified falling object.

When it arrives, it is a crash landing, augmented by all the cymbals and brass the orchestra can muster. And once the creamy, dreamy smoke has lifted, in the ruins of the shell, it is something that could easily be a miracle.

Ava told me about the complicated elevator that rushed her up in a tightly curled ball until her back touched the underside of the stage. She had to rear up like a beast, she said, or else the trapdoor wouldn’t work. Her back, padded by wings, forced the panels apart and she stood, so quickly that the unprompted eye would swear that she could only have appeared from the ruins of the egg.

Charles steps back and Ava shakes out her wings. They are covered in glitter, big, garish things that look, under the stage lights, like items bought from a costume shop on the cheap. They wave, they strain, they grip the air and pull it down to haul Ava up, and for the people sitting close enough, there is a faint rush of displaced air. Ava rises, leaving Charles behind. “Wait!” he says. “You’re supposed to take me, too.” He raises his arms to reach for her, or maybe to obscure his face. He stands like that, for a slow count of five, until a single feather drifts down and strikes him on the head, hidden behind his still and upraised arms, and his suit crumples to the floor, full of nothing.

Ava punched me in the shoulder when I asked and said that it was only a classic substitution, switch one in, switch the other out, all elegant as pie if you have a distraction — that’s me, Ava said — no eye can resist. And the rest is theater, smoke and mirrors to make the trick taste good.

Shoot them in the heart, Ava said.

In the end, the audience always cheers. They clap until the magician comes back to take his bow. Ava takes one too, and the audience claps because she is so beautiful, despite the makeup smearing her sweaty face. But they clap loudest of all when the magician takes Ava’s hand and they bow together, one arm each lifted in thanks. The end, the audience thinks. Happily ever after.

• • • •

“And you just fly?” I asked. “That’s not much of a trick.”

“Up, up, and away,” Ava said. “Like a balloon on a string. Not that I’m telling you anything. Secrets.” She pinched her lips together so she momentarily looked like a fish.

“What about Charlie’s secrets though? Goose eggs, you told me. Extra pockets. Trap doors under the stage.”

Ava took her fingers off her lips and climbed into bed. “Those aren’t my secrets. They’re his. And you can have as many as you want.”

Her feathers made a crunching noise when we rolled on top of them, their central shafts crushed under our weight. They only bent, never broke, though leftover glitter lodged between their barbs and some of them looked like they had been combed backwards until the filaments unlocked and sprang irreparably apart.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked her while listening to the way we breathed.

“Not much,” she said. “But I’m very good at hiding it.”

One of her wings was caught under me, and I would have sat up to rearrange it, but Ava pushed herself across the bed until we were pressed tight together. Her wing pulled on me and I imagined it tearing off in pieces from wherever it was attached. I worried that it might hurt.

Ava didn’t say anything. Pins and needles began to grow where her shoulder carved a hole in my ribs. Feathers filled all the spaces between us, trapping the air against our skin and turning it into something so hot and still that I thought it would suffocate us both.

• • • •

The important question is: Did I ever see Ava fly? Honest to goodness, close up, right in front of my own and only eyes. All the questions can be boiled down to one.

• • • •

There is a very short list of people allowed backstage at a magic show. I don’t mean the waiting area, or the dressing rooms, which are all lit up in honest brightness. Anyone can go there, but the doors all close before you make it to the secret black corridors where the curtains meet the stage.

I know how theaters work. It’s part of my job.

I hid in the back, next to a bisected glass bowl that held goldfish on one side and empty water on the other. I waited and imagined my stomach floating up to fill my throat.

Ava and Charlie stood onstage, under the dim rehearsal lights. Ava was so still that she looked like a statue next to Charlie’s swooping, competent hands.

Ava said something. I was too far away to hear.

Charlie said something. He pointed to the wing closest to him, and when Ava shook her head, he pressed his fingers on his eyebrows and dug his thumbs into his cheeks. He stood that way for several seconds, then put his hands down and snatched at Ava’s wing.

I was with him in that moment. I was Charlie and Charlie was me.

“Don’t you get it?” he shouted.

Pull the feathers from them, I thought. Pluck them, one by one. If they’re real, they must hurt. We would have Ava’s face before us then, impassive and dishonest, or else Ava’s face with every detail outlined in tears.

The world stopped.

My legs dragged me across the stage. I was a man in slow motion, a sloth, a snail on a burning summer day, and by the time I got there, Charlie had gone. Coward.

I was breathing too hard to speak, and Ava looked bored. “He wanted to know how things worked,” she said. She licked a finger and smoothed the feathers where Charlie’s hand had disarranged them.

The world began to move again. It resolved itself into distinct pieces: me and Ava. Ava in a harness of thick webbing, painted to blend with the skin around her arms and the feathers of her wings. I stared at it.

“For safety,” she said.

“What does it do?” It had complicated metal fixings painted black to block out their shine.

“Nothing,” Ava said. She took off the harness and dropped it on the floor, and then she reached behind her back and took off her wings.

It seemed to be an arduous process. She had to twist her arms around her neck and under her armpits to reach. They came off one at a time and fell with a damp, sodden noise that hurt my ears. I wanted to gather them up and shove them back at her, right away, as if I could save them, as if they were in danger of death. I couldn’t move. Ava stood in front of me, her back bare and delicate, and I knew I should say something, or touch her, but I couldn’t think of how to start. I looked at the wings for inspiration. They lay still on the floor.

“They don’t do anything,” Ava said. “Nothing.” She picked up the wings and walked away from me. “Nothing, nothing, nothing at all.”

• • • •

You may have heard about the closing of the magic show. It was sudden, unexpected, and the theater returned every ticketholder’s money with a letter of polite and vague apology. Charlie retired to teach mime at an obscure university in western Canada, and I occasionally receive letters from him on official stationary with requests for consultation on experimental theater productions. His most recent project was a surrealist play for which he needed a dozen birds that would fly out into the theater and back to the stage like clockwork. The best I could offer him were pigeons, but Charlie wrote back and said they had decided to scrap the idea and were starting all over again with puppets.

Ava rode away, early in the morning before I got out of bed. She folded her wings in a plastic tarp and strapped them to the back of her bicycle, securing the bundle with rope and tape to keep it from tangling in the wheel. They were battered and worn out, molting and spiked with feathers bent in half or broken off to leave sharp, hollow tips. She smoothed them down anyway and stacked them, soft undersides together, to wrap safe in the blue plastic skin.

I shouldn’t have pretended to be asleep, but I did. I tried to watch her without opening my eyes, and every so often I made a noise like I was hearing something I thought was part of a dream.

I found her phone in the laundry hamper, in the pocket of a pair of jeans she kept saying she really needed to throw away.

• • • •

Ava doesn’t have a forwarding address. Of course she doesn’t. You saw that coming. I guess I did, too, but a story doesn’t mean anything unless you get to the point where you are holding a phone and pressing it to your ear, as if, by listening hard enough, it will turn into some sort of clue.

• • • •

The day before she left, Ava put a ladder against the side of the house and climbed to the top of the roof.

“I’m up here,” she called, and I ran out the door to see her balancing with both feet curled around the highest peak. “Up. No, up. Up.”

I went to the ladder, put my hands on its sides and one foot on a rung, but Ava shook her head. She leaned over so I could see her wingless back curved under the sky and gestured me away.

“Further,” she said. “Further.” She pushed her hands at me until I shuffled backwards into the street, and then across it, where I stood in someone else’s lawn. She stayed on the roof, her pointy elbows braced against the air. The sun hit her in the face and I could see how she squinted, even from so far away.

“Up there. Look at that.”

There was nothing to see when I tried to follow her extended arm except for flat blue sky that made my eyes water. Which is why I never saw Ava fly. I wiped my eyes and I only saw her fall. She tumbled into the sky, knocking against invisible corners, and while she fell, she laughed.

How she had time to laugh, I’m not sure. My house is narrow and tall, but not tall enough to lift her that many seconds away from the ground, not unless she stayed inside and took all the stairs, pausing as she went.

Ava laughed anyway. She descended through the thin, bright air, laughing until she shook with the joke, until her arms pressed into her sides and her knees headed toward her nose. She made a cannonball that bobbled impossibly in its arc, clearing the road at a height that made me lean back to keep her in view. She kept going until she ran out of laughs, and then she sighed, a tiny noise I only heard because she fell down beside me, in the grass on the opposite side of the street from where my house stood, empty.

When I picked her up, she was smaller than I expected. Her shoulders had strange muscles that could have carried heavy things, and I didn’t know where to put my arms without the slab of feathers that would have kept them from wrapping all the way around.

“There you go,” she said.

The sun sat on top of her lashes so I couldn’t see what her eyes were telling me, if they were saying anything. She had a dark spot on her cheek, and at first I thought it was a bruise. Later, when I rubbed it as gently as I could, it came off on my fingers, just a smudge of dirt that went away so there was nothing left.

© 2014 by Megan Kurashige.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Megan Kurashige is a professional dancer. She and her sister, Shannon Kurashige, collaborate on wild and quixotic dance projects under the name Sharp & Fine in San Francisco. She is also a member of Liss Fain Dance. Her fiction has appeared in Unnatural Creatures, an anthology edited by Neil Gaiman and Maria Dahvana Headley, Electric Velocipede, and Sybil’s Garage. She attended the Clarion Writers’ Workshop at UCSD in 2008. You can find out more about Sharp & Fine at sharpandfine.com. She has a blog (immobileexplorations.blogspot.com) and is on Twitter @mkazoo.

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

NOVELLA

Jesus and the Eightfold Path

Lavie Tidhar

PART ONE: HIS BIRTH AND EARLY YEARS

Episode One: Journey to the West

Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem.

 — Matthew 2:1

They were not entirely men, and they were not entirely wise; however, here they were, three pilgrims clothed in the dust of the road, travelling faster than men do: for the road was long and dangerous and hard, and a single star in the sky beckoned them on, as if to say, hurry, hurry.

“Barbarous country,” Sūn Wùkōng said. He was tall and thin and had the wizened face of a monkey. He raised a hand and touched the gold band around his head. “I could be back in the Bloom Mountains, or better yet, making a play for the Jade Emperor’s daughter.”

The fat companion beside him roared with laughter and said, “Really, Monkey! The girls in these parts are not too bad. You are too aloof! Too selective! You are a connoisseur, whereas I — ” he took two enormous fingers and pinched a lavish section of the pink ample skin of his belly — “I am a democrat, a man of the people! I like to try everything!”

“Like the Princesses of the Moon?” the third companion, a quiet, narrow-shouldered man said. His name was Shā Wùjìng, and it was Monkey’s turn to laugh as the fat man scowled and said, “That was uncalled for, Sandy.”

“It was your own fault, Pigsy,” Sandy said. “If only you learnt to keep your hands to yourself . . .”

“Like last night,” Monkey said, and Pigsy opened a snout-like mouth wide and grinned and said, “I tell you again, Monkey, the lasses here are none too bad, and willing, for an exotic stranger and a charmer, too.”

“Charmer!” Sandy said. “The girls here must be barbarous indeed!”

“You sound envious!” Pigsy said.

“Never!” Sandy said, but Monkey smiled and said, “You’ll find a nice girl and settle down one day, Sandy,” and the monk blushed. He was not like the other two. He was more refined and delicate.

Pigsy was back to his exploits of the night before. “Such arms!” he said. “Such belly! Such . . . such thighs!” His hands drew vulgar shapes in the air. “She sounds like an elephant!” Monkey said, and Pigsy, not listening, said, “I tell you again, Monkey, the girls here may be farmer-girls and chunky, but they know how to rut.”

“Enough!” Monkey said. He touched again the golden crown on his head. “Time is growing short, and the stars will soon be in alignment. We should be there soon.”

“Sooner we get there, the sooner we can go back,” Sandy said. Monkey smiled; it was a small, strange smile, like that of a man who knows, or guesses, more than his companions; but he said nothing.

They had travelled far. Many weary days they spent, crossing the great sullen mountains beyond the Emperor’s realm, hiking through treacherous snow and beside deep gorges. Many were the snow-demons they had fought, and many were the deep and ancient cave-dwellers, things of darkness and fear, that tried to waylay them on their way. A giant bird had taken Pigsy for a meal and carried him by its talons to its high eyrie at the top of the world, and it took all of Monkey’s power to rescue him. He had summoned a cloud, and he and Sandy rode it to the top, where the giant bird, its feathers the colour of blood and the sun, its scales glittering like jewels, was already pecking at Pigsy’s pink, succulent flesh. Oh, how the once-Commander of the Heavenly Naval Forces shrieked! Oh, how he cried! Eight babies did the monster bird have, eight sharp-beaked monstrosities clamouring for Pigsy’s flesh!

The battle was lengthy and worthy of song. Sandy used his fighting spade against the bird, but it was of little use against her giant beak. Monkey plucked hairs from his body and blew on them, until soon there were many Monkeys flying around, fighting the bird, while all the while Pigsy screamed and screamed like a pig about to be devoured. Oh, they had laughed! It took Pigsy almost a week to get over his ordeal. Luckily they had found that hidden city high up in the Himalayas, where lights came from shining crystals and the women were fair and wore shimmering robes . . .

They had almost lost Sandy there, to the charms and grace of the beautiful Princess of the Pale Water, she who was like a mountain spring . . . they were two beings of water, she and the once-water ogre, and it was only the importance of the journey — and the wiles of Monkey, who had set out to seduce the princess — that saved the day. Long and hard the journey had been! Across the mountains, at last, and down into the hot lands below, and across a vast distance of danger and temptation. There were nomads on the plains, strong harsh men who tried to attack the three travellers, and there were wizards, too, of a new ilk not seen in the Middle Kingdom, preying on travellers, man-eaters and uncouth. There had been many fights, but always the three travellers were triumphant.

The lands gradually changed. The air became hot and humid. The barrenness of the plains turned lush, and there were many trees, and their fruits were exotic and new, and Pigsy lusted after the fruits of the land, and the fruits of men’s loins, too. At last there was a great crossing of a sea, by ship sturdy and taut of sail. “A good craft,” Monkey said thoughtfully as he patted the beams of cedar, but Pigsy leered and said, “Fishermen’s tubs, Monkey! One Imperial ship would sink a whole fleet of them.”

“Perhaps,” Monkey said, and his wise monkey’s eyes were thoughtful.

At last they had come to the barbarous land called Judea. They went as men, here, and old men at that. On the first night coming off the ship, brigands tried to rob them. After that there had been no more attempts.

Episode Two: The King of the Jews

When Herod the king had heard these things, he was troubled.

 — Matthew 2:3

“What’s their king like?” Sandy said.

“A provincial,” Pigsy said and laughed a har-har sound, showing teeth. He picked at them with the long, sharp nail of his small finger. “What do you expect?”

“I don’t know,” Monkey said. He had been mainly silent since they had entered Judea. It was not at all, as Pigsy privately thought, like him, but then Monkey was a more complicated creature. He, Pigsy, was a simple man, and liked the simple life: food and drink and wenches, and what more could you want? But Monkey was different, and sometimes Pigsy worried about him. It was the influence of the Tripitaka on Monkey, he thought. It had turned him into a sometimes-philosopher. It did not occur to Pigsy that his thinking this, his worrying about Monkey, was itself an influence of the Tripitaka. “He seems capable. A bit ambitious in his building projects — ”

“What king isn’t,” Sandy said —

“But a good politician. Which he probably needs to be, in these barbarous lands. They have their own emperor, you know — ”

“A Roman,” Sandy said. “They’re called Romans.”

Pigsy snorted. “Enough!” he said. “When do we leave?”

“We just got here!” Monkey said, and a new smile came over his wizened face. “It could be fun to stick around . . .”

They were walking up the mountain road to the city called Jerusalem. They did not quite go unnoticed. There had been . . . indiscretions.

Such as at the inn that stood outside the little hovel of a town called Beersheba. It was a hot place, and Pigsy was irritable and sweating, and when he saw a pool of mud outside the stables he did not even stop to look around but jumped in and was soon rolling in the yellow-brown mud making the strange grunting noises that meant he was happy.

It might have ended at that if not for a most-delectable black-eyed girl who had chosen that exact moment to walk past the stables, slipped in the mud — and was amorously wrapped in the arms of the pig. The girl had shrieked, the household was alerted — and the companions had to beat a hasty retreat and spend the night camped under the stars.

And there was the moment Sandy got drunk. It was in a tavern further down the road. After a couple of bottles of the potent local red wine, Sandy, quite earnestly, began to tell the assembled company — camel-drivers and traders and even, alas, the old king’s man — all about the tripitaka, and the star, and their journey. That was not a good move, but the situation was made even worse when Sandy, innocently, seemed to have offended one of the ladies present, whose man, a large, beefy Edomite, charged at him. Soon Sandy’s spade was flying everywhere, and then Pigsy joined in, and bodies were flying around as if a desert wind had passed through the tavern, and tables and chairs, too. Monkey had not been pleased.

“The road seems awfully quiet,” Sandy said now. The three walked slowly, as old men. Above them, far in the distance, towered the city of white stone. “I wonder where everyone is.”

Monkey smiled. It did not escape his notice that the general populace had been giving them a wide berth of late. In fact, quite a blockage was forming about a mile behind them, as cart-drivers became aware of the three travellers’ presence ahead and slowed down to a crawl.

“There’s someone coming,” he said, and pointed, and indeed, coming down the mountain road at a gallop was a young man on a horse, wearing a uniform that seemed part-local and part-Roman (as far as the travellers, who had encountered few Romans, could tell) and looking quite official and self-important.

“Do you think he wants to talk to us?” Sandy said, and Pigsy said, “I’m hungry.”

The horse came thundering towards them. It was a handsome specimen. Black-coated and shiny, and it seemed aimed directly at the three travellers. When it came within a few feet of them, the horse stopped. The three travellers, too, stopped, and stood staring at the animal and its rider.

When the rider dismounted they could see that he was indeed young, but that his face was already hardened by fighting. He seemed a local boy, what they called a Hebrew, and he spoke in Aramaic. He said, “Greetings, venerable gentlemen — ” or something to that effect.

“Greetings, soldier,” Sandy said. “What can we do for you — ” or something to that effect.

“Venerable one,” the boy said, “the king wishes to have conversation with yourselves. I am requested to escort you the rest of the way to Jerusalem, and to the palace itself.”

“Will there be food?” Pigsy said, and the soldier turned to him and smiled, if only briefly, and said gravely, “There will be.”

“We are old men,” Monkey said, and he leaned on his staff as if to demonstrate his feebleness. “And peaceful. We have no business with your king, and our errand is urgent.”

The boy’s raised eyebrow said, “Is that so?” but aloud he said only, “But the king, it seems, has business with you.”

“Very well,” Monkey said amiably. “Seeing as our path leads us to Jerusalem on its own. I believe we could spare your king some moments.”

“That is very generous of you,” the soldier said. “My name, by the way, is Josephus, son of Matthias.”

The boy had a solemn face but his eyes twinkled. Monkey, without quite knowing why, liked him. He said, “Lead the way, then, Josephus.”

The boy led his horse slowly forward. The three wise men followed on foot. When at last they reached the great gates of the city, Pigsy was out of breath and pinker than usual. He said, “I’m hungry.”

“Business first,” Monkey said, and Sandy sniggered. They followed the boy through the busy entrance, down narrow alleyways bordered by houses built entirely with stone.

They passed a large building where the noise of construction was overwhelming. “Our Temple,” the boy, Josephus, said. The three companions looked, once. “Lacks a certain grandeur,” Sandy murmured.

They came to the palace.

The king, when at last they saw him, seemed vigorous and somewhat earthly. There was little protocol. The king’s name was Hordos, Herod in the manner of the Romans, and he had a thick white beard and a nose that had been broken once before. He said, “Wise men. Thank you for coming to see me.”

“Did we have a choice?” Sandy said, but quietly. Hordos smiled. “I am, after all, the king,” he said.

“What do you want?” Pigsy said, bluntly. The king’s smiled wavered. Monkey said, “Forgive my friend, for he is led mostly by his appetites, and his appetites are great, and we have come a long way and are weary, and have a long way to go yet.”

The king inched his head. “Very well,” he said. “Let us not bandy words. I wish to know of your purpose here.”

“And by asking,” Monkey said, “you indicate that you feel you already have a good idea?”

For the first time they could see the king and soldier in him. Hordos leaned forward, and his eyes were hard, and he said, “This is my country. There is little I don’t know. And in your travels you have been less than circumspect.”

Monkey sighed. “That is true,” he acknowledged. “But if you know of our purpose, why did you summon us here?”

“Please,” the king said. “Let us not pretend to be simpletons. I have heard tell that you follow a star, and that a messiah will be born here in Judea, and that he will become king of the Jews.”

“You fear for your succession?” Monkey said, and Sandy said, “It is the nature of kings that they are sometimes dethroned, and dynasties change. What of it?”

But Pigsy, who was looking at the king the way one does at a juicy lamb chop, said, “We know little of kings and nothing of Jews. We follow the tripitaka, and curse the day that he was ordained to be born in this barbarous backwater.”

The king smiled and raised his hand. “Peace,” he said. “You are hungry, and I have been a graceless host.” He called out, and servants came and brought meats and bread and cheese and jugs of red wine. “Eat,” he said. “Let it not be said that you find us inhospitable.”

And so discussion was adjourned; and the three companions ate until they could eat no more; and at last even Pigsy has had enough, and he belched enormously and grinned and patted his belly and said, “Simple fair, but good.”

“Thank you,” the king said wryly. He had merely tasted of the food, and drank but half a cup of the wine. “Now, what is this tripitaka of which you speak? What is your true purpose?”

“King,” Monkey said, and he fingered the golden band around his head as if in pain, “we three are bound to the service of the tripitaka, the sanzang, ‘three baskets’ in your tongue. He is a messenger of the Buddha; and it is his destiny to travel far and gain wisdom, and it is ours to keep him well and to protect him. Why he was ordained to be reborn here I do not know. What his purpose is, that, too, I do not know. We three, who were once mighty kings and generals, are now fallen and bound in service to him. And you, what is it that you desire of our master?”

“Your master,” Hordos said, “is yet unborn.”

“He was born before,” Pigsy said indifferently, “and will be born again. That is the nature of his karma.”

The king shook his head. “There is much I do not understand in your speech,” he said, and then he sighed and said, “but enough to trouble me.”

The servants had been dismissed. They were alone. The king said, “A bad time is coming, and while some here accuse me of not being a true Jew, that I am, and I grow concerned for my people. Some call me cruel, and yes, I have been cruel, and will be so again when necessity demands.”

Pigsy nodded; he was beginning to think better of this king, who had good food and who, moreover, understood the importance of carefully applied cruelty. It was, Pigsy felt, a necessary quality in a king.

“I have held off against the Romans,” the king said. “I have maintained Judea as an independent entity; it took much doing. I have forged links with Ptolemy of Egypt, but I fear his time, too, and his dynasty’s are ending. A war is coming, gentlemen. A war of the Jews. When I go, I fear I will have no successors, and the Romans will annex this country the way one gathers a fallen fruit.” His eyes glazed, and Monkey saw with wonder that the power of prophecy was in the king’s eyes. “A war will come,” the king said, and his voice was booming, and urgent. “My people will revolt. We have fought the Greeks, and we have beaten them. We have outlasted the Babylonians. We have escaped the Egyptians. Always, my people survive. But now, I fear, the final war is coming, and against the Romans there can be no victory. We will be defeated, and taken as slaves, and the temple — my temple, that I have been rebuilding and remaking until it will stand as glorious as Solomon’s once was! — will be destroyed, and the menorah lost forever, and two thousand years of exile will follow. This,” he said, and his eyes opened and he saw again, “is what I wish to prevent.”

Then the three companions bowed their heads, for the king’s words had moved them; and Monkey said, “What is it you wish done?”

“Find the boy,” the king said. “And take him away. I will put out an order for his death. The Romans will not trouble further. Take him to . . . Egypt. I will arrange safe passage with Ptolemy, its ruler. Return to Judea when my time comes. It will not be too long now. Already the shadows lengthen, and my temple is not yet done.” The king shook his head, and smiled, and the expression in his eyes was cruel. “I will put out an order for the boy’s death,” he said, “and it will be followed. Should he remain in Judea he will be killed. It will be up to you three to prevent that — if you can.”

Monkey smiled, and Pigsy grinned, and only Sandy remained expressionless, as if thinking deeply. “Politics is not our strongest suit,” Monkey said. “But we understand fighting.”

“Then go,” the king said, and he bowed his head to the three companions. “We will not meet again.”

And they left; and as the king had said, so it was, and they never saw Hordos again.

Episode Three: A Star Over Bethlehem

When they had heard the king, they departed; and, lo, the star, which they saw in the east, went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was.

 — Matthew 2:9

Miriam felt restless. A hot wind was blowing outside and the house felt damp and airless, and she longed to go out of doors. Yet it was dark; a moonless night and the stars gazed down oppressively, and so she remained inside with the baby.

Jesus! Her little Yeshua, a cherub, an angel, a sweet-tempered baby who seemed not to know the meaning of crying. He was a lifeline. She had felt so queer since he was born. Oppressed by the house, the night, the small noises that made her jump . . . the birthing-mother was kind, and said it was only to be expected. Sometimes women felt this way on the birth of their first child. She wished Joseph was there, but he was working late again, an urgent order from a Hashmonai family in Jerusalem asking for a cabinet — he was a good carpenter, her husband — a good man — but he worked too hard. Yet she never complained. He had taken her in with child, and had always treated her right. And the baby was as much his as — as — she didn’t want to think about it. Not now.

A noise outside startled her. She sat close to the fire and stared out into the dark. Was anyone out there? She heard the neighing of a horse and the clatter of hooves, disappearing into the distance. Just some messenger or late traveller going past. She needn’t worry. Bethlehem was a good town, quiet, observant. It was close enough to Jerusalem and the markets and the temple. Idly she wondered if Joseph would buy her the new shawl she had seen on their last visit to the city. It was dyed a bright blue. She stirred the fire with a stick and stared at the dark outside. Why was she so nervous?

• • • •

“Bit of a dump,” Pigsy said cheerfully. Somehow he had secured upon his person one of the king’s personal flagons of wine, half a loaf of bread, and a large chunk of cheese. He was chewing as he spoke. It never failed to annoy Sandy. “Not much to do after dark, I shouldn’t think.”

Monkey didn’t reply. He looked up into the night sky and once again touched the golden band there, the one he couldn’t remove. He was bound to the tripitaka. The band of gold on his forehead was his jailor. Most of the time he enjoyed his adventures with the tripitaka. But, recently, he was becoming more and more distracted, and felt the weight of the band more acutely. He shrugged, said, “I’ve seen worse.”

The town was dark and quiet. Low-lying stone houses and thatched roofs, and orderly dirt roads that ran in between. Bethlehem. It meant the house of bread in the Hebrew’s tongue. Pigsy choked and sprayed a fountain of breadcrumbs from his mouth. “Really!” Sandy said. Pigsy shrugged and took a deep sip of the wine. Sandy shook his head. He found himself agreeing with Zhū Bājiè on this. “What a place to be born,” he said.

“Here,” Monkey said. He was still looking at the skies. The other two looked up, followed his finger. Stars scattered across the sky like a hoard of diamonds and rubies. The Milky Way ran from one end of the sky to the other, two of its arms visible, reaching out as if to pluck at an unseen treasure. Sirius, the Dog Star, was bright in the centre of the heavens. And there . . .

Monkey never quite knew what it was. His knowledge of astronomy had not been great. He had been more interested in mischief than true learning. And yet he wondered. Was it a comet they were following? A star that — a sage in the Imperial Court had once told him this happened — exploded and its light reached out an unimaginable distance away? Was it a spirit-being, or a demon cast down from heaven very much like Pigsy or Sandy once were?

He didn’t know. But there it was, a bright, steady point in the sky, a beacon they had followed all the way from the Middle Kingdom, past the forbidding mountains and the dreary plains, to this land, to this town, finally to this house, brick and thatch and a small yard, and a fire burning quietly inside.

He nodded, and the other two exchanged a glance. They made no move, but merely stood there, gazing at the house, each thinking his own thoughts. Pigsy finished the bread and took a last sip from the wine. Monkey stepped forward and knocked on the door.

• • • •

She jumped at the unexpected sound. Had she nodded off? She stood up and went and looked at the cot and little Yeshua, toothless and sweet, was smiling up at her and there were little dimples at the corners of his mouth. Jesus, she thought, using the Latinate version which was such de rigour. What shall I do with you?

The sound came again. Someone knocking at the door. And Joseph wasn’t there. What should she do?

“Hello!” It was a cheerful voice, quite deep, as of an old yet vital man. “Anybody home?”

Perhaps it was the voice. In truth, she couldn’t have said why she did it. But she went to the door. “Who is it?”

Did her voice quiver? She heard low voices conferring outside. They spoke a strange language she didn’t understand.

“We are wise men come from the east,” a new voice said decisively. Then, less so — “And, um, would it be possible for us to come in?”

“Wise men,” Miriam said, remembering something her grandmother used to say, “do not call themselves wise.”

“Bugger,” someone muttered outside. “Look, lady — ” but he was silenced, and the first voice laughed. “I think the word in your language is star gazers,” he said. “Chozei kochavim? We are astrologers. Our wisdom is a matter for interpretation, but we would like to speak with you. It is about your son.”

Her son! What did they want with her son? She looked over at the cot. Baby Jesus was cooing to himself. He was grinning, that face he made when he — oh, not now!

She found herself opening the door. Outside stood three old men. They leaned on canes and two of them looked wizened and bent beyond description, though the third was fat and fleshy and she thought he looked like a pig, and it cheered her up. “Come in,” she said. “I’m afraid I have to — ”

• • • •

“What is that smell?” Sandy whispered. Unfortunately his voice was quite loud. The woman had heard it, and was embarrassed; Monkey could see that. Surprisingly, it was Pigsy who stepped in.

“He’s a baby, you idiot,” he said to Sandy, and went over to the woman and said, “Let me help you,” and in moments he was changing the baby’s dress and wiping his bottom. Monkey and Sandy stared as if they were thunderstruck by one of the gods. “What?” Pigsy demanded. “You have to forgive them,” he said, turning around to the baby’s mother. “Sworn bachelors, both of them. Me, I like the family life. Your husband not in, by the way? I must say pregnancy makes women positively glow. What are you doing later?”

“Pigsy!”

The woman seemed bewildered. “What do you want?” she said again. And, “My husband will be here soon.”

“What we have to say concerns you both,” Monkey said. “But first — may I . . . ?” he gestured to the baby, and the woman nodded reluctantly, and Monkey went to the cot and looked down, and saw the tripitaka, and bowed his head; and his golden band gleamed in the fire.

And so, he tried to explain. About the tripitaka, the sanzang, and about the eightfold path and enlightenment and nirvana, and the woman looked like she wanted nothing more than to throw the three of them out and be done with it. “He’s in danger,” Monkey finally said, bluntly, and the woman blanched. “You have had a premonition,” he said, and she nodded and said, “Yes,” and sounded surprised.

“We will protect him,” Monkey said. “We are his . . . guardians. For a while, anyway. It is our job. But he must leave Judea, and you and your husband must take him. For he has destiny awaiting, and the world is full of pitfalls and traps for the unwary.”

“But where?” the mother said, and they could see she was distraught; and Pigsy went and comforted her.

“We shall wait for your husband,” Monkey said. “And as soon as he returns we must depart.”

“But where?” the mother said again, and Monkey, looking at Sandy for confirmation, said, “I believe it is a place called Egypt.”

Episode Four: Egypt

He took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt.

 — Matthew 2:14

Egypt! Misr, Mitzraim . . . Even in the final years of its decline, it remained a wonder of the ancient world. How can one describe the great yellow desert and its calm, its endless quiet under a sky as wide as a universe? How can one describe what it is like to stand beneath the giant pyramids casting their jagged shadows on to the bare earth, and watch a blood-red sun engorged like an ill heart, so big it dominated the horizon?

“We get better sunsets at home,” Pigsy said. “What food have they got?”

Sandy shushed him.

They had travelled by night. They had slipped out of Bethlehem and journeyed north, and crossed the great desert, camping out under the cold and unrelenting stars, and have arrived at last in the land of Egypt. The baby tripitaka’s father turned out to be a quiet and unassuming man. His wife was hardier than him, but they had both found it hard. To leave home and hearth and venture into a strange land with a baby and three very odd strangers — the parents have become subdued and the mother overly protective of her child. The three companions — sworn bachelors all, whatever Pigsy may claim — became quite irritable.

It was with a sense of mutual relief, therefore, when they arrived in the shadow of the pyramids and reached the old Hebrew Quarter, where once the slaves of the Pharaoh lived. “It’s all right,” Joseph said to Miriam. He felt responsible somehow for the whole thing. “Remember my namesake did the same thing in his youth, only to return triumphant.”

“You are no longer young, husband,” she said, and saw his hurt face and was sorry. “You are right,” she said. “It will be fine.” They held each other close, two strangers frightened in a land they didn’t know.

But Egypt! It was a barbarous land, a wondrous land, a place decaying decade by decade, and yet full, still, of its ancient grandeur, of whimsical miracles and moulding magic.

Their new house was baked mud and the old quarter almost deserted. Yet some Hebrews had remained in Egypt, and some still came and went, men of trade or learning or messengers of the Jewish king. There was always work to be had for a carpenter. Joseph found himself busier even than in Bethlehem, and he wished for his son to follow him. “An honest trade,” he said to Miriam. “That’s what the boy needs. You can’t go wrong with an honest trade.”

Miriam smiled at him. Sometimes, she worried for the baby Jesus, but she kept it from her husband.

The baby Jesus, meanwhile, grew to be a healthy little boy. His skin was browned dark by the sun, and his hair grew long and fell down to his shoulders. He played in the alleyways of the Hebrew Quarter and learned Hebrew and Aramaic and a smattering of Greek, and he was seldom alone: His friends were always there when he needed them.

“Again,” Monkey said. The boy, his face frowning in concentration, beads of sweat forming on his unlined face, once again assumed the position of Praying Mantis Preparing to Jump. “Focus your ch’i,” Monkey said. The boy took a deep breath and eased it out slowly. “Settle,” Monkey said. “Feel the ch’i flowing through you. When your attacker moves — ”

Monkey struck, and the boy moved — like a praying mantis. Where the boy had been only air remained. “Good,” Monkey said. “Now try it again.”

Sandy taught the boy the Sūtras, and debated with him the nature of the world. “Be like water,” he said. “Do not resist change; be change. Remember that the usefulness of a cup is its emptiness.” He also taught him to drink tea, of which he had a small supply — “A wonderful infusion! The basis of a civilization!” — though it had never quite caught on.

But it was Pigsy whom the boy liked most of all. Pigsy, fat and sweating and grumbling, who carried him on his back without complaint, and joined him in his make-believe games and always played the parts Jesus didn’t want. It was Pigsy, too, who took the boy beyond the walls of the Hebrew Quarter into the dazzling city outside and protected him from harm, and they explored the wide avenues, the startling markets, the hustle and bustle of the ports on the Nile and admired the ships and invented stories of adventure and daring for them. It was a happy childhood.

At that time they lived in peace and were not disturbed. The word of Herod the king had proven true. Yet it is the truth that water can both flow and crash — and the path of the river that was Jesus was forming deep grooves in the earth, and they did not go unnoticed; and many were curious, and some were concerned.

• • • •

Jesus was walking along the Nile on his own. At thirteen, he was still small but there was a sense of compressed energy about him. He didn’t yet need to shave, but his long, dark hair was shiny and rich; yet it was his eyes that drew people to him. They were a blue-black colour, like a bruise, but the longer you stared at them the more colours you saw, the more swirls and eddies — it was like staring into an infinite pool, and it was hard to pull away.

At thirteen, Jesus was discovering girls; and in that he was late, for the girls had already discovered him.

The banks of the Nile were relatively quiet at this time of the evening, which was unusual. The heat of the day had abated and a half-full moon provided plenty of light. Stalls were strung along the bank, selling spiced mutton and flatbread, watered wines from Rome, oranges from Judea and pineapples from Kush. Jesus bought himself half a loaf of bread loaded with meat and walked along, the juice running down the sides of his mouth.

A ship cruised silently by on the great river, sails open, as graceful as a swan. Gold flashed off its sides — a royal barge? He didn’t know, and didn’t care. He walked down along the Nile with all the carelessness and good cheer a boy of thirteen has when he is away from his parents and has pocket money to spare. The world was full of delights.

He passed a group of skimpily-dressed ladies, their bodies painted harsh bright colours. He was dazzled by their smiles. “What a beautiful boy!” — “Where are you going, honey?” — “Where’s your mother?” — “I’ll mother you!” — laughs.

He walked past the open mouth of an alleyway when the tune dropped from his lips and he paused and stood stock-still. An observer may have failed to notice him: He disappeared into the shadows as if he were one of them.

Inside the alleyway a fight was taking place, and it was not even. A girl only a few years older than himself was fighting desperately against a gang of young, muscled men. Bare-chested, the men held clubs, knives, curved swords, and on their arms wore heavy bands of dull metal. Jesus looked up — and was smitten. The girl was beautiful and wild, with bare arms on which glittered heavy gold bands. Her nose was proud, her skin dark, and she fought with a ferocity he had not known women possessed. She jumped high in the air and kicked and one man’s face caved in and he fell, but two more grabbed her arms and brought her down.

The words of his mentors came back to him. Be like water. He was ready. Somehow, he felt, this was what he was born for. He eased his way along the wall, unseen and unnoticed. The girl was struggling fiercely against her opponents, but there were too many of them. Jesus —

He leaped. High in the air he went, and the power of ch’i was inside him. He leaped and lashed out, once, twice, three times. The men fell back.

