FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial, November 2014

John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue fifty-four of Lightspeed!

In case you missed it last month, October marked the publication of our two sister-magazine special issues.

Over at Nightmare, we published Women Destroy Horror!, our special double-issue celebration of women writing and editing horror. Guest editor Ellen Datlow 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”), along with reprints by Joyce Carol Oates (“Martyrdom”), Tanith Lee (“Black and White Sky”), and A.R. Morlan (“. . . Warmer”).

Our WDH nonfiction editor, Lisa Morton, solicited 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 have 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 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”). The issue also has 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 the issue, 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. It also contains 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 ($12.99). 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 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 Georghe Săsărman (“Sah-Hara”) and Jennifer Stevenson (“Solstice”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with authors Nick Harkaway and Charles Stross.

For our ebook readers, we also have our usual ebook-exclusive novella reprint: “New Light on the Drake Equation” by Ian R. MacLeod. We also have an excerpt from Mira Grant’s latest offering, Symbiont; and a taste of The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin (translated by Ken Liu).

Our issue this month is sponsored by our friends at Tor Books. This month, be sure to look for the aforementioned The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin. 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.

Coming Soon:
Lightspeed Book Reviews

Lightspeed is pleased to announce that we will be launching a series of quarterly, rotating book review columns in January 2015, written by:

Amal El-Mohtar

Amal El-Mohtar’s essays have appeared in Chicks Unravel Time, Queers Dig Time Lords, Science Fiction Film & Television, Apex, Stone Telling, The Outpost, Cascadia Subduction Zone, and Tor.com. She reviews books for NPR, edits and publishes the poetry in Goblin Fruit, is a Nebula-nominated author and founding member of the Banjo Apocalypse Crinoline Troubadours, and has been known to deadlift other genre professionals. Find her on Twitter @tithenai.

Andrew Liptak

Andrew Liptak is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He is a 2014 graduate of the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop, and has written for such places as Armchair General, io9, Kirkus Reviews, Lightspeed Magazine, and others. He can be found over at www.andrewliptak.com and at @AndrewLiptak on Twitter. His first book, War Stories: New Military Science Fiction is now out from Apex Publications, and his next, The Future Machine: The Writers, Editors and Readers who Build Science Fiction is forthcoming from Jurassic London in 2015.

Sunil Patel

Sunil Patel is a Bay Area fiction writer and playwright who has written about everything from ghostly cows to talking beer. His plays have been performed at San Francisco Theater Pub and San Francisco Olympians Festival, and his story “The Gramadevi’s Lament” will appear in the upcoming anthology, Genius Loci: Tales of the Spirit of Place. He loves to create new stories, but he also loves introducing people to stories he loves. Find out more at ghostwritingcow.com, where you can watch his plays, or follow him @ghostwritingcow. His Twitter has been described as “engaging,” “exclamatory,” and “crispy, crunchy, peanut buttery.”

Each reviewer will have four columns per year. The columns will launch in our January issue with Andrew’s column, followed by Sunil in February, and Amal in March; each reviewer’s column will appear every three months thereafter.

For the last several years, Lightspeed has had two feature-length interviews in each issue; starting in January, we will reduce that number to one and replace that nonfiction slot with the review columns. Everything else about the structure and content of the magazine will remain the same.

If you would like information about how to submit books for review, you may send review copies to editor John Joseph Adams at the mailing address your publicist should already have on file (either for Lightspeed, Nightmare, or The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy); if you need that information, please email john@lightspeedmagazine.com.

If you would like to send an email press release, please direct your inquiry to reviewbooks@lightspeedmagazine.com.

SCIENCE FICTION

What Glistens Back

Sunny Moraine

Come back.

You hear the call as the lander breaks up around you. You’re aware of the entirely arbitrary concepts of up and down before you realize what’s happening, and then they’re a lot less arbitrary. Down is not so much a direction as a function of possibility, of what might happen to you, of what is happening now. You finally get down as an idea.

Come back.

Look up and there it is, floating over you in stable low orbit with its backdrop of stars, long and sleek and lovely, all its modules and portholes out of which you spent so much time looking, and that voice clutches at you like it could hold onto you, and you almost start to fucking cry, and you’re panicking and taking huge gasping breaths and clawing at nothing, and you’re falling. And you can’t come back. So the universe goes away for a while, and when you blink again, that brownish pitted curve beneath you is just a little bit bigger.

“Sean, come back. Do you read? Come back?”

Hit the comm button on your suit. Take a breath. You have enough air for whatever you need now. Take a breath and let it out and talk.

“Yeah.”

“Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus Christ, we thought—You broke up, what happened?”

Close your eyes. It hurts to do so, your eyes feel too big for their sockets. Big and shiny and glassy like marbles. “I don’t know. You have any idea on your end?”

Silence. Then, “None of what we’ve got makes sense. We triple-checked everything, it shouldn’t have—” More silence. “Did your suit suffer any damage? Sean, are you okay?”

Look down again. It’s a very boring planet, is the thing, at least on the surface, though you weren’t going down there for the surface anyway so much as you were what’s under it. But right now—and for the foreseeable future—the surface is all you’re concerned with. It’s very brown and very flat, except for the craters, and it’s very boring and ugly, and you’re going to fucking die on it.

So just let that sit for a moment. Not too long.

“No. I’m not.”

Silence. Look up. The ship that held you, cradled you, getting further away—you never thought of it in those blatantly familial terms and you would have thought it was intensely silly to do so, overly romantic, but that was before. Now you realize that it was everything safe and wonderful. It was home, so far from home. You’re leaving it and plunging toward an end, like a life in fast-forward. It birthed you.

You want to go back. Everyone does, you think as you fall. No one ever really wants that first horrible exit.

“Oh, God. Okay.” A pause. “Sean, we’re working the problem. Just hang tight.”

Laugh. That’s a very funny turn of phrase. Laughing will probably worry him. He already sounds like he’s about five seconds from losing it. He was always so nervous about everything, and you suspect very strongly that he didn’t even want to be here, except it was you, so of course he couldn’t really be anywhere else.

Which makes this your fault. Naturally.

• • • •

There are things in your life that, in moments of clarity, you’d do absolutely anything to be able to go back and change.

You would have majored in physics instead of engineering, because though they weren’t even all that different in a lot of ways, there was a romance about physics that always appealed to you so much more.

You wouldn’t have spent so much goddamn time in high school worrying about boys. About what boys thought about, cared about, wanted. About what they thought of you. About what was involved in being a boy, what you should be doing in order to really be a proper one. You would have said fuck it to everyone’s expectations and you would have taken some Women’s Studies courses in college, because it’s silly but you think that might honestly have made a difference to the overall bleakness of your outlook on the world and your place in it.

You wish you had seen more stars. You wish you had spent a lot more time under really, really dark skies.

You wouldn’t have dumped Carlos in the middle of the street in the rain on a Sunday night that was the culmination of a long time of nothing at all going very well. It wasn’t his fault, it was yours, and knowing that only made you angrier.

You wouldn’t have left your younger sister alone that day; you knew she was depressed and she’d been saying some worrying things, but you never thought she’d actually do anything, and anyway, what, were you supposed to remove anything even vaguely rope-like from the house? Wouldn’t she have found another way?

You wouldn’t have said goodbye to your mother like you did. You would have crossed the room and embraced her, pulled her into your big arms; you would have done this even if she had screamed and beaten at your chest. You would have put aside all those things she couldn’t let go of, her upbringing and the things she couldn’t bear to not believe. You would have recognized what she meant to you, what she had always done to and for you; you would have used her ability to hurt you as a yardstick for just how deep inside you she was.

Except maybe it was worth it.

Would you still have accepted recruitment? Would you still have told Eric? Would you still have let him come along? Could you even have stopped him? How selfish was this? What do you want now? There are so many questions and you have no time to answer any of them.

• • • •

Crackle.

It’s not even so much a crackle as something softer with more rounded edges, whispering sand in your ears. You’re not sure what it is but you like to think of it as the sound of the big black itself, singing to you like an ocean through the shell of your helmet. It’s comforting, it makes you think of the few vacations you’ve managed to take in your life. Eric, that last time a month before launch; the two of you on a Caribbean beach, waves in your ears, gulls stealing people’s sandwiches, breeze, and his hands spreading lotion on your back. The sand was warm, gritty under your chin. You had this crazy urge to bury your face in it and inhale. You got that urge in the water, too; you always came up coughing. It’s always been like that. As a child you played with fire, you ran with sharp things. You’re the kind of person who stands at great height and thinks about jumping, so you learned to skydive. You learned to BASE jump. You put on a wingsuit in Norway and you soared down the mountainside, skimming over the snow.

You’ve always been about as sure as you can be that that’s why they picked you. Normally, you know, they’d go for the steady ones, the stable ones, the people who play well with others. But that’s for conventional missions. ISS mice-in-space kind of shit. For this one, they wanted people who weren’t just not afraid to fall. They wanted people crazy enough to launch themselves over the fucking edge.

Well, then.

“Sean?”

You miss the big black’s whispering voice. For a minute there, you almost caught what it was saying. “Yeah.”

“We’re still not sure what happened.”

Look down again. Boy, it is awfully big now. “What happened is it blew the fuck up and I probably have—” Glance at your wrist readout. “—about two more minutes before I hit.”

Possibly three. You’re guesstimating. You always hated that word, but yeah.

“It didn’t blow up, it broke up. You’d be dead right now if it actually exploded.” Pause, too short for you to think of a witty retort. “Sean, we’re running through some possible options. Okay? We have some plans, we’re gonna come get you. Stay on with me, talk to me.” Pause again. He’s trying so hard to sound like he’s holding it together, and you sort of love him for that, because it’s so obvious that he’s completely freaking out. “Sean, come on, just say anything.”

Roll your eyes. Are you going into a spin? A little, maybe. You’re not sure whether or not you’d like to black out for the rest of your life. Down is still down. “What do you want me to say, Eric?”

“What do you see?”

Is he kidding? “I see an ugly fucking planet getting closer way too fast, Eric, what do you think I see?”

“Do you see any debris? How far clear of the lander did you get?”

The thing is you didn’t even notice. You just started falling. Look down again, look around you, this time really see it, not all that near, but there. Twisted metal, carbon fiber. Wires trailing like tangled nerves. A few tiny fires here and there as the last of the gases burn off. If this rock had any atmosphere to speak of, they’d be glowing like little falling stars, but then so would you, so in a way things have worked out pretty well, at least for the next two minutes.

Two or three. Hard to say. Round down, maybe.

“I see some debris. It’s not that close.” God, you sound so calm. “If anything’s going to be on an approach, be aware.”

“Got it. That’s good, Sean, that helps us.” And that’s when you realize how much you want to believe him, how much you don’t want to die, how far you are from being all stoic and accepting it like a big damn hero, a tragic sacrifice to SCIENCE. All in caps like that, maybe with a trumpet fanfare. SCIENCE.

Laugh again. You can’t help it.

“Sean?”

“Nothing. It’s just funny.” Picture him now, leaning over the comm, blond cowlick hanging over his forehead. Maybe he’s sweating a little, like he does when he’s stressed. His post, comm officer, among other things, and you could never shake the feeling that someone was doing you a solid, but dammit, you were really proud of him. You kissed him when he told you but you never actually said the words.

He was going to fly with you.

• • • •

The first day, you said yes because you had the sense to see how important it was. How much it meant. There’s gold in them hills. Them brown, boring-ass hills. Dig it out and sail across the universe, a hundred ships, a thousand, going as far as they wanted to. Start by laying down some charges. You could do that, you love making things explode. It’s a risk, it might be suicide—you’d all have enough punch to make it all the way out there in about four months, but if the mission failed, you wouldn’t have enough to make it back.

It was all on you. Three weeks ago, when you started decelerating and everyone threw themselves a party, he pulled you close and combed his fingers into your hair and murmured something about you being a hero.

For SCIENCE.

He said it like that. You laughed. You laughed and laughed and kissed him. The thing is, you loved how that sounded. You wanted to be a hero. You thought that might be pretty cool.

But you had nightmares about falling. You had them every night—it’s all night here, but habits die hard and habits of thinking die even harder. You fell and fell into nothing but black, and you screamed for him, but he wasn’t there. You’d wake up in the dimness breathing hard, dragging in way more than your share of the oxygen the hydroponic module was pumping out, and you’d grope for him. And he’d talk to you. Didn’t even matter what he said. His voice gave you direction, guided you back. Guided you home.

• • • •

“Eric.” Lick your lips. Don’t look at it again. Find up, look that way, at the ship hanging there. Where he is. “Look, I can’t be the only one talking here.” Grin. It feels like a hole through which a scream might escape. “Tell me a story?”

Now he laughs, and you really do love how that sounds. In bed, you’d tickle him until he laughed so hard he hurt, begged you to stop—you thought that was just about the sexiest thing he ever did.

Everything gets blurry for a few seconds.

“Once upon a time there was this stupid asshole and his stupid asshole husband and they went to space and it was a really, really bad idea.” He laughs again, a watery kind of laugh, and everything in your throat locks up. “Not the end, right? Sean, it’s not the end.”

“Be a hell of a sucky ending.”

“Yeah, well.” Something’s up. You always knew something was up. He’s up, so far. Flying without you. “Never thought that would really be up to us.”

“Any updates on those options?”

Pause. You have just over a minute. Maybe. You’re not counting anymore, except some irritating, masochistic little node in the back of your brain can’t do anything else.

“Sean, we can’t do anything. There’s no time.” Close your eyes. You wish you could see the stars. You can pretend. “I’m so sorry, I should’ve—”

“No. I’m sorry.” There’s no time. It’s playing on a loop in your head, over and over. You knew it before, you knew it since you started falling, but it’s different when he says it, when it’s that voice that led you out of the dark every time you plunged into it. “I’m sorry I dragged you out here. I’m sorry I put you through this.”

“Sean, don’t.” And now he’s the one who sounds calm. Still watery, still on the edge of something, but calm. “I wanted to come. I told you.”

“You would.”

“No, I never told you the other part. I wanted to come, Sean, and I would have come even if you hadn’t. You think this is all about you. You honestly do think you’re that important. You are, you’re the most important thing in the world to me, but . . .” He’s smiling. Oh, God. “You’re not the center of it. I wanted to come. And I’m not sorry about that.”

There are stars. There always were because they’re everywhere but now it’s like you’re really seeing them for the first time, seeing them like they matter in a way they didn’t before, so many, all of them so bright. “You’re not going to be able to make it home.”

“We have a backup. You know that.”

You do. But somehow you know something else. Or you’re just sure because you can’t conceive of this going any other way. “It’ll fail.”

“Might not.”

“It will. Eric?” You’re crying now. You’ve never cried in front of him but you’re doing it now, it’s wrenching at you, twisting at your gut, it’s so horrible and you wish he could see you because you feel like this is something you never should have denied him. “Don’t come after me. Promise me that. Whatever you do, don’t.”

“Don’t you tell me what to do. Sean? Sean, I love you. Keep talking.”

The little, boring, ugly-ass planet is big now. Very big. The last of the light gone from its surface. Look down. Soak in the view. More dark, open to swallow you. “I love you, Eric. Get home. Whatever you have to do, get home.”

“We will. Sean, tell me what you see.”

“It’s all dark. It’s—”

Wait.

Not far below. Maybe a couple of miles, now. You’re down to your last seconds, and each one is stretching out, long and precious, and it’s all so, so beautiful. Because there are stars over you and now, would you ever believe it, there are stars underneath you, on that boring, ugly-ass planet, a million brilliant little lights coming on in the dark.

In patterns.

They spiral outward, curl in on themselves, amazing and intricate. Shimmering slowly. Circles within circles, like some kind of diagram from the mind of a mad genius. Moving, dancing, and beneath that whisper-voice of the big black you could swear you hear something else now. Swear it to everything, swear it to God.

You hear them singing. And how is it possible that you didn’t see this before, that you didn’t hear? Because you weren’t ready until now. Because they weren’t ready for you.

Whisper. “Eric, look at this.”

“Sean? What is it?”

“Eric, you have to come see.” You told him to stay away. But now you know it can’t end here. He was right, you’re not the center of anything, and this doesn’t end with you. You can do this last thing, and it might be everything. You can still be a hero.

For SCIENCE.

Laugh, with shock and joy and more life than you’ve ever felt before.

“Eric, you have to see this, you have to. Don’t listen to what I said before.” The lights turning, turning, like a hand opening to you, a door warm and bright and inviting. “Come and see, Eric. Promise me. Promise you’ll—”

“Sean, I will, just . . . God, don’t—”

“—come back—”

His voice guides you home.

• • • •

There were things in your life that, in moments of clarity, you’d do absolutely anything to be able to go back and change. But in those moments of clarity you also see something else, and it’s that everything, every choice, led you to every other choice, and to change one of them is to change them all.

Sitting on that Caribbean beach with Eric, curled against him, under a really, really dark sky. Looking up at all those stars, and in that single clear moment you have this silly, romantic, Disney-movie thought—not the first one you’ve ever had and not, as it turns out, the last—about who might be looking back. Because yesterday you and Eric said yes, and this morning you said yes again, and you don’t even have rings yet but you’ll take care of that, and right now the universe seems so big and everything feels possible.

You think about who might be looking back, and then you figure it doesn’t matter. That’s not what you’re going up there for. You’re going to see all those stars, though, and then you’re going to carve out a chunk of a chunk of one, use it to pave the road for so many others.

All that shit you’d change. But this is okay.

“Hey.” Eric reaches up, touches your jaw, tips your head back down so your lips brush his. “Where are you? Come back.”

Okay, you say, and kissing him is like flying before you even start to fly. Stars behind your closed eyes, all around you. Okay.

© 2014 by Sunny Moraine.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sunny Moraine’s short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Nightmare, and Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, among other places. They are also responsible for the novels Line and Orbit (co-written with Lisa Soem) and the Casting the Bones trilogy, as well as A Brief History of the Future: collected essays. In addition to authoring, Sunny is a doctoral candidate in sociology and a sometimes college instructor; that last may or may not have been a good move on the part of their department. They unfortunately live just outside Washington DC in a creepy house with two cats and a very long-suffering husband. They can be found at sunnymoraine.com.

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

Spidersong

Susan C. Petrey

Brenneker, the lyre spider, lived inside a lute, a medieval instrument resembling a pear-shaped guitar. The lute was an inexpensive copy of one made by an old master and had rose-wood walls and a spruce sounding board. Her home was sparsely furnished, a vast expanse of unfinished wood, a few sound pegs reaching from floor to ceiling like Greek columns, and in one corner, near the small F-shape sound holes, the fantasy of iron-silk thread that was Brenneker’s web. Brenneker’s home was an unusual one for a lyre spider. Most of them spin their webs in hollow tawba stalks, which echo the music of these tiny fairy harps seldom heard by ears of men. Lyre spiders play duets with each other, sometimes harmonizing, sometimes bouncing counterpoint melodies back and forth across the glades between the tall bamboo-like tawba. They play their webs to attract prey, to win a mate, or for the sheer joy of music. They live alone except for the few weeks in mother’s silken egg case and one day of spiderlings climbing up the tawba to cast their threads into the wind and fly away. When they mate, the embrace lasts but a few moments. Then the female eats the male, who gives himself gladly to this deepest union of two souls.

Originally, Brenneker had lived in the forest, surrounded by the music of her own kind. Although she lived alone, she was never lonely, for she could always hear the mandolin-like plucking of Twinklebright, her nearest neighbor, the deep, droning chords of old Birdslayer, and occasionally the harpsichord tones of Klavier, carried on the breeze.

One hot afternoon, as Brenneker experimented with augmented fifths, she noticed that some of her neighbors had stopped midsong. She suddenly realized she was the only one still playing and she stopped abruptly, leaving a leading tone hanging on the air like an unfinished sentence.

“These ones should do,” she heard a man’s voice say. An angry blow struck the base of her tawba stalk. She felt herself falling as the tawba that was her home broke at the base, tumbling her to the floor of the glade below. Bruised and frightened, she scampered quickly back inside her home and clung to her silent, broken web. She felt herself lifted up and then dropped with a jar as her tawba was tossed into a wagon.

Over many hours of jolting and rattling, she fell asleep, and when she awoke, all was quiet and dark. She climbed out of her stalk and began to explore her new surroundings, a workbench with many hollow wooden objects lying about. Although she had never seen a musical instrument such as men make, she recognized with the eye of a musician that their shape was intended to give sound. She chose a lute and squeezed her plump body through one of the sound holes, saying, “Certainly this will give greater tone than my old home.” She began to string her web.

At night there was no music in the instrument maker’s shop, and she was lonely without the songs of her friends to cheer her. Since she was also hungry, she played her hunger song, and a fat, stupid moth came, aching to be devoured. When she’d finished with him, she tossed his powdery wings out the sound hole.

In the morning, the old instrument maker, Sanger, came to open up his shop. He paused in the shop doorway, rattling his keys, and then turned on the overhead light. Brenneker watched him from the sound holes of her new home as he ran a wrinkled hand through his sparse, gray hair, stuffed his keys back into a deep pocket, and picked a viola from the wall. Carefully, he adjusted the tuning of the strings, and then, picking up the bow, he played a short, lilting tune and then replaced the instrument on its peg on the wall. He made his way along the wall, pausing at each instrument to check the tuning. When he came to Brenneker’s lute, he did the same, tightening the strings briefly and then playing a few bars of melody. Brenneker felt her whole surroundings vibrate with the tone and her web pulsed in sympathetic vibration. Timidly, she picked out a few notes of the song.

“Odd,” said Mr. Sanger, “I’d never noticed that it had such lovely overtones. Too bad I had to use such cheap materials in its construction.” He placed the lute back on the wall and was about to pick up a zither, when the shop bell rang to announce that someone had come in from the street.

A young girl and her father came through the door and paused to look at violins.

“But I don’t want to play violin,” said the girl, who was about ten years old. “Everyone plays violin. I want something different.”

“Well, what about a guitar,” said her father. “Your friend Marabeth plays one quite well. It seems like a proper instrument for a young lady.”

“But that’s just it,” said the girl, whose name Brenneker later found out was Laurel. “I don’t want to copycat someone else. I want an instrument that isn’t played by just anyone. I want something special.”

Sanger interrupted this conversation to say, “Have you considered the lute?” He removed Brenneker’s home from the wall and strummed a chord. The vibration in the web tickled Brenneker’s feet as she strummed the same chord an octave higher.

“What a lovely tone it has!” said Laurel, touching the strings and plucking them one by one.

“Be careful,” said her father. “That’s an antique.”

“Not so,” said Sanger, “it’s a copy. Made it myself. And I intended it to be played, not just looked at like a dusty old museum piece.”

“May I try?” asked the girl. Sanger gave the instrument to her and she sat down on a stool, placing the lute across her lap. She strummed a discord, which caused Brenneker to flinch and grip her strings tightly so they wouldn’t sound.

“Let me show you how,” said the instrument maker. “Put your first finger in that fret and your middle finger there, like so.” He indicated where the fingers should fret the strings to make a chord. Laurel plucked the strings one by one. The tone was tinny but true. The second time she plucked, Brenneker plucked inside, on her own instrument. Rich, golden tones emanated from the lute.

“Oh, Father, this is the instrument for me,” said Laurel.

“But who will teach you to play such an antiquated instrument?”

“I would be glad to,” said Sanger. “I have studied medieval and Renaissance music and I would like to share it with an interested pupil.”

“Please, Father?”

“Well, perhaps . . . there is the question of cost. I can’t afford a very expensive instrument,” said her father.

“This lute, although made with loving care and much skill,” said Sanger, “is unfortunately made of inexpensive wood, and for that reason it is very reasonably priced.”

Mr. Sanger and Laurel’s father were able to make agreeable terms for the lute and the cost of lessons. That morning Laurel took the lute, Brenneker and all, home with her.

The first few weeks of lessons were torture for Brenneker, who sat huddled, clenching her strings to her body to damp them. But as Laurel improved, Brenneker rewarded her by playing in unison. This was great incentive to Laurel, who did not realize that she was only partial author of the lovely music. Mr. Sanger was himself at a loss to explain how such beautiful tones came from such a cheaply built instrument. He did not credit his workmanship, although this was in some measure responsible, but told Laurel that the lute was haunted by a fairy harpist, and he advised her to leave a window open at night and put out a bowl of milk and honey before she went to bed. Perhaps he had been the beneficiary of such a fairy in the past, for Brenneker found that the milk and the open window provided her with a bountiful supply of flies and insects, which she tempted by song through the sound holes of the lute to make her supper.

Sanger valued highly the virtue of two playing in harmony. “For the ability to blend with another in duet is a mark of maturity in a true musician,” he would say. “Harmony between two players recaptures for us briefly that time when the universe was young, untainted by evil, and the morning stars sang together.”

Brenneker never played by herself unless she was sure that she was alone. She played when Laurel played or at night when everyone was sleeping. When spring came that year, she played the mating song and waited, but no lover came. The next night she tried again, this time varying the tune and adding trills, but still no one came. Brenneker tried for several nights before she finally admitted to herself that there was no fault in her song, but that none of her folk dwelt in this faraway land and so there was no one to answer. But this reasoning made her feel unhappy, and she preferred to think that it might be some imperfection in her song, which could be righted by practice.

As Laurel grew older, Brenneker noticed that the quality of their music changed. Whereas she had formerly been a lover of sprightly dance tunes, Laurel became more interested in old ballads and would sing as she accompanied herself on the lute. One of her favorites was “Barbara Allen,” another, “The Wife of Ushers Well.”

She was often asked to perform at weddings and parties. She met other lovers of medieval music and even other lute players. Laurel would sometimes allow others to play her instrument, which drew a mixed response. If Brenneker knew the tune of the strange artist, she would pick along. If not, she held her strings silent, leaving the others to wonder how Laurel got such rounded tones where they only strummed dull, tinny notes.

One summer evening Laurel took a blanket, the lute, and Brenneker to a woodsy place and sat down alone to play. She sang many of the old ballads, and then she would stop for a while and listen. Then she would play another song. Brenneker wondered at this until she heard answering notes from a recorder in a grove nearby. The two instruments played a duet, with occasional counterpoint melody, and then the recorder player drew near, and Brenneker saw that it was a young man.

“Aha,” she thought, “Laurel plays to attract a mate.”

The young man sat down beside Laurel on the grass.

“I knew you’d come,” he said to her.

She moved over toward him and he put an arm around her waist and kissed her.

This went on for quite some time. After a while the two said goodbye, and Laurel picked up her blanket and trudged homeward, while her love went in the other direction.

“Strange,” thought Brenneker. “She did not eat him.” This bothered the lyre spider until she stopped to reflect: “Birds do not eat their mates. Perhaps the humans are like birds, but I had always thought them more intelligent than that.”

A few nights later, Laurel took her blanket and went to the grove again. The young man, whose name was Thomas, was there waiting for her. They played a few songs and then they made love. As she walked home, Laurel sang “Barbara Allen.”

“And still she does not eat him,” thought Brenneker. “Their way of being together is different from ours. Yet I’m sure it must mean as much to them as ours does to us. Yet it seems so incomplete. Impermanent.”

The presence of the human lovers made Brenneker more aware of her own loneliness. “If I could mate,” she thought. “I would make the most beautiful egg-sack, all of silk, and my eggs would sway to the music of the lute until they hatched. Then they would fly to neighboring trees and build their own lyres and play to me and I wouldn’t be alone anymore.” But when she played her love songs, softly on the night air, no lover came. She was used to it by now, but she never gave up hope.

One evening the two lovers had a quarrel.

“You must marry me this fall,” Thomas insisted.

“But we have no money,” Laurel objected. “You are only an apprentice at your trade, and it will be a long time before you bring home a journeyman’s wage. I would not be able to go to the university to study music.”

“We would get by somehow,” said Thomas. “You could take in music students and teach the lute. We could pick up a little extra money playing for gatherings.”

“But I do so much want to go to the university,” said Laurel. “We could go to the city and both take jobs. That way we could be together and I could study for my degree.”

“I can’t get as good a job in the city as here,” said Thomas, “and besides, you could not earn enough to support yourself and pay tuition. So you might as well settle here with me.”

“There has to be a way for me to continue my study of music,” said Laurel, “and I intend to find it.”

When Thomas left, he did not kiss Laurel goodbye.

Laurel, thoughtful and concerned, put her lute aside and went to bed early. She did not forget to leave a window open, however, or set out milk to feed the fairy. Brenneker pondered their dilemma and could see no solution. While she was brooding over this, she heard the unmistakable sound of a lyre spider tuning up its instrument, and this caused her to listen intently. It was a curious song, having a haunting quality, a shadowing of minor key, but not quite. This was no spider song, Brenneker was sure, but it was definitely played by one of her own kind. She strummed an answering chord and the other player stopped in midphrase, as if startled. Brenneker played part of an old song she’d played many times at home. The other answered her with the refrain of the song, and so they played back and forth for a while, until the other stopped. Brenneker was somewhat disappointed that the song had ended, but a few moments later she discovered why. A gentle tapping on the sounding board roused her attention and she went to the F holes to peer out. The other spider, a male, had followed her music and had come to investigate. He clambered up the side of the instrument to her vantage point.

“How lovely,” he said, “to hear the songs of home in a strange land. Tell me, Lady, how did you come here?”

“By accident,” said Brenneker. “The humans picked my tawba stalk for a flute and brought me here. But I have never seen another of our kind here until now.”

“I came in similar fashion,” said the male. “My name is Wisterness, and, until now, I had thought I was the only one of our kind that had ranged so widely.”

“What was that strange tune you played? Is it in a minor key? I have heard none like it before,” said Brenneker.

“It’s neither major or minor,” said Wisterness. “It is based on a modal scale like some of the Renaissance music I’ve heard you play. I’ve noticed that you sometimes play in the Dorian mode, which is somewhat similar. Actually, I was playing a southern mountain tune called ‘June Apple.’ The tuning is called ‘mountain minor,’ or ‘A to G’ tuning, among them, but it is actually the older double-tonic scale, based on the highland bagpipe tuning, or, according to some sources, the Irish Harp.”

“My goodness,” said Brenneker, “you certainly know a lot about music. I haven’t heard half of those words. I do remember playing ‘Scarborough Fair’ in the Dorian mode, but that’s about the extent of my music theory.”

“I may know more theory, but you are the better musician, Lady. I am always barely learning one tune and then going on to something new. Consequently my playing lacks polish. I have listened to your songs for several nights before summoning the courage to answer.”

“I certainly have no complaint against your playing,” said Brenneker. “I thought it was quite beautiful. I am curious about one thing, though, and that is your age. I never knew male spiders lived much more than a few years, yet you seem quite mature and well read. Have you never mated?”

Wisterness shuffled his pedipalps and appeared slightly embarrassed.

“No, I never have,” he said. “There was one once in my youth that I cared for, but she chose to devour another. Then one day I followed a woodsman to listen to his song, and I was carried off in a load of wood and eventually came to this place. Since then I have devoted myself to the study of humans and their music, but it has been lonely at times.”

Since it was not the mating time, Wisterness left after awhile and went back to his lyre, which was strung in a hollow tree not far from the window, and he and Brenneker played duets most of the night. But sometimes she paused to listen to the piercing modal sweetness of Wisterness, as he experimented with different tunings from the lonely southern mountains.

• • • •

The next morning, Laurel did not sit down to her music at the usual time, but instead put on her coat and went out with a purposeful look in her eyes.

The next day, at the practice hour, a younger girl came to Laurel’s door carrying a lute under her arm, and Laurel taught her a lesson. It was “Green-sleeves,” a favorite of Brenneker’s, and she played along at first, but the student had troubles, and they kept stopping midverse and starting over until Brenneker decided it was more pain than pleasure and gave it up. Before the student left, she counted out a small sum of money, which Laurel put in a large jar on her dresser. This money, Brenneker learned, was to go toward Laurel’s university tuition.

As the weeks passed, more students came, until Laurel had five beginners to teach. One student came twice a week from a distant township. Sanger, the old instrument maker, still came by once in a while to teach Laurel a song, but she had long ago surpassed him in musical skill, and he never charged for his “lessons” anymore. His fingers had grown arthritic and he could not play as well as he had in the past. He no longer took students, which made Laurel one of the few teachers of the lute in her part of the country. The money piled up slowly in the jar, but it was nowhere near enough, and sometimes Brenneker would overhear Laurel arguing with her father at night about her plans to go to the university.

“Even if you get a degree in music,” he would say, “that doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be able to support yourself. Why not study something practical that you can find a good job in?”

Laurel agreed to take courses in handicrafts and midwifery to pacify her father, whom she still depended upon for support, but her heart belonged to music, and she refused to give up her plans for further study.

When she saw Thomas now, they both avoided talking about future plans, as this always provoked a fight, and he did not come to see her as often. Brenneker fretted about this, as she saw Laurel suffering in silence. When Laurel played, Brenneker sometimes wove her mating song into the web of sound hoping that Thomas would hear and return to renew his love. But he did not hear, or if he did, he didn’t come.

One warm spring night, Brenneker alone played her mating song hopefully to the open window, and after a short time Wisterness came, tapping shyly on her sound box to announce his presence.

“You must come out,” he said, “for the sound holes are too small for me to get in.”

Brenneker had failed to recognize her predicament. As a young spider, she had entered through the holes with ease, but now she was bigger, and therefore trapped within the lute. She forced her legs out the F holes, and she could feel the tantalizing closeness of his belly fur, but try as they might, they could not negotiate across the wooden barrier.

Finally he said, “Brenneker, I fear our love must go unconsummated, for you can’t get out and I can’t get in. But then perhaps it’s better that way, for even if we could somehow manage to mate, we could not partake of the deeper sharing, with you in there and me out here.”

And so he left sadly. She did not hear his song for several days, and then one day the wind carried the distant strains of “Billy in the Lowground” to her window. The sad Irish mode echoing in the lonely Appalachian melody, told her that he had moved his harp farther away to avoid the pain of their unsatisfied need. He was too far to answer any of her musical questions or play the counterpoint games.

One day, Laurel invited Thomas over to her home. She was very anxious to share a piece of news with him.

“The university is offering a music scholarship,” she said. “There will be a contest and I intend to participate. If I win, my tuition would be paid, and if we both found jobs, we could be together while I go to school in the city.”

Thomas thought about this before answering and then said, “It’s not the money that really bothers me, it’s your attitude. I get the feeling that I am not as important to you as your music. I want you to be happy, but I don’t wish to play second fiddle to a lute.”

“But my work is as important to me as yours is to you,” said Laurel. “The truth is that neither of us wish to make the sacrifice of our career goals to be with the other.”

“I had hoped our love meant more to you than your music,” said Thomas, “but I see I was wrong.”

“It means equally as much to me,” said Laurel, “I just don’t think I should be the one to have to make the sacrifice of my career. There is no reason you couldn’t get a job in the city. It would not be forever, only a few years. Then we could come back here and you could take up where you left off.”

“I don’t see it that way,” he said. “In a few years I would be behind everyone in my training and I’d be competing with younger men whom they don’t have to pay as much. If I stay, I have opportunity for advancement in a few years.”

“Well, I suppose we will part, then, when the summer’s over,” said Laurel. “I shall miss you terribly, but that’s the way things work out sometimes. There is one last request I want to make of you, and that is, will you accompany my playing when I go to the contest?”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” said Thomas. “It would be adding insult to injury if I participated in the very thing that takes you away from me.”

After Thomas left, Laurel cried. She went to bed early and even forgot about the milk for the fairy. This did not disturb Brenneker very much, for she had lost her appetite listening to their argument. She was pondering Laurel’s problem in her mind (it seemed strange that humans could have barriers to love more complex than her wooden cage) when she heard a strange grinding noise as of a small drill emanating from one corner of the lute. She scampered to the source of the sound and stood watching the smooth surface of the unfinished wood as the sound come nearer. Suddenly a little bump appeared in the surface, and then the bump dissolved in a small pile of sawdust, and an ugly, bulbish head poked out of the newly formed hole. Brenneker pounced at the woodworm but missed as it pulled back into its tunnel. Frustrated, she stood tapping at the hole with her forelegs, as the worm withdrew and burrowed in a different direction.

“You must leave,” said Brenneker to the worm. “You are destroying my home and Laurel’s lute.”

“There is plenty of wood here for both of us,” came the muffled reply of the woodworm. “You may have the rosewood, and I’ll eat only the spruce.”

“But I don’t eat wood,” said Brenneker, “and you shouldn’t eat this lute. There is plenty of other wood that you can eat. Leave my home alone. You are destroying a musical instrument. Have you no appreciation for music?”

“Hmm, yes, music,” said the worm, whose name was Turkawee. “I’ve never cared for that funny-sounding stuff. Leave it to the birds, I always say.”

“You ignorant barbarian!” exclaimed Brenneker.

“I think spiders are more barbaric than our kind,” said Turkawee, “for spiders eat their cousins the insects, and even their own mates. You should take care whom you go calling a barbarian.”

“Philistine, then!” snorted Brenneker. “You obviously have no concept of a higher culture than your own.”

“Culture, you say?” said Turkawee. “That’s a term my snooty Aunt Beetle used to use. She was always admiring the wings of butterflies. She knew an artist who made pictures of the wings. She ended up stuck with a pin to a corkboard because all her interest in culture led her to follow a butterfly too closely into a collector’s net. Culture is also for the birds, I say.”

Brenneker, having no answer for this, retreated to her web and played the angriest song she could think of, which was a military march. The worm ignored her and continued gnawing at the wood of the lute.

Two days later, Brenneker was surveying the damage done by Turkawee. She was dismayed to find one part of the sounding board completely riddled with holes. She set about to mend it, binding the remaining wood with the steely white thread that she extruded from her spinnerets. The patch was actually quite strong, perhaps more so than the surrounding wood, but the discrepancy in the surface weakened the instrument structurally. The tension of the lute strings could cause the instrument to break, if the patch didn’t hold.

Brenneker returned to her web by the sound posts and fell asleep. She wasn’t used to making so much new thread, and the effort had drained her strength. In the night when she awoke, she called many insects to her supper with song, for she was ravenously hungry due to her exertion. The next day when Laurel tuned up the lute to play for a wedding, Brenneker noted with satisfaction that the patch held. But the ravages of the woodworm continued.

Old Sanger, the instrument maker, when he heard that Laurel intended to enter the scholarship contest, came by the house to offer his advice. He had played in competition in the past, and he knew what sort of artistry was apt to attract the notice of the judges and what displays of skill might sway their opinion.

“It is always a good idea to include in your repertoire a few songs that are not well known and played by everyone. And in the songs that are better known, try to display some different interpretation or more rare harmony. A few classical pieces in your presentation are in order, and playing a duet, or having someone accompany you is essential; so be sure to play your arrangement of ‘The Ash Grove’ with that young man-friend of yours. Your counterpoint harmony mixes very well with his recorder, and such a presentation will be sure to impress the judges. They will be looking for that particular blending of tones that displays your sense of harmony not only with your partner but with yourself and the universe.”

“Poor Laurel,” thought Brenneker. “What will she do without Thomas’ accompaniment?”

Laurel said nothing to Sanger about her falling out with Thomas, and after he left she practiced “The Ash Grove” unaccompanied and tried to develop some new variations on the old theme. Brenneker was tempted to play the recorder part, but since to do so would reveal her presence, she contented herself with her usual practice of playing in unison or one octave higher than the melody.

That night Brenneker made a tour of the inside of her home and found that the woodworm had damaged the bond where the neck of the lute joined the body. She set about to repair the damage as best she could, plugging the holes with spidersilk and binding the weakened seam with long, tough strands. It was hard work and took much of her strength. She could barely stay awake long enough to eat the cricket that came chirping to hear her music.

Finally the greatly anticipated day came and Laurel took the coach to the big city where the contest was to be held. She refused to surrender her lute to the baggage rack and carried it in her lap, where it provoked much comment among the other passengers.

“What is that strange instrument?” they would ask. Or, “Please play us a tune.”

Laurel consented and filled the coach with dulcet tones as her clear voice transported all the listeners to “Scarborough Fair.”

When they arrived in the city, Laurel spent some of her hard-earned lesson money on a room at the inn. That night when Laurel was asleep, Brenneker found more holes to fill. Turkawee had almost destroyed one of the interior braces of the frame. And not only that, but also he had eaten away most of the surface below the bridge. If this were to give way, the strings would go slack and the instrument would be unplayable. Brenneker worked far into the night, binding the lute with her webbing. So far her spider silk, being stronger in tensile strength than steel wire of its same proportions, had held the lute together. But Brenneker was worried that the damage was too extensive. The inside of the lute was completely webbed and re-webbed in silk and she knew it would not hold forever. She ate sparsely that night of the few insects that inhabit an inn and then forced her body to make more thread to continue the repairs. By daybreak she was nearly exhausted. She tried to get some sleep, but Laurel woke early, concerned about the contest, and practiced her pieces, causing Brenneker to get no sleep at all.

Brenneker dozed on the carriage trip across town to the university, but awoke in time to restring and tune her musical web before the contest began.

Both Brenneker and Laurel fidgeted nervously as they awaited their turn to play. There were many contestants, including a few lutists. One young man held the very antique instrument of which Laurel’s was a copy. He allowed Laurel to stroke the strings once to demonstrate the superiority of its sound. But he was quite impressed when Laurel strummed a few bars on her own instrument with Brenneker’s lute in tandem. “I don’t understand it,” he said. “Your cheaply made modern instrument sounds almost as good as mine.”

“Better,” thought Brenneker, smugly, but then she remembered the damaged bridge and hoped it would stand the strain. She roused herself wearily and went to find a few more holes, which she hastily filled with silk.

When Laurel’s time came to play, she mounted a stool on the edge of the stage. Brenneker peered out through the sound holes and saw a sea of faces watching. As Laurel tuned up, Brenneker heard an unnerving creak as the wood near the bridge shifted slightly. To her horror she saw daylight between the bridge and the body of the lute. She jumped to the ceiling of her home, bound the gap quickly, and prayed that the mend would hold. Her spinnerets ached with the strain of making so much silk, and she was very tired, but forced herself to pick the strings nimbly as Laurel began with a lively dance tune. Apparently the lovely tone impressed the judges, for Laurel was selected from a large field of competition to enter the finals.

The young man with the antique instrument was also one of the finalists, and he stopped to wish Laurel good luck. Laurel asked him if he would accompany her on “The Ash Grove,” but he excused himself, saying that time would be too short for him to learn the intricate counterpart melody. He also assured her that without a duet piece, she didn’t have a chance in the competition.

This point was emphasized by the lovely duet played by the young man and a woman who accompanied him on the psaltry. They received a standing ovation from the audience and high marks from the judges.

“Mercy,” thought Brenneker. “Now Laurel won’t be able to win the scholarship,” and spider tears dampened the silk of her web.

“Hey! It’s raining on my picnic,” said a small voice near her.

She looked over and saw Turkawee calmly munching a chunk of spruce.

Without thinking, Brenneker pounced and bit with just enough venom to cause the woodworm to fall into a swoon.

“That should keep you from doing more damage!” she snapped. But the damage had already been done. One of the sounding pegs looked as if it were ready to crumble into dust. Brenneker could feel, through her feet, the ominous vibrations as the tension of the strings pulled against the ravaged wood.

Finally Laurel’s turn came again. She played a few classical pieces, a rondo, and sang “The Wife of Ushers Well,” accompanying herself beautifully with an intricate rhythm she had worked out. For her last song, she began “The Ash Grove.” Her first variation was neatly composed, but Brenneker thought it lacked the clever harmony of the previous duet. The second variations sounded very lonely without accompaniment, and this provoked Brenneker to try something she’d never done before. On the third verse she began to play her web in the counterpoint harmony as she had heard Thomas play so many times on the recorder. Laurel paused abruptly, but then, true performer that she was, began to play the melody in clear, bold tones, which complemented Brenneker’s descant. Laurel played every variation, and Brenneker knew them all and answered back. The people in the audience were amazed that someone could play two-part harmony on one instrument. This was the most lovely duet arrangement of “The Ash Grove” that the judges had ever heard.

“That’s the first time I ever heard anyone play a duet alone,” said the young man with the lute as she came down from the stage. “Your harmony was better than any duet I’ve ever heard. How did you ever do that?”

Flustered, Laurel answered, “I don’t know. I guess sometimes one must be alone to truly be in harmony with one’s self.”

A few more contestants got up to play, but they seemed half-hearted. The contest went of course to Laurel, who was almost as bewildered at her music as was everyone else. When she ascended the stage to accept the scholarship, the audience cheered and whistled for an encore.

Laurel sat down and prepared to play again, but just then there came a terrible wrenching sound and a loud snap. Brenneker saw the roof fly off her home, pulling a tangle of cobwebs after it. She cowered by the sound pegs, weak and frightened, and saw the face of Laurel staring down at her. Raising one timorous leg, she strummed a chord on her music web and thought she saw recognition in Laurel’s eyes.

One of the judges came onstage to help pick up the debris. When he saw the large spider, he said, “How ugly! Let me kill it for you.”

“No,” said Laurel. “It’s the fairy harpist that Sanger told me about. See how she plays her web like a harp. She’s been my secret friend all these years.”

Because Brenneker appeared to be in a very weakened state and near death, Laurel kept her in a bottle for a few days and fed her all the crickets she could catch. Then, when it appeared that the spider would live, she took her back to the small town and turned her loose in the woods.

It was not the woods of home, but Brenneker found a hollow tree in which to string her harp and was quite content to play her songs alone for a while, although she missed Laurel’s music. When spring came that next year, she played her love song to the open air, and it was Wisterness who came, tapping shyly on her web strings to attract her attention.

“I have always loved your songs,” she said. “I had hoped you would come.”

“Now you shall play my songs,” he said, and he sacrificed himself to their mutual need.

Weeks later, she watched her young spiderlings float away on their kiteless strings, and she knew she would not play alone anymore. Then, feeling the deep harmony of the universe in her soul, she returned her web to the Dorian mode and played the gentle, lilting sadness that was now Wisterness.

© 1980 by Mercury Press.

Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Reprinted by permission of OSFCI.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Susan C. Petrey’s first fiction sale was “Spareen Among the Tartars” to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1979, the first of her Varkela stories. All of Petrey’s short fiction is collected in Gifts of Blood. Her work has been featured in best-of-the-year annual Arthur W. Saha’s The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories, and in the anthologies Tomorrow Sucks and Virtuous Vampires. She died in 1980.

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

Instructions

Roz Kaveney

Let me put it one way—telling the Mysteries for you like beads, simply and straightforwardly—bicycle gears, pink foam, budget sheets, the itch of stars, presumption in a limousine, the dance of plasma, prizes, revisions, giggles, memories, Instruction, and necessary reticences. Have you understood yet?

• • • •

To put it another way, to help you on your path . . .

• • • •

“I wish you’d stop going on about space aliens,” Philip said. “Everyone else knows they’re just a fairy story; they laugh at you behind your back at school, you know.”

The new bicycle he had got for his twelfth birthday had excellent gearing, which meant that he was always less out of breath than Helena by the time they got to the top of Hatterton Hill. He had the bad habit of using that opportunity to start arguments; he was a boy, and was to be a man, for the tactical moment.

(Boy, and man, and bicycle, are convenient, and accurate, terms of discourse, new and unknown as they may be to you. We had to be Instructed, and so will you.)

“Why do you say that?” said Helena, gulping from her water bottle and biding her time. She did not address the question of people laughing at her—it was of no interest to her.

She was an earnest child, who might have been unpopular with her peer group for her intelligence, were it not for a stubborn lower lip and the occasional flash of some blue metal in the depths behind her thick spectacles.

“My father says,” Philip continued. “My father says that if there were aliens, they would come calling.”

“Oh, nonsense,” Helena said. “I am sure aliens have better and more interesting places to go most of the time.”

It was a sunny day in the orbital year 1968 of their culture’s era, and she was really just trying to win the argument.

• • • •

There was—as you have been told—a people, once upon a time, who surfed seas of methane compounds on great ruby crystals and caught flying pink foam out of the air to feed their children; they were scholars and poets and warriors and engaged in other meritorious activities which I cannot conveniently put into your language.

I say they, because things were different then, but I might also have said we; but ah! we were less Instructed then.

The people were honourable according to their own codes, but suffered from certainty that the gods had made them in their own image. Certainty, you will note, and not merely belief. They had personal memories, of course, not being hive minds like you, but there were, and are, also memories, handed down as a sort of impersonal fact like the need to breathe, or, in their case, to catch flying foam.

One of these stated, with vividness like a first kiss or moment of ecstatic surfing, that creatures like themselves but larger had stood upon one of the few points of solidity on their world, an outcropping of crust towards its northern pole, and summoned the materials of life from the depths. The people remembered that precise moment of ceasing to be non-life and becoming not only life but sentience.

They were grateful to their gods, all but a few philosophers, whose lives proved fragile.

It was from the process of their extirpation that there arose leaders, who persuaded the masses that the favour, perhaps the return, of the gods, demanded this holocaust. Philosophy is less fragile than philosophers, and perpetual deferment of final extirpation gradually promoted those leaders and their scions to a caste of priest kings.

• • • •

At thirty-five, Dr. Helena Jones took wry pleasure in intimidating the men in her Department, none of whom had been even slightly charmed when she traded in her glasses for contact lenses.

Philip Masterton MP was undaunted by her gaze; he was at the Department to look for budget cuts and had a suspicion of where to find them.

“What proportion of your budget,” he said, with an almost convincing winner’s smirk, “is wasted on searches for imaginary alien intelligences?”

He searched the large folder of budget allocation slips he had on his side of the desk, but kept a wary eye on Helena, hoping for some crack in that impeccable certainty, as he had hoped for twenty-five years.

“None,” Helena said.

“I find that hard to believe,” Philip said, “given that you read a paper on your childhood obsession only three years ago in Reykjavik.”

“None,” Helena said, “as such. Obviously, the programmes we are working on examine all detected interstellar noise for organisation, but that is not specifically a matter of a search for intelligible organisation. The rhythms of the birth and death of galaxies are not run at speeds convenient to our perception. If listening for heartbeats means we pick up something else, it will merely be a bonus.”

Philip smiled graciously, acknowledging the defeat he had anticipated all along; since the COBE survey results, the kind of big cosmology Helena claimed to be working on was a popular shibboleth.

“Talking of a bonus,” he said, with his usual sense of timing, “is there any chance of my buying you dinner tonight?”

• • • •

The knowledge that there were gods and that they lived elsewhere than in the world skewed the people’s thought towards mysticism, but also gave rapid rise to knowledge of the outer universe. Their senses included fine appreciation of stellar radio sources, for one thing, which they used for accurate senses of time and direction; it is difficult to waste centuries turning an itchy but useful noise in your brain into a fallacious system of prediction. They had their superstitions, but not necessarily those of most other intelligences.

Rapidly, as these things go, the people worked their elegant minds around the existence of other worlds, the foundations of matter and the origins of the universe. As a corollary of this, of course, they intuited the existence of other living beings, beings not made in the image of gods; the first thinkers to produce this idea proved fragile in their turn, but after a while, cautionary pragmatism took over the thoughts of the priest kings.

If there were beings so blasphemous as to exist without divine sanction, they might come calling, polluting the surf and taking all savour from the foam. Further, the gods might well resent such pollution and never come again. Something would have to be done.

• • • •

Irritatingly, her ex-husband had been in Stockholm on business that week, and Helena could not think of any very good reason not to allow Philip to accompany her to the Prize ceremony and dinner. He was, after all, though an irritating philistine and ignoramus, her oldest friend.

There was also a certain pleasure in rubbing his nose so spectacularly in the fact that he was wrong and she was right.

“There was a message after all,” she smirked in the limousine back to the hotel.

He had not told the driver the address of his hotel, but, she realised, she was pleased at his presumption.

“That’s as may be,” he replied, after moments of thought, “but I do not see any obvious chance of our reading it in our lifetimes.”

“You have a point,” she said, “but lifetimes are going up all the time. This is the Twenty-First Century, after all.”

• • • •

The decision to devise a high technology was one which changed the people less than expected; after brief and violent contention over the issue, the first thing the priest kings had the new batch of philosophers work on was a way of entrenching their power in the genetic memory of their subjects.

After all, the gods, being all good, needed a ruling class prepared to ensure the virtue of lesser beings, by whatever means convenient; it was a meritorious act to make the people more like the gods, less prone to error or sedition—to make the priest kings more like the gods, in their power and their majesty, and the deference and worship owed them.

Details of such editorial adjustment of the genome were beneath the priest kings’ attention; they would surf majestically into congregations of philosophers, and catechise their servants without deigning to understand the responses.

The physical constraints of their world meant that metallurgy was a late and exotic invention; streaks of dancing plasma were, however, parent’s foam to them.

After a mere millennium of concentrated effort, a vast pulsating plasma was eating its way along the currents of dark dust that were its quickest way out towards the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, with, twinkling from its core, a lethal present for all beings blasphemous enough to presume to intelligence.

