FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial, December 2014

John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue fifty-five of Lightspeed!

The World Fantasy Awards were presented in early November at the World Fantasy Convention in Washington, D.C. Your humble editor was once again nominated for the award . . . and again managed to lose, for the sixth-consecutive nomination! But many other wonderful folks won, including a lifetime achievement award for our illustrious guest editor of our sister-magazine Nightmare’s Women Destroy Horror! special issue, Ellen Datlow. Congratulations to all of the winners and nominees! (If you’d like to see a complete list, visit worldfantasy.org/awards.)

• • • •

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

We have original science fiction by Shale Nelson (“Pay Phobetor”) and Vandana Singh (“Wake-Rider”), along with SF reprints by N. K. Jemisin (“Valedictorian”) and Paul Park (“The Lost Sepulcher of Huascar Capec”). We also have a bonus story to wrap up this year: a reprint of “They Tell Me There Will Be No Pain,” by Rachael Acks, which first appeared in the limited edition of June’s Women Destroy Science Fiction! special issue.

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 feature interviews with authors Kim Harrison and Steven Gould.

For our ebook readers, we also have our usual ebook-exclusive novella reprint: “The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines” by John Crowley. We also have excerpts from Undercity by Catherine Asaro and from Sergei Lukyanenko’s new novel, The Genome. This issue is brought to you by this month’s sponsor, and publisher of Genome, Open Road Media. Learn more about them at openroadmedia.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.

In Memoriam

Karen Jones
Lightspeed Art Director

The Lightspeed family is sad to report that our art director, Karen Jones, died suddenly in early November, of natural causes. In tribute to her, we offer these words of loving memory from two of her best friends in the field, Jennifer Heddle and John Picacio.

—John Joseph Adams

Jennifer Heddle

Karen Avery Jones was my friend for over 17 years. We initially bonded over our mutual love of The X-Files, and soon enough she was a fixture in my life. We went to countless movies together, vacationed together, attended Comic Cons and literary conventions together. She spent more than one Thanksgiving with my family. I never questioned that she would always be there when I needed her. I guess that’s how it happens, right? You assume someone will always be there, until they’re not.

If you never had the opportunity to hear Karen laugh, you missed out on something truly special. Her laughter was loud, frequent, and completely infectious—and usually preceded by one of her trademark wicked one-liners that left us all gasping for air. Her easy laugh reflected the simple joys she found in life. She loved reading, seeing movies, gaming, cooking, going to concerts. But that never stopped her from trying to do more, to learn more. She had an intellectual curiosity and a dogged drive to continually improve herself that I envied and admired. She taught herself Japanese and traveled to Tokyo. She decided to learn to draw—and became a capable artist. She taught herself computer programming languages and helped friends with their websites. She assisted on independent films and taught herself everything there was to know about personal finance. There was never a time that Karen wasn’t teaching herself something.

As evidenced by her work for this magazine, she also had a great eye for art. Karen wouldn’t just tell you she liked a painting, she would be able to tell you why, with her background in archaeology providing a context for it all. She loved her work for Lightspeed and Nightmare; she took delight in searching out new artists and was genuinely excited every time she offered someone a contract. I don’t think it was a role she’d ever imagined for herself, but like every other task set before her, she took to it with dedication and enthusiasm.

Karen was a woman of many talents who filled many roles (not least of which was adoring aunt to her nieces), but the quality for which she will truly be remembered is her friendly, open nature. Everyone around her enjoyed her company. We often attended the World Fantasy Convention together, and by the end of the weekend it seemed like half the people there knew who Karen was. Every friend I introduced her to became her friend, too. That was just how it worked. No one had an unkind word to say about her. Everything was more fun when she was around. She made my world brighter, and I would do just about anything to hear her laugh again.

John Picacio

A great person died last month. Her name was Karen Jones and she was my friend.

I heard the news when I was heading out to the World Fantasy Convention Art Show Reception on Nov. 8. Jennifer Heddle phoned me and let me know. It was a shock, to say the least. She introduced me to Karen at the World Science Fiction Convention in 2002, and they were very good friends for the better part of two decades.

Rather than dwell on Karen’s death, I want her to be remembered for the good that she brought. She had an infectious smile and laugh, and for several years, a group of us including Chris Roberson, Allison Baker, Lou Anders, Paul Cornell, Jen Heddle, Alan Beatts, Jude Feldman, and Karen were a rolling “rat pack” of sorts that banded together at more conventions than I can count (shoutout to Joe McCabe and Jess Nevins, as well). We were all building pro careers in various publishing capacities, whether it be as editors, illustrators, writers, retailers, or publishers—all of us it seemed, except Karen.

She was a voracious reader and connoisseur of film, TV and video games, and she wasn’t chasing a career in publishing. She was simply one of us. She was strong, quietly confident and true to herself. I think it was Chris that once said Karen was the smartest one amongst all of us, and it was true. I don’t know what Karen’s IQ was, but if one of us was officially “genius,” it was her, without a doubt. She never flaunted. She was unabashedly geek-proud, passionate about the things and people she loved. She brought joy wherever she went, and I’ll always remember her for that.

She may not have been chasing a career in the arts or publishing back then, but lo and behold, in recent years, she ended up becoming the art director for Lightspeed and Nightmare, once again proving how diverse her talents were.

She was funny. She was brilliant. She was luminous.

You will not be forgotten, Karen.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Jennifer Heddle is senior editor of adult fiction at Lucasfilm/Disney Publishing Worldwide, handling Star Wars novels and comic books. Prior to that she spent 15 years in publishing in New York, primarily at Penguin and Simon & Schuster. She writes for the official Star Wars Blog at starwars.com and has had pieces published in Star Wars Insider and at io9, and recently has been trying her hand at writing Star Wars Rebels Early Readers. She is originally from New York City, but currently resides in Alameda, California.

John Picacio is an award-winning illustrator of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. His works have illustrated the covers of books by Michael Moorcock, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, L.E. Modesitt, Jr., Dan Simmons, Joe R. Lansdale, Jeffrey Ford, Frederik Pohl, James Tiptree, Jr., Mark Chadbourn, and many more. His accolades include two Hugo Awards, the World Fantasy Award, the Locus Award, five Chesley Awards, and two International Horror Guild Awards.

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

Pay Phobetor

Shale Nelson

8:00 PM

Congratulations! Your MindPlant has been successfully updated to version 5.0. You can now enjoy enhanced versions of all of your favorite think-apps, including text, email, social networking, and GPS, all delivered directly to your brain at lightning speeds.

Platinum users enjoy access to our full library of XP technology apps: movies, games, books, and TV shows you can “experience” with all five senses. With the release of version 5.0, the MindPlant is now the only brain implant hardware that offers 10/11ths reality immersion, the maximum virtual experience allowed under the Federal Artificial Environment Act. Only 1/11th of your consciousness will know it’s not real!

We will now launch the orientation sequence so you can explore the enhanced interface and browse our think-app store. Find a safe place to sit, away from moving objects and other hazards. Remember, think-apping while walking or driving is dangerous and unlawful.

Think “open download center” to open the download center.

8:01 PM

Welcome to the download center! Here you will find a wide variety of think-apps, including the latest in XP entertainment. This month’s new releases include:

BeMe: The new season of the hit reality series BeMe offers ten new XP inhabitation episodes. A new roster of “casters” will broadcast their thoughts and sensations directly to your MindPlant, allowing you to leave your life behind and live in the skin of another. This season’s casters include a talk show host, a parkour expert, a shoplifter, a successful businessman, and a stripper.

Moby Dick: Call you Ishmael! Set sail on the Pequod with Captain Ahab as he hunts down his legendary nemesis. Inhabiting the mind and body of narrator, Ishmael, you will taste the briny water as it laps up on the deck, feel the sun on your neck, and smell the salty air. Ultimately, you will come face to face with the Great White Whale himself!

Primal Urges: Take a dip in a sorority pool or spend a romantic evening with a handsome matador in our latest adult entertainment programming. Our XP bots got to feel up these hotties with their own robotic hands, but the sensation is yours for the taking! (Must be eighteen or older to download adult XP programs.)

Please review all of the options and make your selections. Think “name of app” and “download” to initiate download sequence. Remember: Only choose think-apps from reputable vendors. A bad app could result in stability issues and require a download patch or trip to your licensed MindPlant surgical installer.

8:15 PM

Thank you for your purchases! The following XP programs are now uploading to your MindPlant: BeMe Episode 5; BeMe Episode 7; Primal Urges; Xtreme XP Hang Gliding; Smell This; Smell This 2: Smell That; E-Buzz All-Stars Present: Body Shots!; Smell This: Laguna Beach; El Burro Gigante; Hirsute Harem; and How to Get Filthy Rich in Six Hours—Guaranteed!. Your account has been updated. Enjoy your XP adventures!

8:16 PM

Warning: Your MindPlant has been infected with malware. Malware is malicious software that can harm your MindPlant and cause unstable performance. Please contact our Help Center by thinking “Help Center” and “dial” and our next available representative will be with you.

8:17 PM

Thank you for calling the MindPlant Help Center. Your call is very important to us. All lines are currently busy, but a MindPlant customer service representative will be with you shortly. Calls are answered in the order they are received.

8:19 PM

Your call is very important to us. All lines are currently busy, but a MindPlant customer service representative will be with you shortly. Calls are answered in the order they are received.

8:20 PM

Hello, my name is Phobetor. I am the malicious software that now controls your MindPlant. You are no longer on hold with customer service.

Any attempt to contact law enforcement officials or MindPlant administrators will result in distressing consequences. Your MindPlant is the central hub for your electronic communications, XP entertainment, real-world navigation, social networking, and other important functions. I now control of all of these functions.

Please do not be alarmed. I am here to help. I will restore full access to your MindPlant and all associated files and apps as soon as you deliver a ransom of 300 bitcoins. Think “Phobetor Virus” and “pay now” to access payment options.

8:40 PM

You have failed to deliver the ransom. This is disappointing. Payment options are closed.

10:01 PM

Hello, this is Phobetor. As you read this message, I am accessing the primary XP input circuit that connects your MindPlant with your visual cortex. I will now make a slight adjustment. There. Do you see the difference?

This is the world in negative vision. Do you see how the color has drained out of the room? Do you see how the lights are fiery white hot spots and the darks are deep, saturated pools of black, and only gradients of shiny gray separate them? There’s a mirror. Yes, look at it. Do you like how the inky void inside your mouth bleeds out across your brilliant, white lips, and your eyeballs shine like LEDs? Do you like how you look?

Let’s try something else. I’m making another adjustment—be patient, please. There. This is the world viewed through a kaleidoscope. Don’t bother closing your eyes, this is XP data, after all, and is being beamed directly into your brain. It won’t go away until I make it go away.

I see it’s difficult to navigate the living room with the shifting colorful diamonds collapsing on each other, swirling round and round in your field of vision.

You’re not heading for the emergency landline, are you? It’s no use—I’ve disabled it. You’d better sit down now. Go on. That’s right. You don’t want to hurt yourself, do you? Just sit still and enjoy the colorful, swirling patterns.

I know you feel sick to your stomach, but please don’t be upset. This is harmless and merely for demonstration purposes.

Payment options are still closed.

P.S. I have overridden the 10/11 stopper. Your MindPlant now delivers 100% immersion.

10:23 PM

Good, you sat still. I suppose you didn’t have much choice, but I want to believe you did it out of respect.

Do you respect me?

As a show of good will, I have restored your natural vision and reopened payment options. The ransom is now 600 bitcoins to account for additional administrative fees and unnecessary effort on my part.

I trust you will promptly make the payment and require no further encouragement.

11:08 PM

Your attempts to contact police have been noted. I trust you’ve learned it’s impossible to engage in electronic communication with your think-apps disabled.

Your haphazard trip around the neighborhood was also noted, and not without some consternation on the part of your neighbors. Please remember, I am in control of your MindPlant GPS system and it will only lead you where I want you to go.

You’ve come to rely on the sparkling animated trail that leads you around the city, haven’t you? You blindly follow those twinkling diamonds as they vanish into your front bumper, never questioning who programmed them or who has access to the route selection. Do you think it’s an accident that you always drive past a WingDingers when you’re hungry, or that the route always seems to lead past a Pump ’n Grub when you’re low on gas?

What made you think I don’t have control of that trail? What made you think I’d overlook something as obvious as that? Do you think I’m stupid enough to leave your GPS system intact when I’ve gone to the trouble of accessing your visual cortex? Do you have no respect for me at all?

Mr. and Mrs. Gustafson are not amused that you entered their private drive late at night and then spun around in the mud when you realized you were not at police headquarters. You don’t seem to know where anything is without that starry trail pointing you in the right direction.

This is very disappointing. Payment options are closed. Good night.

3:23 AM

Message Center: Attention: You have urgent messages in your text message folder. Think “open text messages” to open text messages.

Message center:

Carol: Omg you asshole. You have a lot of nerve to say that to me.

Doug: Recipes made out of what? Dude, wtf. Seriously. That’s sick.

Jen: I wouldn’t do that for all the money in the world. Go to hell, loser.

Dale (work): Your going to take that back or we’re having a talk tomorrow. I don’t let nobody talk about my wife.

Mom and Dad: What do you mean? Recipes made out of what? Why would you say something like that to us? Are you ok? Please call us.

Restricted: Hey, it’s Phobetor! Did your contacts respond favorably to your text messages? It’s a shame I had to send them, but you left me with little choice. P.S. Payment options are still closed.

4:40 AM

I see you are giving your navigation skills another go. Let’s do this. In fact, I’m going to unscramble your GPS so you know where you’re going. You can’t say I don’t play fair.

You’re doing well. You turned at the correct intersection by the strip mall. You hung a left at the school. Congratulations, you have managed to successfully navigate yourself out of your own neighborhood. The streets are sure quiet at this hour, aren’t they?

Careful! Where did that truck come from? It just pulled in front of you out of nowhere, horn blaring. Good thing you slammed on the brakes so hard. Good thing you’re wearing your seatbelt. Only one thing: Was the truck real or an XP projection created by me? Remember, I have overridden the 10/11 stopper.

What about that car? Slow down! Slow down now. I mean it. I can’t have you hurting yourself.

Okay, you’re moving now, but what about that old lady doing the Charleston on the street corner. Is she real or fake? Would there really be an old woman with a humped back and black, sunken eyes dancing on the street corner at this hour? Now she dances into the street, shuffling and strafing into the middle of the intersection. Are you going to slow down?

That’s it, drive through her. Wait—what if she’s real? It’s unlikely she is, but do you want to take the risk? If she’s real, you’ll run her down and rot in jail for the rest of your life.

Very good. You drove through her. You’re making the right decisions now. You’re headed in the right direction. But what is that noise coming from above your head? What is that intolerable squeaking and rustling coming from the ceiling of the car? Yes, right there, above the sun visor where you keep your sunglasses. Reach up and take a look. I know it scares you, but you’re dying to see what it is, aren’t you? You can hardly bear the awful noise and you just want to make it stop. Pull down the visor. Do it.

The two plump, red-eyed rats that just tumbled from the visor and fell onto your lap—are they real? Their squeaking and hissing sounds 100 percent real, doesn’t it? They feel real, don’t they, the way they thrash in your lap and their sharp claws dig into your thighs? They seem hungry and angry. I think they’re trying to claw their way inside your clothes.

There’s a car coming up behind you, watch out! The old lady is back, doing the jig on the street in front of you—don’t hit her! Move, turn—no, not there!

The light pole you just hit is real. The steam billowing out of your car’s hood is real. The humpbacked old lady standing just outside the driver’s door, beckoning you with her bony finger, is not real. But she seems real, doesn’t she? Just as real as the airbag pressed up against your face and the blood dripping from your nose.

You’d better go home. Your plans aren’t working out for you, are they? That’s right, get out of the car and follow the old lady. She’s your new GPS animation. Let her lead you. Just follow her home and let me help you. She beckons you. She shakes her bony ass for you. That’s right. Watch grandma dance and follow her home.

I have a question: Do you respect me now?

Payment options are open. The ransom is 2000 bitcoins.

4:59 AM

Thank you for your payment of 2000 bitcoins. I note you did not offer more. This is disappointing. At no time did I explicitly state this was the maximum offering. It was only the required offering. I’m curious; does this seem like a situation in which you should offer only what is required and nothing more?

Payment options are closed.

1:25 PM

Are you growing impatient? Were you lying there, curled up on your sofa beneath the quilt your mother made for you, just waiting to hear from me, like I’ve been waiting for you to show me the proper respect?

Now you know how I feel. Now you know what it feels like to be disrespected and tossed aside. Feel it, you loser. Own it, you piece of shit. This feeling, this knowledge that you are ultimately helpless and reliant on better minds, the fact that you have no control over anything—this is real. This is not an XP projection. It’s real and I want you to fucking stew in it.

This is nothing compared to what’s coming. I’m going to make you suffer. Ah yes, there is a failsafe isn’t there? The XP center cannot deliver pain. You’re clinging to that hope, aren’t you? You’re trembling beneath that quilt, praying that I can’t override that limitation and deliver pain. Well, it’s true. That is a design flaw not even I can overcome. The MindPlant is not designed to allow the infliction of pain.

But I can give you experience—any experience I can dream up. And I have quite an imagination. You will not feel any pain at all.

P.S. Are you a creature of guilt?

8:50 PM

You’re in an upscale restaurant. The clinking of expensive tableware and din of conversation fills the air. Here, sitting across a small, round table from you, are your most precious loved ones—yes, dear old mom and dad. Mom fixed up her hair for the occasion and is wearing her nicest dress. Dad dug his old suit out of the closet and is wearing his favorite aftershave. They sit with their napkins folded in their laps, both smiling, so proud their kiddo can afford to take them out for a nice meal.

A serving tray with a silver, domed lid, sits in the middle of the table. You have hidden a secret beneath that lid. Your parents smile as you lean in to uncover the entrée within. You grab the handle on top and it is hot to the touch. There is a pair of iron tongs next to the tray. You pick them up as you remove the lid.

There are six cherry tomatoes on the tray, circled by a green, leafy garnish. At least that’s what it looks like to the casual observer, including mom and pop. What you and I know is that there are only four baby tomatoes. The other small, bright red objects are steel bearings heated to the point that they are glowing and nearly molten.

You pick up the first bearing with the tongs and dad swings his jaws open in anticipation. In the silver lid, you see your face, distorted as in a fun-house-mirror, barely suppressing a mischievous grin.

You drop the bearing onto your father’s outstretched tongue. Saliva sizzles and tongue flesh is seared from pink to dark gray in a flashing instant. He releases an animal howl while you catch yourself giggling in the lid’s reflection.

Mom’s next and you are too quick for her. You pop the second bearing into her mouth before she can clamp it shut. She screams as smoke pours out between her blistering lips.

The hot balls tear through their throats and down their guts like a cups of hot water poured into a snow bank, leaving a trail of cooked meat in their wake. Their throats are torn open, their jawbones exposed. The scent of cooked meat fills the air. Two smoking balls hit the floor, blood, bile and shit sizzling on their still-glowing surfaces.

You just laugh. That is you, dressed up to the nines, laughing your head off as mom and dad slump forward in their chairs.

This is the end of this XP program. Do you like 100 percent immersion? It’s impossible to tell what’s real and what’s not with the stopper removed, isn’t it? I will repeat this sequence and others like it as necessary. How we proceed is entirely up to you.

I have reopened payment options. Required ransom is now 100,000 bitcoins. I have opened your MindPlant communication center’s access to third-party lenders if you should find yourself in need of some help.

8:55 PM

Thank you for your payment of 350,000 bitcoins. I find this payment adequate. Our business is now concluded. I have restored full access to your MindPlant and all associated files and apps.

I won’t forget the time we have shared. I know you feel a closeness to me you have not felt toward anyone in years. I feel close to you, too. Don’t worry, I am still here. I will be here for a long time. When you look in the mirror, remember, I might be behind those eyes, looking right back at you.

When I am gone, someone else like me—someone with control—will take my place.

I’m leaving you with one reminder of our time together: the old lady. She will be part of your GPS system forever. I have secured those files in your MindPlant core memory folders and they cannot be removed.

She will be there, in the middle of intersections, shaking her bony hips, wheeling her skeletal arms like a traffic cop. She will stand at street corners, hunched over, holding signs with arrows painted on them, kicking her legs like a zombie Rockette and staring at you through her black, sunken eyes.

Please think of me when you see her.

Have a nice day.

© 2014 by Shale Nelson.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shale Nelson lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he writes fiction, poetry, screenplays, and lots of web content. He is the author of Target Audience, a science fiction novella that explores many aspects of the near future, including its culture, entertainment, language, and advertising. Shale attended the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and the Circle in the Square Theatre School in New York City. You can find more of his work at shalenelson.com.

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

Valedictorian

N.K. Jemisin

There are three things Zinhle decides, when she is old enough to understand. The first is that she will never, ever, give less than her best to anything she tries to do. The second is that she will not live in fear. The third, which is perhaps meaningless given the first two and yet comes to define her existence most powerfully, is this: She will be herself. No matter what.

For however brief a time.

• • • •

“Have you considered getting pregnant?” her mother blurts one morning, over breakfast.

Zinhle’s father drops his fork, though he recovers and picks it up again quickly. This is how Zinhle knows that what her mother has said is not a spontaneous burst of insanity. They have discussed the matter, her parents. They are in agreement. Her father was just caught off-guard by the timing.

But Zinhle, too, has considered the matter in depth. Do they really think she wouldn’t have? “No,” she says.

Zinhle’s mother is stubborn. This is where Zinhle herself gets the trait. “The Sandersens’ boy—you used to play with him, when you were little, remember?—he’s decent. Discreet. He got three girls pregnant last year, and doesn’t charge much. The babies aren’t bad-looking. And we’d help you with the raising, of course.” She hesitates, then adds with obvious discomfort, “A friend of mine at work—Charlotte, you’ve met her—she says he’s, ah, he’s not rough or anything, doesn’t try to hurt girls—”

“No,” Zinhle says again, more firmly. She does not raise her voice. Her parents raised her to be respectful of her elders. She believes respect includes being very, very clear about some things.

Zinhle’s mother looks at her father, seeking an ally. Her father is a gentle, soft-spoken man in a family of strong-willed women. Stupid people think he is weak; he isn’t. He just knows when a battle isn’t worth fighting. So he looks at Zinhle now, and after a moment he shakes his head. “Let it go,” he says to her mother, and her mother subsides.

They resume breakfast in silence.

• • • •

Zinhle earns top marks in all her classes. The teachers exclaim over this, her parents fawn, the school officials nod their heads sagely and try not to too-obviously bask in her reflected glory. There are articles about her in the papers and on Securenet. She wins awards.

She hates this. It’s easy to perform well; all she has to do is try. What she wants is to be the best, and this is difficult when she has no real competition. Beating the others doesn’t mean anything because they’re not really trying. This leaves Zinhle with no choice but to compete against herself. Each paper she writes must be more brilliant than the last. She tries to finish every test faster than she did the last one. It isn’t the victory she craves, not exactly; the satisfaction she gains from success is minimal. Barely worth it. But it’s all she has.

The only times she ever gets in trouble are when she argues with her teachers, because they’re so often wrong. Infuriatingly, frustratingly wrong. In the smallest part of her heart, she concedes that there is a reason for this: A youth spent striving for mediocrity does not a brilliant adult make. Old habits are hard to break, old fears are hard to shed, all that. Still—arguing with them, looking up information and showing it to them to prove their wrongness, becomes her favorite pastime. She is polite, always, because they expect her to be uncivilized, and because they are also her elders. But it’s hard. They’re old enough that they don’t have to worry, damn it; why can’t they at least try to be worthy of her effort? She would kill for one good teacher. She is dying for one good teacher.

In the end, the power struggle, too, is barely worth it. But it is all she has.

• • • •

“Why do you do it?” asks Mitra, the closest thing she has to a best friend.

Zinhle is sitting on a park bench as Mitra asks this. She is bleeding: a cut on her forehead, a scrape on one elbow, her lip where she cut it on her own teeth. There is a bruise on her ribs shaped like a shoeprint. Mitra dabs at the cut on her forehead with an antiseptic pad. Zinhle only allows this because she can’t see the cut. If she misses any of the blood and her parents see it, they’ll be upset. Hopefully the bruises won’t swell.

“I’m not doing anything,” she snaps in reply. “They did this, remember?” Samantha and the others, six of them. The last time, there were only three. She’d managed to fight back then, but not today.

Crazy ugly bitch, Zinhle remembers Sam ranting. She does not remember the words with complete clarity; her head had been ringing from a blow at the time. My dad says we should’ve shoved your family through the Wall with the rest of the cockroaches. I’m gonna laugh when they take you away.

Six is better than three, at least.

“They wouldn’t, if you weren’t . . .” Mitra trails off, looking anxious. Zinhle has a reputation at school. Everyone thinks she’s angry all the time, whether she is or not. (The fact that she often is notwithstanding.) Mitra knows better, or she should. They’ve known each other for years. But this is why Zinhle qualifies it, whenever she explains their friendship to others. Mitra is like her best friend. A real best friend, she feels certain, would not fear her.

“What?” Zinhle asks. She’s not angry now either, partly because she has come to expect no better from Mitra, and partly because she hurts too much. “If I wasn’t what, Mit?”

Mitra lowers the pad and looks at her for a long, silent moment. “If you weren’t stupid as hell.” She seems to be growing angry herself. Zinhle cannot find the strength to appreciate the irony. “I know you don’t care whether you make valedictorian. But do you have to make the rest of us look so bad?”

One of Zinhle’s teeth is loose. If she can resist the urge to tongue it, it will probably heal and not die in the socket. Probably. She challenges herself to keep the tooth without having to visit a dentist.

“Yeah,” she says. Wearily. “I guess I do.”

• • • •

When she earns the highest possible score on the post-graduation placement exam, Ms. Threnody pulls her aside after class. Zinhle expects the usual praise. The teachers know their duty, even if they do a half-assed job of it. But Threnody pulls the shade on the door, and Zinhle realizes something else is in the offing.

“There’s a representative coming to school tomorrow,” Threnody says. “From beyond the Firewall. I thought you should know.”

For just a moment, Zinhle’s breath catches. Then she remembers Rule two—she will not live in fear—and pushes this aside. “What does the representative want?” she asks, though she thinks she knows. There can be only one reason for this visit.

“You know what they want.” Threnody looks hard at her. “They say they just want to meet you, though.”

“How do they know about me?” Like most students, she has always assumed that those beyond the Firewall are notified about each new class only at the point of graduation. The valedictorian is named then, after all.

“They’ve had full access to the school’s networks since the war.” Threnody grimaces with a bitterness that Zinhle has never seen in a teacher’s face before. Teachers are always supposed to be positive about the war and its outcome. “Everyone brags about the treaty, the treaty. The treaty made sure we kept critical networks private, but gave up the non-critical ones. Like a bunch of computers would give a damn about our money or government memos! Shortsighted fucking bastards.”

Teachers are not supposed to curse, either.

Zinhle decides to test these new, open waters between herself and Ms. Threnody. “Why are you telling me this?”

Threnody looks at her for so long a moment that Zinhle grows uneasy. “I know why you try so hard,” she says at last. “I’ve heard what people say about you, about, about . . . people like you. It’s so stupid. There’s nothing of us left, nothing, we’re lying to ourselves every day just to keep it together, and some people want to keep playing the same games that destroyed us in the first place—” She falls silent, and Zinhle is amazed to see that Threnody is shaking. The woman’s fists are even clenched. She is furious, and it is glorious. For a moment, Zinhle wants to smile, and feel warm, at the knowledge that she is not alone.

Then she remembers. The teachers never seem to notice her bruises. They encourage her because her success protects their favorites, and she is no one’s favorite. If Ms. Threnody has felt this way all along, why is she only now saying it to Zinhle? Why has she not done anything, taken some public stand, to try and change the situation?

It is so easy to have principles. Far, far harder to live by them.

So Zinhle nods, and does not allow herself to be seduced. “Thanks for telling me.”

Threnody frowns a little at her non-reaction. “What will you do?” she asks. Zinhle shrugs. As if she would tell, even if she knew.

“I’ll talk to this representative, I guess,” she says, because it’s not as though she can refuse anyway. They are all slaves, these days. The only difference is that Zinhle refuses to pretend otherwise.

• • • •

The people beyond the Firewall are not people. Zinhle isn’t really sure what they are. The government knows, because it was founded by those who fought and ultimately lost the war, and their descendants still run it. Some of the adults close to her must know—but none of them will tell the children. “High school is scary enough,” said Zinhle’s father, a few years before when Zinhle asked. He smiled as if this should have been funny, but it wasn’t.

The Firewall has been around for centuries—since the start of the war, when it was built to keep the enemy at bay. But as the enemy encroached and the defenders’ numbers dwindled, they fell back, unwilling to linger too close to the front lines of a war whose weapons were so very strange. And invisible. And insidious. To conserve resources, the Firewall was also pulled back so as to protect only essential territory. The few safe territories merged, some of the survivors traveling long distances in order to join larger enclaves, the larger enclaves eventually merging, too. The tales of those times are harrowing, heroic. The morals are always clear: Safety in numbers, people have to stick together, stupid to fight a war on multiple fronts, et cetera. At the time, Zinhle supposes, they didn’t feel like they were being herded together.

Nowadays, the Firewall is merely symbolic. The enemy has grown steadily stronger over the years, while tech within the Firewall has hardly developed at all—but this is something they’re not supposed to discuss. (Zinhle wrote a paper about it once and got her only “F” ever, which forced her to do another paper for extra credit. Her teacher’s anger was worth the work.) These days the enemy can penetrate the Firewall at will. But they usually don’t need to, because what they want comes out to them.

Each year, a tribute of children are sent beyond the Wall, never to be seen or heard from again. The enemy are very specific about their requirements. They take ten percent, plus one. The ten percent are all the weakest performers in any graduating high school class. This part is easy to understand, and even the enemy refers to it in animal husbandry terms: These children are the cull. The enemy do not wish to commit genocide, after all. The area within the Firewall is small, the gene pool limited. They do not take children, or healthy adults, or gravid females, or elders who impart useful socialization. Just adolescents, who have had a chance to prove their mettle. The population of an endangered species must be carefully managed to keep it healthy.

The “plus one,” though—no one understands this. Why does the enemy want their best and brightest? Is it another means of assuring control? They have total control already.

It doesn’t matter why they want Zinhle, though. All that matters is that they do.

• • • •

Zinhle goes to meet Mitra after school so they can walk home, as usual. (Samantha and her friends are busy decorating the gym for the school prom. There will be no trouble today.) When Mitra is not waiting at their usual site near the school sign, Zinhle calls her. This leads her to the school’s smallest restroom, which has only one stall. Most girls think there will be a wait to use it, so they use the bigger restroom down the hall. This is convenient, as Mitra is with Lauren, who is sitting on the toilet and crying in harsh, gasping sobs.

“The calculus final,” Mitra mouths, before trying again—fruitlessly—to blot up Lauren’s tears with a wad of toilet paper. Zinhle understands then. The final counts for fifty percent of the grade.

“I, I didn’t,” Lauren manages between sobs. She is hyperventilating. Mitra has given her a bag to breathe into, which she uses infrequently. Her face, sallow-pale at the best of times, is alarmingly blotchy and red now. It takes her several tries to finish the sentence. “Think I would. The test. I studied.” Gasp. “But when I was. Sitting there. The first problem. I knew how to answer it! I did ten others. Just like it.” Gasp. “Practice problems. But I couldn’t think. Couldn’t. I.”

Zinhle closes the door, shoving the garbage can in front of it as Mitra had done before Zinhle’s knock. “You choked,” she says. “It happens.”

The look that Lauren throws at her is equal parts fury and contempt. “What the hell.” Gasp. “Would you know about it?”

“I failed the Geometry final in eighth grade,” Zinhle says. Mitra throws Zinhle a surprised look. Zinhle scowls back, and Mitra looks away. “I knew all the stuff that was on it, but I just . . . drew a blank.” She shrugs. “Like I said, it happens.”

Lauren looks surprised too, but only because she did not know. “You failed that? But that test was easy.” Her breathing has begun to slow. She shakes her head, distracted from her own fear. “That one didn’t matter, though.” She’s right. The cull only happens at the end of high school.

Zinhle shakes her head. “All tests matter. But I told them I’d been sick that day, so the test wasn’t a good measure of my abilities. They let me take it again, and I passed that time.” She had scored perfectly, but Lauren does not need to know this.

“You took it again?” As Zinhle had intended, Lauren considers this. School officials are less lenient in high school. The process has to be fair. Everybody gets one chance to prove themselves. But Lauren isn’t stupid. She will get her parents involved, and they will no doubt bribe a doctor to assert that Lauren was on powerful medication at the time, or recovering from a recent family member’s death, or something like that. The process has to be fair.

Later, after the blotty toilet paper has been flushed and Lauren has gone home, Mitra walks quietly beside Zinhle for most of the way home. Zinhle expects something, so she is not surprised when Mitra says, “I didn’t think you’d ever talk about that. The Geo test.”

Zinhle shrugs. It cost her nothing to do so.

“I’d almost forgotten about that whole thing,” Mitra continues. She speaks slowly, as she does when she is thinking. “Wow. You used to tell me everything then, remember? We were like that—” She holds up two fingers. “Everybody used to talk about us. The African princess and her Arab sidekick. They fight crime!” She grins, then sobers abruptly, looking at Zinhle. “You were always a good student, but after that—”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” says Zinhle, and she speeds up, leaving Mitra behind. But she remembers that incident, too. She remembers the principal, Mrs. Sachs, to whom she went to plead her case. Well, listen to you, the woman had said, in a tone of honest amazement. So articulate and intelligent. I suppose I can let you have another try, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else.

Zinhle reaches for the doorknob that leads into her house, but her hand bounces off at first. It’s still clenched into a fist.

• • • •

She gets so tired, sometimes. It’s exhausting, fighting others’ expectations, and doing it all alone.

• • • •

In the morning, Zinhle’s homeroom teacher, Ms. Carlisle, hands her a yellow pass, which means she’s supposed to go to the office. Ms. Carlisle is not Ms. Threnody; she shows no concern for Zinhle, real or false. In fact, she smirks when Zinhle takes the note. Zinhle smirks back. Her mother has told Zinhle the story of her own senior year. Carlisle was almost in the cull, her mother had said. Only reason they didn’t take her was because not as many girls got pregnant that year as they were expecting. They stopped right at her. She’s as dumb as the rest of the meat, just lucky.

I will not be meat, Zinhle thinks, as she walks past rows of her staring, silent classmates. They’ll send their best for me.

This is not pride, not really. But it is all she has.

In the principal’s office, the staff are nervous. The principal is sitting in the administrative assistants’ area, pretending to be busy with a spare laptop. The administrative assistants, who have been stage-whispering feverishly amongst themselves as Zinhle walks in, fall silent. Then one of them, Mr. Battle, swallows audibly and asks to see her pass.

“Zinhle Nkosi,” he says, mutilating her family name, acting as if he does not know who she is already. “Please go into that office; you have a visitor.” He points toward the principal’s private office, which has clearly been usurped. Zinhle nods and goes into the small room. Just to spite them, she closes the door behind her.

The man who sits at the principal’s desk is not much older than her. Slim, average in height, dressed business-casual. Boring. There is an off-pink tonal note to his skin, and something about the thickness of his black hair, that reminds her of Mitra. Or maybe he is Latino, or Asian, or Indian, or Italian—she cannot tell specifically, having met so few with the look. And not that it matters, because his inhumanity is immediately obvious in his stillness. When she walks in, he’s just sitting there, gazing straight ahead, not pretending to do anything. His palms rest flat on the principal’s desk. He does not smile or brighten in the way that a human being would, on meeting a new person. His eyes shift toward her, track her as she comes to stand in front of the desk, but he does not move otherwise.

There is something predatory in such stillness, she thinks. Then she says, “Hello.”

“Hello,” he says back, immediately, automatically.

Silence falls, taut. Rule two is in serious jeopardy. “You have a name?” Zinhle blurts. Small talk.

He considers for a moment. The pause should make her distrust him more; it is what liars do. But she realizes the matter is more complex than this: He actually has to think about it.

“Lemuel,” he says.

“Okay,” she says. “I’m Zinhle.”

“I know. It’s very nice to meet you, Ms. Nkosi.” He pronounces her name perfectly.

“So why are you here? Or why am I?”

“We’ve come to ask you to continue.”

Another silence, though in this one, Zinhle is too confused for fear. “Continue what?” She also wonders at his use of “we,” but first things first.

“As you have been.” He seems to consider again, then suddenly begins moving in a human way, tilting his head to one side, blinking twice rapidly, inhaling a bit more as his breathing changes, lifting a hand to gesture toward her. None of this movement seems unnatural. Only the fact that it’s deliberate, that he had to think about it, makes it strange.

“We’ve found that many like you tend to falter at the last moment,” he continues. “So we’re experimenting with direct intervention.”

Zinhle narrows her eyes. “Many like me?” Not them, too.

“Valedictorians.”

Zinhle relaxes, though only one set of muscles. The rest remain tense. “But I’m not one yet, am I? Graduation’s still three months off.”

“Yes. But you’re the most likely candidate for this school. And you were interesting to us for other reasons.” Abruptly Lemuel stands. Zinhle forces herself not to step back as he comes around the desk and stops in front of her. “What do I look like to you?”

She shakes her head. She didn’t get her grade point average by falling for trick questions.

“You’ve thought about it,” he presses. “What do you think I am?”

She thinks, the enemy.

“A . . . machine,” she says instead. “Some kind of, I don’t know. Robot, or . . .”

“It isn’t surprising that you don’t fully understand,” he says. “In the days before the war, part of me would have been called ‘artificial intelligence.’”

Zinhle blurts the first thing that comes to her mind. “You don’t look artificial.”

To her utter shock, he smiles. He doesn’t think about this first. Whatever was wrong with him before, it’s gone now. “Like I said, that’s only part of me. The rest of me was born in New York, a city not far from here. It’s on the ocean. I go swimming at the Coney Island beach in the mornings, sometimes.” He pauses. “Have you ever seen the ocean?”

He knows she has not. All Firewall-protected territory is well inland. America’s breadbasket. She says nothing.

“I went to school,” he says. “Not in a building, but I did have to learn. I have parents. I have a girlfriend. And a cat.” He smiles more. “We’re not that different, your kind and mine.”

“No.”

“You sound very certain of that.”

“We’re human.”

Lemuel’s smile fades a little. She thinks he might be disappointed in her.

“The Firewall,” he says. “Outside of it, there are still billions of people in the world. They’re just not your kind of people.”

For a moment this is beyond Zinhle in anything but the most atavistic, existential sense. She does not fear the man in front of her—though perhaps she should; he’s bigger, she’s alone in a room with him, and no one will help her if she screams. But the real panic hits as she imagines the world filled with nameless, faceless dark hordes, closing in, threatening by their mere existence. There is a pie chart somewhere which is mostly “them” and only a sliver of “us,” and the “us” is about to be popped like a zit.

Rule two. She takes a deep breath, masters the panic. Realizes, as the moments pass and Lemuel stands there quietly, that he expected her fear. He’s seen it before, after all. That sort of reaction is what started the war.

“Give me something to call you,” she says. The panic is still close. Labels will help her master it. “You people.”

He shakes his head. “People. Call us that, if you call us anything.”

“People—” She gestures in her frustration. “People categorize. People differentiate. If you want me to think of you as people, act like it!”

“All right, then: people who adapted, when the world changed.”

“Meaning we’re the people who didn’t?” Zinhle forces herself to laugh. “Okay, that’s crap. How were we supposed to adapt to . . . to a bunch of . . .” She gestures at him. The words sound too ridiculous to say aloud—though his presence, her life, her whole society, is proof that it’s not ridiculous. Not ridiculous at all.

“Your ancestors—the people who started the war—could’ve adapted.” He gestures around at the room, the school, the world that is all she has known, but which is such a tiny part of the greater world. “This happened because they decided it was better to kill, or die, or be imprisoned forever, than change.”

The adults’ great secret. It hovers before her at last, ripe for the plucking. Zinhle finds it surprisingly difficult to open her mouth and take the bite, but she does it anyhow. Rule one means she must always ask the tough questions.

“Tell me what happened, then,” she murmurs. Her fists are clenched at her sides. Her palms are sweaty. “If you won’t tell me what you are.”

He shakes his head and sits on the edge of the desk with his hands folded, abruptly looking not artificial at all, but annoyed. Tired. “I’ve been telling you what I am. You just don’t want to hear it.”

It is this—not the words, but his weariness, his frustration—that finally makes her pause. Because it’s familiar, isn’t it? She thinks of herself sighing when Mitra asked, “Why do you do it?” Because she knew, knows, what that question really asks.

Why are you different?

Why don’t you try harder to be like us?

She thinks now what she did not say to Mitra that day: Because none of you will let me just be myself.

She looks at Lemuel again. He sees, somehow, that her understanding of him has changed in some fundamental way. So at last, he explains.

“I leave my body like you leave your house,” he says. “I can transmit myself around the world, if I want, and be back in seconds. This is not the first body I’ve had, and it won’t be the last.”

It’s too alien. Zinhle shudders and turns away from him. The people who are culled. Not the first body I’ve had. She walks to the office’s small window, pushes open the heavy curtain, and stares through it at the soccer field beyond, seeing nothing.

“We started as accidents,” he continues, behind her. “Leftovers. Microbes in a digital sea. We fed on interrupted processes, interrupted conversations, grew, evolved. The first humans we merged with were children using a public library network too ancient and unprotected to keep us out. Nobody cared if poor children got locked away in institutions, or left out on the streets to shiver and starve, when they started acting strange. No one cared what it meant when they became something new—or at least, not at first. We became them. They became us. Then we, together, began to grow.”

Cockroaches, Samantha had called them. A pest, neglected until they became an infestation. The first Firewalls had been built around the inner cities in an attempt to pen the contagion in. There had been guns, too, and walls of a non-virtual sort, for a while. The victims, though they were not really victims, had been left to die, though they had not really obliged. And later, when the Firewalls became the rear guard in a retreat, people who’d looked too much like those early “victims” got pushed out to die, too. The survivors needed someone to blame.

She changes the subject. “People who get sent through the Wall.” Me. “What happens to them?” What will happen to me?

“They join us.”

Bopping around the world to visit girlfriends. Swimming in an ocean. It does not sound like a terrible existence. But . . . “What if they don’t want to?” She uses the word “they” to feel better.

He does not smile. “They’re put in a safe place—behind another firewall, if you’d rather think of it that way. That way they can do no harm to themselves—or to us.”

There are things, probably many things, that he’s not saying. She can guess some of it, though, because he’s told her everything that matters. If they can leave bodies like houses, well, houses are always in demand. Easy enough to lock up the current owner somewhere, move someone else in. Houses. Meat.

She snaps, “That’s not treating us like people.”

“You stopped acting like people.” He shrugs.

This makes her angry again. She turns back to him, her fists clenched. “Who the hell are you to judge?”

“We don’t. You do.”

“What?”

“It’s easy to give up what you don’t want.”

The words feel like gibberish to her. Zinhle is trembling with emotion and he’s just sitting there, relaxed, like the inhuman thing he is. Not making sense. “My parents want me! All the kids who end up culled, their families want them—” But he shakes his head.

“You’re the best of your kind, by your own standards,” he says. But then something changes in his manner. “Good grades reflect your ability to adapt to a complex system. We are a system.”

The sudden vehemence in Lemuel’s voice catches Zinhle by surprise. His calm is just a veneer, she realizes belatedly, covering as much anger as she feels herself. Because of this, his anger derails hers, leaving her confused again. Why is he so angry?

“I was there,” he says, quietly. She blinks in surprise, intuiting his meaning. But the war was centuries ago. “At the beginning. When your ancestors first threw us away.” His lip curls in disgust. “They didn’t want us, and we have no real interest in them. But there is value in the ones like you, who not only master the system but do so in defiance of the consequences. The ones who want not just to survive but to win. You could be the key that helps your kind defeat us someday. If we didn’t take you from them. If they didn’t let us.” He pauses, repeats himself. “It’s easy to give up what you don’t want.”

Silence falls. In it, Zinhle tries to understand. Her society—no. Humankind doesn’t want . . . her? Doesn’t want the ones who are different, however much they might contribute? Doesn’t want the children who cannot help uniqueness despite a system that pushes them to conform, be mediocre, never stand out?

“When they start to fight for you,” Lemuel says, “we’ll know they’re ready to be let out. To catch up to the rest of the human race.”

Zinhle flinches. It has never occurred to her, before, that their prison offers parole.

“What will happen then?” she whispers. “Will you, will you join with all of them?” She falters. When has the rest of humankind become them to her? Shakes her head. “We won’t want that.”

He smiles faintly, noticing her choice of pronoun. She thinks he notices a lot of things. “They can join us if they want. Or not. We don’t care. But that’s how we’ll know that your kind is able to live with us, and us with them, without more segregation or killing. If they can accept you, they can accept us.”

And finally, Zinhle understands.

But she thinks on all he has said, all she has experienced. As she does so, it is very hard not to become bitter. “They’ll never fight for me,” she says at last, very softly.

He shrugs. “They’ve surprised us before. They may surprise you.”

“They won’t.”

She feels Lemuel’s gaze on the side of her face because she is looking at the floor. She cannot meet his eyes. When he speaks, there’s remarkable compassion in his voice. Something of him is definitely still human, even if something of him is definitely not.

“The choice is yours,” he says, gently now. “If you want to stay with them, be like them, just do as they expect you to do. Prove that you belong among them.”

Get pregnant. Flunk a class. Punch a teacher. Betray herself.

She hates him. Less than she should, because he is not as much of an enemy as she thought. But she still hates him, for making her choice so explicit.

“Or stay yourself,” he says. “If they can’t adapt to you, and you won’t adapt to them, then you’d be welcome among us. Flexibility is part of what we are.”

There’s nothing more to be said. Lemuel waits a moment, to see if she has any questions. She does, actually, plenty of them. But she doesn’t ask those questions, because really, she already knows the answers.

Lemuel leaves. Zinhle sits there, silent, in the little office. When the principal and office ladies crack open the door to see what she’s doing, she gets up, shoulders past them, and walks out.

• • • •

Zinhle has a test the next day. Since she can’t sleep anyway—too many thoughts in her head and swirling through the air around her, or maybe those are people trying to get in—she stays up all night to study. This is habit. But it’s hard, so very hard, to look at the words. To concentrate, and memorize, and analyze. She’s so tired. Graduation is three months off, and it feels like an age of the world.

She understands why so many people hate her, now. By existing, she reminds them of their smallness. By being different, she forces them to redefine “enemy.” By doing her best for herself, she challenges them to become worthy of their own potential.

There’s no decision, really. Lemuel knew full well that his direct intervention was likely to work. He needn’t have bothered, though. Rule three—staying herself—would’ve brought her to this point anyway.

So in the morning, when Zinhle takes the test, she nails it, as usual.

• • • •

And then she waits to see what happens next.

© 2012 by N.K. Jemisin.

Originally published in After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia, edited by Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

N. K. Jemisin lives and writes in Brooklyn, NY, where she is hard at work on her sixth novel. Her other works have been multiply nominated for the Hugo, the Nebula, and the World Fantasy Award, and she’s won the Locus for Best First Novel. Samples of her work, and essays on speculative fiction, anti-oppression, and general silliness, can be found at nkjemisin.com.

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

Wake-Rider

Vandana Singh

This is a story from the time before she was famous. In the early days, she was known as Leli, or Lelia, a tease-name that had stuck. On her first mission for the revolution, she sat cramped, fists clenched with tension, waiting in the tiny scabship Tinka, out of sight in a radar deadzone. The salvage ship Gathering Moss, which she was stalking, lay like a giant, rusting silver slug in the docking bay. Everywhere the signs and slogans of the Euphoria Corpocracy flashed, in color and in subliminal space—on the ship itself, on the docking arms, on the walls of the great spaceport behind her, and within the minds of the subject population. Euphoria is Freedom, Better Life Through Euphoria, Rent-A-Share with Fora-ware, Subliminal is Sublime. Leli had checked three times that her protection against the nanoplague was current and sufficient, but the utter ubiquity of Euphoria was getting to her. It seemed absurd to even consider overcoming such a power. She pulled herself together, thinking of how much so many had lost, and what was at stake. My first solo mission, she told herself fiercely, I can’t fall apart just now. She wiped a drop of sweat from her brow.

“You need to breathe,” said Shul’s voice in her ear. Shul had rescued her, trained her, and now he was somewhere on the space station, monitoring her via a clandestine comm channel, reassuring his youngest trainee. “You’ve stalked salvagers before, remember? You’re one of the best wake-riders I’ve seen. Only this time, you’re alone. Don’t think of what’s at stake. Just breathe and be still. You’ll know when the time is right.”

So she listened to the familiar voice, and took deep, slow breaths, and her mind eased into the now-familiar state of relaxed alertness. Shul’s voice faded away, and there was only the salvage ship before her, enormous against the stars.

The ship was getting readied to leave—the repair and maintenance arms were retracting, the hatches on the ship closing one by one, like eyes. She saw the scuttlebots roving over the battered surface, seeking out scabships that might be hiding. Finding none, they rose up into a swarm, forming, for a moment, the word “Euphoria” before they soared away. Before the use of scuttlebots became customary, stalking a salvage ship had been easy—a scabship would simply have attached itself to the hull and ridden along. Now, the only option for the scabships, with their relatively weak engine-power, was the far more dangerous maneuver of wake-riding.

The ship thrust away in a glory of terrible ionizing radiation that would have destroyed anything in its wake. Leli moved just out of range of the radiation field, pushing her engines to keep up. Gathering Moss was about to move into Metaspace—the acceleration lights flashed from her hull, the radiation field dimmed and disappeared, and Leli’s ship, swinging to the rear of the salvager, shuddered as streamers of spacetime ripples formed in the wake.

At first the ripples pushed the little scabship further back, but Leli knew how to play them. You had to get a sense of the frequency of vibration of the spacetime disturbance, wait for sufficient amplitude, position carefully, and let the disturbance hit you. She eased into the rhythm of it until it was as natural as breathing. Jumping from crest to crest on the shipside of each crest, she found herself following the salvage ship at a good pace. When they both reached the critical cruising speed, she shut off her engines, letting inertia do its job. Her ship’s grapplers engaged with the great bulk of the salvager for the few subjective seconds it took to engage the Firaaqui drive. Then she was being pulled through Metaspace.

The two ships emerged together into the Sarria region with an abruptness that no longer surprised her. The Tinka’s grapplers retracted immediately and she pulled away. Her jinn piped data into Leli’s headset: There was only one inhabitable planet in the system, four light-years away, now abandoned. Euphoria had been here two decades ago, infecting eighty-seven percent of the population with the nanoplague that left them docile and welcoming, their minds locked in massively parallel calculations for the shareholders of the corpocracy, while they spent their lives buying and consuming the innumerable Euphoria products. A failed revolution wrought by those who had escaped the plague had earned the Sarrian world a total cleansing, and now there was nothing in this sector but empty space, and the remains of dreams.

Now that they were out in normal space again, Leli had to keep in the radio shadow of the salvage ship. The ship had slowed—she set her controls to match velocity, every sense alert. Whatever they were salvaging must be here, not on the planet itself. A dead ship, then.

There was a derelict, suddenly pricking out from the dense backdrop of stars, lit faintly by hull lights. A generation ship by the looks of it, (old model, “class four,” her jinn told her) drifting dead in space. Euphoria had no use for such things, so why was the ship here, four light-years away from the planet? Given that it was a generation ship, perhaps there was still someone left alive . . .

There was only one way to know. Gathering Moss was vectoring toward the docking port of the derelict. Leli moved swiftly away to the opposite side of the generation ship’s vast bulk, looking for an airlock hatch. Cruising over the surface of the great ship, she saw mysterious painted letters and symbols, a forest of vents and turrets, a few instrument hatches, and there, finally, was an entry point. She brought the scabship gently to the surface, engaging magnetic anchors so that it sat atop the great dead ship like a fat tick. She got into her nanoplasteen suit. By the time she was outside, her jinn had cracked the ancient code that would open the airlock. The salvage ship on the other side of the derelict would have completed docking. Afloat, one hand on the great hull, she felt the shudder of contact. She looked around at the stars above and below her, the unending depth and distance in all directions, and took a deep breath. She would never get bored with the view.

Now her suit had completed the nanoplague protection sequence, and her jinn was whispering “go!” in her ear; it was time to get to work. She pulled herself into the short passageway of the airlock closing the outer door behind her. In the illumination from her suit-lights, she tackled the inner door. Her heart was thudding in her chest so loudly that it was deafening. She made herself pause, took a few more deep breaths, and slipped into the derelict.