“Brat!” A massive hand reached out to grab him. Jesus allowed it to come, welcomed it, unresisting — and when it came, took hold, used his opponent’s own force, and broke his arm. He leaped again, kicked, breaking a man’s nose, landed and punched, one two three rapid hits, moving, ducking underneath the big men, a mad swirl of energy.

Had one of his mentors seen him then, they would not have, perhaps, been impressed. They might have felt that he was too impulsive; that, despite how coolly he might have thought he fought, it was not so; that he fought, in fact, almost like a child. Yet there have been few children in the world ever to be trained by Sūn Wùkōng.

The girl fought by his side. Together they faced the circle of evil-looking attackers, and together they punched, leaped, swung and ducked and hit, until at last —

A boy and a girl stood alone in a dark alleyway, and a sliver of moonlight came down from above and circled them; and all around them were the bodies of the attackers; and all was still.

“Traitors!” the girl said. Her eyes flashed. She seemed hardly to notice Jesus. “They will live yet to regret ever having lived.” She smiled. “The torturers will make sure of that.”

“What did they want?” Jesus said. “Why were they attacking you?”

“What is your name, boy?”

“Yeshua. Jesus.”

Her eyes opened; surprised. “A Hebrew?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t fight like one.” She laughed. He thought she had a cruel laugh, but she was very attractive. “The last time your people were here, they ran away across the desert.”

“The last time my people were here, God killed every first-born in Egypt,” Jesus said. The girl stopped laughing.

“God . . .” she said, musingly. “Do you believe in God, boy?”

“I do.”

“I don’t,” the girl said, quite matter-of-factly. “But I believe in politics, and those thugs were sent to assassinate me. By my sister Tryphaena, no doubt. The whore. God!” She turned her head and looked straight at Jesus, and seemed to discover something in his eyes; for a long moment they looked at each other, not speaking. “I am . . .” she said, and her voice was thicker now, as if she was being shaken from a dream. “I am Cleopatra.”

PART TWO: THE TEMPTATION OF THE CHRIST

Episode One: Nazarene

And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth.

 — Matthew 2:23

The journey back to Judea took considerably less than forty years, though it might have, at times, felt like it. Pigsy was irritable; Sandy morose. “The girls!” Pigsy said to Monkey. They were trudging through the desert. “Skin like dark olives, warm hands scented with oil, warm bo — ”

“Olives,” said Sandy. “Don’t talk to me about olives.” Pigsy and Monkey both looked at him sideways, surprised at the non sequitur. Pigsy, miffed, said, “What have olives got to do with it?”

“Nothing,” Sandy said, a little too forcefully. He had spent most of his time in Egypt at the Pharaoh’s library. Didn’t Sandy mention, in a few unguarded moments, that one of the librarians was unusually helpful? Perhaps that was it, Monkey thought, but why the olives? He decided, on second thought, that he didn’t really want to know.

The boy, meanwhile, was taking the travelling rather well. He looked about him everywhere with a sort of sharp-eyed innocence (long lost to the three travellers) and Monkey rather envied him. He had turned out well, the tripitaka: handsome, well-spoken, rather better in the noble arts of war than the last tripitaka had been. Always having to bail him out; always running after this demon or that who had ensnared the tripitaka. This latest reincarnation was something of a blessing, really, when it came down to it. The boy turned around and, as if reading Monkey’s thoughts, flashed him a boyish grin and a wink. Damn it! The tripitaka always made him feel like this, knowing what lay inside of him, never coming outright and saying it, but knowing, all the same, and — he touched the crown on his head. If only he could have it removed . . .

“Is this Mount Sinai?” the boy Jesus said. He pointed at an unremarkable sandy-coloured hill, which looked identical to all the other dune-like hills they had so far passed. “Where Moses gave the Ten Commandments to my people and spoke to God?”

“Speaking to Gods,” Monkey said dryly, “is seldom a beneficial policy.”

“Yes,” Pigsy said, “they just might hear you and talk back.” He smacked his hands together and said, “Kapawo!”

“Olives!” Sandy said. He looked like he was spoiling for a fight.

The parents rode behind, on donkeys. A small train of pitiful-looking animals carried their worldly goods, leaving a trail of hoof-prints and the occasional excrement behind.

The desert was dreary but — on the plus side, Monkey thought — it didn’t take long to cross. And once they entered Judea proper, and the air turned cooler and the wind whispered promises of the sea, the companions’ mood improved. Slightly.

The journey north was long but uneventful. Herod’s death would have left the country in an upheaval, but the Romans had stepped in quickly, and order was restored. There were to be no more kings for the Jews. Herod’s three boys ruled as tetrarchs, and a Roman prefect was, indeed, more than enough for what was, after all, a Roman colony in all but name. And a small, insignificant one at that. “Romans build good roads,” Monkey said.

“Ah, but Egypt . . .” Pigsy said wistfully. “I went into one of their pyramids once, did I tell you?”

“About a hundred times . . .” Sandy muttered, but the boy Jesus turned and gave Uncle Pigsy his wide-eyed stare and said, “Truly?”

“Truly,” Pigsy said, obviously pleased. “Found a secret door. Led inside — long tunnel — went down quite a long way — dark — of course, I knew the place was cursed — was waiting for it, you can bet on it — but treasure, I must admit I was quite — curious — as to its exact nature — I wasn’t going to take anything — ”

“Ha!” — this one from Sandy.

“Mummies,” Pigsy said, matter-of-factly. Jesus’ eyes grew even larger. “A horde of them. Damnedest thing I ever saw. All wrapped in bandages, quite brainless, obviously, they had their brains pulled out through the nose before they put them there — ” Miriam, behind, looked horrified — “quite barbaric, really,” Pigsy said magnanimously, as if conceding her an important point. “But the crux of it was, I’m standing there, in the very treasure house of this old pharaoh, and this army of mummies comes rushing me — I’m completely surrounded — no way out — deep underground — nothing for it but to fight them.”

“Oh!”

Pigsy grinned at the boy. “When fighting mummies,” he said, as if imparting some great and secret knowledge, “remember that they move slowly and have no brains. They rely purely on numbers — and being virtually unstoppable, of course, already being dead and all.”

“Please!” It was the mother again. Pigsy sighed. “Later,” he promised. “I’ll tell you how I got away from them. Best not to go into it now. Must say they mummify some nice-looking girls in those tombs. Chambermaids and what not, you know. Not their fault — it’s not like they asked to be made into mummies — ”

“Pigsy . . .” Monkey, growling. The boy looked between them and looked disappointed — “and I, for one, never minded such a minor a point as the lack of a brain,” Pigsy said, and roared in laughter.

They had decided, at last, to settle in the Galilee. The warm climate, fertile land, and — importantly — the distance from Jerusalem were all factors. And Nazareth itself was a pleasant enough town, with cobbled streets and low stone walls and a bustling market, and one could drink plenty of the local wine and find conversation, and there was plenty of work for a carpenter. And so they settled and lived comfortably enough, and the boy grew and became a man, and all would have been peaceful and prosperous if it weren’t, of course, for the nature of fate and the inevitable turning of the wheel of life upon its axis — and one day, as if heralding at last the winds of destiny, there came a man to the river Jordan, and his name was Yochanan.

Episode Two: The Baptist

And the same John had his raiment of camel’s hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins; and his meat was locusts and wild honey.

 — Matthew 3:4

“Locusts and honey!” Pigsy said disgustedly. “I mean, really!” He was sitting with Monkey and Sandy at a lakeside taverna in Tiberias, drinking red wine. The sun was low on the horizon. A lone fisherman could be seen in the distance. “I mean, did you see that old devil?”

It had all been most disagreeable, Monkey had to concede. This man Yochanan, this John as he called himself in the vulgate, reminded him of the men of a mountain tribe they had encountered up in the Himalayas: big, hairy creatures, shadows against the snowline. They hadn’t attacked, but followed them, just out of reach, for days across the endless snow. Tenacious: that’s what they were. And that’s what this man John was, too. Though he, too, was not entirely a man.

“Do you think he will be all right?” Sandy said. He seemed morose, but then he usually did.

“It is out of our hands now,” Monkey said. “For a little while, anyhow.”

John — yes, they had all recognised him, at the end, but he was not a threat, despite his nature. It was what transpired afterwards that had them worried — and meant they were now sitting without their charge on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, and fretting.

It had all began innocently enough. John had come to the river Jordan and there he dwelt, and preached, of course — the land was full of preachers of all hues, and he was no exception — but it had become a fashion among the young and not-so-young to go to him, for the man John offered a new spiritual service to the community, and it was called baptism. Come and see him, and he would dunk you in the river Jordan, and pronounce you free of sin. Jesus wanted to go.

“What sins have you committed that you need to go there?” Pigsy had asked morosely. Morality, he thought, should be left to those best suitable to handle it — Buddhas and such-like. That the tripitaka needed to wash away his sins seemed — well, it seemed indecent, is what it was.

Jesus, thinking about Cleopatra — there was that thing she did, with olives, he couldn’t seem to shake that memory away these days — blushed and didn’t reply. But he was determined to go.

He had grown to be a handsome young man. Long hair fell down to his shoulders, and his beard, which he cultivated in the vain hope of appearing older, nevertheless gave him a rather fetching appearance. There being nothing else to it, the companions joined him. Monkey had a bad feeling about the whole thing. The old tripitaka always got mired in those side-trips of his, and he thought the new one would be no exception. Anyway, it was their job to watch over him. And so they went.

The river was pleasant and there were many fishes and Sandy, at least, seemed delighted by the change of scene, and he caught their lunch barehanded, standing in the river. John’s place was easy to find. There was a veritable horde of people heading the same way.

From above, the scene was curious: There was this man, hairy and almost naked, big arms almost rippling in the sunlight, standing stock-still in the middle of the Jordan. And there were the people, forming an orderly line, stepping gingerly into the cold water, waddling up to this John, and being baptised. And the man, all the while he was dunking them into the water, was shouting at the top of his voice, and speaking thus:

“O generation of vipers!” said John, “who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance. And think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham. And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire — ” and so on and so forth. And Pigsy scowled but kept his tongue, for there were many women in the baptism and the sight of their wet clothes filled him with delight, but Sandy was more hasty and said — “There is something familiar about this man.”

“Wait,” Monkey said. And Jesus went down with the rest of the crowd and waited his turn, and when he stepped into the water John looked into his face and took a step back, and nearly fell. And then he raised his eyes and saw the three companions, outlined against the bank of the river Jordan, and he scowled. “I will not baptise you,” he said flatly to Jesus, and the expression on the young man’s face was one of grave disappointment. And John said, “I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me?” — or words to that effect, in the Aramaic tongue which makes it sound less poncy.

And Sandy said, “He’s a water-sprite!” for he recognised something then, and for being a water-demon himself, of a sort, was well familiar with the order. And Pigsy said, “Let’s attack him!” but Monkey stayed, as they say, their hands. “Wait.”

And Jesus said, “Suffer it to be so now,” and John nodded, and didn’t argue, and after that he grabbed Jesus’ head and dunked him in the river, and the boy came back again spluttering and said, “It’s cold!”

“He is the tripitaka,” Monkey said to Sandy, quietly. “And all demons must, in the end, accept the Buddha or perish beside him. But now it is the time of his temptation, that which every man must pass on his way to enlightenment. And of this John, at least, I think we need not fear.”

Then John raised his eyes again, and his and Monkey’s met, and the water-man inched his head towards Sūn Wùkōng, in recognition or acceptance, and both turned to look at Jesus.

“It’s a trap!” Sandy said. But Monkey remained where he was, and held back his companions. The young tripitaka was out of the water. And above his head, where before soft clouds had amassed, there was now an opening; and the sun shone down, and seemed to suffuse the young man in light. And a voice spoke, or seemed to, and there was a moment of stillness.

“Monkey, please!” Sandy cried.

“There are things we cannot guard against, Shā Wùjìng,” Monkey said. “This is the time of the tripitaka’s trials. He must make his own choices now, and we cannot help. Be patient.”

And Sandy looked at Monkey and for a moment he almost didn’t recognise him, for Monkey looked like a wise and ancient king just then, and his eyes looked far away. And so they paused, and did nothing, as their young charge stood alone under the opening in the sky —

And then there was a rumble of thunder —

A fork of lightning burst open a stone —

There was a scream, or perhaps many all joined into one —

And a blackness descended on the earth and something horrid and demonic seemed to grasp —

To grapple —

To take hold —

Something ancient and great and full of horrors unnamed —

It was only for a moment —

And then it was over and the sun was shining and the clouds dispersed, and the earth was as it was before, warm and pleasantly scented, and it took them all another moment to realise that Jesus was no longer there.

The tripitaka had disappeared.

Episode Three: The Great Old One

Then was Jesus led up of the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil.

 — Matthew 4:1

There was that confusing moment in the river — John’s face, for a moment revealing behind it something alien and gleeful — and then the clouds, opening, the light falling on him and him knowing, all of a sudden, a simple, joyous, wondrous, and strange knowing of all and everything, and he could see the sense in the way motes of light danced on the surface of the water, in the way wind governed the movement of clouds, and he tried to hold on to it, that way of seeing, all-encompassing and strange —

And then the blackness, that sense of wrongness descending, and the feel of slimy tentacles holding him, squeezing the breath out of him, pulling him down, down, and into the ground and beyond it, and into the underworld that lies beneath.

Jesus felt calmer than perhaps he should have. But it had all happened so quickly! He had no time to panic.

Down and down he went, and as he did, light took shape again around him and he could see: and what he saw began to work on him, like water dripping slowly until they turn the body blue with cold, and he knew where he was: for his guardians had taught him well.

First came the Chamber of Wind and Thunder, a great cavernous space filled with lightning and the smell of burning flesh, and bodies buffeted by cyclones thrown here and there like rag dolls.

Second came the Chamber of Grinding, where a horrid dry smell permeated, and where men and women, sobbing quietly, were ground to dust. The chamber expanded and constricted like a lung, and all inside it were reduced to powder.

Third came the Chamber of Flames, where eternal fires burned and human bodies sizzled as they perished; and fourth came the Chamber of Ice, quiet and solemn and filled with the bodies of children; and fifth came the Chamber of Oil Cauldrons, where rapists were boiled alive; and the Chamber of Dismemberment by Sawing, and the Chamber of Dismemberment by Chariot; and eighth came the Chamber of Mountain of Knives, where Jesus turned back, horrified, as those who cheat and profit from it were forced to climb the mountain, the knives cutting into their flesh, over and over, until they seemed like an inhuman mass of blood and tissue; and on and on they went, and the great old one took him down with him through all the levels of hell.

They went through the Chamber of Tongue Ripping; the Chamber of Pounding, with the sound of giant pistons going up and down, crushing screams; they went through the Chamber of Torso-severing; the Chamber of Scales, where men hung upside down from the high ceiling, giant meat hooks pierced through their bodies; they went through the Chamber of Eye-gouging and the Chamber of Heart-digging, the Chamber of Disembowelment and the Chamber of Blood, where the blasphemous were skinned alive, and the Chamber of Maggots, where crooks lay screaming on the ground while a black cloud of maggots crawled over them and devoured them slowly; and finally through the flames of the inferno and down to the nameless level nineteen.

Jesus stood in front of a great, carved chair. Standing before it, immobile as statues, were the two fearsome guardians of Diyu, of hell: Ox-Head and Horse-Face, great weapons by their sides.

“Approach, human!” boomed a voice, and a dark shape suddenly filled the great chair — it seemed as if the light dimmed further, and the darkness on the chair was discerned only by its relation to the outer darkness of the hall, so that features were hard to identify — though Jesus seemed to notice tentacles, and two enormous eyes like dark moons. Jesus stepped forward, and bowed politely. “Yanluo Wang,” he said.

“Jesus of Bethlehem,” said Yanluo Wang, Lord of Hell, the Great Old One. “Latterly of Nazareth.” He sounded pleased. “Your teachers taught you well. Welcome to hell.”

“Thank you.”

“How do you like it?” boomed the voice.

Jesus smiled. “Human imagination is a wonderful thing,” he said.

“Indeed!” A tentacle seemed to flop from the deep darkness. The two guards remained immobile, staring fixedly ahead. “But, come. Enough small talk. That is one vice not usually enjoyed in hell — ” the great awful voice laughed, like a grating of rusty cogs in a mighty engine — “though personally I consider it a punishment all by itself. Perhaps a new hell . . .” his voice ebbed away speculatively, then he sighed, and the dark attention returned to the standing Jesus. “I want your soul,” Yanluo Wang said, matter-of-factly.

“My soul?”

“Your will,” the Great Old One said impatiently. “Your service. Your worship. A soul is but actions of the mind. And I want yours.”

“Are you willing to pay for it?” Jesus said, and Yanluo Wang laughed. “Hebrews!” he said. “Your people truly are equal to the Chinese in the fecundity of mercantile opportunity! Pay, you say? Indeed. I can offer you a great many things.”

And so began the temptation of the Christ. And for forty days and forty nights (that being a number of particular significance for the Hebrew people, along with seven and thirteen) Jesus was left in the desert, the wilderness as later scholars might translate it, and he was very hungry. And when the forty days and forty nights (give or take) had passed, the Great Old One reappeared to him and said, “You are the Buddha. Make the stones into bread, so that you may be saved.”

But Jesus laughed and said, “One does not achieve nirvana through the coveting of foodstuffs. Let the stones remain — or roll if they so wish.”

And Yanluo Wang was not pleased. And he took him here and there, and offered him many things; and at last, when they were both weary, he took him to the highest peak of the highest mountain, higher even than where the yeti go; and he sat Jesus down and gestured, and the whole world was spread out below them, from the Middle Kingdom in the east to the great empire whose seat was the Eternal City, Mother Roma, Rome, and he said (more or less): “All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.”

And Jesus looked down at the world, and it was beautiful. “The sun may rise in the East,” he said, “but it sets in the West — ” and the Great Old One looked at him like he was crazy and said, in a pained voice, “Please do not quote Zen koans at me.”

“Sorry.”

Jesus looked down at the world and saw the sun rise and travel across the globe (for he had learned much from the Greeks in Egypt, and thought the idea of a flat world ridiculous), and his eyes were drawn first to Nazareth, where his mother and father sat together by the fire and spoke in low voices, and looked afraid; and then to Tiberias, where three once-heavenly companions were getting terribly, horribly drunk; and last to the wide and desolate sands of Egypt, and to the palace, where through one window he heard the sound of running water, and a girl singing in the bath —

And further, to the great armies of the Roman generals, and in particular that of Gaius Julius Caesar Octavian, and further yet to Jerusalem, the city of white stone, where Herod’s son Archelaus ruled as tetrarch — and he knew then that his place was there, among his people, and that his role in the world was yet to come, and he said, “No.”

And Yanluo Wang nodded his great squid-like head and departed; and before he did he called him Buddha, for he knew then that the young man had now found the path, and that if he stayed on it and did not fail he would indeed achieve nirvana and transcend Mara, all that which is illusion. But he knew, too, that there was time enough yet for him to fail. And Jesus was left alone in the Himalayas, and it was very cold. But as he called there were those who heard his cry from far away; and Sūn Wùkōng, the Monkey King, left his drink and summoned his cloud, and rode faster than wind until he reached the great heights of the mountains; and Jesus, at last, was returned to Galilee.

Episode Four: The Sermon on the Mount

And there followed him great multitudes of people from Galilee, and from Decapolis, and from Jerusalem, and from Judea, and from beyond Jordan. And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him.

 — Matthew 4:25-5:1

It had not escaped the companions’ notice that, when the boy returned from the mountain, he was different. His smile, while still dazzling, was no longer quite so carefree; and his manner was that of a man set on a path; the youthful hesitance had gone, and in its place stood the certainty of a man.

“He had conquered temptation,” Sandy said knowingly. “He is on the path of enlightenment now.”

“I don’t like it,” Pigsy said. “Mixing with devils never did anyone any favours. We should have stayed in Egypt.”

Monkey said nothing, though he, too, was concerned about the young Buddha. Changes were coming, he knew that for certain. And he thought of the old king’s words, and about the war that must surely come between the Hebrews and the Romans; and he was uneasy.

It is not a Buddha’s role to fight; though Jesus had been trained well by the three of them, and indeed as he grew, he became a wonder to watch, flowing through the ch’i of kung fu like a mountain spirit, like water, and like sun. But since he returned, since Monkey brought him back from the Himalayas, the boy was no longer open to them. He was his own man, and he had plans. That was evident at a glance. But what form these plans took, in what way Jesus intended to continue along the eightfold path, that none of them knew. And so they huddled together, and drank many flagons of wine, and they brooded; and Jesus took to walking great distances, and visiting all places in the Galilee; and he almost always went alone.

How far things had gone, how well on his way he was to achieving his plans, they only found out later. The days passed, and the months, and Jesus was nearly always away, walking through the hills and rivers of the Galilee, sleeping in villages and fields, talking to the people — his people, these curious men and women called Hebrews, or Jews, who lived on the land and grew grapes and wheat, and spent much time studying their own version of the Sūtras, which they called Tanach, and was both a religious text and a history of their people.

“I don’t like it,” Pigsy said again, but Sandy said, “Silence, Pigsy! It isn’t for us to question the tripitaka, but to follow him.”

“And keep him out of trouble,” Pigsy said, morose; and he roared for another flagon of wine.

• • • •

For Jesus, the land of the Galilee was a place of pasture; he loved its rolling green hills, its ancient fig trees laden with the heavy fruit that opened to a touch and revealed the sweetness inside; he loved its small, prosperous villages and its flowing rivers where fish leaped in the sun. He loved Yam Kinneret, the place that was called the Sea of Galilee, and he loved Tiberias, that new town, and its fisher folk and tavernas and markets. He wandered this green and pleasant land like a man seeing for the first time what was in front of him; and as he walked, he spoke to the people he met.

Once, for instance, passing along the shore of the Kinneret, he saw two fishermen, and their names were Simon and Andrew — that is, Shim’on and Andrei — and he called to them, and spoke, and they joined him. And once he saw a ship in the distance, and men mending nets on the deck; and he called out to them, too. And the men — old Zebedee, and his boys James and John his brother — came ashore, and followed him.

And so a group of young men formed around Jesus, and they followed him everywhere, and they did as he commanded. Which was bound to raise some concerns, in Jerusalem, for certain, but in Rome, too, as we shall see.

And he trained them in kung fu and other martial arts, and often they camped under the stars and away from the towns; and though sometimes Jesus missed his old friends, Monkey and Pigsy and Sandy, he was happy and did not give them much thought; and they, for their part, watched him from a distance and did not interfere, for they knew their time was yet to come.

And another curious thing happened then. For the sick and the possessed came to Jesus; and he, having been through the eighteen levels of hell and down to the nameless level nineteen, discovered in himself now the power to resist the many devils that lived, in that time, in Judea and the Galilee; and he banished them, and the possessed were dispossessed; and it was seen as a miracle, though a miracle by definition is something that can only happen once.

“It’s a skill,” Jesus once said to old Zebedee, in confidence. “Once you can see the demons, it is easy enough to command them. For though they love to take on human flesh, they are scared of it. And once revealed, it is an easy matter to convince them to depart.”

Zebedee, who knew powerful magic when he saw it, didn’t bother to argue. He, in any event, had spent more years than he could count on the Kinneret and he, at least, had never seen the devils.

And the number of people following Jesus grew and grew. And at last, having found a convenient hill on which to stand, where the winds drew the voice clear and a sort of natural amphitheatre was formed below, Jesus spoke to his followers.

“Be like water,” he said, “Empty your mind. Be formless and shapeless like water. Now you put water into a cup: It becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle: It becomes the bottle. You put it into a teapot, and it becomes the teapot. Now, water can either flow, or it can crash! Be like water, my friends.

“Be supple like bamboo; bend at powers greater than you, but return upright when their storm has died; for that is the meaning of being a Jew.

“Blessed are the followers of the path; for they shall achieve nirvana.

“Blessed are the meek; for they shall rise in the next turn of the Wheel.

“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled with righteousness.

“Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

“Blessed are the pure in heart: for theirs is the way of the Buddha.

“Blessed are the tea-makers; for they shall warm, and be warmed.

“Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the guardians of peace, if they must fight to achieve it.

“Fighting for peace is like performing carnal acts in order to achieve virginity. Do not fight but when you are fought; be like water, like bamboo, like an ancient fig tree weathering the elements. We are an ancient people. We have seen Babylon come and go, and the might of Pharaohs, and the fall of Assyria, and the Philistines, and the men of Canaan. We have seen prophets rise, and then kings. And now at last we have neither, and the might of Rome is threatening to come down on us, the way Goliath once thought to conquer the young David.

“Do not light a candle and put it under a bushel, for that is silly. Put it in the candlestick of Chanukah, and celebrate the defeat of the Greeks, who once sought to do the same to us as the Romans.

“You must move from form to formless and from finite to infinite.

“Follow the eightfold path.

“Beware of Mara, who is the illusion of this world. See what is there, not what you wish there to be.

“Remember the desert, for we have passed through it, and can pass through it again and again. And the desert of years, which is our ally, and has seen generations of us go past when all others fell by the wayside and perished.

“Remember Moses, who did battle with the Pharaoh’s magicians, and bested them. And remember David, who fought the giant and won. And remember Elijah, who defeated Ba’al and Ashera and went to the heavens in a chariot of fire.

“Remember: The usefulness of a cup is its emptiness.”

And on Jesus spoke, until the shadow of the mount lengthened over the multitudes that stood on its slopes and listened to the Buddha. And at last Jesus said:

“Being a Jew is like being a house built upon a rock. Let the rain descend, and the floods come, and the winds blow, and beat upon that house; and it will fall not: for it is founded upon a rock. Be like a rock, my people. Be like a rock, and be ready to roll.”

And when Jesus had finished he climbed down from the mountain; and great multitudes followed him.

PART THREE: THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JOSEPHUS

Episode One: The Roman Agent

Those who undertake to write histories, do not, I perceive, take that trouble on one and the same account, but for many reasons, and those such as are very different one from another.

 — Josephus Flavius, The Antiquities of the Jews

It is now time to depart, if only for a moment, from the events unfolding in the Galilee, and turn instead to my own involvement in the affair. The following period in the life of Jesus, he who was called The Christ, The Great Soul, The Buddha, is one of extensive travel and of what we may term adventure. It is a time of great interest to the keen historian, and we shall return to it momentarily.

But as to my own role. When I first met the wise men I was but a young soldier in the service of King Herod — and a more patriotic follower than I no king could wish for. Yet patriotic does not always mean that one is willing to die for one’s country. When I was twenty-six, I undertook a journey to Rome, and ever since I felt my life hanging in the balance of two allegiances: for I was a Jew and faithful to my people, but I had also seen the world, and knew the Romans to be its rulers, if only for the time being.

Rome! You may have seen, in the earlier parts of this narrative, something of the wonder that was Egypt. But Egypt’s was the wonder of barbarism, of declining grandeur. Rome was its opposite. It was noble and mighty, but also young, vibrant, like a royal son on the cusp of becoming Caesar. I can not begin to describe to you the wide avenues, the markets carrying the fruits and produce of every country in the known world, the atmosphere of intellectual curiosity one could so easily find, the libraries and theatres and the bronzed ladies carried down the road . . . but I digress. I was in Rome again at the time of this telling, and had been residing in the eternal city for some time, on an errand from Judea to the Caesar himself (with whom, it can be said, I had an understanding), and my life was, though of some pleasure to myself, on the whole uneventful.

That all changed with the arrival of the messenger from the east.

I was summoned to the palace one clear summer night. The stars shone over the black dome of the sky as if they had never seen a cloud. Everywhere was the smell of cooking foods carried on a summer breeze, and the streets were full of citizens sitting outside, enjoying the balmy weather.

It goes without saying that the Caesar was a commanding man. I was ushered through untold corridors into his office, a humble affair one would not think to associate with a ruler of the known world. When I came in, he was upright, pacing the room. He motioned for me to sit down. There were no servants in the room. We were alone. Caesar himself fetched me a goblet of wine.

“Josephus,” he said. He had very dark, intense eyes, and they fastened on to me now. “What do you know of a man called Yeshua Ben Yosef, a Nazarene?”

At that I was taken aback. I had heard many stories of this man, Jesus, as the Romans called him, through the large and active networks of Jewish merchants and travellers, and it was some time before that I associated the arrival of those strange, wise men from the east whom I had met with the birth of a boy in Bethlehem. I said, carefully, “I believe he is a preacher. One of many, of course, but a successful one.”

“And what, Josephus,” Caesar said, still pacing, and I could not help but wonder why he seemed so agitated, for Judea had always been full of preachers and prophets, but that should hardly matter to a Caesar, “what does this man preach?”

At that I shrugged, though I was uneasy. “I imagine it is the usual,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “The country is rife with seditionists and desert-men.”

Caesar smiled; though without humour. “Desert men,” he said. “Yes. I had heard this Jesus did come through the desert, and more than once. A potent symbol for your people, is it not?”

I acknowledged that it might be, but said, “Surely you do not find him a threat, Caesar? Is he not like a grain of sand on a wide and endless beach?”

At that Caesar glanced sharply at me. “I would have thought the same,” he said, “I would hardly concern myself, nor raise you to my side, on the account of one insignificant — what did you call him — seditionist.”

I merely bowed my head, acknowledging the truth he spoke. Caesar nodded. “A man arrived in Rome yesterday evening. A strange man, such as was not seen in these parts for many years, with eyes the shape of almonds, and of stature short, though powerfully built, and speaking a foreign tongue none in the Empire can understand.”

“Come from where?” I asked, though an idea was already forming in my head.

“From the east,” he said. “An ambassador from a place he calls the Middle Kingdom. Though his language is exceedingly strange, he speaks a passable Greek. And his errand concerns this man Yeshua.”

I had never heard of a middle kingdom, and said so. “Beyond the known world?” I said. “Surely . . .”

“Surely nothing,” Caesar said. He turned and glared at me. “The man is already dead. I had heard rumours of the wealth of the east, and rest assured Rome will one day move against it. But for now, it must be kept silent.”

I swallowed hard, thinking of the poor emissary. “Of course,” I said. Caesar smiled. “What do you know of three wise men who may have come to Judea from the east, some thirty years ago?”

He saw in my face that I knew something, and he laughed then. “Come, Josephus!” he cried, and clapped me on the back. He went to his cabinet and poured himself a goblet of wine. “I knew you were the man! Tell me of your wise men.”

“Well,” I said cautiously, and knew that I must tread carefully, “I am not sure they were entirely men, nor were they entirely wise . . .”

And I told him the little that I knew.

When I had finished Caesar sat down for a long moment. Then he raised his head, and looked at me, and smiled. “This is probably nothing,” he said. “A plot amidst plots. Perhaps merely a diversion to draw my attention elsewhere. It matters not. You have been in Rome for some time now, Josephus. Is it not time for you to return to your home, if only for a while?”

I understood Caesar at that moment; and knew he was not asking a question, but giving an instruction I was obliged to follow. And in truth I was glad, for I had a desire to return, to that land of which writing can only ever reflect a partial truth. But there was more: I could feel the wings of history fluttering in that room, as fragile and enchanting as a butterfly’s; and in that moment the desire arose in me to follow it and see where it would land.

“It would be my pleasure and my honour, Caesar,” I said, and he laughed; and so I became his agent; and was despatched to return to Judea.

Episode Two: Tiberias

And now Herod the tetrarch, who was in great favour with Tiberius, built a city of the same name with him, and called it Tiberias. He built it in the best part of Galilee [and] strangers came and inhabited this city.

 — Josephus Flavius, The Antiquities of the Jews

I set out from Rome with a caravan of spice merchants heading to the Mediterranean Sea. My heart was easy at departing Rome, for in truth, the spirit of travel was upon me. I went alone, for I was to be little more than an observer, a mere reporter of events — though I had other, more secret instructions I was to carry out under certain circumstances, which I preferred not to dwell upon.

It was spring when we set off, a time of the year most suited to my nature, and I rejoiced in it. The merchants I travelled with were wealthy enough, and we lived comfortably on the road. Bread and olives and tomatoes dried in the sun, and straight wide roads, and everywhere Imperial peace and prosperity. It was good to be a Roman citizen, I thought, though I was not one, then. On the coast I bid my merchants goodbye and took passage on a ship. The Mediterranean sparkled in the sun, and as we departed I saw in the distance some dolphins, and thought it a good omen.

I landed in Judea one spring day and the feeling that took me as I stepped off the ship was one of homecoming, and the smell of the land threatened to suffocate me for a moment, so rich and full of feeling it was.

The next step of my journey was undertaken on foot, and I travelled slowly, at leisure, staying frequently in busy inns, buying drinks liberally, and generally getting the lay of the land. It was a far cry from my time as an industrious young soldier, going busily hither and dither on a horse!

Of rumours, as is natural, there was an abundance of riches. Of Roman taxation there was much grumbling. I learned of the man John, a baptiser in the river Jordan, who had been sent to prison at the command of Herod Tetrach, son of Herod the Great, my old king, and heard many fantastical stories of the Nazarene, who was touring, so I learned, far and wide, ranging across the Galilee and its sea and over to other lands, to Syria and elsewhere, and he drove away the demons that take over people and bring sicknesses and ill will, and performed many miracles, and taught his way, which I heard tell was called Xao-lin. And I greatly desired to meet with him, but bid my time.

And there were stories, too, of the three beings who I had met, briefly, once before, though there were less of these, and clouded. But I learned that they resided now in Tiberias, and determined to meet with them once more and learn for myself of their nature. But first I went to Nazareth.

Nazareth was pleasant and quiet, the sort of place I could imagine myself retiring to, growing grapes and sitting in the shade of a fig tree, and drinking rough local wine while grandchildren played in the yard. I did not know then, of course, that this was not to be, but I indulged in such fantasies for a while, idly, as I waited in the woman’s yard.

Her name was Miriam, and she was becoming stooped with age. I introduced myself as an old soldier of the last king; now something of an amateur historian. I asked whether she could help me with some stories, some anecdotes.

“You have,” she said, without the slightest hesitation, “too obvious a mark of Rome on you, and it is clear to me — no, please don’t interrupt — that you wish to hear of my son. Very well. I have no objection to that.” She smiled at me then. “As long as we understand where each other stands.”

I smiled and bowed my head. “I am here merely to listen,” I said, “and to record. I truly am a historian.”

“Oh, I know who you are, Joseph son of Matthias,” she said, surprising me. “My son has been expecting you, and sent word of your arrival over a month ago.”

I tried to hide my reaction, but she could see I was startled. She nodded, as if acknowledging something we both shared. For a moment her eyes misted over. “I brought him up to be a good boy,” she said.

“I’m sure you did,” I said.

She shook her head. “Too much interference.” In her eyes I could see pain, but also pride. “If you wish to learn of him,” she said, “go to him, Josephus son of Matthias. He will tell you all you wish to know and more.”

• • • •

It was thus that it was revealed to me that neither my identity nor, it seemed, my mission were a secret to the man whom I had come to investigate. That, you may imagine, had made me uneasy, yet I was not willing to abandon my inquiry. Besides, I must confess I was curious.

Yet defiance stayed me for a while; and I did not make directly to Jesus’ camp, which was in any case roving all about, the man and his Xao-lin disciples. Instead I went to Tiberias.

I found the wise men easily — following the sound of fighting and drunken shouts, I came to a taverna on the shores of the lake. Men were rushing in while others were flying through the air on their way out. The din was incredible. The sounds of breaking clay were everywhere. I eased my way in, dodging flying plates and jugs and men, and stopped short at the sight that greeted me.

In the middle of the taverna stood the three wise men, though they were much changed from the last time I saw them. For one, the mask of old age had slipped from them as easily as dirt in a wash — but it was more than that, for in their drunken anger their true nature was revealed, and it was no wonder the cry of “Devils! Devils!” then rose in the air.

One had the body of a man and the face of a monkey. Another was like a pig in human clothes. And the third had a dreadful countenance, some elemental being from the depths of some cold dark river. “Devils? Devils?” the pig one roared. “You are the foreign devils! Be gone and let a man drink in peace! Be gone, I tell you!” and he sprang into the air, kicked — and barrelled into two attacking men, sending them crashing to the wall.

“You call this wine?” said the monkey-faced one. “My piss tastes better than this!” and he took on five men at once, all rushing him, and bested them in the time it took to utter his words.

I felt that intervening might be in order. I stepped closer to the melee. “Venerable gentlemen,” I said, adopting again the way of address I had first used all those years before — and then louder, “Venerable gentlemen!”

For a moment the three warriors paused. Even their attackers hesitated at my intrusion, no doubt curious as to who may be foolhardy enough to attempt discussion under the circumstances.

“Who?” I heard the pig one say. He turned an enormous head and two beady eyes regarded me blearily. “You the ma’nger o’ this place?”

“Please,” I said. “Venerable one. I wish to talk. We are old acquaintances. Would you not lay down your arms?”

“No’ ev’n used ’em yet,” the pig one said, but he looked uncertain. He turned his face to his companion and said, “Monkey?”

The monkey man regarded me thoughtfully, and the cheerfulness of battle left his face. “The boy soldier,” he murmured, “now grown old. Jehosaphat, was it?”

“Josephus,” I said.

“Quite,” the monkey said. And then, “A messenger boy if ever I saw one.” His dark monkey eyes didn’t leave my face. “And who’s errands are you running now, boy?”

I did not reply to that. Instead, I said, “Where is your charge? Or have you given up your purpose so easily?”

At that the pig man roared and would have charged me, were it not for the monkey staying holding him back.

“Very well,” the monkey said. “Let us adjourn to somewhere more private. Do you have wine?”

At that I smiled, for I still retained some skins from Rome with the finest drink that could be found in that grand place. “The very best,” I said, “and money to buy more were it to run out.”

At that even the sour-faced water demon smiled. And so the three of them followed me out of that hall of devastation, and the men of Tiberias, wearing the hollow sunken looks of warriors after battle, watched us as we passed.