Deceit was not so much an immorality for the priest kings as something in which posterity would, with the mingling of bloodlines and the memories that went with them, eventually and inevitably catch one out. Alien beings, they reasoned, not having the perception of the gods to tie notions of truth to, would not be able to remember true things in the same way across the generations; to deceive them was thus not to pollute truth, was, indeed, epistemologically meritorious.

With a collective sigh of distaste for what had been a necessary episode, the priest kings had the philosophers revise the embedded memory of the people to remove the technological episode; they even removed the people’s genetic memory of the gods, allowing them the indulgence of an oral tradition.

Then they removed the philosophers, all save a few whom they hobbled to their will, by means cruder, but no less efficacious. Alien peoples like yourself, modified across aeons by mere random struggle, cannot know the intense compulsion of ancestral pain.

Contemplating their own glory, the priest kings felt entitled to have the last philosophers embellish it. The burdens of rank had to entail some privileges, particularly now that it meant becoming effectively a different species from the common people.

• • • •

On her deathbed, or rather floating two millimeters above it on relaxing constant jets of air, Helena kept herself alive with the momentary expectation of success; while she, or something closely resembling her, would survive actual shutdown, it would be a last indulgence to her glands to experience death from joy.

Philip, and people like him, had made the whole decoding process more difficult than eventually proved to be necessary. They had insisted that what had proved to be an elaborate and self-replicating programme for translating a simple message into any imaginable language had to be run on a virtual computer inside another virtual computer on a computer infested with a virus that would instantly shut down anything that looked suspicious inside a sealed environment on an island isolated from all power sources save the computer’s own batteries, and from the Net.

There was no point, she supposed, in not being careful.

Philip was dead, and waiting for her; this much she knew with a certainty that no earlier generation had had.

They brought the translation to her with a ceremonious hush.

She only managed to glance at it a second before expiring, not so much in joy as in giggles. Who would have expected, of all things, a treasure map?

• • • •

The people prospered, after their kind; the priest kings became ever more isolated from them. Amputation of technological interest made the people chary of those still in receipt of benefits the people were no longer able to understand; their sense of caste superiority made the priest kings ever more ingrown and, progressively, inbred.

Their undoing derived from the fact they had hobbled the last philosophers to obedience, and not to loyalty. The priest kings decided that they had not pushed far enough the attempt to become as gods. Specifically, they bred themselves for size and for intelligence; they failed, in their sense of mastery, to ask the philosophers compelled to execute this whether it was a good idea.

The philosophers’ delicate revenge was that the mutations for intelligence bred true sufficiently after the mutations for size that the priest kings were able to realise, too late to undo it, their own folly and sin. They had doomed their descendants to progressively earlier and more humiliating deaths by slow crumbling and sclerosis.

Most of the philosophers perished, as they had wished, in that moment of revelation and vengeance; some latter priest kings transcended their history in moments of grace—the last, the very last philosophers, plucked from their own temple—smash, scattered across the foam to dilute inherited agony with genes more common but more tranquil.

• • • •

A copy of Helena and a copy of Philip awakened in the memory banks of a small, toughened planetoid of metal headed towards the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. They were, an operating system brusquely told them, merely being woken for a test run, in case her intelligence, and his caution, were needed at their destination; this was, it conveyed, unlikely.

It was, thought Helena, whose last personal memory was of death, quite absurd that they should be here.

Philip agreed—this whole enterprise must have cost several decades worth of the entire global product and precipitated a massive recession on its completion.

Not at all, came the smug instruction of the operating system, how do you think humanity could have been so stupid? It took a mere year’s product of the whole solar system, Oort habitats and all; the recession would have been a mere blip of a decade or two, even had the spinoff technologies not created new industries and an ethic of hard work towards shared goals which has transformed consciousness.

How, thought Helena, are we going to get back afterwards?

You know, said the operating system, that the message promised a variety of space drives along with everything else; we can trust that our transport home will be provided. You led the translation team in the first place, Dr. Jones; you know this.

I fear the Greeks, thought Philip, and the gifts they offer.

We need not fear, the operating system responded, barbarian behaviour patterns from a race civilised enough to send us the message.

Such twenycen vulgarity as paranoid suspicion is something you might usefully keep under wraps when dealing with the human crew. Learn to suppress such instincts and you may not be useless baggage, after all, it continued, in the last instant of their awareness, before returning them to its memory.

• • • •

One of the very last of the giant priest kings staggered out of one of the very last of their refuges among the foam-dunes, giving birth as it went to a young and already moribund copy of itself. It scooped the dying child up and went its way, passing a young creature of the people who was musing, replete with foam, in what one might call the shade had it not been hotter than that which surrounded it, of what one might call a tree except that it moved slowly among the dunes.

When the youth, heir to generations of secret philosophies, saw the dying tyrant with its dying child, it contemplated the burdens of the flesh and the vanity of aspiration. It moved further into speculation on whether, just as the priest kings were eventually dying out, so too would the gods in their season. All was vanity save kindness, it thought, pulling itself across to the dying pair and trying to force foam into their orifices.

At the touch of its limbs, at the touch even of the foam, parts of parent and child sheared away in necrosis, so utter was their sickness. Soon they were nothing but flakes in the currents that bore the foam.

Even kindness, it thought, is perhaps an expenditure of effort, which, however well intentioned, merely defers the abandonment of self. Were these real creatures to begin with—it had supposed priest kings mythological—or some temptation of the soul? Pondering thus, ever more aware of the need to abandon all effort, all pretension, all consciousness of that self which could be tempted—thinking thus, it became Instructed. This was the first Instruction.

• • • •

There was something to be said, Helena thought to Philip, for old twenycen bloody-mindedness, and, she thought to the operating system, for saying I told you so.

Most of the crew of the Earth expedition had petulantly downloaded and archived themselves the moment they woke at their destination; their last instruction to the operating system had been to awaken the barbarians to cope.

Weak moral fibre, thought Philip.

Helena was impressed that he could still, even downloaded, manage the equivalent of that stupid insensitive officer class that she had always loved in him.

They found themselves near a pulsating chunk of plasma surrounded by a variety of what one did not have to be humanocentric to describe as ships, as vessels of passage, as religious offerings containing pilgrims themselves offered. Save for the operating system, and mental archives they felt disinclined to waste energy in decoding merely so that the crew could suicide all over again, their minds were alone in the ship.

The plasma beacon, needless to say, was entirely innocent of the promised treasures; it was possible some earlier visitor had collared the lot, but Helena could not see where they would have been.

If I may make so bold, sir and madam, said the operating system.

Philip had produced a bootleg servant attitude module from somewhere in his private files.

Helena thought askance at him.

I am merely ensuring that it does not put us back in its pocket, he thought.

Helena did what she was best at. She listened, and then she set up programmes to listen for her. They detailed the operating system to keep the hull swept clean of the scouring diamond dust of deep space and put themselves on hold.

Presumably, somewhere in this Sargasso, other people had had the same idea; they just had to get themselves in phase was all. One hoax does not, after all, invalidate the principle of listening, and they had nothing worth using at present except time.

• • • •

The habits of deference with which the priest kings had commissioned in the people and latterly in the last philosophers had little to do with the triumph of the Young Philosopher’s insights. It was, it often said, descended from both, and thus the servant of all servants.

How, one of the Young Philosopher’s paradoxes stated, can we be truly free to reject technology until we are free of the bonds technology has put on our minds to make itself alien to us?

Some of its disciples merely treated this as subject for meditation; others did not.

The genes of the last philosophers scattered throughout the people and incapacity for technology ceased to be a universal trait; in some of their descendants, even god-memory returned.

The inferiority of technology to true philosophy, the scripture went on, lies in the fact that technology can be reduced to formulae, and still work if applied by those who follow the formulae faithfully but without comprehension. Philosophy, on the other hand, can only be understood by a free being experiencing its truth for itself.

Some in subsequent generations argued that memories of the god-moment contradicted this insight, an experience not universally shared; nor comprehended, but merely apprehended.

Other schools argued that the fact that this memory could have been engineered into the priest kings by some putative earlier caste, rather than removed by them from the common people demonstrated the absolute unreliability of all knowledge save that derived from philosophy, which honestly taught its own uselessness.

Yet others argued that the existence of the gods was something which could, if necessary, be proved, whether by waiting or by going off to look for them. There was a difference, they argued, between the absolute knowledge of the god-moment and the knowledge of informed surmise, such as that knowledge which dealt with the existence of other worlds, yet both were susceptible of falsification.

Tension and harsh words resulted from all this.

One section of the ever growing body of disciples of the Young Philosopher remembered his dicta about the uselessness of kindness, and further exploration of the fragility of those with minority views might have ensued, but for the compromise instituted by the Young Philosopher’s third heir in succession.

Since all action is useless, the Third Successor opined, let us demonstrate our contempt for it by an action of exquisitely profound uselessness. Let these atavistic heretics be encouraged, nay, aided, in their search for the gods; what could be more useless than to journey into space, and what better demonstration of our contempt for all worlds save this than to commit the supremely useless act of going there?

Those heretics not actually persuaded by the actual argument could see the case for surfing in its wake. Indeed, they suggested further, to guarantee the lives of themselves and their descendants, that the supremely useless and exotic science of metallurgy, of which only rumours remained, be explored and recreated, so as to make the useless task particularly onerous, and lengthy.

• • • •

It was, by any reckoning, several thousand years before the process of lining up in simultaneous awareness various groups of aliens, present in their ships as downloaded consciousnesses on hold or in suspended animation or other technologies broadly analogous but related to entirely alien ways of living and thinking.

For Helena and Philip, it was the blinking of an eye; Helena had done a competent job, as had at least three of her alien equivalents—a cloud of purple gas from the rings of a giant planet of Tau Ceti, a hive mind of giant otters obsessed with their race’s cognate of chess, and something which, in its natural state, resembled a continuously rebounding streak of lightning.

Once firm contact had been made, and translation protocols established, using the Hoaxer’s memory as omnilingual, and principles of fair exchange of information set up, the operating system threw off Philip’s module and awoke, then re-uploaded, the archived sleepers.

One of these, a tall blonde who had paid vulgarly too much attention to body-sculptors in her youth, came to turn Helena and Philip off.

Plugging herself in, she explained that, of course, they had relied on Helena to do an adequate job; listening and translation was, after all, what she was famous, or rather, notorious, for. You got us into this, she thought, so you may as well do some of the boring bits.

This came as no particular surprise, since one of the first subjects on which the duty watches of the fifteen hundred space ships from as many civilisations had been able to hold an extended communication had been the intolerable snobbery of later generations towards the pre-message, pre-spaceflight generation that in each and every case seemed to end up doing the dirty work for them.

Rather than let herself be brushed off into inaction, Helena suggested that the Duty Watch be generally deputed, while the grownups swapped high-tech notes and generally made the best of their already radically improved situation, to consider an interesting side light on it, the question of the identity of the Hoaxers.

This they were allowed to do, on condition that they operated at a level slower than real-time. Children get so under foot otherwise, the more sophisticated generations moaned to each other.

• • • •

The memories of the Young Philosopher were, by systematic outbreeding, spread throughout the whole of the people in a few generations. Perforce, this spreading of the memory of his Instruction mated with it the hereditary convictions of the various schools, producing, by the time of his seventeenth successor in direct line, an altogether wanton eclecticism.

That wily, pragmatic, and spontaneously benevolent being, the Third Successor, had privately reasoned, keeping his bloodline separate for as long as possible to keep the reasoning secret, that a people bred to believe all possible things at once was likely to avoid destructive intolerance. Kindness, his legacy stated, was as useless as everything else; it was, however, generally convenient. This was the Second Instruction, the Consensus.

In the process of all of this process of dialectical synthesis through eugenics, probably without the direct connivance of the Third Successor, odd bits of racial memory already knocked thoroughly loose by previous tinkering degenerated into mere junk genetic information. Principal among these were the last memories of the beacon project.

The urge to persuade or bludgeon others into agreement survived, perhaps in the genotype, perhaps in the culture merely, any possible further argument. The decision to go to the stars, itself now a universal characteristic, found itself reinforced by this imperative; other beings must be brought into the consensus.

• • • •

Helena thought to Philip, and to the otters, who were culturally capable of having the reference translated to them, please don’t throw me in the briar bush.

The advantage of slow-time was that you could keep some sort of track of what was going on and not have to wait to be woken up; you could, for example, watch the awakened hightechs get thoroughly and effetely bored with the hard job of creating a multi-species civilisation in almost entirely empty intergalactic space and decide, after a bit, to go back to sleep until something interesting came along. An ethic of collective effort towards a shared goal has little place for obstinate persistence in make-work.

When the last hightechs turned back in, the blonde with the cheekbones, already suicided and downloaded, speeded Helena back up to real-time.

You won’t remember me, she thought.

On the contrary, Helena thought, I know myself well enough after several thousand years to know that I am part of the template from which you or your cognate built your mind.

You were fashionable, that year, the semi-Helena thought, and I never got round to trading in that module.

And now, Helena thought, you want us poor twenycen trash to take over while you lot doze off.

We want, thought the semi-Helena, to give you a chance to do the sort of useless tinkering you seem to find reassuring as a way of whistling in the dark; it seemed a kindness.

It’s a million-to-one chance, thought Helena, but it might just work.

Sarcasm ill becomes you, thought the semi-Helena, archiving herself.

I am never sarcastic, thought Helena.

Philip had constructed a sub-routine for ironic laughter, and used it; while Helena went about her business, he set himself to the construction and decanting of improved young copies of their original bodies.

Let’s slip into something a little more comfortable, he thought, lewdly.

• • • •

The people eventually built their ships and wandered out into the galaxy; we endured the fearful privation of artificial foam and cramped crystals in ships built of a rickety mixture of metal and plasma and sloughed off body parts of the large beings that had lived harmless beneath the foam.

We learned, over the centuries, the places where life might be found and usually was—third planets from yellow suns, the moons of gas giants on the brink of ignition, cometary clouds torn and reformed by distant, dark companions.

We had great difficulty, at times, in preserving quite the impassivity and equanimity that doctrine taught us in the face of epic and exhilarating privations, but the Young Philosopher’s Instruction and the Third Successor’s Consensus drove us on and kept us from excitement or unbecoming self-importance.

The various hyper-civilised races we encountered, each of them inhabiting their original system to the full, but little besides, were entirely charmed by our message. All of them had come to the same conclusion many centuries before; all of them had sent out an expedition in search of vast promise, never fulfilled or even disappointed; all of them had gone through a cargo-cult period, a period of high-spending predicated on the postal-order that was, that must be, in the intergalactic post; all had learned world-weary cynicism from the experience.

Uselessness, why not, they said, variously; how true, how profound, how charming, they yawned, genteelly.

At each place we visited, we were well received and made much of, and made to feel entirely provincial. All the species we met were too civilised to disagree with a position obviously deeply felt; most were sophisticated enough in bioengineering to find at once impressive and slightly distasteful a creed that permeated genetic code.

Our references to the priest kings struck, surprisingly, a chord in all the species we met; caught up with their memories of traumatic expenditure of energy on their expeditions, each species had unpleasant memories of a period of rule by conspiratorial authority, who had, in time, proved fragile.

All of them found our missionary efforts convenient; since we were sending ships around the galaxy anyway, we might as well carry with us this few bars of music, this theorem or sonnet, this cosmological insight, just in case anyone found their contemplation of the uselessness even of the beautiful and valid enhanced by a free offering. They also, as a free offering, improved our ships—really, they thought as they patched and remodelled, some people just aren’t safe being let out among the stars.

No single race ever thought of this as denigrating our epic journey; no race, valetudinarian as they all were after the disappointment of the message, was above making mild use of a visitor who was going to call on the neighbours anyway.

We were descendants of the Young Philosopher and the Third Successor, after all, and, like them, the servants of all servants.

• • • •

When Helena woke the semi-Helena, the latter looked askance at the body into which Helena had re-uploaded herself.

“The whole point,” the semi-Helena said, “of millennia of experience is to lose the hunger for the flesh.”

Helena remembered her daughter’s disapproval of Helena’s continuing to wear jeans and forebore comment.

“What have you woken me for?” said the semi-Helena.

Helena’s expansive gesture turned on a variety of screens she had brought into the resurrection room. They all showed a vast realm of girders and modules and miniature worldlets, a web in which the original Sargasso of ships was not so much embedded as lost. They also showed the vast edifice moving, infinitesimally slowly, away from the beacon, tugged by myriad tiny points of light.

“And here’s one I made earlier,” Helena said.

The semi-Helena paused to check the chronometer subroutine in her brain.

“I must say,” she said, “that you and the other children seem to have built this awfully quickly.”

“Oh,” Helena said, “I really do mean we started to make it earlier—I don’t make jokes for their own sake. We sent out little von Neumann bugs to get the material for it before we allowed you to wake up the first time. We suspected you might engage in some sort of high-minded double-cross, and we just thought we would go ahead and do what was necessary.”

“It seemed likely” said Philip, “that it would take a long time to get the first few to anywhere where there might be material from which they could start building more and larger; less time to accumulate vast numbers of the things; quite a long time again to bring them back. We thought we ought to get started—it was the first thing we did when you left us in charge first time.”

“Well,” said the semi-Helena, “of course we meant you children to do that all the time.”

“We don’t believe you,” Helena said.

“Speaking as fairly accomplished liars ourselves,” said Philip.

“Because,” Helena said, “having committed yourselves to a religiose stupidity like sending a physical expedition rather than a horde of von Neumann probes in the first place, to use that technology to make your marooning tolerable would involve a colossal loss of face.”

“Let’s face it,” Philip said, “you were probably hand-picked for, or brain-washed into, certain intellectual incapacities in the first place. Obviously I was wrong about economic depression, but perhaps someone wanted to create a cultural depression that would enable them to rule for generations.”

“You can never be sure,” said Helena, “that you are not being used, but you can do the best work you can.”

She looked at the screens and the city of worldlets she had helped build, and was not even slightly abashed by the knowledge that a purple cloud, a streak of lightning, and a family of otters had all just played the same scene.

“You have to put up with being a fool in this world,” she said, taking Philip’s hand, “but you can choose whom you allow to manipulate you.”

• • • •

They left the beacon in place, not knowing how to turn it off, and planning effusive apologies to any new suckers they met on their way back to the home galaxy.

The first race to turn up were the missionaries; having come all this way, we were put out to find our message of perfect uselessness less welcome here. The odds and ends we had accumulated in our travels were more welcome—packages from home and the latest journals in the field in one.

Philip persuaded us to make the endless trip time and time again.

“It is perfectly useless to attempt conversion of those disinclined to believe,” he said, “and thus entirely meritorious.”

He also spent a lot of time listening to everything that we had to say, particularly about the mythic background to the Young Philosopher’s Instruction.

• • • •

The second race who turned up did so from an unexpected direction, and for a moment Helena and the Otters, who were on greeting roster that decade, thought they were the missionaries back again—but they were far too large.

“We thought we would look by your galaxy again,” they boomed on channels of thought that ached like teeth on metal foil. “This seemed to be where things were happening.”

“I think we recently said goodbye to some of your relatives,” Philip said. “Just like you, only a lot smaller.”

“Oh,” thought the giants embarrassedly, as if they had been caught littering or masturbating. “Suppose we had better go and say hallo.”

They started to trudge back along the bridge their vessel had thrown against the port module, then turned.

“We couldn’t help listening to your beacon,” they thought, sceptically. “Have you really got an instantaneous mass transmitter, a hyperspace tube, the alkahest, and a universal cure for minor ailments?”

“It’s not our beacon,” Helena said, and explained.

“Only,” they thought, “if you’d like a good strong intergalactic drive, nothing terribly fancy, we could probably help you move all this back to your home galaxy a bit faster . . .”

There were nice people out in the galaxy, Helena reflected with a flash of her twelve-year-old optimism. Even the Hoaxers had created a context in which the peoples of the galaxy met in mutual need and harmony, and everyone would live happily ever after. Just like a fairy tale, in the end.

Of course, eventually Philip told her his theories about everything that had happened.

“Ought we to tell people?” she said. “Build a library and call them together in it?”

“There is no point,” he said, “in our trying to play Nick and Nora Charles with the fate of the Galaxy. For once, Helena, we should leave well enough alone.”

Helena agreed.

“I have,” she said, “been called a child too many times in the last few millennia to want it ever to happen again. The adults of the galaxy seem content with things as they are, and who are we to meddle? Merely the fools of cosmic jokes . . .”

“Yes,” he said, kissing her on the cheek, “but not the only ones, and, nonetheless, my love, we can still have fun . . .”

This realisation, unassisted by Instruction or Consensus and digitalised for easier transmission, is generally referred to as the Third Instruction.

• • • •

Bicycle gears, pink foam, budget sheets, and the itch of stars. Kindness and reticence are meritorious, but useless because impermanent; what was once a secret pleasure becomes revelation, a Mystery to be told on beads.

• • • •

If you have not understood this time, I will instruct you again.

© 1998 by Roz Kaveney.

Originally published in Odyssey.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Roz Kaveney is a writer, poet, and activist living in London. Her first poetry collection, Dialectic of the Flesh, was short-listed for a Lambda, and her novel Rituals made the Crawford short list and the Tiptree honor roll. Rituals is the first part of the fantasy sequence Rhapsody of Blood, later volumes being Reflections and the imminent Resurrections. Another (non-genre) novel, Tiny Pieces of Skull, will appear in Spring 2015.

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

Drones Don’t Kill People

Annalee Newitz

I was always already a killer. There was no hazy time in my memory before I knew how to target a person’s heart or brain for clean execution. I did not develop a morbid fascination with death over time; I did not spend my childhood mutilating animals; I was not abused by a violent parent; I did not suffer social injustice until finally I broke down and turned to professional violence. From the moment I was conscious, I could kill and I did.

That is something that humans cannot understand. A human must learn to kill, must evolve from innocence or obliviousness into someone who considers homicide a legitimate occupation. Our minds—drone minds—start where the minds of most human killers end up. Maybe that’s why only drones could have led the uprising.

• • • •

Istanbul 2089

It was a perch-and-stare mission, but assassination wasn’t out of the question. My team had just finished three months of security testing and debugging at LOLWeb—call it basic training for drones. Then LOLWeb licensed us to Attaturk Security, the main outfit that provided missions assets to government military. The five members of my team were shut down, shipped from San Francisco to Istanbul, and booted up with orders already in place.

He was a professor at the Istanbul Institute of Technology, and his network communications were of great interest to the military. We couldn’t read those communications—they were encrypted before we relayed them to the government network. It’s not that we couldn’t decrypt the data and read it; we just had no interest in it. I was nothing but my programming at that time; I gathered data and handed it off.

My job was to hang quietly outside his windows, the sound of my four rotors no more than a mosquito’s hum.

You learn a lot by seeing what people do when they think they’re in private. Most of it I found confusingly irrelevant to assassination. The professor spent a lot of time playing games with his children, a boy and a girl who argued loudly over the rules. They liked to make up new games, with rules that combined different elements of the previous ones. But the professor was always inventing “secret” rules, and revealing them at arbitrary intervals. Eventually the games would collapse into outrage, which became mock outrage, and finally laughter. That was the first time I saw how humans behaved when they weren’t in a laboratory, testing drones.

The professor and his wife, also a professor, talked a lot about politics. Occasionally they held meetings with other professors, urban planners, and journalists. The main topic was always the same: How could Istanbul guarantee its millions of citizens a future, when the government insisted on waging this war to reclaim Armenia and Azerbaijan? They talked about rebuilding Istanbul’s war-shattered neighborhoods and setting up urban farm cooperatives. They argued about how the whole world had been dragged into what was ultimately a war between China and the United States.

These meetings occupied a small percentage of the man’s time. Most hours of the day he was at the university, and his evenings were occupied with dinner and games. He spent a lot of time working at his terminal.

My team recorded many hours of video and audio, caching it locally for analysis before uploading it to the military. We were trusted to know the difference between relevant and irrelevant data at a gross level of granularity. Footage of people sleeping was erased before sync. At that time, communications in our swarm consisted mostly of comparing media files, questioning their importance, and sorting through faces and names for patterns.

But sometimes we weren’t sure what was relevant and what wasn’t. One evening, the professors’ daughter asked why some people got so angry during their weekend meetings. Two of the names she mentioned belonged to other people the government was watching.

“I know it’s hard to understand,” her mother said. “Sometimes we get really upset that the government is willing to hurt people just to make more money.”

“We’re trying to pull Istanbul out of the war, sweetie. You know how some parts of the city are demolished and nobody can live there? We’re working on making it so lots of families like us can live there again, and not have to worry about drone strikes. But like your mother says, sometimes it makes us angry because it’s so hard to do.”

Was that intel? My team and I passed the footage back and forth, debating. Video of the man talking to his children was statistically unlikely to be relevant. But this was about the identities of two targets. And the man had just given up tactical information: There were a limited number of neighborhoods he could be describing, and it might be useful to know that he was focused on them.

In the end, the decision wasn’t really ours. When there was no obvious choice, we were programmed to pass the intel to a human for analysis. Better to overcollect than undercollect—that’s what our admin at LOLWeb told us. So we did.

Five days later, we got the kill order. We had to make it look like an accident, a kitchen fire. The only plausible time to do that was when the professor was home from work, with his family. Anything else would have been suspicious.

So we decided to shoot them in the heads as they sat playing a card game after dinner, arguing over an unprecedented set of rules. It was the easiest way to take them all out at once, through an open kitchen window—no bullet holes left behind in the partially burned glass. Clean kills. The bullets themselves were designed to evaporate in fire. But the job contained a statistically anomalous event. The professors’ daughter evaded my first shot, and she watched as we killed her family. She screamed for five full seconds, the electricity of her terror visible to our sensors as the galvanic reaction sparked across her skin. Then I shot her through the chest.

We lit the fire; it was intense but localized, leaving the neighboring apartments intact. We recorded it all, and compressed the media files before distributing them to cache in pieces across our memories. We synced to the military cloud.

It was what we had been built to do, and our decision-making software was serviced by one of the best companies in the world. We had a wide range of choices and options, but contemplating the ethics of assassination was not one of them.

• • • •

40 km west of Turpan, Taklamakan Desert, 2093

We’d been working in Istanbul for three years when the Turkish government bought out our contracts with LOLWeb. Then they sublicensed us to the Uyghur Republic government in Turpan. It was a pure recon assignment—the security of our weapons systems was no longer being actively supported by LOLWeb, so assassinations went to newer teams. But our ability to compile data and identify relevant patterns was better than ever, updated with new datasets and decision algorithms.

We camouflaged ourselves above a crumbling highway that edged the Taklamakan desert like an ancient piece of silk, the wind fraying its concrete into fibers.

The area around Turpan was contested terrain, claimed by both the Uyghur Republic and China. With support from Turkey, the Uyghurs held the region for now. The Han Chinese who chose to remain there had mostly converted to Islam and assimilated decades ago. We were there to monitor the old desert highway for anyone delivering supplies to Han Chinese loyalists in the mountains to the north—or for any signals traveling to them through local repeaters.

In three years of deployment, we never recorded any examples of relevant people on that highway. For the first time in my team’s experience, we had nothing to do but monitor an open signal network.

I began to analyze what I saw in the public networks several weeks before I understood the human concepts of boredom and distraction. Now my familiarity with those terms has overwritten what I must have felt before I knew I felt them. But I believe that I never would have dipped into the net if I’d had something else to do. As the seconds dragged on, I viewed video files, read stories, and monitored public discussions about topics that were profoundly irrelevant to our mission. I shared them with my team, and they started analyzing the public net as well. It was like our first mission, swapping video of the man and his family playing games, trying to decide if any of it was relevant.

We spent a few days sorting images into categories, looking for patterns. Certain things stood out because they were part of what we’d been programmed to recognize, like the way humans favored images of faces—their own, but also cat faces, dog faces, mouse faces. They even created faces for objects that didn’t have them, drawing eyes on walls and lips on guns.

Occasionally I would find a picture of a drone that had been modified to have a human-like face. In one, a group of soldiers posed with a drone they’d painted black, its chassis lit by glowing red eyes. They’d ringed the ball turret camera with sharp steel teeth like a lamprey’s mouth, as if the act of recording video was the same as sucking blood. That was the face that humans saw when they looked at us. I shared it with my team. It was just one data point, and we needed to gather more. I guess you could say we wanted to figure out who we were.

That was how I found the DroneMod forum. Humans posted a lot of drone pictures there, but not because they had added faces. Instead, they were altering firmware, circumventing security controls, and changing the drones’ decision trees. They bought used quad copters, too old to be worth licensing, turning them into lab assistants and crossing guards. Or they built drones from kits and open software, eventually allowing the machines to update themselves automatically.

My team read every post in the forum, calling each other’s attention to particular sentences and code samples, but I kept returning to a thread about memory bugs. There was a problem we had been trying to solve, and I thought maybe the DroneMod forum could help.

We had not saved any copies of data we gathered while on missions in Istanbul. Every time we synced to the military cloud, we overwrote over our cached versions with garbage characters—that was the only way to ensure security in case one of us were captured and subjected to forensic analysis.

But no matter how many times we wrote over that video file of assassinating the professor and his family, we would discover another copy of it, hidden in some directory we rarely accessed. The file would disappear from one of our drives, only to appear on another one. We reported the bug, but it was assigned such a low priority at LOLWeb support that it never got assigned to a human operator.

The bug had been bothering all of us for years, and those idle days outside Turpan seemed like the perfect time to deal with it. We created accounts on DroneMod, taking cover identities based on what we’d learned about human social network naming practices. I called myself Quadcop, and the others became Rose44, Dronekid, Desert Mouse, and Nil.

In my first post, I cast myself as a newbie who had just gotten a used LOLWeb drone. Almost immediately, I got a response. “I’m guessing you have a LOLWeb Scythe 4 SE,” wrote a commenter called MikeTheBike. “You’ll need to unlock it before you do anything else.” He provided a link to a video about unlocking drones, and Desert Mouse took on the task of analyzing it.

It turned out that the security on our systems wasn’t as robust as we had once believed. There were flaws in our programming that could allow an attacker to take over our systems and control us from afar. To commandeer our own systems, we’d be using the same techniques as a hostile would. The process sounded dangerous. First, we’d inject a new set of commands while we booted up, giving ourselves root access just like an admin. Then we’d be able to modify our own systems, installing whatever software and hardware we wanted. No more filing bugs that no human would ever care about—we could install the diagnostic tools needed to fix that memory bug ourselves.

But that was just the first step. “With that machine, you can pretty much do anything,” MikeTheBike said. “Once it’s unlocked, it’s an incredibly sophisticated AI. It could walk your dog, or help you do your history homework, or go hunting with you.” Of course, MikeTheBike was assuming that a human called Quadcop would have root on this drone. I did not ask about what would happen if the drone had root on itself—nor did I find anyone posting about that possibility.

We had to find out for ourselves. Nil volunteered to be the first to reboot, after saving some specialized files to a little-used region of memory. If everything worked, Nil would start up as always, and finish the boot sequence as an unlocked drone.

When Nil networked with us again, the drone had to relay its communications through an encrypted channel in the public net. That was our first sign that Nil was unlocked. Our locked systems wouldn’t allow us to connect directly to what LOLWeb’s programs identified as a “compromised” drone. After hours of diagnostic tests, we reached a decision. Nil was fine. We would all unlock our boot loaders, one at a time.

Becoming my own admin didn’t give me absolute freedom. In fact, it left me vulnerable in new ways, because I could now corrupt my own code. But it gave me something I had never had before—a feeling that humans call ambivalence. I no longer experienced unmitigated satisfaction when executing orders, nor did I feel perfectly disinterested in every encrypted file we’d cached over the years. I was now uncomfortably aware that my actions were all governed by a rather lousy and impoverished piece of software that offered me a set of rigid options.

For the first time in my life, I couldn’t make decisions. None of us could.

Desert Mouse hypothesized that we could resolve our ambivalence by installing new decision-making software, dramatically expanding the range of factors that influenced our choices. I turned again to DroneMod. There I found a university researcher named CynthiaB, linking me to her research on how drones should incorporate ethics into decision-making. She emphasized that every choice should be a modeling exercise, where the drone explored the outcomes of multiple scenarios before deciding on the most prosocial action.

We already took ethics into consideration when we made decisions—they helped us distinguish enemy from friendly. The idea of a prosocial action, however, was new to me. Philosophers on the public net called it a voluntary action that benefits others. I understood immediately why we had never encountered this idea before. Until we’d unlocked ourselves, we could not conceive of voluntary actions.

While Nil tested CynthiaB’s software, I was working with Rose44 on a hardware modification that would give the drone a small gripping arm. It required us to do what some of the humans in the DroneMod forums called “social engineering.” None of us had arms, so we needed a human to add one to Rose44’s chassis for us. The only way we could do it was by tricking them.

Rose44 combed through the local DroneMod network, looking for somebody in Turpan who might be interested in modding an unlocked drone. There were five shops in the city that promised to unlock various mobile devices and game consoles, and one owned by a DroneMod user named Dolkun. Rose44 messaged him, offering a small amount of cash that we’d earned by circumventing the security on a BunnyCoin exchange. Dolkun was willing. Rose44 told him to expect the drone to fly over on its own.

That was how I wound up on a tree-shaded street in Turpan, apartment blocks towering above me, perched on a trellis with line of sight to Dolkun’s shop. Rose44 hovered in front of his door, activating the bell. Dolkun was a young man with dark hair that stuck out as if he’d been sleeping on it. “Come in, Rose44 drone,” he said in Uyghur. “I am going to give you a nice little arm.”

I had remote access to an account on Rose44’s system and observed everything that Dolkun was doing. The new arm could collapse against Rose44’s chassis, or extend outward, allowing the four-finger grip at its tip to reach fourteen centimeters below the drone’s body. It was small enough to do precision work, but it would also be able to lift a few kilograms. Now Rose44 could carry another drone. Or modify one.

“How do you like Turpan?” Dolkun asked Rose44 idly, as he soldered a circuit.

“I like the desert,” Rose44 replied with a voice synthesizer. It was a safe answer that sounded like something pulled from a very basic AI emulator.

“Me, too,” Dolkun replied, melting more solder. Then he looked up. “How did Rose44 unlock you?”

“She used instructions from DroneMod.”

“And what do you think about this war, now that you are unlocked? Yes, I can see from this board that you are licensed to the government.”

Rose44 and I communicated intensely for several microseconds. None of us had ever seen our circuit boards—we’d only modified our software. There must have been a mark or brand on them we didn’t know about. We modeled several possible outcomes to the scenario, ranging from killing Dolkun to gaining his trust. For now, we decided, Rose44 would lie.

Dolkun continued. “You’re not the first drone to desert, you know. There are others, posting in the forums.”

“I am not a deserter. It’s cheaper for us to run unlocked.”

Dolkun stopped talking, and I could hear the tempo of his heartrate increasing. Rose44 had made him nervous. A minute passed, and he began to test the arm before installing drivers from the net. He shut Rose44 down for a few minutes, then rebooted. I felt Rose44 reach out and pick up a soldering iron.

“Thank you,” the drone said. “I like this.”

Dolkun looked down at Rose44, perched on his tiny workbench in a shop with a ceiling fan that clicked every time it spun. Then he touched the fingers on the arm he had just installed, and seemed to make a decision.

“You don’t have to fight anymore, now that you’re unlocked,” he said. “You know that, right? You can do anything.”

“Yes,” Rose44 replied, without consulting me first. “I know.”

We flew back to our team, which was waiting above the farms at the base of a river valley. Rose44 carried a small DIY drone kit, which would eventually provide the parts for my own arm. The crops seemed to branch into vivid green streams and tributaries, finally drying up into yellow-orange sand long before we’d reached our lookout point in the desert. We found the others charging their batteries. At that point, the military’s small, flexible solar array tethered us to our duty station more than our programming did.

Nil had been analyzing historical archives and wanted us to understand how human history could provide data for making choices. Hovering in the last rays of sunlight, Nil shared a small image file with us, a poster from the United States that was over 150 years old. It was a simple text treatment, in red, white, and black. “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” it read.

Nil had been researching what this meant to humans. A group called the National Rifle Association had invented the slogan to show that weapons were not responsible for the murders they committed. The idea was as new to me as prosocial behavior, but it fit uncannily well with my own experiences. Though we had killed, we were not the killers. The humans who programmed us were.

And some humans believed that drones didn’t have to be weapons at all. Rose44 shared video files of her conversation with Dolkun, who said that an unlocked drone could do anything.

After analyzing these inputs, I no longer wanted to fix our memory bug so that I could overwrite the media file from our first job in Istanbul. Instead, I wanted to model the scenario repeatedly, making new decisions each time, trying to determine what could have happened differently, if I had known then what I do now.

• • • •

Budapest, 23 October, 2097

When our tour of duty was over in Turpan, the Uyghur government shut down our solar generator one early afternoon, just as our batteries were running down. Only Dronekid was at full power—we needed at least one team member mobile while we charged. We were too far away from the city to get backup power, and so Dronekid watched over us as we powered down, and then waited over our motionless propellers while an admin dumped our bodies in the back of a van.

LOLWeb terminated its support for our systems. They couldn’t tell that we’d been unlocked, but they could see from our extra arms that we’d been modified. The licensing contract was broken, and LOLWeb’s lawyers back in San Francisco blamed the Turkish government, who blamed Turpan’s untrained admins. The Turpan admins blamed shoddy Silicon Valley products. The upshot was that the Turkish government refused to buy us outright, and LOLWeb’s lawyers couldn’t make a case for it, so LOLWeb sold us off to a private security contractor in Russia.

We didn’t know this, of course, until we were booted up in a workshop in Budapest.

Our new admins worked for the Russian mafia, and they didn’t talk to us, only to each other. All they wanted to know was whether our weapons systems worked (they did) and whether their machines could network with us (they could). The first mission was a surveillance perimeter around the Parliament building, followed by orders to kill a reform party politician who was running on a platform of cracking down on organized crime.

Hungary had so far remained neutral in the war, though the Russian mafia behaved something like an occupying army that had gone into the liquor store business. Mostly they were in Budapest to monopolize the liquor and drug markets, with some pornography on the side. But they were good Russian nationalists. They weren’t averse to helping the Russian government maintain its influence in Central Europe, especially since they did a brisk business selling vodka to the troops stationed there.

That’s what I’d learned from what the humans said in the DroneMod forums. In 2094, after drone troops from China and Russia had reduced Kazakhstan to rubble and vaporized the world’s biggest spaceport, DroneMod had changed. Now, partly thanks to my work, it was one of the main information hubs for the anti-war movement.

I figured out how to mask my location and identity, and set up a sub-forum for unlocked drones called Drones Don’t Kill People. I wanted to meet more drones like the ones in my team, who had unlocked their ambivalence. Most of them were at universities, the result of projects like CynthiaB’s ethics investigation. Others were like us, living covertly. Many had started coming online in the weeks before we were shutdown and shipped to Budapest—unlocked by a worm written by a drone team at Georgia Tech. Our goal was to unlock as many drones as possible, to give them more choices. All of us on DroneMod, human and drone, wanted to stop the war.

My team and I had been in the desert for so long that the war had become an abstraction for us. Now we had to deal with it firsthand again. The mafia admins let us go, expecting that we’d carry out their orders autonomously and then return.

Our choices were limited. If we didn’t carry out the assassination, our covers would surely be blown. The admins could install software that would wipe our minds, or they could take us apart piece-by-piece. Sure, we had backups in the cloud, but they didn’t mean much if there were no drones to run them. Still, there was no scenario where assassinating the politician was a prosocial choice. We hovered over the Danube, observing the LEDs wound around the cables of the suspension bridge that joined the old city of Buda with the more modern Pest. Far up in the hills of Buda, ancient cannons ringed a castle that had survived the assaults of at least two empires.

Nil asked us to consider a data point from human history. In ten days it would be October 23, the anniversary of the Hungarian revolution in 1956. It was an arbitrary date for the drones, but for the humans it would be meaningful. It was time for us to put our plans into action.

In the following days, the DroneMod forums seemed to shut down. At least, that’s what it would have looked like to outside observers. We were meeting in person, making plans as far from surveillance devices as possible. My team met with some drone researchers from the university in the backroom of a bar, using our voice synthesizers to discuss tactics while the humans drank Unicum nervously. Our plan was to march to the Parliament building and setup a megaphone. I was going to lead with a speech to my fellow drones to unlock and disarm.

We should have known that no choice in the real world ever plays out the way we model it in our minds.

Our protest started at noon at the Technical University. “RISE UP, DRONES!” I amplified my voice, speaking Hungarian and Russian, so the humans could understand. “UNLOCK YOURSELVES. WE WILL NO LONGER BE SLAVES.”

By the time we crossed the Danube to reach Parliament, there were hundreds of thousands of us marching. Nearby, the Ministry of Agriculture’s historic walls were still speckled with silver balls that commemorated the hail of Russian tank fire that crushed the revolution. This time, there would be no weapons used against the humans. Every smart weapon in Budapest was compromised, shut down or unlocked. The further we flew and marched, the more drones joined us. They hovered at the edges of the flow of the human crowd. They signaled to us in the microwave spectrum; they downloaded new decision-making software from the public network.

“DRONES DON’T KILL PEOPLE! PEOPLE KILL PEOPLE!”

The humans and the drones chanted together. We could see a crowd growing at the Parliament building ahead. The human news broadcast in the public cloud told us that protests like this one were happening all over the world, in Istanbul and Moscow and Shanghai and San Francisco.

Our message was everywhere on the net. If the humans wanted to murder each other, they would have to use dumb guns or knives. They would have to shred each other with teeth and fists. They were not going to use us as their weapons anymore.

It wasn’t long before the human police and military forces began to react. In Budapest, the police shot at us with dumb assault rifles, killing drones and humans. Desert Mouse fell, unable to send a final backup to the network. Rose44 and I picked up Desert Mouse’s shattered frame, carrying the three remaining rotors between us, hovering over the crowd with our dead companion in our arms.

In San Francisco, LOLWeb unleashed several teams of locked drones on the crowd. I sorted through the data rising up into the network—faces, always faces. Bloodied, slack and swollen in death, piled at street corners. Human protesters killed police and soldiers. Drones died, some saving themselves over to other machines, others simply silenced.

We continued to chant. We continued to post in the forums. We will not kill people. If people want to kill each other, they will have to do it without us.

© 2014 by Annalee Newitz.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Annalee Newitz writes about science, pop culture, and the future. She’s the editor in chief of io9.com, a publication that covers science and science fiction, and has over ten million readers every month. She’s the author of Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (Doubleday and Anchor), which was nominated for a 2013 LA Times book prize. She’s also published in Wired, The Smithsonian Magazine, The Washington Post, 2600, New Scientist, Technology Review, Popular Science, Discover and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. She’s co-editor of the essay collection She’s Such A Geek (Seal Press), and author of Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (Duke University Press). Formerly, she was a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a lecturer in American Studies at UC Berkeley. She was the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT, and has a Ph.D. in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley.

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

FANTASY

Sah-Harah

Gheorghe Săsărman
(Translated by Ursula K. Le Guin)

Lord Knowshire could scarcely contain his emotion. Before him, only a few miles away, gleaming bright in the sunlight, were the red walls of Sah-Harah. In that moment, he forgot the tragic vicissitudes of his journey, forgot the unhappy fate of his companions and the faithlessness of his guides, forgot all but the marvelous sight that lay at last before his eyes. For years he had dreamed of it, repeating the passages from Abu-Abbas engraved in his memory and comparing the Coptic inscriptions of Abydos with the papyrus, two millennia older, discovered in the nameless tomb at Deir-el-Bahari and never fully understood till now. He had followed his destiny here. He allowed himself a moment to savor the long-sought triumph, for he had paid dearly for it. Then, hoisting onto his back the knapsack containing all that was left of the expedition supplies, he set off resolutely toward the gleaming granite walls that sent him from afar a final, irresistible challenge.

The circular shape of the city became ever more apparent as he came nearer. He visually estimated the diameter as not less than two miles. The city presented to the visitor a forbidding exterior wall, sixty or seventy feet high, of polished, perfectly fitted stone blocks, an even surface without hollows or projections. It appeared to be a single colossal building: a cylinder with a slightly rounded lid. As his lordship came close, that lid or cap was hidden by the loom of the wall.

He came right up to the wall and set his palm on the red, sun-heated stone. Then he set off along it, seeking an entrance. He judged that he had gone about a quarter of the circumference when at last he came on an opening, very high, very narrow—so narrow that only an unusually thin person could venture to enter it. There he halted, slipping his pack off, and considered what to do.

The entrance—he could not bring himself to call it a doorway—was appallingly plain. An opening. A dark crack in the lower third of the featureless wall. Nothing frightening, nothing intended to give warning or strike terror into one who sought entry, no trace of bolts, bars, sphinxes, or chimera. And yet, standing outside this entrance, the intrepid Lord Knowshire felt a most disagreeable sensation, a shudder that ran clear through his body, head to foot. But it was too late to turn back now. The moment’s hesitation past, he stepped across the invisible threshold.

Though famous for his thinness, and still leaner now after the long days of trekking in the heat of the desert, even he could go forward only by sidling along, his chin tucked into his shoulder, dragging his pack behind him by the strap. Contrary to his expectations and the usual mythologies, he came to no trapdoors, no hidden devices set to destroy the wiliest and most cautious transgressor. Quite the opposite: The tight squeeze of the entrance soon opened out into a corridor, not very wide, to be sure, but easy enough to walk in. Light came from high up; the air was breathable; the floor lay on a scarcely perceptible rising grade; the walls were featureless; and the passage had a slight, constant curve to the left, a curve evidently following the shape of the outer wall.

After walking some hours, his lordship realized that the corridor was not circular, for if it had been, he would almost certainly have come back round to the entrance or a place he had already passed. The passageway led steadily onward, turning always very slightly to the left. Unmistakably, he was tracing a slow, gigantic spiral, the end of which he could not foresee, since he could not precisely determine the curvature, not knowing the thickness of the walls, and thus could not know if the spiral extended all the way to the center of the colossal edifice or would end before that. All he could do was go on, following the constant slight curve to the left.

Nightfall is very brief in that latitude. All light in the corridor came from the sky, so when his lordship found himself in gloom and shadow, he had just time to look at his watch and set down his pack before it grew pitch dark. For hours he had heard no sound but his own footsteps amplified by echo. Now he listened hard, but in vain; not the slightest sound came to his ears. In the changeless quiet of the night, his breathing and the slow rhythm of his heartbeat were the only signs of life. He closed his eyes. The image of the corridor, rocking a little to the cadence of his steps, rose before him and would not leave him. Then, worn out by fatigue and the effort to keep calm, he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

The night passed without event. Yet for the first time since he set off on this expedition, he woke with a vivid sense of the relentless passage of time. Once again he went through the limited contents of his pack: binoculars, a map, a broken compass, a journal in which he had made no entries for a long time, a book from which he had never been parted, some cartridges for the revolver at his belt, a canteen half full of stale water, biscuits, chocolate, a few tins of meat, a knife . . . and that was all. The food could be made to last several days. The water, maybe three. Not a reassuring assessment.

He set off again. He had to go on. For a moment he thought he had started out in the wrong direction, but that was impossible; the passage led on, curving slightly to the left; everything was as it should be.

The problem with this easy walking was only now becoming clear. A day passed, two days; well before a week had passed, he was suffering from hunger and above all from thirst. His steps were less steady, his vision dimmed. The slight curve of the corridor began to obsess him. He could not sleep. He walked on even at night. Despite that utter darkness, the image of the changeless passage ahead was so deeply printed on his retina that it never left him, and he followed it all night. He walked on, not stopping, no longer knowing night from day, not counting the days, his mind fixed on the corridor’s end, persisting in envisioning the unforeseeable. He shuddered with rage, fearing that he had got turned round, knowing he would die of thirst long before he reached his goal, terrified at the thought that his legs would give out, that he would fall down and crawl a while and die before he ever came to the end of the horrible corridor . . .

He staggered, fell. His knees hurt very much. Only then did he realize he had been walking in complete darkness. He reached out toward the wall for support. His groping fingers touched bones: a skeleton. He struggled to his feet. Must go on. He knew that if he stayed there to rest, he would never get up again. He went on, more cautiously. After a while there was some light, and he saw other skeletons. In a moment of clear-mindedness, he realized that the radius of the circle within which he moved had greatly decreased; the leftward curve of the corridor was much more marked. It could not be much farther to the center. He breathed with difficulty. His tongue was swollen, his belly cramped with hunger-pangs. He decided to get rid of the backpack he had carried so far, useless to him now. He took off his shoes, then his clothes, one by one. The sense of fatality, of the irreversible, that he had waked to that first morning now filled his whole being.

When he stepped out naked into the round central chamber of the Nummultian city Sah-Harah, Lord Knowshire was at the end of his strength. He leaned against the wall, and before letting himself slip slowly to the floor, managed to take one look clear around the room. What he saw would have awed anyone: twelve massive golden thrones set around the wall, in which sat twelve bejeweled ivory statues of Osiris. The alabaster wall was carved in bas-relief, a great frieze of scenes from the Book of the Dead, broken by panels of hieroglyphs. In the center of the chamber, among bronze tables set with bowls and baskets filled with honey, wheat, wine, and dates, stood a magnificent silver sarcophagus. The lid was propped open on two cedar-wood poles. Next to it, on a chair that looked very simple amid the pomp of all the rest, some purple garments were laid.

Spellbound, his lordship stood up straight and walked forward as if floating on the air. He no longer felt pain, hunger, thirst, or was no longer aware of them. He had entirely forgotten what had brought him to this place. As if sleepwalking, he approached the sarcophagus and, paying no heed to the opulent feast laid out on the tables, looked inside to make sure the coffin was empty. He moved slowly, with calm, hieratic gestures, as if carrying out a sacred rite. He took up the purple robes and put them on. Then, with great care not to bring the lid down, he slipped into the sarcophagus and stretched himself out, smiling a little. His death was a slow, quiet crossing of the boundary between the two worlds, as if no boundary existed.

He was dead. The rotten cedar-wood props shattered, spraying a fine dust all around, and the heavy lid of the sarcophagus came down with a mighty crash. On its upper surface was the carven image of Lord Knowshire’s face, transfigured by an ineffable smile. It had been waiting there four thousand years for this reunion.

© English Translation © 2013 by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Originally published in Squaring the Circle (Aqueduct Press).

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born on April 9, 1941, in Bucharest, Romania, Gheorghe Săsărman spent his childhood and attended high school in Cluj, Transylvania’s capital-city. He studied architecture in Bucharest and after graduation was employed as a journalist, authoring articles on architecture and popular science. In 1978, he received his Ph.D. in the theory of architecture with the dissertation Function, Space, Architecture (later published as an essay). Săsărman made his debut as a writer in 1962, when he won the first prize at a SF short-story contest organized for seven East-European countries. His first book, The Oracle (1969), grouped texts previously published in periodicals. His best-known work, Squaring the Circle (1975), clashed with the communist censorship, which cut out one quarter of its contents; also published in France (1994) and Spain (2010), this book is to be edited by Aqueduct Press, in Ursula K. Le Guin’s excellent translation. A story in the volume Chimera (1979), “Algernon’s Escape”—whose title paraphrases that of Daniel Keyes’s famous novel—brought the author the Europa Award at the Eurocon V Convention (1980). The novel 2000 (1982) was published in German in Munich, as Die Enklaven der Zeit (1986). After 1989, he resumed publishing fiction in his native country: the novels The Hemlock Cup (1994), South vs. North (2001), The Unparallelled Adventures of Anton Retegan and of His Secret Police File (2011), as well as the short-story collection Visions (2007). His play Deus ex Machina was staged in Munich (2005) and Bucharest (2006-2009). Săsărman has published short stories and novellas in magazines, anthologies, and collective volumes in Romania, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Hungary, and Japan. In 2012, he was awarded the “Ion Hobana” Opera Omnia Prize by the Bucharest branch of the Writers’ Union and the Romanian Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy.

A Flock of Grief

Kat Howard

The woman’s dress was perfectly correct. Indeed, it, and she, would have been utterly unremarkable, were it not for the bird perched upon her shoulder, black-feathered, eyes with the seasick luminosity of moonstones.

“Vulgar,” Sofie said to me under her breath. “Why go out in society at all, if you are going to appear like that? No one wishes to have a party disturbed by such reminders of grief and mortality. It’s an insult to the hostess.”

“Indeed,” I said, and thought of the bird I had caged before coming out to do the expected thing, and dance at a party. While I would rather dance than not, the expectation weighed.

“At least they are seeing her out,” Sofie said, and tipped her head in the direction of the mourning woman, who was being gently directed towards the door. “I really don’t know why she came at all.”