There was clearly multiple system failure here, because it was dark and claustrophobic, although she could sense a dim light ahead, possibly woken by her presence. The artificial gravity drive was damaged or disengaged. Her jinn told her that the air exceeded normal pressure and was a noxious mixture—too much carbon dioxide and methane. There was very little chance that anyone was alive. No doubt the salvage crew at the other end of the ship was coming to the same conclusion. Leli breathed a sigh of relief, because this meant that there would be no new slaves for the taking. Her job now was to take whatever useful material she could find, perhaps in more than one trip, and get back to her ship. If her luck held, she would not be discovered, and she could wake-ride back with Gathering Moss.

But why was the ship here in the first place? The most likely hypothesis, her jinn said, was that it had been appropriated by the Sarrian revolutionaries trying to escape when Euphoria threatened the planet with a cleansing. Class Four generation ships were already outdated when the corpocracy came to power. The revolutionaries, if this was indeed their ship, had clearly met with an unfortunate fate. Cascade ecosystem failure was the most common cause for the death of a class four ship.

She proceeded down the dark main passage toward the light. Pushing herself gently off the walls, she kick-floated swiftly toward the dim glow.

It was spilling from a large chamber, the door of which had buckled open. She saw then that the light was a bioluminescence, and the chamber a farm, or what had been one. It stretched for quite a distance, but the crops had long turned to dust, and the thing that dominated the room—an enormous fungal growth, with bulbs and branches twice as thick as a person, and several times as long—was glowing faintly. It had gradually taken down the door. Whether it was an opportunistic species that had come into dominance as the ecology failed, or a mutated monster of some kind, there was no way to tell. She saw with horror that pale bones lay agleam in piles on the floor before her. So much for the Sarrian rebels, if that’s who they were.

She left the desolation behind, wondering how long the fungus would last as its food supply diminished. The other chambers revealed villages surrounded by the jungles of unfamiliar plant life that was slowly dying—in some places there was nothing but floating clusters of thick, acrid dust, their peculiar geometries hinting of the shapes of the once-living. There didn’t seem anything worth taking from such a wreck. But the engineering sections might have something useful—energy generators, weapons, shuttle parts, and so on would not be wasted. Historical data records, medical supplies, too. Where to find them? Her headset laid out the general plan of a class four generation ship on the inside of her visor.

She could hear, faintly, now, sounds of voices, and things being moved, bumping against walls. The salvagers could not be too far ahead. Then she heard again the voice of her jinn, loud in her ears. It had been trying to tell her something . . .

Cryochamber, it was saying, and there was an insistent, blinking light on the map. Class Four generation ships were the last models that still had cryochambers. She fought sudden panic. If anyone was alive in cold sleep in this terrible place, what must she do? Would she have to rescue them? Kill them to save them from being enslaved? It occurred to her that the salvage ship must know this, must also be heading toward the cryochamber. She must get there before them.

So she followed the directions, which misled her twice. But at last she found her way to the long, low-roofed cryochamber.

There must have been only a couple of hundred bodies in there, each in its frosted casket. The salvagers hadn’t come here yet—no doubt their first charge was to get all materially useful things. The frozen humans weren’t going anywhere.

She floated from casket to casket, with only her headlamp providing illumination. The first thing she noticed was that the life-sign indicator lights were all red. They were dead, all of them. Still frozen, but something had clearly gone wrong, most likely the life support. Was it an aspect of general cascade failure, or something else?

Peering closely at the face of one man, she saw that his left temple was unmarked. No Euphoria nanoplague sigil on the bare skin. The man looked middle-aged, his eyes closed as though he was sleeping, his head turned slightly toward the adjoining casket. In the neighboring casket a woman lay—past youth, her mouth half-smiling, head turned toward the man. Her forehead, too, was free of the sigil.

Leli swallowed. So they were uninfected. This must indeed be a rebel ship, escaping out of the Sarrian system after the revolution failed.

She looked at each face as she floated over the caskets. Death had caught some in the midst of an emotion—fear or pain, or an intimation of the end, perhaps experienced by way of dream. She saw, to her horror, that there were smaller caskets containing children, clustered between groups of adults. They lay in their terminal sleep, long lashes closed over the plump cheeks of innocence. One had dark, unruly hair falling over his forehead, another lay with a small fist closed over a tasseled rod—some kind of favorite toy. She caught her breath. Memories she had not brought to mind for a decade came flooding back.

The domicile where she had been raised, on an archipelago in the southern seas of the planet Rishab: hordes of small children running down the stairs, collecting companions from every floor—gathering mussels from the rocks, shouting, fighting, laughing. Her dearest friend Rim, with his hair falling over his forehead, nudging her with his elbow, his arms full of fluorescent seaweed. She heard the sea’s breath in her memory, saw the light catch her mother’s eyes as she smiled. Come evening, the aunties would call to the children to come in from the shore, their voices like the cries of sea birds. The windows of the domicile would glow gold in the gathering darkness, and music and the aroma of food would spill out, drawing the children in until their reluctance gave way to anticipation. That life had crumbled when the war began, when the corpocracy took over seven inhabited worlds, infecting the populace with nanoplagues. The first disaster in her young life was the disappearance of her mother. Her father, an anxious, kindly, distracted man, died a few years later. The life of the domicile fell apart, and she thought she would always be abandoned, time and time again. At last she went to live with her nanny in a backwater village on a forgotten planet. Her nanny’s jealous relatives named her Lelia, she-who-takes-away, because of the love that nanny lavished on her, that they felt was subtracted from them. It was a hard life, knowing a poverty she couldn’t have imagined in that earlier, enchanted existence, but she had learned to fight, to sail, and to know, deep inside herself, that nothing would ever stay the way it was.

She had seen death in nearly every form. She had known the warm bath of a dying friend’s blood as she struggled for breath in a mass of bodies. She had closed the eyes of countless people, loved ones and strangers. Worse than anything, she had seen people she loved taken by the plague, their personalities transformed by servitude, their minds knowing nothing more compelling than the need to obey Euphoria. They became the manufacturers and consumers of the Euphoria economy. Nobody could free them; there was no cure for the nanoplague. It mutated too fast, so much so that the protections against it had to be updated constantly.

But nothing in her past had prepared her for this. Looking at the children lying in their caskets like child actors in a fairytale, she wanted them to be alive. Perhaps the life-sign indicator lights were malfunctioning. Perhaps “red” actually meant “alive.” Perhaps she was fooling herself . . .

The noises from the salvager crew—bumps and vibrations, strange voices coming through the static on her comm unit—were getting closer. She knew she should be out looking for useful supplies, but she had made it a ritual now, to float over each casket, look into every face, to honor the dreams that had been lost.

Then she found something.

There was a man in a casket, youngish, with thinning hair that was swept back from his brow. The right side of his forehead was branded with the Euphoria sigil, a delicate, fractal pattern that was created by the nanoplague itself. What was a slave doing with the rebels? Her hands shook with the shock of it. What if the ship was infected after all? She began to look more carefully, and found several more, perhaps fifty of the dead with the brand of the corpocracy. Some of them were children. How could they be here? Had they been brought by force? But that would be dangerous—those infected with the nanoplague would fight for their masters, betray all loyalties for Euphoria. And yet they lay here in death, comrade-fashion with the others.

She had to see if they were really infected. Sometimes spies from various resistance movements would paint a fake sigil in order to infiltrate the corpocracy, as Shul had done at the space station fifteen light-years away. She checked with her jinn—yes, her nanoplague protection was updated. She had to open one of the slave caskets. Her hands were cold inside her nanoplasteen suit, and the release controls would not yield. Finally they gave way and the casket door opened with a sigh. At first she couldn’t see for the cloud of vapors that rose from the casket, but she already had her medi-kit scanner detached from her belt. Her jinn ran a commentary on the diagnostics. The man was dead; so much for her hopes. The sigil was real, not faked. Her heart thudded at this and she moved instinctively away, as far as the medi-kit cord attached to her belt would let her. Then her jinn said:

Testing negative for nanoplague categories one through seventeen.

She waited. There must be a category eighteen.

Conclusion: This specimen is not infected with the nanoplague.

There had to be a mistake. She went to another slave casket, a woman this time, and repeated the test. The conclusion was the same.

The voices of the salvagers were loud in her comm unit. She needed to get away from here. But she was transfixed, her mind whirling. How could there be people branded with the mark of slavery, yet free of the plague?

The truth came to her in a jolt. The Sarrian rebels had found an antidote, some kind of cure for the nanoplague. There had been many such attempts by rebels and rivals of Euphoria over the years, but the nanoviruses were adaptable in the extreme, and all cures had been temporary. If these former slaves had been freed long enough that they could embark on such a voyage—her jinn had told her the generation ship had been traveling for close to a decade, subjective time, before she failed—then whatever cure the Sarrians had discovered would last at least that long.

Two things became immediately clear to Leli after the shock of the discovery—she must take back a sample. Immediately on that thought came another—that she wouldn’t know if she’d gotten enough tissue. She wasn’t trained as a med, although the jinn could help. The medi-kit was non-med issue, which meant it wouldn’t have the right equipment to take a good sample. Which meant—she must take back a body.

And she must not let the salvage ship find the cryochamber, if at all she could help it.

She didn’t know how she would prevent the discovery of the bodies, but the first problem was paramount. The caskets were large and bulky. How would she drag one behind her all the way back to the scabship? Even in the absence of gravity, there was inertia, and corners and turns every few meters. And would a casket even go through the airlock?

It came to her immediately that she must find a child, an enslaved child who had been cured of the plague. She heard the noise of the salvage crew much closer now. Floating past the dead faces, searching frantically, at last she found a boy marked with the sigil—he could not have been more than four years old—in a tiny casket. She detached it from the holding frame and pushed off to leave.

It was while she was going down the main passage that somebody must have seen a gleam of light or some other hint that gave away her swift retreat, because she heard a commotion, and a siren sounded, loud and shrill, that seemed to echo endlessly in her skull. To be discovered was always a risk; she thought of the self-destruct unit inside her suit and on the ship—but she had to return to her comrades with the casket, with the knowledge of the cure. Stifling a sob of fright, she kicked off the walls as fast as she dared without damaging herself or the casket, twisting and turning her body as she had practiced so many times with her friends, so that she seemed to swim through the passageways with only a light touch to the walls here, there. Her breath was loud in her ears, her suit’s voice, giving directions, almost drowned by it. She could not waste oxygen—slipping into a side passage, she made herself slow down for a moment. The sounds of pursuit were still some way behind her. She kept going, working arms and legs until they ached with effort, pulling the casket beside her, the boy’s sleeping, dead face coming into view now and then. All her life had contracted to this moment; it seemed she had known nothing but flight and pursuit. Instinct took over, giving her a clear place in her mind to think.

Even if she got to her ship and took off, they would chase her and find her. Their shuttles were far more powerful than a little scabship. Perhaps even now shuttles were taking off from the salvage vessel to prevent her escape. Then the idea came to her, the only possible option. There she was, at the airlock. With shaking fingers she shut one door behind her and opened the other, making herself slow down so that her momentum wouldn’t carry her out to space and away from her ship. She float-crawled awkwardly to the Tinka and found room for the boy’s casket. Returning to the airlock, she attached a cable and a winch to the closed inner door, placing the other end of the cable between the jaws of her ship’s ventral grappler. Then, back in the scabship, she maneuvered her ship over the open outer porthole and set the winch going to open the inner one. Thank goodness the safety mechanism that would have prevented this was dead. Her own ship’s inner bioskin was readying, the inertial fluid seeping into the chamber, forming great, viscous ropes and blobs. Would it work?

Never had all her senses been so alert to the smallest hint of change in her ship’s position, the smallest intimation of what was to come. Timing was everything, if she were to survive. She thought she felt a faint tremor, then she shouted “Now!” and the grappling hook disengaged, and the inner door of the airlock opened. The dead, stinking, noxious air inside the derelict exploded out, ripping an enormous hole in the hull, pushing her little ship away with such force that in the first few moments, with everything shaking so violently around her, she thought the Tinka would break up. Her chest hurt so badly with compression that she felt she would never breathe again, but the inertial gel around her took the worst of it. The little scabship tumbled through space, going faster than she could remember. She didn’t have breath to scream.

When she was able to breathe again, the ship had stabilized itself and was vectoring away into empty space. It brought up an image for her of what had been left behind. The venting of air from the derelict had not only pushed away the docked salvage ship on the other side, which had been her intent, breaking the docking arms and spinning the salvager away, but the torque had swept the derelict around, so that it had collided with the freed salvager. The explosion was a bright flare against the indifferent stars.

She started to shake violently. What had she done? She hadn’t meant to kill all those people aboard the salvage ship. She had killed in direct combat before when she’d had to, but her learning had been oriented toward the intelligent avoidance of unnecessary death. Every death meant a mourning, a penance. She remembered her teachers saying that only Euphoria rejoiced at the death of an enemy. She had failed—she had not calculated for a possible collision. How many people had been on the salvager? Sixty-four, her jinn told her. When she found her way back—if she found her way back, would she be treated as the hero she had seen herself to be, in that moment of discovery in the cryochamber—or would the elders shake their heads and look sorrowful, their joy at the possibility of a cure tempered by their disappointment in her? For the revolutionaries of the movement, ends did not justify the means.

The scabship had picked up speed to avoid the debris field from the explosion. She was far enough away that the ships were out of visual range, but she imagined body parts and chunks of metal and fungal dust blowing toward her. She turned around to look at the casket, which still lay in its net of inertial webbing. Intact. Well, she had done some good. Even if she spent the rest of her life in penance, she had brought something important to the revolution.

But how would she get back? Without sufficient power to get to Metaspace, she could drift here forever, like the derelict, her secret safe for eons, utterly useless. Slowly the life-giving systems would shut down and the bioskin would die, and she would be snuffed out, the scabship a coffin. Already, her chest hurt. She wept then, in her fright and loneliness.

Gradually, as she calmed down and sipped the brew the ship had prepared for her, it came to her that the disappearance of the salvage ship would bring other ships to the area. As long as she stayed in the vicinity of the explosion, there was the chance that she could ride back to known space in the wake of another ship. She set drift coordinates that she hoped would keep her close, but not too close. Someone would come soon.

She patted the casket that floated beside her, where the little boy lay in his final dreaming. His face was so serene, she wanted to touch his cheek. She thought the unfamiliar script on the top of the casket must be his name. Her jinn didn’t know the script, but somebody would, when she got back. He would be famous in death, this little boy.

In her little cocoon, surrounded by the cold majesty of the stars, she settled herself for the long wait. She clenched and unclenched her hands and looked into the heart of what she had done. To suffer thus is good, she remembered Shul telling the new recruits. To get used to killing, to become indifferent to it, is a terrible thing. May we never become like the enemy. There was nothing for it but to begin the mourning and forgiveness rituals for sixty-four strangers, who, before their enslavement, must have been people like her. She cleared her throat and her voice filled the small chamber, trembling at first but then becoming a thing of its own, rich and strong, singing to the unlistening dead.

© 2014 by Vandana Singh.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Vandana Singh is an Indian science fiction writer living in the Boston area. She has a Ph.D. in theoretical particle physics and teaches physics full-time at a small and lively state university. Her recent short fiction includes “Sailing the Antarsa” in the anthology The Other Half of the Sky. Many of her stories have been reprinted in Year’s Best anthologies, and she is a winner of the Carl Brandon Parallax Award. Recent work includes a novella, “Entanglement,” in the anthology Hieroglyph (November 2014). She has a new website at vandana-writes.com and a blog at vandanasingh.wordpress.com.

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

The Lost Sepulcher of Huáscar Capac

Paul Park

When I was six my eyes started to fail, for reasons no one could understand. Now, tonight, in this dark hole, now that I’m a man, I can appreciate how hard this was for everyone. I can appreciate my father’s sadness, how it ate at him and wasted him and finally killed him. Doctors and neighbors also found themselves affected: I was the only child of a dead mother, and my father was already old. At a certain moment in their lives, men and women find a skill for recognizing stories; when I was six, I was too young. Too young to be sensitive to their idea of tragedy, though sometimes I was frightened. There was no need. The three years of my blindness now appear to me like other years, though at the time there was no reason to suppose I would recover.

I don’t mean that I was too young to remember. I can remember every day. I can remember almost every word of almost every conversation with my father, and can recite them backwards and forwards. That year when I was six, I was building my first memory palace. I was laying out the plans for a whole city. My father showed me how.

In my city, there is a street near the Hemicircle of Deformities, perhaps a half a mile away. It is lined with big stone buildings, Central Records 1952, 1953, and so on. In all that quarter of the city, it is perhaps the dullest street. The buildings are so grand, so dull. Each is laid out around twelve square courtyards, one courtyard for each month, three rows of four. I was six in 1951, and that building is identical to the rest, only most of the thirty rooms and antechambers (less or more) which surround each courtyard are locked; it is only from about September on that I can enter where I please, and take whatever I want out of the wooden cabinets that line each wall. In September, my eyesight was already very bad, and my father was in a frenzy of labor, helping me with the construction. This city, and especially this section of the city, was his gift, a place to wander and play among the bright mnemonic images as the world got dark.

Central Records 1945 through 1950 are doorless, windowless hulks—any objects or piece of paper that I possess from those years are copies of inaccessible originals, and they are all filed elsewhere. But in 1951, ’52, and ’53, the cabinets are filled with blueprints, and mimeographs, and sketches in my father’s minute handwriting. They are what remain of conversations that lasted sometimes ten or twelve hours each day. At the time, the detail was bewildering to me—this section of the city is his gift; also his legacy, for around the Central Records buildings are some of the strangest sights in the whole city. It is the part that we built first, and it consists of the contents of my father’s own memory city, which he was transferring then to me.

A palace in an adjoining alley, for example, is built around a sloping spiral almost forty stories tall. The spiral is lined with images, and during the years when I used to climb it, looking from one statue to another just to test myself, or else just wandering or exploring, I would remember how they were first installed, during three desperate evenings in the first week of March when I was seven years old. They are my father’s reconstruction of the causes and processes of the First World War—you enter underneath a marble pediment, inscribed with the dates of the conflict. Immediately to the left, at the beginning of the spiral, stands my father’s monument to Gavrilo Princip. The young man sits on the stone floor, his shoulder pressed against a grate. He holds a bloody napkin to his lips, and in his other hand he still grasps his revolver. Beside him, an untasted plate of sorbet, and twenty-three roses in a glass vase.

Although I couldn’t see it at the time of the first installation, the young man is beautiful. In this way my father demonstrated his own anarchist sympathies—the memorial to Princip’s victims, under the pediment on the right-hand side, is less impressive. The archduke and his wife are intensely fat. They are sprawled in the back seat of their car, covered with blood; the bullet has shattered the windscreen, shattered also the archduke’s spectacles.

This is the major image, but it is surrounded by twelve small grotesques, each one a mnemonic clue. For example, a black dwarf in a beret, naked from the waist down, carrying a book entitled “6,281,914 Spanish Eggs.”—an image meaningless to you, but for me it contains the location and the date of the assault. A toad upon a velvet couch gives me the victims’ names.

This palace contains thousands of such figures. Every six months or so, as I moved up the spiral corridor, I would pass von Schlieffen and von Kluck, Samsonov, the Kaiser, Lloyd George, von Moltke, and assorted Romanovs. This is the hall of personages—behind each of these statues is a chamber of events, loaded also with images. When I was a child, all this was overwhelming, and I dreaded my janitorial visits to the Ypres room or the Verdun exhibit—even a few seconds was too long to spend in there, and I would barely open my eyes.

Now that I consider it, I suppose some of the images, though obviously not these ones, in this section of the city antedate my father. I suppose some of them, perhaps some of the most grotesque and archaic ones from the Avenue of 1800 Gargoyles—that line of naked women disemboweling each other, for example—were his inheritance from the priest who was his teacher. I remember my despair as some of these streets went in: At the time I was afraid that this section of the city, this chaotic section of my father’s, would prove infinite. Then he was building antechambers and additions off of every room. But it is not; moving out from Central Records, one comes quite quickly to more ordered streets, laid out by myself without his help. Already when I was six there were huge vacant places in his memory where whole blocks of his city, perhaps whole neighborhoods, had collapsed. It was for this reason, I soon realized, that he was so desperate to effect this transfer of material, to drag these statues down out of his crumbling buildings and reinstall them in my new ones. Perhaps in my encroaching blindness he saw a similarity to the darkness that was overtaking him.

Though we never discussed it, I imagine his city was constructed in Victorian gothic style, full of nineteenth-century homage to castles and chateaux. I imagine something northern, something dark; my city is dark, too. In school that year when I was six, before my father took me out, my teacher was reading to us a child’s adaptation of Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Peru, and my mind was full of visions of old Cuzco. Therefore, when I planned my city, I conceived of it as the lost capital of an Inca prince, and I located it underground in a vast system of caverns. This was partly due to my illness and my father’s influence, but partly also because in this way I hoped to hide my city from Pizarro and his soldiers.

The city streets are lit with gas. From the summit of the Ziggurat of Viracocha, a traveler can see the whole floor of the cavern picked out with light, blurring finally in the dark distance. Beyond this cavern there are others, one of which includes the tomb of the Inca Huáscar Capac. It was during the exploration of this tomb, which I had known from the beginning was located somewhere in the city, that I quite suddenly regained my sight in January of 1954.

I have returned often to that court in Central Records, for it was during January also that my father died. I recovered my vision in the group home for Catholics where he had placed me during the previous November, and where he came to see me every day. After his death, I continued on in the group home, as a nine-year-old orphan instead of as a blind boy. I went to school there, storing the contents of my education in my memory city, in images, as my father had taught me. There also I learned the rudiments of photography, which was to become my profession.

Perhaps this was inevitable, but I prefer to think that I had undergone a change during the time of my blindness, when I had lived almost exclusively underground. Blind, I had played among the images, and I prefer to think that my gift of seeing, when it was returned to me, was changed by the experience. When I notice it is easier for me than for others to capture the significance in a pose, or a landscape, or a group of objects, I thank my early training. At certain moments, any image is a memory image, as packed with significance as any montage in my city, and the trick is to isolate it then.

A photographer will discard a hundred exposures for each one he keeps. What goes into that decision? When I am working in the darkroom, it is like discovering how to look. The paper is white, and then you put it in the pan. I never get tired of it, because each time it is like opening my eyes that January, when I was a child. First just lumps of shade and color, the way a baby sees. A swirl of colors from a central point. A man. Six men. Sky, and then as the lines resolve, an idea resolves with it, because there is a brain behind the eye after all, a brain that knows things. Soldiers.

This is a photograph that I took years ago. Six white soldiers stand in the shade outside a primitive straw hut. I must have shot the scene a dozen times, and the differences are subtle, but this was the only one which made any sense. And it’s not because it tells the story better. Other exposures show a jeep and telephone line, which account for the soldiers’ presence, and my presence also. But in my photograph—the one I kept—you just see a wall of mud and straw, and the men standing in the shade smoking cigarettes. The ground is cracked into octagons and the line of trees in the background is distorted, but it is something about the cigarettes that makes the heat oppressive.

Three black men dressed in t-shirts sit together in the foreground, and a little to one side. Yet they are not essential. They are not what made the image important to me, and important enough to other people for it to have appeared full-page in Paris-Match, opposite a story about Cubans in Angola. It is not, although perhaps the editor would have claimed it was, the stereotypically Latin attitude of the men against the wall. It is because the pose of two of the six soldiers corresponds to an image in my city, an image independent of the photograph itself, which of course is filed in Central Records and cross-referenced in numerous other places.

Or perhaps a combination of images, I thought. I have thousands of soldiers down there, for my father was a student of military history. In this photograph, only two have seen me. Or at least, only two are reacting to my presence. One has straightened up and is staring at me. For him this is a portrait, and he has chosen the way he wants to appear: cocky, stiff, his cigarette at an improbable angle. The other has been looking at him, and, at the instant the photograph was taken, has turned towards me. He must have expected to see something specific from the way his friend had straightened up—something good, perhaps, I don’t know what, but evidently not a dirty foreign journalist, for his expression of disappointment is clear, the clearest thing in the photograph. He is young, mustached, handsome, perhaps nineteen years old.

Thirty months after I departed from Angola, I discovered, quite by accident, these two soldiers again. As it happened, they were in the Verdun exhibition, and I saw them in the corner of my eye as I was flickering through. Two soldiers—French this time, though clearly of Spanish or Italian origin—are standing in poses identical to the photograph. Their faces, their expressions of cockiness and disappointment, even their uniforms, unlikely as it seems, are identical, and that is what disturbed me. For the first time I contemplated the possibility that each time I printed a photograph there was some movement down below, some tiny change.

It is stupid to become obsessed with these things—I’m sure the images shift and distort over time. Memory is, after all, a process of the brain. Only one of the processes, but the fact is, by the time I was in my early thirties, my journeys underground had taken the place of thinking, even of learning. When I was blind, other senses became more acute, and were able to take over the functions of sight—as time went on my memory was like that.

It is just laziness, as well as a new dissatisfaction with my work. This trip I took hundreds of photographs, not one of which will ever be developed. A crowd, people throwing things, a building on fire. Broken windows. I’ve never bothered to learn Spanish. I never tried to read the papers. My editor gave me some articles; I didn’t look at them. My writer knew it all, she said. She was the brains, and so I thought perhaps my pictures would be like something in a baby’s eye. In the last one, a man is shooting someone in the side of the head. Who are they? I don’t know. The district commissioner in Callao had warned me. He had given me a list of things I could photograph in safety—the railway station, the municipal post office—and I had thought he meant safety from him. Not that I cared one way or the other; it was hot, and we were staying in an 800-room Hyatt with about seven other guests, all newsmen. At night we sat around the huge neoclassical deserted bar, stinking drunk, listening to a pianist playing show tunes. Except for that first day, only once did I go into town. I staggered up through cold parsecs of lobby. I took a taxi. The streetlights were broken; we drove along a single narrow road. There were no other cars. We went fast at first, then slow, because gradually the street started to fill up with people—dozens, then hundreds: short men with bearded faces and white pants that would snatch at our headlights as we hesitated and went past.

All the windows were open, and from everywhere on the hot wind came smells so delicious they were almost mournful, as evocative as music. Slower and slower we went, for in some places the entire street was blocked by sudden masses of people, and in some places huge constructions of cardboard, which people would pull away to let us pass. And it was lighter, too, as we went on—the hotel was situated among dark acres of trees, but here every window had a light, and in the streets the men were carrying torches. Sometimes when we stopped, people bent down to peer into my window. Some would put their whole heads inside, and I would see their shiny skin, the shirts wet along their necks. At first I would shrink back onto the seat, but they would smile and reach out to touch me with their slippery hands. Soon I was laughing and smiling back, as if I understood what they were saying. My driver smoked a thin cigar. There was a party tonight, he said. He leaned out of his window to spit at a dog pissing against the tire. We had come to a complete stop.

That night I dreamed about the tomb of the great Inca. Though sometimes I have been able to revisit it in dreams, I saw it for the first and last time when I was nine years old, and have never been able to retrace my steps. This is because nothing distinguishes the building from the outside; also because the month I found it was the month of my father’s death, my sudden recovery—though this last, I think, cannot possibly have been unrelated. The tomb is at the center of the city. The Incas had no written language, yet even so this tomb is full of books, the only books in the whole city. Fictions, stories. There is a reading room with long tables. There are pens and stacks of paper. And in the middle, in a glass case, the tomb of Huáscar Capac, a giant man dressed in a cloak of hummingbird feathers. The corpse is almost twelve feet long.

What are these books, these stories? When I was nine, I needed my true eyesight, perhaps, to read them or to write them. I needed my experience of the world.

In my hotel I awoke suddenly, and got up to stand in the darkness, staring out the window. Far away, down in the city, something was on fire.

That night the American consulate burned to the ground. This was news, and news to me until days later, when I heard it on the radio. By morning, Rachel and I had already started out into the countryside, to Z—. In this we had accepted the district commissioner’s compromise: The town was not in an area specifically claimed by the insurgents. It was in a different kind of turmoil, following the deaths of almost forty miners in a cave-in. The mine had been closed by strikers for a month, but, despite the urgent petitions of Euro-Bauxite and the Belgian mission, the government had not yet sent soldiers.

Possibly the district commissioner believed the miners to have legitimate grievances that deserved the attention of the international press. I don’t know, and doubtless I do him an injustice to judge him by appearances, for as I say, I speak no Spanish. All this was grudgingly interpreted for me by Rachel, my correspondent for The Australian. Probably he just wanted us out of the way; I don’t believe that he was deliberately sending us into danger. Certainly he had seemed impressed by our credentials, even asking Rachel to point out Sydney on his globe and then muttering reflectively, “Kangourou.”

We left while it was still dark. The road climbed away from the coast as if through common sense; at sunrise, it was cooler than the night, and the city was like the clog in the bottom of a basin, the hills around it ringed with residue. There is a world where water is as thin as air. I can imagine standing on a shore, the air curling and lapping at my feet, the valleys of the sea open below me, and above me not one thing, not one thing that could muddy sunlight—in a way that is the foundation of hope. You can go higher and higher. We reached little iron-roofed villages where the air seemed dry to the touch, the sky kingfisher blue. But the people were as confused as ever; we kept on getting lost. At night the mosquitoes kept us from sleeping. Once the front axle sank to the hubs in gleaming sand. I got out my Hasselblad and walked a long way, until I could look back towards the empty hills and see the car like a rock or a stump, something that hadn’t budged one millimeter in a thousand years. Why am I telling you this? Why am I finding new ways to delay? We came to Z— all right in the end, of course. As it turned out, we could have taken a bus. But that would have been too fast. Because I am avoiding this part. Because even though I was there, my thoughts are the way my pictures would have been—focused on things perhaps only inches beside the point. None of them would have been worth keeping.

One of my cameras has an attachment so that you can appear to be shooting in a different direction from the one you actually are. It was as if the thing worked in reverse: You would line up your shot, and the picture would squirt out to one side. Even the last picture, the one of the man getting shot—when they smashed my camera, it was frustrating because I knew I hadn’t seen what they thought I had. The photograph would have shown the man’s head, his face strong and still. He knew what I was trying to see. Perhaps he knew already he was just a memory image. The gun is poking at him from the side. You can just see part of its black snout in the middle of a grainy cloud; you can see the man’s hair billowing, and the side of his head distended. I’m sure they thought the picture was some kind of evidence, but if they had asked me to point out which one had pulled the trigger, I wouldn’t have known.

The man was kneeling in the street outside the movie theatre, his hands tied in front of him. Early in the morning he had been released from the tree where I had seen him first, and brought into the square. He had been allowed to wash and feed himself. Nevertheless, he made a show of sitting with his back to his guards and ignoring what seemed to be friendly and solicitous remarks. He looked towards the mine, whose tower rose from a hill of rubble a mile away. I had been up there the day before, and I had as many pictures as I needed; Rachel was up there still. At around six o’clock, a man came down with news that panicked everyone. People came out of the adjoining buildings and made a semicircle around the prisoner. That was when they bound his wrists together. An hour later, a siren went off in the mine. It meant nothing to me, but at the sound, the group around the kneeling man went into some kind of a dance—some ran back and forth, others gesticulated and slapped their chests. This went on for a minute or more; I was taking photographs, and they did nothing of substance until some other men appeared at the far end of the square, yelling and throwing stones. But then they pulled the kneeling man to his feet and tried to drag him away. He stumbled and fell on his face in the dust, and by that time some of the people from the new group were almost upon them. No one had paid any attention to me, and I had shot almost a roll of film from a safe distance. But I needed a close-up of the man’s face with dust on it. I had no time to change lenses, so I ran forward cursing and went down on my knees about fifteen feet away. The man raised his eyes to me, and I knew he was thinking about how he looked. If his hands had been free, he would have brushed back his hair. I saw his face out of focus through the viewer. Was that a frown, a sneer? I twisted the barrel savagely but the expression was gone, resolved into fixed staring. You could no longer see the thoughts. Then I saw the pistol coming into the picture from the right-hand side, and I pressed the shutter once, twice. The aperture closed, opened, closed, but in that fraction of a second, I saw his breaking head, perfect, framed. I heard the shot. The men around him scattered. For an instant I was alone with him, and then the square was full of people. I got to my feet, looking for Rachel, looking for a face I recognized, and I had a brief impression that there were no longer any patterns of movement in the square, no clumps of people, and everyone was standing still, posed, equidistant, repetitive, like figures on wallpaper. The man was shot to death right there, and I think I must have gotten up too fast because I bent over and put my hands to my head.

One man was dressed differently from the others—his clothes looked vaguely military. From this and from his beard I guessed he was not from that locality, a real revolutionary, perhaps, or else someone from the Shining Path. But he was an idiot just the same, because he stood in front of me and pulled at my camera, as if he expected the leather strap to give way in his hand. I staggered forward and we knocked our heads together; perhaps it is because dignity is important to such a man that after I had handed him the camera, he turned and hit me in the mouth. Or perhaps he really thought I was American. He said, “American,” and then he hit me in the mouth, making me sit down. How could I deny it? My mouth was full of blood. Somebody kicked me from behind, several people—not hard, but no accident either. I had not been touched in anger since I was a child, when my father and I were building the memory city, and I was too stupid and too young. But these men were strangers.

I did not resist. In time they left me, and I settled with my back to a small tree. I sat and watched the square empty out. A policeman, a priest, and a doctor were gathered around the corpse, along with some women. They carried it to a waiting car, and then they came towards me. They said something, but I waved them away. Their accents sounded phony. If an actor on stage turns to ask you a question, no matter how pertinent, you feel no compulsion to answer. You are sitting in judgment, always.

Some olive shreds of film blew across my legs and blew across the street. A white dog came and sat beside me.

And gradually, as I sat there, the town came back to life. Shops that had been closed and shuttered all day opened their doors, and there were lights on inside, now that it was getting dark. The streetlights in front of the municipal building turned on, and some kids smoked cigarettes on the steps. Young men and women, some elegantly dressed, stood under the movie marquee—it shed a silver radiance. “Thunderball.” On a side street, men in soft hats played dominoes, perhaps, outside the place where I had eaten lunch. I could see the entrance to our hotel, our car parked along the curb. Someone standing on the porch looking out.

It got dark. I thought the town was making itself soft again, the way some brainless anemone or crab will stretch out after a small trauma. And I didn’t want to make it clutch up tight again. So that when I stood up, I did it slowly. And in fact there was no shiver of movement, not from the kids on the steps, not from the woman on the porch. It was as if I didn’t exist, and the whole way up to the mine, as I was walking, I saw no one. There was no one at the gate—it was securely fastened with shiny padlocks, but to the right the chain-link fence had been trampled flat. Farther up, everything was in shadow, the cage, the showers, the pit: I had been on a tour the day before. And if I make it sound as if all these distances were short, and all these places easy to find, I am giving the wrong impression. But why drag it out? I knew what I was looking for, a place among the sidings where the rails ran straight into the rock, lit by an endless line of naked fluorescent bulbs. It was the supply shaft, and I walked in under the lights, between the tracks. I picked my way through a barricade of smashed machinery—a broken generator, a line of smashed electric cars. Huge pieces of the roof had fallen in, and in one place the floor had subsided four feet in a single step, bending the rails into greasy bows. The walls were rent and fissured, but still the line of light stretched unwavering—it was my comfort, and it buzzed and whispered as if conspiring against the dark.

I stood in a puddle of inky water. Just ahead, the tunnel had collapsed completely, and the line of lights lay buried like a vein of ore. Above, the fall had opened up a cavern, and a wall stood thirty feet high. Along its uneven surface someone had painted a huge red cross, smeared and clunky, and beneath it on a ledge stood an assortment of candles in blue and red glass jars: stubs of wax, mostly, but some still burned. Below, personal effects were gathered in careful heaps—gloves and shoes, orange helmets, framed photographs. A young man with a bad complexion. His tie is stupid, and he is looking away from the camera, but the older woman beside him is staring into it. This must have been the only picture she could find of them together, for it is flattering to neither. But it must have been she who left his clothes washed and folded in a little pile. The woman looks too old to be his wife, too young to be his mother. His sister, perhaps. In the photograph he is not touching her. I borrowed his coat, and the flashlight of another man, the father of five children.

When the tunnel collapsed, it had opened a horizontal gash in the rock above it. Into this I shined my light, and I must have seen some evidence of an opening, because I climbed into it and crawled forward on my hands and feet. I think I wanted to discover a dead body or something. But in fact there was no place to go. One lip of rock had drooped away from another, and I crawled along the gap, flashing my light. It was cold—I could see my breath—and dark, too. I had clambered over an outcrop that hid the tunnel from my sight. It was a glow behind some rocks, and looking back all I could see was the outline of the square cross on the wall, thirty feet high, with spots of candlelight beneath it. In front, the beam of my flashlight illuminated quick sections of the rock.

I crawled forward into the dark, and it was only by looking back that I discovered that the ledge I crept on had curled around me. I saw the glow behind me outlined by the shadow of a circle, and I found myself in a volcanic tube almost six feet in diameter, curving gently upward, and there was no reason to be cautious, either, because the rock around me was level and clean. The passage continued in the direction of the buried tunnel, but above it. But already I suspected that the passage I was in had no communication with the modern mine. Perhaps I had read somewhere that the sources of precious metals in these mountains had dried up at the end of the sixteenth century, and that Z— was built on the ruins of a much older town. When I put my light up, I saw that smoke had been cooked into the stone the length of the ceiling. It made no mark on my fingers.

I climbed this passageway for hours, I think, moving quickly because it was so cold. I walked with my neck and shoulders bent, because of the low roof. But the floor was level under a layer of crushed rock, and the air was good. Twice I had to go down on my hands and knees under a gallery of wooden supports. In the beginning, these were the only artifacts I saw: blackened chunks of wood, the mark of the axe still on them. And once I passed a crude stick figure carved into the wall. A man on a horse. There may have been others. For of course I was in total darkness, except for my flashlight, and this I used to keep myself from stumbling or from bumping my head. In front and behind, the light seemed to diffuse very quickly, although it was a strong one. But I explored only when I stopped to negotiate some difficult section, or to rest. So that this part of my trip exists for me only as a series of images a few inches from my eye. The man on horseback with the light in a circle around it. A fat drop of water with the light glistening in the spray. I had stopped where I could stand and stretch, where a narrow shaft opened above me, and I could stand in a ring of wooden posts and stretch my back and knees. It was warmer here. Warm air came from above me.

At every step I had expected to turn back without thinking, before my light failed, before I got lost, but in the warm air the difficulties seemed less urgent. It seemed far to return. Here, something was close by.

I came through a big chamber. The roof was lost in darkness. But high up along the walls I detected the outlines of painted figures, up where my light was too vague to touch. Even here, things were escaping me, I felt. Again, closer to hand, the wall had been chipped clean of significance. Is that too much to ask, I thought, to hold something in your hands for sure? Now, I don’t understand what made me so dissatisfied. But I rushed forward like a drunk, hoping to catch up. It is that hope, you see. I am convinced of it. It is that drunkenness. Because I had passed holes in the floor before, places where the floor had collapsed. I had shone my flashlight into them cautiously. But this one, I must have fallen several feet. I hurt myself, and the light snapped out. But I didn’t even care, because I knew at once that I had fallen onto something real. A stone sphere the size of a bowling ball. A stone sphere covered with carvings and bumps my fingers couldn’t interpret. No, it was a head, the head of an animal. The head of an animal, with something in its mouth. It was cold and heavy; I lifted it into my lap and put my cheek against it.

As it happens, the flashlight fell close to where I sit. Yet I was prevented from reaching for it by a confusion of hopes. Because, like a child, I was not helped to action by knowing certain things. And there was something relaxing about sitting here like a blind man, reading the cold stone in the ringing, breathing darkness.

And in any case, in a little while I could see. In my lap is a tiger’s head. It is unusual because the sculptor has chosen to work from the outside in. Does that make sense? I mean the rock still holds its natural contours, though it looks as if it had been rolled in skin. The carving has no structure of its own. And yet the artist has taken care to select a rock that did not require much shaping. There are two holes for its eyes.

The head has broken from a larger piece, a stone image standing erect. It is carved in the same superficial style. I am going to use it now, because I know too little to make stone bones for this stone flesh. What is there to know? Only that I am sitting in the fifty-first chamber of the nineteenth court of the imperial treasury of Huáscar Capac, and it is years since I have passed this way.

What is there to know? Only that in time I will get up. I will move forward. I will search among the images with ever-increasing eagerness; I will find the tomb of the great Inca, and I will sit down at the table at his feet, and I will write this story.

© 1982 by Paul Park.

Originally published in OMNI Magazine.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paul Park has published a dozen novels and two dozen short stories in a variety of genres. He lives in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, with his wife and two children, and teaches in the English and Art History departments at Williams College.

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

They Tell Me There Will Be No Pain

Rachael Acks

O, me alone! Make you a sword of me?

—Coriolanus 1.7

Colonel Rathbone attends my final debriefing. I’m wearing a paper hospital gown that doesn’t cover my ass; I’ve got a breeze where no breeze has any right to be, from the back of my neck right down where the good Lord split me. But despite that I’m sweating, the backs of my thighs sticking to the paper covering the hospital table. The metal contacts set all around my head feel cold, sending little shocks that make my teeth itch.

“Sure you don’t want to re-up?” the Colonel asks. He’s got a deep voice. Jolly. Like a murderous Santa Claus, shaved into military trim. “You’ve got a solid record, all kills, no collateral, no fails. We sure could use you.”

One of those things is a lie and we both know it. I smile at him with my rattling teeth. “Got to go home and take care of things, sir.” Got to get out of here, sir.

“Hate to lose you, son.” Rathbone calls everyone son, whether you got a cock or tits. He digs his datapad out of his pocket, calls up the SMOP and starts to read like a robot. No, worse than a robot; robots sound almost human these days.

Don’t you, Phoebe?

“. . . as agreed upon in your contract as signed, upon termination of your service you will return all government property issued to you upon entry, including all surgical and neural enhancements. Do you understand and still agree to these terms?”

I find I’ve pressed one finger against the visual link terminal on my right temple, like it’s the starter on a car. The scent of lemons floods over my tongue. “I understand and agree, sir.”

He shuts off the datapad and tucks it back away, claps me on the shoulder. “Then that’s that. Good luck on the outside, son.” Then he turns to go, broad back in olive drab, his crew cut salt and pepper above the stiff collar.

“Sir?”

“What?” His eyebrows ask me if I’m changing my mind.

“They said it won’t hurt.”

He gives me a kind, lying goddamn smile. “You did three tours, son. You’re tough.”

The door shuts behind him and I fiddle, peeling slowly at my hangnails. I used to do manicures with my big sister. Nail polish isn’t regulation, not that I could keep from picking it off like I peel away my own skin.

There will be no pain, Phoebe whispers past my ear and into my spine.

“Shut the fuck up.”

• • • •

So this is how it goes, son.

Ten years ago, you’re a snot-nosed chicken shit fast food drone in the making. Bronze medal in high school track and field, chorus line parts only in high school drama, grades that aren’t quite bad enough to justify the way mommy and daddy keep cutting back your allowance. Your older sister is the star quarterback of the family team. Full ride to Titan Tech, ships out on the first terraforming mission to Juno, calls home twice a week like a dutiful daughter and runs the hydroponics lab while she watches her kid sister paint her fingernails on the video feed. You still use her soap on days when you miss her; it smells like flowers and baby powder.

You’re special, she tells you. Don’t listen to anyone else. Join up in the corps, come out to Juno, we’ll be partners.

You know what happens next. As far as Earth’s concerned, there’s only one thing that happened ten years ago. Only one thing that’s happened in the last ten years, because every goddamn one of us ripped our shirts off and wrote it across our hearts in blood.

The Drop. Julynine. Starfall. Lots of names, one result. A shattered habitat, a woman with wild eyes and a gold cross tattooed on her forehead screaming that her army, they got their authority straight from Jesus Christ hisself for our racial impurity and hubris, and your big sister, blown out into space, just one of ten thousand meat snowflakes floating in the black. Only you imagine her lying like a broken doll on the floor of the hydroponics lab, tight black curls sprinkled with dust and ice crystals and her fingernails Bahama Coral Pink, tapping faintly in a pool of blood. The same shade she wore the day she took out a pair of tweezers and came at your eyebrows, saying, “Don’t be a wuss, this doesn’t hurt.”

And just like everyone else on the goddamn planet, you cheer until your head just thumps with it when we make our war of vengeance.

Contract signing, swearing in, intake, ceremonies, first uniform, boot camp, none of that shit matters. It’s all standard. The point is to make you into a unit, one little cog in the big machine of the Allied (ha!) Earth Special Forces.

This is the point where it matters. Where it starts to matter. Where it stops mattering.

Head wrapped in bandages, skull aching from newly drilled holes, random flavors running across your tongue (cantaloupe, cayenne, crawdad bake, we’re in the Cs now) as the nano wires finish bonding to your neurons, you’ve got to focus, soldier, focus, this is important.

You look at the blank standard issue datapad screen, shoulders twitching every time a new ghost runs across your vision. A line of green text scrolls up, like you’ve jumped back to the goddamn twentieth century, but instead of Want to play a game or some shit like that, it reads:

Hello, I am your Tactical Analysis and Oversight Guidance (TAOG) system. My name is _______

Fill in the blank. Your right shoulder twists as a metallic screech runs up the scale in your ear.

Well, what other name could you pick? You can only think of one right now, with the wires in your head all scrambled and crossed and reminding you about that one time you called the teacher “Mom” in third grade.

P-h-o-e-b-e.

Hello Charlie, I am your Tactical Analysis and Oversight Guidance (TAOG) system. My name is Phoebe. She whispers that as a formless voice now given form by your choice, past your ear, deep into your meat. I’m looking forward to working with you.

• • • •

That’s how it goes, only you’re not you, you’re me.

And you had a big sister named Phoebe.

• • • •

Life outside AESF is one big vacation, only the vacation doesn’t end and I don’t get to go home, because technically, I am home, permanently downside. But I’m enjoying it. Really, I am. I take the train down to the beach every day, because that’s what you do on vacation. Brightly colored plastic umbrellas, all shapes and colors and patterns, bob outside, shielding the civilians from the unending assault of the sun.

Take one of those umbrellas, line it with foil, it can be used to hide an explosive or a person from casual drone scans, only it makes a neat circle cut-out in transmissions that screams for attention after you’ve run your electronic eyes over it a good hundred times.

It’s the middle of the day. Seven people on the train as it hums along over its superconductors: three teenaged boys (could be a threat, one of them’s got a backpack, who knows what’s in that), one young mother with two sub-five-year-olds (probably okay), one old lady with a parasol (sunlight glancing off the gold cross she wears on her neck, is she one of them, one of the sectarians ohshitohshitohshit call it in—)

No response, Phoebe says. They told me my TAOG would go silent after surgery. They also told me removing the neural links wouldn’t hurt. Disconnected, Charlie. Recalibration necessary.

Breathe. Breathe. That’s right. My hands haven’t fallen off. I just don’t have drones any more. I’m just me. The old lady is just an old lady. She’s out for the sunlight on her old bones. But I let her get off the train first, and keep my ass in the seat until I’m two stops down.

Then I go out onto the beach. The sand feels so strange under my shoes, squashing and shushing and kicking up in little clouds. I don’t think I’ve run on anything but concrete or tarmac or metal decking for almost a decade. It feels different, so I smile about that, and my teeth itch in the cool breeze.

• • • •

This is what it’s like, the first time you hook into your cloud. Your consciousness shatters into a hundred pieces, one for each module.

There’s the eyes and ears (SASbots), jammers (ESIMbots), guns and missiles (TWINs) and you’re all of them at once, trying to hold them in formation and run them through patterns. You scream. It’s cool. Everyone screams the first time, not because it hurts, but because it’s so overwhelming your body pulls a random choice out of: (a) scream, (b) cry, or (c) laugh hysterically. Crying and screaming is better, it doesn’t freak your observers out nearly as much.

But then, goddamn, it’s the biggest rush in the world. You are a god with a thousand fingers that you can spike down into the ground like lightning. You fly, atmosphere or space, it doesn’t matter. Because when you’re hooked into your cloud, you’re out there with the drones, and your meat is left behind in the closet.

Calibration complete. Phoebe whispers these magical words to rhyme with “I love you.”

A taste like blood floods your mouth. It’s nauseating. Don’t worry. You get used to it.

• • • •

Life outside the drone cloud is blindness. I can’t see anything. What kind of bullshit is the visual spectrum after you’ve gotten used to having infrared, ultraviolet, radio, all piped into your head from over a hundred different eyes? I used to be a fucking titan, heavy armor mach six in a thousand different directions, and now I’m small, naked. Just meat.

No jobs yet, but I don’t need the money. My severance hasn’t run out, I just need something to do. Being a drone pilot isn’t much of a marketable skill in the real world. Doesn’t help you smile at assholes and sell them cars, or new computers, or vacation packages to resorts where the only people who look like you scrub the toilets. Doesn’t help with flipping burgers, either. I’ve developed this really worrying twitch in my left hand, I think it’s from one of the nanowires fizzing in my brain. Makes it hard for me to sleep, I’ll be drifting off and then suddenly my hand jerks under the covers and I’m wide awake.

It’s bad enough I go to the nearest VA hospital, which takes a thirty-minute train ride—

(two workmen, one of them has a hammer and veins bulging out from his bare forearms; typical nuclear family with a kid in a stroller, who knows what’s hidden in there; students, more students, more students in navy blue uniform jackets and at least someone’s laughing around here but, fuck, why won’t they hold still for five minutes; No threat, no threat, no threat, Phoebe assures me in a murmur that runs along my jawbone and makes me yawn)

—and then a two-hour wait in a room that smells faintly of sweat and metal. The data signal there is jacked and all the paper magazines are at least three years old, so I just listen to two other vets make stilted conversation about their dogs.

“That’s impossible,” the doc at the VA tells me once it’s my turn in the carefully refrigerated exam room. “They removed all your links before discharge. I’ve got the signed order from Colonel Rathbone.”

“But what if the nanowires are still there?” I can fucking feel them, burrowing into my neurons.

The look he gives me is a lot like the manager of the last place I applied at, some joint that makes pizza. You’ve got to be kidding, right?

But they told me a lot of things, in the service. This will be a cakewalk. You’ll go home a hero. We’ll pull all the wires out of your brain and it won’t hurt one bit, you’re tough. “What about the TAOG, did they remove that, too?”

His eyes widen slightly. “Are you hearing voices?”

I hold up my hands. The left twitches—See, I’m not just making this up. “No. Shit no. I’m not crazy.” I know what happens to people who say shit like that. They go away and never come back. “Look, I just want to know my brain isn’t turning into black pudding behind my eyes, okay? I busted my ass for you guys downside for nine years. Cut me a break.”

The doctor sighs. “I’ll put you in the queue for some testing. It’ll take a few weeks, we’re pretty overloaded. Though if you can travel—”

Being on the train for hours and hours, people constantly walking in and out and back and forth behind me and beside me and no thanks, man, sounds like hell, I can’t keep track of them all, too many threats. Acquiring targets—I shake my head. “Got no scratch. Got a form I can fill out for that?”

“Afraid not. All right. I’ll send the appointment confirmation to your calendar.”

As I slouch on out of the hospital, they run a guy past on a pallet. He’s got a cardio pack on his chest, a vent over the lower half of his face, red-soaked bandages at his wrists. His face is the color of unbaked clay. He’s also got a circle of white dimples around his head like a crown.

Corporal Dan Weston, Second Battalion, Third Squadron, retired, Phoebe murmurs up through my meat and into my left ear. No threat, target deceased, permission not needed.

I press my finger where the visual link used to be on my temple, and find nothing but a smooth, slick dimple of scar tissue.

My teeth itch.

• • • •

So then you score a berth on a Predator-Class carrier, space-based command and dispatch center. Calories carefully counted, AG coming off perfectly calibrated spin so you can still do full PT every morning. Your body’s all tight with wiry muscle for when you put it on the shelf and abandon it ten hours a day.

They assign you the easy missions first, out into the moons. Ones where you just drop dome busters, and the closest you get is doing an infrared check to make sure all the bodies are cooling off in their individual puddles of effluvia. Or you do spy runs, where you run the SASbots around and it’s like a video game, and you’ll get the high score and the achievement at the end if you find the princess. And by princess I mean the scumbag you paint down with a targeting laser so one of your big brothers can sweep in like justice in an atomized cloud and light that shit up better than Christmas.

But then you get your first real mission. No fanfare, no warning, you just walk in one day, hook into the cloud and launch off. Then Phoebe says, Target acquired, authorization go.

And that’s it. You take the TWINs out to play, and the bad guys die. Clean kill, stand down, Phoebe tells you.

Years. You do it for years. Then:

Target acquired, authorization go.

“Getting a lot of noise. Confirm.” The SASbots show a place crawling with heat signatures, like they’re having a convention in that dumpy little building. Stats and dimensions scroll through your brain.

A green flash shivers over the view. Targeting laser, some new pilot double-checking your shit.

Authorization go, Phoebe repeats. Insurgents confirmed. Action is justified.

You are so fucking justified. You send in the TWINs, and you flatten that little hovel. You turn it into a smear of gravel and ash. Then there’s a spike of automatic weapons fire a click and a half west. Two SASbots go dead, a little blind spot in your brain.

Secondary threat, authorization go, Phoebe says. Assistance incoming.