Episode Three: Demons and Storms

They [our books], indeed, contain in them the history of five thousand years; in which time happened many strange accidents [and] many chances of war.

 — Josephus Flavius, The Antiquities of the Jews

But let us abandon, for the moment, my conversation with the three strange beings from the east, and turn away, across the sea, and to the affairs of Yeshua, he who was indeed called the Christ, the Hebrew Fist, and the Great Soul. For this, the time of my coming as an agent for distant (but oh so close!) Rome, was the time of Jesus’ so-called Galilee Tour, though he had gone far beyond the Galilee. It was a time of great change and great upheavals, a time of miracles and strange affairs, of demons and storms.

Let us, then, turn momentarily away, and see Jesus.

He was handsome, with hair grown long and beard to match, and eyes that shone and a Hebrew nose. Jesus not so young, but passionate; a desert man, surging out of the desert with his followers devout, to smite a great empire. Not so likeable, perhaps, not now: The boyish charm is gone and in its place is a mystic, a rebel, a marshal of men. But not yet wanted. Not yet hunted. Free, as yet. And, once again, going on a journey.

“The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head,” Jesus was saying. He was becoming, more and more, like that, speaking in riddles, not always making much sense. One of his men approached him. He was agitated. “Lord,” he said, “suffer me first to go and bury my father.”

At that Jesus looked very stern, and he said, “Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead.” And the man looked horrified, but complied.

It was not a long way from where I sat with the wise men. We were, in fact, there to see it happen, to watch — to watch over, if we must be exact — the young Jesus, the tripitaka reborn. His men couldn’t see us. He, I have no doubt, could, but he ignored our presence, in the shade above the docks. “You see?” Zhū Bājiè — The Pig of the Eight Prohibitions, as I had since learned his proper name was — said. “How he ignores us? How he shuns us?”

“Pigsy, Pigsy,” Sandy said awkwardly. Even more awkwardly he tried to pat the former Heavenly Marshal’s back. “Come. You are being emotional.”

“He is the tripitaka!” Pigsy said. “He journeys across the path to nirvana but he must have us to keep him safe and out of trouble! Instead of which, he goes hither and dither like a messianic desert warrior, raising hell, forgetting who his friends are — ” and the pig-like entity did a curious and embarrassing thing — he burst out crying.

“Pigsy, Pigsy . . .” Sandy said helplessly. I looked at Sūn Wùkōng and the Monkey King looked back at me. He shrugged. “It is the way of the tripitaka. Each must seek enlightenment in his own way. We can only ever watch out for him from afar. But the tripitaka must make his own choices, and enter into peril wholeheartedly.” He smiled, though there was little humour in it. “The way we do.”

On the docks below, Jesus and his Xao-lin followers were boarding a ship. Sails were being raised, and as they did, they puffed in the wind, like a cockerel putting out its chest.

“There is going to be a storm,” Sandy said.

“Of course there is going to be a storm,” Monkey said. “How else could he quell it?”

The ship pushed out to sea. We watched it go. And this, as I later pieced it out, is what happened:

• • • •

There had been a great storm, a tempest. The waves rose as high as boulders and as strong, and crashed against the ship. The wind buffeted the sails, threatened to rip them, and the ship rolled dangerously, and all aboard it rolled with it, and all their possessions, and many were — as could only be expected — sick.

Jesus was asleep in his cabin.

There was running around, and falling, and bumping into the narrow walls; water was threatening to breach the hull, and the air smelled thick of tar and ozone. Lighting crackled, too close, outside. The men, those who could still stand, made their way at last to Jesus’ door, and banged upon it.

“Jesus! Jesus!”

At last there came a reply. “What?”

“Save us!” — “The storm!” — “Save us or we perish!”

Jesus rose from his bed. His hair, being long and all, was somewhat unkempt from sleep. Then he smiled, the smile rising like rumpled sheets being straightened; a smile that brought calm; a confident smile. “O ye of little faith,” he said — or something to that effect — and followed his followers up to the deck.

The tempest raged. The storm threw waves like soldiers at the hull. Spherical lightning squatted over the mast. In the darkness of the storm, the wind seemed to carry faces, demonic and strange, wafting over the men and laughing, horribly. Jesus held up his arms, no longer smiling, his face rebuking the storm.

“Stop it,” he said.

The wind howled defiance. “I mean it,” Jesus said.

And the storm stopped. The wind receded. The waves quieted and retreated. And a great calm descended on the sea.

• • • •

What power is that? Perhaps — and this is only a suspicion — the three companions kept an eye on him wherever he went despite his protestations. Perhaps — and this is mere speculation — Monkey, in a different shape, was following the ship, and fought the demon of the storm, and bested him. Perhaps Sandy, assuming the shape of water, fought the demons of the waves and quelled them, too. Perhaps. But the true Buddha needs no companions to make those of the Mara, of the illusion of the world, obey his will. And his men were seized with amazement, and anyway were much relieved when the ship came to rest, at last, on the other side of the country of the Gergesenes.

Though not for long.

As they came onto the shore, it was night, with only half a moon to light the way. And in the distance were the Gergesenes’ tombs, which they build to last, and where their dead lie entombed and yet . . . and yet not always still.

The cry rose from the men of Xao-lin. Fear grasped them in its clasp and pressed and pressed and squeezed. For from the tombs there rose unquiet devils, riding dead and horrid corpses, exceedingly fierce, and blocked their way.

In the distance was a herd of pigs at pasture. The night air smelled fragrant and fresh, the breeze coming in from the sea. The horrid mummies lurched to a standstill. “Who are you to come and disturb our peace?” they cried in awful voices.

“I am Jesus, son of Joseph,” the tripitaka replied. “Go, return to your crypts before you raise my wrath.”

“Don’t antagonise them,” one of the disciples said, and shivered, but he was silenced by the others. The devils, those living-dead, laughed, most horribly. “What are you going to do to stop us?”

For a moment there was stillness. Somewhere in the darkness, perhaps, a monkey-shaped shadow moved. Perhaps noticing it, perhaps not, Jesus assumed the Stance of the Crouching Monkey. His hand reached forward, fingers spread open. He beckoned the devils.

“Come.”

The mummies charged. Jesus, quick as lightning and as bright, leaped into the air. He seemed to move in slow motion, while all around him was a blur. He lashed out, connected, landed, swept the legs from under one opponent, tore at another’s bandages. The air seemed to crackle with eldritch tension.

In the midst of battle, the devils laughed again, the sound rising in unison, shattering peace and loosening men’s bladders. “If you have power, tripitaka,” they said, “or whatever you call yourself — ” bodies connected in mid-air. Blows rained. Jesus leaped in a figure of eight and seemed to rise, rise, rise like an arrow of cloud. “Then put us into the herd of swine over there!”

Shadows of monkeys moved in the dark. Somewhere there was the flash of gold. A pig neighed, the sound most horrid.

There was a crackle of lightning. The air felt charged. And many voices cried as one — “No! No! No . . .” and faded away.

Down by the beach, a herd of swine screamed as one, a tormented sound, and, running in blind panic and terror, ran along the sand and finally, horribly, straight into the water, and drowned.

Silence settled again. The disciples, shaking still, looked up at Jesus, fear and admiration filling their eyes.

And from somewhere in the distance, a keening, angry, frightened voice screamed, again and again as if beset by devils itself — “What in God’s name have you done to my pigs?”

Episode Four: Walking on Water

But now Pilate, the procurator of Judea, removed the army from Caesarea to Jerusalem, to take their winter quarters there, in order to abolish the Jewish laws.

 — Josephus Flavius, The Antiquities of the Jews

Matthew, in his somewhat long-winded account of the Christ, tells us that “it came to pass, as Jesus sat at meat in the house, behold, many publicans and sinners came and sat down with him and his disciples.” To that I say:

It was quite a party.

I had been living in Rome for some time, and was not a stranger to such scenes, but I must confess that Jesus could really gather them together.

Jesus amused the guests by turning water into wine. Scenes of drunkenness inevitably followed. Pigsy was lolling against one wall, a tankard of wine in one hand, a painted Jezebel in the other. Monkey was demonstrating martial arts to several anxious disciples. Sandy was nowhere to be seen. Music wafted through the warm air, alongside the smells of roasting meat, spilled wine, and perfume. Jesus seemed in good spirits, almost serene. For a change, he wasn’t preaching, just hanging out, talking quietly with some guests, keeping an eye on everyone.

The message I received from Caesar was troubling. Pontius, the procurator (the “tax-collector,” as Jesus called him, and with some justification) was mobilising the army to go back to Jerusalem from Caesarea, the new Roman town on the shore of the Great Sea.

Jesus had been quiet recently. He had returned from his journeys and for a time seemed content to sit idly, yet even so, with every passing day more people came to join him, men and women both, some high and some low, but all drawn to him and to his cause. I had my suspicions. I had communicated with Rome by cipher, and my conclusion was uneasy: Jesus was intending to march on Jerusalem.

Would he confront Pilate? I did not know the man, but heard he was a good administrator. He came from a place called Vienne, a good citizen of Rome, ambitious — but not too much — and had his hands full with the taxation problem in Syria, not to mention the internal problems in Judea, with Jewish politics and the escalating conflicts within the Sanhedrin, the council of judges. Being a Roman procurator was a demanding job. Taxes had to be collected. Possibilities of rebellion had to be kept down. Administration . . . I lifted my eyes as I thought this and saw Jesus looking at me. There was a twinkle in his eyes. What was he planning?

I decided that night to take my leave of him. I wanted to see the country again, see for myself what its citizens thought, what they may want, what changes were being wrought by the Romans. I was a man with his feet on two sides of a river, and I feared a flood.

The next day I set out for Jerusalem. The journey was long and pleasant. I passed through the Galilee and onto the shore of the Great Sea, and made my way without hurry to the mountains where Jerusalem sits.

Stories of Jesus still reached my ears. Healing the sick. Walking on water. And making speeches. I began to fear Jesus. Later historians tried to make him a man of peace. But he was not. He was a focus for change, and change is violent and disruptive. Jesus said, “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.” These words echoed that year across Judea.

When I spoke with Sūn Wùkōng, much later, after all these things had indeed come to a head, he expressed his view of the time in a short, almost brusque manner. “The tripitaka,” he said, “did not follow the eightfold path. His nature is to stray, to be lost, to err. Only by journeying so can he learn to follow the true path, and achieve the state of the Buddha.” Then he said, “Walking on water is easy. You just have to make sure you don’t drown.” He smiled then, a little ruefully it had seemed to me. “Attaining true wisdom is harder.”

In any case, my journey was pleasant and, on the whole, uneventful. I did stop at Caesarea, but only caught up with the army when I at last reached Jerusalem, and saw again my home, that eternal city for which even Rome is no match, Jerusalem of the Temple and of King David and of the Ark of the Covenant: Jerusalem, the city of white stone.

There would be no water to walk on in this city, I thought to myself then. The stones of Jerusalem are not as pliable. In the following days, I watched the life of the city, the battles of ideology, of politics, of belief, between the Pharisees and Sadducees, the work of the Great Sanhedrin, Pilate’s work on the water aqueduct to Jerusalem, the completion of Herod’s great temple — but more than that, I merely sat in the markets, and spoke to my people, and listened, and smelled the city with its spices and cloth and merchandise from all across the known world, and Rome seemed, for the moment, to recede away from me as if in a dream.

Yet I knew enough of the nature of dreams to dread the waking up.

PART FOUR: THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST

Episode One: A Ramble In the Temple

And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers.

 — Matthew 21:12

Look at them go, look at them go, Jesus and his gang! Look at them go, with a force, with a bang!

It was a quiet day at the temple. The sky was blue and clear. The white stone walls were clean and still looked fresh, young in years, old in purpose. The cohanim had departed inside. In the great yard, only the usual bustle of morning visitors and the trade sounds in the various religious stalls could be heard.

The mob appeared gradually. They had snuck into Jerusalem over several days, unnoticed, unobtrusive. Perhaps the narrow streets felt a little busier, but that was all. Yet now they gathered. And now they were felt.

Were a man to look closely at the yard of the temple, he might have seen three strange shapes, three statues standing a solitary guard. Grey stone they were, immovable and ancient, and to man barely noticeable. Only their eyes were alive, but no man looked at their eyes. One had the appearance of a wizened monkey. One seemed a little like a pig, or an Egyptian hippopotamus. A third, thin and sour, stood with a sheen of water on his stony skin. If such statues could speak, this is, perhaps, what they would have said:

“I don’t think it’s such a good idea,” Pigsy said.

“None of us do,” Monkey said. “But it is not up to us. Let the tripitaka fight his own battles.”

“Nothing can be achieved by fighting in a temple,” Sandy said. “Even if it’s not a proper temple.”

“It is to them,” Monkey said mildly. Sandy snorted. “It isn’t the role of a tripitaka to pick fights. And anyway, what if he needs to borrow money?”

“Then he can ask his mother,” Pigsy said, and snorted. The mob was approaching, but for now, inside the walls, it was peaceful.

“A Buddha is a man of peace,” Sandy said.

The Monkey statue, for one impossible moment, seemed to shrug. “But we are not.”

“That is why we are only his companions,” Sandy said. But the Monkey statue seemed to shake its head. “We only follow the tripitaka as he himself follows the path to enlightenment,” he said. “He is on that path yet. He will learn, at last.”

“Do we join in?” Pigsy said. “I feel like fighting.”

“We’ll have time yet,” Monkey said: it seemed with relish. “For now we wait, and watch.”

The mob came to the gates. At its head was Jesus. He wore loose, flowing robes, multicoloured, that seemed to shine in the sun. A felt belt, black, closed around his narrow waist.

There were two guards outside. One said, “You can’t come in here like this!”

The other took one look at the situation and turned to run. Jesus soared into the air.

He was like a maelstrom, like a hurricane sweeping in from the Great Sea and into the coastal areas, sucking up everything in its path. He rose in a graceful arc, seemed for a moment to freeze (or was it the world around him, slowing?) and lashed out. His foot connected with the remaining guard’s face.

The guard dropped like a stone statue.

“He’s good,” Pigsy said. “That was a Crouching Monkey Jump.”

Monkey said, “We trained him well.”

“I could do with a cup of tea,” Sandy said.

Jesus and his men marched into the temple. A shout rose in the air.

Jesus came and stopped before a long table. Behind it a man of quite noticeable bulk was sitting comfortably. “Yes, young man?” he said. He seemed not to see the crowd pressing behind Jesus. “You would like to purchase a dove? Speak to a cohen? Bring a sacrifice to the sacred altar? Whatever your religious needs, we can help.”

“I am religious need,” Jesus said. For a moment it seemed as if the monkey statue had covered its eyes. “Oh, no,” it might have said.

Jesus grasped the long table with his hands. “Is this a Roman temple,” he said, “or a Jewish one?”

“A temple,” the fat man said mildly, “is a temple.”

Jesus shook his head. “This won’t do,” he said. The fat man wobbled and for a moment seemed to think of rising. Then he laid his large hands on the table and leaned forward. “You the young preacher from the Galilee?” he said. “The one been making all that trouble up north?”

Jesus said mildly, “What if I am?”

“Then you can bloody well go back to the Galilee, country boy!” the fat man said. Several men further down from him laughed. “Please don’t piss him off,” Sandy said, though of course no one heard him.

Jesus’ hands tightened on the table. “That’s it, boy,” Monkey said. “Focus your ch’i.”

Jesus raised his hands. The table, with one impossibly sweeping motion, flew in the air and landed with a crash, breaking on the stony floor. The fat man rocked in his chair and fell, landing on his back. A shocked silence settled, for a flickering moment, over the yard.

Then the silence, too, broke. Enraged men charged at Jesus. His disciples spread out across the yard.

“Bloodshed,” Sandy said, and seemed to shake his head. “I do not call this following the path.”

“That’s right,” Pigsy said. “We’re the ones should be doing the fighting.”

The attacking men were almost on Jesus. He leaped into the air again, his legs pulled under him. His hands were a blur of motion. When he landed more men were lying comatose on the ground of the temple.

“Can we join in? Please, Monkey?” Pigsy said.

“Let the boy play.”

A man charged Jesus with a knife. Jesus dodged, rose effortlessly behind the man, and landed a blow that felled the knife — and the man. Another man charged him with a staff, and he jumped between the swipes and somehow, a moment later, remained holding the staff alone, his opponent on the ground.

All over the temple ground, fights had broken out. Pockets of violence erupted and occasionally merged, until at last the whole floor of the yard seemed to be one heaving mob of people, screaming and cursing and spilling each other’s blood.

Birds were screaming. A man was thrown and hit their cages, and a latch sprang open. A multitude of white doves rose into the air.

“The army is coming,” Sandy said.

“The army!” the shout rose a moment later. “The army is coming!”

With one graceful, impossible movement, Jesus rose in the air, reached the top of the wall, somersaulted above it, and was gone behind, and his men all followed. Soon the only remaining things in the temple’s wide yard were the bruised and aching bodies of men struggling to get up, while high overhead the white doves flew, in a vast cloud that spread away from Jerusalem.

Episode Two: The Last Supper

And the disciples did as Jesus had appointed them; and they made ready the Passover.

 — Matthew 26:19

“I like pigeons,” Pigsy said a little later. Two of the birds had made the mistake of landing, for a moment, on the pig-shaped statue. Now nothing remained of them but a couple of belched feathers that floated, forlorn, in the air. Someone was singing. It sounded a little like “Jesus loves you more than you might think.” Monkey said, “He’s in trouble now.”

“The Romans are in trouble,” Pigsy said. But Monkey shook his head. “They have a story here,” Sandy said, “David and Goliath. He was one of their early kings.”

“Goliath?”

“David. He was a boy with a catapult and he felled a giant.”

“You’d need one hell of a big catapult to fell the Roman empire,” Monkey said.

“Let’s get drunk,” Pigsy said. “Where is that boy soldier from Rome?”

“Josephus? Not seen him.”

“Must be up to no good.”

“Let’s go.”

They went.

• • • •

Accounts of his last days are numerous, and I shall therefore not offer too many details in this, the chronicle of Jesus, he who was called, in various times, the rebel, the troublemaker, the Hebrew Fist, or the Buddha. The three companions called him the tripitaka, which is the embodiment of their laws, but when used thus it merely denotes a man: a seeker on the path to nirvana — and it is said that the road is full of false trails and traps of quicksand for the unwary traveller. In any event, I arrived in Jerusalem after the affair in the temple, and was in time to see the beginning of the conflict — if that, and not a street brawl, it can be called.

Jews do fight, and fight well. The Greeks can testify to that, the Canaanites and the Philistines and many others. But to be a Jew, too, and to survive the long centuries, the rise and fall of mighty empires, is to know, too, how to lose well. In any event, and following the temple incident, the small revolt began.

In the narrow streets of Jerusalem, fighting erupted. Roman soldiers were ambushed and slain. Confrontations took place hourly, in squares and open spaces, but the real fighting was done in the side streets and urban areas: It was a war in the margins of the city.

The council of the Sanhedrin was alarmed. So was Pilate, but to a lesser extent. He had, after all, the whole might of Rome behind him; and in the middle of the second day he called for me, and I came to see him.

“Josephus,” he said. “Who is this troublesome man?”

“They say he is a messiah,” I replied. “When he was born, a star shone over Bethlehem.”

“The stars shine over many places,” Pilate said. “If they made messiahs out of men, then the whole world would be filled.”

I inched my head at that. “Nevertheless,” I said. “He has a following.”

“And they are militant. What is the manner of their fighting?”

“I believe it is called Xao-lin.”

“Shaolin? What barbarous language is that?”

I said I did not know.

“From the east, I hear,” he said, and his shrewd eyes observed me while I said nothing. He shrugged. “You have your instructions,” he said at last, and I inched my head again at that. “It is Passover in two days. There will be no fighting. I . . . I will declare an amnesty. Let the Jews settle the matters of the Jews. You know what to do. Can I trust you to do that?”

“I will do what is necessary,” I said stiffly. He smiled, and dismissed me.

• • • •

On the night of the seder, the Passover meal, I sat with Jesus and his followers in Jerusalem and we celebrated the escape of our people from Egypt. Jesus was in a subdued mood. At some point, a woman came to him and poured oil over his face and clothes from an alabaster box. The oil ran down his long hair and stained his beard.

The day before, standing in a market square with his men spread around him like bodyguards, he seemed to have lost it a little. “Hypocrites!” he shouted. “Woe unto you! Fools and blind! Even so you also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity!” And then he launched into a tirade that took even myself by surprise. “You serpents!” he shouted, and the people around him turned back in fright. “You generation of vipers, how can you escape the damnation of hell?”

It was not a speech designed to make new converts.

I sat with him at the seder table, in the house of Simon, the leper, and the oil ran down his face and he said, “She did it for my burial.”

I had not heard him so grim before. But something had changed in Jesus in those last days. Perhaps it was the sight of the bloodshed. Perhaps the people’s reactions to his attack on them. No one likes to be called a viper. Something fundamental changed in him, and he seemed quieter, darkened, like a lamp about to burn off. And at last, he turned to me (for I was sitting on his right) and he said, and with a slight smile — “You know what to do, Josephus. Can I trust you to do that?”

I shook my head, and he said it again, until finally I nodded.

Episode Three: The Hill of Skulls

and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.

 — Matthew 27:51-53

They came with swords and staves, but they were not needed. They came with authority, but it went unanswered. I think he expected me to kiss him, to mark him in some way, but that too was unnecessary. Everyone knew Jesus. They came in a guard of men and I led them, and we took hold of Jesus and took him to the Procurator.

“Are you the king of the Jews?” Pilate said, and Jesus said, “Ata amarta,” which means, You said it, or, That’s what you say.

“I am innocent of his blood,” Pilate said, and he called for water and washed his hands and then said, “Send him to be crucified.”

And so it was. The cross was erected in the place they call Golgotha, that is, the place of golgalot, of skulls. To either side of him was a thief. The nails were driven in, and he was left to die. The rebel was caught without a fight. Order was restored. A hush lay on the earth, expectant; like the humidity that presages a storm.

• • • •

“Tripitaka.”

“Tripitaka!”

“Leave me.”

“Why do you always have to get into such trouble?”

The crucified man smiled. “I was a fool,” he said.

Pigsy snorted. “Ata amarta. We’ll get you out of here.”

“Leave me.”

Of the three, only Monkey was silent. It was dark on the hill of skulls. It had been dark for several hours. Sūn Wùkōng peered into the dying man’s face, and they held each other’s eyes for a long moment. “I was a fool,” the man on the cross said again, and smiled, though it looked more like a grimace of pain. “Please forgive me.”

“Tripitaka!” — “Tripitaka!”

But Monkey silenced his two companions. “So it is true,” he said at last, and the crucified man nodded. “I no longer have a name,” he said, and looked surprised, “I see . . .” but he did not complete the thought. His eyes took on a faraway gaze, and Monkey knew that the man was truly seeing now, that Mara, the illusion of the world, was lifted from before his eyes at last. He was close to nirvana now. He said, “Master . . .” and the bound man shook his head, a minute movement, and said, “No more, Sūn Wùkōng. There are no masters in the Republic of Heaven. You are free.”

The gold band on the Monkey King’s head began to vibrate. Slowly, it seemed to expand, its pressure on his head easing. It slipped from his head and hovered in the air above it; and then it broke.

“Fool, companion, king,” the crucified man said, and though his face was twisted in pain, his eyes contained a smile, “it is time to seek your own wisdom. Friends — ” his eyes sought out Pigsy’s and Sandy’s — “farewell.”

His last words to them, as soft as the sound of distant waves carried on the wind, were, “Follow the eightfold path . . .”

• • • •

At the time of his death, there was an earthquake. The tremors pulsed through the ground and shook tables and chairs and felled cups and flagons, and great stones rolled, and graves broke open.

And from the graves rose an army of corpses, though many had lain in the ground for many years and were but skeletons; and when the people saw them they were understandably upset. And the army of the dead men rose in the darkness and converged on the city of white stone, and the people fled before them. The dead marched through the narrow streets of Jerusalem, and some of them were only freshly dead, and their deaths had been violent. So it was that the men who died in the skirmishes were alive again, if only for a moment, and if not alive than at least undead; and they walked through the streets and the people barred their doors and shut their windows; and after that the night was silent.

Episode Four: Resurrection

He is not here

 — Matthew 28:8

There are many stories concerning the passing of the Christ, and few truths to be gained by sifting through words as one would through silt in search of precious gold. What is known, more or less, is this:

When he died, a man came to collect his corpse, and he called himself Joseph, and said he was from the country of Arimathaea. It might be that the man had a vaguely piggish appearance; but if so, few make much of the fact. The man took the body from the cross and wrapped it in linen, until only the shape of a man could be discerned inside. He transported the body thus to a fresh tomb, hewn in the rock outside Jerusalem, and he placed the appearance of the body inside, and sealed the tomb with a rock; and after that he disappeared.

For three days the tomb was guarded, and women came and sat by the sepulchre, and amongst them Miriam his mother, and Miriam of the town of Migdal, and Miriam the other, and indeed the name Miriam was exceedingly common in those days, and who Miriam the other was I cannot in truth say, but that she wasn’t the first nor the second. And it is said, though I was not witness to it, that on the night of the second day a chariot came and a lone woman, dark-skinned and proud, stepped out from it and sat for a long while by the rock, and spoke words no one could hear; and then she too departed and was not seen in that country again.

On the third day the tomb was opened. The bandages, what is called in the Hebrew tachrichim, were left strewn on the floor. There was no body.

A search of the tomb was ordered, but no hidden exits could be found. His disciples were blamed, accused of stealing the body in the dead of night; but nothing was ever proven. At that time, rumours of his reappearance became common. His disciples claimed to have met him on a hill in Nazareth, but there were few to heed their words at that time. The story of he who was called Christ and Buddha was left unended, which was perhaps for the best.

In later years, I had heard stories of his appearance in unexpected places. It was rumoured that a man resembling Jesus appeared in the eastern land called India, and healed the sick, and travelled around. And others said he was seen on the distant isle of mist, in a place called by the heathens Glastonbury; and others yet told of his going to some vast and undiscovered continent, a place of barbarous splendour that lay beyond the known world.

As for me: The Procurator was not ungrateful, nor was Caesar back in Rome. I had remained in Judea and advanced through the ranks, and at last had taken command of Yodfat, a military outpost in the Galilee. It was there that I found myself when the Great War finally took place, and the Jews of Judea revolted against the Romans. We made our stand against the empire, but the might of Rome, as always, was too great; and when they had taken Yodfat, many thousands were killed — and the remaining soldiers preferred to commit suicide rather than to be taken prisoner.

Not so I. It is essential, for a warrior, to be prepared to lose his life in service. Yet when the time for it came, and I saw the futility of further resistance, I wished to live. Suicide is a thing of zealots. Yet I have always believed that being a Jew is first about living, about surviving adversity, not giving in to it. I shall not go into details. Suffice it to say that I was taken captive, endured, and found it beneficial to assist the Romans with some minor intelligence. I was present at the siege of Jerusalem and witness to its destruction. And, at last, I was taken to Rome in the entourage of Flavius Vespasian and his son, Titus, and became a Roman citizen; amen.

© 2010 by Lavie Tidhar.

Originally published in Apex Publications Blog.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lavie Tidhar is the World Fantasy Award winning author of Osama (2011) and of The Violent Century (2013), in addition to many other works and several awards. He works across genres, combining detective and thriller modes with poetry, science fiction, and historical and autobiographical material. His work has been compared to that of Philip K. Dick by the Guardian and the Financial Times, and to Kurt Vonnegut’s by Locus.

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

NOVEL EXCERPTS

Tor Books Presents
Wild Cards: Lowball
(novel excerpt)

edited by George R.R. Martin & Melinda Snodgrass

Tor Books presents “Once More, for Old Times’ Sake” by Carrie Vaughn, an excerpt of the new mosaic novel Wild Cards: Lowball, edited by George R.R. Martin and Melinda Snodgrass, forthcoming in November:

Decades after an alien virus changed the course of history, the surviving population of Manhattan still struggles to understand the new world left in its wake. Natural humans share the rough city with those given extraordinary — and sometimes terrifying — traits. While most manage to coexist in an uneasy peace, not everyone is willing to adapt. Down in the seedy underbelly of Jokertown, residents are going missing. The authorities are unwilling to investigate, except for a fresh lieutenant looking to prove himself and a collection of unlikely jokers forced to take matters into their own hands — or tentacles. The deeper into the kidnapping case these misfits and miscreants get, the higher the stakes are raised.

Edited by #1 New York Times bestselling author George R. R. Martin and acclaimed author Melinda M. Snodgrass, Lowball is the latest mosaic novel in the acclaimed Wild Cards universe, featuring original fiction by Carrie Vaughn, Ian Tregillis, David Anthony Durham, Melinda M. Snodgrass, Mary Anne Mohanraj, David D. Levine, Michael Cassutt, and Walter John Williams.

Perfect for old fans and new readers alike, Lowball delves deeper into the world of aces, jokers, and the hard-boiled men and women of the Fort Freak police precinct in a pulpy, page-turning novel of superheroics and mystery.

Once More, for Old Times’ Sake

Carrie Vaughn

Ana Cortez was playing hooky from work. She called in sick — first time ever, not counting the couple of times she’d ended up hospitalized because of work. On the phone with her boss, she sounded as pathetic and self-sacrificing as she could, saying that she couldn’t possibly come in and risk infecting anybody else with whatever twenty-four-hour stomach bug was ravaging her system. She wasn’t sure Lohengrin believed her, but she’d earned enough status over the last few years, he didn’t question her. She deserved to play hooky.

What would she do with her day off? What any self-respecting New Yorker — transplanted, but still — would do: she went to a baseball game at Yankee Stadium. Not that she particularly liked baseball, but Kate would be on the field today, and Ana wasn’t going to miss it for the world.

Except for the local favorites and the one or two who made the news in some scandal or other, Ana didn’t know who any of the players were, didn’t follow baseball at all, but she got caught up in the excitement anyway, cheering and shouting from her seat in the front row off third base.

The player who won the Home Run Derby, Yankee hitter Robinson Canó, was a local favorite, and the crowd stayed ramped up for the next event. The special charity exhibition was billed as a Pitching Derby — the major league’s top pitchers took to the field, facing home plate and a radar gun, and pitched their fastest. 100 miles per hour. 101. 99. 102. The crowd lost it when Aroldis Chapman pitched 105 — it had broken some kind of record, apparently. But the show wasn’t over, and when the last pitcher in the lineup walked onto the field, an anticipatory hush fell.

The athletic young woman wore the tight-fitting white pants of a baseball uniform and a baby-doll T-shirt, navy blue, with “Curveball” printed on the back. No number, no team affiliation, which was Kate all over these days. Curveball, the famous ace who could blow up buildings with her pitches, who’d quit the first season of American Hero to be a real-life hero, who’d then quit the Committee, because she didn’t need anybody.

The crowd never got completely quiet as they murmured wondering observations and pointed at the newcomer. Ana leaned forward, trying to get a better look at her friend, who seemed small and alone as she crossed the diamond and reached the mound, tugging on her cap. She didn’t face home plate like the others, but turned outward, to the one-ton pile of concrete blocks that had been trucked to the outfield.

Kate looked nervous, stepping on one foot, then another, digging the toes of her shoes into the dirt, pressing the baseball into her glove. Her ponytail twitched when she moved. Some traditionalists hadn’t wanted her here — were appalled at the very idea of a woman on the pitcher’s mound at venerable Yankee Stadium. But this was raising money for charity so they couldn’t very well argue. Ana wondered how much harassment Kate had put up with behind the scenes. If she had, she’d channel her anger into her arm.

Ana’s stomach clenched in shared anxiety, and she gripped the railing in front of her until her fingers hurt. Why did this feel like a battle, that Ana should be out on the field with her, backing her up? Like they’d fought together so many times before. Here, all Ana could do was watch. This wasn’t a battle, this was supposed to be for fun. Gah. She touched the St. Barbara medallion she wore around her neck, tucked under her shirt. The action usually calmed her.

Finally, the ace pitcher settled, raised the ball and her glove to her chest, wound up, left leg drawn up, and let fly, her whole body stretching into the throw.

Sparks flared along her arm, and the ball vanished from her hand, followed by a crack of thunder, the whump of an explosion — and the pile of concrete was gone, just gone. Debris rained down over the field in a cloud of dust and gravel. The sound was like hail falling. The crowd sitting along the backfield screamed and ducked. Kate turned away, raising her arm to shelter her face.

Something weird had happened. Ana had seen Kate throw a thousand times, everything from a grain of rice to a bowling ball. She’d blown up cars and killed people with her projectiles. But she’d never erased a target like this.

Then the speed of the pitch flashed on the big board: 772 mph.

The announcer went crazy, his voice cracking as he screamed, “. . . that sound . . . the sonic boom of a baseball! Oh my God, I’ve never seen anything like it! Unbelievable!”

Kate had also put a sedan-sized crater in the outfield, but no one seemed to mind. The crowd’s collective roar matched the noise of a tidal wave, and the major league players rushed out on the field to swarm Curveball. A pair of them lifted her to their shoulders, so she sailed above them. Her face held an expression of stark wonder. The screen at the backfield focused on her, her vast smile and bright eyes.

Ana clapped and screamed along with the rest of the crowd.

It took two hours for the stadium to clear out. Ana lingered, making her way toward home plate, where Kate was entertaining fans leaning over the boards to talk to her. Signing baseballs, posing for pictures. Ana arrived in time to catch one exchange with a girl, maybe twelve, a redhead in braids and a baseball cap of her own.

“I play softball,” she said, handing Kate a ball to sign.

“You pitch?” Kate asked.

“Yeah, but not like you.”

“Chapman doesn’t pitch like me. I bet you’re good enough.”

The girl shrugged. “I don’t know. We didn’t win the season.”

“Keep practicing. That’s what it takes. Work hard. Okay?”

The girl left smiling.

Kate saw Ana hanging back as the last of her admirers left. Squealing, she pulled herself over the barrier and caught her up in a rib-squishing hug. Ana hugged back, laughing. They separated to get a better look at each other. Kate was still grinning, as well she should be, but Ana noticed the shadows under her eyes.

“I’m so glad you could make it,” Kate said.

“Are you kidding? I wasn’t going to miss it. You ready for the party?”

Kate sighed. “I need a couple more hours. They want a press conference and a photo op for the charity. We raised seventy-five grand.” Her gaze brightened.

“That’s so great. How about this — come over as soon as you can, and I’ll have a chance to pick up a few more things and get the place cleaned up.”

“You promised me a gallon of margaritas. Is that still on?”

“Oh, you know it. A gallon of margaritas, a pile of DVDs — and all the gossip on that new boy of yours.”

Kate blushed, but her smile glowed. “You got it.”

• • • •

Ana had brought home the tequila, limes, salt, and a bag of ice already. Now, she went for approximately a metric ton of burritos from the excellent taquería around the corner from her apartment. They had to eat if they were going to keep up their strength for more margaritas.

The Lower East Side walk-up used to be her and Kate’s apartment, back when Kate was still on the Committee, until she quit and went back to school in Oregon. That had been a couple of years ago now, and they didn’t get to see each other very often these days.

Her apartment was on East Fifth Street, a few blocks off Jokertown, in a neighborhood that wasn’t great but wasn’t awful. Ana liked the place. It wasn’t pretentious, and she could maintain some level of normality. Like go to the taquería without anyone giving her a hard time or snapping pictures. With her straight dark hair and stoutish frame, she wasn’t as photogenic as Kate, but she’d had her own share of publicity as the Latin American Coordinator for the UN Committee on Extraordinary Interventions. She didn’t much feel like a public figure most of the time. So she stayed in her unassuming neighborhood. The street food was better.

At her building’s front door, she paused to find her key one-handed, when a voice hissed at her from the stairwell to the lower-level apartment.

“Ana! Ana, down here!” She looked over the railing.

The joker wore dark sunglasses and had his top two arms shoved into an oversized jacket. His middle two arms held it tight around his torso in some futile attempt at a disguise. He made his best effort to huddle in the shadows, away from the view of street level, but the guy was over seven feet tall and bulky: the world-famous drummer for the band Joker Plague.

“DB? What are you doing here?” she said.

He made a waving motion, hushing her. “Quiet! Get down here, will you?”

She swung around the railing, and Drummer Boy pulled her into the shelter of the stairwell, making her drop the bag of food. “Michael!”

“Shhh! Sorry. Here.” With a fifth arm emerging from the bottom of the jacket, he picked up the bag and shoved it at her. The contents were probably mushed. Maybe they could have burrito casserole. “Ana, I need to talk to you, can I come in?”

“Couldn’t you call?”

“In person. Come on, at least can we get off the street?”

She hadn’t seen him in almost a year. Normally, she’d be happy to see him, and they tried to get together the rare times they happened to be in the same zip code at the same time. He’d gotten her tickets to a Joker Plague show awhile back, and she’d love to do something like that again. But she really wished he’d called. What she didn’t want was him still hanging around when Kate arrived.

She spent too long thinking, and DB continued cajoling. “I’m passing through town, and I really need to talk to you but I’m trying to keep a low profile — ”

She raised an eyebrow and gave him a skeptical look. With six arms and tympanic membranes covering his torso, Michael Vogali, aka Drummer Boy, could never keep a low profile. Ever.

“Michael, what do you want, really?” she said.

“Can I crash at your place? Just for a couple of days. Please?”

Three hundred sixty-five days in a year, and he picked this one to show up asking for a favor. He was a friend, she didn’t want to say no, but this couldn’t be happening. This . . . this was not going to end well.

She winced. “You don’t have anyone else you can stay with? Don’t you own an apartment on Central Park or something excessive like that?”

“Never did get around to it,” he said. “Our recording studio’s in LA.”

“You can’t stay at my place, it’s tiny.”

