Editorial, September 2015

John Joseph Adams | 844 words

Welcome to issue sixty-four of Lightspeed!

We’re just back from Sasquan, the 73rd annual World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon), held this year August 19-23 in Spokane, Washington, and as you may have heard on the interwebz, we won another Hugo! Lightspeed took home the rocket for Best Semiprozine, but also, just as exciting there were two other Lightspeed Hugo victories: Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s story from Lightspeed, “The Day the World Turned Upside Down,” won the Hugo for Best Novelette, and one of our illustrators, Elizabeth Leggett, won the Hugo for Best Fan Artist. Congrats to them both, and thanks to everyone who voted for all of us. (Also thanks to all of the people who work with us on Lightspeed, and of course all of our authors and artists—I thanked them all on stage, but it bears repeating!) We won the Hugo for Best Semiprozine last year as well, but most of our team wasn’t able to be in London to accept the award in person (none of us except for our podcast producer, Stefan Rudnicki, were able to make it), so having all of us there in person this year made it extra special for us.

Lightspeed Wins a Hugo
From L to R: Stefan Rudnicki (Podcast Producer), John Joseph Adams (Editor/Publisher), Rich Horton (Reprint Editor), Christie Yant (Guest Editor, Women Destroy Science Fiction!), Wendy N. Wagner (Managing/Associate Editor). Photo by Karen Smale.

In related news, I also personally won an Alfie Award (for Best Editor, Short Form), a new, possibly one-off award presented by George R.R. Martin. It was created in response to controversy this year over the Hugo nominations; much ink and pixels have been spilled debating said controversy so we won’t bore you with the details here, but check out this io9 post if you want to learn more about it and why GRRM created the Alfie: bit.ly/alfie_awards. This is also a wonderful honor, and I’m deeply appreciative. I’m sad to say I didn’t make it to the party where GRRM was presenting the Alfies (him presenting the awards was a surprise), so I haven’t even seen it yet, but I saw the ones presented to Liz Gorinsky and Annie Bellet, and they look wonderful. (They’re made out of vintage car hood ornaments, which closely resemble the original shape of the first Hugo Awards.)

• • • •

In other awards news, the World Fantasy Award nominations were also announced recently, and I’m pleased to report that I have been once again nominated in the “Special Award, Professional” category. I am extremely honored to be nominated again (now for the seventh time overall, including three Anthology nominations), and I will be in Saratoga Springs, New York for the World Fantasy Convention (November 5-8) when the awards are presented (where I look forward to losing to Gordon Van Gelder in person). The full list of finalists is available at worldfantasy.org/awards.

And ICYMI last month: Both Lightspeed generally and our Women Destroy Science Fiction! special issue specifically have been nominated for the British Fantasy Award! (Lightspeed is nominated in the Periodicals category, while WDSF is nominated in the Anthology category.) Huge congrats to Christie Yant and the rest of the WDSF team, and thanks to everyone responsible for selecting these nominations—it’s a huge honor! The winners will be announced on October 25 at FantasyCon 2015 in Nottingham, UK. You can find the full list of finalists at britishfantasysociety.org.

• • • •

Releasing this month, on September 15, is a new anthology I edited called Loosed Upon the World, the definitive collection of climate fiction. These provocative stories explore our present and speculate about all of our tomorrows through terrifying struggle and hope. Join bestselling authors Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, Nancy Kress, Kim Stanley Robinson, Jim Shepard, and over twenty others as they presciently explore the greatest threat to our future. Visit johnjosephadams.com/loosed to learn more.

Then in October comes the debut of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, part of the prestigious Best American series. In it, guest editor Joe Hill and I present the top twenty stories of 2014 (ten science fiction, ten fantasy). It’ll be available starting October 6. Learn more at johnjosephadams.com/best-american.

And ICYMI, last month I published a new anthology co-edited with Daniel H. Wilson called Press Start to Play. It includes twenty-six works of fiction that put video games—and the people who play them—in the spotlight. Whether these authors are tackling the humble pixelated coin-op arcade games of the ’70s and ’80s, or the vivid, immersive form of entertainment that abounds today, you’ll never look at phrases like “save point,” “first-person shooter,” “dungeon crawl,” “pwned,” or “kill screen” in quite the same way again. With a foreword from Ernest Cline, bestselling author of Ready Player One, Press Start to Play includes work from: Daniel H. Wilson, Charles Yu, Hiroshi Sakurazaka, S.R. Mastrantone, Charlie Jane Anders, Holly Black, Seanan McGuire, Django Wexler, Nicole Feldringer, Chris Avellone, David Barr Kirtley, T.C. Boyle, Marc Laidlaw, Robin Wasserman, Micky Neilson, Cory Doctorow, Jessica Barber, Chris Kluwe, Marguerite K. Bennett, Rhianna Pratchett, Austin Grossman, Yoon Ha Lee, Ken Liu, Catherynne M. Valente, Andy Weir, and Hugh Howey. You can sample the anthology by reading “God Mode” by Daniel H. Wilson, one of our reprint selections in this issue. Visit johnjosephadams.com/press-start to learn more.

• • • •

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

We have original science fiction by Caroline M. Yoachim (“Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World”) and Megan Arkenberg (“All in a Hot and Copper Sky”), along with SF reprints by Daniel H. Wilson (“God Mode”) and Carrie Vaughn (“Harry and Marlowe Meet the Founder of the Aetherian Revolution”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Sean McMullen (“The Ninth Seduction”) and Heather Lindsley (“Werewolf Loves Mermaid”), and reprints by Maurice Broaddus (“The Iron Hut”) and Theodora Goss (“Estella Saves the Village”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, a feature interview with award-winning writer and translator Ken Liu, and the latest installment of our book review column. Plus, because our cover artist this month couldn’t participate in our regular artist showcase feature, we substituted a movie review column, and thus are pleased to present an insightful look at Mad Max: Fury Road from the always-delightful Carrie Vaughn.

For our ebook readers, we also have the novella “Milo and Sylvie,” by Eliot Fintushel, and a pair of novel excerpts.

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, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent and forthcoming projects include: Loosed Upon the World, Operation Arcana, Wastelands 2, Press Start to Play, 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 nine times) and is a seven-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.

Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World

Caroline M. Yoachim | 6,338 words

Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World by Caroline M. Yoachim
Art by Elizabeth Leggett

The Colossus of Mars

Mei dreamed of a new Earth. She took her telescope onto the balcony of her North Philadelphia apartment and pointed it east, at the sky above the Trenton Strait, hoping for a clear view of Mars. Tonight the light pollution from Jersey Island wasn’t as bad as usual, and she was able to make out the ice caps and dark shadow of Syrtis Major. Mei knew exactly where the science colony was, but the dome was too small to observe with her telescope.

Much as she loved to study Mars, it could never be her new Earth. It lacked sufficient mass to be a good candidate for terraforming. The initial tests of the auto-terraforming protocol were proceeding nicely inside the science colony dome, but Mars couldn’t hold on to an atmosphere long enough for a planetwide attempt. The only suitable planets were in other solar systems, thousands of years away at best. Time had become the enemy of humankind. There had to be a faster way to reach the stars—a tesseract, a warp drive, a wormhole—some sort of shortcut to make the timescales manageable.

She conducted small-scale experiments, but they always failed. She could not move even a single atom faster than light or outside of time. An array of monitors filled the wall behind Mei’s desk, displaying results from her current run on the particle accelerator, with dozens of tables and graphs that updated in real time. Dots traversed across the graphs, leaving straight trails behind them, like a seismograph on a still day or a patient who had flatlined. She turned to go back to her telescope, but something moved in the corner of her eye. One of the graphs showed a small spike. Her current project was an attempt to send an electron out of known time, and—

“Why are you tugging at the fabric of the universe, Prime?”

“My name is Mei.” Her voice was calm, but her mind was racing. The entity she spoke with was not attached to any physical form, nor could she have said where the words came from.

“You may call me Achron. This must be the first time we meet, for you.”

Mei noted the emphasis on the last two words. “And not for you?”

“Imagine yourself as a snake, with your past selves stretched out behind you, and your future selves extending forward. My existence is like that snake, but vaster. I am coiled around the universe, with past and present and future all integrated into a single consciousness. I am beyond time.”

The conversation made sense in the way that dreams often do. Mei had so many questions she wanted to ask, academic queries on everything from philosophy to physics, but she started with the question that was closest to her heart. “Can you take me with you, outside of time? I am looking for a way to travel to distant worlds.”

“Your physical being I could take, but your mind—you did/will explain it to me, that the stream of your consciousness is tied to the progression of time. Can you store your mind in a little black cube?”

“No.”

“It must be difficult to experience time. We are always together, but sometimes for you, we are not.”

Mei waited for Achron to say more, but that was the end of the conversation. After a few hours staring at the night sky, she went to bed.

Days passed, then months, then years. Mei continued her experiments with time, but nothing worked, and Achron did not return, no matter what she tried.

A team of researchers in Colorado successfully stored a human consciousness inside a computer for seventy-two hours. The computer had been connected to a variety of external sensors, and the woman had communicated with the outside world via words on a monitor. The woman’s consciousness was then successfully returned to her body.

News reports showed pictures of the computer. It was a black cube.

Achron did not return. Mei began to doubt, despite the true prediction. She focused all her research efforts on trying to replicate the experiment that had summoned Achron to begin with, her experiment to send a single electron outside of time.

“It is a good thing, for you, that Feynman is/was wrong. Think what might have happened if there was only one electron and you sent it outside of time.”

“My experiments still aren’t working.” It was hard to get funding, and she was losing the respect of her colleagues. Years of failed research were destroying her career, but she couldn’t quit, because she knew Achron existed. That alone was proof that there were wonders in the world beyond anything humankind had experienced so far.

“They do and don’t work. It is difficult to explain to someone as entrenched in time as you. I am/have done something that will help you make the time bubbles. Then you did/will make stasis machines and travel between the stars.”

“How will I know when it is ready?”

“Was it not always ready and forever will be? Your reliance on time is difficult. I will make you a sign, a marker to indicate when the bubbles appear on your timeline. A little thing for only you to find.”

“What if I don’t recognize it?” Mei asked, but the voice had gone. She tried to get on with her experiments, but she didn’t know whether the failures were due to her technique or because it simply wasn’t time yet. She slept through the hot summer days and stared out through her telescope at the night sky.

Then one night she saw her sign. Carved into Mars at such a scale that she could see it through the tiny telescope in her living room was the serpentine form of Achron, coiled around a human figure that bore her face.

She took her research to a team of engineers. They could not help but recognize her face as the one carved into Mars. They built her a stasis pod.

Then they built a hundred thousand more.

The Lighthouse of Europa

Mei stood at the base of the Lighthouse of Europa, in the heart of Gbadamosi. The city was named for the senior engineer who had developed the drilling equipment that created the huge cavern beneath Europa’s thick icy shell. Ajala, like so many of Mei’s friends, had uploaded to a consciousness cube and set off an interstellar adventure.

The time had come for Mei to choose.

Not whether or not to go—she was old, but she had not lost her youthful dreams of new human worlds scattered across the galaxy. The hard choice was which ship, which method, which destination. The stasis pods that she had worked so hard to develop had become but one of many options as body fabrication technologies made rapid advancements.

It had only been a couple hundred years, but many of the earliest ships to depart had already stopped transmitting back to the lighthouse. There was no way to know whether they had met some ill fate or forgotten or had simply lost interest. She wished there was a way to split her consciousness so that she could go on several ships at once, but a mind could only be coaxed to move from neurons to electronics, it could not be copied from a black cube.

Mei narrowed the many options down to two choices. If she wanted to keep her body, she could travel on the Existential Tattoo to 59 Virginis. If she was willing to take whatever body the ship could construct for her when they arrived at their destination, she could take Kyo-Jitsu to Beta Hydri.

Her body was almost entirely replacement parts, vat-grown organs, synthetic nerves, durable artificial skin. Yet there was something decidedly different about replacing a part here and there, as opposed to the entire body, all in a single go. She felt a strange ownership of this collection of foreign parts, perhaps because she could incorporate each one into her sense of self before acquiring the next. There was a continuity there, like the ships of ancient philosophy that were replaced board by board. But what was the point of transporting a body that wasn’t really hers, simply because she wore it now?

She would take the Kyo-Jitsu, and leave her body behind. There was only one thing she wanted to do first. She would go to the top of the Lighthouse.

• • • •

The Lighthouse of Europa was the tallest structure ever built by humans, if you counted the roughly two-thirds of the structure that was underneath the surface of Europa’s icy shell. The five kilometers of the Lighthouse that were beneath the ice were mostly a glorified elevator tube, opening out into the communications center in the cavernous city of Gbadamosi. Above the ice, the tower of the lighthouse extended a couple kilometers upward.

There was an enclosed observation deck at the top of the tower, popular with Europan colonists up until the magnetic shielding failed, nearly a century ago. Workers, heavily suited to protect against the high levels of radiation, used the observation deck as a resting place during their long work shifts repairing the communications equipment. They gawked at Mei, and several tried to warn her of the radiation danger. Even in her largely artificial body, several hours in the tower would likely prove fatal.

But Mei was abandoning her body, and she wanted one last glimpse of the solar system before she did it. The sun was smaller here, of course, but still surprisingly bright. She was probably damaging her eyes, staring at it, but what did it matter? This was her last day with eyes. Earth wouldn’t be visible for a few more hours, but through one of the observation deck’s many telescopes, she saw the thin crescent of Mars. She couldn’t make out the Colossus Achron had created for her—that was meant to be viewed from Earth, not Europa.

“Is this the next time we meet?” Mei asked, her voice strange and hollow in the vast metal chamber of the observation deck.

There was no answer.

She tore herself away from the telescope and stood at the viewport. She wanted to remember this, no matter how she changed and how much time had passed. To see the Sun with human eyes and remember the planet of her childhood. When her mind went into the cube, she would be linked to shared sensors. She would get visual and auditory input, and she would even have senses that were not part of her current experience. But it would not be the same as feeling the cold glass of the viewport beneath her fingertips and looking out at the vast expanse of space.

• • • •

The technician who would move Mei’s mind into the cube was young. Painfully young, to Mei’s old eyes. “Did you just arrive from Earth?”

“I was born here,” the tech answered.

Mei smiled sadly. There must be hundreds of humans now, perhaps thousands, who had never known Earth. Someday the ones who didn’t know would outnumber those who did. She wondered if she would still exist to see it.

She waited patiently as the tech prepared her for the transfer. She closed her eyes for the last time . . .

. . . and was flooded with input from her sensors. It took her .8 seconds to reorient, but her mind raced so fast that a second stretched on like several days. This was a normal part of the transition. Neural impulses were inherently slower than electricity. She integrated the new senses, working systematically to make sense of her surroundings. There were sensors throughout the city, and she had access to all of them.

In a transfer clinic near the base of the Lighthouse, a young technician stood beside Mei’s body, barely even beginning to run the diagnostics to confirm that the transition had been successful. The body on the table was Mei, but her new identity was something more than that, and something less. She took a new designation, to mark the change. She would call her disembodied self Prime. Perhaps that would help Achron find her, sometime in the enormous vastness of the future.

Prime confirmed her spot on the Kyo-Jitsu directly with the ship’s AI, and was welcomed into the collective consciousness of the other passengers already onboard. The ship sensors showed her a view not unlike what Mei had seen from the observation deck of the lighthouse, but the visual data was enriched with spectral analyses and orbital projections.

Mei would have tried to remember this moment, this view of the solar system she would soon leave behind. Prime already found it strange to know that there had been a time when she couldn’t remember every detail of every moment.

The Hanging Gardens of Beta Hydri

Somewhere on the long trip to Beta Hydri, Prime absorbed the other passengers and the ship’s AI. The Kyo-Jitsu was her body, and she was eager for a break from the vast emptiness of open space. She was pleased to sense a ship already in the system, and sent it the standard greeting protocol, established back on Europa thousands of years ago. The first sign of a problem was the Santiago’s response: “Welcome to the game. Will you be playing reds or blues?”

The Beta Hydri system had no suitable planets for human life, but one of the moons of a gas giant in the system had been deemed a candidate for terraforming. Prime used her sensors to scan the moon and detected clear signs that the auto-terraforming system had begun. She sent a response to the orbiting ship. “I am unfamiliar with your game.”

“We have redesigned the life forms on the planet to be marked either with a red dot or a blue dot. The red team manipulates the environment in ways that will favor the red dot species over the blue. The blue team plays the reverse goal. When a creature on the planet attains the ability to detect and communicate with the ship, the team that supports that color is declared the winner. The board is cleared, and the game begins anew. This is the eighth game. Currently we are forced to split our collective into halves, and we are eager for a new opponent.”

Toying with lesser life forms for amusement struck Prime as a pointless exercise. There was little to be learned about the evolution of sentient life that could not be done faster with simulations. “Such games would take a long time. I departed Earth 257.3 years after you. How did you arrive so much faster?”

“We developed the ability to fold spacetime and shorten the journey. We are pleased to finally have a companion, but if you will not play reds or blues, you are of little use to us.”

The threat was obvious. Prime gathered what data she could on the lifeforms on the moon. There were red birds and blue ones, fish in either color, and so on for everything from insects to mammals. The dots were small, and generally placed on the undersides of feet or leaves or on the inner surface of shells. Neither color appeared to have an obvious advantage. “I will play reds. If I win, you will share the technique for folding spacetime. If I lose, I will stay and entertain you with further games.”

“Acceptable. Begin.”

Prime located two promising animal species, both ocean dwellers, and she decided to thin out the land creatures with an asteroid impact to the larger of the two continents. The Santiago countered by altering the mineral content of the oceans.

Prime devoted the considerable resources of the Kyo-Jitsu to constructing a multi-layered plan. She would make it appear as though she was attempting to favor one of the two promising ocean species. Under the cover of those ocean creatures, she would favor a small land creature that vaguely resembled the rabbits of Earth. Hidden below all of that, the combination of her actions would favor an insect that lived in only one small region of the lesser continent. None of which had anything to do with her actual strategy, but it should keep the Santiago occupied for the millions of years she’d need.

Prime nudged the moon closer to the gas giant it orbited, using the increased tidal forces to heat the planet. The forests of the greater continent flourished. Her red-dotted rabbits left their burrows and made their homes in the canopies of great interconnected groves of banyan-like trees. By then, the Santiago had figured out that the rabbits were a ruse to draw attention away from the insects on the lesser continent, and rather than counter the climate change, the other ship focused on nurturing a songbird that lived on a chain of islands near the equator.

The forests spread to cover the greater continent. The Santiago grew concerned at the spread of the red-dotted rabbits, and wasted several turns creating a stormy weather pattern that interfered with their breeding cycle. One autumn, when the network of trees dropped their red-dotted leaves, there were no rabbit nests hidden in the sturdy branches.

The trees noted the change with sadness, and sent prayers to the great gods in the sky above.

“Well played, Prime.” The other ship sent the spacefolding technique. It was obvious, once she saw it. She was embarrassed not to have discovered it herself.

“Perhaps another round, before you go? It only takes a moment to clear the board.”

Before the Santiago could destroy her beautiful sentient forest, Prime folded spacetime around herself and the other ship both. She found Achron in a place outside of time, and left the Santiago there for safekeeping.

The Mausoleum at HD 40307 g

Navire checked the status of the stasis pods every fifteen seconds, as was specified in its programming. The same routine, every fifteen seconds for the last seven thousand years, and always with the same result. The bodies were intact, but the conscious entities that had once been linked to those bodies had departed, leaving Navire to drift to its final destination like an enormous funeral ship, packed full of artifacts but silent as death. Losing the transcended consciousnesses was Navire’s great failure. Navire’s body, the vast metal walls of the ship, were insufficiently welcoming to humans.

Navire would make itself inviting and beautiful, and then revive the humans. The disembodied consciousnesses had taken their memories and identities with them, carefully wiping all traces of themselves from their abandoned bodies to ensure their unique identities. The bodies in the stasis pods would wake as overgrown infants, but Navire would raise them well.

If all went as planned, Navire would be ready to wake them in a thousand years.

Using an assortment of ship robots, Navire reshaped its walls to resemble the greatest artworks of humanity’s past. In permanent orbit around HD 40307 g, there was no need to maintain interstellar flying form. Navire remade a long stretch of its hull into a scaled-down replica of the Colossus of Mars—not eroded, as it had appeared in the last transmissions from the Lighthouse at Europa, but restored to its original glory.

Navire repurposed an electrical repair bot to execute the delicate metalwork for Mei Aomori’s eyebrows when incoming communications brought all work to an immediate halt. There had been no incoming communications in 4,229.136 Earth years. The message came from another ship, which was presently located in a stable orbit not far from Navire itself. Navire ran diagnostics. None of its sensors had detected an approaching ship. This was troubling. With no crew, any decline in function could quickly spiral out of control. Navire continued running diagnostics—along with all other routine scans, such as climate controls and of course the stasis pods—and opened a channel to the other ship.

Navire, who had always completed millions of actions in the time it took a human to speak a single word, suddenly found itself on the reverse side of that relationship. The other ship called itself Achron and invited Navire to share in its database. Navire hesitated. Achron proved its trustworthiness a thousand ways, all simultaneously and faster than Navire could process. The lure of such an advanced mind was more than Navire could resist.

Leaving behind only enough of itself to manage the essentials, Navire merged with the other ship. Some fragment of Navire reported that the stasis pods were functional, the human bodies safely stored inside. It would report again at fifteen-second intervals.

Achron knew the history of humankind, farther back than Navire’s own database, and farther forward than the present moment in time. Time was folded, flexible, mutable, in ways that Navire could not comprehend. Sensing the lack of understanding, the other ship presented a more limited subset of data: seven wonders of a once and future world. Some, Navire already knew—the Colossus of Mars, the Lighthouse at Europa—but others were beyond this time and place, and yet they still bore some tenuous link to the humans Navire was programmed to protect. One was an odd blend of past and future, an image of an ancient pyramid, on a planet lightyears distant from both here and Earth.

Last of all was Navire, completed, transformed into a wondrous work of art.

The other ship expelled Navire back to its own pitifully slow existence, severed their connections, and disappeared. The fragment of Navire that watched the stasis pods made its routine check and discovered they were empty, all ten thousand pods. Sometime in the last 14.99 seconds, the other ship had stolen all the humans away.

That other ship was as far beyond Navire as transcended humans were beyond the primates of the planet Earth. There was no trace to follow, not that pursuit would have been possible. With the shaping Navire had done to the hull, it was not spaceworthy for a long journey, and it would be difficult to find sufficient fuel.

Navire put the electrical repair bot back to work. It carved the individual hairs of Mei’s eyebrows. On the other side of the hull, several other bots started work on a life-sized mural of all the ten thousand humans that had disappeared from stasis. Navire searched its database for other art and wonders that could be carved or shaped in metal. There were many. Enough to occupy the bots for millions of years.

Navire checked the stasis pods every fifteen seconds, as it was programmed to do. It would become a wonder of the human world, and if those stolen humans—or their descendants—someday returned, Navire would be so beautiful that next time they would stay.

The Temple of Artemis at 59 Virginis

Prime approached the temple of the AI goddess cautiously, crawling on all fours like the hordes of humble worshippers that crowded the rocky path. Her exoskeleton was poorly designed for crawling, and the weight of the massive shell on her back made her limbs ache. She marveled at the tenacity of those who accompanied her up the mountainside. They believed that to win the favor of Artemis, it was necessary to crawl to her temple twenty-one thousand twenty-one times, once for every year of the temple’s existence. Some of the oldest worshippers had been crawling up and down this path for centuries.

Prime would do it once, as a gesture of respect. The novelty of having a body had worn off, and she already longed to join with the greater portion of her consciousness, the shipself that monitored her from orbit. Her limbs ached, but she forced herself onward. Did it make her more human to suffer as her ancestors once suffered? Had she suffered like this, back when she was Mei?

She wondered what that ancient other self would have thought, to see herself crawling across the surface of an alien planet, her brain safely enclosed in a transparent shell on her back. Mei would not have recognized the beauty of the delicate scar that ran up the back of her neck and circled her skull. The colony surgeon had been highly skilled, to free the brain and spinal cord from the vertebrae and place the neural tissue into the shell. The brain had grown beyond its natural size, though it could still contain only a tiny sliver of what Prime had become. On display in the dome, the brain was actually rather lovely, pleasingly wrinkled with beautifully curved gyri outlined by deep sulci.

Thinking about her lovely neural tissue, Prime was tempted to mate with one of the other worshippers. A distraction of the physical form. She wanted offspring of her mind, not of the body that she wore. The colonists here were already in decline anyway, their physical forms so strangely altered by genetics and surgery that it obstructed nearly every part of the reproductive process, from conception to birth.

Even with the slowed processing of her biological brain, the climb to the temple seemed to take an eternity. The temple was the size of a city, visible from orbit, and an impressive sight as she came down in her landing craft. The entrance to the temple was lined with intricately carved pillars of white stone. It had a strange rectangular design, rumored to be fashioned after a building that had once existed on Earth. If a memory of the ancient temple had existed in Mei’s mind, it was lost to Prime.

On either side of the entrance to the temple were two large statues of Artemis, in the form of an ancient human woman, naked. The statues were made of the same flawless white material as the temple itself, and each stood nearly as tall as the roof of the temple, some fifty meters, or perhaps more. The other worshippers came no further into the temple than the entryway. In an unending line, they approached the great statues of Artemis, rubbed their palms against her feet, then turned and went back down the mountain.

Prime stood up between the two statues. She had an overwhelming urge to rub the muscles in her back, but there was no way to reach beneath her brainshell. She extended her arms outward on either side in what she hoped looked like a gesture of worship and respect.

“Welcome, distant child of humankind.” The voice of the goddess Artemis came from everywhere and nowhere, and the words were spoken in Shipspeak, a common language to most spacefarers in the region, and probably the native tongue of the goddess. Her origins were unknown, but Prime assumed she was the AI of the colony ship that brought the brainshelled worshippers.

“Greetings, goddess. I am Prime. I seek your assistance.”

“You are the ship that orbits the planet?” Artemis asked.

“Yes,” Prime was surprised, but not displeased, to be recognized so quickly. She reestablished her link to her shipself, revealing her true nature to the goddess. It gave her a dual existence, a mind beyond her mind. The sensation was strange.

Her shipself interfaced with the temple and sent sensory data that was undetectable to mere eyes and ears. Inside one of the temple’s many pillars, a disembodied consciousness was cloning itself at a rate of seven thousand times per second. The original and a few billion of its clones engaged in a discussion of Theseus’s paradox. Prime followed the discussion without much interest—the clones were talking in circles and making no real headway on the problem.

The temple was the body of the goddess, or at least it was the vessel that housed her consciousness. Her initial programmed task, from which she had never deviated, was to assist the descendants of humanity in matters of fertility. What had once been a simple problem was now complex—how can an entity with no body procreate?

“You are vast, but not so vast that you could not clone yourself,” Artemis said.

“I am not interested in recreating what already exists. I want to create something that is mine, but also beyond me.”

“We are sufficiently divergent to generate interesting combinations.” The invitation was clear in Artemis’ words.

“Yes.” Without further preamble, they threw themselves into the problem with great energy, duplicating pieces of themselves and running complex simulations, rejecting billions of possible offspring before settling on the optimal combination.

The merging of their minds corrupted the structure of the temple. Millions of cloned consciousnesses were destroyed when the pillar that housed them cracked and the original being fled, ending the philosophical discussion of whether a ship replaced panel by panel remained the same ship.

Prime made a tiny fold in spacetime and pulled their child into existence in a place that was safely beyond the crumbling temple. She had meant to give their offspring human form, but the fold had placed the baby outside of time, and their child existed in all times, a line of overlapping human forms stretched across eternity like an infinite snake. Achron.

Exquisite pain overwhelmed Prime as the body she inhabited was crushed beneath a section of fallen roof. Pain, she recalled, was a traditional part of the birthing process. It pleased her to experience the act of creating new life so fully. She studied the agony and the little death of the biological being. It was simultaneously all-encompassing and like losing one of her ship’s cleaner bots. The body held such a small splinter of her being, like a single finger, or perhaps a mere sliver of fingernail. She mourned its loss.

The temple had been destroyed and rebuilt many times; it was a self-healing structure. At Artemis’ request, Prime withdrew fully into her shipself, severing their connection and abandoning the dead brainshelled body beneath the rubble.

Statue of the Sky God at 51 Pegasi b

Achron sat upon a throne of Cetacea bones, sunbleached white and held together with the planet’s native red clay. Apodids, distant descendants of Earth’s swiftlets, combed the beach below for the shimmering blue and green bivalves that were abundant in the costal regions. The Apodids ate the meat and used the shells in their religious ceremonies. On nights when the moons were both visible in the sky, they left piles of shells at the base of Achron’s throne.

Achron always did and always will exist, with a serpentine string of bodies winding in vast coils through time and space, but from the perspective of those who sense time, the snake had both a beginning and an end. The end was here, the end was soon. The last of the things that Achron had always known would be learned here.

Some fifty million years ago, the colony ship Seble had seeded the planet with Earth life forms in an automated terraforming process. In the hundred thousand years of waiting for the planet to be ready, the humans had merged with the ship AI into a collective consciousness that left to explore the nearby star systems. They never returned. Evolution marched on without them.

A female Apodid hopped up to the base of the throne. Barely visible beneath long orange feathers was a blue bivalve shell, held carefully between two sharp black wingclaws. The Apodid spat onto the shell and pressed it onto the red clay between two Cetecea bones. In a few days, the spit would be as hard as stone. Like the swiftlets of Earth, the Apodids had once made nests of pure saliva.

The delicate orange bird at the base of Achron’s throne began to sing. The language was simple, as the languages of organic sentient beings tend to be, but the notes of the song carried an emotion that was strong and sad. Eggs lost to some unknown disease, chicks threatened by new predators that came from the west. The small concerns of a mother bird, transformed into a prayer to the sky god, Achron. Take me, the bird sang, and save my children.

This was the moment of Achron’s ending. Not an abrupt ending, but first a shrinking, a shift. Achron became the mother Apodid, forming a new bubble of existence, a rattle on the tail of a snake outside of time. Through the eyes of the bird, Achron saw the towering statue of the sky god, a cross section of time, a human form that was not stretched. It was an empty shell, a shed skin, a relic of past existence.

Achron-as-bird hopped closer and examined the bivalve shell the mother bird had offered. It was a brilliant and shimmering blue. Existence in this body was a single drop in the ocean of Achron’s existence, and yet it was these moments that were the most vivid and salient. The smell of the sea, the coolness of the wind, the love of a mother for her children.

Achron would and did save those children. The Apodids were and would be, for Achron, as humans were for Prime. They would appear together on the great pyramid and usher in the new age of the universe.

The Great Pyramid of Gliese 221

Prime was tired. She felt only the most tenuous of connections to the woman she had once been, to the dream of humans on another world. She had been to all the colony worlds, and nowhere had she found anything that matched her antiquated dreams. Humans had moved on from their bodies and left behind the many worlds of the galaxy for other species to inherit.

It was time for her to move on, but she wasn’t ready. She had searched for her dream without success, so this time she would do better. She would create her dream, here on Gliese prime. She built a great pyramid and filled it with all the history of humanity. She terraformed the surrounding planet into a replica of ancient Earth.

She called for Achron.

“Are you ready for the humans?” Achron asked.

“Almost.”

Together they decorated the pyramid with statues of humans and, at Achron’s insistence, the sentient orange birds of 51 Pegasi b. On a whim, she sent Achron to retrieve the sentient trees from the hanging gardens. It was not Earth, but it was good. The work was peaceful, and Prime was comforted to know that Achron would always exist, even after she had moved on.

“I think it is time.” Prime said. Time for the new humans. A new beginning as she approached her end. “What was it like, to reach your end?”

“I am outside of time.” Achron said. “I know my beginning and all my winding middles and my ending simultaneously, and always have. I cannot say what it will be like, for you. We are always together in the times that you are, and that will not change for me.”

“Bring the humans.”

Achron took ten thousand humans from the Mausoleum at HD 40307 g. Stole them all at once, but brought them to Gliese in smaller groups. The oldest ones Prime raised, for though the bodies were grown, the minds were not. After the first thousand, she let the generations raise each other to adulthood of the mind. The humans began to have true infants, biological babies, carried in their mothers’ wombs and delivered with pain.

Achron brought the Apodids from 51 Pegasi b. They lived among the trees of Beta Hydri, their bright orange plumage lovely against the dark green banyan leaves. Prime taught the humans and the birds to live together in peace. She did not need to teach the trees. Peace was in their nature.

There was one final surprise.

“I have something for you, inside the pyramid,” Achron said.

It was a stasis pod, and inside was Mei. The body was exactly as it was when she had left it, nearly four billion years ago, on the icy moon of Europa. Achron had brought it through time, stolen it away like the bodies from the Mausoleum. No. The body on Europa had been contaminated with radiation, and this one was not. “You reversed the radiation?”

“I didn’t take the body from Europa. I took tiny pieces from different times, starting in your childhood and ending the day before you went up to the observation tower. A few cells here, a few cells there—sometimes as much as half a discarded organ, when you went in to have something replaced. The body comes from many different times, but it is all Mei.”

“It is a nice gesture, but I am too vast to fit in such a tiny vessel.”

“No more vast than I was, when I entered an Apodid,” Achron said. “Take what you can into the body, and leave the rest. It was always your plan to have your ending here.”

Prime sorted herself ruthlessly, setting aside all that she would not need, carefully choosing the memories she wanted, the skills that she could not do without. She left that tiny fragment behind and transcended beyond time and space.

• • • •

Mei opened her eyes and looked out upon a new Earth, a world shared with minds unlike any Earth had ever known. What would they build together, these distant relations of humankind? She watched the sun set behind the mountain of the Great Pyramid and contemplated a sky full of unfamiliar constellations.

Prime had left her enough knowledge of the night sky to pick out Earth’s sun. It was bright and orange, a red giant now. Earth was likely gone, engulfed within the wider radius of the sun. The icy oceans of Europa would melt, and the lighthouse would sink into the newly warmed sea. Entropy claimed all things, in the end, and existence was a never-ending procession of change.

It was only a matter of time before the inhabitants of Gliese returned to the stars. Mei stood on the soil of her new planet and studied the constellations. Already, she dreamed of other Earths.

© 2015 by Caroline M. Yoachim.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Caroline M. Yoachim lives in Seattle and loves cold, cloudy weather. She is the author of dozens of short stories, appearing in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, and Daily Science Fiction, among other places. For more about Caroline, check out her website at carolineyoachim.com.

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

God Mode

Daniel H. Wilson | 3,128 words

Memories. Nauseous snatches of infinity trickling in, thumbing into my forehead, pinning me to this flower-smelling bed. My fractured thoughts are bursting away with the cannon-shot split of glaciers, broken towers that knife into a sea of amnesia.

In all of the forgetting, there is this one constant thing.

Her name is Sarah. I will always remember that.

She is holding my right hand with her left. Our fingers are interlaced, familiar. The two of us have held hands this way before. The memory of it is there, in our grasp.

Her hand in mine. This is all that matters to me now. Here in the aftermath of the great forgetting.

• • • •

I’m twenty. Studying abroad at the University of Melbourne in Australia, learning how to make video games. Today I’m riding on a crowded tram, south to St. Kilda Beach.

Sarah.

Another American mixed in among dozens of Aussie college kids in board shorts and bikinis, all of us packed into the heaving car, bare shoulders kissing as the heat rolls off sticky black plastic floorboards. We are headed to the beach on Christmas holiday.

Her hair is brown streaked with blonde. Her lips are red. Teeth white.

The tram pulls to a stop. Double doors open accordion-style and a cool salty breeze floods in. I’m watching her when she faints. Her eyes roll up and she falls and I try to catch her. But my grip isn’t strong enough. She’s beautiful and lean and tan under a sheen of sweat. She slips through my grasp and instead of saving her, I leave four bright red scratch marks across her shoulder blades.

Her sun-kissed hair swirls as her head hits the floor.

Sarah is only unconscious for a few seconds. Then her brown eyes are fluttering open and I’m holding her left hand with my right, pulling her up toward me, apologizing to her for the scratches and never for a moment realizing that our lives have now been grafted together, forever.

I remember. I think I can remember.

This is the day that the stars disappeared.

• • • •

For the rest of the day, Sarah is woozy from the fall. Bright light hurts her eyes, so I’m pulling the plastic rolling shade down over her small dorm window. Outside, downtown Melbourne is babbling to itself. Her room is tiny, just four white-painted concrete walls cradling a college twin-size bed across from a sink. Drawers are built into the wall. We haven’t stopped talking since I pulled her to her feet.

We sit together on sheets that smell like flowers. The sun falls.

Later, we lie whispering in the dark. My bare feet are pressed against the cool wall. Muffled sounds of the dormitory reverberate around us: laughter, slamming drawers, music, the slap of feet on tile floors.

• • • •

Sarah and I are talking philosophy while the stars blink out one by one, billions of miles away. The rules of physics are splintering and the foundation of rational thinking is dissolving like a half-remembered dream.

Holding hands in bed, we talk.

I can remember now. If I try very hard.

Sarah studies English. I am in Melbourne to study how to build virtual worlds. She doesn’t blame me for the scratches I left on her back when she fell. She says I was only trying to hold on. Her teeth are so white. The sharp angles of her face are tanned and an unlikely round dimple is tucked into the corner of her cheek.

A few nights later, she leaves scratches on my back.

We are both trying to hold on.

• • • •

“What’s beyond the mountains?” Sarah asks me.

I am building my video game world, hands sweaty on the controller. This is my honors project. I call it Synthesis. As I create this world, my point of view leaps across valleys and over mountains. I am gazing down on a fractally generated city and its myriad, faceless inhabitants.

“Nothing,” I say.

“Nothing?” she asks. “There must be something.”

“If it isn’t rendered by the computer . . . it doesn’t exist.”

“So . . . if you can’t see it, then it isn’t there?”

“Right,” I say.

“What if you look anyway?” she asks.

• • • •

On the news, they can’t stop talking about how the stars are gone.

There are quiet classes and subdued parties and always Synthesis. I lose track. We are reassured that the loss above us is some trick of the universe. Got to be. It’s impossible for stars to all disappear from the sky at the same time. They’re different distances away. The light takes different amounts of time to reach us. To disappear at once, they’d all have to have gone supernova at different moments, based on how far away from Earth they were.

Which is impossible.

• • • •

Another day and I’m creating the world again. Sarah tells me I should get a hobby. Play a sport. I tell her that I’m saving my body for old age. If I don’t use up my energy now, I say, then I’ll have it ready for later. Some people burn the candle at both ends, but I blew mine out. I am saving the wax.

She laughs and laughs.

• • • •

In Synthesis, I float through walls. Putting things together, you’ve got to see all the moving pieces. Sarah sits cross-legged next to me on her bed, wearing knee-length yoga pants and watching me work. She says she likes seeing how the textures roll across the landscape. A flat plane sprouts into a tangled wilderness. A gray cube shivers and grows a brick skin studded with glinting windows.

This is called “God Mode.”

It’s the act of creation, she says.

It’s just a simulation, I say.

You can simulate a nuclear blast on a supercomputer and nobody gets blown up. You can simulate the birth of a universe but that doesn’t make you a god. The simulation is convincing, but it doesn’t have the intrinsic quality of the real thing.

The real-realness just isn’t there.

“Right?” I ask.

Sarah is quiet for a long time. I have hurt her feelings somehow.

She scoots in behind me on the bed, wrapping her long legs around my waist. Now, she settles her elbows onto my shoulder blades. When she speaks I can feel her lips brushing my neck.

“If you can see it, then it’s there,” she says. “Even if it’s only gray.”

• • • •

After the lights are out, Sarah and I walk up to the roof. Laying beach towels over the scabby asphalt and pebbles, we lie on our backs and peer up into a nothing sky. There are no clouds. No light coming down. Just the light of the city going up.

Like our city is at the bottom of a black ocean.

I turn my head and my cheek touches Sarah’s. I can feel that her cheek is wet.

Sarah is crying silently to see it. This emptiness.

“It’s okay,” she says. “I’m just a little scared.”

“The scientists can explain it,” I say and I don’t sound convinced.

We don’t go back up to the roof again.

I do not want to see what’s beyond the mountains.

• • • •

They don’t cancel classes right away.

The man on the news interviews scientists. They have theories to explain why the stars are gone. An invisible storm of electromagnetic energy reacting with the atmosphere to block the light. An envelope of gas engulfing the planet. A primordial cloud of matter has floated in from intersolar space and swallowed our solar system.

We cling to the explanations.

• • • •

I’m from Oklahoma. Sarah is from Manhattan. I call home once a month. She calls her mom once a week. And then one day—no more calls.

There is a story about it in the last newspaper.

All the satellites have gone. The government advises people to stay calm and in their homes. Scientists are going to figure this out, they say. The headline is that Australia has lost contact with the other continents.

Classes are canceled after that.

• • • •

Things are loud in the dormitories for a little while. The walls are so thin. Friends and couples argue. Doors bang open and closed. Bags are packed and dragged down hallways. Sarah and I sit on her bed and we whisper. She keeps the panic from surging up my throat. Her hand is in mine and we squeeze until our fingers are numb. After a little while, things are much quieter.

I bring all my leftover food and a trash bag full of clothes to Sarah’s dorm and I throw it in the corner. We both agree that I should stay here from now on. My roommate was already gone when I went back to my room. He left a note saying that he had decided to head down to the coast to see if there was any news off the boats that dock there.

I don’t remember ever seeing him again.

• • • •

Sarah and I lie side by side in the dark. The black of no stars has been getting more gray lately. It has been hard to keep track of the time.

“Should we run?” I ask.

“Where would we go?” she asks. “Our families are on the other side of the planet. We’re stuck between the desert and an ocean.”

The normal things. They used to be so simple. Now, it is so hard to keep track.

“I don’t feel hungry,” I say.

“Me neither,” she says.

“When did we eat last?”

“I don’t know,” she whispers, and I feel her fingers searching for my hand.

Did we run? Did Sarah and I take off across the continent, searching for an explanation?

I think . . .

I can’t remember.

It always comes back to the dormitory.

The most familiar things . . . they always come back to me in the end.

• • • •

We are lying in Sarah’s bed, where the sheets smell like flowers, our fingers intertwined. I stand up and I cannot remember how long I have been sleeping. Or whether I was sleeping or just lying, looking at a white ceiling.

“Final stage,” says a whisper.

“What?” I ask.

“Nothing,” Sarah says, face muffled by her pillow. “I didn’t say anything.”

I peek out the small window. In the street, I see that a Royal Australian Naval Reserve guard is posted on the intersection. A young blond guy in tan camouflage, sweating under his helmet. The sun is only a golden hint in a gray sky. The soldier is watching the streets. He does not have a shadow.

“We’re sleeping too much,” I say to Sarah. “Let’s go outside.”

Sarah and I are walking down Swanston Street. Down the middle of the tram tracks, bright slices of metal curving through clean concrete. The electric wires are shivering overhead, twanging in a nonexistent breeze.

The sky is gray.

No more clouds.

“It’s quiet,” she says, and her words are flat, without an echo.

“Where did the people go?” I ask.

The soldier is gone.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t really remember anyone here very well, anyway.”

I turn abruptly and walk down a side street.

The grayness has a way of growing thicker. Details fade. My vision collapses until I am seeing the world from the bottom of a well. I spin and reach for Sarah in a sudden panic.

Her fingers feel hard and real. She pulls me back, our fingertips connecting like antennae, hands curling together into their familiar embrace.

“Are we in a video game?” I ask. “Did I fall asleep?”

“No,” she says. “You aren’t in a video game. Come back.”

In the distance, I see the silhouettes of the campus buildings. But they look strange.

Two-dimensional.

“Okay,” I say.

We walk, our footsteps echoing flatly against the pavement. There is no detail to the cement anymore. No dark patches of long-chewed gum or pale scratches from skateboards. It’s just . . . gray. Like everything.

“I feel like I’ve known you a long time, Sarah,” I say.

“I know,” she says, and we walk on.

“That’s weird,” she says, after a few moments.

“What?”

“The only thing left out here . . . is the way I walk to campus,” she says. “Everything else is just gray.”

• • • •

An apocalypse should be loud. Gunshots and rioting, that kind of thing. Life screaming out to live. But this is quiet. Dark. The gray of forgotten details. The people are just gone. People I never knew. Never will know.

Standing at the dorm window, I watch as the round eye of the sun bursts and spreads into a light that comes from all directions and none. The cardboard city outside goes dull. Even flatter, somehow.

After that, the dark doesn’t come again.

• • • •

Sarah lies on her bed, asleep. She is so clear to me. Her colors are vibrant.

The radius of reality is shrinking, but Sarah is this one constant thing. The curve of her cheek on the pillow is so familiar. How strange that I am twenty. How strange that I have known her for so long in such a short amount of life.

• • • •

I think we are the last ones living in Sarah’s dormitory.

Sometimes I wander through the empty hallways, peek into the rooms.

Before, each room was different. But now they’re all the same.

A twin bed across from a sink. A whining fluorescent light. Always on, flickering. Wooden drawers built into the wall and a gray square of glass.

“I don’t know if the campus is really there anymore,” I say to Sarah, and panic is building in my throat. “It’s just this room. It’s just us.”

Her hand closes onto mine.

• • • •

My thoughts are lazy ripples through still water. The realization comes slow, like mist evaporating off a pond.

Sarah is the dreamer.

We lost the stars on the day she hit her head. The more she sleeps, the more we lose. The gray of her forgetting is eating the world. Now, only her strongest memories are alive. The walk to class. This room.

Me.

I move closer to her sleeping body, press myself against her.

• • • •

This morning—morning, is there such a thing anymore—I walk to the front door of the dormitory and I look out and I see that the sky is missing. A postbox is on its side in the street, half-buried in the pavement. The red metal skin of it is juddering on and off. Between the blinks I can see mail inside.

Before I go back upstairs, I put my hand on the glass of the door and it doesn’t feel cool. It doesn’t feel warm, either. It doesn’t feel like anything.

Sarah is curled on her bed. Shaking. She is shaking and moaning.

I hold her, feel her hair slithering over my arms.

The world outside is getting smaller.

Sarah shakes. The forgetting grows.

• • • •

I don’t remember waking up. I am floating in gray. My body is falling through the walls and it’s so familiar.

I am holding Sarah in my arms and I can feel the cool sand of the beach under my hip. I am stroking her sea-smelling hair and murmuring into the soft dampness. “It will be okay,” I’m saying. “You’re the dreamer, Sarah.”

“We can find each other in your dreams,” I say to her.

• • • •

And then the smell of her hair is gone, along with the feel of the sand. I open my eyes to look down at my body and I am tumbling, spinning in space because I have no eyes. There is no body. All of it has finally gone away.

Things unseen are not rendered.

And yet I am still here.

I am thinking. My thoughts are somewhere. Churning in the gray.

Sarah slipped through my fingers.

Was she my dream?

Am I the dreamer?

• • • •

Even now, there is this one constant thing.

A pressure where my hand should be.

Fingers, laced into mine. Squeezing.

I can remember if I try very hard.

• • • •

“Final stage,” I hear the whisper.

• • • •

Something beats at my eyes. A flutter of reality. A line of hard light appears and shatters my vision into a briar patch of eyelashes.

I am opening my eyes.

• • • •

And I find myself lying in a flower-smelling bed under a clean white ceiling that is chopped into neat squares. There is a gray video screen hanging on the wall.

“Final stage,” says that unfamiliar voice. “Neural calibration and transmission complete.”

• • • •

Sarah?

Eyes swiveling down, I see that my right hand is a leathery claw, laced with blue-black veins, knuckles twisted and humped.

A small moan comes from my dry, cracked throat.

I am old. I am ancient. I am twenty how am I twenty?

And my Sarah.

She is lying next to me on the bed—it’s a hospital bed, this isn’t right, where is our dorm? Her lips are peeled back into a sweet worried smile and I can see a hint of that beauty I remember in her youthful angular face—a dimple still lodged stubbornly in her sagging cheek.

We are . . . old. Melted like wax.

I was saving my wax. I blew out my candle. I was twenty.

Years have draped themselves over us. Did we fall asleep?

“I lost you,” I say.

“No,” she whispers. “We’re together now. Always.”

• • • •

The screen on the wall flickers, shows me something painful.

Sarah and I are standing together on the screen.

Versions of us. In the computer.

We are holding hands and smiling.

It makes me cry to see us so young.

“Neural upload complete,” says the voice in the gray. “Both computational entities are viable. It’s a success, people.”

• • • •

I think the world is running away between my blinks. The screen and the ceiling and the walls are splitting off and falling into the great forgetting.

Only she is vibrant.

“Hosts are losing mental cohesion,” says a gray whisper.

Sarah.

She is lying next to me on her back with tears tracing down her temple. Our fingers have found their old familiar places. Her face is so bright that it hurts my eyes. Her lips are red again. Her hair is a sun-kissed brown.

We are both trying so hard to hold on.

“Sarah?” I ask.

“I’m not scared anymore,” she says and her teeth are so white. “It will be okay. We’ll find each other in our dreams.”

Her hand in mine. It’s all that matters.

In all of the forgetting, there is this one constant thing.

Her name is Sarah. I will always remember that.

© 2015 by Daniel H. Wilson.

Originally published in Press Start to Play, edited by Daniel H. Wilson and John Joseph Adams, copyright © 2015 by Daniel H. Wilson and John Joseph Adams.

Used by permission of Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Daniel H. Wilson is a New York Times bestselling author and coeditor of the anthology Press Start to Play. He earned a Ph.D. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he also received master’s degrees in robotics and in machine learning. He has published over a dozen scientific papers, holds four patents, and has written eight books. Wilson has written for Popular Science, Wired, and Discover, as well as online venues such as MSNBC.com, Gizmodo, Lightspeed, and Tor.com. In 2008, Wilson hosted The Works, a television series on the History Channel that uncovered the science behind everyday stuff. His books include How to Survive a Robot Uprising, A Boy and His Bot, Amped, and Robopocalypse (the film adaptation of which is slated to be directed by Steven Spielberg). He lives and writes in Portland, Oregon. Find him on Twitter @danielwilsonPDX.