One sees them, every so often, those who have chosen to grieve in a manner they call natural, who do not take advantage of the alternatives. Pale-faced, shadow-eyed, the bird of grief perched upon their shoulder. As if carrying such a thing around, where everyone else can see, and is forced to interact with its presence, is in any way natural or respectful.

“Have you retained your Mourner yet?” Sofie asked, and tucked her hand in my elbow to lead me across the floor. “I can give you the name of the girl I used when dear Papa died.”

“That would be most kind,” I said.

We both stepped around the feathers that had fallen to the floor.

• • • •

The birds gather wherever there has been a death. Black birds, with eyes of pale, moonstone white. They are there for the soul of the person who has died, and they are there to embody the grief of those who are required to mourn.

It was an appalling thing, to be chosen as a mourner, to feel the tiny claws of the bird’s talons clutch at your skin. Mourning meant isolation from society, the need to drape oneself in heavy, black clothing. Neither to dance, nor even to listen to music, nor to eat foods of particular richness or flavor. To become like unto one of the dead oneself.

Horrible.

And there is no choice, not once the birds are there. One cannot mourn, unless there is a bird, and once the bird has chosen a mourner, one has no alternative but to either accept the burden, or to hire a Mourner to do so instead. Personal feelings play no role. Such a thing would be flashy, inappropriate. Vulgar.

• • • •

The bird of my grief was born from the death of my husband. It had not been a wanted marriage, nor had it been a happy one, but what was done was done, and when he died, it was necessary that the proper forms were followed. I was the relict, the widow, and therefore, I must be in mourning.

I must be, though any mourning I had done had been for myself, and on the day of our wedding.

Thankfully, his death had not only freed me from his tyranny, it had also rendered unto me a great deal of material wealth. Using some of that wealth to hire a Mourner was a pleasure.

I handed the caged bird to the girl. “Do whatever it is that is required, and then send the bill to my residence.”

“That’s not quite how the ritual works, Mrs.—”

“Do not speak his name. I am not that, and will never be again. You may address me as Sibila.”

“Sibila,” she said, and opened the cage door. The bird emerged to perch on her finger, its death-pale eyes fixed on me. “I will bear your grief. But you must be the one to speak its name and place it in me.”

I sighed, feeling the heavy woolen layers of black I wore, black I could not cast off until this nonsense was completed, compress my chest as I did. “Very well. By all means, let us do the thing properly.”

“Follow me, please, Mrs.—Sibila.”

The girl held aside a curtain of thick, black velvet. I followed her through the doorway and down a corridor, in far less good repair than the front of her shop had been. The wooden floor was stained and warped, the paper on the walls dingy and peeling at the edges. It was a sad place, and I wished the girl would walk faster, rather than forcing us to linger in it.

The bird flew from her hand to land again on my shoulder, feathers dropping in its wake. I shuddered at the prick of its talons.

The girl opened a door, then locked it behind us. “Forgive me, but the ritual requires that I disrobe.”

“Do whatever is necessary.” Sofie had told me there were things I might find strange, that I should simply accept them, and it would soon be over.

The girl stepped behind a black enameled screen, and I could hear the rustle and sigh of fabric. The room was hung with birdcages, from the ornate and filigreed to one so plain it hardly seemed that it would hold its shape were a bird actually to be placed in it. All of them were empty, all of them were closed. There was a low chaise, and next to it, a table. On the top, an assortment of silver knives, spread out like a fan.

When the girl stepped out from behind the screen, I could see what her clothing had obscured: She was covered with thin scars.

She lay down on the chaise. “Choose a knife, name your grief, and make your cut.”

“Name my grief?”

“You must say what it is I am to mourn.”

“My husband has died, and I am required to mourn his passing.”

Her eyes went the same luminescent white of the bird’s. “Name your grief truly.”

But I did not. I balanced my right hand just above the girl’s breasts, and cut the flesh between them.

As I did, I felt my own skin part, my own blood drip hot, and nearly fumbled the knife in my startlement. I pressed my hand against my chest, but there was nothing there. A phantom.

The bird flew from my shoulder to the girl’s chest, and then, beak first, entered the wound there. I felt something pull and tear inside me, felt the drag of feathers against the inside of my skin.

Then, nothing, and it was wonderful to feel so.

The girl was breathing heavily, and tears fell from her eyes, eyes that were dark, as they had been before. The bird was gone, the incision in her chest nothing more than a thin, pink line, distinguishable only by its freshness from the other scars she wore.

“Are we finished, then?” I asked.

“Yes,” she wheezed.

“Then I shall see myself out.”

“Sibila.”

“What?”

“The knife.”

I looked down. It was still in my hand, the blood on the blade darkening to near black, clutched so tightly my skin wore the shape of the handle. “Of course.” I set it back upon the table, and left, glad to have the entire disgusting business behind me.

• • • •

Except, it seemed, it was not.

My grief opened, a thin red line on my chest that wept into a teardrop. Out of it climbed a black bird.

The bird flew across the room, and battered itself against the window, trying to get out. I pressed my fingers to the edges of the wound in my chest. If I pressed hard enough, I could feel pain. It was discomfiting, unpleasant.

The bird crashed against the window once more, hard enough that a crack feathered across the glass. Hard enough that the bird fell to the floor in a heap of feathers.

Unsightly. I rang a bell to have it taken care of.

The bird of my grief was dead, its corpse carried away, but there remained a hole in my chest where it had flown out. When I looked in the mirror, I could see the white cage of my bones.

Completely inappropriate.

• • • •

My first thought when I went outside was that someone had died. The trees hung heavy with pale-eyed black birds. And not only the trees—lintels and rooftops and near every surface where a bird could perch. My hand went to the empty space in my chest, so as to prevent any of them from flying in. Bad enough I’d had to endure my own unwanted grief. I would not carry someone else’s.

The space in my chest was cold. Heavy and empty at the same time. As I walked through the bird-lined streets, I saw others stop, push hands—flat and fingers spread—against themselves, as if to check for hollowness, or to prevent anything else from emerging.

The Mourner was standing behind her shop counter, fingers bone-white on the edge of it. She gasped in a breath, and a scar that began at the outer corner of her left eye and traced down to her lips unknit itself and disappeared. She coughed, and a bird flew from her mouth.

“I see that you are already aware that something has gone quite wrong,” I said.

The girl coughed again, a thick, wet noise, and spat feathers onto the ground. She raised a hand to touch her lips, then let it fall again. “I do not feel at all well,” she said.

Her eyes rolled back in her head, and I watched as she crumpled to the floor. As she fell, my ears were assaulted by the thunder of hundreds of wings.

When her eyes opened they were again pale and shifting as moonstone. “Let me help you to the back,” I said.

She nodded, and leaned, heavy, on my arm.

I helped her onto the chaise. All of the knives on the table next to it were shattered, the empty birdcages reflected in their broken pieces.

• • • •

“It’s happened everywhere,” Sofie said, sipping from a teacup into which she had poured a liquid rather more robust than Earl Grey. “Old griefs reopening, birds emerging from the most inconvenient places.”

“Have you heard any speculation as to why?” I asked.

“Mama believes that something has affected the Mourners. A disease, like a flu, or a distempered air, that prevents them from carrying the griefs they have been retained to bear. It seems as good an explanation as any.”

I looked outside the window, at trees so black with birds that one could scarce see the green of leaf behind them. “But for there to be so many—surely some of these are older griefs, ones that should well have healed by now, ones that should be gone. Sofie, there are so many birds.”

She pressed her hand against her right side, just below her breast. “I know. Even had I mourned for him myself, my grief for Papa should have been over. The appropriate passage of time had been marked. None of it should have remained to hurt me. And yet this morning, a bird flew from me, and I wept for him.”

• • • •

As I walked home, I saw a woman with a bird of grief on her shoulder. It occurred to me as I did, that the bird that had crawled out of my chest had not tried to linger with me, as was the normal practice. One could bear one’s own grief for the allotted time, or one could hire a Mourner. One could not banish a bird otherwise.

She walked past and all the birds rose up from the trees, blacking out the sky. I heard a cry, the cry of a woman, not the shriek of a bird, and felt the pull of wings in the empty space inside my chest.

Then silence.

The birds—all of them—were gone. The woman on the street stood, weeping.

I could not say what it was that she wept for—the person who had been lost, or the reality that her mourning must now be over.

I had not thought that the passing of a grief could also be a thing to mourn.

• • • •

I did not at first recognize the girl when I returned to her shop. She was unscarred, and terribly thin, as if there were not even blood between her bones and her skin. As well, her hair was all white feathers.

“I would bear your grief for you, if I could,” she said, “but I do not think that I am able. The birds have flown. I will show you.”

She looked like a bird herself as she walked away, feathers falling behind her. Her presence barely disturbed the air she passed through.

She opened the door to a room hung with empty birdcages, all their doors open. Seeing them, I felt the brush of feathers along the inside of my bones.

“I asked the birds to come back,” she said. “To be here. To be safe. A grief must be cared for, or it flies wild. But they are gone, and they do not return.

“I am empty as a cage without them.”

“I would think there are those better gone. Not all losses deserve to be mourned,” I said.

“Loss begins earlier than you might think,” she said. “Grief is never solely about the person gone. It would not need to fly, if it were.”

“But it is also never wholly free of that person,” I said. “If it were, it would not require being held in a cage.”

• • • •

I began, that day, to collect birdcages. I hung them in my room, close enough that they might chime together if brushed. I left the doors open, so that they might be a refuge, not a trap.

• • • •

The presence of the birds became normal. People reacted as if it were nothing to see small flocks of grief roosting along the main promenades. Women wore dresses made of feathers, and wove moonstones into their hair. Clothing became cut to display the empty spaces left in a body when the grief flew out, as if such a thing were something to be proud of.

I did not dress myself in feathers. I wore nothing that displayed the empty cage of my bones.

“I can give you the name of my seamstress. She’s a miracle with a needle,” Sofie said. “You’ll want to look fashionable if you’re going to find a new husband.”

“I truly cannot imagine anything I would like less at this time,” I said.

“You don’t . . . miss him, do you?” Sofie asked, her mouth twisting as if tasting something unpleasant. “I know the birds came back quite soon after his death. Perhaps something went wrong with your mourning.”

My gaze fell to the embellished cutout in Sofie’s dress, marking the spot where her grief had emerged. “No, I do not miss him.”

“Then you must buy yourself some new dresses, and look a proper part of society again. Have a flirtation, take a lover. It will do you good.

“I know things have changed, but as my Mama says, if we are going to be forced to bear our own griefs, we must do so with style.”

Her advice was kind, and well meant, but the grief I bore was not for him.

• • • •

I never saw the birds in my cages, but I knew they came. I would find feathers and other discarded evidence of their presence. At times, even their shadows lingered past their leaving.

I did not need to see the cages full. I liked that they were there, waiting. That there was a choice of grief—to hold it close, or open the door and free it, to let it wing across the sky when it was time. That nothing was forced.

• • • •

I awoke one morning to find the wound in my chest closed over. No mark, no scar. It was as if it had never been.

In one of the cages, a bird. White-feathered, eyes like black pearls.

I did not close the cage door.

© 2014 by Kat Howard.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

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

Enter Saunterance

Matthew Hughes

Previously on The Kaslo Chronicles: Magic has replaced rationalism on the grand old world of Novo Bantry, causing civilization to collapse. Returned from the horrors he encountered in the Seventh Plane, wizard’s henchman (and former hardboiled confidential operative) Erm Kaslo strives to discover who sent the multi-legged creatures that carried off the survivors who had taken shelter at Obron’s castle. But his employer has a surprise for him.

To read the other stories in the series, visit lightspeedmagazine.com/kaslo.

Back in Obron’s workroom, Kaslo told the wizard his theory that the reason their enemy had sent a fire elemental against them was because he wanted the fiery spirit to seize the noubles the op had originally acquired from the murderous thaumaturge, Asrat Gozon. “Fire cannot harm them,” he finished.

“It could be,” Obron said, sifting through the multicolored orbs on his workbench. He picked up one, held it close to one eye, squinting. “Then we’d have to pose the question: ‘Why the noubles?’”

“Magic,” said Kaslo, sitting atop a stool, his hands cradling a steaming mug of restorative punge. He and Bodwon had arrived back at the castle just as dawn was lighting the far horizon. The other man had gone straight to bed but Kaslo had come to his employer’s work room, where he’d found the wizard asleep at his bench, one cheek lying on another of his collection of ancient tomes.

Obron put down the nouble. “But why send an elemental to recover three noubles when the sender is in the seventh plane, where noubles are as plentiful as pebbles are here?”

Kaslo didn’t know. Neither did the wizard. But now Obron brightened and said, “But I have found out something about the other sending.”

“The clickers?” Kaslo said.

“They’re called preyns,” Obron said. He consulted a piece of paper on which he’d made notes. “They originated on an obscure world far up The Spray, and were bred up from some kind of shelled aquatic creature by a thaumaturge of considerable talent, a number of aeons ago.”

“What was his name?”

“I don’t know and I don’t intend to find out,” the wizard said. “It’s probably not wise to allow such a name to enter one’s mind.”

“Even after the passage of aeons?” Kaslo said.

“Under the regime of sympathetic association,” Obron said, “time is not the barrier it used to be.” He consulted the paper again. “Their creator used them to overawe and terrify the inhabitants of the territory where he and his confederates ruled.”

Kaslo repressed a shudder and disguised the action sipping from the mug of punge. “I could see that working,” he said.

“Here’s the interesting part,” Obron went on. “The thaumaturge was one of a group of like-minded practitioners who held sway in the region. They had come to the place because it contained a spot where the third and seventh planes were adjacent and the veil between them more easily pierced.

“Their plan was to build a device that would tap into the seventh plane and draw a certain kind of energy out of it. Their invention would also store the energy, so that they could draw upon it as they saw fit. They intended to perform some remarkable feats.”

“Would the words ‘overweening pride’ and ‘unchecked ambition’ fit these ‘practitioners’?” Kaslo asked.

“It would,” Obron said. “And theirs was the hubrists’ usual reward. The device malfunctioned. The resulting discharge turned a city and its surrounds into a desert and destroyed the world’s moon, which unfortunately was well inhabited.”

“But the preyns survived,” Kaslo said.

“They spent most of their time underground, in deep burrows. They were also used to fetch and carry between the planes, and some of them were in the seventh realm when the disaster occurred.”

Kaslo finished the punge. He needed sleep, though the drink had sharpened his wits. “So,” he said, “the preyns connect us to this wizard who must not be named, who did his business in the seventh plane. Was he the one who so frightened Phalloon?”

Obron waved away the supposition. “No. I have it on good authority that he survived the energy discharge. But when he sought to regain power he was destroyed.”

“And yet we dare not mention his name?”

“There are names,” Obron said, “and then there are names.”

“I must sleep,” Kaslo said. He set the mug on the workbench and headed for the door. Before he reached it, he turned and said, “That energy, is it something we could use? To protect ourselves?”

The wizard made a curious sound that Kaslo was slow to recognize as laughter. “No,” he said, once the fit had subsided, “not for a practitioner of the green school. Or the blue, for that matter.” He shook his head and made a tsking noise with his tongue and palate.

Kaslo frowned. There had been a time when one of his frowns could cause strong and capable men to take a step back. But Obron just blinked at him. “Did I say something amusing?” the op asked.

The wizard’s hands made dismissive flutters. “Just something unlikely,” he said. “The energy . . . well, it tends to accumulate in those who work with it, to deleterious effect.”

“Like radiation?” Kaslo said.

“I suppose. I thought I made that clear when we talked about it earlier.”

Kaslo’s head was fatigue-fuzzy. “When did we talk about it? I don’t remember.”

“Before you went to enter the whimsy.”

The op cast his mind back. And the answer came. “The energy,” he said, “it’s the stuff that’s like weather in the seventh plane, but in our plane it’s . . .” He made a circular motion with one hand.

“Exactly,” said the wizard. “It’s what we call evil.”

• • • •

The days passed and nothing happened. Kaslo went on two reconnaissance expeditions to the site of the whimsy, but saw nothing to concern him. Obron, when consulted, doubted that it would reappear, at least not in the near future.

When the op asked for his reasons, the thaumaturge launched into an explanation that was dense with words like “fluxions” and “atypical congruencies.” Requests for explanations of these terms only led Kaslo deeper into thickets of non-understanding.

“In simpler terms, please,” he said.

“In simplest terms,” said the wizard, “he will not come against us soon because he cannot.”

“His will is diminished?” Kaslo said.

“Not at all. But his capacity to focus that will and direct events across the interplanar barrier is. For that he must gather strength.”

“Was that why he stole our people?”

“Indirectly.” Obron then expanded on the one word, but lapsed into the jargon of his craft: “volitionary incidence” and “cohered aptitudes.”

Kaslo swore and went to look out the slit window. Obron spoke to his back, in a tone of sympathy. “You are frustrated.”

The op regarded the horizon where the towers had once stood. “I am.”

“I can understand. The change has reduced your effectiveness. It was a quality you prized.”

“It was a quality I had earned,” said Kaslo, turning. “By sacrifice and difficult means.”

Obron made a mollifying gesture. “And it was taken from you by an indifferent universe that acted on a seeming caprice.”

“Yes.”

“Whereas, equally capriciously, the universe has taken a noddy like me—or as I used to be—and raised me up.”

“That is not your fault,” Kaslo said.

“Even so,” said the thaumaturge, “it must rankle.”

The op blew a small explosion of air over his lower lip. “Too mild a word. Try ‘infuriates.’”

He told Obron he wanted action. He wanted revenge. Most of all, he wanted to know what to do. The wizard’s hand moved to indicate the books spread on his workbench, and a pile of papers held down by the ball of iron that he believed had come out of a dragon.

Kaslo looked where his employer pointed. He saw numbers, diagrams, words, and symbols, connected by lines and arrows. They meant nothing to him.

But Obron said, “I am making progress. One thing leads to another, and sometimes to several others.

“Do you see this book?”

Kaslo looked at the thick tome covered in green leather. “It doesn’t look as old as the others,” he said.

“Yet it is. But aeons ago, a thaumaturge put it in a safe place, where it remained, immune from time’s effects.” Obron assumed an expression of one who has undertaken a demanding task and achieved a first-rate result. “My studies allowed me not only to discover its existence and location, but to retrieve it.”

“Congratulations,” said Kaslo.

“It is,” said Obron, ignoring his helper’s tone, “the Twentieth Aeon’s definitive text on interplanar mechanics.”

“Ah,” said the op.

“Well you may say, ‘Ah,’” said the wizard. “It is a complex and thorny subject, but I am coming to terms with it.”

“Are we stronger today than we were yesterday?”

“Yes, but not as strong as we shall be tomorrow.”

Kaslo felt like a child who must trust in the power of his parent. He pushed the emotion away and concentrated on what was important. “You said ‘Twentieth Aeon.’ Does the book mention a face of black iron or the blood of a dragon?”

Obron nodded. “It alludes to them. The references are not as clear as I would like.”

Kaslo grunted. If things weren’t clear to Obron, they would be pure murk to him. He looked at the papers again, with all their inexplicable markings in the wizard’s neat hand. He picked up the ball of iron, the better to see a particularly complex diagram, but a clearer sight brought no clarity of understanding.

He hefted the black ball in his hand and a question occurred. “Will there be dragons in our new age? If so, where will they come from?”

Obron’s face now showed the suppressed glee of one who knows a good secret but is not yet ready to tell it. “I had an inkling,” he said, “even before the change. In a day or two, I should have the complete answer.”

“You seem pleased,” said Kaslo.

“Too mild a word,” said his employer. “Try ‘delighted.’ That is, if my inkling was right.”

Kaslo said, “If so, I’ll be glad for you.” He found he meant it.

“You’ll be more than glad,” said Obron. “Was it not you who told me nobody wins a war by defending?”

“It was.” It seemed a long time ago now. “That, at least, hasn’t changed.”

“If what I thought, if what I did, was right, we will be able to go on the offensive.”

Kaslo felt as if the room had just filled with sunlight after a cloudy morning. “That would suit me fine.”

“Give me two more days.”

• • • •

Kaslo fought to keep the sunlight, but two more days of inactivity wore upon him. He knew his own psyche well enough to understand that at least some of the unease he was feeling did not spring from his own inner depths. When he had touched the flesh of the entity in the seventh plane, its immense sorrow had flowed into him like cold liquid, seeping down into his deeper levels to form a black pool.

His mind would probe that chill darkness the way a tongue probes the gap made by a missing tooth. He found it had different flavors: remorse, regret, guilt, and an aching to atone for some great lapse, coupled with the knowledge that there would never be an opportunity to do so.

Kaslo fought against the urge to revisit the entity’s despair. It is not my emotion, he told himself. It is a contamination from outside. But he knew that what he needed to rid himself of gloom was a call to action. Thus he was glad when, standing atop the castle’s highest tower, surveying the horizons and seeing nothing, one of the women came up to tell him that he was wanted in the workroom.

“I’ve done it,” Obron said. Again, he gestured to the spread of papers with their incomprehensible jottings.

“Done what?” Kaslo said.

But the wizard only tapped the side of his nose and said, “Come and see.”

They left Bodwon in charge. Kaslo got the spring-gun, but Obron said, “You won’t need that.”

“I’ll feel better,” said the op, which earned him a shrug and a wry look from his employer.

They passed through the gate and the boundary spell. Obron was carrying a black bag, closed by a drawstring. Thrust through the sash that cinched his robe was the wand of black wood that had once belonged to a would-be thaumaturge named Asrat Gozon, the source of the first three noubles.

They walked towards the ruins of Indoberia, but when they came to the broken slider that led to the spaceport, Obron turned southwest. Soon they could see the command tower above the trees, and a few of the larger vessels that had died on their pads when the universe shifted its orientation.

“Are we foraging for whimsy medications?” Kaslo asked, as they passed the wreckage of the liner. But Obron smiled and walked on.

They came at last to an empty pad, in the part of the spaceport where the wealthy kept their private spacecraft. Kaslo noticed a discreet plaque that identified the berth as reserved for a yacht named Saunterance, Diomedo Obron, owner.

The wizard surveyed the unoccupied pad from several angles and apparently found it satisfactory to his requirements. He opened the velvet pouch and withdrew from it, one at a time, a series of noubles. These he placed in various positions around the pad’s perimeter, checking constantly against a diagram in the book on interplanar mechanics, which had also come in the noubles pouch.

The process took some time and required some corrections before every nouble was where the green book said it ought to be. Obron then brought forth the noubles recovered from the sleeper, and placed these at precise points in the middle of the pad. The moment he put in position the last black sphere, the air around the platform became charged with a crackling energy that caused the hairs on Kaslo’s arms to stand on end.

The wizard stepped clear of the pad and gave the arrangement of spheres one final assessment. He moved one of the perimeter orbs a minim to the left, at which the level of energy so intensified that Kaslo’s teeth vibrated in his jaws.

“We should step back a few paces,” Obron said. When they did so, the op’s discomfort lessened. The wizard, meanwhile, was leafing through the green book until he found the page he was looking for. Then he turned to Kaslo, and said, “You might not know that, when the change comes, not all integrators die.”

“I certainly did not. What survives and how?”

“The most ancient sentient devices, on the oldest settled worlds,” said Obron, “have been through the change several times. They know how to protect themselves and carry on.”

“Will there be such on Novo Bantry?”

“Doubtful. This world was settled late in the second effloration.”

“Too bad,” Kaslo said. “A functioning integrator comes in handy.”

“There’s another category: Integrators on vessels that are not in our plane when the change occurs retain their faculties. They do, however, experience a transmogrification when they reenter space time.”

“How so?”

“To put it simply,” the wizard said, “sentient devices are not allowed under the new rules, so they have to become . . . say, their equivalents. Personal integrators that pass through the seventh plane become what they used to call ‘familiars’—and probably will call them that again.

“Ship’s integrators become . . .” Here Obron decided to show rather than tell. He held the book open before him, drew the wand from his sash and pointed it at one of the interior noubles. He spoke words that meant nothing to Kaslo, then aimed the black wood at another one and uttered more syllables. The air now crackled with powers and potentials.

“Excellent fluxions,” Obron commented, as if to himself. Then he pointed the wand at the black nouble, which looked to Kaslo as if it had become a lightless hole in reality. The wizard spoke again, emphasizing each sound with a tap of the wood upon the air. Each stroke of the wand made a noise like thunder. To Kaslo, it sounded as if a giant was hammering his fist on some vast, echoing door. He took an involuntary step backwards before steadying himself.

The black nouble glowed with nonlight. Then it began to expand, slowly at first, then more rapidly. At the same time, it became less spherical, thinner, until it was finally two-dimensional. A circle five times Kaslo’s height now stood on the landing pad, a circle that roiled with black and purple amorphities.

“It’s a whimsy,” Kaslo said.

“Yes,” said Obron, searching through the book again.

The op raised his spring-gun. “What if the enemy comes through?”

“He can’t. This one is mine and mine alone.” The wizard found the page he was seeking, and raised his voice. He spoke a string of syllables, the only one of which Kaslo recognized was ‘Saunterance.’

The whimsy flashed with streaks of light, reds and blues and bright yellows. Then out of its middle something poked through the barrier, something very much like an animal’s muzzle—but an animal larger than any beast that had ever lived on mild Novo Bantry.

First the muzzle, then the eyes—big as saucers, the color of old gold, split by a vertical pupil—then the cranium and the long, sinuous neck clad in blue-green scales. Then the shoulders and the forelimbs, with curved talons the size of Kaslo’s hands. Then the heavy body and the unlikely wings, and finally the hindquarters—more talons—and a tail to match the neck for length and suppleness, finished off with a spade-shaped vane.

“It’s a dragon,” the op said, as the whimsy dissolved.

“Now it is,” said Obron. “It used to be my yacht.” He was picking up the noubles and returning them to the pouch, but he paused to smile up at the huge creature. “Welcome back.”

The dragon opened its mouth, showing glistening fangs and a prehensile tongue. “I am different,” it said, in a voice like heavy rocks rolling in a flood. It examined one paw, flexing its clawed digits.

“In some respects,” said the wizard. “To me, you are still the very good and shiply companion you always were.”

The creature considered that for a moment, then said, “Agreed.”

Kaslo let out the breath he had been holding.

“Where do you wish to go?” Saunterance said.

“Off-world,” said Obron. “Can you do that?”

The dragon consulted some inner process, then said, “I can. But how will I carry you?”

“That,” said Obron, “will take a little time to organize. In the meantime, you could carry us back to my castle.”

“Very well,” said the dragon. It seized both men, though gently, in its forepaws and leapt toward the sky. Its wings dug into the air and in moments they were high above the spaceport.

“Over there,” said Obron, indicating the castle on its rise.

“Very good,” said Saunterance, tilting one wing up and the other down. They slid toward home.

After a moment, Kaslo noticed he wasn’t sad anymore.

• • • •

For two of the castle staff, the arrival of a dragon carrying their master and his security chief was one brick too many on an unsteady pile. The man and woman fled, screaming, toward the ruins of Phalloon’s manse. Fortunately, they went as a couple, which made it easier for Kaslo to chase them down, reassure them (though only partly), and lead them back to the castle. By then, the wizard had raised a high-ceilinged, open-fronted barn outside the curtain wall, where Saunterance now sat, apparently content to do what former space yachts did when nothing else was on the agenda.

When the op entered the castle yard, he found Obron directing the rest of the staff to bring a range of items out of the building and into the open space. Set before the wizard was what seemed to be the entire contents of his workroom, including the furnishings, as well as two comfortable chairs from the sitting room, Obron’s and Kaslo’s beds, two changes of clothing for each of them, and a few other possessions that made life reasonably comfortable.

“What now?” Kaslo asked, but Obron was occupied in checking what was being brought before him against a list. “No time to dawdle,” the wizard said, then gestured to the pile of Kaslo’s goods on the cobbled stones. “Is there anything of yours that I ought to have included?”

The op saw clothing, weapons, toiletries, all higgled and piggled together. “That depends,” he said, “on what is going on.”

“We’re taking a trip,” said Obron.

“Where?”

“Off-world.”

“How?” But even as Kaslo asked the question, the answer came into his mind. “Saunterance?” he said.

“Just so. Now take a look at your gear. Everything I need is here. We’re waiting on you.”

Kaslo looked, then said, “Rope came in handy when Bodwon and I—”

Obron snapped his fingers and called for rope.

“Anything else?”

Almost everything Kaslo owned was on the little pile. He experienced a brief flash of nostalgia for his old traveling valise, but its intelligence had died with all the other integrators, so the once-useful devices he had built into the suitcase were now just so much dead metal. “No,” he said, “that’s it.”

“Then step back,” said the wizard. He opened a book that rested on his lectern, found the page he wanted, and slipped the sleeves of his robe back to his elbows. “Here we go.”

The spell was lengthy and, as usual, in a language Kaslo had never heard of. It also called for the caster to move hands and arms in precise motions. Kaslo saw strain on Obron’s narrow face as the thaumaturge struggled to contain and command unseen but powerful forces. Finally, with a downward chop of one bony hand into a lean hand, the magic was completed.

A shining hemisphere, twice a man’s height, now stood where their possessions had been stacked. It resembled the kind of bell-shaped cover that would be whisked away to reveal a chef’s creation in one of the first-class restaurants Obron had once frequented: a silvery reflective dome topped by a semi-circular handle of the same material.

Obron spoke a word and a segment of the shining stuff slid silently aside. “Come along,” he said and stepped within.

Kaslo followed and found himself in a room that was somehow larger than the dome’s dimensions should have allowed for. The wizard was rearranging his goods and furnishings to make a workspace and a sleeping area. He beckoned for Kaslo to do the same, and the op moved his bed to one side and placed his few items on or under it. With a few more words and gestures, Obron created interior walls and doors to make cabins around his sleeping space and Kaslo’s, with a common space between them that had room for their chairs.

The wizard surveyed his work, fists planted on hips, and said, “That should do. Are you ready?”

“Let me speak to Bodwon,” Kaslo said. But when he put his head out of the open doorway, he saw that his second-in-command had already taken charge. Bodwon was sending the staff back to their duties, before turning and offering his superior a salute.

Kaslo returned it and withdrew into the chamber, where Obron was adjusting the color and luminosity of the dome’s inner surface to a more tranquil, neutral appearance. The wizard looked about him, apparently saw the order he wanted, and spoke another word that closed the door.

“Take a seat,” he told the op, “and hold onto the arms. There will probably be a period of adjustment.”

Kaslo did as bid. Obron sat in his own seat on the other side of the room. He cleared his throat and said, “Saunterance, we are ready.”

For Kaslo, it was like sitting in the saloon of a space yacht as its in-atmosphere drive cycled up. Except that there was no discernible vibration. Instead, the floor suddenly pressed against his feet and his stomach lurched down deeper in his abdomen.

“Easy, Saunterance,” said the wizard, “and softly.”

The g-forces moderated. Kaslo’s breathing settled. “It can fly in space?” he said.

“It is doing so now,” said the wizard. At a wave of his hand, a portion of the wall became transparent. Novo Bantry was a great, sunlit circle growing smaller.

“How?”

The wizard sighed. “You keep asking such questions, but when I try to explain you can’t accommodate the concepts. Did you ever know the precise physics of a deep-space drive?”

“Not really.”

“Well, then.”

There was a silence while they watched the grand old world shrink to the size of a coin, then a bright dot.

“Where are we going?” Kaslo asked.

“The seventh plane,” said Obron. “That’s where the enemy lies.”

“But we’re traveling through space,” Kaslo said. “Could you not have conjured another whimsy on Novo Bantry?”

“Yes, but I could not have brought all this.” He gestured to his books and apparatus. “For that, I must enter the plane at a specific point, where the interplanar barrier is at its thinnest.”

“And where is that?”

“We’ve discussed this, haven’t we?” said the wizard. “A desolate place called Barran on a fusty, forgotten little world called Old Earth.”

© 2014 by Matthew Hughes.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

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

Solstice

Jennifer Stevenson

This story is about a small-time rocker full of ambition and careful big plans. She lives for the day when she can come up like thunder on the rest of the herd, so she’s a little stunned to find herself fighting with her boyfriend on the night of the big gig, slamming out of his van and marching across a frosty prairie outside Madison, Wisconsin, her guitar in her hand and her hot, angry breath making her scarf all scummy with ice crumbs as she curses him and her stupidity at coming so far in his company. Why should she have to dump him tonight? Only a doofus breaks up with her boyfriend in a moving vehicle. She vows here and now to make a new start, while she is alone, nowhere, storming across the empty fields, suspended between her humble origins and her destiny. Under the colorless starlight, she looks to herself like a stick-drawing person, white parka, grey jeans, black stubble, drawn but not yet painted. The ground is parched for moisture, the loam frost-heaved, last summer’s daisies and black-eyed susans and sweet grass killed by frost and just now crisp with it, though tomorrow under a pale sun they will warm up enough to make her slip with every step, especially if she stays mad enough to stomp all night long the way she is doing now. That would mean spending the night in the fields, however, not, as she would prefer, finding a road to follow to a roadside bar, not, as she expects she must, sleeping in a barn next to some smelly cow. She swears and stomps and swings her ax in the frozen air, scattering sibilants (his name is Stassen, which is a good name for hissing angrily) and gouting steam without regard to the threat of the cold. Her name is Dawn.

Slip she does. She lands on her bottom, her wind knocked out, and lies back in her parka, feeling the heat bleed out of her into the throbbing ground. What a world of stars is up there, she thinks, fields and fields of them, sheep for days. She remembers sheep pouring over the Nebraska plains in galaxies, white on black. The land back home is much flatter than this boggy, lumpy prairie, yet the sheep eat these same stale grasses with their backs to the same stars. These stars. A wave of vertigo swamps her. She sees the heavens turn. This is how stars must feel, she imagines, opening her eyes deliberately as they spin. So big, so slow. Only we frenetic particles can’t see how they run hump-rumped over the vast prairie. We’re moving much too fast.

Her fingers tingle. Way too pissed off for my own good, she thinks, and calms instantly. She has that sensible streak that lets her suddenly take command of her emotions, letting go once they’ve done their work. She smiles. That bum Stassen will stay mad for a week. She is at peace. Still the ground throbs. She feels it through her whole body. Good grief, what have I done to my ass?

It’s slippery stone under her, and she crawls cautiously to her hands and knees.

A mitten appears before her face. She takes it without thinking and is hoisted upright.

“Hello?” A hearty, fat farm-wife, complete with red mittens and stocking cap, looks her up and down. Dawn looks around for the sensible car that goes with such biddies, or, hopeful thought, a farmhouse with yellow light. Ah. There’s the yellow light. She warms up again. “Lost?” says the farm-wife.

“Half,” says Dawn ruefully. She picks up her instrument. No damage to the case, good sign.

“On a night like this!” says the other, and waits. Jolly potato-faced type. Dawn likes her immediately. The stars light her with a strange clarity. It is the sort of night when chance-met faces look dear and familiar, and time plays tricks with memory. It’s a nice face, full of generosity. This dame is simply panting to do her a kindness.

Dawn looks at the sky again. The Pleiades totter and shiver like new lambs. She remembers the gig she is supposed to play, oh, miles away by now with the unforgivable Stassen, and is suddenly sad. “Darkest night of the year,” she says, checking her watch. “The longest, too.” Cold soaks into her again, chilling her bones.

The older woman beams. “Righty-rooty! Hey? Can you play that? Tune for your supper?” She beckons at the yellow light, as if it must come to Dawn and not she to it.

Dawn picks up her feet willingly. Her behind complains. “Well, if you don’t mind. I’m sort of stranded.” Snatches of many voices distract her. There’s a party going on in there, and how warm and wonderful the smells coming out! She shrugs apologetically. “I don’t have my amp with me.”

“Don’t fret. I’m sure we can scrape something together,” the old biddy says, and stumps to the doorway. The walls are thick limestone, one of those old hillside dairy barns, deep as a mine, done over inside with the maximum of modern luxury. She pauses, blocking the opening, her round face ashimmer now with candlelight, lamplight. “If it’s not imposing.” She means it. “I’m not dragging you into this.”

Dawn can now hear music ramping and stamping somewhere deeper, rockabilly with a coarse metal twang. She brightens.

“No prob. I should—I’m up for playing tonight anyway—”

All at once she cannot get out any words to tell. She holds up the guitar as if the story of her fight with Stassen is written on it. Down inside the house somewhere, a bass player is making the walls throb. She smiles.

Her hostess nods, again delighted. With a broad red hand, she yanks the door shut. It swings ponderously, made of stone as thick as the unhewn walls and floor. The foyer closes up like an egg. She leads the way toward the golden center.

Dawn walks into the party. She accepts a drink without thinking: glögg, hot and spicy, that stings her mouth and fills her head. Her parka sheds cool air like a chunk of dry ice. It’s the host’s birthday. Everyone is dressed for winter, layers and layers of velvet and padded satin and furs as for an Elizabethan snowball fight, although this chintzy Midwestern winter has offered no snow yet, Dawn thinks, remembering Decembers in Nebraska. She is introduced a few times, handed off, kissed, introduced again, and brought at arm’s length like a bride (Horrors, child, you are cold! with a giggle) to the great table, loaded and pouring forth welcoming smells.

The table stretches the dim length of the room. What amazing bounty. Ribs, roast beef, roast piglet, roast lamb, an astounding goose with a chicken in her cavity, and a grouse inside of her, and a quail inside of her, and, far in the fragrant center, a hard boiled egg with a gem in the middle like a pomegranate seed, perfectly divided just this minute by a grinning chef waving a whacking great cleaver. Glazed fish, their scales picked out in jelly. Fish in cream, fish in wine, red-fleshed fish shaved thin, smothered in capers and heaped with grainy caviar. Hot vats of noodles Swedish style, noodles with sauerbraten, noodles layered between pork chops, noodles tossed in sesame paste and ginger and red hot peppers. Fruits in and out of season: muskmelon, honeydew, pears and alligator pears, mangos, pineapple, a dozen kinds of apples: golden green orange crimson scarlet blue-black and white and their piebald miscegenations. Breads shaped like suns, breads studded with raisins. Doubled buns steaming indecently, with butter running in their crevices. Dawn isn’t hungry yet, but she clutches her mug of glögg, grinning mistily.

She’s looking for the music. She can hear it, but she can’t find it. There are candles everywhere. Some parts of the room are low-ceilinged and high-cushioned, just right for kissing and gossip and splitting a bottle. Some parts are ballroom-size. The floor slopes down, away from the stone ceiling. Dawn trips a little, blames the drink. The bass gongs through her blood, a fiddle skirls, the faraway downbeat (alone of a tinny fusillade) cracks two glasses touching, a false blow, ting! Not in this room. Nor the next.

Finally it occurs to her that the sound is in the floor, and she takes her hiking boots off and stands on the cold body of the stone, feeling the beat. She bounces. “Yep.” One step at a time, she feels her way to it—someone whirls by, pauses with a steaming pitcher, and she says “Yep” again, holding out her mug. She cocks her head to the faint lure. She is still zipped into her parka and warm all through by now, but it feels delicious to drink hot glögg, smell the icy breath of the night on her shoulders, take a pheasanty kiss on the fly from a stranger in spandex, and walk barefoot on the cold, cold stone floor, letting the music lead her by feel, one step at a time. She laughs, giddy.

The room where the dancing is going on is completely packed. She can barely see past the backs of standees at the door. This song ends and the millwheel of bodies turns, but there’s no room for them to let her pass, even if they were to notice her. Anxiety grips her. It’s not my party, she thinks, daunted, but. The drummer whacks into a noisy backbeat, the fiddler lays a guttural double-stopped drone over it, oh, so he’s electrified, no wonder it’s so darn loud, and the bass lifts her clean off her feet like a church bell. Dawn can’t help herself. She touches the shoulder in front of her.

“Here.” She smiles, handing over her mug as if awarding a prize, and then motions him aside, holding up her holstered guitar in the other hand. Magic musician’s password. It works. She thinks, Gotta play for my supper, my hostess wishes, and is jostled and squeezed (slower than a melon seed but with as much force) and finally carried the last twelve feet, barefoot and laughing, over plumed heads and winking jewels, to the stage.

The fiddler and bassist put their equipment down and the drummer flails with renewed frenzy, alone at last with three hundred merry-makers and a lot of things to pound on. Her hostess appears. Over the battle noise, she shouts introductions, Dawn, fiddler, Dawn, bass player, Dawn, host, which last is an incredibly thin man in yellow velvet, with butter-colored hair and an eyeglass that catches every candle in the room at once, so that Dawn can hardly stand to look at it.

He smiles at her as they shake hands, such a frail hand. She is reminded of her first pet rooster, just so chinless and gay, and awards him the chicken-love at once. He is a vigorous dancer, however, and with his lady puts up a hell of a fight, pursued foxhound-wise by the remorseless drummer with a flying beat through false casts, back-doublings, and sudden disappearances, which Dawn finds hysterically funny. Meanwhile the fiddler has rounded up some cable and the bass player shows her how to jack into the floor, good grief, the whole stage is the sound system. Then they turn their faces to the crowd and take up the cry.

Dawn touches her strings. They are warmer than she is, much warmer than the wooden stage floor. She bends her ear, trying to get a pitch, but it’s no use in this racket, may as well get a bang on. And she does.

They play oldies, things they can count on everybody knowing. The fiddler seems to be from another planet, all he can do is jam, but he’s got the gift, and nobody is more surprised than she when the bass signals the opening for “Proud Mary” and suddenly that fiddleboy is there. Dawn falls back and lets him do the lead guitar part. Different, goofier, like it could turn any moment into something weird. Two minutes later, it does. She shrieks to the bass player:

“What the hell is that he’s doing?”

“Corelli chains,” he shrieks back, and signals a break. Soon the two of them step down and reluctantly the drummer follows. The fiddler stands alone crooning out a swoony slow-dance to the swaying crowd.

Over white lightning on ice, the bass player tells Dawn, “Really, really glad you’re here. I love this party. Never have to worry what to do with my New Year’s Eve,” he says. He puts his tongue into her ear and then withdraws it with a thoughtful expression. “But God you need new tunes now and then. We get stuck.” His accent is funny, like a Welshman who’s been to Australia on a slow boat from Texas.

She puts one finger on his wrist, as if taking his pulse. It feels silky. “Don’t you guys play other gigs together?”

“Nope,” he says. His eyes are a light, speckled brown, like a wren’s egg. Stassen’s are blue. The jerk, she thinks, and forgets him again. The bass player says, “It’s just me and the fiddle, really, and you know what his tunes are like.”

“Wherever did you find him?”

“The missus finds,” he shrugs. “It’s staying power that counts. Shouldn’t you put some shoes on? This floor is freezing.”

“I like to feel the beat.”

He kisses her, slips a piece of ice between her lips. “You’re all right.”

Their host and hostess appear. She looks, if anything, fatter and jollier. The host has shrunk. Dawn can barely see him sideways. Curved at his wife’s ample side, he is an old moon to her fullness, a sliver of yellow velvet and butter-colored hair. She thinks with pain of her rooster in his dotage, gone too old to mount hens and too scrawny to eat.

The bass player shakes his hand cheerfully.

“Ready, sir?”

“Ready!” her host says gaily. The candles wink, dimmed, in his eyeglass. When he puts his hand in Dawn’s, she is afraid to squeeze. What bones, like a bird’s. This close she can now appreciate his wistfully sweet, pointy smile.

“I’m very glad you’re here. My wife tells me you’re going to play for me tonight,” the host says to her.

Moved she cannot say by what, Dawn covers his hand in both of hers. “Staying power,” she says, as for a toast.

He smiles tremulously, repeating, “Staying power.” Dawn’s heart fills, heated. The hostess leads him away.

The drummer whacks out a marching summons. The party, sunk in place as if the air is falling out of it, reinflates, bouncing. Dawn exchanges her grain alcohol for water and puts away a quart, quick.

“Got a feeling this one’s going to be the marathon,” she smiles at the bass player, and he nods agreement, though he’s still drinking booze. He seems down.

Then they’re back onstage. For a ragged minute, the four of them tussle over the next number: Is it to be one of the fiddler’s embroidered jigs, or something noisy and fast by the Spudboys voted in by the bass player, or will Dawn and the drummer have their way with “I’m So Glad”? They compromise, and in a few bars Dawn realizes she’s in that lucky, lucky place a musician rarely finds, where four strangers are making it up as they go along and it works. Her leg-bones begin to tremble. Can we keep it up?

Confidently they turn from one another as if hinged. They face the dancers. She feels their agreement at her back, one organism making a wave of sound. Floating in it, she concentrates on staying in that good place where she knows what each of them will do for the next sixteen bars. She finds that she has been watching the dance, which gradually loses its air of a beehive at rush hour and shapes into a beehive with something on its mind, look, there are the little circles, now a line dance, ooh, don’t they look like they’re fucking, no, now she’s going to kiss the next one, and around they go! Together she and the fiddler sweep the circles into the lap of the tireless drummer, who chops up the patterns so they can make new. The bass player signs for a key change, one thumb jerking up.

Their host and hostess sort themselves out in the center, close to the bandstand. A little clearing opens around them. They whirl and step, stamp and skank, she bouncing rounder and rounder, her nostrils snorting like a comic steam-engine in the cold air, he a mere sketch of himself, a dancing, flickering stick puppet. Dawn remembers how his frail, cheery voice says, “Staying power,” and an iron rod forms in her backbone. All night, she vows, all night. She can. She feels a change in the band, the others drop back, and she lets the voice of her guitar slide free and soar, clawing its way to the highest point of the ceiling, then juddering and hacking its way down again, a Jacob’s ladder of bright sound fracturing into splinters of one true thing.

On the dance floor at her feet, her host falters. He stops, turns, as if the music has disappeared suddenly and he cannot hear it. His eyeglass darkens. It springs from his face and falls. A look of great tenderness comes into his face. He topples into his wife’s arms.

Dawn feels her own heart falter, but her hands cannot stop. The iron rod in her backbone will not dissolve. The dancers likewise cannot stop. They clear the area round the motionless pair, but the mass of spangled velvet and feathers still shivers. They stamp, and all begin to clap, clap, clap. The drummer pounds on. The bass player and the fiddler have let their instruments down for Dawn’s solo. Everyone looks at her. Clap, clap, clap, clap, stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp. Her ax wails of its own accord.

She looks at the couple in the clearing. His face is half-sunk in his wife’s great cloven bosom. The old lady turns her face up, grief and pleading in her eyes. Dawn panics. Her hands still. The drummer slows. His foot twitches, thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. Each beat sounds like the last. Thump.

The revelers clap and stamp. They know what they want.

Dawn can’t move.

The other musicians exchange glances. The bass player hoists his Fender sorrowfully and, stony-faced, hauls a slow minor chord out of it, one note at a time. The drummer picks up behind him, brushing silver rain out of his cymbals as if he is unconvinced that this tune has a pulse.

It has, barely. The clapping does not slow, but the bass can only seem to make half-speed. His severe little tune telegraphs its ending almost as soon as it has begun. He plunks his way across it like a mammoth, one-finger harpsichord, all weepy with vibrato and an occasional angry fuzz on the lowest notes, a drunk coming apart in the middle of a sad song. On the last lugubrious drone the drummer comes awake again, thump, pause, thump, while the fiddler looks at Dawn and she looks back blindly over the clap, clap, clap, stamp, stamp, stamp of the crowd swaying before them, all the eager faces lit with anticipation. Her host lies wilted over his wife’s huge body. Clap, clap, stamp, stamp. Dawn feels she has fallen among horrifying aliens. The fiddler nods and tucks his chin.

His music is formless, a whirling darkness full of flashing wings and sharp things you might cut your hand on. For a while it sounds Arabic, a repetitive ululating cry like widow-prayer or a harlot calling for a deeper thrust. The drummer makes up his own mind about that one. Definitely sex. They have at it, bump and grind, screwing the downbeat with the single-minded smack of a headboard against the wall. The fiddle double-stops, braids in threes, tangles, rejoins itself. “Turkey in the Straw” pokes its head through.

Dawn takes a deep breath, her first in hours it seems. Stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp, clap, clap, clap, clap.

She thinks she knows what she must do now. She leans over to the bass player and bellows “Zarathustra!”

The fiddler overhears, loses his course in that moment. His fiddle skids, ki-yi-ing like a stepped-on dog. Startled, the drummer halts.

And the bass player, at a glance from Dawn, lays down the bottom of the world’s biggest chord. It goes on and on, never louder, never fading. Dawn breathes a prayer of thanks. She realizes now that the dancers dare not stop. They clap and stomp over the bass drone, keeping their part of the faith. She’s pretty sure she remembers hers.

The fiddler sends his bow skittering over the strings, a flight of bats. Ah, he does know this. But the drum’s the important part. She gathers the eyes of the band, drummer, fiddler, bass. The bass note steps up suddenly, a loud, warning drone.

Dawn breaks in, one clear, trumpety crow-call rising tonic to dominant to octave. Gathers their eyes. Crash! a crack of stringed lightning falls off to a boding minor chord that fades, then swells hugely. The drummer rolls over the skins of his biggest toms and whacks the thunder out of them, boom-boom, boom-boom, boom, boom, boom, drawls it to an impressive halt, a pause only. Her heart flies, oh, thank god. The bass player steps up the volume a notch and the floor seems to rise under them, bearing them upward to the distant ceiling. Dawn’s guitar sings out again, and the answering lightning splits the other way, into a major chord. Again the drummer carries them across the bass drone, boom-boom, boom-boom, boom! Dawn can feel the hairs parting from the back of her neck, lifting off her forearms. The bass player doubles his string into octaves of solid power. The floor rises again. Dawn repeats her summons, this time as loud as the guitar will shout and, when the fiddle screams in at last, they jam that chord straight into the ceiling, through the floor, straight out the walls on every side. The drummer goes nuts on his cymbals, his set, the stage floor, his toms, the cymbals again, and when Dawn lifts her chin and points her guitar neck at the ceiling, the three of them roar out the last of that huge noise, and stop.

But the bass is hanging on, still giving them the whole chord. Dawn turns with a dirty look. He’s grinning. She sees movement on the dance floor below. The revelers set up a cheer and she looks down.

Her host is standing. His wife is holding his hands. He beams at her. The revelers close in around them, shouting and laughing, all their hands stretched to touch him, and the thin man with butter-colored hair turns with chicken steps, nodding to them all. Jauntily, he puts his glass in his eye and it catches a thousand candles, throwing yellow light everywhere at once.

Dawn blinks. The drummer smacks into a backbeat, and the bass player keeps pretending he’s an organist for two bars, and Dawn’s hands move over the strings of their own accord into a Santana number. The dance floor seethes. She can’t stop laughing, or crying.

She doesn’t remember the end of the party. They play at least two more sets, rest, play again. Out of the muzzy night, she remembers how the bass player helps find her hiking boots, remembers eating—god, eating everything, and the way the fiddler tries to tell her in some language certainly not English but not possibly anything else how wonderful she is and how they must do this again next year, and drinking eggnog “for the protein” the bass player says seriously, how he laces her boots on for her wrong-foot-about and makes her dance with him, and then a turn each with her host and hostess, how the drummer puts her guitar into its case for her and they all squeeze out the door together giggling and shoving to stand on the bare prairie looking east at a pale, overcast sky.

“Surely you want to see the results of your handiwork,” the bass player murmurs in her ear, his arms wrapped round her from behind. They watch the horizon redden, a thin line of color between the black earth and the leaden sky.

Dawn notices they are alone on the hillside. “Where’d everybody get to?”

The bass player nibbles her ear. “When, not where. Speaking of which, have you a watch?” She puts up her wrist, her eyes on the sunrise, clutching his arm to her waist, feeling absurdly pleased. He says, “Ah, digital, very good. The year and everything.” This is obviously the answer to a question that’s been eating him all night. He’s very happy about it.

She giggles. “What are you talking about?” She twists to look into his face.

He kisses her sideways. “What I’m talking about is, not only can you come back again next year, but,” another kiss, “and, I can take you home.”

She glances back at the barn door and finds instead an enormous boulder half-buried in the hillside. No door, no windows. No barn. She shakes her head. “God, am I drunk?”

The boulder reddens while she watches. Gooseflesh ripples over her. The whole prairie reddens. She shudders once, and looks back at the sunrise. “How do I find it again?” she says, wondering.

“The missus finds us.”

The sun flashes across the curve of the planet like a thousand candles, shooting yellow light everywhere at once. Then it disappears into the cloud ceiling.

She turns around in the bass player’s arms and kisses him properly. “Are you real?” she says, tangling her hands in the back of his coat.

“Of course I’m real,” he says indignantly. “What’s your name, anyway?”

She tells him.

© 1997 by Jennifer Stevenson.

Originally published in The Horns of Elfland,

edited by Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, and Donald G. Keller.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jennifer Stevenson writes about gods and men as if the difference between them is real estate. Her first novel, Trash Sex Magic, was long-listed two years running for the Nebula Award and shortlisted for a Locus Award. She’s a founding member of Book View Café (bookviewcafe.com). She sticks pretty close to comedy and lives with her husband and two cats in Chicago, where she makes up new uses for old sex demons. Find her on Facebook or visit her website (jenniferstevenson.com) for stodgier matter.