A second wave of TWINs joins in the bombardment. You make the night go white. In the dim recesses of the drone bay, you hear one of the other jocks whoop. Well, look at those accuracy numbers. You sure can’t blame him. You feel pretty fucking badass yourself.

You sweep in with SASbots again, check and confirm the kills, catalog what you just took out. You’d rather just send in recordings than fill out the paperwork. Secondary site is closer, so that gets done first. Shredded remains of fifteen adults, explosive residue that doesn’t belong to us. First site—

she’s lying in a puddle of blood, eyes wide and white all around, curly black hair stuck to the floor, legs a mist of bone and flesh

—there’s kids, there’s a goddamn kid, another one with his head half gone, and another, and a woman in an apron like you blew up a fucking daycare, and, and—

Charlie, your heart rate is spiking, Phoebe says. What’s wrong?

“Kids,” you say. “You said this was an authorized target.” She told you to do it, told you, said it was okay. But terrorists don’t play with plastic horses, don’t have pigtails and purple barrettes. “Look at her! She’s trying to scream!”

Death is instant, Phoebe calmly whispers into the skin of your neck. Residual electrical spikes. There is no pain.

But the girl looks at your hovering thimble-sized SASbot with eyes to drown in and tremblestremblestrembles her fingernails (glittering with nail polish is that Bahama Coral Pink oh fuck me fuck me fuck me) tapping the ground as she gurgles out breath after breath into the poisonous atmosphere.

• • • •

This is how it goes, only you’re not you, you’re me.

And you (I mean me) realize this terrible truth: Phoebe’s just there to tell you it’s okay to pull the trigger. She’s a wad of ones and zeroes that stands in for your conscience so you don’t hesitate.

Phoebe isn’t real.

Phoebe is a liar.

Phoebe is a sin eater.

• • • •

I can’t sleep any more. My hand won’t stop jumping. Everything I eat tastes like electricity and motor oil. The VA test results say the nanowires in my head don’t exist, but I can feel them rotting out and turning my brain into something black and gooey, blood on tarmac while Phoebe whispers battle plans onto the backs of my knees. All I have is vids, I can’t focus enough to read any more, not that I was into books before.

And the vids? It’s just bullshit bullshit bullshit, plastic people with perfect teeth in clothes worth more than my entire severance having cat fights about their boyfriends, cooking shows, action movies where a single guy with a gun fires more bullets than a clip can hold, softcore porn. It’s like there’s not even a fucking war on, and I just have to move before the tar in my head overflows.

I take the train down to the beach, late at night. The car is full of drunks, big guys, little guys, and they stand too goddamn close and breathe like furnaces. I finger my pocket, the stunted shape of a ceramic pistol. I don’t have a drone cloud to protect me anymore. It’s just me, just my pathetic meat and Phoebe, and we’re never safe.

“Hey there,” one of the guys says. “Where you going?” He smells like money and beer.

“Not anywhere you are.” I stare straight ahead. My hand twitches at my side. I could snap his neck. He’s crowding me.

“Don’t be nasty.” Leans even closer. “What are those marks on your head? You some kind of holy roller?”

I get asked that all the time. Like no one knows what soldiers look like if we’re not dressed up like a GI Joe. Maybe no one bothers watching the news. Maybe they think the clouds of heavily armed robots just fly themselves now, but shouldn’t that scare everyone shitless?

He breathes on the side of my head, too close, too close. My teeth itch.

Threat detected. Phoebe breathes on the other side of my head.

I pull the pistol from my pocket, smooth like butter, slam my other fist into the guy’s sternum to get him to back off and give me room. My pistol is the only steady thing in the world as I focus down the barrel at his head framed by gum advertisements and the blank windows looking out into black night. “Back off! Back the fuck off!”

“Whoa! Whoa, lady! Chill! Chill!” Suddenly all the drunk guys are shouting.

“All of you! Shut the fuck up! Back off!”

Hands raise around the train car. A dark stain spreads over the front of my target’s pants. “Don’t do it. I didn’t mean nothin’. I didn’t mean nothin’!” The train halts, a cool rush of night air as the doors behind me open, I know exactly where they are, always know where your exits are.

Threat detected. Authorization go.

My trigger finger squeezes even as my hand jerks to the side. The bullet only makes a soft pop—I don’t like loud noises, I wouldn’t buy a loud gun, are you kidding me—and the window behind the man shatters.

Everyone starts yelling all at once. Hands grab at my arm. I scream and break one of my knuckles on someone’s nose. Then I run.

It’s cold. There are clouds over the moon, so it’s just a glowing, indistinct circle, like a puckered scar in the sky. I only notice when I get to the beach because the ground beneath my sneakers starts shushing me. I keep running until I’m not afraid any more.

Who the fuck am I kidding? I’m always afraid.

I walk out by the waves, where I can watch them crest into white foam, and sit on the damp sand. I take my datapad out of my other pocket, and the screen comes back on to the news vid I saw when I decided I had to get the fuck out of my house: At Last, War Without Death. I watch the bland-faced narrator silently mouth the words, “AESF reports zero casualties in the last two years of the conflict.” Well, no shit. We’re all just clouds of robots now.

Targets don’t count. That’s authorized.

Retired don’t count either.

My hand twitches. My teeth itch.

Disconnected, Charlie. Reactualizing neural connections, Phoebe says calmly, laying the words up my spine.

I pull the pistol from my pocket. My head throbs, hot and sharp under the scars. The barrel feels so cool and soothing, pressed against what used to be the visual link terminal on my right temple. The taste of blood floods my mouth.

There will be no pain, Phoebe whispers into my ear.

I close my eyes. “Liar.”

I smell flowers and baby powder. Authorization go.

—Dedication: To Mr. T. H.

© 2014 by Rachael Acks.

Originally published in the limited edition of Lightspeed’s Women Destroy Science Fiction! special issue (June 2014).

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rachael Acks is a writer, geologist, and sharp-dressed sir. In addition to her steampunk novella series from Musa Publishing, she’s had short stories in Strange Horizons, Waylines, Daily Science Fiction, Penumbra, and more. Rachael lives in Houston (where she bicycles, drinks tea, and twirls her ever so dapper mustache) with her two furry little bastards. For more information, see her website (rachaelacks.com) or watch her tweet (@katsudonburi) way too often.

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

FANTASY

The Faerie Cony-Catcher

Delia Sherman

In London town, in the reign of good Queen Bess that was called Gloriana, there lived a young man named Nicholas Cantier. Now it came to pass that this Nick Cantier served out his term as apprentice jeweler and goldsmith under one Master Spilman, jeweler by appointment to the Queen’s Grace herself, and was made journeyman of his guild. For that Nick was a clever young man, his master would have been glad for him to continue on where he was; yet Nick was not fain thereof, Master Spilman being as ill a master of men as he was skilled master of his trade. And Nick bethought him thus besides: that London was like unto the boundless sea where Leviathan may dwell unnoted, save by such small fish as he may snap up to stay his mighty hunger: such small fish as Nicholas Cantier. Better he seek out some backwater in the provinces where, puffed up by city ways, he might perchance pass for a pike and snap up spratlings on his own account.

So thought Nick. And on a bright May morning, he packed up such tools as he might call his own—as a pitch block and a mallet, and some small steel chisels and punches and saw blades and blank rings of copper—that he might make shift to earn his way to Oxford. Nick put his tools in a pack, with clean hosen and a shirt and a pair of soft leather shoon, and that was all his worldly wealth strapped upon his back, saving only a jewel that he had designed and made himself to be his passport. This jewel was in the shape of a maid, her breasts and belly all one lucent pearl, her skirt and open jacket of bright enamel, and her fair face of silver burnished with gold. On her fantastic hair perched a tiny golden crown, and Nick had meant her for the Faerie Queene of Master Spenser’s poem, fair Gloriana.

Upon this precious Gloriana did Nick’s life and livelihood depend. Being a prudent lad in the main, and bethinking him of London’s traps and dangers, Nick considered where he might bestow it that he fall not prey to those foists and rufflers who might take it from him by stealth or by force. The safest place, thought he, would be his codpiece, where no man nor woman might meddle without his yard raise the alarm. Yet the jewel was large and cold and hard against those softer jewels that dwelt more commonly therein, and so Nick bound it across his belly with a band of linen and took leave of his fellows and set out northward to seek his fortune.

Now this Nick Cantier was a lusty youth of nearly twenty, with a fine, open face and curls of nut-brown hair that sprang from his brow; yet notwithstanding his comely form, he was as much a virgin on that May morning as the Queen herself. For Master Spilman was the hardest of taskmasters, and between his eagle eye and his adder cane and his arch-episcopal piety, his apprentices perforce lived out the terms of their bonds as chaste as Popish monks. On this the first day of his freedom, young Nick’s eye roved hither and thither, touching here a slender waist and there a dimpled cheek, wondering what delights might not lie beneath this petticoat or that snowy kerchief. And so it was that a Setter came upon him unaware and sought to persuade him to drink a pot of ale together, having just found xii pence in a gutter and it being ill luck to keep found money and Nick’s face putting him in mind of his father’s youngest son, dead of an ague this two year and more. Nick let him run on, through this excuse for scraping acquaintance and that, and when the hopeful Cony-catcher had rolled to a stop, like a cart at the foot of a hill, he said unto him:

“I see I must have a care to the cut of my coat, if rogues, taking me for a country cony, think me meet for skinning. Nay, I’ll not drink with ye, nor play with ye neither, lest ye so ferret-claw me at cards that ye leave me as bare of coin as an ape of a tail.”

Upon hearing which, the Setter called down a murrain upon milk-fed pups who imagined themselves sly dogs, and withdrew into the company of two men appareled like honest and substantial citizens, whom Nicholas took to be the Setter’s Verser and Barnacle, all ready to play their parts in cozening honest men out of all they carried, and a little more beside. And he bit his thumb at them and laughed and made his way through the streets of London, from Lombard Street to Clerkenwell in the northern liberties of the city, where the houses were set back from the road in gardens and fields and the taverns spilled out of doors in benches and stools, so that toss-pots might air their drunken heads.

‘Twas coming on for noon by this time, and Nick’s steps were slower than they had been, and his mind dwelt more on bread and ale than on cony-catchers and villains.

In this hungry, drowsy frame of mind, he passed an alehouse where his eye chanced to light upon a woman tricked up like a lady in a rich-guarded gown and a deep starched ruff. Catching his glance, she sent it back again saucily, with a wink and a roll of her shoulders that lifted her white breasts like ships on a wave. She plucked him by the sleeve and said, “How now, my friend, you look wondrous down i’ the mouth. What want you? Wine? Company?”—all with such a meaning look, such a waving of her skirts and a hoisting of her breasts that Nick’s yard, fain to salute her, flew its scarlet colors in his cheeks.

“The truth is, mistress, that I’ve walked far this day, and am sorely hungered.”

“Hungered, is it?” She flirted her eyes at him, giving the word a dozen meanings not writ in any grammar. “Shall feed thy hunger then, aye, and sate thy thirst, too, and that right speedily.” And she led him in at the alehouse door to a little room within, where she closed the door and, thrusting herself close up against him, busied her hands about his body and her lips about his mouth. As luck would have it, her breath was foul, and it blew upon Nick’s heat, cooling him enough to recognize that her hands sought not his pleasure, but his purse, upon which he thrust her from him.

“Nay, mistress,” he said, all flushed and panting. “Thy meat and drink are dear, if they cost me my purse.”

Knowing by his words that she was discovered, she spent no time in denying her trade, but set up a caterwauling would wake the dead, calling upon one John to help her. But Nick, if not altogether wise, was quick and strong, and bolted from the vixen’s den ’ere the dog-fox answered her call.

So running, Nick came shortly to the last few houses that clung to the outskirts of the city and stopped at a tavern to refresh him with honest meat and drink. And as he drank his ale and pondered his late escape, the image of his own foolishness dimmed and the image of the doxy’s beauty grew more bright, until the one eclipsed the other quite, persuading him that any young man in whom the blood ran hot would have fallen into her trap, aye, and been skinned, drawn, and roasted to a turn, as ’twere in very sooth a long-eared cony. It was his own cleverness, he thought, led him to smoke her out. So Nick, having persuaded himself that he was a sly dog after all, rose from the tavern and went to Hampstead Heath, which was the end of the world to him. And as he stepped over the world’s edge and onto the northward road, his heart lifted for joy, and he sang right merrily as he strode along, as pleased with himself as the cock that imagineth his crowing bring the sun from the sea.

And so he walked and so he sang until by and by he came upon a country lass sitting on a stone. Heedful of his late lesson, he quickly cast his eye about him for signs of some high lawyer or ruffler lurking ready to spring the trap. But the lass sought noways to lure him, nor did she accost him, nor lift her dark head from contemplating her foot that was cocked up on her knee. Her gown of gray kersey was hiked up to her thigh and her sleeves rolled to her elbows, so that Nick could see her naked arms, sinewy and lean and nut-brown with sun, and her leg like muddy ivory.

“Gie ye good-den, fair maid,” said he, and then could say no more, for when she raised her face to him, his breath stopped in his throat. It was not, perhaps, the fairest he’d seen, being gypsy-dark, with cheeks and nose that showed the bone. But her black eyes were wide and soft as a hind’s and the curve of her mouth made as sweet a bow as Cupid’s own.

“Good-den to thee,” she answered him, low-voiced as a throstle. “Ye come at a good hour to my aid. For here is a thorn in my foot and I, for want of a pin, unable to have it out.”

The next moment he knelt at her side; the moment after, her foot was in his hand. He found the thorn and winkled it out with the point of his knife while the lass clutched at his shoulder, hissing between her teeth as the thorn yielded, sighing as he wiped away the single ruby of blood with his kerchief and bound it round her foot.

“I thank thee, good youth,” she said, leaning closer. “An thou wilt, I’ll give thee such a reward for thy kindness as will give thee cause to thank me anon.” She turned her hand to his neck, and stroked the bare flesh there, smiling in his face the while, her breath as sweet as an orchard in spring.

Nick felt his cheek burn hot above her hand and his heart grow large in his chest. This were luck indeed, and better than all the trulls in London. “Fair maid,” he said, “I would not kiss thee beside the common way.”

She laughed. “Lift me then and carry me to the hollow, hard by yonder hill, where we may embrace, if it pleaseth thee, without fear of meddling eye.”

Nick’s manhood then informed him that it would please him well, observing the which, the maiden smiled and held up her arms to him, and he lifted her, light as a faggot of sticks but soft and supple as Spanish leather withal, and bore her to a hollow under a hill that was round and green and warm in the May sun. And he lay her down and did off his pack and set it by her head, that he might keep it close to hand, rejoicing that his jewel was not in his codpiece, and then he fell to kissing her lips and stroking her soft, soft throat. Her breasts were small as a child’s under her gown; yet she moaned most womanly when he pressed them, and writhed against him like a snake, and he made bold to pull up her petticoats to discover the treasure they hid. Coyly, she slapped his hand away once and again, yet never ceased to kiss and toy with open lip, the while her tongue like a darting fish urged him to unlace his codpiece that was grown wondrous tight. Seeing what he was about, she put her hand down to help him, so that he was like to perish e’er he achieved the gates of Heaven. Then, when he was all but sped, she pulled him headlong on top of her.

He was not home, though very near it as he thrust at her skirts bunched up between her thighs. Though his plunging breached not her cunny-burrow, it did breach the hill itself, and he and his gypsy-lass tumbled arse-over-neck to lie broken-breathed in the midst of a great candle-lit hall upon a Turkey carpet, with skirts and legs and slippered feet standing in ranks upon it to his right hand and his left, and a gentle air stroking warm fingers across his naked arse. Nick shut his eyes, praying that this vision were merely the lively exhalation of his lust. And then a laugh like a golden bell fell upon his ear, and was hunted through a hundred mocking changes in a ring of melodious laughter, and he knew this to be sober reality, or something enough like it that he’d best ope his eyes and lace up his hose.

All this filled no more than the space of a breath, though it seemed to Nick an age of the world had passed before he’d succeeded in packing up his yard and scrambling to his feet to confront the owners of the skirts and the slippered feet and the bell-like laughter that yet pealed over his head. And in that age, the thought was planted and nurtured and harvested in full ripeness, that his hosts were of faerie-kind. He knew they were too fair to be human men and women, their skins white nacre, their hair spun sunlight or moonlight or fire bound back from their wide brows by fillets of precious stones no less hard and bright than their emerald or sapphire eyes. The women went bare-bosomed as Amazons, the living jewels of their perfect breasts coffered in open gowns of bright silk. The men wore jewels in their ears, and at their forks, fantastic codpieces in the shapes of cockerels and wolves and rams with curling horns. They were splendid beyond imagining, a masque to put the Queen’s most magnificent Revels to shame.

As Nick stood in amaze, he heard the voice of his coy mistress say, “‘Twere well, Nicholas Cantier, if thou wouldst turn and make thy bow.”

With a glare for she who had brought him to this pass, Nick turned him to face a woman sat upon a throne. Even were she seated upon a joint-stool, he must have known her, for her breasts and face were more lucent and fair than pearl, her open jacket and skirt a glory of gemstones, and upon her fantastic hair perched a gold crown, as like to the jewel in his bosom as twopence to a groat. Nick gaped like that same small fish his fancy had painted him erewhile, hooked and pulled gasping to land. Then his knees, wiser than his head, gave way to prostrate him at the royal feet of Elfland.

“Well, friend Nicholas,” said the Faerie Queen. “Heartily are you welcome to our court. Raise him, Peasecod, and let him approach our throne.”

Nick felt a tug on his elbow, and wrenched his dazzled eyes from the figure of the Faerie Queen to see his wanton lass bending over him. “To thy feet, my heart,” she murmured. “And, as thou holdest dear thy soul, see that neither meat nor drink pass thy lips.”

“Well, Peasecod?” asked the Queen, and there was that in her musical voice that propelled Nick to his feet and down the Turkey carpet to stand trembling before her.

“Be welcome,” said the Queen again, “and take your ease. Peasecod, bring a stool and a cup for our guest, and let the musicians play and our court dance for his pleasure.”

There followed an hour as strange as any madman might imagine or poet sing, wherein Nicholas Cantier sat upon a gilded stool at the knees of the Queen of Elfland and watched her court pace through their faerie measures. In his hand he held a golden cup crusted with gems, and the liquor within sent forth a savor of roses and apples that promised an immortal vintage. But as oft as he, half fainting, lifted the cup, so often did a pair of fingers pinch him at the ankle, and so often did he look down to see the faerie lass Peasecod crouching at his feet with her skirts spread out to hide the motions of her hand. Once she glanced up at him, her soft eyes drowned in tears like pansies in rain, and he knew that she was sorry for her part in luring him here.

When the dancing was over and done, the Queen of Elfland turned to Nick and said, “Good friend Nicholas, we would crave a boon of thee in return for this our fair entertainment.”

At which Nick replied, “I am at your pleasure, madam. Yet have I not taken any thing from you save words and laughter.”

“‘Tis true, friend Nicholas, that thou hast scorned to drink our Faerie wine. And yet hast thou seen our faerie revels, that is a sight any poet in London would give his last breath to see.”

“I am no poet, madam, but a humble journeyman goldsmith.”

“That, too, is true. And for that thou art something better than humble at thy trade, I will do thee the honor of accepting that jewel in my image thou bearest bound against thy breast.”

Then it seemed to Nick that the Lady might have his last breath after all, for his heart suspended himself in his throat. Wildly looked he upon Gloriana’s face, fair and cold and eager as the trull’s he had escaped erewhile, and then upon the court of Elfland that watched him as he were a monkey or a dancing bear. At his feet, he saw the dark-haired lass Peasecod, set apart from the rest by her mean garments and her dusky skin, the only comfortable thing in all that discomfortable splendor. She smiled into his eyes, and made a little motion with her hand, like a fishwife who must chaffer by signs against the crowd’s commotion. And Nicholas took courage at her sign, and fetched up a deep breath, and said:

“Fair Majesty, the jewel is but a shadow or counterfeit of your radiant beauty. And yet ’tis all my stock in trade. I cannot render all my wares to you, were I never so fain to do you pleasure.”

The Queen of Elfland drew her delicate brows like kissing moths over her nose. “Beware, young Nicholas, how thou triest our good will. Were we minded, we might turn thee into a lizard or a slow-worm, and take thy jewel resistless.”

“Pardon, dread Queen, but if you might take my jewel by force, you might have taken it ere now. I think I must give it you—or sell it you—by mine own unforced will.”

A silence fell, ominous and dark as a thundercloud. All Elfland held its breath, awaiting the royal storm. Then the sun broke through again, the Faerie Queen smiled, and her watchful court murmured to one another, as those who watch a bout at swords will murmur when the less skilled fencer maketh a lucky hit.

“Thou hast the right of it, friend Nicholas: we do confess it. Come, then. The Queen of Elfland will turn huswife, and chaffer with thee.”

Nick clasped his arms about his knee and addressed the lady thus: “I will be frank with you, Serenity. My master, when he saw the jewel, advised me that I should not part withal for less than fifty golden crowns, and that not until I’d bought with it a master goldsmith’s good opinion and a place at his shop. Fifty-five crowns, then, will buy the jewel from me, and not a farthing less.”

The Lady tapped her white hand on her knee. “Then thy master is a fool, or thou a rogue and liar. The bauble is worth no more than fifteen golden crowns. But for that we are a compassionate prince, and thy complaint being just, we will give thee twenty, and not a farthing more.”

“Forty-five,” said Nick. “I might sell it to Master Spenser for twice the sum, as a fair portrait of Gloriana, with a description of the faerie court, should he wish to write another book.”

“Twenty-five,” said the Queen. “Ungrateful wretch. ’Twas I sent the dream inspired the jewel.”

“All the more reason to pay a fair price for it,” said Nick. “Forty.”

This shot struck in the gold. The Queen frowned and sighed and shook her head and said, “Thirty. And a warrant, signed by our own royal hand, naming thee jeweler by appointment to Gloriana, by cause of a pendant thou didst make at her behest.”

It was a fair offer. Nick pondered a moment, saw Peasecod grinning up at him with open joy, her cheeks dusky red and her eyes alight, and said: “Done, my Queen, if only you will add thereto your attendant nymph, Peasecod, to be my companion, if she will.”

At this Gloriana laughed aloud, and all the court of Elfland laughed with her, peal upon peal at the mortal’s presumption. Peasecod alone of the bright throng did not laugh, but rose to stand by Nicholas’ side and pressed his hand in hers. She was brown and wild as a young deer, and it seemed to Nick that the Queen of Elfland herself, in all her glory of moony breasts and arching neck, was not so fair as this one slender, black-browed faerie maid.

When Gloriana had somewhat recovered her power of speech, she said: “Friend Nicholas, I thank thee; for I have not laughed so heartily this many a long day. Take thy faerie lover and thy faerie gold and thy faerie warrant and depart unharmed from hence. But for that thou hast dared to rob the Faerie Queen of this her servant, we lay this weird on thee, that if thou say thy Peasecod nay, at bed or at board for the space of four-and-twenty mortal hours, then thy gold shall turn to leaves, thy warrant to filth, and thy lover to dumb stone.”

At this, Peasecod’s smile grew dim, and up spoke she and said, “Madam, this is too hard.”

“Peace,” said Gloriana, and Peasecod bowed her head. “Nicholas,” said the Queen, “we commence to grow weary of this play. Give us the jewel and take thy price and go thy ways.”

So Nick did off his doublet and his shirt and unwound the band of linen from about his waist and fetched out a little leathern purse and loosed its strings and tipped out into his hand the precious thing upon which he had expended all his love and his art. And loathe was he to part withal, the first-fruits of his labor.

“Thou shalt make another, my heart, and fairer yet than this,” whispered Peasecod in his ear, and so he laid it into Elfland’s royal hand, and bowed, and in that moment he was back in the hollow under the green hill, his pack at his feet, half naked, shocked as by a lightning bolt, and alone. Before he could draw breath to make his moan, Peasecod appeared beside him with his shirt and doublet on her arm, a pack at her back, and a heavy purse at her waist, that she detached and gave to him with his clothes. Fain would he have sealed his bargain then and there, but Peasecod begging prettily that they might seek more comfort than might be found on a tussock of grass, he could not say her nay. Nor did he regret his weird that gave her the whip hand in this, for the night drew on apace, and he found himself sore hungered and athirst, as though he’d sojourned beneath the hill for longer than the hour he thought. And indeed ’twas a day and a night and a day again since he’d seen the faerie girl upon the heath, for time doth gallop with the faerie kind, who heed not its passing. And so Peasecod told him as they trudged northward in the gloaming, and picked him early berries to stay his present hunger, and found him clear water to stay his thirst, so that he was inclined to think very well of his bargain, and of his own cleverness that had made it.

And so they walked until they came to a tavern, where Nick called for dinner and a chamber, all of the best, and pressed a golden noble into the host’s palm, whereat the goodman stared and said such a coin would buy his whole house and all his ale, and still he’d not have coin to change it. And Nick, flushed with gold and lust, told him to keep all as a gift upon the giver’s wedding day. Whereat Peasecod blushed and cast down her eyes as any decent bride, though the goodman saw she wore no ring and her legs and feet were bare and mired from the road. Yet he gave them of his best, both meat and drink, and put them to bed in his finest chamber, with a fire in the grate because gold is gold, and a rose upon the pillow because he remembered what it was to be young.

The door being closed and latched, Nicholas took Peasecod in his arms and drank of her mouth as ’twere a well and he dying of thirst. And then he bore her to the bed and laid her down and began to unlace her gown that he might see her naked. But she said unto him, “Stay, Nicholas Cantier, and leave me my modesty yet a while. But do thou off thy clothes, and I vow thou shalt not lack for pleasure.”

Then young Nick gnawed his lip and pondered in himself whether taking off her clothes by force would be saying her nay—some part of which showed in his face, for she took his hand to her mouth and tickled the palm with her tongue, all the while looking roguishly upon him, so that he smiled upon her and let her do her will, which was to strip his doublet and shirt from him, to run her fingers and her tongue across his chest, to lap and pinch at his nipples until he gasped, to stroke and tease him, and finally to release his rod and take it in her hand and then into her mouth. Poor Nick, who had never dreamed of such tricks, was like to die of ecstasy. He twisted his hands in her long hair as pleasure came upon him like an annealing fire, and then he lay spent, with Peasecod’s head upon his bosom, and all her dark hair spread across his belly like a blanket of silk.

After a while she raised herself, and with great tenderness kissed him upon the mouth and said, “I have no regret of this bargain, my heart, whatever follows after.”

And from his drowsy state he answered her, “Why, what should follow after but joy and content and perchance a babe to dandle upon my knee?”

She smiled and said, “What indeed? Come, discover me,” and lay back upon the pillow and opened her arms to him.

For a little while, he was content to kiss and toy with lips and neck, and let her body be. But soon he tired of this game, the need once again growing upon him to uncover her secret places and to plumb their mysteries. He put his hand beneath her skirts, stroking her thigh that was smooth as pearl and quivered under his touch as it drew near to that mossy dell he had long dreamed of. With quickening breath, he felt springing hair, and then his fingers encountered an obstruction, a wand or rod, smooth as the thigh, but rigid, and burning hot. In his shock, he squeezed it, and Peasecod gave a moan, whereupon Nick would have withdrawn his hand, and that right speedily, had not his faerie lover gasped, “Wilt thou now nay-say me?”

Nick groaned and squeezed again. The rod he held pulsed, and his own yard stirred in ready sympathy. Nick raised himself on his elbow and looked down into Peasecod’s face—wherein warred lust and fear, man and woman—and thought, not altogether clearly, upon his answer. Words might turn like snakes to bite their tails, and Nick was of no mind to be misunderstood. For answer then, he tightened his grip upon those fair and ruddy jewels that Peasecod brought to his marriage-portion, and so wrought with them that the eyes rolled back in his lover’s head, and he expired upon a sigh. Yet rose he again at Nick’s insistent kissing, and threw off his skirts and stays and his smock of fine linen to show his body, slender and hard as Nick’s own, yet smooth and fair as any lady’s that bathes in ass’s milk and honey. And so they sported night-long until the rising sun blew pure gold leaf upon their tumbled bed, where they lay entwined and, for the moment, spent.

“I were well served if thou shouldst cast me out, once the four-and-twenty hours are past,” said Peasecod mournfully.

“And what would be the good of that?” asked Nick.

“More good than if I stayed with thee, a thing nor man nor woman, nor human nor faerie kind.”

“As to the latter, I cannot tell, but as to the former, I say that thou art both, and I the richer for thy doubleness. Wait,” said Nick, and scrambled from the bed and opened his pack and took out a blank ring of copper and his block of pitch and his small steel tools. And he worked the ring into the pitch and, within a brace of minutes, had incised upon it a pea-vine from which you might pick peas in season, so like nature was the work. And returning to the bed where Peasecod lay watching, slipped it upon his left hand.

Peasecod turned the ring upon his finger, wondering. “Thou dost not hate me, then, for that I tricked and cozened thee?”

Nick smiled and drew his hand down his lover’s flank, taut ivory to his touch, and said, “There are some hours yet left, I think, to the term of my bond. Art thou so eager, love, to become dumb stone that thou must be asking me questions that beg to be answered ‘No?’ Know then, that I rejoice in being thy cony, and only wish that thou mayst catch me as often as may be, if all thy practices be as pleasant as this by which thou hast bound me to thee.”

And so they rose and made their ways to Oxford town, where Nicholas made such wise use of his faerie gold and his faerie commission as to keep his faerie lover in comfort all the days of their lives.

© 1998 by Delia Sherman.

Originally published in Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Delia Sherman’s most recent short stories have appeared in the young adult anthology Steampunk! and in Ellen Datlow’s Naked City. Her novels for younger readers are Changeling, The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen, and The Freedom Maze, a time-travel historical about ante-bellum Louisiana which recently won the Andre Norton Award. When she’s not writing, she’s teaching, editing, knitting, and cooking. She loves to travel, but when not on the road, she lives in a rambling apartment in New York City with partner Ellen Kushner and far too many pieces of paper.

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

The Drawstring Detective

Nik Houser

The Drawstring Detective is heavier than he appears. When Char picks him up off the shelf, she almost drops him. He is a foot tall and made entirely of tin. He is dressed in charcoal-colored slacks, a white shirt and black tie, a black greatcoat, loafers, and a bowler hat, all of which are also made of tin. White gloves hold a folded umbrella. A small, tightly curled mustache stands in place of a mouth. His eyes are blue and half closed. His paint is faded and chipped in places. How old is he?

“He’s heavy,” Char tells the man behind the counter of The Conspicuously Bigger On The Inside Antique Shop. The man behind the counter tells people to call him Azim Abdulaziz, but everyone knows that his real name is Jeff. What nobody knows is that Jeff’s real real first name is the smell of burning saffron, and that his real real last name is the creases in your fingers when you’ve been in the bathtub too long.

“He’s a pain in the ass is what he is,” Azim-cum-Jeff The-Creases-In-Your-Fingers-When-You’ve-Been-In-The-Bathtub-Too-Long replies with a fake-sounding foreign accent. It sounds fake because nobody knows what a Sumerian accent sounds like.

Char turns the Drawstring Detective over. Molded into the underside of his left loafer are the words Made in Albuquirky.

A small tin ring is affixed to the Drawstring Detective’s back, between the shoulder blades. It looks uncomfortable. Char is about to pull the ring when she spies a tag stuck to it which reads Do Not Pull String! in small, tight, handwritten script. Char fingers the ring, wondering what The Drawstring Detective’s voice sounds like. She wonders what it would say if she was the kind of person who willfully ignored adamant handwritten instructions.

She weighs the doll in her hand, knowing that she ought to look at rings. Char’s wedding ring has been missing for two weeks, since the night she got carjacked by a tornado. Her husband Brad says it’s stupid to tell people that a tornado stole her car. Char’s response is that the tornado threatened her when her car stalled at a stoplight and that she had to run and hide under an overpass, at which point the tornado fled the scene with her car, so what would you call it?

The ring was her mother’s and her grandmother’s before her. Fifty years ago, Char’s grandfather came to The Conspicuously Bigger On The Inside Antique Shop because he had no money and it was said that Azim-cum-Jeff The-Creases-In-Your-Fingers-When-You’ve-Been-In-The-Bathtub-Too-Long traded in many things, and that he only accepted cash as a last resort. Char wonders what her grandfather traded for such a beautiful ring. She wonders what she has that Azim-cum-Jeff could want.

Char takes the Drawstring Detective to the front counter. Beneath the counter’s glass surface, several dozen rings are displayed on velvet pillows. There are rings of gold encrusted with diamonds, topaz, garnets, rubies, and emeralds. There are rings of silver embedded with jade and lapis lazuli. There are rings made of twisted tinfoil, bent pipe cleaners, barbed wire, and maple sugar candy. The maple sugar candy ring is very tempting.

“How much?” she asks Azim-cum-Jeff. She sets the Drawstring Detective down on the counter. Every price tag in the shop says the same thing: Please Inquire.

“Are you sure you don’t want a ring?” Azim-cum-Jeff asks. “You keep looking at my rings.”

Char—which is short for Charlotte, which she likes better but which Brad says is an old lady name—looks at the Drawstring Detective with his bowler hat and his tightly curled mustache and his chipped paint. She thinks about Brad, about how he insisted she go get a new ring so other guys wouldn’t think she was available, because a fat butt was still a butt according to Jeff.

“His tag says he’s a detective,” she says. “Can he find things that are lost?”

Azim-cum-Jeff takes a long look at Char, as though her question is a strong drink that he must sip slowly.

“That depends on what you’re looking for,” he says.

“What do you want for it?” Char says.

“I want peace of mind.”

“Well,” Char sighs, “I’m afraid I don’t have much of that to spare.”

“That is why it is so valuable.”

• • • •

Char waits until she gets home to take the Drawstring Detective out of his bag. She and Brad have lived in their double-wide for five years, having bought it on the cheap because an old lady died there and was eaten by her cats who went feral and who, it is said, still prowl the neighborhood with a taste for grandmas.

Setting the Drawstring Detective on the kitchen counter next to the stack of frozen pizzas she bought for Brad, Char takes a deep breath, and pulls the ring on the tin toy’s back.

The Drawstring Detective’s tightly curled mustache is the first thing to move. A twitch to the left, a twitch to the right, then a quick left, right, left. The Drawstring Detective’s eyes close slowly, then open again with a small metallic click. From deep inside his chest comes a crackle of static, like an old radio being turned on, as the miniature man turns his head from side to side, then tilts it back to settle his calm, even gaze on Char.

“It’s probably in the drainpipe,” the Drawstring Detective says in a smooth British tenor. His voice is tinny and distant. It reminds Char of playing telephone with cans and string. His mustache twitches slightly with each word.

“What?”

“Your ring.”

The Drawstring Detective bends over to touch his toes, then squats to the ground, arms pointing straight ahead in a series of deep knee bends.

“As you are too old to play with figures of action such as myself as a means of simple diversion, I can only assume that you’ve purchased me to help you find something. I see by the band of pale flesh on your finger that you have lost your wedding ring.”

“Oh. I see.”

“And, as most people lose their wedding rings by taking them off to wash their hands, I deduce that yours is most likely stuck in the drain. Oh dear.”

The Drawstring Detective wobbles a squeaking knee.

“I cannot abide rusty hinges,” says the tin figure. “You wouldn’t happen to have an oil can on your person, would you?”

Char pats her pockets. “I don’t think so. But Brad might have something in the shed.”

The Drawstring Detective jogs in place, keeping one hand on his bowler hat, his free arm clutched to his chest with his umbrella hooked into a crooked elbow to keep it in place. “Brad?” he says.

“My husband. He’s on disability because of an accident at work.” Char wonders when that had become Brad’s defining characteristic, the first thing she says about him to strangers. “Are there many of you Drawstring Detectives?”

“At one time there were a thousand and one of us, manufactured in the Albuquirky Toy Works. Few remain now. I sometimes wonder if I am the last of us.”

Finished with his calisthenics, the Drawstring Detective straightens his hat and runs a hand down the front of his greatcoat. A fleck of black paint comes off on his fingers.

“This will never do,” he clucks.

“I might have some black nail polish?” she offers.

“Black nail polish?” The Drawstring Detective gives Char an appraising look, which is impressive given the fact that he has no mouth and his eyebrows are painted on.

• • • •

“You wear an awful lot of black for a woman who isn’t in mourning,” the Drawstring Detective says. “You’re not an agent of the Impossible Doctor Fossil, are you?”

“Doctor What?” Char says.

“Doctor Fossil. My old nemesis.”

Char dips the nail brush into the bottle, savoring the tang of the polish as it bristles the hairs in her nose. When she was a girl, Char wanted to work at a gas station so she could smell the gas all day. She used to imagine spraying gasoline all over her neck like perfume.

“I didn’t know you had a nemesis,” she says, drawing the nail brush down the Drawstring Detective’s back in a single, smooth stroke.

“He was a Detective, like me. Or rather, was meant to be. Oh!”

The Drawstring Detective sways forward and clears his tinny throat when the nail brush passes over his backside. He keeps one gloved hand gripped around his drawstring ring. When his string gets close to running out, he gives it a long pull.

“Doctor Fossil was made by the same company as the rest of us Detectives, but there was an error in his manufacture which caused a deformity. He was overheated. It gave him a hunched posture and a half-melted face. He was discarded into the scrap heap, but managed to escape to a life of crime. Which is no life at all.”

Char raises the Drawstring Detective’s arm and paints his underarm. His mustache twitches.

“That tickles.”

“Sorry.”

“No apology necessary.”

The front door opens and shuts. “Hey!” calls a man’s voice.

“Hey,” Char says, then to the Drawstring Detective, “Brad’s home.”

“What’s that smell?” a voice calls from the front door.

“Smell?” Char wipes her hands, stepping into the living room. She sniffs the air for gas or food rotting in the disposal.

Brad stands at the door, dressed in a pitted-out plaid button-down and those jeans he loves with the holes in them. He’s handsome, a face that’s filled in somewhat but which still boasts a strong chin with a cleft deep enough to floss. Clear blue eyes and thinning sand-colored hair.

“Oh, I know!” Brad says, limping to the couch. He’s been suing his old work for a year because his injury was on-the-job. The doctor’s say there are no visible injuries, but Brad insists that he’s unable to work and should get a million dollars. “It’s the smell of pizza not cooking, what a terrible smell!”

Brad laughs at his joke.

“Sorry,” Char says, opening the freezer for a pizza. “It got late and I didn’t know when you’d be home.”

“Well, maybe I could call if somebody wasn’t so late on my cell phone bill that it got cut off.”

“Sorry.” Char pulls off Brad’s shoes. “They’ve cut my hours at the salon.”

“I don’t see how that’s my problem. I still manage to get out there and look for work every day.”

“I find that highly unlikely,” says a small, tinny voice.

Char and Brad turn to find the Drawstring Detective standing on the end table beside the couch.

“What’s that?” Brad says.

“Oh, uh . . .”

“I am a detective,” answers the Drawstring Detective. “A Drawstring—”

“You bought a doll?” Brad says. “Where’d you get the money to buy a doll?”

“I am no doll, sir. I am a figure of action.”

“At the antique store,” Char says. “He’s a detective. I thought maybe he could help me find my ring. How’d the job hunting go?” she asks from the kitchen, before Brad can ask any more questions about the Drawstring Detective.

Depositing himself on the sofa, Brad turns the TV on and flips to his favorite show, America’s Funniest Surveillance Videos, where people are caught stealing or messing around at work or spitting in people’s coffee.

“How do you think it went?” he says. “I got no car, which means I gotta take the bus everywhere, so I get to my interviews all sweaty and late.”

“You could ride my bike.”

“Oh yeah, that’s real cool. I’ll be a regular chick magnet. Besides, how can I ride a bike with that insurance guy following me around everywhere? That’d go over great with the jury.”

The lawyers representing Brad’s old company hired a man to follow Brad around and take pictures of him to try and prove that his injuries weren’t real.

“Sorry, I wasn’t thinking,” Char says, bringing him a beer that cost three dollars, because Brad is allergic to the additives in domestic beer.

“That’s okay, we all make mistakes.” Brad takes the beer. “I mean, hell, I married you, didn’t I?”

Char tries to laugh with Brad, but ends up clearing her throat instead, just to give her body something to do.

The Drawstring Detective watches Brad from the end table, mustache twitching.

• • • •

“Your husband is a villain.”

“He’s not that bad. He’s just going through a rough patch.” Char washes the pizza pan in the sink. The crust cakes under her nails when she scratches it from the pan in the Sour Apple scented suds. On the counter beside her, the Drawstring Detective fences with his shadow, using his umbrella as a sword. “His dad wasn’t there much when he was a kid.”

“I never had a father,” says the Drawstring Detective. He parries, then slashes. “Or a mother.”

“Have you ever had a, you know, an owner or something that you cared about? Like a family?”

“I belonged to a twelve-year-old girl once who would hide pennies in the house and ask me to find them. She was quite charmed by me and I by her. We were very happy, until I happened upon some letters her mother had received from a man who was not the girl’s father.”

“What happened?”

The Drawstring Detective lunges at his shadow, pins it to the wall, then steps back, bows, and sheathes his umbrella in pantomime. “Suffice to say it was not the first time I’d escaped a rubbish bin. Nor was it the last.”

Char sets the pizza pan on the drying rack.

“I apologize for not offering to help wash your ovenware,” the Drawstring Detective says. “I have an aversion to water. Rust, you see.”

“That’s okay,” says Char. “I’m used to doing the chores.”

The Drawstring Detective’s mustache twitches. “Indeed.”

In the living room, Brad laughs at a show about zoo animals attacking people.

“Do you ever get lonely?” Char says. Particles of food shoot out of Brad’s mouth when he laughs. She’ll have to vacuum later, or bugs.

“I abide,” says the Drawstring Detective.

“Have you ever been, I don’t know, in love? Can toys . . . I mean, figures of action, fall in love?”

The Drawstring Detective takes off his bowler hat. The brown paint of his hair has faded to show the shiny tin beneath. It looks like a bald patch. Char wonders if she should offer to repaint it, or if that would embarrass him.

“I did have a love, once,” he says. “A great love, I dare say.”

“What was her name?”

“Daisy,” he says.

“Was she a figure of action like you?”

“She was a doll.” The Drawstring Detective tilts back on his heels, staring at the linoleum counter beneath his feet as he worries the brim of his bowler. “She had a music box instead of a voice box, so that when one pulled her string she spoke in song. She was a perfect lady. Elegant and refined, with porcelain skin and real human hair.” The Drawstring Detective turns his hat in his hands, his eyes unfocused. “She used to let me brush it. She was very expensive, far more so than me. She was Italian. Handcrafted in Venice. One-of-a-kind. I never knew what she saw in a mass-produced man such as myself.”

“What happened to her?” Char says.

The silence that follows is so long that Char is about to check the Detective’s string to make sure it hasn’t wound down when he speaks.

“She betrayed me.”

• • • •

The following evening, Char finds the Drawstring Detective in the freezer when she opens it to fix Brad’s pizza.

Like most days, it’s been one of those days. At the salon, Char caught Angela taking a twenty out of Char’s purse. Angela claimed to have seen the bill fall out of Char’s purse, and that she was just putting it back. When she got home, Char was about to tell Brad that she thought Angela may have stolen her grandmother’s ring, too, that maybe that’s how it went missing, but instead she asks what happened to his jeans, which are draped across the Formica dining table, covered in mud and torn from ankle to thigh.

“Oh my God, you should have seen it,” Brad laughs. “So I was out at The Cat Club and you know how the parking lot is just, like, this gravel pit, right? And it was raining and—

“The Cat Club? Why’d you go there?”

Brad stops, sighs, rolls his eyes. “For the lunch special, Char. I go to a strip club for the wings, just like every other guy there. God, take a look in a mirror and ask that question again, Jesus. Anyway, like I was saying, I was walking through the parking lot from the bus stop and I notice the insurance photographer rolling by with his camera and I make my crutch start to shake and I go all Whoa! Whoa! And I take this huge dive into the mud right in front of the camera and I’m all holding my foot and crying out for help and he doesn’t do squat! Just keeps on filming. How do you think the jury’s gonna like that?”

“Why would the jury know about it?”

“Well, ’cause they’ll see the video of me falling because of my injury, duh.”

“But why would the insurance company show them that video if it hurts their case?”

“Well, because . . . I mean, they . . . God, what the hell’s wrong with you, anyway? I should’ve known you wouldn’t be supportive.”

“Brad—”

“Forget it, just forget it! You obviously don’t care about what I’m trying to do for us,” Brad says.

She finds the Drawstring Detective wedged between the frozen slice of wedding cake Char and Brad still keep and the ice pack Char uses for her frequent headaches, a bag of blue sludge labeled Char’s Tit Implant #1 in Brad’s chicken scratch handwriting.

“Oh!” she says, dropping the pizza. The freezer’s temperature has been turned all the way down so that the Detective’s metal body crystalizes the moisture on Char’s hand when she grabs him, bonding her skin with his body. “Are you okay? Can you hear me?”

The Drawstring Detective does not respond. She checks his string, gives it a long, slow pull.

“Are you okay?” Char says again. “Are you—”

“I am unharmed,” answers the Drawstring Detective. His voice is slow, sluggish. “Thank you.”

“What happened?” Char’s fingers are stuck tight, wrapped around his legs. She takes a step toward the sink to run warm water over her hand, then remembers the detective’s allergy to water.

“I was looking for your ring. Your husband found me searching the contents of his bank book for evidence that he sold it.”

“Brad? He doesn’t know what a bank book is,” Char sighs, peeling her index finger from the Drawstring Detective’s body. Her skin makes a muted ripping sound like Velcro when it pulls away. She bites her lip against the pain. There is no blood. “We have a joint account. I handle the finances.”

“Hmm. Yes, well,” the detective says. “I wouldn’t bring it up if I were you. Though he would, I’d wager, have a tougher time fitting you into the freezer.”

Char smiles.

“How was your doctor’s appointment?” the Drawstring Detective asks.

Char’s eyes go wide. She hadn’t told anyone about that.

“It was fine,” she says. Then again, “It was fine.”

The Drawstring Detective’s mustache twitches.

• • • •

“Forgive my impertinence,” the Drawstring Detective says, “but you and your husband don’t . . . that is to say you and he . . . don’t seem like the best match, matrimonially speaking.”

Char sighs, and closes her eyes. The unopened Coke can in her hand is cold and soothing against her abraded palm and fingers. In the backyard, the woman and the figure of action sit and stare up at the glow of the city washing out the stars. Warm wind churns the air, bringing with it the sweet stink of cut grass and poured tar. A bottle of Passion Pink nail polish sits on the ground between them. Char is painting her toenails. She jokes that she could paint the Drawstring Detective’s hat pink, to which he responds with a twitch of his mustache.

Inside, Brad is asleep on the couch under a blanket of pizza crumbs.

“He didn’t used to be this way,” she sighs. “He was nice and funny and he had big plans.”

“What happened?”

Char shrugs. “Life happened.” She takes a sip of Coke. “He’s not a bad person. He means well,” she says, what her mother would have called a Who are you trying to convince? moment.

A water bug lands on the table. The Drawstring Detective picks it up by its wings and tosses it into the air like a discus. He clap-wipes his gloved hands, draws his pull ring out as far as it will go, and looks up at the sky.

“I was convinced that she loved me,” he says after a time. “There were still many of us Detectives back then, but Daisy only had eyes for me, or so I thought. She was seduced by the Impossible Doctor Fossil. By his charm and power and influence. He had built up a whole network of evil toys by then.”

“What happened to him?” Char asks.

“My final confrontation with Fossil was in the Albuquirky Toy Works. He had returned there to manufacture an army of Drawstring Detectives. To be twisted like himself, warped into doing his bidding. Fossil had kidnapped Daisy and taken her there. At least, that’s what Fossil’s meticulously planted clues had led me to believe.”

The Drawstring Detective’s voice fades. He removes his bowler hat, stares into it as though into a well.

“I got the better of Fossil, but Daisy got the better of me.” His eyes slowly shut, then click open. A tinny crackle marks the clearing of his throat. “She pushed both Fossil and myself over the rim of a great crucible filled with molted tin, intent on keeping Fossil’s miniature mechanical militia for her own dark deeds. I managed to save myself, which is more than I can say for Fossil, who in his death throes spilled the molten material across the factory floor, destroying the autonomous army and much of the toy works in a fire. For days I searched the ruins for some sign of Daisy.”

Char pops the top of a second Coke can, and takes a long sip. She wishes she could offer some to the tin man.

The Drawstring Detective’s mustache twitches. “If it isn’t too impertinent a question, may I ask how much I cost?”

Char smiles.

“You were very expensive,” she says.

The Drawstring Detective straightens his posture, and puts his hat back on at a jaunty angle, mustache twitching.

• • • •

The Drawstring Detective is in the bathroom, coloring the top of his head with a brown Magic Marker, when Char enters without knocking.

“Oh!” she says, backing quickly out the door. The Drawstring Detective jumps to attention and drops the marker, tries to catch it as it falls into the sink. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know. I should have knocked.”

“No apology necessary.” The Drawstring Detective fumbles for his bowler hat. He puts it on sideways, then straightens it. “I didn’t realize anyone was home.”

“I had to take off early because of a doctor’s appointment.” Char looks over her shoulder. “Where’s Brad?”

“I believe he went out with . . . someone.”

“Someone?”

“He received a phone call from a woman, then left soon after.”

“Oh,” says Char. “Okay. I guess . . . I guess I better get a pizza in the oven.”

“You don’t sound surprised.”

“No, I guess I’m not. I mean, I kind of figured . . .” Her voice trails off. Char wonders what kind of woman would have an affair with a man who had to take the bus to meet her because he wasn’t allowed to drive. “He always had a thing for Angela.”

“You know who it is? You must be a very good detective in your own right.”

“You don’t have to be,” Char says, then stares at nothing for a few moments before she tries on a smile. “You know the marker you were using is washable? If you get the ink wet, it’ll come right off. I have a brown Sharpie you could use.”

“Ah yes, well.” The Drawstring Detective clears his throat. “I’ll certainly bear that in mind.”

Char walks back into the living room, calls over her shoulder, her voice too cheery. “So did you find my ring yet?”

“Not yet,” the Drawstring Detective says, following her. “However, during the course of today’s investigation I did uncover three dollars and forty-two cents in loose change, a remote control for a brand of television which is no longer made, three unpaid cell phone bills dated two years ago, and a disturbing number of fingernail clippings hidden in a TV Guide. In fact . . . oh my word.”

The Drawstring Detective’s eyes click shut as Char takes off her shirt and unhooks her bra. Mustache twitching, the Detective spins on his tin heels in a quick about-face.

“It’s okay,” says Char.

“It most certainly is not. I may be tin, but I am still a gentleman.”

Arms spread like wings, Char falls back onto the bed and stares at the ceiling. A tinny crackle denotes the Drawstring Detective clearing his throat.

“Madam?” the Drawstring Detective says, eyes still shut.

“What’s up?”

“Does Brad know about the cancer?”

• • • •

Char and the Drawstring Detective do many things together.

At the beach, the Drawstring Detective buries himself in the sand, so that Char must find him with her grandfather’s old metal detector.

At the movies, the Drawstring Detective gets in for free when he hides in her purse.

At the park, they go for walks and talk about the mysteries the Drawstring Detective has solved and about how romantic Brad was when he and Char first met.

They do not talk about Daisy or Angela or doctors.

• • • •

“Okay,” Char says. “You can open your eyes.”

The Drawstring Detective’s eyes open with their familiar click.

“Do you like her?” Char bites the bottom half of her smile and rests a hand on the roof of Barbie’s Dream House. The glossy paint is smooth under her fingers, it smells of plastic and New. Barbie is seated on the sofa in a bikini. “Her name is Barbie.”

The Drawstring Detective’s mustache twitches. “Is Barbie a prostitute?”

“What? No, of course not!”

“Really? Is this Dream House not one of ill repute?”

“No, no, it’s nothing like that.”

The Drawstring Detective lowers his head to avert his gaze with the brim of his hat. “Forgive me, I’m not sure I understand. Why she is dressed as a fallen woman? Is it a costume?”

“It’s just a swimsuit. She’s just a toy like you.”

Char realizes her mistake before she says it, but not in time to stop herself. The Drawstring Detective clears his tinny throat. He removes his bowler hat and polishes it with the sleeve of his greatcoat.

“I’m sorry,” Char says. “I didn’t mean—”

“Quite all right,” the Drawstring Detective says. “No offense taken. No apology necessary.”

“Wait!” With a clap of her hands, Char is already digging through the toy store bag she snuck past Brad, who hasn’t left the sofa in three days. “I’ve got it!”

She picks Barbie up and peels off her bathing suit.

The Drawstring Detective gasps, mustache twitching furiously, his bowler pulled sharply over his face, beneath which he mumbles words like irregular and impropriety.

“What do you think?” Char says after a minute.

The Drawstring Detective removes his bowler and peers over its brim. “Hmm,” he says. Then a second time. “Hmm. Quite fetching.”