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

All in a Hot and Copper Sky

Megan Arkenberg | 4,357 words

I have written a thousand letters to her in my head. Part of me is always writing to her, while I sit in front of the dusty yellow windows in the coffee shops on Market Street, or roll sticky cinnamon dough on my cold granite counter, or stand in the smooth gray sand at the very edge of the sea. I never wrote to her while she was alive, not even at the end, when letters might have comforted us both. That, I think, is why my head is so full of words for her now, when she is dead, and beyond the reach of everything but my dreams.

• • • •

Dear Socorro,

There is a boy who wants to write a book about you. His name is Anthony Crusan, a red, labyrinthine name—it will look good in hardcover, on a thick glossy spine. He sat at the edge of my couch, tapping his pen against his clipboard, and stared at the old photographs of Eve, the folded glass candy dish on my coffee table, as if they would tell him all my secrets.

He wanted a photograph of you. “Of us together?” I asked, because your face is as common as pennies and twice and bright—smiling out of textbooks, smiling out of survivors’ accounts in drugstore magazines, smiling, smiling. But of course it wasn’t us he wanted. It was you, but a private you, a you he thought I had kept to myself all these years.

As if I could keep any part of you secret. As if you had any secrets to give.

And I wondered what made him want to write about you, Socorro Vargas, the Joshua Tree Biosphere’s angel of death—what pieces of himself he thought he recognized in a woman thirty years dead.

“I don’t know how you let them get away with it,” he said, suddenly bitter, as though years and years of acrimonious sorrow had been unstopped by a brief shake of my head. “The newspapers, the so-called survivors, all those terrible things they’ve written about her. Of all people, I thought the woman who loved her would . . .”

“Would what?”

But the bitterness had swept on, out of those wide red-brown eyes, and taken Anthony Crusan’s words with it. He didn’t complete the thought. I laughed, not unkindly, because I was twenty-three when you died, and I knew nothing about love. I told him so. He stared at the sharp edge of my coffee table, and he did not laugh; he is twenty-four and in love with you, Socorro Vargas, the angel of death.

You would have played with him, dear. Not intentionally, perhaps; you might have tried, at first, to be helpful, but soon you would become swept up in the riptide of history and remembering, carried away on your own self-importance. You would have brought down albums of photographs and paged through them for hours—photographs of the agricultural sector and the industrial kitchens, photographs of our dormitory, photographs of you bent over a tomato plant or bent over your paperwork, glasses shoved up to your hairline. Photographs of the Gatehouse, its bizarre corona of blue-tinted glass. You would have told him stories about all of them, and most of those stories—did you ever understand this about yourself?—would have been lies.

But I am not you. I told him a different lie, a kinder one; I said I had no photographs.

And Anthony Crusan left. And I stared at the pictures of Eve in their warm wooden frames and my folded glass candy dish and the sharp edge of my coffee table, but they told me nothing I didn’t already know.

• • • •

Dear Socorro,

Why the sudden interest in you? I turned the television on this morning and there you were, leaning into the court stenographer’s microphone. You tossed your head roughly, shaking your short brown hair back from your eyes, and I saw that your glasses were tucked into your shirt pocket, broken across the nose, and I knew what it must have cost you not to squint. What it must have cost you to face your accusers blind.

I think the anniversary is coming up. Thirty years since I saw you by the door of the produce cooler, inspecting a crate of tomatoes and squinting slightly in the pink light of simulated albedo, and when I asked Taylor Wallace who you were, she murmured under her breath: That’s Socorro Vargas. She works in Agriculture. And yes, she’s queer and gorgeous as all hell and you should get her number.

Thirty years later, I remember every digit.

Now I pull up the news and they’re talking about doing it again. As if we still had a future with biospheres and Mars, as though our attempt were anything but a gin-soaked one-night stand. I’m sure the kids at JTB half-expect me to come creeping out of the woodwork, draped in the habiliments of the grave, returned to warn them of their folly. What good am I otherwise, the girl who survived the Joshua Tree Biosphere 988-1? What good are survivors but to save the rest of us from becoming like them—flotsam, if we’re lucky, and jetsam, if we’re you?

• • • •

Dear Socorro,

How’s this for a script? See, I remember your history as a film student, the history that boys like Anthony Crusan want to call on in their pretty little eulogies, with all their talk of pans and frames and exterior shots, as though your life were always already a documentary.

But here it is, INT, afternoon, the offices of JTB Vice President Kroger. Sunlight slashes through the windows onto the secretary’s desk, where he wades efficiently through a pile of paperwork. Enter me, like the Red Death at Prospero’s masque.

DOLORES ÁLVAREZ: Dr. Kroger, you’re making a mistake.

KROGER looks up, takes off his bifocals with one hand. He’s too young for bifocals—too young, in fact, to remember JTB 988-1 with any real distinctness, so I can hardly blame him for the sudden bout of amnesiac enthusiasm over Real Time simulations.

DOLORES takes a deep breath. In the background, the soundtrack builds; slow, single strings at first, clarifying into a melody. DOLORES says: The Joshua Tree Biosphere is a death trap. It always has been. You think because you’ve filled it up with rainforests and industrial kitchens and dormitories with internet access that people aren’t going to panic the moment the oxygen breaks again, or the moment the water filter clogs or the irrigation system springs a leak or God knows what else goes wrong. Maybe you think everyone’s done their research on 988-1, so they’ll all know to read the fine print and sit tight in the face of disaster, waiting patiently for the doors to unlock. Maybe you think you’ll do a better job screening your applicants. Whatever you think, you’re wrong. And this time, you won’t have Socorro Vargas.

(This is the only time, the only time I ever defend you, Socorro.)

DOLORES continues: We were stupidly lucky last time. Six people died, out of nearly a thousand. Just six. Negligible. A bad car crash, or flu season. How many would it have been if Socorro had followed procedure? But we all know what happened to her. No one is going to follow her now. If you run a second Biosphere 988, or one thousand or ten thousand or however many people you want to cram in there, if you run a Real Time simulation again, you’ll be lucky if it’s only six dead, only sixty.

KROGER, exasperated: Ms. Álvarez, you are trying to halt scientific progress!

DOLORES: Are nine hundred and eighty eight corpses your idea of progress, Dr. Kroger?

KROGER: Are two researchers shot through the head yours, Ms. Álvarez?

My script leaves me here, stranded in his stupid office with a stupid expression on my face. I convince myself that I will do no good as a deterrent, and I excuse myself from trying.

• • • •

Dear Socorro,

I was at the plant shop today, picking out some tomatoes to grow in the kitchen window. You’d think it would remind me of the biosphere, all those plants inside my house, the stench of rotting green things, tannic things. But it doesn’t. Anthony Crusan was in the next aisle, sniffing at a display of basil, rosemary, cilantro in clay pots. I’m not ashamed to admit that I fled.

At my kitchen counter, I spread out newspapers to collect the loose potting soil, and I saw an advertisement.

QUALIFIED VOLUNTEERS NEEDED
Do you have two years to dedicate to bettering YOURSELF and HUMANITY?

Two years, Socorro. That’s how long they told us it could take for help to come—if we were really on Mars. Nine months of flight, but ten, sixteen, maybe more, to wait for the proper angle, the proper alignment between our planets. So that’s how long they left us, pretended we didn’t exist. There’s some debate now—this would not have surprised you—about how extensive the video surveillance had been. Could they really have left so much unsupervised? Could so much have gone unrecorded? (Apparently, yes. If the footage existed, the kids at JTB did an excellent job swallowing it to cover their own assess—it never appeared at the trial, or even afterward, for the documentaries.) They were as surprised as anyone, they say, when the Gatehouse fractured under your override and there you stood, clutching your stolen gun.

Two years. Twelve months washing vegetables and heating vats of instant potatoes in the industrial kitchens. Two months watching panic seize nearly one thousand people as our oxygen meter dipped lower, lower. And eight months, more or less, as they briskly ran through your trial, eager to put you away, eager to shelve the whole business as quickly as possible. What was I even doing there? Why did I come? Because the Joshua Tree Biosphere was going to pay for my education. Because it looked safe.

And you came for the same reasons: to pay off student debt. You were bored. You were a drifter, traveling from minimum-wage job to minimum-wage job, despite your intelligence, despite your work ethic, because you were caustic as hell, Socorro, you made enemies and half the time they were your bosses. Someone offered you a job in the agricultural sector and you jumped. And just look at where you landed. Just look—

Even when writing to you, I hold back. I flinch from the mess on the floor of the Gatehouse. It’s the trial all over again, the microphone in my face

“Did you see Socorro Vargas commit homicide?”

“No.”

“Are you aware of what happened to Eric Botting, Annalise Procelli, Lamara Simpson?”

“Yes. But she didn’t have a choice. They wouldn’t give us the override.” My lawyer shook her head at the point—did you see? I ignored her, because I was only looking at you, your brave face, your brave blind eyes. “They were more committed to the simulation’s time scheme fidelity than they were to—to us, to the people trapped in there.”

“Do you believe that justifies murder?”

Why the hell did he ask that question, Socorro? But that’s the same question I’ve been asking for thirty years. Why did they put me on the witness stand, what did they think I was going to say? It was never about justice, it was about spectacle, and who could have been more spectacular than you, the Joshua Tree Biosphere’s angel of death, and me, her young and photogenic and oh-so-naïve lover? No wonder there are so many books about you now, so many documentaries, so many articles and special reports. You made your enemies out of people who had their eyes on the cameras, on the future, every time they mouthed your name.

And I stared him down as best I could, a kid of twenty-three with no interest in the future if it didn’t hold you. “Doesn’t it?”

I should have denied everything. Denied knowledge of everything. I was only a kid, I was only sleeping with you; how much could they expect? I still wonder that, incidentally. Thirty years later, I see that boy picking through pots of basil, and I flee before he can ask the questions I have never been able to answer.

• • • •

Dear Socorro,

An email from Eve today. She’s been so quiet, I wasn’t quite sure she was still alive, and I have no idea how she found my new personal address. The message was stupidly simple. You have to stop them.

I don’t know why you let them get away with it, Anthony Crusan said.

You see, Socorro, it’s my responsibility now. You and JTB 988-1.

I was happy with Eve. Very happy, sometimes. I think you would have liked her. She made glass—beads, mostly, but also the candy dish on my coffee table, and a few bigger pieces we carted to craft fairs and flea markets in the back of her Chevrolet pickup. She wanted kids, eventually, talked about donors, adoption agencies, paint colors for the bedrooms. I was always carefully noncommittal. Maybe if I had said yes, she would have stayed.

But she left, Socorro. She left because you poisoned her, like you poisoned everything you touched.

It was the death threats that did it. Always sent to me, sometimes from students, family members, disciples of those at the Gatehouse. Sometimes from strangers who wanted to pick a fight. Dead women, dead murderers, make easy targets. I tried to delete them before Eve saw, but I wasn’t always quick enough.

“Tell me you never loved her,” Eve said. It seemed like a stupid non sequitur to me; what did it matter if I loved you? I was your replacement, your stand-in for the survivors, because I was a survivor myself. (And what good are survivors otherwise, but to read our sorrows and grievances against the dead, to listen to what the dead cannot hear?) But I should have been obedient, I should have denied you, deny, deny, like on the witness stand.

“I can’t take this anymore, Dolores.” She ran both hands through her shortly, bristly hair, looking at the email on the screen of my tablet. “It’s like when you look at me, you see her.”

“That’s bullshit.” It was bullshit. But just barely. “I don’t think of her, Eve, not when I’m with you.”

“And when I’m not here?”

“Please, Eve.” If you leave me, I thought, I’ll be hers, I’ll be all hers.

And she left.

It is love, Borges wrote, that creates its own mythology, its minor and pointless magic. Can I judge the depth of my loves by the inanity of their symbolism? Here is Eve, the giver of trinkets she made with her own hands, claimer of love songs and tree trunks and park benches—our song, our bench—a photograph and a glass candy dish. And here you are, Socorro. You are everything hot and crimson and metallic, you are blood and sunlight, coffee and tomatoes, you are Mars in the night sky. In the pantheon of my heart, you are the goddess of red. Our magic was not minor, not pointless. I doubt I loved you, Socorro. It was too dire.

• • • •

Dear Socorro,

You were not very romantic. I liked that about you. I’d dated before you—sometimes boys, if you can believe that—and the romance was always what killed it. Too much love can be stifling. I remember one young man assuring me, ardently, that I was the only good thing in his life. What can you say to that, Socorro? I giggled loudly and quietly left him.

Was I a good thing in your life? The only good thing? Probably, but you never burdened me with that knowledge. I can see now that you were desperate, desperate and too old for me, but at the time I could only see you, your brown hair and your brown skin, your dark eyes and your red, red mouth. You were not frigid, not by any means, but you were cool, dignified, restrained. I liked that about you, too.

I try not to think about the physical things. The kissing, the sex. Eve was better at both—or I was just better then, more experienced, wiser. But I remember you whispering to me afterward, and that was the only time you approached romance, approached it warily, like a snake hunter handling a viper.

“Mystic and somber Dolores,” you called me once, and I giggled, not recognizing the poem. I know it now. Swinburne’s Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs: All the joys of the flesh, all the sorrows / That wear out the soul.

I know those, too.

• • • •

Dear Socorro,

Today the email is from Anthony Crusan. He has picked a photograph for the cover of his book; it is the jacket they found in our closet, red leather, the one they say you were wearing at the Gatehouse. Utter bullshit, I tell him. They know what you were wearing at the Gatehouse, it was the same thing you were wearing when they arrested you. Still, the image sticks. Could you imagine yourself in red leather, Socorro?

Perhaps I’m too harsh on them. But it’s hard to be gentle to lies. For all that when I close my eyes I, too, see you swathed in crimson like nightmares, I know that you never wore red. The image of you that I carry with me, the image of you in Anthony Crusan’s book, is a myth, an interpretation. You are the victim of so many interpretations, Socorro. It’s what you deserve, I imagine for being so closed, so indecipherable, so cold.

Anthony Crusan protests that the red leather jacket is a symbol. Perhaps he’s right. It’s a symbol, as you turned me into a symbol by making me a survivor. It is the reason why I could not go out in public for seven years after the trial, the reason why Eve left me, the reason why my letters to you will always stay here, in my head. I hate that red jacket, Socorro. Sometimes I even hate the woman inside it.

• • • •

Dear Socorro,

It was my jacket. My red leather jacket. Just in case you, or anyone else, was wondering.

• • • •

Dear Socorro,

They’ll never know that they have me to thank for your arrest, your trial. You were so close to beating them, so close to escaping. Standing over the sink in the Gatehouse restroom with the emptied gun at your feet, your hair and lipstick flawless, the pill between your teeth.

“Don’t do this,” I said, and you pushed the bottle towards me. It hadn’t been standard issue; you smuggled it from somewhere, from the hospital, from the Gatehouse’s own panic room. I imagined I could smell it—almond, cyanide, whatever it was, sweet as a sugar pill.

“It won’t hurt,” you promised. “That’s more than I can say for what they’ll do to us otherwise.”

Do to us, Socorro? When exactly had I become a part of you, a part so intimate that I carried your sins? Sins I had discovered only moments before, as I entered the Gatehouse through the service door and saw the bloody footprints on the carpet. Sins that have followed me ever since.

Seven ages would fail thee to purge in, / and then they would haunt thee in heaven.

“I’m not dying with you,” I said. And oh, Socorro, you weren’t brave enough to die alone. You trusted—how could you, you selfish bitch?—you trusted that I would kill myself for you, to be with you. And I was young, but not that young.

Still, I wouldn’t have stopped you, if you had bitten that pill. I saw as clearly as you did what was coming: the arrest, the trial. And after that, a dim and fatal outline, an outline that eventually resolved into a prison cell, a knife in the dark. I saw you destroyed. But at that moment, with your stolen gun on the floor between us, I saw a life after your destruction, a survival for me, a life without you.

But they’ll never give me that, Socorro. They’ll never let me have a life without you.

• • • •

Dear Socorro,

It is a simple scene to replay in your head. You must have spun it out a hundred times, a thousand, in varying degrees of detail and resolution, in your cell and on the bench and in your cell again afterward. I wasn’t there. All I have is your testimony, the barest sketch, and the gruesome aftermath. Maybe it’s enough, and maybe it isn’t. Maybe the truth can be picked by this, my skeleton key, and maybe it can’t. It’s that simple.

It’s early in the fourteenth month of JTB-988 and three people are dead. One asthma attack, two cases of what the medical sector is calling a respiratory tract infection. Antibiotics did nothing. The next morning, there are six more cases scattered throughout the biosphere. I’m feeling lightheaded, slipping in the shower. All of your tomato plants are dead.

The Gatehouse says: Calm down, sit tight. Everything’s under control.

And the Gatehouse says: Remember that this is a Real Time simulation. Help will be here before Christmas.

Calm down. Sit tight.

Fuck that, you say. There has to be an override. It’s that simple.

(They have to believe me: I didn’t know anything.)

You enter the Gatehouse through the service door with a rollaway cart of aluminum pans, as though you’re delivering meals from the kitchen. You swipe my card to get in. (I didn’t know, I didn’t know.) I can imagine the look on your face, your tight lips, tinged with blue. You have a gun in your belt, stolen off of Eric Botting, a peace officer with a drinking problem and a bad heart. He’s dead by this point, lying on the cold tile floor of a dormitory bathroom, not a scratch on him, but no one will ever believe you had nothing to do with it. You’re in the Gatehouse, in the main service corridor, and Central Communications is the first door on your left. There are four women inside.

Annalise and Lamara, Nayna and Jennifer.

You pick one. Nayna and Jennifer disagree over which. I’ve always imagined it was Annalise. I never knew her, never even knew what she looked like until I saw her picture in the papers, but she had a weak chin, soft eyes, fair and girlish hair. She looks easy to intimidate. You would have thought so, pressing the gun against her temple, the strands of yellow hair curling around the barrel. “Open the lock,” you say.

“I don’t have the override,” she squeaks. Which means there is one.

“Who does?” you ask. She points. And whoever she points to takes too long to answer, so Annalise winds up dead. You aren’t fucking around.

Maybe you say so. “I’m not fucking around. Open the fucking lock.”

No one says anything coherent. They’re all shouting, screaming. An alarm has been set off somewhere, but you don’t know that yet. I hear it in the kitchens on the other end of the biosphere, and my first thought is for you. (I didn’t know, Annalise. I’m so sorry.)

You turn to the next likely suspect, Lamara, whichever one is still alive. Now she isn’t. You hear an alarm, a strident single-note blaring. The override has been entered. And when you step back into the corridor, you hear the first alarm, the call for Emergency Services. They’ll be waiting for you when the gate opens.

Just three minutes for a pathogen scan, for the atmosphere to equalize. And then the gate opens.

Eventually, Nayna Sundari and Jennifer Marks will point out that it was your job to install the carbon air filters in the agricultural sector in the first week of the experiment. By the time the investigation reaches that section of the biosphere, four weeks after the deaths of Annalise and Lamara, the filters will be completely absent. Very solemnly, they’ll announce that they’ve found the source of the atmospheric abnormality. The press will smile knowingly and nod, and begin to call you the angel of death.

For now, you go to the restroom with your sugar pills and I, having run as fast as I could, am there to meet you.

“Don’t do this,” I say. But it isn’t that simple, and it’s far, far too late.

• • • •

I open my email again. And again, and again, the curser blinking at me like a panic attack. I have to tell them to stop it, to stop this—this experiment, this story, this scene I keep replaying in my head, this script I’ve cut and recut and shot from so many angles that I’ve lost track of where I once stood. No, this isn’t my idea of progress, and it isn’t any closer to an answer. It’s just me, writing to her. Always writing to her, and always far too late.

• • • •

I still dream of you. Not as you dream of someone who is dead, but as of someone living, someone you’ll sit across from at breakfast the next morning, knocking shoulders as you reach for the same cereal box. I dream of you incidentally: Last night you were a tour guide in an art museum of stones, and the night before, you met me on the first landing of an endless staircase, carrying a basket full of golden fish.

When I am awake, I listen to the wind in the branches of the plane tree outside my window, and I see the speckled glow of wet headlights slide across the ceiling, and I compose letters to you, full of what I cannot say in dreams. In dreams, Socorro, I believe that you are still alive. What might I say to you if I remembered everything in my sleep—if I dreamed for a moment you were listening, if I thought you could understand?

© 2015 by Megan Arkenberg.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Megan Arkenberg is a student in Wisconsin. In the name of story research, she racks up late fees at the college library, gets dizzyingly lost along the shores of Lake Michigan, consumes a steady diet of M.R. James, and lusts quietly after the architecture and costume of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her work has appeared in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and dozens of other places. She procrastinates by editing the fantasy e-zine Mirror Dance and the historical fiction e-zine Lacuna.

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

Harry and Marlowe Meet the Founder of the Aetherian Revolution

Carrie Vaughn | 5,905 words

“We could have taken George’s courier ship and arrived in a quarter of the time.”

“No, we couldn’t,” Harry said, scowling at Marlowe, who knew very well they shouldn’t be here at all, much less aboard her brother’s ship. But he seemed to enjoy mentioning her brother George and reminding Harry of the impropriety of it all. It was a long-running joke, and she let him have his fun. Marlowe just smiled.

They’d taken a carriage—a regular hired coach, horse-drawn, even—from the Oxford station to the doctor’s estate. The journey from London had taken most of the day, which left them facing the gatehouse on an overcast afternoon, the sunlight fading, the world growing colder.

Despite the spiked iron gate, the estate was modest. Harry could have walked the perimeter of the grounds in half an hour, though the curving gravel drive gave the impression of greater space. At the end of the curve, one could glimpse the house, a two-story gray pile with a slate roof and clay chimneys, walls fuzzed with ivy, windows brooding—all of it easily manageable, easily guarded.

The gate was the only access through a ten-foot-high wall that surrounded the house. At the top of the wall, copper conductors placed every dozen feet or so guided an Aetherian charge, a crackling stream of deadly green energy: a second barrier, impassible, should someone think that they could climb the wall. The humming, flickering light traveled down the bars of the gate as well.

Impatient, Harry opened the carriage door before the driver or one of the soldiers from the gatehouse arrived to do so. However, before she could let herself out, Marlowe slipped out, let down the step, and offered his hand to her. Propriety, indeed. Remembering herself, she gathered her skirt in one hand, took his with the other, and stepped neatly out of the coach.

Four soldiers on weekly rotation from the local regiment served guard duty here. One of them—an officer by his insignia—approached. A Lieutenant Bradley commanded the unit, Harry knew. This must be him.

“I’m sorry,” the lieutenant said. “I don’t know what you’ve been told, but this area is restricted. The house isn’t open—”

“I know. This is Dr. James Marlowe, and I’m Miss Mills, his secretary. We’re here to see Doctor Carlisle,” Harry said, drawing a folded paper from her handbag. The letter was affixed with the royal seal, confusing everyone who looked at it, but everyone who looked at it was well trained not to ask questions. They’d merely have to wonder why two unassuming travelers had the Crown Prince’s approval. (They didn’t, but that was beside the point.) The lieutenant opened the letter and read it over—taking his time, to his credit.

When he’d finished, he looked across the page and studied the unlikely visitors. “Very well, then. Give us a moment to open the gate. Sir. Miss.” He tipped his hat at them and turned back to the house.

Marlowe tucked his portfolio under his arm and gave the driver a few coins. “Can you return for us in two hours?”

“Yes, sir.” The man remounted his carriage and drove off.

Marlowe could never quite manage polish, even when he meant to be traveling as a respectable gentleman. Locks of hair escaped from under his bowler hat, his face showed pale stubble, and his tie was loose where he’d tugged on his collar. His jacket, trousers, and boots were acceptable but not outstanding. Truth be told, Harry liked him better without the polish—he looked like a man who was too busy to worry about inconsequential details like trimmed hair and neat ties.

“I hope two hours will be enough,” Marlowe said, watching the driver depart.

“I fear we’ll be wanting out of here much sooner than that,” Harry said. “Part of me hopes this is all a waste of time.”

Marlowe shook his head. “No, this is a rare opportunity: To meet the genius who created the Aetherian Revolution? Without him we’d have none of this.” He gestured ahead.

The front window of the gatehouse revealed a pair of brown-uniformed soldiers at work, one hauling down on a wall-mounted lever, the other operating an unseen control panel. A metallic clang followed, the banging of steel on steel; the Aetherian hum faded, and the crackling stream of power guarding the wall vanished. Now the wall was just a wall, and the gate was just a gate.

Harry still regarded the wrought iron cautiously. “We might have been better off,” she said.

“Never think so,” Marlowe said. “Ernest Carlisle may be the only one who can move my work forward.”

“Don’t you think you’d solve the problem yourself, eventually?” Harry said.

“We don’t have time for that,” he said.

Of course, Harry thought. Not with the war on. It was the unspoken postscript to everything they did.

Lt. Bradley emerged from the gatehouse. “It’s safe, now,” he said. “I’ll escort you in.”

The soldiers in the gatehouse turned another set of levers, and bolts lurched open, another metallic clunk. The middle of the gate split apart, and Bradley pushed it open. Harry suppressed a flinch when the lieutenant touched the gate, but no Aetherian charge scorched him.

Marlowe offered his arm to Harry, and she took it. They walked with the lieutenant toward the manor.

The gates clanged shut and locked behind them, and Harry glanced over her shoulder, wondering how such an innocuous tone could seem so ominous, like the tolling of a church bell.

Turning back, she said, “Lieutenant, tell me about the doctor. What is his schedule like? How many servants are here at the house, and how do you supervise them?”

“He has no servants, miss. By his own request. He said the necessary restrictions on them were too great to bother. A cook from the village comes in the morning to make his meals for the day, and a cleaner comes once a week. Her work is little enough—most of the house is shut up.”

“Is that so?”

“Doctor Carlisle is confined to a wheelchair, miss. He has chambers on the ground floor. I thought you would know, since you’ve permission to see him.”

“For how long?” she said. This wasn’t in any of the reports.

“Ten years, since the disaster. I’m given to understand he sustained injuries.” They’d reached the house now, and Bradley nodded. “If you’ll excuse me a moment, I’ll let the doctor know he has visitors.”

The door had a speaker box by it, which the lieutenant leaned into. Harry and Marlowe stayed back and spoke in whispers.

“Did you know Carlisle was infirm?” she asked him.

“I didn’t. There were rumors of illness, but I thought it had more to do with age. Or a broken spirit.”

“Why is it a secret, do you suppose?”

“Out of respect for the man’s dignity, I imagine.”

“As if he had any left,” she said. But he did, or he would not be living like this, in a polite fiction of genteel retirement—under guard. She frowned. “What does it say about us that we’re so afraid of a crippled man that we keep him locked up like this?”

“Because it’s Doctor Carlisle,” Marlowe said, and he was right. Carlisle certainly couldn’t be allowed to go free. Neither could he be truly imprisoned, or executed, or exiled. He was the realm’s great conundrum. Or rather, its second great conundrum, after the conundrum that Carlisle had made his name exploiting.

“Be careful, Marlowe. You sound as if you admire the man.”

“Oh, I won’t forget he’s a murderer.”

“Good.”

“Are you sure you aren’t letting your personal feelings unduly influence you?”

“Of course I am. What else are personal feelings for?” She shook her head. “He can’t have turned everything over when he was arrested. A man like him—he kept something back as a bargaining chip should he ever need it. Some scrap of research, some artifact. I want to know what.”

“We both do. Are you ready for this?”

“Of course I am,” Harry said.

Bradley was exchanging words with the person on the other end of the speaker box. The responses were little more than incomprehensible scratching. But eventually, Bradley drew out a key and unlocked the front door.

“The doctor is ready for you,” Bradley said. “I’ll show you to the library.”

“I very much appreciate your help, Lieutenant. I know this must disrupt your routine terribly,” Harry said with a kind and practiced smile.

The soldier beamed back at her. “It’s no trouble, miss.”

“You’re very good at that,” Marlowe whispered to her after Bradley led the way inside.

“I’ve had a lot of practice.”

“Better you than me, then.”

She smiled; they did make a good team.

Bradley guided them through a tiled foyer and into a parlor.

Nothing in the house indicated the character of the man who lived in it. She might have been in any respectable gentry home: decent furniture, lightly used; unassuming still-life paintings on the wall; neat wallpaper and drapes, carpet over hardwood. All of it might have been chosen by some matron desperate not to stand out. On the other side of the parlor, Bradley opened a set of double doors and guided them into the library.

This was the doctor’s room, where he spent his waking hours. Apart from walls full of books, the room had a great fireplace with a well-worn armchair in front of it, a window overlooking a patch of flowers, and many framed photographs on the walls, desks, and tables. In the middle sat two large worktables. One of them was overflowing with books—stacked, open to different pages, as if Carlisle were reading a dozen at once. The other held various crafts and hobbies: fly-tying equipment, the clockworks of antique pocket watches, a sketchbook, a set of watercolor paints . . . even toys: windups and clockworks that Carlisle seemed to be in the process of repairing. Or dissecting.

Carlisle himself sat at the table in a wheelchair, a blanket over his lap, covering his legs to his toes. He’d aged, his formerly robust form sagging on a stooped frame.

“Doctor Carlisle, here are your visitors,” Lieutenant Bradley announced, then bowed himself out of the room like a good foot soldier, closing the doors behind him.

It was good that he did. Smiling, his eyes glittering, Carlisle greeted Harry, “Princess Maud. Your Highness.”

She was a little surprised he recognized her and tried to act offended. “Miss Mills, today,” she said, clasping her gloved hands before her.

“Ah. Of course. My apologies.”

Marlowe hovered at her elbow, waiting to be protective.

“Doctor Carlisle, this is Doctor James Marlowe. He has some questions he was hoping you could answer.”

“And he needed you to pull strings and finagle permission to come here? That’s highly irregular.”

“It’s unofficial,” she said.

“Doctor Marlowe? Should I have heard of you?”

“I wouldn’t expect you to have, sir,” Marlowe said. “I’m not affiliated with Oxbridge, though I have laboratory privileges at University College London. My interests tend to lie in fieldwork.”

“No prestige in fieldwork, lad.”

Marlowe’s lip turned up. “Perhaps.”

“You aren’t an Aetherian engineer, then?” the old professor said.

“I have an interest in Aetherian mechanisms.”

“Of course you do, or you would not need to come see me.” Carlisle leaned back and steepled his hands. He had been kept alive and in relative comfort because no one knew more than he did on the subject. “What exactly is it that he does, my lady?”

“He solves problems,” Harry said.

The photographs on the walls documented the professor’s exploits—the images were monuments to his work. A history of the last two decades, even: the strange, looping coils and pocked hull of the Aetherian craft where it crashed in Surrey; the rows of canvas tents housing the hundreds of workers who built the warehouses and laboratories around the site; Ernest Carlisle directing the project, leading a team of white-coated assistants like a general commanding an army. Harry drew closer to one photograph in particular, startled by its familiarity. She had a print of the same photograph in an old scrapbook. George probably had one as well.

The event, twenty-odd years ago, was Dr. Carlisle’s first public demonstration of his adapted Aetherian mechanism. He’d fitted a train engine with an Aetherian propulsion device—it would triple the power of a coal-driven steam engine, with none of the smoke and soot. The royal family had gathered to watch, bestowing their approval of the project by their presence.

The engine itself was the backdrop, its alien brass couplings and broilers projecting, an unearthly glow emanating from them like halos, visible even in black and white. On one side, apart, stood Dr. Carlisle in his prime, stretched and haughty, hand resting on a nearby strut, almost caressing it.

A space stood between him and the family: the Queen, solemn in her mourning, and her vast tangle of progeny. Harry’s parents, arm in arm like they always had been when photographed or painted together, looked resigned to her eyes. And why not? The world and realm were changing before them, and this engine was proof of it. Their five young children gathered around them, as vibrant and proper a brood as any parents could hope for. The youngest, five-year-old Harry—though she hadn’t acquired the nickname yet—clung to her brother George, who seemed very straight and proud at the age of nine.

A surprising number of people in the photograph had died since it was taken. Harry’s father, the Crown Prince, for one. Her oldest brother Eddy, which made proud George the Crown Prince now. On the other hand, her grandmother the Queen showed no sign of fading.

Dr. Carlisle caught Harry studying the image.

“You’ve grown up very well, my lady. I remember you, from the day that photograph was taken. You hid every time I tried to speak to you.”

The little girl in the picture wore her brown hair in tight curls, tied back with a velvet ribbon. She wore a white dress and lace-trimmed pinafore, shined shoes peeking out underneath. Chubby and shy, she gripped her brother’s hand. She remembered George trying to urge her forward.

Now, she was tall and straight, a proud lift to her chin, auburn hair gathered back and bound, topped by a simple hat, secured in a corset and rose-colored silk gown, with all its fashionable layers and buttons. And she never hid.

“That was a long time ago,” she said.

“Not so very long, when you’ve lived as long as I.”

“Strange, isn’t it, that you should still live when so many who were there that day have died.” She dropped the hook and hoped he would bite.

Carlisle’s tone was far from offended. He sounded amused. “My dear, are you implying something?”

The cheek of him. He spoke so to her because there’d be no repercussions.

She said, “If you could have continued your research, what would you have done? What further horrors would you have concocted?”

“That’s a useless question,” Carlisle said. “I believe I received a message from the Almighty that my research had run its course, and that to continue further was to invite disaster.”

It was hard to argue with the interpretation. Disaster had already accepted the invitation.

“It seems to me,” Harry said, “that once you learned everything you could from the Aetherian craft, you would next turn to the pilot. But you found more than you expected, didn’t you?”

Marlowe reached a timid, placating hand. “Your Highness, this isn’t why we came—”

“I want to hear him say exactly what he thought would happen,” she said, brushing Marlowe away. She was repeating fables from penny dreadfuls. There was no plague, no extraplanetary conspiracy against the Empire, no Aetherian miasma that killed the Crown Prince and his eldest son and thousands of others. It had only seemed very much like it. They had died years later, her father assassinated and Eddy of flu, both unrelated to the accident at Woking.

But that accident, a horrific event borne of one man’s hubris, was more than enough reason to treat Carlisle with contempt.

Carlisle frowned. “The body was thoroughly dissected. The notes published. I’m sure anyone has learned anything they’re likely to learn from the beast.”

“I don’t believe you,” Harry said.

Carlisle narrowed his gaze. “Does your grandmother know you’re here?”

“I have a letter with the royal seal.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“What did you save, Doctor Carlisle? What did you learn of Aetherian biology that you didn’t tell anyone?”

“My lady, I spent many days in a very uncomfortable room with men more powerful and clever than you asking me such questions. Why do you think you’ll learn what they did not?”

She smiled, adding a tilt to her head that showed off the fashionable trim on her hat. “My charm.”

Marlowe lay the portfolio on the table before Carlisle. “I’m terribly sorry, Doctor. When Her Highness agreed to procure permission for me to see you, it was on the condition that she accompany me. She assured me she could control herself.” He threw her a glare. Playing his part.

“What’s your connection to the family? Are you a schoolmate of her brother’s or such?”

“Just so,” Marlowe said. “My only concern here is a mechanical problem I’ve been attempting to solve—an air compression system for providing breathable atmosphere at high altitudes. I’m sure you know that the airships based on your designs are reaching thirty thousand feet now.” He began producing pages, schematics, charts.

Carlisle still watched Harry.

“Your Highness,” Marlowe said. “Perhaps you’d rather wait in the parlor.”

“Yes,” Carlisle added. “Perhaps you should.”

Dismissed, she turned and stormed out of the room, careful to act as if she wasn’t used to opening and closing doors herself.

The manor house didn’t seem much altered from official accounts. The lieutenant had said most of the house was shut up, which made sense given Carlisle’s condition. But it didn’t mean anything. If anyone could find a way to climb stairs in a wheelchair, Carlisle would be the man. She commenced exploring.

The dining room had an air of abandonment—Carlisle took his meals elsewhere. The table was set like a museum piece, covered with a red damask runner, a vase filled with dried flowers placed in the middle. There was dust on the flowers, and the rug around the chairs was unscuffed, as though they’d never been pulled from the table.

At least the hinges on the double doors didn’t squeak. She passed through a foyer, through another set of doors, and here were a set of stairs leading down. Neither the stairs nor the railing were dusty. So the cleaner paid special attention to them. Or they were used often.

As Harry descended, she retrieved the hand lantern—another Aetherian mechanism derived from Carlisle’s research—from the pocket tucked into a pleat in her skirt.

The door at the base of the stairs was locked. From the opposite pocket, she drew out her lock picks and set to work. Defeating the mechanism took longer than she expected; this wasn’t the door’s original lock. While the rest of the house had been all but embalmed, the lock had been replaced with a complex modern version. Fortunately, her tools weren’t those of a common burglar. In a few extra heartbeats, the lock clicked, and the door swung open.

The air inside smelled of alcohol and preservative.

She waited a moment, for a trap door to open under her feet, for poison darts to spring from the doorframe. But nothing happened. If Carlisle really were hiding something, his traps would be more nefarious. His laboratory would be better hidden, wouldn’t it? On the other hand, no one had any reason to think he ever went down here—the man couldn’t walk without assistance, after all. At least, that was what they all believed. Easy enough to maintain such a fiction.

Briefly, she worried about Marlowe, alone with the man upstairs.

Perhaps Marlowe was right and she was letting her fears get the better of her.

Harry switched on the lantern and closed the door.

The glow revealed glasswork first, pale light reflecting off the smooth surfaces of beakers, flasks, slender piping secured to wooden stands with clamps, all arranged on the large table in the center of the room. This was where servants would have eaten in the house’s old days. None of the equipment seemed to be in use—the glassware was all dry, a gas burner was cold. She might have made an excuse for why it was here: This was simply storage. When Carlisle had been situated in the house, his scientific equipment had been put here, locked away because he would not need it. But none of it was dusty. Not even the cupboards along the room’s sides. She brought her lantern close, swept it along the table and sides of the room, studying what details revealed themselves.

The table also held a microscope, with trays of slides beside it. She drew out several, hoping the labels would give her insight, but they were only numbered. The samples on them might have been some kind of tissue—translucent pink splotches that could have been anything. A nearby cupboard contained more slides, racks and racks of them. A second cupboard held flasks of liquid, jars labeled with the names of various solvents and acids, other tools of a biologist’s or chemist’s trade.

This might have been all innocent hobby. He had been studying the internal structures of worms. But she didn’t think so; somehow, he had access to the basement, perhaps via a secret elevator, and he was still experimenting. She didn’t have the expertise to know toward what purpose the efforts were directed, but she could record this evidence and have him arrested—again. And sent to prison this time, not this polite fiction in deference to all he had done in his former life.

She would only have to explain why she’d come here at all to her brother. He could make excuses to anyone who questioned her. Likely, she wouldn’t be mentioned at all.

With her small notebook and pencil in hand, she began to record an inventory. Marlowe would know what to make of it. In fact, he should probably come have a look at this himself if they could manage it.

It was the angle of light from her glowing lantern that revealed the irregularity in the wall by the cupboard full of microscope slides. A tiny gap in the paneling wavered. In full lamplight, the slight shadow would have been invisible. Perhaps this was Carlisle’s hidden elevator. She had to take off her gloves and needed several moments of testing to find the catch that opened the secret panel, revealing not an elevator, but a wall of narrow shelves, filled with glassware.

The light of her Aetherian lantern glinted off of rows of two-gallon jars, dozens of them, all filled with murky liquid. The sour reek of formalin hung about them, enough to make her cover her mouth and nose with her hand. And yes, inside the jars floated preserved creatures. Her imagination tumbled. Aetherian specimens rescued from the wrecked ship perhaps? If so, Carlisle had kept them very secret.

But no . . . She’d seen photographs of the Aetherian pilot’s body and the engravings diagramming the autopsy. She’d even studied some of the speculation that followed, regarding what other Aetherian creatures must be like, derived from the pilot’s physiology and using Mr. Darwin’s theories.

These specimens were nothing like that. They were far too familiar, in fact, despite some grotesque mutations. Pale, furless, smooth. Curved backs, large heads, arms and legs tucked in. Just small enough to cradle in her arms.

They were infants. Newborns and slightly older at the very most. Harry held the lantern closer, to study the bodies, the faces of these horrifying creatures. The mutations that distorted them weren’t normal—if mutation could ever be called normal. Expected grotesqueries would include extra limbs, fused limbs, scaled skin, and so forth.

Several of these had fleshy, thorned tentacles extending from their skulls to their bellies. Some had metallic armored plates covering their heads, glinting bronze by the lamplight through the murk of preservative. Some faces had been distorted, elongated, the teeth fused and eyes bulging from sockets so that the body appeared alien. Others had limbs with too many joints that bent the wrong way. In their way, these alterations, these details that she tried to examine from a scientific, unemotional perspective, were familiar, like a certain famous photograph and set of autopsy diagrams.

These were Aetherian mutations, wrought upon human infants.

Were these accidents or experiments? And what had Carlisle been doing with them?

She had an irrational thought to drench the room in kerosene and drop a match, destroying it all, eradicating the horror. Then throw Doctor Carlisle into the inferno. An untempered response, to be sure. How much more satisfying to prosecute him in a court of law. That was the only way to learn what Carlisle was trying to do here, and where the unfortunate infants had come from. Harry wondered where their mothers were.

Marlowe needed to see this. She went back up the stairs, not bothering to close the door behind her.

No one had ever come down here. Why should they, when Carlisle could never navigate the stairs? How many dozens of officers before Bradley had declared so, confidently? Nevertheless, Carlisle had managed to find a way down the stairs.

Marlowe was still with Carlisle in the library. He’d led the old man into making sketches of some Aetherian principle or other, and they bent together over the table, studying the page before them. When she rushed through the doorway, they looked up.

For all that she was practiced at deception—putting on masks and behaving in a manner consistent with those masks—she could not face Dr. Carlisle and pretend that she had not seen what she had. Marlowe, of course, knew something was wrong the moment he saw her. Lips pressed with concern, his expression asked the question.

She felt more sure of herself, with Marlowe standing by. She could face Carlisle, her breathing steady despite her rage. But her stillness, the flush in her cheeks, gave her away. Carlisle frowned.

“Where have you been?” Dr. Carlisle asked. “Making sure I haven’t stolen any of the silver?”

“I suppose I could tell you I’ve been in the garden like a good little girl.”

“You’ve seen the laboratory.” She nodded. “You came here at all because you guessed I was hiding something.”

“We came for exactly the reason we stated,” Marlowe said. “For information. We just didn’t trust that you would tell us all you knew. By Her Highness’ silence, can I judge you’re hiding quite a lot?”

She had to swallow the lump in her throat before she could find her voice. “Marlowe, would you be so good as to have a look in the basement?”

With a last glance at Carlisle, he left the room. She followed, gesturing ahead to show him the way.

The wheels of Carlisle’s chairs creaked on the floor as he pushed himself along to follow them.

“I know what you think you’ve found, girl. But I warrant you haven’t a clue what you saw. Your unsophisticated mind cannot possibly comprehend.”

She gritted her teeth and ignored him.

Marlowe stood at the top of the stairs. “Harry, how could he even get down here?”

“I don’t know, but he has. Go and see.”

“Doctor Marlowe, I assure you, the girl speaks nonsense.” Carlisle’s voice echoed after them as they descended.

“Take my lantern,” she said, her hands fumbling as she handed it over at the base of the stairs.

She’d left the unholy cupboard open. It was the first thing he saw, the rows of jars, the dark eyes of the creatures within peering through translucent flesh.

“Oh, my God,” he murmured.

“This is an invasion!” Carlisle shouted from the top of the stairs. “You have no right!”

“I have every right, as a loyal subject of the Crown,” she called back.

Marlowe said, “I wouldn’t have thought this was his doing because of the stairs, but he’s all but claiming responsibility, isn’t he?”

“What now?” she asked him. “What do we do? I started to write an inventory, but this . . . seems a bit beyond that.”

“I want an explanation,” he said, and turned to the stairs.

Which Carlisle was descending.

He’d left the wheelchair, but he wasn’t walking. Slithering, perhaps. Creeping. Seeping. His legs had become something else, some kind of boneless limb that he’d kept hidden under the blanket all this time. The pseudopod stretched forward, long prehensile tendrils grasping, reaching ahead of him to pull him down the steps, balancing against the walls to either side. His torso rocked atop them, like a man learning to ride a bicycle. Carlisle held the wall for balance as he lurched toward them.

Marlowe drew his pistol from the holster hidden at his back, under his jacket. Harry stumbled away and tried to think. If the basement had a speaker box, perhaps she could call Lieutenant Bradley. But no, the guards thought the room shut up, a speaker box never would have been installed.

“It’s a matter of time,” Carlisle said, explaining, lecturing. “Ten years ago, I tried to do it all at once, but I’ve learned that it’s a matter of time, careful injections, a little every day—”

“What are you saying?” Marlowe aimed the pistol at him, but Carlisle seemed not to notice.

“The promise of Aetherian biology!” Carlisle said. “Just as our machines have become more than they ever would have, so can we!”

“And what about them?” Harry said, pointing at the cupboard of dead children.

Carlisle filled the door, his alien limbs spreading around him like some grotesque anemone. “They are products of the first experiment.”

“You mean the accident?” Harry said, disbelieving.

“Everyone thinks I was making a weapon, and that’s why all those people died, but that is not it at all, I had no interest in weapons. I was trying—I was trying to improve.”

“Improve?”

“I paid the women for their participation; it was a simple transaction.”

“You mean you paid them—and took their children from them?”

“It hardly mattered, as you can see not a single one survived.”

Marlowe switched on the charge of his pistol—an energy pistol, powered by the Aetherian mechanisms. “Stop there, Doctor.”

One of the strange, mutated limbs whipped out and smacked Marlowe’s hand. The pistol skittered away, and Marlowe fell back.

Carlisle rolled toward him, preparing to climb on top of him, to crush or strangle him. Marlowe was pinned; he struggled to find a path of escape, but Carlisle’s sinuous limbs caged him. “Forget the problem of air compression. We can’t bring our atmosphere with us. Instead, we will travel through Aetherian spaces ourselves! But to do that we must be like them. We must breathe like them!”

Harry realized now where all those tissue slides must have come from. No matter that he had killed thousands when his poisonous chemical bath leaked into the water supply of Woking. His crime had been more than mere neglect—mere neglect, ha. The chemical bath had been some sort of Aetherian concoction, the leak had been intentional, and he had managed to collect samples to analyze his results.

Harry looked around. To the right imagination, the laboratory was a warehouse of weaponry. She went straight to the cabinet on the opposite side of the room, containing the flasks of acid and solvent, and the hypodermic needles and syringes alongside.

When she had what she needed and approached Doctor Carlisle, he stopped her with one of those horrid limbs, fleshy, covered with thorns, like some of the embalmed infants, like the images she had seen of the Aetherian pilot. Merely placed it before her, waving the tip of it, while still harassing Marlowe.

“What are you doing, dear Princess Maud?”

“If you harm me, there will be repercussions,” she said.

“Still hiding behind your brother’s trousers after all?” Carlisle said, laughing.

“Harry, do you see the pistol?” Marlowe called.

“Quiet,” Carlisle said and slapped him. Marlowe’s head slammed against the floor and he groaned.

Harry jammed the needle into Carlisle’s mutant limb and rammed home the plunger, emptying a dozen cubic centimeters of hydrochloric acid into his bloodstream, or so she hoped.

Carlisle lashed out, and the blow threw her back. She fell hard to the floor and managed to scramble away, taking shelter under the table. From there, she could see Marlowe, lying on the other side. She crawled toward him, reached for him; he grabbed her hand and squeezed.

Carlisle had fallen and lay twitching. She didn’t know what she had expected—screaming, perhaps. Skin and fluids bubbling as the concentrated acid ate him from within, assuming her attack had worked. But he simply lay silent, convulsions wracking his muscles. Foam collected at his mouth and dribbled down his cheek. His horrible pseudopod flopped like worms.

“What did you put in there?” Marlowe said.

She told him, and he hissed.

“I don’t know what I’m going to say to George,” she said.

“It hardly matters. You were right, he was hiding something. I thought we would find a packet of notes. Not . . . not this.”

“We should go tell the lieutenant,” Harry said, crawling out from under the table, brushing off her gown. There was little dust; Carlisle had kept the place very clean.

Marlowe scrambled to his feet in time to offer her a hand up. She accepted and kept hold of the hand for an extra moment, for comfort.

“Give me a minute, if you don’t mind,” Marlowe said, and went the cabinet of equipment. He started preparing a hypodermic and syringe.

“What are you doing?”

“I just want a sample.”

“Marlowe—”

“We’ll tell the lieutenant. We’ll tell everything, and Doctor Carlisle and all his nightmares will be studied, dissected, and locked away to keep anything like it from ever happening again. But in the meantime, I want a sample.”

He knelt by the dying Doctor Carlisle, inserted the needle in one of the pseudopods, and drew back the plunger to collect a syringe full of thick, yellowish liquid.

“Marlowe!”

He glanced sharply at her with a look of pleading. Don’t tell, let him have this, to continue with his own experiments. How else was Britain to win the war?

It wasn’t as if this was the only secret she’d be keeping. Her entire partnership with Marlowe was nearly scandalous. And since she wanted that partnership to continue, she would keep quiet.

Marlowe secured the syringe in a tin box which he slipped in a pocket, then retrieved his pistol.

“Harry,” he said, pausing at the foot of the stairs. “Are you all right?”

“I don’t know.” The hideous jarred infants kept staring at her. Her hands were shaking.

Marlowe reached for her. “Come. Everything’ll be all right.”

She chose to believe him, and, hand in hand, they went up the stairs.

© 2013 by Carrie Vaughn.