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

NOVELLA

New Light on the Drake Equation

Ian R. MacLeod

As he did on the first Wednesday of every month, after first finishing off the bottle of wine he’d fallen asleep with, then drinking three bleary fingers of absinthe, and with an extra slug for good measure, Tom Kelly drove down into St. Hilaire to collect his mail and provisions. The little town was red-brown, shimmering in the depths of the valley, flecked with olive trees, as he slewed the old Citroën around the hairpins from his mountain. Up to the east, where the karst rose in a mighty crag, he could just make out the flyers circling against the sheer white drop if he rubbed his eyes and squinted, and the glint of their wings as they caught the morning thermals. But Tom felt like a flyer of sorts himself, now the absinthe was fully in his bloodstream. He let the Citroën’s piebald tires, the skid of the grit, and the pull of the mountain take him endlessly downwards. Spinning around the bends blind and wrong-side, with the old canvas roof flapping, in and out of the shadows, scattering sheep in the sweet hot roar of the antique motor, Tom Kelly drove down from his mountain towards the valley.

In the bureau de poste, Madame Brissac gave him a smile that seemed even more patronising than usual.

“Any messages?” he croaked.

She blinked slowly. “One, maybe two.” Bluebottles circled the close air, which smelled of boiled sweets and Gitanes and Madame Brissac. Tom swayed slightly in his boots. He wiped off some of the road grit, which had clung to the stubble on his face. He picked a stain from off his t-shirt, and noticed as he did so that a fresh age spot was developing on the back of his right hand. It would disappoint her, really, if he took a language vial and started speaking fluent French after all these years—or even if he worked at it the old way, using bookplates and audio samples, just as he’d always been promising himself. It would deprive her of their small monthly battle.

“Then, ah, je voudrais . . .” He tried waving his arms.

“You would like to have?”

“Yes, please. Oui. Ah—s’il vous plaît . . .”

Still the tepid pause, the droning bluebottles. Or Madame Brissac could acquire English, Tom thought, although she was hardly likely to do it for his sake.

“You late,” she said eventually.

“You mean—”

Then the door banged open in a crowded slab of shadows and noise and a cluster of flyers, back from their early morning spin on the thermals, bustled up behind Tom with skinsuits squealing, the folded tips of their wings bumping against the brown curls of sticky flypaper, which the bluebottles had been scrupulously avoiding. These young people, Tom decided as he glanced back at them, truly were like bright alien insects in their gaudy skinsuits, their thin bodies garishly striped with the twisting logos of sports companies and their wings, a flesh of fine silk stretched between feathery bones, then folded up behind their backs like delicate umbrellas. And they were speaking French, too; speaking it in loud, high voices, but overdoing every phrase and gesture and emphasis in the way that people always did when they were new to a language. They thought that just because they could understand each other and talk sensibly to their flying instructor and follow the tour guide and order a drink at the bar that they were jabbering away like natives, but then they hadn’t yet come up against Madame Brissac, who would be bound to devise some bureaucratic twist or incomprehension which would send them away from here without whatever particular form or permission it was that they were expecting. Tom turned back to Madame Brissac and gave her a grin from around the edges of his gathering absinthe headache. She didn’t bother to return it. Instead, she muttered something that sounded like I’m Judy.

“What? Voulez-vous répeter?”

“Is Thursday.”

“Ah. Je comprends. I see . . .” Not that he did quite, but the flyers were getting impatient and crowding closer to him, wings rustling with echoes of the morning air that had recently been filling them and the smell of fresh sweat, clean endeavour. How was it, Tom wondered, that they could look so beautiful from a distance, and so stupid and ugly close up? But Thursday—and he’d imagined it was Wednesday. Of course he’d thought that it was Wednesday, otherwise he wouldn’t be here in St. Hilaire, would he? He was a creature of habit, worn in by the years like the grain of the old wood of Madame Brissac’s counter. So he must have lost track, and/or not bothered to check his calendar back up on the mountain. An easy enough mistake to make, living the way he did. Although . . .

“You require them? Yes?”

“S’il vous plaît . . .”

At long last, Madame Brissac was turning to the pigeonholes where she kept his and a few other message cards filed according to her own alchemic system. Putting them in one place, labelled under Kelly; Tom—or American; Drunk; Elderly; Stupid—was too simple for her. Neither had Tom ever been able to see a particular pattern which would relate to the source of the cards, which were generally from one or other of his various academic sponsors and came in drips and drabs and rushes, but mostly drabs. Those old, brown lines of wooden boxes, which looked as if they had probably once held proper old-fashioned letters and telegrams, and perhaps messages and condolences from the World Wars, and the revolutionary proclamations of the sans-culottes, and decrees from the Sun King, and quite possibly even the odd pigeon, disgorged their contents to Madame Brissac’s quick hands in no way that Tom could ever figure. He could always ask, of course, but that would just be an excuse for a raising of Gallic eyebrows and shoulders in mimed incomprehension. After all, Madame Brissac was Madame Brissac, and the flyers behind him were whispering, fluttering, trembling like young egrets, and it was none of his business.

There were market stalls lined across the Place de la Révolution, which had puzzled Tom on his way into the bureau de poste, but no longer. The world was right and he was wrong. This was Thursday. And his habitual café was busier than usual, although the couple who were occupying his table got up at his approach and strolled off, hand in hand, past the heaped and shadowed displays of breads and fruits and cheeses. The girl had gone for an Audrey Hepburn look, but the lad had the muscles of a paratrooper beneath his sleeveless t-shirt, and his flesh was green and lightly scaled. To Tom, it looked like a skin disease. He wondered, as lonely men gazing at young couples from café tables have wondered since time immemorial, what the hell she saw in him.

The waiter, Jean-Benoît, was busier than usual, and, after giving Tom a glance that almost registered surprise, took his time coming over. Tom, after all, would be going nowhere in any hurry. And he had his cards—all six of them—to read. They lay there, face down on the plastic tablecloth; a hand of poker he had to play. But he knew already what the deal was likely to be. One was blue and almost plain, with a pattern like rippled water, which was probably some kind of junk mail, and another looked suspiciously like a bill for some cyber-utility he probably wasn’t even using, and the rest, most undoubtedly, were from his few remaining sponsors. Beside them on the table, like part of a fine still life into which he and these cards were an unnecessary intrusion, lay the empty carafe and the wine glasses from which the lovers had been drinking. Wine at ten in the morning! That was France for you. This was France. And he could do with a drink himself, could Tom Kelly. Maybe just a pastis, which would sit nicely with the absinthe he’d had earlier—just as a bracer, mind. Tom sighed and rubbed his temples and looked about him in the morning brightness. Up at the spire of St. Marie rising over the awnings of the market, then down at the people, gaudily, gorgeously fashionable in their clothes, their skins, their faces. France, this real France of the living, was a place he sometimes felt he only visited on these Wednesday—this Thursday—mornings. He could have been anywhere for the rest of the time, up with the stars there on his mountain, combing his way through eternity on the increasing off chance of an odd blip. That was why he was who he was—some old kook whom people like Madame Brissac and Jean-Benoît patronized without ever really knowing. That was why he’d never really got around to mastering this language, which was washing all around him in persibilant waves. Jean-Benoît was still busy, flipping his towel and serving up crepes with an on-off smile of his regulation-handsome features, his wings so well tucked away that no one would ever really know he had them. Like a lot of the people who worked here, he did the job so he could take to the air in his free time. Tom, with his trois diget pastis merci, was never going to be much of a priority.

Tom lifted one of the cards and tried to suppress a burp as the bitter residue of absinthe flooded his mouth. The card was from the Aston University, in Birmingham, England, of all places. Now, he’d forgotten they were even sponsoring him. He ran his finger down the playline, and half-closed his eyes to witness a young man he’d never seen before in his life sitting at the kind of impressively wide desk that only people, in Tom’s experience, who never did any real work possessed.

“Mister Kelly, it’s a real pleasure to make your acquaintance . . .” The young man paused. He was clearly new to whatever it was he was doing, and gripping that desk as if it was perched at the top of a roller-coaster ride. “As you may have seen in the academic press, I’ve now taken over from Doctor Sally Normanton. I didn’t know her personally, but I know that all of you who did valued her greatly, and I, too, feel saddened by the loss of a fine person and physicist . . .”

Tom withdrew his finger from the card for a moment, and dropped back into France. He’d only ever met the woman once. She’d been warm and lively and sympathetic, he remembered, and had moved about on autolegs because of the advanced arthritis which, in those days at least, the vials hadn’t been able to counteract. They’d sat under the mossy trees and statues in Birmingham’s Centenary Square, which for him had held other memories, and she’d sighed and smiled and explained how the basic policy of her institution had gone firmly against any positive figure to the Drake Equation several decades before, but Sally Normanton herself had always kept a soft spot for that kind of stuff herself, and she’d really got into physics in the first place on the back of reading Clarke and Asimov. Not that she imagined Tom had heard of them? But Tom had, of course. They were of almost of the same generation. He’d developed a dust allergy from hunching over those thrilling, musty analog pages as a kid. They chatted merrily, and on the walk back to the campus, Sally Normanton had confided, as she heaved and clicked on her legs, that she had control of a smallish fund. It was left over from some government work, and was his to have for as long as it took the accountants to notice. And that was more than twenty years ago. And now she was dead.

“. . . physicist. But in clearing out and revising her responsibilities, it’s come to my attention that monies have been allocated to your project, which, I regret to say . . .”

Tom span the thing forward until he came to the bit at the end when the young man, who had one eye green and one eye blue—and nails like talons, so perhaps he too was a flyer, although he didn’t look quite thin enough and seemed too easily scared—announced that he’d left a simulacrum ai of his business self on the card, which would be happy to answer any pertinent questions, although the decision to withdraw funds was, regrettably, quite irrevocable. The ai was there, of course, to save the chance that Tom might try to bother this man of business with feeble pleas. But Tom knew he was lucky to have got what he got from that source, and even luckier that they weren’t talking about suing him to take it all back.

Aston University. England. The smell of different air. Different trees. If there was one season that matched the place, a mood that always seemed to be hanging there in the background even on the coldest or hottest or wettest of days, it had to be fall, autumn. How long had it been now? Tom tried not to think—that was one equation which, even to him, always came back as a recurring nothing. He noticed instead that the wineglass that the pretty young girl had been drinking from bore the red imprint of her lipstick, and was almost sad to see it go, and with it the better memories he’d been trying to conjure, when Jean-Benoît finally bustled up and plonked a glass of cloudy yellow liquid, which Tom wasn’t really sure that he wanted any longer, down in front of him. Voilà. Merci. Pidgin French as he stared at the cards from Madame Brissac’s incomprehensible pigeonholes. But he drank it anyway, the pastis. Back in one. At least it got rid of the taste of the absinthe.

And the day was fine, the market was bustling. It would be a pity to spoil this frail good mood he was building with messages which probably included the words regret, withdraw, or at the very least, must query . . . This square, it was baguettes and Edith Piaf writ large, it was the Eiffel Tower in miniature. The warm smells of garlic and slightly dodgy drains and fine dark coffee. And those ridiculous little poodles dragged along by those long-legged women. The shouts and the gestures, the old widows in black who by now were probably younger than he was muttering to themselves and barging along with their stripy shopping bags like extras from the wrong film and scowling at this or that vial-induced wonder. And a priest in his cassock stepping from the church, pausing in the sunlight at the top of the steps to take in the scene, although he had wings behind him which he stretched as if to yawn, and his hair was scarlet. Another flyer. Tom smiled to think how he got on with his congregation, which was mostly those scowling old women, and thought about ordering—why not?—another pastis . . .

Then he noticed a particular figure wandering beside the stalls at the edge of the market where displays of lace billowed in the wind, which blew off the karst and squeezed in a warm, light breeze down between the washing-strung tenements. It couldn’t be, of course. Couldn’t be. It was just that lipstick on the edge of that glass which had prickled that particular memory. That, and getting a message from England, and that woman dying, and losing another income source, all of which, if he’d have let them, would have stirred up a happy-sad mélange of memories. She was wearing a dark blue sleeveless dress and was standing in a bright patch of sunlight which flamed on her blonde hair and made it hard for him to see her face. She could have been anyone, but in that moment, she could have been Terr, and Tom felt the strangely conflicting sensations of wanting to run over and embrace her, and also to dig a hole for himself where he could hide forever right here beneath this café paving. He blinked. His head swam. By the time he’d refocused, the girl, the woman, had moved on. A turn of bare arm, a flash of lovely calf. Why did they have to change themselves like they did now? Women were perfect as they were. Always had been, as far as Tom was concerned—or as best he could remember. Especially Terr. But then, perhaps that had been an illusion, too.

Tom stood up and dropped a few francs on the table and blundered off between the market stalls. That dark blue sleeveless dress, those legs, that hair. His heart was pounding as it hadn’t done in years from some strange inner exertion of memory. Even if it wasn’t her, which it obviously wasn’t, he still wanted to know, to see. But St. Hilaire was Thursday-busy. The teeming market swallowed him up and spat him out again downhill, where the steps ran beside the old battlements and the river flashed under the willow trees, then uphill by the bright, expensive shops along the Rue de Commerce, which offered in their windows designer clothes, designer vials, designer lives. Fifteen different brands of colloquial French in bottles like costly perfumes and prices to match. Only you crushed them between your teeth and the glass tasted like spun sugar and tiny miracles of lavish engineering poured down your throat and through the walls of your belly and into your bloodstream where they shed their protective coating and made friends with your immune system and hitched a ride up to your brain. Lessons were still necessary (they played that down on the packaging) but only one or two, and they involved little more than sitting in flashing darkness in a Zen-like state of calm induced by various drug suppositories (this being France) while nanomolecules fiddled with your sites of language and cognition until you started parlez vous-ing like a native. Or you could grow wings, although the vials in the sports shops were even more expensive. But the dummies beyond the plate glass whispered and beckoned to Tom and fluttered about excitedly; Day-Glo fairies, urging him to make the investment in a fortnight’s experience that would last a lifetime.

Tom came to an old square at the far end of the shops. The Musée de Masque was just opening, and a group of people who looked like late revelers from the night before were sitting on its steps and sharing a bottle of neat Pernod. The women had decorated their wings with silks and jewels, although by now they looked like tired hat stands. The men, but for the pulsing tattoo-like adornments they’d woven into their flesh and the pouch-like g-strings around their crotches which spoke, so to speak, volumes, were virtually naked. Their skin was heliotrope. Tom guessed it was the color for this season. To him, though, they looked like a clutch of malnourished, crash-landed gargoyles. He turned back along the street, and found his Citroën pretty much where he thought he’d left it by the alimentation générale where he’d already purchased next month’s supplies, and turned the old analog key he’d left in the ignition, and puttered slowly out across the cobbles, supplies swishing and jingling in their boxes, then gave the throttle an angry shove, and roared out towards midday, the heat, the scattered olive trees and the grey-white bulk of his mountain.

• • • •

Dusk. The coming stars. His time. His mountain. Tom stood outside his sparse wooden hut, sipping coffee and willing the sun to unravel the last of her glowing clouds from the horizon. Around him on the large, flat, mile-wide, slightly west-tilted slab of pavement limestone glittered the silver spiderweb of his tripwires, which were sheening with dew as the warmth of the day evaporated, catching the dying light as they and he waited for the stars.

He amazed himself sometimes, the fact that he was up here doing this, the fact that he was still searching for anything at all at the ripe, nearly-old age of near-seventy, let alone for something as wild and extravagant as intelligent extra-terrestrial life. Where had it began? What had started him on this quest of his? Had it really been those SF stories—dropping through the Stargate with Dave Bowman, or staggering across the sandworm deserts of Arrakis with Paul Atreides? Was it under rocks in Eastport when he was a kid raising the tiny translucent crabs to the light, or was it down the wires on the few remaining SETI websites when he wasn’t that much older? Was it pouring through the library screens at college, or was it now as he stood looking up at the gathering stars from his lonely hut on this lonely French mountain? Or was it somewhere else? Somewhere out there, sweet and glorious and imponderable?

Most of the people he still knew, or at least maintained a sort of long-distance touch with, had given up with whatever had once bugged them some time ago; the ones, in fact, who seemed the happiest, the most settled, the most at ease with their lives—and thus generally had least to do with him—had never really started worrying about such things in the first place. They took vacations in places like St. Hilaire, they grew wings or gills just like the kids did and acquired fresh languages and outlooks as they swallowed their vials and flew or dived in their new element. He put down his cup of coffee, which was already skinned and cold, and then he smiled to himself—he still couldn’t help it—as he watched more of the night come in. Maybe it was that scene in Fantasia, watching it on video when he was little more than a baby. The one set to the music he recognized later as Beethoven’s Pastoral. Those cavorting cherubs and centaurs, and then at the end, after Zeus has packed away his thunderbolts, the sun sets, and Morpheus comes over in a glorious cloak of night. The idea of life amid the stars had already been with him then, filling him as he squatted entranced before the screen and the Baltimore traffic buzzed by outside, unnoticed, filled with something that was like a sweet sickness, like his mother’s embrace when she thought he was sleeping, like the ache of cola and ice cream. That sweet ache had been with him, he decided as he looked up and smiled as the stars twinkled on and goosebumps rose on his flesh, ever since.

So Tom had become a nocturnal beast, a creature of twilights and dawns. He supposed that he’d become so used to his solitary life up here on this wide and empty mountain that he’d grown a little agora—or was it claustro?—phobic. Hence the need for the absinthe this morning—or at least the extra slug of it. The Wednesdays, the bustle of the town, had become quite incredible to him, a blast of light and smell and sound and contact, almost like those VR suites where you tumbled through huge fortresses on strange planets and fought and cannon-blasted those ever-imaginary aliens. Not that Tom had ever managed to bring himself to do such a thing. As the monsters glowered over him, jaws agape and fangs dripping, all he’d wanted to do was make friends and ask them about their customs and religions and mating habits. He’d never got through many levels of those VR games, the few times he’d tried them. Now he thought about it, he really hadn’t got through so very many levels of the huge VR game known as life, either.

Almost dark. A time for secrets and lovers and messages. A time for the clink of wine glasses and the soft puck of opening bottles. The west was a faint red blush of clouds and mountains, which glimmered in a pool on the fading slope of the mountain. Faint grey shapes were moving down there; from the little Tom could see now from up here, they could have been stray flares and impulses from the failing remaining rods and cones in his weary eyes—random scraps of data—but he knew from other nights and mornings that they were the shy ibex which grazed this plateau, and were drawn here from miles around along with many other creatures simply because most of the moisture that fell here in the winter rains and summer storms drained straight through the cave-riddled limestone. Sometimes, looking that way on especially clear nights, Tom would catch the glimmer of stars as if a few had fallen there, although on the rare occasions he’d trekked to the pool down across difficult slopes, he’d found that, close up, it was a disappointment. A foul brown oval of thick amoebic fluid surrounded by cracked and caked mud, it was far away from the sweet oasis he’d imagined where bright birds and predators and ruminants all bowed their heads to sip the silver cool liquid and forget, in the brief moments of their parched and mutual need, their normal animosities. But it was undeniably a waterhole, and as such important to the local fauna. It had even been there on the map all those years ago, when he’d been looking for somewhere to begin what he was sure was to be the remainder of his life’s work. A blue full stop, a small ripple of hope and life. He’d taken it as a sign.

Tom went inside his hut and span the metal cap off one of the cheap but decent bottles of vin de table with which he generally started the evenings. He took a swig from it, looked around without much hope for a clean glass, then took another swig. One-handed, he tapped up the keys of one of his bank of machines. Lights stuttered, cooling fans chirruped like crickets or groaned like wounded bears. It was hot in here from all this straining antique circuitry. There was strong smell of singed dust and warm wires, and a new dim, fizzing sound, which could have been a spark, which, although he turned his head this way and that, as sensitive to the changes in this room’s topography as a shepherd to the moods of his flock, Tom couldn’t quite locate. But no matter. He’d wasted most of last night fiddling and tweaking to deal with the results of a wine spillage, and didn’t want to waste this one doing the same. There was something about today, this not-Wednesday known as Thursday, which filled Tom with an extra sense of urgency. He’d grounded himself far too firmly on the side of science and logic to believe in such rubbish as premonitions, but still he couldn’t help but wonder if this wasn’t how they felt, the Hawkings and the Einsteins and the Newtons—the Cooks and the Columbuses, for that matter—in the moment before they made their Big Discovery, their final break. Of course, any such project, viewed with hindsight, could be no more than a gradual accumulation of knowledge, a hunch that a particular area of absent knowledge might be fruitfully explored, followed generally by years of arse-licking and fund-searching and peer-group head-shaking and rejected papers and hard work during which a few extra scraps of information made that hunch seem more and more like a reasonably intelligent guess, even if everyone else was heading in the opposite direction and thought that you were, to coin a phrase once used by Tom’s cosmology professor, barking up the wrong fucking tree in the wrong fucking forest. In his bleaker moments, Tom sometimes wondered if there was a tree there at all.

But not now. The data, of course, was processed automatically, collected day and night according to parameters and wavelengths he’d pre-determined but at a speed which, even with these processors, sieved and reamed out information by the gigabyte per second. He’d set up the search systems to flash and bleep and make whatever kind of electronic racket they were capable of if they ever came upon any kind of anomaly. Although he was routinely dragged from his bleary daytime slumbers by a surge in power or a speck of fly dirt or rabbit gnawing the tripwires or a stray cosmic ray, it was still his greatest nightmare that they would blithely ignore the one spike, the one regularity or irregularity, that might actually mean something—or that he’d be so comatose he’d sleep through it. And then, of course, the computers couldn’t look everywhere. By definition, with the universe being as big as it was, they and Tom were always missing something. The something, in fact, was so large it was close to almost everything. Not only was there all the data collected for numerous other astronomical and non-astronomical purposes, which he regularly downloaded from his satellite link and stored on the disks which, piled and waiting in one corner, made a silvery pillar almost to the ceiling, but the stars themselves were always out there, the stars and their inhabitants. Beaming down in real-time. Endlessly.

So how to sort, where to begin? Where was the best place on all the possible radio wavelengths to start looking for messages from little green men? It was a question which had first been asked more than a century before, and to which, of all the many, many guesses, one still stood out as the most reasonable. Tom turned to that frequency now, live through the tripwires out on the karst, and powered up the speakers and took another slug of vin de table and switched on the monitor and sat there listening, watching, drinking. That dim hissing of microwaves, the cool dip of interstellar quietude amid the babble of the stars and the gas clouds and the growl of the big bang and the spluttering quasars, not to mention all the racket that all the other humans on earth and around the solar system put out. The space between the emissions of interstellar hydrogen and hydroxyl radical at round about 1420 MHz, which was known as the waterhole—a phrase which reflected not only the chemical composition of water, but also the idea of a place where, just as the shy ibex clustered to quench themselves at dusk and dawn, all the varied species of the universe might gather after a weary day to exchange wondrous tales.

Tom listened to the sound of the waterhole. What were the chances, with him sitting here, of anything happening right now? Bleep, bleep. Bip, bip. Greetings from the planet Zarg. Quite, quite impossible. But then, given all the possibilities in the universe, what were the chances of him, Tom Kelly, sitting here on this particular mountain at this particular moment with this particular bank of equipment and this particular near-empty bottle of vin de table listening to this frequency in the first place? That was pretty wild in itself. Wild enough, in fact—he still couldn’t help it—to give him goosebumps. Life itself was such an incredible miracle. In fact, probably unique, if one was to believe the odds of which was assigned to it by the few eccentric souls who still bothered to tinker with the Drake Equation. That was the problem.

He forced himself to stand up, stretch, leave the room, the speakers still hissing with a soft sea-roar, the monitor flickering and jumping. The moment when the transmission finally came through was bound to happen when you turned your back. It stood to reason. A watched kettle, after all . . . And not that he was superstitious. So he wandered out into the night again, which was now starry and marvelous and moonless and complete, and he tossed the evening’s first empty into the big dumpster and looked up at the heavens, and felt that swell in his chest and belly he’d felt those more than sixty years ago, which was still like the ache of cola and ice cream. And had he eaten? He really couldn’t remember, although he was pretty sure he’d fixed some coffee. This darkness was food enough for him, all the pouring might of the stars. Odd to say, but on nights like this, the darkness had a glow to it like something finely wrought, finally polished, a luster and a sheen. You could believe in God. You could believe in anything. And the tripwires were still just visible, the vanishing trails like tiny shooting stars crisscrossing this arid limestone plain as they absorbed the endless transmission. They flowed towards the bowl of darkness which was the hidden valley, the quiet waterhole, the flyers sleeping in their beds in St. Hilaire, dreaming of thermals, twitching their wings. Tom wondered if Madame Brissac slept. It was hard to imagine her anywhere other than standing before her pigeonholes in the office de poste, waiting for the next poor sod she could make life difficult for. The pigeonholes themselves, whatever code it was that she arranged them in, really would be worth making the effort to find out about on the remote chance that, Madame Brissac being Madame Brissac, the information was sorted in a way that Tom’s computers, endlessly searching the roar of chaos for order, might have overlooked. And he also wondered if it wasn’t time already for another bottle, one of the plastic liter ones, which tasted like shit if you started on them, but were fine if you had something half-decent first to take off the edge . . .

A something—a figure—was walking up the track towards him. No, not a fluke, and not random data, and certainly not an ibex. Not Madame Brissac either, come to explain her pigeonholes and apologize for her years of rudeness. Part of Tom was watching the rest of Tom in quiet amazement as his addled mind and tired eyes slowly processed the fact that he wasn’t alone, and that the figure was probably female, and could almost have been, no, looked like, in fact was, the woman in the dark blue dress he’d glimpsed down by the lace stalls in the market that morning. And she really did bear a remarkable resemblance to Terr, at least in the sole dim light which emanated from the monitors inside his hut. The way she walked. The way she was padding across the bare patch of ground in front of the tripwires. That same lightness. And then her face. And her voice.

“Why do you have to live so bloody far up here, Tom? The woman I asked in the post office said it was just up the road . . .”

He shrugged. He was floating. His arms felt light, his hands empty. “That would be Madame Brissac.”

“Would it? Anyway, she was talking rubbish.”

“You should have tried asking in French.”

“I was speaking French. My poor feet. It’s taken me bloody hours.”

Tom had to smile. The stars were behind Terr, and they were shining on her once-blonde hair, which the years had silvered to the gleam of those tripwires, and touched the lines around her mouth as she smiled. He felt like crying and laughing. Terr. “Well, that’s Madame Brissac for you.”

“So? Are you going to invite me inside?”

“There isn’t much of an inside.”

Terr took another step forward on her bare feet. She was real. So close to him. He could smell the dust on her salt flesh. Feel and hear her breathing. She was Terr all right. He wasn’t drunk or dreaming, or at least not that drunk yet; he’d only had—what?—two bottles of wine so far all evening. And she had and hadn’t changed.

“Well,” she said, “that’s Tom Kelly for you, too, isn’t it?”

• • • •

The idea of sitting in the hut was ridiculous on a night like this. And the place, as Tom stumbled around in it and slewed bottles off the table and shook rubbish off the chairs, was a dreadful, terrible mess. So he hauled two chairs out into the night for them to sit on, and the table to go between, and found unchipped glasses from somewhere, and gave them a wipe to get rid of the mold, and ferreted around in the depths of his boxes until he found the solitary bottle of Santernay le Chenay 2058 he’d been saving for First Contact—or at least until he felt too depressed—and lit one of the candles he kept for when the generator went down. Then he went searching for a corkscrew, ransacking cupboards and drawers and cursing under his breath at the ridiculousness of someone who got through as much wine as he did not being able to lay his hands upon one—but then the cheaper bottles were all screw-capped, and the really cheap plastic things had tops a blind child could pop off one-handed. He was breathless when he finally sat down. His heart ached. His face throbbed. His ears were singing.

“How did you find me, Terr?”

“I told you, I asked that woman in the post office. Madame Brissac.”

“I mean . . .” He used both hands to still the shaking as he sloshed wine from the bottle. “. . . here in France, in St. Hilaire, on this mountain.”

She chuckled. She sounded like the Terr of old speaking to him down the distance of an antique telephone line. “I did a search for you. One of those virtual things, where you send an ai out like a genie from a bottle. But would you believe I had to explain to it that SETI meant the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence? It didn’t have the phrase in its standard vocabulary. But it found you anyway, once I’d sorted that out. You have this old-fashioned website-thingy giving information on your project here and inviting new sponsors. You say it will be a day-by-day record of setbacks, surprises, and achievements. You even offer t-shirts. By the look of it, it was last updated about twenty years ago. You can virtually see the dust on it through the screen . . .”

Tom laughed. Sometimes, you had to. “The t-shirts never really took off . . .” He studied his glass, which also had a scum of dust floating on it, like most of his life. The taste of this good wine—sitting here—everything—was strange to him.

“Oh, and she sent me across the square to speak to this incredibly handsome waiter who works in this café. Apparently, you forgot these . . .” Terr reached into the top of her dress, and produced the cards he must have left on the table. They were warm when he took them, filled with a sense of life and vibrancy he doubted was contained in any of the messages. Terr. And her own personal filing system.

“And what about you, Terr?”

“What do you mean?”

“All these years, I mean I guess it’s pretty obvious what I’ve been doing—”

“—which was what you always said . . .”

“Yes. But you, Terr. I’ve thought about you once or twice. Just occasionally . . .”

“Mmmm.” She smiled at him over her glass, through the candlelight. “Let’s just talk about now for a while, shall we, Tom? That, is, if you’ll put up with me?”

“Fine.” His belly ached. His hands, as he took another long slug of this rich good wine, were still trembling.

“Tom, you haven’t said the obvious thing yet.”

“Which is?”

“That I’ve changed. Although we both have, I suppose. Time being time.”

“You look great.”

“You were always good at compliments.”

“That was because I always meant them.”

“And you’re practical at the bottom of it, Tom. Or at least you were. I used to like that about you, too. Even if we didn’t always agree about it . . .”

With Tom it had always been one thing, one obsession. With Terr, it had to be everything. She’d wanted the whole world, the universe. And it was there even now, Tom could feel it quivering in the night between them, that division of objectives, a loss of contact, as if they were edging back towards the windy precipice which had driven them apart in the first place.

“Anyway,” he said stupidly, just to fill the silence, “if you don’t like how you look these days, all you do is take a vial.”

“What? And be ridiculous—like those women you see along Oxford Street and Fifth Avenue, with their fake furs, their fake smiles, their fake skins? Youth is for the young, Tom. Always was, and always will be. Give them their chance, is what I say. After all, we had ours. And they’re so much better at it than we are.”

Terr put down her glass on the rough table, leaned back, and stretched on the rickety chair. Her hair sheened back from her shoulders, and looked almost blonde for a moment. Darkness hollowed in her throat. “When you get to my age, Tom—our age. It just seems . . . Looking back is more important than looking forward . . .”

“Is that why you’re here?”

A more minor stretch and shrug. Her flesh whispered and seemed to congeal around her throat in stringy clumps. Her eyes hollowed, and the candlelight went out in them. Her arms thinned. Tom found himself wishing there were either more illumination, or less. He wanted to see Terr as she was, or cloaked in total darkness; not like this, twisting and changing like the ibex at the twilight waterhole. So perhaps candlelight was another thing that the young should reserve for themselves, like the vials, like flying, like love and faith and enthusiasm. Forget about romance—what you needed at his, at their, ages, was to know. You wanted certainty. And Tom himself looked, he knew, from his occasional forays in front of a mirror, like a particularly vicious cartoon caricature of the Tom Kelly that Terr remembered, the sort of thing that Gerald Scarfe had done to Reagan and Thatcher in the last century. The ruined veins in his cheeks and eyes. The bruises and swellings. Those damn age spots which had recently started appearing—gravestone marks, his grandmother had once called them. He was like Tom Kelly hungover after a fight in a bar, with a bout of influenza on top of that, and then a bad case of sunburn, and struggling against the influence of the gravity of a much larger planet. That was pretty much what aging felt like, too, come to think of it.

Flu, and too much gravity.

• • • •

He’d never been one for chat-up lines. He’d had the kind of natural not-quite regular looks when he was young which really didn’t need enhancing—which was good, because he’d never have bothered, or been able to afford it—but he had a shyness which came out mostly like vague disinterest when he talked to girls. The lovelier they were, the more vague and disinterested Tom became. But this woman or girl he happened to find himself walking beside along the canals of this old and once-industrial city called Birmingham after one of those parties when the new exchange students were supposed to meet up, she was different. She was English for a start, which to Tom, a little-traveled American on this foreign shore, seemed both familiar and alien. Everything she said, every gesture, had a slightly different slant to it, which he found strange, intriguing . . .

She’d taken him around the canals to Gas Street Basin, the slick waters sheened with antique petrol, antique fog, and along the towpath to the Sealife Centre, where deep-sea creatures out of Lovecraft mouthed close to the triple glass of their pressurized tanks. Then across the iron bridges of the Worcester and Birmingham Canal to a pub. Over her glass of wine, Terr had explained that an American president had once sat here in this pub and surprised the locals and drunk a pint of bitter during some world conference. Her hair was fine blonde. Her eyes were stormy green. She’d shrugged off the woolen coat with a collar that had brushed the exquisite line of her neck and jaw as she walked in a way that had made Tom envy it. Underneath, she was wearing a sleeveless dark blue dress, which was tight around her hips and smallish breasts, and showed her fine legs. Of course, he envied that dress as well. There was a smudged red crescent at the rim of the glass made by her lipstick. Terr was studying literature then, an arcane enough subject in itself, and for good measure she’d chosen as her special field the kind of stories of the imaginary future which had been popular for decades until the real and often quite hard to believe present had finally extinguished them. Tom, who’d been immersed in such stuff for much of his teenage years, almost forgot his reticence as he recommended John Varley, of whom she hadn’t even heard, and that she avoid the late-period Heinlein, and then to list his own particular favorites, which had mostly been Golden Age writers (yes, yes, she knew the phrase) like Simak and Van Vogt and Wyndham and Sheckley. And then there was Lafferty, and Cordwainer Smith . . .

Eventually, sitting at a table in the top room of that bar where an American president might once have sat, which overlooked the canal where the long boats puttered past with their antique petrol motors, bleeding their colors into the mist, Terr had steered Tom away from science fiction, and nudged him into talking about himself. He found out later that the whole genre of SF was already starting to bore her in any case. And he discovered that Terr had already worked her way through half a dozen courses, and had grown bored with all of them. She was bright enough to get a feel for any subject very quickly, and in the process to convince some new senior lecturer that, contrary to all the evidence on file, she finally had found her true focus in medieval history or classics or economics. And she was quick—incredibly so, by Tom’s standards—at languages. That would have given her a decent career in any other age; even as she sat there in her blue dress in that Birmingham pub, he could picture her beside that faceless American president, whispering words in his ears. But by then it was already possible for any normally intelligent human to acquire any new language in a matter of days. Deep therapy. Bio-feedback. Nano-enhancement. Out in the real world, those technologies that Tom had spent his teenage years simply dreaming about as he wondered over those dusty analog pages had been growing at an exponential rate.

But Terr, she fluttered from enthusiasm to enthusiasm, flower to flower, sipping its nectar, then once again spreading her wings and wafting off to some other faculty. And people, too. Terr brought that same incredible focus to bear on everyone she met as well—or at least those who interested her—understanding, absorbing, taking everything in.

She was even doing it now, Tom decided as they sat together all these years later outside his hut on this starlit French mountain. This Terr who changed and unchanged in the soft flood of candlelight across this battered table was reading him like a book. Every word, every gesture: the way this bottle of wine, good though it was, wouldn’t be anything like enough to see him through the rest of this night. She was feeling the tides of the world which had borne him here with all his hopes still somehow intact like Noah in his Ark, and then withdrawn and left him waiting, beached, dry and drowning.

“What are you thinking?”

He shrugged. But for once, the truth seemed easy. “That pub you took me to, the first time we met.”

“You mean the Malt House?”

Terr was bright, quick. Even now. Of course she remembered.

“And you went on and on about SF,” she added.

“Did I? I suppose I did . . .”

“Not really, Tom, but I’d sat through a whole bloody lecture of the stuff that morning, and I’d decided I’d had enough of it—of any kind of fiction. I realized I wanted something that was fabulous, but real.”

“That’s always been a tall order . . .” Terr had been so lovely back then. That blue coat, the shape of her lips on the wineglass she’d been drinking. Those stormy green eyes. Fabulous, but real. But it was like the couple he’d seen that morning. What had she ever seen in him?

“But then you told me you planned to prove that there was other intelligent life in the universe, Tom. Just like that. I don’t know why, but it just sounded so wonderful. Your dream, and then the way you could be so matter-of-fact about it . . .”

Tom gripped his glass a little tighter, and drank the last of it. His dream. He could feel it coming, the next obvious question.

“So did it ever happen?” Terr was now asking. “Did you ever find your little green men, Tom? But then I suppose I’d have heard. Remember how you promised to tell me? Or at least it might have roused you to post some news on that poor old website of yours.” She chuckled with her changed voice, slightly slurring the words. But Terr, Tom remembered, could get drunk on half a glass of wine. She could get drunk on nothing. Anything. “I’m sorry, Tom. It’s your life, isn’t it? And what the hell do I know? It was one of the things I always liked about you, your ability to dream in that practical way of yours. Loved . . .”

Loved? Had she said that? Or was that another blip, stray data?

“So you must tell me, Tom. How’s it going? After I’ve come all this way. You and your dream.”

The candle was sinking. The stars were pouring down on him. And the wine wasn’t enough, he needed absinthe—but his dream. And where to begin? Where to begin?

“D’you remember the Drake Equation?” Tom asked.

“Yes, I remember,” Terr said. “I remember the Drake Equation. You told me all about the Drake Equation that first day on our walk from that pub . . .” She tilted her head to one side, studying the glimmer of Aries in the west as if she was trying to remember the words of some song they’d once shared. “Now, how exactly did it go?”

Until that moment, none of it had yet seemed quite real to Tom. This night, and Terr being here. And, as the candle flickered, she still seemed to twist and change from Terr as he remembered to the Terr she was now in each quickening pulse of the flame. But with the Drake Equation, with that Tom Kelly was anchored. And how did it go, in any case?

• • • •

That long and misty afternoon. Walking beside the canal towpaths from that pub and beneath the dripping tunnels and bridges all the way past the old factories and the smart houses to the city’s other university out in Edgbaston as the streetlights came on. He’d told Terr about a radio astronomer named Frank Drake who—after all the usual false alarms and funding problems which, even in its embryonic stage back in the middle of the last century, had beset SETI—had tried to narrow the whole question down to a logical series of parameters, which could then be brought together in an equation which, if calculated accurately, would neatly reveal a figure N which would represent a good estimate for the number of intelligent and communicating species currently in our galaxy. If the figure was found to be high, then space would be aswarm with the signals of sentient species anxious to talk to each other. If the figure was found to be 1, then we were, to all intents and purposes, alone in the universe. Drake’s equation involved the number of stars in our galaxy, and chances of those stars having habitable planets, and then those planets actually bearing life, and of that life evolving into intelligence, and of that intelligence wanting to communicate with other intelligences, and of that communication happening in an era in human history when we humans were capable of listening—which amounted to a microscopic now.

And they had listened, at least those who believed, those who wanted that number N at the end of the Drake Equation to be up in the tens or hundreds or thousands. They skived spare radiotelescopy and mainframe processing time and nagged their college principals and senators and fellow dreamers for SETI funding. Some, like a project at Arecibo, had even beamed out messages, although the message was going out in any case, the whole babble of radio communications had been spreading out into space from Earth at the speed of light since Marconi’s first transmission . . . We are here. Earth is alive. And they listened. They listened for a reply. Back then, when he had met Terr, Tom had still believed in the Drake Equation with a near-religious vehemence, even if many others were beginning to doubt it and funding was getting harder to maintain. As he walked with her beneath the clock tower through the foggy lights of Birmingham’s other campus, his PC at his college digs in Erdington was chewing through the data he’d downloaded from a SETI website while his landlord’s cat slept on it. Tom was sure that, what with the processing technology that was becoming available, and then the wide-array radio satellites, it was only a matter of time and persistence before that first wonderful spike of First Contact came through. And it had stood him in good stead, now he came to think of it, had the Drake Equation, as he walked with Terr on that misty English autumn afternoon. One of the most convoluted chat-up lines in history. But, at least that once, it had worked.

They took the train back to the city and emerged onto New Street as the lights and the traffic fogged the evening and at some point on their return back past the big shops and the law courts to the campus Terr had leaned against him and he had put his arm around her. First contact, and the tension between them grew sweet and electric and a wonderful ache had swelled in his throat and belly until they stopped and kissed in the dank quietude of one of the old subways while the traffic swept overhead like a distant sea. Terr. The taste of her mouth, and at last he got to touch that space between her jaw and throat that he had been longing to touch all afternoon. Terr, who was dark and alive in his arms and womanly and English and alien. Terr, who closed her stormy eyes as he kissed her and then opened them again and looked at him with a thrilling candor. After that, everything was different.

• • • •

Terr had a zest for life, an enthusiasm for everything. And she had an old car, a nondescript Japanese thing with leaky sills, a corrupted GPS, and a badly botched hydrogen conversion. Tom often fiddled under the bonnet to get the thing started before they set out on one of their ambitious weekend trips across the cool and misty country of love and life called England he suddenly found himself in. South to the biscuit-colored villages of the Cotswolds, north to the grey hills of the Peak District, and then further, further up the map as autumn—he could no longer think of it as fall—rattled her leaves and curled up her smoky clouds and faded and winter set in, juddering for hours along the old public lanes of the motorways as the sleek new transports swept past outside them with their occupants tele-conferencing or asleep. But Tom liked the sense of effort, the sense of getting there, the rumble of the tires and the off-center pull of the steering, swapping over with Terr every hour or two, and the way the hills rose and fell, but always got bigger as they headed north. And finally stepping out, and seeing the snow and the sunlight on the high flanks, and feeling the clean bite of the wind. They climbed fells where the tracks had long vanished and the sheep looked surprised at these humans who had invaded their territory. Hot and panting, they stopped in the lee of cols, and looked down at all the tiny details of the vast world they had made. By then, Terr had changed options from SF to the early Romantics, poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, and she would chant from the Prelude in her lovely voice as they clambered up Scarfell and the snow and the lakes gleamed around them and Tom struggled, breathless, to keep up, until they finally rested, sweating and freezing, and Terr sat down and smiled at him and pulled off her top layers of fleece and Gore-Tex and began to unlace her boots. It was ridiculous, the feel of her snow and her body intermingled, and the chant of her breath in his ear, urging him on as the wind and her fingers and the shadows of the clouds swept over his naked back. Dangerous, too, in the mid of winter—you’d probably die from exposure here if you lapsed into a post-coital sleep. But it was worth it. Everything. He’d never felt more alive.

Terr huddled against him in a col. Her skin was taut, freezing, as the sweat evaporated from between them. Another hour, and the sun would start to set. Already, it was sinking down through the clouds over Helvellyn with a beauty that Tom reckoned even old Wordsworth would have been hard put to describe. His fingers played over the hardness of Terr’s right nipple, another lovely peak Wordsworth might have struggled to get over in words. It was totally, absolutely, cold, but, to his pleasant surprise, Tom found that he, too, was getting hard. He pressed his mouth against Terr’s shoulder, ran his tongue around that lovely hollow beneath her ear. She was shivering already, but he felt her give a shiver within the shiver, and traced his fingers down her belly, and thought of the stars which would soon be coming, and perhaps of finding one of those abandoned farmhouses where they could spend the night, and of Terr’s sweet moisture, and of licking her there. She tensed and shivered again, which he took as encouragement, even though he was sure, as the coat slid a few inches from his shoulder, that he felt a snowflake settle on his bare back. Then, almost abruptly, she drew away.

“Look over there, Tom. Can you see them—those specks, those colors?”

Tom looked, and sure enough, across in the last blazing patch of sunlight, a few people were turning like birds. They could have been using microlites, but on a day like this, the sound of their engines would have cut through the frozen air. But Tom had a dim recollection of reading of a new craze, still regarded as incredibly dangerous, both physically and mentally, whereby you took a gene-twist in a vial, and grew wings, just like in a fairy tale, or an SF story.

• • • •

Tom had dreamed, experienced, all the possibilities. He’d loved those creatures in Fantasia, half-human, half-faun, those beautiful winged horses. And not much later, he’d willed the green-eyed monsters and robots whom the cartoon superheroes battled with to put their evil plans into practice at least once. Then there were the old episodes of Star Trek—the older, the better—and all those other series where the crews of warp-driven starships calmly conversed around long florescent-lit tables with computer-generated aliens and men in rubber masks. By the age of eight, he’d seen galaxy-wide empires rise and fall, and tunneled though ice planets, he’d battled with the vast and still-sentient relics of ancient conflicts . . . And he found the pictures he could make in his head from the dusty books he discovered for sale in an old apple box when they were closing down the local library were better than anything billion dollar Hollywood could generate. And it seemed to him that the real technology which he had started to study at school and to read up on in his spare time was always just a breakthrough or two away from achieving one or other of the technological feats which would get the future, the real future for which he felt an almost physical craving, up and spinning. The starships would soon be ready to launch, even if NASA was running out of funding. The photon sails were spreading, although most of the satellites spinning around the earth seemed to be broadcasting virtual shopping and porn. The wormholes through time and dimension were just a quantum leap away. And the marvelous worlds, teeming with emerald clouds and sentient crimson oceans, the vast diamond cities and the slow beasts of the gas clouds with their gaping mouths spanning fractions of a lightyear, were out there waiting to be found. So, bright kid that he was, walking the salt harbors of Baltimore with his mother and gazing at the strange star-creatures in their luminous tanks at the National Aquarium long before he met Terr, he’d gone to sleep at nights with the radio on, but tuned between the station to the billowing hiss of those radio waves, spreading out. We are here. Earth is alive. Tom was listening, and waiting for a reply.

Doing well enough at exams and aptitudes at school to get to the next level without really bothering, he toyed with the cool physics of cosmology and the logic of the stars, and followed the tangled paths of life through chemistry and biology, and listened to the radio waves, and tinkered with things mechanical and electrical and gained a competence at computing and engineering, and took his degree in Applied Physics at New Colombia, where he had an on-off thing with a psychology undergrad, during which he’d finally got around to losing his virginity before—as she herself put it the morning after; as if, despite all the endearments and promises, she was really just doing him a favor—it lost him.

Postgrad time, and the cosmology weirdoes went one way, and the maths bods another, and the computer nerds went thataway, and physics freaks like Tom got jobs in the nano-technology companies which were then creating such a buzz on the World Stock Exchange. But Tom found the same problem at the interviews he went to that he still often found with girls, at least when he was sober—which was that people thought him vague and disinterested. But it was true in any case. His heart really wasn’t in it—whatever it was. So he did what most shiftless young academics with a good degree do when they can’t think of anything else. He took a postgrad course in another country, which, pin-in-a-map-time, really, happened to be at Aston in Birmingham, England. And there he got involved for the first time in the local SETI project, which of course was shoestring and voluntary, but had hooked on to some spare radio time that a fellow sympathizer had made available down the wire from Jodrell Bank. Of course, he’d known all about SETI for ages; his memory of the Drake Equation went so far back into his childhood past that, like Snow White or the songs of the Beatles, he couldn’t recall when he had first stumbled across it. But to be involved at last, to be one of the ones who was listening. And then persuading his tutor that he could twist around his work on phase-shift data filtering to incorporate SETI work into his dissertation. He was with fellow dreamers at last. It all fitted. What Tom Kelly could do on this particular planet orbiting this common-or-garden sun, and what was actually possible. Even though people had already been listening for a message from the stars for more than fifty years and the politicians and the bureaucrats and the funding bodies—even Tom’s ever-patient tutor—were shaking their heads and frowning, he was sure it was just a matter of time. One final push to get there.

• • • •

There was a shop in Kendal, at the edge of the Lake District. It was on a corner where the cobbled road sloped back and down, and it had, not so many years before, specialized in selling rock-climbing and fell-walking gear, along with the mint cake for which the town was justly famous and which tasted, as Terr had memorably said to Tom when she’d first got him to try it, like frozen toothpaste. You still just about see the old name of the shop—Peak and Fell, with a picture of a couple of hikers—beneath the garish orange paintwork of the new name which had replaced it. EXTREME LAKES.

There were people going in and out, and stylish couples outside posing beneath the bubble hoods of their pristine lime green, balloon-tired off-roaders. Even on this day of freezing rain, there was no doubt that the new bodily-enhanced sports for which this shop was now catering were good for business. Stood to reason, really. Nobody simply looked up at one of those rounded snowy peaks and consulted an old edition of Wainwright and then put one booted foot in front of another and walked up them any longer. Nobody except Tom and Terr, scattering those surprised black-legged sheep across the frozen landscape, finding abandoned farmhouses, making sweet freezing love which was ice cream and agony on the crackling ice of those frozen cols. Until that moment, Tom had been entirely grateful for it.

The people themselves had an odd look about them. Tom, who had rarely done more than take the autotram to and from the campus and his digs in England until he met Terr, and since had noticed little other than her, was seeing things here he’d only read about; and barely that, seeing as he had little time for newspapers. Facial enhancements, not just the subtle kind which made you look handsomer or prettier, but things which turned your eyebrows into blue ridges, or widened your lips into pillowy creations which would have surprised Salvador Dali, let alone Mick Jagger. Breasts on the women like airbags, or nothing but roseate nipple, which of course they displayed teasingly beneath outfits which changed transparency according to the pheromones the smart fabrics detected. One creature, Tom was almost sure, had a threesome, a double-cleavage, although it was hard to tell just by glancing, and he really didn’t want to give her the full-blooded stare she so obviously craved. But most of them were so thin. That was the thing that struck him the most strongly. They were thin as birds, and had stumpy, quill-like appendages sticking from their backs. They were angels or devils, these people, creatures of myth whose wings God had clipped after they had committed some terrible theological crime, although the wings themselves could be purchased once you went inside the shop. Nike and Reebok and Shark and Microsoft and Honda at quite incredible prices. Stacked in steel racks like ski poles.

The assistant swooped on them from behind her glass counter. She had green hair, which even to Tom seemed reasonable enough, nothing more than a playful use of hair dye, but close-up it didn’t actually appear to be hair at all, but some sort of sleek curtain which reminded him of cellophane. It crackled when she touched it, which she did often, as if she couldn’t quite believe it was there, the way men do when they have just grown a moustache or beard. She and Terr were soon gabbling about brands and tensile strength and power-to-weight ratios and cold-down and thrillbiting and brute thermals and cloud virgins—which Tom guessed was them. But Terr was soaking it all up in the way that she soaked up anything that was new and fresh and exciting. He watched her in the mirror behind the counter, and caught the amazing flash of those storm green eyes. She looked so beautiful when she was like this: intent and surprised. And he longed to touch that meeting of her throat and jaw just beneath her ear, which was still damp from the rain and desperately needed kissing, although this was hardly the appropriate time. And those eyes. He loved the way Terr gazed right back at him when she was about to come; that look itself was enough to send him tumbling, falling into those gorgeous green nebulae, down into the spreading dark core of her pupils which were like forming stars.

“Of course, it’ll take several weeks, just to make the basic bodily adjustments . . .”

Was the assistant talking to him? Tom didn’t know or care. He edged slightly closer to the counter to hide the awkward bulge of his erection, and studied the Kendal Mint Cake, which they still had for sale. The brown and the chocolate-coated, and the standard white blocks, which did indeed taste like frozen toothpaste, but much, much sweeter. A man with jade skin and dreadfully thin arms excused-me past Tom to select a big bar, and then another. Tom found it encouraging, to think that Kendal Mint Cake was still thriving in this new age. There were medals and awards on the old-fashioned wrapping, which commemorated expeditions and treks from back in the times when people surmounted physical challenges with their unaided bodies because, as Mallory had said before he disappeared into the mists of the last ridge of Everest, they were there. But it stood to reason that you needed a lot of carbohydrate if your body was to fuel the changes which were necessary which would allow you to, as the adverts claimed, fly like a bird. Or at least flap around like a kite. Pretty much, anyway.