“It’s just for a couple of days — ”

Exasperated, she blurted, “You can’t because Kate’s staying with me tonight.”

He brightened. “She is? I haven’t seen her in ages. Is she . . . I mean, is she okay and everything?”

She hadn’t meant to say anything about Kate. “Are you sure you can’t stay someplace else?”

“This isn’t just about someplace to stay, we really do need to talk. And Kate . . . oh fuck, I didn’t want to be the one to tell Kate, I was hoping you could do it after I’d talked to you — ”

“What are you talking about?”

“Please, can we go inside?” He gave her a hangdog look that should have been ridiculous on a seven-foot-tall joker behemoth, but he managed to make himself endearing.

She rolled her eyes. “Okay. Fine. But Kate and I are still having our margarita night.”

“Hey, that sounds like fun — ”

“Michael!”

He raised his hands in a defensive pose and backed up a step. “No problem.”

“Hold this.” She handed him the burritos and found the key for the door. “Why didn’t you just call me instead of camping out like a homeless person?”

“Because you’d be more likely to say yes if I just showed up on your doorstep?”

She growled and hit him on the side, generating a hollow echo through his torso.

“My walls are thin — you’re going to have to cut down on the drumming.”

“Sure, of course,” he said, smacking a hollow beat as punctuation.

Oh yeah, was this going to end badly.

• • • •

Kate and DB had quit the Committee at the same time, over the politicization of the group in the Middle East. Ana hadn’t been there, but she’d gotten an earful when Kate called to tell her about it. She’d cried a bunch during that phone call — Ana might be the only person in the world who knew how torn up Kate had been over the whole thing. Ana had been stuck halfway around the world, on another mission for the Committee, and couldn’t do a thing about it. DB had just been angry — he hadn’t called Ana to vent. A bunch of the tabloids insisted that DB and Kate had run off together in some torrid romance, but that wasn’t at all true. It was all getting to be old history, now. They’d moved on. Ana hoped they didn’t revive the soap opera here tonight.

Kate’s call from the downstairs intercom came an hour later, and Ana buzzed her in.

“I never thought they’d let me leave,” Kate said, pushing into the apartment and dropping her bag by the door. “One more picture, they kept saying. Not like they didn’t already have twenty million.”

Ana stepped aside, closed the door behind her, and waited. Didn’t take long.

DB stood from the sofa and sheepishly waved a couple of arms, while a third skittered a nervous beat that sounded like balloons popping. He’d taken off the oversized jacket and stood in all his shirtless, tattooed glory. “Hey, Kate.”

Kate turned to Ana. “What’s he doing here?”

DB stepped forward. “It’s just for the night, I promise, I’m trying to keep a low profile — ”

“I’m a pushover,” Ana said, shrugging.

Kate glared, and Ana wasn’t sure whom the glare was directed toward. “I hope you have those margaritas ready.”

“Two pitchers, ready to go.”

They headed into the kitchen, or rather the corner of the apartment that served as the kitchen. DB followed them, sidling along, as delicately as his body allowed. “So, hey, Kate. How you doing?” DB had been nursing a crush on Kate for years now. He wasn’t any more subtle about it than he had been back on the set of the first season of American Hero. He’d gotten a little more polite, at least.

“I pitched past the sound barrier at Yankee Stadium today, how are you?”

“Um . . . hey, that’s great. I think. I just happened to be in town, and, well, we really need to talk — ”

Kate said, “Michael, Ana and I planned a night to chill out, with too much alcohol and a lot of TV and not thinking about anything. That’s not going to change just because you’re here, okay? I can’t be mad about Ana letting you stay here. But can you just . . . leave us alone?”

DB sat back on the sofa, his arms folded together contritely.

• • • •

Feeding everyone margaritas kept them quiet for a little while. Half an hour, maybe. The first DVD of the latest season of Grey’s Anatomy was good for another hour or so, especially watching the episode where Meredith and Derek spent the whole time fighting over Derek’s ethically questionable experiments using a new version of the trump virus on a collection of hideous joker patients. It was pretty awful.

DB chortled through the whole thing. “I wouldn’t mind it so much if they actually used joker actors rather than nat actors with fucking rubber tentacles.”

Ana agreed with him, but they had to have the rubber tentacles so they could take them off and declare them cured for five minutes before they melted in a hideous ooze of sudden-onset Black Queen.

But the episode finally ended, and in the quiet while Ana changed out DVDs, DB had to ruin it. “Okay, I know you’re having your party and all, and I know I’m interrupting — ”

Kate, nested on pillows on the floor in front of the TV, took a long drink of margarita and ignored him. Ana almost felt sorry for the guy. He was nice, usually; he’d take a bullet for his friends, and with their history that wasn’t just a saying. But he was way too used to being the center of attention, and definitely wasn’t used to being ignored by a couple of women.

“ — but I really need to talk to you. This is serious. Seriously.” The sofa creaked as he leaned forward, and half his hands drummed nervously.

Ana shushed him, got the DVD in and hit play, hoping that would shut him up. But Kate rolled over and glared. “Michael, what are you doing here? Isn’t Joker Plague supposed to be on tour in . . . in Thailand or someplace?”

He brightened. “You’ve been keeping up with us — ”

She glowered. “Crazy guess.”

“The tour was last month. We’re supposed to be recording the new album, but . . . I gotta tell you, it’s not going well. I knew we were in trouble when all our songs started being about how tough it is being a band on tour. So I’m telling the guys, maybe we should take some time off, get back to our roots. Hang in Jokertown for a while — ”

Kate turned back to the TV.

“ — but never mind that. I was doing this signing in LA a week or so ago, and a fan brought me this . . . this thing. I think you really need to know that this is out there.” He was serious — worried, even, reaching for something in the pocket of his oversized coat, draped over the back of the sofa.

The intercom buzzer at the front door went off.

Ana needed a minute to scramble up from the bed of cushions. Her first margarita was already making her wobbly. She really needed a vacation. . . .

“You expecting anyone?” Kate asked.

“No,” Ana said, and hit the intercom button. “Hello?”

“Ana. It’s John. John Fortune.”

This had to be a joke. Someone had put him up to this. This was too . . . If it had happened to someone else, it would be funny.

““What?” Kate said. Both she and DB were staring at her. So yeah, they’d heard it.

She didn’t want to argue. “I’ll be right down,” she said, and left before Kate and DB could say anything.

He was waiting at the front door, hands shoved in the pockets of a ratty army jacket. She couldn’t say he looked particularly good at the moment. He was a slim, handsome man, with dark skin, pale hair, and a serious expression. The white lines of an asterisk-shaped scar painted his forehead. At the moment his hair was too long and uncombed, and he looked shadowed, gaunt, like he hadn’t gotten enough food, sleep, or both.

“Hi,” he said, his smile thin, halfhearted.

“John. Hi. What’s the matter?”

“I need a favor.” Oh, no, this was not happening. . . . He said, “Can I stay with you? Just a couple of nights.”

Any other night . . . “This really isn’t the best time. Can’t you stay with your mom?”

He winced and rubbed his head. “I would, except she’s trying to talk me into coming back to work for her on American Hero. And that . . . I can’t do that. I’m avoiding her.”

“No,” she said. “You sure can’t.”

“I know I should have called ahead . . . but it’s just a couple of nights, I promise.”

Whatever else she was, Ana was not the kind of person who left a friend standing on the street. She held open the door. “Come on in. Um, I should probably warn you . . .”

• • • •

Ana half expected Kate to be hiding in the bathroom, the only spot in the studio with a closable door and any modicum of privacy. But she was standing in the middle of the room, side by side with DB, waiting. Ana led John inside and softly closed the door.

John slouched, and his smile was strained. “Hi, Kate.”

“Hi,” she said, her tone flat. That was it.

“Well,” DB drawled. “Look what the cat dragged in.”

“Can it, Michael,” Ana said. She drew herself up, hands on hips. She’d stared down diplomats from a dozen countries and addressed the UN Security Council. Surely she could lay down the law here. “You’re all my friends and I’m not going to leave anybody stranded. But I would appreciate you all acting like grown-ups. You think you can do that?” Nobody said anything, so she assumed that was yes. “I’ll heat up some food, we can have dinner. Like normal people.” While she pulled food out of the fridge and transferred it to the microwave, she listened.

“How you doing?” John said.

“I’m okay,” Kate answered. “You?”

He might have shrugged.

Ana hadn’t been there when they broke up, but she knew it had been bad — Kate walking out while John was still in the hospital, recovering from having a joker parasite with delusions of grandeur ripped out of his forehead. John had gone from being a latent, to drawing a Black Queen, to having his father die to save his life, to having an ace power in the form of a scarab-beetle ace living inside him — to nathood. And then his girlfriend broke up with him.

But Ana had heard both sides of that story, and John had screwed up as well. He’d never trusted Kate. He kept assuming she would run off with someone else, someone with power — someone like DB. And he threw that in her face. She’d told him she loved him, and he never really believed her, so she walked. Now, Kate had her first real boyfriend in years. Ana wondered how John felt about that, if he even knew. He had to know — Kate was a celebrity, the pictures had been in the magazines.

They’d all met in the first season of American Hero — Ana, Kate, and DB as contestants, John working as a PA for his mother Peregrine, producer of the show and arguably the most famous wild carder of all time. Those days seemed dream-like, surreal. Part of some fun-house carnival ride that ultimately meant nothing. So much had happened since then, but that was where it all started. The show was still going strong, riding high in the ratings; Ana didn’t pay attention.

DB paced, pounding a double beat on his torso.

“You in town for anything special?” John said to Kate, as if they were alone in the room.

“Yeah, charity pitching derby at the All-Star Game.”

“Oh yeah? Cool.”

“You?”

“I’ve been traveling, I guess. Here and there.”

This was the most gratingly awkward conversation of all time. Ana wondered if she could fix it by feeding them more margaritas. She went to the kitchen to get started on that.

“I figured you’d be staying with your mom,” Kate said.

John rolled his eyes. “I’d have to spend all night hearing about how I should go back to work for her on American Hero.”

“Oh, no,” Kate said, with genuine outrage.

The drumming and pacing stopped. “Hey, maybe you can get the Winged Wench to explain this. Unless you know where it came from.”

He held out a DVD case, which he’d retrieved from his coat pocket. Poor quality, low production values, with a photocopied cover shoved behind cheap clear plastic. The title: AMERICAN HERO UNCUT, VOL. I.

John gave a long-suffering look at the ceiling. “My mother had nothing to do with that. I had nothing to do with that.”

Kate yanked the DVD case out of DB’s hand and stared at it. “What the hell is this?”

Ana drifted over to Kate’s side, to study the case over her shoulder. The image on the front featured DB, all his arms wrapped around the svelte figure of Jade Blossom, another of the first season American Hero contestants. Naked Jade Blossom, Ana noted. Her state of undress was obvious even through the shadowed, unfocused quality of the picture. Uncut, indeed — unauthorized footage from the reality show’s seemingly infinite number of cameras.

Somehow, Ana couldn’t be entirely surprised that such a thing existed. What did surprise her was not stumbling on the footage online somewhere. Now that she knew it existed, she probably wouldn’t be able to avoid it.

Kate gaped for a moment, then covered her mouth with her hands and spit laughter. “I’m sorry. It’s not funny. But it is.” She might have been having some kind of fit, doubled over, holding her gut. “Karma’s a bitch!”

“Look at the back,” DB said, making a turning motion with one of his hands. “This is what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

When Kate turned the case over to look at the back, Ana almost turned away. The back showed three more pictures: two more of DB, captured in the moment with two entirely different contestants of the show. And one of Kate, her back to the camera, towel sliding off her shoulders as she stepped into the shower. The picture was a tease, of course. How much did the video actually show?

Ana couldn’t tell if the red in Kate’s cheeks was from alcohol or embarrassment. When Kate set her jaw and hefted the DVD case as if to throw it, all three of them reached for her, making halting noises. Glancing at them, Kate sighed, and merely tossed the DVD back to DB, without her ace power charging it. DB fumbled it out of a couple of hands before managing to catch it.

Kate said, “At least I can say there aren’t any sex tapes of me. Unlike some people.”

“You had your chance,” DB muttered.

Kate glared. The TV played through the pause; two characters were making out in a hospital supply closet.

“Volume I,” Ana said. “So how many of those are there?”

“Who the fuck knows?” DB said. “The guy wanted me to sign it for him.”

“Whoever’s doing these has to have access to the show’s raw footage.” She looked at John, inquiring.

He said, “Could be anyone with access to the editing process. Mom and Josh have a pack of lawyers working on it — you can imagine what it’s doing to the American Hero brand. But there’s not much they can do about it once the videos hit the web.”

Ana went to the kitchen and stuck a plate of burritos in the microwave. Food. Food would make everything better. And more margaritas. If she could just get everyone commiserating over the shared trauma rather than making accusations, maybe she could salvage the party.

“I do not need this right now,” Kate said, and started pacing. “Oh my God, I should tell Tyler . . . but if he doesn’t know about it already maybe I shouldn’t tell him. . . .”

“Who’s Tyler?” DB said.

John smirked. “Haven’t you heard? It’s been all over Aces!. Kate’s new boyfriend — she’s dating nats now.”

“John, don’t be an asshole,” Ana said. She’d had no intention of bringing this up while the love triangle from hell was in her five-hundred-square-foot apartment. She’d kill John for poking Kate like this.

Kate plowed on. “I told you then, I didn’t break up with you because you lost your powers. I broke up with you because I couldn’t keep . . . propping up your self-esteem. You kept making the whole thing about you.”

“Wait a minute, boyfriend? What boyfriend? Who is this guy?” DB said.

Kate didn’t answer, and Ana sure wasn’t going to say anything.

DB continued. “No, really — we can settle this. Tyler, huh? I don’t care if he’s a nat or the king of Persia, I want to meet him. You know, just to make sure he’s a nice guy.”

“I can pick my own boyfriends, thank you very much,” Kate said.

“Apparently not,” DB said, pointing three arms at John.

Kate growled and cocked back her arm. Despite watching for it — hoping to minimize damage to the apartment — Ana hadn’t seen whatever projectile she picked up; but then, Kate always kept a few marbles in her pocket, for whenever she lost her temper.

“Kate!” Ana yelled. “Cool it! No throwing in the house! Nobody uses any powers in the house! Got it?”

The ace pitcher froze, a static charge dancing around her hand. For their parts, John and DB had both ducked, because she kept turning back and forth between them, unable to decide who to target first.

Then her hand dropped. “You know what’s real rich? That neither one of you can figure out why I won’t go out with you.” She stomped into the bathroom and slammed the door.

The microwave dinged, and Ana said, with false brightness, “Anyone want burritos?”

© 2014 by Carrie Vaughn.

Excerpted from Wild Cards: Lowball,

edited by George R. R. Martin and Melinda Snodgrass.

Published by permission of the author and Tor Books.

All rights reserved.

No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

The Doubt Factory
(novel excerpt)

Paolo Bacigalupi

Please enjoy the following excerpt of the new novel The Doubt Factory by Paolo Bacigalupi, forthcoming this month from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers:

In this page-turning contemporary thriller, National Book Award Finalist and New York Times bestselling author Paolo Bacigalupi explores the timely issue of how public information is distorted for monetary gain, and how those who exploit it must be stopped.

Everything Alix knows about her life is a lie. At least that’s what a mysterious young man who’s stalking her keeps saying. But then she begins investigating the disturbing claims he makes against her father. Could her dad really be at the helm of a firm that distorts the truth and covers up wrongdoing by hugely profitable corporations that have allowed innocent victims to die? Is it possible that her father is the bad guy, and that the undeniably alluring criminal who calls himself Moses — and his radical band of teen activists — is right? Alix has to make a choice, and time is running out, but can she truly risk everything and blow the whistle on the man who loves her and raised her?

PROLOGUE

He’d been watching her for a long time. Watching how she moved through the still waters of her life. Watching the friends and family who surrounded her. It was like watching a bright tropical fish in an aquarium, bounded on all sides, safe inside the confines. Unaware of the glass walls.

He could watch her sitting at a coffee shop, intent on something in her e-book reader, drinking the same skinny latte that she always ordered. He knew her street, and he knew her home. He knew her class schedule. Calculus and AP Chem, Honors English. A 3.9 GPA, because some asshole bio teacher had knocked off her perfect score over a triviality of how she formatted her lab notes.

Smart girl.

Sharp girl.

And yet completely unaware.

It wasn’t her fault. All the fish in her tank were the same. All of them swimming in perfectly controlled waters, bare millimeters from another world that was hostile to them entirely.

Moses Cruz felt like he’d been watching all of them forever. But Alix Banks he could watch in that aquarium and hours could pass. Fundraising events, field hockey tournaments, vacations to Saint Barts and Aspen. It was a safe and quiet world she lived in, and she — just like a beautiful neon tetra in a tropical tank — had no idea she was being watched.

All of her people were like that. Just a bunch of pretty fish in love with themselves and how beautiful they were, in love with their little aquarium castles. All of them thinking that they ran the world. None of them realizing that only a thin pane of glass separated them from disaster.

And here he was, standing outside, holding a hammer.

PART 1

1

Alix was sitting in AP Chem when she saw him.

She’d been gazing out the window, letting her eyes wander over the perfectly manicured grounds of Seitz Academy’s academic quad, and as soon as she saw him standing outside, she had the feeling she knew him.

Familiar.

That was how she put it later, talking to the cops. He’d seemed familiar. Like someone’s older brother, the one you only glimpsed when he was back from college. Or else the sib whom Seitz wouldn’t let in because of “behavioral match issues.” The one who didn’t attend the school but showed up with Mommy and Daddy at the Seitz Annual Auction anyway because sis was Seitz Material even though he wasn’t. The resentful lone wolf who leaned against the back wall, texting his friends about how fucked up it was that he was stuck killing the night watching his parents get sloppy drunk while they bid on vacations to Saint Martin and find-yourself-in-middle-age pottery classes at Lena Chisolm’s studio/gallery.

Familiar.

Like her tongue running the line of her teeth. Never seen, but still, known.

He was standing outside, staring up at the science building.

Ms. Liss (never Mrs. and definitely not Miss — Ms. with the z, right?) was passing back AP Chem lab reports. Easy A’s. Even when Liss was putting on the pressure, she never pushed hard enough, so Alix had let the activity of the class fade into the background: students in their lab coats beside their personal sinks and burners, the rustle of papers, Ms. Liss droning on about top-tier colleges (which was code for the Ivy Leagues) and how no one was getting anywhere if they didn’t challenge themselves — and Alix thinking that no one was getting anywhere anytime soon.

Suspended animation was how she thought of it sometimes. She was just another student in a cohort of students being groomed and sculpted and prepped for the future. She sometimes imagined them all floating in liquid suspension, rows and rows in holding tanks, all of them drifting. Seitz-approved skirts and blazers billowing. School ties drifting with the currents. Hair tangling across blank faces, bubbles rising from silent lips. Tangles and bubbles. Waiting for someone to say that they were finished.

Other times, she thought of it as being prepped for a race that they were never quite allowed to run. Each Seitz student set up and poised, runners on their starting blocks, ready to take over the world — as soon as their control-freak parents decided to let them get their hands on their trust funds. But no one ever gave them the gun, so they all waited and partied and studied and tested and added extracurriculars like volunteering at the battered women’s shelter in Hartford so they could have “meaningful” material for their college-entrance essays.

And then she caught sight of him — that loner marooned on Seitz’s emerald lawns — and everything changed.

For a second, when she first spied him, Alix was almost convinced that she’d conjured him. He was so weirdly recognizable to her that it seemed like he could only have emerged from her own mind. A good-looking black guy in a trench coat. Short little dreadlocks, or maybe cornrows — it was hard to tell from this distance — but cool-looking whatever it was. A little bit gangsta . . . and he was so unsettlingly familiar to her. Like some kind of music star, some guy out of the Black Eyed Peas who looked better than Will.i.am. Not an Akon, not a Kanye. They were too clean-cut . . . But still, somebody famous.

The more Alix studied him, the more he appeared out of place. He was just standing there, staring up at the science building. Maybe he was lost? Like his sister had been kidnapped and dragged to one of the whitest schools on the East Coast, and he was here to break her out.

Well, the school wasn’t all white, but pretty close. Alix could think of maybe six kids who were actually black, and two of them were adopted. Of course, there was a solid helping of Asians and Indians because there were so many Wall Street quants who sent their kids to the school, but they were, as one of Alix’s friends put it, “the other white meat.” Which said all you really needed to know about Seitz. If you were Ivy-bound, and headed for money and power, Seitz Academy found that it could hit its diversity targets easily.

But there was that black guy standing outside, looking in. Cool. Old-school aviator shades. Army jacket kind of trench. Looking like he could stand out on the grass all day long, watching Alix and her classmates.

Was he a new student? It was hard to guess his age from this distance, but she thought he could be the right age for a senior.

Just then, Mr. Mulroy came into view, striding with purpose.

From the man’s attitude, Alix could tell the Seitz headmaster didn’t think the black guy belonged on his lawn. Mulroy moved into the stranger’s space. Alix could see the man’s lips moving, telling the stranger he wasn’t at the right school.

Move along.

Mulroy pointed off campus, his body language loaded with authority — arm out and rigid, finger pointing — ordering the intruder back wherever he’d come from, back to wherever black kids came from when they weren’t here on a scholarship or given a pass via Nigerian oil money into Seitz’s manicured world.

Mulroy made another sharp gesture of authority. Alix had seen him do the same with new students who he nailed smoking. She’d watched them cringe and gather up their backpacks as the headmaster herded them into Weller House’s admin offices for their sentencing. Mulroy was used to making rebellious rich kids believe he was in charge. He was good at it.

The black guy was still staring up at the school, nodding as if he were paying attention to the headmaster’s words. But he wasn’t moving to go at all. Mulroy said something else.

The stranger glanced over, taking in the man for the first time. Tall, Alix realized. He was at least as tall as the headmaster —

The stranger buried a fist into Mulroy’s gut.

Mulroy doubled over.

What the —?

Alix pressed against the glass, staring, trying to make sense of what she’d just witnessed. Had she really just seen Mulroy get punched? It had been so fast, and yet there the headmaster was, clutching his gut and gagging, looking like he was trying to throw up. The black guy was bracing him up now, patting the headmaster on the back. Patting him like a baby. Soothing.

The headmaster sank to his knees. The stranger gently let the headmaster down and laid the man on the grass.

Mulroy rolled onto his back, still clutching his belly. The stranger crouched beside him, seeming to say something as he laid his hand on the older man’s chest.

“Holy shit,” Alix whispered. Gaining her senses, she turned to the rest of the class. “Someone just beat the shit out of Mr. Mulroy!”

Everyone rushed for the windows. The intruder had straightened. He looked up at them as everyone crowded against the glass for a view. A strange, isolated figure standing over the laid-out body of his victim. They all stared down at him, and he stared back. A frozen moment, everyone taking stock of one another — and then the guy smiled, and his smile was radiant.

He didn’t seem bothered at all that the headmaster was sprawled at his feet, nor that he had the entire class as witnesses. He looked completely at home.

Still smiling, the stranger gave them a lazy salute and strode off. He didn’t even bother to run.

Mulroy was trying to get up, but he was having a hard time of it. Alix was dimly aware of Ms. Liss calling security, using the hotline number they were supposed to use if there was ever a campus shooter. Her voice kept cracking.

“We should help him!” someone said, and everyone made a rush for the door. But Liss shouted at them all to get back to their seats, and then she was back on the phone, trying to give instructions to security. “He’s right outside Widener Hall!” she was saying over and over again.

The guy who had hit Mulroy had already ambled out of sight. All that was left were Mulroy lying in the grass and Alix trying to make sense of what she’d witnessed.

It had been utterly unlike any school fight she’d ever seen. Nothing like the silly strutting matches where two dudebros started shouting at each other, and then maybe pushed each other a little, and then maybe danced around playing as if they were serious — with neither of them doing much — until maybe, finally, the shame and gathering spectator pressure forced them to throw an actual punch.

Those fights almost immediately ended up as a tangle on the floor, with a couple of red-faced guys squirming and grunting and swearing, tearing at each other’s clothes and trying out their wrestling holds and not doing much damage one way or the other, except that the school ended up having discussions about conflict resolution for a week.

This had been different, though. No warnings and no threats. The black guy had just turned and put his fist into Mulroy’s gut, and Mulroy was done. No second round, nothing. The boy — the more she thought about it, the more Alix thought he really was student age — had just destroyed Mulroy.

Ms. Liss was still speaking urgently into the phone, but now Alix spied the school’s security team dashing across the quad from Weller House. Too late, of course. They’d probably been eating doughnuts and watching South Park reruns behind their desks when Liss’s call came in.

Cynthia Yang was leaning over Alix’s shoulder, watching the slow-moving campus cops.

“If there’s ever a school shooting, we’re toast.” Cynthia snorted. “Look at that reaction time.”

“Seriously,” Emil chimed in. “My dad’s security could get here faster, and they’re across town.”

Emil’s dad was some kind of diplomat. He was always reminding people how important his dad was, which was seriously annoying, but Alix had to admit Emil was right. She’d seen that security detail once when they’d partied at Emil’s summer house in the Hamptons, and those guys had definitely been more on top of it than Seitz Academy’s rent-a-cops.

The campus cops finally made it to Mulroy. He was on his feet now, though bent over and gasping, and he shook off their help. Alix didn’t need to hear the words to know what Mulroy was saying as he pointed off campus. “Go get the guy who beat the hell out of me!” Or something like that.

From where Alix was standing, she knew they’d fail. The puncher was long gone.

• • • •

A few hours later Alix heard from Cynthia that, sure enough, they hadn’t found the guy. He’d just evaporated.

“Poof!” Cynthia said. “Like smoke.”

“Like smoke,” Alix echoed.

“I heard he was from the low-income housing over on the east side,” Sophie said.

“I heard he’s an escaped convict,” Tyler said, plopping down beside them. “Some kind of ax murderer.”

They all kept chattering and speculating, but Alix wasn’t paying attention. She couldn’t stop playing the incident over in her head. A shattering of Seitz’s model perfection that wasn’t supposed to happen, like a bum crapping in the reflecting pool near her father’s offices in DC, or a runway model with lipstick smeared across her face in a jagged red slash.

As soon as the rent-a-cops had started questioning the students, descriptions of the intruder had started falling apart: He was tall, he was short, he had dreads, and he had braids. Someone said he had a rainbow knitted Rasta beret, someone else said he had a gold-and-diamond grill — it quickly turned into a strange jumble of conflicting stereotypes that had nothing to do with the guy Alix had seen.

For Alix, he remained fixed in her mind, unchanged by the shifting stories of her peers. He stayed with her through Honors English and then followed her out to the track. And even though she ran until her lungs were fire and her legs were rubber, she couldn’t shake the image of him.

She could play the entire event back in her mind as if in slow motion. She could still see the stranger’s green army trench billowing around him as he squatted beside the headmaster. She could still see the guy laying his hand on Mulroy’s chest, soothing him.

She could see him looking up at the class. She could see him smile.

And the memory of his smile started her running again, pushing against her pounding heart and her ragged breath and her aching legs. Pushing against the memory of the stranger, because she could swear that when he looked up, he hadn’t cared about all the AP Chem students crowding around and staring from the windows. He hadn’t been looking at any of them.

He’d been staring directly at her.

He’d been smiling at her.

And she still couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d seen him before. Familiar and frightening at the same time. Like the smell of an electrical storm looming on the horizon, ozone and moisture and winds and promise, swirling down after a long time dry.

2

At dinner, Alix’s younger brother, Jonah, wouldn’t quit talking about the strange event. “He completely pounded Mulroy. It was like some kind of MMA takedown.”

“You weren’t even there,” Alix said. “He just hit him, and Mulroy keeled over.”

“One hit, though, right?” Jonah mimed a punch that almost knocked his water glass off the table. He caught it just in time. “Epic!”

“Jonah,” Mom said. “Please?”

Mom had put candles on the table and laid out a tablecloth. Dinner was supposed to be a family ritual, the entire Banks clan gathered and undistracted for a whole half hour, instead of grabbing something out of the fridge and separating into different rooms to play on iPads and computers or watch TV.

Mom had been on a kick for family time lately, but she was fighting an uphill battle. Dad had once again brought his tablet to the table, just to reply to one quick emergency e-mail, he said, and so everyone was engaged in the conversation while he claimed to listen: Alix, Jonah, their mother, and half of Mr. Banks, workaholic extraordinaire.

For Mom, it counted as a win; Alix’s mother took what she could get, when she could get it.

Alix’s friend Cynthia was always asking what made the relationship work considering that Alix’s father was never paying attention and her mother always seemed a little isolated in the project of raising her family. Alix had never really thought about it until that moment. It was just the way things were. Dad worked in public relations and made the money for the family. Mom did Pilates and book clubs and fund-raisers, and tried to gather everyone together for meals. They mostly got along. It wasn’t like in Sophie’s house, where you could practically hear her mom and dad chewing glass every time they said anything to each other.

“Nobody caught the guy,” Alix said. “He just walked away. They called security, and the police and Mr. Mulroy went out looking for him.” She took a bite of Caesar salad. “Nothing.”

“I don’t like the town around there,” her mother said. “They should have security at the gates.”

“The town around there?” Alix rolled her eyes. “Why don’t you just say you don’t trust those people, Mom?”

“That’s not what I said,” Mom said. “Strangers shouldn’t just be able to wander onto campus. They should have a guard at the gate, at least.”

“Fortress Seitz,” Jonah said, pushing a crouton onto his fork with a finger. “Maybe we can put in gun turrets, too. Then we can feel really secure. Put up some barbwire, right? Fifty cals and barbwire. Oh wait, don’t we call that prison?”

Mom gave him a sharp look. “Don’t be smart. That’s not what we’re talking about. Seitz is hardly a prison, no matter how much you pretend.”

“You only say that because you don’t have to go,” Jonah said.

Mom gave him an exasperated look. “Someone just walked onto campus and assaulted the headmaster. I’d think even you’d admit there’s a problem. What if that had been a student? Don’t you think that’s a problem, at least?”

“I’m definitely bummed I missed it,” Jonah said. “I’d pay money to see Mulroy take one in the gut.”

“Jonah!”

Alix stifled a laugh. Doctors described Jonah as having poor impulse control, which basically meant that Jonah’s entire world was a series of decisions that balanced precariously on the razor’s edge of clever vs. stupid.

Stupid normally won out.

Which meant that since he started attending Seitz, it was Alix’s job to keep an eye on him. When she’d protested that playing nursemaid for her younger brother wasn’t her idea of a good time, Mom hadn’t even yelled; she’d just sighed in resignation.

“I know it’s not fair, Alix, but we can’t always be there . . . and Jonah . . .” She sighed. “It’s not his fault.”

“Yeah, yeah. It’s his nature, just like the scorpion and the frog.”

Alix’s nature was just the opposite. She knew the difference between clever and stupid, and didn’t feel any need to dive across the line. So, as long as Mom was doing Pilates and fund-raisers and book clubs, and Dad was down in the city or seeing clients in DC, Alix was in charge of keeping an eye on the little nutball.

“We could punch him for charity,” Jonah was saying. “Like those old-time dunk tanks. Big fund-raising thing. Thousand dollars a pop.” He mimed punches. “Bam! Bam! Bam! Slug Mulroy and feed the homeless. I bet even Alix would donate to that,” he said. “It would make her early-decision application look good.”

“There aren’t any homeless in Haverport,” Alix said. “We put them on a bus to New York.”

“So save the whales! Who cares, as long as we get to punch Mulroy.”

“I don’t think assault is a joke,” Mom said.

They went back and forth like they always did, with Mom taking it seriously, trying to persuade Jonah to stop being “troublesome,” and Jonah taking the opportunity to poke at her, saying just the right thing to annoy her again and again.

Alix tuned them out. When she played the attack back in her own mind, it made her feel a little nauseated. It had been a completely normal, boring day. She could still see Mulroy walking over to the guy, thinking that he was in charge, thinking he knew what was up. Mulroy and Alix had been fooled by the spring sunshine. They’d been living inside a bubble that they’d thought was real.

And then this guy turned up at school, and the bubble popped.

“It was weird,” Alix said. “Right after he punched Mulroy, the guy held Mulroy up so he didn’t fall over. He was gentle about it. It almost looked tender, the way he laid him in the grass.”

“Tender?” her mother said, her voice rising. “A tender assault?”

Alix rolled her eyes. “Cut it out, Mom. I’m not Jonah. I’m just saying it was weird.”

But it really had looked tender, in the end. So slow and careful and gentle as he laid the man down. Tender. Alix knew the power of words. Dad had drilled it into her enough as a kid. Words were specific, with fine shadings and colors. You chose them to paint exactly the picture you wanted in another person’s mind.

Tender.

She hadn’t chosen the word accidentally. The only other word she could think of that might have described the moment was apologetic. Like the stranger had actually been sorry he’d beaten Mulroy up. But that didn’t match with what had happened. No one accidentally shoved a fist into another person’s stomach.

Oh, gee, sorry about that. I didn’t see your belly there . . .

Dad had been reading on his tablet, half listening, and half working. Now he broke in as he kept tapping on his tablet. “The school is going to hire an extra security detail. They have the young man’s face from the security cameras — ”

“They probably got a thousand pics,” Jonah said.

Dad went on undeterred. “ — police have him identified. He should be found soon.”

“He’s identified?” Alix asked, interested. “They already know who he is? Is he famous or something? Is he from around here?” He looked so familiar.

“Hardly,” her father said. “He’s just a vandal they’ve been looking for.”

“How’d you find that out?”

“I called the school,” her father said, barely looking up. “Mr. Mulroy, despite his terrible skills at self-defense, is a very efficient administrator.”

“I’ll bet he’s getting a lot of calls right now,” Mom said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if some parents pull their children.”

“There’s extra security?” Alix asked. “Do they think he’ll come back?”

“It seems unlikely.” Dad finished his salad and set it aside. “But better safe than sorry.”

“Yeah,” said Jonah. “If we aren’t careful, we’ll come into school and the whole place will be tagged.”

“I didn’t say he was a spray-painter,” Dad said. “I said he was a vandal.”

“Like he breaks windows and things?”

“Don’t get any ideas,” Mom interjected.

“What did I do?” Jonah looked wounded.

“You sounded like you wanted to start a fan club,” Alix said.

“You know, sometimes a question is just an innocent question,” Jonah groused.

“Not with your track record, young man,” Mom said as she cleared the salad dishes.

Dad was ignoring the interplay, still tapping out e-mails on his tablet.

“Mr. Mulroy didn’t know what other things the young man had been up to. All he knew was that he’d been associated with extensive vandalism incidents.”

“So does the vandal have a name?” Alix asked.

Dad looked up at her, frowning, suddenly serious.

Alix stopped short, surprised. It was the first time he’d really looked at her all night. Normally, Dad was Mr. Multitasker, thinking about other things, working out puzzles with his job, only half there. It was a joke among all of them that you sometimes had to ask him a question three times before he even heard you. But now he was looking at Alix full force.

When Dad focused, he really focused.

“What?” Alix asked, feeling defensive. “What did I say?”

“No.”

“No, what?”

“No, he doesn’t have a name.”

“Nice. Ghost in the machine,” Jonah said, as usual completely unaware of the way the energy in the dining room had changed. “The man with no name.” He made a funny ghost noise to go with it. “Woooo.”

Dad didn’t even look over at Jonah. He was still looking at her, and she felt suddenly as if she was picking her way through a conversation that had become more important than she’d expected. Like the time Jonah had joked about seeing Kala Spelling’s mom having coffee with Mr. Underwood, the European History teacher.

“So . . .” Alix hesitated. “If they don’t know his name . . . then how do they know who they’re looking for? I thought you said he was identified.”

“He has a track record,” Dad said.

“But you don’t know his name?”

“He has a nickname,” Dad said finally. “Something he marks his work with.”

“And it’s . . .”

“2.0.”

“That’s my GPA!” Jonah said.

“In your dreams,” Alix retorted. To her father, she said, “What’s the name supposed to mean?”

“If anyone knew, I’m sure they would have caught him already.”

• • • •

Alix couldn’t sleep. The strange day and conversations hung with her. Finally she got up and turned on her computer. Jonah wasn’t allowed to have a computer in his room, but Mom and Dad trusted her not to do “anything inappropriate,” as Mom put it, without actually meeting Alix’s eyes when she said it. So Sophie and Denise had spent a year jokingly warning her not to do “Anything Inappropriate” with her computer in her room.

She opened a browser and ran a search for 2.0.

She found Wikipedia entries. A lot of entries for Web 2.0, Health 2.0, Creative Commons, and the Apache Software Foundation came up. There were fistfuls of computer listings, actually. Software companies released new versions all the time, tracked by their release numbers: .09 beta, 1.2 release, 2.0. The Chrome browser she was using now had a release number, too, except it was something like 33.0.

2.0 . . .

She tried image searching and scrolled idly through the pictures that came back. Lots of corporate logos, antiseptic and staid, even as they tried to claim that they were doing something new. Gov 2.0, City 2.0, and — seriously? — even a Dad 2.0. Apparently everything was 2.0. Even Dad could get a new version. Alix tried to imagine what a “Dad 2.0” would look like, but all that came to mind were paunchy old dudes wearing hipster plaids and skinny jeans while swaggering around in Snuglis —

An image caught Alix’s eye. She scrolled back up. She’d almost missed it, but it was different from the others.

A spray-paint tag on the side of a smokestack. Instead of the carefully designed corporate brands with 2.0s affixed as an afterthought, this was 2.0 as red scrawl spray. From the image, it looked like it was maybe at an oil refinery. And the graffiti was high up, almost impossibly high. The image was a little blurry, shot with someone’s phone, but the 2.0 was starkly legible. In the foreground, dark and sooty pipes ran this way and that, linking grimy holding tanks in an industrial tangle. Against that dark foreground, the number was like a beacon, rising high above the pipes and steam.