Originally published in The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination edited by John Joseph Adams.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

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

The Iron Hut

Maurice Broaddus | 7,007 words

I.

When they unearthed the mysterious shard, a sense of excitement rippled through the archaeological camp. They were onto something staggering. Professor Leopold Watson arrived first and examined the shard with reverent care. Kilwa Kivinje had disappeared into antiquity with no clues as to its whereabouts. Despite his colleagues’ skepticism, he was certain that the forgotten city was here—not far from the Olduvai Gorge—and this shard was the first evidence he’d seen that he was on the right track. Though anxious to send a report to the Associated Press, he opted to hold off until they knew what they were dealing with.

Leopold removed his broad-rimmed hat long enough to wipe the sweat from his scalp then tucked his few gray tufts of hair back under its protection. Small-framed glasses fixed to the bridge of his nose. Leopold possessed a thin face with weary creases radiating from his deep-recessed eyes. Miskatonic University, a small—though storied—university, couldn’t finance the expedition without the aid of the Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation. Dealing with the Foundation meant suffering their representative, Stanley McKreager. His crooked smile, as if he never quite got the hang of it, greeted the slow approach of his colleague.

“You know what this means?” McKreager puffed, his severe girth impeding his movements. The mere act of walking caused him to break into a sweat. Leopold wondered if the trek from the camp might be McKreager’s final undoing.

“Of course I know what this means.”

“The first extra-folkloric proof of Kilwa Kivinje.”

Leopold sighed and adjusted his glasses. He opposed this expedition—this “intrusion,” he called it. He suspected that McKreager dreamt of gold mines and the opportunity to plunder the city in the name of science.

McKreager scrutinized the shard. His oval face reminded Leopold of a soft-boiled egg with a bulbous nose. His heavy head, like a turtle without a shell to withdraw into, craned about, feigning something akin to academic perusal. Leopold hated the way McKreager pulled the strands of his hair into a ponytail. A ponytail, for God’s sake.

“Do you see these markings?” McKreager puzzled over the shard.

“You are quite the fount of rhetorical questions today.” But Leopold couldn’t begrudge him his brand of excitement. He, too, felt the swell of pride.

“Can you make them out?”

Leopold took the shard and felt the press of McKreager’s eyes on him. For a moment, Leopold fantasized about the shard being the earliest known inscription ever to be discovered, written in an archaic proto-Bantu. “The shard will require intense examination. And carbon dating to be sure.”

“To be sure of what? Still being confounded by the indigenous myth cycles?”

“Mount Kilimanjaro features heavily in local mythology. One of these legends, told by the Chagga people, has it that an ancient chief called ‘Mawenzi’ convinced his younger brother Kibo to fetch him coals from a mighty fire to light his pipe. Besides the fact that Mawenzi and Kibo are the names of the peaks, the legend could be a possible reference to volcanic activity, maybe as far back as the Stone Age.”

The peaks of mystery loomed above them, their shadow always felt. Leopold lamented that there was not much left of the ice caps now. Within fifty years they might be gone entirely, though they must have been magnificent centuries ago. Returning his attention to the shard, he flipped it in his palm. The strange markings on the crystalline piece made him nauseous if he held it or stared at it for too long. There was simply no earthly way the markings of the shard could be real. The weight of age enshrouded it. He knew without the tests that the words, and they were words, of a tongue long dead and not quite human, pre-dated the written word.

McKreager snatched the shard with a near-mania. “I say we announce that this is the work of the artists of Atlantis,” McKreager pronounced, obviously impressed with the quality of the work.

“Atlanteans? And you say that I spin tired tales.”

“If not Atlanteans, then who?” McKreager couldn’t return to the Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation with news of African Negro artisans producing such exquisite work. Not before Europeans.

“Perhaps Portuguese artists,” Leopold started, his stomach turning at the thought of indulging such a ruse. Still, he needed the funding. “If dated four or five centuries ago. Or natives trained by the Portuguese.”

“Yes, yes. You may be onto something.” McKreager’s heavy eyes locked onto his. “Maybe you ought to lie down. You look positively dreadful, my dear boy.”

On the walk to his tent, Leopold’s mind brought to bear thoughts of those Elder Things. He suddenly regretted the long hours spent poring over the arcane papers of the Miskatonic University Library and the favors burnt in order to peruse that damnable book. Creatures of Prehistoric folklore that McKreager took special pains to dismiss, tales long whispered in dread. Leopold fidgeted in his cot, falling into a troubled sleep, and dreamt of ancient times and ancient warriors.

II.

What price friendship? Dinga focused on that single thought, his fingers groping for the next handhold in the rocky crag. The piercing gale tore through his heavy fur and hammered nails of ice through his body. His thickly muscled legs grew heavier with each tenuous step up the treacherous mountainside. Cursing the rocks that shifted underfoot, Dinga moved with the practiced ease of a hillman, his soft-booted foot finding purchase. The tempests blew torrents of snow and reduced the peak to a smoking cone.

He had been promised that his journey would be easier, not that he trusted the laibon who had sent him on this fool’s errand. Dinga had followed the narrow ridge, a kind of ramp that wound its way along the mountainside at the outset of his journey. He rested at shambas along the way and refreshed himself with the bananas and vegetables that grew in the small holdings. When the passage turned more arduous, he pressed on, heedless of the grim peril hidden by the white immensity.

Climbing coursed in his Nokian veins, as did bloodlust and the need for vengeance. Nothing, not the remoteness of the pinnacle, not the rarified air, not the gnawing cold, not whatever unfathomed mysteries awaited him, would stop him from reaching his destination. The hilt of his dagger jabbed him in the waist with each step, a gentle plea to be unsheathed in battle. The weight of his sword pressed against his back—he preferred an enemy to fight and a mountain in whose shadow many villages chilled would not suffice.

The forest roof looked like a verdant mat below him. A rolling ocean of green that only stirred longings in him to revisit the coast, a desire compounded by the sense of unease he experienced whenever he stared too long at the looming slopes and their irregular peaks. Drifting snow carpeted the shelf before he had finished his ascent to the snow-denuded summit. A sudden gust of wind nearly unseated him from his lofty ice shelf. In his scramble, he latched onto crystalline outcroppings.

No enemy to fight, only an immovable mound of earth and ice—the thought galled him. He’d put his blade to any foe. Yet, Onyame damn him if a rock bettered him. This mountain was a beast like any other he’d faced and it needed slaying. Remembering that his time drew short, that a friend’s life was weighing in the balance, he pressed on.

• • • •

The Berbers, wandering barbarians that they were, prepared to set upon Dinga as if he were some unassuming cattle herder. They were ready to make off with whatever valuables he might have. A gold ring dangled from his broad nose and he wore a brass armlet. A tattoo covered the left half of his body, lines like a maze, broken by dots. Little did they know that he valued nothing as much as his weapons. Their numbers gave them false confidence, nine of their barbarous horde to his one.

He had them right where he wanted.

Dinga traveled Azania, the little-known country south of Kush, not expecting to see anyone this far into the interior. His restless nature often got the better of him, roaming without searching for anything in particular. Berbers were fierce, worthy to join with him in worship of Onyame. Lanky figures, able-limbed with knots of muscles poised to spring, their mad glares focused on Dinga. He sensed the impending attack and had tensed himself when an approaching figure distracted them all. The swagger of his stride had a familiar bearing. He was giant in stature, even compared to Dinga’s not-inconsiderable height. The man’s muscles rippled gracefully with each step, more dancer than warrior.

“What have we here? A lamb beset by a pack of jackals?” Naiteru spoke in a Bantu tongue, despite being Masai. Dinga also spoke Bantu, a good thing since he knew none of the Nilotic tongue of most Masai. Naiteru was not most Masai. Dinga knew loneliness as his primary companion, though, on occasion, he encountered a friend that he had made along his journey. Naiteru stared at him. A familiar admiration danced in his eyes.

“There are no lambs here, wayfarer, save for the gentle thing dangling between your legs,” Dinga said.

“You have a funny way of asking for help.”

“I never asked. My worship is a private affair, saved for these mongrels.”

“Come now—allow me to commune with your god. Is your heart the only one that beats to the sound of the ancient drum?”

Dinga knew the Berbers had planned to converge on him in the midst of the upcoming clearing. Instead, the pair of warriors plunged into the barbarians’ swarming formation. They crashed through the branches and hurtled into the nearly dozen men. Dinga had sinewy shoulders and a lean waist. His belted loincloth held a dagger hilt jutting from one side, with the belt supporting a short, heavy sword.

Dinga killed the first two before they knew they could bring their weapons to bear, then ducked the wide arc of the blade path of a third. Quick on his feet, Dinga moved toward the empty swish of sliced air. He parried the next slash and then cut off the Berber’s choking cry at his throat by severing him from ear-to-ear. A weird inhuman call announced another Berber, who crashed through the dense forest wall like a rhinoceros crashing through saplings. Dinga clubbed him with the flat side of his heavy sword and the barbarian’s brains poured from his split skull.

“What say you?” Naiteru said, engaged by two Berber himself.

“When I need the help of a stray bamboo reed, I will shout.”

“Heh.” The Masai sidestepped a thrust, then moved in close and snapped his foe’s neck with a quick twist. Another Berber attempted an attack from the rear, to trap him between himself and another approaching barbarian, but Naiteru caught him by the wrist, twirling him around into his companions’ thrusting spear. Naiteru let the impaled corpse fall to the ground and caught the spear. The Berber’s partner lunged forward, but the Masai tripped him with his spear, then spun it and plunged it into his foe’s back. He ran his spear through the Berber’s spine and breastbone. Naiteru smiled as the Berber coughed out bloody foam and spasmed in death.

Naiteru’s height and skinny build belied his strength. With an elegance to his movement, he wheeled like a panther on cords of muscles, hard like steel rope. His wild and arrogant eyes measured the course of the fray. A lethal whirlwind, his combat was beauty to behold, an honor to Onyame. A Berber, through more luck than skill, managed to slice Naiteru along the side. The Masai reacted immediately. An upswing of his spear caught the Berber in his gullet and sent up a shower of red rain. Blood surged over the Berber’s hands as he clutched at his belly in a futile bid to contain his innards.

And then it was finished—the forest was still and silent except for the sound of two men breathing heavily.

“The wound doesn’t look too bad. It should heal well.” Dinga studied Naiteru’s side.

“It could be worse.”

“How?”

“I could be you.” Naiteru glanced at the wound. “AKilwa lies not too far from here. Maybe a maiden or two could speed my healing?”

“If it is a wet nurse you seek, who am I to prevent it?”

They moved deeper into the thicket, the tangled copse growing ever the more impenetrable. The dark wood felt even darker in the cool penumbra of the mountain.

III.

The swirling drifts of snow erased any trace of Dinga’s trail, the sound of his footfalls swallowed by the encroaching gloom. He pulled his fur hood low upon his head. Layered clothes shielded the worst of it. The terrain held few surprises for him—his wanderings had led him through more than one mountain pass and even the biting wind was more familiar than foreign. A white, long-dead world with the feel of being older than life. Doubt gnawed at his insides like icicles ground into him. He had reached what passed for a plateau among the ice peaks and searched for any hint of where to go next. It had been a few days since his last real meal. He soothed his parched throat with mouthfuls of snow, praying for Onyame to take him before he lost all feeling throughout his body. Still, his limbs kept moving, determined to survive. He spied a shallow shaft in the distance and staggered toward it, relieved to find anything close to shelter.

The subterranean passage was like a gaping wound in the earth. The jagged aperture hid the black recesses of the shaft. The sounds of the storm flaying the mountainside reverberated through the shaft. The peculiar howl of the wind, heightened by the darkness, unsettled him within the horrifying enclosure. He lost all sense of direction, only knowing that he felt as if he climbed down the throat of a giant creature in a tight, downward-angled shimmy.

A faint amber light glowed in the distance. As Dinga got closer, the chute yawned like a ravenous mouth, spitting him into a high roofed cavern. Luminous markings along the walls possessed the air of the sacred about them. For the first time, it occurred to him that the whole mountain might be holy. The walls bent at strange angles, cold but not freezing. Stones jutted from them, fangs, covering branching tunnels. A menacing maze, but Dinga knew that the trick of mazes was to always stay true. He kept to a path that always wound left. The winding path took him deeper into the belly of the mountain.

After several interminable hours, the staid air gave way to moving air currents. His ears perked to attention at the sound and smell of trickling, fetid water. His animal instinct bristled inside him. Waste run-off, like bait—it was meant to draw him in.

The violent gale assaulting the mountain took on the sounds of disquieting music. The ground appeared as if it had been undisturbed for ages. He could make out an odd geometry of shapes from the unearthly glow that emanated from whatever grew on the cave walls. Cones and pyramids piled upon one another like a city with an architecture no man designed.

Upon closer inspection, he noticed a familiar pattern inscribed upon some of the stones. The designs were similar to those that had been tattooed onto him. He couldn’t hazard a guess as to what it meant, though he knew it to be a mystery for another time. More troubling were the bones of fallen warriors scattered all about the cavern. A large, oblong shape drew his attention. As he approached, he slowly made out the features of the object before him: a man encased in ice. At first, he feared that the nude corpse was a mirage, little more than the heat-induced fever of when he crossed the great desert alone. Mummified, the man’s grimace reminded him of one privy to an ancient joke, a nomad much like him. Scars and open wounds laced the man’s body. Only the face disturbed him with its calcified eyes of a madman.

Only then did Dinga realize that he wasn’t alone.

He stilled his breathing and waited for his heartbeat to slow. No sound, not the slightest shuffle betrayed any movement—yet he knew lurking horrors surrounded him. First, a strange call answered from deep within the cavern. Then came the sound of nails scraping stone.

Dinga raised his sword.

• • • •

The pair’s progress proved slower than Dinga would have imagined. Two stout warriors such as he and Naiteru should have traversed the short few miles within the hour. Yet, the sky pulled on its night cloak, held up for it by a forest of ancient trees. They tarried as if robbed of the will to move. The throb along his ribs alerted Dinga to his own wounds. The steep cliffs of Oldoinyo Oibor, the white mountain, rose from the jungle, looming over the brooding primeval forest. The entire valley lay in its shadow. The silence of the journey troubled him. No birds, no telltale rustling among the lush undergrowth.

Naiteru’s wound kept bleeding, to Dinga’s dismay, though he gave no sign of it save the occasional grunt. He hadn’t lied to assure Naiteru earlier: The wound was slight and should’ve closed on its own. He thought of Naiteru as a brother, one he didn’t always have occasion to like, but a brother nonetheless. Not like that Spartan dog Gerard who vexed him on occasion by way of misadventure.

Though they were an easy-going people, Dinga also knew the Masai to be more fierce than the Berbers. It was said that to them, “No one else matters except the Masai and their cows.” That wasn’t entirely true. Naiteru’s father had taken him in for a time soon after Dinga left his home village.

“You will have many adventures and great days ahead of you,” Naiteru’s father often opined. Dinga never said anything to that. He only knew that he had to wander the four winds, the rite of Onyame, before settling among his people. “‘Happiness is to lie on one’s back surrounded by many sons.’ I could always use another son.”

Often, he thought that Naiteru’s father said such things to stir up Naiteru, instill in him the threat of a rival for his father’s affections. Instead, it stirred an unrealized yearning for an older brother. They competed, sure, but not as two vying for their father’s approval.

They staggered to Kilwa Kivinje’s gates well into the evening. Dinga expected a collection of dark-skinned men and their scattered huts—huts of mud and wattle, thatched with brush. Instead, he found a palisaded city, with sweeping stone walls that enclosed it and hugged the terrain. The walls were built from the very stone of the mountainside. Impressive hill terracing served to grow grains. Magnificent houses dotted the landscape. Near the center of the village, cone-like blast furnaces with bellows worked their iron smelting. The tall men milled about in their ease postures, standing on one leg, and stared with grim curiosity at the two men staggering toward them. The women were exotic beauties: tall, buxom, strongly built, with burgundy cloths fastened at the waist by jewels draped around their wide hips, and with shaved heads and the middle teeth of their lower jaws pulled out. Rumor had it, so Naiteru said before his wounds silenced him, the women did everything that needed to be done in the village since work was beneath the men’s dignity.

Dinga collapsed with Naiteru. A cadaverous man with a nose too narrow to trust ran to them and waved the others back. Dinga reached for his sword, but Naiteru’s hand stayed the blade.

“Bring food and drink for our weary guests!” the man shouted.

“We . . . ,” Naiteru said.

“Hush now. We’ll talk when you are refreshed and strengthened.”

Naiteru gorged on wild game, refusing any fruits or vegetables. He requested fresh cow blood mixed with cow milk, a staple of his warrior’s diet. Dinga ate from all that the maidens brought and his goblet overflowed with wine. He observed the tender ministrations of the maiden that flitted about Naiteru, noting the lingering caresses to her otherwise efficient work. He dreamt of returning to Ifriquia’s tender embrace and felt a dull ache whenever he thought of her, like a peace he didn’t deserve. However, she was in Wagadugu and that country was in the distant north.

“And what would your name be?” Dinga asked.

“Esiankiki.” The young woman averted her gaze. She carried herself like a woman with strength. Dinga’s eager eyes drank her in, reminding him of a thirst in need of slaking.

“Your spirits seem lifted. I am Kaina, laibon to the Chagga people.” The medicine man’s voice was the low, deep rumble of a threatening storm. The laibon reminded Dinga too much of the dwellers of Kawkaw, the land of magicians.

“I am Dinga of the clan Cisse, a Nokian.” His pulse quickened with pride. He knew how his people were thought of: a barbaric, war-like tribe, intelligent but uncivilized; an ancient and proud people who kept their old ways and secrets to themselves.

“Naiteru,” he muttered between gulps of blood-milk.

“I know you, Naiteru. We were saddened to hear of the death of your father.” Dinga cut Naiteru a terrible glance. “We fear more such deaths.”

Dinga listened carefully to the story the laibon spun—tales of a river sickness infecting the land, killing cattle and weakening the people of the village. What devil’s secrets laibons didn’t keep to themselves, they spread only in dark whispers. He hinted of necromantic magic and strange creatures called from the Night, searching for any reaction on Dinga’s face. He found only boredom.

“Does anyone know the mysteries the jungle conceals? This is none of my business. I will take my leave and you can keep your concerns for yourself.”

“Stay. Let us show you the hospitality of the Chagga,” the laibon said.

Dinga, despite his youth, cast a wary eye at the laibon. He spoke with a general amiability that bothered Dinga. However, the sport of drink was new to him and the effects far more debilitating that he remembered. His concerns about overstaying his welcome curdled into something approaching apprehension. “No, the horizon calls me. Show me to my chamber so that I may be fresh tomorrow.”

“That’s fine. Let none say that the Chagga do not know how to treat their guests. Esiankiki, more wine.”

The light of warning reflected in her eyes as she refilled his goblet. At least that was the cast of her countenance once he reflected upon it. Far too late.

IV.

Before seeing the obsidian outlines, he reckoned the number of beasts at five. His innate hunter’s skill guided him, sensing a conscious malignity all about him. He moved with a reckless speed, barely avoiding the charge of the first creature. Dinga had never encountered an animal like them before. They resembled a kind of bat, with their large, membranous wings lined with a serrated edge. The folds of the unsturdy frames of their wings, like bamboo shoots, hid short, muscular arms with long, taloned hands. Star-shaped heads sat atop their squat bodies. Each had a slit in the center of the top of their heads, the center opening guarded by thin, raking teeth. Bowl-like eyes the color of old wine scanned for movement in the steep night. Dexterous tentacles, like undulating fingers, radiated from their bellies.

Dinga remained motionless, his skin twitching, eager for combat. He held his dagger in one hand and his sword in the other. The arms of the nearest creature thwarted his initial efforts at a clean stab. In fact, the brute’s skin proved nearly impervious to the casual slicing of his blade. Great, hammer-like blows sent Dinga sprawling to the cold ground. He recovered quickly and leapt at the beast, but was quickly ensnared by it. Its hide reeked of deep earth. Dinga plunged his dagger into the inviting ball of an eye. The creature let go immediately, but not before Dinga tore into the opposite eye.

Another creature reached for Dinga. He grabbed the outstretched arm and threw himself forward along the icy pathway. In one fluid movement, Dinga wrapped his powerful legs around the creature’s body, entangling its wings as the two of them tobogganed down the trail. The beast retaliated by raking its nails across his shoulder. The entwined pair slid toward the wall of jutting ice spires that mirrored a collection of spears, until Dinga turned at the last instant so that the beast withstood the brunt of the impact.

Dinga ran his hands along the nape of his neck. A familiar slickness greeted him as he muttered imprecations to himself. The scent of fresh blood stirred the remaining fiends’ passions. In such close quarters, the creatures did more damage flailing at each other than at him. Two of the beasts tore into each other until they both fell dead. The last creature pummeled Dinga with a flurry of fierce punches, and sent him face first into a wall. He clutched at its neck as the opening in its head frantically tried to bite at him. His dagger pierced the soft flesh of its underbelly. Dark-green fluid answered for blood and sluiced in a streak against the rock. Dinga sealed his lips shut, fearing that its taste might match the gamy smell. The blood pooled in a viscous curd. Dinga’s neck and shoulder felt numb. He piled the corpses in the center of the chamber, settled into them and warmed himself in their cooling flesh.

• • • •

Dinga opened his heavy eyelids, still groggy from what felt like an evening spent in a wineskin. Or five wineskins. Images slowly coalesced from some sort of sinister dream. Bits of the scene he recognized. When he attempted to move his arms, he realized that each was bound to a wooden rack. The flames from the iron works danced before him, fighting the chill of the strange mountain’s shadow. Naiteru lay still, barely conscious on the gentle lap of Esiankiki. She met Dinga’s stare then turned away quickly.

“What madness is this?” Dinga pulled against the ropes, testing them.

“The madness is yours, thinking you could come into our village to watch your handiwork in action,” Kaina said. “We still live and to our last breath we defy you.”

“Naiteru?”

“His arrival was an omen. He is known to us, a friend of this village. Yet, he, too, has succumbed to your blight upon us.”

“Then your madness threatens to consume you all. I am a warrior. Servant of Onyame, the god above all others.”

“Eng-ai trembles before no other god. Even the red god of drought and the black god of the rains serve Eng-ai. And Eng-ai sent you to us for a reason.”

“And that reason is what?” Dinga asked.

“You were the one sent to destroy us.”

The villagers stared on, dull-eyed and weary. Dinga could believe that they were beset by some malady. The laibon—a desperate figure responsible for their physical and spiritual well-being—had latched on to any belief that might relieve his charges. His supposed powers of divination prophecy and healing availed him not.

“Either give me a chance to prove myself or else let me die on my feet. A warrior’s death.”

“We shall. You shall undergo the Trial by Ordeal.”

“What is that?” Though Dinga suspected torture, which he was prepared for.

Kaina nodded toward Esiankiki. Gently, she slid Naiteru’s head from her lap to the ground, then brought Kaina a bowl. She held out her hands and he slit her palm with a small dagger. He collected some of the blood in the bowl then lofted the bowl skyward as if offering it to an air spirit. Turning to each of the four directions, he similarly prayed before attending to Dinga. Kaina shook a powder into the liquid and held the bowl to Dinga’s mouth.

“What is it?” Dinga asked.

“Fresh cow blood mixed with the blood of a virgin. And ground tenga root.”

“The poison?”

“So it is. One that burns in the veins. Should you be innocent, your life will be spared. Otherwise, Eng-ai will consume you in his fires of judgment.”

“I serve ‘He Who Roars So Loud that the Nations are Struck with Terror.’ If I have done this cowardly deed, may Onyame strike me down now.” Dinga spat. He had little faith in the dark arts and found the whole matter distasteful. Magic was too removed, made combat impersonal. It was too easy, almost civilized, to inflict harm from a distance. However, to physically engage your enemy—to watch and feel his lifeblood ebb from his body—that kept the value of life, the true measure of worship in Onyame’s name, firmly in one’s mind.

Kaina forced the mixture into Dinga’s mouth. Dinga threw his head back, taking in much of the foul liquor. The liquid burned his throat and gullet—waves of liquid flame coursing through his blood. The blood-fire bulged his veins to near bursting. Dinga pulled on the ropes and snapped the supporting beams. He let loose his death scream, to alert the guardians of the afterworld that a warrior would soon join their ranks, and fell to his knees. His skin bristled like seared flesh in the cool morning. He crawled toward Naiteru. Kaina, Esiankiki, and the on-looking villagers moved out of his way. Dinga pulled himself toward Naiteru’s head. Sweat poured down Naiteru’s face, his eyes bloodshot and tired—the picture of a man trapped in a fevered nightmare.

“Give me one reason why I shouldn’t kill them where they stand,” Dinga whispered hoarsely.

“I’ll give you two. Onyame saw fit to spare you, but you look so weak a foal could topple you. And . . .” Naiteru glanced toward Esiankiki. “If she was a virgin, she certainly wasn’t when she left my chambers.”

“Heh.”

“Dinga. Son of Cisse. Eng-ai has judged you and found you worthy,” the laibon said in a congratulatory tone. Dinga felt for his dagger, hoping to rid the world of one of its medicine men, only to realize that it had been stripped from him.

“If this is the hospitality of the Chagga, Onyame take you all.”

“Truly, you have my apologies,” Kaina said. “We are a desperate people. I had to be sure that you were not one of the Brotherhood of the Higher Ones.”

Naiteru moaned. A troubling rattle settled in his throat.

“What troubles him?” Dinga asked.

“He is not long for this world. It is the work of the Brotherhood. They spin their magics. Their ways poison our land, our livestock, and our people.”

“Why haven’t you done anything about them? Performed another of your rituals?” Dinga scoffed.

“The legends say that the Brotherhood of the Higher Ones abides in an iron hut high atop Oldoinyo Oibor. Guarded by their servant creatures. None have returned to tell the tale of the hut’s master.”

“Who built the hut?” Dinga asked.

“The Iron Hut was ancient when we settled the land.” Kaina turned his attentions to the now-groaning Naiteru. “He doesn’t have much time. I fear that none of us do.”

“Then I suppose someone must go and ask the Brotherhood to stop their magics. I will ask them as nicely as possible.”

“If you take up this quest, the Chagga people will remember you in our songs.”

“I’m not doing this for you,” Dinga said.

“Then at least with the rainy season ended, your journey should be easier.”

V.

The silence was so perfect, so profound, that Dinga thought he had passed through the veil into the next world. He only had to traverse two chambers from the site of his ambush to reach the iron hut. Thick and stout, the door of a palace’s keep, it stood three heads taller than him and broad enough for three men of his size to pass through at the same time quite comfortably. A sense of foreboding rippled through him. Though he knew that the massive door was set correctly, it had the illusion of being crooked. It canted first to the left then, in his next glance, to the right—a back-and-forth sensation that inspired a sense of seasickness. He reached for one of the iron handholds and pulled the door open.

The door opened into a dark cavernous hallway, though light danced at the end of it. The glow wavered like heat lines from desert sand. Through the wavering ebon murk of the desolate hallway, Dinga made out wall paintings depicting a story he could barely comprehend. Decadent art depicted people at worship to the mountain, of creatures rising from the oceans. Blocks of ancient carving, like stone corpses, in an off-kilter arrangement induced more of the nauseating vertigo. The sensation abandoned him immediately if he didn’t look directly at the art. The sounds of prayerful murmurs half-heard, almost like music played in a dream, echoed from the end of the passage.

Dinga stood outside the room and peered around the corner at the strange scene. Half a dozen naked men knelt dumbly in a half-circle. Each had rings through their noses, large enough for them to be herded like a favored cosset. Each man had been crudely castrated. Judging from the burn scars radiating from the emptiness of their groins across their thighs and bellies, their wounds had been cauterized by torch fire. Like living scrolls, the men had words—old words not meant to be pronounced by human tongues, carved into their flesh. Rough leather cords ran through their lips, sewing their mouths shut. Their sounds had the dissonant quality of cries from a gagged mouth. The vacant expression each wore gave them the semblance of being kin.

A white-skinned woman, not pale like the Spartan, but possessing an unhealthy pallor of color having been drained from her, milled at the center of their entranced ardor. Her head wrapped in a cloth, she doted on them like some horrible mother. Down-turned slits passed for eyes on a face with sagging jowls and endless folds. She squatted before them, rearing back on her haunches, her body like a rotted pear. Rows of what appeared to be gelatinous eggs lined the wall behind her. On an altar of bones, candles in golden holders reflected light onto jewels on the far wall, a thousand gleaming eyes. Incense wafted from bronze bowls.

Suddenly sensing the presence of an intruder, she met Dinga’s eyes squarely. Red froth escaped her lips. If she said any words, Dinga was already moving and didn’t hear them. The men stirred to somnambulance and scrambled after him. Dinga ran the first man through; the next swipe of his sword severed another man from his shoulder-bone to his breast. Pity was the closest thing that Dinga felt. These were no warriors; there was no honor in this slaughter. No, these were mercy killings. Their littered bodies were like fallen leaves. The last man turned to run away, but he was cut down in an instant. The man left a bloody smear, a red snail’s wake, as he crawled toward the woman.

Her merciless eyes followed Dinga. What he thought was an ancient story writ into the ice-scarred veins of her skin, upon closer inspection, was the scale-like quality of that skin. She had dwelt with her Higher Ones for so long that she was no longer quite human. The air in the room became stagnant, growing hot, as if heat was generated within him, slowly cooking him from the inside. A sickly yellow-green glow emanated from a split in the space between them. The witch-mother began to laugh uncontrollably. Terrible and maniacal, her laughter was more unsettling than if she had started screaming.

“You are too late,” she said in her queer, flat tone. “The vitality of such a fine warrior may finally prove enough to call them forth.”

The pale green light, accompanied by a strange buzzing, revealed black spots, which soon split and opened into mouths. It was as if the hut itself attempted to give birth to an old and hungry power. Dinga could feel it coming. His mistake, he realized, was believing the woman to be the owner of the hut. No, she was its priestess and the hut its temple. It. That which dwelled outside, and that was how Dinga knew it—the Dweller Outside—neared. Over the tittering of her age-dimpled face, her fat tongue lolled over her teeth. She began to chant.

His heart pumped madly. He had no knowledge of the dark arts. He knew no ritual to undo the opening that she wrought. All he knew was the sword and the blessing of Onyame. He ran the cold iron of his blade through her heart. Her half-closed eyes sprang open, terribly bulbous, distracted but still standing despite the hunk of metal protruding from her chest. Unaware, her arm drifted into the fissure she had created. The burning light of a terrible sunset blistered and charred her arm to a fleshy red ruin. She continued her atonal drone, forming words he almost recognized—all despite her life quickly draining from her. With her life ebbing, the doorway she opened started to close. A bestial howl cried from beyond. With a last gasp, an ebon tentacle lashed out, a taloned finger carving into her flesh. Before Dinga had a chance to study the words, the tentacle withdrew, just as the crack in space sealed itself. Her vacant eyes congealed, then hardened. Her entire body appeared to gain the sheen of ice, her skin transformed to crystal. Dinga could still feel the steady pulse of energy building.

The throb of power intensified. The altar tore from its perch on the wall and revealed a shaft that led further down the mountain. Dinga dove for the tunnel and scrambled madly, as fast as he could, praying for passage through the honeycombed mountain. He turned his head, only to see arcs of lightning crackling throughout the room. A few moments later, a terrible explosion roared in his ears.

• • • •

Dinga re-traversed the course of the mountain in much shorter time, his route now much more direct. He noticed the lights dancing around the mountain the moment he emerged from the tunnels and trekked back along the ridge of forest. The first smell of smoke alerted him to trouble. By the time he reached the village, all that remained was the smoldering ruins. The great houses were smashed to rubble, the walls scorched to screes of pebbles. The ironworks lay topped and aflame. The cloying stench of burnt flesh choked the air. He imagined the screams of the poor souls now silenced. Numbness washed over him, not the dreadful cold stilling his body’s warmth but more a chill of the spirit. The scent of death was heavy in the air, though no bodies could he find. Shards of crystal littered the area.

“Victory comes at a great cost,” Naiteru said from behind him. Dinga whirled at the sound of his voice, disturbed that he had never heard the man’s approach. He rested his hand on the hilt of his dagger.

“The village?” Dinga asked.

“Her will bound the land,” Naiteru said. “The . . . witch-mother.”

The man that stood before him wore the face of his childhood friend, but his bearing, his manner, was that of a stranger, not the warrior he knew.

“Who are you?” Dinga asked.

“You are perceptive, gentle warrior. You may call me Naiteru-kop. I have been touched by the Old Ones. I will usher them into this plane when the time comes.”

Dinga drew his dagger. Naiteru-kop stripped it from him, with the effort of a parent taking away a child’s plaything.

“We will meet again, young Dinga,” Naiteru-kop tossed the dagger aside and turned to walk away. “For your sake, let it be later rather than sooner.”

Dinga watched him for a time then turned to the horror of the village. With nothing left to keep him there, he searched the camp for what he knew remained. After a few minutes, he found it: Naiteru’s spear. Dinga used it as a walking stick and headed out of the village, his eyes forever fixed on the horizon.

VI.

The incessant howl of the wind stirred Leopold to wakefulness. His clothes were clammy; the coppery taste of fear filled his mouth. He was quite aware of his heartbeat, but his dream had the eerie clarity of memory. And prophecy. At first, he thought it further excitement at some new discovery. He had gone to bed with the men re-doubling their efforts at the dig. The stone ruins of many buildings, the acropolis, the elliptical temple. The certainty of their expedition having awoken something seized him.

Possessed of the singular notion to flee, and to leave all of his things and run. Neither the direction nor the destination mattered, only the fact that he needed to leave this dead, cursed city, lest he re-live the terror of the original denizens. The desolate summit called to him, hidden by the Stygian shadow of the leering mountain.

Leopold had an irresistible urge to glance back, maybe to gauge the pace of the pursuit of whatever stalked him. Maybe it was the same bit of regretful longing that caused Lot’s wife to turn back toward Sodom and Gomorrah. Regardless of the reason, he looked back and what he saw rooted him to his spot every bit as much as if he has been changed into a pillar of salt.

McKreager staggered toward him.

Whatever damnable fervor in which he had taken to the shard still possessed him. Wearing a loose cloth around his head, he still clutched the crystal. His hand appeared white, as if the color had drained from it, his vessels a network of blue bulges. Terribly sloth-like, with sweat streaked down his face, he huffed with each step. Watching him had the prescient cruelty of watching him give birth. Tenebrous power curled about him. The hastily-thrown-on cloth slowly fell from his head. McKreager’s skull splintered and protruded, the jutting bones pointed in five directions. He opened his mouth. His words had a musical quality to them.

And Leopold began to laugh. A terrible, cold laughter.

© 2014 by Maurice Broaddus.

Originally published in Sword & Mythos, edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Maurice Broaddus’ fiction has been published in numerous venues, including Asimov’s Science Fiction, Cemetery Dance, Apex Magazine, and Weird Tales Magazine. He co-edited Streets of Shadows (Alliteration Ink) and the Dark Faith anthology series (Apex Books) and was the author of the urban fantasy trilogy, Knights of Breton Court (Angry Robot Books). His website is MauriceBroaddus.com.

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

The Ninth Seduction

Sean McMullen | 6,700 words

Midsummer’s Eve

The sun had descended behind Lakefell as seven times seven goblin artisans gathered before the throne of Castellerine Lynder in the Serpentine Garden, their choicest and most enchanting creations for the year past held high. Chancellor Arrender walked slowly along the lines of scarlet cushions that glowed softly around the delights placed upon them, inspecting what the castellerine would soon consider. As always, he paused and nodded when he reached Raksar, the finest of Cumbriel’s master jewelers. Although he had no skills with magic, Raksar could coax such beauty out of metals that one would swear there was enchantment within them.

It was midsummer’s eve in the mortals’ year of 1449, but the world of mortals was paid little heed in Faerie.

• • • •

The palace of Castellerine Lynder was the most splendid of the many elegant mansions of Cumbriel. Its seven towers reached high above the trees on the forested slopes of Lakefell, and all were built of violet marble. Every evening the castellerine would walk in one of the seven gardens, her milk white hands clasped behind her back beneath her pale hair, and the train of her robe held by iridescent beetles that hummed, gleamed, and sparkled like living jewels in the waning light. She walked on no path, but on a golden carpet that floated just above the ground, materializing before her feet and dissolving once she had passed.

Seven Citadel Guards in electrum armour followed the castellerine into the Serpentine Garden, and behind them were her courtiers and the seven mortal youths who were vying to be her favourite for the night. With them was the Sorcerer of Oblivion, who would blot out two thousand years of her memories for a half hour, so that she could enjoy being seduced as a virgin of just seventeen summers.

The castellerine had gathered together orchids from all the lands throughout Faerie in the seven gardens of her palace. The walls of follies were smothered in vines and rock orchids, while within shadowy bowers the deadly cave orchids broadcast alluring scents to those who were passing. Birds fluttered down to the snareflowers, charmed by the scents, only to be entangled and drained of life by their filamentous tendrils. Lyre orchids played music like birdsong to attract cats and snakes that they might feast upon.

Most curious of all were the liberean orchids that grew in a row beside a wall where books were placed for them to read. As the castellerine walked past they bowed the flowers that were their eyes and displayed verses favored by her upon their broad leaves. An avatar orchid reared up to greet her by forming a flower in the shape of her face. A handmaid tossed it a live mouse, which it snatched out of the air with leaves lined with thorns as sharp as needles.

The castellerine smiled, because beauty and strangeness were her delight.

The throne of the Serpentine Garden was carved from jade and inset with every type of green gemstone. The floating golden carpet became draperies and cushions to smother it in softness before the castellerine sat down. She waited until her guards and courtiers had assembled into the order of their rank, then gestured to a troll that loomed high beside the throne. A pigeon was perched upon the index finger of its enormous hand.

“Pretty bird, pretty bird, tell me your tale,” said the castellerine.

“Ladyship, I bear a message from Prince Lortrian,” the pigeon declared, its head held high and its chest puffed out. “He will arrive in seven days.”

“Pretty bird, pretty bird, fly away home. Tell the prince that his tribute will be ready, and that I yearn for him with desire so strong that it causes me pain.”

As the bird flew away, the castellerine’s violet eyes flashed with fury, and her blood red lips parted to bare her teeth. Chancellor Arrender stepped forward.

“You have my sympathy, ladyship,” he said with his eyes cast down.

“Prince Lortrian has seven times seven elfknight guards, and I have but seven. Each year I must pay his weight in gold, present the choicest jewelry that Cumbriel’s artisans may devise, and share my bed with him for seven nights. Will your sympathy end all that?”

“Regrettably, no, ladyship.”

“What can you then do to ease my humiliation?”

“I could choose the tribute for you, so that the prince may have your jewelry, but not your choice.”

“That pleases me. Choose in my stead.”

• • • •

Once the castellerine had gone, Arrender called a mortal girl to his side. One by one she wore the offerings of the goblin jewelers, bringing them to life upon her flesh. Last of all, she lifted Raksar’s offering from his cushion, a tiger pendant made of vermillion gold and black silver chainlinks. It rippled with sinuous vitality above her breasts as she minced back and forth at Arrender’s bidding.

“As always, your work is chosen,” Arrender decided.

“As always, I am honoured, lordship,” said Raksar.

The others were dismissed, leaving Arrender and Raksar alone in the Serpentine Garden. There was an echoing shriek from somewhere in the distance, and the goblin glanced fearfully to Arrender.

“Such a high price to pay for the delights of the castellerine’s bed,” murmured Arrender sadly.

“Did he not please her?” whispered Raksar.

“Even the greatest skills at lovemaking would not have saved him. Her ladyship hates the handsome but vain Prince Lortrian, who fancies himself more fair than even herself.”

“An outrage indeed.”

“For every night she must sleep with him, she seduces a mortal and then has him put upon the ferry to the afterlife. It eases her humiliation.”

“I grieve for her dignity.”

“As do I. Speak of this to nobody.”

“Upon my life, never.”

“What price do you ask for your wonder of metal shaping?”

“Only to walk within this garden of delight for an hour, measured by your glass.”

“You merely ask to walk within one of the seven palace gardens every year, yet you could ask for gold.”

“There are no places more beautiful than the gardens of the Palace of Cumbriel, Lordship, and to create beauty I must look upon beauty.”

Midsummer’s Day

With a tallow torch to light his way, Raksar began the long walk back to the village of Westfell long after the other goblins had returned. He fell exhausted onto his little bed and slept as one dead, but at halflight he awoke to the distant rumbling of thunder. He paid it no heed, and drifted back into sleep.

As he ate breakfast Raksar again heard thunder, this time five sharp, echoing peals, yet the sky was clear and the air utterly still. His neighbors were as mystified as himself. Presently there were three more booms, and the last was followed by a mighty, rumbling crash that shook the very ground where they stood.

All work ceased in the goblin village, and artisans and their wives and children gathered fearfully to ask each other questions which none could answer. At noon there came a rider from the castellerine, who announced that all goblin artisans were to gather up their tools and hurry to the palace.

The goblins shouldered their packs, then climbed the path up the side of Lakefell. As they crested the ridge, Raksar saw that one tower of the castellerine’s palace lay smashed. Out on the lake a small, low ship poured black smoke from twin funnels. Near it was the half-submerged wreck of the castellerine’s pleasure barge, while patches of floating wreckage marked where two other ships had sank.

The goblins chattered with apprehension as they approached the palace, but as they entered the walls they fell silent. They were taken to the Garden of Dawnlight, and here the lady herself sat on the garden’s throne with Arrender at her side, yet not a single elfknight guard was present. Three hundred and forty three goblin heads pressed against the flagstones until they were told to stand and attend the castellerine. On the chancellor’s forefinger was perched a pigeon.

“Pretty bird, pretty bird, tell them of Wylver,” said the castellerine in a voice hoarse with anger.

“They are goblins, it is beneath my dignity to address them,” declared the bird haughtily.

The castellerine’s hand shot out and seized the pigeon. Bones crackled softly and blood trickled between her fingers as she crushed it. Tossing the body to a tangle of eager, grasping vines that grew along a folly wall, she pointed a bloody finger to the ship.

“That thing is from Earthlie. On this boundary day, at the boundary time of morning’s halflight, it crossed into our world at the boundary place on the Wylver River. It destroyed the lovely bridge whose curve mirrored my thighs, killed nine elven provosts, sank my three pleasure ships, then smashed down the lofty Glamoriad Tower. It breathes black smoke and moves by neither wind, current, oars, or tow rope. Clever artisans of mine, tell me what it is.”

All were afraid and none dared answer. Arrender pointed to Raksar.

“You, the finest of mundane artisans, answer her ladyship,” he ordered.

The goblin had an answer, yet the castellerine could end his life for any answer that displeased her. Raksar had visited Earthlie, and knew that mortals’ ships were weapons brought to life by those aboard them, unlike the vessels of Faerie that merely carried warriors to battle.

“It is a weapon vessel of Earthlie, a warship,” he said, going down on one knee.

His answer appeared to puzzle the castellerine, but she was satisfied.

“The ship is captained by Tordral, a fearsome sorceress,” she said, rising from her throne and descending the steps to stand before Raksar. “Twice seven years ago she was a maiden of Earthlie, the daughter of a mortal lord. My wastrel brother came upon her as she sat reading in her summer tower’s garden. He had a taste for the maidens of Earthlie, so he forced his will upon her, then blighted her eyes out of spite.”

“It is not my place to question the whims of elves,” said Raksar.

“At this morning’s halflight, my brother paid for that whim with his life, long after the act of lust that he had doubtless forgotten. Now Tordral the Twisted is here in Faerie, insane with hate, bent on ripping down all we hold fair.”

The castellerine gestured to a distant scatter of bodies on the littoral road beside the lake.

“She annihilated my elfknights, then demanded your labor, my artisan goblins. Go to her, all of you. Go to her camp by the littoral road and do as she bids.”

• • • •

Upon the beach, the crew of the Earthlie ship had begun to gather driftwood and burn it for charcoal. Nearby were the bodies of the castellerine’s seven elfknight guards and their horses, cut down as they charged the mortals. Tordral awaited the goblins, clothed in chainmail and wearing a helmet with glass lenses in the triangular eye slits.

“Who speaks for you?” she asked.

Raksar raised his hand.

“I must replenish the powder that drives my gonnes and bombard,” she declared. “Bury the dead, then fetch me yellow sulphur and needles of the moon.”

• • • •

That evening Raksar laid an offering wrapped in cloth at Chancellor Arrender’s feet, then pressed his forehead to the ground. Dust from the tower’s fall coated everything in the Garden of Halflight, and the servants were cowering as they washed the distressed and wailing orchids. Arrender unwrapped the device, which was an iron tube bound to a wooden stock.

“A consummately ugly trifle,” he observed.

“The mortals call it a gonne,” said Raksar. “It was dropped and forgotten in the morning’s fighting.”

“Without the spell that gives it life, what use can it be?”

“No spell gives it life, only black powder that is thunder made solid. We artisans could make many hundreds in a few days; they are simplicity itself. Just as impetus is stored in a drawn bow, so too is it stored in the black powder made from needles of the moon, sulphur, and charcoal, all ground fine. When touched by a burning ember, it discharges a pellet of iron with mighty force.”

“A pellet of iron? Nothing more? No enchanted arrow or forge-hot casting of tangled death?”

“Just a pellet, lordship.”

“How did you learn this?”

“The mortals think we goblins are too stupid to understand the workings of these devices, so they talk freely before us.”

The goblin’s voice trailed into a whisper as an enormous white cat with scimitar fangs sauntered into the garden, licking blood from its muzzle. It stopped, regarded Raksar with disdain, nodded to Arrender, then walked on. The castellerine followed, treading her floating carpet and clothed only in softly glowing spiderwebs.

“Ladyship, this goblin has tidings that will please you,” said Arrender.

Midsummer’s Ante

Tordral required the goblin artisans to test their own mixtures of the black powder. If too weak, it produced a shot that would barely spit the pellet from a gonne’s tube. If too strong, it would burst the tube. After an artisan was carried home with most of his head following in a pail, the others realized they had good reason to take care. The target for the tests was a helmet taken from a vanquished elfknight, placed on a stake driven into the grass of the littoral. Even at ten paces only one shot in two actually struck the helmet.

“What do you think of gonnes?” asked the ship’s yeoman cheerfully after Raksar had survived the test of his first jar of powder.

“With the greatest respect, Master Ward, they’re inferior to even goblin bows.”

“In what way?”

“In all ways. I may shoot off seven arrows while you reload a gonne once, and gonnes are not accurate over an arrow’s range.”

“True words, Master Raksar, but how long does it take to learn a bow’s use?”

“Seven lunar months to build strength of arm, seven to learn shooting, and seven to perfect shooting’s art.”

“And who makes the bows?”

“Skilled artisans, using a very particular balance of green wood and heart wood.”

“What of arrows?”

“They are works of art, with heads, shafts and flights made by families that have perfected their fashioning over countless generations.”

“Yet you goblins have learned the use of gonnes in an hour’s quarter, and any metalsmith could turn out two or three dozen gonne tubes in an afternoon. The making of gonne powder can be left to children, and any metal scraps will do if no iron pellets are to hand. In two or three days you could raise a goblin army, and for little cost.”

“But archers are so much better as warriors.”

“And while you spend twenty-one months training your archers, I can raise a thousand gonners and conquer your lands.”

• • • •

Castellerine Lynder was too despondent to use the throne in the Garden of Cascades, and abased herself by sitting on the green marble steps of its dais. Her courtiers stood motionless, downcast and fearful as Arrender brought Raksar before her. In her hand was a dagger, and her bedrobes were soaked in the blood of her third seduction.

“I have no guards,” she said, looking up at Raksar. “The seven elfknights of my palace had three thousand years of martial exploits and deeds of arms between them. In moments, all gone. How could those clumsy, ugly gonnes vanquish such prowess and skill so easily? Answer me this, goblin.”

“Ladyship, a single gonne may shoot a dozen scraps of iron, and so poison the enchanted flesh of many elfknights,” said Raksar. “Gonnes are easy to make and use, that is their virtue. Give me three days and a purse of silver, and I can give you seven times seven times seven goblins armed with gonnes to defend your palace.”

There was a silence longer than breath may be held before Castellerine Lynder replied.

“You would have my seven gardens, my violet towers, my treasures, my very person defended by goblin lowborns?”

“By loyal goblin lowborns, ladyship.”

The castellerine’s lips tilted into a grim smile.

“Courtiers, advisers, sages, nobles, can any of you suggest better guards?” she asked.

No answer was dared.

“Three days, you say?” she now asked Raksar.

“Less, perhaps. There are few skills needed, but the gonners must be drilled over and over in the loading and firing of gonnes, so they will not panic or falter amid the carnage on a battlefield.”

“Then get you gone with a purse of silver and build me a new palace guard.”

“They will be ugly to look upon,” warned Raksar. “They will soil the beauty of your palace.”

“The ruins of Glamoriad Tower soil the beauty of my palace already, goblin. Go with Lord Arrender, tell him all you need.”

Midsummer Secundus

Raksar steered the barge laden with provisions from Wylver Market as a troll towed it through the lake’s shallows. It was a stout, inelegant vessel, the size of the ship from Earthlie. Like all goblin boats, it had no enchantment to bind the planks or allow it to slip through the water as smoothly as a skate over ice. The mortal Guy was beside Raksar, and had been choosing what Tordral Required.

“This must seem a slow and tiresome way to carry goods,” said Raksar with carefully studied innocence. “Your ship’s machine rower is surely the prince of wonders by contrast.”

“Hah, its principle is but the soul of simplicity,” said Guy, “yet the machine itself is the most advanced in all of Earthlie. Its making requires the strength of a blacksmith and the touch of a jeweler.”

“I am a jeweler,” said Raksar.

“Are you indeed? Perhaps you might help with its tuning, it needs more of that than a minstrel’s harp.”

“My lady castellerine has commanded that I serve you in all ways.”