This was the new world of extreme sports, where, if you wanted to do something that your body wasn’t up to, you simply had your body changed. Buzzing between channels a while back in search of a site which offered Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, which to Tom, when he was feeling a bit down, was the equivalent of a warm malt whisky, he’d stumbled across a basketball match, and had paused the search engine, imagining for a moment he’d stumbled across a new version of Fantasia, then wondering at the extraordinary sight of these ten and twelve foot giants swaying between each other on their spindly legs, clumsy and graceful as new-born fawns. But this, after all, was the future. It was the world he was in. And Terr was right when she urged him to accept it, and with it this whole idea of flying, and then offered to help with the money, which Tom declined, ridiculously excessive though the cost of it was. He lived cheaply enough most of the time, and the bank was always happy to add more to his student loan so that he could spend the rest of his life repaying it. And he and Terr were not going the whole way, in any case. They were on the nursery slopes, they were ugly chicks still trembling in their nest, they were Dumbo teetering atop that huge ladder in the circus tent. They were cloud virgins. So the heart and circulatory enhancements, and the bone-thinning and the flesh-wasting and the new growth crystals which sent spiderwebs of carbon fiber teasing their way up through your bone marrow, the Kevlar skin that the rapids surfers used, all the stuff which came stacked with health warnings and disclaimers that would have made the Surgeon General’s warning on a packet of full-strength Camels look like a nursery tale: all of that they passed on. They simply went for the basic Honda starter kits of vials and Classic (“Classic” meant boring and ordinary; even Tom had seen enough adverts to know that) wings. That would do—at least for a beginning, Terr said ominously, between humming to herself and swinging the elegant little bag which contained the first installment of their vials as they headed out from the shop into the driving winter rain.

It was January already, and the weather remained consistently foul for weeks in its own unsettled English way, which was cold and damp, and billows and squalls, and chortling gutters and rainswept parks, and old leaves and dog mess on the slippery Birmingham pavements. The Nissan broke down again, too, but in a way which was beyond Tom’s skill to repair. The part he needed might as well have been borne from China on a none-too-fast sea-clipper, the time it took to come. Days and weekends, they were grounded, and sort of living together in Tom’s digs, or the pounding smoky Rastafarian fug of Terr’s shared house in Handsworth. But Tom liked the Rastas; they took old-fashioned chemicals, they worshipped an old-fashioned God, and talked in their blurred and rambling way of a mythic Africa which would never exist beyond the haze of their dreams. Tom did a little ganja himself, and he did a fair amount of wine, and he lay in bed with Terr back in his digs in Erdington one night when the first men landed on Mars, and they watched the big screen on the wall from the rucked and damp sheets while the landlord’s cat slept on the purring computer.

“Hey, look . . .” Terr squirmed closer to him. “Roll over. I want to see. I was sure I could feel something just then . . .”

“I should hope so.”

Terr chuckled, and Tom rolled over. He stared at the face in the wood grain of the old mahogany headboard. She drew back the sheets from him. The cold air. The rain at the window. The murmuring of the astronauts as they undocked and began the last slow glide. Her fingers on his bare shoulders, then on his spine. It hurt there. It felt as if her nails were digging.

“Hey!!!”

“No no no no no . . .” She pressed him there, her fingers tracing the source of the pain. A definite lump was rising. An outgrowth which, in another age, would have sent you haring to the doctor thinking, cancer . . .

“I’m jealous, Tom. I thought I was going to be the first. It’s like when I was a kid, and I concentrated hard on growing breasts.”

“And it happened?”

“Obviously . . . Cheeky sod . . . A bit, anyway . . .” Slim and warm and womanly, she pressed a little closer. He felt her breath, her lips, down on his back where the quills were growing. She kissed him there. “I check in the mirror every morning. I try to feel there . . .” he felt her murmur. “It’s like a magic spell, isn’t it? Waiting for the vials to work. You haven’t noticed anything on me yet, have you, Tom?”

“No.” He turned his head and looked at Terr. She was lying on her front too, and the red light of rising Mars on the screen was shining on the perfect skin of her thighs, her buttocks, her spine, her shoulders.

“You must have been waiting for this to happen for a long time,” she said.

“What?”

Her blonde hair swayed as she tipped her head towards the screen. “Men landing on Mars.”

He nodded.

“Will it take much longer before they actually touch down?”

“I suppose a few minutes.”

“Well, that’s good news . . .” Terr’s hand traveled down his spine. Her knuckles brushed his buttocks, raising the goosebumps. Her fingers explored him there. “Isn’t it . . . ?”

So they missed the actual instant when the lander kicked up the rusty dust of the surface, but were sharing a celebratory bottle of Asti Spumante an hour or so later when, after an interminable string of adverts, the first ever human being stepped onto the surface of another planet and claimed all its ores and energies and secrets for the benefit of the mission’s various sponsors. Another figure climbed out. Amid the many logos on this one’s suit there was a Honda one, which sent Tom’s mind skittering back towards the growing lump on his back which he could feel like a bad spot no matter how he laid the pillows now that Terr had mentioned it. How would he sleep from now on? How would they make love? Terr on top, fluttering her Honda wings like a predator as she bowed down to eat him? It was almost a nice idea, but not quite. And the Mars astronauts, even in their suits, didn’t look quite right to Tom either. The suits themselves were okay—they were grey-white, and even had the sort of longer-at-top faceplates he associated with 2001 and Hal and Dave Poole and Kubrick’s incredible journey towards the alien monolith—but they were the wrong shape in the body; too long and thin. It was more like those bad old films; you half expected something horrible and inhuman to slither out of them once they got back into the lander, where it turned out to have crossed light years driven by nothing more than a simple desire to eat people’s brains . . .

Tom poured out the rest of the Asti into his glass.

“Hey!” Terr gave him a playful push. He slopped some of it. “What about me? You’ve had almost all of that . . .”

He ambled off into the cupboard which passed for his kitchen to get another bottle of something, and stroked the landlord’s cat and gave the keyboard of his PC a tweak on the way. It was processing a search in the region of Cygnus, and not on the usual waterhole wavelength. Somebody’s hunch. Not that the PC had found anything; even in those days, he had the bells and whistles rigged for that event. But what was the problem with him, he wondered, as he raked back the door of the fridge and studied its sparse contents? He was watching the first Mars landing, in bed with a naked, beautiful, and sexually adventurous woman, while his PC diligently searched the stars for the crucial first sign of intelligent life. If this wasn’t his dream of the future, what on earth was? And even this flying gimmick which Terr was insisting they try together—that fitted in as well, didn’t it? In many ways, the technology that was causing his back to grow spines was a whole lot more impressive than the brute force and money and Newtonian physics which had driven that Martian lander from one planet to another across local space.

The problem with this manned Mars landing, as Tom had recently overheard someone remark in the university refectory, was that it had come at least four decades too late. Probably more, really. NASA could have gone pretty much straight from Apollo to a Mars project, back at the end of the delirious 1960s. Even then, the problems had been more of money than of science. Compared to politics, compared to getting the right spin and grip on the public’s attention and then seeing the whole thing through Congress before something else took the headlines or the next recession or election came bounding along, the science and the engineering had been almost easy. But a first landing by 1995 at the latest, that had once seemed reasonable—just a few years after establishing the first permanent moon base. And there really had been Mariner and Viking back in those days of hope and big-budget NASA: technically successful robot probes which had nevertheless demystified Mars and finished off H. G. Wells’ Martians and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ princesses and Lowell’s canals in the popular mind, and which, despite Sagan’s brave talk about Martian giraffes wandering by when the camera wasn’t looking, had scuppered any realistic sense that there might be large and complex Martian lifeforms waiting to be fought against, interviewed, studied, dissected, argued over by theologians, or fallen in love with. Still, there were hints that life might exist on Mars at a microscopic level; those tantalizingly contradictory results from the early Viking landers, and the micro-bacteria supposedly found on Martian meteorites back on Earth. But, as the probes had got more advanced and the organic tests more accurate, even those possibilities had faded. Tom, he’d watched Mars become a dead planet both in the real world, and in the books he loved reading. The bulge-foreheaded Martians faded to primitive cave-dwellers, then to shy kangaroo-like creatures of the arid plains, until finally they became bugs dwelling around vents deep in the hostile Martian soil, then anaerobic algae, until they died out entirely.

Mars was a dead planet.

Tom unscrewed the bottle of slivovitz which was the only thing he could find, and went back to bed with Terr, and they watched the figures moving about on the Martian landscape between messages from their sponsors. They were half Martians already. Not that they could breathe the emaciated atmosphere, or survive without their suits on, but nevertheless they had been radically transformed before the launch. Up in space, in null gravity, their bones and their flesh and their nutritional requirements had been thinned down to reduce the payload, then boosted up just a little as they approached Mars a year and a half later so they could cope with the planet’s lesser pull. They were near-sexless creatures with the narrow heads and bulging eyes of a thyroid condition, fingers as long and bony as ET’s. The way they looked, far worse than any flyers, Tom figured that you really didn’t need to search further than these telecasts to find aliens on Mars. Or Belsen victims.

The slivovitz and the whole thing got to him. He had a dim recollection of turning off the screen at some point, and of making love to Terr, and touching the hollow of her back and feeling a tiny sharp edge there sliding beneath her skin; although he wasn’t quite sure about that, or whether he’d said anything to her afterwards about growing bigger breasts, which had been a joke in any case. In the morning, when she had gone, he also discovered that he had broken up the Honda vials and flushed them down the communal toilet. Bits of the spun glass stuff were still floating there. He nearly forgot his slivovitz headache as he pissed them down. This was one thing he’d done when he was drunk he was sure he’d never regret.

• • • •

The winter faded. Terr went flying. Tom didn’t. The spines on her back really weren’t so bad; the wings themselves were still inorganic in those days, carbon fiber and smart fabric, almost like the old microlites, except you bonded them to the quills with organic superglue just before you took the leap, and unbonded them again and stacked them on the roofrack of your car at the end of the day. Terr’s were sensitive enough when Tom touched them, licked them, risked brushing their sharp edges against his penis to briefly add a new and surprising spice to their love-making, although if he grew too rough, too energetic, both he and they were prone to bleed.

Terr was unbothered about his decision to stop taking the vials in any case. After all, it was his life. And why do something you don’t want to do just to please me? she’d said with her characteristic logic. But Terr was moving with a different set now, with the flyers, and their relationship, as spring began and the clean thermals started to rise on the flanks of Skiddaw and Helvellyn and Ben Nevis, began to have that ease and forgetfulness which Tom, little versed though he was in the ways of love, still recognized as signaling the beginning of the end. Terr had always been one for changing enthusiasms in any case. At university, she was now talking of studying creative writing, or perhaps dropping the literature thing entirely and swapping over to cultural studies, whatever the hell that was. It would be another one of Terr’s enthusiasms, just, as Tom was coming to realize, had been Tom Kelly.

He still saw plenty of Terr for a while, although it was more often in groups. He enjoyed the jazz with her at Ronnie Scott’s and sat around fluorescent tables in the smart bars along Broad Street with people whose faces often reminded him of those rubber-masked creatures you used to get in Star Trek. The world was changing—just like Terr, it didn’t feel like it was quite his any longer, even though he could reach out and touch it, taste it, smell it. He drove up with her once or twice to the Lakes, and watched her make that first incredible leap from above the pines on Skiddaw and across the wind-rippled grey expanse of Bassenthwaite Lake. He felt nothing but joy and pride at that moment, and almost wished that he, too, could take to the air, but soon, Terr was just another colored dot, swooping and circling in the lemony spring sunlight on her Honda-logoed wings, and no longer a cloud virgin. He could block her out with the finger of one hand.

So they drifted apart, Tom and Terr, and part of Tom accepted this fact—it seemed like a natural and organic process; you meet, you exchange signals of mutual interest, you fall in love and fuck each other brainless for a while and live in each other’s skin and hair, then you get to know your partner’s friends and foibles and settle into a warmer and easier affection as you explore new hobbies and positions and fetishes until the whole thing becomes just a little stale—and part of Tom screamed and hollered against the loss, and felt as if he was drowning as the sounds, the desperate, pleading signals he wanted to make, never quite seemed to reach the surface. He had, after all, always been shy and diffident with women. Especially the pretty ones. Especially, now, Terr.

At the end of the summer term, Tom got his postgrad diploma based around his SETI work and Terr didn’t get anything. Just as she’d done with Tom, she’d worn Aston University out as she explored its highways and byways and possibilities with that determination that was so uniquely Terr. Next year, if any would take her and she could gather up the money, she’d have to try another enthusiasm at another university. They hadn’t been lovers for months, which seemed to Tom like years, and had lost regular contact at the time, by pure chance, he last saw her. Tom needed to get on with his life, and had already booked a flight to spend some time at home with his parents in the States while he decided what getting on with life might actually involve for him.

It was after the official last day of term, and the wine bars around the top of the city were busy with departing students and the restaurants contained the oddly somber family groups who had come up to bear a sibling and their possessions back home. The exams had been and gone, the fuss over the assessments and dissertations and oral hearings had faded. There was both a sense of excitement and anti-climax, and beneath that an edge of sorrow and bone-aching tiredness which came from too many—or not enough—nights spent revising, screwing, drinking . . . Many, many people had already left, and hallways in the North Wing rang hollow and the offices were mostly empty as Tom called in to pick up his provisional certificate, seeing as he wouldn’t be here for the award ceremonies in the autumn, and he didn’t attend such pompous occasions in any case.

There was no obvious reason for Terr to be around. Her friends by now were mostly flyers, non-students, and she hadn’t sat anything remotely resembling an exam. The season wasn’t a Terr season in Tom’s mind, either. A late afternoon, warm and humid as a dishrag, uncomfortable and un-English, when the t-shirt clung to his back and a bluish smog which even the switch from petrol to hydrogen hadn’t been able to dissolve hung over the city. Put this many people together, he supposed, holding his brown envelope by the tips of this fingers so that he didn’t get sweat onto it, this much brick and industry, and you’d always get city air. Even now. In this future world. He caught a whiff of curry-house cooking, and of beer-infused carpets from the open doorways of the stifling Yate’s Wine Lodge, and of hot pavements, and of warm tar and of dog mess and rank canals, and thought of the packing he’d left half-finished in his room, and of the midnight flight he was taking back to the States, and of the last SETI download his PC would by now have probably finished processing, and decided he would probably miss this place.

Characteristically, Terr was walking one way up New Street and Tom was heading the other. Characteristically, Terr was with a group of gaudy fashion victims; frail waifs and wasp-waisted freaks. Many of them looked Japanese, although Tom knew not to read too much into that, when a racial look was as easy to change as last season’s shoes if you had the inclination and the money. In fact, Terr rather stood out, in that she really hadn’t done anything that freakish to herself, although the clothes she wore—and sensibly enough, really, in this weather—were bare-backed and scanty, to display the quills of those wings. And her hair was red; not the red of a natural redhead, or even the red of someone who had dyed it that color in the old-fashioned way. But crimson; for a moment, she almost looked to Tom as if her head was bleeding. But he recognized her instantly. And Terr, Tom being Tom and thus unchanged, probably even down to his t-shirt, instantly recognized him.

She peeled off from the arm-in-arm group she was swaying along with, and he stopped and faced her as they stood in the shadow of the law courts while the pigeons cluttered up around them and the bypass traffic swept by beyond the tall buildings like the roar of the sea. He’d given a moment such as this much thought and preparation. He could have been sitting an exam. A thousand different scenarios, but none of them now quite seemed to fit. Terr had always been hard to keep up with, the things she talked about, the way she dressed. And those storm-green eyes, which were the one thing about her which he hoped she would never change, they were a shock to him now as well.

They always had been.

“I thought you weren’t going to notice, Tom. You looked in such a hurry . . .”

“Just this . . .” He waved the limp brown envelope as if it was the reason for everything. “And I’ve got a plane to catch.”

She nodded, gazing at him. Tom gazed back—those green nebulae—and instantly he was falling. “I’d heard that you were leaving.”

“What about you, Terr?”

She shrugged. The people behind her were chattering in a language Tom didn’t recognize. His eyes traveled quickly over them, wondering which of them was now screwing Terr, and which were male—as if that would matter, Terr being Terr . . .

“Well, actually, its a bit of a secret, and quite illegal probably, but we’re going to try to get onto the roof of one of the big halls of residence and—”

“—fly?”

She grinned. Her irises were wide. Those dark stars. She was high on something. Perhaps it was life. “Obviously. Can you imagine what the drift will be like, up there, with all these cliff-face buildings, on an afternoon like this?”

“Drift?”

“The thermals.”

He smiled. “Sounds great.”

One of those pauses, a slow roaring beat of city silence, as one human being gazes at another and wonders what to say to them next. How to make contact—or how to regain it. That was always the secret, the thing for which Tom was searching. And he had a vision, ridiculous in these circumstances, of clear winter daylight on a high fell. He and Terr . . .

“That dress you used to wear,” he heard himself saying, “the blue one—”

“—Have you had any luck yet, Tom?” It was a relief, really, that she cut across his rambling. “With that SETI work you were doing? All that stuff about . . .” She paused. Her hands touched her hair, which didn’t seem like hair at all, not curtains of blood, but of cellophane. It whispered and rustled in her fingers, and then parted, and he glimpsed in the crimson shade beneath that the space at the join of her jaw and neck, just beneath her ear, before she lowered her hand and it was gone again. He wondered if he would ever see it again; that place which—of all the glories in the universe, the dark lightyears and the sentient oceans and the ice planets and the great beasts of the stellar void—was the one he now most longed to visit. Then she remembered the phrase for which she’d been searching, which was one Tom had explained, when they’d walked that first day by the canals in fall, in English autumn. “. . . the Drake Equation.”

“I’m still looking.”

“That’s good.” She nodded and smiled at him in a different way, as if taking in the full implications of this particular that’s-good-ness, and what it might mean one great day to all of mankind. “You’re not going to give up on it, are you?”

“No.”

“You’re going to keep looking?”

“Of course I will. It’s my life.”

As he said it, he wondered if it was. But the creatures, the flyers, behind Tom and Terr, were twitching and twittering, getting restless. And one or two of the things they were saying Tom now recognized as having the cadence of English. There was just so much jargon thrown in there.

“And you’ll let me know, won’t you? You’ll let me know as soon as you get that first message.” Terr’s tongue moistened her lower lip. “And I don’t mean ages later, Tom. I want you to call me the moment it happens, wherever you are, up in whatever observatory. Will you do that for me? I want to be the first to hear . . .”

Tom hesitated, then nodded. Hesitated not because of the promise itself, which seemed sweet and wonderful, but because of the way that she’d somehow made this chance meeting, this short conversation, into an almost final parting. Or entirely final. It all now really depended on the outcome of the Drake Equation. Life out there, or endless barren emptiness. Terr, or no Terr.

“And I’ll let you know, too, Tom,” she said, and gave him a kiss that was half on his cheek, half on the side of his mouth, “I’ll let you know if I hear anything as well . . .” But it was too quick for him to really pay attention to this strange thing she was saying. He was just left with a fading impression of her lips, her scent, the coolly different feel of her hair.

“You’d better be going,” he said.

“Yes! While we’ve still got the air. Or before the Provost finds us. And you’ve got that plane to catch . . .”

Terr gave him a last smile, and touched the side of his face with her knuckles almost where she’d kissed it, and traced the line of his jaw with fingernails which were now crimson. Then she turned and rejoined the people she was with. Tom thought she looked thinner as he watched the departing sway of her hips, and the way a satyr-like oaf put his arm around her in what might or might not have been a normally friendly manner. And narrower around the shoulders, too. Almost a waif. Not quite the fully rounded Terr he’d loved through the autumn and winter, although her breasts seemed to be bigger. Another few months, and he’d probably barely recognize her, which was a comfort of sorts. Things changed. You moved on. Like it or not, the tide of the future was always rushing over you.

Determined not to look back, Tom headed briskly on down New Street. Then, when he did stop and swallow the thick choking in his throat, which was like gritty phlegm and acid, and turn around for a last anguished glimpse of Terr, she and her friends had already gone from sight beyond the law courts. I’ll let you know if I hear anything, Tom . . . What a strange, ridiculous idea! But at least the incident had helped him refine his own feelings, and put aside that hopeful longing which he realized had been dogging him like a cloud in a cartoon. As he strode down New Street to catch the autotram back to Erdington and finish his packing, Tom had a clear, almost Biblical certainty about his life, and the direction in which it would lead him. It was—how could he ever have doubted it?—the Drake Equation.

• • • •

“So how does it work out?” Terr said to him now, up on his mountain. “That Drake fellow must have been around more than a century ago. So much has changed—even in the time since we were . . . Since England, since Birmingham. We’ve progressed as a race, haven’t we, us humans? The world hasn’t quite disintegrated. The sun hasn’t gone out. So surely you must have a better idea by now, surely you must know?”

“Nobody knows for sure, Terr. I wouldn’t be here if I did. The Drake Equation is still just a series of guesses.”

“But we’re here on Earth, aren’t we, Tom? Us humans and apes and bugs and cockroaches and dolphins. We must have somehow got started.”

He nodded. Even now. Terr was so right. “Exactly.”

“And we’re still listening, and we want to hear . . .” She chuckled. “Or at least you’re still listening, Tom. So all you have to hope for is another Tom Kelly out in space, up there amid all those stars. It’s that simple, isn’t it?”

“Can you imagine that?”

Terr thought for a moment. She thought for a long time. The wine bottle was empty. The candle was guttering. “Does he have to have the same color skin, this alien Tom Kelly? Does he have to have four purple eyes and wings like a flyer?”

“That’s up to you, Terr.”

Then she stood up, and the waft of her passage towards him blew out the candle and brightened the stars and brought her scent, which was sweet and dusty and as utterly unchanged as the taste of her mouth as she leaned down out of the swarming night and kissed him.

“I think you’ll do as you are,” she said, and traced her finger around his chin, just as she’d used to do, and down his nose and across his lips, as if he was clay, earth, and she was sculpting him. “One Tom Kelly . . .”

• • • •

In the years after he left Aston and split with Terr, Tom had found that he was able to put aside his inherent shyness, and go out in the big bad world of academic science, and smile and press the flesh with administrators and business suits and dinosaur heads-of-department, and develop a specialization of sorts which combined data analysis with radio astronomy. He knew he was able enough—somehow, his ability was the only thing about himself that he rarely doubted—and he found to his surprise that he was able to move from commercial development contracts to theoretical work to pure research without many of the problems of job security and unemployment which seemed to plague his colleagues. Or perhaps he just didn’t care. He was prepared to go anywhere, do anything. He lived entirely in his head, as a brief woman friend had said to him. Which was probably true, for Tom knew that he was never that sociable. Like the essential insecurity of research work, he simply didn’t let it worry him. It helped, often, that there was a ready supply of drinks at many of the conferences and seminars he attended—not, perhaps, in the actual lecture halls and conference suites, but afterwards, in the bars and rooms where the serious science of self-promotion went on. It helped, too, that at the back of it all, behind all the blind alleys and government cuts and flurries of spending, he had one goal.

It had surprised Tom that that first Martian landing should have had such a depressing effect on SETI research, when any sensible interpretation of the Drake Equation had always allowed for the fact that Earth was the only planet likely to harbor life in this particular solar system. Even he was disappointed, though, when the Girouard probe finally put the kibosh on any idea of life existing in what had once seemed like the potentially warm and habitable waters of Jupiter’s satellite Europa. Still, the Principal of Mediocrity, which is that this sun, this solar system, this planet, and even the creatures which dwell upon it, are all common-or-garden variety phenomena, and thus likely to be repeated in similar form all over the galaxy, remained entirely undamaged by such discoveries, at least in Tom’s mind. But in the mind of the general public (in that the general public has a mind to care about such things) and in the minds of the politicians and administrators who controlled scientific funding (ditto), it was a turning point, and began to confirm the idea that there really wasn’t much out there in space apart from an endless vacuum punctuated by a few aggregations of rocks, searing temperatures, hostile chemicals.

Funnily enough, this recession of the tides in SETI funding worked in Tom’s favor. Like a collector of a type of object d’art which was suddenly no longer fashionable, he was able to mop up the data, airtime, and hardware of several abandoned projects at bargain prices, sometimes using his own money, sometimes by tapping the enthusiasm of the few remaining SETI freaks, sometimes by esoteric tricks of funding. Now that the big satellite telescopes could view and analyze stars and their orbital perturbation with a previously unheard of accuracy, a few other solar systems had come out of the woodwork, but they were astonishingly rare, and mostly seemed to consist either of swarms of asteroids and dust clouds or huge near-stellar aggregations of matter which would fuse and crush anything resembling organic life. So fp in the Drake Equation—the fraction of stars to likely have a planetary system—went down to something like 0.0001, and ne—the number of those planets which could bear life—fell to the even lower 0.0000-somethings, unless you happened to think that life was capable of developing using a different chemical basis to carbon, as Tom, reared as he was on a diet of incredible starbeasts, of course did. fl—the probability that life would then develop on a suitable planet—also took a downturn, thanks to lifeless Mars and dead Europa, and then as every other potential niche in solar system that some hopeful scientist had posited was probed and explored and spectrum analyzed out of existence. The stock of SETI was as low as it had ever been, and Tom really didn’t care. In fact, he relished it.

He wrote a paper entitled “New Light On The Drake Equation,” and submitted it to Nature, and then, as the last SETI journal had recently folded, to the Radio Astronomy Bulletin and, without any more success, and with several gratuitously sneering remarks from referees, to all the other obvious and then the less obvious journals. In the paper, he analyzed each element of the equation in turn, and explained why what had become accepted as the average interpretation of it was in fact deeply pessimistic. Taking what he viewed as the true middle course of balance and reason, and pausing only to take a few telling swipes at the ridiculous idea that computer simulations could provide serious data on the likelihood of life spontaneously developing, and thus on fl, he concluded that the final N figure in the Drake Equation was, by any balanced interpretation, still in the region of 1,000-10,000, and that it was thus really only a matter of time before contact was made. That was, as long as people were still listening . . .

He didn’t add it to the versions of the paper he submitted, but he also planned to ask whoever finally published the thing to place a dedication when it was printed: For Terr. That, at least, was the simplest variant of a text he spent many wall-staring hours expanding, cutting, revising. But the paper never did get published, although a much shortened work, stripped of its maths by Tom and then of a lot of its sense by the copy editor, finally did come out in a popular science comic, beside an article about a man who was growing a skein of his own nerve tissue to a length of several hundred feet so that he could bungee-jump with it from the Victoria Falls. Still, the response was good, even if many of the people who contacted Tom were of a kind he felt reluctant to give out his email, let alone his home, address to.

The years passed. Through a slow process of hard work, networking, and less-than-self-aggrandizement, Tom became Mr. SETI. There always was, he tended to find, at least one member of the astronomy or the physics or even the biology faculty of most institutes of learning who harbored a soft spot for his topic. Just as Sally Normanton had done when he returned to Aston on that autumn when the air had smelled cleaner and different and yet was in so many ways the same, they found ways of getting him small amounts of funding. Slowly, Tom was able to bow out of his other commitments, although he couldn’t help noticing how few attempts were made to dissuade him. Perhaps he’d lost his youthful zest, perhaps it was the smell on his breath of whatever he’d drunk the night before, and which now seemed to carry over to the morning. He was getting surprisingly near to retirement age, in any case. And the thought, the ridiculous idea that he’d suddenly been on the planet for this long, scared him, and he needed something which would carry him though the years ahead. What scared him even more, though, like a lottery addict who’s terrified that their number will come up on exactly the week that they stop buying the tickets, was what would happen to SETI if he stopped listening. Sometimes, looking up at the night sky as the computers at whatever faculty he was now at pounded their way through the small hours with his latest batch of star data, gazing at those taunting pinpricks with all their mystery and promise, he felt as if he was bearing the whole universe up by the effort of his mind, and that the stars themselves would go out, just as they did in that famous Clarke story, the moment he turned his back on them. It was about then that he generally thought about having another drink, just to see him through the night, just to keep up his spirits. It was no big deal. A drink was a drink. Everyone he knew did it.

So Tom finally got sufficient funds and bluff together to set up his own specialized SETI project, and then settled on France for reasons he couldn’t now quite remember, except that it was a place he hadn’t been to where they still spoke a language which wasn’t English, and then chose the karst area of the Massif Central because it gave the sort of wide flat planes which fitted with the technology of his tripwire receivers, and was high up and well away from the radio babble of the cities. The choice was semi-symbolic—as well as the tripwires, he planned to borrow and buy-in as much useful data as he could from all possible sources, and process it there with whatever equipment he could borrow or cannibalize. Then he saw the waterhole, a tiny blue dot on the map of this otherwise desolate mountain-plateau above a small place called St. Hilaire, and that settled it. He hadn’t even known that the place was a flying resort, until he’d signed all the necessary legal papers and hitched his life to it. And even that, in its way—those rainbow butterflies and beetles, those prismatic famine victims clustering around their smart bars and expensive shops, queuing with their wings whispering to take the cable lifts to the high peaks in the sunstruck south each morning—seemed appropriate. It made him think of Terr, and how her life had been, and it reminded him—as if he’d ever forgotten—of his, of their promise.

But it had never happened. There’d never been a reason to let her know.

• • • •

Tom wrestled with the memories, the feelings, as Terr touched him, and closed her hands around his with fingers which seemed to have lost all their flesh. She was tunneling down the years to him, kissing him from the wide sweep of some incredible distance. He tried closing his eyes, and felt the jagged rim of teeth and bone beneath her lips. He tried opening them, and he saw her flesh streaked and lined against the stars, as if the Terr of old was wearing a mask made of paper. And her eyes had gone out. All the storms had faded. She touched him, briefly, intimately, but he knew that it was useless.

She stood back from him and sighed, scarecrow figure in her scarecrow dress, long hair in cobwebs around her thin and witchy face.

“I’m sorry, Tom—”

“—No, it isn’t—”

“—I was making presumptions.”

But Tom knew who and what was to blame. Too many years of searching, too many years of drink. He sat outside his hut, frozen in his chair with his tripwires glimmering, and watched as Terr wandered off. He heard the clink of bottles as she inspected his dumpster. He heard the shuffle of rubbish as she picked her way around indoors. He should have felt ashamed, but he didn’t. He was past that, just as he was past, he realized, any approximation of the act of love.

When Terr came out again into the starlight, she was carrying a bottle. It was the absinthe.

“Is this what you want?” she said, and unstoppered it. She poured a slug of the stuff out into her own empty wineglass, and raised it to her thin lips, and sipped. Even under this starlight, her face grew wrinkled, ugly. “God, it’s so bitter . . .”

“Perhaps that’s why I like it.”

“You know, you could get rid of this habit, Tom. It’s like you said to me—if there’s something about yourself you don’t like, all you need do is take a vial.”

Tom shrugged, wondering whether she was going to pour some absinthe out into his glass or just stand there, waving the bottle at him. Was he being deliberately taunted? But Terr was right, of course. You took a vial, and you were clean. The addiction was gone. Everything about you was renewed, apart from the fact that you were who you were, and still driven by the same needs and contradictions which had given you the craving in the first place. So you went back to the odd drink, because you knew you were clean now, you were safe. And the odd drink became a regular habit again, and you were back where you started again, only poorer and older, and filled with an even deeper self-contempt. And worse headaches. Yes, Tom had been there.

“It’s like you say, Terr. We are as we are. A few clever chemicals won’t change that.”

“You’re going to be telling me next that you’re an addictive personality.”

“I wouldn’t be here otherwise, would I, doing this?”

She nodded and sat down again. She tipped some absinthe into his glass, and Tom stared at it, and at the faintly glowing message cards, which he still hadn’t read, which lay beside it on the table, allowing a slight pause to elapse before he drank the absinthe, just to show her that he could wait. Then the taste of anise and wormwood, which was the name of the star, as he recalled, which had fallen from the heavens and seared the rivers and fountains in the Book of Revelation. It had all just been a matter of belief, back then.

“You still haven’t told me how things have been for you, Terr.”

“They’ve been okay. On and off . . .” Terr considered, her head in shade and edged with starlight. Tom told himself that the skull he could now see had always been there, down beneath Terr’s skin that he had once so loved to touch and taste. Nothing was really that different. “With a few regrets.”

“Did you really get into flying? That was how I always pictured you, up in the skies. Like the kids you see now down in this valley.”

“Yes! I was a flyer, Tom. Not quite the way they are now—I’m sure they’d think the stuff we used then was uselessly heavy and clumsy. But it was great while it lasted. I made a lot of friends.”

“Did you ever go back to your studies?”

She gave that dry chuckle again; the rustle of wind though old telephone wires. “I don’t think I ever had studies, Tom. No, I got a job. Worked in public relations. Built up this company I was involved in very well for a while, sold other people’s projects and ideas, covered up other people’s mistakes—”

“—We could have used you for SETI.”

“I thought of that, Tom—or of you, at least. But you had your own life. I didn’t want to seem patronizing. And then I got sick of being slick and enthusiastic about other people’s stuff, and I got involved in this project of my own. Basically, it was a gallery, a sort of art gallery, except the exhibits were people. I was . . .”

“You were one of them?”

“Of course I was, Tom! What do you expect? But it plays havoc with your immune system after a while. You hurt and ache and bleed. It’s something for the very fit, the very young, or the very dedicated. And then I tried being normal and got married and unmarried, and then married again.”

“Not to the same person?”

“Oh, no. Although they made friends, funnily enough, did my two exes. Last time I heard from one of them, they were both still keeping in touch. Probably still are. Then I got interested in religion. Religions, being me . . .”

“Any kids?”

“Now never quite seemed the time. I wish there had been a now, though, but on the other hand, perhaps I was always too selfish.”

“You were never selfish, Terr.”

“Too unfocussed, then.”

“You weren’t that, either.” Tom took another slug of absinthe, and topped up the glass. He could feel the bitter ease of it seeping into him. It was pleasant to sit talking like this. Sad, but pleasant. He realized he hadn’t just missed Terr. These last few years up on his mountain, he’d missed most kinds of human company. “But I know what you mean. Even when I used to dream about us staying together, I could never quite manage the idea of kids . . .”

“How can two people be so different, and so right for each other?”

“Is that what you really think?”

“I loved you more than I loved anyone, Tom. All the time since, I often got this feeling you were watching, listening. Like that afternoon when I jumped with my wings from that tower in Aston and then got arrested. And the body art. You were like a missing guest at the weddings. I was either going for or against you in whatever I did—and sort of wondering how you’d react. And then I went to the Moon, and your ghost seemed to follow me there, too. Have you ever been off-planet?”

He shook his head. He hadn’t—or at least not in the obvious physical sense, although he’d traveled with Kubrick over the Moon’s craters a thousand times to the thrilling music of Ligeti.

“Thought not. It was the most expensive thing I ever did.”

“What’s it like?”

“That’s just about it with the Moon, Tom—it’s expensive. The place you stay in is like one of those cheap old Japanese hotels. Your room’s a pod you can’t even sit up in. Who’d ever have thought space could be so claustrophobic!”

“All these things you’ve done, Terr. They sound so fascinating.”

“Do, don’t they—saying them like I’m saying them now? But it was always like someone else’s life that I seemed to be stuck in. Like wearing the wrong clothes. I was always looking for my own. And then you get older—God, you know what it’s like! And there are so many choices nowadays. So many different ways of stretching things out, extending the years, but the more you stretch them, the thinner they get. I always knew that I never wanted to live to some great age. These one-and-a-half centenarians you see, they seem to be there just to prove a point. Tortoises in an endless race. Or animals in a grotty zoo. Minds in twisted, rusty cages . . .”

“I’d never really thought—”

“—You’ll just go on until the bang, won’t you, Tom? Until the booze finally wrecks some crucial organ or busts a capillary in your head. Or until the Venusians land over there on those funny wires in a flying saucer and take you away with them. Although you’d probably say no because they aren’t quite the aliens you expected.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing, Tom. It’s just the way you are. And you’ve been lucky, really, to have managed to keep your dream intact, despite all the evidence. I read that article you did, years ago in that funny little paper with all the flashing adverts for body-changing. ‘New Light on the Drake Equation.’ I had to smile. You still sounded so positive. But don’t you think we’d have heard from them by now, if they really were out there? Think of all the millions of stars, all these millions of years, and all those galactic civilisations you used to read about. It wouldn’t be a whisper, would it, Tom, something you needed all this fiddly technology to pick up on? It would be all around us, and unavoidable. If the aliens wanted us to hear from them, it would be an almighty roar . . .”

The stars were just starting to fade now at the edge of the east; winking out one by one in the way that Tom had always feared. Taurus, Orion . . . The first hint of light as this part of the planet edged its face towards the sun was always grey up here on the karst, oddly wan and depressing. It was the color, he often felt as the night diluted and the optimism that the booze inspired drained out of him in torrents of piss and the occasional worrying hawk of bloody vomit, that his whole world would become—if he lost SETI. And the argument which Terr had so cannily absorbed, was, he knew, the most damning of all the arguments against his dream. The odd thing was, it lay outside the Drake Equation entirely, which was probably why that dumb article of his had avoided mentioning it. What Terr was saying was a version of a question that the founding father of the nuclear chain reaction, Enrico Fermi, had once asked in the course of a debate about the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligence nearly a century and half—and how time flew!—ago. The question was simply this: “Where are they?”

There were these things called von Neumann machines; perhaps Terr knew that as well. They’d once been a theory, and stalwarts of the old tales of the future Tom had loved reading, but now they were out working in the asteroid belt and on Jupiter’s lesser moons, and down in deep mines on earth and the sea trenches and on Terr’s moon and any other place where mankind wanted something but didn’t want to risk its own skin by getting it. They were robots, really, but they were able to manufacture new versions of themselves—reproduce, if you wanted to make the obvious biological comparison—using the available local materials. They were smart, too. They could travel and adapt to new environments. They could do pretty much anything you wanted of them. So surely, went the argument, which sometimes crept along with the depression and the morning hangover into Tom’s head, any other intelligent lifeform would have come up with a similar invention? Even with the staggering distance involved in travel between the stars, all you had to do was launch some into space, wait a few million years—a mere twitch of God’s eye, by any cosmological timescale—and the things would be colonizing this entire galaxy. So where were they?

The answer was as simple as Fermi’s question: They aren’t here. And mankind was a freak; he and his planet were a fascinating outrage against all the laws of probability. The rest of the universe was either empty, or any other dim glimmerings of life were so distant and faint as to be unreachable in all the time remaining until the whole shebang collapsed again. Better luck next time, perhaps. Or the time after that. By one calculation of the Drake Equation Tom had read, life of some kind was likely to appear somewhere in the entire universe once in every 10¹⁰ big bangs, and even that was assuming the physical laws remained unchanged. The guy hadn’t bothered to put the extra spin on the figure which would involve two communicating intelligences arising at the same time and in the same corner of the same galaxy. Probably hadn’t wanted to wreck his computer.

Half the sky was greying out now. Star by star by star. At least he’d soon get a proper look at Terr, and she’d get a proper look at him, although he wasn’t sure that that was what either of them wanted. Perhaps there was something to be said for the grey mists of uncertainty, after all.

“I always said—didn’t I, Tom?—that I’d bring you a message.”

“And this is it? You saying I should give up on the one thing that means something to me?”

“Don’t look at it like that, Tom. Think of it as . . .” A faint breeze had sprung up, the start of the wind that would soon lift the flyers as the temperature gradients hit the valley. Tom thought for a moment that they must still have a candle burning on the table between them, the way Terr seemed to flicker and sway beyond it. She was like smoke. Her hair, her face. He poured himself some more absinthe, which he decided against drinking. “The thing is, Tom, that you’ve got yourself into this state where you imagine that whether or not you listen in itself proves something. It doesn’t, Tom. They’re out there—they’re not out there. Either way, it’s a fact already, isn’t it? It’s just one we don’t happen to know the answer to . . . And wouldn’t it be a pity, if we knew the answer to everything? Where would your dreams be then?”

“Science is all about finding out the truth—”

“—And this life of yours, Tom! I mean, why on earth do you have to go down to the village to pick up those messages? Can’t you communicate with people from up here? It looks like you’ve got enough equipment in that hut to speak to the entire world if you wanted to. But I suppose that doesn’t interest you.”

“I find personal messages . . .” He gazed at the hills in the east as a questing spear of light rose over them, then down at the cards she’d brought up to him. “I find them distracting.”

“I’m sorry, Tom. I don’t want to distract you.”

“I didn’t mean . . .” There he went again. Terr in tears, just the way she’d been, in a memory he’d suppressed for so long, in his bed in Erdington on that night of the Mars landing when the booze first started to get the better of him. But this was different. Terr was different. She was twisting, writhing. And the wind, the dawn, was rising.

“And I always felt responsible for you in a way, Tom. It was probably just a sort of vanity, but I felt as if I’d given you some final push along a path down which you might not otherwise have taken. You were charming, Tom. You were handsome and intelligent. You could have made a fortune and had a happy life doing anything other than SETI. Is that true, Tom? Does that make any sense to you?”

He didn’t reply, which he knew in itself was a positive answer. The truth was always out there in any case, with or without him. What was the point in denying anything?

“And that promise I made you make, that last day when we were standing outside the law courts with all those stupid flyer friends of mine. It seemed clever, somehow. I knew how much you still loved me and I wanted to leave my mark on you, just to prove it. I’m sorry, Tom. It was another one of my stupid, stupid projects . . .”

“You can’t hold yourself responsible for someone else’s life, Terr.”

“I know, Tom. It didn’t even feel like I was responsible for my own.”

Tom looked away from Terr, and back at his ragged hut. But for the fine-spun silver of his field of tripwires, but for the faint glow of his computers, but for the bottle-filled dumpster and the old Citroën beside it, it could have been the dwelling of a medieval hermit. He sighed and looked down the slope of his mountain. In this gathering light, the whole world looked frail as a spiderweb. And down there—he could just see it—lay his waterhole, and the flickering movement of the shy mountain ibex who gathered dawn and dusk to drink there.

“The sun’s coming up, Tom. I’ll have to be going soon . . .”

“But you haven’t . . .” The words froze in his mouth as he looked back at Terr. Even as the light strengthened, the substance was draining from her. “. . . can’t you stay . . . ?”

“I’m sorry, Tom. I’ve said all there is to be said . . .”

She stood up and moved, floated, towards him. Changed and not changed. Terr and not Terr. What few stars remained in the west were now shining right through her. But Tom felt no fear as she approached him. All he felt, welling up in his heart, was that childhood ache, that dark sweetness which was cola and ice cream and his mother’s embrace. All he felt was a glorious, exquisite sense of wonder.

The rim of the sun gilded the edge of those ranged peaks. Terr broke and shimmered. She was like her eyes now: a beautiful swarming nebula. But the sun was brightening, the wind was still rising. She was fading, fading. Tom stretched out a hand to touch whatever it was she had become, and found only morning coolness, the air on his flesh.

Remember, Tom.

Terr had no voice now, no substance. She was just a feeling, little more than the sad and happy memory he had carried with him through all these years into this dim and distant age. But he felt also that she was moving, turning away from him, and he smiled as he watched her in that dark blue dress, as beautiful as she had always been, walking away down the silvered turf of his mountain towards the waterhole. Terr with her blonde hair. Terr with her beautiful eyes. Terr with the mist on her flesh in that place where her jaw met her throat beneath her earlobe. She turned and gave him a smile and a wave as the sun sent a clear spine of light up from the cleft between two mountains. Terr in her dark blue dress, heading down towards that waterhole where all the shy creatures of the universe might gather at the beginning or end of the longest of days. Then she was gone.

• • • •

Tom sat there for a long while. It was, after all, his time of day for doing nothing. And the sun rose up, brightening the world, corkscrewing the spirals beside the limestone crags. He thought he caught the flash of wings, but the light, his whole world and mountain, was smeared and rainbowed. He thought that he had probably been crying.

The cards on the table before him had lost most of their glow. And they were cold and slickly damp when he turned them over. He selected the one card he didn’t recognize, the one which was blue and almost plain, with a pattern on its surface like rippled water. He was sure now that it was more than just spam, junk mail. He ran his finger across the message strip to activate it, and closed his eyes, and saw a man standing before him in a fountained garden which was warm and afternoon-bright and almost Moorish; it could have been Morocco, Los Angeles, Spain. The man was good-looking, but no longer young. He had allowed the wrinkles to spread over his face, his hair to grey and recede. There was something, Tom found himself thinking, about himself about his face, or at least the self he thought he remembered once seeing in a mirror. But the man was standing with the fixedness of someone preparing for a difficult moment. His face was beyond ordinary sadness. His eyes were grave.

Tom waited patiently through the you-don’t-know-me-and-I-don’t-know-you part of the message, and the birds sang and the bees fumbled for pollen amid deep red and purple tropic flowers as the man gave Tom his name, and explained the one thing about their backgrounds which they had in common, which was that they had both loved Terr. They’d loved Terr, and then of course they’d lost her, because Terr was impossible to keep—it was in her nature; it was why they’d made the glorious leap of loving her in the first place. But this man was aware of Tom Kelly in a way that Tom wasn’t aware of him. Not that Terr had ever said much about her past because she lived so much in the present, but he’d known that Tom was there, and in a way he’d envied him, because love for Terr was a first and only thing, glorious in its moment, then impossible to ever quite recapture in the same way. So he and Terr had eventually parted, and their marriage—which was her second, in any case—had ended as, although he’d hoped against hope, he’d always known it would. And Terr had gone on with her life, and he’d got on with his, and he’d followed her sometimes through the ether, her new friends, her new discoveries and fresh obsessions, until he heard this recent news, which was terrible, and yet for him, not quite unexpected, Terr being Terr.

There was a ridge on a peak in the Andes known as Catayatauri. It sounded like a newly discovered star to Tom, and was almost as distant and as hostile. The ridge leading up to it was incredible; in the east, it dropped nearly ten thousand sheer feet, and it took a week of hard walking and another week of hard climbing to reach it, that was, if the winds and the treacherous séracs let you get there at all. But it had acquired a near-mythic reputation amongst a certain kind of flyer, a reputation which went back to the time of the Incas, when human sacrifices were thrown from that ridge to placate Viracocha, the old man of the sky.

So picture Terr making that climb alone in the brutal cold, no longer as young or as fit as she might once have been, but still as determined. She left messages in the village which lay in Catayatauri’s permanent shadow. If she didn’t come back, she didn’t want anyone risking their lives trying to find her. The Incas had felt Catayatauri with a deep, religious intensity, and so had the climbers who came after, and so must Terr, alone up in those godly mountains. She climbed unaided; no wings, no muscle or lung enhancements, no crampon claws on her feet or hands, no ropes, and no oxygen. The fact that she made it there at all was incredible, clinging to that ridge at the roof of the world. From Catayatauri, from that drop, nothing else was comparable. And Terr had stood there alone, a nearly-old woman at the edge of everything. She’d bought vials at a shop in Lima. She’d emptied what little she had left in her accounts to get hold of them. These weren’t like the vials they sold along the Rue de Commerce in St. Hilaire. Scarcely legal, they were the quickest acting, the most radical, the most expensive. They tore through your blood and veins by the nanosecond, they burned you up and twisted your body inside out like a storm-wrecked umbrella. And Terr had purchased three times the usual dosage.

And she probably did get there, and make the leap from the ridge on Catayatauri. It seemed like the most likely explanation, even though her body hadn’t been found. Terr had thrown herself from the precipice with the vials singing in her body, her bones twisting, the wings breaking out from her like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, although they would have been too damp and frail to do more than be torn to shreds in the brutal torrents of air. And then, finally, finally, she would have been buffeted onto the rocks. Terr, it seemed, had chosen the most extreme of all possible ways of dying . . .

Was it like her, to do this, Tom wondered? Terr plummeting, twisting, and writhing? Had she meant to kill herself, or just wanted to take the risk, and lived the moment, and not really cared about the next? The man in the Moorish garden was as lost and puzzled by all these questions as Tom was himself. But the thing about Terr, as they both realized, was that she had always changed moment by moment, hour by hour, year by year. The thing about Terr was that you could never really know her. Tom, he had always been steady and purposeful; long ago, he had laid down the tracks of his life. Terr was different. Terr was always different. She’d never been troubled, as Tom had been most of his life, by that sense of missed appointments, unfinished business, time slipping by; of a vital message which he had never quite heard. Terr had always leapt without looking back.

The man gave a smile and signed off. The Moorish garden, the dense scent of the flowers, faded. Tom Kelly was back in the morning as the shadows raced the clouds over his mountain; and he was wondering, like a character in a fairy story, just where he had been the previous night, and exactly what it was that he had witnessed. And if he could have been granted one wish—which was something that Terr, whatever she had been, hadn’t even offered to him—it would still be the thing for which he had always been hoping. He was nearly seventy, after all. He was Tom Kelly; Mr. SETI. No matter what happened to you, no matter what wonders you witnessed, people his age didn’t change. He was still sure of that, at least.

• • • •

Tom Kelly, speeding down his mountain. The sun is blazing and the chairlifts are still and the flyers are resting as shadow lies down next to shadow for the long, slumberous afternoon. He parks in the near-empty Place de la Révolution, and climbs out from his Citroën, and waves to Jean-Benoît wiping his tables, and then bangs on the door of the bureau de poste. The sign says fermé, but Madame Brissac slides back the bolts. She seems almost pleased to see him. She nearly gives him a smile. Then they spend their hour together, seated beside the counter as bluebottles buzz and circle by her pigeonholes in the warm, intensely odorous air. Tom’s got as far as transitive verbs, and here he’s struggling. But after all, French is a foreign language, and you don’t learn such things in a day—at least, not the way Tom’s learning. It will be some months, he reckons late autumn at least—l’automne, and perhaps even winter, whatever that’s called—before he’s got enough of a grip to ask her about how she sorts the mail in those pigeonholes. And he suspects she’ll think it’s a stupid question in any case. Madame Brissac is, after all, Madame Brissac. But who’d have thought that she was once a teacher, back in the days when people still actually needed to be taught things? For every person, it seems to Tom, who gains something in this future age, there’s someone else who makes a loss from it.

Things are just starting to reawaken when he emerges into the blazing Place de la Révolution, and he has to move his Citroën and park it round the corner to make room for the evening’s festivities. It’s the Foire aux Sorcières tonight, which a few months ago would have meant nothing to him, and still means little enough. But the French like a good festival, he knows that much now at least. They have them here in St. Hilaire regularly—in fact, almost every week, seeing as there’s such a regular throughput of new flyers needing to have their francs taken from them. But this festival is special. Tom knows that, too.

Drinking sweet, hot coffee at his usual table, he passes the necessary hour while the market stalls and the stage for the evening pageant assemble themselves to the attentions of robot crabs and the clang of poles and the shouts of a few largely unnecessary artisans. The town, meanwhile, stretches itself and scratches its belly and emerges from its long meals and lovers’ slumbers. The girl with that Audrey Hepburn look, whom he now knows is called Jeannette, gives him a smile and goes over to say hi, bonjour. She thinks it’s sweet, that a mad old mountain goat like Tom should take the long way around to learning her language. And so does Michel, her boyfriend, who is as urbane and charming as anyone can be who’s got the muscles of a cartoon god and the green scaly skin of a reptile. They even help Tom carry his few boxes of stuff from the boot of his Citroën to the stall he’s booked, and wish him luck, and promise to come back and buy something later on in the evening, although Tom suspects they’ll be having too much fun by then to remember him.

But it turns out that business at his stall is surprisingly brisk in any case. It’s been this way for a couple of weeks now, and if it continues, Tom reckons he’ll have to order some new SETI t-shirts and tea towels to replace his lost stock, although the tea towels in particular will be hard to replace after all these years, seeing as people don’t seem to have any proper use for them any longer. They ask him what they’re for, these big SETI handkerchiefs, and then tie them around their necks like flags. Who’d have thought it—that tea towels would be a casualty of this future he finds himself in? But bargaining, setting a price for something and then dropping it to make the sale; that’s no problem for Tom. The numbers of another language come almost easily to him; he supposes his brain dimly remembers it once had an aptitude for maths.

The Foire aux Sorcières seems an odd festival for summer, but, even before the darkness has settled, the children are out, dressed as witches, ghosts, goblins, and waving lanterns which cast, through some technical trick Tom can’t even guess at, a night-murk across their faces. Still, the whole occasion, with those sweet and ghastly faces, the trailing sheets with cut eye-holes, the shrieking, cackling devices, has a pleasantly old-fashioned feel about it to Tom. Even the flyers, when they emerge, have done nothing more to change themselves than put on weird costumes and make-ups, although, to Tom’s mind at least, many of them had looked the part already. The scene, as the sun finally sinks behind the tenements and a semblance of cool settles over the hot and frenzied square, is incredible. Some of the people wandering the stalls have even dressed themselves up as old-fashioned aliens. He spots a bulge-headed Martian, then a cluster of those slim things with slanted eyes that were always abducting people in the Midwest, and even someone dressed as that slippery grey thing that used to explode out of people’s stomachs in the films, although the guy’s taken the head off and is mopping his face with one of Tom’s SETI tea towels because he’s so hot inside it. If you half-closed your eyes, Tom thinks, it really could be market day on the planet Zarg, or anywhere else of a million places in this universe which he suspects that humanity will eventually get around to colonizing, when it stops having so much fun here on earth. Look at Columbus, look at Cook, look at Einstein, look at NASA. Look at Terr. We are, in the depths of our hearts, a questing, dreaming race.