2.0. Bright and red and defiant.

Alix clicked through to the site, hoping for more images or an explanation, but the site the image came from was just a website for street graffiti from around the world. Random people uploading their random exploits. Among all the other art, the one that she’d found wasn’t particularly compelling. It wasn’t complex or wildly colorful. It wasn’t clever or strange or thought-provoking. Except for its location, it was an unremarkable tag. Not like a Banksy, for example. Over the winter, Cynthia had become obsessed with Banksy because he’d been in the news again. She’d persuaded Alix to catch the train down to the city for the day to go on a treasure hunt for the guerrilla street art. They’d spent the day canvassing New York, digging up every instance they could find where the street artist had left his mark.

Alix kept scanning images, focused in the way she normally focused on Calc prep. Half an hour later she found one more picture with the 2.0 tag, this time on the side of what looked like a metal-sided warehouse. The picture looked like it had been snapped from beyond barbwire, but when she clicked through, there wasn’t any information on this one, either. Just a big metal building in some place that looked like it might have been a desert, judging from the yellow dirt around it.

2.0 . . .

A new version of . . . something.

Alix kept scrolling, but those were the only images that seemed relevant to 2.0 and vandalism, and even those didn’t carry any real information. She went back to the smokestack picture and studied it again.

The graffiti was ridiculously high up on the smokestack. Impossible for anyone to miss. A red scrawled challenge. An arrogant mark. A statement, standing out like a beacon above the soot and industrial grime of the refinery.

2.0.

Something new.

3

When Alix pulled her red MINI into Seitz’s parking lot the next day, she found herself being challenged by a cop, who allowed her to park only after he saw Jonah’s and her school uniforms.

“Use the spaces on the far side of the lot,” he said.

“What the hell?” Alix muttered as she maneuvered the MINI through the clogged parking area, avoiding students and other cars searching for spaces. She found an empty slot and parked.

“Is there some kind of event happening?” Jonah wondered as students and people from off the street streamed past.

“Guess we’re going to find out.”

Alix grabbed her schoolbag and climbed out of the car. Standing beside her MINI, she scanned the crowd around the Seitz main gate. Maybe someone famous was coming to tour the school. Seitz students and teachers, along with town bystanders, clogged all the sidewalks and approaches to the grounds.

Alix caught sight of Derek and Cynthia in the throng. “Come on,” she said to Jonah. “And stick close, for once.”

She pushed into the crowd, bumping and nudging through, wedging herself between students and bystanders. Up ahead, she spied yellow crime-scene tape and heard someone shouting for everyone to “move back, move back.”

Broken glimpses through the crush of the crowd showed the flashing red lights of an ambulance. Alix’s heart beat faster.

I hope someone isn’t hurt was her first thought. Followed quickly by I hope it’s not someone I know.

Pushing through the crowd was slow. She was fighting against the tide, she realized. People were gradually being herded back behind the low perimeter wall that ringed Seitz’s grounds. She finally managed to squeeze through the press to where she could get a view and was relieved to see there wasn’t anyone lying dead. There was a fire truck parked beside the ambulance, and a couple of firemen in heavy Day-Glo coats sitting on the steps of the fire truck.

How bad can it be if the firemen are drinking coffee?

She craned her neck and caught another glimpse of yellow crime-scene tape being stretched to push the crowd farther back. Beyond the tape, though, all she could see were the fire truck and ambulance parked on the quad, and, of course, Widener Hall, with its four stories of classroom windows, all looking down on the Seitz grounds like rows of empty eyes.

“What’s going on?” Jonah grabbed her shoulder and jumped, yanking on her in the process and earning them both dirty looks as he jostled the bystanders around them. “I can’t see!”

Alix shrugged his hand off her shoulder. “I don’t think anybody knows.” She stood on tiptoe again. Now she spied a bunch of cops standing at the doors to Widener.

What the —?

It looked like they were in some kind of hazmat gear.

Maybe something broke in the labs. Some kind of spill.

“Alix!” Derek and Cynthia were elbowing through the crowd to join them. “Did you just get here?”

“Yeah. Do you know what’s going on?”

“Everyone’s clueless,” Derek said as he squeezed into Alix’s personal space. He shifted apologetically, trying to give her room, and bumped into her again as Cynthia plowed through to them as well.

“They’ve had us locked out for the last twenty minutes,” she said breathlessly. “The fire truck got here just before you did. The guys in the bodysuits, too.”

Alix noticed that Jonah was getting antsy, looking for a chance to slip away. She barely snagged him by his book bag and dragged him back as he tried to make an escape. “Nice try, bro.”

“Come on, Alix,” Jonah whined as she got a firm grip on his arm. “I just wanted to see if anyone was dead in the ambulance.”

My brother, ghoul in training, Alix thought.

But Jonah’s mention of bodies mirrored her own suppressed worry. The whole thing was too weird, and now that Jonah had said it out loud, it made her own anxiety suddenly feel more real as well. As if he’d invoked something that had to happen now that he’d said it.

It had happened to her friend Anna Lenay that way. She’d lost her mother and father in a small-plane accident when they were sophomores. Before her parents left, Anna had joked with her dad that he was probably going to crash the plane. It was the last thing she’d said to them before they took off for Martha’s Vineyard, and Alix had been there to hear it.

One of the guys in the hazmat suits jogged over to the crowd. He was sweating when he pulled off his hood. He spoke to an officer who looked like he was in charge, and then the police were telling everyone to step back even farther.

“Maybe it’s a bomb,” Jonah said.

“You better hope not,” Alix replied darkly.

They’d had a bomb scare in the fall. The faculty and students had been cleared off the entire campus, dorms, faculty housing, science and humanities buildings, the pool house, everything, while K9 units went over the grounds. No one had been caught for it, and Alix had never said anything out loud, but she privately suspected Jonah had been behind the scare. It was the kind of thing her brother would do. The kid had serious impulse-control problems.

Luckily, Jonah hadn’t even been suspected. He’d covered his tracks, at least. Alix wondered if he’d been disappointed. It was at least possible that he’d been trying to get himself caught so he wouldn’t have to attend Seitz, but she never asked.

The cops kept pushing everyone farther back, and the crowd got tighter as a result. Alix was shoved up against Jonah and Cynthia and Derek. Some of the really little kids were starting to freak out. Older ones were talking on their cell phones, giving a blow-by-blow of what was happening, or else texting and posting photos online as it all went down.

Alix was starting to feel claustrophobic. The crush and shift of the crowd were overwhelming.

“We need everyone to step back, please! Behind the yellow tape! All the way back!”

The jostling increased. A truck rumbled through the crowd with the word swat on the side.

“Worse and worse,” Cynthia said.

“You think there are hostages?” Derek wondered.

“Yeah. SWAT got a call about a crew of free radicals holding a bunch of innocent alkanes prisoner in the chem lab,” Cynthia said.

In the crush, Alix couldn’t turn to respond. She was sweltering in her school blazer. Seitz school uniforms were uncomfortable enough as it was, and now in the unseasonably warm spring sunshine, packed in the crowd, the layers of clothing were becoming unbearable.

A news crew showed up. A camerawoman and blow-dried-hair guy with a microphone went from person to person, asking questions. The camerawoman was gesturing for the guy to move into a better position. Everyone watched the SWAT police get out of their armored truck. They started pulling equipment and setting it up on the grass.

“Bomb squad,” someone said.

It looked that way to Alix as well. The cops all had heavily padded protective garments. The SWAT guys were skulking around the edges of Widener, carrying assault rifles, and now the guys in heavy bodysuits were lumbering up the steps of the building. The SWAT guys pressed themselves up against the brick on either side of the doors. Riot helmets and body armor. It looked like the movies: cops all around the doors, ready to bust in and start blasting away at the bad guys.

The shout of “Clear!” echoed distantly.

Derek was standing right behind Alix, leaning over her shoulder, cheek close, his breath hot on her ear.

“Watch this,” he said. “It should be good.”

Alix froze.

That’s not Derek.

Alix tried to turn in the constricting crowd. She barely managed to twist, and when she did, she gasped. The black guy from yesterday was right there, smiling slightly. Mirror aviator sunglasses reflected her own surprised expression back at her.

“Nice to see you again, Alix.”

He looked completely different. His head was shaved smooth now, and he was wearing an expensive sports coat over a button-down shirt. TAG Heuer wristwatch. But it wasn’t just the change of hair and clothing. Everything about him was different. The style of him was different. The guy yesterday had been loose, carefree — cool in that I don’t give a damn about all of you sort of way. Hip-hop cool. But the way this guy held himself, the first thing that popped into Alix’s mind was cop. Or even more: Secret Service. Like the cold men who had observed from the alcoves the time Dad had been invited to a dinner for the president’s reelection campaign.

But still, this was definitely the same guy who had punched Mulroy. She was sure of it. He was an inch away, and he looked completely different, but he was the same guy.

“How do you know my name?”

“You’re going to miss the show if you keep looking at me,” he said. And then he smiled and raised his sunglasses, showing dark, flashing eyes. Alix felt like she’d been hit by a train. Definitely the same guy. The same blaze of wildness and laughter. The same frightening promise.

His eyes flicked toward the school. “You’ll like this, Alix,” he said. “This is for you.”

Another preparatory call echoed up from the SWAT team members arrayed around Widener Hall’s doorway, and then the air shivered as their explosives went off. A booming rush rolled over the crowd and left everyone murmuring. Alix jerked her gaze back to the school. Smoke was billowing up from around the doorway.

Widener’s doors had been blown wide, and then . . .

Nothing.

Everyone waited with bated breath, expecting whatever they were supposed to expect when SWAT blew open a door in the movies. Gunfire. Dragons. A nuclear apocalypse . . . Something, at least.

Instead, there was silence.

The SWAT team dashed inside, assault rifles pointed ahead, ready to fire.

“Wait for it,” the stranger whispered in her ear. His hands were on her shoulders, lightly holding her, keeping her looking at the events unfolding.

Wait for what? Alix wanted to ask.

She wanted to turn around and see him fully, ask him who the hell he thought he was —

A dull thud echoed from Widener Hall.

Alix gasped as blood splattered up against the windows.

It was a massacre. There was so much blood that it looked like every single SWAT guy had been run through a blender and splattered on the windows.

Shrieks of shock and terror rose up from the crowd, and suddenly everyone was trying to get away. Alix tried to run, but the stranger’s fingers dug into her shoulders, holding her in place. His lips pressed against her ear.

“Don’t panic!” he whispered. “Read! You see it, right?”

And even as everyone was shoving and pulling back and screaming about all the blood, Alix did see. Right there in the windows, a message inscribed in red, now dripping down.

Suddenly all the SWAT guys who had disappeared into the building came barreling back out, shouting and hollering, wordless and panicked, their rifles held carelessly, stumbling down the front steps in their heavy armor.

Behind them, a seething wave of snowy motion erupted from the doors, a tumbling rush pouring out in a river. White fur, twisting-clawing-thrashing bodies, a tidal wave exploding through the open doors and cascading down the school steps.

“No way!” Jonah exclaimed from somewhere in the crowd, delighted.

Rats.

Thousands and thousands and thousands of rats, gushing out of the building and down the steps. More and more of them coming every second. They swarmed the cops and the SWAT team. They surged across the lawns. They scattered every which way. The people watching up front tried to run, but everyone was too jammed together. People were scrambling up on Seitz’s wall. Police were standing in the middle of the rodent horde, kicking and shaking the rats that ran up their legs. The TV crew was balanced up on the wall, recording the whole weird thing.

Alix caught a glimpse of Jonah laughing and pointing at how all the cops were running, and then everyone was running and shoving and fleeing as the rats came scrambling through. Someone smashed into Alix and she stumbled, barely catching herself before she fell. A white furry streak bolted past, followed by another and another.

Alix spun, trying to find the guy who’d been standing right behind her, but the stranger was gone. Lost in the scrum. Gone entirely except for the rats and the word that he’d left dripping in red paint from the windows of the science building:

Alix dodged another surge of rats coming her way and scanned the crowd, frantically trying to spot the stranger again.

There!

He was striding away, moving confidently through the chaos. The same careless, arrogant stride she’d seen after he’d punched Mulroy.

He could be dangerous. You shouldn’t — oh, fuck it.

Alix went after him.

Behind her, she thought she heard Jonah shout, but she kept her eyes on the stranger, fighting to keep him in sight as people fled in every direction.

Later, she couldn’t even really say why she went after him. She was angry, sure. Pissed that he was so smug and that he thought he could just come up on her like that. She did it because she was angry; that was what she told herself later.

She caught up to him as he was pulling open the rear door to a black town car.

“Wait!” She grabbed his sleeve.

He turned so fast she flinched. She took a step back, suddenly reminded that this was the guy who’d punched Mulroy. She took another step back, swallowing uncertainly.

“Who are you?” she asked. “How do you know my name?”

She could see herself reflected in his mirrored lenses. It made her feel small. More like a little girl than a grown woman: brown hair French-braided, Seitz school uniform with its prim blazer and skirt. He’s tall, she thought inanely.

“You want to know who I am?” he asked, and there was so much sadness in the words that she was struck nearly speechless. She felt even more horribly aware of her school uniform. It was as if she was looking at someone who had seen the entire world. Not like she’d seen Paris or Barcelona on vacation, but more like the Bastille or the slums of India. And here she was, in all her naïveté, trying to grab hold of that. It took all her will to press him again.

“What’s all this about?” she asked. “What’s 2.0?”

The guy’s expression was so different that she almost wondered if she’d grabbed the wrong black guy in the crowd. It reminded her of how Cynthia complained about people not being able to tell her and Alice Kim apart. Improbably, Alix heard Cynthia’s voice in her head — Alice is Korean, for Christ’s sake.

“You’ve got questions now, don’t you?” he said, and abruptly the heavy sadness disappeared and the brilliant smile was back. The same boisterous, knowing smile that she’d seen twice before.

A new explosion went off, right among the parked cars. Alix ducked instinctively. Smoke enveloped her, wild and thick and yellow, hiding everything from sight. Suddenly the stranger grabbed her. Hard and tight.

“Hey!” Alix tried to knee him in the balls, but he must have turned away because all she hit was thigh. She struggled against him for another second, then changed tactics and let herself be pulled close.

She bit him.

She heard a satisfying yelp of pain, but to her surprise the stranger didn’t let go. Instead, he spun her around and wrapped his strong arms around her, pulling her into a tighter embrace.

“Should have known you’d have some bite to you,” he murmured in her ear.

The amusement and play were back in his voice.

“You want to see how much bite I’ve got?” she asked. She tried to twist free again, but he was ready for her now. He had her pinned against his chest. She rested, gathering strength. Looking for a chance to hurt him again.

The stranger chuckled. His breath was hot on her cheek. “How about we call a little truce?”

“Why? So we can go for coffee?” If she threw her head back fast, she could hit his face with the back of her skull. She might crush his nose if she was lucky.

“You want to know what this is all about?”

Alix stilled, suddenly alert.

“Are you going to tell me?”

The smoke was thick around them. Alix could hear cops shouting and people running, but all of it was distant. She and the stranger were in a bubble of smoke, separate from everything around them.

She was suddenly acutely aware of how closely he held her. She could feel the rise and fall of his chest as he panted, the exertion she’d put him through. He was holding her so tightly she could feel his heart beating.

“What’s this all about?” she asked.

“Ask your father.”

“What?”

“Ask your father. He’s the one who knows all the secrets.” He shoved her away abruptly.

Alix spun to pursue, but he was lost in the smoke. Everything was shadow forms.

By the time the smoke cleared, he was gone, as if he’d blown away in the wind.

© 2014 by Paolo Bacigalupi.

Excerpted from The Doubt Factory by Paolo Bacigalupi.

Published by permission of the author and Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.

All rights reserved.

No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paolo Bacigalupi is the New York Times bestselling author of the highly acclaimed The Drowned Cities and Ship Breaker, a Michael L. Printz Award winner and a National Book Award finalist. He is also the author of a novel for young readers, Zombie Baseball Beatdown, and the adult books The Windup Girl and Pump Six and Other Stories. He is a Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook, John W. Campbell Memorial, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award winner. He lives in western Colorado with his wife and son. Learn more at bit.ly/TheDoubtFactory.

Ancillary Sword
(novel excerpt)

Ann Leckie

Please enjoy the following excerpt of the new novel Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie, forthcoming this month from Orbit Books:

Breq is a soldier who used to be a warship. Once a weapon of conquest controlling thousands of minds, now she has only a single body and serves the emperor. With a new ship and a troublesome crew, Breq is ordered to go to the only place in the galaxy she would agree to go: to Athoek Station to protect the family of a lieutenant she once knew — a lieutenant she murdered in cold blood.

1

“Considering the circumstances, you could use another lieutenant.” Anaander Mianaai, ruler (for the moment) of all the vast reaches of Radchaai space, sat in a wide chair cushioned with embroidered silk. This body that spoke to me — one of thousands — looked to be about thirteen years old. Black-clad, dark-skinned. Her face was already stamped with the aristocratic features that were, in Radchaai space, a marker of the highest rank and fashion. Under normal circumstances no one ever saw such young versions of the Lord of the Radch, but these were not normal circumstances.

The room was small, three and a half meters square, paneled with a lattice of dark wood. In one corner the wood was missing — probably damaged in last week’s violent dispute between rival parts of Anaander Mianaai herself. Where the wood remained, tendrils of some wispy plant trailed, thin silver-green leaves and here and there tiny white flowers. This was not a public area of the palace, not an audience chamber. An empty chair sat beside the Lord of the Radch’s, a table between those chairs held a tea set, flask, and bowls of unadorned white porcelain, gracefully lined, the sort of thing that, at first glance, you might take as unremarkable, but on second would realize was a work of art worth more than some planets.

I had been offered tea, been invited to sit. I had elected to remain standing. “You said I could choose my own officers.” I ought to have added a respectful my lord but did not. I also ought to have knelt and put my forehead to the floor, when I’d entered and found the Lord of the Radch. I hadn’t done that, either.

“You’ve chosen two. Seivarden, of course, and Lieutenant Ekalu was an obvious choice.” The names brought both people reflexively to mind. In approximately a tenth of a second Mercy of Kalr, parked some thirty-five thousand kilometers away from this station, would receive that near-instinctive check for data, and a tenth of a second after that its response would reach me. I’d spent the last several days learning to control that old, old habit. I hadn’t completely succeeded. “A fleet captain is entitled to a third,” Anaander Mianaai continued. Beautiful porcelain bowl in one black-gloved hand, she gestured toward me, meaning, I thought, to indicate my uniform. Radchaai military wore dark-brown jackets and trousers, boots and gloves. Mine was different. The left-hand side was brown, but the right side was black, and my captain’s insignia bore the marks that showed I commanded not only my own ship but other ships’ captains. Of course, I had no ships in my fleet besides my own, Mercy of Kalr, but there were no other fleet captains stationed near Athoek, where I was bound, and the rank would give me an advantage over other captains I might meet. Assuming, of course, those other captains were at all inclined to accept my authority.

Just days ago a long-simmering dispute had broken out and one faction had destroyed two of the intersystem gates. Now preventing more gates from going down — and preventing that faction from seizing gates and stations in other systems — was an urgent priority. I understood Anaander’s reasons for giving me the rank, but still I didn’t like it. “Don’t make the mistake,” I said, “of thinking I’m working for you.”

She smiled. “Oh, I don’t. Your only other choices are officers currently in the system, and near this station. Lieutenant Tisarwat is just out of training. She was on her way to take her first assignment, and now of course that’s out of the question. And I thought you’d appreciate having someone you could train up the way you want.” She seemed amused at that last.

As she spoke I knew Seivarden was in stage two of NREM sleep. I saw pulse, temperature, respiration, blood oxygen, hormone levels. Then that data was gone, replaced by Lieutenant Ekalu, standing watch. Stressed — jaw slightly clenched, elevated cortisol. She’d been a common soldier until one week ago, when Mercy of Kalr’s captain had been arrested for treason. She had never expected to be made an officer. Wasn’t, I thought, entirely sure she was capable of it.

“You can’t possibly think,” I said to the Lord of the Radch, blinking away that vision, “that it’s a good idea to send me into a newly broken-out civil war with only one experienced officer.”

“It can’t be worse than going understaffed,” Anaander Mianaai said, maybe aware of my momentary distraction, maybe not. “And the child is beside herself at the thought of serving under a fleet captain. She’s waiting for you at the docks.” She set down her tea, straightened in her chair. “Since the gate leading to Athoek is down and I have no idea what the situation there might be, I can’t give you specific orders. Besides” — she raised her now-empty hand as though forestalling some speech of mine — “I’d be wasting my time attempting to direct you too closely. You’ll do as you like no matter what I say. You’re loaded up? Have all the supplies you need?”

The question was perfunctory — she surely knew the status of my ship’s stores as well as I did. I made an indefinite gesture, deliberately insolent.

“You might as well take Captain Vel’s things,” she said, as though I’d answered reasonably. “She won’t need them.”

Vel Osck had been captain of Mercy of Kalr until a week ago. There were any number of reasons she might not need her possessions, the most likely, of course, being that she was dead. Anaander Mianaai didn’t do anything halfway, particularly when it came to dealing with her enemies. Of course, in this case, the enemy Vel Osck had supported was Anaander Mianaai herself. “I don’t want them,” I said. “Send them to her family.”

“If I can.” She might well not be able to do that. “Is there anything you need before you go? Anything at all?”

Various answers occurred to me. None seemed useful. “No.”

“I’ll miss you, you know,” she said. “No one else will speak to me quite the way you do. You’re one of the very few people I’ve ever met who really, truly didn’t fear the consequences of offending me. And none of those very few have the. . . . similarity of background you and I have.”

Because I had once been a ship. An AI controlling an enormous troop carrier and thousands of ancillaries, human bodies, part of myself. At the time I had not thought of myself as a slave, but I had been a weapon of conquest, the possession of Anaander Mianaai, herself occupying thousands of bodies spread throughout Radch space.

Now I was only this single human body. “Nothing you can do to me could possibly be worse than what you’ve already done.”

“I am aware of that,” she said, “and aware of just how dangerous that makes you. I may well be extremely foolish just letting you live, let alone giving you official authority and a ship. But the games I play aren’t for the timid.”

“For most of us,” I said, openly angry now, knowing she could see the physical signs of it no matter how impassive my expression, “they aren’t games.”

“I am also aware of that,” said the Lord of the Radch. “Truly I am. It’s just that some losses are unavoidable.”

I could have chosen any of a half dozen responses to that. Instead I turned and walked out of the room without answering. As I stepped through the door, the soldier Mercy of Kalr One Kalr Five, who had been standing at stiff attention just outside, fell in behind me, silent and efficient. Kalr Five was human, like all Mercy of Kalr’s soldiers, not an ancillary. She had a name, beyond her ship, decade, and number. I had addressed her by that name once. She’d responded with outward impassivity, but with an inner wave of alarm and unease. I hadn’t tried it again.

When I had been a ship — when I had been just one component of the troop carrier Justice of Toren — I had been always aware of the state of my officers. What they heard and what they saw. Every breath, every twitch of every muscle. Hormone levels, oxygen levels. Everything, nearly, except the specific contents of their thoughts, though even that I could often guess, from experience, from intimate acquaintance. Not something I had ever shown any of my captains — it would have meant little to them, a stream of meaningless data. But for me, at that time, it had been just part of my awareness.

I no longer was my ship. But I was still an ancillary, could still read that data as no human captain could have. But I only had a single human brain, now, could only handle the smallest fragment of the information I’d once been constantly, unthinkingly aware of. And even that small amount required some care — I’d run straight into a bulkhead trying to walk and receive data at the same time, when I’d first tried it. I queried Mercy of Kalr, deliberately this time. I was fairly sure I could walk through this corridor and monitor Five at the same time without stopping or stumbling.

I made it all the way to the palace’s reception area without incident. Five was tired, and slightly hungover. Bored, I was sure, from standing staring at the wall during my conference with the Lord of the Radch. I saw a strange mix of anticipation and dread, which troubled me a bit, because I couldn’t guess what that conflict was about.

Out on the main concourse, high, broad, and echoing, stone paved, I turned toward the lifts that would take me to the docks, to the shuttle that waited to take me back to Mercy of Kalr. Most shops and offices along the concourse, including the wide, brightly painted gods crowding the temple façade, orange and blue and red and green, seemed surprisingly undamaged after last week’s violence, when the Lord of the Radch’s struggle against herself had broken into the open. Now citizens in colorful coats, trousers, and gloves, glittering with jewelry, walked by, seemingly unconcerned. Last week might never have happened. Anaander Mianaai, Lord of the Radch, might still be herself, many-bodied but one single, undivided person. But last week had happened, and Anaander Mianaai was not, in fact, one person. Had not been for quite some time.

As I approached the lifts a sudden surge of resentment and dismay overtook me. I stopped, turned. Kalr Five had stopped when I stopped, and now stared impassively ahead. As though that wave of resentment Ship had shown me hadn’t come from her. I hadn’t thought most humans could mask such strong emotions so effectively — her face was absolutely expressionless. But all the Mercy of Kalrs, it had turned out, could do it. Captain Vel had been an old-fashioned sort — or at the very least she’d had idealized notions of what “old-fashioned” meant — and had demanded that her human soldiers conduct themselves as much like ancillaries as possible.

Five didn’t know I’d been an ancillary. As far as she knew I was Fleet Captain Breq Mianaai, promoted because of Captain Vel’s arrest and what most imagined were my powerful family connections. She couldn’t know how much of her I saw. “What is it?” I asked, brusque. Taken aback.

“Sir?” Flat. Expressionless. Wanting, I saw after the tiny signal delay, for me to turn my attention away from her, to leave her safely ignored. Wanting also to speak.

I was right, that resentment, that dismay had been on my account. “You have something to say. Let’s hear it.”

Surprise. Sheer terror. And not the least twitch of a muscle. “Sir,” she said again, and there was, finally, a faint, fleeting expression of some sort, quickly gone. She swallowed. “It’s the dishes.”

My turn to be surprised. “The dishes?”

“Sir, you sent Captain Vel’s things into storage here on the station.”

And lovely things they had been. The dishes (and utensils, and tea things) Kalr Five was, presumably, preoccupied with had been porcelain, glass, jeweled and enameled metal. But they hadn’t been mine. And I didn’t want anything of Captain Vel’s. Five expected me to understand her. Wanted so much for me to understand. But I didn’t. “Yes?”

Frustration. Anger, even. Clearly, from Five’s perspective what she wanted was obvious. But the only part of it that was obvious to me was the fact she couldn’t just come out and say it, even when I’d asked her to. “Sir,” she said finally, citizens walking around us, some with curious glances, some pretending not to notice us. “I understand we’re leaving the system soon.”

“Soldier,” I said, beginning to be frustrated and angry myself, in no good mood from my talk with the Lord of the Radch. “Are you capable of speaking directly?”

“We can’t leave the system with no good dishes!” she blurted finally, face still impressively impassive. “Sir.” When I didn’t answer, she continued, through another surge of fear at speaking so plainly, “Of course it doesn’t matter to you. You’re a fleet captain, your rank is enough to impress anyone.” And my house name — I was now Breq Mianaai. I wasn’t too pleased at having been given that particular name, which marked me as a cousin of the Lord of the Radch herself. None of my crew but Seivarden and the ship’s medic knew I hadn’t been born with it. “You could invite a captain to supper and serve her soldier’s mess and she wouldn’t say a word, sir.” Couldn’t, unless she outranked me.

“We’re not going where we’re going so we can hold dinner parties,” I said. That apparently confounded her, brief confusion showing for a moment on her face.

“Sir!” she said, voice pleading, in some distress. “You don’t need to worry what other people think of you. I’m only saying, because you ordered me to.”

Of course. I should have seen. Should have realized days ago. She was worried that she would look bad if I didn’t have dinnerware to match my rank. That it would reflect badly on the ship itself. “You’re worried about the reputation of the ship.”

Chagrin, but also relief. “Yes, sir.”

“I’m not Captain Vel.” Captain Vel had cared a great deal about such things.

“No, sir.” I wasn’t sure if the emphasis — and the relief I read in Five — was because my not being Captain Vel was a good thing, or because I had finally understood what she had been trying to tell me. Or both.

I had already cleared my account here, all my money in chits locked in my quarters on board Mercy of Kalr. What little I carried on my person wouldn’t be sufficient to ease Kalr Five’s anxieties. Station — the AI that ran this place, was this place — could probably smooth the financial details over for me. But Station resented me as the cause of last week’s violence and would not be disposed to assist me.

“Go back to the palace,” I said. “Tell the Lord of the Radch what you require.” Her eyes widened just slightly, and two tenths of a second later I read disbelief and then frank terror in Kalr Five. “When everything is arranged to your satisfaction, come to the shuttle.”

Three citizens passed, bags in gloved hands, the fragment of conversation I heard telling me they were on their way to the docks, to catch a ship to one of the outer stations. A lift door slid open, obligingly. Of course. Station knew where they were going, they didn’t have to ask.

Station knew where I was going, but it wouldn’t open any doors for me without my giving the most explicit of requests. I turned, stepped quickly into the dockbound lift after them, saw the lift door close on Five standing, horrified, on the black stone pavement of the concourse. The lift moved, the three citizens chattered. I closed my eyes and saw Kalr Five staring at the lift, hyperventilating slightly. She frowned just the smallest amount — possibly no one passing her would notice. Her fingers twitched, summoning Mercy of Kalr’s attention, though with some trepidation, as though maybe she feared it wouldn’t answer.

But of course Mercy of Kalr was already paying attention. “Don’t worry,” said Mercy of Kalr, voice serene and neutral in Five’s ear and mine. “It’s not you Fleet Captain’s angry with. Go ahead. It’ll be all right.”

True enough. It wasn’t Kalr Five I was angry with. I pushed away the data coming from her, received a disorienting flash of Seivarden, asleep, dreaming, and Lieutenant Ekalu, still tense, in the middle of asking one of her Etrepas for tea. Opened my eyes. The citizens in the lift with me laughed at something, I didn’t know or care what, and as the lift door slid open we walked out into the broad lobby of the docks, lined all around with icons of gods that travelers might find useful or comforting. It was sparsely populated for this time of day, except by the entrance to the dock authority office, where a line of ill-tempered ship captains and pilots waited for their turn to complain to the overburdened inspector adjuncts. Two intersystem gates had been disabled in last week’s upheaval, more were likely to be in the near future, and the Lord of the Radch had forbidden any travel in the remaining ones, trapping dozens of ships in the system, with all their cargo and passengers.

They moved aside for me, bowing slightly as though a wind had blown through them. It was the uniform that had done it — I heard one captain whisper to another one, “Who is that?” and the responding murmur as her neighbor replied and others commented on her ignorance or added what they knew. I heard Mianaai and Special Missions. The sense they’d managed to make out of last week’s events. The official version was that I had come to Omaugh Palace undercover, to root out a seditious conspiracy. That I had been working for Anaander Mianaai all along. Anyone who’d ever been part of events that later received an official version would know or suspect that wasn’t true. But most Radchaai lived unremarkable lives and would have no reason to doubt it.

No one questioned my walking past the adjuncts, into the outer office of the Inspector Supervisor. Daos Ceit, who was her assistant, was still recovering from injuries. An adjunct I didn’t know sat in her place but rose swiftly and bowed as I entered. So did a very, very young lieutenant, more gracefully and collectedly than I expected in a seventeen-year-old, the sort who was still all lanky arms and legs and frivolous enough to spend her first pay on lilac-colored eyes — surely she hadn’t been born with eyes that color. Her dark-brown jacket, trousers, gloves, and boots were crisp and spotless, her straight, dark hair cut close. “Fleet Captain. Sir,” she said. “Lieutenant Tisarwat, sir.” She bowed again.

I didn’t answer, only looked at her. If my scrutiny disturbed her, I couldn’t see it. She wasn’t yet sending data to Mercy of Kalr, and her brown skin hadn’t darkened in any sort of flush. The small, discreet scatter of pins near one shoulder suggested a family of some substance but not the most elevated in the Radch. She was, I thought, either preternaturally self-possessed or a fool. Neither option pleased me.

“Go on in, sir,” said the unfamiliar adjunct, gesturing me toward the inner office. I did, without a word to Lieutenant Tisarwat.

Dark-skinned, amber-eyed, elegant and aristocratic even in the dark-blue uniform of dock authority, Inspector Supervisor Skaaiat Awer rose and bowed as the door shut behind me. “Breq. Are you going, then?”

I opened my mouth to say, Whenever you authorize our departure, but remembered Five and the errand I’d sent her on. “I’m only waiting for Kalr Five. Apparently I can’t ship out without an acceptable set of dishes.”

Surprise crossed her face, gone in an instant. She had known, of course, that I had sent Captain Vel’s things here, and that I didn’t own anything to replace them. Once the surprise had gone I saw amusement. “Well,” she said. “Wouldn’t you have felt the same?” When I had been in Five’s place, she meant. When I had been a ship.

“No, I wouldn’t have. I didn’t. Some other ships did. Do.” Mostly Swords, who by and large already thought they were above the smaller, less prestigious Mercies, or the troop carrier Justices.

“My Seven Issas cared about that sort of thing.” Skaaiat Awer had served as a lieutenant on a ship with human troops, before she’d become Inspector Supervisor here at Omaugh Palace. Her eyes went to my single piece of jewelry, a small gold tag pinned near my left shoulder. She gestured, a change of topic that wasn’t really a change of topic. “Athoek, is it?” My destination hadn’t been publicly announced, might, in fact, be considered sensitive information. But Awer was one of the most ancient and wealthy of houses. Skaaiat had cousins who knew people who knew things. “I’m not sure that’s where I’d have sent you.”

“It’s where I’m going.”

She accepted that answer, no surprise or offense visible in her expression. “Have a seat. Tea?”

“Thank you, no.” Actually I could have used some tea, might under other circumstances have been glad of a relaxed chat with Skaaiat Awer, but I was anxious to be off.

This, too, Inspector Supervisor Skaaiat took with equanimity. She did not sit, herself. “You’ll be calling on Basnaaid Elming when you get to Athoek Station.” Not a question. She knew I would be. Basnaaid was the younger sister of someone both Skaaiat and I had once loved. Someone I had, under orders from Anaander Mianaai, killed. “She’s like Awn, in some ways, but not in others.”

“Stubborn, you said.”

“Very proud. And fully as stubborn as her sister. Possibly more so. She was very offended when I offered her clientage for her sister’s sake. I mention it because I suspect you’re planning to do something similar. And you might be the only person alive even more stubborn than she is.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Not even the tyrant?” The word wasn’t Radchaai, was from one of the worlds annexed and absorbed by the Radch. By Anaander Mianaai. The tyrant herself, almost the only person on Omaugh Palace who would have recognized or understood the word, besides Skaaiat and myself.

Skaaiat Awer’s mouth quirked, sardonic humor. “Possibly. Possibly not. In any event, be very careful about offering Basnaaid money or favors. She won’t take it kindly.” She gestured, good-natured but resigned, as if to say, but of course you’ll do as you like. “You’ll have met your new baby lieutenant.”

Lieutenant Tisarwat, she meant. “Why did she come here and not go directly to the shuttle?”

“She came to apologize to my adjunct.” Daos Ceit’s replacement, there in the outer office. “Their mothers are cousins.” Formally, the word Skaaiat used referred to a relation between two people of different houses who shared a parent or a grandparent, but in casual use meant someone more distantly related who was a friend, or someone you’d grown up with. “They were supposed to meet for tea yesterday, and Tisarwat never showed or answered any messages. And you know how military gets along with dock authorities.” Which was to say, overtly politely and privately contemptuously. “My adjunct took offense.”

“Why should Lieutenant Tisarwat care?”

“You never had a mother to be angry you offended her cousin,” Skaaiat said, half laughing, “or you wouldn’t ask.”

True enough. “What do you make of her?”

“Flighty, I would have said a day or two ago. But today she’s very subdued.” Flighty didn’t match the collected young person I’d seen in that outer office. Except, perhaps, those impossible eyes. “Until today she was on her way to a desk job in a border system.”

“The tyrant sent me a baby administrator?”

“I wouldn’t have thought she’d send you a baby anything,” Skaaiat said. “I’d have thought she’d have wanted to come with you herself. Maybe there’s not enough of her left here.” She drew breath as though to say more but then frowned, head cocked. “I’m sorry, there’s something I have to take care of.”

The docks were crowded with ships in need of supplies or repairs or emergency medical assistance, ships that were trapped here in the system, with crews and passengers who were extremely unhappy about the fact. Skaaiat’s staff had been working hard for days, with very few breaks. “Of course.” I bowed. “I’ll get out of your way.” She was still listening to whoever had messaged her. I turned to go.

“Breq.” I looked back. Skaaiat’s head was still cocked slightly, she was still hearing whoever else spoke. “Take care.”

“You, too.” I walked through the door, to the outer office. Lieutenant Tisarwat stood, still and silent. The adjunct stared ahead, fingers moving, attending to urgent dock business no doubt. “Lieutenant,” I said sharply, and didn’t wait for a reply but walked out of the office, through the crowd of disgruntled ships’ captains, onto the docks where I would find the shuttle that would take me to Mercy of Kalr.

The shuttle was too small to generate its own gravity. I was perfectly comfortable in such circumstances, but very young officers often were not. I stationed Lieutenant Tisarwat at the dock, to wait for Kalr Five, and then pushed myself over the awkward, chancy boundary between the gravity of the palace and the weightlessness of the shuttle, kicked myself over to a seat, and strapped myself in. The pilot gave a respectful nod, bowing being difficult in these circumstances. I closed my eyes, saw that Five stood in a large storage room inside the palace proper, plain, utilitarian, gray-walled. Filled with chests and boxes. In one brown-gloved hand she held a teabowl of delicate, deep rose glass. An open box in front of her showed more — a flask, seven more bowls, other dishes. Her pleasure in the beautiful things, her desire, was undercut by doubt. I couldn’t read her mind, but I guessed that she had been told to choose from this storeroom, had found these and wanted them very much, but didn’t quite believe she would be allowed to take them away. I was fairly sure this set was hand-blown, and some seven hundred years old. I hadn’t realized she had a connoisseur’s eye for such things.