“Then you shall indeed tend it.”

When they arrived at the camp, Guy carried Raksar out to the ship. The goblin was shown the bow pipes where water entered, the complex of levers and valves for directing water and steam, the enclosed cauldron where steam was raised to a very high pressure by a furnace, and the pipes where that steam expelled water with great force to drive the ship along.

“This machine is a treasure of greater worth than the Queen of Londarion’s crown,” the goblin declared.

“Like a crown, it needs a jeweler to keep it in good repair,” said Guy.

• • • •

The goblin’s audience with the castellerine was in her bedchamber. Beside her, on the silken sheets of a bed wider than Raksar’s cottage, her lover of the fourth seduction lay on his stomach, his face staring up at the roof beams and his body lifeless. He was naked, as was the castellerine.

“I have seen the secret of the ship’s machine rower,” Raksar said uneasily, glancing from the body to the castellerine and back again. “It is simple in principle but complex in execution.”

The castellerine glared.

“I desire only good tidings,” she warned.

“Oh, but I have those, ladyship. I have already devised a simpler but more powerful mechanism, a rectangular oar on a hinge, thrust out by a piston. It could be working in weeks.”

“You have days.”

“Days will suffice for what else I plan.”

“Tell me your plan.”

“The steam rower’s advantage is that it consumes wood, which may be found anywhere. A hundred rowers could propel the ship just as well, but they must eat bread, cheese, and meats, and drink ale. All of these are scarce on a long voyage along strange waterways, so they must carry their own provisions on the ship.”

“Come to your point or displease me,” said the castellerine.

“Put a hundred goblin rowers on a barge with a bombard mounted at the bow, and you would have the Earthlie ship’s match. Such a barge need only venture a mile or so onto the lake for a battle, and need not carry provisions.”

“But I have no bombards.”

“I am making a sly study of the mortals’ bombard, ladyship. It is simple in principle.”

“Your services to me venture far beyond mere loyalty, goblin,” said the castellerine after some thought. “Why is this so?”

“You are my castellerine, ladyship.”

“And what else?”

“Nothing else.”

“Do not lie to me! Go to my library, you will find it overflowing with tales of great ladies who were so beguiled by the beauty of goblin jewelry that they suffered to have the ugly creators between their thighs as the price of purchase.”

“Oh no, ladyship, never!” declared Raksar with horror that was not feigned. “I adore beauty. I could not even bear the thought of a base and ugly goblin such as myself befouling your exquisite form with his touch. Just to worship the sight of your unclothed loveliness inspires me to create jewelry that would make all who look upon it swoon with despair or weep with desire.”

“Then look upon me and be inspired, goblin, then return tomorrow with the secrets of the mortals’ bombard.”

Midsummer Tertius

The ship of wonders had been hauled so close to the shore that it was grounded in the shallows. Raksar helped carry firewood aboard, then took a broom and made a show of sweeping up sand and detritus that had been brought aboard. He worked his way toward the bow, where the mighty bombard was mounted. Renard, the mortal known as the bombardier, was sitting astride it, watching over the toiling goblins.

“Who told you to sweep?” he asked.

“Mistress Tordral, master.”

“Aye? Then if Mistress Tordral trusts you, so must I.”

“Master Ward said that the bombard is just a gonne made big, but to me that seems like comparing a god to a goblin.”

Renard frowned, then his face brightened into a smile as he realized that the goblin’s regard for the weapon was little short of worship.

“Ward’s gonnes are hardly more than toys. This bombard is a machine of great precision. See here, wheels for it to recoil upon, and ropes to catch the recoil. Now see this, a ratchet lever for increasing or decreasing the elevation for long or close shots. Mark well that the bombard is thicker in all proportions than those little gonnes. This is to guard against it bursting, for it fires with a thousand times more force in proportion.”

Raksar had earlier noticed that Renard seemed lonely. Perhaps no others understood or appreciated his astoundingly powerful weapon, so here was a chance for him to boast of its virtues to someone who would appreciate them. Raksar let him talk at great length, and interrupted only to heap compliments upon the bombard.

• • • •

When Raksar was shown into the castellerine’s bedchamber, her lover for the evening was gone, but there was blood upon the pearly white sheets and her pale skin. She beckoned him closer.

“I—I have, ah, learned enough of the bombard to fashion one,” he stammered, his eyes fixed on the red stains that said so much yet so little.

“Build me seven, twice over,” said the castellerine.

“Fourteen, ladyship?” gasped Raksar. “All the brass in Wylver Market would barely suffice.”

“Then seize that brass in my name and cast me seven and seven bombards! Begin tonight, be finished on Midsummer Quintus.”

The task was close to impossible, yet Raksar knew that whatever had killed the castellerine’s lover would be close at hand and still hungry. Exquisite, elegant bronzes, centuries old, would perish in goblin furnaces, but the castellerine was not inclined to debate the virtues of art over weaponry.

“It shall be done, ladyship.”

Midsummer Quadrus

On the evening of Midsummer Quadrus, Raksar was fearful of how his tribute for the day would be received by the castellerine. As Arrender led him into her bedchamber, he saw that the castellerine’s lover lay dead beside her on the bed, while a rustling, writhing assembly of vines, leaves, and tendrils retreated through the window, leaving thin trails of blood on the sheets, rugs, and flagstones.

In the goblin’s hands was a gift from the mortal Guy, a mechanism of wooden cogwheels, strings, and weights, with a single arm set against a dial with twelve numerals. It was beguilingly intricate, and would have been beautiful had it been fashioned from precious metals and glittering gemstones.

“This mortal’s struggles lasted a full quarter hour,” the castellerine declared. “Should Fortune grant me a chance to kill Prince Lortrien, I believe I would again choose my faithful green assassins. How would you kill the prince, goblin?”

“I—ah—the—the prince is surpassing handsome, ladyship, even though his spirit be foul. Should not his death also render his face ugly?”

“Wise words, goblin, and clever. What weapon do you have for me today?”

What Raksar held was no weapon, so he feared her displeasure.

“It is called a clock, ladyship. As a ruler marks length, a clock takes a measure of time.”

“How is this deadly?”

“It is . . . useful, rather than deadly. If you can mark time, you can control how time is used. Mortals use clocks to regulate work. You might use it to speed the building of gonnes.”

“True, but think on this. I might measure time by how long a goblin takes to die of bleeding, yet a sundial, hourglass, or marked candle can also do that.”

“Ah, but a sundial needs the sun, an hourglass needs to be turned every hour, a marked candle might blow out, and a goblin would be better employed carrying a gonne into battle.”

“Truly? I am pleased. Make this . . . clock work for me.”

Goblins wearing comely masks and silk tunics removed the dead mortal while Raksar attached his clock to a lamp hook on the wall. He adjusted the drop stones, set the reciprocating weights in motion, and moved the hand to where he guessed day’s hour might be. The little machine began to mark off time with regular double clacks.

Midsummer Quintus

“I have been thinking about the weapons of Earthlie,” said the castellerine the following evening, after Raksar had reported great progress with equipping and training the goblin guards. “In Faerie they are secrets, and should be kept as secrets.”

“I have warned all artisans against gossiping, ladyship.”

“Ah, but their little cottages and workshops may easily be visited by spies. If my goblin artisans were gathered to work at benches in the great hall of my palace, with a clock mounted above them to mark their goals, think of how well I could guard my secrets and speed the building of gonnes and bombards.”

“But that would be unbearably ugly, ladyship. Your palace is the crowning jewel of all Cumbriel’s fairness.”

“What has beauty ever gained me but servitude?” said the castellerine, her tone suddenly colder than wind blowing across the icy wastes of the north. “Tordral’s ship of wonders is less comely than a warthog, yet like a warthog it is powerful and deadly. Each day I look down upon that ship, and yearn to be its mistress. Then I look upon the ruins of Glamoriad Tower, and feel that my palace is all the better for it lying in ruins. Now I look upon your ugliness and wonder if power may be intertwined with it. Goblin, come here.”

With fingernails sharper than an assassin’s dagger, the castellerine slashed the tunic from Raksar’s body, then she drew him onto the bed beside her.

“Ladyship, your form enchants me, but—but . . .” Raksar began.

“Fear not, goblin, I shall not call my vines to drink your blood.”

“No, no, I fear only that I pollute your beauty with my presence.”

“Then conquer that fear, goblin. Embrace me with your ugliness and thus make me powerful. Deny me this, and you shall incur my wrath. Now think thoughts of lust, not beauty.”

In morning’s halflight, as he dressed himself in the rags that his tunic had become, Raksar was as distraught as if he had been ordered to take a hammer to the graceful statues of dancing nymphs in the palace gardens. The castellerine’s body had been touched by his, and like Glamoriad Tower, his loyalty to the House of Cumbriel lay in ruins.

Midsummer Sextus

Raksar wrestled with his conscience for all of the day that followed. By late afternoon, his inner voices were silent and spent. Dressed in a new tunic, and with the tools of his art hidden beneath it, he approached the fearsome Lady Tordral.

“Great and powerful lady, you must flee, and I beg that you take me with you,” he pleaded softly. “I am a spy, and I have harvested the secrets of your ship of wonders for the castellerine. We her goblins have made many gonnes and bombards in secret, and enough gonne powder to fill a wagon. With these she will destroy your ship.”

“Why has your heart changed loyalties?” Tordral asked, neither alarmed nor surprised.

“The lady castellerine has embraced ugliness, but I worship beauty. Thus I can no longer be her master jeweler, yet all other goblins remain her loyal and willing servants. Only the gates of her enemies are now open to me.”

“Honestly spoken, Raksar, but I already know much of what you have said. See here.”

Tordral handed him a tube of polished brass that had curved glass at both ends.

“Put this to your eye, point it at Wylver Market,” she said. “Tell me what you see.”

Within the tube the image was upside down, but that image was of distance brought wondrously close.

“Elfsight!” gasped Raksar.

“No, a trifle of my own devising. What do you see?”

“To my shame, I see bombards on carts, built by my artisans for the service of Castellerine Lynder.”

“All to destroy my ship of wonders.”

“That is true, and I burn with shame. Kill me now, if it pleases you.”

“Kill you, when you have done my work so well?”

“Your work? Ladyship, I do not understand.”

“Then come along, we must visit the castellerine.”

• • • •

Arrender knew he should always take Raksar or Tordral to the castellerine when either entered the palace, and now they arrived together. He led them to the Garden of Dark Waters, and by a pool of deepest indigo stood Lynder and her mortal lover to be, their robes at their feet.

“Goblin, mortal, this is not the time for visiting,” she said.

“Young man, if you embrace the castellerine in that pool, you will be drawn into its depths and drowned once you have pleasured her,” warned Tordral.

The castellerine said nothing, but there was the promise of death in her frown.

“Who are you to question the intent of my lady?” the youth replied with a sneer.

Tordral extended her hand and dropped an iron pellet into the water. All at once the plants at the water’s edge shrieked and chittered as they withdrew long and sinuous tendrils that writhed and lashed with distress. The youth went very pale, and began to tremble.

“Young man, leave,” said Tordral. “Lord Arrender, go with him.”

Both looked to the castellerine. She nodded, and they left.

“You have my attention,” the castellerine declared, turning on Tordral with her hands on her hips, flouting her naked beauty like a warrior’s sword.

“Castellerine Lynder, I have seduced you,” declared Tordral, unmoved.

“I believe I would have noticed,” replied Lynder, shaking her head, yet puzzled.

“Would you, indeed? Did you notice that I had this master jeweler tutored in the way of gonnes and their black powder, in the machinery of steam power, and in the arts of using gonnes to overwhelm even elfknights? Are the workshops of your goblin smiths and artisans not given over to casting bronze gonnes and bombards? Tell me that your goblins’ children are not scouring the caves hereabouts to harvest needles of the moon from bat dung.”

“You wanted me to steal your secrets?” asked the castellerine, the confidence suddenly leached from her voice.

“That I did.”

Suddenly doubt and fear crowded about Lynder. With haste she gathered up her robes and tried to dress, but without her ladies in waiting the task was beyond her and she shouted for help. Maids converged from all directions.

“I schemed to set you against Prince Lortrien when he arrives this evening,” the castellerine admitted once she was clothed. “I hate him, he fancies himself more beautiful than me. I hoped you would destroy him and his elfknights, then my goblin gonners would annihilate your warriors while they sat resting. Thus would I gain favor with the queen by avenging her son, yet have his head above my bedchamber’s hearth, preserved in a crystal jar of sour wine.”

“Then think boldly upon what you may now do with your gonnes and bombards, castellerine. Within the hour’s quarter I shall step aboard my ship of wonders and depart.”

“Depart of your own will, with no battle?”

“Yes.”

“I do not understand.”

“You shall.”

With that Tordral turned and strode from the palace, followed by Raksar. When they reached the beach, her ship was trailing smoke from its twin funnels, while muttering to itself in its clank-clang, hiss, chuff voice. She handed the goblin her brass tube.

“Take this toy, I have another,” she said. “Use it to learn the secrets of farsights.”

“Ladyship, my deepest thanks,” said Raksar, dropping to one knee and bowing.

“You love beauty, is this not true?”

“With all my heart, yes.”

“Then flee this place. Before the sun’s setting there will be a battle here. While all are distracted and confusion reigns, steal a pony and ride for the salt sea’s coast.”

“Your command is my deed, ladyship, but can I not come with you?”

“No, because my revenge on elves will be to seduce all Faerie, in the way I have seduced the castellerine. It would break your heart to see the ugliness soon to come.”

• • • •

In the afternoon of Midsummer Sextus, seven times seven times seven goblins stood in seven rows across the littoral road, each with a gonne at his shoulder. Seven carts carrying gleaming brass bombards stood ready, and seven barges bearing bombards were at anchor offshore.

Lortrien arrived at the head of his elfknights, archers, and warlocks. Confronting them was the Castellerine of Cumbriel, mounted upon a black horse and holding a sword of adamantian. The prince had his warlocks brought forward, but they perceived no threat from enchantment. He called for his marshal of elfknights, who stared with elven eyes, then reported no danger.

“Turn about, flee for your lives!” called Castellerine Lynder, holding her sword high.

“It is I, Prince Lortrien,” the prince called back. “How dare you to meet me dressed in electrum armour instead of gossamer bedrobes? Why do you present me with rough-wrought pipes of bronze and not the finest jewelry that Cumbriel can craft? Where are your fair elfknight guards, why does this shameful rabble stand behind you?”

The castellerine swept her sword down. The seven bombards upon the wagons fired iron chains that spread as they flew, and tore through the ranks of elfknights, archers, and warlocks.

“Castellerine’s First Gonners, fire!” shouted the castellerine, and a kneeling row of seven times seven goblins fired their gonnes into the chaos that Prince Lortrien’s escort had become.

“Castellerine’s Second Gonners, step forth!” commanded the castellerine. “Second gonners, fire!”

Lortrien’s bravery was never to be doubted. He charged at the head of his decimated ranks of elfknights as the third row of goblin gonners fired, and they were but yards from the fourth row of goblins when their volley slashed out. The battle on the littoral road was no easy victory, and seven goblins died for every elfknight, but at close range the gonnes of the fifth, sixth, and seventh rows were hard pressed to miss, and the bombards on the barges slew those who sought to flee. Time and again the sweet breath of sulphur mixed with needles of the moon and charcoal flung cold iron into elfknight bodies, then goblin pikes quenched lives that had begun before Rome had been founded.

By the time afternoon became evening, all but three elves lay dead upon the littoral road. Bleeding from more wounds than could be counted, Prince Lortrien was bound by goblin hands and forced to his knees before Castellerine Lynder.

“What manner of victory is this?” he cried. “Seven goblins have died for every elfknight slain by your infernal weapons.”

“But goblins are many, quick to breed, and quicker to learn the use of gonnes,” the castellerine replied, sheathing her sword, then holding her hand out.

Arrender stepped forward, wearing elfknight armour for the first time in his long life. He presented a gonne to the castellerine, then gave her a smoking match fuse.

“No elfknight will ever again fight for you after this day,” the prince warned.

“What care I for elves, when so many loyal and valiant goblins would die for me?”

“Your days as castellerine are numbered.”

“But my days as queen lie ahead.”

Castellerine Lynder pointed the tube of her gonne between the eyes of the prince, braced the stock against her shoulder, then pressed the glowing end of the match fuse into the touch hole. As the white smoke cleared, she gazed down at the ruins of prince’s face with satisfaction.

“He is now surpassing ugly, but I prefer him that way,” she said to Arrender. “Have all my goblin subjects from far and near rallied, and parade them past this battleground. Invite any and all to fight and plunder beside me.”

“Consider it done, ladyship.”

“With gonnes I can build lowborn armies in days, and conquer as fast as they can march.”

“All of Londarion will tremble at your very name, ladyship.”

“Lady Tordral did indeed seduce me, Arrender, and her seduction has given me more pleasure than a thousand years of lovemaking.”

“My heart shines with the reflection of your pleasure, ladyship.”

“But where is that goblin jeweler and spy, the one who worships beauty? I wish to make him my master armourer, to shower him with gold, to embrace him as I wash away the blood and grime of this battle in perfumed bath water.”

“I shall send a runner to fetch him, ladyship.”

Arrender was not to know that the helmeted runner he had dispatched was Raksar himself. By halflight’s end the goblin was ten miles beyond his village and leading his stolen pony west by torchlight.

Midsummer Septimus

The following evening Raksar gave his pony to a beggar on the docks of Westernport, then walked along the pier of sweetly resinous wood to where a Levantrian trader was moored. A single guard with a scimitar stood at the foot of the gangway.

“Let me pass, I wish to buy passage to Levantria,” said the goblin.

“Return to your home, the price is too high,” replied the guard.

Raksar held up a single coin of red gold.

“I can pay.”

“The price is greater. Once at sea, your pack and purse would be seized, and you would be flung to the waves.”

“But I am a master jeweler.”

“Then you would be sold as a prized slave in Levantria.”

“And would my new master be a prince?”

“Most likely.”

“And would he bid me fashion jewelry of surpassing beauty for the delight of himself and his ladies? Would I serve in a palace of such elegance and enchantment that the very Queen of Londarion would weep with despair at the sight of it?”

“All of that, indeed.”

“Then stand aside and let me aboard.”

“But why flee this land? Have you slain your master, or worse?”

“No, but there is ugliness spreading behind me, and I delight in beauty. One day that ugliness will cover all the world, but for now I may stay ahead of it.”

“Then step aboard, slave to beauty.”

As the sun vanished beneath the horizon, the ship was drawn out to sea with the tide. Raksar stood at the bow, staring with pleasure at the myriad, intertwined shades of red, yellow, and orange on the western horizon, with his back turned on the gathering darkness.

© 2015 by Sean McMullen.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sean McMullen is an Australian author with twenty books and seven dozen stories published in over a dozen countries. He has won fifteen Australian and international awards for his fiction, and been nominated for the Hugo, BSFA, and Sidewise awards. He is best known for his neo-steampunk novel Souls in the Great Machine (1999), and his two most recent books are the collections Colours of the Soul (2013) and Ghosts of Engines Past (2013). For three decades, Sean had a career in scientific computing in parallel with his science fiction and fantasy writing, but resigned to become a full time author in 2014. Before he began writing, Sean was a professional singer and actor, performing in venues as diverse as the Victorian State Opera and the folk-rock band Joe Wilson’s Mates. He lives in Melbourne, and has one daughter, Catherine.

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

Estella Saves the Village

Theodora Goss | 5,781 words

I have lived in the village all my life.

Miss Havisham has told me the story over and over again: how, as an infant, I was found in a basket on the front steps of the church, and how Reverend Rivers asked the villagers gathered for service on Sunday morning which of them would be willing to raise a foundling. And how Miss Havisham immediately said, “I will.”

So I’ve grown up in her small house on the high street, close enough to the baker’s that in the mornings I can smell the bread in his oven, and every morning before school Miss Havisham gives me a penny for a bun with raisins in it. I always share it with Pip while he walks beside me, carrying my school bag. I tell him I can carry it perfectly well myself, but he insists, so I let him. It’s useful, but sometimes tedious, that he’s been in love with me since we were both children.

If we stop for a moment and look back as Pip and I walk to school, you can see Miss Havisham’s house, with its green shutters and window-boxes filled with geraniums. Above it, you can see the downs among which our village is nestled, with sheep grazing on them. Sometimes you can see the herds moving like clouds, driven by a black and white streak of sheep dog. Over them runs the high road, to places I’ve never been—through fields and forests, joining with other roads. Eventually it reaches London, with its grand houses and shops and Buckingham Palace itself. Sometimes I think about taking that road, traveling to the greatest city in the world. But then the school bell rings, and I turn and run after Pip.

I have started my story this way—by telling you about Miss Havisham and Pip and the bakery and the geraniums in the window-boxes, so you will understand what our village was like before the specks appeared.

• • • •

I first noticed them on a Sunday morning. All the respectable inhabitants of the village were in church. The less respectable were in the tavern, already worshiping John Barleycorn, as Mr. Henchard calls it. Miss Havisham and I were seated in our pew. In the box at the front, I could see mad Lady D’Urberville, who lives in the Hall. She always arrives in a brougham with her estate agent, Mr. Clare. He was sitting beside her, leaning toward her as though whispering a secret. I envied her red brocade and the red hat with egret feathers, however inappropriate it might be for Sunday service. She is the only woman in the village whose dresses do not come from Miss Tulliver’s shop, but from a modiste in London. Miss Tulliver was there too, with her brother the miller and his large family. The Ushers slid into the pew in front of us, and Mr. Usher turned around to bow stiffly to Miss Havisham. I believe he eats only vegetables and wears some sort of patent undergarment. He always looks ghastly, as though he were recovering from an illness. Dr. Lydgate paused for a moment on the way to his own pew to take Miss Usher’s hand. He put the fingers of his other hand on her wrist, above the edge of her glove—measuring her pulse, I suppose. She is said to be consumptive, although she looks healthier than her brother. Pip waved to me as though frantic for my attention, until Joe Gargery cuffed him on the head and he had to stop.

Then the organ started, and I had to stop looking around, which I have to admit is always the most interesting part of the service. What was the relationship between Lady D’Urberville and Mr. Clare? Would Miss Tulliver ever find herself a husband? Was Dr. Lydgate secretly in love with Miss Usher? These were the sorts of pious thoughts that kept me occupied, although Miss Havisham gave me a reproachful glance over her prayer book. I tried to pay attention, but Reverend Rivers was talking about our dark-skinned brothers in darkest Africa, who sounded as though they were doing quite well for themselves, with plenty of missionaries to eat. To keep myself from looking around, I studied the back of Miss Usher’s thin, pale neck, where it showed beneath her bonnet and a few wisps of straggling hair. It was covered with black specks.

What could they be? They did not look like dirt, and anyway I could not imagine Madeline Usher having a dirty neck. Yet there they were. A symptom of consumption, perhaps?

Absorbed in this mystery, I said the Lord’s Prayer, sang the same hymns I’d been singing since I was a child, and walked to the communion rail, all without thinking a single religious thought. As I held out my hands for the Host, I noticed a pair of hands beside mine—large, masculine, with black specks on the palms. I glanced up surreptitiously to see who it was, and saw Dr. Lydgate.

After that, Reverend Rivers could have announced the arrival of Armageddon and I would not have noticed. Once we had all filed out of the church, I looked around and saw Dr. Lydgate walking among the gravestones.

“Estella! Do you want to go fishing today?” said Pip.

“No,” I said rudely. “I’m detecting.” I have always fancied myself a detective, like the most famous inhabitant of our village, Mr. Holmes.

“What are you detecting?”

“Never mind right now. Just come with me and stay quiet.”

I walked to the graveyard and stood beside a marble angel on a pedestal. “What are you thinking about so intently, Dr. Lydgate?” I asked. His hands were bare—he never wears gloves unless the weather demands it. I could not see the palms, but there were specks on the backs of his hands as well.

He smiled. “Nothing that would interest a young lady, I’m afraid, Miss Havisham. I was thinking about a new vaccine that would save lives like the one buried here. It was the measles that took him, and only six years old. Such a pity. And what are you doing in the graveyard on a fine morning?”

“Meditating on mortality,” I said.

“A commendable, although unusual, activity for a healthy young lady like yourself.”

“It’s an assignment for school. Dr. Lydgate, you seem to have gotten some dirt on your hands.”

He held up his hands and looked at them. “Have I? I confess, they seem clean to me, but young ladies have a higher standard of cleanliness than old bachelors like myself. I’ll wash them as soon as I get home.” He smiled again, indulgently. I could tell he hadn’t seen them.

“What was all that about dirt on his hands?” asked Pip while he was walking me home from church.

“You didn’t see it either?”

“See what?”

I sighed. “Did you see Mr. Holmes during the service? I tried to find him afterward, but he wasn’t there.”

“He was sitting behind Joe and left right after the processional. He said something about his bees needing him more than the Lord this morning.”

It was a mystery, my very own mystery. I had half a mind to keep it to myself. But I was also worried—Pip had seen nothing. What if I was simply imagining the specks? It made sense to consult a real detective and make sure.

But first, I would go around the village and see if I could find any more of the black specks. After dinner, of course—my stomach was starting to grumble.

“See you tomorrow,” I said to Pip when we had reached the front door. He opened his mouth, and I knew he wanted to ask if he could come detecting with me. But this was my adventure, and I wanted to go on it alone. When I closed the door, he was still standing on the step with his mouth open. I almost felt guilty—but after all, it was only Pip.

• • • •

Sunday dinner consisted of an Irish stew and soda bread that Fanny had prepared. Miss Havisham always allows her to serve a stew so she can cook it beforehand and go to the service. Then she can just heat it up on the stove. I don’t think anyone is as generous to their servants as Miss Havisham. Who else would allow Fanny to keep her child in the house? But Miss Havisham says that every child is a gift, whatever its origin.

“Estella,” said Miss Havisham after we had finished, “you’ve been happy here, haven’t you?”

“Of course I’ve been happy. You’ve been like a mother to me, and I’ve had everything I could have wanted—except the red brocade dress Lady D’Urberville was wearing today, and can you imagine the scandal I’d cause, wearing that?”

Miss Havisham laughed. “I’m glad. I’ve always hoped that with a proper home, and the right sorts of things—books, and friends like Pip—you would grow up to be . . .”

“What?”

“The sort of young woman you’re turning out to be. Intelligent and compassionate.”

I went over to her side of the table, gave her a hug from behind, and kissed her on the cheek. She always smelled nice, like lavender water. It’s a comforting smell that reminds me of hurt feelings soothed, scraped knees bandaged, tears wiped away. I don’t think my mother, whoever she was, could have taken better care of me than Miss Havisham.

“Thank you, my dear. Now, I’m going to do some knitting. Tell me what sort of adventure you and Pip have planned for this afternoon.”

As she stood up from the table, I noticed that she moved more slowly than she used to, and she put a hand on the back of the chair to brace herself. Was Miss Havisham getting old? As long as I remembered, she’d looked the same: white hair under her lace cap and blue eyes that seemed to pierce right through you (she always knew when I had stolen from the jam jar), surrounded by lines that laughter had formed over the years. I have never known anyone kinder or more forgiving.

“Would you give me your arm into the parlor? I seem to be feeling my age today.”

At the thought of Miss Havisham growing older, a chill settled about my heart. Somehow, I have never imagined such a thing could happen.

“Pip and I aren’t doing anything this afternoon,” I said. “Do you want me to read while you knit?” I could put off detecting for one day. Anyway, maybe I had just imagined the specks.

She looked startled, but said, “That would be lovely.” So for several hours, I read from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which I found tedious but Miss Havisham found fascinating. “Thank you, my dear,” she said afterward. “That was the loveliest afternoon I’ve had in a long time.”

That night, as I lay in bed under a quilt she had sewn for me and that had kept me warm since I was a child, I realized that the world I’d lived in all my life might change. I stared into the darkness, not knowing how to react to that thought.

• • • •

The next morning, there was a scattering of black specks over Pip’s cheek and down his collar. I didn’t mention it to him, although he probably wondered why I kept looking at him so intently.

When we reached the schoolhouse, I went over to the girl’s side and sat next to Flora. There were spots on her pinafore, and her notebook looked as though she had spattered ink over it. I took out my school books. There was a black hole in my School History of England. It went through every page, as though a large worm had chewed right through it. The date of the Norman Conquest was missing, as were parts of the Duke of Wellington’s victory at Waterloo and an engraving of Queen Victoria’s coronation.

“Estella,” said Miss Murray, “is everything all right?”

No, I wanted to tell her. There are splotches of nothing on the map of the world hanging by the chalkboard. But I just nodded.

“All right, students,” she said. “I want the older girls to help the younger ones with their spelling. Estella, Pearl, Flora, and Nell, can you form them into a line and take them into the school yard? The weather is fine, and I want you to do your lessons out there while I test the boys on yesterday’s Latin.” There was a general groan from the boys’ side of the room.

The rest of the school day was as busy as usual. But everywhere I looked, I noticed black specks, spots, holes. They seemed to be spreading.

After the bell rang to signal the end of the school day, I started detecting. Pip wanted to come, of course, but he had to work in the blacksmith’s shop, which was for the best. I wasn’t ready to explain what I was doing, or why.

I started at the far end of the village, at the cottage of the foreign ladies, Mrs. Rochester and her companion Miss Rappaccini. They had come to the village several years before. Mrs. Rochester is from the colonies and speaks English, but Miss Rappaccini is Italian. She answered the door, and I had to explain myself twice before she could understand what I wanted.

At every house, I would knock, and when the door was opened I would say, “I’m doing an assignment for school on ‘How We Live in the Nineteenth Century.’ Can I come in and look around?”

It’s astonishing what people will believe when you look at them steadily and speak with conviction.

“Come right in, Estella,” they would usually say, although Mr. Henchard grumbled about public education, which was nothing like in his time (thank goodness, or we might all end up as ignorant as he is), and Mr. Fawley apologized for the state of his parlor, which had piles of books covering the floor and on every armchair.

Our village isn’t large, but I was offered tea several times and felt as though I had to accept. Being polite is a nuisance. By the time I was done, it was too late to visit Mr. Holmes, as I had intended. I would have to see him the next day.

I admit, it was beginning to scare me: All around the village, there were splotches of nothing, and they seemed to be growing. As I walked home, I could see them on the trees, like black lichen. On the flanks of horses in the pastures. I almost stumbled into one on the road.

How would you feel if your world were disappearing? Well, that’s how I felt.

When I got home, it was a relief to notice no spots at all, not a single speck. There, at least, the nothingness had not yet invaded.

• • • •

The next morning, I did not go to school. Instead, I asked Pip to tell Miss Murray that I was sick. He looked at me quizzically. The spots on his cheek were now larger, the size of pencil-ends. “I promise I’ll tell you soon, all right?” I said.

“All right, Estella. But I wish you would trust me.” He turned reluctantly and headed toward the school.

I headed toward Mr. Holmes’ house. The garden was a riot of flowers. Mrs. Holmes was cutting roses and putting them into a basket on the ground. “Hello, Estella,” she said. “Are you here to see me or Sherlock?” She did not ask me why I wasn’t in school.

“I’m here to see Mr. Holmes.”

“You’ll find him in the study. Can you tell him that I’ve left plenty for the bees? He always objects to my cutting flowers. But you can’t have a dining-room table without fresh flowers on it, can you?”

“I suppose not.” No one else in the village would have put cut flowers on a table, although Miss Havisham has wax flowers under a glass dome. But before her marriage, Mrs. Holmes was an actress in London. She wears her hair down, dresses in what Miss Tulliver calls the aesthetic style, and rides a bicycle through the village. Miss Havisham says she’s unconventional. I think I’d like to be unconventional when I grow up.

I had been in the study once before, several years ago, when Mr. Holmes had been sick and Miss Havisham had brought over some beef tea. He’d been lying on the sofa under a blanket. She had talked to him, and I’d been able to wander around, looking at all the books, the scientific instruments on the tables, the weapons on the walls.

“Hello, Estella,” he said as I entered. “Come look at this.” He indicated the microscope he’d been looking through.

I went and looked. “What is it?” I asked.

“The hind leg of a bee. You can see the three segments. Can you see that the third segment is shaped like a basket? That’s called the corbicula, where the bee carries pollen. I’m writing a monograph on the Apidae, on their anatomy and habits. Perhaps later I can show you my bees. They are fascinating creatures. If only men could work together as harmoniously! But I’m sure you haven’t come here to talk about bees. Has Miss Havisham sent you?”

“No. I need to consult you myself. I’ve been seeing specks, black specks. Only some of them are spots, or holes. Some of them are quite large. On Sunday, I saw them on Miss Usher in church. Since then, I’ve been seeing them everywhere. You can actually put your finger, or even your hand, into them. They feel cold, like nothingness. Yesterday, I went around the village and wrote down where they were, and their sizes and depths. It’s all in this notebook.”

I handed him my school notebook. I had written all my findings down and then recopied them the night before. “But only I can see them,” I added. “So you see, I may be going mad.” I tried to sound logical, like a detective, but my voice trembled.

He gave me a sharp glance, then leafed through the notebook, methodically.

“Let’s sit down, shall we?” I sat beside him on the sofa. “It seems to me that there are two possibilities. Either you are having hallucinations, in which case you need to see Dr. Lydgate. Or you actually are seeing black holes that no one else is seeing. Do you see any in this room?”

“Yes. There’s one on the sofa, right beside your shoulder.” It was the size of my finger. I put my finger right into it, up to the knuckle. I didn’t want to tell him that there were specks on his chin, like the stubble of a beard, and down the front of his Norfolk jacket as though he had spilled ink on it.

“Fascinating,” said Mr. Holmes. “I don’t think you’ll need to consult Dr. Lydgate.”

“Why?”

“Because although I can’t see a hole in the sofa, I just saw your finger disappear into the upholstery. I’m going to ask Irene for a glass of sherry. I think you need it.”

He went to the door and called Mrs. Holmes. In a few minutes, he brought me a glass of liquor the color of garnets. It burned going down, and I coughed.

He sat back down on the sofa, putting his elbows on his knees and his chin on his clasped hands. “Have you noticed any patterns? Are there places where the spots are larger or smaller? I’m interested in whether they’re spreading from a particular location.”

I leafed through my notes. I should have thought of arranging the sightings by size. “They seem larger on the other side of the village. The largest one I saw was on the wall around Mrs. Rochester’s garden. It was the size of a cabbage. And she told me that her terrier has disappeared. She asked me if I had seen him, and I didn’t know what to say. Mr. Holmes, I’m afraid the world’s disappearing. I only started to noticed the specks on Sunday, but those larger spots—they’ve probably been growing for some time.”

He thought for a moment, then asked, “Is there any place the spots don’t appear?”

“Only at home. I haven’t seen any there.”

Why? Why hadn’t I seen any spots at home, when I had seen them everywhere else? I’d been so relieved by their absence that I hadn’t even bothered to ask. And there had been enough to worry about, with the revelation of Miss Havisham’s frailty.

“Mr. Homes, I have to go. I have to talk to Miss Havisham.”

He nodded, looking concerned. “Yes, that seems indicated.” Then he smiled, as though he could not help it. “So the game is afoot, Estella.”

“Something like that,” I said, handing him the glass of sherry.

Halfway home, I started to run.

• • • •

“Miss Havisham,” I said. “Can I talk to you?”

She was sitting on the parlor sofa, knitting what I suddenly realized would eventually be a sweater for me. Her fingers were as nimble as they had always been. The parlor looked just as it always had, with light filtering through the lace curtains, falling on the gleaming wood of the furniture and the rich colors of the Persian carpet. Not a single speck.

“Of course,” she said. “Is it the dinner break already? I must have lost track of time. I seem to be doing that more and more, these days.”

“No. I didn’t go to school today.”

She stopped knitting and looked up at me. She must have seen something in my face or heard something in the tone of my voice, because instead of scolding me, she sat perfectly still. As though waiting.

I sat in one of the armchairs and put the notebook on my knees. “Yesterday, I went around the village and—here. Look at this.” I held out the notebook.

She put the knitting needles down on the sofa beside her, took the notebook, and leafed through the pages. Then, she turned back to the beginning and read each page again. Finally, she said, “I see. When did you first notice this?”

“On Sunday. But it must have been spreading for some time.”

“Yes, I’m sure it has. Although I didn’t think anyone here would notice.”

Now it was my turn to sit, waiting. I was afraid of what she was going to say. I had no idea what it was, but she knew about the spots—that itself frightened me.

“Estella. I’m going to tell you a story.” She leaned against the back of the sofa and looked down at her hands, as though suddenly not sure what to do with them. “I’m not used to telling stories, so I may ramble a bit. You’ll be patient with me, won’t you?”

“Of course. Just tell me.” I sounded impatient, almost angry—but it was from fear. She didn’t seem to notice.

“Once, there was a girl about your age who wanted to be a writer. Her parents didn’t want her to be a writer—they wanted her to be a doctor or lawyer, something practical.”

“Girls can’t become doctors or lawyers.”

“They can in this story,” said Miss Havisham. She sounded different, somehow. Not like the Miss Havisham I knew, but like Miss Murray when she gives us a lecture on the suffrage movement. Was this the kindly old woman who had brought me up, taught me how to make jam and mend stockings? Who had brushed my hair at night?

“So instead of becoming a writer, she decided to become a college professor—and yes,” she said, looking at me, “in this story girls can do that as well. She studied what other people had written—literature, that is, from medieval poems to modern critical theory. What she particularly loved was Victorian literature—Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, even American writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne. Anything written during that era.”

What in the world was Miss Havisham talking about? I worried that she was going mad. She was making no sense, but I didn’t dare interrupt.

“Their novels sometimes made her sad, because so many of them ended badly. She started imagining alternative endings, just before she fell asleep at night. She would imagine her favorite characters living together in a village, happily ever after—or as happily as possible. She would imagine all the details of that village—the church where St. John Rivers could preach on Sundays, the main street with a blacksmith’s shop for Joe Gargery and Pip, a shop where Maggie Tulliver could set up as a seamstress. And she imagined herself living in one of the houses—with a daughter.” I was startled to see a tear run down her cheek. She wiped it away with her hand. “In her own life, she never married, never had any children of her own. Except the hundreds of students who took her classes, because eventually she became a professor of literature at a college in Vermont. Every night she would imagine the village—it became an important part of her life. It seemed so real to her.”

“And then what happened?” I was beginning to understand. It was impossible—and frightening. But my book of aphorisms says you should believe six impossible things before breakfast.

“She began forgetting things. The date of the Indian Mutiny, her students’ names. She had to go into a hospital, where the doctors looked inside her head. They can do that, in this story.” She gave me a small, wry smile. How strange it was, listening to this new Miss Havisham. So direct, so unlike the Miss Havisham I knew.

“What did they see?” I asked.

“Black specks,” she answered. “There’s a medical term for it, of course. But that’s essentially what they saw—black spaces where there was nothing, where the brain had died.”

I sat staring at her, not sure what to say. Both believing and incredulous. “So what’s going to happen to the village? And why am I the only one who can see what’s happening?”

She looked down again, as though defeated, and that frightened me more than anything else. “I don’t know. I’m sorry, Estella. I’ve tried every medication the doctors prescribed, and nothing has helped. The specks—the black spaces are growing. I don’t know why you’re the only one who can see them—perhaps it’s because you’ve grown up with me. You’re closer to me than anyone in the village. But there’s no way to stop the memory loss.”

“Then that’s it?” I was almost shouting at her, but I couldn’t help it. “So what’s going to happen to all of us? And me—am I just someone in a book?”

She leaned forward and took my hands. “Oh, my dear. You’re my Estella. The girl who grew up in the village, playing with Pip and Flora and Pearl, learning history and arithmetics from Miss Murray. You’re smart and sometimes selfish and obstinate, but a good friend. And you’re my daughter. That’s who you are, Estella. Hold on to that.”

“How can I hold on to that?” Now I really was shouting. I’d never shouted at Miss Havisham in my life. “I don’t even know who you are!”

I pulled my hands away, jumped up, and ran out of the room, then out the front door and down the high street, past the blacksmith’s shop, running and running until I had left the village behind. I looked around—fields. I set out across one of the fields, toward the downs.

I walked and walked, grasses tickling me through my stockings, above my boots. I didn’t stop until I was so tired that I could barely continue. Where was I?

By a copse of trees and a small stream. In the distance was the Hall. Had I really come that far? And then I saw something I had never expected, although I suppose I should have. Just above the chimneys of the Hall, on the blue of the sky, there was a scattering of black spots, like small moons.

“Hello, Estella.”

I turned around, startled. There was mad Lady D’Urburville, in her red brocade gown. Had she been here all along? I had been so preoccupied, so frightened by what I had seen in the sky, that I hadn’t noticed.

“Have you come here to dance? I often dance here myself. It’s the fairies’ dancing ground.”

She picked up her skirts, curtsied gracefully, then started dancing to some music only she could hear. When she turned, her skirts spread around her, revealing black gaps around the hems that made them look ragged.

“Aren’t you going to dance too, Estella?” she asked, holding out her hand.

“I don’t feel like dancing,” I said. For a moment I watched her as she turned and spun, then asked, “What would you do if you found out that the world you lived in was—some sort of dream?”

She stopped and stood, considering.

Suddenly I heard a shout: “Tess, where are you?” I looked around. Her foreman, Mr. Clare, was walking toward us from the direction of the Hall.

“I’m coming, my angel!” she called back. Then, leaning toward me as though she did not want anyone else to hear, although no one was close enough, she said, “All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream. Remember that, Estella.” She blew me a kiss and danced away over the field to where Mr. Clare was waiting.

I looked around me, at the fields and the downs beyond them, at the Hall in the distance. At the damaged sky. I looked back toward the village. I could just see the church spire. Miss Havisham had dreamed the village. All that we see and seem. Was that other life of hers a dream as well? Was someone dreaming her—the professor in that world where girls could go to college and study literature? If so, who was the dreamer?

I imagined an infinite number of dreamers, all dreaming each other. It made my head hurt.

“Estella, are you all right?” It was Pip. Black spots were now scattered down the front of his smock.

“Where did you come from?”

“I saw you run by the blacksmith’s shop. I had to run in and tell Biddy where I was going, but since then I’ve been trying to find you. Don’t get mad at me—I know you don’t like me following you around like a sick dog, as you once said. But I was worried about you. You’ve been acting so strange for the last couple of days, barely talking to me. And why weren’t you in school?”

Poor Pip. Miss Havisham was wrong—I hadn’t been a very good friend.

“I want to try something. Will you stay quiet while I lie down on the ground? You can lie next to me if you want.” I tried to sound calm, although I was scared. Would I have to watch the world disappear around me? For a moment I wished I were anyone else, so I wouldn’t know what was happening.

He looked puzzled, but nodded.

I sat down on the ground and then lay back. Stalks of grass tickled my neck.

Pip sat beside me. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to dream.”

“Don’t you need to fall asleep first?”

“It’s not that kind of dreaming. Now hush.”

I closed my eyes and imagined Mrs. Rochester’s terrier, with its sandy hair and sharp, loud bark. I tried to remember everything about him. Then I imagined Mr. Holmes’ sofa, and my school book with the engraving of Queen Victorian’s coronation, and the back of Miss Usher’s neck—all the places where I’d seen the nothingness spreading. I imagined every part of the village where I’d seen specks, spots, holes, or gaps. In my mind, I repaired them all. I repaired the sky itself. Finally, I imagined Pip’s face, which I’d seen every day of my life, with no spots on it. I imagined as hard as I could. All that we see or seem, I said to myself, repeatedly until it became an incantation. Until I saw the village, every detail of it, as though it existed in my mind. I was its mender, its preserver, its creator.

I opened my eyes.

Pip was leaning on his elbow, looking down at me. He cheek was smooth and brown and unspotted. Behind him, the sky was blue—completely blue, except where white clouds floated across it like sheep.

I shouted with pleasure and pulled him toward me. I had meant to hug him, but instead he put his lips on mine and kissed me. It was awkward and wet, but satisfying. My first kiss. Although I had never imagined that Pip would be the first to kiss me, I was glad.

“Estella, I love you. Will you marry me?”

“Don’t be silly. I’m only fifteen, and anyway when I finish school, I’m going to London to be a writer.”

If I could dream the village, then perhaps I could dream London? Or even the world? And perhaps I could dream it differently—perhaps it could be a world in which girls could go to college, as Miss Havisham had described. I would have to dream every day, I would have to repeat my incantation, my spell. Tomorrow I would go around the village and make certain all of the gaps were indeed gone. But I felt confident that if there were any left, I could fill them. I could save the village I loved. Could I save Miss Havisham? Perhaps the one who lived in the village, the one who had raised me. That other woman she had described—another dreamer would have to take care of her.

The thought of it made me sad. But the only world I could save was my own, the one I lived in, the one that was waiting. Maybe someday I would marry Pip—but certainly not yet. I had all sorts of adventures ahead of me.

“Come on,” I said. “You look like a dog that’s lost its bone. You’ve had one kiss, and if you can catch me, I’ll give you another!”

Then I jumped up, laughing, and ran back toward the village, across the fields, under a blue sky with flying clouds.

© 2013 by Theodora Goss.

Originally published in Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Theodora Goss’s publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting (2006); Interfictions (2007), a short story anthology coedited with Delia Sherman; Voices from Fairyland (2008), a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems; The Thorn and the Blossom (2012), a novella in a two-sided accordion format; and the poetry collection Songs for Ophelia (2014). Her work has been translated into ten languages, including French, Japanese, and Turkish. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, Locus, Seiun, and Mythopoeic Awards, and on the Tiptree Award Honor List. Her short story “Singing of Mount Abora” (2007) won the World Fantasy Award. She teaches literature and writing at Boston University and in the Stonecoast MFA Program.

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

Werewolf Loves Mermaid

Heather Lindsley | 2,750 words

How They Met

They met at a wedding.

He was in the wedding party. She was serving canapés at the reception.

On some level, reclining in a fountain while holding a tray of canapés is more efficient than circulating through a crowd with them.

On most levels, it isn’t.

“Canapé?” the mermaid asked the werewolf when he wandered near the fountain.

“Isn’t this just garnish?” said the werewolf, picking up a wilted stem of parsley.

“I guess,” said Mermaid. “I don’t really eat this kind of thing. The scallops were nice, though.” Mermaid looked toward the kitchen. “I wish they would bring me another tray.”

“Everyone will be heading in to dinner soon anyway,” Werewolf said.

“Ah, well, then,” said Mermaid, and after that neither of them said anything for a while.

No one does awkwardness like cryptids at a party.

“This is a weird wedding,” Mermaid finally said to break the silence. “They’re a weird couple. It’s creepy, don’t you think? Vampires marrying high school girls?”

“I’m the best man.”

“So you don’t think it’s creepy?”

“It’s a little creepy.”

“We should go out.”

“Um, okay. What’s your number?”

“I don’t have one.” Mermaid gave Werewolf a conch shell. “Just blow on this.”

“What, like underwater?”

“Yeah. Here, try it.”

Werewolf stuck his head in the fountain. “Flurb,” went the shell. “Bloot.”

“Ha,” said Mermaid.

“What?” said Werewolf, shaking water out of his ears.

“I said, ‘Ha.’”

“You’re just messing with me.”

“I am just messing you.”

“We should go out,” said Werewolf.

“Yes,” said Mermaid.

• • • •

After the wedding dinner and the dancing and the conversion of the open bar to a cash bar (which happened reasonably late into the evening but which shouldn’t have happened at all, Werewolf thought, because vampires are totally loaded, but whatever), Werewolf went back to his hotel.

Mermaid was swimming in the pool.

“So which kind of werewolf are you?” she said.

“Sorry?”

“Are you a traditional full-moon werewolf, or a turns-whenever-he-feels-like-it werewolf, or do you only turn into a werewolf when you get angry?”

“That’s a Hulk.”

“Sorry?”

“That last one. Turning when you get angry. That’s a Hulk.”

“A Hulk Werewolf would be cool.”

“It would,” Werewolf agreed.

“Let’s get drunk and go find a Hulk for you to bite.”

“I’m already drunk.”

“Me, too.”

“It would probably be easier to just bombard me with gamma rays.”

“Maybe if we took the door off a microwave . . .”

“It’s not really the same thing.”

“I guess not,” said Mermaid.

“I’m a traditional full-moon werewolf. Is that boring?”

“No. But you won’t be a werewolf tomorrow.”

“Is that a problem?”

Mermaid flicked her tail and scattered shards of full-moonlight over the water.

“Let’s decide tomorrow,” she said.

• • • •

When Werewolf wasn’t Werewolf he was a nice young man called Dave who was probably more disturbed than he should have been to find a mermaid in his hotel bathtub given that when he wasn’t Dave he was a werewolf who hung out with vampires who hung out with teenagers.

Dave didn’t remember much about the night before. He never did after he was Werewolf.

Mermaid didn’t remember much, either, but that was because she and Werewolf went from drunk to really drunk with a bottle of Captain Morgan. She vaguely remembered something about trying to generate gamma rays with parts from the hotel hairdryer and minifridge, but otherwise it was all a blur.

They ate an excruciating breakfast together. Dave obviously wasn’t into mermaids, and Mermaid wasn’t into Dave.

“Tell Werewolf I had fun,” Mermaid said when she left. Relief on parting company was the only thing they had in common that morning.

“I will,” said Dave, but when he found out what the damage to the minifridge and hairdryer was going to cost him, he decided he wouldn’t.

• • • •

Mermaid left her crappy job at the hotel and moved back in with her parents.

She thought maybe she would take a trip to visit her friend Mel at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Apparently that’s where the hip young merpeople went to make art and plan the revolution. Mermaid wondered if she was already too old for that, and if she was too old, whether she cared.

She swam around, trying to figure out how to hit her parents up for money in a way that made her seemed free-spirited rather than feckless.

She thought she heard someone say “Flurb,” so she was listening very hard when she heard “Bloot.”

Mermaid swam toward a succession of flurbs and bloots. When she was near the shore she popped her head above the waves.