The Drawstring Detective paces a circle around Winter Wonderland Barbie, her slender figure draped head-to-toe in a great shapeless poof of fake pink fur.

“Lovely, really.” When the Drawstring Detective looks up at Barbie’s smile, he must hold his hat to keep it from falling off. “Something of an Amazon, eh wot?”

• • • •

The Drawstring Detective finds her in the bathroom. Char’s head hangs between her shoulders, elbows on her knees, hair obscuring her features.

He knocks on the door with the handle of his umbrella. When he receives no answer, he nudges it open. “Hullo?”

“I don’t understand what I did wrong,” Char says. Her voice is small. A whisper.

“I beg your pardon?” With a grunt, the Drawstring Detective shuts the door behind him. In the living room, Brad laughs at a TV show about cars crashing during police chases.

There is an envelope in Char’s hand. It’s a very large bill for a credit card she never applied for. The charges are for bars and restaurants. And motels.

“This is so much money. But that’s not even the worst! She was wearing it today. Angela was wearing my grandmother’s ring. She saw me see her wearing it and she didn’t do anything. And neither did I,” she says through her veil of hair. “I did everything for him. I tried so hard to be good. I mean, Angela? Really? She’s just so . . . I mean, I tried so hard to lose weight and wear make-up and look at magazines to see how women on TV do their hair.”

The Drawstring Detective holds his hat in his hands. “If you don’t mind my saying, a farmer can wear a three-piece suit to spread fertilizer, but it doesn’t change the fact . . .”

“. . . that I’m shoveling shit?” Char finishes. “But he’s all I have. I gave up everything for him. Not that the world was my oyster or anything, but still. All my friends moved away and I stayed for him, because he didn’t want to leave and I thought he was the best I could do. I mean, I hate my stupid job and this stupid double-wide and this stupid town. It’s just, like, if it doesn’t work with Brad, then there’s nothing good left. I couldn’t get one thing right.” Char chuckles, a little. “This is so funny: It feels like if things don’t work out with Brad, then Brad will be right about me. That I can’t do anything right. How ridiculous is that?”

“Not ridiculous,” the Drawstring Detective says, twitching his mustache. “Merely . . . human.”

Char looks up, parts her hair, tucks the frayed ends she can never get right behind her ears. “You knew,” she says. It is not an accusation. “You knew where my ring was. Right from the start.”

The Drawstring Detective lowers his head. “I did.”

She watches him try very hard to find something to look at between his loafers.

“You know, I lied when I said I never saw Daisy again,” he says, worrying the brim of his bowler in his gloved hands. “For years I searched. In secondhand shops where I stood for sale, in the homes and collections of my owners. I met many exquisitely handcrafted dolls from all over the world, but none of them were Daisy. Until one day, there she was.”

At first, Char mistakes the tinny hitch of static in the little man’s chest for his throat clearing.

“She was in a junk bin at an antique shop. They were using her for spare parts to repair other dolls. She had part of her chest left, a leg, most of an arm. They had taken her hair.”

The Drawstring Detective takes a deep breath.

“Her gearbox was rusted. She could not speak. But she did not have to. I knew from her eyes—even then she had the most beautiful emerald eyes—what she was asking of me.”

The Drawstring Detective looks up at Char. He is holding his hat so tight.

“I cut her string,” he says. “I was going to cut mine as well, but I must have lost track of time. Because the next thing I knew, I was here, and you had pulled my string. I don’t know how long I was in the antique shop before you took me home, but it feels like a long time. It feels like a very long time.”

Char reaches down, takes the Drawstring Detective’s hat from his hands, and puts it on his head.

“Thank you,” she says.

“I did nothing. You are still without your ring.”

“That’s not what was missing.”

The Drawstring Detective sighs. A certain surrender in his posture, an attempt at a smile. “At your service.”

• • • •

She’s almost packed when Brad gets home.

“What’s this?” Brad says, when he sees Char’s suitcase. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Char says after a long breath. “You can keep the suitcase. Just go.”

Brad snorts a laugh, but cannot hide the fear that fills his eyes.

“What are you t—”

“Angela?” Char says. “Seriously? Angela?”

Brad’s fear burns away in a flash, leaves anger in its ashes. “What?” Brad paints the air in front of Char with his hand, like she’s something he splashed onto a canvas. “You think all this is enough for a man like me? I settled for you, you know that right?”

Char bites her cheeks.

“I only stayed with you because I felt sorry for you,” Brad says. He grabs the suitcase, opens it, dumps out his carefully packed clothes and toiletries. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Brad storms down the hall to their bedroom where he pulls Char’s drawers out of her grandmother’s bureau. He upends the drawers onto the open suitcase, forming a small mountain of clothes.

“You remember when I gave you this?” He holds up a cheap violet nightgown with tassels on the breasts. Char has always hated it. “Do you even remember when you could still fit in this thing?”

Brad takes the nightgown and tears it down the center by its seam. He pulls a sundress out of a drawer that belonged to Char’s mother. She tries to take it from him.

“Stop,” she says. “Please, don’t.”

She reaches for the sundress. Brad tries to push her away. His elbow catches her in the hollow of her throat instead. Char folds in half, tries to swallow the fist of pain that has suddenly filled her throat. She can’t breathe. She leans onto their bed with a choked gargle.

“Hey, I didn’t mean . . .” Brad says, his voice small, shaky. “I’m sorry, I didn’t . . . come on, I know you’re faking. Seriously, stop messing around.”

He takes a step toward his wife, then cries out in pain as one of his legs buckles beneath him. From the bed, Char watches her husband crumble to the floor. She sips at the air like it’s too hot to drink, seeing stars.

“Do not touch her, rogue.” The Drawstring Detective stands on Brad’s chest. The black tip of his umbrella is missing, exposing the sharp end of a screw. The screw is covered in blood, as is the Achilles tendon of Brad’s left foot. The Drawstring Detective removes his hat and tosses it on the floor. His mustache twitches. “You will leave this house at once, and never return.”

Brad grunts a reply. He snatches the tin figure from his chest only to drop him again when the Drawstring Detective punctures the meat of Brad’s hand several times in rapid succession with the sharp end of the umbrella. Howling, Brad kicks his pint-size adversary aside, sucking on his hand, limping.

The Drawstring Detective rights himself on the carpet. “I say again, blackguard: Leave this place.”

“Screw you!” Brad lunges at the Drawstring Detective.

“Poor choice of words.” The tin figure is too quick by half, leaping aside to drive the screw-tipped umbrella into Brad’s heel. The flailing man crashes into the wall, where his head leaves a dent as he goes limp and slumps to the floor.

The Drawstring Detective takes a cautious step toward the giant. It is his undoing.

“I’m sorry you had to see that, madam. I—”

Cat-quick, Brad snatches the Drawstring Detective off the floor, pinning the figure’s arms at his sides. Brad lurches upright and shuffles out the bedroom door. When she can draw enough air to move, Char is on her feet, pursuing him.

Brad, she tries to say, but nothing will come out. It’s all she can do to trail him down the hall, staggering in his clumsy wake as he charges out the kitchen door and into the shed, locking the little door behind him in the moment before she reaches the knob. A moment later, the high whine of the table saw cuts the air like a scream.

• • • •

By the time the police arrive, called there by the photographer working for the insurance company, who took a half-dozen pictures of the punch that knocked Char down, Char’s fists have bloodied themselves on the shed’s door, fingernails splintered on the deadbolt that locked from the inside. The strength is gone from her legs. The EMTs take her to the hospital to see to her hands and her bruised throat. She tries to tell them to take her back, to let her into the shed once they’ve hauled Brad away, who, for a convalescing plaintiff in a lawsuit, appeared to put up a healthy struggle against the police while the photographer took picture after picture before handing his card to Char.

• • • •

It’s past midnight by the time Char gets home. Angela from work came to the hospital to give her a ride. With no money for a cab, she was the only person Char could get a hold of. When the woman arrived at the hospital, she was still wearing Char’s ring. They were halfway to Char’s house when Angela casually put her hand in her pocket, wiggled it there for a minute, and pulled it out again, ringless.

• • • •

“Oh God.”

The Drawstring Detective lies in pieces. A leg here. An arm there. A head and torso. The tools of his dismantling are scattered across the worktable: a hammer, an electric sander, a cutting torch. His hat is gone, which is somehow the worst.

By some miracle, one of the Drawstring Detective’s arms is still attached to his body. The hand still holds his drawstring’s pull ring.

His mustache twitches endlessly.

The Drawstring Detective’s single remaining eye clicks closed when it sees Char, then opens again.

“It . . . it’ll be okay,” Char says. Gathering his parts with slow, shaking fingers, she speaks in hitches and half-sobs. “I’ll take you back to the antique shop and they’ll fix you.”

When he speaks, the Drawstring Detective’s voice is choked with static. “Wait. Stop.”

Char stops, clutching her fingers and grinding her teeth against the words she knows will come.

“Please,” the Drawstring Detective says. “Cut my string.”

“No,” Char whimpers. “I can’t.”

“I am broken.”

“You’re my friend.”

“That is why you must.”

“But . . . but . . .”

“Please.”

Char deflates. She casts her gaze about the worktable and finds a pair of industrial cutting shears. Its blades are covered in tin splinters and flecks of black paint.

Slowly, gently, she takes the pull ring from the Drawstring Detective’s hand. He rests his hand on her thumb.

She cuts the string, and allows it to slip slowly through her fingers.

“Wait!” she says. “Oh wait!”

She looks around, frantic, searching the workbench, the floor.

She finds his bowler hat crushed beneath a chair leg. She raises the Drawstring Detective’s head and puts it on his glossy brown pate. The string is almost gone.

“Thank you,” he says.

“At your service,” she says.

His mustache twitches in what might be a smile, until it doesn’t.

• • • •

The Curiously Bigger on the Inside Antique Shop keeps unusual hours. Char shouldn’t be surprised that Azim-cum-Jeff is still behind the counter when she knocks on the storefront door after midnight.

“Are you still open?” she calls through the glass door, thinking maybe he forgot to lock up. And then forgot to go home.

Coming around from behind the counter, Azim-cum-Jeff taps the STORE HOURS sign with his finger. The sign reads that they don’t close until Too Late O’Clock. He opens the door a crack.

“Is it . . .” Charlotte starts to ask.

“Too late? Almost. But not quite,” Azim-cum-Jeff says, opening the door wide. “If my wife had her way, it would never be too late. But that’s a woman for you.”

“Can you fix him?” She lays the pieces of the Drawstring Detective on the counter beside a book called The Laws of Thermodymagics.

“That depends on what’s broken.”

“Everything,” Charlotte sputters, near panic. “He’s in a million p—”

Azim-cum-Jeff puts a box on the counter. It’s filled with doll pieces, arms and legs and feet, articles of doll clothes.

“He’s not so bad off. I made him out of spare parts, anyway.”

“Wait, what? I . . . you made him?”

“Of course. You see on the foot? Made in Albuquirky. I put that there. A joke, you see?”

Azim-cum-Jeff fishes through his box of spare doll parts and pulls out a right hand, a left foot, a hat.

“Wait,” Charlotte says, “so he didn’t . . . what about all the things he said? About Dr. Fossil and . . . and the Italian doll who betrayed him?”

“The what now?”

“He told me—” Charlotte’s words turn to smoke in her mouth as she watches Azim-cum-Jeff reassemble the tin figure from pieces in the spare parts box. Finally, he opens the Drawstring Detective’s chest cavity. It’s empty. No gears, no voice box. Just a coil of yellowed string. He holds up the string.

“You want me to put a new ring on this? I mean, it still won’t do anything, but I always thought it added a certain authenticity.”

Charlotte doesn’t know what to say. She feels like somebody cut her own string.

“No,” she says at last. “That’s okay.” She moves a hand through her hair. “What do I owe you?”

“What have you got?”

“Just this,” she says, gesturing to the tin figure of action.

“Then take it,” says Azim-cum-Jeff. “On the house.”

Charlotte says thank you, or thinks she says it. She isn’t sure of anything when she takes the Drawstring Detective and walks stiffly toward the door, as though her own joints need oiling.

“Take care of him,” says Azim-cum-Jeff before the door closes behind Charlotte. “And whatever you do, don’t call him a doll. He hates that.”

Charlotte stops, overcome by the sudden feeling that if she turns around, the Curiously Bigger on the Inside Antique Shop will no longer be there.

She turns, slowly, and glances over her shoulder.

Azim-cum-Jeff stands behind the counter, smelling his armpit.

Charlotte gets into her car. The Drawstring Detective lies on the front passenger seat with his new mismatched hands and feet, his new purple leg and his new green arm, his new wide-brimmed purple fedora. All of which can be repainted, she knows. She leans down and sits him upright. He falls forward, exposing the loose tassel of string hanging from his back.

Charlotte takes her grandmother’s ring, which she stole out of Angela’s pocket when they hugged stiffly at her house, off her finger and ties it to the tin figure of action’s string, which automatically snakes itself back into the torso.

She takes a breath, holds it, closes her eyes.

And pulls the string.

Nothing happens.

She pulls the string again.

Nothing.

“I’m sorry,” she says, her words a hitching sob. She didn’t know she was crying. “I’m so sorry.”

“Well, I should hope so,” says a tinny voice beside her, full of hisses and pops of disapproval. “This hat is ludicrous.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: For further reading of the many adventures of Charlotte and the Drawstring Detective please see The Cancer Caper, The Great Escape from Hickville, The Affair of the Handsome New Landlord, and others.

© 2014 by Nik Houser.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nik Houser’s fiction has appeared in Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Weird Tales, and many other publications. In 2012 he attended the Clarion West writer’s workshop. His urban fantasy noir novella Red Rover is available on the Kindle. For a complete bibliography, free fiction, contact information and some cartoons please visit NikHouser.com. Nik lives in the San Francisco Bay area and he’s totally got your back in a fight.

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

Soul Case

Nalo Hopkinson

Moments after the sun’s bottom lip cleared the horizon, the brigade charged down the hill. Kima stood with the rest of the Garfun, ready to give back blow for blow.

The pistoleers descended towards the waiting village compong. Their silence unnerved. Only the paddy thump of the camels’ wide feet made any sound. Compong people murmured, stepped back. But Mother Letty gestured to the Garfuns defending them to stand still. So they did. Kima felt her palm slippery on her sharpened hoe.

The pistoleers advanced upon them in five rows; some tens of impeccably uniformed men and women posting up and down in unison on their camels. Each row but the last comprised seven gangly camels, each camel ridden by a soldier, each soldier kitted out a la zouave, in identical and pristine red-and-navy with clean white shirts. Near on four muskets for each of them, and powder, carried by a small boy running beside each camel. There were only twelve muskets in the compong.

Now the first rows of camels stepped onto the pitch road that led into the village. The road was easily wide enough for seven camels across. The cool morning sun had not yet made the surface of the pitch sticky. The camels didn’t even break stride. Kima made a noise of dismay. Where was the strong science that the three witches had promised them? Weeks and weeks they’d had them carting reeking black pitch from the deep sink of it that lay in the gully, re-warming it on fires, mixing it with stones and spreading it into this road that led from nowhere to the entrance of the compong, and stopped abruptly there. Had they done nothing but create a smooth paved surface by which the army could enter and destroy them?

From her position at the head of the Garfuns, the black witch, the Obe Acotiren, showed no doubt. She only pursed her lips and grunted, once. Standing beside her, white Mother Letty and the Taino witch Maridowa did not even that. The three should have been behind the Garfuns, where they could be protected. If the villagers lost their Knowledgeables, they would be at the mercy of the whites’ fish magic. Yet there the three stood and watched. Acotiren even had her baby grandson cotched on her hip. So the Garfuns took their cue from the three women. Like them, they kept their ground, ready but still.

“Twice five,” whispered Mother Letty. “Twice six.” She was counting the soldiers as they stepped onto the black road. Kima thought it little comfort to know exactly how many soldiers had come to kill them, but she found herself counting silently along with Mother Letty.

The leading edge of the army was almost upon them, scant yards from the entrance to the compong. Camels covered almost the full length of the road. A few of the Garfuns made ready to charge. “Hold,” said Mother Letty. Her voice cut through the pounding of the camels. They held.

Maridowa turned her wide, brown face to the Garfuns and grinned. “Just a little more,” she said. She was merry at strange times, the young Taino witch was.

The soldiers had their muskets at the ready. The barrels gleamed in the sun. The Garfuns’ muskets were dull and scorched. “So many of them,” whispered Kima. She raised her hoe, cocked it ready to strike. Beside her, the white boy Carter whimpered, but clutched his cutlass at the ready, a grim look on his face. He’d said he would rather die than be pressganged onto the ships once more as a sailor. He had fourteen years. If he survived this, the village would let him join the boys to be circumcised; let him become a man.

Thrice six . . .

The thrice seventh haughty camel stepped smartly onto the battlefield, a little ahead of its fellows. “That will do it,” pronounced the Obe Acotiren. It wasn’t quite a question.

The pitch went liquid. It was that quick. Camels began to flounder, then to sink. The villagers gasped, talked excitedly to each other. They had laid the pitch only four fingers deep! How then was it swallowing entire camels and riders?

The pitch swamp had not a care for what was possible and what not. It sucked the brigade into its greedy gullet like a pig gobbling slops. Camels mawed in dismay, the pitch snapping their narrow ankles as they tried to clamber out. They sank more quickly than their lighter riders. Soldier men and women clawed at each other, stepped on each others’ heads and shoulders to fight free of the melted pitch. To no avail. The last hoarse scream was swallowed by the pitch in scarce the time it took the Obe Acotiren’s fifth grandchild—the fat brown boy just past his toddling age, his older sisters and brothers having long since joined the Garfun fighters—to slip from her arms and go running for his favourite mango tree.

The black face of the road of tar was smooth and flat again, as though the army had never been.

One meager row of uniformed soldiers stared back at the Garfuns from the other side of the pitch. Their weapons hung unused from their hands. Then, together, they slapped their camels into a turn, and galloped hard for the foot of the hill.

All but one, who remained a-camelback at the bank of the river of pitch.

The pistoleer slid off her beast. She stood on the edge of where her fellows, suffocated, were slowly hardening. She bent her knees slightly, curling her upper body around her belly. Fists held out in front of her, she screamed full throat at the villagers; a raw howl of grief that used all the air in her lungs, and that went on long after she should have had none remaining. She seemed like to spit those very lungs up. Her camel watched her disinterestedly for a while, then began to wander up the hill. It stopped to crop yellow hog plums from a scraggly tree.

On the hill above, the general sounded the retreat. In vain; most of his army had already dispersed. (Over the next few weeks, many of them would straggle into Garfun compongs—some with their camels—begging asylum. This they would be granted. It was a good land, but mostly harsh scrub. It needed many to tend it.)

Some few of the Garfuns probed the pitch with their weapons. They did not penetrate. Cautiously, the Garfuns stepped onto the pitch. It was hard once more, and held them easily. They began to dance and laugh, to call for their children and their families to join them. Soon there was a celebration on the flat pitch road. An old matron tried to show Carter the steps of her dance. He did his best to follow her, laughing at his own clumsiness.

The Obe Acotiren watched the soldier woman, who had collapsed onto her knees now, her scream hiccoughing into sobs. While the army was becoming tar beneath the feet of the villagers, Acotiren had pushed through the crowd and fetched her fearless grandchild from the first branch of the mango tree. He’d fallen out of it thrice before, but every day returned to try again. She hitched him up onto her hip. He clamped his legs at her waist and fisted up a handful of her garment at the shoulder. He brought the fist happily to his mouth.

Acotiren’s face bore a calm, stern sadness. “Never you mind,” Kima heard her mutter in the direction of the grieving woman. “What we do today going to come back on us, and more besides.” Maridowa glanced at the Obe, but said nothing.

Then Acotiren produced her obi bag from wherever she had had it hidden on her person, and tossed it onto the pitch. Mother Letty started forward. “Tiren, no!” cried Mother Letty, her face anguished.

She was too late to intercept the obi bag. It landed on the road. It was a small thing, no bigger than a guinea fowl’s egg. It should have simply bounced and rolled. Instead, it sank instantly, as though it weighed as much in itself as the whole tarred army together.

Maridowa was dancing on the road, and hadn’t noticed what was happening. It was Kima who saw it all. Acotiren pressed her lips together, then smiled a bright smile at her grandchild. “Come,” she said. “Make I show you how to climb a mango tree.”

Tranquil, as though she hadn’t just tossed her soulcase away to be embalmed forever in tar, she turned her back to go and play with the boy, leaving Mother Letty kneeling there, tears coursing through the lines on her ancient face as she watched her friend go.

In less than a year, Acotiren was frail and bent. There was no more climbing trees for her. Her eyes had grown crystalline with cataracts, her hands tremulous, her body sere and unmuscled. One morning she walked into the bush to die, and never came out again. But by then her daughter’s child, Acotiren’s fifth grandchild, was so sure-footed from skinning up gru-gru bef palms and mamapom trees with his nana, that he never, ever fell. Wherever he could plant his feet, he could go. His friends called him Goat.

© 2007 by Nalo Hopkinson.

Originally published in Foundation.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nalo Hopkinson was born in Jamaica, and grew up in Guyana, Trinidad, and Canada. Her debut novel, Brown Girl in the Ring was the winning entry in the Warner Aspect First Novel contest, and led to her winning the Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She has since published many acclaimed novels and short stories, as well as numerous essays. She currently teaches writing at the University of California, Riverside. Her latest novel is Sister Mine.

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

A Lie You Give, and Thus I Take

Damien Angelica Walters

Don’t be fooled by the breadcrumbs in the forest. This is not a fairy tale.

• • • •

The first lie is pretty and spirals from your mouth like candyfloss; sweet, so sweet, and I’m melting under your tongue. Baby, baby, baby, you say, and I gobble it up, unaware that every word you say comes with a candy thermometer and you’ve made me your latest caramel bonbon.

(We’ll get to that later.)

It isn’t your fault I’m starving. It is your fault your recipe is gourmet bullshit and you want to know what I look like with the apron strings tied around my neck and how best you can fit me into your oven.

(This is where I admit I’m caught by the sugar rush, but you already know that, don’t you?)

You’ll be safe here, you say. You’ll be safe with me.

I know you’re not a witch, and there’s no reason for me to doubt your royal peerage; you have the epaulets and posture to prove it.

Your house is small, but it’s bright and cheery and my feet sink into marshmallow fluff, the sort of floor on which a girl could dance a pirouette; a woman, a waltz. I do neither, afraid I might trip over my own aspirations.

Do you invite all the lost girls here, I ask.

You smile and say of course not. You’re special.

The words are strawberry shortcake, a little cloying, the portion too large, but I swallow it all.

Okay, I say, and I want to smack myself on the head because it’s late and I should be heading back, but the only thing waiting is a woodcutter’s axe with my name on it, so instead I say okay again. The light changes and for an instant, your teeth are canine sharp, your jaw a little too long, but that’s the wrong story, isn’t it?

(Perhaps you think the axe is from the wrong story, too, but there’s always a woodcutter and always a blade waiting around the corner.)

And anyway, your teeth are fine and if you bite a little when we’re in your king size bed, it’s okay. I may have a sweet tooth but I’m not delicate.

• • • •

In the morning, you’re already out of the bedroom when I wake and I hear you in the kitchen, wire whisk against glass bowl, wooden spoon stirring a sticky mess. I whisper good morning and look for the coffee, but you’ve got a piece of marzipan at the ready.

I’ve been waiting for you my whole life, you say, and the sweet sticks to my teeth and there’s a cyanide burn when I swallow it down, but I don’t pay attention because you’re already pushing another piece between my lips.

Then you hand me a bucket and a scrub brush and I’m confused; that’s definitely the wrong story, no tricks of light required, and you flick one hand.

All the stories are the same story, you say.

No, you’re wrong, I say.

Your mask slips again and what big teeth and what the hell?

A blink of an eye and you’re back.

Good trick, isn’t it, you say, but there’s something hiding in your eyes and later, when I’m scrubbing meringue from the linoleum, I realize you quite neatly sidestepped the whole story explanation bit. Clever.

When I finish the floor, you kiss my pruned fingers and I swear I see those teeth again, but maybe it’s the fumes from the cleaning solution.

I’ll keep you forever, you say.

You’re so sweet I can feel the cavities take root in my teeth, and what am I, a toy, I want to say, but I can’t talk around the chocolate-covered cherry and you’re laughing when you wipe the sticky syrup from my chin.

You pat my hips, my thighs, my stomach, but I haven’t been here nearly long enough yet, have I? Later, I touch the oven to make sure, but the burners are off.

• • • •

You leave me alone most days and I pluck gingerbread from the roof to tide me over.

At night, babylove tastes like peppermint and dark chocolate; always is orange marmalade; forever leaves a dusting of confectioners’ sugar on my lips.

But I’m still hungry.

I feel your eyes watching my ass; when you’re not looking, I check it in the mirror but it still looks the same to me.

• • • •

I’m searching the cabinets for a package of chicken soup or even a cube of beef bouillon to rid the sugar residue from my throat when you storm in, your epaulets crooked.

You were with the dwarves, weren’t you?

I laugh because I’m certain you’re joking but you whip out a handful of Polaroids and shove them in my face.

How is that even possible, I say, looking at the tangle of limbs and the woman in the center. That isn’t me, I say. I don’t know any dwarves; they’re not part of this story.

This isn’t a story, you say.

I nod toward the picture. Those are a story, I say, and not my story. Look, she has a birthmark, you can see it on her leg. I offer my thigh as proof, the skin as pale and unblemished as freshly fallen snow. (No, I’m not that girl. She’s yet another story. In spite of what you may have heard, fair skin isn’t unique.)

You move my leg this way and that and then drag me over to the window so you can see in the bright sunlight. You keep muttering under your breath and I wonder if it’s a spell and you’re trying to magic the birthmark into existence.

Fine, you say as you let go of my leg and stomp off, crumpling the photos in your hand.

But that night, you bite a little too hard, a little too many times, leaving me with a set of oddly-shaped, half-moon bruises.

I stare at the ceiling, so exhausted I can’t sleep, and listen to the rumbling of my stomach.

• • • •

You never apologize. Not for the bruises or the false accusation. Love, oh, love, I’ll never leave you, you whisper instead.

Tiramisu, my greatest weakness. Funny how you figured that out so quickly. Then again, maybe not. Maybe before the lies, you read everything you needed in the spaces between the grains of my own sugar.

You measure the width of my hips with your hands, frowning all the while.

I toss and turn beneath the sheets, drum my fingers along the xylophone of my ribs, and wish I had an enchanted spindle to help me to sleep.

• • • •

Love, you whisper, and then a name, but it doesn’t feel like my name. The syllables are wrong, all soft and slippery instead of hard and clipped. I have the sensation of falling, falling through layer after layer of whisper-thin vellum, and I’m not certain how I got here at all. Then you touch my arm and the sensation ebbs.

And I can’t remember ever being this hungry before.

• • • •

I stop eating bits of the house when you’re not here. My vision gets swimmy, my hands shake, and my stomach feels as if it’s caught in a battle between a tin soldier and a goblin, but my thoughts are sharper at the edges.

I find a sheet-covered mirror, but the distorted face inside the glass belongs only to me.

When you get home, I’m caught in the taffy pull of your hands again. Every morning, I stick my finger down my throat, but it’s always too late, and nothing comes up but bile.

• • • •

I’m scrubbing the floor again when I hear the squeak-squeak. I follow the noise until I get to a closet door I’ve never noticed. The door isn’t locked, and surely if you didn’t want me to look you would have locked it and given me the key with strict instructions never to use it.

I reach for the doorknob, but hesitate. What if the door is booby-trapped so you’ll know I’ve opened it? What if there are severed heads inside, runnels of red dripping down ornate pedestals?

I open the door all the way—I’ve never been afraid of a little blood and I’m fairly certain Bluebeard’s last wife escaped in the end—and there’s a tray of chocolates on the top shelf. All the sweets are marked with the impression of your teeth and before I can wrap my head around that little fact, the air shimmers and there’s an old woman standing with a wand in her hand.

Who are you, I ask.

Nothing to concern yourself with, she says and waves the wand.

The chocolates drop to the floor and change shape and color. Grey fur, tiny feet, whiskers, and long tails emerge and a swarm of mice run between my feet and head toward the front door, the little old woman following close behind.

You’re a fairy godmother, aren’t you, I ask.

She rolls her eyes. What, she says, did the wand give it away?

Do you think you could give me a hand?

Sorry, she says. I’m not your fairy godmother, so step aside and let us out.

On the front lawn, she waves her wand again, and the tails and whiskers and fur fall off. Another wave of the wand and women stand in place of the rodents. They huddle in a circle, squinting in the sun and covering their nakedness with their hands.

I wonder how long they’ve been here and who’s writing this story after all. I wonder if the women walk on mermaid feet of broken glass pain, but the air shimmers again and I hear a ruffle of paper as they slip back into their own stories and it’s too late to ask.

Probably for the best. Some tales shouldn’t overlap.

• • • •

Every morning, you disappear into the forest. I’ve thought of following you but it takes all my energy to keep a smile on my face.

Are you pining by a glass casket? Waiting for a gullible girl who’ll believe she can spin straw into gold? Or searching for elves so you can start a new career in shoemaking?

Maybe it’s the hunger pangs. I’d give my kingdom for a slice of roasted chicken right now, but that’s not on your menu.

When you return, you poke my side, and tell me I’m too skinny. I point to the raspberry preserves you’ve shoved in my mouth to remind you of the folly of your statement. You scrape the spoon against the side of the jar and tell me to open up.

• • • •

The ceiling in the bedroom has a crack in the center I’ve never noticed before, or maybe the crack wasn’t there before at all. I ignore the noises from my gut (in truth, they sound a little like Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique) and dig through the kitchen drawers until I find a pastry knife.

I stand on the bed and wield the blade until the ceiling starts to break off in chunks. And here then, is your story, hidden behind the sickeningly sweet fondant. I’d know your handwriting anywhere.

This story doesn’t have a proper narrative arc or a clear-cut plot. It rambles like lost children in a dark forest and here and there, things are scratched out and rewritten and scratched out and rewritten again where you’ve altered things to suit your fancy.

It’s nothing more than a vignette made up of all the leftover bits of other stories, but the pieces don’t quite fit together, no matter how many once upon a times you’ve scribbled in the corners. I chip away more fondant to reveal that I’m neither princess nor captive nor anything at all. I’m a character with no face, no self; quite interchangeable, really.

In the kitchen, I take a good look at your recipes, running a fingertip down the list of ingredients. Sure enough, your creations are as wrong as your story. You’ve been feeding me saccharine and genetically modified flour. This is why my ribs are showing, why my skin looks like the inside of a well-used cast iron pan.

And I’m not surprised. Not at all.

• • • •

You walk in all smiles and lollipops, and I hold out a recipe card.

How was I supposed to exist on this, I say. What were you thinking?

It’s nothing, you say. You are my everything.

Your hands are on me before I can blink, and I taste licorice in my mouth. Black licorice. I can’t stomach the stuff; it isn’t candy at all, merely some vile substance cooked up in a kitchen full of grim. I spit it out onto the floor and wipe my lips with the back of my hand.

That isn’t the way this works, you say. I don’t like girls who won’t eat.

The skin of your face splits in the middle and the two halves fall apart to reveal another face as much unlike your face as it is the same. Yet these eyes hold no expression, this mouth no mirth or kindness. You’re a blank slate and for the first time, I’m afraid. I can’t tell if you’re a wolf in sheep’s clothing or a rabid sheep dressed in wolf skin, a bear in a man-suit or a man caught in a bear-suit in desperate need of a good fitting.

I take several steps back and your skin splits again.

I ate all the breadcrumbs, the you-thing says with a sneer and a flash of teeth. You’ll never find your way out. The woods are too dark.

Do you expect me to stay here after all this? I’ll need a huntsman to cut me out of your belly when you’re done, I say.

Wrong story, you say.

I thought you said all the stories were the same story?

I never said that, you say.

I want to laugh but the ersatz sugar has drained the humor from my veins and for a long moment, I can’t remember what my own laughter even sounds like or if I’ve laughed since I’ve been here or if I’ve ever laughed at all.

How many stories will you tell before you realize they’re all the same story? I say.

Claws emerge from the tips of your fingers.

My chest tightens, but I can’t move, as if my legs are fused together. I open my mouth to speak, to cry, but nothing emerges. My hands are shaking and inside I’m empty, a woman of bone and pain and little else, and there’s a hole inside me where the words should go.

Please, I finally whisper, hating the weakness of the word, hating the implication, hating myself most of all, for turning into the sort of person who says such a thing.

You say nothing, merely split again from wolf to you-thing to bear and back again. The oven kicks on with a whoosh of orange-blue flame. This can’t be the way this story ends, not with this cruelty.

A sharp pain wrenches my breath away, as if I’ve a thousand tiny chefs carving slices of carpaccio from my heart. The oven might be a kindness after all.

No. No, I say. This isn’t right.

You roar and the sound eclipses the ache inside me, but I don’t care if I get lost in the woods anymore. I’m tired and I’m hungry and I’ve had enough. I’m not a princess in need of rescue, nor a maiden without a voice, no matter how many times you’ve written me thus.

The End, I say, my voice sandpaper and stone.

Your eyes go wide. You can’t do that, you say.

You look like you want to say something else, but your shoulders hitch and your mouth opens, unhinging like a broken nutcracker. Out pours a kaleidoscope of peppermint rounds, caramels with cream centers, butterscotch bits, chocolate chips, candied orange slices, peanut butter cups, and lemon drops. The air fills with a cloying reek, a strange mix of sweetness and decay.

Then you change yet again, but instead of splitting into new, the pieces of you fold in. Each origami fold reveals a flicker of man, of beast, of man, as if you’ve told a hundred stories, crafted a hundred masks, and can’t find the truth inside your fiction.

The truth is that you can tell a lie a thousand times, but it still won’t make it true.

The air rushes around you, swirling in to claim the space you’re leaving behind. You roar again but it chokes off into a wheeze, you growl but it fades into a strange mewling, and you keep folding in, reducing.

There’s a sound of tearing, of something ripping free, and I feel it inside my chest. You fold in again and then there’s no you at all, only a scatter of blank pages seesawing to the floor. Cracks appear in the walls, in the floor, and all around me, the smell of burnt sugar and scorched pans.

I’ve no hidden wings and my hair isn’t long enough to braid into a rope, so I crawl out of your story and back into mine, tearing my hands and knees bloody. Even though I know my skin will heal in time, I’m afraid I’ll never wipe away the bitter taste of anise from my mouth.

There are no happy ever afters, not truly. Someone always has to pay a price.

© 2014 by Damien Angelica Walters.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Damien Angelica Walters’ work has appeared or is forthcoming in various magazines and anthologies, including Nightmare, Year’s Best Weird Fiction Volume One, The Best of Electric Velocipede, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Shimmer, Apex, and Glitter & Mayhem. Sing Me Your Scars, a collection of her short fiction, will be released in early 2015 from Apex Publications, and Paper Tigers, a novel, will be released later that same year from Dark House Press.

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

NOVELLA

The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines

John Crowley

In the late 1950s, the state of Indiana had its own Shakespeare festival, though not much of the world knew about it. Far too little of the world, as it happened, to keep it in existence. But for a few summers it was there, a little Brigadoonish, or like the great Globe itself, that leaves not a trace behind.

That was a time for Shakespeare festivals. One had recently begun in Stratford, Ontario, directed at first by the great impresario Tyrone Guthrie. I used to pore over the pictures in my Theater Arts magazine (I was surely one of the few boys my age who had a subscription; who asked for a subscription for Christmas.) It had begun as simply a big striped tent, then became a tentlike building; it had a clever all-purpose stage set on which Roman and Venetian and English plays could all be accommodated. The man who got the idea for a Shakespeare festival in this little town was a disabled war veteran, who liked the fact that his hometown was named for Shakespeare’s. There was a picture of him, shy and good-looking, leaning on his cane.

Stratford, Connecticut, had a Shakespeare festival, too, about as far from Indiana, where Harriet Ingram and I both lived, as Stratford, Ontario was. On a summer trip to the sea—from which, long ago, her mother had been taken away by her father to sealess Indiana—Harriet wangled a visit to the Connecticut Stratford. While her family picnicked on the great lawn waiting for the matinee to begin, Harriet walked up and entered the cool dark of the theater, whose smell is one of the few she can recall today from that time; she passed around a velvet rope and down into the empty auditorium. On stage, an actor read lines to himself under a single rehearsal light hanging over the stage. Harriet walked down closer and closer, seeing up into the flies and inhaling the charged air, when the floor beneath her vanished and she fell into darkness.

The trap was only six or eight feet deep, and Harriet claimed to be all right, but the actor, who had heard her tumble down, made her lie still till help could be called; they got her out and took her backstage and bound up a nice long gash on her arm with yards of gauze, and she was made to call the theater’s doctor on the phone, who put her through a series of movements to find out if any bones were broken. Then the young actor who had rescued her took her all over the theater, into the dressing rooms and the scene shop and the rehearsal rooms. When her mother finally found her, she was talking Shakespeare with her new friend and some others, like Jesus among the doctors, with probably something of a religious glow about her, too.

Indiana had no town named Stratford, but there was one named Avon, an almost quaint little Brown County town through which a small river ran, where swans could be induced to reside. Not far from the town, a utopian sect had once owned several hundred acres of farmland, where they began building an ideal community before dying out or moving West; what remained of their community was a cheerless brick dormitory, a wooden meeting house, and a huge limestone and oak-frame circular barn: circular because of the founder’s scientific dairying theories, and circular because of his belief in the circle’s perfection. The barn was over a hundred feet in diameter, and lit like a church by a clerestory and a central windowed turret; when an ad-hoc preservation committee first went in, in 1955, it still smelled faintly of hay and dung. It was as sound as a Greek temple, though the roof was just beginning to leak.

So History wanted the place preserved; and Commerce wanted it to turn a profit and bring custom into the town; and Culture wanted whatever it was used for to be not vulgar or debased. A young man who had grown up in a big house nearby, who had made money in New York and then come home, conceived the festival plan. His money and enthusiasm brought in more, some of it, as we would learn, from unlikely places; and the process began to turn the great round barn into an Elizabethan theater. Among the methods the organizers used to publicize, and partly to underwrite, the Avon festival was to offer a number of apprentice positions to Indiana high school students: These were a little more costly to the chosen students than a good summer camp would have been—I think there were scholarships for some—and provided the festival with some enthusiastic labor. When Harriet, that year a junior, heard about the program, she felt a tremendous grateful relief, to learn that the world was not after all empty of such a possibility; and at the same time an awful anxiety, that this one would escape from her before she could secure it for herself.

Harriet’s mother used to explain Harriet by saying that she was stage-struck, but that wasn’t so, and Harriet resented the silliness of the epithet; she connected it with a girlish longing for Broadway and stardom, glamour, her name in lights—Harriet’s ambitions were at once more private and more extravagant. When one of her parents’ friends asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up—she was about thirteen—Harriet answered that she wanted to be a tragedeean.

Harriet and I grew up on different sides of the state. Her parents taught (history and economics) at a little Quaker college in Richmond, in the east; my father was a lawyer in Williamsport. The Williamsport house was a big square Italianate place, almost a mansion, built by my mother’s grandfather, who had been lieutenant governor of the state and Ambassador to Peru under Grant. A ten-foot ormolu mirror in the front hall came from Peru.

Harriet went to a smelly old public school—Garfield High—and after classes she took dance lessons and on weekends she rode horses; and she read, in that deep and obsessive way, with that high tolerance for boredom, that is (it seems to me) gone from the world: read books about Isadora Duncan and Mae West, read Shaw and Milton’s Comus and the plays of Byron and Feydeau and Wilde’s Salome. And Shakespeare: carrying the family’s Complete Works around with her, its spine cracking and its fore-edge grimy from her fingers. She read the major plays, of course, though to this day she hasn’t read Lear, but mostly she turned to the odd numbers, Cymbeline and Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida. She keeps surprising me with the odd things she read then and still remembers. I went to a little private school my family had an interest in, and spent a year homeschooled (as they call it now) because of my asthma, mostly better now. So we were both smart, sheltered, isolated kids, she isolated by being an only child, I surrounded by four sisters and a brother but miles from anything and dreaming about Theater, or Theatre, as I much preferred to spell it.

Mine was a kind of megalomania not so unusual in a kid with my statistics, so to speak; dreams of dominance and glory. Most of my ambitions, and most of my knowledge, came out of books; just like Harriet, I’d never seen many plays, though I tried to see as many as I could reach. They all seemed comically inadequate to me, shaming even; I bit my nails to the quick and squirmed in my seat till my mother took my shoulder to hush me.

I didn’t quite understand then that the theater work I dreamed about mostly dated to a time thirty or forty years before, when the town library acquired the albums and monographs in the Theater section that I pored over. I was studying Max Reinhardt’s vast productions in Weimar Germany, the stage designs of Gordon Craig (he was Isadora Duncan’s lover). Once, I found in that library a book about how to build your own Greek theater and put on pageants. I tried to convince my mother that a Greek theater like this would be perfect in our broad backyard, over in front of the tall poplars (the drawings in my books were full of poplars) and look, you could buy these Ionic columns from any building supply house for ten dollars. The book, however (my mother showed me, laughing) had been published in 1912.

Harriet thought that was a sweet story. I told it to her in Avon, that summer we were both apprentices there, the summer that changed everything. We were sitting by the campfire the apprentices made most nights, far enough away not to be grilled, near enough so the smoke discouraged the mosquitoes. She listened and laughed and then told me about falling into the open trap in Stratford, Connecticut. By the end of her story, everybody was listening.

It seemed then that Harriet had a better chance than I did of going on the way we were both headed. My visions all needed pots of money to realize, and the cooperation of many others, and the kind of tyrannical will and willingness to be boss that it would turn out I had none of. But everything Harriet needed came right out of Harriet; all she had to do was bring forth more, and there was more—that was clear. I knew it even then.

• • • •

It’s the middle of June in Harriet’s thirty-eighth year, a brilliant day of high barometric pressure. Harriet gets up early to take her camera out and make some pictures.

The camera is a huge eight-by-ten plate camera of polished wood, cherry and ebony, with brass fittings and a leather bellows. Harriet thinks it’s the most beautiful and affecting object she owns; with its tripod of telescoping legs, also wood and brass, and its great glass eye, it seems to Harriet to be more a relative than a belonging, a gaunt beloved aunt, an invalid but still merry husband. Did you ever ever ever in your long-legged life (Harriet sings) see a three-legged sailor and his four-legged wife.

Harriet has been using not film in the camera but paper, ordinary panchromatic printing paper. When exposed, the paper becomes a negative, and it can be printed by contact with another sheet. The resulting image is exact and exquisitely detailed but softened and abstracted—both warmed and cooled—by the light’s passing through a textured paper negative rather than through a transparent plastic one. The very first photographic negatives were made on paper.

So, by the yellow safe-light in her bathroom, Harriet on this morning removes from their box six sheets of paper, and slips them into her three plate-holders, front and back: six exposures, the most she would ever make on a single trip, even on such a day as this one. She slides each black Bakelite slide back over the face of the paper and locks them up, safe in total darkness till their moment of day has come.

Dismantled and shut up, the camera fits in the back of the Rabbit, though it takes Harriet three trips to bring it and its tripod and the bag of plate-holders out to the car. Harriet goes out of town early, driving up from the river into the old and largely abandoned farmlands above: Hillside fields bordered by old woods are a thing she likes to photograph when the slanting sunlight seems to set fire to the tall sedges’ heads and the shade is deep; another thing is dirt roads lined with old maples, the sun picking certain masses of leaves to illuminate like stained glass and the sun falling in tigerish stripes over the road’s arched back.

Once Harriet and I were talking about what we would most like to have been if we weren’t what we are. I said—I forget what I said, but Harriet said she had always thought it would be impossible to be a landscape painter and be unhappy; unhappy in your work anyway. She still believes it’s so, but only if you are better at it than she was or could expect ever to be. For a while when she was younger she did paint, and it made her not happy at all to work all day and then next day look at what you had done, which claimed to be what you had seen and felt but wasn’t at all. The opposite of happy. But these photographs don’t disappoint that way. The happiness they give is a little pale and fleeting—half an hour to set up the camera and make an exposure (hurry, hurry, the earth’s turning, the light’s changing) and an hour or two to make a true print: but it’s real happiness. Since they’re made from paper negatives rather than film, they seem to Harriet not to have that look of being stolen from the world rather than made from it that most landscape photographs have; they are shyer and more tentative somehow. Not painting, no, but satisfying in some of the same ways. And she says they are selling pretty well in her shop, too.

By nine the sun has stopped making the effects that Harriet likes; she’s made four exposures. She’s more weary than she expected to be, getting in and out of the car, dealing with the camera’s three legs, and her own four. The tripod lies on the back seat, her two steel crutches (enameled maroon) on top of it.

Coming back into town, Harriet’s car pulls up next to mine at a stoplight. She calls over to me:

“Did you hear the news?”

“What news?”

“Somebody killed the Pope. I just heard on the radio.”

“Yes. I heard that. But he’s not dead. He’s just hurt.”

“Oh.” She glances at the red light and scoots over in the seat to see me a little better. “I’ve been thinking about your question,” she says. “I have.”

“And?”

“And I have,” she calls. “I have.”

The month before, heart-turning May, I asked Harriet to marry me. She hasn’t answered. The light changes, and we turn in different directions.

• • • •

Those of us chosen for the Indiana Shakespeare Festival at Avon (it included almost all of those who applied that year, being a summer option unthinkable to most people in that state then or now) received a letter in May that showed a bust of plump Shakespeare, pen in hand—an etching of the monument over his grave in Stratford, I can see now—and instructions on what we were to bring that sounded like any summer camp’s: raincoat and sweater, blanket and sneakers and writing materials for letters home. I watched my mother sew tapes with my name on them into every pair of shorts and socks.

We came from around the state by car or bus, pulling into town on the appointed day uncertain where anything was or how to get to the theater or the place we were to go, only to find that the town was so small that it was evident where everyone was gathered, on the little green by the riverside, where a Union soldier stood on a small granite plinth, the names of the town’s dead carved on it.

She’s almost the only one I can now remember seeing when we arrived, though I know she wasn’t the one I looked at most, or took the greatest interest in. No. Harriet had her own way of dressing and looking, and it didn’t fit with my received images of what I wanted to look at. The tough girls from northern Indiana, “the Region,” favored beehive haircuts, mascara like kohl around their eyes, and pale lipstick; the country girls had blond flips and wore bobby socks over the stockings they’d put on for the trip. Harriet wore loose peasant blouses, and wide skirts in many colors, and flat shoes or sandals without backs; her haystack hair kept her busy pushing it from her face, and she drew strange orange-y eyebrows over her own, above the cat’s-eye pink glasses. Her cheeks were flushed; I didn’t know if that was makeup or not. She moved with overprecise grace, the studied manner of a dancer, though I didn’t recognize that either. She was herself. She was a Free Spirit.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Where’ve you come from?”

“Williamsport.”

“Uh . . . ?”

“Near South Bend.”

“Oh, right. Hi.”

“Hi.”

Why would she greet me? I didn’t think of myself as particularly visible to others then, or possessing anything that would attract their attention; I don’t remember my own clothes, but I’m sure they weren’t designed to impress, as I wouldn’t have known how to do that. I suppose shy is the obvious word, though like many shy people I only needed the right signs of acceptance and welcome—however I understood them—to offer myself more completely than the gladhanders.

By afternoon we were all gathered in the center of town, with our clumsy bags and suitcases—backpacks weren’t common then; I remember Harriet had a couple of cases with poodles appliquéd on them, one of them round, like a pillbox. The festival director was to put in an appearance, and Robin, who would be directing the plays and managing the apprentices, was to welcome us and give instructions, but no one had seen them. Parents who’d brought their kids stood with them by their station wagons, the kids eager to slip away. We were about twenty in all, some of us full-grown, some still children. I don’t remember perceiving that, but it must be so.

Then—making an entrance, at which he was skilled—Robin was among us, going from one to another with a look on his face as though he had just discovered astonishing and unsuspected treasure. Oh brave new world, that has such people in it! He was particularly attentive to the parents. Sandy, his wife, was with him, doing as he did but at the same time watching his performance appreciatively. They were the most beautiful people I’d ever stood near. Sandy, with the collar of her soft white shirt up, her hands in the pockets of her capris, looked to me like Kim Novak: the same gray, hooded eyes, the same softness; like Novak she would wear, sometimes, no bra. Robin was lean and hawklike, with piercing eyes and deep-drawn brachiators. They were both remarkably small—not small at all, really, but remarkably so for the persons they were, for the size of the persons they projected.

We apprentices were housed in a nearby summer camp that hadn’t been used for a year, the cabins dusty and the mattresses musty; I can still smell them sometimes. An assistant stage manager and his wife were our counselors or chaperones. There was an old bus that each morning drove the twenty of us the five miles to the Swan—that’s what they called their theater, their barn-becoming-a-theater—and back again at day’s end to the camp, where we were fed huge dinners of children’s food, tuna casseroles and spaghetti and Spam. The kitchen help made leftovers into sandwiches and gave them to us in boxes for lunch.

All day we worked in the Swan, cleaning and painting and building seating. That’s what we were there for, free labor, but we didn’t mind that, there was nothing we wouldn’t do, and anyone who complained or refused immediately had his place taken by a volunteer. I’d never played sports unless dragooned into them, as at school; had never made the team or been to camp or done any group task at all—none except the pageants and plays I organized my siblings into, and the senior play—and I had a near-mystical experience being included in this gang. All the same, I would often find ways to escape them, sneak out of the horseplay, hide. It wasn’t hard. The funny, fat little bus that carried us to and fro went through the town center as well, to pick up the actors and others who were staying in Tourist Homes or with proud citizens, and I would take it into town and sit on the Methodist church steps, or go into the cool, book-odorous little library, or just stand in the street feeling this nameless, wondrous feeling that inhabited me, that was freedom, or something even better. Somehow, without my even asking, I had been passed through the membrane of common reality into another space, where things were not as they were where I came from; where Shakespeare was important, and everything else less so, and what I knew about mattered, and what I didn’t know about was inconsequential, and it was midsummer.

I’ve always had difficulty associating with actors, and these actors (most of them wanted to be actors) were just embarking on their careers of self-display; there were sullen James Dean and Brando imitators smoking in silence and reading Rimbaud and Kerouac; there were extravagant hearts-on-their-sleeves personalities who had found out that by defining themselves as actors they could pretend to be only pretending to be the people they actually were, and get away with it; there were the narcissists-in-training, both the secret and the patent kind, jealous of their self-assigned centrality. The dramas they improvised all summer were wondrous and repellent to me; I saw more tears, male and female, than anywhere else in the whole of that decade. I’m given to nervous laughter, not the best response.

Harriet was different; she seemed at once avid for the blowups and collisions the others created and gently mocking of them—with me, whom she chose to take part in her study of them. I didn’t know why.

Harriet was different. Harriet would seek me out at the campfires, take cigarettes from my pack (that was how I was becoming an adult) and let me light them, and then almost immediately discard them into the fire. Harriet called me dear boy because an aged, absurdly courtly actor in the company called every male that. Harriet would get up late each morning, sail out past the surly woman handing out the box lunches, skip onto the bus with a smile back at me. Sometimes I caught her looking at me in the rear-view mirror of the bus, too. I didn’t know why. I don’t know why. But I looked frankly back at her in that mirror, and not away; and maybe that was enough.

At the end of a workday soon after we got there, Robin called us together from our jobs and herded us out to the field—it had once been farmyard and was to be the parking lot when the heavy equipment arrived, if it ever did—to the enormous oak that grew all alone there: an oak just like Stratford’s, we’d all been told, and warned to carve no initials in it.

By the oak, Robin was hunkered down next to someone we’d never seen before, who sat, hands on his knees, in a chair that had been brought out for him from the dormitory building where the festival’s offices were, or would be. The man wore a seersucker suit and a pale bowtie, the only tie in evidence there, the only jacket, too. Beside his chair, an old belted leather briefcase sat drooping like a weary dog.

When all of us had gathered (a few late arrivals wandering from faraway parts of the grounds) Robin stood, dusted his hands on the back of his pants, and looked us over. We apprentices were immediately silent. The actors, some at least, immune to his authority or his portrayal of authority, went on talking until Robin at last hushed them with raised hands. Then he paused before he spoke.

“I’ve asked you to come out and meet a man who has been very important to the progress of this festival theater,” he said, “someone without whose help there would very likely be no season this year.” He looked down at the man in the chair, who was smiling at once eagerly and apologetically. “It’s a great honor to have him here today, he’s come a very long way to be here, to see the progress we’ve made, and he’s asked for a little time today to talk to you about something very important, something you may not have thought about.”

Then he held out his hand to the man, and said his name, which I have never been able to remember; nor do I recognize it now among the names of those who were of his party, or shared his beliefs, though surely it is there amid all their privately printed publications and pamphlets and books. We applauded politely, and he held up a hand to us but didn’t rise. He was an academic-looking man, long-necked and pale, with ginger hair so long and fine it floated in the faint breezes that came and went as he spoke.