I pushed the vision away. She would be some time, I thought, and I might as well get some sleep.

I woke three hours later, to lilac-eyed Lieutenant Tisarwat strapping herself deftly into a seat across from me. Kalr Five — now radiating contentment, presumably from the results of her stint in the palace storeroom — pushed herself over to Lieutenant Tisarwat, and with a nod and a quiet Just in case, sir proffered a bag for the nearly inevitable moment when the new officer’s stomach reacted to microgravity.

I’d known young lieutenants who took such an offer as an insult. Lieutenant Tisarwat accepted it, with a small, vague smile that didn’t quite reach the rest of her face. Still seeming entirely calm and collected.

“Lieutenant,” I said, as Kalr Five kicked herself forward to strap herself in beside the pilot, another Kalr. “Have you taken any meds?” Another potential insult. Antinausea meds were available, and I’d known excellent, long-serving officers who for the whole length of their careers took them every time they got on a shuttle. None of them ever admitted to it.

The last traces of Lieutenant Tisarwat’s smile vanished. “No, sir.” Even. Calm.

“Pilot has some, if you need them.” That ought to have gotten some kind of reaction.

And it did, though just the barest fraction of a second later than I’d expected. The hint of a frown, an indignant straightening of her shoulders, hampered by her seat restraints. “No, thank you, sir.”

Flighty, Skaaiat Awer had said. She didn’t usually misread people so badly. “I didn’t request your presence, Lieutenant.” I kept my voice calm, but with an edge of anger. Easy enough to do under the circumstances. “You’re here only because Anaander Mianaai ordered it. I don’t have the time or the resources to hand-raise a brand-new baby. You’d better get up to speed fast. I need officers who know what they’re doing. I need a whole crew I can depend on.”

“Sir,” replied Lieutenant Tisarwat. Still calm, but now some earnestness in her voice, that tiny trace of frown deepening, just a bit. “Yes, sir.”

Dosed with something. Possibly antinausea, and if I’d been given to gambling I’d have bet my considerable fortune that she was filled to the ears with at least one sedative. I wanted to pull up her personal record — Mercy of Kalr would have it by now. But the tyrant would see that I had pulled that record up. Mercy of Kalr belonged, ultimately, to Anaander Mianaai, and she had accesses that allowed her to control it. Mercy of Kalr saw and heard everything I did, and if the tyrant wanted that information she had only to demand it. And I didn’t want her to know what it was I suspected. Wanted, truth be told, for my suspicions to be proven false. Unreasonable.

For now, if the tyrant was watching — and she was surely watching, through Mercy of Kalr, would be so long as we were in the system — let her think I resented having a baby foisted on me when I’d rather have someone who knew what they were doing.

I turned my attention away from Lieutenant Tisarwat. Forward, the pilot leaned closer to Five and said, quiet and oblique, “Everything all right?” And then to Five’s responding, puzzled frown, “Too quiet.”

“All this time?” asked Five. Still oblique. Because they were talking about me and didn’t want to trigger any requests I might have made to Ship, to tell me when the crew was talking about me. I had an old habit — some two thousand years old — of singing whatever song ran through my head. Or humming. It had caused the crew some puzzlement and distress at first — this body, the only one left to me, didn’t have a particularly good voice. They were getting used to it, though, and now I was dryly amused to see crew members disturbed by my silence.

“Not a peep,” said the pilot to Kalr Five. With a brief sideways glance and a tiny twitch of neck and shoulder muscles that told me she’d thought of looking back, toward Lieutenant Tisarwat.

“Yeah,” said Five, agreeing, I thought, with the pilot’s unstated assessment of what might be troubling me.

Good. Let Anaander Mianaai be watching that, too.

It was a long ride back to Mercy of Kalr, but Lieutenant Tisarwat never did use the bag or evince any discomfort. I spent the time sleeping, and thinking.

Ships, communications, data traveled between stars using gates, beacon-marked, held constantly open. The calculations had already been made, the routes marked out through the strangeness of gate space, where distances and proximity didn’t match normal space. But military ships — like Mercy of Kalr — could generate their own gates. It was a good deal more risky — choose the wrong route, the wrong exit or entrance, and a ship could end up anywhere, or nowhere. That didn’t trouble me. Mercy of Kalr knew what it was doing, and we would arrive safely at Athoek Station.

And while we moved through gate space in our own, contained bubble of normal space, we would be completely isolated. I wanted that. Wanted to be gone from Omaugh Palace, away from Anaander Mianaai’s sight and any orders or interference she might decide to send.

When we were nearly there, minutes away from docking, Ship spoke directly into my ear. “Fleet Captain.” It didn’t need to speak to me that way, could merely desire me to know it wanted my attention. And it nearly always knew what I wanted without my saying it. I could connect to Mercy of Kalr in a way no one else aboard could. I could not, however, be Mercy of Kalr, as I had been Justice of Toren. Not without losing myself entirely. Permanently.

“Ship,” I replied quietly. And without my saying anything else, Mercy of Kalr gave me the results of its calculations, made unasked, a whole range of possible routes and departure times flaring into my vision. I chose the soonest, gave orders, and a little more than six hours later we were gone.

© 2014 by Ann Leckie.

Excerpted from Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie.

Published by permission of the author and Orbit.

All rights reserved.

No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ann Leckie has worked as a waitress, a receptionist, a rodman on a land-surveying crew, a lunch lady, and a recording engineer. The author of many published short stories, and former secretary of the Science Fiction Writers of America, she lives in St. Louis, Missouri, with her husband, children, and cats. Her debut novel, Ancillary Justice, won the Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke, and BSFA Awards, and was nominated for the Philip K. Dick and John W. Campbell Awards.

NONFICTION

Interview: James S.A. Corey

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Ty Franck, together with Daniel Abraham, who we interviewed back in episode 35, writes the Expanse series of space adventure novels under the penname James S.A. Corey. The fourth book, Cibola Burn, is out now. The series is also being adapted for television by the Syfy channel.

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 Cibola Burn, and it’s the fourth book in the Expanse series, which is based on a pen-and-paper role-playing game that you created. First off, why don’t you just tell us a bit about how you first got into pen-and-paper role-playing games?

Well, I don’t actually know. I remember playing Red Box D&D in, I think, grade school. That may have been the first one, but it just seems like I’ve always been doing that. Actually, the Expanse didn’t start out as pen-and-paper; the Expanse started out as a pitch for an MMORPG that never went anywhere and then became a pen-and-paper game after that because I liked the setting and wanted to see if it worked.

Why don’t you tell us a bit more about the MMORPG project?

Unfortunately, there’s not a lot to tell on that one. A friend of mine came to me and asked me if I would help her develop content for an MMO that an ISP was looking to develop. I had some notes that I had been playing around with — this near future, science fiction setting. She agreed that that would probably work for them. The thing you have to know about the MMO stuff is that everybody wants to do fantasy, but World of Warcraft really owns that space. It’s almost impossible to compete with them in fantasy. At the time, EVE was out as an SF setting; it’s a cool game, but it’s limited to just the spaceships. I really wanted a version of EVE, or something like EVE, where you could actually get off of your ship and have adventures on the ground. That was sort of the initial idea, and then I took this near-future setting and built it out to accommodate spaceship and ground-based adventure.

So the different factions that we see in this world kind of came out of the structure of an MMO.

Yeah, it did. We wanted to do different things from World of Warcraft. Of course, they have two factions, the Alliance and the Horde, so we had three factions: Earth, Mars, and the OPA. Those would have been the factions you started out your character in.

What is the OPA?

The Outer Planets Alliance — that’s everybody who does not live on Earth or Mars.

Why did you decide to go with a near-future setting as opposed to more of a Star Trek, ships-faster-than-light kind of stuff?

Two reasons: One — probably the most important one — is that my favorite book of all time is The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. I read it when I was eleven, which is way too young to read that book, so if you have eleven-year-olds, don’t let them read that. But it was exactly the right time to sort of rewrite my brain, and I just became obsessed with the idea of this fully populated solar system, which is the setting of that book — with people living on Mars, with people living on the moon, people living on the various moons of the outer planets. That just stuck in my head and stayed in there for decades, and so when I was coming up with a setting for gaming, that’s the thing that bubbled up.

The other reason is that not a lot of people play in that space. There are some people doing really good work in that space, but if you compare the number of people working in that pre-faster-than-light science fiction setting versus the people who are working in, like, Star Trek and all of that, where you have hyperspace or whatever, it’s a much smaller percentage. Very few people were working in the space where you take humans from the pre-FTL, trapped-in-the-solar-system kind of setting to the galaxy-spanning empire setting. You almost never see that transition, and I thought that was a really interesting place.

You developed all this content for the game. How much material had you come up with and what happened ultimately with that project?

I actually came up with quite a lot — almost everything that is the later worldbuilding for the pen-and-paper game that followed and the books came out of that. I sat down and went through all of the various bodies in the solar system — what possible reason people would have for living in those places. There’s no economic reason to settle our solar system, so let’s get that out of the way. There’s no reason to do it — but if we were doing it, what would be the things that people would actually use on those various bodies? I did a lot of research on that and pretty much had mapped out the political situation in that setting, what people were doing on the various bodies, why they lived there, what kind of cultures were springing up — all of that work had been done. Daniel, my writing partner, tells this story that the first time he played in the pen-and-paper setting, I had this giant three-ring binder full of notes. When he found out that those were the notes about the solar system they were gaming in, that’s when he decided to ask me if I would write the book with him because he hates worldbuilding, and I had a giant three-ring binder filled with worldbuilding that we could use.

Talk a little bit more about that process of how you went from working on an MMO to running the pen-and-paper version.

When the MMO project fell through, it was one of those things where everybody was really excited to do it, but nobody actually had the resources to do it. Even the people who asked us to work on it clearly didn’t understand what they were getting into. Once they did understand what they were getting into, they just backed away slowly, which I totally respect. I mean, a project like that is like making a Hollywood movie. To make a game that can compete with World of Warcraft, you’re looking at tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a project like that. So I understand rightly once they realized that that’s what they signed up for, they sort of backed away.

But I had all this material, and I’ve been a gamer all my life — computer games and role-playing games — so I started play testing in the universe with my gaming buddies. Did it work? Were there interesting stories to tell? What kinds of characters would be fun to play in that setting? Not with any real purpose in mind — just because that’s something I do for fun. So I started running games in the setting. I came up with a rule system that worked for a pen-and-paper setting and started gaming in it.

When in this process did you meet Daniel? Had you met him prior to starting?

No, no, actually I started writing games in this setting before I moved to New Mexico. I met Daniel years later when I moved to New Mexico and we were in the same writing group together. He and his wife came over to do some gaming with my wife and I. That was years after I started running games in this setting. Actually, Daniel was late to the game — the first game I ran in this setting in New Mexico was with a completely different group. That gaming group was Melinda Snodgrass and Ian Tregillis and George R.R. Martin and my wife.

How did you get involved with that gaming group?

I just started hanging out with those guys. They love to game, and Melinda asked me, “So I hear you run a good game. Would you be willing to run a game for us?” I agreed to do it, and this was the setting I had. Those are all science fiction people. Melinda used to write for Star Trek, and Ian writes science fiction and fantasy, and George, of course, had written a ton of science fiction before that, so it seemed like a good group to try out an SF game on.

So you moved to Albuquerque, and then how did you initially make contact with all these people out there?

We moved to Albuquerque so my wife could do her undergraduate degree at UNM, so that was the initial reason we went there. I had one friend who lived there, and she was in this writing group. She went to the writing group and said, “Hey, my friend is moving here, and he’s written some stuff.” This particular writing group you had to have a professional sale to get in. They would only take people who had professional sales. So she went to them and said, “Hey, he’s got a professional sale.” That qualified me to get in. They met me, and we all got along, so they said, “Sure, yeah, you can start hanging out.” That’s how I met everybody. George needed to hire somebody to run his multimedia empire, and Melinda, again, who is sort of at the center of all this, said, “Hey, you should hire this guy.” Before we moved to New Mexico, I had sold out of a financial software consulting company that I helped found. George had always been hesitant to hire anybody because he didn’t want to hire somebody that he had to train, and Melinda’s argument was, “Well, you know, this guy used to run his own consulting company. He can probably handle your stuff.” George took a chance and hired me to do that.

That’s really amazing. What’s a job interview like when you’re going to work for George R.R. Martin?

Actually, there really wasn’t an interview because George has never had a real job other than two years he spent as a college professor in the seventies or early eighties. He said, “So, Melinda says I should hire you.” And I said, “Yes, and here’s why,” and laid out what I could do for him. The next day I was there at his office setting up his new systems. It was very informal.

What is George R.R. Martin’s office like? I heard someone say he has two houses across the street from each other and one is sort of his office house and one’s his home house. Is that true?

It is. Unfortunately, I can’t talk too much about that because we had talked a lot about it and based on conversations we had and interviews about his houses, people figured out where he lived. So, yes, it is true that he has a couple of houses, one of which is his office, but I can’t really talk about where that is or what it looks like because people will figure it out and start banging on the door.

I understand — don’t want to do anything to invade his privacy or anything. I was also curious . . . I heard that he writes on an old DOS computer with WordStar.

Well, he doesn’t actually write on an old DOS computer. He did write on an old DOS computer, and then it died. Actually, I built him the computer he writes on now, which is a state-of-the-art machine running DOS and WordStar 4.0.

Does it have internet access? I heard one of the big advantages of that old computer was it had no internet access so he couldn’t waste all day on the internet.

No, it does not have internet access. He actually has two computers at his desk, one of which is a Windows machine where he does his email and all that. The other one is this DOS machine that he actually does his writing on. He’s just got a keyboard toggle to toggle between the two of them, so if he wants to waste time on the internet he can. The real advantage with the DOS machine not being connected to the internet is, of course, he cannot possibly get a virus on it.

Or he doesn’t have to worry about hackers, I guess.

Not on that machine, no. There is a physical firewall, in that you have to be sitting at that keyboard to have access to that computer.

I’ve heard you talk about how, since you worked for George R.R. Martin, people assume that he was a writing mentor to you and all this stuff, but you’ve said that that’s not actually the case.

No, actually, the ways in which George was a really great mentor were on the business side. George has worked in the writing world, in TV, and in novels, and in feature production. He’s done that for thirty or forty years, so on the business side, it was really great to be able to ask him, “Here’s what they’re offering. Here’s what the contract looks like. If I get to do this, what’s that going to look like when I get there?” He has enormous stores of experience on that stuff. On that side, he really was a great mentor. He and I have very different ideas on what constitutes good writing. I’m a big fan of his work, so I’m not saying that I don’t think he’s good. He’s good at it, he is. He’s clearly one of the top writers in the field, but how you get to putting words on paper — sort of the pre-production process — he and I work very differently. There wasn’t a lot that we could talk about meaningfully on that side.

He talks in terms of gardeners and architects, so I guess you’re more of an architect?

Actually, I think that distinction is a false distinction. He really loves that idea, but I think it really doesn’t actually make any sense. He and I had several arguments about it — friendly arguments — but we had several arguments about it. And he’s actually changed how he describes it now because of our arguments. He no longer talks about it like these are two separate things; he now talks about it as everybody has shades of both. The truth is, I think if you have an ending in mind, I don’t think you can get there unless you roadmap of how to get there. And he is much more of a sit down at the keyboard, wait for the muse to strike, and bang out whatever chapter is sort of banging around in your head at that time. That works for him; he’s able to produce work, so more power to him, but that just seems like a really inefficient way to get a story out, from my perspective.

For me as a writer, I could not do that. I have to know where I am going, and I have to know what the next chapters are about so I can start layering and foreshadowing and all the other stuff that you want to do. He’s much more comfortable rewriting chapters over and over and over and over again than I am. For me, a chapter is like a spell in old D&D, where once you’ve cast that spell, it’s not in your memory anymore. Once I’ve written a chapter, I can’t go back and rewrite that chapter. I can edit it, but I can’t completely rewrite it the way he does. We just have very different brains for doing this work.

Speaking of your writing, let’s go back a little bit. You mentioned that you joined this writers group because you had at least one pro sale under your belt. How much writing did you do when you were younger and how did you get to the point where you had the pro sales that qualified you to join this writers group?

It’s a weird and twisting tale. I never had done a lot of prose writing. I had done a lot of informal writing for gaming settings and that sort of thing. I liked writing games — that was my thing. But I would spend a lot of time writing worldbuilding kind of stuff, which is not good prose. You couldn’t sell that. But I had done a lot of that sort of writing, kind of The Silmarillion type thing, where you’re writing the backstory of the world. Then, my sister was doing a creative writing class and she asked me for an idea for a story. I gave her an idea that had been banging around in my head, and she wrote a story and gave it back to me, and she had done it all wrong. So I wrote my version of it, the version that was actually in my head, and then didn’t do anything with it. I wrote it, and then I had it.

But at the time, I was interacting online with some people who were in Orson Scott Card’s camp, and one of them had worked with him on another project. I said, “Hey, I wrote this story. Take a look at it, tell me what you think.” I emailed it to her, and she read it. She wrote back, and she’s like, “This is great. I’m going to show it to Scott.” I was not sure how I felt about that, but whatever, that’s cool. So, he was staying at her house, and she gave him the story that I had written, and he apparently told her, “This is great and this person should be writing more stuff.”

Later, Scott started running what he called The Writer’s Boot Camp, which was a two-week intensive writing course, sort of like a two-week version of Clarion with him as the teacher in North Carolina. It happened to coincide with a time when I had left one job and I had a non-compete agreement with that company, so they had to give me a giant sack of money when I left. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I said, “Hey, maybe I’ll just not take another job right away. I’ll go do this writer’s boot camp.” And my wife was fine with it. She was like, “Yeah, that sounds like fun. We should do that.” So, I went, spent two weeks in North Carolina doing the writer’s boot camp, and then that was the end of that. I took another job somewhere else, and Scott emailed me and said, “Hey, I’m starting up this magazine, Intergalactic Medicine Show, and I’d really love to buy that story you brought to the boot camp with you.” I was like, “Sure, why not?” Well, he was paying pro rates, so I got a pro rate sale out of that.

Later, he wrote back and said, “Hey, I’m doing a selected stories from Intergalactic Medicine Show, like ‘the best of’ kind of thing, and I’d like to buy your story for that, too.” I was like, “Okay.” So now, I had two pro sales — same story, but pro rates both times. Then, he wrote back later and said, “Hey, I’d like to do a sample of that for an audiobook, and I’d like to buy your story for the audiobook.” So now, I had three pro sales — all of the same story, of course, but every time I was getting pro rates for it. When I moved to New Mexico, I had more pro sales than some of the other people in the writing group who’d been writing a lot longer than I had. That’s what got me into the room.

So, you joined the writer’s group, and you started doing the pen-and-paper role-playing game, and you met Daniel Abraham. How did that lead to you writing books together?

He and his wife lived not too far from where my wife and I lived in Albuquerque. When he found out that I was writing this game for George and Melinda and those guys, he said, “Hey, would you be willing to run a game here?” because that game was up in Santa Fe, which is about an hour’s drive. Daniel and his wife had a young kid, so it was harder for them to get up there. He was like, “Hey, if you ran a game here in Albuquerque, I would play it.” So, I started running a game there. That’s when he saw the binder, and he said, “Have you ever considered writing novels in this setting?” and, of course, I hadn’t, because I’m really lazy. So, he said, “Hey, you know what you should do? You should let me write a novel in this setting, and we can split the money,” which is like the opposite version of the gag that every writer hates when people walk up to them at a convention and say, “Hey, I’ve got a great idea: You write it, we can split the money.” So, I actually had an award-winning and respected novelist coming to me and saying, “You’ve got a great idea, I’ll write it, and we can split the money.” He always tells me that I’m not allowed to tell that story, but I tell it anyway. He wrote the first chapter, and again, it was like the thing with my sister writing her story idea: He did it wrong. So, I said, “No, this is wrong. I’m going to rewrite it.” I rewrote it the way I wanted it, and he said, “Yeah, no, this is actually great. You should just write half the book.” So that’s how we started: I wrote half and he wrote half, and that’s what we’ve done ever since.

How much work was it taking this world that was originally conceived for games and turning it into a novel format? What sort of adjustments did you have to make to it?

Oh, tons. Games are terrible books. This is something I always have to explain to people at conventions when I’m on panels and things. Don’t take your D&D campaign and write it down as a book. It doesn’t work. Maybe you can take the setting, maybe you can take some of the characters, maybe you can take some of the plot points, but you have to completely redesign the order of events because in gaming, of course, so much of it is interactive, and so much of it is you, as the game runner, reacting to what your players have done and changing the setting or the story to accommodate the actions they’ve taken. In a novel, which is much more driven by the narrative, you actually have to have a much tighter grip on where the story is going, much more control over how you release information to the reader. If you actually read the game I had run and then read the story, you would recognize similarities, but the major plot is very different and how I feed information to the reader is very different than how I feed information to players.

Could you give maybe some specific examples from Leviathan Wakes of things that were changed to make that into a novel?

No, because I did that like five years ago. My memories of that are fairly dim at this point . . . Just a lot of stuff: how the protomolecule manifests on Eros and what the characters do to get away is completely different. That was a much bigger portion of game plot, but in the novel, any time we tried to keep them on Eros, it just made no sense. We took what was a huge plot element of the game and just compressed it down to one escape sequence.

As I mentioned, you guys have written a bunch of these books. You’re on the fourth one, Cibola Burn. Why don’t we talk about that? First of all, what does the title Cibola Burn mean and how did you come up with that?

Cibola is one of the seven cities of gold that the Spaniards were looking for. It kind of has that sense of the great treasure that you commit atrocities to find but doesn’t actually exist. The Spaniards burned and murdered their way across Central America looking for this huge payout in gold that didn’t actually exist. They stole a bunch of gold from Montezuma, but the Cibola — the city of gold, the city made entirely of gold that they were murdering their way across Central America to find — wasn’t real. It was a myth. The idea of people in history committing great atrocities to find treasures that don’t actually exist is one that resonates in that book.

I guess all the titles in the series have some sort of meaning like that. They don’t literally refer to things in the book.

No. Daniel says our titles are designed to let our readers know that we’re pretentious, and there is an element of that in there. They’re all sort of mythological ideas that loosely tie in to what we’re doing. In the first one, waking up the great monster that’s been sleeping, is Leviathan Wakes. In the second one, Caliban is the half-human, half-monster that lives on the same island as Prospero (in The Tempest), who Prospero attempts to control, but Caliban fights back against being controlled by the wizard. In Hebrew mythology, Abaddon is the angel who guards the gates to Hell. So, that’s what we’re using there. Cibola, of course, is the cities of gold, the treasure that you are willing to commit murder to find but doesn’t actually exist.

I don’t know how much you want to say about the actual plot of Cibola Burns, but could you talk maybe just a little bit about how that relates to the events of this book?

Each book is also us mashing other genres into science fiction. In the fourth book, we’re sort of mashing SF up with a western. It’s our version of the railroad coming through the town and what people who are living hand-to-mouth do to protect themselves when giant corporate interests are just making a land grab. We’re playing with that idea a little bit and the idea that these worlds that the corporations are spreading out to have this wealth that the corporations want to take, and people who are not wealthy, people who don’t have power, are sitting on top of it, so how do you displace them?

The plot of this book deals with the first humans to settle on an alien world. I think, in a lot of science fiction, people don’t really think through the implications from biology of what it would be like to enter a completely alien biosphere, and I thought you guys did a really good job with that here. Could you just talk about what some of those alien biology considerations are when you’re the first person to set foot on an alien planet?

Daniel has a biology degree, so we do like to play around with the idea of biology because he has a background in that. The thing that always drove both of us crazy is you get to the alien world and then you catch an alien disease, like the Martians getting our diseases in War of the Worlds. Of course, H. G. Wells had a much more limited understanding than we do today, but even the idea that aliens would have DNA is totally unfounded. That’s our version of life, which stumbled across RNA and DNA as ways to create stable replicators, but those are by no means the only possible version of that. Left-handed or right-handed chirality and proteins — our version of life has a subset of that.

That is by no means the only possible subset life could be based on. A scientist recently did an experiment where, instead of potassium you can use, I believe, cyanide as the basis for some of the protein building blocks. So you could have a life form that one of its primary building blocks is a deadly poison to us. That should go the other way, too. The things that are essential proteins to our biology could easily be deadly poisons to another biosphere. So you have things like the stinging insects that land on you, sting you, drink your blood, and then fall over dead because the things in our blood that are vital to our life are poisonous to them, or, at the very least, not nutritious. The idea that we could eat alien life and get nutrition from that is a pretty big stretch.

There are a million variations on what life can be built from and we have a tiny little subset of that. The idea that our circle in the Venn diagram is going to overlap with their circle in the Venn diagram is a pretty big stretch. How does that look then when you’ve got two biologies on the same planet that have absolutely no overlap? What does that wind up looking like? We like playing around with that idea. Of course, in ours, there’s actually more biologies than that. I won’t get into that because of spoilers, but just the idea of a whole bunch of different biologies in the same space, none of which can feed off of each other — we can interact physically, but biologically, we can’t interact at all. One of the plot points is that people do start getting what appears to be a disease. What is that? Because clearly it can’t be a disease. So, what looks like a disease that isn’t? That’s one of the things we play around with.

Did Daniel know all the science that you guys needed for this book or did you have to consult any other scientists or experts?

We do, but Daniel’s joke is that we try to aim for Wikipedia-level plausibility. We want it to seem plausible, but we never want scientific rigor to get in the way of awesome. We try to at least not be insultingly implausible for most things. We probably fail sometimes, but we try not to be insultingly implausible. Most of the research we need to do can be done with just reading, finding biology texts — and there are a lot of people out there who have done work on other possible bases for life. There was a guy who was, for a while, proposing the idea that life could have started out with a crystalline structure and then shifted to DNA. What would that look like? Just reading that stuff gives you great ideas. One of the main things you do is take out all the math, so that nobody can double-check your work and see all the things you screwed up.

There’s a lot of science in this book in terms of the orbital mechanics and things like that. How did you guys figure all that stuff out?

Well, we take out all the math, so you can’t double-check our work. [laughs] We’re both nerds, and we both read a lot about the early space program. The idea of changing orbits and how you change orbits is something that’s just part of the science-fiction-ers lexicon. If we’re having somebody fire a rail gun to add more energy to go to a higher orbit, as long as we don’t tell you how fast any of that stuff goes or what orbital change they’re getting out of it, as long as we leave that kind of vague, it sounds plausible. It doesn’t throw you out of the story, but we make sure not to put any of the math in so the people who do understand all that don’t check our math and find out all these places we get it wrong.

You mentioned that before starting these books, you had only published maybe one short story, if I have that right.

Well, one short story that I actually got three pro rates for.

So, you didn’t have much experience writing fiction before starting the series, and now obviously, you have a ton of experience writing fiction, having written these four massive books. Could you just say some of the biggest lessons you’ve learned about writing over the past couple of years writing the series?

I’ve learned that chapter length is definitely something you should consider before you start writing. One of the things we learned is that three-thousand-word chapters is a fast pace that invites the reader to keep reading, because it seems like most people have the energy to read about four or five thousand words in one sitting. If you do three-thousand-word chapters, they read a chapter and a half, and most people aren’t going to be satisfied reading a chapter and a half, so we get email and tweets all the time from people saying, “I stayed up all night reading your book.” Well, there’s actually structural reasons why our books invite you to stay up all night reading them, some of which is in the chapter length.

One of the other things I learned is people will think that the solutions to your characters’ problems are too easy if you bring a problem up in one chapter and solve it in the same chapter. You can have exactly the same story, but if you bring up the problem in a chapter and then wait till another chapter to resolve it, just by breaking it up across a chapter break, it doesn’t seem like it was easy to do. That’s not a thing people can teach you; that’s not a thing people think about. Writers usually talk about how to find your voice and how to develop character, and yet, very few people talk about “here’s what chapter length does for you.” That was cool, to start learning that stuff.

I’ll go off on a tangent for a second — Michael Caine did an acting video in the nineties where he’s like, “Here’s how to be an actor.” The thing that he did that I think is brilliant is he doesn’t talk about how to act, he doesn’t talk about “here’s how you find your character’s voice” and “here’s what the method is” and all that stuff. He doesn’t do any of that. His video is about “here’s how you find your mark every time,” “here’s how you can avoid blinking during your close up,” all this sort of structural stuff that isn’t the art of it but is super vitally important to the craft of it. He did a video on that, and I think that’s brilliant. I actually feel like, at this point, I could do a writing class on that — on “here’s how you structure a chapter so that people want to keep reading,” “here’s the writing version of not blinking into the camera on your close up.” That kind of stuff is stuff you don’t learn until you actually write books and read reader reactions to them.

Do you get a great volume of reader reactions? Do any of those reactions stick out in your mind?

You’re going to get some. Our books are pretty popular and a lot of people read them, so you’re going to get people who email you, and you’re going to get people who tweet at you. You’re going to get reviewed. Neither Daniel nor I are big fans of reading reviews on review sites like Goodreads or Amazon because reviews tend not to be helpful. But when somebody writes you an email and says, “Hey, I was a Marine, and this thing that you’re having a Marine in your book do doesn’t read right to me and here’s why,” that’s actually really useful stuff. And we do actually listen to that kind of thing — technical sorts of things. The other thing is when somebody writes to you and says, “I really love this character.” That makes you think, “Okay, what did we do with that character that made somebody fall in love with them, and how can we do more of that with our other characters?” That kind of stuff is the thing you pay attention to.

The other big news obviously with the series is that it’s being turned into a TV series for the Syfy channel.

I’m actually at our production offices right now, sitting in the executive producer’s office doing this interview because he has an office that’s quiet.

Tell us how that first came about.

People always want a story on how we did it, but there isn’t one because we didn’t actually do anything. We wrote the books, which is pretty much the end of what we did to get this. Our literary agent has a connection to a Hollywood agent and passed the books along to the Hollywood agent. This part happened without us knowing about it. The Hollywood agent went out and took the books out and started getting offers on them. If you have a series that’s popular at all, it’s pretty easy to find option offers because they tend to not be a lot of money and studios and networks buy a bunch of options and just sort of hold on to them.

So, he got a bunch of option offers, but what we didn’t know is that our Hollywood agent was awesome and super experienced. He represents Dennis Lehane, he’s the guy who took Band of Brothers and sent it to HBO. He’s kind of a high-powered agent. So, he got a bunch of lowball option offers and turned them all down without telling us just because he didn’t think it was worth anybody’s time. He just kept turning all these offers down and what he kept saying is, “I think I can get a lot for these books, and I’m not going to take you seriously” — to the people who were making the offer — “until you come to me with a production company and a writer already attached.”

One of the people who’d been snaking around the project is the Sean Daniel Company, which is a production company run by Sean Daniel, who used to be a bigwig at Universal. Sean has personally produced two hundred movies, or some crazy number like that. I don’t know what the exact number is, but pretty much any movie you mention, Sean will go, “Oh, yeah, I produced that.” He has his own independent production company now. Sean knew Mark and Hawk — Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby — they had worked together on another project. Mark and Hawk are the writers of Iron Man and Children of Men and a lot of high-profile science fiction projects. Sean took it to them and said, “Hey, take a look at this and let me know what you think and see if you’d be interested in being attached to this.” They read the first book, and apparently they liked it. They got back to Sean and said, “Yeah, we totally want to be involved in this. Tell them that we committed to doing it.” So, Sean came back to Brian and said, “Here’s who we have attached.”

Then, Brian and Sean and Mark and Hawk and another guy named Jason Brown who works for Sean, all of us got on a conference call and they said, “Here’s Mark and Hawk, they’re committing to writing a pilot for this. Are you willing to give us the option so we can move forward?” Then Daniel and I were like, “Yeah, that sounds great. We love those guys.” We’re both big fans of the first Iron Man. We thought it was a perfect blend of science fiction and action and humor, and we didn’t want somebody who would be humorless about this. So we’re like, “Yeah, people who can be funny, that sounds great. We want those guys.”

So they went off and they wrote a pilot, and then took that pilot to Alcon Entertainment, which is a big movie production company that’s starting its own TV division. We were the first project that Alcon was doing as a TV project. Alcon took it to a bunch of networks. There was a bidding war, apparently. I was not involved in that piece, but I have heard that there was a bidding war. Syfy were the ones who pushed the most poker chips to the middle of the table. So that’s who we’re doing it with. It’s a joint Alcon TV and Syfy Channel production and that’s how it happened.

As you can see, Daniel and I did almost nothing. Through a lot of this process, we were baggage. We did come out when the Sean Daniel Company was pitching the project to the various production companies and networks. We sat in the room, I guess as show ponies, where they could turn and say, “These are the guys who wrote the books,” and we could wave.

Like a visual aid?

Like a visual aid, yeah. Once we got picked up, Alcon insisted that it was a direct-to-series thing. They weren’t going to do a pilot, and Syfy was willing to do a direct-to-series order. Once we got that, we were invited by the executive producers to come out and join the writers’ room and help develop the story for the first season and we’ve been asked to write a script for the first season. Because I had figured out what all this stuff should look like years ago, I’ve been asked to help take point on the production side of it, so I’m talking a lot with production designers and concept artist on what things should look like. I’ve been invited to have a big piece in that, which is really nice, because they don’t have to do that. They don’t have to let us be involved at all if they don’t want to. They just have to mail us checks. We’ve been invited to do a lot of stuff that writers are often not invited to do. It’s been pretty cool.

Just to be clear for listeners, often they’ll film a pilot and, depending on whether that’s successful, it’ll go to series, but this is a deal where the whole first season is definitely being made at this point.

They have purchased the entire first season. So if they don’t make it, something catastrophic would have to happen.

How many episodes is this going to be? Is it going to be an adaptation of the first book, I assume?

Yes, it is an adaptation of the series. I’m not actually yet allowed to talk about what portion of the series the first season will cover, but yes, it is from the material in the book series. And it is ten episodes for the first season. That could change if we go forward, if there’s additional seasons, that order could change, but right now it’s ten.

I’m getting that you can’t really say much at all about the content of it, like what changes might be made or anything like that?

Not really supposed to talk about that yet. They’re developing their marketing plan for this and they have a process that they do when you release certain information and how you package that information. We have to make sure that we don’t step on any of that. We don’t get to really talk about much. We can talk about Mark and Hawk because we love them and that’s already public information. We can talk about Sean and Jason because that’s already public information. We can talk about who the Alcon executives were who bought this because that’s already public information. The Alcon executive who bought it for Alcon is a woman named Sharon Hall who has been working in TV a long time. She developed Breaking Bad, so she’s a high-power figure in the TV world, along with a gentleman named Ben Roberts. They are the two executives who bought it for Alcon, so we can mention their names because that’s already public information.

Can you talk at all about the process of being in the writing room? How much time are you there and how many people are there? What does the room look like? Is there a whiteboard? I don’t know, stuff like that?

I can’t talk about it too much. Daniel and I have been here now for, I don’t know, five weeks? We’re in the writing room every day for eight or nine hours a day. It started out with Daniel and I and Mark and Hawk and one other gentleman who’s an EP on the show whose name hasn’t been mentioned yet, so we don’t get to mention him. But the five of us sat around a table for two weeks and just talked about the series and talked about who the characters were and talked about what the later books were going to be about so that we could start seeding some of that information in. The rest of the writers showed up after those two weeks, and we moved to different offices. Now we’re actually starting to beat out the episodes and what happens in the first season and how that is broken up into ten episodes and what are things that happen in each of those ten episodes. The end of this, of course, is that people go off and start writing scripts.

Do you have any idea at this point when the series will actually be on television?

Next year. I don’t know when next year, but they’re pretty committed to getting it on the air next year. With a ten-episode run, they have a lot of flexibility on when they can start it. It used to be you had to start by a certain point because everybody’s show was twenty-two episodes, and so there was a certain time of year where all shows started. That’s no longer true, and especially with short-run series like ours, like ten episodes or twelve episodes, those sorts of series can start whenever the network wants them to start. So they have some flexibility there, and we don’t know exactly when that will be.

The other James S.A. Corey project this year was a Star Wars novel called Honor Among Thieves. You want to tell us a bit about that?

It’s a boring story. I know some people at Random House, and they were looking for somebody to write this Han Solo novel, and one of the people at Random House says, “Have you considered James S.A. Corey? He kind of writes stuff that’s kind of like Star Wars.” Not really, but I guess for those people, anything that’s SF is the same. They were like, “You should talk to this guy.” The people at Del Rey contacted us and said, “Would you be interested in doing this?” At first, we weren’t. I have to be honest with you: We were kind of hinky on doing a Star Wars novel, but then they said, “Oh, and this novel will be about Han Solo, set between Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back.” Then, we were like, “Yeah, okay. We have to do that, right?” That’s pretty much the coolest character in the series in the coolest period in the series because it’s still got all the sexual tension with Leia before the big “I love you” dramatic reveal in Empire. We’ve still got the tension of “Is Han Solo a hero or not? Is he still a smuggler?” He’s still struggling with his own feelings on whether or not he’s actually a rebel. That’s great stuff. You have to write that book. Once they told us which book they were offering us, we had to take it.

Did you always know you were going to use the James S.A. Corey name for that, or did you ever consider using a different pseudonym?

No, they wanted Jim. James S.A. Corey is a much bigger name than Daniel or I individually. He’s a much more popular author now than even Daniel is under his own name.

Do you have any tips for writing Han Solo?