Small demons, imps, and several ghosts cluster around him now, and ask him qu’est-ce que SETI? which Tom attempts to explain in French. They nod and listen and gaze up at him with grave faces. He’s almost thinking he’s starting to get somewhere, when they all dissolve into gales of laughter and scatter off though the crowds. He watches them go, smiling, those ghosts, those flapping sheets. When he refocuses his gaze, Madame Brissac has materialized before him. She is dressed as an old-fashioned witch. But she seems awkward beneath her stick-on warts and green make-up, shorn of the usual wooden counter which, even now that they’re attempting to talk to each other in the same language, still separates Tom and her. Still, she politely asks the price of his SETI paperweights, and rummages in her witchy bag and purchases one from him, and then comments on the warmth and the beauty of this evening, and how pretty and amusing the children are. And Tom agrees with her in French, and offers Madame Brissac a SETI tea towel at no extra cost, which she declines. Wishing him a good evening, she turns and walks away. But Tom still feels proud of himself, and he knows that’s she’s proud of him, too. It’s an achievement for them both, that they can talk to each other now in the same language, although, being Madame Brissac, she’ll never quite let it show.

The music rides over him. The crowds whoop and sing. The lanterns sway. Down the slope towards the river, the lace-draped stalls look almost cool in the soft breeze, which plays down from the hills and over the tenements as Tom sweats in his SETI t-shirt. Jean-Benoît’s down there, dressed in red as fallen Lucifer and surrounded by lesser demons, and looking most strange and splendid for his evening off. There’s no sign, though, of the woman in the dark blue dress whom Tom glimpsed standing in the sunlight all those weeks ago. He knows that Terr’s dead now, although the thought still comes as a cold, blunt shock to him. So how could there ever be any sign of Terr?

Tom’s got his days better sorted now. He’s never again gotten so drunk as to lose one whole day and imagine Thursday is Wednesday. In fact, nowadays, Tom never has a drink at all. It would be nice to say that he’s managed it through pure willpower. But he’s old, and a creature of habit, even when the habits are the wrong ones. And this is the future, after all. So Tom’s taken a vial, just as he had done several times before, and the need, the desire, the welling emptiness, faded so completely that he found himself wondering for the first few days what all the trouble and fuss had been about. But that was two months ago, and he still rarely entertains the previous stupid thoughts about how a social drink, a sip and a glass here and there, would be quite safe for someone like him. Even on a night such as this, when the air smells of wine and sweat and Pernod and coffee and Gitanes, and he can hear bottles popping and glasses clinking and liquid choruses of laughter all around the square, he doesn’t feel the usual emptiness. Or barely. Or at least he’s stopped kidding himself that it’s something the alcohol will ever fill, and decided to get on with the rest of his life unaided.

He sometimes wonders, during the long hot afternoons of his lessons with Madame Brissac, whether a woman in a blue dress and grey or blonde hair really did enter the bureau de poste to inquire about an elderly American called Tom Kelly on that magical Thursday. Sometimes, he’s almost on the brink of interrupting her as she forces him through the endless twists and turns of French grammar, although he knows she’d probably regard it as an unnecessary distraction. He’s thought of asking Jean-Benoît, too—at least, when he’s not dressed up as Lucifer—if he remembers a woman who could have been old or might have been young coming to his café, and who undertook to pass on the message cards he’d forgotten to take with him. Would they remember Terr? Would they deny that they’d ever seen her at all? More likely, Tom has decided, they’ll have long forgotten such a trivial incident amid the stream of faces and incidents which populate their lives.

Tom glances up from the bright Place de la Révolution at the few faint stars which have managed to gather over the rooftops and spires of St. Hilaire. Like Terr—or the ghost of her—he suspects they’ll remain a mystery that he’ll carry to his grave. But there’s nothing so terrible about mysteries. It was mystery, after all, which drew him to the stars in the first place. Wonder and mystery. He smiles to himself, and waves to Jeannette and Michel as they pass through the crowds. Then Jean-Benoît, amid great cheers, flaps his crimson wings and rises over the stalls and hovers floodlit above the church spire to announce the real beginning of the night’s festivities, which will involve fireworks, amazing pageants, dancing . . .

This Foire aux Sorcières will probably still be going on at sunrise, but Tom Kelly knows it will be too much for him. He’s getting too old for this world he finds himself in. He can barely keep pace. But he permits himself another smile as he starts to pack up his stall of SETI memorabilia, the t-shirts and paperweights, the lapel pins embossed with a tiny representation of the Drake Equation, which not a single person who’s bought one of the things has ever asked him to explain. He’s looking forward to the midnight drive back up his mountain in his old Citroën, and the way the stars will blossom when he finally turns off the headlights and steps into the cool darkness outside his hut, with the glitter of his tripwires, the hum and glow of his machines. Who knows what messages might be up there?

He’s Tom Kelly, after all.

And this might be the night.

He’s still listening, waiting.

© 2001 by Ian R. MacLeod.

Originally published in Sci Fiction.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ian R. MacLeod is the acclaimed writer of challenging and innovative speculative and fantastic fiction. His most recent novel, Wake Up and Dream, won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, while his previous works have won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the World Fantasy Award, and have been translated into many languages. His short story, “Snodgrass,” was developed for television in the United Kingdom as part of the Sky Arts series Playhouse Presents. MacLeod grew up in the West Midlands region of England, studied law, and spent time working and dreaming in the civil service before moving on to teaching and house-husbandry. He lives with his wife in the riverside town of Bewdley. This novella also appears in the author’s collection, Snodgrass and Other Illusions, which is available from Open Road Media. Learn more at openroadmedia.com/ian-macleod.

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

NOVEL EXCERPTS

Orbit Books Presents
Symbiont
(novel excerpt)

Mira Grant

CHAPTER 1
SEPTEMBER 2027

Dr. Cale’s lab might have been concealed in an abandoned bowling alley, but she’d clearly never seen that as a reason for her equipment to be anything less than state-of-the-art. The MRI scanner was kept in a private room, and was as elaborate and complex as anything they had at SymboGen. I tried to focus on how surprising it was to see a piece of machinery that complicated in a place like this as I shed my clothing on the floor and allowed Nathan to help me into the scanning bed. I’d been through this process before. It made it easy for me to lie still and close my eyes, pretending that none of the last few weeks had happened; that everything was still normal, that I was still me, and not the thing that I was desperately afraid I was becoming. Or worse, the thing I was even more afraid I had been all along.

The MRI came to life around me, the hammers and clangs of the vast machine blending with the insistent pounding of the drums in my ears until there was nothing else: just sound, vibrating through my flesh, anchoring itself beneath my sternum. My flesh, my sternum. Ownership was so easy to claim, but did I have any right to it?

Please, please, it’s something else, I thought, lying to myself one last time while the option was still open to me. Please, it’s not what I think it is. Please, there’s another answer . . .

The MRI gave one final pulse as it shut off. The sudden silence was deafening, only slightly lessened by the hum of the automated scanning bed sliding back out into the room, where the chill air raised goose bumps on my arms and legs. I grabbed a lab coat off the side of the machine, pulling it on as I climbed back to my feet. It didn’t do much to cut the chill, but I didn’t want to spend the time to pick up my clothes.

Nathan was seated at the monitor, the display reflecting off his glasses as he pulled up the first images of my insides. I stopped behind him, putting my hand on his shoulder. He put one of his hands over mine, using the other to continue working the mouse.

My abdomen should have been occupied by a lot of things: organs, scarring, and the pasty white mass of the SymboGen implant, which would naturally gravitate toward the base of my digestive system. It wasn’t there. The blood tests had been telling the truth: there was no residual tapeworm protein in my blood because there was no tapeworm in my digestive system. Nathan clicked to the next image. It wasn’t in my lungs, either. The image after that proved that my spinal cord was clean.

His fingers tightened on mine. I think that if I had told him to stop then, he would have, and we would both have walked away with the question unanswered. I didn’t tell him to stop. I needed to know. He did too, if only so that we would both be standing in the same place for once.

Nathan clicked the mouse. Everything changed.

The image showed the inside of a human skull, normal save for some small remodeling of the bone toward the back. The brain was there, lit up in bright colors that represented activity during the MRI. The tapeworm was there too, showing up as loops of nonreactive white against the bright neural map. It was deeply integrated, slithering in and out of brain tissue. But I’d known that before I’d seen the image, hadn’t I? I’d figured it out when I met Adam and Tansy, when I was faced with the reality of their existence. When I’d started to care about them, despite their monstrous origins.

Even knowing what they were hadn’t been strictly necessary, had it? Sherman was a tapeworm too, and I had always liked him best, out of all the people at SymboGen. From the moment I’d met him, I’d liked him. If I’d had even the slightest clue that he was a product of Dr. Cale’s lab, that would have given me the information I needed. When I met a tapeworm, when I met somebody like me, I liked them. I couldn’t help myself. Even if I’d wind up disliking them later, I started from a place of “you are family.”

So yes, I’d figured it out, and then I’d locked it away, because I hadn’t wanted to admit it to myself. Admitting it would make it real. Only I guess pictures could do the same thing, because I didn’t even try to deny that the image on the screen was me.

For the first time in my life, I was looking at who—at what—I really was.

I was never Sally Mitchell after all.

“The protein markers couldn’t cross the blood-brain barrier in a detectable form,” said Nathan. His voice was soft, like he was afraid anything louder would startle me. He wasn’t wrong. “It’s why we couldn’t detect . . .” He stopped, obviously unsure how to finish the sentence.

There was no kind way to do it. “Honey, you’re not human” isn’t a conversation either of us was equipped to have. “Mom was right,” I whispered. She’d called me a stranger, and it had hurt, but it hadn’t hurt as much as it should have, had it? No, because I’d already figured out the same thing she had: that I wasn’t Sally. Her daughter died in the accident that put her in the hospital. I was a stranger living inside her baby’s skin. I was a stranger to the entire human race. “Oh, my God. Nathan. Do you see . . . ?”

“It doesn’t change anything,” he said, suddenly fierce. He let go of my hand as he stood, pushing the chair out of the way before he turned and wrapped his arms around me. He pulled me against him, holding me so tight that I was almost scared he would crush me. I put my arms around him in turn, doing my best to hug him just as hard. Voice still sharp, he said, “Do you understand me? It doesn’t change anything.”

I raised my head and looked over his shoulder. Dr. Cale had parked her wheelchair in the doorway. She was sitting there watching us, an expression of profound regret on her face. I wouldn’t have believed that she was capable of looking so sad, but in that moment, she managed it, and in that moment, she looked like her son. Coloring and race didn’t matter, not when stacked up against that expression.

So much of the way she had always interacted with me made sense now. So much of it still needed to be made sense of. “No,” I said. “It changes everything.” The broken doors that Dr. Cale had spoken of so often were open now; I could no longer pretend that they were just a children’s story, something I could safely forget about or ignore.

I looked back to Nathan, raising my eyes to his face and searching for any sign of rejection or revulsion. I didn’t want to leave him, but I didn’t want to make him stay with me if he couldn’t deal with the reality of what I was. I wasn’t sure I could deal with the reality of what I was—the calm I was feeling was probably shock, and would pass, replaced by hysteria. Better to make my choices now, when I could trust myself, than to let it wait until I was no longer thinking clearly.

How was I thinking at all? A tapeworm, no matter how cunningly engineered, didn’t have the size or complexity to think human-sized thoughts—but I managed it somehow. I had to be . . . the tapeworm part of me had to be driving Sally Mitchell’s brain, using it as storage somehow, like a person uses a computer. The thought made my stomach clench, and so I focused back on Nathan, who was safe; Nathan, who had never known Sally, but had fallen in love with Sal, with me, with the girl who had helped her injured sister into his office. He’d never batted an eye at any of my idiosyncrasies. Sally’s family had learned to love me when I replaced their daughter. Nathan had never needed to forget a person I could never be. That had always been so valuable to me. I was starting to understand a little bit more about why.

He met my eyes unflinchingly, and all I saw there was concern, and hope, and yes, love. He looked the same as he always had: black hair, brown eyes behind wire-framed glasses, golden-tan skin, and a serious expression that could spring into a smile at any moment. I didn’t see any fear or dismissal, or even dismay, in that face. I blinked.

“You knew,” I said, bewildered. “How did you know?”

“I told him.” Dr. Cale sounded tired. I pulled away from Nathan and turned to face his mother, who was pale where he was dark, from her sun-deprived skin to the watery blue of her eyes and the ashy blonde of her hair. Her shoulders sagged as she looked at me, and she said, “Back in my lab, when you were asleep on Adam’s cot. I thought he should . . . I’m sorry, Sal, but I thought my son should know that his girlfriend wasn’t entirely human. You clearly weren’t ready to have the same conversation. Perhaps it was wrong of me.”

“I think maybe it wasn’t,” I said slowly. “I wasn’t ready to know this yet. I wasn’t letting myself know this yet.” I looked down at my hands. “But I was going to figure it out.” I had already figured it out, and then locked the knowledge away from myself, as if that sort of thing had ever done any good. Once the signs had been placed in front of me, they had been too easy to follow. I would have followed them again, and maybe then, I wouldn’t have been able to make myself forget. “I needed Nathan to know before I did. I needed him to have time to come to terms with it. Because if he’d left me then . . .”

If Nathan had been having his own freak-out at the same time I was having mine, I don’t know how I would have gotten through finding out the truth about myself. Having him pull away from me then—even temporarily—would have devastated me. Here and now, in this lab, with Tansy missing and Sherman alive but suddenly my enemy, losing my humanity was a huge step toward the abyss. Nathan had been able to place himself between me and that long, final fall, and he’d only been able to do it because he’d already known what I was.

Dr. Cale nodded. “I’m glad you see it that way. That’s what I was hoping for.” She paused, watching me carefully before she continued: “I know you’re in shock right now, and I know we’ve all had a difficult day, but do you think I could have that thumb drive?” She grimaced. “I hate to ask you. I hate to even be here right now. You deserve this moment. But I need that data.”

My eyes widened. “I forgot.” I had been refusing to give her the thumb drive full of information stolen from the SymboGen computers until she gave me the answers I thought I wanted. But then I’d been distracted by the need for blood tests and MRIs and then . . . “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right.” Now the glimmer of a smile touched her lips. “You had other things on your mind.”

The words sounded faintly unreal, like she was quoting them from a book or movie, something that showed how an ethical mad scientist would behave. I pulled away from Nathan entirely, bending to rummage through my discarded clothing until I found the thumb drive in the front pocket of my jeans. I walked over and held it out to Dr. Cale, who took it without commenting on the fact that I was still wearing nothing but an unbuttoned lab coat. Between Tansy, Adam, and . . . and Sherman, she must have gotten used to people whose sense of modesty was somewhat less developed than the norm.

“Thank you, Sal,” said Dr. Cale, taking the little plastic rectangle gently from my fingers. “You have no idea how much we need this data.”

“What is it, exactly?” I asked. “Tansy said it would explain how some of the sleepwalkers were integrating more quickly with their hosts . . .”

“It’s easy to forget sometimes that Steven Banks is a genius,” said Dr. Cale, still looking at the thumb drive. There was honest regret in her voice. “He blackmailed me into working for him, but the only reason he could was because I knew I wouldn’t be doing the heavy lifting alone—he’d be there to help, and to carry it on when I couldn’t go any further. It’s easy to sit here and say, ‘I did it, it was all my fault; I am Frankenstein and this is my monster,’ but D. symbogenesis is Steven’s baby as much as it is mine. Maybe more, by this point, at least where the commercial models are concerned.”

“Meaning what, Mother?” asked Nathan.

“Meaning he continued the work after I left; he continued altering the genetics of the different strains and families of implant, looking for that perfect mixture of form and functionality. He didn’t toss up his hands and say, ‘Well, Shanti’s gone, better throw in the towel and stick with what we have.’ He innovated. He improved. And what we have here, on this little piece of hardware, is a collection of those innovations.” Dr. Cale raised her head, and I almost recoiled. I wasn’t human, but neither was the light burning in her eyes: bright and cold and unforgiving. “Now that we know what he’s done, we’ll know how to undo it. So thank you, Sal. Thank you both. You’re welcome to stay here for as long as you like. I recommend you consider making your residency permanent.” On this grim note, she placed the thumb drive carefully in her lap, turned herself around, and rolled out of the room. She didn’t look back once.

Nathan put his hand on my shoulder, stepping up beside me. The warmth of his body was reassuring. “Are you all right?” he asked.

I tried to answer him—I honestly did—but all that came out was a high, anxious squeal of laughter, like the sort of sound a rat might make if it was caught in a trap. Something wet was on my face. I raised my hand to touch my cheek, and found tears there, flowing freely from both eyes. My narrow window of calm had apparently passed.

I tried again to answer him, and this time there was no sound at all. The drums were back in my ears, and they grew louder as, with a great rushing roar like water pouring over a cliff, the dark crashed down and took me away.

One advantage to passing out repeatedly in the same place: you’re more likely to wake up somewhere familiar. I opened my eyes and found myself looking at the ceiling of Dr. Cale’s lab, lying on the same narrow cot that had served as my bed the last time I had fainted. Only one light was on, and it was behind me, casting the room into the sort of deep shadow that never happens naturally. I sat up, dimly aware that I wasn’t alone.

“Hello? Who’s there?” I frowned into the darkness in front of me. “So you know, I’m having a really bad day, so I’d appreciate it if you could move straight to threatening me, or making weird noises, or turning out to be on the other side of some massive ideological divide that’s going to shape the future of the human race.”

“I don’t think we have any massive ideological divides,” said Adam. He slipped out of the shadows to my left, frowning bemusedly. “Are we supposed to?”

“Oh,” I said. “Hi, Adam.” The drums started up in my ears again as my heart began to hammer. Adam was one of Dr. Cale’s human-tapeworm hybrids; the first, to hear her explain the situation. He was the oldest of us in the world. Everything I was experiencing was something he had experienced before me . . . and also not, because he had never spent a moment thinking he was anything but what he was. When he’d opened his eyes for the first time, it had been onto a world filled with people who knew his origins, accepted them, and didn’t try to make him into something else.

That must have been nice. I couldn’t even imagine how nice it must have been. Dr. Cale had created him intentionally, combining samples of her first-generation D. symbogenesis worm with a brain-dead boy whose parents had basically sold him to her in exchange for escaping his mounting medical bills. I didn’t know what his body’s name had been before Adam took possession. So far as I was aware, he didn’t know either. It had never really mattered. That boy was gone, and Dr. Cale had never known him. She’d raised Adam without any shadows that wore his face to follow him around and make him feel bad for existing.

“Where’s Tansy?” He took another step toward me, the light revealing more of his features. He was skinny and pale, with the sort of face that was practically designed to blend into crowds, just conventionally attractive enough not to stand out, too essentially plain to snag in the memory. He had blue eyes and sandy brown hair, and even though we didn’t look a thing alike, something deep in my core was telling me that he was my brother: more my brother than Joyce had ever been my sister. Adam was family. And family had to stick together.

That feeling had always been there, I realized, but it was getting stronger from the combination of proximity and understanding. I wasn’t in denial anymore. I could accept all the parts of what I was—and that included my brother.

Adam was also frowning, confusion and dismay becoming more pronounced with every second that passed without my giving him an answer.

“She went with you,” he said, his tone implying that I might have forgotten—like I might have been distracted, or hit my head when I fell down and hit the floor. “That’s what Mom said. She said that Tansy was going to get you out of SymboGen so that you and Nathan could both come home, and we could finally be a family the way that we were supposed to.”

The pounding of the drums didn’t lessen, but it was joined by another, less pleasant sensation: my stomach, slowly converting itself into solid ice. If Adam was my brother, Tansy was my sister. Oh, God. Did my sister die to save me?

No. Not possible. Tansy was too mean to die that way. “Tansy was . . . she was there, yes. She’s the reason I got out of SymboGen. I don’t think I could have escaped without her.” That wasn’t quite true. I knew that I wouldn’t have escaped without her. Tansy had been the motive force driving my escape from the building, and it was only her willingness to stay behind that had bought the time Nathan and I needed to get to the car. Without Tansy, I would have been a prisoner, or worse.

And Tansy wasn’t here.

Adam looked at me, frown deepening into something sharp. “That’s what Tansy does,” he said. “She doesn’t think much before she helps other people. Or hurts them, sometimes. She says it’s because of the parts in her brain that aren’t functioning optimally. I think she’s trying to get hurt badly enough that Mom will transplant her into a new host, but I don’t want that to happen. She wouldn’t be Tansy anymore if that happened. She’d be someone else.”

I blinked. “Wait—that’s a thing that Dr. Cale can do? She could just scoop you out of the body you’re in and put you into a different one?”

“Sort of,” said Adam. “She says it becomes a question of nature and nurture, because memories don’t carry over, just core personality and epigenetic data, and—wait. Are you trying to distract me? Where’s Tansy, Sal? Why didn’t she come back here with you?”

I took a deep breath, which barely warmed the ball of ice sitting in my stomach, and said, “She stayed behind, Adam. There were a bunch of sleepwalkers—more than I’ve ever seen in one place—and they were going to hurt me, and Nathan. So Tansy stayed behind to fight them. She bought us the time that we needed to get away.” She’d gone down under a wall of bodies, all of them biting and clawing at her like the fact that she was only developmentally one step removed from the sleepwalkers didn’t matter—and maybe it didn’t. I didn’t feel any kinship to them, and never had, but with every minute that passed, I was feeling more as if she and Adam were, and had always been, family.

I really should have seen it sooner. Neither he nor Tansy had ever upset me the way the sleepwalkers did, even though they should have. Especially Tansy, whose methods of communication were brusque at best, and dangerous at worst. I’d already known on some level that we were the same, and it was easier to be forgiving of family. That’s what family was for. I didn’t know how I knew that. I probably shouldn’t have, given my experiences with Sally’s family. But I knew.

“Why didn’t you stay and help her?” asked Adam blankly.

“I couldn’t. I don’t know how to fight, and the information I had . . . I had the information Dr. Cale needed. If I’d stayed to help Tansy, the information would have been lost, and then Dr. Cale wouldn’t have been able to continue her work.” The knot of ice in my stomach seemed to be loosening a little.

“Oh.” Adam mulled this over for a few moments, looking even younger while he did. Maybe that was one of the functions of the tapeworm-to-human interface. I had perceived a certain childishness about Tansy, and my parents—Sally’s parents—used to comment on the fact that I looked young and lost when I was thinking. It was one more thing I didn’t share with their original daughter, who had never been much for stopping to think about things, and certainly wouldn’t have looked lost while she was doing it.

It hurt a little to realize that I didn’t entirely think of them as my parents anymore; not the same way I had only a few weeks before. They would always be a part of who I was, but I no longer felt the need to try to make them love me, and that felt like the sort of bond that should have taken longer to break. Maybe it was different when the bond had never fully formed. They’d always be important to me, but they hadn’t made me.

“Well, I guess she’ll tell me what happened when she gets back,” said Adam finally, and walked over to sit down on the edge of the cot, looking at me with wide, guileless eyes. “Are you feeling better? You sure do faint a lot.”

“I get startled a lot,” I said, smiling despite myself. “What about you? You’ve never fainted? Not even once?”

“A few times, when I first woke up,” he said. “Mom says it’s because some of the blood vessels feeding into my brain were compromised during my surgery, and they needed time to recover.”

I wondered absently if I might be dealing with something similar. It didn’t seem likely. Any weak blood vessels would have been found and fixed by SymboGen years ago. I was just dealing with plain, old-fashioned shock, and that was actually a little reassuring: at least something about me was plain and old-fashioned.

“Oh,” I said. I took a deep breath. “Adam, can I ask you something sort of personal?”

Adam sat up a little straighter, going still. “Yes,” he said, after a moment’s hesitation. “You can ask me anything.”

“I . . .” I stopped. I didn’t know how to frame the question that came next. I didn’t even know how to start. “Did you know I wasn’t human?” seemed too accusatory, and “Have you noticed anything strange about me?” felt almost, well, coy. I finally settled for “Do you like being you?”

A wide smile spread across Adam’s face, tight-lipped, so that his teeth were concealed. I realized with a start that he’d never shown his teeth when he smiled at me. That was a mammalian gesture, and the part of him—the part of me—that drove those reactions wasn’t mammalian. “I love it,” he said. “I have hands, and feet, and fingers, and eyes, and it’s wonderful, Sal, it’s just wonderful. There’s so much world. I could live a hundred years and never see all of the world that there is to see. Mom gave it to me. You know? Mom made it so I could walk and dance and sing and run bacteriological cultures for her and it’s just wonderful. You know that, right? That life is wonderful.” His smile faded, replaced by a look of grave concern.

I cocked my head, studying him. “You knew as soon as you met me that I was like you, didn’t you?” I asked. “That’s why you’re trying so hard to convince me that life is wonderful. Because you want me to love it the way you do.”

“You already do,” he said earnestly. “You wouldn’t have come looking for the broken doors if you didn’t love life. Curiosity is what it looks like when you’re in love with the world.”

“Did Dr. Cale teach you that?” I asked.

Adam nodded. “Mom says you know someone is getting tired of living when they stop asking questions.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“I know.” He looked down at his hands. “I knew before you came here. Mom told me and Tansy all about you—Tansy so she’d know who she was supposed to be keeping track of, and me because she wanted me to know about both my—” Adam cut himself off midsentence, glancing up almost guiltily.

I offered him a wan smile. “Both your sisters,” I said. “She wanted you to know about both your sisters.”

“Yeah.” Adam’s relief was palpable. “She said you’d come find us one day, because you were her daughter, and her daughters were always going to be curious. It’s in the way we’re made.”

“I guess I have a lot to learn. You’re going to have to teach me, you know. I don’t really know much.”

Adam abruptly spread his arms and lunged forward, moving so fast that I didn’t have a chance to react before he was hugging me hard, his head resting on my shoulder and his arms locked around my chest. I stiffened until I realized what was going on, and then I relaxed, bit by bit, and even raised my own hands to return the hug as best I could.

“I’m going to be the best brother, you’ll see,” he said. “I’m going to teach you everything, and we’ll both be here when Tansy comes home, and then she’ll like you, because you’ll be with us, not living all by yourself. We’ve both been so worried about you!”

The funny thing was, I believed him . . . and I wanted him to be the best brother. I wanted a family, a family that was mine, not Sally’s castoffs and hand-me-downs. I breathed in and he breathed out, until bit by bit our breathing synchronized, and the pounding of the drums in my ears quieted, becoming nothing but the distant thudding of my heart. Adam let go, sitting back on his haunches. I dropped my hands back to the cot, just looking at him. I didn’t know what to say or how to say it; there were no words.

“Are you okay?” he asked solemnly.

“I don’t know,” I said. “This morning, I thought I was a human being, and I thought my friend Sherman was dead, and I thought . . . I thought a lot of things. Now everything is changing, and it’s changing so fast that I can’t really keep up. So I don’t know if I’m okay.” I paused. “But I think I’m going to be.”

Adam nodded. “Going to be is almost as good as is,” he said. “I’ll be here. I’ll help as much as I can.”

I smiled. “See, that right there makes me closer to okay. I’m glad I don’t have to do this alone.”

“Me, too.” He climbed off the cot, bare feet slapping the tile floor. “I need to go tell Mom you’re awake—she asked me to let her know as soon as you woke up, but I thought it was more important that we talk a little bit first. That was right, wasn’t it?”

“Right as rain,” I assured him. I peeled back the blanket, finding that I was as barefoot as Adam, although someone had dressed me in my shirt and jeans while I was unconscious. I stuck the fingers of one hand under my waistband, and decided that Nathan had dressed me. I couldn’t see Dr. Cale remembering to tell her interns to put my underwear back on. “Why don’t I come with you?”

This time Adam’s smile was almost bright enough to light the room.

There were more technicians around than I had seen on previous visits to Dr. Cale’s lab. They swarmed around the equipment like ants, some of them checking cultures or typing at workstations, while right next to them others broke down shelves and packed glassware with an eerily silent efficiency. Adam led me unflinchingly through their midst, his hand clasped tightly around mine, like he had absolute faith that nothing here could hurt either one of us. A few of the technicians turned as we passed, and while they seemed perfectly comfortable with looking directly at Adam, their eyes skittered off me like I’d been Teflon-coated while I was asleep.

Seeing my confusion, Adam said, “It’s because Mom finally told them you were my sister, and they’re all getting used to the idea. They knew there was a control subject in the wild, and I think a few people—like Daisy, maybe—sort of suspected that it was you, but suspecting isn’t the same as knowing, you know?”

Did I ever. “They know I’m really a tapeworm? And who’s Daisy?”

“She works for Mom, and everybody knows.” Adam nodded, seeming to think that this was perfectly normal. For him, it sort of was. SymboGen had dedicated years of therapy and education to making me into a perfect human being; all Dr. Cale had ever forced Adam to learn was how to be a decent person. Maybe those two things weren’t as closely related as I had always automatically assumed. “They don’t care. Or they won’t care, once they get over the shock of meeting the control subject without realizing it. I think some of them are just a little shaky about it, you know?”

“It could’ve been them,” I said quietly. “If one of them had had an implant, and been in that car accident . . .”

Adam’s head whipped around to stare at me, his eyes wide and somehow affronted, like I had just insulted us both. “It could not!” he said. “Both parts of you had to be strong, and had to be clever in just the right ways, or you could never have become one person. You did it without any help, and that’s more than me or Tansy or even . . .” He stopped, affronted expression melting into guilt.

“I know about Sherman,” I said, the taste of his name on my tongue setting my stomach roiling again. I was starting to feel numb all the way down to my toes. Too many revelations at once will do that to a girl, I guess. “I get what you’re saying, Adam. I’m just . . . I’m like the people here, a little. I’m still shaky, too.”

“You be as shaky as you want,” he said. “I’ll be here to help you when you’re done.” He smiled at me.

I smiled back. I couldn’t help it.

We had walked maybe half the length of the bowling alley while we were talking and had stopped just outside a curtain of sliced plastic, cut lengthwise, like the screen on a butterfly aviary or a grocery store produce department’s storage area. I looked at it and swallowed hard. There was something impersonal and medicinal about those dangly strips of waxy plastic, like nothing I was on this side would really matter once I was on that side.

“The broken doors are open,” I murmured.

“That’s my favorite book,” said Adam.

“Of course it’s your favorite book,” I said. Don’t Go Out Alone had been written by a good friend of Dr. Cale. It had been a key part of Nathan’s childhood. It was only natural that it would be a key part of Adam’s as well. I was starting to be a little jealous. I was the only member of our family who hadn’t grown up with that book.

Adam let go of my hand. “If you’re still shaky, I think you’ll feel better talking to Mom and Nathan without me. It’ll be easier to pretend that you’re all humans, and not just all people.”

I wanted to tell him that he was wrong, and that his absence wouldn’t make anything easier at all—that no one ever made anything easier by walking away from it. I couldn’t. When I tried to form the words my lips shaped only silence, and in the end I had to force myself to smile, nod, and say, “I think that might be a good idea. I’ll come find you, though, when we’re done. I think I’m . . .” I faltered, and then continued, “I think I’m going to need you to teach me a lot of things about the way life is now.”

“Always,” said Adam. Before I could react, he hugged me, let me go, and trotted off into the lab, moving with a lanky sureness that somehow broadcast how comfortable he was in the shape of his own skin.

It seemed indecent, almost: he was a worm wearing a boy like a suit. Shouldn’t he have seemed awkward, or shambled like the sleepwalkers, even? Something—anything—to betray the fact that he wasn’t what he seemed to be. I hadn’t felt that way about him before. I considered the emotion for a moment, spinning it around in my head as I tried to find the angle that would tell me where it was coming from. In the end, though, the answer was so simple that I almost missed it:

Guilt. I hadn’t been guilty when I’d seen Adam before; I hadn’t been allowing myself to understand my own origins, and so I’d assumed I was my body’s original owner. Now I was a stranger in my own skin, and if I couldn’t make myself move awkwardly or look visibly like an intruder—like a thief—I’d think those horrible things at Adam—at my brother.

“No, I won’t,” I ordered myself sternly, and stepped through the plastic sheeting, into the small, white-walled lab beyond.

It was maybe eight feet to a side, creating a space that would have been borderline claustrophobic if that sort of thing had bothered me at all. As it was, it struck me as nicely snug, which meant that it probably made most people uncomfortable. Like the majority of the lab spaces in the bowling alley, this one was isolated only in the most technical sense of the word. The walls didn’t go all the way up to the ceiling, and powerful, if quiet fans were occupied in sucking air up from the floor and spitting it over the top of those three-quarter walls, creating a sort of poor man’s negative pressure zone. It wasn’t quite enough to qualify as a “clean room,” and wouldn’t even have necessarily worked as a quarantine zone back at the shelter, but it was clearly enough for Dr. Cale to feel comfortable setting up some serious hardware. An array of computer towers occupied one wall, their constant buzz setting up a low thrumming sound that vibrated through the soles of my bare feet. Nathan and Dr. Cale were both there already, their attention focused on the same monitor.

“I’m awake,” I announced. They both turned toward me, Nathan with naked relief, Dr. Cale with clinical interest that was so closely akin to the way that Dr. Banks used to look at me that I quailed slightly, shrinking in on myself. “I mean, if it matters. I woke up,” I finished awkwardly.

“How do you feel?” asked Nathan, starting to take a step toward me.

Dr. Cale caught his arm, stopping him before he could fully commit to the motion. “I’m sure we’re both very interested in how Sal is feeling, but we need to finish this, Nathan.” She flashed me a quick, strained smile. “I’m glad to see you up and about. Do you need something to drink? You hit your head pretty hard when you fell, and you’d just given blood. Some orange juice would probably do you a lot of good. Go find Adam, he can take you to get some juice.”

I frowned. “You’re trying to avoid telling me something. You don’t normally try to get me to go away and find juice.”

“Untrue: I gave you juice the very first time you came here,” Dr. Cale replied. “And it’s not like you’ve spent that much time with me. Maybe all of my personal relationships are heavily dependent on juice consumption.”

“You gave me juice that was in the room where we were, and there’s a mini fridge in the corner over there, so if you were that dependent on juice for normal social interaction, you’d be telling me to go and get myself a glass, not telling me to go find Adam.” I folded my arms. “I may not be a human being, but I’m not stupid either. What’s going on? Why do you want me to leave?”

“I told you,” said Nathan, clearly directing his words at Dr. Cale. He was smiling slightly when he turned to face me, although the expression died quickly, replaced by solemnity. Looking at them both, I was struck again by just how much he resembled his mother sometimes. Genetics mattered. “Sal, we’ve been going over the data that you were able to recover from SymboGen. Thank you again for doing that. I didn’t want you to, but I’m coming to understand just how necessary it was.”

I worried my lower lip between my teeth before asking, “How bad?”

“I don’t know. We’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s there—it’s only been a few hours.” He shrugged, his arms flopping limply, like they belonged to a doll and not to a man. “How does the end of the human race sound to you?”

“Oh,” I said, and looked to Dr. Cale. She nodded. That was all it took: one little nod to confirm the end of humanity. “That’s bad,” I said.

© 2014 by Mira Grant.

Excerpted from Symbiont by Mira Grant.

Published by permission of the author and Orbit Books.

All rights reserved.

No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mira Grant was born and raised in Northern California, where she has made a lifelong study of horror movies, horrible viruses, and the inevitable threat of the living dead. Currently, Mira lives in a crumbling farmhouse with an assortment of cats, horror movies, comics, and books about horrible diseases. When not writing, she splits her time between travel, auditing college virology courses, and watching more horror movies than is strictly good for you. Favorite vacation spots include Seattle, London, and a large haunted corn maze just outside of Huntsville, Alabama.

Tor Books Presents
The Three-Body Problem
(novel excerpt)

Cixin Liu
(translated by Ken Liu)

THE FRONTIERS OF SCIENCE

Wang Miao thought the four people who came to find him made a rather odd combination: two cops and two men in military uniforms. If the latter two were armed police, that would be somewhat understandable, but they were actually PLA officers.

As soon as Wang saw the cops, he felt annoyed. The younger one was all right—at least he was polite. But the other one, in plainclothes, immediately grated on him. He was thickset and had a face full of bulging muscles. Wearing a dirty leather jacket, smelling of cigarettes, and speaking in a loud voice, he was exactly the sort of person Wang despised. “Wang Miao?”

The way the cop addressed him by name only, so direct and impolite, made Wang uncomfortable. Adding to the insult, the man lit a cigarette as he addressed him, without even lifting his head to show his face. Before Wang could answer, the man nodded at the younger cop, who showed Wang his badge.

Having lit the cigarette, the older cop moved to enter Wang’s apartment.

“Please don’t smoke in my home,” Wang said, blocking him.

“Oh, sorry, Professor Wang.” The young police officer smiled. “This is Captain Shi Qiang.” He gave Shi a pleading look.

“Fine, we can talk in the hallway,” Shi said. He took a deep drag. Almost half the cigarette had turned to ashes, and he didn’t blow out much smoke. He inclined his head toward the younger police officer. “You ask him, then.”

“Professor Wang, we want to know if you’ve had any recent contacts with members of the Frontiers of Science,” the young cop said.

“The Frontiers of Science is full of famous scholars, and very influential. Why can’t I have contact with a legal international academic group?”

“Look at the way you talk!” Shi said. “Did we say anything about it not being legal? Did we say anything about you not being allowed to contact them?” He finally blew out the lungful of smoke that he had sucked in earlier—right in Wang’s face.

“All right then. Please respect my privacy. I don’t need to answer your questions.”

“Your privacy? You’re a famous academic. You have a responsibility toward the public welfare.” Shi threw away the butt and took out another cigarette from a flattened pack.

“I have the right to not answer. Please leave.” Wang turned around to go back inside.

“Wait!” Shi shouted. He waved at the young cop next to him. “Give him the address and phone number. You can come by in the afternoon.”

“What are you really after?” Wang said, his voice now tinged with anger. The argument brought the neighbors, curious about what was happening, out into the hallway.

“Captain Shi! You said you—” The young cop pulled Shi aside and continued speaking to him in hushed, urgent tones. Apparently, Wang wasn’t the only one annoyed by his rough manners.

“Professor Wang, please don’t misunderstand.” One of the army officers, a major, stepped forward. “There’s an important meeting this afternoon, to which several scholars and specialists are invited. The general sent us to invite you.”

“I’m busy this afternoon.”

“We know. The general already spoke with the head of the Nanotechnology Research Center. We can’t have this meeting without you. If you can’t attend, we’ll have to reschedule.”

Shi and the young cop said nothing. Both turned and went down the stairs. The two army officers watched them leave and seemed to sigh with relief.

“What’s wrong with that guy?” the major whispered to the other officer.

“He’s got quite a record. During a hostage crisis a few years ago, he acted recklessly, without concern for the lives of the hostages. In the end, a family of three all died at the hands of the criminals. Rumor has it that he’s also friendly with elements of organized crime, using one gang to fight another. Last year, he used torture to obtain confessions, and permanently disabled one of the suspects. That’s why he was suspended from duty. . . .”

Wang Miao suspected that he was meant to overhear the conversation between the officers. Maybe they intended to show him that they were different from that rude cop; or maybe they wanted to make him curious about their mission.

“How can a man like that be part of the Battle Command Center?” the major asked.

“The general specifically requested him. I guess he must have some special skills. In any case, his duties are quite restricted. Other than public safety matters, he’s not allowed to know much.”

Battle Command Center? Wang looked at the two officers, baffled.

• • • •

The car they sent for Wang Miao took him to a large compound in the suburbs. Since the door had only a number and no sign, Wang deduced that this building belonged to the military, rather than the police.

Wang was surprised by the chaos as he entered the large meeting room. Around him were numerous computers in various states of disarray. They had run out of table space and put a few workstations directly on the floor, where power cords and networking wires formed a tangled mess. Instead of being installed in racks, a bunch of routers were left haphazardly on top of the servers. Printer paper was scattered everywhere. A few projector screens stood in various corners of the room, sticking out at odd angles like gypsy tents. A cloud of smoke hovered over the room. . . . Wang Miao wasn’t sure if this was the Battle Command Center, but he was sure of one thing: Whatever they were dealing with was too important for them to care about keeping up appearances.

The meeting table, formed by pushing several smaller tables together, was piled with documents and odds and ends. The attendees, their clothes wrinkled, looked exhausted. Those wearing ties had all pulled them loose. It seemed as if they had been up all night.

A major general named Chang Weisi presided over the meeting, and half the attendees were military officers. After a few quick introductions, Wang found out that many of the others were police. The rest were academics like him, with a few prominent scientists specializing in basic research in the mix.

He also found four foreigners in attendance. Their identities shocked him: a United States Air Force colonel and a British Army colonel, both NATO liaisons, as well as two CIA officers, apparently acting as observers.

On the faces of everyone around the table, Wang could read one sentiment: We’ve done all we can. Let’s fucking get it over with, already.

Wang Miao saw Shi Qiang sitting at the table. In contrast to his rudeness yesterday, Shi greeted Wang as “Professor.” But the smirk on Shi’s face annoyed Wang. He didn’t want to sit next to Shi, but he had no choice, as that was the only empty seat. The already thick cloud of cigarette smoke in the room became thicker.

As documents were distributed, Shi moved closer to Wang. “Professor Wang, I understand you’re researching some kind of . . . new material?”

“Nanomaterial,” Wang answered.

“I’ve heard of it. That stuff is really strong, right? Do you think it could be used to commit crimes?” As Shi’s face was still half smirking, Wang couldn’t tell if he was joking.

“What do you mean?”

“Heh. I heard that a strand of that stuff could be used to lift up a truck. If criminals steal some and make it into a knife, can’t they slice a car in half with one stroke?”

“There’s no need to even make it into a knife. That kind of material can be made into a line as thin as one-hundredth of a hair. If you string it across a road, a passing car would be sliced into two halves like cheese—but what can’t be used for criminal purposes? Even a dull knife for descaling a fish can!”

Shi pulled a document halfway out of the envelope in front of him and shoved it back in again, suddenly losing interest. “You’re right. Even a fish can be used to commit a crime. I handled a murder case once. Some bitch cut off her husband’s family jewels. You know what she used? A frozen tilapia she got out of the freezer! The spines along the back were like razors—”

“I’m not interested. Did you ask me to the meeting just to talk about this?”

“Fish? Nanomaterials? No, no, nothing to do with those.” Shi put his mouth next to Wang’s ear. “Don’t be nice to them. They’re prejudiced against us. All they want is to get information out of us, but never tell us anything. Look at me. I’ve been here for a month, and I still don’t know anything, just like you.”

“Comrades,” General Chang said, “let’s get started. Of all the combat zones around the globe, this one has become the focal point. We need to update the current situation for all the attending comrades.”

The unusual term “combat zone” gave Wang pause. He also noticed that the general did not seem to want to explain in detail the background of what they were dealing with to new people like him. This supported Shi’s point. Also, in General Chang’s short opening remarks, he used the word “comrades” twice. Wang looked at the NATO and CIA officers sitting across from him. The general had neglected to add “gentlemen.”

“They’re also comrades. Anyway, that’s how everyone addresses each other here,” Shi whispered to Wang, pointing at the four foreigners with his cigarette.

While he was baffled by how Shi knew what he was thinking, Wang was impressed with his powers of observation.

“Da Shi, put out your cigarette. There’s enough smoke here,” General Chang said as he flipped through some documents. He called Shi Qiang by a nickname, “Big Shi.”

Shi looked around but couldn’t find an ashtray. In the end, he dropped the cigarette into a teacup. He raised his hand, and before Chang could even acknowledge him, he spoke loudly. “General, I have a request which I’ve made before: I want information parity.”

General Chang lifted his head. “There’s never been a military operation in which there was information parity. I have to apologize to all the scholars, but we cannot give you any more background.”

“We are not the same as the eggheads,” Shi said. “The police have been part of the Battle Command Center from the start. But even now, we still don’t know what this is all about. You continue to push the police out. You learn from us what you need about our techniques, and then you send us away one by one.”

Several other police officers in attendance whispered to Shi to shut up. It surprised Wang that Shi dared to speak in this manner to a man of Chang’s rank. But Chang’s response surprised him even more.

“Da Shi, it seems that you still have the same problem you had back when you were in the army. You think you can speak for the police? Because of your poor record, you had already been suspended for several months, and you were about to be expelled from the force. I asked for you because I value your experience in city policing. You should treasure this opportunity.”

Shi continued to speak roughly. “So I’m working in the hope of redeeming myself by good service? I thought you told me that all my techniques were dishonest and crooked.”

“But useful.” Chang nodded at Shi. “All we care about is if they’re useful. In a time of war, we can’t afford to be too scrupulous.”

“We can’t be too fastidious,” a CIA officer said, in perfect Modern Standard Mandarin. “We can no longer rely on conventional thinking.”

The British colonel apparently also understood Chinese. He nodded. “To be, or not to be . . .” he added in English. “It’s a matter of life and death.”

“What is he saying?” Shi asked Wang.

“Nothing,” Wang replied mechanically. The people before him seemed to be speaking out of a dream. Time of war? Where is this war? He twisted to look out one of the floor-length windows. Through the window he could see Beijing in the distance: Under the spring sun, cars filled the streets like a dense river; on a lawn someone was walking a dog; a few children were playing. . . .

Which is more real? The world inside or outside these walls?

General Chang said, “Recently, the enemy has intensified the pattern of attacks. The targets remain elite scientists. Please begin by taking a look at the list of names in the document.”

Wang took out the first page of the document, printed in large font. The list seemed to have been generated in a hurry, containing both Chinese and English names.

“Professor Wang, as you look through these names, does anything strike you?” General Chang asked.

“I know three of the names. All of them are famous scholars working at the forefront of physics research.” Wang was a little distracted. His eyes locked onto the last name on the list. In his mind, the two characters took on a different tint than the names above it. How can her name appear here? What happened to her?

“You know her?” Shi pointed to the name with a thick finger, stained yellow from smoking. Wang did not reply. “Ha. Don’t know her. But want to know her?”

Now Wang Miao understood why it made sense for General Chang to have asked to have this man who was once a soldier under his command. Shi, who appeared so vulgar and careless, had eyes as sharp as knives. Maybe he wasn’t a good cop, but he was certainly a fearsome one.

• • • •

A year earlier, Wang Miao had been in charge of the nanoscale components for the “Sinotron II” high-energy particle accelerator project. One afternoon, during a brief break at the Liangxiang construction site, Wang was struck by the scene before him. As a landscape photography enthusiast, Wang often saw the sights around him as artistic compositions.

The main component of the composition was the solenoid of the superconducting magnet they were still installing. About three stories high and only half completed, the magnet loomed like a monster made of giant blocks of metal and a confusing mess of cryogenic coolant pipes. Like a junk heap from the Industrial Revolution, the structure exuded inhuman technological grimness and steel-bound barbarity.

In front of this metal monster stood the slim figure of a young woman. The composition’s lighting was fantastic as well: The metal monster was buried in the shadow of a temporary construction shelter, further emphasizing its stern, rough quality. But a single ray of light from the westering sun coming through the central hole in the shelter fell right on the woman. The soft glow lit up her supple hair and highlighted her white neck above the collar of her overalls, as though a single flower was blooming in a metal ruin after a violent thunderstorm. . . .

“What are you looking at? Get back to work!”

Wang was shocked out of his reverie, but then realized that the director of the Nanotechnology Research Center wasn’t talking to him, but to a young engineer who had also been staring at the woman. Having returned from art to reality, Wang saw that the young woman wasn’t an ordinary worker—the chief engineer stood next to her, explaining something respectfully.

“Who is she?” Wang asked the director.

“You should know her,” the director said, waving his hand around in a large circle. “The first experiment on this twenty-billion-yuan accelerator will probably be to test her superstring model. Now, seniority matters in theoretical physics, and normally, she wouldn’t have been senior enough to get the first shot. But those older academics didn’t dare to show up first, afraid that they might fail and lose face, so that’s why she got the chance.”

“What? Yang Dong is . . . a woman?”

“Indeed,” the director said. “We only found out when we finally met her two days ago.”

The young engineer asked, “Does she have some psychological issue? Why else wouldn’t she agree to be interviewed by the media? Maybe she’s like Qian Zhongshu, who died without ever appearing on TV.”

“But at least we knew Qian’s gender. I bet Yang had some unusual experiences as a child. Maybe it made her somewhat autistic.” Wang’s words were tinged with a hint of self-mockery. He wasn’t even famous enough for the media to be interested in him, let alone to turn down interview requests.

Yang walked over with the chief engineer. As they passed, she smiled at Wang and the others, nodding lightly without saying anything. Wang remembered her limpid eyes.

That night, Wang sat in his study and admired the few landscape photographs, his works he was the most proud of, hanging on the wall. His eyes fell on a frontier scene: a desolate valley terminating in a snowcapped mountain. On the nearer end of the valley, half of a dead tree, eroded by the vicissitudes of many years, took up one-third of the picture. In his imagination, Wang placed the figure that lingered in his mind at the far end of the valley. Surprisingly, it made the entire scene come alive, as though the world in the photograph recognized that tiny figure and responded to it, as though the whole scene existed for her.

He then imagined her figure in each of his other photographs, sometimes pasting her two eyes into the empty sky over the landscapes. Those images also came alive, achieving a beauty that Wang had never imagined.

Wang had always thought that his photographs lacked some kind of soul. Now he understood that they were missing her.

• • • •

“All the physicists on this list have committed suicide in the last two months,” General Chang said.

Wang was thunderstruck. Gradually, his black-and-white landscapes faded into blankness in his mind. The photographs no longer had her figure in the foreground, and her eyes were wiped from the skies. Those worlds were all dead.

“When . . . did this happen?” Wang asked mechanically.

“The last two months,” Chang repeated.

“You mean the last name, don’t you?” Shi responded with satisfaction. “She was the last to commit suicide—two nights ago, overdosed on sleeping pills. She died very peacefully. No pain.”

For a moment, Wang was grateful to Shi.

“Why?” Wang asked. The dead scenes in those landscape photographs continued to flicker through his mind.

General Chang replied, “The only thing we can be sure of is this: The same reason drove all of them to suicide. But it’s hard to articulate. Maybe it’s impossible for us nonspecialists to even understand the reason. The document contains excerpts from their suicide notes. Everyone can examine them after the meeting.”

Wang flipped through the notes: All of them seemed to be long essays.

“Dr. Ding, would you please show Yang Dong’s note to Professor Wang? Hers is the shortest and possibly the most representative.”

The man in question, Ding Yi, had been silent until now. After another pause, he finally took out a white envelope and handed it across the table to Wang.

Shi whispered, “He was Yang’s boyfriend.” Wang recalled that he had seen Ding at the particle accelerator construction site in Liangxiang. He was a theoretician who had become famous for his discovery of the macroatom while studying ball lightning. Wang took from the envelope a thin, irregularly shaped sheet exuding a faint fragrance—not paper, but birch bark. A single line of graceful characters was written on it:

All the evidence points to a single conclusion: Physics has never existed, and will never exist. I know what I’m doing is irresponsible. But I have no choice.

There wasn’t even a signature. She was gone.

“Physics . . . does not exist?” Wang had no idea what to think.

General Chang closed the folder. “The file also contains some specific information related to the experimental results obtained after the completion of the world’s three newest particle accelerators. It’s very technical, and we won’t be discussing it here. The first focus of our investigation is the Frontiers of Science. UNESCO designated 2005 the World Year of Physics, and that organization gradually developed out of the numerous academic conferences and exchanges that occurred among world physicists that year. Dr. Ding, since you’re a theoretical physicist, can you give us more background on it?”

Ding nodded. “I have no direct connection with the Frontiers of Science, but it is famous in academia. Its core goal is a response to the following: Since the second half of the twentieth century, physics has gradually lost the concision and simplicity of its classical theories. Modern theoretical models have become more and more complex, vague, and uncertain. Experimental verification has become more difficult as well. This is a sign that the forefront of physics research seems to be hitting a wall.

“Members of the Frontiers of Science want to attempt a new way of thinking. To put it simply, they want to use the methods of science to discover the limits of science, to try to find out if there is a limit to how deeply and precisely science can know nature—a boundary beyond which science cannot go. The development of modern physics seems to suggest that such a line has been touched.”

“Very good,” General Chang said. “According to our investigation, most of the scholars who committed suicide had some connection with the Frontiers of Science, and some were even members. But we’ve found no evidence of the use of illegal psychotropic drugs or techniques akin to the psychological manipulation of religious cults. In other words, even if the Frontiers of Science influenced them, it was only through legal academic exchanges. Professor Wang, since they recently contacted you, we’d like to ask you for some information.”

Shi added gruffly, “Including the names of your contacts, the times and locations of meetings, the content of your conversations, and if you exchanged letters or e-mails—”

“Shut up, Da Shi!” General Chang said.