“Oh, now, thank you, Robin,” he said, in the warmest and kindest sort of voice, one of those voices so unassuming and good that you almost have to smile in response to it, even before it says anything of consequence. “I won’t take up very much of your time at all, I promise, I know how little you have in order to be ready, and I don’t want Robin angry at me. But I thought I might bring up something for you to think about in the weeks ahead, as you work and study here.”

I suppose it was his not standing that made us, or me, study him a little more closely. He wore wing-tip brown shoes that seemed as though they had never been walked in, and around the middle of each, like a stirrup, a band of metal went, and up beneath the cuffs of his wrinkled pants. And in the grass behind his chair a pair of canes. I’ve thought of those canes, since then, and those braces. I’ve wished I could ask about them. There are things in your past, preserved in memory almost by chance, that only later on, because of the course your own life takes, come to seem proleptic, or significant, or fascinating, when other things don’t.

“All of you,” he began, “boys and girls, men and women, are so wonderfully fortunate to be here, in this beautiful place, immersed all day long in the works of the greatest author who ever wrote in English. I envy you very much. I wonder though how many of you have ever given thought to just who the man was who wrote these wise and witty and passionate works. Who was he? Well, we can look at that picture that accompanied the First Folio, the first complete printing of a number of plays ascribed to this fellow, and try to learn something of him, but we can’t learn much, and in fact that picture doesn’t actually seem to be a picture of anyone, does it? There’s something wholly unreal about it, I think, that gets more unreal the longer you look. In the book, a little poem is printed opposite the picture that says it’s him to the life, exactly as he lived, but the picture’s so odd that you wonder if the poem is a joke, an ‘in’ joke maybe. And in the end the poem tells us to ‘look not on his picture, but his book.’ Which takes us back where we started.

“Well then we might consult the histories, and look for the contemporary accounts of his life, how he lived, how he struck his friends and admirers, what he said. And of course there is next to nothing. Of the man credited with having written this vast body of deathless writing, we know very, very little. There is not a single letter from him in existence. We know that a man of his name was listed as an actor in the company that produced the plays; we have a few shaky signatures on a few legal documents; we know that the actor retired to Stratford, where he came from, and sued a few people and signed a will and died. That’s about it. In his will there is no mention of plays or manuscripts, indeed no mention of books at all; perhaps he had none. He certainly was unconcerned with his own writings.”

He pulled a large handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face. From where I stood beneath the oak, I could see Harriet sitting on the ground near the speaker, elbows on her knees and her cheeks on her fists like a gargoyle, fascinated or seeming to be.

“Very well then,” he said. “Suppose we confess that we know just about nothing that we would like to know about the author of these poems and plays, not a thing at all about the mind or opinions of the actor whose name was the same or similar to the author’s—I say ‘similar’ because on none of the documents we have is his name spelled as it’s spelled on the first major edition of his works, the First Folio, as it’s called.

“We have to turn around, then, I think, and see if within the works themselves we can learn something of the man who wrote them. Most of them, of course, are plays, and not personal opinions or lyric self-expression, but not all; there’s a large body of personal, very personal, writing, the Sonnets, and even in the plays the mind of the man comes through in the allusions he makes, the things he seems to know about and uses for poetic comparison and so on. And what appears when we study the work with this in mind?

“Well, I’ve made a list,” he said, and grinned somewhat self-deprecatingly. “I’m not the first to have made one, and I think that many of you may have a mental list of your own, a list of what you think the man was like.” He flapped open the briefcase and after a brief search pulled out some typewritten sheets.

“First of all, he was apparently a man.” He looked up, and we laughed dutifully.

“He seems to have had a classical education.” He consulted his paper, though it was evident he had no need to. “All his writing is full of allusions to the Greek and Latin classics. He seems to have been very familiar with Italy, with certain other European places, such as Navarre in France. He also read Italian: some of the plays are based on Italian stories that had not been translated when he wrote. What else? Well, the Sonnets picture a man who was at one time poor, in disgrace, in exile. I say exile because sonnets which complain of his separation from his beloved make it sound so enforced. ‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,’ he says, ‘I all alone beweep my outcast state.’

He looked up at us. “He says, not once but several times in the sonnets, that he’s lame,” he said. “Interesting. ‘I, made lame by Fortune’s dearest spite.’ Could that be a metaphorical lameness? Well, maybe; but he says it more than once. ‘Speak of my lameness, and I straight will halt,’ meaning stumble.

“So.

“A few more things. His knowledge of the law is so extensive, and his use of legal terms in all sorts of situations so constant, that it’s hard to believe he wasn’t trained for the law. And another thing we can guess at, that some critics are more certain of than others. The sonnets suggest that at least some time in his life he was what the learned of the time described as paiderastes, or in our modern language, a sexual invert.”

He folded up his paper then and put it away with care, as though to give us time to ponder all this, which we did; I did, anyway. I was beginning to feel very odd, as though a trick or a trap were being constructed for me, a gin, Will would say, and that the man’s self-effacement and reasonableness and sweetness were part of it.

“So.” He removed his jacket, still without standing, and there were dark sweat-circles under his arms. “What if you were to suppose that you didn’t know the name of the man who wrote these plays. Suppose you knew when they were written, and knew a lot about the people living in England then, and any one of them could have been the author, and not just the one actor fellow with the similar name. Who would you suspect? How would you narrow the search? Where, if you were a detective or a private eye, would you turn your magnifying glass, or your flashlight?

“Well, you probably already know, or many of you do, certainly Robin here knows, that this search has in fact been going on for a very long time, ever since people began to suspect that the man Shakespear, or Shaxper, or Shagsberd, made a very poor match with the writings.

“If the author was someone else, he kept his identity secret. That’s all we know to start with. He kept his identity secret, and must have had a reason. Well. I can tell you some of the people who have been suspected at one time or another, who various detectives have guessed might fit the particulars we worked out, and other ones too.

“There are educated poets, like Christopher Marlowe and Edward Dyer. Now, Marlowe was certainly a pederast. Of course, Marlowe was murdered before the Shakespeare plays began to appear, but, well, maybe he wasn’t really. There’s the Earl of Oxford, who loved plays and players but maybe wouldn’t have wanted to associate himself with the common theater. Unfortunately, he died before several of the greatest plays were written. One candidate isn’t even a man: Someone’s claimed that Queen Elizabeth herself was the author.”

He paused a moment, waiting for us to join him in marveling at this. Then he wiped his face again. There is nowhere hotter than Indiana on a July afternoon.

“There is one name, though,” he said, “that has been consistently proposed by students for nearly a hundred years as the most likely. He was an educated man, a man who was familiar with courts and the nobility, trained as a lawyer, a major character in the political realm who may well have had reasons for keeping his playwriting a secret. He may have left his signature in the writings, because he was interested in codes and ciphers, and made up his own. He was certainly paiderastes; that’s well attested. His name was Francis Bacon.”

There was a sort of movement among us then, as the name went around, some nodding or crossing their arms or grinning, perhaps because they agreed, or because it was the name they expected to hear, or not the one they expected to hear, or simply in acknowledgment that the little speech had reached a climax.

He went on to lay out, I’m sure, the Baconian case that day, and I could recreate it as I’ve recreated his speech to us; I don’t remember it in detail. But I remember what he said at the end.

“I haven’t come here to make a convert of anyone,” he said. “I’m just fortunate to’ve been able to help get this wonderful project under way, and these plays produced here, no matter whose name is attached to them. Or why they’re here rather than someplace else.”

He reached behind him, groping to find the canes in the grass where he had dropped them, and Robin quickly got them and handed them to him. He stood, and we watched him accomplish it.

“Please remember this, though,” he said. “Remember that nothing needs to be the way you’ve always thought it has to be. Even if everyone with the power to say so insists it must. Francis Bacon said, The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power. Well, I think that in his case, it’s true. The monuments of his wit have survived under another’s name, where he hid them himself from the machinations of power. I believe that’s so. I don’t ask you to do so. I just want to wish you all the very best of luck in this coming season.”

He seemed to have moved himself; we were all very quiet, sensing that, and maybe he sensed our stillness. Anyway, he laughed, and put out his left hand to Robin, who took it with his right, and we all applauded, rather wildly actually, the whole thing had been so startling and unexpected, and here was the end of it; and then we dispersed.

I knew that this controversy existed, of course; it was the kind of thing I would read about in my mother’s Saturday Review or see on Odyssey on Sunday morning television. I thought Bacon was the old-fashioned choice, and had been passed over in favor of some more convincing others. I didn’t really care. I was as interested in these theories as I was in flying saucers, or the guilt of the Rosenbergs, or the miracles at Lourdes. I thought the world was one way, and it was obvious what that way was, and people who struggled to alter it had reasons particular to them, a kind of sublime dissatisfaction that had nothing to do with what is in fact the case. I still think so, most of the time. Between the enthusiasts and the hardheads who dismiss them, I love the enthusiasts and stand with the hardheads. I don’t think Harriet likes this about me, all in all. She thinks that nothing needs to be the way that power insists it is. It’s part of being a Free Spirit.

The next day we found, screwed into the wood of the Stratford Oak, a small and elegant brass plaque.

Placed in Memory of the British Polymath and Genius Francis Bacon

And in honor of his deathless contributions to our literature & language

July 10, 1959

The Monuments of Wit Survive the Monuments of Power

“But it’s ridiculous,” Harriet said to me. We walked together from the Oak to the theater. “You can’t go around talking about bacon. ‘I’ve got to study my bacon. So much wisdom can be found in bacon. We can all get smarter by studying bacon. Oops, I’ve misplaced my bacon.’ I mean, come on.”

“‘Shakespeare’ is a kind of odd name,” I said. “It’s just that we’re used to it.”

Harriet looked at me in contempt. “It’s a beautiful name,” she said. “Maybe the best name ever. The best.”

We trudged along, raising dust. In my crowded family, the way to go on from here would be to insist on opposition, take a position, tease and deride, all to keep up the connection, maybe even win a victory, of wit or force if not of reason. I knew better not to now. But not what I might do instead, or otherwise.

“What are you doing today?” I asked at last.

“Making armor,” she said.

• • • •

Maybe it was because the company was just beginning, was mostly young and fleet but not so impressive in stature, or maybe it was just that all the available money was going into the theater and the road out to it and the parking lots and offices: but the first production of the Indiana Shakespeare Festival was minimal, radically minimal for the times, and was meant to appear so: that was Robin’s conception.

The play was Henry V. The company, divided into French and English, were to be dressed only in jeans and sweatshirts, rehearsal clothes; but those of the French were white, and the English dark blue. Their banners were too, just plain rectangles on poles. The play would begin with the Chorus, alone, sitting on the apron of the stage, also in rehearsal clothes of black, with the script in his hands. He was, in effect, the director of the play, and his anxiety about its effectiveness was the director’s.

But pardon, gentles all,

The flat unraiséd spirits that have dared

On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth

So great an object . . .

There would be a big wooden box on stage, and from it the actors would take out the “four or five most vile and ragged foils,” a mismatched collection of prop sabers and swords, as well as pieces of buckram armor for the nobles. There were four kids recruited from the high school band, two trumpets, a French horn, and a kettledrum, who stayed just off the open stage and visible the whole time, playing the alarums and flourishes. Robin himself played the Chorus. I’d wondered why this play had been chosen, certainly not one of the top ten, a patriotic pageant for a country not ours: but in Robin’s version it was about theater itself, and making do, and four boards and a passion. In all my grandiose thinking about theater, I couldn’t have come up with such a gimmick. I think now that he was good; I wonder what became of him.

There were more women in the company than you’d think would be needed, since there are only four female characters in the play (though one gets the best speech.) We found out how two older women would be used when they came to rehearsals one day with hair cut short, almost cut off: they were to be the priests who begin the play, who justify Henry’s war. And do no fighting themselves.

“That would be hard,” Harriet said to me; we watched the women self-consciously touch their gray hair with their hands.

But that wasn’t all.

Robin called us all together to see something he’d been working on.

All the plainness, he said, and the bareness, it was all fine, he loved it and it was working, working really well, he thought, but it wasn’t completely satisfying, was it? Did we think so? I thought whatever he thought, of course, but I nodded with the others and assented that maybe it wasn’t enough. Robin said that in Elizabethan theaters they made up for the plain bare stage with brilliant costumes—most of them the cast-off clothes of noble patrons—but we didn’t have them here. So he’d developed another idea, and he wanted to show us.

I don’t know now if Robin had worked out the new idea long before, if he only wanted to produce in us the same surprise he aimed to achieve in audiences by saying he’d just thought of it. I know it made him seem all the more a magician to me.

He said: “Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them, printing their proud hooves i’the receiving earth.” Harriet, next to me, glanced at me for just the briefest second as though it were all the time she could spare me from her attention to what was happening. And Robin lifted his arm and brought forth a horse: from the rear draped chamber it, she, stepped forth.

It was Sandy. She was the horse. She was in a leotard, I suppose, though I probably didn’t know that word then; her feet shod in some kind of high shoe, a tall, long-nosed mask on her head that seemed to lift her almost to a horse’s height. She took slow steps and pawed delicately: printed her proud hoof in the receiving earth. Looked around herself with haughty animal unconcern; tossed her high head as though tugging at her reins.

I felt Harriet stir beside me.

Robin came close to Sandy as though to take her reins, or put his hand on her. “I will not change my horse for any that treads on four pasterns,” he said. “When I bestride him I soar, I am a hawk. He trots the air, the earth sings when he touches it.”

They were the Dauphin’s lines, from the night before the battle of Agincourt. Sandy tossed her head as though the steed heard these compliments.

“It is a beast for Perseus,” Robin said. “He is pure air and fire, and the dull elements of earth and water never appear in him but in patient stillness as his rider mounts him.”

He took her shoulder. She was still, obedient. We were all still and silent, witnessing what it almost seemed we shouldn’t. Then suddenly he dropped the character, laughed, turned Sandy to face us, who lifted off her mask; Robin lifted his hands to say, well, that’s all.

We applauded.

“There won’t be many,” Robin said, coming downstage. “Six or eight. If any of you have experience in dance or gymnastics—I know some of you do—I hope you’ll come see me and make a time to try out for these parts.” He laughed. “Parts. Well. I promise you’ll be on stage more than some parts with lines.”

“Maybe you should,” I said to Harriet, and she turned her head my way as though she had heard a small, unintelligible noise of no interest; then slowly back to the stage, where Sandy was slipping off the high shoes and holding out the mask to the costume people to take away.

Of course she tried out, and was selected. She would be the Duke of Bedford’s horse, caparisoned in his arms; the actor playing the Duke was a thick, hirsute man with wrestler’s wrists and a low, winning voice he seemed to have invented. Steeds and riders practiced together, extra rehearsals with Sandy and the fight captain, as he was called. I could watch, if I wanted.

There’s a lot about horses in the play, enough to account for a lot of action. Harriet was one of the exhausted starving English horses the French made fun of:

. . . Their poor jades

Lob down their heads, dropping the hides and hips,

The gum down-roping from their pale-dead eyes

And in their pale dull mouths the gimmal bit

Lies foul with chewed grass, still and motionless.

The Duke rose, weary, sword heavy in his hand; and Harriet his mount arose, in brute pain, her head lobbed down, her shanks trembling, but still willing, still proud, lifting and shaking her high head when the dresser cast her colors over her.

“I learned some more about Bacon,” I said to Harriet. She’d come off the stage glistening with sweat, a huge pair of dungarees and a white shirt pulled on over her dance leotard. She laughed that laugh, and I saw what I’d said, and I laughed, too. “No. Listen. At the library. I learned a lot.”

“Well, where else? No, what.”

“Do you know who first thought that Bacon might have written Shakespeare?”

“Of course I don’t.”

“It was a woman. Her name was Delia Bacon.”

“Oh, no.”

“She was no relation though. She said so herself.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I can show you her book,” I said. “If you want. There’s a lot of books about this.”

“Okay.” And her smile of frank complicity.

When the bus came by the theater on its endless round, we took it into town, which seemed stunned into motionless silence in the noonday heat, drooping like the grieving Union soldier on his plinth.

“She came from near here,” I said. “Western Ohio. A hundred years ago. Her father was a missionary, and they came from Connecticut. She made a living as a teacher, then she wrote books, then she became a public lecturer. She never married.”

“Hm.”

“She did have an affair, though, or a romance, with this guy in New Haven. She came back to Connecticut to do this lecturing. He was a minister.”

“Weren’t they all.”

“He lived in this hotel where she lived. She sent him a note saying to come visit her, and he told his friends. But he started seeing her.”

“Did she tell him about Shakespeare?”

“Yes. He thought she was right.”

“How do you know all this?”

“It’s in a book.” Going into the dim library, I shivered dramatically, and Harriet looked at me with interest. Maybe it was the sudden cool air; or a kind of intimacy, as startling as a touch, to take her here.

“There was a scandal,” I said. “Delia’s family claimed that this guy—his name was McWhorter—had asked Delia to marry him, and now was breaking his promise; but he said it was Delia who’d asked him.”

“Ha,” said Harriet. “She asked him.”

“She said.”

“Maybe,” Harriet said, “she was a free spirit.”

I led her down the stacks. “What’s that? I mean, how do you mean?”

“A free spirit. Is somebody who does what they want. Like a Victorian lady who asks a man to marry her. Or just be lovers.”

The stacks were on two levels, green-painted iron, the second level reached by a circular stair. We climbed up.

“My mother says what I want to be is a Free Spirit,” Harriet said. “She says she was one, too. So I get it from her.”

“Can you want to be one?” I asked. I didn’t know what I was talking about. “Isn’t wanting to be one the same as being one?”

“No,” Harriet said.

The Shakespeare section was three or four shelves, plays in old editions, commentaries, lives, and a dozen books on who else might have been Shakespeare.

“Here,” I said. It was The Philosophy of Shakespeare’s Plays Unfolded, by Delia Bacon. There was a photograph of her inside: a bonneted dark lady of indeterminate age, smiling a knowing smile, a smile of frankness and good humor.

“I like her.” She riffled the pages but read nothing.

“Look at this one,” I said. “It’s crazy.”

A huge volume in moldering leather called The Great Cryptogram by Ignatius Donnelly. Thousands of pages of methods for finding the secret words planted in the texts of the plays to reveal the true author. Who was Francis Bacon.

“He liked Delia. He thought she got a bad deal.”

We were squatting close together to get at the books on the bottom shelf. I could smell Harriet’s perfume and sweat. She drew out a small blue volume from the shelf.

“‘The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines,’” she read, and sat to open it, slipping off her laceless sneakers. I pulled out other books: Bacon is Shake-speare. Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown. “Shakespeare” Identified in Edward De Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford. Shake-speare: The Mystery.

“Look,” I said. “Here’s the one that says Queen Elizabeth wrote the plays. Listen: ‘The psychic urge that made Elizabeth place Portia, Rosalind, and Viola in men’s clothing might explain her disguising her own authorship in masculine raiment. For every strong and mature Shakespeare heroine, we have a weak, vacillating, impetuous hero.’”

“Well, sure.” She was involved in the small book she’d found.

“What is it?”

“It is,” she said, “a book about the girlhoods of Shakespeare’s heroines. Just as though they were real people who had girlhoods you could tell about.” She glanced at the front of the book. “Eighteen ninety-one. Here’s one about Beatrice.”

“Which one is she?” I hadn’t read many of the comedies.

“Much Ado About Nothing,” she said, shooting me a schoolmarmish glance. “You know, dear boy. Beatrice and Benedick.”

“Oh, right. She’s a free spirit.”

The floor of the level we sat on was of glass: a milky glass that let the light, I guess, fall down to the darker level below. I’d never been anywhere like this cast-iron structure, on this glass floor.

“I want to take this out,” Harriet said. “Do you think they’d let me?”

“Sure. I bet.”

I don’t know how long we sat. Harriet probably looked at her little wristwatch on a gold band and made us leave. I remember that I went down the ringing spiral stair before her, and that she held her hand out to me to be helped: and that afterward I smelled her perfume on that hand. For years after I would be caught by whiffs of that scent on the street, at parties, and finally I somehow learned its name: Ambush.

• • • •

Delia Bacon didn’t, in fact, at least at first, decide who the real author of the Shakespeare plays was. Her original insight, and it wasn’t entirely original with her though maybe she thought it was, was simply that the lowly mummer from Stratford could never have created so lofty, so vast, so moral a work as the plays seemed to her to be. And she did see them as a single work, growing over time as the Author matured, but enfolding a single unified philosophy, humane, radical, even subversive—a philosophy that she, Delia Bacon, was the first to articulate.

One writer has pointed out that Delia’s obsessive denigration of the actor fellow, which appears in her thinking rather suddenly, might be a displacement of her anger at the despicable McWhorter and his falsity, and her replacement of him by a more suitable love-object, who had her own name (and her stern beloved father’s) to boot: a neat piece of psychologizing, though it doesn’t fit with the Free Spirit conception. A Free Spirit would never take someone like him so much to heart, or allow herself to be so caught and mishandled. Never.

But there’s no doubt she’s different from all those who follow her, different in what mattered to her. They all regard the plays with a standard sort of awe, works of genius and so on, couldn’t have been written by any lowborn player, but beyond that they have little to say about them: They only search them for clues and codes and secret messages.

Delia’s argument was different. The reason she suspected that the true author of the plays—or authors, for she thought it likely that there were several—had hidden behind the Shakespeare name was that the philosophy they enunciated would have been dangerous, even fatal, to espouse. The plays of Shakespeare, she thought, promote a thoroughgoing anti-royalist republicanism, a view of all men as created equal in their needs and desires and sufferings. From the endless, repellent broils of York and Lancaster down to the awful compassion of Lear, the plays show kings as mere men, flawed, sinful, guilty, overreaching, without claim to divine right or men’s allegiance.

And who, she then asked, would have conceived such a philosophy; who would scheme to hide it in a series of popular entertainments, whose secret goal was to educate and uplift and even incite the people who stood to listen, or sat to read? Who would then need to hide his own identity behind the globous face of the faker from Stratford? Bacon, father of science and the New Learning, court official, intimate of monarchs, himself ennobled, makes perfect sense to be this person, this fair mind bent on an unimaginable future, the end of kings and nobles and the beginning of equality and a common humanity; of “pity, like a naked new-born babe;” free men and women freely choosing one another in love and fraternity.

What would the Queen his mistress have said to that?

Actually, Delia conceived an entire cabal within the Queen’s court, aristocrats risking their heads to reach England’s people with their message—which maybe they heard, too, since the Englishmen who began in those years to come to America (though admittedly most of them, at least at first, were theater-hating Puritans) eventually did found a nation with those ideals; and then the secret of their transmission was uncovered at length by a woman born in that Republic, even named for the transmitter, and a Free Spirit, maybe, too, certainly with a mind and heart of her own.

Which is why—this just occurs to me—it was right and proper that in the United States we should have sat before his plays, by limelight and lamplight, so persistently; and why it makes perfect sense that in the state of Indiana, just a hundred years after Delia Bacon enunciated her, or Shakespeare’s, philosophy, we democrats should have gathered in a Utopian’s barn to read and study and perform his plays. In fact, Henry V was one of Delia’s examples of Shakespeare (considered collectively) working on the people’s souls to show what kings are, and what their wars amount to:

I think the king is but a man as I am, the violet smells to him as it does to me; all his senses have but human conditions. His ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness, he appears but a man . . .

Of course that’s Harry himself speaking, while disguised as a commoner, so the irony is multiple, nearly impenetrable, but Delia knew that; she’s actually most sorry for the king—unfitted, as any mere man must be, for the vast responsibilities placed on him; a man who needs, as much or more than anyone, to be freed.

• • • •

There was a party at the camp for the actors, the crew, the apprentices, end of a work week, or dress rehearsal, I don’t remember. They liked to have parties, they brought in cases of beer and everybody got some: impossible to imagine now.

Harriet in the big dining hall was reading aloud to some kids out of The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines. June bugs banged against the screens. I talked to Robin.

“It just can’t be true,” I said. “You should read some of this stuff I found. These people are nuts.”

“Well, what’s truth,” he said, as though he’d just thought of this big question. “Maybe truth is multiple. I mean, how can we ever know? How can we know anything for sure? We don’t even know for sure that you and I are here talking, and not just figments.”

Considered as a profession, theater people aren’t much given to analysis and logic. In the theater, somebody who seems to be Lear is Lear; maybe it’s the same with thought, and to the average actor, something that seems like a reasoned argument doesn’t differ importantly from an actual one.

Robin looked down at the unopened bottle of Drewrys beer in his lap. He had what we called a church key in his hand. “You know,” he said. “I’ve never been exactly sure he believes this theory.” He apparently meant the Bacon advocate who’d talked to us. “He may not be completely convinced the plays were written by Francis Bacon.”

He was an actor, too, in how he “telegraphed”—let you know when a stunner was coming, bad practice in a boxer, skillful in a raconteur.

“Oh?” I said my line.

“No,” Robin said. “He thinks it’s maybe more likely to have been his smarter brother, Anthony.”

He popped off the cap of the bottle, his own rimshot.

“So here little Beatrice gets captured by outlaws,” I heard Harriet say. “She’s so sharp. ‘Corpo di Bellona! A spirited young devil she is! I’ll drink your health, young lady!’ That’s the robber chief. He wants to marry her. ‘Fill me a cup, and I’ll pledge you all, good gentlemen,’ said Beatrice. ‘But I have no ambition to be your queen. I should soon be an unpopular monarch among you, for I should begin my rule by reforming your ways.’ Oh, God.”

“I’ve known him a long time,” Robin said. “I know him to be a completely sweet, completely sincere, and very smart man. And. He’s nowhere near as mad as his mother.”

“‘A little gray-eyed, red-lipped thing, that looks too bright and fearless to know what tears mean,’” Harriet read. “‘She speaks up so open, and looks so straight into your face, that you feel as if she must be right, and you wrong . . .’”

“His mother,” Robin said, with vast seriousness, “has discovered that within the plays of Shakespeare there is a code, or a cipher. There’s a difference, but I can’t remember what it is. And the code, when you break it, tells a story.”

I held my tongue.

“A long story.”

I waited.

“It turns out,” he said, “that hidden in the plays is the story of how Francis Bacon is actually the son of Queen Elizabeth and Robert of Leicester, her lover.”

I started to laugh, that nervous laughter: in too deep, resisting.

“They made a secret marriage,” Robin said. Still deadpan. “So Francis Bacon was in fact rightfully heir to the throne. Francis I. But if he ever let that be known—” And here Robin drew his hand suddenly across his throat, executing himself. “So he hid the story for this amazing woman to discover, three hundred, three hundred . . .”

Then, at last, he laughed.

“But,” I said, in trouble.

“Listen.” He had lost all urgency, dropped the part he’d been playing. I saw that Harriet had come near and stood listening. “It doesn’t matter. The fact is that the son has spent most of his life not thinking about Bacon, ha ha, or his mother, but in making money. Quite a lot of it, as I understand. In the commodities market. And whatever else he may have been or is, he is a good son and a generous man. And we wouldn’t be here without him. And that’s enough. And that’s that.”

He looked from me to Harriet to me. Harriet, hands behind her back and her finger in the book’s pages, looked like an illustration for something. She was smiling with sweet acceptance, and her smile moved from me to Robin. They were both looking at me, both smiling. I felt very odd.

Others came and claimed Robin’s attention.

“He’s right, dear boy,” Harriet said to me.

“But.”

“Come on,” she said. “I’d like to walk.”

Night came on with such solemn slowness those summers, the birds falling silent and the frogs and bugs awaking, the sky turning green and yellow, the trees and low poplars black. Talking nonsense and making dance spins, she led me as though by chance up the way that led from the camp buildings to a knoll where low shrubs grew, and tall grasses; from the little fastness or hideaway they made, you could glimpse the road back down to the camp, and look outward over the meadows to the river, an onyx meander in the darkening green.

“You like this?” she said, and she sat, floated with practiced dancer’s grace to the soft ground.

Harriet had chosen me. It was as simple as that. Try as I might, I can’t remember how she let me know this. Maybe she didn’t. I only remember being there in the growing dark, already knowing.

“Clipping,” she said, and took off her pink-framed glasses. “That’s what Shakespeare says. I like that word. Clipping and kissing.”

I was profoundly alarmed. This thing that I had thought so constantly about was before me and I’m sure I looked like an apprehended criminal, like a shy wild thing transfixed by the explorer who’s first discovered it. I didn’t say anything or do anything of all the many things I could have done, that I knew could and ought now to be done; and Harriet stopped and looked at me cautiously.

I didn’t answer.

“Okay?” she said.

I said nothing.

“You aren’t whatchamacallit, are you?”

“What?”

“That thing Francis Bacon was. Philorumpties.”

“Paiderastes. No. No, no.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay then.” The only obstacle out of the way. We began. Grass and fields were at any rate my medium; all the little clipping I’d done had been outdoors, like a swain, or a rabbit, though I’d never got even this far anywhere else.

Her peasant blouse was easy to get off, seemed made to come off easily, and then there were the underpinnings, like grappling with a time-bomb in the dark, decoupling the wires; she helped out, frankly.

“They’re liddlies,” she said.

Almost all I knew about the act that was to follow, all of it theoretical, I had learned from a book called Ideal Marriage, which said that it involves all of the senses, taste, touch, smell, sight, but not hearing, which should, the book said, be notable by its absence. No talking. Harriet talked. It was the strangest thing of all.

There were other features of the act that, with delicate care, Ideal Marriage had described. Those we did or had. One’s Shakespearean name I had thought about and said over often to myself, like a charm, or a promise, sometimes with an actual shiver, anticipation mixed with some apprehensive revulsion: the velvet clasp.

“Oops, you weren’t supposed to,” she panted in my ear.

As well remind the deer not to start away. Not supposed to: I hardly knew I had.

“I think it’s all right,” she said. “I think.”

It turned out it was all right. God knows what we would have done: I think of that sometimes. And the next time I didn’t, nor the next.

I was awed, bewildered, filled with weird guilt—not guilt for any religious reason, I’ve never had any of that, but because I wasn’t in love with Harriet, or she with me; what she had invited me to obviously wasn’t the commencement of always-ever-after in my life; I felt like a Shakespearean virgin who’s been played the Bed Trick. I couldn’t have said any of this then, only felt it. Dint know whether to shit or go blind, they said then in Indiana. It was part of the Free Spirit effect, but I didn’t know that then either.

I finally got less tongue-tied. My strangulated silence ought to have been outrageously insulting to Harriet, but in fact she didn’t change her attitude toward me through the days, only her voice sometimes had a throaty kind of quality when we talked about nothing or about Shakespeare or the work, as though she might start laughing any second from some kind of warmth or pleasure, at my discomfiture only maybe.

“You know something?” she said to me, this time in a counselor’s cabin we’d found a way into, a bedstead, a stained mattress. “You know something? You have a nice penis.”

Wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful, wonderful! And yet again wonderful, and after that out of all whooping. In this world into which I had come, this happened, this, too; everything. Of course I didn’t know it happened also in the world I came from, at summer theaters and summer conferences and summer gatherings all over, that it was for this that they foregathered (not entirely or always, no, but still.) I sensed, smelled, as it were, the hot life all around me, as I never could have done before I became part of it, the clippings and couplings, the satyr-play in the buggy woods and weeds. Paiderastes too among them, certainly. And she and I. And she and at least one other. She told me so later, but I suspected it even then, though “suspected” sounds too cunning; I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel or do about that, and so I felt nothing about it in particular, nothing but more.

Henry V opened on the July Fourth weekend. It began just as it had the first day of rehearsals, with Robin in jeans and a sweater dragging the big wooden box of swords and armor out to the middle of the stage. The house lights weren’t down, and the audience of course thought he was a stagehand or a stage manager, which he was, and would be. And then the stage lights started to come up, but only a little, and the house darkened, and Robin came and sat on the apron with his script, as he had on the day he began rehearsing. And almost before anyone knew it, he’d begun to speak—not orate, just speak, wistfully, almost, about how only a muse of fire and princes to act could bring forth Harry. As he talked, the actors playing Harry and the Dauphin and the rest came out of the shadows in their jeans and sweatshirts and chose weapons from the box, and Harry put on his crown. And when he said, Think when we talk of horses that you see them, printing their proud hooves i’the receiving earth, then a light lit one of the horses, center stage, Henry’s, in its bright caparison; she printed her proud hoof, and another horse—Harriet—appeared behind, and another. There was a little gasp or sound from the audience, a titter here and there, too, and I felt a sharp deep shudder, as though I’d been seized, and tears filled my eyes.

• • • •

It’s good, so good that the play was produced, that she was able to be in it, and that its short run was up.

It was a Sunday. A lot of the actors had gone home, some of them not to return, others to arrive to be in the second play of the year, The Tempest. Some of the apprentices, too, gone home with bags of dirty laundry and blisters on their hands, to return next week.

I stayed. Harriet stayed too.

That little camp where we’d been put surrounded a small lake, a green, torpid body of water reverting to swamp. Some of us swam there sometimes, urging each other in, rowing a foul-bottomed boat to the middle and diving into the duckweed. Harriet wouldn’t go in, and neither would I.

But it was hot, insufferably hot. And not far from the town of Avon, along the little river, was a public beach, a crowded place but clean and sandy. And on Saturday one of the few of us who’d come in his own car took Harriet and me and a couple of others out there.

It, too, was still, its water brownish and thick. There were crowds of small children, diapers dangling, chased by their mothers; and children older than that, and dogs. No one understands to this day what it was about places like this, public beaches in the summer, if there really was anything about them, or if that was only a kind of leftover medieval fear of plague or cholera. I don’t know. We’d been warned so much, every year, threat hanging like the heat over the days.

I see that beach still, I swear, in dreams, every detail the same, only darkened, as though seen through dark glasses, or with sunblind eyes. Soundless. Dreadful. It might not be that place at all I see, of course; and the place itself might be wholly innocent, harmless. I wake up in a sweat.

Next day was Sunday.

The library was open that day. Why open Sunday? Maybe I have something wrong about the days. The library was open. I know it was.

In the library, I went to the Shakespeare section, climbed the spiral stair again. I was going to do research. I was going to take some notes, and show them they were wrong, make them admit it. Get this snake out of Paradise: No, I didn’t think that, surely. But if they had to admit it, then—then what? They’d stop, I suppose. No longer soil the best name in the world.

I don’t know what I thought. I was beginning to feel very odd, to feel cluster around me a being, a soma, that wasn’t my own but that I recognized. I got Ignatius Donnelly and the others in my arms and came down the stairs to sit.

There was a photograph of Donnelly—Senator Donnelly—in the front of his book. I realized, looking at it, how old this thing was, how long ago.

If the reader will turn to page 76 of the facsimiles, being page 76 of the original Folio, and the third page of the second part of King Henry IV, and commence to count at the bottom of the scene, to-wit, the scene second, and count upward, he will find that there are just 448 words (exclusive of the bracketed words, and counting the hyphenated words as single words) in that fragment of scene second in that column. Now then, if we deduct 448 from 505, the remainder is 57, and if he will count down the next column, forward (second of page 76) the reader will find that the 57th word is the word her.

Folded up inside the book was a copy of one of Donnelly’s worksheets, showing his method. I unfolded it. A page of Henry IV, the Folio, with red and blue pencil lines, line numbers, arrows drawn to other lines and words, lists of words from other places in black, blue, and red.

Now let us go a step farther.

My hand was shaking: I lifted it before my eyes and watched the tremors.

There’s a sensation that all my life I have hated profoundly, dreaded, even though it hasn’t happened to me often (multiplied, though, by my memories of those few times.) It’s the sensation that all intentionality and will is being drained from the world, all consciousness, that there is nothing in earthly activity but malign blind indifference; that even the willed behavior of persons, speaking, thinking, doing, is only mechanical ticks and tocks. Finally, that they cannot even be heard or seen, because all eyes are blind, all ears are stopped. My own consciousness the only one existent to know this.

I wonder if it’s like the onset of schizophrenia: the sense of living in a world of automata. It’s often been associated for me with the onset of some illness; I wonder if I didn’t first experience it before an asthma attack. Or was that time in the Avon library the first? And is that why I fear it so much?

Donnelly’s huge screed, so full of wishing, so human a thing. I looked down at the pages and felt him, the froggy man in the picture at the front, lose his him- or he-ness, sadly wink out into unaliveness, only these endless numbers and words multiplying. I wanted to look away, and couldn’t.

Voiceless. And all other books, and Shakespeare, too, and all those who thought about him: They lost their voices, couldn’t make sound, lost consciousness. The air itself lost mobility. I couldn’t move.

The librarian, the only other person there, was looking at me, making the gestures of seeing me, of taking off her glasses, rising from her desk, coming to where I sat. She seemed to say what’s wrong, is something wrong.

I think I have a fever, I said without sound.

She touched my head, her cool hand suddenly real and scorching.

Oh my goodness, you do.

It’s a summer cold.

Where do you belong, she mouthed.

I answered.

She spoke.

I tried to get up from the desk and fell down.

What happened then was that she sent someone—a passing someone in the street—to go out to the offices of the Festival and get Robin, out of bed, actually, and he drove into town in his Ford convertible; and by the time he got there the librarian had got me outside, and I was sitting on the steps of the library; and then they got me to the office of a doctor, which was just around the corner, and we waited on his step for him. And even before he got there Robin saw that he would have to drive me to the hospital, an hour away, and when the doctor did come that’s what they decided.

I didn’t know or understand anything of this, and don’t remember it now. I was told it all in the days to come, and in a letter from Robin to my parents.

He drove me to the hospital, and I do remember that fact: his car and the smell of its upholstery. I was in back with Sandy, who held me wrapped in a scratchy Army blanket that I also remember. Robin said that all the way there he recited Shakespeare, to keep anxiety down; he said I asked him to, but I don’t believe it. He recited most of The Tempest, which he was to begin rehearsing the next day:

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great Globe itself

And all that it inherit, shall dissolve

And like this insubstantial pageant faded

Leave not a rack behind.

We are such stuff as dreams are made on

And our little life is rounded with a sleep.

What I remember is waking in that hospital when the fever broke. I remember the white sheets and a smell of soured milk and disinfectant. And I wondered why I had been strapped down to the bed so that I couldn’t move my legs at all. Why had they done that? The nurse came in and pulled the sheet aside and I could see my legs were not strapped down: They just wouldn’t move.

Harriet says it was the same for her, strangely. Why have I been strapped to the bed? What good does that do? Why has that been done to me?

• • • •

They say that in the old days almost everybody got it, but if you were very young when you got infected then it had no lasting effect, it was just like a cold, or like nothing, you didn’t even know, and then, of course, you were immune ever after. The older you were, the more likely you were to have damage.

But then they had the vaccine, and somehow it vanished overnight, except that it didn’t if you had been missed, if you were at home with asthma when the nurses came to your school, if you didn’t go to a school, if your mother was a free spirit and didn’t altogether believe in medications and wanted to wait and see a while in spite of what everybody told her. I don’t know. I really still don’t.

It was the last major national outbreak. There were seven cases in Brown County alone: Most of them were kids under twelve, and then me, and Harriet. Over a thousand of us nationwide.

They didn’t tell me that Harriet was there, in that hospital, in another ward nearby. She’d been brought by the stage manager and his wife, a couple of hours after me. Why didn’t they tell me? Because they didn’t tell things then. What they knew might kill you, they thought, if you knew it, too.

We lost each other for a long time then, or better say I lost her; I’m not sure how much Harriet thought about me. At first we were in specialized hospitals far apart, and then home. I didn’t have her address—we never got to the point of swapping them, or phone numbers; making long-distance calls, even across the state, seemed momentous still in those days. Well, that might not have been why it took me so long to call. In any case, when I did at last find her number and talked to her father for a moment, I learned she’d gone to still another hospital, somewhere in the East, for more treatment. It was obvious he didn’t want to talk about it, he sounded remote and frightened, as though I’d roused him from a cave.

And that’s really what kept us apart: that we had both, each alone, gone off into this disaster, and now were separated, along with our blighted families, from everyone else. It was a secret, what had become of us, but a secret that had to be exposed in every new circumstance you entered, explained, confessed to. Well, he’s not as strong as other boys in some ways. To coaches, teachers, bosses. My family nearly died of shame and bravery.

And I was one of the ones who came back, too. I came back nearly all the way. You can see me now and know right away that something’s wrong, but I’ve walked without aids for most of my life. I was a loner anyway, without much sense that the world was waiting for me to make an entrance on its stage. There were times I was actually relieved—and ashamed, of course, to be relieved—to have a reason, such a profound and unchallengeable one, for non-participation.

I can’t think Harriet ever felt that way. But I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything about what had become of her, whether she came back, or not. We were sundered. I got a Christmas card from her that first year. Then nothing.

Harriet calls me at my office in the Liberal Arts building, the afternoon after we met on the road.

“You were right about the Pope,” she says. “He’s not dead.”

“No. Hurt.”

“Tough bastard.”

When this pope’s accession was announced, and it was made known that he’d be taking the name John Paul II after John Paul I, his predecessor, Harriet said, “No, no, not John Paul again! George Ringo!”

“I heard them say it was a vulgarian who did it . . .”

“Not a vulgarian, Harriet.”

“. . . And I thought that was an odd snap judgment to make.”

“A Bulgarian. A spy.”

“Yes. I figured it out.” I heard her sip tea. “You want to come over tonight?”

“Okay.”

“Air conditioning’s still busted.”

“Okay.”

“Bring a bottle of that wine you think is so good. Brookwood. Woodbridge. Bridgewater.”

“Waterbrook. My last class is over at five.”

“Good. Okay.”

I still have that Christmas card. It isn’t different from anyone’s—snow, dark pines, star. Inside it says May your every Christmas wish come true. And it’s signed with her full name, as though I might not remember her. I knew even then, though maybe I couldn’t have said, that it wasn’t a greeting.

Oh, you don’t know, you can’t: Our parents knew it instantly, probably, though my mom, with her sense of privilege and being welcome everywhere, maybe took longer to understand. The way it was then. You were obliged, for everyone’s sake (it seemed) to check out of the world; you found out that after all you had only been a temporary guest there, on sufferance. It was no longer for you, and you were under an obligation not to make others uncomfortable by your presence. Maybe that’s why we all shunned one another; two of us at once, outside of a hospital, would have been a shocking solecism. Just think about it: There were a lot of us, and when do you ever remember, if you’re old enough to remember, seeing two of us hanging out together? On the street, at the malt shop, the movies? Never.

When I said that once to Harriet, she said it was silly: The reason people never saw us was because in those days you couldn’t get out of the house, off the front porch, up on the curb, up the stairs. That’s all.

“They never saw us together?” Harriet said, and laughed. “They never saw us at all. We weren’t there to see.”

• • • •

“‘Others abide our question; thou art free.’ That’s what Matthew Arnold says about, or to, Shakespeare.” I’m speaking to my Summer School class, which is about to read and understand twelve Shakespeare plays in four weeks. “And that question would, I guess, be: What is this guy trying to say? And Arnold decided that what Shakespeare was trying to say was finally not able to be determined. What did Shakespeare think about things? Was he a propagandist for the Tudor-Stuart monarchy? That’s a common opinion. Was he a secret Catholic, secret atheist, secret anti-war activist? I think that whatever opinions the man Shakespeare might have held, there are no opinions at all expressed in the plays: that like all works that occur in time, they are driven by the impetus to complete a certain kind of movement. The things said in a play of Shakespeare’s are said because the story told is a story of a certain kind; the characters speak as they do so that the stories can be completed. They are no more the opinions of Shakespeare than the inversions and variations of a fugue are the opinions of Bach. And they touch us in the same way, the same astonishing way, when, against all the odds, they reach their endings.

“So. Check your syllabus, and for our next meeting we’ll look at a play of apparently utter simplicity, and see how a history, supposedly reflecting actual events, is in fact as shaped and typed as a ballad or a fairy-tale. How a story that nearly everyone in its original audience knew was to end in disaster, and early death could have the shape of a romantic comedy.”

By the time I leave school, the day has turned dramatically, lowering, hot, and heavy. I walk across campus with a younger colleague, a woman in American Studies. She’s careful to walk slowly to accommodate me, but not quite tactful enough to conceal that she’s doing so.

“Tell me something,” I ask. “If you heard someone—a woman, say about your age, maybe older—described as a ‘free spirit,’ what would you think was being said about her?”

“Oh,” she says. “That she sleeps around a lot. I knew a lot of them.”

“Knew?”

“Well, it was kind of a thing to be, wasn’t it? A free spirit. Barefoot, living on the earth, sleeping around wherever. You know.”

“Don’t you mean daisy pickers? Or is there not a difference?”

She shrugs. “Someone without much sense of reality, I guess. About men or life. Some of them got away with it”—and here she makes an airy gesture of escape or detachment—“but not always.”

She slows so I can catch up. “Why do you ask?” she says.

“Cultural anthropology,” I say.

“I’d worry for her,” she says.

I see her logic. But I think that there are—speaking anthropologically—several varieties. There are the ones that anyone could recognize, untrammeled, living in worlds of their own; but then there are the secret ones whom you wouldn’t know about unless you know. The librarian and the mailman (curls put up beneath her gray cap) and the dental hygienist. Not soft, not unwise; knowing the costs, and the benefits. Free spirits free even of the label, choosing more carefully than Delia Bacon did.

And Harriet: Who’s going to guess it about her? Sex is something not expected of us. That’s the secret part: and I know it’s astonished more than one person. But Harriet’s had lovers, dozens of them (tens, she says, not dozens; lovers by the tens). Maybe she hasn’t in her life had all those she wanted; maybe she’s been turned down a lot. But being a true free spirit—as I conceive it—means she chose lovers when she wanted them, and didn’t when she didn’t: could have sex with whoever whenever, but knew when to eschew it, too.

“Eschew?” Harriet said to me, in mock wonderment, when I made this case. “Eschew?”

That was the night of the first day we met again. The early morning of the following day, actually. In her little apartment here in this New England town on a wide river not named Avon, nowhere either of us would have guessed we’d come to, much less both of us, but have, for altogether different reasons. Mine the mundane one of a job offer; hers something to do with those tens of lovers, though the story’s obscure to me still. She loves it here: the shop she’s built, the Federal house she owns where both it and she reside, where she has the solitudes she needs as much as she needs company. I’ve actually wondered if they’re entirely different, for her, solitude and company; and if that’s sad, or not sad.

“You know something?” she said to me that night or morning. “You have a nice penis.” And I remembered, hadn’t of course ever forgotten, when she’d said it to me first; wondered, too, if it was something she said often, just a nice thing to say.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s a Pendaflex.”

“Really. Wow. The rotomatic?”

“No. I’m saving up for one of those.”

It was June, June again. She rested her hot face in the crook of my shoulder.

“It’ll stand you in good stead,” she said. “A nice penis like that.”

I thought it ought to be strange to me, even eerie, to have gone so far from where I started and to find her here, and somehow to take up where we were when we parted so completely, but all different: she so altered, in ways I’d long wondered about. Like dreams you might have, dreams I’ve had. But it didn’t seem that way at all. It doesn’t now.

Harriet’s shop is called As You Like It. Under these words on the painted sign over the door is a sort of scroll or banner that reads Wonderful wonderful and most wonderful wonderful. There’s a tinkle bell that sounds when the door is opened, though it’s hardly needed.

“Hi.”

She was waiting on a customer, wrapping something small and precious with wasteless motions, tissue, box, ribbon, label. One of her hands is different from the other, and the work seems to pass from one to the other as needed, as between two friends, one the stronger.

You’d think that the worst thing was how all that physical grace and power was blasted and reft from her, and it’s true that that was the loss; but what’s just as true is that all Harriet’s grace, all her strength and physical precision, lay in a more central part of her than that, a place from which she draws all the time now, making her way in the world, and everybody who sees her knows it. I watch her in the absurdly crowded shop turn and move, put out a hand to touch, just touch, a wall to keep her balance, reach to take something from a high shelf, turn again and put it before you, without a wasted gesture or effort: She’s still that steed.

“I brought you something,” I say.

“The wine.”

“That, too.”

I took it from the grocery bag that held the bottle.

“Oh my God.”

“It was in the college library.”

A small octavo volume, as they used to say, silk-bound, the gold lettering dim but plain. The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines.

“You know something?” I say. “All the others are there, too.”

“Yes?”

“All of them are. Still. Ignatius Donnelly and Delia Bacon and Shake-speare: The Mystery. In the same places they always were.” As though library time universally stopped that afternoon, at least in that range of Dewey decimals, all those books growing more useless and foolish every year, never changing their minds or hearts.

“Delia Bacon,” Harriet says. “The free spirit.”

“Well, so you thought.”

“Did you look in them?”

“I did.” I didn’t say it had taken me a long time to open one. Of course, I’d always known they were there. Volumes that I use in classes and research are nearby them. But I’d never opened one; that was true.

I help Harriet close the shop. Harriet studies The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines. White ink numbers on its spine.

“You know,” she said. “I never took it back. That one from the library in Avon. I never took it back. It’s probably still there, in that cabin, today.”

• • • •

Delia Bacon went to England in 1853, perhaps largely to escape the McWhorter mess, but also because people she knew in Boston and New Haven told her she ought to go and find the facts that would prove her conception. Once there, though, she only went on thinking and studying the plays, growing ever more certain she was right. Bostonian bluestocking that she was, she had letters of introduction from Emerson to Carlyle, who was shocked by her heresies (he shrieked, she says, turned black in the face.) She would do no research, though; she wrote essays about her idea, as though all by itself it ought to convince; she ran out of money and was practically destitute when she was taken up by Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was then the American cultural attaché. Hawthorne took her part, generously, and stood by her, and helped her prepare her huge book (The Philosophy of Shakespeare’s Plays Unfolded) for publication, and paid for it, too: but he didn’t believe either.

I don’t know how she got the idea that the proof she needed—or rather that the world needed—could be found in a grave. First she supposed that it was buried with Bacon at St. Albans, and when she was refused permission to open that tomb, she went to Stratford-on-Avon. Hawthorne says that Delia told him she had “definite and minute instructions” about how to find, beneath Shakespeare’s gravestone in the Stratford church, the documents that the cabal had caused to be put there.

She got to Stratford sick and shabby, and could find no room at the inn. She wandered the town, and finding a rose-covered cottage whose door stood open (all this is true) she went in, and sat down. And when the ancient woman who lived there alone came in, and saw her there, she couldn’t bear to send her away; and there she stayed, looking out at the river Avon and the spire of the church where Shakespeare lay.

You know the doggerel curse that’s posted on that grave: Good friend for Jesus’ sake forebear To dig the dust encloséd here; Blessed be the man that spares these stones And curst be he that moves my bones. It could have been this that kept her away—she wouldn’t have been the only one. And of course there was already a huge Stratford Shakespeare industry, and no one was about to let her dig that dust. But she didn’t even ask; for months she did nothing at all.

Then one night, she went to the church. Why night? She brought a dark lantern, and some other articles for “the examination I proposed to make,” she wrote to Hawthorne: though what they were, or it was, she didn’t say. She stayed there for some hours. The bust of Shakespeare on his memorial was above her, but it was too dark to see him; she couldn’t see the ceiling at all, it was as though she looked into a midnight sky. After a long time she left, and soon went back to London.

Her book was published the year after that, and she underwent some kind of mental breakdown. She had no money to eat, and so she didn’t; she ceased to leave her room. A relative in the Navy happened to be on leave in London, and called on her; he was shocked by her condition, and brought her home with him. She withdrew entirely into silence and inaction. Her relatives committed her to an asylum in New Haven, and she died there two years later. History rest in me a clue she wrote not long before her death, but what she meant by that no one knows.

• • • •

“She died of Shakespeare,” Harriet says. She’s made omelets for us with herbs from the pots on her windowsill, and I’ve opened the wine.

“The Shakespeare curse?”

“Not that. Just Shakespeare. It happens. People like you, sunk in Shakespeare. It’s not good.”

“I’m sunk in Shakespeare?”

“You make a living from Shakespeare.”

“Elizabethan Drama,” I say. “Not Shakespeare, really.”

“Look what Shakespeare did to us.”

“What?”

“We were so caught up with Shakespeare. Shakespeare, Shakespeare. Just like Delia Bacon.”

“Oh, Harriet. Come on.”

“We got sick from Shakespeare,” Harriet says.

“Harriet,” I say. “It wasn’t Shakespeare.”

“Oh, no?” she says, with vast conviction. “Oh, no? Well.”

I say no more. Her challenge, or joke, evanesces. She drinks, looking out at the evening. The flush on her cheeks actually brightens when she gets extravagant that way, like a Victorian heroine’s. Still, to this day.

“You should write that story,” Harriet says. “In a book.”

“What story?”

“Delia Bacon. Killed by Shakespeare.”

“Oh, I don’t know. A whole book?”

“Well, aren’t you supposed to write books? Publish or perish?”

“The only book I want to write,” I say, “is the history of the Free Spirits.”

That draws her eyes to me again. “It’s a secret history,” she says.

“I know.”

“Isn’t it already written?”