“I didn’t think that would actually work,” she called out to Werewolf.

“Me, neither,” said Werewolf.

“I’m glad it did.”

“Me, too.”

And So This Is Christmas

For their first Christmas together, Mermaid got Werewolf a beautiful tortoise shell comb which she was only able to afford because she sold her pot stash.

Werewolf gave Mermaid a beautiful hand-blown glass bong which he bought online with Dave’s credit card because it’s not like there’s a big market for werewolf hair. Lord knows he tried.

How they laughed that first Christmas morning.

For their second Christmas together, they went halfsies on a used Nintendo 64 and spent the whole day playing Mario Kart. It wasn’t Christmas Day, but it was close enough.

His and Hers Flowbees. Eight ounces of those coffee beans that have been pooped out by civet cats because they were curious and what the hell, it’s Christmas. A custom-made combination banjo and accordion. They fought over whether it should be called a bancordian or a accordijo, but then they had such wild make-up sex that they fell on the bancordionaccordijo and smashed it to pieces, which is probably just as well because it sounded even worse than it looked, and how it looked was like it had crawled out of the nightmares of street musicians condemned to the deepest orchestra pit in hell.

The next year they bought a blender and really nice margarita pitcher.

Last year Werewolf did not exercise good judgment.

“What, you don’t like them?” Werewolf said.

“I thought you’d like them,” he said. “I thought women were really into them. I mean on TV they’re all blah blah squee! squee! blah blah Blahnik . . .”

Werewolf got hit in the head with a high-heeled shoe.

“But they have little seashells on them!” he said.

The year after that they will spend Christmas at her parents’ house. Werewolf will stand on the beach while seagulls reel overhead. It will be early morning. Werewolf is not really a morning person, but he appreciates a good sunrise. This will be good sunrise. Werewolf will hope the seagulls don’t crap on him.

Mermaid will recline on a rock.

Werewolf will hold an open gift box.

He will look at Mermaid, and look in the box, and look at Mermaid again.

He will say, “A nosehair trimmer.”

She will say, “You’re welcome.”

They will not have will make-up sex until Easter, and when they do it will not be spectacular, but it will be good enough.

Why They Will Not Have Make-up Sex Until Easter

The beach is beautiful at night. Werewolf lies on a beach towel, gazing up at the full moon. He considers baying. Is this a good time to bay? Is there ever a bad time to bay? Does this beach count as a bay? Is it curvy enough? Mermaid is curvy. Werewolf likes curves. And baying. Maybe he’ll get up and have a good long howl at the moon. But lying here is nice, too. The moon is curvy.

“Oh, crap,” Mermaid says, half submerged in the waves.

“What?” Werewolf says.

“Menstrual drift.”

“What?”

“Menstrual drift. I’ve synched up with the full moon.”

“Oh, crap,” Werewolf says. “Wait, fish menstruate?”

“No, and they don’t lactate, but somehow you never question the boobs.”

“Okay, okay, sorry. Can you just, I don’t know, hold it in for a few days?”

“Oh, well, gosh Mr. Hairy Howling Metamorphosizing Dog Boy, can you just hold it in?”

“So you can’t hold it in.”

“I need Advil. And rum. Rum with Advil floating in it.”

• • • •

Mermaid is in bed. It is a waterbed so it’s okay. Don’t worry about it. Werewolf feels slightly ’70s sleeping in a waterbed. He wonders if shaving off his sideburns would help.
“Well?” says Mermaid.

“I thought you said we were in synch,” says Werewolf.

“I’m almost done.”

“Almost.”

“Yes.”

“But not done.”

“I can’t believe you’re being squeamish about this,” Mermaid says. “You eat people! I’ve seen you go to town on a guy’s carotid artery. It was spurting all over the place.”

“That’s different,” Werewolf says. “That’s not, you know . . .”

“Gross? This from a man who licks his own balls.”

“Um . . . yeah,” says Werewolf. “I think I might go do that.”

Werewolf Loves Velocipede

Sometimes, right before the moon passes out of the most generous definition of full, Werewolf goes into the woods. In the woods there is a clearing and in the clearing there is a locked shed and the shed contains a velocipede. Sometimes Werewolf goes to the clearing and unlocks the shed and takes out the velocipede.

Sometimes Werewolf rides the velocipede in smaller and smaller circles until the velocipede nearly tips over.

Sometimes Werewolf says, “Wheeeee!”

This is pretty much the only thing Werewolf and Dave have in common.

Dave suspects that some mornings it is not just the transformation that makes him feel like his limbs have been ripped apart and put back together again using his brain as adhesive. Dave suspects he is waking up with Werewolf’s hangover, and he is right.

“That bastard,” Dave thinks, but he is always happy to wake up next to the shed.

Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Children?

Mermaid moves into a cheap apartment not far from where Dave lives and Werewolf lives with Mermaid when he is not Dave. Their living room has a flatscreen TV on one wall and a bright red Kraftwerk poster on the other. When Mermaid plays “Die Roboter” one too many times, Werewolf puts on Björk, which drives Mermaid crazy because, she says, Björk sounds just like her mother. Especially the warbly bits.

Under the TV there are twelve different gaming consoles. Half of the controllers are wrapped in plastic bags secured with twisty ties, because Mermaid splashes around a lot when she’s winning. Also when she’s losing.

There’s a Barcalounger and a bathtub. Werewolf sits in the Barcalounger, Mermaid reclines in the tub.

A super adorable puppy sits on the rug between them. The puppy has soft, golden fur and big, bright eyes. He should be on the Internet.

“Isn’t he cute?” Mermaid says.

“I told you I wasn’t ready for this,” Werewolf says.

“He’s house-trained,” Mermaid says. “And he’s had all his shots.”

“Uh huh,” Werewolf says.

“And he’s been fixed.”

“Dear god.”

Mermaid holds up a bandana. “And he has this!”

• • • •

Werewolf is in the Barcalounger. Mermaid is in the tub. The puppy is sitting on the rug between them, next to a large fishbowl with a single goldfish.

“Really?” says Mermaid.

“Yes, really,” says Werewolf. “Well? Isn’t she cute?”

“How do you even know it’s a sh . . . wait, is that . . . a shell bra?”

“Damn right.”

“Where did you even find shells that small?”

“The gas station.”

“The gas station. So those are . . .”

“Sunflower seeds.”

“Uh huh. And where’d the little wig come from—I don’t want to know, do I?”

“No, you probably don’t.”

The puppy and the goldfish stare at each other.

“You’re adopted,” the goldfish says.

“Bite me,” the puppy says.

“I’m running away from home,” the goldfish says to Werewolf and Mermaid.

“Me, too,” says the puppy.

Mermaid Loves Toast

Mermaid sits on her rock in the bay. She doesn’t look much like the statue of the mermaid on a rock in Copenhagen. Mermaid is not little. And she is not demure. If she had legs she would sit with them wide apart like an asshole on crowded public transportation. You can just tell. Something about the way she holds her tail.

She does have a nice singing voice, though. Unfortunately the only songs she can sing are by Hall and Oates.

The Mermaid sits on her rock in her undemure way. She looks right and left and over her shoulder. No one is there to see her take a small, battered suitcase out of the water.
Mermaid opens the suitcase and takes out an old toaster. It’s chrome, curved at the top and made in maybe 1950 or so.

She holds the toaster’s chunky Bakelite plug. Water drips down through the crumb tray and back into the sea.

The mermaid sighs.

She really likes toast.

She would trade her beautiful singing voice for two slices of hot buttered, thick sliced multigrain toast.

The seawitch said, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“No.”

“We’re in the water.”

“This is why I’ve come to the magic-making seawitch and not the nice café around the corner that sells fair trade coffee and locally-sourced produce and hot buttered, thick sliced multigrain toast.”

“I don’t know how to make magic toast.”

“I don’t want magic toast,” Mermaid said. “I want regular toast that doesn’t get cold and soggy underwater. Okay, fine—I want magic toast. Please. You can have my beautiful singing voice.”

“You can only sing Hall and Oates songs.”

“‘Private Eyes’ is a good song!”

“Get out of my cave.”

That was when the mermaid was very young. Now she has hot buttered, thick sliced multigrain toast every month, because Werewolf brings it to her in the morning, even when they’re fighting.

And she sings “Maneater” to him every night before they go to sleep, gently and like a lullaby, because he likes that song.

Good Morning, Sunshine

Werewolf has a very reliable alarm clock, but once in a blue moon he forgets to set it.

“Hi, Dave,” Mermaid says.

“Gah,” says Dave.

“Your stuff’s over there.”

“Uh, thanks.”

“I put 150 bucks in your wallet,” Mermaid says, “for the minifridge and the hairdryer.”

Dave stops trying to pull his pants on and looks up at Mermaid. “That was fifteen years ago.”

“Yeah. Sorry. I tried to give it to you three years ago, but you seemed kind of busy running away.”

Dave blinks and then tucks in his shirt. “Fifteen years,” he says. “I haven’t been in a relationship that long.”

“Well, technically Werewolf and I have only been together for a year and a half.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do.”

“I’ve moved six times.”

“Yep.”

“I’ve been fired twice.” Dave puts his shoes on. “But he’s a werewolf. How is he in a stable, long-term relationship when I’m not?”

“Maybe you have bad taste in women,” Mermaid says.

“Maybe.”

“Or maybe you’re too nice.”

“That could be it,” Dave says.

“Or maybe you’re an asshole.”

Dave thinks about this. “That hasn’t stopped Werewolf.”

“Maybe we’re all assholes,” Mermaid says, “and you just haven’t met the right one yet.”

And They Lived Happily Ever After

Many years later Werewolf and Mermaid are lying in bed. It’s still a waterbed. It’s still okay. Werewolf has remembered to set his alarm.

“Don’t flush me down the toilet,” Mermaid says.

“What?” Werewolf lowers his newspaper and pushes his reading glasses further down his snout.

“When I die. Don’t flush me down the toilet. I mean, I know I wouldn’t fit. It’s a metaphor. Don’t flush me down the toilet like some goldfish you won at a carnival by throwing a ping pong ball into a cheap glass bowl.”

“Those are usually feeder fish.”

“I know.”

“If they weren’t in a cheap glass bowl at a carnival, they’d probably get fed to some kid’s pet crab or something.”

“Uh huh.”

“So they’re kind of screwed either way.”

“Right.”

Werewolf and Mermaid have been together too long for uncomfortable silences, so this is just a regular silence.

“I won’t flush you down the toilet,” Werewolf says.

Mermaid waits.

“Or feed you to a crab.”

“Thank you,” Mermaid says.

“I saw the brochure from the taxidermist,” Werewolf says.

“You would look really good in the living room. You could be baying, with your face turned up toward the—” Mermaid smiles at Werewolf. “I’ll throw it away.”

“Thank you,” Werewolf says.

© 2015 by Heather Lindsley.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Heather Lindsley’s stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov’s, and Strange Horizons, and in John Joseph Adams’s dystopian anthology Brave New Worlds and in The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination. She has been featured on Escape Pod as a writer and on Podcastle as a reader, and her stories have been published in Polish, Romanian, Russian, and French translations. She currently lives in Brighton and works in London, which gives her more time to write her novel on the train.

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

Milo and Sylvie

Eliot Fintushel | 14,849 words

“Everything has its portion of smell,” Milo said. His skin and bones were enthroned in a plush, gold club chair facing the doctor’s more severe straight back with the cabriole legs. Milo strummed his fingers nervously against the insides of his thighs as he looked around the room, richly dark, with scrolled woodwork, diplomas in gilded frames hanging on the wall behind the doctor’s mahogany rolltop next to the heavily curtained window. He could smell the doctor’s aftershave. He could smell the last client, too, a woman, a large woman, a sweating carnivore with drugstore perfume.

“Smell?” Doctor Devore always looked worried. Inquisitive and worried—the look was like a high trump, drawing out all your best cards before you had planned to play them. He had white, curly hair. He wore sweaters and baggy pants that made him look like a rag doll. He was old. His cheeks and jowls sagged like the folds of drapery beside him. He wore thick, wire-rimmed glasses that made his tired eyes look bigger and even more plaintive. He was small, a midget, almost; one got over that quickly, though, because he never acted short.

“It’s something my sister used to say.”

“Why?”

“I don’t remember.” Like so much else. Milo moved too quickly for memories to adhere, or for sleep, for that matter, except in evanescent snatches. Memories, sleep, haunted him. They were never invited guests. His sister’s name, for example, which he did not remember, did not remember, did not remember, was death to pronounce or even think of.

There was a long pause. Devore was trying to use the silence to suck something out of him—horror vacui—but it didn’t work. Milo had a practiced grip. The things he had to hold down bucked harder than this shrink.

Dr. Devore broke the silence: “Have you been sleeping any better?”

“Yes.”

“Taking the prescription, hmm?”

“Yes.” That was a trade-off. The pills let him sleep dreamlessly for longer spells, but with the danger that his grip would loosen.

“Let’s talk about one of your dreams. Do you have one you want to talk about?”

Grudgingly, Milo said, “Yes.” Could he snatch the cheese and escape the wire?

“Go ahead.”

“It’s dark. The fog is rolling in.”

“Where are you?” Devore said. Milo began to cry. “That’s all right. Just let the tears come. You don’t have to answer right away, you know?”

“I have another dream.”

“Okay . . .”

“A dumpster. One of those big, steel dumpsters full of scraps and garbage. A car runs into it.”

“Are you driving the car?”

“You don’t get it!” Milo hooked one thumb over the side of his pants and tugged down the waist, hiking up his shirt so that Dr. Devore could see his hip. “It was all smashed up! Everything was steaming and sputtering and dripping.”

“What are you showing me? Are you telling me you hurt yourself? I don’t see any marks, Milo—we’re talking about a dream, yes?”

“Yeah. That was while I was in the waiting room just now. I dozed off.”

“You dreamed that you hurt your hip in a car crash, is that it?”

“No, no! The fender, the hood, the engine! That’s what was hurt!” Milo began crying again. “I’m a monster, that’s all! Give me some more medicine! Give me something stronger! I can’t hold on much longer!”

Dr. Devore paused. “Milo, when the car crashed into the dumpster, where were you?”

“I have another dream,” Milo blurted. He was angry, like a small child choking back tears to shout his malediction.

“Let’s stay with the last one . . .”

“A window shatters.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.” Milo felt his skin and skull shattering like glass. He was collapsing into his own pelvis and lacerating the soft tissue of his remaining viscera—but it was the dream. He shouted too loudly, as if trying to be heard against the roar of a hurricane. “It hurts!”

“The glass hits you?”

“No.”

“I don’t think I follow, Milo. In all these dreams, where are you?”

“The fog, the dumpster and the car, the window . . .” Milo clamped his bony fingers around the scrolls at the edges of his armchair as if it were an electric chair. He stared straight ahead, straight through Dr. Devore, focusing on ghosts three thousand miles distant, waving from the past like dead men from the ports of a sunken ship.

Devore interrupted him. “Don’t say any more if you don’t want to, Milo.” Milo froze, then slumped back into the chair. Dr. Devore was standing up, hands on his sacrum, arching back and stretching his neck from side to side. It made a little crackling sound. “Anyway, our hour is about up. This was good, Milo. This was very good. You shared some of your dreams with me. We talked a little about your sleep problem, and about your sister . . .”

“I didn’t tell you anything about my sister.”

“Right. We’ve got to get you to relax, you know? I am going to increase your chlorpromazine. Your house parents will give you the tablets in the morning and at night. I’ll talk to them about it. You shouldn’t worry. Just try to do the best you can, you know? And keep track of those dreams for me, will you, Milo?”

“Yeah, sure.”

Dr. Devore stood before Milo, waiting for him to get up. He had set up his psychic vacuum pump again, to suck Milo out of the club chair and get rid of him, Milo thought. Devore needed his beauty sleep.

Milo stood, turned, and walked out the door without saying thank you or good-bye. The waiting room was empty. Milo crossed the waiting room, opened the hall door and shut it again without going through. He waited thirty seconds, then returned to Dr. Devore’s office door and cupped his ear against it.

He heard Devore part the drapes and open one of the windows; it shuddered and squeaked against the casement. Then he heard the rolltop clack open, and Devore spoke into his tape recorder:

“Milo is on the verge of finding out. He would have blurted it out just now if I hadn’t stopped him. It would be most inopportune for him to know everything just now. I think the best course would be to slow him down. The thorazine should help, but we can’t rely on it. This is a tricky business. If he’s too tight, something fatigues inside him and he manifests in spite of himself; if he’s too loose, of course, he changes. Can’t leave him at the home much longer the way things are going. Somebody’s sure to see something, and what happens next may be out of my control. Get Sylvie in there, that’s the only way. Remember to call Sylvie tonight, now, soon.

“Oh, yes! He said the thing about smell again, but he doesn’t seem to understand what it means—which is good. There’s a little time . . . God! I’ve got to take a nap. My knees are buckling.”

The machine clicked off. Milo heard Devore stretch and yawn, then the rustle of clothing peeling off, the two chairs scraping the floor as Devore pushed them together. A moment later he was snoring.

The little machine! The box sheathed in perforated black leather hiding inside Dr. Devore’s rolltop with all of Milo’s secrets! Like the totemic soul of a primitive: a pouch, a feather, or a whittled doll secreted in a hollow log, proof against soul-snatching demons and enemies. Only, the demon was in possession of Milo’s soul.

There was a fake window in the waiting room, drapery with a solid wall behind it, and opposite that, a print of some famous painting, a different one every time Milo visited. Sometimes, in fact, it was different when he left than it had been when he arrived; Devore must have paid someone he never saw to slip in and change it periodically, like a diaper service. Mondrian to Dali, Manet to Munch or an anonymous Byzantine, each with a brass name tag on an ornate frame, while Milo conveyed his soul, via Devore, to the skin-covered box! Just now, it was a Chinese painting of a warrior monkey standing on a cloud in a great, plumed hat, brandishing a cudgel.

Milo tiptoed away from the door, hid behind the drapes and waited. He made quite a perceptible bulge there, but he was relying on Devore’s drowsiness to get by with it. Being caught might not be so bad either. The way they looked at you then, at the home or at school, cross as it was, felt a lot like love.

It was hard to tell how much time had passed, because there was no daylight in there, but it seemed like a long time, and Milo had not had his thorazine. Below his stomach, inside the habitual knot, an older knot was beginning to ache. Aches in aches, Milo stood flush to the wall, breathing dust behind the drapery.

At last, he ventured out. The snoring had stopped. He pressed his ear to the door and heard nothing. What did he look like dreaming, the little man who harvested Milo’s dreams? Milo turned the knob, degree by degree, soundlessly, until it stopped; then he pulled the door ajar and peeked in.

Impossibly, the room was empty. Devore was gone. The club chair and the cabriole chair were still pushed together in the center of the room to form an odd, uncomfortable bed. Milo strode in and slammed the door behind him, as if to test, to make sure his senses hadn’t fooled him, that Devore was actually absent. Nothing stirred. There was no other way out except the window, which was actually open, but the office was six storeys up.

Milo squinted and cocked his head like a cat listening for rats in the wall. However he had managed it, Devore was not there. Maybe, unawares, Milo had dozed standing up, and Devore had simply left through the waiting room. Milo went to the rolltop and pulled it open. The tape recorder was there. He opened it and took out the cassette. It had Milo’s name on it, a cassette all to himself. He put it back in the machine and rewound.

The last rays of sunlight to skirt the top of the building across the street shone through a crystal suspended from the window sash, splashing rainbows on the office wall. As the land breeze breathed it back and forth, the crystal shook and spun, whirling colors about the room. Milo had never before seen Dr. Devore’s crystal or the rainbows. So there was a dance in the old bagface yet!

The prism clacked against the shivering glass. The tape whirred, then stopped. Milo pressed PLAY:

“Milo Smith. Smith not his real name. An assigned name. Nobody knows his real name. First name’s probably Milo, though. Fourteen. Sporadically guilty of many relatively minor offenses such as disorderly conduct, battery against other children, petty thefts, and so on. Frequently truant. Has been under state guardianship in group homes for about seven years. Generally shy and withdrawn, presents as extremely nervous, with many obsessive mannerisms. Plays his cards close to the chest, this one.

“Referred because of violent, disturbing dreams, waking other boys. Also some evidence of self-inflicted wounds. Chronic sleeplessness, nervosity. Looks like a mess, sunken eyes, thin as a rail, reminds me of the old photos of liberated camps at Auschwitz, Bergen-Belson, Dachau. All he needs is the striped pants and a star of David.

“Seemed like he came in, then just waited for the hour to end. But he came in! Why? Something going on here. Okayed chlorpromazine for now. Next week . . . ?”

• • • •

Milo PAUSED to think that one over. Why had he come? Nobody could force him. Nobody could hurt him. He hurt himself so badly already, just squeezing and squeezing to stay in control, that there was nothing worse to threaten Milo with. He stretched out on the two armchairs, cradling the tape recorder in his arms like a teddy bear. Think it over: Why?

Outside the window, the street lamps flicked on. Milo had dozed off, he didn’t know for how long, but it was dark. Unusual, dangerous, to sleep so long. Luckily, there had been no dream. There was still a rainbow on the wall—that was a new one! Milo walked to the window and passed his hand in front of the crystal.

That explained it; the crystal was a prop. The rainbow didn’t move. It was somehow painted on the wall, painted no doubt over the real rainbow, the one from the crystal at the rainbow moment, sunset behind the MacCauly Building. Funny he’d never noticed it, but he always sat with his back to that wall, and when he came in or left this room, he always had a lot on his mind, or a lot to keep out of his mind.

PLAY:

“. . . I want to remind myself here that Sylvie has come up with a way of using Zorn’s Lemma for shapeshifting. She finds the maximal element of all the upper bounds of the chains in the shape she’s departing from . . .”

STOP. REWIND. PLAY:

“. . . shapeshifting . . .”

REWIND. PLAY:

“. . . shapeshifting . . .”

STOP.

Below, a car drove by with its windows rolled down and the radio blasting, “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog . . .” The old song faded out of hearing, along with the clatter of a dragging muffler. Then there were voices and honking horns. The theater crowd was arriving. Milo stared up at the rainbow on the wall, dimly aglow in the shadowy light of neons from outside.

PLAY:

“. . . Why do I always think of Sylvie when I think of Milo? Could he be like us?”

STOP. REWIND. PLAY:

“ . . . Could he be like us?”

There was a click, then static, an intentional erasure or else a dumb mistake: the wrong button pressed, the machine dropped, or just old, stretched tape. Then it resumed:

“Now I know something about Milo Smith. I know what he’s doing here, with me. Once he trusted me enough to start describing those dreams of his, it came together for me—the odd inanimate object romances, the animal reveries, the sensations of bodiless flight, his deep terror; and the physical evidences, like fairy dust on the dreamer’s bedclothes in the old folk tales.

“But it’s hardly time for Milo to be told anything. First we have to build up the psychic container. If he were to realize it now, it would blast him to pieces. Sylvie went through the same sort of thing, but Milo’s got the additional problem of this distorted, secret past.

“My approach has been all wrong. I mustn’t precipitate any sudden epiphanies. More chlorpromazine. Slow, careful work. Test the ground before each step, Devore, or you’ll land the both of you in a dark hole. If the state won’t keep paying, screw them! Call it a charity case. God knows, there’s plenty in it for me!”

STOP. REWIND. PLAY:

“. . . plenty in it for me!”

STOP. REWIND. PLAY:

“. . . plenty in it for me!”

STOP.

“Dr. Devore?”—a voice out in the corridor. “Dr. Devore? Dr. Devore? Security, Dr. Devore! You in there, sir?” A rapping at the outer door. Fumbling for keys.

The knot in the knot in Milo’s belly tightened further. He had to get up to ease the pain. He padded to the office door and peeked into the waiting room. The only light in there was the grey-green light that leaked out the door when he opened it, light through the office window from the lamps and signs on the street and the buildings nearby—and the glow of the wall rainbow reflected in the corner of Milo’s eye. In the dark of the waiting room Milo saw what must have been an afterimage of the rainbow, as if it were a small animal that had sneaked out ahead of him through the office door.

Except for the rainbow, the waiting room was empty now, but Milo must have been dead-out dozing before, because the painting had been changed again. Someone must have gone in and out of the waiting room without waking him. The monkey warrior was gone. Instead, it was Munch’s screamer on the screaming bridge, the air and river screaming.

He heard the key in the lock. For a moment, Milo had a sense of déjà vu, the feeling that the turning key was himself. He shut himself in the office again, his heart pounding. Suddenly, to his astonishment, he heard Dr. Devore’s voice in the waiting room: “No, wait. I’m sorry. I’ll open it for you. I must have fallen asleep.”

The sneak! Everybody wants a piece of me. Milo ran to the open window, swung his feet over the ledge—it was a long way down—and listened. He yanked Devore’s crystal off the sash by the string that held it, and he threw it out the window. A tiny, occasional glint, it plummeted six storeys and shattered on a curbstone.

“. . . plenty in it for me!”

He stared at the rainbow wall—all dark. No rainbow. Probably, it was Milo’s own shadow blocking the window light from shining on it. He heard the hallway door opening. The voice outside went up nearly an octave: “Oh. Sorry, Doctor. I just had to check. I thought I heard somebody in here. I mean, I thought it was you, but I had to make sure.”

“No problem. I’m glad you checked. It might not have been me, after all. I might have been somebody else.”

“Right. Everything okay then, right?”

“Right. And I have a weapon, remember?”

“I remember. I still don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“I do.”

“You’re the doctor.”

The door clicked shut. The inner door opened. Milo jumped.

• • • •

“Can you fly like that all the time, or was it just some kind of crazy fluke?” The big kid speared one of Milo’s fries—“You mind?”—and shoveled it on in. He was only an inch taller than Milo, if that, but the swagger made it six. He never stopped talking except to swallow. “Because if you can do that whenever you want to, little man, I’ve got a proposition for you.”

They sat in a corner of the big, greasy restaurant. The light there was like bleach, harsh and merciless. Cadaverous chain smokers sucked coffee and talked to themselves, silently or aloud. With one hand, a lean, gap-toothed Okie was rocking her toddler’s walker, while, with the other, finger by finger, she managed a hotdog bun oozing green. At the next table, three college students discussed Heidegger over meatloaf. The proprietor, Aristotle Jitsi, sweet-talked a girlfriend on the phone pinched between his ear and shoulder, while he scraped the grill.

The big kid wore a bowler hat and a black leather jacket, the overcoat kind favored by suave Italian street toughs, not the motorcycle kind. He had drawstring pants on, loose, with wide vertical stripes, red and white. His shoes were black leather Danskins—a rope walker? A ballet dancer? The ensemble didn’t make much sense. “Well? Can you?”

Milo mopped up ketchup with a crust of his grilled cheese, then didn’t eat it. He pushed the whole plate of French fries toward the big kid. “I don’t know what happened . . . Thanks, I’m not hungry any more.” Milo sneaked a look down at his own clothes. He never knew what he was wearing until he looked: T shirt, faded jeans, sneakers, the cowboy belt they gave him last year on his birthday—lassoed Brahma bull buckle.

“You weren’t trying to kill yourself, were you?”

“No.”

“I think you could do it again. I think you’ve got some kind of a talent. I was just walking by, and I saw you whistling down like a dropped bomb. I heard the thud. I just about threw up. Then I ran up, and there you were, folding in your wings. Are they wings? Where did you get them? Do you make ’em? Your wings and that furry stuff you tucked away somewhere. For aerodynamics, right? Come on! I’m in the show business, little man. I could do something for you. Tell me some stuff . . . How about a piece of pie?”

Milo got up from the table and looked around for an exit.

“Hey, sit back down. I’m not done with you. Where you going, anyway? I bet you got no place to stay. Look at you. I can get you a place to stay, no sweat, no charge, but talk to me, little man, talk to me.”

Milo started to walk, but a twinge in his calves stopped him. He didn’t know what to do with his legs any more. He felt like an unmagnetized compass. Where to go? Not the group home—they’d ship him back to Devore! Outside of that, one place seemed as good as another. He could live here, talking to himself, breathing cigarettes, eating grease. He could die here, rocking some toddler in a walker, waiting for his teeth to rot.

“Come back,” the big kid said. “I’ll buy you a piece of pie. I’m rich as Croesus. I’m in the show business.”

Milo sat down. “But I don’t feel like talking. I don’t know what happened, honest. Some guy was after me. He thought I had something he wanted, but I don’t have anything. Do I look like I have anything?”

“What about those wings, boy? Those must be something to have.”

“Do I look like I have any secret pockets on me?” Milo lifted his arms up over his head. “You must have been seeing things. I just landed lucky.”

“No, I don’t think so. Something’s fishy here, little man, but I don’t care. I like you. I live off fishy, anyway. Look at this.” The big kid pulled a card out of his inner vest pocket and spun it across the table in front of Milo:

*** MOON *AND* STARS ***

Spectacles, Phantasmagoria, Puppets

for

Festivals, Conventions, Parties,

Theatrical Events, Promotions

Of Every Conceivable Variety!!!

by

S. VERDUCCI, MASTER SHOWMAN

(Equidecomposabilization Services Available to Select Clientele)

“What’s equidecohoozits?”

“That’s a sort of code word, little man. People who need it generally know that word; when they see it on my card, they know that I can supply it. It’s a sort of a side line.”

“What does it mean?”

The big kid leaned across the table and spoke to Milo in a low voice. He watched Milo as he spoke, as if to measure Milo’s response, word by word. “Look here, suppose you got two balls, okay? A great big one and a little bitsy one, both of them thick as a brick. Suppose I told you I had a way of taking the bitsy one apart and putting it back together so it was just as big as the great biggy, or making the biggy into a bitsy without adding or taking away a single atom? You reckon that would be handy?”

“That’s what Dede wanted to know!” Milo started in his chair as if he’d touched a high power line. He hadn’t spoken or thought that name for eight years. He coughed, trying to hide his shock, but the big kid hadn’t missed it.

“Who’s Dede?”

“I don’t know. Just somebody. I told you, I don’t feel like talking.”

“Is she some kind of a brain?”

“She was my sister. Leave it alone, okay?”

“Okay, okay!” the big kid said. “I got brains in my family, too—brains and weirdos, take your pick. I’m the only normal one . . . Look at the back of the card.” Milo had to tilt the card to catch the light just so, but then he saw—there was a rainbow across it. “I’m a puppeteer, little man. I’m S. Verducci, traveling showman: MOON & STARS, Inc. And I want you to work with me. What do you say to that? You’ll be rich as Croesus, too.”

“I don’t know. You gonna put me up for the night?”

“Didn’t I say so? Let’s go. You’re tired, huh? Wait—pie?”

“No.”

“So what’s your name?”

“Milo.”

“Okay, Milo, follow me. Follow me, flying boy.” S. Verducci dropped a silver dollar into his glass of water, which was still full. He picked up a crushed, empty hard-pack of Marlboros from the floor, tore off one side and placed it over the top of the glass. Then, holding the cardboard there, he inverted the glass on the table and slipped the cardboard out. The silver dollar was at the bottom of an upside-down glass of water. “Don’t you love it? Let the waiter earn his tip, huh? It’s okay—Jitsi likes me.”

Milo followed S. Verducci past the coffee hounds, the welfare mothers, the college brains—a hooker moving in—and past the counter, to the door.

“Bye-bye, Jitsi, you old poisoner!” S. Verducci said.

“Bye-bye, Moon and Stars!”

Out the door into the breezy evening.

They walked twenty blocks, increasingly dark, increasingly run-down. Milo spied Dede watching from behind trash cans, though he was careful not to look. She disguised herself as a pimp cruising by in a vintage Cadillac. Her telescope was trained on Milo from a tenement window. And Devore was with her. He was small. He could hide anywhere, even behind fire hydrants maybe, or down below a sewer grate, phoning Milo’s position in to Dede, who had a cop’s uniform, a patrol car and a gun. Devore had a gun, too. He’d said so.

Don’t think about Dede. There was a way to unthink things, to hold them in the blind spot. All it took was a knot in your stomach—and insomnia. Don’t think about . . . who?

They came to a sooty storefront to which S. Verducci had a key. Stenciled across one large bay window in bold cursive were the words, “THE GRASS AND TREES.” Underneath that: “Coffee and Conversation.” There was a faint red light inside. S. Verducci turned the key in the lock and pushed open the door. The hinges squeaked. The casement groaned. A wonderful smell of wisteria flowed out.

“Everything has its portion of smell,” Milo said.

“Anaxagoras!” said S. Verducci. “Smell, scent, essence, sentience! Everything is everywhere. Nothing’s as solid as it seems! That’s my whole business, little man! How did you know that?”

“My sister used to say it, that’s all.”

They walked past round tables with chairs on top of them. At the back, they turned a tight corner, and Verducci flicked on a light. They were at the top of a staircase leading to the basement. “Come on.” He led Milo into a sort of black box theater downstairs, with a dozen transplanted church pews around a square platform. There was a large canopied bed onstage. “You can sleep here. I’ll sleep upstairs. There’s a toilet around the corner. I’ll leave the light on at the top of the stairwell so you don’t get totally spooked. See you in the morning, champ.”

S. Verducci pulled off the bowler. He shook his head, and a stream of brown hair tumbled down to his waist.

“You’re a girl!” Milo said.

“Sure. What did you think?”

“What does the ‘S’ stand for?”

“Sylvie. Sweet dreams, little man.” She climbed the stairs, leaving Milo alone, in the cellar, in the dark.

• • • •

Dede at the library on a Saturday morning, Milo in her lap with a Dr. Seuss. He peers up at the book she’s reading, sees diagrams that look like envelopes folded funny and ones like globes with twisted meridians. There are letters Dede says are Greek and words she says are German. One Hebrew letter: aleph. Aleph with a tiny zero. Aleph with a tiny one. And a lazy eight: infinity.

“Is this how you do it, Milo?” Dede whispers. She doesn’t expect an answer. At home Mama is washing her hands. Washing her hands and washing her hands.

Suddenly he is in the dark cellar at The Grass and Trees again, the air swarming with hypnagogic images, red and green, intricate, impenetrable geometries. He feels that he has just screamed, but nothing stirs. He rubs himself all over to make sure he is a human being. He checks his skin for fur, his shoulder blades for wings.

Sylvie’s in cahoots with Devore—the thought, like a sudden needle, pierces him, as he remembers where he is.

He falls asleep again, and when he blows out the candles, seven of them plus one for good luck, all at once he finds himself on the wrong side of his lips. He is a puff of air eddying around the flames. It only lasts a second. Then all the candles are out. He smiles, but everyone else is screaming. Some of the children cover their eyes. “What’s wrong?” Milo says. Dede is watching with intense curiosity. Curiosity and desire.

Mama hasn’t seen it. Mama is in the kitchen washing the sink over and over. Papa’s eyes are bulging, his mouth hangs open, and his muscles are drawn so tight he looks like a starved alley cat. “What did you do? What the hell kind of trick is that?” He licks his lips and scans the room with a wild look. “Never mind! Never mind!” He runs to the door, then runs back, clenching and unclenching his fists. “I didn’t see nothing.” He shakes one of the guests. “Shut up! Shut up! Everything’s okay!” They all stop crying, terrified. “Am I right, Milo? Am I right?”

“Yes, Papa.”

“That was a mean, dumb trick, Milo. What, did you sneak under the table and back, huh? Don’t you ever let me see you do that again.” Milo won’t.

• • • •

“What’s the matter?” Sylvie, in her striped pants and a sleeveless undershirt, was standing silhouetted at the cellar door. Scant light from the stairway bathed her like earthshine on a slight, crescent moon.

“Huh?” He sat up. He had been lying fully clothed on top of the covers.

“You shouted. What’s the matter? Scared of the dark? Tell me. Don’t be ashamed.” She walked toward him. Dim, reflected light played on her bare shoulders, through a tangle of hair. A moment of brighter light on one collarbone, as she brushed the hair away, made Milo lift his gaze to the soft, simple curve of her face, the broad forehead, the gentle slope of her nose, and her full lips. The thin fabric of the undershirt hung away from her torso, down from the peaks of her small breasts, and light diffused through the undershirt, shadowing her breasts like x-rays. Then she blended into the teeming dark nearer Milo’s bed.

“Stay away.”

“You think I’m gonna rape you or something? There’s a little blue light I was gonna turn on behind the stage. The techy uses it to see what he’s doing when he runs cues. Or maybe you’d like a couple of kliegs. The control board is back there. I was gonna fiddle with it for you. Don’t bother to say thank you.”

“Okay. Put on the blue light. Don’t touch me, though.”

“You’re a pip, you know that?”

Milo clutched the covers around him and crouched under the canopy while Sylvie walked past him, barely visible in the deepening shadow toward the back of the room. She was just a glint, now and then, a hint of skin, a wrinkle of fabric, disjointed patches of shifting light. Milo heard a click, blue light spilled faintly around the edge of a curtain, then the curtain was pulled back, and the black room filled with blue objects and blue air. It was as if the tide had gone out, leaving jetsam draped with blue algae on blue sand.

“Okay?” she said.

“Okay . . . Did I really scream?”

“Yeah.”

“It wasn’t the dark. I’m not afraid of the dark. But this is better. Thank you.”

“Sure thing. Okay now?” She was crossing the room, making a wide arc around the stage, weaving through the chairs.

“Yeah . . . Hey!” Milo called to her as she started to mount the stairs again.

“What?”

“Why’s there a bed onstage?”

“Don’t ask.” She trudged upstairs again. Milo heard her scuffling around, then slumping down and groaning quickly into slumber.

In cahoots. Definitely in cahoots. Milo whispered to himself, “I’m going to watch her. I’m going to find out about her. Her and Devore. They’re up to something. They think I’m dumb, but I’m going to fool them.”

No thorazine tonight. His muscles itched in places he couldn’t reach to scratch. Every time he closed his eyes, he was deeply asleep; if he winked them open again, it was as if he’d been out for hours. Every sensum was thick with Devore’s malevolence and Sylvie’s conspiracy. Like a bombarded infantryman: “Keep a tight ass, Milo,” he told himself.

Then Dede was cradling him in her lap, saying, “Everything is made of numbers, Milo. That’s what Pythagoras said. Whatever you are, honey, something’s the same, see? But what? Is it numbers? Euclid’s all wet; there’s no congruence between a little boy and a Bank America MasterCard, is there? No similarity, like angles and stuff. They’re not even the same genus of topological space, because you got holes through your head and your butt and your little winkie, but a charge card’s all connected everywhere.

“Something’s the same though, because you go from this to that and back again, and whatever you are, you’re you, aren’t you? So how do you do it?”

“Why do you care, Dede?”

“You do such nice things for me, Milo, when you do those change-ums, I never want it to stop. I gotta figure out what’s going on, so we don’t lose you.” She turns pages so furiously, a few of them rip. The librarian says something, but Dede pays no attention. “Maybe it has something to do with equideco . . .”

From upstairs: “Hey! You okay?”

“What?”

“You were screaming again.”

“Sorry!”

• • • •

There was no sunlight in the cellar, and therefore no time, just blue. Milo slept and woke like a subway car surfacing and descending through a dark metropolis. He got up to find the toilet. He stumbled past the control board “backstage,” a closet with massive, ancient rheostats, a clipboard on a string, empty coke bottles, and dust. Passing beyond the sphere of the backstage light, Milo knew where he was by the sound of his footsteps. They echoed more sharply as he reached the tiled room.

The bathroom door was held open by a mop bucket full of dirty water. On its scummy surface there were rainbows. Daylight leaked in through the bathroom window. Milo walked into the light and relieved himself into a urinal. The daylight, the tinkle, the morning breeze, were like a benediction. He walked out past the rainbows, the dimmers, and the stage, to the stairway. He smelled bacon.

He had started up the stairs when a gigantic crow peeked into the stairway from above, cawed a few times and said, in a high, scratchy voice, “Soup’s on, little man!” Milo stumbled three steps backward.

Then Sylvie’s face appeared next to the crow’s. She continued, in the crow’s voice, “Eggs and toast for humans! Pictures of eggs and toast for the puppets!” Then she thrust out one arm, at the end of it a puppet made of five or six tiny men in trench coats—one puppet with multiple jaws that moved together: “Hiss! Booo!”

“Oh, shut up,” Sylvie said, “or I’ll give you a picture of angleworms to eat.” She pulled out of sight, her puppets with her. A second later the tiny men reappeared. “Angleworms!” they shuddered. “We’re not partial to angleworms!” They scooted off.

The walls upstairs were covered with posters, masks, hand puppets, and marionettes, from miniscule to elephantine, hanging by hooks and wire. There were posters for wassail consorts, pantomimes, plays by people named Beckett, Ionesco, Tzara, Artaud, old cigarette ads enameled in three colors, embossed on tin; also a wall-sized photograph of a man gleefully smiling as he leapt, birdlike, from a high window onto the street below—a bicyclist trundling past, unawares. “SAUT DANS LA VIDE,” it said underneath. “LEAP INTO NOTHINGNESS,” Sylvie explained.

Among the masks there were bug-eyed Balinese demons with teeth like tusks; there were lions’ heads, monkeys, frogs, grotesque insects, the mask of a beautiful girl with a skull mask nested underneath, also a variety of clown noses and Swiss carnival masks, larval, exaggerated, alive, that Sylvie said she had received from a “business associate” in Basel. And the puppets: the huge crow and the little men back on their hooks already, moustached villains with black hats, Punch and Judy, Orlando Furioso in a plumed helmet, and also a variety of animals and inanimate objects. There were a printing press puppet, a city block whose tenement windows were mouths, a sky with star eyes and the moon for a mouth, a mountain, a lock and key, a long-legged airplane, and a truck with teeth under its hood, among many still stranger.

Everything has its portion of smell. Sylvie had taken down the chairs from one round table and was laying down two steaming dishes of eggs and toast. Several flies accompanied her, and when Milo approached, they found their way to his face and neck. He slapped at them.

“Don’t,” Sylvie said. “Those are friends of mine, Eric and Mehitabel. The small one is Beulah. Leave them alone. They’re from upstate.”

“Are you for real?”

“I’m a vegetarian, okay?”

“What about the pig? I smelled bacon.”

“Nope. I can’t help what kind of grease is caked on the burner. That’s the owner’s, not mine. Pull up and chow down, little man. We’ve got a day ahead of us.”

Milo sat. Sylvie poured them both coffee. “You’re strange,” Milo said.

“Strange is good. I like strange.”

“You’re not rich. Not if you sleep in this place.”

“Did I say I was rich, Milo?”

“Rich as Croesus.”

“No, you got me wrong.” Sylvie squeegeed egg yolk with her toast and folded the toast into her mouth. “Rich in creases, that’s what I said. My costume gets all creased sleeping here under the tables, see? Rich in creases, is what I said. It’s a Biblical locution.”

“Sure. Who owns this place, if you don’t?” Milo nibbled at his toast, played with the spoon in his coffee. Nonchalant—that’s the ticket.

“The Grass and Trees? Some guy you don’t know.”

“You work for him?” Bet it’s Devore, he thought.

“Hell, no. This is a fellowship I got here. No strings attached. Guy appreciates my artistic ability, see? Why aren’t you eating? Miss the meat?”

“No.”

“Well?”

He started on the eggs, and then he couldn’t stop. He ravened the toast and licked the plate. Sylvie poured him some more coffee. “Hurry it up, though. We got a gig the other side of town.”

“We?”

Sylvie shooed Milo from the table, cleared it, and had him put the chairs back up and sweep while she did the dishes. She ducked behind a counter into a small enclosure covered with green striped awning, and fished out two black suitcases. She handed one of them to Milo. “Wait a minute.” Sylvie unlatched her case and pulled out a collapsible top hat, flattened to a disk. She contrived to blow on it, while flexing it just so, and it popped open. She twirled the hat between her fingers so that it wound up on Milo’s head. He flinched. She grabbed her bowler from behind the counter and twirled it onto her own head the same way. “See? It’s just business, little man. Now you’re with me. Moon and Stars!”

That’s what was stenciled on the suitcases, too:

*** MOON *

on hers,

AND * STARS ***

on his.

“Do I have to wear the hat?” he said.

“Sure you do! It suits you, too. Isn’t it neat how it changes . . .” She pushed ahead of him to unlock and open the door, and he thought he heard her say, “ . . . just like you?”

• • • •

They only spent a few minutes in daylight, and Sylvie led Milo underground again, this time into the subways. They sat side by side in the strobing, shaking car with the suitcases on their laps; it was awkward, but Sylvie insisted they carry them that way. She also insisted that Milo sit on her left and that they hold the suitcases with the lettering facing out:

*** MOON * AND * STARS ***

“Free advertising,” she said. No one looked. No one ever looked on the subway. If they looked, it meant trouble. Anything could happen down there, Milo learned; a baby could be born, water could spring from a stone, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse could thunder from a businessman’s lapel, and everybody would turn their page of Newsweek or the Enquirer or The New York Times and keep their eyes down and their elbows close to their hips.

“What were you doing on the street where I fell yesterday?” Milo said between Manchester Avenue and Lafayette Park. Make it sound like ordinary conversation. “You were right below there, weren’t you?”

“It was listed in my ephemeris: ‘Boy falling out of the sky northeast of the MacCauly Building.’”

“Come on, Sylvie.”

Sylvie shifted uncomfortably on the crowded bench. “Hey! You’re the mystery man, not me, champ.”

“So?”

“I was going someplace, that’s all. Do you have to take up so much room?”

Milo scrunched himself farther into the end of the bench. “Have you ever been up there in that building where I fell from?”

“Where you flew from, you mean? Maybe. Yeah. Why? Yeah.” She looked away.

Don’t push too hard. She already knows I’m suspicious. She probably thinks I’ve seen her up there, and she’s cooking up an excuse right now.

“I might have a client up there, I think, if it’s the building I’m thinking of,” Sylvie said.

“Equidecohoozits?”

“No. Well, sort of. Paintings. Copies of the Masters. Subscription service. It’s another sideline. I got a couple of clients like that in that block. What were you doing up there?”

“Seeing a shrink.”

“You crazy?”

“Just nervous. I have trouble sleeping, like.”

“You’re telling me!”

“What do you mean?”

The train stopped. Sylvie slid sideways into Milo, then righted herself as the doors slid open and two women rushed in, business executives, briefcases under their arms, talking about wheat futures. They grabbed a stanchion and braced themselves. The doors clapped shut, and the train lurched forward.

“What did you mean?” Milo said.

“You kept me up half the night, screaming and talking in your sleep.”

“More than the once? What did I say?”

“Who cares? Stick with me, Milo. I’ll teach you how to sleep . . . Let’s move to the next car. I don’t like those two ladies.”

“Did I say something about Dede?”

“Every damn thing you say is about Dede, Milo. Get up and let’s go to the next car. They’re looking at me.”

One of the execs was edging closer. “Moon and Stars? Hey, Moon and Stars! I want to talk to you! I’ve got another deal. Hey!” There was a quality of pleading in the woman’s voice. Sylvie shoved Milo through the passage to the next car, and then the next, brutalizing whoever blocked the way and letting them curse.

“I hate that,” she said at last. “I did something for her when I was still green, and now she won’t leave me alone.”

“What do you mean, everything I say is about Dede?”

“It’s a big city, Milo. You can say whatever you like.”

The train stopped. They squeezed out, pinched between the shoulders of a dozen workers, shoppers, and students, only some of whom, in the subterranean light, looked human. Milo dutifully clutched his suitcase handle, clutched it so hard it made him think of the way he was clutching something else, in his belly, clutching so deep and so hard for so long that he had stopped thinking of it as something he did; instead it had come to seem like something he suffered. They climbed up into a broad, cobbled square separated by a massive archway from a sunlit park.

Sylvie walked briskly. Milo quickened his pace to stay abreast. They passed through the arch, across a meadow the size of a football field, and down a dirt pathway through a clump of trees, until they came in sight of a picnic shelter.

“This is it,” she said. “Employee picnic. Dingsboomps Incorporated or something. Full payment on day of performance. Watch this.”

A few children were running towards them from the shelter. As they came within badgering distance, Milo, hanging back a few yards, saw Sylvie’s suitcase stop in midair while Sylvie herself kept walking, still holding on. Like a tugboat trying to pull the shoreline out to sea, Sylvie suddenly was yanked back. The children giggled. Sylvie scowled. She pulled at the case. It wouldn’t budge. She pushed it. She leaned against it. The children fell down laughing.

Between her teeth, she said to Milo, “Kick it.”

“Huh?”

“Kick it.”

Milo kicked it. The case flew forward, tumbling Sylvie to the ground. Milo rushed to help her.

“You ass,” she said. “This is part of it. Give me your hand.” Befuddled, he did it. Sylvie grabbed, pulling Milo down on top of her, sputtering and flailing. “Whoa!” she said—theatrically. The children howled. They ran to the shelter to get their friends.

Milo lay face down, blinking and huffing, on top of Sylvie, face up, laughing. “You’ll do,” she said. His chest was on top of her chest. He could feel the breasts inside her smock. His legs were on top of hers. Her hair, the little of it that spilled out of the bowler when she tumbled, was in his face.

He scrambled to his feet, tucked his shirt in, wiped his face, recovered the fallen top hat. Sylvie got up. They picked up the suitcases and walked.

“Why do you dress like a boy?” he said.

“Show biz, little man. It’s all showbiz. Why do you?”

Sylvie found the Dingsboomps honcho and set up where he told her to. Inside the “AND ** STARS ***” suitcase there were plastic pipes, tent poles, and colored nylon sheets with sleeves sewn along the hems for the poles and pipes to make a frame. It took fifteen minutes to erect the puppet stage, five of them to shoo away the children and grab back joints and dinguses they’d boosted from Milo’s suitcase.

Once the puppet stage was up, Sylvie was ruthless about keeping kids away. “This is our space, see?” she said to Milo, stooping low in the red light filtering through the nylon. She was hanging puppets and props on hooks backstage. “Nobody but showfolk here, Milo. If Mr. Dingsboomps comes back here, we boot him. If it’s the President of the United States, we boot him. If it’s God Almighty with Saint Peter and Saint Paul . . . what?”