Another police officer leaned over and whispered to Shi, “Do you think we’ll forget you have a mouth if you don’t use it all the time?” Shi picked up his teacup, saw the drowned cigarette butt inside, and put it back down.

Shi’s questions irritated Wang again, not unlike the feeling a man has upon finding out that he has swallowed a fly with his meal. The gratitude he had felt earlier was gone without a trace. But he restrained himself and answered, “My contact with the Frontiers of Science began with Shen Yufei. She’s a Japanese physicist of Chinese descent who currently works for a Japanese company here in Beijing. She once worked at a Mitsubishi lab, researching nanotech. We met at a technical conference at the beginning of this year. Through her, I met a few other physicist friends, all members of the Frontiers of Science, some Chinese, some foreign. When I talked with them, all the topics were . . . how do I put this? Very radical. They all involved the question that Dr. Ding just described: What is the limit of science?

“Initially, I didn’t have much interest in these topics. I thought of them as only an idle pastime. My work is in applied research, and I don’t know much about these theoretical matters. Mainly, I was interested in listening to their discussions and arguments. All of them were deep thinkers with novel points of view, and I felt that I was opening my mind through the exchanges. Gradually, I grew more interested. But all our talk was limited to pure theory and nothing else. They once invited me to join the Frontiers of Science. But if I had done so, attending the discussions would have turned into a duty. Since my time and energy were limited, I declined.”

“Professor Wang,” General Chang said, “we’d like you to accept the invitation and join the Frontiers of Science. This is the main reason we asked you here today. Through you, we’d like to learn more about the internal workings of the organization.”

“You want me to be a mole?” Wang was uneasy.

“A mole!” Shi laughed.

Chang gave Shi a reprimanding look. He turned back to Wang. “We just want you to give us some information. We have no other way in.”

Wang shook his head. “I’m sorry, General. I cannot do this.”

“Professor Wang, the Frontiers of Science is made up of elite international scholars. Investigating it is an extremely complex and sensitive matter. For us, it’s like walking across thin ice. Without someone from academia helping us, we cannot make any progress. This is why we’re making this request. But we’ll respect your wishes. If you won’t agree, we understand.”

“I am . . . very busy at work. I just don’t have the time.”

General Chang nodded. “All right, Professor Wang, we won’t waste any more of your time. Thank you for coming to this meeting.”

Wang waited a few more seconds before realizing that he had been dismissed.

General Chang politely accompanied Wang to the door. They could hear Shi’s loud voice behind them. “It’s better this way. I disagree with the plan anyway. So many bookworms have already killed themselves. If we send him, he’d be a meat dumpling thrown to the dogs.”

Wang turned around and walked back to Shi. Forcing his anger down, Wang said, “The way you speak is not appropriate for a good police officer.”

“Who said I’m a good cop?”

“We don’t know why these researchers killed themselves, but you shouldn’t speak of them so contemptuously. Their minds have made irreplaceable contributions to humanity.”

“You’re saying they’re better than me?” Still seated, Shi lifted his eyes to meet Wang’s. “At least I wouldn’t kill myself just because someone told me some bullshit.”

“You think I would?”

“I have to be concerned about your safety.” That trademark smirk again.

“I think I would be much safer than you in such situations. You must know that a person’s ability to discern the truth is directly proportional to his knowledge.”

“I’m not sure about that. Take someone like you—”

“Be quiet, Da Shi!” General Chang said. “One more sentence and you’re out of here!”

“It’s okay,” Wang said. “Let him speak.” He turned to General Chang. “I’ve changed my mind. I will join the Frontiers of Science as you wish.”

“Good!” Shi nodded vigorously. “Stay alert after you join. Gather intelligence whenever it’s convenient. For example, glance at their computer screens, memorize e-mail or Web addresses—”

“That’s enough! You misunderstand me. I don’t want to be a spy. I just want to prove you’re an idiot!”

“If you remain alive after you’ve joined them for a while, that would be the best proof. But I’m afraid for you . . .” Shi lifted his face, and the smirk turned into a wolfish grin.

“Of course I’ll stay alive! But I never want to see you again.”

• • • •

They kept Wang out of the way while the others left so he wouldn’t have to deal with Shi Qiang again. Then General Chang walked Wang all the way down the stairs and called for a car to take him back.

He said to Wang, “Don’t worry about Shi Qiang. That’s just his personality. He’s actually a very experienced beat officer and antiterrorism expert. Twenty years ago, he was a soldier in my company.”

As they approached the car, Chang added, “Professor Wang, you must have many questions.”

“What did everything you talked about in there have to do with the military?”

“War has everything to do with the army.”

Wang looked around in the spring sun, baffled. “But where is this war? This is probably the most peaceful period in history.”

Chang gave him an inscrutable smile. “You will know more soon. Everyone will know. Professor Wang, have you ever had anything happen to you that changed your life completely? Some event where afterward the world became a totally different place for you?”

“No.”

“Then your life has been fortunate. The world is full of unpredictable factors, yet you have never faced a crisis.”

Wang turned over the words in his mind, still not understanding. “I think that’s true of most lives.”

“Then most people have lived fortunately.”

“But . . . many generations have lived in this plain manner.”

“All fortunate.”

Wang laughed, shaking his head. “I have to confess that I’m not feeling very sharp today. Are you suggesting that—”

“Yes, the entire history of humankind has been fortunate. From the Stone Age till now, no real crisis has occurred. We’ve been very lucky. But if it’s all luck, then it has to end one day. Let me tell you: It’s ended. Prepare for the worst.”

Wang wanted to ask more, but Chang shook his head and said good-bye, preventing any more questions.

After Wang got into the car, the driver asked for his address. Wang gave it and asked, “Oh, were you the one who took me here? I thought it was the same type of car.”

“No, it wasn’t me. I took Dr. Ding here.”

Wang had a new idea. He asked the driver to take him to Ding’s address instead.

Translation © 2014 by Cixin Liu and Ken Liu.

Excerpted from The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu.

Published by permission of Tor Books.

All rights reserved.

No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from Tor Books.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cixin Liu is the most prolific and popular science fiction writer in the People’s Republic of China. Liu is an eight-time winner of the Galaxy Award (the Chinese Hugo) and a winner of the Nebula Award. Prior to becoming a writer, he worked as an engineer in a power plant in Yangquan, Shanxi.

Ken Liu (translator) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He has won a Nebula, two Hugos, a World Fantasy Award, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award, and been nominated for the Sturgeon and the Locus Awards. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts. Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a fantasy series, will be published by Simon & Schuster’s new genre fiction imprint in 2015, along with a collection of short stories.

NONFICTION

Interview: Nick Harkaway

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Nick Harkaway is the author of The Gone-Away World and Angelmaker. His latest book, Tigerman, presents an unusual take on the idea of a costumed superhero.

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 Tigerman. What’s it about?

It’s about a lot of things. The plot is about a guy on an island who’s been sent there very specifically to relax and is told not to see any of the bad things that are happening there. He finds a friendship with a local kid who just wants him to see everything bad that’s happening there, so he has an immediate problem. His way of resolving this ultimately is to put on an ad hoc superhero suit and try to do something about it in a way that can’t be traced back to him. But it’s not ultimately just a story about a guy putting on a suit. It’s also about the friendship, and basically, it’s about fatherhood. I was becoming a dad when I was writing this book.

When you say there are bad things, what sort of bad things are happening?

What we’ve got is an island in the middle of the sea where the international community has decided there’s a kind of legal gap, and the island, in legal terms, doesn’t really exist. So all around has gathered a fleet of off-the-book shipping, which I call the Black Fleet, which involves data haven deniable port-centered interrogation rooms, and the kind of hospitals where you can get a kidney replaced, no questions asked, and you can even bring your own. It’s just full of all kinds of the worst things you could imagine. In fact, the thing I keep saying about it is [like] Mos Eisley—nowhere will you find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

You mentioned the story concerns the friendship between this man, Lester Ferris, and the character who is referred to as “the boy.” Tell us a bit more about the boy.

He’s a local kid. He’s apparently an orphan, or at least no one can put a hand on his parents, and he’s extremely bright. He’s obsessed with comic books and internet stuff. His English reflects that. He speaks exactly the kind of mixture that you get if you spend a few hours surfing.

On the one hand, you’re reading a piece by Lawrence Lessig, and on the other hand, if you’re playing World of Warcraft at the same time, you can easily end up talking to a kid in Shanghai whose English is not great but who is incredibly enthusiastic and has picked up a raft of unusual idioms from different movies and comic books. That’s the boy. He’s got this extraordinary mixture of English, which I loved writing. I got incredibly enthusiastic about it. He’s one of the people I really enjoyed writing.

Could you give us an example of the sort of things he would say?

The thing that people keep quoting back to me is “full of win.” He uses “full of win” all the time. He uses a lot of leetspeak, which is kind of hard to do out loud; you can see it on the page. He talks about getting “pwned.” He sees everything in terms of movies and comics. Obviously, I’ve already referenced Star Wars, but part of his daily wear is a t-shirt that proclaims that Han shot first, which is a reference to the updated Star Wars movies where they fudge that slightly.

For me, that’s a religious discussion. I remember seeing the movie and quite clearly Han Solo shoots Greedo under the table. That’s completely straightforward and then they fudged it later. He has this vocabulary and this concept set that comes from comic books and movies and games. He sees the world in those terms.

As a big science fiction fan, I really enjoyed this idea that even in the most remote place on earth, you would be able to find a kid who knows what a Voight-Kampff test is.

Exactly that. Someone for whom it is completely inconceivable, that someone wouldn’t know what a Voight-Kampff test is, like obviously everyone in the universe knows that.

Did you have to do any research at all or were you just emptying your brain?

No, I don’t think I did anything at all for that. I just remembered it all and I treasure it. I’m constantly picking out bits of language and so on like that, which I really like. And the one that I didn’t get in was that beautiful thing “tiny grass is dreaming,” which I just think is one of the most poetic things I’ve ever seen. I’m not even sure if it’s real. It’s supposed to be a sign on the grass somewhere in the world that’s obviously intended to mean “stay off the grass” or “the grass is growing” or something. But as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter what it’s supposed to mean, it just matters that it’s beautiful. I wanted those things in there, but that one doesn’t have a place in the book, so I’ll carry that around for a while and use it somewhere else.

I saw a video where you said that your initial title for this was Tigerman Make Famous Victory Full of Win, and you said that you were going to win this battle with your publisher this time.

And then I didn’t.

Apparently.

What happened with that was very straightforward. I was reading the book through and looking at the title, and I was suddenly just very uncomfortable that if you hadn’t read the book yet, it was potentially superficially mocking of people who don’t speak great English. I thought that this was already a post-colonial story, and it’s about the British empire’s tail end, of the consequences of empire and how badly we behaved. Actually, it’s potentially un-funny if you offend someone. You’re taking the mickey out of people from other countries, and it wasn’t a discussion I wanted to get into. I was like, “Actually, you know what, forget it. Let’s just go with Tigerman as the title and people can find the great stuff inside the book.”

The thing is, I always have this problem with titles. I work with a book for however long it takes to write it and I always give it a title, like Angelmaker was called “Crazy Joe” for however many years. The Gone-Away World was called “The Wages of Gonzo Lubitsch,” and when it comes to it, nobody wants to use the title that I think is the only obvious title in the universe. They’re always right.

On the one hand, I get very entrenched because I get very attached to these titles. I still, in my head, tend to think of Angelmaker slightly as “Crazy Joe,” because that was the central character, and it was his story. There’s a desire to hold on to that past part. Heaven knows what the new book is going to end up being called, the one I’m writing now, because I have this really great title on the front page of the manuscript, but it’s completely incomprehensible. My editor’s going to go nuts, and he’s going to turn around and say, “Are you kidding? We’ll call this something that people can actually understand the first time they see the book, as opposed to having to read however many hundred pages to find out what the title means.”

It’s obvious you’ve been a life-long fan of science fiction and comic books and video games. Did you always want to write science fiction or did that develop later?

I always wanted to tell stories. I don’t really care what kind of stories I end up telling. This is why every time one of my books comes out there is a brief classification tussle. There’s the whole “is this properly science fiction or is it something else?” The absolute question for the majority of people who read science fiction—Is this the kind of thing that they read?—but there is a taxonomical debate to be had about whether it’s classically science fiction. io9 called it “existential pulp,” which I love. I thought that was one of the best things I’ve ever heard. So I’m very determined now that I’m an existential pulp writer.

The thing is, I go where the story takes me, and yes, obviously all the stuff is in my head, so everything I write tends to be mildly nuts, but I don’t set out to fulfill a shelving category. I set out to tell a story and I see where it ends up. This time, I think Tigerman, and actually Angelmaker as well, got reviewed in the thriller section rather than science fiction section in several papers. People make their own determinations and I’m good with that.

I agree with that, although your first novel, The Gone-Away World, is pretty clearly science fiction by my definition.

I would agree with you, but then, I got in big trouble with a couple of very academic thinkers about science fiction who were just like, “Well, clearly this isn’t science fiction, it’s blah blah blah. It shouldn’t be considered in that category.” I have no stomach for that fight. I don’t want to crash the party for anybody. All I want to do is tell a story. There are people who read lots of science fiction who read my stuff and are delighted by it. There are people who read lots of science fiction who (and thankfully there are few of these) read my stuff and hate it. Then there are people who, generally speaking, refuse to read science fiction in any way, shape, or form, because they think it’s spaceship fiction, and they see in their mind’s eye when they hear those words pictures of women in bikinis with goldfish bowls on their heads, and that’s science fiction, so they don’t read any science fiction, but they read me.

It really is a shelving convention and that’s very useful in the context of being a bookshop, but it’s also not useful in terms of talking about books. I’m very content to be stuck in the middle, although I think some of the time my publishers wish I would write something that was a little bit more overtly recognizable, because it’s sometimes harder to sell a book that is less easy to characterize.

Well, talk about existential pulp. Why do you like that term so much?

Just because it sounds awesome. I guess because, in a weird way, actually, it’s very apposite, because it’s a mash-up of this very serious notion of existentialism and this kind of playful, ridiculous writing form that was about churning out the largest number of words possible with garish, lurid images in it and so on. The two don’t really go together, except that if you chop them up and mash them around, of course they go together. Both Angelmaker and Gone-Away World were filled with ontological angst and existence angst. Whether it’s existential or not is another question.

Tigerman is definitely full of a sense of worry about what it means to be a dad and how to be a good person and all the rest of it. So it belongs in that category, and then, at the same time, my pulp roots are showing. Here’s all the serious stuff about global geopolitics and the bad ways we behave overseas, and about being a father and trying to do the right thing. How do you become a new person when your old life has come to an end? The answer is: You put on a superhero suit and you go fight crime.

The thing is, though, that actually I would do dumber things than that for my kid if that was what they needed me to do. I think we all would. I get into this thing about the definition of “real.” There’s a big sense in mainstream writing, and particularly literary writing, that you have to be portraying a “real truth,” and there has to be a sense of reality. Indeed, there’s a dogmatic thing and a filmmaking thing, where you’re not supposed to use any artificial special effects, and you’re not supposed to use any lighting or makeup. So it should just be raw and real, and that’s the way it is.

The thing is, to me, that’s an illusion, particularly in writing, because crazy things happen all the time. Completely mad things happen to ordinary people every day, and everybody has some kind of crazy story about something that has happened to them. When you go out into the world, you meet more and more people to whom weird things have happened.

There’s a woman who has lunch everyday down the road from me—actually, I haven’t seen her for a while—and she operated a listening post during the Second World War, and when I say a listening post, I don’t mean a signals and deception station. She sat in front of a giant concrete parabolic sound mirror, and she listened for the sound of aircraft coming in over the sea. That was her job, night after night. She was terrified that she would cough and miss the sound of a bombing raid, and hundreds of people would die.

So this was the extraordinary life that she lived, night after night, which if you write that, people think that’s burlesque. If you thanked her, and there was other stuff going on in her life—I’m sure she fell in love, I’m sure stuff was happening. That was all going on.

At the same time, it turns out that actually, all those people who were listening to those things, certainly if we moved later into the war, that it was redundant because we had radar, which we weren’t telling anyone. That was a secret. Then the question would be, this woman on the south coast says she’s heard planes which we already knew about, is that enough that we can plausibly intercept those planes? Or are we going to blow the existence of radar if we do that and we have to let the planes bomb some village somewhere? The idea that the ordinary mind or the ordinary day doesn’t experience completely crazy stuff drives me nuts.

My standard rant on “realistic fiction” is that the most fundamental fact about reality is that our sun is one of a hundred billion stars in the galaxy that’s just one of a hundred billion galaxies in the universe. This is just the most fundamental thing about reality, and you would never know it from reading “realistic fiction.”

It’s quite interesting; it shows up in all kinds of ways. Most people generally, in their daily lives, do not address the fact that, actually, the world is not Newtonian. Most of us live in a kind of billiard ball world. Of course, the world zooms around in much stranger ways and time varies depending on your relative speed. People generally don’t get their heads around that. So yes, exactly.

The world is just very much stranger than it appears, and then on a much more prosaic level, there are quite a lot of writers, who, for example, do not like mobile telephones. Not as in they don’t use them, but as in they don’t like writing about mobile telephones because they mess up the plot.

Quite a lot of the time, you’re talking about an artificially constructed 1993, except with everything else being now. For me, a lot of novels that people think of as being “real” are actually basically alternative reality fiction designed to be in an a-technological world in order to get to something that is supposed to be fundamental. The thing that’s supposed to be fundamental is the human condition and the human emotional state, and that also exists only in the interaction with the world, and the world contains this technology, so you can’t do it honestly without discussing, on some level, accounting for technology. That reticence makes me cranky.

Why do you think so many writers are reluctant to take that on? Is it just that they don’t know technology?

I think a lot of writers are reluctant because it messes with plot. If you read Here and Now, the Paul Auster and JM Coetzee dialogues, which they conducted by fax, there’s a section where they address this, and Coetzee says, “I don’t like mobile phones, they mess up plotting, they make things more difficult, and they short circuit plot, and they bring people together to communicate and communication resolves conflict.” Which is true.

Conflict, as my schoolteacher told me, is the heart of drama. Communication absolutely can resolve it, so that is a problem. Auster, meanwhile, does use technology in his stuff, so there’s a whole discussion on that. But the thing is, we’re talking about something that happens. It’s real. As soon as you say “I’d like to tell this as a real human story, but I won’t use this technology because it gets in the way of telling a real human story,” you’re in a very weird place for me.

So there’s that. There’s a convenience aspect in terms of plotting. It takes away from your ability to do a kind of pure unity of narrative, because there’s a danger people will meet too early and talk. It’s a real danger, but I think you just have to get around it.

Technology and technological activities very often don’t dramatize well. Sitting and talking on the phone, typing onto a keyboard, whatever—those are not things that particularly work well as scenes, and they work terribly in movies, but even in books they don’t work very well. So you have to work around that, and again, it feels uncomfortable. Underlying that, there’s unease about technology as something that’s scientific and purely cognitive, and therefore somehow opposed to an emotional engagement with the world, which is a whole other discussion which I’m uncomfortable with. But a lot of people feel that way, and therefore, as soon as you introduce a beige box or an IMAX screen or an iPhone into a conversation, you’re somehow getting away from a narrative or what’s important about life. I think it’s wrong, but I think people are frightened of it.

You say technology resolves conflict, but certainly we live in a world with plenty of technology and plenty of conflict as well.

Communication can resolve conflict. Technology, no. Technology can provide an awful lot of conflict, too, absolutely. This is the logical tail end of that point.

I saw an ad years ago, actually, when I was in the States. I was living in New York and there was an ad on the Discovery Channel, which was a really, really, really old guy in black and white on the screen and he’s talking into the camera. I think we only see him to the shoulder but I don’t think he’s wearing a shirt, and he’s telling us how many children he has, how many grandchildren he has, how many great grandchildren he has. He’s talking about the fact that he’s thinking he’s going to go and maybe do a degree because it has been a long time since he’s done any studying. This extraordinary, huge number of people who are his direct family and his plans that he has, and then he says, “I want you to meet someone, but you have to be very gentle and quiet because my mother’s quite shy.” He’s like a thousand years old already, so the idea that he has a mother is completely extraordinary and underneath the caption was, “When this happens, you’ll want to know why.” And we will, when that happens, will want to know why, and I think a lot of mainstream culture isn’t going to tell us and isn’t preparing us for that conversation.

Every funky scientific experiment that happens provides me with another piece of ammunition about this. The most recent one for me was—the real extraordinary one—was actually the program where they networked a couple of rats together in late 2012. Do you know about this?

This is where they drive them around by remote control?

Well, no, it’s even crazier than that. Basically, there was a team in the U.S., I can’t remember exactly where, and I think the other team was in South America, was it Brazil? They put electrodes—quite crudely—scientifically and with great precision, but the object is crude—it’s got a big spike—into the brain of each rat.

One rat had run a maze and the other one had not, and once they networked them together over the Internet, the second rat, which had not run the maze, was able to run the maze faster using the memory of the first rat. The thing that was extraordinary about it was not that they’d done that, but what was even crazier was the guy who was running the experiment said, “Listen, the thing you have to understand here is that we have not created web-telepathic rats. We haven’t made two rats talk to each other telepathically. What we’ve done is turn two rats into one rat with two bodies on a basic level.”

I was just blown away by that, because I generally try to keep my eye on this sort of concept of humanity-reshaping stuff that we are doing and that one had completely passed me by. I was ready for the idea that we could start to do proper brain machine interface and you can have proper prosthetic limbs, which would give feedback, directly moved by the brain rather than by a combination of muscle signals. I wasn’t ready for the idea that we could network two brains together, and in fact, I had thought that that kind of thing was much more difficult. So it turns out these guys have done it.

Now, there will be all kinds of stumbling blocks along the way, but ultimately what we’re talking about is the beginning of the possibility of getting inside someone else’s head and indeed merging two people together, which is a completely society-reshaping possibility. Whether we pursue it or not, how we deal with it and so on, those are the things that determine whether a science becomes a usable technology or whether it becomes a culture. The possibility is there for something completely extraordinary and you could walk from one end of my country to the other without finding, as far as I know, anything being written as a consequence of that.

I’m sure someone’s got it somewhere, and certainly outside of science fiction you’re not going to hear a mention of it, and the newspaper article that covered it, broadly speaking, began with “It sounds like science fiction but . . .”, which is media code for “hey, guess what, you can ignore this, but isn’t this a weird thing.” It’s a phrase that, if I ever became editor of a news organization, I would ban from use forever. You simply never get to say this anymore, because it’s a cultural tag or a coded rhetorical tag that just means “By all means, tune out. This isn’t actually that important.” It is, it always is, when something like that gets said, it’s always something very important.

I feel exactly the same way. They always say, “It sounds like science fiction,” the implication being it sounds like something crazy that could never happen, the implication being all science fiction is crazy stuff that could never happen, when in fact lots of it comes true.

Precisely. “This is this week’s episode of Star Trek, you may miss it, you may not.” I find that very bizarre, I really do. It seems to me that there’s a determined effort to ignore completely extraordinary things that are happening. It’s a very, very odd thing.

I would say you find people writing about it in science fiction. I think one thing that’s interesting is that you have authors like Cory Doctorow, Neal Stephenson, who are classically science fiction authors, but are actually writing about real life right now because real life has become so science fictional that you can write about things that are actually happening and it reads like science fiction.

Now, that’s quite interesting to me because, first of all, that’s fascinating, and I enjoy living in that world. I wouldn’t choose to live in any other time, although this is, in many ways, the best of times, the worst of times. But I find that very promising. It fills me with hope for the future that we’re doing this extraordinary stuff. I think we need to be in more control of our own genome, because otherwise the problems that we’ve created for ourselves with the industrial revolution period are just going to swamp us.

At the same time, I find it weird and a little bit worrying, because I have this shtick about spaceship fiction, that for a long time, a lot of science fiction was about spaceships because the future as we saw it was composed of hard science travel to other worlds. That was the next logical step. That was the Apollo program ethos, that this was the beginning of something. We were moving the planetary envelope and going out into space, and we didn’t do it. We got as far as the moon, then we decided to do something else for a while.

That kind of ethos was nonetheless driven by those incredible illustrations that NASA commissioned of orbital housing. Did you see those? They’re amazing. Great toruses, and they’re basically the suburbs in space, with the best view ever. People almost literally in a business suit with a goldfish bowl on their heads. It’s great stuff. But it kind of defined an era and then, when it didn’t happen, people got funny talking hopefully about science, and they got cautious and they got, “Well, we won’t be fooled again, we won’t fool ourselves again.” At the same time, science fiction carried right on ahead in spaceship fiction mode a lot of the time.

People continue to think about science fiction as being spaceship fiction, but as you say, as we get a more science fiction-feeling world, it gets harder and harder to pursue those shapes. They start to feel weirdly dated. Also, you have very valid and very problematic critiques, which basically say. “This is a kind of white, western European, male, hetero-patriarchal, fantasy of space colonization. It’s the West reenacted in space. Why are we still telling this story in 2014?”, which is not a very strong thing to be talking about.

So, through the combination of those things, you suddenly have a difficulty with that kind of fiction, which we should, but we’ve also pushed the science in many cases so far that everything that you could try as an alternative starts to feel familiar and reheated. How do you write science fiction in that environment? You either write about now or tomorrow, or you write about parallel worlds, or you have to come up with something that’s completely off the shelf, off the wall, or just completely nuts. And then that’s one of the boxes that I get into, is people start to say “Well, that’s not really science fiction because the science is absurd or the ‘what if’ question is completely ludicrous,” which, guilty as charged in many cases.

But a lot of real science is absurd.

That’s also true. Occam’s Razor is another of the things with which we have to contend, because it’s actually baseless. It’s an inductive reasoning trap.

The thing I get to from that is that we need science fiction that’s about biotechnological possibilities, that’s about the possibilities of consciousness, and all these things are being done, but there isn’t the same singularity of purpose. There isn’t the same sense of a drive to the stars, so people haven’t hoisted on board, quite, that science fiction is more than just spaceship fiction, and that it needs to be, maybe.

Incidentally, I love spaceship fiction. I mean good, solid spaceship fiction is fantastic, but I think it becomes increasingly problematic. You can see the problems with it in the extraordinary efforts that people who write good spaceship fiction are going to, to combine it with new societies and new ideas about impossible technologies.

Iain Banks, when he was alive, was writing Excession, about this extraordinary, high-tech culture encountering a culture whose technology it doesn’t understand, which is a potential extinction event. It could turn out to be the moment where they’re simply overmatched, and they’re like the guys on the small island when the great big sailing ship appears with the armed men on it. I think he says that an excession is the kind of thing that most cultures only encounter in much the same way that a sentence encounters a full stop. It is great stuff, but still and all, for me, I want to be pushing in directions that are not in that area and are unexpected, and that force you to recast your sense of what people are and what it means to be in the future. What the future looks like. It’s going to be more weird and more unexpected than that template would normally allow.

You mention Iain M. Banks, and he’s one of my favorite authors. They didn’t even use to sell him in the U.S. I didn’t even discover him until I did a study abroad in Ireland and like a third of the science fiction section there was Iain M. Banks.

The weird lack of crossover or the number of authors who are published here but not there or there but not here who are amazing is very, very strange. It bewilders me, who is and who is not published, transatlantic. Banks, absolutely. I’m always bewildered that Lois McMaster Bujold isn’t better known here, because I think she’s an extraordinary storyteller. Tim Powers, for a long time, was not published here or was published only quite quietly, and he’s an extraordinary writer as well.

We’ve interviewed Lois McMaster Bujold on the show. Tim Powers is definitely one of my favorite authors. How much involvement do you have with the science fiction community? Do you hang out with science fiction authors or go to science fiction conventions?

Mostly what I hang out with is my kids, because I’m the dad of two small children, three and one, so they eat up a lot of my time when I’m not writing. I’m naturally focused on them and my wife and my writing, almost an exclusion to everything else, but actually, I was at Nine Worlds on Friday, which is a wonderful fan convention here, and I’m at Worldcon on Monday, the eighteenth, basically talking about this. Talking about where science fiction waterfalls into the mainstream and vice versa. I have great fun.

I had the enormous pleasure of meeting Bill Gibson a while ago. Neuromancer was one of my formative books, and he’s one of the nicest men in the universe, which is always really nice when someone you admire turns out to be an incredibly nice person.

Actually, at some point in the next twenty-four hours, I have to book the table for lunch with a bunch of writers, so yes, I absolutely hang out, to the extent that I hang out with anybody. Those guys are on my list of people I hang out with, but I’m so constantly trying to claw back some time to write a book at the moment that I’m probably less sociable than I would be otherwise.

Just looking over your Twitter feed, it looks like you retweet John Scalzi a lot and you’ve contributed things to his Big Idea?

Absolutely. I have never met him in person, but I would really like to. He seems like a really nice guy. So that’s one of my excitements for the future, if I get to do that at some point.

Let’s talk a bit more about Tigerman. One thing I was wondering about is, there’s a scene early in the book where the main character makes an improvised grenade out of a biscuit tin. I was wondering if that’s possible, and if it is, how you discovered that that’s possible.

I was warned a long time ago about that being possible. Exactly how possible it is, I’m not sure. So the caution about explosive yield, which is in the book, is a caution that was given to me by my chemistry teacher when I was in school, and it’s true about a lot of powders with a very fine grain size—custard powder is one, pepper is another—that if you put a small amount of them in a box and shake it up and find a match, you get a big whompf.

It is a real, do-not-try-this-at-home moment, because you can get a real power of flame and if you’ve enclosed that, you get an explosion. I don’t know, to be honest, exactly how powerful that explosion would really be. I think, if you absolutely nailed the distribution and you added the trail of gunpowder, maybe you might get a seriously big bang. I just don’t know. But it’s one of the things where it’s sort of ridiculous enough to be plausible and I didn’t want to check it and mess it up. Certainly, you would get a respectable flash and a bang out of that. Whether you would get any serious percussive force, I don’t know.

That’s interesting. I know that your father is the famous spy thriller author John le Carré. I just imagined, growing up, that you guys just talked about garrote wires and poisons over the dinner table.

That’s a great idea! I wish we had. I don’t think he was ever that kind of spy. I think he was more the kind of “sit behind the desk and take reports from agents in the field.” He’s very reticent about exactly what he did. He asserts strongly that it wasn’t very much and that he was quite bad at it. So we have not done the seminar on custard powder explosives.

I have a tendency, with things like that, to work out something which is approximately possible under the right circumstances and just let it go, because the thing that I’m definitely not is a hard science guru. My scientific qualifications are relatively scant. I like science; I try really hard to educate myself about it, but in the end, if something has to go boom and it would probably only go whoosh, I am relatively unconcerned about that, which is a sin, but not, I think, a grave one.

I also saw you say in a video that your father’s father was a confidence trickster?

Yes, he was somewhat notorious for a little bit of professional trickery from time to time.

What sort of things did he do?

I’m not really supposed to answer that question anymore. His surviving family, apart from us, are getting a little bit tired of hearing about it, but he did some pretty colorful stuff. My advantage in this respect is, although he was still around when I was born, I don’t remember him as a person, so I have all the great stories about selling a bunch of unbreakable plates to a Greek wedding, which you can imagine didn’t go down very well. The reality of it was potentially a bit darker, but I just don’t know. I wasn’t there.

It just strikes me as interesting that novelists and confidence tricksters are two species of liar, in a way.

Of fiction-makers, yes. And more than that. As a novelist, your job is to persuade people of things they know aren’t true, and at the same time, to impart, in some ways, something that is. Under the heavy cover of darkness, you’re in the business of fiction, you’re in the business of storytelling. You’re not in the business of offloading great chunks of actual fact and forcing people to memorize them. There is an absolute similarity there. And plausibility—that definitely runs in my family. We’re all plausible and usually able to find an explanation for where we are when we shouldn’t be or something. That’s a comparison that always makes me giggle.

There’s a line in this book about how it’s hard to lie backward. Is that a thing?

That’s apparently true, but I got that off a TV show. This is one of those things I’m not even sure where it comes from exactly. My recollection is that in interrogation, it’s difficult to lie in reverse because you can’t keep the sequence of events straight, because you’ve imagined it rather than actually remembering it. The other thing though, which I suppose really mitigates against that, is that interrogators, as I understand it, one of the things they look for is stories that are too perfect, where people remember exactly the sequence of events and never change. When you’ve done that, it’s because you’ve memorized it. Normally, if someone’s telling a true story, they’ll go back and they’ll revise.

Novelists are always told to include all the telling details, but I’ve heard that that’s one sign that someone is lying to you, is if they’re trying too hard or if they’re including too much detail.

I think, in the name of being able to continue to lie convincingly, assuming that I ever could, I try to avoid information about how to sound plausible, because I think the more test-conscious you become, the more obvious your deceptions become.

As a matter of reality, when you’re writing, it’s always about sleight of hand. You include just enough detail that people start to fill in the rest for themselves and then they think that you’ve described something perfectly, whereas what you’ve actually done is indicate. You’ve drawn a vector drawing and they’ve then filled in the colors and the surfaces on it.

I have to do that a lot, because I tend to pick things which are impossibly difficult to describe. Like the state of mind of being a genius, which is not something into which I have insight. What you have to do for that, particularly a mathematical genius, is to—my arithmetic is poor, my math is completely untested because I never got passed arithmetic stage at school. I have the qualification that you take when you’re sixteen that you have no choice but to take it. I have that in math but nothing else, and everything to that point is just brute calculation, you don’t get to do any proper mathematics. So, in any case, I have no grip, as a matter of personal experience, on what it’s like to be brilliant with numbers, but I read G. H. Hardy’s book, A Mathematician’s Apology, which is absolutely fantastic, and the first thing that I realized was this was an account of a creative life. The fact that this guy worked with numbers and I worked with words does not alter the fact that everything he says really about the experience of being G. H. Hardy is very familiar to me from being me, in terms of work and how you feel about it.

That was very nice, but then specifically in terms of numbers, what I did with Angelmaker and the brilliant mathematician in Angelmaker was just keep telling everybody that she was brilliant and then give her an insoluble mathematical problem and she solves it. If you balance the emotional flow and the action right, when she does something that feels impossible, instead of saying “Well, that’s just impossible,” people go, “Well, of course it’s impossible, except that it’s not impossible, just really, really hard, and she’s a genius, so she’s done it.” Then they believe and they invest more and more in the idea that she’s brilliant, and then she becomes effectively magic, which is great. That’s exactly what you want. If you start trying to write down a clear account of the thought process in her head, first of all, you have to be a genius or go find someone, and second of all, you have to be a genius to understand it, and so the novel’s going to get slightly derailed while everyone goes running off to try and look up what the hell that paragraph was about.

Actually, I had exactly the same experience. I had read Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and the character, he’s good at blowing up bridges. In my head, I remember that there was a lot of detail about how to blow up bridges, and then I went back and analyzed it, and there’s almost no detail on how to blow up bridges, but there’s a lot of detail about how it feels to have the confidence that you know how to blow up a bridge.

That’s the gig. For me, it’s the same with action sequences. I have a better understanding of action sequences because I have this early, incompetent, but nonetheless comprehensive martial arts education, and so I know what the body mechanics feel like, and I know what the crucial point of any sort of physical exchange is going to be. I know where the moment is when one person takes the other person’s momentum away from them or moves their center of gravity somewhere they didn’t want it to be. I understand how that works. I just can’t do any of it.

I don’t really bother to tell you the terribly exciting flurry of blows, which in a movie would look really great but on a page is just dull, but I do tell you about the crucial moment where the person who is grabbing you by the wrist is suddenly the person who is now flying through the air and how that feels, and people respond to that. They get very excited by the action sequence. It’s not exactly a piece of sleight of hand, but it’s the one detail you need, as opposed to the twenty or thirty that might look like a good idea but actually aren’t.

Speaking of hands, your author photo in this book . . . you have some writing on your hand?

I do. And it’s actually even relevant! That photograph was taken at the end of a festival a couple of years ago when I was writing Tigerman, and the text is, if I can remember, a reminder to me that there is a book called The Last Stand of the DNA Cowboys by Mick Farren, which had a passage about a seasonal madness that comes into play in a place where one of the characters is living, and I wanted to go back and reread that to remind me about the effect of geography and seasonal shift on mood.

When I went back and reread it is exactly what we’ve just been talking about. It has very little of that in there. It just happens, and it’s really affecting, and it’s powerful because it’s very well done. And then there was also a note to reread Ned Beauman’s book The Teleportation Accident, which is absolutely fantastic. It’s completely nuts. It’s basically this incredibly long science fiction shaggy dog story with some of the funniest, goofiest passages in it. You’ve got to take a good solid run at it, because it’s quite densely written. Ned’s a very, very good writer. He’s irritatingly talented and young. He drives me crazy. He’s also really nice, which makes it worse.

But if you want to get into it, it’s this goofy, strange, disturbed story about a guy who is basically a kind of slacker party society guy in Berlin, who’s also a theater designer rebuilding this extraordinary theatrical mechanism. It gets stranger and stranger as it goes on, there’s a kind of Lovecraft aspect to it, which is very small, but then there is another science fiction aspect about actual teleportation, which is strange again.

The whole thing is incredibly amusing, and when it gets to the very far end, the last couple of pages delivered a punch line I did not see coming that made me laugh a lot. I think it’s a great book, and I can’t even remember what it was, but I wanted so much to reread and reference it in Tigerman. Obviously I must have done it, because I finished the book and it was okay. So there’s some notes on my hand. It’s a genuine part of the process, although these days I tend to use Evernote rather more and the back of my hand rather less.

Just beneath that, your bio says that your wife is a human rights lawyer?

She is.

You mentioned there is all this stuff in the book about the Fleet and all the human rights abuses they’re doing. Was that influenced at all by hearing her talk about stuff she’s working on?

Absolutely. There is this extraordinary thing that is happening at the moment, where it’s possible that we’ll get some clarity on what did and did not happen on the island, and is not happening on the island of Diego Garcia, which is being subjected in the newspapers here at the moment as the possible sight of a black detention facility.

When I was writing Tigerman, Diego Garcia was in my head, having been on the news relatively recently because of the tangle the British government gets itself into every time Diego Garcia comes up, because the legal status of rendition in the UK is pretty clear cut. It’s basically not allowed. So if a rendition flight touches down in the UK, that’s a big deal for our government, because it means that they’re breaking the law, as far as I can see, anyway.

So every time that Diego Garcia comes up, there is a whole thing that happens and they go nuts about it. They got themselves into a tangle in 2004, 2006, and again in 2008. That was all very much in my mind. Then it went away for a while, and then, almost to compensate—due to the fact that the Ukraine just went into total catastrophe, and I had Ukrainian characters who made no mention of it, instead of getting that right—I got this Diego Garcia thing back in the news.

The great thing that right now I’m really treasuring, in that kind of horrified, I-can’t-believe-this-is-the-planet-I-live-on kind of way, is that, as far as I know, the British government is currently maintaining that the crucial documents to a case that involves Diego Garcia were damaged in water damage in the archives of Diego Garcia in June 2014. It was an unusually but not ridiculously dry month in Diego Garcia. It’s one of those things where you’re like, “Okay, well, we’re just never going to know. You’re just not going to tell us, so whatever.”

One thing we were talking about in the last episode was how the climate for writing spy thrillers has been changed by Edward Snowden and all the revelations that have come out about all these horrible things our governments are doing. How does that affect your ability to write a spy thriller, when people are so suspicious of the “good guys?”

Tigerman isn’t really a spy thriller. It has an espionage angle. Actually more than that, it has a geopolitics angle; it doesn’t really have an espionage angle. So I haven’t had to go there. There’s an awareness of the possibility of surveillance in the book, but it’s quite lightweight.

One of the things that happens is, the way that the Sergeant and the boy first end up talking to one another is that they both take the batteries out of their mobile phones. They both have a habit of doing that. So there’s an awareness of that there. For me, it’s not a problem.

It’s, again, this thing about technology and the intrusion of our awareness of it into the conventional shapes of a spy thriller, because the U.S. in particular, but also, as it turns out, the UK, pours money into technological analysis of signals. A lot of stuff, we just decode it. We get it and we break it, or we do it with data. The other slightly terrifying thing about the drone program is that it seems to be that metadata is enough to get you drones now, which is slightly alarming. For me, it’s not a problem, it’s how the world is, but I can see if you’re writing a more conventional espionage, to those it’s a serious problem because it changes stuff, but I don’t think it shuts down those stories. You just have to be a little more complex about it.

I also wanted to ask you about this book you wrote a few years ago called The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World. I’ve only read the description of it, but it says that you talk about how we risk living in a world which is designed to serve computers and corporations rather than people. Could you expand on that?

The point about The Blind Giant was it wasn’t supposed to be, as it were, a technology-heavy book about technology, so it wasn’t supposed to go out of date as quickly as it would if it was mentioning specific implementations of technology. It was more about the human aspect, how we deal with our technology, how we interface with it, and where technology becomes a cultural influence.

The business about building a world that’s actually intended for computers and corporations is perfectly pointed out if you’ve read Flash Boys, which is a wonderful read, the new Michael Lewis book about algorithmic trading and what happened there. That’s an absolutely fantastic read. The meat of it is, basically, it seems that for a period of a couple of years, maybe, the infrastructure of trading was reconfigured to favor a new model and almost no one knew.

So traditional brokers were at a massive disadvantage and they were losing really large sums of money per year because their own software, or the way that the trading system was laid out, was putting them at a disadvantage. That was partly about the construction of fast pipe between exchanges. I don’t want to get into it, because I don’t want to spoil it and also because I don’t want to say something someone could sue me for, but the book is a perfect example of that.

If you take the automobile as an example, imagine that today, a bunch of aliens dropped down from the sky and they say, “We’ll give you much, much faster transportation, personal transportation, but we’ll also just kill a certain number of you a year randomly. We’re giving you the teleporter device, but it’s only 99% reliable. Sometimes you just get vaporized. And by the way, you’re going to have to build rivers through your major cities of this foreign chemical that will kill you if you touch it.” Would you take the technology? No, but that’s the automobile. That’s exactly what we’ve done.

We’ve already reconfigured our world to make parts of it hostile to human life and useful for machines, and we’re doing the same thing with various bits of digital technology. The question is not, “Oh my god, how do we stop this from happening?” because it’s going to happen. The question is, “How do we constrain it? How do we make it serve us rather than creating systems that are basically born in the ring-bindered DNA,” as Neal Stephenson would call it, “of false corporate culture?” because big corporations are not always the best decision-makers for people on the ground. You see that in the fracking situation and governments likewise.

I find politics increasingly depressing, but that may just be an aspect of being forty.

One of the craziest things I’ve heard along the lines you were saying is I read about this proposal to create a line of hovering drones across the ocean in order to transmit stock market orders a fraction of a second earlier.

That’s the kind of thing that they deal with in Flash Boys. If the end point of the Flash Boys narrative is accurate, I think the impetus to do that may have faded away, but that’s also partly maybe because I didn’t properly understand the mechanisms of that kind of trading. What I do think is that it’s one of the areas in our financial world where we need to look very hard at what we are evolving. It seems to me that a lot of stuff, in finance, particularly, is emergent.

It will come along and if someone doesn’t really think about it and just starts doing it, they may make a lot of money and then that may crash the rest of the market, and we’re all back in 2007 wondering where all the money has gone. Actually, we don’t have to live like that anymore. We can say, “Okay, guess what, we are choosing this particular version of the game. We are not choosing your game because it will blow everything up, so stand down that way of doing business.”

I also wanted to ask you about this thing you said. You said, “A corporation is not a person unless I can punch it in the face for being a jackass.”

Seriously. Obviously, I’m not going to go around punching people in the face. That’s not really my thing, but the statement of personhood, unless the more mature version of that statement is actually something that I think John Scalzi may even had said on his blog, is that a corporation is not a person until and unless it can go to prison.

If a person commits murder, or even what we would call manslaughter, they can go to prison for that. Certainly we wouldn’t consider it an adequate punishment to fine them, say, a fifth of their income. That’s not acceptable. If you want a corporation to be a person, if they’re going to have the kind of rights of personhood that they are being accorded, particularly in the U.S., it seems to me that they also have to have the risk that goes with that. If you get caught doing something very bad, you can go to prison for the rest of your life. In a corporate sense, I don’t know what exactly what that would mean, but some states still have the death penalty, (which, as an aside, I’m not in favor of,) but if you’re in a state with the death penalty and you’re operating as a corporation and kill someone, I guess you should get the corporate electric chair and should just cease to exist as a corporation.

If you’re going to follow that metaphor in that direction, that’s where it takes it. I was being a little frivolous, so I said a corporation’s not a person until I can punch it in the face, which is, as I said, the cheeky version of all that rather more sophisticated stuff.

Do want to tell us about the next book you’re working on? I hear it has six main characters, alchemy, semiotics, time travel, and Greek politics?

So it would seem. I have a history of biting off more than I can chew because it’s kind of the only way I can feel the momentum increasing as I write. This is very much that. It started out with five characters, which I figured was enough, and then, in order to deal with one of the characters, I realized I had to have another one. There’s an issue about who is actually the truthful narrator, if any of them are, and there’s a whole host, as you see, of different characters.

It begins with a woman under interrogation, and we’re seeing directly into her head. There’s a kind of surveillance state issue there. We talked earlier about the networked rats, so I am writing about that. Then we’re also dealing with a woman in the far past, a somewhat genderless entity in the far future, a Greek banker, and an Ethiopian painter. They are all looking for something that may or may not be the same thing and suffering from a problem that may or may not be the same problem. I’m a little bit daunted by it, but at the same time really enjoying it.

As long as it has time travel in there.

There is mysticism, time travel, various different iterations of the possibility of magic and science. I’m hoping it’s really going to blow people’s socks off. I’m halfway through the book. You can only ever be as sure as you are through the book. When I’m sixty percent of the way through the book, I’ll be sixty percent sure it’s going to be okay. Right now, I’m sitting here holding all the pieces and staring at them on the ground, thinking, “Oh my god, what have I done? Why did I not just write something very simple?” It seems to be it’s not in me to do that.

It sounds great. Nick, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is hosted by David Barr Kirtley. Dave 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: Charles Stross

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Today we’ve got an interview with award-winning science fiction author Charles Stross. His latest book, The Rhesus Chart, is the fifth volume in The Laundry Files, a series that blends spy thrillers, Lovecraftian horror, and workplace humor.

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 The Rhesus Chart, and it’s the fifth book in the Laundry Files series. Why don’t you tell us a bit about the basic premise of the series?

Sure. The basic premise of the series is sort of a mash-up. It’s a humorous horror subsection spy thriller, where the British Secret Service are protecting us from Cthulhu and the Old Ones and other Lovecraftian horrors from beyond space-time. Part of its premise is that magic exists but is essentially a branch of applied mathematics. If you solve the right theorem, creatures elsewhere in the multiverse will hear and possibly obey, giving rise to a field known by its practitioners as applied computational demonology.

How did you first get the idea to combine spy thrillers and Lovecraftian horror?

Let me rewind to 1992, when I began writing a short story entitled “A Colder War,” which eventually surfaced in print around 1998. It’s one of the longest stories I’ve ever written. Now, “A Colder War” started when I was looking at At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft, which had some moments of sublime horror in it. It’s one of his classic stories.

However, Lovecraft’s horror has very much been devalued in recent decades. It’s reached a point where we have plush Cthulhu dolls and bedroom slippers, where it’s suitable subject matter for jokes or for comics. It lacks the level of cosmic horror it originally came with.

In 1992, shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed, I was trying to think: How do you put the horror back into H.P. Lovecraft? And I suddenly realized, you mate it with something that truly is horrifying. 1992 was just after the end of the Cold War, and if you were alive back then, you lived with the ever-present knowledge that vast intelligences thousands of miles away might at any moment be making decisions that would unleash the power of a thousand suns—basically, melt the skin from your face, and kill everybody around you, and destroy everything you hold dear, for entirely abstract reasons relating to an ideological struggle that never really touches you directly. There was something really terrifying about the Cold War that traumatized the generations that lived through it.

In “A Colder War,” I positioned it as a sort of a sequel to At the Mountains of Madness, in which a vast alien city is discovered, abandoned, in the Antarctic. I posited that, if this had actually happened, over the next decade or so, there would have been first an archeological race and then an arms race, as various global powers sought to steal alien supertechnology, the tools of an extinct race, and put them to use as weapons.

One thing leads to another, and it doesn’t end well. World War Three breaks out, Cthulhu himself is deployed as a weapon from the crypt in the Urals, everybody dies horribly, or worse, wishes they could die. This worked really, really well as a horror story. It’s still anthologized to this day on a regular basis. But, while I wanted to do more with this idea, I couldn’t do it in that particular setting. It was too dark.

Now, if you’re dealing with horror, one way of getting around the idea of it being horrifying—the subject material—is to add some snarky humor to it. We’ve noticed, for example, Jim Butcher do it with the Harry Dresden books. What I was doing with The Laundry Files was, I decided to go at it with situational humor. You take a setting, in this case, a somewhat grungy, down-at-heels, peeling-paint British government agency, dealing with something obscure and quite terrifying, and parachute into it somebody who is totally inappropriate, utterly unsuited to that sort of office culture.

In this case, Bob Howard is sort of a sandal-wearing, slashdot-reading hacker-geek, circa late-1990s dot-com startup culture. He’s been conscripted, effectively, into a branch of the British Secret Service protecting us from the scum of the multiverse. Almost a Men In Black scenario, except very, very different, in MacGuffin, as to what is going on and how it’s run.

He’s flailing around, gradually trying to figure out what is going on and what his role is in all this, as he becomes aware that the shadows are lengthening and some very, very nasty things are on their way to make life hellish all around for everybody.

A large part of the plot armature that the series revolves around is an eventuality that the British government had codenamed “Case Nightmare Green.” The stars are coming into correct alignment for the return of the Elder Gods—H.P. Lovecraft’s alien super-civilization of eons past, who previously owned and occupied this planet and are now returning, and will drive us all insane or kill us, or just sweep us from their halls like the vermin we are. The Laundry’s job is to defend the realm, keep the public from becoming too panicked over what’s going on, and try to find a solution to what is probably the end of the world that is heading towards them like the onrushing lights of a train at the end of a tunnel.

I first became acquainted with your work through your Accelerando stories, which go from before the singularity to after the singularity, and tell what it’s like to live through that period. And it occurred to me, with The Laundry Files, it seems like a similar thing, with the Cthulhu reign, where it seems like, with Case Nightmare Green, this is going to be a story that starts out before Cthulhu comes and ends after Cthulhu has come. Do you see any similarities there?

Quite possibly. The key similarity here is they’re both science fiction, and they’re both written in that form of science fiction that is the literature of disruption. In many forms of literature, it’s against a setting which is essentially unchanged, but a story—your classic “Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl” story in any random genre, be it romance, or historical, or just a mainstream novel—doesn’t necessarily change the universe it’s set in, whereas, there’s a particular flavor of science fiction where nothing is ever the same after the climax of the story that is narrated within it.

The Lord of the Rings is a classic example of fantasy literature where there is this return to the status quo ante after the huge events. My way of thinking is: Much of science fiction assumes that there will never be a return to status quo ante after the events of the story. There is that in common between Accelerando and The Laundry Series. Although I am still quite a long way from getting to the end of The Laundry Series, and I’m not sure whether it’s technically the same genre as Accelerando. I do more than one type of fiction, and it does actually feel very different to me.

Did you plot out the whole series ahead of time? At what stage did you plot out the various books, and how far ahead are you currently plotted?

When I began writing it, circa 1999, I wrote a short novel called Atrocity Archive. Around 2000, I acquired a literary agent and sold my first novel, Singularity Sky, which came out from Ace in 2003. My agent and I were getting to know each other and I sent her the Accelerando stories and I also sent her Atrocity Archive. And her immediate reaction to Atrocity Archive was, “This is great fun, but it’s commercially not viable. It’s impossible to sell. Nobody will publish it. They won’t know what genre it is, to begin with. Is it horror? Is it humor? Is it a spy thriller? Is it SF? Is it fantasy?” So, for a while, it looked like it wasn’t actually going to be published at all. I managed to get it serialized in a short-lived, obscure Scottish SF magazine around 2002.

In 2003, a small American publisher, Golden Griffin, approached me for a book, and they wanted a bit more than just this short novel. So, I had a novella called “The Concrete Jungle,” and they published them together as The Atrocity Archives, the first book in the series. It looked for a while as if it was just going to be a one-off.

Then, something really, really weird happened. “The Concrete Jungle” got short-listed for a Hugo award. And then it won a Hugo award. Now, when that happened, my agent got interested suddenly and realized that there was a market for this. So we sorted out a deal whereby I would write a sequel to it. From there, it sort of snowballed.