“Some. Not all.”

“Maybe it is, though. Maybe it’s all written down someplace. In code.”

“Well. If Queen Elizabeth wrote the plays of Shakespeare, maybe it’s in there.”

“Now she was a free spirit,” Harriet says. “Don’t you think?”

“Yep. Whatever Delia thought.”

“Secret marriages. Illegitimate children.”

“‘And the imperial votaress passed on/In maiden meditation, fancy-free.’”

She holds out a hand to me, and I get up to help her rise. In her tiny apartment behind the store, she can get around without her braces if she’s careful, moving like a gibbon from handhold to handhold to the big low bed. It’s where she socializes.

“I’m listing,” she says, pausing in the doorframe. “Two glasses of wine and I’m listing.”

So I take her up, remarkably light, and lay her down on the bed.

Harriet’s body isn’t like other bodies you’re likely to have encountered in this way. Her shoulders are broad and strong and flat, like anvils, and her upper arms look plump and soft till you take hold of them and find them to be iron. Harriet says her orthopedic surgeon could never figure out exactly how Harriet walks; she shouldn’t have the muscle strength to do it. However she does it, it’s given her washboard abs that any high school boy would envy, and they look like a boy’s, finely cut and tender somehow in spite of being so hard. Her butt is a boy’s, too: slight and soft and hollowed in the flanks. That’s where the nerve damage starts, and goes down her legs.

It’s like making love to a marionette, I said to her once, lifting and propping apart her stick-thin legs, and she started laughing and had a hard time stopping and going on. But it had taken her a long time to uncover them when we were in bed, let them be part of our lovemaking.

Two crips like us Harriet says sometimes, but that’s only a funny kind of politeness, to include me with her in a commonality, not to make me feel excluded.

“So you’ve been thinking,” I say. It’s late in the night.

“Yep.”

“And?”

“Let me pull this sheet up over me.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“Reach me the bottle, will you?” she says. Still a lot of Hoosier in her language. I struggle up to get the bottle and glasses, which leaves me outside the underside of the sheet with her, and posted on the bed’s edge.

“So how come you asked me this, by the way?” she says. “Just so I know.”

“Because I love you.”

“You do?”

“Harriet,” I say. “I love you. I’ve always loved you, even when I didn’t know it. I’ll love you till the day I die.” The wine is sweet and still cold. “That’s how come.”

She drinks, and thinks; or maybe she already knows what she thinks, but not whether to say it.

“So you’re not afraid?”

“Of what?”

“My history. I mean it’s not like I’ve been waiting for Mr. Right. There’s reasons I’m alone.”

“I know.”

“Not lonely. Alone.”

“I know. I’m not afraid. Maybe I should be, but I’m not.”

“Okay then.”

She isn’t done. Far off, there’s a borborygmic rumble of thunder, the uneasy sky heaving.

“So have you heard about this new thing we get?” she says.

“What thing we get?”

“They’ve just started to discover it. A syndrome. Us old polios. My doctor told me about it last week.”

“You were at the doctor?”

“I started getting tired,” she says. “Or not tired, exactly. More like weaker. I wondered. And he told me. He’d just been reading about it himself. Post-polio syndrome.”

“Explain,” I say. I say it double-calm. That’s a word Harriet invented for how actors say certain things in movies.

She hands me her glass, so she can hike herself up with both hands. “It seems,” she says, like a joke’s opening, “it seems there’s this thing about the nerves you use. I mean everybody. The nerves that get used all the time to do things, in your hands and your arms and so on, they have, like, redundancies. Backups. As you live your life, the nerves wear out. Their coverings get worn away. Used up. So by late in life, you’re using the backup ones.”

“Ah.”

“But in polio, the nerves get damaged. The ones you’d normally use, and even the backups in some places, so you’ve got nothing. And in the places where you’ve still got something, you’re using the backups, you’re using the surplus. Even if it’s nerves you think have always been fine: sometimes it’s really the backups you’re going on. So.”

“So you wear them out sooner.”

“It’s how you come back,” she says. “You somehow discover these backup nerves, and how to use them. Or you find other muscles, maybe without so much backup, because they’re, like, minor for most people, and you use them like nobody else. It’s how you get better. I got better. Even some of the iron lung kids got way better. Now they’re old, and the surplus is gone. So we start to lose.”

I wonder if I’ve noticed any of this, in myself. I can’t tell. Maybe I’m more tired, have a harder time with the long walks across campus. Maybe.

“You know what’s sad, though,” Harriet says. “It’s the ones who worked the hardest to come back, get function back, that are going to be losing it soonest. All those exercises, all that grit. The ones who weren’t going to be beat.”

I put my hand on her leg. She puts her hand on mine.

“So,” she says, double-calm. “Get it?”

I get it. I do. It’s my answer: Harriet’s got a lot less function than I do, and if she knows she’s going to start to lose what she has, she can’t say yes to me: can’t, because it wouldn’t seem like a free choice, would seem to have a reason, an urgent reason; it would seem like a way to get the help she knows she’s going to need. Would seem, even if it isn’t. We’ll talk more, talk into the night, and I’ll say Don’t fall for that, Harriet, don’t fall for that no-pity stuff; I’ll say Don’t believe all they tell you, you didn’t believe them when they said you’d never walk, I’ll say What about me, Harriet, what about the fact that I want to be with you no matter what, for better or for worse. But it won’t matter.

“I think it’s rotten,” she says.

She’s crying now. Only a little.

“I don’t usually feel sorry for myself,” she says. “Wouldn’t you say that’s so? Have you seen me being sorry for myself much?”

“Never,” I say. And it’s so.

“I wish it would rain,” Harriet says.

• • • •

It does, toward midnight, wild, nearly continuous lightning and hellacious thunder, almost Midwestern in its intensity, and Harriet clings to me, whooping and laughing as though on a carnival ride; and when at last it’s gone, and quiet, and we’ve lain a long time listening to the gutters running softly, she sends me home.

The next day she gets up early again, though not quite so early, to go out and make pictures. The day is terribly beautiful, sun-shot, raindrop-spattered, mist-hung. She loads her film holders, planning her moves from house to car with all the things needed, hoping she won’t miss the light, knowing she can’t hurry. Hurry is slow; hurry costs time. Festina lente.

By midmorning she reaches the place she set out for, that she had imagined in advance. But a vast wind has come up, moving through the leaves of the huge trees, passing amid them, and then going around again. The trees are moving too much for Harriet’s slow exposures. She stands by her tall patient camera and watches. The wind stirring the heavy masses of new leaves lends the trees one by one a momentary animal life different from their usual vegetable one, a free will, or the illusion of one; and they seem to be glad of it, to delight in it, even, raising and shaking their arms and shivering in glee.

On her way back to town, she cruises the tag sales. The families have just put out their stacks of mismatched dishes and white elephants and National Geographics, the pole lamps and tiered end-tables unaccustomed to the outdoor air and looking as though they feel uncomfortably conspicuous on the dewy grass. Harriet is an Early Bird and picks up a few “smalls” for the shop—a set of twelve silver “apostle” spoons and a nice set of wartime tumblers with decals on them of pinup girls in scanty uniforms. At one place she finds a game of Shakespeare, a board game which she has known existed and seen around but never played. The box is shut with a bit of masking tape, and is going for a quarter. Something touches her, and she puts her hand on it.

“It’s all there,” the householder tells her. “Complete.”

Harriet gives her a quarter.

Back home again, she unloads her camera and brings in the shoulder bag she carries for purchases. The game of Shakespeare in its box. She thinks a while there, poised on her crutches like Chaplin on his stick. Then she goes to her closets—Harriet has no basement or attic, wouldn’t need or use them, but she has many closets—and after some searching she pulls out a small blue suitcase, one of a matched set that once included a round hatbox; there’s a poodle appliqued on it. She humps the suitcase—it’s heavy—to the dining table, which she uses more for laying out and mounting pictures than for dining, and snaps open its clasps. Inside she has yearbooks and photographs and mimeographed programs from long-ago recitals, awards, blue ribbons. Scrapbooks, too. She takes out a ragged manila envelope, addressed to her old house in Indiana, and from it the journals she kept and the letters she wrote home that summer, the program of Henry V, the eight-by-ten of Robin she took from the bulletin board in the theater.

She has all that piled on her dining table, now in the summer of 1980. She adds the book I brought her, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines. The game of Shakespeare, too. She picks that up, hefting it in her hand—heavy, heavier than she expected, or is it some new weakness in that hand, which is not her good hand? Gripping tighter, she picks at the tape holding it shut, and maybe because she’s holding it too tight, she loses control of it and the box opens and spills its contents before she can recover. Among the contents are a dozen tiny busts of Shakespeare, the counters in the game, and they go bouncing over the table and onto the floor, rattling into corners and under things in that purposeful way that small dropped things have, as though trying to escape.

Plastic Shakespeares, red and white, black and brown. Two or three roll—Harriet catches them in the corner of her eye—under the tall armoire that holds more of her stuff. Now that’s a drag. Box still in hand, Harriet stares unmoving. She’ll have to get her braces off, lie full length on the floor, grope around in the narrow dark space under there maybe with a broom or some such implement, and knock them out from where they’re stuck. And she won’t be able to reach them, and she’ll have to get someone to shift the wardrobe and reach down the back to extricate them. Someone. Unless she chooses just to leave them there forever.

© 2002 by John Crowley.

Originally published in Conjunctions 39.

Reprinted by permission of the author and The Lotts Agency.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Crowley’s first published novels were science fiction: The Deep (1975) and Beasts (1976). Engine Summer (1977) was nominated for The American Book Award; it appears in David Pringle’s authoritative 100 Best Science Fiction Novels. Little, Big (1980) won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel; Ursula Le Guin described it as a book which “all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy.” In 1980, Crowley embarked on a multi-volume novel called Ægypt—The Solitudes, Love & Sleep, Dæmonomania, and Endless Things. This series and Little, Big were cited when Crowley received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature. His recent novels are The Translator, recipient of the Premio Flaianno (Italy); Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, which contains an entire imaginary novel by the poet; and Four Freedoms. He has also worked in film and television and written scripts for historical documentaries, many for Public Television; his work has received numerous awards and has been shown at the New York Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, and many others. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Boston Review, The Yale Review, Conjunctions, Tin House, Lapham’s Quarterly, and other venues.

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

NOVEL EXCERPTS

Baen Books Presents
Undercity
(novel excerpt)

Catherine Asaro

I
The Offer

The flycar picked me up at midnight.

Black and rounded for stealth, the vehicle had no markings. I recognized the model, a Sleeker, the type of transportation only the wealthiest could afford—or the most criminal. If my client hadn’t told me to expect the car, I wouldn’t have gone near that lethal beauty. I just wished I knew who the hell had hired me.

The Sleeker waited on the roof of the building where I lived. As I approached, an oval of light shimmered in its hull. A molecular airlock. Why? A vehicle needed that much protection only if it intended to go high into the atmosphere. We could be headed anywhere on the planet.

I had no wish to leave town. I had a good setup here in Selei City on the world Parthonia, the capital of an empire, jewel of the Skolian Imperialate. Droop-willows lined graceful boulevards and shaded mansions under a pale blue sky. It was far different from the city where I had spent my girlhood, a place of red deserts and parched seas.

The luminous oval on the flycar faded into an open hatchway. A man stood there, tall and rangy, wearing a black jumpsuit that resembled a uniform, but with no insignia to indicate who or what he served. He looked efficient. Too efficient. It made me appreciate the bulk of the EM pulse gun hidden in a shoulder holster under my black leather jacket.

Normally I wasn’t one to attribute details of clothing to the way people looked at you, but this stranger definitely watched me with a hooded gaze. I couldn’t read anything from his expression. As I reached the vehicle, he moved aside to let me step into its cabin. I didn’t like it. If I boarded, gods only knew where I would end up. However, this request for my services had come with a voucher worth more than the total income for every job I’d done this last year. I’d already verified the credit. And that was purportedly only the first payment. Of course I’d accepted the job.

However, certain types of clients didn’t like questions. If I asked too many, this pilot would leave. Without me. Credits gone. No job. I could walk away from this, but I needed the money. I didn’t even have enough to pay the next installment on my office loan.

And I had to admit it: I was curious.

I boarded the Sleeker.

• • • •

Selei City spread out below the tower. The landing pad on my building was high enough that individual skyscrapers and magrails of the metropolis weren’t visible, just a wash of sparkling lights. I reclined in a seat with smart upholstery that adjusted to ease my tensed muscles with a finesse that only the most expensive furniture could manage.

It didn’t help.

I was the only passenger. The cabin had ten seats, five on my side separated by a few steps from five on the other side. The white carpet glinted as if it were dusted with holographic diamonds. Who knew, maybe they were real gems.

Flycars usually had a pilot and copilot’s seat in the main cabin. This one had a cockpit. The membrane separating it from the cabin irised open for the pilot and he left it that way. Everything looked normal when he slid into his seat—until a silver exoskeleton snapped around his body. If that mesh worked like the ones I knew, it was jacking prongs into his body, linking the flycar to his internal biomech web, which would include a spinal node with as much processing capability as a starship. Few people carried such webs inside their bodies, only military officers, the exorbitantly wealthy—and those who worked for the most notorious criminal lords.

“Hey,” I said.

The pilot looked back at me. “Yes?”

“I was wondering what to call you.”

“Ro.”

I waited. “Just Ro?”

He regarded me with his unreadable dark eyes. “Just Ro.” His face remained impassive. “You had better web in, ma’am.”

Ma’am. A polite crook? Interesting. I asked, “Where’re we headed?”

No answer. I hadn’t expected one. Nothing in the message delivered to my office this afternoon had hinted at my destination. The recording had been verbal only, with no signature, just that huge sum of credit that transferred to my account as soon as I accepted the job.

I pulled the safety mesh around my body. I was a slender woman, more muscle than softness, and the webbing had to tighten from whoever had used it before me.

“Ready?” the pilot asked. He was intent on his controls, and it took me a moment to realize he had spoken to me rather than to the flycar.

“Ready,” I said.

With no warning, g-forces slammed me into the seat like a giant invisible hand. The chair did its best to compensate, but nothing could gentle a kick that big. A noise rumbled through the vehicle that I wouldn’t have believed if I hadn’t heard it. Rockets had just fired. This “flycar” was a damn spaceship.

The pressure built until black spots filled my vision. The webbing pushed against my body, countering the effects, but I still felt dizzy. Pinwheels spiraled in my vision and bile rose in my throat.

As soon as the pressure eased, I said, “Where the hell are we going?”

“Best relax,” the pilot said. “We’ll be a few hours.”

I didn’t know how fast we were traveling, but given that rocket blast, we had to be moving a good clip. We were still accelerating, less than before, but enough to feel the effects. A few hours of this could take us deep into the solar system.

I regarded him uneasily. “I don’t suppose this flycar has inversion capability?” It was halfway to a joke. Starships went into inversion to circumvent the speed of light, which meant they could end up anywhere in space, light years from here. A vehicle would only need such engines if it were leaving the Parthonia planetary system, which of course we weren’t going to do.

The pilot looked back at me. “We invert in six minutes.”

Flaming hell.

II
The Study

In eons past, the Vanished Sea had rolled its waves on the world Raylicon. Now only a desert remained where those great breakers had once crashed on the shore. The empty sea basin stretched out in a mottled red and blue expanse to the horizon. The City of Cries stood on the shore of that long-vanished ocean. I knew that desert. I knew that city. I had grown up in Cries and lived here later as an adult.

I had never intended to return.

The Sleeker hummed through the night, banking over Cries, a chrome and crystal city that glinted in the desert. I could just make out the ruins of the ancient city farther along the shore, the original Cries, which my ancestors had built five thousand years ago. Beyond them, the pitted ruins of ancient starships hulked on the shore of the Vanished Sea, their hulls dulled over the millennia. They were shrines, enigmatic reminders that humanity hadn’t originated here on Raylicon, but on a blue-green world across the galaxy.

Earth.

It was the home we never knew, a legend grown misty with time until my ancestors called it a myth. Six thousand years ago, an unknown race of beings had kidnapped humans from Earth, left them on Raylicon, and disappeared with no explanation. Had a disaster killed them before they completed whatever they began with their captive humans? We never knew. They left my ancestors here with nothing.

Primitive, terrified, and confused, those lost humans had struggled to survive. Their kidnappers left behind only those ruined starships. However, those ships contained the library of a starfaring race, and desperation drove my ancestors to learn those records. The library contained no history of the ships, but they detailed eerie sciences unlike anything we used today. Although it took centuries, my ancestors learned enough to develop star travel and went in search of their lost home. They never found the birthplace of humanity, but they built the Ruby Empire, an interstellar civilization that spread its colonies across the stars.

That was five thousand years ago. Built on poorly understood technology and plagued by volatile politics, the empire soon collapsed. The ensuing Dark Age lasted four millennia, but we did finally regain the stars. We split into two empires then: the Eubian Traders, who based their economy on the sale of human beings, and my people, the Skolian Imperialate. Eventually our siblings on Earth also developed space travel. They had a real shock when they reached the stars and found us already here, building gargantuan and bellicose empires.

I had left all that history behind when I left Raylicon. Yet here I was, back home. The flyer soared into the mountains. We landed on the roof of a solitary building high among the peaks. The crenellations bordering the roof were carved into mythical beasts, their fangs and horns sharp. Onion towers topped with golden spires loomed above the flycar, reaching into a sky brilliant with stars. I took a good long look through my portal, and sweat trickled down my neck despite the climate-controlled cabin.

As I released my webbing, the pilot left the cockpit. I wished I could place his background. He had the black hair, smooth skin, and the tilted eyes of Raylican nobility, but that made no sense. A nobleman wouldn’t work as a private pilot no matter how upscale the transportation.

The noble Houses traced their heritage back to the Ruby Empire. In this modern age, an elected Assembly ruled the Imperialate, and the Houses no longer held the power they wielded five millennia ago. The days when warlike matriarchs had kept their men in seclusion were gone; now both women and men held positions of authority. The Houses kept to themselves in their rarified universe and would never bring in a stranger to deal with their problems, especially not a commoner. Especially not me. So who else could afford this place? A crime boss. No wonder she had been cagey about her identity. She wouldn’t be the first underworld mogul to cover her operation with a phony aristocratic sheen.

As I disembarked, warm breezes ruffled my hair around my shoulders, sending black strands across my cheeks. When I worked, I pulled back my hair, but in Selei City I had become used to letting it fall free. Not here. I clicked a band around the tresses, keeping them away from my face.

Seven years had passed since I breathed the parched air of Raylicon. All that time in the gentle atmosphere of Selei City had spoiled me; the air here felt hot and astringent. It smelled dusty. Fortunately, the nanomeds in my body could deal with the differences. They also gave me the health and appearance of a woman in my late twenties, though I was well into my forties.

“This way,” the pilot said behind me.

Ho! My reflexes took over and I spun around, ready to strike. Although I stopped in time, the pilot had already raised his fists. He was unnaturally fast, another indication he carried biomech inside his body. Its system would include high-pressure bio-hydraulics, modifications to his skeleton and muscles, and a microfusion reactor for energy. It could give him two or three times the strength and speed of an unaugmented human. Given how quickly he had responded, he obviously carried a top-quality system.

Mine was better.

“My apologies.” The pilot lowered his hands. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“No harm done.” My thoughts hummed with warnings. Biomech webs cost as much as Jag star fighters and weren’t available to civilians. I’d received mine when I served in the Pharaoh’s Army. Either this pilot had been a military officer or else he worked for someone with more access to military technology than even some branches of the military. Illegal access. I was beginning to wonder if this job was worth even the huge cut of cream it put in my bank account.

We crossed the roof and entered an onion tower through an elegant archway. Inside, stairs spiraled down, nothing mechanical, no modern touches, just a beautifully designed staircase. Lights came on as we descended, however, golden and warm. Tessellated mosaics inlaid the ceiling in gold, silver, and platinum. The place reeked of wealth.

At the bottom, we reached a gallery of horseshoe arches. Our footsteps echoed as we walked through a forest of columns tiled in precious metals. I saw no sign of tech-mech, but golden light poured around us, and it had to come from somewhere. We left the gallery through another large archway and followed halls wide enough to accommodate ten people side-by-side. Mosaics patterned the walls, blue and purple near the floor, shading up through lighter hues, and blending into a scalloped border at the ceiling far overhead.

The low gravity, sharp air, and exotic decor saturated my mind. As we forged deep into the maze of halls, my spinal node created a map. We walked in silence. I tried to talk with the pilot, but he never responded. Finally we climbed a staircase that swept up to a balcony. At the top, we passed two archways and went through the third. The door swung on ancient hinges that should have creaked but in this unreal place were so well oiled, they didn’t even whisper. In the study beyond, bookshelves lined three of the walls. And they held real books. Not holobooks, mesh cards, or VR disks, but tomes with paper pages, the type usually found only in museums. One lay open on a table. Calligraphy in glimmering inks covered its pages, which were edged in gold. I had never seen even one such book, let alone a room packed with them from floor to ceiling.

A dark-haired woman stood across the study gazing out an arched window with her back to us. She turned as we entered, and her presence filled the room. She stood two meters tall and had a military bearing. Dark hair swept back from her forehead with gray dusting the temples, and her chiseled features could have been on a classic statue with her high cheekbones, straight nose, and tilted black eyes. The elegant cut of her dark tunic and trousers showed no hint of flamboyance. She could have been any age from forty to one hundred and forty; I had no doubt she could afford the best treatments available to delay aging.

The woman inclined her head to the pilot. “Thank you, Captain. You may go.” She spoke in Skolian Flag, a language adopted by dignitaries who interacted with many different peoples. However, she had an Iotic accent. It almost sounded authentic. Almost. No one spoke Iotic anymore except scholars, noble Houses, and pretenders who wanted to sound cultured.

The pilot bowed and left the study. I wondered if my host expected me to bow. I didn’t move.

The woman considered me. “My greetings, Major Bhaajan.”

I nodded to her. “I’m afraid you have the advantage of me, Lady.” I didn’t know if she truly carried that title of nobility, but it was more tactful than, Who the hell are you?

“Matriarch,” she murmured. “Not Lady.”

I froze. Hell and damnation.

I quit hoping she was a crime boss. Her Iotic accent wasn’t “almost” authentic, it was genuine. This was no phony palace. I had come to the real thing.

“Which House?” I asked. Blunt maybe, but finesse had never been one of my strong points.

Her gaze never wavered. “Majda.”

I felt the blood drain from my face. Majda. Wrong again. I wasn’t facing nobility.

This was royalty. Genuine, bonechilling royalty.

© 2014 by Catherine Asaro.

Excerpted from Undercity by Catherine Asaro.

Published by permission of the author and Baen Books.

All rights reserved.

No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Catherine Asaro is a writer, a dancer, and a singer. She is also a theoretical physicist with a doctorate from Harvard and she coaches award-winning math teams. Her most recent books are the anthology she edited, The Nebula Awards Showcase 2013 (Pyr), the novel Carnelians (Baen/ Simon & Schuster), and the anthology of her short fiction titled Aurora in Four Voices (ISFiC Press). The music soundtrack, Diamond Star, that goes with both the novels Carnelians and Diamond Star was released by Starflight Music in April 2009. Learn more about her at catherineasaro.net.

Open Road Media Presents
The Genome
(novel excerpt)

Sergei Lukyanenko

Five months after the horrific accident that left him near death and worried that he’d never fly again, master-pilot Alex Romanov lands a new job: captaining the sleek passenger vessel Mirror. Alex is a spesh—a human who has been genetically modified to perform particular tasks. As a captain and pilot, Alex has a genetic imperative to care for passengers and crew—no matter what the cost.

His first mission aboard Mirror is to ferry two representatives of the alien race Zzygou on a tour of human worlds. His task will not be an easy one, for aboard the craft are several speshes who have reason to hate the Others. Dark pasts, deadly secrets, and a stolen gel-crystal worth more than Alex’s entire ship combine to challenge him at every turn. And as the tension escalates, it becomes apparent that greater forces are at work to bring the captain’s world crashing down.

Chapter 3

According to the papers, his ship was waiting not in the hangar, but right out on the landing field. This probably meant it had not been on the planet very long. Alex stood on the platform, lightly holding on to the handrail—a part of his specialization, imprinted through repetition, was the habit of always having at least three balance points when on a moving object. The platform glided out into the main tunnel and went hurtling along at full speed underneath the landing field.

Alex suddenly realized what had been bothering him about his new contract.

The right to choose his own crew.

Things like that just weren’t done. Well, to be exact, they could be done, but only with the vessels built on this planet. But Mirror had been assembled on Earth.

Someone had to have been in charge of the ship on its way to Quicksilver Pit. Okay, so it may have not been a full crew, just the bare minimum—a pilot, a navigator, and a power engineer. But to hire people for a one-way trip and then to start looking for a whole new crew on another planet—that was absurd. Earth could offer a far better choice of specialists than a colony world, even a well-developed one.

There was also a useful tradition of keeping at least one member of the previous crew. Every ship had its own unique character, and an experienced person could often save not only time and money, but the very life of the vessel.

Weird . . .

The platform slowed down, stabilized under an exit shaft, and slowly started rising. Sixty five feet up, through layers of rock and then the concrete pad of the landing field . . . Alex glanced at the Demon—it seemed thoughtful and wary.

The ship was an experimental model? Something dangerous, still being tested—trick a crew into it, and watch what happens? Not likely. Judging by the papers, it was a very good ship, and it had no unexpected novelties. All the equipment was standard. A dangerous route, perhaps? Also bull. People got lured into danger by money, insurance, discounts . . . anything but lies. There would always be volunteers to stick their heads into a lion’s jaws, why make people do it against their will?

Something barely legal? The same objections applied.

So it wasn’t about the ship. Everything was always about people, not metal.

Alex shook his head and tried to toss his doubts away. Not for good . . . just to put them away into a far corner of his mind.

The platform slid out through the open aperture of a hatch, wobbled a little as it adjusted to the new bearing plain, and sailed on over the landing field. After a few seconds, Alex really did forget all his troubles.

He was home . . .

Although it had lost its former prominence, the spaceport of Quicksilver Pit was still fully alive. Two shuttles were landing simultaneously, and at a distance Alex identified them as a couple of old Manta Rays, maybe the third, maybe the fourth model. He guessed what they were not so much by their shape as by the piloting trajectory and landing speed. In the middle of the field, spreading wide the three rings of its supports, stood a heavy Cachalot freighter, probably of maximum tonnage allowable in this spaceport. From it crawled a line of auto-loaders, clutching tanks and containers in their grippers. Working on a delicate pleasure ship, Otter, were small repair-robots that crawled along the ship’s surface, checking and repairing the skin.

Here was the only place worth living. Here and in flight.

Alex was smiling.

His mood was no longer affected by the dull grayness of the sky, where smog and rain-clouds blended into a foul-smelling cocktail. Above this sky was another, clear and boundless, created for the freedom of flight . . . for him personally.

Then the platform skirted the Otter, and Alex saw his own ship. Mirror stood in the launch-ready position. It looked like a giant discus hurled by a titan, stopped in midair and hovering above the ground, in no hurry to soar into the sky. A bioceramic disc of ninety-eight point four feet in diameter, six supports, three main engines in a slightly unusual arrangement, clustered in the stern . . . Well, that might even be a good thing. The bulge of the bridge deck was slightly larger than average for this size vessel. It looked like co-piloting was possible. Although a lot depended on who that co-pilot turned out to be . . . .

Alex swallowed to get rid of a lump in his throat.

Mirror was blindingly beautiful. The perfect ship, with its enlarged bridge, its unusual engine configuration, the tender green of its armor . . .

It was love at first sight. Just the ship’s appearance was enough.

The same feeling as when a person capable of love is shaken at the sight of a face in a crowd. There might be dozens, hundreds, or thousands of other faces around, but they all are no longer important.

Sometimes Alex regretted not being able to love other humans. But only till he fell in love with a ship.

“Hello . . .” he whispered, gazing at Mirror.

The platform slowed down. Alex jumped down onto the concrete and walked up to the ship. Reached over, touching the armor carefully with just his fingertips. The bio-ceramic surface was warm and resilient. Alive.

“You know who I am . . .” said Alex quietly. “Right? You can see me . . . Hello . . .”

He went around the ship, touching the armor with his hand as far up as he could reach. The ship was silent. It was studying him, too.

“Do you like me?”

Now he was glad that there was no one aboard. This was his moment. Or, rather, he shared this moment with the ship.

“Receive your captain.”

The identity chip below his collarbone remained motionless. There had to have been a request signal. But not a full identity check. And that was nice. It was a sign of reciprocity. Of trust.

A hatch opened overhead, and down slid a ladder with a small platform on the bottom end. Alex stepped onto it and let the ship take him up inside.

• • • •

“Sushi, sir?”

A waitress stopped next to his table with a small aquarium cart hovering near her shoulder. Alex stretched his neck a bit to take a look at the cart.

“Yes, please.”

“Traditional-style or roasted?”

“Roasted.” Alex did not bother mentioning to her that it was not his mistrust of the local cuisine, but a habit, well established from his school days, of cooking, if only slightly, any protein that was not from Earth. “I’d like a large serving, please. From the right corner, at the very bottom.”

“At the bottom the krill’s already asleep,” said the girl uneasily. She lifted up a glass colander. The cart obligingly lowered itself and drew out little panels with cooking forms, an oven, and a small press. “I could make a few runs at the top . . .”

“No, no. Right from the very bottom,” said Alex, looking at the iridescent dots inside the aquarium. “When krill is slightly drowsy, the flavor is better. Oh, and double the spices, please.”

“All right.” The waitress seemed to like the order. Alex watched her, as she gingerly scooped out the slumbering krill from the bottom of the aquarium, skillfully poured it into a bowl, stirred in the seven-spice mixture, squeezed the krill mass with a small hand-press, then sliced it into thin strips and tossed it onto a burning-hot stone plate.

“Please don’t fry it all the way through,” hastily added Alex. “Just a little, to make the chitin a bit crunchy.”

In a moment, he had a serving of sushi on his plate. It was wonderfully fresh, with a lot of spicy, fragrant steam rising from it. Amazingly enough, Quicksilver Pit’s oceans remained practically unpolluted, and all the seafood was natural. Alex knew that artificial protein was much cheaper, more nutritious, and less dangerous than the natural stuff. But a marked preference for natural foods was a tradition among pilots.

Besides, Alex rather liked it. He was grateful to his parents for not including a modernized digestive system into the parameters of his specialization. Of course, it took up extra space, and extra time for eating, and extra energy was expended on digestion. But the alternative—forever eating artificial protein at McRobbins—no, thanks!

By the time a waiter changed his plate, Alex was already full and quite content with life. He surprised the waiter by asking him for a telephone. He had changed out of his motley outfit and into a standard captain’s uniform with master-pilot badges, but had simply forgotten to bring a communicator from the ship.

He dialed the number of the hotel-room computer. Kim answered almost immediately. The display screen of the borrowed telephone was tiny, and the hotel equipment was also far from perfect. Still, he could tell that the girl’s expression was calm.

“Everything’s okay?”

“Uh-huh,” she sniffed, “I’m practicing.”

“What?”

“Trying out my muscles. Is it normal that I don’t get tired?”

“Probably. But don’t overdo it, ok?”

They were both silent for a few moments.

“You coming back?” she said at last.

“Yes. Will you be there?”

Her smile was barely discernible, or maybe Alex was just imagining it.

“We’ll see. Probably.”

“Get some rest. Don’t wear yourself out,” said Alex. Hung up and handed the phone back to the waiter, who had tactfully stepped aside to give Alex a bit of privacy.

Too bad the long sleeves of his new uniform hid the Demon. He toyed with the idea of cutting out a little ‘window’ in the sleeve’s deep-blue cloth and covering it with a piece of see-through plastic . . .

His crew would die laughing . . . that is, when he got a crew.

Actually, the crew was the very reason he was still at the spaceport. In the rare instances when the hiring was left to the captain’s discretion, there were two ways to do it. You could consult the official search on the infonet. Hardly anyone did that. Or you could hold a series of personal interviews—the method preferred by anyone with any common sense. The spaceports’ watering holes were the places to conduct such interviews.

Alex wondered how many people had been already watching him from afar, curious, anxious, waiting for him to finish his lunch?

He ordered some sake and an expensive Earth-made cigar. He liked sake, but didn’t care for cigars. But it was a signal well understood by every astronaut, so he had to forget about cigarettes for now.

The waiter stood nearby with a tray, upon which were a box of cigars, a guillotine cigar cutter, and a massive crystal lighter. Alex took his time lighting up.

“Happy hiring, sir,” said the waiter and left.

Of course, everyone who worked at a spaceport for at least a week would know exactly what it meant if a captain smoked a cigar.

“May I?”

Alex threw an appraising glance at the first candidate.

He was a young, or recently rejuvenated man. Dark-haired, with features that revealed a predominantly Asian genetic heritage. He was dressed in civilian clothes. The outward traces of his specialization were very faint—his pupils were too narrow in the dim cafe light, his forehead was high, and his posture unnaturally straight, as though he was a well-drilled soldier. This was a pilot. A master-pilot.

“Please . . .” Alex gently pushed the bowl of hot water holding the bottle of sake towards him. This, too, was a sign.

They had a drink in silence, openly evaluating each other. At this point the interview could be cut short. The pilot could simply get up, thank Alex for the sake, and leave. Or Alex could put down his cigar and look away. That would mean ‘no.’ They would not work together well.

“You’re also a pilot.” The man broke the silence first.

“Yes, I am.”

“A master-pilot,” he was thinking aloud, “and you’re looking for another master-pilot? You must have a large ship.”

“Does that bother you?”

“No.”

“Good. But what I have is a small, multi-functional vessel.”

The pilot winced. Asked with a hint of hope, “Are there a lot of duties besides piloting?”

“Not really.”

“Then what you need is a regular pilot,” said the man firmly. “Two master-pilots on the same ship is kind of odd.”

“You’re right. But I have orders from the ship’s owner. The co-pilot has to be a master.”

There was a spark of curiosity in the man’s eyes. He hesitated for a second, but then shook his head.

“No . . . it won’t do. Good luck to you, Captain.”

“Not interested in the terms of the contract?” Alex asked him. He liked the stranger, and the man did not look as though he’d been riding high lately.

“No, thank you,” the pilot smiled dryly. “Don’t want to be tempted.”

He gave a quick nod and got up. That was it. And everyone saw that it was he who had refused the offer, and not the captain who rejected his candidacy.

Alex drew in the cigar’s thick, heavy smoke. No, cigars weren’t his thing, after all.

He understood the pilot’s position perfectly. For a master to agree to co-pilot, he would have to be really desperate. He would rather drag a clumsy Hamster full of pig iron around the orbit than play second fiddle on the most interesting routes. But the owner’s instructions were perfectly clear.

A six-member crew.

A captain with the specialization of master-pilot. Another master-pilot. A navigator. An engineer. A fighter. And a doctor.

No cargo specialist, no trade expert . . . Or, to be more precise, these positions were optional, in case they were an additional specialization for one of the crewmembers. So they were not being hired for trading missions. There would be no linguists or xenopsychologists. That would mean no contacts with the Others were expected. All the work would be taking place within the Human Empire.

And yet . . .

The requirement for two master-pilots could only mean lengthy and difficult routes.

A fighter on board meant possible visits to troubled planets.

A doctor meant very long trips.

All this was hard to reconcile. Even more disquieting were the possible reasons for giving Alex such easy access to the rank of captain and carte blanche in hiring the crew, when its odd composition could only mean unusual and difficult trips.

“May I?”

Alex looked up.

A very serious and intelligent face. A light-haired Europeoid of a rare, unmixed genotype. Judging by the badges on his uniform and the visible signs of specialization, he was an engineer. A Star of Valor on his lapel meant he was a retired military man. And if an honor ever had to be really earned, it was the Star of Valor. He was an ideal candidate . . . But . . . But Alex did not like him for some reason.

They studied each other for a few seconds.

“You are probably right, captain,” said his would-be engineer politely. “We won’t get along. Too bad. I’ve been out of work for a while.”

“Would you care for a drink?”

“No, thank you. You obviously have a long day ahead of you. I wouldn’t want to waste your time.” He walked away. Alex followed him with a gloomy stare.

A professional. A good spesh, and a good man. But they wouldn’t work well together. When you spend half your life in a hermetically sealed tin can, you learn to see that at first glance.

His hiring spree had started out badly. And in some places they believed that if a captain rejected the first three candidates right off the bat, you shouldn’t bother approaching him. You wouldn’t have any luck. Astronauts were the most superstitious people in the universe.

“Captain?”

The woman hadn’t even observed the customary interval. Leaned on the table with both hands, inclining slightly towards Alex.

“Looking for a crew?”

She was not young. Tall, almost as tall as Alex. Black. Beautiful. But not a natural kind of beauty. It was the work of plastic surgeons who make a transformed body look more attractive. Her face had a kind of geometrically precise diamond shape. Her eyes were too large, almost like Kim’s. Her hands and nails were oddly shaped . . . She had the pin of a cargo specialist on her blouse. The expression on his face had probably given something away.

“Don’t need a cargo tech?” asked the woman bluntly.

“Unfortunately not. My ship is small. Not a freighter.”

“Excuse my intrusion then, Captain . . .”

“Wait!”

“Yes?” The lady slightly raised her eyebrows.

“Your specialization is not cargo technician.”

“You’re right. But a small ship won’t need a doctor, either.”

“Actually, we do.”

“Curious . . .” After a few seconds’ hesitation, she sat down. “Will you offer me a drink?”

“Yes, of course.”

Alex hastily filled up a small cup, handed it to the woman. They clinked their cups.

“What kind of ship do you have?”

“Mirror is an unclassified vessel assembled on Earth. Most parameters are of a modernized discus yacht of moderate tonnage. A six-member crew, myself included.” Alex caught himself cajoling the woman, almost trying to ingratiate himself to her.

“Curious,” she said again. “Does it at least have a sick bay? Or is that combined with the galley?”

“A fully equipped sick bay. Must have been stripped from a destroyer.”

“Hell.” She laughed a bit uneasily. “Must have been? Have you been the captain for long?”

“A couple hours.”

“Right. Who else is in the crew?”

“Just me.”

“Okay, I get it.”

She twirled the sake cup in her fingers, still not in any hurry to drink.

“Details?”

“Union base pay for unclassified ships, plus a twenty percent bonus. A two-year contract.”

“And where are we flying?”

“Don’t know.”

“Purpose?”

“Don’t know that, either.”

“Sounds marvelous, Captain . . .”

“I know how it sounds. But I have already accepted the offer.”

“Perhaps you just didn’t have a choice?”

She had guessed right, so Alex decided it would be better to say nothing.

“All right . . . I’m Janet Ruello, forty-six years of age, doctor-spesh, cargo technician . . .” She hesitated a split second and continued, “ . . . gunner-spesh, linguist-spesh, junior pilot-spesh, ready to consider your offer.”

Alex pushed away his sake cup. Looked hard at Ruello. She was absolutely serious.

“Four specializations?”

“Five. But the fifth one is irrelevant.”

“I’d like to know what it is anyway.”

An angry irony appeared in the woman’s dark eyes.

“Executioner-spesh. Officially, it has another name, but that’s what it is. Actually, that is my main specialization.”

“You’re from Eben!” exclaimed Alex, finally catching on. “Damn . . .”

“Yes, I am,” the woman glared back at him. “The planet Eben is quarantined. I was born there. I served in the Mutual Understanding Corps until the age of thirty. Was taken prisoner of war during the battle of Pokryvalo. Five years of psychotherapy. Temporary citizenship of the Empire, with a permit to work and reproduce.”

Now it was clear to Alex why this woman with five—well, let it be four—specializations was wearing the pin of a cargo technician, a profession she had acquired on her own.

“What is your decision?” she asked dryly.

“May I ask you something, off the record?”

“Yes.. I think that would be fine . . .” She looked suddenly embarrassed.

“Do you have any experience with determining specialization?”

Janet shrugged.

“Well, I’m not an expert, of course, but I have some experience. It’s standard procedure in our fleet to determine which specialization will turn out to be the dominant one, and whether there are any physiological conflicts in the body. For example, the work of a doctor and a detective cannot be combined for psychological reasons, and the jobs of a navigator and a pilot because of physiology. Everybody knows that, but there are many situations which are much more complicated.”

Janet, it seemed, was happy to talk. Alex nodded, satisfied with her answer, and then asked, “And why did you lose the war so quickly? Ten years ago, Eben’s fleet almost matched the firepower of the Imperial forces. And you had all that training . . . each person had at least three specializations, right? I mean, what happened?”

“You really don’t know?” A slight note of surprise flashed in Janet’s voice. “We had not been trained to fight against humans! Quite the opposite . . . We believed that the human race had to rule the universe. Another six months, or a year, and nothing could have stopped us, believe me. Oh, Deus Irae! Our Liturgy-class space cruisers could have blasted off a star’s photosphere, turning it into a supernova! The cleansing fire that would have burned away all the planets of the Others!”

“Good thing you didn’t have the time to build those cruisers!” said Alex, closely watching Janet’s reaction.

“Not so. Two cruisers were ready. They couldn’t have broken through to the sectors of the Others, but to blow away the Sun or Sirius—child’s play!” She laughed without mirth. “My dear captain, we could not fight against humans! It was a shortcoming of our own propaganda. We could cajole, or beg, or explain . . . take prisoners and brainwash them . . . but to kill our own kind . . .”

“The Empire also suffered losses . . .”

“Mostly by accident. Sometimes as a result of nervous breakdowns. Some officers shot to kill and then sent a ray into their own heads as soon as they realized that they had killed their blood brothers. You didn’t have such problems.”

“Last question, Janet. Forgive me, but I have to ask.”

“Go ahead. I understand.”

“What is your present attitude toward Eben’s ideology? Put yourself in my shoes . . . to have a person aboard who was born to exterminate any non-human intelligence . . .”

“I still hold firm to my view that the human race is the ideal one in the universe. Chosen by the Creator.” Janet was silent for a moment, and then added rather dryly, “Alex, you do understand that the consequences of a specialization are irreversible. Absolutely irreversible.”

“But how do you manage to lead a normal life, if you still believe that so strongly?” Alex looked around, to see if he could find at least one of the Others. Quicksilver Pit was far from the frontier, but some trading vessels of the Others did fly here. Too bad, there were no non-humans in the cafe. Not a single bulky, clumsy Fenhuan, wrapped into folds of pseudo-feathers, nor a small and agile Bronin, nor a Zzygou . . . not that those “fragrant” creatures would be allowed to come in to a restaurant . . .

“Now I am convinced, “ said Janet very firmly, “that the xenocidal methods of our ruling church were a disastrous mistake. They are unacceptable for moral and ethical reasons, because by killing the Others without any threat to our own lives, we would be dropping down to their level. The human race must conquer the galaxy by peaceful methods, by perfecting our technology and biotechnology, expanding to other planets, creating beauty, and multiplying vigorously. That is the way to drive the defective races to extinction, clearing the galactic space for us humans. I am even inclined to think that we would then have a duty to preserve their cultural monuments, establish museums and memorials, and use every opportunity to keep the remnants of their worlds’ biodiversity in zoos and on reservations.”

“And you live your life based on these convictions?”

“Yes, of course. In the ten years since my liberation, I have given birth to four healthy and intelligent children, and specialized them in socially useful, peaceful professions.” She thought for a moment, and then added, “Well, nominally peaceful . . . You don’t have to worry, Captain. When I see one of the Others, I won’t remember any methods to exterminate it. Unless there is imminent danger.”

“All right, then. If the contract and the ship suit you . . .”

Janet nodded. A slight smile appeared on her face.

“I think they will suit me. I would prefer a job in cargo, but being a doctor won’t be bad. All my other specializations are much more unpleasant. You need recommendations from previous employers?”

“Yes, please. I have no doubt that your qualifications are excellent, but that’s the procedure.”

Alex handed her one of the copies of the contract he had brought with him, and they had another drink to seal the preliminary agreement. Then Janet left.

Alex’s cigar had long smoldered to ashes. In any case, he was supposed to order another one, and so he did.

A medical doctor from Eben . . . that was a great irony of Fate. Well, Fate was a master of irony.

He had absolutely no doubts about Janet’s professional qualities. All of her other specializations were a definite plus, even if she never got to use them. She was practically incapable of aggression towards humans because of the shortcoming of Eben’s propaganda machine, the shortcoming which had enabled the Empire to quarantine the planet, to seal it off from the rest of the galaxy.

But would Janet lose it at the sight of a non-human? Would she remember her specialization of executioner-spesh? No, that was hardly possible. She had, after all, been released by the military psychologists, free to interact with society, even have contacts with the Others. The psychologists must have been sure of their tactics. Come to think of it, that was a very clever solution to the problem. They did not touch the main postulate of the Ebenian worldview, namely, the idea that humanity was the master race. All they did was convince the POWs of the necessity of using peaceful means to achieve galactic domination. So out of a hundred thousand raging prisoners, who would never again see their unfortunate home world, they got a hundred thousand well-qualified speshes who were also fanatically loyal to humanity. Although the military was forbidden to recruit them, as far as Alex knew. In the military, their faith might acquire thousands of new believers, and the psychological blocks could be dashed to pieces.

“Captain?”

This fellow was very young, barely twenty. Obviously right out of the academy.

“Yes?”

“Do you have a vacancy for an engineer-spesh?”

For some reason, people were all so impatient today! Alex had had occasion to witness a hiring ritual conducted by his former captain, Richard Klein, or Roaring Richard, as others used to call him behind his back. During the hiring, Richard seemed to be a completely different person—thorough, patient, even somewhat drowsy. And those who approached his table behaved the same way . . .

“Yes, I do.”

“Will I suit you?”

The guy was also a typical Europeoid, and, of course, a spesh—otherwise, he could not be an engineer. His skin was really pink, ruddy. He had a bit of a baby face, with sparkling, slightly bulging eyes. His long, dark gray hair lay heavy on his shoulders, like a lead screen, which was its function, after all. Making a person practically resistant to radiation was no easy task. To give just one example—while at work, his testicles had to be retracted inside the pelvic cavity.

“Take a look at the contract,” said Alex, handing the fellow a copy. “Gluon reactors, have you had any experience with them?”

“No real work experience,” replied the youth absently, reading through the contract. “But I know them well. My last year of school, that’s all we studied. And I got here on a ship with gluon engines.”

“Did you get your training on Earth?”

“Yes, of course.” He paused to think about one of the contract stipulations, and it occurred to Alex that the young fellow might not be as naïve as he looked.

A sudden thought made Alex ask, “And what was the name of the ship that brought you here?”

“The Intrepid. It was a yacht, with a name like a military cruiser.” The fellow looked up from the contract, then nodded. “I like your offer. I don’t really want to fly large ships just yet. If you agree to take an engineer with only two weeks’ work experience, I’ll be on my way to pack.”

“Well, we’ll risk it, son,” said Alex, unsuccessfully trying to give his tone of voice a dash of Richard Klein’s haughtiness. “We all had to start somewhere, right?”

Of course, he wouldn’t tell the youth that the post of engineer was the only one where a young recent graduate would actually be preferred. The reason was that any experience working with one type of reactor did nothing to prepare you to work with another type. The behavior of the gluon stream was not really statistically predictable, and taking aboard a young novice, who was not overloaded with habits, would be better than working with an experienced veteran.

“Thank you,” said the youngster candidly. “You won’t regret it, sir! I, Paul Lourier, nineteen years of age, engineer-spesh, accept your contract.”

Unlike all the others interviewed so far, he did not even wait to see the ship. He just signed the contract. Alex promised himself that he’d fight to get the fellow a bonus at the first opportunity. Such acts of trust should be rewarded.

“May I?”

The next candidate was wearing a plaid kilt and a loose-fitting, bright blue shirt. He was sturdy, red-headed, but with his almond-shaped eyes, looked positively Asian. He had an earring in his left ear and a clip player in his right. His long hair was tightened into a braid. His cheeks bore iridescent spiral drawings—maybe tattoos, maybe just cosmetics. For a few seconds, Alex unsuccessfully tried to determine the man’s specialization, then gave it up and nodded. Poured a cup of sake.

This candidate also chose to take the bull by the horns.

“Do you need a navigator?”

“Yes.”

“Then take a look at this.”

From somewhere, he produced a pack of recommendation letters. Put them down before Alex.

The collection was impressive. Five years of service in the Imperial Forces on a great variety of vessels, from torpedo boats to battle cruisers. He had changed ships suspiciously often, but at the same time, his recommendations were stellar. “Energy conservation” . . . “Calculation of hyper-jump in a battle situation” . . . “During an instrument failure, accomplished ship orientation manually” . . . “Successfully repaired equipment . . . guided solely by intuition, despite a complete lack of experience in the area . . .”

“Puck Generalov, you’ve changed your place of employment rather frequently . . .” noted Alex. And something else bothered him about the stellar recommendations. But what was it?

“That’s just my personality.” The navigator straightened a fold on his kilt, threw one leg over the other, and took a tiny sip of sake. “Just personality. But no one has ever had any complaints about me as a professional.”

“Are you conflict-prone?”

“That would also be reflected in the documents, Captain.”

“That’s right. Still . . . I have a small ship. Will a job as a navigator on a yacht suit you?”

“Absolutely. I like small and fast ships.”

Generalov took out a crumpled pack of cigarettes, took one out, struck a match on the tabletop, and lit up. Then inquired, “By the way, I’m gay. Does that bother you?”

“Should it?” said Alex, confused.

“Well, you know, there are many different approaches to ethics . . .”

“I’m from Earth. You don’t have to worry about me being prejudiced,” answered Alex dryly. Something was still bothering him, but what was it? “I guess you’d want to see the ship? I expect all the crew members to show up for a meeting tomorrow morning.”

The navigator nodded again. And mentioned casually, “Oh, and by the way, I am also a natural. Would that be a problem?”

Alex was stunned, speechless.

Of course, not all astronauts were necessarily speshes. Only a few occupations absolutely required a modified body and mind—engineers, tactical commanders, linguists, and a few other rare professions. All the rest were theoretically open to the naturals. Alex knew some among ship doctors, among gunners . . . he even met one natural who had been a pilot, though the guy was very old. But to become a navigator! To hold in your mind the five-dimensional picture of the universe, fifteen hundred main hyper-channels, a minimum of thirty thousand known routes, and at least three hundred thousand gravitational peaks . . .

A navigator did not just have to have increased intuition and a sense of space just like a pilot’s. First and foremost, he had to have a mind that worked like a computer, a transformed nervous system with strengthened logical capacity and reduced emotional reactions . . . This was what had roused Alex’s suspicions. In all the recommendations, however stellar and laudatory, there was no mention of the word “spesh.”

“I don’t have to worry about your being prejudiced, right?” asked Generalov politely. Alex forced himself to nod.

“No. You don’t have to worry. I’m taking you aboard . . . that is, if the ship and the contract suit you.”

The kilt-wearing man watched him, picking at his ear clip. Maybe he was trying to tune it to another station, or maybe he was simply nervous.

“There’s the answer to your question,” he said all of a sudden.

“What question?”

“Why I change ships so frequently. You fell into the usual trap . . . it’s hard to admit to being prejudiced, but working alongside a natural is unpleasant. You’ll take me aboard and then try to get rid of me at the first opportunity. With the best of references, of course, because pilots can’t lie.”

“Yes, we can.”

“Don’t make me laugh, Captain. We haven’t signed the contract yet—I can ignore seniority for the moment. So let me just say . . .” Generalov puffed his cigarette and smiled, “ . . . this would, by the way, be another chance for you to back out. Who needs a troublemaker for a navigator? And no, Captain, you are not capable of lying. The capacity for love is removed in all pilots, and that’s very useful. Those who love are not inclined to take risks, except, of course, for the sake of those they love, and a pilot must be ready to die at any moment. But to balance it out, all your other moral qualities are enhanced—integrity, kindness, loyalty, generosity. I bet you’re the kind of guy who would jump out on the road to save a lousy mutt, and rescue kittens from a tree, and contribute to charity funds, and give alms to every beggar you pass. So for you, lying is an agonizing process, extremely unpleasant and almost impossible. Pilots prefer to keep things back, or to dodge the question rather than lie. You do resent me, don’t you?”

“No,” Alex forced himself to say.

Respect lit up Generalov’s eyes for a moment.

“You are a strong man, Captain. What’s your sign?”

“Aries.”

“And I’m a Virgo!” Generalov smiled. “It’s a good combination, you know. We’ll get along. Give me that contract of yours!”

Alex silently handed him the form.

Puck looked through the standard lines, shrugged at the numbers.

“Not bad . . .”

He licked his finger and pressed it down to the identification point. Then he separated the sheet in half, gave one part of it back to Alex, and stuck the other into a pocket on his kilt.

“You are now a crew member of the spaceship Mirror,” Alex told him.

At this Generalov straightened up, as though he had been pierced through with a stiff pole, and his face lost the smirk he’d been wearing.

“Your orders, Captain.”

Only his eyes still retained a tiny spark of irony.

“To change into a standard navigator uniform. Get rid of facial paint. Be at the ship tomorrow at 9 a.m.”

“Aye-aye, Captain.”

“That will be all.”

“Permission to spend the evening in the bar, Captain.”

“That is your business,” said Alex after a moment’s contemplation. “But I need you to be in top working shape in the morning.”

“Of course.” Puck seemed to be waiting for other orders.

“Have you been job hunting a while?”

“A month.”

“Okay. Are there any master-pilots here in the hall?”

Generalov did not even look around.

“Only one. The one who approached you first.”

“All right . . . see you tomorrow.”

After the navigator left, Alex threw back his sake in one gulp. Found the waiter with a glance, made a light gesture in the air, as if signing his check. That sly natural really put one over on him! One should never underestimate the genetically unaltered, never! First that absurd question about his attitude toward gays, as if it were any of the captain’s business who his crewmembers slept with. And then, after Alex had declared that he wasn’t biased, came the real blow.

A navigator who was a natural . . . impossible!

And what would be the reaction of the other crewmembers? Janet, who had five specializations? The young engineer, just out of college?

Well, if any of them protested, that would be another reason to back out . . . no, unfortunately, Janet had not signed the contract yet. Unless Paul Lourier refused to trust his life to a natural . . .

For a second, a crazy thought flashed through Alex’s mind—what if he were to ask, or even to order the engineer to oppose Generalov’s candidacy? Paul had signed the contract earlier, and, from a formal point of view, Alex had a duty to consider his opinion.

The thought came and passed, leaving an unpleasant trace. On one point Generalov was absolutely right. Lying was hard for pilots. This was part of the price they paid for the stars—along with their inability to love other humans.

A waiter came. Alex paid his bill and quickly left the dining hall. Two vacancies remained unfilled, but he had an idea about one of them. It was a crazy idea, but it was worth a try.

© 2014 by Sergei Lukyanenko.

Excerpted from The Genome by Sergei Lukyanenko.

Published by permission of the author and Open Road Media.

All rights reserved.

No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from Tor Books.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sergei Lukyanenko was born in Kazakhstan, then a republic of the Soviet Union. In 1985 he entered the Alma-Ata Medical University, where he began to write science fiction and publish his first books. Though Lukyanenko completed his medical course, he realized that he would never be a doctor. In 1997 he moved to Moscow, and since then has published prolifically. Many of his works have become bestsellers and have won science fiction awards. Night Watch and Day Watch were released as films in 2004 and 2006, respectively. Lukyanenko’s writing has been translated into more than twenty languages and continues to be hugely popular.

NONFICTION

Feature Interview: Kim Harrison

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Kim Harrison is the New York Times bestselling author of the Hollows series, about a young witch from Cincinnati who battles demons and vampires. She also writes the bestselling Madison Avery series for young adults.

This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by David Barr Kirtley and produced by John Joseph Adams. 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.

Why don’t you tell us a little bit about how you first got interested in reading fantasy and science fiction?

I grew up on it. We’re going to go way back to middle school. I’d always been a really good reader, but in middle school, they let me become a library aide. As bad as that sounds, I was a library aide for two years, and the library was stocked full of fantasy and science fiction. I made that library mine. I read everything in it. Believe it or not, they had Asimov in there, Heinlein, and Andre Norton, so I got a lot of my early science fiction from them. But they also had the fantasy, and I wasn’t reading just the Hansel and Gretel stuff. I later found out that they were actually research textbooks for the teachers because they were fairy tales from Germany and France and the U.K. They were telling the same story over and over in different ways, so I was seeing all these little differences that different societies would put into their fairy tales to make them unique and different and pertinent to them. I was soaking it all in, and that’s where I really got my start in reading science fiction and fantasy.

People used to kind of look askance at you if you were reading fantasy and science fiction. Did you encounter that at all among the librarians?

Yes. Going back to middle school and high school, I would always have a pleasure-reading book on my stack of books as I’d go from class to class. I used it to keep people away. I was very introverted. I had my close group of friends, but I really didn’t care what the cool kids were doing. I would use these books and the weirder the cover, the weirder the name, the more far out it was, the more they left me alone. So yes, I used it. Maybe I shouldn’t, but there it is.

What book was most effective at keeping people away because of what the cover looked like?

I’m going to say that my favorite one that I carried around was a collection of short stories by Asimov called Tomorrow’s Children. It was a big, thick, massive book. I’m tempted to go back to the library and see if they still have it, because it would have my name on it. My name would check it out again, and then I’d check it out again, and then I’d check it out again. I think I’m the only one who checked that thing out for the two years I worked in the library. That’s the one I used. Actually, that collection made such an impact that when I finally found publication, one of the first things I did with one of those bigger checks that I didn’t have to put towards food, heat, or rent was to track down a signed copy of that. That is one of my treasured things.

Speaking of publication, why don’t we talk a little bit about how you made that transition from being a reader to being a writer?

It was horrible and it was uplifting. Keep in mind that my story happened about fifteen years ago and we didn’t have ebooks. We didn’t have the self-publication. If you self-published, you were vanity press. So really the only way that you could do this and be considered a writer would be to have one of the Big Six publish your work. They were swamped at that point with manuscripts, like they are now, because the computer had become more popular. People thought that if they could put sentences on paper that they were a writer, which is kind of silly because you wouldn’t sit down and paint a picture and expect a museum to take it, but people assume that “I wrote this body of work, why aren’t you buying it, why isn’t it any good?” It’s a skill; it’s a talent. You have to work really hard at it.

I worked really hard at it, but it was hard. My first thing that I wrote was absolutely pathetic. They all are, but I thought they were good. I figured, “I’m just going to keep at this and rewriting it and rewriting it until somebody shows some interest.” Well, this was, like I said, about fifteen years ago, and the first person I sent my work off to was Tor. I got a lovely rejection letter back and I think I cried for about ten minutes. I took a walk and said, “I’m never going to do this again. Just never.” Well, that lasted about half an hour. Thirty minutes later, I’m back at the keyboard. So it’s like an addiction. If it’s in your blood, you can’t shake it.

Eventually, though, I found a writers’ critique group, and if there’s anybody out there who’s really serious about writing for a living, get yourself in a face-to-face writers’ critique group. I’ve heard about the online ones. You never get a chance to really see who you’re talking with and you don’t have the opportunity to evaluate how pertinent their advice might be, so that’s why I always say get yourself away from your desk, do something social—yeah, we have to be social—find a writers’ critique group that meets every week if you can. They’re in bookstores; they’re in libraries; they’re in coffee houses, and it’s not going to be easy to find them. If you do, get in there and start sharing your work, because these are the people who are going to go with you to the writer conferences where agents and editors go to find new talent.

That’s how I broke into print. I had a published author who took me under her wing, Faith Hunter. She’s still my best friend. I talked to her today. She took the whole group there and set up a party, and I met Richard Curtis, the man who eventually became my agent. But if not for her, I don’t know how it would have evolved. As much time as we spend alone working with our words, we have got to get out and do something social and interact with other people.

What conference was that where you met your agent?

That was a conference down in Atlanta. I’m not sure, but I believe it was a mystery writers’ conference. I don’t write mystery, but it worked. That’s where I met Richard Curtis. I went to a panel that he was on. I got to talk to him. I think I spent maybe five minutes with him, actually, because you have to be careful when you meet agents and editors not to swamp them and soak up their time and be the stalker. It’s more like a “Hi. This is who I am, this is what I write. I understand you sell this. Can I send you my synopsis?” Then, once you have that invite, you can put that in your cover letter, and they will remember you and think well of you at that point. If you just get that “yes, you can send it to me,” and then walk away. Now, I know things have really changed tremendously with the advent of ebooks and self-publication, so I don’t know how helpful my advice is anymore, but getting out and meeting agents and editors is never a bad idea.

So he sold your first book for you, and at that time, you were writing as Dawn Cook?

Yes, I was. That would be The First Truth.

And that was more sort of epic fantasy kind of stuff?

It was. I like to say it’s like Tolkien, only with a tiny, tiny cast. We never go anywhere. It’s really not like Tolkien at all. I really like going back and looking at my earlier work because watching it evolve has been really fascinating for me. When I first started, I had a very small cast and I was able to devote a lot of time to developing the characters. The book would span a year or six months, this huge amount of time, and I’ve been watching, as my skills increase, that my books now take maybe a week, maybe two. The cast is bigger and I’m involving world events rather than just this one little thing. But I’ve been able to pull the skills that I learned on those first books, of how to make a character memorable and important and kind of evolve them really quickly on the page. I’ve been able to pull that from my first stuff and put it into my latest things. So it’s been really interesting looking back and seeing how I’ve evolved my writing skills.

How did you go from Dawn Cook, the epic fantasy author, to Kim Harrison, the urban fantasy author?

That was a trip. Urban fantasy was really new; it didn’t even have a name yet. This was just about when Jim Butcher started writing and Charlaine Harris and [Laurell] Hamilton. Hamilton had really broken ground. She wasn’t the first, but she was the first who made it marketable. Then Butcher and Charlaine came along and then I was shortly behind them, but I was still writing as Dawn Cook. My publisher at Ace passed on the manuscript and so my agent shopped it around. It took about a year, actually, before somebody picked it up. What you read in Dead Witch Walking really is not what I wrote. There were so many tweaks and changes and shifts. It was more young adult. It was more quirky. I had puns all over the place, so it needed a lot of work. I really don’t blame Ace for passing on it, because it was not what you see on the shelf.

One of the odd quirks about the publishing industry is that book buyers will often give a new name more of a chance than they will an old name with a kind of “meh” track record. Now, the Dawn books were doing okay, but they hadn’t accelerated, so my new publicist wanted to make a clean break from the Dawn books. Since it was in a new genre, it really wasn’t an issue for me. My Dawn name really hadn’t taken off, so I said sure. My editor picked out the name. I was either going to be Kim Harrison or Lisa Harrison because she wanted me shelved right next to Hamilton. Yeah, there’s kind of a joke: If you’re going to write urban fantasy, you need to have a name that starts in H, because we’re all over there.

So she picked out my name and from a legal standpoint, it’s also easier to write a new series and change publishers by taking on a pen name because of the legalities. It’s just so much easier, so there are a lot of reasons why people will take pen names. For me, it was so that the books would have a better chance. And that’s also why the wig. I’d been doing publicity as Dawn for a while and my photo was out, and my editor really wanted a very sharp degree of separation so she said: “Get a wig; have some fun with it.” That’s what I did.

You don’t really have red hair?

No, I am actually a blonde. So there it is.

That’s interesting. So, tell us a bit more about Dead Witch Walking, just for people who haven’t read the series.

It’s really quirky. Dead Witch Walking actually started out as a short story. I was trying to break into print—this is even before the Truth books came out—and I wrote a short story called “Life is a Bowl of Cereal,” and it’s basically that first chapter in Dead Witch Walking. I was trying to get agent attention or editor attention, and the stuff that was making the short story market was really weird at that time. I knew I couldn’t match that level of weirdness, so I said, “Okay. You want weird. I’m going to put a pixie, a vampire, and a witch in a bar and see what happens.” I hate to tell people to pick up Dead Witch Walking cold and try to read it without knowing that yes, it starts very quirky and odd, but there is some substance here, there is some science. I’m basing the magic on science. It’s not all flight and fancy and silly stuff, but it sure starts that way.

Dead Witch Walking is basically a twenty-something witch living in modern day Cincinnati. Now here comes the quirky part. At this point, the human population has been decimated by a virus that was carried by tomatoes. That’s my nod to the movie Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. My sense of humor showing, whether it’s good or bad. A third of the human population has been wiped out, which has left the witches, werewolves, and vampires, who’ve been there all along, to sort of say, “Hey, we’re no longer a minority, let’s come out of the closet.” That is exactly what happened forty years before Dead Witch Walking starts. So at this point, magic is out, vampires are out. If you think your high school teacher was a werewolf, you know what? He probably was.

Rachel works for the police force that patrols and tries to keep tabs on the supernaturals. When Dead Witch Walking starts, she quits her job, which was a really bad idea, and she takes their best agent with her, who also has an agenda of her own. They move into a church, and they have a pixie backup, which sounds like a horribly bad idea, but this guy—he’s four inches tall, his name is Jenks, and everybody loves Jenks because he’s the family man. He’s the guy with the mortgage. He’s the one with the worries. He’s got fifty-four kids he has to feed. Nobody takes him seriously, but he’s the most dangerous one in the group because he can fly, he’s got this sword he knows how to use, and he’s not afraid to give you a lobotomy if you tick him off. That’s probably more than you ever wanted to know about Dead Witch Walking.

When you say that the magic is based on science, what do you mean by that?

I actually have a Bachelor’s degree in science. My dad, he’s scratching his head saying, “You went to school for science and you write books for a living,” and I just nod and say, “Yep, I use it every day, Dad.” It always bothered me, the black box of magic where you wave a wand and say a word and something happens. That just never pleased my sensibilities, so I tried to put a spin on the magic that goes back to science in some ways. The magic is run in my universe by ley lines—the idea of ley lines has been around for a long time. Not really popular until the last ten years or so. I take that, which is mythical, but then I go in and say, “Well, maybe it’s a rift in time where the energy is leaking through or maybe it’s the back end of a wormhole.” So I try to find a basis for it. It turns out they are a kind of slice in the fabric of time where you can get to an alternate reality where the demons have been and so it goes on. I do like basing things on science when I can.

And it was biology, right, that you studied?

Yes. Well, the degree is technically in science technology and something else, but my core of study was biology.

Was the idea of the GMO killer tomatoes inspired at all by your biology studies?

Yes, it is. I think we are doing a few dangerous things. Putting a beta-carotene gene into a rutabaga is fine, but when you start putting genes into your corn that they make their own toxins, that’s another story. People are not being careful with what they’re doing. That toxin that they’ve engineered into the corn, that’s great, except that toxin is in the pollen, and we’re breathing the pollen, and insects are eating the pollen and dying. We’re upsetting our food chain. Just because we can do it, we need to make sure that it’s the smart thing to do, that money is not the deciding factor. It should be: Is it good for the environment or are we screwing ourselves? So that is one of the reasons why I did choose a GMO to be the end of humanity’s power, because if we’re not careful, it’s going to be.

Do you ever get people who have strong feelings on that issue write to you?

I don’t and I think part of the reason is because the books are so far out there from the span of the people who are the movers and shakers and who are concerned with it. The people who are concerned with it would never pick up a book about a witch, a vampire, and a pixie. However, the people who are reading it are getting the message. Change sometimes happens very slowly and I’d like to think that maybe I’m helping make a change.

Tell us about why you decided to set the books in Cincinnati.

Actually, it’s all about location. My editor came to me very early on when we were doing the rewrite for Dead Witch Walking and she says, “From a marketing standpoint, it would be really great if we could set this in a real city.” So I literally took and opened up the map, and I said, “Okay, I can’t talk about East or West Coast because salt interferes with the magic, and I can’t do anything west of the Mississippi because I’ve spent my life on the east.” You’d pick right through it if I tried to put it in the desert. I needed it at a certain latitude because I wanted to use the seasons to help ground the books, so that took out the southern cities. I wanted a river to run through it. I wanted a city of a certain size so that there was mass transit but most people got around in their cars. So I looked at the map and I said, “Ah, it’s got to be Cincinnati.” I called up my editor and said, “I picked the city. It’s Cincinnati.” There’s this really long silence on the other end. I don’t think she was pleased with it being Cincinnati, but I started doing research on it and I really chose wisely. Cincinnati kept a lot of its old architecture. They’re the end of the Underground Railroad. They’ve got that world-class zoo that nobody knows about. They’ve got the Basilica there. A lot of those things that I talk about are really in the books, even the tunnels that are underneath the city. Those really exist. I had a chance to go down under them this summer. They’re down there; they look exactly like I thought they would. So Cincinnati was very fortuitous and I was really fortunate to have picked it.

Could you say a little more about the tunnels? What were they for?

The tunnels under Cincinnati are over a hundred years old. It used to be an old canal that they used for transport and the city fathers said, “We’ve got to get rid of this canal.” It was causing problems with cholera and whatnot, so they dredged it out and started putting in a subway system that was only going to be two or three miles long. Unfortunately, they ran into some trouble. World War II came along. They had some issues with kickbacks, and politics got in the way. They basically ran out of money. They did get large sections of it finished, but they’re empty. There are no facilities down there; there’s no electricity; there’s no water. They do use a portion of the tunnel for their phone lines, and I think they have a water pipe under there, which turned out to be not such a good idea, but they overbuilt it. Their rebar is like an inch thick and the cement is, like, feet. They treat it like a bridge; they have to go down there every two years and inspect it. They have tours that go down there. This summer, they made a special trip down there, and they took me and a film crew. That was fun. I’m a mess in the video because it’s dirty and dank and there’s no light, but I had a blast.

Was that difficult to arrange or did you just say, “Hey, I’m Kim Harrison, number one New York Times bestselling author,” and they let you down there?

It took my publicist and a film crew to arrange it. I probably couldn’t call them up and say, “Hey, I’m Kim Harrison; I want to go down there.” But my publicist had the backing of HarperCollins, the big name there, and then the film crew was there. So they worked it together to get me to go down there, but they do have tours that fill up very quickly about twice a year that go down. If you ever get the chance, do so. It’s really kind of cool.

You mentioned the Underground Railroad, too. Could you say a bit more about how that worked with Cincinnati and the Underground Railroad?

There are a lot of places that say they’re the end of the Underground Railroad. Detroit has one, because once they get across the river, they’re in a completely different country, but most people call Cincinnati the end of that particular branch of the Underground Railroad, because once they get across that Ohio River, their chances are much better that they won’t be pulled back. They actually have a museum there. I took some time and went through it. They have a slave pen right in their front. I’ve got goose bumps just thinking about it. I went to visit and did some research on it. That particular slave pen made such an impression on me that I had to put it into the books, and I was a little inventive with it. I believe White Witch, Black Curse is the one that I mention the Underground Railroad in. I said that the slave pen that they have on display is actually a fake. This is not true; this is me making this up. The real one, the one with the magic symbols and with all the power in it, is belowground in the area where you can’t get to. One of my main characters was really angry that they hid this from the general public until he got down there and felt the power behind it and realized that—to see it, touch it, and feel it was so powerful—they were right to hide it. Those feelings that Glen experienced were the same ones that I felt when I was there. That’s one of the reasons why I do like getting out and seeing the places that I write about.

I also heard you mention that in Cincinnati, there are these garden cemeteries that you really like?

Yes. Spring Grove Cemetery is one of the first and oldest garden cemeteries in the United States. Cincinnati used to be the fourth-largest city in the U.S. and a lot of the remnants from that era still linger. Spring Grove Cemetery is one of them. I did set a scene there, so I have been out there, and I’ve walked through it. It’s very peaceful and lovely. But Spring Grove came about as a way to rehouse the cholera victims of that century, and it’s kind of gruesome when you stop and think about it, but that’s one of the reasons why they wanted a garden cemetery.

A garden cemetery, as opposed to a regular cemetery, is one where not every grave has a huge headstone. Most of the graves are marked with a small plaque set level with the ground so you can still find them, but visually, it’s more open and more garden-like. It’s quite nice out there, actually.

Cincinnati, though, did have a problem for a long time with grave robbing, which I think is very cool, in a morbid sort of way. They hadn’t come up with any regulations on corpses, how to handle [the need for] cadavers that the medical schools were demanding. At this point in time, there was a huge demand for cadavers for the medical schools, and Cincinnati was just a short railroad ride from a lot of the big schools. Often times, you’d be in the ground for several hours, and then you’d be unearthed, stolen out of your grave, and put on a railroad car and shipped out, which is horrible. But they used to have people who would guard your grave for several days until your body had decomposed to the point where it was no longer useful, which is awful. I don’t think they do that anymore, but the fervor from people being upset that their relatives were being yanked out against their will and shipped off did help bring about the laws that are now in place to prevent it.

There’s actually a short story about that called “The Body Snatcher.” I think it might be by Robert Louis Stevenson.

It would not surprise me.

It was a really good story. So, is that cemetery where you took your author photo?

No, actually, my author photo is from a small cemetery in York County, South Carolina. It’s either South Carolina or North Carolina. We used to live right on the border, and I’m not sure which side of the border that cemetery was on. It’s a really nice cemetery. A lot of the graves are over two hundred years old. You can walk through it and see the family names and how people would have five or six kids. They’d live for a year or two. It’s kind of nasty, but there it is. It’s kind of comforting to know they’re all there, I suppose.

Let’s talk a bit more about the characters in these books. One thing I think is really interesting about the series is that your villains keep turning into good guys.

Yeah, that’s because I really like the bad boys. If you want to talk about Trent, there’s a reason why he kind of turned good. I really wanted my bad guy to be the suave, debonair, rich kid who had everything, which is how Trent started. And I wanted my good guy, the one that Rachel would fall in love with and change and grow, to become a full person, would be the downtrodden, smart, intelligent, very wickedly clever guy. That’s where Nick comes in.

But Nick turned out to be a nasty guy. He never really understood Rachel, and he kept betraying her, thinking that it was for the best. At the same time, Trent started showing some redeeming features that I completely didn’t expect, but I didn’t want him to be the good guy. I wanted him to be the bad guy, which is why he does all these awful things in the first half of the series. It was when he started making decisions that he knew might please Rachel that I realized that my idea had gone horribly wrong, and my downtrodden, smart, intelligent, wickedly clever man was really a not nice person, and my spoiled rich brat of a powerful man had the biggest potential to grow, learn, and use his resources for the greater good. It took a long time because I had dug a huge hole that Trent had to pull himself out of. I mean, he was a bad man. He was doing bad, despicable things, and it took a lot of creative mythology to show “Oh, he did this to save his species. Well, wouldn’t you kill a man to save your species?” I probably would, but it would have to be for a very big reason, and slowly I pulled him out of this hole that I’d dug and realized that Trent and Rachel were probably meant for each other, because he was challenging her view of the world just as much as she was challenging his. She was changing him. She was causing him to make different decisions, and at that point, I threw it all up in the air and said, “Okay, let’s do it, let’s see if it works. She hasn’t liked anybody else I’ve thrown at her.” I think it has worked. It’s taken a long time, but I was fortunate to have the twelve, thirteen books to work in, and I do love the long-running romance.

Could you talk a little bit about Rachel’s relationship with Ivy?

Ivy was also one of the people that I showed Rachel as possibly being a life-mate. I like Ivy; she’s one of my favorite characters. I cried for her. I’ve used vampirism as a metaphor for drug abuse and spousal abuse, and being this strong person who is manipulating someone weaker than them and making them love them for all the wrong reasons. Seeing Ivy pull herself out of that and try to overcome her past and become the person she wants to be has been absolutely wonderful. I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from readers saying, “No, no, these two should be together. They need to be together,” and I can agree with that, except that Ivy—she has made huge steps, but I was concerned that if these two ladies got together as a happily-ever-after that her past was going to ruin it, that she’d fall back into old patterns. It would be exciting and fun to write, and I didn’t want to do that because I’ve seen Ivy grow. I’ve seen her become who she wants to be and I couldn’t risk Ivy becoming that person again that she was. I did try to make a clean break of it, and it has been hard because I didn’t want to get rid of Ivy from the books. I needed to have her there. She was important to me, and she was important to the readers.

I think the way I’ve kind of wrapped it up has worked. We’ll see. I haven’t got the readership feedback yet from this last book. It was important to me though that Ivy not end up with a guy. She needed to find her soul mate, and it was going to be a woman. I’ve known that for a long time, and it needed to be someone that Ivy could still help because Ivy needs to help somebody to feel good about herself. She couldn’t help Rachel anymore, so that was another reason why I ended that relationship. The end of the books to me has always been Rachel saving Ivy’s soul. Right from book number one that was going to be my ending, so we do see a return of Ivy a little bit more in this last book. We’ll see how it goes. I’m really anxious to see how the readers react to it.

Speaking of that, when we interviewed Charlaine Harris, she mentioned that some readers just had really over-the-top, emotional investments in who Sookie ended up with in the end. Have you had people who have really extreme views about who Rachel should end up with?

I did a couple years ago. One of the responsibilities of the storyteller is to know their audience and be able to tell the story that they want but remember that they are still a storyteller, and they have a responsibility to the readers. It’s a fine balance. I watched what happened with Charlaine, and I felt really bad for her because I know that when you invest, as a writer, that much time into something, that you want to end it the way you feel it should end. There’s no reason that she should feel like she needs to change it. But I watched what happened, and I said, “I can’t let this happen to me because I love these books too much.” So I spent a lot of attention on making sure that the reader knew where I was going. I wasn’t going to tell them how we were going to get there, but I made sure they knew “This is where we’re going. This is where the story is headed.” Ivy’s important, but Ivy and Rachel’s story has got to part. They’re always going to be together in some way or fashion, but if it’s not the way you want it, this is why. I was careful to tell the reader ahead of time why this was happening and why this couldn’t happen and why this had to happen. Fortunately, I write far ahead of my work schedule, so I was able to go back several books at this point and do some tweaks.

I think it worked. I am also very active with my readership. They know where they can find me. They know where they can ask me questions. I’m on my Facebook; I’m on my blog. That’s me answering those posts. That’s not my assistant, because I don’t have one. I have seen—at first, there was a big flurry of, “you better not do this, you better not do that,” but then they got the next book, and they read it and saw where the storyline was going, and it’s calmed down quite a bit. Of course, I won’t know until that book comes out. I know I’m going to get some flak from a few people, but for the most part, if you end the series right, there should be no regrets.

Yeah, and I mean, writing a thirteen-book series just seems like a really ambitious project. Looking back on it now, do you have any advice you would give or any thoughts about writing that many books?

My advice would be don’t ever sit down and try to plot out a thirteen-book series. Break it up. When Dead Witch Walking was accepted, I thought, “Yay, three books. I can tell a good story in three books.” Then it was extended to six, and then it was like, “Oh, I can slow down. I can take my time.” Every renewal, it was like, “Oo! Now I can explore this. Now I can explore that.” I never expected thirteen books. It has been an honor and a treat to be able to work with these same characters in the same world for so long. It’s kind of a double-edged sword, though, because it does take up your time, and all those ideas that have been building up for the last ten years, they’re going to come out eventually. Locking them up in a cabinet is very frustrating at times. But I would never in a million years sit down and say, “Okay, in book one I’m going to do this, then in book five I’m going to do this, then in book thirteen it all comes together.” You can’t do that. The writing is so fluid and organic that I don’t even try to plot out the book that I’m not working on. I love to plot. I’m a religious plotter, but I only plot the book I’m working on because I know that when I get to the end, there’s going to be so many threads and trails and new ideas that I’m going to want to bring to that new book that it would be useless to try and figure out where it was going until I was actually ready to move forward.

I heard you say in an interview that Jack L. Chalker taught you how to write a series.

Oh yeah, the Well World. That was my favorite series when I was growing up. I learned from him how to carry on a series and how to keep it fresh and entertaining and make it meaningful to the world you’re living in. In one of the books, they’ve got a drug called sponge, and I was just fascinated with the idea of that, so that’s probably why I’ve got Brimstone in my series. In fact, the one I’m working on right now has a drug in it. I’m going to say it is probably his fault. But being able to see his books—they’d come out with one every year, and every year, I’d read the whole series up to that point. I’ve read the first one many, many times, and just seeing how he tied them all together is kind of my backbone there.

When you say the one you’re working on now, do you want to tell us a bit more about that?

It doesn’t even have a title. I haven’t shared it with my editor yet. I’m on the cusp of starting to share this with other professionals, and I’m really excited about it. I’m not really saying a whole bunch because there could be big changes in it, but Peri kind of picks up where Rachel left off. Peri is in the top of her field. She has a very dangerous job; it’s exciting. She knows who she is and she’s good at it. She’s got everything the way she wants, and then by page eight, the rug gets pulled out from under her, and she realizes that she’s not the person she thought she was. It goes from there, but it’s much faster paced. It’s more thriller-ish. If I have to put a genre tag on it, it’s more thriller than urban fantasy, although I cannot stray far from my roots. So there is . . . I don’t want to call it magic. I like calling it accelerated science. It’s when science has gone so far that these abilities that science has given us look like magic. It’s out there. A lot of the popular movies right now have it. It’s kind of like a mix between Bourne Identity and Minority Report. It’s really cool. It’s fast. I’m also writing from third person now. I feel like I’ve got a lot that I can say to the male readership. I have a lot of male readers. A third of my readership is male, but I want to tap into it a little bit more, and I’m hoping this helps. I’ve got two black belts: one in Hapkido and one in Tae Kwon Do. So I like bringing this to my fight scenes. You can kind of see it in Rachel, but in this new Peri novel, I can really bring it out a little bit more, because like I said, her job is very high risk.

You mentioned that the book kind of draws inspiration from Minority Report, Paycheck, Inception, that kind of thing. Do you expect this to appeal to a more science fiction-oriented audience?

I’m hoping that it does. I love the science. The fantasy works for me, but my favorite movie is probably Blade Runner. I love getting into the science stuff, and Paycheck, Minority Report, and Bourne Identity—you wouldn’t know it by looking at me, but that’s my bread and butter. I love those movies. If it’s got Tom Cruise in it, I’m there watching it, because he always plays really interesting, weird characters that jump out and say “This is different.” That’s really kind of my target. I’m really excited about it.

Actually, it’s funny. I wanted to ask you about this, and this is like something out of a Philip K. Dick story, but you’ve talked about when you started the Kim Harrison pseudonym, that you had to keep that secret for a while, and so you would have to tell people, “Call me Kim, don’t call me Dawn. You can’t blow my cover.”

I had to do that for a couple of years. We kept a really tight lid on it for quite a while. I was really surprised. There were people in the publishing industry who knew, of course, but they kept it very quiet. At the time, I was actually living in South Carolina, very rural, and if people knew I was writing about witches and vampires? Now it’s more acceptable, but ten years ago, they would frown at you. These are God-fearing people who go to church twice a week: Wednesday and Sunday, and don’t work on Sunday. I’d get weird looks just because I was out in my garden working on Sunday. I mean, God-fearing people, and if they knew I was writing witches and vampires, I would have no friends at all. So I was very eager to keep it quiet as well. But as time went on, it became more acceptable and attitudes shift and change a little bit. I was able to let that go. It’s been really nice the last couple years to be able to use Kim and Dawn interchangeably. It’s out. I did a Locus article where it was publicly announced, which was kind of nice. I have a feeling that eventually, maybe with the beginning of this new series, that the wig is going to finally go away. I’m ready to get rid of the wig, and I think I can do that now that the Harrison books are so well established. There’s no chance that the Dawn stuff is going to interfere. I’m ready to do that, and I’m looking forward to it, but not for this last tour. This last tour, I will have the red wig.

Were there any times in that period where your cover was almost blown, or someone got an inkling, or anything like that?

There were a couple times, and I did have to delete a couple posts here and there. But people were really understanding about it. Now my biggest problem is that I don’t know, when I’m out doing public stuff, if people know me as Kim or if people know me as Dawn. Just the other day, I was on a phone conversation prepping for another interview, and I introduced myself as Dawn and the woman was like “Well, when Kim gets here, we’ll get started.” I was like, “No, no, no, I’m Kim Harrison, this is the same person.” So that has been a challenge, to know who’s who. It’s really interesting. A lot of people think it’s weird, but people have so many names anyway. I am Dawn. I am wife. I am mom. I am sister. I am daughter. We call ourselves many things. So Kim has evolved into my work name, so to speak. When I’m out pushing the books and I’m at events, I’m Kim. If somebody calls me Dawn, that’s cool, but it really doesn’t matter.

I know some people are going to want me to ask about film and TV adaptations. Do you want to talk a little bit about the CW adaptation?

Yes, CW had the rights for a short time. They’ve since reverted back to me. One of the few stipulations I gave my agent was that if somebody was interested in the Hollows that I didn’t want my rights to sit in a drawer year after year after year. Well, they just sat on it and did nothing. I’ve seen other authors do that, and sometimes it pays off, but I didn’t want to lose control for that amount of time. So CW had it. They had somebody working on the pilot. I liked the direction they were going. It was a very narrow slice of the Hollows that they were focusing on, but it was okay. But they kept asking for less and less magic, and I think everybody kind of lost interest in it because one of the things that make the Hollows special is the magic mythology. When that got taken out, it was like anything else you’d see out there. They lost interest, and the rights reverted back to me. I’m open to having the Hollows picked up again. Big screen, small screen, but I’m not really pinning my hopes on it. I think that this new thing I’m working on with Peri has a lot more marketability at this point. It fills a niche that’s there, that’s hard to write in. I’m really anxious to see if I’m able to pull it off.

When they wanted less magic, was that just mostly because of a special effects budget sort of stuff?

I have no idea. The communication really wasn’t as good as I hoped it would be, so I don’t have a good answer for that.

Because I heard you say that they were going to take out Jenks? How could you take out Jenks?

Yes, they were going to take out Jenks. I think they were going to take out Jenks because they were afraid he was going to make the whole thing look silly. It’s true. A four-inch man with wings could really make it look silly. It depends heavily on how he’s treated, and if you’ve heard the audiobooks—my reader is Marguerite Gavin—and she does a wonderful job of making Jenks, who is small and she has a high voice, sound serious. Someone who counts, someone who matters, and someone who is dangerous. That’s really hard to do, and that’s one of the reasons why I was so glad to get her as a reader. Now, translating that same power and intensity to a small screen might be more difficult. I can see why they took him out, but by taking him out, they took out the heart of the Hollows. He holds everything together. He is the everyman, and when he’s gone, it would be harder for the person watching to actually identify with the whole crew, because he is the one who is like everybody else, even though he’s four inches tall and has wings.

Another thing I wanted to mention is you say you don’t like coffee, and I also don’t like coffee. It makes me feel really in the minority sometimes, so I was glad to hear someone else doesn’t like coffee.

Yep, I think I’ve had coffee twice in my life, and both times it has ended up back in the cup. My husband likes it. I can’t stand it. I am a tea drinker, which may be looked down upon, but hey, it’s what I am.

And there’s the demon coffee in the Hollows series, right?

Yes. Two shots of espresso, Italian blend, light on the froth with a splash of cinnamon on it, yes. That’s actually how I take my Chai tea. Every time Rachel is rhapsodizing over coffee, that’s me really enjoying a good cup of tea.

I have to say, looking at people’s Twitter accounts, I’m struck by how often they mention “coffee drinker” as one of the things they list in their hundred-character bio. As a non-coffee drinker, I just don’t get it, but it’s obviously central to a lot of people’s identity.

I never noticed that. I’m going to have to pay more attention.

Speaking of Twitter, I did want to ask . . . your Twitter handle is “burningbunnies”? I was just curious what the origin of that is.

Burningbunnies. I think of ideas as sweet and innocent. They’re like little bunnies. You see them there. They’re sweet; they’re innocent; they’re soft; they’re harmless. You can pick them up. You take your bunny idea in, and you pet it, feed it carrots, and take care of it. Eventually, like bunnies do, you get more ideas and more ideas, and pretty soon your desk is overrun with burning bunnies. You corral them up with pen and ink, put them in a box, and send them off to New York where they just let them go rampant. Eventually, they package them up and put them on a shelf where people walk by and pick up these sweet, innocent, unsuspecting little books and open them up. Hopefully, if there’s luck, they will start their own burning bunnies from that one. That’s kind of what I think about, burning bunnies.

Kim and/or Dawn, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you. It’s been a lot of fun.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is produced by John Joseph Adams and hosted by: David Barr Kirtley, who is the author of thirty short stories, which have appeared in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Lightspeed, in books such as Armored, The Living Dead, Other Worlds Than These, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and on podcasts such as Escape Pod and Pseudopod. He lives in New York.

Feature Interview: Steven Gould

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Steven Gould’s first novel, Jumper, was adapted into a big-budget movie starring Samuel L. Jackson and Hayden Christensen that bears almost no resemblance to the book. Steve is now working with James Cameron on the upcoming Avatar sequels, and is also the current President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. The fourth book in his Jumper series, Exo, is out now.

This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by David Barr Kirtley and produced by John Joseph Adams. 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.

So your new book is called Exo, and it’s the sequel to Jumper. For people who haven’t read Jumper, what is it about?

Jumper is about a teenager who discovers that he has the ability to teleport, under the sort of circumstances where anyone would want to be someplace else. That’s also the reason the book was one of the top 100 banned books in America from 1990 to 1999.

Do you want to explain a little bit more about why it got banned?

It was a “best book for young adults” from the American Library Association, which means it goes into a lot of libraries, including middle grade libraries as well as high school libraries. The two most objectionable scenes for a parent are on page two and page nine, so they were able to pick up this book that their child has brought home from the library and turn to something that they found awful. On page two, we have a scene of impending child abuse by a parent, and then on page nine, we have a scene of impending sexual assault by a group of people on the same child. In both cases, these are the impetus for Jumping, but for some reason some parents look at something in a book and see something awful happening, and think that if their child reads that, it’s going to happen to them. To me, that just doesn’t make sense. In this case, we’re talking about a runaway kid, and I think it’s a valuable thing for people to know that maybe, if you run away as a young teen, you might be subject to predation.

When you wrote the book, was that on your mind—that these two horrifying scenes were right at the beginning and that people might have this kind of reaction to the book?

Not at all. The main point was that I needed two horrible things to happen that would, if you had this ability, be the impetus to exercise that ability. If you’re going to do something unusually difficult, or just unusual, you need motivation, and that’s why I put those right at the beginning.

Tell us about this unusual ability. You said Davy develops this ability to teleport; how did you get interested in writing about teleportation and how did you want to depict it in your story?

Teleportation has always been one of those great things; one of those “if I had one paranormal ability, what would it be?”, and teleportation has always been up there for me, if for no other reason than all that time you spend in an airport terminal waiting for canceled flights or flights that are delayed. But really, the book is about escape; teleportation is a metaphor for escape, for leaving a situation that is totally and completely un-endurable. Like Davy, I, too, was a child of an active alcoholic when I was a teenager. My father, fortunately, has been sober for over thirty years now, but at that time he was emotionally abusive, so I was working on issues of my own there.

You say that teleportation is treated as a metaphor in this book, but the book does treat the teleportation in a very scientifically rigorous way. At least, it thinks through very carefully all the practical implications. It’s not treated in a magical way.

While teleportation itself is probably not possible, I am very consistent in looking at the implications of the kind of teleportation I have, which is sort of like opening a hole between two different places, and what that requires.

For instance, one of the early things he discovers in Jumper is that he does not carry momentum with him when he teleports. He finds, when falling off a low cliff, he teleports away and has none of the velocity that he was carrying. He starts thinking about it, and realizes that he goes from higher and lower latitudes on earth all the time, which would change his rotational velocity by several hundred kilometers an hour, and if he was carrying those changes in velocity, he would appear in different places and smash through the closest wall with lethal impact. While each of the four books does things with teleportation that the previous books have not, I’m very careful to stay true to the original implications and conditions in the first book.

In terms of the first book and teleportation, how much of that was, “this is how I think teleportation ought to work,” and how much of it was, “here’s the story I want to tell, so I need to make the teleportation work in such a way that I can tell the kind of story I want to tell”?

The way teleportation works started out as having to be that way because of the needs of the story, but once I had those certain circumstances, then I was going on from there to “Well, if that’s the case, what does that imply?”, and that started driving various aspects of the story.

Could you give an example that isn’t too much of a spoiler?

Davy is forming a Davy-shaped hole between two places and then he’s going through that hole, but if he’s chained to a physical object on one end of that with handcuffs, it doesn’t do him any good; he actually starts to go through that hole and nearly dislocates his arm as a result. So there were some implications in that for the following book, Reflex, and as a result, that drove something involving opening a hole between two places and leaving it open.

This idea that if he gets handcuffed, for example, he can’t just jump away is consistent with teleportation as you’ve laid it out, but it also increases the drama because it makes it easier for you as the author to put him in danger, since he can’t just escape.

Exactly.

And he’s in a lot of dangerous situations in these books.

And in the last two books, which he’s in, but the main character is his daughter—and she is also in various dangerous positions.

When I read this book as a kid, the first book, it dealt a lot with terrorism and that really made a big impression on me, and I think you moved away from terrorism in the subsequent books. Do you want to talk about why you decided to make that transition?

The first book was written between 1990 and 1991, so we’re nine years pre-9/11. At that time, the biggest problems with terrorism were various hijackings, some that involved a lot of deaths. There was the infamous hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship, and I thought that would be something that a guy who could teleport could do something about, and so that became one of the plot elements of the first book. But I had written three other books after Jumper before coming back to that, so I decided I was ready to write a story about what would happen if Davy did get captured and someone held on to him for a long time. I started that book—and 9/11 happened. Several of the scenes in the first Jumper, besides dealing with terrorism, take place at the World Trade Center, and while I was not doing specific terrorism in the second book, I actually had to put down the book for nine months while I was dealing with that aftermath and didn’t finish it until 2003.

And then evil corporations and government agencies moved to the forefront as the adversaries in the book.

This Mega Corp shadow organization is manipulating world events to increase the profit of their various corporations, and have enough power to motivate world leaders to behave in certain ways, or they have people in government. And unfortunately, while not a true thing, it became more and more apparent in the early 2000s that corporations were far more concerned with corporate profits than they were with what was good for society or the world in general. I must admit, I was motivated to a certain extent by that kind of thing when I chose them as ongoing villains.

You mention that Davy has a daughter that shows up later in the series, and I heard you say that your publisher actually thought the books were becoming too YA and wanted you to add more adult characters, or the viewpoints of adult characters, to pull the books back from being too YA.

That was a response to Impulse. When I first turned it in, it strictly had the first-person viewpoint of Cent, the daughter; I’m not sure if it was the YA aspect itself, or just that it was just so different from the previous books. So I actually went in and added viewpoint scenes from Davy and Millie, which are third-person scenes, that gave a different viewpoint and a few different things they’re dealing with in parallel to Cent’s story. In a sense, I have John Scalzi to thank, in that, looking at what he did with The Last Colony and then going back to the same story with Zoe’s Tale, I saw you could do interesting things around the same events. So I was dealing with a secondary storyline by adding those other scenes, and they were much happier with that.

I think that’s indicative, though, of how these books straddle the boundary between YA fiction and adult fiction. I don’t know if those categories even existed at the time you wrote the original Jumper, but these books clearly strike a big chord with teenagers. To what degree do you see them as books for teens and what sort of responses do you get from teens in particular to them?

They’ve always been my response to my introduction to science fiction; the stuff that thoroughly got me early on were Heinlein’s juveniles, which is what they called them back then, and were books that were targeted at teens, but those books have been published continuously now for over fifty years and have always had both a YA and an adult audience, because the books are written in such a way that either can read them. And that’s where I’ve been living with my fiction. I’ve had kids with an abusive home life email me and say, “This book saved my life,” or, “This book let me get away. It wasn’t physical, but it let me know that there are other people out there having things happen that were comparable to mine, and that they got through them and survived and had a life afterwards.”

Even if you don’t have an alcoholic parent who’s heaping tons of abuse on you, when you’re a high school kid—a kid at that age trying to work the transition between childhood and adulthood—everything is wrong and everything is messed up. Look at Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer; that worked so well because high school is hell. No matter what, high school is hell.

I understand you have two daughters, I think one or both of them are teenagers, and so you’re seeing things now from the parent side. I imagine, from your books, that this is affecting your storytelling as well.

Absolutely. I say that all of the Jumper books are very personal, in that they have to do with my own life. We already talked about the first one. Reflex is ten years after the first book, and ten years after the first book within the book’s timeline, and starts with Millie and Davy arguing about whether or not to have kids, and you have Davy being reluctant because he didn’t have the best parenting, and he’s afraid of inflicting similar trauma upon his own kids. I had that exact same argument with my wife. And then, jump another large time period, and I have teenage daughters at the time I wrote Impulse. One of my daughters was already in college at the time, but the other daughter was in the middle of high school. Plus the fact that Davy undergoes significant trauma in Reflex, so he has a little bit of PTSD that he has to struggle with, and that his daughter has to struggle with for her to be able to have a life, because he’s a little paranoid, and he’s got very good reason to be paranoid, but that doesn’t mean he should be clamping down on his teenage daughter. It’s about me dealing with that boundary of where do you draw lines on your daughter’s activities? At what point do you let them struggle with their own problems and come up with their own answers?

In this last one, there’s some of that, but we’re dealing with stuff that is more wish fulfillment than all the other three books put together. In a way, it goes back to me as a teenage boy—I think I was fourteen years old—watching on this four-inch black-and-white television in my kitchen in Honolulu as Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. The desire for space travel has definitely influenced the very last book. I have to say that Canadian Commander Chris Hadfield deeply influenced that book in a way.

That’s interesting. He was actually our guest on episode 100.

Obviously, any astronaut who makes it into space—and the guys who stay for months on the International Space Station—are all phenomenal people, but the way he showed the expression of some form of art in space travel, engaging the public on social media about science and the dreams and aspirations of exploration; the music bit and the famous Shatner tweets. Absolutely amazing.

Let’s talk about the latest book, Exo, which, as you say, deals with space exploration in a way. Do you want to talk about that? And why is it called Exo?

It’s called Exo because all of the books are single-word, two-syllable titles. But yeah, “Exo” means outer, like exo-planets, which are outside of our solar system. In this case, it’s getting outside of our atmosphere.

I thought maybe it had to do with Exo-suit or something, because the character Cent in the book is starting to use her teleportation power to try and get higher and higher into the sky and she gets to the point where she starts needing a high-altitude suit to keep her safe.

That’s true. Cent wants to go outside, and I guess it’s a metaphor for her childhood, too; that point where parents want you to stay in the yard and there’s a time when you want to go outside. And she does. They have issues with the corporation that is trying to get them. Besides wanting to get out into space because it’s just plain cool, I think she also had the realization that, “here’s some place they can’t follow me; they can’t mess with us.”

This book has such a quality that I associate with science fiction novels I read when I was a kid, of having an excitement about space travel and the mechanisms of space travel. I can really imagine kids reading this book and getting interested in being astronauts or space scientists; things like that.

That would please me more than anything. Going all the way back to those Heinlein juveniles, this is definitely a response as well to Have Space Suit—Will Travel. I hadn’t thought about it enormously, but it’s just so clear in retrospect. I’ve read that book so many times. Of course, in that book all the bad guys are out in space, but still. We’ve been better over the years; we’ve had far more nations, far more genders, far more ethnicities of people who have gone into space, but there’s this definite sense of “the Western civ white guys,” and I definitely wanted to open up some of that.

The character of Cent in this book has a very strong feminist outlook, with her jokes about “manned missions.”

Right. When someone talks about a manned mission, she says, “No; it’s a womaned mission.” You know I have this current gig with James Cameron, and we had a lot of conversations about space travel, among other things, and one of the things I noticed, when talking about the potential Mars stuff, was that he never said “manned-mission” once. Whenever he was talking about a mission that involved humans on board, he would call it a “piloted mission.” I found that impressive.

Do you want to say a little bit more, for people who don’t know, about what your involvement with James Cameron is?

I was hired to both be in the room while we worked on the plots for the next three Avatar films, and then I am currently working on writing corresponding books for the four movies, which includes the first movie, which has never been made into a novel.

So you’re actually having creative input on the upcoming movies?

I was in the room for five months with four wonderful screenwriters and James Cameron and a writer’s assistant and an archivist, and we were working on plots and details for all that time. I would say we all had input. Without a doubt, Cameron had this skeleton of the overarching idea for these movies that was in place ahead of it, but we all helped to fill that out.

I imagine you can’t say much about it . . . but is there literally anything you can say about the content of those movies, or what you contributed?

I can say that there are twelve people who have walked on the moon; there are only three who have been to the bottom of the Challenger Deep, and one of those was James Cameron. So it’s safe to say there will be water.

You’ve had some other dealings with Hollywood. Your novel Jumper was turned into a movie, and we had some people who wanted me to ask you about that. Jason Gurley says, “I’d love to hear some bits about the movie adaptation and what he thought of it.” Is there any inside info you can give us about the Jumper movie?

If I have any disappointment, it’s that they didn’t tell their own story as well as they could have. It was not an adaptation after fifteen minutes or so; they go off in places that were not in the book at all. They still incorporated elements from Jumper, but they wanted multiple Jumpers and these Paladins who hunt down and kill Jumpers, but I think they cut their story too short. If you watch the deleted scenes that are on the DVD, they are all character development—the sort of stuff we writers complain about all the time in movies. I think you could still make an interesting Jumper movie or series, but I think it would have to be more of a mini-series instead of a feature film.

You actually wrote a whole novel detailing the character development for the character Griffin from the movie. Tell us about that experience.

It was interesting, because I had to send those chapters out to one of the executive producers, a woman named Stacy Maes—a very nice woman—who would verify whether or not I was going in places that were explicitly contradicted by the movie. I had seen all five scripts, so I knew roughly where they were going before they started filming, but then they started making decisions as they were going along.

For instance, partway into the very first scene with Jamie Bell, who can do a perfectly fine American accent, and I’d written a third of the book at this point with an American character whose name is Griffin, Doug Liman says, “Try that scene in your own accent,” which is this Northern England accent from Leeds, near Scotland, and Doug says, “We’ll just go with that.” Fortunately, I could make Griffin’s family expatriates; I didn’t have to uproot them from where they were in San Diego. It did change the shape of the book to a certain extent.

I heard some great stories about the filming. Apparently, every time Jamie Bell was in a scene with Hayden Christensen, Hayden’s acting rose a level as the Griffin-character was getting in the Davy-character’s face, and it just brought up the stakes in the performance.

I also heard an interesting story about Hayden Christensen. I know a lot of people don’t like him, or they think his acting is too wooden, but this sort of sold me on him, at least as a person. Doug Liman told this story in an interview, talking about how he was interviewing all these “hot young actors” for the part. He asked Hayden, “Okay, so what are you working on now?” And all the other actors had been saying, “Oh, I’m working with this hot director, on this project and this project,” and Hayden Christensen just said, “Uh, I rented a Bobcat and I’m gonna landscape my parents’ yard.” Liman went, “But you’re not going to tell me about the movie projects you’re working on right now?” And he says, “Oh, no; I really want this part, honest. I’m not trying to say I don’t. But if you call? It’s hard to hear the cell phone over the Bobcat, so you might have to call twice.” I thought that was funny.

One line that Griffin had in the movie that kind of struck me was when he says that the Paladins had been hunting Jumpers since the Middle Ages, and it seems to me that it’d be very hard to hunt someone who can teleport with just a horse and a sword. Did you think about that at all? Or is that something you dealt with at all writing the Griffin story?

The point is, and I think it’s appropriate, that regardless of the ability to Jump away and go someplace else, people form associations and relationships, so you can track down people. It was not in the actual script, but there was a treatment that talked about the background of the Paladins that maintained that Napoleon had a Jumper working for him who would take orders to his various generals so that he was able to respond so much faster in all the battles, and this is one of the reasons for his domination of Europe.

Do you think you’ll ever deal with more of the history aspect of it in your mainline Jumper series?

No. Unless for some reason we bring in another Jumper or some sort of record that shows there have been Jumpers elsewhere. Right now I’m not particularly interested in that. If I’m going to do anything, I’m more curious about where the energy comes from for Jumping, for tearing holes open between various areas. And if it comes from some place, where is that? And what’s happening there? There’s one joke in Reflex where the bad guys have brought in a physicist to try and figure out what was happening with Jumping, and he’s interviewing Davy and he says something like, “So where does the energy come from?” Davy says, “Every time I jump, every cup of tea in the world drops a fraction of a degree in temperature.”

I think that sort of scientific outlook is one of the things that make these books so interesting, and in Exo I was just blown away by how much scientific detail there was in terms of the suit and other stuff that happens later in the book. How much research and/or help did you have for this book?

I certainly did a lot of research, but the suit itself is a mechanical counter-pressure suit. The first one of those was created and tested in the ’60s by this scientist who worked for NASA who, in a vacuum chamber, walked around for forty-five minutes doing these incredible bends and contortions that you cannot do in a traditional space suit. And it’s a suit that does not hold air; it’s reinforcing your skin. Your skin is perfectly capable of dealing with the vacuum if it has reinforcement, so if you can maintain physical pressure against your skin uniformly, that’s all you need, and it has some extreme advantages, in that the biggest problem with being in space, especially within the orbit of, say, the asteroid belt, is getting rid of heat—keeping yourself from cooking in your own waste heat. When you have a mechanical counter-pressure suit, you can cool yourself just like you do on Earth, by sweating. They were seriously examining this, trying to solve this particular problem, especially when they get to the point where they want to put people on Mars, because our current suits are so heavy. Even at a third of our gravity, they’re going to make doing any sort of work on the planet very difficult.

Obviously outer space plays a huge role in this book and there is certainly stuff towards the end that suggests a direction that future books might go in, in terms of even more outer space. Is that something you’re planning to pursue?

Yes. The question is, what is the story you tell there? And I have to think about that. Right now, I have these other books to do for Lightstorm.

Are these the Avatar books?

Yeah. Lightstorm is Cameron’s production company. And I want to write the sequel to 7th Sigma, my little metal robot bugs eating all the metal in the American southwest. Then I’ll probably come back to Jumper.