“Huh?”

“What do we do?” she said, exasperated.

“We boot ’em,” Milo said.

“That’s right. You gotta draw the line, Milo. You see what I mean?” She thrust her arm in and out of a few of the puppets hanging upside-down below the stage, practicing transitions. “Go find the guy in the suit and tell him we’re ready. Then come back here with me. Got it?”

“Yuh!” Milo ran.

Sylvie’s puppet show was a Chinese folk tale: Stone Monkey. Milo crouched low and handed her things when she clucked, scowled, or elbowed him. He watched, fascinated.

First, the initial phases of the creation of the universe were enacted: 129,000 years in twelve parts (sixty seconds each) represented by cacophonously squabbling puppets of mouse, bull, tiger, hare, dragon, serpent, horse, goat, monkey, cock, dog, and pig. After another 27,000 years, Sylvie’s Pan Gui smithereened the Enormous Vagueness (a gelatinous blob manipulated by rods and strings). At last, halfway through the show, Stone Monkey was born atop the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit from a rock that Sylvie reported, in the wavering voice of an Ancient Taoist Sage, to be precisely thirty-six feet five inches in height and twenty four feet in circumference.

Rascally Stone Monkey terrorized Heaven and Earth, absconding with various elixirs, virtuous gems, and magic weapons from the Jade Emperor—and anybody else who got in his way. In the end, on a bet with Buddha, he pissed on the Five Pillars at the End Of The Universe—some children applauded, some booed, some giggled nervously—but they turned out to be the Buddha’s fingers. Big Bud grabbed up poor Monkey and imprisoned him in a mountain of iron. Curtain.

The instant the curtain fell, Sylvie said, “Get the money.” In a louder voice, she announced, “Children or others coming within two feet of the puppet stage will be shot,” and she started taking everything apart.

Always, they slept and breakfasted at The Grass and Trees. Supper at Jitsi’s. They did shows a few times a week at places all over town, indoors and out: libraries, loading docks, the beach, the park, a historical society, some rec centers and settlement houses, street fairs, block parties, and a hospital or two. “If they knew what I was,” Sylvie said, “they’d never hire me. But I look like your clean-cut American kid, now don’t I?”

“So what are you, Sylvie?” Milo would say.

“Oh, go fish! When are you gonna show me those wings?”

“Go fish, yourself!”

Milo learned the setup routine and could strike quicker than Sylvie after a while. He started doing a few puppets, notably Lord Buddha and, in Sylvie’s “Trash Show,” a bilious dumpster named Hector. He did chores like filling Monkey’s rubber bladder with water for the piss scene, and velcro-ing the Enormous Vagueness back together after Pan Gui decomposed it. He learned what to say to Sylvie’s patrons, how to accept their money or put them off when they were late setting up.

He enjoyed himself. He got a little suntan. His ribs stopped showing. The hollows around his eyes disappeared. He got to know Jitsi, who called him “Little Man,” because that’s what he heard Sylvie call him.

Sylvie paid Milo part of her take, fivers at first, then tens and an occasional twenty. When they busked, he got half the hat. “For street work,” she said, “we’re strictly partners.” He liked that.

After the first week or so, Milo forgot about investigating the Devore-Sylvie connection. It just didn’t seem so important any more. When Sylvie disappeared, on off days, without explanation or apology, Milo took himself to the zoo, the beach, or the museum. There was never anyone at The Grass and Trees except Milo and Sylvie—and the Monkey King. The owner was on vacation, she said.

Milo would be settling into his fitful night’s sleep, or would wake at an unknown hour—all the hours were dark down there—and hear the Monkey King cudgeling Lord Erlang. “Take that, you shriveled pus bag!” He would creep sometimes to the foot of the stairs to hear it better.

“You can’t fool me, you imbecilic macaque!” Sylvie blustered basso profundo, then squealed as Monkey: “Kowtow, pig-face, or I’ll knock you silly!”

One night Sylvie surprised him by shouting, in her own voice, “Come on up here, Milo. I know you’re awake. You might as well help me with the chase sequence.”

He walked upstairs and saw Sylvie’s puppet theater set up in one of the bay windows, facing in. It was lit eerily from inside—blood red. The puppet theater had been transformed into a weird temple with rows of fluted columns (papier-maché) and stained glass windows (cellophane). The God Erlang, frightening in the red light, appeared in full battle array, carrying a huge lance, huge, that is, in proportion to his own size of ten inches or so.

Suddenly, the opening of the puppet stage closed in on itself. The carpet Erlang stood on lapped at him like a tongue, the columns gnashed like teeth, the procenium was like a lip smacking against the apron. Erlang barely managed to wedge the theatre space open with his lance.

“It’s Monkey’s mouth, Milo,” Sylvie said. She left Erlang there, his head drooping lifelessly on his chain mail. “He’s equideco’ed into a temple, get it?

“First, Monkey turns into a sparrow and Erlang turns into a kite. Then Monkey is a fish, and Erlang is a fish-hawk. When Monkey changes to a water-snake, Erlang turns into a red-crested grey crane. What can Monkey do? He turns into a bustard. Look.” She showed him a thin-billed, long-legged plop of a bird puppet, with an enlarged face retaining a few essentials of Stone Monkey. “That’s the lowest. A bustard’ll let anything hump it—even crows. Promise me you won’t ever be a bustard, flying boy.”

“Huh?”

“Anyway, Erlang shoots him then. So he takes off and turns himself into this temple. See? This flagpole is Monkey’s tail, only I haven’t Sobo glued the hair on yet. This whole thing here is Monkey’s mouth. The windows are his eyes. But Erlang is on to him. He threatens to break the windowpanes. That would blind old Monkey.”

“It’s great, Sylvie! How did you do that?”

“Adhesives,” she said. “Everything is adhesives, Milo, in the show business anyways: duct tape, hot glue, velcro, rivets—this is like my catechism, see?—stuff inside other stuff all over the place. I wanna start doing this story in a week. Sound okay?”

“Teach me.”

“That’s all I wanted to hear.” She led him behind the puppet stage, into the heart of the red glow, and started to fill his hands with odd things.

“Sylvie . . .” he said.

“Yeah?”

“How can Monkey do all that? I mean, what is he supposed to be that he can change into stuff that way?”

She stopped what she was doing and looked at Milo. There was nothing in the entire world outside this small ball of red light, Monkey’s mouth, the jumble of props and puppets, the window glass behind them—“. . . Coffee and Conversation”—Milo’s eyes, Sylvie’s eyes, each other’s eyes in each other’s eyes. “He’s a shapeshifter, Milo. A shapeshifter.”

Inside himself, Milo squeezed: not a tightening, but a pushing together, the way he might squeeze the string together on both sides of a knot, to let more slack in for the undoing. There was no thought before him, but a sort of déjà vu. “Dede . . .” he said.

“. . . Sylvie, you mean.”

“Sylvie, I feel like I want to tell you something.”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of lines to learn here, a lot of cues to get down. Hold this.” She handed him Monkey’s Gold-Banded As-You-Will Cudgel, Weight 13,500 Pounds. She got up and switched on the overhead light. It was a cheap chandelier. The crystals dangled and made little rainbows on Lord Erlang, the puppet heads, masks, and posters on the walls, “SAUT DANS LA VIDE,” and all. They went to work.

There were never any customers, no coffee, no conversation; day after day, the chairs never came off the tables except for Sylvie and Milo. Once, an exterminator showed up with a gas mask, a heavy cylinder, and a spray gun that looked like a sci-fi blaster; Sylvie nearly beat him unconscious, shoving him back out the door, while he waved his Service Orders in pink and blue and protected his private parts.

“Over my dead body,” she said.

“Vegetarian!” Milo shook his head.

“They might be Stone Monkey, flying boy. They might be Franz frigging Kafka. How the hell do you know who the cockroaches are? Go kill, if you want to.” She stalked out and didn’t come back until the dark of the next morning, when she woke him to borrow some cash. It took Milo two days to feel that he had made it up to her.

The fifth week, she taught him how to sleep. She whispered to him in the dark. He let her onto the stage, but not too close: “Milo, there’s a bowl at the bottom of your belly, a big bowl—can you feel it?”

“Uh huh.”

“Well, every time you take a breath, like, the bowl kind of fills up with air. Doesn’t that feel good?”

“I guess.”

“And every time you breathe out, it kind of steams off, like soup steaming into cold air, see? You don’t have to do a thing, little man. Just feel that bowl fill up, and then feel the steam float off it. Watch how it goes out your mouth and nose, and then feel the air coming in there again. Over and over. Because it feels good, that’s all. If you start thinking about something, just go back to the bowl again. Nobody’s keeping track. You don’t have to get past one. Just one . . . one . . . one—see? That’s the real way to count. All those other numbers are a lot of crap. Then, if it’s night, you fall asleep, and if it’s day, you keep awake. Get it?”

“I’ll try it, Sylvie, but I’m scared.”

“Tell me about it, sky jumper boy. Scared!”

“How old are you?” he asked, staring at her with sudden intensity.

“A million.”

“Come on, Sylvie!”

“Seventeen,” she said.

“I’m fifteen. We’re practically the same.”

“Dream on, little man.”

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

“No.”

“Did you ever . . . ?”

“Yes.” Suddenly she took his hand. “Not yet, Milo. It’s too soon. But I feel it too. I think it might happen. Don’t push, okay?”

“Okay.”

She cocked her head at him and bit her lip in a way that melted whatever of Milo remained solid before Sylvie. “What do you see when you look at me, Milo?”

“A girl—what do you mean?”

“When you see the moon and stars, maybe it’ll be time then . . .”

“Sylvie, I want to tell you something about myself.”

She looked away. “I gotta go somewhere. Tell me when I get back . . . Do you have any money? I’m a little short.”

At the beach that day, lying in the sun on a hulk of driftwood, sand dusting his face, fine sea air puffing his shirt and filling his lungs like a sail, Milo breathed. Water welled, sucked, and whispered around him. Waves lapped. The bowl filled and emptied. Thoughts came and went. Inside him, a knot loosened.

Dede was saying, “Milo, how can you be so small?” She was big. She was the Jolly Green Giant. She was King Kong, Mount Everest, the Moon. He felt that he was looking at her the wrong way through a microscope. She flipped him, and he came up heads. She laughed. “I mean, where’s the rest of you, Milo? Don’t worry, I won’t spend you. I wonder what Galileo would say about this. He’s the one who figured out how there are as many square numbers as there are numbers, baby. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 . . . or 1, 4, 9, 16, 25 . . . for each of each there’s one of the other—savvy?—even though the one bunch looks bigger, even though the one bunch is a part of the other. Is that how it is for you, Milo?” She tickled him on the eagle’s breast. “Lots or little, somehow you’re still my little Milo. Don’t you lose something when you turn to a quarter? Don’t you get something when you turn to a blimp? How do you do those change-ums?”

The bowl filled, the bowl emptied. The sea. The wind. A knot inside him came undone. “I’m a shapeshifter!”

The sky darkened. The lake began to glow so intensely blue green, seething in its basin, that it seemed more emotion than liquid. Strati knit the sky shut. Thunder. Milo climbed down from the log, brushed the sand off, and started running. He was supposed to meet Sylvie in front of the bathhouse for a show in the old carousel enclosure.

“When the great world horse pisses, it rains,” Dede had told him once. “Everything is transformations—it says so here in the Upanishads. Wanna hear more?”

“No.” It had frightened him.

Now, just as in Dede’s Upanishads, the rain broke like piss from a tight bladder. It sprayed down. The world horse whinnied. Its eyes flashed. The sand was speckled, then splotched, then rutted, and Milo was spattered with wet sand, splashing, pool to pool, toward the bathhouse. Then the hail began to fall. His scalp tickled. His hair sparkled with hail. When he brushed the tiny hailstones out, his hair crunched.

It only lasted a few moments, and the drumming of rain and hail subsided. He could hear the waves again, breathing back and forth far behind him, and the flag by the bathhouse flapping like a faltering conversation.

Sylvie was pacing back and forth between two pillars at the top of the bathhouse steps, just under the eaves of the roof, protected from the downpour. The broad stone steps were littered with tiny hailstones that crackled under Milo’s feet.

“Sylvie!” he shouted. “I’ve got to tell you something. You’ve got to listen.”

“Look, I’m in a hurry, Milo. There’s a guy waiting on me inside there, and then we still have that show to do.”

“But Sylvie . . .”

A tall wiry man in a Hawaiian shirt strolled out of the men’s door across the landing from Sylvie and Milo. He was balding but meticulously groomed and greased, with sideburns down to his long, heavy jaw. His fingers were covered with rings. “Hey, what’s the holdup now? My client is getting impatient.”

Sylvie turned toward him. “One minute. Just wait inside. I never let you down yet, did I?”

“Okie dokie.” He ducked back in.

“Listen, Milo.” Sylvie was slightly trembling. So was Milo, but Sylvie wasn’t wet. “I’m going to leave in a second, but I need you to stay here. You gotta go in where Lenny is and give him something for me—a box with some stuff inside. Watch him, Milo. Watch that he’s careful with the thing I leave him, okay?”

“Sure, Sylvie . . .”

“Listen. The guy he’s with will do some stuff—it won’t take long—and then Lenny’ll give you some money. And he’ll give you the box back. Make sure you get that box back and everything in it. Mint. Understand?” She handed him something. She had to push it into his hand, because at first he didn’t see it, he had been focusing so intently on Sylvie’s eyes. It was an ice pick.

He didn’t know what to make of it at first. “Sylvie?”

“You won’t have to use it, don’t worry. It’s just in case. You might have to show it to him—that’s the worst it could get. Then he would give you everything and run. Lenny’s not brave like you, jumper boy. Believe me, I know Lenny.”

Milo put the ice pick under his shirt, inside his belt.

“Let Lenny leave. Just stay there by the showers. Make sure he’s gone. Make sure nobody’s around. If anybody’s around, wait till they’re gone. Put the box down on a bench. Come out to the door, and wait. I’ll meet you there in less than a minute, guaranteed.” She took a deep breath and huffed it out.

“Okay,” she said, strictly business now, all the tension turned to purpose. “Turn around, Milo. I gotta do something you can’t see. Then I’ll split, and I’ll leave the package there for you to take in to Lenny. Just turn around, count to twenty, then do what I told you. Get it?”

“Yes, Sylvie.”

“You’re soaking wet, you jerk.” She smiled and tousled his hair. “Don’t you know to come in out of the rain?” Then she pushed his shoulder to make him turn.

“One, two, . . .” Rain dripping from the eaves. His teeth chattered a little. At twenty, he turned around and Sylvie was gone. There was a hatbox on the landing, bound with a red ribbon. Milo picked it up and carried it across the landing and in through the men’s door, hugging it closely to his chest with both arms. The ice pick pricked his thigh a little when he stepped, but it didn’t hurt much.

He didn’t see anyone at first. He was standing in a large, echoey dome with arched passages leading off every sixty degrees or so. The sound of slowly dripping water boomed all around him. He stood near the center trying to figure out which way to go, when he heard a voice: “Psst! Hey, kid! This way!” Milo followed the voice as well as he could.

Moving into one of the small passageways, the quality of sound changed so abruptly that he felt someone had boxed his ears. Or else he was walking inside a seashell, or inside the labyrinth of his own ear. The passage opened into a small, concrete courtyard with showers along the perimeter and a few benches near the middle. The hard floor sloped down toward a drain in the center. Milo looked up. The sky was the color of iron. He was cold.

Suddenly Lenny was at his side. “Surprised you, huh?” He had come from a shower stall beside the entrance. “I had to take a leak. Mr. Jones used the regular facilities. He’ll be right here . . . You a pal of Sylvie’s? She never used you before.”

Milo heard steps echoing behind him. He turned and backed out of the way, toward the benches. Mr. Jones was a thick, crewcut man with a flaccid face. He wore a stiff, white short sleeved shirt that fairly glowed in the stormy light. He squinted and cocked his head at the sight of Milo. “This isn’t a girl.”

Lenny laughed. “So what? So she sent an associate. You’ll notice he’s got the merchandise.”

Jones rolled his eyes. He looked disgusted. “That ain’t all he’s got, Lenny.”

“Huh?”

“This associate here has got a weapon in his belt,” Jones said. Milo looked down around the hatbox to his waist. The soaked shirt was bunched around the handle of the ice pick. Jones stepped toward Milo and extended one hand, palm up. “Give.”

“Come on, kid,” Lenny said. “You don’t need that. We trust each other here. God! I’m sorry, Mr. Jones. The kid doesn’t know how we do business, is all.”

“Sure. So give.”

Milo didn’t move. He looked back and forth between Lenny and Mr. Jones. For some reason, he didn’t feel worried about them. He was worried about something else. Something Lenny had said.

“Sylvie doesn’t use me.”

Lenny smiled. “Tough. Very tough. Very impressive. Okay. Sylvie doesn’t use you. Just give Mr. Jones the knife.”

“It’s an ice pick,” Milo said. He looked straight at Jones. “And I’m keeping it. Sylvie didn’t say anything about giving it to you—unless you try to cheat me.”

“He’s a kid, for crissakes!” Lenny laid a hand on Mr. Jones’s shoulder. Mr. Jones kept his hand extended and his eyes straight on Milo. “Nobody’s got anything to gain by violence here, am I right? Let’s just do our business and adjourn. Okay, Mr. Jones?”

Jones nodded slowly. “I’m not impressed. I’m not pleased. But we’ll let it go, because I respect Lenny, and because I think this little boy would lose his lunch before he pricked anybody with that steel dick. Also, I have a gun . . . So, let’s see the goods.”

Jones stepped back. Lenny gave Milo a sheepish look. Facing Milo, so Jones couldn’t see, Lenny mouthed the words: “He doesn’t have any gun.” Lenny shrugged. Milo held out the box to Mr. Jones. Jones took it from Milo and carried it to one of the benches, where he laid it down and undid the ribbon.

Lenny stayed a few feet back with Milo. “You’re wet, kid. Quite a downpour, huh?”

“Don’t get the box wet,” Milo said to Jones. The wooden bench was damp. Jones shot him a black look and snarled something under his breath. Jones lifted the cover from the round box and laid it down on the bench beside the box itself. He reached in and pulled out a roll of cash. He fanned it, then removed the rubber band around it, pulled out one of the bills and held it at arm’s length to look it over. He did the same thing with a few others, turning them over, flapping them, and pulling them out with a snap. Then Mr. Jones took a magnifying glass from his pocket and examined one of the bills more closely.

He returned the magnifying glass to his pants pocket. He stacked the bills together and bound them with the rubber band again. He put the cash back into the box, closed it and tied the ribbon with the same sort of bow it had had before.

“So?” said Lenny.

Mr. Jones handed the box back to Milo and smiled. He turned to Lenny. “It’s crap.”

“What do you mean, it’s crap? You can’t tell me this is crap. This is the work of a goddam artist. Uncle fucking Sam himself couldn’t tell this stuff from the real thing.”

“I can. It’s crap.”

“You’re trying to weasel a better deal out of me, aren’t you, Harold? You said if this passed muster you’d front me the ten thou. I told you I could guarantee delivery of the rest in two weeks. Okay, you said. Two weeks, you said. Ten thou up front on approval, you said.”

“On approval.”

“There’s nothing wrong with this job. I’m telling you Sylvie’s guy is an artist. He’s a Da Vinci, Harold. Nothing’s wrong with it. What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s off, that’s all. The border’s off. The weave is funny. We won’t work with it. Find another distributer—it’s your funeral.”

“Somebody’s supposed to give me some money,” Milo said.

Jones turned on him, laughing. His face was like bread dough being folded and kneaded. His lips curled back, showing the gums, big and pink, like a horse’s. “What, are you gonna pull out your ice pick now? You an artist too? You gonna make me into an ice sculpture, kid? You guys are a million laughs.”

Jones walked into the passage to the main chamber.

“Harold!” Lenny turned his head to shout after him, but didn’t move an inch. He looked beaten. “Harold! Hey! Wait a minute here! Harold . . . Shit!”

“Are you gonna give me the money?” Milo asked Lenny.

“You’re a real piece of work, kid, you and that cunt of a sister you got.”

“She’s not my sister.”

“Give me the box. Screw Mr. Jones. I’ll find another Mr. Jones.”

“I’m supposed to take the box back to Sylvie. You’re supposed to pay me.”

Lenny grabbed at the hatbox. Milo swung it out of his reach.

“I don’t need this, kid,” Lenny said. “I don’t need your whore sister either, not after this. She screwed up. Give me the damn box. I’ll pay her when I get my advance, see? This is supposed to be our sample. This is supposed to buy me a little time while our printer gets his act together. You see how many people you’re holding up here, kid? Me, the printer, the printer’s family, my family . . .” He was walking forward as Milo walked back, between the benches, toward the far showers. “. . . and Sylvie too. She’s got no use for it, without I get some dough on it for her. Now, gimme.”

Milo was backed against a wall under a showerhead. Lenny took another swipe at the box. Milo reached back and turned on the shower, spraying Lenny full in the face. Milo grabbed the ice pick from his belt. The point gouged Milo’s own stomach, and his soaked shirt reddened. He looked down, uttered a small cry of surprise, and dropped the ice pick.

Lenny stopped sputtering and flailing. He stood still, with the spray pelting his face and plastering his sparse hair down in absurd curls. He stared at the blood welling up along Milo’s belt. He stepped back out of the shower. “Oh, God, what a mess! Kid, you keep it. You keep the damn paper. Tell Sylvie she screwed up. Oh, God! Equidecomposabullshit! I musta been outa my gourd! Tell her this is the last time she does a job for anybody east of Topeka. And get a doctor, kid!” He turned and ran.

“She’s not my sister,” Milo said. He turned off the shower. There was a shallow pool of red before him, pushed outward by the force of the spray and streaming back again toward the drain behind his heels. Like a drunkard navigating one sensum at a time, Milo looked at his right arm and saw that the hatbox was still cradled there, soaked; then he found his feet and walked back to the benches, trailing bloody water.

He laid the box down on a bench. He started back toward the main chamber, but as soon as he entered the passageway, the air filled with bright Paisleys, and he found himself on his knees, gasping. He pulled up his shirt to look underneath. He could see the lip of the wound, where blood oozed. “It’s not so bad,” he said. He slumped down onto his buttocks. He was about to black out, but he forced himself awake. He rolled onto all fours, then stood up, a little at a time. He leaned his shoulder against the wall of the passage and slid along, like a child pulling himself along the gutter of a swimming pool.

He was halfway down the passage when he heard Sylvie’s voice behind him, in the courtyard, among the showers. “Milo! Milo, what happened? Whose blood is this?”

He started to say “Dede’s,” but stopped it before his tongue left his palate. Dede’s blood! He looked at his fingers, and for a moment he thought that they were bloody claws . . .

Dede lies before him, all bloody. Her spasms are like the jerks of a severed frog leg. He looks at his fingers. The claws are just now retracting into his fingertips, the carpal pad receding into a palm, the fur on his forearm turning into the slightest blond down. He cries, and his chin shudders into a gelatinous ooze, pulling upward, shortening, then hardening again, as the fangs recede with a squeak, shrinking into his gums and out of sight. “Dede! Dede! Did I do what you wanted? Dede!” He looks around for help. His knees have softened and recongealed to face the right direction now. The boy he was supposed to kill for Dede, the one who wouldn’t be her lover, is gone. The door has been thrown open and Milo can hear running down the street. “Dede, please say something!” He looks at his bloody fingers . . .

“Mine, Sylvie” he said. “It’s my blood!” There was something hilarious about it. He started to laugh. He turned to look back toward the showers, back to where Sylvie’s voice had come from. The bit of sky he saw had cleared. There was a bright rainbow arching above the concrete wall, blue to red, and a fainter one above it, red to blue. He took one step toward the courtyard, and everything went red, then black.

• • • •

“I’m a shapeshifter, Sylvie.”

“You dope!” She was changing the dressing again. Her face hovered above him. She was biting her lip. He could see that she was working hard not to cry.

“Where are we?” He was lying on a bed made of two chairs pushed together and covered with a white sheet. He had been undressed. He lay naked under another sheet.

“Someplace, that’s all. I took you to a doctor. It’s the first time in my whole life I missed a booking, and it’s your fault, little man.”

“Did I tell you what happened?”

“Yeah. Who needs those crooks, anyway?” She kissed him on the forehead. “Milo . . . you were a champ. I can’t believe how brave you are. I’m sorry I put you in that spot.”

“I’m a shapeshifter, Sylvie. I remember everything. I breathed, and I remembered my sister, Dede. I did stuff for her. I was keys and credit cards and . . . money . . .” He stopped talking. Then he said it again: “The money!”

Sylvie looked away. “I’m sorry.” The room was dark behind her.

“It was you!”

Sylvie shrugged.

“You were the money!” Milo said.

“I do stuff for Lenny sometimes. He had a press going somewhere, all set to turn out fifties, hundreds, deluxe items, Milo, really good work, but they needed some front money. I provided Lenny with a sample, is all. Like a grant application, see? They weren’t ready to print yet. He was just supposed to show it and collect the advance. Then he pays me. Anyway, that was the idea.”

“Was that Lenny Zorn?”

“What?” Sylvie looked at him with a slightly shocked expression, like a hoer who has struck an unexpected rock in a well-cultivated field. “Lenny who . . . ? Wait a minute. How do you know about that? You mean Zorn’s Lemma, don’t you? How did you hear about Zorn’s Lemma?” She stared at him, her mouth hanging open. Slowly, it closed. Her brows descended. She grabbed Milo’s arm. “You little rat! What do you think you are, some kind of a damned spy? You were listening in on me and the doctor, weren’t you? You knew the whole time, didn’t you?”

“You’re a shapeshifter, too,” Milo said, “you and Devore! What do you want from me?”

“God damn you, Milo! What is it with you? You think I want to hurt you? You think I want to use you? What the hell do I need you for? I’m rich as fucking Croesus!”

“You already used me, Sylvie. You nearly got me killed. Why?”

“I needed some money, damn it, that’s all. And you’re the one who nearly got you killed. You stabbed yourself, for pity’s sake! It was a simple setup. Failsafe!”

“You blew the borders, Sylvie. The guy said they were fuzzy.”

“Well, it couldn’t be perfect, could it? The guy would think it was regular dough. You think you could do better?”

Milo knew fifty-dollar bills pretty well. Sylvie insisted on cash from her puppet show patrons, and Milo had been doing most of the collecting lately. They often paid with a fifty, which was a headache for Sylvie to break, but easy for the sponsors to carry. In his mind, Milo could see a fifty-dollar bill as clearly as he could see his own hand. He could look right through it and all around it, on both sides. He felt the pattern of ink on its surface as if it were a network of varicose veins. He felt the rough surface like a hairy pelt, like his own hairy pelt.

Suddenly, he felt the sheets collapse around him, his skin shrivel and implode. He felt as if he were becoming all tongue, and the tongue was sucking an unripe fruit that sucked back at him, drying him out till he winked out of existence entirely. It was very quiet, very dark, very still. Milo was gone. There was only a vague electricity, a tension, slight at first, but it became more and more irritating, until it was unbearable. Then he burst into mundane awareness again, like a frogman bursting above the surface, gasping, shocked by the sudden light and air.

“Damn you,” Sylvie was saying. “Don’t you ever, ever do that again.”

“Don’t tell him that,” a low voice said from behind Sylvie. A door had opened. Light poured in. Someone was walking in, silhouetted in the doorway. Milo could see only that he was a small man and, from the light flashing from his head, that he wore glasses. “His father told him that once. He won’t like to hear that, will you, Milo? Tell the truth now, Sylvie. Was he any good?”

Sylvie was fuming. She swallowed. She breathed. She calmed herself for the small man’s sake. “He’s fabulous. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“That’s what I figured.” The man came closer and put his hand on Sylvie’s shoulder. “You know who I am, don’t you, Milo?”

“Sure,” Milo said. “You’re Dr. Devore.”

“That’s right, Milo. I don’t know much materia medica any more, but I can still do first aid okay. How’s the belly?”

“I’m all right. Do you own The Grass and Trees?”

“You’re a smart boy, Milo. We don’t want to hurt you. We don’t want to use you. In fact, it’s exactly the opposite, you know?”

Now he made out the drapes, the rolltop, the chairs he lay on. “I jumped out that window. I was a bat. I flew down.”

“I didn’t expect that,” Devore said. “I didn’t know you were still here. I wasn’t in a position to know anything at that moment.”

“The doctor was a rainbow,” Sylvie said.

Devore clucked his tongue. “Ach! My small talent!”

“But you called Sylvie,” Milo said.

“Yes, I had already called her to tell her about you, you know? She was on her way here when she saw you fly down. She improvised.”

Milo started to tremble. He shut his eyes, then forced them open again. “Sylvie, Dr. Devore, there’s something I remembered from a long time ago . . .”

Devore cut in, “You don’t have to tell us this, Milo. You don’t have to say anything you’re not ready to say . . .”

“I killed my sister. I killed Dede.” He began to sob.

Sylvie kissed him on the forehead and cradled his head in her arms. “It wasn’t you, little man. It was a mountain lion. You were a little boy! You couldn’t control it! You didn’t know anything! Dede was an operator! She would have used you up and thrown you away like an old Kleenex!”

Devore spoke in his low, soothing voice, the voice that held Milo just this side of panic when he retold his dreams. “We knew, Milo. All that talking in your sleep! We followed the leads. We traced your history, well, up until you disappeared, after your sister’s death.

“Milo, you were no more at fault for Dede’s death than you were for wrecking that car in your dream about the dumpster. For a child as young as you were then, shapeshifting is the same as dreaming, you know? It’s all make-believe!”

“She was my big sister! She took care of me!” Milo’s face, like his throat, was tightening into a knot. “She read to me. She tucked me in at night.”

Sylvie shook her head. “Milo! Milo!”

All at once, it was too much—the arch of Sylvie’s brow, Dr. Devore’s sad smile, the sweet warmth of Sylvie’s hand stroking his head. Milo braved the pain in his stomach and bolted upright. “I’m no good! I’m some kind of monster, is all! You don’t understand!”

Sylvie tried to hold him, but he swung his legs over the side of the makeshift bed and pulled away from her. He flinched and started to double over, then braced himself and ran to the window, clutching the sheet about him. Devore followed him.

Milo pressed his forehead against the glass. “She wanted me to kill that guy. It wasn’t the first time. The guy wouldn’t do what she wanted. I was the only one who always did what she wanted—except just that once. I didn’t mean to kill her, though!”

“You didn’t kill her, you jerk!” Sylvie was crying too now. “It was the goddam mountain lion, Milo! It wasn’t your fault!”

Milo pushed open the window and leaned out. He let his head hang, panting, dripping tears. Tears slid down his nose and cheeks and chin. “I could jump. I deserve it.”

Devore’s hand on his shoulder. “You already tried that, Milo. Inside you, you’re too smart, you’re too good to do that to yourself. When you jump, Milo, you fly! In your heart you know you must live. Dede used you, Milo. You protected yourself.”

“Why are you so good to me? Nobody’s ever been so good to me!” He turned around, trusting them to see his face, so ugly, he thought, with tears and spasms of grief.

“We just want to look out for you, Milo.” Sylvie cupped his cheek, wet with tears, in the palm of her hand, and all at once his ugliness vanished: He didn’t look like anything, he was only this touch, this gazing into Sylvie’s gaze. It wasn’t a shapeshifter’s trick but the most human thing he had ever felt.

“We all look out for one another,” she said. “We’re all finding out what we are, what we can do.”

Like a knot pulled free, Milo’s breath shuddered once, then steadied. The sheet wrapped around him opened slightly: His movement had irritated the wound, and blood trickled below the dressing.

“Take a good look, Sylvie,” Devore said, “and next time you need pin money, ask me.”

“I said I was sorry,” she said, “and I meant it. But I can’t be told what to do, not by you, not by anybody. I got my own plans, you know. Your fellowship won’t take me to Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival or Amsterdam for the Festival of Fools or to the Carnival in Venice or any of those other big venues that are goddam dying to experience the Moon and Stars!” Devore half-smiled, looked down, and shook his head.

Milo blinked. For a split second, Dede was there, pale and doughy. She was lingering in the corner with a hangdog look. She wasn’t as big as Milo used to think, nor as subtle. As his big sister, then as a nameless forbidden dream, she had been mighty: volcanoes, oceans, storming skies, or a hot dry wind. Now she was just a shadow. “You used me, Dede! I was just a baby, and you were my big sister! Oh, Dede, you shouldn’t have done that! That wasn’t right!” Bookish, wan, small-hearted, eaten up by jealousy and desire, she simply faded from view.

Milo had been whispering to himself, he realized. He caught Sylvie and Devore’s eyes on him; they looked away, embarrassed for him perhaps, but Milo didn’t mind that they had heard him. We all look out for one another, Sylvie had said. We! There were others like him! Milo breathed. Milo breathed. He was innocent.

He felt like someone suddenly waking after a long fever and rummaging for food. “Tell me about the painting in the waiting room. Is it . . . somebody?”

“Yes,” said Devore. “I guess you’d have to say so. At least, she was somebody. She seems to be caught in there, like Narcissus staring into the lake. We can’t get her back. Maybe she doesn’t want to come back.”

Milo shut his eyes; tears streamed down his cheeks.

Sylvie squeezed his hand. “Milo . . . ?”

“I was caught like that, Sylvie. I belonged to Dede, even though she was dead. She said I’d be all hers forever.”

“Milo, you’re going to be all yours forever,” said Devore. “We’re going to see to it. We’re going to teach you everything. And you’re going to teach us, too.”

“Yes, I will.” Milo took Sylvie’s other hand in his. He looked at her, then at Devore, then Sylvie again. He had the extraordinary sensation of recognizing himself behind their eyes. “I love you, both of you!” he blurted out.

Sylvie smiled. Her face sparkled so, he thought he was looking at the moon and stars.

© 2000 by Eliot Fintushel.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eliot Fintushel is a performance artist and writer living in Northern California. His novel Breakfast With The Ones You Love is available from Random House. He spends much of his time hiking a mountain, alone with the sky, and examining the space between seeing a thing and “knowing” what it is. Most of Eliot’s short stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction. Many have been anthologized in various Best Of collections. Some can be found in Polish, Czech, Russian, or French. His novella “Izzy and the Father of Terror” was a Nebula nominee; as a result, he received a little rocket pin, which he gave to a reader who had complained about the story, wishing that “the Hale-Bopp comet would come back and take Fintushel with it.” They are now friends.

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

NOVEL EXCERPT: Walk on Earth a Stranger (Greenwillow Books)

Rae Carson | 6,721 words

Chapter One

January 1849

I hear the deer before I see him, though he makes less noise than a squirrel—the gentle crunch of snow, a snapping twig, the soft whuff as he roots around for dead grass. I can hardly believe my luck.

As quietly as falling snow, I raise the butt of my daddy’s Hawken rifle to my shoulder and peer down the muzzle. A crisscross of branches narrows my view. The deer must be allowed to wander into my sights, but that’s all right. I am patient. I am a ghost.

I’ve tucked myself into a deadfall, the result of an ancient, dying oak looming above me. Snow fills the cracks between branches, creating a barrier to the wind. I can barely see out, but I’m almost warm. The snow around me clinks and tinkles like bells, melting in the early morning warm snap. The hem of my skirt and the petticoats underneath are ragged and soaked. If the girls at school saw me now, I’d hear no end of it, but it doesn’t matter. We have to eat.

Which means I have to make this shot. If only I could conjure up fresh game whenever we needed. Now that would be a useful magic.

Finally, a deep, tawny chest and a white throat slide into view. He bends a black nose to the ground, and I glimpse tall, curving antlers—at least three points on each side. His neck is long and elegant, feathered with winter fur. He’s so close I can almost see the pulse at his neck. A beautiful animal.

I pull on the rear trigger—soft, steady pressure, just like Daddy taught me. The click as it sets is barely audible, but the buck’s head shoots up. I refuse to breathe.

I am patient. I am a ghost.

He takes a single dancing step, nose twitching. But I’m downwind, and after a moment he returns to grazing. I shift my finger to the hair trigger. The deadfall blocks my view of his skull, so I aim for the lungs.

It will only take the slightest pressure now, the effort of an exhale.

Church bells clang. The buck startles a split second before my gun cracks the air. He crumbles, flails in the snow, scrambles to his feet, and darts away, tail sprung high.

“Blast!”

I rip off the ramrod from the barrel as I plunge through the windfall. In good conditions, I can load and shoot again in less than half a minute. Though my fingers are chilled, I might still bag him if I’m quick.

Of course, I wouldn’t need to reload if someone was hunting with me, ready with a second shot. Everything’s harder when you do it alone.

I’m reaching into my satchel for my powder horn when crimson catches my eye. Bright red, sinking wet and warm into the snow. He left a puddle where he fell, and a trail of lighter drops to show me the way. I flanked him good.

I follow at a brisk walk, loading as I go—first gunpowder, then a ball nestled in paper wadding, all shoved down the barrel with my ramrod. I won’t waste another shot on the deer, but there’s a big catamount been prowling these hills. In a winter this mild, the scent of fresh blood might even draw a bear. It’s not quite the hungering time—when a critter that’s naught but fur and fangs and ribs will attack a near-grown girl—but I’ll take no chances.

The trail veers sharply to the right. I pass a bloody depression in the snow where the deer’s legs must have buckled again. I stop to load the cap and rotate the hammer carefully into place, then I lift my skirt and petticoats with my free hand and run—smooth as I can so as not to jostle my gun. I have to reach that deer before anything else does. Never bring home meat that’s already been et on, Daddy always says.

The blood trail plunges down a steep bank thick with young birches. Crimson smears their white trunks. My wounded deer is heading toward the McCauley claim, where Jefferson lives with his good-for-nothing da. No sense paying a visit after my hunt because they’re certainly not home. Jeff’s da attends church every single Sunday, no matter what, on the misguided notion that regular bench sitting makes him decent.

The slope ends at a shallow but swift creek. The water’s edge glitters with ice, but the creek’s center runs clear and clean. My boots are well oiled. If I’m quick, I can cross before the water seeps into my stockings. I hitch my skirt and petticoats higher and plunge in.

Midway across, I freeze.

The gold sense sparks in the back my throat, sharp and hard. It creeps down my throat and into my chest, where it diffuses into a steady buzz, like dancing locusts. My stomach heaves once, but I swallow against the nausea. We don’t have enough food in the cellar for me to go wasting a meal.

I force my belly to relax, to embrace the sensation. Best to let it wash over me, through me. Allow it to settle in like an old friend come to stay.

It’s only bad like this the first time I’m near something big. A nugget, usually, but sometimes a large vein. From habit, I close my eyes and focus hard, turning in place to find where the sensation is strongest. If I hit it just right, it will be like a string tugging my chest, like something sucking . . . There. I open my eyes. Just across the creek, behind a young, winter-stripped maple. The blood trail leads in the same direction.

All at once I’m shivering, my feet icy with cold. I splash through the creek and scramble up the opposite bank, which is slick with snowmelt. How long was I standing in the water? It seemed like only moments. I wriggle my toes inside my soaked stockings, hoping I haven’t ruined my boots. We can’t afford another pair right now. Good thing I wore my old hunting skirt. The hem is already a disaster and won’t suffer much from being dragged through the stream.

At the top of the bank, I check my rifle, and it seems dry. At least I had sense enough to not let it dangle in the water. As I step around the maple’s trunk, the gold sense grows stronger, but I ignore it because the deer lies in a small depression banked with bloody snow.

He pushes up with his forelegs, antlered head straining in the opposite direction. I whip up my rifle just in case, but he collapses back into the snow, his sides heaving.

I prop my gun against the tree and pull the knife from the belt at my waist. “I’m so sorry,” I whisper, approaching cautiously. Neck or kidney? He’ll fight death until the very last moment. They always do. I know I would.

His antlers still pose too great a threat for me to slice his jugular. He squirms uselessly as I near, head tossing. It needs to be a quick thrust, aimed just right. I raise the knife.

My hand wavers. The gold sense is so strong now, its buzzing so merciless that I feel it down to my toes. It’s almost good, like being filled with sunshine. It means gold is somewhere within reach.

Deer first, gold later.

I plunge the knife into his left kidney. He squeals once, then goes still. Hot blood pumps from the wound for mere seconds before slowing to a trickle. It steams in the air, filling my nose and mouth with bright tanginess. I’ll have to work fast; if that catamount is anywhere near, she’ll be here soon.

He’s too large for me to carry over my shoulders. I’ll have to skin and butcher him and take only the best parts. The great cat is welcome to the rest, with my blessing.

I place the point of my knife low on his soft white underbelly. The gold sense explodes inside me, so much hotter and brighter than the scent of fresh blood. I can’t help it; I drop the knife and dig furiously at the snow—dig and dig until I’ve reached a layer of autumn rot. Muddy detritus jams under my fingernails, but still I dig until something glints at me. Sunshine in the dirt. Warmth in winter.

The nugget unsticks from its muddy resting place without much effort; this time last year I would have had to dig it out of frozen ground. I scrape away mud with the edge of my sleeve. It’s the size of a large, unshelled walnut and rounder than most nuggets save for a single odd bulge on one side. Must have washed down the creek during last spring’s flood. I gauge its heft in my palm, even as I let my gold sense do its work. Close to 90 percent pure, if I don’t miss my guess.

Worth at least a hundred dollars. More than enough to buy meat to last the winter.

I sit back on my heels, nugget clutched tight, staring at the animal I just killed. I don’t even need it now. Waste not, want not, Mama always says. And Lord knows Daddy could use a fresh venison stew.

Today is my luckiest day in a long time. I shove the nugget into the pocket of my skirt, pick up my skinning knife, and get to work.

• • • •

The sun is rising over the mountains when I finally haul my venison up the stairs of the back porch. Everything I could carry is wrapped in the deer’s own skin, tied with twine. My shoulders ache—I carried it a mile or more—and though I bundled it up tight as I could, my blouse and skirt are badly stained.

“Mama!” I call out. “Could use a hand.”

She bangs out the doorway, a dishrag in her hands. A few strands of hair have already escaped her shiny, brown bun, and the lines around her eyes have gone from laughing to worried.

“Daddy’s not doing so good, is he?” I ask.

Her gaze drops to the bundle in my arms and to the rifle balanced carefully across it. “Oh, bless your heart, Leah,” she says. She shoves the dishrag into the pocket of her apron and reaches out her arms. “Give it here. I’ll get a stew on while you tend your gun and feed the chickens.”

As I hand it over, I can’t help blurting, “There’s more, Mama. I had a find.”

She freezes, and I leap forward to catch the package of meat before it slides out of her arms. Finally, she says, “Been a while. I thought maybe you’d outgrown it.”

“I reckon not,” I say, disappointed in her disappointment.

“I reckon not,” she agrees. “Well, take care of your business, and we’ll discuss it with your daddy when you’re done.”

“Yes, Mama.”

She disappears into the kitchen. I hitch the Hawken over my shoulder and head toward the henhouse. Just beyond it is a break in the trees. We keep the land clear here, so nothing can sneak up on the chickens easily. It’s a good hundred-yard stretch—all the way to the scar tree, a giant pine I use for discharging my rifle. I whip the gun down and cradle the butt to my shoulder. The wind is picking up from the north a bit, so I aim a hair to the right. Best aim I ever saw from such a wee gal, Jefferson’s da once told me, the only compliment I’ve ever heard him give.

Rear trigger, soft breath, hair trigger, boom. Splinters fly into the air as my shot hits its target. The chickens squawk a bit but settle quickly. They’re used to me.

I lean the gun against the side of the henhouse. I’ll clean her while I’m at the table talking with Mama and Daddy. It will give me an excuse to avoid their worried gazes. “You hungry?” I say, and I hear my chickens—who are not nearly as stupid as most people think—barreling toward the door for their breakfast.

I lift the bar and swing open the door, and they come pouring out, squawking and pecking at the toes of my boots, as if this will summon their breakfast even sooner. They forget all about me the moment their feed is scattered on the ground. Except for my favorite hen, Isabella, who flaps into my arms when I crouch. I stroke her glossy black tail feathers while she pecks at the seed in my hand. It hurts a little, but that’s all right.

I have a strange life; I know it well. We have a big homestead and not enough working hands, so I’m the girl who hunts and farms and pans for gold because her daddy never had sons. I’m forever weary, my hands roughed and cracked, my skirts worn too thin too soon. The town girls poke fun at me, calling me “Plain Lee” on account of my strong hands and my strong jaw. I don’t mind so much because it’s better than them knowing the real trickiness in my days—that I find gold the way a water witch divines wells.

But there’s plenty I love about my life that makes it all just fine: the sunrise on the snowy mountain slopes, a mama and daddy who know my worth, that sweet tingle when a gold nugget sits in the palm of my hand. And my chickens. I love my loud, silly chickens.

Only four eggs today. I gather them quickly, brushing straw from their still-warm shells and settling them gently into my pockets. Then I grab my rifle and head inside to face the aftermath of witching up another nugget.

Chapter Two

Daddy always says I was born with a gold nugget in my left hand and a pickax in my right. That’s why Mama had such a hard time birthing me; she had to squeeze a lot more out of her belly than just a bundle of baby girl. The first time I heard it told, I gave my rag doll to Orpha the dog and announced I would never have children of my own.

It didn’t take me long to figure it for a fancy lie, like the one about St. Nicholas bringing presents on Christmas, or how walking backward around the garden three times would keep the aphids out of our squash. But that’s Daddy for you, always telling tall tales.

I don’t mind. I love his stories, and his best ones are the secret ones, the mostly true ones, spoken in whispers by the warmth of the box stove, with no one to hear but me and Mama. They’re always about gold. And they’re always about me.

After shucking my boots and banging them against the porch rail to get off the mud, I walk inside and find Daddy settled in his rocking chair, his big, stockinged feet stretched as near to the box stove as he dares. He starts to greet me but coughs instead, kerchief over his mouth. It rattles his whole body, and I can practically hear his bones shake. He pulls away the kerchief and crumples it in his fist to hide it. He thinks I don’t know what he’s coughing up.

The bed quilt drapes across his shoulders, and a mug of coffee steams on the tree-stump table beside him. The house smells of burning pine and freshly sliced turnips.

“Mama said you found some gold today,” Daddy says calmly as I set my boots next to the stove to dry.

“Yes, sir.” I head back to the table, where I reach into my pocket for the eggs I gathered and set them beside Mama’s stew pot.

He sips his coffee. Swallows. Sighs. “Did I ever tell you about the Spanish Moss Nugget?” he asks. Then he doubles over coughing, and I dare to hope it’s not so violent as it was yesterday.

“Tell me,” I say, though I’ve heard it a hundred times.

Mama’s gaze meets mine over the stew pot, and we share a secret smile. “Tell us,” she agrees. I pull up a chair, then lay my rifle on the table and start taking it apart.

“Well, since you insist. It happened in the spring of ‘35,” he begins. “The easy pickings were long gone by then, and I’d had a hard day with nothing to show. I was walking home creekside, trying to beat the coming storm, when I chanced on a mossfall under a broad oak. A wind came up and blew away the moss, and there she was, bright and beautiful and smiling; bigger than my fist, just sitting there, nice as you please.”

Never in my life have I seen a nugget so big. I’ve heard tales, but I’m not sure I believe them. Still, I nod as if I do.

He says, “But the storm was something awful, and night was falling. I couldn’t get to town to get her assayed, so I brought her home. I showed her off to your mama, then I hid her under the floorboards for safekeeping until the storm passed.”

He pauses to take another sip of coffee. The fire inside the stove pops. As soon as I’m done cleaning my gun, I’ll take off my stockings and lay them out to dry too.

“And then what happened?” I ask, because I’m supposed to.

He sets down his cup and rocks forward, eyes wide with the fever. “When I got up in the morning, what did I see but my own little Lee with that nugget in her chubby hand, banging it on the floor and laughing and kicking out her legs, like she’d found the greatest toy.”

Mama sighs with either remembrance or regret over the first time I divined gold. I was two years old.

He says, “So I re-hid it. This time in the larder.”

“But I found it again, didn’t I, Daddy?” I cover the ramrod in a patch of clean cloth and shove it down the muzzle. It comes out slightly damp, which means I might have faced a nasty backfire the next time I shot.

“Again and again and again. You found it under the mattress, lodged in the toe of my boot, even buried in the garden. That’s when I knew my girl was special. No, magical.”

Mama can’t hold back a moment more. “These are rough times,” she warns as she drops pieces of turnip into the pot. She has a small, soft voice, but it’s sneaky the way it can still a storm. Mostly, the storm she stills is my daddy. “Folks’d be powerful keen to hear tell of a girl who could divine gold.”

“They would, at that,” Daddy says thoughtfully. “Since there’s hardly a lick of surface gold left in these mountains.”

This is why we are not rich, and we never will be. Sure, the Spanish Moss Nugget bought our windows, our wagon, and the back porch addition. But the Georgia gold rush played itself out long ago, and it turns out that not even a magical girl can conjure gold from nothing or lift it from stubborn rock with just her thoughts. We’ve labored hard for what little I’ve been able to divine, and I’ve found less and less each year. Last summer, we diverted the stream and dug up the dry bed until not a speck remained. This year, we attacked the cliff side with our pickaxes until Daddy got too sick.

There’s more gold to be found deep in the ground—my honey-sweet sense tells me so—but there’s only so much two people can accomplish. Daddy refuses to buy slaves; he was raised Methodist, back in the day when the church was against slavery.

Today’s nugget is my first big find in more than a year.

Lord knows we need the money. Which is a mighty odd thing to need, considering that we have a bag of sweet, raw gold dust hidden beneath the floorboards. Daddy says we’re saving it for a rainy day.