Everybody gave us advice on which books we should read and all that, but the truth is Del Rey didn’t want us to reference much in the expanded universe. The goal for these books was to be a novel that somebody who’s never read any expanded universe books could pick up and enjoy, even if the only exposure they’ve ever had to Star Wars is the movies. They didn’t want us dragging a lot of backstory from previous expanding universe novels, and they actively told us not to do that. What we did to research is we had all the movies on Blu-ray and we just sat down and watched Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back over and over and over. Mostly what we were looking for is the cadences of language. How does Han Solo talk? How does Leia talk? How do Han Solo and Chewbacca interact? What does that look like? What does it sound like? Just getting to the point where you could say anything in a Han Solo voice, where you could say anything in a Leia voice. Getting to that point before you start writing, so that when you have to write a Leia line, or you have to write a Luke Skywalker line, or you have to write a Han Solo line, the patterns of their speech are just natural. You’re not trying to force it to sound like Han Solo because I feel like that’s a trapping. The reader can kind of sense that. But if you’re just writing whatever as Han Solo and his way of speaking is just already built into your brain, then I think it comes off a little more naturally. That’s what we did. Whether we were successful or not is up to the reader, but that’s what we were trying for.

When you’re writing Chewbacca, do you say, “He growled,” or do you spell it out phonetically or do you say, “He growled in a way that Han Solo knew he meant this,” or . . . ?

Yeah, actually, that’s what we did. We used descriptive text: “Chewbacca growled, he howled, he barked” — that sort of thing. Because that’s what the movies do. Han Solo’s reaction to Chewbacca tells you what Chewbacca said, and that’s what we wanted. We wanted to have that movie feel to it, where Chewbacca makes a growl and then Han said, “It’s not my fault.” We know that Chewbacca just blamed him for something bad that just happened. A lot of the humor in their interactions comes from that, because you can see Chewbacca sort of growling around the ship and grumping around, and then Han’s reaction to that letting you know that Chewbacca is complaining about stuff is funny. That’s funny stuff, and we didn’t want to lose that.

I heard you say that one thing you noticed rewatching the movies is that Han Solo is always wrong.

That is true. If you rewatch the first two movies, the things that are true about Han Solo is that, if he says something is true, it isn’t, and if he makes a plan, it fails every single time. He is never correct about anything in the first two movies. Not once. The thing that he’s great at, though, is improvising. You have Han say, “We’re going to make the jump to light speed,” and then he pulls the lever and it doesn’t work. But, if he says, “I still got a few maneuvers up my sleeve,” and then starts yanking on handles, the Millennium Falcon does all these amazing maneuvers to escape.

That’s what Han is great at. Han is great at yanking on levers in the Millennium Falcon and making it do amazing maneuvers to dodge incoming fire. Han is great at shooting his way past stormtroopers. He has a plan, it totally fails, a bunch of stormtroopers show up, and then he and Chewy just run at them shooting and the stormtroopers run away. That was never the plan. The plan was never “Let’s just charge the stormtroopers and they’ll chicken out and run away,” but he does it and it works. That’s what we love about Han, and capturing that in the books was important to us: that we have him be sort of a bumbler when he’s making plans, but when he’s just improvising, he kicks ass.

I’ve heard a lot of people suggest actually that the original trilogy works so well because of Han Solo, that he’s sort of an average guy just trying to do his job, doesn’t believe in any of this Jedi crap, and it gives it this grounding in reality. And when you make everybody a Jedi or president or something in the prequels, you lose that everyman quality that makes the whole thing work.

It’s silly and when everybody’s taking it seriously, it comes across as silly. You have to have at least one guy going, “Come on, this is ridiculous.” As long as you have one guy saying that, it takes the curse off of it, to use a writing term. If you have something really improbable happen in your story, and one person in the story goes, “Wow, that was really improbable,” that’s what the reader is thinking, so having a character say it takes the curse off of it. Han Solo is that guy in the first three movies. He’s the guy who’s going, “This is ridiculous. What are we doing here?” And because he’s saying that, it’s okay. When everyone on screen is taking it seriously, the audience stops taking it seriously. That is a truth of storytelling.

What do you think about the upcoming J. J. Abrams/Rian Johnson Star Wars movies?

I have no idea what to think. I don’t know. I’m not a huge fan of the Star Trek reboot, but I recognize that J. J. is an extremely talented filmmaker, and his stuff looks gorgeous. Maybe it’ll be awesome, I don’t know. We’re going to have to wait and see I guess.

And we understand that Han Solo is coming back, so maybe that’ll help.

Maybe. I heard the Millennium Falcon fell on his legs.

We’re just about out of time. Do you want to just talk about any new or upcoming projects you have going on?

We got this TV show. That’s coming out next year, so everybody should watch that. Cibola Burn just came out a couple of weeks ago. If you don’t have a copy, you should buy that. And we’re working on writing the fifth book.

Is there anything you can say about the fifth book? I actually heard you guys say that you’re really excited about this one; a lot of plot threads are going to come together.

Yeah, the fifth book is the axle around which the entire series is involved. We get to do a lot of stuff. We’ve been dropping in hints about stuff in book five since book one. The tentative title for it is Nemesis Games. Other than that, I don’t know what else I can really say.

I heard Daniel say they always change his titles.

They always change his titles, but they tend to keep mine. I don’t know why that is. We have a pretty good justification for calling it Nemesis Games, and it fits with the structure that they like. They really like “a mythological thing has or does something.” We’re using nemesis in the Greek mythology term. Nemesis is a Greek god, or a Greek mythological character, I should say. So they should like that.

Well, I really enjoyed Cibola Burn, and I’m really looking forward to Nemesis Games or whatever they end up calling it.

Whatever they end up calling it, yeah.

Ty, I really just want to thank you for joining us today.

Thank you for having me.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is hosted by David Barr Kirtley, who is the author of thirty short stories, which have appeared in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Lightspeed, in books such as Armored, The Living Dead, Other Worlds Than These, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and on podcasts such as Escape Pod and Pseudopod. He lives in New York.

Interview: Lawrence Krauss

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Physicist Lawrence Krauss is the author of such books as A Universe from Nothing and The Physics of Star Trek. The new documentary film, The Unbelievers, follows him and Richard Dawkins as they travel the world arguing in favor of atheism.

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.

Tell us about this new movie, The Unbelievers. How did you get involved with that?

The young team that made it were actually fans of ours and had attended one of the first events I’d put on in the Origins project at Arizona State University, and it was an amazing event. We filled up an auditorium with six thousand people for twelve hours to listen to science. We had most of the well-known scientists and public intellectuals in the world there, and it was an amazing event.

Afterward, they accosted me in the parking lot, I remember, and they were fans and they had said — Gus, who’s now the director, had said that it reminded him of a rock concert. They were former musicians. They were also filmmakers but they enjoyed several films, one of them by Radiohead that explored what it was like to tour, to be on the road. What they wanted to make was a rock-and-roll tour film about science. In any case, all of this I heard later.

We started to talk and a few years later, they asked me to do a cameo in actually a science fiction movie that they were making, which is almost finished now. But I did it, and I was very impressed with the quality of the work they were doing, and when we needed some people to film and potentially record several of our events for archiving, for the Origins project, I asked them to do it.

The first event they did was an event with me and Richard, but I was blown away by the quality of the product. They had talked to me about doing various films, including ones of my books, and Richard and I were scheduled to do a tour of Australia together doing several dialogues, and three weeks before we actually went, I actually managed to secure funding. It’s amazing to think they put it together in three weeks, and had a film crew of six people, two different crews in Australia, and that started what ended up being about eight months of following us around in various locations, first in Australia, in New York, in England, Washington, and Phoenix. They ended up doing a hundred and twenty hours of footage of us and put together the movie.

At the same time, we also thought about whether it would be reasonable to have them interview, or have us interview, other people — in particular, celebrities. It’s all right for Richard and I to be promoting science and reason, people know we do, but I like the idea of trying to reach a broader audience, and it seemed to me important for people to know their cultural role models, ranging from directors to movie stars, even though they aren’t scientists, were fascinated by science. We were fortunate to get several — a lot of people I knew — from Woody Allen to Cameron Diaz to Werner Herzog, Ricky Gervais and others, to agree to be interviewed. Those interviews are at the beginning and end of the movie, and I think they’re great, and of course, they also hopefully will attract some people who don’t know who Richard and I are.

The idea is to not proselytize so much against religion, but rather to get people talking, to get them thinking. My great hope is that it will reach an audience who haven’t thought about these questions. The early results were encouraging. We had a big screening where we provided people with questionnaires and we learned a number of things. First of all, people said that after the movie, they spent the evening at a restaurant talking the whole evening about the movie and having a discussion with their friends, which is exactly what we want. Also equally interesting, people who declared themselves as religious were perhaps the strongest group for saying that they would encourage friends to see the movie, which really surprised us, and that was also encouraging.

Now that it’s out on iTunes and Amazon and many places around the world, it’s really encouraging to see that it’s got a broad audience — it’s right now the number one documentary on iTunes, and that’s the point. It’s not just to preach to convert; I’m hoping we reach a broad audience and get discussions going about the nature of science and reality and truth and nonsense, and it ends on a high note. It actually ends interestingly enough — and this says something — the last scenes are something called “The Reason Rally,” the rally for reason that was in Washington D.C. about two years ago, and thirty thousand people — from atheists to secularist to humanists — came to the Mall to celebrate reason. What’s amazing is that no mainstream media outlet covered it. Thirty thousand people were on the Mall at Washington and no mainstream outlet covered it, which I think says something about the difficulty of openly saying that you question the existence of God, and as I say in the movie, “It’s unfortunate that you simply can’t ask questions when it comes to religion as you can with every other human activity from politics to sex.”

I’ve been really excited about this movie since I first heard of it, and we’ve been contacting Gus for over a year, it seems like, trying to set up an interview, and so I’ve gotten a little bit of a glimpse of all the distribution problems and things that the movie has gone through. From your perspective, what kind of challenges has the movie faced?

It’s been a learning experience. I’ve written a lot of books and I’ve appeared in a lot of documentaries, but I’ve never been involved in helping produce one at that level. The first thing I discovered is that documentaries are simply hard to get distributed in general. Most distribution companies and media people don’t think there’s a market for documentaries, which surprised me a lot, and even though there was clearly a built-in audience — almost three hundred thousand people downloaded or viewed the trailer for this movie in the first month that the trailer came out. When we did our world premiere, which was in Toronto at the Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival a year ago, the movie was sold out almost instantly. There were lines for six hours to wait through the rain for extra seats, last man standing room, and they had to add an extra showing of the movie, and we thought, “Wow, that’s a good sign.”

Even then, we couldn’t make a deal for distribution and partly, of course, it’s the problems of documentaries in general. Most documentaries don’t get distributed. But also, I think there’s no doubt, the concern of some people at least, that a movie that’s perceived to be about atheism might have problems with distribution and sales, and I’m happy that the results of the last week, at least, have proved us right and those people wrong. There is interest, but even then, even from the time we signed with a distribution company to get attention paid to ultimately distributing it, and we felt very bad because the fan base was asking for this movie for a long time, and we said, “Well, we signed a distribution deal.” They said, “Great, when’s it going to come out?” We didn’t know, and it’s been over a year since the world premiere, although that often happens.

People don’t realize that movies get announced often a year before they come out, but there was great frustration among many people who kept saying, “Why won’t it come out? Why? What are you doing? Why are you holding on to it?” We were as frustrated as anyone else, and we tried to convey that. It’s nice that at least an initial release has taken place, but even so, of course, around the world, there are various countries where it hasn’t come out yet. It’s come out in the United States, Canada, and England, and digitally on Video On Demand, iTunes, and Amazon. The DVD will be available probably by the end of this month. I’m in Australia right now and a lot of the movie happens in Australia. We had an Australian premiere at the Sydney Opera House, but it still hasn’t come out here. It’s frustrating.

Could you talk a little bit about your friendship with Richard Dawkins? How did you guys first meet and how did you become this tag-team duo traveling the globe?

It was sort of organic-involved. There was no strategy. We first met probably over a decade ago at an event that we were both speaking at, and we actually disagreed. As Richard has described, his first memory is me asking a question after a talk of his that was a difficult question to answer, and we disagreed about, I think, strategy in terms of reaching the public. I was concerned at the time about whether the best way to reach people was to approach them and say, “You’re wrong,” and maybe “You’re stupid, or at least you’re not thinking correctly,” whether you should instead approach people a little more gently.

We had a long discussion about that, and in fact, [based on] our initial discussion about educating people about science and about the nature of religion, following a late evening-long discussion that we had, we decided to put it together as a Scientific American article, which was a dialogue between the two of us. That was fun to work together on, and that was beginning of our relationship and our friendship, and then we’ve been together at events, not because we’re asked to be together, but we often have appeared together. Maybe about seven years ago, Stanford University asked us to do an event together, and they wanted to have a moderator with us on stage, and Richard was pretty adamant ultimately that we shouldn’t have a moderator, that it should just be a dialogue between the two of us. That created a new style, which was very successful.

And as he says in the film, moderators usually get in the way. If there’s more than two people around, then when those two people, A and B, are having an interesting conversation, the moderator will often interrupt in the middle and say, “What do you think about that, C?” and just break the flow. Obviously, I think you have to be a fairly well-conditioned public speaker to be able to comfortably have a dialogue and know how to pace it, but we both have done that a lot.

So I really enjoyed it and Richard did, and I think the audience did. We decided that we liked that format a lot, and Richard wrote the afterword for my most recent book, A Universe from Nothing. He had a new book coming out, The Magic of Reality, around that time, and we thought it would be fun to have a series of dialogues talking about both those books or the content of both those books, going back and forth, and talking about everything from evolutionary biology to physics. We had a dialogue at Arizona State, which had been filmed by Gus and Luke almost six months before we did the Australian tour, and then we did the Australian tour, and it was a challenge. It’s not so easy, but it was fun.

Those form the basis of material for producing the movie. We also have, for want of better words, each been asked to debate groups — from Muslim groups to the Archbishop of Sydney. All of those things appear as well, at least little bits of those events, to demonstrate the kind of things that we’re doing. We became not only close friends, but I think our views have certainly converged. I don’t know if Richard has moderated his views a lot, but he has, and I’ve come to appreciate much more the need to be honest and confront the religious nonsense that permeates so much of our society. People often call Richard strident, and maybe I did, but once my last book came out — and again, in the book, I just asked questions. There are very few places where I even discussed religion, but people react and call me strident just for saying, “You know what? How dare you propose that God isn’t necessary to create a whole universe? That you can create a whole universe from nothing?” I began to realize that just asking questions, you get called strident, and Richard is often misrepresented as being so. I guess I’ve come to appreciate that a lot more as I get condemned for the same heresies as him.

It was really interesting when The God Delusion first came out, all you heard in the press was, “Oh, Richard Dawkins is so philosophically and theologically naïve. Real philosophers/theologians would just make mincemeat out of him.” And I have to say, watching him debate various people, I have not been impressed at all by the arguments that they’ve been able to muster against him.

I have to say this — and I’ll get more hate mail, especially from philosophers, about this — but I’ve now done tons of debates with religious apologists and philosophers, and for the most part, they’re incredibly weak. Especially, I find, the philosophers. Let me point out I have a lot of friends who are philosophers who understand the relationship between philosophy and science, but there are some people, some philosophers, who think philosophy in some sense is a substitute for science. In my book, I made a joke which perhaps infuriated that group. I talked about the fact that a number of philosophers and theologians take exception with my discussion of nothing, and as I said, well, they’re experts at nothing. And, of course, that set the stage for subsequent debate.

But you’re right. I’m often called philosophically naïve or theologically naïve. Then when you try and base the discussion not on theology or philosophy but on science, they still say, “Oh, you’re theologically naïve.” This is the point. I was once in the Vatican at the Pontifical Academy, lecturing, believe it or not, and talking to theologians. I was being a little facetious but I was also being honest. I said, “You know what? You have to listen to me but I don’t have to listen to you.” What I meant by that is that to be a — I don’t know if this phrase is an oxymoron — but to be a sensible theologian or at least one who has pretense of being scholarly, you at least have to have some vague idea of what’s going on in science. How old the universe is, etc., etc. But to do science, you don’t have to know anything about theology, anything that theologians and to some extent philosophers do. Scientists don’t read theology, they don’t read philosophy. It doesn’t make any difference to what they’re doing. It may not be a value judgment, but it’s true.

You mentioned Richard Dawkins being misrepresented, and I don’t know if you saw this, but just in the last day or so, a bunch of people were posting this story from The Guardian about Richard Dawkins saying fairy tales are bad for kids. I’ve been through this before with Harry Potter, so I know that this is completely made up, but it’s just crazy how often this completely ridiculous headline gets resurrected.

You just have to add one word. Richard would say religious fairy tales are bad for kids, and the reason is the difference between fairy tales and religious fairy tales is one we tell kids as stories to put them to sleep and one to get them excited. We tell them about Santa Claus, but we don’t expect them to believe it when they grow up, and we also don’t suggest it’s the truth. In some sense, fairy tales are to provoke kids to think and that’s what Richard’s all about.

You’re right, all sorts of distortions of his position are presented and you can see them. You can see some of this, and the same for me. In the movie, there’s a discussion with the Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal Pell, who happily for the Australians has now been moved to Rome, because he’s a very, very, I have to say, dislikable or hateful individual. At least he comes across that way and also, unfortunately, rather ignorant. But throughout their debate on TV, Cardinal Pell misrepresents evolution and Richard’s views, and misrepresents mine, although it’s not in the movie. We were both supposed to be in the program with him but he said he didn’t want to debate two people. So he took advantage of that to completely misrepresent my viewpoints as well, and it happens all the time. I can’t tell you how many times I read on blogs and websites complete distortions about what I say and again, complete distortions about what Richard says, but to be fair, I think it’s true of any public figure that you have to get used to being misquoted and misrepresented.

Whenever I bring up these sorts of Richard Dawkins arguments against religion, people always say there’s no point in even arguing about religion; nobody ever changes their mind; no rational argument ever convinces anyone to change their minds. And I have to say that most of my friends these days are atheists. Virtually all of them were raised religious, and virtually all of them changed their minds in response to rational arguments that they heard presented to them over the years, so I don’t know why people are so certain that you can never change someone’s mind by presenting rational arguments.

Since I like to base my, quote, “beliefs” on empirical reality, I have lots of evidence that supports your viewpoint. In particular, both Richard and I, although we don’t show it in the movie so much, get email every single day from people who tell us that our debates, our discussions, and our books have changed their lives, that they had been trapped, and it’s unfortunate. People think there’s nothing, that religion is innocuous. Even if religion doesn’t say to cut someone’s head off if they steal something or whatever, it’s not innocuous; it causes people pain. I get emails all the time from people saying, “I was in a family, and I began to question things, and I felt like a bad person. I was ostracized, and your books and the movie or the debates have shown me that I’m not alone and that I can think for myself.” So our discussions do have an impact.

More than that, when we debate some religious fundamentalist or maybe an apologist or whatever, we don’t expect to change the minds of those individuals. They don’t listen to what we’re saying, that’s true. That’s not the reason one does it, if one chooses to do it. It’s really for the vast [majority of] people in the middle. In England, in the census, they ask people’s religious affiliations and I think fifty-four percent in the last British census, fifty-four percent of the people declared they were Christian, which was the lowest ever, although still the majority. But Richard’s foundation went and did a subsequent survey of people who checked the Christian box, and they said, “Well, do you believe in this? Do you believe in the transubstantiation? Do you believe in the virgin birth? Do you believe in this, do you believe in that?” Universally, people would say no, no, no, no, no, and then ultimately the question was, “Why did you check the box?” The answer is, “Well, I like to think of myself as a good person.” So people like to say they’re religious or Christian, because to not say so is to often be labeled as evil, and we have to change that in our society.

All those people, really they should be checking Jedi because they’re clearly good guys, right?

Yeah, exactly, and moreover, as my late friend (and the movie, as people will see, is dedicated to Christopher Hitchens, who is a friend of both Richard’s and mine, and a remarkable man) said, “Religion poisons everything.” As Richard points out adequately, and now I guess I try to, people say, “Okay, well, religion has nothing to do with science, but it’s a guide for how we should live.” Well, it’s a pretty darn poor guide for how we should live. If you look at the Old Testament, it’s hard to find a more immoral book, and the same is true of all the scriptures of all the world’s religions. They’re not guides to live. You wouldn’t want to live the way they say, and if you do, inevitably, it produces violence and hatred.

Another reason we wanted to get you on the show is because you’re the author of The Physics of Star Trek, so I did want to talk about some science fiction stuff with you as well. You mentioned that Gus, the director of this Unbelievers film, did a science fiction film in which you had a cameo. Tell us about that.

It’s a time-travel story. It’s a film that they’re just finishing up now, and it’s a film involving a young boy who is interested in science. There is a scene where he comes to my university and has a chat with me, and I haven’t seen the whole film. I’ve done the cameo, and I know they’re working on post-production now. Obviously, I’ve been interested in science fiction. Gus and his brother Luke, who’s the director of cinematography, have been big fans of science fiction. So it’s neat to be in a science fiction movie. There’s actually another movie that I’ve done a cameo in which has elements of science fiction in it called London Fields. It’s actually a mainstream Hollywood movie that’s coming out with several major stars, but I’m not allowed to let you know who. It’ll be fascinating to see what we filmed for a day, what comes out in that.

The other thing I should add is that Gus and Luke’s family are extremely religious people. They came from a fundamentalist background, and it’s been interesting for their family to see the movie. They’ve experienced the same breakout that in some sense many people write to us about, and I think that’s part of what they wanted to celebrate — their own recognition of skepticism and inquiry and science. I suspect their interest in science fiction probably helped them be interested in science, and for many young people, it’s a chicken-and-egg case. I don’t know whether when I was a kid I read science fiction because it encouraged my interest in science or whether my interest in science encouraged my interest in science fiction. As Steven Hawking says in the foreword for The Physics of Star Trek, “Science fiction encourages the imagination like science,” and it’s a wonderful thing for that reason.

So you’re obviously a Star Trek fan. What other science fiction books or movies are some of your favorites?

I used to read a lot of science fiction when I was younger. I read some Isaac Asimov. I read John Wyndham, a British science fiction author. Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes and, I think, Village of the Damned.

Midwich Cuckoos is the book.

Midwich Cuckoos, that’s right. The movie got made into Village of the Damned. I liked him a lot for some reason, and I read science fiction short stories. I read Robert Heinlein. I read a number of the major science fiction authors. It’s interesting because what happened to me is that as my interest in science began to blossom, as I became a scientist, I stopped reading science fiction as much and read science, because frankly, as I try and say in The Physics of Star Trek, although I certainly watched Star Trek — every episode when I was a kid, because I liked it (I also watched a lot of TV in general) — but truth is stranger than fiction. The real universe is actually far more fascinating than the universe of science fiction. The imagination of the universe far exceeds the human imagination, and therefore, for me, as amusing as science fiction is, I usually find it comes up short when compared to the real universe.

You mentioned Steven Hawking, and one of the things I wanted to ask you about is you often quote his line about how we know that there’s no time travel because we haven’t met any time travelers from the future.

Yeah, though as you also probably heard me say, he changed the line in the preface of the book, and I claim that one of the reasons was that I told him that they all went back to the 1960s and no one noticed. In fact, it is a paradox. Time travel is probably — I’m probably anticipating your question, and if I’m not, we can change the subject — but for me, time travel is probably the most interesting science fiction concept, because of course it brings up all these paradoxes. My favorite episodes of Star Trek involve time travel, and the whole paradox of time travel, of changing the past, is a fascinating one. In fact, it’s that paradox that’s convinced many physicists, including Steven, initially, that time travel in the real universe isn’t possible. But as he recognizes, because he’s a scientist, the universe doesn’t give a damn what we care or what we like or what we think is reasonable. Time travel may seem unreasonable, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Just as much of quantum mechanics seems unreasonable but it happens.

I don’t know if you saw the movie Primer, but it presents the idea that you could build a box in which time goes backward, and so an implication of that is that you could travel backward in time but only back to the point at which the box was constructed. So it’s possible that in the future, time travel will be invented, but you’ll need sort of a receiving station, and you can’t travel back any farther than that.

Actually, there’s some relationship of that to science. It’s called closed timelike curves. The idea is that, in general relativity, time and space are related intimately as part of what we call space-time in both special and general relativity. Now, you could do a circle in space, no problem. I can travel from Australia to the United States — I’ll be doing it tomorrow in fact — and then I can come back, as I’ll do in July. So there’s no problem doing round trips in space, and so, if you think about it, why can’t you do a round trip in time? Such a round trip in time is exactly what you’re talking about, because of course, you return to the point you began but not earlier. These things are called closed timelike curves.

The big question in physics is: Are closed timelike curves possible? There’s a lot of debate and discussion about that, and there are some good reasons for thinking potentially not. In general relativity, you can create any curve you want, including the closed timelike curve, if you create the kind of space, designer space, if you wish. But to create a designer space, you’d need special kinds of energy. The question is, are those kinds of energy physically realizable? That’s the ultimate question. The initial evidence isn’t good, but we don’t know for certain. But again, in those kinds of closed timelike curves, you sort of get around the time travel paradox because you cannot only return to time before the machine was constructed, if you wish, but you’re doomed to repeat the mistakes in the past. The curve repeats itself; it never changes, and therefore, you get around this ultimate paradox, which I mentioned in the book and which is a famous paradox — I call it the Grandmother Paradox — which is what happens if you go back in time and kill your grandmother before your mother was born. Well, then your mother’s never born, but then you were never born, and if you were never born, how did you go back in time and kill your grandmother? So you get around those kinds of fascinating paradoxes of the Terminator and other things. It makes time travel less interesting, perhaps, but it’s still fascinating to know whether even that’s possible.

I heard you say in your lecture on The Physics of Star Trek that faster-than-light travel, like we see in a lot of science fiction movies — Star Wars, Star Trek — necessarily involves time travel? Could you talk about that, and is a science fiction author who chooses to have faster-than-light travel, like hyperspace jumps in Star Wars, obligated to also have time travel be something those characters can do?

In principal, of course, you’re entitled to anything you want. The operative word in science fiction, we should say — and several science fiction authors have agreed with me on this — the operative word is not science. It’s fiction. You have to tell a good story, and you have to get people to suspend disbelief in a way that’s plausible. Then you can do whatever you want. Science fiction doesn’t have to be accurate. It has to be interesting. In general, it is true that if you were to create something like wormholes, as I talk about in the book (wormholes allowed, of course, Jodie Foster in Contact to go from one place to another, and there’s my favorite wormhole in Star Trek), it’s a good way to travel through space, in principle, faster than light because you take a short cut. You go from one point to another by making a new tunnel, if you wish, that connects those two points that’s much shorter than going through the background space. It’s a good idea if you can do it, but as has been shown, if you were to create such a tunnel, automatically, you would have to have a time machine.

Now, it’s also true that if you could travel literally faster than light — which by the way, you can’t; you can’t travel faster than light through space — but if you could, then time would go backwards. In fact, it’s the reason, as I talk about in one of my other books, why antiparticles exist as Richard Feynman first discussed. For every particle in nature, there is an equal mass and opposite charge, and it turns out that we can show that antiparticles exist because essentially, they behave like particles going backward in time, and a negative charge going backward in time is equivalent to a positive charge going forward in time. If you could travel faster than light, relativity tells you that you’d be going backwards in time. We’ve searched for such particles — they’re called tachyons — particles that are doomed to have ever traveled faster than light would literally be traveling backward in time. Although there’s no sensible theory that incorporates such objects, physicists recognize they shouldn’t be guided by theory all the time, that they should be guided by experiment. So people look for tachyons and, of course, never see them.

I definitely understand that you can’t have a velocity through space that’s faster than light, but if you were to take some sort of shortcut through space, folding space, or going through a wormhole, you would still be traveling through time anyway, right?

I can explain to you how to do it. It’s pretty simple. At least I think it is. If you have a wormhole, then one mouth of the wormhole is anchored to one place in space and the other mouth is anchored at another place in space, and you go through the wormhole, and you come out somewhere else. But one end of the wormhole could be moving through space, say, at near the speed of light. Let’s say it does a big circle in space at near the speed of light, five light years around. Well, that end of the wormhole is traveling through space. Einstein’s special theory of relativity tells us that an observer sitting at that end of the wormhole, their clocks would be moving slower than the clocks of the observer at the other end of the wormhole who’s at rest in space. So one observer may see the other observer far away at that end of the wormhole going on a ride five light years around, and if they’re traveling near the speed of light, it will take them almost five years to do that. Fine. But the observer who’s on the mouth of the wormhole that’s moving, their clocks are traveling slowly and that whole trip may just take two weeks. So that observer is now five years minus two weeks behind the observer at the other end of the wormhole, so if you go through the wormhole, you come out five years minus two weeks earlier. A wormhole is a time machine.

Another Star Trek thing I wanted to ask you about is: You say in your lecture that the transporter is impossible because a) of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and b) because the amount of data to record every atom of the human body is just beyond any imaginable recording device. We interviewed Brian Greene a number of episodes back now, and he was saying that this quantum teleportation that takes advantage of quantum entanglement has the potential, in the future, to possibly get around Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle for teleporting objects.

Brian should know better. It doesn’t ever get around Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. What it does is exploit the weird behavior of quantum mechanical systems to allow, if you very specially prepare a quantum mechanical system, you to do what looks like teleportation. But the whole point is we are not — we, you and me — are not specially prepared quantum mechanical systems. We are not. One of the ways to find that out is, if I were to take an electron and throw it at the wall of the room I’m sitting in, every now and then, it would literally tunnel through the wall and suddenly appear on the other side of the wall. You can, if you wish, from now to the end of time, run towards that wall with your head forward and bang into the wall, and I guarantee you that you will never end up on the other side of the wall unless you could break a hole in the process. We are not specially prepared quantum mechanical systems, and therefore, we can’t take advantage of the weird quantum mechanical properties that you can for an individual photon or even for maybe an atom or a molecule. We can use that for maybe things like quantum computing, but it’s not going to allow us to transport a human being, unfortunately, and I wish it would, believe me. The transporter is the reason I wrote the book. I found it fascinating, and also, since unfortunately I fly all the time, I’d love to avoid that and figure a way to avoid the security lines in airports.

Speaking of quantum mechanics, I heard you say something years ago that really stuck with me. You said that people should never use the phrase quantum mechanics and consciousness in the same sentence?

People shouldn’t. It’s all right to use in the same sentence if you say that consciousness —

Has nothing to do with.

Well, I was going to say it has nothing to do with quantum mechanics. That’s not true, in a sense, because quantum mechanics is the basis of all physical phenomena. But people who argue that you could use quantum coherence to understand consciousness — it’s a fun word and they use it, unfortunately, to argue for all sorts of New Age garbage. But your brain is a complicated system with lots of particles interacting, and it’s unlikely to expect that quantum coherence is responsible for the nature of consciousness because quantum coherence gets destroyed in most physical systems because of the many particles interacting in a small fraction of a second. Although, of course, quantum mechanics at some level underlies the atomic interactions and chemical interactions that are taking place that determine memory and, in fact, biochemistry, we’re not sophisticated, coherent quantum mechanical machines, I expect. Moreover, anyone who makes a claim about consciousness is probably lying, because we don’t understand the nature of consciousness. There are lots of people who try and make a living by being hucksters. In particular, there are those people, those awful people, who promote things like that silly, nonsensical book, The Secret, that suggest that quantum mechanics, if you think about it, it will happen. If you want it, it will happen. That somehow your desires can affect the universe, and that is the worst garbage, the worst misrepresentation of science mechanics. Fraudulent. It’s a lie, and people should ignore those people, and moreover, ridicule them.

One thing I was wondering about is, you’ve talked about how we’re just not evolved to think about quantum mechanics because we evolved from this event in Africa. I was wondering if you could upgrade your brain with cybernetics or something, what abilities would be useful for you in science? For example, being able to actually conceptualize more than three spatial dimensions, things like that?

Conceptualizing more than three spatial dimensions would be great. Probably you would have to be a four-dimensional computer to do that, but who knows? The other thing would be to have an intuitive understanding of quantum mechanics. Richard Feynman was fascinated with quantum computing. He was one of the first people to talk about using quantum mechanical principles to create new kinds of computers, as people are actually doing nowadays, or trying to do. He wanted to do it so he could understand quantum mechanics better, and you might say very few people understood quantum mechanics as well as him, but he recognized that, because he was a classical being, he could never really intuitively understand the quantum phenomena. So he wanted to create a quantum computer to see those quantum phenomena more explicitly. Of course, being able to intuitively experience quantum mechanical phenomena by maybe being a quantum computer might give you a whole new appreciation of physics. In fact, maybe in the future, computers will become conscious. I don’t see any reason why they couldn’t. My friend Frank Wilczek, who’s another physicist, a Nobel-prize winning physicist, has said that what really interests him is will those computers do physics differently than we would? It’s a fascinating question and it’d be interesting to know.

Given the name of the show, obviously we’re big Douglas Adams fans, and Douglas Adams wrote a sequel to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy called The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

Which is the title of one of the chapters in one of my books, by the way.

Excellent. Just based on the latest cosmological knowledge, if you were to build a restaurant at the end of the universe inside the time-space bubble, when would that be and what would the view be like from the restaurant?

Unfortunately, as I described, I think, in The Universe from Nothing, the future is miserable in many ways, and the universe is not likely to end with a bang but rather a whimper, a long, boring whimper. What would happen if you were at the restaurant at the end of the universe is you’d be very lonely, because our universe remarkably is expanding faster and faster. One of the great discoveries of the last twenty years is that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Eventually, all the galaxies that we now see will be moving away from us faster than light. That’s allowed. They’re not moving through space faster than light. Space is carrying them away faster than light, and they’ll eventually disappear in a time frame of about two trillion years.

All the galaxies we now see will have disappeared and our Milky Way galaxy will be alone and lonely, and all the evidence of the Big Bang will have disappeared for physicists who evolve on planets around stars in the far future. They’ll look out and all of the evidence that we now have that there was once a Big Bang will have disappeared. Ultimately, those stars in our galaxy, or what will become the Milky Way galaxy because we’ll collide with several other galaxies in the interim, will burn out, and the universe will become cold, dark, and empty. That’s the future.

As my late friend Christopher Hitchens used to say when I talked about nothing and I explained that to him — he used to say, “Nothing’s heading towards us about as fast as can be, and if you ask the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing,’ one of the good answers that he proposed was ‘just wait, there won’t be for long.’”

So, say the owners of the restaurant at the end of the universe want to open up a new franchise location at the beginning of the universe. What would that view look like?

They would have a hard time doing it, because all evidence of the beginning of the universe would have disappeared, basically. All evidence of the hot Big Bang would have disappeared, and they wouldn’t even have access to the information that it happened much less access to the beginning of time. That is, of course, unless they built a time machine.

No, I’m sorry. I’m saying if they had a time machine.

Well, if they had a time machine, they would not want to create such a franchise because the beginning of the universe was an equally miserable place in a very different sense. It was unbelievably dense. In fact, if you take the things back beyond the domain of validity, it was a single point. But we talk about, with a straight face, a universe, and I wrote a book about the life history of an atom. It begins when our entire visible universe now, which contains a hundred billion galaxies, each of which contains a hundred billion stars, was contained in a region smaller than the size of an atom. You have to imagine stuffing all of that energy and matter into such a small region. It was incredibly hot, incredibly dense, almost unfathomably so. It’s really difficult, if not impossible, to picture everything that’s now in our universe in such a region, but it once was, and what’s really neat is we can test that. We can test those ideas, and we’re doing it by looking out at the universe today and seeing remnants of that time. That’s what makes science so fascinating.

You’ve said that it’s possible that our universe is just one universe within a multiverse of universes, sort of bubbling out of nothingness and coming into existence. Is that multiverse eternal or did it itself have a beginning at some point?

The answer is: We don’t know. It is certainly eternal into the future if our ideas of inflation are correct, but we don’t know. Space and time are tied together, so as far as our universe is concerned, there may have been no before, because time itself may be a product of the creation of our universe — because time and space are tied together in general relativity. Time may have come into existence when space came into existence. We don’t know these questions, nor do I claim to know those questions despite the fact that some people largely ignorant of my book claim that I make such. We don’t know the answers, and we’re trying to find out the answers. It’s fascinating, but I guess that answer is: stay tuned.

A lot of the breakthroughs in high-energy physics, such as the discovery of the Higgs boson, came out of the Large Hadron Collider, and now the European scientists are able to do all this stuff that American scientists were not able to do because of the canceling of the Superconducting Super Collider, and I thought it was funny you said the cost of the Superconducting Super Collider was equivalent to one day’s worth of the air conditioning bill for Iraq.

One week, I think. And the question is, which is more useful? I think, in retrospect, no one who’s sensible could argue that learning about our origins is not more useful than destabilizing a country for no reason, even if the country had a dictator. We probably don’t want to get into politics. It’s sad to think that some people claim the United States could not afford what was then a six billion dollar machine. Six billion dollars sounds like a lot of money, but over twenty years, it’s not. By comparison, it’s less than the cost of probably an aircraft carrier, and if we are so impoverished that we as a society have to stop asking questions about our origins or the beginning of the universe and the end of the universe because we don’t have the money, then we are really, truly impoverished, and I don’t think we’re there.

Another thing that’s really struck me in recent years is that there was this presidential debate on religion moderated by Rick Warren, and I know some people were trying to get together a presidential science debate.

Actually, I’m one of the people. You may not know, but I’m one of the people who helped originate that effort.

I think it’s wildly inappropriate for this religious forum in a country with a constitutionally mandated separation of church and state. What are the prospects for the future? Do you think there will be a presidential science debate?

No. I’m very happy with what we managed to do. We managed to get both candidates in the last two elections to answer fourteen questions, not a science quiz. We didn’t ask them what is the seventh decimal of pi. We asked them about science policy. That’s what’s so ridiculous about a debate about religion or faith, because all the major questions that are going to face any president in the next decade, from the environment to national security to health to energy, all have a scientific basis. Science policy ultimately is vital to all of the major political decisions that are going to take place. I think the problem is there isn’t a science constituency, if you want. There are people who vote single issue on abortion or gay marriage, perhaps, but scientists can say, “We disagree with the president. Their policies in this area are bad,” but usually that single issue alone is not enough to affect their vote, let’s say, and I think as long as politicians realize that people who are fascinated by reality are not single issue voters, they’re not going to cater to them as they do to religious fundamentalists. That’s an unfortunate situation.

Finally, are there any other books, movies, anything else you want to mention?

Well, I’m writing one, but it won’t be out for another few months. No, I’ll just plug The Unbelievers again. I’m biased, of course, but I hope people enjoy it. I think it’s an enjoyable film as well as a thought-provoking one, and I hope people agree. If that’s successful, we’ll be producing other ones on science, and I’m hoping we can reach a broader audience. Of course, that doesn’t stop the writing. I’m looking forward to my next book, and maybe in a few years, we’ll have an interview about that.

Looking forward to it. Lawrence Krauss, thanks so much for joining us.

Take care.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is hosted by David Barr Kirtley, who is the author of thirty short stories, which have appeared in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Lightspeed, in books such as Armored, The Living Dead, Other Worlds Than These, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and on podcasts such as Escape Pod and Pseudopod. He lives in New York.

Artist Gallery: Rovina Cai

Rovina Cai was born in 1988 in Australia. She received a degree in Communication Design from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, then completed an MFA in Illustration at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her work has been featured in publications including Spectrum Fantastic Art. She currently works as an illustrator based in New York City. Her website is rovinacai.com.

[To view the gallery, turn the page.]

Artist Spotlight: Rovina Cai

Henry Lien

Your work is restrained in color palette and builds in ample negative space, unlike much science fiction/fantasy art, which is often saturated in colors and busily composed. Are these deliberate deviations from what we expect from science fiction/fantasy illustration?

For a long time I tried to emulate what I would see in much of the genre, because I thought I had to fit into a certain mould; using bright colours and making images with a lot going on, but it just wasn’t me. I admire complex, busy illustrations, and actually enjoyed making some “epic,” highly rendered, very colourful images for a while — but it’s not something that comes very naturally to me. Eventually I started relying more on instinct and just doing what I enjoyed most (maybe a little out of laziness, ha!). Luckily, people seemed to respond well to it, so my work now is not so much a deliberate deviation from what is expected in science fiction/fantasy, but just a choice to do my own thing regardless of fitting in.

While it does seem like science fiction/fantasy leans heavily toward the shiny and colourful, there are actually a lot of illustrators working in styles that might be considered unconventional for the genre, and these are the sort of illustrations I love best, because it challenges people’s perceptions of what fantasy art is.

Do you feel that your experience in the illustration industry has been unique as a female artist?

I’m fortunate to be surrounded by people who are incredibly supportive and encouraging; my experiences and interactions in the illustration industry so far have been very positive. I don’t think gender has ever really come up as an issue anywhere in my career.

How do you feel about the depictions of female figures in most science fiction/fantasy illustration?

I am glad that there’s recently been a lot more discussion on the issue. I think things are changing for the better. In a lot of images where women are objectified, it’s an issue with commercialism, and appealing to a specific demographic, not necessarily an issue that is restricted to science fiction/fantasy illustration. Once in a while, I’ll come across an illustration that I think is in bad taste, but I’m not personally offended by these images, I just find them to be examples of bad artwork, and bad art is everywhere; it’s not worth looking at or paying attention to. For every negative portrayal, I can think of many examples of illustrations of women that are positive, inspiring, and beautiful.

Can we talk about the motif of the line in your work? It is everywhere. There are strange ribbons, cords, and threads that spiral through your works. Even the monochromatic works are comprised of thousands of lines. They suggest many things. They suggest transformation, such as in the metamorphosis of an outline of a moth into a three-dimensional, full-color moth. They also suggest liberation, such as the tethered bird that bursts out of a mechanical torso or a tiny serpent of light rising out of a fig. Then there are suggestions of lines cocooning and constraining, which is reminiscent of the video for Björk’s “Cocoon,” directed by Oscar-winning costume designer Eiko Ishioka. What do the lines signify to you?

I was a huge Björk fan in my teenage years. I’ve never made the connection between the Eiko Ishioka video and my obsession with lines, but it makes sense that some of my teenage obsessions must be lingering in my subconscious!

Line introduces a sense of movement into a piece. In my more rendered images, I use flowing ribbons and lines as a way to create narrative, to direct the viewer’s attention. A teacher I had in grad school once mentioned something about finding the wind in an image—thinking about where the wind is coming from, and that’s what I’ve been trying to do with line — to breathe a sense of life or spirit into my images. In my looser drawings, I’m interested in exploring mark-making. A mark by itself is an abstract thing, but when it’s applied to something figurative, it takes on new meanings and interpretations that are personal to the viewer. People see different things in the mass of lines that make up a drawing, whether it is the wind, or a sense of chaos, and I like that the interpretations vary.

As artists, we do all our thinking in lines, in the form of sketches and thumbnails. This is such an immediate form of expression, but it’s often reserved for sketchbooks or scrap paper, never intended to be seen as the final product, and I think that’s a shame. Drawing is one of the most intimate forms of image-making; you can always see an artists’ hand or voice in a drawing, which is what makes it so fascinating. I’ve been focusing more on making drawings recently, because I enjoy how personal it is, and how much you can say with a couple of simple lines.

Can you discuss the element of point of view in your work? Most science fiction/fantasy illustrators seem to be heavily influenced by contemporary action filmmaking in their placement of the “camera.” The default point of view always seems to be the one that will provide the most sense of depth and motion and the most dramatic vantage point. Awe seems to be the default goal. And the choice of camera placement almost always seems calculated to draw as much attention to itself as possible. Your work does the exact opposite in that it places the point of view in unshowy and intimate places, as if it were trying to make you forget that a choice of point of view had to be made. Is this deliberate? What does it signify to you?

It’s about achieving a certain type of atmosphere in an illustration. Using a static, unobtrusive point of view creates a sense of intrigue, like you’re an outside observer of a private moment, peeking through a door or window when you’re not supposed to.
There’s also an element of theatre in this sort of point of view; the image is like a stage, everything is presented front-on, and the drama and tension comes from the arrangement and interaction of the different elements that are presented. I generally enjoy graphical compositions — where things are reduced to geometric shapes and appear flattened out, like in medieval art. I think this comes from my background in graphic design, since the goal in design is to arrange a given set of elements (text, images, etc.) into a cohesive whole. I often approach an illustration like it is a layout for a poster or book design. It’s about moving elements around, finding the right hierarchy and balance for everything.

Do you see any distinct aspects of art/illustration coming out of Australia that are different from what is coming out of other countries? Do you see your illustration as inherently Australian in any way? Of course, the beloved Shaun Tan is probably the biggest illustrator to come out of Australia in recent years. Is it unfair to see commonality between your work and his, especially in its gentle nature and subtle exploration of themes involving nature and animals?

I grew up reading Shaun Tan’s picture books and I have so much respect for his work. He is definitely one of my influences as an illustrator. I can remember the first time I read each of his books, because they are so vivid and full of meaning, and that’s the kind of effect I want my images to have on someone else one day. When I graduated from high school, my art teacher, who was very encouraging of my illustration ambitions, gave me a Shaun Tan book as a graduation gift. It meant a lot to me, and I’ve kept it ever since as motivation and a reminder of how special illustration is to me.

Despite there being a lot of wonderful Australian illustrators, there isn’t much of a community here for fantasy/science fiction illustration, especially in terms of conventions or workshops to attend, like you would find in the US. As a result of this, and also because illustration is such a global thing these days, it’s hard to pick out anything that is unique to Australian illustration. But in some work by Australians, I recognize little things that you’d only notice or find importance in if you’re familiar with a place. I identify strongly with Shaun Tan’s depiction of suburbs as these surreal, sprawling landscapes to explore, and how another artist, Jeremy Geddes, captures a sense of emptiness through the looming, monumental buildings of Melbourne’s inner city.

I’ve recently returned to Melbourne after three years abroad, and it’s kind of surreal being here. Every place I visit seems to be attached to a memory from the past. I’m hoping to make some personal work inspired by Australia and my experiences growing up here. I’m not sure what form this personal work will take yet, but the city is providing plenty of inspiration and nostalgia.

 What are your greatest influences as an artist? Film? Illustrators? Fine art painters?

This might come as a surprise since we’ve just discussed how non-cinematic my art is, but film has been a big influence on me. Some of my favourites are The Fountain for its beautiful imagery and mythology, The Fall for the costumes and cinematography, and Pan’s Labyrinth for . . . everything!

Music also influences me a lot. I often think of illustration in terms of music, using it as a way to figure out the mood or theme of a piece. My musical staples include Sigur Rós, Alcest, and film composer Clint Mansell. But sometimes my playlist is made up of endless hours of what I called “junk food music” like Nicki Minaj!

What is your dream project?

I’d love to illustrate a picture book. They were my first encounter with illustration and what inspired me to pursue this career, so it would be a dream come true to make my own some day.

I’d also love to make a deck of tarot cards, or some other extended project that involves working on a series of images.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Henry Lien is an art dealer in Los Angeles (glassgaragegallery.com). He represents artists from North America, Asia, Europe, and South America. 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 henrylien.com.

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Author Spotlight: Daniel José Older

Patrick J. Stephens

Stories like “Dust” provide a very important insight into why this kind of fiction will always remain relevant. What are your thoughts on science fiction and its importance?

Science fiction allows us to imagine both the best and worst of humanity. When we open our stories up to the realm of the fantastic, we bring a new creativity and freshness to the question of how to survive this twisted, complicated world with our souls intact. As a genre, science fiction hasn’t always been welcoming to different cultures and their answers to this question — sometimes it’s not such a comfortable answer for folks that are used to being comfortable, but I believe literature is at its best when we sit with discomfort and open ourselves to these challenges.

Lead us through how you discovered “Dust.” Where did it begin, and what do you think drove you to finish it?

A few years ago, I had this very clear narrative fragment running through my head over and over of a genderqueer cowboy-type character on an asteroid. This character was sort of punk rock and sort of a genius and moody and complicated and didn’t fit in with the other folks on the asteroid and was deeply romantic. And I knew the asteroid itself had to figure largely into the story, as a kind of unintelligible godlike figure, but that’s all I knew really. The idea of dust, this all-encompassing physical manifestation of the asteroid that is literally everywhere — that’s what tied all those pieces together for me, and Jax’s emotional relationship to the asteroid and Maya are what powered me through to the finish.

Per that last question, what was the most compelling, or most difficult part of the story to craft?

Well, being a cis-male, it was challenging to write a character who doesn’t have a fixed gender. I really wanted to allow Jax to be complex and nuanced and not play into the traditional stereotypes that SF generally squeezes non-binary people into. Along with that, I generally write ghost noir set in modern-day Brooklyn, so the technological and space age aspects of worldbuilding were new to me.

“Dust” is written in the first person, so which other voices do you think most mirror the narrator’s? Did you identify with any of the characters while writing?

I love Jax and Maya’s relationship, and while they’re very different people, they share a certain balance/tension between cynical and romantic that I very much relate to. Each of them has the scales tipped slightly differently, but I can see how their minds meet and make friends on that level.

What can we expect to see from you in the future?

My first novel, Half-Resurrection Blues, comes out in January from Penguin’s Roc imprint. It’s book one of the Bone Street Rumba urban fantasy series. And next summer my first YA book, Shadowshaper, comes out from Scholastic’s Arthur A. Levine Books.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Patrick J. Stephens graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 2012, and has published two books since his return. Aurichrome (and Other Stories) and Sondranos: the Narrative of Leon Bishop are both available in free e-book form and hard copy.

Author Spotlight: Rebecca Ore

Jude Griffin

How did this story come about?

I was living in rural Virginia, where the fragments of slavery and interracial breeding were still swirling around — one of the people I knew was a guy whose male ancestor was either R.J. or Hardin Reynolds — [of the] Reynolds Tobacco family. We saw what had happened, but didn’t always understand why things had happened. The Reynolds family sold a slave, apparently because the other slaves hated him, and bought a piano with the money. I don’t know if that’s a true narrative or not, or whether the slave was sold for any number of other reasons.

The Cotton Kingdom — who knew Olmsted had all that rattling around in his head?

Olmsted wrote this very interesting “tour through the Upper South,” which I’d read. A lot of the same cultural patterns still existed, plus I found Olmsted’s account of the white Tennessee farm owner who collected unruly blacks at auctions and let them teach each other how to read (he himself was illiterate).

Pantser or plotter?

I’ve done both — but do keep a tactical notebook for things for a project, especially novels.

“The brain always interprets” — is that a concept you revisit in other stories?

Yes. In Time’s Child (Harper Collins), it’s a minor aspect of the story, also in the Alien Trilogy, my first books. Since I wrote the story, I’ve seen the Harvard Unconscious Biases test.

Any new projects you want to tell us about?

Currently learning Spanish and have done one story for Big Click on the ways expats can screw up here by not realizing what they’re seeing (so, yeah, that’s another “the brain always interprets” — and can get things horribly wrong, too). The Nicaraguan saying is “each mind is a world of its own.”

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: Marie Vibbert

Sandra Odell

“Jupiter Wrestlerama” embraces noir sensibilities without sacrificing any of the science fiction flavors of life on a space station. What drew you to explore this combination?

This is actually a story about Niagara Falls.

I was walking in Niagara Falls, Canada, far from the strip, with my husband. We had gotten lost and ended up on a residential street — all these tiny bungalows so close to massive hotels. I wondered what it was like to live in a small town that was also a huge tourist attraction.

I wanted to write a story that took place on a space station as the ultimate closed community — an exaggeration of the trapped feeling of living in a small town, juxtaposed against the freely mobile wealthy visitors.

When I sat down to write this, I had just received a critique that none of my stories had enough plot. In a fit of pique, I said, “You want plot? Fine. I’ll write a murder mystery. Those are full of plot.” That naturally drew in the noir element, and it stayed after I decided it wasn’t really a murder mystery, but just a story with a murder in it.

Setting is important to both science fiction and noir. You make good use of physics and biology to support the setting without sacrificing the flow of the story: the trampoline and guywires for wrestling matches; black market carbs; the signs on the staircases; bone density tests. How conscious were you of your decision to present this information to the reader?

The setting was the whole impetus of the story, so I was very conscious of it. Every scene started with setting for me — the fortuneteller’s office, the gym, the Strip. Many details I just wrote as they came to me — the trampoline, the density tests. Others I carefully went back and added in once I had a good handle on my plot and knew what the readers would most need to know.

Also, I come from a blue-collar background, so it’s important to me to show blue-collar futures. I wanted there to be a laundromat. I wanted the characters to care about money and keeping their jobs. I wanted a sense of class barriers within the closed community, and barriers to escaping the community at all.

Not only do you take on more traditional genre tropes, you also tackle the stereotypes of larger men as courageous brutes, and female bodybuilders as in denial of their own femininity. What consideration did you give to your portrayal of characters that turn these stereotypes on their ears?

I’m particularly passionate about subverting gender roles, and stereotypes in general. Stereotypes can be comforting, and certainly many people build their own identity in line with one or another, but the toughest butch you know has a My Little Pony collection, and the sweetest, shyest flower will punch your lights out. Real people are full of contradictions; no one really fits the narrative perfectly, and I wanted to show that.

Besides, if you didn’t figure it out already, I’m a fierce warrior girly-girl. I lift weights, and you should see my party dress collection.

Your secret identity as an SCA recreationist offers a range of research possibilities. Have you ever taken advantage of such possibilities to fuel your writing?

Well, I did write a story about a female alchemist in 1520s France, but no one has accepted it yet. The experience of being a heavy weapons fighter — a female in a male-dominated sport — did color my portrayal of Kay. (My first draft of this story focused on her infiltrating the Wrestlerama and had her actually wrestle Jenna.)

My specialty in the SCA is Fifteenth-Century French costuming. (I’m cited on Wikipedia!) It hasn’t really come up in a science fiction setting for me, yet, but I have advised many writer friends on costume for their historical pieces.

“Jupiter Wrestlerama” ends on a gritty, realistic note, another nod towards the noirish influence. Who do you read when you want stories that reach beyond “happily ever after”?

The first name that comes to mind is Maureen McHugh, who writes beautifully literary SF. Someone needs to chain her to a keyboard and make her write more. Her endings epitomize realism and I want to be her when I grow up.

Let me be self-indulgent and mention two of my Clarion classmates: Alyssa Wong and Will Kaufman. Names to watch. Their delicious dark stories will soon be the stuff of legend if there is justice in the world.

You just finished the Clarion Write-a-Thon, and have a story coming out in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. What else can we expect from Marie Vibbert in the future?

It’s been an exciting year for me! Having made my third pro sale, I just joined SFWA. I have two stories which have been accepted, but no contracts yet, so I feel I can’t even mention the magazines, but I’ll leak that one of them is very noir. Femme Fatale Robot in the 1940s Noir. OH YEAH.

And I’m just . . . writing. I have something like sixty short stories on my hard drive after all that write-a-thon-ing. Four of them might even be good!

Oh, and I’ve written a memoir about playing women’s tackle football, which I am terrified to show anyone, and I have a couple other novel drafts which might someday be revised into something readable. Maybe.

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: Zoran Živković

Patrick J. Stephens

Creation is a very important running theme in “The Puzzle.” Did the various elements of creation — including the idea of cooking days and painting — borrow from your own perspective on the idea?

Creation is indeed a recurring theme in my fiction. In “The Puzzle” it is presented in extremis, as one of the so-called ultimate questions. Indeed, what is the purpose of any creative activity sub specie aeternitatis? The older I get, the more often I ask myself this fundamental question. If I don’t happen to find an answer eventually, I might just follow the steps of the protagonist of “The Puzzle” — simply to continue living. Indeed, what other alternative do we have?

What character trait of Mr. Adam do you feel was the most intriguing to write? The most challenging?

It was Mr. Adam’s determination to go on with any activity he chooses to perform regardless of how gigantic its proportions are. That trait had to be impeccably motivated in order not to make the protagonist look like an idiot. It is for this reason that he is a retired SETI expert.

What was the inspiration to tell a story like “The Puzzle”?

“The Puzzle” is a part of Seven Touches of Music, one of my ten mosaic novels. It is a book about how music occasionally offers us glimpses into deeper levels of reality. The idea seemed very inspirational indeed, so I have written as much as seven variations of the basic theme.

“The Puzzle” was translated from Serbian to English. How involved were you in the translation process, and what do you feel might have changed about your own process as a result?

I am very, very fortunate to have Mrs. Alice Copple-Tošić as my translator. She has translated into English eighteen out of twenty of my books of fiction. Alice knows so perfectly well the structure of my writing, my style, my idiosyncrasy, that I often have an impression, while reading her translations of my manuscripts, that my stories and novels were indeed originally written in English.

What can we expect to see from you in the near future?

Hopefully a new book — for example, the third and final part of the Inspector Dejan Lukic trilogy — although at the age of sixty-five I have to be rather careful about any long-term promises.

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: Kelly Link

Lee Hallison

This was your first published story and one that continues to resonate for readers. What inspired it?

I hadn’t written many stories at this point. I was in my first year of the MFA program at University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and needed to turn something in to workshop for the first time. Someone I knew had told me the story about how as a teenager, they had masturbated into Kleenex, and then had the problem of their dog wanting to eat the Kleenex. I also wanted to write about a mother with a wooden leg, and a surplus of dogs. I liked the idea of an awkward dinner.

Why does Rachel want Carroll to choose between love and water?

Well, one of them is necessary. The other is also maybe necessary, but the need for it is harder to define. It seems to be one of the things that only jerks make you choose between.

Rachel keeps a lot of secrets. Did you start with her character or with the idea of how loss might affect an individual and her family?

Hard to say! I did like the idea of a family who felt, reasonably or unreasonably, that they lost more than other people had to, and resented it. And stories are all about secrets, right? Keeping them or not keeping them.

Do you usually start with character, setting, or theme?

I don’t ever start with a theme. In general, I try to describe setting as little as possible. So I guess that leaves character, except I’m not really sure that this is where I start either. At least not all the time.

Why did you use dogs as a motif in this story?

Well, snakes would have been too obvious and guinea pigs not ominous enough. And there’s that whole thing in the literature of the weird, in folktales, etc., about black dogs. But I think the real question is why Christmas trees.

Carroll is hopeful at the end, despite the “heavy dragging noise” coming toward him and the moody tension of his wedding dream. Do you think he will find his Rachel or experience true loss?

Nice try! Awful, isn’t it, the way I never end things.

What are you currently working on?

I’ve just finished a story — the last story to go into my next collection. The collection is Get in Trouble. The story is called “The Lesson.” I’ll also have a new story out in Stephanie Perkins’ anthology My True Love Gave to Me. That one’s called “The Fox and the Lady.” And then there’s Monstrous Affections, which Gavin and I co-edited for Candlewick. I’m taking a bit of a break to read novels. Because the next thing I have to do is write a novel.

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: Steve Hockensmith

Jude Griffin

How did “The Herd” come into being?

A few years back, John Joseph Adams asked if I might be interested in contributing a story to Dead Man’s Hand, a “Weird Western” anthology he was putting together. I thought that sounded like a lot of fun, so eventually I whipped up “The Herd” for him. It seemed to slip through the editorial cracks, however, and the story didn’t make it into the book. I just thought, “Oh, well — maybe that story sucks.” But then John recently got back in touch to see if he could run the story in Lightspeed. So I looked at the story again, realized to my relief that it doesn’t suck (in my opinion), and gratefully accepted his offer.

The title made me look for parallels between the herd ruled over by The General, how the people in the town were ruled, and what happened when a herd member tried to stray: Was that your intention or was the title meant to indicate something different?

Bingo! Yes, you’re absolutely supposed to pick up on a parallel between the cattle and the people in the town and also between The General and the narrator.

“Beeves”: Who knew this was a real word? Where did you first come across it?

I’ve written a mystery series set in the Old West — the “Holmes on the Range” novels — so I’ve done a ton of research into cowboy life and slang. One of the things I enjoyed most about writing the “Holmes on the Range” books was the chance to throw around a lot of colorful words and turns of phrase, so I did that in “The Herd,” too.

What are the challenges of mixing vocabulary across centuries (“dude” vs. “Old Scratch,” for instance) in one character’s speech?

I think the primary danger is corniness. If you lay it on too thick or use a lot of clichés, you’re going to turn most modern readers off in a big hurry. Another challenge, of course, is coherence. You don’t want to toss in a bunch of obscure words just to show off, because your readers will end up doing a lot of work just to understand what you’re saying, and again you’ll lose them. A story set in the Wild West needs some old-timey flavor, in my opinion, but that flavoring also needs to be sprinkled on lightly.

Why is the protagonist able to walk away from the first bar, while his companions are not?

They don’t try to leave. They’re happy where they are. It’s a case of bread and circuses — and beer and babes.

The power of three in stories: I expected a third interaction around town names after Schultzton and Goddard City: Were you tempted?

Yup. But there’s a rule of conservation at work in short stories, too: Don’t introduce a character you don’t need to advance the plot. I could’ve had one more person lay claim to the town, but what other purpose would that character serve?

The protagonist briefly experiences an apparent Judeo-Christian Hell, which made me wonder if the town is also framed by the same religious outlook, but it seems more ambiguous: Heaven for some (like Jawbone), a minor Hell for others. What was your thinking?

What do cows make of a farm? Do they have any idea what a semi-truck is? What do they think they’re looking at when they peer through the slates of the trailer on the interstate and see buildings and bridges whipping by? Do they ever grasp what the slaughterhouse is, or is it just a swirl of noise and light and confusion and terror? Whatever that experience is to them, the narrator’s experience is to him.

Why do some characters blink out of existence?

It’s their time. Maybe they’ve been plumped up enough, maybe it’s something else. We all blink out of existence sooner or later. A lot of people have put a lot of effort into understanding why we do — and why we were here in the first place — but so far I haven’t heard any answers that I find particularly satisfying.

You write across a number of genres and age groups: Any forays into new genre/age group territories planned?

At the moment, I’ve got my hands full with two series: the middle-grade mysteries I write with “Science Bob” Plugfelder and the adult, tarot-themed mysteries I write with Lisa Falco. I’m also really eager to relaunch the “Holmes on the Range” series, and I have a million other ideas for middle-grade, YA, and adult books in the mystery, thriller, Western, horror, science fiction, and fantasy genres. If I live to be 300, maybe I’ll have found time to write them all . . .

Any projects you want to tell us about?

My most important project at the moment is meeting my next three book deadlines without having a nervous breakdown. Wish me luck!

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: Ysabeau S. Wilce

Robyn Lupo

How did this story come about for you? Where did the voice of the narrator come from?

I wrote this story while I was at Clarion West. The whole thing — character, voice, action — just sort of sprang, as it were, completely out of nowhere. I stole the name Springheel Jack from the notorious early nineteenth-century monster, but the shiny red boots were a riff on the fairy tale of the red shoes. Instead of making you dance until you drop, these boots make you steal until you drop.

This story shows a lot of color: blue for the cold, the tenement, and poverty; red for the shiny boots, and the promise of what the boots can bring our Jack. What prompted this choice? Do you dabble in the visual arts yourself?

I work purely in words, but I try to be as vivid as possible in my description. I hadn’t actually noticed until now the oppositional use of red and blue — it was a lucky accident, I guess.

What’s next for you? Do you think you’d expand on Jack’s adventures as you see them?

Springheel Jack does appear in my other novels, in varying guises. I see him as a trickster character, so I never know where he is going to show up or what he’s going to be up to when he does. In fact, he is a major character in my current work in progress so we’ll definitely be hearing more from him.

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: Megan Kurashige

Liz Argall

How did this story come about?

It’s silly, but the only reason I wrote this story is because I became irrationally attached to the title. I originally had an idea to write a story called “The Quality of Descent” that would be about a very long-lasting fall from a very high hot air balloon. There was going to be a storm of golden pollen that gave everyone clairvoyant abilities. I started writing this story and it was terrible — leaden, plodding, completely devoid of humor. It was so bad that there was nothing to rescue except the title. But I loved that title. So I started excavating the inside of my head for something the shape of that title. I’ve had, for years and years, a recurring dream in which I’m flying above a stage and then my massive, ridiculously white, picture-book wings fall off. I went from there.

This story has a great title. What are the qualities of descent you think of when you see this title?

I’m a little obsessed with the physical act of falling. There’s something about it that’s beautifully, dreadfully naked. It’s hard to maintain any sort of mask or fakery when you’re taking a surprise plunge toward the ground. My sister, Shannon, and I once filmed a few of our friends as they pretended to be shot. The most interesting part was when they fell down. No matter how cheesy or slapstick or dramatic they made it, something about their fall was a reflection of their personalities.

So, I guess when I think of the qualities of descent, I think of bareness and that moment of helplessness (not necessarily a pitiable or unhappy thing) when a body has given in to falling and is only capable of being itself while it waits for the ground to hit.

Do you have a favorite illusionist or magician? And if so can you tell us a bit about them and why you are drawn to them.

I love Teller. I’ve seen the Penn & Teller show live once and Teller does this trick in which he pulls coins from unexpected places on an audience member’s person and drops them into a large fishbowl full of water. That part isn’t particularly unusual, but, at the end of the trick, he reaches into the water and stirs it with his hands and, in the next moment, all the coins turn into goldfish. It’s such a gorgeous surprise. You can’t help but be delighted. I like that his tricks make me feel something beyond astonishment. They feel like good theater or dance, like everything is operating on different levels of reality, metaphor, and memory.

I also have a friend who is an amateur magician. His name is Harry Bolles and he’s always fiddling with cards or coins in spare moments at bars or restaurants or while sitting around and chatting. I so enjoy watching the constant craft and obsessive practice that make tricks work. It’s like watching the physical equivalent of telling a story. The magician has to get everything so smooth and have it make such perfect sense that he convinces someone else’s eyes and brain that he has bent reality and is telling the truth.

If you’re in the mood for a YouTube rabbit hole, I recommend looking up: Teller, Cardini, and Lennart Green.

I love all the doodles, sketches, and cartoons on your blog. Did you do any drawings while you were working on this story?

Thank you! Drawing is my lollygagging relaxation activity. It feels both fiddly and functional at the same time. I don’t think I drew much while I was writing this story, but I did doodle a little when I was revising it. Sometimes, drawing parts of a story out as if I were going to make it into an illustrated book or comic really helps me clarify how I want a story to feel. I tend to imagine my stories very visually, almost as if I were watching a movie, so working out a bit as an actual visual thing on a page is satisfying. I also try to write out the words from the bit I’m doodling as beautifully as I can, and that makes me pay attention to my habit of long-winded excess and figure out what I really want to say.

I once talked to Daniel Clowes, who is an incredible graphic novelist. He told me that lettering by hand is extremely important to him because he sometimes doesn’t know what word should come next until he’s in the act of writing it on the page, inside the world of the comic.

(If you’re unfamiliar with Clowes, but interested in storytelling, rush yourself off to a bookstore or library and check out The Death-Ray. It’s a masterful piece of storytelling that does shocking things with structure and the reader’s sympathies. Reading it made me exclaim, “You CAN DO THAT?” at embarrassingly regular intervals.)

This story is so slippery it’s hard to write questions about; it’s easier to experience than articulate. Let’s hope there’s a question in amongst all these words! “The Quality of Descent” is an interesting exploration of relationships, intimacy, and illusion. We start with a fall that isn’t really a fall that leaves us floating. There’s falling in and out of love, falling from grace, a sort of fear of falling, and the actual fall that becomes a float. The protagonist feels weighed down by life as he observes a more numinous and floating world. Do you think he ever learns to fly?

I don’t know! I have a rather limited imagination sometimes. When I finish writing a story, I stop thinking about the characters in any other context except the one I’ve left them in. Maybe it’s a sort of laziness or placidity, but I’ve never been someone who dreams up continuations for stories I’ve read. Characters and story are tied up together for me, and the thought of dragging one out of the other seems deeply weird and awkward.

So I have no idea. Though I’d be curious if anyone else does. I have a feeling that if I did my job properly as a storyteller, readers might have an opinion about this.

Did you make any interesting discoveries while you were writing this story?

It took me a very long time to finish this story. I wrote occasional drafts of it over several years. Seriously! I’d write a draft of it, send it out to a magazine or two, get distracted by other things, and forget about it for months or a year. My (immeasurably patient) friend Kat Howard read, I think, three different versions of it, each one ages and ages apart.

I am a lazy, lazy writer. And slow. Glacially slow.

I suppose it’s interesting to carry a story around for a long time because things happen and you can’t help but be different every time you look at the story again. I wrote a draft of this story when I was in despair over dance. I wrote a draft of it when I was very in love. I wrote a draft of it when I was very heartbroken. None of this necessarily made it into the story, but it was interesting to see how those things changed the way I understood what I was trying to tell.

This could also just be me making excuses for my incredible laziness.

You draw, write, dance, and manage your own dance company. Do you find that different forms of creativity lend themselves to different times of day? How do you structure your time?

For the most part, dance dictates my schedule because it always involves other people, time, and resources that need to be coordinated. Dance is greedy. The physical practice of it is necessary and inescapable, and if you’re working with other people, you have to be in the studio with them for hours and hours. You can’t learn your own part and then come together for a few rehearsals before a show. I’m very lucky to work in ensembles of incredible collaborators. Being in the same room with intelligent, generous, inspiring people and making something together is the most deeply satisfying thing.

I usually take ballet class in the mornings, rehearse in the afternoons, do administrative work in the evenings, and fit everything else in the cracks. Sometimes, writing is a relief because all I need are an idea and something to write with.

Are there any other projects you’d like to tell us about?

Yes! My sister and I are working on a dance adaptation of Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf with our dance company, Sharp & Fine. We are collaborating with a mixed cast of dancers and jazz musicians, and having the musicians move alongside the dancers. It’s been a very challenging process, but I’m terribly excited about it. All the artists we’re working with have a surfeit of talent, brains, and curiosity, and I love watching and listening to them so much. It’s going to be a fun (and unusual) show, so if you are in the San Francisco area October 23-26, please check it out (see sharpandfine.com/peter-and-the-wolf for information)!

I’m also working on a short story about werewolf-ish women and a trumpet player, but I have no idea where that is headed yet.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Liz’s short stories can be found in places like Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, and This is How You Die: Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death. She creates the webcomic Things Without Arms and Without Legs and writes love songs to inanimate objects. Her previous incarnations include circus manager, refuge worker, artists’ model, research officer for the Order of Australia Awards, farm girl, and extensive work in the not-for-profit sector.

Author Spotlight: Lavie Tidhar

Jude Griffin

This was an amazing read, for a number of reasons: How did it come about?

Thanks so much!

I was living on an island in the South Pacific at the time — a very remote place called Vanua Lava in Vanuatu — and my nearest neighbours belonged to one of those evangelical Christian sects, which meant that every Sunday they would turn on their generator and start preaching in Bislama as loudly as they could (to make sure all the neighbours could hear them!). So every Sunday I’d get a lot of “Jizas i savem yumi!” (Jesus saved us, in Bislama) and I’d slowly go insane.

So I was sitting in my little bamboo hut staring out at the sea and it occurred to me I should write the real story of the New Testament, and what Jesus was really up to.

And in a way, I think, as silly as the concept (or the execution!) sounds, it’s really at heart a story about Judaism, about what it means to be a Jew, as embodied by two people as different from each other as Jesus and Josephus Flavius. But all these weird little connections kept popping up while I was writing — Rome, the dying days of the Egyptian empire, Cleopatra — basically it was a lot of fun to do!

So, Saiyūki (Monkey) has sucked me in — how long have you been a fan?

I’ve been a fan since, well, there was this ‘70s (I think) Japanese programme called Monkey Magic, which a lot of British people I think grew up on, but I got to watch on late night reruns on, I think it was Channel 4, when I moved to London. And it was amazing. It’s absolutely brilliant. So that’s me sort of mashing Monkey Magic with the New Testament. Which makes perfect sense, really, if you think about it. Three wise men from the east in the New Testament, and the three companions of the Buddha in Journey to the West . . .

I mean, it’s obvious, when you think about it, isn’t it!

You weave in elements of multiple religions, history, and plot elements from Saiyūki (Monkey): How did you keep it all moving forward and not lose the thread of the overall plot arc?

The plot was easy, to be honest. I stuck to Matthew, being the closest in time and language — and I used both the Hebrew and English versions as points of reference. So I stuck, to a large extent, to the life of Jesus as Matthew records it. But of course, there are all these unanswered questions. The whole thing about Jesus going off to Egypt, growing up there and then coming back as a man. That fascinated me! Or the incident with the demon-possessed men in the Galilee, or talking to the storm, or going into the desert to battle the devil. Or the whole turning the tables of the moneylenders in the temple. Which just begged to be rewritten as a kung fu scene.

Basically, if I could ever get Stephen Chow to make a film version of Kung Fu Jesus (my working title!), I’d be happy. I did try to convince an Israeli producer I worked with about the absolute necessity of shooting it, but he hasn’t been returning my calls . . .

But yeah, the plot was pretty easy for once! And of course it detours into “The Roman Agent,” Josephus, since Matthew, no offence, does sag a bit in the middle!

John as a water demon: SO PERFECT. That slayed me. What was your process for making all the crossovers work? Reading source material and letting it all ferment?

Haha, right, makes perfect sense doesn’t it? John the Baptist. I think I wrote it fairly fast, but I know the geography well (I was born a short way away from Armageddon, after all!) and I was pretty well-versed in the source material to begin with. I mean, really, once you realise the two texts are essentially the same one, it just flows. And one of my favourite things is rewriting the Sermon on the Mount, which I did twice before in The Tel Aviv Dossier. So doing a kung fu version of that was easy. Lots of Bruce Lee, etc.

Really, it was one of those absolutely painless things to write, which is so rare. It was fun! Which is not always the case . . .

Any new projects you want to tell us about?

On the novel front, The Violent Century is coming out in the US next year from Thomas Dunne Books — it’s a sort of Cold War existential thriller about the Nietzschean concept of the Übermensch.

Or, you know, superheroes.

And in the UK, my latest novel is coming out in October — A Man Lies Dreaming, about a Yiddish pulp writer in Auschwitz who is dreaming a sort of hardboiled pulp novel in which a disgraced former dictator is now working as a low-rent PI in the mean streets of London. I think it’s very funny in parts, very dark in others — absolutely the best thing I’ve ever written. It’s being marketed as literary fiction, I think, though if you like noir, if you like alternative history, if you like weird fiction, you know, it’s all in there!

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 November, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Sunny Moraine (“What Glistens Back”) and Annalee Newitz (“Drones Don’t Kill People”), along with SF reprints by Susan C. Petrey (“Spidersong”) and Roz Kaveney (“Instructions”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Kat Howard (“A Flock of Grief”) and Matthew Hughes (“Enter Saunterance”), and fantasy reprints by Gheorghe Săsărman (“Sah-Hara,” translated by Ursula K. Le Guin) and Jennifer Stevenson (“Solstice”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with a pair of feature interviews.

For our ebook readers, we also have our usual ebook-exclusive novella reprint and a pair of novel excerpts.

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

• • • •

Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got tons of great stories forthcoming. We’ve got work from the following authors coming up over the next couple of issues: Shale Nelson, Nik Houser, Vandana Singh, Damien Angelica Walters, Rachael Acks, and many more.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that SFnal goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

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Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so. Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

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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).

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About the Editor

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Lightspeed, is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. New projects coming out in 2014 and 2015 include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Operation Arcana, Wastelands 2, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. 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.