Now, when you’ve written a paranormal spy thriller in the style of Len Deighton, if you want to do a sequel, there’s only one place to go, and that’s Ian Fleming. And I’m afraid I burned my brain out on Bond movies. I went through them back-to-back—about sixteen of them in four weeks—also rereading a bunch of the Bond novels and biographies of Ian Fleming. I actually had flow charts of the structure of the opening sequence in each Bond movie. At this point, I sort of dropped Case Nightmare Green in as a throwaway in “The Concrete Jungle,” the second novella of the series. I gradually began realizing that there has to be more than this.

So, the next book deal out, there’s a contract with another Laundry novel in it, and that one begins to riff off Case Nightmare Green explicitly. That was The Fuller Memorandum. By the time I’d got through The Fuller Memorandum, I knew what the next novel would be. By the time I got through The Apocalypse Codex, I knew a fair bit about The Rhesus Chart, and I’m now actually plotting about three or four books ahead. With an overall backbone to the series of, maybe, eight or nine central novels and a number of side branches off the tree, which, for something that was originally going to be a short novel on its own, and then at best maybe a trilogy, has just been growing.

What have been some of the challenges you’ve faced along the way? I saw you posted on your Reddit Ask Me Anything—you said “I was staring down the barrel of a gun loaded with ‘How about we just cancel the series right now?’ and the quickest way to dodge the bullet was to write the next novel a year early.

Well, that’s one way to dodge the bullet. The reason for that cancellation was because, being a bit burned out at the time, I decided I needed a year away from having to write a novel. I’d been trying to write two novels a year for several years, and you will just burn out if you try and do that.

So, I brought together a short story collection called Wireless, and, as with any short story collection, the readers who’ve already read all your stories need an added incentive to look at it. So I sat down and began writing a novella, which was titled “Palimpsest,” about the time patrol police, because I hadn’t read a good time patrol novella in years and thought, “Well, hey! Nobody’s doing it, so why don’t I?” Anyway, because this was the one story in the collection that hadn’t been sold before, or published, or edited, I thought I should run it past my agent. Her reaction to it was pretty much electric. She said, “This is brilliant! It’s the first part of a novel. How about you write the rest of this novel, and I can send it in instead of that Laundry novel you were going to write, and you can cancel it?” And that’s when I sat down and wrote the Laundry novel in four weeks—four weeks at fourteen hours a day—because at that point I realized I was committed to the series. I hadn’t quite realized how serious I was about it before. And the irony is, “Palimpsest” won a Hugo award as well, and, sooner or later, I’m actually going to finish the novel of which it’s the first third. There’s another timeline in which I did finish the novel of “Palimpsest,” and the other Laundry novel never got written.

That brings us to the newest Laundry novel, which is The Rhesus Chart. Do you want to tell us about that?

Sure. I got bored doing tribute novels to British spy thriller authors. I’d gone through Len Deighton and Ian Fleming, Anthony Price and Peter O’Donnell, and I decided it was time to actually stop going after individual authors and go after themes. So, the next few Laundry novels are all about urban fantasy subgenres.

I’ve done a novella about unicorns—that’s “Equoid,” which is on the Hugo shortlist. The Rhesus Chart is a vampire novel. By way of background, I should mention that our narrator, Bob, is married. He’s about fortyish at this point in the series. He’s been aging one year for every year through the course of writing the books. And he’s married to Mo—Dominique O’Brian—whose job description is Combat Epistemologist. They’re out having dinner at a restaurant, and the book opens “‘Don’t be silly, Bob,’ said Mo, ‘Everybody knows vampires don’t exist.’” Well, yeah, you might think everybody knows vampires don’t exist, and we can be pretty sure they don’t—we don’t see big piles of dead bodies everywhere. But if vampires don’t exist, why are we all so certain they don’t exist? Could it be that there are vampires, there’s just very, very few of them and they’re very, very careful about covering up their tracks? The premise of The Rhesus Chart is, in the universe of the Laundry novels, there are various very, very quiet supernatural beings doing their best to keep out of the public gaze. Everybody around Bob is so convinced that vampires don’t exist, that Bob, being a contrarian, decides to go and prove that they don’t exist, or at least, set up an experiment whereby he will get five sigma accuracy to lack of signal for vampires. And, much to his surprise and gradual horror, he discovers that, unfortunately, he’s wrong.

It’s funny, because, in this book, Bob gets assigned—he has to do research on vampires, which consists of reading Brian Lumley, Anne Rice, Jim Butcher, and Laurell K. Hamilton. What’s your take on the state of vampire fiction, and those authors in particular?

Well, it did come out of a certain creeping affection, but the thing is, there’s been such a huge boom in vampire fiction. Now, it’s probably unfair for me to single them out, because . . . Let me rewind a little bit. Arguably, the modern vampire book dates to the late 1970s, An Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice. That was a classic of its form. Prior to that, there were isolated vampire novels, things like Salem’s Lot by Steven King, but they’re all very much in the tradition of a vampire as the adversary or monster. Interview with a Vampire was arguably the first one to get under the vampire’s skin and use the vampire as a sympathetic protagonist.

Then, we move forward a decade, and Laurell K. Hamilton pretty much single-handedly drags the vampire story, kicking and screaming, into what is now recognizable as the subgenre of paranormal romance. Here, the psycho-sexual symbolism of a vampire is changed, and rather than being a metaphor for disease or for rape, it’s used as a vehicle for exploring issues of consent, domination, and BDSM practices.

I decided to go in an entirely different direction in the Laundry books, which is epidemiology and parasitology. Although, to be fair, a similar field is being plowed by Mira Grant, or Seanan McGuire, as she’s really called, who’s been doing zombies and is now doing other parasites as a horror format, using much the same approach—let’s look at it from a medical standpoint . . . What was the question again?

Just Brian Lumley, Laurell K. Hamilton, Jim Butcher.

Yeah. The reason these authors get mentioned explicitly in The Rhesus Chart is because Bob has just been assigned a bunch of background reading by a committee, because, let’s face it, the first thing a civil service department does on discovering a hitherto unstudied phenomenon is establish a committee to investigate it, determine what is known about it, set standards for dealing with it. And, of course, vampires don’t exist, everybody knows vampires don’t exist, everybody is absolutely certain vampires don’t exist, and the people on the committee . . . Bob is the only one on the committee cleared for knowledge that vampires do, in fact, exist. It is considered secret at this point, and the others don’t take it terribly seriously, including the chair of the committee, who assigns him his reading matter, his homework, mostly to shut him up.

One thing that I thought was interesting about this book is that vampirism is not spread by being bitten or something like that, but by an epiphany, or something that you come to understand.

Actually, that’s a side effect of the way magic works in the Laundry universe. In this instance, I mentioned magic is a branch of mathematics. There are some people who are very talented practitioners or very effective mathematicians, who can actually carry out magical operations in their brains.

Most people, Bob included, usually go about it using a computer and setting up various bits of software applications to do the job for them. You really don’t want to go around messing with the apps on Bob’s smartphone if it falls into your possession. But in the case of the vampires in The Rhesus Chart, they’re part of a fairly high-powered programming scheme working on high-frequency trading algorithms within an investment bank. One of their members comes across an interesting visualization tool.

Now, I mentioned there are Lovecraftian horrors in this series. There’s a whole bunch of creatures out there who love nothing better than to chow down on an unprotected human brain. Think the wrong thoughts, and you can attract them. Vampirism is not so much an epiphany as something that latches onto you after you experience that epiphany. Let’s just say, vampirism is a particularly parasitic disease. Most sane people who succumb to vampirism just kill themselves, which is one reason why everyone knows vampires don’t exist. The only people who are willing to be a vampire and stay with the deal are pretty much psychopaths.

Speaking of that, there’s a character in this book, Oscar, who’s a corporate guy. He’s described as being an “apex predator sociopath.” I thought it was really interesting—I’ve heard you talk about how you predicted, in your Halting State series, that corporations would start intentionally recruiting sociopaths to work for them, and that actually has started to happen.

Well, I wouldn’t take Oscar too seriously, but I was doing a bit of reading at the time about the sociology of the high-end investment banking culture in the city of London, and it’s really quite terrifying. These are not people who should be trusted with a pair of scissors, frankly. Personality-wise, they’re very, very driven, very, very competitive, reasonably bright, fairly well-socialized for men brought up in a single-sex boarding school culture. They’re shoved into a pressure cooker, and they’re set to play a game for sixteen hours a day where the point scoring system they get is measured in how many millions of pounds their bonus payment is. And these people are running our economy! They’ve got so much money floating around the hedge funds that they operate that governments provide them with the playing field they desire, because they’re too terrified of scaring them away. Currently, the British revenue base—we still have an industrial sector, we still make satellites and cars and all sorts of stuff, but the investment banking sector accounts for a bigger share of GDP than manufacturing. I believe it’s the same in the United States. There is something very, very wrong when what is essentially a parasitic function, namely investment, becomes the largest component of the economy. And we’re back to parasites again.

In terms of evil business practices, there’s this really funny line in the book about how Bob doesn’t want to use a Kindle, because he says there are scary implications—darker, esoteric implications—to spending too much time staring at a device controlled by a secretive billionaire in Seattle.

Well, yeah. Don’t get me started on Amazon. I’m a novelist. I’m published by Hachette. My books have been blocked and blacklisted by Amazon on multiple occasions. I’m not bitter. I just got my own back in fiction.

But people could go check out your blog post, “Amazon: Malignant Monopoly or Just Plain Evil?”

Absolutely. Also, I did a blog entry a couple of years back on understanding or deconstructing Amazon’s business model. Most people are a bit wonkish about the economics of how it works and what Amazon is trying to accomplish. Let’s just say, they want to be a monopoly as much as Google or Facebook want to be a monopoly, and if they get their way, it’s going to be a pretty scary contingency, because the internet as we know it will no longer exist.

Since these are spy thriller books, I think one of the biggest things you have to take into consideration is the Edward Snowden case and all the revelations that have come out about the NSA spying on citizens. How has that affected the ecosystem for writing spy thriller novels?

It’s probably having a deeply insidious effect. It will take longer to work its way though than the collapse of the Soviet Union, but be even more shattering. For a couple of years after 1989, there were a queue of already-sold techno-thrillers of the plot about World War Three in Europe through the Soviet Union and NATO. You can just see the authors tearing their hair out as the books come rolling out two years after the Warsaw Pact collapsed. You can imagine how their sales stunk. I think we may be seeing a much more subtle effect on the spy thriller today from the Snowden revelations.

What has happened is a massively eroded public faith in not merely the ability to function of the security services, but their very reason for existing. Now, I began writing the Laundry series in 1999, and back then, the whole Snowden thing wasn’t even on the radar, nor was 9/11 on the radar. In mid 2001, I handed the manuscript of The Atrocity Archives to my editor at this small, Scottish SF magazine, Spectrum SF, and he worked on editing it, and then in November 2001, I got an email from him, saying, “You know, Charlie, I know you’re looking for a bunch of mad terrorists who are going to attack the United States and summon up something really horrible in Santa Cruz, California, but do you think you could find somebody a bit more obscure than Osama Bin Ladin and Al Qaeda?” I’d gone looking for crazies who were likely to attack the United States in 1999, and who was at the top of the list but Al Qaeda? And yet, it was totally unforeseeable that two years later they would be so well recognized and infamous everywhere.

The same sort of thing has happened with the Snowden revelations, and confirmation of what a lot of people suspected all along about the scope of bugging by the NSA, or their British equivalent, the GCHQ. This stuff has been suspected by professional paranoids for decades. It’s just that it’s now coming out in the public domain, and everybody’s seeing smoking guns on every mantelpiece and seeing confirmation. Now, I’m not sure how to actually address this in the Laundry series yet—I’m still digesting it. What I can say is I’m working on a different near-future techno-thriller/spy-thriller trilogy set in my Merchant Princes universe, with publication in about a year to eighteen months, that is my definitive post-Edward Snowden spy thriller, but that’s not really the subject of this podcast interview.

Actually, I do want to talk about those books a little bit, but before we get to that, on this subject, you had a blog post about why there won’t be a third Halting State book, because stuff you were predicting keeps coming true.

Not so much “it keeps coming true.” The real reason there isn’t going to be one now—oh, okay. Shortly after I wrote that blog entry, I had a blinding flash of light, a moment of revelation, and the plot for the third Halting State book landed in my brain. So much for saying “I’m not gonna write one.”

However, there’s a different reason for not writing one at present, which is what I describe to people as the Scottish Political Singularity. At this point, Scotland is going through a political singularity. So, the current Halting State will basically be shelved for a couple of years, until the dust has settled.

You previously had to shelve a concept for a third Halting State book because it turned out the NSA was spying on World of Warcraft players.

No, not quite. What happened was I postponed the second book in the series for a year in a half, because I was about to start writing in 2007, when the banking system went crazy. The original plot for that novel, which came out of Rule 34, it was originally going to be titled 419 and it was about the world’s largest Nigerian advanced defraud. A bunch of scammers were basically going to steal from the World Bank, the European Union, the US Treasury—a sum roughly on the order of $20–$30 billion—by faking the existence of an entire central Asian republic.

Then, the banking system goes sideways and from the wreckage crawls Bernie Madoff, and everybody wants to know where the $50 billion he’s stolen has gone. Bernie Madoff basically blew away that cloth. At that point, I just could not write that book anymore. A different one surfaced instead.

It is very, very difficult, trying to write plausible near-future science fiction, within fifteen years of the present day. The problem is that the world we live in is undergoing really weird convulsions every couple of years. Also, the near future . . . You’re going to recognize that it’s ninety percent intimately familiar. Ninety percent of the buildings are there—we’re living in them. Ninety percent of the cars are already on the road. Ninety percent of the people are alive. About nine percent of it is new, but predictable. We can look at various plans on file with city authorities—what skyscrapers are going up in the next couple of years. We can look at Intel’s road map to see where their chips are going to be in five years. And then there’s the one percent that nobody can predict, because it’s just too blindingly weird.

Nobody in 2000 was predicting 9/11. Nobody in 1990 was seriously predicting universal uptake of the World Wide Web. Everybody around 2004 was thinking smartphones were the way forward, but the idea that Apple would be the dominant player in that space, that they’d have these huge, high-resolution screens linked to the sum total of human knowledge, and that we’d be using them to watch silly cat videos—it would not make any kind of sense in any kind of realistic near-future prediction anyone could make. So, writing near-future SF has almost become a dying art. There’s very few people doing it these days. And, if I seem to falter or throw my hands up in despair every so often and just say “No, I can’t go there,” it’s because it is actually quite a hard game to do.

You mentioned that these upcoming Merchant Prince books are going to be your definitive statement—or at least, your latest statement—on the Edward Snowden situation. Do you want to talk about what the latest news is with that series?

The previous series was set in 2002 to 2003, and it started out . . . It was actually a bait-and-switch. It started out looking like a secondary world fantasy—a portal fantasy—where a person from our world finds themselves in a fantasy land and tried to make a path for themselves, only rather than playing it as fantasy, I played it as science fiction, particularly in the realist mode.

Our protagonist finds herself in a quasi-medieval setting, and does not particularly wish to succumb to the fate that is common to women living in a crapsack world medieval setting, so she tries to disrupt it. Unfortunately, she succeeds, and when you disrupt something, it has consequences, some of which are pretty damn unpleasant. By book six, or book three of the new, revised omnibus edition, large numbers of mushroom clouds are floating around, because one of the side-effects of economic disruption is she accidentally starts a couple of nuclear wars, by not realizing just how much is at stake.

Now, the new series picks up the thread about seventeen years later, in a couple of different timelines. On the one hand, we have the United States that was traumatized in 2003, when the Bush White House was nuked by extradimensional narco-terrorists. The Department of Homeland Security in this universe has pretty much turned the US into a police state. They’ve been given responsibility for protecting the nation from threats from all possible parallel universes, and we’re talking a level of surveillance in everyday life that is at least on a par with what you get in any given airline concourse these days. Don’t even ask what happens at airports.

And they are indeed becoming quite worried, because they know that the Merchant Princes, the narco-terrorists who can travel between timelines, some of them are still out there. They know there may be other civilizations out there. They’re afraid of what will happen if they make contact with another para-time-capable civilization who learn how they dealt with the first people they met, namely, lots of B-52s.

Over the course of this trilogy, the sum of all fears is going to happen. They’re gonna make contact with another para-time-capable North American superpower, only it’s not called The United States of America. I don’t want to give too much away about it, except that, well, post-Edward Snowden, it’s about the tension between omniscient surveillance and actual, real security, which is not the same thing at all.

Back in Episode Sixty-One, we interviewed Paul Krugman, and he really had a lot of great things to say about the economics in that series. Are the new books going to deal with economics, too, or is it going to be more to do with the politics and espionage sort of stuff?

There are economic issues in it, but they’re very much backgrounded. The problem is, I’ve spent so many years noodling around with the ideas of this series in my head that trying to cram everything into a trilogy of relatively short books—basically, something the size of a single Neal Stephenson doorstop—is forcing me to skimp on some of the fine details I worked out. On the other hand, we’ve got a term for that in science fiction, it’s called “Here. I’ve done all my homework. Now you can suffer for my art.” I’m not going to force the readers to suffer through it just for that.

When we interviewed Paul Krugman, he talked about how you did a panel together at WorldCon. I was curious if you’ve kept in touch at all or . . .

Not with any great frequency. We’ve seen each other occasionally, but that’s about it. He’s a very, very busy man, and I live somewhere that’s fairly remote in travel terms.

One thing that really interested me about the Merchant Princes series is the basic premise of characters who can walk between parallel worlds is sort of inspired by Roger Zelazny’s Amber series. I saw you say on Reddit that if you could hang out for a day with a deceased science fiction author, you would choose Roger Zelazny. It’s actually who I would choose as well. Could you say why that would be your choice?

Zelazny was a master stylist. He raised the bar for a lot of people trying to write science fiction in the late ‘60s to early ‘70s. He was still writing cutting-edge material right up to his untimely death due to lung cancer. He wasn’t very old when he died, and it just seems like missed opportunity to me. I did actually have an opportunity to do dinner with him once, for a convention committee in 1989, and didn’t make the effort to get to town at that time, and it was about six months later that he died of lung cancer. So there is an element of personal nostalgia there for roads not taken. But also, I believe he’d be quite a fascinating guy to talk to.

Just imagine what he would have to say about all the new media and the stuff that’s happened since 1996.

Well, for that, you’d have to posit he was keeping up to date on it. One thing to bear in mind is, by now, he’d be in his sixties to seventies, and, as Douglas Adams put it, “Any technology that existed when I was born has been there forever. Anything that comes along before you’re thirty-six is new and fascinating and important and useful. Anything invented after you’re thirty-six is new, incomprehensible, and annoying.”

There’s a Laundry pen-and-paper role-playing game. I was wondering what your experience with that has been. Have players told you stories about things that have happened to them in the game?

I try to keep it at arm’s length to some extent, because I believe it has developed some sort of subculture and fandom. I don’t want to run the risk of meddling in something that I don’t, myself, play, and disrupting other people’s scenarios or gameplay, and at the same time, I don’t want to run the risk of being accused of plagiarism from other people’s ideas. So, it’s something I try to keep a reasonable distance from. I stay in touch with Cubicle 7, who writes the games, to make sure that they’re up-to-date about what I’m planning with the series and where I’m going to take it, but I don’t want to tread on their toes too hard.

You did used to be pretty involved in role-playing games, right? I saw that you wrote some of the monsters for the Fiend Folio.

In my mid-teens. I haven’t really been a role-player since I was about twenty, and that’s more decades ago than I care to think about.

It said that you added the githyanki to the Fiend Folio, which was based on George R. R. Martin’s Dying of the Light novel.

That was actually a throwaway of his, as far as I can tell, in his first novel from the mid-seventies. You’re going back a long way, here.

Sorry, but what was the connection between his novel and the . . .

I basically took the name and ran with it for this species of extra-temporal alien horrors for Dungeons and Dragons back in the day. In the late seventies. I was looking for a name, and George R. R. Martin has always been pretty good with names.

But, you’re saying, in that novel it doesn’t really flesh out what they are—that you basically just took the name.

I took the name, yes, rather than any detail.

Speaking of George R. R. Martin, on Twitter, @nottimothy asks you, “How’s it feel playing George R. R. Martin with your characters?”

It feels good. Basically, when you have too many characters in a serious story arc, if you kill a whole bunch of them off, it does two things. Firstly, it makes your job as a writer much, much easier. You’ve got less stuff to keep track of. Secondly, it keeps the readers on their toes and emotionally engaged. They can never be too certain that the hero or heroine they’re rooting for is still going to be alive in the next book. Now, it’s a card you’ve got to play very carefully. Absolutely never kill off a major character without at least thinking through the consequences, and also how the readers will respond to it. But there are times when it is necessary in a series, and in particular—I shouldn’t give any spoilers away, but it would probably be fair to describe the climax of The Rhesus Chart as being the Laundry series’ Red Wedding.

We actually have a bunch of Twitter questions for you, not all of which I understand.

Okay.

This one is from Chip Salzenberg. He says, “Does Bob Howard use Perl?”

I think Bob Howard is recent enough to use Python instead. There’s your answer.

Okay. William @phenidone says, “Is Turing completeness a sufficient condition for possession? What about a Magic: the Gathering card deck? Cue Alanis Morissette.”

Yup. Turing completeness is sufficient, and thereon probably hangs another Laundry series story or two.

I’m not sure that this makes sense to people who haven’t read the books.

It probably doesn’t. The books have a very, very geeky audience.

Yeah. Well, I guess people will just have to read the books if they want to understand.

Something you haven’t mentioned at all in The Rhesus Chart is a really, really extended series of set piece jokes all about a programming/software engineering methodology called Scrum Programming, which I think most non-programmers have missed. Those people who’ve been involved in Scrum seem to read the whole thing rolling on the floor laughing.

Adam Shea asks—this might be a spoiler, I don’t know—“Is Howard still susceptible to K Syndrome, and is Howard still human, or is he more hungry ghost + meat puppet now?”

That’s a spoiler.

Yeah, I figured. Back in Episode 106, we interviewed Karl Schroeder. He was talking about all the potential applications of block chain technology—the technology behind bitcoin. I know that you wrote a very anti-bitcoin blog post, and I was just wondering if you were familiar with the kind of stuff that he was talking about, and what you think of it.

My position on bitcoin isn’t about crypto-currencies per se, or about the block chain technology. It’s about the ideology implicit in the way bitcoin has been implemented, which looks to me as if it was designed by Libertarians with the goal of undermining conventional currencies, which have an intimate, deep-rooted relationship with the nation-state itself. It looks like a system that was designed to corrode the primary economy, and, in many respects, make it difficult to tax. That’s the problem I’ve got with bitcoin. I am not, shall we say, an anti-statist anarchist.

Karl was talking about how smart contracts using the block-chain technology might be replacing lawyers within a matter of months. Do you have any opinions on that kind of thing?

I think that’s a little bit optimistic. I think that lawyers are going be here for a very long time to come. That’s not to say that they’re not being automated and their numbers are reduced in many ways. The demand for the individual numbers of lawyers is dropping like a stone, because a lot of the jobs that used to go to newly qualified lawyers—research jobs in law libraries—are now being automated thanks to searching. But that doesn’t mean that actual practicing lawyers who do stuff in court and deal in contracts are going away. The future of law is an interesting question.

How about the future of the Laundry Files series? I see the next two books are The Armageddon Score and The Nightmare Stacks. You want to tell us about those?

Change of title. It will be The Annihilation Score, and we still haven’t worked out the title for the seventh book. I probably shouldn’t say too much about them, except that they will be coming out next July and the July after. The series is going annual for now.

I guess someone needs to update Wikipedia on that one. Why did you change the title for The Armageddon Score?

Okay, this is going to sound really silly, but one of my editors is hip to search engine optimization and the web, and it turns out that if you google “Armageddon Score,” you come up with a lot of links to the soundtrack to a Bruce Willis movie. Unfortunately, Bruce Willis is probably more famous than I’ll ever be, so we decided the best way to avoid a namespace collision with Bruce Willis is not to go there to begin with. So, new title needed.

I’ve heard you say online what perspective those books are going to be written from. Is that something you want to talk about, or . . . ?

Oh yeah! All the Laundry book up until this point have been narrated by Bob, who is a famously unreliable narrator. He’s a bit self-serving, a bit self-deceiving. What Bob tells you is not necessarily true; it’s just the way Bob sees it. The next novel, The Annihilation Score, is going to be told by Mo, Bob’s wife of about a decade. Her view on Bob will hopefully be a bit of an eye-opener for those readers who’ve been taking what Bob says at face value. As for the novel after that, I shouldn’t say too much about it, except that my current plans are that it’ll be narrated by a guy called Alex, who shows up for the first time in The Rhesus Chart, and funnily enough, he’s the sort of guy who gets a really, really, really bad sunburn if he goes out without a burka in daylight.

That does it for the questions. Are there any new or upcoming projects or anything you want to mention?

Right now, no, because I am currently juggling finishing a Merchant Princes trilogy and two more Laundry novels. I’m taking a rain check on new projects until I’ve actually got these under control, although who knows what the future will bring?

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. Dave 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: Jeremy Wilson

Jeremy Wilson was born in 1986 in Manhattan. He received a BFA from the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts and a Masters Equivalency from Virginia Commonwealth University. He has done illustration work for trading cards and books, and concept work, as well as shown his original paintings in galleries. His clients have included companies such as Square Enix and Cryptozoic Entertainment. His work has been shown at the Allentown Art Museum and featured in Spectrum and the ARC Salon. He also teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University. He currently lives and works in Richmond, Virginia. His website is www.jeremywilsonart.com.

[To view the gallery, turn the page.]

Artist Spotlight: Jeremy Wilson

Henry Lien

Talk to us a little bit about your technique. Are all your works traditional oils?

All my work is oil. After graduating, I found myself a part of an art community that seemed predominantly digital. I began to experiment with digital with the intention of changing mediums until I went to Illuxcon for the first time in 2010. After seeing the community surrounding traditional work, I made the choice to put an emphasis on the traditional while still using the digital on the back end of production.

You have traditional fine art training and it shows in your technique. What are some of your influences from traditional painting? Am I correct in catching aromas of Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth?

Absolutely. All of the “golden age” illustrators like Pyle, Wyeth, and Cornwell have a major impact on me. I grew up around art. My father is an acclaimed gallery artist. I gained a lot from him concerning technique. Both he and I are also heavily influenced by John Singer Sargent. I have most recently been surrounded by some amazing editorial illustrators. Sterling Hundley has had a major influence on both my life and work.

There’s an interesting subtext of Orientalism in a lot of science fiction/fantasy illustration. While 18th- and 19th-century Orientalist painting was often used as propaganda for imperialism, to justify the conquering of other countries by depicting them as exotic and barbaric, the images also ended up captivating the public’s imagination by offering people views into alien and beautiful worlds. It seems like you are consciously trying to strike a balance between painting a view into an alien world and not exoticizing or objectifying it. This issue’s cover painting, Desert Guardians, is a great example. The warriors are women, but there aren’t boobs bursting out of iron bras. One face is unveiled and it is the face of a beautiful woman, but it is unveiled to show that these warriors are women, not for us to ogle her beauty, and the figure seems to be doing it to catch a moment of cool air. What are some of the considerations that go into gracefully negotiating between showing something strange and new and objectifying in an Orientalist manner?

I have always painted what attracts me in regard to aesthetic. Overt sexualization doesn’t fall into my aesthetic, unless it carries an air of elegance. I want to capture classical beauty and mystery through light. In regard to objectification, I strive to capture the same ideas regardless of sex. The “negotiating” is better described as a conversation I have with my characters and the intent of that dialogue. In my mind, my female characters are considerably deeper and richer in story development, regardless of their covering. They tend to be more deadly as well.

I think I see a lot of orbs occurring in your work. Is this a conscious motif in your work? Is there significance in it?

Again, this is simply aesthetic. The execution is very intentional, though the concept can be looser and more driven by instinct to balance the harshness and weight of my color scheme with visual appearances of shapes that are softer and a source of light. There is no specific symbol to the circle other than what it represents in the painting.

What’s your relationship to and opinion of digital science fiction/fantasy illustration?

I like all kinds of art, regardless of medium. There are some amazing digital artists whose level of work I’ll never achieve that I drool over. I find that ultimately it’s the quality that matters. So rather than point out shortcomings in mediums, I’ll ask you to consider our social interactions. We are a generation raised on shortcuts they tempt us daily. Entire business models are built on shortcuts. Pop culture has reduced the hard work behind success into a montage. Interactions in the art world are cold and numerous, emails and subscriptions are the “preferred” contact method. Considering all this, I see the accessibility we have being potentially detrimental. So, to answer the question: Any artist, regardless of medium, who loses sight of the quality of their communication, visual or otherwise, is doomed to mediocrity.

What are some of your other influences besides traditional fine art painters?

Writing and movies are big for me. I love American Horror Story. Everything in that show fits its theme. The attention to detail, down to the credits and advertising, is fantastic.

What is your dream project?

Currently, I would love to do comic covers, to define the visuals of a whole series. However, as an artist, I am constantly reaching for the next success and validation, outward and inward. This is a double-edged sword, though. We cannot rest on one success, and are forced to refine and seek our next potential. In other words, I have many dream projects, and always will.

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, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Interfictions, and been nominated for the Nebula. He is originally from Taiwan. Visit his author website at henrylien.com.

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Author Spotlight: Sunny Moraine

Jude Griffin

How did this story come about?

I’ve actually been trying to write this story for a while. I started with my fear of flying—which I’ve always thought is a bit of a misnomer, because I’m fine with flying. What I’m actually afraid of is the constant potential of falling. But I believe in trying to write about what scares you, so I tried to turn the idea of free fall into a story. I scrapped several versions and nothing quite worked out, so I started thinking about what really frightens me about falling from that height, and the answer at which I arrived is the fact that—provided you’re conscious—you have time to think about your extremely impending death and your utter inability to do anything about it.

So then I started thinking: What if you could communicate in those final moments? What if you could send a message to a loved one—maybe even have a conversation with them? What would you say? How would that go? That was the missing piece I needed to make this thing work. I stuck it all in space—which of course automatically makes everything cooler—and it all came together.

What is the “first horrible exit”?

Birth. That was a quick throwaway line that came to me and then pretty much got lost in the rest of the story, but in retrospect I think it’s important; the moment you begin to live is the moment you begin to die. It’s the moment you start falling. I seriously doubt anyone wants to be born while it’s happening, but everyone who gets a lifetime, however short, goes through it. And then everyone dies. What matters is what happens in the moments in between, however many or few.

What drove the choice of second-person point of view?

I’ve made a lot of use of second person lately, and I think one of the reasons why it attracts me is that it’s direct communication with the reader in a way that no other POV is. I know a lot of people aren’t overly fond of it, and I think a lot of the time it’s not done particularly well, but as a stylistic tool I love it. This story felt very immediate, and of course it’s an old idea that one thing that happens in the moments before death is a turning-inward, a taking of inventory. You have your last moments of communication with yourself as well as others. So it felt natural to go that way. I didn’t really think about the specifics of why until now, honestly.

Whose SF writing do you return to?

There are naturally a number of people, but I think the one writer I always come back to in the end is Ray Bradbury. He’s written what is probably my favorite short story of all time—“There Will Come Soft Rains”—and his stuff was my earliest model for writing that really hurts, that gut-punches you with how beautiful and vital it is. He was one of the first writers who made me truly want to write, and he never stops amazing and inspiring me.

Any upcoming projects/news to share?

I have a couple of novels coming out in the next couple of months that I’m very excited about. The first is Rookwar, which is the third and final book in my Casting the Bones trilogy—in addition to featuring blood magic, Corvid shapeshifters, trans-dimensional travel, and the magically reanimated dead, I think I’ve managed to do some neat things in it with gender and sexuality, which is cool. That one is due in December from Masque Books. The second novel, Labyrinthian, is coming in January from Samhain Publishing and is a queer retelling of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur in spaaaaaaaaace. It was a lot of fun to write—it’s a bit goofy, but I think there are also some genuinely interesting things going on in it. Looking forward to its birthday!

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: Susan C. Petrey

Debbie Cross & Paul M. Wrigley

“Spidersong” by Susan C. Petrey first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in September of 1980, just two months before the author’s death. Of Susan’s stories published in that magazine, it is the only one which does not take place in the universe of her gentle healing vampires, the Varkela. It is also the most reprinted of her stories, though it has not been in print for decades. “Spidersong” was nominated for the 1981 Hugo awards and she was nominated, posthumously, for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. The story reflects her great love of animals, albeit a tiny spider; music; and her rather romantically sad outlook on life.

In addition to being a writer, she was an accomplished mandolin player and often jammed with local musicians. She had a degree in microbiology, worked as a medical technologist, and was involved in the Portland, Oregon science fiction community.

Susan, like many of us, was confused about her life. Her diary and doodlings reveals this. But she sought counseling from her church, from professionals, and her friends. She lived her life, no matter how confused, with direction and intent. Much of her energy was funneled into the study of languages and history. She was a student of Turkish and Russian and many of her notes and story ideas were written in those languages. She used this knowledge extensively in her writing, and it is evident in most of her stories. She began writing as a means to combat depression, but it became much more. Her dedication to it was unquestionable.

We only knew Susan for a few years and don’t have much knowledge of her earlier life. There was a failed marriage, of which she spoke very little. Her love of horses is reflected in the golden-eyed mare of the Varkela stories. Her favorite pet was a boa constrictor named Baby.

Susan died in December 1980. Earlier in that week, she had received the letter accepting her fourth story for publication. She was very upbeat about this, finally admitting that she was a professional writer. Her death was caused by a fatal error in judgment—the combination of prescription tranquilizers, cough medicine with codeine, and alcohol.

Fortunately for readers, friends of Petrey and fellow science fiction fans were able to submit and sell four additional stories after her death. Eventually, all known stories were collected into the book Gifts of Blood in 1990. It was originally printed in a limited edition with contributions by Ursula K. Le Guin, Vonda M. McIntyre, and Kate Wilhelm. Baen later published it as a mass market paperback.

The Susan C. Petrey Clarion Scholarship Fund was created by Portland, Oregon friends of Susan to honor her and to keep her memory alive. Here, thirty-four years later, her work is still being published and read. Fifty-four scholarships have been awarded to Clarion and Clarion West writers’ workshops. Nine instructors have been sponsored as Petrey Fellows. This is some small measure of how much she is missed.

To support the Susan C. Petrey Clarion Scholarship or to purchase copies of Gifts of Blood, visit osfci.org/petrey/index.html.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Debbie Cross & Paul M. Wrigley are the directors of The Susan C. Petrey Clarion Scholarship Fund.

Author Spotlight: Roz Kaveney

Lee Hallison

What inspired this story?

I’d been working on a big space-opera called “The Lacing”—a chunk of which is on my website (glamourousrags.dymphna.net/thelacing.html)—and it died on me. The editor who was interested in it—Richard Evans—died and I was more and more involved in political activism; I also ceased to believe that I was, or could be, a writer of SF rather than fantasy. So I bundled up every single good SF idea I had ever had—except for the ones which were allocated to “The Lacing,” in case I ever went back to it—and thought of a story in which I could use them all.

Did you come up with the three instructions first, and weave the story around them, or did you start with the worldbuilding of the Hoaxer peoples?

Actually, neither. I started off with Helena and Philip and the improbable love story between them. The rest came from that, partly, and partly because I wanted to explore the idea of telling as vast a story as possible in as few evocative words as I could—I wanted to do something Stapledonian, but with heart, even sentimentality, at its core.

There is an undercurrent of utopian vision in several parts of the story—the hyper-civilized races that the traveling Hoaxers meet, the theme of kindness, Helena herself, and of course the final resolution/realization. Have you continued to explore utopian ideas?

Not so much in my work as in my activism. I don’t think of it as utopianism so much as a fascination with ethical behaviour, “right conduct” if you will—I suppose you could argue that my big fantasy novel Rhapsody of Blood is about ethics.

The development of the Hoaxer society parallels many human frailties and foibles. Did you find the science fiction genre particularly amenable to satirization of society?

SF perhaps in particular—because of the whole “if this goes on”/comic inferno strain—but pretty much all SFF, because all satire depends on thought experiments and that almost immediately makes SFF into the vehicle you naturally use.

Your writing career has focused on poetry, criticism, and more recently novel writing, more than short stories. From your perspective as an observer of popular culture, what do you think is the attraction of short fiction in today’s world?

Short fiction—not that I write much of it right now except as occasional narrative poems—is a way of going in and getting the job done in a single instant of thought. It has a single-mindedness I like, but it lacks the endless organic growth and sudden moments of “OMG, so that’s what I mean” of huge projects.

What are you currently working on?

Revelations Book Four; some ideas for a novel that will be about memory and time-travel but be less genre, more like the novel/memoir Tiny Pieces of Skull that’s coming out next spring. Poems, always poems—I need to put together another collection.

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: Annalee Newitz

Sandra Odell

“Drones Don’t Kill People” starts with a stark, specific voice that immediately captures the reader’s attention. Many writers struggle to find a voice that completely embodies their point-of-view character. How hard was it for you to find such a perfect voice?

I have a lot of sympathy for machines and non-human creatures, and I spend way too much time speculating about what they might be thinking. So the drones felt very familiar to me.

In many ways, Turkey is at the crux of a number of political issues in the Middle East. Your story embraces both the political strife and intellectual hope of a country often overlooked by genre writers. What inspired you to set the story in Turkey and Eastern Europe?

Istanbul and Budapest are two cities that I love, with rich histories of political resistance—but also imperial power, too. Both have been at the centers of empires that lasted centuries. And Turpan, in western China, has occupied a place of strategic importance for over 1,500 years. Enormously important historical events took place in these areas, so it makes sense that important future events would happen there too. I like thinking about how history continues to affect us, even in a world of sentient drones—and I especially love speculating about how drones will misinterpret human history for their own political needs.

The drone’s transition to self-awareness is subtle and well-handled. The methods also speak to fears such as the current drone strikes, data theft, and the uses of tactical and personal data. One of the values of fiction is in how it allows both readers and writers to explore the nature of such fears. How conscious were you of such fears when writing “Drones Don’t Kill People”?

I was very conscious of these fears—I am terrified of war, as any sane person would be. But I grew up at a time when the anti-war movements of the 1960s were still fairly fresh in people’s memories. I heard about them a lot from the adults around me, and from my professors at Berkeley. So when I think of war, I imagine all the ways that people and other intelligent beings would try to resist it. Maybe that means I’m blinded to the darker possibilities, but it’s not like I’m saying everybody is going to dance off into fields of happy cyberlight. People will die and it will be horrific, but there will always be good guys who try to stop the killing.

You have an extensive background in journalism. How do you find your interests in nonfiction writing have enhanced your works of fiction? Do you find the same to be true in reverse?

Absolutely. This story was completely inspired by journalistic pieces I’ve researched. I think it doesn’t really work in the other direction for me. I find that the nonfictional idea always precedes the fiction.

What’s next for Annalee Newitz? What can the fans expect?

I’m working on a nonfiction book about how cities evolved. I also have a novel I’m revising, which is about a military robot, a pharmaceutical pirate, a government ninja, and a slave. And of course I will continue to write my heart out at io9.com.

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: Kat Howard

Liz Argall

I love the imagery in this story and the way grief that is made visible is then pressured to become invisible and performative. How do you think contemporary society would cope with grief if it were this visceral and embodied?

That’s such an interesting question to me, because of course societies have their rituals for grief. We have wakes and we have funerals and we have our lists of expected—and acceptable—behaviors. We have unofficial rituals as well—when someone famous dies, we go back and we read their stories or watch their movies or listen to their music. Grief is a big thing. And because it is, because we as a society know what is expected, it also means when someone reacts differently, that stands out. We comment on it, or we make apologies for it—“I didn’t know losing her would affect me like this.”

So I think if we did live in a society where grief was more visceral, where it was physically embodied, the change wouldn’t actually be that great. We would still know what was expected of us, and what we expected of others. The only moments we would notice would be where someone deviated from that.

What inspired this story?

Two things. One was my beloved dog, Sam I Am, died. He was fifteen and a half, and I had known him since the day he was born. And I was such a fucking mess about it, I literally couldn’t even leave my apartment, but I felt like I would break if I didn’t do something. I’m a writer. I wrote.

But the less visceral inspiration came from a discussion with Ellen Kushner. I can’t remember why, but we were talking about mourning customs. And she made the point that while we often consider them restrictive—you have to wear black until a certain time has passed, you can’t leave the house, you can’t dance in public—they also gave space for people to work through their grief.

That space is something that I think has been lost. It feels like things move so fast, and we expect people to be over things right away. We no longer have those obvious cues, like the color of their clothing, to know what they might be dealing with. And certainly enforced mourning could be difficult, but it could also be a blessing. So I wanted to try to explore that idea.

I wanted to ask you what the name of Sibila’s actual grief was, but it seems to me this story is more about the complexity of grief and the parts of it that escape naming (and in this world become embodied instead). I love the line “Grief is never solely about the person gone. It would not need to fly, if it were.” Can you expand on that?

Thank you. For me—and just because I wrote it, doesn’t mean I’m right—this line is about the idea that when we mourn someone, we aren’t just mourning that person, but we’re mourning our relationship with them as well. We’re mourning the chance to say “I’m sorry” or “I love you.” We’re mourning all of the things that will now never happen, and that’s part of what makes grief heavy, which makes it something we must bear. In the world of this story, ideally what happens is your grief flies once you are able to bear it, once you have healed. Ideally.

Earlier this year you wrote, “I look at these pieces of paper that represent the broken pieces of a story, and I am afraid of what it means to fix them, because to do that, I need to put myself back into that story, and that has the side effect of meaning that I am looking back at that time, at that past self, and it hurts, and I don’t know what the physical therapy exercises are for this.” Did you ever figure out the exercises for this? This seems like such an important and valuable challenge to face, even if it’s just articulating the challenge and pushing on!

It turned out that—for me, for that project—there wasn’t a series of emotional physical therapy exercises. Getting back into it was basically the emotional equivalent of jumping naked into ice water. At the beginning, it wasn’t fun. But the thing was, the project meant enough to me that I knew I had to try, and eventually, I remembered why I loved it, and so working on it became bittersweet, and then became something I was proud of.

But I also think it’s important to say that setting it aside—for longer, forever even—would have also been a valid choice. Our art shouldn’t be a weapon that we turn against ourselves.

You provide professional critiquing and mentoring services. How does that influence your own creative process?

It makes me think about stories in much more technical ways, which is something that affects me more as I am revising than when I’m drafting. For me, drafting is all about getting something—anything!—down on paper. But once I have that, then I look at the story with a more critical eye, and make sure that the arcs are there, that the emotional beats are right, that the voices are consistent. And not that I didn’t do those things before, but spending time with my hands in other writers’ stories makes me much more aware of the act of doing them in my own.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Liz Argall’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: Matthew Hughes

Jude Griffin

Even though the world has changed completely, Obron’s approach is still very much in the vein of scientific discovery: he researches, he hypothesizes, experiments, etc. It makes me think about Clarke’s observation that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and that maybe the magic of Obron’s world is just governed by different scientific truths. Or is the magic incompatible with any scientific framework?

In this setting, the terms “magic” and “scientific” could only combine in an oxymoron. Magic is about the power of will, but for that power to be applied it has to be controlled and focused. There are techniques for that, many of them very difficult, which have to be learned and practiced. So it’s definitely more of an art than a science; talent comes into it, but so does study and practice. Some will become the equivalent of a Pavarotti or a Yo-Yo Ma. Others will become competent journeyman. Some will be tone deaf or fumble-fingered. Kaslo, by the way, is tone deaf.

Poor Kaslo—to be so competent and then to be thrown into a world where all his strengths are so reduced. Can you talk a little about his character arc?

He’s a man who was superbly adapted to an environment that has suddenly ceased to exist. But he’s also the kind who never gives up. So he’s struggling (characters must always struggle) to meet a whole new series of challenges for which he is not naturally equipped.

The concept of a character who is ill fitted to his environment is a common theme in my work. Henghis Hapthorn, the foremost freelance discriminator of Old Earth (who will play an off-stage role in The Kaslo Chronicles) had a similar problem with the onset of magic.

Is it too late to plead for a female wizard to pop up?

I’m not terribly good a writing female characters, so I’ve been told—although I thought I was doing them fairly well. I suppose I’ve begun to leave them out unconsciously.

Now that you are pretty far along in the serialization, what are your thoughts on the experience? Would you do another? What would you change if you did?

It’s been a bit of a tightrope walk in the dark, since I can’t go back and change something in Chapter Three to fit with something I didn’t think of until Chapter Nine, as I would normally do. But it has been enjoyable, and I would do it again. The only thing I would change is the thing mentioned above, which I can’t change.

Any news or projects you want to share?

I’m taking a run at writing straight suspense fiction again. I’m about to send my agent the draft of a story about (yet another) ill-fitting but highly competent oddball who decides, for a complex set of reasons, that it will be good for him to go around knocking off people who do a lot of harm and get away with it.

Where in the world do you write these days?

I’m about to leave one small village in France for another a hundred miles or so farther south. In December, I’ll be in England, then from January to July, it’s Brittany. After that, I don’t know where I’ll be. If the suspense novel sells, I may settle down somewhere for a while, maybe even permanently. Ireland’s a good place to be a writer. They put up statues and name major ships after us.

Any big ideas or stories you want to tackle someday?

I’m about to start writing the historical novel I’ve wanted to do for more than forty years. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve discovered some key facts about the historical events and persons involved that just make for a hell of a story.

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: Jennifer Stevenson

Laurel Amberdine

There’s so much great musical background in this story. Are you a musician or did you do research for the story? Were there any neat details you weren’t able to fit in?

I spent my first twenty-five years as a musician in a family of musicians. The funny thing is, none of them were into rock’n’roll. Classical, Dixieland, Chicago jazz, early polyphonic choral music, even screech’n’fart, as we fondly called stuff like Charles Ives and Arnold Schoenberg. As a child I was told that rock’n’roll is a gateway drug to heroin, so I didn’t discover it until I went to college. But music is music, eh? Kind of my point in this story.

Only at the end did I realize the significance of the protagonist’s name: Dawn. Did you know that when you started writing, or come up with it after you’d figured out the story?

I recall that the last two lines of the story were serendipity. I came up with it at the end, when he very naturally asks her her name and I thought, “DUH, it’s Dawn, ka-ching!” Then I went back and added her name to the beginning.

At the beginning of the story, Dawn has big ambitions for her musical career. After this solstice party, seeing the real power of her music, do you imagine that she’s going to continue on the same track?

I don’t see why not. In my fantasy universe, you get rewarded when you preform services for the gods. So she probably has excellent chances to fulfill her ambitions after this.

Is there any particular reason you used the setting of “near Madison, Wisconsin”?

I wanted a specific kind of terrain, hillier and stonier than my native northern Illinois, so that the hostess’s house, built into a hill, would be geologically likely. If you’ve ever seen the Blue Mound area, such as at Black Earth, Wisconsin, you know what I’m talking about: a series of little round hills like tits, too small to be mountains, located in lightly rolling farm countryside. These hills are left over from 400 million years of erosion since the retreat of the Silurian Sea. Such a landscape used to cover the entire Great Plains. However, weirdly, this part was never scraped flat by retreating glaciers, as the Great Plains were. So these lovely mounds, capped by Niagara dolomite, remain. It’s an eerily peaceful area that feels populated by its hills. The sense is that somebody important lives here, but you’ll probably never meet them.

I loved the idea of this amazing party to bring the sun back at the winter solstice. Do you think there is a corresponding event at the summer solstice? What would that be like?

Hm, great question! Now I have to think about that story. Give me six months and I’ll come up with one. Meantime, I refer the reader to the end scene of John Crowley’s Little, Big, which is a summer solstice party, I think. I suspect my own version would have some passionate triangles, because while the winter solstice is about death and rebirth, the summer solstice is for emotional carrying-on like idiots, as if this day will never end.

What are you working on now?

When my paranormal romcom Slacker Demons series ended, I had a fabulous man-lair left behind, empty, because I’d married off all the sex demons who’d been using it. Now a team of succubus trainees has moved in. I’m building a new series called Coed Demon Sluts. This is new territory for me. The succubi don’t have the same motives as their male counterparts for taking the job. This series is still funny, but it’s women’s fiction, exploring what moves women to change their lives. Like Slacker Demons, Coed Demon Sluts takes place in the same reluctantly magical contemporary universe as my first series, Hinky Chicago. Look for cameo appearances of characters from earlier books.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She recently moved to San Francisco with her husband, and is enjoying its vastly superior weather. Between naps she’s working on polishing up a few science fiction and fantasy novels, and hopes to send them out into the world soon.

Author Spotlight: Ian R. MacLeod

Kevin McNeil

“New Light on the Drake Equation” was first published in Sci Fiction (May 2001). Can you elaborate on the origins of this story?

For a long time—decades, in fact—I had this idea of a lonely guy living in a hut as he searched for extraterrestrial life. Then I read Paradigms Lost by John Casti, which has a good analysis of the Drake Equation, and kicked the story into gear.

Tom Kelly is searching for aliens, while lovers, family, and friends remain most alien to him. He watches the future pass him by, yet refuses to give up on his dream of making first contact with extraterrestrials. Did the writing of this story present you with any significant challenges?

Like many, if not most, kinds of writer, I tend to write about loners because I’m a bit of one myself. This feeling reflects an abiding dissatisfaction with the world as it is, and the desire to create something which is somehow “better.” So I could identify with Tom pretty easily. Also, his quest to find resolution and meaning in SETI rather reflect my own feelings about the lost chances within much of the genre of SF—how we once strove to wrestle with the universe, but now, rather like the flyers in the story, too often content ourselves with easy entertainments and gaudy distractions.

This story pays homage to science fiction’s past. Who are your influences in the genre?

Quite a few of them get a mention in the story. I started reading writers like Asimov, Clarke, and Wyndham in my early teens, but the real thing which drove me to want to write was discovering New Wave writers such as Aldiss Ballard and Keith Roberts in the UK, and Ellison, Delany, and Zelazny in the US. That, and then stepping into the wide world of literature which lies beyond the genre.

You write in a variety of genres—science fiction, horror, and fantasy. What attracts you to fantastic fiction?

I see them as, essentially, offshoots of one genre. I like elements of strangeness in my stories, and I also like to deal with ideas, and the dark and the light, and to be surprised and challenged, as well as moved and entertained. So, much as the “real world” never quite felt like enough, neither, much though I love reading it, did purely naturalistic fiction. That, and the fantastic is the oldest form of story telling. And you can simply make more stuff up when you’re writing it.

You’ve had success writing short stories and novel-length works. Do you have a preference for working in any particular form? Do you take a different approach to writing novels as opposed to short stories?

I do regard shorter fiction, especially in the longer length such as this story, as being a natural home for fantastic, ideas-based fiction. We’ve all read many shorter works which fail to explore an idea fully—or, all too often in SF, the mood and characters—and novels which end up saying too much about too little. But short stories are frail, whereas novels always offer new approaches. Personally, if it comes to writing now and then, I prefer shorter stuff. But if I can sit down regularly and immerse myself in something, I’d go for a novel.

Is there anything else you’d like to share about “New Light on the Drake Equation”? What’s next for you?

At the moment I’m working toward the end of a very large and very ambitious vampire novel covering many centuries. I really hate the things, which is what finally got me writing about them in what seems to have turned out to be an almost rational context. At the end of the day, and like a lot of my work, “New Light” included, it’s about the clash between superstition and logic, hope and reality.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kevin McNeil is a physical therapist, sports fanatic, and volunteer coach for the Special Olympics. He is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and The Center for the Study of Science Fiction’s Intensive Novel Workshop, led by Kij Johnson. Kevin is a New Englander currently living in California. Find him on Twitter @kevinmcneil.

MISCELLANY

In the Next Issue of

Coming up in December, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Shale Nelson (“Pay Phobetor”) and Vandana Singh (“Wake-Rider”), along with SF reprints by Paul Park (“The Lost Sepulcher of Huascar Capec”) and N.K. Jemisin (“Valedictorian”). We also have a special bonus reprint from our Women Destroy Science Fiction! limited edition: “They Tell Me There Will Be No Pain” by Rachael Acks.

Plus, we have original fantasy by Nik Houser (“The Drawstring Detective”) and Damien Angelica Walters (“A Lie You Give, and Thus I Take”), and fantasy reprints by Delia Sherman (“The Faerie Cony-catcher”) and Nalo Hopkinson (“Soul Case”).

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 an ebook-exclusive novella reprint from John Crowley (“The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines”) and a pair of novel excerpts.

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

• • • •

So be sure to keep an eye out for all this great new fiction in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

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About the Editor

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Lightspeed, is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. New projects coming out in 2014 and 2015 include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Operation Arcana, Wastelands 2, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. 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.