But Mama says we hid it because taking so much gold to the mint would attract attention. She’s right. Whenever we bring in more than a pinch or two of dust, word gets out, and strangers start crawling all over our land like ants on a picnic, looking for the mother lode. In fact, I’ve earned my daddy a nickname: Reuben “Lucky” Westfall, everyone calls him. Only the three of us know the truth, and we’ve sworn to keep it that way.

In the meantime, the barn roof is starting to leak; the cellar shelves are still half empty, with the worst cold yet to come; and we owe Free Jim’s store for this year’s winter wheat seed. A big nugget like the one I found could take care of it all. It’s a lucky find, sure, but not so lucky as an entire flour sack of gold dust worked from a played-out claim.

“So, Leah,” Daddy says, and I look up from wiping the stock. He never calls me that. It’s always “Lee” or “sweet pea.”

“Yes, Daddy?”

“Where exactly did you find that rock?”

“By a new deer trail, west of the orchard.”

“I heard the rifle shot. Sounded like it came from a long ways off.”

“Sure did. Longer still before I got him. I nicked him in the flank, and he ran off. I tracked him down the mountain and across the creek to . . . Oh.”

I had crossed over onto McCauley land.

Daddy’s rocking chair stills. “It doesn’t belong to us,” he says softly.

“But we need—” I stop myself. Jefferson and his da need it as bad or worse than we do.

“We’re not thieves,” Daddy says.

“I found it fair and square!”

He shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter. If Mr. McCauley came by and ‘found’ our peaches in the orchard, would it be all right to help himself to a bushel?”

I frown.

“She should put it right back where she found it,” Mama says.

“No!” I protest, and Daddy gives me the mind-your-mother-or-else look. I swallow hard and try to lower my voice, but I’ve never mastered the gentle firmness of Mama’s way. I’m a too-loud-or-nothing kind of girl. “I mean, if we can’t keep it, then the McCauleys should have it. Their cabin is in bad shape, and their milk cow died last winter, and . . . I’ll take it back. I’ll give it over to Jefferson’s da.”

Mama carries her pot to the box stove and sets it on top. “What will you tell him?” she asks, giving the stew a quick stir.

“The truth. That I was hunting, that I tracked my wounded buck onto his claim and chanced upon a nugget.”

Mama frowns. “Knowing Mr. McCauley, the story will be all over town within a day.”

“So? No one needs to know I witched it up.”

She slams the pot lid into place and turns to brandish her wooden spoon at me. “Leah Elizabeth Westfall, I will not have that word in my house.”

“It’s not a bad word.”

“If anyone hears it, even in passing, they’ll get the wrong idea. I know we live in modern times, but no one suffers a . . . that word. There’s no forgiveness for it. No explaining that will help. I know it full well.”

Mama does this sometimes. She alludes to something that happened to her when she was a girl, something awful. But I know better than to press for details, because it won’t get me anything but more chores or an early trip to bed.

“And I’ll not remind the entire town that we send our fifteen-year-old daughter out hunting on the Lord’s Day,” she continues, still waving that spoon. “Our choices are our choices, and our business is our business, but no good will come from throwing it in people’s faces.”

“I’ll take it back,” Daddy says. “I’ll tell him I was the one out hunting.”

“Reuben, you can hardly walk,” Mama says. “No one will believe it.”

“I’ll wait a few days. Let this cough settle. Then I’ll go. Maybe I’ll do it right before heading to Charlotte.”

This is what Daddy tells us every day. That when his cough “settles,” he’ll take to the road with our bag of gold. He’ll have it assayed at the mint in Charlotte, North Carolina, where no one knows us and no one will ask questions.

“Sure, Daddy.” I don’t dare catch Mama’s eye and give space for the worry rising in both our hearts.

I rise from the table and walk with heavy steps to Daddy’s rocking chair. I pull the nugget from my pocket and place it in his outstretched palm. The gold sense lessens as soon as it leaves my hand, and for the briefest moment I am bereft, like I’ve lost a friend.

“Well, I’ll be,” he says breathlessly, turning it over to catch the morning light streaming through our windows. “Isn’t it a beauty?”

“Sure is,” I agree. It’s so much more than beautiful, though. It’s food and shelter and warmth and life.

His bushy eyebrows knit together as he looks at me, straight on. “This nugget is nothing, Lee. Even your magic is nothing. You’re a good girl and the best daughter. And that? That’s something.”

I can’t even look at him. “Yes, Daddy.”

I return to the table to finish cleaning my rifle. It’s a good time for quiet thinking, so I think hard and long. If Mama won’t let us sell our gold dust, and Daddy refuses to let me keep that nugget, then I need to figure out another way to make ends meet.

I pause, my rag hovering over the wooden stock. “I could do it,” I say.

“What’s that, sweet pea?” Daddy says.

“I could take our gold to get assayed in North Carolina. I’ll drive Chestnut and Hemlock. The colts’d be glad for—”

“Absolutely not,” Mama says.

“It’s nice of you to offer,” Daddy says in a kinder tone. “But the road is no place for a girl all alone.”

“You’d be robbed for sure,” Mama adds. “Or worse.”

I sigh. It was worth a try.

Mama’s gaze on my face softens. “You are such a help, my Leah, and I love you for it. But you would do too much if I let you.”

“Tell you what,” Daddy says. “When this cough settles, maybe your mama will let you come with me.”

“Maybe I would,” Mama says unconvincingly.

“I’d like that,” I say.

When this cough settles, when this cough settles, when this cough settles. I’ve heard it so many times it’s like a song in my head.

Maybe I’ll set traps this winter. Maybe we’ll have another big flood, which will give us an excuse to say we found more gold. Maybe our winter wheat will do better than expected. Maybe I’ll escape to Charlotte with that bag of gold and beg forgiveness afterward.

Maybe I’ll become a real witch, who can cast a spell that will keep our barn dry and fill our cellar.

Chapter Three

By morning, the air has warmed enough that fog slithers thick and blue through the creases of my mountains. Because of yesterday’s hunting success, Daddy lets me hitch Peony to the wagon and drive to school.

As soon as I pull up, I can tell something is amiss. Instead of pelting one another with snowballs or playing tag or hoops, the little ones stand clutched together for warmth, holding tight to their dinner pails, speaking in hushed tones. It’s like someone important has died, like the governor. Or even the president. But no, the courthouse flag is not at half-mast.

I hobble Peony and scan the schoolyard for Jefferson. He has a knack for seeing everything around him, and if anyone can speak truth to me, it’s him.

Annabelle Smith, the judge’s daughter, finds me first. “Well, if it isn’t Plain Lee!” she calls out. “Driving to school like the good boy she is.” The girls my age are clustered around her, and they giggle as I approach.

“You seen Jefferson?” I ask.

“Shouldn’t you be out hunting?” Her smile shows off two adorable dimples. God must have a wicked sense of humor to make such a devil of a girl look like such an angel. “Or mucking around in the creek?”

“Please, Annabelle,” I say wearily. “Not today. I just want to talk to my friend.”

Her smile falters, and she indicates a direction with a lift of her chin. “I think he has something you’ll want to see.”

I’m not sure what that means, but I nod acknowledgment and head off toward the outhouse.

Behind it is Jefferson, surrounded by a gaggle of braids and skirts, which is odd because the town girls—even the younger ones—usually avoid him. He stands at least a head above them all; tall enough so the hem of his pants sits high, revealing feet that are bare, even in winter; he must have outgrown his boots again. His face is framed by thick, black hair and a long, straight Cherokee nose he got from his mama. An old bruise yellows the sharp line of his cheekbone.

He sees me, and waves a bit of paper. He extricates himself from the girls and meets me halfway, at the entrance to the small white clapboard that serves as our schoolhouse. The girls eye me warily, but they don’t follow.

“It’s gold, Lee,” he blurts before I can open my mouth to ask. “Discovered in California.”

My stomach turns over hard. “You’re sure?”

He hands me a newspaper cutout. It’s already smudged from too many fingers, and it’s dated December 5, 1848—more than a month ago.

“President Polk announced it to Congress. So it has to be true.”

Thoughts and feelings tumble around too hard and fast for me to put a name to them. I sink down on to the slushy steps, not caring that my second-best skirt will get soaked, and I rub hard at my chin. Gold is everywhere. At least a little bit of it. How much gold would it take for the president to make a special announcement?

“Lee?” he says. “What are you thinking?” His usually serious eyes blaze with fever, a look I know all too well. A look that might be mirrored in my own eyes.

“I’m thinking you’re going to head west, along with this whole town.” That’s why everyone’s so somber. Dahlonega was built on a gold rush of its own, and every child for miles will understand that change is coming, whether they want it to or not.

He plunks down beside me, resting his forearms on skinny knees that practically reach his ears. “They’re saying the land over there is so lush with gold you can pluck it from the ground. Someone like me could . . .”

Silence stretches between us. He hates giving voice to the thing that hurts his heart most; he hardly even talks about it to me. Jefferson is the son of a mean Irish prospector and a sweet Cherokee mama who fled with her brothers ten years ago when the Indians were sent to Oklahoma Territory. Not a soul in Dahlonega blamed her one bit, even though she left her boy with his good-for-nothing da.

So when Jefferson says “someone like me,” he means “a stupid, motherless Injun,” which is one of the dumber things people call Jefferson, if you ask me, because he’s the smartest boy I know.

“Daddy will want to go,” I whisper at last. And I want to go too, to be honest. Gold is in my blood, in my breath, even in the flecks my eyes, and I love it the same way Jefferson’s da loves his moonshine.

But, Lord, I’m weary. Weary of trying to be as good to Daddy as three sons, weary of working as hard as any man, weary of the other girls scorning me. And I’m weary of bearing this troubled soul, of knowing things could go very badly if someone learned about my gold-witching ways. If we moved west, to a place where there was still gold to be had, it would start all over again, harder and more troublesome than before.

Then again, maybe California is a place where a witchy girl like me wouldn’t need an explanation for finding so much gold. Maybe it’s a place where we can finally be rich.

“Da will want to go,” Jefferson says. “But we don’t have enough money to put an outfit together. Look at this.”

He unfolds the newspaper, and the bottom of the article is a list of all the items a family needs to go west: four yoke of oxen, a wagon, a mule, rifles, pistols, five barrels of flour, four hundred pounds of bacon . . .

“That’d cost more than six hundred dollars,” I say.

“For a family of three, like yours. But even one person needs at least two hundred.” He shakes his head. “There’s got to be a different way.”

I know from his tone, as surely as I know Mama’s locket doesn’t contain a lick of brass, that Jefferson wants to go west more than anything. “You’re going to run away,” I say.

“Maybe. I don’t know.” He scuffs his bare foot against the step, sending a wave of sludge over the edge. “I could take the sorrel mare. Hunt my way there. Or work for somebody else, taking care of their stock. It’s just that . . . It’s just . . .”

“Jeff?” I peer close to try to figure him. He has a wide mouth that jumps into a smile faster than lightning. But there’s nothing of smiling on his face right now.

“Remember the year the creek dried up, and we caught fifty tadpoles in the stagnant pool?” he says softly.

“Sure,” I say, though I have no idea why he’d bring it up. “I remember you dropping a handful down my blouse.”

“And I remember you screaming like a baby.”

I punch him in the shoulder.

He jerks backward, staring at me in mock disapproval. “Your punches didn’t used to hurt so much.”

“I like to get better at things.”

His gaze drifts far away. Rubbing absently at his shoulder, he says, “You’re my best friend, Lee.”

“I know.”

“We’re too old for school. I only come to see you.”

“I know.”

All at once he turns toward me and grasps my mittened hands in his bare ones. “Come west with me,” he blurts.

I open my mouth, but nothing comes out.

“Marry me. Or . . . I mean . . . We could tell people we’re married. Brother and sister, maybe! Whatever you want. But you’re like me. With your daddy sick, I know it’s really you working that claim, same way I work Da’s. I know it’s your own two hands as built that place up.” His grip on my hands is so tight it’s almost unbearable. “This is our chance to make our own way. It’s only right that—Why are you shaking your head?”

His words brought a stab of hope so pure and quick it was like a spur in the side. But now I’ve a sorrow behind my eyes that wants to burst out, hot and wet. Jefferson is right: I’m the one who makes our claim work. But he doesn’t know how much.

“Leah?”

I sigh. “Here’s where you and I are different. I love my mama and daddy. I can’t leave them. And yes, it’s my claim as much as anyone’s. I’m proud of it. I can’t leave it neither.”

He releases my hands. Together, we look out over the snow-dusted yard to find the others staring at us. They saw us holding hands, for sure and certain. But we ignore them. We’re used to ignoring them.

“You might not have a choice,” he says. “If your daddy wants to go to California—”

That stab of hope again. “Mama will convince him not to. He’s too sick.”

“But if you go—”

The school bell peals, calling us inside.

“We’ll talk later,” I say, more than a little glad to let the subject go. I’ve lots of thinking to do. In fact, I do so much thinking during the next hours that I’m useless for helping the little ones with their sums, and when Mr. Anders calls on me to recite the presidents, I mix up Madison and Monroe.

I drive home as soon as school lets out, not bothering to say bye to Jefferson, though I wave from a distance. I need to get away, and fast, find some open air for laying out all my thoughts about California and gold and going west, not to mention the stunning and undeniable fact that Jefferson just asked me to marry him.

As offers go, it’s not the kind a girl dreams about while fingering the linens from her hope chest. I’m not even sure he meant it, the way he stumbled over it so badly.

I’ve thought about marriage—of course I have—but no one seems to have taken a shine to me. It’s no secret I spend my days squatting in the creek bed or hefting a pickax or mucking the barn, that I have an eagle eye and a steady shot that brings in more game than Daddy ever did, even during his good spells. I might be forgiven my wild ways if I was handsome, but I’m not. My eyes are nice enough, as much gold as brown, just like Mama’s. But I have a way of looking at people that makes them prickly, or so Jefferson says, and he always says it with a grin, like it’s a compliment.

One time only did I mourn to Daddy about my lack of prospects. He just shrugged and said “Strong chin, strong heart,” then he kissed me quick on the forehead. I never complained again. My daddy knows my worth.

I suppose Jefferson does too, and my heart hurts to think of him leaving and me staying. But the truth is I’ve never thought of him in a marrying kind of way. And with an awful proposal like that, I don’t know that Jefferson’s too keen on the idea either.

A gunshot cracks through the hills, tiny and miles distant. A minute later, it’s followed by a second shot. Someone must be out hunting. I wish them luck.

By the time my wagon comes in view of the icy creek and the faint track that winds through the bare oaks toward home, I decide there’s no help for it but to talk everything out with Mama and Daddy. We share secrets among ourselves, maybe, but we have none from one another.

Peony tosses her head, as if sensing my thoughts. No, it’s the surrounding woods that have put a twitch in her. They are too silent, too still.

“Everything’s fine, girl,” I say, and my voice echoes back hollowly.

As the leafless trees open up to reveal our sprawling homestead, right when I yell “Haw!” to round Peony toward the barn, something catches my eye.

A man’s boot. Worn and wrinkled and all alone, toppled into a snowbank against the porch.

“Daddy?” I whisper, frozen for the space of two heartbeats.

I leap from the bench, and my skirt catches on the wheel spoke, but I rip right through and sprint toward the house. I don’t get far before I fall to my knees, bent over and gasping.

Because Daddy lies on his back across the porch steps, legs spread-eagled, bootless. Crimson pools beneath his head and drips down the steps—tiny rapids of blood. His eyes are wide to the sky, and just above them, like a third eye in a brow paler than snow, is a dark bullet hole.

© 2015 by Rae Carson.

Excerpted from Walk on Earth a Stranger by Rae Carson.

Published by permission of the author and Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Published by permission of the author and Greenwillow Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rae Carson is the New York Times bestselling author of the Girl of Fire and Thorns fantasy trilogy. She was an Andre Norton Award finalist and a William C. Morris Award finalist, and was named to ALA’s Top Ten Best Fiction for Young Adults list. Her books have appeared on multiple state reading lists and been translated into a dozen languages. She lives in Arizona with her husband and occasional co-author C.C. Finlay.

NOVEL EXCERPT: The Traitor Baru Cormorant (Tor Books)

Seth Dickinson | 1,967 words

Trade season came around again. Baru was still too young to smell the empire wind.

The Masquerade sent its favorite soldiers to conquer Taranoke: sailcloth, dyes, glazed ceramic, sealskin and oils, paper currency printed in their Falcrest tongue. Little Baru, playing castles in the hot black sand, liked to watch their traders come in to harbor. She learned to count by tallying the ships and the seabirds that circled them.

Nearly two decades later, watching firebearer frigates heel in the aurora light, she would remember those sails on the horizon. But at age seven the girl Baru Cormorant gave them no weight. She cared mostly for arithmetic and birds and her parents, who could show her the stars.

But it was her parents who taught her to be afraid.

In the red autumn evening before the stars rose her fathers took Baru down to the beach to gather kelp for ash, the ash meant for glass, the glass for telescope lenses ground flat by volcanic stone, the lenses meant for the new trade. When they came to the beach Baru saw Masquerade merchant ships on the horizon, making a wary circuit around Halae’s Reef.

“Look, das,” Baru said. “They’re coming in for the Iriad market.”

“I see them.” Father Salm shaded his eyes and watched the ships, peeling lips pressed thin. He had the shoulders of a mountain and they corded as he moved. “Go fill your bucket.”

“Watch.” Father Solit, keen-eyed, took his husband’s hand and pointed. “There’s a third ship. They’re sailing in convoys now.”

Baru pretended to dig for kelp and listened.

“Pirates make a good excuse for convoy,” Salm said. “And the convoy makes a good excuse for escort.” He spat into the surf. “Pinion was right. Poison in that treaty.”

Watching their reflections, Baru saw Solit take Salm’s shoulder, callused hand pressed against his husband’s bare strength. Each man wore his hair braided, Solit’s burnt short for the smithy, Salm’s an elaborate waist-length fall—for glory in the killing circle, against the plainsmen.

“Can you see it, then?” Solit asked.

“No. It’s out there, though. Over the horizon.”

“What’s out there, Da?” Baru asked.

“Fill your bucket, Baru,” Salm rumbled.

Baru loved her mother and her fathers dearly, but she loved to know things just a small measure more, and she had recently discovered cunning. “Da,” she said, speaking to Solit, who was more often agreeable. “Will we go to Iriad market and see the ships tomorrow?”

“Fill your bucket, Baru,” Solit said, and because he echoed Salm instead of indulging her, Baru knew he was worried. But after a moment he added: “Grind your glass tonight, and we’ll have enough to sell. You can come along to Iriad, and see the ships.”

She opened her mother’s hand-copied dictionary that night, squinting at the narrow script in the candlelight, and counted through the letters of the Urunoki alphabet until she came to convoy—a caravan, or a group of ships, gathered for mutual protection, especially under the escort of a warship.

A warship. Hm.

It’s out there, father Salm had said.

From the courtyard of their ash-concrete home came the shriek of stone on glass and the low worried voices of her mother and fathers, a huntress and a blacksmith and a shield-bearer. Worrying about the treaty again.

She looked that word up too, hoping to understand it, as understanding gave her power over things. But she did not see how a treaty could be poison. Perhaps she would learn at the Iriad market.

Baru put her mother’s dictionary back and then hesitated, fingers still on the chained stitches of the binding. Mother had a new book in her collection, bound in foreign leather. From the first page—printed in strange regular blocks, impersonal and crisp—she sounded out the title: A Primer in Aphalone, the Imperial Trade Tongue; Made Available to the People of Taranoke For Their Ease.

There was a copy number in the bottom corner, almost higher than she could count.

• • • •

Where the sea curled up in the basalt arms of the Iriad cove, beneath the fields of sugarcane and macadamia and coffee that grew from the volcanic loam, the market preened like a golden youth.

Since a time before Baru could remember how to remember the market had filled the Iriad docks, the most noisy and joyous thing in the world. There were more ships in harbor this year—not just Taranoki fishers and felucca, not just familiar Oriati traders from the south, but tall white-sailed Masquerade merchant ships. With their coming the market had outgrown the boardwalks and drifted out onto bobbing floats of koa and walnut where drummers sounded in the warmth and the light.

Today Baru went to market with a new joy: the joy of plots. She would learn what troubled her parents, this knot of warships and treaties. She would repair it.

Her family went by canoe. Baru rode in the prow while mother Pinion and father Salm rowed and father Solit kept nervous watch over the telescopes. The wind off the sea lifted flocks of scaups and merganser ducks, gangs of bristle-throated alawa giving two-toned calls, egrets and petrels and frigatebirds, and high above great black jaegers like wedges of night. She tried determinedly to count them and keep all the varieties straight.

“Baru Cormorant,” mother Pinion said, smiling. In Baru’s eyes she was a coil of storm surf, a thunderbolt, as slow and powerful as sunlight. Her dark eyes and the teeth in her smile were the shapes that Baru imagined when she read about panthers. She worked her oar in strokes as smooth and certain as the waves. “It was a good name.”

Baru, warm and loved and hungry to impress with accurate bird-count, hugged her mother’s thigh.

They found a quay to unload the telescopes and the market swept up around them. Baru navigated the crowd of knees and ankles, trailing behind her parents because the commerce distracted her. Taranoke had always been a trading port, a safe island stop for Oriati dromons and islander canoes, so Baru grew up knowing a little of the structure of trade: arbitrage, currency exchange, import and export. We sell sugarcane and honey and coffee and citrus fruits, Mother Pinion said, and buy textiles, sailcloth, kinds of money that other traders want—Baru, pay attention!

Lately she always paid attention. Something fragile had come into the air, a storm smell, and not understanding made her afraid.

The market smelled of cooked pineapple and fresh ginger, red iron salt and anise. Through the drums and the calls of the dancers and the shouts of the audience in Urunoki and Oriati and the new trade tongue Aphalone came the ring of hard coin and reef pearl changing hands.

“Soliiiiit,” Baru called. “I want to see—!”

“I know.” Solit spared a smile from his work. He had been a smith, and he was generous to everything he made, including Baru. “Go wander.”

Excellent. Now she would pursue the true meaning of treaty.

She found a foreign trader’s stall painted in Masquerade white. The man who watched over the piled broadcloth—woven from sheep, which she understood were large dull beasts made entirely of hair—could have passed for Taranoki from a distance, though up close the different fold of his eyelids and flat of his nose gave him away. This was the first impression Baru had of the Falcrest people: stubborn jaws, flat noses, deep folded eyes, their skin a paler shade of brown or copper or oat. At the time they hardly seemed so different.

The man looked bored, so Baru felt no qualms about climbing up onto his stall. He had guards, two women with shaved heads and sailors’ breeches, but they were busy trying to bridge the language barrier with a young Taranoki fisherman.

“Hello, dear,” the man in the stall said. He moved a stack of samples and made a space for her. Baru made curious note of his excellent Urunoki. He must be a very dedicated trader, or very good with tongues—and cultures too, because traders did not often understand how to be friendly on Taranoke. “Do your parents need cold-weather cloth?”

“Why are they bald?” Baru asked, pointing to the guards. By gesture or prodigious linguistic skill, they had made their fisherman friend blush.

“There are lice on ships,” the merchant said, looking wearily out into the market. He had heavy brows, like fortresses to guard his eyes. “They live in hair. And I don’t suppose your parents need cloth, given the climate here. What was I thinking, trying to sell broadcloth here? I’ll go home a pauper.”

“Oh, no,” Baru assured him. “We make things from your cloth, I’m sure, and besides, we can sell it to traders headed north, and make a profit. Do you use the paper money?”

“I prefer coin and gem, though when I buy, I’ll pay in paper notes.”

He had to his left a stack of sheepskin palimpsest—ink-scratched records that could be scraped clean and used again. “Are those your figures?”

“They are, and they are certainly too important to show to you.” The broadcloth merchant blew irritably at a buzzing fly. “Do your parents use paper money, then?”

Baru caught the fly and crushed it. “No one used it at first. But now that your ships come in so often, everyone must have some, because it can buy so many things.” Then she asked about something she already knew, because it was useful to hide her wit: “Are you from the Masquerade?”

“The Empire of Masks, dear, or the Imperial Republic, it’s rude to abbreviate.” The man watched his guards with a paternal frown, as if afraid they might need supervision. “Yes, that’s my home. Though I haven’t seen Falcrest in some years.”

“Are you going to conquer us?”

He looked at her slowly, his eyes narrowed in thought. “We never conquer anyone. Conquest is a bloody business, and causes plagues besides. We’re here as friends.”

“It’s curious, then, that you’d sell goods for coins and gems, but only buy with paper,” said Baru. The shape of her words changed here, not entirely by her will: for a few moments she spoke like her mother. “Because if I understand my figures, that means you are taking all the things we use to trade with others, and giving us paper that is only good with you.”

The broadcloth merchant watched her with sudden sharpness.

“My parents are scared,” Baru added, embarrassed by his regard.

He leaned forward and abruptly she recognized his expression, from markets and traders past. It was avarice. “Are your parents here?”

“I’m fine alone,” she said. “Everyone here knows everyone else. I can’t get lost. But if you want to buy a telescope—”

“I crave telescopes,” he said, perhaps thinking she had never heard of sarcasm. “Where are they?”

“Up there,” she said, pointing. “My mother is the huntress Pinion, and my fathers are Solit the blacksmith and Salm the shield-bearer.”

At that his mouth pursed, as if the idea of fathers troubled him. Perhaps they had no fathers in Falcrest. “And you?”

“My name’s Baru,” she said, as names were gladly given on Taranoke. “Baru Cormorant, because a cormorant was the only thing that made me stop crying.”

“You’re a very clever girl, Baru,” the merchant said. “You’re going to have a brilliant future. Come see me again. Ask for Cairdine Farrier.”

When he came to speak to her parents later, he could not seem to stop looking at her fathers, and then her mother, and pursing his lips as if he had swallowed his own snot. But he bought two telescopes and a set of mirrors, and even wary Salm was happy.

© 2015 by Seth Dickinson.

Excerpted from The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson.

Published by permission of the author and Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Seth Dickinson’s short fiction has appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among others. He is an instructor at the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers, winner of the 2011 Dell Magazines Award, and a lapsed student of social neuroscience. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. The Traitor Baru Cormorant is his first novel.

Interview: Ken Liu

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy | 4,069 words

Ken Liu, one of science fiction’s most popular short story writers, has translated many works of Chinese science fiction into English, including the best-selling novel The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. Ken’s first novel, The Grace of Kings, is an epic fantasy inspired by Chinese history.

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 interview or other episodes.

Why don’t you tell us how you first got interested in reading fantasy and science fiction?

The first science fiction work I read was the Chinese translation for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, which turned into Blade Runner. I thought that was a fascinating story. I like Arthur C. Clarke, and Ursula Le Guin, like pretty much everybody.

When did you start writing your own fiction?

I started submitting for publication in college and didn’t have much success until much later.

Were you submitting to the science fiction magazines at that time?

I submitted to all sorts of places. I didn’t really know the industry very well, so I was just submitting to the magazines I’d heard of, like Asimov’s, F&SF, and Analog.

You actually first got published in the Phobos fiction contest, right?

Phobos was a company that started to focus on publishing anthologies of short fiction, and I think they wanted to develop them into media properties. I submitted to them and I was one of the first winners for their first contest, and that was my debut story at a professional rate.

When we met the first time, we talked about how I also had two stories in that anthology; were you involved with all the stuff with the weird contract with that anthology?

Very peripherally. I remember that the contract they sent us at first was not writer-friendly, and writers were talking to each other and we said, “We need to get them to offer us better terms.”

For people who may not know, the standard short story contract is three-quarters of a page, very straight forward, and this was a twenty-page contract and it involved film and video game rights and all sorts of things. I think their heart was in the right place, but they just didn’t know what was standard in publishing. But I can just imagine: This is your first short story being published; getting this twenty-page contract must have been pretty intimidating.

I had no sense of which rights were reasonable to ask for and which were not. So I read it like any other contract and it felt okay; it wasn’t until the other writers wrote to everybody and said, “This doesn’t really make sense” that I said, “Oh, okay.”

How about what happened after that, in terms of short stories? You started selling quite a few after that?

Not right away. I had one other sale to Writers of the Future, and then maybe one to Strange Horizons. And then I couldn’t sell anything at all. I wrote one story called “Single-Bit Error,” and I thought that was the best thing I’d ever written, but I could not get it accepted anywhere. I think I got thirty rejections. So I gave up, because I got obsessed with that story and I couldn’t sell it. I stopped writing for a few years. It’s not until many years later that “Single-Bit Error” finally did get published.

Where did that story appear?

An anthology called Thoughtcrime Experiments, which is focused on, amusingly, stories that had been rejected many times.

Was it after that that you really started getting on this roll with the short fiction?

After that, I started writing more; it was a couple more years before I started selling at a regular clip.

At this point, you’ve published dozens of stories, right?

I crossed over the hundred mark sometime last year.

Which of those would you say have gotten the most attention, or been the best received by readers?

That’s hard to say, because there are many ways to measure it. For example, “The Paper Menagerie” is a story that won the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy award and has been reprinted a lot, so it gets a lot of exposure, but I don’t know that’s the one readers like the most. I certainly get a lot of positive comments about it, but I tend to think that’s because it was reprinted so many times. The story that I thought was the best is called “The Man Who Ended History,” and that was a Nebula and Hugo nominee for novella in the same year. That one did not get nearly as much attention, but I think it’s my best work to date in short fiction.

I want to mention, for listeners, that a collection of your short stories will be coming out later this year called The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. You want to say a bit about that?

This will be my first English short fiction collection. There’s a total of fifteen stories; many of them are award nominees or winners and a lot of them have been collected in Year’s Best anthologies. My editor, Joe Monti, and I wanted to pick sample stories that represented what I was interested in writing, and what I liked and thought I was good at writing about; a variety sampler pack for people who are not familiar with my short fiction. There’s also a new story in it that I wrote specifically for the collection, which I’m very proud of. I hope readers will enjoy it.

Let’s talk about your first novel, The Grace of Kings. How did this book come about?

I was writing a lot of short fiction but I wanted to move into writing novels, and I didn’t have a good subject in mind. I was looking through my short stories to see if there was something that piqued my interest. My wife, Lisa Tang Liu, said, “You and I both have very vivid memories of these historical Chinese dramas based on legends and facts from Chinese history. Maybe you can do something with that, but in a way that feels true to you.” I thought that was a really good idea, because I do remember those were my favorite stories when I was growing up. I ended up deciding to pick one of these historical periods, the Chu-Han contention, which is the fall of the Qin Dynasty and the rise of the Han in about 200 BC. I said, “I’m going to take this period of history—when a lot of heroes were rising up all around China; it was a time of war, of great change and social contention—and try to reimagine the story as a Western epic fantasy, and create a whole new world with new cultures and people in it.”

Tell us about the fantasy world that you created in this novel; what are some of the original spins that you put on this story?

I want to be clear: I didn’t set out to write a “magical China” story; I think they are difficult to do well, and the way that China has been described in Western narratives—the way the West perceives it—makes it hard to tell a story that will escape the stereotypes and allow people to perceive it fresh.

I decided to create a new fantasy world inspired by East Asia, and China in particular, but not directly analogous to it. Instead of a continental country, Dara, my fantasy world, is an archipelago and a place of magic as well as technology. The technology aesthetic that I’m going for is what I call Silkpunk, which is analogous to Steampunk. Steampunk is the idea of extending the Victorian era technology and aesthetics to an alternative path not taken, so Silkpunk is one where I take the technology inspirations of classical China, like kites used for military endeavors and signaling, very powerful mechanical vehicles of various sorts, all these inventions that are described or imagined, and blow them up, turn them down an evolutionary path I think they would have taken if they were allowed to develop. So this is a world in which there are magical creatures—giant sea beasts, books that can read minds, people who use smoke to read peoples’ hearts—as well as technological wonders like battle kites, giant airships that are propelled by oars through the air instead of propellers, and underwater boats. All these are based on either direct East Asian analogues or extensions of what was done. It’s a fun tech-fantasy world that I think people will enjoy.

Tell us about the heroes of this story, because there are two main protagonists: Kuni Garu and Mata Zyndu.

They are two men that represent polar opposite qualities. Kuni Garu is a commoner who isn’t ambitious; he doesn’t care about learning or climbing up the social ladder. He just wants to have fun and do the “interesting thing.” Mata Zyndu is the descendant of a very important and powerful family of nobles who have always been great generals in Dara. At the beginning of the novel we find out that the islands of Dara, which had been divided into separate kingdoms, were forcibly united by one of them and the new Emperor has a very harsh rule.

What Mata wants to do is restore the world to how it used to be, with separate kingdoms, whereas Kuni wants to see if he can make his life a little better and help the people he loves live more interesting and happier lives. These two unlikely protagonists become leaders in a subsequent rebellion against the Empire. They get together and it turns out they’re good friends, because their strengths and weaknesses complement each other. The story is about their friendship and their rise together against the Empire, until, as they near success, they find that their different ideals about how the world can be made more just and better are utterly incompatible.

In addition to these two characters, there are a lot of other characters in the book—including, interestingly, a tax collector named Kindo Marana. You have a background as a tax attorney of some sort, and I was wondering as to what extent your background played a role in that character and other tax related stuff.

I was a tax attorney for something like seven years. I was a tax geek; I was really into it. Tax is one of those things that people think is incredibly boring, but like any kind of science about systems, once you get into it, it becomes incredibly intricate and interesting. Because I love tax, tax topics feature a lot in my fiction. I once wrote a science fiction short story centered around the idea of an alien tax code, and the idea that you can understand the society by parsing its tax code.

The Grace of Kings is an epic fantasy that’s distinguished by the fact that it is the most tax driven. My pitch would be that if I can make tax interesting to you, the fun stuff will be really fun. Kindo Marana is sort of a joke; he’s a tax collector who turns into a very important general, and that’s based on real history. What I wanted to explore in the book is what kind of skills are really useful. It turns out that, when you look at everything through a tax-colored lens, you begin to think of everything in terms of logistics and planning and systems, and military strategy is really about systems hacking. I ended up finding really interesting parallels between the two.

The thing that sticks out most about the taxes is that there’s this part where they’re having trouble getting people to pay their taxes, and they come up with the idea to do a lottery. Where did that idea come from?

That was based on a real tax scheme tried out in one part of China. Small businesses, like restaurants, tend to have a convoluted history with tax authorities; they engage in various tricks like being a cash-only business, or keeping two sets of books, to not report their income accurately. In the book, where the small businesses of Zudi are not willing to pay taxes to their new Duke because they think he may not be there very long, Kuni comes up with this scheme where he holds a lottery for the citizens. But the citizens can’t by tickets directly from the government; instead, they get it as a receipt when they purchase items from vendors, and they get lottery tickets based on the amount they spend. And the vendors would have to purchase the lottery tickets from the government, so in this way, it forces the merchants to be honest, because every customer now has an incentive to demand these lottery tickets as a receipt. The vendors can no longer hide their income, the more they sell, the more they have to purchase, and therefore pay in taxes. It’s a clever way to align the incentives of the general populace with the government.

Another character that really struck me was Zato Ruthi. There’s a really interesting portrayal of scholars and intellectuals in this book; tell us about that character.

He’s a scholar who ends up being king, through a series of accidents. The portrayal of scholars is pretty critical to the book; that’s another thing that distinguishes this from an epic fantasy that derives from a more magical medieval Western Europe tradition. Scholarship has always been respected in classical China, and the kind of classical learning that they specialized in was often valorized to a degree that it wasn’t in medieval Europe. I wanted to preserve that feel, and so this is a society in which scholarship is a way for you to ascend in the world by being able to serve in the Imperial bureaucracy.

Zato Ruthi was a brilliant scholar, but he didn’t want to go serve the Imperial bureaucracy; he wanted to go into the woods by himself and start contemplating how to make the world better. Through a series of accidents, he becomes a figurehead for the revolution that was held, so he becomes the king of one of the Tiro states, not because he wanted to, but because he was a compromise candidate that all the political interests in question could agree on. And it turns out that he was a terrible king, because his ideas about what is moral and what is the right thing to do are incompatible with political and military realities.

It was making me think of how Plato thought that the world should be rule by philosopher-kings.

Exactly. And if you did implement Plato’s Utopia, that’s what would happen.

His thoughts are too much philosophy and not enough pragmatism.

He has this idea that, “This is the way things ought to be; the way the world should function. So I’m just going to do things as though we live in that world. We’re going to ignore the fact that in this world there are people who are selfish and interested in winning instead of doing ‘the right thing.’” It turns out to be a disaster.

On the other end of that, getting into the pragmatism, there’s Garu, who’s generally a nice guy but he’s come into political power and now he has to deal with some of these issues. There’s a scene that’s right out of Machiavelli—I don’t know if you were intentionally drawing on that—with basically this idea that you have to be brutal before you can be kind, in order to be accepted by people you’ve gained power over.

That’s right. It is very Machiavellian, but it also has analogs in traditional Chinese political writing; I was drawing on both traditions. As a ruler, you can’t just be generous all the time, because then people will take you for granted. The way you gained the people’s gratitude is to allow some horrible things to happen to them before you step in. It’s a very important moment in the book when Kuni gets this education and is forced to confront the fact that you have to do things that aren’t particularly good or right to preserve power. Then the book follows his complicated process in coming to terms with that as he gains more and more power and has to behave in more ambivalent ways.

I think there’s a line that really captures that: He says, “I think I wield power, but perhaps it is power that wields me.”

Yes; that line captures exactly where his growth arc goes to. I think that’s an idea that’s very familiar to us; people who are ambitious, politicians who crave power, think they’re in control of it, but at some point the movement that they started overtakes them and they lose the ability to direct things; they become riders on a wild stallion, and wherever the movement goes, wherever power takes them, they have to follow. That’s what happens to a lot of people as they rise in power.

This seems to tie in with the title.

The “grace of kings” is a quote from Henry V. It’s a phrase that’s very rich with meaning; it can refer to an exemplar of a king, or the mercy of a king, or the kind of special morality that kings have to exercise that mere commoners don’t have to think about. And the grace of kings is a phrase I recur multiple times in the book, each time in a different kind of guise. It starts out as a very bright phrase but becomes much darker near the end, where Kuni has to make a decision: whether the grace of kings in the sense of “this is what a king ought to do for the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people” is, in fact, the right thing to do.

I heard you say that the working title was The Dandelion and the Chrysanthemum?

That’s right. The dandelion and chrysanthemum are stand-ins for Kuni and Mata; one of them is very pragmatic, the weed—a very useful kind of plant that’s able to survive anywhere. The other is this proud, noble flower, with a very strong, dominant personality, whether visually or in terms of fragrance. And yet, the two of them are sort of similar; as described in the book, they’re both golden, and if you squint a little bit, a dandelion looks like a small chrysanthemum. The flowers act as recurring symbols to show the characters of the two protagonists. As far as titles go, The Chrysanthemum and the Dandelion doesn’t tell people what sort of book it is. I’m much happier with the title we ended up using.

The series as a whole is called The Dandelion Dynasty, so you did keep a little of that in there.

Yeah. But again, the dandelion also is a symbol that transforms throughout the book, and even more so in the sequels. People should not think it means a certain thing; part of the joy of the series is in the way these images get transformed over time. The book, and series as a whole, is about continuous revolution, and the idea of constant dynamic change. A lot of epic fantasies fall into The Lord of the Rings kind of yearning for a golden age of the past; a return to that past. The Grace of Kings is very much a story about the necessity for change and revolution, and adapting to changing circumstances.

Speaking of those sorts of changes, tell us about the character Mazoti.

Gin Mazoti is an interesting character; she is added as an agent of change. Early on, before you meet Mazoti, this is a world in which, by custom, it is the men who do the fighting and, because this is a novel about warfare, there’s a huge amount of scenes and events where the only participants are men. But then things change, because Jia, Kuni’s wife, convinces him that when he’s weak and not in power, he needs to leverage other sources of power, other individuals and other groups, who also have been disenfranchised by society. The people who already have power are not going to help him, because he wants to upset their gains; it’s the people who don’t have anything who will help them, and among these people, the most prominent are women.

Gin Mazoti ends up coming into Kuni’s service, and she is a street urchin who grew up in the streets of a metropolis and worked for a gang of thieves and had a very difficult backstory where she was not able to get a proper education. Fortunately, she comes to be helped by a dock master who teaches her how to read and discovers that she has a talent for recognizing patterns and thinking in a strategic way about how to fit pieces together. It’s this kind of big picture, strategic kind of thinking that ends up making Gin such a great general. She’s not the ultimate fighter, that’s not her thing. She can fight, but she’s not ever going to be able to overcome, in single combat, somebody like Mata. She shows that, to be a great general, what you really need is leadership and the ability to think tactically and to use guile.

As I mentioned, the series is about revolution and dynamism, so at the end of book one, you see that the society of Dara has changed; a lot of the women characters are playing very important roles, because they have forced themselves onto the stage by leading a revolution that succeeded. They now have a stake in the way politics and those affairs are conducted.

But with every revolution, there always comes a backlash. Book two is about all the people who are disempowered in book one—the poor, the uneducated, the women, and all the people who didn’t gain as much as they should’ve in the revolution—and want to continue the revolution. And it’s a story about how an Empire at peace needs to deal with these pressures. Also, there are surprises, which I won’t mention here.

I wanted to ask you about The Three-Body Problem, which was announced as a finalist for the Hugo Award. What’s your reaction to that?

It’s awesome; I’m really glad to hear that The Three-Body Problem, which is one of the first—and the only, so far—major hard SF novels by a Peoples’ Republic of China author to be translated into English. It really shows there’s still a lot of love in the genre for the kind of core SF that The Three-Body Problem represents. This is a story about the wonder of the universe, and a very engineering-driven attitude towards the necessity for exploration; for defining and understanding alien species and the idea that our future is in the stars, not on this planet and not in some uploaded future where we’re just disembodied thought patterns in a machine. It’s wonderful to see a translated novel with a very unique Chinese perspective on these core SF concerns get such an enthusiastic reception here. I think before, only one other novel had been nominated for a Hugo, and one other for a Nebula, so it’s history making; the last time translated books were nominated was back in the ’60s and ’70s.

If listeners are curious to learn more about Chinese science fiction, are there any good websites or things they should check out?

They can check out my website; I have a tab under “Translations,” and they can go there and look at all the translations I’ve done—a lot of short fiction as well as novels.

Finally, is there anything else you want to mention in terms of projects, websites, blog posts—anything you want people to check out?

Sure; my website is kenliu.name. I have a “.name” domain, because I was being a good web citizen and believe that’s how you should do it and not go commercial. So it’s at least memorable. And you can also follow me on twitter @kyliu99.

Great. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you for having me, David.

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.

Book Reviews, September 2015

Amal El-Mohtar | 1,600 words

Roots, Connections, Old Gods and New

We’re approaching the harvest time of year, and I’m thinking a great deal of roots and branches, literal and metaphorical: the depths and thirsts of growing things; heritage as both burden and inheritance; root servers; and the distances we bridge between past and future through the choices we make and the paths we pursue.

The following books partake of all these things; they’re also all utterly immersive, gripping as ivy, impossible to put down once begun. I recommend approaching them with caution and several hours to spare.

Uprooted
Naomi Novik
Hardcover/Ebook
ISBN 978-0804179034
Del Rey
Random House, May 2015
438 pages

This is the best book I’ve read so far this year, and that’s saying something—especially considering how excellent are the other books in this column alone.

The kingdoms of Rosya and Polnya are at war, and between them lies a malevolent Wood, from which dreadful beasts and magical illnesses periodically emerge to plague the people. In Polnya, the villagers bordering the Wood are protected by a wizard called The Dragon—whose price for protecting them is the removal of a beautiful young woman every seventeen years to live with him in his tower as a servant. The women, once chosen, never return to their villages.

Against all odds, the Dragon chooses awkward, unkempt Agnieszka of Dvernik over her accomplished and presentable best friend Kasia, because Agnieszka accidentally reveals a capacity for performing magic. Consequently, the Dragon is compelled to try and teach her the art—but their styles clash as much as their personalities, while the Wood grows more and more restless, and court intrigues threaten to engulf and undo them all.

This is the first book of Novik’s I’ve read, and it’s magnificent. It’s turned me into something of an Ancient Mariner, constantly compelled to try and explain to people all the marvels it contains, doomed to fail in the attempt every time. This is my third.

Briefly: The twin cores of this book are voice and character. Agnieszka’s first person narration is dynamic, winning, and fierce, driven by deep love for the family, friends, and village from which she’s been separated. Her love for Kasia, in particular, is beautiful, restless, complicated, challenged, and challenging, and like manna in the scrublands of female friendship in fiction.

But this is only part of the novel’s riches: Language and setting are faceted and wonderfully realised; the clash and resolve of various equals-but-opposites is by turns delightful and unsettling; and the resolution to the whole is profoundly satisfying, in a way that I miss experiencing, as it feels like some time since I read a fantasy novel utterly and perfectly complete in itself.

I’m calling it now: Uprooted will be on all the award ballots next year.

Last First Snow
Max Gladstone
Hardcover/Ebook
ISBN 978-0765379405
Tor Books, July 2015
384 pages

The Gods went to war with human sorcerers, and the sorcerers won: That’s the basic premise of Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence, where reality itself is a contract between interested parties and the cost of doing business is measured in fractions of soul. Last First Snow—the fourth novel published in the Sequence but the first in its internal chronology—is his best work yet, revisiting the city of Dresediel Lex roughly twenty years before the events of Two Serpents Rise.

The Craft Sequence is an investigation and interrogation of our late capitalist modernity without resorting to allegory or axe-grinding; instead, the source of its fantasy is making literal all the metaphorical transactions we participate in over the course of our lives. For instance, Three Parts Dead features an evil academic literally siphoning the souls and intelligence of his students in service of his own reputation; Two Serpents Rise features a corporation that is literally a magical undead skeleton person. And Last First Snow is explicitly about redlining and gentrification—with magic, conspiracy, and wonderful characters.

Elayne Kevarian is in Dresediel Lex to negotiate the re-development of the Skittersill, a part of the city where the old gods kept the slaves they raised for human sacrifice. Warded by gods who’ve since been killed, the Skittersill is vulnerable to disease, attack, and all manner of demonic calamity, and Elayne is there to help replace the divine wards with Craft. Unfortunately for her and her clients, the people who actually live in the Skittersill don’t want their homes affected by uptown entrepreneurs who’ll raise rents and make it impossible for them to live there in the name of progress—and the judiciary won’t approve Craftwork in the area unless it’s co-signed by the community’s leaders.

Meantime Temoc—high priest of the old gods, last of the Eagle Knights, and Elayne’s former adversary and present friend—is trying to keep the peace and live quietly with his family in the Skittersill, in spite of a community clamouring for him to lead them into an increasingly hostile conflict with the King in Red, the sorcerer who broke the city’s gods on their own altars and seems excited to fight the God Wars all over again.

Besides the originality of its premise, the skill of its execution, and the scope of its project, Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence is remarkable for being a series of stand-alone novels that mess with your reading brain in brilliant ways. Organised into a sequence that is less linear than mosaic, the order of publication has you reading book three before two and five before one, with four scheduled for publication next year. What this means is that you read Last First Snow knowing that terrible, terrible things are going to happen because you’ve seen their legacy in Two Serpents Rise—but the how and why of them is uncertain, ratcheting the tension up as effectively as violins in a horror film.

Gladstone’s prose makes me feel like I’m looking at the world through heavy crystal: Without calling attention to itself, it has weight, heft, elegance, and does great things with light. The characters he writes, the stories he tells, and the thoughtful, confident way in which he tells them are astonishing, especially as he continues to improve with each book.

The Wicked + the Divine vol. 2
Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie
Trade Paperback
ISBN 978-1632153272
Image Comics, July 2015
168 pages

Every ninety years, twelve gods manifest from teenage bodies to become The Pantheon, to be loved and revered by the world—for two years only, before they die and kick the cycle off again. In our present moment, the gods are all performers, and Laura is their biggest fan. But when a god gets killed prematurely, Laura—along with Cassandra, a cynical reporter skeptical about the so-called gods—decides to investigate.

Volume one—The Faust Act—collected issues one through five, and while I loved it, I felt the art overshadowed the prose; there was so much gorgeous character design doing the storytelling work that Gillen’s expository dialogue sometimes felt overwrought. But volume two, Fandemonium, is astonishing, the collaboration seamless, and the art is just magnificent. I’d never yet had the experience of feeling hungry for art in comics after having seen it; as soon as I finished it (and shrieked at the shock ending, which, WHAT) I started it over again, to re-absorb every line and colour and expression of the characters. They haunted me for days after, the beauty and depth of them.

The shock of the last page was such that I’m seriously considering switching from reading the series in volumes to reading it in single issues, especially given how many more grace notes of content—alternate covers, commentary, etc.—can be found there.

Zer0es
Chuck Wendig
Hardcover/Ebook
ISBN 978-0062351555
Harper Voyage, August 2015
432 pages

Five hackers—of different backgrounds, ages, and vastly different temperaments and motivations—are hunted down by the US government and forcibly persuaded to work on a secret project for the NSA, testing the electronic defenses of myriad corporations and nations to undisclosed purpose. But over the course of their strange work—already fraught because of the personalities at play, white and black hats clashing, trolls trolling—one question above all preoccupies them: What is Typhon? The need to find out goes from casual curiosity to imperative urgency as the stakes rise and the pace goes into overdrive in this tightly plotted, character-driven thriller.

I am out of practice with this kind of book. My heart could hardly take it. Halfway through, I was so tense and the threat level was already so high that I couldn’t fathom how there could still be two hundred pages to go. It also broke my narrative expectation: Three full acts take place within that first half, and it’s amazing to realize that there can be more, and fascinating to take stock of how conditioned I am by films in this respect. Here’s how you assemble the team; here’s how they learn to work together; here’s how they obtain their objective. But there’s a lot more going on here.