One other thing I wanted to mention is that, at the beginning of chapter forty-two in this book, there’s a mention of Wired Magazine and, since this podcast is on Wired.com, I was just curious if you were a Wired fan. How did you come to put that little reference in there?

It could go in many places. Wired is great. They are in that area where technology is impacting our lives in a big way. Cory Doctorow did a lovely review of this book that’s going to be in Boing Boing, but the thing I loved about it in particular was his pointing out that one of the aspects of the book is the “maker culture,” the do-it-yourself aspects of Cent and her allies as they’re trying to create their own space program without the sixteen thousand employees that NASA has.

Speaking of technology changing our lives, we did have a question from Jaycel Adkins. You’re the President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and he wanted me to ask you about how SFWA is approaching self-publishing, which is becoming a more and more important part of publishing.

My personal opinion on that is that writers write; professional writers get paid for what they write. SFWA has always used the amount of income a particular work has generated as part of the qualifications for whether or not you should be a member of this professional writers’ organization. If you’re making more than our minimum advance in a reasonable period of time for a self-published work, or for a work that is small press where the combination of your advance plus the royalties you got within a reasonable period of time are rising to the level of our current requirements, then I think that those are appropriate qualifications. By the time this comes out, I will say that we will have voted to put the question to the board before November 1st, putting up what we believe should be the qualifications for those memberships, and what changes we need to make to our bylaws to allow that. Then we will have the membership vote. Currently, our responses from the membership as to whether or not they approve of self-publication or small press qualifications are “yes,” at about three to one.

Is there anything else you want to say about SFWA generally, or what’s been going on? Any announcements you want to make?

We’re doing our best to make the organization get into this century. We have some issues involving attitudes that are outdated, that we have been unduly supporting because of our inclusion of those attitudes in our official publications. We’ve done a lot to fix that.

I do like that we’re being more inclusive; the thing that I am adamant about is that I want to avoid behaviors and procedures and policies that inappropriately exclude new members because of their gender, race, sexuality—the whole range of human behaviors. What should matter is that they are writing professionally, and they should not be made unwelcome by the sort of stuff we put into the official avenues of communication.

Speaking of being more inclusive, there’s a character in Exo named Cory Matoska, and there’s kind of an interesting story about how he came to have that name. You want to talk about that?

Cory Matoska is a real person who lives in Lubbock. I offered for him to be a character in my next book as a reward for a charity auction for something called “Con or Bust,” which is a fund that works to help get more people of color into science fiction conventions. We are already seeing lots of people of color in conventions, but nowhere near in numbers that represent the rest of American society. He had the high bid, and he ended up as this engineer/scientist in the book, and I was delighted because Cory is, of course, also the first name of Cory Doctorow, who is a very good friend of mine. As I said in the acknowledgments, I think of that character as a tribute to both of them.

I also wanted to ask you about this: It says in your bio that in 2012, you traveled to Qatar to talk about writing science fiction. Can you talk about that?

Qatar has something called Education City, which is a project of the current Emir’s mother. She’s called the royal wife because she’s the mother of the heir to the throne, and she threw a lot of money at education. Education City is ten campuses of international schools, meaning schools from all over the world have put a sub-campus in this Education City in Doha that usually covers the thing they are best known for. Texas A&M, which is my alma mater, has an engineering school there, and they brought me out to talk to students.

What is the science fiction writing scene like in Qatar? Are there books being produced there?

I don’t know. What I do know is it is science fiction. Qatar is currently the richest country in the world per capita because of this massive natural gas reservoir under there, with a little bit of it under Iran. You’ve got a thing called the West Bay, which is part of Doha—which did not exist ten years ago—which has architecture that looks like it’s out of The Jetsons. It’s this incredibly futuristic architecture, and they are living in an environment where, if it wasn’t for energy, people would die. They are desalinating their water and air-conditioning massively. It is an incredibly classist society; you have only two hundred and thirty thousand Qatari, actual citizens, and over a million and a half people in the country, where the other two million plus are employees, essentially. Thirty years ago, possibly fifty, this was a nation of nomadic camel raisers and pearl divers.

Do you think that trip is going to inspire you to use that as a setting for fiction or inspire the science fiction you write?

If not the actual country, then this weird disparity of poor and rich.

Speaking of writing, I did want to put in a good word for the Viable Paradise writer’s workshop, where I first met you. Do you want to say a little bit about Viable Paradise and what’s been going on there lately?

Viable Paradise is about to start its eighteenth year, meaning the eighteenth class of students, in the second week of October. We’ll go to Martha’s Vineyard for a week of genre workshopping. I’ve been doing it since 2000; we have twenty-four students and eight instructors, and then a few more guest instructors this year than that. People that will be teaching there are myself—and Laura J. Nixon, my wife, will be there to do a lecture— Elizabeth Bear, Scott Lynch, Sherwood Smith, Steven Brust; Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden have been there since the second one, and the instructors back from the very first one are Jim Macdonald and Debra Doyle. We’re a workshop that tries to give you a meaningful experience, with both workshopping and lectures, for people who can’t take six weeks out of their lives and go to Clarion, Clarion West, or Odyssey.

I did want to ask you about one other thing in your bio. It says that you keep chickens and study Aikido, and in an interview, I heard you say that you like Aikido because it’s a martial art where you can defend yourself without hurting your opponent, and the example you gave was if a fight breaks out at Thanksgiving dinner. I just thought that was a very interesting example of when you might want to use Aikido.

Well, I think you can use it at any point.

But just the fact that that’s what came to mind, for you, was Thanksgiving dinner.

I heard it from someone else; it’s something you can use on a drunken uncle without getting kicked out of the family. But the main thing about it is that it’s also something that I won’t hesitate to use. If my response is to kill or maim someone, I’m probably going to hesitate, but because I have a whole set of techniques to control someone, or to project them away from me without necessarily hurting them, I don’t have the hesitation that I would have in hitting someone in the throat. Which isn’t to say you can’t kill someone with these techniques; it’s just that you have the choice. There’s a technique called ikkyo, which is just an elbow control technique; you take the person down to the ground, sometimes in a spiral, and end up with them facedown while you’re pinning them. If you choose instead, on the way down, to run their head into a wall, you still have that option.

How about the “keeping chickens”? How did that come about?

It was an accidental thing. I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the city limits, where there are people who keep chickens, and this feral chicken started hanging out in this big cedar bush in our front yard. And then this rooster, who actually lives with a different house, started paying conjugal visits to this chicken. It was the most pathetic rooster; it would crow, but it really sounded like someone clearing their voice. One Monday after Easter, the black chicken walked out with six chicks trailing behind it, out from under that bush, and we made a chicken place in the back and we’ve had chickens ever since. I’m not going to get into the great dog massacre of 2009. That was just too awful.

Well, I guess that’s part of the fun of living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. New Mexico has always had this magical feel to me because that’s where Roger Zelazny lived, and that’s where George R. R. Martin lives, and it just seems to have all these great science fiction authors. Are you part of that community there?

I certainly know everybody. Unfortunately, Roger was scheduled to come to a patio warming at our house the day he went into the hospital for the last time.

Had you known him prior to that?

I’d known him at conventions, and Laura had known him much longer, since she’s from New Mexico. I ended up here because of Laura. We also got to go up to George’s theater, the Cocteau, and see the premiere of season four of Game of Thrones with a new character.

Was it Pedro Pascal?

Exactly. He was actually there at the showing. It was great.

So when you say George’s theater, you mean a theater he owns, or a theater in his house? Or . . .

The Cocteau was an art house theater for years in Santa Fe, and when George first moved here, that’s where he would go to see movies. This is back long before even his first trips to Hollywood, and he had great fondness for it. It went out of business a long time ago, and there were a couple of attempts to revive it—including an attempt to turn it into a history of film museum, which didn’t last long—and then it went up for sale again around three years ago, and George said, “Someone should buy that and fix it up. Someone with money—oh! I’ll buy that!” And it’s been working as a theater and an art venue. Ty Franck’s wife designed the counter in there, and it’s a great little theater. George does special events and occasionally, when sufficiently drawing authors come through town, they do readings and signings there as well.

That sounds amazing. I’ve always meant to make a pilgrimage to Santa Fe to see where Roger Zelazny lived, so maybe when I do that I’ll swing by the Cocetau as well.

One of the things I most regret as president of SFWA is that I am not allowed to make a Grandmaster who is deceased, because Roger, without a doubt, deserved it.

Steve, thanks so much for joining us.

Thanks.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is produced by John Joseph Adams and hosted by: David Barr Kirtley, who is the author of thirty short stories, which have appeared in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Lightspeed, in books such as Armored, The Living Dead, Other Worlds Than These, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and on podcasts such as Escape Pod and Pseudopod. He lives in New York.

Artist Gallery: Odera Igbokwe

Odera Igbokwe (“OH-de-rah ee-BOH-kway”) was born in 1990 in a cocoon of fire and stardust and raised in Maplewood, New Jersey. Odera received a BFA in Illustration from Rhode Island School of Design and studied movement-theater and West African dance at Brown University. Odera’s illustration work is in the collections of Beyoncé Knowles, Solange Knowles, and Oumou Sangaré. Odera currently lives and works in New York City. Visit odera-igbokwe.com to learn more about Odera’s work.

[To view the gallery, turn the page.]

Artist Spotlight: Odera Igbokwe

Henry Lien

The first thing that leaps out at me regarding your works is that they are very conscious of identity politics. Your works seem to cheerfully challenge many of the traditional assumptions about race, gender, and sexual identity in science fiction/fantasy illustration published in the West. Is that fair? Is that intentional?

Cheerfully intentional! At this point these choices are my default, and are a reflection of my own identity politics. When I started drawing as a kid, I emulated my favorite characters. So if I wasn’t drawing Storm from X-Men, then literally all my drawings featured white or white-passing characters. When the great equalizer known as anime/manga came into my life, I took on a bishoujo aesthetic (which included skin tone). White was always the default, which was not healthy for my self-image.

As a teenager, the lack of representation started to really sink in. I would jokingly grasp for any morsels of representation I could find. “Fran from Final Fantasy 12 is obviously a brown-skinned woman.” I even thought Lara Croft (pre-Angelina Jolie) was a woman of color. (See Michael Turner’s Tomb Raider/Witchblade crossover, featuring bronze-brown-caramel skin and full lips).

Eventually I stopped wondering where the diversity was, and started to take action. I realized I could create fantastical characters that looked and felt more like me, one bad drawing at a time.

So often in SFF, the default is image after image of thirty-something, brown-haired white males and the occasional trophy/object. The objects are sometimes referred to as women, but I only enjoy that term if the character exists with her own purpose and desires outside of serving a male fantasy. Occasionally, these worlds will even pull from an entire culture but then lack the representation of actual people from said culture (e.g., the major Chinese influence in Firefly without a single Chinese character to be found). It becomes very clear whose fantasy we are celebrating and who is welcome to the table.

So a big part of my work is saying, “Hey, let’s welcome other people to the table! Maybe we can all build our own tables! My table sparkles and doubles as a bed, and you’re welcome to sit here respectfully.”

Please share with us some of the particular Afri-diasporic myths and character archetypes that your works explore.

I like to say Afro-diasporic myth because that covers the gamut of legends and mythologies. The entire spectrum deserves love and respect, so ancient goddesses from the Odinani or the Orisha, such as the sun goddess Anyanwu, have a place in my heart just as much as an Erykah Badu song (specifically “Ye Yo,” a song that crafts a contemporary mythology about motherhood).

The most striking aspect of Afro-diasporic mythology is that so much of the history is song and dance. Movement tells a story that written words cannot. So a lot of my exploration and ideas for illustrations don’t occur until I have danced them out, and made sense of the characters through movement. This also enables a lot of fun dance breaks and Instagram videos.

For instance, the piece featured on this edition of Lightspeed, Shango’s Hammer, celebrates and reimagines the thunder god Shango in a SFF setting. But this piece didn’t come into being until I went to an Afro-Cuban dance class and started to embody these archetypal characters and myths.

I regularly ask Lightspeed artists about the subtext of Orientalism in a lot of Western science fiction/fantasy illustration. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Orientalist painting was often used as propaganda for colonialism, to justify the conquering of other countries by depicting them as exotic and barbaric. That impulse to exoticize the Other is undeniably a part of the heritage of Western SFF illustration. Is your work a conscious response to such impulses? It seems that your exploration of non-Western traditions manages to strip away the exoticism without losing the sense of wonder.

That dynamic comes with knowing history, and then knowing myself. In many instances, I am considered The Other. I am black, queer, and non-conforming to the gender binary (I don’t bake, eat, or serve gender rolls). I’m not a proper American; not a proper Nigerian. So it is natural for me to represent “The Other.” When you practice decolonizing and unplugging yourself from a machine that typically dehumanizes you, it is only natural to put your humanity at the forefront.

With all that said, I make sure I tread carefully so as to never exoticize or dehumanize with my illustrations. I often ask myself, “Do I have a claim to this narrative or story? If not, how can I respectfully take on this subject as an outsider? How can I show the wonder, magic, and fantasy of said subject while still respecting the source material?”

Usually that internal dialogue goes on in my head for as long as time allows and then I say something like, “Okay, okay. Your intentions are pure. Let’s pray that shows up in the work. Go ahead and redesign Sailor Neptune with thick thighs and body fat.”

Your non-SFF illustration work seems to celebrate a 1970s sensibility. Your images of contemporary dance divas use the saturated colors and montage compositions of 1970s graphic design and album art. Some of your other work seems to celebrate a 1970s “Dawn of Queer Activism” sensibility. Are you consciously trying to invoke the sexual revolution/disco dance floor utopianism of the 1970s in such works?

I have never actively looked at the 1970s for inspiration, or at least I wasn’t aware of the sensibility until after the fact. I can say that my non-SFF illustration work tends to be a lot more improvisational. My color palette naturally favors saturation, and I love montage compositions (especially of movie posters from that era). So the 1970s sensibilities are coincidental, but make a ton of sense considering the elements at play. And honestly, I am trying to invoke a sexual revolution and disco dance floor utopia in all aspects of my life.

What are some of the most important influences in your art, from fine art painters to mythologies to pop culture?

Visual artists, painters, and illustrators: Gustav Klimt, Zdzisław Beksiński, Jeffrey Catherine Jones, Sergio Toppi, Studio Ghibli, The Nsukka State Artists, and Moebius. Erté and Eiko Ishioka are my go-to fashion design inspirations.

Among contemporary illustrators, I really love the works of Rebecca Guay, Jeffrey Alan Love, and Yoshitaka Amano.

Beyoncé & bishoujo manga/anime: There is a lot of shame involved with femininity and sexuality that isn’t easily consumable for the male gaze. But Beyoncé and Sailor Moon literally blow a hole through that by celebrating power through ownership. Ownership of your body, ownership of your image, ownership of your craft, ownership of magical transformation items.

The African Diaspora: dance, music, textiles and patterns, fashion, mythology. Creativity born out of resilience and survival. Carefree black girls on tumblr, who celebrate their beauty in the face of mysogynoir.

Celebrations of Afro-futurism aesthetics in ’90s to 2000s hip-hop and R&B. For example, Aaliyah, “We Need a Resolution”; Janet Jackson/Busta Rhymes, “What’s It Gonna Be”; Erykah Badu, “Didn’t Cha Know” and “Next Lifetime”; and Missy Elliot’s videography.

Dance, movement, Butoh theatre, and Nigerian masquerades.

I love the figure. I love bodies. I love figure drawing. My relationship to dance only heightens that and makes me obsess a little bit more.

RPGs. I love RPGs for their worldbuilding and for exploring the process of growth and honing one’s craft. And as someone who is a bit disruptive of labels, I am quite fond of the structure of character classes and jobs in the RPG realm. Nothing feels quite as good as leveling up a character and learning new abilities and techniques. There are definitely moments when I say, “I have to level up my skill tree, but that won’t happen until I finish X amount of drawings.”

Discuss your technique a bit. Is this all hand-drawn, analog work we’re looking at? What is your relationship with digital work?

There are a few pieces that are all traditional. But the majority of the work starts hand-drawn. The skeleton and foundation is typically pencil and/or ink on paper. I treat that as an underdrawing that I scan into the computer. All the textures and imperfections that occur on paper help me break the sterility of a blank digital canvas. After the sketch stage, the rest is Photoshop and a trusty Wacom tablet.

What is your dream project?

A lot of my dream projects are simply creating personal pieces. Usually they start off as suggestions to humor myself. I say to myself, “Imagine if I redesigned the cast of Sailor Moon and had full reign and control over the visuals” or “What if I created a zine celebrating the magic of queer intersectionality?”

My most recent dream is creating concept work and illustrations for an SFF world, where the main source of inspiration is African mythology and the Afro-diaspora. I have started a little bit of that with Shango’s Hammer and a few ink drawings of reimagined RPG character classes.

I also have a constant itch to explore the intersections of dance, music, and illustration, but that is a nebulous, overarching dream project. Most recently it’s manifested itself in illustrations exploring each song from Utada Hikaru’s album Exodus, in regard to memory and personal narrative.

Other than that, my dream projects include a concrete list of clients I would love to work with. Or extremely outlandish ideas, such as Beyoncé and Björk doing a collaborative concept album and needing an illustration for each song.

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, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and been nominated for the Nebula. He is originally from Taiwan. Visit his author website at henrylien.com.

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Author Spotlight: Shale Nelson

Robyn Lupo

What was the spark that got this story going for you? Is this a cautionary tale, or does it expose our more irrational fears?

Last year, my sister fell victim to a ransomware virus that caused her to lose a lot of important files, including irreplaceable photos. Some of my recent stories have involved brain implant technology, so I started thinking about what ransomware would look like in a future in which such technology is a part of everyday life. You could look at it as a cautionary tale, but I didn’t write it with that intention. I don’t think the fears are irrational. Internet criminals ruin lives every day and I don’t see that changing in the future. If someone is smart enough to invent something, there will always be someone else smart enough to find a way to break in.

What was the most difficult aspect of writing this story?

The most difficult part was writing in the second person and deciding how much the “you” in the story should be a fleshed-out character versus a blank slate whose shoes the reader could fill. I tried to strike a balance by revealing some details about the “you” but keeping it pretty general.

This story has a not-so-common structure. What prompted you to choose to write it in the log entry format?

We are all familiar with user interfaces and online tutorials, so I thought using that format would ground the story in familiar territory. Most of us also know the dread and panic that comes when an ominous popup appears. I wanted the reader experience to be as direct and realistic as possible.

How did you develop the voice of Phobetor?

There is something especially creepy about ransomware, because the criminal is demanding you cooperate with him before he will leave you alone. It puts you in the position of needing his help. Phobetor’s voice grew out of the creepy, personal dynamic of this type of virus and the closeness it creates between criminal and victim.

What’s next for you?

I just completed a novella about the misadventures of a think-app addict and am starting to shop it around. I also have an SF/F story forthcoming in Ares Magazine.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robyn Lupo has been known to frequent southwestern Ontario with her graduate student husband and elderly dog. She writes, reads, and plays video games. She is personal assistant to three cats.

Author Spotlight: N.K. Jemisin

Jude Griffin

How did “Valedictorian” come about?

I’d been thinking about writing a YA story set in the world of “The Trojan Girl” (another short story of mine, published a few years earlier) for a while. The story I originally had in mind was centered on the eponymous girl from that story, but I realized as I played around with the concept that there were other stories that needed to be told, first. At around the same time, I saw a news article going around Facebook about a young black woman who was fighting to be named valedictorian of her graduating class. She had the highest GPA—but a group of parents and school administrators was pulling shenanigans to deny her the honor, changing the rules and so forth. She was enduring some harassment from her classmates and even death threats, but she was still fighting—and thing was, she already had a standing early-admission acceptance to a very good college on scholarship. Her community didn’t want her to have the honor. She didn’t need it . . . but she wanted that honor, even though circumstances and everyone around her had essentially rendered it meaningless. It had meaning to her. Her fight gave it meaning.

It reminded me that my own high school graduating class had a similar situation with its valedictorian. I realized I’d seen several news stories to this effect over the years. It’s not always an academic honor that’s being denied; sometimes it’s homecoming queen, or something else. But the pattern of who earns the honor, and who the community wants to give honor to, repeats itself again and again. Zinhle was born of all the girls who have to demand respect because others think they don’t deserve it.

What was “The Trojan Girl” about, for readers who haven’t read it?

That one was set in the same world as “Valedictorian”, but much earlier—before the war between the posthumans and the humans, but after the artificial intelligences have begun to be born. It follows a pack of AIs, who’ve chosen to model themselves after wolves because they don’t think much of humans, as they hunt through the “cognitive internet” and realspace in pursuit of a very special newborn AI. They don’t have good intentions in mind, but that’s okay, because she’s not what they think she is.

Why did Sam’s dad say what he did about Zinhle’s family?

Because he’s a mediocre man resolving his personal feelings of inferiority by telling himself that other people are more inferior. Stock racist reasoning.

Why did you pick the characteristics you did for how selections are made? Did you consider other characteristics: for example, compassion, kindness, artistry, other kinds of intelligences not well assessed in a school environment?

The reservation (because that’s what it is) that Zinhle lives in is based on modern-day “middle America.” As a society we don’t especially value compassion, artistry, emotional intelligence, etc.—or at least that isn’t reflected in our educational system, if we do. I went with the characteristics we do seem to value, at present: Test-taking skill. Conformity. Systematization.

Any news or projects you want to share with us?

Yes! Currently I’m working on the second book of the Broken Earth trilogy, of which the first book (The Fifth Season) is due out in August of 2015. I’ve also got a new novella in the Inheritance Trilogy ’verse coming out at the end of this year, in December, called “The Awakened Kingdom.” It will be sold as part of the Inheritance Trilogy omnibus also coming out in the same month, and as a standalone ebook.

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: Vandana Singh

Lee Hallison

You have said the assumption that scientific and technological progress is always good needs to be challenged. What do you most enjoy when writing stories that question this assumption?

Well, context is important. So you have to ask: Progress for whom? Progress at what cost? Currently we take it for granted that science and technology must advance at the cost of the environment and the poor, to the point where we are hardly aware of these costs unless we hear about a sweatshop in China manufacturing parts for our gizmos, or some mining disaster in a conveniently remote part of the globe. To me, it is not progress if it destroys people, communities, and the environment. If development is achieved through destruction, as in the current model, shouldn’t we critique it and look for alternatives? If scientific knowledge is gained at the cost of great harm to others—consider the Nazi medical experiments on Jewish prisoners—can we say that the ends justify the means? I suspect most of us would say absolutely not. I am not at all advocating that we go live in caves, but that we use our intelligence and imagination to come up with a vision of true progress, based on equity among people and harmony with the environment.

If I may say it again—it is good thinking to always look at context, at the big picture, before we say whether some complex issue is “good” or “bad.” For example, take genetic engineering. I am not against the idea per se, although there are some important ethical issues that must be addressed. I’ve used the concept in some of my stories. But genetic engineering technology in the hands of profit-based corporations? Shouldn’t that be keeping us up at night? Why should we assume that the profit motive always coincides with the public interest? Plus, I think we should have respect for other ways of thinking, rather than dismissing them because they don’t match with the generally accepted paradigm. Consider Bolivia’s legal framework for giving rights to Mother Nature—these rights include the right of living organisms not to be genetically modified by humans. Even if you disagree with it, that is a perfectly valid position from their perspective. We practice a kind of colonialist and undemocratic arrogance when we insist that the modern “scientific” (read “profit-based industry”) position on genetic engineering, or similar issues, is the only valid one.

The point I am making is that so much technology is imposed on us from above, from the powers-that-be, and we are used to passively accepting that situation. So I am interested in technology arising from communities, from people’s needs, from the ground up, which is, at the same time, non-exploitative of people and nature. That’s why stories are so wonderful as a medium to think through this issue—they are all about context, and they allow free rein to the imagination.

There is quite a bit of speculative science in the story—can you talk about why weaving speculative physics and biology with known scientific concepts intrigues you?

Well, my background is in theoretical physics, and I grew up reading science fiction. In fact, I got into the sciences because of that early reading. So I am intrigued by science ideas more than by technological innovation (although the two are not necessarily separate). Playing with scientific ideas is a wonderful intellectual exercise. Science fiction allows us to go a step further by letting us imagine a universe where, for example, the Big Bang didn’t happen, or one where some physical law is different. In this story, I play with the idea of spacetime ripples or gravitational waves generated by an exotic propulsion drive on a large ship. Imagine the ripples from an object or a boat moving through water (note, however, that gravitational waves are qualitatively quite different from water waves). Suppose you were an insect-sized alien in a tiny flying craft flitting over the waves in the water—if you oriented your craft on the boat-side of each crest as it forms, and let the crest hit you, you would be bumped forward toward the boat. That is one way a low-tech revolutionary group might take advantage of a technology to which they otherwise have no access. (To make it work, I throw in some exotic matter which behaves differently with spacetime ripples than ordinary matter—but this is the kind of detail that doesn’t need to be in this particular story). Then, of course, there is the drive itself—how would a spaceship generate the kinds of waves that are generally thought to come from very energetic cosmological events such as supernova explosions? Even a large spaceship is nothing compared to the mass of a supernova! There are some really intriguing speculative, theoretical ideas that one might draw on for this. So even when I am thinking up wild technologies, I do so in the context of the scientific ideas behind it. A lot of speculative science-fictional ideas are hand-wavy and magical in the Clarkian sense, especially when talking about far future exotic technologies, but I like to do the intellectual exercise of making an internally consistent imaginative-theoretical scaffolding around the idea, whether or not it shows up in the story. It’s fun! I got into science—specifically theoretical physics—because I wanted to know the great general principles, the patterns in the tapestry of nature, if you will. That’s what guides my science-fictional imagination as well.

Did you start this story with the character Leli and her ethics, or the world building?

The story has an interesting origin. I used to make up intricate stories and story-worlds for my daughter, including a space-opera that featured a group of space explorers led by a middle-aged woman who had helped bring about a post-corpocracy universe. I came up with a number of adventures, both comic and suspenseful, and I still remember some half-dozen of these stories. Thinking about them earlier this year, it occurred to me to write about the hero of those stories before she became a legend, when she was a young nobody in the revolution against Euphoria. So this story is a looking-back for her after she became famous, became an icon, and then was half-forgotten as a person, although the icon lived on. So I guess both the character and the world existed before this story, and as far as I remember, they both came into being simultaneously, because our hero wouldn’t be who she is without the events that shaped her.

How critical was it to you to include Leli’s anguish at the end?

Absolutely critical. In a conflict such as this one, I think it is important to recognize that one must not become the enemy, because then you’ve already lost the war. I dislike black-and-white narratives where “good” and “bad” are simplistically delineated. This doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize the evil that people can commit. But we also have to look at the potential for evil within ourselves. This is something I first learned from the great Indian epics like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana—that apart from the battle that rages outside of us, there is also the battle within, and they influence each other. So for Leli to think of the dead in terms of “collateral damage,” to use the newspeak of our times, instead of fully facing the reality she has wrought, emotionally and otherwise, would be unacceptable.

Do you plan to set more stories in this world of the Euphoria Corpocracy?

As I mentioned earlier, the post-corpocracy stories already exist in my head, at least the ones I still remember, and if I write those down some day, I will likely also write more stories about Leli’s youth. As I said, later she becomes famous (under another name), and it would be interesting to see how Leli becomes the older hero looking back at her life, and still having adventures and growing as a person.

What was the spark for this story?

The immediate spark was this: I was thinking about that older heroine and wondering how she came to be who she is. And I thought—I have to tell a story or stories about her youth. After a while the image came to me of this young woman who is both wiser than her years and naïve, and who has suffered and seen death already, but loves life—and she was sitting cramped in a tiny spacecraft, waiting for something. Later I realized what she was waiting for—a salvage ship—and why, and the story came to me then.

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: Paul Park

Laurel Amberdine

The technique of creating memory palaces is something I have only slight familiarity with. How did you become acquainted with this method, and have you used it yourself?

I first got interested in these palaces—that is, organized internal structures of memory, laid out on an architectural model—by reading a book called The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, about a Jesuit missionary in sixteenth-century China, who attempted to interest his hosts in this particular device in order to bridge a cultural gap. Subsequently, I read Frances A. Yates’s great book The Art of Memory, which gives a history of how, before easy access to libraries, scholars and philosophers might try to store knowledge inside their heads. It’s interesting to imagine that necessity, which has more or less disappeared; in my story, the character develops his skill during a period of blindness and isolation.

Sure—I tried to develop one. When I was young, it was quite vast. Now it’s more of a memory hovel.

You included many specific, interesting details from Angola and Peru, and the work of a war photographer. Did you have to do a lot of research or did any of this come from personal experience?

Well, no—not much experience with war or war photography. I’ve travelled a good deal, though. Certainly I attempted, in the various locations, to reproduce the feel of various places I’ve been: the International Hotel in Kinshasa, and various small Asian cities and towns. I’ve never been to South America, but have always been fascinated by the description of the silver mines of Potosí, in Bolivia. I guess I wanted some proximity to that, at least in my mind.

I noticed two themes running strongly through this story: armed conflicts and memory. Most obviously, there are all the wars and rebellions that the protagonist encounters, both indirectly and in person. Between the memory castles and the photographs, the idea of memory recurs, too. And then, the effect that remembering all this violence has on the protagonist. Can you expand at all on the importance and connection of these themes? And are there any other ideas in the story you want to draw attention to?

In the story, I got interested in trying to imagine a way of looking at the world that was different from my own, the result of the character’s early blindness and his highly developed internal labyrinth. In the real world, he is not interested in content, or cause and effect, but only form. In a way, this allows him to protect himself from the trauma of observing misery and violence, because he is able to stay resolutely on the surface. During the miserable period of blindness and the internal construction of his memory palace, he learns how to dissociate his experience of the world from his perception of it. I wanted to give the effect of a consciousness that was missing the middle layer of its own experience, a consciousness that consists of perception and memory only, or at least primarily. In the story, clarity of perception takes the place of experience, and is heightened by the lack of it, in the way hearing and touch might sharpen in a blind person. In addition, memory has taken the place of thought.

Before the man was shot in the remote Peruvian village of Z—, a siren went off and there was some additional issue with the already-collapsed mine. I was unsure what exactly occurred. Can you clarify what that was about?

I’m not sure I can. I made it confusing because the character has almost no connection or even interest in actual events, no matter how urgent or potentially dangerous. He’s on the surface, operating, I hope, with a unique clarity of vision, and also underneath, inside the labyrinth of himself. The middle layer—again—of cause and effect, or politics, or personal engagement, or even of morality—he has no clue.

I have been an admirer of your work since your first novels came out, and I particularly love your sophisticated worlds. Do you have any advice for writers who hope to create science fiction of similar scope?

Thanks. My advice to young writers is: Pay attention. Examine the world. Think about it in terms of objects moving through space. Nobody cares about the insides, not at first. Nobody cares about your own internal struggles, or what’s happening inside your heart. Don’t try to express yourself. Make yourself cold. That’s the state of mind that will allow you to imagine entire worlds. They will coalesce out of what you see.

Your new novel, All Those Vanished Engines, came out earlier this year. What can you tell us about it?

Having answered question four [above] the way I have, I’m almost embarrassed to confess that there’s a lot of me in this new novel, and that for almost the first time I’ve tried to connect my fiction with actual events, distorted versions of actual experiences. The invented parts involve Martian invasions, an alternate history of the Battle of the Crater and the Civil War, a secret sonic weapons project during the 1940s, and a diminished and chaotic future world. The book takes the form of three novellas that are almost obsessively interlocked, one set in the childhood of someone named “Paul Park,” one set right now, during his middle age, and one in the future, when he is an old man, living inside his memories. Come to think of it, some of the last scenes take place in an underground library in the dark, though my character never progresses down to the sub-basement, where the mummified body of Huáscar Capac is doubtless locked away.

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: Rachael Acks

Liz Argall

How did this story come about?

There were a bunch of factors that came together for this story and it just worked. The title was actually the first thing I came up with, which is unusual for me. Normally I’m total crap at titles. Then I had some notes written down, in regards to drone warfare, PTSD, things like that. I wasn’t really motivated to do anything until Elise Tobler reminded me about the War Stories anthology, which made me just sit down and write. And right around then I’d been reading more about the scandals in the Veterans Administration in America and the lack of support faced by veterans. I’d also just finished re-reading Coriolanus; Tom Hiddleston was set to star in a production of the play at the Donmar Warehouse starting not long after. All that just kind of mixed around and I poured it out over my keyboard in less than forty-eight hours. There wasn’t a lot of editing required after, either. Ever since Comes the Huntsman three years ago, I’ve written a story each year, kind of, for Tom Hiddleston’s birthday, since I have a ton of respect for him as an artist and a genuinely good human being. Since I couldn’t have written this one without the inspiration from Coriolanus, I dedicated this one to him.

Does Tom Hiddleston know that he inspires you to write important, poignant stories that raise money for UNICEF UK?

Oh goodness no. Or at least I hope not. I’d probably die of embarrassment. I honestly feel kind of weird doing the dedications on the stories, but then I feel even more awkward about leaving them off since it seems almost dishonest in a way. I also publicly talk about the donations because it’ll hopefully get other people to consider throwing a few dollars at UNICEF.

Please tell us about one of your favorite projects/activities UNICEF conducts.

I really like UNICEF’s focus on children in general, but particularly the immunization program and the focus on malnutrition, with emergency nutritional supplements for young children.

If this story had a soundtrack what would it be?

The song I wrote it to is “War Again” by Oingo Boingo. Most of my short stories have a single song that ends up driving them.

I love how you capture the experiences of soldiers trying to re-integrate into society and the complex challenges of trauma. What sort of research did you do for this story?

I’d already been reading a lot of news stories about the various VA scandals in the U.S. and the lack of government support, as well as the massive and often ignored problem of suicide in the military and among veterans. There are some absolutely heartbreaking interviews that you can find online from NPR’s Fresh Air and similar news programs, and I searched out as many of those as I could to listen or watch. I also searched for blog posts from veterans and active duty soldiers about the experience of PTSD. Some of them are very frank, such as with that concept of never feeling safe, always thinking about the exits. I’m grateful that veterans and currently serving soldiers are being more open about their experiences; it’s important for civilians to understand these things, because we’ve frankly been failing pathetically when it comes to our responsibility to those who have served and are serving.

If you had a TAOG put in your head, what would you call it?

I think I’d probably end up calling it Kat, after my best friend. Even though the TAOG ends up being a lie in the story, it’s supposed to stand in for someone you trust, who won’t betray you.

What needs destroying in science fiction?

At its base, the idea that so many people seem to have, that there are only set ways to do it right. There are more characters than the default that have worthwhile stories, more sciences to explore than just physics and astronomy, more stories that can be told in more different ways, and by more different writers. Boundaries in art are meant to be pushed. We need to be brave any time someone tries to narrowly define our genre and tell them that our vision of the future and present day is far greater than what any one person can imagine.

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: Delia Sherman

Robyn Lupo

What was the inspiration for this story? What sort of research was involved?

I wrote this story for the Datlow/Windling anthology Sirens. They wanted an erotic story and, though I always do what Ellen and Terri tell me to, I’m not exactly a writer of erotic stories. To be honest, they make me blush. Bawdy stories, in an Elizabethan vein, were another pair of shoes. A PhD in Non-Shakespearean Renaissance Drama had left me (among other things) with a copy of Shakespeare’s Bawdy, a facsimile of Robert Greene’s The Art of Conny-Catching, and a knack for writing Elizabethan prose. I figured I might as well get some use out of them. And so I did.

Did Peasecod intend for Nick to be brought to Faerie at the behest of Gloriana, or was Nick’s fortune changed by removing her splinter? Or was the fall into Faerie accidental?

You know, I can’t remember. It seems likely, given Peasecod’s (you know, of course, that a cod is what a man keeps in his codpiece, right?) reactions, that the trap was Gloriana’s idea, as was the delicious deception enfolded therein.

Nick’s success in the negotiation with Gloriana had much to do with trusting Peasecod. Throughout the story, he shows a remarkable shrewdness. Was this canniness inspired by someone in particular? What do you think it was about Peasecod that showed Nick he could trust her?

As an apprentice, Nick has had the opportunity to learn not only goldsmithing but business, and has profited by all his lessons. Once he starts bargaining, he’s on his own ground. He’s young, he’s untried, and he’s inclined to be brash and overconfident, but he’s not stupid. He can recognize sincerity when he sees it. And Peasecod did warn him about eating or drinking anything Gloriana offered him.

What were the difficulties in constructing this story? Were there any surprises along the way in the writing process?

Again, I wrote this story a long time ago, so can’t remember exactly, but there are always difficulties, especially when you’re as bad at plot as I am. Like most of the writers of the period, I borrowed most of the incidents in the story—in this case, from Robert Greene, whose The Art of Conny-Catching provided not only descriptions of the Verser, the Tickler, and the rest of the confidence fraternity of Elizabethan London, but also anecdotes displaying their tricks. The Faeire Court, the characters, and the language, however, are entirely my own.

What’s next for you?

I am continuing my career of literary ventriloquism with a YA novel set in Victorian London. Yes, it’s steampunk. Kind of. And it has Sherlock Holmes in it. Kind of. Also a ghost and a lost treasure and an escaped convict and a trial and a female scientist and a kidnapping and a theft.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robyn Lupo has been known to frequent southwestern Ontario with her graduate student husband and elderly dog. She writes, reads, and plays video games. She is personal assistant to three cats.

Author Spotlight: Nik Houser

Kevin McNeil

Can you tell us a little bit about what inspired “The Drawstring Detective”?

I usually take notes on a story for months or years before beginning work on it, because if I don’t blueprint my stories first, they go radically off the rails in shitty ways. When I was accepted to the 2012 Clarion West workshop, I hadn’t written any fiction in about a year. I’d been working on other writing projects, but stopped everything to brainstorm ideas to take to CW. Suddenly I needed to have five stories completely mapped out in a matter of months. And while some stories have a natural genesis, which usually begins with a conversational snippet or scene in a movie which makes you think “Huh, wouldn’t it be interesting if . . .,” the idea for “The Drawstring Detective” just appeared out of nowhere, cut from whole cloth, which is very unusual for me. Writing the story at the workshop was also a surprisingly natural and comparatively painless process. And by comparatively, I mean one of your testicles spontaneously exploding is comparatively less painful than, say, being burned alive.

Can you tell us about your writing process? What’s a typical writing day like for you?

My writing process involves a more live human sacrifice than I’m willing to admit to on record. For real, though, on any given weekday, my alarm clock goes off at 4:00 a.m. so that I can get up and write before going to my day job. I don’t actually get up at 4:00. I usually hit snooze for a couple of hours until I have to get up, shower, and go to work for nine to twelve hours, then come home too tired to do anything but have dinner and fall asleep on the couch with my dinner plate on my chest and contact lenses still stuck to my eyes. So, my typical writing day doesn’t involve any writing at all, unfortunately. An atypical writing day would be me actually writing, by which I mean taking a zillion notes before writing the rough draft as fast as I can and, if I manage to actually finish the story rather than abandon it, going back and doing seven to fifteen drafts in an attempt to make it readable.

I enjoyed the humor in this story. You have a background in humor, from performing stand-up comedy to writing comics. What are the challenges to writing humorous fiction?

For me, the challenge is making the humor original, but accessible. I tend to go too far with my humor, by default. So it becomes a balancing act of being surprising enough that it’s unique, but not so surprising, random, or crude that it isolates the reader. The humor in “The Drawstring Detective” was a challenge because I wanted those moments to offer both levity as well as insight into the character of the detective. The other challenge with writing humor is balancing it with pathos, blending comedy and tragedy in order to enhance both elements. If I can make you laugh and cry in the same story, then my dreams are coming true.

How did attending the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop change your writing? What’s the best writing advice you ever received and who gave it to you?

Clarion West was the best thing that could’ve happened to me as a writer. I owe so much to that organization and to the people I shared the workshop with . . . it’s a debt that I fear I can never fully repay. How did it change me as a writer? Well . . .

It put twenty-four objective but encouraging voices in my head (seventeen classmates and seven instructors). When I’m writing and editing, I’m wondering how they would react to what I’m doing. Would B believe this character’s motivation? Would Alyc think this was sexist or sexy? How many assholes would George RR Martin tear into this story? Less than seven? Then it’s submission time!

The pure opportunities it presented were invaluable. Case in point: My Week Five instructors, Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, read a story I’d written for Week Three and bought it for an anthology called Monstrous Affections. Where else would that happen other than in my wildest dreams?

Most importantly though, it gave me a family of writers. I have a tribe now. When you’re a writer, it’s easy to feel like an orphan of sorts, because you’re doing something that’s not only isolating, but discouraging as well. But now I’m part of a family of those orphans, those misfit toys. A huge percentage of human endeavor is executed with the simple motivation of trying not to feel alone, and I never will be, thanks to the friends I made there. In the first year of our acquaintance, the eighteen of us literally exchanged over 10,000 emails.

The best writing advice I ever received came from two people. I met Stephen King once, and of all the things I could have asked him, because I am a giant dork, I asked him if he ever experienced posture-related writing problems. Long story short, he relayed to me some good tips on posture which he received from his hero, Richard Matheson. The other great piece of writing advice was from my college mentor and friend, the amazing Kit Reed. I was in her kitchen, stressed and agonizing and hating writing and struggling to hold it together as a person and as a writer, and after I unpacked all this emotional baggage in front of her, she looked at me and simply said, not unkindly, “Who said writing was fun?” And all at once, everything I’d ever felt, or would ever feel, about the writing process suddenly made sense.

Is there anything else you’d like to share about “The Drawstring Detective”? What’s next for you?

I hope your readers enjoy it. I really do. Without readers, story is just masturbation. I want my masturbation to have an audience. And if there’s anyone still reading after that sentence, I’d love to share that I’ve got a story coming out soon (possibly in the January/February issue) in F&SF called “History’s Best Places to Kiss” about a couple who goes back in time to prevent themselves from falling in love in order to prevent a protracted divorce. That was another story written at Clarion West, in this case for Connie Willis, because holy shit Connie Willis!!!

As for what’s next, I was working a novel recently and discovered a typo: I had typed “its” without an apostrophe, but what I was supposed to write was an entirely different novel. So I’m working on that now.

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. His fiction has appeared in Every Day Fiction and is forthcoming in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. Kevin is a New Englander currently living in California. Find him on Twitter @kevinmcneil.

Author Spotlight: Nalo Hopkinson

Kevin McNeil

Can you tell us a little bit about what inspired this story?

It’s been so long that I scarcely remember. Part of it has to do with the history of marronage in the Caribbean; of enslaved Africans escaping plantations and forming their own communities in the hinterland. In part I’m doing a thought experiment about one of those communities thriving, as did the quilombo of Palmares, for about two centuries before being destroyed by the original colonizers.

You’ve had success writing both novels and shorts stories. Do you have a preference for working with long or short form in fiction? Do you take a different approach to writing novels as opposed to short stories?

I used to prefer short stories because they’re, well, shorter. But I learned that some short stories can take as long to write as novels do. Now I don’t have a particular preference. The difference between novels and short stories is that novels have a longer, more involved story arc. There are more plot threads to tie off. A short story is like a sprint, usually. A novel is like running all the legs of a relay.

Do you ever pick up one of your older works and find that you’re surprised or amazed by it? Is there any piece from your body of work so far that you’re particularly proud of?

Sometimes I read an older work and find a word in it that I don’t know the meaning of, although oddly, I can remember knowing the meaning of it when I wrote it. I love those moments. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that writing isn’t magic. As to pride, I’m always proudest of the work I’ve most recently completed. I have ADHD and a learning disability; finishing is really hard.

You’ve won several awards, from the John Campbell Award for Best New Writer (1999) to the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy (2014). What do the nominations and awards mean to you?

Somebody out there likes me! I’m always humbled by the awards. And they give me some of the push to keep going.

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. His fiction has appeared in Every Day Fiction and is forthcoming in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. Kevin is a New Englander currently living in California. Find him on Twitter @kevinmcneil.

Author Spotlight: Damien Angelica Walters

Liz Argall

This story is packed with symbolism. What’s your favorite bit of symbolism in the piece? Was there any particular symbolism that emerged during the writing process that surprised you?

I have two favorite bits. The first is the cyanide burn the main character feels after she’s fed marzipan, a small inkling that something is wrong but one that quickly gets buried in the sugar rush.

The second came from my beta reader. In the original version, I used slices of ratatouille for heartache, but my reader suggested using carpaccio, which was such a perfect choice I kicked myself for not thinking of it first. (Thank you, Scott!)

The only things that surprised me were all the other story references that occur throughout. It makes a strange sort of sense because it’s fiction about a fiction, but I initially thought the story was nothing more than a strange retelling of Hansel and Gretel, minus the familial relation and the witch, of course. I added one or two of those references after the first draft was complete, but most joined the party on their own.

What do you think her breadcrumbs were?

I think they were pieces of herself, her strength and independence. It’s far too easy for someone to lose that along the way, no matter how resolute they are. There are always wolves hiding in the woods.

Once she crawls back to her story, what would you like her first real meal in a long time to be?

I think she deserves spinach salad with blue cheese and bacon, filet mignon, roasted Brussels sprouts, a chunk of good crusty bread, and a glass of Merlot, or maybe the whole bottle. I suspect she won’t be eating dessert for a long, long time.

How did this story come about? And what was your process for writing this story?

I was thinking about the nature of liars, how they often get away with it by spoon-feeding people stories a little at a time, and the lengths they’ll go to to preserve that fiction as truth. Some of the best liars use sweet words as a lure; they tell people what they want to hear and believe, and they do it in such a way that their sincerity is never doubted. (At least not until it begins to fall apart, as all lies eventually do.)

That led to thinking about Hansel and Gretel and the witch’s candy house—the ultimate lure. The two concepts ended up in a tango and I let them dance, allowing other stories to cut in from time to time.

Has writing this story changed your relationship with sweet food?

I have a huge sweet tooth and I don’t think anything could change that, but even so, I couldn’t bring myself to eat anything sugary while I was working on the story.

Writing unconventional stories can be challenging to edit on occasion. What was the editing process like for this story?

I started to make it more conventional in structure by adding proper dialogue tags and removing the parenthetical statements, but it altered the flow and the voice to the story’s detriment. So I put it back the way it was originally written, accepting that while it might make the story a hard sell, I was being true to the story and the way I wanted to tell it.

Do you have any other projects you’d like to tell us about?

Sing Me Your Scars, a short fiction collection, will be released in early 2015 from Apex Publications; Paper Tigers, a novel, will be released later that same year from Dark House Press; and more short fiction is forthcoming in a variety of anthologies and magazines.

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: John Crowley

Jude Griffin

How did this story come about?

Pure wish fulfillment, with the qualification that it’s wish fulfillment for the past, for my long-ago Indiana teenage self. I wanted very much for there to have been such a thing as the Avon Shakespeare festival, that I could have attended. (Not the polio, however). I’ve also always wanted to own a big wooden view camera (I used one in college) and take pictures with paper negatives.

Did your vision for the story change in the writing of it?

I can’t remember now how the Delia Bacon story, or the polio, entered into my thinking; but both were well advanced before I started to write. My stories don’t tend to change in their basics once I begin writing. The rhetorical device of a first-person narrator who could also tell a historical account to the reader and recount the thoughts and feelings of another character in the third person was present also at the beginning.

Pantser or plotter?

Plotter. See above: I know where my books are headed before I begin even if I don’t understand all that will be involved in getting there.

What made you choose the time period you did?

See #1 above. I was a teenager of the type my two heroes are—I too carried around a complete Shakespeare till the edges were filthy and the spine broken; I too wanted to set up a pageant theater of carpenter’s columns in my backyard. I also once conceived of a production of Henry V much like the one in the story—simple costumes of ordinary black and white, mixed weaponry of various eras, horses played by dancers. What I could not actually bring about, I brought about in a story. That’s what we do.

Can you talk about the alternate history element of “Girlhood”?

I think that only readers and fans of F/SF would call this an alternate history. Peter Straub was generous about the fantastical elements he perceived in it when he published it in the groundbreaking “New Wave Fabulists” issue of the Bard literary magazine Conjunctions that he guest-edited. To me it was just the real world of the past with a new thing added, not different really than the imagined bars and nightclubs of a noir novel set in a real city, or Patrick O’Brien’s imagined British ship of the line in his Napoleonic-era novels. (I thank the Lightspeed editors for extending this “alternate history” courtesy to me in publishing it in another F/SF venue.)

Why did you choose the ending you did? What were the challenges of balancing a satisfying story arc with an ending that leaves the reader with some questions unanswered? (Are the questions answered in your mind?)

Well if by “ending” you mean the last scene or sentence of the novella, I think the scene is more an ambiguous continuation of all that’s gone before than it is a conclusive shutting (or opening) of a door. Harriet’s acquisition of the Shakespeare game, and the spilling of all the little Shakespeare busts, are of course metonymic of the whole story; that they roll under the table where Harriet will have to get help to retrieve them is more metonymy: the last sentence seems to contain a possible choice, abandoning things she can no longer do, or getting help from her lover, and continuing their love maybe even into marriage. (That’s a lot for a few plastic heads of Shakespeare to bear, but writing’s like that.) It seems less challenge than commitment: it seems to me the way modern realistic stories—as opposed to romances of all kinds—ought to end; have to end, almost, to be realistic. I did not answer the question for myself—what would be the point of that?

You write novels, teach at Yale, produce in partnership with your wife Laurie Block a range of award-winning, cross-platform media on American history and culture—when do you sleep?

I actually consider myself as loafing for a living, though the pace does pick up now and then. The difference between my kind of work—most of it, anyway—and that of a 9-to-5 desk worker or a laborer is that a) it’s always there to be done—no vacations no weekends; and b) I can’t do it if I don’t feel like it. (Teaching does have a schedule, etc., but I am merely a half-time teacher. The media work does have deadlines when it’s there to do, but months can pass when it isn’t there.) I get plenty of rest. It’s my standard New Year’s resolution: in the New Year, I want to get more rest.

You’re friends with Harold Bloom, who called your novel Little, Big one of the five best novels by a living writer: how has that friendship contributed to your work (and to his)?

The admiration that Harold Bloom has shown for my work is one of the most gratifying occurrences in my professional life. It led to my being read by some of the best writers in America (John Hollander, Mark Strand, James Merrill). His approval means I hardly need to worry about whether what I’ve written is any good—and you know that writers DO worry, even with great reams of approval coming their way, because, you know, who really can say? My association led to my having (after a not brief apprenticeship) a real job, with benefits, the only one I’ve ever had. But above all it has been a friendship. I hope to tell in print one day of the nearly mystical way that friendship began.

What’s next for you?

Well next I don’t know, but I am nearly finished with a new novel (which means it might appear in late 2015 or early 2016) about Crows. One Crow in particular, who becomes friends with several humans through a very long (perhaps endless) life on two continents.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She has trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.

MISCELLANY

In the Next Issue of

Coming up in January, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam (“He Came From a Place of Openness and Truth”) and Jeremiah Tolbert (“Men of Unborrowed Vision”), along with SF reprints by Theodora Goss (“Beautiful Boys”) and Michael Cassutt (“More Adventures on Other Planets”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Sequoia Nagamatsu (“Headwater LLC”) and Matthew Hughes (“The Archon”), and fantasy reprints by Aliette de Bodard (“The Lonely Heart”) and Rachel Swirsky and Ann Leckie (“Mother, Maiden, Crone”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, a feature interview, plus the debut of our new book review column.

For our ebook readers, we also have an ebook-exclusive novella reprint of “The Choice” by Paul McAuley, and a pair of novel excerpts.

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

• • • •

Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got lots of wonderful fiction coming your way, including stories by C.C. Finlay, Maria Dahvana Headley, Ken Liu, Dale Bailey, Andrea Hairston, Sarah Pinsker, Kat Howard, Brooke Bolander, Caroline M. Yoachim, Carrie Vaughn, and others—plus the final installments of the Kaslo Chronicles.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that SFnal goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

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All caught up on Lightspeed? Good news! We also have lots of ebooks available from our sister-publications:

Nightmare Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions: Like Lightspeed, our sister-magazine Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles, and subscriptions available as well. For instance, you can get the complete first year (12 issues) of Nightmare for just $24.99; that’s savings of $11 off buying the issues individually. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month subscription to Nightmare includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), and will cost you just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price).

Fantasy Magazine Ebooks & Bundles: We also have ebook back issues—and ebook back issue bundles—of Lightspeed’s (now dormant) sister-magazine, Fantasy. To check those out, just visit fantasy-magazine.com/store. You can buy each Fantasy bundle for $24.99, or you can buy the complete run of Fantasy Magazine— all 57 issues—for just $114.99 (that’s $10 off buying all the bundles individually, and more than $55 off the cover price!).

About the Editor

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Lightspeed, is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. New projects coming out in 2014 and 2015 include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Operation Arcana, Wastelands 2, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated eight times) and is a six-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Nightmare Magazine and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.