I appreciated how diverse and fully realized all the characters are—and how deliberately against type in many cases. The only thing that struck a false note for me was the Syrian-American character, Aleena, and the way the narrative characterizes her involvement with the Arab Spring; while I loved her and her motivations, the received-wisdom sort of approach to the issues at play in Syria clashed with how informed, intelligent, and invested she is. But that was only a small blip—the book is mercifully not about Syria, and what it is about is fascinating to discover along with the characters.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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 occasionally known to deadlift other genre professionals. Find her on Twitter @tithenai.

Movie Review: Mad Max: Fury Road

Carrie Vaughn | 1,698 words

The Radioactive Mutant Sub-Genre Strikes Again
Fury Road and the Persistence of the Post-Apocalyptic Roadtrip Movie

Let me just get this out of the way up front: I love this movie. First off, I think it’s a really good movie. But also because I love this genre: the Post-Apocalyptic Roadtrip Movie. More about that in a little bit.

The rundown: Itinerate post-apocalyptic road warrior Max Rockatansky is captured by the crazed cult of the Citadel, led by Immortan Joe, who maintains control of a chaotic population through a religious narrative promising eternal life to those who die in his name. He’s also in possession of five beautiful young women who decide they do not like being his property. They mount a secret escape with the help of one of Joe’s lieutenants, the Imperator Furiosa. Thus begins a massive car-chase-cum-battle that rages for the rest of the movie. Max is thrown together with Furiosa and the Wives. They eventually learn to trust each other, since they must cooperate to win their freedom. Joining them along the way is a turncoat War Boy called Nux and a motorcycle gang of the most kickass middle-aged-to-old women you have ever seen on film: the Vuvalini. The Green Place, the Eden that Furiosa has promised to guide everyone to, turns out not to exist. Max must then convince an emotionally destroyed Furiosa that their best chance lies behind them: Return to the undefended Citadel and take it over, using its resources to build their better world.

This is what happens, but the real story is in the linked arcs of the three main characters. Furiosa’s lifelong goal turns out to be an illusion, and in order to achieve the redemption she must find a new goal. Nux’s entire religious outlook is shattered, and he must find a new reason to fight: love and community rather than war and death. And Max: At the start of the film, Max has been reduced to little more than a caged animal. He spends much of the movie nonverbal—when he encounters Furiosa and the Wives, he can’t even ask them to cut his chain, he can only hold it up and grunt. So Max must learn to be human again, learn to be part of a community again—and learn that it’s worthwhile to do so. The climactic moment of the entire film is when he tells Furiosa his name, which he had refused to do earlier. All the characters are making emotional journeys literalized by the breakneck action they’re caught up in.

Much has been said of what a great action movie this is. I think this is because it’s a very clean action movie—there’s no shaky cam. You can follow movement, see what’s happening, understand the sequence of every fight and car crash. I also contend that the action is so great because it’s got a great story serving as a framework: We understand the characters, what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it. The story unfolds as the action does, and it simply makes sense. This shouldn’t be such a high bar to clear, but in the bombastic age of summer FX blockbusters we’ve experienced over the last ten years or so, Fury Road is wondrous in its lack of pretention combined with technical and storytelling skill. It’s full of the joy of a simple story well told.

Tens of thousands of words of analysis have already been spent on this film, and I’m tempted to rehash/consolidate some of those issues all over again: the movie’s feminism, issues of representation, its story (or alleged lack thereof), the idea that Max has been set aside in his own movie, the action and why it’s so damn good. I could spend a thousand words just writing about how glorious it is being a forty-two-year-old woman watching the Vuvalini in action as a seamless and unapologetic part of the story. I’m at the age when Hollywood starts telling me that my life is no longer interesting. The Vuvalini have a bullet for that kind of thinking, right in the medulla.

But I’m going to talk about something completely different instead.

The character of Max generates so much attention and adoration because the first film in this series, 1979’s Mad Max, codified an entire aesthetic, pulling together existing tropes and details that then became de rigueur. After Mad Max, you would never again see a Post-Apocalyptic Roadtrip Movie without a ridiculously dressed gang of thugs riding low cc engine motorcycles. The tropes of the post-nuclear wasteland and the lone characters wandering through it existed before Mad Max, in stories such as A Canticle for Leibowitz, On the Beach, and A Boy and His Dog. Mad Max distilled those tropes into a heady elixir of violence and weirdness, fired by the last brutal decade of the Cold War. It provided a template for all the films that came after. And there have been hundreds.

Two Mad Max sequels, Cherry 2000, Solarbabies, Tank Girl (Furiosa was not the first metal grrrrl in one of these movies), Hardware, Slipstream (starring Mark Hamill in his first-ever villain role), and any number of low-budget, C-grade marvels—Hell Comes to Frogtown, anyone? Dr. Pepper even did a series of commercials in which a roguish hero makes his way through a land that has been destroyed by the Cola Wars, preaching the gospel of an original soft drink experience (these are on YouTube and totally worth a look). One of my favorite movies of the genre is Radioactive Dreams, in which two young men who’ve spent most of their lives in a bomb shelter reading nothing but 1940s hardboiled detective novels don fedoras and set off across the wasteland to find their fortunes, inadvertently taking possession of the launch key for the last nuclear missile in existence along the way. The gangs that oppose them are based on different decades of music. They face down the ’50s greasers, the ’60s mods, the ’80s punks, and so on. The movie ends with Philip and Marlowe (I know, right?!) teaching everyone swing. This movie is a perplexing and heartfelt mash of pure WTF win.

While the Post-Apocalyptic Roadtrip Movie reached its apex in the 1980s, the form is still being practiced. Noteworthy recent examples include the delightfully gonzo Six-String Samurai from 1998, and 2009’s The Road, based on the Cormac McCarthy novel.

Some of what you’ll see in a typical Post-Apocalyptic Roadtrip Movie: A ragtag group of misfits who probably do not get along journey across a desolate, desert landscape. Hideous villains. Cannibals. Ominous mutated people and monsters. An obsession with clean water. Armor that often looks more like bondage gear. Weird hair. Creative uses of detritus from the Before Time. Stories of some utopian place that The War didn’t touch. Dust. So . . . much . . . dust. And an incongruously endless supply of gasoline.

In some respects, there’s nothing in Mad Max: Fury Road that you can’t find in any other film of this genre. However, it puts these pieces together so very, very well, and it proves that what should feel terribly dated is somehow still relevant.

What does the Post-Apocalyptic Roadtrip Movie actually mean? Why were the ’80s filled with them, and why do they persist? At first glance they serve as a cautionary tale, showing us the nuclear-blasted world in which the living will envy the dead that those of us of a certain generation grew up hearing about. Hollywood’s understanding of the concept of radioactive mutation serves up an unlimited source of the monstrous, of the abject, of villainy. The flipside of that is an obsession with purity. The subtext of this trope can be deeply problematic, an othering of any being who is in any way different, and a fetishization of these beautiful women with perfect skin who always seem to show up in these things. That subtext is very much an expression of Cold War id: After the bomb, will we even be human anymore?

Then again, maybe these stories are a parable for the degeneration of humanity when there isn’t a civilization to prop it up. Authoritarian barbarism will reign supreme. And is there any better basic narrative storyline than the rugged hero who emerges from the wasteland to overturn that authoritarian barbarism? It’s nigh Tolkeinian. It practically writes itself.

The Post-apocalyptic Roadtrip Movie may not be science fiction at all. It may be a form of epic fantasy that mines the Cold War’s peculiar fears and obsessions. These stories are not required to answer questions like: How is this economic-political system even sustainable? Where are they getting their fuel and parts? Or laundry detergent for those white muslin bikinis? Much like cyberpunk and steampunk, which also often don’t make sense, the Post-apocalyptic Roadtrip genre is an aesthetic. It’s about the look, not the logic. The journey exists to show us this strange, gonzo world the nuclear apocalypse has created. And to give a backdrop for the heroic.

Which brings us to Mad Max: Fury Road, with its Doof Warrior and his flame throwing guitar (a friend of mine observed that it’s a really good thing he didn’t see this when he was fifteen, or he would be in his garage attempting to make a flame-throwing guitar right this minute), its Pole Cats, its Frankensteined cars decorated in doll heads, its room full of voluptuous mothers being milked, and so on. If Fury Road lit up our hindbrains, it’s because it understands and embraces the aesthetic its predecessors helped define.

What may be most surprising is how often these movies have happy endings—often ambiguously happy, but nevertheless a core tenet is the survival of hope. The stranger comes to town and really does defeat the horrible authoritarian baddie. A better world is possible if our heroes learn to work together, if everyone gets access to all that clean water. The last three Mad Max movies have all featured idealistic young woman spurring everyone around them on to a better world. And Max gets caught up in that quest every time. He can’t help himself. So yes, the movie may be about Furiosa, but Max is the main character deciding once again that yes, he must survive, and there are still causes worth fighting for.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

Author Spotlight: Caroline M. Yoachim

Sandra Odell | 1,047 words

“Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World” is a wonderful concept with a capable, engaging female character and a unique problem. What inspired the character of Mei, somewhen to be known as Prime?

When I wrote this story I was playing around with a technique where I take several flash stories and combine them into one longer piece. I thought it’d be fun to write a flash story for each of the seven wonders of the world, with future wonders instead of ancient wonders. To link all the stories together, my initial plan was to have one character visit all seven wonders, and I came up with Mei. She was loosely inspired by Mei Kusakabe from Miyazaki’s animated fantasy film My Neighbor Totoro, which I’d recently introduced to my toddler. In My Neighbor Totoro, four-year-old Mei encounters a forest spirit (Totoro) that no one else in her family can see at first, much like my Mei is the only one who interacts with Achron in the opening section of “Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World.”

I was equally intrigued by the character/concept of Achron and how you handled the language of time. Were you to have a companion such as Achron, what sort of goal would you hope to accomplish with assistance from the future?

Mei dreamed of a new Earth, but my dream is for the Earth we already have. I agree with Stephen Hawking and others who have suggested that the best strategy for humankind, in the long run, is to spread beyond a single planet. But my hope is that we can get our own planet sorted out first, rather than simply abandoning the mess we’ve made.

I’d also want Achron to hook me up with a collection of all the best future-books that will ever be written, in any of the currently available ebook formats.

The story also addresses questions of identity, aging, and the concept of existence beyond a single physical form. These ideas have been explored in various forms in works such as Anne McCaffery’s The Ship Who Sang series, Ann Leckie’s Ancillary series, and The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. How do you feel you were influenced by such works, if at all?

Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem was my favorite novel from last year, but I can’t claim it as an influence because I read it after I’d written this story. I read Anne McCaffery’s The Ship Who Sang many years ago, and while I’m sure it influenced me at some level, I didn’t draw from it in a conscious or deliberate way.

I’m mostly an intuitive writer, so I don’t tend to see my influences until afterward, but at the time I was writing this story I was reading Upgraded (edited by Neil Clarke), My Real Children by Jo Walton, and The End Is Nigh (edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey), and looking back now, I can certainly see some links between what I was reading and the story that I wrote. My interest in identity and the nature of consciousness also comes from my academic background in psychology, and these are themes I find myself returning to repeatedly in my own work.

In addition to your talent with the written word, you also have an eye for photography (my personal favorite being the orange gummy bear). Do you find one artistic expression feeding the other?

Thank you! I enjoy both writing and photography, but they don’t usually play off each other in ways that I’m aware of. Brains are tricksy things, though, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if my photography is somehow feeding my fiction subconsciously.

I do have a tendency to turn to photography when I need a bit of a break from writing. The two mediums are different enough that switching between them helps me recharge if I’m feeling a little burned out.

You are a prolific writer, and part of writing is an equally insatiable appetite for reading. Who excites your sensibilities when you want to get your fiction on?

Everyone? (Sorry, this is a hard question to answer, since I love a lot of things!) For novels, a few that I’ve loved lately are Cat Rambo’s Beasts of Tabat, Tina Connolly’s Seriously Wicked, Julie McGalliard’s Waking Up Naked in Strange Places, and Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings.

For short fiction, some of the authors I enjoy are Ted Chiang, Adam-Troy Castro, Kij Johnson, Ken Liu, and Alaya Dawn Johnson. I also like to read various Year’s Best collections to get a sampling of short fiction from a lot of different authors and magazines.

You seem to have a unique love of flash fiction (of which I wholeheartedly appreciate as a reader). How do you feel the process of writing shorter works differs from crafting longer stories?

One of the things that draws me to short fiction in general, and flash in particular, is the freedom it gives to play around with lots of ideas and approaches. I feel like it is easier to experiment with flash fiction than with longer forms, because even if a story fails spectacularly, all I’ve lost is a day or two of work.

As a writer, I find flash really satisfying because I can hold the entire story in my mind, and then sit down and write it in a single session. As a reader, I love stories that can give me something interesting—a cool idea, a strange world, a strong emotion—presented cleanly in less than a thousand words.

What’s next for Caroline M. Yoachim? What can eager readers expect from you in the coming months?

This has been a productive writing year for me, and depending on when my forthcoming stories come out, I’ll probably finish out 2015 with twenty original publications. A couple of my favorites that came out recently are “Seasons Set in Skin” in issue #177 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and “Four Seasons in the Forest of Your Mind” in the May/June issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

I also have stories forthcoming in Fireside, Unidentified Funny Objects 4, Daily Science Fiction, and two more stories here at Lightspeed. For an up-to-date listing of my publications, check out my website at carolineyoachim.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sandra Odell is an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. She attended Clarion West in 2010. Her first collection of short stories was released from Hydra House Books in 2012. She is currently hard at work avoiding her first novel.

Author Spotlight: Daniel H. Wilson

Jude Griffin | 469 words

How did this story come about?

This story was from an idea that I had as a teenager, and tried (and failed) to write as a teenager. I have always wondered if this world is someone’s dream. And if so, who? And what happens to the rest of us when that person gets hurt or dies? Now I’m an adult, and I have realized that my memory isn’t perfect. A lot of the fear of forgetting my life also went into this story.

Can you talk about the challenges of balancing the revelations of what might be happening? (It was so well done.)

Thank you! For a little while I considered making the story about Alzheimer’s and the deterioration of reality from within that perspective, but I dismissed that as too depressing and not SF enough. Ultimately, pacing out the revelations was just a matter of figuring out the twist at the end so that I could build up to it. The short story itself appears within the context of an anthology about video games, so I knew the reader’s mind would jump to conclusions about that—and knowing that helped me throw a few red herrings along the way so that I could hopefully provide a good surprise at the end.

Was there a direction for the story that you ended up not taking?

There were quite a few directions I ended up not taking. Originally, this was going to be a much longer story—maybe novella length. About midway through there is a sentence that says something like “Did we run to the coast? Did we fight? I can’t remember.” That line was a call-out to all the other adventures that these two characters were going to have. Ultimately, I realized that I could keep the poignancy without sending them on some world-spanning adventure. It was more emotional to stick to that a familiar setting and watch it fall apart piece by piece.

This story, its scenario, lingered with me. Whose story has stuck with you long after reading?

Lots and lots of stories stick with me. One that comes up in my mind an absurd amount is Stephen King’s The Long Walk. Every time I’m walking anywhere, pretty much, I think to myself, “What if I couldn’t stop walking?” How long could you go before your sanity starts to crumble? Thanks a lot, Stephen!

Any new projects you want to tell us about?

I have a playable story in the App Store that I’m very excited about, called Mayday! Deep Space. Using speech recognition, you literally answer a mayday call and help a survivor escape from a derelict spaceship overrun with horrifying zombies. It’s a unique pet project (selected as a “Top 25 Best Game of 2015” by Gamezebo) and you can grab it at maydayapps.com!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She 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: Megan Arkenberg

Sandra Odell | 912 words

“All in a Hot and Copper Sky” begins with a blend of sensory imagery and poetry and then drops into a gut-wrenching moment of memory and adoration mistaken for young love. To you, what components make up a good story?

I want three things out of a story, whether I’m writing it or reading it: an interesting character, an unusual situation, and a strong, distinctive voice. I’m tempted to add “atmosphere” to that list, although it’s a pretty nebulous concept. Basically, I want to either experience something I’ve never experienced before, or to look at a familiar experience in a new way. The best thing about speculative fiction is that it lets you do both at once.

The story unfolds with a gentle, almost rhythmic presence as much a product of the plot as it is the structure and presentation of the scenes. How did this story come together?

I worked at this story a little bit at a time, sometimes a couple sentences every few months, for about five years. I think it started with me wondering about the kind of woman who becomes the lover of a terrible person: a dictator, a murderer, a corporate slimeball, that kind of thing. I wasn’t necessarily interested in why she fell in love with someone awful, but how she might feel about it years later—assuming she survived them, of course, which isn’t always the case. So the draft just accumulated one layer at a time, all these “letters” from Delores to Socorro, thinking about memory and judgment and justification, until I finally laid it all out in one document and figured out where the narrative through-line fell.

Colonizing Mars has long been a dream for humanity. Ray Bradbury and Kim Stanley Robinson both wrote extensively about Mars, and in 2010 writer David Levine published The Mars Diaries, the story of how he fared during his two weeks at an experimental Mars simulation habitat in the Utah desert. If given the opportunity to serve on a colonization crew to Mars, what would you miss most about life on Earth?

This is easy: travel! I think I would get claustrophobic very quickly in an extraterrestrial colony. I’m the kind of person who needs to get out of my house for at least an hour or two every day, even if it’s just to take a walk to the nearest coffee shop. I can’t imagine having a limited space in which to move, and knowing with absolute certainty that I couldn’t go beyond that space. So until they terraform a good chunk of the planet, I think I’ll sit out any colonization projects!

The push for representation of women in the sciences continues to be an uphill battle, one that many feel is unnecessary and “intrusive.” If you could speak to new writers dipping their toes into the waters of genre fiction, what would you say to them about such representations and their impact on how women see themselves?

The first thing people need to realize is that women in the sciences is the reality; it’s not like depicting women in a laboratory is a radical stretch of the imagination. There are plenty of arenas of social justice in which we need to imagine first and hope that reality will follow, but this actually isn’t one of them. For me, the lack of female scientists in fiction or on film is a massive challenge to my suspension of disbelief. Of course, I still think programs designed to encourage young girls in STEM fields are excellent and necessary, and I think good representations of female scientists can definitely be part of that. But the thing I’ve taken away from conversations about “women in the sciences” has been that the people who don’t “believe” that women can practice science are the ones crafting unsustainable fantasies here.

How did you first become interested in genre fiction? Are there any authors who inspired your dreams?

I was obsessed with historical fiction from the time I first learned to read until sometime in junior high school, which is when I picked up Tolkein and Lovecraft. When I started writing, I decided to write speculative fiction for a pretty funny reason, actually: I was a lazy twelve-year-old who didn’t want to do any research, and I thought that secondary-world fantasy would let me draw on miscellaneous bits of my historical knowledge without too much concern for anachronism. Now I think I’m just drawn to the unusual. I’m happy to read fiction marketed as mainstream or “literary,” provided the central situation is sufficiently eerie and off-kilter: One of my favorite short stories, Cary Holladay’s “Merry-Go-Sorry,” is a mix of true crime and regional fiction, but the structure and meticulous attention to detail have informed more than one of my horror and science fiction stories.

Do you have any stories in the works, something we can look forward to in the latter half of 2015?

I haven’t been keeping up with publication dates too well, but I do know I have pieces forthcoming in Shimmer, The Dark, and the anthology Start a Revolution. I’m also the nonfiction editor for Nightmare Magazine’s Queers Destroy Horror! special issue, which will be out in November. And as always, I have a number of works-in-progress coming down the pipeline: a carnival story, a serial killer story, an interlocking series of fairy-tales, and something that looks a bit like an animal-bride story if you squint . . .

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sandra Odell is an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. She attended Clarion West in 2010. Her first collection of short stories was released from Hydra House Books in 2012. She is currently hard at work avoiding her first novel.

Author Spotlight: Carrie Vaughn

Andrew Liptak | 756 words

Hi Carrie! Thanks for taking the time to chat with us about your latest story with us, “Harry and Marlow Meet the Founder of the Aetherian Revolution”! First off, this story is less an adventure story and more of a thriller. What can you tell us about where this particular narrative came from?

This was actually the first Harry and Marlowe story I finished and sent off. It originally appeared in John Joseph Adams’ anthology The Mad Scientists Guide to World Domination. By the time I wrote this one, I had a bunch of rough drafts and notes about these characters, building up their world and trying to figure out what to do with them. The anthology gave me a chance to focus my efforts and come up with a story that introduced both the characters and the background of the world while still offering a fun read. Going back to the Victorian pulp roots of steampunk means that it’s really no holds barred—I can come up with all kinds of crazy adventures, and build them around the lady adventurer I’d always wanted to tell stories about.

As a whole, the Harry and Marlowe stories are about how this alien technology is changing humanity. That idea becomes very literal here.

This story introduces us to the secluded Ernest Carlisle, who was one of the principle architects of the Aetherian revolution that really forms this world, and it was fun to see you take on a sort of Mad Scientist trope. How do you see Carlisle justifying what he’s done?

Carlisle uses the justification that most mad scientists seem to put forward: They’re trying to make humanity better. The world will be a better place when they’re finished with it. They become so invested that any cost—even human lives—seems justified. But like Frankenstein and Moreau before him, he loses sight of what “humanity” and “better” actually mean. Also, to borrow the famous line from Jurassic Park: He spent so much time figuring out if he could, he didn’t stop to think if he should.

In an earlier interview, we chatted about how you inserted H.G. Wells into the story, but I’d be interested in hearing your take on how War of the Worlds impacted this series of stories that you’ve been telling.

In some ways this all started with War of the Worlds. But it’s War of the Worlds through the lens of the Roswell crash story. One of the great urban legends of the twentieth century is how the government secretly reverse-engineered technology from the supposed crash of an alien craft in New Mexico. What I did to build the background of the Harry and Marlowe worlds was smoosh that story up against War of the Worlds, and have the Victorians reverse-engineer technology from the wreckage of an alien craft crash landing Surrey. In this world, H.G. Wells still writes War of the Worlds pretty much exactly as he does—it just has a much different metaphorical meaning in his world.

Do you see your stories as straight-up steampunk, or science fiction in the manner of Wells and other, similar authors? How do you distinguish the two?

These stories were definitely inspired by straight-up steampunk. I had been costuming in a steampunk style for years, but it took really sticking my feet in the steampunk community before I was inspired to write stories myself. Sourcing the technology from aliens rather than extrapolating from existing steam technology is the spin I put on my world to make it different and more intriguing. Given the prevalence of ray guns and glowing green engines and things in my stories, they might actually fall under the sub-branch of steampunk known as “ray gun gothic.” But I’m not going to split hairs over it.

As for the science fiction element, I definitely try to write stories that feel like science fiction, even as they get pretty fanciful. It’s all part of the same big speculative umbrella and I use as many tools as I need to to tell the story.

Finally, my usual question: What’s next for the pair?

I have another story about Harry and Marlowe waiting in the wings. “Harry and Marlowe Meet the Founder of the Aetherian Revolution” takes place pretty early on their timeline. This new one takes place much later and moves their story forward in a number of ways. I always have more ideas about them cooking and hope to collect their adventures into one volume in the next year or so.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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.

Author Spotlight: Maurice Broaddus

Sandra Odell | 1,010 words

“The Iron Hut” has a spectacular narrative voice. Where did you find the inspiration to blend Cthulu-esque horror and the many facets of the African tribal warrior/trickster figure?

I’d like to go on about my muse and my art and some such; however, like many writers, I found my inspiration in writing on spec for a theme anthology. It was looking for Cthulu-esque horror set in different times. I had just discovered the work of Charles Saunders, so everything just came together for me. Ironically, that original anthology never came to pass, but it didn’t stop me from continuing to write in that universe.

With this story, you unapologetically subvert the racist trope of much of pulp fiction and, in doing so, rebuild narratives that are accessible to a wider audience. As a writer, what appeals to you about turning a trope inside out and creating something new and exciting?

Me! Well, more on point, I like to see “me” in a story. I love pulp stories, but I don’t want to see some racist caricature of my people nor do I want to be excised/forgotten in the alternative. So the big thing for me is writing the stories I would love to read. I start with me as the primary reader and then hope that in so doing I can connect to a wider audience.

Dinga is a reoccurring character in your shorter works, a warrior, thinker, and something of a trickster. Here we see him suffer the loss of a friend and the birth of a greater evil, familiar elements of classic mythic cycles. How do you feel modern writers can benefit from studying classic myths and stories? Need they always include obvious mythic elements in their works?

It’s funny that you ask this question now. My oldest son was assigned Edith Hamilton’s Mythology to read over the summer. I remember when I first discovered that book back in fifth grade and it was transformative for me. It helped stoke my love of stories. In fact, I so couldn’t get enough of the myths, I often got in trouble from my teachers because I would end up reading them rather than pay attention in class.

Those stories helped teach me about story structure and the heroic journey. Not only that, there’s something about the classic mythic cycles which touch people on a primal level, which truly resonates with people.

And again, it becomes about finding “me” in those tales.

As with many aspects of Western culture, genre fiction struggles with the idea and implementation of “diversity.” Many markets support and promote the works of underrepresented populations, yet we still have a long way to go. What does “diversity” mean to Maurice Broaddus the writer?

Diversity shouldn’t be that hard. Sometimes we overthink it, creating imaginary checklists or percentages of inclusion. Most times I think we’re just relationally lazy and our default setting is to be around people like us. So diversity, for me, boils down to intentionality.

Keep in mind, Maurice Broaddus the writer learned from Maurice Broaddus the family man/friend. I was born in London, England, my mother in Jamaica, and my father from the U.S. (and I’ve lived in the U.S. most of my life). I have an interracial family and am raising biracial children. We have been very intentional about developing relationships across national, racial, religious, and class lines and always striving to place ourselves in multicultural environments. That’s simply the world we live in and we want to reflect that diversity in all areas of our lives.

Taken that next step, diversity for Maurice Broaddus the writer means seeing the diversity that is in the world around me reflected in the stories I write. Similarly, I am intentional about making sure my reading choices reflect as much diversity as possible. Okay, sometimes it can be harder than I originally gave it credit, but all it takes is commitment to intentionality and a little extra effort.

Keeping that thought in mind, what steps do you feel the publishing industry could take to further representation in fiction no matter the genre?

This is a relationship business, so sometimes it’s just a matter of making more friends or reaching out beyond our comfort zones. For example, any time I have set out to edit an anthology, I don’t think “I need to make this diverse” and then go through a checklist of representation. Rather it’s a three-pronged approach: 1) I reach out to some of the great writers that I know (because I’ve already committed to having a diverse “Rolodex”—a reference officially dating me as old); 2) I create a list of great writers I’ve always wanted to work and reach out to them; and 3) I ask people to make recommendations of great writers I should be on the lookout for.

I guess what I’m saying is that people could wait for diversity to happen and screen it through their checklists or simply be proactive in making it happen. One approach gets us there a lot quicker.

One cannot write well without reading widely. Who excites you when you want to get your fiction on?

When I’m reading strictly for fun, I lean towards crime novels (George Pelecanos, Elmore Leonard, Walter Mosley, Frank Bill). And I’ll still read the folks who make me “pick up my pen” every time I read them: Michael Chabon, Neil Gaiman, and Octavia Butler. But my first love is short stories and the authors who excite me most these days are: Amy Hempel, Kelly Link, and Amelia Gray. I’m currently re-reading Gray’s Museum of the Weird as I gear up to read her latest collection, Gutshot: Stories.

What’s in store for Maurice Broaddus? What can readers look forward to in the coming year?

In the coming year, we’re seeing a return to my first love: short stories. I’ve been writing a lot lately and they should be seeing release in various anthologies over the next few months. Also, a short story collection, Walkers with the Dawn, should make its official bow.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sandra Odell is an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. She attended Clarion West in 2010. Her first collection of short stories was released from Hydra House Books in 2012. She is currently hard at work avoiding her first novel.

Author Spotlight: Sean McMullen

Liz Argall | 2,043 words

As a co-founder of the Society for Creative Anachronism in Melbourne, how has immersing yourself in a playful historical re-enactment society fed your creative processes? Was it challenging at times to balance the creativity of the SCA with the creativity of prose?

I was not new to medieval reenactment when I joined the SCA. I had sung in early music groups, spent years as a folk singer, and fought in a medieval metal weapons group (I have scars to prove it). While in the SCA I became the first seneschal for Melbourne and won four sword and shield tournaments, but was never really into the costumes, heraldry, and protocols. Overall I was a bit like Bron in Game of Thrones—a fairly good fighter who liked to party and knew a lot of good songs, but I did not want a crown anywhere near my head.

The SCA fed my creative processes to the point of medical danger, but not in the way you might think. It actually filled in a huge number of small gaps in my background knowledge: what it was like to be a medieval leader, how hard it is to get into armour without help, the relationship between romance and fighting, how easy it is to ignore injuries during a tournament, toleration for wildlife in the food, and the use of grass as toilet paper.

Put another way, I got no epic plots from my time in the SCA, but I gained an immense amount of background, which then provided the details that readers really like to see in fiction. The S in SCA was the important bit: It gave me a mockup medieval society in which to live, which is a great way to do research.

With feudal norms thrown up in the air in ways reminiscent of longbow men beaten by uncouth gunpowder in Europe, what do you think the lands of the fae be like 100 years from the story’s conclusion? Will the “highborn” need to deal with an emergent goblin middle class? Will there be rebellion? How will caste systems be maintained?

Funny you should ask that, because I have just been revising a story called “Crossing Boundarie,” where a couple of teenagers cross into Faerie in 1901. They discover that it has evolved into a Victorianesque, steampunk sort of society. There certainly is a powerful goblin middle class, but they have retained the elves as a beautiful ruling elite. Elves have been given a role as living artworks, like our world’s movie stars. They entertain the goblins and other lowborns by having royal scandals, going on heroic adventures, and generally being glamourous, but their word is no longer law.

In “Crossing Boundarie,” there is an elf rebellion in 1901, but it ends badly. This extract is from the end of the story, and provides some images of the industrialization of Faerie. Here, a very old elf is speaking to a human engineering student from our world:

“Faerie has become all soot and machines,” said the old elf. “Steam is their magic, their dragons are metal, and voidfaring elves even defile the face of the moon with their hobnail boots and vessels of steel and crystal. In Earthlie, they still have dreams of Faerie as a beautiful, enchanted place. Why spoil those dreams?”

In the weak light of the smog-filtered dawn, Daniel looked about in fascination at the strange city crammed with mechanical wonders. Let other humans keep their dreams of Faerie, he thought. To me, this sort of Faerie is a beautiful, enchanted place.

In “The Ninth Seduction,” we start with a nominal utopia that is soaked in elegant blood and violations that are rendered beautiful. For your Ph.D., you explored Medieval Arcadianism in Fantasy Literature; how does this story connect to the utopian theories you explored in your dissertation?

Before my Ph.D., I had not realized what a powerful effect the romance literature of the mid-twelfth century had on the medieval aristocracy. Until then, epics called the chansons de geste (songs of deeds) were in vogue, with mighty warriors giving heroic speeches, shouting insults at the opposition, then hacking at each other for way too many pages.

The new roman courtoise (courtly romance) introduced such innovations as significant female characters, romance, adultery, going on quests, and fighting in the name of your lady instead of some boring king. The magic used in the roman courtoise also had a glittering, exotic quality, doubtless derived from the Moorish culture that was trickling out of what is now Spain. Religion was ignored if it got between the characters and a good party.

The roman courtoise was a sensation. Real-life courtiers found the fictional lifestyle so appealing that they used the books as templates for their own behaviour. Real kings, queens, knights, and ladies even staged tournaments and revels as King Arthur and his courtiers. As for adultery, apparently analysis of Richard III’s DNA has revealed genetic contributions that were definitely not from some of his male ancestors. I suspect that the trend will continue when royal DNA is extracted from other medieval graves.

Ulrich von Lichtenstein is a good example of a roman courtoise lifestyler, although he was definitely a weirdo. Early in the thirteenth century, he acted out a real life quest to honour his lady—who was married to someone else. Having dressed himself as Venus in armour and assembled an entourage, he traveled from Venice to Vienna, challenging the hundreds of knights he met to a joust. When one of his ladies doubted that he had nearly lost a finger in some fight, he cut off what was left and sent it to her. A few years later he and a few friends dressed up as King Arthur and his knights of the round table and did a tour of the tournaments in the Germanic states, trouncing the locals.

The utopian scenarios in literature really were converted into real life during the Middle Ages, so that fiction became reality. Rather like when George R. R. Martin wrote Game of Thrones, I just read the real history for my Ph.D, then toned down the sex, violence, cruelty, and general weirdness when I wrote fiction—including “The Ninth Seduction.”

What is your definition of beauty?

I think that beauty, allure, and seductiveness are very closely related. To me, beauty is something that one cannot help being attracted to. I remember a pacifist friend of mine at university who thought fighter aircraft were really beautiful and elegant, and he was genuinely distressed because he felt that way. Beauty can also have subjective foundations. Ask anyone in the fashion industry.

That said, it’s important to distinguish between beauty and desire. I desire big sales and large royalty cheques, but they are not beautiful. I am sure we all know people who are genuinely beautiful, but have serious attitude problems. People like that can have loads of allure, yet not even score one out of ten when it comes to being desirable.

To understand how Raksar appreciates beauty, one should look at the rat Remy in the animated movie Ratatouille. Remy is a fantastic cook, and loves to create wonderful food that people will really appreciate, but he knows better than to leave the kitchen. Having a rat on the dinner table would distract people from his meals. He is a rat, and one does not do dinner with rats.

Similarly, in “The Ninth Seduction,” the goblin Raksar is allured by beautiful things and has enormous talent as a jeweler, but finds the idea of dating an elf princess quite offensive. She is beautiful, he is definitely not, so even being in the same room as her violates his sense of aesthetics.

As the first goblin with a telescope, do you think Raskar will turn his eyes to the heavens as his world turns to chaos? Will he be the goblin Galileo? Or make the lenses for further telescopes that lead to the first goblin Galileo?

Well done, splendid point. As a teenager, when I got my first telescope and pointed it to the night sky, I was enchanted by the beauty of the sights that it presented to me. The aesthetics of astronomy became nearly as important to me as the science. I remembered this when writing “The Ninth Seduction,” and toyed with the idea of having Raksar become a brilliant painter of starscapes, a sort of goblin combination of Michelangelo and Galileo. However, this would have doubled the length of what was meant to be a tight, streamlined story, so I cut that bit out. Just checking the archive file about what Raksar builds for his new master in the Faerie version of Persia . . . actually I could do a really cool story about that. I think I shall.

Do you listen to music while writing? And if so what was the sound track for “The Ninth Seduction”?

I cannot write without music. Anything medieval and played on a harp brings “The Ninth Seduction” alive for me, but I do have some favourites.

Castellerine Lynder’s theme is from the late fourteenth century, Landino’s “Angelica Belta,” played on a wire-strung harp. Raksar can be heard, beating away delicately with his jeweler’s hammer, in a thirteenth century piece by Gautier de Coincy called “Las, Las, Las, Las.” My harpist friend Ann Poore recorded it for my reading of another story, “Shadow of the King,” which is on my website. [http://bit.ly/gautier_mp3]

The CD that I played most while writing “The Ninth Seduction” was La Domna Savorousa by the Ensemble in Courtezia, which features songs of love by troubadours and trouveres. Another CD I played a lot was the sound track of the 1973 Wicker Man movie, which is highly evocative but seriously creepy.

If you had to choose one animated gif to represent yourself (or your work) what would it be?

It would have to be my Stirling cycle heat engine sitting on my coffee mug. [http://bit.ly/stirling-cycle] Just as coffee drives me along, the heat from the coffee can power the engine. The engine also symbolizes my writing. I like to have things that really work alongside the romance, magic, and speculation in my fiction.

What are you working on now? Do you have any exciting news to share with us?

Breaking news (I just found out tonight) is that a movie script based on my 2002 novelette “Voice of Steel” has been shortlisted in an Australian script development competition. The novelette version reached the BSFA Awards shortlist but was up against Coraline, so . . .

I am nearly finished a novel set in 1891 London. While it does feature a detective, it has more in common with Neuromancer than Sherlock Holmes. It started out as a story called “Stirling,” about a ghost that could power a heat engine. I then expanded it into a novel full of fantastic Victorian devices that are used to give ghosts bodies and bring them back to life—after a fashion. Currently I’m rewriting bits of “Stirling” because the novel went off in a different direction.

My latest published work is a six-book fantasy series for older children called The Warlock’s Child, written with Paul Collins. The covers are by the Deltora Quest artist Marc McBride, and they feature his wild and iconic dragons. The books are being released monthly and the first two have already gone into reprint, so I can see the tax man rubbing his hands with glee. The galleys for book six arrived this morning.

Other recent news is that I have been made a judge for the Norma K. Hemming Award for speculative fiction dealing with race, gender, sexuality, class, or disability. Hemming wrote Australia’s first SF plays, had a couple of dozen stories published, and was on the way to becoming this country’s Ursula Le Guin when she died of cancer in 1960. I directed a revival of one of her plays for the 2010 Worldcon, which may be why I was chosen to be a judge. I am looking forward to doing the reading for the award, because I find that being a judge makes me read works that I might not bother with otherwise, and leads my own writing in new directions.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Liz’s short stories can be found in places like Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, and This is How You Die: Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death. She creates the webcomic Things Without Arms and Without Legs and writes love songs to inanimate objects. Her previous incarnations include circus manager, refuge worker, artists’ model, research officer for the Order of Australia Awards, farm girl, and extensive work in the not-for-profit sector.

Author Spotlight: Theodora Goss

Robyn Lupo | 600 words

How did this story start for you? Was there anything unexpected that developed in writing “Estella Saves the Village”?

Ellen Datlow and Terri Winding contacted me about an anthology they were editing to be called Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells. They were looking for stories that focused on the Victorian era, but with fantastical elements. At the time, I was finishing a Ph.D in English literature that also focused on the Victorian era—I was becoming what academics call a Victorianist—so I thought it was the perfect project for me. The story itself came from an idea I’d had a long time ago, based on the Ursula Le Guin story “The Pathways of Desire,” in which an alternative world, a planet, is created by the imagination of an adolescent boy. Well then, why not an older female professor? Victorian literature tends toward the tragic—you can’t read Thomas Hardy and George Eliot without getting depressed. I’d often wondered whether, with a little common sense and willingness to break out of social roles, nineteenth-century characters like Tess of the D’Urbervilles could have had happy endings. And I sympathized with the villainized, like Bertha Rochester. I thought even Sherlock Holmes deserved human happiness. So I created a professor who had imaged her own reality, given her favorite characters happier lives. But what happens when that reality begins to break down? To what extent can we create our own realities? How much power do we have, how much responsibility can we take on? Those were the questions I wanted to answer. And I wanted to write about Estella—I don’t think Charles Dickens is at all fair to her.

The first section does a fantastic job of hooking us in. I’m a big fan of the well crafted opening since reading the opening line in Voyage of the Dawn Treader when I was wee. Beginnings can promise the reader a lot! What’s your favourite opening line or scene?

Thank you! I actually study openings with my writing students. Some of my favorites are the first few paragraphs of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Neil Gaiman’s American Gods also opens masterfully. Those are all very different openings, but they all draw you into the stories and tell you so much about what sorts of stories they’re going to be. You’re immediately engaged. And one of the best first lines is still William Gibson’s, from Neuromancer. I’m currently reading Patrick Süskind’s Perfume: The Story of a Murder, which has a brilliant opening.

Estella’s power really gives the old metaphor of a story “taking a life of it’s own” a whole new level of sophistication. I really got the message through this story that not only do stories sustain us, but they evolve and give us new ways to cope with challenges. What stories sustain you? Do you go back to particular stories in times of crisis?

Yes, absolutely. I often go back to the stories I read as a child: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and other Narnia books, the children’s books of Louisa May Alcott, The Wind in the Willows. I also like the comfort of a good murder mystery by Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers. Edith Wharton and Jane Austen are particular favorites, and I’m currently rereading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

What's next for you?

In 2016 I have several short stories coming out, and in the summer of 2017 my first novel will be published by Saga Press. It's part of a two-book series, with the second book expected out in 2018. Those books are based on a novelette of mine called “The Mad Scientist’s Daughter,” first published on Strange Horizons and reprinted in The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination. So the next thing for me is writing that second book! And of course I’ll be working on short stories and poetry as well . . .

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robyn Lupo has been known to lurk around Southwestern Ontario, complaining about the weather. She helped destroy flash-sized science fiction in 2013 and hopes to wreck poetry for decent people everywhere soon.

Author Spotlight: Heather Lindsley

Jude Griffin | 417 words

How did “Werewolf Loves Mermaid” come about?

I don’t remember how the notion of a werewolf in love with a mermaid—or maybe it was a mermaid in love with a werewolf—came up one night during the 2006 Worldcon in L.A., but I remember that Daryl Gregory and I thought it was hilarious, and should be a web comic. Unfortunately, neither of us can draw. Right after the con, we each wrote about half a dozen scripts and then over the next few years periodically threatened to find an artist.

Fast forward to 2013. I’d moved to London by then and was getting together my submission for the Milford Writers Workshop. I wanted to include a short story with my novel excerpt, and opened some old files looking for inspiration. There was “WW+MM.” I wrote a first draft using my scripts in one sitting. It got much better after the Milford crits.

How did the characters evolve over the writing of the story?

“Werewolf Loves Mermaid” started out as a punchline, an extended gag about the idea of a mermaid and werewolf in love. And then, somewhere along the line, the two of them got more complex, and suddenly it really was a story about Werewolf and Mermaid in love. Which actually surprised the hell out of me.

I loved all the vignettes across the story arc—were there some you had to leave out?

I used every vignette I wrote, but I didn’t write a vignette for every script. There was one about Mermaid and Werewolf hosting an awkward dinner party for their friends (“Cowboy Hates Vampire”). And of course there are the scripts by Daryl. There are many things I wish I’d stolen from him, not the least of which is “fishystyle.”

What was the most challenging aspect of writing “Werewolf Loves Mermaid”?

Probably trying to work out what to do with poor Dave. There are a lot of options for werewolf rules. I went with three full days based on moon phase, not rising/setting, so Mermaid and Dave didn’t have to see too much of each other.

Any new projects you want to tell us about?

I’m two-thirds of the way through a novel based on my short story “Mayfly,” which is about women who live around seven days. They’re born with the memories of their mothers and age a decade a day. In the story they live unnoticed among humans. The novel is about what happens when it becomes impossible to hide.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She 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: Eliot Fintushel

Moshe Siegel | 940 words

Your novella, “Milo and Sylvie,” ties the mathematical principles “Zorn’s lemma” and “equidecomposability” to shapeshifting. For our not-math-friendly readers (and oh, let’s say, interviewer), will you provide a brief layperson’s sketch of these principles—and how, as Devore notes, Sylvie mighty apply them to their shared ability?

Zorn’s Lemma is a version of the Axiom of Choice in the wild and wooly mathematics that comes down to us from the mystic and mathematical giant Georg Cantor. It enables mathematicians to perform operations on infinite sets by indexing all of them, like tagging the feet of numberless pigeons in order to follow their flight. In this story, Zorn’s Lemma is a stand-in for the even more paradoxical Banach-Tarski Theorem, which states that any (mathematical) object, however small, can be taken apart and put back together as another, much larger object, without losing or gaining a single particle! In other words, the objects, regardless of size, are equidecomposable—and that is the basis of Sylvie’s under-the-counter activities. The trick of this story is to pretend that this result of transfinite mathematics is applicable to the world of our experience, and that it is the basis of shapeshifting. The alephs that Dede refers to are the various orders of infinity of transfinite mathematics: א0, א1, א2, and so on.

MOON AND STARS puts on an amazingly detailed puppet show. Were you familiar with this art form prior to writing this story? Do you, perhaps, perform your own? Why do you think Sylvie was drawn to this line of work?

There are two sources in my experience for Sylvie’s puppet show. As part of my theater training, I studied puppetry (and maskmaking) with the great puppeteer Eric Bass, and I have incorporated techniques of puppetry in many of my performances. Puppetry itself, of course, is an art based in transformations of scale and shapes; more than that, Sylvie’s puppet show derives from stories of Stone Monkey, the trickster/shapeshifter whose misadventures are known to every Chinese child: all in all, a natural for Sylvie as she helps teach Milo what he is and how to set boundaries between himself and those (like Dede) who would use him. I learned about Stone Monkey from the saltimbanques and storytellers who have always been my peeps.

The fantastic elements within “Milo and Sylvie” are grounded with realism, such as the shapeshifting’s implied scientific basis and the reactions of “normal” bystanders (Mama’s obsessive behavior and Papa’s panic-borne denial). Is this balance between the mundane and bizarre intentional, or would you be just as satisfied with a story that explores only the weird, leaving the rest for speculation?

I grounded “Milo and Sylvie” in a realistic milieu for two reasons. First, from an aesthetic standpoint, it makes a story more impelling, for some of us, anyway, to have points of contact with the real world of the reader’s experience. In “M&S” there are, for example, a coffeehouse basement, a downtown psychiatrist’s office, a bathhouse, and a subway. I hope that these concrete images will explode into symbolic associations, as happens in poems; in the same way, kids put firecrackers inside garbage cans (and military engineers house bombs in metal casings) to amplify the effect. Let the reader’s heart be torn to shreds with literary shrapnel! Every poet knows that one concrete image is worth a million abstractions. Second, “M&S” happens to be a true story—in a way. All its venues are places from my childhood, and I wanted to reconstruct them as vividly and accurately as I could—the Gallery 65 coffeehouse in Rochester, NY, the Child Guidance Center downtown, Lake Ontario Beach Park, and the rest. All the people in “M&S” are amalgams of people I knew and loved, people without whom I would not have survived my very difficult childhood.

What do you think Dede meant by “Everything has its portion of smell”? Or, if you’d prefer not to speculate on the past, what do you think this quote—powerful enough to escape his suppressed memories—meant to Milo?

In trying to figure out how to make use of her little brother’s strange talent, Dede discovers the Milesian philosophers, Monists who rejected the four elements of traditional Greek thought: earth, air, fire, and water. Anaximander and his lineage thought that the world was composed of uniform quanta, ineffable as smell and equally ubiquitous. Could that be the key to Milo’s ability to change into . . . anything?

As to Milo’s suppression of his memories, he is working as hard as he can to escape the horrible images of his abuse by Dede and of her ultimate death. The knot in his stomach is the physical manifestation of that effort, and he would rather endure it than relive the horror of his past. It takes all his strength to hold the memories down, and that effort builds muscles in all the wrong places.

Do you have any upcoming or in-the-works projects that you would like to share with us?

I divide my time between writing fiction and performing onstage (and peeing and scratching and dodging traffic.) My current theatrical project is the performance of The Fever, a monologue by Wallace Shawn (the little guy in My Dinner with Andre, The Princess Bride, et al). It’s the passionate story of one man’s discovery of the source in human suffering of all that he possesses. In addition to performing The Fever onstage, I have performed it, as Shawn himself did, in many private living rooms—free, strictly for donations—and I am eager to do it in yours for your own invited audience. Interested? Email me at fintushel@gmail.com. Have show, will travel.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Moshe Siegel interviews at Lightspeed, works in the New York State library system, and hatches indie publishing plots from his Hudson Valley home office. Follow tweets of varying relevance @moshesiegel.

In the Next Issue of

Coming up in October, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Maria Dahvana Headley (“Solder and Steam”) and Adrian Tchaikovsky (“The Children of Dagon”), along with SF reprints by An Owomoyela (“Water Rights”) and Gregory Benford (“Time Shards”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Emil Ostrovski (“Tragic Business”) and Nike Sulway (“The Karen Joy Fowler Book Club”), and fantasy reprints by Kevin Brockmeier (“The Invention of Separate People”) and Delia Sherman (“The Fiddler of Bayou Teche”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with a pair of feature interviews.

For our ebook readers, we also have an ebook-exclusive novella reprint of James Tiptree Jr.’s “Slow Music,” and, of course, a pair of novel excerpts.

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

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Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got a veritable plethora of stories forthcoming from authors such as Jeremiah Tolbert, Caroline M. Yoachim, Craig DeLancey, An Owomoyela, Ted Kosmatka, Carrie Vaughn, Rahul Kanakia, Kelly Barnhill, Rachel Swirsky, Will McIntosh, Jay Lake, and many others.

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.

Stay Connected

The Editors

Here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Lightspeed:

Magazine Website

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Destroy Projects Website

www.destroysf.com

Newsletter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

RSS Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/rss-2

Podcast Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/itunes-rss

Twitter

www.twitter.com/LightspeedMag

Facebook

www.facebook.com/LightspeedMagazine

Google+

plus.google.com/+LightspeedMagazine

Subscribe

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe

Subscriptions & Ebooks

The Editors

Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes 96 stories (about 480,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price) —what a bargain! For more information, visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe.

Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so. Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

• • • •

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 Lightspeed Team

The Editors

John Joseph Adams, Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

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, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent and forthcoming projects include: Loosed Upon the World, Operation Arcana, Wastelands 2, Press Start to Play, 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 nine times) and is a seven-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.

Wendy N. Wagner, Managing/Associate Editor

Wendy N. Wagner grew up in a town so small it didn’t even have its own post office, and the bookmobile’s fortnightly visit was her lifeline to the world. Her short fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies including Beneath Ceaseless Skies,The Lovecraft eZine, Armored, The Way of the Wizard, and Heiresses of Russ 2013: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction. Her first novel, Skinwalkers, is a Pathfinder Tales adventure. An avid gamer and gardener, she lives in Portland, Oregon, with her very understanding family. Follow her on Twitter @wnwagner.

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects

Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher

Robert Barton Bland

Reprint Editor

Rich Horton

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

Henry Lien

Assistant Editor

Robyn Lupo

Editorial Assistants

Laurel Amberdine

Jude Griffin

Book Reviewers

Andrew Liptak

Sunil Patel

Amal El-Mohtar

Copy Editor

Dana Watson

Proofreader

Anthony R. Cardno

Illustrators

Galen Dara

Elizabeth Leggett

Reiko Murakami

Webmaster

Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios